Links - 21st May 2026 (3 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023)

Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng on X - "I am Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, a medical doctor & the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right of everyone to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, I continue to demand, since his abduction, the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from the brutal detention by Israel.  He faces imminent and grave danger as a result of ill-treatment and inhumane conditions & the denial of medical care has been leading to severe physical mental harm and his current deterioration is rapid - these are gross human rights violations.    #FreeDrHussamAbuSafiya #ReleaseDrHussamAbuSafiya  #FreeThemAll"
Jewish Tim Flack 𝕏 on X - "A question for the UN Special Rapporteur: have you actually visited him, or is this based on "received reports"? Because there are other reports worth noting. A photo exists of Dr Abu Safiya in full Hamas uniform at a gathering of Hamas senior officers. Arabic media has long referred to him as Colonel Hussam Abu Safiya. He posted celebratory content on October 7. What's your threshold for vetting a subject before demanding his unconditional release?"

Brianna Wu on X - "The thing that Westerns don’t understand is Islamists do not think the way we do. It’s a death cult.  When I was taken to IDF base to see the secret October 7 footage, it opens with a father trying to save his two children from Hamas terrorists gleefully slaughtering civilians.    He takes his two children to hide in a shed. Moments later, an Islamist terrorist gleefully throws in a grenade. Later, a child comes out with his eye blown out by shrapnel, soaked in his father’s blood. Weeping, he manages to grab his brother’s hand and escape.   I sometimes have nightmares of that child, eye gouged out, hands slick with his father’s blood, escaping through the side yard. Later the Islamist notices he’s gone and smiles at the horror he’s inflicted.  It’s the most evil thing I’ve ever seen.   Westerners who have never scrambled to run in a bomb shelter from a missile think of Palestinianism like the 1964 civil rights movement. This is a false categorization.  The reality is, it’s a death cult that will sacrifice themselves and their children to hurt Jews. They are not rational actors.   Once you realize that, you can understand the lengths Israel has to go through just to survive. You can’t make peace with someone who is so obsessed with hurting you, they don’t care if they live or die."

‘Game on’: NHS doctor accused of inviting support for Hamas challenges Streeting - "An NHS doctor charged with inviting support for Hamas challenged Wes Streeting after she was released on bail.  Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, who allegedly posted online that “I don’t condemn Hamas”, goaded the Health Secretary with a shout of “game on”.  On Friday, the 31-year-old appeared at Westminster magistrates court, where she denied charges of inviting support for a proscribed organisation, namely Hamas, on four separate dates from July to December last year.  Dr Aladwan also indicated not guilty pleas for stirring up racial hatred using words or behaviour at a speech she allegedly made at a protest on July 21 in Westminster, and stirring up racial hatred through the publishing and distribution of written material on Nov 19.  Dr Aladwan was released on bail, and told supporters outside the court: “Wesley Streeting, game on.” The suspended doctor, who was training in trauma and orthopaedics, then led them in chants of “Free, free Palestine”.  Mr Streeting had previously said Dr Aladwan’s comments were “sickening”, and that “action needs to be taken to root the evil of racism out”. Carl Kelvin, prosecuting, told the court that the doctor was accused of writing “I don’t condemn Hamas. I don’t condemn October 7” and “I condemn the existence of Israel” in a social media post on July 23. On Dec 31, it is alleged she wrote “Free the world from Jewish supremacy”, he said.  The court heard that, on the second anniversary of the October 7 attacks, she allegedly posted an image of a bulldozer along with text reading “Glory to the Palestinian resistance”. Mr Kelvin said: “Between July and December, she posted a large quantity of material on social media and took part in a number of protests against Israel and in support of people in Gaza.”  Posts included one calling Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, a “genocidal murderer”, it is claimed.  Dr Aladwan also allegedly said that Mr Streeting taking money from “the Israeli lobby” was a sign of “Jewish supremacy”. She is also accused of calling her followers to “join the Palestinian armed resistance”... Dr Aladwan, of Pilning in Gloucestershire, was arrested at her home on Thursday morning for breaching police bail conditions. She had been arrested on Thursday morning by Metropolitan Police officers for breaching the bail conditions imposed following previous arrests."
Clearly, she meant "Zionist supremacy"

StopAntisemitism on X - "CHARGES DROPPED against Mai Abdulhadi, the Montreal woman who ran a coffee shop inside Jewish General Hospital and was filmed giving Nazi salutes.  Abdulhadi was arrested and charged for threatening Jews, shouting: “The final solution is coming your way… you know what that is?”  Judge Nathalie Fafard ruled Abdulhadi completed a “program" and withdrew all charges.   A complete failure of accountability and disgrace."
Of course, the anti-Semites were claiming that because it was the owner of a cafe inside a Jewish hospital, it was a Jewish false flag

Mario Zelaya on X - "The guy arrested for firing 14 bullets into a Jewish-owned restaurant,  DURING PASSOVER,  has a name.   Mohamed Mahdi.   It’s in the Toronto Police news release.  CBC didn’t use it.  CTV didn’t use it.  Global didn’t use it.  Canadian Press didn’t use it.  Every major Canadian outlet quoted the police release.   Every one of them omitted the name that was IN the release.  I’m sure it’s just a coincidence 🙄"
ADRAB on X - "Pattern noticed: When an Islamist or trans goes on a deadly rampage (which is often these days) our politicians, media & police suddenly hide the attacker’s identity and motive. If the shooter were white? Name splashed everywhere, 'white extremism' blamed instantly."
Terrorist supporters were claiming that this was a Jewish/Mossad false flag. Of course, they won't acknowledge that they were talking rubbish once again, as usual

Arrest made in Jewish restaurant shooting small step in right direction - Mohamed Mahdi, 35, of Brampton, charged with four gun-related offences including discharge of a restricted firearm : r/OntarioNews - "The never ending holy wars."
"Only one side is shooting up businesses and places of worship in Canada."
"And the other is causing irreparable harm to Palestinians and Lebanese. The shooter sucks and has no place but we can't just pretend his motives fell from the sky... Then again... maybe they did.  ESH"
"What does that have to do with jewish people in canada?"
"Because context matters, especially to some. You're framing this as one-sided domestic violence while completely ignoring what's fueling the anger. Condemning the shooting doesn't require pretending it happened in a vacuum."
"Were any Muslim businesses in Canada shot up after October 7th? Or after rockets rain down on Israel? Or after the many suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks that have plagued Israel for decades? The answer is no."

Genocide once meant something – now the term is just political invective - "Of the many examples of moral collapse that followed October 7, the debasement of genocide has been among the ugliest. Using the megaphone of social media, activists, hostile states, the media and non-governmental organisations have corrupted a precise legal term to smear troops who were issuing evacuation orders, facilitating aid handouts and fighting an enemy that used human shields. What begins with Jews never ends with Jews. If the meaning of genocide is lost, no Western army will be safe.  As Keir Starmer’s failed attempts to marshal international law against our own troops who fought in Iraq demonstrated, such instincts are strong amongst progressives... Since 1945, only five legally-confirmed genocides have been recognised by the British government: the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and the liquidation of the Yazidis by Islamic State. Between the Srebrenica massacre – the last time the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a guilty verdict – and Myanmar, times have changed.  As part of the hearing this week, hostile Facebook posts were presented as evidence. Social media has become part of life since 2007, but there are fears that relying upon such contextual and emotive ephemera may eclipse the hard facts, especially as the ICJ’s next case is against Israel... One of the presiding judges, 84-year-old South African jurist Navi Pillay, has already been accused of turning genocide into a political tool. For many years, she headed a UN Human Rights Council “commission of inquiry” that was dismissed as laughably biased. As long ago as 2014, 100 members of Congress said the commission Pillay later led could “not be taken seriously as a human rights organisation”. It has relentlessly condemned the Jewish state while overlooking Hamas; when another commission member claimed that social media was “controlled by the Jewish lobby”, Pillay – who has called for sanctions against “apartheid Israel” – defended him.   Last September, the commission produced a contemptible report which pre-emptively found Israel guilty of “genocide” by airbrushing Hamas out of the conflict. Remove the combatants from any war and you have a crime against humanity. Is Pillay a proper person to preside over genocide cases at the UN’s highest court?  Like the rest of the world, the UN seems to be deploying “genocide” as a campaigning tool, fuelled by ideology and the empty rage of social media. This week, the California state senator Scott Wiener, who is in line for Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco Congressional seat, said the quiet part out loud.  “In terms of the word ‘genocide’, it’s traditionally been a very technical legal term under the Geneva Convention,” he said. “But for so many, the word is not just a technical legal term. It is a descriptor for an extreme level of devastation of a people. It’s a heartfelt descriptor.”  Heartfelt or not, replacing facts with feelings is a dangerous game. Just 10 days – 10 days! – after October 7, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention accused Israel of “genocide”. Hamas, by contrast, had conducted an “unprecedented military operation”, it later declared. Members of Lemkin’s family are fighting to have his name removed from the Institute’s title. So we arrive at last Tuesday, Holocaust Memorial Day. As any schoolboy knows, or used to know, victims of that genocide totalled about 11 million, of which six million were Jews. Regardless, the BBC and other broadcasters repeatedly paid tribute to the six million “people” who were murdered, erasing the Jews once again as a reprehensible coda to the genocide.  Was that “heartfelt”? Probably. Unsurprisingly, of the 2,000 secondary schools that marked the Holocaust in 2023, 1,146 have since given it up. Lurking in the background is the cunning little piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, shamefully endorsed by the UN, that when it comes to genocide, the Jews are as bad as the Nazis. Yet nobody has used the g-word for massacres by the Iranian regime, enemy of our democracies. How easily is truth dismissed as a quaint and old-fashioned habit, like trilbies or good manners! But unmoor legal definitions at your peril. When genocide becomes a political weapon, it is wielded against the West."

Dr. Eli David on X - "An innocent doctor and an innocent journalist were killed by Israel yesterday. Dr. Ahmed Al-Jamal (right) and journalist Abdullah Al-Jamal (left) were brutally murdered. Their only crime was holding Israeli hostages in their home."

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Update from the Gaza flotilla: activists are furious that a senior organising member of the Steering Committee is having sex with people on the boats “To have sex on the boat - while heading to a nation undergoing genocide - is a clear violation of ethics and power” Lmfao"

Meme - Max 📟 @MaxNordau: "None of the people who accuse Israel of being genocidal act like they believe it.  It’s just a game to them, with the ultimate goal of inciting actual genocide against Israeli Jews."
"Footage: Gaza flotilla activists frolicking on Israeli Navy ship"

Grace Tame says her livelihood has been destroyed after she 'spoke the truth' at pro-Palestine rally - "Grace Tame says her livelihood has been 'completely destroyed' in the month since she shouted 'globalise the intifada' at a pro-Palestine rally. The former Australian of the Year penned a first-person piece for the Crikey website in which she claimed to have been the subject of a 'concerted smear campaign' by conservative politicians and media. 'I do not support violence,' she wrote in the piece published on Friday. 'I do not condone antisemitism, Islamophobia or hatred of any kind... After her comments were reported by the ABC, Tame took to Instagram to rip into the national broadcaster, accusing it of pandering to the 'pro-Israel lobby'. Tame has drawn condemnation from the Jewish community... Tame accused the ABC of peddling 'right-wing propaganda' as she defended the 'globalise the intifada' chant. 'Intifadas' refer to two violent uprisings in the Middle East which involved the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians... Tame faced calls to be stripped of her 2021 Australian of the Year honour in the wake of her speech at the Herzog demonstration. More than 25,000 Australians signed a petition calling for authorities to charge Tame with '[alleged] criminal incitement to violence under existing Australian law'."
When you support violence and then accuse those of pointing that out of slandering you
You should only listen to minorities when they push the left wing agenda

Jews Fight Back 🇺🇸🇮🇱 on X - "🚨 A JEWISH TEACHER REPORTED ANTISEMITISM AT A U.N. SCHOOL IN NYC. THEY INVESTIGATED HER. 🚨
At the United Nations International School.  Nadine Sébag filed eight detailed complaints alleging a hostile climate toward Jewish faculty.  No real response.  Instead: a 15-month investigation into HER.  Outcome?  Termination.  Three decades in the classroom.  Gone.  This is a U.N.-affiliated Manhattan school charging up to $50,000 a year.  It received a $60 million pledge from Qatar in 2023. Qatar holds a seat on the school’s board.  The message is clear:  Report Jew-hate.  Lose your job.  They thought it would end there.  It didn’t.  Now they’re being dragged into court."

Eyal Yakoby on X - "BREAKING: Francesca Albanese says that 380,000 kids aged 0-5 have been killed in the Gaza Strip. That’s impossible considering there has never been 380,000 children aged 0-5 in Gaza. These people just lie."

Threads - "Gaza has been “enduring starvation” for 598 days yet has fewer starvation deaths than the U.S.    It has had “indiscriminate bombing “with more payload dropped on it than 6 Hiroshimas” yet has the lowest civilian casualty rate in all modern warfare.    Israel is “committing Genocide,” yet facilitated over 3500 cal/day/person of aid during the war.    Libels all. This war is a massive PR campaign."

Daniel on X - "This is a map of the Hamas tunnel network in the Yavneh 'refugee camp' in Rafah, Gaza. Roughly 7 kilometers covering just one section of Rafah.    I asked @Grok  to convert the manpower effort into civilian terms.  The complex reaches 25m deep, with 80 rooms (including where they held Israeli hostages and remains). Remember "All eyes on Rafah"? Well now you know why so many activists didn't want the IDF there. This is just a single location. There are more to come.  The ~250,000 man-days poured into this single complex equals roughly:
10–16 mid-rise apartment buildings (1,500–2,400 new homes)
15–20 modern schools
2–3 fully equipped 50–100 bed hospitals
1–2 large desalination plants (enough to give the entire Gaza Strip reliable drinking water)
1–2 major sewage treatment plants (ending the flow of raw sewage into the sea and water supply)
One additional 140 MW power-plant block (roughly doubling Gaza’s electricity supply and ending reliance on Israel for electricity)
6–10 km of elevated highway
 In other words, the same human labor secretly invested in one tunnel system under one refugee camp (there are more) could have solved one or two of Gaza’s worst humanitarian crises: Housing, water, electricity, sewage, education and healthcare for tens of thousands of civilians.  Or... All that money and every shovel of dirt could go toward infrastructure whose sole purpose was to enable attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers.  Guess which option the people who were given billions of dollars in international aid chose?"
Angelina on X - "I have to admire their industriousness. If people here were willing to work half as hard it would solve generational unemployment. Pity they didn't use that energy to cultivate food or make it a better place to live."
Daniel on X - "There is an interesting study between the cost to build that Hamas infrastructure (using smuggled materials, prison/slave labour, child labour and no regulatory oversight) versus comparable Western infrastructure projects. In simple cost-per-kilometre terms, Hamas beat almost every formal public infrastructure project on Earth. Their tunnels were circa $5-10M per kilometer versus say $2-4bn per km for the Boston Big Dig or $420M per km for the Channel Tunnel (in today's money terms)."
Israel are such monsters, stopping Gaza from developing

Meme - Uri Kurlianchik @VerminusM: "This is the stadium in which Nasrallah made his famous "Israel is as fragile as cobwebs" speech. Now Nasrallah is dead, the stadium is destroyed, and an Israeli flag flies over the ruins."
When you threaten to destroy another country, attack it and kill its people, and get defeated, that's "genocide"

Albert Aaron | Facebook - "I am sure some of my friends noticed major changes at the New York Magazine in recent years. There was a time when the magazine was an important publisher, printing some of the most influential pieces of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. But more recently and especially since October 7, 2023, their direction seems to have changed. What was once a reputable magazine printing stories of national importance has unfortunately turned towards fringe and obsessive anti-Israel activism. Lest you think this activism is a sound business model, I believe the data suggests otherwise. As reported by Semafor in March, New York Magazine’s parent company, Vox Media, began looking for a buyer at some point last year. While some expressed interest in its less toxic and more successful verticals like The Cut, there seems to be less interest in buying the entire magazine. We will see how that plays out. So why hasn’t anyone purchased the mag since last year? Perhaps that tilt towards anti-Israel activism isn’t profitable? Puck reported, for instance, that New York Magazine’s profit margin is 6%. If true, while that is still in the black, it is unusually low for a media company with such an iconic history. I also suspect that profit trends are moving in the wrong direction. By comparison, the New York Times’s margin is double that, at roughly 12%. The magazine’s anti-Israel hit jobs do not seem to be one-offs as the anti-Israel coverage appears to be happening more frequently and seems to be an important component of its business model. They are also attempting to redefine who speaks for American Jews. For instance, the magazine seems to portray fringe anti-Israel groups like “Jewish Voice for Peace,” which have harassed our communities for decades, as the true voice of the Jewish people. Simultaneously, the publication paints those who have demonstrated animosity towards Israel, like Mahmoud Khalil, as heroes and victims. Two recent examples highlight how the mag uses half-truths to promote specific ideological narratives. Days ago, the magazine published Mahmoud Khalil’s essay, "I Miss My Old Life," framing his ICE detention as a political abduction. But if you’re familiar with Khalil’s case, you’ll immediately notice that the piece is heavy on portraying Khalil as a victim, but conveniently omits important facts.  Before we get to what they omit, one part of his essay jumped out at me. Khalil notes that he noticed Jewish people “singing ‘Am Yisrael Chai’“ and then claims that this is “an Israeli nationalist anthem often chanted by racist mobs while harassing Palestinians.” Of course there’s nothing racist about Am Yisrael Chai. The slogan translates to “The people of Israel live,” signifying Jewish resilience. Certainly Jews wanting to live is not racist. But New York Magazine just went with Khalil’s hateful version. What didn’t make it into the New York Magazine’s Khalil coverage? That Khalil is being accused of material misrepresentations on his green card application, specifically his failure to disclose his work with Hamas-affiliated UNRWA and his prior work at an embassy in Lebanon, among other material misrepresentations. The magazine also fails to detail what Khalil did in his leadership role at Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). In terms of CUAD, the organization was found to pervasively harass Jews on campus, telling them they were “not welcome” there. Khalil’s co-leader at CUAD stated that “Zionists do not deserve to live” and that people should be grateful he “was not murdering Zionists.” The magazine omitted that CUAD-affiliated groups hosted a "Resistance 101" event featuring speakers from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Samidoun, both designated as terrorist entities. They ignored that a university task force on antisemitism found that Jewish and Israeli students experienced pervasive harassment and ostracism led by Khalil’s group. They failed to note that the group celebrated the October 7 massacre and led "globalize the intifada" rallies, or that CUAD’s social media accounts posted "Death to America" in Farsi following US strikes against the Iranian regime. Another example is a June 2025 essay called "Israel’s Crimes of the Century." In it, the author claims that Israel committed war crimes. Like other Israel hit jobs, the piece is intellectually dishonest. The author repeats the accusation of war crimes, but the legal support in the middle of the essay is weak. The author uses the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) definition of war crimes, but the definition provided is so broad that every nation fighting a defensive war in an urban setting, including the Allied Forces during WWII, would be guilty of war crimes too. Deeper in the article, she admits that intent is difficult to prove in international law. The magazine’s pivot toward anti-Israel radicalism is particularly shocking given its history. For decades, New York Magazine counted pro-Israel American Jews as important subscribers. Under its new leadership, writers portray Zionism as evil, effectively alienating the magazine’s once most loyal readers. Advertisers and subscribers have many options. Why would they pick a publication that has traded its intellectual rigor for the comforts of an activist echo chamber? When a magazine becomes indistinguishable from the social media accounts screaming “EtHnIc ClEaNsInG” and “GeNoCiDe” without presenting a complete picture and the full context, it loses the appeal that would justify a subscription. I have no idea where the magazine is heading, but its current trajectory seems like a dead end."

Dutch intelligence: Hamas organizing protests, raising funds in Netherlands - "A Hamas network has been involved in organizing protests in the Netherlands, according to a Thursday General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) report, which also detailed that it had identified individuals raising funds and lobbying on behalf of the Palestinian terrorist organization in the country.  The AIVD annual report for 2025 assessed that Hamas was involved with the groups that organized pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The AIVD said that while in 2025 these protests didn’t lead to violent incidents, they could lead to divisions within society.  The Hamas network involved in demonstrations has been active in propaganda, lobbying, and fundraising for the terrorist organization for years, according to the AIVD. Part of a broader European Hamas network, the report shared that about ten people have been linked to the cells. On April 14, the  Netherlands Public Prosecution Service (PPS) announced that it was seeking three years’ imprisonment and one year suspended for a 58-year-old Leidschendam man who allegedly transferred about €8 million to Hamas between 2010 and 2023. AIVD is also investigating potential national security threats posed to Hamas following a series of arrests across Europe in relation to Lebanese Hamas cells seeking to attack Jewish or Israeli targets on the continent.  In November, German authorities arrested five alleged Hamas operatives, two of whom resided in Denmark. Another British citizen was arrested in relation to the cell in London, and had a cache of weapons in Austria... “The AIVD observes that there is a major, persistent espionage threat emanating from intelligence and security services in countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, but also from services in countries with a large diaspora community in the Netherlands, such as Morocco.”"
Damn Mossad!

Europe’s weirdest border – where locals move their front doors to pay less tax

Europe’s weirdest border – where locals move their front doors to pay less tax

"Husbands and wives sleeping next to each other in different countries. Residents moving their front doors for lower tax rates. Weddings restricted to one side of the town hall. Just another day in Baarle.

The sleepy town in the southern Netherlands is a cartographic anomaly. Pockets of Belgian territory – collectively known as Baarle-Hertog – are scattered throughout the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau.

Some of these Belgian areas contain fragments of Dutch territory, meaning the two countries are stacked like Russian dolls...

The bizarre arrangement is a hangover from the Middle Ages, when aristocrats doled out and swapped pockets of land that were later frozen into national boundaries in the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht. (One tiny rectangle of farmland remained disputed territory until 1995, when it was finally assigned to Belgium.)

Baarle’s borders throw up an array of practical problems for its 10,000 inhabitants who frequently have to navigate two legal, planning, tax and education systems. But these same ambiguities also present opportunities for enterprising citizens who have been exploiting the town’s quirks for centuries.

Smuggling was a “big problem” for most of Baarle’s history, according to Willem van Gool, the sprightly head of the town’s tourist office.

“Farmers would move their livestock to a neighbour’s field at night, just across the border, to sell them for a higher price and avoid domestic taxes,” he says.

The uphill struggle to police the borders has become Baarle folklore. In the 1960s, one shrewd resident built a bank on a border, shifting funds and paperwork from one side to the other to dodge tax inspectors and launder gains of questionable origin.

Another story tells of women suspected of smuggling butter under their clothes being asked by customs inspectors to stand by a fire while their papers were inspected, so the contraband melted out of them.

Smuggling has been on the decline since the 1993 introduction of the European Single Market, which removed customs checks and brought in minimum tax standards across the continent. But Baarle’s modern-day residents have found legal ways to take advantage of the border.

Art Verhagen, 70, is stocking up on cheap Trappist brews at De Biergrens – “The Beer Border” – a retailer with a boundary printed on the shop floor in the colours of the Dutch and Belgian flags. If the premises of a business are bisected by a border, the firm pays taxes on profits to both governments according to how many square metres fall on either side.

“A lot has changed since I was young,” says Verhagen, who grew up in Dutch-administered Baarle-Nassau. “50 years ago, butter, sugar, animals would be moved across the borders. Now the town is mostly full of tourists for beer and fuel.”

He says it with the resignation of an old-timer witnessing terminal decline. But in his next breath Verhagen reveals where he’s heading next: across to the Belgian side of the border to fill up his car with cut-price petrol.

Price caps and lower fuel duty in Belgium mean petrol costs around €0.5 less per litre than on the Dutch side, so filling up a tank can save around €30. Because it’s legal to fill jerrycans with up to 240 litres of fuel in Belgium, drivers stockpile petrol and diesel when the price gap widens...

Baarle’s unique borders attract curious visitors from all over the world. In the town square, tourists draped in Belgian and Dutch flags pose with one leg planted either side of the border, two thumbs up and a big grin.

Drinking tea in the sun outside a brasserie are Nikita Kvir, a 29-year-old “border anomaly enthusiast”, and his mother, Tatiana.

Their table, bolted to the ground, is strategically placed a fraction over the Dutch side of the white-cross line (for tax reasons, the owner says). Kvir sits 2ft away from his mother, on the Belgian side...

Kvir is part of a “quite niche” community of hobbyists who travel the world in search of the weirdest geopolitical quirks. They share maps and photos privately and on Reddit threads, one of the biggest being r/Borderporn. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s safe for work.”

Kvir recently visited Jungholz, a territory connected to Austria by a single point on the map at the top of a mountain ridge. Its status as an exclave is fiercely debated among border aficionados.

He is also fascinated by Gornja Siga, a patch of uninhabited and “unclaimed” land on the banks of the Danube between Croatia and Serbia. In 2015, Vít Jedlička, a Czech political activist and libertarian, planted a flag in the 7km² floodplain, claimed it as a micro-state, and named it the “Free Republic of Liberland”.

Baarle, however, is “the most famous” oddity among fans. “It’s just really cool,” Kvir says.

Van Gool is proud to have branded Baarle the “World Capital of Enclaves”. According to one definition, the town is home to 30 of the world’s 63 enclaves, defined as a territory belonging to one state entirely surrounded by the territory of another.

Covid played a major role in putting Baarle on the map, he says. Pandemic restrictions were a “nightmare” for the authorities. Belgium enforced a complete lockdown for much of the first wave, while the Netherlands had lockdown-lite – or “intelligent lockdown”.

The different rules and unhelpful branding implied that Belgians were being needlessly cautious. Mask-less Dutch wandering around the town created “a lot of friction”.

The authorities’ solution – an inevitable fudge – was to tell all residents to adopt the most restrictive rules of the two jurisdictions. Legally it was unenforceable, but people understood why it was being done, and stuck to the rules.

The silver lining was that the world’s press flocked to Baarle, intrigued by how it was navigating the contradictions. “It was a mad-house here,” van Gool says.

TikTok and Instagram have helped raise the town’s online profile since the pandemic, and tourism has exploded.

“We used to have one or two thousand visitors a year. Now we have 60,000 who register in this office – and many more who don’t.”

There’s a healthy dose of kitsch in Baarle’s celebration of its claim to fame. The town’s two councils built a flag-adorned grensschommel – “border swing” – along a boundary near the centre of town, so residents can oscillate between Belgium and the Netherlands with gay abandon...

Few understand Baarle’s byzantine bureaucracy better than Philip Loots, the mayor of Baarle-Hertog.

Loots is standing in the Belgian town hall, where an illuminated strip runs diagonally across the floor, marking where Belgium ends and the Netherlands begins.

He explains that when he officiates weddings in the room, participants must be careful not to stray on to the Dutch side of the line, or the ceremony may be considered void under Belgian law...

As head of the Belgian municipality, Loots is in “constant contact” with his Dutch counterpart, the mayor of Baarle-Nassau, to coordinate everything from resurfacing roads to cross-border bin collections...

He is acutely aware of the absurdities of the system, which involves two town halls, two elected councils, two police forces and joint committees to oversee Baarle’s water, electricity and gas.

“The fact that there are some houses where the border cuts through the bedroom and couples sleep on different sides, that’s crazy,” he says.

Despite being mayor of the Belgian municipality, Loots has more Dutch citizens living in his territory – like Thomas and Ruth – than Belgians.

The main reason is economic. Income taxes in Belgium are some of the most punitive in the world, and considerably higher than in the Netherlands. As workers pay income tax depending on where they work rather than where they live, many Dutch citizens in high-paying jobs in the Netherlands have moved to Belgian territory in Baarle, where house prices are cheaper.

“We see a lot of people working in the Netherlands and living on the Belgian side,” Loots says. “So they get the best of both worlds.”

Things get more complicated for anyone living in one of Baarle’s 160 homes with a border running directly through them, known as “line houses”.

If you live in a line house, your country of residence and tax jurisdiction are dictated by whether your front door opens on to Belgian or Dutch territory.

The “front door rule” is one of many pragmatic solutions to the quirks thrown up by the border. Moving front doors is possible but strictly controlled.

“People have built extensions to their houses so they can have a front door on one side of the border,” van Gool says. “But it would be a mess if everyone did it. There needs to be a good practical reason.”

When a 1995 commission inspected the town’s borders, it found that one line was slightly off. This would have meant reclassifying the home of an elderly woman as being in Belgium rather than the Netherlands. Doing so would have “completely upended her life”, Loots says, as all her social security was set up according to Belgian law. The authority’s solution, to ensure she could remain in Belgium, was to move her front door two feet to the left.

Loots sees Baarle as the European project in microcosm – a poster-child for international cooperation...

If a road bisected by a border needs resurfacing, the cost is split between the two municipalities according to how much of it lies on each side.

For public spending relating to tourism, Baarle-Nassau shoulders 79pc of the cost, reflecting its relative share of visitor accommodation.

The Dutch administration is also footing 70pc of the bill for a new joint town hall (featuring, naturally, a revolving door so visitors enter in Belgium and exit in the Netherlands) in line with its larger population...

In the 1960s, the authorities felt the need to stagger finishing time for schools on either side of the border to prevent fights between pupils.

A mixed youth group that started in the 1970s helped to improve relations. Today, the two cultures interweave peacefully and mixed marriages are common."

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 21st May 2026 (2 - California)

East Oakland Dad on X - "An Oakland father takes his kids to the park to play baseball, but the gate is locked. The sidewalk is blocked by illegal dumping. Oakland deserves better. cc: @BarbaraLee_CA"
Garry Tan on X - "This is a special kind of American nightmare: blue cities like Oakland run by career bureaucrats, bought and paid for by grifting nonprofits Oakland has a $2.1B per year budget A child can’t even play baseball in their local park"

The Bay Area is getting old — fast. It will change everything - "For years we’ve heard of the potential economic doom spiral circling San Francisco, where a massive city budget deficit fueled by remote work leads to poorer services and even more residents fleeing. But another threat has been building in relative silence. The Bay Area is getting old fast, and it’s accelerating. Though aging is a global trend, the San Francisco metro area — which includes San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Marin counties — is already the third-oldest among 20 of the largest regions in the U.S., trailing only two places in Florida. And no other region is growing older at a quicker pace... In Berkeley, we found a once-vibrant neighborhood that is now essentially a retirement community of single-family homes. In Sonoma County, we visited a city with a family-friendly reputation that lost 35% of its children in a decade... It’s not all doom and gloom. We also found some industries thriving. A longevity clinic in South San Francisco serves patients who pay as much as $19,000 a year in a bid to live longer. And it’s an excellent time to be offering financial services such as estate planning to the elderly... Two Berkeley neighborhoods, Thousand Oaks and Northbrae, have median ages nearing 60. What makes these places remarkable is that, unlike most older communities, they don’t include nursing homes or senior care centers. Most of the residents have been living there for over 20 years, according to a Chronicle analysis of census data... The region will need more senior housing and services like home health aides, a difficult lift in an area with some of the nation’s highest construction costs and a labor shortage for skilled caregivers... Ted Egan, San Francisco’s chief economist, notes that the number of younger people without college degrees was already dropping before COVID, while educated young people continued moving in, many for tech jobs. But post-pandemic, the number of educated young people has also declined. To make matters worse, when residents do decide to have kids, they become more likely to leave the city, according to surveys. “It’s a major trigger point,” Egan said. “People bump into space limitations in a rent-controlled apartment.” For those lucky enough to be homeowners, California’s landmark property tax cap, Proposition 13, has kept annual increases low. But there’s a downside: studies show a “lock-in” effect that discourages homeowners from moving out and potentially downsizing, constraining the supply of new listings. That has helped fuel both San Francisco’s aging-in-place trend and the brutally expensive housing market."
Time for even more rent control and zoning restrictions to "protect" residents, ie. ossify the area even more, and more regulation to increase construction costs and worsen labour shortages even more

Immigrants and Health in California - Public Policy Institute of California - "In March 2021, 66% of California adults supported health care coverage for undocumented immigrants, up from 54% in 2015."
Time to 'tax the 'rich'' to pay for this

The San Francisco Standard on X - "Exclusive: Days before the new school year, SFUSD told parents that their kids had been automatically enrolled in an ethnic studies class covering racism, colonialism, and more. Some see an ideological agenda. 📝: Ezra Wallach and Anya Kaiser"
i/o on X - "Percentage of black 7th grade students proficient in math in San Francisco public schools: 2%."

Gavin Newsom trashed California. Worse, he might win the presidency - "“How do you win elections when you keep losing your voters?,” asks a pained Shawn Steel, the GOP national committeeman for California. California’s conservatism was rooted in the migration of voters from the Mid-West and South, who found in the Golden State an outlet for their material aspirations. But over the past two decades, over 2.6 million net domestic migrants have left – equal to the population of San Francisco, Anaheim and San Diego combined – and many, according to IRS estimates, are concentrated among the middle class family-age population.  Left behind is a rapidly ageing population, as well as a large coterie of affluent professionals, state-dependent individuals and, most importantly, the public sector, whose unions are helping to fund Newsom’s redistricting drive. It’s almost impossible to imagine any of the Republican hopefuls for governor – former David Cameron advisor Steve Hilton or Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco – winning, and it’s possible that neither will even make it to the run-off election. A Republican has not won a state-wide race in California in almost two decades... But the Democrats’ stranglehold over California is both unjustified and damaging. Newsom can crow about the state’s giant economy – largely due to the presence of a handful of the world’s seven companies with trillion dollar valuations, and the highest number of billionaires in the US. But the average Californian has not benefited much from his regime, as the Golden State suffers among the nation’s highest proportion of the population living in poverty, tepid job growth and the US’s highest rates of unemployment, particularly elevated for teenagers and Generation Z.  For those older than 30, buying a home – the traditional route to the middle class – has become a nightmare. Regulations aimed at stopping suburban development have helped push the median cost of a home to nearly 2.5 times higher than in the rest of country. Not surprisingly California has the second lowest homeownership rate in the nation, at 56 per cent (New York’s is lowest at 54 per cent). High prices have been a boon to upper-middle professionals, increasingly the Democratic Party’s base, but ownership rates for those under-35 are half the national average. This is precisely the group that is deserting the West Coast for “cost of living” reasons. Even worse, the Newsom economy has been a disaster for workers. California is one of the worst states for creating jobs that pay above average. In the year to January 2025, the only net new jobs created in California were in areas substantially subsidised by government (like healthcare) and in government itself as well as some in the low wage service sector. Meanwhile, companies in key high wage sectors – technology, aerospace and defence – are heading increasingly to other states, notably to the Carolinas and Texas. Many will be tempted to follow the likes of Elon Musk, who is busily working to turn the Lone Star State into the epicentre of America’s 21st century space economy. Although they have little choice in the matter in an essentially one party state, most Californians, according to a UC Berkeley poll last year, think it is headed in the wrong direction. Only around 44 per cent of voters approve of Newsom; by two to one, voters believe he is more concerned with his political ambitions than delivering decent governance, a charge made recently by San Jose’s Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan. Even Californians no longer see their state as a model for the country. In a 2024 survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times, only 15 per cent of respondents felt that California is a model other states should copy; 39 per cent said the state was not a model and should not be emulated. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now thinks the American dream is achievable. This is a far cry from the California that produced Nixon, Reagan and Jerry Brown. Its failures, which should make Newsom vulnerable, will be hidden as much as possible by a compliant media, and largely ignored in the gubernatorial campaign. But Americans, however distressed over Maga excesses, may still have second thoughts about adopting a Golden State political agenda that promises, on the national level, something potentially equally or even more catastrophic."

Ryan McEntush on X - "so my friend david got home around 2am last night, the porch door’s open and his computer’s gone. he checks find my — it’s pinging somewhere around market street.  so he calls sfpd, tells them he literally knows where it is. they say “we’ll send someone to market street” and won’t let him come along even though he’s got the live location. obviously they don’t find anything. instead they start poking around this creepy abandoned nursing home nextdoor his house, trying to figure out how someone got onto his porch.  david keeps watching find my and sees the signal moving back toward his house, so he decides to just go for it. starts walking that direction, and about a third of a mile from home he passes this homeless guy. glances at the app — the computer’s now behind him.  he turns around, asks the guy, “hey, you got a computer?” the guy says yeah. david asks, “did you take it from my house?” the guy goes, “no, found it on the street.”  so david asks if he can take a look — and the dude literally shows him not just his computer, but also his roommate’s computer and a kindle.  david goes, “okay, these are mine, can i have them back?” and the guy just says “sure.”  so he walks all the stuff back to the cops, who are still screwing around in the abandoned nursing home like it’s resident evil. they’re amazed and tell him, “we should give you a badge.”  a true san francisco story."

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Newsom is behaving as badly as Trump - "Gavin Newsom is behaving just as badly as Donald Trump, Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested.  The Terminator star, who was the last Republican governor of California, hit out at Mr Newsom’s plans to redraw congressional districts to boost the Democrats in next year’s mid-term elections.  Mr Newsom, the current California governor, claims his hand was forced by Mr Trump’s push to gerrymander seats in states such as Texas to maintain Republican control of the House of Representatives... “It doesn’t make any sense to me that because we have to fight Trump [we] become Trump,” the film star told The Wall Street Journal... Mr Newsom has claimed his plans will “defend our democracy” after Mr Trump urged Republicans to secure additional seats via redistricting. His call has been taken up by states such as Texas and Missouri... Despite California’s legacy of non-partisan districting, the well-funded “Yes to 50” campaign has cut through by capitalising on opposition to Mr Trump in the state, where the president is broadly unpopular."
Quite apart from ignoring how Democrats have been gerrymandering all along, left wing logic: left wing parties listening to the electorate and cracking down on illegal migration means becoming "fascist", so they shouldn't do that. But aping what "fascist" Trump does to perpetuate left wing political power is good and "defending democracy"

CMV: Gavin Newsome is a poor choice for a presidential candidate. : r/changemyview - "he's an opportunist, narc, corporate shill, he just has absolutely no appeal in the states that Democrats need to win. Democrats online have a tendency to believe that the nation sees everything as they do or that the nation all demands a fighter. In reality, the swing states which determine our elections are largely looking for someone that will calm things down, that will compromise and that will prioritize the working class to bring back jobs and lower the cost of living. Gavin is not this. He is the image of California, the state with the highest costs in the nation and the highest poverty rate, unemployment rate, homelessness, etc. He has long been ridiculed nationwide and has a reputation as a fake politician. The common motto about California -if you look around online outside of reddit - is "don't California my state". Even if Gavin weren't problematic or were not to blame for any of California's recent failures (such as net 1.5million Californians leaving in 2020-2024 and net 934k foreign immigrants moving in)...the CA image in the midwest and in the south is a deal-breaker. Democrats just won't listen. A lot of them are certain that they lost in 2024 because they did not have a white man as the candidate (and this was absolutely not the case). So they're eager to throw him in as the nominee. As a Californian with my state in decline in virtually every regard (GDP is doing fine because of big tech), there is at least the guarantee that he will not be able to turn this nation back around.  My experience is that critique of him on reddit sometimes leads to the removal of the comment or even a ban in the subreddit. So be mindful. There was a lot more critique about Gavin prior to all of his putting on an act in front of the cameras.  Attitudes toward him just 6 months ago on reddit before what seems like astroturfing began: https://www.reddit.com/r/California/comments/1kq3h4h/california_gov_gavin_newsom_tries_to_rebrand/"

California tied with Louisiana for highest U.S. poverty rate, new report says - Los Angeles Times - "A new report released this week by the California Budget and Policy Center, a Sacramento-based think tank, found that 7 million California residents, or 17.7% of the population, lived in poverty last year."
Time to mock red states again

John LeFevre on X - "Gavin debuts his hip hop persona on an NBA podcast: "It was about payin' the bills, man." "Hustlin." "I raised myself." "Wonder bread and Mac 'n cheese. That's how I grew up, bro." (His dad was the attorney for the billionaire Getty family.)"

Adam Carolla on X - "His dad worked for Getty oil"
Sherry on X - "At age 25 he co-founded a winery in SF with investors including FAMILY FRIEND Gordon Getty, son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty. Made him a multi-millionaire by age 32. Willie Brown was an early political mentor. Those are some tough streets to conquer, Gav."

Katie Porter, leading candidate for California governor, melts down during CBS interview when asked about reaching Trump voters 😬 - "Katie Porter, the radical Dem known for promoting abortion as an inflation buster, dismissing the murder of Laken Riley, and for being an election denier (when she's the loser), and being an accused "abusive and racist boss," apparently has no idea how to be on the receiving end of an interview... With over a dozen primary candidates having announced a bid for governor in the 2026 election (Gov. Gavin Newsom is not eligible to run again), Porter is the leading candidate according to an August 2025 poll from Emerson College. A POLITICO survey from the same month showed that 30% of former Kamala Harris voters shifted their support to Porter after Harris ruled out any run for governor."

Kevin Dalton on X - "Non US citizens are suddenly not able to renew their CDLs after the Trump administration closed loopholes that Gavin Newsom’s California was exploiting. The DOT is singling out California for what it calls "gross negligence." It says more than 25% of CDLs given to noncitizens or non-permanent residents were improperly issued."

Kevin Dalton on X - "Scott Wiener: We don’t want you here
Also Scott Wiener: I have no interest in walking the streets of San Fransisco with a journalist and get confronted with the horrific crime and suffering my progressive policies have created"
"I hope you’re sitting down, but it looks like Scott Wiener has a rich history of avoiding talking about the repercussions of his abysmal policies."
Someone with a foreign accent said it was like a third world country and didn't know why the police didn't do anything

Kane 謝凱堯 on X - "San Francisco progressive supervisors are pushing a “reparations” bill to give $5M cash to every black resident. They want it to be administered by the NGO that was recently caught committing massive fraud."

Benny Johnson on X - "BREAKING: San Francisco quietly rolls out $5 million-per-person reparations for Black residents while in a $1 billion deficit."
Elon Musk on X - "California didn’t even have slaves! Why is it right for someone who escaped tyranny in other countries and happens to live in SF to pay “reparations” for something they had nothing to do with? This is deeply morally wrong."

Wall Street Apes on X - "California Democrats just passed a new rule giving illegals PRIORITY over American citizens for tuition assistance  Yes, this is real  California Rep Carl DeMaio “California Democrat politicians have now enacted a new rule that treats citizens worse than illegal immigrants and gives discounts for tuition to illegal immigrants over citizens here in the United States.”  “I think this is completely unfair and offensive. I was contacted last week by a student wishing to enroll in a California university and they were told that they have to pay tens of thousands of dollars more in tuition than if they were an illegal immigrant. Because illegal immigrants have been given in-state tuition discounts even though they're not eligible for them. Whereas citizens from other states are charged substantially higher rates.   He explained his father fought for freedom. He is a veteran and yet his son cannot get the same treatment as an illegal immigrant. He's quipped that maybe he should try to go to Mexico and then enter California illegally. Would that get him a discount? Sadly, no.“  A new change “rule” was made to the California Dream Act Application (CADAA) pushed by Democratic lawmakers reducing barriers for illegals to get the aid  Democrats in late 2025 specifically granting “priority” tuition assistance to undocumented immigrants over citizens"

emilysavesamerica on X - "Nothing will push you to the right faster than working your entire life to finally make money in California and being forced to hand over half of it while you walk through streets filled with homeless addicts, criminals, and illegal migrants the state prioritizes over you. You watch your hard earned money disappear into people who hate you, make your life unsafe, and destroy your community while politicians get richer every single day. I was liberal my entire life. Living like this will turn any normal person into the furthest right version of themselves."

Wall Street Apes on X - "California journalist calls out the Los Angeles City Council
“So far we have spent $450 million to permanently house 1,144 people — That's an absolute failure”  He says he knows the money is being laundered to NGOs politically connected to Karen Bass and City Council members   “That money is going somewhere. It's not like that money is falling into the abyss. That money ends up being somebody's profit. The non-profit industrial complex who's making a ton of money off of it. And most of those people are politically connected to Hugo and Nithya and Karen Bass, of course, and actually all of you people.”  He talks about how there are entire areas where not a single street light works  He talks about how taxpayers money is being spent to cover up sexual assaults"
Clearly, the problem is that not enough money has been spent, and it's all Trump and the GOP's fault

Steve McGuire on X - "California State University Professor Melina Abdullah invited her students during class to sign a petition urging Gavin Newsom to veto a bill aimed at preventing antisemitism in K-12 schools.  The university is investigating.  According to the faculty handbook, “the law…prohibits the use of state time and resources (including state materials, equipment, facilities, and services) in supporting or opposing any political candidate or issue being considered by the electorate of the state or any political subdivision of the state.”"

Mike Solana on X - "san francisco is trying to give black people five million dollars each for being black, with additional annual income payments so nobody living in the city, who is black, ever has to work again (for 250 years). this is considered uncontroversial on the city's "moderate" board."

Chamath Palihapitiya on X - "Taxes in California can make an Uber ride across LA more expensive than an airplane ticket from LA to Miami…"
"Mandatory insurance costs make up  about 45% of the average Uber fare in  Los Angeles County, versus 10% or less in most places in the country. Taking an Uber across L.A. can cost more than  a flight to Miami."

Thread by @mnolangray on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Reading bizarre NPIC position letters on common sense California legislation is kind of my full-time job, but I don't think I've ever seen one this strange. Enforcing DUI law is a form of "racialized wealth extraction"...?
“Drunk and drugged driving is now so common in car-centric California that drivers routinely rack up four, five, six DUIs. One woman in Fresno just got her 16th.”
"...drivers face even more burdensome costs of DUI class fees, high cost-insurance premiums..." What is the point of insurance if not to force people to internalize the risks? California already mandates that auto insurers provide subsidized insurance for repeat DUI offenders!...
As with disparate impact arguments against safety cameras and traffic enforcement generally, making a disparate impact argument against DUI enforcement is absurd—what about the Black and Hispanic pedestrians and bicyclists disproportionally killed by drunk drivers?"
David Watkins on X - "Today I learned that California requires insurers (and, by implication, responsible drivers) to subsidize criminally dangerous ones. Evidently the goal if this utterly deranged rule is to help ensure these deadly drivers are able to keep driving."

💥Susan Dyer Reynolds🗞️ on X - "The social worker stabbed by a violent lunatic at SF General Hospital has died. Meanwhile the court is requesting a pretrial diversion hearing for the killer. ⬇️"
Eddie Kim on X - "SF's loudest conservatives have been, for years, demonizing civil rights and alternatives to a carceral system that fails public safety needs It might be the heart of ol' Commiefornia, but SF's law-and-order obsessives mirror the same rhetoric as MAGA"
Mike Solana on X - "jailing murderers is not a “conservative” position it’s just the actual bottom rung of maintaining human civilization"
Clearly, they need to send in more social workers

Arye Lipman on X - "Highway 1 in Big Sur has been closed for 838 days. In that time China has built 3500 miles of high speed rail, and California hasn't been able to fix a quarter mile of highway."

Thread by @RamboVanHalen on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Here's another piece of low-hanging fruit.  This encapsulates EVERYTHING that's wrong with Gavin Newsom's California.  But who's telling the story?  In case you don't know, California Highway 1 near Big Sur was closed by a landslide in 2023.  Due to safetyism, environmental groups, and government incompetence/corruption the road remains closed and the possible opening dates keep shifting.  There's really no plan to fix/open the road and the tourist oriented economy along the coast is dying.  The road was built in the early 1920s.  Over the years there have been MANY landslides.  The road was always fixed and reopened.    But somehow, 100 years later in Gavin Newsom's California, this is impossible.  It's as if we've lost the ability to repair roads.  Just like it's impossible to rebuild Paradise or rebuild Pacific Palisades after wild fires.  Just like it's impossible to fix the homeless problem.  Just like it's impossible to build high speed rail.  Just like it's impossible to do ANYTHING of value in California.  Again, this story encapsulates EVERYTHING that's wrong with Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party.     And nobody is telling this story.  A talented filmmaker could make a nice documentary short for around $50-$100k.  It seems like a decent investment, but nobody in big media wants to greenlight projects that make Gavin look bad.    But the people who do have an interest in making Gavin look bad won't put their money where their mouth is.  Because they have no vision.  And they won't fund the people who do.
If Donald Trump was even tangentially responsible for the highway closure--or the fires--or the homeless--or anything else, the Obamas would be throwing MILLIONS at it. Because they UNDERSTAND things about media and power that conservatives don't. It’s not about the Dems/Libs have a monopoly on media. Media can be bought. Creators can be bought. And nobody is stopping the RW from buying it.  What the Libs have is a monopoly on VISION. Because the RW can’t can’t see it. They can’t even comprehend the opportunities."

THE ATTACKS NOBODY TALKS ABOUT (Palestine)

Melissa Steinberg Brodsky | Facebook

THE ATTACKS NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

 

Before we get into the numbers, let’s address the question that will inevitably come up. And that’s why are Israelis in Judea and Samaria at all?

 

The short answer is that the legal and historical picture is considerably more complicated than the phrase “illegal occupation” suggests, and anyone telling you it’s simple is leaving out a lot of information.

 

Jordan seized the West Bank in 1948, fighting a smaller Jewish army, and formally annexed it in 1950. That annexation was not recognized by most of the world, meaning Jordan was never the legitimate legal sovereign of the territory.

 

When Israel took control in 1967, it wasn’t taking land from a recognized state. It was taking land that had been held in legal limbo.

 

There’s also the matter of the League of Nations Mandate, which explicitly recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land and called for encouraging dense Jewish settlement there. Those provisions have never been formally repealed. Israel’s position is that the 1949 Green Line was an armistice line, not an internationally binding border, and that the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits transferring a population into occupied territory, doesn’t apply here because the territory was never under a legitimate sovereign from whom it was taken.

 

These arguments can be debated at length, and they are, by serious legal scholars on both sides of this. The point is that the people who live in Judea and Samaria are not simply squatters defying obvious international law. They are living in territory whose status is genuinely contested, in a region whose history did not begin in 1967.

 

With that on the table, here’s what’s actually happening there right now, on the ground, to Israeli civilians. Because this part seems to be omitted from mainstream conversations.

 

I believe in fairness, balance, and truth-telling. When it comes to Israel and Gaza, nothing on MSM is any of those.

 

So while eyeballs are locked on what Israelis are doing in Judea and Samaria, there is a parallel story that almost never makes a single front page. And that’s not fair, balanced, or truthful.

 

For years, Palestinians in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria have been conducting a sustained, organized, and increasingly sophisticated terror campaign against Israeli civilians in the area. The total silence around it is pretty loud, wouldn’t you agree?

 

Here are the numbers, directly from Israel’s Shin Bet security agency.

 

In 2023, the Shin Bet recorded 3,436 Palestinian terror incidents in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Forty-one Israelis were killed.

In 2024, that number nearly doubled to 6,828 total incidents.

 

The breakdown, cross-checked against official security data by Rescuers Without Borders, tells you exactly what those incidents look like:

 

3,668 instances of rock-throwing

843 Molotov cocktail attacks

671 attempts to blind drivers with laser pointers

526 explosive charges

364 arson attacks

179 shootings

37 stabbings

19 car-rammings

 

27 Israelis murdered. More than 300 wounded. These weren’t provocations or protests. These are targeted attacks on civilians going about their daily lives.

 

In 2025, successful attacks dropped to 57, with 20 Israeli fatalities. That drop is being reported as though the threat diminished. It didn’t.

Attempted attacks actually rose to 1,374 in 2025. What dropped was the number that got through, because Israel’s security forces stopped them.

 

The Shin Bet thwarted 1,040 major attacks in 2024 alone. That includes 689 planned shootings, 326 explosive device plots, car-rammings, stabbings, and two planned suicide bombings.

 

A stopped attack produces nothing visible. No bodies, images, footage, international emergency sessions, and absolutely zero statements from world leaders.

 

The 1,040 attacks that were prevented in 2024 generated almost no coverage outside Israeli media. The ones that weren’t prevented did.

 

That gap between what happens and what gets reported, that’s where this wild distortion of reality lives.

 

This might come as a surprise, but all this violence has a state sponsor.

 

Iran has been smuggling weapons into the West Bank through Jordan, recruiting Palestinians for terror operations, and funding the armed infrastructure of groups like the Jenin Battalion, affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

 

The Shin Bet recorded a 400% rise in Iranian espionage arrests in 2024. 13 Iranian plots were foiled that year alone.

 

When Israel launched Operation Iron Wall in January 2025, targeting the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps, they uncovered weapons manufacturing sites, explosives labs, underground tunnel systems, and Hamas networks with active plans for coordinated attacks across Judea and Samaria and into Israel proper.

 

More than 100 terror operatives were killed, 320 wanted suspects arrested, and 450 weapons seized in the northern West Bank alone.

 

This wasn’t a military operation targeting a civilian population. It was targeting an armed infrastructure that had been deliberately embedded in a civilian population. Which happens to be a war crime under international law, committed by the people who built it there: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iran.

 

Since October 7, 2023, through early February 2026, 62 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or armed clashes within Judea and Samaria and inside Israel.

 

That number comes directly from the UN human rights office’s own records, not Israeli government figures. Sixty-two people, and not a single UN emergency session. It hasn’t produced international sanctions or international condemnations. It hasn’t even trended on social media.

 

Compare that to the coverage generated by Israeli military actions in the same territory over the same period. Why the double standard?

The Israeli civilians driving to work through Gush Etzion, dropping their kids at school near Ariel, stopping at the junction near Nablus, are moving through a territory where more than a thousand attacks were planned against them in a single year. Most of those people will never know how many times something was stopped before it reached them.

 

That invisibility is by design, on the part of those who want the world to see only one side of what’s happening there. And the media ecosystem that has decided which casualties are worth covering and which are not is fully complicit in that.

 

The fact that Israeli casualties don’t get a second of coverage makes it obvious who’s actually driving this conversation. The question worth asking is why.

 

Because here’s what gets lost when only one side of this story gets told. Terror attacks, whether carried out by Palestinians against Israelis or by Israeli extremists against Palestinians, don’t just kill and injure people. They kill the possibility of anything better. Every attack hardens what each side believes about the other. Every attack that goes unacknowledged by the world hardens it further.

 

The cycle of violence feeds on exactly this…the sense that your dead count and theirs don’t, or theirs count and yours don’t. That asymmetry doesn’t move anyone toward peace. It moves everyone toward the next attack.

 

Honest accounting isn’t just a journalistic standard. It’s the only foundation on which any real dialogue between these two peoples could ever be built. You can’t get to good neighborly relations by deciding in advance whose suffering matters. You get there, if you ever get there, by refusing to look away from any of it.

Links - 21st May 2026 (1 - Mark Carney)

Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker on X - "There's an old adage: "They wouldn't keep doing it unless it worked"   Enter Mark Carney, who can't go five minutes without dropping the line "In a more divided and uncertain world" like it's his personal mantra.   Every speech, every policy pitch, every news release...bam, there it is.    Why? Because it sells fear. It justifies bloated government spending, endless regulations, and "unity" under Ottawa's control while painting critics as dividers.  The Carney Liberals peddle this doom-loop to distract from their own messes. Skyrocketing debt, housing chaos,  inflation, crime, immigration.     "The World's uncertain? Blame Trump or anyone but us.  Hand over more taxes!"  Repeat.  And the believers? Eastern citiots and media lapdogs who nod along, feeling virtuous in their echo chambers.   Newsflash...the World's always been messy. Carney's line isn't insight,  it's manipulation. But if it didn't work on the gullible, he'd have drop it yesterday.    Division sells votes."

Mike Lake on X - "It’s absolutely unfathomable how little scrutiny Canada’s national media is giving the Carney Liberal government, while offering megaphones to partisan Liberal insiders to declare their feelings about their literal political opponent. Where are the blaring headlines about Canada’s record debt, self-inflicted housing and food crises, increasing serious crime rate, and broken immigration system?  If we’re going to talk about political machinations, where are the dogged reporters asking MPs who have joined the Liberals about the conversations they’ve had, and with whom, in advance of crossing?  Who’s asking the newest Liberal MP why he took the last three months off?! Or if he actually lives in BC or Alberta? These are all important and fair questions that are in the public interest and are, quite simply, not being pursued by almost anyone in the mainstream media.  Relentlessly asking Liberals what they think of Conservatives is not the journalism Canada needs at this crucial moment in time."
Andrew Scheer on X - "The Canadian mainstream media is giving Carney the biggest open ice EVER in recent political history.   Punishing food inflation? Housing starts falling? Bigger deficits than Trudeau? They don’t care.   They even write articles about Canada being worse off than Alabama but act like it happened all of a sudden - like the weather.   Meanwhile, Carney hasn’t removed a single anti-development law, or approved a single new project out of his Major Projects office.   His response to food inflation is a recycled Trudeau policy that didn’t work back then.   He promised during the election that he would get a deal on US tariffs and so far things have just gotten worse.   Meanwhile, the media gush over trade deals that have already been signed by previous governments, regurgitate Liberal spin as headlines, and spend more time scrutinizing the opposition than the government.  We all know the Liberals subsidize them. But the Parliamentary press gallery could at least pretend to be objective by telling the truth on Carney’s actual results versus his rhetoric."

Foreign minister won't say if China is still seen as a 'disruptive' force in the world - "Within hours of landing in Beijing with Prime Minister Mark Carney, Foreign Minister Anita Anand appeared to be stepping back from the Liberal government’s 2024 assessment that China is an “increasingly disruptive” global force."

Liberals Must Go | Facebook - "Chrystia Freeland criticized Mark Carney for his deal with China. She had this to say on TV: “What is really ironic, and I personally would say is sad, is China today when it talks to countries like Canada, is casting itself as the reliable partner. As a country that particularly middle powers like Canada, can trust, can lean on, that if you do a deal with China, it’s a deal that has meaning. And China is also casting itself as the defender of this international order based on rules that the US created. Now, my own view is we need to be a little bit skeptical of commitments from China to do that. I was foreign Minister when, in retaliation for Canada’s decision to honor an extradition treaty with the United States, two Canadians were illegally seized, arrested by China, effectively held hostage. International experts concluded that their treatment amounted to torture. That is not the behaviour of a reliable partner! But for me, a really terrible thing that’s happening right now is a lot of people, a lot of Canadians are now coming to the conclusion that Beijing can be trusted more than Washington. I think that’s really sad and I don’t think that’s in America’s national interest.”"

Andy Lee on X - "Chinese News (posting under 大中生活 on WeChat) releases a glowing endorsement of Mark Carney. It’s described as being headquartered in Toronto, with a Chinese Canadian audience of 800,000. There’s only one issue. Its IP address shows the account is being run from Shandong, China.  @csiscanada  @CPC_HQ    http://chinesenewsgroup.com/index.php/news"
cbcwatcher on X - "Michael Cooper at the Procedure and House Affairs committee, asks Nathalie Drouin, Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, why they downplayed Chinese language propaganda on WeChat that was obviously promoting Mark Carney "It completely downplayed what on the whole were generally positive narratives about Mr. Carney." @MichaelCooperMP"

Carney wants 'justice' for the world, but what about for Canadians? - " It is always a little worrying when politicians wrap themselves in the flag. Patriotism is such an easy emotion to arouse that the public, with banners flying, almost always rally to the “cause” — whatever the cause is.  So it was Thursday, when Prime Minister Mark Carney, fresh from his triumph at Davos, made a speech in Quebec that declared Canada the greatest country on earth...  The world has been dangerous and divided for years and Canada has done nothing about it. Wayne Eyre, the out-going Chief of the Defence Staff, gave an interview to the Post in 2024 warning the world was in a “pre-wartime security environment.”  China and Russia were meddling dangerously in the Arctic, he said.  It was only when Trump — the Great Disrupter or the Big Bully, call him what you will — started making loud and belligerent noises that Canada increased defence spending... Justice is something that Canadians have been demanding for a while after being exposed to a litany of cases of criminals being bailed only to continually re-offend.  The Liberals broke the system which is why Carney announced “the strongest tightening of the criminal justice system in generations” in an effort to fix it.  As a bastion, said Carney, we are recruiting more agents for the Canada Border Services Agency, enabling greater surveillance at the border, breaking down internal trade and finding new international markets.  “We’ve announced a dozen new economic and security partnerships across four continents in the last six months,” said Carney.  Great, but if it hadn’t been for Trump would any of this have happened?  As for a “beacon” where rights are protected, perhaps the prime minister has not yet got around to reading the Appeal Court judgement last week which found the invocation of the Emergencies Act to deal with the Freedom Convoy was massive overreach and an enormous infringement of free expression.  Canadian civil rights were trampled into the ground and the prime minister remains mute on it.  The problem with appealing to patriotism is that it blinds people to the real issues."

Jimmy Lai shows the cost of Carney's devil's bargain with China - "The draconian 20 year imprisonment of Hong Kong dissident and newspaper-owner Jimmy Lai, effectively a death sentence, is a reminder that if we are going to get into bed with China we should be aware that we are soiled by association... Clearly, Carney is in no hurry to start lecturing the Chinese on their appalling human rights abuses, not with business at stake.  When he returned from his trade mission to Beijing last month, Carney was insistent on telling Canadians that Canada “can thrive in a new system” and that if we were ambitious we could secure enormous investment from new partners.  “And we must be pragmatic,” he said, code for there will be times when we need to hold our noses from the noisome behaviour of our new partners.  Canada’s approach to China had to be “recalibrated,” he said, it had to be narrow, specific and within guardrails as well as rooted in “value-based realism.” Human rights had to be part of broader discussions, preferably with coalition partners, he added.  Whatever all this meant, Carney summed it up perfectly when he said, “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” Four days later, Carney was preaching a different story at Davos. In a speech widely interpreted as aimed at U.S. President Donald Trump, the prime minister was demanding the creation of a new world order “that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights.”  Carney’s approach to China is thus a laissez faire, hands off, “no megaphone” policy. However, to the U.S., once considered an indispensable ally, Carney’s response is to shout very loudly at a world forum for middle powers to band together against the American oppressor.  The danger in such a foreign policy should be obvious. We have decided to implicitly trust a dangerous power that until a few months ago was considered the greatest threat to our democracy and way of life, while abandoning an ally because the current president cannot control his mouth or his temper...  it was less than a year ago that Carney, when asked for the biggest threat facing Canada, replied with one word: China... Anita Anand, the foreign affairs minister, said she was “disappointed” with the sentencing and called for his release.  Disappointed? It’s disappointing when your elderly mother can’t meet you for lunch, but it’s an absolute tragedy when an elderly man is imprisoned for believing in democracy.  Consider that in December, a month before Carney’s love-in with China, Anand wrote about Lai’s trial saying, “Canada condemns the politically motivated prosecution of Jimmy Lai under the National Security Law in Hong Kong and calls for his immediate release. We continue to express our concerns about deteriorating rights, freedoms and autonomy which are enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law.”  If we must trade with China, we should be under no illusions that there will be a cost — not just abandoning the megaphone but abandoning people such as Jimmy Lai.  In less than two months we have gone from strongly condemning his trial to merely being disappointed at his two decade sentence.  At Davos, Carney said Canada was not “powerless” — “The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.”  Fine, let’s start with honesty: What values is the prime minister willing to sacrifice as part of his devil’s bargain with China?"
Human rights only apply to Western countries

Ryan O'Connor on X - "Liberals during the pandemic: anyone who talks about the New World Order is a conspiracy theorist
Liberals, 2026: our "partnership" with the Chinese dictatorship "sets us up well for the New World Order""

Carney's artificial government - " Carney had promised a tariff relief deal with the U.S. by July, only for most of those tariffs to still be in place more than six months later. He had promised a Canada “building at speeds not seen in a generation,” only for his tenure to coincide with contractions in everything from manufacturing to construction.  But even many of the Carney government’s accomplishments aren’t all they seem. Agencies have been founded, agreements have been drafted and targets have been met, but actual material results are yet to be seen...
His much-touted trade deals aren’t really trade deals...  Carney said he told U.S. President Donald Trump in a phone call that he had secured “12 new deals on four continents in six months.” According to Carney, Trump was “impressed.”  But a closer look at virtually all those deals reveals no material changes to Canada’s prior trade relationship with the subject country. No alterations on tariff rates, no changes to import quotas; just documents replete with non-binding vagaries like “encourage joint research, development, and demonstration … in strategic areas.”  One of the only exceptions was Carney’s recent deal with Beijing, which saw Canada agree to admit 49,000 Chinese-made EVs in exchange for China dropping its punitive tariffs on Canadian canola. But even then, the deal was very limited. The only other material provision being Canada expressing its hope that China would drop its other punitive tariffs, if only for the next nine months. “Canada expects that Canadian canola meal, lobsters, peas and crabs will not be subjected to relevant anti-discrimination tariffs from March 1, 2026, to the end of this year,” it reads.  As Carney himself would confirm a few days later, all he did was “rectify some issues” with China, and he has no intention of pursuing a free trade deal...
The “major projects” list is still just a list
His expansion of the Canadian military has involved some clerical tricks... the Carney government placed the Canadian Coast Guard under the oversight of the Department of Defence.  Previously, the Coast Guard had been the purview of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The move was officially explained as being necessary to “strengthen coordination, improve information-sharing, and enhance Canada’s ability to protect and defend its interests at home and abroad.” But it just so happens that the agency’s $2.8 billion budget now counts as military spending.
Spending is very obviously not being reined in... his first budget also delivered the highest non-crisis deficit in Canadian history, coming in at $78.3 billion. For every dollar in “savings,” several dollars in new spending were added.  And as was highlighted this week by Canada’s interim parliamentary budget officer, billions of dollars in supposed spending reductions might be happening simply because the Carney government has rejigged the definition of spending...
Build Canada Homes isn’t fixing the housing crisis (and obviously has no plans to)...  Build Canada Homes had been pitched during the 2025 election as the agency that would singlehandedly turn the tide on Canada’s deeply entrenched housing affordability crisis. The agency would assemble prefabricated housing on federal lands “at scale,” pushing Canada towards an unprecedented build rate of 500,000 homes per year.  But the agency needed only to release its first plans and budget before it became clear that nothing close to 500,000 homes would be in the offing. A December analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Officer concluded that Build Canada Homes would, at best, be able to deliver “26,000 new housing units over five years.”"

Carney blames Conservatives for falling Canadian dollar and rising grocery prices, despite the Liberals having been in power for 10+ years : r/CanadianConservative

Carney definition of 'capital' recognized by nobody else on earth: PBO - "In their pursuit of a budget that prioritizes “capital spending,” the Liberals have adopted a definition of “capital” recognized by no other advanced economy on earth.  This was according to recent testimony by Jason Jacques, Canada’s interim Parliamentary Budget Officer.  Appearing before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates on Tuesday, Jacques was asked whether any other countries follow the Carney government’s newly adopted policy of counting items like subsidies and tax credits as “capital.” “We are unaware of any advanced jurisdictions that would define capital in that way,” replied Jacques.  Jacques cited the explicit example of the Carney government defining corporate income tax credits as “capital” in their 2025 budget.  “There are other measures as well, including operating subsidies provided to companies … that’s not really seen in other jurisdictions,” he said.  Although Canada’s 2025 federal budget contained the single largest non-crisis deficit in the country’s history ($78.3 billion), Prime Minister Mark Carney argued that much of this was due to “generational capital investments” rather than conventional federal spending.  It’s a theme Carney took up during the 2025 campaign. Under the slogan “Spend Less, Invest More,” he pledged a new kind of federal bookkeeping that would define spending as either “operational” or “capital.”... the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer has been warning for months that the Carney government seemed to be using the new “capital” definition to hide billions of dollars of spending that wasn’t really about capital at all.  In a November report on the 2025 budget, the PBO said the Carney government had an “overly expansive” definition of capital investments, and that the whole system seemed to be defined by “subjectivity.”  As one example, whole swaths of spending sometimes ridiculed as “corporate welfare” were now reclassified as “capital investments.”  This includes production subsidies and “capital-focused corporate income tax incentives” similar to those that formed the core of the various multi-billion dollar handouts to EV companies struck in the final months of the leadership of then prime minister Justin Trudeau. Volkswagen, for one, was promised a $13 billion package of grants, tax credits and subsidies if they built their EV facilities outside St. Thomas, Ont., while Stellantis was promised $15 billion to do the same in Windsor.  Under the Carney government’s Capital Budgeting Framework, a federal dollar can be tallied as capital spending so long as it assists “a private sector entity, Indigenous community or another level of government” to build capital.  Thus, all kinds of grants, subsidies, tax credits and bursaries are now eligible to be deleted from the government’s operational spending rolls.  A report published by the office of the PBO in November noted that while other countries do maintain separate capital budgets — most notably the U.K. —they’re much more disciplined in what they define as capital.  According to the report, if the Carney government was defining capital the way the British do, $94 billion of their planned “capital spending” over the next five years wouldn’t qualify."
Clearly, the Master Economist is right and the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer is just ignorant. He should Trust the Expert

Dan Albas on X - "Former PM Harper allegedly "silencing" fed.govt. scientists was a national news story that ran for weeks. PM Carney's Liberal govt. actually firing scientists and closing down research facilities is largely ignored by the same media org's."

Joe Rogan says Trump 'ruined Canada' by helping Mark Carney win : r/notthebeaverton
Of course, the left wingers were very upset. Ironically, one asked "Why is this chucklefuck so obsessed with us?", when left wing Canadians are obsessed over Trump and the US

Carson Jerema: Is Carney leader of the Trump 'resistance' or an inanimate carbon rod? - "This week Mark Carney applied for the job he really wants: leader of a new “rules-based international order” centred around “middle powers.” It is pretty much the same job that every Canadian prime minister, chafing at American power, has wanted. John Diefenbaker bristled at U.S. expectations that Canada host nuclear weapons, or support its Latin America strategy, and so hoped the British Commonwealth of Nations could exist as almost a rival to the United Nations. Pierre Trudeau embarrassed Richard Nixon by normalizing relations with China first, and Paul Martin oversaw the creation of the G20. Justin Trudeau, of course, tried to lecture the world about how Canada could lead the way on lowering greenhouse gas emissions.  Yet, now that Carney is making a similar play for similar reasons as his predecessors, much of the western media is swooning as if he discovered fire and we are all tasting cooked steak for the first time. He has been described variously as “meeting the moment,” the leader of the “resistance” and even as “Churchillian.” An American conservative writer posted on X that Carney was a “pretty big upgrade” on Trudeau.  Look, an inanimate carbon rod would have been a “pretty big upgrade” on Trudeau, but it is still an inanimate carbon rod, so perhaps some perspective is in order. During his speech at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, Carney spoke of a “rules-based order” that “is fading” and about how “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” It was all a not-so-veiled attack on U.S. President Donald Trump’s admittedly disruptive approach to foreign policy. “Rather than waiting for the hegemon to restore an order it is dismantling” Carney said, the so-called middle powers must “create institutions and agreements that function as described.”  His arguments might have been more persuasive if he hadn’t completely misunderstood why, since the end of the Second World War, the world has been marked by relative stability and peace, at least among western countries and their allies.  Carney spoke as if the “international rules-based order” exists (existed?) as a distinct entity separate and apart from American power. He recognized the “fiction” of such an “order” but argued the fiction was that “the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.” In fact, the only reason there is (was?) an “international rules-based order” is because the Americans wanted it. The U.S. didn’t merely help with, as Carney put it, “open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” it subsidized and backstopped the entire system through the projection of hard power and by creating alliances and relationships around the globe.  Carney merely spoke of amoral “hegemons” completely oblivious to history. After the world wars, rather than retreat into its historic isolationism and permit the world to fall back into a destructive era of multipolar competition, the Americans pledged to protect Western Europe and East Asia. The primary threats came from, as they do today, the Russians and the Chinese... Countries around the world permitted the Americans to set up military bases and enter into economic partnerships and trade deals, all of which the U.S. deemed in its interests. Allies participated (mostly) freely and willingly because they similarly benefitted from it. The U.S. is the system. Without it, the world we’ve known since 1945 would not exist.  Carney’s Davos speech contains not just historical errors, but also logical ones, particularly in his use of Václav Havel’s greengrocer. The grocer puts up a sign touting communist propaganda, as does every other business on the block, even though no one believes it. The lie of communist totalitarian regimes is enforced through fear. Carney twisted this story by likening participation in the post-war order with Havel’s greengrocer: “We participated in the rituals. And largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.” But this puts a global system that has permitted untold prosperity and security on par with some of the worst regimes of the 20th century."

Michael Kovrig on X - "There's just one problem. It also has the most subversively horrifying subtext by a Western world leader who is not Trump that I've read in a very long time. Carney's (or his speechwriter's) choice of Havel’s “lie” metaphor is rhetorically dangerous: it blurs the difference between democratic hypocrisy and totalitarian coercion, and it invites the interpretation that liberal order itself has been a quasi-ideological fraud, which for all its many flaws, it has not been.   For example, Canada was not coerced into the LRBIO in the way Havel's shopkeepers were coerced into communist conformity. It's a problematic parallel. And there are more of them.  I'm still thinking about this. It's a powerful speech but has some dangerous undercurrents...  a lot depends on what is meant..."

Dr. Andrea Wagner on X - "Carney’s @MarkJCarney  speech at WEF, invoking Václav Havel, landed harder than people realize.   Havel’s warning wasn’t simply about communism as an ideology. It was about how any society can be cemented into a soft or hard  totalitarianism when ordinary people are pressured to repeat slogans they don’t believe just to stay safe, employed, and socially accepted. That is how the lie becomes infrastructure. Not through tanks, but through compliance.  Canada has its own version of this now. It’s the compelled language, the forced scripts, the institutional rituals where people nod along to statements they privately reject: that sex is infinitely malleable, that women and men are interchangeable categories, that merit must be subordinated to “equity” as defined by bureaucracy, and that the default political solution is always more administration, more surveillance, more power for the state.  Freedom of speech has long died.  And the most corrosive part is the moral theatre: scapegoating mostly conservative “white men” as a class, lowering standards in the name of virtue, and calling it progress while universities and institutions lose the capacity for honest debate.   The moment truth becomes punishable and conformity becomes a job requirement, the society is already sliding. Slowly, politely, and then all at once.  Havel’s point was simple: the regime survives because people participate in the lie.   The only antidote is refusing to speak what you do not believe. Canada needs less coercion dressed up as compassion, and more courage to defend reality, meritocracy, and free speech before we wake up in a country where people are investigated, sanctioned, or even arrested for saying the obvious.  I grew up on the slogan Workers of the World Unite. I miss Václav Havel."
Dr. Andrea Wagner on X - "After reading the replies and DMs under my Václav Havel post, I have to say I’m genuinely impressed.  Havel is a Central and Eastern European icon. Everyone from our part of the world knows exactly what his name means: the moral clarity of living in truth, the courage to resist soft coercion, and the refusal to let comfort become complicity. Most Canadians don’t know him unfortunately.   Which is why it’s almost ironic to watch Carney invoke Havel at all, because Carney represents precisely the kind of managerial, elitist, fake, technocratic worldview Havel would have distrusted and despised.   Havel didn’t fight totalitarianism so that a new class of polished administrators could repackage control as “stability,” dissent as “risk,” and conformity as “social responsibility.”  But here’s the part that gave me real hope: the Canadians in my comments and my inbox are not asleep.   They are not naive.   They are paying attention.   They see the drift. They feel the tightening. They understand, instinctively, that Canada has been sliding into soft authoritarianism for years now, not with tanks, but with narrative policing, institutional capture, and the quiet punishment of anyone who refuses to repeat the approved script.  And if it’s even 51% of us who can still see it, then that’s a majority.  Which means it’s still possible to fight for the soul of this country. 🇨🇦   So let’s fight!"