Links - 11th June 2026 (3 - Therapy)

Opinion | This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers - The New York Times - "Ever since the pandemic, when rates of teenage suicide, anxiety and depression spiked, policymakers around the world have pushed to make mental health resources more broadly available to young people through programming in schools and on social media platforms. This strategy is well intentioned. Traditional therapy can be expensive and time-consuming; access can be limited. By contrast, large-scale, “light touch” interventions — TikTok offerings from Harvard’s School of Public Health, grief-coping workshops in junior high — aim to reach young people where they are and at relatively low cost. But there is now reason to think that this approach is risky. Recent studies have found that several of these programs not only failed to help young people, they also made their mental-health problems worse... Consider a “social-emotional skills training” school program called WISE Teens. Led by clinical psychologists in training, it consists of eight weekly hourlong classroom sessions in which students learn to manage their emotions with the help of tools and principles drawn from cognitive behavior therapy and Zen Buddhism. Last month, the journal Behavior Research and Therapy published a study of 1,071 Australian teenagers who were observed from 2017 to 2018: One group participated in WISE Teens; another group participated in a standard health-class curriculum. Compared with the teenagers who got the standard education, the students in WISE Teens reported more depression, more anxiety, more difficulty managing their emotions and worse relationships with their parents. One out of every eight WISE Teens participants appeared clinically depressed after completing the program, compared with one out of every 13 participants who did the regular health classes. These results are striking but not unique. Last year, an even larger study of a school-based mindfulness program, which looked at more than 8,000 British teenagers in more than 80 schools, found that the program did not improve mental health — and in fact led to worse anxiety and emotional problems, and lower levels of mindfulness skills. Yet another study published last year, which included some 2,500 Australian teenagers, also found that a mental health program made students more distressed... First, by focusing teenagers’ attention on mental health issues, these interventions may have unwittingly exacerbated their problems. Lucy Foulkes, an Oxford psychologist, calls this phenomenon “prevalence inflation” — when greater awareness of mental illness leads people to talk of normal life struggles in terms of “symptoms” and “diagnoses.” These sorts of labels begin to dictate how people view themselves, in ways that can become self-fulfilling. Teenagers, who are still developing their identities, are especially prone to take psychological labels to heart. Instead of “I am nervous about X,” a teenager might say, “I can’t do X because I have anxiety” — a reframing that research shows undermines resilience by encouraging people to view everyday challenges as insurmountable. It’s generally a sign of progress when diagnoses that were once whispered in shameful secrecy enter our everyday vocabulary and shed their stigma. But especially online, where therapy “influencers” flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders, greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions — what Dr. Foulkes calls “problems of living.” When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop. A second possible explanation for why these programs backfired is that they were provided in the wrong place and to the wrong people. The structure of school, which emphasizes evaluation and achievement, may clash with practicing “slow” contemplative skills like mindfulness. And many of the skills taught in these programs were developed for people coping with severe mental illness, not everyday stresses. These tools might not feel applicable to teenagers who aren’t deeply struggling — and on the flip side, their wide-scale adoption might make them seem too generic and watered-down to teenagers who are truly ill. A third possible explanation is that these interventions offered enough information to highlight a problem, but not enough to fix it. As research has repeatedly shown, the most effective therapies involve not just learning skills but also developing meaningful relationships. Even the most structured cognitive behavioral approaches recognize the value of a strong working therapeutic alliance between therapist and client... In the meantime, those serving up mental health guidance, both online and at school, should be cautious. It’s critical to keep pace with the evidence and attend to the first principle of all health care providers: First, do no harm."

Do no harm: can school mental health interventions cause iatrogenic harm? - "In recent years, there have been extensive efforts in secondary schools to prevent, treat and raise awareness of adolescent mental health problems. For some adolescents, these efforts are essential and will lead to a reduction in clinical symptoms. However, it is also vital to assess whether, for others, the current approach might be causing iatrogenic harm. A growing body of quantitative research indicates that some aspects of school-based mental health interventions increase distress or clinical symptoms, relative to control activities, and qualitative work indicates that this may be partly due to the interventions themselves."

Is It Really Trauma? Rethinking Stress, Resilience, and Identity (Part 2) - "We talk a lot about trauma these days. It’s become almost expected that every difficulty, every disruption, and every emotional wound is described as “traumatic. “But what if we’ve stretched that word too far? What if some of what we’re calling trauma is actually just part of the normal human experience—and what if this misunderstanding is affecting how we create and respond to adolescent distress? In video essays here and here, I highlighted the parallels between Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and the repressed memories epidemic of the 80s and 90s. In that exploration, the concept of trauma came up over and over again, and I found myself wondering: how is therapy culture currently defining “trauma,” and is it helping or hurting us?... Bonanno, a grief and trauma researcher, noticed something surprising in his long-term studies: the most common response to potentially traumatic events wasn’t PTSD or prolonged suffering. It was resilience. Even after 9/11, researchers expected a tsunami of long-term mental health problems. What they found instead was that most people, in the long run, were okay. This lines up with something we often forget: humans throughout history have faced unthinkable hardships—war, famine, natural disaster—and yet, generation after generation, we’ve adapted and moved forward. Resilience, it turns out, is the norm, not the exception. In Bonanno’s book, he describes the flexibility mindset. This is a set of traits that consistently predicts resilient outcomes. People with a flexibility mindset demonstrate three powerful qualities:
Optimism about the future – Even amid chaos or fear, they maintain a sense that things can get better.
A challenge orientation – They view adversity not as a death sentence, but as a problem to solve, something to face and work through.
Confidence in one’s ability to cope – This isn’t toxic positivity; it’s the grounded belief that "I can handle what comes my way."
These qualities, Bonanno observed, aren’t just innate—they can be cultivated, especially when modeled and supported by others... A 2017 study examined how people’s mindset about stress impacted their actual physiological response. Participants were shown short videos that framed stress as either helpful or harmful. Then they were put through a stressful mock interview, and researchers measured their biological responses. Those who had been told stress could be helpful not only felt better—they produced higher levels of DHEAs (hormones that counteract the effects of cortisol), performed better cognitively, and even noticed positive social cues more accurately. In contrast, those primed to view stress as harmful were more likely to spiral and miss positive feedback. Stress itself isn’t always the problem. It’s our perception that shapes what happens next. So What Does This Have to Do With Gender-Distressed Teens? A lot. Right now, many teens are operating under a mindset of fragility. Social media, school culture, and even well-meaning parents have taught them to see discomfort as danger, and stress as harmful. With a plethora of mental health diagnoses, giftedness labels, and other special needs, a child’s perceived exceptionality and fragility can become the center of the family’s orbit. If your child has been under the microscope for many years (for a number of different legitimate reasons), this can send the message that he or she is too vulnerable and incapable of being resilient. Furthermore, rather than encouraging adaptive coping, much of social media messaging promotes "co-rumination"—a peer and post-fueled loop of distress, disclosure, suffering for the audience, and validation. Some teens may be engaging in what Bonanno calls "coping ugly": short-term strategies that help them survive a tough moment but don’t serve them long-term. Adopting a trans identity, using a binder, or cutting off social ties might provide temporary relief—but for many young people, these aren’t sustainable or healthy solutions (or even authentic ones, at that). We also have to consider how providers are framing things. The infamous "Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?" is the ultimate example of a stress-is-debilitating message. Puberty will literally weaken and destroy your child. One of the most egregious and unethical versions of the fragility narrative. And it’s an outright lie."

Kamala Harris' stepdaughter shares 'trauma' while voting for Mamdani - "Former Vice President Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, shared with her Instagram followers on Tuesday that she felt "a little trauma" while on her way to vote in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Emhoff revealed that she was voting in the same polling station where she had cast her ballot for her stepmother, who ultimately suffered a crushing defeat in Nov. 2024."
"Trauma" is anything you don't like

MenNeedToBeHeard: Why Are Mental Health Professionals Mocking Men? : r/MensRights - "I'd like to say the therapist showcased at the start of the linked video should have their license revoked for their horrible treatment of men. However, considering the unprofessional state of the mental health industry as a whole, I expect that this type of misandrist attitude is actually a requirement for having a license in the first place. There are still a few good ones out there who truly care about men's mental health – like Tom Golden – but unfortunately they're the exception, not the rule."
"I think it's because the mental health industry has been taken over by a specific ideology that is geared against specially hetero men. There is a sort of anti-patriarchy mantra in that industry, and so if you're male, and hetero, you are part of that patriarchy from their perspective. So they are set up to not be very helpful to you. They'll just tell you that your natural behaviors are a male is all socially constructed, and push you to take on more feminine traits as the true human default of expression and feelings."
"And this is one of the reasons why "just go to therapy" doesn't work for most men"
"This Psychologist talks about it. It’s been taken over by women. Most women are liberal and follow the feminist ideology whether they know it or not. It’s the same problem in the publishing industry. Once a certain amount of women are in the profession, it caters to them and their sensibilities."

The Curious Case of School Counsellor Trauma - "it’s not uncommon to have bad experiences with school counsellors. These counsellors are touted as a respite for students in crisis. Most of the time, they get the job done, and students get the help and guidance they need. But there’s also a subset of people with experiences that are bizarre at best and outrageous at worst. They speak of counsellors breaching confidentiality, getting involved and making predicaments worse for their students, or otherwise leaving the student worse off for approaching them. Even stranger is the fact that it’s secondary school counsellors who seem to behave badly. Most of the people I speak to who’ve sought help at universities have nothing but good things to say."

Is There Moral Incongruence Bias in Some Sex Therapists? - "Moral incongruence theory was introduced about 10 years ago by University of New Mexico psychologist Josh Grubbs, and it has been used to explain why so-called sex addicts don’t have more sex than other people but feel worse about it. When people hold moral beliefs about certain kinds of sexual behavior but still engage in those same behaviors, they are likely to experience shame and guilt, which often leads to depression, distress, and anxiety. Unfortunately, most therapists who promote diagnosis and treatment for sex and porn addiction do little to help resolve these moral conflicts and instead focus on the sexual behaviors. This may be due to moral incongruence in the therapists themselves. Research recommends cognitive behavioral and acceptance and commitment therapies for the treatment of pornography-related difficulties. No research supports treatments that address pornography as an addiction. New research by Justine Meador assessed views of pornography, sex and pornography addiction, and examined personal characteristics of the therapists. Meador collected data from 289 mental health professionals, including 55 certified sex addiction therapists (CSAT). Results revealed that 25 percent of CSATs had a personal history of seeking sex addiction treatment themselves, compared to less than 5 percent of non-CSAT therapists...
Mental health professionals who had higher levels of moral incongruence about their own sexuality were significantly more likely to diagnose porn addiction in other people...
When considering clinical vignettes containing symptoms of depression or bipolar disorder along with pornography use, CSATs tended to diagnose porn or sex addiction rather than clinical diagnoses...
Non-heterosexual therapists were significantly less likely to diagnose porn addiction or recommend porn addiction treatment and less likely to be morally condemning of pornography use.
Republican therapists were the most likely to diagnose porn addiction and had the highest levels of moral disapproval of pornography.
Religious therapists who were higher on a measure of narcissism were more likely than others to diagnose porn addiction.
Therapists who identified as being non-monogamous were less likely to diagnose porn addiction or recommend this treatment."

Joyce Carol Oates on X - "in virtually every advice column the panacea is: "see a therapist." yet, in real life, many therapists with whom we are acquainted are not particularly intelligent or original-thinking persons; they may be good-hearted, sympathetic, but inevitably veer toward a conformist notion of How to Behave. they only know what they've been taught. in one case, a psychoanalyst acquaintance, male, behaved horribly toward his own wife, disinclined to drive her for medical appointments so that she had to appeal to friends. (who stepped forward.) surely ChatGPT would at least say a few cheering-up words to the client floundering in the vicissitudes of adult life, even if they are programmed syllables."

It's simple. Islamic extremism is behind all the Jew hate

Jesse Kline: It's simple. Islamic extremism is behind all the Jew hate

Canada has an antisemitism problem, but listening to our politicians, government agencies and some in the media, it's easy to get the impression that no one really knows where the hatred is coming from or who is committing attacks against Jews.

In his much-discussed speech Monday at a Toronto synagogue, Prime Minister Mark Carney called out Jew-hate as a "crisis" that is testing the very "nature" of our country. He tacitly admitted that some immigrants are bringing old-world hatreds with them when he said, "When you come to Canada, you bring your faith, your tradition, your language, your story. You leave behind your wars and your animosities."

What he did not say is anything about Islamic extremism, the foreign-funded campaign that's driving anti-Jewish hate or the groups, foreign and domestic, that have been organizing the hate-filled protests that have taken over Canadian streets.

On the same day, Toronto police announced that five people — Hosaam Hemdan, Omer Turcan, Syed Hussaini, Hasan Aydin and Yasaf Shaikh — had been arrested for allegedly holding blatantly antisemitic signs at an anti-Israel rally.

A month earlier, Toronto residents described by police as "visibly identifiable members of the Jewish community" sustained minor injuries following a drive-by shooting with a "replica firearm." The following week, people standing in front of a synagogue were targeted in a similar attack. A day after the second shooting, police arrested 18-year-old Ruslan Novruzov.

Although not much is known about Novruzov, his surname is common in Azerbaijan, a 97.3 per cent Muslim-majority country where 53 per cent of the population harbour antisemitic views, according to the Anti-Defamation League's Global 100 index.

Yet anyone who read the CBC's story on the arrest would not have known Novruzov's name, because the public broadcaster chose not to publish it. And this is not the first time this has happened.

The CBC similarly failed to mention the names of people arrested for attacks against two Jewish schools in Toronto and one in Montreal, which serves to create the impression that some amorphous blob is responsible for Canada's antisemitism problem.

This is not the case in many other places, especially in Europe, where authorities, the media, academia and advocacy groups have historically been far less timid about identifying the sources of antisemitism.

All the way back in 2002, journalist Tove Gravdal, reporting on the rise in antisemitism in France, noted that after the start of the Second Intifada, "Young French men of Arabic origin came together over the Palestinian cause, turned French Jews into symbols of Israel and launched a wave of attacks on Jewish targets."

In a 2017 study, researchers at the University of Oslo asked the victims of antisemitic incidents in Europe who committed the attacks and found that respondents "most often perceived the perpetrator(s) to be 'someone with a Muslim extremist view.' "

Similar findings were reported in a 2017 study from researchers and Bielefeld University and Goethe University Frankfurt, in which almost half (48 per cent) of victims described the perpetrator as "Muslim."

In the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust's latest annual report on antisemitic incidents found that when the victims of anti-Jewish hate were able to identify their attackers, a quarter were described as "Arab or North African," and 11 per cent were said to be "South Asian."

These numbers are similar to those found in a 2015 report from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, which noted that, "Cautious estimations put the percentage of Muslim perpetrators of antisemitic acts in Great Britain at between 20 and 30 per cent, while the percentage of Muslims in the general population stands at five per cent."

Likewise, surveys conducted by the European Union in 2024 found that 30 per cent of the victims of antisemitic harassment and half of Jews who endured physical attacks reported that their victimizers held "Islamist extremist views."

In Canada, however, the ethnicity or ideological leanings of those who disseminate hate or commit violence against Jewish targets is rarely discussed. A Senate report on antisemitism that was released in April made no mention of Islamic extremism.

Liberal cabinet ministers also seem unable to denounce antisemitism without incorporating the word "Islamophobia" into the sentence, creating the impression that Jews and Muslims are being victimized by hate crimes at similar rates, or that both communities are engaged in an ethnic conflict with one another.

But the government's own statistics show that this is simply not the case. According to Statistics Canada, police-reported hate crimes targeting Muslims rose 44 per cent between 2015 and 2024. While this is certainly a problem, and one that needs to be addressed, it pales in comparison to the 417 per cent increase in hate crimes against Jews over the same period.

In an interview with National Post, Raheel Raza, president of the Council of Muslims Against Antisemitism, noted that the violence and hate is all one-sided.

"I remind the Muslims: Do you ever think that the Jewish community can also retaliate? You know, have they gone and burned halal meat stores? Look at all the Muslim businesses. Have they targeted them? They don't retaliate. And this is the big difference," she said. "While it's hate on one side, the other side is just so busy defending themselves and looking for ways to make peace."

Even our security services seem reticent to name the source of the violence: a recent CSIS report noted that some violent extremism stems from "extreme interpretations of religion," but did not venture a guess as to what religion that might be.

This contrasts sharply to the situation in many other western countries. The German government's "2023 Report on the Protection of the Constitution," for example, was refreshingly candid in its assessment that Islamists are one of the primary drivers of antisemitic rhetoric and violence.

According to the report, "Islamist extremist groups exploited" Hamas's October 7 massacre in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza to "organize," "mobilize support," "take part in demonstrations" and "engage in agitation on social media."

This was orchestrated by domestic interests — including followers of Salafism, which is described as "the Islamist extremist movement with the largest number of adherents in Germany" — and foreign terrorist groups, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Vancouver-based Samidoun, the Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Some of these groups began working together for the first time after October 7, with their "antisemitic ideas" forming the "common denominator in the ideology of the entire Islamist extremist spectrum." The report further noted that in Germany and neighbouring countries, numerous attacks were planned or carried out by "lone actors with Islamist extremist motives," proving that "Islamist terrorism continues to pose a threat."

Yet Robert Brym, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and the country's leading pollster on Canadian Jews, said he's unaware of similar data on the perpetrators of antisemitic hate crimes being collected in Canada.

"I suspect Canadian police forces consider such information potentially inflammatory," he said, even though it would be useful. "Just as crime statistics categorized by race of perpetrator have been used to identify biases in the criminal justice system, information on the religious and ethnic identity of perpetrators of hate crimes can be used to provide certain categories of the population with educational support, thus helping to ameliorate the problem."

Since October 7, anti-Israel demonstrations have become commonplace on many university campuses and in cities throughout the country. Yet the protesters' opposition often extends far beyond the policies of the Israeli government, with many expressing animosity towards Jews, in both Israel and Canada.

Caryma Sa'd, a lawyer and independent journalist of Palestinian and Indian descent who has documented many of the protests, said she's witnessed this first hand.

"My Jewish videographer has been targeted countless times at demonstrations and online. The stated reason for some attacks is that he's a 'Zionist,' yet he's never expressed any opinion about Israel," she said. "So it stands to reason that Canadian Jews are caught in the crossfire of assumptions, including conflating their mere existence with Israeli policy."

Raza, who has also witnessed some of the demonstrations, is adamant that the protesters are "not so much pro-Palestine, as much as they hate" Israel. If "these people were saying, let's have peace, let's have a ceasefire, it would make sense," she said. But that's not what they're saying.

In one notable example, a Toronto man named Razaali Bahadur was caught on video telling Jewish children attending a rally in support of hostages being held by Hamas that their moms and dads "raped and murdered children," that the Jewish people are "not from Israel" and "have no religion," and that, "You guys crawled out of the earth … that's where you belong."

Bahadur — who has a history of anti-Israel activism, including support for Hamas's atrocities — was subsequently convicted of public incitement of hatred.

Anti-Israel agitators also hold regular protests in Toronto's Bathurst and Sheppard area, a neighbourhood notable only for its large Jewish population. In March, protesters were caught holding antisemitic signs, including images of a Gollum-like Orthodox Jewish man emerging from a cave, a man with a hook nose wearing a kippah and rats scurrying out of a Star of David.

"I call it the new antisemitism," said Raza, when asked how people justify protesting in a Jewish neighbourhood, rather than, say, outside the Israeli Consulate. "All those Islamist organizations who don't get along with each other come together with one cause — the hate for Israel and the Jewish community. So they justify it."

The protests are being organized by a variety of loosely-knit, ostensibly pro-Palestinian groups, but some of the major ones include Samidoun, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Samidoun was responsible for organizing protests where demonstrators chanted "death to Canada" and praised the October 7 massacre as "heroic and brave." It was co-founded by Charlotte Kates, who was born in the United States but resides in Vancouver when she's not in the Islamic Republic of Iran accepting "human rights" awards, and her husband, Khaled Barakat, a Palestinian and member of the PFLP, a listed terrorist entity, who spends much of his time in Lebanon. In 2024, Samidoun was designated as a terrorist organization by the Canadian government.

PYM, an international group with chapters in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, has been described as the "most prolific organizer" of anti-Israel rallies, which include celebrations of the October 7 massacre as it was occurring. According to the Israeli government, PYM has "close ties" with the PFLP, an assertion backed up by a 2019 French court ruling, which found that it is "affiliated" with PFLP and "claims resistance against the State of Israel."

SJP organizes anti-Israel protests on campuses throughout North America. It published material immediately after the October 7 attacks glorifying Hamas and calling for a "day of resistance." The group has well-documented alleged ties to Hamas and organizations accused of fundraising for the terror group.

"It's quite clear that the major funders of these rallies, while the head of the snake, of course, is Iran, and through its proxies, through its organizations, through its mosques, they channel the funding," said Raza. "This is not something that just happened on Oct. 8 … this is something that has been in the works and been planned for years before October 7."

As hate-filled protests have taken over our streets, Canada has witnessed a spate of attacks targeting Jews and Jewish institutions. Sa'd said there's "certainly a correlation" between the two.

"As far as vandalism and shootings that target Jewish businesses and synagogues, there generally isn't enough publicly available information to draw a straight through-line between such incidents and the protest circuit," she said, but "it's all happening in an atmosphere of increased animosity towards Jewish people and groups (with 'Jewish' effectively being a stand-in for 'Zionist')."

Raza was far less hesitant to draw such a link, saying that the demonstrations and the violence are "totally connected."

One case that clearly illustrates this relationship took place last fall, when the group Students Supporting Israel at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) held an off-campus talk featuring Israel Defense Forces soldiers. SJP's TMU chapter immediately called for a protest of the event, which ended with a group of masked demonstrators smashing a glass door, forcibly entering the private venue and injuring some of the participants.

Six people were charged in relation to the incident, including Qabil Ibrahim, Fatimah Mugni, Nicole Baiton, Kiana Alexis, Manal Kamran and Chelsea Wu. Sa'd said she's "frequently encountered" Ibrahim at the protests. He was previously charged with arson after allegedly burning an Israeli flag at a demonstration last spring, and now faces six additional charges, including forcible entry, assault and rioting while masked.

Arrests have also been made in relation to attacks against Jewish synagogues, day schools, businesses and other community institutions.

Amir Arvahi Azar was charged with 29 crimes, including advocating genocide, wilful promotion of hatred, arson, mischief to cultural property, criminal harassment and firearm possession. Over eight months, he is alleged to have vandalized and set fire to four synagogues, threatened a Jewish centre and vandalized a Jewish-owned cafe.

Mohamed Ilyess Akodad is accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Montreal-area synagogue and smashing the windows of Federation CJA.

In December, police arrested three suspects in Toronto — Waleed Khan, Fahad Sadaat and Osman Azizov — and laid 79 charges, including "attempted kidnapping with firearms" for an alleged crime spree that targeted women and the Jewish community. After executing search warrants, police said they "uncovered links to terrorism."

Abdirazak Mahdi Ahmed and Feijhoo-Leito Joseph were both charged in connection with an incident in which shots were fired at a Montreal-area Jewish school. Mohamed Mahdi was charged with four firearm-related offences in connection with a shooting at a Jewish-owned restaurant in Toronto. And Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, an ISIS supporter and Pakistani national, plead guilty to planning a mass shooting targeting New York Jews.

"The protesters are not all" Muslim, said Raza, but she believes the crux of the issue is "animosity against Israel and the Jewish community" from some segments of Canada's Islamic community, noting that, "Hamas, Hezbollah, name all the extremist terrorist organizations — they're (all) Muslims."

Sa'd believes that characterization misses an important part of the story: the so-called red-green alliance between Islamists and western leftists. She said the protest movement has created "an uncomfortable common ground between 'progressives' and Muslim protesters. Both groups harbour lots of true antisemitism in their midst, which neither side bothers to root out."

In his book, "After the Pogrom," British author Brendan O'Neill documents the history of what he terms "the unholiest alliance" between socialists and Islamists. It starts in the early 1990s when western communists were struggling to define themselves in the aftermath of the Cold War and socialist journalist Chris Harman penned a manifesto arguing that the left should forge alliances with radical Islam on some issues.

That's exactly what happened after 9/11, when the anti-war movement found common cause with Muslim groups opposed to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. A little over a decade later, the leader of Her Majesty's official Opposition in the United Kingdom, Jeremy Corbyn, was bragging about being "friends" with Hamas.

In Canada and elsewhere, this marriage between people who claim to be "anti-racist" and value human rights, and those, such as Hamas, who oppress women, stone gay people and denigrate Jews, has been gathering steam on university campuses for decades. It is why, after October 7, we saw educational unions that claim to represent broad swaths of society and left-wing professors actively cheering on Hamas's "resistance."

At the same time, Canada has seen an influx of newcomers from Muslim-majority countries with high rates of antisemitism. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of permanent residents from Africa and the Middle East admitted to Canada each year increased from 24,221 to 42,917.

Between 2015 and 2024, the number of permanent residents from Algeria — a country where eight out of 10 people harbour antisemitic attitudes, according to the ADL — nearly tripled, rising to 8,255 from 2,830. Immigration from Lebanon, where 86 per cent of the population holds antisemitic views, doubled.

Permanent residents admitted from the West Bank and Gaza, where 97 per cent of the populations holds negative attitudes towards Jews, nearly doubled. The number of immigrants from Morocco, where seven in 10 people have antisemitic attitudes, reached a high of 7,635 in 2024, up from 2,705 in 2015.

Immigration from Turkey, where 79 per cent of people hold antisemitic views, nearly tripled between 2015 and 2024. The number of newcomers from Sudan, which scored 72 per cent on the ADL's Global 100 index, increased 14-fold between 2015 and 2025, while immigration from Tunisia, with a score of 83, quadrupled. The list goes on.

This has led to a significant demographic shift: the 2001 census found that Muslims and Jews made up two per cent and 1.1 per cent of the Canadian population, respectively; by 2021, the Muslim population had increased to 4.9 per cent and the Jewish population fell to 0.9 per cent.

This likely goes a long way in explaining why Ottawa has done little to curb the tide of antisemitism — the Carney government's recent spring fiscal update allocated over three-times more money to save whales than to save Canadian Jews — and has turned its back on its historic allies in Jerusalem.

The result of a decade of unfettered immigration without regard to shared values is that Canada's multicultural mosaic, once hailed as a model for the world, has been smashed to pieces. Demonstrators openly hold antisemitic signs and call for genocide against Jews. Prominent taxpayer-funded Islamic charities, like the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), invite supporters of extremism and people who oppose liberal values to speak at their conventions.

In this climate, it's little wonder that when the phrase "Jew free" was displayed in a word cloud about what type of world attendees at the recent MAC conference in Toronto want to build, no one protested. In modern-day Canada, antisemitism has become normalized, and advocating for violent jihad is no longer seen as taboo.

When asked how to deal with the situation, Sa'd advocated for dialogue, as well as holding people accountable by enforcing existing laws. Raza is a big believer in education and inter-faith dialogue, goals she works toward with her community outreach, but also highlighted the need for immigration reform to ensure people coming to this country share our values.

All of these solutions are sorely needed if Canada hopes to quell the hatred that continues to seethe in our streets well after a ceasefire took effect in Gaza, create a safe environment for Jewish-Canadians and return to a time when this country was held up as a model of multiculturalism. But none of that can happen if Canadians can't have an honest conversation about who's committing these crimes and where the hatred is coming from.

 

Time to do more about Islamophobia, because this is radicalising Muslims to attack Jews. So the solution is to jail the (white) "far right". But then, since, as we are told across the pond, Zionism is anti-Muslim hatred, we need to jail/deport "Zionists" for Jews to truly be safe

Clearly, foreign data is totally irrelevant to Canada, so we cannot draw any inferences from it

Since most Jews are Zionists, Jews need to publicly disclaim Israel and Zionism, or they deserve to be attacked for their complicity in the genocide of Palestinians

Links - 11th June 2026 (2 - Socialism)

Ideology and the death of satire - "As the 2017 hit The Death of Stalin illustrated, communism is an inherently funny system because it is both built on wild optimism, and because the terror and malice is often so random and nonsensical. The Nazis coldly and precisely murdered their enemies but otherwise left obedient citizens alone; communism consumed its most sycophantic supporters in an absurd manner. Nazism was inherently evil in its intentions, while communism created evil out of human naivety; that made it both less morally repugnant, but also funnier. ‘Unlike other commonly acknowledged ideologies, such as imperialism, Capitalism, fascism and fundamentalism, Communism was inherently “funny” because of a unique combination of factors’, Lewis wrote: ‘The ineffectiveness of its theories, the mendacity of its propaganda and the ubiquity of censorship were all important. The cruelty of its methods interacted with the sense of humour of the people on whom it was imposed. The concentration of all political and economic power in the hands of the state, and the state’s attempt to direct artistic activities – that meant that any joke critical of life in a Communist society was de facto about Communism. All these things created the innate and inalienable humour of Communism, its greatest cultural achievement.’... Revolutionary regimes are contradictory in their relationship with authority, arising out of subversion and attracting natural rebels and bohemians; therefore as they become the establishment, they find it hard to accept that they are now the natural subject of satire. There are obvious parallels with today’s ‘clapter’, and the new type of comedy that aims to mock only the rural, old and reactionary. This kind of anti-comedy makes no real attempt to poke fun at the genuinely powerful, the people who could lose you your job or your friends, nor to take aim at the absurdities of the new regime or break its taboos. It is really just the same party-approved humour, aimed at laughing at those left behind by the Revolution."

Meme - "I have all kinds of Facebook friends. Tankies, anarchists, ancoms, liberals"
"But you don't have any right wing friends."
"No, I mentioned the liberals."
Tankies considering liberals right wingers. But tankies want to kill each other anyway
The unrealistic part is thinking commies would proudly have liberals as friends rather than wanting to send them to the guillotine (along with everyone else they disagree with)

Rob Henderson on X - "The people most committed to communism in the Soviet Union weren’t the workers—it was the educated elite. A retrospective study conducted in the 1990s titled "Work Ethics and the Collapse of the Soviet System," examined which groups were most supportive of the Soviet system. The researchers found that, compared to factory workers and semi-skilled laborers, individuals in white-collar positions—especially those with higher levels of education—were significantly more likely to express loyalty to the Communist Party. In some cases, support was two to three times higher among elites. In other words, the strongest support for the system came not from those at the bottom, but from those in relatively advantaged positions within it. This runs counter to the common assumption that egalitarian or redistributive ideologies are primarily driven by the least well-off. In practice, they are often most strongly endorsed by people closer to the top of the social hierarchy—those who benefit from the system’s institutional structure, or who are positioned to navigate it successfully"
Time to mock poor people for voting against their interests

Kyle Becker on X - "This is a critical point about socialism. "Workers" don't support it. Elites do. They hate markets because they provide accountability. They hate private property because it limits their economic clout. They hate individual rights because they limit power. It has nothing to do with whether or not capitalist economy works for "the masses." Socialist economy works for the elites. That's why they support it. Multiple studies show that economic freedom not only leads to more wealth, but more economic equality. A middle class is built in a market economy. It is destroyed in a socialist economy. That leads to misery, poverty, and oppression. It's not a historical accident. That's what happens under socialism."

Handre on X - "Tanzania's forced collectivization under Julius Nyerere killed more people per capita than Stalin's agricultural disasters, yet Western intellectuals still romanticize ujamaa as "African socialism." Between 1967 and 1975, Nyerere's government forcibly relocated over 13 million Tanzanians—roughly 80% of the rural population—into collective villages called ujamaa. The state promised modern amenities, shared prosperity, and liberation from "capitalist exploitation." Instead, they delivered mass starvation. Agricultural output collapsed by 50% within five years. Food imports skyrocketed from 50,000 tons in 1970 to 400,000 tons by 1974. Rural villagers who had fed themselves for generations suddenly couldn't grow enough grain to survive winter. The mechanics were predictably Austrian. When you destroy private property rights and eliminate price signals, you obliterate the knowledge that makes agriculture work. Farmers knew their local soil, rainfall patterns, and crop rotations. But central planners in Dar es Salaam decided that "scientific socialism" trumped centuries of accumulated farming wisdom. They forced communities to abandon fertile ancestral lands for designated plots that bureaucrats selected from maps. Villages that resisted faced military force—troops literally burned homes to drive families into the collectives. And the damn tragedy continues reverberating today. Tanzania remains one of Africa's poorest countries, importing food despite having some of the continent's best agricultural land. Per capita income in 2023 sits at $1,192—lower than Bangladesh. You can draw a straight line from ujamaa's destruction of property rights to Tanzania's persistent poverty. But mention this at any development economics conference and watch professors explain how Nyerere had "good intentions" and the real problem was "insufficient implementation."
Lesson: Collectivism fails equally hard across race, language, geography, population size, education level, continent, or any other possible metric you can dream of."
Emil Kirkegaard on X - "Socialism with African characteristics didn't work much better than socialism with Chinese or Russian characteristics."

Devon Eriksen on X - "At last, the relevant question. Here's how it works.
1. Communism is when depraved freaks make it illegal to be normal, and kill all the successful people.
2. Fascism is when normie dullards make it illegal to be weird, and kill all the bright and creative people.
The depraved freaks from #1 think they are the bright and creative people from #2. They are not. All those people gyrating half-naked in front of children at pride parades think they are Oscar Wilde, but they aren't. When societies become highly permissive, the productive weirdos, the ones who simply can't fit in because they are creative in useful ways, become surrounded by, outnumbered by, a horde of cargo-cult imitators. These people imagine themselves to be creative free spirits, because they compete to be as freaky as possible. They do not understand that freaky behavior is not creative talent... it is only a side effect of creative talent. Often these people are defective and useless, which is why they seek to use freakiness to camouflage themselves as creative, hoping to hide their uselessness. This progresses until normies get disgusted with them, and start thinking fascism might be a good idea. Then they kill everyone. This wipes out all the depraved freaks from #1, but it also wipes out Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, etc, as described in #2. Because normie dullards can't tell the difference, especially when their blood is up. I understand why a lot of the right is educating itself about Wiemar Germany and re-examining fascism as a response to those conditions. The impulse makes sense. Disgust is an entirely appropriate emotional response right now. But they don't understand that even if it has rational origins, fascism, like communism, is a process that spirals out of control.
Fascism isn't just an expression of disgust. It is an ever-increasing hypersensitivity to disgust, created by a social and cultural echo chamber. Once it eliminates the original objects of disgust, it moves on to find more mildly disgusting things to target. Eventually, any deviation from the norm, however trivial and harmless, becomes an object of disgust to be eradicated. It begins with getting rid of Harvey Weinstein... but it progresses to getting rid of Richard Feynman and Elon Musk. That sentence may sound strange to you. Feynman? Musk? Really?
But remember that the Gay Race Communism that now become the state religion of the political class progressed the same way. Barack Obama, the 2008 presidential candidate, was against state recognition of homosexual marriages. At the time, that was too much, too far. Things progressed. Slopes really are slippery. It isn't a fallacy at all. The whole reason we characterize things as slopes is that a slope is a thing people tend to fall down. We notice things lead to other things, because the Overton window shifts, and we correctly characterize certain metaphorical terrain as a "slope". And just as the political class, Hollywood, and their pet idiots in NYC and LA spiraled into Gay Race Communism, the Middle American normal person backlash carries the risk of spiraling the opposite way. Remember that fascist societies aren't actually perfectly healthy cultures that suddenly, for no reason at all, get destroyed by their neighbors. What they do is they attack everyone they can see, once their disgust threshold becomes so low that every other type of society appears to them as nothing but a plague vector that must be wiped out. So their neighbors are forced to destroy them in self-defense.
We, as a society, are currently in danger of both communism and fascism. The risk of communism is that it's what we will get if we do not purge the political class. The risk of fascism is that it's what we will get if that purge spirals out of control. Everyone reading this already understands that communism is the worst thing in the known universe... because anyone who doesn't understand that has muted/blocked/unfollowed me long ago. But we also need to understand the dangers of our own response. If we do not use and focus our disgust, we are doomed to a communist future. But we must make that disgust our servant, not our master."

Swann Marcus on X - "My favorite thing about "late stage capitalism" is that the term was invented in the 1920s Any day now, guys! Any day capitalism will really end because of its internal contradictions! We've been saying this 150 years, but we're serious for reals this time!"
rosie 💜 on X - "the left treats “the revolution” the same way the right treats “the rapture”"

Lauren Chen on X - "It's crazy to me how Robin Hood is now popularized as "stealing from the rich to give to the poor" (Socialist messaging) In reality, Robin Hood stole back the taxes that a cruel leader unjustly levied against the population (Anti-socialist messaging)"

Meme - Soyjak: "Capitalism causes cyclical financial crysis."
"Republic of [Place]. *gdp/capita going up over time to be much higher at the end than the start*"
"Democratic Socialist People's Republic of [Place] Time. *gdp/capita barely going up over time to be only a bit higher at the end than the start*"
Soyjak: "Much better!"

Common Sense Extremists on X - "Robert Duvall refused to work with Spielberg and DreamWorks again after Spielberg visited Fidel Castro in 2002, noting the hypocrisy of him making films like Schindlers List while visiting a dictator. RIP."

Make Economics a College Requirement to Help Fight Socialism - WSJ - "After nearly two decades of teaching American politics, I’ve noticed a striking shift among my students. They’re arriving to campus not only skeptical of free markets, but openly embracing democratic socialist ideas. The problem isn’t that students have rejected capitalism. It’s that many have never been taught how it works or why it matters. When we discuss housing, inequality or wages in my course on politics and geography, my students come to conclusions quickly and confidently: Rent control is necessary. Housing is a human right. Markets have failed. But when I ask simple follow-up questions, such as how housing actually gets built if returns are capped, the class goes silent. These aren’t weak students. The issue is that they aren’t debating economic ideas; they’re blindly inheriting them. This is a failure of curriculum, not intelligence. Up to three-quarters of college students never take an economics course, and only about 3% of colleges require one. By the time students encounter formal economic reasoning, if they ever do, their moral intuitions and political frameworks are already set. Those frameworks aren’t emerging in a vacuum. They’re shaped by a cultural ecosystem that delivers simple, emotionally compelling claims habitually amplified on social media: The system is rigged. You’ll never get ahead. Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Capitalism harms the masses. These arguments travel well because they’re moral and immediate. They require no understanding of trade-offs... Recent surveys show a majority of Americans under 30 now view socialism favorably, while far fewer feel favorable toward capitalism. In New York, Zohran Mamdani’s victory was powered by younger voters backing rent freezes, expanded public provision and redistribution of wealth. In Seattle, similar dynamics have elevated candidates who speak the same moral language. These outcomes are the predictable result of an education system that fails to teach students the basic tenets of economic literacy... The study of statistics matters, too. In a world saturated with data, students must be able to distinguish correlation from causation and evaluate competing claims. Without this capacity, even well-intentioned arguments can mislead. And we’d continue sending young people into a world of complex economic questions and social policy challenges armed only with slogans. The goal is exposure, not indoctrination. Students should encounter the best arguments on all sides and be equipped to evaluate them. If some ultimately prefer democratic socialism, they could at least provide a reasoned explanation"
Left wingers were complaining about this (posted under "How one professor stumps his students when they defend democratic socialism"), claiming that just because students couldn't answer the questions on the spot didn't mean that their ideas weren't bankrupt and trying to paint the professor as a bad person. Clearly, if you criticise the left wing agenda, you're a bad person

Meme - *Cycle with tankie with hammer and sickle crushing his skull*
"Make some nonsense claim. Somebody corrects you. Call them a bootlicker."

Meme - "American leftists when they find out the 'hammer and sickle' represents workers, and they'd still need a job after the 'revolution'. *triggered blue-haired person (including eyebrows) with lots of piercings*"

Meme - "Communism. There will always be that 1% that will say "If they only did this... it would have worked", to them I say "From the day of our birth we tried, our parents tried, our grandparents tried for seventy years we tried, and all we accomplished was to create a more unbearable form of hell." - Daniel Vitek, Survivor"

Commie Trucker on X - "I’ve worked 50-60 hours a week for the last 20 years in order to support my family, while my employers have gotten rich off my labor. Yet I’m lazy and entitled and my bosses are entrepreneurial and hardworking."
Kix on X - "The beauty of capitalism is you can build whatever you want, including communist style companies. There a dozens of large, billion dollar + revenue companies in the US that are 100% employee owned. Mondragon Corporation has 70,000 employees and is not only 100% employee owned but each employee = 1 vote in a democratic governance process to control the company. The world is your oyster. You can literally create your communist utopia inside of capitalism. The problem is that to create that, you need to be willing to take risk, sell others on your vision, and work really hard. Too much work and risk for 99.999% of communist believers. So instead they want to dismantle and destroy everything in the hopes they slightly increase their quality of life. History says the opposite happens."
The cope is that capitalists sabotage communism, which is why it never works. Of course, the fact that even communist countries are so weak that capitalists can always sabotage them is unremarked upon (as is the fact that communists sabotage and sabotaged capitalism but have never managed to destroy it - just subvert it)

phillip dorsett on X - "the US hasn’t been working to sabotage and overthrow communism around the clock 24/7/365 for 100 years in every region on earth because it “doesn’t work,” Dottie. They do it because if they don’t….it will work everywhere. And once it does, humanity will never go back to this"
Communism weakens your country so capitalism can successfully sabotage it. Capitalism strengthens it so communists can't sabotage it
One communist claimed not just that modern China was communist, but that North Korea was more democratic than the US. There's no limit to how deluded and insane commies are

Handre on X - "General Ne Win seized power in Burma in 1962 and immediately launched "the Burmese Way to Socialism," transforming Asia's rice bowl into a laboratory for economic destruction. He nationalized every major industry, banned private enterprise, severed trade relationships, and handed economic planning to bureaucrats who had never grown a grain of rice or balanced a ledger. The results arrived swiftly and brutally. Burma's rice exports, once feeding much of Asia, collapsed as state planners allocated resources based on political connections rather than market signals. Black markets flourished while official stores sat empty. The currency became worthless paper as central planners printed money to fund their fantasies. Education deteriorated as resources flowed to party apparatus instead of schools and universities. Within a generation, Ne Win transformed one of Southeast Asia's wealthiest nations into one of the world's poorest. Living standards plummeted. Shortages became permanent features of daily life. The country that once exported food to its neighbors couldn't feed its own people. Free market economists predicted exactly this outcome, but Ne Win's advisors dismissed market mechanisms as capitalist propaganda. By 1988, mass protests finally forced the regime to abandon its socialist experiment, but the damage was done. Twenty-six years of central planning had destroyed the accumulated capital, knowledge, and institutions that make prosperity possible. Every socialist claims their system will work differently this time. The laws of economics don't bend to political will."

Kurt Belgard MD on X - "The laws of economics that doom socialism are really just the laws of human nature. It is why totalitarian socialism kills so many as it tries to kill off those whose nature doesn't fit it, but they never reach the end of that because those qualities are characteristic of man."
Jim Davis 1776 on X - "Who can forget the New Soviet Man? They believed they could change the fundamental nature of Mankind. The hubris is mindnumbing. But they had a lot of faith in themselves."

Handre on X - "The Plymouth Pilgrims accidentally ran the first documented socialist experiment in America three centuries before Marx scribbled his manifesto. Governor William Bradford's "common storehouse" system from 1620-1623 delivered textbook collectivist results: mass shirking, crop failures, and near-starvation. Bradford recorded the disaster in detail. Young men "complained that they were oppressed" when forced to work for others without reward. Productive colonists watched lazy neighbors receive equal rations despite contributing nothing. The system "was found to breed much confusion and discontent" because it violated basic human incentives. People starved while fertile Massachusetts soil lay underworked. The turnaround came swiftly in 1623 when Bradford abandoned the collective model and assigned private family plots. Production exploded overnight. Women and children voluntarily joined field work when their families directly benefited from extra effort. The same colonists who nearly died under socialism suddenly produced abundant harvests under private property. Bradford explicitly credited private ownership for saving Plymouth Colony. He documented how individual responsibility transformed human behavior within a single growing season. Individual effort cannot be separated from individual reward without destroying both. Every socialist experiment since Plymouth has repeated this identical pattern. Different century, different continent, same predictable collapse when planners ignore the reality of human nature. No matter what they call it, whenever and wherever collectivist ideas are put into practice, disaster soon follows."

Handre on X - "In 1843, a group of socialist vegans bought a farm in Massachusetts and declared it a transcendentalist utopia. What could go wrong? The Fruitlands commune collapsed within seven months because ideological purity cannot feed human stomachs or organize economic production. Bronson Alcott's experiment banned money, animal products, and apparently common sense while expecting 90 acres to sustain a community through New England winter. Alcott recruited transcendentalist dreamers who had never farmed but possessed strong opinions about spiritual agriculture. They refused animal labor for plowing, rejected manure as fertilizer, and spent harvest season attending philosophy lectures instead of gathering crops. When October arrived, they had planted late, harvested little, and stored almost nothing for winter. Their ideology forbade the market mechanisms that could have saved them. The community's anti-money stance meant no price signals, no profit motive, and no rational allocation of scarce resources. Without property rights, nobody owned responsibility for specific tasks. Without market prices, they couldn't calculate which crops would feed the most people or generate trade value with neighboring farms. Alcott traveled constantly giving speeches while his family and followers faced starvation. By January 1844, members fled to towns where evil capitalism provided food, shelter, and paying work. The commune's collapse wasn't bad luck or poor weather - it was economic law in action. You cannot organize production through wishful thinking and moral lectures. Even the most devoted ideologues eventually choose survival over starvation when reality intervenes. Every socialist experiment faces this identical problem, whether it's 90 acres in Massachusetts or 90 million people in the Soviet Union."
Damn capitalism always sabotaging socialism because it's too successful!

Nancy Pearcey on X - "The Pilgrims' experiment in socialism illustrates "the tragedy of the commons": When you own something outright, you capture 100% of the gains from taking care of it and bear 100% of the costs from neglecting or mismanaging it. That creates incentives to do your best. But communal ownership shatters this incentive structure. Why invest personal time and money when you do not benefit from your efforts -- while others free-ride on your work?"

Handre on X - "Brook Farm stands as one of history's most perfect controlled experiments in voluntary socialism; and its spectacular failure proves every principle of free market economics. Picture this: 1841 Massachusetts. The brightest minds of the Transcendentalist movement, including Nathaniel Hawthorne as an investor, decide to escape "capitalist drudgery" by creating their perfect commune. These weren't your typical utopian cranks. They were educated elites who genuinely believed intellectual superiority could overcome economic reality. The experiment started as a joint-stock egalitarian community where residents rotated between farm work and domestic duties. Manual labor for Harvard types. When that predictably struggled, they pivoted to French socialist Charles Fourier's "phalanx" model — shared labor, shared profits, shared everything. The intellectuals attracted other luminaries who bought into the romantic vision of escaping market-based work allocation. Reality had other plans. Financial losses mounted as bookish idealists discovered that good intentions don't harvest crops efficiently. Internal squabbles erupted when people faced the eternal socialist problem: who decides who does what, and who gets what? The final blow came when their massive Phalanstery building burned down with zero insurance coverage. By 1847, they sold everything at auction. Brook Farm collapsed despite every advantage socialism could ask for: voluntary participation, educated residents, shared ideology, and zero government coercion. Collectivist economics cannot work even when willing, intelligent people attempt it. The iron laws of human action and economic calculation operate in their purest form."

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "I am concerned that the Dems are becoming the party of "millionaires who resent billionaires". "I made my millions fair and square, but you cheated and exploited the workers to make your billions, you capitalist pig!""

Rothmus 🏴 on X - "This is a striking pattern among many prominent leftist leaders: they were overwhelmingly born into relative privilege.
>Engels was born into a wealthy industrialist family
>Marx was the son of a prosperous lawyer who enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life
>Lenin came from a privileged background and his father held noble status as a high-ranking education official, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy physician who owned multiple estates
>Castro was the son of a wealthy Spanish landowner. He grew up on a large sugar plantation and attended elite Jesuit schools
>Che had aristocratic ancestry, grew up with servants, and received a privileged education
>Pol Pot was raised in a prosperous farming family with ties to the Cambodian royal palace. He attended elite French-influenced schools and later studied in Paris
>The same pattern holds for the Fabian socialists in Britain. Figures such as Beatrice Webb, Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw all came from comfortable backgrounds or married into wealth. They were openly described as a clique of bourgeois socialists, and the term “champagne socialists” was originally coined in reference to them
Despite the rhetoric, the modern left has never truly been a spontaneous movement of the working class or the poor. It has more often been a movement of the haves against the have-mores. Led by the privileged, funded by the privileged, and aimed at reshaping society to suit their vision."

Kay on X - "Communists were the ones that overthrew the Nazis. lol. So you guys were the Nazis all along"
Kraut on X - "The first people the communists murdered in Czechoslovakia was the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance Milada Horakova, and the leader of the allied exile army Helidor Pika. In every European country they seized power, the first people they murdered were those who fought the Nazis"

Meme - "r/socialism
Serious question about wealth distribution
Why don't people who are already socialist / collectivist get together with other people who are also socialist / collectivist, pool their all assets and income and then split it evenly amongst all participants?"
"What would that achieve?"

White knights and black Saxons

White knights and black Saxons

"There is the mysterious and inexplicable presence of black people in 11^th century northern Europe, now a ubiquitous feature of any programme set in England’s past. Almost every historical drama, and every single one on the BBC, now portrays pre-Windrush Britain as multiracial in a way that is historically implausible, indeed bizarre. 

Why this has to come to pass is an interesting case study of human psychology, as are the reasons people are willing to defend it – and no one working in the film industry, nor the ivory tower of history, seems to publicly criticise the practice.

Colour-blind casting has an older pedigree in the theatre, and for obvious reasons. Theatre is not aimed at the same level of realism, and so is permitted far more artistic licence; the audience is nowhere near as immersed as they are in a cinema or television. The stage has always creatively played with roles, and that’s part of the fun (if you enjoy theatre).

It’s especially true of Shakespeare, whose plays feature universal themes that have been adapted around the world. The Bard belongs to humanity. As far back as I can remember, from memories of being dragged to the theatre against my will as a teenager, Shakespeare plays have featured actors from diverse backgrounds, often performed in 19th or 20^th century period costume, that can be appreciated on many, non-literal, levels. (Usually, from memory, as an analogy for the evils of Margaret Thatcher.)

Historical drama on television is somewhat different; accuracy is normally a major aim, even if our ideas about the past are always fanciful. Modern depictions of the Middle Ages invariably present people in far darker colours than would have been the reality, and with much gloomier skies, as well as having everyone dressed in leather for some reason. In some cases, an accurate rendition of the past would actually be more immersion-breaking than these convenient tropes. Yet while historical depictions can never be entirely accurate, it is only in the past decade or so that cultural elites have become intent on deliberately lying about the past.

This is especially contradictory when one considers that in recent years there has been far more attention paid to historical accuracy, now more authentic in dress, weaponry and location, with historical consultants hired to make the genre far more realistic than it was a generation ago – while at the same introducing one glaring form of anachronism for obviously political reasons.

This was the case with The Hollow Crown, the BBC production of the Henriad which screened in 2012 and 2016, and accelerated the trend for colour-blind casting, or as I prefer to call it, ancestrally anachronistic casting. This was not a theatrical production at the National, where Henry V is dressed up in 20^th century combat gear or Lear is a corporate executive and it’s actually about FATCHA.

[Ed: FATCHA is probably FATCA]

It was a flagship show with a considerable budget, rightly praised in all quarters for its acting, with purposefully chosen and authentic-looking locations, accurate military hardware and dress; the Percys even spoke in Northumbrian accents, rather than the inauthentic RP-thespian style of past productions. At the same time, Edward of York was black and Margaret of Anjou was mixed race; the Bishop of Carlisle, who makes the famous warning that ‘the blood of the English will water the ground’, was played by a strongly-accented British-Tanzanian actor, which came across as jarring, since the purpose of that speech is that it is an appeal to fellow countrymen.

I engage in this kind of throat-clearing because it’s a natural human instinct to question the motives of people who object to symbolic but petty issues. No, this doesn’t affect me; yes, I think it’s important. Telling the truth about history is important.

It was the second series of the Hollow Crown which first provoked public debate about this practice, and that was indeed the argument from many: why would you even care? But as well as supporting it on the grounds of artistic licence, it was striking that one or two historians were willing to defend the casting of Okonedo as historians, because we don’t know for certain that ‘the she-wolf of France’ was white.

Indeed, the one second-hand description we have of her, written by an Italian traveller to his patron Bianca Maria Visconti, describes how ‘The Englishman told me that the queen is a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark and not so beautiful as your Serenity.’

‘Dark’ in this context means by the standards of western Europe, and this may have been flattery aimed at the Duchess of Milan; one painting depicts the queen as a redhead. The truth is that we don’t know, but Margaret of Anjou was a 15^th century princess from the Franco-German border, whose lineage is well-known; I think we can reasonably infer that she was of European appearance, and her many enemies would have commented if she wasn’t.

I found the response from the historians of the Great Awokening quite revealing, an insight into how people in almost any field will sacrifice the principled search for truth if their career depends on the right politics. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? A black woman led the Lancastrians in the War of the Roses.

This trend only accelerated with the success of the Hollow Crown, while historical productions otherwise became far more assiduous about general accuracy; the second series of Wolf Hall, which came out last November, was notable for its meticulous attention to detail. At the same time, Thomas Wyatt was played by an Egyptian-born actor, something criticised as ‘absurd’ by his descendent Petronella Wyatt.

Director Peter Kosminsky defended this - and other colour-blind casting in the show - by saying how he was ‘delighted’ there were ‘a number of parts played by people of colour’. He argued that they ‘chose the best actors who auditioned for the roles… And obviously, we aren’t playing lookalikes in the series. Damian [Lewis] is many things, but he doesn’t resemble Henry VIII particularly. Jonathan Pryce doesn’t particularly resemble Cardinal Wolsey.’ This rather sounded like someone trying to convince themselves of something they know to be untrue, but must believe in order to function within the regime.

If you look in the back pages of The Stage – or at least this is how it was a few years ago – you will see directories of working actors listing things like age, height and ‘ethnic types’, eg ‘can play European or Latin American’.

Their range is limited by their appearance, sex and age, with some liberties taken; Dustin Hoffman was only five years younger than his older woman Anne Bancroft, but few are aware of this fact when they watch The Graduate. If it had been noticeable, that would have been a huge failure of the director and actors.

Henry VIII is arguably the most recognisable figure in English history, and countless men have portrayed the Tudor monster, among them Robert Shaw, Richard Burton, Brian Blessed, Ray Winstone and Charles Laughton (although in my view Sid James surpassed them all; he really became Henry VIII in Carry On Henry).

None of them hugely resembled the monarch in detail, but they were all cast within their range, enough for their acting skills to enable us to immerse ourselves. The aim of every director and every actor, after all, is to enable this immersion.

This range limits all actors; Ridley Scott’s biopic of Napoleon was ruined for me because Joaquin Phoenix, then in his late forties, was clearly way too old to play the dynamic young French military genius. Bonaparte was 23 when the story begins, ambitious and energetic, and Phoenix had the manner of a middle-aged man exhausted by asking his teenagers to clean up their room (a manner I know all too well.)

Actors are limited by age and ‘ethnic type’. Omar Sharif playing a German was not plausible. John Wayne playing a Mongol was absurd. Spaniard Antonio Banderas as an Iraqi was believable, to a Western audience at least. Egyptian-American Remi Malek as the Parsi Freddy Mercury? We can suspend our disbelief, even though the Coptic actor looks like he should be playing a Pharoah. Some actors have a wide or surprising ethnic range; Karim Kadjar, a Savoyard diplomat in Wolf Hall, is an Iranian of very aristocratic lineage, but looks northern European.

All actors are confined by their physical form, and deliberately casting one outside of this range counters our suspension of disbelief; to do is obviously not about finding the best actor, but making a political statement.

A more realistic defence came from Wolf Hall’s executive producer Colin Callender, who said at a Broadcasting Press Guild Event that: ‘The world has changed since the first series. We felt that diverse casting was appropriate and something we should and wanted to do. It’s as simple as that.’

What ‘the world has changed’ sounds like is an admission that it has become accepted among creatives that art should reflect the dominant political ideals; art should actively promote multicultural Britain, and artists are wise to signal their support for diversity and equality lest they be seen as being on the wrong side of history.

It is a running theme in modern progressive thought that art must serve politics, to further their idea of justice, something it shares with its distant relative, communism. Stalin was perceptive in his understanding of the value of art as propaganda, and led the way with socialist realism, describing how the artist ‘must show life the way it is’ but pointing out that ‘he cannot help noticing, and showing, the forces that are leading it towards socialism’. Socialism is inevitable, and so, as an artist, you want to show the inevitable, surely? (Or do you want to be shot, perhaps?)

Modern progressives promote a sort of multicultural realism, one in which the dynamics of diverse societies are often jarringly inaccurate, Eastenders being the most famous, flagship example. The past plays a key role in this project because it will help shape the future; educated members of the industry know it’s not truthful, but do you want to be the BAFTA member who objects?

Over the past ten years, this trend has accelerated, and consciously so. An episode of Dr Who from the David Tennant era has a black character worried about standing out in Tudor England; by the time Peter Capaldi is occupying the Tardis, that contradiction has been resolved because now the past was diverse. Between 2010 and 2015 it had been decided that Britain had always been multicultural, after all.

Since then, almost every historical drama has been colour-blind, and it’s often jarring or just absurd. In the 2017 BBC drama Gunpowder, we see Catholics hiding at a safe house in Jacobean London, trying to evade the authorities, and they have a black guy posted at the door. I mean, you’re trying to look inconspicuous!

There was a recent reworking of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which the lawyer Jaggers is played by a black rapper, John Wemmick is Asian, and Estella is played by an actress of mixed Mauritian and Thai descent.

Or take Wicked Little Letters, a comedy set in a small town in 1920s Britain in which the population has the social composition of an upmarket area of inner London in the 2020s. Even the much more distant past is given the treatment, with The Sandman apparently showing a multiracial 13^th century England, while Robert the Bruce has black people walking around in medieval Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Perhaps that can be explained, and history is full of improbable-sounding diversity that isn’t well known. There were thousands of Britons in Ottoman-era Smyrna, for instance, and many Scots in 17^th century Poland. But if you made a historical drama set in 19^th century Anatolia, and more than two British people turn up, you’d probably want to weave that into the storyline to explain it - otherwise it leaves the audience confused and breaks the immersion.

Wartime diversity is especially important because of the symbolic importance of the Second World War as the birth of a new Britain. This pivotal moment is now usually presented as one in which a multicultural population struggled against Nazism, symbolised by a West Indian quoting Tennyson to Churchill in a Tube carriage in Darkest Hour.

In the 2021 film Munich: The Edge of War, this is much more explicit. Chamberlain’s adviser, Cecil Syers, is black, something criticised by the Morning Star for glossing over the racism of the British Empire. (As the Empire was so monstrous to the far Left, I can see why this looks like an attempt to give the British moral prestige when they were evil and exploitative; why not go the full hog and cast some black Nazis?)

The film features a Special Operations Executive agent played by an Asian actress, perhaps a nod to Noor Inayat Khan, except she breaks a sort of fourth wall when, obviously noticing someone’s confusion about her appearance, says ‘if you're going to ask where I'm from, the answer's Nottingham’.

At the time the character would have been born, Nottingham’s foreign-born population was 0.63 per cent, the vast majority of those being – in order – French, Russian, American and German. It’s possible, if not probable, that there was not a single Asian person with a Nottinghamshire accent at the time, nor would there be for many years.

That sort of ‘where are you really from’ riposte would make sense if it was set in the 1970s or 80s, when people were first getting used to the novelty of British-born Asians. It’s a deliberate anachronism in 1940, and the joke would fit an absurdist comedy; in a straight drama it only makes sense if we assume that the viewers now believe Britain to be multicultural at the time. Which, for younger viewers, may be true.

When my daughter was about 11, and I was talking to her about the past (as always), she asked why all the politicians and major figures she learned about from Victorian times were white; she genuinely thought that 19^th century Britain was as diverse as it is today, and why wouldn’t she? All the historical drama she watched presented it that way. It struck me as strange that a country might deliberately teach its children something to be wildly untrue.

One reason why honesty in historical drama matters is because an unprecedented proportion of the public are now largely ignorant of history outside of the Second World War, and so the importance of television is magnified. Many even well-educated people get their impression of history largely through fiction, whether it’s novels or films. The responsibility to be truthful is greater than ever, and yet an entire generation are being brought up to believe something false.

Few historians criticise the trend, or even deign to notice, and some will even justify it. After the Sam Mendes audio version of Oliver Twist featured a black actor, David Olusoga responded to criticism by saying ‘Who knew Victorian Britain was so diverse? People who spend their time reading books rather than spreading hatred.’

Britain in the early years of Queen Victoria had a black population in the very low tens of thousands, in a country of around 20 million. The South Asian population was smaller still. It wasn’t that diverse at all, and I’m not sure which history books claim otherwise.

Further back, and in that time of leather jerkins and dark skies, the non-European population was almost non-existent. There were individual stories, of course, strays and stowaways whose skeletal remains present intriguing questions that can never be answered. But they were incredibly rare, and so don’t work as tropes.

I suspect that Olusoga’s argument pointed to the real motive for defending colour-blind casting, that it annoys all the right people...

Yet this is not a good heuristic; the biggest hacks in history have all made art aimed at annoying the right people, because that is the goal of the regimes they serve and aim to flatter. Art directed at political goals is usually bad art.

What was done out of kindness and pity is eventually done out of fear and deadening conformity. Colour-blind casting was originally justified as a way of providing roles for non-white actors, and then to make history feel inclusive, but is now done because there is no choice.

Part of it is now law; since 2017 the BBC’s diversity code of practice has ruled that the corporation is pledged to take action with ‘on-air portrayal and casting; workforce diversity of commissioning and production teams’. There is huge pressure to make these political casting decisions and, since everyone else does it, do you want to be the first one to stop clapping Comrade Stalin?

There is a more ambitious aim, as well. As progressive goals have expanded, there has developed a far more concerted effort to make British history more multiracial, with some pretty tenuous claims made about the past. (This is often quite contradictory; Britain was rebuilt by immigrants after the war, before which it was incorrigibly racist and backward, but it was also multiracial.) Colour-blind casting is part of that effort, the aim being to actually suggest that this is what it was like.

Dr Who producer Steven Moffat once explained the rationale by saying that: ‘Young people watching have to know that they’ve a place in the future. That really matters. You have to care profoundly what children’s shows in particular say about where you’re going to be.

‘And we’ve kind of got to tell a lie; we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, “to hell with it, this is the imaginary, better vision of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.”’

Perhaps this is noble or high minded, but I don’t think it’s a healthy sign that artistic elites so obviously present historical untruths as facts. Many defenders of this noble lie fail to appreciate how others care about accuracy and truth for its own sake. It annoys people to see obvious untruths being told about the past, and disconcerting when this has always been the hallmark of authoritarian and extreme nationalist movements. It is also demoralising to see otherwise intelligent people acquiesce to falsehoods; indeed, it is notable to contrast elite concerns about ‘misinformation’ and their sanguine response to the distortion of history, a clear-cut case of misinformation.

If television makers wish to make people feel that they have ‘a future’, I suspect that they are being very naïve about the highly-charged role of history in multicultural societies. It may not be wise to turn history into a competition between people’s ancestors, unleashing the passions Francis Fukuyama warned about many years ago. This question of who owns a country’s past has been characteristic of societies which fell into sectarian and ethnic conflict, and I don’t think it’s wise to raise it.

Paterson Joseph went on to write a novel about Ignatius Sancho, and when asked about the famous composer and abolitionist, voiced his view that ‘This is as much my home as anybody — almost more so because ancestrally we paid in blood, sweat and tears for the creation of Barclays Bank, Lloyd’s, the great institutions… they were all based on slavery. The wealth of our country was based on free labour, and that free labour was African labour — our ancestors.’

Joseph’s instincts are the norm for most people in almost every society, indeed they are closer to mine than either of us are to the psychologically unusual progressives who dominate western cultural institutions, and whose response to their ancestors being downgraded is ‘why do you even care?’

Wokeness, after all, is two things, an alliance between a small, mostly white elite with unusually high levels of empathy and guilt, and a much larger coalition of ethnic minorities whose aim is to raise the prestige of their own group. Their aim is not equality or justice in the abstract, but to maximise the interest and prestige of their group, and to push for asymmetrical multiculturalism which favours them, and which these psychologically unusual white progressives think is fair.

Most people are not in favour of colour-blind casting in the abstract; they favour it when it favours them, and are notably hostile to supposed ethnic miscasting if their group is seen to lose out.

As an example John Leguizamo, a Colombian-American actor of mixed indigenous descent, criticised the recent casting of James Franco as Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro in Alina of Cuba: ‘How is this still going on? How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well? No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This F’d up!... I don’t got a [problem] with Franco but he ain’t Latino!’

Castro’s father was from Galicia in northern Spain; his mother from the Canaries. Franco’s family are Portuguese on his father’s side, and he is actually a pretty close match in terms of ethnic types; the two men look quite alike.

The 2024 casting of an Israeli actress, Noa Cohen, to play the Virgin Mary provoked much offence, which seemed like a pretty feeble objection when Mary was, you know, Jewish. Similarly, there were accusations of ‘whitewashing’ because another Israeli, Gal Gadot, was cast as Cleopatra, which apparently should have gone to an Arab or African actress.

Gadot is of Ashkenazi descent and perhaps on the light-skinned side, but certainly within the range, since some Middle Eastern people are quite fair; there are red-haired Arabs just as there are swarthy Englishmen. While Cleopatra’s ethnicity has been a source of contention down the years, she was certainly of predominantly Macedonian ancestry. People weren’t objecting to ‘authenticity’, they just didn’t want one of their people losing out on a role, especially to an Israeli, who they view as European transplants.

With much greater historical justification, Egyptians also took umbrage at American television makers portraying Cleopatra as black, and why shouldn’t they ? Isn’t this sort of misrepresentation of people’s ancestors and historical icons vaguely insulting, as well as absurd?

Colour-blind television makers perhaps see themselves as white knights helping the world’s disadvantaged, but people who view race politics in that altruistic way are very rare; most see it as a way of furthering group interests, and raising the status of their ancestors is an important part of it.

Historical diversity is propaganda, but as propaganda it is not very effective. Joseph Heath, co-author of the Rebel Sell, noted in a hugely insightful post last year that ‘One of the charming things about Americans is that they’re only good at making propaganda when they don’t realize they’re making propaganda. As soon as they try to do it intentionally, they suck. As a result, Hollywood studios used to be really good at promoting liberal values, but once they became convinced that this was their special calling, they started to become much worse at it.’

Over his lifetime noted, ‘it’s as though subtlety acquired some sort of moral stigma… it is apparently no longer sufficient to advance progressive values, one must also draw attention to the fact that one is advancing progressive values. This is most obvious in casting choices, where the effort to find a plausible rationale for introducing greater diversity has in many cases been replaced by the opposite desire, to introduce diversity where it makes no sense. The latter, presumably, constitutes a stronger signal of commitment – it shows that one is doing it, not because the story calls for it, but rather despite what the story calls for.’

The problem, he points out, is that it is immersion-breaking. ‘While it does not technically “break the fourth wall,” it has the same effect. Not only does it draw attention to the artificiality of the product, it does so in a way that references the audience. And yet when people complain about this, the standard response has been to tell them that they are foolish for having become immersed in the first place – after all, isn’t the whole thing obviously fake? In so doing, the creators of these cultural products are simply forfeiting the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of artistic techniques, which is precisely the ability to captivate an audience.’

Whereas left-leaning creatives have often used television and film to influence our ideas of the past, forming popular tropes like the cruelty of Victorian capitalists or the stultifying prison of marriage before the sexual revolution – James Cameron’s Titanic being a pre-eminent example - the multicultural realism of 2020s is far cruder.

One thinks of Theodore Dalrymple’s famous line that ‘the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.’ By this measure it certainly succeeds – but to what end?"

It's telling that as productions have become more historically accurate otherwise, they have become more inaccurate where race-appropriate casting is concerned, as that deals with one left wing cope (that historical accuracy is not important).

Another cope, that it is fiction so race-swapping is okay, is belied by the fact that even historical dramas are victims of this diktat (and anyway, is belied by left wingers bitching about historical race-swapping in fictional works).

Yet another cope ("why do you even care?") is belied by them caring a lot about white-washing (which they have stopped talking about in recent years, probably not just because there're no more contemporary examples but because they know it will expose their hypocrisy).

So they need to admit (as this article mentions) that it's about pushing a political agenda (e.g. owning the chuds) and brainwashing viewers, or a make-work program for "minority" actors (briefly mentioned here).

The Dr Who producer's words are a great example of left wingers trying to manifest reality by continually lying about it. 

"Colour-blind" television makers are not really colour-blind, as evidenced by their selective race-swapping: they just hate white people.