Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

Clearly, in-person examinations are outdated and shallow, and coursework, take home exams and term papers allow for holistic evaluation of students, which is superior

Someone (talking about DEI) claimed to pass university you need to put in the effort. So much for that, if you can't fail students

Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

"Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment...

(His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”...

What if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead?

In February, Lee and Shanmugam launched a tool that did just that. Interview Coder’s website featured a banner that read F*CK LEETCODE. Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon...

Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments... “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT...

Teachers have tried AI-proofing assignments, returning to Blue Books or switching to oral exams. Brian Patrick Green, a tech-ethics scholar at Santa Clara University, immediately stopped assigning essays after he tried ChatGPT for the first time. Less than three months later, teaching a course called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, he figured a low-stakes reading reflection would be safe — surely no one would dare use ChatGPT to write something personal. But one of his students turned in a reflection with robotic language and awkward phrasing that Green knew was AI-generated. A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI. “We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.” 

Before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, cheating had already reached a sort of zenith. At the time, many college students had finished high school remotely, largely unsupervised, and with access to tools like Chegg and Course Hero. These companies advertised themselves as vast online libraries of textbooks and course materials but, in reality, were cheating multi-tools. For $15.95 a month, Chegg promised answers to homework questions in as little as 30 minutes, 24/7, from the 150,000 experts with advanced degrees it employed, mostly in India. When ChatGPT launched, students were primed for a tool that was faster, more capable...

These days, professors will often state their policy on their syllabi — allowing AI, for example, as long as students cite it as if it were any other source, or permitting it for conceptual help only, or requiring students to provide receipts of their dialogue with a chatbot. Students often interpret those instructions as guidelines rather than hard rules. Sometimes they will cheat on their homework without even knowing — or knowing exactly how much — they are violating university policy when they ask a chatbot to clean up a draft or find a relevant study to cite. Wendy, a freshman finance major at one of the city’s top universities, told me that she is against using AI. Or, she clarified, “I’m against copy-and-pasting. I’m against cheating and plagiarism. All of that. It’s against the student handbook.” Then she described, step-by-step, how on a recent Friday at 8 a.m., she called up an AI platform to help her write a four-to-five-page essay due two hours later...

“I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

Most of the writing professors I spoke to told me that it’s abundantly clear when their students use AI. Sometimes there’s a smoothness to the language, a flattened syntax; other times, it’s clumsy and mechanical. The arguments are too evenhanded — counterpoints tend to be presented just as rigorously as the paper’s central thesis. Words like multifaceted and context pop up more than they might normally. On occasion, the evidence is more obvious, as when last year a teacher reported reading a paper that opened with “As an AI, I have been programmed …” Usually, though, the evidence is more subtle, which makes nailing an AI plagiarist harder than identifying the deed. Some professors have resorted to deploying so-called Trojan horses, sticking strange phrases, in small white text, in between the paragraphs of an essay prompt. (The idea is that this would theoretically prompt ChatGPT to insert a non sequitur into the essay.) Students at Santa Clara recently found the word broccoli hidden in a professor’s assignment. Last fall, a professor at the University of Oklahoma sneaked the phrases “mention Finland” and “mention Dua Lipa” in his. A student discovered his trap and warned her classmates about it on TikTok. “It does work sometimes,” said Jollimore, the Cal State Chico professor. “I’ve used ‘How would Aristotle answer this?’ when we hadn’t read Aristotle. But I’ve also used absurd ones and they didn’t notice that there was this crazy thing in their paper, meaning these are people who not only didn’t write the paper but also didn’t read their own paper before submitting it.”

Still, while professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. One, published in June 2024, used fake student profiles to slip 100 percent AI-generated work into professors’ grading piles at a U.K. university. The professors failed to flag 97 percent. It doesn’t help that since ChatGPT’s launch, AI’s capacity to write human-sounding essays has only gotten better...

There are, of course, plenty of simple ways to fool both professors and detectors...

Most professors have come to the conclusion that stopping rampant AI abuse would require more than simply policing individual cases and would likely mean overhauling the education system to consider students more holistically. “Cheating correlates with mental health, well-being, sleep exhaustion, anxiety, depression, belonging,” said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford and one of the world’s leading student-engagement researchers.

Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair. In the fall, Sam Williams was a teaching assistant for a writing-intensive class on music and social change at the University of Iowa that, officially, didn’t allow students to use AI at all. Williams enjoyed reading and grading the class’s first assignment: a personal essay that asked the students to write about their own music tastes. Then, on the second assignment, an essay on the New Orleans jazz era (1890 to 1920), many of his students’ writing styles changed drastically. Worse were the ridiculous factual errors. Multiple essays contained entire paragraphs on Elvis Presley (born in 1935). “I literally told my class, ‘Hey, don’t use AI. But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out,’” Williams said.

Williams knew most of the students in this general-education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed. “They’re using AI because it’s a simple solution and it’s an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays. And I get it, because I hated writing essays when I was in school,” Williams said. “But now, whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them.”

By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones...

The confusion was enough to sour Williams on education as a whole. By the end of the semester, he was so disillusioned that he decided to drop out of graduate school altogether. “We’re in a new generation, a new time, and I just don’t think that’s what I want to do,” he said.

Jollimore, who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving...

He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT...

It’s not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification. This is all especially unnerving if you add in the reality that AI is imperfect — it might rely on something that is factually inaccurate or just make something up entirely — with the ruinous effect social media has had on Gen Z’s ability to tell fact from fiction...

“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” wrote Duke professor Orin Starn in a recent column titled “My Losing Battle Against AI Cheating,” citing a quote often attributed to W. H. Auden. But it’s not just writing that develops critical thinking. “Learning math is working on your ability to systematically go through a process to solve a problem. Even if you’re not going to use algebra or trigonometry or calculus in your career, you’re going to use those skills to keep track of what’s up and what’s down when things don’t make sense,” said Michael Johnson, an associate provost at Texas A&M University. Adolescents benefit from structured adversity, whether it’s algebra or chores. They build self-esteem and work ethic. It’s why the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued for the importance of children learning to do hard things, something that technology is making infinitely easier to avoid"

 

Links - 7th November 2026 (History Extra Quoting)

This will probably be the last History Extra Podcast Quoting links post.

Alcatraz: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Today we kind of use prison and jail interchangeably and throughout history we've used these terms interchangeably but they're actually distinct types of facilities with important differences. So prisons are places where we use to punish people convicted of serious crimes with long periods of confinement whereas jails serve a lot of different purposes but they're generally intended to be short-term holding tanks for a variety of people including people who haven't been convicted of a crime … while islands offer that useful isolation, that's the main attraction that we think of island prisons, that isolation makes it really difficult to run a prison so for example on Alcatraz there's no source of fresh water so that water has to be you know shipped in or brought in somehow which makes it very difficult and then there are added difficulties of just being so close to the ocean. So the sea water and the salt in the air, that's really corrosive. That actually came in handy for a couple of escape attempts because just the materials of the prison were disintegrating so badly and then another factor is even though there's a lot of fresh air and the islands are usually quite picturesque, you have a gorgeous view of San Francisco and the surrounding *something* County on the other side from Alcatraz. Islands tend to be cold and miserable which is attractive if you're thinking about a very punitive style prison but it's also going to be really terrible for the prison staff’...
‘Alcatraz is an outlier… Alcatraz was basically designed to clean up the mess that was the federal prison system at the time and in the United States we have a long history of turning to some prisons or sometimes just part of our existing prisons to fix problems that the main system just can't handle. So throughout history we usually turn to some sort of punishment on the grounds of the prison usually this would be some version of the hole or dark cell, various names for where prisoners would do additional solitary confinement usually on a bread and water diet for a period of days or weeks. Later when states started to build more than one prison for the whole state we developed different security level prisons so we would have a minimum security prison, a medium security prison and a Maximum Security Prison, and the idea there was that you would take the worst prisoners and put them into the maximum security prisons and you would take the kind of lowest level offenders, those who were least likely to recidivate, kind of isolate them from the kind of notorious bad prisoners. But the funny thing is the security levels didn't actually match up to the populations, we would just shuffle people around based on not their dangerousness but just how much of a pain they were for for the wardens. So if warden didn't want to deal with a particularly annoying prisoner they would just transfer them to a different security level, never mind what that security level actually was. So today we've continued that tradition. We have the supermax prison, so supermax which is short for super maximum security prisons so minimum, medium, maximum, super maximum. So these are prisons where prisoners spend about 23 hours a day in solitary confinement and Alcatraz is actually oftentimes called the first supermax which, I don't agree with that label, it's it's not quite right because Alcatraz didn't really use a lot of solitary confinement it definitely didn't use it routinely for most prisoners. So some prisoners would be in solitary but not the majority. But what Alcatraz and the supermax do have in common is both were ostensibly reserved for the worst of the worst prisoner. So today's supermax is often described as being reserved for the Hannibal Lectors of the world. But most people who ended up in Alcatraz or who end up in a supermax tend to be ordinary criminals who were just kind of pains to deal with rather than you know some criminal mastermind... Half of the men who spent time in Alcatraz never returned to the prison after the release um and the number was even higher after the early years so it's known as the Gangster Era so these men who were ostensibly incorrigible recidivists actually weren't'"

Medieval medicine: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘If we were in the medieval period if you and I were there who would we expect to be treated by?’
‘Yeah well the first thing to say is probably not a doctor usually. So doctors’ services were very expensive. And also in many instances I think you'd be pretty sort of certain that they wouldn't be necessarily the right person much as I think today you wouldn't go to your GP with a dental problem, you'd go to your dentist. So there was a range of practitioners with specialisms. So barber-surgeons are a really interesting group because they were were much more omnipresent, their services were less expensive and they were skilled in doing a number of hands-on things. So physicians generally didn't touch the body. They might touch you to take your pulse but usually they were kind of advising you and hearing your case history and so forth. A barber surgeon would do a number of things such as um stitching a wound, cutting your hair, applying a plaster. Many things that were involved close contact with the body, and those those individuals were very important and might you know have their own specialisms. And there might be people with with very niche specialisms such as pulling out teeth for example.’"

An African perspective on the history of Africa | HistoryExtra - "'I was surprised by the richness of the continent's history and especially by the history of the country where I was born, the Sudan, which has a thousand pyramids. Egypt has 100. A thousand in Sudan, although only 300 preserved their superstructure. So I was really quite blown away by the statues of the kings of ancient Sudan and the tombs and some of the artifacts and so on so'"

Highwaymen: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘What's really interesting is that highwaymen began to participate in their own self-promotion. They actually realize that their reputations will be enhanced and their chances of avoiding punishment were enhanced if they could have good stories about them told, so they would work with people who wanted to write their biographies or they would sit in the 18th century. They would sit to have their portraits done so that those positive images of them would be circulating… the ideal Highwayman certainly in the 18th century was a gentleman or had genteel behaviors. He was polite, chivalrous. He robbed without any actual violence. He may have threatened violence but he wouldn't commit it. He would stop a coach, he would hold a pistol to it with one hand but with the other hand offer his hand to let the ladies step out of the coach onto the ground and they could surrender their valuables. He was always apologetic, I'm very sorry I have to do this but it's necessity that requires me to do it. And he left them a bit of money so that they could continue their journey without difficulty… the surprising thing is how many positive representations existed [in literature]... Their whole aim was to present themselves as above the common criminal. They were not an ordinary low and degraded criminal. They were actually genteel. They came from respectable backgrounds, it was just unfortunate they'd fallen on hard times and they needed to support themselves. And as a gentleman you wouldn't work for a living, that's not what gentlemen do. So instead they would rob for a living’"

Graffiti's golden age: radicalism & romance in the 18th century | HistoryExtra - "'For most of human history really up until the early modern period at least in Europe there was a sense of graffiti being instead part of everyday life. It was something that everyone partook in. Everyone would do, in their own homes, in churches, so in the medieval period in Britain we would have everyone from the priest down to the the lowliest poorest member of the parish leaving a mark, things like carved crosses, other Christian symbols, merchants’ marks. Things that were versions or iterations of those people's individual and sort of community beliefs. You know leaving your Merchant’s Mark you might be sealing some kind of business deal for example and often we find these in in the porches of churches and around columns inside and that kind of thing. So it's something that's always been there people have always wanted to leave their mark and there's a real sort of human urge from the very first cave paintings really to do that'"

David Lloyd George: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "'The Germans invade neutral Belgium which gives Lloyd George and indeed many other people if you like who call it a justification or you call it an excuse to support the war because again Belgium, a nation which actually has got its own massive Empire in Africa and is acting in an incredibly oppressive way against the population of the Congo, for example. Nevertheless is presented as one of these small nations on which Liberals are so fond of, they’re sort of supporting their rights and so that when you put it in this frame of the Germans trampling over this plucky little Belgium then that gives Lloyd George and many of his supporters although not all of them this cover if you like to move to supporting what is really a kind of a fairly conventional great power conflict'...
in 1940 where he really doesn't have a party any longer, the only people who were loyal to him are basically MPS who are members of his own family either directly or through marriage and he's not got a party and yet he's actually discussed seriously by some people as a potential prime minister at the point where Neville Chamberlain resigns in May after the Norwegian crisis. And so I don't really think that was ever a runner but it's kind of remarkable what he should still have been discussed by anybody in those terms so long after he'd fallen from office and I think that ultimately is a tribute people's continued belief in his ability on the basis of his record in World War I"

Benjamin Franklin: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Is there any great figure in history who didn't have some deep flaw. And I came up with Joseph Haydn as being somebody who was a complete genius and also incredibly nice. But I'm afraid I think that's a great rarity, and I'm afraid Franklin did have a bit of a flaw and that was the treatment of his wife Deborah’"

The Magus: enlightened magician or Renaissance charlatan? | HistoryExtra - "'Alchemy actually works in a physical sense it's one of the great discoveries of history, historians of Science in the last couple of generations… [Some] have recreated alchemical procedures and it turns out that Alchemy is metallic crystalline chemistry and it works quite well if you can just understand the recipes. And so that is an independent tradition which also goes back to Antiquity but it keeps intersecting with the magical tradition. But the big difference is it works which is one reason why Newton and Boyle and Hooke are still really interested in alchemy by, at a point when they've really given up on astrology and many of the other characteristic pursuits of the Magus. Astrology is the great predictive art of the premodern world. Uh it still of course flourishes, supposedly polls show that more Americans believe in astrology than in any version of Christianity. But I don't think that's a very strong kind of belief’...
‘The other thing I think we have to understand is the very theatrical world and people have a lot of will to, for suspension of disbelief, and that's part of the way the Catholic Church works. You know, there are many many convents you can go to where the rood is a statue which will move, and will move its head and move its arms. And the people going are very sophisticated, you know 15th, 16th century people, but in that place, they're willing to suspend disbelief and see something miraculous happen. And I think that that also works for a skilled Magus and performer with charisma that you know, people suspend disbelief and they'll go along with what you're doing. And I'm afraid we still do this too. I mean to anybody who has lived through the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman Fried, it's impossible not to see that a bit of charisma and a good line of patter can get you a long way even now'"

The Spartans: Everything You Wanted to Know | HistoryExtra - "‘Come back either with it or on it. Meaning come back victorious with your shield which is the key item of defensive armor that a Spartan warrior would use or dead and on top of the shield carried by your comrades. Actually Spartans were buried on the battlefield, they weren't brought back home, so the saying is no doubt made up’...
'[On Leonidas] The 300 he chose, very interestingly not his usual royal bodyguard… he chose 300 specially men who already both were married and had fathered a living son. So there's some point here about the future that these 300 won't necessarily survive Thermopylae, but their children will come up to avenge them and to be their, their successors as it were. And I think Leonidas deserves enormous credit for the psychological warfare as well as the physical bravery that he displayed'"

Inside a Jim Crow asylum | HistoryExtra - "'I was shocked to find that there were patients at Crownsville, one woman brought there for the crime of having cut a white person off in traffic. She ended up at Crownsville for decades. Another patient named Mr Bell that I write about who is discovered by one of the first black employees to get there in the 1950s, it turns out that he's been there for years, he he complains to the new Black employees that he hasn't seen the sun, he hasn't seen the sky, in years… Mr Bell was picked up by her own supervisor, her own boss, in Baltimore with the authorities one night because they had overheard him using a British accent and they didn't believe that there were black people who could have British accents. They just couldn't imagine that world, that way of being. And so they assume he's crazy and bring him to Crownsville. Well it turns out that this man had actually been born in London and had been a jockey, had come to America and fallen on hard times, and had no relatives or friends to really fight for him and get him out of Crownsville'"

Ancient Greek theatre: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Women were not allowed on the stage… you have a very strange situation where a lot of Greek tragedies give you these very powerful women who are out in the public eye, who are doing sophisticated, powerful things, running the show. And that's very very different from the way we understand life to have been for women in Athens at that time, right. Women in Athens lived a very cloistered domestic life and really didn't have public rights of any kind that that we can see, except maybe for priestesses’"

History Behind the Headlines: student protests down the centuries | HistoryExtra - "'[Reagan] basically thought these students were being subsidized heavily to behave in a deeply antisocial way. Reagan once famously said that a student meaning a California student was a person who talked like Tarzan, looked like Jane and smelled like cheetah, who for those who don't know is the chimpanzee in the Tarzan movies. But that connection between the you know mass growth of higher education in the US and in California in particular was also tied up with the politics of the time, protests against Vietnam, the Hippie movement and of course the contrast between a kind of expansive Democratic party and a Republican party which even then was beginning to move towards a sort of more free market small government vision which Reagan of course became an exemplar of’"

The Tattooist of Auschwitz: is it ok to fictionalise the Holocaust? | HistoryExtra - "'Spielberg making the film has to convert it into moral parable, a moral lesson as it were so in fact all the historical records show that Schindler continues as a corrupt businessman before and after, didn't affect his character at all, he was always having affairs with women. The film prettifies this by showing him reconciling with his wife which he in fact did didn't do at all according to the historical record. And there is this constant temptation to draw moral from from the Holocaust. And there’s some other cheap tricks in Spielberg’s film, you know the women are herded into a shower room which is usually what the gas chambers are disguised at and then to their amazement you know water starts spouting in and it really is a shower room. I think it's a really cheap cheap trick...
Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader for example which is made into a powerful film starring Kate Winslet. This young boy has an affair with an older woman and it's through her asking him to read literary texts to him and he later discovers that she was a prison camp guard in in the Holocaust and she's illiterate and that is a really I think misleading trick because it's not the case that people became camp guards and SS men and so on because they were ignorant or illiterate. On the contrary the higher up you go in the SS hierarchy the more PhD holders there are. So that's very dubious'...
‘How much of a challenge is it to show something like Auschwitz on screen?’
‘Well it's it's very difficult. First of all you've got healthy well fed Hollywood actors and actresses and so on playing people who in reality were starving covered in lice, ill, sick, brutalized. It can't really convey that on film. There are some rare actors like uh Christian Bale I think is one who does sort of if he's playing somebody who's starving he starves himself and there's a kind of method acting in that but I you can't do it you can't so it's one of the problems of Schindler’s List… then films have to have a beginning a middle and an end and for a lot of people this did not, the Holocaust, you know you can't structure it in that way. So in Schindler's List it ends with Schindler with a group of survivors of his own people who survived because he employed them in his factory, saying he wished he could have saved more. But he didn't, it didn't have an effect to him at all. He just went back to his old ways. His businesses failed and in the end some of them got together and tried to support him but he wasn't somebody who became as ideologically committed to ending the, ending the Holocaust anymore than he became committed to making it up with his wife and stopping having affairs. Essentially his behavior was kind of inexplicable, and films don't like that'"
What a weird interpretation of The Reader

Agent Zo: spying against the Nazis | HistoryExtra - "'The Warsaw Uprising is one of most highly documented battles of the Second World War. The Poles deliberately sent out units of five men with cameras and rolls of film, there were cinefilm taking, they were actually to keep their own morale up playing some of the cinefilm in the cinemas in Warsaw while they were under fire, against a backdrop of machine gun fire from you know down the road. and so some of this information is brought out and the commander sends out five different all men in fact to get to Britain so that the world will know the truth of this battle so that it's recorded... They had this Soviet backed Communist Regime installed who rounded up a number of the senior members of the Home Army and basically imprisoned and executed them in the peacetime even though they've been allies because they didn't want potential resistance leaders against the new regime'"

Galileo: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Galileo's work was compared to many scientists really very accessible and readable and it's still it's still pretty accessible and readable today. Nobody reads for example Copernicus for pleasure. Actually nobody reads Kepler for pleasure either but Galileo actually is quite a readable author and I think that is a an important thing because science has to be accessible to the next generation of people who are going to take those ideas forward’...
'He had three children, two daughters and a son who were all born to his mistress and the two daughters he arranged for them to become nuns… At the time he was on his professor's salary and and he would have been expected to provide diaries for his daughters. He was also as the eldest son responsible for his brothers and sisters as well to the extent that they didn't already have their own families. So by putting into nunneries it meant that they weren't to get married and he wouldn't have to pay the dowries that their social status might have demanded but he couldn't afford'"

The Terror: everything you wan - History Extra podcast - Apple Podcasts - "‘He writes in his notebooks a whole series of things that get called Republican institutions but by people who who've dug them up later on. But they they're focused around this very strange static vision of of essentially rural community, is kind of sort of utopianism that's looking backwards to the classical world really and concerned with personal relationships... Men have to declare their friendships on an annual basis and if you don't have any friends you're not part of the community and you get banished. And then these friends are people who support each other through the life course and dig each other's graves and weep at each other's funerals, sort of sort sentimental diffusions that start coming out then’"

Death and mourning in Britain: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Invisible Dead. This was a major project run by our archaeology department and it would ask this question: we can roughly estimate how many people there have been living in Europe over the last 2,000 years. It's guess work but there's a rough estimate. How many graves have we found? Absolutely minimal number. So where are the invisible dead? What's happened to them?’"

The history of museums: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘They also come up with this again quite quickly this very sort of ingenious system in many ways where they categorize their collection as a b and c and a is basically any kind of object that is unique, irreplaceable, incredibly valuable, incredible provenance attached to it they take that straight away. So that moves immediately. B it's you know second kind of priority but they take as much of that as they can and then c is what they decide to leave on display and remain in the site of the museum and that's something you see with a lot of museums across the world at this point, even though there's world war going on they really don't want to actually shut the doors. They really want to still be able to keep part of the museum open to have the public come in and have that respite, which is actually something that museums came back to during the global pandemic in Covid, because it was actually the first time they actually had to close for a lot of them and one of of the key things with a lot of the national museums and galleries particularly in the UK is that they had never even had to do that during the Second World War’...
'The International Council of Museums a few years ago they changed the official definition of a museum or what a museum is. And there was sort of a lot of debate back and forth. I think it was the first time in over 50 or 60 years they changed the definition… the museum is not for profit, it's permanent, it is in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage, which is open to the public, accessible, inclusive, fosters  diversity and sustainability and that operates and communicates ethically and professionally with the participation of communities. So I find that definition incredibly interesting, very positive actually’
Clearly covid was even more dangerous than the Second World War
If you don't push the left wing agenda, you're not a museum

Tudor ladies-in-waiting: the women who served Henry VIII's queens | HistoryExtra - "'Every lady in waiting had her own female servants, but trying to find them in records, you basically can't, unless you found any kind of anecdotal evidence of a name or something like that but otherwise you just have to assume that they've each got a certain number of women around them and leave it at that'...
'They do definitely write letters but usually they don't put the sensitive information in letters which is incredibly frustrating as a historian. It's very common that somebody will write a letter and say the bearer will tell you the rest. So whoever they've given the letter to and said take this to so and so, the letter bearer carries an oral message as well and that has the sensitive information in it. And it's it's so annoying you see that at the end of the letter and you're like Goddamnit, the juicy stuff was not written down'"

Beastly Victorians: the 19th-century fight for animal rights | HistoryExtra - "‘Different species of animals attracted different levels of attention. I imagine that dogs and cats you would expect would be the ones that people were most worried about cruelty to, or is that just a modern expectation’
‘That's half true. I think dogs, less so cats. Actually cats have a bit of a sort of transformation in terms of their perception in the 19 century. They're not really kept as pets that much until about the 1850s. They are kept but they are largely kept to control vermin. Dogs yes though. People definitely felt affection for them although some of them were working dogs as well. But I guess I'd say within even within that category of dogs you kind of have gradations. So pedigree dogs for example dogs that were a particular breed you know like a St Bernard or a poodle, people cared about them if they were owned. If they were pets definitely you get prosecutions for the mistreatment of pets, usually public mistreatment not kind of in people's homes which was a different issue. On the other hand though stray dogs your mongrels were kind of running around the street, people associate them with things like rabies. They're very worried about them... … mammals tend to more attention particularly kind of large supposedly sort of sentient mammals I mean elephants I'm thinking of here in particular. There's an awful lot of concern for like the elephant jumbo when he’s sold to the circus owner PT Barnum in the states… the RSPCA even actually at one point advocates culling tigers in India because it says you they can't be civilized, they're just killing human beings’"

D-Day: Air | HistoryExtra - "'Of the more than 6,000 jumpers from the 101st only 1,000… land on or near their objectives. Major General Maxwell Taylor who's the 101st Divisional Commander ends up in a topheavy group of 20 men including four colonels and a number of other officers. Never quips one of them have so many been commanded by so few'"

D-Day: Sea | HistoryExtra - "'Nobody thinks they're going to destroy a concrete bunker but what they are attempting to do is so traumatize the German defenders that are inside them that they won't be fit for action at that crucial moment when the landing craft are coming in. So there's a huge amount of work for sailors to do before any landing craft ramp touches the beach'"

D-Day: Land | HistoryExtra - "‘The idea of the German Army I think if we're familiar with the old wartime movies and everything is these sort of goose stepping highly trained you know Waffen SS Panzer divisions etc but the truth on D-Day and on the beaches of Normandy was rather different. That many of the German strongpoints, these gun implacements and the machine gun nests that line in the coastline, they were manned by young conscripts, you know many of them schoolboys 16, 17 years of age who had no experience whatsoever of fighting and frankly were absolutely terrified… they just recalled the absolute terror on the morning you know at dawn on the 6th of June of looking out, peering out of their machine gun nests and seeing this vast armada, this Allied Fleet that was coming towards them and realizing that this was the moment of reckoning. You know they all knew, everyone knew that D Day was going to come at some point but they didn't know when and they didn't know where the Allies were going to land… it really was you know a terrifying moment for them as it was for the Allied troops coming in to land’...
'Sainte-Mère-Église… went badly wrong in the sense that men were just scattered all over the place, they were meant to land in specific landing zones but of course they were scattered wildly over the country, country side. And this was both paradoxically good news and bad news. It was bad news because most of the men had no idea where they were and they'd lost all their other their comrades and and weren't quite sure what to do and where they were and their objectives Etc. But it was good news in the sense that the Germans were utterly confused, they were thinking what on Earth are the Americans trying to do here. What happened is that these men were highly trained, they knew what their objectives were, and they began to gather themselves into small little bands'...
'Some beaches were much bloodier than others so we know that on on Omaha itself there were some 2,400 American casualties so they really, it was a really tough struggle to get onto the beach at Omaha. But others were relatively light in casualties so Utah Beach. there was a mere, I say that with some caution, 197 men who were killed… that's extraordinarily light considering they're capturing this you know huge and heavily defended beach. And if you can contrast that with one of the practice runs for D-Day which was Exercise Tiger in which 749 men were killed in the exercise, and yet on the day itself on Utah Beach, 197 were killed'"

Katherine Parr: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Katherine is the most married Queen of England which is quite a sort of a neat fact when she's married to the most married King. But she's married as a teenager to Edward Burr of Gainsboro...
Katherine She's certainly not someone you would ordinarily consider to be royal wife material. She's also of course a widow, so she's not a young virgin. However he tried to marry a young virgin before with Catherine Howard and that obviously turned out to be a disaster. And I think part of Catherine's attraction to Henry is the fact that she's a widow, he's actually passed a law following Catherine Howard's fall that it's illegal for a non-virgin to marry the king without sort of disclosing the fact that they've got a past’...
'Henry has of course broken with Rome, he's made some changes to the traditional Church, particularly publishing the Bible in English, although he does backtrack actually, during his marriage to Catherine he passes a law that makes it illegal for women to read the Bible in English for example and lower status men'"

Boudica: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "'Prasutagus seems to have died sometime perhaps in the winter of AD 59 or AD 60. He left a will to the emperor Nero… he left a will leaving half of his kingdom and wealth to the emperor Nero in the hope that that would satisfy the Romans and the other half to his daughters… his natural inheritors the Romans weren't having any of this'"

A 17th-century scandal & a writer's secret life | HistoryExtra - "‘Henrietta's lover was her own brother-in-law, he was married to her sister Mary Ford, Lord Gray, aged 27 to her 18 years on the day she ran away from her parents' home and vanished into the underworld of London… we have a very good description of Henrietta's physical appearance because her parents… was so desperate to get their daughter back that they took a really unprecedented step and they advertised for her publicly in the London Gazette, and the London Gazette describes her as a young lady of a fair complexion, fair head, full breasted and indifferent to all. Later editions of the London Gazette removed the reference to Lady Henrietta's bosom’"

The First Crusade | The call to arms | HistoryExtra - "‘Western Europe had been plagued with famine for quite some time and with Jerusalem being depicted as a land of milk and honey rich with wondrous opportunity, it seems likely that this could have been a big draw for potential Crusaders. But this expense Natasha mentioned is an important factor when we consider who actually had the opportunity to go on Crusade, and, what they really wanted.’
‘It used to be thought that a lot of the Crusaders were younger sons who are off freebooting, they're not going to get any land because of the rule that firstborn son gets everything. Looking at the documents just how expensive, it was for the first Crusaders to go, on a journey of roughly 3,500 km, and that's if you make it back. We're looking at about four times the average wage of a knight just to be able to afford to go. So the accounts that we have of what people brought back with them, it tends to be relics, pieces of the True Cross. They're not really telling us in great detail about the huge chunk of wealth they brought back with them. There are a lot of accounts of pillaging and looting. But that is more to keep this campaign going, than it is about bringing back a wealth of riches. We do get some accounts from men like Caffaro of Genoa who tell us, oh we came back rich in peppercorns and we all bought 48 celide [sp?] home with us. It's a long way to go, for 48 celide. So we can probably say that the freebooting younger sons is on its way out, as a theory. But it is one that has persisted for quite some time’"

The First Crusade | On the road | HistoryExtra - "‘It’s easy to focus on the fighting force and perhaps overlook the large number of non-combatants performing auxiliary roles in the background and according to Natasha this has proven to be one of the most enduring misconceptions surrounding the Crusades’
 ‘My kind of take on the legacy of the Crusades is this particular fascination with the hyper masculine concept of the Knight Crusader. This idea that this was the most uber manly man of the medieval period and that that's what a crusader is, when in fact, if you look at the makeup of crusade armies, only, what, six to possibly 10% of them were Knights. The rest were ordinary people. Women, sometimes children, clergy, siege engineers, sailors. All sorts of people are involved in crusading activity. The image of the Knight Crusader is one that's been handed down to us through retellings. First of all in medieval chronicles, then romances, then art in the 19th century. Crusade memes now. There's an instant recognition amongst people at a popular level of what a crusade is but it doesn't bear out what a medieval Crusade necessarily was about’"

The First Crusade | Crossing into the unknown | HistoryExtra - "'If you want to look at the demographic and the political reality of the Levant, it's extremely extremely diverse. On the one hand, the overwhelming population in what is today Eastern Anatolia, Eastern Turkey. Today Syria, Palestine, were Christians. And that's often not considered when you are talking about the Levant. You know, we we say the Crusaders invaded the Islamic world. What do we mean by the Islamic world? Is this because of the people were Muslims or is this because the Muslims were ruling it? Actually it's because the Muslims were ruling it. The majority of the populations were Christians in large cities and in the rural areas. And here Christians you have the Orthodox, you have lots of Arabs who have been Christians for a long time and they remained so. But most of the populations were not of Arab Origins. They have Armenians. You have lots of Syriac speaking people. These were traditionally non-Arabs. They lived there before the coming of the Muslims to occupy this part in the 7th century and these were varieties of Orthodox sects, Orthodox Christian sects. And if you move southward you might come in into contact with people who might follow actually the Greek Orthodo, or the Byzantine Orthodox church. So that's on the Christian front. On the Muslim front, the large number of Muslims in what we call Syria, greater Syria. That is Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel today, the majority of the Muslims were actually Shiites. Three different types of Shiites were living there. The Sunnis had a presence, but their presence was very sporadic and probably only in and around major cities like Damascus. So that, this is the kind of reality and when the Seljuks came, in, starting in 1071 and they controlled this geography, even as Sunnis, they were practicing a form of Sunnism often is we call it Hanafi Sunni Islam that wasn't either present or powerful in that area. And they directly came into problems with the local Sunni populations who practised other forms of Sunni Islam. Especially for instance in the city of Damascus... The division between Sunnis and Shiias or the division between Sunni and Shiias is blown out of historical reality… that it's not true that Sunnis and Shiias were always enemies of each other. For instance the Fatimids at one point during the Crusader period they hired Sunnis to be their Prime Ministers so to speak. And we have equivalent in say in the Abbasid Court. The Abbasids were Sunnis and sometimes they hired Shias as their lead ministers… cities like Bagdad were largely, the Muslims there were either Sunnis or Shiias and they coexisted. Damascus was divided between Sunnis and Shias. Aleppo Etc. So there are large periods of Islamic history where Sunnis and Shiias lived together without necessarily killing each other but there were other moments when there were religious tensions… my opinion this division of Sunnism and Shiiaism when it comes to the Crusader period largely has no relevance in terms of explaining why certain things happens. It can explain other things in terms of context, reception, reaction to the Crusades, the reality of the Muslim world...
There’s the Turkish garrison, they're there for 6 weeks and the Byzantines then say, why don't we talk? And the fact is this is perfectly normal in the Middle Ages. I know Hollywood movies always love you know scenes where cities are taken by storm and people swarming over the walls with ladders and siege engines and all the rest of it. That was quite rare. If a relieving force didn't turn up it was expected the garrison normally did surrender'"

The First Crusade | Besieged | HistoryExtra - "'The other problem the crusaders had with starving cities into submission was that these were big cities and there were never quite enough Crusaders to really, do a tight blockade. It's very rare that a Crusader Army can besiege a city and then stop everybody going in and out. So for instance even in the Siege of Antioch, where the Crusaders um were there for months. At no point were they able to stop supplies going in and out. They were able to hinder them, but people could always move out and around. So once you've realized that you can't starve them into submission, you then have to go to less subtle and more violent, ways. And at its most simple, you can do an assault...
The city of Antioch had only been uh taken over by the Turks in 1086, it was it was only in Turkic hands for 11 years, their population was still Christian. Even when the Turks had taken it over it was only taken by treachery. So treachery is a, is an important ingredient in the toolbox of how you capture cities'"

The First Crusade: the end or the beginning? | HistoryExtra - "'[On the capture of Jerusalem] The Christian chronicles made a big deal of of a massacre. Sieges that end without a surrender, are, very bloodthirsty and that's true in Europe, it's true in the Middle East, and I think that's one thing to bear in mind, is that what happened to Jerusalem was not a, necessarily a rush of fanatical religious hatred or racial hatred. It was of a magnitude which was the same when a European city was captured under siege and without surrender. That was the ghastly rules of war the other thing, that's since become known is that the chroniclers were vastly exaggerating. So the massacres were supposed to be total in fact weren't that at all.'...
'Contrary to what contemporary chroniclers wrote we do know that many members of the Jewish Community were also ransomed after the massacre'...
' They killed everybody and went and asked the Muslims to bury their Muslim coreligionists. Wait a minute where did you bring those Muslims to bury other Muslims? So when you start looking at the details you realize oh wait this doesn't add up. Someone is inventing a story about a massacre that they want to use in order to show off. And by the way Muslim historians from a century after, they became aware of that Christian narrative, Crusader narrative and they adopted it. And, but they adopted it in order to fuel the Islamic resentment. Is very utilitarian, extremely powerful. They are repeating it also for specific agendas'"

Death by nostalgia: the curious history of a dangerous emotion | HistoryExtra - "‘There's an amazing fact in your book which is there was one Swiss milking song that was deemed so nostalgic that singing it among Swiss mercenaries was punishable by death’...
'Absolutely and particularly among soldiers...obviously you need your armies to be fighting fit, you need them to be well, you need them to not be lying around wistfully pining for their home. And so anything that could provoke nostalgia was seen as a real threat not just to the individual well-being of the soldiers but to the kind of whole military effort. And you have similar things in the US during the American Civil War. There was also injunctions against you know there were all these songs like home sweet home that were also cautioned against because they were worried that it would put soldiers off their form, kind of it would make the war effort less effective'...
' In the early 19th century in France where lots of babies were sent away to wet nurses, so not so much the initial sending away because they were so tiny but when they'd come back to their real parents they were effectively leaving the only people they'd ever known to be parents, the wet nurses and there were all these cases of babies being diagnosed with nostalgia or little children that you know were desperately sad and it's it is kind of tragic to think that you know of course they'd be hugely unhappy at the thought of not being able to see their standin mother ever again'
'It can actually be used to improve your well-being so there are all these studies now that are done that kind of try and invoke nostalgia in people trying to make people feel nostalgic as a kind of therapy, as a kind of therapeutic intervention. And they say okay well if we make people feel nostalgic, you know nostalgia is a very social emotion, will make people feel more connected with each other, it will make them feel better about themselves. It'll make them weirdly and kind of you know paradoxically more confident about the future and more positive and optimistic. There are also studies that suggest that nostalgia can make people more creative and that is supposed to improve memory, improve social connectedness, lessen their anxiety, lessen symptoms of depression’"

Becoming a Family

Becoming a Family

"The state now forces us to send our children to school, while ensuring that nothing much in the way of education occurs there. What passes for education in many British schools is really a process of demoralization, in which children are taken from their parents and surrendered to their peers. Today, significant numbers of young Britons leave school unable to read or do mental arithmetic. Useless old subjects like Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics have disappeared, and English grammar, with its oppressive rules and useless complexities, has been pushed aside as "elitist." As for manners, these have declined to such an extent that shops near London schools regularly close their doors to children, while older people seek refuge in another car when children board a train.

Instead of preparing children for adult life, our system of education ensures that they remain children, with all of childhood's self-centered incompetence but none of its redeeming innocence and shame. The state's attempt to sexualize children—encouraging members of the younger generation to master all the relevant positions by the age of 14, and making homosexuality a central part of their curriculum—doesn't help matters. Sex, pupils learn, is just an extension of childhood—another realm of play, in which all is permitted that could lead to enjoyment, and in which only the serious, the lasting, and the loving are dangerous.

The sixties' ideology, which caused such havoc in my own personal life, and the evil effects of which it took me 20 years to overcome, is now an obligatory basis of schooling, enforced from the tenderest age, and with complete disregard for the personal happiness and long-term hopes of the pupils. What I escaped only with the greatest difficulty and by the skin of my teeth is now being imposed as a general destiny. Surely, the first of my duties toward Sam is to ensure that he does not fall into the clutches of the people who want to do this to him.

The new curriculum, which has both the aim and the effect of cutting off children from their parents, making them unlovable to adults and the exclusive property of the state, springs from the minds of people who are themselves, for the most part, childless. It would be better, it seemed to us, for Sam to be sent down a coal mine, there to encounter the real world of adults, than to go through the complete course in demoralization that our rulers require. Even the private schools must follow the National Curriculum, which has been carefully devised to remove all the knowledge that Sophie and I value and to substitute the "life skills" needed in an urban slum.

The only solution that has occurred to us so far is to educate Sam ourselves for as long as time, energy, and knowledge permit and then to send him to the Lycée Francaise in London, on the understanding that the French have been slightly less contemptuous toward their national culture than we have been. As to what Sam's curriculum should be, common sense directs us down the old and beaten path. And we shall start him off with Grimm, Andersen, and Lewis Carroll, since their brand of children's literature does not merely enlarge the imagination: it also educates the moral sense.

While pondering this matter, however, I was invited by a national newspaper to describe what we intended for Sam—a sign that many people share our concerns. Naturally, I assured the readers, if John Stuart Mill could read Greek at six, why not Sam? And maybe Sam's first public utterance could match that of the four-year-old Macaulay, deflecting the meddlesome attentions of a toddler-coddler, after he had hurt himself, with the words: "I thank you, Madam, the agony is abated." Sam would be kept away from pop music and television but would study the viola as a salutary form of self-abasement. He would be introduced to horses and fox hunting, so as to learn both to care for animals and to do so unsentimentally. He would be taught the virtues—courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—in their Christian version, as forms of faith, hope, and charity. And although Sam would probably not enjoy his childhood, I wrote, he would emerge from it as someone agreeable to others, whether or not happy in himself.

The article precipitated a storm of abuse from experts in child-rearing, educational gurus, feminists, and assorted believers in progress—all manifestly products of an education system that identifies irony as an elitist crime and has therefore extinguished the ability to understand it. For several weeks, we lived in dread of the social workers. If we could not answer their inquiries, we feared, Sam would be put into foster care, denied all access to his parents, and given a normal diet of pop, television, and takeout.

The experts who greeted our educational plans with such outrage were, after all, the voice of our modern culture—the very same culture that has shaped the educational system and set up the state in opposition to the family. It is only since becoming part of a family that I have fully gauged the depth and seriousness of this opposition. The family has become a subversive institution—almost an underground conspiracy—at war with the state and the state-sponsored culture.

Hence the official curriculum has rigorously excluded the family. Mothers appear from time to time in schoolbooks, but they are conspicuously single. Fathers are never mentioned—indeed, they have become unmentionable, as trousers were to our Victorian ancestors. The state-imposed sex education is designed to sever the link between sex and the family, by showing the family to be merely an "option." Sex education will ensure that the next generation will not form families, since it will have destroyed in its pupils everything that leads one sex to idealize the other and so to channel erotic feelings into marriage.

But Sophie and I have no doubt that it is the family, not the state, that fulfills us. Hence we have decided to follow our own instincts and observations, and to bring up our children as we believe to be right. We are members of a growing class of criminals, who have declared war on the state-sponsored culture and are prepared to challenge it.

This official culture is founded on the premise that the human material is infinitely plastic and can be molded by the state into any shape required. This is one of the first of the official doctrines that you learn, as a parent, to doubt. We compared Sam with other boys and could not help remarking how similar they are in one fundamental respect: which is, that they all want to be men. Moreover, they all associate manliness with action, with the use of tools, with the making of something out of nothing, and with power and the machines that produce it...

The official doctrine attributes such tendencies to culture: change the toys, the role models, and the contexts, the experts say, and boys will dress up, play with dolls, coddle animals, and make little interiors where they can be snug as a bug in a rug. But there seems to be a paucity of supporting evidence for such a view. Science, common sense, and recorded history all point to the conclusion that sex is a constant, which influences what can be achieved and what can be desired. Rather than work against it, we should work with it, to use its vast and unconscious power to drive our civilizing purpose.

The birth of our baby girl Lucy again awoke our curiosity in this respect, and while we of course intend to bring her up in the same improving regime that we proposed for Sam, we are fairly sure that she will not be seen, 12 months hence, with a trowel in her hand. Lucy's first smile was enough to convince us of this. Whereas Sam grinned broadly and mischievously, and then reached out to tear down the toy horse that hung above his crib, Lucy offered a serene, observing twinkle. Friends and neighbors all confirm the view that little girls are interested in people, in words, in the intimate togetherness of home, and that tools and machines fail to awaken their sympathies.

Why should people resist the obvious, when it comes to sexual roles? The answer, I believe, goes to the heart of our modern anxieties. In the world described by Jane Austen, men and women enjoyed separate spheres of action, the first public, the second private, the first involving influence without intimacy, the second an intimacy that was also a form of far-reaching, though publicly hidden, influence. Dress, manners, education, recreation, and language all reinforced this division, with marriage as the great life-choice in which it culminated and whose purpose it was. Because there is no going back to Jane Austen's world, we take refuge in the belief that every aspect of it reflects some arbitrary cultural imperative, with nothing due to permanent human nature. By extending cultural relativism even into those spheres where it is not culture but nature that determines what we do, we deceive ourselves into accepting—but with anxiety—a situation so novel that our ancestors never even thought to guard against it: the situation in which men and women are exchangeable in all their social roles and all their spheres of action.

It seems to me, however, that we do our children a disservice if we fail to acknowledge that their sexual nature sets them from the beginning on different paths. We should learn not to deny sex but to idealize it—to set before our children an image of the good man and the good woman, and to teach them to imitate what can be loved and admired. Even without the old division of roles, we can envisage alternative forms of role-playing that serve a comparable function—that rescue sex from animal appetite and make it the foundation of a lasting commitment.

Children, in their innocence, have an inkling of this...

The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness, as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant. But on what fund of knowledge are we to draw when framing our alternative? The utopias have proved to be illusions, and the most evident result of our "liberation" from traditional constraints has been widespread discontent with the human condition." 

Links - 6th November 2026 (2 - Donald Trump)

It's a Lovely Life by Heather Delaney Reese | Facebook - "This may be the most important thing I’ve ever written... White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stepped behind the podium in the briefing room... She told the room she felt it was too important not to be there, and then she launched into one of the most dangerous performances our country has ever seen come out of that room. And within minutes, it became clear this wasn’t a press conference about a shooting as the White House claimed it would be. It was about defining this administration’s next moves. Telling the country that criticism of the president is no longer just disagreement, but something more dangerous and potentially criminal. That the people speaking out against Donald Trump and his regime are not just wrong, but responsible for the violence in our country and subject to consequences for it, saying it in plain language: “This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of him and his supporters by commentators, by elected members of the Democrat Party, and even some in the media.” And then going even further: “Much of the manifesto of the would-be assassin is indistinguishable from the words that we hear daily from so many.”... She opened by invoking the First Amendment. “Saturday was supposed to be a joyful evening celebrating free speech and the First Amendment with all of you, members of the press.” She said it with a straight face. She used the words “free speech” to begin dismantling it. And everything that followed was built on that contradiction. She told the room that the political violence this country is experiencing “stems from a systemic demonization” of Trump and his supporters. That the “hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump, day after day for eleven years, has helped legitimize this violence.” And then she said the whole framework for the press conference. The whole argument in just a couple sentences before she started to justify all that she was saying: “Those who constantly and falsely label and slander the President as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.” Notice the word she chose. Slander. That is a legal term. It was not chosen by accident. Slander is actionable. Slander can be prosecuted... She said: “When you read the manifesto of this shooter, ask yourselves: how different is the rhetoric from this almost-assassin than what you read on social media and hear in various forums every single day? The answer, if you’re being honest with yourself, is that there is no difference at all.” She is not saying the left inspired the shooter. She is saying the left is the shooter... She then read a list of names. Democratic elected officials, called out one by one in front of the entire press corps, in front of every camera, and in front of every person watching at home. Hakeem Jeffries. Josh Shapiro. Alex Padilla. Elizabeth Warren. Adam Schiff. Ed Markey. JB Pritzker. Ayanna Pressley. LaMonica McIver. Each name read aloud with a quote attached, each quote stripped of its context, and each one handed to Trump’s super fans, the most radicalized people in this country, as proof that these officials are dangerous. Trump and his enablers know how his base works. You give them talking points, and they repeat them. You give them propaganda, and they regurgitate it as fact. You call someone an enemy, and they receive death threats. She knows how this works. She has watched it work. And she read the list anyway... One that I keep coming back to is how they keep trying to recreate a Reichstag moment... since she wants to talk about rhetoric that incites violence, we need to look at where the violence is really coming from. The president... said of Liz Cheney, his own former Republican colleague, “Let’s put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.”... Every time this administration attacks the First Amendment, we respond by funding the people defending it."
Left wing logic: if you denounce the left's incitement of violence, that's fascism, and Trump is staging fake assassination attempts at the risk of his own life and left wingers have nothing to do with it at all
Left wingers are allowed to incite violence, because that's free speech, but if you criticise them, you are violating their right to free speech. If you quote left wingers inciting violence, that's somehow out of context, but when you lie about Trump and right wingers, that's proof that they incite violence (ironic that the Liz Cheney bit is well known to be out of context) Trump supporters are "the most radicalized people in this country" even though left wingers are responsible for most of the violence

M.A. Rothman | Facebook - "𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄-𝐃𝐔𝐓𝐘 𝐀𝐈𝐑 𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐂𝐄 𝐌𝐀𝐉𝐎𝐑 𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐀𝐓 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐈𝐓𝐎𝐋 𝐈𝐍 𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐌 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐃𝐄𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐌𝐏 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐕𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐁𝐄 𝐈𝐌𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐃
Maj. Jason Watson put on his Air Force uniform, walked to the U.S. Capitol, and stood alongside Rep. Al Green demanding the 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭, 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐥 of the President and Vice President. When Green left the scene, Capitol Police ordered Watson to stop demonstrating. He refused — and was arrested for violating code 22–1307, crowding, obstructing and incommoding (Washington Times, Mediaite). Watson’s stated grievance was the strikes on Iran and Venezuela, which he claimed violated the War Powers Act and cost service members their lives. His real audience wasn’t Congress. It was the cameras: he told the crowd he was standing “𝘪𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺” with Green’s uphill Rule 9 push to force a floor vote on impeachment articles — a maneuver Congress has shown zero appetite to touch. There’s a reason officers don’t campaign in uniform. The military exists outside politics precisely so a commander in chief never has to wonder whether the officer corps will follow orders or stage a protest instead. Watson didn’t just break Capitol Police’s rules — he broke that line, and now faces likely additional review under military law on top of his civilian charge. A 𝐧𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐦𝐞, he told the crowd, could take a stand. A sworn officer in dress blues isn’t a nobody. He’s the guy who’s supposed to salute, not sermonize. 𝐇𝐞 𝐬𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧."
Naturally left wingers complained about fascism and claimed freedom of speech was violated. Nobody is above the law - unless it pushes the left wing agenda, after all

Meme - Donald Trump: "Best I can do is live in your head rent free"

Europe’s rearmament drive is sustaining 195,000 US defence jobs, Nato chief says - "Europe’s rearmament drive is sustaining 195,000 US defence jobs through $300bn in arms orders, Nato’s top official has said"
A Trump hater claimed that higher NATO defence spending didn't benefit the US. And this is excluding how much the US spends on European defence, which the WEF has calculated to be quite substantial

Meme - "The Last Time Voters Elected a Republican Mayor:
New York - 1994
Seattle - 1964
Minneapolis - 1957
Portland - 1952
Chicago - 1927
Washington, D.C. - NEVER
But Liberals want to blame President Trump for crime in these cities?"

VictoriaL59 on X - "Canada spent five years renaming its own streets, squares, parkways and universities because the old names made somebody uncomfortable. Trutch Street in Vancouver is now šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street. The Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway in Ottawa is now Kichi Zībī Mīkan. Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto is now Sankofa Square. Ryerson University is now Toronto Metropolitan. Then Trump signed a piece of paper calling it Lake America, and the entire country discovered overnight that names are sacred, history matters, and you cannot simply decide to call a place something else. Where was the outrage then⁉️"

Threads - "16 years ago Google shut down their entire business in China because they wouldn’t submit to an authoritarian government. Today, they are renaming lakes because a fascist declared it so on the toilet at 2am."
Left wing logic - disappearing political dissidents is the same as renaming a lake

Congratulations, MAGAs, You Really Won With “Lake America” - "I’m sure all those poor Canadians your guy stuck it to this week feel truly defeated, as they retreat to their peaceful nation where they have affordable groceries, excellent healthcare, a living wage, national pride, global respect, and leaders who aren’t felons and rapists."
Left wingers are so deluded. Left wingers in Canada are just as miserable as in the US, despite their having the left wing American dream of "free healthcare", because left wingers are always miserable. Certainly, they wouldn't agree they have "affordable groceries", "excellent healthcare" or "a living wage"

The Real Reason Donald Trump Didn't Eat In The Morning, According To Andre Rush - "former White House chef Andre Rush revealed that the businessman wasn't regularly noshing on pancakes or cereal in the early hours of the day. "Some people are not morning eaters," Rush said. "He's a worker. He's up all night. It wasn't a lot of morning breakfast.""

Gavin Newsom on X - "The President of the United States of America blocked access to the free press and launched state-run media. This is authoritarianism in action. We can end his unchecked power when we take back Congress this November. VOTE."
Nick shirley on X - "Aren’t you the same guy who signed a bill into law that criminalizes and penalizes those who expose fraud in your state? You have no room to talk."

Ron Ironfield | Facebook - "💥 The Supreme Court ruled 50-years-ago that news organizations are not entitled to access to places or information the government controls - shutting down any claim by CNN that President Trump's decision to revoke the press-passes for three organizations violates its constitutional rights.
🔻In Houchins v. KQED (1978), the justices held that the First Amendment is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act.
The press’s core protection is the right to communicate information once it has been obtained, not a right to collect it from the government.
🔻Pell v. Procunier (1974) and related cases established that the press has no constitutional right to information or locations not available to the public generally.
🔻Zemel v. Rusk (1965) stated that the right to speak and publish does not carry with it an unrestrained right to gather information, and that entry into the White House is not a First Amendment right.
Those rulings have never been overruled.
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were banned from the White House effective immediately because they constantly publishes information that is blatantly false. The President told reporters in the Oval Office those organizations can write whatever they choose; but because they are dishonest he does not have to let them into the people’s house. Today Secret Service agents deactivated and confiscated hard passes when CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters arrived at the press entrance. CNN called the move an illegal assault on a constitutionally protected right to report without government hindrance. MS NOW and Politico said they would take every step to defend their First Amendment rights. Conservatives point out that the three outlets still have cameras, websites, sources, and nationwide reach. He did not ban them from operating. What they lost is a privilege - workspace, West Wing proximity, and pool access - that ordinary citizens never receive. White House press access is a courtesy the executive can manage, not a legal entitlement. The organizations will sue, but the Highest Court already ruled."

The idea that Heinlein’s Starship Troopers were fascists is a lazy Leftist smear - "Paul Verhoeven, director of the movie, makes it clear that in his view the future human Federation described in Heinlein’s book is a “fascist utopia”. “I decided to make a movie about fascists,” he told the Guardian in 2022. He certainly did make that decision: in his movie the Federation’s symbols are clearly modelled on Nazi and fascist ones and there are references to Triumph of the Will and Olympia. These are all additions by Verhoeven and his team, not to be found in Heinlein’s book. The Federation as described in the book probably does fit quite well with a Hollywood lefty’s definition of fascism. This is basically the same definition used by Rik Mayall’s character, sociology student Rick, in The Young Ones. Such people believe that anyone or anything they disagree with or dislike is fascist. Using the Britannica definition of fascism, however, you have to say that Heinlein’s Federation doesn’t fit at all well. One universal characteristic of fascism, for instance, is “contempt for electoral democracy”. Heinlein’s Federation is an electoral democracy, and moreover one in which the right to vote is highly prized and respected, almost the defining element of the system. The actual fascists and Nazis abandoned elections and voting as soon as they were in power, and frequently insisted that democracy is philosophically unsound. Militarism is another characteristic of fascism. If Heinlein’s Federation is militaristic, however, it goes an odd way about it. There is no conscription, nor any aggressive recruiting as in the movie – indeed young people are discouraged from signing up. Far from the Mobile Infantry being a huge army of cannon-fodder as in Verhoeven’s vision, it is as selective as today’s SAS. In the book, Johnny Rico’s course starts with 2,009 recruits of whom just 187 pass out to become “cap troopers”, a pass rate fairly similar to UK special forces selection – and in the case of the MI, no fewer than 14 of the rejects are dead (mostly in training accidents but one executed on purpose) which even the SAS couldn’t get away with today. Then again, it’s clear that Heinlein’s Federation doesn’t discriminate against non-voters who haven’t served. Johnny Rico’s father (at the start of the book a strong critic of the military, from a family with no tradition of service) is a very wealthy businessman able to afford not only a home swimming pool, but an Olympic-length one. Heinlein made absolutely no suggestion in the book that non-voters were not allowed to have children, or that having children was made more difficult for them: Verhoeven put that idea into the movie on his own initiative. It’s always easier to argue against a bad person you made out of straw than a real person, of course. Actual real-world fascists, too, were generally racists of one type or another. Heinlein handled this issue quite clearly in Starship Troopers. Johnny Rico becomes a commissioned officer in the MI. But he and his wealthy family are Filipino, and probably not of Spanish colonial descent either – they speak Tagalog at home. The MI and the rest of the Federation services clearly recruit from the entire human race: Native Americans, Arabs and Japanese are specifically mentioned in the book, among others. These will have been challenging ideas for a lot of white American readers in 1959, but Heinlein didn’t shy away. Fascism in the real world also generally meant sexism. Heinlein’s Federation wasn’t quite as nominally liberated as Verhoeven’s mixed-showers, gratuitous breast visuals one. The MI itself, the Federation’s close-combat force, was all-male in the book (as indeed British close-combat forces remained until 2016). But it was specified by Heinlein that women were better at piloting spaceships than men, and most space pilots were therefore women, including the character Carmen Ibanez and the captain of Johnny’s ship, Yvette Deladrier. There were many other ways for women to earn their vote and it was clear that plenty of them did so, in Heinlein’s future. And Heinlein managed to avoid the suggestion that women would only serve because they wanted babies, or to pursue male romantic targets. Verhoeven failed both those tests. So, Verhoeven is dead, stupid wrong. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers Federation is no “fascist utopia”. One may well doubt the idea that restricting the vote to service veterans and reintroducing corporal and capital punishment would result in the ideal society as Heinlein suggests. But calling his ideas “fascist”, and smearing them as such at movie length, is lazy and childish. It was also incredibly disappointing (and again, lazy) that Verhoeven and his crew made no effort whatsoever to depict the signature technology of the MI in the book: powered armour suits, an idea which went on to become a major sci-fi trope and which would have made a much more interesting movie. One wonders how much of this President Trump knows – probably not much. It seems reasonable to believe he just thought the movie uniforms looked cool, perhaps without picking up Verhoeven’s not-so-subtle messaging. And you have to say, Trump’s proposed Space Force uniforms don’t look particularly Nazi or fascist, unless – as is pretty common among Left-wing people – you basically think all military uniforms look Nazi or fascist. Indeed, the actual badge symbol of the US Space Force, far from being based on eagles or fasces, appears to be closely modelled on that of Star Trek’s “Starfleet” – a fictional non-military organisation which usually appears primarily focused on peace conferences and scientific research rather than warfare. It’s another storm in a teacup, then: and what it mainly illustrates is just how strong the urge is among certain sections of society to call people and ideas which are disliked “fascist” or “Nazi” when they are actually nothing of the kind."

Meme - Fusilll Spock @awstar11: "Leftist rely on their followers being incurious, drooling, partisan morons"
Usually Right @normouspenis: "-12 hour warnings of flooding
-3 hour flash flood warning
-NOAA proposed cuts not effective until October 1, 2025."
Rachel Bitecofer @RachelBitecofer Jul 5, 2025: "Republican's "small government" lunacy got these poor kids killed."

Rod Dreher on X - "Deleted post griping about what Trump said about Los Angeles and San Diego being nuked by Iran. Now that I've seen the clip, it was clear that he simply wasn't speaking clearly, that he was WARNING that this could happen, not wishing for it. I apologize."

New Greenland security deal offers hope for a reasonable defence agreement with the U.S. - "There are at least two important differences from 1951. The first is the new restriction barring states or investors which are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or NATO partners or European Union members from controlling, significantly influencing or accessing non-public information unless the parties are that the “activities of such states or investors would not constitute a threat to national security or public order.” It states that the reasoning for this restriction is the “threat to national security and public order posed by increased efforts by adversaries to expand influence and control in Greenland.” Which suggests that unless parties agree, Russia and China will not likely be able to establish a direct investment presence in Greenland. The second is the role of the Greenlandic government itself. Greenland is now directly involved in the agreement and the possibility of independence is explicitly recognized in its preamble. Neither was the case in 1951. Indeed, no one was seriously talking about an independent Greenland at the time. The political circumstances have, therefore, changed considerably, even though the basic American military presence remains."
Weird. Left wingers insist that the US got nothing new and Trump was an idiot to pretend otherwise

Bernie on X - "Trump buys $6 BILLION of oil and gas from Russia and there’s a Backlash? Seriously? Europe has spent MORE THAN €375 BILLION buying Russian oil, gas and coal in the last 3 years. And they’ve never stopped buying! In fact they bought almost €3 BILLION of the stuff in August alone. The BBC left this bit out of the story. (Obvs)"

Meme - TheEdgeofGoon: "If 9/11 happened today, the hijackers would be white conservative men..."
macguini: "It already happened on January 6th. Update for clarity: Some of y'all are crazy. Yes the death toll was higher for 9/11. But both were terrorist attacks on American soil and both have ultimately led to yet another war in the Middle East. One led to a war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The other lead to the current wars we are in, bombing children schools and hospitals."
Left wingers are deranged with hatred

Meme - Democratic NPCs in unison: "Dictator Felon Russian Asset Nazi King TACO Pedophile"

Meme - "The Democrat's Pedo Dilemma
The same people who want to allow grown men in little girl's bathrooms, boys in girl's sports, trans & sex books in children's libraries, drag queens in children's reading hour, encourage children to explore their bodies, teach them about transitioning in grade school etc. etc. etc. are calling Trump a "Pedo""

Meme - :You celebrated M.A.P.S
You put porn in kids libraries
You ignore democrats in the files to attack Trump who is not implicated
YOU ARE THE PEDO PROTECTOR"
Left wingers just work backwards from their desired conclusion

The Hatred That Broke American Politics - The Atlantic
Ironically, the author criticises the left for ignoring anti-Semitism and obsessing over other alleged prejudices, then slams Trump and the right for only going after anti-Semitism on the left. Of couse, this being because the left is obsessed over alleged prejudice against other "minorities" but condones, excuses or even promotes anti-Semitism is not a possibility. Not to mention how anti-Semitism on the right is quite powerless, which is why ignoring it isn't hypocrisy

Center for Strategic Politics on X - "We polled five routes for Trump to leave office before the end of his term. A plurality of Dems support four of them, including a military coup and death by natural causes. The only one underwater, an assassination, is still supported by 29%.
Criminal prosecutions of Trump officials are generally favored by Dems, with clear majorities indicating support in all cases. Voters also support prosecution of officials from both the Trump and Biden admins over US support for Israel's genocide in Gaza.
A majority of Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court and abolish the filibuster, but getting rid of the Senate altogether is highly disfavored (however, 34% of Dems under 45 support it). "
Damn Trump promoting hate! Hate will never win! Right wing political violence needs to be stopped. Lock them all up!
Damn Trump prosecuting his political enemies and destroying centuries-old institutions! He's destroying democracy!

Svetlana Lokhova on X - "They are lying to you. The documents that Obama's henchmen took when they raided President Trump's home Mar-a-Lago is the evidence of their own crimes. Here is the most important document, which Monaco and co secretly and retroactively re-classified few weeks before the Raid. It shows that Brennan's CIA operative masquerading as a "Cambridge University Professor" lied that I am a Russian spy who recruited Donald Trump's National Security Advisor. That kicked off the whole Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the senior Trump campaign advisor, then leading into Mueller etc. So they stole the documents and charged President Trump under the Espionage Act for exposing Obama, Brennan, Comey and co."
Lara Logan on X - "If anyone would know the truth here, it would be Svetlana Lokhova. She has written multiple books based on years of research. And she was at the center of much of this when they targeted her & falsely accused her of being a Russian spy who was supposedly having an affair with Gen Michael Flynn. This was a complete lie on every level. And reporters got prizes for pushing these lies year after year. Shame on them. Folo Svetlana for the truth bout “Russia collusion” & what it was really about. This is so damning. It is shameful."

OSINTdefender on X - "U.S. President Donald J. Trump has announced that he has instructed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce any future joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea, calling them “totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, who he claims has been “unthreatening and respectful.”"
Sam E. Antar on X - "The knee-jerk reactions to Trump on South Korea are missing the interesting part. South Korea itself is run by liberal President Lee Jae-myung, who has been pushing a “peace first” policy toward North Korea, reducing tensions and calling for renewed dialogue. Now Trump is telling the Pentagon to substantially reduce joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises because he says they send a “hostile” signal to North Korea. Think about that before automatically reaching for the partisan pom-poms. Trump may have just outflanked South Korea’s own liberal government from the left on North Korea."

Ida Turan 🇮🇷 on X - "I see a serious meltdown in the timeline over Trump’s post again. As an Iranian, I’m telling you: you don’t deserve this president. Someone should tell these angry American pundits to read a tiny bit of their own country’s history, and also remind them that they didn’t elect a pope. This is freaking politics. Get used to it already ffs. Nixon met Mao, the communist dictator who was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his own people.
Reagan not only met Gorbachev, the president of the “Evil Empire,” he built a close personal friendship with him.
@realDonaldTrump met Kim Jong-un, who is a grotesque joke compared to the pure evil of Mao and the Soviet Empire. You had the exact same meltdown over negotiations with the Islamic regime in Iran. Not every negotiation means appeasement. Sometimes it’s just a window to reduce and manage tension, and to save lives! The Korean War was a proxy war in the Cold War between the USSR and the United States. North Korea is a silly joke compared to the Soviet Union. The Soviets had literally a thousand times more nuclear warheads that could actually reach the U.S. And the USSR was not some isolated country quietly minding its own business like North Korea. I can easily imagine that back then there were plenty of people screaming the exact same thing you’re screaming now: “No appeasement with pure evil!”
Yet the USSR, a communist superpower, dissolved without any major military intervention. Thank you, but your screaming and your prescribed approach doesn’t work. Oh, Trump has no moral compass? Fuck you and your stupid moral compass. He’s saving God knows how many lives while you’re sitting in your basement preaching morality. Things might go wrong, yes, Trump could make mistakes, just as Reagan certainly did, but you still have to be thankful to him for his courage in facing the inevitable challenges that nobody else ever had the guts to face, instead of dodging it. Let him do his job. The man knows what he’s doing. He’s protecting South Korea’s ass and, most likely, freeing up a huge amount of American taxpayers’ defense money that’s been pouring into Korea. He’s saving who knows how many lives by ending the conflict now, before it’s too late. And don’t even get me started on the lesson he’s teaching South Korea: what they’re doing isn’t the behavior of an ally, it’s the behavior of a freeloader. If you don’t even understand this, politics is certainly not for you. Anyway, he needs to move the military equipments from Korea to middle east, these are not random, not for punishment. He is signaling NK not to get smart. Reagan made the impossible possible. He proved people like you were wrong. Trump has shown you that you were wrong hundreds of times, yet you still don’t have the humility to admit that you know nothing. Pray for his success and stop making yourselves look ridiculous with these ignorant meltdowns.
P.S. My head hurts and I don’t have the patience for sugarcoating. Sorry not sorry."

Praying Medic on X - "Although he cannot say it publicly, Trump is in a cold war against the CCP. China intends to topple the US as the world's greatest military and economic power. They've been slowly subverting governments that are currently allies of the US. Canada is one example. The UK is another. Spain and South Korea are currently being reeled in by the CCP. Trump removed the CCP's influence in Venezuela. He's working on Iran & Cuba. Trump's endgame is to form new economic & military alliances to maintain a Western democratic bulwark against the CCP's plan for global domination. The Gulf States are a key part of this plan. There's a decoupling happening. Any nation that will not stand against the CCP's subversive plans will be left to fend for itself. If South Korea aligns itself with the CCP, Trump will leverage his relationship with Kim Jong Un to try to bring them back into alignment. The CCP plans to capture not just Taiwan, but South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the entire Pacific."

Status-6 (War & Military News) on X - "US President Trump: When I called recently the president of South Korea... I said, would you like to give us a little hand? We don't need help with Iran. But if you'd like, give us a hand with Iran. He said, no, thanks. And I said, we have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor. And you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran? That's strange. No, no, we'd rather not get involved. I say, well, why are we involved in helping you?"
Meaghan Mobbs on X - "In the clip below, POTUS is 🎯 . I commented yesterday on my concern about adjusting our military posture and cooperation without significant concessions made by Pyongyang. And Seoul’s drift toward Beijing concerns me. But refusing to stand with the United States against Iran’s nuclear ambitions concern me too. Alliances cannot simply be about what America is obligated to provide when an ally is threatened. There must be an expectation of strategic reciprocity. The United States and South Korea share a long and consequential history there - forged through war, sacrifice, and decades of standing alongside one another other. Free nations either stand together against nuclear proliferation, wars of aggression, and authoritarian powers increasingly working in concert, or eventually we will confront those threats alone and fail together. I want South Korea firmly inside the American alliance system. But that alliance has to mean something in both directions, and Washington is right to expect more from Seoul."