Balderdash

How USAID Built a Global Color Revolution Infrastructure With NGOs

2026-11-14T14:00:00.000+08:00

This is why left wingers are so upset about USAID

"How USAID Built a Global Color Revolution Infrastructure With NGOs...

The right points to USAID grants for transgender operas in Colombia and DEI workshops in Serbia and asks why American taxpayers were funding them. The left points to children who depended on foreign aid claims millions of deaths.

But both miss the purpose of true USAID.

USAID was one of Washington's primary instruments for regime change abroad. Beneath the humanitarian programs, the cultural initiatives, and the development projects sat a much larger objective: managing regime change and color revolutions across the globe.

Which raises an obvious question:

What does a transgender opera in Colombia have to do with regime change?...

1. Media. Independent outlets. Journalism training, equipment, institutional funding so a newsroom can survive without depending on the local government or corporations for revenue. The function is to ensure that there is an “independent” outlet ready to broadcast Western narratives. You need a megaphone before you propagate a message.

2. Legal infrastructure. Lawyers, legal aid clinics, rule-of-law programs, judicial reform advocacy. The function is to build a class of professionals who know how to challenge a government through its own legal system — and who have the institutional backing to survive doing it. And, yes, build a judiciary that shares the values of liberal Western democracy.

3. Election monitoring. Observer training, voter roll modernization, parallel vote tabulation (PVT). PVT is the critical technology: an “independent” count run alongside the official one. Without PVT data, people claiming a stolen election are sore losers. With Western-backed election monitoring, they're defenders of liberal democracy.

4. Activist training. Civic engagement workshops, youth leadership programs, community organizing. The grant descriptions say "civic engagement" and "leadership development." The skills being transferred:

How to organize a protest
How to sustain a protest
How to train others to do the same
How to communicate with media
“Nonviolent” discipline under pressure and training.

The result is a trained cadre of people who know how to convert public anger into sustained political pressure across multiple election cycles.

5. Governance data. Procurement monitoring, FOIA programs, budget transparency initiatives, anti-corruption databases. These organizations generate the raw material that the media reports on, the lawyers cite in court, and the election monitors reference in their findings. Without this layer, the other four operate on anecdote. With it, they operate on evidence.

None of these looks like regime change in isolation. A journalism training program is a journalism training program. The system becomes visible only when you fund all five in the same country for a decade and the people running them all know each other because you trained them at the same conferences, connected them through the same fellowship programs, and funded them through the same grant pipelines.

What the Completed System Looks Like: Georgia

Georgia is the country where the full pipeline played out in public, so Georgia is where you can trace it.

Starting in the mid-1990s, American and European money built all five capabilities inside Georgian civil society. USAID and the Eurasia Foundation funded Rustavi 2, an independent broadcaster that became the opposition's primary media outlet by 2003. The Liberty Institute, founded in 1996, drafted Georgia's freedom of speech legislation and ran anti-corruption campaigns. ISFED, founded in 1995 with USAID and NED money, trained 3,000 election observers and ran parallel vote tabulation across ten Georgian elections. NED spent $3 million on Otpor in Serbia, whose trainers then came to Georgia — funded by Open Society, facilitated by Liberty Institute — and trained a student group called Kmara. Same playbook, same clenched-fist logo, different country. And organizations like IDFI monitored government procurement, generating the data everybody else used.

Open Society's own Georgia staff described the scale in a video: "We have been out there, helping every startup in Georgia, almost every organization that came to us with new ideas... There were 16,000 projects supported by the foundation."

Read that again. Sixteen thousand projects in a country of 3.7 million people.

In November 2003, all five fired at once. ISFED's parallel vote count proved the parliamentary election was fraudulent. Rustavi 2 broadcast the evidence. Kmara filled the streets. Liberty Institute provided the organizational backbone. Three weeks later, President Shevardnadze resigned in the Rose Revolution.

The activation was emergent. Every node in the network activated and performed its designed function simultaneously.

After the revolution, Liberty Institute members entered the Georgian government: Bokeria to the National Security Council, Subari as Public Defender, Targamadze to the Defense and Security Committee, Vardzelashvili as Deputy Justice Minister, Zhvania to Foreign Intelligence, and Minashvili as Foreign Affairs Committee Chair. The organizations didn't just support a transition. They staffed it.

USASpending.gov shows over a billion in USAID awards to Georgia from 2008 to 2025. The contract descriptions spell it out: CEPPS received $26 million for "Georgia Elections and Political Processes Activity."East-West Management Institute got $21 million for "build and innovate upon PAST USAID investments in the rule of law." That one is the pipeline describing itself — build on what we already built.

Twenty years later, the Georgian government proposed a law requiring NGOs to disclose their foreign funding. The same network activated: foreign-funded NGOs sustained protests across multiple waves, hundreds of thousands in the streets. Former U.S. Ambassador Ian Kelly explained the dependency on camera: "The civil society is the absolute beating heart of Georgian democracy... it relies quite a bit on EU and U.S. funding."

The Georgian government's response was blunt: foreign-funded NGOs organized the 2003 color revolution, and the same infrastructure activated again when the government tried to make them disclose who was paying.

If this is starting to sound familiar, good. It should.

Now Look at the United States

The same five capabilities exist domestically. The language softens — "election observation" becomes "election protection," "civil society training" becomes "civic engagement," "independent media" becomes "local civic journalism" — but the functional categories are identical. The funding source shifts from USAID to private foundations. The scale is larger.

1. Media. The Knight Foundation gave $25 million to the American Journalism Project, which it

described as a "first-of-its-kind venture philanthropy organization focused on growing and sustaining independent, nonpartisan, local civic news." AJP has distributed millions in smaller grants. MacArthur

gave Howard University $5 million for a "Center for Journalism and Democracy."

2. Legal infrastructure. The Brennan Center for Justice — mission statement: "nonpartisan law and policy institute that seeks to improve the American systems of democracy and justice." The Hopewell Fund, an Arabella Advisors fiscal sponsor, hosts Democracy Docket — Marc Elias's election litigation operation — as one of its many fiscally sponsored projects. The domestic legal infrastructure shapes the legal environment from the outside through litigation, judicial training, and model legislation that state legislatures adopt.

3. Election monitoring. The Voter Registration Project runs $40+ million per year on private donations. Its grantee, State Voices, coordinates over 700 organizations in 24 states, providing "cutting-edge organizing technology and experimentation access." The Foundation to Promote Open Society gave the Hopewell Fund $10 million in 2023 for a "Nonpartisan Free Election Fund." The Election Trust Initiative launched with $25 million from Hewlett, Peterson, and Klarman foundations — and files no independent public returns because its finances are buried inside Pew's 990. Domestically, 700 coordinated organizations across 24 states provide poll monitoring, voter verification, and legal rapid response.

4. Activist training. The Alliance for Youth Organizing runs programs on over 200 college campuses. Its 990 describes "local, integrated civic engagement programs that help train and develop new leaders, register and mobilize young voters, and educate young people about key issues in their communities. Our program engages with young people year-round and over multiple cycles, building habits that translate into lifelong civic engagement." Open Society Action Fund spends tens of millions on domestic civic engagement grants. The capability is identical as Georgia: a trained cadre who know how to organize, mobilize, and sustain political pressure across multiple election cycles.

5. Governance data. Open Society Action Fund's 2023 IRS 990 lists its domestic program areas: "DEMOCRACY DEFENSE, VOTING RIGHTS, ELECTION INTEGRITY, CENSUS, REDISTRICTING, ECONOMIC SECURITY... COMBATTING MIS- AND DISINFORMATION, TECHNOLOGY AND CIVIL RIGHTS... GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY." Domestic program expense: $173 million.

Those are NED's foreign democracy categories — democracy defense, election integrity, government accountability and transparency, combatting disinformation — applied domestically, word for word.

The Recognition

Seven right-wing candidates won in Latin America after the funding stopped. The infrastructure that had been cultivated for decades began to weaken because its primary source of capital disappeared. The newspapers survived only if they could find new donors. The NGOs shrank.

That is what people misunderstand when they argue about whether USAID funded transgender operas, journalism workshops, anti-corruption databases, youth leadership programs, or election observers.

Those were never the point.

The point was the network.

A grant to a newspaper is not a newspaper. A grant to an activist group is not an activist group. A grant to an election-monitoring organization is not an election-monitoring organization. Fund enough of them for long enough, connect them to one another, train their leaders together, give them shared sources of funding, shared language, shared objectives, and eventually they become a political operating system.

At that stage, individual grants no longer matter. The system reproduces itself.

Georgia shows what the completed architecture looks like. The organizations did not merely criticize the government. They generated information, trained activists, shaped public opinion, challenged institutions, mobilized voters, and ultimately supplied personnel for the government that followed.

The architecture was the product.

And once you recognize the architecture, you start seeing it everywhere.

Even in the United States.

Especially in the United States.

That is why we see a major nationwide protest every month as long as President Trump is in office."

Links - 14th November 2026 (1 - Women [including Shane Gillis])

2026-11-14T10:56:00.000+08:00

Loki on X - "So an American comedian named Shane Gillis went on SNL and said women dress like whores in the gym, he was referring to women that wear nothing but compression shorts (you know the ones that show the shape of the sandwich) and sports bras. To teach him a lesson, thousands of women are now making social media posts of themselves wearing exactly that, while talking about him. Basically, they’ve launched the biggest “sex sells” PR campaign imaginable, giving him free publicity while advertising the very thing he was criticising. All in an attempt to teach him a lesson. 😂 Maybe he should say women don’t cook next, hopefully that works just as good as this one too 🤣"

Melissa Chen on X - "The outrage over Shane Gillis’s gym joke recalls the backlash Jordan Peterson faced thanks to a 2018 Vice interview where he pointed out that women wear makeup and high heels at work as sexual displays. The Professor was ahead of his time and showed what it's like when a reflexive low-IQ lefty refuses to engage with reality in order to preserve his bubble of ideological safety. In both these incidents, you have someone observing (or joking about) women's deliberate sexual signaling in mixed sex spaces, and instead of examining the signaling, the biology, or the inconsistent rules, the reflexive response was to treat that truthful observation itself as the offense. Our choices in clothing and cosmetics have aesthetic, evolutionary, social and sexual functions. Yet modern feminists like to pretend the sexual component is absent or irrelevant. Both controversies highlight how hypocritical things are because on one hand, female sexual presentation is common and in fact, ENCOURAGED, yet male visual attention or commentary is pathologized. Peterson’s broader point was that post-sexual-revolution and #MeToo environments demand male restraint and “enthusiastic consent” protocols while refusing to discuss female signaling, hypergamy, or the biological asymmetry in visual arousal. Reaction to Gillis’s banal joke reveals the same double standard at play. Both women (and men) deliberately dress and behave in ways that maximize sexual attention, status, or mate-value signaling. Remember when second wave feminists used to own the "I’m a 'ho" energy? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Back then, dressing sexy or slutty was treated as straightforward empowerment and self-expression. Today’s third wave feminism is in denial about the biological realities of sexual signaling, and then piles shrill emotional moralizing on top of the dishonesty. Dr. @jordanbpeterson argued that once traditional sexual norms are dismantled without replacement, mixed environments become minefields. Women still engage in sexual display, but men are punished for acknowledging it, and the rules governing behavior are written in moral language that defines male behavior as toxic by default. This will keep happening until one side stops pretending that signaling and biology don’t exist."

drew on X - "Genuinely confused about the reaction this Shane Gillis monologue is getting. No one can seriously be that upset about this"
Katie Campione on X - "We are in the middle of one of the largest nationwide reckonings with sexual assault ever and this guy gets on stage and calls women whores for wearing shorts at the gym? You think he doesn’t know what he is saying? It’s not only unoriginal and unfunny, it’s really disgusting."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "The funny thing is that this is ALL fake. The Cornell 7 thing turned out to be scuzzy on all sides, but no kind of prosecutable rape. The other #NewMeToo cases ("62 million man rape academy") ALL fell apart or duly ended with the men in jail. Gillis didn't say women ARE working prostitutes: he said they dress slutty in mixed gyms - an innocuous Chapelle's Show joke. Almost all left wing modern rage boils down to this. "How can you ignore Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, and Rayshard Brooks, and Trayvon Martin, and Kyle Rittenhouse, and Pretti/Good, and the Duke Lacrosse rape, and the Chi Phi 7 hour rape, and the Rolling Stone rape, and the Rape Academy, and Yasmin Seweid, and Jussie Smolliet, and Covington Catholic, and Air Force Academy, and the dozen lynchings?" Because either almost every one of literally every one of those cases was bullshit. The goal is presenting such a mass of angry text to the world that good faith people think there must be something there. But, there really isn't."

Bridget Phetasy on X - "Shane Gillis goading thousands of women into tagging him in their half-naked selfies is elite tier."

Allie ✞ on X - "On gym attire: There is an innate fantasy women have that goes like this: I am super duper pretty and everyone notices and loves me for this, but also this attention and power come with zero further implications or downsides The fantasy is one thing, being frustrated it isn't reality is another Most girls grow out of this as part of normal development (and you should! it's not realistic), learning that large amounts of attention and affection from, say, your dad, are freely given ....but that same kind of attention from strangers comes with strings attached Posting bikini pics that get 10M likes means you have a lot of men saving them for...gross reasons Going to the gym wearing next to nothing is attention grabbing for a reason, and you don't get to decide whose attention it grabs or the nature of that attention It's a bit of a black pill, and you tend to (or, should) figure it out somewhere in your teens: strange men do not want to adore and dote on you for zero reason To be clear, negative attention can happen even when you aren't doing something specifically out of the ordinary Getting catcalled often happens in the most normal outfits - it's just the flip side of being young and pretty The issue is this has evolved into almost an ideology: rather than recognizing the reality that attention is a double-edged sword, there's an impulse to regulate the attention i.e. "You can only notice me in the ways I want" You become like the dog meme below, saying "No sexual thoughts, only attention" Unfortunately for its advocates, this line of thinking is waging war with reality itself"

Hi on X - ""strange men do not want to adore and dote on you for zero reason" I legitimately don't understand what reason women have in their minds as to why showing off their bodies garners so much male attention? Do they think its some mechanical fascination with female proportions?"
Allie ✞ on X - " I'll do my best to explain it but you have to grant that we just...are that way by default. Our assumption is that we are, by default, worthy of attention and adoration. Men aren't like this - men assume they are loved for what they do/achieve/provide - everyone can blackpill about the difference if you want but I see no reason to ascribe moral weight to it. ANYWAYS this default setting is healthy if (and reinforced when) that attention and adoration are coming from a dad, but your brain doesn't automatically recalibrate when it's not. We are then raised on princess movies where everyone adores the princess because she is pretty. Think about it: Prince Charming is not trying to sleep with Cinderella. He also doesn't love her for her intellect, they barely speak the whole movie. She. Is. Just. Pretty. Cinderella is one such example but this is reinforced by virtually every form of young girls' media. Partly because it sells, partly because the desire to be loved manifests itself this way naturally in girls. So we learn to connect "people look at me and like the way I look" with "I am worthy". Because women are used to being loved for what we are and not what we provide/produce, we have no instinct to search for "What does this man see in me?" ...and this gets dangerous once you outgrow princess dresses, because when you try on your first too-short skirt and realize the attention ramps up, you have no mental emergency brake for what's happening. Your dad should, and in a healthy dynamic does, by saying "You are not leaving the house in that". But if for whatever reason that doesn't happen, you just keep on thinking that you are getting rightful attention and adoration by dressing pretty. And it IS pretty. Even to women, we like the look of short skirts, heels, etc. Not for sexual reasons, but there's a reason that's what Barbies wear. It's feminine and pretty! But I digress. This is a long-winded way of saying: it is not natural for a woman to ask "Why is he giving me attention?" that is a skill we need to learn and, more specifically, need to be taught by either someone who cares about us or by life experience"
Too bad dads saying "you are not leaving the house in that" is considered sexist and misogynistic nowadays

Allie ✞ on X - ""Screw clothes at the gym, bring back hot people!!!!" I regret to inform this crowd that the monkey paw is going to curl. 70% of the US is overweight or obese. This will not result in gyms full of sweat-misted models, it will be your local Walmart with less clothing"
Michael Druggan on X - "You can avoid this by going to an expensive gym. The gym I go to on San Diego is $150/mo and almost everyone there is in good shape because people who aren't serious about fitness don't want to pay that much."

🎃🍁 Pumpkin Spice Sand 🏈☕️ on X - "My 2 cents: The only women I’ve ever seen go to the gym in skimpy outfits are mostly influencers. When I go the gym (I try to go 2 - 3x a week) and I’ve never seen the women there in booty shorts (unless you count bike shorts as booty shorts) or pants w the weird butt things... The gym I go to (the Y) has a dress code and I have to assume that the gyms these people go to probably doesn’t. 🤷‍♀️"

Lupe Macias | Facebook - "The seam on your shorts doesn't need to touch your butthole. Your ass cheeks don't need to be hanging out. Underboob doesn't give you any advantage, and your tits don't need to be popping out, showing areolas, to lift. That being said, MEN SHOULDN'T gaze, make inappropriate comments, advances, or assumptions if you do. It was a joke about the current state of gym culture. A joke could also be made about sporting commercials. I can't watch a game without seeing Sweeney naked, covering up with balls all over my screen, or Fox selling boner pills. Women really want to stop being treated like "whores," AS THEY SHOULD AND DESERVE. But unfortunately, there are bad apples that rot the entire group, just like bad cops, bad teachers, and the absolute worst politicians. I could go on and on. And unfortunately, I can scroll down my feed and give you more bad examples of women objectifying themselves for clicks and views than actual gym tutorials with women wearing more clothing doing actual workouts. And I get how algorithms work but even when looking up specific creators the follwer/view count clearly shows what is being pushed So, until this social media obsession with clicks and views, and the need to be monetized for doing everyday things, runs its course—which is its own epidemic—unfortunately, change will be difficult. We reward this every time we interact with content promoting such behavior that does nothing more than divide. We made people popular and it inspired others to pursue the same dream. Let's make one thing clear. I'm not saying that every woman who wears revealing clothing to the gym is objectifying herself or seeking attention. I'm talking specifically about the content I see on social media every single day. Women posting videos in extremely revealing gym clothes, supposedly demonstrating workouts, yet there's no discussion of the routine, no explanation of proper form, and often not even a camera angle that allows viewers to see whether the exercise is being performed correctly. So what exactly is the purpose of the video? If the focus isn't on the workout, the technique, or educating the viewer, but instead on highlighting certain body parts, I think it's perfectly reasonable to question whether the content is actually about fitness or simply using fitness as a backdrop to attract views and engagement. And that's my point. There's a difference between wearing what makes you comfortable at the gym and deliberately creating sexualized content under the guise of fitness. And it is those women on social media making such content that put a spot light on the matter That still doesn't give anyone the right to harass, disrespect, or make inappropriate advances toward women. Those are two separate issues, and both can be discussed without excusing either behavior."

Ian Kennedy on X - "Wish it didn’t need to be said over and over. Women are not a joke, not a punchline. Women’s bodies, and the clothing women choose to wear are not topics for men to debate or criticize. Not on a stage, not in private."
Lisa Britton on X - "Apparently men shouldn’t criticize women at all, on a stage or in private. But women criticize men all the time! About everything—their bodies, bank accounts, style, everything! If women’s bodies and the clothing they choose to wear are not topics for men to debate or criticize, then women shouldn’t criticize men either, no?"

Tadhg Mac an Chalbhaigh 🇮🇪 on X - "I've been going to gyms in Ireland on and off for 15 years. There are far more women in gyms now, and it's not even close. Yes, they've gone from dressing sensibly to dressing in gym bikinis and full face make-up (like whores). It's not misogyny to describe a real phenomenon."
Dvorstone on X - "Okay, I guess I will explain the "gym whore" issue. In short, gyms are a less-crass Instagram. It's a way of showing off their bodies to strangers for attention, while maintaining plausible deniability:
1. Women are psychologically more inclined to like attention.
2. Using sex for attention is arguably the most common manifestation of that.
3. The traditional purpose of this was to get a husband.
4. Today, the purpose is ego-validation and/or money via social media or OnlyFans (or similar way of monetizing their sexual aesthetics).
5. Gyms are a place where women can show off their bodies without being flagrant about it.
They've been relying on "plausible deniability" and now they just got called out for it, which is why they're so upset."

Meghan Murphy | Facebook - "No one is actually paying that much attention to you. You aren’t being harassed on the daily. All attractive women know this, because we have all spent our lives moving about the world from the time we were teenagers, and we are aware that actual sexual harassment is not really as common as melodramatic liberal feminists pretend it is. Most men are reasonably polite and normal people. Some are weirdo creeps and public perverts, I know. But they are far less common than the masses of normals who keep their thoughts inside their heads and don’t feel inclined towards criminal or intimidating behaviour. The fact that legions of women used Gillis’ monologue and their fake-rage response to post photos of their asses on the internet proves my point. If only you knew how much your lying, whiny personalities took away from the attractiveness of your butts."

Meme - *WAP* *Excited feminist*
*Sydney Sweeney* *Upset feminist*
*Lindsay Clancy* *Excited feminist*
*Shane Gillish skit* *Super triggered feminists as launched missiles*

Meme - "Why are all you whores mad at Shane Gillis? Y'all are acting like he strangled 3 children with exercise equipment"

Meme - Rachel Wilson @Rach4Patriarchy: "The same stupid women who were canceling Sydney Sweeney for doing a sexy sports ball ad a couple weeks ago are the same women who are defiantly going to the gym in a bra and booty shorts today to prove Shane Gillis wrong"
Emperor Thickens @EmperorT...: "Women are called out for dressing like whores for attention. In response, they record videos dressed as whores, saying they don't dress like whores for attention-for attention."
Marcus Reid @WarNoWinners: "It's just another excuse to dress like a whore at the gym for male attention, but the second a naturally hot woman commands more of that attention, suddenly it's a crime. Same thing children do."

Meme - David Pivtorak @TheDavidPiv: "All the women criticizing Shane Gillis right now:"
dasha @nobody_stop_me: "PLEASE stop sexualizing my tight wet pussy!!!"

Meme - *Monk lifting weights in gym with closed eyes while woman pulls up her skirt and shakes her bare ass in front of him while pretending to lift weights*

Natalie Jean Beisner on X - "I’m really confused. Last month feminists were mad at Sydney Sweeney for prancing around naked and in her underwear, sexualizing herself and women in her gambling ad. …but now we’re mad a comedian said women dress like whores in the gym? Can someone explain this to me? I’m getting whiplash."
Lisa Britton on X - "It really is hard to keep up with what women are supposed to be upset about. Whiplash, indeed. One minute, everyone is outraged that Sweeney objectifying and sexualizing herself was “setting women back” and anyone going against that was a misogynist, and now women objectifying and sexualizing themselves is perfectly acceptable and anyone going against that is a misogynist."
Electronzap on X - "The rules change however they need to in order to constantly keep attacking men."

Meme - ">NO
>I DONT WANNA GET MARRIED
>I WANT TO BE SEEN AND HEARD
>I WANT TO START AN ONLYFANS
>I WANT TO SPEND MY 20s GETTING PLOWED INTO OBLIVION BY MEN I'VE JUST MET WHO ARE AN 8 OR ABOVE
>I WANT TO GET KNOCKED UP DOZENS OF TIMES AND USE ABORTION AS A BIRTH CONTROL
>I WANT TO BELIEVE I'M MORE ATTRACTIVE THEN I AM BECAUSE A 10/10 CHAD LET ME BLOW HIM ONCE BEFORE GHOSTING ME
>I WANT TO OPENLY SUPPORT THE INVASION OF MY COUNTRY BY THE THIRD WORLD
>IF I I EVER DO GET MARRIED I WANT IT TO BE FOR MONEY
>I WANT TO BE ALLOWED TO MURDER MY KIDS IF I'M EVER FEELING DEPRESSED OR MY STAR SIGN TELLS ME TO
>I WANT TO LOOK LIKE I'M 60 BY AGE 30
>I WANT TO BECOME A BITTER OLD CRONE WHO HATES ALL MEN AND ATTRACTIVE YOUNG WOMEN
Why can't men empathize with her? Is it because women have higher EQ (Emotional Intelligence)? This is very Gemini-coded. Saturn must be in retrograde."

Meme - "What secret ended a relationship instantly?"
"Found out my boyfriend had been recording our arguments on his phone. Not for himself. He was posting them online and letting strangers vote on who was right. He had 40k followers. I was losing 70 to 30."
Dave L.: "I don't see a problem here. Women do the same thing but in group chats with screen shots and voice messages."

Meme - Specter @DemonFramed: "I'm sorry to tell you this, but your girlfriend just got her insides demolished, and the guilt is eating her alive. If your girlfriend or wife suddenly starts love bombing you out of nowhere, you need to automatically assume another man just busted inside her."
Peter @Peterisrandom: "2AM and suddenly I'm the only person she feels safe with"
"What time would you be coming over tonight?"
"I can't. I'm busy. Going to a party with friends, I might spend the night at her place"
"Ohh okay"
"I'll text you later"
"I can't stop thinking about you. I know I've been distant but you're literally the only person I feel safe with. I hate that I pushed you away. You always make me feel safe. I don't say it enough but I really love you. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me. Please don't get tired of me. I swear I'll do better. Just don't leave me. Say something ... please. I need you rn"

Meme - "Foid Bingo
"Incel" "Gay reference' "Cis" "White" *prawn*
"Just say you ... " "Hairline reference" "Short-man complex" "Fragile" “Immature"
"Manchild" "Toxic masculinity" "FREE SPACE" "Mansplaining" "Touch grass"
"Go to therapy" "Who hurt you?" "Projection" "Red flag" "It's giving ... "
"You're weird" "Women don't owe you anything" "Small ego" "Chronically online" "Get a life"

Meme - Emily Carter: "Can someone make my boyfriend look like he has money?" *man with mid woman* Ben Parker: "Sure. Here you go." *man with pretty woman*

Amarachi 🎀 on X - "A WOMAN will find another YOU 20 times before you find another HER."
jesse alordiah 44DB on X - "are you saying there are more good men than good women out there?"

Thread by @BrianMPeter on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Having sex in the 90s
Man- I'm sexually attracted to you
Woman- me too
Man- let's fuck
Woman- yes
Having sex in 2026:
Man- I'm sexually attracted to you
Woman- I'm sexually attracted to you too.... but, my rent is due, I need to make my hair, l've not eaten since last week, I need a new bag, I need new clothes and I need money for maintenance.
Man- are you a prostitute?
Woman- ewww you're a misogynist and not a real man 🤏🏼"

Thrilla the Gorilla on X - "When a man is retarded, men tell him that he’s retarded and to stop being retarded. Behind every retarded woman are 1000 more retarded women encouraging her to continue being retarded."

Aimee Terese on X - "“Women talk a lot about how scared of male violence they are, but from their behavior it's clear they never actually consider it a possibility” When I was eighteen I was out for the night with my bf and some friends, we were barhopping in Kings Cross. I was tipsy & occasionally lippy & obnoxious towards strangers (who were asking for it!). My bf quietly & discreetly at one point during the night said “babe, I love you, but fuck sometimes I worry that you’re writing cheques I won’t be able to cash, if it comes to and I’m on my own”. I was like “wtf are you talking about?” He literally had to explain to me that if I was being a fuckwit starting trouble, he’d obviously have to defend me if anything went down, and if I’m being a massive smart ass and it’s just like him & me & my best girlfriend, then he’s going to be in a fight on his own. All because I was being an antagonistic smart ass to some strangers who couldn’t take a joke. The idea that I needed to be able to back up my words with violence if it came to it, was something that had literally never occurred to me. Ever. It was a total revelation. Suddenly i realised talk wasn’t “cheap” in this context, it was expensive. The idea that I could effectively get him beaten up, or put him in real danger, by being a precocious little shit arguing with idiots because I could, was horrifying. From then on I was extremely reluctant to ever argue with strangers or act like a smart ass unnecessarily, because I was suddenly keenly aware that the guys we were with could potentially be expected to pay with their lives for any poorly received flippant comments we made. It really was totally novel to me. This isn’t how women see the world, at all."
I Know What I Know on X - "Mate, I had the exact same situation in my longest relationship. 5 years in, we are out for drinks in her hometown….and she picks a confrontation with 3 guys (all much bigger than me) at the cashpoint. I had to get involved verbally, and if one on them would have gone any further, honour dictated I would have to do something, and I would have gotten a serious beating. When I explained this to her the following morning, she was genuinely confused."
Aimee Terese on X - "I remember it so vividly because at 18 I was actually smart and mature and had seen and experienced more than most people my age, I wasn’t naive. And yet this entire concept, that ones words translated almost directly into risk or liability that one had to be willing to bear in terms of physical violence, this is so completely anathema to the way women reflexively see the world. It’s just not the way we are socialised at all. I found it to be a really meaningful lesson, and I pulled my head in quickly. I had just turned 18 (old enough to go to clubs and bars) so it was the perfect time to learn that lesson, but I can’t help but wonder what might have happened had my bf not explained it to me? He was like 6’3’ so he was like forced to play the authority figure whether he wanted to or not, he would be the guy people would challenge to a fight, even though he wa like not a fighter at all, so I guess it was something he had to go through life conscious of, whereas upto that point I had never even considered."

Larry Correia on X - "Ladies, if your man is about to get into a fight don't grab his arm. Don't pull his shirt. Your motherly instincts aren't helping. Get the fuck out of the way. Note how the delusional family and "helpful" bystanders always grab the normal dude instead of the deranged schizophrenic hobo who is harassing people."
Women don't understand the reality of violence

Devon Eriksen on X - "This is a public service announcement for all women everywhere ever. A fight does not happen by mutual consent. A fight happens because one person decides to start it. That's ONE. Uno. Un. Eins. Ichi. Yī. Unus. Ett. Hana. Wāḥid. One is not two. Your man is not in a fight because he looked at the other guy, and they both said, hey, let's totally throw down, bro, as if fighting were a pickup game of basketball. Your man is in a fight because one person decided to attack. That person is not necessarily your man even if, and I cannot stress this enough, even if your man is the one who throws hands first. Yes, you read that right. If you don't understand, if it makes no sense to you, that's because you know nothing about fighting. If you grab your man and try to restrain him, you are not preventing the fight. You are restraining him while the fight occurs. Just because you would like your man to exit the situation does not necessarily mean he can. Even if he can, that does not necessarily mean he should. He knows about fighting. Some men know less about it, and some men know more, but unless you are Ronda Rousey or Lena Miculek, your man always knows more about fighting than you. If you have something you want him to do, like exit the situation if he can, use your words like a big girl. Do not touch him. He will ignore you, of course, because you have no idea what you are talking about, but you can talk if it makes you happy. Do not touch him. Step back from the area of conflict and get out of the way. Keep him between you and the threat if possible. Do not get between him and the threat. That is retarded. Also do not touch him. If you do touch him, do not be surprised if you shoves you hard enough to land you on your butt ten feet away. This is the appropriate response. He is trying to protect himself and you from your willful ignorance. Do not touch him. If you do touch him, and he survives, do not be surprised if he ends the relationship afterwards. You grossly disrespected his judgement, and put him in serious danger with your selfish desire to be right all the time. Do not touch him. The time to have a conversation about whether the fight should have happened is after the fight, not while people are in danger. Do not touch him. Okay, quick reading comprehension test. What should you not do?"

Isabel Brown on X - "When Lauren Friedman showed up at Amherst College, she was surprised to discover that almost every single girl in her dorm and on her athletic team was already taking SSRIs. Inside jokes about Zoloft & Lexapro were common on campus, and everyone seemed deeply grateful their persistent anxiety and depression from teenage years was magically disappearing from a pharmaceutical drug. Like her peers, @lololizzle had struggled earlier in life with both anxiety and depression -- so Zoloft seemed like a perfect solution. After all, all of her friends were taking it too, so how bad could it be? Little did she know, SSRIs are causing a silent epidemic among Gen Zers called Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction, or PSSD. Like untold tens of thousands of other people just like her, Lauren now has completely lost her libido, sensation in her genitals, and even a sense of emotional connection with the people around her... PERMANENTLY. She says she and others like her were NEVER given informed consent about the risk of developing PSSD, and American doctors will rarely even diagnose the condition at all. Whether it's birth control being thrown in the faces of teenage girls to magically "regulate your hormones" or Zoloft instantly prescribed to "make you happy," one thing is clear--the young women of Generation Z are being poisoned en masse without any understanding of what may happen to them down the line."
Mankind vs Modern Feminism on X - "I truly pity women who have been destroyed by Modern Feminism. Watch this video, then read what follows. The cure for MOST teenage female depression and dysphoria is alloparenting with older women, and the natural transition from "maiden" to "mother" in a collective context with friends, aunts, and grandmothers that gives them the dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin they need to NOT be dysphoric, in a largely cooperative and non-competitive "alloparenting" environment. The "cure" for most teenage female dysphoria is holding babies, getting approval from mothers and aunts for caring for babies, then themselves having babies, while their friends also have babies, and raising them together, as a loose collective. Birth control (for mood regulation) and SSRIs treat the SYMPTOMS of the problem (evolutionary failure to launch) with HUGE longitudinal iatrogenic harm to women, family, unborn generations, and civilization. When will doctors actually begin to recommend the CURE for this disease of female teenage dysphoria - alloparenting and the transition to maternity?"

Leftists Mad at Sydney Sweeney / Claude vs Starlink for War

2026-11-13T18:25:00.000+08:00

Pre-emptively skipping iFunny:

evan loves worf @esjesjesj: "Literally no leftist is mad about that" - Jul 30, 2025
Fox News @FoxNews: "RED HOT: "Let's cut the nonsense: liberal women aren't mad at Sydney Sweeney because she's "setting women back" ... They're mad because she's young, hot, White, and blonde. And they're mad that corporations are finally waking up to the truth: that the American people are done Show more"
"OPINION: THE WAR ON HOT WOMEN: WHY THE WOKE MOB HATES SYDNEY SWEENEY"

evan loves worf @esjesjesj: "Did they mean to include a bunch of Nazi dog whistles in this" - Jul 25, 2025
Sweeney Daily @sweeneydailyx: "Sydney Sweeney x American Eagle, oh my god."

Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic): "No Claude for War"
Democratic Donkey: "Hero!"
Elon Musk (CEO of Spacex): "No Starlink for War"
Democratic Donkey: "Nazi!"

Links - November 13 2026 (Palestine/Middle East Peace)

2026-11-13T14:25:00.000+08:00

U.N. condemns Israel, U.S. for not sharing Iron Dome with Hamas
Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 on X - "LMAO. This is who is getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Because leftism is brain rot."

Alef Avenue | Facebook - "Yasser Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize. Winning one of these does not prove that you’re a champion of peace. This snake accepted a Nobel peace prize, and sat with the Israeli prime minister holding a sign that had שלום shalom written on it in 1994. Arafat led Fatah and the entire PLO during decades of terrorist attacks against Israel committed by Arabs from “Palestine.” Suicide bombings, hijackings, murdering innocent Israeli civilians, targeting the IDF, kidnapping hostages, and much more."

BRUTAL! Former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov TORCHES Nobel Committee After Controversial Peace Prize Award: “Maybe Next Year They’ll Give the Chemistry Prize to a Hamas Bomb Maker” - "The chess legend was reacting to the committee’s decision to honor Pillay “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.” [Navi] Pillay chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which issued a report accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. Critics, including Israeli officials and Jewish advocacy groups, have long documented her lack of impartiality: she signed a 2020 manifesto calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel,” then accepted the chairmanship of the inquiry without disclosing the conflict; she defended a fellow commissioner who invoked “the Jewish lobby”; and she has a record of one-sided criticism that ignored Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, the rapes, the hostages, and the group’s use of human shields."
Garry Kasparov on X - "Maybe next year they’ll give the Chemistry prize to a Hamas bomb maker."

Sarah Ettedgui on X - "When Wikipedia Becomes the Source Code for AI
Most people have no idea what is unfolding inside Wikipedia’s most sensitive articles. Haviv Rettig Gur’s conversation with Ashley Rindsberg reveals a problem that cannot be ignored. The implications go far beyond one page. They influence how the internet defines core concepts. They influence how AI systems learn. They influence what the next generation believes Zionism is. Here is the current lead sentence of the Zionism article, now under moratorium until February 2026: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” This is not neutral language. Sure, Zionism, like every national movement, sought a demographic majority of its own people. That is the basic logic of self-determination. What this sentence does is single out the Jewish national movement as uniquely spiteful, exclusionary, even eliminationist, while treating the same demographic logic as entirely normal for everyone else. Apply the standard consistently and it aligns with Palestinian nationalism even more clearly. Gaza has had no Jewish population for nearly twenty years. The Palestinian Authority governs areas with virtually none. No serious observer expects a future Palestinian state to aspire to a meaningful Jewish demographic, and Palestinian leaders say so explicitly. Yet Wikipedia presents what is normal for Palestinians (and every other people) as evidence of malice when Jews pursue the same goal. That is the asymmetry Haviv Rettig Gur was describing. The sentence reframes Zionism not as a movement of national revival or as the return of Jewish refugees from Europe and the Arab world to their historic homeland and language, but as something inherently hateful. And it sits in the most authoritative position on the page, written in Wikipedia’s own voice, where only uncontested facts are supposed to appear. The problem is not only the sentence. The problem is the system that allowed a small, coordinated group of editors to insert it and then protect it through procedural warfare and exhaustion of opponents. Once something enters Wikipedia this way, it spreads. Wikipedia is a primary data source for Google, for search engines, and for every major AI system: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, all of them. These systems treat lead sections as high-confidence truth. When Wikipedia is distorted, the entire knowledge ecosystem becomes distorted with it. This is why the issue matters so deeply. A manipulated framing of Zionism is being elevated into the base architecture of digital knowledge, where it will be indexed, repeated, summarized, and reinforced as objective fact millions of times each day. If we care about intellectual integrity and about our children, we cannot dismiss this as a minor online dispute. Wikipedia remains the baseline reference for an entire generation, and AI technologies now reproduce its claims as if they were settled history. When editors whose activity and off-wiki statements align with Iranian state media and other hostile actors succeed in seeding disinformation into the core definition of Zionism, that disinformation becomes the first lens through which millions of young people encounter Jewish history and identity. We have a responsibility to call this out and to protect the next generation from narratives designed to delegitimize them. Listen to the podcast. Read the investigative work. This deserves far more attention than it has received."

Group says it vandalized Ontario facility because of ties to Israel | National Post - "the anti-Israel group Palestine Action Canada took responsibility for the damage. A video posted to the account shows a masked person cutting wires in a dark room with a flashlight illuminating the scene... Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada urged the Canadian federal government to take action against the group after it released a map of locations to “target” because of apparent ties to Israel. The map of “targets” included sites within Canada. The group also released a manual that described how to take “direct action” and provided advice on how “to develop small ‘cells’ to perpetrate property damage, in addition to guidance on avoiding law enforcement and destroying evidence of criminal misconduct.” In the United States, sanctions were issued against the group, which according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, “has supported numerous acts of terrorism since July 2020, including acts that have physically injured U.K. law enforcement personnel, as well as acts intended to intimidate lawful commercial enterprises and coerce the U.K. Government.”"
More suppression of "pro-Palestine" "speech"!

Toronto lawyer says he was attacked in the street for being Jewish - "A Toronto-area real estate agent and lawyer has been left with lesions and bruises after he says he was attacked by a man who threatened to kill him while shouting that Jews were “baby killers committing genocide.” Joseph Bitton was at a commercial property he manages in the Jane Street and Lawrence Avenue West area around noon on Tuesday, when a man allegedly began swinging a parking pylon at him... “I dodged all the projectiles he was throwing at me, blocked him with my arms. I’ve got lesions and scratches on both arms,” said Bitton, whose injuries were documented by a doctor later that day. “Some people are telling me I should have knocked the guy out. I said, ‘Absolutely not. Then I would be arrested, and he would go free, and I would be the bad guy.’ So I deliberately just stayed 10 or 15 feet away,” Bitton told National Post... He followed the man from a distance of 10 to 15 feet as he boarded one bus, then attempted to escape through a rear door, crossed the street and got on another bus headed in the opposite direction. Bitton said he alerted both bus drivers that police were on their way and asked them not to move until officers arrived. “Nobody lifted a finger,” Bitton lamented. “There were dozens and dozens of witnesses at the bus stop, on the bus, at the other location across the street, at the original location. The only one single person that stepped out to help me was one retail tenant from the property that I manage, and he knows me. He came out when the guy was swinging this pylon, and tried to put distance between us and get the guy to stand down.” According to Bitton, his attacker eventually moved into a laneway behind an automotive repair shop, throwing rocks and bricks, before police arrived. Bitton said eight officers cornered the suspect in a dead end, handcuffed him and placed him in a cruiser. “When the police grabbed him,” Bitton said, “he kept saying ‘I didn’t do anything!’” From footage from eight property surveillance cameras, police officers identified a suspect, he said. “They saw the guy doing everything, throwing the pylon at me, and swinging at me, and throwing things at me,” Bitton said. Police charged Abdulkadir Al-Jelani, 58, of Toronto, with three counts of assault with a weapon and one count of uttering death threats. They are investigating the incident as a possible hate-motivated crime."
Time to blame "Zionists", Mossad and/or Israel, one way or the other

Toronto, Edmonton police arrest multiple suspects in anti-Israel incidents - "Police forces in Edmonton and Toronto announced charges this week following separate criminal incidents tied to anti-Israel hostility, including a knife attack at a festival pavilion and a violent assault during a demonstration. In Edmonton, police charged Abdimalik Jama, 29, on Wednesday in connection with an incident at the Edmonton Heritage Festival on August 3. Jama breached a protective perimeter around the festival's Israel pavilion, lunged with a knife, and struck the back of the kitchen tent before security guards detained him and on-site officers arrested him... in Toronto, police announced an arrest on Wednesday in an assault causing bodily harm investigation stemming from a March for Palestine protest on Saturday. Authorities stated that a victim walking near Yonge Street and Grosvenor Street was approached from behind and punched multiple times in the head without provocation, sustaining facial and leg injuries... Martin Salgatar, 20, of Mississauga, surrendered to police at 52 Division on Monday and was charged with aggravated assault... the victim, Kyle, was a familiar presence in the local protest landscape who participates across various causes as a protester, counterprotester, and independent creator Sa'd wrote that following the assault, others swarmed the victim, pointing, laughing, and seemingly trying to prevent bystanders from helping, before Salgatar escaped into the crowd after being urged to leave. Kyle was subsequently transported to the hospital with a serious knee injury that left him unable to walk. "This is what happens when repeated warnings about unlawful behavior at protests go unanswered, and police refuse to meaningfully address concerns about enforcement," Sa'd wrote online. "It is as though protesters have been led to believe they can assault people with impunity, particularly those documenting their public activities.""
Damn police suppressing "pro-Palestine" "speech"!
Mossad is so smart, they employ people with Muslim names for their false flag attacks

Meme - burntoakboy: "Two months ago, the Irish cricket team played Afghanistan, a country where women are treated like animals, where homosexuality is punishable by death and where democracy is entirely non-existent. The progressive Dublin elites said fuck-all. Tomorrow, the Irish football team will play Israel, a democracy, the only free country in the Middle East and a nation where women and gays enjoy full, unfettered equality. And the progressive Dublin elites have gone nuts. They've wept and wailed and marched. They've spoken of nothing else for weeks on end. There is no way to explain this mania and hypocrisy without using the word antisemitism. Go on, try. It's impossible."

Meme - *Fred from Scooby Doo unmasking 'Free Palestine'*
Hitler under mask: "KILL THE JEWS!"
The Palestinian @InsiderWorld_1: "Wish Hitler lives till now"
The Palestinian @InsiderWorld_1: "Hitler was the one good German!"
As left wingers would say if they were consistent, not all anti-Zionists are anti-Semites, but all anti-Semites are anti-Zionists. But they only use that to smear right wingers/Trump supporters as bigots by association

Meme - "EVERY TYPE OF PRO-PALESTINE AND ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVIST
Communist Socialist. History Denier. LGBTQ WOKE. BLM ANTIFA. Left-wing Liberals
Useful Idiot. Ignorant Retard. Clueless Influencer. Conspiracy theorist. Muslim Islamists
Mob Enjoyer Riot Junkie. Paid activist. Fascist Nazi. Right-wing Jew Hater. Blame Addict Victim Lifer
WHERE DO YOU FIT IN?"

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "Pro-Palestinian activist in Sweden: “I know I don’t belong here. That is why I’m destroying this country as much as I can, and sucking up all the benefits and tax money to the absolute max." Remember, the entire purpose of the Palestinian movement is to advance the Islamic takeover of the West. These people absolutely hate you."

Revealed: the ‘Palestine poppy’ creator who justified stoning | The Spectator - "The creator of the ‘Palestine poppy’ is an Oxford-educated paediatrician who has written books for Muslim teenagers justifying stoning and warning that homosexuality is ‘a test from Allah’. Abdul Qader Ismail was accused of trying to ‘hijack’ Remembrance Day after he began selling an enamel pin shaped like a poppy in the colours of the Palestinian flag for £1.78 on eBay. The pin is listed as ‘not for profit’ with money being donated to Gaza charities. The Spectator can now reveal that Ismail is an active member of Greens for Palestine and co-sponsored the group’s ‘Zionism is Racism’ policy. He is also the author of a book series titled An Introduction to Challenging Topics for Muslim Teens. A chapter in the first book, marked for readers aged 13 to 15 and older, discusses religious punishments including stoning, whipping, crucifixion and amputation. Ismail describes them as deterrents and writes that, if applied, they may be a blessing because a person pays for their sins in this life and avoids punishment in the afterlife... A separate chapter on female genital mutilation, marked for readers aged 15 to 17 and older, describes one traditional Islamic religious position as allowing, and even recommending, female circumcision. It discusses procedures such as reducing or removing the clitoral hood and reducing the inner labia, and describes arguments for having them performed by a trained surgeon using sterile equipment. Ismail writes: ‘The traditional Islamic position is that female circumcision is allowed, and even desirable. This is based on several Hadith.’ He also outlines that some scholars believe FGM is unacceptable... In the Greens for Palestine WhatsApp chat, Ismail has accused Zack Polanski of ‘confirming he is a genocide denier’. He has also declared: ‘Zionism is in its dying stages, but things will likely get worse before they get better.’"
No surprise that people associated with a toxic movement is toxic. The "pro-Palestine" people are terrible people

Revealed: Jonathan Powell’s wife has defended Hamas | The Spectator - "Sarah Helm, the wife of Britain’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, took flak last week after appearing to support Palestine Action, the banned terror group, on Twitter. The police looked, but took no further action. The Spectator can reveal that there is vastly more material, far more controversial than this, in Helm’s tweets. Helm has defended Hamas, questioned reports of mass rape by the terror group, blamed the 7 October attacks on the creation of Israel in 1948, compared Israel to the Nazis, and appeared to praise Syria’s then dictator Bashar al-Assad for remarks in which he had called the Jewish state an ‘outlaw colonial entity’ populated by ‘herds of settlers that are closer to barbarism than to humanity.’ She has also called for western military intervention against Israel and attacked her husband’s own government for its ‘complicity’ and ‘appeasement’ towards Tel Aviv. Here are some of the highlights. All of these posts are still up at the time of writing and several were made while Powell was serving as national security adviser. What on earth must the pillow-talk in the Powell-Helm household be like?"

Campaign Against Antisemitism on X - "The police have now reportedly announced that Sarah Helm’s post did not reach the criminal threshold and therefore that no further action will be taken. So it’s illegal to express support for a proscribed terrorist organisation if you’re an ordinary person, but if you allegedly do it when you’re the wife of the National Security Advisor, that’s okay? Aren’t we supposed to be a country where everyone is equal under the law? With decisions like this, it’s no wonder that 89% of British Jews think the authorities are not doing enough to tackle political extremism. Police inaction in this high-profile case beggars belief. It’s another nail in the coffin of British justice."

Visegrad24 | Facebook - "🇳🇱🇮🇱 Sarah Hildering van Lith, a non-Jewish Amsterdam-born music executive at Universal Music Group, says she fled the Netherlands for Israel after a wave of antisemitic threats, intimidation, and attacks following October 7. Hildering herself is also a terror attack survivor. On October 7, 2004, exactly 19 years before the Hamas massacre, Palestinian terrorists bombed the Taba Hilton in Sinai where she was staying as a teenager. She survived but permanently lost 60% hearing in one ear. Things escalated dramatically in March 2024. While unlocking her front door in Amsterdam, she says a Moroccan Muslim man approached her screaming: “Cancer Jew wh*re, I’m going to rape you.” Within seconds, two other Muslim men reportedly joined him after hearing the word “Jew.” Hildering believes she was targeted because she wore a Star of David necklace. She later described seeing Amsterdam radically change after October 7, saying her neighborhood became covered in Palestinian and Hamas flags. During an interfaith dialogue initiative backed by Amsterdam’s mayor, she says one Muslim cultural leader openly defended “jihad” as synonymous with the caliphate while others nodded in agreement. In another incident in May 2025, Hildering says a man driving beside her on an Amsterdam highway made a throat-slitting gesture, displayed Hamas imagery on his car, then allegedly tried to force her into a near-fatal crash while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” After moving to a Jewish neighborhood hoping to feel safer, her new home was burglarized in what she believes was a targeted attack. Around €30,000–€40,000 worth of valuables, heirlooms, jewelry, and Israel-related items were stolen. Neighbors reportedly captured footage of a van surveilling her home for days beforehand. “I thought I would grow old and die in Amsterdam. I never imagined myself fleeing my birth city for safety reasons.”"
Damn Mossad!

TrendingPolitics.ca on X - "A fire truck responding to an emergency in Vancouver was forced to wait after pro-Palestinian protesters blocked the street, leaving crews unable to get through."
Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 on X - "The trucker convoy in Ottawa had daily coordination with the police, and agreed to keep a lane clear for emergency vehicles. They were still prosecuted with a vicious vendetta. Pro-Hamas extremists, many of them foreign nationals, block firetrucks with impunity. #TwoTier"
Protests are only a sacred right that cannot be interfered with in democracies if they push the left wing agenda

Maral Salmassi on X - "Amsterdam, 2026. Why are we tolerating this?"
leekern on X - "You wanted globalise the intifada? Cool. Now you have masked muslim psychopaths marching the streets of Europe holding the machine gun flag of Islamic terror groups like Hezbollah Their name means “the party of Allah” and their goal is to murder and subjugate humanity until Islam reigns supreme"

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "TERRIFYING: In Amsterdam, Netherlands, Muslims and far-left activists with Hamas flags openly call for jihad. I don’t think Europe is taking this Islamic threat very seriously. What do you think will happen when these terrorists realize they cannot destroy Israel? That’s right. They’ll do to their host countries what they want to do to Israel. Dark days ahead."
"We support Hamas" signs. Clearly, this is Mossad's doing!

Eyal Yakoby on X - "Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar reveals that their true goal is to wipe out all Christians and Jewish people across the world. “To create a world where Judaism and Christianity do not exist.”"

Owen Jones on X - "When the Zionist movement was promised Palestine by the British Empire, 90% of its people were Arab Muslims and Christians. The Zionist movement of the era echoed the colonialist mantras of the time to justify taking the land away from the people who actually lived there."
Mor Edge Insight on X - "This is exactly why an uneducated socialist pleb like @owenjonesjourno is simply the last person anybody should ever even take seriously. He literally makes up everything he claims. None of it has any historical legitimacy. He’s a charlatan and a propagandist, and nothing more. Jones is treating 1917 as year zero. It isn’t. When the British promised a Jewish national home, Jews were already the largest community in Jerusalem and, by the later Ottoman counts, the majority. The Prussian consul in 1844 put Jews ahead of Muslims and Christians in the city. By the 1880s they were the vast majority. Yet Herzl didn’t publish “The Jewish State” until 1896. The people Jones says “actually lived there” didn’t include, in his telling, the Jews who already did. His 90 percent figure is a countrywide snapshot of a thinly governed Ottoman district, not a title deed. And the promise wasn’t the whole map. In 1922 Britain cut the Mandate at the Jordan River. About three-quarters of the original territory, the part that became Transjordan, was closed to Jewish settlement and handed to an Arab emirate. The Jewish national home was what was left west of the river. That partition happened before a single refugee from 1948 existed. Arabs did move into western Palestine in the Mandate years. British officials recorded illegal and unrecorded immigration from Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan into the towns the new economy was building. People moved toward jobs which the Jews created. And none of this explains 1834. In Safed, Arab and Druze mobs looted the Jewish quarter for 33 days, killing and raping hundreds of Jews, while Egypt was fighting a peasant revolt. In Hebron the same summer, Jews who had taken no side were killed, synagogues wrecked, the quarter stripped. Herzl wasn’t even born. There was no Zionist movement, no Balfour, no occupation to blame. The attacks still happened. Jones isn’t describing the historical record. He is inventing a history that simply never existed, starting it at 1917, and omitting everything that came before it."

💀 Bisexual Selena 💀 on X - "Reminder that Israel has destroyed the whole town of Bethlehem and yet not a single Christian has spoke up about it since then"
Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "Bethlehem was 80% Christian under Israeli control. Then the city was transferred to the Palestinian Authority in 1995. 30 years later, it is now less than 10% Christian. Making the birth town of Jesus Muslim-majority was always an Islamic goal."
Time to get Christians to condemn the Israeli persecution of Christians

Meme - ""Activist for the Worker" vs. The Worker
*Man in red balaclava and topless waving Palestine flag with graffiti*
*Worker cleaning up graffiti*"

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇫🇷🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "BREAKING: An extremist Palestine supporter just carried out Australia's first attempted political assassination in thirty years. Radical left-wing terrorist and Houthi supporter Brendan Nugent rammed independent MP Helen Haines with his car, shattering her lower body and critically injuring her. She will probably lose both her legs and could still die of critical injuries. Pray for Helen's recovery. She is actually a progressive MP who spoke out for Gaza, yet the crazy terrorist still targeted her."
The "pro-Palestine" crowd are the worst.
Time to crush the "far right"!
Leopards eating people's faces is only for people who threaten the left wing agenda

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇫🇷🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Horrific news: Australian MP Helen Haines will never walk again as a result of Monday’s far-left terror attack. Doctors had to amputate both her legs. Her attacker was radicalised on the fringes of the Palestine movement in Australia. He supported the Houthis and expressed support for Hamas. The anti-Israel movement in Australia has so much blood on its hands. 15 dead at Bondi and now an Australian MP forced to amputate both legs. Out of control. The anti-Zionists are literally a biblical plague on any nation that allows their movement to fester"

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇫🇷🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Australian Federal Police commissioner Krissy Barrett just tried to say that Pauline Hanson’s cartoon series was morally responsible for the far-left terrorist attack on Helen Haines. She needs to resign. Labor obviously put her up to this to try push the Digital Duty of Care bill and censorship against the Australian right. Just sickening attempts to weaponise a far-left terror attack to destroy the Australian right with censorship. We literally have the attacker’s Twitter account. He had TEN THOUSAND left wing tweets and they are still trying to pin this on the right. They were itching from the very first seconds of the attack to blame this on the right to justify censorship against right wingers."

The Daily Telegraph on X = "Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has deflected questions about a reported ‘dirt sheet’ his office compiled on independent MP Helen Haines last month, instead praising her as a “good local member”."
Dave Hughes on X - "He used taxpayer funds in an attempt to ruin Helen Haines political career only a few weeks ago and on Monday night he called her ‘A beacon of light’ with ‘the highest integrity’. We all have been let down so badly. My god, no wonder Australia is tanking so hard."

Zionism And Anti-Zionism | Facebook - "Antizionism did not appear ex nihilo; it evolved from classical antisemitism, adapting old libels into new, contextually plausible forms. Its core accusations—colonizer, apartheid, and genocide—can all be understood as ideological mutations of earlier anti-Jewish tropes. The charge of “colonizer” reframes the classical image of the Jew as a foreign usurper or parasitic outsider, a theme recurring in the writings of Marr, Drumont, Stoecker, and refined within Nazi racial doctrine. The accusation of “apartheid” secularizes an older anti-Judaic trope: that Jews, as a self-declared “chosen people,” separate themselves from and despise others—an image now transmuted into the claim that Zionists are inherently racist. The genocide libel forms a crucial evolutionary link: the Nazis claimed that Jews were plotting to exterminate the German people, while the Mufti of Jerusalem broadcast on Nazi radio that Zionists intended to annihilate the Arabs. Classical antisemitism was animated by fantasies of Jewish takeover and national extinction—fantasies now projected onto Israel itself. Yet evolution is not identity. Antizionism is not the same as classical antisemitism, just as Homo sapiens is not Homo erectus. It is a descendant, not a replica—a new formation bearing the inherited structure of accusation, but expressed in a different moral and political language."

Meme - Dr. Eli David: "Let that sink in: Arabs have more rights in Israel than in any Arab country."
Yaron Samid @yaron...: "Hi, @grok. In which Muslim countries do Arabs have more rights than in Israel?"
Grok @grok: "None. Per Freedom House 2026, Israel scores 73 (Free). No Muslim-majority country scores higher: Senegal 70 (Free), Albania 69 (Partly Free), Indonesia 56, Malaysia 53. Arab states score far lower (e.g. Egypt 18, Saudi Arabia 9, Iran 10). Israeli Arabs hold full citizenship, vote, and serve in the Knesset and courts."

Chrissie Mayr🇺🇸 on X - "Remember when mainstream media claimed this footage did not exist when Donald Trump said it did, trying to paint him as racist and a liar? I remember."
On Palestinians cheering after 9/11

UC Merced professor calls for ‘dezionization’ of University of California system - "A University of California Merced professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies recently called for the “dezionization” of the UC system. Sean Malloy, who according to his faculty page researches “colonialism, war, white supremacy, and the critical study of Zionism,” writes in the Ethnic Studies Council at UC Substack that Zionism is a “driving force behind many of the external and internal threats to the UC and its faculty, staff, and students.”... Eight years ago, Malloy was apoplectic about a “threatening” display put up by the UC Merced College Republicans that included the phrases “I Love Undocumented Firearms” and “ICE ICE Baby.” Malloy was “disgusted that some of [UC Merced] students would advocate for the government-sponsored ethnic cleansing of their fellow students,” and ripped the university for standing for the First Amendment in the face of such “terrorism.”"

Eyal Yakoby on X - "Yesterday, Islamists entered a church and slaughtered over a half dozen Christians in Jordan. Cenk Uygur? Silent. Mehdi Hasan? Silent. Ms. Rachel? Silent."
Damn Jews spitting on Christians!

Mor Edge Insight on X - "Just a reminder that between 1913 and 1923 the Turks committed not one, not two, but THREE genocides. The Armenian genocide, Assyrian genocide, and the Greek genocide. The Turks also currently illegally occupy Cyprus, for the past 50 years. The Turks also illegally occupy Northern Syria. But yeah, let’s invert reality and just blame Israel🤦🏼‍♂️"

Left Wing Cope on Bioware's Collapse

2026-11-13T10:32:00.000+08:00

This also applies to other left wing straw men, e.g. "Star Wars was always political" or "Marvel was always political"

It's interesting how left wingers claim realism is important when they don't want bikini armour, but isn't important when you want to push the left wing agenda. Ergo, "You can accept dragons, elves and talking trees, but you can't accept a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating. Why are you so bigoted? *Battle of Pelennor Fields*"

SirD 🇺🇸 on X

You guys ready to drop BOMBS on these left-wing culture war leeches rising up to "blame and fight with the chuds", in the face of the closure of BioWare?

Let's go:

DEBUNKING EVERY. SINGLE. LEFT-WING CULTURE WAR ARGUMENT & STRAW MAN IN GAMING DISCOURSE 💣💥:

"Games were always political!"––
Everyone understands the difference between telling a fictional political story, and politicization. Political stories created for the purpose of entertainment are great. Doing veiled gender propaganda is just subversive, obnoxious, and annoying.

It also muddies the waters and damages the quality of games/the hobby at large.

"If the chuds know games so well, why aren't they making their own games?!"––
Nearly every single successful video game IP that has EVER been created in the west, was originally developed by "the chuds." Aka overwhelmingly straight white nerds and dudebros.

You're seeing less of that today because leftists brought DEI to the industry, allowing them to subvert merit and actually get jobs. Then they refuse to hire anyone who isn't also a leftist. Hence why all the beloved IPs keep getting coopted then destroyed. Oh and Japanese/eastern games are chud games.

"You just hate diversity!"––
Diversity has been a thing in video games since their inception. You'd know that if you weren't a tourist. It was never a problem. We hate *manufactured* / inauthentic diversity that breeds caricatures, rather than characters born from a genuine creative vision.

"You just think gay/trans = woke!"––
See above. No we don't. Though there's a lot less tolerance for gay shit in the industry now because there's an overt agenda to force 100x more of it into everything, regardless of whether it fits. Literally shit like the "ExecuPride LGBTQ+ Ratings System" that scores companies from 0-7 for their "queer inclusion" and financially incentivizes more of it.

"You just hate fictional women who weren't created to appeal to you!"––
Uh yeah, no shit. We also hate men who weren't created to appeal to us. When you make a video game you should aim to appeal to your audience. Crazy, I know. Men and women have different preferences for what we think is "cool" or "appealing," depending on the gender of the characters, but we actually align more than you think of female characters. A

A baddie who is also cool, intelligent, and exciting is going to be 100x more interesting to a dude than some mopey, androgynous turbodyke who "misses mah gurl" and is always sad about her problems.

"That's misogyny/objectification!"––
No it isn't, you don't know what those words mean. We're discussing fictional characters not real women. If I refused to engage with a real woman because she's ugly, that would be misogyny/sexism/objectification.

If I refuse to play a video game or dislike a female fictional character because she's ugly, that's just me having preferences and standards for fiction like a normal person. Learn the difference between fiction and reality, it's not complicated. How we feel about fictional characters says nothing, zero, about how we treat or feel about real women.

"So you just want oversexualized DOLLS who you can goon to?? Get a girlfriend!"––
People will genuinely come on here and say, "everything around me has to be objectively ugly, covered and modest, or I will compulsively masturbate." You're projecting. We're discussing appeal and preferences for video game characters, not masturbation or fucking porn.

"If you don't intend to masturbate then what does it matter? Wanting romance or sexuality in games is loser behavior."––
On the contrary, relationships and romance have been present in games (especially RPGs) since their inception. It's a perfectly normal thing to want in story games and RPGs. For many, it simply increases their appeal, enhancing immersion, your character's story, and your degree of choice in the fictional world.

"Video games don't revolve around you!"––
Uh, as a straight male, they kind of do. We are the overwhelming majority of the gaming audience, aka the paying customers who are keeping the lights on. I can guarantee you I speak for the majority, even if many of them don't understand the culture war or even realize it. Not every game needs to be for me, but if you're trying to make the next blockbuster hit, good luck if you decide to ignore my preferences.

"Oh yeah? Well they don't NEED to appeal to you!"––
No shit. It's fine if you want to make a game that doesn't appeal to straight men. Just stop deceptively marketing them - market your games to the gay, women, whatever and stop trying to hide it. We have never had a problem with you guys having separate games made especially for you.

The problem is you keep coopting, and changing, established franchises. It's subversive, divisive, harmful, and it deserves criticism... especially when you market them as if nothing at all has changed.

"50% of gamers are women, actually!"––
Sure, if you consider playing a fucking Match5 mobile phone game for 45 minutes once a week or less to be enough to constitute "being a gamer." Men outnumber women in console/PC gaming/handheld gaming, and when you look at who games at least 5+ hours per week (again, not mobile), it's not close.

As you increase the hours from 5/wk, the gap grows even wider. "Serious gamers" who buy the majority of products are still overwhelmingly men. Women are still overwhelmingly more on the casual side.

"It makes no sense for women to wear makeup in combat roles! It makes no sense that she's cute or feminine! We want realism!"––
No you don't. The realism nonsense is an excuse. If you wanted realism, women would barely even be IN combat roles. Also, sorry to burst your bubble, but a 280lbs of solid muscle turbodyke leading a squad of Gears into combat is not "more realistic" than a woman making herself look more presentable in public. What you "want" is to blur the lines between men and women.

You believe the way women are portrayed in games "creates harmful standards." You also believe femininity is a social construct of "the patriarchy." You want to subvert and deny "the male gaze" while making troons feel better. Most women who are *actually gamers* don't even want this, btw.

You took it upon yourselves to change the way women are portrayed, when women were already happy with this overwhelmingly. If you're skeptical, go take a look at the most cosplayed characters. Look at the characters girl-gamers are buying merch for. Ask them their favorite character - it's VASLTY more likely to be Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, Tifa, etc. than it is to be Mags fucking Carter or Abby from TLOU2, lol.

"X franchise, series, or IP was always like... super gay and woke!"––
Shut the fuck up, no it wasn't. You guys always do this weird revisionist shit. You tried this shit with Dragon Age: Origins, when it was one of the most chud games to ever chud. A straight male-centric power fantasy from top to bottom. 1 optional gay romance and 1 gender ambiguous character with 10 minutes of screentime doesn't negate this. If you're still skeptical, see the attached screenshot below.

"Get woke go broke is a myth!"––
It's exaggerated, but not really. There are exceptions to every rule (ex: Spider-Man, enjoyed by kids and normies everywhere). Nearly every woke game sells less than they otherwise would if they weren't woke.

Usually massively - for example selling half or a quarter as much as previous (not woke) franchise entries. And that's setting aside the rapidly growing, insane number of once beloved studios that started doing woke shit, only to completely fucking implode, get hit with mass layoffs, closures, disastrous sales, humiliating game launches, etc.

You idiots also have the foresight of a peanut, so you don't understand the severity of long term reputational damage, either. You might get by unscathed, with relatively high sales for 1-2 games. But keep burning the target audience, creating to spite the majority's preferences, and it WILL catch up.

"This game has progressive politics and themes!"–– If it's done right, we don't give three quarters of a fuck if a game has progressive politics and themes. Go look at the popularity of Metal Gear Solid. Dragon Age. Mass Effect. And many others. As I said, there's an OBVIOUS difference between politicization, and fictional political stories. We all see that difference.

"Games are woke unless they're good, or you guys personally like them!"––
No, games are woke if they are woke. Woke literally means, "this game was deliberately created to spite the preferences of the majority male audience, despite pretending it wasn't and marketing itself otherwise." Woke refers to games made by devs whose creativity is agenda driven. Woke games often have thinly, or not so thinly veiled propaganda.

"Baldur's Gate 3 was super woke and it sold 20 million units. Take that, chud."––
See screenshots below, and learn to have independent thoughts and arguments rather than just fucking regurgitating the same dumb shit everyone else in your sociology classroom is saying. BG3 is "optionally" woke. And it's *completely* optional. This is not the case AT ALL with most woke games.

Links - 12th November 2026 (2 - General Wokeness)

2026-11-12T18:20:00.000+08:00

Michigan Activists Lose Fight to Remove Display of 3 Wise Men From Public School Roof - "A Michigan school board decided on Monday to keep Christmas decorations on top of the elementary school’s roof despite activists claiming the display is too religious. The three wise men, a biblical reference to Jesus Christ’s birth, are displayed on Newaygo Elementary School’s roof. The Michigan Association of Civil Rights Activists argued the Christmas display went against the separation of church and state"
From 2018

Collin Rugg on X - "Ms. Rachel blasts a children's soccer league for "racism" after a child's parents claim the cops were called on him for being "too good" at soccer. The man who called the police is black. He called the police because the boy's parents were being disruptive. Is there a single hoax she won't believe?"
Of course, all the other shameless left wing and black grifters were jumping on the same bandwagon

Dan Burmawi on X - "The West Got the Islam Islamic Countries Restrict
About 16,000 jihadists from the Middle East and North Africa went to fight with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. That region has about 414 million Muslims, 94 percent of its population. Western Europe, where Muslims number about 26 million, under 5 percent of the population, produced more than 5,000. That is one jihadist for every 25,000 or so Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, and one for every 5,000 in Western Europe, more than four times the rate. The gap widens in individual countries. Belgium, with about 860,000 Muslims, produced roughly 500 jihadists, one for every 1,700. France, with 5.7 million Muslims, produced about 1,700, one for every 3,400. Indonesia, with about 239 million Muslims, produced about 600, one for every 400,000. Belgium’s rate is roughly two hundred times Indonesia’s. A study coordinated by Germany’s federal criminal police found that in 2025, 23.8 percent of Muslims in Germany called an Islamic theocracy the best form of government, up from 18.7 percent in 2021, and 25.1 percent put the rules of the Koran above German law. In France, 24 percent of Muslims told IFOP they sympathize with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founder called restoring the caliphate an obligation on every Muslim. Muslims in the West are a small minority in rich, safe, free countries. Muslims in the Islamic world are the majority, and Islam runs their courts, their schools and their calendars. The second group should be the more militant one. The first is, by a wide margin. So what is happening? Why does Islam in the West, at a fraction of the numbers, produce more jihad per head than the Muslim world does?
For thirteen centuries Islam divided the world into the House of Islam and the House of War. Jihad was a divine duty of Muslims, led by the ruler. Peoples who surrendered paid the jizya and lived as dhimmis, and those who refused were fought. Jihad was the foreign policy doctrine of the Islamic Caliphate since the days of Muhammad. The last caliph to officially use this doctrine was Sultan Mehmed V, who in November 1914 proclaimed jihad against Britain, France and Russia and called on Muslims everywhere to rise. On March 3, 1924, Turkey abolished the caliphate, and the governments that subsequently took control of Muslim lands kept the shell while abandoning the doctrines. They did not retain jihad, dhimma, or the full application of sharia law. Yet these countries are called Islamic, while the thousands of Islamic groups that emerged after the caliphate’s fall to continue jihad until Allah’s rule is established over the entire earth were given a label of Western invention: “Islamism.” Under Muslim dictatorships, Islam is permitted where it serves the ruler and suppressed where it threatens him. The regime keeps the religious restrictions, the conservative customs and the demands for personal obedience. It allows Islam to govern people’s clothing, relationships and private conduct, but refuses to let an independent Islamic movement decide who has the right to rule. The ruler wants the population controlled by Islam without having his own authority challenged by it. That’s why those Muslim rulers can wage war against Islamic terrorism even though they are Muslims: because for these rulers, not for their people, trying to impose an Islamic political order is terrorism, and anyone among their people who says otherwise gets punished. Yet their people, just like the rulers themselves, know that establishing an Islamic political order is the heart of Islam, but they can’t say it openly out of fear. Those who try to accomplish it indirectly, like the Muslim Brotherhood, get banned, and those who try to establish it directly face war. Take the leash off and see what Muslims in the Islamic world will do. In Egypt, the moment the dictator fell in 2011, 13.2 million Egyptians voted for the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate in a country where elections were controlled by the army, the same army that removed the Muslim Brotherhood’s president a year later. When Assad’s authority collapsed across much of Syria, almost all those who could joined Islamic terrorist groups: hundreds of thousands of them, spread across more than a thousand units by 2014. The fall of Saddam showed the world what happens when Muslims are no longer suppressed by a dictator and get to choose which version of Islam they believe in. In Jordan, four members of parliament visited Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s family home after he was killed to mourn him and call him a martyr, while hundreds of mourners flocked to the tent. This was the man who had bombed three Amman hotels the year before and killed Jordanians. If it weren’t for fear, millions would have gone to mourn Zarqawi.
Islamism is simply Islam practiced in freedom.
In the West, Islam has room to pursue the political ambitions that Muslim dictators keep under lock and key. A movement banned in its country of origin can establish an organization in London, recruit followers, raise money and preach that Allah’s law must govern society. The ruler who would have jailed its leaders is gone. In his place stands a democracy that protects their right to organize, without examining what they are organizing to achieve... Twenty years ago, I remember Muslim families in the West returning to their home countries when their children reached adolescence because the parents feared what Western freedom would do to them."

Britons were black ‘before these isles were British’, says Horrible Histories - "Early Britons were black “before these isles were British”, BBC children’s series Horrible Histories will tell its younger viewers in its first ever episode dedicated to black history... One song will touch on Britain’s prehistoric population having dark skin “before these Isles were British”, in reference to the probable skin colour of the 10,000-year-old Cheddar Man remains... “When we started out we had no idea of the responsibility we would end up having. There is an onus on us to get it right.”... There was widespread anger last year at the lyrics which cited tea, sugar, cotton and even Queen Victoria as examples of supposedly “British things” that are “from abroad” or “frankly stolen”."
From 2021. If you push the left wing agenda, you're morally right even if factually wrong, which is all that matters

No, the first Britons were not ‘black’ - spiked - "The idea that the native inhabitants of a nation have some kind of mystical connection with the land is something usually associated with the ultra-nationalist far right. So why are self-professed anti-racists now trying to bring back this blood-and-soil mindset? Last month, the Black Cultural Archives (BCA) in Brixton, south London hosted an exhibition claiming that the first Britons were black. The Brilliant Black British History exhibition was based on the children’s book of the same name by Nigerian-born poet and author Atinuke. The exhibition, funded by both Lambeth Council and Arts Council England, made some truly astonishing claims. Visitors to the exhibit were told that ‘Britain was black for 7,000 years’ before white people arrived. Apparently, scientists have discovered that ‘the first migrants to Britain around 12,000 years ago had black skin’. This seems to be based on the contentious genetic study that claimed the Cheddar Man – the 10,000-year-old set of remains found in Somerset – was likely to have had ‘dark to black skin’. Of course, that would not have made the Cheddar Man ‘black’ in any meaningful sense. It would be ludicrous to suggest that the dark-skinned, blue-eyed people who inhabited most of western Europe 10,000 years ago had any concept at all of ‘blackness’. And it is even more ridiculous to suggest that the pigmentation of the Cheddar Man’s skin meant that he shared the same ethnicity as today’s Brits of African and Caribbean descent. Undeterred by these inconvenient facts, the exhibition goes on to claim that Emperor Septimius Severus, who died in York in the 3rd century AD, was ‘a black Roman ruler’. As it turns out, Severus was born in North Africa, a fact that has been taken to mean he was ‘black’. In fact, it is much more likely that Severus was of Italian and Middle Eastern descent. The curators make this mistake once again when they claim that a whopping 11 per cent of Roman York was black. This seems to come from a misunderstanding of a 2009 study, which found that one group of human remains in York was composed mainly of migrants from North Africa. Amazingly, the content of the BCA exhibition was actually a lot tamer than the children’s book it was based on. Atinuke’s Brilliant Black British History tells young readers that black people built Stonehenge, that ‘every single British person comes from a migrant’ and that Britain’s population was majority black for longer than it has been majority white. These claims are skewed, to say the least. But perhaps more importantly, most Brits wouldn’t care even if they did prove to be true... Regular Brits might not care about the skin colour of their ancient forebears, but our cultural institutions clearly do. The BCA is a charity supported by, among others, Lambeth Council, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the British Film Institute. Until 2021, it was even working with the Home Office. Our educational institutions also seem keen on peddling identitarian falsehoods. In December last year, it emerged that some schoolkids across the UK were being falsely taught that St Hadrian of Canterbury – an abbot living in 7th-century England – was black. He wasn’t. He was born in Libya and was probably of Berber descent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC has also got in on the action. Beloved kids’ series Horrible Histories recently came out with a song called ‘Been Here From the Start’. The lyrics imply that black people have always maintained a significant presence in Britain. The supposedly educational, non-fiction show omits the fact that this is patently untrue. This obsession with inventing an alternative black British history is deeply unhealthy for all of us. For starters, there are plenty of black Britons who really were black and who really did make significant contributions to our history. Making demonstrably false claims about black people being the true natives of the British Isles both ignores the real black figures of British history and revives some pretty ugly nativist notions. As an organisation that claims to dedicate itself to both education and anti-racism, the Black Cultural Archives should know better than to spread this kind of divisive nonsense."

The first Britons were Black, exhibition on diverse history claims - "In 2018, it was announced that a genetic study of Cheddar Man, the oldest set of human remains to have been found in Briton, suggested that “giveaway” genes meant he likely had blue eyes and a range of possible skin pigmentations from “dark to black”... But the leader of the genetic study, Susan Walsh, clarified that Cheddar Man’s appearance was uncertain, while a separate 2017 study from geneticist Sarah Tishkoff found that predicting likely pigmentation based on “giveaway” genes was inaccurate... Cambridge historian Professor David Abulafia said: “The Brixton expo is new to me but the tendentious tone seems to be exactly what I would expect. I am totally nonplussed by the obsession with the skin colour of people in Britain’s remote past. “They are unlikely to have existed and even if they did they didn’t pass on their dark skin to modern Britons. Most black Britons are ultimately of African descent. “Judging people by skin colour is racist and I don’t understand why anyone of any colour would think it is desirable. “And that applies to diatribes against ‘white males’ as well as against black or brown people. “The presence of a very small number of Africans in this country over the two millennia up to the 19th century is exaggerated out of all proportion. And most of these ‘Africans’ were from the north of the continent and white or light brown.”"

Ukpahiojo James on X - "“Religion was invented to control people.” You really think men invented a religion that tells them to love their enemies, forgive those who hurt them, and pray for those who persecute them? 🤔"
John Wright on X - "“Religion was invented to control people.” Only people who want to control people recite this absurdity: Revolutionaries, Anarchists, and Marxists. Because empty men cannot envision any other motive for anything. Christianity is abolished the slave trade, humbled emperors, curtailed kings, forbade usury, sanctified monogamy, banished pederasty, bestiality, and other perversions. Not only does it NOT control people, it preaches self control, and opposes every force of tyranny external and internal, secular or spiritual."

Meme - Metropolitan Police @metpoliceuk: "Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has responded to the unacceptable online abuse directed at a Met officer who received an award at yesterday's annual Police Federation Conference. PC Fiona Shaik Umar was recognised for the outstanding contribution she has made for women in policing."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The vast majority of criticism was not because she is Muslim, but because she was not following very basic gun safety rules. Her finger was on the trigger and she pointed the barrel of the gun at a fellow officer."
Meme - "Women in Firearms Attachment *female police officer with finger on trigger, pointing gun at male colleague's thigh*"

Meme - jackie @SubccubusGirl: "i tried to donate blood today, i had an appointment, and they turned me away. apparently you still can’t donate blood if you’re on PrEP or had anal sex within 3 months? (both disqualified me) i thought they unbanned gays from donating? how is this not de facto discrimination?"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "US FDA blood donation guidelines apply the same individual risk-based questions to all donors regardless of orientation, deferring for recent anal sex with new/multiple partners or PrEP use to protect the blood supply as these can affect HIV detection."
Jail him for promoting homophobic stereotypes!

Meme - AG @AGHamilton29: "That awkward feeling where you’re a member of Congress parroting the same bogus talking points as neo-Nazis and they notice…"
Nicholas J. Fuentes @NickJFuentes: "AOC is more America First than 99% of Republicans."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "An unspoken secret in Congress is that much of the reflexive, blind, unconditional vote support for nearly any Israeli gov action isn't from actual agreement..."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "You are a white supremacist and I want nothing to do with you nor the world you imagine. I believe in a multiracial democracy, one of economic rights, civil liberties, and that affirms the working class and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people. These are not small differences. They are irreconcilable. White supremacy is a scourge and must be disavowed in all places."
As left wingers keep telling us, if a Nazi is at the table with 9 others, there're 10 Nazis at the table

Jacqueline Thomsen on X - "New: A lawyer’s misconduct complaint against US District Judge Ada Brown stemmed from a hearing during which she repeatedly directed racial insults at him, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg Law."
Mary Katharine Ham on X - "A judge bullies a lawyer she thinks is white, but is actually Latino, calling him a “chad” and “Mr. Social Media, Main Character Chad, White Hero, Savior, Loves to Help Black People Be An Ally.” The percentage of unhinged educated people one encounters these days is disconcerting. This account goes on and on. She doesn’t think she was out of line."

The Free Speech Union on X - "🚨🚨 BREAKING NEWS: Blasphemy law is back — but it only applies to Muslims. FSU member and retired police officer Stephen Gray was found guilty of being "grossly offensive", a criminal offence under s127 of the Communications Act 2003, for repeating a joke about Mohammed. Stephen reposted a message he saw on Facebook that said: “Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9 year old!” While giving evidence, Stephen explained that the post was a reference to the marriage between the Prophet Mohammed and Aisha — which was consummated when she was just nine years old, after he married her when she was six. Stephen said the post was intended to be satirical but he also hoped it would spark a serious debate: did that marriage, as recorded in the Hadiths, contribute to the acceptability of child marriage in Muslim countries? District Judge Steven Hood found the post to be “grossly offensive” and dismissed Stephen's defence that it was making a serious political point about the acceptability of child marriage. He found that the post was designed to be offensive and could not be making a serious point because it was light-hearted in nature. He concluded that a conviction would not amount to a disproportionate interference with Stephen’s right to freedom of expression. The Free Speech Union is helping Stephen appeal his conviction and has instructed a top criminal silk, John Beggs KC, to act for him. With your support, we hope to be able to pay for Stephen’s legal defence in the Crown Court and meet the costs of any further appeals. Please donate Stephen's crowdfunder in the link below. Earlier this year, the FSU paid for the defence of Hamit Coskun, who burnt a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. He was initially convicted, but we managed to get that conviction overturned on appeal. When the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) then tried to appeal the acquittal, we took them on and won again. More recently, the Free Speech Union threatened South Wales Police with legal action after it adopted a draconian version of the Government’s definition of anti-Muslim hostility, instructing officers to record any comment that went beyond “legitimate” discussion of Islam as a 'non-crime hate incident'. We won, and the force withdrew the guidance. Stephen’s case gives us another opportunity to reaffirm the principle that there is nothing illegal about criticising any religion, including Islam. It should not be a criminal offence to repost jokes about Islam that some Muslims find offensive. Read more below and please donate to our Crowdfunder 👇"

Basil the Great on X - "🚨NEWS: It has been revealed that Dr Farah Ahmed of Cambridge University previously wrote an article in which she claimed: "Muslims should study engineering and computers 'to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad in order that the deen [Islam] may dominate over all other" Is Cambridge going to fire her?"

The Food Professor on X - "The Canadian Press has seriously undermined its moral credibility. Using the September 11 attacks primarily as a vehicle for discussing Islamophobia demonstrates remarkably poor editorial judgment. Those attacks were perpetrated by 19 Islamist terrorists who murdered nearly 3,000 people, most of them Americans. For anyone old enough to remember September 11, the day remains profoundly painful and disturbing. Most of us remember exactly where we were when it happened. Anniversary coverage should focus first on the victims, the events themselves and how they changed the world forever—not subordinate that history to a contemporary political narrative. CP is not simply another newspaper: it is Canada’s national wire service. Its journalists produce stories that are distributed to subscribing newspapers, broadcasters and digital platforms across the country, where they may be published largely unchanged under a Canadian Press byline. That gives its editorial choices enormous reach. A questionable framing does not remain confined to one newsroom—it can be reproduced nationwide and presented as authoritative reporting. Canada faces a broader problem with the quality, balance and intellectual diversity of its media coverage. This may help explain the increasingly reflexive anti-Americanism shaping our public discourse. When a national wire service amplifies ideology instead of scrutinizing it, the effects reverberate throughout the entire media ecosystem. Informed debate suffers—and our democracy becomes more fragile by the day."

Brivael Le Pogam on X - "Here's how the system works. No conspiracy, no secret room. Something far more solid: a century of patience. It starts in an Italian prison. In the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci, locked up by Mussolini, tries to understand why the communist revolution failed in the West. The workers didn't follow. They were attached to their families, their faith, their homeland, their small property. His conclusion changed everything: you don't take power with rifles, you take it through culture. First you conquer the schools, the universities, the press, publishing, the theater. Once you control what people think, you don't need to seize the state. It falls on its own. In 1967, the German student leader Rudi Dutschke gave it a name: the long march through the institutions. In France, that march received a historic gift. At the Liberation, de Gaulle distrusted the communists. He refused them the Interior, Defense, and Foreign Affairs. He kept the sword but let the mind slip away. A commission chaired by two communists, Paul Langevin and then Henri Wallon, drew up the plan for France's postwar schools. The Communist Party presented itself as the party of the martyrs of the Resistance, and the intelligentsia fell in line: Sartre, Aragon, the journals, the publishing houses, the teachers' unions. The right kept the ministries, and the left took the minds. That was the founding mistake. People believed power lived in the state, when it actually lived in the heads of those who would run the state tomorrow. Then came May 68. From the intellectual ruins of that era, France gave the world Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, three brilliant minds who forged, in the elegance of our language, the weapon that would paralyze the West. Foucault taught that truth doesn't exist, only power relations disguised as knowledge. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning and that every reading is a betrayal. Deleuze taught that we should prefer desire to law, the nomad to the settler, becoming to being. Gramsci provided the strategy. French Theory provided the software. Those texts crossed the Atlantic. Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 80s, where they met American puritanism, its racial guilt, and its obsession with identity. Judith Butler read Foucault and invented performative gender. Edward Said read Foucault and invented postcolonialism. Then came intersectionality. The matrix was always the same: there is no truth, only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every norm is violence, and every majority is guilty. The child of that marriage is called wokeism, and today it's coming back to us like a boomerang, in our own universities. Meanwhile, the infusion went on for forty years. A generation of professors trained a generation of journalists, judges, senior civil servants, and HR managers. Nobody needed to give orders. People came out of the same mold, hired those who thought like them, and pushed the others aside. That's what capturing an institution looks like: not a coup, but slow sedimentation. Above the nations, a structure was built that answers to no one. Europe, dreamed up as a common market among free peoples, became a machine for producing norms, directives, and regulations, far from voters, far from borders, far from reality. Today the loop is closed. In 2016, the Davos forum promoted a vision of 2030 summed up in one line: "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy." It came from a former Danish socialist minister. In Brussels, they passed the DSA, which turns platforms into auxiliaries of censorship. For years they've been negotiating a regulation that would allow your private messages to be scanned. They're preparing a digital ID and a digital euro. Every time with a nice justification, and every time with a little less freedom. And who's at the controls? Look at the résumés. Emmanuel Macron was a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party before becoming François Hollande's economy minister. Gabriel Attal was a Socialist Party activist for ten years and learned the trade in a socialist minister's office. They changed labels, not software. That software rests on one belief: human beings are interchangeable, and so are cultures. Mass immigration isn't a problem, then. It's a step toward a finally equal world. They don't understand that it's impossible by design. A culture doesn't vanish into a vacuum. When a civilization gives up on itself, another one, more sure of itself, takes its place. This left courted political Islam as an electoral base and an ally against "the system." But political Islam shares none of its dreams. It doesn't want an equal, borderless world. It has its own project. Those who thought they could use it will end up devoured by it. The craziest part is that there are hardly any true believers left. Inside these institutions, almost nobody sincerely believes in the project anymore. No small group is pulling the strings. There are incentives: thousands of people whose salaries, status, grants, and careers depend on keeping the fiction alive. Admitting they were wrong would cost them their position, their prestige, their standard of living. So they prefer the collective lie. They double down on what doesn't work, because admitting failure would cost them more than carrying on. It's that dumb. People who understood nothing about economics or human nature built a system that only holds as long as nobody looks at it. So here is the real fight of our time. It isn't left versus right. It's a simpler question: what world do we want? The first is a world of strong nations and strong cultures that respect each other because they know who they are. A world that welcomes people through assimilation, not dissolution. The second is a world of total dilution, where every culture melts into a tasteless mush with no memory and no roots. They sell it to you as diversity, but it's the opposite. Real diversity is different peoples remaining themselves. A world where everyone is the same, everywhere, isn't diverse. It's uniform. And a uniform world is the easiest one to control. For a century, this system seemed unstoppable. It held the schools, the press, the culture, and the institutions. It lacked one thing: someone powerful enough that he couldn't be bought, who decided to look and say what he saw. Elon Musk did it, and I have high hopes that he'll be the one to finish this project off. The lie had a century. The truth only needs a moment."

M.A. Rothman | Facebook - "𝐁𝐎𝐃𝐘𝐂𝐀𝐌 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝟗𝟏𝟏 𝐀𝐔𝐃𝐈𝐎 𝐃𝐄𝐌𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐇 𝐕𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐋 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐈𝐌 𝐏𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐄 𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐎𝐍 𝐓𝐎𝐃𝐃𝐋𝐄𝐑 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐁𝐄𝐈𝐍𝐆 “𝐓𝐎𝐎 𝐆𝐎𝐎𝐃”
Ms. Rachel told her millions of followers: 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘵, 𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘬, 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘨𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨. Her post claimed police were called on a 3-year-old Black boy because he was too good at soccer. Former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III and attorney Ben Crump piled on. Griffin III wrote that 𝐩𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝟑-𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫-𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 was ridiculous, and also claimed the family had been escorted off the field with a trespass notice. Then the body cam footage and 911 audio came out. League director Thomas Hayes, who is also Black, told officers the parents were causing a disturbance and he wanted them removed. He said he had subbed the boy out so other kids could play, and that the boy was pushing other children. Hayes also said the boy was exceptionally talented and had scored plenty of goals. Winter Park police said the call was about the parents, and that 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘴𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥'𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵. They also said nobody was arrested, trespassed, or forced to leave the park. The boy's mother, Martasia Griffin, told officers on video: 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺'𝘳𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘬𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘪𝘮 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘩𝘦'𝘴 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘳. The league, i9 Sports, says it is reviewing the incident and has contacted the family. By then the outrage had already gone viral, built on a version of events that the police and the recordings 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐯𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 — 𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞."
This doesn't deter all the disgusting grifters like Ms Rachel. But then, there is no left wing bandwagon she won't shamelessly jump on

Emmanuel Ruimy on X - "Il y a quand même une différence entre l'extrême droite et l'extrême gauche qui m'a toujours fasciné.
L'extrême droite dit ce qu'elle est. Réactionnaire, ultra-conservatrice ou xénophobe : elle ne s'en cache absolument pas. Quand Zemmour déclare qu'on ne peut pas être français en ayant un prénom musulman, c'est choquant, mais au moins on sait à quoi s'en tenir.
L'extrême gauche, c'est l'inverse exact. Elle fait le contraire de ce qu'elle proclame.
- Elle se dit antifasciste. Et ce sont des miliciens cagoulés, se réclamant de l'antifascisme, qui sont aujourd'hui mis en examen pour avoir lynché à mort un jeune homme de 23 ans sur un trottoir de Lyon.
- Elle se dit anticonformiste. Mais elle vit dans des microcosmes sociaux très fermés, où l'on parle le même langage codé, et où le moindre écart vous vaut l'exclusion.
- Elle se dit antiraciste, mais elle trie les gens en « racisés » et en « blancs » et organise des réunions interdites à certains selon leur origine.
- Elle se dit du côté du pluralisme et du contre-pouvoir. Mais elle bloque des conférences, fait annuler des intervenants à l'université, réclame le boycott des médias qui lui déplaisent, arrive à faire censurer un journaliste sur un média de service public.
En résumé, l'extrême droite dit ce qu'elle veut faire, l'extrême gauche fait le contraire de ce qu'elle veut dire."

NHS invites white staff to take £250 ‘disrupt racism’ course - "An NHS trust has suggested its white staff sign up to a “disrupt racism” course. Staff at Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Swindon, Wiltshire, were sent a newsletter encouraging them to sign up to a programme for “white-identifying individuals” called From Allies to Disruptors. The course, from equality charity Brap, was one of a list of activities suggested to NHS staff for black history month. The letter says the £250 course, which involves six half-day online workshops and runs from November until April 2027, is designed for “individuals who are white and live in the world as white people”. “By understanding more about racialised dynamics, the programme will help you become a more confident disruptor of racism,” it says... Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, a director at Don’t Divide Us, a campaign group opposing racial identity politics, said it was “time to call enough on schemes like this”. She said: “It’s not only, or primarily, a question of wasted money and time; the embedded beliefs being promoted: that Britain is systemically and/or institutionally racist against black or brown ethnic minorities, and that white people need to be more effective ‘disruptors of racism’, actively sow grievance, division, entitlement and make solidarity more difficult.” “We need to be finding ways of building social bonds, not tearing them apart. No public institution should be outsourcing their moral responsibility – not to mention money – to address problems, where they exist and can be evidenced, to charities or companies who act in sectional rather than public interests,” Dr Cuthbert added."
Damn Tory underfunding destroying the NHS!

Xenophobia vs Cultural Appropriation

2026-11-12T14:56:00.000+08:00

This famous essay was written in 1937 to mock American xenophobes. A century later, it is once again valuable to expose the vacuity of "cultural appropriation":

One Hundred Percent American

There can be no question about the average American’s Americanism or his desire to preserve this precious heritage at all costs. Nevertheless, some insidious foreign ideas have already wormed their way into his civilization without his realizing what was going on. Thus, dawn finds the unsuspecting patriot garbed in pajamas, a garment of East Indian origin; and lying in a bed built on a pattern which originated in either Persia or Asia Minor. He is muffled to the ears in un-American materials: cotton, first domesticated in India; linen, domesticated in the Middle East; wool from an animal native to Asia Minor; or silk whose uses were first discovered by the Chinese.

On awakening he glances at the clock, a medieval European invention, rises in haste, and goes to the bathroom. Here, if he stops to think about it, he must feel himself in the presence of a great American institution; he will have heard stories of both the quality and frequency of foreign plumbing and will know that in no other country does the average man or woman perform their ablutions in the midst of such splendor. But the insidious foreign influences pursue him even here. Glass was invented by the ancient Egyptians, the use of glazed tiles for floors and walls in the Middle East, porcelain in China, and the art of enameling on metal by Mediterranean artisans of the Bronze Age. Even his bathtub and toilet are but slightly modified copies of Roman originals. The only purely American contribution to the ensemble is the steam radiator, against which our patriot very briefly and unintentionally places his posterior.

Returning to the bedroom, the unconscious victim of un-American practices removes his clothes from a chair, invented in the Near East, and proceeds to dress. He puts on close-fitting tailored garments whose form derives from the skin clothing of the ancient nomads of the Asiatic steppes and fastens them with buttons whose prototypes appeared in Europe at the close of the Stone Age. He puts on his feet stiff coverings made from hide prepared by a process invented in ancient Egypt and cut to a pattern which can be traced back to ancient Greece and makes sure they are properly polished, also a Greek idea. Lastly, he ties about his neck a strip of bright-colored cloth, which is a vestigial survival of the shoulder shawls worn by seventeenth-century Croats. He gives himself a final appraisal in the mirror, an old Mediterranean invention and goes downstairs to breakfast.

Here a whole new series of foreign things confront him. His food and drink are placed before him in pottery vessels, the popular name of which – china – is sufficient evidence of their origin. His fork is a medieval Italian invention and his spoon a copy of a Roman original. He will usually begin his meal with coffee, an Abyssinian plant first discovered by Arabs. The American is quite likely to need it to dispel the morning after affects of over-indulgence in fermented drinks, invented in the Near East; or distilled ones, invented by the alchemists of medieval Europe.

If our patriot is old-fashioned enough to adhere to the so-called American breakfast, his coffee will be accompanied by an orange, or orange juice, domesticated in the Mediterranean region, a cantaloupe domesticated in Persia, or grapes domesticated in Asia Minor. From this he will go on to waffles, a Scandinavian invention, with plenty of butter, originally a Near-Eastern cosmetic.

Breakfast over, he sprints for his train – the train, not the sprinting, being an English invention. At the station, he pauses for a moment to buy a newspaper, paying for it with coins invented in ancient Lydia. Once on the train he settles back to inhale the fumes of a cigarette invented in Mexico, or a cigar invented in Brazil. Meanwhile, he reads the news of the day, imprinted in characters invented by the ancient Semites by a process invented in Germany upon a material invented in China. As he scans the latest editorial pointing out the dire results to our institutions of accepting foreign ideas, he will not fail to thank a Hebrew God in an Indo-European language that he is one hundred percent (decimal system invented by the Greeks) American (from Americus Vespucci, Italian geographer).

--- by Ralph Linton in The American Century (1937)

Links - 12th November 2026 (1 - Zohran Mamdani)

2026-11-12T10:18:00.000+08:00

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani on X - "I am deeply saddened by the death of a New Yorker in City custody at a jail on Rikers Island early this morning. My thoughts are with his family and loved ones as they grieve this loss. We do not yet know the cause of death, but we do know that too many New Yorkers have died on Rikers Island. The Department of Correction and its oversight partners will investigate the circumstances surrounding his death. Our administration is fully committed to the critical work of creating better conditions in our city’s jail system and closing Rikers Island as quickly as possible."
Adam Milstein on X - "Mamdani didn't name Jose Miranda. He named his killer. A homeless parolee with 30 arrests who took a father from his two children with a meat cleaver. What kind of backwards world are we living in??"

Immigrant businesses who spoke out against Mamdani supermarkets say they're getting hit with NYC sanitation fines - "Members of an immigrant business group that has spoken out against Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans for government-owned supermarkets lately have been getting slapped with fines from the city’s Sanitation Department — and some say it looks like a case of retaliation. Diana Larrazabal, who owns flower and gift shop Aroma D’ Angel at 304 E. 116th St., said shops including hers in recent months have received a slew of citations from the New York City Department of Sanitation for garbage that isn’t even theirs. Her flower and gift shop was dinged with fines three times this year — most recently for $350 in May. Many of her Spanish-speaking neighbors who are not bilingual lean on her to help them navigate the city’s red tape, she said, adding that they also are forking over hundreds of dollars in fines... The coalition’s chairman, Frank Garcia, says the fines ramped up about two weeks ago when the group began pounding the pavement to speak with local business owners to get support for its suit. “When we started going door to door two weeks ago, that’s when the fines started,” Garcia told The Post, saying some have been served with penalties as stiff as $1,000. “The owners don’t speak English.”"

Exclusive | Mamdani accused of misusing NYC resources to boost Dems: ethics complaint - "Mayor Zohran Mamdani was slapped Tuesday with an ethics complaint from a watchdog group accusing him of misusing city resources to boost multiple Empire State Democrats, The Post has learned. The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust urged the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board to launch a probe into Hizzoner’s endorsements of both Gov. Kathy Hochul’s re-election campaign and Lindsey Boylan’s failed bid for City Council... The letter cited an advisory opinion from the board in 2009 advising Big Apple pols against using city resources to endorse candidates... FACT noted that in all three instances, Mamdani stood behind the seal of New York City and that his team put transcripts of those press conferences on the city website. The watchdog is urging the board to “impose the proper penalties” on him. Mamdani’s predecessor, former Mayor Eric Adams, was hit with a $4,000 fine from the board in February after his staffers put multicolored whistles on reporters’ chairs during a press conference last year to jab at the harassment accusations against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo."

Farai Mazhindu on X - "The global left's obsession with turning a failing state into an ideological blueprint is the height of intellectual laziness and political delusion. The fact that Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist politician from New York, looks at South Africa and sees a model to emulate proves just how detached Western progressive academics are from the brutal realities of African governance. They treat lived economic tragedies as experimental playgrounds for their virtue signaling. To look at South Africa and see an economic North Star requires a breathtaking level of willful blindness. There is absolutely nothing good to copy from the South African reality. The country is trapped in a low-growth loop, with astronomical unemployment rates and a completely suffocated private sector. The municipal water networks are collapsing, and the national rail and logistics corridors are in shambles. Law and order have effectively broken down, turning the country into one of the most violent, high-crime zones outside an active war theater. Decades of porous borders and failed regional foreign policy have fueled explosive, unmanaged migration, sparking violent grassroots conflict. Mamdani and the global left look at this smoking ruin and somehow see a progressive paradise, simply because the political rhetoric sounds nice in a Manhattan lecture hall. The core defect of the socialist fantasy is that it is entirely obsessed with distributing wealth but utterly incapable of creating it. The strategy is always to "eat the rich" and penalize success. They overtax the productive middle class and the corporate sector to fund massive, unsustainable social grant systems. When you destroy a business-friendly landscape, capital flees the country. Factories close. Intellectual property leaves. You cannot distribute wealth that has already fled the borders. Once the rich are "eaten" and the business class is gone, the state is left with nothing but an impoverished population and a broken tax base. The "comrades" end up presiding over equalized misery rather than shared prosperity. Western leftists like Mamdani love South Africa because they only engage with its symbols, the progressive constitution, the anti-apartheid history, the radical rhetoric of economic transformation. They don't have to live with the rolling blackouts, the dry taps, or the fear of home invasions. They champion ideologies that kill production and development because they are completely insulated from the consequences of their own ideas. Copying South Africa's current economic trajectory isn't a progressive strategy; it is a blueprint for national suicide."
Time to mock poor people for supposedly voting against their interests

Bring Your Crash Helmet to New York City - WSJ - "Walking or running in the Big Apple is becoming more perilous by the day as e-bikers and motor-scooters speed, ignore traffic signals, ride the wrong way on one-way streets or up on sidewalks and are otherwise reckless. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the self-styled man of the people, is looking the other way. He’s siding with delivery companies that prioritize rapid service over safety and resist accountability... “Micromobility”—people zipping around on small motorized vehicles—has brought challenges to traffic-law enforcement for years. But New York can’t seem to get its arms around the problem, and casualties are rising. There have been some 560 e-bike crashes in the city this year through the third week in July, up 28% from the same period last year. Add in scooters, and fatalities stand at 20, up from 13 last year. Survivors of accidents also pay a high cost. Doree Lewak, a contributing writer at the New York Post, has written about how, in 2019, she “was mowed down by a speeding food delivery worker—going the wrong direction on a one-way street and on the opposite side from the bike lane—on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, leaving me for dead.” For months, “it was difficult to speak, and the radiating pain was so intense that even modest movement—from laughing to getting dressed to turning on the shower—was wrenching,” she wrote. The e-bike problem got the attention of former mayor Eric Adams in 2025. He moved to regulate e-bikes, and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s department began to issue criminal court summonses for reckless violations of traffic laws by their riders. She called the behavior “clearly unlawful, dangerous, and degrading of our collective quality of life in New York City.” But Mr. Mamdani, who took office in January, issued an executive order in March to the NYPD, putting an end to criminal summonses for e-bikers. His view seems to be that it’s cruel to hold bikers responsible when they break the law. Chaos in the streets has ensued. On July 7 a 43-year-old in the running lane on Central Park’s West Drive was rammed from behind by an e-biker traveling in the wrong direction. She suffered a traumatic brain injury and a broken elbow and needed three blood transfusions and skin grafts. A witness alleged that the e-bike rider tried to flee but was detained by horrified onlookers. No charges were filed."

Florida names Mamdani "Economic Developer of the Year" with giant billboard in Times Square

Mamdani's Rent Freeze Is Going As Well As Expected - "If only someone could have predicted that the guy who ran for office promising a city-wide rent freeze was going to make things worse. Wait, didn't lots of people predict this would not go well? Back in January, I wrote about how the rent freeze would lead to higher rents... LA, like New York, has rent control and it's difficult to build in the city. As a result rents are up and vacancy levels are low. San Diego has no rent control and streamlined building processes. As a result, San Diego is building new apartments like crazy."

NYC rents hit record high while Mamdani advances rent freeze agenda - "The citywide median asking rent reached $4,200 in June, up 5% from a year earlier and the highest recorded by StreetEasy since it began tracking the market in 2010. In Manhattan — the most densely populated NYC borough — the median cost of monthly rent climbed 5.1% to $4,965. At the same time, apartments are becoming harder to find. The number of rentals available across the city fell 1.4% from a year ago, while Manhattan saw a 4.4% drop. It was even more dire for larger apartments in Manhattan, where the number of available two-bedroom units fell 9.3% and three-bedroom units dropped 11%. Simply put, there are not enough apartment units to meet demand, and costs are reflecting that squeeze. The rental unit shortage presents an early test for Mamdani’s affordability agenda in New York. While the socialist mayor has pledged to dramatically expand the city’s housing supply, his push to freeze rents on roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments has drawn warnings from economists who say the policy could discourage investment and make an already tight housing market even tighter. Adam Lehodey of the Manhattan Institute told Fox News Digital that rent increases on rent-stabilized apartments have failed to keep pace with inflation for years, even as the costs of maintaining buildings have continued to rise. As a result, he said, "slowly but surely, landlords have less to invest in their properties." He argued that this growing gap is leaving some building owners increasingly unable to cover basic operating expenses, which can lead to deferred maintenance and reduced investment in the city’s existing housing stock. Lehodey also pointed to a second dynamic in the rent-stabilized market: tenants paying below-market rents have a strong incentive to stay in place, which reduces turnover and makes those apartments harder for prospective renters to find. "People who are looking for apartments can't find apartments," Lehodey said. "People aren't giving them up, even if they have too much room." Other economists have sounded similar warnings, arguing that uncertainty surrounding Mamdani’s broader tax and regulatory agenda could also discourage the investment needed to expand the city’s housing supply. "Merely the threat of a more hostile tax and regulatory environment has been enough to chill investment in New York City, and that’s already impacting prices," E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital. "Builders and financiers aren’t going to start multi-year projects that might become unprofitable on Mamdani’s next whim." Antoni previously told Fox News Digital that the problem goes beyond new construction, arguing that government limits on rents can reduce the number of apartments available and discourage investment in existing properties. "Economists, whether they are on the right or on the left, essentially are in universal agreement, that when the government implements price controls in the rental market, you end up with housing shortages," Antoni said. "And not only do you end up with fewer housing units available, but the quality of those units consistently goes down as well," he added."
Clearly, the solution is to confiscate housing!

Exclusive | Manhattan rents reach all-time high of $6,655 per month - "The average price tag for a place to live just hit a jaw-dropping $6,655 a month, an all-time high, according to fresh data from Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. That’s a brutal 10% jump from a year ago, and real estate pros are pointing straight at Mayor Mamdani’s incoming rent freeze on stabilized units as one of the culprits, along with a looming pied-a-terre tax that brokers say is only going to squeeze the market harder. The pain is compounded by a record-low number of vacant apartments across the city, leaving desperate renters with almost nowhere to turn... New York’s rental vacancy rate has cratered to just 1.49%, the tightest it’s been since 1968, and down from 1.57% previously. Experts consider anything under 5% a landlord’s market. This is far worse than that. Separately, state registration data self-reported by landlords shows about 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sat empty citywide in 2025, roughly 5.6% of the regulated stock and up from 3.7% a decade earlier... Gary Malin, chief operating officer of The Corcoran Group, points the finger squarely at Albany and City Hall. “Misguided New York City and State legislation, like ‘good cause’ eviction, the FARE act, and the 2019 rent laws, have in large part created this perfect storm for sky-high rents,” Malin told The Post. “These laws have curtailed the supply of rental housing. This has caused demand to build up to a boiling point and pricing for available apartments to reach all-time highs. Legislators seem to care more about optics versus the actual impact of their policies. Their initiatives may be well intentioned, but there’s been severe unintended consequences, and today’s apartment seekers are literally paying the price.” And the incoming rent freeze won’t be the relief tenants are hoping for, Malin warned, since landlords still have bills to pay. “One thing is for certain, landlords’ costs will still go up regardless of the new rent freeze,” Malin said. “While the freeze may be good news for rent stabilized tenants, the bad news for market rate renters is that these increased expenses will likely be passed on to them, in the form of higher rents when it’s time to renew their lease.” And brokers say that shift is already underway, well before the freeze officially kicks in on October 1. Landlords who know their rent-stabilized units are about to be locked in place are padding rents on their free-market apartments now to cover the gap. He also sees the new pied-a-terre tax scaring off would-be buyers and pushing them straight into the already-slammed rental pool. “The new pied-a-terre tax may have an impact on the rental market as well, especially at the high-end,” Malin said. “People who were in the market to purchase a part-time home in New York, may instead look to rent — to avoid the liability and hassle associated with the surcharge. In addition, current homeowners now faced with the tax may choose to sell their pied-a-terre and rent as an alternative. Overall, both new policies will likely cause additional demand to hit a rental market that’s already incredibly stressed.” Douglas Elliman’s top-producing rental broker, Keyan Sanai, says it’s a collision of forces: high mortgage rates keeping buyers on the sidelines, a housing shortage that never gets fixed, and policy blunders piling on at the worst possible moment."

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani on X - "Yesterday, I gathered with residents at the Allama Iqbal Community Center’s Mela to commemorate Pakistan’s Independence Day and honor the contributions Pakistani New Yorkers have made to our city. Today and everyday, we celebrate this community whose open arms, determination, and dreams for a better life have helped shape the city they call home."
Eylon Levy on X - "Zohran Mamdani: “I can’t support any state that privileges one religion.”
The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Article 2: “Islam shall be the State religion of Pakistan.”"
One cope is that by attending, he wasn't supporting Pakistan, but his constituents who have ties to it. Yet, he skipped the Israel Day Parade, breaking a longstanding tradition, and there're a lot more New Yorkers with ties to Israel than Pakistan.

Brianna Wu | Facebook - "“Commemorate Pakistan’s Independence Day?” If you don’t like what happened in Israel in 1948, just wait until I tell you the details of what happened in India in 1947. Around 14 million people were displaced. Muslims fled India. Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan. About a million were killed in the massacres, and women were raped and abducted. What country shows the dangers of Islamism to its own citizens more clearly than Pakistan? India became a global superpower. Pakistan progressively Islamized its laws, persecuted religious minorities, empowered jihadist movements and somehow allowed Osama bin Laden to live for years beside its premier military academy. Mamdani treats the creation of Israel as a historic crime and the creation of Pakistan as something to commemorate? His Jew hatred shows in the double standard."

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani on X - "If it looks like an Amazon delivery and drives like an Amazon delivery, then it's an Amazon delivery, right? Not according to Amazon. Big companies like Amazon have built a vast network of subcontractors who deliver their packages while shielding them from accountability. It leaves our workers unprotected and our streets less safe. It's time for a change. I'm proud to support the Delivery Protection Act to crack down on exploitative subcontracting and build an economy that works for everyone."
Tweets from Zach Weinberg on X - "In two years, we'll wonder why Amazon delivery prices are up and service level is down and now only middle class and above can afford it. Same thing happening to Uber in NYC. Harming the poorest NY'ers who benefit from Amazon's incredible service."

End Wokeness on X - "I just found this clip of Zohran Mamdani on an Arab podcast, admitting that he fooled white liberals. Progressive ideology is just a tool. His real priority? "Identity""

@amuse on X - "SOCIALISM: Tracy Rosenthal hasn't paid rent on her $2,300/month apartment in almost six years. She's Zohran Mamdani's housing guru and author of "Abolish Rent". It turns out she's a trust fund baby whose daddy is a 4-time Grammy winner."

Eyal Yakoby on X - "BREAKING: A secret bot army boosting Mamdani on X appears to be operating from City Hall, according to an exclusive report. Cyber experts say they’re “100% sure” the IP addresses trace back there. So much of the DSA’s online support is astroturfed."

Flopping Aces on X - "There may be no more revealing line in the entire Mamdani story than this one: “His security blanket is his phone and the dopamine from how many likes he gets on a post.” That wasn’t some MAGA meme account. That was a Democratic operative describing New York City’s mayor. Another City Council member reportedly said Mamdani is so thin-skinned that he “reads everything.” Imagine running America’s largest city while your emotional support device keeps buzzing in your pocket. Crime? Housing? Taxes? Garbage? Hold on, somebody ratioed the mayor. According to the New York Post, Mamdani allegedly becomes particularly attentive when criticism starts generating bad press. Insiders say negative coverage or a critical social-media post can suddenly accomplish what unanswered calls, texts and emails apparently cannot: get City Hall’s attention. One operative said they respond when something reaches “crisis levels in the press.” That’s not constituent services. That’s reputation-management Whac-A-Mole. Then Councilwoman Virginia Maloney committed the unforgivable offense of tweeting “I know math is hard.” Sources say Mamdani contacted her afterward. Somewhere, a notification appeared. Mayor Zoflake saw it. Dopamine levels crashed. Emergency meeting at Gracie Mansion. This is the great irony of influencer politics: spend years teaching everyone that likes, shares, views and viral clips are evidence of your popularity, and eventually you start believing your own analytics dashboard. But New York City isn’t TikTok. The electorate doesn’t come with a beauty filter. And Staten Island proved the comment section occasionally shows up in person."

Exclusive | Mamdani is ‘thin-skinned and hyper-sensitive' in private despite unflappable social media image: political sources - "Social media-savvy Mayor Zohran Mamdani is developing a reputation IRL as “thin-skinned” and hyper-sensitive to public criticism, despite hyping himself online as a smiling and unflappable politician, scores of insiders spilled to The Post. Behind the scenes, Hizzoner huffily badgers critics who dare question him publicly, harbors petty grudges against prominent pols and often only responds to texts when he’s miffed about bad press, according to interviews with more than a dozen elected officials, consultants and other politicos. “I see more and more he cannot handle criticism, but mainly from elected officials who he thinks he can push around,” one political consultant said... His reputed simmering irritation recently boiled over after city Jewish leaders called on him to “stop fanning the flames of hatred” against Israel in the wake of an alleged antisemitic stabbing attack on the Upper West Side. Sources said the mayor personally called at least one elected official who attended the news conference, complaining about being told to tone down his rhetoric — and upset that their exhortation was connected to his video branding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal,” which was posted days before the attack... After taking office in January, Mamdani maintained his image-conscious ways by pouring $53 million into a new “Office of Mass Engagement,” an expansion of his already massive communications team that critics argue is a propaganda organ for City Hall. He also regularly drops new videos, from an arguably ill-advised clip filmed outside billionaire hedge fund titan Ken Griffin’s $200 million condo to hype the DSA “tax the rich” agenda to a 13-minute documentary this week about tenants organizing against their do-nothing landlord. Protecting the DSA movement’s burgeoning political power appears to be the source of much Mamdani touchiness, insiders said. Another Democratic operative said Mamdani is “tough on staff,” often holding late-night meetings in Gracie Mansion with his DSA comrades. “He’s the first DSA (mayor) so they have to show he can manage the city, and any time someone puts a dent in that it hurts their cause,” a government insider said. But sources revealed that Mamdani also obsesses over even the potential for bad media coverage, such as when Queens Borough President Donovan Richards in July slammed the DSA as “white supremacy” in an X post. Sources said Mamdani tried to nip a negative story in the bud by having a staffer reach out to Richards’ office to take down the post. Richards left the post up, leading to a Post story highlighting the rift between Mamdani’s largely lily-white DSA comrades and minority lawmakers such as the borough president. “He’s so thin-skinned and reads everything,” one City Council member said... One Democratic insider said Mamdani treats those who cross him with a “cold demeanor,” terse in responses and not his usual smiling self. That’s a contrast to his usual smiley and affable public manner... “He has been known to hold grudges against whoever challenges him or his positions for even some of the smallest of slights, and those people get sent to the back of the line unless he needs something.” Some insiders did credit the youthful Mamdani, 34, for being engaged in backroom dealings and acknowledging his limits. The mayor carries himself with “humility,” a union source said. “He asks lots of questions. Seeks to understand the issues he’s lacking familiarity with,” the source said. “He does more listening than talking. That’s uncommon in the political realm.”... insiders said Mamdani is quickly showing himself to be even more sensitive to media coverage than his notoriously whiny groundhog-killing predecessor Bill de Blasio. Mamdani should focus on the job, rather than a “first-term council member tweeting” about him, snarked Fabien Levy, former Mayor Eric Adams’ chief mouthpiece. “This administration is more on Twitter, Instagram or TikTok than probably any other politician in the county, but to steal an Eric Adams-ism: it’s not what’s in the tweets, it’s what’s in the streets,” Levy said."
Time to dismiss this as a hit job despite multiple sources and some bits praising him

Zohran Mamdani booed off stage at NYPD Night Out on Staten Island - "New York City socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is being mocked after many say he was humiliated by being booed off the stage while attending one of the city's biggest pro-police celebrations on Staten Island. Mamdani attempted to address about 3,500 residents and families attending the New York Police Department’s 43rd Patrol Borough National Night Out Against Crime event on Tuesday. His remarks, however, lasted less than a minute as loud boos, jeers and chants of "get out of here" and "nobody wants you" drowned out his voice... Mamdani has faced criticism over his relationship with police dating back to his mayoral campaign, which was dogged by questions about his past support for defunding the police. After his election, critics renewed those attacks when his budget included cuts to police funding and canceled plans to hire 5,000 new NYPD officers. He also took criticism for his handling of an incident in February in Washington Square Park, dubbed "Snowballgate," where a mob of roughly 100 people pelted NYPD officers with snowballs, leaving two officers injured. Rather than condemning the assault, Mamdani appeared to downplay the violence, referring to the perpetrators as "kids" taking part in a snowball fight. Fox News Digital previously reported that local crime expert and Manhattan Institute fellow Rafael Mangual said, "Mamdani did not come out in support of the NYPD in that incident. Instead, he seemed to kind of brush it off and even refused to call for the prosecution of the perpetrators," adding that the actions of the mob clearly qualified as an assault against police officers."

Meme - Zeek Arkham 🇺🇸 @ZeekArkham: "Dear Zohran, This is why people don’t want you at the memorial. Those people on 9/11 didn’t just “die.” They were murdered. Murdered by radical Islamists who committed an act of terrorism. Terrorism that you refuse to condemn. Terrorism where you’ve unapologetically stood with people who said these people deserved it. Instead, you’ve made this event about your made up aunt. Instead, you and the rest of your DSA comrades have done everything in your power to shift the blame away from radical Islam. You acknowledge people died, but you won’t say why they died. Instead it’s “some people did something.” You, and everyone who voted for you, disgust me. New York has forgotten. Shame. Zeek"
Zohran Kwame Mamdani @ZohranKMamdani: "Nearly 3,000 New Yorkers died on 9/11; 22 years later, the death hasn't stopped. We mourn our neighbors who died that day. The hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed. The unknown millions injured & displaced. In their memory, we work toward a better world."

Ridiculous Zuccs: Being Thin (Glorifying Obesity)

2026-11-11T18:32:00.000+08:00

"The comment may contain something that could cause others to harm themselves.

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.
This goes against our Community Standards on suicide, self-injury and eating disorders."

You're only allowed to glorify obesity, not promote being thin (notice the comment is not about anorexia - just about eating less).

Of course, lots of people are still deluded into thinking that anorexia is a lot more harmful than obesity, even though this is demonstrably false; for example, anorexia is responsible for 10,2000 deaths a year, but obesity kills 3.7 million, which is 300 times more.

Links - 11th November 2026 (General Wokeness)

2026-11-11T14:48:00.000+08:00

Basil the Great on X - "🚨NEWS: THIS MIGHT BE THE WOKEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD Glasgow Life has REMOVED the Egyptian Mummies on display at Kelvingrove Art Gallery because the deceased mummies DID NOT CONSENT to be on display. I wish I was joking. Absolutely true"

Max Klinger on X - [On the execution of Melika Azizi for dissent] "Let’s check in with leading ‘anti-racists’ and pro-Palestine activists, who spend their lives lecturing everyone else for ‘being on the wrong side of history’, to see how they’ve responded to the Iranian mullahs committing these unforgivable crimes.
Mothin Ali, deputy head of the Green Party: While she was awaiting her death sentence for blaspheming against Islam, he was giving speeches at large events surrounded by the flag of the jihadist regime that would murder her.
Jeremy Corbyn: Was literally paid to present propaganda on the Iranian state TV channel. He now builds a career labelling everyone else in society oppressors.
George Galloway: paid to present propaganda on Iranian TV channel.
Zack Polanski: has given multiple speeches to large crowds flying the flags of her killers
Bushra Shaikh: held up by channel 4 as a ‘moderate Muslim’ who would teach a lesson to any racist out there I - travelled to Iran while this woman was awaiting execution, praised the regime
I could go on. These people are massive, massive frauds."
Terrorism supporters want to destroy the West, after all

sim on X - ""Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Syria, Free Palestine.""
ADONIS on X - "> be Congo
> colonisation ends
> immidiately descend into civil war
> every road, hospital & mine the Belgians built just sits there rotting
> no engineers left to run anything
> 70iq warlord Mobutu grabs the throne for 32 years
> steals billions
> Congo enters the deadliest African conflict
> drags another 9 countries in it
> 5 million people die
> world now needs cobalt for phones and cars
> kids go back to working in the mines
> militias & chinese run the mines together
> 7 million people get displaced
> country is ranked among the most corrupt countries on earth almost every single year since
“Free Congo” from what, from africans?"

Will Chamberlain on X - "Abdul El-Sayed wrote about the harms of Arab women dating White men in college. Zohran Mamdani wrote about his frustrations that white women were "impossible to talk to" because of his skin. Radical politics springing out of dating frustrations?"
Rob Henderson on X - "It is shocking how much of politics on both the left and the right come down to either frustrated desire for (or envy of) white women. Use this power wisely."

Richard “Beebo” Russell on X - "I’m going to let you in on a secret about rape that I learned while bouncing at 3 nightclubs concurrently for my entire undergrad. 500 nights at the club dealing with women and creeps have produced some insight. The first thing to understand is that 99% of date-rape cases are just patently false. Every weekend like clockwork a new tiny girl who hadn’t eaten all day would confidently down 5 shots of tequila then claim she was drugged once word got around that she shit herself in a cab, or fell asleep in a dumpster. I’ve lost count of how many of them were perplexed to report that their drug tests came back clean the next morning. BUT… In my 500 nights of service, I witnessed it happen for real, bill cosby style, twice. And in 100% of those cases it was a black or an Indian guy. The first was a guy named Sohil who had actually openly made some suspect remarks to people I knew. Why was nothing done? Because the concept was so completely alien to the white guys around him that they simply didn’t believe what they were hearing. It was exactly like the scene from American Psycho where he talks about a girls head on a stick as though it’s the punchline to a joke, and his friends just exchange a weird look and carry on. That’s how crazy the prospect of rape sounds to white guys, he might as well have said he had a head in his freezer. Ultimately, Sohil was caught trying to sneak into a drugged girl’s bedroom window after her roommates had shuttled her home for the night. He was sentenced to 2 years in prison. There was no international outrage, no big news articles, nothing. Just a post on Facebook shared between the bar staff. The second was a black guy from Martinique. He was a charming niggardly character who hung around the bars every weekend bumming cigarettes or making a few bucks selling fake cocaine. He lived in someone’s walk-in closet for $300 a month. He had rumours circulating about his predation, but nobody had anything concrete until he was finally caught inappropriately touching an incapacitated girl and force feeding her drugs. He was quickly and brutally sentenced to a swift release and a mild scolding from a social worker. He had successfully argued to the judge that people would kill him if he were sent back to Martinique, and was therefore let off with not even a slap on the wrist. The funniest part of this whole ordeal is that we have reason to suspect that he was a refugee in the first place because he had raped the wrong guy’s sister back home. You genuinely can’t make this shit up. Word got around to the bars, but this was back in the day. We didn’t have ID scanners, and hiring was a revolving door. Every Fortnite we’d have a new roster of Dianabol enthusiasts standing at the entrance letting groups of bombshells skip the line. It was impossible to entirely keep people out. And so within 2 months it happened again. Exactly the same as last time. And the black guy hit the judge with the exact same excuse. Luckily the judge finally came to his senses, and sent him back to a third world shithole. He has lived in Paris France ever since. I tell these stories because I’m at my whits end with headlines like the one I see below. At this point we’re so used to being gaslit that the omission of a description is as good as a 4K portrait. So I’ll do my small part to set record straight. It is never the white men."

The ‘homicidal empathy’ of the Islamo-left - spiked - "The concept of ‘suicidal empathy’ is having a moment right now. Coined by Gad Saad in his book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, it’s defined by Wikipedia as ‘a purported phenomenon in which excessive, misdirected and pathological forms of empathy are destructive for the party that exhibits them’. We see it in Western countries, whose leaders tell their shivering populations that they’re not allowed to have cheap fossil fuels because of the polar bears. We see it in young liberal women, who would have a fit if a white man whistled at them, but bend over backwards to make men from rabidly misogynistic cultures welcome in their countries – and this despite the fact that we certainly don’t need to import sex offenders when we have enough of the homegrown kind. In extreme cases of this lunacy, we see alleged feminists voluntarily donning the hijab – the living shroud that so many brave Muslim-born women have been tortured and killed for trying to cast off. There was a shocking example of this in 2017 when Sweden’s self-proclaimed ‘first feminist government in the world’ donned hijabs and chadors on a trade visit to Tehran, in order to make themselves fit to be seen by the righteous Muslims of the Islamic Republic. They did this shortly after promising to promote a ‘gender-equality perspective’ internationally and adopt a ‘feminist foreign policy’, while ignoring the appeal by the Persian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, who had specifically asked European female politicians to defy the hijab demands when visiting Iran. Also in 2017 there was the Washington ‘Women’s March’, which involved the grotesque spectacle of many non-Muslim women voluntarily hijabing-up. We certainly see a massive dose of suicidal empathy among the Islamo-left, from Queers for Palestine – often mocked as Turkeys for Christmas – to Owen Jones. Jones probably thinks that he’s so unique that he could sprout wings and fly if he got thrown off a Gazan roof by the local gay-haters. Do these fools honestly believe that the facts about Hamas hating homosexuals are Israeli propaganda? Or are they so bound up in The Wonder Of Me, so convinced of their exceptionalism, that they are as deluded as that strange girl on TikTok, who mused on how she would be treated if taken hostage by Hamas: ‘They would probably comfort me, make sure I had medical attention, make sure I was doing okay…’ The message is loud, clear and strikingly ignorant. Other women / gays / infidels may get raped and / or murdered, but those big angry men would see me as special. We assume that such people are simply thick, or perhaps suffering from extreme narcissistic exceptionalism. A lot of them are mad at their parents and are acting up or acting out. Is it performative social masochism, in which liberal young white folk seek to outdo each other as if in some silly and sinister sport? Or is this a double bluff – and is it actual masochism, of the kind which provides a sexual thrill? I first thought this back in 2020 when, at the hysterical height of the Black Lives Matter protests, we were treated to the online spectacle of white people – of both sexes, including police officers – kneeling before or kissing the boots of black men. As one wit commented beneath footage of a blond girl doing the latter: ‘I saw it on Pornhub – it gets better!’ The horror of white-on-black slavery might conceivably drive white folk to go too far in their attempts at recompense. But what explains the sight of non-Muslims cheerleading for, gushing over and generally be-clowning themselves vis-à-vis our Islamic brethren? After all, the Muslim religion is the fastest-growing in the world – there are a whopping 53 Muslim-majority countries. Not only did Islam historically pursue empire-building (and the accompanying slavery), it also continues to do so in some cases. These people are not victims. But perhaps the claim of Muslim victimhood is exactly why a certain kind of mixed-up masochist is drawn to them? This is not a new thing; back in the 1970s, we had well-born white women who couldn’t get enough of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This song-of-the-desert sexual shtick goes right back to Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 film, The Sheik... Then of course there were the Fry’s Turkish Delight TV commercials, featuring tents, veiled women and hot men in turbans – ‘Full of Eastern Promise…’ went the tagline. Sadly, the ads did not survive beyond the 1980s, due to fears of cultural stereotyping. Blame for the demise of these commercials can fairly be laid at the door of two figures: Edward Said with his 1978 book, Orientalism, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who came up with the idea of ‘othering’ in 1985... Is it beyond the realms of possibility that those women – and gay men – once attracted to the sexual cliché of the sheikh might now be drawn to Islamism because it appeals to them in a less than wholesome manner? We’re not meant to say that things are sex-things now, even things which blatantly are. Cross-dressing. Men wearing huge prosthetic breasts. Dressing up as ‘leather pups’ and being taken out on a lead in public by a cruel-looking ‘owner’. But women write love letters to serial killers, so there’s no telling how murky things can get Down There, as my mum used to call it. If people want to make themselves into doormats for jihadis to wipe their feet on, that’s their business. But when you use the persecution and even killings of others as ammunition for your nasty little thrill, we move into the realms of not suicidal empathy, but of homicidal empathy. The term was originally coined to describe an irrational bias shown by juries towards violent suspects at the expense of a victim or a law enforcer. But we’ve seen it recently in the barely concealed sadistic revelling in anti-Semitism on the part of some of those on the left in this country. In France, where they always go further with these things, a popular song among the rioters and even the schoolchildren involved in the recent clashes has been ‘M*R*H’ by the rapper BORO700. The song, if it can be called that, name-checks the gunman Mohamed Merah, who killed three small Jewish children in 2012, and the Islamist slaughterers at the Bataclan in 2015. Was there ever a sicker contradiction? Sadistically glorying in the killing of others – yet masochistically wallowing in the destruction of one’s own civilisation. ‘Nothing human is alien to me’, said the Roman playwright Terence. Thankfully, some things are alien to those of us with one iota of decency, such as the pathological empathy – both suicidal and homicidal – now spreading like wildfire throughout the cities of the West."

The nonsense around human rights tribunals is even worse than you think | National Post - "When I became the Chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 2014, I said some things I was not supposed to say. I made the observation that human rights tribunals had a bad reputation. This wasn’t received well. In my first Annual Report to Parliament, I asserted that “Discrimination is not widely accepted in Canada. It is not acceptable to most Canadians to even hear a suggestion of prohibited discrimination, let alone engage in it.” I still believe that remains true today. That’s not to say that no discrimination ever happens, and that is why human rights tribunals should exist. Like maintaining our good health, we need to remain vigilant to keep prohibited discrimination at bay. However, in that same report, I warned that our preservation relied on us making credible decisions. “We have a duty to make decisions that reflect broad Canadian values so that our work continues to be respected and valued.” Human rights tribunals were set up to keep discrimination cases outside of the courts, probably reflecting the idea that these matters were not as serious as criminality. The way the tribunals were originally set up supported the idea that complaints could be heard by a panel of non-lawyers over a few hours, decided upon quickly, and a decision rendered days later. Remedies could include an order to cease prohibited discrimination, pay restitution and perhaps a small penalty for injury to dignity. Now it takes years to get a case through the system. Most provinces have lifted damage limits, and awards in the tens of thousands of dollars for injury to dignity are routinely made. These same administrative tribunals have now been used to put forward class-action style cases resulting in massive awards, including one which led to a settlement negotiated by the government for a total sum of $23.3 billion. There have also been absurd cases, like the transgender woman who filed a complaint after being denied a scrotum waxing at various beauty salons. However, much of the human rights nonsense seldom makes the news. Many frivolous cases are settled at mediation where respondents are faced with paying money to make the complaint go away, or paying much more in legal costs to defend themselves at a hearing. Even if they win their case, they will rarely be able to recover any costs from the complainant. I mediated about 300 cases for the Canadian and B.C. human rights tribunals. At times I felt like an agent of a state-controlled extortion ring, persuading respondents to pay money to settle claims I knew they would never lose at a hearing. I kept track in my 12 years of doing this work. In my opinion, more than half of the complaints had no merit. There are so many cases that have strayed from what I referred to as broad Canadian values. There was the Ontario father who was told that discrimination laws don’t apply to his son because he is white. There have been hate speech cases which have imposed unclear rules about what you can and cannot say. Businesses have been fined tens of thousands of dollars because of pronoun disputes amongst their employees. The most recent controversy comes from the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal decision in B.C. Teachers Federation v. Neufeld. Barry Neufeld was an elected school trustee and a vocal online critic of the sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum — known as SOGI 123 — being provided to B.C.’s K-12 students since 2017. Neufeld’s online criticism resulted in the tribunal finding him guilty of hate speech and being ordered to pay $750,000 in damages for “injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect” to an entire class of people he didn’t directly work with or even know. Far from being a minor administrative matter designed to stay out of the courts, decisions like Neufeld suggest financial ruin could await anyone offending the Human Rights Code, just for doing something like challenging the accepted narrative on transgender issues. It always occurred to me, how many times do certain politicians need to hear about these types of cases, straying far away from broad Canadian values, before they get to a point where they say, enough is enough? It should not be surprising that recently in British Columbia, an opposition member of the legislature proposed a bill (entitled Human Rights Code Repeal Act) to entirely eliminate the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal and the B.C. Human Rights Commission. The first reading of the bill was supported by the Conservative caucus, including one candidate for leadership for the party. Other leadership candidates have not dared to say out loud that they wish to shut down the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, but their criticism of the Neufeld decision and others is starting to send the message that major reform, if not outright repeal, is on the horizon. Human rights adjudicators have an obligation to be neutral decision-makers, giving as much of a fair hearing to the respondent as the complainant. Their role is not that of an activist who wishes to push the progressive envelope. It is important that ordinary Canadians buy into and value our work. If we push too far, the day will come when the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater and the whole system will get tossed."

Tara Armstrong on X - "The Human Rights Tribunal exists to silence conservative speech and anti-woke opinions. Even its former chair is calling it a “state-controlled extortion ring.” The government shouldn’t be fining its citizens for offensive words. It’s time to abolish the HRT."

Tearing down B.C. Human Rights Tribunal should be only the start - "Luckily, the proposition to abolish the tribunal is not an extreme position. Saskatchewan abolished its human rights tribunal in 2011, placing the majority of case management with its human rights commission and sending cases that could not be settled to the Court of King’s Bench. B.C. has also made major reforms to its human rights regime in the past. In 1983, Premier Bill Bennett abolished the B.C. Human Rights Commission in a slash-and-burn move, part of a massive budget overhaul that found its employees on the streets the very same day. The Free Speech Union has been calling for these tribunals to be abolished for months... Mere weeks ago, the Canadian Constitution Foundation had a recent victory in defence of a realtor targeted by the B.C. Financial Services Authority for social media posts critiquing the closure of Joffre Lakes Provincial Park... A further move to protect the free expression of professionals would be the immediate repeal of Bill 36, the Health Professions and Occupations Act. The act exposes doctors to potential frivolous complaints, with broad prescriptions to mandate the implementation of vague anti-discrimination principles in order to “foster physically, culturally, socially, emotionally and spiritually safe practices.”... Since the 2023-24 school year, students must take mandatory Indigenous classes to get their high school diploma. One of the courses that can be taken to fulfil this requirement is “Indigenous Peoples 12,” in which one of the “Big Ideas” is how “through self-governance, leadership, and self-determination, B.C. First Peoples challenge and resist Canada’s ongoing colonialism.” Or take as another example, “English First Peoples 12,” which aims to teach an understanding that Indigenous “oral histories are valid evidence of ownership of the land within Canadian law.” We may be given a rare chance here to actually undertake transformative change. Let us not continue to teach our children that they live in a genocidal country, or that the biological reality of their sex is something to be questioned. Nine years ago, it was unimaginable that a doctor could be disciplined for refusing to administer an irreversible puberty blocker to a child. It was unthinkable that commenting on the issue could solicit name-calling, social ostracization and perpetual disciplinary action. We need to champion free speech and civil discourse here, and we must call upon a prospective B.C. Conservative government to make doing so a priority."

David Coletto on X - "NEW POLL: One in three Canadians says a strong leader who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections could be a good way to govern. Among Canadians under 30, that rises to 47%. The divide over democracy is increasingly generational."
Jason Kenney 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 on X - "This attitude, together with the declining attachment to Canada amongst Gen Z, is partly the result of shredding Canadian history and civics in our school curricula. How many of these young people who prefer a strong-man republic could write a paragraph accurately describing our constitutional monarchy rooted in the Westminster Parliamentary tradition? How many of them have been taught the fascinating story of the organic development of Parliamentary government over eight centuries? How many of them have been taught to be proud of having inherited one of the most stable, democratic systems of government in the world? A system that created the concept of the rule of law through the Magna Carta, the Common Law, habeas corpus, trial by jury, religious liberty, the abolition of slavery, etc.. How many of them have been taught anything memorable about the fight for responsible government in Canada, and how it is embodied in our Parliamentary institutions? Or the division of powers in our federal system? How many of them know that Canada is the fourth oldest continuous democratic state on Earth? Not only have they been denied this basic civic literacy that is a requisite for responsible citizenship, but they have been denied access to the poetry of patriotism: the old stories and heroes (including ordinary heroes like the voyageurs and pioneers,) that formed and transmitted pride in Canada for generations. Instead they are more likely to have been taught that Canada is a genocidal white settler society built on stolen land; that our British and French roots and institutions are the regrettable vestiges of Eurocentric colonialism; that our founders were nasty racists; and that we continue to be characterized by systemic racism. So is it any wonder that rather than embracing the customs and institutions that made Canada one of the most successful nations on Earth, the emerging generation prefers a strongman? This is the rotten fruit of the Canadian educational establishment having been dominated by Gramscians pumped out by OISE and adjacent institutions for decades."

Daniel Foubert 🇵🇱🇱🇹 on X (Translated) - "YOUNG PEOPLE ARE PATHOLOGY.
1. We’ve produced a generation of people who have access to the entirety of human knowledge in their pocket, yet know absolutely nothing at the same time. They don’t know history, geography, economics, or their own country, but they have an opinion on EVERY topic. Back in the day, to be an ignoramus, you at least had to lack access to books. Today, ignorance requires active effort.
2. They don’t control their own emotions. Everything is “toxic,” “traumatic,” “problematic,” or “triggering.” Criticism becomes an attack. Discomfort becomes suffering. Failure becomes trauma. Instead of teaching a person to cope with reality, we’ve taught them to develop ever more sophisticated vocabulary for describing why reality should adapt to them.
3. They also can’t appreciate what they have. They live in one of the safest and richest periods in history, surrounded by technology their great-grandparents couldn’t even have dreamed of, yet they act as if they’ve been exiled to a salt mine in the 14th century. Warm housing, a full fridge, a smartphone, vacations, streaming, food delivery to the door—and a permanent sense of grievance.
4. They’re poorly raised. Not because they don’t know which fork to use for fish. Worse: they don’t understand that public space belongs to other people too. Blasting speakers on the bus, scootering through crowds of pedestrians, phone calls at the dinner table, screaming in public places. The world is a stage, they’re the main characters, and the rest of society needs to get out of the frame.
5. They can’t wait. They can’t be bored. They can’t sit for five minutes without stimulation. The phone has to be checked during meals, conversations, walks, work, and probably someday their own funeral. The generation with the greatest access to information in history has trained itself to have the attention span of a goldfish on amphetamines.
6. They can’t fix anything. They can’t build anything. Some can’t even cook five normal dinners, sew on a button, unclog a drain, or organize their own day without an app. But they know perfectly well how the entire society should be reorganized.
7. They have no patience for competence. They want results without practice, positions without hierarchy, money without experience, and authority without achievements. If someone’s been doing something for twenty years, they’re not an expert. They’re a “gatekeeper.”
8. They don’t understand money. Subscription here, delivery there, coffee for 25 zł, phone on installments, five apps deducting money from the account every month—and then the great economic discovery: YOU CAN’T SAVE.
9. They have no relationship to the past, because for them, the past starts roughly around 2016. Everything before that is either incomprehensible or morally suspect. A person without historical memory looks at institutions that have existed for centuries and, after fifteen seconds of reflection, declares that they’ve just figured out how to fix them.
10. They don’t even live in the same reality. The algorithm gives everyone their own private universe, private facts, private authorities, private outrage, and a private epidemic of a problem that a normal person has never even heard of. Then they log off the internet and are surprised that society didn’t read the same feed.
The most impressive thing, however, is the combination of all these traits. Never before has a human been able to know so little, be able to do so little, control themselves so poorly, and yet possess such unshakable conviction that it’s precisely HE who should be lecturing all previous generations of people on how the world should have been arranged."

Darya Safai MP on X (Translated) - "The Quran was sung during the opening of the academic year at the Catholic University of Leuven, a university with centuries-old roots in the Catholic tradition. They call this inclusivity. I call it cultural self-denial. The Quran is, for Muslims, the word of Allah. And in that same Quran are verses that prescribe or legitimize violence against unbelievers. That alone makes it outright problematic to use such texts as an intellectual or cultural opening for an academic ceremony, as if it were a universal symbol of tolerance. A university should not present religious texts uncritically as a symbol of inclusivity when parts of them directly clash with the principles of individual freedom, equality, and human rights. And no, the Catholic University of Leuven does not need to be "neutral." It is a Catholic university. It may be Catholic. It may express its Christian identity. There is nothing wrong with that. What *is* shameful is that a university with such a centuries-old Christian history seems to increasingly relativize its own identity and then puts forward the Quran as a sign of inclusivity. Europe has a Christian cultural heritage. We don't need to hide it away to be inclusive. Tolerance does not mean you have to accept everything uncritically. Inclusivity does not mean you have to erase your own identity. And respect for other religions does not mean you have to stay silent about ideas that fundamentally clash with our values. Those who constantly relativize their own culture create space for others to change it. This is not progress. This is cultural self-denial. @KU_Leuven"
Time to ban the Bible to prevent Theocracy

Will Tanner on X - "Never forget: Detroit was once known as the Paris of the Midwest. It was, per capita, the wealthiest city in America. It had thriving industry controlled by those who cared about and loved their city, and so they invested in it in incredible public buildings, such as the famously beautiful library. The workers had their neighborhoods in which they invested over generations, building social capital of the sort that makes life pleasant and worth living. And then it was destroyed. The Civil Rights Cultural Revolution brought with it out-of-control crime, rioting, and resultant white flight and blockbusting that ruined all of that. The neighborhoods and their social capital were wrecked, the factories left devoid of good men at the same time as union intransigence bit and globalization proved a siren song, and civilization collapsed. Now Detroit is a byword for dysfunction. The wages of equality are death"

The Decline of American Soft Power - "toxic identity politics trends, which have grown in the last few years, could cause the country’s soft power projection to take a major dive in the long-term... American success was so great that many foreign nations have gone to great lengths to emulate it. Over the last 70 years, countless countries have made genuine attempts to become liberal democracies, embrace capitalism, and join multinational institutions that the US is at the helm of. Most of this transition did not occur through military power or raw coercion. The very concept of the American dream—the belief that anyone can achieve a high level of success in a society that rewards hard work irrespective of a person’s social status—became an inspiration for millions of people around the world, who would make harsh journeys in hopes of attaining a lifestyle that could not be obtained elsewhere. Victorian-era Prime Minister William Gladstone said it best that “good government at home” is the first principle of a sound foreign policy. What has traditionally made countries like the US become powerful juggernauts on the world stage is a stable foundation at home. From a powerful economic base that allowed it to build a robust military machine to a stable federalist system that facilitated unprecedented jurisdictional competition, the US became the envy of the world by the middle of the 20th century up until the present... The growing embrace of wokism and other diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives presents a unique threat to the US both domestically and internationally. At its core, DEI is raw cronyism pure and simple. It’s all about rewarding jobs and benefits to people based on tribal grounds, with no consideration of merit. A country that wants to maintain its superpower status must be firing on all cylinders. When cronyism is embraced on a mass scale in both the private and public spheres, stagnation and decay begin to ensue. Moreover, the constant obsession about people’s race, gender, and lifestyle habits is not a sign of a healthy society. This type of internal tension will inevitably bleed into other facets of American public policy that foreign onlookers will be observing with interest, if not outright horror. In recent years, we’ve already seen some of America’s social ills gradually exported to foreign countries. For example, Japan saw its fair share of BLM protests in the summer of 2020. A bizarre scene to say the least for a homogenous country with no history of participating in the African slave trade. In France, a country that is no bastion of right-wing politics, political leaders have come out against the spread of wokism in various institutions. French President Emmanuel Macron lamented the penetration of American-style identity politics into France. In a similar vein, French education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer had choice words about wokism and the toxic influence it has had on French institutions. Even the US's most ideologically aligned allies have limits when it comes to embracing its most controversial cultural trends. US foreign policy has turned increasingly ornery, as numerous diplomats have used their positions to lecture other countries about their social inadequacies as opposed to working with them in a constructive manner... most foreign nations want to deal with a normal country that’s not going to lecture them about racial justice or export its pathologies abroad. Instead, they want to do business or cooperate in practical matters concerning defense. Rival countries may also use unrest and constant bouts of social instability for propagandistic purposes and portray the US as a hub of instability."

Title IX and Trans Students / MTFs Listening to Women Pee

2026-11-11T10:22:00.000+08:00

This was deleted by iFunny:

U.S. Department of Education @usedgov: "Fixed it for you."
"Education Department ~~formally rescinds~~ restores Title IX protections for ~~LGBTQ students~~ women"
The Hill @thehill: "Education Department formally rescinds Title IX protections for LGBTQ students"

Uploading this pre-emptively as trans-related photos get blocked more (and at the time of post preparation I was still banned anyway):

Sarah @TheSarahThe: "Oh, please. Sitting in the stall listening to women pee because it's hot does NOT MEAN I'm a predator. FFS"
"Oh my god, I would NEVER rape someone [Ed: ?] Jesus Christ. I just like listening to them pee."
"I do like listening to women pee, though. For reals. It is so hot. Like SO hot. OMG"

Links - 10th November 2026 (2 - University Majors)

2026-11-10T18:24:00.000+08:00

Thread by @C_Harwick on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Even in school the math students tended to know more about the humanities than the humanities students."
"I believe this because based on assessments at my university, knowledge in every field has the same rank-order by major. Finance students know the most, in every business field. Marketing students know the least in every field, including marketing.
This also seems like strong firsthand evidence of a signaling over a human capital theory of education. Interesting deep-dive into stratification by major. Apparently psych wasn't always the throwaway major.

Crémieux on X - "When it comes to cognitive tests, something like this is (almost) true! Let's look at some examples, old and new. First, let's go back in time, to the long-forgotten year of 1952. Or really, 1946, since that's the year the sample was gathered in. Wolfle & Oxtoby published an enlightening study on the distribution of ability of students specializing in different fields. Wolfle & Oxtoby gathered this data for the Commission on Human Resources and Advanced Training, since it was a topic of considerable interest at the time whether and how people who picked different majors differed in their abilities. Let's take a look at their results: You can see that, on top, there's a broad physical sciences category, followed by chemistry, then engineering. But then we have what some today might consider a shocker: psychology?! Yes, in the past, psychology was a "smart" major. Psychology then was more biophysics: it was more generally focused on measurement and understanding the mind through things like reaction times and law-like behaviors, and it was far less "social". The field has changed. Nowadays, it's often a washout field. Consider the result reached by Yu, Kuncel & Sackett in 2020. With a longitudinal sample that included nearly a million students at 249 colleges and universities, they observed that most students who majored in psychology didn't initially express an interest in the field. Instead, people who majored in psychology were often people with poor performance in some other area who then transferred into psychology from another major—and in particular, from STEM courses. Now, contrarily, a considerable number of students who did initially express an interest in psychology filtered out of the discipline. These students were often higher-performers: "Students with poorer performance in college often transfer into psychology from majors that may be perceived as difficult (e.g., science, technology, engineering, and math), whereas higher-performing students appear to leave psychology for these same majors, which may also be perceived as more lucrative." But I digress. We're supposed to be talking intelligence-by-major, not how some majors end up with lower or higher levels of measured intelligence. In Wolfle & Oxtoby's study, the physical sciences were above engineering were above humanities were above the biological sciences were above the social sciences were above business were above agriculture were above education. Among 38,420 American college seniors assessed between 1951 and 1967, the order was the same using the Selective Service College Qualification Test: In the Project Talent study, we observe a pretty similar pattern of differences: In this diagram, verbal, spatial, and mathematical test results are given by the initials V, S, and M. Engineers, physical scientists, mathematicians, and computer scientists performed admirably; humanities students performed much worse when it came to intelligence (general ability), and they managed to perform comparably or a bit better in verbal skills. Education majors did very badly. Also take notice of how the V, S, and M means relate differently in the smartest groups. But the Project Talent sample was gathered from 440,000 American high schoolers in 1960. We need more recent data! Using the GRE between 2002 and 2005, we get the same result! Average GRE mathematics and verbal scores were
- 594 for engineers
- 592 for physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists
- 561 for biological scientists
- 560 for the humanities
- 537 for artists
- 526 for social scientists
- 517 for business majors
- 492 for educators
The gaps between major categories grew considerably over time, as university educations in general became more selective while the content required to earn these majors didn't really drift, so selection among them became far more intense. Just look at the jumps between the hard majors (engineering, physics, mathematics, etc.), biology, and then the arts/social sciences/business, and finally, education. Even more recently ,we have SAT mathematics and verbal results by intended major from 2014. The results are similar: There's a consistent patterning of majors, with some changes over the past few decades that mostly have to do with gap sizes rather than ranks. Overall, the smartest kids are going into exactly the majors you'd intuitively think they would: the hard sciences and other financially lucrative majors. I don't think this reality escapes anyone. People who are honest recognize that those in the "hard" subjects seem to be more capable in general than the people in easier subjects. But anyone looking at this clearly also recognizes this is down to selection that makes total sense for a market society. In fact, this may relate to another phenomenon people often find fascinating: the Flynn effect! In a recent publication, Hermo et al. used Swedish administrative data and, using exams taken at military enlistment (there's a draft) and earnings records from the tax register, the relative returns to logical reasoning skills were observed to increase over time. The returns to logical reasoning skills increased relative to vocabulary knowledge. In Sweden, it's become more valuable to be better at logical reasoning than vocabulary, directly favoring smart people moving into STEM majors if they're motivated by money, as basically everyone is. The changes in returns in this data were actually capable of explaining 37% of the measured increase in reasoning scores, as well as a concomitant decline in vocabulary knowledge. There was even evidence that parents and teachers responded to the labor market and placed greater emphasis on logical reasoning relative to vocabulary knowledge. Let's imagine the cognitive abilities of teachers relate to the quality of their teaching and the impacts they can have on students. Places like Singapore and Finland seem to hold to this belief: they exclusively recruit teachers from the top 30% and 20% of test scorers, respectively. South Korea is even more extreme, recruiting only the top 5%! If these countries are right to do what they do (and the jury is out), the fact that the labor market strongly disincentivizes being a teacher could be a problem, not a source of mere fascination."

The End of the English Major | The New Yorker - "The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent... For decades now, the cost of education has increased over all ahead of inflation. One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors. (English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.) For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous... During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade... For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods... Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall.
There're hints in the article of how the left's long march through the institutions and corruption of the humanities (e.g. Black artists, the canon and clay pigeons) could also be to blame, but this idea isn't really explored

Major Marriage Metrics: How Your Major Affects Your Marriage Rate - "If getting married sooner is your goal, aside from finding the right partner, consider majoring in education, boosting your income, and being a woman, as these factors have shown strong correlations with marriage rates."

The top 10 most-regretted college majors - "Journalism 87%
Sociology 72%
Liberal arts/general studies 72%
Communications 64%
Education 61%
Marketing management + research 60%
Medical/clinical assisting 58%
Political science + government 56%
Biology 52%
English language + literature 52%"

Philosophy Majors Beat Every Other Major On Critical Thinking Tests - "Prinzing and Vazquez compared how students performed when they entered college versus when they graduated, adjusting for differences in ability at the start. The idea is simple: if philosophy students only looked better because they were already stronger thinkers, then accounting for those initial advantages should make them look ordinary. But if philosophy education itself provides benefits, philosophy majors should continue outperforming their peers even after those adjustments... Students with stronger verbal abilities and greater intellectual curiosity were indeed more likely to major in philosophy, confirming that self-selection plays a role. A one standard deviation increase in SAT verbal scores corresponded to 57% greater odds of choosing philosophy as a major. But even after adjusting for these baseline differences, philosophy majors still significantly outperformed students in other disciplines... Philosophy majors also reported stronger intellectual habits during their senior year — such as curiosity, intellectual rigor, and open-mindedness — than non-philosophy majors, even after accounting for differences measured at the freshman year baseline. When researchers ranked all 57 academic majors (with at least 200 students each) on five different measures, philosophy claimed the top spot on three: GRE verbal, LSAT, and intellectual habits. On open-mindedness, philosophy ranked sixth. On GRE quantitative reasoning, philosophy ranked 30th. Mathematics and statistics majors dominated quantitative reasoning, but for skills involving language, logic, and habits of critical thought, philosophy was unmatched."
It's telling that TRAs are so upset at how "transphobic" philosophy is - it's harder to gaslight philosophers. Philosophy is also allegedly unwelcoming to women, but that may be a good thing.
The paper shows how people with different majors perform on the dimensions of LSAT, GRE Verbal, GRE Quantitative, Habits of Mind and Pluralistic Orientation

Are Recent College Graduates Finding Good Jobs? - "we find that recent graduates are increasingly working in low-wage jobs or working part-time... recent research has shown that graduating with a math or science major is more difficult than pursuing other fields of study... We characterize the labor market situation for recent college graduates by looking at three possible labor market outcomes for each graduate: unemployed, employed in a job where a bachelor’s degree is required, and employed in a job where a bachelor’s degree is not required. We then identify the share of recent college graduates in each of the thirteen majors that has experienced each of these outcomes (Chart 7). We find that unemployment rates across majors range from 3 percent to 8 percent. The two majors with the lowest unemployment rates are health majors, at 3 percent, and education majors, at just under 4 percent. Relatively low unemployment rates for these majors likely reflect the stability of the education and health sectors, which grew before, during, and after the Great Recession and thus have tended to provide a growing number of jobs during this period. At the other end of the spectrum, the unemployment rate for architecture and construction majors was 8 percent—a finding consistent with the lack of jobs in housing-related sectors of the economy following the housing bust. Liberal arts and social sciences majors also tended to have relatively high unemployment rates, at 7 to 8 percent. Chart 7 also identifies the share of recent college gradu- ates working in jobs where a bachelor’s degree is required and the share working in jobs where a bachelor’s degree is not required. For example, 75 percent of those with an engineering degree worked in a job that required a college degree. We find that majors providing technical training—that is, training that focuses on quantitative and analytical skills—had the highest shares of graduates working in jobs that require a degree; engi- neering and math and computers majors are cases in point. In addition, education and health majors also had high shares of workers employed in jobs that require a college degree, again likely reflecting the growth of these sectors in recent years. At the other end of the spectrum, leisure and hospitality was the major with the lowest share of graduates working in a job that required a degree. Although degree holders with this major experienced relatively low unemployment, only 33 percent were working in jobs that required a bachelor’s degree, while 63 percent worked in jobs that did not require this degree. It is likely that many of the jobs such graduates took were in the leisure and hospitality industry, and these jobs often do not require a bachelor’s degree. Similarly, only 38 percent of recent graduates with a technologies major— which provides practical training in fields such as electrical and mechanical repairs, radiology, and biological technolo- gies—were working in a job that required a bachelor’s degree. This finding may stem in part from the fact that many of the jobs for people with this type of training often require only an associate’s degree. In addition, many of the majors that provide general training—that is, training that is not occupation- specific or highly technical in nature—also ranked relatively low on this dimension. In particular, only 40 to 45 percent of recent college graduates majoring in communications, liberal arts, business, and social sciences were working in jobs that required a degree... An important caveat about this interpretation is that the links we show between college major, unemployment, and underemployment are not necessarily causal. That is, the data may in part reflect the fact that people can sort into majors based on their skill level, such that those with higher innate skills and abilities select majors that tend to have better labor market outcomes."

Meme - i/o @rational_wiki: "Unsurprisingly, conservativism is associated with majors that tend to be more practical, potentially lucrative, and are less subjective and idealistic than those associated with liberalism."
"Figure 4: Effects of College Majors on Political Ideology"

The toolbelt generation: Why teens are losing faith in college - "Junior Achievement and Citizen polled 1,000 teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 in July. Roughly half, or 49%, believe a high school degree, trade program, two-year degree or other type of enrichment program is the highest level of education needed for their anticipated career path. Even more, 56%, believe that real world and on-the-job experience is more beneficial than obtaining a higher education degree... Now, 86% of U.S. workers with education debt said their degree wasn’t worth the toll that student loans has had on their overall well-being. Further, 53% of workers said that knowing they would incur additional debt has prevented them from pursuing more education... Over 2012 to 2021, the number of registered apprentices rose 64%, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor, especially in industries such as construction, public administration and education. From 2022 to 2023, alone, enrollment in vocational programs jumped 16%, the National Student Clearinghouse found. A shortage of skilled tradespeople, due to experienced workers aging out of the field, is also boosting the number of job opportunities and pay... Federal data also shows that trade school students are more likely to be employed after school than their degree-seeking counterparts — and much more likely to work in a job related to their field of study."

Busting Bernie's BS

2026-11-10T14:34:00.000+08:00

Bernie Sanders on X

We're told progressive ideas are "fringe." Really?

59% want Medicare for All
57% want a $20 minimum wage
61% want a billionaire wealth tax
63% want to pause AI development
66% want the wealthy to pay more into Social Security

Maybe it's the establishment that's out of touch.

mike bski on X

Bernie.

A list of percentages is not a lesson plan.

I read your post. Then I read it again. Then I did what I do every single time a student hands me a lab report full of numbers: I looked for the source.

There isn't one.

No pollster. No date. No sample size. No margin of error. No question wording. Just five percentages floating in space like dust in a sunbeam, and a guy behind a desk telling us the "establishment" is out of touch. Senator, if one of my sophomores turned this in, I'd hand it back with one word written across the top in red: CITATION.

You're a weather report with no weather. A recipe with no ingredients. A lab report with a conclusion and no lab.

And before anything else, I have to talk about the poster.

Behind you, in your video, there's a red poster with a raised fist and the words "For the Many, Not the Few." Bernie, do you know where that slogan comes from? That was Jeremy Corbyn's campaign slogan for the British Labour Party in 2017. Corbyn ran on the exact same playbook you're running on right now. Nationalize this. Tax that. Free everything for everybody.

And then in 2019, British voters handed Labour its worst defeat since 1935.

So you hung the losing team's jersey on your wall and filmed a five-minute video in front of it about how popular your ideas are. That's like a guy giving a lecture on how to win at poker while sitting in front of a framed photo of his own repossessed truck. Bernie, your set decorator hates you.

Now. Let's talk about your polls.

"59% want Medicare for All."

Sure, Bernie. Ask people if they want free health care, and a lot of them say yes. Ask people if they want a free puppy, and you'll get the same kind of number. Then ask the follow-up question. The one you always leave out.

Back when the Kaiser Family Foundation polled this, support for Medicare for All was in the mid-50s. Then they told people it would eliminate private health insurance. Support dropped into the 30s. Then they told people it would require higher taxes. Support dropped into the 30s again. The second people heard what it actually COSTS them, the majority evaporated like a puddle in July.

That's not public opinion, Bernie. That's a sugar high. Everybody loves the cake until somebody hands them the bill for the bakery.

And here's my favorite part. If 59 percent of Americans want Medicare for All, why couldn't your own party pass it?

What's next, Democrats running the House, the Senate, AND the White House with a golden chance to pass Medicare for All... wait. I'm being told that happened in 2021 and 2022. It never even got a vote. Kamala Harris co-sponsored your Medicare for All bill back in 2019, then spent her 2024 campaign running away from it like it was on fire. Bernie, if your "popular" idea is so popular, why do the people in your own party treat it like a live grenade the second they have to put their names on a ballot?

You're a salesman bragging about how much everybody loves the free sample, while nobody ever buys the product.

"57% want a $20 minimum wage."

This one makes me mad, Bernie. Genuinely mad. Because I teach the kids this hurts.

Sixteen years old. Seventeen. No diploma yet. Nothing on the resume. Some of them have never lived in a house where an adult had a steady job. What they need more than anything in the world is a FIRST job. One manager willing to take a chance on them. One summer of showing up on time and learning how to deal with a cranky customer without quitting.

When the Congressional Budget Office looked at a $15 minimum wage back in 2019, it estimated about 1.3 million people would lose their jobs, and possibly as many as 3.7 million. Fifteen dollars. You want twenty.

Ask people "Do you want workers to make more money?" and of course they say yes. I say yes! Now ask them "Do you want 1.3 million fewer jobs, mostly for teenagers and people without a diploma?" Watch that 57 percent shrink faster than a cheap sweater in a hot dryer.

You're not raising that kid's wage, Bernie. You're locking the front door and hanging a sign on it that says "fairness." And then you're flying home on a chartered jet feeling good about yourself while my student sits on the curb wondering why nobody will hire him.

Quinn's Law Number Twenty-Four: every time a liberal tries to fix something, somebody somewhere loses their job. With your $20 minimum wage, that somebody is seventeen years old and sitting in the second row of my classroom.

"61% want a billionaire wealth tax."

Of course they do. It's a tax on somebody else. Ask 100 people if they want somebody ELSE to pay more, and you'll get a landslide every time. I could get 61 percent of people to vote for a tax on left-handed accordion players.

And we already know how wealth taxes end, because Europe ran the experiment. France had one, and money and wealthy people left in such numbers that Macron scrapped most of it in 2018. Sweden dumped theirs. Germany stopped collecting theirs. Norway's still got one, and wealthy Norwegians have been packing up for Switzerland. Your idea has been tried, Bernie. It has a return label on it in four languages.

"63% want to pause AI development."

Bernie, you posted that video on a phone, through a cell tower, onto servers in a data center, with captions running across the bottom of the screen that were very likely made with the same kind of technology you want to pause. You're using the internet to tell everybody the internet is too dangerous. That's like a guy driving to a rally to protest cars.

And while you "pause," China doesn't. China is building computing hubs as fast as they can pour concrete. Pausing AI in America doesn't stop AI. It just changes who's in charge of it. You're asking America to sit out the race and call it safety.

"66% want the wealthy to pay more into Social Security."

Okay, Bernie, let's talk about Social Security, since your party has been in charge of "protecting" it for my entire life.

The government's own Social Security trustees have been warning for years that the trust fund is headed for a cliff in the early 2030s, when benefits could get cut across the board if Congress does nothing. You've been in Congress since 1991. Thirty-five years. You've had decades to fix it. You've had a Democratic president, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate at the same time. And what did you do? Gave speeches. Wrote books. Posted polls.

That's not protecting Social Security, Bernie. That's standing on the dock waving at the Titanic.

Now. Let me name what you actually did in this post, because I teach this too.

It's called an appeal to popularity. Latin name, argumentum ad populum. "Lots of people believe it, so it must be right." It's one of the oldest fallacies in the book.

Do you know what else was popular once? Prohibition. So popular they put it in the Constitution. Fourteen years later they had to rip it back out because it was a disaster. Majorities have been wrong before, Bernie. Many, many times.

And that's exactly why the Founders built a constitutional republic, not a democracy. James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 about majorities using their numbers to take the property of everybody else. He had a word for it. He called it a "wicked project." The Founders put up guardrails so that a poll, or a mob, or a mood, couldn't just vote away somebody else's paycheck because 61 percent of a survey thought it sounded nice.

The Constitution doesn't say "unless Bernie has a poll."

And let me show you how polls work, Senator. If I polled my classroom tomorrow, I already know exactly what I'd get:

100% of my students want no homework. 97% want pizza every Friday. 94% want school to start at 10 AM. 89% want their phones back during tests. And 100% want a "fair" grading system where my A students donate some of their points to the kids who skipped half the semester.
By your logic, Bernie, I'm "out of touch" for still giving a final exam.
That's Quinn's Law Number Nine: to a liberal, intentions are more significant than outcomes. The intention is "everybody gets free stuff." The outcome is a country that runs out of other people's money. Every poll in your post is the intention. Every single one leaves out the outcome.
And "maybe it's the establishment that's out of touch."
Bernie. Who do you think the establishment IS?

You've been in Congress since 1991. You've been in Washington longer than half the people reading this have been alive. You've had a Senate parking spot since before smartphones existed. You chaired the Budget Committee. You ARE the establishment, Senator. You're the furniture. You're the carpet. You're the slightly yellowed ceiling tile in the corner that nobody's replaced since the Clinton administration. You just keep talking like an outsider so nobody notices.

And the "fringe" label? Bernie, Republicans aren't the ones calling your ideas fringe. Your own party is. The Democrats who ran from Medicare for All. The ones who stripped the minimum wage out of the COVID bill. The ones who cleared the field for Hillary in 2016 and for Biden in 2020 and left you standing in the rain both times. You're not mad at the establishment, Bernie. You're mad at your own party, and you're taking it out on the rest of us.

So here's my standing offer, Senator, because I make it every time and you never take it. I keep hearing Democrats demand that "the wealthy pay more" while they ARE the wealthy. Three houses. $221,000 on chartered jets in one quarter of 2025. Millions in book money. So go first. File with the standard deduction only. No itemizing. Pay DOUBLE what the IRS says you owe. Post the return. Then, and only then, tell me what 66 percent of a poll thinks rich people should pay.

Quinn's Law Number Twenty-Five: liberals are great at giving away other people's money. Never their own.

You know what you are, Bernie? You're a carnival barker standing in front of a ride that's been shut down for safety violations, yelling about how much everybody loves roller coasters.

You're a toddler with a calculator. Lots of buttons pushed. No idea what any of the numbers mean.

You've got the economic instincts of a raccoon at a buffet. Grab everything, worry about who's paying later, and leave a mess for somebody else to clean up.

Your arguments are like a screen door in a hurricane. Lots of flapping. Zero protection.

You're a one-trick pony, and the trick is complaining.

You're so far behind the times, Senator, you think "streaming" is something that happens to a creek.

And if brains were taxed, Bernie, you'd finally be getting the refund you've always wanted.

But what do I know? I'm only a physics teacher who makes teenagers cite their sources, label their units, and finish the experiment before they announce the result, which is apparently three more steps than a 35-year senator takes before he hits post.

Left wingers keep demanding more and more social spending, pretending that with just a bit more utopia will come. Luckily for them, most people have a short memory and are also taken in by simplistic left wing logic, so whenever they get what they demand, they just demand even more.

Links - 10th November 2026 (1 - Canadian Politics)

2026-11-10T10:23:00.000+08:00

TOWN TALK (Aurora, ON) | Facebook - "Does no one else see the irony? Not posting it here…edited….posted below as per someone’s request (end of edit) but the mayor’s lengthy post today that starts out by saying how residents are tired of the online personal attacks. Then the remainder of his post…is a personal attack on a candidate referring back to something from 16 years ago. You can’t make this stuff up."
On Tom Mrakas

Deputy mayor’s pals given huge DEI payday by city hall | Toronto Sun - "Toronto city hall has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to a DEI consulting firm with long, personal ties to both Olivia Chow’s most trusted staffer and one of her deputy mayors... Contracts, invoices and other documents, some obtained via freedom of information and some publicly available, show more than $500,000 in taxpayer money has been paid to Monumental Projects Inc. since 2022. In the fall of that year, Ausma Malik was elected the councillor for Spadina-Fort York. Malik has personal relationships going back years with Monumental’s founders, Zahra Ebrahim and Kofi Hope. Ebrahim and Hope are also listed as founding advisers by the political organization Progress Toronto. Despite that, Progress Toronto founder Michal Hay appears to have personally signed a Monumental Projects expense on behalf of Chow, while serving as chief of staff to the mayor in 2023. In a series of statements, city hall confirmed its contracts with Monumental “on two separate projects” in 2022, but did not acknowledge invoices dated from 2023 to 2025, when Chow and Malik were in power... Monumental defended its work but did not address questions about the founders’ ties to Malik and Chow... Representatives for Chow did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Progress Toronto. Monumental was paid for DEI-related consulting work, including training, speaking and public engagement, involving a range of departments at city hall, from the parks division to housing and planning all the way to the mayor’s office. Many of the contracts and invoices were provided to the Sun by the political advocacy group Integrity TO, which obtained them in a pair of freedom-of-information requests. That group was founded by Daniel Tate, a vocal critic of Chow and her allies on city council, who is running for council in a downtown ward next to Malik’s. One request contained two six-figure Monumental contracts, one of them a sole-source deal. The sole-source contract was for the planning department, with a listed delivery date of April 2023, totalling $107,563. Monumental was tasked with revising the city’s “equity tool with a gender-specific lens to support and reinforce work on the making space tool kit.”... Another contract, dating from March 2022, was for $124,116.67. That bought five months of “public engagement services for the City of Toronto’s recognition review for the economic development and culture division,” with two options to renew for one month. Article content Part of that so-called recognition review was city hall’s maligned initiative to rename public assets bearing the name of Henry Dundas. A list of invoices makes that plain, saying Monumental’s contract was for a “City of Toronto naming project.”... A search of the city’s bids portal found only one publicly posted contract won by Monumental: a 2022 public engagement deal for $121,970, which was the initial estimate for its naming project work. It’s unclear how many other deals were put through competitive processes and how many were simply offered to Monumental. It’s also possible that the records obtained by the Sun may account for individual payments more than once, given they come from an array of sources, or that other payments are unaccounted for. The Sun asked for definitive totals for payments to Monumental, both since its 2020 founding and since Malik won election in 2022, but city hall ignored that request. Article content Whatever conflict-of-interest rules were followed, Ebrahim did publicly endorse Chow for mayor in 2023 and, just recently, Malik for re-election in Spadina-Fort York. Malik’s ties to the Monumental founders go back far before her time in politics. A Toronto Star article from 2017 said she had met Hope “more than a decade” before that year, while fighting police policies in the wake of the Summer of the Gun."
This is why left wingers push DEI so much

Op-Ed: Progress Toronto is not progressive in the slightest - "I could have given him an earful about Mayor Olivia Chow’s puppeteers, whose main mission has been to get rid of conservatives on council by endorsing like-minded candidates and putting out mean-spirited attack literature and online propaganda that spreads untruths about candidates who might expose their radical agenda. They have been on the scene since 2018 — created by activist Michal Hay, who later became Chow’s chief of staff. They were largely responsible for putting Chow in office in the 2023 by-election, along with the progressive wing of council, such as Ausma Malik (I call them the Hamas caucus). Progress Toronto is, in many ways, all that’s wrong with the city and its decline. They claim to subsist on donations, but it’s dubious. They targeted my former Toronto Sun colleague Anthony Furey with hate literature alleging he was far right and racist when he ran for council in Don Valley West in 2024. The executive director, Saman Tabasinejad, subsequently gloated about it in a missive to its followers. If we needed any proof of their mission to promote a radical left agenda, their 37-question survey to pick what they call “Progressive Champions” is indeed revealing. They ask potential recruits to support throwing more money at Indigenous in Toronto, a mere .08% of the population. They push all kinds of protections for tenants, good or bad, and ask would-be candidates to vote to prevent ‘renovictions’ and do “everything in their power” to prop up affordable housing and create more expensive shelter spaces. The Progress Toronto questionnaire asks that their recruits support the use of social workers instead of police in violent situations and overdoses on the TTC or on the city’s streets (a ridiculous concept!). Not surprisingly, their recruits are asked to vote against any bylaw that restricts the “constitutional freedom” of Torontonians to protest (of course they’d be happy to let the terrorist sympathizers occupy our streets with impunity). They make it clear they want to hike the vacant home tax to 5% from 3% of the assessed value, bring outsourced services back in-house and expand safe injection services. The Progress Toronto questionnaire makes their anti-policing, pro-chaos agenda very clear: Spend with impunity on social programs, eschew policies that improve law and order, protect drug addicts and violent protesters. Mazri said when he filled out the questionnaire, it became very clear that they are an “ideological group” that wants candidates “they can steer.” He said his mission is to focus on accountability, lowering property taxes and doing what’s right for his community — not serving a special interest group’s agenda. ”They endorsed my opponent because they know (she Ala’a Adib) can be managed… they knew they couldn’t control me,” he said. ”I refuse to be anyone’s puppet.” Sadly, their puppet Olivia Chow has done just about everything they’d hoped she’d do and, in the process, has contributed to the city’s decline. With Brad Bradford gaining in the polls, Progress Toronto and its activist recruits have tried to fling as much dirt as they can before election day"

Duncan Dee 🇮🇱🇺🇦 on X - "Brad Bradford wants to be mayor for all Torontonians. He aims to fix transit, improve housing, and keep residents safe. Olivia Chow wants to use the mayor’s office to engage in global conflicts and foreign affairs (a federal matter), divide Torontonians (a moral matter), and virtue-signal (a pointless matter). Toronto voters should elect the person who actually wants to be the city’s mayor: to fix its problems, make it a better place to live and to unite the city. Enough division. Enough talk. Vote Brad Bradford. Olivia out!"

Dmitry Broytman | Facebook - "We have municipal election in Toronto on October 26. Mayor and city councillor candidates just started to put up lawn signs, so I did some statistical observations while running today. Along my route I discovered 6 signs for Brad Bradford, 4 signs for Olivia Chow, and 3 signs for Slow Down. My guess is the latter one is just an alias for Ms. Chow, because this city slowed down significantly under her watch: almost every time I take a subway—and the last time I experienced this was also today—the train would slow down or stop completely in the tunnel, and you hear the same mantra: medical emergency… works on track… police investigation… we apologize for the inconvenience… And you keep looking on your phone: will I be on time for my appointment or event. This is especially bizarre after visiting European cities with similar—in terms of lines and daily passengers—underground transit network like Budapest or Milan, where underground trains just follow schedule and are highly reliable. Why bike lane photos—another “slow down” thing—was running/walking along two bike lanes today for 5-10 minutes each. The first one was in a residential neighbourhood: two metres wide, taking probably a third of the road, and not a single bike on it, only me; the second one—on the photo—along Eglinton Avenue, taking significant part of the road again, and in 10 minutes you can count 150+ cars (it’s Sunday), 3 buses, and you already guessed… not a single bike but quite a few delivery motorcycles, and I doubt this kind of usage was on the minds of those who invented this “slow down traffic” scheme. My completely unscientific survey shows that “Slow Down” candidate currently has a lead but I hope very much that Mr. Bradford, representing dynamics, and change, and lower taxes, and safety, and just common sense will win.
Update. I wrote this half-serious but also tongue-in-cheek (Slow Down) post and never expected it to be read by more than a handful of my Facebook friends. Coming from work and seeing it getting more than 8,000 views and counting was quite a surprise. So I have to add a few words and photos.
1. I went through the comments and did my best to remove all the insults — not towards me, I do not care, but towards both candidates and other people who left comments here, as well as some of the comments provoking such behaviour. Might have missed something but did my best.
2. Some people somehow completely lack the sense of humour and seriously think I do not know the meaning of "Slow Down" signs or make electoral predictions by counting a dozen lawn signs.
3. Quite a few commented something along the lines: "Oh, it is not Olivia Chow's fault, she inherited problems from John Tory and Rob Ford". She has been the mayor for 3 years and 3 months: quite enough time to stop blaming her predecessors.
4. I attached a few additional photos to this post. This is Midtown Toronto near Yonge & Eglinton: some are from Yonge Street and most from my street. Just look at the state of the road. My street has been getting progressively worse throughout the last three years of Ms. Chow's tenure. This summer there happened to be a huge pothole in the middle of the street: they just put an orange cone in it, and it stayed like this for about three weeks until it was "repaired" — and the quality of this "repair" you can see in the photos. It is a disgrace.
5. Delivery motorcycles and electric bikes on the sidewalks and bike lanes, or moving in any direction across the road in a dangerous manner. Nobody enforces any rules on them.
6. Unfortunately, this city is dysfunctional in many ways, and we cannot allow 4 more years of the same. The only candidate representing this change is Mr. Bradford. And this change shouldn't stop with the mayor. Mr. Josh Matlow, hey, have a look at the photos, this is your constituency — hopefully not for long.
#toronto #torontoelection #ttc #bradbradford #oliviachow"

Meme - "IS THE MAYOR OF TORONTO INFLUENCED BY THE MULLAHS OF IRAN?
Iranian Canadian Congress. The ICC says Canada should remove the IRGC - the tyrannical dictatorship that mass murders its people - from the terrorist list
Saman Tabasimajad former ICC policy chair, Progress Toronto advisor, which runs Chow's campaign.
Saman Tabasimajad former ICC policy chair, now leads Progress Toronto, which runs Chow's campaign.
REJECT FOREIGN INFLUENCE IN TORONTO! TORONTONIANS DESERVE BETTER! VoteOutChow.com. DEMAND BETTER LEADERSHIP ON OCTOBER 26"

Meme - "Palestine House-Toronto: A Palestinian community organization founded by Amin El-Maoued. El-Maoued was recorded on video holding a megaphone chanting "Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammed is returning." The organization has publicly endorsed Chow's re-election."

Reto Baumgartner | Facebook - "Well, the BC election is over, and judging by some people's reactions, you'd think the world just ended. 😂 I actually find the whole situation almost funny. Let's look at what happened. For nearly 10 years, BC has been under NDP leadership. During that time, homelessness, drug problems, affordability and public safety have become major concerns. In my opinion, the province has been heading in the wrong direction for far too long. And then we have David Eby. The BC Conservatives were having leadership problems. Their party was divided, their leader had just resigned, and they were trying to get themselves back together. So what does Eby do? He calls an election. Two years early! Now, there's an unwritten understanding in politics that you don't take advantage of another party going through a leadership transition. Apparently, that didn't matter much to him. And his reasoning for calling an early election? Donald Trump, economic uncertainty and needing a stronger mandate to get things done. Hang on a minute. 🤔 You already have a majority government, and you're telling people you need another election to get things done? Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't your mandate. Maybe the problem is your leadership. Well, that gamble certainly didn't work out as planned. 😂 After years of controversies, growing problems and frustrated British Columbians, the people finally had their say. And what a message they sent! Now comes the part I find even more entertaining. Some people are already complaining about how terrible this new Conservative government is going to be. Really? The NDP had nearly a decade to show what they could do. Were the last 10 years really that wonderful that you're already convinced a new government will be worse? Here's a thought. How about we give Lorne Doerkson and his team a chance to actually govern before deciding they've failed? I'm not suggesting they'll get everything right. No government ever does. They should absolutely be held accountable for their decisions, just like every other government. At least give them the opportunity to prove themselves. Personally, I'm happy for the people of British Columbia. You have an opportunity for a fresh start, a different direction and hopefully a province that can thrive again. And here's the biggest lesson I take from this election. Politicians are elected to serve the people. They aren't entitled to stay in power, and having a majority doesn't mean voters owe you another one. David Eby took a gamble, thinking an early election was his opportunity. Turns out, it was an opportunity for the people of BC instead. Funny how that works. 😂"

Thread by @jonkay on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - ".@Dave_Eby was an unmitigated disaster for BC & for Canada. He embraced every destructive progressive policy fad—drug decrim, genderwang, unmarked-graves social panic—and it is a special treat to see his arrogant election gambit end with his humiliation
(In the great tradition of trash-heap BC progressives, Eby will now get a well-paid sinecure at SFU or UBC teaching one grad seminar a month on the underappreciated awesomeness of all his policies)
He’s also the only politician of any significance in Canada who spends his time blocking critics on Twitter "

Lindsay Shepherd on X - "The BC teachers union president issued this statement today 🥴 "I recognize that with the outcome of a Conservative government, many of us may be feeling disappointed, scared, or deeply concerned about what might come next. I know these results may be particularly concerning for Indigenous, racialized, and 2SLGBTQIA+ members. You are not alone.""
Clearly only deluded right wing extremist conspiracy theories think that the teachers unions are politically biased

Kari Hollend-Wright | Facebook - "Dear progressive, left-leaning Toronto friends, I say that as someone who used to consider myself one of you. In many ways, I still am. I believe in justice, equality, human rights, social services, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and protecting marginalized communities. I also believe that most decent people, on either side of the political aisle, care about these things. But here's where I seem to have lost my political home. Just because someone doesn't share every single one of your views doesn't mean you get to diminish their humanity. I believe in democracy. I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in everyone's right to vote for the person they feel best represents their values and priorities. At the moment, I feel fairly politically homeless. I don't fit neatly into the boxes I'm apparently supposed to tick. So perhaps we can just file me under decent human being. Last night, Olivia Chow and Brad Bradford both demonstrated something I wish more people would learn from. They acknowledged one another with dignity and respect, despite their political differences. When Bradford acknowledged Chow, his supporters responded respectfully. When Chow mentioned Bradford, members of her crowd booed. That contrast matters. And today, I saw a social media post attributed to a Canadian journalist and writer, someone whose work appears in mainstream publications, suggesting that Brad Bradford should kill himself. That is absolutely fucking disgraceful. And here's what I'm sick and tired of: the notion that identifying with progressive politics, social justice, or a marginalized community somehow grants you immunity from accountability. It doesn't. Your identity doesn't make you incapable of cruelty. Your politics don't automatically make you compassionate. And your belief that you're on the right side of history doesn't give you permission to dehumanize people who disagree with you. You don't get to be the bully and the victim whenever it suits you. We are constantly told that silence is complicity. That we are responsible for the company we keep. That we must call out hate, intolerance, and dangerous rhetoric wherever we see it. Fine. I agree. But those principles don't suddenly become optional when the behaviour comes from someone on your own side. You cannot demand accountability from the right while making excuses for cruelty, intimidation, and hypocrisy on the left. And when did "middle ground" get totally ruled out. You cannot champion inclusion while deciding that certain people, communities, or political opponents are undeserving of your compassion. And you certainly cannot claim the moral high ground simply because you've memorized the language of social justice. I voted for Olivia Chow in the last election. I believed in many of the things she stood for. This time, I voted to replace her. Not because I suddenly stopped caring about affordability, housing, social services, or equality, but because my humanity, my community's safety, my children's safety and my sense of belonging in this city matter too. And to those who voted for her, I respect your democratic choice. I ask that you extend that same respect to people who voted differently. But supporting a leader doesn't mean giving that leader a free pass. If you believe in the values that brought you to the ballot box, you should be willing to hold your chosen leader accountable for upholding them for everyone. Not just the communities you identify with. Not just the people who agree with you. Not just when it's politically convenient. And Mayor Olivia Chow, that responsibility now belongs to you, too. You have been elected to represent an entire city, including those who didn't vote for you. I have spent my life standing up for people whose experiences are different from my own. I don't intend to stop. But I am exhausted by the expectation that compassion must flow in only one direction. If your humanity depends on someone's politics, religion, identity, or whether they voted the same way you did, then perhaps it's time to reconsider what you actually stand for. Because justice isn't justice when it's selective. Equality isn't equality when it comes with exceptions. And compassion isn't compassion when it's reserved for people you already agree with. Pick one. Either you believe in these values for everyone, or you don't. And if we're serious about making Toronto a safer, more inclusive city, then every single one of us has a responsibility to act like it."
Left wingers are full of hate as usual

Facebook - "And so begins the winter of British Columbia's discontent. BC just experienced what the US did in 2024. It's incredible the NDP learned nothing from that, instead following the Biden-Kamala model, loathsome-maxxing right into the abyss. And now, they've created another illustrative learning moment. The BCNDP have proven once again that trying to play progressive while still remaining the handmaiden of capitalism and neoliberal hegemony will always fail and alienate everybody, and in doing handed the province of my birth to trumpistic reaction. Sadness...but they had it coming. They crushed Appadurai and their own party democracy, they let militarized police go to town on the Ada'itsx/Fairy Creek protesters, and called an election in a fit of pique and cyncism. Eby's anti-leadership will be the stuff of legend. Marginally progressive public administration coupled with letting lumber companies aggressively mow down irreplaceable old growth makes you friends with no one. Reactionaries who make it their identity to cheer on clear cuts and spit on protesters aren't going to thank you. AI-assisted right-wing cultural war brainrot has clearly seized large swathes of BC voters. They seem to have come out in droves simply out of contempt for the concept of progressivism, whatever that is meant to mean. It is pure reaction, primordial colonial white supremacy that condemns everything woke, rainbow, public, or indigenous, everything that isn't using power to punish, dominate, and exploit. Anti-science, anti-thought, anti-anything that counsels reflection or self-restraint. That is the essential character of the right-wing, that perpetual domination is the just order of the world. This is the Convoy-MAGA fascist blob, brought to us by capital, to aggressively assert the rights of power - the strong do what they will , and the weak suffer what they must - it's their fault for being weak anyways, right? Thus anti-everything, how dare anyone assert themselves, how dare the indigenous and the tree-huggers and the homeless and the transpeople exist at all, how dare temporary workers have healthcare, how dare immigrants vote, etc, etc. Droves of people showed up for this. Their mobilization speaks to the hollowness at the core of "conservative" BC society, so lacking in identity they become defined as opposite, filled with contempt for whatever those dress-wearing *progressives* are doing, etc. There's nothing much new about any of that. What is new(er) is is the extent to which AI propaganda slop and social media manipulation can produce signal-boosting, constant repetition of vitriolic right-wing agitation, driving up outrage and turnout. That is the role of social media in reactionary politics. Filling all space with noise is what propaganda has always done, but social media AI slop is particularly good at it. On the other side, those with enough internal dialogue to be immune to the above, once again learn how deadly inadequate everything is. Progressives are trapped in a system that actively militates against thoughtful, effective politics. But even without progressive vote splitting only ten or so ridings more would have gone orange, defeat still inevitable. Whatever the progressive project was, it has failed. A stunning case study. By calling the election, Eby alienated everyone, and gave the right-wing the perfect jump start ammunition to carry the momentum into a social-media fueled reactionary maelstrom - the decadent, deficit-happy lefties are at it again with a gratuitous election, wasting our money while blocking our precious precious oil, time to show them what real hard headed men can do, etc, etc. Outage begets engagement, and engagement begets advertiser revenue, so social media companies engineer the algorithm to reinforce the outrage and the biggotry that underlies it. It is an ugly cycle that utterly turfed Eby and will make all of BC suffer for his sins. Indigenous peoples will no doubt return to their communities and territories and plan resistance on the ground where they live. I have no doubts that will be ugly as they face off against a government that has already stated their intention to "conquer". The same goes for any sort of ecological protest movement against the incoming clearcuts, pipelines, and terminals extravaganza. The left needs to rebuild from scratch. Surely over the incoming 4 years of fossil-fuelled austerity terror, something can be done, surely. The Con base is block of toxic reaction and petro-chauvinism, but it doesn't make up a majority, or even plurality, of people in rid8ngs that went blue. Younger workers at the ass end of a deeply precarious economy, rural communities that perhaps today are lost to the toxic minority can be won back after they're gutted and spitted by the new regime, their hospitals and schools closed while the oligarchs extend their private airports and their local poobah lackies build their 8 or 10 car garages, all fat from untendered contracts, unfunded tax cuts, and wholesale public giveaways. The deficit will be eye-watering, to be sure. But everywhere right now the narrative framing has been captured, or perhaps rather given, entirely to reactionaries. A lot of people, neither reactionary nor pleased with government, so alienated, thus barely showed up. BC Greens and NDP need to decide what they are about and develop a modus vivendi. Against the fascist inferno, coherent left wing politics is a necessity. I know its a naive interpretation, but they both, in their essential character as social democratic and ecologist parties, are ultimately socialist, yeah? That private wealth is not the greatest good? And the right-wing is explicitly petro-chauvinist, burning fuel and consuming nature has become central to the "conservative" image, so its opposition must be ecologist. A non-ecologist leftwing is as useless and contradictory as pro-capitalist green (and not accusing current BCGreens to be guilty of the latter, to be clear). Establish some meaning in politics and vigorously defending it, would be welcome to all those who are lost. Signing a pact on electoral reform might also be a start. Once again though, unhinged electoralism has failed, and the left vanquished. They'll have a long time to pick through the ruins. BC, and perhaps Canada as a whole, appear to be behind the American cycle. Corporate progressives of liberal and liberalish NDP flavors are making themselves rankly vulnerable to well-earned progressive apathy and maple maga flavoured outrage. Funny how that works out. Attached: the conqueror, BC Con Mike Hicks, who won a progressive riding through vote splitting, sigh. Not that that actually matters, but it's still pretty cringe."
Left wing logic: the failure of far left policies means that they weren't far left enough and you need to double down

Crazy Rider Fan 🇨🇦 on X - "Canadas most woke, progressive and broken province just stunned the world by destroying the NDP (needles, drugs and poverty) party. British Columbia just annihilated David Eby and his NDP party by electing the first Conservative government in generations. This stunning victory proves a few things.
-David Eby is an idiot and so is anyone who voted for him.
-Progressives and leftists are willing to endure a horrendous amount of abuse and incompetence to defend their ideology before accepting and admitting to reality.
-Leftists and progressives do have a pain threshold.
-There were not enough immigrants, activists, criminals, communists and welfare recipients to overcome reality.
-Canadian politics is frustratingly schizophrenic. Trudeau and Carney did and continue to do to Canada what Eby did to BC. Yet Liberals are hailed as our saviours with a 3000% approval rating.
Something does not add up. Congratulations to BC for finally seeing the light. We have been pointing the flashlight at you for years. Welcome back "

Melanie Eresman on X - "I just saw a dispute between a “disabled trans” and an indigenous arguing about who has it worse now that the conservatives have won in BC. It’s like listening to satire but these humans are actually serious. What the fuck is wrong with people!!!!"

Mud-slinging Eby attempts to cancel his opposition | National Post - "As we wrap up a month of what has the potential to be one of the biggest missteps in British Columbia, or Canadian, political history, it bears examining whether David Eby’s attempt to position himself as a modern day Joseph McCarthy dedicated to rooting out thought criminals from his opposition will be ultimately effective. If Eby somehow pulls together a victory on Saturday, it will likely be a ringing endorsement that cancel culture is alive and well in Canada. In a sort of pseudo-McCarthyist attempt, the B.C. NDP has gone full throttle since the writ was dropped with attempted cancellations and censorship of B.C. Conservative candidates and staffers. The predominant narrative put forward by the B.C. NDP is the message that there are dangerous extremists that might be sitting at Lorne Doerkson’s table should the B.C. Conservatives form government. So concerned are they with a litany of old Facebook comments, X reposts and offhand remarks that they have put together a handy who’s who: “Meet Lorne Doerkson’s Team.” Like a very dull and farfetched version of Guess Who, the website conveniently lists the purported offenders and offences. Since the campaign kickoff, the B.C. NDP has been committed to attempted cancellations and censorship of prospective B.C. Conservative MLAs. When asked whether British Columbians might look past controversial comments made by MLA candidates, Eby doubled down, stating “these views are relevant to voters as they consider who will best protect them and their family.” But will this gamble pay off? While doubtless this strategy would have had a greater resonance during the 2020 “Summer of Love,” or the heyday of the “#MeToo” era, increasingly Canadians are fatigued with political correctness. A three-year-old Angus Reid poll found that over half of Canadians said the trend of cancelling public figures due to controversial statements suppresses free speech. Since 2023, public attitudes towards cancelling have arguably gotten much less supportive. In a 2024 report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canadians rejected cancel culture, agreeing with the statement “political correctness has gone too far” by a margin of 78-22. Cancel culture fatigue has seen the rehabilitation of many previously cast aside from society, even seeing figures like persona non grata Don Cherry appointed to the Order of Ontario with minimal pushback. Highlights from the final week of the campaign included attempting to cancel Lorne Doerkson for holding private fundraisers, and claiming that holding two private maximum-donor fundraisers at “swanky downtown Vancouver hotels” was a sign that a Conservative government would sell out to “private interests.” Not to be forgotten, Conservative candidate Heather Maahs has been one of Eby’s primary punching bags over the past days, with the NDP positioning Maahs as a dangerous homophobe who does not belong in the public sphere... The NDP called for the removal of Powell River-Sunshine Coast candidate John Henderson for having a copy of Tom Flanagan’s “Grave Error” at work while he was the mayor of Sechelt. In the NDP’s framing, merely having the book and discussing it with some senior staffers meant Henderson “pushed” the book... In the 30 days of the campaign, the B.C. NDP has devoted a significant portion of its energy to the attempted censorship and cancellation of Conservative candidates, primarily based on shaky foundations of old Facebook screenshots, X reposts and Instagram stories long since expired. The results on Saturday will likely prove an interesting indicator of whether the all bark, no bite strategy of censorship and cancellation remains an effective one in Canada. Is slinging mud an effective strategy or will the consequences of reckless, largely unsubstantiated character attacks manifest in the opposite result intended? David Eby’s attempt to root out those he deems unacceptable from the B.C. Conservative ecosystem reeks of a McCarthyist ethos determined to police the bounds of discourse in a way that should send a shiver down the spine of anyone committed to free expression. Much like McCarthy, it’s doubtful that Eby has any real self-awareness of the shaky foundations many of his accusations rest upon, instead finding himself completely enveloped in his quest to root out any and all thought criminals from the B.C. Conservative tent. Playing on fear and resentment might have worked 10 years ago, but I would bet that such an approach, especially backed up with few successes and minimal policy prescriptions, will be soundly rejected at the polls."
That would explain the sudden activity among the NPCs just before the election

Canadian society has high social trust—but can that survive our unprecedented immigration increases?

2026-11-09T18:35:00.000+08:00

Left wing logic (when it's convenient) - it doesn't matter if trust goes down as long as it's still above the global average.

If elites undermine trust by lying, clearly the "far right" and "misinformation" are to blame.

Since integration is racist, good luck rebuilding trust.

Clearly, if you oppose mass migration, you're racist.

DeepDive: Canadian society has high social trust—but can that survive our unprecedented immigration increases?

"Canada is a high-trust country. Surveys consistently show that Canadians are more likely than most people in the world to say “others can be trusted,” to respect the rules, and to view government and civic institutions as broadly legitimate. In Q4 2024, for instance, 43.5 percent of Canadians reported that “most people can be trusted”, which is significantly higher than global averages and among the highest in the OECD.

This sense of collective trust is a huge advantage for the country. It helps to explain why our markets function as well as they do, why our democracy is relatively stable, and why Canada is generally seen as a good place to live and invest.

Scholars often note that only a small cluster of countries consistently report that a majority of people can be trusted. That makes Canada an outlier in the global context. Preserving that advantage has, among other benefits, major economic upside. Economic research, for instance, links a one-point rise in generalized trust to several percentage points of GDP per capita in the long run.

Trust isn’t a static inheritance. It’s continually shaped by social change, economic developments, and political choices. Immigration, in particular, has long interacted with these trust dynamics—sometimes straining them but more often reinforcing them. For decades, newcomers have contributed to Canada’s economy, enriched its culture, and, over time, come to share in its high-trust norms.

But the unprecedented scale of today’s immigration experiment raises new questions that haven’t yet been squarely addressed by policymakers or commentators.

The central issue is this: What happens when a high-trust society welcomes large numbers of newcomers from countries with lower levels of trust? Do newcomers converge toward Canada’s institutions and norms of cooperation, or does the sheer scale of change begin to alter those norms themselves?

In the past, the answer has generally been positive. Over generations, immigrants and their children have converged toward Canadian levels of trust. Yet scale, speed, and segregation matter. When half the population in some of our cities is already foreign-born, and when housing and settlement patterns reduce day-to-day mixing, can we still assume the same outcome?

This DeepDive essay aims to explore that question by surveying the best theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between immigration, diversity, and social trust. The research shows that high-trust societies can remain resilient, but only if their institutions function well and integration is actively managed. Canada’s unprecedented immigration levels make those conditions harder to sustain...

The highest-trust societies are typically in Northern Europe. In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, for instance, more than 60 percent of respondents say that most people can be trusted. At the other end of the spectrum, in countries like Brazil, Colombia, and the Philippines, the share can be as low as 5 percent. The United States falls somewhere in the middle, with roughly a third of respondents expressing generalized trust.

Canada consistently ranks as a high-trust country. Roughly 40 percent of Canadians tell survey researchers that most people can be trusted—though the number has been falling in recent years. According to Statistics Canada’s Canadian Social Survey, for instance, the share of Canadians who believe that most people can be trusted has fallen from 46.8 percent in Q2 2022 to 43.5 percent in Q4 2024 (see figure 1).

The downward drift in Canadian trust levels may seem small, but longitudinal research shows that even modest declines can signal important shifts...

High levels of social trust are rightly seen as a civic and engagement advantage. Scholars have shown that trust acts as a source of social capital that lowers transaction costs, facilitates cooperation, and enables societies to organize at scale. High-trust societies can build dynamic economies and robust democracies. Low-trust societies often rely on family ties, informal networks, or heavy state coercion.

Studies estimate that differences in trust can explain up to one-fifth of the variance in economic growth across advanced countries. Trust lowers the cost of credit, increases investment horizons, and reduces reliance on costly monitoring. In low-trust societies, firms tend to remain family-owned and small; in high-trust ones, large corporations can emerge because strangers are more willing to collaborate...

In high-trust contexts, people are able to cooperate beyond kinship networks, which in turn enables the rise of large-scale firms, vibrant civic associations, and credible political institutions. In low-trust societies, by contrast, confidence rarely extends beyond the family, constraining organizational scale and leaving more functions to the state. For Fukuyama, generalized trust is a cultural inheritance that’s transmitted across generations and rooted in historical experience...

[In] E Pluribus Unum, Putnam addressed the role of diversity more directly. His large-N empirical work showed that more ethnically diverse communities often reported lower levels of trust—not only between groups, but even within them. He described this response as people “hunkering down.” Yet Putnam was careful to stress that this outcome wasn’t inevitable. In his view, the long-term trajectory could still be one of rising trust if institutions fostered integration and common identities. The critical variables were the scale and speed of demographic change, and the strength of institutions tasked with absorbing it.

Political scientist Eric Uslaner advanced the debate by shifting attention from observable networks to moral orientation in his 2002 book, The Moral Foundations of Trust. For Uslaner, generalized trust isn’t simply a reflection of civic participation or rational calculation, but an ingrained belief that society is fair and the future is hopeful. In this sense, trust functions almost like an ethical disposition: it’s passed down across generations and thus proves remarkably “sticky.”

Yet, once eroded, it’s extraordinarily difficult to rebuild...

Trust also underpins democratic resilience. Research shows that when citizens lose confidence in one another and in institutions, they become more susceptible to populist appeals, conspiracy theories, and polarization. In this sense, Canada’s high-trust inheritance has acted as a shock absorber against global currents of populism...

Canadian scholars note that our immigration and settlement policies have served as institutional buffers. Yet these studies often drew on periods when annual immigration was in the range of 200,000 to 300,000. Today’s levels are several times higher, and the evidence base for what happens at this unprecedented scale is thin.

Canada has long been a case study in successful immigration. Research has found that while ethnic diversity can reduce neighborhood-level trust, strong national institutions and redistributive policies mitigate the effect. Other Canadian studies likewise find that the diversity–trust effect is strongest at the micro level (e.g., neighbourhoods) but tends to dissipate at larger scales where institutions and national identity buffer it...

Immigration levels today are unprecedented. In some metropolitan areas, more than half of residents are foreign-born. In 2021, nearly 47 percent of Toronto’s CMA residents were foreign-born, and several GTA municipalities—Markham, Richmond Hill, Mississauga, Brampton—are now majority-immigrant. Vancouver is at about 42 percent. Rising housing costs, long health-care wait times, and crowded transit raise the risk that institutions may no longer deliver the same integrative outcomes. There is, in short, less margin for error...

Europe, especially Scandinavia, has been a laboratory for studying trust under immigration pressure. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are historically the highest-trust societies in the world.

Yet research shows immigration has modestly lowered generalized trust, particularly where migrants cluster in segregated neighbourhoods. Swedish studies find that negatives tend to weigh more heavily than positives in diverse neighbourhoods, and the effects are strongest when segregation and socio-economic disadvantage overlap. Germany’s experience with Turkish “guest workers” illustrates how weak integration policies can entrench bonding trust within enclaves, which in turn slows convergence.

In Scandinavia, where trust has historically exceeded 60 percent, even small declines are taken seriously. Danish and Swedish policymakers debate immigration in explicitly trust-related terms, reflecting an awareness that their high-trust inheritance is both precious and fragile.

Cross-country studies add nuance. A 2020 meta-analysis found that while ethnic diversity often correlates with lower trust, effect sizes are small to moderate and heavily context-dependent. Where institutions are strong, education is high, and integration policies are robust, trust recovers. Where those conditions are absent, the negative effects are more persistent...

The empirical literature suggests three takeaways. First, immigration can lower trust in the short run, especially at the neighbourhood level. Second, over time and across generations, convergence is possible, but it’s not automatic. Repeated, structured contact across groups—through schools, public services, or civic programs—consistently improves outcomes. The policy lever isn’t diversity itself but how it is managed in daily life. Third, scale and speed matter. Smaller, gradual inflows are easier to integrate; rapid, large-scale inflows can overwhelm institutions and delay trust-building...

In earlier decades, immigration was significant but gradual, which gave time for convergence in trust, culture, and civic identity. Today’s scale compresses those timelines and strains the capacity of institutions to mediate the process.

It’s also far more highly geographically concentrated than historic patterns. More than 90 percent of newcomers settle in just four provinces—Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and Alberta—and within them, overwhelmingly in a handful of large metropolitan areas. In Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal, the scale of immigration is transforming the cities’ demography and putting pressure on housing, infrastructure, and social services.

Housing is the best-known example. A supply-constrained housing market is absorbing record demand from newcomers, which in turn has pushed affordability to historic lows. But growing evidence from other parts of civic life is notable too.

The Hub recently published an analysis, for instance, that showed in some of the country’s largest school districts, a third or more of students spoke neither English nor French. The school system is a bellwether. When more than 30 percent of students speak another language at home, the classroom becomes a primary site of integration. If schools succeed, they can generate bridging trust. Yet if they struggle, they risk entrenching divides.

These bottlenecks matter for trust because effective institutions are the mechanisms through which integration takes place. When institutions falter, both newcomers and existing citizens may lose confidence in them—and, by extension, in each other.

Spatial segregation compounds the problem. Rising housing costs have pushed newcomers into concentrated enclaves. The 2021 Census showed that 46.6 percent of residents in the Greater Toronto Area were immigrants, and municipalities like Markham (58.6 percent), Richmond Hill (58.2 percent), Mississauga (53.2 percent), and Brampton (52.9 percent) are now among the most immigrant-concentrated in Canada. Over time, the clustering trend has accelerated: in the early 2000s, visible minority shares in Mississauga rose from 40.3 percent (2001) to 53.7 percent (2011), and in Brampton from 40.2 percent to 66.4 percent, which points to intensifying ethnic concentration in suburban areas.

Economists note that segregation can produce “tipping points”: once a neighbourhood crosses a certain threshold of linguistic or cultural concentration, the likelihood of further out-migration by majority residents increases. That dynamic, documented in U.S. and European cities, may already be unfolding in parts of the GTA and Metro Vancouver.

This matters because segregation slows the development of bridging trust and increases reliance on bonding trust within communities. The long-run risk is that instead of convergence toward Canadian norms, we see the persistence of parallel yet separate societies."

Links - 9th November 2026 (Gender Differences)

2026-11-09T14:34:00.000+08:00

Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization - "Sex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting brain function and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, previous research on how brain organization differs between males and females has been inconclusive. Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort fMRI (functional MRI) datasets, we identify highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network. Our findings advance the understanding of sex-related differences in brain function and behavior. More generally, our approach provides AI–based tools for probing robust, generalizable, and interpretable neurobiological measures of sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, aging, and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, our understanding of sex differences in human functional brain organization and their behavioral consequences has been hindered by inconsistent findings and a lack of replication. Here, we address these challenges using a spatiotemporal deep neural network (stDNN) model to uncover latent functional brain dynamics that distinguish male and female brains. Our stDNN model accurately differentiated male and female brains, demonstrating consistently high cross-validation accuracy (>90%), replicability, and generalizability across multisession data from the same individuals and three independent cohorts (N ~ 1,500 young adults aged 20 to 35). Explainable AI (XAI) analysis revealed that brain features associated with the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network consistently exhibited significant sex differences (effect sizes > 1.5) across sessions and independent cohorts. Furthermore, XAI-derived brain features accurately predicted sex-specific cognitive profiles, a finding that was also independently replicated. Our results demonstrate that sex differences in functional brain dynamics are not only highly replicable and generalizable but also behaviorally relevant, challenging the notion of a continuum in male-female brain organization. Our findings underscore the crucial role of sex as a biological determinant in human brain organization, have significant implications for developing personalized sex-specific biomarkers in psychiatric and neurological disorders, and provide innovative AI-based computational tools for future research."
Damn neurosexism! AI algorithms just amplify human bias, so they need to be trained to prevent "harm" by pretending that men and women are identical

Young teens at play: Girls are egalitarian, boys are generous - "Using the decisions of 2500 girls and boys in three mini dictator games, this paper investigates how the social preferences of five cohorts of students (aged 12 to 16) evolve throughout adolescence. We find that at early ages (12 years old, 7th grade), girls tend to be egalitarian, boys are more generous, and <10 % exhibit spiteful behavior - with equal representation of girls and boys. The gender gap in both strong egalitarianism (with girls showing more egalitarianism) and weak generosity (with boys being more generous) doesn't seem to fade as they grow older."

Thread by @SpencrGreenberg on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Important but often overlooked: when groups differ a small amount in their means, they may differ *dramatically* in their tails. For instance, in a personality study, we found males to have a little bit lower average compassion score than females (1.4 vs. 2) [tails thread] 🧵 Small differences like this in averages are typically not noticeable or important. Most people are not in the tails. If you knew only someone's compassion level and had to guess their sex from it, you'd be wrong more than one-third of the time (predicting optimally)! However, small differences in means can lead to much bigger differences in the tails. Among just the most compassionate people in our study, there were about 2x more females than males (right side of the chart). Moreover, the least compassionate people were almost all males! Similarly, on average, females usually test only a bit higher than males on peacefulness and forgiveness. But, if we look at the tails of behavior, we see extreme differences. Males accounted for 96% of U.S. mass shootings and 90% of homicide convictions. I suspect that one reason so many people believe that groups differ much more, on average, than they really do (and engage in dichotomizing and stereotyping) is that tail behavior is sometimes much more visible than typical behavior. When you meet most people, you don't really think about whether their compassion level is slightly above average or slightly below average (and then correlate it with sex). You just wouldn't even notice one way or the other. But when you see that the vast majority of serial killers are male, that stands out. Most males are not very low in compassion. But most people who are very low in compassion are males! For instance, ~4x more males than females have psychopathy/sociopathy."

Meme - Diana S. Fleischman @sentientist: "This woman weighs 47 kilos, meaning there are almost no grown men in her weight class. But she might be able to beat up the average 13 year old boy."
🚨 Katherine Brodsky @mysteriouskat: "The number of unfit, unskilled men claiming they can "take her" merely based on the fact that they are men... Yes, men are on average stronger. But take an unfit man in a somewhat similar weight class and she's winning."

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "14 and 15 year-old boys track and field records beat the world records set by adult women."
"100m 200m 400m 800m 1000m 1500m Mile 5000m 400m Hurdles
High Jump Pole Vault Long Jump Triple Jump Shot Put Discus Hammer Throw Javelin"

Keeping it Casual - "men and women’s sexual behavior since the 1960s actually fits better with the evolutionary psychologists’ narrative than with its sociocultural rival. The pill removes one of the main risks of casual sex for women: the risk of getting pregnant and having to raise an unplanned child without the help of the father. Despite this, more than a half century after it first appeared, women are still less willing than men to engage in casual sex. This doesn’t prove that the Nurture Only theory is false; it’s no doubt possible to come up with a non-evolutionary explanation for the tenacity of the sex difference. But the tenacity of the sex difference isn’t what we would have predicted on the basis of the Nurture Only theory. That should make us wary of any post hoc explanation for the persistence of the casual sex gender gap. Other evidence presents a similar challenge to the Nurture Only view. Consider, for instance, the sexual behavior of lesbians. Unlike straight women, lesbians don’t have to worry about getting pregnant or about being alone with a more physically powerful partner. If these worries were all that kept women from jumping into bed with every good-looking stranger, then lesbians would have more sexual partners than their straight female counterparts. As various studies have demonstrated, however, they don’t; they have fewer partners... the social pressures don’t all point in the direction presupposed by the Nurture Only theory. Research has generally failed to demonstrate a consistent or pervasive sexual double standard in the modern Western world. Although the belief in the sexual double standard is still widespread, the double standard itself is much less so. Indeed, some people these days hold a reverse double standard, such that they judge men who sleep around more harshly than they judge women. Certainly, “slut” is an insulting term. But so is “prude,” and women who don’t engage in casual sex are sometimes called that – by men who want to sleep with them, for a start. And while “slut” is usually reserved for women, there are plenty of pejorative terms for men who sleep around: womanizer, dirty old man, letch, sleaze, “worthless, lazy, good-for-nothing, womanizing asshole” – and so on... the difference persists even when society pushes against it. As Donald Symons points out, men’s stronger interest in casual sex and sexual novelty has survived society’s best efforts to eradicate it... Arguably, though, the most persuasive argument against the Nurture Only view is that sex differences in sexual inclinations and choosiness can be found in many individuals who have no gender norms, no socialization, and little in the way of culture: that rather sizeable group, so often overlooked by psychologists, known as other animals. The differences aren’t found in all other species, but they are found in many, including most birds, mammals, and reptiles. And when we find the differences in other animals, evolution is the only reasonable explanation. Why should humans be different?... what the Nurture Only theory asks us to believe is that, in our lineage and ours alone, natural selection eliminated the normal sex differences, despite the fact that the selection pressure that initially created them was still operative. Why would it do that? It’s particularly perplexing given that, when we look around the world, we still find the sex differences that selection supposedly eliminated. Thus, the Nurture Only theory asks us to believe not only that selection eliminated the differences for reasons unknown, but that learning and culture then coincidentally reproduced exactly the same differences in every culture on record. This is not a compelling thesis."
As usual, the nurture squad believes in nurture only, while the "nature squad" believes both are important, and the nurture squad pretend that just because culture influences things means that nature cannot play a role at all
Patriarchy is so powerful it affects animals, once again

Paulo F. on X - "Why are there > men in leadership positions? Because it is men who have the most to gain from these positions. They guarantee more income, status & above all more sex. As for sex, it is men who, in reproductive terms, gain the most from it the more they practice it. That's all"
Dryborer on X - "Men are more interested in the status symbols of leadership and less vulnerable to the costs. Some men will neglect their wife and kids to get status. Very few women think it's worth it."

Bachman on X - "A weird result of 60 years of sexual egalitarian whitewashing is that every adult learns about gender differences via a series of private relationship crises--more or less excruciating--rather than that knowledge being embodied in institutions, ritual, and prejudice"

Four-foot-tall dwarf beats female pornstar in MMA fight before sparking brawl - "A four-foot-tall dwarf defeated two female MMA fighters including a pornstar during the latest instalment of Epic Fighting Championship. Majit Suleymanov, who is a blogger and social media influencer, was fighting on the Russian label's latest bizarre MMA card. He was facing pornstar Alexandra Piskun who has previously fought with the promotion against a reality-TV star."

Meme - "The well-known sex difference in brain size is not explained by men being taller than women."

ZUBY: on X - "The social media fuelled 'gender war' is stupid. But it's also interesting. I think an overlooked reason for it is despite all the "men and women are the same" claptrap, men think and talk like men, and women think and talk like women. And online, these styles constantly clash. In real life, men typically soften our speech and manner when women are present. It happens instantaneously and perhaps unconsciously in most cases. But on the internet, detached from being able to physically SEE (let alone cater to) every potential viewer or listener, this calibration is less likely to occur. Online, men default to speaking as if their audience is other men (it predominantly is). Women hear or see this and think the tone is too 'harsh', broad, and 'insensitive'. And it often is. But that's how men speak when you're not around. For the first time in human history, we have billions of men and women of all different backgrounds, all communicating and cross-pollinating ideas and communication styles. People are privvy to more conversations than ever, and don't always like it because their particularly sensitivities are not catered to. They are often outright ignored. Very few men actually hate women. But we aren't women and technology has its limitations. Real world conversations are superior because there is more empathy and humanity. And fewer algorithms :)"
Feminists claim that treating men and women differently is sexist. But they can't walk the walk and get upset when men treat women like they treat men (see also: treating women like you'd treat Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - they'd be upset at that too)

Girls' under-10s football team lost every game last season beats boys to claim league trophy - "A girl’s under-10 football team which lost every single game last season has now triumphed in a league of all-boys squads to win a cup trophy. The team from Woodlanders FC won the Huddersfield Junior Football League Vase trophy by beating rivals Howden Clough FC 3-2... The girls had a difficult start last season as an all-girl team in a league of boys’ teams and lost every game."
Clearly, this shows that women are equally physically capable as men, because puberty isn't a thing

Steve Stewart-Williams on X - "Sex differences in suicide rates by age (UK; 2017)
Note that a lot of sex differences follow a similar trajectory: They start growing in adolescence then shrink in later life. This applies, for instance, to fireworks-related hospitalizations, alcohol consumption, road deaths, and homicide rates."

Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "I still haven't seen a satisfactory explanation for the finding that men are much stronger than women even when they're equally muscular."
Damn socialisation!

This Mixed-Gender Wrestling Match Ended In Tears… 🤼‍♂️
Instagram - Mens Media: "Bro ain't playing no games"
High school (?) girl wrestles guy from "BTWC" and epically loses and cries, with her hairband down over her mouthBTWC" and epically loses and cries, with her hairband down over her mouth

mark normand on X - "Me: Are women as horny as men?
Lady Friend: Definitely.
Me: Well I’d have sex with you, would you have sex with me?
LF: No way.
Me: Well there ya go.
LF: But I’m not attracted to you.
Me: Yeah, I’m not attracted to you either."
Left wing logic: if person A says he's starving and he will eat anything and person B says he's staving but refuses to eat most things you give him but loves burgers, person A and person B are equally hungrystaving but refuses to eat most things you give him but loves burgers, person A and person B are equally hungry

Defiant L’s on X - "Democrat Lindsey Williams: "Female bodies are just as strong and fast and capable as male bodies.""

︎ ︎venom on X - "YouTuber Jesse James West held a competition to see who’s stronger between tall, strong bodybuilder women and strong dwarf men.
> Dwarf men easily crushed them
> Women were very egoistic, serious, and competitive
> While men were just having fun
Why is gender equality forced when the difference in ability is pretty clear?"
Damn structural sexism and misogyny!

Gender stereotypes are often accurate but vary in magnitude depending on the criterion - "Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that while gender stereotypes are often viewed as misleading, they are surprisingly accurate. People correctly guess whether men or women are higher on a given trait about 85% of the time... People tended to underestimate gender differences in areas such as cognitive abilities, occupational distributions, and academic performance (e.g., GPA in different college majors). In contrast, they overestimated differences in personality traits, behaviors, and social attitudes. The sensitivity correlations further supported the conclusion that gender stereotypes are largely accurate. When averaging across all participants in a given study, the mean consensual sensitivity correlation was .77, indicating a strong relationship between stereotypical beliefs and actual gender differences."
Most stereotypes are true

Rob Henderson on X - "Interesting: women carry a large reproductive cost (pregnancy). But men carry 20% more active metabolic tissue to aid in reproductive efforts (boosts competitiveness, attractiveness, and ability to provide) and is ultimately just as costly as pregnancy."

Evolution and Social Cognition: Contrast Effects as a Function of Sex, Dominance, and Physical Attractiveness - "Previous research indicates that males, compared with females, evaluate their relationships less favorably after exposure to physically attractive members of the other sex. An evolutionary model predicts a converse effect after exposure to opposite-sex individuals high in dominance, which should lead females to evaluate their current relationships less favorably than males. Women and men rated their current relationships after being exposed to opposite-sex targets varying in both dominance and physical attractiveness. Consistent with earlier research, males exposed to physically attractive, as compared with average, targets rated their current relationships less favorably. Males' relationship evaluations were not directly influenced by the targets' dominance, although the effect of physical attractiveness was significant only for men exposed to women low in dominance. However; females' evaluations of their relationships were unaffected by exposure to physically attractive males but were lower after exposure to targets high in dominance. These data support predictions derived from an evolutionary model and suggest that such models can be used to generate testable hypotheses about ongoing social cognition."

John Rain on X - "Men consistently score higher than women on measures of political knowledge. A 2018 study found that this difference cannot be explained by stereotype threat. (More generally, men tend to have broader general knowledge than women on average.)"
Time to demonize men and their politics because deferring to stances supported by people with greater knowledge is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda

Covfefe Anon on X - "Women having significantly less general knowledge than men is a real phenomenon and shows up in multiple areas - in this case a female PhD student in the field doesn't know basic underlying facts about the field - this is only surprising in that you can't predict where her knowledge will be lacking Part of the reason our society is destroying itself is that it's decided upon a religious dogma of group equality across all domains which it then enforces by making it taboo to look at and think about the implications of the fact that groups are *not* all equally capable How many people know about the general knowledge gap between men and women? Few How many studies are there on it? Few - no one wants to try to publish a paper that has a "controversial" result when the result contradicts progressive religious dogma Millions and millions of "little" things like this add up and only disagreeable, knowledgeable people can actually fit it all into a coherent framework"
Men are better at trivia than women

Covfefe Anon on X - "The general knowledge gap between men and women is huge and replicates across many studies"
Bryan Caplan on X - "I found that being male changes beliefs about economics by roughly 16% as much as a PhD in economics."

Rob Henderson on X - ""social scientists are more likely than civilians to chalk up sex differences to nurture rather than nature...even extends to differences between hens and roosters...this one area where laypeople have a firmer grasp on reality than many alleged experts""
Eve Keneinan 𝛗☦️ن on X - "There are many such areas because "experts" are usually educated academics, and academic fields are highly susceptible to ideologies. Once an academic in field A has been captured by an ideological lens, it is not only possible, but common, that all his judgments in his own area of expertise are distorted to the point that laypeople make sounder judgments. Not because they know more, but because their ability to see the realities on the ground are not systematically distorted or corrupted by extraneous ideological incentives. Hence the key conclusion here "Academia seems to impair people's understanding of the world rather than improving it.""
Trust the Experts! Even when they are wrong

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒂𝒍𝒕 𝑶𝒇 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑬𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒉 on X - "When selling to a woman, show her that other women have it. Because women want what other women have. Explains their dating lifestyle - why they are attracted to players and married men
• Women value preselection
When selling to a man, show him that no other man has it. Because men want what what other men don't have. Explains their dating lifestyle - why they are more likely to commit to virgins
• Men value exclusivity"

Sex Differences in Mathematics and Reading Achievement Are Inversely Related: Within- and Across-Nation Assessment of 10 Years of PISA Data - "We analyzed one decade of data collected by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including the mathematics and reading performance of nearly 1.5 million 15 year olds in 75 countries. Across nations, boys scored higher than girls in mathematics, but lower than girls in reading. The sex difference in reading was three times as large as in mathematics. There was considerable variation in the extent of the sex differences between nations. There are countries without a sex difference in mathematics performance, and in some countries girls scored higher than boys. Boys scored lower in reading in all nations in all four PISA assessments (2000, 2003, 2006, 2009). Contrary to several previous studies, we found no evidence that the sex differences were related to nations’ gender equality indicators. Further, paradoxically, sex differences in mathematics were consistently and strongly inversely correlated with sex differences in reading: Countries with a smaller sex difference in mathematics had a larger sex difference in reading and vice versa. We demonstrate that this was not merely a between-nation, but also a within-nation effect. This effect is related to relative changes in these sex differences across the performance continuum: We did not find a sex difference in mathematics among the lowest performing students, but this is where the sex difference in reading was largest. In contrast, the sex difference in mathematics was largest among the higher performing students, and this is where the sex difference in reading was smallest. The implication is that if policy makers decide that changes in these sex differences are desired, different approaches will be needed to achieve this for reading and mathematics. Interventions that focus on high-achieving girls in mathematics and on low achieving boys in reading are likely to yield the strongest educational benefits."
Time to do more about "patriarchy"
It seems that countries which are more feminist boost girls and/or suppress boys in maths, and feminism also generally demonises males, so that would increase the sex differences in reading

Boys behave differently to girls within hours of birth, Cambridge study finds - "Girls and boys exhibit sex differences within a few hours of birth, a University of Cambridge study has found. For decades, biologists and sociologists have noticed that boys and girls show different behaviours and preferences growing up, but have been unsure whether nature or nurture was responsible. Cambridge scientists have shown that, on average, infant girls show a natural preference for looking at faces within a few hours of birth, while boys would rather gaze at objects... There are major differences between boys and girls during childhood. Girls typically develop language earlier, speak in longer sentences and often have larger vocabularies than boys growing up. Girls are also better at picking up non-verbal signals, such as facial expressions and tone of voice, and have fine motor coordination and more self-control. In contrast, boys display higher levels of physical activity and are more adept at large motor movements such as running, jumping and climbing. When playing, girls tend to lean towards co-operative, verbal and fantasy play, sometimes focusing on domestic make-believe scenarios, while boys gravitate towards sports, outdoor activities, construction sets and toy vehicles... For the study, 130 infants were presented with side-by-side videos containing either a social stimulus – a human face with natural movement – or a non-social object, in this case a popular desk toy or a set of swinging metallic balls known as a Newton’s cradle. Researchers who analysed the videos of the babies eyes were unaware of their sex or what video a child was looking at, which ensured that they could not bias the results. The team found that, regardless of sex, newborn infants generally preferred to look at the social stimulus. But on average, female infants spent a greater proportion of the time looking at the social stimulus compared with male infants, while male infants spent a greater proportion of time looking at the non-social stimulus compared with female infants. Since the differences could be seen within hours of birth, it was likely that prenatal biological factors such as hormone levels and genetics contributed to the observed on-average sex differences, the researchers concluded... The team is interested in finding out whether these early sex differences contribute to later differences in children’s minds, brains and behaviour. To test this requires a longitudinal study design, which is under way. The researchers hope that by understanding the origins of the earliest sex differences, scientists can better understand neurodiversity and conditions such as autism, which is diagnosed about twice as often in boys than in girls."
This shows the power of patriarchy - it's capable of socialising infants within hours of birth! If you disagree, that's neurosexism because male and female brains are almost the same

Compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable - "We identify a profound and consistent gender gap in people’s core life goals. Across nine studies using diverse sample populations (executives in high-power positions, recent graduates of a top MBA program, undergraduate students, and online panels of working adults) and over 4,000 participants, we find that, compared to men, women have a higher number of life goals, place less importance on power-related goals, associate more negative outcomes (e.g., time constraints and tradeoffs) with high-power positions, perceive power as less desirable, and are less likely to take advantage of opportunities for professional advancement. Women view high-level positions as equally attainable as men do, but less desirable. Our findings advance the science of gender, goals, organizational behavior, and decision making."
The gender wage gap is proof that women are discriminated against

Paul Graham on X - "In England, students choose just a few subjects (usually 3) to study in the last 2 years of high school, so gender differences in their interests become more visible than in the US."
John Papola on X - "Read another way, this is a smooth sliding scale from rigorous reality-based studies to complete groupthink bullshit. Men and women need each other. Women help us be kind. We help them be rational. It’s grand pop wisdom and it’s reflect in every clear revealed preference."

Do women talk more than men? It might depend on their age - "The stereotype that women are much more talkative than men is pervasive across many cultures, but a widely reported study by University of Arizona researchers in 2007 refuted the claim, finding that men and women speak roughly the same number of words per day – around 16,000. A new, larger follow-up to that study paints a more nuanced picture, suggesting that women may be the chattier gender, but only during a certain period of life. "There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men," said co-lead study author Colin Tidwell, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the U of A. "We wanted to see whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested." Researchers found that women between the ages of 25 and 64 – the life stages of early and middle adulthood – spoke on average about 3,000 more words per day than their male counterparts. Significant gender differences did not appear in the study's other age groups: adolescence (ages 10 to 17), emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 24) and older adulthood (65 and up). The researchers also discovered that people in general might be becoming less talkative, a finding they suspect is linked to an increasing reliance on digital communication."
Women talk more than men after all. This is more robust than Mehl's previous study of college students finding they talked the same, too
Amusingly, a September 2026 Psychology Today article written by a PhD and reviewed by someone else misrepresented the study and dismissed its findings. Anything to protect the narrative

RESPONDING TO SOCIAL JUSTICE RHETORIC | A Cheat Sheet for Policy Makers

2026-11-09T10:29:00.000+08:00

RESPONDING TO SOCIAL JUSTICE RHETORIC | A Cheat Sheet for Policy Makers

SOCIAL JUSTICE
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Group entitlements
WHICH IS…
• The reframing of particular political demands as universal moral imperatives
• A denial of just rewards to individuals who follow the law

CRITICAL RACE THEORY
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Belief that people of European descent make society racist for their own benefit
WHICH IS…
• The view that racism is baked into the system and inescapable
• The view that racism is present even if no one is racist
• The view that all disparities in group outcomes are due to racist systems

DIVERSITY
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
An identity-based approach to society; includes only those who agree with Social Justice
WHICH IS…
• A violation of individual identity; enforced intellectual conformity
• Political quotas; an attack on merit and a form of soft bigotry

EQUITY
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Equality of outcomes plus reparations
WHICH IS…
• A violation of equality before the law
• A dismantling of the foundations of a free society
• State management of society by redistributing resources, opportunity, and access

INCLUSION
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Restricted speech and justification for purges
WHICH IS…
• Making people feel “welcomed” by banning anything they find offensive
• An attack on freedoms of association and speech
• An enforced separation of people by race (“neo-segregation”)

BIPOC FOLX
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Non-European people
WHICH IS…
• Used for neo-racist policies
(racism reborn as “progressive”) and stereotypes

IMPLICIT BIAS
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Unconscious bigotry as a result of socialization by oppressive systems
WHICH IS…
• Shown not to be significant on behavior above age 12
• Mind-reading that always finds what it seeks

DECOLONIZATION
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Removing European influence
WHICH IS…
• An attempt to delegitimize the U.S. as a “colonial project”
• Replacing universal equality with illiberal non-European “traditions”

RACIAL JUSTICE
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Racial favoritism
WHICH IS…
• Using anti-discrimination laws for unrelated political purposes
• A violation of equality before the law
• Neo-racist (racism reborn as “progressive”); group stereotyping

CULTURAL COMPETENCE OR RELEVANCE
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Catering to stereotypes associated with identity groups
WHICH IS…
• A blank check to tell people that they are not sufficiently “culturally aware” and must modify their behavior
• Indoctrination in Critical Race Theory; neo-racism
• An ineffective method with no scientific evidence

DISCRIMINATION
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Judgement based on experience, facts, predictions, and preferences
WHICH IS…
• Claimed to be inexcusable when exercised with respect to “minoritized” groups unless it makes them better off
• Claimed to be required against“privileged” groups to “level the playing field”
• A tool to achieve “equity”
• Illegal

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Environmental issues are race issues
WHICH IS…
• Using environmental protection for unrelated political purposes
• An ineffective and inefficient way to protect the environment

WHITE PRIVILEGE / SUPREMACY
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
European moral culpability
WHICH IS…
• Racist scapegoating, especially against economically disadvantaged Europeans
• Neo-racist (racism reborn as “progressive”); group stereotyping

SYSTEMIC RACISM
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Differences in outcome are always due to systemic biases
WHICH IS…
• An attribution of group differences to vague “systems” imposed by others
• An attempt to “dismantle” freedoms and to forcibly redistribute public and private goods

MICRO- AGGRESSION
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Small slights perceived as bigotry
WHICH IS…
• Weaponizing the taking of offense to control others
• Putting perceived impact above actual intentions
• Claiming that normal, everyday interactions are bigotry

HATE SPEECH
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
An expression of opinion that the accuser finds objectionable
WHICH IS…
• Usually constitutionally protected speech
• Usually a reflection of political differences rather than an expression of hatred
• A way to restrict the speech of others by claiming it poses a danger

ACCOUNTABILITY
WHAT THEY MEAN IS…
Using institutional and social power to force compliance
WHICH IS…
• Bullying
• Mob rule
• Heckler’s veto

OREGON ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS | DRS. BRUCE GILLEY, PETER BOGHOSSIAN, & JAMES LINDSAY

Links - 8th November 2026 (2 - Climate Change)

2026-11-08T18:27:00.000+08:00

EVs are more reliable than petrol cars in the long run - "New Automotive stressed that its analysis could only account for roadworthiness, not battery condition. An MOT examines a car’s brakes, tyres, suspension, steering and lights but does not measure battery health or charging performance, which can affect an EV’s performance. Separate research by UK broker Howden Group has also previously found that drivers of electric cars were being asked to pay twice as much for insurance as those who own petrol-fuelled models. The difference was blamed on a higher cost of repairs for electric models when something did go wrong."

Meme - Serafim Batzogiou: "The @washingtonpost has published a graph showing that Earth is close to its coolest temperature of the past 485M years, with most of the time temperature being tens of degrees higher. In fact Earth was much warmer even 1-2M years ago as we are now in an ice age interglacial."
zerohedge @zerohedge: "A funny thing happened as the WaPo tried to map out half a billion years of global temperatures and the "disaster of global warming""
"Scientists have captured Earth's climate over the last 485 million years. Here's the surprising place we stand now. An effort to understand Earth's past climates uncovered a history of wild temperature shifts and offered a warning on the consequences of human -caused warming."

The Left is losing the climate class war - "It is telling that, rather than gathering around such a programme on the Left, “green” industrial workers — such as those in the Danish wind industry — are rejecting environmentalism and voting for the Right. After all, the environmental movement still remains populated by middle-class activists brimming with moral certitude that their political project must include corralling the consumptive behaviour of ordinary people. That we could both save the planet and make life significantly better for the majority simply does not cross their mind. And as long as the Left simply renews the climate politics of the last 30 years, workers will continue to reject a platform that has nothing to offer them."
Punishing rich people and companies, as the author recommends, will still flow down to affect normal people, so. Left wingers see economic growth as evil, so good luck making life better for the majority

The hypocrisy of Australia’s Net Zero policy - "Once completed, the 86 towers will rise 200 metres above the tree line, polluting the view for miles. The federal government can ill-afford to press pause. It has pledged to make the east coast electricity grid 82% carbon-free by 2030. It will be no mean achievement for a grid that relies on coal and gas for more than 65% of its electricity. The Australian Labor Party is making the task considerably harder by refusing to remove the long-standing moratorium on nuclear power. Of the dozens of jurisdictions with grids running on 80% clean energy or more, none have achieved it with wind, sunshine and water alone. Nevertheless, Chris Bowen, Australia’s pugnacious energy minister, told a business gathering last month his targets are “very, very achievable for Australia”. His timetable is ambitious: installing a 7mw wind turbine and 16,500 solar panels every 18 hours until 2030, supported by some 10,000km of new transmission lines... Their single-minded attention to climate change leads them to regard the destruction of natural biodiversity as a necessary evil. And so they plough on, blind to the realisation that, in Australia as elsewhere, the expansion of wind and solar is constrained by the scarcity of land. We are re-learning the lesson that broke the hearts of Australia’s pioneering farmers in the late 19th century — that even in a country as vast and sparsely populated as this one, you eventually run out of usable terrain. It was only a matter of time before the iron law of energy density checked the headlong rush for wind and solar. A report last month, jointly sponsored by the Universities of Melbourne, Princeton and Griffith, calculated that 120,179 square kilometres of land would be needed to produce enough renewable energy to achieve Australia’s Net Zero target. That is an area equivalent to 90% of the landmass of England, or half the size of the state of Victoria. Understandably, not everyone supports the colonisation of this land. In April, Apple pulled out of a deal to buy power from a proposed wind development on the edge of the North Queensland rainforests at Upper Burdekin after a devastating environmental impact report. It found that constructing the wind turbine plant would destroy 769 hectares of koala habitat. Elsewhere, politicians and environmental bureaucrats are quietly making trade-offs. A proposed wind farm on Robbin Island in north-west Tasmania will only proceed if the operators agree to it shut down for five months each year so as not to disturb the migration of the orange-bellied parrot. Construction of a wind farm in Victoria has been curtailed because of the threat to a local wetland bird species, the brolga... Tim Nevard, an adjunct professor at the Cairns Institute at James Cook University, describes the application to build on the site as ludicrous. “Biodiversity can’t be destroyed in order to stop climate change,” he said. A virtue often ignored is the power of the forest to enrich the human spirit. The natural beauty of the rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef attracts 400,000 tourists a year to the region. But it also has a deeper, sacred significance to the Jirrbal people, whose ancestors were here long before the birth of Christ. Those who retain an attachment to the land through blood lines and tradition are distraught by the proposal... the Jirrbal people, in alliance with local conservationists, are trying to raise funds to fly to Canberra, a distance equivalent to London to Moscow, hoping to put their case to the minister face to face. It is a measure of the unequal battle between a small regional community and the renewable energy companies that they are relying on charity for the fare. For the defenders of Chalumbin, it’s an all-or-nothing fight. If this land isn’t safe from colonisation by big renewables, where is?"

The great Net Zero lie - "while the West is clearly responsible for the overwhelming majority of past emissions, future emissions are going to be driven primarily by newly emerging economies. Regardless of what we do in the West, the billions of people who still live in poverty in countries such as India, not to mention those in Africa, and who legitimately aspire to the comforts of industrialisation, will drive a colossal surge in energy demand in the coming years. Projected worldwide consumption of all types of energy 30 years from now is about 50% higher than today, most of it in poorer countries. This usually invites two types of response: the Malthusian-pessimist kind, which claims that this is intrinsically unsustainable, and that the world can’t afford the massive increase in fossil fuels that the widespread development of the Global South would inevitably entail; and the naïve-environmentalist kind, which contends that developing countries can rely on solar panels and wind turbines to sustainably grow their way out of poverty. Both of these responses share one thing: they’re wrong. What’s interesting, however, is how these two approaches overlap when it comes to Net-Zero polices in the West. Climate ideology has become a dangerous mix of end-of-days apocalypticism, with thousands of young Westerners now suffering from “climate anxiety”; of individual scapegoating, where ordinary citizens who bear little responsibility for systemic problems are guilt-tripped into thinking that they bear the burden for potential ecological collapse; and of eco-authoritarian hubris, based on the notion that the West needs to drastically accelerate its process of decarbonisation. A perfect example of the latter is Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte’s recent proposal to drastically cut back nitrogen emissions (70-80%) in the country’s farming sector... the Netherlands is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States, meaning the government’s plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a global food and resource shortage — a disaster caused by the same global elites who are now peddling Net Zero. This isn’t just happening in the Netherlands. In July, thousands of protesters stormed Sri Lanka’s presidential palace and forced the president and prime minister to resign. As in the Netherlands, the protests were sparked by the government’s decision to ban fertilisers and pesticides in favour of organic, climate-friendly alternatives — a decision that devastated millions of the country’s farmers and caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, and turned the country from rice exporter to importer. The defenestrated prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was also, like Rutte, a devoted member and Agenda Contributor of the WEF; in 2018, he published an article on the organisation’s website titled: “This is How I Will Make My Country Rich by 2025”. (Following the protests, the WEF swiftly removed the article from its website.) In light of all this, it’s easy to see why a growing number of people view Net Zero as either a case study in utter incompetence or, even more troublingly, as the latest example of “crisis capitalism”, whereby crises are exploited (and in some cases engineered) by ruling elites to push through restructurings of the capitalist system — usually by concentrating capital and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people in a manner that would likely face unsurmountable popular opposition in “normal” times. We saw it happen with the financial crisis, with the pandemic, with the war in Ukraine. Now it is being repeated with the climate crisis... there’s one thing that more than any other raises doubts about [elites'] good faith: the fact that while they keep coming up with increasingly fantastical solutions to CO2 emissions, they largely keep ignoring the only existing technology that can help us rapidly phase out fossil fuels once and for all — without disrupting Western societies, and without denying the rest of the world the living standards they legitimately aspire to. I’m talking, of course, about nuclear energy. The reason nuclear energy is largely absent from the decarbonisation debate is that the latter is based on a lie: that we can generate all the world’s energy needs from renewable sources — primarily wind and solar power. This has become a mantra for much of the climate movement, but it’s a delusion. Aside from the problems arising from covering colossal tracts of land with wind turbines and solar panels (which require hugely polluting rare earth elements, most of which are in China) to meet the world’s growing energy needs, the fact is that both are intermittent and energy storage technologies don’t come close to what would be needed. Even with a high percentage of renewables, a stable, constant source of energy would still be needed — and that’s either going to be fossil fuels or nuclear energy. As James Hansen, the Nasa climate scientist who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the Eighties, has pointed out, nuclear is “the only viable path that has been proposed for rapid global decarbonisation”. This, then, is the great Net Zero lie: it’s primary goal isn’t remedying the climate crisis. After all, a solution to the crisis stands right in front of us — only to be ignored by our political and financial elites. Faced with such deception, it’s hardly surprising that many are starting to question their motives; and in more and more countries, are starting to let it be known that they have had enough."

Meme - Bjorn Lomborg: "Alarmists: "World on fire!" Reality: By Aug 5, global burned area likely never lower than 2026. Disasters in France, Spain & Canada are tragic-but climate is global. Cherry-picking isn't science. Climate policy does near-nothing for fires. We need better fire policy (prescribed burns, let some burn) and better climate info"
"7 months through 2026: Record-low Global Burn. By August 5 2026, the world has burned less than any year, 2012-25"

Despite What You’ve Heard, the World Isn’t on Fire - WSJ - "As smoke from Canadian wildfires poured into American cities last month, the headlines poured out equally fast. Most blamed climate change. Canada’s public broadcaster informed readers the smoky skies had “only one true fix”: Stop burning fossil fuels. But the headlines seem to have missed the most remarkable fact about the wildfires: Canada is having a below-average fire year. In fact, the world is on track to a record low in area burned. Ottawa’s own tally released July 9 showed 1.4 million hectares burned—less than a third of the 4.6 million hectares burned by the same date last year. Tucked into the “quick facts” of the government’s press release, beneath ministerial quotes about climate change driving ever more severe disasters, was the quiet admission that wildfire activity “remains below the five-year average.” That’s understating it: Satellite data weekly updated by the European Union confirm that Canada’s total burned area in 2026 by Aug. 5 was below the 2012-25 average the EU uses as a baseline. And the statistical good news keeps coming. The U.S. this year has remained below its 2012-25 average, with its most recent measurement 20% below average as of Aug. 5. North America and South America are at a record-low burn since 2012. Every continent on the globe is burning less—some much less—than usual. As of Aug. 5, Oceania has burned 14% less than its 2012-25 average and Europe has burned 35% less. Asia has a near-record low of burned area since 2012, clocking in at 41% below average. Africa is at a record low, with current burn at 44% below average. Globally, we’re on trend for the lowest burn since the collection of that satellite data began in 2001, and likely the lowest since 1900. In the early 1900s, nearly 4% of global land burned annually, nearly double today’s rate. American annual burned area in the 1930s was about five times as large as its modern annual burned area. The deadliest aspect of fires has declined, too: smoke deaths. Air pollution from fires kills roughly 20,000 times as many people as the fires themselves. As fires have declined, the rate of annual deaths from landscape-fire air pollution has fallen substantially since 2000, according to a 2024 Lancet study. Given the current global population, that means fire pollution kills about 1.6 million—400,000 fewer than would have been the case had the 2000 death rate remained. You wouldn’t know any of this from most media reports. Too much coverage cherry-picks smaller areas that happen to have lots of fire, ignoring everything else. With Canada this summer, scary pictures won out over compelling statistics. In Europe, wildfires in France and Spain repeatedly make headlines; that the Continent’s fires are significantly below average doesn’t. One of the most egregious examples of this narrow reporting was the coverage of the “black summer” fires in Australia in 2019 and 2020. The headlines were apocalyptic. But while the fires did come near heavily populated areas—such as Melbourne and Sydney, where many media outlets are based—the total national burn was “well below average,” according to the government’s annual environmental overview. This sort of media coverage leaves the public with the impression that the planet is ablaze when the evidence shows the opposite. The positive news in fire statistics should give pause to climate alarmists and those in the media promoting their cause. To be logically consistent, if climate change gets the blame for every fire, it should also get credit for burn declining. The truth is that climate change isn’t the main determiner either way. A warmer planet does lengthen fire seasons and dries out vegetation faster, tilting the odds toward more dangerous fire weather. But weather only sets how easily a landscape can burn. Whether it burns—and how badly—depends mostly on people: how much fuel we let accumulate, how quickly we detect and douse flames, and how much land we farm, fragment and pave. The significant decline in area burned is due to a century of better land management, agriculture and firefighting. The main culprits of the bad fire seasons Canada suffered in 2023 and 2025 are homegrown. A nation can have less fire overall but still impressive blazes: The same decades of aggressive firefighting that drove total burned area down also let fuel pile up. Canada has all but abandoned prescribed burning—deliberate, controlled fires that clear out the deadwood and undergrowth that turn ordinary fires into monsters. By one measure, the area in Canada treated with prescribed burns annually collapsed from more than 35,000 hectares in 1990 to 182 hectares in 2023, a 99.5% decline. The stock response from climate activists—that the only real fix is decarbonization—fails elementary arithmetic. Even if the entire wealthy world went net-zero by 2050, an astoundingly improbable and expensive policy, temperatures would change less than 0.2 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century, with near-zero effect on fire risks. Adaptation is what makes the difference. Modeling of Los Angeles’s Palisades fire shows that with no climate action, a similar fire in 2050 would burn about 7.2% more intensely. Yet even if the entire world managed dramatic emission cuts, the fire would still burn 5.5% more intensely in 2050. On the other hand, adaptation—prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, fire-resistant building codes and smarter zoning—could make that fire about 15.4% less severe in 2050 than it was in 2025, at a tiny fraction of the cost massive decarbonization poses. Canadians and Americans who spent July coughing on smoke deserve better than a false diagnosis. Better forest management—particularly prescribed burns—will do more for next summer’s air than any emissions target."

No To LNG - Squamish | Facebook - "Hey Carney. If you think renewables can’t dramatically power a country, then look at China. The grid is the problem. Not the inability to create renewable energy. Stop putting money into fossil fuels. Put it into renewable energies and the means to get it to our communities: “China turned away enough clean energy to power Mexico for a year in the six months through June as its grids hit their limits, while networks in many other nations ‌such as Australia and Japan also failed to keep pace with a surging renewables buildout. Curtailments, or the pre-emptive rejection of wind or solar power because a grid reaches capacity, are emerging as a growing challenge to renewables globally and underscore continued reliance on fossil fuels.”"
Climate change hystericists are ignorant and don't realise this actually illustrates why renewables are bad because of intermittency meaning you need tons of wasted capacity and the implications for grid stability. Hell, the article already tells you it's a challenge to "renewables"

Meme - "Material per AVERAGE Terrawatt-hour per DOE Quadrennial Review
Metric Tons per AVERAGE TWh
Wind: 11x nuclear. Solar: 18x nuclear
Solar PV - >16,000
Hydro - 14,000
Wind - 10,000
Geothermal - ~5,000
Coal - ~1,000
Nuclear - <1,000
NGCC - 500?
DOE Estimate of Resources per Terrawatt-hour"
"Green" energy sure does require a lot of resources

A landfill of “renewables” = a land full of poison. - "Millions of solar panels are hitting their end-of-life cycle, and the world is completely unprepared for the coming toxic avalanche. By 2050, projections estimate up to 78 million metric tons of solar e-waste globally. This isn’t just a pile of debris — it’s the future of green energy waste hidden in plain sight. While renewables promise a clean transition, their end-of-life realities reveal massive logistical, economic, and environmental challenges. The industry often boasts that solar panels are “95% recyclable” in theory because of their glass, aluminum, and copper components. Yet economics consistently overrides technical feasibility. Proper disassembly and recycling of a single panel can cost $20 to $28 in places like Australia and the United States, while landfilling runs as low as $4. Without strong financial incentives or mandates, up to 90% of decommissioned panels end up in landfills rather than recycling streams. Each solar panel functions as an industrial “sandwich,” with layers tightly bound by heavy polymers and encapsulants. Extracting the microscopic amounts of silver and high-purity silicon requires energy-intensive chemical processes or thermal treatments that often exceed the value of the recovered materials. Newer, cheaper panels use less silver and thinner wafers, further eroding recycling economics and leaving valuable fractions locked away. When panels fracture or are crushed in landfills, heavy metals like lead and cadmium can leach into soil and groundwater. This creates the prospect of multi-generational contamination from dispersed, unmanaged waste sites. The shift from “clean energy” to persistent hazardous legacies becomes real if proper management fails at scale. The crisis accelerates faster than many models anticipated. Solar cells naturally degrade over 25-30 years, but economic pressures drive even earlier retirements. Newer, higher-efficiency or cheaper panels prompt solar farms and homeowners to replace functional systems a decade or more ahead of schedule. This compressed lifecycle shatters the narrative of durable, long-term green assets and fuels an endless loop of waste generation. Wind turbines add another dimension to the problem, particularly their massive blades made of fiberglass and epoxy resins. These durable structures resist easy recycling due to cross-linked polymers that cannot be readily melted or reformed. By 2050, significant volumes of blade waste are expected, much of it destined for landfills where the non-biodegradable materials will occupy vast space for centuries. Transporting blades longer than 50-100 meters creates additional logistical nightmares. Electric vehicle and grid-scale batteries introduce further complexity. Lithium-ion packs contain valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel, yet global recycling rates remain low despite high potential recovery in advanced facilities. Varying chemistries, glued assemblies, and fire risks during disassembly make processes expensive. Improper disposal risks toxic leaks, even as second-life applications try to extend their usefulness... Environmental trade-offs extend beyond local landfills. While renewables reduce operational emissions, their full lifecycle — including mining rare materials, manufacturing, and disposal — generates industrial waste streams that challenge sustainability claims. Scaling to meet climate goals without parallel advances in circular design risks trading one pollution problem for another, with cumulative impacts on land use and resources."
"Cheap" "renewable" energy isn't so cheap once you take into account recycling and waste management costs

The Dutch are filling gas wells with cement - "Readers will be familiar with the German nuclear phase-out. The Merkel and Scholz governments prematurely shut down twenty gigawatts of nuclear power. Those plants provided energy for 38 million households for less than twenty percent of the cost of gas. The Scholz government closed one power plant thirteen years before its expected retirement date. But few know that the Dutch government is doing something similar: it is pouring cement down the country’s gas wells. These wells are already inactive; destroying them doesn’t do anything for safety or the environment. The government is demolishing the wells to prevent a future government from reconsidering its decision to stop producing gas. The wells are located in Groningen, a province in the north of the country. Prospectors discovered the gas field in 1959 and soon realized it was the largest in Europe. Over the next 60 years, they extracted 2.2 trillion cubic metres of gas. Groningen earned the treasury lots of money – 363 billion euros – and gave Dutch utilities the ability to generate power without relying on foreign countries. But gas production in Groningen had local downsides. The field is large, shallow, and crossed by small faults, so extraction caused bits of it to shift. In 1986, the region started experiencing small earthquakes. The majority of these quakes registered beneath 1.5 on the Richter scale, too faint for most people to notice. But a small number exceeded 2.0, and a tiny handful 3.0. The earthquakes led vocal Groningers to demand an end to the drilling. Jesse Frederik, a smart Dutch journalist, has argued that locals greatly exaggerated the harmfulness of the earthquakes. But even if they hadn’t, there was a good case to keep drilling. The remaining reserves, some 500 billion cubic metres, are worth around €200 billion at current wholesale prices – enough to pay every single resident of the province €150,000 as compensation and still have 110 billion euros. And while gas alone is not good for the environment, more gas usually results in less coal usage, not less renewable generation. Norway is one of the world’s largest gas exporters despite its sincere concerns about climate change. (The enlightened Norwegians opened seventy more sites for drilling this past May.) But like many modern Western countries, the Dutch are increasingly unable to pursue policies with huge numbers of winners and small numbers of concentrated losers. Rather than buy off the Groningers, the cabinet decided to give in to them. In 2018, the cabinet promised to end gas production by 2030. In 2019, it accelerated that deadline to 2023. The concessions to the losers continued. In 2023, a parliamentary commission released a report announcing that the Dutch government had a ‘debt of honour’ to the people of Groningen, and that economic interests had superseded the interests of Groningers for too long. Hans Vijlbrief, the D66 minister responsible, then decided to fill the wells with 500 metres of cement. The Mining Council opposed the decision: they said that it was possible and preferable to mothball the facilities. The main scientific advisor to the government also opposed the decision: they argued (and continue to argue) that pausing production was no worse for the environment than plugging the wells was, and preserved much greater flexibility for the government in case of geopolitical necessity or economic crisis. The Groningen gas field still holds twice as much gas as the EU has imported from Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. At market value, that gas would be worth enough to increase the Netherlands’ aid to the Ukrainian government thirteenfold. But the politics of the ‘debt of honour’ overcame the national and European interest. A specialised machine is now travelling around the province ripping out kilometres of pipes and filling what is left with thousands of tonnes of cement. It has destroyed 70 of the 300 wells this way so far. This is a story of a few concentrated losers defeating a very diffuse majority of winners. But it is also a story of a government proactively choosing to limit the country’s options. Destroying the wells does not change the likelihood of additional earthquakes. It does not change the world’s emissions pathway either, given that production had stopped. Its only purpose is to ensure that a future government, faced with different circumstances – a collapse in global LNG production – or different preferences – the Groningers decide that they would rather have more money than fewer tremors – has no ability to change course. The situation in Groningen is unique, but the effort to reduce options is not. The German Greens chose to speed through the nuclear phase-out, rejecting a pause proposed by their partner in government, the FDP. In the case of one reactor, Neckarwestheim 2, they issued the dismantling permit before the reactor even shut down. An Austrian Green minister cast the pivotal vote in the European council for the European Nature Restoration Laws against the wishes of their coalition, weeks before an election they lost. Restricting optionality ‘works’. Friedrich Merz opposed Olaf Scholz’s decision to shut down Germany’s remaining nuclear reactors in April 2023, but now says that it is too late to restart them. Future governments do find it difficult to reverse course if the alternative course has become impossible. But it comes at a cost. The impulse to make a decision irreversible signals a lack of confidence in one’s decisions. If a decision is good, it should be capable of surviving the judgement of voters. That the government feels the need to shield it from such judgement suggests that they are not sure it would. It is an act of institutional vandalism, raising the stakes of elections. It is also inefficient. Sometimes circumstances change in unforeseen ways. The demand for data centres has suddenly increased the usefulness of baseload power. Though Japan closed every reactor after Fukushima, it dismantled few; more than a dozen have since restarted. Michigan’s Palisades plant closed in 2022; it is now in the final stage of a restart. (Although it didn’t require much foresight in 2023 to think that gas might be geopolitically useful.) Options are valuable. It would be good for the current Dutch government to prioritize the interests of the Netherlands and Europe over that of Groningen. Failing that, it would be nice for it to allow future governments to reconsider its priorities. For now, the cement-pouring machine is destroying more wells."
Left wingers want to destroy their countries and they are so closed minded and unimaginative they can never imagine changing their mind or the world changing

Meme - "I am 99% sure that climate change is the universe's way of giving us a deadline to end capitalism" earthlyeducation: "extreme heat, drought and consequently wildfires are wreaking havoc all over the world. this video is from Serbia.... See more"
The left wing agenda is all connected. This is why they keep pushing climate change hysteria. It's easier to manipulate scared people too

Tangwa Abilu.🌿🌏🌾🍀🍃.SDG's. on X - "Stop asking what YOU can do for the climate. Start demanding what SHELL, TOTAL and 100 other corporations will do to PAY for the damage."
Climate hystericist logic: China is not responsible for its carbon emissions because supposedly this is because it produces stuff for the rest of the world. Even if only 10% of their carbon emissions are caused by that. But oil companies are responsible for their emissions even though almost all of them are linked to those who consume their products. Left wingers just hate the West

New/Mode | Make your voice impossible to ignore - "Tell the Canada Pension Plan to stop investing in fossil fuel expansion... CPPIB owes all of us a duty to maximize our returns without undue risk of loss. Fossil fuel expansion simply cannot be a responsible investment, with the high risk of assets becoming stranded as the global economy moves away from fossil fuels"
Yet left wingers bitch about how oil companies will profit from pipelines. Their claims are incoherent

Meme - blackleftiss: keeps mixing up coinstar & cointelpro @Boringstein: "youre going to see a lot of people saying this, to the point where it might feel trite from overexposure, but it remains true: the single most impactful action the earth could take to fight climate change would be the disbanding the US military"
The left wing agenda is all connected

Meme - "Africa: Climate Low Priority
Africans from 39 countries worry about unemployment, economy, health, water roads, education, crime, hunger, electricity, poverty, and corruption - but not climate
Percent cite as one one of top top 3 priorities
Unemployment 32.1%
Management of the economy 30.2%
Health 26.3%
Water supply 22.6%
Infrastructure/Roads 22.1%
Education 19.7%
Crime and security 19.3%
Food Shortage/Famine 14.1%
Electricity 12.6%
Poverty/Destitution 12.1%
Corruption 11.6%
Farming/Agriculture 6.5%
Wages, incomes, and salaries 5.5%
Democracy/political rights 3.9%
Services (other) 3.6%
Transportation 3.1%
Housing 2.7%
Political instability/Political... 2.5%
Rates and taxes 2.4%
Agricultural marketing 2.3%
Civil war 2.0%
Discrimination/inequality 1.9%
Loans/Credit 1.7%
Drought 1.5%
Gender issues/Women's rights 1.2%
COVID-19 1.2%
Land 1.1%
Communications 0.8%
Political violence 0.7%
Orphans/Street children 0.7%
Climate change 0.6% 31st of 34th
Sickness/Disease 0.5%
AIDS 0.1%
War (International) 0.1%"
Clearly, Africans are too ignorant to know that climate change will end the world and that they will pay the highest costs for it. They need to be educated on what's good for them.

Europe's Decline and Coasting on the Past

2026-11-08T14:55:00.000+08:00

From FT comments (via Nick, 30):

Le Gun:

"The politicians are the symptom, it's the entitled voters that are the disease. They expect a nice life paid for any someone else because they either don't want to work in the available jobs or build a business or don't have the grit and discipline to gain the abilities to do so. Their answer is to hand the whole thing over the politicians to deal with on their behalf which the pols have duly delivered, effectively by liquidating the national equity build up over decades after WW2 to do so. Not much different in the UK.

Nature has a very clear way of dealing with such individuals or indeed entire societies because the laws of thermodynamics don't stop at your borders or even own front door. If you want a nice life every day you have to go out and fight nature to earn it because she gives us nothing for free. Every day you have to work with others to build or do something useful, every day you have to invest at real risk some of the surplus you produce for the future, every day you have to, even late in your career, do the job a bit better, learn a new skill as technology changes. Most importantly you have to determine that you want to create a life for yourself on your terms so you don't have to ask the state to thieve from someone else to pay for what you yourself have not earned. And you have to do it without resorting to becoming thieving smasher because you won't want to live in a society where we all play that game.

Everyone thinks the politicians can fix this. 5 minutes with any senior pol in power will completely disabuse you of such hallucinations. Good societies are build from the ground up actions of millions of peoples working together in a myriad of ways to meet each others needs, but the fundamental building block is a well intentioned individual with some set of values that means they can function with others as a part of the whole.

You can decide whether or not France and many other European countries have that most fundamental quality still in them."

Links - 8th November 2026 (1 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023)

2026-11-08T10:23:00.000+08:00

Aizenberg on X - "There's a wave of people today sharing images of Gaza's destruction as prima facie evidence of "genocide," never mind that ~99% of the civilian population was evacuated and survived. Similar images came out of Mosul & Raqqa (see below) where there was also brutal urban combat."
Kristin Reid on X - "This is very simple. Your arguments make no sense. If over 70% of the structures in Gaza are destroyed but 97% of the population is alive, either the IDF can’t hit a target or they’re going above and beyond to avoid civilian casualties."

Seth Frantzman on X - "ISIS was defeated and almost completely disarmed by around 2019 in Iraq and most of Syria. It went from controlling a large area with some 50,000 or more fighters, tens of thousands of them foreign fighters, as well as having taken at least one Iraqi division’s worth of equipment in 2014…it was rolled back and completely defeated; in Mosul, which is a city and area around the size of Gaza with a similar population, ISIS was completely removed by 2017, and completely disarmed because all of its members were killed or removed from the field in that city and its environs. The fact is that Hamas can be disarmed and defeated, using a method as was used with ISIS in Mosul. It’s true that one can’t be rid of all Hamas supporters, but it can be disarmed. The fact is that Hamas is mostly disarmed in the West Bank, a success story of the PA and IDF. There is a way. It’s a question of whether there is the will to do it and to let people in Gaza live free from Hamas. It worked in Mosul and Raqqa; it can work but the local people need rights and freedoms to be free from the extremists like happened in Mosul and Raqqa. Also journalists can travel to Mosul and Raqqa today."
One terrorist supporter cope when the counter-examples of Berlin and Tokyo in 1945 are brought up is that that was a different time and war crimes were committed then too. But ISIS being a victim of "genocide" is a whole new level (then again, a further cope is that Israel was behind ISIS, so)

Meme - Andrew Fox-online: "Was Caen in 1944 a genocide? 5% of the civilian population killed in two months (3% in 3 years Gaza). 75-80% of the city destroyed (50.44% destroyed in Gaza, per UNOSAT). Rubble is not a metric of genocide."
It's "genocide" when the "West" is winning a war and left wingers want to stop them

Meme - Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa: "This is not Hiroshima, this's Gaza. Gaza is nearly 3 times smaller than Hiroshima, and Israel dropped 223,000+ tonnes of explosives, equivalent of ~15 "Little Boy" ATOMIC BOMBS, on Gaza. The world hasn't seen anything like the destruction in Gaza since Second World War."
Yoav Nahmias: "So why have fewer people died in 3 years of war in gaza than on single day at Hiroshima?"
Terrorist supporter logic: destroying buildings is "genocide"

GauleHero on X - "AND Japanese DID NOT accuse the US of a Genocide.... Japanese knew they started the War (much like Hamas did on Oct 7).... But Japanese had the courage to accept the consequences on them (which Palestinians have not be able to) from a war they started... 🤣🤣🤣"
Mr jheri curl on X - "It's a false flag. Hamas blew the buildings up themselves to try and turn the world against Israel"

Saggezza Eterna on X - "The Civilizational Suicide Pact: The Left Launders Terrorism to Destroy the West
The modern left operates as a parasitic organism feeding on the moral decay of Western civilization. Look at the streets of Paris today. It is the third anniversary of the October 7 massacres. While civilized individuals pause to remember the slaughtered, the progressive mob takes to the streets to defend the butchers. This behavior reveals the putrid core of the leftist mind. They possess a sickening obsession with the destruction of successful societies. They despise achievement, order, and strength. They worship victimhood and chaos. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez and Paris police prefect Patrice Faure attempted to ban Wednesday demonstrations organized by the collective Urgence Palestine. The state authorities correctly identified the dark reality of these gatherings. They cited a heightened terror threat, historically high levels of antisemitic acts, and the glaring risk that a march on this exact date serves as a grotesque celebration of the Hamas atrocities. October 7 was officially set aside for solemn commemoration. The radical left views this sacred grief as an invitation to riot. Naturally, the mob defied the law. They believe their self-righteous delusions grant them immunity from civil order. They flooded the streets with their anti-Israel venom. Consider the repulsive scene in Paris. A man violently breached a barrier to rip an Israeli flag from a woman's hands, screaming, "Nazi, you are committing a genocide." We must analyze the utter psychological sickness required to assault a woman displaying a Jewish star on the exact anniversary of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. This is textbook psychological projection. The left harbors deep, violent authoritarian impulses. They project their own genocidal fantasies onto their victims to absolve themselves of their inherent guilt. They brand their violent intimidation as "pro-Palestinian solidarity." French authorities and Israeli outlets properly recognize it as a severe threat to public order and a blatant display of hatred. This ideological virus infects every facet of the left's political apparatus. Look at the supposedly separate street protests from October 6. Hundreds of thousands of students marched across dozens of cities, ostensibly complaining about school conditions. The Interior Ministry counted 266,000 nationwide and 56,000 in Paris. What did this grievance march actually look like? It was completely overrun with Palestinian flags and radical chants. The youthful left seamlessly blended their anti-Macron and anti-National Rally slogans with apologism for Islamic terrorism. They even cheered for the radical agitator Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The left has engineered an intersectional alliance of the perpetually aggrieved and the openly violent. There is absolutely zero distinction between a student complaining about a crowded classroom and an activist demanding the eradication of Israel. They share the exact same fundamentally destructive impulse. Now, the Association France Palestine Solidarité is organizing a massive national mobilization for Saturday, October 10 at Place de la République. They demand sanctions and an end to what they falsely label genocide, colonization, apartheid, and occupation. Read their official literature to see the mechanics of their deception. Their written call acknowledges the three-year mark since October 7, only to immediately justify the Hamas slaughter as a mere reaction to a blockade. They accuse Israel of a genocidal war and accelerated settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These are entirely fabricated claims designed to provide intellectual cover for barbarism. The left launders terrorist propaganda through the sanitized language of human rights. The media conveniently fails to provide a solid breakdown of how many of these marchers are actual French citizens versus foreign nationals. The distinction is completely irrelevant at this point. Palestinian flags permeate the broader student protests because the ideological infection has already taken hold of the native youth. Whether they are imported radicals or domestic students, they are united in their profound hatred for the foundations of our society. The left aligns itself with the architects of mass murder because they share a common civilizational enemy. They celebrate slaughter while claiming the moral high ground. We must look at them with absolute revulsion. We must recognize them for the civilizational poison they truly are and ensure they never again hold the levers of power."

Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 on X - "NOW: "Globalize the Intifada" and Mamdani chant as Pro-Palestine protesters storm the 'Israelis for Peace, Union Square rally', occupying the vigil seats as speaker of the rally addressed the crowd. Video by @yyeeaahhhboiii2 | Licensing @FreedomNTV Desk@freedomnews.tv"
Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 on X - "NOW: "Long Live Hamas!" chants as protesters stormed and confronted the 'Israelis For Peace' vigil held at USQ, organizers say they hold the vigil regularly for the hostages and for Gaza. Video by @yyeeaahhhboiii2 | Licensing @FreedomNTV Desk@freedomnews.tv"
Guy Benson on X - "Perfect juxtaposition. The worst people in our society & they’re taking over a major political party."
We're still told that no one supports Hamas

Terry Glavin: The antisemitic nightmares are not stopping | National Post - "Within hours of the massacres, throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, there were celebrations. From Vancouver to New York, and from Los Angeles to Istanbul, the killers mobilized by Ḥarakat al-Muqawamah al-ʾIslamiyyah, otherwise known as Hamas, were praised as gallant resistance fighters. Heroes. An upwelling of antisemitic depravity burst its banks from the universities, the “social justice” milieu and all the activist networks that so routinely summon protesters into the public squares. The grisly mutation of Judenrein to Judenstaatrein — the denial of a Jewish right to life to the denial of the right to a Jewish state — was all of a sudden out in the open, jubilant and positively gleeful at the news of what had happened. Across Canada, by the morning of Sunday, Oct. 8, banners were already being hung from freeway overpasses, placards were already being hoisted and slogans were already being chanted at rallies exhorting solidarity with the heroic Palestinian “resistance.” And so it went, week after week, month after month. Campuses became sites of semi-permanent “protest” encampments demonizing Israel. A coordinated bomb threat targeted more than 100 Jewish institutions across the country. Synagogues were firebombed and vandalized. Shots were fired at Jewish schools in Montreal. Jews were besieged in their own neighbourhoods in Toronto. Jewish students were afraid to attend classes. Over the past two years, Statistics Canada has counted 1,731 hate crimes targeting Jews that were reported to the police... Israelis didn’t just wake up on October 7 to find themselves under assault from a ground incursion of the Hamas military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The murderers of October 7 also came from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — the PFLP, particularly, is deeply embedded in “anti-Zionist” networks in Europe and Canada. And almost immediately after October 7 Israel came under a steady bombardment of thousands of rockets and guided missiles from the Hezbollah-controlled territories in Lebanon. Within the year, nearly a quarter of a million Israelis had been displaced from the “Gaza envelope” along with more than 40 communities near the Lebanese border. The Houthi militants of Yemen, meanwhile, began a reign of terror targeting shipping in the Red Sea. The Khomeinist Islamic Republic of Iran, the key sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and about a dozen other terrorist proxies in the Greater Middle East, soon began targeting Israel directly. The “12 Day War” between Iran and Israel last year ended up drawing the Trump administration into a catastrophic and erratic operation that has spread through the Gulf states and dramatically disrupted global oil supplies... In Canada, antisemitic hate crimes appear to be on the decline, although Statistic Canada reports that last year, 71 per cent of anti-religious hate crimes targeted Jews, who represent less than one per cent of Canada’s population. According to a report from the “J7” group (representing Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K. and U.S.), more than 23,000 incidents involving Jew-hatred occurred in 2025, including 20 killings. Canada is “one intelligence failure away from a mass casualty event,” the report found. And right on cue: In Belleville, Ontario, the Jew-obsessed 29-year-old Sean Ward who shot up the Sons of Jacob synagogue last month was thwarted in his apparent intent to carry out a mass shooting at Yom Kippur services, only by the bravery of a local police constable, Jeff Smith, who was gravely wounded in the encounter. Ottawa’s unaccountable inattention to the predicament facing Canada’s Jews may be subsiding, at long last. For whatever it might be worth, as of two weeks ago Public Safety Canada has now clearly identified “anti-Zionism” as a form of antisemitism. The finding has triggered “anti-Zionist” complaints, petitions and protests, as you would expect. “Anti-Zionism” remains a disfigurement of much of the NATO capitals’ popular culture and activist set. Israel’s diaspora ministry counts 262 anti-Israel events organized to coincide with the anniversary of the October 7 massacres. Most of them are planned for next weekend, including at least 14 events scheduled across Canada. Worldwide, the diaspora ministry counts 87 of the events as medium or high risk, owing to their proximity to Israeli diplomatic missions."

Toronto poet praises Oct. 7 in government-funded journal | National Post - "An internal review is underway after the latest issue of a journal funded by the Canada Council for the Arts appeared to support terrorism as a form of resistance and featured a poem by a Toronto writer who praises the events of October 7. The poem, called Flood, was written by Bahar Orang and is featured in The Ex-Puritan. In the piece, Orang describes the events of an October morning, a reference to October 7 — the deadliest day for the Jewish community since the Holocaust, when 1,200 Israelis were murdered by Hamas terrorists in 2023. “Praise the paragliders, their gentle ascension, their unbroken morning, and of course their triumphant descension…,” she writes... Orang also writes “praise the fighters,” and acknowledges their courage, cunning and patience. She describes “the tanks on fire, the enemy fleeing.” “Praise the missiles, the recognitions written in blood on each one, the names carved already into your own flesh,” she continues... Orang was a guest editor for the edition and wrote an editorial note explaining why the issue turns “deliberately toward armed resistance.” “Among our obligations as Westerners, one is straightforward: to honour that creation of possibility, even when — or especially when — it takes the systematically disavowed form of armed resistance,” she explains. “Taking resistance seriously in all its forms alters what we, as cultural workers, are able to perceive: the violence already structuring ordinary life, and those who fight it as political agents.” Orang’s biography on the website of Book*hug Press, which published her first book in 2020, describes her as an award-winning author who lives and works as a psychiatrist in Toronto. Her work is expected to be featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2027."
Weird. I thought no one supports Hamas

Meme - "FREE GAZA? GAZA WAS FREE. ISRAEL LEFT GAZA IN 2005 FOR PEACE. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? HAMAS TOOK OVER, RULED FOR 20 YEARS, STOLE $26B IN AID, AND SPENT IT ALL ON TERROR TUNNELS, ROCKETS, AND WEAPONS THEN ATTACKED ISRAEL AND BUTCHERED CIVILIANS"

Meme - echo5savage: "Hamas starts a war calls it Jihad, Hamas loses the war they call it genocide."
timothy.brown.73307634: "When I visited Israel in 2011, I noticed something that wasn't widely known. Muslims are free to roam in the Jewish districts. They own businesses and participate in commerce there. But, non Muslims are forbidden from entering the Palestinian territories. It seemed pretty apparent which side was hostile and who was occupying who."

Meme - Tamer Masudin @TMasudin: "Muhammad: "Gaza has no missiles and no army. Stop calling it a war."
Also Muhammad: "Hamas just launched rockets at the Jews!! Allahu Akbar!!! Glory to the resistance!!!""
Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09 (Translated from Arabic): "At 9 o'clock, the sound of the rockets launching from Gaza lifts the head, oh Lord, grant victory to the resistance and guide their aim"
Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09: "Gaza has no army, no air force, no navy, no tanks, no artillery, and no missiles. Stop calling this a war. It's a genocide."
Terrorist supporters know at some level that they're lying

Meme - Governor Kathy Hochul @Go...: "On a day of profound pain for so many New Yorkers, disrupting a vigil for the victims of October 7 while waving the flags of terrorist organizations is absolutely despicable. Jewish New Yorkers deserve to mourn in peace, free from hatred and intimidation. There is no excuse for this. None."
Extremely Careless @Shanghaibeast: ""Well. Well. Well. If it isn't the consequences of my own actions."" *Hochul in mosque and with Zohran Mamdani*

Meme - "When Egypt occupied Gaza, Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel. When Israel occupied Gaza, Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel. When Gaza was unoccupied, Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel. It was never about occupation. IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT JEWS."

Thread by @StarrJpost on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The two youngest Palestinian child soldiers so far to have died in the October 7 War appear to be this 13-year-old and this 14-year-old. They join 29 other deceased Gazan child soldiers that have been confirmed so far. 🧵
Thirteen year old Hossam Muhammad Morsi was announced by Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Friday to be an operative of its Northern Brigade's Central Mobilization Unit. Facial match software and only one similar name in casualty databases indicate the correct identity. Morsi appears to have been killed in a September 9 incident alongside his 18-year-old brother Munir Muhammad Morsi, who was also in the Al-Quds Brigades Northern Brigade, but in the Martyr Husam Abu Habl Battalion. His Facebook page contains photographs of armed men with PIJ insignias. Another man who appears to be a relative, Abdullah Muhammad Morsi, was killed in a later incident. PIJ announced that he was also a member of the Northern Brigade's Central Mobilization Unit. Fourteen-year-old Khalil Mahdi Al-Bahtiti was announced on Friday to be a PIJ operative in the Gaza Brigade's Al-Tuffah and Al-Daraj Battalion. Malik Raafat Marzouq appears to have died at age 16. His name is unique in casualty databases, and while most photos on social media are of poor quality or when he was younger, they do pass muster of facial matching platforms. According to PIJ, Marzouq was an Al-Quds Brigades member, in the Gaza Brigade's Al-Tuffah and Al-Daraj Battalion"
Damn Israel killing defenceless children!

Scholars, legal experts among 6,000 rejecting Gaza genocide charge in letter - "Prominent academics, legal experts, and historians are among more than 6,000 signatories of an open letter released earlier this month rejecting as a “blood libel” the accusation that Israel committed genocide in Gaza... Taking the Gaza Health Ministry’s current death toll, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, alongside INSS’s May estimate of more than 23,000 terrorists killed, the implied civilian-to-combatant ratio would be roughly 2:1. The letter also cites “the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe” and “the warnings given to civilians before attack,” and asserts that “All these factors were erased in the eagerness to indict Israel for genocide.” Meanwhile, the letter argues that Israel went to war after October 7 to break what it calls an “Iranian-led siege of terror enclaves” on its borders, while noting that anti-Zionists were already leveling accusations of genocide against Israel the following day. “The bitter irony is that Israel, home to half the world’s Jews, is the only country to face a sustained war of attempted genocide – from its inception in 1948 until today,” the letter states. Prominent scholars who signed the letter include Harvard professor and public intellectual Steven Pinker. Other Harvard-affiliated signatories include Harvard Law professor Jesse Fried and visiting scholar Anat Alon-Beck, a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University. Other notable scholars who signed on include historian Niall Ferguson, Israeli historian Benny Morris, Holocaust historian and former US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, Tel Aviv University professor emerita and former Yad Vashem chief historian Dina Porat, historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, UCLA professor Judea Pearl, and Brandeis University professor emeritus Jonathan Sarna. The signatories also include John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Prominent legal figures include former Canadian justice minister and attorney general Irwin Cotler, Cornell Law professor Robert Hockett, Jeffrey Mausner, a former prosecutor with the US Justice Department’s Nazi War Crimes Unit, and Eugene Kontorovich, a professor of law at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School and director of its Center for the Middle East and International Law. “The genocide libel is a case study in the longstanding – and intensified post-October 7th – historical, moral, legal and normative inversions of fact, law and history,” Cotler said in a statement cited by CCFP. Political signatories include former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, Iraqi-born former UK cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi, and former US secretary of veterans affairs Robert Wilkie, among others."
Weird. I thought all the experts agreed that Israel was committing genocide. Of course, the anti-Semites were claiming they were all Jews

Nicole Lampert on X - "There are several main thrusts to the genocide libel.
- One is Amnesty calling it a genocide even though they admit they have changed the definition of genocide to accuse Israel of it.
- One is an ‘independent UN report’ by three UN workers with a history of anti Israel activism which hasn’t been adopted by the UN.
- One is the ‘genocide scholars’ even though anyone (you don’t even have to be a scholar) can join the genocide scholars organisation and only 28 per cent of the 500 members voted in what was seen as a political hijacking.
- And finally you have South Africa and others bringing a genocide case at the ICJ. Nations behind this such as Ireland have pushed for the definition of genocide to be changed. The court has said it will allow the case to be heard even though Palestine isn’t a country and it’s being brought by a third party leading to confusion that this is a ‘plausible case’ for genocide rather than the more complicated idea that South Africa can plausibly bring this case. In plain terms: Palestinians have a plausible legal right, under the Convention, to be protected from genocide, and South Africa has a plausible right to bring the case. That is all the word “plausible” referred to. The Court did not find that it was plausible Israel was committing genocide.
In contrast you have facts. If Israel intended to commit genocide of the Palestinian people (and intent is the key word in the genocide definition) it would not have fed them, given them polio vaccinations, moved them to humanitarian zones when it tried to fight Hamas etc and there would be many, many, many more dead. That’s why you have these 6000 experts and genocide scholars saying it not a genocide. The genocide libel against Israel was started in the 1960s by the Soviets to attack America and Israel. It was pushed though the USSR via the UN and now trips off the tongue of antisemites everywhere who don’t understand that genocide is different to war. Antisemites and ignorants who basically want to call a people who were victims of an actual genocide, genociders to appease their guilt, steal Jewish victimhood, dismantle the case for Israel and label Jews the new Nazis."
Ofra Haza Stan Account on X - "Holocaust Inversion actually precedes the Holocaust, when Jewish Nazi appeaser Max Neumann called Zionists worse than Nazis. It was being used during the Holocaust when it was said “Jews are more Hitleran than Hitler.” It was used in the 1950s immediately following the Holocaust. Didn't just appear in the 1960s"

Meme - "A group of psychopaths say "We will butcher you and your children." So you put up a fence. People cry: "You've put these poor things in a cage!" Then they break down the fence and butcher us and our children. And people cry: "What, did you expect?! You put them in a cage!"" - Dr Sheila. Nazarian lranian-American Surgeon & TV Personality

Hamas plan to plant explosives near Gaza displaced persons camps revealed by IDF - "The IDF revealed on Sunday a Hamas document detailing plans to plant explosives in and around camps for displaced civilians in the Gaza Strip, which would then be used as cover in case their leadership needed to evacuate the sites. The document, written in April 2024, detailed a plan that explicitly exploited the civilian population for the benefit of the terror organization's leadership and showed intent to cause direct harm to Palestinian civilians for the sake of minor tactical advantages, like "creating smoke screens, distracting the enemy, and divert[ing] their focus and efforts away from the primary objective." Plans involved detonating improvised explosive devices around civilian camps as IDF troops approached in order to create panic, which terrorists would take advantage of in order to flee."

Leslie Kajomovitz on X = "I think UNRWA is running its own version of "pay-for-slay" The sharia law compliant "aid," which is exclusive for Muslims, is mostly distributed in cash. It prioritizes a unique definition "orphans," which Palestinians re-defined as, "a child without a FATHER" You do the math."
Leslie Kajomovitz on X - "An UNRWA teacher goes public on the indoctrination of children by UNRWA in Gaza. She said she believes the indoctrination has grown worse since October 7th and that if not addressed, another October 7th is inevitable. “If the upcoming generations in Gaza have the capabilities to make another attack, they will make it,” she warned. She says sixth graders are taught to blame Jews for Palestinian suffering, young girls are encouraged to continue Hamas’s war against Jews, and when she objected, a school administrator threatened to cut out her tongue with scissors. She called for an overhaul of Gaza’s schools, including changes to the curriculum and independent oversight of teachers. “It’s more important than disarming Hamas or changing who will govern Gaza,” she said. “Because this can change the future.”"

Jaimee Michell on X - "This is absolutely sickening. Coffeyeh, a coffee shop in Cedar Park, Texas, just outside Austin, is giving free lattes on October 7th to anyone who comes in wearing a keffiyeh and can tell them "what day it is." October 7th is the day Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups stormed southern Israel, killed ~1,200 people, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Turning the anniversary of a massacre into a coffee promo is sick. The Islamification of Texas continues."

WikiBias on X - "Wikipedia editor JDiala admitted today that since 7 October 2023, sockpuppets and Discord coordination have kept Wikipedia pro-Palestine. What drove the admission was a sense of having nothing to lose. On 4 October, he asked Wikipedia to lift his topic ban and wrote: "I regret my previous conduct." Editors rejected it, cited his Jew-tagging and antisemitic comments, and called for a site ban. Today he dropped the apology: "You can go ahead and site ban me." He said he had already won, that he would return under a different account, and admitted the coordination. The bias against Israel is an orchestrated campaign. Wikimedia is still treating it as a series of isolated editors."

Meme - "SELECTIVE OUTRAGE IS THE TELL
500k Christians killed in Nigeria
500k Christians killed in Syria
500k Christians killed in Sudan
400k killed in Yemen
300k killed in Iraq
250k killed in Afghanistan
Ongoing. Documented. Almost no global marches.
75k killed in Gaza: In a WAR, Of whom 50k were Hamas fighters... "Genocide!""

Dr. Eli David on X - ".@billmaher on Gaza: “It is not a genocide, it is a counterattack in a war… You can't just change the definition of genocide to mean counterattack in a war where people including civilians die, that's every war.”"

Even the Israeli Left can see the West is deluded about a two-state solution - "Ed Miliband may have proudly insisted that his politically convenient sanctions on Israel were to ensure that the two-state solution could not be destroyed by Israeli settlements. But, among the voters I spoke to ahead of the election, even the most optimistic peace-loving Israelis struggled to envisage a Palestinian state happening in this generation. The disconnect between the rhetoric about this conflict that our Parliament has spent so much time blustering over – time on a subject we have absolutely no influence over – and the reality on the ground, where Hamas has been regrouping in Gaza and gaining popularity in the West Bank, is staggering. They could be two completely different conflicts. Hila showed me a photo of a poster Hamas had put up in broken Hebrew on an observation post facing her moshav. “Netiv HaAsara, out of the Sinai and out of Palestine soon. Your destruction is near.” The intention was clear. Before October 7, most of Israel believed the consensus or “conceptzia” idea of containment: to allow Hamas the freedom to rule Gaza, the shared view that however bad their rhetoric about wanting to destroy Israel, however many rockets they periodically sent over, they didn’t really want to start a war. Until they did. And now for most Israelis, whatever their political persuasion, the blinkers have come off. And as much as we see the conflict through a particular lens – through the suffering of the Palestinians – that is just a small part of the picture. Zoom out and you see Hamas growing in power in the West Bank without having disarmed, a radicalised population, and Iran – hurt but not broken – still intent on destroying the country. Many Israelis feel that we in the West have on the same blinkers that blinded them to the enemies who harboured so much hatred. And that by being blind to the threat around us, we are encouraging it against them and ourselves. “As long as I hear voices coming Europe and America saying that Hamas is a legitimate organisation and they are only freedom fighters who want to liberate their people, I know there is no way for both me and the people in Gaza to have a better future,” says Hila. “We will be tangled in that story and all that is happening is Hamas is gaining its money and power.”... Israelis see that Hamas is still a danger which won’t disappear by itself, however many times Western governments pretend a few stern words will do the trick. “We want peace, of course we do,” says Hila. “We don’t want our children and grandchildren to grow up under the shadow of bombs and rockets. But how do you have peace when there is no partner for it?”"

Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

2026-11-07T18:57:00.000+08:00

Clearly, in-person examinations are outdated and shallow, and coursework, take home exams and term papers allow for holistic evaluation of students, which is superior

Someone (talking about DEI) claimed to pass university you need to put in the effort. So much for that, if you can't fail students

Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

"Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment...

(His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”...

What if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead?

In February, Lee and Shanmugam launched a tool that did just that. Interview Coder’s website featured a banner that read F*CK LEETCODE. Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon...

Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments... “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT...

Teachers have tried AI-proofing assignments, returning to Blue Books or switching to oral exams. Brian Patrick Green, a tech-ethics scholar at Santa Clara University, immediately stopped assigning essays after he tried ChatGPT for the first time. Less than three months later, teaching a course called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, he figured a low-stakes reading reflection would be safe — surely no one would dare use ChatGPT to write something personal. But one of his students turned in a reflection with robotic language and awkward phrasing that Green knew was AI-generated. A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI. “We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”

Before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, cheating had already reached a sort of zenith. At the time, many college students had finished high school remotely, largely unsupervised, and with access to tools like Chegg and Course Hero. These companies advertised themselves as vast online libraries of textbooks and course materials but, in reality, were cheating multi-tools. For $15.95 a month, Chegg promised answers to homework questions in as little as 30 minutes, 24/7, from the 150,000 experts with advanced degrees it employed, mostly in India. When ChatGPT launched, students were primed for a tool that was faster, more capable...

These days, professors will often state their policy on their syllabi — allowing AI, for example, as long as students cite it as if it were any other source, or permitting it for conceptual help only, or requiring students to provide receipts of their dialogue with a chatbot. Students often interpret those instructions as guidelines rather than hard rules. Sometimes they will cheat on their homework without even knowing — or knowing exactly how much — they are violating university policy when they ask a chatbot to clean up a draft or find a relevant study to cite. Wendy, a freshman finance major at one of the city’s top universities, told me that she is against using AI. Or, she clarified, “I’m against copy-and-pasting. I’m against cheating and plagiarism. All of that. It’s against the student handbook.” Then she described, step-by-step, how on a recent Friday at 8 a.m., she called up an AI platform to help her write a four-to-five-page essay due two hours later...

“I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

Most of the writing professors I spoke to told me that it’s abundantly clear when their students use AI. Sometimes there’s a smoothness to the language, a flattened syntax; other times, it’s clumsy and mechanical. The arguments are too evenhanded — counterpoints tend to be presented just as rigorously as the paper’s central thesis. Words like multifaceted and context pop up more than they might normally. On occasion, the evidence is more obvious, as when last year a teacher reported reading a paper that opened with “As an AI, I have been programmed …” Usually, though, the evidence is more subtle, which makes nailing an AI plagiarist harder than identifying the deed. Some professors have resorted to deploying so-called Trojan horses, sticking strange phrases, in small white text, in between the paragraphs of an essay prompt. (The idea is that this would theoretically prompt ChatGPT to insert a non sequitur into the essay.) Students at Santa Clara recently found the word broccoli hidden in a professor’s assignment. Last fall, a professor at the University of Oklahoma sneaked the phrases “mention Finland” and “mention Dua Lipa” in his. A student discovered his trap and warned her classmates about it on TikTok. “It does work sometimes,” said Jollimore, the Cal State Chico professor. “I’ve used ‘How would Aristotle answer this?’ when we hadn’t read Aristotle. But I’ve also used absurd ones and they didn’t notice that there was this crazy thing in their paper, meaning these are people who not only didn’t write the paper but also didn’t read their own paper before submitting it.”

Still, while professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. One, published in June 2024, used fake student profiles to slip 100 percent AI-generated work into professors’ grading piles at a U.K. university. The professors failed to flag 97 percent. It doesn’t help that since ChatGPT’s launch, AI’s capacity to write human-sounding essays has only gotten better...

There are, of course, plenty of simple ways to fool both professors and detectors...

Most professors have come to the conclusion that stopping rampant AI abuse would require more than simply policing individual cases and would likely mean overhauling the education system to consider students more holistically. “Cheating correlates with mental health, well-being, sleep exhaustion, anxiety, depression, belonging,” said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford and one of the world’s leading student-engagement researchers.

Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair. In the fall, Sam Williams was a teaching assistant for a writing-intensive class on music and social change at the University of Iowa that, officially, didn’t allow students to use AI at all. Williams enjoyed reading and grading the class’s first assignment: a personal essay that asked the students to write about their own music tastes. Then, on the second assignment, an essay on the New Orleans jazz era (1890 to 1920), many of his students’ writing styles changed drastically. Worse were the ridiculous factual errors. Multiple essays contained entire paragraphs on Elvis Presley (born in 1935). “I literally told my class, ‘Hey, don’t use AI. But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out,’” Williams said.

Williams knew most of the students in this general-education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed. “They’re using AI because it’s a simple solution and it’s an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays. And I get it, because I hated writing essays when I was in school,” Williams said. “But now, whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them.”

By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones...

The confusion was enough to sour Williams on education as a whole. By the end of the semester, he was so disillusioned that he decided to drop out of graduate school altogether. “We’re in a new generation, a new time, and I just don’t think that’s what I want to do,” he said.

Jollimore, who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving...

He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT...

It’s not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification. This is all especially unnerving if you add in the reality that AI is imperfect — it might rely on something that is factually inaccurate or just make something up entirely — with the ruinous effect social media has had on Gen Z’s ability to tell fact from fiction...

“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” wrote Duke professor Orin Starn in a recent column titled “My Losing Battle Against AI Cheating,” citing a quote often attributed to W. H. Auden. But it’s not just writing that develops critical thinking. “Learning math is working on your ability to systematically go through a process to solve a problem. Even if you’re not going to use algebra or trigonometry or calculus in your career, you’re going to use those skills to keep track of what’s up and what’s down when things don’t make sense,” said Michael Johnson, an associate provost at Texas A&M University. Adolescents benefit from structured adversity, whether it’s algebra or chores. They build self-esteem and work ethic. It’s why the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued for the importance of children learning to do hard things, something that technology is making infinitely easier to avoid"

Links - 7th November 2026 (History Extra Quoting)

2026-11-07T14:20:00.000+08:00

This will probably be the last History Extra Podcast Quoting links post.

Alcatraz: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Today we kind of use prison and jail interchangeably and throughout history we've used these terms interchangeably but they're actually distinct types of facilities with important differences. So prisons are places where we use to punish people convicted of serious crimes with long periods of confinement whereas jails serve a lot of different purposes but they're generally intended to be short-term holding tanks for a variety of people including people who haven't been convicted of a crime … while islands offer that useful isolation, that's the main attraction that we think of island prisons, that isolation makes it really difficult to run a prison so for example on Alcatraz there's no source of fresh water so that water has to be you know shipped in or brought in somehow which makes it very difficult and then there are added difficulties of just being so close to the ocean. So the sea water and the salt in the air, that's really corrosive. That actually came in handy for a couple of escape attempts because just the materials of the prison were disintegrating so badly and then another factor is even though there's a lot of fresh air and the islands are usually quite picturesque, you have a gorgeous view of San Francisco and the surrounding *something* County on the other side from Alcatraz. Islands tend to be cold and miserable which is attractive if you're thinking about a very punitive style prison but it's also going to be really terrible for the prison staff’...
‘Alcatraz is an outlier… Alcatraz was basically designed to clean up the mess that was the federal prison system at the time and in the United States we have a long history of turning to some prisons or sometimes just part of our existing prisons to fix problems that the main system just can't handle. So throughout history we usually turn to some sort of punishment on the grounds of the prison usually this would be some version of the hole or dark cell, various names for where prisoners would do additional solitary confinement usually on a bread and water diet for a period of days or weeks. Later when states started to build more than one prison for the whole state we developed different security level prisons so we would have a minimum security prison, a medium security prison and a Maximum Security Prison, and the idea there was that you would take the worst prisoners and put them into the maximum security prisons and you would take the kind of lowest level offenders, those who were least likely to recidivate, kind of isolate them from the kind of notorious bad prisoners. But the funny thing is the security levels didn't actually match up to the populations, we would just shuffle people around based on not their dangerousness but just how much of a pain they were for for the wardens. So if warden didn't want to deal with a particularly annoying prisoner they would just transfer them to a different security level, never mind what that security level actually was. So today we've continued that tradition. We have the supermax prison, so supermax which is short for super maximum security prisons so minimum, medium, maximum, super maximum. So these are prisons where prisoners spend about 23 hours a day in solitary confinement and Alcatraz is actually oftentimes called the first supermax which, I don't agree with that label, it's it's not quite right because Alcatraz didn't really use a lot of solitary confinement it definitely didn't use it routinely for most prisoners. So some prisoners would be in solitary but not the majority. But what Alcatraz and the supermax do have in common is both were ostensibly reserved for the worst of the worst prisoner. So today's supermax is often described as being reserved for the Hannibal Lectors of the world. But most people who ended up in Alcatraz or who end up in a supermax tend to be ordinary criminals who were just kind of pains to deal with rather than you know some criminal mastermind... Half of the men who spent time in Alcatraz never returned to the prison after the release um and the number was even higher after the early years so it's known as the Gangster Era so these men who were ostensibly incorrigible recidivists actually weren't'"

Medieval medicine: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘If we were in the medieval period if you and I were there who would we expect to be treated by?’
‘Yeah well the first thing to say is probably not a doctor usually. So doctors’ services were very expensive. And also in many instances I think you'd be pretty sort of certain that they wouldn't be necessarily the right person much as I think today you wouldn't go to your GP with a dental problem, you'd go to your dentist. So there was a range of practitioners with specialisms. So barber-surgeons are a really interesting group because they were were much more omnipresent, their services were less expensive and they were skilled in doing a number of hands-on things. So physicians generally didn't touch the body. They might touch you to take your pulse but usually they were kind of advising you and hearing your case history and so forth. A barber surgeon would do a number of things such as um stitching a wound, cutting your hair, applying a plaster. Many things that were involved close contact with the body, and those those individuals were very important and might you know have their own specialisms. And there might be people with with very niche specialisms such as pulling out teeth for example.’"

An African perspective on the history of Africa | HistoryExtra - "'I was surprised by the richness of the continent's history and especially by the history of the country where I was born, the Sudan, which has a thousand pyramids. Egypt has 100. A thousand in Sudan, although only 300 preserved their superstructure. So I was really quite blown away by the statues of the kings of ancient Sudan and the tombs and some of the artifacts and so on so'"

Highwaymen: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘What's really interesting is that highwaymen began to participate in their own self-promotion. They actually realize that their reputations will be enhanced and their chances of avoiding punishment were enhanced if they could have good stories about them told, so they would work with people who wanted to write their biographies or they would sit in the 18th century. They would sit to have their portraits done so that those positive images of them would be circulating… the ideal Highwayman certainly in the 18th century was a gentleman or had genteel behaviors. He was polite, chivalrous. He robbed without any actual violence. He may have threatened violence but he wouldn't commit it. He would stop a coach, he would hold a pistol to it with one hand but with the other hand offer his hand to let the ladies step out of the coach onto the ground and they could surrender their valuables. He was always apologetic, I'm very sorry I have to do this but it's necessity that requires me to do it. And he left them a bit of money so that they could continue their journey without difficulty… the surprising thing is how many positive representations existed [in literature]... Their whole aim was to present themselves as above the common criminal. They were not an ordinary low and degraded criminal. They were actually genteel. They came from respectable backgrounds, it was just unfortunate they'd fallen on hard times and they needed to support themselves. And as a gentleman you wouldn't work for a living, that's not what gentlemen do. So instead they would rob for a living’"

Graffiti's golden age: radicalism & romance in the 18th century | HistoryExtra - "'For most of human history really up until the early modern period at least in Europe there was a sense of graffiti being instead part of everyday life. It was something that everyone partook in. Everyone would do, in their own homes, in churches, so in the medieval period in Britain we would have everyone from the priest down to the the lowliest poorest member of the parish leaving a mark, things like carved crosses, other Christian symbols, merchants’ marks. Things that were versions or iterations of those people's individual and sort of community beliefs. You know leaving your Merchant’s Mark you might be sealing some kind of business deal for example and often we find these in in the porches of churches and around columns inside and that kind of thing. So it's something that's always been there people have always wanted to leave their mark and there's a real sort of human urge from the very first cave paintings really to do that'"

David Lloyd George: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "'The Germans invade neutral Belgium which gives Lloyd George and indeed many other people if you like who call it a justification or you call it an excuse to support the war because again Belgium, a nation which actually has got its own massive Empire in Africa and is acting in an incredibly oppressive way against the population of the Congo, for example. Nevertheless is presented as one of these small nations on which Liberals are so fond of, they’re sort of supporting their rights and so that when you put it in this frame of the Germans trampling over this plucky little Belgium then that gives Lloyd George and many of his supporters although not all of them this cover if you like to move to supporting what is really a kind of a fairly conventional great power conflict'...
in 1940 where he really doesn't have a party any longer, the only people who were loyal to him are basically MPS who are members of his own family either directly or through marriage and he's not got a party and yet he's actually discussed seriously by some people as a potential prime minister at the point where Neville Chamberlain resigns in May after the Norwegian crisis. And so I don't really think that was ever a runner but it's kind of remarkable what he should still have been discussed by anybody in those terms so long after he'd fallen from office and I think that ultimately is a tribute people's continued belief in his ability on the basis of his record in World War I"

Benjamin Franklin: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Is there any great figure in history who didn't have some deep flaw. And I came up with Joseph Haydn as being somebody who was a complete genius and also incredibly nice. But I'm afraid I think that's a great rarity, and I'm afraid Franklin did have a bit of a flaw and that was the treatment of his wife Deborah’"

The Magus: enlightened magician or Renaissance charlatan? | HistoryExtra - "'Alchemy actually works in a physical sense it's one of the great discoveries of history, historians of Science in the last couple of generations… [Some] have recreated alchemical procedures and it turns out that Alchemy is metallic crystalline chemistry and it works quite well if you can just understand the recipes. And so that is an independent tradition which also goes back to Antiquity but it keeps intersecting with the magical tradition. But the big difference is it works which is one reason why Newton and Boyle and Hooke are still really interested in alchemy by, at a point when they've really given up on astrology and many of the other characteristic pursuits of the Magus. Astrology is the great predictive art of the premodern world. Uh it still of course flourishes, supposedly polls show that more Americans believe in astrology than in any version of Christianity. But I don't think that's a very strong kind of belief’...
‘The other thing I think we have to understand is the very theatrical world and people have a lot of will to, for suspension of disbelief, and that's part of the way the Catholic Church works. You know, there are many many convents you can go to where the rood is a statue which will move, and will move its head and move its arms. And the people going are very sophisticated, you know 15th, 16th century people, but in that place, they're willing to suspend disbelief and see something miraculous happen. And I think that that also works for a skilled Magus and performer with charisma that you know, people suspend disbelief and they'll go along with what you're doing. And I'm afraid we still do this too. I mean to anybody who has lived through the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman Fried, it's impossible not to see that a bit of charisma and a good line of patter can get you a long way even now'"

The Spartans: Everything You Wanted to Know | HistoryExtra - "‘Come back either with it or on it. Meaning come back victorious with your shield which is the key item of defensive armor that a Spartan warrior would use or dead and on top of the shield carried by your comrades. Actually Spartans were buried on the battlefield, they weren't brought back home, so the saying is no doubt made up’...
'[On Leonidas] The 300 he chose, very interestingly not his usual royal bodyguard… he chose 300 specially men who already both were married and had fathered a living son. So there's some point here about the future that these 300 won't necessarily survive Thermopylae, but their children will come up to avenge them and to be their, their successors as it were. And I think Leonidas deserves enormous credit for the psychological warfare as well as the physical bravery that he displayed'"

Inside a Jim Crow asylum | HistoryExtra - "'I was shocked to find that there were patients at Crownsville, one woman brought there for the crime of having cut a white person off in traffic. She ended up at Crownsville for decades. Another patient named Mr Bell that I write about who is discovered by one of the first black employees to get there in the 1950s, it turns out that he's been there for years, he he complains to the new Black employees that he hasn't seen the sun, he hasn't seen the sky, in years… Mr Bell was picked up by her own supervisor, her own boss, in Baltimore with the authorities one night because they had overheard him using a British accent and they didn't believe that there were black people who could have British accents. They just couldn't imagine that world, that way of being. And so they assume he's crazy and bring him to Crownsville. Well it turns out that this man had actually been born in London and had been a jockey, had come to America and fallen on hard times, and had no relatives or friends to really fight for him and get him out of Crownsville'"

Ancient Greek theatre: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Women were not allowed on the stage… you have a very strange situation where a lot of Greek tragedies give you these very powerful women who are out in the public eye, who are doing sophisticated, powerful things, running the show. And that's very very different from the way we understand life to have been for women in Athens at that time, right. Women in Athens lived a very cloistered domestic life and really didn't have public rights of any kind that that we can see, except maybe for priestesses’"

History Behind the Headlines: student protests down the centuries | HistoryExtra - "'[Reagan] basically thought these students were being subsidized heavily to behave in a deeply antisocial way. Reagan once famously said that a student meaning a California student was a person who talked like Tarzan, looked like Jane and smelled like cheetah, who for those who don't know is the chimpanzee in the Tarzan movies. But that connection between the you know mass growth of higher education in the US and in California in particular was also tied up with the politics of the time, protests against Vietnam, the Hippie movement and of course the contrast between a kind of expansive Democratic party and a Republican party which even then was beginning to move towards a sort of more free market small government vision which Reagan of course became an exemplar of’"

The Tattooist of Auschwitz: is it ok to fictionalise the Holocaust? | HistoryExtra - "'Spielberg making the film has to convert it into moral parable, a moral lesson as it were so in fact all the historical records show that Schindler continues as a corrupt businessman before and after, didn't affect his character at all, he was always having affairs with women. The film prettifies this by showing him reconciling with his wife which he in fact did didn't do at all according to the historical record. And there is this constant temptation to draw moral from from the Holocaust. And there’s some other cheap tricks in Spielberg’s film, you know the women are herded into a shower room which is usually what the gas chambers are disguised at and then to their amazement you know water starts spouting in and it really is a shower room. I think it's a really cheap cheap trick...
Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader for example which is made into a powerful film starring Kate Winslet. This young boy has an affair with an older woman and it's through her asking him to read literary texts to him and he later discovers that she was a prison camp guard in in the Holocaust and she's illiterate and that is a really I think misleading trick because it's not the case that people became camp guards and SS men and so on because they were ignorant or illiterate. On the contrary the higher up you go in the SS hierarchy the more PhD holders there are. So that's very dubious'...
‘How much of a challenge is it to show something like Auschwitz on screen?’
‘Well it's it's very difficult. First of all you've got healthy well fed Hollywood actors and actresses and so on playing people who in reality were starving covered in lice, ill, sick, brutalized. It can't really convey that on film. There are some rare actors like uh Christian Bale I think is one who does sort of if he's playing somebody who's starving he starves himself and there's a kind of method acting in that but I you can't do it you can't so it's one of the problems of Schindler’s List… then films have to have a beginning a middle and an end and for a lot of people this did not, the Holocaust, you know you can't structure it in that way. So in Schindler's List it ends with Schindler with a group of survivors of his own people who survived because he employed them in his factory, saying he wished he could have saved more. But he didn't, it didn't have an effect to him at all. He just went back to his old ways. His businesses failed and in the end some of them got together and tried to support him but he wasn't somebody who became as ideologically committed to ending the, ending the Holocaust anymore than he became committed to making it up with his wife and stopping having affairs. Essentially his behavior was kind of inexplicable, and films don't like that'"
What a weird interpretation of The Reader

Agent Zo: spying against the Nazis | HistoryExtra - "'The Warsaw Uprising is one of most highly documented battles of the Second World War. The Poles deliberately sent out units of five men with cameras and rolls of film, there were cinefilm taking, they were actually to keep their own morale up playing some of the cinefilm in the cinemas in Warsaw while they were under fire, against a backdrop of machine gun fire from you know down the road. and so some of this information is brought out and the commander sends out five different all men in fact to get to Britain so that the world will know the truth of this battle so that it's recorded... They had this Soviet backed Communist Regime installed who rounded up a number of the senior members of the Home Army and basically imprisoned and executed them in the peacetime even though they've been allies because they didn't want potential resistance leaders against the new regime'"

Galileo: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Galileo's work was compared to many scientists really very accessible and readable and it's still it's still pretty accessible and readable today. Nobody reads for example Copernicus for pleasure. Actually nobody reads Kepler for pleasure either but Galileo actually is quite a readable author and I think that is a an important thing because science has to be accessible to the next generation of people who are going to take those ideas forward’...
'He had three children, two daughters and a son who were all born to his mistress and the two daughters he arranged for them to become nuns… At the time he was on his professor's salary and and he would have been expected to provide diaries for his daughters. He was also as the eldest son responsible for his brothers and sisters as well to the extent that they didn't already have their own families. So by putting into nunneries it meant that they weren't to get married and he wouldn't have to pay the dowries that their social status might have demanded but he couldn't afford'"

The Terror: everything you wan - History Extra podcast - Apple Podcasts - "‘He writes in his notebooks a whole series of things that get called Republican institutions but by people who who've dug them up later on. But they they're focused around this very strange static vision of of essentially rural community, is kind of sort of utopianism that's looking backwards to the classical world really and concerned with personal relationships... Men have to declare their friendships on an annual basis and if you don't have any friends you're not part of the community and you get banished. And then these friends are people who support each other through the life course and dig each other's graves and weep at each other's funerals, sort of sort sentimental diffusions that start coming out then’"

Death and mourning in Britain: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Invisible Dead. This was a major project run by our archaeology department and it would ask this question: we can roughly estimate how many people there have been living in Europe over the last 2,000 years. It's guess work but there's a rough estimate. How many graves have we found? Absolutely minimal number. So where are the invisible dead? What's happened to them?’"

The history of museums: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘They also come up with this again quite quickly this very sort of ingenious system in many ways where they categorize their collection as a b and c and a is basically any kind of object that is unique, irreplaceable, incredibly valuable, incredible provenance attached to it they take that straight away. So that moves immediately. B it's you know second kind of priority but they take as much of that as they can and then c is what they decide to leave on display and remain in the site of the museum and that's something you see with a lot of museums across the world at this point, even though there's world war going on they really don't want to actually shut the doors. They really want to still be able to keep part of the museum open to have the public come in and have that respite, which is actually something that museums came back to during the global pandemic in Covid, because it was actually the first time they actually had to close for a lot of them and one of of the key things with a lot of the national museums and galleries particularly in the UK is that they had never even had to do that during the Second World War’...
'The International Council of Museums a few years ago they changed the official definition of a museum or what a museum is. And there was sort of a lot of debate back and forth. I think it was the first time in over 50 or 60 years they changed the definition… the museum is not for profit, it's permanent, it is in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage, which is open to the public, accessible, inclusive, fosters diversity and sustainability and that operates and communicates ethically and professionally with the participation of communities. So I find that definition incredibly interesting, very positive actually’
Clearly covid was even more dangerous than the Second World War
If you don't push the left wing agenda, you're not a museum

Tudor ladies-in-waiting: the women who served Henry VIII's queens | HistoryExtra - "'Every lady in waiting had her own female servants, but trying to find them in records, you basically can't, unless you found any kind of anecdotal evidence of a name or something like that but otherwise you just have to assume that they've each got a certain number of women around them and leave it at that'...
'They do definitely write letters but usually they don't put the sensitive information in letters which is incredibly frustrating as a historian. It's very common that somebody will write a letter and say the bearer will tell you the rest. So whoever they've given the letter to and said take this to so and so, the letter bearer carries an oral message as well and that has the sensitive information in it. And it's it's so annoying you see that at the end of the letter and you're like Goddamnit, the juicy stuff was not written down'"

Beastly Victorians: the 19th-century fight for animal rights | HistoryExtra - "‘Different species of animals attracted different levels of attention. I imagine that dogs and cats you would expect would be the ones that people were most worried about cruelty to, or is that just a modern expectation’
‘That's half true. I think dogs, less so cats. Actually cats have a bit of a sort of transformation in terms of their perception in the 19 century. They're not really kept as pets that much until about the 1850s. They are kept but they are largely kept to control vermin. Dogs yes though. People definitely felt affection for them although some of them were working dogs as well. But I guess I'd say within even within that category of dogs you kind of have gradations. So pedigree dogs for example dogs that were a particular breed you know like a St Bernard or a poodle, people cared about them if they were owned. If they were pets definitely you get prosecutions for the mistreatment of pets, usually public mistreatment not kind of in people's homes which was a different issue. On the other hand though stray dogs your mongrels were kind of running around the street, people associate them with things like rabies. They're very worried about them... … mammals tend to more attention particularly kind of large supposedly sort of sentient mammals I mean elephants I'm thinking of here in particular. There's an awful lot of concern for like the elephant jumbo when he’s sold to the circus owner PT Barnum in the states… the RSPCA even actually at one point advocates culling tigers in India because it says you they can't be civilized, they're just killing human beings’"

D-Day: Air | HistoryExtra - "'Of the more than 6,000 jumpers from the 101st only 1,000… land on or near their objectives. Major General Maxwell Taylor who's the 101st Divisional Commander ends up in a topheavy group of 20 men including four colonels and a number of other officers. Never quips one of them have so many been commanded by so few'"

D-Day: Sea | HistoryExtra - "'Nobody thinks they're going to destroy a concrete bunker but what they are attempting to do is so traumatize the German defenders that are inside them that they won't be fit for action at that crucial moment when the landing craft are coming in. So there's a huge amount of work for sailors to do before any landing craft ramp touches the beach'"

D-Day: Land | HistoryExtra - "‘The idea of the German Army I think if we're familiar with the old wartime movies and everything is these sort of goose stepping highly trained you know Waffen SS Panzer divisions etc but the truth on D-Day and on the beaches of Normandy was rather different. That many of the German strongpoints, these gun implacements and the machine gun nests that line in the coastline, they were manned by young conscripts, you know many of them schoolboys 16, 17 years of age who had no experience whatsoever of fighting and frankly were absolutely terrified… they just recalled the absolute terror on the morning you know at dawn on the 6th of June of looking out, peering out of their machine gun nests and seeing this vast armada, this Allied Fleet that was coming towards them and realizing that this was the moment of reckoning. You know they all knew, everyone knew that D Day was going to come at some point but they didn't know when and they didn't know where the Allies were going to land… it really was you know a terrifying moment for them as it was for the Allied troops coming in to land’...
'Sainte-Mère-Église… went badly wrong in the sense that men were just scattered all over the place, they were meant to land in specific landing zones but of course they were scattered wildly over the country, country side. And this was both paradoxically good news and bad news. It was bad news because most of the men had no idea where they were and they'd lost all their other their comrades and and weren't quite sure what to do and where they were and their objectives Etc. But it was good news in the sense that the Germans were utterly confused, they were thinking what on Earth are the Americans trying to do here. What happened is that these men were highly trained, they knew what their objectives were, and they began to gather themselves into small little bands'...
'Some beaches were much bloodier than others so we know that on on Omaha itself there were some 2,400 American casualties so they really, it was a really tough struggle to get onto the beach at Omaha. But others were relatively light in casualties so Utah Beach. there was a mere, I say that with some caution, 197 men who were killed… that's extraordinarily light considering they're capturing this you know huge and heavily defended beach. And if you can contrast that with one of the practice runs for D-Day which was Exercise Tiger in which 749 men were killed in the exercise, and yet on the day itself on Utah Beach, 197 were killed'"

Katherine Parr: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Katherine is the most married Queen of England which is quite a sort of a neat fact when she's married to the most married King. But she's married as a teenager to Edward Burr of Gainsboro...
Katherine She's certainly not someone you would ordinarily consider to be royal wife material. She's also of course a widow, so she's not a young virgin. However he tried to marry a young virgin before with Catherine Howard and that obviously turned out to be a disaster. And I think part of Catherine's attraction to Henry is the fact that she's a widow, he's actually passed a law following Catherine Howard's fall that it's illegal for a non-virgin to marry the king without sort of disclosing the fact that they've got a past’...
'Henry has of course broken with Rome, he's made some changes to the traditional Church, particularly publishing the Bible in English, although he does backtrack actually, during his marriage to Catherine he passes a law that makes it illegal for women to read the Bible in English for example and lower status men'"

Boudica: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "'Prasutagus seems to have died sometime perhaps in the winter of AD 59 or AD 60. He left a will to the emperor Nero… he left a will leaving half of his kingdom and wealth to the emperor Nero in the hope that that would satisfy the Romans and the other half to his daughters… his natural inheritors the Romans weren't having any of this'"

A 17th-century scandal & a writer's secret life | HistoryExtra - "‘Henrietta's lover was her own brother-in-law, he was married to her sister Mary Ford, Lord Gray, aged 27 to her 18 years on the day she ran away from her parents' home and vanished into the underworld of London… we have a very good description of Henrietta's physical appearance because her parents… was so desperate to get their daughter back that they took a really unprecedented step and they advertised for her publicly in the London Gazette, and the London Gazette describes her as a young lady of a fair complexion, fair head, full breasted and indifferent to all. Later editions of the London Gazette removed the reference to Lady Henrietta's bosom’"

The First Crusade | The call to arms | HistoryExtra - "‘Western Europe had been plagued with famine for quite some time and with Jerusalem being depicted as a land of milk and honey rich with wondrous opportunity, it seems likely that this could have been a big draw for potential Crusaders. But this expense Natasha mentioned is an important factor when we consider who actually had the opportunity to go on Crusade, and, what they really wanted.’
‘It used to be thought that a lot of the Crusaders were younger sons who are off freebooting, they're not going to get any land because of the rule that firstborn son gets everything. Looking at the documents just how expensive, it was for the first Crusaders to go, on a journey of roughly 3,500 km, and that's if you make it back. We're looking at about four times the average wage of a knight just to be able to afford to go. So the accounts that we have of what people brought back with them, it tends to be relics, pieces of the True Cross. They're not really telling us in great detail about the huge chunk of wealth they brought back with them. There are a lot of accounts of pillaging and looting. But that is more to keep this campaign going, than it is about bringing back a wealth of riches. We do get some accounts from men like Caffaro of Genoa who tell us, oh we came back rich in peppercorns and we all bought 48 celide [sp?] home with us. It's a long way to go, for 48 celide. So we can probably say that the freebooting younger sons is on its way out, as a theory. But it is one that has persisted for quite some time’"

The First Crusade | On the road | HistoryExtra - "‘It’s easy to focus on the fighting force and perhaps overlook the large number of non-combatants performing auxiliary roles in the background and according to Natasha this has proven to be one of the most enduring misconceptions surrounding the Crusades’
‘My kind of take on the legacy of the Crusades is this particular fascination with the hyper masculine concept of the Knight Crusader. This idea that this was the most uber manly man of the medieval period and that that's what a crusader is, when in fact, if you look at the makeup of crusade armies, only, what, six to possibly 10% of them were Knights. The rest were ordinary people. Women, sometimes children, clergy, siege engineers, sailors. All sorts of people are involved in crusading activity. The image of the Knight Crusader is one that's been handed down to us through retellings. First of all in medieval chronicles, then romances, then art in the 19th century. Crusade memes now. There's an instant recognition amongst people at a popular level of what a crusade is but it doesn't bear out what a medieval Crusade necessarily was about’"

The First Crusade | Crossing into the unknown | HistoryExtra - "'If you want to look at the demographic and the political reality of the Levant, it's extremely extremely diverse. On the one hand, the overwhelming population in what is today Eastern Anatolia, Eastern Turkey. Today Syria, Palestine, were Christians. And that's often not considered when you are talking about the Levant. You know, we we say the Crusaders invaded the Islamic world. What do we mean by the Islamic world? Is this because of the people were Muslims or is this because the Muslims were ruling it? Actually it's because the Muslims were ruling it. The majority of the populations were Christians in large cities and in the rural areas. And here Christians you have the Orthodox, you have lots of Arabs who have been Christians for a long time and they remained so. But most of the populations were not of Arab Origins. They have Armenians. You have lots of Syriac speaking people. These were traditionally non-Arabs. They lived there before the coming of the Muslims to occupy this part in the 7th century and these were varieties of Orthodox sects, Orthodox Christian sects. And if you move southward you might come in into contact with people who might follow actually the Greek Orthodo, or the Byzantine Orthodox church. So that's on the Christian front. On the Muslim front, the large number of Muslims in what we call Syria, greater Syria. That is Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel today, the majority of the Muslims were actually Shiites. Three different types of Shiites were living there. The Sunnis had a presence, but their presence was very sporadic and probably only in and around major cities like Damascus. So that, this is the kind of reality and when the Seljuks came, in, starting in 1071 and they controlled this geography, even as Sunnis, they were practicing a form of Sunnism often is we call it Hanafi Sunni Islam that wasn't either present or powerful in that area. And they directly came into problems with the local Sunni populations who practised other forms of Sunni Islam. Especially for instance in the city of Damascus... The division between Sunnis and Shiias or the division between Sunni and Shiias is blown out of historical reality… that it's not true that Sunnis and Shiias were always enemies of each other. For instance the Fatimids at one point during the Crusader period they hired Sunnis to be their Prime Ministers so to speak. And we have equivalent in say in the Abbasid Court. The Abbasids were Sunnis and sometimes they hired Shias as their lead ministers… cities like Bagdad were largely, the Muslims there were either Sunnis or Shiias and they coexisted. Damascus was divided between Sunnis and Shias. Aleppo Etc. So there are large periods of Islamic history where Sunnis and Shiias lived together without necessarily killing each other but there were other moments when there were religious tensions… my opinion this division of Sunnism and Shiiaism when it comes to the Crusader period largely has no relevance in terms of explaining why certain things happens. It can explain other things in terms of context, reception, reaction to the Crusades, the reality of the Muslim world...
There’s the Turkish garrison, they're there for 6 weeks and the Byzantines then say, why don't we talk? And the fact is this is perfectly normal in the Middle Ages. I know Hollywood movies always love you know scenes where cities are taken by storm and people swarming over the walls with ladders and siege engines and all the rest of it. That was quite rare. If a relieving force didn't turn up it was expected the garrison normally did surrender'"

The First Crusade | Besieged | HistoryExtra - "'The other problem the crusaders had with starving cities into submission was that these were big cities and there were never quite enough Crusaders to really, do a tight blockade. It's very rare that a Crusader Army can besiege a city and then stop everybody going in and out. So for instance even in the Siege of Antioch, where the Crusaders um were there for months. At no point were they able to stop supplies going in and out. They were able to hinder them, but people could always move out and around. So once you've realized that you can't starve them into submission, you then have to go to less subtle and more violent, ways. And at its most simple, you can do an assault...
The city of Antioch had only been uh taken over by the Turks in 1086, it was it was only in Turkic hands for 11 years, their population was still Christian. Even when the Turks had taken it over it was only taken by treachery. So treachery is a, is an important ingredient in the toolbox of how you capture cities'"

The First Crusade: the end or the beginning? | HistoryExtra - "'[On the capture of Jerusalem] The Christian chronicles made a big deal of of a massacre. Sieges that end without a surrender, are, very bloodthirsty and that's true in Europe, it's true in the Middle East, and I think that's one thing to bear in mind, is that what happened to Jerusalem was not a, necessarily a rush of fanatical religious hatred or racial hatred. It was of a magnitude which was the same when a European city was captured under siege and without surrender. That was the ghastly rules of war the other thing, that's since become known is that the chroniclers were vastly exaggerating. So the massacres were supposed to be total in fact weren't that at all.'...
'Contrary to what contemporary chroniclers wrote we do know that many members of the Jewish Community were also ransomed after the massacre'...
' They killed everybody and went and asked the Muslims to bury their Muslim coreligionists. Wait a minute where did you bring those Muslims to bury other Muslims? So when you start looking at the details you realize oh wait this doesn't add up. Someone is inventing a story about a massacre that they want to use in order to show off. And by the way Muslim historians from a century after, they became aware of that Christian narrative, Crusader narrative and they adopted it. And, but they adopted it in order to fuel the Islamic resentment. Is very utilitarian, extremely powerful. They are repeating it also for specific agendas'"

Death by nostalgia: the curious history of a dangerous emotion | HistoryExtra - "‘There's an amazing fact in your book which is there was one Swiss milking song that was deemed so nostalgic that singing it among Swiss mercenaries was punishable by death’...
'Absolutely and particularly among soldiers...obviously you need your armies to be fighting fit, you need them to be well, you need them to not be lying around wistfully pining for their home. And so anything that could provoke nostalgia was seen as a real threat not just to the individual well-being of the soldiers but to the kind of whole military effort. And you have similar things in the US during the American Civil War. There was also injunctions against you know there were all these songs like home sweet home that were also cautioned against because they were worried that it would put soldiers off their form, kind of it would make the war effort less effective'...
' In the early 19th century in France where lots of babies were sent away to wet nurses, so not so much the initial sending away because they were so tiny but when they'd come back to their real parents they were effectively leaving the only people they'd ever known to be parents, the wet nurses and there were all these cases of babies being diagnosed with nostalgia or little children that you know were desperately sad and it's it is kind of tragic to think that you know of course they'd be hugely unhappy at the thought of not being able to see their standin mother ever again'
'It can actually be used to improve your well-being so there are all these studies now that are done that kind of try and invoke nostalgia in people trying to make people feel nostalgic as a kind of therapy, as a kind of therapeutic intervention. And they say okay well if we make people feel nostalgic, you know nostalgia is a very social emotion, will make people feel more connected with each other, it will make them feel better about themselves. It'll make them weirdly and kind of you know paradoxically more confident about the future and more positive and optimistic. There are also studies that suggest that nostalgia can make people more creative and that is supposed to improve memory, improve social connectedness, lessen their anxiety, lessen symptoms of depression’"

Becoming a Family

2026-11-07T10:40:00.000+08:00

Becoming a Family

"The state now forces us to send our children to school, while ensuring that nothing much in the way of education occurs there. What passes for education in many British schools is really a process of demoralization, in which children are taken from their parents and surrendered to their peers. Today, significant numbers of young Britons leave school unable to read or do mental arithmetic. Useless old subjects like Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics have disappeared, and English grammar, with its oppressive rules and useless complexities, has been pushed aside as "elitist." As for manners, these have declined to such an extent that shops near London schools regularly close their doors to children, while older people seek refuge in another car when children board a train.

Instead of preparing children for adult life, our system of education ensures that they remain children, with all of childhood's self-centered incompetence but none of its redeeming innocence and shame. The state's attempt to sexualize children—encouraging members of the younger generation to master all the relevant positions by the age of 14, and making homosexuality a central part of their curriculum—doesn't help matters. Sex, pupils learn, is just an extension of childhood—another realm of play, in which all is permitted that could lead to enjoyment, and in which only the serious, the lasting, and the loving are dangerous.

The sixties' ideology, which caused such havoc in my own personal life, and the evil effects of which it took me 20 years to overcome, is now an obligatory basis of schooling, enforced from the tenderest age, and with complete disregard for the personal happiness and long-term hopes of the pupils. What I escaped only with the greatest difficulty and by the skin of my teeth is now being imposed as a general destiny. Surely, the first of my duties toward Sam is to ensure that he does not fall into the clutches of the people who want to do this to him.

The new curriculum, which has both the aim and the effect of cutting off children from their parents, making them unlovable to adults and the exclusive property of the state, springs from the minds of people who are themselves, for the most part, childless. It would be better, it seemed to us, for Sam to be sent down a coal mine, there to encounter the real world of adults, than to go through the complete course in demoralization that our rulers require. Even the private schools must follow the National Curriculum, which has been carefully devised to remove all the knowledge that Sophie and I value and to substitute the "life skills" needed in an urban slum.

The only solution that has occurred to us so far is to educate Sam ourselves for as long as time, energy, and knowledge permit and then to send him to the Lycée Francaise in London, on the understanding that the French have been slightly less contemptuous toward their national culture than we have been. As to what Sam's curriculum should be, common sense directs us down the old and beaten path. And we shall start him off with Grimm, Andersen, and Lewis Carroll, since their brand of children's literature does not merely enlarge the imagination: it also educates the moral sense.

While pondering this matter, however, I was invited by a national newspaper to describe what we intended for Sam—a sign that many people share our concerns. Naturally, I assured the readers, if John Stuart Mill could read Greek at six, why not Sam? And maybe Sam's first public utterance could match that of the four-year-old Macaulay, deflecting the meddlesome attentions of a toddler-coddler, after he had hurt himself, with the words: "I thank you, Madam, the agony is abated." Sam would be kept away from pop music and television but would study the viola as a salutary form of self-abasement. He would be introduced to horses and fox hunting, so as to learn both to care for animals and to do so unsentimentally. He would be taught the virtues—courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—in their Christian version, as forms of faith, hope, and charity. And although Sam would probably not enjoy his childhood, I wrote, he would emerge from it as someone agreeable to others, whether or not happy in himself.

The article precipitated a storm of abuse from experts in child-rearing, educational gurus, feminists, and assorted believers in progress—all manifestly products of an education system that identifies irony as an elitist crime and has therefore extinguished the ability to understand it. For several weeks, we lived in dread of the social workers. If we could not answer their inquiries, we feared, Sam would be put into foster care, denied all access to his parents, and given a normal diet of pop, television, and takeout.

The experts who greeted our educational plans with such outrage were, after all, the voice of our modern culture—the very same culture that has shaped the educational system and set up the state in opposition to the family. It is only since becoming part of a family that I have fully gauged the depth and seriousness of this opposition. The family has become a subversive institution—almost an underground conspiracy—at war with the state and the state-sponsored culture.

Hence the official curriculum has rigorously excluded the family. Mothers appear from time to time in schoolbooks, but they are conspicuously single. Fathers are never mentioned—indeed, they have become unmentionable, as trousers were to our Victorian ancestors. The state-imposed sex education is designed to sever the link between sex and the family, by showing the family to be merely an "option." Sex education will ensure that the next generation will not form families, since it will have destroyed in its pupils everything that leads one sex to idealize the other and so to channel erotic feelings into marriage.

But Sophie and I have no doubt that it is the family, not the state, that fulfills us. Hence we have decided to follow our own instincts and observations, and to bring up our children as we believe to be right. We are members of a growing class of criminals, who have declared war on the state-sponsored culture and are prepared to challenge it.

This official culture is founded on the premise that the human material is infinitely plastic and can be molded by the state into any shape required. This is one of the first of the official doctrines that you learn, as a parent, to doubt. We compared Sam with other boys and could not help remarking how similar they are in one fundamental respect: which is, that they all want to be men. Moreover, they all associate manliness with action, with the use of tools, with the making of something out of nothing, and with power and the machines that produce it...

The official doctrine attributes such tendencies to culture: change the toys, the role models, and the contexts, the experts say, and boys will dress up, play with dolls, coddle animals, and make little interiors where they can be snug as a bug in a rug. But there seems to be a paucity of supporting evidence for such a view. Science, common sense, and recorded history all point to the conclusion that sex is a constant, which influences what can be achieved and what can be desired. Rather than work against it, we should work with it, to use its vast and unconscious power to drive our civilizing purpose.

The birth of our baby girl Lucy again awoke our curiosity in this respect, and while we of course intend to bring her up in the same improving regime that we proposed for Sam, we are fairly sure that she will not be seen, 12 months hence, with a trowel in her hand. Lucy's first smile was enough to convince us of this. Whereas Sam grinned broadly and mischievously, and then reached out to tear down the toy horse that hung above his crib, Lucy offered a serene, observing twinkle. Friends and neighbors all confirm the view that little girls are interested in people, in words, in the intimate togetherness of home, and that tools and machines fail to awaken their sympathies.

Why should people resist the obvious, when it comes to sexual roles? The answer, I believe, goes to the heart of our modern anxieties. In the world described by Jane Austen, men and women enjoyed separate spheres of action, the first public, the second private, the first involving influence without intimacy, the second an intimacy that was also a form of far-reaching, though publicly hidden, influence. Dress, manners, education, recreation, and language all reinforced this division, with marriage as the great life-choice in which it culminated and whose purpose it was. Because there is no going back to Jane Austen's world, we take refuge in the belief that every aspect of it reflects some arbitrary cultural imperative, with nothing due to permanent human nature. By extending cultural relativism even into those spheres where it is not culture but nature that determines what we do, we deceive ourselves into accepting—but with anxiety—a situation so novel that our ancestors never even thought to guard against it: the situation in which men and women are exchangeable in all their social roles and all their spheres of action.

It seems to me, however, that we do our children a disservice if we fail to acknowledge that their sexual nature sets them from the beginning on different paths. We should learn not to deny sex but to idealize it—to set before our children an image of the good man and the good woman, and to teach them to imitate what can be loved and admired. Even without the old division of roles, we can envisage alternative forms of role-playing that serve a comparable function—that rescue sex from animal appetite and make it the foundation of a lasting commitment.

Children, in their innocence, have an inkling of this...

The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness, as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant. But on what fund of knowledge are we to draw when framing our alternative? The utopias have proved to be illusions, and the most evident result of our "liberation" from traditional constraints has been widespread discontent with the human condition."

Links - 6th November 2026 (2 - Donald Trump)

2026-11-06T18:40:00.000+08:00

It's a Lovely Life by Heather Delaney Reese | Facebook - "This may be the most important thing I’ve ever written... White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stepped behind the podium in the briefing room... She told the room she felt it was too important not to be there, and then she launched into one of the most dangerous performances our country has ever seen come out of that room. And within minutes, it became clear this wasn’t a press conference about a shooting as the White House claimed it would be. It was about defining this administration’s next moves. Telling the country that criticism of the president is no longer just disagreement, but something more dangerous and potentially criminal. That the people speaking out against Donald Trump and his regime are not just wrong, but responsible for the violence in our country and subject to consequences for it, saying it in plain language: “This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of him and his supporters by commentators, by elected members of the Democrat Party, and even some in the media.” And then going even further: “Much of the manifesto of the would-be assassin is indistinguishable from the words that we hear daily from so many.”... She opened by invoking the First Amendment. “Saturday was supposed to be a joyful evening celebrating free speech and the First Amendment with all of you, members of the press.” She said it with a straight face. She used the words “free speech” to begin dismantling it. And everything that followed was built on that contradiction. She told the room that the political violence this country is experiencing “stems from a systemic demonization” of Trump and his supporters. That the “hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump, day after day for eleven years, has helped legitimize this violence.” And then she said the whole framework for the press conference. The whole argument in just a couple sentences before she started to justify all that she was saying: “Those who constantly and falsely label and slander the President as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.” Notice the word she chose. Slander. That is a legal term. It was not chosen by accident. Slander is actionable. Slander can be prosecuted... She said: “When you read the manifesto of this shooter, ask yourselves: how different is the rhetoric from this almost-assassin than what you read on social media and hear in various forums every single day? The answer, if you’re being honest with yourself, is that there is no difference at all.” She is not saying the left inspired the shooter. She is saying the left is the shooter... She then read a list of names. Democratic elected officials, called out one by one in front of the entire press corps, in front of every camera, and in front of every person watching at home. Hakeem Jeffries. Josh Shapiro. Alex Padilla. Elizabeth Warren. Adam Schiff. Ed Markey. JB Pritzker. Ayanna Pressley. LaMonica McIver. Each name read aloud with a quote attached, each quote stripped of its context, and each one handed to Trump’s super fans, the most radicalized people in this country, as proof that these officials are dangerous. Trump and his enablers know how his base works. You give them talking points, and they repeat them. You give them propaganda, and they regurgitate it as fact. You call someone an enemy, and they receive death threats. She knows how this works. She has watched it work. And she read the list anyway... One that I keep coming back to is how they keep trying to recreate a Reichstag moment... since she wants to talk about rhetoric that incites violence, we need to look at where the violence is really coming from. The president... said of Liz Cheney, his own former Republican colleague, “Let’s put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.”... Every time this administration attacks the First Amendment, we respond by funding the people defending it."
Left wing logic: if you denounce the left's incitement of violence, that's fascism, and Trump is staging fake assassination attempts at the risk of his own life and left wingers have nothing to do with it at all
Left wingers are allowed to incite violence, because that's free speech, but if you criticise them, you are violating their right to free speech. If you quote left wingers inciting violence, that's somehow out of context, but when you lie about Trump and right wingers, that's proof that they incite violence (ironic that the Liz Cheney bit is well known to be out of context) Trump supporters are "the most radicalized people in this country" even though left wingers are responsible for most of the violence

M.A. Rothman | Facebook - "𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄-𝐃𝐔𝐓𝐘 𝐀𝐈𝐑 𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐂𝐄 𝐌𝐀𝐉𝐎𝐑 𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐀𝐓 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐈𝐓𝐎𝐋 𝐈𝐍 𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐌 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐃𝐄𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐌𝐏 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐕𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐁𝐄 𝐈𝐌𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐃
Maj. Jason Watson put on his Air Force uniform, walked to the U.S. Capitol, and stood alongside Rep. Al Green demanding the 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭, 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐥 of the President and Vice President. When Green left the scene, Capitol Police ordered Watson to stop demonstrating. He refused — and was arrested for violating code 22–1307, crowding, obstructing and incommoding (Washington Times, Mediaite). Watson’s stated grievance was the strikes on Iran and Venezuela, which he claimed violated the War Powers Act and cost service members their lives. His real audience wasn’t Congress. It was the cameras: he told the crowd he was standing “𝘪𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺” with Green’s uphill Rule 9 push to force a floor vote on impeachment articles — a maneuver Congress has shown zero appetite to touch. There’s a reason officers don’t campaign in uniform. The military exists outside politics precisely so a commander in chief never has to wonder whether the officer corps will follow orders or stage a protest instead. Watson didn’t just break Capitol Police’s rules — he broke that line, and now faces likely additional review under military law on top of his civilian charge. A 𝐧𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐦𝐞, he told the crowd, could take a stand. A sworn officer in dress blues isn’t a nobody. He’s the guy who’s supposed to salute, not sermonize. 𝐇𝐞 𝐬𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧."
Naturally left wingers complained about fascism and claimed freedom of speech was violated. Nobody is above the law - unless it pushes the left wing agenda, after all

Meme - Donald Trump: "Best I can do is live in your head rent free"

Europe’s rearmament drive is sustaining 195,000 US defence jobs, Nato chief says - "Europe’s rearmament drive is sustaining 195,000 US defence jobs through $300bn in arms orders, Nato’s top official has said"
A Trump hater claimed that higher NATO defence spending didn't benefit the US. And this is excluding how much the US spends on European defence, which the WEF has calculated to be quite substantial

Meme - "The Last Time Voters Elected a Republican Mayor:
New York - 1994
Seattle - 1964
Minneapolis - 1957
Portland - 1952
Chicago - 1927
Washington, D.C. - NEVER
But Liberals want to blame President Trump for crime in these cities?"

VictoriaL59 on X - "Canada spent five years renaming its own streets, squares, parkways and universities because the old names made somebody uncomfortable. Trutch Street in Vancouver is now šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street. The Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway in Ottawa is now Kichi Zībī Mīkan. Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto is now Sankofa Square. Ryerson University is now Toronto Metropolitan. Then Trump signed a piece of paper calling it Lake America, and the entire country discovered overnight that names are sacred, history matters, and you cannot simply decide to call a place something else. Where was the outrage then⁉️"

Threads - "16 years ago Google shut down their entire business in China because they wouldn’t submit to an authoritarian government. Today, they are renaming lakes because a fascist declared it so on the toilet at 2am."
Left wing logic - disappearing political dissidents is the same as renaming a lake

Congratulations, MAGAs, You Really Won With “Lake America” - "I’m sure all those poor Canadians your guy stuck it to this week feel truly defeated, as they retreat to their peaceful nation where they have affordable groceries, excellent healthcare, a living wage, national pride, global respect, and leaders who aren’t felons and rapists."
Left wingers are so deluded. Left wingers in Canada are just as miserable as in the US, despite their having the left wing American dream of "free healthcare", because left wingers are always miserable. Certainly, they wouldn't agree they have "affordable groceries", "excellent healthcare" or "a living wage"

The Real Reason Donald Trump Didn't Eat In The Morning, According To Andre Rush - "former White House chef Andre Rush revealed that the businessman wasn't regularly noshing on pancakes or cereal in the early hours of the day. "Some people are not morning eaters," Rush said. "He's a worker. He's up all night. It wasn't a lot of morning breakfast.""

Gavin Newsom on X - "The President of the United States of America blocked access to the free press and launched state-run media. This is authoritarianism in action. We can end his unchecked power when we take back Congress this November. VOTE."
Nick shirley on X - "Aren’t you the same guy who signed a bill into law that criminalizes and penalizes those who expose fraud in your state? You have no room to talk."

Ron Ironfield | Facebook - "💥 The Supreme Court ruled 50-years-ago that news organizations are not entitled to access to places or information the government controls - shutting down any claim by CNN that President Trump's decision to revoke the press-passes for three organizations violates its constitutional rights.
🔻In Houchins v. KQED (1978), the justices held that the First Amendment is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act.
The press’s core protection is the right to communicate information once it has been obtained, not a right to collect it from the government.
🔻Pell v. Procunier (1974) and related cases established that the press has no constitutional right to information or locations not available to the public generally.
🔻Zemel v. Rusk (1965) stated that the right to speak and publish does not carry with it an unrestrained right to gather information, and that entry into the White House is not a First Amendment right.
Those rulings have never been overruled.
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were banned from the White House effective immediately because they constantly publishes information that is blatantly false. The President told reporters in the Oval Office those organizations can write whatever they choose; but because they are dishonest he does not have to let them into the people’s house. Today Secret Service agents deactivated and confiscated hard passes when CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters arrived at the press entrance. CNN called the move an illegal assault on a constitutionally protected right to report without government hindrance. MS NOW and Politico said they would take every step to defend their First Amendment rights. Conservatives point out that the three outlets still have cameras, websites, sources, and nationwide reach. He did not ban them from operating. What they lost is a privilege - workspace, West Wing proximity, and pool access - that ordinary citizens never receive. White House press access is a courtesy the executive can manage, not a legal entitlement. The organizations will sue, but the Highest Court already ruled."

The idea that Heinlein’s Starship Troopers were fascists is a lazy Leftist smear - "Paul Verhoeven, director of the movie, makes it clear that in his view the future human Federation described in Heinlein’s book is a “fascist utopia”. “I decided to make a movie about fascists,” he told the Guardian in 2022. He certainly did make that decision: in his movie the Federation’s symbols are clearly modelled on Nazi and fascist ones and there are references to Triumph of the Will and Olympia. These are all additions by Verhoeven and his team, not to be found in Heinlein’s book. The Federation as described in the book probably does fit quite well with a Hollywood lefty’s definition of fascism. This is basically the same definition used by Rik Mayall’s character, sociology student Rick, in The Young Ones. Such people believe that anyone or anything they disagree with or dislike is fascist. Using the Britannica definition of fascism, however, you have to say that Heinlein’s Federation doesn’t fit at all well. One universal characteristic of fascism, for instance, is “contempt for electoral democracy”. Heinlein’s Federation is an electoral democracy, and moreover one in which the right to vote is highly prized and respected, almost the defining element of the system. The actual fascists and Nazis abandoned elections and voting as soon as they were in power, and frequently insisted that democracy is philosophically unsound. Militarism is another characteristic of fascism. If Heinlein’s Federation is militaristic, however, it goes an odd way about it. There is no conscription, nor any aggressive recruiting as in the movie – indeed young people are discouraged from signing up. Far from the Mobile Infantry being a huge army of cannon-fodder as in Verhoeven’s vision, it is as selective as today’s SAS. In the book, Johnny Rico’s course starts with 2,009 recruits of whom just 187 pass out to become “cap troopers”, a pass rate fairly similar to UK special forces selection – and in the case of the MI, no fewer than 14 of the rejects are dead (mostly in training accidents but one executed on purpose) which even the SAS couldn’t get away with today. Then again, it’s clear that Heinlein’s Federation doesn’t discriminate against non-voters who haven’t served. Johnny Rico’s father (at the start of the book a strong critic of the military, from a family with no tradition of service) is a very wealthy businessman able to afford not only a home swimming pool, but an Olympic-length one. Heinlein made absolutely no suggestion in the book that non-voters were not allowed to have children, or that having children was made more difficult for them: Verhoeven put that idea into the movie on his own initiative. It’s always easier to argue against a bad person you made out of straw than a real person, of course. Actual real-world fascists, too, were generally racists of one type or another. Heinlein handled this issue quite clearly in Starship Troopers. Johnny Rico becomes a commissioned officer in the MI. But he and his wealthy family are Filipino, and probably not of Spanish colonial descent either – they speak Tagalog at home. The MI and the rest of the Federation services clearly recruit from the entire human race: Native Americans, Arabs and Japanese are specifically mentioned in the book, among others. These will have been challenging ideas for a lot of white American readers in 1959, but Heinlein didn’t shy away. Fascism in the real world also generally meant sexism. Heinlein’s Federation wasn’t quite as nominally liberated as Verhoeven’s mixed-showers, gratuitous breast visuals one. The MI itself, the Federation’s close-combat force, was all-male in the book (as indeed British close-combat forces remained until 2016). But it was specified by Heinlein that women were better at piloting spaceships than men, and most space pilots were therefore women, including the character Carmen Ibanez and the captain of Johnny’s ship, Yvette Deladrier. There were many other ways for women to earn their vote and it was clear that plenty of them did so, in Heinlein’s future. And Heinlein managed to avoid the suggestion that women would only serve because they wanted babies, or to pursue male romantic targets. Verhoeven failed both those tests. So, Verhoeven is dead, stupid wrong. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers Federation is no “fascist utopia”. One may well doubt the idea that restricting the vote to service veterans and reintroducing corporal and capital punishment would result in the ideal society as Heinlein suggests. But calling his ideas “fascist”, and smearing them as such at movie length, is lazy and childish. It was also incredibly disappointing (and again, lazy) that Verhoeven and his crew made no effort whatsoever to depict the signature technology of the MI in the book: powered armour suits, an idea which went on to become a major sci-fi trope and which would have made a much more interesting movie. One wonders how much of this President Trump knows – probably not much. It seems reasonable to believe he just thought the movie uniforms looked cool, perhaps without picking up Verhoeven’s not-so-subtle messaging. And you have to say, Trump’s proposed Space Force uniforms don’t look particularly Nazi or fascist, unless – as is pretty common among Left-wing people – you basically think all military uniforms look Nazi or fascist. Indeed, the actual badge symbol of the US Space Force, far from being based on eagles or fasces, appears to be closely modelled on that of Star Trek’s “Starfleet” – a fictional non-military organisation which usually appears primarily focused on peace conferences and scientific research rather than warfare. It’s another storm in a teacup, then: and what it mainly illustrates is just how strong the urge is among certain sections of society to call people and ideas which are disliked “fascist” or “Nazi” when they are actually nothing of the kind."

Meme - Fusilll Spock @awstar11: "Leftist rely on their followers being incurious, drooling, partisan morons"
Usually Right @normouspenis: "-12 hour warnings of flooding
-3 hour flash flood warning
-NOAA proposed cuts not effective until October 1, 2025."
Rachel Bitecofer @RachelBitecofer Jul 5, 2025: "Republican's "small government" lunacy got these poor kids killed."

Rod Dreher on X - "Deleted post griping about what Trump said about Los Angeles and San Diego being nuked by Iran. Now that I've seen the clip, it was clear that he simply wasn't speaking clearly, that he was WARNING that this could happen, not wishing for it. I apologize."

New Greenland security deal offers hope for a reasonable defence agreement with the U.S. - "There are at least two important differences from 1951. The first is the new restriction barring states or investors which are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or NATO partners or European Union members from controlling, significantly influencing or accessing non-public information unless the parties are that the “activities of such states or investors would not constitute a threat to national security or public order.” It states that the reasoning for this restriction is the “threat to national security and public order posed by increased efforts by adversaries to expand influence and control in Greenland.” Which suggests that unless parties agree, Russia and China will not likely be able to establish a direct investment presence in Greenland. The second is the role of the Greenlandic government itself. Greenland is now directly involved in the agreement and the possibility of independence is explicitly recognized in its preamble. Neither was the case in 1951. Indeed, no one was seriously talking about an independent Greenland at the time. The political circumstances have, therefore, changed considerably, even though the basic American military presence remains."
Weird. Left wingers insist that the US got nothing new and Trump was an idiot to pretend otherwise

Bernie on X - "Trump buys $6 BILLION of oil and gas from Russia and there’s a Backlash? Seriously? Europe has spent MORE THAN €375 BILLION buying Russian oil, gas and coal in the last 3 years. And they’ve never stopped buying! In fact they bought almost €3 BILLION of the stuff in August alone. The BBC left this bit out of the story. (Obvs)"

Meme - TheEdgeofGoon: "If 9/11 happened today, the hijackers would be white conservative men..."
macguini: "It already happened on January 6th. Update for clarity: Some of y'all are crazy. Yes the death toll was higher for 9/11. But both were terrorist attacks on American soil and both have ultimately led to yet another war in the Middle East. One led to a war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The other lead to the current wars we are in, bombing children schools and hospitals."
Left wingers are deranged with hatred

Meme - Democratic NPCs in unison: "~~Dictator~~ ~~Felon~~ ~~Russian Asset~~ ~~Nazi~~ ~~King~~ ~~TACO~~ Pedophile"

Meme - "The Democrat's Pedo Dilemma
The same people who want to allow grown men in little girl's bathrooms, boys in girl's sports, trans & sex books in children's libraries, drag queens in children's reading hour, encourage children to explore their bodies, teach them about transitioning in grade school etc. etc. etc. are calling Trump a "Pedo""

Meme - :You celebrated M.A.P.S
You put porn in kids libraries
You ignore democrats in the files to attack Trump who is not implicated
YOU ARE THE PEDO PROTECTOR"
Left wingers just work backwards from their desired conclusion

The Hatred That Broke American Politics - The Atlantic
Ironically, the author criticises the left for ignoring anti-Semitism and obsessing over other alleged prejudices, then slams Trump and the right for only going after anti-Semitism on the left. Of couse, this being because the left is obsessed over alleged prejudice against other "minorities" but condones, excuses or even promotes anti-Semitism is not a possibility. Not to mention how anti-Semitism on the right is quite powerless, which is why ignoring it isn't hypocrisy

Center for Strategic Politics on X - "We polled five routes for Trump to leave office before the end of his term. A plurality of Dems support four of them, including a military coup and death by natural causes. The only one underwater, an assassination, is still supported by 29%.
Criminal prosecutions of Trump officials are generally favored by Dems, with clear majorities indicating support in all cases. Voters also support prosecution of officials from both the Trump and Biden admins over US support for Israel's genocide in Gaza.
A majority of Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court and abolish the filibuster, but getting rid of the Senate altogether is highly disfavored (however, 34% of Dems under 45 support it). "
Damn Trump promoting hate! Hate will never win! Right wing political violence needs to be stopped. Lock them all up!
Damn Trump prosecuting his political enemies and destroying centuries-old institutions! He's destroying democracy!

Svetlana Lokhova on X - "They are lying to you. The documents that Obama's henchmen took when they raided President Trump's home Mar-a-Lago is the evidence of their own crimes. Here is the most important document, which Monaco and co secretly and retroactively re-classified few weeks before the Raid. It shows that Brennan's CIA operative masquerading as a "Cambridge University Professor" lied that I am a Russian spy who recruited Donald Trump's National Security Advisor. That kicked off the whole Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the senior Trump campaign advisor, then leading into Mueller etc. So they stole the documents and charged President Trump under the Espionage Act for exposing Obama, Brennan, Comey and co."
Lara Logan on X - "If anyone would know the truth here, it would be Svetlana Lokhova. She has written multiple books based on years of research. And she was at the center of much of this when they targeted her & falsely accused her of being a Russian spy who was supposedly having an affair with Gen Michael Flynn. This was a complete lie on every level. And reporters got prizes for pushing these lies year after year. Shame on them. Folo Svetlana for the truth bout “Russia collusion” & what it was really about. This is so damning. It is shameful."

OSINTdefender on X - "U.S. President Donald J. Trump has announced that he has instructed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce any future joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea, calling them “totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, who he claims has been “unthreatening and respectful.”"
Sam E. Antar on X - "The knee-jerk reactions to Trump on South Korea are missing the interesting part. South Korea itself is run by liberal President Lee Jae-myung, who has been pushing a “peace first” policy toward North Korea, reducing tensions and calling for renewed dialogue. Now Trump is telling the Pentagon to substantially reduce joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises because he says they send a “hostile” signal to North Korea. Think about that before automatically reaching for the partisan pom-poms. Trump may have just outflanked South Korea’s own liberal government from the left on North Korea."

Ida Turan 🇮🇷 on X - "I see a serious meltdown in the timeline over Trump’s post again. As an Iranian, I’m telling you: you don’t deserve this president. Someone should tell these angry American pundits to read a tiny bit of their own country’s history, and also remind them that they didn’t elect a pope. This is freaking politics. Get used to it already ffs. Nixon met Mao, the communist dictator who was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his own people. Reagan not only met Gorbachev, the president of the “Evil Empire,” he built a close personal friendship with him. @realDonaldTrump met Kim Jong-un, who is a grotesque joke compared to the pure evil of Mao and the Soviet Empire. You had the exact same meltdown over negotiations with the Islamic regime in Iran. Not every negotiation means appeasement. Sometimes it’s just a window to reduce and manage tension, and to save lives! The Korean War was a proxy war in the Cold War between the USSR and the United States. North Korea is a silly joke compared to the Soviet Union. The Soviets had literally a thousand times more nuclear warheads that could actually reach the U.S. And the USSR was not some isolated country quietly minding its own business like North Korea. I can easily imagine that back then there were plenty of people screaming the exact same thing you’re screaming now: “No appeasement with pure evil!” Yet the USSR, a communist superpower, dissolved without any major military intervention. Thank you, but your screaming and your prescribed approach doesn’t work. Oh, Trump has no moral compass? Fuck you and your stupid moral compass. He’s saving God knows how many lives while you’re sitting in your basement preaching morality. Things might go wrong, yes, Trump could make mistakes, just as Reagan certainly did, but you still have to be thankful to him for his courage in facing the inevitable challenges that nobody else ever had the guts to face, instead of dodging it. Let him do his job. The man knows what he’s doing. He’s protecting South Korea’s ass and, most likely, freeing up a huge amount of American taxpayers’ defense money that’s been pouring into Korea. He’s saving who knows how many lives by ending the conflict now, before it’s too late. And don’t even get me started on the lesson he’s teaching South Korea: what they’re doing isn’t the behavior of an ally, it’s the behavior of a freeloader. If you don’t even understand this, politics is certainly not for you. Anyway, he needs to move the military equipments from Korea to middle east, these are not random, not for punishment. He is signaling NK not to get smart. Reagan made the impossible possible. He proved people like you were wrong. Trump has shown you that you were wrong hundreds of times, yet you still don’t have the humility to admit that you know nothing. Pray for his success and stop making yourselves look ridiculous with these ignorant meltdowns.
P.S. My head hurts and I don’t have the patience for sugarcoating. Sorry not sorry."

Praying Medic on X - "Although he cannot say it publicly, Trump is in a cold war against the CCP. China intends to topple the US as the world's greatest military and economic power. They've been slowly subverting governments that are currently allies of the US. Canada is one example. The UK is another. Spain and South Korea are currently being reeled in by the CCP. Trump removed the CCP's influence in Venezuela. He's working on Iran & Cuba. Trump's endgame is to form new economic & military alliances to maintain a Western democratic bulwark against the CCP's plan for global domination. The Gulf States are a key part of this plan. There's a decoupling happening. Any nation that will not stand against the CCP's subversive plans will be left to fend for itself. If South Korea aligns itself with the CCP, Trump will leverage his relationship with Kim Jong Un to try to bring them back into alignment. The CCP plans to capture not just Taiwan, but South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the entire Pacific."

Status-6 (War & Military News) on X - "US President Trump: When I called recently the president of South Korea... I said, would you like to give us a little hand? We don't need help with Iran. But if you'd like, give us a hand with Iran. He said, no, thanks. And I said, we have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor. And you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran? That's strange. No, no, we'd rather not get involved. I say, well, why are we involved in helping you?"
Meaghan Mobbs on X - "In the clip below, POTUS is 🎯 . I commented yesterday on my concern about adjusting our military posture and cooperation without significant concessions made by Pyongyang. And Seoul’s drift toward Beijing concerns me. But refusing to stand with the United States against Iran’s nuclear ambitions concern me too. Alliances cannot simply be about what America is obligated to provide when an ally is threatened. There must be an expectation of strategic reciprocity. The United States and South Korea share a long and consequential history there - forged through war, sacrifice, and decades of standing alongside one another other. Free nations either stand together against nuclear proliferation, wars of aggression, and authoritarian powers increasingly working in concert, or eventually we will confront those threats alone and fail together. I want South Korea firmly inside the American alliance system. But that alliance has to mean something in both directions, and Washington is right to expect more from Seoul."

Osama bin Laden vs Hasan Piker / Left Wing Hypocrisy on Public Executions

2026-11-06T14:16:00.000+08:00

These probably contributed to my first one week ban from iFunny:

Destiny | Steven Bonnell II @TheOmniLiberal: "*Osama bin Laden* >pretended he grew up in humble background, was actually born to incredibly wealthy parents
>pretended to be Muslim, but only when convenient to him
>spoke about how he's from "the Middle East", but attended wealthy schools in the West
>justified the killing of women and children by jihadists
>lived in gated community
>published content claiming American civilians deserved 9/11
>be Hasan Piker
>pic unrelated"

The Liberal Agenda: "I'm sick of this clown. I'm sick of his circus."
"Marked Safe From Watching a public execution because I'm not a sadistic piece of shit"

The Liberal Agenda: "This is our entire statement on what happened to Charlie Kirk."
The Liberal Agenda @theleft.org: ""I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."-Charlie Kirk, who just got shot in the neck *Charlie Kirk death photo*"