Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Apr 2026When the US military academy at West Point opened in 1802, one of the things it did was train cadets in rifle drill. The cadets were as young as 14 at that time, and the standard US infantry rifle was quite long and heavy, and it was not well suited to cadet use. A series of shortened and converted rifles were used until 1830, when Springfield made its first model of rifle specifically for the cadets. From that year forward, each new service rifle was accompanied by a slightly smaller version for West Point. In 1867 the first Trapdoor Springfield (aka Allin conversion) cadet rifle was introduced.
The 1867 Cadet Trapdoor was unusual in that it was not a shortened version of the regular rifle. Instead, it used a whole bunch of unique parts, including a different lock plate, hammer, and breechblock. The barrel was reduced to 29 3/4 inches, it used the .50-55 cartridge, and it had no provision for sling swivels. Only 424 of these rifles were made before a new cadet model was introduced in 1869 which used standard parts. Two further Cadet models of the Trapdoor would follow in 1873 (the .45 caliber change) and 1884 (change to sights and other details), and these were the last cadet rifles made by Springfield. The next rifle after the 1884 Trapdoor was the Krag-Jorgenson, and by this time minimum age at West Point was up to 17 and the Krag was a much handier rifle to begin with — so a Cadet model was not necessary.
The American Society of Arms Collectors has an excellent paper on Cadet rifles written by David Hanes, which is publicly available here:
https://americansocietyofarmscollecto…
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September 12, 2026
Model 1867 Trapdoor: A Unique Rifle for West Point Cadets
QotD: The spiritual immune system
The Left (as always for rhetorical convenience) controls everything. You want to keep your kids away from the Poz entirely, you need to go no-shit Amish.
But first, keeping them totally away from anything is doing them a disservice. I think Escriva would strongly agree with this — we are commanded, after all, to be IN the world, not OF it. It’s a two-part command. The Poz is a disease, yes, and diseases can kill, but look at the aftermath of covid. Who are the unhealthiest people in society right now? The folks who got vaxxed and triple-boosted and spent two years hiding under their beds in a hazmat suit. Every minor sniffle hits them like a sledgehammer now, because they spent two years screwing up their own immune systems.
Second, and closely related, the fight is in the small things. People see you avoiding everything and you look like a wimp. Where I grew up, every high school had the Bible Camp Kids. They were their own little clique. They went everywhere together and tried to live as Amish-ly as possible. And everybody knew what happened to the Bible Camp Kids when they went off to college. You could set your watch by it: Two semesters in, and she’d have a tattoo and a face piercing and would either be knocked up or out of the closet.
They had no spiritual immune system.
Fighting and failing in the small things builds up your defenses for the big things. Not only that, people respect fighters. You failed, but you fought — you can hold your head high. As opposed to “You didn’t fail, but only because you tucked tail and ran”. Nobody respects those guys. It sucks to lose. But it’s far worse to “win” by never trying. Worst of all is to wallow in your defeat. Get up! Fight!
Severian, “The Way Ch. 10: Scruples”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-10.
September 7, 2026
“Don’t forget to like and subscribe!”
Along with the earlier post on the recent steep decline in basic literacy, here’s Christopher Gage discussing the same phenomenon of younger Brits’ increased dependency on videos while also demonstrating reduced verbal skills. A mere co-incidence, we can be sure:
La Cigarette by Henri Lebasque (1921)
A friend of a friend of a friend — a primary school teacher — reckons her pupils spend so much time glued to screens that they speak in YouTube English.
Rather than greet one and other with “Hello” they say, “Hi, guys! Welcome to my channel!” When saying goodbye, it’s “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” Apparently, these little dopamine fiends cannot endure one moment without suckling on the eternal teat of Mother iPad. With their scrolling fingers they tear the pages in strange, ad-free artefacts once known as “books”. Reader, I don’t know if this little fable is entirely true or some semblance of the truth. But it rings truer than false.
Am I being facetious? Not really. The British government, in a rare bout of usefulness, conducted a study into screen-time amongst primary school children. That recent study by the education department found that the more a child spends scrolling on a screen, the less good their vocabulary be.
Please excuse that example of mongrelised English. Then again, perhaps we should call it Future English given that, in just a few years, the YouTube kids will speak in that very bastardised tongue.
According to a bleak wave of childhood study, spending hours tethered to screens quite literally dissolves learning. Researchers found that the “heavy users” — a term usually reserved for heroin addicts — recalled significantly fewer words from a list than their less addicted peers. These screen-addled sprogs spend more than five hours chasing that dopamine dragon. In Plain English, them don’t talk good and shit. At least when compared to their mates who spend less than one hour on a screen. Them kids know more words and shit.
They asked kids to recall words from a list of 34. The ones double-stitched to iPads upwards of five hours daily recognised barely half the words whilst their peers recalled two thirds. Eighty-six minutes. That figure represents the tipping point between literacy and a life talking in the mangled English of a failed rapper.
The study arrived at a rather chilling conclusion: If a child spends over an hour and a half each day thumbing through brain-bleaching bilge on YouTube, their grasp of language withers faster than a doormat outside a crack den.
Of course, these are hyper-sensitive times. The researchers keenly doled out the old “correlation doesn’t imply causation” disclaimer mandatory in a neurotic culture which treats truth like hazardous waste. And who am I to judge? The ability to express one’s thoughts isn’t utterly essential. The development of language — I’m sure a Foucault-addled academic might agree — is elitist and racist and sexist and ableist and all that.
And so, I am intensely relaxed about this brave new world in which the brains of the next generation dissolve in a swamp of TikTok reels and YouTube videos. There is nothing to worry about. This is progress. And progress must always progress. Words are just words and you can still talk good and shit without knowing them words in them things that don’t even have videos on them pages.
The New Dark Ages by James Marriot
Ed West reviews James Marriot’s The New Dark Ages, which covers issues that are certainly of deep concern to parents as GenZ and Gen Alpha appear to have almost completely abandoned literacy in any written form:
I’m not the only parent who feels increasingly anxious about their children’s media diet. For teenage boys in particular, entertainment often comes in the form of YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” or “I cemented a microwave to my head”. In comparison to this, the mindless television I watched in the 1990s seems as narratively complex as Dostoevsky.
Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening.
Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.
I wouldn’t call the book “urgent” because I usually take that to mean “worthy scolding by an ideological ally”; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us.
James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have been to Alfred the Great.
Literature was our religion: the way we explained and interpreted our lives. As a child I quickly learned that every possible event — from a major bereavement to a minor playground contretemps — could be cross-referenced against a novel by Thomas Hardy or a poem by Philip Larkin. There was a quote for everything. I was dragged off to Shakespeare plays at what now strikes me as a rather cruelly young age (“if you’re not enjoying it”, I remember my dad telling me, “you can just read your book instead”). We worshipped pretty much all the canonical English poets but in our pantheon of literary saints, Shakespeare was Jesus or, more probably, God.
We celebrated his birthday every year with a homemade cake and in the holidays we were taken on solemn pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. I recall that I was once presented with a Shakespeare-themed stuffed bear (it was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Hamlet).
Such a veneration for the written word naturally made him sensitive to disturbing stories about declining literacy that began circulating around the turn of the decade. “The first rumours that something important was happening reached me via friends working in universities”, he writes: “I came close to going into academia myself (though I don’t think the world is a poorer place for the loss of my proposed PhD on landscape imagery in post-war British poetry)”.
Anecdotes were soon backed up by data, showing significant declines in reading comprehension among students, as well as an even sharper drop in the number of adults and children reading for pleasure. The chief suspect seemed obvious: it’s the phones. (Everything’s “the phones”). Yet the more Marriott looked into it, the more he came to believe that the real transformation came with television, as Neil Postman had warned in his 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death.
“Postman believed that the rise of TV — with its bias towards triviality and charismatic personalities — was beginning to undermine the kinds of reasoned and productive public discourse on which a civilised democracy depends. He was dismissed by some of his critics as a crank and a Luddite. The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.”
September 3, 2026
Canada’s “softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive” cadet movement
I was in the army cadets from 1972-76. We were still wearing British-style battledress uniforms rather than the CF Green delivery driver uniforms, but we weren’t in cadets for the pseudo-scouting experience … we wanted to be army cadets. Not long after I left cadets for the reserves, the leadership vision changed to (I assume) make cadet organizations more “inclusive”, as John Carter describes:
This unfortunately isn’t new. I was in Army Cadets back in the 90s. Even then female fatbodies in the adult officer corps weren’t unknown, and cadets was coed.
I didn’t actually mind the coed aspect at the time, I picked up a lot of my hs gfs through cadets. What I did mind was how ridiculously soft it was. Weapons training, in particular, was essentially impossible to obtain unless you joined the marksmanship team (which I did for that specific reason), and even then they only gave us ancient Lee-Enfields with .22 inserts. We did a lot of camping and rucking, including in winter, which was great, but aside from the exercises being on army bases and conducted in combat fatigues using old surplus kit, there was almost nothing to mark it out as military in character. Nor for that matter was there anything in the way of physical conditioning.
I wasn’t the only one annoyed by that. The kids who joined cadets wanted to be little warriors. They wanted to crawl through mud with a knife clenched between their teeth, they wanted to get emotionally abused as they struggled through obstacle courses, and they wanted to handle firearms. There was a rumor that all of us had signed an agreement that in event of war, if the rest of the military had been wiped out, we could be called up for the last line of defence. I doubt that was true but we thought it was the coolest thing.
Instead, the only cadets who were allowed to handle C7s were the honour guard, who were issued (rubberized) rifles before parades.
Unfortunately it didn’t matter what the cadets themselves wanted. The adults had decided that softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive was the name of the game. I didn’t make the connection with the presence of female cadets at the time, though in retrospect that’s obvious. What was obvious to me at the time however was that this was all downstream of liberal females aghast at the very concept of a militarized youth, and weak men who couldn’t tell the females to shut their fool mouths.
As an epilogue, when I turned 17 I joined the Army Reserve, only to discover that this infernal feminine softening had long since infected the military, as well.
The cadet Lee-Enfields firing .22LR were an important part of our weapons training … although due to a weird bit of timing, the very first rifle I ever fired was a full-size .303 Lee Enfield that seemed to have enough kick to push me right out of the rifle pit when I fired it (I was small for a 12-year-old). We hadn’t yet learned about hearing protectors, so my ears were ringing for about an hour after the range trip.
August 13, 2026
A minimum 12-year sentence
It’ll probably be no surprise to anyone who’s met me, but I was a terrible student in school. While I quite enjoyed learning (about some things, anyway), I hated the environment where that learning was supposed to be taking place. I did well enough in primary and middle school, but I dropped out of high school and finished my diploma through correspondence. I have a great deal of sympathy for those kids who don’t fit into the institutional framework, as I certainly didn’t feel I fit in during my sentence. (It’s often worse for boys, as it’s more difficult for boys to sit still and stay quiet, and teachers readily interpret distraction and fidgeting as something needing medical intervention rather than signs of normal human development for half the species.) At Without Diminishment, Sam Dagres considers the plight of the vast majority of children locked in to that minimum 12-year incarceration:
You’re sitting there, one eye on the clock, eagerly waiting for the bell to ring. How you crave the chime of that sweet-sounding bell, a ring marking the start of your allotted outdoor time. You rush outside, feel the sun on your skin, eat a snack reminding you of a world that exists on the other side of the fence. But for most of the day, you are sat, effectively immobile for 8 hours. Stillness is the highest virtue, and any violation leads to punishment and an ADHD diagnosis. Day in and day out, you wait for the last bell.
Most of us will have experienced this kind of imprisonment, befitting what crime, you may wonder? We are punished for the crime of being born into a society where all forms of care are by default institutional, a society whose “child care policy is adult policy, not early childhood policy”, as Katharine B. Stevens noted.
According to Statistics Canada, approximately 5.5 million students are enrolled in K–12 public schools, dwarfing the 67,000 who are home-schooled. Nearly 99 per cent of all school-aged children in Canada are currently institutionalised.
In 2025, 58 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 were in childcare facilities, representing approximately 1.4 million children. One-quarter of those were aged under 1.
As someone who attended public schools all my life, I never thought of it as anything but natural. But as I reach a point in my life where family formation is uppermost in my mind, I wonder whose interests are prioritised whenever I walk by a school and hear, not see, kids playing on the other side of a tall brick wall.
We do not leave it to children to decide very much for themselves, which means their interests are ours to safeguard. Luckily, the research exists: institutional, non-familial care is not what is best for most of our young.
The incomparable Institute for Family Studies recently enumerated the relevant studies, one of which is the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which followed 1,000 children from infancy through adulthood and found that “children who had spent at least 30 hours per week in those settings beginning in infancy had three times the rate of social-emotional difficulties, including lower social competence, higher externalising behavior, and more conflict with teachers and peers. These effects persisted through elementary school, and by adolescence appeared as impulsivity, risk-taking, and substance use.”
Similarly, studies of Quebec’s universal childcare system have shown that the programme “has been associated with increased anxiety, aggression, hyperactivity, worse parent-child relationships, and lower self-reported life satisfaction in adolescence. By young adulthood, the negative effects extended to a 22% increase in criminal conviction rates.”
The foundations of our emotional and cognitive lives are formed early on while we bond with caregivers, and early institutionalisation disrupts that. The emotional downsides resulting from the systematic separation between the young children and their mothers are not broadly grasped, since the opposite is widely believed. When I share my musings about home-schooling with my friends, without fail, I receive the unanimous response: “Aren’t you worried they’ll turn out weird?” To that I respond, “Have you been paying attention?”
We are living through an era of weird, surrounded by friendless, non-eye-contact-making, socially anxious individuals. Nowadays, most schools encourage gender exploration and, through intense anti-bullying campaigns, demand a near-total embrace of any and all quirks. Not to mention that these tiny balls of anxiety, for some reason, require Vietnam-War-vet-levels of pharmacological intervention. I had someone tell me, “In my current role, I feel more like a pharmacist than a teacher”.
We can attribute the explosion of weirdness to a whole host of factors, notably digital devices and their role in mass social atrophy, but the forced dislocation of young children from their families is the foundation for a lifetime of alienation.
July 16, 2026
“Banned” book library in a Portuguese bookshop
Most people are at least a bit uncomfortable with censorship, at least when the censors get into the swing of things and start banning ordinary books and authors. I had to check Wikipedia to find out who Dua Lipa might be as I hadn’t heard of her before, so the name popping up in headlines about her bold anti-censorship actions didn’t tell me much. I think I’m safe in assuming that Ms. Lipa is fully read-in on all the fashionable concerns of the celebrity set, so it’ll be easy to predict the works her library will feature:
The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of “banned” books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.
For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).
Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. “The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection” would make a funny meme — as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey — but it would likely not be much of a career boost.
And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.
Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc.), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).
Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: “The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices.”
What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.
This is most notable in the “Voice” section, which, we’re told, “amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented”.
Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the woke era of radical Leftism, aggressive conformity and cancel culture.
Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism — a hostile force attacking it from the outside.
And as the “banned” book library is in Portugal, I’m including Larry Correia’s comments on the issue (he still counts as “Portuguese”, right?)
Since I’m still getting barked at by pearl clutching weirdos about my comment yesterday about “banned books” everybody with a functioning brain knows that just because parents don’t want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing liberal authors to stock public school libraries with torture porn, and the book is still legally available literally everywhere else books are sold, means that book is not “banned”.
And most “banned” book displays are just left wing virtue signaling for marketing purposes. Like most liberal causes its a fake ass moralizing narrative disconnected from reality where they get to play the victim and the rest of us are bullies.
Manhattan publishing LOVES when the school board in Somnambulant Iowa says they don’t want to spend their limited budget buying copies of The Illustrated Guide To Fisting for Trans Middle Schoolers, because that’s great marketing and all the blue haired weirdos are now religiously mandated to go buy a copy to stick it to the chuds.
Libs tried their best to get writers like me booted out of everything, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before you see any of us showing up on any of these banned books displays, and we all know it.
Stephen King was lying his ass off about how that particular novella collection was all about “friendship” or WTF ever he claimed. The friendship story has prison rape as a subplot, but the real issue was the story about an escaped Nazi war criminal teaching an American teenager about the joys of rape, torture, and murder.
As you can imagine some parents get hesitant about giving stuff like that to their kids … just like Stephen King himself did when he banned his own school shooting book, Rage. But it was okay when he did it.
If a school board said they didn’t want to buy one of my books because they thought it was too violent for kids, I’d say, okay, cool. Not being a dishonest histrionic dork, I recognize that’s their choice, and not being in that one collection does not in any way make my book “banned”.
The book in question is still available in every store, can be ordered online, and is in most public library systems. No law is broken if you possess it or share it. But to a liberal NOT buying their shit with tax dollars to give to children (even if their parents think it is inappropriate) is the gravest sin imaginable and you are all basically nazis.
Well, except for Graham Platner obviously. Stephen King says he’s alright.
June 18, 2026
The Rape Gang Inquiry Report
At The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian expresses his disgust and contempt at the British government which has categorically failed to protect a quarter of a million girls and young women from sexual predators imported by that government, which then actively covered up the crimes. It’s impossible to put into words just how cowardly every politician, every police officer, and every “social worker” has been for decades in allowing these crimes to flourish:
Click the image to open the report PDF
I was not expecting to learn that the grooming gangs have been operating since 1955. Seventy-one years. At least two generations of British children have been savagely sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism, willingly helped and encouraged by not only the State, but by our “Journalistic Betters”.
I was not expecting to learn that the victims number a quarter of a million. At minimum.
The least job of a society — the very minimal function expected — is the protection of the innocent and the defence of those who cannot protect themselves.
The Government of Great Britain — from the least to the highest — not only failed in this most minor of duties, but actively aided and abetted the destruction of the innocent and the depredation of the defenceless — with the enthusiastic assistance of “professional” “journalists”.
Seventy-one (71) years. Two-hundred and fifty-thousand (250,000) children raped. Trafficked. Tortured.
I don’t ever bloody well want to hear any English person tell me I don’t need guns again. “The police will protect you” you say, with that supercilious smirk. Read that report again — especially the part about the police failing to protect children, CHILDREN for God’s sake — and then get sodding bent.
I am furious. I don’t want apologies — I want officers executed. I want politicians hung in the public square, their possessions seized. I want journalistic edifices chained shut and set on fire.
I want the bloodshed and retribution visited upon those responsible, those who enabled, and those who willingly ignored to be of a level that will snarl softly to British people for ages to come:
“Do. Not. Fail. Again.”
Bastards.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, X Freeze summarizes some of the findings from the report:
Perpetrators:
~87% of convicted group-based CSE offenders had Muslim names. Estimates put the real figure at ~95% Muslim. Networks were almost entirely Muslim men — overwhelmingly Pakistani. Massively disproportionate to population share.Enabled by honour-shame clan culture and Islamic doctrines that treat non-Muslim girls as available property: Muslim superiority over kuffar, al-walā‘ wa-l-barā‘ enmity to non-Muslims, no fixed age of consent, and rules allowing sexual use of captives.
How the grooming worked:
Girls as young as 11 were befriended by young Muslim men who treated them like adults, supplied alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. They were collected in taxis from school gates, care homes and streets, taken to houses, flats, restaurants and hotels, then raped repeatedly by groups of men, passed between perpetrators, tortured, filmed, and told they were “white trash” or “kuffar” who deserved punishment. Many became pregnant while still children. Some were trafficked to the Middle East for Islamic marriage.
failure & cover-up
Every pillar of the state failed catastrophically for decades:
- Police ignored reports, criminalised victims instead of perpetrators, destroyed evidence and bailed known rapists.
- Social services placed children in trafficking hubs inside children’s homes, closed cases despite clear signs, and retaliated against whistleblowers.
- NHS recorded genital injuries, multiple STIs in children as young as 13, and rape pregnancies — then discharged victims back to their abusers.
- Schools saw older men collecting girls at the gates and heard disclosures, yet often excluded the victims rather than protecting them.
- Politicians (especially Labour-controlled councils and the party nationally) denied knowledge, blocked or watered down inquiries, suppressed ethnicity data, and prioritised electoral support from Muslim voting blocs and “community cohesion” over child protection. Fear of being called “racist” paralysed action. Sadiq Khan repeatedly insisted there were no grooming gangs in London, despite the Metropolitan Police holding reports of girls being raped by groups of men in hotels and other locations across the capital.
On her Substack, Celina identifies the specific state failures that perpetuated what started as isolated, local crimes:
The central thesis of the Rape Gang Inquiry Report is unequivocal: the estimated 250,000 victims were the victims of a deliberate collapse of the British state’s safeguarding architecture. Across every crucial sector, the state chose institutional convenience over the lives of children.
The Police: Criminalisation and Complicity
The Inquiry documents how officers frequently arrived hours late to missing persons reports, actively discouraged parents from filing complaints, and routinely closed cases without conducting basic forensic or digital examinations.
The most pervasive failure was the ideological decision to view the victims as willing participants in their own destruction. Children like Chloe, found highly intoxicated in the cars of adult men, were labelled “prostitutes” making “lifestyle choices”. By framing the organised rape of children as consensual sex work, the police absolved themselves of the legal requirement to launch resource-heavy investigations into organised crime syndicates.
When victims or their families did provide actionable evidence, it was routinely mishandled, ignored, or actively destroyed. Ross, the father of a survivor named Phoebe, testified that vital digital evidence handed over to the police was inexplicably deleted from the device while in police custody. When Grace’s abusers repeatedly breached their bail conditions and stalked her family, the police took no action, rendering protective non-molestation orders entirely meaningless.
The bureaucratic responses were often farcical. In some instances, the only formal action taken by police was issuing “harbouring notices” to the men, pieces of paper warning them not to associate with the child. When the men inevitably ignored these notices, no further enforcement followed. Furthermore, the Inquiry uncovered a deeply entrenched “two-tier” policing system. While forces surrendered to the fear of disorder from certain communities, they aggressively targeted the victims and their families. Chloe was arrested in her pyjamas after her mother called the police for help, kept in a cell until 2:00 AM, and released onto the streets without transportation, leading directly to her being picked up by a gang member and trafficked nationwide.
Most disturbingly, the report highlights allegations of direct police complicity, referencing whistleblower accounts of “cop nights” where officers were allegedly active participants in the trafficking and abuse of girls using police vehicles. The revelation that an abuser could be legally accepted as an “appropriate adult” for Michelle during police questioning underscores a force either dangerously incompetent or wilfully blind to the dynamics of coercive control.
Social Services: Abandonment and Retaliation
If the police failed to enforce the law, social services failed to enforce basic humanity. Across multiple districts, social care systems identified the precise markers of severe exploitation, truancy, self-harm, sudden wealth, STIs, missing episodes and consistently chose to look away.
The Inquiry demonstrates that social workers frequently undermined protective parents, isolating children from their families and placing them in residential care homes and semi-independent units that functioned as drive-through delivery systems for the gangs. Children were centralised, making them easier targets.
Jane, a victim placed in semi-independent living at 16, was trafficked directly from her state-provided accommodation. When she disclosed the abuse and the exchange of money to the staff, she was told it did not constitute trafficking because she was over 16. The staff then blackmailed her, threatening to blame her for the exploitation if she complained further. Following a psychiatric hospitalisation, Jane discovered that all statutory care records from her placement had been mysteriously “lost or destroyed,” legally obstructing any path to future accountability.
When internal whistleblowers attempted to expose the ongoing grooming, trafficking, and financial abuse of children in these units, they were met with severe retaliation. An unnamed social worker who acted as an Interim Co-Manager testified that after raising concerns about untreated exploitation risks and unlawful housing practices, she faced sudden suspensions, the removal of payments, fabricated allegations, and career-ending professional isolation orchestrated by senior leadership to protect the council’s reputation. Social services actively punished those who tried to protect children.
Schools:
Teachers and school administrators observed older men waiting at the school gates to collect young girls in taxis. They noted sudden drops in attendance, drastic changes in behaviour, and physical exhaustion.
Instead of recognising these as textbook indicators of exploitation, schools responded with punitive measures that pushed the children further to the margins. When Chloe’s trauma manifested as truancy, the school repeatedly placed her in isolation, compounding her emotional distress and alienation. When Jen was bullied to the point of wetting herself because a teacher refused her access to the toilet, the school ignored her subsequent self-harm and suicidal ideation, failing to initiate any safeguarding response.
In the most tragic instances, schools actively protected the abusers to avoid scandal. When Rachel’s autistic daughter disclosed that she had been orally raped by a peer, the school failed to effectively safeguard her, allowing the alleged perpetrator to remain on the premises. She was subjected to relentless physical and online bullying by students linked to the abuser, which was filmed and shared online. The intimidation escalated until the twelve-year-old took a fatal overdose of colchicine, stating she “just wanted everything to stop”.
Rupert Lowe explains his next steps after the publication of the inquiry report:
Ross 1912 Cadet: Straight Pull .22 Rimfire Training Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Jan 2026The Ross model 1912 Cadet rifle was introduced in 1912 as a diminutive rimfire companion to the 1905 and 1910 military Ross rifles. It was a single-shot straight pull rifle, with a somewhat unusual locking bolt system. Somewhere between 13,000 and 17,000 appear to have been made, for civilian commercial sale, Cadet Corps, and Militia use. Production ended in March 1917, when the Ross company collapsed. Today these are quite rare rifles.
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June 11, 2026
Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act
As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:
The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.
Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.
I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.
The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly
The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.
[…]
The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s
The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]
The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition
The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]
The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties
The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.
June 10, 2026
To protect under-16s from harmful content, everyone will now need to show their ID online
Australia’s attempt to ban under-16s from accessing social media and other online sites blew up rather quickly. Britain and Canada, seeing what happened down under, chorused “Hold our beers!“:
“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.
What is the government reportedly about to introduce?
According to the Globe and Mail, the forthcoming bill would bar anyone under 16 from social media. The government will indicate that this is a temporary safeguard with an opt-back-in once a regulator certifies safety standards. The government will frame this as “temporary” measure, but I argue that once established, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube given that the policy will require a regulator and proof of age from everyone.
Didn’t this start with Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? What happened to it?
Bill C-63 was the government’s 2024 online harms bill, and from my first-day take I described it as effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of provisions focused on platforms that featured a duty to act responsibly, more contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act provisions, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission modelled on the CRTC to be funded by the tech companies. My view was that the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions should have been dropped or incorporated into a separate piece of legislation. Bill C-63 itself died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election, but the duty-to-act-responsibly model is likely to survive as part of the forthcoming bill.
Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy?
I set out at least six reasons in this post on the issue. The most important is the first: the harms people associate with social media, such as algorithmic manipulation, addictive engagement design, weak content moderation, inconsistent enforcement, inadequate transparency, and privacy risks, affect users of every age. Treating them as a children’s problem misidentifies both the source of the harm and the right target of regulation. By focusing legislative attention on who is permitted to use social media rather than on how the platforms operate, an age-based ban lets legislators and the companies off the hook from more effective broad-based regulation. The other reasons identified in the post include the absence of evidence that bans work, the privacy harms they create, and the constitutional rights of the children they claim to protect.
Does the ban actually work?
The evidence to date says no. Australia’s under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s first compliance report found that roughly 70 per cent of children who had accounts before the ban retained access to at least one platform three months later, with no discernible reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from under-16 users. Children route around age gates through VPNs, borrowed accounts, and false birthdates, and the most at-risk users are the most likely to circumvent them. Professor Lisa Given laid out much of this on a Law Bytes episode before most of the data was even in. Canadian politicians now citing the Australian approach with approval are pointing to a model whose own regulator’s data suggests has thus far proven ineffective. At a recent Canada 2020 event in Ottawa, Australian professor Amanda Third confirmed that kids are actively circumventing the ban and indicated that parents are concerned that their children are now less safe.
Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban?
The headline number is real but misleading. The March 2026 Angus Reid Institute survey found that three-quarters of respondents support a full ban on social media for those under 16, and politicians have cited it repeatedly. But as McGill’s Sara Grimes documented on this Law Bytes podcast episode, the less-quoted numbers in the same survey complicate the picture: 72 per cent said parents, not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use, only 32 per cent picked 16 as the right threshold, and the survey did not ask respondents anything about the mechanism any ban would actually require. Simply put, public support for “protect kids from harm” is not the same as public support for “every Canadian must submit ID to a third-party provider in order to use the internet”.
Hasn’t social media been proven harmful to kids?
The data on social media harms to kids is far more mixed than is often portrayed in the media and in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book that has fuelled much of the legislative panic. Grimes has produced a very accessible explainer on the issue that walks through the science. As she notes in Panic First, Evidence Later, “there is a serious problem. Researchers who have spent their entire careers studying adolescent mental health, children’s digital media, developmental science, and media psychology – the people who actually built the evidence base Haidt draws on – have raised sustained, substantive objections to his core claims.”
Read all of Michael Geist’s FAQ here.
May 24, 2026
How to Indoctrinate a Generation – Death of Democracy 16 – Q4 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 23 May 2026How did Nazi Germany seize control of its youth by the end of 1936? In this episode, Spartacus traces the Hitler Youth Law, the Four-Year Plan, Winterhilfswerk, the Anti-Comintern Pact, Goebbels’ attack on criticism, and the tightening exclusion of German Jews.
Berlin, December 31, 1936. The Nazi regime did not need another single dramatic coup. It connected the household, the factory, the school, the street collection, the newspaper, and the foreign threat into one system of mobilization.
This episode covers how the Law on the Hitler Youth declared all German youth organized within the Hitler Youth; how the Four-Year Plan redirected recovery toward rearmament and autarky; how charity became mandated patriotic ritual through Winterhilfswerk; how anti-Bolshevik propaganda linked Spain, Japan, Italy, and Germany; and how Jewish Germans were pushed further into isolation through administrative humiliation and police control.
This is an educational historical documentary condemning Nazism, antisemitism, dictatorship, racial exclusion, and political indoctrination.
May 15, 2026
The good news: kids are drinking a lot less! But there’s also bad news …
The good news seemed to be that teenage drinking was dropping fast. Fewer underage drinkers, happier teenagers, right? Not so fast …
⚡️The deeper signal is youth risk did not disappear.
It migrated inward.
Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.
That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.
So the surface looks healthier. Fewer kids drinking. Fewer kids using weed. Fewer kids doing reckless things in public.
The hidden layer looks worse. The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it.
The old teenage world produced damage, stupidity, alcohol abuse, pregnancy risk, fights, accidents, and bad decisions. No need to romanticize it. But it also produced social reps. It forced young people through discomfort. It made them practice attraction, rejection, conflict, reputation, risk, repair, and status in the open.
The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.
That is the trade.
A teenager can avoid drinking, avoid parties, avoid sex, avoid driving, avoid real confrontation, avoid rejection, avoid shame, avoid danger, and still arrive at 23 emotionally underbuilt. Cleaner behavior does not automatically mean stronger formation.
This is why the marriage chart and the teen drinking chart are the same story at different stages. People are not suddenly failing to pair in adulthood. The whole pathway into embodied adulthood has been slowing for years before marriage even becomes the question.
The real truth: society solved part of the teen vice problem by shrinking the arena where teenagers become adults.
It took away the dangerous commons and replaced it with controlled isolation.
The result is safer kids with weaker initiation into real life.
May 3, 2026
Reasons people romanticize their college experience
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to comments about people wanting the world to be like they remember their time at college:
People romanticize college because for four years of their lives they:
1. Had all the rights of adults but none of the responsibilities.
2. Lived in a closed community with sealed borders that kept out low IQs and anti-socials.
3. Were young, energetic, healthy, and attractive.
4. Were thrown together with a bunch of similar people who had no predefined power- or need-based relationship with them, which is how friendships form.
This last is the important one, especially as fertility rates decline.
People with children transition to making friends with other parents of children in the same age group, because events and networks centered around those children throw them together with other parents in the same way.
But childless people have few or no opportunities to make friends after college. So they are left with a slow dwindling circle of college based relationships, remembering the days when it was all easy, and they weren’t so isolated, and they didn’t have to work so hard.
Couple that with having to complete with infinity immigrants in the job market, so they can pay taxes to support infinity boomers and government bureaucrats, while being passed over for the best jobs and careers in favor of infinity DEI incompetents, who they also have to support …
Well, for a lot of people born into what was once the American middle class, college was their first and last experience of an adult life wherein they weren’t being systematically and deliberately routed into the formation of a new underclass.
A special form of underclass who are still expected to be productive enough to materially support all the non-producing people who were positioned as their social superiors despite being their intellectual inferiors.
So, yeah, they wish they could go back to college.
Is anyone surprised by this?
April 18, 2026
Australia’s age verification scheme – a great success!
Every time a politician gets up on hind legs to propose yet another brilliant scheme to ensure little Jaden and little Daenerys don’t access adult content on the internet, I remind myself that it’s going to be pitting the tech know-how of people who need help opening child-proof caps against the youngsters they get to open the child-proof caps for them. In other words, it’s not going to work out quite how the politicians expect:
“Kid-notebook-computer-learns-159533” by LuidmilaKot is marked with CC0 1.0 
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Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges — and they’re debatable — politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids’ online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.
[…]
“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban”, reports the U.K.’s Molly Rose Foundation, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. “Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts.”
The group adds that “70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was ‘easy’ to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts.”
Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that “a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms’ age assurance systems”.
Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.
In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, “around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account”. Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.
