Links - 19th June 2026 (3)

Colin Wright on X - "This person just got a PhD in human sexuality for a thesis about "How Queer Witches Heal Without Western Psychology" and why "magic" should be a "public health priority."   From the abstract:  "What can queer pagan liminal healing practices teach therapists and other practitioners? Investigating the dichotomies of clinical versus spiritual and history versus present, as well as the inherent liminality between queer memory and queer futurity, aid us in understanding the many subaltern patterns of queer witch healing that are created in the absence of support from mental health fields of practice.""

Mustafa and Zejneba Hardaga, Izet and Bachriya Hardaga, Ahmed Sadik - "In April 1941 when the Germans invaded Yugoslavia, Sarajevo was bombed from the air. The home of the Kavilio family was destroyed. They had fled to the hills when the bombing began, and were now without a home. As they were walking to the family factory, they met Mustafa Hardaga, a Muslim friend who was the owner of the factory building. He immediately offered them to stay at his house.  The Hardagas were observant Muslims. The household included Mustafa and his wife Zejneba, and his brother Izet and wife Bachriya. According to their Muslim tradition, the women were supposed to wear a veil and cover their faces in front of strangers. Having a strange man sleep at their home was a most unusual step. However, as Zejneba described many years later, their husbands welcomed the Kavilios and told them that they would now be part of the family. “Our home is your home”, they said, and to demonstrate this point, the women were not obliged to cover their faces in the presence of Josef Kavilio, since he was now a member of the family.  The Kavilio family stayed with the Hardagas for a short while until Josef Kavilio was able to move his wife and children to Mostar, in an area under Italian control, where Jews were relatively safe. Kavilio himself stayed behind to liquidate his business. Eventually he was arrested and imprisoned by the Ustasa. Because of the heavy snow, the prisoners could not be transferred from Sarajevo to the infamous Jasenovac camp near Zagreb, where the Croatians systematically killed Serbs, Jews and Roma. Instead the prisoners were taken, with their legs chained, to clear the roads from snow. This is where Zejneba saw Kvilio. Kavilio later testified that he saw her standing at the street corner, her face traditionally veiled, watching the plight of their family friend with tears in her eyes. Undisturbed by the danger, she began to bring food to the prisoners.  Josef Kavilio eventually managed to escape and returned to the Hardaga home. The family welcomed him warmly and nursed him back to health. The Gestapo headquarters were nearby, and the danger was immense. In his testimony Josef described the notices on the walls threatening those who would hide Serbs and Jews with the death penalty. Not wanting to endanger the Hardagas life, Josef decided to flee to Mostar and join his family...   The Kavilio family immigrated to Israel. In 1984 they asked Yad Vashem to recognize the Hardaga family and Ahmed Sadik as Righteous Among the Nations. A year later, Zejneba Hardaga came to Israel to plant a tree in her family’s name.  Fifty years after the Holocaust, when in 1994 Sarajevo was under the attack of Serb forces, Zejneba and her family were in great distress. With the help of the Joint Distribution Committee, Yad Vashem appealed to the President of Bosnia to permit Zejneba to come to Israel. In February 1994 Zejneba, her daughter her husband and child arrived in Israel and were welcomed by government officials, representatives of Yad Vashem and the Kavilios. The Hardagas had sheltered a Jewish family during the darkest period in Jewish history. It was now the State of Israel that paid back the debt and helped the Hardagas in their time of distress.  It was probably this deep bond that prompted Zejneba’s daughter – Sarah Pecanac – and her family to convert to Judaism"

Richard H. Ebright on X - "(These are career tracks chosen only by academics who realize that they are uncompetitive, or are becoming uncompetitive, for the research-focused careers for which they trained. Often as they realize they are experiencing initial signs of dementia and mental incapacitation.)"
Jason Locasale on X - "When middle-management salaries inside universities approach seven figures while tenured associate professors make around $120K, universities select for people who angle and connive their way up the corporate ladder.    It’s not surprising that many of them end up treating scholarship with disdain and professors as peons — the system reinforces that mentality through the compensation, status, and authority they give to admins."

coldbutt on X - ""Teach a people to hate themselves and their history and they are defenseless against mind viruses and re-program E.g. I met a kid called Nelson. I said "cool, named after a hero" . He looked at me blankly and said "I'm named after the Simpsons kid" (Nelson Muntz, the bully)""

Meme - "SMALL BUSTED WOMEN HAVE BIG HEARTS
SMALL BUSTED WOMEN Know that people can read the entire message on their T-Shirts
SMALL BUSTED WOMEN Can go braless; it's comfortable in warm weather and sexier the year-round.
SMALL BUSTED WOMEN Can take an aerobic dance class without running the risk of knocking themselves out.
SMALL BUSTED WOMEN Can wear designer clothes"

Meme - Possum Reviews: "Have you ever wondered why wholesome content attracts toxic fandoms? It's because wholesome content appeals to people who don't like to have their sensibilities challenged. They're attracted to things that are safe and inoffensive. This ensures that you end up with a bunch of easily offended, self-righteous people all in one place. There's nothing these people love more than to dogpile on someone for a mild offense or disagreement so they can show the tribe that they're "one of the good guys" by tilting at the windmill of the week. Beware of the audience you cultivate."
Cartoon: FARTING SuPeR RACISTS
Fandom: nice people who are socially well-adjusted.
Cartoon: WHOLESOME HUGGING HELPING BUNNIES
Fandom: perverts and sex criminals who bully people to suicide."

Pitbull plays a gig in Alaska after a Facebook vote - "Pitbull has fulfilled his promise to perform a gig in a remote part of Alaska after a Facebook vote to have him play a supermarket show was hijacked.  The rapper vowed to go through with the gig in Kodiak, which has a population of 6,000, after it came out top.  He was greeted by locals, presented with a 'bear survival kit' and given a key to the town by the mayor.  He tweeted: "Thank U (sic) Kodiak, I am honoured truly."... The rapper's visit was organised after he vowed to play in whichever Walmart store received the most votes on Facebook.  A Twitter campaign encouraged people to vote for Kodiak, Alaska - one of the national chain's most remote stores.  The store is located in the town of Kodiak on the Alaskan island of the same name."
From 2012

U.S. Customs And Border Protection Agent Leaves Canadian In Tears Following Personal Attack For Frequent Visits To New York City : r/TourismHell - "Why are Canadians still going to the USA......have some pride"
"Millions of Canadians still cross the border every month"
"Spineless cowards*.  My best friend does it for work once every few months. Im spineless too since I havent called him out. Ill tell my own company to fuck off with that shit before I step foot in the US."
"Lol so your friend should quit his job to make Reddit happy? Is Reddit going to supplement his income?"
U.S. Customs And Border Protection Agent Leaves Canadian In Tears Following Personal Attack For Frequent Visits To New York City : r/TourismHell - "So I'm spineless for wanting to go to an American friends wedding, despite not vising the states before that since like 2015. Go fuck yourself lmao"
Left wingers are so deranged

[deleted by user] : r/ontario - "Buddy and I went out drinking with some friends we were not expecting to run into. Instead of ubering home, he called CAA said his car wasn’t able to get out of first gear. CAA drove us home and I passed out on his couch LOL"

Meme - "TO ALL EMPLOYEES. JUST TO LET YOU KNOW, THAT THE CAMERA IS ON ALL THE TIME. WHEN YOU ARE ON THE CLOCK YOU ARE WORKING FOR LEE'S CARIBBEAN RESTAURANT. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING IN THE RESTAURANT, ALSO FOR WHAT GOES ON IN THERE. ANYONE WHO TAKES ANYTHING OUT OF THE RESTAURANT, FOOD, DRINKS, GROCERIES ETC, WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT OR WITHOUT MY PERMISSIOM WILL BE CHARGED $25.00 PER ITEM. IT IS ALSO EVERYONE RESPONSIBILITY TO LET ME KNOW IF ANYONE COMES INTO THE RESTAURANT AND TAKE ANYTHING. I AM NOT ASKING ANYONE TO PUT HIM OR HERSELF IN DANGER. JUST LET ME KNOW IMMEDIATELY BY ***. Management"

Indonesian research scandal: Academic misconduct under scrutiny - "The almost cartoonish antics of an Indonesian researcher at an international scientific conference has opened a Pandora’s box of alleged academic misconduct, putting Indonesian academia under the spotlight.  The scandal surfaced after UK-based Indonesian medical researcher Wa Ode Dwi Daningrat posted a series of Instagram stories on May 22 about another Indonesian researcher at the 2026 International Society of Pneumonia and Pneumococcal Diseases conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.  At the conference, held from May 17 to 21, Dwi observed the researcher, later identified as Prihantini, changing her hijab and switching name tags in an apparent attempt to pose as other members of her team. “I found it so bizarre. Usually if someone presents on behalf of a colleague or teammate, they just say so. They don’t have to change name tags,” Dwi, 35, told The Straits Times.  When confronted by Dwi and other Indonesian conference participants, Prihantini struggled to answer basic questions about her own research, which claimed to involve locations as far-flung as the Peruvian Andes, Lebanon or South Sudan, while involving only Indonesian researchers. Dwi also learnt that Prihantini and three supposed teammates had all been awarded travel grants to attend the conference, but only Prihantini attended – apparently intending to present all 15 of the team’s submitted abstracts herself... Dwi’s fellow UK-based researcher Ida Bagus Mandhara Brasika summarised the incident in a May 25 Instagram post titled “Damaging Indonesia’s Reputation on the World Stage: Fraud Scandal at an International Conference”. It quickly went viral and has since garnered over 236,000 likes and 97,000 shares.  The post triggered internet sleuths to investigate the researchers, who appeared to be part of a possibly fictitious “AI-BioMedicine Research Group” led by Yogyakarta State University (UNY) graduate Rifaldy Fajar.  What they found suggested the Copenhagen incident was not an isolated one: Rifaldy and associates appeared to have submitted suspiciously similar abstracts to dozens of international conferences over several years... In a particularly striking development, Rifaldy’s own mother, Elfiany Syafruddin, came forward to say that her name had been used in research articles and conference submissions without her knowledge... Academic misconduct is not uncommon in Indonesia.  In 2023, for example, a whistleblower triggered an Education Ministry investigation into dozens of academics at Lambung Mangkurat University in Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan, who were accused of publishing low-quality articles in problematic journals in order to meet professorship requirements. The investigation resulted in the ministry revoking 28 professor titles between 2024 and 2025.  But according to Ilham Akhsanu Ridlo, an Indonesian public health researcher who runs the blog ScienceWatchdog.id, such misconduct is unusual among early-career academics – Prihantini and Rifaldy completed their bachelor’s degrees only in 2019 and 2018 respectively."

Alpha News on X - "Photo shows fitting rooms at Apple Valley Target blocked off for prayer space marked with Ramadan sign One fitting room door displayed a sign reading: "RAMADAN MUBARAK" and "This room is being used for prayer. Please do not enter.""

Amazon Cancels New Stargate Series For The One Reason No Sci-Fi Fan Wants To Hear - "it looks like Amazon decided to axe a show for hardcore sci-fi fans because it was being built to appeal to…hardcore sci-fi fans... It’s rare for a show so far along to be canceled instead of redesigned to fit better with the network, which means the differences had to be considered insurmountable.   On the face of it, this sounds like the new Stargate was being designed for fans of Stargate SG-1. The same die-hard fanbase who has kept the franchise alive for over 30 years, filling multiple conventions each year, buying spin-off novels, binging Atlantis and Universe, and they think “Wormhole X-Treme” is one of the best episodes of any sci-fi series. That should be the target audience and not a reason to cancel a series. Sci-fi fans will never outnumber the people watching Reacher, but keep in mind that Amazon also produces Fallout and Invincible, two niche genre shows. This is the same company that saved The Expanse, one of the greatest sci-fi shows of the last 15 years, from cancellation. Yet, early reporting is that’s exactly why Amazon decided to again disappoint Stargate fans with another revival tease."

@levelsio on X - "Amazon ($19.99) is a showroom for Aliexpress
Aliexpress ($5.17) is a showroom for Taobao
Taobao ($2.48) is a showroom for Alibaba
Alibaba ($0.69) is a showroom for well whoever actually makes the thing! Via @pandrewhk"

BBC bosses were ‘protected from GB News grillings’ - "BBC bosses were prevented from appearing on GB News because the environment would be “challenging”, its former communications chief has claimed.  John Shield, the broadcaster’s director of communications from 2013 to 2025, advised senior executives to give interviews to GB News and make the case for the BBC. He was overruled... “The BBC should go on to some difficult and challenging platforms that might well intrinsically not like the BBC and make the case, because you will reach an audience who otherwise won’t hear your views.  “And I think it’s important to do that, to make that case, and to do it often.  “Making the case in places that are perhaps hostile – if you navigate those and do them well, you come out with a huge amount of credit.”... According to a forthcoming biography of Nigel Farage, written by Lord Ashcroft, the Reform leader will never be invited to appear on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Lord Ashcroft quoted an unnamed BBC source who said that Mr Farage had “effectively been blacklisted”. The BBC has denied this.  Mr Shield said: “The whole point about the BBC having people from all walks of life and all political views on the BBC, including people like Nigel Farage, is precisely to have a range of views which are challenged and heard and listened to, and then the public makes up its own mind based on all that.”"
How ignorant. Doesn't he know that if you criticise the (left wing) media, that's fascism? There's no need for the BBC to give GB News more publicity by going on it!

Audience member takes over from orchestra’s sick pianist - "When a keyboardist fell ill in the middle of a concert in Australia, it seemed that the performance would have to be abandoned.  That was until a young member of the audience came forward and offered to fill in.  The medical emergency happened during a screening in Sydney of La La Land, in which a live orchestra performed the film’s score as the movie played on a giant screen... The concert at Sydney’s Darling Harbour Theatre went off smoothly until the interval, when Justin Hurwitz, the award-winning composer and conductor of the film, revealed that the keyboardist had fallen ill.  Urgently in need of a replacement, his staff started calling pianists they knew, asking whether they could step in. But none of them could make it in time.  So Mr Hurwitz asked the audience whether there was anyone who might happen to have the high-level skills to sight-read the music and play along with the rest of the orchestra without a moment’s rehearsal.  Step forward, Sterling Nasa – a 21-year-old who plays organ and piano and also teaches bagpipes."

Leftist curators ruining museums are not just at work in London - "When I first moved from London to Birmingham, I remember spending hours in BMAG’s “Industrial Gallery”. Peering through the glass, I found ceramics, jewellery, stained glass, metalwork and other significant artefacts from the Arts and Crafts movement. They were all integral pieces of Birmingham’s inspiring history.  Now, the same gallery space has been revamped with pretend roadworks, a mocked-up vintage poster of a pedestrian ramp, and old pub signs. These are neither works of art nor historical items. Visitors are greeted with a mock notice, “Diversion: Road Closed for Event”. This terrible joke plays into the unfair claim that Birmingham is a cultural wasteland: the very notion I have been fighting against in my own exhibition projects.  Meanwhile, where there were once beautifully decorated ceramics by Victorian designer William De Morgan and objects by Morris & Co is now a large photograph of… a piece of bread. Mounted poorly on a tacky piece of board, the caption says “Crusty Cob” and asks: “What is your favourite filling?”  It’s part of a so-called A-to-Z of Birmingham, with the display tacked up like an amateur school project with stereotypical views of the city. B is for Balti, T is for BT Tower, Y is for “Yes Bab”, and so it goes on. This is nothing less than an insulting caricature. It’s as if the curators assume us Brummies can only understand ourselves with the obvious parts of our culture exaggerated and regurgitated at us. Other renovated displays are similarly egregious. One show’s a re-created house with a wall of photographs of everyday people. Above the arrangements are the painfully unoriginal words, “Live Love Laugh/Birmingham”. The set-up feels like it’s been generated by an algorithm. It looks like physically realised AI slop.  On another wall, a giant neon sign flashes “Made in Birmingham” in hot pink, signalling the museum as a backdrop and brand for influencers. What has been put on show, and how it’s been presented, reveals a desperation to be relevant. In tone and style, it also betrays a low estimation of the general public’s intelligence, curiosity and interest in culture. This museum, which first opened its Grade II* listed doors in 1885, has forgotten its core role and responsibility. As the Museums Association argues, these havens of history “enable people to explore collections or inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artefacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society.”  Built around the city’s civic pride, the museum’s foundational motto reads: “By the gains of industry we promote art.” Sadly, today, that pride, and the art, are missing. Works on display once included Botticelli’s The Descent of the Holy Ghost and others by Orazio Gentileschi, Simone Martini, Petrus Christus, Eugène Delacroix and Canaletto. They’ve all gone. The walls of the museum’s Round Room – which used to be painted red – were once full to bursting in a style reminiscent of the National Gallery. Now, poorly executed contemporary artworks hang in place of the true masterpieces, and the room itself has been re-painted in sad hotel-lobby white. The curation proclaims “One Fresh Take” and patronisingly claims to show viewers “how art can be a way to see the world differently”. But it’s made apparent that there is only one accepted viewpoint – ideology comes first with some poorly executed contemporary artworks taking the place of true masterpieces.  Where, too, are the modernist sculptures by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore – works of national and international importance – which were once on display? Locally significant works are also missing. From the 1930s to the 1950s, Birmingham Surrealists Conroy Maddox, John Melville, Emmy Bridgwater, Oscar Mellor, and Desmond Morris brought the strangest of all modern art movements to the West Midlands. None of this revolutionary group are represented. Tellingly, I notice that four galleries of pre-Raphaelite works – seemingly survivors of the renovation – are noticeably busier, with visitors clearly more absorbed by these great works of art. Having said that, I can’t find local hero Edward Burne-Jones’s masterpiece, The Star of Bethlehem... It’s seemingly been decided then that our wonderfully diverse local audiences don’t deserve, or won’t appreciate, masterpieces on show. In turn, this reinforces the false idea that art is elitist and only for certain groups of people. Such a belief goes against the museum’s stated mission, to foster “greater community engagement”."

China forced Indians to retreat with 'secret microwave pulse weapon' - "Chinese troops used 'microwave' weapons to force Indian soldiers to retreat by making them violently sick during a Himalayan stand-off, a professor has claimed.    The electromagnetic weapons which cook the human tissue of enemy troops 'turned the mountain tops into a microwave oven' and made the Indian soldiers vomit, international studies expert Jin Canrong told his students in Beijing.    The microwave weapons heat water molecules in the same way as the kitchen appliance, targeting water under the skin and causing increasing amounts of pain to the target from ranges of up to 0.6 miles away.     Jin hailed the Chinese forces for 'beautifully' executing the move which cleared out Indian troops without violating a ban on gunfire along the disputed border.  It is the first known use of microwave weapons on a battlefield... There is some suspicion that similar weapons were used against US diplomatic personnel who mysteriously fell ill in China and Cuba in a series of incidents beginning in 2016.  America's equivalent 'heat ray', the Active Denial System, was unveiled in 2007 and deployed to Afghanistan but apparently never used against hostile troops.   The Pentagon touted it as 'the first non-lethal, directed-energy, counter-personnel system with an extended range greater than currently fielded non-lethal weapons'.   Fears of a political backlash were thought to have contributed to its withdrawal from Afghanistan, although the US government said it complied with international law."
From 2020. Time to condemn the US for violating international law and praise China for following it

Malaysia's Greatest Car Theft Story Involves One Guy Stealing The Same Porsche Twice In One Day - "The man then asked the salesman for the keys because he wanted to hear the roar of the engine.   When he got a hold of the keys, the man stunned everyone in the showroom when he drove off with the car, smashing through the windows.  However, the man's masterplan for a quick getaway was dashed, because after driving for just 2km, the Porsche ran out of fuel.  He was forced to abandon the high-performance by the side of the road and took off on foot.  According to Reuters, the police subsequently found the car and hauled it back to their compound to have the paperwork processed.  That's the end of the story, right? Well, not by a long shot, dear friends. The man went back for the Porsche again. Later that night, at around 10.45pm, the man reportedly showed up at the police station where the Porsche was kept - this time, with a fuel cannister in hand.  He reportedly cut the perimeter fence, snuck into the compound, re-fuelled the car and drove off with it again.  How is that possible, you ask? Well, when he abandoned the car earlier in the day, he kept the car keys... Unfortunately, the man was once again forced to ditch his dream car when he realised that he couldn't escape all the roadblocks set up to stop his escape.  The car was reportedly found abandoned in a secluded spot near Maktab Perguruan Tuanku Bainun in Mengkuang, and the man was nowhere to be found.  A full investigation ensued, with the police lifting fingerprints from the car and theorising that this could be the work of more than one man.  Amazingly, the suspect was never caught and he could still be roaming free today."

M’sian who used to live in KL says living in SG is “really cheap, cheap, cheap” - "Facebook user, Nizam Nizam, took to Facebook group “Complaint Singapore” to compare the cost of living between the two neighbouring countries.  He first explains that during his residency in Kuala Lumpur earning Malaysian money, he would spend between RM30 to RM60 on meals and snacks outside.  “Even go to a cheap eatery, it’s RM12 for chicken rice,” lamented Nizam.  But he noticed a change upon living in Singapore and earning (their) money.  “Everything in Singapore is really cheap, cheap, cheap,” observed Nizam, adding that he would cringe every time he heard his Singaporean colleagues complain that GST has gone up and everything was “expensive”. However he then admits that the only actual expensive thing in Singapore is the cars.  Nizam also highlighted how cheap the housing was in Singapore as long as people “met the requirements” and the drawbacks being it was “a shoe box” sized house... A netizen backed Nizam’s thoughts, “I totally agree, and I have personally experienced the high cost of living in Malaysia, especially in KL and JB. You’ll understand when you get a job in Malaysia (earning ringgit) and try to make ends meet.”"

The surveillance powers the Canadian left condemns abroad and builds at home

Anarcho-tyranny strikes again. Left wingers love government overreach when it pushes the left wing agenda.

The surveillance powers the Canadian left condemns abroad and builds at home

"On April 27, 2026, the United States Supreme Court heard argument in Chatrie v. United States, and a decision is pending. The case began with a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, and a single warrant served on Google. Police did not have a suspect. They had a location and a time, so they asked a magistrate to order Google to identify every device that passed through a roughly 17.5-acre zone around the Call Federal Credit Union during a two-hour window.

To answer that warrant, Google had to search the Location History of more than 500 million users. The technique is called a geofence warrant, and it inverts the ordinary logic of a search. A conventional warrant names a person and authorizes a look at that person's effects. A geofence warrant names a place and a time and works backward through everyone who was there.

The federal courts have not been able to agree on whether this is constitutional...

The same questions surround Flock Safety, the company that has built the largest automated licence-plate reader network in the United States. Its cameras logged more than 12 million searches by over 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. A Texas sheriff's office ran a woman's plate across 83,000 cameras after she ended a pregnancy, with the search note "had an abortion, search for female." U.S. Customs and Border Protection was given access to Illinois data in violation of that state's privacy law.

What is notable about the American argument is the broad reaction across the spectrum. The libertarian Cato Institute filed a brief urging the Court to find that Fourth Amendment property rights "do not dissolve merely because one's records are stored by a third party." The ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Georgetown's Center on Privacy & Technology filed on the same side. Reason covered the case sympathetically. On the merits, the right-libertarian and the civil-liberties left agree that a search which sweeps in everyone near a crime is a problem. But yet, depending on country and context, there's a difference about who is willing to say it out loud.

In March 2026 the federal government introduced Bill C-22, its lawful-access bill. It is the successor to the data-disclosure provisions of the 2025 Strong Borders Act, Bill C-2, which were withdrawn after the privacy community objected and never reached committee. C-22 carries the core of that regime forward...

The bill also expands data-sharing with foreign governments, the United States among them. A law marketed as a defence of Canadian borders would route Canadian subscriber and metadata into the same American security apparatus that Canadian commentators describe as a threat.

Let's focus on the metadata retention provision. Metadata is not the content of a message, but a year of it draws a precise map of associations and movements: who contacted whom, from where, and when. The Supreme Court of Canada has already considered how revealing that kind of record can be. In R. v. Spencer, decided in 2014, the Court held that Canadians retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in the subscriber information that links an identity to online activity, and that obtaining it without authorization is a search under section 8 of the Charter. The Court treated the ability to stay anonymous online as part of personal privacy, and found that no existing law — not Canada's privacy legislation, not the Criminal Code — gave police the power to demand the data on their own. Lowering the statutory threshold to "reasonable grounds to suspect" is a legislative response to Spencer rather than compliance with it.

The objections to C-22 have come almost entirely from outside the partisan arena... These are privacy specialists and civil libertarians. These are not the voices of Canada's political opinion class.

Canadian progressive commentary treats American surveillance as a standing emergency... mmigration enforcement and abortion access do not neatly divide Canadians along the same lines they divide Americans, but they animate the Canadian progressives who follow American politics as a spectator sport.

As Toronto prepared to host World Cup matches in June 2026, Mayor Olivia Chow declared American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents "not welcome" in the city and carried a council motion, 21 to 4, opposing any ICE presence during the tournament — a stand against a foreign agency that has no authority to operate in Toronto regardless. The gesture cost nothing and changed nothing — a virtue signal to her base during an election year. Meanwhile no comparable defiance has met the surveillance powers the Carney government is actually legislating at home.

In fact, where C-22 is covered, it is covered as a technical dispute about retention periods and encryption standards and warnings from technology companies. The treatment is dry, procedural, and confined largely to the academics named above. In Canada, the American apparatus is described as a step toward a police state, while the Canadian one is described as an esoteric privacy file.

The explanation is not complicated. The government building the Canadian apparatus is one that left-of-centre commentators broadly trust. A surveillance power feels administrative when the right people hold it and ominous when the wrong people do. The moral outrage stays focused on Trump because the partisan cognitive dissonance to address what's happening at home is too great.

Canada does not need to speculate about how a government uses a power to compel private firms to hand over personal data without a warrant. The Liberal government did so in February 2022, when it invoked the Emergencies Act against the convoy protests in Ottawa...

The Federal Court found that unconstitutional...

The pattern is the same in both countries. The judiciary holds that compelled access to data held by a third party is a search that requires authorization, and the executive keeps building tools that operate without it.

In the United States, the Fourth Amendment gave rise to Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 ruling that the government needs a warrant to obtain historical cell-site location records, and now to the geofence question in Chatrie before the Supreme Court. In Canada, section 8 of the Charter did the same work in Spencer on subscriber information and in Mosley and the Court of Appeal on the convoy account freezes. Courts in both countries reached the same conclusion. Trump and Carney have responded the same way, by legislating or operating around the rulings rather than within them.

C-22 fits that pattern exactly. The Supreme Court of Canada said in 2014 that subscriber information carries a reasonable expectation of privacy. The bill answers by letting police demand it on the weakest standard in Canadian criminal law: reasonable grounds to suspect.

The government justifies new surveillance powers in the name of public safety. The record makes that justification difficult to take at face value, because the same government has been reluctant to use the ordinary powers it already holds.

Parliament had to pass Bill C-48 in 2023 to re-tighten the bail rules it had loosened in 2019, after police forces across the country reported repeat violent offenders reoffending on release. The Edmonton Police Service tracked one cohort of released arrestees and counted, over three years, more than 3,600 further violent-crime incidents and 26 homicides. Statistics Canada's violent Crime Severity Index rose 15% across 2021 through 2023 before a slight dip.

Auto theft reached a record $1.5 billion in insurance claims in 2023, up 254% nationally since 2018 and 524% in Ontario, severe enough that Ottawa convened a national summit on the problem. British Columbia, with federal cooperation, walked back its drug-decriminalization pilot in 2024 and then ended take-home so-called safe supply in 2025, conceding that prescribed opioids were being diverted into the illicit market.

A state that will not hold violent repeat offenders, slow a record wave of auto theft, or keep the free opioids it hands out from being trafficked back onto the street, but that does want to execute digital dragnets of Canadian metadata and build a mechanism to reach inside encrypted services, is not following a public-safety logic.

The more plausible motive is harmonization. Bill C-2 was a border bill, drafted under American pressure on the shared frontier, and C-22 expands the sharing of Canadian data with the United States. The reach for these powers is more aligned with the demands of the bilateral relationship than it is with addressing crime in Canada.

Mark Carney was elected on "elbows up," a promise to resist American overreach. On surveillance the elbows are down: C-22 feeds Canadian data into the apparatus he campaigned against, and the wager is that his supporters will swallow it obsequiously.

Surveillance infrastructure is permanent in a way that governments are not. A metadata retention mandate, a lowered threshold for subscriber data, and a standing capability to compel decryption do not expire when a government changes. They are inherited by whoever wins the next election, and the one after that.

The leftist commentators comfortable with C-22 because they approve of the government building it are extending a trust they cannot expect their successors to honour. The same powers, in the hands of a future Conservative government, would not be received as anodyne administrative housekeeping. The left would call these powers the "fascist" police-state machinery that the Trump version is being called."

Links - 19th June 2026 (2 [including JP Morgan Sexual Harassment, SNAP])

Gabriel on X - "Turns out the story of the year was just...made up. and it gets worse.
- John Doe is Chirayu Rana, 35, now a principal at Bregal Sagemount. he left JPMorgan and went straight to private equity.
- The whole "threaten his bonus" premise collapsed. Hajdini reported to a completely different managing director than Rana. she had no say over his compensation.
- JPMorgan pulled phone records, reviewed emails, interviewed the full team. found nothing. Rana even refused to participate in his own investigation.
- A colleague described Rana as "socially awkward" but someone who "met the requirements" to stay at the bank.
- Before any lawsuit, he tried to negotiate a payout in the "millions" to leave the bank quietly. they didn't bite.
- He filed court filing, then his lawyers retracted it for "corrections" and deleted it. But the Daily Mail already ran the whole thing and the rest twitter did its thing.
so he tried to get paid, didn't, then filed a now-retracted complaint against someone who couldn't touch his bonus. wild. feel terrible for her and her family."

Exclusive | Chirayu Rana — former JPMorgan banker at center of ‘completely fabricated’ ‘sex slave’ allegations against Lorna Hajdini — left new job 3 weeks ago - "Wall Street financier Chirayu Rana, the anonymous “John Doe” who filed a sensational — and fiercely disputed — sexual harassment lawsuit against a JPMorgan Chase executive has left investment firm Bregal Sagemount... he accused Lorna Hajdini, 37, of drugging him and keeping him as a “sex slave.” The Post exclusively unmasked Rana on Thursday evening, with allies of high-flying leveraged finance expert Hajdini branding his claims “a complete fabrication.”... The explosive court document, originally filed Monday in New York state court and then retracted for “corrections,” alleged Hajdini drugged Rana with Rohypnol and Viagra, threatened his bonus to extort sex, and stalked his Manhattan apartment. But the viral allegations are unraveling almost as quickly as they surfaced. The Post has confirmed that the pair reported to two different managing directors, meaning Hajdini had no way of influencing his annual compensation... An internal JPMorgan investigation that reviewed emails, phone records, and witness statements found “no evidence” to support the claims made by “John Doe,” according to a bank spokesperson... Rana had unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a payout from JPMorgan that ran into “millions.”"

Kangmin Lee | 이강민 on X - "This JPMorgan saga proves every single Indian stereotype.
1. Scammer — fabricated a story to rake in some cash
2. Incompetent — failed at his job, likely lied about his credentials to get hired
3. Pervert — delusional sexual fantasies about white & Asian women #MePoo"

Meme - "KNOW THE WORK RULES
APPROPRIATE
Fish headed woman: LOOKING GOOD, RAJESH
Indian man: YOU'RE SWEET.
INAPPROPRIATE
Lorna Hajdini: CHECK OUT THESE CANNONS
Indian man: HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?!"

Ex-JPMorgan banker Chirayu Rana files wild new claims against Lorna Hajdini - "Rana apparently lied to the bank about his father dying so he could collect paid leave — and apparently used the time off to prepare the bombshell lawsuit against Hajdini and his employer. Despite sources saying he used time off for bereavement, The Post found Rana’s father alive and well on Sunday. In Rana’s new filing, one alleged witness — who appears to be a family friend of Rana’s — says he was staying at an apartment while visiting New York City and was woken up by Hajdini’s drunken antics in the middle of the night. He attempted to go back to sleep, but a “completely naked” Hajdini woke him up. Hajdini sat on the couch he was sleeping on, lit a cigarette and began begging him to “join them” in the bedroom, the document claims. Despite refusing several times, the mystery witness claims Hajdini told him “you know I own [redacted], so you better come join.” After she returned to the bedroom, he claims, he could hear Rana pleading, “No, no, no, you have to leave. I’m not going to do this. Please stop.” Hajdini left the apartment later in the night, and a stunned Rana emerged, sharing his story of how Hajdini “constantly harassed him and forced him to engage in sexual behavior with her on a number of occasions,” the docs say. Rana allegedly recalled that Hajdini threatened him with “trouble” if he didn’t comply, and “reiterated his concern that Ms. Hajdini was blackmailing him.” That affirmation also claims witnessing Hajdini be “handsy” with Rana at a concert for Norwegian DJ Kygo at Barclay’s Center earlier that month. The other anonymous affirmation — seemingly from the owner of the apartment where the family friend was staying — claims he saw Hajdini kissing Rana’s neck on the street sometime during the summer of 2024. And in September 2024, she overheard them entering her apartment building, recalling that Hajdini said something that sounded like, “I own you, Brownie.” Both affirmations were signed last July, records show. Other exhibits include an affirmation from Rana, who argues he should proceed anonymously because the alleged events have left him with PTSD. A letter from Johnathan Alpert, an executive psychotherapist, claims to confirm his PTSD diagnosis. Rana cites a June 2025 email to Alpert claiming that he had “not slept in weeks” and was “unable to eat,” was hearing Hajdini’s voice in his head, and “I feared for my own safety” and for his family’s."

JP Morgan executive sues junior colleague over sex slave allegations - "The suit also alleges Rana made “eerily similar” claims in a previous workplace – specifically that he was sexually assaulted, drugged and raped by a supervisor there... Mr Rana was initially seeking a payout of $22m (£17m), sources told the Wall Street Journal. The bank tried to mediate with him, later offering him $1m (£743,000) to settle. Instead, he went public with his allegations. JP Morgan described its former offer as a bid “to avoid the time and expense of litigation and to support an employee who was being threatened with the very reputational harm now unfolding.”"

Meme - Qasim Rashid, Esq. @qasimrashid.com: "A reminder that the largest demographic of Americans on food aid are white MAGA voters. By far. No other demographic is even a close second. This is the Trump regime's cruelty to distract from its own failures by punishing those who didn't vote for him."
SNAP food aid: "The Trump administration said that it will move to withhold food aid from most Democratic-controlled states unless they provide recipient records."
"SNAP benefits should be held if the states refuse to turn over the requested records. Checks and balances. But the Democratic cities don't want to do it because they know it will show mass amounts of fraud. Specifically illegals getting these benefits."
Left wingers don't understand per capita as usual. And they hate reducing fraud, because fraud is the point

FOX 9 on X - "Nearly 4.3 million Americans stopped receiving SNAP benefits from January 2025 through January 2026. Experts say it's because of changes that make the program harder to access."
Jason Robertson on X - "These totals keep getting worse and it shows why socialism won’t work  The new requirements are able bodied adults over 18 without kids under 14 need to work, go to school or volunteer 20 hours/week  We now are finding out that there are 4.3 Million Americans who fall in this category (10% of the SNAP total)  4.3 million Able bodied Americans refuse to even volunteer to help their communities in exchange for their food…"

Wall Street Apes on X - "The soda isle at the popular grocery store chain H-E-B in Texas is completely full after the state implemented new Food Stamps restrictions  Now that EBT can’t be used for soda the isles are stocked and the sodas are all on sale….  Imagine that….  Just in 2025 the 3 major soda companies, Coca-Cola Co, PepsiCo Inc and the American Beverage Association spent a combined $13 billion dollars on lobbying  Roughly 25% of all soda sales in America are EBT purchases"
Meanwhile, left wingers think that SNAP lowers grocery prices for everyone because boosting demand definitely doesn't increases prices

Wall Street Mav on X - "They can't get their SBA loans renewed. They can't get H-1B workers any more. EBT cards no longer work for most of their junk food. 7-11 closing 645 stores this year."
Is ending SNAP and racially-based loans racist against Indians?

Heart & Soil on X - "*No more EBT for Soda or Candy*
*7-Eleven begins aggressively closing stores*
*Realize 7-Eleven was subsidized*"

Collin Rugg on X - "NEW: Woman says she will start eating white people if EBT is taken away, says EBT recipients will build their own nation & grow their own food. "We are going to eat regardless, even if we have to hunt you animals down & roast & eat you, the delectable crackers & cheese."   "We will make it happen if we have to, trust & believe me."  Video: @EBTofTikTok"
Basically SNAP is blackmail. But since left wingers keep going on about "eating the 'rich'" even with SNAP, it should be abolished anyway

Governor Tim Walz on X - "Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in economic activity. It’s not about the money, Trump just wants Americans to go hungry."
Roman Helmet Guy on X - "SNAP is the greatest investment of all time. Every dollar invested into SNAP doubles. The Chinese are trying to harness our SNAP technology but they can't figure it out. If we were smart we'd spend $100T on SNAP, growing our GDP by $180T and making us all filthy rich."

Meme - Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom: "Donald Trump hosted a Great Gatsby party while SNAP benefits were about to disappear for 42 million Americans. He does not give a damn about you."
AnOmaly @LegendaryEnergy: "Didn't you dine at the French Laundry while you were treating your constituents like locked up cattle?"

Warren on X - "As of today, Florida SNAP recipients can’t buy soda or candy because God forbid we allow a single mom and her kids a few moments of happiness at the end of the day. 😡"
Jeffery Mead on X - "Wasn’t aware that soda and candy are the only ways to have happiness. She can still have that happiness, she just needs to pay for that happiness herself. It’s Supplemental NUTRITION Assistance Program."
William Sperry on X - "My fav is watching legacy news showing a family that had ‘lost everything’ and needed financial assistance and there’s the mom with fancy nails and holding a Starbucks coffee. How about priorities of eating and maintaining your home before holding out your hand because you can’t manage money."
Left wing logic - if something isn't free people arent being allowed to have it

Pablo Antonio on X - "Here’s how you can sell your food stamps to buy fentanyl in San Francisco. My friends and I from SF10x did some investigative journalism."
Sebastian Caliri on X - "SNAP money is supposed to buy food. But in San Francisco you can use SNAP to buy drugs.  How does it work? You can convert SNAP dollars to paper vouchers at farmer's markets. Then sell those vouchers at a discount for cash.  Because we don't seem to arrest drug dealers in the Tenderloin, you can then buy drugs with the cash.  California does not look after federal dollars meant for welfare and this poor level of stewardship is insulting to taxpayers. We will see all kinds of schemes affecting Medicaid in California in the months ahead."

How drug dealers are abusing Ohio's food assistance program - "Sussi recently spent time with three drug dealers and addicts in Circleville. They said food assistance benefits are sold and traded for drugs “all the time.”   One 31-year-old heroin addict and drug dealer said many of her customers are on welfare and have children. “I just got a phone call earlier somebody wanting to sell $30 worth of food stamps for a berry.”   A “berry” is one hit of Mexican black tar heroin, enough to fill up a syringe. It goes for about $15 bucks on the streets.   Sussi asked her, “In a given week how many calls will you get from people wanting to sell their food stamps  so they can buy dope?” She said, “You probably get four or five calls at least a week.”   “These people are buying heroin from food debt cards or money they’ve gotten rather from selling food debt cards,” said Rep. Schaffer. “And it’s worsening the crisis for Ohio families.”"

The B in EBT stands for Bentley - "In one red state alone, more than 14,000 people with EBTs (food stamp recipients) own luxury cars... States approve their applications through the BBCE—Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility—loophole, which allows states to ignore restrictions on eligibility such as income (you can now have an income twice the federal poverty level), eliminate limits on cars, yachts and savings, and states can also waive these limits. 43 states and DC use the loophole to line their pockets. You’ve heard of 10% going back to the big guy. 10.4% of the program’s benefits go back to the state governments. Hence, up to 6 million people—14% of EBT recipients—should be ineligible. EBT costs taxpayers $100 billion a year. Closing the BBCE could save taxpayers $14 billion a year. Think about that the next time Congress complains about feeding soldiers one surf-and-turf on a special occasion. That costs $23 million—or $0.023 billion. So while Senator John Kennedy was complaining about troops getting a nice meal before a heavy assignment, he ignored Rolls Royce drivers getting the same meal using EBT. The FGA report noted, “Critically, these were newer vehicles, manufactured in just the last handful of years—not an old Porsche from 1978 or a Lamborghini from 1997. Moreover, the list is not of all new vehicles—just typical luxury vehicles that were newly manufactured.” 1978 Porsches and 1997 Lambos are classic automobiles, not used cars."
If you object to luxury car owners being on SNAP and want to reduce SNAP fraud, you're a heartless, cruel person who just doesn't want poor people to eat, and should be going after billionaires instead

From Luxury Vehicles to Fake Emails: Why Food Stamp Program Integrity Is More Important Now Than Ever - "Foreign fraudsters are signing up for welfare from overseas using IP addresses traced back to China, Mexico, Canada, and more. And resources meant for the truly needy are instead siphoned off by people who have no business being on welfare in the first place. This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s happening right now, in state after state, because the systems designed to prevent it are failing or simply don’t exist at all. Officially, more than one in every $10 spent on food stamps is in error—and even that excludes a significant amount of fraud. This amounts to nearly $10.4 billion in improper spending each year—a sevenfold increase over erroneous spending 20 years ago. This figure significantly understates the real waste, fraud, and abuse in the program, as the official rate ignores most erroneous payments; many instances of fraud and improper payments go unnoticed or uninvestigated; and the official rate does not account for food stamp trafficking, intentional program violations, and known fraud. But thanks to the 2025 federal reconciliation law, states will now have skin in the food stamp program for the first time ever. Historically, food stamp benefits have been entirely federally funded, but this legislation now requires states to share in the cost of food stamp benefits based on their error rate—the higher the error rate, the more the state is on the hook for... more than one in five food stamp enrollees did not have their identity successfully matched with the address listed on their application for benefits. Countless others had addresses that were marked as undeliverable or registered with a business rather than a residence. Shockingly, hundreds of thousands of enrollees had their most recent verifiable address listed as being in another state—of which tens of thousands had no record of ever living in the state in which they were receiving benefits. It’s not just residency records. Thousands of food stamp enrollees listed Social Security numbers (SSNs) on their application that were unable to be successfully verified, while hundreds had SSNs that were issued before their date of birth. These are clear signs of identify fraud—using both stolen identities and synthetic identities—used to game the system and improperly acquire benefits. A significant number of cases of identity theft in major welfare programs are attributable to illegal aliens using stolen IDs, which, when coupled with the use of synthetic identities, can pose a major threat to resources intended for the truly needy. Yet, despite these obvious signs of fraud, these individuals were able to sign up for and obtain food stamp benefits. Commonsense program integrity provisions like regular data cross-checks against available data sources, shortened recertification periods, and adopting “change reporting” rather than “simplified reporting” would help reduce these instances of blatant fraud. Many individuals were successfully approved for food stamps while using an IP address linked to a foreign country, from China to Mexico to Canada. Even more concerning is foreign emails: More than 5,000 email addresses that were used to sign up for food stamps were from domains based in foreign countries. Others listed email accounts that were disposable, commonly used by individuals or entities engaging in identity theft, phishing attempts, or spam. In total, more than 20,000 email accounts were flagged as either “high” or “very high” risk for fraudulent activity."

Video resurfaces of Ilhan Omar saying ‘World War Eleven’ in embarrassing blunder - "A resurfaced video of Ilhan Omar has sparked online ridicule after she mistakenly referred to World War II as “World War Eleven.” Although Omar quickly corrected herself, the clip still received mockery across social media platforms. The video has been widely circulated by political accounts across X, with the verbal blunder leading many to question the Minnesota congresswoman’s intelligence."

Tokyo’s city hall changes dress code, workers now allowed to wear shorts[Videos] - "For a very long time, the baseline attitude in Japan has been that if you’re working in an office, you should be wearing formal business attire. However, while people in Japan may place great value on traditions, climate change, by its very nature, is unconcerned with conforming to the status quo. With Japan Meteorological Agency data showing the country has experienced its hottest summer on record for three years in a row, the Tokyo metropolitan government decided to rethink the dress code at Tocho, Tokyo’s city hall complex, and now allows workers to wear attire that would have been unthinkable a generation ago: shorts... The new policy isn’t coming without public blowback about the breezy wardrobe choices. Shorts, especially when worn by men, have long been seen as decidedly casual attire in Japan, and some online commenters have grumbled about the idea of government employees dressing in such a laid-back style. The until-now rarity of uncovered male legs in the workplace also raises grooming-related business etiquette questions, as in many Japanese offices stubbly facial hair is discouraged or banned, causing some to wonder if men choosing to wear shorts at Tocho should then also be willing to shave their legs or otherwise remove lower body hair. Despite complaints from those who perceive the new dress code as representing a loss of professional decorum, the above videos appear to imply that shorts are being allowed for workers in internal/back office positions, not necessarily for those in roles which involve directly interacting with residents and other members of the public coming to Tocho to take care of administrative issues. And with Japan’s summers becoming so hot that the country is needing to create new words to describe the heat, it’s nice to see Tocho taking some sort of countermeasures before the end of spring."

No laughing matter: Why it’s time to cancel Facebook’s haha reaction - "The haha emoji is poisoning Facebook. Created 11 years ago to express laughter, the emoji – officially dubbed Grinning Squinting Face – has become the emoji of ridicule. Every time I see that little yellow ball of derision sitting at the bottom of news stories and posts, cackling at the pandemic, climate change, inequality – actually anything where someone is trying to make the world a better place – my faith in humanity slips a little further. While I’m training myself not to click on Facebook’s comments section – and that addictive rush of outrage of reading the horrendous views of strangers – the haha emoji is unavoidable. It takes just one person to click that avatar of vitriol and the post and my newsfeed is tainted forever. Even on stories where the comments are turned off, you’ll still find that little androgynous face of scorn. My experience of social media is now like being followed everywhere by Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons – like every earnest view I hold is a source of belittlement for the world. In a way it has become the emoji of the moment. The emoji of Brexit, Donald Trump and the anti-vaxxers. A weapon of the trolls in the time of the culture wars. So how did the emoji of joy become the emoji of hate?... In 2016, Guardian columnist Abi Wilkinson called it an “obnoxious, chortling little yellow dickhead”... An Irish Times columnist called Tears of Joy “more beastly than any other [emoji]” and a “sobbing cretin popular with right-wing bullies and those with no imagination”... bullies were gifted a new and more powerful tool. As people were given more ways to express their views on Facebook, it soon became clear that, as journalist Daniel Walters wrote, the haha emoji is “an A-hole”. Walters said, rather than laughter, the emoji had been “pressed into service for a more sinister purpose: Derisive mockery of sincere statements”."
Weird. We are told that authoritarians cannot stand being made fun of, but laugh reacts always trigger left wingers
Once again, "hate" is anything that threatens the left wing agenda

Facebook - "WATCHING DIRTY DANCING AS A PARENT IS A WHOLE DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE. Baby's dad wasn't the bad guy - she was 17, sneaking around with a Catskills dance instructor who looked like he was pushing 40 and had the emotional stability of a wasp in a soda can. And honestly, Baby, you do belong in a corner. That's called a time out, sweetheart."
Clearly, he's a toxic parent who will be cut off and ignored to die alone in a nursing home

Rob Moore on X - "Proof that London and the UK is way out of control. I just went into Pret-a-Manger to buy my breakfast. Handed over a tenner & the server took 30 seconds to check it for being fake. It was a I said to him, “do you get a lot of fake money here”? And he said, “you would be shocked… Not only do we get a lot of fake money, but people start fights with us when we check it. So now we have to wear body cams” He showed me his body cam. Body cams in fucking Pret-a-Manger for buying toasties & coffee. This is the real state of London and the UK. This is not doom mongering, this is for real"

Altus on X - "Breasts feed and nurture life. They are the bedrock of civilization. The ass expels waste and can only destroy. The boob man is a creator, the butt man worships chaos."

Erick Erickson on X - "The fundamental problem for this nation is that the Democrats have internalized that only they are virtuous and all power exercised outside of their control is illegitimate. Historically, when groups do that, it ends badly for everyone. From Hitler to Mao to Pol Pot, when a party cannot love its nation and people unless it rules them, it ends badly for everyone. The Democrats are headed in that trajectory. Again, you can say the GOP provokes violence or Trump says awful things, but the bullets are all going from left to right."

Japan survey finds 1 in 6 men groped on Tokyo public transport, defying gender assumptions | South China Morning Post - "Several comments noted that the assailants were female. One victim recalled: “A woman who looked like an office worker started touching my hair, ears and neck, and I was left confused. Looking back, it wasn’t until I entered university that I realised that it was molestation.” A Cabinet Office survey published last year found that 44.1 per cent of male victims identified their attacker as male, while 42.5 per cent said it was a woman and the rest were unsure."

Thread by @arctotherium42 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Most Spanish South American countries had very liberal constitutions on independence, guaranteeing property, liberal freedoms like speech and contract, and abolishing the fueros and legal caste/race distinctions, often inspired by but going further than the United States. Many people claim the US was founded as a [classical] liberal state without racial or ethnic content. This is mostly not true; the US was founded by Whigs (the word liberal was coined around 1800) and had explicit race laws. But it *is* true of most of Latin America. Spanish-American liberals were within the Spanish liberal tradition, much like the Founding Fathers were Whigs. 19th Hispanic century liberalism, politically very successful, is overlooked vs Britain or France. Liberalism won but failed in both Spain and America. I suspect liberalism's failure in Spain and Spanish America is overlooked by many because most interested in 19th century liberalism are sympathetic towards it (if leftist, as a precursor of socialism and derivatives, otherwise, in and of itself); the failure is embarrassing. Couple more differences between Spanish America and the US: most of Spanish America abolished slavery without much fuss on independence, and just about every major independence leader from Iturbide to Bolivar to San Martin died in exile, like if Washington had fled to Russia."
Garett Jones on X - "Nobel Laureate Douglass North said the same in this interview with Timur Kuran: Latin American countries copied America's excellent formal institutions but couldn't copy the cultural norms that made the institutions work. Libertarians and academics alike forgot North's lesson."
Clearly, Latin America is lagging behind because of US intervention

Winona Ryder and Jamiroquai "Breasts Too Big, Too Much Sex" Breakup Story - "The Winona Ryder and Jamiroquai "Breasts Too Big, Too Much Sex" Breakup Story refers to a viral story about Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay breaking up with actress Winona Ryder because her breasts were too big and she always wanted to have sex with him. Jay Kay purportedly made the claim to FHM Magazine in 2005 and was quoted in an article as saying, "She did have this habit of constantly wanting to play hide the sausage. It was exhausting." The story resurfaced and went viral on social media in April 2026, inspiring reactions and memes, including many references to the My Steak Is Too Juicy / My Lobster Is Too Buttery meme...
'Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay says sexy Winona Ryder wore him out with her non-stop demands for sex. The 35-year-old singer said, although he enjoyed his brief relationship with the Hollywood star, he was left shattered trying to keep up with her. He confessed: "She has these enormous breasts – bigger than they look on film […] She did have this habit of constantly wanting to play hide the sausage. It was exhausting."'"

My sister is pregnant for the fourth time in four years and I’m worried for her. : r/self - "She’s 23 and currently expecting baby #4. She got married at 19 in 2022, got pregnant pretty much right away, their first daughter was born just over nine months after the wedding. They had a second daughter in March 2024, she was pregnant again by the fall and they had a son in June of last year. I figured (and hoped) they would at the very least take a break after that. I thought maybe they had just been trying for a boy secretly and now that they had one, she’d get some rest. They had. She seems really happy on the outside and I haven’t noticed any major issues, mental or physical, but I know it isn’t really a wise idea. She’s in good shape which probably helps but still not all that reassuring. She’s pregnant yet again and due in July. I know it’s not my place to bring it up to her but I’ve read up on it and read some horror stories about woman who’ve died from having too many children in rapid succession. I’m terrified they are going to get pregnant yet again after this one, as their track record isn’t very encouraging."
Anti-natalists are wild

Losing control of the narrative (Migrants in the UK and Government Messaging)

Losing control of the narrative | Sebastian Milbank | The Critic Magazine
The British establishment no longer sets the terms of public debate over migration  

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” As Southampton simmers and Belfast erupts in fire, Gramsci’s words weigh heavily. We are in an interregnum, a chaotic gap between a dying social order, and a new Britain that has yet to emerge. 

The clearest sign of this was not in the horrors visited upon Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie on the nation’s streets, which are sadly far from new, but in the way British society has reacted. There are protests, many of them violent. There is a populist political party set to win potentially hundreds of seats openly linking the violence to immigration. Millions witnessed a dying Nowak being handcuffed by police officers, and millions watched Ogilvie being brutalised by an asylum seeker, as shocking videos spread across social media. 

Something has changed. Once, not long ago, this wasn’t how society reacted, with the British government maintaining strict narrative control over media and public responses to violent acts by immigrants. 

In 2014, as news broke that hundreds of British Muslims were fighting for Islamic State in the Middle East, and with videos circulating of a British aid workers being executed, an image of a Muslim woman in a Union Jack headscarf appeared on the cover of the Sun, with the headline, “United Against I.S.” When a Libyan immigrant conducted the Manchester Arena Bombing in 2017, killing 22 people, many of them children, Manchester crowds sang “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, and Muslim religious leaders joined the local bishop at a vigil. These were not simply spontaneous outpourings of public sentiment, but rather what government contingency planners call “controlled spontaneity”. Real stories are mixed with stage-managed events, and carefully tailored to create a narrative that channels public sentiment away from politically charged anger or civil disorder. 

It later emerged that the Sun cover was sourced from a PR firm called “Breakthrough Media”, an organisation that works closely with RICU, the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit, a crucial element in the British state’s counter-extremism. The Sun cover was the product of a Prevent PR campaign, and in the words of Breakthrough Media, “the UK authorities wanted to challenge ultraconservative and misogynistic interpretations of Islam – particularly those around women – in order to promote the true face of Islam among vulnerable UK communities”. 

There is a now widely understood sense that, whether explicitly or implicitly, the British state carefully manipulates and shapes the political narrative around shocking acts of violence involving immigrant communities. Yet this fact, although made public in regards to the 2014 Sun cover, is little explored or investigated by the media. Part of the reason for this is that, as the Sun example showed, many in the press feel they have an ethical or political reason to reinforce government spin in emergency contexts. Part of this is that as many of these efforts happen under the aegis of a state security apparatus, there is little transparency or way to access firm information about what is being done. Freedom of information requests about the work of RICU have been routinely denied on the grounds of national security.

In other words we know little about how extensively RICU and government PR firms have been at work behind the scenes attempting to dampen tensions and guide public debates over terrorism, immigration and integration in the past decade. In the wake of Southampton and Belfast, the families of both victims released press statements asking his death not be used to increase “division, hatred or tension”. There was widespread speculation that these statements had come about through government or police prompting or intervention, especially in relation to the Belfast statement, which was delivered by a local MP rather than the family, and included lines about “peaceful protest” being “the only way forward”, as well as the idea that, “we have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector, and we depend on them to make our country work.” With so little transparency around government counterterrorism work, suspicion and paranoia have become rampant. Many found it implausible that a family in the throes of tragedy’s first thoughts would be for the importance of migration for the hospitality sector, but there is of course no evidence either way. 

Regardless of whether the statements were examples of true or “controlled” spontaneity, the political establishment was swift to use them to condemn anyone who tried to link the killings in Southampton and Belfast to migration policy. In parliament, Farage was booed when he asked if Nowak’s treatment by officers was an example of “two-tier policing”, the Prime Minister accused Farage of sewing division and dishonouring the wishes of the victim’s family. 

The mood in parliament when Farage stood up was ugly. MPs hissed, murmured and jeered. He had expressed “pure, cold rage”. He had not called for calm, he had expressed outrage and demanded change. 

The grip of the British state on the press and public was being fatally weakened. A big part of the story was social media, especially Elon Musk’s X, where millions had viewed and shared the shocking body cam footage of a dying Henry Nowak’s handcuffing by police. This echoed the bruising events of last year, in which Musk and X had kicked up a storm of public anger over grooming gangs. 

Grooming gangs had been reported on again and again, but without result. In 2004 a Channel 4 documentary was planned on grooming gangs in Bradford. It was delayed by police who warned that it would inflame racial tensions, and did little to change public debate. When Andrew Norfolk exposed the Rotherham grooming gangs in 2011, he was subjected to death threats and accusations of racism. Social media has changed the media landscape. When Musk attacked the British government for refusing to launch a national inquiry, they were forced to commission a national audit authored by Baroness Casey, an audit which found that across multiple public services, fears of being perceived as racist, or causing racial division, had led to grooming gangs being ignored, data on ethnicity uncollected, and victims left to their abusers. 

Between new forms of media, and new outlets like GB News, the information ecosystem once united in depoliticising migration and crime is now divided. The public debate is moving very quickly, with politicians sprinting to catch up with a shifting Overton window. Only a week ago, Kemi Badenoch was attacking Farage for calling for “rage”. Yesterday in Parliament, reacting to Belfast, she condemned rioting, but said, “people have the right to be angry, and I am angry”.

Where once migration was firmly delinked from instances of public violence, now people are speaking openly about it. The head of the DUP talked directly of an attack on “British values” and demanded answers of how the Sudanese knifeman had been allowed to enter Northern Ireland, and why he had been granted leave to remain. The government has again been forced to act, with the Home Office promising to “ramp up” action against illegal migrants in Northern Ireland.

Those in the political centre find the ground shifting beneath their feet, and are desperate to reassert control. Many in the press and politics pointed the finger at social media, with Lib Dem leader Ed Davey blaming the Belfast violence on “social media barons like Elon Musk, and their divisive algorithms”, saying that online rhetoric “is not free speech” , and calling on the Prime Minister to “crack down on platforms like X”.

The government seems set to do just that, with Technology Secretary Liz Kendall laying out plans to control online content “during times of crisis”. Many in the British establishment would desperately like to put the genii back in the bottle, and return to “normality”. 

At one level, you can fully understand and even agree with the aims of the authorities in wishing to prevent violence and rioting. Anyone who reads about the harrowing stories coming out of Belfast of people left homeless by arson, of whole families forced to flee in terror from their homes by mobs, can see why politicians and police have good reason to want to curb popular rage. 

The problem is that the government’s approach is not simply to appeal to people’s decency, or counter the spread of harmful misinformation. In fact, its strategy has historically been to create propagandistic narratives or to suppress inflammatory truths, even where this has meant failing to prevent or punish terrible crimes, as with the mass rape of white working class children by Pakistani grooming gangs. Even if this works to suppress tensions in the short term, like putting a lid on a boiling saucepan, it only builds up more tension in the long term. 

Once you pass a certain point of public awareness and anger over migration, integration and criminality, the tactics that once worked to suppress rage, will increasingly achieve the opposite of their intentions. There is some sign that authorities are starting to learn this lesson, and the rapid confirmation of the details of the Belfast case, including the ethnicity and migration status of the attacker, was indicative of an understanding that failing to disclose details, especially in the context of a widely shared and horrific video, was only going to fuel further speculation, paranoia and rage. 

Yet in large part the mainstream conversation remains hopelessly behind public opinion and an emerging debate occurring on social media and the right wing press, with many marooned by the whirlwind pace of discursive norms. In Parliament, Reform, Farage and Musk sometimes seem to generate more ire than the terrible violence inflicted on British streets, which is instead spoken of more in sorrow than in anger. On X, Owen Jones wrote a thread listing decapitations by white killers. Lewis Goodall, penning a Substack post from the Basque Country, suggested that concern over Henry Nowak reflected the “endless unreality” of the culture wars, and called suggestions that police anti-racism had any bearing on their decision to treat a prone and dying white suspect as a possible racist on the word of his killer as “fanciful stuff”. The Economist described right wing leaders as in the grips of “violent fantasy”, and members of the public who support them as “bastards”. At a certain point these kinds of responses from press and politicians are themselves dangerous provocations, creating a sense that mainstream debate and democracy are no longer paths to political change. 

There has not been a single leader in the past 15 years who has become Prime Minister without promising to lower migration and take control of our borders, yet in that same time both legal and illegal migration have risen to extraordinary, demographically transformative heights. The sense of political powerlessness and cultural alienation this has created is a recipe for civil unrest of the sort we saw in Southport in 2024, and Ballymena in 2025. 

Regaining public trust means taking meaningful action on migration, but it also means frank, uncomfortable public conversations about crime, integration and the impact of mass migration on British society. People feel, really profoundly, that politicians are not on their side, don’t listen, and don’t take action. 

A young man spent his last moments falsely arrested for racism, disbelieved and manhandled by police as his killer loomed over his dying body. Another man is currently in hospital, an eye gouged out of his head, covered in wounds inflicted in a frenzied attack perpetrated by a man with no connection to Britain or Ireland, no visa, no right or business whatsoever being in our country. It is time our leaders stopped blaming angry words for civil disorder — these crimes, and the policies that let them happen, are the reason British streets are burning.

 

 

 

Links - 19th June 2026 (1 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

Meme - "Hi Mary, I couldn't help but notice the israeli flag in your bio; if you were familiar with Kid Sister you would know that we are a pro Palestinian company and are vocal advocates against the ongoing genocide. Please remove us from your mailing list. Christen"
Mary Sheridan: "To: Christen Lalonde
If you would actually cared to LOOK at my bio, you would see I am a proud Salvadoran Canadian indigenous woman who proudly stands with Palestine."
Terrorism supporters are so ignorant and hateful

Meme - "What Has Israel Provided to the World?
All of the following were developed in Israel:
Cell phone technology
Microsoft Windows NT® operating system
Instant Messenger software
Intel Pentium MMX® Chip
Heart Attack Blood Test Diagnoses By Phone
PC anti-virus software
"Gut cam" Ingestible pill video camera to diagnose cancer
USB Flash Drive Disk On Key
Radiation-free, breast cancer diagnostic test
FireWall® internet security software
Drip irrigation technology for farmers to conserve water
Large-scale solar electricity plant in Calif. Mojave desert
What Has Palestine Provided to the World?
All of the following were developed in Palestine:
Homemade rockets
Suicide Bombings
Terror Tunnels
Indoctrination of children
Subjugation of women
Commercial airline hijacking"

Jon Levine on X - "Wikipedia has a "Palestinian inventions" page and literally half the entries are various types of bombs"
A lot of left wingers quoted Mikhail Kalashnikov in his AK-47 designer capacity saying: "Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer. I always wanted to construct agricultural machinery." Given that the AK-47 was only introduced after World War II, that's a great example of left wingers' historical ignorance and grasping at straws

WikiBias on X - "While Israelis are known for their inventions and impressive Nobel Prize-winning rate, their enemies excel mainly at inventing lies and obscuring the truth. Here are just some of the many Israeli inventions deleted from Wikipedia, including Babylon, ICQ, OrCam, and Moovit."

WikiBias on X - "While many groundbreaking Israeli inventions and innovations have been deleted from Wikipedia as "unfit for inclusion," the Palestinian keffiyeh is fully recognized and listed under the category of “Palestinian inventions,” alongside Nabulsi cheese and Nabulsi soap. 😃"
WikiBias on X - "Stop using your computer, as it contains Israeli chips. Also, rely only on Palestinian "inventions"..."

Meme - Zachary Foster: "Why don't Palestinians embrace non-violent resistence? You've probably heard this question asked a lot over the past 2 weeks. A short response.
From late 1987-1988, Palestinians in Gaza rose up in a series of non-violent demonstrations, strikes, boycotts & protests. They killed 0 Israelis. They were unarmed. In response, Israel killed 142 Palestinians in Gaza. Source: Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History (2014), 206."
"The first year of the intifada ended with an especially high toll of dead and wounded in the Gaza Strip. Whereas 142 Palestinians had died, not a single Israeli had been killed in the territory. Seventy-seven Palestinians fell to gunfire and thirty-seven died after inhaling teargas (most of whom were older people and very young children or infants who are especially vulnerable to this kind of attack). Seventeen lost their lives after being beaten by Israeli soldiers or police, nine were killed in traffic accidents that may have been deliberate and two died in detention, their bodies bearing the marks of torture. The Gaza Strip emerged from this period of twelve months scarred and impoverished. Never, on the other hand, had the ambition for ign Palestine appeared to be nearer to fulfilment."
Ohad Gertel: "These "non-violent demonstrations" were in fact:
suicide bombings in a Israeli city,
hijacking a civilian Israeli bus and murdering its passengers,
unprovoked murders of Israeli civilians by deliberately running them over with a car or stabbing them with a knife"
Terrorism supporters just keep on lying, as usual. Cherry picking the Gaza Strip and claiming that no Israelis died there is rich when Palestinian terrorists were killing Israelis elsewhere (not to mention a key reason why no Israelis died in the Gaza Strip was due to the "apartheid" that they keep bitching about)
One terrorism supporter claimed that this was expected as they were occupying Palestinian land. Terrorism supporters don't want peace - they want Jews to be ethnically cleansed from the Middle East. And of course, if that ever happens, they will still justify Jews being murdered in the rest of the world as being Israel's fault, just like decades after colonialism ended, they still mock Europe's problems with mass migration as being their just desserts from colonialism

Brianna Wu on X - "Free Palestine is not a peace movement. It is an anti-Jew pro-war movement. Just look at the slogans.    “Globalize the Intifada” means people all around the world must support efforts to destroy Israel, including violence.   “By any means necessary” means if Israeli civilians are killed, that is fine.   “Resistance until return” means the violence will continue until Palestinians control Israel. There is no scenario of that happening where 7 million Jews in Israel are not slaughtered and ethnicly cleansed.   I want peace. That is why I oppose the Free Palestine movement. If you don’t believe in a two state solution, you believe in endless war."
Meme - Brendan @BrendanMcinnis: ""From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Arab" Didn't test well with Western audiences for some reason. Doubt it's just that it doesn't rhyme in English"

Meme - AG @AGHamilton29: "They signed a pledge from a group so openly hateful and extreme that it even attacked the anti-Israel filmakers behind the "No Other Land" documentary for violating "normalization standards""
Nerdeen Kiswani: "Today, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) officially published a statement in Arabic, confirming that No Other Land violates anti-normalization standards. This vindicates what many of us have been saying."
Nerdeen Kiswanl @Nerdee: "No Other Land winning an Oscar is being framed as a historic moment for Palestinians, but would the Academy have awarded it if it weren't framed as a joint project? Why did the speech stop a..."

Ms. Rachel cries on camera after liking post to 'free America from the Jews' : r/NewsWorthPayingFor - "She says that she “accidentally liked the comment.” But then Palestinian News Network (PNN) left a comment saying “they (the Jews) probably left that comment themselves” to trick her. She responds “ooooooo”
EDIT: She’s insinuating that the jews themselves put the comment there and maybe its their fault and not hers"
"I’ve generally been a Ms. Rachel defender but I’m having a hard time explaining this one"

Meme - mssrachelforlittles: "Free Palestine"
alex_james.d: "Free America from the Jews"
"*heart* by author"
We all know he meant "Zionists", so this is just pretending that criticising Israel is anti-Semitic

Nation Starting To Wonder If People Who Spend Life Singing Songs To Toddlers On YouTube Might Not Be All There Mentally | Babylon Bee

Bari Weiss Listens to Shocking Palestinian Bomber Story - "VITTERT: Wafaa had been a woman in the West Bank-, a woman in Gaza. She had pulled a pot of boiling water over herself when she was like five or six years old The Israelis treat most of the people out of Gaza who have really horrific burns, catastrophic medical injuries. She goes back to Gaza after being treated for four or five years in Israel, but has a past to get in and out of Israel, which very few people in Gaza did at the time. So she gets recruited to be a suicide bomber. This is in the Second Intifada, so mid-2000s. And there’s the video of her coming to the checkpoint to get into Israel wearing her suicide vest And she’d been given three target options by the Al-Asqa Martyrs Brigade: a bus, a cafe, or the hospital that had treated her and saved her life. She chose the hospital that had treated her and saved her life. She gets to the checkpoint they discover that she has a bomb or they  think she does, she tries to detonate it, it doesn’t go off. She gets thrown in jail. Again, the Israelis treat her, they help her with her burns, they educate her, they give her a college degree. And now in the Gilad Shalit deal, she goes back to Gaza. So I go to Gaza to interview her thinking this is going to be a redemption story — it was before Christmas, right? That she is gonna say, “I am going to be the one to try and forge peace and I believe in peace, and I’ve seen that the Israelis are not evil that I don’t want to kill them anymore.” Fine. So I get into Gaza and I bring with me an iPad that has the video of her trying to blow herself up. So we’re sitting across from each other like this. She’s wearing a hijab in a very junkie Gazan apartment, it is an awful place in every sense of the word. And I show her the video and I said, “What are you thinking watching this?” She goes, “Oh, oh, oh.” Has all this reaction she goes, “Oh.” she goes, “I’m thinking I almost tasted paradise.” Okay. “Would you do it again?” “Absolutely in a minute. This is my calling in life.” I said, “Wait a second, these people treated you and all of your burns, they saved your life, you tried to blow them up, they still treated you, they educated you, and now you have a chance at life back here in Gaza and you’d want to blow him up?” And she goes, “Absolutely, they are the infidels. They are evil. They’re the enemy.” I can’t remember what the exact translation was and that’s when my mind was made up about sort of the moral clarity of the Israeli-Palestinian debate. are the Israelis perfect? No, but that’s what they’re up against."

The UN Has Been Evil For Longer Than You Think - "The Gaza war reminds me of the Vietnam war, but not in the way you think.  Israel is not America. It’s Vietnam. Gaza is not America either. It’s Cambodia.  Okay, so my first sentence was a bit misleading. I’m not talking about THE Vietnam war. I’m talking about the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. Arguably, the most justified war of the 20th century.  This little-known war stopped one of the worst genocides in human history and exposed the absolute worst of the UN almost 50 years before October 7... In just four years, this insane far left government had killed as many 2.8 million of its own people. It was only the Vietnamese military intervention and subsequent facilitation of international food aid that ended the genocide and saved millions of lives.  Now, this might seems like one of the most morally virtuous wars in history. In response to a series of beastly massacres, an nation invades a barbaric neighbor engaged in one of the worst genocides in history, topples its deranged dictator and ends the slaughter.  You’d think the world would celebrate this crusade against evil. Nah, you wouldn’t think that. You’re not an idiot. You see, international law cares about borders, not motives. Even though the Khmer Rouge was pure evil, even though they started the war through a series of senseless massacres, the West was unhappy Vietnam took the battle to their enemies instead of just pushing the enemy away from the border.  “Okay,” you may ask, this is the First World, “but what about the Second World?”  Well, China and ASEAN saw this as Soviet-aligned invasion because the Soviet Union supported Vietnam. “Sure, Pol Pot made Dracula look like a saint, but we can’t have Soviet allies expanding Soviet influence by killing monsters, can we now?”  As a result, the UN condemned Vietnam for the invasion. Almost the entire world condemned Vietnam for the invasion. What’s even more disgusting is that it let the Khmer Rouge keep Cambodia’s UN seat for years. Again, we’re talking about a regime which murdered 25% of its own population and then brought the same level of brutality to its neighbors.  Cambodia attacked first. Cambodia committed genocide. Vietnam stopped it. The world condemned Vietnam.  The hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy already stink, but let’s make it worse.  Let’s talk about Gaza and Kosovo.  Just like the Khmer Rouge carried out cross-border massacres, Hamas carried out a massive invasion from Gaza, committing untold atrocities in Israeli border towns.  Just like Vietnam, Israel responded with a large-scale military action to remove this threat to its citizens. Just like Vietnam, most of the world focused on the response instead of the initial attack.  People acknowledged the horror but refused to let the horror shape policy. Pressure, sanctions threats, and legal action focused overwhelmingly on Israel despite the Jewish state being the victim of aggression from an entity which promised endless war and genocide, not just against the Jews but against everyone who didn’t share its Islamist ideology.  Both Vietnam and Israel crossed an ostensible international taboo: they aimed to remove the threat not just deter it. The international system relies on states to stop horrors it does nothing to stop itself… then condemns them for doing exactly that."

Hen Mazzig on X - ""The stated mission of the boycott is to end apartheid, and I keep saying, what apartheid? My products are made by Israeli-Arabs, not Jewish Israelis."  Seed + Mill, which makes sesame-based foods, is one of the brands that might be impacted by the new boycott of Israeli goods by the Park Slope Food Coop.   The Coop voted this week to boycott all Israeli goods in a contentious vote.   Another example of how these boycotts often end up harming the exact people they were meant to help."
If you don't give people from another country the same rights as your own citizens, that's "apartheid". Similar logic is behind how Western countries which don't have open borders are authoritarian, fascist regimes

Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ on X - "I think the pigheaded ignorance of the BDS movement is really illuminated best by what they did to SodaStream.  An Israeli company, SodaStream was one of BDS's earliest boycotts, leading to the closure of its West Bank facility in 2015. At the time, the company was the largest private employers of Palestinians in the area, and 600 Palestinians were immediately laid off. Their Palestinian employees received the same benefits, wages, and conditions of Israelis, and all of that was lost due to BDS, who hilariously (and wrongly) claimed that SodaStream was "exploiting" Palestinians.  SodaStream then moved into Israel proper and to a new plant in Lehavim, which is close to Rahat, a large Bedouin town in the Negev. The facility, like the West Bank one, employs the locals: hundreds of Bedouins, particularly Bedouin women, who otherwise lack economic opportunities.  Did this satisfy BDS? Nope. They continue to boycott SodaStream entirely, claiming the factory is part of the Israeli government's plans to ethnically cleanse the Bedouins, which are Israeli citizens of Arab descent. BDS, of course, did not ask the Bedouins, who receive the same wages as Jews, guaranteed by equal rights laws that BDS pretends do not exist in Israel. Those wages are significantly higher than the average income in nearby Arab towns, and SodaStream provides benefits that are rare outside of the urban areas of Israel, like a healthcare plan, pension contributions, and daily transportation. Job satisfaction is very high.  In short, these boycotts just make rich white WASP Westerners feel good. They do nothing for Palestinians or Israeli minorities."

Thread by @EFischberger on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The UN just "blacklisted" Israel for sexual violence. So I read the report.  Not only does it fail spectacularly at proving systematic sexual violence against Palestinians, it actually makes a far more compelling case for the UN's own systematic dishonesty and incompetence 🧵
Of the 31 "verified" cases, 18 are from 2023–2024, not from 2025, the actual reporting period.  Meaning the UN is recycling prior-period cases to bulk up their numbers, because the actual numbers don't support their premise. Of those 31 cases, only 9 involve rape or gang rape allegations. The rest are threats of rape, forced nudity, unwanted touching, and strip searches. Still awful — but not rape.  Yet the UN acts like this is enough to justify placing Israel on the same blacklist as Hamas and ISIS. The UN blames Israel for "denying access" to freed hostages as the reason it couldn't verify their allegations.  But these are free people living in Israel who've already given public statements and media interviews.  The freed hostages can speak to whomever they want — and do. The report explains the low volume of testimony by citing "explicit threats made by Israeli not to report abuse."  In other words, the absence of evidence is pre-explained by "Israeli intimidation."  The UN is creating an unfalsifiable thesis and calling it evidence.
Next, the report lists specific facilities where violations allegedly occurred.  Among them is "an unidentified base."  They're claiming to have verified cases at a location they cannot name..... How exactly, then, is that verified?
Now onto Sde Teiman.  Israel's own courts charged the soldiers with severe physical assault, not rape.  Then in March 2026 all charges were dropped.  The report frames the dropped charges as proof of "a climate of impunity."  i.e. an acquittal is now confirmation of guilt."

Eitan Fischberger on X - "Amazing how the UN can just deem a country guilty of committing sexual violence at a level akin to ISIS based on, what, Euro-Med and B'Tselem saying so?"
Alex Gandler on X - "Watch how the cycle works:
1. An allegation is made.
2. Journalists report the allegation.
3. NGOs cite the reporting.
4. The UN cites the NGOs.
5. A strongly worded report is issued.
6. Everyone cites the UN report.
By the end, an unverified claim has been transformed into an accepted "fact" through repetition rather than evidence."

Regavim on X - "BREAKING: The EU just revealed why it sanctioned Regavim.  Our “crime”? Petitioning Israeli courts against an illegal EU-built structure near Herodium, on the edge of the Judean Desert Nature Reserve, after a professional engineering assessment found it posed a safety hazard to the children and staff inside.  So now it’s official: the EU builds illegally, Israel enforces the law, and Regavim gets sanctioned for exposing it."

New Memo Reveals Biden-Harris Administration Misused Taxpayer Dollars to Fund Radical Anti-Israel Protests and Terrorist-linked NGOs

Thread by @mishtal on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Last week I was sent an image of a pro-Palestine stall at Cambridge Market Square.  Not angry students. Not masked radicals. Rather elderly white women encouraging strangers to boycott Israel.  So yesterday I went to Cambridge to hear what they were selling.  Thread ⬇️⬇️
The stall was bigger yesterday - but the same women were also there. I looked over the material and listened for a while - as one activist tried to explain to people how the Arabs had always considered themselves Palestinians -  Newsflash - this was a big fat lie. Eventually the same woman came over to me. I did not want to confront her - I did not seek an argument.  I just wanted to understand what it was she was selling - so I played as someone there to be educated.  We spoke for about twenty minutes. Everything I was told was false. I was told the Arab armies in 1948 only entered the areas allocated to the proposed Arab state. This is false.  I was told the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 were “completely disarmed” passive victims. This is false. She called Israel an Apartheid state because of "65 discriminatory laws". I asked for an example. She stuttered and could not give me a single one.  They do not exist, of course. It is empty propaganda where Jewish holidays and state emblems are seen as signs of Apartheid. By the same token - the UK would be apartheid because of Christmas day and the crosses in the flag and emblems. But that is really not the point. This is the activists' reason for boycott. The point of her activism - and she did not have a single concrete example.
Their literature was no better.  A newspaper on the stall was still promoting the false claim that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza - despite it becoming clear years ago that the explosion was caused by a failed Islamic Jihad rocket. I was told Hamas was “created by Israel.” More lies. This is how propaganda works.  Israel maintained ties with Islamic organisations in Gaza after 1967. Hamas did not exist.  That understandable reality later became twisted into conspiracy mythology to smear Israel.   The conversation became darker:  I heard Holocaust revisionism, conspiracies about Iraqi and Yemenite Jews, claims that “Zionists” hated weak and brown-skinned Jews, and repeated attempts to portray Israelis as alien European colonists with no authentic connection to the region. Eventually the mask slipped completely.  She compared Israeli Jews to white Europeans in Africa - told me they were foreign colonists - and implied they deserved whatever comes to them when forced to take down their walls.  The reality behind all their slogans.
This is what Palestinianism is: History must be distorted. Violence erased. Jihadism excused. Conspiracies created. Jews transformed into demonic outsiders.
This is what was on sale at Market Square in Cambridge. Elderly grandmothers spreading lies about the Jewish state, demanding its boycott, and pressuring it to surrender to people who openly call for its destruction. Rarely has antisemitism dressed so sweetly. Rarely has it been so dangerous."

Meme - Kosher @KosherCockney: "Awkward. Bella Hadid is such a clown. Just proves "Palestinians" don't even know their history."
"Bella Hadid posted a photo of the 1939 Palestine football team... Palestine Vs. Australia 1939 ...who were all Jewish as Palestine was - and is - Israel."

Meme - Vicki @vickikolomensky: "An organization called "end Jew hatred" is responded to with "may allah condemn you to jahannam (hell)" by a sitting Brooklyn city council member Remarkable."
Shahana Hanif @ShahanaFromBK: "May Allah condemn you to Jahannam."
Anila Ali @anilaali: "We are on our way to join @endjewhatred to stand with the Jewish people and protest @NYCMayor's refusal to stop religious freedom violations against the Jewish people, their intimidation and harassment under his leadership."
Clearly, this is just anti-Zionism and a religious curse is not religious in nature unless it is Christian

Meme - Eyal Yakoby: "BREAKING: Hezbollah just accidentally exposed themselves to international media. They posted a video claiming the IDF struck a civilian home in Lebanon. But they accidentally filmed the rocket launcher in the background Suddenly, the media isn't reporting the story."

Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 on X - "Israel in the early 70s did a "build your own home" program to move people out of the refugee favelas and into new towns and neighborhoods. More than 11,000 Palestinians took the offer. The PLO threatened violence against participants and the UN passed two resolutions against"
Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 on X - "In 1977 there were at most 5,000 Israeli Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. So Israel by 1977 financed and subsidized the building of more than twice as many houses for Palestinian refugees as it did Jews. Dayan mentioned in 1977 there were more Palestinians illegally residing in Israel than there were Jewish settlers too."

'Shoot Him in the Neck Like Charlie Kirk': Chant at London Protest Sparks Outrage - "London saw two massive and competing demonstrations on Saturday, but one moment cut through everything else. Video circulating online captured a group of protesters chanting that Tommy Robinson should be shot in the neck "like Charlie Kirk," a reference to the assassination of the American conservative commentator. The group could be seen waving Palestinian flags as they chanted. “Shoot him in the neck like Charlie Kirk!” they chanted"
Time to jail Tommy Robinson for inciting violence

Meme - "Everything I don't like is A GENOCIDE. A book for losers that got nowhere in life and blame Jews"
"This engine is a genocide"

Jonathan Eric Lewis on X - "A Lebanese Sunni professional colleague of mine -- mind you, he could hardly be called a "Zionist" -- spoke to me about "anti-Zionist Jews".  He told me how they are perceived in the Arab world; namely, as far worse than "Zionists".  Why? Because "they have no honor," as my friend said. They refuse to stand up for their own people and are willing to sell them out to placate the worst political actors in the Arab world.  I think of this often"

Captain Allen on X - "Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh ) – Prominent Muslim Israeli Arab journalist:  "If Israel were an apartheid state, I would not be allowed to work for a Jewish newspaper or live in a Jewish neighborhood or own a home.   The real apartheid is in Lebanon, where there is a law that bans Palestinians from working in over 50 professions.   Can you imagine if the Knesset passed a law banning Arabs from working even in one profession? The law of Israel does not distinguish between a Jew and an Arab.”  Israel sucks at "apartheid.""

Texas sex therapist and Dem congressional hopeful vows to turn ICE facility into ‘prison for American Zionists’ - "A Democratic House candidate in Texas is facing fierce backlash, including from members of her own party, after posting that she would send “American Zionists” to a facility currently used to detain illegal immigrants. In an Instagram post last week, Maureen Galindo said she would turn the Karnes ICE Detention Center “into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.” “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists,” Galindo wrote, referring to herself in the third person. Galindo, a housing activist and sex therapist, is running in Texas’s newly redrawn 35th Congressional District and faces Johnny Garcia in a May 26 Democratic primary runoff... Galindo accused Garcia, a former hostage negotiator and public information officer for the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, of wanting “Jews and Mexicans in warehouses.” She also claimed “billionaire Zionists” control San Antonio and South Texas trafficking networks. In another post, Galindo wrote: “WE MUST END ZIONISM TO PROTECT JEWS AND SEMITES & ALL OTHER VICTIMS OF THE ISRAEL AND EPSTEIN NETWORK OF TERROR. GLOBAL TERRORISM PAID FOR WITH OUR AMERICAN TAXPAYER MONEY.” Galindo has also targeted Caterpillar, a frequent focus of anti-Israel activists, accusing the company and the Holt family, owners of Holt Caterpillar and the San Antonio Spurs, of profiting from equipment she claimed is used against Palestinians. In another post, she claimed that Flock safety cameras are “Israeli spyware” and alleged that Israel controls the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. She also wrote that ICE is “a terrorist organization under DHS based in Tel Aviv Israel,” and claimed it is run by “Proud Boys and IDF soldiers.” Galindo has repeatedly argued that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, because "Zionist Jews" aren't real Jews, but has also described “Zionist Jews” as “genocidal European colonizer freaks” and claimed Zionists are “not real Jews.” In another post, she appeared to advocate making Zionism, rather than anti-Zionism, an antisemitic crime against humanity. She also criticized Christian Zionists... Even Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has frequently been accused of trafficking in anti-Israel and antisemitic tropes, condemned Galindo, writing on X, "This is absolutely disgusting. This bigoted garbage and antisemitism should be nowhere near our politics," and encouraged her followers to support Garcia."