Links - 7th March 2026 (2 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023: West Midlands Police/Birmingham Maccabi Scandal)

The Birmingham Maccabi scandal proves multiculturalism has failed - "Imagine if a UK police force had information suggesting white supremacists were planning to attack black football fans from overseas. Imagine they suppressed that information. Worse, imagine if their solution to this sickening threat was to ban the black fans from coming here, effectively giving the menacing supremacists exactly what they wanted: a ‘black-free’ zone. It would be one of the great scandals of our time. Leftists would be swarming the streets. The front pages of the press would fizzle with furious condemnation. There would be calls for an inquiry. Heads would roll. Well, the moral equivalent of the above has just taken place, and we’re seeing no such reaction. I’ll tell you why: because the victims in the real-world event are ‘just Jews’.  The Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal grows larger and more alarming every day. The latest discovery is that West Midlands Police were not being entirely truthful when they said concerns over ‘Maccabi hooliganism’ were the main reason they banned Maccabi fans from their team’s clash with Aston Villa in November last year. No, they were also aware of a sinister threat from within Birmingham itself against these Jews from Israel.  The force had been informed that elements within Birmingham’s Muslim community felt an intense hostility towards Maccabi fans, and what’s more that it was a bigoted hostility, based on the fans’ nationality. They were also informed that some of these Islamist bigots wanted to ‘arm’ themselves in order that they might bash a few of these Jews from afar.   And yet the police chiefs ‘failed to disclose’ this information. Unbelievably, they chose to focus on the threat apparently posed by the Maccabi fans themselves. They continually said ‘Maccabi hooliganism’ was the reason they barred these foreigners from Villa Park. This ignited a firestorm of Israelophobia on social media, with swarms of haters praising the police and denouncing the ‘racist’, ‘genocidal’ hooligans from the Jewish state. It can feel hard to comprehend the seriousness of this. A British police force, in the 21st century, post-Macpherson, failed to disclose relevant information about a violent hateful threat against a group of people on the basis of their national heritage. They chose instead to emphasise, incessantly, the supposed threat posed by the targets of this animus that was bubbling up in Birmingham: the Maccabi fans, the Israelis, the Jews.  To respond to information about potential anti-Jewish violence by banning Jews is a moral outrage. It is to do the bidding of bigots. It is to conspire in the creation of the very thing these warped people dream of: a space without Jews. As Kemi Badenoch says, the cops in Birmingham ‘knew extremists were planning to attack Jews’ but their response was to ‘blame and remove Jewish people’.   This was cultural appeasement. West Midlands Police made a choice, consciously or otherwise. They decided that placating the bigoted fury of local Islamists was more important than guaranteeing the safety of visiting Jews. They prioritised the irrational feelings of extremists over the right of Israeli Jews to visit Britain. If they had done this in relation to any other ethnic group, they’d already be out the door.  The mismatch between the size of this scandal and the limp response to it feels alarming...   Many are saying the police chiefs’ positions are untenable now. I agree. But this goes deeper than that. This scandal makes clear that the ideology of multiculturalism itself is untenable. It confirms that sectarianism is the bastard child of this divisive ideology that too often prioritises ‘cultural stability’ over truth and freedom.  Just as people in power turned a blind eye to the ‘grooming gangs’, lest they should unwittingly stir up multicultural tension, now it seems police downplayed a threat of potentially ‘armed’ violence against Jews in order to placate an Islamist mob. Any ideology that demands the suppression of truth, the silencing of working-class girls and the banning of Jews is an ideology worthy only of contempt. Those chiefs need to go, and so does the ideology that fuelled their scandalous appeasement."

The police are losing control of the streets to Islamists - "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.  We now know West Midlands Police banned Jewish away fans from attending a football match in Birmingham because they feared the wrath of local armed Islamists. Then they lied and blamed the Jewish fans.  It’s almost a week since the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, Craig Guilford came before the Home Affairs Select Committee and was confronted with the evidence amassed by my tenacious colleague Nick Timothy. He obfuscated and dissembled and was humiliated and disgraced. We’re still waiting for him to resign, or be sacked by the Home Secretary.  But was the police’s deceit because didn’t they think the public could cope with the truth?  The reality is the police can no longer sustain their authority in parts of Britain and have to lie to preserve the illusion. Mass migration and the abject failure of integration that has flowed with it has meant that in some places Islamists – unrespecting of British institutions of law and order, violent or openly threatening violence – now have such a foothold that the police do not know how to assert control and maintain order.  They believe they would be overwhelmed if they tried to enforce the law. They are too defeatist to try. Or perhaps they believe it better not to as the sight of their failure would be catastrophic for faith in them and in the rule of law as we’ve known it. Rather than explain this shocking conclusion to the British public they develop false narratives – exemplified by the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban – to preserve the pretence of authority for as long as possible. The Jewish fans were used as an excuse.  We saw the same in the aftermath of October 7 in London and elsewhere. The police made a myriad of excuses for their inaction in the face of the hate marches – the law wasn’t quite right to ban them, what was happening wasn’t really extremism and so on. They refused to be honest and concede the scale of the Islamist challenge was too big to confront.  Every time the police bow to the need to placate “community relations”. In the summer disturbances of 2024 the police in Birmingham said they let the community “police itself”. Perhaps the most public demonstration came when I was a Home Office minister, in 2023, as a senior West Yorkshire Police officer spoke at a hastily called press conference in a mosque after a 14-year-old autistic boy scuffed a copy of the Quran in the school playground.  The senior cop – as well as the boy’s mother – were forced to sit there and placate the “community” by explaining the boy had learned a terrible lesson and was to be punished by the police with the recording of a “non crime hate incident”. The intent was obvious. The police felt it necessary to plead with local Islamists in order to protect the boy and his family for fear of what might happen otherwise. Only an intervention by Suella Braverman saw the “hate incident” deleted from the record. The police fear is understandable.  Remember the almost paramilitary display we saw in Tower Hamlets recently – men in uniforms, an Islamist version of the black shirts that stalked the same streets almost a century ago.  Or the school teacher driven out of his home community in Batley, and still in hiding, because he dared to show an image of Muhammad to pupils in a religious education class.  Or the Islamist gangs out in force at our last General Election, intimidating political rivals so their preferred extremist candidates could get into Parliament.  And the shameful scene in Parliament in 2024 when the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle ended up having to apologise for forcing an unconventional vote on Gaza, just to protect MPs from a baying group of protesters outside. In this world honesty about what’s happening becomes a radical choice. Two-tier policing becomes the norm. The police crack down on law abiding citizens in more petty and pointless ways to retain a semblance of authority, all the while perpetuating rampant falsehoods to ignore the elephant in the room.  And the media? Much of it refuses to acknowledge the problem. See this week’s BBC article on the select committee hearing which managed to avoid mentioning Islamism at all and would have left the casual reader none the wiser about what was happening.  The British state has failed the British people by facilitating this disastrous experiment with mass migration over the past 25 years. Now its institutions refuse to act against the problem of Islamism or even acknowledge it. The truth is we have a limited amount of time to attempt to address this, or it will become clear that the British state has no clothes. Islamism will have won and the liberal, democratic values that underpinned our country for generations will have lost. With that will come the ubiquity of Sharia courts, cousin marriage, hate preachers in mosques (enjoying charitable status), rampant anti-Semitism. Our Government is happy to ban trail hunting, but won’t touch non-stun slaughter for halal meat. Our foreign policy will be increasingly dictated by Islamism, rather than by any traditional understanding of British interests. Women’s rights will be further undermined. Our country will be a more threatening and violent place.  This is why the West Midlands Police scandal matters. It’s about more than a football match. It’s about who controls our streets – the police or the Islamists? Who governs our country – the Islamists or the rest of the British people?  The fight against Islamism is the fight of our generation. It’s a battle for the soul of the country. It begins by telling the truth."

Ben Green on X - "Just incredible framing from the BBC. Tucked away in paragraph 19 is the actual real news that only emerged today. Maccabi fans were banned due to the threat of “local vigilante groups”. A national scandal. A police force cowered by local radical Islamists. The BBC continue the gaslighting. 🤮"
Francis Harris on X - "But note the absence of the words Muslim or Islamist in an extraordinarily long (37 paragraph) story Baffled readers will be asking why Brummies are so violent"
Clearly it's time to crack down on the "far right" to keep Jews safe

Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧🎗 on X - "The Birmingham policing scandal has crossed a line. What began as cowardice has curdled into something far worse.  It has now emerged that a Birmingham mosque was involved in interviewing and appointing the police chief whose force later excluded Jewish football supporters from public life. This is not a minor procedural curiosity. It goes to the heart of why the truth was bent, why the threat was inverted, and why the victims were removed instead of protected.  Craig Guildford, the head of West Midlands Police, was appointed after a process that included Kamran Hussain, then chief executive of Green Lane mosque, sitting on an interview panel. That same mosque was later consulted by the force ahead of the decision to exclude Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from Villa Park. The same force then claimed, falsely, that the threat came from Jewish fans rather than from local extremists preparing violence. Individually, each of these facts can be brushed aside. Together, they form a pattern that can no longer be ignored.  Green Lane mosque is not an abstract "community partner". It has hosted preachers who promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories and sectarian intolerance. Government funding was suspended after videos surfaced of sermons excusing discrimination and endorsing physical "discipline" of wives. These are not marginal details. They are the backdrop.   And yet this institution was treated as a stakeholder in policing decisions affecting Jews. Its former chief executive helped vet the man now presiding over a force accused of lying to Parliament, concealing intelligence, and rewriting events to protect its reputation.  This is not an accusation of crude conspiracy. It is something more corrosive. It is the exposure of a system in which authority is shaped by appeasement networks. Where those most capable of causing unrest are granted influence. Where enforcement becomes negotiable and truth becomes inconvenient.  That is how we arrived at a position where police logs recorded masked groups gathering, youths "looking to fight", and intelligence that the Israeli team was being tracked online. And yet the public was told the day was "largely peaceful" to avoid "over-dramatisation". This was not reassurance. It was deception.  When Keir Starmer called the ban wrong, he was right. When Kemi Badenoch demanded Guildford's dismissal, she was right. When critics said this reeked of political pressure rather than policing necessity, they were right again.  The most revealing detail is not who sat on which panel. It is what followed. A police force that consults mosques hosting extremist rhetoric. A leadership culture shaped by "community engagement" where the loudest voices are treated as veto-holders. A decision to exclude Jews "for their own safety". And then a cover-up to make it all look routine.  This is how equal policing is dismantled. Not through open prejudice, but through institutional fear. Not because officers hate Jews, but because the system rewards accommodation and punishes enforcement. Because it is easier to manage the victims than confront the threat.   The defenders of this arrangement will say there is nothing sinister here. That processes were followed. That panels were broad. That no single individual decided anything. That is precisely the problem. When responsibility is so diffused that no one is accountable, injustice becomes frictionless.  A country that allows sectarian pressure to shape police leadership and operational decisions is no longer policing by consent. It is policing by concession.  Birmingham did not stumble into this outcome. It arrived there by design. And until that design is dismantled, this will not be the last time a minority is told to stay away quietly so others do not have to behave. That is not the rule of law. It is governance by fear.
"Craig Guildford was appointed after a process that included Kamran Hussain, then chief executive of Green Lane mosque, sitting on an interview panel.""
It's only theocracy if the ceremonial head of the Church of England is ceremonial head of state. If you oppose Muslim control of government that's Islamophobia

West Midlands Police is rotten to the core - "In December 2025, the mosque livestreamed a sermon where an imam said husbands had a right to impose ‘physical discipline [as] a last resort on the condition that it doesn’t cause pain, injury, fear or humiliation’ on their wives. In 2024, the then chief executive of the mosque, Abdul Haqq Baker appeared to cast doubt on the number of victims in the 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks. In 2023, the mosque had £2.2 million of government funding suspended after footage was uncovered of a preacher linked to the Green Lane mosque and community centre arguing that ‘homosexuality is not permissible’. None of this is a recent turn of events: as far back as 2007, a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation found that teachers and preachers were promoting extremist ideas at the mosque. The association between the police and Green Lane mosque is one which the mosque is keen to promote. Both West Midlands Police and the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner are listed as ‘partners’ in the mosque’s 2024 annual report. In their 2021 annual report, they refer to the assistant chief constable attending their annual Gala Dinner. It has now been revealed through a Freedom of Information request that the local Police and Crime Commissioner, Labour’s Simon Foster, has documented how well the mosque is known to his office, how he has ‘attended Green Lane mosque and community centre on various occasions’ and that he has previously confirmed he is ‘happy to provide a general letter of support for the purpose of Green Lane mosque and community centre funding applications’.  Can any other faiths or community groups claim such strong partnerships with the police? Why is this faith ‘community’ – particularly those within it who have connections to those who espouse extremist views – seemingly prioritised above all others?"

Mahmood has ‘no confidence’ in police chief behind Maccabi Tel Aviv fans ban - "Shabana Mahmood has declared that she has “no confidence” in the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police after a damning report found the force exaggerated evidence to justify its decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a match against Aston Villa... Ms Mahmood is the first home secretary to call for Chief Constable Craig Guildford to go for 20 years – but she cannot sack him because that power instead lies with West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster, who has said he will formally review evidence on decision-making around the ban.  But Ms Mahmood announced plans to change that by bringing in legislation to restore the power of the home secretary to sack police chiefs in the light of the scandal... Ms Mahmood was backed by West Midlands mayor Richard Parker, who described the chief constable’s position as untenable. He warned that confidence in West Midlands Police has been “badly tested”, and trust wouldn’t be rebuilt if things remained as they are... Sir Andy’s report found eight “inaccuracies” in the information provided by the force to Sag. They included a reference to a non-existent game between Tel Aviv and West Ham, found to be an “AI hallucination” produced by Microsoft Copilot.  Other inaccuracies included overstating the number of Dutch police officers deployed during the earlier match in the Netherlands, claims that fans were linked to the Israeli Defence Forces, claims that Muslim communities had been intentionally targeted by Tel Aviv fans and reports of multiple Dutch police officers being injured in the disorder... Mr Guildford issued a “profound apology” for the fictitious information used to justify the ban, but insisted the decision was not politically influenced and instead blamed the use of AI.  Mr Guildford told the Commons home affairs committee in a letter that until Friday afternoon, he believed the mistake was caused by using Google, when in fact it was the result of the AI tool, Microsoft Copilot... There were cries of shame when independent MP Ayoub Khan claimed that Mr Guildford was being “thrown under a bus” because of right-wing attacks.  But they were rare voices of support for the beleaguered chief constable, with MPs on both sides of the House demanding that he be removed or quit. Lord Walney, the government’s former anti-extremism adviser, said: “This is the end for the West Midlands Chief Constable.  “His force has told lie after lie to cover up their disgraceful appeasement of local Muslim antisemites, and it has backfired spectacularly.”... Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said the report findings were “concerning” and needed to be taken seriously. He added: “This case underlines the importance of policing without fear or favour, including our essential role in the policing of events so that they can be safely enjoyed, and our responsibility to work with communities on preventing crime, disorder and fear.”"

West Midlands Police ‘ignored’ string of ‘hate crimes’ against Jews in Birmingham - "West Midlands Police is “institutionally anti-Semitic” and has repeatedly dismissed alleged hate crimes against Jews in Birmingham, a whistleblower has claimed.  A dossier obtained by The Telegraph, including internal emails and police crime logs, appears to show West Midlands Police disregard complaints about alleged anti-Semitism and extremism raised by members of the Jewish community, including by a former police volunteer who claims she was dismissed by the force after raising concerns... Its Prevent unit, designed to intervene early in cases of possible radicalisation especially in younger people, is also facing criticism after appearing to ignore multiple reports of extremism and anti-Jewish hatred. Emails seen by The Telegraph show the unit saying there was “no role” for police to respond to a WhatsApp group chat in which a student said he wished Hitler had done more to kill “the little rats [Jews]”.  The unit also appeared to dismiss a report of extremist material on display at a pro-Palestine march which proclaimed that “the military action of the Palestinian resistance on October 7 was justified”, an apparent endorsement of Hamas terrorism... a 12-year-old Jewish girl reported to the police that she was punched in the face twice and kicked in the stomach by a student who, she said, had bullied her since the Oct 7 terror attacks.  He had repeatedly yelled “free Palestine” at her, but the police refused to investigate.  The girl’s mother, a 48-year-old food scientist who asked not to be named out of concern for her family’s safety, told The Telegraph that police had even suggested the boy’s family could prosecute her daughter because she had reportedly “pushed” him first.  Within two months of the alleged attack, the family fled Birmingham, having lost faith in the school and the police to protect them... one student wrote: “I wish Hitler had f---ing ended the little rats [Jews].”  He also said he wanted to “miss school” to “go to Palestine” and “f---ing ruin em [the Jews]”, while warning his friends that Instagram is “owned by Jews”.  Despite reporting the incident to police “nothing happened”."
The next season of Adolescence will feature anti-Semitic white boys doing all this

‘Zio-eradication’ group that favours ‘armed resistance’ to meet in Birmingham - "A Birmingham community venue is scheduled to host the launch of a group that openly supports “armed resistance” and campaigns against what it calls “Jewish supremacy”.  The event, due to take place next Sunday at the Old Print Works – a community centre complete with a cafe, co-working space and darkroom – is billed as the launch of the “Anti Zionist Movement”, a group that states publicly that it is “pro-armed resistance” and explicitly campaigns “against Jewish supremacy”. The group’s Instagram description reads “Liberation via zio eradication”. The event is supported by the “Activist Independent Movement” group"
Clearly to criticise this would be to have a chilling effect on free speech, and be Islamophobic to boot.

NYT Underplaying Iran Protester Deaths / Iran Attacking Arab Countries

Kassy Akiva @KassyAkiva: "New York Times is claiming the Iranian regime only killed “hundreds of protesters.”"
"Mr. Rahmati said that, nevertheless, not everyone will be pleased. "A portion of the public will react negatively and forcefully to this decision, and it will have a backlash," he predicted. Supporters of the government would see him as a continuation of a ruler whom they view as martyred and will back him swiftly, Mr. Rahmati said. But government opponents, too, will see him as a continuation of the regime, which in recent months killed hundreds of protesters."

"Leftist when they figure out Iran has attacked more Arab countries in the last 72 hours than America has in the past decade.
Yoel and Mari Aerosmith . Sweet Emotion (Album Version ( ...: "It's not computing for them.""

Links - 7th March 2026 (1 - General Wokeness)

Alton Towers bans people with anxiety from using disability pass - "Alton Towers has banned visitors with ADHD and anxiety from using disability “fast lane” passes.  Merlin Entertainments, which runs the theme park in Staffordshire, will no longer allow people with the conditions to skip the main queues.  The company said in recent years “demand has grown” for the digital passes, designed for visitors “who may find it difficult, or cannot, stand for long periods of time either due to a physical disability or a learning/emotional impairment”.  Since 2015, the number of people taking medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has more than doubled and 7.5 per cent of adults in England have been diagnosed with anxiety... He claimed guests with accessibility needs had reported that the pass was not working for them after demand increased.  “Our guests with additional accessibility needs have increasingly told us that the Ride Access Pass simply isn’t working for them, particularly as demand has grown and queue times for these guests have increased."
Damn stigma against people with mental health problems! This has set mental health awareness back 20 years!
How ignorant. Don't they know that rights are not like cake? More for one doesn't mean less for another

Mum who claimed £20,000 in disability benefits caught running marathons - "Sara Morris, 49, from Stone, Staffordshire, exaggerated the extent of her condition and claimed too much Personal Independence Payment (PIP) from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in 2020.   She was later spotted running 5km, 10km, and marathon races competitively, Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court heard...  ‘The DWP obtained photographs of the defendant and some Facebook posts taken by Morris herself. She had been taking part in marathons, races and orienteering.  ‘The first photo was taken a month after she signed her initial claim form. The defendant can be seen to have been taking part on a competitive run two days prior to making that initial claim.  ‘The defendant reported receiving assistance in almost every aspect of her life. She claimed to experience difficulties with her balance adding she struggles to stand and required supervision from her family. She said she required grab rails in the bathroom and assistance with getting dressed.  ‘On some days her stress and anxiety led to her being housebound. She added she used a walking stick when she felt tired and unsteady. The defendant exaggerated her issues throughout the claim process.’...  Paul Cliff, mitigating, said Morris was diagnosed with MS 19 years ago and the ‘severity of its impact ebbs and flows to a degree’."

Move over Ireland, there is a new worst country in Europe - "Which is the worst country in Europe? Not in terms of the weather, food or culture, but measured by its governing elite? With its fondness for soft borders, coupled with an ideological Europhilia and pathological hatred of Israel, I used to think it was Ireland. But now I’m starting to wonder.  Step forward the Spanish, groaning under the curled lip of the unpopular socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez. According to YouGov, his approval ratings now stand at -36, a precipitous fall since last year, helped along by corruption scandals involving his wife, brother and several of his closest aides (all deny any wrongdoing). Peak Sánchez arrived last September, when the prime minister publicly regretted that Spain did not have nuclear weapons to drop on Israel – alright, Ayatollah! – then dispatched a warship to protect Greta Thunberg (the patrol vessel, which embarrassingly enough turned out to be armed with Israeli-made weaponry, reversed course before entering the warzone).   As ever, a nation’s position on the Jewish state provides a bellwether for its general soundness. Or lack thereof. Last year, while Finland’s defence minister fretted that progress towards Nato’s new spending target of five per cent was too slow to deter Russia, Sánchez, whose coalition includes the far Left, was the only European leader to refuse to sign up to the new target at all.  His reasoning epitomised the sybaritic state of post-Cold War western Europe: spending more on defence would jeopardise his social welfare budget. Talk about priorities. The inevitable rebuke from Donald Trump, who condemned the Spanish position as “unbelievably disrespectful”, was part of the point. In Spain, the American leader is even less popular than Sánchez, transmuting transatlantic tension into a net positive.  Indeed, throwing tomatoes at Trump has long been a strategy upon which Sánchez has apparently relied to shore up such support as he retains amongst the voting public... As for Spain’s invitation to join the Board of Peace overseeing Gaza? Snubbed. Natch.  It is true that the trauma of the Civil War of the 1930s left the Spanish with a pacifist bent (apart from when it comes to Israel). But the self-regarding nature of the administration, coupled with the allegations of sleaze – Sánchez, who in 2017 campaigned on an anti-establishment platform while driving a 2005 Peugeot around the country, has been forced to apologise for corruption scandals and has recently been considered “untrustworthy” by 67 per cent of Spaniards – is triggering a backlash from the far Right... The current government, which in 2023 offered amnesty to exiled Catalan separatists, has become a recruiting sergeant for such extremists. The young are now more likely than their grandparents to back the far-Right Vox.  Which brings us to Monday, when Sánchez released a video seemingly designed to encourage that trend. In it, he defended a radical new policy of granting legal status to 500,000 undocumented migrants. It was all about “dignity, community and justice,” he insisted. Really, of course, it was about boosting the Spanish economy, which is floundering under the weight of workforce shortages and an ageing population. That’s not all. When opponents accused Sánchez of “electoral engineering” – after all, half-a-million naturalised Spaniards would surely support the party that had handed them that bounty – Elon Musk commented “wow”. Gleefully, the prime minister responded: “Mars can wait, humanity can’t.” Again, such provocation is part of the point. But this is exactly the sort of thing the far Right detests.   Last year, the southeastern town of Torre-Pacheco descended into anarchy after three North African men allegedly beat up a pensioner, sparking anti-migrant reprisals. Given the high crime rates for foreigners in Spain, however, and various outrages by undocumented migrants (such as the 2023 machete attack on two churches in Andalucia, which wounded four and claimed the life of a sexton), such concerns are hardly limited to extremists. Under Sánchez, however, polarisation is the name of the game.  Only don’t express your disapproval online! In a speech in Dubai this week, the Spanish leader unveiled some of the tightest digital censorship laws in Europe. Under-16s will be banned from social media; efforts made to surveil a “footprint of hate and polarisation”; Grok, TikTok and Instagram will be pursued in the courts; and company executives will be personally targeted if banned content remains on their platforms. Critics accused Sánchez of “weaponising tech policy”. Pressure cooker, anybody?  Amazingly, Spain remains economically healthy, buoyed by post-Covid tourism. But how long before it gives way? There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Sadly, it’s one that our own prime minister will almost certainly fail to learn."
No wonder they need to fast track migrants to shore up support for the left in Spain

Meme - "Nothing about the current political situation we are currently experiencing in the west will ever make sense to you unless you first understand that you live under foreign occupation and are thus subject to the rules of the occupiers. If you do not start from there, you will search for multiple explanations and rationalizations for your society's misery and shortcomings that will ultimately lead you nowhere. The thing is, your enemy has no interest in a so-called "victory" over you, because they already won - long ago, before most of you were even born. Now, the entirety of their actions is aimed at a single goal - humiliation. Humiliation robs you of your humanity, your will, your reason to fight on. Humiliation takes everything from you, and it even robs you of being worthy of empathy. It has been used by every occupier in history, and it's our natural primal understanding of defeat. The Ottoman practice of Köçek is a prime example, similar to the concept of "Drag Kids" in modern America. Köçeks were a combination of dancers, clowns and prostitutes; they were young non-Muslim boys taken from their parents and trained to be willful sexual objects and entertainers for the Ottoman Turks. The goal was to have the occupied think "if we allow that to be done to our boys, what else can they do?" The answer is "anything". It is full-spectrum domination of the minds of the conquered. Your enemy doesn't want gay pride parades in your street, drag queens in your libraries, your son's penis mutilated and drip-fed estrogen from birth, your parents dead from opioids and cancer, your daughter race mixing, your meat replaced with bugs, all while your media laughs at you because they think it's for anyone's benefit. They want it because they know you don't want it, but can't stop them. They want to humiliate you. There isn't any other reason. And that's exactly what they are doing."

Jamie Sarkonak: New Liberal 'inclusion' council heralds more division - "Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller announced that he’ll be assembling a committee to come up with a “common narrative” to hold our rapidly diversifying nation together.  This new Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion is just the latest initiative that makes some kind of vague promise to unite Canadians and, in Miller’s words, “ensure that every person feels included.” If it feels like the 30th time the Liberals have done something like this, well, you’re probably not far off. Diversity is always our strength, but diversity also perpetually needs to be solved... At no point does the announcement for this committee mention Canada’s history, its art and architecture, its contributions to film, its military accomplishments, its beautiful and vast geography, its pride in self-sufficiency or its pioneer spirit. Indeed, aside from mentioning Indigenous people, it’s nearly completely blind to the heritage that has underpinned the country for a century and a half.  For 10 years, the Liberals have cast Canada as a postnational state whose dominant culture is … multiculturalism. A collection of other people’s cultures. At the same time, they’ve alienated the population from its own history and redrawn the Canadian timeline as a sequence of human rights violations: stolen land, residential schools, head tax, lack of women’s suffrage, Komagata Maru, and so on. There is no attempt to understand why decision-makers in history made the choices they did at the time, no calls for nuance, just visceral contempt for the past.  This Liberal conception of the country doesn’t demand — heck, it doesn’t even politely ask — newcomers to make an effort to be a part of it. Indeed, treats many of them as people who are owed something from the get-go, whether that be priority in hiring, access to grant funding, or even bonus support at work to help them move up the management ladder. The federal government had already excluded white male academics from applying to certain federally funded research grants, directed the entire public service to promote and recruit on the basis of race, prioritized the hiring of minorities in various positions at the Department of National Defence, earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for Black people, ordered new judges to take ideological training on “systemic racism,” and initiated work on a new nationwide policy for museums that embraces DEI and reconciliation.  There’s a pattern here: the government tends to put down members of the population (and their ancestors) who are likely to have been here for generations, while telling Indigenous people and those who are likely to be newer arrivals that they are victims deserving of special treatment. That’s a recipe for division, not social cohesion. The feds have spun up numerous advisory groups and committees to further an illusion of consensus when it comes to implementing this new post-national, multicultural vision. They tapped activist thinkers to recommend more leniency and support for Black and Indigenous people in the justice system. They assembled a task force to review the Employment Equity Act (the statutory basis for discriminatory hiring in the federal government and its contractors), which in 2024 recommended that the feds double down.  To promote decolonial legal reforms — and the feeble notion of “Indigenous law” — the feds resurrected the Law Commission of Canada, which gives money to those organizing conferences and seminars, but only if they commit “to learn from and/or work with Indigenous peoples, organizations, and legal traditions.” Even science is being politicized: DEI committees are ubiquitous in the federal research funding agencies, and in 2022, Environment Canada created an “Indigenous science” division to rival colonial “western science.”  It seems that the more reconciliation and diversity the government promotes, the more division we get. Nearly half of the country says it’s “time to move on” from residential schools. Half of Canadians are opposed to new immigration. Half of those born outside of Canada believe the country belongs to Indigenous people. Half of Canadians claim to have witnessed systemic racism. These are all stats from 2025. And then, there’s the general vibe: conversations and comments sections seem to be more racially charged than ever.  The Liberal response to the overdose crisis was to give more drugs to addicts, and it left everyone worse off. On social cohesion, they’re doing something similar: put everyone into boxes and make up reasons to treat some of them better than others, and then wonder how society got so divided.  The answer, which Miller’s committee is unlikely to arrive at, is to drop the agenda of discrimination and start promoting Canadian history — not the abridged version that only focuses on dark parts, enclaves, and the legal victories of progressives. If you want Canadians to feel like they are one people, you need to treat them like it."

Association of American Medical Colleges Releases Official DEI Curriculum Standards - "The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) just released its official Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Competencies. Designed for curriculum development, the competencies function as DEI educational standards, providing a set of ideal “diversity” and “inclusion” skills for three stages of a physician’s education. For graduating medical students, the competencies include “describ[ing] the impact of various systems of oppression on health and health care (e.g., colonization, White supremacy, acculturation, assimilation).” For graduating residents, they include “promoting social justice and engag[ing] in efforts to eliminate health care disparities,” and for faculty physicians, “teach[ing] how systems of power, privilege, and oppression inform policies and practices and how to engage with systems to disrupt oppressive practices.”  Ultimately, these new competencies provide a blueprint for infusing the themes of identity politics—“intersectionality,” “white privilege,” “microaggression,” “allyship”—into medical education...  This statement of priorities—that DEI should be on par with science—is all the more noteworthy given the ideologically-charged nature of the competencies. Consider just a few:
Demonstrates knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice [students]
Identifies systems of power, privilege, and oppression and their impacts on health outcomes (e.g., White privilege, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, religious oppression) [students]
Articulates race as a social construct that is a cause of health and health care inequities, not a risk factor for disease [students]
Practices moral courage, self-advocacy, allyship, and being an active bystander or upstander to address injustices [residents]
Role models anti-racism in medicine and teaching, including strategies grounded in critical understanding of unjust systems of oppression [faculty]
Role models how knowledge of intersectionality informs clinical decision-making and practice [faculty]
Concepts such as “intersectionality” and “allyship” connote substantive political positions; to declare that faculty and students must embrace them clearly violates academic freedom. But perhaps more significantly, these concepts are often interpreted idiosyncratically to enforce a narrow and damaging orthodoxy. At medical schools that adopt the competencies, it will undoubtedly become harder for students and faculty to voice support for a meritocracy or skepticism toward “gender-affirming care” for minors. Such views, after all, are commonly labeled “oppressive.”   In practice, the competencies are likely to elicit a wave of highly dubious medical curricula—to say nothing of medical research...  The program frequently invokes the so-called “Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture”—the bizarre notion that attributes such as “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “a sense of urgency” constitute white supremacy culture.  Unfortunately, medical schools and residency programs are primed to incorporate these competencies into their curricula. After all, medical accreditation bodies such as the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education now solicit increasingly robust DEI programming, a phenomenon that the AAMC notes in its report on the competencies. Some medical schools—including Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Indiana University’s School of Medicine—have already expressed their interest in adopting the de facto standards. UT Austin’s Dell School of Medicine recently adopted a set of health equity competencies for its undergraduates that bear a striking resemblance to the AAMC’s.   The AAMC’s DEI competencies will hamper free expression, politicize medical education, encourage physicians to engage in misbegotten activism, and in the longer run, lead to substantively harmful policies. We should hope that students and faculty alike speak up and reject them."
From 2022

Home Office ‘tried to silence adviser who raised concerns about Islamism’ - "A former government adviser has accused the Home Office of attempting to “silence” him after he warned about the threat of Islamism.  Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Tell Mama, a project that records anti-Muslim incidents in the UK, raised concerns publicly last year that ministers were failing to take seriously the threat of Islamic extremism.  At the time, Mr Mughal was working as a contractor for the Home Office’s Channel programme, which is part of the Government’s counter-extremism strategy. In an article for The Telegraph published last year, he said it was “astonishing” that during a Home Office summit on extremism, the threat of Islamism was not mentioned for the first 90 minutes.  The day after the article’s publication, he was contacted by a senior Home Office official who wanted to discuss his engagement with the media as well as the possibility of future government work... Mr Mughal, an expert in the field of counter-extremism who has worked as a government adviser on and off for the past 20 years, said he felt the Home Office was trying to “silence” him... But at the end of last year he decided to quit his Home Office role, saying he no longer felt comfortable with the “insidious pressure” that was put on him not to speak out about the dangers of Islamism.  “I actively made the decision to more robustly challenge Islamist extremism and felt it wasn’t possible to continue speaking out about it while working there,” he said.  “As soon as Labour came in, I recognised a shift. Why has suddenly the focus on Islamism dropped off? There is a political perspective within this Government which has bought into advice that actually talking about Islamism is not a beneficial thing to do.  “My perspective is they feel it will cost them politically if they speak about it – they have bought into the ruse that it will cause community divisions. They desperately don’t want to lose the Muslim vote and support.” At the last election, pro-Palestinian MPs effectively became the sixth-largest party after five independent candidates unseated Labour rivals.  The Muslim Vote organisation, which encourages British Muslims to vote for specific candidates it has approved, boasted that its “unprecedented” influence on the election results had also led to “slashed” majorities for several other Labour figures. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, held on to his seat by just 528 votes after a challenge from another independent who is the granddaughter of Palestinian refugees.  The Muslim Vote campaign group was established in response to the war in Gaza and the Labour Party’s decision not to oppose Israel’s military response to Oct 7 from the start. It said its aim was to make sure Britain’s 3.9 million Muslims turn out on polling day and vote for their approved candidates, putting pressure on Sir Keir Starmer to adopt The Muslim Vote’s 18 demands... He said it was 90 minutes before the civil servant briefing him and up to 80 counter-extremism experts mentioned “Islamist extremism”, even though it has been identified by the intelligence agencies as the biggest security threat to the UK.  Mr Mughal, who is also the founder and director of Faith Matters, which helps communities using conflict management tools, claimed instead that the civil servant focused on extremism that was of “mixed” or “no clear ideology”, as well as misogyny, the far-Right and incel culture. Ministers went on to reject the recommendations of a review they had commissioned, which said that the approach to tackling extremism should no longer be based on specific ideologies such as Islamism or the far-Right but on “behaviours and activity of concern”."
Islamophobia!

Home Office ‘tried to silence adviser who raised concerns about Islamism’ : r/unitedkingdom - "Tower Hamlets is a London Borough of 200k people. The mayor, Lutfur Rahman, used to be Labour, then he was thrown out of the party, convicted of electoral fraud, and banned from politics for five years. He founded his own party, then as soon as his ban expired he was re-elected as mayor, and his party now hold a majority on the council. All the council cabinet are now middle aged British-Bangladeshi men.  Somali Muslims living in the Borough complain that council housing is preferentially allocated to Bangladeshi Muslims.  The council has not had published fully audited accounts for more than 5 years. There's also an ongoing police fraud and money laundering investigation at the council:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/tower-hamlets-council-fraud-b1262808.html
Also, 70% of school aged kids are Muslim, and the schools are even more segregated than that, and have been for 15 years at least. So people are growing up with little contact amongst peers outside their sectarian ethnic or religious group.
https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/schools-in-the-east-end-dividing-by-race-6585982.html
This is one of the futures of politics and society in the country, people don't realise that there's a melting point model of migration where people from all backgrounds live in a place and share friend groups, and there's a completely different model of migration where there are parallel sectarian communities. You see both models of migration in different parts of London today, and in other major cities.  Those sectarian areas come from the difference in culture, the clannishness of the culture, and the scale of migration. In London today 60-65% of 35-45 year olds were born abroad, with high migration from a subset of countries, so there is a lot of pressure away from both integration and melting pot models of migration. That level of population turnover is a result of net migration post 2000 increasing to 5-10 times higher than before 2000, then after 2020 ballooning to 20-30 times higher.  There's a good few sectarian areas like that now, where on one side of a road maybe 50% or 70% the population is Muslim, on the other side of the road 5% or 1%, you see it in Tower Hamlets and also in northern towns like Oldham or Rochdale."

NHS staff told to stop discouraging first cousin marriages - "Hospital staff need to stop discouraging first cousin marriages, a government-funded NHS monitoring board has said, despite the practice increasing the risk of birth defects. The National Child Mortality Database (NCMD) has told NHS staff that “it is unacceptable to discourage close relative marriage in a blanket way” because the risk of having a child with a genetic disorder is only “slightly increased”... YouGov polling from last year showed that three-quarters of Britons think first cousin marriage should not be legal, compared with 9 per cent who think the law should remain. Michael Muthukrishna, professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, said last month: “When marriage is restricted to family members, communities become more isolated, limiting social integration. “This isolation is what has allowed for over-representation of radicalisation and grooming gangs. Normalising cousin marriage doesn’t help mothers, nor babies affected by the well-documented health risks of repeated inbreeding.” Last year it was reported that the deaths of more than two children a week in England were linked to their parents being closely related. Figures showed that up to 20 per cent of children treated for congenital problems in cities such as Glasgow and Birmingham are of Pakistani descent, compared with 4 per cent in the wider population."

Deport Foreign Criminals on X - "I often Cite a secret Met Police report that states Cousin officers are more likely to be corrupt , here’s the evidence it existed because guess what, it’s disappeared along with @NCA_UK report on 75% of all rape gangs being Pakistani Muslim Police officers are ten times more likely to be corrupt according to this Police report The report argued that British Pakistanis live in a cash culture in which "assisting your extended family is considered a duty" and in an environment in which large amounts of money are loaned between relatives and friends"

Hunter Ash on X - "This is a fundamental betrayal of what made Europeans WEIRD - that is, high-trust, individualist, and classically egalitarian.
The Hajnal Line: The Hajnal line labels the portion of Europe that has historically practiced the distinctive Western European Marriage Pattern. In these cultures, marriages typically happened at older ages, the consent of the bride was more emphasized, and nuclear families - men starting their own households, rather than multi-generational living - were the norm. According to many scholars, this was largely driven by the Catholic ban on cousin marriage. A prohibition on marrying close relatives inhibits the formation of tight-knit extended-family networks and forces cooperation with non-kin. This in turn requires (and thus selects for) trust. In many cultures, it is not considered dishonorable to lie to, cheat, and steal from non-clan members. All morality applies only to the extended family group. This makes running large-scale modern nation-states much less efficient, since every clan is constantly grifting off the state for its own benefit, engaging in nepotism, etc. This nepotistic grifting is exactly what the NHS is calling “economic advantages”. The Western European Marriage Pattern is a large part of what made Western Europeans unique and globally dominant. That the British government is now actively promoting clannishness and inbreeding is one of the bleakest indicators of the decay of Europe."

Megha on X - "I recently finished reading an essay from a Columbia English Major recalling her experience of studying literature in modern academia. Her experiences recall being excoriated and receiving failing grades if she ever insinuated that an author revealed positive emotion toward a patriarchal structure or if a heterosexual love was not subverted to be “secretly queer”.   It’s disgusting what they do in the humanities. I never formally studied the humanities and now I know I was saved from watching the most beautiful works of art get mutilated by a vile and disgusting leftist establishment that wanted to cut open every artery of every poem and stain it with feminism, queer theory and “social justice”.   I am glad I was spared that carnage because of how much I dearly love art.   Dostoevsky, in the Petrashevsky circle in the 1840s made a similar rant when they were trying to tell him that the purpose of literature is to “advance socialist propaganda”. And Dostoevsky, usually mild mannered and taciturn, exploded with rage at this idea.   The academics are nothing but disgusting Marxists who despise art, beauty, literature, the family, all that is wholesome and good as is displayed by the western canon. All great art is “right wing art” in so far as it is not LYING to progress a political agenda. The politics of the true right wing are apolitical. This is why the university must be annihilated.   Everyone must be purged from the hallowed halls they have stolen."

Links - 6th March 2026 (2 - Iran Attack)

Rest in Pieces: Ali Khamenei, Demure Progressive Stalwart and 'Black Lives Matter' Ally Who Inspired Democrats and Academics, Bombed to Death at 86 - "Ali Khamenei, the "Black Lives Matter" advocate and long-serving supreme leader of Iran, was a guiding light to Democratic lawmakers, Ivy League professors, and other progressive ideologues who endorsed his intellectual appraisal of America's evil and the treachery of Jews...   The Iranian people cheered a tyrant's demise and hoped for what could be. You could tell their joy was real and not the Kamala Harris kind. The ayatollah's left-wing comrades sobbed like sloppy seventh graders. They shook their fists at mushroom clouds and wept for what had been. The revolution. The hostages. The oil nonsense. Decades of degenerate behavior and the targeting of American soldiers. The homespun hipster in his button-down shirt (also killed). The slow death of the Iranian economy, which even the Obama nuclear shake-down couldn't stop.  They had to hand it to the supreme leader. Fans commended him for dying honorably—on his own terms, mid-resistance, cowering in a bunker, surrounded by his closest friends and military commanders. They touted his progressive bona fides—he understood that decolonization was more than vibes and essays. In May 2020, he penned an eloquent clapback against white supremacy after the death of George Floyd. He never took Trump's calls or laughed at a misogynistic joke, which in some ways made him even more of a winner than the USA men's hockey team. He inspired a generation of Ivy League losers to hate Jews even more than they hate themselves.  Khamenei's death was a crippling blow to America's elite institutions, many of which had presumably shortlisted the supreme leader in their search for a commencement speaker. It was basically the last remaining option to forestall a shrieking walkout. Now what? The students and faculty who supported Iran's proxy, Hamas, and its "anti-colonial insurgency," are naturally devastated. Their terrorist allies have been crushed. They must endure the moral indignity of mourning a tyrant who murdered thousands and repressed millions. It remains to be seen which campus chapters of Feminist Fatties for Palestine will issue statements denouncing Iranian women for burning their hijabs. One can only marvel at the magnitude of self-absorption required to exist this way... The garment rending in the media was also a sight to behold. It's been several years since the Washington Post was deservedly mocked for lamenting the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the "austere religious scholar" who pioneered the rise of ISIS. Many assumed they would be too embarrassed to do that again. Evidently not. The Post's obituary described Khamenei as an "avuncular figure" with a "bushy white beard and easy smile" who enjoyed classic Westerns and Les Misérables. Mehdi Hasan melted down in public. He was not alone.  Ben Rhodes, the former Obama aide who recently implored Iranians to "negotiate" with their oppressors, may never recover. He took Khamenei's side in 2009 when the regime was shooting protesters in the streets, and bragged of manipulating halfwit journalists to rally support for the nuclear deal he crafted. Rhodes's public comments in response to the supreme leader's death reflected a profound anguish at the thought of not being invited to the funeral.   It is often said a man's enemies reveal the content of his character. As far as Khamenei is concerned, the pathetic zeal of his admirers will supply the final judgment."

Larry Correia | Facebook - "Scrolling through the internet, people remain really fucking stupid, are totally incapable of critical thinking, and they're completely divorced from any sense of history. So... Iran's been fucking with us since I was born, has funded, trained, and enabled some of the most heinous assholes of the last several decades, destabilized an entire region of the Earth, and generally been total pricks.  Previous administrations going back to Jimmy Carter have had problems with the Iranians being total pricks who routinely do evil shit. Each of them did a little something, or nothing, or went full quisling sucked up and bribed them, but mostly they kicked the can down the road to be someone else's problem for political expediency. Because due to the situation at those times there'd be no overthrowing the fanatics without getting into a protracted ground war that would result in lots of American casualties.  But today, due to a cascading series of current events, the situation has evolved and the American president most likely to say Fuck It YOLO, was presented the opportunity to dog walk this regime without invading. That hadn't really been an option before. This was all caused because one of Iran's many proxy bands of terrorist dickheads flew their waxy terrorist wings too close to the sun and got their dicks blown off by pagers. As that escalated Iran decided to launch a shit ton of missiles which weren't nearly as impressive as everyone was scared they would be, so then they lost a whole bunch of their leading boss assholes, and the whole world saw that Iranian air defenses were wishful thinking when some B2s buttfucked their impenetrable super bunker.  So then the populace of Iran got really uppity, because they're sick of these religious fanatic death cultists too. Their asshole government then provided a demonstration of why we're never ever giving up the 2nd Amendment here.  Except the FAFO president told them not to massacre all those people, and he was sick of their shit. This is the same guy who has made a rather impressive list of military operations that get in, fuck shit up, and then get out fast with minimal American casualties. This man is not George Bush. He does not have a Colin "You Break It You Buy It" Powell. Trump apparently does not seem to give a fuck about "nation building", which works out because the American people do not want  another twenty years of bullshit like Afghanistan or Iraq. When given the opportunity to kill a ton of bad people, allowing the Iranian people to do the rest, and this opportunity has never come along before, of course Trump is going to go for it. And despite the screaming from the schizophrenic podcaster crowd of the griftosphere, most conservative Americans are very much of the attitude fuck Iran.  (of course libs are gonna lib, so get ready for a bunch of rainbow dipshits to march with Iranian flags next week)  And none of this should be surprising either, because Trump just recently took out a South American dictatorship over one weekend. People were like, oh shit, yeah, America can actually do stuff like that. Americans got so used to wars being long and stupid and pointless fucking around with dumb ass rules of engagement that the concept we could just do shit and get it over with is crazy to people. We got used to sending dictators and fanatics pallets of cash, making red lines that didn't mean anything, followed by the occasional drone strike, all while our young warriors risked their lives trying to make a country with Man Love Thursday into a Jeffersonian democracy for YEARS.  I see zero indication Trump wants to do that shit again. Good.  Of course when this kicked off the fucking Deus Vult, helmet avatar, Return bros who keep talking all this shit about throwing a new crusade, crushing Islam, and protecting the west, all turned into pacifists who are absolutely against attacking the regime that funds most of the world's Islamist bullshit. The same country that's building mosques across Europe and behind most of the refugee crisis bullshit that flooded those countries, nope. Leave the ayatollahs alone!  Why this change of heart? The JOOOOOOOZ of course! Because clearly, America can't have its own strategic reasons for wanting to fight the Death To America crowd who has continually fucked with us for five decades. Oh no. Clearly this is Israel's war, and these guys (who aren't in our volunteer military) "aren't gonna die for Israel."  Which is fucking stupid. Because if there's one other country that this is all really about, it isn't Israel. It's China.  We're down to two major global powers who actually matter, us and commies, and so far this year Trump has basically taken two of China's allies/suppliers off the table. Which limits China's options and ability to fuck with us.  As for being on the same side as Israel? No shit, of course we are. Militant Islam is a mutual foe. They're tired of getting bombed and terrorized by these assholes. So they've got reasons to want the Iranian regime overthrown. And the US has reasons we want to overthrow the Iranian regime. And now, because the Iranian mullahs are INSANE DEATH CULTISTS the other Muslim countries are jumping in on this too. These dipshits launched missiles at Muslim countries that were neutral or even aiding them. (no word yet if Tucker Carlson's house in Qatar was damaged!)  Beyond screaming about the Jews, the other big thing I've seen is that attacking Iran is a distraction from the Epstein Files... Are you fucking high? I've seen this from the halal right and the commie gibberish left. Because that's an absolutely brilliant plan these masterminds hatched, let's fuck around with Iran for nearly fifty years, and then when a pedophile scumbag dies, seven years after that we'll rile up the Persian people to the point of revolution so we can overthrow their government as a distraction. AND this is such a brilliant distraction, that the plan is to do it FAST. That way it distracts for less time. Genius.  Plus, what is it with these fucking simpletons who can only pay attention to one issue at a time? But you know, come to think of it, I bet these fucking idiots are that easily distracted. Never mind.  My position on Iran, fuck the government of Iran, I hope the Persian people replace it with something better (it would be hard to be worse!), good luck to them, and God speed to our troops. Killing bad guys and letting the Persian people build their own nation-good. Invading-stupid. But I see zero indication anybody wants to do that (well, except for maybe Lindsey Graham and the ghost of John McCain)."

Terrence K. Williams on X - "Pelosi: " Obama doesn’t need congressional authorization for Libya"
Today: " Trump must ask Congress first"
Same Constitution. Same war powers. Hold them to the same standard. Full quote from Nancy Pelosi: “The President Obama does not need congressional authorization to take military action in Libya… and I think that he has that authority.”"

Rabbi Poupko on X - "The Amir of Kuwait checking in on the health of the American pilots after Kuwait mistakenly shot down three American airplanes. The USS Liberty conspiracy theorists do not seem to be very interested in the fact that Kuwait just shot down three American airplanes."
Of course, the Jews tricked Kuwait into shooting down US planes

London news: UCL society MOURNS Ayatollah's death as 'unimaginable loss' - and urges Muslims to 'remain ready' - "A Muslim society at a prestigious British university has mourned the death of the Iranian Ayatollah as an "unimaginable loss".  The Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society at University College London (UCL) expressed its "sincere condolences" after the death of Ali Khamenei, posting a tribute to him alongside a prayer to be recited in his memory. The society claimed the expression of mourning was not any form of "incitement, endorsement of violence, or unlawful mobilisation".  The death of the Iranian leader was described as "martyrdom" by the Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society, with condolences given from "all at UCL ABSoc".  The group's "mental health team" went on to describe his death as an "unimaginable loss for the entire Ummah", or the Muslim world. It added: "This is not the end to resistance. The Shia in the West must remain aware and ready.""

MEMRI on X - "Dearborn Heights Shiite Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi Eulogizes Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: He Would Have Loved to End His Life This Way – Being Killed by “the Most Wretched Hands on Earth” Is an Honor; Nothing Is Greater Than Martyrdom after 86 Years of Service"
The Persian Jewess on X - "The Michigan based Imam calling America “wretched” and glorifying Khamenei is an Iranian Radical Islamist trained by the Islamic Regime.  He moved to Dearborn in 1991 to run the Islamic Center of America and later established the Islamic House of Wisdom.  How did an Iranian with clear Regimist ties receive a visa to enter the U.S.?"

Jennie Taer on X - "Israeli Ambassador to the UN @dannydanon  just called out a United Nations official who tweeted a graphic photo showing rows of body bags she claimed was from the recent strikes in Iran. Turns out, Danon says, the photo shows victims of the "Iranian regime itself" and was taken in January."

Calla on X - "Every single US and “Israeli” official is a legitimate target wherever they are in the world."
Bonchie on X - "This account is run by a silver-spooned 21-year-old white woman. She's a former Elizabeth Warren campaign volunteer, a self-avowed communist, and a pro-Hamas activist. As I've said before, there is a serious mental health crisis going on among left-wing women in America."

Stu Smith on X - "“Death to America.”  That’s the phrase 20-year-old American activist Calla Walsh chants from Tehran—“Marg bar Âmrikâ”—while praising “all the martyrs” and glorifying the “axis of resistance,” Iran’s alliance with terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.  “Glory to all the martyrs, glory to the axis of resistance. May we see victory within our lifetimes. Marg bar Âmrikâ.”  If she loves the “axis of resistance” so much, she’s welcome to stay there."
ML 🇺🇸⚾️✝️ on X - "This woman is a domestic terrorist, she has a well documented history of radical extremism. @FBI she is now calling for US and Israeli officials to be targeted."

J.T. Alexander on X - "This is worth highlighting about the brilliance of how the way was paved for the 2026 Gulf War.  Thanks to Obama and the JCPOA, by 2016 Iran had the upper hand in the Middle East. A complete logistical line ran from Tehran to Beirut, with Shia militias all the way between receiving high-end military equipment and competent IRGC Qods Force leadership. All of this was built under the mastermind Qasem Soleimani.  In 2020, Trump initiated the Maximum Pressure Campaign against Iran and, in addition to his economic pressures, elected to remove Soleimani from the picture. This removed Iran's queen from the chessboard.  After an incredibly poorly thought out attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, Hamas wrote Bibi a blank check of political capital to destroy the enemies of Israel. Bibi leveraged this to not only cripple Hamas, but to set back Hezbollah and the Shia militias in Syria for a generation.  By the time Trump returned to power in 2025, Iran's fortunes had taken a complete turn. I do believe Trump wanted a negotiated settlement with Iran last year and that Iran just vastly overestimated its position. On paper, Iran was a regional power with the best non-American/non-IDF military capabilities around.  The 2025 12-Day War would prove to be a brilliant prelude to the 2026 Gulf War in large part because it weaponized Khamenei's chihuahua nature against him. As I've written countless times, Khamenei's tendency had always been to bark and shout and declare victory, but as long as you let him have the last word about it you could bang his wife and get little more than an earful of whining over it.  Khamenei's only concern was survival of the Velyat-e Faqih, the Guardianship of the Jurist, the political system instituted by the Iranian Revolution. As long as the Velyat survived, he would tolerate way too much for his own good. This was known before Soleimani's assassination and was, no doubt, part of the decision calculus on whether to pull that trigger.  The 12-Day War ended up an excellent chance to use that tendency against Khamenei. By attacking him under pretenses that did not include destruction of the Velyat, the US and IDF were able to achieve battlespace supremacy, destroy Iran's ability to defend its airspace, exhaust significant portions of its ballistic missile and drone swarm capabilities, and expose some of their retaliation mechanisms—without triggering Iran's MAD-substitute: firing indiscriminately at the GCC and other neighbors.  So, come February 28, 2026, the scales are totally tilted against Iran.  They have less than half their ballistic missiles on hand, their chains of command have been decimated, their tactics, techniques, and procedures all tested and exposed, their airspace free for the flying, and their allies in no position to help them whatsoever.  Iran was no slouch, militarily speaking, as recently as five years ago. Fighting them would have been a nightmare as recently as 2017.  Absolute brilliant display of strategic militarism."

Jim VandeHei on X - "🚨🚨3 US soldiers dead. This shifts the debate inside MAGA, Congress and America to: Is the killing the Iranian leader and degrading its capabilities worth three American lives? Puts a human face and reality on Trump’s war of choice…This ? will dominate politics for weeks."
Max Twain on X - "33 Americans were killed on October 7th by Iranian proxies. 12 more were held hostage. Strange that I can’t find a post from you with sirens highlighting them. 🤔"
Alex Joffe on X - "Ask the 600+ who were killed by Iranian IEDs in Iraq. Or the three killed in Jordan by an Iranian backed militia in 2024. Or the Marines killed Beirut in 1983. Iran made its choice in 1979."

Daniel on X - "Despite civilians being killed in Iran, have you noticed there are no videos of ambulances, wailing parents, lifeless bodies covered in dust? Exact same in Lebanon. Or Ukraine. Compare that to Gaza where every hospital apparently has a film crew, multiple cameras, directors, editors and social media channels.   Do you get it yet?"

International law is not a suicide pact - "There is a certain type of British parliamentarian for whom the world is not a complex web of shifting allegiances and existential threats, but a neatly ruled jurisdictional straightjacket for the West. To hear Emily Thornberry or the leadership of the Green Party tell it, the recent US and Israeli operations against the Iranian regime are not a necessary excision of a regional cancer, but a simple “breach of international law.” Case closed. Bring in the tea. One expects this kind of reductionism from the protest lines, but it is deeply unsettling to see it calcify into the official posture of a British government. We have reached a bizarre juncture where Whitehall appears to have adopted a black-and-white interpretation of international law that slants so heavily against national freedom of action that it borders on the masochistic. For centuries, British law was held up as the global paragon – a pragmatic, evolving system that balanced order with the messy reality of human affairs. Yet this government seemingly no longer believes in that legacy. Instead, they treat the UN Charter, and other branches of the international legal apparatus, not as a living contestable framework, but as a suicide pact designed to ensure Western democracies remain politely motionless while their enemies sharpen the blade. International law is not some static, crystalline structure handed down from Sinai. Indeed, it is formed by the practice of states. If the law is interpreted in a way that always leaves the law-abiding defenceless against the law-breaker, then the law is not just “flawed” – it is worse than useless. Other liberal democracies, such as Australia and Canada, have looked at the same facts and reached the opposite conclusion about “Operation Epic Fury.” They understand what our own Foreign Office seems to have forgotten: that nuance is not a loophole; it is a necessity. The legal case for action against Iran is not merely “arguable”; it is compelling, both within and without the strictures of the UN Charter.  First, there is the reality of the “Long War.” Since the Ayatollah’s 1979 proclamation of “Death to America,” Iran has been in a state of constant, if unconventional, armed conflict with the West. A state of war does not vanish because there is a temporary lull in the counting of bodies. Through its proxies – Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis – Tehran has waged a persistent campaign of kinetic aggression. When President Trump listed the decades of attacks, from the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing to the strikes on global shipping, he wasn’t just reminiscing; he was identifying a continuous theatre of operations. British lives lost to Iranian IEDs in Iraq furnish further such sad evidence, as do the many attempted terrorist attacks on our soil, which the Prime Minister referenced. If a conflict is established, the use of force is governed by the laws of war – distinction and proportionality – not the peacetime hurdles of Article 51... Negotiations with a regime that views diplomacy as a stalling tactic for enrichment are not a legal barrier to action once it is clear those negotiations have failed.  Finally, there is the moral and legal weight of humanitarian intervention as established in customary law and statecraft. We have seen this before: in Liberia, in the no-fly zones of Iraq, and in Kosovo. In 1999, Tony Blair stood in Chicago and argued that Western democracies have a responsibility to intervene against oppressive regimes. The Iranian people, who have been tortured, slaughtered, and repressed for decades, represent the ultimate “humanitarian distress.”   To hide behind a narrow, 1945-era reading of the UN Charter while a regime exports terror and murders its own children is not “upholding the rule of law.” It is moral cowardice dressed up as jurisprudence. The Prime Minister’s recent, dizzying U-turn on the use of British sovereign bases –previously described by Whitehall as a legal impossibility – has let the cat out of the bag. It confirms that what was presented as “inviolable international law” was, in fact, nothing more than political sophistry designed to delay the inevitable.The US/Israeli action is both morally justified and legally legitimate. Sir Keir Starmer will continue to face a series of choices: He can continue to play the role of the cautious clerk, clutching a dusty rulebook while the world burns, or he can finally inhabit the role of a statesman and a true upholder of human rights. This demands more than a reluctant nod; it requires: an explicit acknowledgement that the Iranian regime is an existential evil... International law was designed to protect the civilised world, not to serve as a set of handcuffs for those tasked with defending it. If our legal frameworks truly forbade us from stopping a genocidal, nuclear-aspirant theocracy, then it would be the law – and not the action – that was fundamentally broken. Fortunately, the law is far more robust than the anaemic interpretations currently favoured by the high priests of paralysis in Whitehall. It bestows clear legitimacy on those who refuse to wait for catastrophe before acting in self-defence."

Juliet Moses on X - "By the Judge Advocate General of the British Armed Forces 2004-2020: “To suggest that the US and Israel must wait for a mushroom cloud to appear over Tel Aviv before the law “allows” them to act is a form of legalistic insanity. Negotiations with a regime that views diplomacy as a stalling tactic for enrichment are not a legal barrier to action once it is clear those negotiations have failed.” I have not heard anyone who has said Israel and the US acted illegally come up with a realistic solution about what they should have done to prevent Iran getting a nuke, which leads me to believe either they would have no problem with a mushroom cloud appearing over Tel Aviv or are deluded enough to believe that the fanatical theocracy, having just murdered tens of thousands of its own people and now targeting Sunni states with ballistic missiles, wouldn’t use it."
Even if a mushroom cloud appeared over Tel Aviv, left wingers and Islamists would be bitching over the response, as we can see from October 7th

re Iranian agents targeting Canadians with bullets? - " There appears to be a dark storm gathering over not only Jewish communities in Canada, but Iranian-Canadians who oppose the Islamic regime.  Late Monday night, gunfire struck the Temple Emanu‑El synagogue in Toronto, leaving several bullet holes in its windows. This followed a shooting on Sunday morning, in which multiple rounds were fired into an undisclosed business in Markham, Ont., just north of Toronto. Police have advised the community that they are aware of concerns that these violent incidents may be linked to what’s happening in the Middle East. These incidents in the Toronto area are not isolated. They are part of a pattern of violence, which appears to be escalating due to events in the Mideast. It also shows that law enforcement and governments are in over their heads... The Saliwan Boxing gym in Thornhill, Ont., which is owned by an Iranian-Canadian, was also hit by gunfire...  the gym’s owner, Salar Gholami, believes his business was targeted because he is an anti-Iranian regime activist and that agents of the Islamic Republic carried out the attack... “This is so serious, a clear message for the Government of Canada. When they open the door for Islamic Republic, they come inside, and you can see they are gangsters, they come in and support the terrorists.  “Here is the school. We have a lot of teenager and a lot of kids.… Seventeen bullets means 17 bodies.… You must protect your citizens. I’m Iranian. A world without Islamic Republic is better place for everyone. Not Just for Iranian.”  Gholami’s concerns about the Iranian regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are justified. Although Iran and its leadership have been designated as state sponsors of terror for years, and the IRGC was put on the terrorist watch list in 2024, Global News reported last spring that immigration officials had identified 20 suspected senior Iranian officials living in the country. And now that the regime is collapsing, there are concerns that more will attempt to flee to Canada.  But it wasn’t as if this couldn’t have been predicted. Iranian-Canadians have been sounding the alarm about people with links to the regime entering Canada for years. Mojdeh Shahriari, a human rights lawyer in Vancouver whose organization, StopIRGC, has received more than 200 reports about regime members and affiliates in this country, was interviewed by the CBC back in 2023 and did not mince words: “They’re terrorists.… Do you want these people to roam around in Canada unchecked? Are you OK with that? I don’t think so.” The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs notes that the Jewish and Iranian communities share common bonds, as both have been terrorized by Iran and its proxies. The group also pointed out that there is a stark contrast between rallies held by anti-regime activists and those held by anti-Israel activists.  Having gone to both types of protests, I agree. Even Toronto police have remarked that the anti-Islamic regime protests held in February were “safe” and incident-free, despite their large numbers. The same cannot be said of many pro-Palestinian rallies. According to a January report in the Grind, citing data from the Legal Support Committee, since October 2023, 170 people in Toronto have been arrested “as a result of Palestine solidarity actions.”  After attending the “No War in Iran” protest held by the Palestinian Youth Movement in Montreal last weekend, which took place alongside a much larger protest held by Iranians celebrating the killing of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, I can tell you that many of the people I’ve see taking to the streets of Montreal on a weekly basis and accusing Israel of “genocide” also came out to support the Islamic regime last weekend, with “Hands Off Iran” posters...  The common bonds shared by Jews and Iranians in Canada are the same bonds shared by every Canadian who believes in democracy and fundamental human rights. As Gholami said, a “world without the Islamic Republic is better place for everyone — not just for Iranian people, for everyone.”"
The terrorist supporter cope is going to be that this proves that Iranians who oppose the regime as "Zionists", so that proves that the Iranian government is good

Antifa_Ultras on X - "Watch the cockroaches dancing and waving US and Israeli flags while their so-called beloved country is being bombed."
Alan MacLeod on X - "I'm not sure how they did it, but somehow the Iranian diaspora is worse than even Miami Cubans and Venezuelans."
Haviv Rettig Gur on X - "That vile Iranian refugee diaspora keeps expressing the wrong opinion on the Iran war. Like those chutzpadik Miami Cubans or the vile one-in-four Venezuelans who no longer live in Venezuela for some unknowable reason. I, Alan, shall explain."
Richard Hanania on X - "Yes, it’s the people who have suffered under tyranny who are always the problem. It’s not your left-wing anti-human ideology which sympathizes with the worst dictators in the world. This is a deep moral and spiritual sickness."
Harry Ellis, Head of International Development on X - "Why is there a diaspora? (He might ask)"
Weird. I thought antifa wasn't an organisation

Max K on X - "This type of woke leftism is pushed by such frauds it's hard to know where to begin. They spent over a decade smearing anything and everything in the hyper-tolerant West as 'racist', 'extremist', 'white supremacist', 'fascistic' etc, and on that basis trying to get everyone else censored, fired, and cast out of public life for making virtually any statement that ran counter to cult-left groupthink - even factually accurate ones.   They relentlessly depict hyper-tolerant metropolitan institutions as unbearably oppressive, fake-cry about their own supposed subjugation on hyper-elite university campuses and in well-paid media jobs etc, and wang on about things like microaggressions and 'silence' being 'violence'.   But show them *actual*, brutal, genocidal oppression, (e,g. jihadists massacring men, women and children), recorded in HD on go-pro cameras, and they immediately call it a 'day of celebration', suggest it's 'exhilarating', say we should 'support' it, and so on.   They cry 'believe all women' and go mad if you question the existence of 'rape culture' in Ivy League colleges but, upon watching footage of female corpses being stripped naked then desecrated in the streets by armed bands of medieval, ultra-patriarchal Islamic fundamentalist savages they immediately take to social media to claim the women are making up the rape claims, the Israelis made them up, etc. And rush to the streets to fly the flag of the nation whose government organised the massacre. And chant jihadist slogans on marches organised by Hamas, full of islamists who are celebrating and demanding more 'jihad' (which, ofc, these people explain is actually no big deal at all).  They laud themselves as heroic warriors for 'social justice' but in reality they are a deeply malign force. They should have been laughed out of public life many years ago."

Why Johnny Can’t Read Anything Other Than Pronouns

Why Johnny Can’t Read Anything Other Than Pronouns - WSJ
Schools have become laboratories for esoteric ideological projects, not centers of learning.

The Supreme Court reinstated a lower-court ruling this week that said California schools must notify the parents of children who start asking to use new pronouns or otherwise take steps to adopt a “gender identity” at school that is different from their sex. 

In an unsigned 6-3 decision—the liberal justices dissented—the court said the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their claim that schools violated the Constitution when they kept parents in the dark on such matters. Parents, it concluded, have a right to “direct the upbringing and education of their children” as they see fit. Most Americans no doubt are relieved by the majority’s common sense. But what does it say that these are the kinds of issues that often dominate our national discussions around K-12 education today?

Far too many children are still assigned to substandard schools, and too many remain unable to read or do math at grade level. Meanwhile, educators and policymakers seem preoccupied with nonsense like helping students “transition” behind their parents’ backs or indoctrinating impressionable youngsters with social-justice poppycock to promote trendy political causes. American kids are outperformed by their foreign peers on international exams while we have to concern ourselves with whether school libraries make sexually explicit texts available to third-graders.

For a growing number of people in charge of the public education establishment, making sure that boys can play on girls’ sports teams has become more important than making sure students are acquiring basic academic skills that will enable them to learn a trade, complete college, become productive adults.

One of the few bright spots in our education system has been selective-enrollment public high schools, which use standardized tests and other objective measures to determine admissions. Examples include Boston Latin School in Massachusetts, Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Va., all of which boast long and proven records of providing a rigorous education for students from all backgrounds. Yet even this successful model is increasingly under attack, and its future is uncertain.

A new study from the Manhattan Institute details efforts in Chicago to eliminate selective public high schools. Much of the Chicago public school system is in shambles. Wirepoints, a government watchdog group, reported last year that the Chicago Public School system operated 53 schools in 2024 where not a single student tested proficient in math, and 17 schools in which no student tested proficient in reading. Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Democrats blame these outcomes on a lack of resources, but spending per pupil has almost doubled since 2017, and teacher pay in the Windy City is among the highest in the nation for large school districts after adjusting for cost of living.

The sensible path forward in Chicago would be to change or close the schools that are underperforming, but Mr. Johnson and his fellow progressives are far more interested in targeting the selective-enrollment school model. Chicago operates under a “choice” system, which means students aren’t required to attend a school based on their ZIP Code and can apply to schools with open seats in other neighborhoods, including selective-enrollment schools.

In 2023, 76% of Chicago high-school students chose to attend a school other than the one assigned to them, but if teachers unions and other opponents of school choice get their way, this option will end. Resource allocation in the public school system is based in part on enrollment. Mr. Johnson, a former union official, and his allies want to force students to attend their assigned schools, which will help prop up failing schools and protect their union jobs. By design, it might also result in the closure of selective-enrollment schools that admit students from all over the city. School board elections in November could determine the future of Chicago’s choice system.

Critics of selective public schools claim that they serve too few minority students, divert resources from traditional schools, and exacerbate racial and economic achievement gaps. Yet the Manhattan Institute’s assessment found that at least a third of the students at selective high schools in Chicago come from low-income families, and Chicago Public Schools spend thousands more per student on nonselective schools.

Almost “70% of all students at selective enrollment schools are black and Hispanic,” according to the study’s author, Renu Mukherjee. And the “black-white, Hispanic-white, and low-income-non-low-income achievement gaps” in math and English test scores “are, on average, significantly smaller at the city’s eight top selective enrollment high schools than at CPS overall.”

We should be replicating successful school-choice models, not thwarting them. When will concern about the educational advancement of all kids reach the level of concern for their preferred pronouns?

Links - 6th March 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

France is giving us a lesson on why wealth taxes always fail - "If wealth taxes were the easy solution that the online activists and Left-wing populists claim they are, then France would surely be doing brilliantly right now.  Amid a budget crisis last year, the country imposed a special surcharge on anyone earning more than €250,000 (£216,000) a year. So the deficit is fixed, right?... According to figures from the finance ministry this week, the so-called differential contribution, a special rate of income tax for the highest earners, generated an additional €400m last year. That compares to a forecast of €1.9bn... Of course, it is not hard to work out what went wrong. The better-off simply adjusted their income to bring themselves under the threshold, or else they moved elsewhere.  Paris was emerging as a serious rival to London as a financial centre, with lots of encouragement from Emmanuel Macron, but the financiers and hedge fund managers have all left, We haven’t heard much about bankers crossing the channel recently, while senior executives and successful entrepreneurs are getting out.  None of that will deter the high-tax, big state fanatics who now control the French parliament. The Left is already arguing that a clampdown on avoidance is needed, while the 2026 budget extends the temporary corporation tax surcharge that takes the rate up to a punishing 36pc for the country’s 400 largest companies. It surely can’t be long before major French companies such as the infrastructure operator Vinci or the drinks manufacturer Pernod Ricard, and perhaps even LVMH, are forced by their shareholders to move somewhere where they are not made to pay for the country’s lavish pension system. Taxes go up, revenues go down, so the political establishment puts them up again to make up the shortfall. No one in Paris seems able to work out what is going wrong.  And yet, the rest of the world should pay attention to what is happening in France. In her last Budget, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, imposed a mansion tax, a wealth tax under a different name, and if she and Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, are ousted this year, it seems certain the party will impose some form of levy on assets.  In New York, Mamdani is demanding a 2pc extra surcharge on incomes above $1m (£740,000). California is poised to hold a referendum later this year on a one-off 5pc wealth tax.  In 2022, Spain introduced a two-year “solidarity tax” on assets of more than €3m, and surprise, surprise, it has now been rolled over, and looks set to remain in place permanently. With government deficits soaring and budgets under pressure, wealth taxes have never been more politically popular. The trouble is, they never work. We have just seen that in France, and there are early signs of it in the UK as well. Only this week, the latest figures showed the amount collected from capital gains tax fell by 8pc in 2025, or £1.3bn. It wasn’t hard to work out why. The annual exemption was slashed from £12,000 to just £3,000 – shamefully by the last Conservative government – and anyone with a gain simply postponed selling instead of paying more. With the mansion tax, we will suddenly find that most properties are worth less than the £2m threshold.  Likewise, wealthy entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel and the Google co-founder Sergey Brin are already leaving California ahead of its vote, while Spain forecast revenues of €1.5bn when it introduced its levy, but the actual amount came in at slightly over €600m. Once again, it was a spectacular flop. A handful of governments have figured out a better strategy. Italy, with its flat tax on non-doms, has turned Milan into a hub for financiers and dealmakers, with property prices in the city rising by 49pc since it was introduced. Dubai keeps booming on the back of its minimal taxes.  The lesson from wherever wealth taxes are imposed could hardly be clearer. They drive out entrepreneurs, deter wealth creation, damage savings and investment, and worst of all, they never raise anything more than a fraction of the amount expected. Once the second-round impacts are taken into account, they generally mean lower overall tax revenues."

Meme - Kendric Tonn: "There are several things one could say about this, but the thing that's getting me is the evident belief that $500 is a lot of damage, instead of, like, the absolute lowest number in which fixing problems on a property is denominated"
sarah @thesarahkelly: "I admit it's a low priority but I would support legislation that made "pet rent" illegal. I don't know how we normalized this practice over the last decade or so but it's a scam.
There is simply no way my dog is doing an extra $500 A YEAR in damage or wear and tear. I already put down a deposit! It is already legal to bill/sue me for damages exceeding the deposit! You're just being greedy."
Left wingers think maintaining a property is costless, which is why they seethe at paying rent

Chuck Ross on X - "Nekima Levy Armstrong, who takes $200k salary at her "anti-poverty" charity, sent three of her kids to a "prestigious boarding school on the east coast," her husband wrote a few years ago."
Bonchie on X - "The numbers are worse when you add more context. From 2019-2024, her “charity” raised $5.2 million. She paid *herself* $1.2 million of that while giving out only $700k in grants. The level of abuse of non-profits in this country by activists is insane."
Time to tax churches!

The Fallacy of Redistribution - "The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago... Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.  The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.  In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s.  How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.   People in industry are not inert objects either. Moreover, unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country... Among the most valuable assets in any nation are the knowledge, skills and productive experience that economists call "human capital." When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments or hostile mobs whipped up by demagogues exploiting envy, lasting damage can be done to the economy they leave behind.  Fidel Castro's confiscatory policies drove successful Cubans to flee to Florida, often leaving much of their physical wealth behind. But poverty-stricken refugees rose to prosperity again in Florida, while the wealth they left behind in Cuba did not prevent the people there from being poverty stricken under Castro. The lasting wealth the refugees took with them was their human capital.  We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him only for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the government for more fish in the future. If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held by others.  That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them."
Thomas Sowell from 2012

Borrowing to keep up (with the Joneses): Inequality, debt, and conspicuous consumption - "The quest for status is a powerful motivator, but does it affect inequality? This paper presents a novel lab experiment that was designed and conducted to identify the relationship between conspicuous consumption, access to credit, and inequality. We report four main findings: First, consumption increases when it is “conspicuous” (i.e., is both observable and signaling ability). Second, costly borrowing increases when consumption is conspicuous. Third, the increase in costly borrowing is driven by those at lower income levels. Finally, in the presence of conspicuous consumption, access to credit exacerbates inequality."
Clearly, we just need to give poor people money to end poverty

Kiyah Willis on X - "I love capitalism because it has lifted much of the world out of poverty, made lifesaving innovations easily accessible, and allowed millions of people to live happy lives full of passion and love. You hate capitalism becaue someone you've never met owns a yacht and you don't"

Meme - The Other 98%: "If you're a Christian and you're big mad about the possibility of student loan debt being canceled. Let me remind you that the entirety of your faith is built on a debt that you can't pay that someone else stepped in and paid for you"
The Meme Policeman: "This equivocation of the word "debt" is impressive, truly one for the ages."
"The difference is Jesus didn't steal from me to pay the debt. He paid it all himself."
"So in this analogy, that would make Government their god. Makes perfect sense."
"Uh, I'm not really Christian, but I'm like 97% sure that's not what it is."

Calls for wealth tax as Rich List shows £772bn in the hands of just 350 families : r/unitedkingdom - "“You can’t tax wealth”  But you can use it as collateral to generate income.  Cunts."
"That is the loophole that needs to be closed."
"It's not even a loophole. Reddit has convinced itself that someone can generate endless tax-free income by taking a loan against stocks, seemingly forgetting that loans have to be repaid from income, which is taxed. At best it's a delay in paying that tax, not a reduction in it."
"What makes you think that loans have to be paid from income?"
"Because that's how the monthly payments are paid, from income. Either salary, dividends or capital gains. The main purpose of such collateral loans are to allow quick access to liquidity in a way that avoids onerous taxation (mostly an American thing as short-term capital gains have a higher tax rate), avoid volatility, or to avoid having to sell a controlling share to access that liquidity.  I know everyone on this site is convinced you can just take a loan and then somehow not pay it back, or convinced you just take more loans to pay it off, that's not how it works and for most examples, it'll result in the outstanding balance being greater than shareholding, meaning they'll be bankrupted within 10-15 years trying to service the debt by selling everything they have, and they'll still owe those taxes. The only scenario where that could realistically work is either if the borrower dies within a few years of the loan, or if their shareholding is wildly disproportionate to their annual spend (think £1bn shareholding, and an annual spend of £200k). Otherwise, it sits within the Reddit School of Economics lore alongside "supermarkets allow charity donations at the till all for the tax write-off"."
Left wingers are economically illiterate. That's why they're poor

San Diego State Wants Students to “Interrogate Capitalism” - "At San Diego State University (SDSU), ethnic studies students are learning to approach their internships from a “decolonial perspective” and to challenge the “colonizer logic of work.” Thanks to funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the university now offers a course called “Ethnic and Gender Studies in the Workplace,” part of a broader project to apply the principles of ethnic studies beyond the campus.  The “Building Decolonized Internship Pipelines” project, which SDSU launched last year, seeks to address a problem endemic to women’s, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies (area studies) departments: their students are routinely underemployed...   To address this perception—and presumably, to improve students’ chances at gainful employment—the project proposes an unconventional approach: applying decolonial ideology. “To counter deficit models of [area studies] students,” the project aims to create a navigating-the-workplace course and internship program “from a decolonial perspective,” the grant proposal said.  In practice, this means teaching students to be skeptical of the “colonizer logic of work.” That logic, the proposal noted, “seeks to indoctrinate and police students into uncritical, non-self-reflecting citizens who do not interrogate the relationship between capitalism and minoritized cultural practices, values, and traditions.”  One of the SDSU initiative’s key activities is developing an “Ethnic and Gender Studies in the Workplace” course. This course teaches students “how to interrogate capitalism and minoritized cultural practices, values, and traditions” while “challenging and resisting white supremacy, racism and hate, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, imperialism, and contemporary colonialism that are deeply entangle [sic] with professional workplaces.”  The new course is seemingly designed to make area-studies students even less employable...   SDSU’s decolonized internship program is just one in a flurry of new ethnic studies projects in California. In 2024, the Mellon Foundation gave the California State University System $1.5 million to “Expand Ethnic Studies Pathways.” The system used these dollars for nearly a dozen smaller grants to its campuses for projects such as “Advancing Queer and Trans Ethnic Studies” and “Advancing Two Spirit and Indigenous Trans Sovereignty.”  In a recent Wall Street Journal article, I describe the Mellon Foundation’s activist turn. The country’s largest funder of the humanities has embraced a political agenda, single-mindedly focused on advancing “social justice.”  SDSU’s project offers a small but poignant example of the consequences. The Mellon-funded program sets out to teach students that the workplace is oppressive and to prepare them to challenge it. By making students less prepared for post-college life, the Mellon Foundation continues to undermine the case for the humanities."

ZUBY: on X - "It's funny how it's anti-capitalists who are so much more obsessed with money than capitalists. They're always focusing on how much money other people have and how they should spend it."
The Atlas Society on X - "The builder dreams about creating value. The critic dreams about redistribution."

Argentina's Milei News 🇦🇷🤝🌎 on X - "BREAKING🔴 ARGENTINA's WHEAT-HARVEST SHATTERS ALL-TIME RECORD HIGH
In a stunning victory for Argentina’s rural sector, farmers have just harvested a jaw-dropping 27.7 million tons of wheat — a massive 20% surge above the previous all-time record.  This historic milestone, thanks to President Milei's tax breaks, marks another triumph for the productive countryside, proving that freedom and sound policies deliver results.  Contrast this with the Kirchnerist era, when the country was forced to import wheat after production collapsed to an embarrassing low of just 8 million tons.  Today, Argentina is once again feeding the world and writing a new chapter of agricultural greatness. Argentina's golden fields are roaring back — and it sure looks like the best is yet to come.  @JMilei"

Councilwoman Vickie Paladino on X - "As leftist policies fail in increasingly high profile and undeniable fashion, and people and businesses continue to flee en masse, Democrats will now do what socialists have always done in these situations — build a wall to keep people in against their will.  Both Mamdani and Bernie Sanders have now seriously proposed an economic Berlin Wall around blue jurisdictions to prevent population and capital loss as a result of people not wanting to live under socialist policies anymore.  It’s hard to articulate how un American this really is. But I expect nothing less from these people.  We fought a Cold War to prevent this from happening here. And we might have to take even more drastic action against our own Soviet uprising."

Stefan Schubert on X - "The US tax system has become much more progressive (notice the X-axis). The richest pay half their income in tax, the poorest nothing."
Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "The idea that we can balance the budget or even just avoid financial Gotterdammerung at this point if we simply raise taxes across the board is just wrong.  Just look at how consistent Federal revenues as a percent of GDP has been since WWII. The tax code has certainly not been consistent during the last 80 years.   We had an extremely progressive tax code in the 1950s and a much flatter one today, and yet the amount of money the Feds can extract as a percentage of GDP has remained relatively stable during this time.  This suggests that we already know more or less where the Laffer Curve is, and raising taxes wouldn’t do much of anything to raise revenues more than a few points as a percent of GDP.  The problem is the Federal government’s spending trajectory is utterly unsustainable, not that we aren’t collecting enough in taxes.  But nothing can be done to rein spending in because it’s political suicide to do so. “Nothing stops this train” as Lyn Alden likes to say.  Financial repression is inevitable."

Thread by @simonsarris on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I used to believe this but then you run the numbers and you find out that in practice its not true at all. The most dense cities in the US have *higher*, not lower, municipal spend per person. There's basically an inverse to cost savings in practice.  Partly this is because as you increase density you increase municipal demands. You're doing more with more.  But part of it is that as you make a more dense city you bring brand new problems and costs that couldn't exist before that you now have to spend on. Looking at the extreme example, NYC's municipal social spending alone is the same as San Antonio's entire spend.  That's fine, its a choice a city can make. But if a city decides to expand scope then that ruins any tax efficiency argument, and it seems regularly true.
"Look how much money we could save if we were a city"
"Does the city spend less per person?"
"Well, no, they spend more"
Struck me as odd when I first found it. It seems pertinent to infrastructure discussions. Infrastructure is not built in a vacuum. These are total spend which has some data problems (NYC's includes schools, many others do not, etc)  I asked Gemini to include a few more including SF, some data may be suspect but it mostly looks good, here:"
Arpit Gupta on X - "Also remarkable that NYC’s budget per capita is comparable to Spain, Singapore, or Japan *on top of* everything the federal government handles"
Kevin A. Bryan on X - "On fiscal position of US relative to social welfare states: in US places with very high public spending, what do you get? NY State spends 3x/student what Ontario or Utah spends! If they spent US avg = 240k/student saved = free 4 yr daycare + parent leave + free public univ.
It is a mystery where the money goes. It isn't just salaries: NY State 33% higher average teacher salary vs US overall, ~40% higher vs Utah or Ontario. Total school spending 3x. Outcomes worse despite this - < US avg even adjusting for SES. Would love an accounting deep dive."
Total NIMBY Death on X - "its funny how people start discussing politics like its an abstract battle of ideas between "low taxes, poor services" vs "high taxes, good services" but then they discover that high spending in blue states is just a scam, it goes into a money pit."
Weird. Left wingers keep insisting that cities are efficient and the suburbs are inefficient and want to force everyone to live in a city. In reality it's easier to push the left wing agenda that way

Dominic Pino on X - "France doesn't only tax the rich at much higher rates than the US. It also taxes the middle class more. A LOT more. And the government still can't pay its bills."
Philippe Lemoine on X - "I think people, including and perhaps especially in France, don't realize how expensive a welfare state as large as we have in France is. You need to raise ridiculous amounts of money and, in practice, the only way to do that is through broad-based taxation.  But politicians don't want to admit that, often I think they don't really understand it themselves, so instead of telling people the truth about the trade-offs involved, those on the left pretend we could pay for it just by taxing the rich while those on the right pretend we could pay for it by eliminating waste 🤷‍♂️"
Clearly, France needs to make the rich pay their "fair share" and to "tax the 'rich'"

Opinion | France learns it cannot sustain its welfare state by taxing the rich - The Washington Post - "France has budget problems, so politicians reached for a politically popular solution: Tax the rich. Never mind that France already had the second highest tax rate in Europe for its top bracket at 55.4 percent. Or that it already had surtaxes on income over 250,000 euros and income over 500,000 euros. Politicians hashed out a compromise in 2025 to add a “differential contribution” for individuals with taxable income over 250,000 euros. If, after calculating tax liability, someone’s average tax rate was below 20 percent, they’d need to pay extra to reach that proportion. The government forecast that this would raise 1.9 billion euros in revenue during 2025. Turns out, it actually raised — sacre bleu! — 400 million euros, a 79 percent miss. The tax’s projected revenue for 2026 is now a billion euros less than previously estimated. The government blames the shortfall on a change in the tax’s design. It was supposed to be retroactive to 2024, but in practice it applied only to 2025. Saying that a tax works if it re-taxes people who already paid is not the strongest argument for its soundness. The French far-left say the problem is the tax didn’t go far enough. (They always say that.) But government already took in over half of France’s GDP in revenue in 2024, before the new tax was added. How much is enough?...  The average single French worker gets to keep only 53 percent of his or her pay after taxes, compared with 70 percent for the average single American worker. For average one-earner families with two children, the tax burden is almost twice as high in France as in America. And those figures are only for taxes on labor. They don’t include the burden of France’s national value-added tax, with a standard rate of 20 percent on consumer purchases of goods and services. (Compare that with the average U.S. sales tax rate of 7.53 percent.) France’s massive welfare state was not built by taxing the rich. It was built by taxing the rich and everyone else at far higher rates than Americans would ever tolerate. Yes, France has universal government health coverage, but nearly all French people have private insurance on top of that. France also has lower average gross wages (adjusted for purchasing power), a much higher unemployment rate and much slower economic growth than the U.S. These stats of shame are all related. Even then, all those taxes still aren’t enough to avoid an enormous budget deficit. Efforts at reform have torn apart French politics, and bond markets are now making clear that past changes weren’t anywhere near enough to solve the problem. The unsustainable welfare state also means France cannot afford its ambitions to build a self-sufficient military or fully support Ukraine as it fends off Russia. The bleak conclusion: Politicians in Paris have made promises they can’t keep to a people who are now dependent on government for their livelihoods. Charismatic socialists keep trying to sell Americans on the European model. Look under the hood, and it’s clearly a lemon."

Rutger Bregman on X - "Whenever European billionaires threaten to leave Europe for the US, feel free to remind them that they'll actually pay more income tax over there 👍"

Christopher M. Meissner on X - "European welfare states have much more regressive tax systems than the USA in order to support their welfare systems. Counterintuitive as though it may be. Peter Lindert, author of “Growing Public”, amongst others, has been saying this for decades."

Aakash Gupta on X - "Everyone is missing the second chart.  The left chart shows effective income tax rates. The U.S. taxes its poor less and its rich more than France and the Netherlands. That’s the number Thompson is leading with, and it’s real.  But the right chart is where the actual story lives. That’s total average tax rates, which includes consumption taxes like VAT. And look what happens: the Netherlands jumps to ~45% for middle-income earners. France stays elevated across the board. The U.S. stays the lowest for the bottom 60% of earners.  Why? Because European welfare states are funded by 20-25% VAT rates that hit every purchase a lower-income household makes. Denmark charges 25% VAT. Hungary charges 27%. The EU average is 21.6%. The U.S. has no federal consumption tax and state sales taxes average around 5-6%.  When you spend 80-90% of your income on consumption (as most lower-income households do), a 20% VAT is functionally a 16-18% income tax that never shows up on your pay stub.  And here’s what both charts agree on: billionaires in every country converge toward the same effective rate. The U.S. top 400 pay about 24% of economic income. French and Dutch billionaires land in a similar range once you account for all taxes. Zucman’s own G20 report estimates global billionaires pay roughly 0.3% of their wealth annually, regardless of jurisdiction.  The “be more like Europe” framing assumes Europe taxes the rich and spares the poor. The data shows Europe taxes everyone, especially through consumption, and the rich find the same exits everywhere.  The real policy question this surfaces: European countries collect 34% of GDP in taxes vs. 27% for the U.S., and that 7-point gap comes almost entirely from taxing the bottom 60% harder through VAT. The trade is higher taxes on the poor in exchange for universal healthcare, childcare, and public transit. You can argue that’s a good trade. But you can’t argue the poor aren’t paying for it."

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "If Elon Musk liquidated his entire wealth tomorrow and gave all his money to the poor it would legitimately be a disaster for humanity.   Trillions of dollars in wealth would be incinerated, multiple companies at the frontier of human technological advancement would be destroyed, human space exploration would be set back decades.  And for what?  Most people would just use the money on drugs, porn, crypto and online sports gambling.  Destroy SpaceX, Tesla, xAI so that idiots can spend a $200 Elon stimmy cheque on OnlyFans and online sports gambling. The worst trade off in history.   Consider actual reality here.   Elon’s wealth is tied up in shares so if he tried to liquidate all his positions at once, the stock price would immediately crash, destroying trillions in value for normal middle class people whose pensions rely on stock market growth. Ultimately Elon could probably only recover 10-15% of the headline $850 billion figure if he tried to immediately go liquid. Then you would have to divide that up across hundreds of million of people.   If you tried to target the poorest people on Earth - those earning less than $3 a day - you would have to try distribute about $100 billion to 800 million people. About $120 each.   Logistically you would lose at least 20-30% of that on last mile delivery: banking fees, security, fraud, identifying the poor, preventing corruption. So you end up getting $90 to 800 million seperate people. That is one month of income.   The equivalent of a COVID stimmy cheque in a rich world country. Did COVID stimmy cheques solve the problem of poverty in the US? No, of course not, because one time infusions of cash are not enough to end poverty.   Even if you kept the program just within the United States it would largely be pointless. Divide 100 billion across the 40 million Americans below the federal poverty line - you get a $2500 payment per person. Roughly the equivalent of two COVID stimmy cheques. Not exactly world changing stuff.   Studies show that significant amounts of money from COVID stimmy cheques in America and Australia went directly to non-essential spending - gambling, day trading, crypto, online porn.   Studies from Australia show that when people were allowed to liquidate their superannuation (retirement fund savings) during COVID, they spent massive amounts on gambling. Up to 11% of all funds withdrawn from superannuation went towards online gambling.  Sadly the reality is that many poor people do not know how to manage money.   If you think the poor are only poor due to lack of money, you’re an idiot. Poverty is unfortunately far more complex than that, which is why so many poor people who win the lottery wind up going broke.   Elon could liquidate everything tomorrow, destroy all his companies. The end result would be a redistribution of wealth away from productive enterprises (companies pushing the frontier of human knowledge and civilizational advancement) towards some of the most non-productive ends imaginable: organised crime, drugs, prostitution, porn, online gambling.   Legitimate world historic disaster.  I would rather Elon keep the money."
Hunter Ash on X - "“Tax the rich” means converting SpaceX and Neuralink into hot cheetos for obese people."