He invented it. Every premise of contemporary progressive ideology traces directly back to one man who had never met a “noble savage”, never raised a child, and never lived according to a single principle he preached.
1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.
2. The “Noble Savage” is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.
3. The “General Will” is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were “properly enlightened”. Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.
4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every “liberation” movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.
5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.
6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda [hypocrisy] (remember the obłuda of communism👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.
7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.
Krzysztof Szczawinski, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-10. (Auto-translated from the original Polish by X)
October 13, 2026
QotD: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wokester avant la lettre
September 5, 2026
The high-water mark of Cancel Culture
This Noahpinion piece is from last year, but I hadn’t seen it before and I think it outlines fairly accurately why “we” allowed Cancel Culture to temporarily take over social media and cause so much personal damage to disfavoured individuals. It gave the mob the power to identify their own Emmanuel Goldsteins and drive them from the public sphere:
The Arrest of Robespierre, The Night of the 9th to 10th Thermidor, Year II, 27th July 1794
Colour engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert (1765 – ca.1835) via Wikimedia Commons.I think about this when I think about cancel culture.
Back in 2018, Bari Weiss got dogpiled on Twitter for an anodyne liberal tweet. Weiss congratulated Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu on pulling off a difficult move, quoting a line from the musical Hamilton about immigrants being great:
Weiss was viciously attacked for this tweet by thousands of people who called her racist over the course of several days. Why? Because Mirai Nagasu isn’t actually an immigrant — she was born in the U.S. According to Weiss’ many attackers, Weiss’ statement implied that nonwhite people are perpetual foreigners.
That was, of course, complete hogwash. Nagasu’s parents are immigrants; the use of the term “second-generation immigrants” to describe the children of immigrants is utterly standard terminology in academic sociology. And by quoting a line from Hamilton in praise of a second-generation immigrant athlete competing on behalf of the U.S., Weiss was clearly advocating in favor of (nonwhite) immigration as something that makes America stronger — a very standard liberal viewpoint.
Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on — and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years — to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.
The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.
Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity.
Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)“, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.
But to get that clout, you have to stand out. Attacking the same old progressive targets — Donald Trump, Republican senators, conservative influencers — is a low-yield activity, because the field is too competitive. Everyone attacks those people. But finding more novel targets for mob attack — like an NYT writer who calls a second-generation American an “immigrant” — can be a high-yield activity. It’s basically outrage entrepreneurship.
Of course, this means that there was an incentive for progressive purity spirals and tent-shrinking. If you’re a progressive looking for new people to denounce, the most tempting targets are probably center-left liberals who have heretofore been safe from cancellation. Hating Donald Trump is old news. But hating Matt Yglesias? That could get you some real attention!
And so the ranks of the online cancel-mobs were probably also swollen by people who participated in the mobs out of fear that if they didn’t, they too would be canceled. This gave rise to a phenomenon I call ponzi screaming — berating the person immediately to your right on the political spectrum, out of fear that if you don’t berate them, people further to your left will berate you. You have people like the progressive online shouter and failed Congressional candidate Will Stancil berating Nate Silver even as he gets frequently dogpiled and berated by leftists.
Between outrage entrepreneurship, purity contests, and ponzi screaming, late-2010s progressive cancel culture started to look like a farcical imitation of the French Terror or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The stakes were obviously much lower — losing your job is a lot less bad than losing your head — but many of the social dynamics and behavior patterns were recognizably similar.
September 3, 2026
That problematic arch-conservative New-Dealer … Norman Rockwell?
Chris Bray was in Stockbridge Massachusetts recently and discovered that the notorious arch-conservative artist Norman Rockwell … supported the New Deal and FDR … which is unquestionably extreme-right, yet somehow “got woke” in the 1960s:
Stockbridge is in the (astonishingly pretty) Berkshires, where you can’t sell a latte or a $14 egg and cheese sandwich without a trans pride flag and a sticker in the window boldly supporting a woman’s right to choose and a “No Kings in America” sign and on and and on and on.
I’m an outsider, so they won’t show me the manual. But it’s a lot of virtue, signaled with a great deal of self-consciousness, and also there are a ton of German SUVs with New York license plates. Status status status. We stand with immigrants / new Mercedes.
Rockwell lived and painted in Stockbridge, and that’s … that’s … (ambiguous facial expression). He painted images that demonstrated a bone-deep fondness for America and Americans, especially small-town Americans, so he was a huge far-right figure, OBVIOUSLY, and also a major white supremacist, but maybe kind of accidentally a big Klan figure?
You can find this stuff everywhere: Rockwell’s name was “a symbol of an idealized, conservative, white American past”. Click on that link: It’s an essay that says Rockwell is known for an idealized conservative past, and it’s illustrated with a 1943 painting that celebrated FDR’s declaration that Freedom From Want is a basic freedom that that all Americans should enjoy. So, to wrap a bow around this amazing cultural artifact, Rockwell’s idealized conservative past was a celebration of the New Deal president’s declaration that government should assure material comfort for everyone. See, huge right-winger.
[…]
But Rockwell painted a massive quantity of routine shitlibbery alongside his depictions of small-town America as a place he didn’t despise, and, I’m repeating myself, several of his most famous paintings express his affection for that huge far-right figure Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a registered Republican who painted Democrats and Democrat political themes with great warmth, and also liked Ike, and then went on to paint important depictions of the Civil Rights Movement. So he’s … he’s … a huge Trumper who didn’t hate black people? Which lawn sign should we display about this? The past has to be sorted into the categories of right now, in ways that should feel comfortable to an NPR personality: This Thucydides person, was he a Trumper?
The just absolutely amazing leftist discourse about Rockwell is that he changed: He used to be a brutal Republican Nazi like ORANGE MAN, but then he turned into a good person. These essays tend to have the subtlety of a claw hammer to the face. Go read this example at the reliably boneheaded Vox, which describes Rockwell’s “late-life political transformation” and says that the “tumultuous ’60s would convert Rockwell into an overt social liberal”. He turned from right to left! He became good! See, he had an “awakening!”
The reason all of this confuses them is that Rockwell was a social type that no longer exists: a liberal Republican who thought that America had flaws that needed fixing, but who also at the same time loved the country and loved its people. He was sort of center-left on some stuff and center-right on some stuff, and culturally attuned to a nation that he viewed fondly. He liked FDR and the Four Freedoms and he personally liked Eisenhower, who had him over for dinner.
August 30, 2026
QotD: Cant
Without hypocrisy, there would be no gossip; without gossip, there would be no literature and precious little conversation. The dose of hypocrisy necessary to maintain social intercourse is a matter of judgment, for while many individual instances of hypocrisy are reprehensible and properly the subject of adverse comment, and some instances are beyond the pale, hypocrisy is as necessary to human existence as love or laughter. We should never forget La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue: but at least he knows that there is a difference. The only effective way to eliminate hypocrisy entirely from human affairs is to have no moral standards.
Cant is more destructive than hypocrisy because it is harder to expose and because a humbug deceives himself as well as others, while a mere hypocrite retains some awareness; he is a rogue rather than a villain. Cant is the vehement public expression of concern for others, or of anger at an opinion casting doubt on some moral orthodoxy that is not, and cannot be, genuinely felt, its vehemence being a shield for insincerity and lack of confidence in the orthodox opinion. Doctor Johnson defined cant as “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Cant is contagious, and, when widespread, it creates an atmosphere in which people are afraid to call it by its name. Arguments then go by default; and if arguments go by default, ludicrous, bad, or even wicked policies result.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Age of Cant”, City Journal, 2020-11-27.
August 20, 2026
“It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams”
It’s a common observation that teenage boys’ teams can compete — and beat — professional or national competitive womens’ teams in many sports. I’d always assumed that greater male muscle mass and overall strength were the primary reason for this, but Lorenzo Warby points out that strength differences do not completely explain the competitive disparity:
Babylon Bee pokes fun at the US Women’s Team
Social media provides the technology to strongly increase the social signalling and the shunning and shaming that moralises disagreement in service of shared status games. To put it another way, social media upscales social/relational aggression that attacks people’s social standing on the basis of ostentatious moral or social concern.
Because believing X is such performative way of grading people, believing-X makes you a good person creates purity-spirals as people up-the-ante to make their signal — their moral piety display — more salient and reduce competition for positions. It also attracts and empowers the personality disordered — specifically Cluster B’s — as believing-X makes you a good person requires so little to join the status game and advantages those who are manipulatively unrestrained. In other words, it acts as a negative character test, that selects for people of bad moral character.
The inability to admit ever being wrong goes with the moralising of disagreement and identity-through-belief.
Social media does not enable the up-scaling of physical aggression, although it does enable the transmission of threats of such. By contrast, social media — with its electronic mobbing — is a very effective medium for emotional or relational aggression. As women, the physically weaker sex, are particularly inclined to be quite protectively self-deceptive about their own aggression — it is “just” moral or social concern — that leads to both intense aggression and denial of its existence: “there is no such thing as cancel culture”/”it is just a shift in moral, in social, concern”.
Screenshot
Social media can be particularly toxic for adolescent girls. Adolescents often lack a settled or robust sense of self, tend to be very wrapped up in how other people see them, and have a weak sense of their effect on others. All this is even more so for people-focused adolescent girls, who are both particularly prone to engage in — and be vulnerable to — emotional or relational aggression and to seek socially-protective identities. It is plausible that growing up with the excesses of social media increases support for control of speech, including making hate speech a live issue.
More things-focused boys are much more likely to retreat into playing games (both online or physical games) or some other physical activity. The greater female focus on people makes adolescent girls more vulnerable to social media-generated aggression, identity confusion and comforting cognitive refuges and conformism; the greater male focus on things creates a divergence between young male and female perspectives, aggravated by the strong female social preference for other females.
Survey of British women done for The New Statesman.
Due to strong, even at times intense, sex-differentiated selection pressures, in human evolution, human males are systematically better at forming and operating teams than women. Among women, it is the most masculinised personalities — lesbians and tomboys — who tend to be better at teams and teamwork, though they are still generally not as good at it as men.
The operating principle is that men are more likely to suppress their emotions to perform their designated role (in a team, in an organisation). Women are more likely to subordinate their designated role (in a team, in an organisation) to their emotions. Hence, for example, women and girls are more likely to be aggressive towards fellow team members during a game than are men and boys. Hence also — as we will see — male-dominated institutions have been better at catering for women and girls than female-dominated institutions have been at catering for men and boys.
It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams. From adolescence on, boys and men are systematically stronger than girls and women of the same age: but even a fit 14 year old boy is not likely to be stronger than a fit, athletic 21 year old sportswoman. It is difference in male and female cognitive and behaviour patterns that leads to teenage boys sporting teams beating national women’s teams.
Institutions — to be functional — generally have to been scaled-up teams. That women are systematically worse at teams than men means that the feminisation of institutions and organisations tends to degrade their functionality. For example, female “emotions-as-threat” tone-policing makes it harder to generate trust, as people curate their interactions. Men and boys make outrageous jokes and rib and insult each other to test whether the others will fold under pressure. The social flattening of tone policing generates much more uncertainty, because it produces far less revealing information, so less trust.
The more differences of opinion are seen as threat, insult or moral failure, the more destructively conformist the institution or organisation is likely to be. This both acts to block feedback and enable the entrenchment of structures of conformist not-noticing.
One way out of this is to have strong standards in favour of truth and robust use of evidence. This, in turn, requires willingness to enforce such standards, which many women find emotionally confronting to do, as they are far more primed to read emotions as threat. Retreating from enforcing standards and boundaries on the grounds of being “inclusive” gives emotional — and so moral — cowardice a warm inner glow via a patina of self-righteousness. An emotionally-comforting retreat from enforcing standards then aids the entrenchment of emotionally-comforting opinion conformities.
That women tend to be self-deceptive about their own aggression — passing it off as moral or social concern — can be highly corrosive to the internal operation of an organisation or institution. In particular, it can be an effective way to block inconvenient information or concerns. All of this makes an information-restricting conformity likely to develop, and become entrenched, within an organisation as it becomes more female-dominated while making it less functional in enforcing standards, so delivering services.
Women are much less likely than men to have friends of lower socio-economic standing — as those of lower social standing are generally not a good social return on the emotional investment that female friendships are based on. Given the biological expense of human children, focusing on getting a good social return for one’s emotional investment was a successful reproductive advantage. For more team-oriented men, one never knows when someone of lower socio-economic status might be useful on your team.
Feminisation — that is, the increasing pervasiveness of more female-typical behaviour patterns — thus raises issues of weakening social solidarity. One of the striking things about contemporary Western societies is how little active concern that female university graduates show for people, including other women, of lower socio-economic status within their own societies. They have very little sense of how very different the experience of women in very different social milieus can be, and they do not socialise with such women to find out.
May 13, 2026
QotD: The advertising business
That’s what makes the ads a useful window into the black soul of our rulers. The ad makers are all from the ruling class. Look at the team photo of an ad agency and it looks like the faculty of an Ivy League college. There may be a little color in there for show, but otherwise it is all men with small hats and people who still write “Episcopalian” when asked about their religion. The advertising agencies that produce these ads are the special forces of the Judeo-Puritan ruling class.
The Z Man, “Turn Off, Tune Out and Drop Out”, The Z Blog, 2020-09-04.
April 24, 2026
QotD: Cant
As the authors point out, canting has an inherent positive feedback mechanism. For example, in the game of more-compassionate-than-thou it is always possible to be outflanked by someone who claims an even wider circle of concern, a deeper fellow-feeling with the downtrodden, than any that you have expressed, so that you feel obliged, in order to come out top in this competition, to go another step beyond your original claim, which was bogus to start with. Once you start canting, it is difficult to stop, at least in the short term.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Expanding Tyranny of Cant”, The Iconoclast, 2020-08-26.
March 30, 2026
Net Zero or mass immigration, pick one (or better, pick neither)
Lorenzo Warby points out the blindingly obvious (to anyone with common sense) fact that the top two pet projects of western transnationalist elites — Net Zero and mass third-world immigration — are in direct conflict with one another. But rather than choosing one form of societal suicide over the other, the healthy alternative is to absolutely reject both:
Culturally more homogeneous democracies are happier than more culturally diverse democracies. Also, in the Anglophone countries, where the centre-right won the most recent national election, happiness went up slightly. Where the centre-left won the most recent national election, happiness went down noticeably.
Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.
What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.
National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.
It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.
As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:
by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.
Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.
Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration — higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures) — are then magnified.
March 10, 2026
There’s ordinary virtue signalling, then there’s virtue costuming
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison describes what happens when virtue signalling becomes someone’s entire persona:
When Virtue Becomes a Costume
Here’s an old village joke: if a man walks around telling everyone how humble he is, check his pockets. He’s usually carrying a mirror.
That’s roughly how the modern “woke” phenomenon works. It presents itself as moral enlightenment, but most of the time it behaves like a status game, who can signal the most compassion, the loudest outrage, and the strongest allegiance to the fashionable cause of the week.
My definition is blunt: woke politics is moral signalling replacing moral responsibility.
It’s not about solving problems. It’s about performing concern.
And once you start looking at it that way, the pattern shows up everywhere.
The Performance Economy of Virtue
Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs”.
Luxury beliefs are ideas held mostly by wealthy or highly educated people that signal status but impose real costs on everyone else. The people promoting them rarely suffer the consequences.
Think about it.
Defund the police.
Abolish prisons.
Decriminalize hard drugs.
Romanticize homelessness as a “lifestyle choice”.Who pushes these ideas hardest?
Not the working-class neighbourhood dealing with break-ins. Not the single mother living beside a drug market. It’s usually professors, activists, and celebrities living in safe neighbourhoods with security cameras and gated buildings.
The belief becomes a badge of moral sophistication.
The consequences fall somewhere else.
This is the luxury belief machine.
The Five Laws of Stupidity at Work
Carlo Cipolla’s Five Laws of Human Stupidity explains the rest.
His argument was beautifully cynical: stupidity is not about intelligence. It’s about behaviour.
A stupid person, he wrote, is someone who causes harm to others while gaining nothing themselves.
Sound familiar?
Look around at some modern activism and you’ll see Cipolla’s laws running like background software.
Law #1: Always underestimate the number of stupid people.
Every generation believes it has escaped mass foolishness. Every generation is wrong.
Law #2: Stupidity is independent of education.
A PhD does not vaccinate someone against bad thinking. Sometimes it just gives them fancier vocabulary.
Law #3: A stupid person harms others without benefit.
Policies driven by emotional slogans often damage the very communities they claim to protect.
Law #4: Non-stupid people underestimate stupidity’s power.
This is why sensible people are constantly surprised when destructive ideas gain traction.
Law #5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Unlike criminals, they don’t know what they’re doing. And unlike the selfish, they aren’t pursuing rational gain.
They simply push the lever harder.
The Hollywood Example
Even entertainment hasn’t escaped the pattern.
Hollywood increasingly behaves less like a storytelling industry and more like a political signalling club. The pressure to conform is real: careers depend on being publicly aligned with the dominant ideology, and dissent can carry professional consequences.
The incentives are obvious.
Actors gain admiration by championing fashionable causes. They receive praise, awards, and moral approval, often without sacrificing anything material in their own lives.
It’s “virtue” at almost zero cost.
The Moral Time Machine
Then there’s what Bill Maher once joked about: the moral time machine.
Modern activists judge people from centuries ago as if those individuals possessed today’s cultural knowledge and moral vocabulary. It’s a kind of historical self-congratulation, imagining how virtuous we would have been in 1066 if only we had been there.
But that trick isn’t really about history.
It’s about status.
If you can condemn the past loudly enough, you look enlightened in the present.
The Incentive Problem
Here’s the uncomfortable truth.
Most systems don’t run on morality. They run on incentives.
Corporations chase profit.
Media chase attention.
Algorithms chase engagement.
Political activists chase moral prestige.If the reward structure encourages outrage and virtue signalling, that’s exactly what people will produce.
Not because they’re evil.
Because incentives work.
The Reframe
The real divide in modern politics isn’t left versus right.
It’s performance versus results.
One side asks:
“Does this policy sound compassionate?”
The other asks:
“Did it actually improve people’s lives?”
That’s the question that cuts through the noise.
Because compassion measured by intentions is theatre.
Compassion measured by outcomes is responsibility.
Here’s the test I use now.
When someone proposes a moral crusade, ask three questions:
Who pays the cost?
Who receives the applause?
What happens if the policy fails?
Luxury beliefs collapse under those questions almost instantly.
And the moment the performance stops, something interesting happens.
We can finally start solving the problem.
[NR – emphasis added]
Update, 11 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
February 17, 2026
The three core false claims of wokeness
Lorenzo Warby analyzes the three claims that underpin the intellectual structure of all the sub-categories derived from Critical Theory:
Universities across Anglo-America, and across the West more broadly, have become increasingly dominated by a Critical Theory magisterium: a teaching authority that claims ultimate or trumping moral authority. This magisterium is based on Critical Theory and its derivatives — Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Settler-Colonial Theory, and so on: which constitutes the Critical Social Justice matrix.
This magisterium has come to increasingly dominate academe for a range of reasons. It generates intolerant zealots, so benefits from the dynamics of an intolerant minority.
It offers a powerful shared status game — affirm beliefs X, Y, Z and that makes you A Good Person. This status game spreads a supporting censorious intolerance, for if affirming beliefs X, Y, Z and makes you A Good Person, then denying X, Y, or Z makes you A Bad Person.
This justifies shaming and shunning anyone who denies X, Y, Z, because they are Bad People and its shows your commitment to what makes someone A Good Person. It shows commitment to the shared status game. This status game generates moralised cognitive assets, and you protect the value of those assets by participating in — or at least going along with — the shaming and the shunning.
The status game generates moral projects that the central administrations of universities can use to expand their authority, range of action, and so resources. An opportunity they have enthusiastically embraced. An opportunity that corporate, non-profit and government bureaucracies have also enthusiastically embraced.
The emotions this status game attaches to those moralised cognitive assets — care, compassion, concern for the marginalised, if you affirm those beliefs, the opposite if you deny them — also plays into fears about threatening emotions (and safety through norm conformity) which are much stronger among men than women. Women are thus systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than men.
It is an exaggeration to claim that “wokery” is just the consequence of feminisation of institutions and occupations. It is, however, true that what works for — what is emotionally resonant in — increasingly feminised institutions and occupations has been selected for.
Source: data taken from this paper.
But the Critical Theory magisterium has expanded across academe — and beyond — due to the nature of its three foundational claims:
- A blank slate view of human nature.
- A view of social dynamics as dominated by conflict.
- An activist relationship with information: that the trumping purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it.
The blank slate view of human nature — not merely that we are not born without inborn ideas, but that everything that forms us is social — means that any level of social transformation that can be conceived is attainable. Provided enough social power can be assembled—to move human action, speech and thought in the correct direction—the socially-transformative society free of oppression and alienation can be created.
The grander the conceived purpose, the more energising and motivating it is. But also the more it rhetorically trumps anyone who is willing to “settle” for less than complete human liberation. This then feeds back into energising and motivating, as it provides an endless sense of being moral trumps.
A recurring version of such blank slate claims is that our “true” nature has been obscured or repressed by oppressive forces. This might be the alienation via private property (Marx) or by patriarchy, or white supremacy, or heteronormativity or whatever.
The most dramatic statement of the “repressed true nature” claim is also the earliest, in the first sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s The Social Contract (1762):
Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. (l’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.)
The view that oppressive forces are blocking our true nature goes naturally with the claim that social dynamics are dominated by conflict. This dominated-by-conflict claim was classically stated by Marx and Engels as the first sentence of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
If conflict dominates social dynamics, then the prosecution of such conflict so as to achieve human liberation becomes the ultimate moral good. Coordinating the fighters for human liberation becomes a moral urgency. To prosecute that struggle becomes the most important thing one can do.
Both of these claims naturally lead to, and gain strength from the claim, that the morally trumping thing to do with information is to prosecute the struggle for human liberation. Marx famously said:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis Eleven, 1845.
Max Horkheimer, in his seminal essay Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) tells us that:
Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built. Critical thought has a concept of man as in conflict with himself until this opposition is removed. If activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent social practice, which forms the individual’s life down to its least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything that goes on in the society.
Critical Theory is activist Theory, aimed at human liberation from the unwanted constraints of existing society and epitomises the activist relationship with information. All scholarship is trumped by this aim and so the most authoritative scholarship is that which is most committed to this aim.
Source. Notice the delusional claim of the first listed article. The intrusion of such updated Lysenkoism into contemporary science and medicine is even more rampant with matters Trans.
February 12, 2026
“Imagine getting mad about this and still thinking you’re a good person”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens responds to a typical rage-baiting “we’re all good people except those evil right wingnuts” post:
Every invocation of “universal love” is always invoked to legitimize a very particular form of hatred.
The Left does this thing where it denies the existence of its own ideology as being political at all. It’s just “love”. It’s just morality-as-politics, or simply “being a good person”.
And Leftists insist this is all they’re doing, even as they engage in the most aggressive and ruthless forms of politics imaginable.
Nothing is ever depicted as a power struggle between competing worldviews. It’s always a crusade against social ills, pathologies, and evil itself.
“Conservatism” doesn’t exist to these people. There’s no legitimate opposition, only a criminal element that has to be destroyed because Leftists have already declared themselves to be the universal manifestation of morality, peace, kindness, love, progress, and everything that is good and just in this world.
But everyone can see just how utterly hypocritical these people are. We continuously see examples of these same people exhibiting the most immoral, disgusting, and downright evil manifestations of hatred and violence against people and factions that they despise.
They just call it “love” as they do these things.
Meghan Murphy has a similar point on progressive delusion and its domestic variant, Canadian delusion:
The phenomenon of progressive delusion is very much like the phenomenon of Canadian delusion. Both groups go about their lives presuming that everyone not only respects and admires them, but sees them as they see themselves: 100% right.
There is zero doubt in the minds of progressives and Canadians that the entire world envies their intelligence — they are the most informed, the most invested in The Science, the most rational, and the most educated. Not only that, but they view themselves as the kindest, most compassionate, and most polite.
Should a progressive deem not to ostracize, scream at, or punch a person who dares hold non-left political views, they consider themselves very generous. Imagine! They, a Correct and Good, allowing a Hateful, Stupid, and Wrong to share the same air as them.
The assumption that everyone around them bases their lives and relationships on political parties, activist movements, and propaganda that has been consistently wrong for at least a decade is strange. Imagine buying the Covid scam hook, line, and sinker, or repeating “Transwomen are women” ad nauseam for five+ years, and still assuming you and your “side” are right about everything. Imagine continuing to insist that the “good” side is that side that advocated for child sterilization, forced the elderly to die alone in hospitals on account of a cold, and banned people from the internet and public life for speaking truths we all acknowledge are true now, but were not your party line a few years ago.
I hate to break it to you, but you are the bad guys, not us.
February 7, 2026
Food hang-ups by generation
Around the early to mid-80s, I started to notice trends in the kind of health information being pushed by the mainstream media. One of the big topics of the day was the dangers of … eggs. Eggs were so dangerous that “experts” were warning adults to avoid eating more than one or two per week. Three was the absolute limit and you were dicing with death if you went over that “healthy” limit. Then, a few years later, eggs were “the perfect food” and we weren’t eating enough of these formerly abominated death pills. A few years after that, OMG! Apples, people, apples! Danger, danger, danger! That was around the time I stopped putting any credence into health reporting in the media. However, as Lisa De Pasquale points out, food issues have been an ongoing struggle for each succeeding generation:
In the ’80s, the ultimate healthy Boomer breakfast was a bran muffin. There were also various cereals like Grape-Nuts and Raisin Bran. There definitely wasn’t room for their parents’ bacon and eggs unless you had a death wish. Boomers settled on eggs as the devil’s snack when the American Heart Association warned in the 1960s that people shouldn’t consume more than three eggs per week. Like social distancing six feet from others during COVID and eight 8oz glasses of water per day, the recommendation wasn’t based on science, but on being a simple number Americans could remember.
Thanks, but this Gen Xer will stick to getting my 8,675,309 steps per year as my guiding fitness principle.
[…]
The Millennial Food Pyramid
Level One: Genetically Modified Organism and Nonorganic Foods — Use Sparingly
While Gen X was at ground zero in doubting Big Food’s pyramid, our Millennial colleagues and kids really continued the battle. Like luxury logos, they seek out the organic and non-GMO labels. It’s a virtue signal of both their values and what they can afford. Erewhon smoothies, anyone?
Level Two: Various Overpriced Coffee Drinks — Two to Three Servings
Gen Xers link coffee to work and responsibility; caffeine is a tool to get through the morning. Millennials view coffee drinks as self-care. It’s about treating themselves to dessert any time of day — a major win for marketing executives.
Level Three: Charcuterie Boards, Wine, Hard Seltzers, Craft Beers — Three to Five Servings
Millennials love to entertain. Nothing shows sophistication and “adulting” in your 30s and early 40s like a charcuterie board. Lunchables upgraded! They came of drinking age at the same time as small-batch beers, American boutique wineries, and hard seltzers.
Level Four: Instagram-Worthy Food — Six to Eleven Servings
Camera phones leveled up the entertainment value of food consumption. Like organic labels, what Millennials eat signals their open-mindedness. As they get older, they straddle the line of wanting to be in on the trends (avocado toast and açai bowls) and the dive you haven’t heard of with authentic phở.
The Generation Z and Generation Alpha Food Pyramid
Level One: Real Meat, Dairy, and Peanuts — Use Sparingly
The Gen X and Millennial generations dabbled in veggie burgers, but Gen Z and Gen Alpha went whole lab-created hog into plant-based meats and milks, to the point that meat and milk no longer have a meaning until a company gets sued for using the words. To be fair, they are also embracing biohacking trends and ditching seed oils. Due to the growing prevalence of allergies, peanuts are a universal no-no food in public spaces.
Level Two: TikTok Recipes — Two to Three Servings
The term “recipe” is used loosely. I’ve come across a TikTok video for making a cream sauce from a block of cream cheese, water, and dried pasta. There is a positive aspect of trying these TikTok recipes, though: it prepares them for trying new things and for failure when a recipe doesn’t come out right.
Level Three: Food Delivery Service Meals — Three to Five Servings
Postmates, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash are staples at mealtime. Following their surge during the COVID era as restaurants struggled to stay in business, accounts linked to their parents’ bank accounts became as common as sharing a cell phone plan.
Level Four: Gamer Food and Drinks — Six to Eleven Servings
Living next to a park has taught me one thing about Gen Z and Gen Alpha — they’re all inside. I mostly see neighborhood kids on Halloween, and every year, I recognize fewer and fewer costumes because they’re dressed as video game characters. Their snacks are manufactured for their attention span: quick hits of spicy, sour, or sweet while on pause. The gamer culture and H Mart remove barriers as Japanese snacks dominate.
So, where does this leave Gen X? We’re not immune to the powers of Big Food. In fact, recent research shows that ultra-processed food addiction began with us thanks to the explosion and availability of ultra palatable foods with added refined carbs and fats. StudyFinds reported researchers from the University of Michigan said, “Individuals who are now older adults were in developmentally sensitive stages during the 1970s and 1980s, precisely when tobacco-owned food manufacturers were shaping the market with addictive ultra-processed foods”.
January 22, 2026
Carney in Davos … “the mismatch between message and messenger is … very special”
I make it a point not to listen to politicans’ speeches, as I need to keep my blood pressure within safe ranges for health reasons. A lot of Canadian commentators have been gushing with praise for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s bloviations at the WEF gabathon in Davos, because of course they have. Brave Mr. Carney standing up to the Bad Orange Man and getting ovations from the kind of people he’s most comfortable dealing with. How very nice for him. But as Chris Bray explains, it didn’t play quite as well with the rest of the non-Davos-attending world:
Mark Carney gave a speech in Davos, that fortress of democratic pluralism where hotel rooms inside the security zone cost thousands of dollars a night and no one with an expense account has to be lonely because the massive security forces don’t try to interfere with all the sex trafficking, which is very democratic. Anyway, the speech was stunning and brave, and everybody clapped a lot.
Someone put the word “flexes” next to the word “Canada”, apparently not intending to cause laughter, but yes: Mark Carney flexed and warned and puffed himself up like a man who’d just eaten the wrong part of the fugu.
You should watch it. Don’t try to eat or drink during the speech, because you’ll choke, and push any breakable household goods away from the reach of what will soon be your flailing arms, but you should watch him perform this extraordinary set of stranded symbols. The mismatch between message and messenger is … very special.
I was physically paralyzed as an effect of hearing this sentence from this face for a full ten seconds, and then I spasmed. It’s like watching Erich Honecker stand up to the East German regime. “We cannot tolerate misogyny, warns Jack the Ripper.”
Carney hinted broadly that the rules are breaking down in international relationships …
… which for the first time in a long time are being reshaped by mere power, a rare thing on the global stage, because there’s meanness and bullying and a rejection of friendly norms and restraint from … someone very bad, not that he was naming names, and so Canada is turning to new partners, extending the hand of friendship to nations and leaders that still care about rules and values and democracy.
The central banker who was selected as his country’s head of government before he’d ever stood for election to any office anywhere ever, the prime minister of a country where the government had just been rebuked by its courts for faking a national security emergency so it could suspend the rule of law and crush dissent, gave a real tubthumper about democracy and the rule of law.
The total absence of connection between “things being said” and “things being done” sets a record, here.
January 15, 2026
“The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation”
At Always the Horizon, Copernican discusses the progressive mindset and its complete inability to cope with barbarians (literal and figurative):
In light of recent events, it is important to recognize that a rules-based system can exist only as long as there exists someone to enforce the rules. For a long time, White Westerners have been brow-beaten with an imagined consensus morality where those who are historically hierarchically powerful are also inherently evil. “Those misogynist White rednecks”, etc. That was, according to the rules, the acceptable position to hold.
The rules are enforced by consuming den-mothers who have built around themselves fortresses of bureaucracy and perceived cultural alignment. You have to follow the rules, or you’re a bad person.
Historically, Christianity managed these ideals through Europe and the Holy Roman Empire, where they were considered a moral standard. Enforced through the social order of the time. Having previously attacked Christianity in the late 20th century, the modern Left has proceeded to annihilate that moral grounding. Replacing it with a vague sense of moral relativism and platitudes:
“We think these behaviors and rules are good because everyone agrees, and everyone agrees because we’ve made them as these behaviors and rules are good.”
The tautology of liberal thought. Moral relativism with appeal-to-majority and appeal-to-consensus stacked atop one another. Recent events have demonstrated that even classically liberal political positions cannot be maintained without a strong underlying social and moral framework. Lacking that, liberalism (again, as recently demonstrated) defaults to meaningless tautologies and a feminine urge to “not harm” people who in many circumstances damn well need to be harmed.
The result of this social decay is, of course, a default to basics.
The Barbarians Veto
Your village or apartment block has been put to flame. Your son is dead, your wife and daughter are being hauled off to god knows where, and a giant of a man with a bloody axe stands before you. Knowing that this is probably your last chance to do anything, you puff up your chest and pronounce: “YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON”.
The man looks at you like you’re retarded, and then messily separates your prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. The Barbarian doesn’t give a shit what you consider a “good person” to be. He couldn’t care less. What he knows is that the only thing separating the two of you is that he is strong and you are weak. The reason why it is he standing with a bloodied axe and not you, is simply a matter of prowess and luck. If you were strong, you would be doing the same thing to him.
Do unto others before they do unto you. Do it fast. Do it first. And do it effectively.
The political Left has built its entire philosophical core on minimizing harm and playing the role of victim. The Left is thus completely blind to the barbarians veto. The Left believes there’s some inherent nobility in having your home burnt to the ground and your family murdered. That’s why they pursue with suicidal ideation the opportunity to die for their psychotic religion. Better yet, they zealously pursue the opportunity to get other people to die for their psychotic religion. Leftism is a cult that requires blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of its most zealous supporters.
They fear the strength of the Barbarian, uncompromising, not willing to sacrifice himself, but entirely willing to sacrifice hordes of his unthinking enemies. He does not see himself as a “good person”, but the barbarian sees himself as a “surviving person”. He survives by killing his enemies. His bloodline survives by impregnating his women, whether they want it or not. The Left has no answer to the barbarian, but to submit to his will, and then demand you do so as well.
That’s why they love murderers, cartels, and foreigners, but demand that their own men and sons die bloodily in self-sacrifice to their own cultural enemies. The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation.
Update, 16 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
January 12, 2026
Britain’s new “war against misogyny”
At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage explains how a Netflix show ended up as a key exhibit in the British chattering classes’ latest crusade:
Under our Labour government, the dictionary of euphemisms has swollen to rival War and Peace. Each day mints a fresh brick of Lego Language — words pressed together into sentence shapes that feel moral without actually meaning anything. Euphemism is not just annoying speech; it is a habit of mind. The mouth that traffics in euphemisms aligns with the mind that thinks in euphemisms too.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Labour’s declared War on Misogyny. According to our betters, Britain is a scorched plain over which misogynists roam, knuckles dragging, hypnotised by Andrew Tate and the Manosphere. These creatures, we are told, stalk the land, muttering statistics about male athletic advantage like a swarm of demented Daleks.
Our Labour government, its approval rating currently three percent lower than the percentage of Brits who believe there is a monster living in Loch Ness Lake, will train teachers to spot misogyny in boys and send “high-risk” offenders to courses to “tackle the root causes of misogyny”.
Misogyny, however, is not a vibes-based category. The word comes from the Ancient Greek misos (hatred) and gunē (woman): hatred of women. Until recently, it described a pathological condition involving fear, control, and violence directed at women. Such brutal men exist. They always have. But are they representative of the average British schoolboy doom-scrolling through social-media nonsense? Press X to doubt.
Yet this is where the campaign now lands: in classrooms of adolescent boys, taught to interrogate their latent depravity before it has manifested. It is not behaviour being punished, but probability.
In a culture strapped to the algorithm, only the most extreme definitions float to the surface. The brain, trained by screens, learns to seek the sensational, the novel, the ludicrous. And so, Labour shapes its moral imagination on content rather than evidence.
The Netflix drama Adolescence perfectly captures this drift. For the unacquainted, the series — an incel murder story drugged liberally with “that Andrew Tate shit” — was received as revealed truth. For The Guardian, it was “the best TV show ever”. It was not. Even a semi-literate eye would charge Adolescence as, well … adolescent.
Nevertheless, Adolescence assumed the status of revealed truth. On a BBC news panel, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was interrogated for admitting she had not yet seen it. Middle-class parents dutifully watched alongside their sons, scanning their offspring for signs of misogyny leaking from its gills. Fiction hardened into diagnosis.
Life now imitates social media. Labour’s plan to tackle misogyny appears lifted directly from the website formerly known as Twitter. Schools will teach boys that it is not acceptable to act like barbarians. One wonders who imagined otherwise.
What these awareness seminars will not address — naturally — are the forms of misogyny that are neither hypothetical nor algorithmically inferred, but routine, organised, and existing beyond a Twitter feed or a Netflix menu.
They will not dwell on forced veiling, female genital mutilation, so-called honour violence, or acid attacks — practices documented in Britain and overwhelmingly concentrated within small but electorally critical communities governed by brutal patriarchal codes.
A rational observer might reasonably conclude that such practices meet any serious definition of misogyny: not ironic hatred, not incel posturing, but actual coercion, violence, and control exercised over women’s bodies and lives. You know, the very domination that Iranian women (and men) are currently risking their lives — quite literally — to uproot.
Yet these realities remain untouched and unmentioned, whilst classrooms revert into courtrooms enlisted to pre-emptively correct the imagined sins of adolescent boys. The reason is not moral complexity but political convenience. Euphemism thrives where naming the problem would threaten electoral arithmetic.
And so, the language grows ever softer around real brutality, even as it hardens against boys whose only crime is to physically resemble a fictitious incel murderer on Netflix.
