Balderdash

No wonder men are opting out (Woke Women)

2026-06-25T12:12:00.000+08:00

No wonder men are opting out | The Spectator Australia

"The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book –

Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic – inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture, and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible, and less than a real man.

Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame, and the yoke comes off.

Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in three American men – roughly 33 per cent – were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67 per cent, down from 73.5 per cent two decades ago and from 87 per cent in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.

The trend is not confined to America. Australian men’s workforce participation has fallen from around 79 per cent in 1978 to approximately 71 per cent today, while similar declines – though less dramatic than in the United States – have occurred in the UK and Canada...

Ehrenreich had made the argument that marriage and productivity were inseparable – that the same mechanism which got men to the altar got them to work. The data suggests she was right.

What Ehrenreich did not fully reckon with – could not have foreseen in 1983 – was that the inducements for tying the knot would collapse. The shame mechanism has disappeared, yes, but the incentive has simultaneously imploded. The product on offer has changed beyond recognition. If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them – and the costs are severe – but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.

The following is an observation and opinion of some commentators that may help shed some light on the issue.

The modern woman: a prospectus

Some studies show they are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory – hardly great marriage material.

Many married women go off sex – and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.

Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.

Increasing numbers of women have gone full throttle left – and three quarters of college-educated women in some studies won’t even date a man who votes differently.

The education system contains anti-male rhetoric and it has, in some cases, colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.

Yet their hypergamy is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, statistically some women still demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.

The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour – silence, opinions, jokes, breathing – gets flagged as a red flag.

Many women are well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, and there have been reported incidents of false allegations being used to eliminate tedious shared parenting.

What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?

To examine more carefully what is going on here, let’s start by looking at the latest addition to this sorry reckoning. I’m referring to the finding published in New Statesman last month: that many young women don’t like men. A Merlin Strategy poll of young Britons aged 18 to 30 found three times more young women than young men held a negative view of the opposite sex. Only about 50 per cent of women had a positive view of men compared to 72 per cent of men feeling positive about women. For women under 25, it was even starker: only around one-third (35 per cent) reported a positive view of men.

This applies particularly to professional and managerial young women of whom, according to some polls, just 36 per cent hold a positive view of men, compared with 61 per cent of working-class women. In other words, the contempt for men is most concentrated in educated, middle-class women – precisely the demographic that has benefited most from feminist gains and whose prospects are objectively the strongest.

The contempt for men is hardly surprising – that’s what they have been taught. Mary Harrington, a British journalist and cultural critic who writes on Substack, frequently critiques what she calls the ‘femosphere’ – the online feminist spaces where women bond through shared grievances about men.

‘The online feminist scene often feels like one long group therapy session for women to compare notes on how awful men are,’ she writes, suggesting this makes men the universal scapegoat, where ordinary male behaviour is routinely framed as toxic or oppressive, while women’s collective resentment is rewarded and amplified. ‘Casual, low-level male-bashing has become the background hum of progressive online culture.’

Encountering these women isn’t much fun for men. Reddit recently published this telling comment: ‘It’s exhausting. You might be having a decent conversation, then she drops a casual “men suck” comment like it’s small talk. Feels like you’re starting every interaction with a presumption of guilt.’...

Not only does this toxic climate encourage women to be wary of men, but growing up in a hate-fuelled online sewer takes a toll on their mental health. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been warning that the toxic world of social media would lead to a rise in mental health problems – particularly in girls and young women. ‘Since the early 2010s, young people across the developed world are becoming more anxious, depressed and lonely. The increases were even greater in young women,’ he said.

Recent large-scale surveys (Ipsos 2025–26 across 31 countries, Gallup 2025) are showing Gen Z women currently report the highest recorded levels of anxiety, persistent sadness/hopelessness, and depression of any female generation at the same age.

Around 33 per cent of young women feel anxious or worried about the future ‘almost all the time’; 40 per cent of Gen Z workers feel anxious or depressed at least a few times per week, according to recent 2025 surveys.

Not much fun for their partners. Last year Psychology Today had a stark warning for men about these women as marriage prospects. ‘The saying “happy wife, happy life” may have some validity, but the lesser-known saying “anxious wife, miserable life” has research-approved validation. […] The more neurotic the spouse is, the less happy the relationship – but women’s neuroticism seems to carry more weight in the overall marital happiness equation.’

Then there’s the intriguing issue of married women turning off the tap, leaving sex-starved husbands as the norm. For as long as anyone can remember, men were shamed into showing up economically. Society has absolutely nothing to say to women who stop showing up sexually. One obligation was enforced by church, law, and community for centuries. The other is now abrogated on the grounds of bodily autonomy.

So here we have the portrait of the modern woman as marriage prospect: miserable, anxious, politically radicalised, contemptuous of men, often sexually rejecting, and trained to see menace in ordinary male behaviour. And yet the puzzled chorus from commentators, economists, and policymakers continues: Why won’t men commit? Why won’t they work?

The approved explanations are dutifully trotted out. The economic story: men have been displaced by automation and globalisation. The health story: opioids, disability, mental illness. The educational story: men are falling behind women in universities and therefore in the job market. The cultural story, favoured by progressive commentators: toxic masculinity is preventing men from adapting to a modern service economy. All of these contain a grain of truth. But they do not account for what is really going on. The obvious explanation – the one staring out of every data table – is intentionally ignored.

Marriage was the primary incentive for sustained male economic effort. It has always been – Ehrenreich knew it in 1983, and the economists have now confirmed it. There’s an economic research paper – The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men – which establishes that the prospect of forming and providing for a family constitutes a critical male labour supply incentive, and that the decline of stable marriage directly removes it. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that declining marriage rates are responsible for roughly half the drop in the hours men work.

Remove the marriage, and you remove the responsibility. The data has been telling us this for decades.

But here is what nobody in the mainstream conversation will say: it is not only that marriage has become too costly and too legally treacherous for men – though it has. It is that many young women themselves have become, to put it plainly, not worth having. A third of young British women don’t trust men. In some polls, more than half of educated young women view men negatively. They may arrive at relationships pre-loaded with grievance, fluent in the language of red flags and emotional labour, primed by algorithms that have fed them a diet of male failure and female outrage since adolescence. When this happens, they are, by their own account, anxious, miserable, and politically furious.

What rational man, surveying this landscape, concludes that what his life is missing is a legally booby-trapped commitment to a woman primed to be impossible to keep happy.

Ehrenreich feared in 1983 that if the shame mechanism collapsed, male productivity would follow. She was right. What she could not have anticipated was the other half of the equation – that the feminist revolution would produce not a generation of fulfilled, generous, companionable women, but one that is, by every available measure, angrier and unhappier than any before it. The yoke is off. The men have looked at what’s on offer. And many have, with considerable rationality, decided to go and play video games instead."

Links - 25th June 2026 (1 - Canadian Politics [including Alberta Separatism])

2026-06-25T09:04:00.000+08:00

Rob Anderson on X - "The usual mindless drivel from Canada’s Chief Laurentian elite representative @acoyne Andrew, let me try and spell it out for you yet again.
1. Trudeau waged a sustained economic attack on Alberta with a string of destructive laws and policies that cost Albertans hundreds of billions in investments and hundreds of thousands of jobs while dealing with a cost of living crisis fueled by your buddy, Justin’s, open borders policies and failed Keynesian monetary theories.
2. Trudeau was replaced by Carney and, as part of Energy MOU, retracted or amended the 9 bad laws you refer to.
3. As a result, we have seen tens of billions of new private sector investment announcements in Alberta with much more to be announced shortly. We knuckle draggers in Alberta call this the initial signs of an economic boom (you are forgiven if you have forgotten what that looks like).
4. Premier Smith sees this flood of investment and jobs - stemming from the repeal of most of the terrible legislation under the MOU - as evidence that we can still make Canada work for Alberta and is fighting to make that case to Albertans despite your - and those of your ilk - continuing your feckless attacks on her.
The reason for the block Andrew is I simply don’t value your opinion on the affairs of Alberta. You show your disdain for our province at every opportunity and I don’t need you clogging my feed with your 20x a day posts. But I will instead merely mute you so you can still follow my posts as I don’t wish to hurt your feelings. Have fun on that wonderfully balanced CBC At-Issue panel trying to unpack the important issues distressing Albertans with your fellow Toronto/Montreal panelists."

Meme - "Hey susan m, Today's commentators and politicians are demanding Alberta prove its loyalty to Canada - but their own records tell a different story. First, former environment minister Steven Guilbeault questioned whether Premier Smith is "a reliable partner when it comes to supporting Canada" because she is pursuing a referendum. But political donation records show Gu donated to the Parti Quebecois while it was actively pushing for a third independence referendum. Questioning Smith's loyalty to Canada hits differently when you once bankrolled Quebec separatists. Next, CBC panellist Andrew Coyne now dismisses Alberta's sovereignty referendum as reckless political theatre. But writing in the National Post in 2014, he praised B.C.'s transit tax referendum, called asking voters whether they consent to higher taxes "only democratic,' and celebrated Swiss-style direct democracy as civic modernization. The only thing to have changed is which province is holding the vote. Finally, on CBC's Power & Politics, Quebec correspondent Martin Patriquin described Alberta separatists as people motivated purely by racial resentment over immigration - and nobody on the panel challenged it. Meanwhile, CBC has previously treated Quebec politicians' use of racial slurs as a matter of "academic and journalistic freedoms." One province's political frustration is racism; the other's is a nuanced question of rights. Let's set the record straight. The Alberta Fact Check Team"

Fact check: Calling Alberta independence 'MAGA nihilism' is easier than addressing why Albertans are angry - "Calgary commentator Jen Gerson says the Alberta independence movement is “a kind of religious movement,” driven by “nihilism” and influenced by “broader MAGA” politics. That’s a convenient way to dismiss hundreds of thousands of Albertans without having to grapple with why so many people have lost faith in Confederation in the first place. Here’s the reality. The independence movement didn’t appear because Albertans suddenly woke up one morning and decided to cosplay as Texas Republicans. It grew after decades of pipeline cancellations, equalization fights, federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction, emissions caps targeting Alberta’s economy, and a political system where Quebec is routinely accommodated while Alberta is told to sit down and pay up. Even Gerson herself has repeatedly acknowledged Alberta’s legitimate grievances. In previous writing, she openly admitted Albertans are frustrated by being “condescended to by Eastern pricks,” criticized the federal government’s refusal to meaningfully address Alberta concerns after the 2021 equalization referendum, and acknowledged that failed reform efforts push voters toward “ever-more-radical positions.” That’s not “MAGA nihilism.” That’s what happens when people conclude constitutional reform inside Canada is politically impossible. And contrary to Gerson’s framing, Alberta separatism is not some fringe online cult detached from reality... if Canada’s commentariat keeps responding to those frustrations with sneering psychoanalysis instead of serious engagement, they shouldn’t be shocked when separatist sentiment keeps growing"

Reforming Parliament seat distribution would be more fair: report | National Post - "A new report proposes establishing a 350-seat Parliament in an effort to correct for imbalances in the House of Commons that have long left Ontario, Alberta and B.C. underrepresented compared with other provinces. In the study, the Calgary-based Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy points out that Alberta currently has the lowest representation among provinces in the House, with one member of Parliament for every 134,057 citizens, when compared against 2025 population numbers. British Columbia has one MP per 133,077, while Ontario has one per 132,645. That is well higher than Prince Edward Island (44,820), Quebec (116,816), Saskatchewan (89,351) and other Canadian provinces. “Political representation in Canada at present is not representative of the actual populations in each province”... The report comes as resentments over a range of issues — including a lack of federal representation in the House of Commons and Senate — has fed separatist sentiments in Alberta in particular. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has proposed a referendum in October that will ask, among other things, whether Canada should amend the Canadian constitution to “abolish the unelected federal Senate.”... The imbalance in the House of Commons or Senate is the result of a number of legal provisions, including a clause that stipulates that provinces should not have fewer MPs than they have senators. That, combined with another clause that ensures provinces have no fewer MPs than they had under a pre-set benchmark (which the Liberal government recently updated to 2019 levels), has led to “chronic underrepresentation” among some provinces"
Asher Honickman on X - "One way to achieve rep-by-pop more promptly would be to meaningfully increase the number of MPs. This could also have the salutary benefit of making MPs more independent. The other needed reform is amending the constitutional allocation of senators. The west is chronically underrepresented due to a population distribution more than a century out of date."

Jack Mintz: Tactics divide Albertans on 'stay' or 'leave' - "Although Alberta remains the richest province in Canada, with per capita GDP of $71,000 in 2025, that’s a noticeable deterioration in its standard of living since 2014, when real per capita GDP peaked at $81,100. Though the oil price crash at the end of 2014 hurt the province, prices recovered in later years. But per capita GDP continued to fall as resource development stalled. Albertans and Quebecers are not the only people to have considered separation . Dissolution has been common the world round, with the number of sovereign states rising from 50 in 1945 to about 200 in 2025. Even so, there are benefits from being part of a bigger country. Large countries can more easily share the cost of public goods like defence, the legal system and foreign relations. There can also be better co-ordination of local public goods, including power transmission, transportation and communication networks. Larger markets free of tariffs and non-tariff barriers and with easy labour and capital mobility encourage more competition and economies of scale in trade. On the other hand, smaller countries may be more homogeneous and better able to cater to a population’s political and cultural preferences. One widely quoted 2011 study found that a breakup is more likely when populations are less culturally homogenous and more distant from each other. The dissolution of empires (e.g., the British, Ottoman and Soviet) saw many new countries emerge. After 10 years, the loss in per capita GDP can be striking — 24 per cent on average estimated in a 2019 study. But some breakups have led to long-run prosperity, especially if the new countries have access to large markets and democratize. Norway and Sweden’s breakup in 1907, Malaysia’s expulsion of Singapore in 1965 and the “velvet divorce” of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993 are examples. An independent Alberta presumably would have access to the huge American market. Alberta’s grievances have only grown this past decade . Federal climate policies blocked oil and gas development, fanning frustration. With Ottawa making little effort to clean up its fiscal act, deficit spending and the civil service grew rapidly. Top federal tax rates were hiked , with Albertans bearing the greatest burden. Despite these anti-growth federal policies, Alberta transferred almost $130 billion through the federal budget to other provinces from 2015 to 2024. Last year the give was $19 billion or four per cent of Alberta’s GDP. That’s much more than from any other province. Second-richest Ontario is still receiving equalization payments. Though equalization is only part of that inter-provincial transfer it remains a permanent sore point, with grants now tied to Canada’s GDP growth rate. High taxes and uncontrolled federal spending run contrary to Alberta’s small government philosophy yet Albertans feel powerless to influence federal policies. In this country, unlike Australia, Germany and the United States, provinces do not have a regionally representative body at the federal level, which means they need to protect their own interests. Albertans disagree on how best to get their grievances answered. Rather than leave Canada, Premier Danielle Smith wants more control over immigration, and a separate police force and pension and tax system. She and other “stayers” hope the province can have more control over its destiny within Confederation. But the “grand bargain” to build a “ decarbonized ” oil pipeline to the West Coast comes at substantial cost in the form of higher carbon taxes and a risky and expensive investment in carbon storage. Those who want to leave believe federal policies will never change. Any governing party must draw support from Quebec and Ontario, which have different cultures than Alberta. Perceptions also differ regionally. The same Angus Reid poll mentioned above reports only two per cent of Quebec and Ontario respondents believe Alberta gets less out of Confederation that it pays in."

Judge far too quick to toss out separation petition with 300K signatures | National Post - "in its Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation v Alberta decision, the Alberta Court of King’s Bench quashed the province’s secession referendum process. In particular, the judge quashed the chief electoral officer’s decision to allow signatures to be gathered to call for a referendum. Whatever your view on Alberta secession, the decision warrants attention for the readiness of the judge to prohibit a democratic process based on Indigenous rights claims... The duty to consult applies specifically to executive action — meaning actions taken by the operating arms of government to implement laws and policies. In 2018, the Supreme Court of Canada held in the Mikisew Cree case that the duty to consult does not apply to legislative action. In other words, when a provincial legislature or Parliament is working on drafting and passing new laws, legislators do not have to consult with Indigenous communities. Any decision otherwise, the Court held, would interfere too much with the workings of the parliamentary system... In the decision on the secession petition, the judge mechanically applied the duty to consult test used since Haida and ignored that fundamental democratic issues were in play. While referenda do not have the same prominence as Parliament itself, they are a vital means of democratic participation in fundamental decisions to which they are applied. And gathering of signatures to call for a referendum is a vital act of democratic participation. More than 300,000 signatures cannot be thrown in the garbage based on an unreflective application of a legal test to circumstances outside its appropriate sphere. Don’t get me wrong. I think clear legal tests are important, and they help to uphold the rule of law. We cannot have judges operating based on personal policy preferences but must have courts of law. But judges must exercise judgment when the circumstances of a case are fundamentally different. Judges must explain carefully why the rule does or does not apply, referencing deeper principles of the legal system. A simplistic application of rules in inappropriate circumstances shows insufficient application of judgment. This decision is in some ways eerily reminiscent of what happened in the Cowichan decision where a trial judge in British Columbia mechanistically applied the rules of the doctrine of Aboriginal title to the new circumstances of a title claim that included areas of private land. The result has been chaos, as British Columbians wonder what becomes of their systems of property ownership. When judges face the prospect of bringing down a whole system of property ownership or the prospect of interfering in fundamental democratic processes, they must exercise judgment. Those reading the judgments deserve more than a few lines of mechanical test application to believe that the courts are considering all interests and are acting as courts of both law and justice."

Viva Frei on X - "Amazing that an Alberta Court struck down the Albertan separation petition on the basis they didn’t consult with indigenous communities, while Canadian courts simultaneously ignored indigenous groups claiming the federal government couldn’t slaughter the B.C. ostriches because it was on unceded indigenous land. Motivation is the master of reason. And the Canadian government and court system is a hypocritical criminal organization."

Meme - Andy Ujku-Dardania: "Similar chicanery they used against Quebec in 1995. The indigenous oppose Alberta, Quebec or any kind of independence from Canada because they know these movements are largely the effort of White people fed up with the Anti-White prison that is an increasingly brown Canada. Out of spite they want to trap White people into a brown hellscape. They also know that in an independent Alberta they wouldn't get away with the kind of "reparations" guilt tripping they do in Canada. The gravy train would stop and they'd have to work for a living. Be that as it may, Albertans should move ahead with any and all means to attain independence from Ottawa. They'll be much better off without the burden of having to carry both the feather and dot variety of Indians. It's White coded and that's why it's good. Go for it!"
Polymarket: "JUST IN: Canada court blocks Alberta separatists' bid to force an independence vote over failure to consult Indigenous people."
Left wingers only quote "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable" when they don't get their way. But if they disagree with your cause, they send the military after you

What they’re saying an independent Alberta would look like - "During the heyday of Quebec separatism in the 1980s and 1990s, the usual line from Quebec nationalists was that Canada is a fine country, it’s just that they don’t want to be part of it. Alberta separatism is different in that the idea is very much to pull down the rafters as they leave. The Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), the leading champion for separation, is closely aligned with a similar secessionist group in Saskatchewan. They’ve also been active in forging links with the Parti Québécois to assist each other’s respective secession plans. Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon (who is the favourite to become the next Quebec premier) met with APP leaders last year, and announced afterwards that if their referendum succeeded, he would be the first to recognize Alberta independence... While it’s possible to find Quebec sovereigntists who claim that they would be richer as an independent nation, the usual pitch has been that it doesn’t matter. Quebecers might take an economic hit from leaving Canada, but it’s a small price to pay for freedom. As the name suggests, the Alberta Prosperity Project’s singular pitch is that secession will make everybody richer... All this extra wealth would come from two places: Lower taxes and ramped-up oil and gas development... One chronic issue with Alberta’s current oil economy is that virtually all of its exports go to the United States, thus allowing the Americans to leverage their monopsony into paying a lower price. A second international border would make this situation worse, not better... Law professor Bruce Pardy, a longtime proponent for Alberta secession, this week weighed in on the treaty issue with an online post writing that “independence is a repudiation of the existing constitutional order,” including treaty and Aboriginal rights. “Independence means a fresh start, and a chance to fix old ideas that no longer make sense”"

Support for Alberta separatism at a 5-year high: poll - "27 per cent of decided voters in Alberta would vote for the province to separate from Canada. This is a seven point increase from December 2025 and a record-high over the five years Pollara has spent tracking support for independence among Albertans. A further 15 per cent say they might vote to separate as a way to “send a message to Ottawa,” meaning that as many as 42 per cent of voters could be in play for the separatists in an independence referendum... Interestingly, a majority of Albertans who’d vote to separate, 58 per cent, also said they’re proud Canadians."

Unapologetically Albertan Facebook - "In 1995, when Quebec talked about leaving Canada, the country responded with love. Unity rallies. Open arms. “We need you. Please stay.” Today, Alberta raises the same constitutional question — and we’re called traitors. What changed? Quebec challenged Canada’s identity. Alberta challenges Canada’s power and money. Quebec was culturally indispensable. Alberta is economically indispensable. One was wooed. The other is shamed. Same right. Same country. Very different reaction. That’s not about unity. That’s about control."

Michelle Rempel Garner on X: "In defence of frustrated Albertans." / X - "28% of Albertans said they would vote for their province to begin the process of separating from Canada. Two additional findings stand out in the data: support for independence in Alberta is now comparable to that in Quebec (where 31% expressed similar views), and Albertans are more likely than Quebecers to cite historical mistreatment within Confederation as their primary reason for supporting a “yes” vote... the federal Liberal government has patently ignored the core warning we wrote: heed the concerns of frustrated Albertans who are saying they will be treated as equals within Confederation, or they will seek independence... successive Liberal governments have ignored this wisdom with clocklike repetition. For example, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s National Energy Program in the early 1980s devastated Alberta’s economy, sparking widespread resentment of the federal Liberal government. More recently, under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, federal legislation such as Bill C-69 (colloquially known in Alberta as the “no more pipelines” bill) effectively kneecapped Alberta’s vital energy sector, while operationalizing a post-national, no-identity vision of Canada. And over the past year, Prime Minister Mark Carney and his caucus have done precious little to change any of this. For example, Bill C-69 remains in place today, and so does the perception among many quarters that the federal Liberal government doesn’t give a flying fudge about addressing the negative impact it’s had on the province’s economy. And so, warnings about separatist-driven instability and lost investment are now met by some with a simple reply: we would rather face instability we control than endure the instability the federal Liberals perpetually create for us. Obviously, it is insane that the federal Liberals and their fellow travellers have let the situation escalate to this point. It’s also a mistake to think that energy policy is the sole driver of the rise in Albertan separatist sentiment. There are many other irritants which contribute to it , too, like the underrepresentation of a modern, populous Alberta in Parliament, and the lack of federal recognition of the importance of Western heritage to Canada (try to find a Western heritage display in the National Art Gallery, for example). But the common denominator among the litany of concerns is that the federal Liberal government does not view the concerns of Albertans as being worth listening to... Albertans understand better than most, as the largest net contributor to equalization, that in order to work, Confederation was always going to be a give and take situation. But a common refrain you will hear in Alberta today is that there seems to have been far more taking than there has been giving. And so, for any Canadian who values national unity, understand that it is deeply counterproductive to disparage the thousands of Albertans who are signing separatist petitions. The wiser course is to take stock of valid concerns and act decisively to address them. A strong Canada has always depended on a strong Alberta, a reality that has never been clearer than it is today. As Canadians face an unstable geopolitical landscape without adequate critical energy infrastructure, Alberta’s role as an economic engine and energy powerhouse is more important to the country than ever before... it’s worth noting that there has never been a national unity crisis under a Conservative government. Having served in the cabinet of former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the working ethos of his leadership was to ensure that no region was pitted against another. At this juncture, Mr. Carney and his caucus would be well served to immediately try this approach for once."

Lorne Gunter: Poll finds many Canadians misunderstand equalization - "Canadians outside the two provinces want both to remain part of Canada. Overwhelmingly. But they want Alberta to remain even more than they want Quebec to — 79 per cent to 71 per cent. Why does this result give me a smile? Because all my life, even before I was an adult, central Canadian media, politicians and academics — the so-called Laurentian elite — have quivered at any mention of separation by Quebec. You want more money? Here it is. More power over your own affairs? Happy to oblige. Special constitutional status? No problem. Just please, please, please don’t go. No Quebec demand has ever been too great. No threat ever seen as disloyal. Meanwhile, every time Alberta suggested equalization payments were unfair. Or immigration should have greater provincial input (as it does in Quebec). Or the province should have the same kind of input into federal judicial appointments Quebec already enjoys. Well, coming from Alberta, that has been seen too much. The province should be ashamed for asking. Its attitude is entirely disloyal to Canadian ideals. So it struck me as funny that after nearly 60 years of elite kowtowing to Quebec and scoffing at Alberta, more ordinary Canadians would rather we stay than Quebec. Notably, the survey found, Quebecers are much more likely to want to block Alberta separatism than the other way around — 72 per cent to 58 per cent... Canadians outside of Alberta and outside of Quebec seem to understand the disproportionate fiscal contribution Alberta makes to the country. To the pollsters’ question, “Are there any provinces you believe receive more than they give as part of Confederation,” only Quebecers thought Alberta was a net recipient. Fifty-nine per cent of Quebecers thought Alberta received more than it contributed, exceeded only by Saskatchewan (68 per cent). The province Quebecers felt got the rawest deal from Confederation? Their own, of course. Only 22 per cent of Quebecers believe Quebec receives more than it pays into the country, despite Quebec being far and away the largest recipient of federal transfers. Far and away. For instance, of the $26.3 billion Ottawa will pay out this year to the “have-not” provinces, nearly 53 per cent ($13.6 billion) will go to Quebec. Of $108.4 billion in total transfers this year (including health, education and social services), $30.2 billion (28 per cent) will go to Quebec despite it having less than 22 per cent of the national population. Yet, Quebecers live under the delusion that somehow their province is being ripped off by the rest of the country. No wonder the argument that they should allow pipelines across their territory in return for all the money they receive falls on deaf ears. They don’t actually believe they are receiving that much. The perception of Alberta’s contribution is not great elsewhere, except in the West. A plurality of Ontarians (37 per cent) believe Alberta receives more than it contributes, while an equal percentage think we give more than we receive."

Meme - Steven Guilbeault: "Imagine one second that the Qc separatist movement reached out to France to help with Qc separatism, people in English Canada would be rightly outraged... This is no different, @Dave Eby is right!"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "In 1995 the Quebec separatist movement did just that:"

Dusty Rose on X - "Quebec gets ~$14 BILLION in equalization payments every year, half the national program, while charging the lowest electricity rates in Canada. This Fraser Institute study shows why: by keeping Hydro-Québec prices artificially low, Quebec deliberately reduces its measured “fiscal capacity” and qualifies for way more federal transfers. Alberta? We get $0. We pay massive federal taxes from our incomes and oil/gas sector (which gets fully clawed back in the formula), yet subsidize this system. A modest hydro price increase in Quebec could save Canadian taxpayers billions -- if Ottawa fixed the broken “fixed growth rule.” This is exactly why equalization feels rigged against Alberta. Time to get out of it. #cdnpoli #abpoli #AlbertaIndependence"

Louise Arbour alienates the West - " With every Governor General appointment comes an opportunity. In July 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used it to smooth over an Indigenous relations maelstrom that began swirling in May of that year, when a B.C. First Nation announced that it found 215 “graves” (later corrected to “potential graves”) at the site of the old Kamloops residential school. It’s no coincidence that he settled on the appointment of Mary Simon, a half-Inuk woman, to symbolize his reconciliation efforts and show the community that they had a stake in Canada’s highest offices, too. In 2026 — and billions of reconciliatory dollars later — it’s not the Indigenous who are most unhappy within Confederation but Western Canadians. Between one-fifth and one-third of Albertans favour separation, and the numbers out of Saskatchewan are close. And that’s just the crest of the alienation wave: many more federalist Albertans are frustrated with how they’re treated by Ottawa. Which is why the appointment of a Governor General from out west should have been a top priority. Instead, we’re getting Louise Arbour, the most Laurentian of Laurentian elites, whose resume entries range from Canadian Supreme Court judge to United Nations Eurocrat. At a time like this, especially considering how office appointments have served as olive branches to communities in pain in the past, naming Arbour to the role is profoundly alienating to Western Canada. The last time the region had the pride of putting forth a Governor General was more than 20 years ago, when Ray Hnatyshyn of Saskatchewan held the post. A lawyer, former member of Parliament, and former attorney general of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, he certainly had the practical understanding of the role upon his swearing-in in 1990. He was in office until 1995, serving alongside Mulroney as well as Prime Ministers Kim Campbell and Jean Chrétien. Subsequent Governors General originally came from New Brunswick, Hong Kong, Haiti, Ontario and, twice, Quebec. Of course, representation shouldn’t be the only criterion that determines who should fill the post. In fact, in an ideal world, the Governor General would be selected based on their commitment to service to the Crown, and their constitutional knowledge of the role, which is why we previously recommended appointing someone from the military leadership. Alas, the reality is representation does figure into the appointment, particularly with Liberals, so given the length of the drought since there was a Governor General from the West, it deserved extra consideration. That shouldn’t have been hard for the Liberals to give, seeing how they are the experts in breaking the population down into statistics and increasingly granular sub-categories that come with new entitlements to group privileges as a matter of achieving equity. Liberals have expanded bilingualism requirements throughout public offices and the judiciary to the point of locking out the best candidates from the West (Arbour, of course, is bilingual). Racial and gender expectations have dominated the conversation when it comes to appointments, hires and promotions. It’s their guiding principle. But the goal of Canada was never to create total equity between every sub-dimension of the population. Indeed, the primary balance struck by Confederation was the regional one. House of Commons seats, Senate seats and Supreme Court seats were all allocated to achieve regional representation first; secondary to that in Confederation’s structure were guarantees of religious and linguistic freedom, with a specific mind to protecting English, French and the forms of Christianity practiced by those early Canadians. It would not be an aberration to select a Governor General with regional representation in mind; really, it’s consistent with how the country is constituted. The intense focus on non-regional identity in the role is an anomaly of recent decades, and a distraction from deeper tradition. Regional representation is also already deeply lopsided elsewhere in our country. Ontario and Quebec dominate both houses of Parliament, even though the Senate is supposed to offer regional representation. An Alberta Governor General could have a gone a long way to at least acknowledging this profound imbalance. When Mary Simon was appointed, much fanfare was made about her identity. She spoke of “climate action” and of reconciliation being “a way of life.” She perpetuated the false narrative that actual graves had been found in Kamloops (no radar anomaly on the site was ever confirmed): “I think the day they found those unmarked graves of children that died at residential schools, that was the day the wound really opened up,” she told CBC in the first months of her term. Now that immigration ranks among the top concerns of Canadians, we have Arbour, a longtime believer in a multicultural utopia who favours a radical interpretation of Canada’s refugee obligations and sees major demographic change by way of immigration as an inevitability that is racist to oppose. Her views are standard fare among Laurentians, another signal that alienates the West. We’ve been deprived of a present in which a solemn, tradition-respecting, federalist westerner heads to Rideau Hall for a GG reset. It’s only one entry on the list of reasons for feeling alienated, but boy, is that list getting long."

Shocking anti-white comments of woke Canadian judge who will step into top government position that will see her work closely with King Charles - "In a July 2022 interview, Arbour had been asked about how she would 'rehabilitate' the military when she called for greater diversity within its ranks. In her response, she urged the Canadian Armed Forces to take after advocacy groups, such as the Canadian Human Rights Commission. 'It could also bring in experts from the civil corporate sector or send cadets to civilian universities, where diversity is years ahead of what we'll ever see in military colleges,' Arbour told Canadian publication Maclean's. She added that similar recruitment patterns could supposedly shape an institution, such as the military, before commenting on the armed forces' demographics. 'If you just recruit white boys who like guns but don't like women or anybody who doesn't look like them, you'll perpetuate that culture,' Arbour said."

Links - 24th June 2026 (3 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

2026-06-24T21:15:00.000+08:00

The abuse of Helen Mirren shows how deranged the anti-Zionists have become - "A video has emerged on social media of Dame Helen being assailed one night in London by a passer-by. “It’s Helen Mirren, the avowed Zionist,” shouts the man to the video he has clearly decided to film as he sees her. Addressing the viewers of the video he knows he is going to post, he continued: “She said, ‘Israel should last forever because of the Holocaust.’ And she was very happy the Palestinians’ houses were gone… You’re an evil Zionist bitch.” Then the man turns to her husband, Taylor Hackford: “And you and all. F––k you and all.” Dame Helen remains composed throughout this verbal assault, which would have been frightening for anyone, let alone for someone aged 80. Her husband, meanwhile – also in his 80s – responds with a restrained but clear: “F––k off.”"
Damn Zionists harassing "pro-Palestine" activists! They need to be jailed for violating their freedom of speech!
Left wingers love to claim that rights are not like cake - more for one doesn't mean less for another. Yet, they hate Zionism so much. Ironic.

Slovenia embroiled in Palestine flag wars - "Slovenia’s new pro-Israel prime minister has prompted a flag war with his country’s president by taking down his predecessor’s Palestinian flag. Minutes after taking office on Thursday, Janez Janša, a Donald Trump-admiring nationalist and Eurosceptic, removed the flag from the government palace in Ljubljana, where it flew alongside the Slovenian, EU and Ukrainian flags, to signal a “new chapter” in relations with Israel. The next day, Nataša Pirc Musar, Slovenia’s president, announced the Palestinian banner would be raised outside her palace for a week."
He didn't even fly the Israeli flag. To terrorism supporters, if you are not for them, you are against them

RC on X - "#BREAKING: This is a 14-year-old Palestinian Terrorist who tried to stab IDF soldiers. Pro Hamas edited the video to make it look like they killed him for no reason. This is the full true unedited version. @HamasAtrocities @Ahmad4ISRL @IDF @Israel"
Terrorism supporters just keep lying

The Telegraph on X - "Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, has signed an open letter demanding that a database be created of 2,000 dual British-Israeli nationals called up for service since the terror attacks by Hamas on October 7 2023 🔗:"
Sebastian Milbank on X - "Incredible how quickly Zack becomes enthusiastic for government databases of migrants, border controls and “you wouldn’t want to live next to em’” rhetoric as soon as Israelis are involved"

Zack Polanski wants a Jew register. What could be more sinister than that? - "You will notice one obvious element to this demand. There are wars on every continent. There are accusations of war crimes in all those conflicts. But Polanski has said not a word about British dual citizens – or even those of sole UK nationality – who have fought in any of those wars, either ongoing or historic. I wait, for example, for Polanski to demand a list of dual-nationality Britons who fought in one of the most brutal post-1945 conflicts, the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence. The nine-month conflict led to the death of up to three million Bengalis and the displacement of 10 million refugees into India. This is not merely historic. War crime investigations are still going on. But no Israelis were involved (let’s be honest: no Jews). So Polanski is silent – not least because many new Green voters are drawn from those communities. By signing the letter, Polanski doesn’t only demand that Britons who have fought in Gaza be put on a database. He goes far beyond that. The letter calls says “travellers with Israeli travel documents or arriving from an origin of Tel Aviv airport” should be subject to “potential secondary screenings at ports of entry”. For Polanski then, any Israeli should be marked out for special screening. As for the allegation of genocide against Israel, it is, at the very least, hotly contested. But there is a well-founded allegation of genocide against the Chinese in its treatment of the Uyghurs. Does Polanski demand that any Chinese national arriving in the UK is deemed a suspected war criminal? Of course he doesn’t. If Jews aren’t involved, neither Polanski nor any of his fellow Greens could give a damn. Polanski may be Jewish, but his party’s strategy could hardly be clearer"

Ahmed Al-Khalidi on X - "People love pretending Arab anti-Zionism is some ancient, organic, authentic movement. It’s not. It’s a Frankenstein ideology built from Soviet lies, Arab dictators’ excuses, and Islamist slogans. And It collapses the moment you actually examine it. The Soviet Union needed a Middle Eastern villain after Israel leaned West. So Moscow manufactured a narrative and sold it to the world:
Zionism = racism
Israel = colonial white settlers
Jews returning to their homeland = “imperialism”
Palestinians = anti-imperialist revolutionaries
None of this was honest. It was Cold War propaganda weaponized to gain influence in the Arab world. And the slogans you hear today? Still the exact same Soviet talking points. Arab regimes loved the Soviet framing because it did one thing perfectly: It erased their responsibility.
Corruption? Not the leaders’ fault. It's Zionism. Economic collapse? Not decades of incompetence. It's imperialism. Lack of innovation, education, freedom, justice, or progress? Of course not. It's always the same magical enemy. “Israel is the reason your leaders keep failing.”
It’s the biggest political scam in the region’s history, repeated for 70+ years. Here’s where it becomes truly ridiculous.
Communism is atheist. Arab ideology is religious. Communism hates nationalism. Arab ideology is obsessed with nationalism. Communism demands class revolution. Arab regimes protected elites and dictators. These worldviews should be enemies. Instead, they all chant the same slogan: “Down with Zionism.” That tells you everything. The ideology isn’t honest. It’s useful. Useful for regimes that need a distraction. Useful for militants who need recruits. Useful for activists who need a villain for their worldview. From the USSR came ready-made intellectual garbage:
“Zionism is racism.”
“Israel is apartheid.”
“Israel is a colonial settler project.”
“Palestinians are liberation fighters.”
Arab leaders copy–pasted these slogans because they were loud, emotional, and required zero self-critique. They replaced genuine introspection with a propaganda script. If communists, Islamists, Arab dictators, monarchs, Western radicals, campus Marxists, tribal elites, and corrupt militias all magically agree on the same anti-Zionist narrative… that alone should make every rational person suspicious. These people agree on NOTHING except this one convenient lie. Why? Because blaming Israel is the easiest way to avoid admitting the truth: The region’s wounds are mostly self-inflicted, not Zionist-made. Anti-Zionism became the perfect political anesthesia: It numbs the pain while killing the patient."

Committee to fight Jewish hate includes former defender of Hezbollah and Yasser Arafat : r/OntarioNews - "Yasser Arafat who referred to Jews as "dogs, filth, dirt"? This will go well, I'm sure."
"Says someone who probably complains about them immigrants taking over except if they take your home with a gun to your head and say it’s there home now you’ll love them right?"
"Do you genuinely believe that anyone advocating against hatred toward Jews is a bigot? Wth"

Committee to fight Jewish hate includes former defender of Hezbollah and Yasser Arafat : r/OntarioNews - "It is like having members of the KKK on a committee to address black racism."
"Or as having an israeli on a anti islamophobia board."
"Not really. Israel isn’t Islamophobic. There are plenty of Muslim Israelis and Israel has normal diplomatic relations with plenty of Muslim-majority countries."
"How? Did they accept that they lost a war, agree on a boarder and not lob rockets over it?"
"In Egypt’s case, that’s (in the most simplified explanation) almost exactly what happened."

Hezbollah rejects ceasefire plan declared in Washington, Israel keeps up strikes
Damn peace-hating Zionists!

Jewish guests faced with ‘anti-Semitic message’ on Travelodge TV screen - "Two visibly Jewish guests reportedly checked in to Travelodge Manor House in north London to find the words “Free Palestine” displayed on their television... In the video circulating online, a man turns the screen on to show a pitch which said “Welcome Guest” and “Free Palestine”. “This behaviour bears all the hallmarks of targeted anti-Semitism,” Somrim said, adding: “We urge Travelodge to investigate.” The neighbourhood watch said the guest had alleged “hostile treatment” by a member of staff. It has been alleged that a staff member at the hotel refused to look at the Jewish man or properly serve him."
Left wingers will claim that this is anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. But they also claim that not all Jews are Zionists, so you can't say anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. Yet, assuming that Jews must be Zionists and so targeting them with a "Free Palestine" message is anti-Semitic. There's really no way to claim this wasn't anti-Semitic (unless the guests, for some reason, made it clear that they supported Israel, in which case this would just be grossly inappropriate for non-racial/religious reasons instead).

Abdul El Sayed 'struggles' with the Jewish state's right to exist - "Abdul El Sayed, a progressive Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan, told an audience that he “struggles” to answer questions about whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. My first reaction to people who question whether Israel has “a right to exist” is usually, “Go pound sand.” Israel is a nuclear power with one of the most advanced militaries, economies, and technological infrastructures in the world. And yet, for some reason, and it’s not difficult to guess what that reason is, people are constantly pondering whether a Jewish state should exist. They exist because they fought to exist. But El Sayed’s reasoning exposes a confused and warped worldview. “The question becomes,” he goes on, “how do you sustain democracy if you don’t have a Jewish majority? And then to say it’s Jewish by power, are there particular offices that have to be held by Jewish people? If so, what kind of Jewish people?” First of all, El Sayed has it backward. Israel sustains a democracy because it’s a Jewish state. I’ll tell you how you don’t “sustain a democracy”: by giving the Palestinians a state or any “right of return” to Israel proper. That would destroy any semblance of “liberal values,” tout de suite. Forget the nihilistic tyranny of Hamas, the regime that took power after Israel gave Gaza autonomy in 2006. Someone should ask El Sayed if he struggles with the fact that Fatah, the “moderate” wing of Palestinian politics, hasn’t put on an election in the “West Bank” for nearly 20 years. It has good reasons, of course. It knows extremists would win. El Sayed can’t explicitly say that he opposes the notion of a Jewish state because he believes that a Palestinian ethnostate should take its place. Dissolving and creating a regional non-ethnostate ruled by a Palestinian majority is a sure way to create an authoritarian theocracy or fascist state. Ask the Middle East’s Christians how that kind of arrangement works out. Then again, there isn’t a single genuine liberal democracy anywhere in the Islamic world. Has anyone asked El Sayed if he believes that Islamic nations that ban nonbelievers from entering cities, whip breakers of blasphemy laws, and function under the medieval diktats of sharia law are consistent “with any form of liberal values that we say we believe in here in the United States?” Why not? Most Arab nations are artificial constructs of 20th-century French and British colonial rulers, who had little regard for any ethnic or denominational continuity or history, much less “liberal values.” Do they have a right to exist? By any measure, the one Middle Eastern state that has laws and rights that align with American liberalism is Israel — a free press, rule of law, an independent judiciary, open elections, pluralism, and protections for the minority. By any measure, Israel has the most diverse and safest religious minority populations in the Middle East. It’s true that Israel is an “ethnonationalist” state like, I guess, virtually every nation in Europe, for instance. It is primarily concerned with protecting people of Jewish ethnicity and culture. Not only is this important because the rest of the world has repeatedly tried to extinguish that ethnicity and culture, but also because the Islamists with whom El Sayed allies himself want to destroy it right now. The biggest problem with El Sayed isn’t that he believes that people of Jewish descent shouldn’t be able to defend themselves, and their liberalism, in their ancient homeland, but that he doesn’t seem to think much of their safety here in the U.S., either. El Sayed campaigns with Hasan “America deserved 9/11” Piker, whose string of violent rhetoric aimed at Jews and others is well known. When a Hezbollah fan rammed his car into a Jewish daycare center in West Bloomfield, Michigan, with the intent of massacring the children inside, El Sayed rationalized the act by contending that “hurt people hurt people.” This is an abnormal reaction in a healthy liberal society. It’s no coincidence that El Sayed is supported by Amani Barakat, chairwoman of Al Awda, a group that celebrates Hamas, calls for the destruction of Israel, and targets Jewish institutions in the U.S."

Glenn Greenwald on X - "Note that the UK Government just banned entry of two American citizens -- @cenkuygur and @hasanthehun -- not because they criticized or worked against the interests of the UK. It was solely because they criticize and oppose the one country deemed sacred and off-limits in the UK and so many other wester countires: Israel. The UK under Labour is also regularly arresting its own citizens for peacefully protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza (including old British ladies and countless Jewish activists at these protests, though they remain free to protest *in favor* of Israel or against any other country). This is all driven by the same dynamic that caused the Trump Admin -- as one of its very earliest top priorities last year -- to force US universities to expel American students protesting Israel, to deport others who merely criticized Israel, and to implement aggressive speech codes to protect Israel from common criticisms (even though one is free to say all the same things about any other country, including the US). Why does this one small country command such special, elevated, supreme status and attention in so many western countries? It's way past time to give that question the attention it deserves and to finally put and end to it."

Eitan Fischberger on X - "Glenn is being a dishonest hack, as usual.
1) Piker wasn't banned — he just had his Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) revoked. He can still apply for a visa like the citizens of 100+ countries do when they visit the UK.
2) Outspoken pro-Israel, pro-West activist @ezralevant was denied entry to the UK just two weeks ago. So the idea that the UK is canceling ETA's just because someone is critical of Israel is complete nonsense.
3) The British Home Secretary who "banned" them is Shabana Mahmood, who is staunchly anti-Israel."

Haviv Rettig Gur on X - "This is a lie. I mean, it's Glenn, so of course it's a lie. The UK government hates this Israeli government, and in fact has also banned members of this Israeli government from entering the UK. It also just banned speakers who were meant to speak at Tommy Robinson's rally from entering the country. This isn't about Israel. This is a British government that has become awfully trigger-happy with its "do not enter" powers. It's getting to the point where anyone controversial is persona non grata. That's Britain's right, I suppose, though it's a bad policy and a slippery slope and all the rest. But it's not about Israel. Unless literally everything everywhere is always and forever about Israel. In which case yes, it's about Israel."
Left wingers aren't against censorship and violating human rights - they just want to do it to their enemies

Melissa Chen on X - "It's funny and revealing, isn't it? If you're a leftist seething over your own guys Piker and Cenk getting banned from the UK, the logical move would be to hammer the government's broader censorious bullshit on speech. After all, they've pulled the same crap on conservative, right-wing voices not that long ago. Free speech is either for everyone or it's selective tyranny. Easy target, right? But nah. You didn't go there. Instead, you sprinted straight to the conspiracy, that it's all "at the behest of Israel." That's Piker's line, and plenty of others are parroting it. Greenwald too. Are you guys actually dumb, or just so deep in the fever swamp you can't see how this looks to normal people? Even if you believe it's true, tactically, it's political suicide because anyone normal with EYES can see that:
- Antisemitism and hardcore anti-Zionism aren't just tolerated in the UK right now - they're celebrated in the streets, week after week.
- Jews are getting stabbed in broad daylight, like the recent Golders Green attack. Synagogues and Jewish sites are targeted
- Labour just banned a bunch of conservative, pro-Israel American and European activists and speakers from entering the UK for Tommy Robinson's march
- The Home Secretary behind these decisions, Shabana Mahmood, is a Muslim critic of Israel, hardly a Zionist puppet. She's the one issuing these bans
- The UK has sanctioned far-right Israeli ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, threatened to arrest Netanyahu if he shows up, restricted arms sales to Israel, and pushed toward recognizing the State of Palestine.
Yet according to Cenk, Piker, and the usual crew, this Labour government is somehow beholden to Israel? Give me a break. This is clearly a mind virus at work, a toxic fungus that reduces every issue to one agenda item - that Israel controls everything; that Israel is behind everything. Everything defaults to this one script, even in the face of overwhelming counter evidence. Overplaying your hand this hard just exposes the infection to everyone watching. Normal people see the contradiction immediately. You can't gaslight observable reality forever - it only makes the rest of your movement look completely unhinged. If you actually cared about free speech, you'd call out the UK's pattern across the board. But you can't because the mind virus won't let you."
Terrorism supporters want to make enough people anti-Semitic too that their lies don't matter
Terrorism supporters believe that Israel and "Zionists" are behind everything wrong with the world, after all. Conspiracy theories stop you from actually solving your problems

Arsonist targets Golders Green flats - "Police investigate pram fire on estate where many Jewish families live "

▶ The Story Behind the Latest Gaza Flotilla - "The Global Sumud flotilla partnered with IHH, the Turkish NGO behind the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident. When Israeli naval forces intercepted that flotilla, they were met by organized violence on board. Nine passengers were killed in the clash, and 11 Israeli soldiers were wounded. The UN’s Palmer Report later confirmed that the activists acted recklessly and that Israel’s naval blockade was legal under international law. That legal point is often left out. Israel’s blockade is designed to prevent weapons from reaching Hamas in Gaza. Egypt maintains restrictions on Gaza from its own border, though that rarely receives the same activist attention. The current flotilla also raises questions about who is involved. Some activists have reported ties to the PCPA, which Israel and the United States have designated as a terrorist organization linked to Hamas coordination and fundraising. If the goal were truly humanitarian aid, there are established land channels coordinated through COGAT to deliver supplies into Gaza. Sailing into a naval blockade is not the most effective way to help civilians. It is a confrontation strategy. And the media should report it that way."

IHH (Insani Yardim Vakfi) - Turkey - "IHH is a member of the Union of the Good, an umbrella of 50+ Islamic organizations, which was designated by the US government as “an organization created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization.”
According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), during the IDF’s 2002 Operation Defensive Shield, the Union of the Good transferred money, via Hamas charities, to families of suicide bombers.
According to a December 2021 article by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), “The IHH transferred to the Hamas military wing, systematically and for years, funds that served to strengthen Hamas militarily” and “Mehmet Kaya, head of the IHH branch in Gaza, [] transferred to Hamas senior officials Ismail Haniyeh and Raed Saad cash that had come from Turkey and was designated for the Hamas military wing. These funds served, among other things, to build a naval-training facility at a Hamas base in Gaza and to purchase equipment and weapons.”
According to German media, the German branch of IHH had a close relationship with Milli Görüs (IGMG), a “pan-European organization, which the German domestic intelligence agency claims is responsible for promoting extremist ideas and propagating antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
According to a Danish research institute, the Turkish authorities investigated IHH in 1997 after receiving info that senior figures had purchased weapons from Islamic radicals. A police raid on an IHH building in Istanbul found weapons, explosives, and instructions for making improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
French counter-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere claimed that IHH maintained contact with Al-Qaeda in Milan and Algerian terrorists in Europe; recruited militants for fighting in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan; and played a “central role” in the Al Qaida bomb plot targeting LAX airport...
In 2010, IHH organized a six-ship flotilla, which set out carrying more than 700 passengers to “challenge” Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. Israeli commandos boarded the largest ship, the “Mavi Marmara,” and were met with severe and extreme violence by forty IHH activists. The activists were “equipped with gas masks, night vision goggles, and life vests,” and the IDF said that “the passengers also seized a commando’s side arm.” The soldiers were attacked with chains, clubs, iron rods, “knives, broken glass bottles, and sling shots.” After this armed struggle, nine activists were dead and nine Israeli soldiers were injured, several critically. During searches of the ships following the operation, no humanitarian supplies were found aboard the Marmara and two other boats."

Liza Rosen on X - "Top British attorney Natasha Hausdorff dismantled the Palestinian narrative with cold historical facts. There was never a sovereign Arab state called “Palestine.” The British Mandate of Palestine was simply British administration over the historic Land of Israel after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Jews lived continuously in the land for centuries — including under Ottoman rule, when they formed the majority in Jerusalem. Before 1909, Tel Aviv was empty desert legally purchased by Jews, who built it from nothing. No Arabs were displaced. After the British handed the mandate to the UN, the Arab world rejected the partition plan and launched a war to destroy the Jewish state. Arab armies and local militias tried to “push the Jews into the sea.” At the same time, Arab countries ethnically cleansed their ancient Jewish communities, forcing nearly a million Jews to flee to Israel. During the war, Arab leaders ordered local Arabs to evacuate combat zones so their armies could annihilate the Jews. Many of those who left later became permanent “refugees” under Egyptian and Jordanian control. Israel has never committed genocide — and never will. By defending itself, it prevents another holocaust. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic regime of Iran are the real obstacles to peace in the Middle East. Retweet if you support Israel’s right to exist and defend itself."

Why do Women Cling to Feminism?

2026-06-24T18:14:00.000+08:00

Why do Women Cling to Feminism?

There's a powerful force at play that binds both men and women to the belief that feminism stands for equality. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, public perception remains steadfast. This strong adhesive, I believe, is gynocentrism—an often unnoticed bias that influences both genders to avoid confronting the truth.

But what exactly is gynocentrism? It's the pervasive belief that women's needs, desires, and perspectives should take precedence. This societal tendency elevates women's experiences to a central position in discussions of justice, equality, and societal norms. Remarkably, many are unaware of this bias within themselves; it operates subtly yet significantly in everyday life.

Feminists, whether knowingly or not, have harnessed gynocentrism as a tool to shield their ideology from scrutiny. By framing their movement around the principle that women's well-being and viewpoints must be prioritized—a core tenet of gynocentrism—they've built an ideology that resonates not just with women, but also with men who unwittingly accept this framework.

1. Emotional Investment and Identity

Feminism offers an emotionally charged, identity-affirming cause that, for many women, becomes central to how they define themselves and their place in the world. Gynocentrism amplifies this by creating a cultural framework in which women’s experiences are not just important, but inherently more valid and deserving of attention than men’s. Within this framework, feminist ideology is elevated from a political stance to a moral imperative — a movement that feels inseparable from one’s personal worth and identity.

Because gynocentrism positions women’s struggles as uniquely significant, feminism is perceived not simply as one of many social causes, but as the cause — the rightful focal point of empathy, policy, and moral concern. This emotional elevation makes feminist beliefs harder to question, because doing so feels like a denial of women’s legitimacy or suffering. For women, this gynocentric framing allows personal grievances to be folded into a broader, sanctified struggle, making feminism both empowering and emotionally protective.

Men, too, are drawn into this framework. Socialized to prioritize women’s needs and seek moral approval through deference, many adopt feminist ideals not out of conviction, but out of a sense of duty or fear of moral condemnation. Biology also plays a role, as evolutionary pressures have shaped men to be caretakers and protectors, further reinforcing this inclination. In this way, gynocentrism doesn’t just support feminism—it shields it, fuels it, and emotionally compels loyalty to it, even in the face of contradictory evidence or unfair outcomes.

2. The Power of Groupthink and Social Reinforcement

Feminism thrives on social reinforcement, and groupthink plays a significant role in maintaining this ideological strength. In a gynocentric society, the idea that women’s perspectives should dominate is not only normalized but encouraged, creating an environment where challenging feminist ideals feels uncomfortable or even socially unacceptable. This dynamic is further amplified by women’s strong in-group bias—a well-documented psychological tendency to show loyalty, empathy, and moral deference to other women, often at the expense of fairness to those outside the group. In feminist circles, this in-group loyalty reinforces a collective identity centered on shared grievances and moral superiority, making dissent feel like betrayal. The power of groupthink is sustained by constant affirmation that women’s needs are paramount, and anyone questioning this premise risks social ostracism—or worse, being labeled a misogynist. This creates an atmosphere where individuals—especially men—find it difficult to voice opposition, as doing so is perceived not as a critique of ideas, but as an attack on women themselves and the gynocentric norms that have been so deeply entrenched in society.

3. Fear of Losing Hard-Won Progress

For many women, feminism is not just a political or social movement — they have been led to believe that it’s the framework that secured their rights, safety, and dignity in a historically male-dominated world. This association makes feminism deeply personal and emotionally charged. Gynocentrism reinforces this by framing women’s societal gains not merely as important milestones, but as personal validations of their identity and worth — making feminist progress feel inseparable from female value itself. It casts any challenge to feminist orthodoxy — even a measured critique — as a threat to women’s safety, freedom, or status.

As a result, the push to prioritize women’s rights over men’s is not just about fairness or equality; it becomes a reflexive act of self-preservation. For women who have internalized feminism as synonymous with progress and protection, any perceived rollback is existential. The fear is not just that rights might be lost, but that their societal value might be diminished.

Gynocentrism amplifies this anxiety by maintaining a singular focus on women’s needs, portraying them as the perpetual underdogs, regardless of social context or material advantage. This selective lens obscures male suffering, sidelines men’s rights, and downplays the unintended consequences of a one-sided narrative. In doing so, it creates an emotional and moral environment where any call for balance or shared empathy is viewed with suspicion — or even hostility — because it feels like a threat to hard-won ground.

4. Media and Cultural Narratives

The media and cultural narratives overwhelmingly reflect and reinforce gynocentrism, often framing women as the default victims and men as the default perpetrators. Feminism, which aligns itself with this framework, benefits from the widespread acceptance of these skewed narratives. Media portrayals of gender dynamics rarely include nuanced views on how both men and women can suffer from societal issues. Instead, they lean heavily on the gynocentric view that women’s needs—whether related to equality, protection, or support—should always take precedence. By embedding this perspective into the cultural psyche, feminism gains more followers and becomes harder to challenge.

5. Victimhood and Empowerment

Feminism often draws strength from a narrative of victimhood, positioning women as the oppressed group within a patriarchal system. Gynocentrism powerfully reinforces this narrative by casting women not only as victims, but as noble underdogs—vulnerable, morally righteous, and inherently deserving of society’s protection and focus. In Western culture, the underdog holds a revered place; their struggle evokes sympathy, support, and a moral imperative to act. Feminism thrives within this framing, as it leverages the societal instinct to champion the underdog and victim, to advance its ideological goals.By elevating women's struggles above all others, gynocentrism ensures that women's issues dominate the discourse, while simultaneously portraying any challenge to that focus as callous or regressive. This dynamic plays directly into feminism’s hands, enabling it to cloak itself in moral legitimacy while resisting scrutiny or balance. The victim-centric framing doesn’t just protect feminism—it empowers it, converting women’s suffering into a cultural rallying point that demands continuous attention and policy response.Meanwhile, men’s struggles are minimized or ignored, as their pain does not fit the underdog narrative gynocentrism upholds. As a result, feminism benefits from a cultural lens that shields it from criticism and maintains women’s narratives as central, unquestionable, and morally superior, while men are relegated to the margins of empathy and policy.

Gynocentrism not only elevates women's suffering—it also provides cover for open hostility toward men. In a cultural context where women are presumed morally superior and perpetually victimized, attacks on men are rarely seen for what they are: expressions of contempt, generalization, and at times outright hate. Feminist rhetoric that blames men collectively for societal problems is tolerated—even celebrated—because gynocentrism flips the moral lens. Where fairness would demand reciprocity and empathy for all, gynocentrism excuses misandry as justified outrage. Without this protective framing, the vilification of men that often occurs in feminist discourse would be seen clearly as morally bankrupt and socially destructive.

6. Unconscious Bias and Cognitive Dissonance

Feminism, when viewed through the lens of gynocentrism, creates a powerful cognitive dissonance for those who challenge it. Cognitive dissonance refers to the mental discomfort that arises when a person is confronted with information that conflicts with their deeply held beliefs or values. In this case, gynocentrism shifts the framework to one where women’s needs and experiences are always considered more important than men’s. When people are faced with information that contradicts this bias—such as evidence of men’s suffering—cognitive dissonance kicks in. It becomes difficult to argue otherwise without being labeled as misogynistic or unsympathetic to women’s issues. This bias makes it easy for people to ignore or rationalize evidence that challenges feminist ideas, because doing so would force them to confront the deeply held belief that women’s perspectives should always come first. As a result, cognitive dissonance leads many to dismiss the realities of male suffering—such as the high rates of male suicide or domestic violence against men—without any corresponding societal change, reinforcing the gynocentric framework.

7. The Sense of Solidarity and Collective Purpose

Feminism offers solidarity, a sense of purpose, and a collective identity for many women. The gynocentric framework supports this by positioning women as a collective group with a shared cause that is viewed as morally righteous. Feminism becomes more than just a political movement—it is a personal and communal experience where women rally around the belief that their needs are paramount and have been neglected by men. Gynocentrism ensures that this solidarity remains intact by consistently placing women’s rights and experiences at the center, leaving little room for other perspectives that might dilute or challenge this collective purpose.

8. Social Media and Confirmation Bias

Social media platforms, with their emphasis on viral content and quick engagement, amplify gynocentric narratives by perpetuating the idea that women’s voices and concerns should dominate. These platforms often create echo chambers where feminist ideas are not just accepted but celebrated, reinforcing the idea that women’s needs should always take precedence. Gynocentrism drives this reinforcement, making it difficult for people—especially men—to challenge feminist narratives without facing backlash. The confirmation bias that exists on these platforms further cements the dominance of the feminist narrative, as users are more likely to encounter content that supports the gynocentric view of gender dynamics.

Conclusion

Gynocentrism is not a side effect of feminist ideology — it is its lifeblood. It provides the cultural scaffolding that shields feminism from scrutiny, fortifies its moral authority, and ensures its dominance in public discourse. By placing women’s needs, perspectives, and grievances at the emotional and ethical center of society, gynocentrism makes feminism feel not like an ideology, but like common sense — even when its claims defy evidence or fairness.

This framing is so deeply embedded in our institutions, our media, and our social instincts that most people — including many well-meaning women and men — defend feminism reflexively, without realizing they’re defending a worldview that demands moral deference to one sex while marginalizing the other. The emotional, social, and psychological incentives to protect feminism are all reinforced by the gynocentric lens through which we view gender.

It also enables something more corrosive: the normalization of male-blame. Gynocentrism allows feminists to attack men collectively—assigning them guilt, privilege, or violence by default—without triggering the moral backlash such generalizations would provoke if directed at women. In this way, gynocentrism not only shields feminism from criticism; it also empowers it to wound others without accountability.

Until we recognize this hidden framework, genuine conversations about equality will remain impossible. So long as gynocentrism goes unexamined, feminism will continue to operate with cultural impunity, upheld by a society that mistakes favoritism for fairness and silence for justice.

The first step to restoring balance is to see the bias — and name it. Gynocentrism must be brought out of the shadows if we are ever to build a society where the needs of both men and women are heard, honored, and held to the same moral standard.

Links - 24th June 2026 (2 - Hasan Piker)

2026-06-24T15:17:00.000+08:00

Meme - "r/libsofreddit
Hasan Piker - Caviar Communist
*Hasan Piker reading* *Cartier Juste Un Clou Ring, Classic Model. C$4,350*"

Melissa Chen on X - "Actual Chinese leftists are mad at Hasan Piker for strongly defending and praising China, calling out the clear contradictions in his position. Labor activist Kevin Lin says the Chinese economy combines state, private, and foreign capital in ways that exploit workers, with zero independent trade unions and workers having minimal influence on their workplaces. Lin sees this as fundamentally "exploitative" and therefore, capitalist. He can't fathom why Piker would object to this kind of "capitalistic exploitation" in the US but condones it in China, all in the name of anti-imperialism. Taiwan-based progressive Brian Hioe calls it Orientalism at its finest because to Piker, the Chinese people are just props in his personal anti-West crusade. Piker is quite honestly the worst kind of leftist because he's a total hypocrite. He doesn't champion the values he claims, all the while, he enjoys the freedom and privileges of the West."
Left wingers just hate the West

The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story - The Atlantic - "While discussing his personal opposition to Israel’s founding, Piker marshals an unexpected ally: Albert Einstein. “My assessment on Zionism as an ideology is not that different from Albert Einstein’s assessment of Zionism,” he tells the co-host Jon Favreau. The Jewish physicist, Piker said, “was actually asked to be the first president of Israel.” But Einstein, in Piker’s account, assailed the Israeli project from the start: He saw “the violence that the early Zionist brigades were engaging in” before “the IDF existed, before Israel existed,” and “wrote about what Zionism was turning into, and he warned that what he was seeing was exactly what the Nazis were doing.” Most listeners probably took little notice of this historical riff. Favreau does not remark on it. But for me, it was a flashing-neon sign. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Einstein’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism, poring over the relevant documents in three languages on two continents. And just about every bit of Piker’s potted portrayal is either misleading or false. Far from an opponent of the Zionist endeavor, Einstein assisted it for decades. In 1921, he raised money across America for the Hebrew University alongside Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization. In 1923, he delivered a guest lecture at the school’s campus in Jerusalem. Weizmann, meanwhile, was tapped to be the first president of Israel, in 1948; Einstein, who had not been in the running, congratulated him. “Long before the emergency of Hitler, I made the cause of Zionism mine because through it I saw a means of correcting a flagrant wrong,” Einstein wrote to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947, in an attempt to persuade him to support the movement. In 1951, the physicist hosted David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. When Weizmann died the next year, Ben-Gurion offered his position to Einstein, who declined, writing that he was “deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.” (The notoriously absent-minded professor explained, “I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.”) Shortly before his death, Einstein told an interviewer that he had “great hopes for the future of the Jewish state.” He even planned to deliver a speech marking the seventh anniversary of Israel’s founding in 1955—but died days before he could deliver it. He bequeathed his valuable papers and the rights to his name and likeness to Hebrew University... Before Israel was founded, Einstein advocated for a shared state for Jews and Arabs, writing in 1946 that “what we can and should ask” is for “secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration.” But once Israel was established, Einstein strongly supported its continued existence, while insisting that its ultimate success depended on the pursuit of peace and fair treatment of the land’s Arab inhabitants. “International policies for the Middle East should be dominated by efforts to secure peace for Israel and its neighbors,” he wrote in the draft of his deathbed speech. In other words, Einstein wasn’t an unapologetic Israel-right-or-wrong advocate or an ardent anti-Zionist, but something more interesting: a left-wing supporter of Jewish statehood who believed in Israel’s necessity but also in the fundamental rights of the region’s Palestinian citizens. This complex combination of commitments puts him in accord with many, if not most, Americans and American Jews today, according to survey data. In contemporary terms, one might call Einstein a liberal Zionist—the same category of people Piker has previously called “liberal Nazis.” But listeners to Piker on Pod Save America will have learned none of this. The streamer’s cavalier characterization of the views of American Jews, living and dead, and his failure to genuinely reckon with what they think, help explain why some feel that Piker fosters anti-Jewish animus. But one need not reach a conclusion on the anti-Semitism question to arrive at the simpler determination that he speaks confidently about things that he does not know much about. And this phenomenon is not unique to Piker. It’s characteristic of the new-media landscape, which now includes smashmouth streamers and podcasters of all political persuasions who talk about everything but are experts in nothing, and whose incentives run toward incendiary virality rather than accuracy. Often, this means that these talkers leave listeners less informed than when they came in, as is the case here... The question is not whether such people should be engaged, but how. Interviewers should educate themselves about an influencer’s past arguments and be prepared to dig into the details... Hosts could also bring on experts to complicate the simplistic narratives marketed by the streaming set: One imagines a medical researcher might have some thoughts about Piker’s recent claim that Cuba has come up with a treatment for Alzheimer’s that he alleges has been suppressed. Other interviewers might have someone else in the studio who is tasked with interrogating the claims of guests in real time. After all, even Joe Rogan has his producer serve as an on-air fact-checker; the people interviewing Rogan should too... Piker has repeatedly exhibited a soft spot for left-coded expansionist authoritarian regimes... Talking with Piker about a political coalition to save American democracy without discussing his affinity for China’s rulers is like teaming up... with Donald Trump without examining his outlook toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, only the debate over the latter tends to happen, such that Israel crowds out all other considerations, including extremely consequential beliefs that can end up going unchallenged... Carlson isn’t the only one whose Israel rhetoric attracts outsize attention that conveniently enables the rest of his ideology to evade scrutiny."
Left wingers just keep on lying to try to manifest reality
Too bad it's racist to question a "minority"

Hot Takes Nobody Asked For | Facebook - "hasan piker, aka cenk uygur's nephew, complained about being detained and questioned at the airport last month. he has recently said that he didn't see an email sent before the incident that informed him that his global entry membership was revoked. so he may have been detained because he went into pre-check while no longer being eligible."

Eyal Yakoby on X - "Hassan Piker urges his audience to assassinate senators, stating: “If you cared about Medicare fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.” In what world is it acceptable for Democrats to campaign with him?"
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino on X - "The guy telling his followers to ‘kill’ a US Senator is currently a top Democrat influencer and spokesman, firmly welcomed into the mainstream of the party by its most prominent figures. He also said that America deserved 9/11, hosted Houthi terrorists on his show, and said he feels ‘no patriotism towards America’ whatsoever. This is quite literally the Democrat poster boy."
Proof that we need to stop right wing violence by jailing all of the "far right"

Meme - hasanabi @hasanthehun: "the us doesn't want peaceful reunification. but they're maybe too busy rm."
Domino Theory @DominoTheoryMag: "BREAKING: Taiwan's main opposition the KMT said on Monday that its chairwoman, Cheng Li-wun, has accepted an invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party's Central Committee to lead a party delegation to China. fad"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "2025 National Chengchi University polls show 63% of Taiwanese identify solely as Taiwanese and only 2.4% support unification."

hasanabi on X - "the va supreme court denied the results of the redistricting referendum. scotus gutted the voting rights act and tennessee carved up the last dem district destroying black voter power in the state. those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable"
Noah Rothman on X - ""An SDS radical once wrote, 'The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.'" – David Horowitz"
Comment: "Hasan is basically arguing that if elections and court rulings don’t go his way, violence becomes justified. That’s not “saving democracy” — that’s political intimidation dressed up as activism. Tennessee lawmakers redrew districts through a legal legislative process, and the courts ruled on the case. You can disagree with the outcome without hinting at “violent revolution.” That rhetoric is reckless, especially in a country already dealing with political tension and assassination attempts. Also, reducing voters to race and claiming Black Americans can only have political power through heavily engineered districts is insulting. People are more than demographic statistics, and elections are supposed to be decided by voters — not by racial gerrymandering designed to guarantee outcomes. Democracy means accepting results you don’t like, not threatening unrest when your side loses."

M.A. Rothman on X - "𝐇𝐀𝐒𝐀𝐍 𝐏𝐈𝐊𝐄𝐑 𝐀𝐓 𝐘𝐀𝐋𝐄: “𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐔𝐒𝐒𝐑 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐏𝐇𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝟐𝟎𝐓𝐇 𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐘”
This is who Democrats are now platforming. Twitch streamer turned far-left political commentator Hasan Piker just stood up at 𝐘𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 and mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union. “𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘚𝘚𝘙 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 20𝘵𝘩 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘺” His reasoning? It wasn’t about the people who suffered under communism. It was about 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫: “𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘦. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘸 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘯𝘦𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘷𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘞𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘸. 𝘜𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘥” “𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘜.𝘚. 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳”
Let’s review the “catastrophe” of the USSR’s fall: the Soviet regime was responsible for an estimated 𝟐𝟎 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐝∗𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐬 through purges, forced labor, and engineered famine (The Black Book of Communism). The Holodomor alone starved 𝟑.𝟗 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐔𝐤𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬 (Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation). East Germans were so desperate to escape they risked being 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐭 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐧 𝐖𝐚𝐥𝐥. Piker mentioned “child prostitution” and “skyrocketing suicide rates” after the fall — conveniently ignoring that the Soviet system 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 that made the transition so devastating after 𝟕𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. This man has 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟐 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐓𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 and Democrats campaign with him. 𝐇𝐞’𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐬. 𝐀𝐭 𝐘𝐚𝐥𝐞. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐞."
We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries.

Shannon Watts on X - "Jon Favreau: "When you say Hamas is a thousand times better, do you mean that?"
Hasan Piker: "I do mean it … I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.”"
Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "I could not love this more. The Obama Bro tries so freaking hard to sanitize Piker's love of terrorists, only to have it revealed that Piker is exactly who the Right says he is. The absolute state of the Democratic Party in one glorious 20-second clip."

RNC Research on X - "Democrat spokesperson Hasan Piker goes off on a Vietnamese refugee who escaped communism: "Shut the fuck up you stupid fucking idiotic old lady." "Suck my dick old lady." "Fuck this south Vietnamese motherfucking...psychotic fucking refugee!" This is the Democrat Party."
Robby Starbuck on X - "*psst* I have a secret: The reason leftists get so mad at survivors of communism is because they want to carry out the same atrocities past communist regimes did. Survivors infuriate them because they're afraid they might wake people up before they get the chance."

It's politics on X - "Someone needs to study how personal vendettas against Hasan Piker turn liberals into literal right wing dipshits"
hasanabi on X - "its easy, i have fairly modest leftist views across the board and im stubborn, so if they want to oppose everything i do - they inevitably find themselves aligning with right wing forces"
Dispropaganda on X - ""modest leftist views" like
-justifying Chinese imperialism.
-simping for murderous dictators like Assad.
-defending Russian imperialism.
-promoting a totalitarian ideology.
-supporting terrorist massacres like 9/11.
-venerating Mao, one of the greatest mass murderers in history.
-urges followers to kill a US senator."
Ugly Hate Machine on X - ""Fairly modest leftist views" = murder the landlords, America is fundamentally evil and deserved 9/11, preach Marxist ideology while wearing $1200 glasses and a $500 t-shirt from your Beverly Hills mansion while electroshocking your dog for standing up after 4 hours. idiot"
This just tells you how extreme left wingers are

Melissa Chen on X - "Why do podcast bros and worse, the Dem Party itself, keep legitimizing Piker? Hasan Piker is not just some streamer who spouts hot takes from his million-dollar LA setup. He's someone who has done campaign events with Abdul El-Sayed, Summer Lee, and Bernie Sanders. El-Sayed made excuses for a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack on a synagogue and refused to say anything negative about Ayatollah Khamenei. Meanwhile, his preferred candidate for the Michigan Board of Regents, Amir Makled, has been frantically deleting pro-Hezbollah and pro-Nasrallah social media posts. Piker himself has said his favorite flag is Hezbollah's. Recently, he visited Tiananmen Square for the flag-raising ceremony (in front of Mao's portrait), held up Chinese flags, and said on stream "I have no patriotism in my heart for America." Needless to say, you can guess what his position is on the ongoing repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. He also loves the Cuban dictatorship and Putin. So when he says he supports Hamas, he is literally saying that FFS. All these pod bros and abundance democrats need to stop pretending he's just some anti-war dem. He's not. Piker is just serving up a TikTok-ified version of Maoist Third Worldism, an ideology which upholds the "global south" as the pure revolutionary vanguard against the evil imperialist West. Forget actual class analysis or workers' rights. Forget that Hamas and Hezbollah are Islamist fascists who hang gays, stone women, and execute dissidents. In this worldview, any brown or Muslim group pointing a gun at Israel (or America) gets a free pass as "anti-imperialist." It's the same brain rot that had Western leftists simping for the Khmer Rouge for no other reason than their status as Third World resistance fighters. There are a million ways to support Palestinians without supporting Hamas and Hezbollah - indeed, actually supporting Palestinians *requires* rejecting Hamas and Hezbollah. In reality Piker is holding up a death cult's flag feeling morally righteous about it since it serves "decolonization." Every person espousing this in the free world should be forced to live in the totalitarian states they simp so hard for. Conservatives are also now minting their own Third Worldists; in this case they're all masquerading as "multipolarists." Say whatever you want about the right but at least they don't legitimize them the way the Dems do with their Third Worldists."

Adam Mossoff on X - "The intellectual and moral collapse of the NY Times as "the paper of record." A play in two acts:
Act 1: In 2020, more than 800 reporters, editors, and staff at NY Times revolt and protest the publication of op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton arguing that troops should be deployed, like they were in the 1960s, to quell nationwide riots that summer. The newspaper apologizes to the world for publishing the op-ed and the editor of the op-ed page is forced to resign (James Bennett).
Act 2: In 2026, NY Times publishes a massive puff piece *news article* (not op-ed) about "progressive" Hasan Piker, who has called for assassination of a U.S. Senator, says Hamas is "1,000 times better than Israel," says "America deserved 9/11," supports Islamic regime of Iran, and mourns the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When elites at the NY Times bemoan the loss of trust and respect for institutions like the media, they should take a long look in the mirror to discover the real reasons for this loss of trust."

Hasan Piker says he's 'pro-stealing' from big corporations on NYT podcast - "Far-left commentator Hasan Piker explained to The New York Times on Wednesday how he was "pro-stealing" and "pro-piracy" when it came to corporations. "I’m pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers," Piker said on "The Opinions" podcast. "However, one thing that might even help your ethical dilemma is the fact that the automated process that they design, these companies know will increase shrink, right?" He continued, "So it’s actually factored in. The lemons that you stole are factored into the bottom line of these mega-corporations regardless. And they still end up having increased profit margins, because they no longer have to pay the cashiers that they used to hire, as opposed to this automated system, knowing full well that people are still going to be able to steal a lot more efficiently, as a matter of fact, through the automated process." Piker was part of a discussion with The Opinions culture editor Nadja Spiegelman and The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino on the subject Spiegelman dubbed "microlooting," or people robbing stores out of protest of major corporations. Though Piker stopped short of endorsing all forms of theft, he was largely dismissive of concerns over stealing if a person was in need or if the act was simple. "Yeah, I’m pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board. Would you pirate a car? Yes. You know, if you could," Piker said... He added that he would personally not take part in "microlooting" and would not support stealing from places that would be taxpayer-funded, like libraries or a government-run grocery store. He also agreed that the idea of private schools should be "illegal."... Piker's comments come on the heels of several controversial statements he's made over the years against American capitalism and in favor of communism as he becomes more influential within the Democratic Party. Last month, he traveled with several left-wing activists to Cuba in support of the communist regime while ignoring or downplaying rolling blackouts in the nation. Last year, Piker referred to communism as the "honorable end goal" of socialism."

Theft Is Now Progressive Chic - The Atlantic - "“But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?” “Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.” “I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.” It is difficult to know where to begin with such moral reasoning, if it can be called reasoning. At a time of kleptocratic governance and corporate oligarchy, Tolentino and Piker resort to a game of jaded whataboutism. For them, theft is a kind of perverse virtue signaling. Societal problems do not just excuse personal wrongdoing; they ennoble it. Both Tolentino and Piker seem to justify stealing from large companies such as Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, because those corporations exploit workers and already budget for theft. Why wring our hands about shoplifting when it’s been accounted for? Such an attempt to normalize petty crime makes Vicky Osterweil’s 2020 manifesto, In Defense of Looting, look high-minded. As with Osterweil, who argued that white supremacy can render even violent looting a legitimate act, Piker and Tolentino suggest that certain crimes become not just morally justifiable but even admirable when coupled with a claim against structural injustice. Spiegelman uses the term micro-looting, dressing up petty theft in political pretensions... Tolentino encourages readers to skirt The New Yorker’s paywalls and read her articles for free. “I say, go off, use the Wayback Machine.” “Would you steal from the Louvre?” Spiegelman asks. “Yes,” Piker says... “I think it’s cool,” Piker says. “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” These remarks are manifestly silly, but the conversation ranges into darker territory. Toward the end of the discussion, Spiegelman asks for an example of something that is not considered acceptable to do but should be. Tolentino responds, “Maybe things like blowing up a pipeline.” “I can relate to what you were saying, Jia,” Spiegelman replies. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” She’s right. Rather than lead a discussion about the difficulties of maintaining personal integrity in an immoral age, however, she wound up convening a celebration of vice. Tolentino’s treatment of sabotage is emblematic of the discussion’s overall irresponsibility. She continues, “Some sort of fire could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful.” Piker concurs: “Sabotage has played a formative role in labor unions.” During the Kenosha, Wisconsin, uprising in the summer of 2020, as fires raged nearby, a masked rioter screamed into a camera, “It’s Black Lives Matter, not building lives matter!” The implication, which was widely accepted at that time on the left, was that property destruction is trivial but human life is sacrosanct. Yet both Piker and Tolentino move from discussing nonlethal crimes of nuisance and destruction to making excuses for murder. When the conversation turns to Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Piker asserts that the executive had been engaged in “a tremendous amount of social murder.” Both he and Tolentino frame the at-times-gleeful public reaction to the killing as understandable because the health-care industry is structurally oppressive. Watching the video, and not merely reading the transcript, is worthwhile here. Asked whether one should murder a health-care executive, all three dutifully say no, even as they refuse to treat the extrajudicial killing of a man with anything approaching gravity. In fact, the way they exchange smirks about it, you could be forgiven for thinking they were still on the subject of shoplifting produce. And so a very silly conversation leads to a series of positions that are far from frivolous. Its overarching premise is that the law loses its legitimacy when political and economic elites violate—or are merely perceived to violate—the social contract. In such a world, ordinary people become entitled to ignore rules as they see fit. Neither Piker nor Tolentino explicitly endorses violence. But it is a short conceptual bridge from where they sit behind microphones to political murder."
When left wingers are explicitly pro-crime

The 'graves' and the poisoned chalice of 'reconciliation'

2026-06-24T12:41:00.000+08:00

Terry Glavin: The 'graves' and the poisoned chalice of 'reconciliation' | National Post (aka "The Kamloops 'graves' and the poisoned chalice of 'reconciliation'")

On the last weekend in May 2021, former prime minister Justin Trudeau issued an order to lower the flags on Parliament Hill, and on the Monday he ordered the flags to be lowered on all federal buildings across Canada. It was an extraordinary, unprecedented exercise arising from a shocking claim reported around the world that the bodies of 215 children had been discovered in a mass grave at a long-shuttered Roman Catholic Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

The flags remained at half-mast for more than five months during a national paroxysm of hysteria, bigotry, rioting and bedlam, punctuated by reports of similarly gruesome discoveries at residential schools across the country, each accompanied by maudlin expressions of shock and dismay uttered by Trudeau and his ministers. It was all part of what was consistently reported as a “long overdue reckoning” with Canada’s dismal residential schools legacy.

Canada Day celebrations were cancelled in several cities and towns or replaced by street demonstrations proclaiming Canada’s disgrace as an illegitimate, genocidal colonial settler state. Statues of John A. Macdonald, Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, Egerton Ryerson, Joseph Hugonard, James Cook and other historical figures were toppled by mobs or formally removed by local officials in Charlottetown, Winnipeg, Toronto, Kingston, Hamilton and Victoria.

Dozens of churches were desecrated and vandalized, and several were burned to the ground. Before the year was over the RCMP reported a 260 per cent spike in anti-Catholic hate crimes and Statistics Canada noted “the highest number of hate crimes targeting a religion since comparable data have been recorded.” Trudeau called the frenzies “unacceptable” but understandable: “The anger is real.”

It was the incitement that was real

If the anger was real, it was incited by the Trudeau government and by headlines like these.

New York Times, May 28, 2021: “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” Washington Post, June 24, 2021: “Hundreds of Graves Found at Former Residential School for Indigenous Children in Canada.” CBC, June 30, 2021. “182 Unmarked Graves Discovered Near Residential School in B.C.’s Interior, First Nation Says.” The Guardian, UK, July 13: “A First Nations community in western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school.”

None of these stories was true. In the case of the Kamloops horror story, more than 50 officers had been assigned to the Native Indian Residential Schools Task Force, which carried out an eight-year investigation that concluded in 2003. “Each of these allegations were thoroughly investigated by both the Task Force and the applicable Sub-Division Major Crime Unit. Not one of these allegations has ever been substantiated, much less proven.”

No “mass grave” was discovered at the site of the Kamloops Indian residential school five years ago. Even the Tkemlúps te Secwepemc Nation at Kamloops refuted that characterization within a week of the initial round of shocking headlines. Ever since, the Tkemlúps have gone back and forth on the subject, aided by $12.1 million in federal funds, from “probable burials” to graves to “signatures that resemble burials.”

The hundreds of graves “found” at Marieval in Saskatchewan, where Trudeau famously posed kneeling at a gravesite holding a teddy bear, were ordinary burials in a Cowessess community cemetery where gravestones had been removed. Cowessess elder and former Marieval student Lloyd Lerat said this about the graves: “We’ve always known these were there.… It’s just the fact that the media picked up on unmarked graves, and the story actually created itself from there because that’s how it happens.”

The 182 graves “discovered” near the old St. Eugene’s residential school in B.C. at the Ktunaxa community of ʔAq’am were burials in a former pioneer cemetery later associated with a hospital and a Catholic mission that had lost its wooden crosses to grass fires over the years. “There’s no discovery, we knew it was there, it’s a graveyard,” Sophie Pierre, a former St. Eugene’s student who served for 25 years as the Ktunaxa tribal chair, explained later. “The fact there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.”

The 160 “unmarked graves” reported on Penelakut Island were not newly discovered. Some were associated with a cemetery, others were inferred from ground penetrating radar research, and more were the result of archeological surveys on the island’s foreshore. Twenty years earlier the RCMP had excavated a rumoured residential-school burial site on the island and came up with nothing.

Before the summer of 2021 was over, the remains of roughly 1,300 Indigenous children were reported to have been discovered on the grounds of long-shuttered residential schools across Canada. The stories were not true, and the horror stories did not end when the flags were raised again after Remembrance Day in 2021.

By then, the Trudeau government had set aside a $321-million fund to continue the search for graves, and so the search goes on, and the stories about clandestine burials of Indigenous children have become embedded in the way the federal government and several provincial governments expect Canadians to understand their history.

Following the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023, much of the street activism associated with the graves uproars evolved into “From Turtle Island to Palestine” sloganeering, situating Israel along with Canada in the same status as a racist, colonial settler state. The church burnings and desecrations continued, but at a much slower place, while attacks on synagogues and antisemitic hate crimes skyrocketed. Last month, the B’nai Brith organization reported that it had documented 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the worst of any year since B’nai Brith began monitoring the phenomenon in 1982.

Something broke five years ago

It was during those months of intense moral panic between May to November, 2021 that the constitutionally-mandated reconciliation process anticipated by Section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982 was transformed into something else altogether, especially in British Columbia, home to roughly one third of Canada’s 630 First Nation communities.

Public debates about land claims, Canada’s history and the various roles Indigenous people played in that history have become minefields of speech-policing, extremist rhetoric and alarmist nonsense about aboriginal title sweeping away private property rights from coast to coast. Whatever you make of it, this is not what “reconciliation” looks like.

If you “downplay” the excesses of the residential-school era by expressing the view that Canada’s residential schools should never be mentioned even in the same sentence as Auschwitz, Treblinka or Sobibor, good luck to you. A proposal to include the amorphous, catch-all transgression of “residential schools denialism” in the same section of the Criminal Code as Holocaust denial remains a going concern on Parliament Hill.

At Senate committee hearings just last week, Linda Debassige, Grand Council Chief of Ontario’s Anishinabek Nation, argued explicitly that “residential schools denialism” should be seen through the same lens as the law sees Holocaust denial. In March, Tk’emlups chief Rosanne Casimir justified the time it’s taking for some objective evidence to confirm stories about residential school children being made to bury their murdered classmates in an old Kamloops apple orchard this way: “Holocaust investigations have continued for more than 75 years.”

Residential schools denialism is a wholly unique construct, defined so broadly by its proponents as to encompass skepticism or expressions of disbelief in stories about students at the Kamloops Indian residential school being forced to bury their dead classmates under the light of the moon or the existence of an archipelago of clandestine burial grounds at residential school sites across Canada.

The most recent Angus Reid polling suggests that the majority of Canadians, including Indigenous people, may well be guilty of the proposed crime of “residential schools denialism.” The majority of respondents said they’d prefer evidence first.

The Enforcement of an Official Version of History

There is a dark irony in all this.

After British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871 and well into the late 20th century, successive provincial governments variously insisted that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 did not apply West of the Rockies, that treaty negotiations were unnecessary, that there was no such thing as aboriginal title on Canada’s west coast and that if there ever was, it was “extinguished” by provincial laws that came into effect after 1871.

This was an untenable posture, as a succession of Supreme Court rulings have made plain going back to the Calder case in 1973. It was untenable In the early 20th Century, too, when tribal delegations in 1906 and 1926 travelled to London to press their case. Until 1949, the Judicial Council of the Privy Council in London was Canada’s highest court.

To head off a defeat of B.C.’s position at the Privy Council, the Indian Act was amended in 1927 to criminalize Indigenous legal challenges. The federal government added Section 141 to the Act, which barred lawyers from advancing Indigenous grievances in the courts. Unauthorized gatherings were outlawed and several Indigenous organizations were forced to disband. The law stayed on the books until 1951.

And here we are, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and “residential schools denialism” is proposed to outlaw objections to the establishment’s polemics about residential schools (the essay you’re reading here would surely be illegal).

Even at the extremes, there is no constituency in Canada that denies that terrible harms were done during the residential school era. At the height of their operation between the late 1800s and the early 1970s, about a third of Canada’s Indigenous people had spent at least some of their childhood in a residential school.

While many former students insist that their memories of those days are happy ones, the effect of the unchallenged post-Kamloops “narrative” is that the real-world experiences of hundreds of genuine and still-living victims of abuse at the schools have been relegated to a bloodcurdling horror genre of unwanted babies being burned in incinerators, and students hanged, beheaded, murdered and secretly buried.

That jumbled “narrative” is now bundled into an understanding of “reconciliation” that was never anticipated by Section 35, which recognized and affirmed the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. The Supreme Court of Canada has consistently explained that the point of Section 35 is the reconciliation of Crown sovereignty with aboriginal rights and title. But according to Heritage Canada, public commemoration of “the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools” is now a “vital component” of the reconciliation process.

The irony has lately grown darker. In an apparent effort to make a contribution to the paranoid atmosphere set in motion by last August’s Court of Appeals ruling that aboriginal title remains a burden on the Crown title underlying private fee-simple interests in the vicinity of an old Cowichan fishing site on the Fraser River, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has lately taken up the argument Prime Minister Mark Carney should be arguing the long-dead case for aboriginal title’s “extinguishment.”

The Cowichan decision is currently the subject of court-ordered talks between the Crown and the Cowichan. It’s also being appealed and cross-appealed and subject to applications for intervenor status by local private property owners, whose fee-simple interests were explicitly excluded from the Cowichan claim.

Let’s stop blaming the Constitution

Section 35 did not create aboriginal rights or treaty rights, but the Supreme Court of Canada has explained more than once that it does mean governments are obliged by a fiduciary duty to uphold the honour of the Crown by engaging in meaningful consultations with Indigenous people to ensure their rights are not unjustifiably infringed.

Instead, both Ottawa and B.C. have construed their constitutional obligations under Section 35 in such a way as to also include the 47 articles of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) along with the 94 “calls to action” contained in the final report of Judge Murray Sinclair’s expansive 2008-2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Liberals have accepted all 94 calls to action.

All this elaborate layering-on has left little room or opportunity to establish certainty and finality either in modern-day treaties or in court to settle the “Indian land question” in British Columbia, where the absence of treaties has left aboriginal title unextinguished across almost the entire landmass.

The consequences are almost comical.

Like the federal government, in 2019 B.C. adopted enabling legislation to ensure that all B.C. laws were consistent with UNDRIP. At the time, the Liberal opposition MLAs assented to the move. But the B.C. Liberals, later B.C. United, joined the B.C. Conservative opposition, and then imploded, partly because of internal objections to the established narrative about the alleged Kamloops graves. The Conservatives are conducting a leadership vote this weekend.

Premier David Eby’s New Democrats also descended into chaos because the UNDRIP law was found in court to be justiciable, throwing the whole project into a weird loop that has involved Eby threatening to suspend the UNDRIP law, then backing down owing to First Nations protests.

The latest: The Lilwat Nation is going to court against the provincial government and B.C. Hydro over low renewal rates for a power project that the Lilwat partly own. The Lilwat say the B.C. government isn’t applying its own UNDRIP implementation law properly.

To be fair, progress on reconciliation in B.C. has been subjected to scare stories about secret plots to transfer ownership of private property to First Nations and to relinquish public access to Crown lands by way of backroom deals. There have been successes, not least the federal-provincial Haida Agreement, but that arrangement, which leaves Haida title intact, has also attracted loud alarms about threats to private property.

B.C. and Ottawa finally got around to establishing a treaty process with First Nations in 1992. Only seven treaties have been concluded. The First Nations were originally expected to resolve their “overlapping claims” with neighbouring nations, but that commitment has fallen by the wayside. The latest treaty, with the K’ómoks First Nation, was concluded in March. It is hotly contested by the neighbouring Vancouver Island Wei Wai Kum First Nation on the grounds that Victoria and Ottawa have recognized 80 per cent of their territories as falling within K’ómoks territory. Earlier this week, Wei Wai Kum threatened to protest by disrupting vehicle traffic on the Island Highway, along with marine terminals and cruise ship traffic in the Inside Passage.

The Kitselas and Kitsumkalum nations signed treaties with the federal and provincial governments last year over the objections of several neighbouring First Nations citing the treaty’s overlapping infringements on their territories. The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, meanwhile, has called for a pause in treaty-making because the process violates UNDRIP.

It’s a mess. But it’s not the fault of Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

Why hasn’t someone called the police?

It’s one of the enduring peculiarities of the claim that at least 200 children were killed and buried in a secret grave adjacent to the Kamloops Indian Residential School: Why wasn’t the RCMP called in?

They weren’t, but the Mounties were involved, briefly. An investigation was opened the week the flags were lowered but the RCMP immediately scaled back its engagement to a “supporting role” after the former Truth and Reconciliation head Murray Sinclair accused them of intimidating the people who “made this story available.”

That was how the story was reported, anyway, and it never made much sense. And this is where the Native Indian Residential Schools Task Force comes in. The RCMP had already looked into complaints about “unlawful and suspicious deaths” at 14 B.C. residential schools, including Kamloops, including reports that children had been killed and buried on the residential school grounds.

In its 2003 report, under the heading Unlawful / Suspicious Deaths, the Task Force found: “These ranged from outright allegations of murder to deaths caused by negligence, and even included allegations that babies were being killed and buried on the school grounds. Each of these allegations were thoroughly investigated by both the Task Force and the applicable Sub-Division Major Crime Unit. Not one of these allegations has ever been substantiated, much less proven, and in many cases, investigation has established that the death was due to either disease or some other natural cause: in some cases, the alleged victim was found to be alive several years after his supposed death.”

The stories about the deaths of infants often involved nuns or students giving birth to stillborn babies that were buried in unmarked graves located somewhere on the school property. “One such allegation was more involved: in this case, the complainant stated that a baby was deliberately killed minutes after a nun gave birth, and that this baby was subsequently buried in the school basement.” Even more bizarre was a claim that a baby was sacrificed in the woods at yet another school late at night “as part of a satanic ritual.

“No evidence was found to substantiate either of these allegations.”

The recurrence of stories like these was noticed by the investigators. They’re not easily put to rest. Popularized by the defrocked Protestant minister Kevin Annett, the stories tend to take on a life of their own. One such story involved a 14-year-old girl allegedly killed when she was pushed down a flight of stairs by a priest at the Alberni Residential School. Annett alleged the murder was then covered up. In fact, the girl died of acute rheumatic pericarditis, following an eight day hospitalization. She was never pushed down any stairs.

“Despite the evidence that this incident never happened, the story has been kept alive and continues to resurface year after year, resulting in continued media coverage.”

Where the real world collides with the horror genre

The Task Force investigated 974 separate allegations of criminal acts. Most of the alleged offenders were adult males. Women were identified as suspects in about a third of the physical assaults, mostly “slapping, the administration of corporal punishment, or striking the student on his or her hands or body using a ruler or other similar object.”

Charges were laid against 14 individuals, but “dozens more will never be charged,” the report concluded, because they had already died, or because evidence was lacking.

“More importantly, the residential school system has scarred generations of Native Canadians who are still struggling to deal with this legacy. We can only hope this investigation will have helped the healing process and that these events will never be repeated.”

Links - 24th June 2026 (1)

2026-06-24T09:15:00.000+08:00

Condal's respone to GRRM criticism and falling out. : r/HouseOfTheDragon - "Yeah, no. We all read GRRM's blogpost so we KNOW what he was complaining about. George has been very permissive on practical things since the first adaptation of his works because he used to be a screenwriter. The first time Sandkings was adapted it was a very loose adaptation but he never complained. He never complained about cutting things off for practicality in Game of Thrones either. He has been INCREDIBLY open about the fact that the problem was the writing. And writing is never a practical issue."
"Completely agree with this. The notion that GRRM hates changes to his source material is bullshit, he’s praised multiple changes from both game of thrones and House of the dragon S1. The problem is s2 and s3 of HOTD are straying so far from the source material that it’s ridiculous."
"Yup. I’ve seen him point things out that bothered him based on practicality\ (like the main characters not wearing helmets running into a battle), but he immediately follows it up with admitting that television calls for certain unrealistic tweaks as part of the business. The “practicality” being referred to here is that they decided the writing needed to present women as not responsible for the war, and men as war hungry patriarchy lovers that don’t think women can cut it— so they had to show women not needing men to succeed. Then when the war hits people can go “Not the women’s fault they had secret suicide mission girl talk sessions to prevent war. Alicent even agreed to have her son killed!” That was their “practicality,” portraying women a certain way. It led to horrible writing because they had an agenda that was more important than realism. One of the most important aspects of fantasy is you need realism and good character development to make the supernatural stuff not feel ridiculous. Before people pull the stupid “you hate women” bullshit arguments, I think putting women in a box where they have to be portrayed a certain way is limiting and a disservice to women. If it’s as simple as people projecting their own complexes (I.e. “Oh, I think she would blame the patriarchy here and need to find a female voice to get away from men,” then it’s just shoving modern sentiment into the show in a way that makes themselves, and thus likeminded people, relate and be happy with the agenda. In reality people make decisions in self interest, emotion, love, sacrifice, empathy, etc. They’re not mainly driven by social norms of the far distant future they’re not aware of."

Condal's respone to GRRM criticism and falling out. : r/HouseOfTheDragon - "Of all the betrayals, Condal must've been the worst for GRRM. Because he hand picked him to run the series and to enact his vision. And watching S1, it was a really good start. Who knows what changed but now we have yet another inferior adaptor who just wants to bastardize the original work."
"What buggers me is that... if one day I'll finally land a screenwriting job and my favorite author would ask me to adapt one of his books... I would probably die before I fumble it so much that he would shame me in a blogpost. I really want to know what really happened there. I would guess, without judgment, that when Sapochnik left who remained went a bit on a power trip. But that's me speculating based only on the screenwriters I met through the years."
"I've no idea but I'll guess a few things are at play. 1 is a lack of understanding of the source material - maybe enough for GRRM to trust him initially, but not as deep as a true fan. 2 is ego - being called an adaptor is a lot less sexy than it is to be called a creator; and sadly with a story as complex and nuanced as GoT if you aren't equally as subtle any deviation can lead to disaster as we've found. And 3rd is unchecked authority - GRRM himself struggles with this, as his books have gone off a cliff since his stature as an author grew. Just as GRRM was at his best when he was a minor author meeting the iron deadlines of a publisher that would cut him loose or fine him if they were broken, Condall was at his best when he was checked by both GRRM and Sapochnik. Without either in the picture, we've got someone without the correct vision but whose vision isn't being checked by more sensible opinions."

DC_Draino on X - "The data is out and it looks like MAGA was right about Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She’s a backstabber to the people who appointed her. The records show her agreeing with liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan 82% of the time during her 2nd term, up from 39% in her 1st. She’s also the conservative 'least likely to support Trump' in cases that involve the president himself. What an ungrateful, Ivory Tower weakling"
Proof that Conservative Justices are all biased, cannot be trusted and just push MAGA's agenda. They're spineless and do whatever Trump tells them to do. They all need to be removed and replaced with Liberal Justices to Save Democracy

Russian Photographer Jailed for Writing Gay Fan Fiction - "a 36-year-old Russian woman named Alexandra Kuzyk was sentenced to 18 months of labor camp for publishing what authorities deemed “illegal pornography”... Said pornography was actually same-sex fan fiction about the K-pop band Stray Kids, published on the messaging app Telegram. Trouble began a year ago when a woman discovered Kuzyk’s fan fiction on her daughter’s device, according to the Mirror, and reported it to the police. (Russia’s Supreme Court had banned the “LGBTQ movement” as an “extremist” organization in 2023, leading to crackdowns on fan content. Last year, authorities blocked the world’s largest anime and manga networking platform, MyAnimeList.) The woman sent screenshots to Roskomnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, according to the Mirror. Police then raided Kuzyk’s home. Kuzyk pleaded guilty in court and said her writing did not earn her money. Her initial sentence of four years was reduced to 18 months of labor. She must also pay 10 percent of her wages to the state"
Weird. Russia defenders tell us they don't discriminate against homosexuality

Tim Hortons won't give you water in a cup even if you pay for the cup : r/TimHortons - "In Ontario it is required by law for them to provide drinking water on request... Safe Water Act of Ontario. They also cannot charge you for said water if it is not in a bottle. Tap water is free. Full stop."
"That's not accurate. In Ontario, the Safe Drinking Water Act does not mandate that restaurants must provide tap water to customers. The obligation to offer free tap water is linked to the establishment's liquor license. Restaurants and bars that hold a liquor license are required to provide free drinking water to patrons. This requirement ensures that customers consuming alcohol have access to water, promoting responsible drinking. For establishments without a liquor license, there is no legal obligation to provide free tap water. It's a stupid business decision, one in a long list of stupid decisions by TH, but it's not against the law."

Meme - ">be me, obsessed with aliens, UFOs
>honestly believe they're on earth
>one day see unequivocal proof of ayyylmao
>little guy just chilling in my back yard
>run to grab highest quality camera I own, can take clear pictures of the surface of Pluto, can literally photograph an individual atom
>run back to back yard
>he's still there
>thankfuck.pdf
>take out camera
>smash it to pieces with rock
>reach in pocket for my trusty 2012 Nokia 113
>start shaking uncontrollably
>take one (1) photo
>I finally got proof
>print out photo, delete file
>spill coffee all over it
>photocopy it 10 times before scanning it in
>post to r/UFOs
>10,000 upvotes"

Meme - Berlin Blade @TeBe_Blade: "He didn't write wonderwall so he could shag 60 year old women"
Gene Parmesan @dsonoiki: "sorry but I'm sick of this predatory ass shit. Noel Gallagher is 58. his gf is 28..."

Sick China woman marries cancer patient as part of kidney donation deal; couple fall in love | South China Morning Post - "A woman in northwestern China, battling uremia, married a cancer patient, agreeing to care for him during his treatment in exchange for his kidney after his death. As they spent time together, their shared humour and optimism blossomed into an unexpected love story... 24-year-old Wang Xiao from Shaanxi province was diagnosed with uremia and informed that she had only a year to live without a kidney transplant. With no matching donors among her relatives, a desperate Wang took an unconventional step. Following the suggestion of a fellow patient, she posted a marriage advertisement in a cancer support group, seeking a terminally ill man willing to marry her so she could receive his kidney after his passing. “I will take the best care of you after marriage. Please forgive me; I just want to live,” Wang wrote in her ad. A few days later, 27-year-old Yu Jianping responded. His blood type matched hers. Yu was battling myeloma, which had relapsed multiple times... In July 2013, the two quietly registered their marriage. They agreed to keep their union private, manage their own finances, and decided that after Yu’s passing, he would donate one of his kidneys to Wang. In return, Wang promised to care for him during his treatment and look after his father after his death. However, what began as a survival arrangement soon transformed into something deeper. They started communicating every day, sharing updates about their health and lives. Wang’s playful nature often made Yu laugh, and her optimism began to uplift his spirits. He started cooking soup for her, and she accompanied him to every treatment. Determined to help Yu afford a bone-marrow transplant, Wang began making and selling flower bouquets at a street stall. She placed cards alongside the flowers, telling their story, which attracted crowds of customers and even local shop owners. Through her sales and savings, she managed to raise 500,000 yuan (US$70,000), enough to finance Yu’s surgery. By June 2014, Yu’s condition had stabilised, and Wang’s health was improving as well. Her dialysis sessions decreased from twice a week to once a month, and doctors indicated that she might no longer need a transplant at all. In February 2015, to celebrate their love and regained health, the couple held a wedding banquet at a local restaurant. Their story was later adapted into the film Viva La Vida, which premiered in mainland China in 2024 and grossed over 276 million yuan (US$38 million)."

🥀 🖤𝔏𝔦𝔟𝔢𝔯𝔱𝔞𝔯𝔦𝔞𝔫 𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥🖤🥀 on X - "The difference between the right leaning libertarians and the left leaning libertarians is that the right leaning libertarians would return their shopping cart because it’s the polite and respectful thing to do, while the left leaning libertarians would just leave their shopping cart out in the parking lot because they 𝒄𝒂𝒏 as it’s not like there’s any victims or consequences."

Toronto’s Finch Store is looking to the future - "Yana Miriev was ready to walk away from her business. She tried to sell Finch Store, a grocer and cafe near College Street and Ossington Avenue, which was locked in a zoning dispute over its licence to sell coffee after the City of Toronto received an anonymous complaint about the espresso machine. Without being able to give prospective buyers the certainty they could sell coffee, however, Finch Store didn’t get any takers. Miriev, instead, was waiting for the shop’s lease to end so she could simply “close the door.” But then, an eleventh-hour amendment to a motion at City Hall redirected Miriev’s path... the city informed Miriev that her business, located in a residential area, was not zoned to permit refreshments, such as takeout coffee. It asked her to voluntarily change her permit to exclude refreshments, but Miriev declined. In February 2024, the city said Finch Store was “not operating in compliance” with the area’s zoning bylaw and that its licence would be subject to a hearing at the Toronto Licensing Tribunal."
Zoning is very important, because it stops factories being set up beside houses

New York Post on X - "Swiss 'terrorist' who shouted 'Allahu Akbar' before train station stabbing 'needs help,' dad says"
Flappr on X - "Interesting choice to put "terrorist" in quotes but not "Swiss"."
He is a Swiss national. Given that Switzerland has 4 major ethno-linguistic groups, the usual American inability to tell the difference between race and nationality is even more ridiculous

Australia election: Can universal healthcare be saved? - "A once-revered universal healthcare system is crumbling at every level, sometimes barely getting by on the sheer willpower of doctors and local communities. As a result, more and more Australians, regardless of where they live, are delaying or going without the care they need... the core of the crisis and key to this election is GP services, or primary care, largely offered by private clinics. There has historically been little need for public ones, with most GPs choosing to accept Medicare rebates as full payment. That is increasingly uncommon though, with doctors saying those allowances haven't kept up with the true cost of delivering care. At the same time, staff shortages, which persist despite efforts to recruit from overseas, create a scarcity that only drives up prices further. According to government data, about 30% of patients must now pay a "gap fee" for a regular doctor's appointment - on average A$40 (£19.25; $25.55) out of pocket. But experts suspect the true figure is higher: it's skewed by seniors and children, who tend to visit doctors more often and still enjoy mostly bulk-billed appointments. Plus there's a growing cohort of patients not captured by statistics, who simply don't go to the doctor because of escalating fees... if the average Australian adult walked into a GP clinic, could they get a free, standard appointment? This year, they called almost all of the nation's estimated 7,000 GP clinics – only a fifth of them would bulk bill a new adult patient. In the entire state of Tasmania, for example, they couldn't find a single one... The BBC spoke to people across the country who say the increasing cost of healthcare had left them relying on charities for food, avoiding dental care for almost a decade, or emptying their retirement savings to fund treatment. Others are borrowing from their parents, taking out pay-day loans to buy medication, remortgaging their houses, or selling their possessions. Kimberley Grima regularly lies awake at night, calculating which of her three children – who, like her, all have chronic illnesses – can see their specialists. Her own overdue health checks and tests are barely an afterthought. "They're decisions that you really don't want to have to make," the Aboriginal woman from New South Wales tells the BBC. "But when push comes to shove and you haven't got the money… you've got no other option. It's heart-breaking." Another woman tells the BBC that had she been able to afford timely appointments, her multiple sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disease, would have been identified, and slowed, quicker. "I was so disabled by the time I got a diagnosis," she says... Like many wealthy countries, the nation is struggling to cope with a growing population which is, on average, getting older and sicker. There's a small but increasing cohort which says it is time to let go of the notion of universal healthcare, as we've known it. Many doctors, a handful of economists, and some conservative politicians have sought to redefine Medicare as a "safety net" for the nation's most vulnerable rather than as a scheme for all. Health economist Yuting Zhang argues free healthcare and universal healthcare are different things. The taxes the government collects for Medicare are already nowhere near enough to support the system, she says, and the country either needs to have some tough conversations about how it will find additional funds, or accept reasonable fees for those who can afford them."
From 2025.
Weird. Left wingers tell us that only one country in the developed world has medical bankruptcy

California mom sentenced to nearly 36 years for hosting drunken teen sex parties: 'I am ashamed' - "The mom of victims identified as Jane Doe 8 and 9 said, "When people call you a monster, pedophile, rapist, they had it right. You preyed upon my daughter by supplying her alcohol, enticing sexual situation, and pushing her when she was not in a place to consent." The young women and their families have called for the maximum sentence after O'Connor's felony convictions, citing what they described as a profound and lasting impact on their lives. Prosecutors say O'Connor hosted parties for her teenage son, in which she encouraged teens to drink and engage in sexual activity, at times facilitating those interactions by providing condoms. Victims have also said O'Connor messaged them after parties, prying into their personal lives and harassing them."
Oddly, some people defend her

California’s ‘Los Gatos party mom’ sentenced to 35 years in prison - "“This isn’t some fun parent giving sips of wine spritzers to kids,” Santa Clara district attorney Jeff Rosen wrote in a statement. “She facilitated dangerous and drunken sex acts with these children. She risked their lives and damaged their psyches. She is not a party mom. Shannon O’Connor is a convicted felon. Shannon O’Connor is a registered sex offender.” During a series of parties, O’Connor bought Fireball whiskey, vodka and condoms for teens mostly aged 14 and 15, allowed them to drink to the point of vomiting, then declined to seek medical attention for them. In some cases, she encouraged the drunken teens to have sex with each other or placed them into rooms together, including in instances where they were too drunk to consent... O’Connor’s lawyer told the court that she threw the parties in an attempt to improve her son’s social life during the isolated times of the Covid-19 pandemic"

California 'party mom' sentenced to 35 years prison time - "A survivor’s mother also described to the court how O’Connor groomed her daughter, showered her with gifts pretending they were from O’Connor’s 15-year-old son who she was dating at the time. Other mothers burst into tears describing how alarmed they were when O’Connor gifted one of their daughters lacy thong underwear. “I listened to the testimony of several victims and their parents and heard these words and phrases over and over again,” Rosen said. “Predator, manipulated, groomed, hypersexualized, violated, betrayed, traumatized, isolated, intimidated, harassed. Made me feel small. Suffered severe anxiety and depression. Contemplated suicide. Not over it, life-long impact, forever changed me, stole my innocence, took away my childhood. But I also heard resilient, strong survivors.”... In some cases, O’Connor would Snapchat or text teens to leave their homes in the middle of the night and drink at her home. O’Connor urged the sexual assault of intoxicated teen girls, “sometimes non-consensual, and sometimes while she watched,” according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Court documents described O’Connor providing a boy with a condom and pushing him into a room with an intoxicated girl, who later escaped and locked herself in a bathroom. During a New Year’s Eve party at her home, O’Connor allegedly watched and laughed as a drunk teen sexually battered a young girl in bed. In another case, she brought a drunk teen into a bedroom where he sexually assaulted an intoxicated 14-year-old girl, who also told investigators that at another party she was so drunk she almost drowned in a hot tub, according to court filings... When detectives arrived at her home northwest of Boise, they found “there were 10 underage boys and two girls at her home — most of whom spent the night there”"

California mom sentenced to 35 years for throwing alcohol-fueled underage parties - "Shannon O’Connor, also known as Shannon Bruga, received the maximum sentence following three days of victim impact statements, including from one who told the court she became suicidal from the trauma... She also discouraged the teens from telling their parents or seeking help when one of the victims passed out in their own vomit. The teens at these parties were mostly 14 and 15 years old... O’Connor was convicted in March of dozens of crimes, including child endangerment, dissuading witnesses from reporting a crime and facilitating forcible sexual assault between minors. O’Connor must also register as a sex offender... Parents said the parties were not the main problem. It was the years of grooming, manipulation and harassment of their children, some as young as 11 and 12, by O’Connor, who still denies allegations that she orchestrated sexual misconduct between the minors... she pressured victims to “hook up” in designated bedrooms in her house."

Daniel Yun | Facebook - "Is there something amiss in Singapore F&B? The facts are staggering. About 8,000 F&B establishments have closed in Singapore in the last three years, with a near 20-year high of 3,047 closures in 2024. But Chinese food and beverage brands in Singapore grew from 32 in mid-2024 to about 85 by August 2025. Together, they operate more than 400 outlets, making it one of the fastest foreign expansions in recent years. Take a walk through any mall. The bubble tea shop is from Chengdu. The hotpot place is backed by a 700-outlet chain you have never heard of. The coffee queue is for Luckin, not Starbucks. The queue for teas is longer at Chagee. As far as I can remember, it all started with Haidilao. In 2012, the hotpot chain opened its first Singapore outlet at Clarke Quay, their first outlet outside China. Following its success, Haidilao expanded to more than 20 outlets across Singapore at its peak. Suddenly, like how they snapped up local properties before the Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty, Chinese F&B businesses are everywhere. Talking to people in F&B, there is a little back story. In 2024, three million food businesses closed in China. With savage domestic competition, they are forced to look outwards. Singapore becomes the target for Chinese F&B businesses looking to expand in Asia. “If we can build up our brand in Singapore, the brand awareness can go to Malaysia and Vietnam, even Indonesia.” For them, making money in Singapore is secondary, a low priority. Which means they can afford to pay much higher rents and retail their food at lower prices. Bringing fierce price-undercutting to local F&B retail. Andy Hoon, chairman of Bosses Network described a scenario: if a Singaporean tenant offers S$36 to S$38 per square foot when the market expectation is S$30 to S$40, a Chinese brand might offer S$45 and above. This has caused rents to hit the roof, especially in high-traffic locations. It burns both ends of the candle for local brands. Pay high rentals to stay put and sell at lower prices to compete. Or close shop. Meanwhile, our national taste palette is forced to shift, our food paradise reputation marred, as our wide 'Nanyang' variety is curtailed by one Mala Hot Pot or Mayo Tofu too many. However, there is also truth that the Chinese are good at what they do. Good food, good price, served piping hot in a flash. The jury is still out if the Chinese will invade the hawker space. Our street food which defined us as a people, are not as easily replicated. Yet at closer inspection, the young men assisting the hawkers are mostly mainland Chinese. How can local F&B brands and our Hawker culture be protected? The result of a free market without regulation is an unrecognisable new beast. The loss of those who built the market will be irreparable. It takes a foreigner who loves our local food to tell me, “In Italy, foreign restaurants are not allowed in many prime areas. People come from all over the world to taste our local food.""

Meme - "Bill Gates was arrested for a traffic violation in 1977 and the outline of his mugshot would go on to be used as the default profile pic for Outlook 2010"

Meme - Jack @Jackkk: "Bryan Johnson reveals why he uses an umbrella even when it's not raining and UV levels are low "90% of physical skin aging is from the sun, so this is a UV umbrella protecting me""
Beatrix Vox @beatrixvox: "He is right maybe"
"no matter what you think about bryan and what he does, it's working"
"2018. 2023. 2024. 2025"

Meme - Bushwhacker: "I'm loving the new McDonalds Axis Powers menu"
"Japan Teriyaki Chicken. Italy McPizza Bites. Germany Big Rosti"

Meme - *Busty woman's t-shirt*: "You DON'T NEED TO LOOK AT MY CHEST. THESE AREN'T THE BREASTS yOU'RE LOOKING FOR. MOVE ALONG."

Meme - "Fathers' Rights. Starting Conversations With Billboards
FathersRightsMovement.us was picked up by the local news after their campaign.
Background
Rikki Tatum is a mental health and substance abuse therapist from Buffalo, NY. After losing custody of his son, Dominic, Rikki explored how he could better understand his rights during this challenging period of time. Rikki joined a Father’s Rights group so that he could be involved with a community that he could both learn from and contribute to. Rikki wanted to share his message in a big, bold way—billboards seemed like a powerful way to communicate his message. After meeting with several billboard companies, Rikki chose Blip given the affordability and flexibility offered. With his campaigns, he was looking to accomplish two main goals 1) to let his son know that he loves him and 2) to build awareness and spread compassion regarding issues surrounding Father’s Rights."
"Dear Dominick, your daddy loves you."
Apparently he put the billboard on the route his child's schoolbus took

Outrage as Zelensky names army unit after group that slaughtered Poles in Second World War - "Poland's president has called for a state body to discuss revoking the country's highest honour from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, following Kyiv's decision to rename an army unit after nationalist insurgents. The move to consider stripping Mr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, awarded in 2023 by Andrzej Duda, marks a significant point of tension despite Poland's staunch support for Ukraine during Russia's war. Indignation arose after Mr Zelensky signed a decree recognising a Ukrainian special forces unit by naming it after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). While many Ukrainians regard the UPA as heroes for their resistance against Soviet and Nazi Germany, symbolising their fight for independence, the group remains highly controversial in Poland. The UPA was involved in the Volhynia massacres, a series of killings from 1943 to 1945, in which Poland says around 100,000 Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists. Thousands of Ukrainians also died in reprisal killings... Russia on Thursday said it had summoned Luxembourg's ambassador to denounce the exhumation of the remains of Andriy Melnyk, a leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, a group allied to the UPA. Mr Melnyk, branded a Nazi collaborator by Moscow, was reburied in Kyiv last week with full military honours."
Clearly, Poland's president is a Russian plant and a traitor. Russia has infiltrated Poland, and Poland's ranks need to be purged

My wife got me a bracelet with the first initials of our kids on it. : r/TwoSentenceHorror - "Now I lay on the side of the road, paramedics dragging me, as I silently pray for Donna, Nick, and Rachel."

"That was a fu–ing waste of money, I want my ring back" - When Gilbert Arenas replaced his ex's $400K ring with a fake one - "Arenas went back to his ex just to pull off the most expensive ring swap in NBA relationship history. That's right, Gil finessed a $400,000 engagement ring off Laura Govan and replaced it with a $10K replica without her even noticing, right in plain sight."

Links - 23rd June 2026 (3 - Left Wing Economics: Bernie Sanders)

2026-06-23T21:14:00.000+08:00

Meme - "When Bernie makes it to a Trillion dollars due to inflation he helped cause
FIGHT Quadrillionaires"

Bernie Sanders on X - "I will soon be introducing a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America. This would guarantee that the trillions created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — and block oligarch decisions that harm the American people."
Enguerrand VII de Coucy on X - "Making a ruckus over introducing stupid bills that’ll never pass is all Bernie does. In all his time in Congress Bernie’s only successfully passed 3 bills into law, 2 of which were for renaming post office branches in Vermont. The last successful bill he introduced was in 2013"

Bernie Sanders on X - "U.S. Oligarchy - 2025: Elon Musk owns as much wealth as the bottom 53% of U.S households. The top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. Real weekly wages are $30 lower than 52 years ago. 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Yes. We can do better than that."
Scott Adams on X - "I would measure how much wealth Musk created that never existed before. Then I'd calculate what percentage of that wealth he kept. Then I'd figure out what percentage of it he spent on his own lifestyle versus paid in taxes. Then I'd calculate the incomes of the employees of his companies and their impact on the economy. Then I'd look at the societal benefits of his companies because it's not all about cash. Then I'd compare to the benefits Bernie Sanders brought to America. (Mostly complaining.)"

Meme - Arthur MacWaters: "Capitalism is a system so good that even the socialists can become millionaires"
Bernie Sanders: "You want to keep the minimum wage low, and give tax breaks to millionaires, @realDonaldTrump, that is not what makes America great." - Not a millionaire
Bernie Sanders: "Are we comfortable to see a huge increase in millionaires and billionaires but have more people living in poverty than ever? I know I'm not." - Not a millionaire
Bernie Sanders: "Are we comfortable as a nation to see a huge increase in millionaires and billionaires but have more people living in poverty than ever?" - Not a millionaire
Bernie Sanders: "Billionaires should not exist." - MILLIONAIRE!

Meme - Bernie Sanders: "I USED CAPITALISM TO BECOME A MILLIONAIRE WHO OWNS MULTIPLE HOMES. THEN I USED SOCIALISM TO BECOME POPULAR WITH LAZY AND ENTITLED LEFTISTS"

Meme - Bernie Sanders: "Claims to be a socialist.
Sells $95 tickets for his "It's Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism" book tour.
Owns three houses worth over $2 million.
LITERALLY Got kicked out of a commune for being too lazy."

Bernie Sanders Spent $221K on Private Jets Amid 'Fighting Oligarchy' Tour - "The revelation is just the latest contrast between his socialist rhetoric and his millionaire lifestyle. The Vermont senator used to rail against "millionaires and billionaires" in his speeches denouncing oligarchy—until he became a millionaire himself shortly before his 2020 presidential campaign, at which point he trained his fire on "billionaires." During that campaign, fellow candidate Michael Bloomberg mocked Sanders for amassing wealth while preaching socialism for the masses. "The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses," Bloomberg said in a 2020 debate... The Vermont senator has been joined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), who usually introduces him at the events. Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, was spotted flying first-class to one of the rallies in Las Vegas last month."

Bernie Sanders Proposes Taxing Income Over $1 Billion At 100% And Urges It's Time To Make 'Greedy Billionaires' Pay Their Fair Share
Clearly, if your marginal tax rate is 100%, that will incentivise you to earn more money and generate more tax revenue. Socialists are really intelligent

More Perfect Union on X - "BREAKING: Today Bernie Sanders is proposing a bill to raise $4.4 trillion in taxes from America’s billionaires — a move that would virtually cut their massive fortunes in half. A chunk of the money would go toward sending a $3K stimulus check to every person earning under $150K."
Rock Chartrand🤑 on X - "If lifting the poor were the focus, you’d see emphasis on production and mobility. When confiscation comes first, punishment is the point. Halving fortunes signals that success is politically conditional. And when the payout maps neatly onto a voting bloc, it’s fair to question whether this is compassion or coalition math."

Meme - Geepers808 @GeepersNFT: "Oligarchy is a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution. Bernie has been in congress so long isn't he describing himself and other lifetime politicians like him."
"YOUR HOUSE UNDER SOCIALISM *slum*
YOUR REPRESENTATIVE'S HOUSE UNDER SOCIALISM *mansion*"

Bernie Sanders: Is America Ready for President Noam Chomsky? | National Review - "Asked in a 60 Minutes interview about old statements praising Fidel Castro’s supposed achievements in health care and education, Sanders stayed true to himself... No, literacy programs aren’t a bad thing, but they usually don’t require seizing power in a violent revolution, jailing and killing political opponents, seizing private property, or outlawing the free press. Teaching children to read is something that happens in free societies, too. That Bernie continues to believe a literacy program is some kind of recommendation for a regime that has otherwise oppressed and immiserated its people for decades is a sign of his skewed view of what’s important and just for a polity... The Left has nonetheless always viewed Fidel Castro as some kind of social worker who happened to take and hold power — or “come to office,” as Sanders delicately puts it — via force. Back in 1989, Sanders wrote, “Cuba — the one country in the entire region that has no hunger, is educating all of its children and is providing high-quality, free health care — is hated with a passion by the Democrats as much as Republicans.” Besides the moral obtuseness of arguments like this, the factual basis for such claims is dubious. Cuba was already doing well on measures of health care and education before the revolution. By one estimate, Cuba’s per capita income in 1955 was about half that of the most advanced Western countries and on par with Italy’s. By 2000, after the collapse of the Soviet Union that had provided Cuba an economic crutch for so long, Cuba’s per capita income was half what it had been in 1955. Cuba went from being a leader in Latin America on key economic measures to a laggard by the time Castro was done with it. The Washington Post has noted that “in terms of GDP, capital formation, industrial production and key measures such as cars per person, Cuba plummeted from the top ranks to as low as 20th place.” Bernie’s perspective on Cuba isn’t an outlier. It is characteristic of his worldview that has a sympathy for America’s enemies, at least if they are Communist or Islamist; that assumes the worst of the United States; and that opposes nearly all U.S. military interventions as misbegotten or malign. (Sanders voted for the Afghanistan War after September 11 and now regrets even that vote.) Electing Bernie Sanders would be almost indistinguishable from putting the late radical historian Howard Zinn, or the America-loathing linguist Noam Chomsky, or the tendentious left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore in charge of American foreign policy. The country would be in the hands of an opponent of its power with no faith in its goodness. Bernie would make Barack Obama’s overly solicitous attitude toward our enemies and Donald Trump’s bizarrely warm statements about foreign dictators look like American foreign-policy orthodoxy by comparison. There is almost no enemy of the United States that wouldn’t be heartened by a Sanders victory and see it as an opportunity to make gains at the expense of the United States and its allies. If his decades-long track record is any indication, Sanders would be inclined to make excuses for our adversaries and look on the bright side of their repression and rapine."
From 2020

Bernie Sanders on X - "Jeff Bezos is seeking $100 billion to put robots into factories. Millions of manufacturing jobs — GONE. Driverless vehicle companies are expanding rapidly. Millions of transportation jobs — truckers, cab drivers, Uber drivers — GONE. We are not ready for what’s coming."
Kane 謝凱堯 on X - "I couldn’t help but notice that Senator Sanders chose to use electric lights. Millions of lighting jobs — GONE: lamplighters, linkboys, wick-trimmers, candle-snuffers, tallow chandlers, wax chandlers, spermaceti refiners, whale oil renderers, harpooners, whaling coopers, gas mantle makers, gas fitters, gas-meter readers, kerosene lamp makers, lamp shade fitters, gasolier makers, lamp-chimney sweeps, lamp-chimney glassblowers, oil-lamp fillers, dairymen’s lamp-boys, mine candlemen, miners’ tallow-dip makers, pit-lamp keepers, theater limelight operators, theater gasmen, Drummond-light operators, calcium oxide cylinder suppliers, Argand-lamp lighthouse keepers, wick-spinners, wick-weavers, rushlight makers, beeswax taper makers, candle moulders, candle dippers, bayberry wax gatherers, taper-stand makers, hand-lantern makers, bull’s-eye lantern makers, ships’ lamp trimmers, railway lamp-men, signal-lamp lighters, lantern-bearing watchmen, night-soil men, knockers-up, match girls, white phosphorus match dippers, match-box makers, fusee makers, vesta makers, flint-and-steel makers, tinderbox makers, lamp-cleaning charwomen."

Was Bernie Sanders America’s Corbyn? - "The very success of Corbyn and Sanders as coalition builders uniting the left contained the seeds of their defeat. The reason is simple—all of the various factions of the left put together make up a minority of the electorate, in both Britain and the United States. To win a general election, a party of the left must appeal to nonleftists. But this will not happen if some of the elements of the left-wing coalition repel nonleftist voters. In the United States as in Britain, it can be argued, there are three lefts: the labor left, the socialist left, and what has come to be known as the woke left. These are entirely different movements, with different worldviews, constituencies, and histories... Of the three lefts, the only one that has ever had broad popular support in modern industrial democracies is the labor left. Its traditional agenda—higher wages for poorly paid workers, decent working conditions, affordable health care and other necessary services, adequate retirement income—is popular among many voters on the right side of the political spectrum as well as in the center and on the left. Indeed, polls showed widespread public support for many of the economic proposals of both Sanders and Corbyn. What did Corbyn in, and what may have already done Sanders in, are the other two lefts: the socialist left and the woke left, since neither has significant support in the electorate. Foregrounding the obsessions of these noisy but tiny movements by denouncing “capitalism” as such or devoting a disproportionate amount of attention to issues involving the minuscule portion of the population that is transgender, drives off voters who are not socialists and who do not share the fad-driven woke culture of a portion of the highly educated elites of the United States and Britain... The Sanders campaign was too odd for most black American Democratic primary voters, who are far from being conservatives, no matter what some embittered white hipsters claim in the aftermath of their hero’s defeat. Here the difference between Sanders in 2016 and Sanders in 2020 is instructive: In 2016, Sanders did relatively well among rural and white working-class voters, because he campaigned on classic labor-left issues, some of them shared with Trump, like protection of American manufacturing from unfair competition with low-wage foreign workers. In his first presidential campaign, Sanders was criticized by the woke left for “class reductionism” and neglect of race and gender, and his followers were caricatured as anti-black, misogynist “Bernie bros.” Sanders was also denounced for sharing the labor left’s traditional worry that mass immigration would undermine worker bargaining power with employers. In 2020, in contrast, Sanders engaged in an arms race with the other major progressive candidate, Elizabeth Warren, to ingratiate himself with the various groupuscules and coteries of the woke left. Sanders reversed himself on immigration and adopted the woke left’s hostility to any effective enforcement of immigration laws. He uncritically endorsed the propaganda of the crackpot fringes of the climate change movement, claiming that if elected he would outlaw fracking, prosecute oil and gas company executives as criminals, and transition to wholly renewable energy in a decade, something that no credible engineer or physicist believes to be possible. To his discredit, even though he is the regular victim of Russia-baiting tactics by his neoliberal and conservative critics, he even repeated the false claim that Vladimir Putin and his army of Russian trolls had swung the U.S. presidential election from Clinton to Trump and threatened to control American democracy. The result? By Super Tuesday, the Bernie Sanders who could present himself as the rumpled, avuncular avatar of common sense and the tribune of working-class people of all regions and views had been replaced by a politician who, like his rival Warren, seemed to be competing to win college campuses and hipster havens like Brooklyn, Oakland, and Takoma Park. On Super Tuesday, Biden defeated Sanders in rural areas, small towns, and suburbs. Meanwhile, the wave of youthful leftist voters who were supposed to be inspired by Sanders to go to the polls did not materialize... Creative politicians on the right, like Boris Johnson in Britain and Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio in the United States, may be able to incorporate elements of the labor left agenda into a new conservatism that is at the same time patriotic and pro-business. If they do, then the choice of Corbyn and Sanders to embrace, rather than distance, themselves from the loud but numerically insignificant socialist left and woke left in hindsight will seem even more misguided."

The Futility of Bernie Sanders - "He isn’t like the socialists whom we know from other countries, where this kind of politics is much more common than it is in the United States. Socialist politicians usually emerge from powerful social movements like the old labor movement or from political parties like the Labour Party in the United Kingdom or the Social Democrats in Germany. Sanders does not come out of, nor has he done anything to build, a significant social movement. That wouldn’t be an easy task in the United States today; in any case, it hasn’t been his task. He has, moreover, never been a member of a political party—not even of the Democratic Party whose nomination he is now seeking. He has never attempted to create a democratic socialist caucus within the party. For all the enthusiasm he has generated, he has no organized, cohesive social or political force behind his candidacy. If he were elected, it is hard to see how he could enact any part of his announced program. Several conservative writers have said it: Sanders is best understood as a left populist. He stands to the Democratic Party today very much like Trump stood to the Republican Party in 2016... he stands in the political arena without the political support necessary to do that or even to begin to do that. He claims to be leading a movement. Look closely: He is alone with his excited followers... Like any populist politician, Sanders is promising many things that he must know he can’t deliver. Nor has he been willing (unlike Elizabeth Warren, who is more engaged in party politics) to hint at the kinds of compromises he might be prepared to make—to win or to govern. His most fervent followers sound very much like sectarian leftists who regard any compromise, any deviation from the “progressive” program, as a betrayal... He was not able anywhere to increase the number of people voting. He could not do what victorious populists have to do: pull new people, previously passive and voiceless people, into the electorate. His numbers, even among the young, compare poorly with those of Obama in his first run in 2008. He is (maybe we should be grateful) a revolutionary manqué... The party of the New Deal is a useful model. It required the hard work of politicians inside the party, like Robert F. Wagner of New York and Frank Murphy of Michigan, and of labor organizers like the Reuther brothers working outside. The truth about Sanders is that he doesn’t look anything like those necessary people."

Meme - Elon: "$1 TRILLION: *built on* TESLA ELECTRIC CAR, STARLINK SATELLITE, ROBOT, SPACEX ROCKET"
HE BUILT THINGS.
Burnie: *Speech 1995, Speech 2005, Speech 2015, Speech 2025*
HE COMPLAINED ABOUT THINGS."

Meme - Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders: "Elon Musk's rise to trillionaire status is not a time to celebrate. It's a call to action to take on the unprecedented income and wealth inequality that now exists and the greed and power of a ruling class that is destroying the social fabric of America. Our democracy cannot survive when one man, who contributed $290 million to get Trump elected, becomes $700 billion richer since Trump's election. Our economy cannot sustain itself when one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of our society, when 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major nation and when our kids will have a lower standard of living than their parents. This is not just about wealth. It's about power. Musk and his fellow Oligarchs want it ALL. Together, we must fight back. We can and must create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires."
Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas: "Elon Musk creates 4400 millionaires to include hundreds of working-class people in one IPO. Bernie has created 1 millionaire. Himself. Stop listening to socialists. They don't know how to create wealth, only how to steal it."

Handre on X - "Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988. Yaroslavl, to be exact, a year before the Berlin Wall fell and the whole rotten edifice collapsed under the weight of its own central planning. This is the man who, in 1985, praised the Sandinistas and once said breadlines were a good thing. His exact reasoning: in poor countries the rich get the food and the poor starve, so breadlines mean rationing is at least spreading the misery around. Read that again. He looked at people queuing for hours to receive a government allotment of bread and saw fairness, not failure. Price controls destroy the signal that tells producers what to grow and how much. When the Politburo fixes the price of bread below cost, farmers stop producing, shelves empty, and people line up. A breadline is the visible result. The Soviets ran this experiment for 70 years and killed millions doing it. Sanders saw the wreckage up close in 1988 and still wanted more of it. Now look at the man today. A lakefront property in North Hero, Vermont. A home in Burlington. The democratic socialist who wants to seize your wealth has accumulated his own through book deals and a Senate salary, then locked it down in real estate the way every capitalist does. Sanders understands property rights perfectly well when the property is his. He understands that incentives matter when his own incentives are on the line. The system he condemns is the one that let a man who never held a real private-sector job until his 40s end up owning three homes and lecturing you about greed. He spent his life cheering for the economic order that produced breadlines and gulags, then cashed out under the one that produced grocery stores stocked with 40,000 items. He knows which one works. He just wants you to live under the other one."

Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel

2026-06-23T18:58:00.000+08:00

Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel

"Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession...

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).

If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:

What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?

Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.

If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th. And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.

Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.

The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.

We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.

To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it. The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.

Of the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.

This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”

I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require."

Links - 23rd June 2026 (2 - UK Politics: Keir Starmer)

2026-06-23T15:20:00.000+08:00

Konstantin Kisin on X - "It genuinely amused me that people think replacing Starmer will make things better. From Boris Johnson's election onwards, we've been shuffling the bollards on the Titanic. You have to actually change direction if you want to avoid crashing into the iceberg:
- End Net Zero
- Make business viable again
- Get welfare under control
- Fund defence
- Ensure equality under the law
- Arrest criminals and keep them in jail
- Deport illegal immigrants and close the border
- Bring the civil service to heel
Burnham will become as unpopular as Starmer within months since he isn't going to do any of that."

Keir Starmer was an appalling prime minister, and he never realised - "He was the accidental prime minister. Keir Starmer never quite got the hang of politics, let alone the job of prime minister. And now he won’t have to keep trying. And he did try. Watching him make the effort was at times painful. Part of Starmer must have known there was something different, something lacking in his personality that made politics a foreign language to him. Being a lifetime card-carrying member of the Labour Party doesn’t by itself give you a deep understanding either of the party or the environment it operates in. The Prime Minister has his talents, to be sure, but they belong in chambers, not in Westminster or Whitehall... As the new leader, he had a shaky start, having to address the nation and the party in the midst of a Covid lockdown, with onlookers forgiving his stilted, uncertain, robotic delivery because it was via Zoom. But his first in-person conference speech, more than a year later, was hardly better: plodding and uninspiring, his hesitant delivery provoking so many bursts of audience applause that he took 90 minutes to deliver it. That was only a few months after his first major leadership crisis, when Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election to the governing Conservatives, an almost unheard-of event. It is known that Starmer seriously considered resigning and was only dissuaded by Morgan McSweeney, who went on to reshape his entire leadership and became his chief of staff in government. From the moment he became Prime Minister, in July 2024, there were complaints from his (suddenly vastly increased number of) backbenchers that they never got to meet him or talk with him. He started his tenure in Downing Street as he meant to go on: depending on a small number of advisers and senior ministers. As a new prime minister, it felt to him like the best way to handle the workload; to his MPs it bred resentment. And so it proved. Throughout his leadership, four years in opposition and less than two in office, he never achieved the level of oratory that many more experienced MPs manage to achieve through regular exposure to party conference and even party branch meetings, as well as the Commons. As Prime Minister, he would respond to criticisms in the chamber with a loss of temper and, occasionally, personal insults. His ability to avoid answering direct questions from the Leader of the Opposition, to an extent rarely achieved by his predecessors, became a defining characteristic and led him into conflict with the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle. Another defining characteristic of his premiership was his inability to take an unpopular stand – an unenviable but inevitable part of national leadership in these straitened times – and stick to it, too often marching his backbenchers to the top of the nearest hill, ordering them to defend the latest cuts to pensioners’ heating allowance or prospective benefit cuts, then marching them back down and retreating. This, more than any other aspect of Starmer’s leadership, even more than his misjudgment in accepting gifts in the first few months of his time as prime minister, was what quickly eroded any trust or loyalty his MPs might have otherwise shown in him. But it was his gross misjudgment over Peter Mandelson that provided the second-to-last nail in Starmer’s political coffin... By the time Starmer landed upon a policy position that seemed at least notionally popular – his opposition to President Trump’s war against Iran – the rot had set in too deeply to save his job. May’s local and devolved elections confirmed Labour’s extreme vulnerability to the new political kids on the block – the Greens on the Left and Reform UK on the Right – taking large chunks of Labour’s support. It was Starmer’s cack-handed response to that crisis that sparked the end. He trumpeted his recruitment of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman as government advisers as if it were an ingenious move, even as the vast majority of MPs and ministers looked on completely bewildered. It was an answer to a question no one was asking. His tin-eared response to Reform’s electoral advance – to reheat an old commitment to put Britain at the heart of the European Union – was seen by a large number of backbenchers as irrelevant, politically inept or even provoking to former Labour voters who had switched to Reform. And, in the face of the increasing certainty that Andy Burnham would return to Parliament in the Makerfield by-election, Starmer had nothing to say beyond a hollow claim that he was hoping the then Manchester mayor would triumph. Triumph he did, resoundingly. It was the scale of that victory that definitively convinced wavering MPs, ministers and – eventually – Starmer himself that he could not continue as PM. The tragedy of Starmer’s premiership is that the man himself might never understand why he was ditched by his MPs because he is simply unaware of the political talents a party leader and prime minister needs. Even his resignation speech was a lesson in delusion, reeling off a list of achievements that almost nobody will believe to be real."

Starmer’s resignation speech exposed his premiership’s fatal flaw - "As he stood behind the podium outside Number 10 for the final time, Keir Starmer claimed that the election of his Labour government was “a page turned”. Yet here he was being written out of the story two years later. It must have been a short chapter. Announcing his resignation as leader of the Labour Party, with his staff and a smattering of Cabinet loyalists standing off to the side looking respectfully grim, Starmer reached for a legacy but could grasp at only the most tenuous threads... Starmer dedicated himself so completely to detoxifying the Labour brand that he neglected to come up with a governing agenda for the day after the party was no longer toxic. The Conservatives’ final years in office, suppurated in scandal and sleaze, directionless and riven by division, meant Labour was under no real pressure to set out an alternative programme. Starmer’s resignation speech was thus heavy on platitudes and light on substance. There was vague talk of investment and infrastructure.An “end to austerity”, from the man who brought down an alleged Tory government that spent its final years hosing the country down with Covid and other cash. There had been a (recent) fall in NHS waiting times. On defence spending, there was to be an unspecified “uplift”, the same one his Chancellor was still battling to keep down... Not even Starmer’s enemies, of which he managed to accumulate many, could have felt schadenfreude at the dreary, monotone exit speech of our dreariest, most monotone prime minister. It had all the joy of a hastily arranged leaving do for the guy from HR whom no one liked but whose name no one could quite remember. The goo-goo eyes the London liberal media made at Starmer, who was one of them and could finally prise power from the hated Brexiteer Tories, meant the Labour leader was exposed to minimal scrutiny. That only came once he was in power and proved cripplingly indecisive, almost predisposed to poor judgment, and either incapable or ill-disposed (or possibly both) to good relations with his backbenchers... Far from having turned a page, Keir Starmer’s premiership was a run-on sentence in Britain’s long, stream-of-consciousness narrative of national decline. He made little impact, was of little import, and will be quickly and enduringly forgotten. "

Labour MP quits Keir Starmer’s frontbench, warning party taken over by ‘woke social media warriors’ - "Labour MP Khalid Mahmood has quit Keir Starmer’s frontbench, warning that the party has been taken over by “a London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors”... Mr Mahmood said that Labour had moved away from working-class voters’ priorities under the leaderships of not only Starmer, but also Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband. “In the past decade, Labour has lost touch with ordinary British people,” he said. “A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party. “They mean well, of course, but their politics – obsessed with identity, division and even tech utopianism – have more in common with those of Californian high society than the kind of people who voted in Hartlepool yesterday. “The loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world. “No wonder it is doing better among rich urban liberals and young university graduates than it is amongst the most important part of its traditional electoral coalition, the working class.”"
From 2021

The biggest myth about Keir Starmer is finally being blown apart - "Whether they want him to stay or go, practically everyone on the centre-Left agrees on one thing. Sir Keir Starmer is “a decent man”... Where to begin? How about with the brazen perfidy of his machinations to become Labour leader? In 2020, he spent his entire leadership campaign gushing to party members about how much he loved his dear “friend”, Jeremy Corbyn. He solemnly promised them all manner of juicy Corbynite policies, from scrapping tuition fees to restoring free movement with the EU. Then, having won, he swiftly ditched almost every pledge he’d campaigned on, and denied that Corbyn had ever been his “friend” at all. It’s not often I’ve felt sympathy for the Corbyn fan club. But on that occasion, they were shamelessly screwed over. The Waspi women will know exactly how they felt. In opposition, Sir Keir noisily endorsed their campaign for compensation for the way they were affected by changes to the State Pension age – in government, he has flatly rejected it. Once again, he’d promised people the earth, pocketed their votes and betrayed them. Is that the behaviour of “a decent man”? Or how about his despicable treatment of Rosie Duffield, the former Labour MP he spinelessly failed to defend from intimidation by trans fanatics? Or his attempt, alongside his Chancellor, to strip millions of pensioners of their winter fuel allowance, despite never having mentioned any such plan during the general election campaign that had taken place mere weeks earlier? Was that “decent”? Perhaps we should ask Lucy Connolly. Or Northern Ireland veterans. Or the millions of people who are being prevented from voting out their Labour councils, because this year’s elections have been spuriously delayed. Or, most importantly of all, the victims of the child-rape gangs, who heard Sir Keir initially dismiss pleas for a national inquiry as a “bandwagon” of the “far-Right”. Would any of the above people call him “decent”? Oh, and while we’re at it, did he only appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador because, being so terribly “decent”, he just wanted to give this poor, maligned chap one more chance? In the same vein, did he ennoble Matthew Doyle, his former spin doctor, in January, simply because “decent” men in power reward “paedophile apologists”? Of course, I realise that it’s not exactly unusual for politicians to renege on their promises, or to take a somewhat flexible approach to the truth. But the reason it’s so much more enraging when this particular politician does it is that he has always presented himself to the nation as “Mr Integrity”. The shining man of principle who was going to restore probity to politics, after 14 years of sleaze and lies by the wicked Tories. Indeed, this was his sole selling point. It certainly wasn’t his dazzling charisma. Still, not everyone has given up on him. On Monday night, his ministers all rushed to state their support. I’m sure this was merely because they’re so steadfast and loyal. And certainly not because they were terrified that, if they declined to support him, he would punish them by calling a snap general election, which – as both he and they must know very well – would cost most of them their seats. After all, they believe he’s a decent man. And a decent man would never do something so vicious and vengeful, would he?"

Trump says he is ‘not happy’ with UK as he criticises Starmer for being overly reliant on advisers – as it happened - "'You don't need to meet your team, you're the PM' - Trump slams Starmer for being over-reliant on his advisers"
"[Starmer] only discovered that Sue Gray, his chief of staff, and Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, had given striking train drivers a new pay deal after it had been agreed. The civil servants who had just begun to work with Starmer were baffled at first. Then, as the months ground on, the confounding realisation struck them. Why would Haigh have bothered to consult him? In the frantic meetings after the winter fuel allowance announcement he was a conspicuous, unfelt absence. “We were surrounded by people, who had worked for Blair and Brown,” one adviser said. ‘They would have known exactly what they would have said had they been in a room like that. None of us could say the same about Keir. It wasn’t just that we didn’t know what he would say. We didn’t know whether he would have said anything” … Cabinet ministers and No 10 advisers strained for loyalty. But it proved too difficult for some. “He is,” said one influential aide upon their departure from Downing Street, “the least intellectually curious person I have ever met.” Said another politician upon whom Starmer relied heavily: “He can only prepare by reading briefing books for hours on end. He doesn’t brainstorm. He has no fixed views on anything. There’s no clarity because there’s no belief. There’s no belief because there’s no understanding. There’s no understanding because there’s no curiosity.”"
"Since last Wednesday, it’s become increasingly clear that either the government did not follow due process in its appointment of Peter Mandelson or that it is not disclosed all of the relevant documents. In different terms, either the prime minister’s assurances that full due process was followed were misleading, or the government has not complied with the humble address. Either would be a contempt of parliament … There are many, many documents missing. I have detailed 56 to him in a letter that I have sent [to Darren Jones, chief secretary to the PM] to give a few examples. There is no prime ministerial readout on the advice he received. This is a breach of protocol. A prime ministerial decision, even if made oral orally, should be formally recorded. Where is that record? It starts to stink of the sofa government we had under Tony Blair. There are no minutes of any meeting at which this appointment was discussed by anyone at any time. Most suspiciously of all, we have no material from the prime minister, from the chiefs, from his chief of staff or from Peter Mandelson. No box returns, no emails, no forms, no WhatsApp, nothing. It is as though their fingerprints have been forensically removed."
Releasing everything is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda

You’ll miss Keir Starmer when he’s gone | The Spectator - "The best way to understand Starmer is as a drug. Precisely because he was so mind-numbingly tedious and so terrible at politics, he was the perfect escape from our national decline – Britain’s last diversionary tactic. You won’t understand the extraordinary and, frankly, shameful abuse directed at him unless you grasp his role as scapegoat for a deeply dishonest political culture... His background told against him. Starmer spent most of his life in the law. After his rapid rise to power, commentators gushed that it was marvellous to have a prime minister who wasn’t a ‘professional politician’. They forgot that politics is a profession, as Max Weber said. You must learn the skills to manage and persuade, and if you don’t, the pressure will destroy you. We have now witnessed the destruction of two amateur prime ministers. Rishi Sunak entered Parliament in 2015 and became prime minister a mere seven years later in 2022. Starmer entered the Commons in 2015 and was prime minister nine years later. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher wasn’t PM until she had spent 20 years in Parliament. Starmer did not serve his apprenticeship. He did not acquire the necessary skills to take credit for his achievements, fight his opponents or advance his ideals. All he could do was become an object of abuse. Jess Phillips made this point well when she said with evident regret in her resignation letter, ‘I think you are a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough. The desire not to have an argument means…leaving opportunities for progress stalled and delayed.’... By blaming Starmer millions of voters, most of the left, all of the right, and what remains of the mainstream media could avoid facing their own complicity in the national disaster. The underlying reason for the failure is economic. Since the crisis of 2008 revealed our overdependence on financial services, real GDP per person has grown by just 0.6 per cent a year compared to 2.3 per cent per year in the previous 50 years. Add it up, and you find that our real incomes are 30 per cent lower than they would have been. No wonder we are so angry. In any thoughtful country decline on this scale would have provoked urgent debate. Instead, we decided that hating Starmer was far easier than confronting the vested interests and half-mad ideologies that stand in the way of escaping stagnation... The dark secret of so much of Britain is that it wants change in theory but hates it in practice."

Kemi Badenoch: Tony Blair’s New Labour legacy is a country run by HR - "Mrs Badenoch said: “The Blairite legacy is that the entire country is now run by HR as Labour junk your best ideas and champion your worst.” Sir Tony published a damning 5,000-word essay on Tuesday, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of retreating into a Left-wing “comfort zone” of high taxes and red tape, which had crippled growth while failing to tackle the ballooning welfare bill. He also intervened in the Labour leadership crisis, warning it would be “dangerous” for the party to shift to the Left. Following the extensive critique, Andy Burnham, who is attempting a return to government by standing in the Makerfield by-election, accused Sir Tony of “not understanding what’s going on”. Mrs Badenoch wrote in The Times: “Andy Burnham’s reply proves your point better than I ever could. Faced with your warning that Labour needs growth, cheaper energy and welfare restraint, his answer is more state control, more public spending and another attack on markets and enterprise. “Burnham will learn the hard way that spending taxpayers’ money as mayor is much easier than finding it as prime minister.” Mrs Badenoch added that Labour politicians were “embarrassed” by Sir Tony’s three general election victories and were on the path to “test to destruction all the Left-wing ideas ... mothballed in 1979”. She said Sir Tony’s “restraints on trade unions” had been undone by Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, while Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, “congratulates himself” for reducing waiting lists when “he simply deleted names off the list”. On immigration, Mrs Badenoch said: “Your Human Rights Act has created a system where Britain struggles to deport foreign criminals. It rewards asylum claims that are an insult to common sense: sudden ‘conversions’ to Christianity, followed by a return to Islam once settled.” She accused Labour of not being able to articulate British identity, insisting that “culture matters” and “this country is our home not a hotel”. Sir Tony’s comments marked his first public criticism of Sir Keir’s administration, having previously criticised only policies. He was particularly opposed to the Prime Minister’s handling of welfare, after Left-wing backbenchers forced No 10 to drop reforms to personal independence payments. Mrs Badenoch said: “The Conservative project is relentlessly focused on delivering a high-growth, lower-immigration economy, cheaper energy by scrapping Miliband’s net-zero targets, reducing Starmer’s ballooning welfare bill and putting the money directly into defence to increase our military strength.” Mr Burnham and Mr Streeting, his potential leadership rival, criticised Sir Tony’s analysis for not mentioning inequality. Mr Burnham said: “If you don’t get how [inequality is] driving politics now, if you are not rooting your analysis in the fact that people are unable to live and that things that were taken for granted are no longer affordable, then you are not understanding what’s going on. “The last 40 years have given us wide inequality – that’s what’s responsible for the abandonment of the centre.”"
The UK has similar income inequality as the USSR, but left wingers will never be satisfied till everyone is equally poor

Britain is facing a 1938 moment - "Never in my lifetime has there been a bigger or more necessary shock to the defence strategy of this country than the resignations of both John Healey and his most accomplished and experienced minister of state, Al Carns. When we get past the political smoke, this double blow to the Government has existential implications for our whole nation. We are facing the very real prospect of war in the next few years, every bit as much as we did in the 1930s. And we are not ready. Healey, until yesterday the defence secretary, attacked the shortfall in terms of money. But Carns addresses an even more fundamental failure: we are simply not organised to face the next war. In his words: “The character of conflict is changing faster than our procurement can keep up with. We are still purchasing capability suitable for the last war while our adversaries arm for the next one. Platforms that cost billions can be defeated by systems that cost thousands. Any serious Defence Investment Plan has to start from that reality.”... we have to build from scratch a complete new military-industrial ecosystem. It has to be one that can invent and produce weapons systems that cost thousands, not billions, and that are on the battlefield in months not years. Such a system will be almost certainly based around small start-ups, not corporate monoliths. It can be done. Ukraine had seven domestic drone manufacturers at the start of the war with Russia, it now has 500. FPV (first-person view) drone production has grown from 3,000-5,000 units in 2022 to more than eight million this year. Equally importantly, it innovates at unbelievable rates... But the technology itself is not the headline. The organisational model is. Ukraine has built a distributed observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) architecture at industrial scale, where feedback between battlefield observation and production action operates faster than any comparable system in history. Observation nodes sit at the point of use, not at the top of a reporting chain – the opposite of traditional Western procurement hierarchies."

Healey’s resignation exposes Starmer’s indefensible priorities - "You might have thought Keir Starmer’s government had run out of ways to surprise us. Between the scandals and U-turns and the entire sorry Mandelson affair, it has crammed a whole parliament’s worth of dismal headlines into less than two years. Quite a run rate. What the 60s were for pop music, the 2020s are for bad government. Who knows what they will have achieved by the next general election. If only the same efficiency improvements could be made in other areas of the economy. Naturally, there has been a smorgasbord of resignations to go with all this incompetence: 18 in less than two years, more than any other recent prime minister. Such a variety, too. Starmer’s ministers have quit over past criminal convictions (Louise Haigh), evicting tenants while minister for homelessness (Rushanara Ali), dodgy family finances (Tulip Siddiq), dodgy tax (Angela Rayner), dodgily paying a PR firm to investigate journalists (Josh Simons), not to mention a smattering of health and personal reasons. Recently, there has been “naked ambition” (Wes Streeting et al). Given such stiff competition, credit to John Healey for rummaging about in his top hat and coming up with the last thing anybody expects from a Labour minister in 2026: a resignation on principle. Shocking stuff. Apart from Anneliese Dodds, no other minister has quit over policy in their own department, although Vicky Foxcroft resigned as whip over disability benefits. On Thursday, Healey joined their meagre number. Here was a defence secretary who felt that when it came to the matter of national defence, his prime minister had been all talk and no trousers. Or all carrier and no aircraft, to use a more pressing analogy... it is not as if Starmer does not know the scale of the defence problems. He watches the same news as everyone else, it’s just his response to it is different. He sees a terrifying drone war in Ukraine and doubles down on the £5.5bn Ajax chunderbus. He sees a lonely HMS Dragon make its glacial way to Cyprus, while the French put a full carrier group to sea, and concludes that our defence spending is basically fine. Still, a man must have a code. One’s priorities are one’s priorities. For the Prime Minister, defence is important, just not as important as net zero or winter fuel or the thousand other commitments Labour has been unable to trim. Of course taxes will go up, just not for anything as naffly old-fashioned as an army. Still, as Putin’s tanks rumble up Whitehall, they may pause to admire the scope and variety of our recycling bins."

Government is favouring HR over Armed Forces improvements, say Tories - "The number of Ministry of Defence (MoD) workers responsible for implementing government policies has fallen by almost 40 per cent in four years, while Whitehall has taken on about 2,000 more human resources (HR) staff."

How Scottish culture is in danger of being strangled to death by activists

2026-06-23T12:08:00.000+08:00

From 2025:

Scottish culture is in danger of being strangled to death by activists (aka "How Scottish culture is in danger of being strangled to death by activists")

An air of crisis hangs over the Scottish arts world following this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, which has been rocked by a series of protests, artist cancellations and a climate of intimidation. “McCarthyite” is how one attendee describes it to me. “What people seem to have misunderstood is that the purpose of the Fringe is the interaction and exchange of ideas.”

On August 2, an event featuring John Swinney, Scotland’s First Minister, in conversation with the writer Susan Morrison on the subject of “life, art, politics and Scotland’s future” was interrupted five times by six different groups of protesters calling for the Scottish government to end funding to arms companies. And at the Fringe venue Summerhall, which earlier this year received a grant of £600,000 from Creative Scotland, staff apologised to audiences ahead of an appearance by Kate Forbes, the deputy first minister and a devout and gender-critical Christian, saying they were concerned about “the safety and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ artists, staff and audiences by attracting those who share her ‘views’” and that the decision to invite her was “an oversight”.

The Edinburgh Book Festival has been roundly criticised after failing to include Scottish authors with gender-critical opinions in its programme, including the authors of the best selling The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, an account of the grass roots campaign against Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which sought to remove most of the legal requirements needed to change gender (the bill was blocked by the UK Government). And two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, had their shows cancelled at the Whistle Binkies venue after bar staff expressed fears of “being unsafe”.

“It felt like every day there was a new protest,” is how one prominent festival-goer put it. “There is a crisis in Scottish culture,” added a leading Scottish author who didn’t want to be named, describing the Scottish arts climate as too “toxic” as a result of “those in charge having very little interest in Scotland’s artistic or intellectual life, instead using their position to advocate for their own divisive political obsessions and the artists that they decide best embody them”.

In an essay for The Dark Horse poetry magazine earlier this year, the poet Don Paterson laid into what he calls the stranglehold of “Identitarianism” on Scottish national politics and its consequences for the arts. “The misplaced sense of self-importance that tends to dog the world of arts administration had led it to forget that its job was the nurturing and promotion of Scottish excellence and talent, not the defence of the culture’s ideological purity,” he wrote.

This crisis has been felt acutely in the conversation surrounding trans rights. The Scottish literary scene was rocked last year when the Edinburgh International Book Festival, alongside seven other literary festivals across Britain, severed links with its principal sponsor, the Scottish investment fund Baillie Gifford. It followed a sustained nationwide campaign by Fossil Free Books (FFB) over the fund’s investments in fossil fuels (about 2 per cent of investments overall) and what FFB described as companies “linked to the Israeli military” – a description Baillie Gifford said is “seriously misleading”.

FFB primarily campaigns on climate change, but it shares strong ideological overlaps with those who protest against the war in Gaza and, crucially, with pro-trans activists.

Edinburgh has form in silencing gender-critical artists and speakers: the comic Graham Linehan was forced to perform outside Holyrood in 2023 after Leith Arches pulled his show. In the same year, the Stand comedy venue cancelled an appearance by Joanna Cherry, the SNP MP, after she voiced opposition to the SNP’s gender recognition reform plans.

Linehan, who this week was arrested by British police for jokes and comments he made online about trans people, tweeted at the time that the actions of Leith Arches “sure sounds like discrimination on the grounds of my legally protected beliefs”, while the Stand retracted its position after Cherry threatened legal action. Meanwhile, beyond the festival, the National Library of Scotland was last month embroiled in controversy when it excluded The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht from a display celebrating Scottish culture after staff threatened to disrupt the exhibition if it was included.

“Scotland has been a vicious place to be a gender-critical writer,” says Jenny Lindsay, a Scottish performance poet and the author of Hounded, a defence of gender criticism. She says she has suffered a sustained campaign of online abuse since speaking out against trans activists in 2019, when Scotland began consulting on its proposed changes to gender recognition. She has been advised by police in the past not to attend events unaccompanied, and has lost work as a result.

Scotland’s small size, adds Lindsay, means the link between nationalism and identity politics in the country has had a profound effect on the creative sector. “Everything is very incestuous,” she says. She points out that Edinburgh International Book Festival has never had a gender-critical writer discuss a gender-critical book.

“What’s really frustrating is that a lot of the time it’s the same small group of people involved, but they have been given so much power by very, very nervous cultural leaders,” she says. Lindsay and other leading members of the Scottish arts scene have reacted with dismay to the decision of Jenny Niven, the Book Festival’s director, to prioritise voices on the programme who, as Lindsay puts it, “are the very people who have made our life [as gender-critical authors] hell”.

Many believe this climate has become increasingly intimidating, even threatening. One woman who participated in an Edinburgh International Book Festival panel event told me: “I think everyone must know full well that had the book festival programmed an event on The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, the event – and perhaps the whole festival – would have been targeted with protest and probably violence.”

David Greig, a Scottish playwright who this year stepped down as the artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, says: “The previous chairman of the Book Festival board said last year that one of the reasons they had stopped the funding from Baillie Gifford was that they were afraid for the safety of their staff.” (The book festival was kept afloat this year by a £300,000 grant from the Scottish government.) “But if you’re afraid for the safety of your staff, to invite those people who led the campaign that has caused you to be afraid for their safety, well, that’s just bewildering.”

Like many people I spoke to, one author, who wanted to stay anonymous for fears over her career, said the culture war debates aren’t actually about the gap between the marginalised and the powerful, however activists might like to frame it as such. “It’s really about fairly insecure cultural establishments who would rather shore up their position by being pious social justice warriors rather than by sticking to standards of excellence and cultural achievement. You have to remember that Scotland is 93 per cent white. And there is a sort of guilt about that. It feels cringingly un-modern.”

Scotland is also historically politically consensual. “If you look at the votes in the 1950s, over 50 per cent of Scots voted Conservative,” points out Greig. “And then in the 1980s, over 50 per cent of Scots voted Labour. And then in the 2000s, over 50 per cent of Scots voted SNP. So we are, by nature, a slightly consensus-driven country, and that can be quite useful. But it is also bad for art and bad for political discourse.”

Yet Greig also notes that much of what has happened in Scotland across the festival as a whole reflects a now-entrenched confusion within the West over the role and purpose of the arts. “There’s been this move towards an HR-style approach to the arts in Britain and America, which has been about trying to improve the morals of artists. This is not exclusive to Scotland.”

Nonetheless, this cultural conservatism, combined with the specific economics of the Edinburgh Fringe post pandemic, where costs have soared in recent years, are having profound consequences for the Fringe. “I would love to see a play that puts both sides of the trans debate,” says Grieg. “But you aren’t seeing it. You no longer, for instance, get plays at the Fringe such as David Harrower’s Blackbird or Anthony Neilson’s Stitching – [two big Fringe hits in the 2000s that both thrillingly explored the morally ambiguous line between abuser and victim within sexual relationships].”

Greig continues: “When I was director of the Lyceum, I got a lot of flak because we refused to take a stand on the Black Lives Matter movement. But that was not our job. The bigger institutions, such as the Book Festival or the Edinburgh International Festival, need to reaffirm the point that they do not take sides in political issues but are instead the means by which artists have the freedom to explore these things.”

So what is the cost to the reputation of Scottish arts as a result of all this? And what damage is being done to the Fringe, which was set up in 1947 as the International Festival’s ungovernable rebellious little sister and which has championed free speech since its inception? “When I was on the board of the Fringe Society between 1986 and 2012, we would often have discussions about offensive subjects,” says Simon Fanshawe, a former stand-up comedian and Perrier Award winner who is now rector of Edinburgh University.

“But the view was ‘that’s the point of the Fringe’. Jonathan Miller used to call it a Darwinian crap shoot. As long as what you are doing is lawful, then the Fringe is the place to do it. But when you have Jewish comedians being told they are not welcome, then that seems inherently damaging. And the book festival has certainly been damaged, no question. The Left has decided that censorship is a progressive tool, and that’s really dangerous. Because when you try to censor [something], the next thing that will happen is that they will censor you,” says Fanshawe.

Yet there are signs that things are changing. The Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), which is separate from the Fringe and is programmed by its current artistic director, Nicola Benedetti, has so far resisted pressure to cut funding links with Baillie Gifford. Fanshawe adds that he received nothing but support from the EIF when he was targeted by an organisation called Arts for Palestine ahead of his appearance at two panel debates on artistic and academic freedom, because of his association with LGB Alliance, a group Arts for Palestine labels “transphobic”.

“Arts for Palestine tried to undermine open discussion around academic and artistic freedom but the EIF stood by me,” he says. “What’s more, our panels were deliberately argumentative. There is a push-back. People are starting to show leadership. And people are starting to say no.”

Greig says that audiences want change. “The arts world in Britain and in America has had a stick up its a--- for a decade or so.” But now, “they don’t want to be treated like idiots. You can see this in the West End success of Giant [Mark Rosenblatt’s Royal Court hit about Roald Dahl and anti-Semitism], which forces audiences to look at both sides of a debate. No one likes a Puritan. And that’s why the Restoration came after Cromwell. We all lie to ourselves, we all tell ourselves that we’re virtuous, but secretly we’re not. And that’s what artists are there for to show us.”

Links - 23rd June 2026 (1 - Climate Change)

2026-06-23T09:03:00.000+08:00

Carbon tax increases will cost workers income, jobs and shrink economy - "The federal government’s current plan to raise the national industrial carbon tax to $170 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 will cost the average Canadian worker $1,160 in lost annual income and result in 50,000 fewer jobs, according to a new study by the Fraser Institute. The report by the fiscally conservative think tank says it would shrink the Canadian economy by 1.3% compared to a scenario in which the industrial carbon price is frozen at its current level of $95 per tonne of emissions. It also predicts a $170 per tonne carbon price in 2030 would have a severe negative impact on capital earnings (interest, dividends, capital gains, etc.), resulting in reduced or cancelled investment plans, and “further long-run declines in Canadian living standards.”"
Left wingers want to destroy the economy, after all
Weird how the rest of the world outside the West hasn't been inspired to destroy their economies too. Clearly the West needs to spend another few decades commiting suicide, because surely that level of dedication and sacrifice will inspire the rest of the world to be equally daft

Meme - Based Jessica @RealJessica: "Thank you Germany 🇩🇪and Britain 🇬🇧 for sacrificing your economies to save the planet. China appreciates you exporting your manufacturing to provide jobs for their citizens."
"Annual CO2 emissions. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and industry. Land-use change is not included. *Germany and United Kingdom dropping, China skyrocketing*"

The end of the British salt industry could be apocalyptic - spiked - "Salt has been a major industry in Britain for centuries. The salt deposits in Cheshire, the West Midlands and Teesside are huge and still are – in fact, they could be viable for decades to come. Yet now the UK is on the verge of becoming a net importer of salt, for the first time in history. Inovyn, the company that produces roughly 50 per cent of Britain’s salt, has announced that it will likely have to close its facility in Runcorn, Cheshire, unless it receives government support. Like the rest of the UK’s manufacturing industry, Inovyn is struggling to cope with the UK’s breathtakingly high energy costs and crippling carbon taxes. In other words, Britain’s salt industry is to be sacrificed at the altar of Net Zero. The decline of salt would be an economic disaster. The chemical and pharmaceutical industry is one of the largest manufacturers in the UK. Salt, which is used in 90 per cent of pharmaceuticals, is a vital component in a surprising number of everyday products. Only the food industry contributes more to the domestic economy – and the food industry also needs high-quality salt, for taste and preservative reasons. Salt is integral to sectors that employ hundreds of thousands of people. The consequences of Britain becoming a net salt importer will have a huge impact on these industries. Salt is difficult to store and transport. That is the major reason why chemical plants are located very close to the point of production. Those chemical and pharmaceutical industries that depend on local supplies will, inevitably, either close down or relocate closer to salt sources. If Runcorn goes, don’t expect the chemicals industry or pharmaceuticals to survive in this country."

Meme - "HOW DO I KNOW THAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS A SCAM? HERE ARE FIVE REASONS
1. They preach sacrifice, but don't practice it. *private jet, SUV, oil barrel and gas pump*
2. They fly across the world to tell us how to reduce our "carbon footprint."
3. Wealthy alarmists still buy oceanfront property.
4. They rarely criticize China and India.
5. Their "solutions" always mean more government power and higher costs. Higher taxes. EV mandates. Restrictions & bans. More government power"

Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki on X - "This chart demolishes one of the central claims of the climate cult. It comes from Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies. Their entire business depends on accurately pricing risk. What does it show? Weather disaster losses as a percentage of global GDP from 1990–2025. Not raw dollars. Not media headlines. Losses normalized to the size of the global economy. And the trend? Flat… if anything slightly declining. If climate change were causing an explosion in extreme weather damages, losses should be rising faster than global wealth. They aren’t. What we see instead are occasional spikes (1993, 2005, 2017) surrounded by long periods of normal variability. Weather fluctuates. The long-term trend does not show escalating catastrophe. So why does the public constantly hear about “record climate disasters”? Because the climate industrial complex almost always cites raw dollar losses. As the global economy grows and more infrastructure exists, of course the total cost of disasters rises. That’s not climate. That’s propaganda. Normalize the data properly, and the panic narrative falls apart. The truth is simple: despite rising CO₂ and endless climate alarmism, weather disasters are not consuming a larger share of global wealth. The climate cult needs people to believe the world is spiraling into chaos. The data keep saying otherwise."

Danish pol defends guidelines limiting nursing home residents to 2.8 ounces of beef a week - "An eco-warrior politician has sparked outrage in Denmark after she defended guidelines limiting residents of government-run nursing homes to just 2.8 ounces of beef a week — which is less than one Big Mac. Birgitte Kehler Holst of the left-wing green Danish party The Alternative was also accused of saying old people in nursing homes should be “punished” by restricting their meat intake in comments made in a meeting of Copenhagen’s City Council on April 30. She was speaking against plans to exclude nursing home residents from guidelines in the Danish capital that restrict meals at government-run sites to just 2.8 ounces (80 grams) of beef, lamb, or veal per week. That is less than the amount of beef in a standard McDonald’s Big Mac, which contains two 1.6-ounce beef patties — for a total of 3.2 ounces. “Everyone, including the elderly, must contribute to achieving our climate goals,” Holst said at the city council meeting, adding, “It is precisely the generation that has screwed up the most.” Her comments sparked outrage among commentators in Denmark and elsewhere, with many accusing her of trying to punish the elderly and force through a vegetarian agenda... “No, we’re not saving the entire world by having our elderly eat only 11.4 grams of beef per day. Denmark emits 0.1% of the world’s human-caused CO2,” he added, taking aim at the hypocrisy of many climate activists. “Many of these climate fanatics who implement this kind of draconian climate measure have no problem flying back and forth to attend irrelevant climate conferences,” he said. Mona Juul of the center-right Conservative People’s Party also slammed the measure for punishing old people. “[Holst] apparently believes that nursing home residents should not be given meat because they have been ‘pigs’ their whole lives. Therefore, they should have lentils instead of meat”"
Old people need more protein too. The cruelty is the point

E&E News on X - "Greens mobilize against redistricting blitz"
Russ Greene on X - "the omnicause"
Jacob Shell on X - "Over the 2010s, the climate movement started gerrymandering their definition of "climate" to make it always actually about whatever the current thing was...a signal that deep down they lacked confidence in climate in and of itself as such an important issue."
Jacob Shell on X - "If you actually focused on climate rather than redefining it to allow fickle lurching from one Current Thing thing to the next, you'd have to confront the geographic complexity of climate change, where some regions will do badly and others will do well, and figure out what to make of this in terms of demands, politics, philosophy, etc. But by 2015, "climate" at the discursive level, whether in politics, media or academia, was not this -- it was a One Big Abstraction. "Climate" was either a Great Doom which was going to destroy the planet evenly and everywhere like a large asteroid (the metaphor of "Don't Look Up"); or if "difference" was acknowledged it was only through lens of race and gender...a lens which was supposed to follow a political formula and which made it impossible for someone to say that the rich, white Malibu coast is actually in a lot of trouble whereas the African Sahel is going to get greener."
tantum on X - "No one really believes in climate change. They believe in climate change in the same fashion the Soviets used to believe in the withering away of the state: useful insofar as it inspires loyalty to socialist world government, but not useful insofar as it has concrete implications, like “the cleanest, most advanced economies should do all the industrial production” or “liberal elites would be foolish to invest in beachfront property”"
This explains Greta Thunberg's move to other areas of the left wing omnicause

Meme - "Why isn't China concerned about global warming?"
"Because they already have a communist government"

Canada’s costly climate gamble on food needs to end - "For years, Canadians were told that catastrophic climate scenarios justified virtually any policy imposed in the name of emissions reductions. In agriculture and food, this translated into mounting costs across the supply chain, escalating industrial carbon pricing, and a policy environment increasingly disconnected from affordability and competitiveness. Now, quietly, the scientific conversation is evolving. A recent paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, tied directly to the next generation of UN-backed climate modeling for the IPCC’s upcoming assessment cycle, suggests that some of the most extreme warming scenarios used for years are no longer considered plausible. The infamous SSP5-8.5 pathway, often portrayed publicly as a “business-as-usual” future, assumed an explosion in coal consumption, extraordinarily high fossil fuel dependence, and emissions trajectories that increasingly diverged from economic and technological realities. In plain English: some of the world’s leading climate scientists are now acknowledging that humanity is unlikely to follow the catastrophic path that dominated climate communication for much of the last decade. Yet Canadian policy, especially in agri-food, still behaves as though we are one harvest away from Mad Max. This matters because few sectors absorb policy costs more directly than food. Even after Ottawa effectively zeroed out the consumer carbon levy on fuels in 2025, the industrial carbon pricing regime remains firmly in place and continues to rise, reaching $110 per tonne this year. These costs ripple through virtually every segment of the food economy: fertilizer production, trucking, warehousing, refrigeration, food processing, packaging, greenhouse operations, grain drying, and cold-chain logistics. Food systems are extraordinarily energy intensive. Unlike many sectors, food has no pause button. Products perish. Refrigeration cannot stop. Trucks must move. Grain must dry. Livestock must eat. And while government officials often insist the carbon price has only a “minimal” effect on grocery bills, that argument misses the broader economic picture entirely. The real issue is not simply retail pass-through. It is competitiveness. Canada’s agri-food sector competes globally. When domestic costs rise faster than those faced by competitors in the United States or elsewhere, investment shifts. Processing capacity weakens. Domestic production becomes less attractive. Imports increase. Over time, consumers pay the price through weaker food sovereignty and higher structural costs. This is not theoretical anymore. Canadians are already visiting grocery stores more frequently in search of deals. Restaurant bankruptcies are accelerating. Food affordability remains the number one concern for households according to repeated national surveys conducted by Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab. Families are adapting, trading down, and increasingly prioritizing price over virtually every other food value. Meanwhile, policymakers continue layering costs onto the supply chain as though affordability were a secondary concern. The irony is that the climate science itself is becoming more nuanced while public policy remains rigid. To be clear, none of this means climate change is fake, harmless, or irrelevant to agriculture. Canadian farmers still face drought risks, floods, extreme weather volatility, and shifting growing conditions. Agriculture has always been vulnerable to nature. It always will be. But policy should be proportional to realistic risks, not permanently anchored to worst-case scenarios that scientists themselves are now reassessing. Canada’s food strategy needs recalibration. Instead of obsessing over punitive cost mechanisms, Ottawa should focus on resilience and productivity: modernizing transportation infrastructure, investing in irrigation and water systems, accelerating precision agriculture, supporting genetics research, strengthening domestic processing capacity, improving trade logistics, and encouraging technological innovation throughout the food chain. Innovation reduces emissions. Efficiency reduces waste. Productivity strengthens food security. Punishing domestic production does not. The danger now is not climate denial. It is policy inertia. Governments built much of today’s climate framework around assumptions that are quietly being revised by the scientific community itself. Yet admitting that some assumptions may have been overstated has become politically difficult because too many institutions, activists, and even media organizations spent years presenting worst-case scenarios as inevitabilities rather than possibilities. The result is a dangerous disconnect between economic reality and policy ambition. Canada needs climate policy rooted in pragmatism, not ideology. Especially in food. Because in the end, no country can claim to care about sustainability while simultaneously making food less affordable, weakening domestic production, and eroding its own supply chains."
Clearly, Canada destroying its own economy and making food unaffordable will inspire China and India to do the same, and stop climate change. The fact that non-Western countries aren't doing the same proves that the West needs to double down to set an example, which will definitely be followed once they have impoverished themselves and China takes over the world. Only Dangerous Far Right Climate Change Deniers don't know that the Science is Settled
How ignorant. Why doesn't the Food Professor know that food is expensive worldwide and nothing Canada does has increased its cost?!

MAZE on X - "2016. Guy McPherson (a climate change expert, scientist, and professor from the University of Arizona) says that there will not be any humans on the planet by 2026 due to the effects of climate change. Trust the scientists. 😜🤣"
Trust the Science!

Meme - "The left blamed climate change for the Palisades fire. It turns out, the arsonist was a leftist who worshipped Luigi Mangione and wanted to punish the rich. 12 people paid for it with their lives."

Consumer groups criticise energy companies charging solar panel owners for exporting power - "A new tariff that will charge solar panel owners for exporting their energy during the middle of the day could discourage solar uptake, consumer groups say. Ausgrid, which has about 280,000 customers in New South Wales with rooftop solar panels, has introduced a two-way tariff system to incentivise solar panel owners to export their power into the grid in the evening, when it is most needed. This will include a charge to solar panel owners of 1.2 cents a kilowatt hour to send electricity to the grid between 10am and 3pm once exports hit above a free threshold... Other energy distributors in NSW and the Australian Capital Territory proposed similar plans last year, including Essential Energy, Endeavour Energy, and EVOenergy, according to the consumer group Solar Citizens. Solar Citizens’ chief executive, Heidi Lee Douglas, said the groupbelieved the tariff was a roadblock to solar uptake, given that few solar panel owners would benefit from the return... This was due to a low uptake in batteries among solar panel owners, she said, which would allow consumers to benefit from the change by storing their power during the day and selling back to the grid during the evening when the return is high. Price was the main inhibitor to uptake, Douglas said, with batteries costing upwards of $10,000. About 12% of homes with solar panels have a battery, according to figures by SunWiz. In NSW it’s 13.5%. Douglas said the change could lead to consumers installing smaller solar power systems so they were not penalised for exporting energy during the day. “We actually need the government to be removing the roadblocks for those people to get the cost of living benefits of solar energy,” she said. Douglas said governments should be doing more and urged the NSW government to follow Queensland’s lead by increasing battery uptake via financial support... Reeve said the change had been triggered by problems caused by the flood of power exported by solar systems during the day rather than at night when it was needed."
Clearly, this is the fault of 'capitalism' which says free power is a bad thing, because left wingers think prices are fake and arbitrary with no informational value
The "cost of living benefits of solar energy" are just government subsidies
Naturally, the Guardian doesn't talk about grid stability, devoting more space to people condemning this move

Students say Humber Polytechnic’s net zero rollout less than ideal - "When Etobicoke’s Humber Polytechnic announced plans to not only greatly reduce its carbon footprint but do so in record time, many students celebrated... In 2024, the college moved its target to achieve net-zero emissions from 2050 to 2029. The move included transitioning from natural gas to advanced electric heating systems, a multi-phase project called “SWITCH,” which a spokesperson says is aimed at reducing natural gas use and carbon emissions. But students who live in residence on the north campus say the changeover has left them in the cold on many days. “It’s greatly reduced the hot water in our bathrooms,” the student told us. “Some days there’d be no hot water for 12 hours. Some days the shortage would last three hours. But the biggest thing is there was no communication.”... “I work for the college and I am about two weeks shy of graduating, and I worry any kind of negative attention might interrupt that,” one of the students told us. The students say they’ve experienced hot water problems since they moved into the dorms this fall. “It started in September with sporadic hot water outages. This was a new system so most of us understood at the time there might be glitches but then it just continued and has been ongoing ever since,” said one student. Students most upset are those who paid extra to live in the suite style dorms equipped with private bathrooms. “But it’s no good when you can’t even shower,” one of the students said. “The options they left us with is to go and shower in other buildings that had hot water but that’s not what we paid for.”"
Leopards eating people's faces is only when you defy the left wing agenda

'Fighting' climate change about expanding government power - " There is nothing as absurd as claims by former environment minister Steven Guilbeault and other green ideologues that Prime Minister Mark Carney has made it impossible to meet Canada’s greenhouse gas emission targets because of his energy policies. It’s absurd because Canada was never going to meet the targets under former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government... Carney’s energy policies so far have been more realistic than Trudeau’s, which is somewhat surprising given Carney’s previous life as the world’s leading corporate shill for higher carbon taxes... In December 2023, Guilbeault said the Trudeau government was “projected to exceed Canada’s interim objective of (reducing emissions to) 20% below 2005 levels by 2026” while remaining “firmly on track to meet our ambitious but achievable 2030 target” of 40% below. In fact, exceeding the 2026 target would have required the Trudeau government, if it was still in power, to shut down the equivalent of Canada’s heavy industry sector by the end of this year. To meet the 2030 target (40% below 2005) would have required the Trudeau government to shut down the equivalent of Canada’s entire oil and gas sector in four years. Trudeau’s emission targets were purely aspirational. Their real purpose as the lynch-pin of Trudeau’s program for fighting climate change was to expand the reach and power of the federal government, redistribute income and interfere in the marketplace by picking private sector winners and losers. The cost to federal taxpayers, as of April 2023 in a statement by Guilbault, was more than $200 billion, with 13 government agencies administering 149 programs. Add in provincial and territorial spending estimated at $303 billion for 364 programs (excluding municipal ones) and the total taxpayer-funded cost comes to over $500 billion or $12,000 per Canadian. Thomas Sowell described in his 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed – Self Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, how interventionist governments repeatedly create massive and costly programs, regardless of whether they will work, ostensibly to address society’s ills, but really to extend the reach and power of government. Written 20 years before Trudeau became PM in 2015, see if it reminds you of Trudeau’s approach to addressing climate change. First, Sowell wrote, there are “assertions of a great danger to the whole of society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.” Second, the government asserts there is “an urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.” Third, the government claims “there is a need … to drastically curtail the dangerous behaviour of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.” Fourth, is a “disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible or motivated by unworthy purposes.” This is how the Trudeau government convinced the Canadian public for a decade of their moral responsibility to address climate change by spending hundreds of billions of their tax dollars on programs that not only failed to achieve the government’s stated goals, but that everyone who could add using the government’s own data knew were failing, year after year, while they were being imposed. Even if they had succeeded, they would have failed because Canada’s emissions are too small to globally impact climate change. Sowell noted the anointed’s response to these failures is to argue things would have been worse if they had not acted. This is exactly what the Trudeau government did by blaming the previous Stephen Harper government for failing to meet its emission targets – ignoring the fact that the previous Jean Chretien and Brian Mulroney governments also failed to meet their targets."
The left wing agenda is all connected

The White House on X - "“GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that “Climate Change” is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” - President DONALD J. TRUMP 🇺🇸"
Steve Guest on X - "President Trump just called out the so-called experts who based litigation as well as reporting on WRONG PROJECTIONS. For those keeping track at home, RCP8.5 was cited 150,000 times according to Google Scholar and was the standard that was used “across global climate modeling and impact assessment literature for over a decade.”"
Weird. We were told that the science was settled.

Lauren Chen on X - "I just filled up at $4.40/gallon. So of course green activists in Louisiana have launched FORTY different lawsuits against the energy industry. OF COURSE"
Time to blame Trump for pricey gas

Don't double-down on net zero again - "In 2021, the world promised to phase-down coal. Since then, global coal consumption has only gone up. Though virtually every climate summit has promised to cut emissions, they’ve increased almost every single year, with 2024 marking a new high. Long before the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol was also sold as a key part of the solution to global warming. Yet studies show it achieved virtually nothing for climate change. In the preamble to the Paris Agreement, world leaders loftily declared they would keep temperature rises “well below 2°C” and perhaps even under 1.5°C. That was never on the cards — it would have required the world’s economies to effectively grind to a halt. The truth is that the “net-zero” green agenda, based on massive subsidies and expensive legislation, will likely cost more than C$38 trillion per year over this century, making it utterly unattractive to voters essentially everywhere. The awkward reality is that emissions from Canada, the EU and other countries pursuing climate policies matter little in the 21st century. Canada only produces about 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions. Using the UN’s “middle of the road” forecast, the OECD countries combined account for only about one-fifth of global emissions this century. The other four-fifths come mostly from China, India and Africa. Even if wealthy countries like Canada impoverish themselves, the result is tiny. Run the UN’s standard climate model with and without Canada reaching net zero in 2050 and the difference is less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius in 2100. (If you can see two lines on the chart, you have good eyes!) And much of the production and emissions just move to the Global South — meaning even less is achieved. Like Justin Trudeau’s governments, the United Kingdom has leaned into climate policies, suggesting it would lead the efforts for strong climate agreements. British families are paying a high price for their government going farther on climate than almost any other. Weighted across households and industry, the inflation-adjusted electricity price tripled between 2003 and 2023, mostly because of climate policies. Over the same two decades, U.S. electricity prices were virtually unchanged. The effect on families has been devastating. At 2003 prices, an average family of four would be spending C$3,380 on electricity, including indirect industry costs. Instead, it’s bill is C$9,740. And rising electricity costs also make investment less attractive: nearly two-thirds of European companies say energy prices are now a major bar to investment. The Paris Treaty approach is fundamentally flawed. Carbon emissions continue to grow because cheap, reliable power, mostly from fossil fuels, drives economic growth. Wealthy countries like Canada, the U.S., and EU member-states have started to cut emissions — often by shifting production elsewhere — but the rest of the world is still focused on eradicating poverty. Poor countries will rightly reject making carbon cuts unless there is a huge flow of “climate aid” from rich nations — trillions of U.S. dollars per year. Without these huge transfers of wealth, China, India and many other developing countries will disavow expensive climate policies. But it’s not going to happen. The Trump administration won’t pay, and a rag-tag group of progressive countries, including Canada, can scarcely afford their own policies let alone pay off everyone else. By doubling down on the Paris Treaty after the U.S. withdrew in 2017, Canada in effect told the world it should spend hundreds of trillions of dollars over the rest of the century to make no real difference to global temperatures."
The meetings are nice junkets for the climate industry though

European energy crisis is ‘good’ – Bill Gates - "Europe’s gas supply and affordability crisis is actually “good for the long run,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told CNBC on Tuesday. He explained that it would ultimately force the continent to embrace renewable energy, adding that “people won’t want to be dependent on Russian natural gas.” Gates acknowledged that the public “did get a little optimistic about how quickly the transition [to renewables] could be done,” admitting the need to find “non-Russian hydrocarbon sources.” Elaborating on the matter, the founder of climate-oriented venture capital fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures published an essay titled ‘State of the Energy Transition’ on his blog on the same day. Speaking about global greenhouse gas emissions, Gates noted that the ultimate goal of going “from 51 billion tons a year to zero” should be achieved “in the next three decades.”"
The cruelty is the point

China coal plant building surges despite record renewable energy additions - "China is doubling down on building new coal-fired power plants to meet growing energy needs even as it maintains record investments in renewable energy , a study released on Feb 3 shows... China has the world’s second highest number of nuclear plants, after the United States, and is expanding its nuclear fleet."
Time for climate change hystericists to lie again about how China is embracing renewables unlike countries that are not eliminating fossil fuels, so Western countries need to build renewables and dismantle fossil fuels and nuclear

Coal – Global Energy Review 2025 – Analysis - IEA - "In China, coal demand grew by 1.2% (43 Mtce) in 2024, reaching a new all-time high. The country now consumes nearly 40% more coal than the rest of the world combined, largely for power generation. Over one-third of all the coal consumed globally is burned by power plants in China. China’s influence in global coal market trends is unparalleled by any country for any type of fuel, with China’s share of global coal consumption now standing at 58%."

Links - 22nd June 2026 (3 - Indigenous Peoples: Canada)

2026-06-22T21:47:00.000+08:00

Judge demands Indigenous report for man who claims to be Caucasian - "A Yellowknife judge has insisted a man who claimed to be Caucasian get a report meant for Indigenous offenders before he sentences him for breaking into a hotel. Jeremy Kuneyuna — who already has 90 convictions — appeared in the Territorial Court of the Northwest Territories recently to be sentenced for breaking into a hotel. “Mr. Kuneyuna states that he is ‘Caucasian’ and on that basis has provided no information relating to case specific factors relating to his background as an indigenous offender,” Judge Robert David Gorin wrote in an April 22 decision. “When I asked him about why he had an Inuit surname, he provided no meaningful response. Also, he is plainly not Caucasian. Rather, his background is indigenous. I will say that I know this from dealings I have had with Mr. Kuneyuna in previous court proceedings.” Kuneyuna pleaded guilty to the hotel break-in and represented himself in court. “He joins with the Crown in submitting that a six-month term of imprisonment would be appropriate,” Gorin said. “He has a criminal record containing approximately 90 criminal convictions over half of which are property related with approximately a dozen of those being for break and enter offences.” But the judge didn’t accept that sentencing recommendation. “In my view, regardless of the ‘joint submission’ provided by Mr. Kuneyuna and the Crown, his erroneous position as to his heritage does not amount to a waiver of the need for this court to make the inquiry as to his background factors that are required by the cases of Gladue and Ipeelee,” Gorin said. “I require more information than he is prepared to provide me. While I do not require a complete pre-sentence report, I do require a report that provides me with his background factors as an indigenous offender.”"

Thread by @TheReclamare on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 1971 Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan was scheduled to close, but eight Indigenous bands protested the closure, arguing to keep it open Since then four of the same eight bands have condemned residential schools, pursued legal action, and accepted compensation🧵
In Canada, Indigenous oral history has been given parity with the documentary record, on the premise it reliably preserves community knowledge Marieval shows otherwise, where Indigenous Oral History produced two incompatible accounts of the same school, decades apart. In the 1971 article, the bands shared their Oral history of the Marieval Residential School;
- Meets the most needs of the children
- Serves children who can't be cared for at home
- Religious training and discipline
- Good parental involvement
- more (article at last post)
By 2008, four of those same eight bands shared a different oral history of Marieval Residential School:
- Children stripped of identity
- Physical abuse
- Cultural suppression
- Families coerced into compliance
- more
Oral history claims to preserve community knowledge across generations. Yet two incompatible accounts of the same Residential School are not equal to a documentary record. Both accounts may reflect sincere truth, but that doesn't rescue oral history, it indicts it "
Clearly, this is proof of internalised whiteness. Why else would indigenous people support genocide?!

Rob Shaw: BC Conservatives surge to 10-point lead as NDP falls on reconciliation concerns - "A new poll shows the BC Conservative Party pulling into a sizable lead over the NDP government, as public concern continues to rise over Indigenous reconciliation and private property rights. The new numbers from the Angus Reid Institute show Premier David Eby in freefall on his popularity, having declined 20 percentage points within one year to sit at 33 per cent approval... More than half the respondents said the premier has done a “bad job” on reconciliation, including more than one-third of supporters who identified as New Democrats. On the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), 47 per cent of people surveyed agreed it has to be repealed, while 33 per cent of people said to keep it, according to Angus Reid."

BC Conservatives surge to 10-point lead as NDP falls on reconciliation concerns : r/ilovebcsub - "This is ultimately the deciding issue for many of us who aren’t typical conservative voters. I didn’t work my ass off to hand over the province to an unelected govt who don’t share in my interests."
"Was it really? These issues affect so little, but someone is amplifying certain voices to make it seem like tomorrow you will no longer be allowed to own anything."
"They affect all British Columbians."
"So you’re basically gonna gut every social net provided by the bc government, cut spending to healthcare, make insurance even worse, and much more because of this issue? Hmmm. You don’t sound like you are concerned about all British Columbians. Me thinks you’re not real."
"Like you mean the Burnaby hospital... or the Delta one? You can't separate the collapse of our critical infrastructure from the massive wealth transfers happening right now. The province is handing over historic amounts of our tax base, including a recent $800 million settlement—plus over 44,000 hectares of land—to just five First Nations. If all ongoing land claims and resource revenue-sharing agreements succeed across B.C., we are looking at tens of billions of dollars permanently stripped from the public purse. On top of that, the NDP’s DRIPA legislation has effectively handed them sweeping veto power over policy and development. Our public monies are being taken for themselves, deliberately starving the very systems all British Columbians rely on. As for the scare tactic that a Conservative government would destroy these public programs—the NDP is already doing exactly that. They are the ones currently canceling critical hospital projects and gutting our social infrastructure. Even if a new government has to make tough fiscal changes, it is exactly what the NDP is doing right now anyway, just with the added insult of deliberately handing over our collective tax wealth to fund these exclusive settlements while our communities are left with crumbs"
"The fundamental difference between the ndp and the cons on all this who reaps the benefits. The cons will tear it all down to replace it with private industry owned by non-canadians. And likely remove enough regulations to poison half the drinking water along the way like they are trying to do in AB right now with the coal mines. But hey, they will earn some billionaires a bit more yacht money. The cons are good at that."
Left wingers hate conservatives so much, they rather destroy their the political unit they live in than let them get into power. Of course, they're still spreading their usual conspiracy theories about poisoning drinking water (because all regulation must be good because private companies and rich people are evil and anything that hurts them is good)
Left wingers are still pretending that there's no threat to private property rights

DRIPA “weaponized” by U.S. tribes to claim rights over B.C. land - "The B.C. Conservatives are warning that recent court cases involving U.S.-based Indigenous tribes could expand foreign influence over provincial affairs through legislation championed by the B.C. NDP. In a statement released Monday, B.C. Conservative Indigenous Relations critic Scott McInnis said several filings before the B.C. Supreme Court show U.S.-based tribes invoking British Columbia’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and amendments to the province’s Interpretation Act in legal disputes involving natural resource projects."

Former NHL goalie Carey Price among those calling for changes to Indian Act - "More witnesses weighed in Tuesday on legislation that would make changes to registration under the Indian Act, including eliminating the second-generation cut-off. Bill S-2, under consideration by the House of Commons' Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, would restore Indian status to some descendants of those who were forced to give up status in exchange for basic rights, through a process called enfranchisement. S-2 was amended by the Senate to also change the second-generation cut-off to a one-parent rule, meaning only one parent would be required to have status under the Indian Act in order to pass status onto their children. Many want the legislation passed, but others argue it will uphold government control on who is allowed to be defined as First Nations and are calling for more consultation. "After 150 years of forced assimilation and denial of rights, we are facing mathematical genocide before our eyes," Marilyn Slett, elected chief of Heiltsuk First Nation and secretary for Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, told the committee."
Clearly, more and more people being "indigenous", thus inflating the "reconciliation" bill to infinity, is the way to balance the budget

Senate report on Jew hatred makes zero mention of Islamic extremism - " The government of B.C. Premier David Eby has just entered a bizarre state of ossification that may not be survivable. It’s all surrounding DRIPA, a 2019 B.C. law that codified the tenets of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Although pitched as a largely symbolic gesture of reconciliation, public opinion turned hard against DRIPA after it effectively became a kind of veto over all other B.C. laws. DRIPA enshrines a right for Indigenous people to “own, use, develop and control” any land that they’ve previously occupied. And in December, an Appeals Court judge ruled that this meant First Nations now effectively have final say on almost everything. DRIPA was “the interpretive lens through which B.C. laws must be viewed,” it ruled. This has not been a popular view among BCers, with one recent Angus Reid Institute poll finding that 53 per cent think it goes “too far,” against just 30 per cent who call it “necessary.” Which is why Eby has pledged all along to rescind at least some of DRIPA until it could no longer be used as a lever to put courts “in the driver’s seat” of the province’s basic functions. But then this week, he surrendered, announcing in a joint statement with a First Nations activist group (the First Nations Leadership Council) that he wouldn’t be touching DRIPA after all. As retired Aboriginal law expert Geoffrey Moyse told the National Post, “you have a First Nations advocacy organization co-governing a province.” “They told him he couldn’t legislate, couldn’t change legislation, without their consent.” And in a press conference, Eby would even seem to admit that the decision had been influenced by First Nations threats to pursue “collective resistance” in the form of road and rail blockades. When a reporter asked if “threats” had caused him to back off, Eby replied “there is a very real threat to our province in continued conflict with First Nations.”"

Eby NDP labels 'British Columbians' as exclusionary and colonial - "The British Columbia government is facing accusations of quietly scrubbing the word “provincial” from park signage while its own official style guide labels the term “British Columbians” exclusionary and colonial in origin. Social media videos and photos circulating this week show the entrance sign at what was formerly Cypress Provincial Park now reading simply “Cypress Park.” Similar changes have been reported at other sites as old signs are replaced... the government’s own “Writing Guide for Indigenous Content” — last updated Feb. 20, 2026 — explicitly advises against using “British Columbians” in official communications. “The term ‘British Columbians’ is often used to reference people living in B.C. This term excludes indigenous Peoples who may not identify with it,” the guide states. “For many, they identify as members of their own sovereign nations and do not consider themselves part of one that has actively worked to assimilate their people. ‘British Columbians’ also excludes other groups such as newcomers and refugees. We recommend instead saying ‘people living in B.C.’” The same guide frames the province’s park system within the context of colonial history. BC Parks’ reconciliation materials note that “the BC Parks system is a part of the province’s colonial history” and emphasize co-management agreements with First Nations under the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, also known as DRIPA. Those changes have coincided with temporary closures of some parks to the general public. In 2025, Joffre Lakes Provincial Park (Pipi7íyekw) was closed for more than 100 days in staged “reconnection periods” so the Lil’wat and N’Quatqua First Nations could reconnect with the land and allow it to rest. Similar short-term restrictions were imposed at Botanical Beach Provincial Park on Vancouver Island for the Pacheedaht First Nation to conduct cultural and harvesting activities."
This doesn't stop left wingers from continuing to savage him as colonialist scum, because he doesn't quite bend over to everything the Indigenous activists demand and destroy the province

B.C. lawyer says he’s ‘never seen this level of ineptitude and incompetence’ over DRIPA - "B.C. Premier David Eby told reporters on Monday afternoon that DRIPA legislation has been “probably the most challenging issue I’ve worked on in government.” But King’s Counsel and an expert in Aboriginal law had some strong words for what has happened. On Sunday, Eby backed down again on the pausing of key parts of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), scrapping plans to table a suspension bill this legislative session. In a prepared statement on Monday, in partnership with the First Nations Leadership Council, Eby confirmed that the government will not be introducing legislation to suspend or amend DRIPA or UN Declaration-related provisions in the Interpretation Act, in the spring legislative session... An expert in Aboriginal law and treaty matters told Global News that, in his opinion, the NDP is now co-governing the province with First Nations. Geoffrey Moyse was legal counsel in the B.C. Ministry of Attorney General’s Office and for more than 30 years he advised governments on aboriginal law and treaty matters. “I have never seen anything like this… over six terms of governments, working for the provincial government,” he said. Moyse retired in 2022, but said that by adopting DRIPA in 2019, the government essentially layered a framework over the province’s existing laws. “There’s nowhere else in the world that has done this to itself,” he added... Moyse said his top concern isn’t land use, but democracy. In his opinion, by the Eby administration repeatedly backing down, that demonstrates that the province is now co-governing with the First Nations Leadership Council. “Nobody votes for them except their communities,” he said. “They have no obligation to the public interest, for the other 5.7 million British Columbians. And they are co-developing British Columbia’s legislative agenda. From my understanding and my training as a lawyer, that’s completely unconstitutional.”"
Left wingers love caste systems - as long as white people are at the bottom

Tara Armstrong on X - "The NDP are blood and soil nationalists for the indigenous. That's why they embedded UNDRIP, which is an ethno-nationalist declaration, into its two latest treaties."
David Eby on X - "No one should ever be allowed to stand in the BC Legislature to use Nazi rhetoric to argue a point. This a line that should never be crossed. Every party should immediately denounce this abhorrent comment."
Tara Armstrong on X - "You're a racist, Mr. Premier. You endorsed Nazi "blood and soil" ideology in your latest treaties by embedding UNDRIP's ethno-nationalist principles in them. The NDP believes in special rights for indigenous people on the basis of race. I believe in equality for all Canadians."
Left wing logic: you should shoot the messenger instead of solving the real problem. Pointing out racism and ethnonationalism makes you a bad person when it's not white people who are the racists

Rob Shaw on X - "This would be @TaraArmstrongBC doubling down on her "blood and soil" doctrine comments about First Nations treaties, despite repudiation from other MLAs and parties that this was popularized by Nazi Germany and used to justify genocide against Jewish people and others."
Nick Osmond-Jones 🇨🇦 on X - "Her entire point is that blood and soil doctrine is bad. Surely you see that?"
Steve Peacock on X - "Nothing like a good defense on a failed NDP policy UNDRIP is to unleash an Offense… but in this case Extremely Offensive against all BC Citizens. Time for change in BC!"

Frances Widdowson on X - "Chief Charlene Belleau speaks about her interaction with me (and to some extent @Dallas_Brodie ) @thompsonriversu : "I wish that our people could grab you [Frances Widdowson], drag you over to the Kamloops Residential School, put you into the basement, speak our language to you, nothing but @tkemlups , beat you, rape you, hurt you, and maybe you would understand what our people went through". This occurred at a @UBC Faculty of Medicine event moderated by Derek Thompson, the Director of Indigenous Engagement."
Jamie Sarkonak on X - "Today @ubc hosted an event in which an unhinged chief fantasized about having her co-ethnics rape a political opponent. It took 10 years to go from "rape culture bad" to "please come tell our students how you'd sexually defile your enemies.""

Indigenous man who cleaned up murder bragged Gladue ‘discount’ reduce - "An Indigenous man who bragged to an undercover cop about the Gladue “discount” that would cut his penalty in half for helping to clean up after a Calgary murder has been sentenced to 6.5 years in prison, even though the Crown was looking for as much as 10. A jury convicted Jason Leo Tait of being an accessory after the fact to murder in the death of Keenan Crane. He was acquitted of manslaughter. “Mr. Tait’s cavalier reliance on a Gladue ‘discount’ in discussions with the undercover operator are not only wrong in law, but they are undoubtedly distressing to hear for Indigenous people, as well as other citizens, particularly those who have roles in the justice system,” Justice Janice Ashcroft wrote in her Feb. 17 decision on Tait’s sentence... “It is undeniable that Mr. Tait’s life has been impacted by many factors related to colonialism and residential schools,” Ashcroft said. “His comments demonstrate a lack of insight and education into history and how his own family and life have been affected by colonization.” His “life circumstances, as connected to his crime, do allow for some mitigation and reduced moral culpability with respect to sentencing,” she said. “However, I still find that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances.”... While the judge took Tait’s Gladue factors into consideration, she found his “degree of responsibility to be relatively high.” The Crown argued Tait has “shown a disregard for accountability and remorse as demonstrated through his statements to the undercover officer, for example that his sentence would be cut in half because of the ‘Gladue law.’ Crown says that the Gladue principles are borne out of a debt to the Indigenous community which debt has long lasting repercussions for today. However, the Crown says that Mr. Tait is exploiting the Gladue considerations and undermining its principles.”... The judge found that Tait’s “early addiction and reliance on drugs placed him in that house on the day of the crime. His actions, while not excusable in any way, must be viewed through the lens of a person who is Indigenous and who has experienced the early childhood experiences that Mr. Tait experienced.”"
Clearly, he was wrong about the Gladue discount, but his being indigenous got him a lighter sentence anyway

Indigenous man gets six months for choking, kicking toddler - " A 33-year-old Indigenous B.C. man who choked and kicked his girlfriend’s “vulnerable and defenceless” two-year-old son last summer has been sentenced to six months in prison for two separate assaults, both of which were captured by a nanny cam in the child’s room... Provincial Court of B.C. judge Temara Golinsky said that while the man “was not raised with a traditional upbringing,” doesn’t have status and neither he “nor his “immediate family were impacted by state actions such as residential schools, even the dissociation with one’s past and cultural heritage is a negative consequence of colonization.” As such, his Indigeneity was given some weight as a mitigating factor

$5.5M daycare built with provincial funds still not open because government can't figure out who owns the land - "The daycare was built for Peguis First Nation Real Estate Trust, an arm's-length entity formed by Manitoba's most populous First Nation to acquire real estate for investment and housing for the benefit of band members, according to its founding documents. The daycare is built on part of a former golf course east of Highway 59 called The Meadows, which the Peguis real estate trust purchased in 2021. The placement of the daycare on land situated more than 150 kilometres south of the First Nation's main reserve has led some band members to criticize the location. In 2024, the Peguis real estate trust sold 75 per cent of a company that controls the Meadows land to a numbered company owned by Andrew Marquess, a former adviser to the real estate trust, according to a purchase and development agreement obtained by CBC News. The education minister says the "agreement was with Peguis First Nation Real Estate Trust. The province's expectation is that the real estate trust continues to own that land." However, "our understanding is right now they do not own that land," Schmidt said."

Peguis First Nation sues former chief, alleging 'kickbacks,' diversion of funds and other 'corrupt practices' - "Peguis First Nation is suing former chief Glenn Hudson over allegations he failed to act in the best interest of the band and financially benefitted from breaches of duty — including claims that he enriched himself, his family and supporters. In a 29-page statement of claim filed Friday with Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench, the First Nation alleges Hudson “engaged in corrupt practices,” made unauthorized transfers of funds, awarded contracts to companies he benefitted from, treated the First Nation’s assets “as if they were his own” and engaged in “risky financing and real estate transactions” during his 14 years as the chief as well as a shareholder and director of several Peguis corporations."

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) Megathread : r/britishcolumbia - "I’m really shocked they didn’t see this coming. Our government has spent too much time virtue signalling rather than anything substantive."
"Remember that passing DRIPA was not just the NDP. The others parties all agreed to this."
"They did not agree to THIS. Other parties agreed to an aspirational framework which - quoted many, many times at the time - was not intended to provide new rights. Then subsequently, they rushed thru the Interpretation Act and together it provided many new rights which not how it was sold."

Eby facing backlash over DRIPA flip-flop - "Premier David Eby has backpedalled again on DRIPA. His government will not be introducing legislation on suspending parts of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. Instead, he'll speak to media Monday about next steps"

David Eby on X - "Today, the First Nations Leadership Council and I released a joint statement on DRIPA. Our government is committed to working with First Nations in B.C. in genuine collaboration to find a path forward. Read the full statement here:"
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa on X - "British Columbians need to understand that the "First Nations Leadership Council" isn’t some sort of super First Nation legal body that has ultimate authority. It’s literally just a lobby group made up of three advocacy orgs: the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, the BC Assembly of First Nations, and the First Nations Summit. Mind you, none of these are actual governing bodies over B.C. First Nations or hold legal standing to speak on their behalf but the government is treating them like they're the de facto top of the chain authority. Two of these components groups are registered societies under the B.C. Societies Act. That’s it. They're not rights-bearing entities and they're definitely not the Jedi Council of aboriginals like they pretend. Eby is surrendering power over legislation to a lobby group."

How the Southport riots broke Starmer’s government

2026-06-22T18:52:00.000+08:00

How the Southport riots broke Starmer’s government | Mike Jones | The Critic Magazine

"If current trends hold, the party is staring down the barrel of a near-total wipeout — losing between 250 and 300 seats at the next general election. Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea the fires are burning...

The question that needs answering is how a Labour government armed with a 174-seat majority managed to self-destruct this quickly? Why has Starmer become an object of such universal loathing?

The answer remains a taboo subject in polite media circles. Yet the moment you dig beneath the surface, the riots that took place in Southport during the summer of 2024 become impossible to ignore.

The fallout from Southport did something Downing Street never saw coming: it gave ordinary people language with which to dismantle the establishment’s lies. The “two-tier” narrative has just hit boiling point with the stomach-churning case of Henry Nowak, whose inhumane treatment by the law has ignited a public backlash against “two-tier policing.”

The Prime Minister is now acting as a lightning rod for a level of public loathing that will not end until his premiership is consigned to the dustbin of history.

Up until now, the standard media consensus has naturally focused on Labour’s more obvious failures around immigration and the cost-of-living. As a political activist, Starmer earned the nickname “red-green” — a nod to his early obsession with identity politics and environmentalism.

That background has dictated his instincts in office. One of his first acts as Labour leader was putting Ed Miliband in charge of energy policy. A committed Net Zero hardliner, Miliband has blocked new North Sea oil and gas, leaving flagship projects like Rosebank and Jackdaw stuck in limbo.

This was followed by the equally disastrous decision to make Rachel Reeves the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Despite pre-election promises not to turn on “the spending taps”, Reeves has hammered the public with £40 billion in tax hikes and jacked up borrowing by a staggering £36 billion. It is no coincidence that Britain now faces the most aggressive tax grab of any major global economy.

Meanwhile, the prime minister’s plan to stop the boats has collapsed into outright farce. One of his first acts as prime minister was to scrap the Tory plan to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda. He dismissed the policy as a “gimmick” but never seriously explained why.

In its place came the pledge to “smash the gangs” — a counter-terror-style crackdown on the smuggling networks.

The result was predictable — and disastrous. More than 73,000 illegal crossings have taken place across the Channel since Labour took office. Unlike terrorists, people smugglers are fragmented, fast-moving, and practically impossible to smash.

One is left with the impression that Starmer will reach for any impractical solution just to avoid amending the Human Rights Act. His lifelong devotion to that Act has become a shackle, leaving Labour Home Secretaries powerless to clear the courtroom obstacles that make a mockery of our borders.

Each of these failures has contributed to the rot spreading through the parliamentary Labour party. Yet the true point of no return for Starmer’s premiership was reached during the dark days of the 2024 Southport riots.

Starmer’s response to the rioting mobilised much of the media against him in a way few had anticipated. He went from being a dour technocrat in the pocket of the unions to something more sinister: “two-tier Keir”. And the charge did not stop with him. It quickly spread to the police and the wider criminal justice system.

In the wake of Southport, British people adopted a radical new language to voice their grievances:

“Two-tier policing” refers to the abandonment of policing without fear or favour.
“Two-tier justice” describes a legal system shaped by activist judges and lawyers.
“Two-tier politics” captures the idea that politicians have courted ethnic minority voters with special access and privileges.

That critique has now come full circle with the tragic death of Henry Nowak...

Angry residents in Southampton have taken to the streets and clashed with police.

What is most striking is the reaction online. Large numbers of people are openly mocking the prime minister’s condemnation of the violence, while others are actively cheering the disorder on.

To understand how we got here, we need to remind ourselves of what happened in Southport and how the government’s response to that event turned the hapless Keir Starmer into a lightning rod.

The most damning critique of the prime minister is that he remains a complete stranger to the nation he governs. A human rights lawyer by trade, he has spent his career within the echo chamber of the liberal establishment.

This profound detachment set the stage for disaster in July 2024, following the horrific slaughter of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. The killer, Axel Rudakubana, was hauled into custody, but a wall of official silence surrounded his identity.

In the information vacuum that followed, a wave of violent riots exploded across England, with mosques, asylum hotels, and front-line police officers coming under vicious attack. What makes Southport significant is not the violence itself, ugly though it was, but the Labour government’s response.

Just eleven days earlier, rioting had broken out in Harehills, Leeds, after social services removed children from a Romanian family. A police car was overturned and a double-decker bus was set on fire by angry mobs who surrounded and fought the police.

Starmer’s response to Harehills was restrained to the point of near detachment. He described the scenes as “shocking and disgraceful” but stopped short of speaking to the public directly from Downing Street. His spokesperson simply urged people to avoid “speculating on the cause of the disorder.”

The response to Southport was very different indeed. Following the mayhem in early August, Starmer said rioters “will feel the full force of the law”. He added, “I won’t shy away from calling it what it is. Far-right thuggery.”

No doubt some of those involved were on the far-right, especially those attacking mosques. But the broad-brush language coming out of Number 10 felt tone-deaf.

Footage from the protests showed that many people were not extremists at all, just ordinary people venting anger without turning to violence. A YouGov poll in the aftermath found that while 85 per cent of the public opposed the rioting, 58 per cent were sympathetic to those protesting peacefully.

The prime minister’s night-and-day response to Harehills and Southport left the impression of a man whose moral outrage was anything but consistent. After all, the Harehills rioters were mostly Romanian migrants who posed no direct challenge to the multicultural state — unlike the ones in Southport. To many observers, it looked like “two-tier politics” in action...

Within hours of his first COBRA meeting, Starmer unveiled a “standing army” of specialist police officers, alongside a raft of emergency measures: fast-track riot courts, facial recognition sweeps, strict bail conditions and an online dragnet for incitement.

A forceful response was clearly needed. Unlike Harehills, the Southport unrest spread nationwide and pulled in far larger numbers from England’s native majority. Public opinion also backed a crackdown: an Opinium poll found just 18 per cent thought the government had gone too far.

But there was a clear danger. The authorities had already been hammered for soft-touch responses to earlier unrest, including Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestine protests. Against that backdrop, Starmer needed to show strength without giving the impression that state power was being used arbitrarily.

Instead, the British state charged across that line. Many of those swept up had committed no violence at all. Their offence was online speech. And some of the punishments looked wildly heavy-handed. Tyler Kay received 38 months for posting nasty tweets. Lee Dunn got eight weeks for offensive memes. Jamie Michael spent 17 days on remand in custody for a video on Facebook.

Such cases fed a growing sense that justice was being handed out unevenly, and that the state was picking its targets. It was an exercise in “two-tier justice”, where right-wing media posts were trawled, screenshotted and fed into fast-track prosecutions.

Meanwhile, those on the Left who spread dangerous misinformation, such as veteran anti-racist campaigner Nick Lowles, were not even investigated by the authorities let alone prosecuted.

From that moment, the prime minister became “two-tier Keir” — a damning epithet that captured the belief that white Britons were being singled out by the state while other groups were handled with kid gloves...

Two-tier policing increasingly treats minority wrongdoing with indulgence while subjecting the white majority to relentless moral scrutiny. British law mandates the strict policing of racial hostility. If officers prove an offense was racially motivated, the Crown Prosecution Service applies a mandatory judicial upgrade.

Meanwhile, the promotion of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has moved beyond basic slide presentations into mandatory, scenario-based training overseen by the College of Policing. Other programs like the Upstander strategy instruct frontline officers to challenge “microaggressions” or biased behaviours among their peers and superiors.

Officers have been conditioned to think that racism is the worst crime imaginable, and that white people are uniquely guilty of it. Meanwhile, any ethnic minority accusation of prejudice is taken as gospel truth — even when the circumstantial evidence points in the opposite direction.

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was fond of asking, “Who? Whom?”. It is a question that strips politics back to its essence: who holds power, and who is on the receiving end.

For many in Britain, Southport gave a stark answer: A multicultural elite indifferent to mass immigration stood above the rest — backed by the two-tier authority of the state, with Starmer at the helm. (As protests rage in Belfast over a shocking attempted murder, allegedly perpetrated by a Sudanese asylum seeker, the state faces another major test.)

That narrative did not stay on the comment pages. It quickly spilled into the wider public consciousness. Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups showed how fast the “two-tier” charge took hold among ordinary voters. It offered a simple way to package a wide set of grievances into something neat and intelligible.

Combined with Starmer’s failure to “smash the gangs”, this hardened opinion at remarkable speed. Many feel the country they grew up in is being reshaped without their consent, while a political class seems determined to shut down anyone who says so.

For many voters, the verdict is already in. The Prime Minister does not represent them; he resents them."

Links - 22nd June 2026 (2 - General Wokeness)

2026-06-22T15:03:00.000+08:00

Fandom Pulse on X - "The Boys series finale introduced Gunter Van Ellis: world's richest man, 17 children, amateur astronaut, talks about white fertility rates, wears a "We Believe In Homelander" hat. Homelander took him to space. Elon Musk replied to a post about the scene with one word: "Pathetic." Showrunner Eric Kripke quote-tweeted Musk's response and posted: "I'll never get a better review ever." Kripke confirmed Homelander was modeled on Trump, and it was obvious this new character was modeled on Musk. Did The Boys end as a superhero show or a political broadcast?"

The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke on female sexual assault: "I've never worked so hard or stressed so much about a scene in my life before or since." On male sexual assault: "We view it as hilarious." : r/KotakuInAction

Meme - BigCharles_06 @Charles36138349: "I think my respect for Starr has just shot up into the stratosphere. Dude was genuinley trying to put work into making his character and Kripke at every point was like, "but how can we tie this back to TRUMP????" And Anthony was the one to pull him back."
The Boys Out of Context Clips @T...: "Eric Kripke reveals Antony Starrs goal was never to create Homelander as a Donald Trump Parody. #TheBoys totally understand Ant's point of view. He's like, 'I'm not doing a caricature. I'm trying to create a character with a consistent internal life.' And I absolutely agree Show more"
Clearly Anthony Starr's one of the clueless people who doesn't understand that The Boys has always been mocking people like him

Meme - Fans (as Starlight): "You made those fucked-up choices. You ruined the final season of your own show. You're not a fucking baby. For once take some responsibility for yourself."
Eric Kripke (as The Deep): "No!"

Roman Helmet Guy on X - "Emily Wilson read the story about a Cyclops eating Odysseus’s men and thought: “Wow, this monster is a non-White person. People might get the idea that non-White people are savage. I better not use the word ‘savage.’ That would reinforce colonialism.”"

Roman Helmet Guy on X - "Emily Wilson completely changed the meaning of a key word in the Odyssey to make it seem like Helen of Troy didn't blame herself for starting the Trojan War, when in fact the text makes it clear that she did. In 4.145-146, Helen calls herself κυνώπιδος (dog-faced). This is an insult meaning "shameless." It is commonly used to refer to unfaithful lovers. For example, it is used elsewhere in the Odyssey (8.319) to refer to Aphrodite after she cheats on Hephaestus with Ares. Fagles translates 4.145-146 to: "all you Achaeans fought at Troy, launching your headlong battles just for my sake, shameless whore that I was.” Lattimore translates 4.145-146 to: "for the sake of shameless me, the Achaians went beneath Troy, their hearts intent upon reckless warfare." Wilson completely changes the meaning of κυνώπιδος to "hounded" (she is trying to be cute by translating 'dog-faced' to a word that still relates to dogs, even though its actual meaning is completely unrelated). She then applies this word to the Achaeans, saying that they were hounded, not Helen. Her translation is in the image below. This is obviously an ideological change that she made because she personally believes Helen shouldn't be blamed for the Trojan War. She deliberated distorted the meaning of one of the foundational texts of Western literature to conform with her modern beliefs."

Meme - Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff: "Politically active faculty at elite and flagship universities aren't just overwhelmingly Democratic. They're very progressive. Not just NPR-tote-bag-and-recycling progressive, but progressive to the point that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would sit just slightly left of them by comparison."
"Distribution of Faculty Ideology Compared to U.S. Congress. 55-University Sample Facuty. US House. US Senate"

Meme - The Critical Drinker: "The three stages of games journalism grief: 1. It's not true, you're just sexist. 2. It might be true but it's a good thing, stop being sexist. 3. OK, it's true and its bad but youre still sexist."
"Okay, Let's Talk About Kay Vess' Face. The chuds is right: Kay Vess does look weird. It's not for the reasons they tell you, though! It could be because of technical issues and limitatlons or just because she was supposed to look ike that. Whatever it is it's not because of a conspiracy against gamers to make women in video games more ugly."

Meme - mobile vulgus @brassman666: "The Taliban execute homosexuals."
$arah @pples @JustifiedNo: "The US does it far more often. Many LGBT people have been fighting alongside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda against Amerikkkan imperialism. Al-Qaeda has no specific policy to target LGBT folx...far from it. The US, however, does."

Antidissident on X - "The TSA chap let the 9/11 hijackers through because he didn't want to be seen as racist"

Take it from a therapist. Toxic culture is turning everyone into ‘victims’ - "I recently wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Is ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ real?” It went viral almost instantly. Within hours my inbox was flooded with angry messages. I was accused of defending a fascist, labelled a protector of paedophiles, told I had blood on my hands, and sent messages wishing me dead. A surprising number came from fellow therapists. The irony would be funny if it weren’t so revealing. Many of the same people who preach emotional maturity responded with volatility and cruelty, mirroring the very traits they usually claim to condemn. Their outrage became a form of moral elevation. Their sense of injury became a license to attack. As a psychotherapist practising in New York City and Washington, DC, I see this logic every week. Patients insist they “had no choice” but to lash out at a partner, ghost a friend, or retaliate at work because they “felt disrespected”. These aren’t extremists. They’re ordinary people who have absorbed a cultural belief that emotional pain automatically grants moral authority. The parallels between individual psychology and the wider culture are striking. Consider two recent American incidents. Last year, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot dead on a Manhattan street. The alleged shooter’s rage at the insurance industry was treated by many as if it explained, or excused, the crime. Online and in the streets, he was elevated to folk-hero status. Barely nine months later, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on stage at a university event in Utah. Within hours, pockets of the internet justified the murder as political payback. In both cases, violence was filtered through grievance rather than rejected outright. The grievance became a badge of righteousness. The sense of injury became a license to celebrate bloodshed. This same worldview now shapes far more mundane situations. You dislike your job? It must be a toxic workplace. A friend disagrees with you? He’s a narcissist. A colleague corrects you? That’s emotional abuse. Experiences that once required patience or perspective to manage are now framed as injuries inflicted by someone else. Words used in therapy, such as trauma, toxic, unsafe and triggered, have drifted far from their clinical purpose and are applied to everyday frustrations as if mild discomfort were equivalent to harm. In America, this mindset is often reinforced by therapists who rarely challenge their patients and instead rush to affirm every feeling. “Of course it’s their fault, not yours” has become an all-too-familiar refrain. Empathy is not the problem. The way we weaponise it is. When ordinary frustrations are recast as psychological injuries, the person who feels hurt instantly ascends to the moral high ground and often believes they are entitled to respond in ways they would normally recognise as excessive. Grievance becomes an emotional permission slip. Social media supercharges this dynamic. Outrage has become performance art. Platforms reward sharpness, not nuance. People compete to be the most aggrieved because grievance now signals virtue. Call everything harm and treat every slight as an injury, and suddenly the calmest voice looks apathetic while the angriest looks righteous... This emotional logic has hardened into identity. More people now define themselves not by what they value but by what they believe has wronged them. Victimhood becomes a personal brand. Patients in my office cling to slights because letting go would mean giving up the story that gives them meaning. The same trend appears in politics, where movements define themselves through the injuries they claim to have suffered. Once grievance becomes identity, stepping back feels impossible because it threatens the sense of self... What makes this grievance culture so corrosive is its refusal of complexity. Once someone sees themselves as wronged, they are often unwilling to entertain any fact or nuance that might soften their moral certainty. Compromise looks like weakness. Ambivalence looks like betrayal. When grievance becomes the frame, people stop asking what is true and lock themselves into a victim mindset that leaves no room for growth. The outcome is predictable: more conflict, more fragility, emotions treated as evidence. None of this means emotional pain is trivial. It’s not. But emotional pain is not the same as injury or trauma, and it does not justify retaliation. Public life depends on the ability to tolerate uncomfortable feelings without turning them into moral authority. Without that capacity, every disagreement becomes an emotional arms race, and the loudest claim of victimhood wins. The backlash to my WSJ piece was only one small expression of this psychology. The people who wished me harm thankfully did not act on their anger. But the underlying logic – “I feel wronged therefore I may attack” – is the same one that cheered two assassinations. A culture organised around grievance eventually loses the ability to function. When feelings eclipse facts and discomfort is treated as injustice, the guardrails of public life collapse. The solution is emotional clarity, not emotional hardness. We need to relearn the difference between discomfort and danger, offence and injury, disagreement and harm. Resilience means being able to feel without letting those feelings distort reality. Responsibility means refusing to let grievance run the show."

Alice Smith on X - "“You must not divide us!” Screams the Left as they divide everyone up in terms of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, pronouns, Palestine, and anything else their vicious little minds can dream up."

Michelle Obama has just got white men horribly wrong - "So, I’ve been getting it wrong all these years. All those white men, often very senior, who have sat in my training courses and talked about their fears of speaking up in meetings or giving presentations and media interviews, and about how they so often feel unworthy, were in fact telling me a load of porkies. Or so Michelle Obama would have us believe. Because we now know from the former first lady, speaking in London this week, that white men don’t actually feel impostor syndrome. These were her words: “There are so many people like me, like you: women, minorities, folks who aren’t supposed to be at these tables. They are sitting around thinking that they’re impostors … I’ve never heard a white man talk about impostor syndrome. I haven’t met one.”"

By attacking Palantir, MPs are putting politics above patients - "By the NHS’s own count, the platform has already delivered more than 110,000 operations that would not otherwise have happened. Nearly 300,000 patients have been discharged from hospital sooner. Its cancer tool means tens of thousands more patients have heard within 28 days whether they have the disease. You would think a record like that would be celebrated. Instead, this week, the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee published a report on digital government. Some of it is right – legacy IT systems are a genuine scandal – but it also urges ministers to cancel Palantir’s NHS contract, with no view on what would replace it. In doing so, this Westminster committee of MPs has put politics above patients, harming them and setting a dangerous precedent. The committee – chaired by Dame Chi Onwurah – insists its objection is not ideological. But its own report concedes the programme is working, and Whitehall agrees: the Government’s infrastructure authority rates it green, its highest delivery rating awarded to just 30 of 213 major projects across the whole of Government – and reckons it returns almost five pounds for every one spent. So the real argument is narrower: a company whose founders are outspoken, and which works with the US military and immigration enforcement, should not be trusted with NHS data... The report alleges a “clear mismatch” between Palantir and British values. So what are the values of the NHS? They are delivering care to patients across England, free at the point of delivery. That is what our software helps NHS staff do. To tear up a contract won through an 18-month open competition, in which every major tech company bid and 30 independent evaluators assessed the field, would be to override a fair, expert process for political ends. Where it cannot win on politics, the committee turns to the language of national security – sovereignty, dependency, lock-in. But these fears describe a platform that does not exist. The first is that funnelling so much of the NHS’s data through a single American company creates a chokepoint a foreign power could one day exploit, leaving the service “at the mercy” of others. But there is no central vault to seize. Each NHS trust controls its own data; Palantir cannot use it, sell it, or move it. This is a fact a health minister has confirmed to Parliament. The second is that Palantir will be impossible to remove. Yet it already has been. Over the past two years two Government departments – the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Cabinet Office – moved off our software and took their data and intellectual property elsewhere without difficulty. The committee’s alternative – build a replacement platform in-house or find a UK-based alternative – runs straight into its own report, which catalogues the NHS’s long and painful history of in-house IT projects that overran, under-delivered or collapsed. No UK-based platform exists at this scale or capability today. Recommending that ministers tear up the contract in February 2027 – months away – without naming a credible replacement is reckless. Would those MPs tell their constituents: because we dislike the way a foreign government uses similar software, your operation will be delayed?"
Time to blame Tory "underfunding" of the NHS for poor performance

Lancashire chief executive has no case to answer for ‘old white men’ jibe - "Lancashire chief executive Daniel Gidney has been told he has no case to answer after a complaint to the Cricket Regulator following his description of a group of club legends as “old, entitled, white men”."

How the Left has bullied Britain into going for woke - "He found that 'wokeism' is one of the top three concerns for people, and more of an issue than sexism or populism. Some 40 per cent said cancel culture engendered a 'thought and speech police' approach that could ruin lives. In contrast, a quarter of respondents thought cancel culture was a force for good because those who express racist or sexist views must face the consequences. What is so extraordinary, however, is that the domination of woke as an issue has been achieved with little deep support from the public. Just 5 per cent of UK voters identify as woke, while roughly a third of the public do not even know what the term means, according to the survey. Britain is not yet as divided as the U.S. but it is heading in the wrong direction, with a large segment of our population gripped by severe disillusionment. Only 34 per cent of people felt that 'Britain is an exceptional country', while more than a fifth of respondents believe Britain has 'failed its people'. For Luntz, this rings alarm bells because 'when people think they are 'ignored' or 'irrelevant', that's a crisis'. No fewer than 37 per cent said the UK is 'institutionally racist and discriminatory', a figure exceeded by the 41 per cent who accepted the concept of 'white privilege'. The political breakdown of those figures shows that support for the Conservative and Labour parties is increasingly split across cultural lines: for example, 81 per cent of Tory voters believed Britain was a nation of 'equality and freedom' and only 19 per cent believed it was 'institutionally racist and discriminatory'. In contrast, 52 per cent of Labour voters hailed British 'equality and freedom' while 48 per cent saw this country as racist and discriminatory. So how has the woke ascendancy been achieved, given the low levels of support for it? Luntz believes it is a case of 'the loudest voices in the room' being able to impose themselves. But other factors have played their part, such as the failure of businesses and politicians to provide effective leadership, with the result that grievances are unaddressed and resentment is allowed to flourish. 'There are two numbers [in the survey] that really interest me,' Luntz says. Just 42 per cent of Britons feel they are invested in their country; and only 27 per cent feel their country is invested in them. Those numbers help to explain the high levels of antipathy towards MPs, Parliament and big companies, he adds. Businesses have certainly played a negative part by cowering before the woke campaigners instead of concentrating on their commercial role. He has a message for companies faced with woke agitators: 'Their job is destroy you. Your job is to do yours.' Businesses can safeguard themselves by acting responsibly and looking after their employees and communities as well as their customers: 'Woke only works if there is a real grievance, like a chief executive taking a bonus while laying off staff. It dies without that oxygen.'... he thinks the move away from New Labour's stance will do the party no good electorally: 'You have to govern from the centre, as Tony Blair showed. Labour's recent history goes: loss, loss, loss, loss, Blair, Blair, Blair, loss, loss, loss, loss.'"
From 2021

Boris Johnson urges G7 leaders to be 'more feminine' - "Boris Johnson today urged G7 leaders to aim for a more 'feminine' and 'gender neutral' recovery from coronavirus in a bizarre opening speech. Officially kicking off the summit in Carbis Bay, the PM appealed for them to 'level up' and not repeat the mistakes of the aftermath of the credit crunch when 'inequality' increased... As the leaders - including US president Joe Biden - sat around a table before the first session, Mr Johnson told them they need to 'build back better' and be 'united in our vision for a cleaner, greener world'. 'I think that is what the people of our countries now want us to focus on. They want us to be sure that we are beating the pandemic together and discussing how we will never have a repeat of what we have seen but also that we are building back better together,' he said. 'Building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal and, how shall I, in a more gender neutral and, perhaps a more feminine way."
From 2021. Left wingers still claim the Tories were right wing; in this case it wasn't even that they talked right and governed left

Tristin Hopper on X - "A year ago I published Don't Be Canada, outlining eight areas in which Canada is uniquely dysfunctional. In the interim 12 months, the Government of Alberta has made meaningful progress on *all eight* categories. This is why I keep telling people that reform is possible now, and to not wait for a messiah to fix everything from Ottawa.
The Province of BC, meanwhile, has invented several new problems that are now uniquely dysfunctional in Canada. Its quite a cross-the-Rockies duality we've got going."

Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker on X - "Here is a one-line summary of each of Tristin's 8 points:
Housing crisis: Canada pioneered turning entire cities into over-leveraged real estate bubbles, driving home ownership out of reach for ordinary people because prices detached from wages.
Crime and justice: Soft-on-crime policies, catch-and-release bail, and activist courts created a revolving door for repeat offenders, leaving our streets unsafe.
Harm reduction & drugs: "Safe supply" and decriminalization experiments escalated addiction and public drug use, worsening overdoses, tent cities, and societal harm instead of reducing it.
Euthanasia (MAiD): Canada rapidly expanded medical assistance in dying into one of the world's most aggressive programs, with soaring death numbers and cases pushing it as a tratement for poverty and disability.
Healthcare system: Despite high spending, Canada's "free" system ranks near the bottom in performance among developed nations, with deadly wait times and dysfunction.
Transgender policies: Canada went further than most countries with permissive rules on youth transitions, pronouns, biological males in female spaces, and related ideology in schools and institutions.
Identity politics and "anti-racism": Canada outdid even the U.S. in embracing divisive oppressed frameworks, including declaring itself guilty of an ongoing "genocide" against Indigenous people with little accountability.
Censorship and speech laws: Expansive hate speech rules, online content takedowns, and bills like the Online Harms Act pushed Canada toward Orwellian restrictions, chilling expression and drawing international warnings.
Canada took progressive ideas further and faster than peers, almost always with cascading negative consequences, turning a once-stable nation into a totally dysfunctional one. He's right in saying that Danielle Smith is the only one finally acknowledging that things aren't working, and is trying to reverse some of these pad idea. It's still not enough to save Alberta, we need to divorce ourselves from the rest of Canada and their bad ideas."
This is why left wingers hate Alberta so much

Meme - *Soldier protecting sleeping child meme*
Chinese people: *knives, bullets and grenades*
White people: *soldier blocking weapons with body*
Black people: *child stabbing soldier*
@BALUCIAGA: "the chinese launched a black baby doll called "natasha" and people are bolling it, stretching it, beating it, stomping on It and abusing it for "stress relief" content. this is so disgusting."

Meme - Andy Ngo: "The nutter who wrote this is @annkillion. The same publication published a column defending the last World Cup being hosted in Qatar, a country governed under a version of Sharia where male homosexuality is acriminal offense."
San Francisco Chronicle: "The open hostility to gay rights in today's U.S. creates an anxious environment for fans traveling to attend World Cup matches. Pride Houses, such as the one in San Francisco, offer a safe haven."
Readers added context: "The previous FIFA World Cup in 2022 was hosted by Qatar, where same-sex acts are illegal and punishable by up to 7 years in prison, unlike the US where they have been legal nationwide since 2003 and same-sex marriage since 2015."
Mischevious slippage calling protecting children from trans mania "open hostility to gay rights"
Naturally, the article provides no evidence at all of gay rights being under attack

Outrage as scientists push to create ticks that spread red-meat allergies: 'Isn't this biological terrorism?' - "Researchers Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth from Western Michigan University published an inflammatory paper in 2025, making the case that society had a moral 'duty' to spread ticks that were infected with or engineered to carry alpha-gal syndrome (AGS). AGS is a real medical condition transmitted to humans through tick bites, causing victims to suffer allergic reactions when eating red meat, including beef, pork and lamb, dairy and other products derived from mammals. The symptoms can range from a mild case of hives or stomach pain to severe and even life-threatening cases of anaphylaxis - where blood pressure suddenly drops and the person becomes unable to breathe as their airways swell up. Crutchfield and Hereth claimed that it was morally wrong to eat meat because of the suffering animals endure and the environmental damage that the meat industry allegedly causes. They argued that the only reason society should not be spreading ticks to infect people with AGS today is that scientists do not currently have an easy and effective way to do it on a large scale... They also claimed that this process would not violate anyone's rights, despite proposing to intentionally infect the population with a life-threatening infection... Despite the study's claims that spreading diseases through ticks was only a philosophical experiment, scientists have claimed that the CIA has already been using ticks as weapons for decades. Dr Robert Malone, who helped lay the groundwork for mRNA vaccine technology, claimed he analyzed declassified government documents from Cold War biological weapons programs that link the spread of Lyme disease to CIA experiments. Malone highlighted experiments in the 1960s that allegedly released more than 282,000 radioactive ticks in Virginia and open-air tick research at Plum Island, a federal laboratory located near the Connecticut community where Lyme disease was first identified. Malone’s report argued the research was part of a much larger Cold War biological weapons program known as Project 112, which involved dozens of secret tests aimed at studying how insects could be used to spread pathogens."
Bodily autonomy is only sacrosanct when it pushes the left wing agenda (i.e. abortion)

Richard Medhurst on X - "Literally half the problems on this planet can be traced back to the UK. Including the US and Israel. It's extraordinary."
Octavian 🇪🇺 on X - "Yes, without Britain, there would be no steam engine, steam trains, telephones, parliamentarism, modern constitutionalism, English as the lingua france, penicillin, end of the slave trade, ATMs, logarithms, Shakespeare, the theory of evolution and so much more. In 1000 years, once we have gotten over neurotic jealously and third worlidsm, people will look at Britain with more admiration than we look at Ancient Greece today. It is quite evidently the greatest nation the world has ever seen. It's not even particularly close."
Paul Kelly on X - "Most of these were developed by Scots. But yeah, crack on and use ‘Britain’ when it suits you."
Vexxed on X - "When I’m in a victim complex competition and my opponent is anyone not from England"
Time to denounce English nationalism
We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries

What proportion of heterosexuals is ex-homosexual? - "How many heterosexuals are 'ex-homosexuals'? In 1984, a random sample of Dallas adults indicated that 8 (2.7%) of 294 currently heterosexual men and 4 (1.0%) of 393 currently heterosexual women said that they were ex-homosexual. Of an urban sample from 5 additional cities, 0.5% of current heterosexuals reported that they had been homosexually 'married'. It thus appears that perhaps 1-2% of heterosexuals are ex-homosexuals. Proportionately more adults than teenagers and more men than women moved from homosexuality to heterosexuality. Of the 18 who changed, 12 became heterosexual and 6 bisexual, suggesting that perhaps two-thirds of those who abandon "being" homosexual 'become' heterosexual and a third 'become' bisexual. Because labeling oneself 'homosexual' is so mutable and value-laden, the term 'omnisexual' is suggested."
Weird. We are told that sexuality is immutable

Lois McLatchie Miller on X - "🚨🇬🇧: NEW: The UK government’s PREVENT anti-extremism awareness training, provided for teachers through mainstream education platform “The Key”, now warns teachers that children in their class using the “Pepe the Frog” meme might be part of a far-right incel group 👇"

Britain’s Rape Gangs and the Failure of Feminism

2026-06-22T12:39:00.000+08:00

This is why the UK wants to end anonymity on social media (pretending that it's to protect children).

Left wing logic: refuse to collect inconvenient data, then accuse those of extrapolating from incomplete data of racism, Islamophobia and lying.

Even more important to feminism than advancing women's interests: pushing the left wing agenda.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Britain’s Rape Gangs and the Failure of Feminism
Today’s feminists often prioritize cultural sensitivity over girls’ safety. Their activism helped steer Britain away from addressing a yearslong rape crisis.

British feminism, once a universalist moral insurgency, now stands indicted by its own silence in the face of industrial-scale sexual abuse of vulnerable girls. The Rape Gang Inquiry, published Tuesday by Rupert Lowe of the right-wing Restore Britain party, documents a scandal that should have summoned the full ferocity of the UK’s feminist tradition. Yet the dominant institutions of “gender equality” mostly responded with caution, euphemism, and procedural language where plain moral speech was required. I was interviewed as part of the inquiry, and I have studied firsthand many of the failures it documents.

The horrifying stories covered in the report have been discussed throughout Britain for more than a decade, and one government after another has passed around blame, unable to explain why the state failed to stop the ruination of thousands of young women and girls. Yet an unlikely intervention helped bring the scandal back to the surface. Elon Musk began to discuss the story on X in January 2025 and demanded a fuller accounting from British authorities. His request spurred a new round of debate and launched the inquiry that culminated this week.

The Rape Gang Inquiry describes "the systematic targeting of vulnerable girls, overwhelmingly White British, by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs across towns and cities throughout the United Kingdom," and concludes that "this scandal constitutes one of the most horrendous failures in the history of the country." It documents "organised networks of perpetrators" who transported victims between locations, supplied them with alcohol and drugs, recorded their abuse for distribution and blackmail, and "passed girls between multiple adult men." These crimes "have been committed for decades, since the 1950s by Pakistanis in particular, and have affected every region of our nation."

The scale is almost beyond comprehension. Drawing on parliamentary extrapolations and subsequent data, the report notes that "at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma," according to Lord Malcolm Pearson of Rannoch. "The true number is probably higher." It finds that "the same unspeakable crimes occurred in at least 149 local authority districts, close to 40 percent of all such districts across the United Kingdom." (The report later acknowledges that 250,000 is not a precise count of the number of victims, "because the British state has failed to record it." But it asserts that the figure is a conservative estimate.)

The victims' experiences, in the report's words, strip away any possibility of abstraction. Girls "as young as 11 were initially befriended by a young Muslim man" and then plied with "alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes," collected "from school gates, care homes, and streets in taxis," taken to "houses, flats, restaurants, and hotels," and "raped repeatedly by groups of men, tortured, filmed for blackmail," and insulted as "white trash" and "kuffar" who deserved punishment. Many became pregnant; "some miscarried under trauma," some "endured coerced abortions," and "some gave birth to children who were later removed by the state."

One survivor, "Chloe," describes being raped at 12, drugged, groomed in taxis and hotels, and even admitted to Accident & Emergency after a whiskey bottle was forced into her vagina and shattered. Yet "no questions were asked about how she had sustained such an injury" and she "was examined, the glass was removed, and she was discharged" back to the same world of abuse. When she told police she had been having sex with adult men in cars, they "dismissed Chloe as a prostitute." The police also determined that Chloe had consented to the sexual encounters, despite her claim not to know the definition of the word consent.

The report is explicit that "political failure lies at the heart of the scandal. Successive governments lacked the will to confront the ethnic and religious patterns," with Labour "initially refus[ing] a public inquiry altogether," watering down processes, suppressing ethnicity data, and casting legitimate concerns as " 'far-right' agitation," while Conservative governments, once in power, "continued with Labour's approach and failed to impose mandatory ethnicity recording or launch a full statutory inquiry." Across the political class, "political correctness, fear of accusations of racism, and fear of losing electoral support from certain demographics have taken precedence over the protection of British children."

This is what the report calls Britain's "institutional denial" and "paralysing fear of 'racism' accusations," a fear so deep that "the state enabled" perpetrators "to operate with impunity."

The initial reaction to these crimes exposes the moral fraud of so-called feminist solidarity. There has been, in recent decades, plenty of public language about women, an abundance of institutional "equality" talk, and a steady production of statements, panels, reports, and campaigns to crack open a phantom "glass ceiling." Yet, when faced with "repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma" inflicted on hundreds of thousands of poor girls, feminism largely failed to treat this as the central feminist catastrophe of our time.

Instead, the same "cultural sensitivity" and "community relations" language that paralyzed the police and councils seeped into feminist institutions. Rape Crisis England & Wales, a feminist organization that advocates for abuse victims, acknowledges that police investigations for years were focused on victims rather than suspects, and would too often "deem 11-year-olds capable of consent," as their CEO put it in a response to a previous rape gang inquiry last year. The report notes that ethnicity and religion were often left unrecorded "to protect 'community cohesion' " and that national reviews found it "simply not possible to know the scale" because "ethnicity, group offending, and historical cases were routinely unrecorded or shelved."

The abuses were no mere indiscretion on the part of the perpetrators. Rather, they stemmed directly from their culture. The gangs were "predominantly Muslim Pakistani," operating under "an honour- and shame-based clan code that treated non-Muslim girls, especially white working class girls, as property available for sexual use," and this pattern was "reinforced by eight theological and legal aspects of Islam," including the doctrine of Muslim superiority, forms of loyalty and disavowal (al‑walā' wa‑l‑barā'), "the superiority of men over women, … the absence of any fixed minimum age of consent," and "a system of sex slavery authorizing sexual relations with non‑Muslim captives." Filtered through "clannish immigrant sub-cultures," these elements "provided religious justification that enabled the systematic rape and even slaughter of White British girls."

British Islamic organizations dispute the notion that religion played a role in the abuses. "Sex with people they are not married to, all these things that they have done are prohibited in Islam," said Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, then–assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said of the perpetrators in 2014. Yet, like the feminist groups, a principal concern of many Islamic organizations has been to accuse conservatives of overreacting to or exaggerating the abuses.

The feminist movement, which once refused to let male power define women's lives, now routinely refuses to name the "new men" who operate within cultural and religious systems hostile to feminist demands. It is anxious about mentioning their culture, edgy about identifying their religion, panicky about pointing out the cruel and unusual abuse when that abuse did not fit the preferred script dictated by the intersectional logic of the day. The inquiry's insistence that "misguided political correctness and cultural sensitivities" be banished from its proceedings was, explicitly, a rebuke to precisely this sensibility.

Multicultural etiquette, in other words, created an expanding category of unnameables. Where earlier British feminism could say, plainly, that husbands, fathers, employers, priests, or legislators had exploited women and must be opposed, the contemporary movement often refuses to say that certain patterns of male violence are concentrated within particular ethno-religious subcultures, and that these patterns matter for the safety of girls. Modern feminism shouts when the target is culturally safe and falls quiet when the perpetrators are wrapped in the prohibitions of diversity talk.

One of the report's most unsettling implications for feminists is that the loudest voices forcing this scandal into the open were not the major women's organizations or state-backed feminist commissions but insurgent figures: male, and outside the consensus classes.

Nothing in the report suggests that every feminist or every woman in public life is cowardly or complicit. Some individual women, such as social workers, activists, and survivors themselves, showed exemplary courage.

But the absence of a coordinated, unembarrassed, angered feminist response on the scale this scandal demands is impossible to ignore. The inquiry is explicit: "The country now knows the full truth. The country has been given the basis for justice. The country has the roadmap to ensure these crimes never happen again." Yet the response of the major women's movements has been silence.

The older British feminism that began with figures like Mary Wollstonecraft treated women's subordination as a civilizational wrong, not a boutique grievance. Wollstonecraft insisted that women were rational, and entitled both to education and legal equality; the Langham Place circle translated those claims into public agitation; the suffrage movement turned them into a mass political demand. That tradition understood that women had been treated as property, as children, as moral auxiliaries to men, and as bodies for male use—and refused to accept any compromise in naming and resisting such treatment.

It was precisely this refusal to trim moral principle to fashionable alliances that gave British feminism its stature. The vote, access to education, and legal recognition of women as adults equal to men were framed as a civilizational correction, not a narrow lobby interest, and they inspired women across the West to make similar claims and secure similar rights.

If one asks, "what happened to feminism?" in Britain, and in the wider West, the report and the surrounding silence together suggest a brutal answer. A movement that began as a universalist moral revolt, insisting that women's vulnerability was not "a cultural preference to be balanced against competing sensitivities, but a public wrong that had to be named plainly and confronted without apology", has, in its dominant institutional forms, drifted into managed difference and coalition etiquette. It has become a movement that worries first about "community cohesion," about not "inflaming 'community tensions,' " about not disturbing the moral arrangements of the professional class, and only second—if at all—about the girls at the school gate.

The Rape Gang Inquiry could be the beginning of a movement for true accountability. It declares that "the country now knows the full truth" and calls for "considerable changes to our criminal justice system," "legislation aimed at targeting specifically gang-based [child sexual exploitation]," "institutional accountability measures," and "enhanced safeguarding through greater family involvement." It promises, after publication, to "release the full witness testimonies, gather additional survivor accounts, identify those responsible in Parliament, and begin civil and private legal actions to ensure maximal accountability."

In the older feminist tradition, such a report would have been treated as a manifesto for action, the factual backbone of a new, uncompromising campaign.

But when a movement born to protect women cannot bring itself to cry out on behalf of children because the perpetrators are too politically inconvenient, it is difficult to avoid the verdict that it is dead.

Links - 22nd June 2026 (1)

2026-06-22T09:54:00.000+08:00

CNN - Negroponte: Internet is way to world peace - November 25, 1997 - "Tired of all the hype about the Internet? Well, think again -- one respected Internet guru says it will bring world peace. Nicholas Negroponte, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory, told an information technology conference in Brussels on Tuesday that the potential of the global computer network has actually been vastly underrated. "I have never seen people miss the scale of what's going on as badly as they are doing it now," he said, predicting that the Internet would do no less than bring world peace by breaking down national borders. Twenty years from now, he said, children who are used to finding out about other countries through the click of a mouse "are not going to know what nationalism is." Negroponte faulted European countries outside of Scandinavia, including France and Germany, for not climbing on the Internet bandwagon, saying they were on par with the Third World."
Lol

Missing hotel owner found inside crocodile - "A South African hotelier is believed to have been eaten by a 15ft crocodile after human remains were found inside the swollen reptile. The animal was shot from a helicopter and airlifted from the crocodile-infested Komati River in a daring police operation before a post-mortem examination was carried out. A ring was found inside the belly of the 500kg apex predator and is thought to have belonged to Gabriel Batista, 59. The businessman was swept away in floodwaters while trying to drive across the Komati River in the north-east of the country a week ago. Investigators will carry out DNA tests on the bones and flesh found inside the crocodile. Batista’s four-wheel-drive vehicle became stuck when he attempted to cross the Komati River last week. He is believed to have been swept away by the floodwaters. It is not known whether Batista had drowned by the time he was attacked by the crocodiles or if he was eaten alive. In the wake of his disappearance, police spent four days flying drones and helicopters over the river during the search and noticed a crocodile with a swollen belly basking in the sun on a small island. Capt Johan “Pottie” Potgieter, the commander of a police dive unit, told News24: “Besides having a massively full tummy, he didn’t move around or try to slip into the river despite the noise of the drones and the chopper.” The crocodile was shot by a police marksman from a helicopter and airlifted away from the river to nearby Kruger National Park... As well as the body parts, six different types of shoes were found, according to Capt Potgieter. He said this could indicate it had killed other people, but not necessarily, adding: “A crocodile will eat or swallow anything.”... The Nile crocodile is the largest species in Africa, with some individuals rivalling the saltwater or estuarine crocodiles that live in Australia and Southeast Asia. One of the most dangerous reptiles in the world, Nile crocodiles can grow as long as 20ft and weigh more than 680kg. The species is responsible for several hundred confirmed human deaths per year, although the true number may be higher because many attacks happen in remote areas and are not reported to the authorities."

Blame the EU for your increasingly bossy car | The Spectator - "When Eileen, a 75-year-old British grandmother, bought a brand-new car she found its advanced driver-assistance repeatedly told her the speed limit in a 30mph zone was 80mph and then kept jerking the steering wheel to ‘correct’ her, even when she was trying to park. She told Which? that driving had gone ‘from a lifeline to a nightmare’. ‘I’ve seriously considered getting some old, beat-up car from five years ago that doesn’t have this technology,’ she said. Car safety features are boring and intrusive, like having a man with a clipboard and lanyard permanently in your backseat. Indeed, the Which? survey of more than 1,500 motorists found we are increasingly switching off all that ‘safety’ tech because it’s actually dangerous, distracting or useless. From automatic lane-assist steering adjustments to internal monitors of how drowsy you are, the ludicrous gadgets encrusting today’s cars are easy to poke fun at. The unfunny bit is that we pay extra for all this daft technology. We even pay for the unaccountable, rather shadowy organisation that has caused its proliferation. This little-known body is the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. It is based in Leuven, Belgium, but its multi-million-pound budget finances specialist car-testing labs across the world, including in Thatcham in Berkshire. NCAP’s lifespan has corresponded with an auto revolution. Its testing ideology has shaped every new car built in Europe since the 1990s. It is why modern cars chirp, beep, brake, warn, nudge and glare at you. But the way Euro NCAP works is not straight-forward. It gets away with an extreme health and safety agenda that wouldn’t be tolerated in a normal regulatory body. NCAP is a specialist ratings agency that crash-tests new cars and gives a simple star classification. The trouble is no one predicted how powerful a sales tool this would become. Five NCAP stars has become the gold standard, and car companies have become slaves to the stars. A four-star car looks unsafe, even if national law says it’s fine. Producing a three-star car would be commercial suicide... In the early years tests were simple: front and side impacts, child seats, basic restraints. Cars got stronger. Airbags multiplied, seat mounts stiffened. Everyone started earning five stars and this undoubtedly saved lives. Then Euro NCAP needed a new way to spread out the field. It added tech with more dubious credentials. Vehicles were marked down if they didn’t have the sort of gadgets Apollo moonshots would have thought superfluous. Hence cars laden with automatic emergency braking, lane-keep intervention, speed-limit detection, driver-monitoring cameras, pedestrian detection, cyclist detection, side radar, rear radar, matrix headlights and over-the-air updates for safety functions. Manufacturers loaded cars with sensors, processors, algorithms and screens – not because drivers wanted them, but because without them, star ratings fell. The result is you don’t slip behind the wheel any more – you log in behind a heavily padded wheel in a seat that vibrates when you stray, with a camera watching your eyelids, radar monitoring the car ahead and microphones listening for emergency vehicles. The future of motoring is AI choosing when to brake. We’re not far from software deciding how fast you should be going. Drivers blame car brands for forcing this on them. But manufacturers added all this digitised nonsense because Euro NCAP told them to. If a gadget is unreliable, expensive and irritating but scores highly, it goes in. We pay for it in the bloated price tag of cars, maintenance and repair bills, weight and fuel efficiency, and hence environmentalism. Some motoring experts have expressed concern that all the tech is distracting drivers. Don’t worry, they’ll probably come up with gadgets to make sure you don’t get distracted by, er, the other gadgets... Gains are marginal at best and costs are surely excessive. A car’s cockpit now feels like a padded interrogation room... In the context of the EU’s ‘Vision Zero’ road agenda – a strategy aiming for zero road deaths or serious injuries by 2050, which the UK is still wholesomely embracing – there is a prevailing narrative: ‘More tech = fewer deaths = good.’ It isn’t anti-safety to question how far we must go down this road. Trillions of miles are driven annually by Europe’s drivers. If the goal is zero deaths, no level of intrusiveness is off the table... You could carry on making cars ‘safer’ indefinitely. But beyond this point, we are no longer improving transport – we are constraining human behaviour."

Meme - "*I've played these games before*
Singaporeans when they go to Malaysia for cheap petrol
Singaporeans when companies leave Singapore for cheaper everything"

Meme - BrooklynDad_Defiant! @mmpadellan: "For those of you keeping score at home, MAGA wants to impeach any federal judge who disagrees with the raving fucking lunatic convicted felon because reasons. we're in the stupidest timeline."
BrooklynDad_Defiant! @mmpadellan: "IMPEACH JUSTICE ALITO."
BrooklynDad_Defiant! @mmpadellan: "IMPEACH Clarence Thomas."

Study: Left-voting people are more intolerant than their right-voting counterparts - "The more left-leaning someone is, the less likely he or she will accept others with a different worldview. That is the remarkable conclusion of a new study. That is the conclusion of a new study on polarisation by the Mercator Forum on Migration and Democracy (Uni Dresden). Researchers discovered that those who pride themselves in being tolerant and open-minded are often less accepting than the conservatives, whom they accuse of being intolerant. Educated people with a high income who live in urban areas, in general, are the most intolerant to others with a different opinion, the researchers write in their report. They are more polarised than their lower-income, rural and lesser educated fellow citizens. Often, the less intolerant people vote for left-wing or environmental parties, while voters of Christian Democratic or other more conservative parties are more accepting toward people with opinions differing from their own. "On average, those who hold comparatively progressive positions aimed at political change tend to evaluate people holding similar positions very positively while expressing very negative feelings toward those who have different opinions. By contrast, people who hold comparatively conservative views or who locate themselves in the political centre are less polarised", the report states. Swiss political scientist Michael Hermann is not surprised by this outcome. "Leftists claim to work for the good, for the weak and minorities, and they see themselves more in the right, and also in the right to tackle those who are on the 'wrong side'", he explains to Livenet. Author Bettina Weber points out that polarisation has increased because people do not see their worldview as a political attitude anymore. "Increasingly, they see it as part of one's own identity", she says. For that reason, Weber believes, it is harder to find a political compromise. "Everything becomes very personal, and anyone who does not share their own view is quickly perceived as a threat." Not the issues of gender equality or policies concerning sexual minorities are most dividing, but issues of immigration, the Covid-19 pandemic and social benefits cause the most polarisation, the study concludes. Concerning immigration, citizens in Czechia, Sweden and the Netherlands are clearly for stricter rules and tightened legislation. In Spain, on the other hand, people lean more towards a more liberal and welcoming policy for migrants."
A European (10 countries), non-American study adding to the mountain of evidence that left wingers are less tolerant. Time to misquote Popper to justify liberals being less tolerant

Melissa Chen on X - "Fascinating to see that Chinese researchers and whistleblowers are exposing high profile science journals such as Nature for publishing fraudulent papers. This same rot mirrors the replication crisis and distrust of scientific journals that's been going on in the US. Prestigious journals like Nature, Science, and Cell have morphed into gatekeepers of narrative rather than truth, amplifying irreproducible work while sidelining inconvenient findings. Publish-or-perish incentives combined with ideological capture - DEI mandates, politicized climate and biomedical research - have all but eroded credibility. Fraudulent papers proliferate because the system rewards quantity and alignment with prevailing orthodoxies over careful replication and falsification. It's refreshing to see accountability surfacing in China. Maintaining public trust in science demands relentless scrutiny, not institutional sanctity."

Sama Hoole on X - "When butter was demonised, Unilever sold margarine. When tallow was demonised, Procter and Gamble sold Crisco. When eggs were demonised, Kellogg's sold cereal. When red meat was demonised, Cargill sold soy. When raw milk was demonised, Nestle sold infant formula. When leather was demonised, BASF sold PVC. When wool was demonised, ExxonMobil sold polyester feedstock. When animal fat was demonised, the seed-oil industry grew from a niche product to the most consumed food ingredient on earth. Every demonisation of an animal product made a specific group of shareholders very rich. Every one of those products had been eaten by humans for thousands of years without incident. The science changed the moment a substitute existed to sell. Follow the money. The advice will start to make a lot more sense."
Trust the Science!

Meme - Cris @lionesspike: "her choking back tears while delivering this information makes it even funnier"
Spencer Althouse @Spencer...: "lol at this moment from Rose Byrne's Golden Globes speech "I want to thank my husband, Bobby Cannavale, who couldn't be here because we're getting a bearded dragon and he went to a reptile expo in New Jersey, so thank you, baby""

Meme - Anatoly Karlin 🧲💯 @akarlin: "Important Turkiye 🇹🇷 maps:
* TFR
* IQ
* Hijab prevalence *TFR and Hijab prevalence correlated and anti-correlated with IQ*"
Soner Cagaptay @SonerCagaptay: "📌Turkey's collapsing population: Less than a decade, a quarter of the country's 81 provinces had above-replacement fertility rate. Considering the trend line, in 2025, the number will be down to only 3 out of 81 provinces (Urfa, Mardin, Sirnak), and then 0 in 2026-27"

Meme - gothhouse: "Have you seen our Dunkin' Donuts video? #goth #gothgirl #dunkin #dunkindonuts"
bellbobagginses: "We are so cute"
oozingorifices: "Please stop fetishizing goth culture"
The girls are buttercupcosplays, pinkchyuwu, queen.nephie & bellbobagginses
This is the reality behind the fake story: "FOUR WOMEN HAVE BEEN FIRED AFTER FLASHING THE SECURITY CAMERAS WHERE THEY WORK AS AN ACT OF REVENGE AGAINST THEIR BOSS. A shocking and controversial incident has made headlines, where four women were fired after flashing security cameras at their workplace as an act of revenge against their boss. The women, who worked in a corporate environment, reportedly carried out the act as a form of protest after facing mistreatment or dissatisfaction with their employer. While their actions have sparked widespread discussion about workplace culture, employee rights, and the lengths to which people may go when they feel wronged, the consequences have been significant. This incident highlights the importance of maintaining professional behavior in the workplace, even in moments of frustration or disagreement with management. It also underscores the need for employers to create fair and respectful environments where employees feel heard and valued. While the act itself may have been impulsive, it has brought attention to the potential underlying issues that can lead to such drastic decisions. The story serves as a reminder of the complex dynamics between employers and employees and the critical role of mutual respect in a healthy work environment."

Meme - New York Times/Emperor Papatine: "OPINION. INTERESTING TIMES. Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court. Why the left can't win without a new Constitution."

Meme - *Swimming pool full of pee*
*People in urine pointing at one person* "Another Billion for Ukraine. Vote Blue No Matter Who. Men are women. Ban gas. You're racist. 137 Genders"
*Miserable person in clean water* "People wanting to afford groceries and gas"

Meme - Fokebus @fokebus: "Scary how accurate #Concord was #sydneywilson *Bazz (trans character**"

Meme - RichardRatBoy @RichardRa...: "New COD Zombies looks crazy"

James Chin on X - "NON-MUSLIMS in Selangor who are still coping to accept pig farming ban in the state has apparently been slapped with another shocker that houses of worships within areas designated as commercial zones are not permitted” given existing buildings cannot be arbitrarily converted into Places of Worship Other than Islam (RISI)... 'The rule is supposedly for “new townships” and land will be provided for non-Muslims. This means Chinese temples, Hindu temples, Sikh Gurdwaras & churches must compete for probably the single non-Muslim space.'"
Moderate Islam strikes again

Meme - "I don't make milkshakes because I don't want anyone in my fucking yard."

AITA for saying I didn’t sleep with a girl because I didn’t want to get STDs? : r/AITAH - "I go to a small liberal arts college. As a result of being very small, two pertinent patterns emerge: 1) everybody knows everything about each other's business 2) the pool of people that are a) single b) actively looking for something romantic and/or sexual and c) of a compatible orientation with you is very small. There's this one girl that's physically very attractive who was single and wanted to date/sleep around a lot, so essentially all the straight/bi guys were into her. I was initially attracted to her too, but when I saw she was sleeping around a lot, the interest waned. She and I know each other from some classes, and we hung out at study groups/saw each other at parties a lot, during which she would flirt with me. As I said, I find the whole sleeping around a lot, especially with almost all the guys I know, thing gross, so I wasn't into her and politely ignored it. My friends asked me why I turned her down when she was clearly into me and is really hot, I said that I didn't want to get STDs. The point I was making was half a joke, and half a statement that she's slept around so much that I wouldn't be surprised if she's caught something. Some of my friends laughed, but one said I was an AH and disrespectful for speaking about her that way."

Mpox patient had 75 sexual partners in 21 days - "A new study into the spread of Mpox in Ireland between May 2022 and May 2023 has shown that one of the people infected had 75 sexual partners in the previous 21 days... The gender of those infected was male in 226 cases and female in three cases, according to the study... The median number of sexual partners for those infected was two over the previous 21 days. Almost 99% identified as gay, bisexual or men who have sex with men. While Ireland was the country of birth for almost half of those infected, just under a third came from Latin America."
Damn stigma and homophobia!

My family of five tried to cut out ultraprocessed foods for a week. Here’s what we learned - The Globe and Mail - "As our week without UPFs wore on, a few friends asked if I was feeling healthier and more energetic. I was not. Whatever boost I might have gained from eating cleaner was outweighed by how tired I was from being on my feet in the kitchen most of the day. All told, I spent about 25 hours planning, shopping, cooking and cleaning up during our week without UPFs. Cutting out UPFs was only possible because cooking and interviewing for this story was my job for the week, much like the whole-food influencers whose performative meals are their chief source of income."

myra on X - "Abortion is $500 Plan B is $50 A condom is $5 Being gay is free the choice is you"

Abdul Halim Khan: The rapist imam who exploited a religious ‘curse’ - "To fellow Muslims in London’s Tower Hamlets district, Abdul Halim Khan seemed a pillar of the community. The respected imam was a familiar face at his local mosque, delivering prayers and always on hand to dispense the Almighty’s wisdom. To certain members of his flock, however, his spiritual talk took a very different turn. During private religious guidance sessions with women and young girls, Khan would claim he had become possessed by a “jinn” or spirit. He would then carry out rape and sexual assaults, blaming the malign entity that was “inside” him. That same jinn, he would then warn his victims, would also wreak vengeance if they told anyone what had happened. Khan committed his abuse over an 11-year period from 2004 to 2015, with one of those he preyed on aged just 12. Eventually, his youngest victim reported him to a teacher at her school in 2018. That then triggered a long and complex investigation by the Metropolitan Police, which led to six more victims coming forward and Khan’s conviction after a three-month trial. To break their silence, witnesses overcame not just their worries of retribution by Khan’s ‘jinn’, but their fear of testifying against an influential man of standing... In Tower Hamlets, mental health professionals in the local NHS trust are specially trained to deal with cases of alleged jinn possession, where both patients and their families may be reluctant to accept normal medical diagnoses. There is also a thriving industry in clinics specialising in “ruqyah”, or spiritual healing, which advertise exorcism services for jinn possession. Faith healers, also known as raqi, also hold sessions and seminars at local mosques."
I'm surprised there've been no reports (yet) of racism or Islamophobia leading to a coverup

Amazon's Singapore retreat: Why its US playbook failed in Southeast Asia - "Amazon ended local fulfilment in Singapore because it could not leverage its strengths against rivals in Southeast Asia’s highly competitive e-commerce landscape... The tech giant announced it will phase out local fulfilment, including Amazon Fresh grocery delivery, and stop working with third-party sellers on Amazon.sg... Amazon.sg will focus on international offerings from its United States, Japan and Germany stores. Nearly 80 per cent of local customers already shopped for such products in 2025, it said... Southeast Asia's e-commerce market has grown to US$157.6 billion (S$201.5 billion) in gross merchandise value, with more than 98.8 per cent of market share consolidated around three platforms – Shopee, TikTok Shop and Lazada – according to a Momentum Works report in April. Shopee, owned by Singapore-based Sea, leads the region, followed by ByteDance-owned TikTok Shop and Alibaba-owned Lazada. Amazon first entered Southeast Asia via Singapore in 2017. Many platforms in the region were initially inspired by the tech giant, said Momentum Works' Mr Li. “However, over the years, Chinese e-commerce players have evolved a different set of playbooks involving high leverage of China’s supply chain, refined category operations, as well as content commerce and heavy reliance on content as a competitive lever. “Chinese-originated or inspired e-commerce platforms have adapted that set of playbooks well in Southeast Asia,” he said. “Content commerce” refers to a blend of sales and media-driven marketing like livestreaming. This is something that platforms like TikTok Shop and Shopee have grasped better than Amazon, said Mr Li... Singapore made little sense as a fulfilment hub for Southeast Asia, said analyst Alex Szabo, founder of advisory outfit TeakCharge. “Supplier bases are in China, Vietnam and Indonesia. Last-mile economics in fragmented destination markets do not benefit from a centralised Singapore warehouse.” The local market is also too small to justify the cost of building fulfilment capabilities at scale against entrenched incumbents, he added."

Steve Guest on X - "Greenpeace is cooked: "A North Dakota judge has said he will order Greenpeace to pay damages expected to total $345 million in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline from nearly a decade ago, a figure the environmental group contends it cannot pay.""

Bill Gates: ‘If I designed the tax system, I would be tens of billions poorer : r/FluentInFinance - "Pure virtue signaling. He can always pay more"
"He sets up a foundation and then deducts the money he puts into it on his taxes and receives millions in "donations." He then spurs investment in companies through his foundation and then invests privately in them. It's a GRIFT."
"There were some big fuck-ups, mostly from being top-down and not listening to people on the ground. He forced some countries to blow their malaria budgets on his vaccine, but then they had no money for simple mosquito nets and aerial spraying of mosquito breeding grounds near population centers, the vaccine wasn't perfect, uptake wasn't as good as they'd hope, and without the nets and simple spraying, malaria deaths increased. They're trying again now, and hopefully they learned something, but I don't know. I think Melinda did. I'm not sure about Bill. They also fucked up their whole charter school push. They started with the premise that teachers and unions were the problem, and that profit motive and competition was the solution, and it failed miserably. Gates paid for a RAND Corporation analysis, and it was pretty damning. The best it could say was that without unions, it was easier to fire shitty teachers, but overall teacher effectiveness and student outcomes were not improved:"
"The malaria net thing has other factors. It was found that nets were incredibly unfashionable. Just imagine a sunscreen that has a hideous white sheen or whatever thing you know would increase your longterm life safety but don't do because you find it socially unacceptable. That's why people weren't using mosquito nets. And then people were using the nets for other things, like trying to fish with them, etc. There were other issues at play. The charter schools thing is a massive screw up, and probably one born out of a multi-billionaire's isolation from the real world. In any case, Gates is one of the few cases where I actually think he cares about using his wealth to do the most good possible, but realizes that it's also incredibly hard to know how to do the most good per dollar spent. It's easy to waste money. It's hard to use it effectively. So, he's tried several things at small(er) scale that have failed. He's tried to scale other things up that seemed promising and those have had varying levels of success and failure. But the reality is it's hard. We have entire nations and multi-national organizations and we haven't solved all our problems with those political/power structures. He's one guy with a ton of money. The upside is he only has to answer to himself, so he can be a maverick, cut through bureaucracy and corruption. The downside is that when he screws up, he looks like an idiot."
"The blurb you posted indicates there was some improvement. Just not dramatic and not across the whole project. It also states they were able to get rid of ineffective teachers. If this is bad, then isn't the marginally worse alternative also bad? And actually a tad bit worse? Did the Gates Foundation approach cost more or less than the alternative? If it cost less and there were equal or slightly better outcomes, then that is an indictment of the alternative. The foundation didn't get the results it wanted, but this blurb is certainly no endorsement of the alternative."

Best countries ranking: Canada ranks 19th on global scale - "Canada has dropped to 19th on a new best countries ranking list, one position behind the U.S. The results, U.S. News Best Countries ranking, appears dramatic when compared with Canada’s previous placements – fourth in 2024 and second in 2023 – but the rankings themselves have changed significantly, according to U.S. News. Rather than relying primarily on perception surveys, the new model evaluates countries using 100 statistical indicators grouped into eight broader categories to evaluate 100 countries. The measures draw on data provided by international organizations such as the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)... Litke described the shift as moving from “reputation to reality.” “The idea is to give stakeholders across the board the ability to see where countries are actually at - essentially creating a national progress report,” he said... Canada placed 18th in opportunity and 21st in economic development. These categories spotlight Canadians facing persistent affordability concerns. While Canada maintained relatively balanced results across multiple categories, it did not place among the top tier in areas connected to economic performance. Recent housing outlooks suggest affordability challenges continue extending beyond major cities like Toronto and Vancouver into places once considered accessible including Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax. Housing forecasts also suggest slower construction activity and weaker market demand may continue in some regions despite persistent affordability pressures. Canada placed 20th in infrastructure and 27th in health. It also landed at 27th in the civic health ranking. For Canadians, these categories touch some of the country’s most visible domestic debates – health care access, transit systems, population growth and the capacity of public services. Litke said a category looked beyond whether health care coverage exists. “In health, for example, we’re looking at not only coverage and cost, but also access and availability,” he said... the rankings take into account measurable indicators rather than perception – meaning a country’s reputation no longer translates into a stronger score."
I can't wait for all the cope. It'll be something along the lines of it being US News so it must be biased and untrustworthy, because if US News quotes UN and OECD data, that data must be fake. And it's so biased that the US only got 18th place

Links - 21st June 2026 (3 - Migrants: US)

2026-06-21T21:45:00.000+08:00

Blake Neff on X - "This story is great: During the Biden admin a migrant came all the way to the U.S. from Mauritania, and was immediately allowed in by claimig he needed asylum for being gay. He moved to Indiana, married the (female) daughter of a sheriff, and got a job as a prison guard from his father-in-law. But now the Trump Admin has swooped in, pointed out that since he's not gay his asylum claim is clearly fraudulent, and has arrested him for deportation."
Ask Your Doctor if Jihad Is Right for You - "Medicine has a serious antisemitism problem. It especially has a problem among doctors, and a lot of that problem is concentrated among doctors educated overseas. We identified a set of over 700 people from all walks of life profiled by the organization StopAntisemitism for displaying flagrant hostility toward Jews and Israel. We found that health professionals were more than 2.5 times more likely to be found among antisemites than their share of the workforce. Doctors were almost 26 times overrepresented in the list of antisemites relative to their prevalence in the workforce. And half of those Jew-hating doctors received their medical degrees abroad. The fact that Jew-hatred has found a perch among highly educated doctors and other health professionals runs counter to the conventional explanations for antisemitism. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other legacy Jewish organizations, antisemitism is born of ignorance which must be fought through education... Both the past and present put the lie to Greenblatt’s hypothesis. Campus Hamasniks at Columbia and Harvard are radical and morally depraved, but they aren’t uneducated. Nor were the architects of the Holocaust, inheritors of a German cultural tradition that was arguably unmatched in its yearning for modernity. Our own empirical work also calls the education-antisemitism intersection into question. Traditionally, the hypothesized link between education and antisemitism arises from the observation that individuals with lower levels of education are more likely to admit to harboring explicitly antisemitic attitudes. It was unclear, however, whether this meant that elites were in fact less antisemitic or whether they were more inclined to provide socially desirable responses. A study we published in 2021 indicates that it’s the latter. In an experiment designed to detect double standards, we drafted two versions of the same question that ask respondents about one principle but using a Jewish and non-Jewish example. Illustratively, one item asks whether “the U.S. military should be allowed to forbid” the wearing of religious headgear, with a Jewish yarmulke or Sikh turban offered as examples. Responses indicated that higher levels of education are associated with antisemitism since they are more likely to apply a double standard against Jews, such as allowing supporting Sikhs in the military who want to wear turbans but not Jews who want to wear yarmulkes... doctors make up only 0.5% of the entire American workforce, so they are more than 26 times overrepresented among the antisemites identified by StopAntisemitism... if history is any guide, the overrepresentation of health care workers and physicians in particular should not qualify as a surprise. As bioethicist Ashley Fernandes points out, physicians were early and enthusiastic Nazi Party members who were ultimately seven times as likely as other employed males to join the SS. Part of the draw was the “biocracy” that became central to Nazi mythology. “For Hitler and the Nazi physicians,” Fernandes notes, “the state was analogous to a living organism—a supreme political vitalism … The Jews are a disease; disease must be completely cut out (not merely suppressed), for it will otherwise poison and kill the body.” Nazi doctors didn’t imagine forced sterilization and mass slaughter as a dereliction of their oath, but the ultimate fulfillment of it... in the Middle East, higher levels of education are associated with an increased propensity for professing antisemitism... Combine those attitudes with an American health care system that normalizes racial and ethnic tribalism with ideas like whiteness as a form of psychopathology, and the results are predictably disastrous. This problem will only get worse as the rate of importing doctors from abroad is rising"
NJ Gov. Sherrill blames outsiders for Delaney Hall protest violence - "New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill on Saturday blamed out-of-state agitators for clashes that erupted between protesters and local law enforcement outside the Delaney Detention Center in Newark. Sherrill said five of the six people arrested Friday night in clashes outside the detention center for immigrants were not New Jersey residents. State police said the five out-of-staters were from New York and Pennsylvania."
Weird. I thought this was a baseless conspiracy theory. The next cope is going to be that it's the Proud Boys or ICE themselves behind it
If a Democratic state arrests "peaceful protesters", is it still "fascism"?
Nick Sortor on X - "🚨 This is EXACTLY WHY ICE agents are FORCED to wear masks ICE Newark rioter: “I HAVE YOUR FACE, MOTHERF***ER” “Your WHOLE F***ING FAMILY is DEAD!” “Your KIDS. Your WIFE. ALL DEAD!” This is the type of TERRORISM Democrats WANT ICE agents to face by de-masking them"
KTLA on X - "DHS Secretary Kristi Noem attends ICE raid at home of pregnant L.A. County mother"
Bill Melugin on X - "I was at this operation with Noem. It wasn’t targeting a “pregnant mother”, it was targeting her previously deported illegal alien Mexican husband who had been convicted of drug trafficking in February & had an attempted murder charge pleaded down to an assault conviction. ICE had a criminal judicial warrant for his arrest, signed off on by a federal judge, because he illegally re-entered the U.S. after removal, which is a felony. Of course, none of that context is in @KTLA reporting here as they only spoke to his wife, who apparently *shockingly* didn’t disclose any of his criminal history."
Graham Allen on X - "This is hilarious… two brown guys just walked out of ICE’s Newark facility, and leftist idiots started CHEERING They didn’t realize that they WORK THERE🤣🤣🤣 “THEY WORK HERE, DUMBASSES!”"
New York Post on X - "Anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil to appeal to US Supreme Court in last bid to avoid deportation"
Will Ricciardella on X - "I had a professor at Cal State Long Beach who constantly trashed America as racist, oppressive, and irredeemable. He mocked the Constitution, capitalism, and virtually every American institution. At the end of the semester, he gave an emotional story about how his mother crawled through sewer pipes to reach America. So I raised my hand and asked: if America is this irredeemable, oppressive country, why did she risk everything to come here? And why are neither of you interested in going back? He didn’t answer the question. Instead he called me disrespectful. That’s because much of this ideology is not rooted in reality testing. It’s institutional theater rewarded by academia, media, and activism. The system incentivizes moral denunciation of America while simultaneously depending on the opportunities America uniquely provides."
Grifters know that white people are masochistic suckers who will pay them to abuse white people
Meme - "My god, they killed Peanut"
Democratic party: "Well he was being housed illegally"
*side eye*
Seattle socialist mayor will NOT investigate fraud at Somali-run daycare centers, calls it attack on immigrants - "Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said the city has no intention of investigating fraud claims in taxpayer-funded social programs, claiming the concerns are an effort to target immigrant communities rather than address legitimate financial irregularities... "This whole issue is not really about fraud," said Wilson. "It's about dividing and conquering. It's about making an immigrant community a target. There's no reason to assume based on the identity of a daycare operator that their small business is doing anything wrong."... The comments come amid a nationwide crackdown on fraud discovered in taxpayer-funded programs. After millions of dollars worth of fraud was discovered in Minnesota, particularly among the Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis, similar investigations arose in Washington state. Independent journalists discovered earmarks of fraud in Seattle-area immigrant-run daycares, specifically those operated within the Somali community. In January, Mayor Wilson denounced the investigations, claiming they were an attack on immigrants. "I stand with the Somali childcare providers who have experienced targeted harassment and condemn the surveillance campaign promoted by extremist influencers," she said at the time. Wilson announced her intention to charge independent journalists with "hate crimes" for investigating fraud. Reports earlier this year revealed that at least one Somali-run daycare recieved $200,000 of taxpayer funds, but the childcare business did not appear to exist."
The fraud is the point
Jim Njue on X - "“Ethiopia and Kenya stole our Land. We Must work together to liberate our occupied territories. Somalia is for Somalis Only” -Ilhan Omar"
Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "I love how the Third World caucus of the Democratic Party are Gay Race Communists here in the US, but they’re blood and soil nationalists in their home country."
Left wingers just hate the West
Nick shirley on X - "CBS News said there was no evidence of fraud. The NYT said the Somali community was being targeted CNN said there was "little evidence." Tim Walz said it was “white supremacy” to expose fraud Today: $90M busted and 15 charged. IT WAS ALL FRAUD AND THEY KNEW."
Minnesota FGM prosecutions remain zero despite state felony law - "More than half a million women and girls in the United States are living with the physical and psychological scars of female genital mutilation — including many in Minnesota, home to a large Somali community from a country where roughly 98% of women have undergone the procedure, according to United Nations data. Yet despite a state law that makes performing the procedures a felony, Minnesota has never secured a single criminal prosecution under its law — raising questions about enforcement, and whether cases could be going on undetected... Fox News Digital also contacted multiple Minnesota clinics that provide reproductive and women’s health services asking whether clinicians encounter patients with physical evidence of female genital mutilation. None responded... prosecutions nationwide have remained rare, with the only widely cited state-level conviction occurring in Georgia in 2006, where a woman was convicted under Georgia state law for performing FGM on a minor."
Eli Steele on X - "Margaret Cho turned down hit show in Canada because she feared being arrested by ICE. She was born in California. As Shelby Steele put it simply: “By rewarding victimization, we encouraged people to think of themselves as victims.” For some elites, victimization has become their most prized possession, their self-referential worth. And yet it is the most meaningless thing about them for its a lie."
Robert Sterling on X - "During the Biden administration, H-1B visa holders were buying houses with 97-100% financing. 97% would come from the FHA, with the rest coming from state first-time home buyer programs. Zero money down. Thanks to programs that were supposed to be helping low-income American families buy their own homes. FHA loans to non-permanent residents quickly grew to represent 6% of mortgage issuances. The percentage was undoubtedly higher in places like the DFW area, where H-1B visa holders are disproportionately concentrated. I don’t have anything against people in America on H-1B visas. I’ve said it before—and I’ll say it again—that I’ve found many of them to be great people on an individual level, and I wish them all nothing but the best. Individual immigrants—especially those here legally—are not at fault for flawed US immigration policy. But this might be the most radicalizing thing I’ve ever seen. Not only are American workers forced to compete for jobs, they’re also forced to compete in the housing market against people bringing 0-3% of a house’s cost to the closing table, versus the 10-20% most people have to pay. First, companies import mass numbers of H-1B visa holders, largely in "back office" white-collar fields like IT and accounting. This essentially imposes a lower ceiling on domestic wages in these job categories. Next, these workers—who are generally concentrated in certain geographic areas—create more demand for housing (especially in good school districts), driving up home prices and the cost of living. Then, to top it off, they don’t even have to save up money for a down payment. They can close on a $500k house with $0-15k plus a 97% FHA loan. Meanwhile, ordinary American families are forced to come to with $50-100k for the same down payment. I don’t care how you feel about Trump or what your preferred immigration policies are; there’s no defending this. It screws over hard-working American citizens several different ways over, and it’s yet another reason why I will always be glad Trump won and Kamala Harris lost in 2024."
Steven Edginton on X - "For months I’ve been speaking to American tech workers forced to train their H-1B replacements, or told their jobs were being moved to India. I’ve now heard from whistleblowers from Google and FedEx describing the same pattern. Two-thirds of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign born. There are now more Indian-born workers in Silicon Valley (23%) than California-born (18%). More than 70% of H1-B visas go to Indians."
Kangmin Lee | 이강민 on X - "This story is insane. Chinese-American professor Sean Wang is suing Southern Methodist University over Discrimination & Retaliation from Indian Professors. Indian professors at @SMU classified Dr. Wang as white in HR records to justify denying him a promotion. Dr. Hemang Desai, chair of the Accounting Department, along with other Indian faculty, granted tenure to 100% of Indian candidates, while denying tenure to 100% of non-Indian candidates. Indian faculty were also handed prime offices with nice views, while East Asian and non-Indian faculty were assigned to a lesser offices. This perfectly illustrates East Asians' white-adjacent status, the deep normalization of anti-white discrimination, and parasitic Indian nepotism."
Libs of TikTok on X - "BREAKING: Aimee Bock, the ringleader of the massive Feeding our Future $250 million COVID fraud scheme, told the NYP that Rep. Ilhan Omar was IN ON IT LOCK UP @IlhanMN"
RNC Research on X - "Jamie Raskin asks why ICE can't just "pick up" criminal illegals from jail before they are released. Who is going to tell this moron that Democrats are REFUSING cooperation and instead releasing the criminals back into communities?"
Meme - captive dreamer @siegfriedmuell: "The left goes to bat for MS-13 criminal aliens and Haitians who eat people's pets for a reason - they want to make your life worse. South Africans are successful, law abiding and White. That's why they hate them. Immigration is about making your life worse."
Meme - Occupy Democrats Logic:
Common Sense Extremists: "Yes, instead of immigrants who will come here to rape us, pollute our streets, drive down our wages and erase our culture they will at worst actually return their shopping carts and not talk during the movies ..."
Richard Poplak @Poplak: "Not your traditional refugee exodus. *South Africans*"
"Also these are ACTUAL families..."
"Not a bunch of military aged males flipping off the camera... How refreshing!"
Meme - "Twatwaffles Beware !!!
* Public Service Announcement *
DHS will now refer to "IIlegal Aliens" as "Travelers Without Authority To Stay", or "TWATS." The term "Illegal" upsets members of the Democrat Socialist Party and we want them to shut the hell up already. In short, ICE will continue making America safe through the arrests and deportation of TWATS. Thank You."
Thread by @SanDiegoKnight on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This Cato ‘immigrants pay more taxes’ flex + Indian chart is peak cherry-picking. Impressive numbers… until you actually look under the hood. 🧐”
1. It’s median household income, not individual or per-capita — and Indian households are structured differently
• The chart (and the “twice as much” claim) uses households, not people. Indian-American households are larger on average (~3.0–3.8 people vs. U.S. average ~2.5) and far more likely to have multiple full-time high earners (dual STEM/medical professionals is common). en.wikipedia.
• Indian Americans still have high personal earnings (median ~$85k for ages 16+, ~$106k for full-time workers per 2023 Pew), but the “almost twice” headline evaporates when you adjust for household size and number of workers. This is a classic statistical sleight-of-hand when comparing groups with different living arrangements.
2. Extreme positive selection bias … this is the cream of India’s elite, not “immigrants” in general
• Indian Americans aren’t a random sample of India’s 1.4 billion people. The vast majority arrived via H-1B, EB-2/3, or student visas …hyper-selective for advanced degrees and high-skill jobs. You’re comparing the top ~0.1–1% of India’s talent/IQ/education distribution to the broad U.S. average (which includes everyone from McDonald’s workers to retirees).
• India’s own per-capita income and education levels are far lower. This doesn’t prove broad immigration is economically magical; it proves cherry-picked high-skill immigration works for the selectees. Second-generation outcomes are strong but show some regression toward the mean, and chain migration/family sponsorship often dilutes the skill level over time.
3. Cato’s overall “immigrants pay more taxes” claim has well-documented methodological holes
• Cato (a libertarian think tank that favors more immigration) attributes welfare benefits received by U.S.-born children of immigrants to “natives,” not the immigrant parents. This understates immigrant fiscal costs. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and others note this flips the picture: when you count the full household burden (including kids), immigrant-headed households use welfare at higher rates than native-headed ones.
• Cato aggregates all immigrants (high-skill Indians + low-skill groups + illegals). The net positive they find is heavily driven by the high earners. Other studies (National Academies of Sciences, Heritage, etc.) have found first-generation immigrants often impose net costs, especially low-skilled/illegal cohorts.
• Their data ends before the post-2021 border surge effects fully hit long-term budgets.
4. H-1B-specific issues (the main pipeline for Indian success)
• Many Indian immigrants in tech come via H-1B, which has documented problems: outsourcing/body shops (e.g., Infosys, TCS), wage suppression (foreign workers often paid less for similar roles), and ethnic nepotism once Indians reach management (preferring co-ethnics for hiring/promotions). This displaces U.S. workers and depresses wages in STEM.
• Fraud allegations are common (fake credentials, benching workers, etc.). Critics argue this isn’t “adding value” so much as arbitraging cheaper labor and networks.
5. Other drains and context
• Remittances: Indian Americans send massive sums back to India (India receives over $100B+ in remittances annually, a huge chunk from the U.S.). That’s money leaving the U.S. economy.
• Cost of living: Indians are heavily concentrated in high-cost metros (SF Bay, NYC, etc.), where nominal incomes are inflated anyway. Adjust for purchasing power and the gap shrinks.
• The post uses Indian success to defend a general “immigrants = net positive” narrative from Cato. But Indians are ~1.4% of the U.S. population and an outlier. Broad policy implications (more low-skill immigration, open borders, etc.) don’t follow from one high-performing subgroup.
Bottom line: The raw numbers on Indian achievement are real and impressive — selective high-skill immigration from India has produced strong economic outcomes for that group. But the post overreaches by using an old household-income chart + a contested Cato aggregate study to imply broad immigration is unambiguously great or that Indians represent “typical” immigrants. It’s cherry-picking + statistical framing. "
wanye on X - "You can read the whole thread, but the two biggest things to keep in mind any time you hear that immigrants do better than natives are this:
1. Even if true, this is entirely due to selection effects and therefore *cannot even in principle* be used as an argument for eliminating the selection effects. If selecting only the elite is what produced the favorable comparison, then that *cannot* be an argument for accepting more people (unless you think we're just not capturing enough of the elite). It is at *best* an argument for the status quo or for a careful and measured (and highly selective) increase. And *even if this is all true*, we basically know which immigrants and from where are doing the best. So nothing about this suggests that we should keep inviting people from places that *we already know* do not produce good results. All of this is just to say that you can measure what's happening and react. It's not a mystery.
2. Studies of this form *basically always* leave off the citizen kids of immigrants. The family comes here, they have kids, the kids are citizens. So, now, if the kids get welfare, it doesn't count as immigrant welfare. Sometimes people will counter, "Of course! Because they *are* American citizens!" To that I would just say that when people show you how they argue, you should update your opinion of them accordingly."
Geiger Capital on X - "This is insane… ~21,000 students were absent today in Charlotte Public Schools, likely due to the new ICE operations. That’s ~15% of total enrollment. This is why class sizes are too big, resources are stretched thin, and translators are needed. ~12% of all students in American public schools today are "English learners" Meaning they don’t speak English. We can’t educate our children like this. This isn’t complicated."
Meme - DK @1Nicdar: "Unreal! Traffic congestion in Charlotte, NC, before and after ICE."
We are told that this can't be true because only 8% of the population is illegal (as if this were not alarming large already as it is). Yet, we are also told that just reducing 4-5% of traffic increases speeds by 15-20%
S.T.S. on X - "What we have seen in just a week in Charlotte since ICE arrived:
-traffic and car accidents are down
-over 25,000 public school seats have opened up
- illegal activity is down
-shopping centers and parking have all been relieved from over crowding.
This list doesn't even consider other direct and indirect impacts hospitals and insurance impacts, child and sex trafficking, 911 calls, refuse debris on our streets, gas and energy consumption, housing. It's clear as day. The majority of issues we are experiencing is coming from illegal immigrants."

Inventing the Crusades

2026-06-21T18:45:00.000+08:00

Left wing logic: the Fourth Crusade ended up attacking Constantinople (it must be stressed, in the end), therefore none of the Crusades could've been motivated by defending Christendom against non-Christians.
Inventing the Crusades
Within a month of the attacks of September 11, 2001, former president Bill Clinton gave a speech to the students of Georgetown University. As the world tried to make sense of the senseless, Clinton offered his own explanation: “Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless,” he declared. “Indeed, in the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with three hundred Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees.

“I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it,” he concluded, and there is good reason to believe he was right. Osama bin Laden and other Islamists regularly refer to Americans as “Crusaders.” Indeed, bin Laden directed his fatwa authorizing the September 11 attacks against the “Crusaders and Jews.” He later preached that “for the first time the Crusaders have managed to achieve their historic ambitions and dreams against our Islamic umma, gaining control over Islamic holy places and Holy Sanctuaries. . . . Their defeat in Iraq will mean defeat in all their wars and a beginning of the receding of their Zionist–Crusader tide against us.”

Most people in the West do not believe that they have been prosecuting a continuous Crusade against Islam since the Middle Ages. But most do believe that the Crusades started the problems that plague and endanger us today. Westerners in general (and Catholics in particular) find the Crusades a deeply embarrassing episode in their history. As the Ridley Scott movie Kingdom of Heaven graphically proclaimed, the Crusades were unprovoked campaigns of intolerance preached by deranged churchmen and fought by religious zealots against a sophisticated and peaceful Muslim world. According to the Hollywood version, the blind violence of the Crusades gave birth to jihad, as the Muslims fought to defend themselves and their world. And for what? The city of Jerusalem, which was both “nothing and everything,” a place filled with religion that “drives men mad.”

On September 11, 2001, there were only a few professional historians of the Crusades in America. I was the one who was not retired. As a result, my phone began ringing and didn’t stop for years. In the hundreds of interviews I have given since that terrible day, the most common question has been, “How did the Crusades lead to the terrorist attacks against the West today?” I always answered: “They did not. The Crusades were a medieval phenomenon with no connection to modern Islamist terrorism.”

That answer has never gone over well. It seems counterintuitive. If the West sent Crusaders to attack Muslims throughout the Middle Ages, haven’t they a right to be upset? If the Crusades spawned anti-Western jihads, isn’t it reasonable to see them as the root cause of the current jihads? The answer is no, but to understand it requires more than the scant minutes journalists are usually willing to spare. It requires a grasp not only of the Crusades but of the ways those wars have been exploited and distorted for modern agendas.

That answer is now contained in a book, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, written by the most distinguished historian of the Crusades, the Cambridge University scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith. A transcription of the Bampton Lectures he delivered in October 2007 at Columbia University, it is a thin book, brimming with insights, approachable by anyone interested in the subject.

It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”

Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions. For on the other side is, as Riley-Smith puts it “nearly everyone else, from leading churchmen and scholars in other fields to the general public.” There is the great Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume History of the Crusades is still a brisk seller for Cambridge University Press a half century after its release. It was Runciman who called the Crusades “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.” The pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better stories than the professional historians.

So we continue to write our scholarly books and articles, learning more and more about the Crusades but scarcely able to be heard. And when we are heard, we are dismissed as daft. I once asked Riley-Smith if he believed popular perceptions of the Crusades would ever be changed by modern scholarship. “I’ve just about given up hope,” he answered. In his new book he notes that in the last thirty years historians have begun to reject “the long-held belief that it [the Crusade movement] was defined solely by its theaters of operation in the Levant and its hostility toward Islam—with the consequence that in their eyes the Muslims move slightly off center stage—and many of them have begun to face up to the ideas and motivation of the Crusaders. The more they do so the more they find themselves contra mundum or, at least, contra mundum Christianum.”

One of the most profound misconceptions about the Crusades is that they represented a perversion of a religion whose founder preached meekness, love of enemies, and nonresistance. Riley-Smith reminds his reader that on the matter of violence Christ was not as clear as pacifists like to think. He praised the faith of the Roman centurion but did not condemn his profession. At the Last Supper he told his disciples, “Let him who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me, And he was reckoned with transgressors.”

St. Paul said of secular authorities, “He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Several centuries later, St. Augustine articulated a Christian approach to just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it. As Riley-Smith notes, the concept that violence is intrinsically evil belongs solely to the modern world. It is not Christian.

All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars. They came about in reaction attacks against Christians or their Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 in response to the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor, as well as the much earlier Arab conquest of the Christian-held Holy Land. The second was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and most other Christian lands in the Levant in 1187.

In each case, the faithful went to war to defend Christians, to punish the attackers, and to right terrible wrongs. As Riley-Smith has written elsewhere, crusading was seen as an act of love—specifically the love of God and the love of neighbor. By pushing back Muslim aggression and restoring Eastern Christianity, the Crusaders were—at great peril to themselves—imitating the Good Samaritan. Or, as Innocent II told the Knights Templar, “You carry out in deeds the words of the gospel, ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”

But the Crusades were not just wars. They were holy wars, and that is what made them different from what came before. They were made holy not by their target but by the Crusaders’ sacrifice. The Crusade was a pilgrimage and thereby an act of penance. When Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095, he created a model that would be followed for centuries. Crusaders who undertook that burden with right intention and after confessing their sins would receive a plenary indulgence. The indulgence was a recognition that they undertook these sacrifices for Christ, who was crucified again in the tribulations of his people.

And the sacrifices were extraordinary. As Riley-Smith writes in this book and his earlier The First Crusaders, the cost of crusading was staggering. Without financial assistance, only the wealthy could afford to embark on a Crusade. Many noble families impoverished themselves by crusading.

Historians have long known that the image of the Crusader as an adventurer seeking his fortune is exactly backward. The vast majority of Crusaders returned home as soon as they had fulfilled their vow. What little booty they could acquire was more than spent on the journey itself. One is hard pressed to name a single returning Crusader who broke even, let alone made a profit on the journey. And those who returned were the lucky ones. As Riley-Smith explains, recent studies show that around one-third of knights and nobility died on crusade. The death rates for lower classes were even higher.

One can never understand the Crusades without understanding their penitential character. It was the indulgence that led thousands of men to take on a burden that would certainly cost them dearly. The secular nobility of medieval Europe was a warrior aristocracy. They made their living by the sword. We know from their wills and charters that they were deeply aware of their own sinfulness and anxious over the state of their souls. A Crusade provided a way for them to serve God and to do penance for their sins. It allowed them to use their weapons as a means of their salvation rather than of their damnation.

Of course it was difficult, but that is what penance is supposed to be. As Urban and later Crusade preachers reminded them, Christ Himself had said, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” As one Crusade preacher wrote, “Those who take the cross deny, that is to say renounce, themselves by exposing themselves to mortal danger, leaving behind their loved ones, using up their goods, carrying their cross, so that afterward they may be carried to heaven by the cross.” The Crusader sewed a cloth cross to his garment to signify his penitential burden and his hope.

Take away penitence and the Crusades cannot be explained. Yet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Protestants and then Enlightenment thinkers rejected the idea of temporal penalties due to sin—along with indulgences, purgatory, and the papacy. How then did they explain the Crusades? Why else would thousands of men march thousands of miles deep into enemy territory, if not for something precious? The first explanation was that they were fooled by the Antichrist: The Catholic Church had convinced the simple that their salvation lay in fighting its battles. Later, with the advent of liberalism, critics assumed that the Crusaders must have had economic motives. They were seeking wealth and simply used religion as a cover for their worldly desires.

In the nineteenth century, the memory of the Crusades became hopelessly entangled with contemporary European imperialism. Riley-Smith tells the fascinating story of Archbishop Charles-Martial Allemand-Lavigerie of Algiers, the founder of the missionary orders of the White Fathers and White Sisters, who worked diligently to establish a new military order resembling the Knights Templar, Teutonic Knights, and the Knights Hospitaller of the Middle Ages. His new order was to be sent to Africa, where it would protect missionaries, fight against the slave trade, and support the progress of French civilization in the continent.

Drawing on money from antislavery societies, Lavigerie purchased lands on the edge of the Saharan Desert to use as a mother house for a new order, L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Frères Armés du Sahara. The order attracted hundreds of men from all social classes, and in 1891 the first brothers received their white habits emblazoned with red crosses. The dust cover of Riley-Smith’s book is itself a wonderful picture of these brothers at their African home. With palm trees behind them, they look proudly into the camera, each wearing a cross and some holding rifles.

The Institut des Fréres Armés lasted scarcely more than a year before it was scrapped and its founder died, but other attempts to found a military order were made in the nineteenth century, even in Protestant England. All wove together the contrasting threads of Romanticism, imperialism, and the medieval Crusades.

President Clinton is not alone in thinking that the Muslim world is still brooding over the crimes of the Crusaders. It is commonly thought—even by Muslims—that the effects and memory of that trauma have been with the Islamic world since it was first inflicted in the eleventh century. As Riley-Smith explains, however, the Muslim memory of the Crusades is of very recent vintage. Carole Hillenbrand first uncovered this fact in her groundbreaking book The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. The truth is that medieval Muslims came to realize that the Crusades were religious but had little interest in them. When, in 1291, Muslim armies removed the last vestiges of the Crusader Kingdom from Palestine, the Crusades largely dropped out of Muslim memory.

In Europe, however, the Crusades were a well-remembered formative episode. Europeans, who had bound the Crusades to imperialism, brought the story to the Middle East during the nineteenth century and reintroduced it to the Muslims. Stripping the Crusades of their original purpose, they portrayed the Crusades as Europe’s first colonial venture—the first attempt of the West to bring civilization to the backward Muslim East.

Riley-Smith describes the profound effect that Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Talisman had on European and therefore Middle Eastern opinion of the Crusades. Crusaders such as Richard the Lionhearted were portrayed as boorish, brutal, and childish, while Muslims, particularly Saladin, were tolerant and enlightened gentlemen of the nineteenth century. With the collapse of Ottoman power and the rise of Arab nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, Muslims bound together these two strands of Crusade narrative and created a new memory in which the Crusades were only the first part of Europe’s assault on Islam—an assault that continued through the modern imperialism of European powers. Europeans reintroduced Saladin, who had been nearly forgotten in the Middle East, and Arab nationalists then cleansed him of his Kurdish ethnicity to create a new anti-Western hero. We saw the result during the run-up to the Iraq War, when Saddam Hussein portrayed himself as a new Saladin who would expel the new Crusaders.

Arab nationalists made good use of the new story of the Crusades during their struggles for independence. Their enemies, the Islamists, then took over the same tool. Osama bin Laden is only the most recent Islamist to adopt this useful myth to characterize the actions of the West as a continual Crusade against Islam.

That is the Crusades’ only connection with modern Islamist terrorism. And yet, so ingrained is this notion that the Crusades began the modern European assault on Islam that many moderate Muslims still believe it. Riley-Smith recounts : “I recently refused to take part in a television series, produced by an intelligent and well-educated Egyptian woman, for whom a continuing Western crusade was an article of faith. Having less to do with historical reality than with reactions to imperialism, the nationalist and Islamist interpretations of crusade history help many people, moderates as well as extremists, to place the exploitation they believe they have suffered in a historical context and to satisfy their feelings of both superiority and humiliation.”

In the Middle East, as in the West, we are left with the gaping chasm between myth and reality. Crusade historians sometimes try to yell across it but usually just talk to each other, while the leading churchmen, the scholars in other fields, and the general public hold to a caricature of the Crusades created by a pox of modern ideologies. If that chasm is ever to be bridged, it will be with well-written and powerful books such as this.

Links - 21st June 2026 (2 - General Wokeness [including San Diego Mosque Shooting, ChudTheBuilder])

2026-06-21T15:51:00.000+08:00

Meme - Elica Le Bon @elical...: "I was horrified to learn that three people were murdered in a. shooting at a mosque today. I do not condone political violence in any context. I wonder, though, if this tragedy will be justified by the same logic used to justify the murder of Jews. "Muslim countries are responsible for the rise in anti-Muslim hate." "Well, you know, a lot of Muslims do support Hamas, and that is a problem." "Didn't you know? The shooters had relatives in a foreign country who were killed by terrorists. We can't ignore cause and effect." "What did you expect to happen when Islamists are committing massacres?" Something tells me that those who've been cheerleading the elimination of Jews-sorry, "Zionists" --will mysteriously forget their murderous "cause and effect" matrix."
Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن on X - "It’s remarkable. The people who have been justifying violence against Jews for the past 3 years are now shocked that their logic is being used to justify violence against Muslims. This tells me something chilling. They genuinely don’t see that what they’re fighting is a mirror."
Thread by @amyforsandiego on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I have possession of the 75 page manifesto of the San Diego Islamic Center attack. Turn notifications ON. He blames everything on the Jews. The attackers were NOT Trans and they blame Jewish people for everything. They hated women, they were incels. They said they didn’t hate Muslims. They said they hated Islam. They hated Black people. They hated all immigrants (legal and illegal). They hated gay people and trans. The shooters were incels. Repeat, they were not trans. The shooters were NOT MAGA, did NOT like Trump and did NOT identify with the Right. The shooters openly called for the Left to shoot Trump and Vance. One of the shooters said he was/is left wing depending on the definition. He also claimed to be Christian."
Damn MAGA! They're behind this!
Summer on X - "Could you imagine the Christian memes? If this had been a Christian school, the left would be having an absolute orgy of celebration. They’d be posting the same vile, gloating, “Karma is a bitch” memes they posted when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. They’d be laughing about the dead father of 8. They’d be celebrating the “bigots” getting what they deserved. They’d be turning the security guard’s death into TikTok trends and Twitter punchlines.
But because it was the Islamic Center of San Diego (Al Rashid School)? They screamed “Islamophobia!” Called the radical jihadist school the “victims.” Complained that CNN and even VP Vance aren’t crying hard enough. This is the same place with:
• Documented ties to two 9/11 hijackers
• An imam who publicly justified Hamas’s October 7 terror attack
• An imam’s wife who posted a Star of David decapitating babies
• 140 students being indoctrinated right now
A father of 8 died protecting a death-cult school. The left would have danced on Christian graves. But they cry “victim” the second radical Islam gets any blowback. This is the double standard. America First doesn’t play their games. It is very sad people died and families are left to suffer. Javid Shah. Free"
StoicSatellite🇺🇲 on X - "Imam of the Mosque in San Diego said It is "Resistance" if you are fighting a colonizer." Mosque shooter said Islam was Colonizing San Diego. Islam "is" colonizing San Diego. So my hands R tied. If U don't LIKE A RULE. Don't create the RULE. Becuz Some will accept ur terms. To win"
WASHINGTON FREE BEACON: Gavin Newsom Awards Antiterrorism Grant to Mosque Linked to 9/11 Hijackers, Pro-Hamas Cleric - "California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) recently awarded taxpayer funds under a state antiterrorism program to a San Diego mosque that has been linked to 9/11 hijackers and whose imam defended the Hamas attack on Israel. Newsom, considered a top 2028 presidential contender, awarded nearly $200,000 to the Islamic Center of San Diego in March as part of a program to help religious institutions and nonprofits beef up security to protect against potential terrorist attacks, according to state records... The Islamic Center of San Diego, led by Imam Taha Hassane, has condoned anti-Israel violence over the years. Hassane, who joined the center in 2004, defended Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, saying in a sermon weeks later that “resistance [against Israel] is justified,” the Washington Free Beacon previously reported. “We cannot accuse somebody who is fighting for his life to be a terrorist. The terrorist is the one who started the occupation, not the one who is defending himself,” said Hassane, whose remarks prompted his removal from San Diego’s Human Relations Commission. Hassane’s wife, Lallia Allali, resigned from her job with the San Diego school district after she posted a cartoon following the Oct. 7 attacks that showed a Star of David beheading five children. She currently teaches courses on “Islamophobia” at the Islamic Center of San Diego. The Islamic Center of San Diego gained notoriety in the wake of 9/11 after revelations that two of the al Qaeda operatives who flew the plane that hit the Pentagon—Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar—prayed regularly at the mosque. An official at the mosque also allegedly helped the terrorists receive a $5,000 wire transfer from the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. Other mosque leaders hosted a welcoming party for the hijackers when they arrived in San Diego in 2000, according to the 9/11 Commission report. Newsom awarded the grant as California faces a steep budget shortfall. State leaders acknowledged in a press release regarding the antiterrorism program that it comes amid “significant budget challenges” for the state. The office that oversees the grant program—the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services—is the same one that oversees the state’s wildfire mitigation program. Newsom faced criticism following a Free Beacon report that he shut down a highly trained volunteer firefighting force called Team Blaze a year before the Los Angeles wildfires devastated the city in January. Newsom has awarded grants to other mosques that preach anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate, the Free Beacon previously reported. He gave $200,000 to the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco, where preacher Hussam Ayloush said it was a “lie” that Hamas waged an “unprovoked attack” on Israel. Another $200,000 went to the Islamic Center of Hawthorne, where Imam Hamdy Sadek prayed in one sermon: “Oh Allah, purify the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the malevolence of the Jews.” Sadek has also lamented that “weak Muslims” are affected by the “media of the Jews,” the Middle East Media Reporting Institute reported."
Meme - "Interesting info on one of the San Diego mosque attackers. Not at all surprised that this gaslighting rhetoric will create some monsters on both ends of the spectrum."
Amy Reichert @amyforsandiego: "Last year I interviewed the mother of San Diego Islamic Center attacker Cain Clark after she contacted me through Instagram. She said her son was mandated to take an Ethnic Studies class to graduate from @sdschools According to the mother, the first two weeks focused on "whiteness" and "white privilege." She said Cain, who is mixed race with Indonesian heritage on his father's side, felt uncomfortable in the class and believed it was teaching him to view himself and his white family members negatively. l interviewed Cain through his mother. She said they asked if he could be excused from the class, but the school insisted he had to complete an Ethnic Studies course in order to graduate"
Meme - GenZPatriot @GenzPatriotz : "Black guy murders White girl and says "got that White girl".
- Labeled too insane to stand trial
- Not labeled a hate crime
Chud calls man a word, the man charges at him and starts assaulting him, Chud uses self defense.
- Charged with attempted murder
- Labeled a hate crime"
Meme - "WHO CRIED LIKE A LITTLE BITCH BETTER? *Chud the Builder, Kyle Rittenhouse*"
"Leftists: "men are so toxic. They won't show emotion or cry"
Leftists when men show emotion:"
The only emotions men are allowed to feel are shame and disgust at being male
FearBuck on X - "ChudTheBuilder has now been charged with attempted murder, employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, and is currently being held in jail pending arraignment."
John Carter on X - "Remember Karmelo Anthony, the black kid that stabbed the high school football player in Texas because it was raining outside and he was feeling disrespekted when asked to leave the tent he wasn't supposed to be in? Bail cut down to a quarter of the original amount, released, and attending college. Trial starts in June. How will that go? Decarlos Brown, stabbed Iryna Zarutska for no reason at all? Ruled mentally incompetent. State charges dropped. Federal charges remain but a mental competency hearing in June may eliminate those. Murder is okay when you're black. Self-defence is illegal when you're white."
Meme - Trumps Nephew @ForgiatoBlow47: "This guy killed a White girl and had sex with her corpse his bond is 15k. Chud got a 1.25 million bond. 2 tier justice system "black privilege""
On Karen Hollis/Randall Lendell Dejourney
Meme - "I think the main reason why the ruling class pushed the woke anti-White, White guilt narrative, aside from demoralizing White peoples in to self hatred, was to further divide society so we could be easily manipulated. White people hate ourselves and non- Whites hate White people: A perfect formula for seizing power over all institutions of the West."
:Meme - "Politics in games then
I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that whoever controlled the NSA facility could move the world"
"Politics in games now
Tash: So, I'm non-binary."
"games were always political chuds. there is literally no difference between these"
Clearly, if you complain about how badly politics in games is done nowadays, you're ignorant and don't know that games have always been political
Thread by @burnyourbinder on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "the leftist "well we redefined the term that refers to the thing youre talking about to mean something else entirely and therefore I win" style of argumentation is so so tiresome "I redefined the term youre using and now its an umbrella category which contains anything with any superficial similarity to what youre talking about and therefore if you dont feel the exact same way about everything under this new umbrella category youre a hypocrite and I win" no, Patrick, it's not hypocritical to be fine with grown men getting hair plugs but oppose minor girls having their healthy breasts amputated"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "It is a genuinely serious problem that the American academy is run by a fringe 5-10% of the population. 10.5% of professors ID as Marxists - in at least my arena - while 1/40 Americans overall does. Terms like "benevolent sexism" and "racial resentment" intentionally stigmatized all normal behavior. This has to be burnt out - the question is how."
Against Narrative on X - "The "racial resentment" scale is insane. It literally just measures the extent to which the respondent blames white people for black people's problems, and academics launder this into proof that everyone who who disagrees with them is racist."
Thread by @ettingermentum on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "For those of us (nearly everyone) who recognize Woke 1.0 as a failure, what’s something specific you’re willing to say it got wrong? Here’s mine: the practice of describing policies that were, like, Kerner Commission recommendations as “prison abolition” to get attention was dumb. In a lot of cases it felt like people just wanted to say that they supported something attention-catching and radical to show that they had evolved from past failures because the actual substance that they laid out was rarely ever more than bread and butter liberal crime policy."
florence 🦐🪻 on X - "One common epistemic pitfall was that you basically weren’t allowed to disagree with any woke-coded ideas except for woke-coded reasons. Eg say you see some feminists saying they hate men; arguing against them by saying “you shouldn’t hate people for their gender” would not have made you popular. Rather you have to say something like “claims about men being dangerous have been used in a racist way.” Nothing can be an overcorrection, nothing can encroach upon social-justice-related reasons. Something can only be bad because it isn’t woke enough."
Scottish boy goes viral for refusing to bow to Allah during Scout trip to Islamic mosque - "Be the boy who stands in this video. This was a field trip for a group of children aged six to eight in the Beaver Scouts, part of the Scout Movement in the United Kingdom. While screenshots of the photo have been modified, the clip appears to be authentic; even local Islamic Facebook groups do not deny it happened. The Scout leader took them for an educational visit to the Central Scotland Islamic Centre in Stirling, Scotland, a Muslim mosque founded in 1982. Muslims are compelled to pray five times a day toward their holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, bowing to show submission (the meaning of the words "Islam" and "Muslim") to their god Allah. In order to earn their "Faith Activity Badge," the young Scouts were then encouraged to follow this religious observance in prostrating themselves before the Muslim god. One young man refused. Completely. Definitively. Courageously. 👇... one can only imagine the national outrage if Scottish children had been taken to actively participate in a prayer service in a historical Scottish church as a sign of submission to the name of Jesus Christ!"
Islamophobia!
Bastion on X - "🔴🇫🇷 𝗙𝗟𝗔𝗦𝗛 𝗜𝗡𝗙𝗢 — Mathilde Panot déclare que la France blanche et chrétienne n’a jamais existé."
Stelios Panagiotou on X - "🇫🇷France has always been a predominantly white country and its official religion has been Christianity since 496 AD. Modern anti-clerical elements haven't erased that legacy. The rhetorical transition from 'your country's culture is bad because it is white and Christian' to 'your country wasn't white and Christian' is transparent and really tiresome at this point. It is used by oikophobes against almost every European country."
Meme - Will Chamberlain @willchamberlain: "The Democratic Party is structurally adversarial to straight white men, so the straight white men that remain in the party are all weirdos"
TJ Roberts: "Why do they all look like that?" *Andy Beshear, Beto O'Rourke, James Talarico*
The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024This study analyzes approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 to estimate the long-run ideological orientation of disciplinary research output. Large language models (LLMs) were applied to each abstract using a fixed 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum, enabling consistent coding across six decades. Five key findings emerged. First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024. Third, policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not. Fourth, disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity Fifth, sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time. Robustness checks using a wide assortment of alternative datasets and analytical methodologies indicated that these findings were unlikely to be artifacts of idiosyncratic assumptions. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the capacity of LLM-based text classification to deliver reliable, large-scale ideological measurement over time, a task previously impractical with human coding alone. Taken together, the analysis provides the first systematic, cross-disciplinary evidence of the long-run political orientation of anglophone social science scholarship, revealing both the persistence and the intensification of its leftward tendencies, particularly in sociocultural domains."
Clearly, since reality has a known liberal bias, this is proof that academia has become better at discerning the truth over time
Oxford study finds 90% of social science research leans left-wing - "the study also tracks how this pattern changed over time. In the 1960s and 1980s, for example, some fields showed movement in both directions. Areas more closely tied to public policy, such as economics or political science, display periods of moderation before shifting leftward again in later years. Other disciplines follow a steadier path. Fields focused on culture, identity, and social meaning moved left gradually but consistently across the entire period. By the 1990s, the research reflected left-wing views across nearly all disciplines, a trend that continues through to the present day. Another distinction appears when comparing different types of topics. While research dealing with economics, such as markets, employment, or fiscal policy, appears to reflect more centrist views, the left-wing bias in research on social and cultural issues has created a growing gap between these two areas of study. By the 2020s, the divergence between economic and sociocultural topics was significantly wider apart than in earlier decades. Fields that cluster more tightly left tended to show less diversity of viewpoint while by contrast, more centrist disciplines were more open to a wider range of perspectives. This pattern appears both across disciplines and within them over time. The farther the research leaned left, the more the range of viewpoints narrowed, showing more ideological homogeneity."
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa on X - "Over a 60-year period, the social sciences have consolidated into ideological uniformity, with the result being total exclusion of right-wing intellectual thought. On top of that is the steady removal of capital and institutional access (through grants, scholarships, and patronage), effectively limiting the ability to pursue any serious counter-narratives to the dominant hegemony. It's obvious to everyone on here that any real thought on the right isn't happening in universities, it's happening online. What you get with the current system is that the “social science” that emerges from this pipeline is then filtered into the political apparatus, where it helps justify the leftward excesses of modern progressive govts. The academy was conquered by the left in the long march through the institutions. Institutions now used to delegitimize opposition to this very pipeline as "extremist" by default. It's "evidence-based" research but the only evidence allowed is exclusively filtered through a left-wing lens, churning out papers that justify expanding state power, mass immigration and the deconstruction of organic social order"
Liberals are ‘hijacking’ the Charter | National Post - "Former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford is the one man still alive who was personally in the room with then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau when the provinces and the federal government agreed, together, to a new Constitution Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He talks to Brian Lilley about the real basis for Section 33 — the notwithstanding clause — and how it came into being. He explains why the story that the federal government is telling about the clause’s alleged misuse is false, why Ottawa’s attempts to override it are unconstitutional and why the Supreme Court has no authority to weigh in on its use, as the justices are now doing at the justice minister’s request."
Wylie ISD principal resigns after Why Islam controversy at school - "The principal of Wylie East High School resigned last week after months of backlash over the presence of a group at the school that promoted information on Islam... In February, a group called Why Islam offered copies of the Quran and informational pamphlets during lunch at the high school. The group also offered henna and hijabs to try on."
Outrage over Qurans and Hijabs at Texas school fuels Bible revival outside school gates - "The email included, “Wylie ISD does not allow the distribution of any religious materials to students, regardless of the group or message,” and called this a “clear violation of board policy,” and expressed regret. The district added that the table came to meet with the Muslim Student Association to spotlight World Hijab Day... “The principal was there that day looking on, and we actually have photos of her from two previous years wearing the hijab and promoting Islamic events. So this is not an isolated incident. So even if policies were broken, the principal looked on and did nothing about it, so we know she was just A-OK with it.” On Instagram, the principal’s account @raidernationprincipal shows Doolan wearing a hijab with students in 2025 with the caption, “Yesterday, our MSA created an opportunity for everyone to experience the beauty of wearing a hijab on World Hijab Day! I LOVED this experience!”"
Islamophobia!
Time to ban Christianity in schools to maintain the separation of Church and State
Meme - industrial streaming information logist.. @somanyshri...: "Too bad you fucking loser, that's the point of a court system, go live somewhere else you fucking Nazi"
industrial streaming info...: "Simply not legitimate court"
Chicago Tribune: "Supreme Court says Maryland parents can pull their kids from public school lessons using LGBTQ books"
Courts are only sacred and legitimate when they push the left wing agenda
David Bernstein on X - "Even in today's climate, it's pretty rare to see a serious candidate for national office venture into something akin to "Hitler wasn't all bad, he loved animals" territory, but here is New Jersey Congressional candidate Adam Hamawy on the Blind Sheikh of 1993 WTC bombing infamy:"
Democrats’ June primary test: Can the party stop its radical flank? - "Meanwhile, a New York Times interview, published over the weekend, with leading New Jersey Democratic congressional candidate Adam Hamawy about his past affiliations with Islamist extremists is going to raise more red flags for Democrats. Asked about his travels with Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who was connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Hamawy downplayed the spiritual leader’s jihadist sermons. “He wasn’t preaching death and destruction all the time,” Hamawy said. “He had certain views that he spoke in certain forums, but that’s not what he did every single day.” With the calendar now approaching June, it’s yet another reminder that Democrats are on the verge of nominating some truly radical and damaged candidates for congressional office as a critical mass of primaries take place this month. Many of the races are taking place in safely blue seats, so Democrats haven’t raised that much concern over candidates such as Hamawy, whose terror ties (including volunteer work for what was later revealed as an al-Qaida front group) at the very least, raise questions about suitability for public office. But others, such as Platner, are running in battleground Senate seats where the stakes couldn’t be higher."
Hasanabi productions (meme account) on X - "The Oxford Union confirms they will still host Hasan Piker remotely after pro-Israel groups successfully pushed for Hasan's ban from the UK. "It is a direct threat to free expression." "We have never turned a speaker away because of their political beliefs, nor have we sought a permission slip from the state. We will not start now. This event will not be cancelled.""
Torquemada on X - "'We have never turned a speaker away'
Torquemada on X - "Well, apart from;
* Tommy Robinson
* Namal Rajapaksa
* Carl Benjamin
* Katharine Birbalsingh"
(I mean, there may be more examples but I only had to go back five months to find these ones)"
ANJI USA PASSION🇺🇲🙏😘 on X - "Lots of right-lining people have been denied entry. I don't think any of you complained"
Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "This is the same Oxford Union that disinvited @Sargon_of_Akkad over a decade-old social media post that he apologized for. And now these people want to claim that they're deeply committed to "free expression". No they are not. What Oxford Union is committed to is platforming Leftist voices under the guise of standing up for free speech. But the moment that speaker is considered on the "Far Right", these people will go out of their way to placate Leftist agitators who demand that their enemies be silenced. And now, those same Leftists will invoke principles they have no respect for and expect the very people they're trying to ban to leap to their defense."
Error on X - "its so funny how hasan supports terrorism and then cries when he gets banned from countries and blames israel if trump was an actual king he would ship hasan to lebanon so he can go join hezbollah since he loves them so much"
Meme - Legal Advice Yookay @LegalYookay: "r/LegalAdviceUK
I was one of multiple people who reported men carrying large knives at Hazelbank Park, Northern Ireland. Is my identity completely protected? Will I have to act as a witness in in court?
A group of men were waving long knives around at Hazelbank Park. I kept my distance, but it looked like some of the blades were probably the length from my fingertip to my elbow. There may have been some smaller knives as well. Multiple people rang the police. I was one of them.
This is a photo from the incident that was published in the Irish Times. For my own safety I am not sharing the pictures I took as they would indicate where I was standing and recording from.
Police arrived and seized the blades. It was argued that these blades were part of a religious ceremony - however, the Belfast Islamic Centre has since come out and stated that there was "no religious element to the brandishing of these knives." I'm a regular visitor to Hazelbank as I live right beside it. Is it possible that I will be called to court to speak up as a witness? Or will the photos and videos I took be sufficient? I really don't want to go to court in person and have myself identified as I'm scared of retaliation given I live within 5 minutes walk from the park."

The Hidden Curriculum of Antizionism: What the Slogans Hide

2026-06-21T12:34:00.000+08:00

The Hidden Curriculum of Antizionism: What the Slogans Hide
The scandal is not what antizionist syllabi teach. It’s what they have to hide.
In graduate school, the conclusions often arrived before the evidence. The texts were already chosen, the interpretations already implied, and the rooms had a temperature you learned to read fast. Occupation. Apartheid. Settler-colonialism. Resistance. These weren’t just assigned readings—they were the vocabulary of belonging. You used them or you were the collective sigh when you raised your hand. These terms were canonical, the syllabus was the scripture, and the professor was…well, I’m sure you’ve met some.
I used them. I was good at theory and I cared about justice, so of course I’m going to side with the colonized, the subaltern, the wretched of the earth. I knew Fayez Sayegh, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi and Patrick Wolfe, and I felt like I was doing the serious, morally grounded work that was needed in our neo-liberal hegemony. I was, in the language of Philip Jackson, being educated in the hidden curriculum.
The Hidden Curriculum

Not the assigned texts. The unwritten rules. The things the room transmits without ever naming. The lesson underneath the lesson. Those intangible social norms, expectations, and values that influence your perspective. Jackson coined this term in Life in Classrooms (1968), after a B.F. Skinner-trained career of measuring children like lab rats. He attended a Stanford seminar on primates that made him realize he’d been studying kids the way researchers studied monkeys.
His student, Elliot Eisner, named its companion in 1979: the null curriculum. The subjects and authors who get buried because they complicate the lesson. The texts that are never assigned. The non-canonical works. The ones that complicate the trajectory of your arc.
Every course has both the hidden and the null. I didn’t notice the hidden curriculum until I took courses that made students uncomfortable. Or, until I did. I remember giving a presentation on the horrors of the First Crusade in front of Muslim and Catholic students. Not as easy as it sounds. I took a course on American Religious history and the room got silent when I asked how the settlers could think America was so special, like it was some kind of garden of Eden. The silence was broken by a Mormon student.
I read a syllabus for one course, and could not help but ask the professor why the chips were stacked so tightly in favor of his perspective. He paused, “You know, you’re right. They do.” Seems he had never thought of it before.
The point I’m making is that sometimes the only way to see the unseen, is for others to make it obvious. I had never had an awakening to Jewish pain outside of my studies, until October 7th made it impossible to ignore.
And here is what I know—don’t need to be told, just know—what those rooms do to Jewish students. To be the student whose people’s right to exist as a nation is a question at the colloquium. Where Zionism is deployed as a synonym for evil. Where you understand, quickly and without ambiguity, that the room is not built for you. That your identity is the complication the curriculum cannot concede. We all saw what that environment eventually produced—the encampments, the chants, the faculty letters, the Jewish students who hid their Stars of David. This didn’t come from nowhere. It came from syllabi. From what got assigned and what didn’t. From classrooms like the ones I sat in.
The Missing Syllabus

I started thinking: what would the other syllabus look like? The one I never got in graduate school or saw after the massacres. The one I never was assigned. I wanted to make the null curriculum visible. I want to compile the texts that assisted in my transition from antizionism.
The full syllabus is online, with a link at the end of this post.
Here’s what I built.
I started with a name. One that reminded me of an image. A horrible image. Amit Soussana. A forty-year-old lawyer from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who was dragged from her home on October 7th. She fought several Hamas members in a field and there’s video of it. Only watch if you can handle it. Amit was held for fifty-five days. Chained by her ankle to the frame of a child’s bedroom, the walls covered in SpongeBob SquarePants posters.
Her guard, who called himself Muhammad, began asking about her sex life within days. He raped her at gunpoint. Afterward he cried and told her: “I’m bad, I’m bad, please don’t tell Israel.” She says that after the sexual assaults she would break down, but during them she wouldn’t cry. When asked by another hostage how she managed this, she said, “I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.” In March 2024, she became the first released hostage to put her name and face to what Hamas had done to her. She received the International Women of Courage Award at the State Department. The National Organization of Women issued no statement. UN Women published no response. Organizations that had spent years building entire platforms on the principle of believing women, met Amit Soussana’s testimony with the one thing they had given her from the beginning: silence.
That silence would not have been discussed in any lecture I attended. I know because I attended them. And I know exactly why naming it would invite malaise. The theory that says “Zionists oppress and revolutionaries liberate”—doesn’t survive Amit Soussana. So she stays off the syllabus. She’s on mine, not hidden, not silent.
The Null Curriculum

The next thing I pulled was the Hamas charter. Not a summary—the document. The charter of the governing entity that has controlled Gaza since 2007, that runs schools and courts and police and a military apparatus, quotes the Quran saying the Day of Judgment won’t come until Muslims fight and kill Jews. Not Zionists. Jews. Their 2017 update softened the language, but didn’t reject the original. Both are freely available online and neither takes but ten minutes to read.
Assigning Hamas’ charter requires explaining why you assigned it. In liberal academia, that explanation is the beginning of a very uncomfortable conversation—one that may end with your commitment to Palestinian liberation being questioned. So, often the charter stays off the syllabus. The movement it governs stays abstract and its stated goals remain unread. I’m not implying Hamas get portrayed positively, but it’s important to remember they were called a “resistance” after October 7, and praised by professors at Yale, Cornell, Virginia Tech, and unsurprisingly, Columbia.
Then I found the Henry Jackson Society’s 2025 report on Hamas’ human shield strategy—what they called the “missing chapter” in all the UN and NGO analysis on Gaza. The number that stopped me was 367. Since October 7th, the UN has issued 367 reports on Gaza. In those 367, the phrase “human shields” appeared exactly four times—always as an Israeli “claim,” an “allegation,” an “unverified report.” Never a fact. Never a subject warranting investigation.
Meanwhile the UN issued more than ten reports critical of Israeli conduct in the same period. Four mentions versus ten reports. That ratio is egregious. One accused Israel of genocide without a single sentence about how Hamas actually fought the war. No mention of being embedded in hospitals, schools, mosques, residential buildings, or beneath Al-Shifa. No hospital director confessing on record that his staff were members of Hamas.
Then I reached the heavy-hitter. BESA Center’s September 2025 study—led by Prof. Danny Orbach—documented a 500-km tunnel network with 5,700 shafts embedded inside civilian infrastructure. They found war-casualty data riddled with manipulation, that aid deliveries going into Gaza during most of the war exceeding pre-war levels, no evidence of an Israeli policy to target civilians, and that starvation claims were built on a misrepresented baseline figure the UN left unchallenged. These formed months of alarmist headlines, and quiet retroactive corrections buried months later.
I kept going. The UN’s dashboard tracks daily aid flows throughout the war. 54,000 aid trucks entered Gaza in 2022 alone. I also found documented record of Hamas diverting that aid—selling portions on the black market at inflated prices, handing the rest to loyalists while other Gazans went hungry. The BBC’s Palestinian Gaza correspondent reported in August 2025 that the UN itself admitted 88% of the aid trucks it collected over recent months did not reach their destinations due to looting. This is in the UN’s own data. Raise it in a graduate seminar and you’re deflecting from Israeli culpability—as if documenting who steals the food is an argument against the people who are hungry. The standard curriculum teaches that Israel starves Gaza. The null curriculum is who eats what gets through.
Then I found the money. Khaled Mashaal—current leader of Hamas — is reportedly worth between two and five billion dollars. Ismail Haniyeh, before his death, was estimated to hold a comparable fortune. Mousa Abu Marzouk, founding member and chairman, has been estimated at two to three billion. They negotiate ceasefire terms from five-star suites in Doha while the people they claim to love starve. President Mahmoud Abbas’s net worth has been reported at over $100 million. In 2012, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing titled “Chronic Kleptocracy”—naming Abbas and his sons as the beneficiaries of hundreds of millions in diverted Palestinian Authority funds and USAID contracts.
In 2012, the International Labour Organization—a UN agency—reported that Gaza’s tunnel trade had created “over 600 new millionaires.” In the academic spaces where antizionism functions, pointing to any of this is treated as deflection—a Zionist talking point. It’s a financial record. The standard curriculum teaches that Palestinian leadership represents its people. The null curriculum is what it actually does.
I then read the UN Watch report on UNRWA. It documented a Telegram group-chat with 3,000 of their workers. Thirty endorsed the October 7th massacre in real time. One woman called the hostage-takers heroes and wished them a safe return with their “booty.” Another wrote: “dying in the name of God is our most divine aspiration.” They found 150 staff sharing content glorifying Hamas, Hitler, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Israeli intelligence indicated that 12 percent of their UNRWA’s staff in Gaza—roughly 1,468 people—had ties to Hamas. A Canadian official was told by the head of UN Relief: “I am sure there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll.” Eighteen countries pulled their funding. The standard curriculum taught me that UNRWA is a humanitarian organization. The null curriculum is what its employees were saying while the bodies were still warm on October 7th.
To bring Ms. Soussana and reports like hers back, I grabbed the Dinah Project. Named for the biblical figure, the project documents sexual violence during the October 7th attacks. Rape at the Nova music festival, on the road to Kibbutz Re’im, in kibbutz homes, and in open fields. UN Rep. Pramila Patten submitted findings to the Security Council noting clear and convincing evidence of rape, sexualized torture, and cruel and degrading treatment of hostages.
Hamas responded with a statement calling Soussana’s testimony “difficult to believe.” UN Women declined to formally condemn the attacks for weeks. I sat in seminars with people who called themselves feminists and I know—I know exactly—how this evidence would have been received. It would have been the same as the experiences as Danielle Ofek and Nataly Livsk, the women who started #Metoo_UN_less_UR_A_Jew. It’s an example of a culture saying to believe all women, and a curriculum that decides Israeli women are the exception.
Lastly, I got to the peace offers. In 2000 at Camp David, Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state on roughly 94 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat said no and offered nothing in return. At Taba in 2001, Israel improved the terms. Still no. In 2008, Ehud Olmert put forward what many analysts considered the most generous proposal in the conflict’s history. Mahmoud Abbas did not respond. I’ve spoken about this before and been told the offers had conditions and the context was complicated. It’s always complicated when the conclusion is inconvenient. The standard curriculum taught me that Israeli’s block peace. The null curriculum is the record of who walked away from the table, when, without a counteroffer, and in silence.
This is the syllabus I would never have received.
The annotated syllabus with full sources and live links is here: https://thenullcurriculumsyllabus.neocities.org/
What’s missing is the part where I pretend none of this exists, so the room stays comfortable.

Links - 21st June 2026 (1 - US Schools)

2026-06-21T09:39:00.000+08:00

Meme - "In Finland, charging fees for tuition is illegal, which means rich kids have to mix with normal kids, which means rich families had to make sure the school their kid went to was good which meant the rich were prompted to invest in public schools. Finland, take a bow"
Private education is not prohibited in Finland - "Since August 2020, more than 18,000 users have shared on social media claiming that private education in Finland is “forbidden” , “eliminated” or “abolished” . In September 2021, it circulated again, but it is false: Finland does have private schools. What is prohibited is basic education for profit."
Left wingers love control and hate choice (the unanimity in the comments was notable). They love fake news too
Nicki Neily on X - "ICYMI: @DefendingEd obtained internal NEA documents showing the union’s upcoming training doesn’t focus on academics, but on attacking Republicans as “racist and transphobic,” pushing race-class-gender narratives, and promoting gender-transition guides for staff."
Poor student results are proof that they need to spend even more on education
Ohio school under fire for material prompting kids write about sex - "An Ohio mayor is asking all five school board members of his town to resign or face possible criminal charges over high school course material that he said a judge called "child pornography." Hudson, Ohio Mayor Craig Shubert made the statement during a board of education meeting after multiple parents complained about the content of some writing prompts contained in a book called "642 Things to Write About" provided to high school students enrolled in a college credit course called Writing in the Liberal Arts II. Parents said there was a prompt that asked students to "write a sex scene you wouldn't show your mom," and another which said "rewrite the sex scene from above into one that you'd let your mom read." Another prompt asked students to drink a beer and describe how it tastes. Parents said they felt these writing prompts and others were not appropriate for high school students. One speaker said he was "appalled" by the content and requested that cameras be put into the classroom so parents could monitor what is being taught to their children. Another speaker said the material was "disgusting" and that it amounted to "grooming.""
Connecticut school district asks eighth-graders to share their sexual desires in assignment - "A school district in Enfield, Connecticut was left with pie on its face after asking eighth-graders to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings. 'Now that you know this metaphor for sex, let's explore your preferences!' explained the instruction pamphlet distributed to students in a recent health class at John F. Kennedy Middle School. 'Draw and color your favorite type of pizza,' it added. 'What's your favorite style of pizza? Your favorite toppings? What are your pizza no-nos? Now mirror these preferences in relation to sex!' As if that wasn't explicit enough, the instructions offered some suggestions. 'Here are some examples: Likes: Cheese = Kissing. Dislikes: Olives = Giving oral.'"
Meme - Frank McCormick @CBHeresy: "One thing I’ve realized after working with teachers for 12 years is that it’s very hard to get them to commit to political or ideological neutrality in the classroom because:
A. They view teaching as an inherently political act intended to turn students into political units (activists/“change agents.”)
B. They attach moral value to their beliefs, and thus view the proliferation of those beliefs as a moral obligation.
C. They do not recognize particular beliefs as political or ideological, and believe they’re “just teaching truth.”
D. When trying to be balanced, requiring students to compare two sources or opinions, they engineer- purposefully or unwittingly- the lesson to bring students to certain conclusions."
*French cartoon of life in the year 2000 with students all listening via headphones to books thrown into a hand-cranked machine*
Stunted Capital on X - "Some K-12 schools used to group kids by ability based on test scores to pursue the most reasonable amount of academic rigor for every child It was mostly abandoned due to black kids disproportionately testing into the below average groups Everyone should read "Hobson v. Hansen and the Decline of D.C. Schools" By Jack Despain Zhou"
Niels Hoven 🐮 on X - "Yes, grouping kids by ability is one of those obvious educational interventions that shows positive results every time we try it. Students are happier, teachers are happier, and test scores go up. Naturally, it's opposed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Education Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and many other groups who drive education policy"
SPENCER on X - "idk why we treat academics & sports differently"
Michael Druggan on X - "If lowering gaps at all cost is the goal we should start hitting the smart kids in the head with a hammer"
Niels Hoven 🐮 on X - "Modern education policy is basically “how do we hit the smart kids in the head with a hammer, legally?”"
Niels Hoven 🐮 on X - "Since roughly the 1990’s, the main goal of education policy has been to “close the achievement gap”. When high achieving students excel, they grow the achievement gap, and so education policymakers look for ways to hold them back"
wanye on X - "Education is such a mess, because the actual practitioners of education don’t understand that basically the entire point of education is to widen gaps. That’s literally what education is. You take a mixed group of people who can only get so far on their own and then you give them all the tools they need to excel and the smartest and most capable people in the group are going to use those tools to pull away from everybody else. That’s literally what education is."
Meme - Rachael Jefferson, PhD: "Ability grouping feels intuitive, but decades of research shows it often widens gaps rather than supports learning. Mixed-ability classrooms can do this through flexible grouping, targeted feedback, and open projects (as you suggest). It is a wicked problem though!"
Niels Hoven @NielsHoven: "Yes, that is literally the point. We should allow smart kids to excel instead of holding them back to the lowest common denominator They will achieve more if we let them"
John Rich🇺🇸 on X - "PARENTS: Start dropping lawsuits on your schools, and on the actual, specific individuals at that school who are targeting your kids. READ THIS👇 Exposing children to obscene or pornographic material is very often considered a form of child sexual abuse, child endangerment, or a specific offense such as “exhibiting obscenity/harmful material to a minor.” The exact criminal charge depends on the jurisdiction, the age of the child, the nature of the material, and the intent or context. Federal law: 18 U.S.C. § 1470 makes it a federal crime to knowingly transfer obscene material to a person under 16 via any means (including the internet), punishable by up to 10 years."
Meme - "Why is talking sexually at work considered sexual harassment, but talking about sexuality to kids in elementary school considered essential?"
Emil Kirkegaard on X - "A reminder that educational interventions do not generally work. They sometimes appear to work because researchers cheat with the analyses (p-hacking, fraud etc.). However, occasionally, 3rd parties do planned studies with large samples. Given this high quality evidence, the results are basically 0. Almost nothing works. This actual gold standard evidence sets the prior for every other random intervention that no one has done an actually rigorous evaluation of (so far)."
Libs of TikTok on X - "Minneapolis Schools SUED over alleged ANTI-WHITE DISCRIMINATION The DOJ has launched a lawsuit against Minneapolis Public Schools over a policy that shields "teachers of color" from layoffs and requires the district to rehire them first. The lawsuit also claims that members of an organization called "Black Men Teach Fellows" were given priority for special benefits. UNREAL"
Mike Solana on X - "imagine paying $50 billion for public schools. they're about as dangerous as the locale juvenile detention center, and half the kids can't read. every year you're told their failure is your fault, because you don't give the communist teacher's union enough money."
Palmer Luckey on X - "The NYC Department of Education spends more on education than Japan's Ministry of Education spends on the entire country of Japan."
Clearly, the problem is they don't spend enough mouney
Meme - late stage capitalist @bentboolean: "Has anyone tried to figure out where the money goes? My kid's class has 30 kids, the teacher might make 150k all in.... Where does the other 1.1mm go?"
Jessica Riedl @JessicaBRiedI: "Assuming an average of 2 school-age kids per family, that's enough money for NYC to instead hire 450,000 recent college graduates and give each family a full-time, in-home school tutor at an annual salary of $70,000 plus health care, school supplies, etc."
"New York City Public Schools Spend $42,000 Per Student Annually Amid Low Proficiency and High Absenteeism. New York City public schools spend $42,000 per pupil annually, the highest in the U.S. Only 56% of students are proficient in reading and math, with 35% chronic absenteeism. Elite schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science perform well, contrasting with overall system performance."
Only a third of NYC 4th graders deemed 'proficient' in math as Big Apple students lag behind state, national averages: test scores - "Two-thirds of New York City fourth graders are not proficient in math and even fewer proved proficient in reading, the “Nation’s Report Card” released Wednesday shows – despite the Empire State funneling more money into its schools than any other state in the nation. The abysmal results reported in the national exam officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress came to light as New York school districts are spending a whopping $89 billion this academic year. And across the five boroughs, public schools spent an average of $21,112 per student in fiscal year 2023-24, though dozens of schools shelled out a large chunk more – up to $60,000 a student, records show... The shockingly low scores are compounded by the fact that New York state spends more money than other states on nearly everything — teachers’ salaries, benefits and pensions, school construction, services for immigrants or non-English speakers and even electrifying school buses, according to an analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission."
Clearly, this is because of racism and the fact that they don't spend enough, and it's all Republicans' faults. Time to mock red states and spend even more money on teacher salaries
New York’s Class-Size Law is Wreaking Havoc - "In September 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul signed S960, a bill limiting the size of classes in New York City public schools. The law phases in class-size limits—20 students for grades K–3; 23 students for grades 4–8; and 25 students for high school—over six years. Fast forward to today: the implementation of the class-size law is causing predictable disruptions in Gotham. Parents and experts warned from the beginning that the law would be expensive, hard to implement, and generate, rather than reduce, inequality. Three years in, their fears remain valid. Smaller class sizes mean more classes—and more teachers. New York City’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) estimated that the new law would cost the city between $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion annually to hire the number of additional instructors required to comply with the law. This would make the city’s public schools, already projected to spend more than $42,000 per pupil, even more inefficient. And that’s before construction costs. Most public schools lack space to accommodate new classrooms and will have to expand their existing buildings, or erect new ones, to comply with the law. The Class Size Working Group’s minority report estimates that fully implementing the law will require $17 billion to $22 billion in school-construction costs. Even if the city could afford these expenses, it’s unclear where schools would find qualified instructors, given Gotham’s teacher shortage. The law’s most troubling effect will be to worsen inequality. Schools with the largest class sizes are typically high-performing and in the highest demand. Reducing these schools’ seats gives students fewer opportunities to attend high-performing schools. The law does nothing for low-performing schools, which typically serve low-income students and are already under-enrolled... In School District 25 in Queens, the Community Education Council passed a resolution to remove all pre-K and 3K classes from the district’s elementary schools to comply with the law. The resolution suggests that their only other option would have been to repurpose rooms currently used for arts, science, or libraries... As then-chancellor David Banks warned in a 2023 interview with the Daily News: “If you’re going to prioritize the budget for class size, that means you’re going to have to deprioritize the budget for other things, which could be after-school programming or arts programming or mental health services or a whole range of things that aren’t about opening new classrooms and hiring new teachers.” Mayor Adams initially opposed the class-size law, but Albany and the United Federation of Teachers eventually forced his hand. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has spoken in the law’s favor and voted for it as a state assemblyman in 2022. If he pushes forward with full implementation and disrupts the city’s most popular public schools, he will inevitably face backlash from parents and educators."
This doesn't stop the people obsessed with class size
Thread by @StatisticUrban on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Blue states tend to do better in K-12 education because they are wealthier and have higher rates of parents with tertiary education. But if you adjust for those ingrained advantages, blue state performance diminishes, and the south broadly emerges as leaders.
Obviously not universal - many blue states retain a top 20 score, two in the top 10. But it's underwhelming to say the least. For worse or better, many education reforms undertaken in the past 15 years in blue states have been duds, while the playbook states like Louisiana and Mississippi followed has yieled incredible results.
Methodology
Here's just flat raw scores if you prefer.
And you may compare with funding."
Thread by @Austen on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Mississippi switched to a phonics/science of reading curriculum and began requiring that students who weren't reading at grade level be held back. Worked like a charm. California Teachers Union is vehemently in opposition of doing the same thing, killing the bill in CA.
There are two near-universal truths when it comes to K12 education in the United States:
1. The research on what works is clear and empirical, and has said the same thing for a decade
2. Teachers Unions vehemently oppose doing what the research suggests
It really is a tragedy. The Unions are 100% to blame. It's an IQ test we're failing year after year."
By sabotaging children's performance, left wingers can lobby for ever increasing funding. It's brilliant.
Meme - Kane @kane: "Please bro just one more tax will fix it trust me bro"
"California: Change in Spending and Scores since 2013
Spending grew 102% to ~$18,600 per pupil.
Math 8th grade scores fell during the pandemic and are continuing to decline alongside recovery investments.
Reading 4th grade scores fell through the decade even as spending increased."
John Collins @Logically_JC: "So many of our problems could be fixed by properly funding public education."
Clearly, this is Trump's fault and they need to spend even more money to counter the pernicious effects of white supremacy
Left wingers think and/or claim all social problems are because you don't spend enough money. They just want a huge state
Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” on X - "Oh this is hilarious. Sad but hilarious. This study finds (and others confirm) that a teacher earning a graduate degree has a NEGATIVE effect on student achievement Attending a graduate school of education literally makes teachers WORSE at their job"
HOW AND WHY DO TEACHER CREDENTIALS MATTER FOR STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT?
Clearly, teachers need not one but two graduate degrees so they can teach better
Wall Street Apes on X - "This woman’s 6 year old son “expressed conservative values” in his classroom The teacher created a certificate for him that said “Most likely to become a Dictator” and presented it to him in front of his entire class while classmates called him a “Naziphile” The indoctrination taking place in our education system is a national emergency"
Thread by @arctotherium42 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 2022, 45% of high schoolers polled say they were taught that "America is built on stolen land" in class at school, and another 22% heard it from an adult there. Students taught all of the "critical social justice" (CSJ) concepts were in fact more likely to agree with them; among those taught "America is built on stolen land" 73% agreed. Among those students taught 5 CSJ concepts, 75% believed whites are responsible for the inferior social position of black people and 44% support preferential hiring and promotion of blacks. Among whites, 58% felt guilty for this. Members of all races felt less comfortable with criticizing a black classmate with more CSJ concepts taught in school. Anyways, teaching students in public schools that the country is illegitimate is crazy and reminds me of the late Russian Empire. media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/…"
The left wing cope is that there's no indoctrination at school - this is just them learning facts
Book Review: ‘The Cradle of Citizenship,’ by James Traub - The New York Times - "It is hard to think of a period in American history when there were not angry controversies over public education. Still, by any measure conflicts in America today, over everything from history curriculums to school library collections, have become wild and destructive. At bottom, people still ask the right questions — about what kind of country we are and what kind of citizens we want our children to be. But the screamers at school board meetings and the national politicians riling up anxious parents are hardly setting a good example for our children. In the midst of all the cannon fire, it is good to have a cleareyed, unflappable observer like James Traub, the author of “The Cradle of Citizenship,” an illuminating portrait of America’s current education landscape... he saw few examples of overt partisanship from instructors in the classroom, apart from a Minnesota science teacher with a Black Lives Matter poster and a Gay Pride banner on her classroom walls. As in most organizations, the people on the ground were just trying to get the job done while dodging directives raining down from above. But that’s where the good news ends. The real crisis of civics education, Traub discovered, is not that students are learning about 1619 rather than 1776, or the reverse. It is that so many are learning nothing at all. And here he lays responsibility at the feet of the American educational establishment, which has, in the words of one scholar, been turning the “meat of academic subjects into meatloaf.” One of the peculiarities of the American educational system, compared with those in other democracies, is that most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed... In other states, too many teachers just seem to have abdicated their responsibilities out of despair, convinced that their students are no longer capable of reading whole books or remembering what they read. “History has been pushed to the side within social studies because there’s too much reading and writing,” as one frustrated teacher in Illinois puts it, on the verge of tears. “That creates too much stress, and it makes the kids feel bad about themselves.” If students do want to engage, their dependence on social media simplifies their views. As Traub discovers, their credulousness toward online sources renders them dependent on present-day culture war influencers whose historical claims they are unprepared to challenge. Against this tide, teachers struggle to get their students to see how the world of the past could be both alien and instructive in a way that might stoke their skepticism. Not all state-funded schools are alike. About a quarter million American children currently attend so-called “classical” schools, many of them charter schools that receive public money but are privately run. In these schools, memorization and recitation are prized, as are classic texts from the Western canon, like Plato’s “Republic” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Many liberals see red when classical charter schools are mentioned, because of their perceived religious bias and a feeling that such schools drain resources from less advantaged ones. One senses that Traub shared their concerns. But as his book progresses, these schools begin to appear as inspiring examples of more rigorous and civic-minded education for many young Americans... In a ninth grade Western Civilization class, children who had started studying Latin in third grade were reading and intelligently discussing an essay by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. In a medieval history class at another classical charter school in Phoenix, one girl argued that St. Anselm must have been more popular in his time than Thomas Aquinas since Anselm believed, as Traub writes, “that faith preceded reason." She was in seventh grade. “It was in classical schools,” Traub observes, “rather than mainstream ones, that I had most often heard the kind of reflective discussion that civic education seeks to foster.” Yes, a large part of the curriculum is devoted to old books. But “if you can speak thoughtfully about ‘The Nicomachean Ethics,’” he remarks, “you can do so about the fairness of our tax system.”... whatever model is used should impart “a solid foundation of linguistic skills, historical knowledge and habits of reflection” and offer “an alternative to the consumerist, vocational, instrumental culture of today’s public education.”"
An education degree actually makes you less good at teaching, so. Left wing theory is not the same as real life practice
Geoffrey Miller on X - "American 'Schools of Education' teach mostly outdated, wildly inaccurate theories about human nature & childhood learning that were debunked decades ago in real behavioral sciences. Often worse than useless."
Meme - The Kids Are Not Alright: "Education has been replaced with activism."
Paut Rossi, Paleoliberal @pauldrossi: ""Kindergarteners are natural social justice warriors." "If we just build upon the mindset of a kindergartener... you can get them to do fabulous things in the social justice realm.""
"Foundations of the work
DIVERSITY
EQuITY
INCLUSION
JUSTICE
The first three terms are the standard. My favorite part of the year is when we talk no just about injustices, but what we can do about it. Kindergarteners are natural social justice warriors
And it's absolutely truly fascinating."
The cope is that this is not indoctrination - just teaching them to be decent human beings
Minnesota middle school removes F from its grading system and will allow students to retake tests - "Students at a Minnesota school will no longer be seeing an 'F' on test papers - no matter how badly they do - and they could be allowed to retake tests. Sunrise Park Middle School in White Bear Lake released a YouTube video this week detailing its new grading system which it says, in part, helps fight systemic racism... Grades also will not be increased or decreased over behaviors, attitude, tardiness, and whether the assignment was turned in late or on time... In the past, the school has made headlines for allowing students to choose how much privilege different social groups have."
Right Angle News Network on X - "BREAKING - A disturbing new trend is emerging across the country, showing leftist teachers guiding very young children, some no older than kindergarteners, in protests against ICE and President Trump."
Black Rebel on X - "Police locate a juvenile driver accused in a hit-and-run that injured a student and instead of keeping kids in class, Fremont Public Schools had them out at a demonstration while administrators “Supervised.” Let that sink in. Kids go to school to LEAR(N) not to be marched outside for activism."

Links - 20th June 2026 (3 - Migrants: UK)

2026-06-20T21:40:00.000+08:00

When is Britain going to realise that some migrants are better than others? - "One lady in Tamworth told me she had started avoiding the canals there after walking them for 30 years; in Darlington, a pensioner confessed to me she was frightened that the sheer number of young men crossing the Channel put her at greater risk of robbery. Certain commentators are quick to dismiss coverage of such fears as dog-whistle journalism. But, at the very least, an emerging pattern of evidence raises questions. Although mass immigration is now falling, the 2.4 million-plus surge in the foreign-born population between 2021 and 2024 was accompanied by a 62 per cent spike in foreign nationals convicted for sexual offences. Court reports also show judges linking the violent crimes of foreign nationals with their disturbed life histories. When convicting Afghan asylum seeker Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai for murdering a 21-year-old man in a row over an e-scooter the judge stated: “There can be no doubt as to the effect growing up in the horrors of Afghanistan would have on a young child.” The trial of Haybe Cabdiraxmaan Nur, who stabbed a man to death at a Lloyds bank in Derby last year, established that the Somali immigrant suffered from PTSD , had a “difficult upbringing” in his motherland. He is a member of the discriminated-against Gabooye tribe and left the country after his partner was executed in front of him in an “honour” killing. People from conflict zones and failed states pose a challenge to national cohesion. This is for the plain reason that it takes more for an individual from Afghanistan to integrate into British society than someone from, say, Germany. If you or your parents have come of age in a society that has no rule of law, no functional civic institutions, and no prospects for meaningful economic participation, common sense follows that you may struggle to assimilate into a society that does. Many of the older Somalis now in Britain witnessed the nadir of the Siad Barre regime’s collapse – a time when Somalia had no police, schools were shut and violence was the organising mechanism of everyday life. It’s no secret that the collapse of the communist regime in Albania left a vacuum filled in highland areas in the 1990s by the medieval Kanun social code, based on honour, fierce loyalty, kinship and blood feuds. The brutal truth is that we may need to shift towards a far more strict and explicitly discriminatory immigration policy, accepting fewer applicants from conflict zones or failed states. The Government has put an emergency visa brake on people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan. But this is to close a loophole that people are exploiting, as they apply for student visas to later claim asylum. What we need is a decisive shift, where we exclude or penalise applications from certain countries of origin. Some might protest that this would constitute a catastrophic moral failure. After all, asylum seekers from war-torn states who have experienced violence and persecution arguably have the strongest refugee claims. But this needs to be weighed up against the national risk. We are spending more putting asylum seekers up in hotels than we are on humanitarian aid in the home countries of the same refugees. The £4bn that we splurged on the asylum system last year would be enough to revolutionise Afghanistan’s irrigation system, converting millions of acres of desert into farmland, or overhaul Somalia’s power grid, jump-starting its coastal economy. It astounds me that so many metropolitan bien-pensants have such a hard time grasping that the West would have a far greater impact on the world’s injustices if it shifted its focus from taking in the world’s waifs and strays to executing game-changing development projects. Some worry that distinguishing between “good” and “bad” migration is the first step towards a racist, white-only migration policy. But surely the best way to prevent people from lumping all black and brown together as dangerous is openly, systematically and effectively identifying and rooting out those within this amorphous group who do pose an elevated risk. A stricter migration policy which hinges on more than economic criteria need not penalise Africans and Asians who come from stable backgrounds and possess similar values. The immigrants who thrive most in Britain are not just those from the EU and America. London’s leading startup gurus are just as likely to hail from Bangalore as they are from Silicon Valley. British-Chinese pupils are two years ahead of their white British counterparts in the classroom. There is talk of Britain having a “Nigerian moment” as members of the diaspora amass music awards and Michelin stars – and even, in Kemi Badenoch’s case, jostle for the top job of PM. What these groups all have in common is that they hail from countries that have been reasonably peaceful in recent decades and have a strong cultural emphasis on family and education. The big question is whether Britain is ready to have a grown-up conversation about immigration. I suspect that the majority of us crave a robust, unhysterical debate. We are left waiting for a political leader who has the guts to go there."
Reform’s dream of mass deportations hinges on these key companies - "In the US, companies that have assisted the Trump administration’s crackdown have faced heavy criticism. However, Palantir, a tech company that provides software used by ICE officials and other government agencies, has repeatedly defended what bosses call its “ideologically neutral” approach. When questioned about why his company had accepted work from the US government, Alex Karp, the company’s chief executive, warned that businesses should not be setting themselves up as a rival power centre to democratically elected governments. “Immigration policy is not a software challenge; it’s a political one,” he wrote in 2019. “The solution lies with our political and judiciary system, not with Silicon Valley’s C-suite.” Although it is still early days, Reform is understood to have held discussions with businesses, including about its plans for Operation Restoring Justice."
Andy on X - ""Could the far-right please stop weaponising the constant unrelenting stream of events that vindicate their worldview?""
Anyone could have predicted | Chris Bayliss | The Critic Magazine - "There was a time when people who earned their living from political commentary tried to convey the sense that they had seen it all coming well in advance... That’s all changed now — the rise of 24 hour news channels pushed broadcasters into trying to maintain a sense of urgency, to keep people tuned in during the many hours in which there was little new to report. Those who appeared on our screens learned to cultivate a natural tone of hyperbolic disbelief. In the age of social media, a fashion for exuberant displays of personal authenticity made donnish unflappability seem corny. Outrage, bewilderment and fear were more raw reactions to breaking news, and were considered somehow more genuine. As a result, our news media has adopted a far less learned and more histrionic tone. Overall, this is but a single addition to the long list of annoying trends that define modern political life. However, it has opened the door to a strange kind of inverse insouciance, as commentators feign surprise and outrage at things they knew perfectly well were going on, but which are nevertheless inconvenient to acknowledge. If there is no longer any cost to credibility in not being aware of an emerging trend, then there might be a benefit in pretending that something foreseeable was in fact a surprise. This is most obviously the case when people are confronted with the negative consequences of policies their own side favoured — especially those consequences their opponents warned them about... Lewis Goodall knew exactly what he wanted to get out of the interview, and he pressed all the right buttons to get it. He was aware that South Asian political culture has a strong tendency toward machismo, which Yakoob plays up to by adopting elements of African-American “gangsta” aesthetics, and that he would react badly to persistent questioning in an undeferential tone on subjects he didn’t want to talk about. Goodall was also aware that, far from being a career-ending disaster, a prison sentence is considered a right of passage for many South Asian politicians, and can be a great enhancement to their personal credibility. Furthermore, Goodall knew perfectly well that Yakoob does not operate within a political milieu that selects for political sophistication, or which places much value on answering questions in a way that does not shock or horrify gentle English sensibilities. Figures such as Yakoob, as well as an earlier generation of Labour-aligned but Pakistani-focussed local politicians, only avoided causing this type of offence in the past because journalists like Goodall knew quite well not to ask them those kinds of questions. Exposing how starkly different the political culture of the Pakistanis who were settling in our towns and cities was from the British mainstream was not something that left-leaning journalists were willing to consider doing until very recently. The fact that the community was “getting involved” in local democracy and party politics was held up as evidence of their integration into British society, and of their compatibility with democracy. The community was assumed to be a natural ally of the forces of progress in British politics, and one of the few growing bulwarks against the Right. That they had some decidedly old-fashioned sounding ideas about social and sexual issues could be ignored or wished away as they were shoring Labour up in areas where the party’s natural voter-base was being dissolved by the forces of economic change. More recently, Labour and others on the Left have retreated behind the defences of a political dichotomy that contrasts a mythical “unity” against “those who seek to divide us”. The latter in this context being code for pointing out ways in which the politics of the Pakistani diaspora diverge sharply from liberal assumptions. The fact that an outfit with the politics of The News Agents now apparently has licence to indulge in a bit of division is a simple consequence of the fact that the Pakistani “independents” are becoming a hindrance rather than a support for established centre-left parties. For those who long insisted that diversity came only with benefits and no drawbacks, the projection of shock and anguish at Yakoob is a useful means of maintaining deniability, whilst cutting him loose. This is a pattern that is becoming increasingly acute, having grown steadily more obvious over the last few years. The outbreak of aggressively and explicitly antisemitic language and symbolism in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks was met with a tragicomic wringing of hands about where all this ghastliness had all suddenly emerged from. The most recent outrage — the stabbing of two identifiably Jewish men in Golders Green by a Somali-born British citizen with an extensive record of violent crime — triggered a similarly fatuous response questioning what it would take for the British public to “stand with” the country’s Jews. No suggestion is ever given about what this unspecified gesture of solidarity might look like. It is considered vulgar to point out that the majority of this kind of commentary is coming from voices who have long been the most insistent that immigration is an unalloyed social good, but it is true, and is a point worth making. While this point is made by antisemites on the Right, they are mistaken for the same reason that those who insist that the point itself is inherently antisemitic are also mistaken. This hypocrisy and insouciance has come from the ranks of the metropolitan commentariat, among whom Jews are comparatively overrepresented, as they are in law or medicine. But the overwhelming majority of this commentariat are not Jewish, and the overwhelming majority of Jews are not members of the metropolitan commentariat. Very generally speaking, British Jews have similar opinions to their gentile peers in whichever socio-economic and geographic category they inhabit. In a culture in which being wrong about things still carried some costs, the colossal mistakes of the multiculturalist project could be reckoned with in terms of the damage it has caused... As predicted, the dawning of the age of mutli-racial electoral politics in some English towns and cities is engendering ethnic patterns of voting, even among the white voters for whom it was presumed inapplicable. The emergence of a distinct, autonomous Pakistani political machine in such places is introducing a tawdry and rather threatening new political culture that is decidedly not to liberal tastes. Yet rather than be confronted by this, those who spent years dismissing all the warnings that it was coming are permitted to hide behind incredible protestations of outrage and disbelief."
EastAnglian on X - "Shock, horror! Pakistani politics in Britain is just like... politics in Pakistan. Brilliant piece on how progressives contort themselves to finally acknowledge the bleeding obvious."
Migrant crisis: Wearing England badges during World Cup 'intimidating' to asylum seekers, immigration officers told
If asylum seekers are intimidated by the country they are seeking asylum in, they need to be protected from this by deporting them
Afghan men accused of fleeing UK after raping girl in Bristol - "Three Afghan nationals fled the UK in the back of a lorry after allegedly raping a 17-year-old girl, a jury has heard. Mehrab Safi, 21, Awal Ahmadzai and Salman Habibkheil, both 19, and a 16-year-old boy who cannot be named for legal reasons are on trial for a string of offences against the victim at Bristol Crown Court. Safi, Ahmadzai and Habibkheil were arrested in Calais on 3 December 2025, three days after the alleged sexual offences took place, while the 16-year-old was arrested at a property in St Werburghs, Bristol... He added it was "deeply unusual" for the men to leave the UK in the back of a lorry, rather than enter. Mobile phone footage recovered from Safi's phone showed the men in the lorry laughing and gesticulating, which Hetherington said suggested they thought they "got away with it". When they were found by French police in Calais on 3 December, they were returned to the UK. Hetherington said the trio had no travel documents or identification and had given false names to French authorities."
Damn Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, forcing them to rape her! We need to get reparations from Russia!
Modern Folk Beliefs VII: “Immigration built Britain” - "Every society has its folk beliefs: sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact. Traditionally, these were things like a maxim about health or wealth from your grandmother, or an old proverb of forgotten origin. But from the mid 20th century, ideas originating from academia or political activism, transmitted by mass media and mass education, came to be ever more influential in determining mainstream culture. This has given rise to what I have come to think of as modern folk beliefs; simplistic, muddled and often moralistic versions of the original ideas that have become widely held among large segments of society. The folk belief that is the subject of this article holds that immigration is a central theme of British history and a core aspect of Britain’s identity. It further holds that immigration is always a positive story, responsible in large part for the good things about the country. You can see it in recent statements from various politicians, such as Zack Polanski’s “Migration is our DNA as a country” [sic], or Diane Abbott’s “Immigrants built this land”. Various journalists, public officials and activists now claim things like “immigrants built Britain”, “Wales and Britain is the great country it is because of centuries of immigration”, or “we are a country that’s been built on immigration”. In my experience, the belief has also filtered down significantly into the general population. There’s a trivially true version of the claim, in that there has always been some immigration to Britain, and that these immigrants have made various contributions to national life. But it’s generally made in a far stronger way – not just that some immigrants made contributions, but that immigration was central and foundational. In this article I will interpret the claim in its stronger form, as I think it’s pretty clear that that’s how its advocates intend it... The mythmaking begins with the attempt to force the early settlement of Britain into an ‘immigration’ conceptual box. Stewart Lee’s well-known comedy sketch from 2013 offers a good example, mocking the idea that there is anything unusual about current immigration, which has always consisted of nothing more than newcomers bringing useful new goods and services to a benighted and prejudiced native population. In this conception the ‘immigrant’ beaker folk in 2000 BC brought, naturally, their beakers, while the Anglo-Saxons brought their jewellery, ship burials and epic poetry. In reality these groups were not immigrants joining an existing society but settlers establishing a new one, a process which was catastrophic for the existing population. The arrival of the beaker folk led to the replacement of 90% of Britain’s gene pool, a process which I imagine involved something rather more traumatic than the exchange of beakers, while the negative impact of the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons on the Britons hardly needs to be spelled out. Stewart Lee would probably respond to this in the vein of “it’s just a joke mate”, yet it’s now common to hear people genuinely equate this early settlement with modern immigration. Once we get into more recent centuries, which saw something like immigration in the contemporary sense, it still remained on a far too small a scale to have possibly ‘built Britain’. The largest and best-known example prior to the 19th century was that of the Huguenots, around 50,000 of whom came in the last decades of the 17th century, but making up only around 1% of the overall population. In giving sanctuary only to those who shared the dominant religion, it was also entirely unlike our present asylum policy. The closest analogy to Huguenot migration today is probably Trump’s offer of asylum to white South Africans. Irish immigration came in the 19th century, with there being around 800,000 Irish-born people (3.5% of the population) recorded at the peak in the 1861 census. Considering that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom at the time, whether this truly counts as immigration is debatable, but I’ll allow it. Here we can see how much the left has changed tune on this issue. Both Marx and Engels were very clear that Irish immigration into British industrial towns was in the interests of the capitalists, and that its impact was to depress wages and degrade the condition of the native working class. This was the mainstream view on the left well into the twentieth century, but has now disappeared from British left-wing politics. In the US, Bernie Sanders advanced this position in 2015, to the vociferous opposition of the less traditional left. Then, in the late 19th and early 20th century around 300,000 East-European Jews came to Britain, coming to make up around 0.7% of the total population prior to the first world war. These were the largest groups to come in this period, various others came in small numbers, including various Europeans such as Dutch or Italians, and a very few from Asia or Africa, mostly seamen who settled in port cities. During these centuries, the foreign-born never made up more than a few percentage points of the British population, which was in fact expanding massively through natural increase, while sending millions to settle abroad. After the second world war, immigration started to become more significant, and the core focus of today’s mythmaking is on the non-white immigrants who arrived during these decades. Most prominent in the narrative is, of course, the ‘Windrush generation’ from the Caribbean, who, Kier Starmer claimed last year, “laid the foundations for modern Britain.” We even have a National Windrush Monument at Waterloo station, including the inscription “You Called ... and We Came”, despite the fact that the Caribbean passengers were not called for and that the government of the day was alarmed at their arrival. In fact, in another example of how much the left has changed, it was Labour MPs who wrote to Clement Attlee urging stronger immigration control.
Twenty-seven young migrants are hired for every British youngster as youth worklessness 'fuelled' by soaring non-EU immigration, analysis reveals - "Mass immigration is directly fuelling the crisis for young people trying to find work, research reveals. A staggering 27 migrants from outside the EU aged under 25 are hired for every British youngster, according to the analysis. And while the young British workforce has grown by less than 1 per cent since 2020, the number of non-EU youth on the UK payroll has increased by 355 per cent in that time, the research from The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) found... The CSJ think-tank's research shows how young migrants are taking up roles at a much faster rate to young Britons, with them snapping up three times as many jobs as young Britons. Between 2024 and 2025, the number of non-EU under-25s on payrolls increased by 33,200, while the number of UK-nationals of the same age fell by 32,200. This is despite almost one million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK currently not currently in education, employment or training (NEET). And the research shows that migrants are mostly taking entry-level positions despite Alan Milburn saying today that the first rung of the career ladder is 'simply out of reach' for young Britons after he was commissioned by the Government to review soaring levels of youth unemployment in Britain. Non-EU workers of all ages nearly doubled in retail and hospitality roles between January 2020 and December 2025 for instance, while UK nationals in such posts fell by more than a quarter of a million. Chris Philp, shadow home secretary, said: 'Young British people are being locked out of the labour market as immigration into entry-level work continues at scale. Mass immigration undermines our society and low wage immigration is bad for the economy. 'Labour must go further and reform indefinite leave to remain [ILR] before their hard-Left flank forces them to abandon reform altogether. The window is closing and they know it... The think-tank is now calling on ministers to introduce a tax cut for businesses hiring young people worth 30 per cent of their salary. It also suggests restricting benefits for young people with less severe mental health conditions and requiring employers to advertise vacancies to the UK workforce before offering roles through work visa schemes."
Weird. We keep being told that immigration doesn't increase unemployment
One in 10 successful candidates in UK local elections elected on Muslim issues - "A total of 574 candidates were elected on Gaza-related or Muslim issues in the recent British local elections, according to an analysis by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS). In other words, these are individuals whose campaign focused on Muslim transnational grievances, rather than local issues... over 10% of candidates who were elected to English local councils are Muslim sectarians. Broken down by party, 351 of the candidates were from the Green Party, 133 were Independents, 84 from the Labour Party, and six Liberal Democrats. HJS noted the distribution shows this phenomenon cuts across traditional party boundaries and is better understood as a distinct mode of political mobilization rather than as something confined to an individual party. The wider pattern made clear by HJS was that sectarian-style electoral success is associated with wards combining higher voter turnout, younger population profiles, and a larger Muslim population share. Among some of the 574 candidates are Mohammed Suleman, who was elected as a Green to Newcastle despite being suspended for antisemitism. Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate for Lambeth, was elected despite being arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred by posting antisemitic statements online. Green Party candidate for Manchester, Shams Syed, previously admitted he had “no interest in politics” apart from Gaza. He was elected. “The focus after the results may be on which political leaders are fighting for survival, but the real battle is for the integrity of local democracy,” said Emma Schubart, Research Fellow, Henry Jackson Society. “With 574 sectarian-style candidates elected, it is clear that this form of politics is gaining ground and cannot be ignored.” She noted that local elections are increasingly being used to fight political battles on issues councils have no power to resolve - and that risks distorting democratic accountability. The fact that local councils have no power over foreign policy was confirmed in a letter by Local Government Minister Alison McGovern... While McGovern said she recognized that local authorities are concerned about investments linked to conflict zones, she said that “decisions on boycotts, divestment and sanctions are matters of UK foreign policy and are for central government, not local authorities. “It is therefore not appropriate for local authorities to adopt investment policies that go beyond or differ from UK Government sanctions or foreign policy positions,” she added. Nevertheless, the aforementioned 574 candidates were elected on the basis of Muslim transnational grievances - such as the situation in Gaza. According to both HJS and Shadow Equalities Minister Claire Coutinho, the success of these sectarian candidates is at least in large part thanks to endorsement from “The Muslim Vote” campaign. The Muslim Vote is a sectarian Muslim political campaign group aimed at making the Muslim voice “heard across the political spectrum – on issues like Palestine and much more,” according to its website. “Peace in Palestine” is listed as one of its three high level pledges – with the stated aims as “Ceasefire, recognition of the State of Palestine, lifting the siege and occupation of Gaza, strengthening laws barring bilateral British trade with Settlements, denying Visas to Israeli politicians and militants involved in settlement expansion, and sanctions on all companies named by the UN as operating in occupied territories [sic]. The Muslim Vote has scores of partner organizations, three of which have been empirically linked to terror organizations. The first of the three is the Palestine Forum in Britain, whose chair, Zaher Birawi, has been sanctioned by the US Treasury for ties to Hamas and as part of a network allegedly used to support Hamas overseas. The second is the Islam Channel, a UK-based Islamic TV channel licensed by Ofcom, but which has been investigated and sanctioned for broadcasting antisemitic hate speech. The third is the Muslim Association of Britain, which has reported historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and has been described by UK officials as a group of concern under counter‑extremism definitions. While not linked to terror or hate speech as such, three others – MEND, Islam21C, and Prevent Watch – have all been alleged to have radical opinions and promoted antisemitism. In a letter to X/Twitter, Countinho cited some of the sectarian candidates as evidence that the Muslim Vote campaign is explicitly promoting sectarianism and antisemitism. “These are not the views of moderate Muslims in Britain”"
If you talk about dual loyalty, that's Islamophobic

The Last Canadian Politician I’d Trust to Police the Internet

2026-06-20T18:34:00.000+08:00

I remember when left wingers mocked conservatives for justifying policies based on harm to children. And this is ignoring Trans mania being justified the same way too.
The Last Canadian Politician I’d Trust to Police the Internet
"Justin Trudeau’s nine-year tenure as Canadian prime minister, which ended when his own Liberal caucus tossed him overboard in late 2024, can be divided thematically into two distinct periods.
During the mid-to-late 2010s, he presented himself as a sunny Canadian patriot. Then, following the COVID pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and the unmarked-graves social panic of 2021 (which Trudeau’s own government did much to spread), he sounded the exact opposite theme: Canada, he began telling Canadians, was in fact a deeply racist genocide state. He ordered his Liberal colleagues to implement a massive “Action Plan on Combatting Hate,” and introduced legislation that would give his government new powers to stamp out hate speech.
In 2021, Trudeau’s government floated Bill C-36, which would have brought back a defunct legal provision that had allowed Canadians to bring human-rights complaints against one another for alleged hate speech. To give readers an idea of how this kind of arrangement works: Under British Columbia’s provincial human-rights system, which has long permitted this kind of dubious complaint, a former school trustee was just fined $750,000 for saying that he believes in the primacy of biological sex instead of the ideological construct known as gender identity.
Thanks in part to pushback from civil libertarians, Bill C-36 never went anywhere. But the controversy surrounding the legislation gave Canadians a window into the unsettling ambitions of Canada’s would-be censors. In 2022, members of a 12-member “Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety” appointed by the Liberals urged the government to expand the category of censorship-worthy “harmful content” to include “algorithms that contribute to unrealistic body image” and “misleading political communications”; with some adding that “a definition of harmful content must include an understanding of how…a racialized person with lived experience on the psychological toll of racism and its systemic impact would likely have a different perspective on what constitutes harmful content compared to a cis-white male.”
In an ironic twist, many of the experts voiced “concern” over the fact that “misinformation and disinformation” weren’t yet officially deemed to be “harmful content.” As it turns out, one of the better known members of the advisory panel was an activist named Bernie Farber, who’d himself just been outed publicly (and somewhat hilariously) for spreading fake news about the early-2022 convoy protest in Ottawa...
The Liberals took another kick at the can in 2024, with revised legal provisions bundled together into Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act. If anything, this iteration—which also, thankfully, never made it into law—was worse than the original. Not only would it have empowered Canada’s federal human-rights commission to get back into the speech-regulation business. As University of Ottawa scholar Michael Geist noted in a scathing response to the draft bill, it also would have created a new internet oversight body that could conduct secret hearings, and which was completely unbound by “any legal or technical rules of evidence.”
Bill C-63 also would have amended the Criminal Code so that any convicted individual could be sent to jail for life if it was determined that he or she had committed any crime in a manner “motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.”
In fact, the Act didn’t require that the underlying transgression was criminal in nature—only that it was “an offence under this Act or any other Act of Parliament” (my emphasis). And the government didn’t even have to wait for any law to be broken before it acted: Under Bill C-63, Canadians could be pre-emptively hit with a peace bond if authorities believed they might utter hate speech in the future.
Under the new (and more sensible) leadership of Mark Carney, the government retreated to the more modest restrictions contained in Bill C-9—the Combatting Hate Act, which is expected to soon become law.
As the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) notes, C-9 does contain some troubling provisions—such as eliminating the requirement that the Attorney General sign on to criminal hate-speech prosecutions. But other provisions are quite defensible, such as the creation of a new category of criminal offense that targets hatemongers who gather outside houses of worship and other civic institutions “with the intent to provoke a state of fear in a person in order to impede their access.”
As anyone who observed the campus “encampments” that popped up following the 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks, or who’s observed the mobs that periodically harass Jews outside Canadian synagogues on the pretext of promoting Palestinian rights, this kind of thuggish behaviour (often euphemistically described as “direct action” or “civil disobedience”) isn’t really speech at all. It’s simply harassment dressed up as activism. And it’s notable that many of the “civil society groups” that joined the CCLA in criticizing the Combatting Hate Act are strident leftists and anti-Israel types who fret that it will be used to silence “Muslim, Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, 2SLGBTQIA+ and other equity-deserving communities.”
The more stripped-down nature of C-9 reflects the difference in worldviews between Trudeau and Carney. During the second half of his tenure, Trudeau often seemed consumed by the idea that Canada’s main problem was conservative bigotry. And his tenure coincided with a collective progressive hysteria centered on the belief that there was a burbling underground of right-wing hate groups poised to literally destroy Canadian democracy. Trudeau’s legislative overreach reflected these partisan phobias. And one reason his speech-regulation bills failed is that Canadians (rightly) distrusted him as an arbiter of what they should be allowed to say.
Last month, Carney (wisely) announced that his government would abandon efforts to resurrect the aforementioned Human Rights Act provisions that allow Canadians to prosecute one another over alleged online hate speech. He also shot down a thoroughly misguided Senate proposal that would have shoehorned an ill-defined ideological crime called “Residential School denialism” into Bill C-9...
His move to quash the anti-denialism provision nonetheless unleashed a wave of denunciations from Indigenous groups, which called the move “regressive, disappointing, and a setback for reconciliation.”
But C-9 is only half the story. The other half of the Liberals’ Carney-era speech-regulation strategy takes the form of the new Safe Social Media Act, Bill C-34. And this one is more problematic, even if it’s principal stated goal—protecting Canadian children from the (very real) dangers associated with toxic online environments—is entirely legitimate.
The centrepiece of the legislation, which mirrors similar efforts in Australia, is a ban on the enlistment of Canadians under the age of 16 on TikTok and other social media services...
Carney’s government has used the pretext of child protection as a means to advance a larger content-regulation agenda. This includes a blueprint for a “Digital Safety Commission,” which will force social-media companies to ensure Canadians aren’t exposed to “harmful content.”...
the Safe Social Media Act also is aimed at proscribing material that “incites violence” and “foments hatred”—the latter description being one that, as noted above, some Canadian human rights officials would apply to the observation that men can’t become women by putting on a dress.
Moreover, as Geist notes, the text of the Bill “leaves nearly everything that will determine how the law actually works, including which services are covered, when the ban applies and to whom, what counts as adequate age verification, and what design features platforms must build” to later decisions by Cabinet and the (as yet non-existent) Digital Safety Commission.
Several Canadian pundits whom I very much respect, including Jamie Sarkonak of the National Post and Josh Dehaas of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, see C-34 as a thinly veiled plot to eventually put control of the entire internet under the thumb of Canada’s federal government... the Prime Minister would roll out C-34 under the auspices of a cabinet colleague who is strongly associated with the dogmatic style of social-justice puritanism that Trudeau embraced during his political twilight.
I speak here of Trudeau’s childhood friend Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture. He’s been making the media rounds, promoting the Safe Social Media Act while presenting himself as the great defender of Canada’s youth—whom he says are “dying” due to uncontrolled internet use.
“Kids just aren’t on the bargaining table—hard stop,” he told a reporter when asked about potential U.S. objections to Canada’s move to block access to American social-media giants. The eyeball-rolling suggestion here is that opposing Bill C-34 doesn’t just make you anti-child, it makes you pro-Trump, and therefore a bad Canadian.
Back in 2021, Miller had a prominent role in promoting the Trudeau-approved lie that 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children had been found in an old orchard in British Columbia. Even after that falsehood was debunked, Miller continued to call for the criminal prosecution of residential-school “denialists” who deviated from the myth that he and Trudeau helped create...
On the fifth anniversary of the unmarked-graves farce this past May, while others were admitting they’d been duped by the fake news of 2021, Miller was silent. Like Trudeau, he’s never taken accountability for his role signal-boosting what is arguably the single most persistently toxic piece of misinformation the Canadian internet has witnessed in the social-media era—a deception that led to the torching of dozens of Canadian churches. It’s something Miller might want to think about the next time he pontificates about the link between online misinformation and violence.
More than anyone else in Carney’s orbit, this Liberal holdover from the Trudeau era personifies the instinctive sense of distrust that a lot of us feel when we think about allowing our government to decide what we can say, read, and watch online. Carney may have good intentions. But he picked a flawed messenger to communicate them."

Links - 20th June 2026 (2 - Migrants: Canada [including Nate Erskine-Smith])

2026-06-20T15:47:00.000+08:00

Max Genest on X - "Nate, your mass immigration policies have ethnically cleansed your own riding, which allowed a Bangladeshi migrant who posts incest videos on Facebook to steal your job. I would tell you to go fuck yourself, but you already did."
Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 on X - "NEW: Nate Erskine-Smith, white Canadian politician who cosplayed as a Muslim, voted for 10 years to bring in millions of immigrants from Islamic republics ....loses to "cheating" Muslims, complains about it. "they used amazon receipts and travel visas as voter ID""
Peter Brimelow on X - "This would be funny except I remember Canada in the 1970. So it’s tragic"
Mario Zelaya on X - "🚨 MAJOR BREAKING NEWS Nate was the favourite to be the leader of the Liberal Party of Ontario. HE LOST THE NOMINATION. He’s saying there was voter FRAUD! People with no ID. Nothing. His team said “THEY’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT” When Conservatives said this during the election, it was misinformation & conspiracy theories. So which is it? Were Conservatives right in calling out the same irregularities during the election? Or is Nate, the Liberal MP & former cabinet Minister, a conspiracy theorist & engaging in misinformation?"
Mario Zelaya on X - "The Liberal Party spent 10 years importing voters. Today those voters showed up. And voted against the Liberal they were supposed to support. Federal MP Nate Erskine-Smith, endorsed by Mark Carney himself, just lost a provincial nomination race in Scarborough. He lost to Ahsanul Hafiz. A Bangladeshi-born business owner who owns 30 Domino’s Pizza franchises. Today in Scarborough Southwest: Sample ballots were handed out entirely in Bengali. The Ontario Liberal Party allows temporary residents to vote in nominations. Nate knocked on doors of his own “members” people who had no idea they’d signed up. The Globe and Mail reported it themselves. Nate cried irregularities. Hafiz said: “The hallways were full of people wearing my badges. That’s the clear evidence of who won.” The Liberals flooded ridings with new Canadians. Those new Canadians just picked their own guy. The man who built the machine is now complaining about the machine. Welcome to the Canada you created. 🇨🇦"
Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 on X - "I think this is the first time a Liberal MP who brought in 5 million migrants has ever had those migrants affect his life. Normally the victims are just young Canadians who can’t find work or afford housing. Not a member of the elite."
Meme - Harrison Faulkner @Harry_Faulkner: "This photo is incredible. A rain-soaked defeated Liberal MP walking along trash filled streets with the pride flag flying in the distance as he grapples with the consequences of his own party's decisions."
Chris Brunet on X - "Nate was Canada's previous minister of housing. he spent the past decade advocating for unlimited immigration. immediately after taking this picture, they all voted against him for a man named Ahsanul Hafiz who owns Domino's Pizza franchises solely because he was born Bangladesh. Nate is now complaining about voter fraud"
Maky Abugu | Facebook - "Nate Erskine-Smith is now openly escalating his allegations about the Ontario Liberal nomination battle in Scarborough Southwest, and this story is getting more serious by the day. Remember, this is not some random outsider making claims online. This is a sitting Liberal MP who already announced he plans to resign after losing the nomination by just 19 votes. Now he’s publicly questioning what happened during the process. In his own words: “Why would dozens and dozens and dozens of people who are temporary residents showing up not understanding the process, when they're asked for their address, they're not certain about what their address is, and then they're taking pictures of their ballot.” That is a major allegation. Especially inside a party nomination race where the margin was razor thin. Erskine-Smith has already filed an appeal with the Ontario Liberal Party alleging “serious irregularities” in the contest that was won by Ahsanul Hafiz. According to reports, he claims there were concerns involving voter eligibility, confusion around addresses, and people allegedly photographing ballots during the voting process. And this is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable politically. Because Canada is already dealing with rising tensions around immigration, temporary residents, international students, housing pressure and trust in institutions. So when a Liberal MP himself raises concerns involving temporary residents and internal voting integrity, people are obviously going to pay attention. Now to be fair, allegations are not proof. The Ontario Liberal Party has not publicly concluded there was fraud or wrongdoing. And temporary residents can legally participate in some party nomination contests if they meet party membership requirements. That part is important context. But the bigger issue here is trust. If party members believe nomination races are not transparent or properly controlled, confidence in the democratic process starts breaking down very quickly. And honestly, this entire situation is becoming politically damaging for the Liberals because it is happening at the exact moment Canadians are already frustrated with institutions, political elites and internal party operations. What makes this story even bigger is that Erskine-Smith was not some fringe candidate. He was one of the more recognizable Liberal MPs in the GTA, often seen as more independent minded than many others in caucus. Now he is leaving politics after this loss while publicly questioning how the process unfolded. That alone tells you how serious he believes this is."
Randy Parent | Facebook - "Excuse me while I ROTFLMAO. SOOOO poetic. This is exactly what happened in New York and many cities in the UK This is just the beginning my friends. Doug Ford couldn’t plan the last 96 hours any better in Ontario politics:
1. The Ontario Liberal Party asked for proof of fraud & mismanagement during Saturday’s nomination process.
2. Given what I’ve read today, & two lengthy phone chats I’ve had - I’m buying the “We’ve never seen anything like it” thesis. Holy holy if they go public w/ what they told me.
3. The best possible person with a shot to challenge Doug Ford didn’t win the nomination.
4. A person of questionable character & current associations DID win the nomination.
5. #4 makes it REAL easy to campaign against the nominee & state facts about his past, including his incest porn social media from only a decade ago.
6. The OLP would have had a mildly tough time winning the seat WITH Erskine-Smith AND no controversy. Now they have NO Erskine-Smith & TONS of controversy. Quite bad.
7. There are some real good people in the Party. There are some very impressive MPPs. It’s all for nothing if the OLP stacked the deck against Erskine-Smith, or the Hafiz camp did, & they waved their hand & dismissed it.
8. Democratic integrity in a nomination contest is far more important than whether you adore the person who won or not. A system that can’t be trusted means the Party can’t be trusted means good people won’t run for seats, & it certainly means far fewer people will volunteer & give money to help.
Nice mess they have - a little oversight Saturday prevents all eight of the above points from being the reality they face now."
Alexander Brown on X - "Provincial gov’t immigration source in Ontario: "We’re not seeing the exits we are hoping for. The data from the feds is non existent. Temps are converting to varying degrees of visitor statuses and claiming benefits to not work, or goal-hanging while expired hoping for amnesty. The amount of bad-faith and scamming continues to be overwhelming.""
Meme - Maxime Bernier: "Canada may need a Bill 101 to protect the English language and Canadian culture."
Riley Donovan @valdombre: "Calgary Police are putting up signs in Punjabi urging people to report criminal activity. The problem is deeper than the sign. Mass immigration is turning Canada into a Tower of Babel."
Meme - "Singh Hortons *Tim Hortons logo with Sikh*"
DonaldBest.CA * DO NOT COMPLY on X - "The disastrous decline in health and hygiene standards at Tim Hortons and many other Canadian fast food chains is directly attributable to the Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) program. Inside 18 months, Hepatitis A — a fecal-oral disease, by Public Health Canada's own definition — has been confirmed in Tim Hortons food handlers in Ottawa, Amherst NS, and Barrie. A Montreal location was fined $4,200 for premises containing rodent excrement. India is now Canada's largest source of foreign workers. India's own government has spent 11 years and billions on its Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign trying to end open defecation. The current phase is literally branded "Swabhav Swachhata, Sanskar Swachhata" — behavioural and cultural cleanliness — because their own surveys find roughly half of rural households continue to defecate in the open even when they own a toilet. They say they prefer it. The Indian government calls it a cultural problem. Their words, not mine. You cannot import food-service workers from this environment, hand them a hairnet and a 90-minute orientation, and call it a food safety system. There is no training program that closes a 25-year cultural gap in 12 weeks."
Meme - "r/Torontology
Modern-day Toronto is proof that this multiculturalism shit isn't working
We got people in the city protesting and literally fighting over conflicts and shit that has nothing to do with Canada. (Russia-Ukraine, the Eritrean brawl, Hindus-Sikhs, lsrael-Palestine, etc) Different groups segregate themselves so much that entire regions in the GTA are now dominated a single ethnic group. (Markham = East Asian, Brampton = South Asians, Vaughn = Europeans, etc) People are struggling to find jobs and/or places to rent simply because they don't belong to the preferred ethnic group. All these different groups don't actually like one another. They tolerate each other at best, and only interact when absolutely necessary. Even in this sub, mans will say the most foul shit in order to disrespect an entire group just because someone made a joke, or said something that offended the other person. People don't come to Canada to be Canadian. They come to Canada to be whatever they were before while living in Canada. There's little to no actual loyalty to this country."
Naturally, this got deleted
Canada immigration scams: New consultant regulations announced (aka "Canada announces reforms to combat immigration, citizenship scams")
Canada gave citizenship to a terrorist. Revoking it has been ‘ridiculously’ slow - "On May 31, 2001, a former Pakistan army captain named Tahawwur Hussain Rana swore the oath of citizenship in front of an Ottawa judge, who anointed him a Canadian. But he is a fraudulent Canadian, according to hundreds of pages of government documents obtained by Global News that allege he obtained his citizenship through “deception.” The documents show that an RCMP investigation uncovered considerable evidence that Rana lied on his citizen application form by claiming he resided in Canada, when he did not. Nonetheless, immigration officials gave him not just citizenship but also a passport — which he used to fly to Mumbai, India to allegedly mastermind a terrorist attack that killed 166 people. Twenty-five years after Rana swore at his citizenship ceremony to “fulfill my duties as a Canadian,” the federal government is still trying to undo the supposed mistake... A Global News review of cases that have come before the court over the past two years reveals that it routinely takes more than a decade to rescind citizenship from those who obtained it through fraud. Even when immigration officials appear to have substantial evidence that foreign nationals obtained citizenship by submitting false information, the process is plodding... The United Kingdom says it has annulled the citizenship of more than 1,500 Britons since 2010,mostly for terrorism and fraud. The U.S. filed de-naturalization cases against 12 people on Friday they accused of hiding their involvement in terrorism and other crimes when they acquired American citizenship. In Canada, revocation cases are “very rare,” Hayer said... he was identified as a suspect in the attack in Mumbai, India, the previous year by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. Two Canadians died in the assault: Elizabeth Russell, a former Montreal nurse, and her travelling companion, Michael Moss, a Montreal physician. At least two other Canadians were wounded, including Michael Rudder, a Montreal actor who was dining at the Oberoi Hotel when gunmen stormed in... Revoking his citizenship has taken so long that he has raised the time lag as a defence, claiming he can no longer recall events from so many years ago."
Tristin Hopper on X - "This story is quite radicalizing. CBC sent out reporters to find refugee sob stories, and the best they could do was a woman who entered Canada on a visitor visa, magically decided she was now a refugee, and has been living exclusively off benefits ever since."
Tristin Hopper on X - "It wasn't too long ago that Canada was the world's most pro-immigration country, bar none. It wasn't because we were nice and it wasn't because we were welcoming. It was because this kind of brazen exploitation was kept to a minimum, instead of celebrated."
The Locked-Out Generation: 437,000 and Counting - "in 2025, 437,000 young Canadians were unemployed. That’s a 57% increase in just three years – and it doesn’t count the likely tens of thousands more who were looking for work but gave up and left the labour force. And the bleeding hasn’t stopped, according to recent Stats Canada data, as the youth unemployment rate continues to rise and now stands at a staggering 14.3%... Canada is not in a technical recession. Employment among other demographic groups sits at somewhat normal levels. And in the United States, youth unemployment remains near a historic low of 10 percent. Canada’s divergence from the U.S. is now the widest on record outside the late-1990s tech boom and the pandemic. The evidence points not to economic fate, but to something else. The current job market for early-career Canadians is worse than it was during the recessions of 1981, 1990, and 2008. We are producing recession-level youth unemployment in what those very same economists would call stable economy (even though for so many it doesn’t feel like that). That does not happen by accident. And if the problem’s not happening to different countries around the world, and if it’s not happening to people of all ages, then it must be happening because of a specific set of policy levers being pulled right here in Canada. Policies designed to erode young people’s competitiveness in our labour market and undermine their success at the start of their professional journeys. And when we dig into the details, that’s exactly what’s going on. This year alone, Ottawa will be bringing in 215,000 new temporary foreign workers (TFWs) and foreign students, adding to the estimated population of nearly 1.5 million people who are here already... these workers disproportionately occupy low-skill, entry-level jobs in the service or retail industry that would normally be the perfect starter job for a high school or university student. And that’s because big businesses want it that way. On top of that, the system has been proven to exploit permit holders, pushing people into dark, underground economies and driving down wages – adding an incentive for seedy employers to take advantage of vulnerable immigrant workers. Why hire a teenager for $20 an hour when you can get it much cheaper, with practically zero responsibilities to them, for the equivalent of $10 an hour? To make matters worse, the Liberal immigration minister still has no plan to ensure the departure from Canada of the millions of people holding expired visas, further saturating a labour market that’s already at its breaking point. Every time we bring this issue up in Question Period, members of the Liberal cabinet point to the billions of dollars of ‘support’ (read: spending) they pump into the economy. But they just don’t get it. You simply can’t claim to be stimulating growth while actively suppressing the wages and opportunities of a huge share of your own workforce. It’s like stepping on the gas pedal of your car while also holding down the brakes. Sure, you can put on a big show by doing that, but it won’t actually get you anywhere and it certainly isn’t good for the car. Of course, all this spending has deeper effects on the Canadian economy, too, that work against the long-term stabilization of our labour market. Bigger deficits mean higher interest rates, making it more difficult for new businesses to open and existing ones to expand. Higher proportions of our federal budget going to interest payments – we already spend more on debt than we do on healthcare transfers – leave less in the bank account for when we really need it down the road. And underlying this all is a housing market where you need to make a six-figure salary just to afford the average home in a big city like Toronto or Vancouver, and an affordability crisis that sees one in four Canadians classified as ‘food insecure’... There’s a real price to pay for this. It’s not just about a missed summer job at a camp or a part-time shift at a retail store. It’s about keeping kids from ever getting a foot onto Canada’s economic ladder. For a young person, that first paycheck represents more than just money in the bank. It’s the training ground for the various soft skills they’ll use in their careers for the next forty years, things like time management, teamwork and accountability. Without early employment, we see a skills gap widen because without entry-level experience, how can anyoneleave school and reach career-level employment? And with consumer debt already at record levels (and the worst in the G7), it also contributes to an already-spiralling debt trap: with tuition and the cost-of-living skyrocketing, the inability to work while studying forces more students into a cycle of lifelong government debt. This, in consequence,delays their independence, because moving out and starting a life requires a deposit and a steady income. For nearly half a million young Canadians, that independence is currently in a bit of a holding pattern. Indefinitely. What makes this crisis even more concerning is that its effects do not disappear once the economy improves. Economists have long warned about so-called “scarring effects” where young people who enter the workforce during weak labour markets often earn less for years afterward compared to previous generations. Delayed careers mean delayed savings, delayed home ownership, delayed family formation, and lower lifetime earnings overall. In other words: this isn’t simply a bad year for young Canadians; it’s a structural setback that could shape the financial future of an entire generation long after today’s unemployment numbers leave the headlines. What gets me so mad about all this is that this crisis is entirely self-inflicted. Homegrown. We’ve known it’s been a problem for years, but we just keep going down the same path and hoping that something will change by itself. 11 years of record deficits and record immigration, and this is what we have to show for it. 11 years of failed targets, empty words, and broken promises."
Time to blame Donald Trump and the US for all of Canada's problems
Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 on X - "So let me get this straight. Canada lost 110,000 full-time jobs in 2026 so far. we have record youth unemployment. and Carney is letting 33,000 temporary foreign workers stay in Canada to work forever? They HATE us. It the only explanation."
Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 on X - "> be Nate Erskine-Smith, Mark Carney's Liberal MP
>vote yes for every mass immigration initiative for over 10 years
>flood your own city with muslims
>dress up as a Muslim and attend their events
>lose your riding contest to an unknown Muslim man, and suggest voter fraud"
Damn PP! Damn Maple Maga! Damn conservatives!
Canada Ramps Up Temporary Visa Approvals Despite Fading Demand - "While policymakers still have enough applications to hit their targets, it potentially signals a bigger problem. The focus on immigration-driven growth pushed aggregate GDP higher, but job creation trailed the population surge and wasn’t offset with matching growth in service capacity. Canada’s fading application volumes suggest a tarnished reputation—one that’s resulted in its global rank plunging to one of the unhappiest places on earth for young adults."
EXCLUSIVE: CAF training platoon with 83% non-citizens devolved into ethnic infighting - "A confidential Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School report has revealed a complete breakdown in basic officer training following a surge in permanent resident enrolment. One French-language platoon, which had over 80 per cent non-citizens, was reportedly wracked by an inability to communicate fluently, a lack of respect towards female CAF members and infighting between Cameroonian and Côte d’Ivoire candidates. The Quebec platoon saw fewer than one in two recruits graduate, while allegations of racial discrimination were made in multiple directions, from candidates against staff and between candidates of opposing ethnic blocs themselves. Additionally, command saw “challenges” in training permanent residents as they lacked “respect towards women” peers and superiors. “For many candidates it is the first time they have lived with members of a different sex, and for some it is also the first time they have been expected to treat women as their peers,” explained the confidential report. “Platoons are also reporting inter-candidate cultural frustrations, with lack of respect towards women being the most common concern.” Juno News obtained the document, authored by school Commandant and Lieutenant Colonel M.R. Kieley, from an anonymous source. The confidential report is titled “Initial Observations — Impact of Changes to Canadian Armed Forces Recruiting Policies at Basic Training Over 2025.” It paints a picture of declining standards and cultural friction as the Canadian Armed Forces rushed to reconstitute its ranks by relaxing recruiting rules. The most dramatic example unfolded in a French-language Basic Military Officer Qualification (BMOQ) platoon that was 83% permanent residents, many of whom had been in Canada for as little as three months. This comes at a time when the CAF is boasting of record-setting recruitment levels. “The initial platoons that arrived at the (school) in January 2025 were heavily loaded with permanent residents,” reads the confidential report."
Diversity is our strength
Even the CBC confirms this, so left wingers need to look for a new cope
Non-citizens in Canadian Forces struggling to 'treat women as their peers' - "Department of National Defence spokesperson Commodore Pascal Belhumeur did not confirm that the Post’s copy was the same as his own version, but the contents of his copy were consistent with what was before the Post... The report, authored by Lieutenant-Colonel Marc Kieley, describes the effects of new changes to the Canadian Armed Forces recruitment process: restrictions on candidates with certain health and mental health issues were lifted, more permanent residents were permitted to join, security screening was reduced, and the old aptitude test was dropped. “As a result of these changes, CFLRS is experiencing significant changes in candidates’ basic capabilities and increasing pressures on staff and instructors,” it reads... “Older candidates from certain cultural backgrounds are also more likely to experience friction when responding to younger CFLRS instructors due to cultural hierarchies based on age.”... The overall rate of completion for basic training dropped from around 85 per cent to 77 per cent in the first three quarters of 2025, said the report. More candidates are also being ordered to repeat a course: between the fiscal years of 2018 and 2024, this was always in the single digits, ranging between four and eight per cent. In 2025, it was 15 per cent, nearly double the year prior. The dominant reason for re-taking courses also changed. In 2023, according to the report, 62 per cent of candidates re-taking a course did so for medical reasons; another 15 per cent had to re-take for failing practical evaluations (drills, weapons and fitness, for example), and another two per cent had to re-take for failing academic evaluations (on topics from sexual misconduct to navigation theory). In the 2025 fiscal year, per the report, only 45 per cent of candidates retaking courses did so for medical reasons, with 27 per cent doing so for failing practical evaluations, and seven per cent re-taking courses for academic failures. Some candidates “have been unable to learn basic practical skills such as drill and weapons, as well as several candidates who have been unable to read without assistance,” said the report... Some of these candidates had only been in Canada for three months, according to the report. This was corrected in February, said Belhumeur, with the imposition of a three-year residency requirement for all candidates... It’s not just the French basic training instructors who should be asking this — it’s all of Canada. Keep in mind that lawful civilian gun owners are currently experiencing the largest firearms confiscation the country’s ever seen; at the same time, we’re handing military authority over to people who aren’t even citizens of Canada. It’s as if the institution whose job is to carry out the primary duty of the state — the protection of the nation — has completely forgotten a core part of its being."
Riley Donovan on X - "Economics professor schools Liberal MP who says employers need immigrants:
MP: "So that's the answer to this, just increase wages and everything will magically fall in place?"
Professor: "That is the answer. That's what we did in Canada for the first 100 years.""
Eric Jackson on X - "71% of Waterloo software engineering grads leave for the US. The brain drain damage threshold is 20%. Canada is at 3x the red line. Think about that. Canada taxes its people at 60% in part to fund a university system to train its best and brightest to flee the country and make the US GDP spike. Who is spiking US GDP at the moment? All the Canadians working for Anthropic and OpenAI in AI. How crazy is that? What do the Canadian tax payers get for their generosity out of this?"
John Carter on X - "Our GDP per capita is lower than Alabama's, which is a direct consequence of a lost decade of economic growth. The only reason we rate a sub-Alabama is that Alberta pushes the average up; Ontario has fallen below West fucking Virginia. You argue that immigration reduces GDPpc because it increases the denominator but it takes migrants a while to catch up and contribute to the numerator. They've had decades. How long do they need? When my ancestors arrived from England, they hit the ground running by the way. They were cultivating farms and building businesses the moment they stepped off the boat. By the way, how exactly are they supposed to raise GDPpc when they send a substantial fraction of their earnings back to India as remittances? What country has successfully used the mass third world migration model to achieve real improvements in living standards? It hasn't worked in the Yookay, which has all the same problems as Canada and then some. It hasn't worked in Australia. It hasn't worked in France, in Sweden, or in Germany. Denmark ran the numbers and found that immigrants from anywhere but white or East Asian countries were net lifetime drains on the treasury, and by such a huge margin that they could have paid for their own space program. Where are our immigrants coming from again? Oh right, India, a paradise famed for its hard-working, honest peoples, who have built one of the economic jewels of the world. The only things that immigration have done for the Canadian economy are to inflate real estate to an absurd degree and to depress wages. Now we're also seeing the highest rate of food inflation in the G7. GDPpc has flatlined, but living standards have gotten wrecked. We are worse off in every way. You call those of us pointing out the obvious facts of this obvious disaster propagandists, while you yourself repeat CBC propaganda like the timid mindraped traitorous capon that you are, so terrified of being called a racist that you cheer on the erasure of our people by an unending flood of third world migration while you twist the tortured remnants of your fragmented psyche into an oblivious pretzel in a desperate ploy to explain away the innumerable calamitous consequences of the insane treachery that you celebrate."
There was a lot of interesting cope, including looking at nominal GDP rank, nominal GDP (rather than GDP per capita) and federal-debt-to-GDP (ignoring provincial)
Time to hate on Alberta again, since left wingers hate economic growth