Links - 6th July 2026 (2 - Left Wing Economics: UK)

Even the charity shops can’t survive in Labour’s high-tax Britain - "We should be clear about who is to blame for that: Rachel Reeves and the rest of the Cabinet appear to have no idea how tough they are making it for any form of commercial operation to survive.  The charity shops may not face the substantial increase in business rates imposed on pubs, cafés and other shops.   But they still have to pay higher National Insurance (NI) charges on the wages of paid staff, a soaring living wage, electricity bills inflated by green levies and VAT on new goods. Even more seriously, they are victims of the steady closure of other businesses. As the local café closes because it can’t pay the rates bills, the bookshop because it can’t pay the NI, the bookies because it can’t pay the new betting levy or the bakery because it can’t pay the electricity surcharges, the high street gets deader and deader.  With the charity shops gone, there will soon be nothing left. The vape shop that actually does a decent trade in smuggled cigarettes might survive, and so might the Turkish barber. But apart from that, there will be a row of boarded-up shop fronts.  Even the estate agents won’t bother with the “To Let” signs for much longer: it won’t be worth the money.   What was once the thriving heart of a local community will have become a commercial graveyard with nothing but tombstones for dead businesses. It is surely time for the Government to get serious about rescuing the high street from oblivion. It doesn’t have to be that hard.   It should reverse the NI increase, freeze the living wage and cut business rates, and if backbenchers won’t contemplate controlling welfare spending to pay for that, it should increase income tax instead. It is a fairer way to raise money than by hammering retailers.  Next, it should immediately suspend all the planning rules that make it so hard to turn old shops into apartments or workspaces. Buildings that are not occupied get run down very quickly. It is better if they are used for something than left idle."

Profits are not immoral - "The Labour Party manifesto for the 2024 general election promised “a new partnership with business to boost growth everywhere”. After two years, business doesn’t seem to think much of its new relationship.  Rain Newton-Smith, the director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), has accused Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, of treating business like “a cash tap” and warned that “the cost of doing business is reaching a tipping point”. Too often, Mrs Newton-Smith declared, Government treats profit as if it were a “dirty word”. Instead of blaming private companies for the rising cost of living, the Chancellor “should focus on fixing the economic problems she has created”.  Some might wonder whether the CBI is a little late to recognise the dangers presented by Labour’s socialism. The business lobby group has offered full-throated support to net zero and long appeared to be more concerned with Brexit than with domestic economic policy.   So for it to condemn the policies of Ms Reeves in such stark terms speaks volumes for how bad the situation for British businesses really is."

What on earth does it mean to be Left-wing now? - "generally speaking, the more a group or its spokesperson refers to “the rich” with obvious distaste, the further to the Left it is. Confusingly, however, they all say that the interests of “working people” are the sacred measure of political value, without ever defining precisely what that means. This is obviously intended to replace the old Labour shibboleth that the party represented the interests of working class people as opposed to the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. So “working people” is imprecise for a reason: it performs an important function by relinquishing the old militant associations and avoiding the rather patronising note of snobbery implicit in the word “class”. Now, anybody whose heart is in the right place (and who works for a living) can be a part of the Labour movement. Unless and until they earn too much money whereupon they become part of the hated “rich” – even if they have earned their wealth through honest endeavour and in the process created opportunities for other people to become more affluent and therefore not reliant on the state for assistance. So the term “working people” perpetuates the problem rather than solving it. It preserves the distinction between those who work (probably very hard and at genuine risk) perhaps by creating their own businesses, and those who are employed by them. It is the latter group whom Labour notably seeks to protect from the possible predations of the former, through extended employment rights and increases in the minimum wage. Labour, in virtually all its guises, remains on the side of those who work for somebody else rather than embracing those who initiate new enterprises – and that is a sure fire recipe for undermining economic growth. If you want growth – which has been the endlessly reiterated goal of Sir Keir Starmer and his Chancellor – you must embrace the idea of creating new wealth wholeheartedly which means, as Blairite New Labour used to say, letting some people get “filthy rich”. If you want a free enterprise economy to succeed, and to bring the self-determination and social mobility which it can provide, you must not cast yourself as the enemy of entrepreneurialism, especially as the budding entrepreneur is as likely as not to be from what we used to call the “working class”.  Running through all this verbiage, there is a deep rooted contradiction which nobody from any of the factions seems prepared to address. Much of Labour’s policy – or lack of policy – is related to its attitudes to welfare spending. Supporting people who are not working, or helping to support those whose working income is too low to sustain them, seems to be the encumbrance which none of the party’s incarnations can confront. Even when the cost of this support is making it impossible for the state to spend money on improving the services which are important to its favoured “working people” – health, education, defence – the Left, even in its diluted modern form, cannot wind it down.  Paradoxically, this inability to reform welfare dependency is a major obstacle to reconciling Labour with what used to be its natural supporters. Working class people, whom Labour now call “working people”, are notoriously infuriated by those in their communities who live on welfare benefits. Unlike middle class sympathisers who manage to blame themselves for “social unfairness”, they are inclined to believe that the word “fair” means “you get out of life pretty much what you put in.” The Left’s position is obviously contradictory: if you revere working people and regard their interests as the sacred core of your political mission, then you should share in the resentment that they feel for those who choose not to work, or who calculatedly limit their earnings so as not to lose their in-work benefits.  What the welfare programme does, as most “working people” can see, is reward poverty and penalise those who begin to emerge from it by removing guaranteed state support from them. As Arthur Laffer put it: “If you pay people to be poor, you will get more and more poor people.” There are other perversities too in the Left’s message. In all its forms, but most stridently as it approaches the hard end of the spectrum, the Left urges the most extreme environmental measures. Ed Miliband, the hard-Left’s most plausible voice, is evangelical on this point. It seems not to occur to him that the voters whose cost of living would be most severely affected are precisely those “working people” whom he idealises. Telling them to sacrifice their precarious standard of living for the sake of future generations makes him sound more like an indulged aristocrat than a defender of the proletariat.  Add to this that many of his comrades on the “progressive” Left support Arab regimes which suppress women and murder homosexuals. What on earth does being Left-wing mean now, in any of its forms?"

Britain’s biggest company has consigned the UK to the history books - "“We can’t wait for the UK to keep pace with us.”  This damning indictment from the country’s largest company, delivered to a room filled with investors and innovators, is a serious concern.  Although, if we’re honest, it hardly comes as a shock.  The words came from Paul Williamson, who leads corporate ventures and investments at Arm, the $435bn (£324bn) juggernaut that built the chip architecture found in every smartphone, and which remains at the vanguard of semiconductor design today. It is the future, and yet has already consigned the UK to the past.  Famously, the firm opted to list in New York rather than relist in London in 2023 – and its market cap has grown eightfold since that decision. Despite being born in a barn in Cambridge, the city in which it remains headquartered, the company is withering about its home.  While Williamson was extremely positive about the scientific ambition of Cambridge, he decried the city and the nation’s “too modest, too cautious, too local” approach when it comes to business. And he was not alone in this assessment of the country’s prospects.   Speaking earlier at the same Oxford-Cambridge supercluster conference, boldly entitled “Creating a scientific superpower”, Irene Tracey, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, defined the core issue: “There’s a really deep culture of anti-growth in the UK.”... Peter Freeman, of the Cambridge Growth Company, complained that Anglian Water and Thames Water were the biggest blockers of new developments.  These are providers of public utilities fighting planning applications for new homes that would allow these regions to thrive; a disgraceful and embarrassing state of affairs.  We have seen multiple times what happens if cities are allowed to fight the blockers and force regeneration. Just look at the financial hub of Canary Wharf, built from the ruins of the docklands, or the squalor of King’s Cross transformed into the “Silicon Roundabout” of AI... One of the most depressing issues is that money is desperate to flow into the UK, but we refuse it time and again – and even when we do manage to accept it, our country is little more than a staging post for its onward destination to foreign lands... Our dreams of becoming a data centre powerhouse are over before they’ve begun, Williamson says, thanks to a key economic disadvantage of the UK – incredibly expensive energy... If the best the Treasury can bring is failing to fiddle with the margins, the UK is set to remain little more than an incubator for the US’s next big thing."

Looking for Growth on X - "Do you know just how bad the current state of British planning is?  £800,000,000 is being spent on Heathrow’s planning for the runway.   Not the runway. The PLANNING.   We have become a country ran by the lawyers, for the lawyers.    Is this really “efficient spending?”"

Meme - David @david_stillwell: "The world's largest building cost less than a planning application in the UK."
"The building is so big it has its own microclimate (Boeing). World's largest building cost £740m to build and is so big it has its own weather. The colossal facility cost more than to build and has produced over 5,000 wide-body aircraft since it opened in 1967"

Meme - Total NIMBY Death @BarneyFlames: "1980-2000 was the only time England outperformed Europe in economic growth and the voters have never forgiven Thatcher for that."
prge @shguke: "there you go"
"Rarely had it so bad. Average annual GDP per capita growth over lifetime, %"
Left wingers hate economic growth, so

War is forcing Britain to rethink the triple lock on pensions - "“We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget,” warned Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the former Nato secretary general, in a speech this month.  He is right that the resources dedicated to welfare are slowly ratcheting up. At the start of this parliament, it accounted for 10.7pc of GDP.  By the start of the next decade, this figure will have expanded to 11.2pc – equivalent to £406.9bn, the biggest ticket item for government expenditure... Despite the hefty price tag, the British electorate wants to keep it. Since the triple lock’s introduction, it has become one of the most universally popular policies.  Whether young or old, Labour or Tory, rich or poor – a large majority of Britons back it. YouGov polling shows that two thirds of voters support maintaining it while only 11pc say it should go. The remainder say they’re unsure. Such polling is flawed, however, says Sir Charles: “Whenever you ask people about any spending policy, the surveys never associate the cost. People always like having money spent on them if there’s no price tag attached to it... Even without the need to increase military spending rapidly, Britain’s ageing demographics were already making it a costly choice... While the most common trope from pensioners is that they have “paid into the system”, the truth is that Britain’s pension system is pay-as-you-go.  There is no ring-fenced account for the state pension. Rather, workers pay for their parents and grandparents, hoping that they will be entitled to the same benefit one day.  But as deaths are poised to outnumber births this year and net migration could fall to zero for the first time in more than three decades, the burden on a shrinking base of taxpayers grows... Among Britain’s pensioners, many feel strongly that scrapping the triple lock is unaffordable and unacceptable.  But economists say the problem it set out to address has largely been solved.  A typical British pensioner’s income in 2023 was equivalent to 84pc of the average across the population before factoring in housing costs, according to the OECD. This marks a jump of 11 percentage points since 2000.  As the vast majority of retirees own their own home outright, this often leaves them with a similar or higher living standard than working-age families... Children grow up in homes with almost double the rate of relative poverty as in families that are retired, Hale says. She highlights that today’s pensioners also went to university for free and benefited from the right-to-buy policy, which significantly boosted homeownership... Supporters of higher state pensions often point to international statistics showing the state pension as far lower than in other countries.  But experts caution that such comparisons are highly misleading, as Britain’s pension system differs from those of many neighbouring countries. Comparing the generosity of the UK state pension with that of another rich country is therefore apples and oranges."
Time to double down on net zero to destroy the economy

The welfare juggernaut is out of control - "How has the country managed to get itself into a position where more than 600,000 households receive welfare payments greater than the average worker’s post-tax salary of £32,200? In some cases the benefits are far greater, with 16,000 households paid £60,000, the equivalent of earnings well over £80,000.  There is supposed to be a cap on the total amount a household can receive, but so many exemptions have been applied as to render it pointless"

Labour is not 'the party of the workers'. It is the party of those who leech off them - "The last Labour MP who constantly sounded the drum for radical reform that would make an actual difference to the disastrous dependency on benefits of too many citizens was the late Frank Field, and he was dismissed from his role as minister for welfare reform after just a year in office in Tony Blair’s government.  Since then, despite the occasional glimmer of sense from the Labour benches in the House of Commons, there have been few attempts at benefits reform that the party has not opposed. The benefits cap announced by chancellor George Osborne in 2010, the so-called “bedroom tax”, which reduced the benefits of claimants living in social housing with a spare or unused bedroom, the two-child benefit cap and the introduction of Universal Credit to replace various predecessor benefits. Labour promised to reverse them all, even if the two-child benefit cap is the only one they’ve got around to so far.  Yet with the benefits bill costing taxpayers £155bn a year – and rising fast – we face either radical reform or bankruptcy. The former is at least politically manageable, if difficult. But is Labour, the so-called party of the workers, in a position to effect the kind of change that is needed? The recent record suggests not. When the former work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, brought forward modest reforms that would have shaved just £5bin off the benefits bill, it only took a modest rebellion by Labour backbenchers to force Keir Starmer into one of his many high-profile, humiliating U-turns, undermining his own minister in the process. As John Major said this week, governments with very large, three-figure majorities tend to be unmanageable because the back benches are packed with MPs who know they’re only there for a single term, and therefore have little to lose by rebelling and forcing the government to compromise on unpopular policies, even the necessary ones.  Real reform of the sort that is needed in our welfare system would cause national uproar. It would provoke anger in housing estates and in the House itself. It would make the government of the day tremendously unpopular. While an administration committed to putting country before party might seriously consider the reforms needed, this Labour one certainly won’t. For good governance we need a government – and a prime minister – prepared to say “No” to his back benchers, and prepared to suffer the unpopularity that comes with real leadership. Because government is not just about doing what’s popular – in fact, it’s almost never that. It is about, or should be about, deciding what’s best for the country and getting on with it. At a time when the consensus across the political centre is for massively reduced levels of net immigration, the need for more workers earning their living rather than feeding off the state has never been greater... if “the party of the workers” won’t do what is necessary to avoid the imminent cliff edge, then another party will have to step up and remove that mantle from Labour once and for all."

The party of the workers has brought back mass unemployment - "The statistics speak for themselves, as do the repeated testimonies of business leaders up and down the country.  An organisation that claims to represent working-class people has instead brought unemployment back to levels not seen in the UK for many years...  it is indisputable that Reeves has sent the cost of running a business – whether small, medium, or large – rocketing through the roof with all sorts of dire knock-on effects.  The next shoe to drop is huge increases in the minimum wage, something Sir Keir Starmer described this week as an example of how the “Government is choosing to provide security in an increasingly dangerous world”.  Yet as usual, the hype simply isn’t even close to being a reflection of reality.  Labour’s changes are undoubtedly full of “good intentions”, as Cressida Hogg, the chairman of the Confederation of British Industry, put it on Thursday.  The problem, in her view, is that the minimum wage reforms are having the opposite of their intended effect, instead freezing young people out of work by making it too expensive to hire those at the start of their careers. Labour has vowed to axe age bands for minimum wage rates, meaning those aged 18 to 20 will be paid the same as those 21 and over. Hourly pay for younger workers has leapt 26pc from £8.60 when Labour came to power to £10.85 today. The move will “create worse outcomes and fewer jobs for young people”, Hogg told an audience of business leaders in the North West.  As a City grandee in charge of one of Britain’s most influential business lobby groups, Hogg’s intervention is something of a bombshell. This was a flagship policy at the heart of Labour’s election manifesto, with the party promising to “remove the discriminatory age bands so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage”.  Yet Hogg said “the cost of doing business has become a bar on the door of opportunity” for the young. What a spectacular own goal on the part of ministers.  Labour will baulk at the suggestion it has sent a wrecking ball through the jobs market but the evidence is irrefutable.  Youth unemployment is up to 16pc – a level not seen in more than a decade and threatening to leave behind a lost generation. Nearly one million youngsters are classified as Neets – not in employment, education or training – at the same time as nine in 10 employers complain of a shortage of skilled workers. Unemployment at a five-year high of 1.8 million but on course to surpass the two million mark for the first time in 10 years.  Meanwhile, under Labour, taxes on work are rising at a faster rate than any other major economy on the planet, with the UK experiencing the biggest jump among 40 mostly rich countries last year, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.  At the same time, many of those on welfare now earn £2,500 a month, which is more than the minimum wage.  Under this ham-fisted, economically illiterate Government, the incentive to employ people is disappearing fast and so too the motive to work. It is a twin shock that will exact grave and lasting damage on the economy."

Will Tanner on X - "It's annoying to see people frame this as a good thing.  The decline in drinking just indicates people are being less social, not that they're getting healthier; whites actually have better health outcomes if they have a few glasses of wine a few days of the week.  More importantly, alcohol is a social lubricant and has long been a part of our Western culture for that reason. It helps bring people together, particularly in mixed male and female spaces or when it's just the guys, and so to see it decline is to see the other neuroses of the present--particularly childlessness and atomization--increase"
The Old World Show on X - "The death of the famous pubs of Britain is another example of this. Men once got together and built bonds while drinking and smoking in Britain's pubs, which dotted every village and town across the country. Then smoking was banned, and extortionate taxes and fees piled on top of drinking in pubs, to make it unaffordable.  That has gradually killed pub life, and destroyed the social bonds between British men that were once strengthened by it.  An atomized and lonely populace is exactly what the bureaucratic regime wants, so this has succeeded wildly for it"

A million young Britons are falling through the cracks - "one in seven of the UK’s 16 to 24-year-olds — almost a million people — are stranded outside employment, education or training (Neet), with the steep rise of the past three years taking the share of dislocated youth back to levels not seen for over a decade. This upward march is a stark outlier internationally, making the UK worse than its peers on either side of the Atlantic and decisively displacing Italy as the country where youth means being left high and dry. Most concerning, Britain’s lost million are increasingly locked into their isolation: 60 per cent of current Neets have never had a job — the highest figure since records began — and almost a third report a disability or chronic health problem that prevents them working. Governments can at times rely on a fair wind in the wider labour market to bring some economically marginalised youths back in from the cold, but hundreds of thousands in this group are now so far removed from the world of work that they risk becoming permanently stuck outside. Any serious attempt to reverse the trend should begin by understanding what is behind it. That must include acknowledging that government policy is at least partly to blame. As forecast in an analysis for the Institute for Fiscal Studies by Sam Ray-Chaudhuri and Xiaowei Xu, increases to the minimum wage and employers’ social security contributions have made hiring much more expensive in hospitality and retail — two of the main employers of the young. Sure enough, the number of 16-24s in those industries has fallen markedly in the past year or two, tipping tens of thousands into unemployment. But it’s worth remembering that the much larger and worst-hit group is those who have never worked at all; here we must turn to the education system. While common knowledge among most teachers and parents, the steep rise in chronic absence from school during and immediately after the Covid pandemic has derailed the crucial transition from compulsory education to the adult world for huge numbers of young people... despite local authorities having a legal duty to track and support these marginally attached young people, huge numbers are slipping through the cracks. About 10 per cent or more of 16 and 17-year-olds are either registered Neet or unknown to the authorities in some local areas.  Intersecting with all of this is the rise of reported youth mental health problems and disability claims — itself owing to a combination of underlying health trends and changes to the way benefits are awarded to claimants. Nowhere else has seen as steep an increase in young adult ill health as the UK, where the share of 16 to 24-year-olds reporting a problem that reduces their ability to carry out day-to-day activities has almost tripled from 7 per cent in 2008 to 21 per cent today."
Time for more "awareness" about mental health, to increase benefits and pay for it by "taxing the 'rich'" because only a monster bootlicker would advocate otherwise, because almost everyone is one paycheque away from being homeless.

Politics UK on X - "🚨 NEW: Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden told Peter Mandelson that Labour MPs always ask "who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others""

Britain is at a tipping point, and our future is in Ed Miliband’s hands - "sometimes history actually is at the fulcrum, when just a little pressure either way can send a system towards wildly diverging outcomes. It seems clear to me at least that Britain is entering such a period across several fields at once.  The long, slow run down of our military capacity has progressed to the degree that the consequences can no longer be denied. The automation of cognitive labour is threatening an economy built on the bet that manufacturing could be offshored and automated, but that labour-intensive services would remain big British employers forever.   The Boriswave of migrants is about to crystallise into a catastrophic fiscal burden unless their pathway to permanent settlement is blocked, or unless the next government takes action to reverse it.  Across multiple areas, the same pattern keeps emerging. Britain has run down its stock of physical and social capital, embraced short-term solutions at the expense of long-term costs, and now faces a choice between continuing down the current disastrous path or attempting to rebuild, finding that the damage is either exponentially harder or impossible to undo.  Energy might be the best example, as it ties so many fields together. In the United States and elsewhere, investment is pouring into the construction of data centres and power plants as firms race to build the clusters necessary to train and run AI models. In Britain, OpenAI is suspending its flagship investment. Its stated reasons – “regulation and the cost of energy” – have made the UK a marginal investment case, rather than a core one.  British industrial electricity prices (before taxes) have gone from 32 per cent higher than those in France in 1997 to 94pc higher today. They are, by some margin, the highest in the developed world. Over the same period, energy use per capita has fallen by 38pc in Britain, compared to 25pc and 17pc in France and the United States.  Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes  Sam Ashworth-Hayes is an Assistant Comment Editor and leader writer for The Telegraph, a role he took up in early 2023. See more Published 16 April 2026 11:30am BST Related Topics      Rebooting Britain, First World War Centenary, Ed Miliband, Labour Party, Artificial Intelligence, Energy   334 Miliband is making decisions which will shape the country for the next decade Miliband is making decisions which will shape the country for the next decade Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA  A philosophically inclined friend is fond of bringing up a particular line from Hegel: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”  It is a poetic reflection on how a true understanding of why events unfold and how they are connected is available only with the clarity of hindsight. To pick an extreme example, when Edmund Gerde failed to tell Leopold Lojka that the route of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade had changed, he had no reason to think that he was setting the events of the First World War in motion.  Even so, there are still times when we find ourselves obviously at one of those tipping points, or at least are told that we are. Sometimes they are confected for political reasons: Tony Blair’s 1997 claim that Britain had “24 hours to save the NHS” comes strongly to mind, as do its various imitators (48 hours to save the NHS, 72 hours to save the NHS, three months, six months and so on – time and standards in British healthcare apparently both move backwards). Catastrophic predictions followed by anodyne outcomes are part of Westminster’s standard operating procedure.  But sometimes history actually is at the fulcrum, when just a little pressure either way can send a system towards wildly diverging outcomes. It seems clear to me at least that Britain is entering such a period across several fields at once.  The long, slow run down of our military capacity has progressed to the degree that the consequences can no longer be denied. The automation of cognitive labour is threatening an economy built on the bet that manufacturing could be offshored and automated, but that labour-intensive services would remain big British employers forever.   The Boriswave of migrants is about to crystallise into a catastrophic fiscal burden unless their pathway to permanent settlement is blocked, or unless the next government takes action to reverse it.  Across multiple areas, the same pattern keeps emerging. Britain has run down its stock of physical and social capital, embraced short-term solutions at the expense of long-term costs, and now faces a choice between continuing down the current disastrous path or attempting to rebuild, finding that the damage is either exponentially harder or impossible to undo.  Energy might be the best example, as it ties so many fields together. In the United States and elsewhere, investment is pouring into the construction of data centres and power plants as firms race to build the clusters necessary to train and run AI models. In Britain, OpenAI is suspending its flagship investment. Its stated reasons – “regulation and the cost of energy” – have made the UK a marginal investment case, rather than a core one.  British industrial electricity prices (before taxes) have gone from 32 per cent higher than those in France in 1997 to 94pc higher today. They are, by some margin, the highest in the developed world. Over the same period, energy use per capita has fallen by 38pc in Britain, compared to 25pc and 17pc in France and the United States.  These facts are not unconnected. The result of choices made by successive governments is an energy structure in which system costs are compounding while reliability decays: the prospect of surpluses in summer and scarcity in winter means that the National Energy System Operator is increasingly focused on managing demand, rather than meeting it, and the costs of this system are making energy-intensive industries uneconomic. We have storage capacity for fewer than 20 days of average gas use, and our actual reserves are far below this level.  In the North Sea, meanwhile, the number of exploration wells drilled fell from 106 in 2019 to six in 2024. The decline is political, as well as geological and, as a result, the drilling rigs and skilled workers needed to revitalise it are leaving for jurisdictions with more activity. The energy tipping point has not yet passed, but it is approaching. The investment decisions which will shape the next decade and counting of British economic prosperity are being taken now.   Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, and his colleagues are doing their level best to bind the country to their preferred approach through long-running contracts with renewables companies and potentially new treaties with the EU. They may not succeed, and the measures could be undone, but there is only a limited window to change course. Another term of Labour – or indeed the Greens – and it will pass.  In this, the energy sector serves as a microcosm for Britain as a whole. Unless we confront our problems head-on soon, we will find ourselves locked into a pathway of national decline."

How to spot the next mania

From 2024:

How to spot the next mania
Each new panic follows the same playbook

In the late Eighties and Nineties, the psychiatric profession became infatuated with “recovered memory”, which was conceived in the US but also captivated Europe, including Britain. Practitioners claimed that patients sexually abused as children would naturally repress any recollection of their suffering as too painful, but therapists could employ specialised techniques to retrieve these terrible experiences and so heal the patients’ trauma. As a profusion of books, articles and documentaries cultivated a larger cultural fascination, the recovered memory juggernaut resulted in countless adults “remembering” early childhood abuse, usually by parents. Patients would exhume recollections of having been subject to parental rape or oral sex when they were babies. Accusations followed. Families were torn apart.

In hindsight, it’s now accepted that the therapists were frequently implanting these “memories” in their suggestible patients. Recovered memory was a social mania — a.k.a. a moral panic, social contagion, mass formation psychosis, or mass hysteria. In the throes of the popular delirium, many people found this exercise in psychic archaeology wholly convincing (and no little titillating). For a few years, recovered memories were even accepted as factual testimony in American courts. Only from a distance does the sordid psychological dowsing look barmy.

For me, since roughly 2012, what has therefore been more disturbing than the content of any given hysteria is our continuing susceptibility to collective derangement, which can spread and take hold with alarming rapidity in a digital era. To examine the unnerving phenomenon of the communal fever, often destructive but rarely contested at its height, in my most recent novel Mania I invented my own. Suddenly everyone accepts that all humans are equally intelligent, and “cognitive discrimination” is “the last great civil rights fight”. In other words, there’s no such thing as stupid. Because that assertion is itself stupid, my concocted mania seems apt.

Within the astonishingly short time frame of 10 years, I count four real-life collective crazes: transgenderism, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns (which spawned sub-crazes over masks and vaccines), and Black Lives Matter. I also worry we’re already in the grip of social mania number five.

Take trans. Gender-identity disorder was not that long ago an extraordinarily rare psychiatric diagnosis largely constrained to men. Abruptly circa 2012 — on the heels of such a successful crusade for gay rights and even gay marriage that homosexuality became passé — a profusion of television documentaries hit our screens about little boys who wore dresses and played with dolls. Fast-forward to the present, and the renamed diagnosis has exploded by thousands of percent across the West and now pertains abundantly to girls. Teachers tell toddlers that they have to decide whether they’re a girl or a boy or something in-between. We’re subjecting children to powerful, life-altering experimental drugs and surgically removing healthy breasts and genitals, even at the cost of permanent sexual dysfunction and infertility. “Some people are born in the wrong body” has become a truism, which sounds to me as medically credible as phrenology or bloodletting.

The social mania displays a few consistent characteristics. First and foremost, it never seems like a social mania at the time. In the thick of a widespread preoccupation, its precepts simply seem like the truth. Trans women are women; get over it. Or: masculinity is toxic; virtually all women have been subject to sexual torment and male abuse of power; regarding any accusations they make, no matter how far-fetched or petty, women must be believed. Or: Covid-19 is so lethal, and such a threat to our endurance as a species, that we’ve no choice but to shut down our whole economies and abdicate our every civil liberty to contain the disease. Or: all Western countries are “systemically racist”; all white people are genetically racist; the police are all racist (even if they’re black) and should be defunded or abolished; the only remedy for “structural racism” is anti-meritocratic, over-compensatory racial quotas in hiring and education.

While the seeds of a mania have often been planted earlier, for most ordinary people it comes out of nowhere. Transgenderism rocketed to a cultural fetish over a matter of  months. After one fully fledged creep was exposed as a serial sex abuser, #MeToo spread on Twitter like potato blight. Literally overnight, citizenries in March 2020 took it for granted that their “liberal democracies” could justifiably deny them freedom of movement, assembly, association, press and even speech, while many became eager enforcers of the chaotic, despotic, and sometimes positively silly new regime. It took only a few days for George Floyd’s death to trigger huge protest marches all over the world. This hyperbolic response to a single undeserved killing in a one mid-sized American city was partially fed by the pent-up frustrations of whole populations under house arrest during Covid. But for Koreans to troop down the streets of Seoul chanting, “Black lives matter!” when the country has hardly any black people was insensible. Likewise, Britons chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” when their constabulary is unarmed. Moreover, all these recent examples illustrate how moral panics have become more international in scope than ever before.

Manias are fuelled by emotion. The cult of trans has capitalised on our yearning to seem enlightened and compassionate.  It has been presented as the logical next step after gay rights, the movement plays on our craving to feel ultra-contemporary. #MeToo both fed off and promulgated resentment, self-pity, and vengeance; in standing up to abuse of power, it tempted some women to abuse their own power to ruin men’s lives. Covid lockdowns stirred primitive terror of death and contagion, until we came to view other people as mere vectors of disease. BLM stimulated the nascent Christian proclivities for guilt, repentance, and penitence even in the secular, while offering black people opportunity to vent frustration, self-righteous fury, and even hatred. All manias thrive on our desire to be included by our own herd and on our anxiety about being exiled — or, if you will, about being UnHerded.

Because a proper mania brooks no dissent. In its grip, everyone believes the same thing, says the same thing, and even uses the same language. A quasi-religious fervour makes anyone outside the bubble of shared obsession seem heretical, dangerous, insane or outright evil. Opponents of lockdowns were granny killers; the unvaccinated were pariahs who shouldn’t be allowed to fly, eat out or obtain healthcare, while some argued “anti-vaxxers” should be imprisoned or put to death. Their rhetoric and affect often violent, transactivists tar critics as murderers; not long ago, writing a single discouraging word about the mutilation of children would end your career. (Self-protectively, I kept my own journalistic mouth shut for a good four years; most journalists are still prudently bumping along on the trans bandwagon.) Women who expressed reservations about the indiscriminate sweep of #MeToo were traitors to their sex. In 2020, even tweeting “All lives matter” got you sacked.

Manias are prone to grow increasingly extreme, accumulating evermore casualties before collapsing from their contradictions. Stalin’s show trials, Cambodia’s killing fields, Mao’s cultural revolution, obviously Nazism; the eugenics movement in the West (which we like to forget), the rage for lobotomies, and the paranoia about Satanism in day-care centres and the contagion of multiple personality disorder of the Nineties — all these misguided infatuations got worse before they imploded.

Hula hoops were harmless, but most manias are malign. The trans movement has warped primary school education, demented our culture with confusion over biological reality, condemned thousands of children to painful surgery and pharmaceutical side-effects, encroached on women’s privacy, and corrupted female sports. #MeToo contaminated relations between the sexes with such mistrust that it may have alone lowered the Western birth rate, while destroying the careers of countless men whose sins were at most venial. Covid lockdowns ravaged our economies, fuelled inflation, and exploded sovereign debt, while damaging the prospects of a generation of school children. BLM has exacerbated racial animosity, demonised meritocracy, and fostered a wasteful, parasitical managerial class of DEI enforcers whom it will be laborious to get shed of.

Yet both the priests and disciples of moral panics are driven by good intentions. They genuinely believe they are doing God’s work. Aggressively virtuous, “wokeness” is one big bundle of mania.

Some hysterias die an easier death than others. Although the fragile, whiny accuser of a US Supreme Court nominee was once heralded as awesomely “courageous”, Christine Blasey Ford’s recent memoir has drawn weary disdain. Ergo, #MeToo is over. Nevertheless, a social frenzy seldom subsides because its agitators announce they were addled, just as the masses of ordinary people caught up in the derangement seldom acknowledge having been led astray. Everyone simply moves on, only to become consumed by something else.

There’s rarely an identifiable point at which a mania is debunked (barring a world war or counterrevolution). Few will recant, much less apologise to the victims of their excesses. A funny amnesia sets in, as forgetfulness is more palatable than shame; the Chinese have simply erased the cultural revolution from their history books. Occasionally, when folks outside the dogmatic bubble prosecute, the cheerleaders of utter tosh are called to account. We did have Nuremburg, and the belated Pol Pot trials in Cambodia. By contrast, the UK’s farcical Covid inquiry is conducted by the same establishment it’s investigating. The subsequent report may criticise single politicians for not having locked down sooner, but it can’t conclude that the lockdowns were a cataclysmic mistake, lest practically everyone at the top be implicated.

Once manias die down, most people pretend they never believed these things to begin with. Having contracted Covid five or six times post-vaccination, multiply boosted mRNA fanatics aren’t prone to advertise their vicious denunciation of the unvaccinated only two or three years ago — any more than recovered memory patients are inclined to advertise that they destroyed their relationship with their parents over an erroneous psychiatric fad. We like to think that we’re “modern” (and what peoples in the present have ever fancied themselves otherwise?) and that we base our beliefs on fact. But we’re just as prey to mass delusions as we ever were.

Accordingly, how’s this for mania number five. It isn’t a mania; it’s just the truth: check. It’s suddenly all anyone in the media seems to talk about, and they use all the same language: check. It’s powered by emotion: check. It brooks no dissent, refuses to acknowledge there’s even a debate to be had, and doghouses all sceptics as evil “deniers” who will bring about the end of world: check. It’s malign, getting increasingly extreme, and is driven by the very best of intentions: check, check, check. I’m not about to get into the argument here, but the escalating hysteria over climate change — or the climate “emergency”, climate “crisis”, or climate “collapse” — displays all the markers, does it not?

Links - 6th July 2026 (1 - Euthanasia)

Dutch doctors euthanized an autistic teen. Why some say that should be a 'wake-up call' for Canada - "Despite his young age, his doctor had “no doubts whatsoever” that the youth had the mental capacity to appreciate what he was seeking, and that there was no prospect of improvement, according to the case report. His death, part of a dramatic increase in psychiatric euthanasia in the Netherlands in recent years, should serve as a warning to Canada as a special parliamentary committee reconvenes to assess the country’s readiness to permit MAID on the sole basis of mental suffering, a prominent Canadian psychiatrist says. The Dutch experience “should be taken as a wake-up call,” said Dr. Sonu Gaind, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and a past president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association. “The threshold (for assisted death) in Canada is actually lower than the Netherlands,” Gaind said. “If MAID for sole mental illness is opened up in Canada, the numbers would significantly exceed what you see in the Netherlands.” Proponents of MAID for mental suffering have long held the Netherlands out as a model — “no slippery slope there” — arguing that psychiatric euthanasia in Canada, like the Netherlands, would remain extremely rare. However, the Dutch situation suggests a more appropriate metaphor for the risks of medically assisted suicide for mental illness “is not a slippery slope but a runaway train,” as Charles Lane reported last week in The Atlantic. MAID for psychiatric suffering has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002. O nce “virtually nonexistent,” with only one or two cases per year between 2002 and 2010, the number of psychiatric euthanasia cases has risen sharply, “with a disproportionate increase among young adults and, more recently, minors,” Dutch doctors reported this month in the Psychiatric Times . “The Dutch model, once presented internationally as careful and balanced, is now attracting attention for a different reason: growing uncertainty about whether psychiatry has crossed a boundary it cannot coherently justify,” the authors wrote. While most euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands involve people with medical conditions such as cancer, 219 people whose suffering was largely due to one or more psychiatric illnesses died an assisted death in 2024, up from 88 in 2020. Of the 2024 deaths, 111 involved people aged 30 to 60, 78 involved people 60 and over, and 30 deaths were among people aged 18 to 30. In 2023, two psychiatric euthanasia deaths involved a minor between the ages of 12 and 18. The teen with autism was one of them. Not only are more young people requesting assisted death for autism, depression, personality disorders, eating disorders and other mental conditions, those who died by MAID were disproportionately female with a history of suicidality. Of 397 people younger than 24 who applied for MAID for mental illness between 2012 and 2021, 259 were female. “Once you normalize that death is an acceptable solution for the problem that some people are having — people who are not otherwise dying — then people see it as a solution, instead of other things that might help,” Gaind said. In a brief submitted to Canada’s special joint parliamentary committee on MAID three years ago, psychiatrist and bioethicist Scott Kim, a senior investigator with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, estimated Canada could see 2,500 to 5,000 requests for MAID for mental illness annually, and “not what the expansion advocates have suggested, which is that, ‘Oh, it’ll just be a handful,'” Gaind said. “There is no evidence supporting it will just be a handful.” In the Netherlands, MAID can only be a last resort. A doctor must conclude that the person’s suffering is unbearable, and the doctor and patient together must be satisfied that there are no reasonable alternatives. Canada currently has no similar “due care” requirement... In addition to lower rejection rates for MAID requests, Canada’s law also states that intolerable suffering is subjective and personal. It’s what the person says it is and, unlike the Netherlands, a doctor doesn’t have to agree. Groups such as Mental Health Research Canada have warned youth mental health is in serious decline, with a “generation at risk” of rising rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking, and major gaps in care. Given those factors, the approval rate for requests for MAID for mental illness in Canada could be 50 per cent or higher, Kim estimated. The increase in Dutch youth seeking MAID is particularly alarming, Gaind said. “These are people who are not even 30 years old.” “These people are still in the developmental stages of their lives, biologically, socially and psychologically, struggling to find their place in the world, dealing with other issues that are stressing them out, including a mental illness,” he said. “And somehow, in that state, we’re thinking that their wish to have their life ended by the state is potentially OK, even when it’s somebody who is too young to buy alcohol, or marijuana?” In most provinces, the minimum age to drink alcohol or possess pot is 19. Anyone over the age of 18 is eligible for MAID in Canada. Even among psychiatrists, opinions are deeply divided over whether mental illness is ever incurable — terminal. Those who oppose any further delays have been labelled ideological expansion activists; those pushing for an indefinite pause have been accused of over-stating the effectiveness of current treatments. “We can’t make predictions about whether a person’s mental illness will or won’t improve,” Gaind said. “We’re terrible at making those predictions. “To say, ‘this is now a terminal psychiatric condition’ has no scientific basis. The whole concept is nebulous.” “In many cases what people are seeking death for is not suffering that will never get better,” Gaind said. Suffering is broader and often fuelled by isolation and social distress, he said."

Johannes M. Koenraadt on X - "This is my video that recently went viral. I cover the euthanasia situation in the Netherlands. For people under 30, it mostly targets autistic people (75%) and women (74%)."
Marko Jukic on X - "People grow up on dystopian horror stories from 1984 and World War II and the Soviet Bloc and so on but we live in a world where Western governments right now are just directly, outright, admittedly murdering teen girls and nobody does anything about it and many support it."

Dr. Heidi Klessig on X - "According to her lawyer, Noelia Castillo Ramos cannot change her mind about undergoing euthanasia because her organs are already committed. Her lawyer highlights the hospital’s conflict of interest in this case, because Noelia’s organs are worth millions in billable charges."
Emerald Apple on X - "In Spain, Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium, they call this procedure "Organ Donation After Euthanasia".  The person is sedated and "euthanized", and organ harvesting starts while the patient's heart is still beating in many cases.  The patient is declared dead 'legally' before the cutting starts.  In just these 4 countries alone, over 1000 organs have been taken from patients in these assisted euthanasia programs.   There have been cases of patients changing their minds...  In 2026, in Canada, an elderly woman in her 80s was euthanized despite her changing her mind. In Canada, organ donation is discussed during MAiD consultation and causes implicit pressure on the patients, who see themselves as "worthless" and see organ donation as a final altruistic act.   In other countries like Spain, this notion of the patients feeling like they "should" is strong, leading to undue coercion.... especially since many of these countries market medically assisted euthanasia + organ donation as a 'heroic' act."

Scotland’s assisted dying bill exposes a dangerous blind spot in care - "In 2023, Professor Leonie Herx, the globally-renowned palliative care expert, described the nihilistic and dystopian outcomes from assisted suicide legislation. Predictably, poor people or those experiencing short-term or long-term vulnerability were more at risk than affluent people with subjective decisions about the value of human life motivated almost entirely by cost considerations... Prof Herx pointed out that legislation in her native Canada had advanced at “breakneck speed” beyond many of the so-called safeguards. These included the proviso that assisted death would only occur in exceptional circumstances and for physical suffering that couldn’t be controlled, even though investment in palliative care at the end of life can relieve such suffering.  In Scotland and throughout the UK, almost every disabled rights organisation had expressed opposition to what they regarded as horrific outcomes and consequences for those with mental and physical challenges. Professor Herx cited the case of a physician who’d been the main organiser of euthanasia provision at a hospital in Calgary. He was now a passionate opponent of euthanasia because he’d been appalled at how it was being used to target the weak and the vulnerable. It had been extended to children deemed capable of consent and those who had made “advanced requests”.  In Scotland and the UK, such concerns have been brushed aside under the catch-all “we’ll put provisions in the legislation to ensure no-one is unduly coerced into suicide”. Yet as the co-signatories of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s letter show, in Scotland any concerns around this are regarded as being of a secondary nature.  It’s not difficult to understand why Britain’s entire disabled rights sector is troubled by Mr McArthur’s Bill and the expected passing of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill at Westminster. Implicit at their core is the concept of the value of human life according to a cost index and subjective perceptions of usefulness. The fact that babies with Down’s Syndrome can be aborted up until birth tells you that these tiny human beings are not considered worthy of being called fully human.   None of what’s being proposed in Scotland and England even considers the concept of palliative care for those suffering near the end of their lives. Professor Herx, who has advised authorities throughout the world about what can be achieved by proper investment in palliative care, says that no-one needs to suffer intolerable pain at the end of their lives.   In Scotland, the political establishment’s callousness around the care of the sick and the vulnerable is already evident. During the SNP’s watch outrage at the obscenity of drugs-related deaths has eased to resigned acceptance. The Scottish Government and its media sycophants think that by turning addicts into zombies by handing them unlimited Class A drugs in a safe consumption room is morally acceptable. I can’t think of anything more callous and savage.   Rather than see them as fully human and thus deserving of the chance of recovering through rehab facilities they condemn these poor people to a twilight existence in which, inevitably, they’ll eventually die prematurely and thus relieve the state of burden of caring properly for them. To then locate these houses of death in disadvantaged areas miles from the where the political and media elites live adds another level of contempt.   So, why would you trust such a class of amoral opportunists when they tell you they’ll provide safeguards so that the poor and those lacking advocates aren’t targeted by bad actors exploiting assisted dying? They already regard Scotland’s most vulnerable people as below contempt. So what chance do the sick and the dying have?"

Britain’s bitter assisted dying debate is about to come roaring back to life - "Her ally Charlie Falconer, the bill’s sponsor in the Lords and an old ally of Tony Blair, claims up to 150 backbench MPs are willing to put Leadbeater’s law in their own name if they are given the chance. After that, they plan to use a rare procedure to pass the bill without the Lords’ approval if it gets stuck again... One backer, Simon Opher, suggested to Sky News that the entire public bill committee could be made up of supporters to reduce the risk of amendments. This would be an “abuse,” said Nikki Da Costa, the Conservative former legislative affairs director for 10 Downing Street who opposes the bill, as such committees are meant to reflect the breadth of MPs’ views...   Meg Hillier, a veteran Labour MP who opposes the bill, argued MPs are “weary” at the prospect of another round. “Everyone is very worried about what’s going on in the world … so why would we have a national conversation about this again and prolong it even further?”...   Opponents of the bill argue that the debates in the Lords have exposed holes in the law that the Commons scrutiny did not. One, Labour peer Luciana Berger, pointed out that the bill has sweeping powers and 59 clauses — far longer than any known private members’ bill, including those that allowed abortion and outlawed capital punishment. “This process has shown that we can’t get a bill that is safe,” said Berger. “What are [proponents] saying about the medical colleges in this country — the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Medical Examiners, the Royal College of GPs, who all as organizations say they are publicly neutral on the principle of assisted dying, but on this piece of legislation, have very substantive and significant concerns about this bill?” Falconer argued that these concerns had been dealt with during debates in the Lords... Berger countered that “ninety-nine percent of the time, Charlie [Falconer] has rejected every single amendment.”... Hillier argued that any “abuse” of the process, as she described it, would set a “dangerous precedent” for a theoretical future government run by the right-wing populists Reform UK.  “You play games with parliamentary procedure with real caution,” she said. “It opens the door for any future government to try and push something through the private members’ bill process without the scrutiny that you would get in the normal way.”"
Why are left wingers so keen to kill people?

Kathy Hochul Embraces the Culture of Death - "In an op-ed defending her decision, the governor peddles various false equivalences and red herrings. She opens by invoking the Founding Fathers, claiming that they established a nation committed to protecting rights including “privacy and bodily autonomy.”  Hochul’s cavalier misuse of history collapses under a passing familiarity with the nation’s constitutional tradition. These supposed rights appear nowhere in the Constitution, and no Founding-era American would have recognized them as such. The Supreme Court invented a constitutional “right to privacy” in 1965, derived tenuously from the Fourteenth Amendment, itself ratified nearly a century after the Founding. To project the modern concept of extreme bodily autonomy backward onto America’s origins is pure mythmaking to suit the Left’s political ends.  The historical reality is far different: suicide was a felony at common law—felo de se, a crime against oneself—because it violated the natural law of self-preservation and repudiated life as a gift bestowed by God. Those who took their own lives were denied Christian burial and interred at crossroads with a wooden stake driven through the bodies. Their property was forfeited to the Crown as punishment, as deterrence for others, and as compensation for the public obligations that the deceased would no longer fulfill. Whatever one thinks of these practices today, they bear little resemblance to Hochul’s fatuous interpretation of the Founders’ promise of “choice and freedom.”  On a personal note, Hochul recounts her mother’s degenerative death from ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), but a careful reader will notice that the governor never claims that her mother asked for euthanasia. Instead, the anecdote inadvertently reveals what assisted suicide is often really about—the perceived burden that severe illness imposes on families and caregivers and the desire to eliminate such an imposition.  The governor writes that she reflected on this decision during a Catholic funeral Mass, concluding that “God is merciful and compassionate, and so must we be”—which, in her telling, apparently means offering the “merciful option” of a lethal drug cocktail to those “searching for comfort.” This is a poor attempt to sway less-informed religious readers using the cloak of sympathy. It inverts Catholic teaching, which has been clear and consistent for centuries: the Catechism states that intentional euthanasia, “whatever its forms or motives, is murder. It is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator.”  Hochul further argues that denying assisted suicide would “condemn” patients to excruciating pain. This claim ignores how modern medicine can alleviate even severe pain without resorting to intentional life-ending measures. Ethicists of many philosophical stripes—including the Catholic moral tradition—have long recognized the legitimacy of administering pain-relieving treatments that may foreseeably shorten life, provided that death is not the intended outcome. This principle of double effect preserves the physician’s role as healer and the crucial moral line between relieving pain and causing death.  The most unsettling passage in the governor’s op-ed is her portrayal of MAiD as allowing terminally ill New Yorkers to spend their final days at home, “with sunlight streaming through their bedroom window” and the “laughter of their grandkids echoing in the next room.” Putting aside the maudlin sentimentality, hospice-at-home services already make such deaths possible—without resorting to lethal drugs.   Experience from abroad and other states shows that assisted-suicide regimes do not remain confined to Hochul’s paradigmatic case of the terminally ill... Oregon’s 2021 report on its assisted-suicide program documents deaths attributed to nonterminal conditions such as arthritis, hernia, kidney failure, and even complications from a fall...   The real impetus behind Hochul’s move, unsurprisingly, is political. With progressives emboldened by last month’s mayoral election, she has chosen to accommodate the far Left before the next legislative session rather than risk a damaging fight."

Within a few days a suicide forum had me questioning everything in my life - "I’m a feminist and I find it horrifying how often the “my body, my choice” mantra is deployed on this site, or how often it’s described as “pro-choice” in its outlook; equating their quest to take their own lives with the global women’s movement to give us control over our reproductive health. Deciding to die can be a choice, yes, but what choice is any if it obliterates your chances to ever make another choice again?"
Considering that the UK is passing a euthanasia bill, and that "my body my choice" really does imply that (though we know left wing slogans are always misleading, like "love is love is love"), this is what happens when you pretend to glorify bodily autonomy (though of course, this doesn't apply to vaccines, or selling yourself into slavery, because left wingers don't care about logical consistency)

Diana S. Fleischman on X - "You would expect antifascists to oppose things that have closer proximity to Nazi protocols but they are, in general totally fine with government assisted euthanasia and abortion of disabled fetuses. It's almost like people are more influenced by the arbitrary opinions of their ingroup than an overarching principle."

Arrests after Sarco 'suicide pod' used in Switzerland - "In July, a pro-assisted dying group, which promotes the Sarco device, said it anticipated that it would be used for the first time this year.  Advocates say it provides an option not reliant on drugs or doctors, and that it expands access to euthanasia as the portable device can be 3D-printed and assembled at home.  However, there also has been opposition in Switzerland, despite the country having some of the world's most protective laws surrounding assisted dying.  Critics fear the device's modern design glamorises suicide and the fact that it can be operated without medical oversight is concerning."

Did suicide pod malfunction? Strangulation marks raise alarms in Swiss case - "An autopsy report uncovered strangulation marks on the 64-year-old American woman’s neck, raising disturbing questions about her cause of death and prompting Swiss authorities to explore the possibility of “intentional homicide,” according to Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant... Dr Florian Willet, president of the Swiss assisted-dying organisation The Last Resort, was reportedly the only person present at the time and remains in custody as officials probe the circumstances surrounding her death. Swiss Chief Prosecutor Peter Sticher, leading the investigation, has indicated that the incident may not have been as straightforward as intended, hinting at a potential malfunction or interference...  Surveillance footage captured by two cameras – one inside the pod, trained on the control button, and another positioned on a nearby tree – revealed unusual activity. De Volkskrant, which reviewed the footage, noted that the internal camera was triggered twice in quick succession shortly after the woman pressed the button. However, due to the angle, the recording does not clearly show what happened during those crucial moments. During police questioning, Dr Willet reportedly stated that two and a half minutes after the procedure began, the woman appeared to experience severe muscle cramping – a reaction he described as common in nitrogen-induced deaths"

Denmark's Ethics Council advises against legalising euthanasia - "An overwhelming majority of the Danish Council on Ethics have advised the country's parliament against voting to legalise euthanasia.  Fully sixteen out seventeen members of the committee concluded in a report that it was "in principle impossible to establish proper regulation of euthanasia", and as a result recommended that the law in Denmark should not be changed to allow people suffering mental or physical distress to receive help to end their own lives.   "The very existence of an offer of euthanasia will decisively change our ideas about old age, the coming of death, quality of life and what it means to take others into account," they wrote in the full report. "If euthanasia becomes an option, there is too great a risk that it will become an expectation aimed at special groups in society.""

UNN on X - "Wait a second. Something wrong here. All the adverts for 'assisted dying' are white people. Where have all the mixed race and African families gone who appear in the majority of adverts in the UK?"

Thread by @ddhitchens on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Last week four Labour MPs warned their colleagues they weren’t being given the full picture on the assisted suicide bill.  If anything the MPs understated it. Here are 10 things we’ve learnt from the committee stage which Leadbeater and allies have studiously avoided mentioning:
1. Huge anxiety that the state of public services will incentivise assisted suicide.  Several witnesses talked about this, including the head of the Royal College of Nurses and, most eloquently, @doctor_oxford:
2. People will request lethal drugs because they feel like a burden. Nobody denied this, and some pro-bill witnesses like Sam Ahmedzai defended it:
3. The bill’s supporters have entirely failed to reassure people with disabilities.  Disability Rights UK - who Leadbeater originally didn’t want to invite - opposed the bill, and Dr Miro Griffiths said it was “nonsense” to suggest it didn’t apply to disabilities.
4. The bill is not safe for those with eating disorders.  @ChelseaRoff made that point powerfully to the committee; it wasn’t clear that Team Leadbeater had even begun to think this through.
5. A lot of controversy about capacity assessments. A few witnesses, including Chris Whitty, thought they were a good safeguard; the majority disagreed.
6. Also much disagreement about coercion.  Notably, even two eminent witnesses who support the bill thought the safeguards here don’t solve the problem.
7. The bill is probably bad news for palliative care.  Some witnesses were more optimistic than others; but only one, the President of the Association for Palliative Medicine, gave a really detailed and informed answer:
8. The experience of other jurisdictions is not exactly reassuring.
9. The bill falls short of NICE guidelines for patients at risk of self-harm or suicide. Prof Allan House made the point succinctly:
10. How would it work in practice? All very vague so far.  The lawyers cast doubt on the court safeguard, the GPs said they didn’t want it incorporated into their normal work, and Baroness Falkner pointed out that the PMB process leaves us in the dark:
And of course this only scratches the surface, because almost every expert who might have given the bill a hard time was carefully excluded."

Meme - Aleph @woke8yearold: "They are trying to legalize suicide in Britain and the ads they’re running on the metro look like something out of a satirical video game"
"My dying wish is my family won't see me suffer and I won't have to"

The vile assisted suicide bill is on its last legs. Now let’s kill it off - "If you’re still undecided about assisted suicide – or, as its supporters prefer to call it, “assisted dying” – I invite you to consider the following quote. It comes from a newspaper interview conducted in 2017 with Henry Marsh, a leading brain surgeon and author of a bestselling medical memoir entitled Do No Harm. The interviewer, from The Sunday Times, asked Dr Marsh about his support for “assisted dying”. And here’s the most extraordinary section of his reply:  “So much of [the opposition to it] is all bloody Christians,” complained Marsh. “They argue that grannies will be made to commit suicide. Even if a few grannies get bullied into it, isn’t that a price worth paying for all the people who could die with dignity?”... let’s face it: this is what the campaign for “assisted dying” really amounts to. To support it, you have to believe that “a few grannies” getting “bullied into it” is “a price worth paying” – even if you wouldn’t dare to put it in such blunt terms.  I only wish that other supporters of assisted suicide – especially the MPs among them – could be as frank, open and honest as Marsh was in that 2017 interview. Not least because, if they were, the wider public would surely be so horrified, the Bill wouldn’t stand a chance of becoming law... This latest setback follows weeks of chaos, criticism and controversy. The committee of MPs overseeing the Bill removed what had previously been cited as a key judicial safeguard: the need for a High Court judge to approve each request. Meanwhile, eating disorder charities expressed their fear that anorexics would be able to choose “assisted dying”, after MPs refused to close a loophole in the Bill."
This is very telling. Euthanasia is good because Christians think it's bad. And it's alright to pressure people into killing themselves

Links - 5th July 2026 (2 - Antifa: Prairieland Riot)

ANDY NGO REPORTS: First Antifa terrorism convictions in US history - "Five far-left extremists have admitted to being Antifa members and terrorists in federal plea deals stemming from a coordinated ambush shooting on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on the Fourth of July.  It is the first known case in U.S. history in which Antifa members have officially admitted to being part of an organized Antifa cell. On Nov. 19, Seth Sikes, Joy Abigail Gibson, Lynette Read Sharp, Nathan Baumann and John Phillip Thomas each admitted to one count of providing material support to terrorists for their role in the shooting attack on the Prairieland facility in Alvarado, Texas, that resulted in a police officer being shot in the neck and other officers being fired upon.  As part of their plea deals, which would see them imprisoned for no more than 15 years (they were facing up to decades in prison), they also agreed to a set of stipulated, or formally agreed-upon, facts of the case.  “Beginning on or about July 3, 2025, and continuing until on or about July 4, 2025, in the Northern District of Texas, [defendant name] planned with others to provide resources and personnel, including [himself/herself], knowing and intending that they would be used to carry out acts of terrorism,” Baumann, Gibson, and Sikes admitted were true in the court filing. They admitted that the terrorism was “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct.”  In Baumann’s stipulated facts, he admitted: “Baumann found that others who participated in the acts against Prairieland adhered to an Antifa, revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology that is anti-law enforcement, anti-immigration enforcement, and calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law. Antifa is a militant enterprise that advocates insurrection and violence to affect the policy and conduct of the U.S. government by intimidation and coercion. In line with his Antifa ideology, on or about July 3 and July 4, Baumann, along with others, participated in the planning of the ‘direct action’ against Prairieland set for the night of July 4, to influence and affect the conduct of the government by intimidation and coercion…” All five who pleaded guilty admitted that the “Antifa cell” had “conducted an act of terrorism.”  Sikes’ admission provided more detail about how the North Texas Antifa cell operated: “Sikes and his coconspirators adhered to an Antifa, anarchist ideology and organized cells or ‘affinity groups’ around their beliefs.” Formally organized Antifa networks are decentralized, with militants forming cells calling themselves “affinity groups.”...   Cameron Arnold (a Trantifa known as “Autumn Hill”) and Zachary Evetts were indicted on similar terrorism charges on Oct. 15, marking the first time in U.S. history any Antifa members had been formally accused at the federal level of terrorism crimes"

Nick Sortor on X - "🚨 BREAKING: ALL NINE members of an Antifa cell in TX have just been found GUILTY of TERRORISM charges brought by the DOJ, per @MrAndyNgo   This is HUGE, as it's the first terrorism trial against Antifa members in US history!  A precedent has been SET 🔥  The terrorists AMBUSHED ICE agents at their detention center in Alvarado, TX, shooting one of them in the neck, back in July 2025.  Pure TERRORISM. And the FBI, DOJ, and a federal jury of 12 all agreed.  "First time ever: the FBI arrested Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremists and terrorism charges have been brought for the July 4 Prairieland ICE attack in Texas," @FBIDirectorKash  said after their arrests  Jurors found the defendants guilty of providing material support to terrorists, rioting, conspiracy to use/carry explosives, and using/carrying explosives.  Many of them will now rot in prison.  MUCH deserved. We need MORE of this! Well done, @AGPamBondi  👏🏻"
The left wing spin and cope around this is amazing

Thread by @MrAndyNgo on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "BREAKING — Ngo Comment report: Verdict reached in the first-ever federal Antifa terrorism trial over the Texas ICE ambush where an officer was shot in the neck. All cell members have been CONVICTED. Antifa supporters had threatened witnesses during the trial.
They’re looking at potentially decades in federal prison. Read my report. Antifa associates are threatening and promising violence in reaction to nine of their Texas comrades being convicted at the first-ever Antifa federal terrorism trial. ngocomment.com/p/all-members-…
As the verdict was being read out, some of the Antifa supporters in the courtroom started wailing and crying, resulting in them being ejected from the court. Read about what happened at the historic first Antifa federal terrorism trial in Texas:
Antifa supporters are asking if the two trans Antifa terror convicts, both men who pretend to be women, will be able to serve their sentences in a female prison. Read: ngocomment.com/p/all-members-…
Antifa associates are responding to the terrorism conviction of their comrades in the North Texas Antifa cell by calling for the jurors to be hunted down and killed. Read my report: ngocomment.com/p/all-members-…"
Left wingers are still lying that it's not an organisation. Too bad a jury decided differently. So the cope is to condemn Texas

Andy Ngo on X - "The Guardian’s Sam Levine, who lied in his reporting on the Wi Spa trans incident in 2001, is lying again about Antifa as he runs cover for his terrorist comrades who were convicted for their roles in an anti-government, anti-police shooting ambush attack. Here’s what happened:"

The Other 98% | Facebook - "In a massive blow to the first amendment, Trump administration wins its first “antifa case”. Pam Bondi made the stakes clear: "Today's verdict will not be the last."  Eight people were convicted Friday on material support for terrorism charges for attending a July 4th noise demo outside the Prairieland ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, the government's first use of the material support charge against alleged antifa members accused of domestic terrorism.  The conviction didn't require proof anyone committed violence. It required wearing dark clothes. Federal prosecutors told jurors that wearing "black bloc" clothing was itself a terrorist act, that "providing your body as camouflage" constituted material support for terrorism. That's the new legal standard. Show up in black. Go to prison for 15 years. The convictions were made possible by NSPM-7, Trump's executive order weaponizing federal law enforcement against left-wing activism. One defense attorney said it plainly: "This wouldn't be a terrorism case if it weren't for that memo." There is no domestic equivalent to the State Department's list of foreign terror organizations,  in part because organizations operating within the United States are protected by broad First Amendment rights.  Trump bulldozed that protection with an executive order designating "antifa", a decentralized umbrella term, not an organization,  as a domestic terrorist group.  There is no "antifa." There is no membership card. There is no headquarters. The government invented the enemy and then convicted people of joining it. Defense attorney Xavier de Janon put it plainly: "The federal government has signaled, successfully, that very regular protest activities could get you federally charged and federally convicted."  The National Lawyers Guild's Suzanne Adely warned the case is designed to "increase the fear, hoping that folks in other cities will think twice over protesting." That's the point. Not justice. Deterrence. The government doesn't need to arrest everyone. They just need you scared enough to stay home."
The Other 98% | Facebook - "The Trump administration just convicted people of terrorism for wearing black clothes and lighting fireworks on the Fourth of July.  A federal jury in Texas found eight anti-ICE protesters guilty of "providing material support to terrorists" in what the government called its first-ever terrorism prosecution targeting alleged "antifa" members.  Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated by promising "today's verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last." Here's what actually happened. A group of people showed up at the Prairieland ICE detention center on July 4th to set off fireworks in a noise demonstration protesting the caging of immigrants. Things went sideways when one person, Benjamin Song, opened fire and wounded a police officer. Song was the only shooter. He was convicted of attempted murder. But the government didn't stop there. Prosecutors argued that simply wearing black clothing at the protest was enough to convict the other eight of terrorism, telling jurors that "providing your body as camouflage for others to do the enumerated acts is providing support." Read that again. Wearing dark clothes is now terrorism. The prosecution presented zines, anti-Trump stickers, and Socialist Rifle Association pamphlets as evidence. They treated the use of Signal, a widely used encrypted messaging app, as proof of conspiracy. Their own "antifa expert" admitted he uses Signal too. Even the government's own cooperating witnesses said they didn't expect violence that night. The jury acquitted most defendants on the attempted murder charges, signaling they rejected the "coordinated ambush" narrative. But the terrorism convictions stuck. The wife of one defendant wore her wedding dress to court and told reporters: "Federal prosecutors told a panel of Northern District of Texas residents with a straight face that lighting off fireworks on the Fourth of July was terrorism." Eight people now face between 10 and 60 years in prison. For attending a protest. For wearing black. For being against ICE. The judge himself seemed to see the absurdity, asking prosecutors why "antifa" even mattered to the charges. "Whether it's antifa or the Methodist Women's Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter?" It doesn't. That's the point. The label is the punishment."
Left wing logic - prosecuting organised, violent terrorism violates freedom of speech

Meme - memetic_sisyphus @memetic...: "It's difficult for a normal person to understand what happened so I'll try to explain. The terrorist committing a premeditated act of terror saw a cop coming to him and his comrades. He grabbed a rifle and fired at the cop. One of the bullets struck the cop. The terrorist's defense that he actually argued in the court was that he wasn't firing at the cop, he was firing a warning shot at the cop, and the bullet must have taken a ricochet then hit the cop because he didn't actually mean to shoot the cop. Yes, that was his actual defense. This is why he was sentenced to 100 years lol."
BlackRedGuard *Communist hammer and sickle* *Palestinian flag* @OGBlackRedGuard: "100 fucking years for firing a gun at the ground."

Alec Karakatsanis on X - "The sentences handed down today are a huge threat to the possibility of a democratic society. The prosecution is rife with constitutional violations, but 30 years in prison (more than anyone for January 6) for moving some magazines? 50 years in prison even for those not involved in planning the protest? The evidence of an illegal conspiracy is non-existent, but this is how the authoritarian dragnet targets those fighting against repression.  Everyone should be learning about this case."
Payton Alexander on X - "“Everyone should be learning about this case.”  Okay! Here’s what happened:  On the night of July 4, 2025, 11 members of a North Texas Antifa cell carried out a coordinated attack on the Prairieland Detention Center.  Earlier that day, they had conducted reconnaissance (including reporting on security of the facility), and had assembled a cache of dozens of firearms.  The group planned the attack ahead of time, including a “gear check” where the leader discussed bringing rifles and ominously “not getting arrested.”  They dressed in black uniforms and brought 11 firearms, body armor, and military-grade first aid kits (including tourniquets for gunshot wounds).  They disabled CCTV cameras at the facility, and threw fireworks and explosives to flush the officers out for a planned massacre.  When officers called 911, Lt. Thomas Gross responded. Bodycam footage shows one of the attackers yelling “get to the rifles!” as the group opened fire.   Gross was shot once in the neck, with the bullet exiting through his back, but survived and continued to fight back.  The perpetrators of the failed mass shooting were arrested and charged with offenses ranging from concealment of evidence to attempted murder.  They were found guilty by a jury of their peers, and very appropriately received sentences ranging from 30-100 years.  There. Now you know."

Alexis de Tocqueville on X - "The magazines were being removed in an attempt to conceal evidence of the terrorist conspiracy. You may not think this case was about terrorism, but the prosecution was able to convince the jury that it was. So that puts every associated charge in that context."
Ryan Smith on X - "Sorry your terrorism thingy didn’t work out. Everyone should learn about this case, yuppp. Lesson 1. Don’t shoot at law enforcement Lesson 2. Don’t plan to shoot at law enforcement and have those messages on your electronic devices"
CatOuttaHat on X - "Shooting a federal officer in the neck is not a protest, dimwit. It's called attempted murder. If you're going to play with yourself, get a room."
SunCat on X - Sounds pretty reasonable sentences for an armed and coordinated terrorist attack against a federal facility. These antifa goons are used to getting special treatment. Those days are over. Happy incarceration! 🎉"
william tallant on X - "I find it ironic antifa destroyed a federal courthouse week after week in Portland Antifa has the ability to afford to make signs and banners professional fly ppl around and put them up in hotels. You shot a cop in TEXAS duh! Jan6 no weapons extreme terms we want the financing"

Shooter, 7 others sentenced to decades in prison after violent incident at Texas ICE facility - "A man who shot and wounded a police officer during a protest outside a Texas immigration centre last year was sentenced to 100 years in federal prison Tuesday, while other protesters accused of having links to antifa were given multiple decades in federal prison.  Benjamin Song was convicted of attempted murder last March after prosecutors say he opened fire and wounded a police officer at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado in a July 4, 2025 incident... U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, one of two judges overseeing the proceedings, said what happened last July wasn't a protest but "an assault on democracy."... One of the defendants, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, was convicted of corruptly concealing a document and conspiracy to conceal documents. Others pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists rather than take their case to trial... Critics warn the case could have wide-reaching impact on protests given that organizations operating within the U.S. are supposed to be protected by First Amendment free-speech rights.  Short for "anti-fascist," antifa is not a single organization but rather an umbrella term for far-left militant groups that confront or resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations. The National Lawyers Guild — a decades-old progressive bar association — has tracked the Prairieland case, expressing concern about the rights to rights to free expression, assembly, and association for several of the defendants... federal prosecutors charged 15 people with impeding the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in Minnesota. They claimed the demonstrators were members of antifa who conspired against the federal government to block arrests and deportations by setting up blockades around government buildings and throwing chunks of ice at federal vehicles, among other actions."
The most hilarious left wing cope was "Bro you really fell for this one eh? Those people aren't even real."
I like how they pretend that the antifa members are only "accused" of various things instead of being convicted of them, as they have been, and runs cover for antifa in so many other ways
Left wingers are now pretending that attacking and even trying to kill a police officer and providing material support for terrorists fall under the first amendment

Ariana Jasmine | Facebook - "Texas Anti-ICE Protesters Sentenced to Decades in Prison For Protesting
Nine protesters in Texas have been sentenced to extraordinarily unusual and long prison terms after being convicted on terrorism-related charges tied to a 2025 demonstration outside an immigrant detention center. The case stems from a Fourth of July protest at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where activists gathered late at night for a noise demonstration meant to show solidarity with people detained inside. Prosecutors said some demonstrators vandalized property, including vehicles, a guard shack, tires, and a security camera. When law enforcement arrived, one activist, Benjamin Song, fired an AR-15 from nearby woods and struck an officer in the shoulder; the officer survived. Song was sentenced to 100 years in prison because of the shooting. Several others, including Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto, and Meagan Morris, received 50-year sentences. Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who was not present at the protest, was sentenced to 30 years after prosecutors accused him of moving left-wing materials after his wife’s arrest. The sentences are stunning not only because of their length, but also because several of the defendants were acquitted of attempted murder and firearms charges. Legal observers have noted that the judge appears to have stacked sentences consecutively, creating prison terms far beyond what many expected. The Trump administration celebrated the outcome, framing the case as a victory against “Antifa terrorists,” but that framing is exactly what makes this case so alarming. “Antifa” is not a formal organization; it’s a broad label often used to describe anti-fascist politics, protest movements, and decentralized left-wing activism. In this case, prosecutors leaned heavily on that label, arguing that the defendants were part of a “North Texas antifa cell.” Critics say the government used politics, reading material, group chats, Signal messages, and left-wing zines to portray loosely connected activists as a coordinated terrorist threat. Although one person fired a gun, the government’s case went far beyond individual accountability. Prosecutors secured terrorism-related convictions against people who did not fire a weapon, some of whom were not accused of planning the shooting, and at least one person who was not even at the protest. The punishment handed down to these protesters is longer than the harshest sentences given to far-right leaders involved in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to 22 years, and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, received 18 years. They’ve both been released in 2025 thanks to Trump’s full pardon. The message being sent is clear: protest against state violence, ICE, and the carceral system can be reframed as terrorism, and political beliefs can be used as evidence. An association can become a conspiracy, reading material can become ideology, encrypted messaging can become suspicious, and proximity to one person’s violent act can become the basis for decades in prison. The federal government has already pursued similar cases against activists in other cities, including Minneapolis, Spokane, and Chicago. The pattern is deeply troubling: anti-ICE protests are increasingly being treated not as civil disobedience or political resistance, but as a national security threat. This case should force a national conversation about proportionality, political prosecution, and the expanding use of terrorism language against domestic protest movements. Because when the state can turn loosely affiliated activists into “terrorists,” it creates a playbook that can be used against anyone who challenges government power. For more news updates like this, please subscribe at www.arianajasmine.com/subscribe"
Left wing logic (including in comments) - trying to ambush and murder law enforcement is peaceful protest and if you disagree you support authoritarianism. Elsewhere people are still claiming that WWII soldiers were antifa and that only fascists oppose antifa

Sam Russek on X - "Update: 8 Texas protesters were sentenced today, following a July 4 noise demo outside an ICE detention center. The maj. were sentenced to 50 years in prison 2 were sentenced to 70 & 100 years, respectively The last, who wasn't even at the protest, was sentenced to 30 years."
Andy Ngo on X - "I’m sorry your friends were convicted. But it wasn’t a “noise demo.” It was an Antifa ambush shooting. They brought 11 firearms with them and shot an officer in the neck. The cell members who flipped and testified at trial spoke about the secret planning, and firearms training that happened before the attack. They admitted to being inspired to action through antifa ideology in stipulated statements.  I hope you or your friends don’t succeed in killing people."

James Surowiecki on X - "The 1st Amendment prohibits the govt, including judges, from punishing - or, in this case, levying additional punishment on - people because of their ideological positions. Seems like obvious grounds for appealing the sentences."

Charles Fain Lehman on X - "I don't think this has ever come up at SCOTUS, but given that hate crime enhancements don't run afoul of 1A, I'd be surprised if making sentencing choices based in part on expression of a pro-violence ideology does.  For example, the Zodiac killer believed that he was killing people to make them his slaves in the afterlife. That's an ideological position (even if an insane one), yet it would be perfectly reasonable to punish him more severely given the unique threat posed by someone who believed that and had acted on that belief."
Jonathan H. Adler on X - "Unlikely, as the ideology in question here embraces the use of violence so sentence serves to protect public and deter."
Bonchie on X - "They so desperately want these terrorists to get off. A real mask-off moment."

Ken Klippenstein on X - "An American just got sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for moving “Antifa” zines and there’s about 1000x as much media coverage of Trump’s reflecting pool 👍"
Andy Ngo on X - "Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada is not American. And he wasn’t convicted and sentenced for moving Antifa zines. It was proven at his trial that he conspired with and helped one of the terror suspects conceal evidence that showed she and her co-defendants from the night of the shooting were inspired by violent Antifa insurrection ideology."
Left wingers just keep lying to try to manifest reality. Of course, other ignorant left wingers just lap it up, because it plays to their prejudices

The Intercept on X - "Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write. The prosecution’s theory was that Sanchez moved zines, which discussed anti-government ideas, to conceal evidence in the case against his wife, Maricela Rueda."
Andy Ngo on X - "One of the North Texas Antifa terror suspects told her partner, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, to hide evidence of the cell’s anti-government violent extremist ideology after they were arrested for the terrorist attack. He planned the evidence hiding with her and carried it out. It was proven at trial.   To frame this as a free speech issue by a publication whose writers and readers support Antifa killing people for having right-wing beliefs is worse than lying."

Meme - Robin Bougie: "They gave US zinester Elizabeth Soto *50 fucking years* in prison for publishing a zine that supports an anti-fascism stance. Prosecutors also used her feminism themed zine, and an anti-Al zine as evidence against her. This is unprecedented."
Guardian: "Building power - 'This is injustice': how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison. Advocates sound alarm after zines were used as evidence to convict protesters of terrorism charges tied to 2025 protest at Texas ICE facility"
Jared Auner: "Never a day I'm not disgusted and ashamed to be an American."
Besides yet more evidence that left wingers relentlessly lie (that transporting zines was what got antifa insurrectionists long jail sentences), this is an open proclamation by one that he hates his country. But we will still be told that left wingers do not hate their countries. But given how much they lie about the former, it's no surprise they keep lying about the latter too

Meme - PoliMath: "It's boring to argue with this lie so I'll just show what this guy actually got 30 years for"
"Corruptly Concealing a Document or Record, by transporting a box containing numerous Antifa materials, such as insurrection planning, anti-law enforcement, anti-government, and anti-immigration enforcement documents and propaganda from Sanchez Estrada's residence to a location in Denton, Texas, intending to conceal the box's contents and impair its availability for use in a federal grand jury and federal criminal proceeding.
- Defendant convicted: Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada
Conspiracy to Conceal Documents and other objects that would implicate Maricela Rueda in the riot and shooting at the Prairieland facility.
- Defendants convicted: Sanchez Estrada and Maricela Rueda"
Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein: "An American just got sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for moving "Antifa" zines and there's about 1000x as much media coverage of Trump's reflecting pool"