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Saturday, September 13, 2025

Links - 13th September 2025 (2 - Migrants: Continental Europe)

Mass exodus of natives from Germany but sky-high immigration keeps population rising - "Germany is seeing a growing exodus of its own citizens, with new figures from DeStatis showing that more than 93,000 Germans left the country in the first four months of 2025 alone.  That compares with 80,105 departures over the same period in 2024 and 83,109 in 2023, marking a clear year-on-year increase.  The trend highlights how net losses of German nationals are accelerating. Since 2005, more Germans have left than returned each year, and 2025 is on track to set a new record. By contrast, mass immigration from abroad continues at high levels, producing an overall positive migration balance but leaving native Germans a steadily shrinking share of the population... As Handelsblatt recently noted, those leaving are often not retirees or students, but people in their prime working years. Federal statistics show that around half of emigrants are between 25 and 49 — the very cohort most needed in the domestic labor market. Academics, entrepreneurs, and skilled workers are disproportionately represented... Her husband Philipp described the German system as “extremely daunting” for anyone trying to innovate...   Officially, more than 270,000 Germans emigrated in 2024, compared with around 141,000 in 2010. The figures do not break down motives, but analysts point to recurring themes: frustration with red tape, high tax burdens, concern about political shifts, and a broader desire for personal freedom."

Germany's former top judge under Merkel says overzealous application of human rights laws by ECHR 'endangers the existence of Western democracies' - "Hans-Jürgen Papier, Germany’s former chief justice and one of the country’s most senior legal scholars, has warned that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is undermining national sovereignty by creating what he called a “de facto right to immigration through the back door.”... He called for reforms to the ECHR itself, though he admitted this was unlikely given the need for consensus among all 46 Council of Europe states. Instead, he suggested that the EU or national parliaments draft a “precisely formulated law of migration” that would reduce judges’ scope for interpretation and return asylum rights to the original Geneva standards.  Among his proposals are electronic asylum visas for those with a realistic chance of success, strict annual ceilings on “subsidiary protection” — a weaker asylum status covering people at risk of violence or hardship — and potential third-country solutions for processing applications abroad. Papier has long been a critic of what he sees as Europe’s open-border approach. In an op-ed for the Bild newspaper in November 2023, he warned that “essentially nothing has changed” since the 2015 migration crisis. He accused Germany of allowing migrants to bypass the Dublin Regulation, which requires asylum seekers to lodge claims in the first EU country they enter, and insisted that Berlin should move “as quickly as possible” to introduce clear and enforceable rules."
This far right extremist needs to be arrested to Protect Democracy

‘Western democracy at risk without asylum reform’ - "The anniversary of the 2015 migration crisis has prompted a glut of analyses examining how well the country has ultimately coped.  Most of them have been negative. The employment rate for the 2015 cohort of working-age asylum seekers has now reached 64 per cent, only a few points short of the national average. However, other studies have shown that most German voters are exasperated with the strain on public services and the disproportionate prevalence of first-generation immigrants in violent crime statistics. The radical right-wing and migration-critical Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which struggled to reach 5 per cent of the vote in the summer of 2015, is now averaging 25 per cent in the polls and jockeying for first place. When Friedrich Merz, the conservative chancellor, was recently asked about Merkel’s mantra, he replied: “Today, ten years later, we know that in the area she meant back then we clearly did not cope.” Influential figures in Merz’s inner circle support an initiative spearheaded by Italy and Denmark to curb the remit of the ECHR and hand greater powers to individual nation states to determine their own asylum policies. Unlike in the UK, the dividing line in German politics is now between those who regard the expansive modern definition of the right to asylum as sacrosanct, and those who want it stripped back to the core principles of the 1951 Geneva refugee convention and the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights. Papier’s opinions on the issue carry significant weight because he was the president of Germany’s constitutional court from 2002-10, at the start of the Merkel era, and has spent more than half a century working on questions of national sovereignty and the legitimacy of democratic institutions. He argued that the current batch of planned reforms to the European Union’s asylum rules, which include measures to harden the bloc’s outer borders and to redistribute migrants between the member states, would fall far short of restoring the public’s faith in the state. Papier, 82, who is now emeritus professor of public law at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, said the core of the problem was an “ever deeper reaching and ever more closely meshed agglomeration” of asylum rulings from national courts and the ECHR in Strasbourg. These now seemed to “settle like mildew over the states’ political power to take action”, he said. In Papier’s view, they have widened the right to asylum into a “de facto right to immigration through the back door”... Papier said this predicament was “generally destroying the European citizen’s trust in the capacity of their democratic institutions to act, and so at the end of the day endangering the existence of western democracies”. Particular criticism has focused on judges’ broad interpretations of Articles 3 and 8 of the ECHR, which respectively safeguard the right to freedom from torture or inhuman treatment and the right to family life. In the case of Germany, the courts have sometimes used the “inhuman treatment” clause to block the extradition of asylum seekers to Italy and other EU member states on the basis that they might be in danger of homelessness or having to find work on the black market. “That simply goes too far,” said Papier. “Here human dignity is being treated like small change and thereby robbed of its special dignified status.”"

Council of Europe rejects calls to rein in ECHR - "Alain Berset, the secretary general of the Council of Europe (CoE), which oversees and enforces ECHR rulings, said the court should not be “politicised” or “face political pressure” after nine CoE member states challenged its interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights... Italy and Denmark urged other European countries to sign a letter criticising the Strasbourg court for tying national lawmakers’ hands with migration issues.  The letter said the court was making it difficult to “make political decisions in our own democracies”, according to the EurActiv website, which first obtained a copy.  It called for a “new and open-minded conversation” about how the court interprets the convention. The letter was ultimately signed by nine CoE member states, including Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. The court is not an EU body, but part of the larger and older Council of Europe, of which Britain is also a member.  All 27 EU member states belong to the 46-state human rights watchdog and are signatories to the convention... Sir Keir Starmer announced plans to limit judges’ powers to block migrant deportations using the convention earlier this month. The Prime Minister has held talks on illegal migration with Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s hard-Right prime minister, and Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, since his election last year.  But Sir Keir has ruled out leaving the European Court of Human Rights, having previously said doing so would represent a “betrayal” of Britain’s role in the drafting of the convention.  “We will never withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Churchill himself was among the chief architects of the Convention,” he said, speaking at Blenheim Palace in July 2024.  On Saturday, a new paper from Policy Exchange questioned the view that the European Convention on Human Rights is a “British legacy”, and disputed claims that leaving the Convention would constitute a “betrayal” of Sir Winston Churchill.  The report argues that, while Britain helped draft the convention, its modern form is far removed from the limited safeguard against fascism and communism originally envisioned by the government.  The report was backed by Lord Jonathan Sumption, former Supreme Court Justice, and historian Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia.  “Invoking the memory of Churchill to support the ECHR, or to oppose UK withdrawal from it, is either base opportunism or basic historical misunderstanding,” wrote Lord Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny.  “The historical record matters and the memory of Churchill should not be weaponised for political advantage, not least in service of a cause that he would have viewed as wholly incompatible with parliamentary democracy and the prerogatives of the nation state.”"
When you're just asking for countries to withdraw because it's not what they signed up for and judicial activism is pushing it beyond its original intentions

RadioGenoa on X - "Paris has lost its identity."
Pshy 🇵🇸 on X - "Fair honestly, payback for the colonizations in africa" Tolulope on X - "Should’ve left Africa alone then"
Ozai Enjoyers Chairman on X - "Bro complains about colonization like the Western powers didn't leave them with infrastructures that they were quick to destroy when they left. And then they act as if taking advantage of a country's generosity is some kind of payback. Enjoy your new Chinese overlords."

IAMNOTWOKE on X - "The mass immigration Europe is experiencing is probably payback for colonization. If Europe wants it to end it will need to invest in Africa and buy up Africa's economic potential in a fair manner for both sides."
Left wingers promote mass migration because they see brown and black people as punishments for white people for their sins

Moroccan Man Charged With Using Paris' Eternal Flame to Light Cigarette - "French authorities have arrested a Moroccan man after he allegedly lit a cigarette off a memorial in Paris. The moment at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which includes an ever-burning flame, under the Arc de Triomphe was caught on video, leading to outrage from French leaders... Like the U.S., France has been riven by internal debate over immigration as hundreds of thousands of migrants have flocked to the country every year over the last decade, with the majority coming from Africa in recent years... The suspect is a 47-year-old Moroccan man who is a legal resident in France, per the New York Times, meaning he could have his legal status revoked if found guilty of violating a burial site."
I saw someone on The French History Podcast on Facebook defending this, claiming that it was a flame so it was reasonable to light a cigarette with it

France to deport Moroccan man for lighting cigarette at memorial - "For the French political left, the government's decision to revoke the residency of a Moroccan man for lighting a cigarette from the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is less about patriotism and more about racism. The controversy erupted after a video surfaced showing Hamdi Hakim, a 47-year-old homeless Moroccan man, crouching by the eternal flame beneath the Arc de Triomphe on 4 August, and lighting a cigarette before calmly walking away as tourists looked on. The clip, filmed by a Latvian tourist and posted to TikTok, quickly went viral... Right-leaning media outlets were quick to point out that Hakim was known to police, with a reported 21 prior offences, including theft and racial insults... Patricia Mirallès, the minister responsible for Memory and Veterans Affairs, described the incident as "an act of unacceptable indecency," saying the nation's memory could not be "desecrated with impunity." National Assembly deputy Laure Lavalette went further, questioning how someone with such a criminal record had been granted residency in the first place, using the incident to critics what she called failures in France's immigration system. However, for the far-left Lutte Ouvrière ("Workers Fight") party, it was the minister's reaction, not the cigarette, that deserved scrutiny. Nathalie Arthaud, the party's spokesperson, blasted Retailleau as a "racist braggart" and accused him of seizing on a petty act to promote an anti-immigrant agenda. "The Unknown Soldier might well have been Moroccan," she wrote on social media, pointing to the thousands of North African soldiers who fought and died alongside French troops during the world wars. Arthaud also criticised the selective outrage: "They rage over a cigarette, but say nothing about the generals who sent millions to die in 1914," she wrote on X, echoing the sentiments of many others online who saw the incident as symbolic of France's broader denial of its problematic military and colonial past."
We are still told that left wingers don't hate their countries

'Laughing' Syrian asylum seeker who stabbed boy, 14, to death was motivated by 'Islamic terrorism' : r/gbnews - "It's not happening
Ok it's happening but it's a rare 1 off
Ok it's not a rare 1 off but white people commit crimes as well and you just hate brown people for the colour of their skin so stop posting these racist dog whistles you nazi fascist bigot who probably worships Donald trump
Trump is a pedo. Not only that be he's a tyrant who loves Putin and is worse than Hitler.
I'm sure there's other steps along the way but that's the general pipeline."
"I think you covered most of the steps quite well except the "why are you being so racist" that slips in there on each step"
"We've missed out how this is all the Billionaires fault and that this is being highlighted to take away from the real issue which is stopping people from earning a decent wage."
"Youre right. In Poland anytime this is happening(rape/stabbing/whatever like that) by illegall migrants leftist says "but Polish people also does that".  Like there is anyone in Poland who ever cheer(maybe except some hools) when some Polish dude stab someone else."

Germany is acknowledging the unspeakable - "In spring 2024, Herbert Reul, Interior Minister of Germany’s most populous state(22 million inhabitants), Northern Rhine-Westphalia, said something remarkable: “We have a problem with non-German criminals.” What’s remarkable is not what Reul said but the fact that a centre-right politician from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party said it. Nancy Faeser, Germany’s Interior Minister from the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — which courts voters of non-German ancestry — also said something which would have been branded far-right provocation just a few years ago: “We have to talk about the rise in crime by foreigners”. These statements may sound benign, but they shatter taboos. German politicos and journalists have long suppressed discussions of why certain groups of foreigners are overrepresented in crime statistics; Section 12 of the official German press code even forbids identifying the ethnic ancestry of criminals to combat “discrimination”. Any references to “crime by foreigners” (Ausländerkriminalität) as a distinct problem were met with charges of xenophobia and racism. What has moved the Overton Window is a stream of grim crime statistics published by government agencies or, just as frequently, leaked to journalists.   In 2023, according to official statistics, Germany registered 5.5 per cent more crimes than in the previous year. The number of suspects rose 7.3 per cent. 41 per cent were foreigners, an increase of 17.8 per cent. Asylum seekers(a category which excludes Ukrainian refugees)made up 18 per cent of the offenders, an increase of 18 per cent from 2022.    There were 214,000 violent crimes, a 15-year high and an increase of 8.6 per cent. Robberies were up 17.4 per cent, knife crimes 9.7 per cent. Homicides were up 2.1 per cent, sex crimes 2.4 per cent. Crimes involving knives nearly tripled between 2020 (10,121 incidents) and 2023 (26,230). An internal analysis leaked to the Welt newspaper showed that knife crimes in Northern Rhine-Westphalia shot up 45 per cent over a recent 12-month interval. Other statistics from that state: in 2023, 80.1 per cent of pickpockets were foreigners, as were 47.6 per cent of shoplifters, 47.3 per cent of burglars, 41.6 per cent of homicide suspects, and 37.1 per cent of suspects in violent sex crimes.   The Germany-wide statistics on sexual violence were also sobering. An internal study by the German federal law enforcement agency, leaked to a Zurich newspaper, revealed that asylum-seekers have committed some 7,000 sexual assaults (ranging from groping to gang-rape ) between 2015 and 2023. Although they make up only 2.5 per cent of the population, asylum-seekers made up 13.1 per cent of all sexual-assault suspects in 2021.    In 2023, there were 761 gang-rapes registered in Germany — almost two per day; 47.5 per cent of the suspects were foreigners. The frequency of such crimes  — which were rare in Germany as late as the 1990s — has hovered between 600 and 800 per year for the past 7 years. The statistics go on for page after mind-numbing (or mind-boggling) page. Berlin’s police chief delivered the upshot: “Bluntly stated, our numbers show that violence in Berlin is young, male, and has a non-German background.” What is straining German law enforcement (and society) is the sheer number of young male asylum-seekers... Most of these men have no German skills, little education (a 2016 study revealed only 34 per cent could read the Latin alphabet), no experience with alcohol,  and no experience interacting with women not related to them.   They are no longer constrained by their families, and many live jammed into crowded refugee shelters. They can, however, travel freely, and watch pornography on their phones. They soon discover they can buy a bottle of grain liquor (Korn) from any corner shop for €5. With €400 in cash benefits each month, they can afford to indulge. You didn’t have to be an “Islamophobe” or “xenophobe” to see trouble on the horizon. Until recently, however, that’s what you were called if you predicted problems. In the late 2010s, the mainstream German media and political landscape united as one to endorse Chancellor Angela Merkel’s oath that “we can handle” the huge migrant influx (Wir schaffen das). A typical 2016 article in Deutsche Welle entitled “Immigration Reduces Crime” promised to explode the “myths” exploited by “populist rabble-rousers”. Now those “rabble-rousers” include leading politicians. The populist-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was the only party which opposed Merkel’s open-door policy, which had the effect of tripling its support in mere months. It has now become the second-largest party in Germany as the centre-left fades. On immigration at least, the AfD’s arguments fall on fertile soil: German immigration policies have been far to the left of majority sentiment for years. A 2017 survey by Chatham House, for instance, found 53 per cent of Germans wanted to stop all immigration from Muslim countries. Polls conducted before the recent European elections — in which Germany’s ruling “traffic light” (red-green-yellow) coalition was hammered — showed that Germans’ top concern (74 per cent) was that “crime will increase significantly” (a 22 per cent increase from 2019). 61 per cent feared “Islam will become too strong in Germany” (a 14 per cent increase). In 2017, a poll found 23 per cent of Germans felt “unsafe” in public spaces. By 2024, the figure had nearly doubled to 40 per cent, with 43 per cent of women agreeing. Legendary German midfielder Toni Kroos, a Real Madrid star for the last 10 years, said he lets his teenage daughter roam free in Spain, but would now have doubts about letting her stay out late in a large German city because Germany is “not the same place it was 10 years ago.”... political paralysis and bureaucratic inertia keep current policy frozen in place: In 2023, Germany granted 200,100 people(including 75,000 Syrians) citizenship.  Most Germans are frustrated by this chasm between what they want and what their government is willing to do. However, they can only lodge a protest vote for the AfD or a splinter party. The German Constitution essentially bans referendums and even no-confidence votes, and centre-right parties insist they will not collaborate with the AfD(for now). Germans will thus have to wait until September 2025 for national elections, which will likely install a centrist coalition which will be unable or unwilling to adopt major reforms. Meanwhile, alarming crime numbers will keep being published –or leaked. A deep desire for stability is encoded in the DNA of post-war Germany, but the next few years will see it tested to its limit."
Damn far right extremists! Time to jail them. And "tabloids" need to be regulated to stop them from publishing "far right" "misinformation"
Left wing logic: the majority of criminals aren't foreigners, so talking about foreigners committing crimes is xenophobic misinformation

French report warns of Islamist 'entryism' as risk to national cohesion - "Islamists are infiltrating France's republican institutions and are a threat to national cohesion, according to a report presented to President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday.  The report, drawn up by two senior civil servants, claims to find evidence for a policy of "entryism" by the Muslim Brotherhood into public bodies like schools and local government... Secularism is a core tenet of France's national identity.  According to an Élysée official speaking off the record, there is a "new phenomenon - entryism - which is different from separatism".  While separatism implied Muslims living in a parallel society in France, "entryism means getting involved in republican infrastructure… in order to change it from the inside. It requires dissimulation… and it works from the bottom up," the official said.  In a copy of the report published in Le Figaro newspaper, the authors identified the Federation of Muslims of France (FMF) as the main French emanation of the historic Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded 100 years ago to promote a return to core Islamic values. They said the FMF controlled 139 places of worship in France, with a further 68 affiliated – in all around 7% of the total. The organisation also ran some 280 associations, in sports, education, charity and other fields, as well as 21 schools.  The aim of the movement was to set up "ecosystems at local level" to "structure the lives of Muslims from birth till death".  "[The movement's] officials, who are hardened activists, enter into a relationship with the local authority… Social norms – the veil, beards, dress, fasting - are gradually imposed as the ecosystem solidifies," the authors write.  "What happens is that religious practice become stricter, with a high level of girls wearing the abaya (long robe) and a massive and visible increase in the number of young girls wearing Islamic headscarves. Some are as young as five or six."... The report's authors, who visited 10 different regions of France and four other European countries, concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood was losing influence in the Middle East and North Africa, and so was targeting Europe, backed by money from Turkey and Qatar."
Damn racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia! Dual loyalty is a far right conspiracy theory and misinformation!

79% of people arrested for crimes in Barcelona are immigrants. 60% of prison inmates in Spain younger than 22 are immigrants. Solution? Censorship, of course! : r/europe_sub

Man Who Killed French Doctor ‘For Allah’ Ruled Not Criminally Responsible - "Just three years ago, in Marseille, a young 40-year-old military doctor, Alban Gervaise, was brutally murdered by Mohammed—“in the name of Allah”—in front of his children’s school. There was no minute of silence or national tribute for him. His widow has just learned with horror that her husband’s murderer will not be tried because he has been deemed “mentally unfit to stand trial.”...   The brutal murder of Alban Gervaise did not interest the media. A few rare media outlets reported the death of this man “wounded in the throat”—they preferred not to mention that his throat had been slit. A Catholic, a soldier, a husband, and a father, Alban Gervaise was not entitled to a public tribute. The military claimed that his wife had refused to publicise the case, which she vehemently denied. But the public silence surrounding the case suited many people. For Alban’s military friends, “this media silence is a second death.”   As in so many other similar cases, the psychiatric assessment of the suspect, 23-year-old Mohammed L., concluded that he was ‘completely incapable of discernment.’  From the outset, Christelle Gervaise, the doctor’s wife, was alarmed by the conditions under which the psychiatric assessment was carried out. “It is based on what the defendant says. I cannot accept that an expert report is not based on facts,” she explains, pointing out that there is no reference to the investigation file in the psychiatric report.   Very quickly, the terrorist dimension of the act was ruled out, much to the dismay of Alban Gervaise’s family and friends. “If the savage murder of my colleague, as a person, was the result of chance, I remain convinced that the choice of targeting a Catholic school to find a victim was certainly not due to chance,” a retired doctor from Laveran Military Hospital told the weekly magazine Marianne, whose view is widely shared. “There was clearly a desire to punish, to kill, to sacrifice a Christian! This has the same value as if it had happened in a church or in front of a school of another faith! To my knowledge, all the previous incidents have been classified as terrorist acts. Their impact at national and media level has been quite different.”... Since the murder, Mohammed L. has been imprisoned and then transferred to a psychiatric hospital. He was then taken to a unit for less dangerous individuals, according to Le Figaro. Two psychiatric experts will have to approve his possible release—a moment that Christelle Gervaise dreads more than anything, because she knows that he could be out in a very short time and potentially re-offend. She will not be informed of his potential release and could meet the man in the street one day or another.    She has published a poignant testimony in which she asks that one day, at least, the French state will ask for forgiveness"

Kurt Caz, YouTuber (3.42 Subscribers) who has safely vlogged in the most dangerous neighborhoods of Brazil, Venezuela, and Iraq goes to Rome and says the migrant camp and drug addict areas are “amongst the worst and most dangerous things he’s seen in the world” : r/europe_sub
Enforcing law and order would violate their human rights, and be racist and xenophobic

Meme - Jonatan Pallesen @jonatanpallesen: "Descendants of immigrants in Denmark are even more violently criminal than immigrants. We now have in our country a new, persistantly criminal group of people, and it is growing every year."

Who radicalized The Associated Press?

Who radicalized The Associated Press?

The Associated Press has morphed into a Berkeley-style left-wing rag. The key difference is that The Associated Press plays to a global audience of millions.

Take, for example, how the AP broke the news this week of the Supreme Court’s ruling against Colorado’s attempt to keep former President Trump off the ballot. The court ruled unanimously, 9-0, that Colorado had no legal authority to bar a candidate from running for federal office. A majority of the justices added that this would in fact require an act of Congress.

Yet here is how The Associated Press reported the breaking news, which was then picked up and repeated verbatim by many of the largest and most powerful publications around the globe: “Supreme Court restores Trump to the ballot, rejecting state attempts to hold him accountable for attack on Capitol in 2021.”

From the Washington Post to Le Monde, the narrative emerged: The Supreme Court had blocked a state from saving democracy. The framing is not just disingenuous. It’s outright dishonest.

It would be one thing if that were just one hacky news blurb. But there is so much more.

In 2023, for example, The Associated Press suggested Florida’s Republican governor bore responsibility for a racially motivated shooting in the state, claiming baselessly that his opposition to hyper-racialist curricula had contributed to an overall climate of murderous hatred.

Later, the AP went to bat for President Biden. It asserted that the Republican leading the investigation into Hunter Biden’s global influence-peddling scheme “has his own shell company and complicated friends.” This was an attempt to draw an absurd equivalence between Biden’s globe-spanning multi-million-dollar operation, involving Ukrainian business interests and Chinese nationals, and six acres of land partly owned by House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) through an LLC.

And let’s not forget the time Republicans objected to the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, arguing she’s too beholden to partisan zealots. In The Associated Press’s telling, the GOP was opposing her nomination because she “brings too much empathy to the job.”

It’s not remarkable that a news organization should be so slanted in its day-to-day coverage. But the AP has much wider reach than any single newspaper or news station. Its reporting is seen by millions, appearing across hundreds of newspapers and radio and television stations.

By framing news events in such flagrantly partisan terms, the AP has been keeping the public uninformed. And sadly, things get even worse when you consider the AP’s habit of officially deploying ponderous euphemisms in place of clear and concise language, usually in order to avoid reporting out potentially uncomfortable facts. 

For example, an illegal immigrant was charged last month with the murder of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Hope Riley in Athens, Ga. But according to the AP, Riley’s alleged killer isn’t a Venezuelan who illegally entered the country in 2022 and then almost immediately started committing crimes. Rather, he’s an “Athens man.” And for the AP, Riley’s murder isn’t part of a larger story involving inept state and federal law enforcement decisions, but an incident highlighting “the fears of solo female athletes.” 

That story, by the way, also referenced Mollie Tibbets, who was murdered in 2018 after she went for a run in Brooklyn, Iowa. Amazingly, there is no mention in that story of the fact that Tibbets was also stabbed to death by an illegal immigrant. 

The AP’s reluctance to use straightforward language or give honest coverage to the issues surrounding illegal immigration and crime likely stems from the newswire’s self-impeding decision in 2013 to stop talking about the very real national issue of “illegal immigrants” altogether. The reasoning at the time was that the word “illegal” should apply only to actions, not people. As it turns out, however, immigration is an action that some people perform illegally. If you make it harder for yourself to communicate clearly about national news topics by limiting your own vocabulary, the gaps will eventually be reflected in your coverage.

Also, while we’re on the topic of the AP’s tortured relationship with language, let’s not forget that it instructed its staffers in 2021 not to use the word “crisis” to describe the crisis at the U.S. border. Notably, before the wire service handed down its directive, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had reported a monthly record of 100,441 encounters with migrants (including apprehensions plus crossings of undocumented immigrants at legal ports of entry). Also, at the time of the directive, CBP was recording an average of 5,000 undocumented immigrants per day. 

Even more interestingly, two years before the AP’s “crisis” memo went out, at a time when the situation was far less dire, the newswire had published a fact-check that included the following line: “Few would argue that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding.” What had changed? Well, we had a new president, that’s what.

Worse than the clunky euphemisms and partisan framing are the falsehoods the AP publishes, and the fact that its willingness to tell a straight story seems to depend on who is the subject of the coverage. For example, in 2014, it reported that a mass grave containing the remains of nearly 800 orphans had been discovered in Ireland, near a former Catholic-owned home for children of unwed mothers. The report alleged abuse, child neglect, mismanagement and a campaign of silence. The report also claimed that the Catholic Church’s practice at the time was to deny baptism to bastard children.

The AP later had to publish a lengthy correction noting, among other things, that many of the children were baptized, that it has never been Catholic teaching to deny baptism to illegitimate children and that the 800 figure was entirely based on conjecture, not on any factual discovery. The AP didn’t even get the date of the orphanage’s opening correct.

Last October, The Associated Press published a shocking report under the headline, “Hamas says Israeli airstrike on Gaza hospital kills hundreds as Biden heads to Mideast.” Very little of it turned out to be true. The hospital itself was not hit, but its parking lot; it was not struck by an “Israeli airstrike” but by an errant Palestinian rocket; and “hundreds” were not killed — the figure is believed to have been between 50 and 100. Other than all that, solid journalism.

In all seriousness, though, what happened to The Associated Press? When did it turn into this? It didn’t happen overnight.

In 2015, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the removal of advertisements for the Amazon video series “The Man in the High Castle” from a New York City subway, sparking a significant debate around First Amendment rights. The governor’s office believed that the ads, which featured Nazi symbols, were offensive, leading to a discussion about a governor overstepping his bounds and the rights of free speech and private businesses. 

Oddly, the AP’s brief write-up of the incident did not mention the governor’s direct involvement until the final paragraph. This detail could have significantly altered readers’ perception of the event. Or so I thought at the time.

When I asked the AP’s then-spokesman, Paul Colford, about this decision to bury the lede, he did not answer my query. Instead, he directly emailed the editor-in-chief of the publication where I was working, complaining bitterly that I had had the nerve to notice his organization’s befuddling editorial decision.

The Associated Press’s failure to recognize that it had underreported its own story, and its official spokesman’s clumsy attempt at retaliation, were probably small signs of worse things to come.

 

Fact checkers are to push the left wing agenda, not ensure that the media reports accurately 

Links - 13th September 2025 (1 - Charlie Kirk Assassination)

Meme - Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11: "Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elan Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump. In California, activists are naming ballot measures after Luigi Mangione. The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response. This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb."
"Figure 1: Justification for Murder of Elon Musk and Donald Trump
Percent Who Say Destroying Tesla Dealerships is Partially Acceptable"

Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk shot dead in 'political assassination'

Thread by @wokal_distance on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The Radical Left has used political violence to advance their cause for decades. What's new is the progressive left's professional class building a permission structure to justify the use of political violence It's called Assassination Culture, and we need to talk about it 🧵
To understand what's happening, you need to understand that the line between progressive-left professional class and radical left has been blurred. The extremist radical left and the socially progressive "bluesky left" are increasingly intertwined both socially and politically. This is because many of the extremist radical from the 60's and 70' who advocated for, and participated in, the use of political violence have been welcomed into the mainstream institutions that are run by the progressive left professional class. Let's look at examples:
In 1974 a terrorist group called The Whether Underground released a paper arguing directly for armed struggle, and then carried out 25 bombings. One of the groups founders, Bill Ayers, became a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and worked with Barack Obama. Another founder, Bernadine Dohrn, went to prison before ending up as a law professor at Northwestern University. Jeff Jones, also part of The Weather Underground, ended up as a reporter, and then as a consultant working in a mainstream environmental non-profit organization.
Notice the pattern here: Radical leftists who engaged in political violence are integrated and assimilated into mainstream social institutions run by the progressive left's professional class. Let's take a loot at a few more examples so we can see how widespread this is
Susan Rosenberg joined the May 19th Communist Organization (which bombed the United States the Capitol building in 1983). She was convicted in 1984 for illegal possession of firearms and explosives. She sat on the board of the parent organization for Black Lives Matter. Rasmea Odeh was a convicted terrorist who admitted bombing an Israeli supermarket back in 1969, killing 2 civilians (see pic ). She helped found "The Women's March," and co-wrote a manifesto that got published in national outlets to great applause. (pic 3)
It is common knowledge in Academic circles that Marxists, communists, and radical leftists are welcomed into Universities and often end up in positions of power and influence. Isaac Gottesman says this explicitly in his book "The Critical Turn in Education." The institutions which are staffed and run by Progressive leftists, and which credential the professional class, have spent decades welcoming radical leftists with extremist views. The result is that those extreme views are spreading through the leftist professional class.
The result has been entire disciplines have been developed in Universities which are dedicated to studying and developing radical leftist critiques of society and it's institutions. Post-colonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Theory are just three examples. Additionally, the radical leftists have taken over the education colleges, so now almost all of Americas teachers are trained to bring radical leftist politics into the classroom... This entire process repeats itself across the credentialing institutions of the professional managerial classes. The result of this is that the extremist politics of the radical left are being normalized across the institutions and of the progressive left. This radicalization can be seen on bluesky, where radicalized members of the progressive leftist professional class tend to congregate. There you can see lawyers, doctors, teachers, and journalists post political thinking that sounds just like "The Weather Underground."
The result of this has been that the professional disciplines end up sympathizing with the causes of people who assassinate CEO's, and making them out to sympathetic figures (or even outright martyrs) for whatever leftist cause is at hand. By lowering the social opprobrium and disapproval directed towards those who kill CEO's or engage in other forms of violence, they end up destroying the stigma associated with violent crime, and thus encouraging anti-social people to engage in such violence. The fact that political violence against the right is not against the norms of the professional left and the fact that they sympathize with those who engage in political violence, creates a permission structure which allows them to justify violence against conservatives. The result of this is the "assassination culture" which Charlie Kirk was talking about in the post I quoted to start this thread. This is a huge problem, and we need to do something about it. Now."

UBERSOY on X - "The House of Representatives attempts to hold a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk but the Democrats protest"

Matt Walsh on X - "All that Charlie ever did was have conversations with people. He didn’t insult anyone. He made arguments. He debated. He wasn’t an extremist in any way. Everyone who knew Charlie personally loved him. That’s the kind of guy he was. And they still killed him. I am furious and heartbroken in equal measure. I cannot put into words how I feel. Maybe that is for the best."

Wall Street Apes on X - "Are you f*cking kidding me Illinois Governor Governor JB Pritzker literally just blamed Donald Trump for Charlie Kirk being shot and killed “I think the President’s rhetoric often foments it” (Political violence)"

Matt Walsh on X - "I see all the posts of vile piece of shit leftists celebrating Charlie’s death. I’m disgusted by it. But also I see it as a great tribute to Charlie’s life and work. May we all be so successful and effective that our enemies celebrate when we die. May we all be so devastating to the Leftist project that they pray to their demon gods for our demise."

UBERSOY on X - "Destiny urged the Democrats not to disavow Charlie Kirk’s assassin, otherwise they are weak and cucked. You don’t hate them enough."

Thread by @wanyeburkett on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is the kind of stuff that nudged me rightward way back in the days of the gay marriage debate. I knew these people — good people, husbands, fathers, people who really didn’t cause trouble, people who had jobs, were contributing members of society — and my liberal friends thought that they were just total trash, completely reprehensible pieces of shit, useless waste of space…because they disagreed about gay marriage. And I just thought, you know, no. That cannot be right. These people, the people saying this about Charlie Kirk right now, are just so obviously worse for society in every way then somebody who opposes gay marriage. These people create a far worse society than one in which gay marriage is still illegal. You would much rather live in a society with no gay marriage than one in which these people had political power. This is just so totally obvious to me."

William Wolfe 🇺🇸 on X - "This gets even worse when you consider that Charlie Kirk—more than anyone else in America on the right or the left—built his platform making a good faith effort to model civil poltical discourse and debate in the public square. His entire project was built on reaching across the divide and using speech, not violence, to address and resolve the issues!"
JD Vance on X - "This is such a good point. If you actually watch Charlie’s events—as opposed to the fake summaries—they are one of the few places with open and honest dialogue between left and right. He would answer any question and talk to everyone."
Dani on X - "When one of the smug, bratty college students would ask him why he was on campus, he said, many times, something to the effect of: "Because when you stop talking, that's when wars start. I'm trying to remind everyone how to have civil disagreements""

Meme - Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok: "The Simsbury, Connecticut Democrat Party just posted this. Believe them when they tell you who they are"
simsburydems.bsky.social: "Charlie Kirk who advocates for guns everywhere, got exactly what he deserves."

Charlie Kirk was shot : r/Jordan_Peterson_Memes - "Just got banned from r/pics for correcting them that he was straight up murdered, not 'attacked'"

MSNBC Apologizes For Matthew Dowd's "Insensitive" Comments On Charlie Kirk Assassination - "The president of MSNBC has apologized for remarks made by political analyst Matthew Dowd during the network’s coverage of the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk... Appearing on “Katy Tur Reports,” Dowd was asked by host Katy Tur to discuss the environment surrounding the shooting. Dowd began by cautioning that the full details of the incident were not yet known, stating, “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration or, so we have no idea about this.” He then continued, “But following up with what was just said, he’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” Following Dowd’s comments, Tur went on to connect the incident to past political responses. She referenced a previous alleged attack on an employee of the Department of General Services (DOGE) in Washington D.C., which she claimed President Donald Trump used as justification to send federal troops into the city. Tur then speculated that the current administration might use the shooting as a similar justification, stating, “you can imagine the administration using this as a justification for something.”... In a statement released Wednesday night, MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler addressed Dowd’s remarks directly. “During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable,” Kutler said. “We apologize for his statements, as has he. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.”"
MSNBC Fires Matthew Dowd After Charlie Kirk Assassination Comments - Newsweek

Ian Miles Cheong on X - "MSNBC says Charlie Kirk had it coming: “You can’t stop with these awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place”"
Disagreeing with the left wing agenda makes you "awful"

Zack on X - "Anyone surprised at what happened to Charlie Kirk hasn't been paying attention. Go anywhere, reddit, Twitter, ect, and you'll find thousands of unhinged direct calls to violence over politics. Until it's addressed for what it is, things like this will continue to happen"

Andy Ngo on X - "Celebatory reactions from liberals (not the far-left) to the shooting of Charlie Kirk on @Reuters's Facebook post about the incident."
The side of "empathy", "kindness" and "being a decent human being"

Meme - Colin Wright @SwipeWright: "Popular transgender "journalist" @ErinInTheMorn has repeatedly spread lies about Charlie Kirk, saying that he "calls for anti-trans violence." Yet when you watch the actual interview, he says no such thing. Spreading this kind of genocidal rhetoric is dangerous."
"Erin In The Morning. This Must Stop: TPUSA's Charlie Kirk Calls For Anti-Trans Violence "Like In The 50s/60s""

Charlie Kirk’s killing: The Left has fanned the flames of political violence - "Just consider the obscene reaction to his killing. As footage of Kirk’s assassination circulated – a sudden gout of blood punctuating a comment on gang violence – the ghouls crawled out. One MSNBC commentator appeared to blame Kirk’s “hate speech” and “divisive” behaviour, suggesting that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which then lead to hateful actions”. The governor of Illinois gave the impression of blaming Trump. Do you get it? Kirk brought this on himself. If he’d just behaved. If he’d just got with the programme. It could hardly have been more tone-deaf. And it could hardly have been a better summary of the moral abyss now occupied by America’s so-called progressives... Kirk was a man who gave talks on campuses, who sought to challenge groupthink and open minds. Perhaps I’m wrong, but that seems new. And it’s terrifying. A political assassination targeted at a speaker, used to silence, used to intimidate. And the groundwork is in place for it to happen again. And whatever the precise motive of Kirk’s killer turns out to be, it’s fair to point out that much of the responsibility for the legitimisation of this sort of violence lies with the Left. It’s spent decades making politics a matter of identity, carving up votes based on who people are rather than what they believe, agitating on race, on belief, on sexuality, inflaming tensions freely to stir up the base. Disagreement is “violence” against “bodies”. The other side winning means you are “erased”. You are called to punch Nazis, kill Terfs, bash the fash. Their words are violence; respond with violence... Democratic politicians had talked of their base’s desire for “blood to grab the attention of the press”, to “fight” in a show of force. Almost every incident has been used to inflame, to whip up fear and hatred of Republicans and the Right, to shatter the fragile consensus upon which American politics is built in order to create a true friend-enemy distinction. It has succeeded. Left-wing politics has slipped seamlessly back into an old tradition of direct action. Online, they harass, dogpile, insult and threaten. Offline, they turn out on the streets to protest. They seized on the death of George Floyd to burn and loot. They act as a permanent heckler’s veto, shutting events, raising security bills, cowing people into silence while their speakers continue to broadcast. They must know the risks. They must know that when they talk about white people being evil oppressors, that Trump will destroy your family, that their most unhinged followers are listening. They must know how the smirking jokes about gulags and guillotines will be taken, how the stone-faced warnings of catastrophic defeat and the death of America will land. “Charlie was the best of America, and the monster who attacked him was attacking our whole country,” said Trump on Wednesday night. But when swathes of the Left began celebrating Kirk’s murder on their favoured social media platforms almost immediately, it’s a chilling reminder that not everyone agrees."
Speech the left hates is violence. Violence the left loves is speech

Charlie Kirk’s assassination serves as a chilling warning to Britain’s intolerant Left - "There are people who will celebrate the murder of a father of two young children and still think themselves on the side of the angels... This is pure malevolence, dressed up in the form of chirpy memes and TikTok videos catapulted into the moral vacuum in which parts of the Left now operate. It is disgusting... While we do not yet know the motivations of the killer, what has disturbed me so much about Kirk’s murder and the reaction to it is how it shines a light on the absolute aversion so many people have to any notion of debate or disagreement. Kirk has been dismissed as some kind of Hitler – as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are also lazily described by their critics. To the strand of the Left that cannot tolerate any dissent from their ideology, he was a white supremacist and a defender of Israel and therefore it’s a good thing that he’s been killed. So many so-called Antifa – self-declared anti-fascists – appear to prefer violence to debate. If this is the case then we are truly lost. For, unlike them, Kirk did believe in the exchange of ideas and toured campuses in the US and UK proving just that. As we now know, that was at great risk to himself. The truth is that anyone who wants to debate or challenge Left-wing orthodoxy in Britain also faces risks, from losing their jobs to constant verbal abuse and serious physical threats. Women who are deemed “gender critical” receive threats of assault, rape and death. That has been my life for more than 10 years. We have not been protected by the police or by parties of the Left. The brave MP Rosie Duffield, for instance, was warned not to go to the Labour Party conference because of such threats. Kathleen Stock had to attend debates with bodyguards. The new parties of the hard-Left, the Greens and the Corbyn/Sultana effort, will not accept women members unless they agree that some men (those born male and who now claim to be female) are in fact women. This is the level of intolerance we have now reached. In 2019, David Lammy, who is now Deputy Prime Minister, tweeted (in a post that remains online to this day) that the Tories had transformed “from a centre-Right, economically conservative party to one that openly promotes hard-Right, xenophobic bile”. That sort of rhetoric is hardly befitting of a mainstream politician. On the contrary, it is incredibly dangerous. More broadly, trans activists genuinely adopted the slogan “no debate” to explicitly insist that their views could not be challenged. Then we had the ludicrous notion that words (at least, those that contradict the views of the Left-wing morality police) themselves are violence. Repeatedly we are told that if we don’t go along with gender-identity theory we are denying the existence of trans people. There has been an unravelling of both reality and plurality that has been cheered on by those who paint themselves as kind and virtuous. Free speech has been imperilled. Authoritarianism rules. There is an ever-growing fault line, which is not easily definable as Left or Right, between those who believe in freedom of expression and those who don’t. This is a very dark time. The worrying fact is that, if society suppresses political differences or debate, then political violence follows. As George Bernard Shaw said: “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship”. Ultimately those attempting to use violence to shut out the views of people like Kirk will never achieve their aims. But I fear, when people who purport to deplore violence go on social media to justify murder, a point has been reached from which we, as a society, can never return. This is fascism in action."

Oxford Union president who debated Charlie Kirk appears to celebrate his killing - "George Abaraonye shared comments after Kirk, the free-speech advocate and key Donald Trump ally, was fatally shot at Utah Valley University as he discussed mass shootings committed by trans people. In messages seen by The Telegraph, Mr Abaraonye posted: “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f------ go” – a common celebratory phrase among Gen Z. Another message, believed to be on the student’s Instagram account, stated “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”, an exaggeration of the abbreviation “laughing out loud”.

Liberals cheered when Charlie Kirk was shot, witness claims - "Mariah Petersen, 18, said she was standing around 30ft from Kirk when he was hit by the shooter’s bullet as he spoke to an audience at Utah Valley University on Wednesday afternoon. Ms Petersen, who is studying psychology, told The Telegraph that before the Turning Point USA event started there had been “a lot of back and forth” between a group of “strong, Left-leaning Democrats” and members of the audience. “When he was shot, there were cheers from the balcony [behind Kirk],” she said. “It was horrific to be a part of. There was just no human empathy.” She said she was worried the horror of Kirk’s death would make universities more apprehensive about inviting conservative speakers to college campuses... the celebrity and entertainment news site TMZ issued an apology after staff were heard laughing during livestream coverage of the killing of Kirk... In the House of Representatives there was an outbreak of shouting amid calls for a prayer for Kirk. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson led a moment of silence on the House floor on Wednesday, but Representative Lauren Boebert said: “Silent prayers get silent results.” Democrats then shouted “what about the kids in Colorado” in reference to an incident where several students were injured at a shooting at Evergreen High School earlier that day... Activist Laura Loomer, a staunch supporter of Mr Trump, claimed on X that a member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) had been placed on administrative leave after making comments celebrating Kirk’s death. There was no immediate response to inquiries from the department of homeland security. Ms Loomer has a track record of forcing the ousting of a number of officials she has deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. In a statement, a Fema spokesman confirmed that a member of staff had been placed on administrative leave for words considered “revolting and unconscionable”... In the United Kingdom, Fiona Wild, an independent councillor in Burnley, Lancashire, resigned after posting: “I don’t condone violence, but I do think he made himself a target and brought this on himself so good riddance to not a very nice man.”"

Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point accuses Lammy of fuelling political violence - "A pressure group founded by an assassinated Maga influencer accused David Lammy of “fuelling violent rhetoric” against Right-wing figures... The expansion of Turning Point’s UK branches in 2019 was met with praise from Conservative MPs, but Mr Lammy described the group as “hard-Right, xenophobic bile”. Reacting to the celebration of the youth group by the Conservatives, Mr Lammy wrote in a post on X: “The transformation of the Tories from a centre-Right economically conservative party to one that openly promotes hard-Right, xenophobic bile in just a few years shows what happens when you appease. “We should fight for our values on Brexit and immigration.” Responding to Sir Keir Starmer’s statement condemning “political violence” after the assassination, Turning Point UK said: “Your Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, described us and Charlie as ‘sinister forces’ and ‘xenophobic’. “Other Labour MPs have protested with violent far-Left activists who attacked us. “The language your party and the wider Left uses to describe people like Charlie and us is the reason why we face this violence. Shame on you.”... Last year, Mr Lammy refused to say whether he was wrong to call Mr Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” and a “tyrant in a toupée” in a Time magazine article in 2018."

The Left is celebrating Charlie Kirk’s killing. Democracy’s foundations are crumbling - "Even before this tragic event, opinion polls have shown younger voters shifting sharply away from the Democratic Party and toward Republican and Independent affiliation. They are also voting with their feet, leaving progressive “Blue” states by the millions for conservative “Red” ones. They are flocking South for college, too, having watched the suppression of alternative views in the Ivy League and beyond. How did Charlie Kirk inspire his followers? Not with vitriol or name-calling, but with engagement. His points were strong and clear, but they were not personal attacks. He often made them on college campuses, like the one in Utah where he was murdered. Instead of making speeches and long harangues, Kirk took questions, often hostile ones. He responded to students with a rare combination of coherence and courtesy, avoiding ad hominem attacks. That is where Kirk was killed, doing what he lived for: demonstrating the crucial importance of free speech in a democracy, especially one so deeply riven by partisan and ideological mistrust. His goal was to persuade his audience, not to demean or denigrate his questioners, not to distort their views so he could defeat “strawmen”. In that respect, he was closer to our ideal of a good teacher than many in universities and high schools, the ones who have turned literature classes into indoctrination sessions and repelled so many young people. Kirk’s assassination comes a little over a year after Donald Trump was nearly killed at a political rally in Pennsylvania, followed by yet another close call from a potential assassin on Trump’s golf course in Florida... These assassination attempts come amid increasingly harsh partisan rhetoric. Long gone are the days when adversaries were called “the loyal opposition”. Today, the common term for those adversaries is “a fundamental threat to democracy”. In that chilling context, violence is often justified, either explicitly or implicitly, as somehow protecting democracy, not undermining it. Both sides claim the other does it. And both are right. The other disturbing context is unchecked urban violence, with some criminals grasping for money and control of the streets, others seeking to make political points. The violence by youth gangs and criminal cartels is apolitical – at least in intent – but their actions have political consequences since Left-wing mayors and police departments have done so little to stop them. Like-minded prosecutors downgrade the criminal charges or drop them entirely. Local judges do the same thing. Since so many of the gang members are young, minority males, the lax treatment is defended as “social justice”. Since the cartels are filled with illegal immigrants, the lax treatment is defended as protecting all immigrants. The predictable result is more crime and predation, with the worst impact in the poorest neighbourhoods. There has also been more explicitly political violence in some big cities, with repeated attacks on US federal buildings led by organised gangs like Antifa. Those attacks ramped up after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and have continued ever since in a few cities. In some, notably Portland, Oregon, the police are nowhere to be found. They simply refuse to intervene or arrest the perpetrators. The most predictable results are repeated violence, public revulsion at the disorder (especially on downtown streets, where homeless encampments are also a problem), and partisan efforts to capitalise on the divide, with progressives defending “social justice” and conservatives demanding “law and order”. Restoring public safety, they argue, is the first responsibility of any government, local or national. Donald Trump has been especially effective at grasping the issue, highlighting both local crime and illegal immigration. These are lopsided “80-20” issues, and the president capitalises on them immediately and instinctively. His secret power is his ability to lock-in Democrats on the losing side. Trump knows the opposition party, now led by its Left-wing base, will lineup on the other side of every issue and punish moderates who beg to differ. Democrats can’t escape, lest they be seen as allying with Trump. That’s the position the Left now also faces after Charlie Kirk’s assassination"

Friday, September 12, 2025

Links - 12th September 2025 (2 - Left Wing Economics [including Supply Management])

U.K. walks away from trade talks with Canada - "British negotiators walked away from trade talks with Canada Thursday — a dramatic development that taps the brakes on a bilateral trade deal between the two Commonwealth nations that has been years in the making. A major sticking point between the two sides remains how much tariff-free access U.K. producers should have to the Canadian cheese market... In the aftermath of the renegotiation of the former North American Free Trade Agreement, which saw changes to supply-managed sectors, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised dairy farmers that no more slices of Canada's domestic market would be served up to exporters in future negotiations."
From 2024. Time to blame the British Tories

Ontario Dairy Farmer FORCED to dump 30,000 litres of milk because he went over quota according to the Dairy Cartel. : r/Ontario_Sub - "Supply management prevents the taxpayer from subsidizing the dairy industry, while keeping prices stable.  Look at the US if you want to see what happens when you take supply management out."
Left wingers don't understand that taxpayers paying more for a product is a subsidy

Ontario Dairy Farmer FORCED to dump 30,000 litres of milk because he went over quota according to the Dairy Cartel : r/CanadianConservative - "  Again. Supply Management does NOT control food quality. It controls the amount that can be produced.  Supply management actually prevents NEW farms that want to produce more organic/natural"
People hate the US so much they don't realise you can regulate what is allowed without tariffs/bans on imports

Ontario Dairy Farmer FORCED to dump 30,000 litres of milk because he went over quota according to the Dairy Cartel : r/CanadianConservative - "Less than 10% of US milk comes from cows treated with BST. Every gallon of milk you can find (even cheap store brands) specifically says that it comes from cows not treated with rBST.  Regardless, you can regulate the quality of milk without artificially restricting the supply."

Ontario Dairy Farmer FORCED to dump 30,000 litres of milk because he went over quota according to the Dairy Cartel : r/CanadianConservative - "Or you know, we can export our milk and dairy products which our cartel always says is superior to the American stuff."
"Milk expires. Only way processors are going to process the overproduced raw milk is when it’s sold to them at a loss to the farmer and then they still take a chance on having it sold in time. not sustainable for long in my opinion."
"Firstly milk can make it to the States in very reasonable time, this is not a large distance considering most of the population is close to the border. It only takes a couple of hours depending on the location, we are not talking about anything more than a day and that is generous. Secondly the vast majority of exports would likely be other dairy products like cheese, butter, yogurt etc. things that have longer shelf lives. This is a far better alternative than just throwing surplus milk away."
The same people who claim US products need to be banned because of poor quality and health problems (even though growth hormones can be found in Canadian beef) have no faith that US consumers want the protected goods

“Eggs Are Still Affordable in Canada. Thank Supply Management” : r/WildRoseCountry - "By affordable, we mean the most expensive in the world:
https://www.policyschool.ca/canada-tops-world-rankings-milk-prices/
https://secondstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Policy-Brief-%E2%80%93-Supply-Management-Final.pdf"
I saw a left winger lie about milk being cheaper in Canada than in New Zealand, and that it was thanks to supply management

Bruce on X - "In Canada we can get marijuana from stores and crack pipes from vending machines. Sell eggs and you get SWAT teams sent to your door."
Small-scale Alberta egg farmer arrested for selling eggs outside quota systems
Time to hate on US eggs again and pretend that supply management doesn't raise costs and it's all the fault of "greedy" grocery chains

Canada’s dairy farms dump 7 per cent of all milk produced, study contends - The Globe and Mail - "In a paper recently published in the Ecological Economics journal, the authors teamed up to calculate how much milk dairy farmers dispose of. They determined that more than 6.8 billion litres of raw milk – and possibly as much as 10 billion litres – disappeared from Canadian farms between 2012 and 2021, worth at least $6.7-billion.  “If you’re wasting 7 per cent of the milk you produce, well, logically, you can only come to the conclusion that milk is too expensive in Canada,” Sylvain Charlebois, a Dalhousie University professor and one of the study’s authors, said in an interview... The dumped milk results in excess greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 350,000 passenger vehicles annually, and needlessly pollutes soil, air and water, according to the paper, published last month. To grow feed for the cows and care for them, between 920 and 1,900 square kilometres of farmland are required, and huge volumes of water.  Prof. Charlebois said the paper’s authors, who include professors Thomas Elliot from Denmark’s Aalborg University and Benjamin Goldstein from the University of Michigan, assembled last year after an Ontario dairy farmer filmed himself dumping 30,000 litres of milk, which went viral after he published it. They met in Montreal to discuss how to determine the extent of the waste, which they said had never before been revealed by the industry or government... “Boards will call farmers at the end of the month and say there’s a surplus because there’s too much production in the system, or demand has shifted,” Prof. Charlebois explained. “And so they’ll ask a bunch of farmers to dump. It’s a common practice.”  A Senate committee is considering a private member’s bill, known as C-282, which would grant significant new protections to the dairy industry. Passed by the House of Commons in June, 2023, it would prohibit the federal government from granting greater foreign access to Canada’s supply managed agriculture sectors, including dairy, eggs and poultry."

Tasha Kheiriddin: Carney will have no choice but to kill supply management - "the system that protects Canadian dairy, poultry and egg industries from foreign competition through quotas and tariffs, including Trump’s favourite bugaboo, a 200-plus per cent markup on U.S. dairy products... In our country, unfortunately, it has become a hill on which political careers go to die. Case in point: People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier, whose ambition to lead the Conservative party in 2017 was thwarted by the Quebec dairy lobby after he promised to ditch the policy. And the sacred cow lives on: in June, the House of Commons and Senate passed a Bloc Québécois bill with all-party support to prevent bargaining supply management away. Carney knows that he owes his recent election victory in large part to Quebec voters — and with a minority, needs the support of opposition parties like the Bloc to stay in power. But if Canada wants a serious trade deal with a Trump White House, supply management will have to go. Not just for the sake of negotiations, but because it’s a cartel policy that has had its day. The economic case against supply management is straightforward. A study by the Montreal Economic Institute estimates that by limiting Canadian production, the average family pays hundreds more annually for milk, cheese and eggs, compared to countries without such a quota system. The MacDonald Laurier Institute found that these inflated prices protect a tiny number of producers, mostly large, established farms with valuable quotas, at the expense of millions of Canadians and would-be producers who can’t afford to break into the market. It’s the worst kind of protectionism: one that punishes the poor, rewards the entrenched and chokes competition. Carney faces the same dilemma as Bernier, in reverse: will he let trade dreams die on this hill? Will he jeopardize our steel, aluminum and auto sectors, as well as deals for critical minerals, for a policy that makes it harder for Canadian families to afford milk for their kids?"
The same people who denounce Trump's tariffs love supply management, because they hate the US and want to ban their products

Quebec's dairy farmers are blocking free trade in Canada - "In Canada, small, inefficient Quebec-based dairy operations are the primary beneficiaries of the antiquated mid-20th-century supply management strategy that remains in force north of the border.  This system once served an economic purpose. In the 1960s and 1970s, agricultural supply chains differed greatly from today. A lack of international trade rules and frequent use of tariffs significantly and adversely impacted the agricultural industry. At this time, governments around the world legislated to control production, seeking to stabilize domestic prices and farm income for some agricultural sectors—specifically the production of dairy, egg, and poultry products.   Over the past 50 years, supply chains have become more efficient and resilient, enabling countries to scale back or even eliminate these practices. Canada, however, has consistently failed to remove these mechanisms. For political reasons, everyone else is paying the price—and it’s costly.  When governments control production levels, they create incredible industry inefficiencies. Supply-managed sectors provide clear evidence of this. For example, an estimated $11 billion worth of raw milk was simply dumped onto the ground and wasted in Canada between 2012 and 2024 in order to avoid exceeding production quotas.  There are just over 4,200 dairy operations in Quebec out of 9,400 nationally. The objectives of supply management focus on protecting these 4,200 operations at the cost of the other 190,000 Canadian farmers, as well as Canada’s 40 million citizens...   The American dairy sector shows there’s a different path that Canada could follow. Dairy production efficiency in the United States has resulted in Idaho and Wisconsin being the second- and third-largest milk-producing states. Supply chain logistics allow for the transportation of dairy products to reach markets across the U.S. In Canada, market concentration would likely shift to more efficient producers in the western provinces if supply management were to end.  Not only would this contribute to lower dairy prices for all Canadian consumers, but it would also make a difference for Canada on the world stage by boosting the country’s position in international trade negotiations. As long as the system remains in place, it will be an irritant.  In all of its trade negotiations over the past decade, Canada has been required to grant concessions and allow greater volumes of tariff-free imports. In 2015, when negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Canada was forced to make concessions on dairy products worth 3.25 percent. It made further concessions during the 2016 negotiating process of its free trade deal with Europe, and again in the negotiations leading to the 2020 Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). As concessions were made, Ottawa provided billions to domestic dairy producers to compensate them for increased competition, further supporting the sector’s inefficiencies...   This unwillingness to drop the outdated system leaves Canada at significant risk of never negotiating another international trade agreement due to its adherence to preserving supply management.  Yet, the domestic politics that preserve the system persist."

Although dairy operations in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba are more than twice as large as those in Quebec, the government restricts milk production in the three western provinces to 16% of total domestic production, whereas Quebec accounts for 37%. : r/CanadianConservative - ""Supply management" never had anything to do with small dairy farms and everything to do with quebec dairy farms.  It forced all the small dairy farms in the prairies out of business. Same as the wheat board, same as apparently egg sales, etc, etc, etc.  Just the east(meaning que and ont) screwing over the prairies to their benefit. Like always since even before confederation."

Data deficits and transparency: What led to Canada's ‘buttergate’ - "During the fall of 2020, consumers began to question the consistency of Canadian butter. Many consumers expressed their dissatisfaction on social media the following winter. For months, Canadian dairy industry stakeholders debated the on-farm practices and processing of dairy products on social media. International media amplified the concerns of consumers. Though a long-held practice, the use of palm oil derivatives as feed supplements for dairy herds was questioned due to its environmental track-record... We found that higher palmitic acid and oleic acid content increased the melting points of butter. However, the culture and structure of the Canadian dairy industry is such that it’s impossible to compare against benchmarks due to large data deficiencies related to industry standards.
Misconceptions about Canadian dairy products are commonplace among Canadian consumers. Generally, the public perceives the Canadian dairy industry as idyllic, producing from cows that have been grazing in local pastures (Schuppli et al., 2014; Weary & von Keyserlingk, 2017)... Supply management is a protectionist approach to dairy production. Europe, the United Kingdom, Korea, New Zealand, and Australia all had some form of supply management policy in place but all of these programs have since been eliminated (Muirhead and Campbell, 2012; Charlebois et al., 2021)... Society has changed since the introduction of the supply manage- ment system, consumers need accountability and transparency if the dairy industry is to retain their social license to operate in Canada. Farmers face a herd-management challenge in balancing short-term economic profitability that palm oil supplements provide, with prac- tices that consumers deem untenable, such as the environmental destruction caused by the harvesting of palm oil derivatives (Khatun et al., 2017; Tan et al., 2009). Buttergate has shown that the industry cannot disregard the input of consumers. There is virtually no data linking farming practices with quality of products at retail due to the nature of production in Canada. Canada is a science-rich country; yet industry spokesmen claim that the science behind connecting feed to end-product does not exist. However, this science is performable if the industry deems it necessary. This is evident in the adoption of advanced techniques in production, as mentioned previously... the discourse or narrative of dairy farming that requires technocratic expertise is pushed here, subtly suggesting that consumers cannot comprehend the precision needed to produce milk. The disingenuous manner in which palmitic acid is referred to here is evidence of the lack of transparency of the DFC to consumers. The relationship between producers and consumers is such that consumers are not educated on common practices. The reaction of industry insiders to consumers and their advocates suggests that the industry is hostile to third-party regulation, reminiscent of other self-regulating industries of the past... though at least one provincial marketing board recognized a problem with the quality of retail dairy products (BC Milk Marketing Board, 2020), there is virtually no mechanism in place for consumers to question dairy quality... Buttergate did not take place in a vacuum. Consumers comprise an important stakeholder of the dairy industry, not only as end users but as investors. The contempt for consumers as being ignorant or for asking questions exposes not only the lack of transparency of the dairy supply chain, but the lack of political will within the industry for such transparency"
Supply management is necessary to ensure the high quality of dairy products!

Conservatives Made Gains Where Cost Of Living And Tariffs Loomed Large - "Even in Hamilton Centre, which had been represented by the NDP since 2004, the Conservative candidate won more votes than NDP incumbent Matthew Green. Liberal Aslam Rana ultimately won by about 4,000 votes.  “Pierre Poilievre, in his rage farming, tapped into a lot of people,” Green told The Maple.   “What Poilievre was able to do quite well is take all the grievances of capitalism — the homelessness, the encampments, the food banks, the cost of housing, the cost of fuel — take all the worst parts of capitalism, call it socialism, and blame the government.”  “This is a guy who is intellectually dishonest,” said Green."
Clearly, the failure of left wing policies is the fault of capitalism. Commies always work backwards to reach their their desired conclusions, and have the cheek to call everyone they disagree with intellectually dishonest

Meme - Woman comforting distraught woman: "Calling a product or service a human right doesn't magically render it immune to scarcity"

The NDP may be in even bigger trouble than we think : r/CanadianConservative - "Indeed, it just shows they don't ever have their eyes on the purse -- EVER. Not for their organization, not for the country. They can bankrupt anything."
"When in grade 9 our country school principal ran for the ndp.  I asked him what he would do if they actually got elected, his answer:  "Well, the first day we'd bankrupt the country, after that we have no idea". Lol."
"Exactly, they seem to always be of the opinion there is a magical source of revenue (often referred to as 'the rich')."

Why don't governments tax rich people more? : r/stupidquestions - "Walmart's profit margin is less than 3%. Their labor costs are ~35%. That means ten times more money goes to employees than to owners from every single sale. Walmart employees get paid what they are worth.  If Walmart gave the ENTIRE profit of the company to it's employees, each employee would get less than $8000 for the year. This would equate to ~$3.55 an hour for full-time employees. That's it. That's the entire profit of the company.  So cool, let's give every employee a $3 an hour raise, and every single Walmart will close within a few years. Poor people don't need anywhere to shop, at least leftists will feel morally superior."
"The store wouldn't close. Also companies making 15 billion a year in profit shouldn't have employees on food stamps. That's called exploitation."
"So explain how the math will work so that the company still makes a profit."
"Maybe it’s not a sustainable business model."
"Describe a way to make a sustainable nationwide distributor of inexpensive goods that are accessible to poor, rural conusmers."
"This isn't sustainable. If it was sustainable we wouldn't have to pay those employees food stamps. This is a company using capitalism for itself by forcing socialism to take care of it's employees. Aka they make money and we the people who pay taxes pay for the food for those employees. This isn't sustainable and should not be the norm."
"Sure are a lot of temporarily embarrassed millionaires here.
Half of the reason those communities are poor now is because all the jobs got driven out by places like Wal Mart."
NPCs can just repeat their lines

Aren’t co-ops expensive? - Food Shed Co-op (new) - "Co-ops strive to build community and as such are not always the lowest cost available compared to low cost chain stores which are often damaging to communities and ultimately have a higher cost to local communities"
We need coops because profits are evil and raise prices. But low cost chains are evil too, so you should pay higher prices at coops

Leading Report on X - "BREAKING: Chicago’s Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson is warning that the city’s finances are “at the point of no return” unless he gets massive tax hikes to replace dwindling revenue."
Unindicted Ham Sandwich on X - "In his defense, the last Republican Mayor of Chicago left a financial nightmare when his term ended....during the Great Depression, just 94 years ago."
Clearly, the damage left by the last Republican mayor was so bad that it has ruined the city forever

GQ Magazine on X - "“Medicare for all, TRT for all, Ozempic for all, HRT for all. That’s my argument.” — Hasan Piker"
Time to 'tax the 'rich'' to pay for the left's endless wishlist

Laurie Macfarlane on X - "Inheritance tax isn’t “theft” from those who have built a “successful life and legacy”. It is a tax on those receiving a windfall of unearned wealth. It’s not “immoral” unless you think people’s life chances should be determined not by what they do — but who their parents are."
Aetius on X - "“Oh your parents planted a tree for shade they’ll never sit under? Too bad. We need the firewood right now”"
As usual, left wingers think that inherited wealth explains eveything, and that it's unjust for parents to help their kids. No wonder it's unfair to read to your kids
No amount of tax will ever be enough for the left. Even the 100% inheritance tax Abi Wilkinson proposes will quickly be squandered on the endless left wing wishlist, then they'll want a rate higher than 100% to compensate for the supposed unfair advantages being born to rich parents gives you

Matt Walsh on X - "So my children have no right to inherit my money but some obese EBT welfare queen does have a right to inherit my money? Moral madness. Totally indefensible position."
Not to mention illegal immigrants

Comedic policy relief from Canada’s left - "The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), an Ottawa-based socialist think-tank, is Canada’s best source for policy comedy. One recent article, “Remembering Paul Martin’s disastrous 1995 federal budget,” is an absolute howler. In the 1990s, the article tells us, “Canada was under acute financial pressure to reduce the size of the federal debt.” So in 1995 Paul Martin dramatically cut spending. “These cuts were so deep that Canada eliminated the federal deficit in two short years ahead of schedule. Program spending as a proportion of GDP fell to levels not seen in decades, assisted mightily by the booming U.S. economy, the depreciation of the Canadian dollar, and upswing in tax revenues.” Deficit eliminated two years ahead of schedule! Federal spending as a proportion of GDP lower! GDP itself buoyed by a strong U.S. economy! Higher tax revenues despite lower tax rates, thanks to economic growth! What a disaster that all was — though only in socialist CCPA comedyland... The results of smaller government and freer trade, according to the CCPA: lower job growth, persistently high poverty rates, declining median incomes and downward pressure on wages. That must be more satire, for the reality was the opposite. In fact, from 1997 to 2007, Canada was first in the G7 in real GDP growth and second after the U.K. in real GDP per capita growth, enjoyed employment growth nearly double the OECD average and markedly higher than in the United States, and experienced the fastest growth in business investment of any country in the G7. The gains for those at or near the bottom of the income distribution were significant. From 1996 to 2004, the poverty rate fell from 7.8 per cent to 4.9 per cent, and the child poverty rate nearly halved, from 10.9 per cent to 5.8 per cent. After two decades without sustained progress, in 1996 real after-tax incomes for those at the 20th percentile began to ascend steadily, coinciding with declining unionization — another benefit of smaller government and freer trade. Thanks to the ahead-of-schedule deficit elimination and strong economic performance after the 1995 budget, in 2007-8 federal net debt fell to just 33 per cent of GDP, less than half its peak of over 70 per cent barely a decade earlier. Where was the disaster again? Canada’s economic outperformance against the United States after the 1995 budget dispels the myth that it was mainly a booming U.S. economy that generated our strong results... The CCPA’s purpose in recalling the 1995 budget is of course to “warn” Canadians about spending cuts by the federal Liberal government in 2025. More silliness... The claims that disaster supposedly befell Canada when Paul Martin cut spending in 1995-96, and the predictions that people will die if some time-limited spending programs at the federal department of Women and Gender Equality are allowed to expire, cannot be a surprise. If I recently received a $358,597 taxpayer contribution from the federal department of Women and Gender Equality, as CCPA did starting in 2021, I might argue the same. Thankfully, the money wasn’t a total waste. In exchange for the funding taxpayers were forced to give it, CCPA at least gave us some comedic writing in return."
Left wingers want high government spending and a big state for their own sake

Karmelo Anthony vs Shiloh Hendrix / Banning Gay Blood Donation


*Disappointed black guy*
"Black kid stabbing white kid over minor dispute"
"White woman calling Black kid N word over minor dispute"


Jeremy Kauffman 🦔🌲🌕 @jeremykauffman: "The ban on gay blood donations was completely sensible and grounded in statistics. A gay man's blood _that tests negative for HIV_ still has roughly the same odds of having HIV as a straight man's blood that wasn't tested at all. It sounds crazy, but it's true."
"We can answer this with Bayes rule
P(HIV | straight, negative test) = P(negative test | HIV) P(HIV | straight) / P(negative test | straight)
= 0.3% x 0.2% / P(negative test | straight)
The probability of a negative test is P(negative test | HIV) P(HIV|straight) + P(negative test| no HIV) P(no HIV|straight), which is 0.3% x 0.2% + 98.5% x 99.8% = 98.3%. Plugging this in yields:
P(HIV | straight, negative test) = 6.1e-6
Now lets repeat this calculation for a gay person.
P(HIV | gay, negative test) = P(negative test | HIV) P(HIV | gay) / P(negative test|gay)
= 0.3% x 36% / (0.3% x 36% + 98.5% x 64%)
= 0.17%
That's a lot higher.
Edit 2016/06/25: Using Tom's better estimate the actual number is 0.09%. So getting 2 pints of blood from 2 independent gay men with negative HIV results is roughly as dangerous as getting 1 pint of untested blood from a straight man.
Base rates matter
Suppose a non-gay person donates blood. No HIV test is run on this blood. The risk of this blood having HIV is 0.2%. Now suppose a gay person donates blood, and an HIV test turns up negative. The risk of this blood having HIV is only a little bit less than 0.2%. In short, allowing gay people to donate blood is nearly as dangerous as letting straight people donate blood and then not testing it! I guess this twitter meme is wrong. The world does make sense. It turns out the Red Cross isn't anti-gay - they just did the math and decided to protect people who receive donated blood."

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