What is Europe even for? Decline and tragedy at the heart of the West

When you have managed decline, and endorse it too.

The author dismisses Trump's comments on mass migration, but that only worsens the fiscal problems he does cite. He also approvingly cites the left wing policies that're weakening Europe, while later saying Europe should follow Mario Draghi's recommendations. Ironic.

What is Europe even for? Decline and tragedy at the heart of the West - The Globe and Mail

"European leaders at the Munich Security Conference this month, the world’s premier geopolitics summit, where the elders of the Old World spent a weekend telling everyone it was all going to be okay.

Times are bad, but we are strong. Such was the energy of the conference. The embodiment of this message was French President Emmanuel Macron, who, without saying the words, anointed himself Captain Continent. “Europe has been vilified as an aging, slow, fragmented construct,” but in fact “everyone should take their cue from us,” he said...

Try as they might to project otherwise – and perhaps because those continental leaders tried so hard – it is plain that outside, beyond the hotel’s 19th-century façade, Europe’s light is fading.

The EU has irreversibly fractured with Brexit, no matter how much British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it ain’t so in Munich. War creeps from the east, and Big Brother USA unfriends Europe and eyes its wallet. Not that there’s much to take. Britain’s and France’s economies are barely growing, and Germany’s is stagnant. Facing crushing debt and populist upheaval, continental governments are revolving doors where nothing gets done. Today prisoner exchanges are done in the United Arab Emirates. Gaza peace talks are held in Qatar. Ukraine negotiations might be held in Geneva, but Europe was not at the table...

A once-mighty people has been brought low. “Europe is a myth,” Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, said at a WEF panel. “It’s a beautiful myth, but it’s not working.” Or, using the gamer-speak recently adopted by Tesla’s Elon Musk, one might say the continent has become a “non-playable character.”

It raises a tough question: What is Europe even for? And for those on the other side of the West, who draw our values and institutions from the old country, it raises a further question: What does an irrelevant Europe mean for us?...

We can trace the source of European decline endlessly. Brendan Simms, the Cambridge scholar, writes about five centuries of the destructive “struggle for supremacy” among the closely packed European powers that led to their second-fiddle status to the United States. Ian Morris of Stanford University traces the origins of Brexit for 10,000 years. Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King once said “some countries have too much history.” Such is Europe’s tragedy.

History was what culminated in the Second World War and the utter devastation it wrought. It was only American money that saved the continent, aid from a land unravaged by war. And the Old World was never again the same.

In 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt after the latter seized the Suez Canal, a major shipping route they funded. But U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who disdained such echoes of colonialism, had his own geopolitical priorities. Mr. Eisenhower, who had Britain deeply in his pocket, threatened to sell British bonds and ruin its economy. Prime minister Anthony Eden lost that standoff, and then lost his job.

Then Britain would find it could not even win a stare-down against China, a backwater only recently recognized by the world. In 1982, a steely Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking Chinese leader no taller than five feet, bluntly threatened to invade Hong Kong. Britain made concession after concession and walked away with what is arguably nothing. It left prime minister Margaret Thatcher “depressed,” she later said. So shameful was that moment, Queen Elizabeth II was deliberately kept away from the handover ceremony.

History has these moments sometimes, which capture the tides of centuries: Europe had become neutered, wearing a veneer of wealth but underneath just a sick man of the West.

In a rules-based world where institutions are respected, all of this might have mattered less. It may even have been better. One man’s lustrous past is another’s colonial nightmare. The world was moving in a new direction, away from the might-makes-right that has defined much of existence. A new Europe emerged: less powerful, more compassionate, an enthusiastic champion of a new multilateral world. And Europe found a new sort of power.

But then that veneer of wealth started to crack. As entitlements piled up, debt grew and growth slowed. The 2008 financial crisis sparked the eurozone sovereign-debt crisis. The American economy was once about the same as the EU’s, but over the past 20 years, the U.S. economy has more than doubled to US$30-trillion; the 27 EU countries’ economies are at only US$20-trillion, barely more than that of one rising China.

Six U.S. companies founded in the last five decades are valued at more than €1-trillion. In Europe, no company founded during that period is worth even a tenth of that. Some higher-education rankings show only one EU university in the world’s top 30. “Europe is no longer at the forefront of progress,” the European Central Bank’s Ms. Lagarde said in 2024. Europe has been content with old-school industries such as machinery, trains and cars. And those depend on two items that are now either gone or going: cheap Russian energy and abundant Chinese demand. On top of that, China now also makes machines. The proportion of sectors in which China vies directly with the eurozone is 40 per cent now, up from 25 per cent at the turn of the millennium.

Meanwhile, France has now seen five prime ministers in just over two years. Its troubles are the same ones that broke the unwieldy coalition of Germany’s former leader Olaf Schulz, the same that Chancellor Friedrich Merz now faces and the same afflicting the British government that saw six prime ministers in 10 years and its chancellor of the exchequer crying in parliament: Welfare, pensions, healthcare – the entitlements that once stemmed from prosperity now weigh on budgets, but woe be to any government that tries to cut them or raise taxes to fund them.

And so radical politics rise in Europe, for anger and empty stomachs push people toward flashy prophets. In France and Germany, centrist coalitions are barely holding on.

Add to this the return of Donald Trump and geopolitical brinkmanship. The United States does not want to carry Europe or the world order anymore. And we live now in an era of extremes: If you’re not a superpower, you’re not a power at all...

The fraying of the transatlantic partnership, like a rotting carcass, is now attracting vultures. China sees the decay of what Germans call the Weltordnung, and it sees further reason to test Europe, to play hardball in trade talks. Russia, already bent on regional dominance, flies drones into Poland and Romania. Seldom before, perhaps not since the Dark Ages or the fall of Constantinople, has such a proud continent seemed so small in such a big world.

After it came back from a season break in 2024, Emily in Paris, the show about an American gallivanting across a caricatured continent, was 36.6 times more popular in Canada than a typical Netflix production. Forty-four per cent of Canadians want this country to join the European Union. These data confirm anecdotes: It’s hard to go a week without seeing friends’ Instagram pictures from Porto or Tuscany. And you somehow know six people who have done a semester abroad in Aarhus or Stuttgart.

This Euro-lust is not undeserved. Decline is long. Ask a Roman in the fourth century, and she would not know that her empire was falling. Even as Europe fades, its wellspring of soft power remains visible. Canada’s cultural ties aside, we live in a world that Europeans built. China’s super rich have snapped up European vineyards. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un studied in Switzerland. The Thai king treats Germany as a second home. The UAE loves France’s Louvre museum so much it spent US$1.3-billion on licensing and loan fees for Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Indeed, the vestiges of Europe’s power show precisely why its decline is a problem: We mourn a loss only when it has value.

Even with Mr. Trump’s disdain for Europe, he mandates that new federal buildings use classical architecture to “visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity.” Mr. Trump swears by Italian suits and Swiss watches. Germany’s Mr. Merz charmed Mr. Trump with an invitation to his ancestral hometown. Britain’s Mr. Starmer used a royal invitation as a trump card during his visit to the White House. Mr. Trump later also accepted an invitation to the Dutch royal palace. Mr. Carney, to assert Canada’s sovereignty, invited King Charles to deliver the throne speech, an event the likes of which have not been seen in nearly half a century. Cambridge’s Prof. Simms has suggested making Charles emperor of Europe, a modern day Charlemagne, to stabilize the continent.

There’s even some power left that is more than soft. There’s a saying that the United States innovates, and the EU regulates. It’s meant derogatively – that the United States gives the world internet giants and the artificial-intelligence boom, and Europe mandates caps that stick on bottles (for better recycling) and made Apple use USB-C. But think about the impact. The EU sets global standards in regulating climate protection, competition, food handling, privacy and social media. In a world often criticized for unbridled capitalism, where trillion-dollar corporations are gaining unprecedented power, the EU is the lone bulwark against problems that the free market either creates or cannot address.

And where Europe retreats, its antithesis fills in the blanks. It sounded like a good thing when the colonial powers left Africa, and it was, but now we do not live in a good world. Russia’s Africa Corps, mercenaries who took over from the Wagner Group, have been active in six countries that we know of and probably more that we don’t; more than half of that continent has some military pact with Moscow. China has stakes in 46 ports and includes all but two countries in its Belt and Road infrastructure program. In Djibouti, Chinese debt has accounted for as much as 70 per cent of the economy. Eyeing Africa’s natural resources, Russia and China now own so much of the continent that there are reports of them meeting and clashing with each other. In the United Nations, most of Africa votes with China and Russia, although that’s probably no big deal – who cares about UN votes these days?

Europe’s decline exacerbates the trajectory the world is on, and we will end up with a meaner, smaller place. If Europe does not fix its trajectory, it would be to the detriment of not just itself – and therein is also a lesson particular to Canada.

In this new era, institutions and soft power – no longer underpinned by the hard power of the United States – no longer command the clout they used to. Now it is all about defence and industry. It’s about power and money, although it boils down to just money, for that is where power comes from.

Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief and Italian prime minister, painstakingly wrote 400 pages on this subject in 2024, calling for regulatory reforms, a unified capital market and €800-billion more per year in business investment, among 170 recommendations. “We have reached the point where, without action, we will have to either compromise our welfare, our environment or our freedom,” Mr. Draghi said. “This is an existential challenge.” But, as Politico noted, “Draghi’s report got about a day’s worth of coverage in the continent’s major media outlets and then was quickly forgotten.” European leaders must heed that report.

Beyond the major, structural changes, there’s a simple solution: Work harder. Continental productivity is still relatively high – how much economic value a worker produces with how much work. It’s just that Germans work 86 hours for every 100 hours Americans work, and the French work even less at 77 hours. In Britain, critics say, decades of social policy that saw work as inherently bad for mental health has resulted in a vicious circle of unemployment. Germany’s Mr. Merz lectured his country earlier this month, saying, “Work-life balance and a four-day week will not be enough to maintain our country’s current level of prosperity.”

In that respect Canada shares something with Europe: Through our trade and security dependency, we, too, have been propped up by the Americans, who now grow weary of that role. We must take in a lesson: Throughout modern history, dark trends originate on the continent and then ripple forth. In Europe, this country sees a crystal ball, threatening a future in which we, too, will be so irrelevant.

Some of Canada’s path will be easier than Europe’s. Canada has vast natural resources, and a handful of provinces and territories is easier to corral than 27 countries plus the others. But while Europe can simply work harder, Canada is already working hard – we work the same hours as Americans, but with our abysmal productivity we make only European wages. Something has got to change.

The greatest issue of all is that one of Canada’s strengths is also a weakness: We have but a handful of provinces and territories – a small internal market that has problems trading with even itself. Europe, the second-biggest economy, can stand alone and be the big cheese if it musters the will. But Canada, the world’s 10th-largest economy, never can. For Canada to prosper and stand tall, we need a stable world order and big players in it that respect that order. Canada needs a strong Europe.

So, it is all the more important that Europe gets its act together. It must accept the inevitability that life will get harder. The only choice is when. For all the 100-page reports and complex proposals from various policy shops, it really boils down to a marshmallow test: Will Europe make the hard decisions today so that it may have a better tomorrow, or will it coast on accumulated wealth and standing until it all runs out?"

 

Links - 12th September 2026 (Trans Mania)

Chris Milburn: Woke doublethink controls Canada | National Post - "the Standing Committee on Science and Research met to examine explicit affirmative action hiring practices for women. However, when Conservative MP Vincent Neil Ho asked a witness — Dr. Mona Nemer, a molecular biologist and Canada’s chief science advisor — to define “woman,” chaos erupted... Immediately, Liberal MP John Paul Danko interrupted on a point of order. “It is Pride Month,” Danko said, clearly agitated, “and Order 18 prohibits personal attacks, insults and offensive language.” Danko’s interjection kicked off several minutes of acrimonious debate as Ho pressed the question, and his colleague persisted in trying to shut him down.  For viewers, it must have felt like stepping into 2021–22, when “What is a woman?” became one of the defining flashpoints of the culture wars. While many countries have since begun retreating from the postmodern ideology that fuelled that moment, Canada remains stubbornly mired in it.  Postmodernism’s most damaging legacy has been its insistence that even our most basic and self-evident truths — including the biological reality of womanhood — are open to question. This wasn’t a problem when the ideology was confined to obscure fields like 19th-century French literature or 1920s feminist art. But like a malignant cancer, postmodernism spread quietly at first before metastasizing throughout our cultural and societal institutions. Along the way, it produced increasingly absurd ideas, such as “decolonizing light” and “queering math.” But to most people, the most visible consequence has been the efforts to “break the gender binary.” As science fiction author Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Activists can try to “break the gender binary,” but its existence is as fundamental a truth as the physics of light or the reality of mathematics. Our human existence as male or female is as definite and fundamental a distinction as black and white or up and down.  So why do governments and institutions in Canada continue to push forward this harmful, unscientific ideology through, for instance, the recent appointment of a gender activist as the head of the Canadian Pediatric Society? Wokeism’s advocates will, no doubt, claim that the United States’ recent retreat on the issue is fuelled by the supposed transphobia and bigotry of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. However, countries that would normally be considered “progressive” are also eliminating ideologically based policies and returning to a science-based approach. In the United Kingdom, the government closed the infamous Tavistock Clinic and greatly restricted hormonal and surgical manipulation of children in the wake of the release of the Cass Review, while Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have restricted the use of puberty blockers. Gender activists may believe that it is harmless to view sex and gender as fluid. But there are very real-world consequences. Just ask the biological women who, almost overnight, were forced to share women-only spaces such as changing rooms, prisons, or rape crisis centres with biological men. Or ask the women and girls who watched biological men take their places on sports teams and their spots atop the podium.  More than a half-century ago, George Orwell warned of the dangers of “doublethink” — the psychological process of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind and accepting both as true. He also wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”  Today, Canadians are forced to engage in doublethink on a range of contradictory ideas, from “I’m a proud Canadian … but there is no Canadian culture” to “We are living on stolen land … but I support open borders and mass immigration” to “Women need affirmative action in hiring … but asking for a definition of ‘woman’ is deeply offensive.”  The heated exchange between MPs Ho and Danko and Dr. Nemer highlights how “double-thinkers” can retreat to defensiveness and anger when their contradictions are challenged. For many Canadians, it was another moment adding to a growing sense of unease.  Doublethink is not just bad for individuals, it is unhealthy for our country as a whole. We need to be able to agree on basic realities, such as the sex binary. Canada needs to break wokeism’s grip on the nation. How can we begin to find answers if we can’t even ask questions?"
It's telling that asking someone what a woman is is considered a personal attacks, insult and/or offensive language.
Left wingers get very upset when you challenge them, because of cognitive dissonance. They are also not used to being challenged because they stay in their echo chambers and safe spaces

For The Win on X - "Sophie Cunningham must use caution in trans sports debate | Opinion https://t.co/jiGICWsCpH 📸 Trevor Ruszkowski, IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect"
J.K. Rowling on X - "Caution didn't win women the vote, or equal pay, or fair sport, or the right to single-sex spaces. Sophie Cunningham is standing up for women and girls everywhere and it's glorious. Fuck caution."
Left wingers only celebrate badly behaved women and/or "standing up to the establishment" when they push the left wing agenda

Women Speak Tasmania | Facebook - "Heather Herbert, a trans-identified male who worked as a web developer at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, publicly celebrated the death of Ann Widdecombe (former Conservative minister and Reform UK MEP and spokesperson and gender-critical woman). The university launched an investigation and Police Scotland later charged Herbert over the posts. Now some of the same activist circles that spent years insisting “misgendering is violence” and supporting court actions against women (see the Kirralie Smith case in Australia) are suddenly discovering that free speech is fundamental. Free speech for thee but not for me? It’s either a two-way street or it’s not."
How ignorant. Don't they know free speech is to push the left wing agenda?

Aja ♀️🇬🇧 on X - "Dear corporate PR teams: You were told backing women who defend women's rights would destroy your brand. Instead, Sophie Cunningham's Adidas release sold out in under 24hrs. Turns out the loudest people on Twitter aren't your customers. Women are. Maybe it's time you remembered that."

There’s nothing to celebrate about the extremism of trans Pride - "I went along to observe the Trans+ Pride event in London. As a lifelong feminist with more than 20 years’ experience campaigning against gender ideology I was well aware of the misogyny inherent to this movement – as well as the risks it poses to women and children.  I was with Michael Kerr, who spent seven years living as Caitlin before detransitioning last year, and is now seen as an enemy of the trans movement.  I have spoken out against gender ideology for more than 20 years, and was not expecting a warm welcome. What I hadn’t anticipated was how upset I would find it. The sight of hundreds of young women showing off their double mastectomy scars left me tearful.  The first thing I had witnessed on arrival were two women, both with facial hair, passing cream to each other, wincing as they massaged the scars where their breasts had been. Many of the young women had serious outbreaks of acne as a result presumably of going through a puberty induced by cross-sex hormones. Yet despite having been surgically and chemically altered, they remained identifiably female.  There was also a higher proportion of disabled participants than might be expected (as indicated by the use of wheelchairs and walking sticks) with an unmissable over-representation of relatively young women.  “This is my last summer with tits,” read one placard.  There was also aggression, threats and warnings of violence. It wasn’t long before I was spotted; an organiser used the sound system to announce that there were Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) in attendance. The chant, “There are many, many, many more of us than you”, went up, and my name was shouted out. Several of the most obscene placards referred to JK Rowling and included threats of violence. One man held a sign reading: “Vore all transphobes.” Vorarephilia is a sexual fetish involving eating another person. He had fake blood running down his face.  Another stated: “The EHRC can suck my d---.” But perhaps the worst was: “90 per cent of pigs in the UK are gassed to death, but TERFS still exist.”  Sarah Jane Baker was there chanting about prisoners’ rights, having been released from a male prison in 2019 after serving a lengthy sentence for kidnap, torture, and attempted murder. At a similar demo in 2023, he urged participants to “Punch a f---king TERF”. This time, the words “Free Gaza” were painted across his naked breasts. Bash Back was in attendance: “Stand-up, fight back!” as was the usual omni-cause, with some claiming the trans “genocide” to be comparable to what is happening in Gaza. Sex workers’ rights activists were there too. Chants and slogans proclaimed “trans joy”, and there was a near-constant refrain of “HRT, HRT, over the counter and for free!”  One young woman’s placard featured a QR code for her GoFundMe request for “top surgery”.  Amid the many “Protect the Dolls” signs, a lot of paraphilia was on display. Next to me was a furry, complete with tail, and sizeable groups of sado-masochists (many of them biological females) wore heavy leather and, in one instance, a gas mask. A man sporting a black veil pointed theatrically at me and Kerr before making a dramatic throat-cutting gesture.  I asked a group of gay men why Trans+ Pride was necessary in addition to LGBT Pride (which is held across the country throughout the summer). Their response was that trans women were being kept out of “their own” bathrooms and other facilities, and had no rights. When I mentioned women’s rights – did they understand that female-only spaces were created to defend against male violence? – they looked aghast. If one trans woman were to commit a sexual assault, they said, that would only be the same as the occasional woman who does so.  As I joined the rally at Trafalgar Square, the sign “Every time you punch a TERF, a trans kid gets more rights” was waved in front of my face.  But in that sea of misogyny and threats of violence, all I could do was grieve for all those mutilated female bodies, swept along on the most dangerous form of social contagion imaginable."
Damn violent far right oppressing a poor helpless minority!

Dr Helen Webberley (she/her) on X - "Remarkable how many people who have never spoken to a gender specialist, never read a clinical guideline, and never sat with a trans person through any part of this journey feel fully equipped to redesign trans healthcare from scratch. What I particularly enjoy is the certainty. Not a flicker of doubt! Staggering. Truly. 🙄"
Comment: "Remarkable how a doctor who's been suspended several times by the GMC and had her licence revoked in 2024, is still out there spruiking the 'healthcare' that got her suspended. 🙄"

Clown World ™ 🤡 on X - "Jane Michelle Arc, a trans identifying software engineer from San Francisco, “fled” the US last year after Trump won, seeking asylum in the Netherlands over fears of persecution.  Now placed in Ter Apel, the country’s largest asylum center, surrounded by migrants from war torn regions, the Red Cross has pulled its own aid workers out due to violence, and stabbings have become routine.  Arc’s own words: “I will be hurt or killed”  Turns out the danger wasn’t Trump. It was never Trump"

Taxpayer-funded transgender dolls to hit classrooms this fall - "“First-of-their-kind” transgender dolls — complete with removable genitalia — will debut in some Minnesota classrooms this fall to kids as young as 4 years old.  The paper dolls, with gender-neutral names like “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery” and “Parker,” have removable internal and external genitals, along with more than 100 interchangeable pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles — like a trans Mr./Mrs. Potato Head.   The goal is for kids to “learn about the different options that exist for who they can be,” according to a therapist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which spent over half a decade developing the controversial project funded by lefty Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz  The Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health research over those six years included paying $20 to $60 for “trans and gender diverse” children and their parents to play with the dolls and “talk about gender and bodies” in groups...   The trans dolls — which promise to “make gender fun” — will be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and mental health providers, according to a website of the “MyGender Dolls” company. It features an image of a boy doll wearing a dress and others in various states of sexual identity confusion...   The dolls began as a University of Minnesota research project, which was later spun into a commercial venture — “MyGender Dolls” — by two licensed psychologists who are professors at the medical school.  The website does not reveal the cost of the paper dolls.  The University of Minnesota’s Medical School has been receiving $15 million annual funding from the state via Walz — cash earmarked to “increase the medical school’s research capacity” and “ensure its national prominence.”...   Walz, who’s pushed pro-transgender policies on the Midwestern state, was bestowed the institute’s inaugural “Distinguished Sexual and Gender Health Champion Award” in 2023, a title created just for him.  The scandal-plagued governor was even pictured with a wide grin alongside Medical School Associate Professor Nic Rider — co-founder of MyGender Dolls, which is bringing the radical dolls to market... “They will find anybody who’s in trouble and use this as a tool to say, ‘this is why you’re unhappy.’ This is absolutely grooming,” slammed Dr. Quentin Van Meter, past president of the American College of Pediatricians.  “The younger kids — many of them still believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. And you’re then presenting them with paper dolls that kind of look fun, and you can change clothing, hair, genitals… It’s well beyond their ability to sort out fantasy from reality.”...   When reached by The Post, a university spokesperson claimed no public funds were used “to support MyGender Dolls’ commercialization efforts.” But when pressed on how much taxpayer money went to research and development of the dolls, and to the salaries of the professors involved in the project, the university refused to answer, telling The Post instead to file a freedom of information request."

Andy Ngo on X - "Trans activist Sarah Jane Baker, who served years in prison for attempted m—rder and kidnapping and torture, was one of the speakers at the London Trans Pride today in Trafalgar Square. One of the trans activists held a sign declaring “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS” and the photo of @jk_rowling and the Queen."

Uncaptured by Janet Murray | Facebook - "It’s not just the BBC that ignored the more unsavoury side of yesterday’s London Trans+ Pride.  Across much of the mainstream media, the event was presented as a colourful, peaceful demonstration.  Images that might have complicated that narrative - including extremist placards, masked protesters and calls for violence against “TERFs”- were largely absent. At the same time, both the Metro and the Standard published an interview with Caroline Litman, whose child Alice died by suicide in 2022. Her loss is heartbreaking, and her perspective deserves to be heard. But journalism also has a duty to distinguish personal testimony from evidence. Both articles repeat claims that gender-affirming care is “life-saving”, and warn that “more children are going to die” unless government policy changes, with little indication that these are highly contested claims. Where are the voices of detransitioners, or parents who say affirmation wasn’t the right approach for their child? Journalism is shaped by editorial choices.  Whether it’s the images selected from a protest or the voices chosen to explain it, what gets left out can be just as revealing as what gets included."

Meme - r/fourthwavewomen: "I have always felt this from the bottom of my heart."
"If movement declares that a man can define what it means to be a woman based on his feelings, but a woman cannot define being a woman based on her material reality, then it is a movement for the interests of men." -Tasia Aranguez

Andy Ngo on X - "Another trans person has been arrested over the m—rder of his parent.   36-year-old Safford James Wolfson, who identifies as female, was arrested on suspicion of the m—rder of Angela Caprioli. The 61-year-old woman was found dead at her home in Laguna Beach on July 20.   The suspect formerly worked at Spin magazine, according to his Linkedin. He attended the private liberal arts college Pitzer College.   Multiple trans people have been arrested over the m—rders of their parents in just the last couple of years. In extreme trans ideology, parricide — killing one's own mother or father — is often a recurring theme.   In my research of the Zizian trans death cult, I found that its members believed strongly in m—rdering "transphobic" parents. They believed that's how they would get justice"

Thread by @hecheateddotorg on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In a recent post, I highlighted the #1 "female" disc golfer in Iceland, a man named Marteinn Hörður Kristínarson, now going by "María Eldey Kristínardóttir."  Kristinarson was the national champion in Iceland in the "womens" pro open, formerly open, category from 2021 to 2025.  But did you know, the top "female" disc golfer in Iceland before Kristinarson came onto the scene was also a man?  Meet Hilmar Jón Pálsson, now known as "Kolbrún Mist Pálsdóttir". Pálsson began playing "women's" disc golf in 2016 and immediately won that year's "women's" national title.  He then proceeded to win nationals again in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, only coming in second in 2021 after Kristinarson arrived on the scene.  For the past 10 years, the best "female" disc golfers in Iceland have been men.  It should be noted that there are relatively few female athletes in Icelandic disc golf, and Pálsson and Kristinarson have occasionally been the only two in the category in smaller competitions, but these titles are still meaningful for the women who compete for them. Pálsson is an activist, and appears to have been one of the board members of the Frisbee Golf Association of Reykjavík that approved the decision to continue allowing men into the women's category (in other words, the decision to abolish a women's category).  In 2019, he was appointed to a committee with the National Olympic and Sports Association of Iceland (ÍSÍ), that worked to give boys access to girls' teams, co-authoring a guide in 2020 "Trans börn og íþróttir" (Trans Children and Sports)  Like so, so many other organizations in the 2010s, Icelandic disc golf and Icelandic youth sports in general were guilty of consulting a man pretending to be a woman on the abolishment of the women's category rather than actual women."
Matt Osborne on X - "All the best female disc golf players in Iceland are men, what a stunning and brave coincidence"
Weird. We keep being told this never happens

The Globe and Mail on X - "Storm co-owner fined, suspended five games by WNBA after confrontation with fans"
Jonathan Kay on X - "And by “confrontation,” you mean the woman lost her mind and started screaming at two girls because they believe that biology exists"

Meme - greg_meyer61: "Only about 0.5% of high school athletes are transgender. About 0.002% of collegiate athletes are transgender. The frequency of voter fraud is 0.000845% per the far right Heritage Foundation. Yet, a whopping 24% of households spend nearly their entire income just on necessities. Transgender people in sports and voter fraud are issues invented by Republicans to scare gullible voters so they will ignore what their economic policies are doing to everyday Americans."
Meanwhile left wingers fixate on school shootings which kill fewer people than cows and claim that measles deaths are only low because of vaccination so we can't afford to lose vigilance
Since ICE only shot 10 people in 6 months, will left wingers shut up about it or will they continue to pretend there's an issue to scare gullible voters so they will ignore what their immigration policies are doing to everyday Americans?

Meme - "White Woman *female reproductive system* Black Woman *female reproductive system* Latin Woman *female reproductive system* Asian Woman *female reproductive system* Indian Woman *female reproductive system*
Trans Woman *male reproductive system*"

Meme - "*Pirate boy*
KIDS KNOW WHO THEY ARE
Avast ye, mateys! If ye be looking for a life of excitement, adventure, and booty, then a career in piracy be the perfect choice for ye! Imagin seas, free from the constraints of landlubber societ whenever ye want, and do whatever ye want. Ye can merchant ships, or even maroon your enemies on d of the crew! Pips Ye'll form life watch yer mentionin could bec But be wa could be But that' start livi enjoy the fo treasure So what lool  ing th  ates would  na  e-knit bunch, and theyhave our fellow pirates, and ye'll always have someone to cussion of p is, spices, silks - lubber could eve hot all fun and gar by the navy, or e hat are ye waiting for? Arrr! Join the crew today and At wait, there's m free parrot; a l o the Pirate Quarterly Bec enture, and dom of sai  want, and  ga ev W  the  omeor to w out mentioning the booty. Gold Cl Ye could become richer than any eing a pirate be not all fun and o  to survi  be complete without en martoned on a desert island.  e! As a pirate, you'll also get to te to booty ig the high seas, free from the ever ant ships or ever 'e a  a  3200  all part o  y the ema vhat are you waiting for? Arrr! Become for a life hoice for val Imsnine the fraodom of"

Liberal sports secretary says IOCs new gender testing rules concerning | National Post - "Canada’s top federal sports official says he’s “concerned” about new eligibility rules limiting Olympic women’s events to biological females, but says the changes are unlikely to stop Canada from trying to host the Olympics in the future.  Secretary of State for Sport Adam van Koeverden told reporters in Calgary on Monday that he was worried about the International Olympic Committee’s plan to roll out mandatory genetic screening for all athletes competing in the female category...  Michele Krech, a professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University says that the IOC’s new gender eligibility rules are illegal under Canadian law.  “The Genetic Non-Discrimination Act is the most obvious place to look, but the rules could also run afoul of Canadian human rights legislation or the Charter,” said Krech. Krech said that hosting the Olympics would put Canada in a legal grey area.  “The Government of Canada already bears some responsibility for allowing these rules to be enforced in Canada. Hosting international competitions would only add to this responsibility, particularly if the hosting agreement does not align with Canadian laws and policies,” said Krech."
Peter Menzies on X - "Modern man explains that, in Canada, it’s important for men to explain to women in sport what it means to be a woman in sport"

Michael on X - "Another Twitch Streamer, Silvervale, a VTuber, was brought to tears after being doxxed/harassed for playing Hogwarts Legacy."
The "be kind" and "empathy" crowd are incredible hateful and vicious

La Belle Époque 🏺🍇 on X - "When I say that a Troon is a not a woman, I am grilled by libtards about biology, epistemology, the utter meaning of words themselves, etc. When a Troon says they are a woman, not an ounce of inspection is applied to them (or themselves)"

CPS pulls its hate crime guidance for schools after 14-year-old girl mounted legal challenge - "The Crown Prosecution Service has pulled its LGBT hate crime guidance issued to schools earlier this year after a 14-year-old girl mounted a legal challenge against it.  On January 21, the CPS issued its 'LGBT bullying and hate crime schools pack' which warned schools they could face legal action if they do not allow transgender pupils to use their preferred toilets or changing rooms.  But lawyers acting on behalf of the school girl, known only as Miss A, said their client found the guidance “very distressing” and was concerned that she could face prosecution for failing to abide by the rules set out in the guidance...   The letter accused the CPS of “misrepresenting the law” and acting “irrationally” by pulling together the guidance “without input from bodies with specialist knowledge of child welfare”, such as the Department for Education.   “It is extraordinary that no statutory organisation with expertise in safeguarding and the welfare of children has been consulted,” lawyers on behalf of Miss A wrote. "
From 2020. Left wingers only love and praise young activists when they push the left wing agenda

Gad Saad on Cancel Culture, Idea Pathogens and the Future of Discourse

Gad Saad on Cancel Culture, Idea Pathogens and the Future of Discourse - Newsweek

Gad Saad's escape from Lebanon as an 11-year-old set the stage for a life that would eventually combine psychology, politics and scathing Twitter takedowns of his critics. A Canadian Lebanese evolutionary psychologist, professor, host of the YouTube show The Saad Truth and the author of a new book called The Parasitic Mind, Saad's main mission is to combat what he calls "idea pathogens," or omnipresent wokeness, by another name. Known to his fans affectionately as "the Gadfather," and often battling his critics on Twitter with a blend of satire and data, Saad first became interested in the work he's doing when he saw topics becoming taboo in his professional home in science...

Newsweek: Your background is really interesting. How does it influence your work?

Gad Saad: I was born in Beirut, Lebanon. We were part of the last group of Lebanese Jews who had steadfastly refused to leave Lebanon. But when the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975—the Lebanese civil war is the standard by which all butchery is measured against—it became impossible to remain in Lebanon. So we were there for the first year of the civil war, and then luckily we were able to escape to Canada.

The most direct way it [shapes my work] is that it allowed me to see what happens to a society that is instantiating a perfect ethos of identity politics. In Lebanon, everything is defined by identity politics. In this case, it was your religious heritage. There's an internal card in Lebanon, which basically is like an internal passport that states, very prominently, your religion. And if you were Jewish, they didn't even write "Jewish," they wrote "Israelite." So it even creates greater animus against you, even though you've got nothing to do with Israel and you're Lebanese. So I saw what identity politics does to a society, and to now see it lauded as a wonderful way to organize society 45 years after I left Lebanon is quite disheartening.

There's a debate now about who is allowed to speak about what. Your background allows you, in a way, to speak to our current moment. But do you agree with the idea that you need to have experienced something in order to have an opinion on it?

No. People can analyze the Holocaust, even though they didn't go through it. Oncologists study cancer even though they've never suffered from it. On some matters, of course, your lived experience adds one data point to the total narrative. I think in my case, the fact that I do hold the highest hand in victimology poker, or the gold medal in oppression Olympics, makes it more difficult for the enemies of reason to use the woke calculus against me. And so I use that against them, in a somewhat sardonic way, but in a very effective way, because they don't actually listen to the veracity of your arguments. Instead, whoever has the greater victimhood wins, and the reality is it's going to be very tough for most people to defeat me. And so they end up losing using their grotesque calculus. And so in that sense, I am pleased to have had my lived experience because it allows me to defeat the idiots.

On the whole, what are you trying to accomplish?

I'm trying to avoid that which has been tried in previous societies and failed. I'm trying to make people understand the anomalous reality that the West was able to create. I say "anomalous" because, in the history of human civilization, it's a complete outlier that we've had the types of societies that we're able to create in the West. This is not the default value. So to have found the magic recipe where freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and the scientific method and all the other wonderful things that the West has offered us, are allowed to flourish, and to now see it being thrown away under the cloak of the progressive robe is very galling to me. It upsets me, it angers me. I become righteously, I think, indignant. So I'm trying to offer people, if I may use the terms, a vaccine against the brain parasites that have absolutely infected the minds of Westerners.

Was there a specific moment that you decided to get into this? What was the thing that pushed you over the edge?

I guess it started in my scientific work. In my scientific work, I apply evolutionary psychology and the behavioral sciences in general, and in consumer behavior in particular. And for most social scientists, the idea that we would use biology to explain human behavior is really heretical. "Surely, Doctor Saad, you're not saying that the same mechanisms that explain the behavior of my dog and the zebra and the mosquito explain consumer behavior. That's grotesque, Doctor Saad." Of course that's silly, because we don't somehow exist outside of our biology. We don't exist in a supra plane, where our biological heritage ceased to matter or exist. And so I started seeing these tensions to view some ideas as heretical in my scientific world. "Don't discuss sex differences—that's sexist." "The fact that Arianna Grande bench presses less than the center for the Dallas Cowboys is only because her parents taught her to play gently with dolls and taught Bubba to really play aggressively with his blue truck." Surely you don't think there might be any hormonal physiological, anatomical, behavioral, differences across the two sexes. And so at first, I was bewildered by this. So it started by being something that was being fought only within the hallways of academia and the fancy peer-reviewed journals. But then the idea pathogens escaped and started infecting every nook and cranny of society. And so then I took my fight from the typical environment, which I fought in academia, and I started going public. And as my platform grew, my voice grew, and I took on more and more sacred cows.

Do you think that, in the West, America's rightful embrace of civil rights, and anything that looks like civil rights, has led people to take on a lot of these ideologies?

In The Parasitic Mind, I have an entire chapter on thinking vs. feeling. It's a false dichotomy, which is why I refer to it as a form of epistemological dichotomania. To always try to create two mutually exclusive realities. We are either thinking animals or feeling animals. Well that's perfectly incorrect: We are both. What matters, as I explain, is when do you activate the right system? For example, when I'm walking down a dark alley and I see four young men who look suspicious and are loitering around, I'm going to get an affective-based response: My heart will start racing; my blood pressure will go up; I might start perspiring. That affective response makes perfect evolutionary sense. On the other hand, if I'm trying to solve a calculus problem, all of the affective response in the world is not going to help me solve that calculus problem. I need to trigger my cognitive system, my thinking system. A fully grown mature adult recognizes that the world is made up of cost benefits, it's made up of trade-offs, opportunity costs, competing interests. That's what happens when you grow into adulthood. People have this very kind of infantile view.… The maladaptive empathetically progressive, really view the world through only a feelings lens.

The term cancel culture gets thrown around all the time. What do you think of the criticism that cancel culture is overblown and it's not real, and there's nothing to fight against?

It's insane to argue that. I have a chapter called Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome.The metaphor is now well understood as, there's no way you're going to accept reality. When there have been 36,000-plus terror attacks in nearly 70 countries since 9/11, and nearly every single one of those terrorists will state exactly why they are committing the act, and they will quote the exact passage from their religion about why they're committing the act. The super progressive and smart Westerners who analyze the situation say, "No no no, it's not because of what they said. It's because of beard bullying. It's because of climate change, it's because of lack of solar panels. It's because they weren't exposed sufficiently to art; if they'd only been enriched by art, they would've known better. It's because of lone-wolfism. They're alienated. So that's what ostrich parasitic syndrome is. Don't believe your lying eyes. How many more examples does one need of cancel culture before you think it's real? I recently spoke at the Jewish Public Library—so if you want to appreciate the singularity point of wokeness, here it is: The Lebanese Jew who escaped execution in the Middle East is trying to be deplatformed by progressive Jews from speaking at the Jewish Public Library. I mean, we've hit the singularity point. It's impenetrable to reach such people. There is no amount of evidence I can offer you that can convince you that this is serious. I receive innumerable emails where people testify to me—because I've become sort of the grand confessor—where people write to me from all over the world, saying well here's my situation, professor Saad.

Here's a typical one: "My adviser just found out that I said something complimentary about Donald Trump. Now he's removed my name from a paper I've been working on for a very long time and it looks like I'm going to be kicked out of the lab." That wasn't from Yemen, that wasn't from North Korea, that wasn't from Communist China. So how many people need to be deplatformed before you actually take it seriously?. I think it's a very serious problem, because it has normalized the reflex of people saying, "I don't like what you might say, cancel him." Even if not a single person were actually canceled, the fact that people are emboldened to view this as a viable strategy, therein lies the problem. Twenty years ago, you didn't have that reflex, because the zeitgeist was: We live in a free society. Today we don't have that zeitgeist. so it's a profoundly serious problem, it's a terminal illness.

In your book you say, "The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible." So when you point to someone as a racist or a homophobe, you shut down the conversation because it's impossible to prove you are not one of those things. What is your advice for people who are looking to engage in tough subjects but are continuously getting shut down by those accusations?

Using satire effectively is a very very powerful way to stay ahead of those possible accusations, because what you're basically doing is using satire in a very trenchant way. In the way a surgeon's scalpel cuts through warm butter, it cuts through the nonsense. For example, sometimes when I receive a compliment on my book, I'll look at the person on Twitter and if they are white, I'll retweet it and say, "It looks like you are a white person, I'm trying to decolonize my Twitter feed for the purposes of equity and systemic racism. Only accepting compliments from noble people of color." How come I can't be canceled? Because I have literally replicated the exact structure of the argument. By the way, that's why satirists are the first to be executed in regimes. We don't go after the guys with the big muscles when we are dictators, because the guys with the big muscles are easy to control. But the guys with the sharp tongue and the big brain—those are the ones you have to get rid of.

It's hard to offer complete advice that is applicable to every person. But the general advice is you need to activate your inner honey badger. The honey badger is a a very small animal, and yet it can withstand an approach by six adult lions. It means be fierce in the commitment to defend your first principles. I will stand in a ring with anybody to defend an idea that I know I can defend. When I don't know enough about a subject, I will tell you frankly I don't know enough so i'm uncomfortable making a pronouncement. What people have to do is develop the intestinal fortitude and the cerebral fortitude to have the ability to defend the principle of presumption of innocence. I don't emote louder than you, I don't get hysterical, I don't cancel you. I say, "Let me convince you with a preponderance of data."

Do you believe that there is a silent majority against cancel culture that thinks these ideas are absurd. And if you do, do you think they'll be a backlash soon that's larger than anything we've seen so far?

It depends what the population is that you're looking at. In academia, the majority are the proliferators of the idea pathogens. The rate of Democrat professors to Republican professors in American universities is astoundingly lopsided. But if we say that the population is the entire U.S., not the intelligentsia, then it is absolutely the case that the silent majority is not made up of the blue-haired people.

But I analogize it in this way: When you look at the 9/11 terror attacks, it didn't take 19 million people to bring down the twin towers, it didn't take 190 million people to bring down the twin towers, it took 19 terrorists. But then there were a whole bunch of other people who supported their cause. It's a similar dynamic in academia. There are very very few ultra-rabid blue-haired people on campus, but there are enough of them to keep the rest of us in check. In a sense, that's why Donald Trump was so problematic to the blue-haired people, because he really did represent a possibility for a catalyst for this cataclysmic change. The silent majority, if we mean the entire U.S. population despises this stuff—but I also think that most of them don't do anything for all of the reasons I enunciate in Chapter 8. They diffuse the responsibility onto others: "I don't want to lose my job, I don't want to lose friends on Facebook, I wanna still be invited to the cool kids party in Malibu."

Oftentimes people ask me what is it that fundamentally drives me. I think it comes from a very exacting code of personal conduct. At the end of the night when I put my head on my pillow and I'm about to go to sleep, the only way for me to avoid insomnia is to know that I've done all that I could, however big or however small, to contribute to the battle of ideas, to the defense of truth and liberty and freedom and true classical liberal values. My two fundamental life ideas are truth and freedom, and that's what drives all of my actions. If the silent majority were able to somehow access that courage, to speak out, I genuinely think that it could solve this problem in a couple of years. It won't take generations. If we don't, it will be a very very slow, laborious, train ride to hell.

You propose in your book, as part of the solution to the battle of ideas, that social media companies be regulated as utilities. Do you think we'll see that happen?

Not as long as the media companies are able to play both sides of the political aisle with unbelievable political donations. The diabolical brilliance of all the social media companies is that they understand human nature and so they go to the Republicans, who might be the source from where some of these bills might be coming from, and they say, "Here's $5 million for your next campaign. Are you still against us?" I worry that because of that, because of people's myopic selfishness and instrumentality the social media companies will always win. But I suspect that if it gets bad enough, people will wake up out of their stupors, although you would think that shutting out the sitting president of the U.S. might have been a moment by which people take notice but apparently not, so we have to wait and see.

In the months since you wrote your book, the idea of "intent vs. impact" has gained more attention in the public discussion—that it doesn't matter what you were intending it just matters how people took it. What do you think of this idea of intent vs. impact and what the impact of that will be on society?

Let's take, for example, forbidden knowledge in academia. The idea of forbidden knowledge is that there might be downstream ill consequences to you doing research in this topic, therefore stay away from it. That's a grotesquely bad idea. If we follow that principle, then there's this little field called physics that we should have never pursued because of atomic bombs. We have the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. It didn't come because we understood feminist dance therapy, it happened because physicists did that. Those physicists could or could not have known the consequences of having studied physics. But we did not tell them that there could be a future whereby you'd use the production of weapons as a consequence of you being physicists. That's not my problem as a scientist. I follow truth wherever it takes me, and it's someone else's job to worry about the consequences. For most things, we need to be careful about the dichotomy you're talking about. In the criminal justice system, we do recognize that depending upon what your intent was, what we charge you with. the dichotomy you mentioned has become fuzzy and confused, and that's what causes a lot of the problems I discuss in the book.

What are you most concerned about in the near future and what are you most hopeful about?

I am most concerned that the pandemic of these ideas pathogens is going to continue unchallenged. I often end my video clips with: "Slowly, we inch." I updated this to "Quickly, we gallop." What I refer to here with that imagery is that we are either slowly inching or quickly galloping toward the abyss of lunacy. Once you fall off the abyss, that's it, gravity is taking over. What worries me is that our response will not come quickly enough for us to defeat the new idea pathogens that are afoot, so that in the future to defeat those ideas it won't come peacefully to defeat those ideas, it will come violently.

On the flip side of that, I think it can quickly be overturned—if the silent majority truly wake up in unity and say, "I've had enough. I don't want to be talked down to in this way, I don't want to not recognize what biology means. I don't want my children to be taught that they are bad because they are white or they are any color. I've had enough." It's going to be difficult, but if the zeitgeist changes so that people are emboldened to speak out, that's what gives me hope.

 

 

 

The East Asian Package

The East Asian Package

"If you look at almost any kind of cross-national data, you notice that East Asians are fundamentally different from other peoples. So much so that we might talk about an “East Asian package,” a series of traits shared by South Korea, Japan, China, and the Chinese-descended nations and territories of Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan. There are indications that even North Korea shares many of its important components, despite it being the most isolated country in the world. This package includes:

• Low levels of crime... American liberals often respond to complaints about crime by saying that it is a natural part of living in a big city. But the largest and most crowded East Asian cities have less crime than rural and suburban areas in the West!

• Extremely low rates of illegitimacy...
   
• High levels of academic achievement, particularly in math and science. You can see the 2018 PISA results below. Some people think the Chinese numbers here can’t be trusted because they only tested urban centers, but we’re still talking about kids who are coming from families that are poor by Western standards. North Korea doesn’t show up in international comparisons, but it actually fields a formidable Math Olympiad team, and has constantly shocked Western analysts by how quickly it’s been able to develop advanced military technology. The East Asian aptitude for math and science is reflected in it being the only non-Western part of the world to produce multiple major tech giants, including familiar names such as Samsung, Mitsubishi, Sony, TSMC, and Alibaba.  
  
  
• High levels of economic growth in recent decades... There’s a book called How Asia Works that tries to attribute this to East Asian nations adopting the correct developmental policies, but as Scott Alexander points out, “It seems weird that all the countries with good policies would be right next to each other.” Indeed, many of the policies the author suggests, like land reform, have been tried outside the region with limited success. Even if the book could explain economic development, it doesn’t explain East Asian success in other countries, nor the rest of the East Asian package.
  
  
• Extremely low fertility... While East Asians weren’t always infertile, indicating that this isn’t an immutable trait that exists independent of cultural and historical circumstances — we did somehow end up with 1.4 billion Chinese, after all — the nations of the region have without exception responded to economic growth and modernity by being much less likely to start families, and the extent of the collapse isn’t like anything we’ve seen anywhere else in the world. 
  
  
• High life expectancy... 

What’s really amazing about all of this is that these countries are extremely different by most conventional measures of how we understand and classify nations. China is an authoritarian state and about at the middle of the pack when it comes to income and its urbanization rate, while South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are all developed and urbanized democracies in good standing. As mentioned before, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau are basically just cities, though we have numbers for them and can study those places in the cross-national context.

Moreover, you find the East Asian package outside of East Asia, among people of East Asian descent. In the US, Asians famously get higher test scores than whites, and are so successful that the affirmative action debate centers around whether schools can keep trying to stop them from becoming too large a portion of the student body. This is similar to the politics of many Southeast Asian countries, where Chinese success is a constant source of tension with lower-performing natives. In the UK, Chinese students have the highest test scores of any ethnic group. The Japanese are considered a “model minority” in Brazil. One could go on.

You’d think social scientists, if they were serious people, would treat this as one of the most important things they could be studying. We all want a longer life expectancy and less crime, and reducing illegitimacy and getting test scores up are forever goals of public policy. We have a major region of the world that is filled with extreme outliers on all of these measures. If there was a country with nearly no cancer, wouldn’t medical researchers want to know why that was? Why is it so uninteresting that an entire region of the globe seems almost completely free of the social pathologies that afflict much of the rest of the world? 

I never see liberals talk about the East Asian package, except when they’re arguing with their fellow leftists and trying to debunk some misconceptions they hold, in effect making a conservative argument. Conservatives and moderate anti-wokes, in contrast, like to talk about Asians, since their success seems to refute the liberal worldview. Amy Chua, for example, has famously argued that cultural differences explain which ethnic groups in the US succeed.

But do Japan, China, and Korea in fact share a common culture? People sometimes make this point in a circular way. The fact that East Asians behave similarly across various countries and social contexts supposedly indicates that they belong to the same culture. A group that does well on tests “values education,” while one that doesn’t have children out-of-wedlock has “conservative social values.” We might as well say differences in crime rates reflect how much various communities “value crime.” Such explanations are useless. 

But is there a non-circular way to approach the topic? I think there is, and once you do, you struggle to find evidence that China, Korea, and Japan have all that much in common culturally. Without falling into the trap of circular reasoning, we can measure cultural distance or similarity by the following criteria. 

• Religion. We often say that peoples that share a religious faith belong to the same culture. About 70% of Japanese practice Shintoism, a religion that exists in no other country in the world. A similar number of Chinese either have no religion or practice “Chinese folk religion.” Meanwhile, in South Korea, a quarter to a third of the population is Christian, a faith that barely exists in Japan or China. All three countries have sizable Buddhist populations, but they each practice the religion in ways that reflect their own independent cultural histories. There has certainly never been anything equivalent to the Catholic Church in Europe, that is, a centralized spiritual authority for the region.
  
  
• Language. Linguistic similarity and relatedness tend to correlate with closer cultural affinity, both because close languages allow for communication across political boundaries, and indicate that people belonged to the same community not that long ago. Linguists put languages into family trees, based on the theory that the major families of the world each represent an ancient proto-community. All forms of Mandarin are part of the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Meanwhile, when I studied linguistics as an undergrad, Japanese and Korean were said to be “language isolates,” meaning they had no known relatives, although Wikipedia tells me that they are now considered part of the “Japonic” and “Koreanic” families. Some scholars have proposed something called the Altaic family, which would encompass Japonic, Koreanic, Turkic, and Mongolic languages, but this appears to be a minority view. In other words, although East Asian languages have shared loan words over the centuries, Mandarin is at its core as distant from Japanese or Korean as English is from the indigenous languages of Australia. Korean and Japanese are either just as distantly related, or share a common origin so deep in the past that most linguists doubt that they should even be grouped together. 
  
  
• Political history. As mentioned above, China is a dictatorship, while Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are democracies. Singapore is somewhere in between. Japan has been an independent unified nation for over 400 years, and has had a parliament or some form of representative government since 1889. It generally has been extremely xenophobic and closed off to outsiders. The Joseon dynasty of Korea (1392-1897) was so isolated from the rest of the world that Western scholars named it the “Hermit Kingdom.” China under Mao underwent one of the greatest social upheavals the world has ever seen, and it now has a very unique political system. It’s true that Japan briefly colonized Korea and Taiwan, but this was an exception to a long history in which the three major peoples of East Asia had relatively little contact with one another and lived under different kinds of governments. Even if East Asians did start out sharing the same culture, it’s hard to see how the events of the last 150 years, from the Meiji Restoration to World War II and Maoism to democratization across much of the region, wouldn’t have caused divergence given the different experiences of these nations. 
  
  
• Moral psychology. According to Joe Henrich, writing in The WEIRDest People in the World, Japan has “a unique social psychology, distinct not only from WEIRD societies but also from populations in South Korea and China, with which it’s often mistakenly lumped together with psychologically.” Even placing South Korea and Chinese-derived countries and territories together strikes me as a stretch based on the data. Check out this famous chart based on the World Values Survey. It’s gerrymandered in a way that would make a Republican state legislator blush. All East Asians get grouped into the “Confucian” category, despite China being closer to Belarus than it is to South Korea, and Japan being as close to Protestant Europe as it is to its neighbors. Given how distant China is even from Taiwan and Hong Kong, one could argue that it would be too much to grant that all Chinese-derived nations and territories have a similar culture.   

• Pop culture. Japan and South Korea have produced pop cultural products that have large fan bases abroad. China has not, remaining unattractive to outsiders, or as Peter Thiel calls it, “weirdly autistic.” And although I’m no expert in either, from my limited experience K-Pop and Japanese anime strike me as fundamentally reflecting different values and cultures.

• Attitudes towards sex. South Korea is by almost any measure a socially conservative country. It bans pornography, while Japan is known for being extremely creative in this area. Until very recently, South Korea prohibited most abortions and even adultery, with change only coming through court decisions. China is of course even more socially conservative, and has zigzagged from an emphasis on gender equality during the Mao era to the Xi government declaring a war on sissies and telling women that it’s gross for them to remain single over 30.  

If having a similar culture doesn’t mean being similar in terms of language, religion, moral psychology, political institutions and history, pop culture, or sexual attitudes, what could it mean? Again, one can’t define “cultural similarity” in terms of things like high test scores and low levels of crime and illegitimacy, as that’s what we’re trying to explain in the first place. 

We can see how culturally separate East Asian nations are from one another by imagining what a similar exercise would look like for Europe. Here, using the same methods, we can find strong evidence for cultural connections. With a handful of exceptions like Hungarian and Basque, all languages of the continent belong to the Indo-European family, broken down into categories and subcategories like Germanic and Slavic. All countries have historically been overwhelmingly Christian and except for Belarus and Russia all are democracies. Finally, European history can be understood as a series of consolidations and fragmentations of various empires, from Rome to the Soviet Union. The idea of united Europe, or Christendom, has been strong enough to inspire major political projects, as varied as the Crusades and the EU. For centuries, Europeans have seen themselves as part of one community, with political, social, and scientific ideas easily permeating across ever shifting state boundaries. In contrast, in East Asia there has never been a strong idea of an identity that encompasses Japan, China, and Korea and separates their civilization from those of other peoples, or at least nowhere near to the same extent. Thus, while it makes sense to speak of a European culture, the idea of an “East Asian culture” seems like a convenient shorthand used to arrive at a quasi-explanation of why countries that happen to be next to each other have similar outcomes. Europe is even more of a coherent concept in the World Values Survey cited above, unlike the gerrymandered East Asian category. 

None of this is to say that some ideas like Confucianism and Buddhism haven’t crossed the borders between China, Korea, and Japan. Only that political, social, religious, linguistic, and other kinds of links between the nations of the region have been extremely tenuous and weak compared to Europe, and also other parts of the globe we consider broad civilizations like the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. 

Liberals believe in “stereotype threat,” in which our expectations and perceptions regarding how groups behave become self-fulfilling prophecies. We’ve seen that cultural explanations for the East Asian package favored by conservatives don’t make much sense, so maybe liberals are on to something...

Granted, stereotype threat as a way to understand the East Asian package has certain difficulties. It would need to explain how stereotypes operate globally, across cultural, linguistic, and political barriers. Somehow, a Korean in Los Angeles and a descendent of Japanese immigrants in Brazil must both know that Westerners expect them to have a certain collection of traits. This influence of stereotypes even penetrates foreign countries, including China, despite the best efforts of the government to keep its population culturally isolated from the outside world. Of course, Xi Jinping is no match for the power of global stereotype threat, given that it even made North Koreans good at math. Kendism may also need stereotypes to travel back in time to work since East Asians somehow were already wealthy in the US decades ago, despite China being associated with crushing poverty throughout most of American history. But these are small details for Kendism, an ideology so convincing and scientifically well-established that universities produce glossaries to teach its core tenets. 

Say what you will about Kendi, but he’s given us a framework that can possibly explain the East Asian package. Can it be a coincidence that we see the highest levels of economic growth and mathematical success, and lowest levels of illegitimacy and other forms of anti-social behavior, in countries that are geographically adjacent, despite the limited cultural links between them? And that people from these countries show similar traits when they move abroad? Journalists and academics write papers about low South Korean fertility or remarkable Chinese growth over the years, or about Asian success in American schools, and look for local factors at work, without seeming to understand that they’re observing any kind of broader phenomenon. It’s like if scientists were trying to figure out the association between elevation and weather, and were coming up with an independent hypothesis about the relationship on each continent without ever attempting to synthesize various kinds of data into a more general theory. 

Given that conservatives and anti-wokes more generally have done such a poor job of presenting a theory that fits what we see in the world, it is no wonder that Kendism has unrivaled influence. With our advanced modern state of understanding of social phenomena, it remains the only school of thought that has broad explanatory power."

Links - 11th September 2026 (Migrants: UK)

Reform will stop the boats - "When the Australians faced a wave of illegal boat migration, they deployed their military in response. Illegal crossings fell to zero within weeks. It ended the crisis. It also saved lives. Between 2007 and 2013, 1200 migrants had died making the journey. The Australian military operation reduced that to zero. Over 170 migrants have already died trying to come to Britain via the Channel – this policy would have saved their lives too. The Tory Labour establishment will say it can’t be done. They must, or face the reality of their own failure. But the former Navy commanders who engineered this plan leave no room for doubt: it can be done, and it must be done."

Michael Howard: Reform won’t stop the migrant boats, but I have a solution that will - "When I was home secretary, in 1995, I reached an agreement with my French opposite numbers, under which any migrant who was refused admission to one country would be returned to the other... Under the provisions of the European Union, of which we were, of course, still a member, the Dublin Convention was due to come into force in 1997. Under the terms of the Convention, asylum seekers in the European Union were required to make their application in the first safe country they reached and, if they didn’t, they would be returned to that country. Had it worked it would obviously have led to a sharp reduction in the numbers seeking asylum in the UK. So I accepted a clause in the 1995 agreement I made with France which provided that, in relation to asylum seekers, it would be superseded by the provisions of the Dublin Convention.  I thought the Convention would work. How naïve I was. It became entangled in the bureaucracy and red tape which were so characteristic of the EU.  Astonishingly, for most of the time when it applied to the UK, as members of the EU, the numbers returned to us from other countries exceeded the numbers returned by us. So much for the claims sometimes made that Brexit is to blame for the channel migrants crisis, as the Dublin Convention would have ensured their return. I, at least, did not have the benefit of hindsight. Those who make those claims do. So to claim that the Dublin Convention would be the answer means that they are either deceiving themselves or wilfully deceiving the public."

Basil the Great on X - "🚨BREAKING: RED CROSS DELETES VIDEO AFTER MIGRANT MURDERS BRITISH WOMAN
The Red Cross made a sympathetic cartoon video showing the journey of Sharif, an Afghan travelling to Europe  When Sharif got there he MURDERED a British Woman and stuffed her body into a suitcase  They wanted you to feel sorry for him but he killed a young woman like the savage that he is  The Red Cross must be held to account for the blood they have on their hands"

Reformer on X - "Former Conservative minister Edwina Currie suggests a policy of brothels in villages near asylum seekers as a way to reduce sexual violence"
James' dog. on X - "Interesting the discourse has moved from ‘future doctors’ to ‘we need to feed asylum seekers with naked women or they’ll commit heinous crimes.’"
Luckily, the human rights of the asylum seekers are well-protected

Zara Hussain on X - "A street in Bristol still has the England flag up. Strange, because the World Cup ended weeks ago. When will Bristol Council remove them?"
Railfan Reborn on X - "> Foreigner immigrates to England
> UK government spoils her with unlimited welfare
> Demands the flag of her new country be torn down anyways
Remigration is the moderate solution."
Migrants need to be protected from seeing such hate symbols, so they should be sent to a place where they will probably never see them again, e.g. their countries of origin

There’s only one ‘fair’ place to place illegals, and that’s Bristol - "At last, an admission from the Government that illegal immigrants are a pain in the neck. After years of wagging their fingers at uppity plebs who dared to say it’s not nice to have 800 men from God-knows-where imported into your community, now officialdom admits that’s true.  How else are we to interpret Andy Burnham’s harebrained proposal to house more of these un-vetted blokes in middle-class parts of Britain? It’s not right, he says, that it has fallen to our “poorest communities” to host these border-busting men. So in the name of “fairness”, he’ll be calling on leafier towns to “play their part”.  This is the closest we’ve had to an acknowledgement that these intruders are a burden. That all that blather about them being “vulnerable” souls from war-torn lands who might just “enrich” our lame nation was just that – blather, lies, the faux-virtuous bleating of a clueless political class.  What Burnham is essentially saying is that we must share out the pain of illegal immigration. So can we all say it now? Are we finally free to say it is deeply undesirable to wake up one morning to find hundreds of men from distant, regressive lands wandering through your town? It is precisely the accidental truthfulness of Burnham’s proposal that makes it so insane. It is unforgivably reckless to wilfully inflict social pain on proud, tidy towns. It is an assault on the soul of England itself to subject the most pleasant parts of this green and pleasant land to the menace of un-vetted foreign men.  Not content with sowing rage and tension in working-class towns by stuffing the local hotel with men from afar, now the Government wants to serve up the same madness in the manicured enclaves of middle-class Britain... The impact has been dire. Women and girls feel unsafe. Some have suffered horrific assaults, including those seven Doncaster girls aged between 12 and 16 who were trafficked for sexual abuse by an Iraqi asylum seeker.  Social media is awash with video evidence of the civic discord caused by our deranged experiments in mass immigration. But the solution is not to “share out” such social misery. A responsible government would see such problems and think: “How might we put a stop to this?” And not: “What other towns can we bring this lunacy to?”  If we must house these men who have no right to be here, I say send them to Bristol. That Green-run city puffs itself up as a “City of Sanctuary”. Its preening activist class claims to love migrants. Green Party leader Zack Polanski reckons mass immigration is “Britain’s superpower”. Okay, here you go. Both middle-class towns and working-class suburbs have made it crystal clear they don’t want these armadas of men, so you can have them instead... Home Office minister Anna Turley says this is about calling on middle-class communities to do their “fair share” in the great migrant crisis.  This cuts to the blackened heart of the immigration issue. What in God’s name is “fair” about asking hard-working communities to take up the slack of the state’s dereliction of duty? What is “fair” about demanding that even towns of 300 or 400 people open their arms to 1,000 men who barged illegally into our nation?  These are staggeringly unreasonable requests. The Government is treating historic communities as if they were board games, which it might manoeuvre and fiddle with as it pleases... What an extraordinary abdication of the very first duty of a state, which is to defend its territory, and its people. Forget messing with middle-class communities – just police the borders and swiftly deport intruders. And, for the meantime, let’s make Bristol take more than their “fair share”."

Burnham’s migrant plan is going to blow up in his face - "Such an admission only makes sense politically if the Government appeared actively to be trying to stop the flow of boats, and then negatively processing and returning those young men who arrived in this manner. This isn’t what people see. All they hear are excuses about how hard it all is.  Secondly, the timing was a disaster: straight after the massive incursion of illegal immigrants into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, and the sighting of huge new boats in the English Channel capable of carrying more than 250 men. In effect, it looks like the scale of the problem is so enormous, asylum seekers are essentially “spilling out” into rural England. Thirdly, and this is yet to be felt in earnest, the pictures are going to be terrible. By housing asylum seekers in parts of England that could be used as a backdrop to an episode of Poirot, Reform and others will be able to portray the starkest, most extraordinary contrast, that voters across the country will find shocking.  At present, to an extent, asylum seekers have often been hidden in plain sight. In hotels in less affluent, often-multicultural areas, you wouldn’t necessarily know who was an asylum seeker or not. Now, villages with small and settled populations will find themselves dwarfed by large-scale accommodation facilities next door. This takes us to the issue of class. In justifying the move, a Downing Street source said: “Andy feels the current system is unfair, and as a point of principle, he wants to see a redress of the distribution.” Extraordinarily, this source confirmed the move would cost more money, apparently because of the difficulty of finding cheap accommodation in leafy areas: “He acknowledges that it would cost more money to do it fairly, but that is what we need to do.”  This sounds like Labour’s justification for a wealth tax – as well as their earlier taxes on private education – and it reflects how the modern Left sees class. They seem to think there’s a negative working-class identity which is formed primarily through hostility and struggle. It’s as if there’s a zero-sum game, where working-class people suffer because of middle-class privilege. The problem is, the English working class don’t think like this. While they tend to favour wealth taxes and a progressive tax system more generally, this is entirely because they want more money to pay for the NHS and other public services. They don’t want a punishment beating meted out to middle-class people out of hostility or envy. Most working-class people want to “get on” themselves – and certainly they want their kids to have opportunities for a better life – and don’t view the affluent as the enemy. More to the point, their identity isn’t formed by negative perceptions of struggle, but mostly by positive perceptions of their local area and their country. They tend to love their towns and their local heritage and they tend to love England too. This is why they love their (fading) high streets, their heritage sites and local football clubs – but also usually the British Armed Forces and the Royal family too.  It’s this mix of local and national patriotism which explains their hostility to the housing of so many asylum seekers in their towns. Most feel their local area can’t physically cope with so many new arrivals; and most dislike the idea of a country with no border control. The English working-class will not come to think Burnham’s policy is a fair and good one; on the contrary, they’ll sympathise with those now affected and think it underlines the incompetence of the political class. If Burnham is hoping for working-class people to think “now the posh people can have some”, he’ll be sorely disappointed.  There’s another important aspect of the English working-class the left forgets, which is directly applicable here. Where class hostility emerges, it’s because of perceptions of unearned, unfair wealth or benefits... this is why working-class people tend to be the toughest on welfare cheats. And this is why so many are so angry with the current asylum system, which appears to be set up to attract and then reward those who come here illegally."

Burnham’s asylum housing plea is a costly political misjudgment - "When Mr Burnham learnt that two of the killers of Pc Andrew Harper were set to be released from prison early, he decided nothing could be done, went on holiday, and apparently hoped the problem would fix itself. He seems to think the same way about Britain’s broken asylum system. In neither case is he correct."

Middle-class Britons understand what a genuine refugee is – Andy Burnham doesn’t - "The Prime Minister apparently has much less common sense than ordinary people. They know the difference between today’s bogus “boat people” and genuine refugees, such as Jews fleeing the Nazis, Hungarians in 1956, Ugandan Asians in 1972, or Hong Kongers and Ukrainians more recently.  Middle-class Britons are the most generous and hospitable people on earth: look at their unique munificence to charity and readiness to volunteer. But they don’t see why they should pay the price for the Government’s failure to secure our borders. Many readers will know British families who have made real sacrifices to help Ukrainians over the past few years. It is an insult to hundreds of thousands like them for Andy Burnham to suggest that only the poorest are “playing their part” towards refugees.  Blaming middle-class Britain for Labour’s failure to control migration suggests that the new PM, like his predecessor, has no answers to the problems of migration and integration."

The Left is finally paying the price for its idiotic belief in open borders - "Burnham’s plan should have at least one tremendous benefit. Smug, middle-class progressives will finally receive their comeuppance because, for the very first time, they’ll be forced to face the consequences of their own idiotic beliefs.  No longer will they be able to proclaim that refugees are welcome here, safe in the knowledge that the “refugees” will in reality be deposited in the type of frightful, gammony dumps that vote Reform, far from their own charming locales. And, just as importantly, no longer will they be able to delude themselves about the type of men that the  boats tend to contain. These delusions were exquisitely exemplified by the BBC comedian, Zoe Lyons, during an edition of Question Time in November last year. Britain, she declared, was “missing a trick” by failing to take advantage of all the “talent” that the small boats’ occupants have to offer. “Many” of them, she explained, are “doctors”, “scientists” and “engineers”.  Seemingly, it had not occurred to her that, if these men were doctors, scientists and engineers, they wouldn’t be coming to Britain by dinghy. They’d be coming by plane because they would have easily secured a visa. Also, if the boats are filled with doctors, scientists and engineers, why do the French do so little to prevent them from setting sail?...  such imbecilic fantasies will not survive Burnham’s new plan. As a result, middle-class Left-wingers should belatedly grasp why it is that the rest of the country is so unhappy about illegal immigration, and realise that it’s not merely because everyone is a massive racist.  Of course, I suppose it’s possible that these people will stay true to their principles by joyfully welcoming the new arrivals into their neighbourhoods, and eagerly inviting them to their dinner parties. (“And will you be bringing your wife and children, Mr...? Oh, I see. It’s a funny thing, but just about all you refugees seem to be single men. Don’t women and children flee war and persecution, too?”) Equally, though, they might respond like Rachel Millward, the Green Party deputy leader, who indignantly fought Home Office plans to house 600 male asylum seekers in a former Army training camp in her part of East Sussex. Or like Calum Miller, the Lib Dem MP, who’s been fighting plans to house 1,250 male asylum seekers in a former MoD site in his part of Oxfordshire.  Given a choice between these two approaches, I would guess that most middle-class progressives will opt for the latter. If so, it will do our immigration debate the world of good. Because there’s only one way to cure the woke Left of their support for open borders. And that’s to give them exactly what they claim to want."

Brendan Clarke-Smith on X - "Doctors, nurses and engineers don’t generally throw their documentation away and pay gangs to smuggle them in on small boats."
In 2025, we still had left wingers claiming many "refugees" are doctors, engineers and scientists. The exact quote (~11:45): "As a country, we're missing a trick as well. If we have all of these people who have coming over seeking asylum, many of them coming from countries where they'll have been doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists, and we're sticking them away"

The middle classes didn’t work so hard to see their areas ruined by illegal migrants - "The most infuriating aspect of Britain’s experiment with mass migration has been the way in which it was foisted upon the electorate with a contemptuous disregard for the very concept of a democratic mandate.  Which party included in its manifesto a pledge to increase migration incrementally until it reached an all-time high of a million newcomers a year? Not New Labour. Not the Conservatives under any of their leaders. Not the Labour party of Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham. Nobody asked us about it. Yet that is what we got.  Which brings me to Burnham. Yesterday, our brave new leader announced that middle-class families should “play their part” by keeping schtum while small boat arrivals are given accommodation nearby... New YouGov polling has revealed that just one in five people now think that migration has been “mostly good” for the country. In January, 79 per cent of voters wanted the Government to concentrate on stopping small-boat crossings... how many of the illegal migrants streaming across the Channel are genuine asylum seekers? It’s absurd to expect people who have worked extremely hard to build a good life for their family to potentially jeopardise all that in order to accommodate migrants who shouldn’t be here in the first place.  If our political masters really cared, they’d do something about that. Both legal and illegal immigration may be thorny problems to solve, but they are the product of Britain’s own policies and political culture, and our leaders are squarely to blame. Take the small boats: forget “smashing the gangs”, for heaven’s sake. If every man landing on our shores was incarcerated pending deportation, possibly in some nightingale-hospital-style pop-up prison on a remote Scottish island, with no mobile phone, no access to black-market work, no cash handouts and no hotel accommodation, the problem would soon dry up.  This vandalism is, in other words, the result of political choices. It is not some natural disaster afflicting our country that requires us all to pull together and share the burden. It was brought upon our heads without our consent by a political class that is a) incompetent and b) steeped in the twin dogmas of centrist fundamentalism and niceism, both of which have been resoundingly discredited. Yet now Burnham expects the beleaguered middle classes, who are already groaning under historically vast levels of taxation, to put up with a load of foreign criminals – for they arrived, let’s not forget, illegally, and from the safe jurisdiction of France – on our doorsteps. I don’t want to live next door to a Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian small boatman who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl within days of arriving, or a Mohammed Sharwarq, the Syrian who assaulted a cleaner, a head chef and other residents, or any of the numerous other violent migrants who have been welcomed with such generosity by our governments.  Why should we? I repeat: we never wanted it, we never consented to it, and we have frankly had enough of it. For this reason, let me float a counter-proposal.  Every prime minister since 1997, and every home secretary, should take four illegal migrants into their homes, and pledge to care for them with great compassion until such time as the migration crisis is over. Starting with Burnham himself. That should focus their minds."
One cope is to claim that net migration estimates are wrong because the methodology sucks
Human rights means you can't detain asylum seekers, so too bad

Andy Burnham still isn’t listening on illegal migration - spiked - "The post-Southport riots were like a heatmap of Home Office-imposed asylum accommodation. According to a private cabinet briefing, ‘15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots’ during those grim days in summer 2024 ‘are in the top 20 per cent of local authorities with the highest numbers of supported asylum seekers’. But the answer is not bussing more Sudanese to Sevenoaks, or more Afghans to Alderley Edge. If anything, the chances of ending up in one of Britain’s more premier postcodes could become yet another one of those ‘pull factors’, making a £2,000 ‘mega-dinghy’ ticket look like even more of a sound investment. The primary issue with illegal migration is clearly not the uneven distribution of illegal migrants. But rather than leave the ECHR, rip up the Refugee Convention and finally detain and deport those who violate our borders, Labour appears resigned to shifting the problem around. There is a curious literal-mindedness to how the government is responding to public outrage over asylum. Protests outside of migrant hotels? Let’s move the migrants into HMOs, then! Oh, you don’t like the HMOs, either? Let’s stick them on some old military bases instead! It’s almost like they think we’re mugs. If Burnham reckons any of this is going to placate the populace, he’s in for a shock. Indeed, the latest place to erupt over the asylum issue is well-to-do Piddington, a village in Oxfordshire, which is threatening to declare independence over plans to stick 1,250 male migrants in the nearby Bicester Garrison – a number almost four times larger than Piddington’s tiny population. The British people are not heartless, migrant-bashing bastards. They can be incredibly generous to refugees when there is a pressing need, a sense of historical or moral obligation, and precious few concerns around crime or cultural compatibility. Which is why hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Hongkongers have settled here in recent years without anyone raising an eyebrow. But they’re also not idiots. They know that allowing anyone to claim asylum, provided they can pay a people smuggler enough to ferry them across the Channel, is illegal migration by another name – not least given these people aren’t actually fleeing war, they’re fleeing France. They also know that opening the door to men, and they are almost all men, about whom we know nothing, often from cultures with frankly medieval attitudes towards women, is unlikely to end well. The now daily stories about horrific sex attacks committed by illegal migrants, have revealed, once again, the wisdom of the masses and the wilful blindness of our virtue-signalling elites. No one voted for mass and illegal migration. Voters don’t want the effects of it shared out more equitably across the income scale. They just want it to stop. One day they might get a government that is actually willing to listen."

Donna Louise on X - "Just when you think the UK couldnt get more ridiculous.  Asylum seeker Amgad Abouelazm has 67 offences (51 of them theft). Homeless. On drugs. Stealing from shops and cars.  Now the Home Office is housing him and paying him benefits.  Magistrates give him a conditional discharge and order zero compensation because his means are “limited.”  This is what “asylum” looks like in Britain in 2026.  67 crimes. Zero real consequences. Taxpayers still paying.  We are being taken for fools!"

Tony Smith CBE on X - "It’s probably worth saying at this point something I’ve said before, lest it gets lost in the sands of time and political rhetoric about immigration and illegal entry, and how we got to this point.  I was an immigration officer in the 1970s and 1980s. The power to grant or refuse leave to enter was vested to me in law under the authority of a Chief Immigration Officer. Anyone arriving without a valid passport (and a visa if required) was refused entry at the border, detained, and removed on the next available ship or aircraft whence they came. This was under the Immigration Act 1971 (still In force although amended massively by successive governments ever since). It was some 20 - 30 years after the 1951 ECHR and the 1951 Refugee Convention was signed.  Nobody claimed asylum. Nobody claimed human rights. No country refused to take people back. Those who had destroyed their passports were removed on a letter, signed by me.  Fast forward 50 years and now anyone who arrives at the border without a passport or a visa automatically claims asylum or human rights. Immigration Officers of today (or Border Force Officers) are thereby disempowered to send them back before their asylum claims or human rights claims are considered. And their appeals are dismissed. They cannot be detained in the meantime because under the Hardial Singh principles immigration detention is only lawful if there is a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable period of time. Which there isn’t of course. So the only option available to the officer is to grant temporary permission whilst these applications are considered. And if the applicant claims to be destitute they must be given support and accommodation at public expense. Because failure to do so would put the government in breach of A3 of the ECHR (inhuman and degrading treatment). And even if the applicant is eventually refused protection - and loses their appeal - we need to get a passport to remove them on. And they often refuse to comply with the documentation process. Even if they do many countries still refuse to issue them with a passport and refuse to take them back. And even after all this they can abscond and if ever caught start the whole process again.  This is where we are and so far no government has been able to break the Gordian knot that ties the hands of our officers. In order to do that they would have to reverse decades of laws and judgements - and demur from long held well intentioned international conventions. And probably look at the British Constitution itself to curtail the opportunity of political opponents to use the courts to thwart the will of Parliament.   This is not to criticise or favour any political party or policy. It is simply a matter of record to inform the next generation of politicians and the civil servants charged with the duty of implementing any new laws or policies they may introduce.  And to ask why - if we did it back in my day - why can’t we do it now?  I even wrote a book about it. I hope someone keeps a copy for posterity - or even history - when thinking about how to fix this seemingly intractable problem."

Rupert Lowe MP on X - "The British Dental Association has accused me of 'potentially dangerous rhetoric' because I oppose illegal migrants getting priority dental care - as evidenced by Restore Britain's investigation. I suspect the British people agree with us..."

Daily Mail on X - "TV presenter who exposed people smugglers forced to flee home after police warned of death threats"
Mary Harrington on X - "This is also why rape gang investigations keep finding asylum seekers among the suspects Because it’s all the same network of criminal gangs Britain has an ethnic mafia problem"