Links - 17th February 2026 (2 - Zohran Mamdani)

Daily Mail US on X - "NYC mayoral aide who says whites owning homes is racist bursts into TEARS when asked about her mother's $1.4m home"
Mark Taylor on X - "There’s no hypocrisy here. She wants to impoverish white people. Her and her mother are Jewish, not white. That’s how she sees it."

Shocking new video shows NYC's anti-white renters' tsar sharing her desire to make ALL Americans live in social housing - "New York City's notorious new renters' tsar has now revealed her desire to restructure the housing market so that all Americans live in 'full social housing.'... 'The beauty of rent stabilization and rent control is that it weakens the speculative value of the real estate asset,' she said in the clip. It is unclear when the footage was initially recorded.  'The value is no longer based on what the landlord is able to get, but rather it's based on a state public board deciding how much rent is going up.' Socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani's tenant advocate also argued that a strong rent control campaign that weakens the entire housing market would ultimately 'strengthen our ability to fight for social housing.'  In another interview that resurfaced this week, Weaver argued that 'white, middle-class homeowners are a huge problem for a renter justice movement.'... She admitted that homeownership is America's only guaranteed retirement income, but still argued that her goal is to 'undermine the institution of homeownership.'... Weaver, however, justified the assertion by arguing that homeownership 'serves to completely divide working class people and protect those at the top.'  'It's really quite difficult because Blackstone is a bigger and worse target than Mrs Smith who owns 15 buildings, but Mrs Smith... still kind of sucks and has a lot more stability than renters,' she said... Social media users have questioned the legality of Weaver's beliefs, likened her to communist Karl Marx and accused her of being uneducated about real estate and economics.  'She has zero clue how [the] market actually works. Woefully unqualified for any role beyond barista,' one X user wrote.   'This mirrors almost exactly what Marx said about wages. Prices are set by workers' wages, not by markets,' another said. 'By that reasoning, we could simply pay everyone $500K/year, and prices would surely fall in line accordingly. Could we offer free tuition to ECON 101 and 102 for this woman?'  Another added: 'Not sure if it's constitutional or not but either way [the] elite [are] completely idiotic. If you remove incentives you will restrict supply. Simple as that.'   'She isn't concerned with constitutionality. She is so certain that her goals are right that she doesn't care about laws or even her fellow humans,' a poster replied.   One user even went on to argue that Weaver was actively trying to change America's core foundations.  'I've never witnessed anyone so arrogantly discuss the destruction of the American dream,' the poster wrote... The hardline leftist's mother, Celia Applegate, a professor of German studies at prestigious Vanderbilt University, owns a gorgeous $1.4 million home in America's fastest gentrifying city, where longtime black residents are quickly being priced out.   Applegate and her partner, David Blackbourn, a professor of history, purchased their home in Music City USA's Hillsboro West End neighborhood in July 2012 for $814,000, according to county property records.  Since then, its value has soared by nearly $600,000 - a surge in value likely to infuriate Weaver, who in July 2018 tweeted: 'Impoverish the white middle class. Homeownership is racist.' The activist, who has outraged New Yorkers with her calls to 'seize private property' and branded gentrification an act of white supremacy, has similarly failed to address how the push would impact her father, a history professor who is also a landlord.   Stewart A Weaver and his wife, Tatyana Bakhmetyeva, live in a picturesque home in Rochester's Highland Park neighborhood worth more than $514,000. But the couple also own a near-$159,000 townhouse in nearby Brighton that they rent out as a secondary stream of income... Mr Weaver has publicly backed his daughter's calls for tenant protections and even testified before the New York State Assembly's housing committee in May 2019 in favor of 'robust tenant protection' and rent stabilization.  Weaver has failed to respond to any of the Daily Mail's requests for comments.  Last week, she burst into tears outside her apartment in Brooklyn when confronted by a reporter over her assertion that it is racist for white people to own homes."

Mayor Mamdani: South Africa is the model for New York - "“I was elected as a Democratic Socialist and I will govern as a Democratic Socialist.” He hailed an “era of big government,” vowed to govern “expansively and audaciously” and said he would “set an example for the world.”  The grimace-cum-smile on Chuck Schumer’s face – sitting hostage-like behind the mayor, who he has yet to endorse or even say if he voted for – told its own story about exactly how thrilled the mainstream Democratic party is to go into the midterms later this year, and more importantly the 2028 presidential campaign, with Mayor Mamdani as the party’s principal standard bearer. At some point grinning and bearing it won’t be an option, the radical Mamdani platform will have to be embraced or disavowed. It won’t be pretty.   So what can New Yorkers look forward to under their energetic and muscular new form of socialism? Mayor Mamdani gave them clues, advising them to “look to Madiba and the South African Freedom Charter.” The charter that Madiba – Nelson Mandela – helped forge with the ANC was the blueprint for post-apartheid South Africa. It opens with the words “our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality.” Suggesting that apartheid is alive and well in New York will have brought another big gulp from Schumer and the Democratic establishment. The Democrat Socialists of America have so far failed to persuade the country that apartheid exists in Israel, so it’s ambitious to think they can make the case for its existence in New York. This is testing the very limits of grievance politics. And the current almost failed state that is South Africa, with white farmers fleeing to America as refugees, bodes particularly ill as a template for New York.    As in South Africa, the enemy in Mamdani’s New York is often white people. He has already vowed to target “whiter neighborhoods” for higher taxes. In his inaugural speech he zoned in on another set of unprosecuted criminals: billionaires. They think they “can buy our democracy” and for too long New York has belonged to “the wealthy and well-connected.” Billionaires seemingly the scourge of the city and also neatly the solution to its problems – just increase their taxes.   However, the Robin Hood mask slipped when Mamdani spoke about plans to fix the “long-broken property tax system,” which will not see billionaires and oligarchs pay more, but middle-class property owners. According to a report from the liberal think tank the Fiscal Policy Institute, even more tax rises will have to be imposed to fund his universal childcare program – tax hikes on corporations and millionaires alone won’t cover the bill for the program. Governor Kathy Hochul, another hostage on the stage behind Mamdani, will have to sign-off on his tax plans and has, so far at least, signaled reluctance to.  It’s no coincidence that signs for “No-Flo” – New York’s hottest new neighborhood – are cropping up across the city’s underground system. It is, of course, an upscale housing development in North Florida. But the well timed, eye-catching signs and lure of low taxes and sun will turn the heads of ordinary New Yorkers. It’s not just the mobile top one percent of New York taxpayers, those who pay about 40 percent of the city’s personal income tax revenue, who might pack up and leave the city.   Mamdani promised at the start of his speech that he had grand ambitions for New York and perhaps nowhere was that clearer than when he claimed that under his leadership society in the city would be remade to ”replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” His campaign demonstrated to him that “the people of New York yearn for solidarity.” For most observers, the key take-away from his win was that he had accurately put his finger on the cost of living crisis. New Yorkers might be surprised to learn that they, in fact, voted to be less entrepreneurial, resourceful and self-starting.  The new mayor tailored much of his speech towards New York’s now sizable Muslim population by taking his oath of office on a Koran, speaking in Urdu, saying he stood alongside “halal cart vendors whose knees ache from working all day” and referencing “Palestinian New Yorkers in Bay Ridge.” Muslims are now a major voting block that his campaign courted and who repaid him with votes. The number of Muslims in New York has risen to nearly one million, representing nine percent of the population. They cannot be ignored.   That the new mayor has box office star power is beyond doubt. Thousands lined up, at least seven blocks deep, in frigid weather, moving at a snail’s pace, just to gain entry to the post-inauguration block party along Broadway. Mamdani held them in the palm of his hand: they laughed at his jokes, booed Eric Adams – who incredibly appeared to be having the best time of all on the dais – and “chanted tax the rich.”  With a perfectly straight face Mamdani told the crowd, “love will be our guide as we pursue our agenda.” And “we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home.” They loved it, tears were shed.  Mayor Mamdani is, if nothing else, the leading man in New York’s latest chapter. An arts student, who has graduated from bit parts in his director mother’s films and from a rap career as Young Cardamom. Starring on Broadway, albeit the street rather than a stage in the theatre district, was perhaps the culmination of a life’s dream. Especially with supporting performances from established stars AOC and Bernie Sanders. New Yorkers like the rest of America are now desperate to find out how this show ends."

vittorio on X - "south africa:
> 32% unemployment
> 45% youth unemployment
> 8% of population pays 90% of income tax
> highest inequality on earth
> top 0.01% (3,500 people) own 15% of wealth
> bottom 50% has negative net worth
> 330 days of blackouts per year
> taxi mafia burns trains to eliminate competition
> highest rape rate in the world
> 1 in 4 men admit to rape
> 1 in 3 women will be raped in her lifetime
> 67,000+ child rapes reported every year
> women killed by intimate partners at 5x global average
> 4th highest murder rate on earth
> half water systems contaminated with sewage
> half of water lost to leaks (global average 15%)
*and of course*
> white genocide
"south africa is the model for new york"
if this was a parody it would be too retarded to be funny"

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani admits no federal security clearance for briefings - "New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani admitted he has no federal security clearance on Monday, just a day after claiming he had been "briefed" about the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro."
Eric Matheny 🎙️ on X -@NYCMayor Nobody’s briefing a mayor on an international military operation."

The Persian Jewess on X - "NYC has 8.8 Million residents. Less than 6,800 are Palestinian. That’s 0.077%. So why is the “core” of Zohran Mamdani’s politics “Palestinian liberation” instead of the needs of actual New Yorkers?"
"The struggle for Palestinian liberation was at the core of my politics and continues to be."

Joe Weisenthal on X - "Apollo co-founder Marc Rowan called Mamdani an "enemy" of the Jews at a fundraiser last night"
Jesse Arm on X - "Make no mistake.  This is an unambiguously positive development. Influential American Jews who once bankrolled Democrats and left-of-center institutions are now unashamedly responding to threats by naming their chief political adversaries—and recognizing that many of those adversaries come from the left.  That this reckoning is happening in forums like UJA, which have historically been more hesitant to confront and condemn powerful figures on the progressive left, only underscores its significance.  For decades, the American Jewish left embraced a self-destructive posture toward politics, religiosity, national continuity, and communal security. It’s no surprise that it now finds itself in retreat, and that legacy institutions like the ADL are scrambling to reinvent themselves as the consequences of their own choices finally come due.  Meanwhile, the American Jewish right is ascendant."

Charlie Smirkley on X - "AHHHH UGHHHHH! I’M A BRAHMIN INDIAN, MY FATHER IS A PROFESSOR AT COLUMBIA, AND I HAVE TO PRETEND TO BE BLACK TO TRY TO GET INTO THE SCHOOL AND THEY STILL REJECTED ME. I'M FUCKING RETARDED. TAX WHITEY."

Chinese woman, 72, who swam eight hours to escape communism says she's disgusted her children are voting for Mamdani - "Song represents a growing group of Chinese New Yorkers shifting to the right in their political beliefs.   A Times analysis of the 2022 New York gubernatorial race revealed that predominantly Asian neighborhoods across the city's five boroughs shifted 23 percentage points to the right from 2018."
BowTiedRanger on X - "The “based” immigrants’ children are voting for Mamdani. If this shocks you, you’re not gonna make it."

Lee Fang on X - "Huge step backwards for Mamdani. This guy wants to defund and abolish policing. You can find him wherever prep school lefties congregate, zero working class New Yorkers adhere to these ideas."
Coddled Affluent Professional on X - "The Mamdani administration is going to be a Voltron of the dumbest ideas on policing, education, economics, housing, and public transit all coming together. This is the big moment for stupid people with bottomless self regard who somehow haven’t been chastened by the past 5 years."

Councilwoman Vickie Paladino on X - "Zohran is right on the edge of declaring New York an independent city-state, with its own foreign policy and no particular allegiance to federal law.  Other Democrat officials are also coming right up to this line as well, but Zohran's pledge to recognize the International Criminal Court over American law by executing an arrest warrant on a foreign leader is a step beyond even Pritzker and Newsom and Brandon Johnson.  This is EXTREMELY dangerous language and will eventually require a severe federal response if followed through upon, up to and including military action and an arrest for seditious conspiracy.   This isn't a joke. This isn't theater-kid playtime anymore. This is the government of a major US city, and I don't think Zohran really comprehends the stakes."
Nobody is above the law - unless that pushes the left wing agenda

Josh Kraushaar on X - "BREAKING @J_Insider via @matthewkassel: "Mamdani: Nefesh B’Nefesh event at NYC synagogue is ‘violation of international law’" "Mamdani's statement comes as he distanced himself from anti-Israel protesters who demonstrated outside the synagogue event""
Tali Goldsheft on X - "We saw this coming. When an elected official claims synagogues need to be checked for “violating international law,” it confirms exactly what we feared. In NYC — the largest Jewish community outside Israel — singling out Jewish houses of worship is how double standards start. And once they start, they spread.  This is the moment our allies need to show up. If we don’t push back now, this rhetoric becomes the norm. We can’t let that happen — not here, not ever."

Hen Mazzig on X - "Let me get this straight.   Jews can be protected in NYC only if we accept the mayor’s terms on what is an appropriate use of our synagogues.   And we can’t move to Israel because he baselessly deems that “illegal.”  Jews do not have to accept second class treatment, as my ancestors did in Iraq and Tunisia, where they lived for generations as dhimmis with special laws proscribing their existence as Jews.   Zionism and aliyah are not outlawed in NYC, as they were across the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s.   What year does Mamdani think it is?"

C3 on X - "Mandani takes the Subway to work on his first day in office… With armed security. Everything the Democrats do is a scam."

@amuse on X - "NYC: Zohran Mamdani just downgraded the NYPD commissioner, ending direct mayoral briefings that existed since 9/11. Policing is now treated like sanitation. The mayor no longer believes Islamic terror represents a threat to the city and sees no need for daily intelligence briefings.   After 9/11, New York’s mayors kept the NYPD commissioner in a direct, daily intelligence loop. That model is now ending. Mamdani has removed the Commissioner Jessica Tisch direct line to his office, relegating police leadership to the same access level as garbage collection. The shift weakens situational awareness at the top & reflects a belief that Islamic terror threats no longer require mayoral focus."

Councilwoman Inna Vernikov on X - ".@ZohranKMamdani campaigned on FREE BUSES. But only THREE days after he was sworn in, the bus fare WENT UP to $3.00! Promises MADE, Promises BROKEN!"
Yoel Lefkowitz 🇺🇸 🎗️ on X - "1.Subway fares are set by the MTA, which is a state-run agency
2.The fare increase was approved by the MTA Board on September 30, before Mamdani was elected and more than three months before he took office
3.Mamdani never pledged to make all public transit free; it was buses he promised would be free.
4.The fare increase was decided independently of Mamdani and was not something he had the authority to approve or block Its"
Councilwoman Inna Vernikov on X - "If he couldn’t do it, he should not have promised it"
Left wing logic: It's not Zohran's fault bus fares went up, because he has no control over them, but he also wasn't lying when he said he would make buses free

Exclusive | Mamdani chief equity officer disparaged liberal white women in now-deleted X posts: 'Tax them to the white meat' - "  The city’s new equity officer, Afua Atta-Mensah, liberally sprinkled the phrase “comrade” throughout her posts and retweeted statements such as, “there’s NO moderate way to black liberation.”  Mamdani, in appointing Atta-Mensah to the top city position designed to promote inclusion, said, “There is no one I trust more to advance racial equity across our work in City Hall.”... Her account was deleted just as Mamdani’s new tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, faced scrutiny over her own tweets calling to “seize private property” and branding homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy.” Atta-Mensah appeared to take notice and hid her own social media past — which included retweeting or replying to at least three separate posts complaining about liberal white women, including one where she responded to somebody who wrote “we don’t talk about white liberal racism enough.”  “Facts! It would need to be a series of loooooonnnnnnnggggg conversations” Atta-Mensah replied.  She also reposted part of a thread from a post reading,”Who’s not police but FEELS like police to you?  “white women at nonprofit organizations,” read a reply Atta-Mensah reposted in September 2024. A third post compared white women to Amy Cooper — a white woman who was dubbed “Central Park Karen” in 2020 after she called the cops on a black birdwatcher.  “A lot of y’all are Amy Coopers to the Black women in your non-profits every day,” the tweet read, to which the equity chief responded with, “THIS IS A WHOLE WORD!!!!”  Another series of tweets included Atta-Mensah’s 2021 reply to somebody posting about how the show “Succession” made them want to “tax these people to the white meat.”  Atta-Mensah appeared to agree, replying, “Tax Them To The White Meat!!!” with a hand-clapping emoji... Atta-Mensah previously worked on the mayor’s campaign after a career with social justice groups.  “Afua Atta-Mensah has dedicated her career to serving the New Yorkers who are so often forgotten in the halls of power,” Mamdani said in appointing her to her new top position.   Mamdani also stood by tenant advocate Weaver after her social media comments mired his administration in controversy within days of kicking off in January — with her past tweets including stances such as, “The Police Are Just People The State Sanctions To Murder W[ith] Immunity.” Another of her tweets read, “Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.”  She also called on people to “elect more communists” to carry out her radical agenda...   Critics accused the administration of trying to hide Atta-Mensah’s past stances to avoid another kerfuffle.  “Zohran’s team tried to be more careful after the Cea Weaver disaster, but we caught Atta-Mensah before she could scrub her digital footprint,” said New York Young Republicans Club president Stefano Forte. “Anti-white racism is a feature, not a fringe problem, of Mamdani’s inner circle,” Forte said.  “The mayor said there is no one he trusts more than Atta-Mensah to push ‘racial equity,’ and make no mistake: tweets about taxing ‘white meat’ reflect the approach of the entire Mamdani administration to reshape New York.”"
We're still told that the woke don't hate white people
Time to excoriate people who notice of being awful people acting in bad faith. Being racist isn't the crime - noticing is

Mamdani appointee resigns after her decade-old antisemitic social media posts resurface - "One of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ’s appointees has resigned over social media posts she made more than a decade ago that featured antisemitic tropes, Mamdani’s office said Thursday. In a statement, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, who was tapped this week to join the incoming administration, said she expressed “deep regret” for the posts, which date back to 2011 and 2012 and were recently shared online by the Anti-Defamation League." "These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused,” Da Costa said. She had been selected to lead Mamdani's office of appointments, handling “talent recruitment strategy." Da Costa worked in the office more than a decade ago and more recently held roles at a private communications firm and at Sotheby’s, the mayor-elect's office said."
The "Nazis at the table" rule only applies to people the left hate

Mamdani’s victory shows New York learnt the wrong lessons from 9/11 - "Could it be that whoever painted swastikas on a Jewish Brooklyn school in November was emboldened by such things as his refusal to condemn the phrase, “globalise the intifada”? Mamdani appears to be engaged in many very bad sleights of hand. Pretending that his hatred of Israel, the Jewish homeland, is a great source of virtue. Pretending that crude strokes of populism – raising the minimum wage to $30 per hour, banning rent increases for rent-stabilised tenants, making buses free, all while killing off policing powers – will restore New York to where it should be. Where might he have learnt all this? In academia of course. He grew up at its knee. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies. Prof Mamdani is a big cheese in the unwholesome world of post-colonial studies. We know from his Columbia page that his works “explore” that broad and grand-sounding stalwart of the social sciences, “the intersection between politics and culture”. Who wouldn’t want to get their teeth into such a big and important intersection? The trouble is, Mamdani Jr has perhaps been too entranced by daddy’s “intersections”, and now he wants to unveil and destroy all the intersections of dirty money, power, and Zionism. Young Zohran wasn’t quite as bright as he might have been, and so did not make it to an Ivy League. He went to Bowdoin College, a liberal arts college for the rich but not excellent. It is, to be blunt, the thick man’s answer to Dartmouth or Williams College. So: privileged, tick. Brought up with academic nonsense courtesy of Mamdani padre: tick. Very intelligent? No tick... Nobody was surprised that an overwhelming majority of people in their late teens and twenties who voted in the mayoral election voted for Mamdani, propelling him to victory. Though there are plenty of Gen X progressives – and ancient folk too, like Bernie Sanders, who swore him in – who are silly enough to cheerlead for him, he is the Gen Z choice. I have read countless fawning articles in the New York media – especially the New York Times, New Yorker and especially New York – written by nihilistic young wokesters, that make my stomach turn. Many of these authors are well-heeled Brooklynites, many of them young women. It’s a grotesquerie. They cheerlead for TikTok socialism (matcha lattes for all!), ending law and order, divesting and boycotting from Israel, demand the right to practice “criticism” of Israel by violating one of the central planks of the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism... It is no coincidence that they were born after 9/11, or were too young to remember it. These aren’t the valiant, self-sacrificing, inspiring citizens that cleaned up the terrorists’ devastation of their city. They’re a craven, violence-courting bunch who, in their apparent adoration of all things Islamic “resistance”, have managed to learn the opposite of the real lesson of that awful awful day."

1960s Ladies / A Real Man

"1960'S LADIES
No tattoos, nose rings or green hair.
Kill Ritual: or penises ...."

Ugly black woman flexing biceps: "A real man will pay my bills, take care of me, and raise other men's sperm."

Links - 17th February 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

The Biggest Fraud in Welfare - WSJ - "Something is profoundly wrong with the U.S. welfare system—a problem that runs far deeper and is more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota that has been making headlines. Across the past half-century, America has seen what in any other country would be considered a golden age, in which lower-income households have made incredible progress... Yet even as our economy has experienced broad-based growth, real federal welfare spending has soared by 765%, more than twice as fast as total federal spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually. Were that money simply doled out evenly to the 19.8 million families the government defines as poor, each household would receive more than $70,000 a year. The source of this dramatic mismatch is a fraud built into how various programs determine welfare eligibility: The government doesn’t count any refundable tax credits or benefits that aren’t paid in cash as income to the recipients.  Some claim this is appropriate because the beneficiaries aren’t free to spend noncash benefits on whatever they like. But that is a specious argument, because money is fungible. Receiving Medicaid, for example, frees up cash that would otherwise be spent on healthcare, allowing the recipients to spend the newly freed cash on other things. Noncash benefits aren’t in the end that different from income—except that salaries are taxed while government benefits aren’t. And individual welfare programs often don’t even count benefits paid in cash as income for the purpose of gauging eligibility. The government’s failure to count its largess as recipients’ income allows welfare households to blow past the income level above which a working family no longer qualifies for government help. Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128. It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits. The family would also receive Food Stamp debit cards worth $9,216 a year, $9,476 in housing subsidies, $877 of government payments for utility bills, $16,033 to fund Medicaid, $3,102 in free meals at school and $6,624 in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All this puts the family’s income at $64,128, or 254% of the poverty level. A hardworking family earning anything like $64,128 in salary wouldn’t be eligible for any of these welfare benefits in four-fifths of the states. Meanwhile, the welfare family would be eligible for another 90 small federal benefits and sundry state and local welfare programs. According to the Congressional Budget Office and other independent researchers, when all means-tested payments are counted as income, most welfare recipients have incomes that put them in the middle class, and the proportion of poor people in the U.S. falls from more than 10% to less than 1%. This unjust system also penalizes work. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of work-age persons in the bottom 20% of income who in fact work has in the last 50 years fallen from 68% to 36%. The budgetary effects of these inaccurate income calculations are enormous. Look at what government programs cost minus any dedicated revenue they collect and interest on the debt, which government is obligated to pay. Payroll taxes fund 87% of Social Security spending, requiring an additional $188 billion, or 4% of unobligated spending. Medicare is 45% funded by payroll taxes and uses $478 billion of unobligated spending, or 11%. Defense spending of $851 billion is 20% of unobligated spending. Means-tested welfare programs absorb $1.4 trillion, 34% of unobligated spending, and the rest of the federal government spends $1.3 trillion, or 30% of unobligated spending. If the government simply gave every poor family in America enough money to raise its income above the official poverty level, it would cost only $240 billion. That would reduce the annual deficit by two-thirds. In light of the mounting evidence of rampant benefits fraud, Congress should institute a comprehensive audit of all means-tested programs. But it should start with removing the largest fraud in welfare—the government’s gross overstatement of poverty"
Clearly, the reason there is still a problem is that they don't spend enough money, and they need to "tax the 'rich'" to fund even more social spending
Weird. Left wingers claim over 60% of US households are below the poverty line. But poverty is defined as not being able to go to baseball games

Meme - *Super rich companies tall and standing in water*
State tall and standing in water*: "We should raise taxes!"
*Average company. floundering and drowning in water*
*small company floundering and drowning in water*
*taxes as water*

Bondi shooting: Australia has traded its soul for the politics of envy - "The Australia I remember during my youth bears little resemblance to the nation that now exists. I am not sure you can even describe us as a nation – we are more like a heterogeneous agglomeration of vested and frequently colliding interests. I think there is a fair case to be made that we have traded away our soul. There is no cohesive national identity. There was, once upon a time, a demonstrably visible national character. We knew what it was to be Australian. We loved our country. Our flag. Our history. Our entrepreneurial and iconoclastic verve. Our disdain of centralised authority. Our willingness to give every person a fair go. Our characteristically intense competitive streak. And our eccentric and larrikin heroes. From Don Bradman to Kerry Packer. But today it is difficult to discern a unifying crusade or common community. There are, to be sure, redoubts here and there. But across this sunburnt land, we have emerged as a nation divided... The lucky country has become the lazy land, spoilt by endless resource riches and the seemingly bottomless pit of public money that this has bestowed. Our wealth has been relentlessly wasted on pet political projects that serve only to perpetuate the reign of those in power. Financially corrupt the voters to win the next election and then rinse and repeat. Until the money runs out. Australia has become obsessed with the public sector providing answers to its problems. Obsessed with centralised control. Remember the world’s worst lockdowns? Obsessed with censorship: eviscerate parental responsibilities and ban children from access to the internet. Obsessed with revisionism. We don’t even give our kids an opportunity to learn from our historical wins and losses. It is airbrushed in the name of trying to create an alternative political reality. Obsessed with cutting down tall poppies. That is, we don’t just want equality of opportunity, which is a crucial ideal – we increasingly seek equality of outcomes. A huge amount of the secular racial prejudice projected against Judaism by other creeds and cultures can be attributed to the fact that the Jews have been consistently one of the most successful communities in the countries they have lived in... the most intellectually bankrupt answer to any policy problem you will ever find is that inequality is to blame. It sounds profound to talk about inequality. Surely inequality is bad, right? But what is the counterfactual? Equality? So, you want communism? They will respond that this suggestion is absurd. But who then is in a position to judge precisely what the right amount of inequality is? What politician is endowed with the omnipotence to know precisely how successful the very best should be? How can they possibly divine the idealised dispersion in human outcomes? How much should we increase tax rates by as a proportion of total incomes to disproportionately punish the highest earners? To rob Peter to pay Paul? If you are asserting that inequality is bad, you must think that some form of communism is good. It is exactly the same banal logic that people apply when they claim that a persistently successful creed is to blame for all our problems. It’s convenient to point the finger at some transnational force when you cannot make sense of your personal plight... we want a world that celebrates success rather than one that persecutes the poppies. We want to live a life where we have every reason to be the best version of ourselves. The evil at the heart of persecution is pervasive envy of the exceptions"

Sneaky Birds Pretend To Be Hurt After They Noticed a Person Feed Another Injured Bird - "These birds saw a person feed an injured bird, so they all started pretending to be injured as well"

Freyy on X - "we literally live on a planet where water just flows freely and food grows on trees and we created Microsoft Office Suite and credit scores."
Left wingers really think the state of nature is paradise

Hans Mahncke on X - "Even for those who want welfare, there are basic prerequisites that must be in place for it to function. First, the system must rest on a high degree of trust that recipients genuinely need assistance, because policing abuse is inherently difficult and becomes more costly as programs expand. Once abuse grows, the cost of enforcement itself starts to crowd out the capacity to provide help, which is why trust has to be built into the design for the system to function at all.  Second, there must be far more people paying into the system than drawing from it. If that balance flips, the math breaks down, work and tax compliance become less attractive, and incentives are reversed in exactly the wrong direction.  Third, those receiving benefits must be seen as having contributed to the system in some meaningful way. If large numbers of recipients are perceived as having paid nothing into it, resentment among contributors is inevitable, as we are increasingly seeing now.   Finally, benefits must be applied consistently. A system in which some people receive generous support, for example subsidized child care, while others in similar circumstances do not, will quickly be viewed as unfair and corrosive.  In short, welfare systems depend on a delicate balance of trust, proportionality, and fairness. Without those conditions, they do not merely underperform, they cannot function at all. And that is before even addressing the fact that many people reject such systems in principle."

The Free Press on X - "You’ve been lied to about Africa. @MagatteW: “Africa is not poor because of colonialism. Africa is poor because we have made it impossible for our people to create wealth.”"
Magatte Wade on X - "I’ve done business in the US and a handful of African nations, so let me push back on this comparison  Yes, the US has regulations.   But comparing American regulatory burden today to African regulatory burden today misses the point entirely.   The US is a rich country that can afford inefficiency. For instance, California’s overregulation slows it down, sure, but it’s slowing down from an already wealthy baseline. Africa doesn’t have that luxury. Every unnecessary barrier costs us more because we are starting from less.  The problems you listed are not separate from overregulation.   They are consequences of it.
“Lack of access to capital”: Why won’t banks lend? Why won’t investors invest? Because civil law is unpredictable, property rights are weak, land can be seized, and contracts aren’t reliably enforced. Capital avoids Africa because the regulatory environment makes investment risky and returns uncertain.
“Poor social infrastructure”: What do you mean here, precisely?
“Poor human capital”: Where do Africa’s best doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs go? To less regulated economies (like the US) where they can actually earn money. Nigeria loses thousands of doctors yearly to the UK and US. Senegal’s brightest go to France or Canada. Brain drain follows opportunity, and opportunity follows regulatory environments that reward effort instead of punishing it.
“Poor enforcement of public policy and rule of law”: This is part of the regulatory problem I’m describing. The issue is not “too few rules on paper.” It’s too many rules applied arbitrarily, selectively, and unpredictably. In much of Africa, enforcement means whoever has connections gets exceptions and everyone else gets squeezed, and that’s regulation weaponized (note that rule of law is part of economic freedom).
“Inconsistent and opaque regulatory requirements”: This is literally my point, as I stated earlier. When the rules aren’t clear, the bureaucrat becomes the rule. And his incentive is to add senseless steps, not remove them. That’s how you get overregulation and bribes to “speed things up.”
The US got wealthy during periods of much lighter regulation. Now it’s rich enough to afford its own bureaucratic bloat. We are not.   Comparing where America is today to where Africa is today, as if we’re playing the same game with the same margins for error, ignores everything about how wealth actually gets created.  This is not a “big lie.”   It is what every successful prosperity-building story, from Mauritius to South Korea to Singapore, has in common: economic freedom."

Vincent Geloso on X - "Piketty is wrong about the past and the future. My forthcoming book, while not directly about Piketty, shows exactly that. It shows that the era from 1870 to 1910 in America -- when markets were quite open, contestable while people and capital could move around -- was the first era of egalitarian growth.   The living standards of the bottom 90% rose as fast as the top 1%. And that fast was really fast (more than 2.5% per annum year in year out).   The point we must start realizing NOW is that markets are naturally egalitarian forces. State-solutions might here and there promote growth for people at the bottom but state-solutions often open the door to rent-seeking, political specialization and patronage that may create inegalitarian growth and slower overall growth.   With contestable markets, elite wealth is not sacrosanct. With secure property rights, innovation can have spillovers for the many but still be sufficiently rewarding for the innovator to undertake and adopt. With open markets, you can escape bad situations and move to areas or industries of opportunities. With strong protection of property comes (as a tool for it) barriers to political specialization and rent-seeking which atrophies crony capitalism (which slows growht and is inegalitarian). Yes, some functions of the state can be egalitarian but they are modest complements to what I just described.   Open and contestable markets are the ultimate egalitarian force we have ever deployed to generate a growing society."
Mark S Elliott on X - "Raising taxes to reduce inequality has been the game plan for almost 7 decades. What are the results? Hyperfinancialization, waste, and devaluation. Now, Piketty wants to accelerate this model."
Vincent Geloso on X - "One of the things I point out is that the golden age of equality — which he argues coincides with tax hiles — was not as golden. There was far less levelling from 1929 to 1975 than is commonly shown. There was some, but it was probably driven by other things such as internal migration, unions and education spending"

Sylvain Catherine on X - "Very happy that our paper received the DFA Prize for Best Paper in the Journal of Finance.  The literature on wealth inequality has been highly influential in public debates, yet it largely ignores a key way households save over the life cycle: Social Security.  We show that including the fair value of accrued benefits in wealth substantially mutes the rise in wealth inequality since 1989.  Its importance has grown dramatically over the past three decades. In 1989, Social Security represented only 26.0% of the wealth of the bottom 90%. In 2019, this percentage rose to 49.8%. We cannot understand household balance sheets without paying attention to Social Security."

Zephyr Teachout on X - "New York City has an amazing concentration of independent grocery stores, but the way that Amazon (Whole Foods) and Walmart use their power to block them out by getting unfair deals from big suppliers is making it almost impossible to survive. Tell your reps to support @MicahLasher  and @CordellCleare  important Consumer Grocery Pricing Act."
daniela on X - "So a chain like Whole Foods/Amazon that uses its ability to bulk purchase to price out independent grocery stores is bad, but a govt grocery store that can price out independent grocery stores because it doesn’t have to pay taxes is good?"
There being no Walmarts in NYC aside, it's amusing how left wingers want to and do keep raising costs, then complain that prices are high

Carrie Severino on X - "Years after the Supreme Court made clear in Janus v. Afscme that workers have the right to opt out of public employee unions, the state of Oregon is still trying to find a workaround — now by blocking workers from being told of their constitutional rights. Outrageous.  “The reason is simple: Unions are bleeding members. Workers are exercising their rights by resigning, keeping their dues money in their own pockets instead of funding political causes with which they don’t agree. Instead of making themselves more appealing to workers, unions lobbied the state government to criminalize speech and the rank-and-file’s desire to exercise their freedom of association.”"

Crime In NYC on X - "Taking advantage of a generous New York state program to aid his ailing mother, Ballal Hossain signed up a dozen family members to work as her caregivers.  Over six years, they were paid $348,000 to look after the elderly woman at a Manhattan apartment.  Except the mom was in Bangladesh the entire time.  Incredibly, Hossain got away with the fraud by having his brother pose as their sick mother for whenever inspectors showed up, before finally being caught. He was later sentenced for grand larceny, according to prosecutors.  It’s just one egregious example of a welfare program — called the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, or CDPAP — that has cost New York taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to waste and fraud.  First set up in 1994, CDPAP was intended to alleviate the number of elderly people going to nursing homes.  The @nypost  was able to identify at least $179 million stolen by CDPAP recipients over the last 10 years, while the program wasted at least $1 billion of taxpayer cash on middlemen [private companies contracted by the state to handle administrative tasks].  Lawyer Richard Harrow prosecuted Medicaid fraud in New York for 27 years, and now works in Albany specializing in Medicaid fraud cases.  “If you think Minnesota is a big deal, multiply that by 10,” he warned The Post, referring to the $1 billion daycare fraud scandal there.  “CDPAP is the biggest fraud there is because it all takes place in people’s homes.”  Costs for the program itself have more than quadrupled."
Mark Elevate on X - "The problem isn't that the mother was never there. The problem is that even if the mother was there, the taxpayers were paying this family 55k a year to look after their own mother. The whole system is the problem."

𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖊 🕯 on X - "You've probably seen charts showing that "Healthcare" is the fastest growing industry in New York, displacing old mainstays like finance and insurance. To a significant extent, it's because of programs like CDPAP, i.e., just thinly-disguised, widely-defrauded welfare scams."
How much of blue states' vaunted higher GDP is due to government transfers?

Millennials are richer than their boomer parents. Here's why they love to complain anyway. - "When Gen Xers and millennials hit their late 30s they had a median household real (aka inflation-adjusted) income 16% and 18% higher, respectively, compared to the generation before them at the same age, whereas the Silent Generation and baby boomers had increases of 34% and 27%, respectively... thinking your parents had it easier isn't particularly unique to the avocado toast cohort. "Almost every generation is like this," says Matt Darling, a senior research associate at MEF Associates, a social policy research firm. People tend to downplay the tribulations that plagued previous generations — after all, they weren't around for them. Millennials frustrated by post-pandemic inflation could probably stand to talk to boomers about how they dealt with it in the 1970s and '80s. "Every generation has its own unique challenges, and every generation forgets about what happened previously," Darling says. As big-ticket items have become increasingly expensive — housing, healthcare, childcare, education — it's become easy to overlook the smaller-ticket items that have gotten cheaper. Yes, sending your kid to preschool is going to hit you where it hurts, but at least the toys you buy them and the clothes you put them in nowadays are super inexpensive. The same goes for that iPad you let them play with more than you should. "They feel so vulnerable because they're looking at what the ultra-elite rich are doing and can afford to do, and, in comparison, they feel poor."... As workers at the bottom earn more, it can also push up prices for the better-off. Part of the reason people are annoyed by the high cost of their DoorDash orders is that delivery drivers may have a minimum amount they need to earn. That tip you're angry at at the coffee counter is supplementing the barista's pay, whose wages have gone up anyway in recent years and are making your fancy coffee pricier. Most people would agree it's good for home health aides to be paid more — until they try to hire one to take care of their parents."
Time to increase the minimum wage, because greedy companies will be forced to reduce their profits to pay workers more without raising prices

Capitalism does not reward risk – Matt Bruenig Dot Com - "Capitalism does not reward risk-taking. This is easily shown. Suppose Noah and I each invest in ways that are identical in all regards with respect to risk. If capitalism rewarded risk-taking, then each of us would get an identical return. But we don’t necessarily. Suppose Noah’s investment leads to him receiving a large return, while mine leads to me receiving nothing and even losing what I put in. In that possible scenario, even though we behaved in a relevantly identical fashion, capitalism distributed us different amounts. Noah was rewarded for risk-taking. I was punished."
Paul Hundred, GED on X - "“We took on the same amount of risk but he hit the jackpot and I lost everything”
“That’s why it’s called risk”"
Left wingers don't understand capitalism, then proclaim it has failed

CMV: hardly any millionaires are going to leave New York City because of 2% more in taxes : r/changemyview - "These kinds of taxes have been tried before, without success. I collected a few links here
“We argue that a well-designed wealth tax would reduce the tax base by 7–17 per cent if levied at a tax rate of 1 per cent.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1475-5890.12283
“Migration effects of the reform dominate: internal mobility of wealthy taxpayers appears as the major behavioral response to the change in the net tax rate, accounting for a large portion of the post-treatment total net wealth in the treated municipality.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4991833
“We find significant migration responses among the wealthy: a 1pp increase in the top wealth tax rate decreases the stock of wealthy taxpayers by about 2%. A large fraction of the wealthy are business owners, and their businesses are negatively affected by owner out-migration.” https://www.nber.org/papers/w32153
Edit: responding to complaints that links above were about European wealth tax (borrowed from another thread where I argued that the UK eliminating non-tax status is economic suicide), I’m adding links about USA state income tax migration effects:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/taxes-affect-state-migration-trends-2023/
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2024/04/03/research-shows-direct-link-between-state-income-taxes-and-migration “Research shows direct link between state income taxes and migration. A new study looks at 110 years of income tax history across the U.S. and notes out-migration by wealthy Americans”
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/domestic-migration-and-state-tax-policy-0 “the estimates suggest that a 1 percentage point increase in the top marginal income tax rate is associated with a reduction in net migration by 6.1 federal taxpayers per 10,000.4 To put this into perspective, levying California’s top marginal tax rate of 13.3% (relative to no income tax) would be associated with a loss of 8.2 taxpayers per one thousand. If economic growth is roughly proportional to the population of taxpayers, it would imply a loss of nearly 1 percentage point of growth annually. Studying AGI flows, however, suggests that the economic losses could be more severe. The estimates indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in the top marginal tax rate is associated with a reduction in net AGI flows of around $11.54 for every $10,000 of AGI in the state. For California, this suggests an annual loss of 1.5% of AGI, relative to a tax structure with no income tax. “
Edit2: people keep smugly bringing up Massachusetts. It’s not the win you think it is:
“Massachusetts’ tax burdens were above average but nowhere near as high as now, the 36 percent increase in federal tax returns with an AGI of $1 million or more is far less impressive when compared to a national average of 49 percent, let alone against the 61 percent, 75 percent, and 77 percent increases in Texas, Arizona, and Florida, respectively—three notably low-tax states. And the performance of a state like Massachusetts is particularly anemic against the boom in the low-tax mountain west, where Utah’s 81 percent increase, Idaho’s 106 percent increase, and Montana’s 132 percent increase are particularly astonishing. All three states have cut taxes in recent years.”
Edit3: here’s more on Massachusetts since people keep insisting the tax policy was a winner. My debate isn’t about the morality of capitalism or does Massachusetts have good social services - I lived there for several years, it’s a perfectly nice place to live. But the question at hand is tax policy and migration :
“159,200 people left the state between Filing Year (FY) 2021 and FY2022, while just 113,586 people moved into Massachusetts from out of state during the same timeframe. That amounts to a net loss of 45,614 people in population size. According to an analysis by Pioneer Institute, there are only four states that have worse net migration losses: California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Massachusetts didn’t just lose a net 45,614 people. In reality, 159,200 Massachusetts citizens moved out of state, taking about $13.21 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI) with them. Only $9.37 billion in AGI migrated into the state, leaving Massachusetts with a net loss of about $3.9 billion in taxable income, according to IRS data.”"

The failure of Norway's wealth tax hike as a warning signal - Brussels Report - "around 80 affluent business owners left Norway and moved to Switzerland.  The former Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg who oversaw the abolition of the wealth tax in his country in 2007 stated in this regard: “As a Swede, you get the feeling that you are experiencing the same thing we did in the 70s and 80s, when business owner after business owner left the country – at great cost to Sweden.”  Norway has lost several billion NOK in tax revenue due to this emigration. Infrastructure is also being damaged. Numerous small and medium-sized enterprises have been affected negatively. This is primarily a consequence of the fact that the wealth tax is calculated on values tied up in the company (so-called working capital), without taking into account the company’s earnings or losses. In addition, the wealth tax only affects Norwegian private business owners/investors, but not foreign investors. Many Norwegian-owned companies are drained of capital year after year to pay the tax, which foreign-owned companies avoid. The resulting distortion of competition forces companies that cannot or do not want to move out of Norway to decrease their investments and sometimes to sell at an inopportune time or close down. This may be tackled under the Norwegian Constitution... the rigid stance of the current government is essentially due to two reasons: Firstly, the executive in Norway is powerful. However, although the trust of the governed in those who govern is still relatively high, it is declining. Prominent university professors criticise the arrogant behaviour of the state. The private sector is increasingly dissatisfied.  The second reason why the Government is unperturbed by the crisis it has caused, with numerous business owners moving away and so many small and medium-sized businesses suffering, is the fact that the government finds itself in a permanent moral hazard. The country’s enormous oil and gas wealth acts like a comprehensive insurance policy. The government is not forced to be economically prudent. Whatever mistakes it makes, it does not have to bear the consequences, at least not in the short term. In addition, the government can appeal to a motive that is typically European: envy. There are even those who suspect that the current Norwegian Government is trying to benefit from the exodus on a political level. By agitating against the supposedly selfish “traitors to the country” who move to Switzerland, it may profit from the situation with the voters...   Among the countries that had a wealth tax in the past but have abolished it, Germany, France and Sweden are particularly instructive. Everywhere, this tax was abolished because it caused more harm than good. The rich, who were to be fleeced, voted with their feet. Even without including emigration, wealth tax on working capital damaged the government’s income base. The wealth tax discourages investment and growth also in many companies with owners who do not move, and thus reduces other more important tax revenues such as corporation tax."

Links - 16th February 2026 (2 - Trans Mania)

Read some Piaget please! on X - "Kohlberg: sex-role development
Trans activists often misquote Kohlberg, claiming that once children reach “gender constancy” (6–7 years) they reliably know they are transgender. This is the exact opposite of what Kohlberg found. Kohlberg’s three stages (1966) describe how children come to understand biological sex as permanent:
1.Sex-role labelling (2-3 yrs): Can label “boy/girl” from clothes/hair, but believe sex can change with appearance.
2.Sex-role stability (4-5 yrs): Understand sex stays the same over time, but still think it can change with behaviour or clothing.
3. Sex-role constancy (6-7 yrs): Full grasp that biological sex is fixed and unchangeable, regardless of clothes, wishes, or activities. A boy in a dress is still a boy.
Once constancy is achieved, children actively self-socialise into behaviours that match their natal sex because they now cognitively understand it cannot change. Kohlberg explicitly tied this to Piaget’s concrete-operational stage. Also he never used the term “gender identity” — he wrote about biological sex and sex-roles.  True sex-role constancy is the cognitive milestone at which children reject the idea that cross-sex behaviour or feelings can make them the opposite sex. Claiming it proves a child “knows they are trans” and have a 'gender identity' is a deliberate inversion of Kohlberg’s theory."

Janet Murray on X - "Some women don’t mind having intimate medical procedures carried out by male clinicians - or by men who identify as women.  Some don’t mind sharing toilets, changing rooms or other single-sex spaces with men.  Some don’t mind men competing in women’s sports or taking women’s awards in business, sport or the arts.  Some don’t mind being described as “chest feeders,” “birthing people,” or “ovary havers.”  Some don’t mind men’s feelings being prioritised above their own comfort, dignity or safety.  If any of this applies to you, that’s your choice.  But your comfort does not override other women’s discomfort. Nor does it erase women’s legal rights to single-sex spaces, services, sports or sex-based language.  And if you’re a man who thinks you have the right to tell women what they should think or feel about any of this … that’s your choice too.  But remember: women’s rights and their boundaries are not yours to override."

Sall Grover on X - "“Why don’t more women athletes speak up?” This is why 👇 When World Surf League was putting a man in a bikini in the woman’s category, they made women surfers sign a contract saying they would say nothing negative about it or be fined $10,000."

Trans women not a risk in changing rooms, says NHS tribunal judge - "A transgender doctor’s use of a female hospital changing room was not “inherently unlawful”, a tribunal has found, despite the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman.  Sandie Peggie, a nurse, was suspended by NHS Fife after complaining about having to share a changing room with Dr Beth Upton, who was born a male but identifies as a woman.  After submitting a formal claim to an employment tribunal against NHS Fife and Dr Upton, a judgment on Monday found that Ms Peggie had been harassed by the health board.  However, her claims for sexual harassment, belief discrimination and victimisation were dismissed, with the judge ruling that it was lawful for Dr Upton to use the changing room until Ms Peggie complained. Ms Peggie’s solicitor said on Monday night that the judgment appeared to undermine the Supreme Court ruling in April that trans women are not women... His ruling also said there was “very far from sufficient reliable evidence” to show that biologically male trans people posed a “greater risk” to women in female changing rooms."

The trans lobby are determined not to obey the law - "The Sandie Peggie case shows why the Supreme Court was right to make clear last April that, in law, a woman is defined by biological sex. But it also suggests that some institutions, instead of upholding the law, are attempting to resist it. On Monday a tribunal in Fife undermined the Supreme Court’s authoritative interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 by ruling that a transgender doctor had a right to share a women-only changing room with a female nurse. Now it has emerged that the judgment in this case may have been flawed because it allegedly used an AI-generated fake “quotation” as part of its justification in rejecting Ms Peggie’s claim of discrimination.   Judge Kemp appears to have relied on an AI “hallucination”, which distorted the landmark Maya Forstater case to claim that the Equality Act does not give “precedence” to a woman over a trans person. Yet the Supreme Court did indeed rule that “woman” in the meaning of the Act is defined by biological sex, not self-identified gender. So a women-only space is solely for biological females.  The Sandie Peggie case has brought the legal apparatus into disrepute. Quite rightly, Ms Peggie has lodged an appeal."

Rebel Ada on X - "Incredible. The only longterm outcome study of trans people I read +understood immediately 5 years ago. The phrase “retain male patterns of criminality” was burned on my brain. If I can read + understand it, how did Judge Kemp believe and publish that it meant the exact opposite?"
Grim Walrus on X - "Also, if I recall correctly, the study referred to post-op trans ID males. The male in the Peggie case has had no surgery. Based on Ministry of Justice rates of trans incarceration for sex crimes, he was potentially more likely to be an abuser than males generally."

Children taking DIY cross-sex hormones before going to gender clinics - "Fiona said: “It’s like a Breaking Bad bathtub operation [the home meth labs in the hit American TV drama]. “What’s so terrifying is they don’t even know what they’re injecting.”... “They either won’t tell us where they’re getting the hormones, or they’ll say they’re getting it from friends who are being prescribed legally and they’re sharing them. Some have told us they are getting them from illegal websites that sell anabolic steroids to weightlifters. Others say they get them from their drug dealers along with their ketamine.”... When young people later change their minds about being transgender it can have stark repercussions. Anna, a 21-year-old from London, has been left with a deep, gravelly voice after taking testosterone for about a year at the age of 17. “It is heartbreaking to hear,” her mother, Helen, said. Anna had decided she was trans at the age of 13 at a private girls’ school in London. She had been bullied but her new status suddenly saw her one of the most popular pupils. “She got into the party set,” Helen said. By the time she was 17 she was sneaking out at night and, Helen later discovered, taking drugs. Her dealer was not just passing her cannabis, ketamine and MDMA, but also testosterone. Helen discovered this only when she found a vial and needles in her room. Anna later stopped taking the drugs, identifies as a girl again and regrets experimenting with the drugs. For Fiona, the nightmare continues. Hugo has dropped out of his A-levels and his relationship with his parents has disintegrated. “It is cult mind-control stuff,” Fiona said. “They believe that the person trying to protect them from harm is their abuser. And online, people are saying to them, ‘We are your real friends, we are your real family.’” The authorities have not helped. After discovering her son’s drugs, Fiona called the police, but they said there was nothing they could do. “They implied that we somehow were being abusive for trying to withhold urgent life-saving medicines,” she said. Fiona added: “You just feel like your child’s being stolen from you, and the person you once knew is being replaced with a stranger. You still love the person inside, but it’s really hard, because they seem to be reading out someone else’s script. It is so frightening.”"
Left wing logic will be that kids will find a way to get the hormones anyway, so the state should just give it to them anyway

Lozzy B 🇦🇺𝕏 on X - "What kind of dystopian propaganda is this?   The Australian Government says Social media is as dangerous as Alcohol & Cigarettes but puberty blockers & cross sex hormones that destroy young healthy bodies is fine.   Oh & radical leftist Bluesky is fine too. The TQ+ echo chamber that promotes pedophilia 🤔  They also allowed pedo’s & child killers to access ‘Working with Children checks’ to work with vulnerable children too. Many, many children were harmed.  They still haven’t reformed the system either but they say they want to ‘protect the kids’.  Yep 🤨"

Jamie Reed Whistleblower on X - "Running an LGB non profit in the United States daily exposes how entrenched trans is. It is not just the drop ship companies, or google, or sticker printers- it is baked into the entire donation, grant, money stream as well.   We have a profile on a national site that allows donors to resource non profits. We will never reach Gold Status unless I am willing to share the TRANSGENDER STATUS of our board and leadership.   That is not going to happen, because it is complete and utter bullshit."
Wesley Yang on X - "The institutional takeover has never been so rapid or complete. We built out a deca-billion dollar donor funded machine pledged to propagating and enforcing harmful delusions that millions depend on for their livelihoods, that moves in lockstep, and that is far larger than the Democratic Party from which its electoral figureheads are drawn."

Libs of TikTok on X - "HOLY SHIT. Netflix allowed a Transgender activist to tweet on their OFFICIAL ACCOUNT to promote the show “The Baby-Sitters Club," which pushes TRANSGENDERISM on KIDS. @Netflix is DIRECTLY promoting the transing of young children. DISGUSTING CANCEL NETFLIX"

Seasonal Clickfarm Worker on X - "Transgender is something that somehow has been treated as though it were a “medical condition” when in fact it is a religious idea about the relationship between the spirit and the body
Transgender rights should conceived not under the rubric CNN of right to medical care, or the rubric of freedom from discrimination on the basis of sex, but rather within the rubric of freedom of religion."
expatanon on X - "The mistake here is that it gives protection to youth "transitions" as part of a religious practice. "We have a first amendment right to give our child lupron and remove their genitals; these are our sacred rites.""
Seasonal Clickfarm Worker on X - "It seems like the analog would be female genital mutilation, which is not legal in the US"
Hunter Ash on X - "Doctors have no idea how or why transition is supposed to work. They are all deferring to some imagined consensus of greater experts. But that doesn’t exist. We have some ideas about what causes gender dysphoria, but there’s no really robust evidence that the existing treatments alleviate it. There’s no solid mechanistic theory. There’s no solid clinical evidence. It’s presented as settled science when all we have are confounded survey data that would be dismissed in any other context. The whole thing was made up out of air."

Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌ on X - "This man, “Gabrielle” Darone, spent 9 months simulating a pregnancy, including feigned morning sickness and the wearing of a fake belly, with the intention of play-acting the loss of the imaginary baby. He also joined a support group for grieving mothers who had lost children, seeking validation and “support” for his planned “stillbirth.”   He even went so far as to rent a machine that simulated contractions, and bought a plastic “baby” which he inserted into his rectum and then “gave birth to.”   Women who objected to his presence in the group - women who had actually lost children - were kicked out so that this man could feel supported in his game of let’s pretend. Their very real grief was considered less important than this man’s sexual fantasies.   To top it all off, he did all of this in the house he still shared with his unconsenting soon-to-be-ex-wife and their minor children. He even roped his 7 year old into taking “maternity pictures.”   Mr. Darone also convinced his doctors to provide him with drugs to induce lactation. He asked the members of an online breastfeeding group he’d joined if any of them would be willing to let him “breastfeed” - that is, sexually assault - their babies, and attempted to donate the chemical-laced sludge he pumped out of his moobs to “other mothers.”  These men have proven over and over again that there is no aspect of women’s pain that they will not twist into a prop for their sickening deviancy, from rape to oppression to sexual objectification.   Even the loss of a child in the womb is fair game to them: a perverted, selfish, hyper-sexualized game of make-believe that must always take priority over the real pain and real needs of real women."

Wall Street Apes on X - "The UK is finished UK Resident “I now have a criminal record because I wrote in the Critic magazine that my stalker was a man. Because he is a man. But the police said that misgendering him was contrary to the Online Safety Act because it was spreading false information” A criminal record for misgendering…."

Commuter on trial for pushing security officer at train station over bag screening, causing head injury - "A commuter who was asked to stop for a bag screening at a train station allegedly refused to comply and instead shoved the Certis Cisco security officer, causing the 65-year-old woman to fall and injure her head.  Alina Meridian, 31, claimed trial on Monday (Sep 22) to charges of voluntarily causing hurt to Madam Cindy Tay Jui Hwa at Lorong Chuan MRT Station on the morning of Aug 17, 2024 and using threatening behaviour by shouting and gesturing aggressively at Mdm Tay's colleague.  Meridian was unrepresented and brought along a stack of documents meant for defence purposes.  Although listed in charge sheets and court records as male, Meridian told the court that if "I will be misgendered, I would prefer you use my name". Thereafter, the judge referred to Meridian as "Alina"... "So after a while, I saw a madam with lipstick coming in with a bag, so I requested her to go for the screening," said Mdm Tay, referring to Meridian.  "So I requested her to go for the screening, however, she kept walking and I thought she ... couldn't hear. So near the gantry, I tapped on her shoulder and (told) we wanted to screen the bag," said Mdm Tay.  "But she turned into a rage and threw the bag on the floor and (insisted) we pick the bag if we want to scan her bag."  She said Meridian was "shouting in a rage and scolding us," and she tried to ask her to pick the bag up and have it screened.  "However, without a word, he just pushed me and I fell on the floor," said Mdm Tay. She later clarified that Meridian had earlier said that "he's rushing and we are delaying him".  After falling backwards on her head, Mdm Tay said she felt a big bump on her head and wetness that turned out to be blood... When it was time for Meridian to cross-examine, he asked Mdm Tay: "So you are a senior security officer, but you don't know de-escalation tactics?"  Mdm Tay said she did not know what Meridian meant.  "You are not a beginner security officer, you are a senior member, and you don't know how to de-escalate things? But instead (chose) to escalate to a point where I went from impatient to pissed off and impatient," said Meridian.  Mdm Tay repeatedly said her duty was just to screen the bag, and that she would not touch commuters' possessions as they belonged to the commuters.  "Your duty is to screen the bag, but as a senior security officer, I would expect, you to know at least de-escalation tactics, which is to pick up the bag and help to move things along instead of standing there, escalating things," said Meridian.  Meridian added: "What's the point of having a senior security officer if you can't even do such a thing."  At various points, the judge or prosecutor interjected as Meridian was not asking proper cross-examination questions but instead making comments. "Fine. So, then I guess it's my fault, you know, I should have called the police for transphobia," said Meridian.  When directed by the judge to ask questions of the witness instead, Meridian said: "So you can't help me do your job, but you can make me late for my appointment on that day."  The prosecutor said she still did not understand what the question was.  "She chose not to help me, and I'm late for that day," said Meridian, adding that he had stopped doing the job he had. "And so I have stopped doing it, and now I have no more money and this is entirely her fault," Meridian said.  Meridian then had an exchange with Mdm Tay, where Mdm Tay repeatedly said it was the duty of the commuter to comply with instructions and to pick up their bags and have them screened, and not for officers to pick up the bag when it was thrown on the floor.  Meridian shrugged and said: "So the reason you did not de-escalate the situation and caused it to be worse is because I have to do it for you and then you wonder why I got angry. I don't understand why there (weren't) de-escalation tactics."  Meridian added that he was a former security officer and found it "baffling" how a senior security officer did not know de-escalation tactics. "No further questions. Maybe I just take another exit next time when I see security officers, since this is the answer that I'm getting, which is that they will not de-escalate situations but instead choose to escalate situations," said Meridian."
Mandatory treatment order for man who assaulted security officer at MRT station - "A man, who  became upset with a Certis security officer at an MRT station and assaulted her, was sentenced to a two-year mandatory treatment order on Oct 27.  Alina Meridian, 31, who the judge said was found to have “autism spectrum disorder” and was unable to adjust his behaviour appropriately at the time of the offence, pleaded guilty to an assault charge on Sept 24.  Offenders given a mandatory treatment order have to undergo treatment to address their conditions in lieu of time behind bars."
Too bad Singapore isn't the West, or it would have been let off and the security officer would've been jailed for transphobia

Connor Tomlinson on X - "It's time for a complete and total ban on cross-sex hormones. They cannot change your sex. They turn men with perverse fetishes into derranged bioweapons, and women trying to escape sexual trauma into androgynous osteoporotic goblins. These people need to spend a long time  in an asylum — some of them, indefinitely."
Rohan 🌱🔸️🇧🇷 on X - "Post op FtMs commit 5.6x as much crime and 9.9x (!) as much violent crime as women, going to 4.1x and 7.2x as much respectively when adjusting for immigration status and psychiatric morbidity"
Hunter Ash on X - "Masculinization is a One-Way Street
When female-to-male trans people take testosterone, they become much more violent. But when male-to-females take estrogen and suppress their testosterone, they don’t get noticeably less violent.  This is one of many examples of a general pattern: masculinization is something that either happens or doesn’t to a default-feminine morphology, and once it’s happened it doesn’t un-happen.  Other examples include facial and body hair. When FtMs take T, they grow facial and body hair. If they stop, the hair doesn’t go away. Likewise, estrogen does not get rid of facial hair in MtFs. The same is true of voice: FtMs get deeper voices from T, but MtFs don’t get higher voices from E. I’d bet FtMs experience a boost to athletic performance much greater in magnitude than the decline MtFs see.  This goes all the way down to the embryological level. While we are not all “born female” since we have the sex chromosomes that will differentiate us from conception, “female” is the morphological default. That’s what happens without a surge in androgens. We see this in people with CAIS, who are genetically male but, due to a genetic defect that renders them immune to androgens, develop a female body plan, with their testes located where ovaries would be. They usually don’t learn they are technically male until they fail to menstruate.  This is a fascinating and deep asymmetry between men and women: masculinity is something additional that happens on top of a feminine default."

Mia Hughes on X - "Me: You signed a statement calling “gender affirming care” for youth medically necessary.
Guyatt: WHAT!? That’s RIDICULOUS. I would never say that.
Me: *produces the receipt
Guyatt: Oh, I didn’t read that part. I’m a dope.
Unbelievable."

Forest on X - "“Gender dysphoria never goes away,” they say. “The only treatment is to transition.”  But mine did.  Instead of taking my testosterone prescription, I left social media, went to the gym, went hiking, spent time around people, listened to non woke voices.  My dysphoria went away."

Colin Wright on X - "🚨A peer-reviewed paper in a real journal titled “My pronouns are fuck ICE” argues that universities are colonial, racist, transphobic sites of oppression, and calls for their transformation through “de-stress tea,” “organizational gossip,” and revolutionary “queer pláticas.” One such plática, treated as scholarly data, involves: • Glo, a "trans nonbinary Afro-Caribeñx and Mexican sophomore"; • Toni, an "Indigenous Nahua Cipotx with Salvadoran and Nicaraguan Miskito roots"; and • Mars, a "non-binary Zapotec prietx-alien-femme." Their dialogue includes: • “White people love killing folks.” • “My pronouns are fuck ICE, and my childhood dysphoria is crossing the damn border.” • “I love my dick, and I am a woman, so what?” • “Can I get my diploma and some titties?” • “Titties and citizenship. Don’t forget we need both.” @brad_polumbo and I break down this absurd paper on our latest episode of the Citation Needed podcast (link below)!"

Girls STILL forced to share loos with boys despite schools facing 94 complaints - "Young girls across Scotland are still being expected to share school toilets with boys – as new figures show that councils have received almost 100 complaints and representations about gender neutral loos in the last three years.  Scottish state schools were ordered to provide single sex toilets in a landmark ruling handed down by a judge at the Court of Session in Edinburgh"

I begged my bosses not to let the trans nurse who invaded our changing room take part in my intimate operation. They refused - as they didn't want to hurt HIS feelings - "Karen Danson’s father started to sexually abuse her when she was six. It could have been yesterday, so vivid are the memories... You will have heard of the Darlington Nurses, the eight nurses who are taking legal action against their employers, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, because they claim they were forced to share a changing room with a male nurse who identifies as a woman, despite still outwardly presenting as a man.  Twenty-six women in total signed a letter of complaint – and in return were told by their own HR department that they were transphobic and in need of ‘re-education’. Their union also abandoned them, openly calling them bigoted.  Their case, a pivotal one in the toxic gender war, is still proceeding to tribunal, even though the Supreme Court has since clarified that, by law, a trans woman is a biological male – and does not have the right to access a women’s changing room. The Darlington nurses who have been publicly identified so far have always said that they took the unprecedented legal action partly on behalf of more vulnerable colleagues who didn’t feel they could speak out – including one victim of childhood abuse who had felt intimidated and terrified by the behaviour of the trans nurse, Rose Henderson, in that changing room. Karen was that terrified colleague. This is her first interview. It was her distress that set the ball rolling in this extraordinary debacle. She broke down sobbing to colleagues after being repeatedly asked by Rose (who was ‘wearing boxer shorts with holes in them, which meant I could see his male anatomy’) why she wasn’t getting changed.  They were alone in that changing room, and she – a sex abuse survivor; the sort of woman single-sex spaces were enshrined in law to protect – was paralysed by fear... ‘Inside I was thinking, “I am not getting changed in front of you, no”, but I couldn’t say anything. Then he gave this smirk, this expression, which was the same one my dad had when he was doing the abuse. He could see I was uncomfortable, and he didn’t seem to care.’  She claims that Rose’s question about whether she was going to get changed was repeated three times. There is a sense of incredulity at her own reaction, now, in the cold light of day. This is a very strong and sensible woman, trained to be assertive when required, yet she went to pieces... the sleepless nights and panic attacks – and pounding heart when she went into the changing room – were affecting Karen’s work... She tells me that last summer, after legal papers had been served and after The Mail on Sunday had broken the story of the Darlington nurses, Karen needed an urgent hysterectomy, after years of problems with endometriosis. It was to be carried out at the Darlington Memorial – where everyone involved worked – but just a few weeks before the procedure she discovered, to her horror, that Rose was scheduled to be on duty in the operating theatre on that day, and would be part of the surgical team. ‘It was a gynaecological procedure, and his role would have been down at that end, passing the consultant the tools,’ she says, incredulous. She immediately pointed out the obvious (as she thought) issue here. ‘I told them that because there was a legal dispute under way, involving Rose, it was a conflict of interest, and entirely inappropriate that he should be involved in my surgery, especially intimate surgery like that... Karen escalated her complaint, putting her concerns in writing. ‘And I got an email back saying that they could not accommodate my request [for Rose to be replaced]. They said they would cancel the operation, and I could go elsewhere. I couldn’t believe it. I needed that operation, and I’d been with my consultant for years. After everything, I felt I was being punished. I said, “I am asking this as a patient”, but they didn’t care.’"
Caroline Farrow on X - "What kind of sadist schedules a man who has known to be sexually intimidating and harassing a woman, to participate in his victim's intimate operation and aftercare?"

Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Part II

From 2024:

Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Part II

"Initially scheduled for a tidy 10 days, it quickly became apparent the Crown’s new team had no intention of moving swiftly or efficiently. Three days in, Wetscher and Radcliffe were still introducing a vast array of evidence, mostly Facebook and TikTok posts plus thousands of text messages seized from the pair. The defence rightly argued all of this should have been revealed before the trial started. A week in, Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey griped that her trial was already at risk of going “off the rails”. The Crown’s late disclosures left her feeling “very unhappy,” agreeing with the defence that “this should have been done well before the trial.”

By the start of the second week, Lich’s defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon tried to hurry things along by agreeing to accept some of the Crown’s arguments regarding the protest’s impact on residents in downtown Ottawa. “There were individuals who interfered with the enjoyment of property,” he admitted, suggesting the two sides put together an agreed statement of facts. Wetscher “respectfully declined” this offer. She instead promised to produce a lengthy parade of witnesses to complain about the garbage, noise, smells and congestion associated with the protest. Horn-honking by the truckers was to be a particular focus, given how much it irritated those living nearby.

Even Perkins-McVey thought this tactic was a waste of time. “I just don’t know if this evidence is going to have the weight that you hope,” she informed Wetscher, noting that Lich and Barber had no interactions with any of the prospective witnesses. Worried that her trial could “run on ad infinitum,” the judge allowed Wetscher to call just five local residents and imposed clear limits on what they could discuss.

As the proceedings dragged on over the ensuing months for reasons both mundane and mysterious – the strange disappearance of internal police emails supporting defence arguments that the truckers were initially welcomed by the Ottawa Police Service and shown where to park was one such example – the assembled court watchers and journalists in Courtroom 5 at 161 Elgin Street began to speculate that Lich and Barber’s constitutional right to a prompt trial might be in jeopardy. This offered a potential escape hatch for the accused.

One regular unconvinced by this prospect was Lich herself. As she explained to C2C during a courtroom break, the idea of getting off on a technicality was anathema to her...

Lich’s determination to see her trial out to its conclusion regardless of delays or hurdles likely posed a significant obstacle to the Crown. Considering the fury with which Canada’s legal system has pursued her and Barber for the relatively minor crimes of mischief and obstructing police during the Freedom Convoy protest, it seems plausible the Crown’s goal from the start was to bully them into accepting a plea bargain simply to bring the interminable prosecution to a close. Given its benign reputation but steep potential consequences, criminal mischief seems the ideal charge for this sort of brinkmanship. Set against a possible 10-year prison term, the prospect of pleading guilty to a modest-sounding crime and accepting some modest punishment might appeal to many.

But Lich and Barber have refused to play the Crown’s game. Not only have they signalled a steely determination to let the trial play out to its end, they also have the financial resources to back up their resolve. Besides their own substantial fundraising efforts, both have benefited from the support of organizations such as Rebel News and The Democracy Fund in raising money for their lawyers...

Unable to intimidate the pair or run them out of money, the prosecution had to get creative.

In November 2023, with the trial now two months old, the Crown unveiled an additional tactic to ensnare Lich and Barber: what is known as a Carter application. Named for a 1982 Supreme Court case involving a marijuana smuggling ring in the Maritimes, a Carter application sets out a series of steps and evidentiary standards required to link individuals together in a broader criminal conspiracy. Significantly, the focus of the Carter application in this case appeared to be on the sole charge that Barber faces alone...

Amid the mountains of social media and other evidence collated and presented by the Crown, there is none that Lich ever encouraged anyone to break any court order or injunction. “There’s not one word emanating [from] Tamara Lich that she even said ‘honking’ or ‘horns’,” Greenspon pointed out during the trial. Quite the opposite. The evidence repeatedly shows Lich counselling others to remain lawful and respectful.

The Carter argument, however, may provide the Crown with a sneaky way around this inconvenient lack of proof. According to Goldkind, Carter “basically uses the actions of one of the co-conspirators to obtain a conviction against the other.”...

This is why it has been so important for the prosecution to show Lich and Barber together as co-leaders of the protest, as was the focus of the 106-slide PowerPoint presentation shown during the Crown’s closing arguments...

This also explains the Crown’s odd fixation with pronouns. The prosecution submitted numerous examples of Barber and Lich using terms such as “we” and “us”, including when Lich said on February 3, “We plan to be here for the long haul.” According to Radcliffe, “that ‘we’ pronoun was endless,” and he claimed this proves their combined leadership role, as opposed to, say, their merely holding common views or expressing solidarity with other protesters.

Radcliffe also engaged in a lengthy disquisition about the meaning of Lich’s catch-phrase “Hold the line.” According to the Crown, it was a war-cry meant to incite open rebellion; Radcliffe claimed the term actually “crossed the line” by encouraging illegal behaviour. According to Greenspon, however, “Saying ‘Hold the line’ was a way of encouraging demonstrators not to give up.” Perkins-McVey, for her part, observed that it could simply mean, “Stay true to your values.” The judge also noted that she’d heard police use the same phrase during crowd control efforts.

The frequency with which the judge engaged in often-pointed debate with the Crown attorneys seems noteworthy. Early in the trial, Radcliffe attempted to turn an obvious joke told on TikTok about how the protest was about to move to Toronto into further proof of nefarious purpose. Perkins-McVey quickly admonished him for his lack of imagination. “Reacting to a joke is not a crime,” she remarked offhandedly. She also went out of her way to scold him for imputing unproven radical or violent motives onto Lich and Barber. “They were moderate, that’s why [city] officials reached out to them,” Perkins-McVey explained. Another time, in response to Radcliffe’s assertion that the protest was “unlawful” based on statements made by the police, she wryly shot back, “Just because police say it was unlawful doesn’t make it so.”...

“Leading a convoy of trucks to Ottawa is not unlawful,” he noted. “There is no evidence of Lich even being in a vehicle or parking in a vehicle. There is no evidence of her honking horns or emitting any exhaust. There is no evidence of any Ottawa residents having any interactions with Lich. No evidence of her personally obstructing a peace officer.”

Greenspon followed Granger and began with his reading of the dozens of previous mischief cases assembled by the Crown as legal precedent for the charges against Lich and Barber. None of them, he said, involved protesters “told where to park and where to stay, [and] then prosecuted for parking or staying” in those spots, he noted. The level of official direction provided to the protesters was unprecedented; Greenspon then displayed the maps given to the truckers by police showing “staging areas” around downtown Ottawa designated for their exclusive use. “Can it be said that in following the instructions of the OPS, that they weren’t in compliance with the very plan Ottawa police gave them?” he wondered. How could anyone be arrested for following police orders?

“What Tamara Lich encouraged was entirely lawful,” Greenspon continued. While she stands accused of counselling others to break the law, the evidence collected by the Crown itself points in the other direction. He noted her efforts to register the truckers and implement “a signed code of conduct.” Even more significant is the agreement she struck with Ottawa mayor Jim Watson to begin voluntarily removing trucks from Parliament Hill. The deal was signed before the imposition of the Emergencies Act... “The Emergencies Act was completely unnecessary,” he told C2C. “By February 12 there had been an agreement between Tamara Lich and the mayor of Ottawa to reduce the size of the footprint of the trucks…and it actually started to happen the same day as the invocation.”...

Perkins-McVey had mused that the crux of the case before her rested on the issue of, “How do we balance the right to protest with the right to use and enjoy private property?” Greenspon returned to this central question in his summation, claiming it was an easy one to answer. Does a temporary interference into the daily lives of residents take precedence over the Charter-given rights of protesters to express themselves, he asked rhetorically. “We say not so!” he replied. “In a contest between constitutionally-protected rights and the interference in enjoyment of property, there is no contest.”

And when the judge provocatively asked him if the protestors should have policed themselves better by packing up and leaving prior to being forcibly evicted – Perkins-McVey didn’t spar only with the Crown’s attorneys – Greenspon shot back eagerly and with flourish. “Poppycock!” he declared. Any claim the truckers overstayed their welcome would amount to an “attempt to retroactively justify why the trucks were led into the downtown core without any time limit,” noting further that the February 7 horn-honking injunction explicitly preserved both the truckers’ right to remain in the Ottawa core and their liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful and safe protest. “They never put a time limit on…freedom of expression,” Greenspon concluded. Nor should anyone.

When the trial finally wrapped up on September 15, its 45 sitting days and 13-month duration likely set some sort of record for the Canadian legal system. In every aspect it had lasted far longer than expected, something that was almost entirely the result of Crown tactics and strategy. Even the closing arguments exceeded expectations as the prosecution demanded the right of reply to the defence’s summation, adding yet another day.

Veteran court reporter Aeden Helmer of the Ottawa Citizen, who covered every day of the trial, noted in his blog, “I have never encountered a trial that required 7 days just for closing arguments. I’ve covered murder trials that managed to get through closing arguments (in front of a jury) in a day or two.” According to The Democracy Fund, the prosecution of Lich and Barber constituted “the longest mischief trial in Canadian history”. Echoing Helmer, Greenspon noted that, “I’ve represented people charged with a lot more serious crimes than this, and the trials have not taken nearly as long.” During a courtroom break near the end of the case, Lich’s lead lawyer told a crowd of reporters, only half in jest, “We are going to apply to the Guinness Book of World Records.”

“This is the biggest waste-of-time prosecution in the history of waste-of-time prosecutions,” Toronto lawyer Goldkind exclaimed after the trial wrapped up. “The most serious charges in Canada of a criminal nature often take less than 30 days [to resolve at trial]. That this has gone on for 45 days…must be considered one of the most shameful episodes in Canadian legal history.” By way of comparison, the 1995 trial of Paul Bernardo, one of Canada’s most notorious murderers, was concluded in four months, although it sat for slightly more than 45 days.

For Goldkind, the political vendetta against Lich and Barber is not only vexatious and unfair but a grotesque squandering of public resources. “Every day the courtroom was filled with this stupid case meant there were other trials for rape, child abuse, sex assault, drinking and driving, drug trafficking that were being delayed,” he says, an assessment based on his own experiences as a criminal lawyer. “This was an obscene waste of taxpayer’s money on every level.” In this observation, Goldkind echoes the work of prominent Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy, who has written extensively on how Canada’s courts have become badly clogged and afflicted by delays for nearly all legal procedures.

In his classic 1979 text The Process is the Punishment, American sociologist Malcolm M. Feeley observed a clear distinction in the form of punishment meted out by the upper and lower courts of New Haven, Connecticut. As the higher federal courts were concerned with serious crimes such as armed robbery, rape and murder, they thus dealt out significant penalties, including lengthy jail sentences and possibly even capital punishment.

The lower courts, however, were involved with relatively minor crimes that attracted suitably lighter sentences. Feeley’s insight was that the true nature of the punishment they delivered lay in the accumulation of pre-trial burdens placed on the accused, such as meeting bail requirements, getting time off work, attending court and so on. By the time a verdict was rendered – whether guilty or not guilty – the “sentence” was essentially over.

This phenomenon has only worsened throughout North America in the ensuing decades, as prominent commentators such as Mark Steyn have noted. Others, like Canadian media icon Conrad Black, use the term “prosecutocracy” to describe the vindictive and unjust manner in which the legal system can pursue a target out of all proportion to the matter at hand. The prosecution of Lich and Barber appears among the most egregious examples of such punishment-by-process yet to be found in a Canadian court.

Having been identified by politicians in Ottawa as the leaders of a national protest-cum-uprising that allegedly required the invocation of the Emergencies Act, and hence the suspension of Canadians’ essential rights and freedoms, the pair must now fulfill their putative role as arch-villains. But instead of charging them with serious crimes such as sedition or rioting, the worst the police could come up with were mischief and obstructing police...

It is for such self-serving and, some might say, deeply unjust motives that a petite, devout Métis grandmother has been presented to the world as a dangerous, violent rebel whose mere liberty would threaten the safety of all of downtown Ottawa, and whose subsequent communications on social media might destabilize Canada itself. And why she has already spent 49 days in jail for a crime that generally results in no jail time at all.

This is why Karimjee, the original Crown prosecutor, absurdly argued that the fact Lich had accepted a public honour was reason enough to lock her up for years. And why, when that same over-zealous, Liberal-donating prosecutor thought he had her trapped in another bail breach when she allowed her picture to be taken with lawyers just slightly off-stage, he issued a Canada-wide warrant for her arrest and sent homicide detectives to Medicine Hat to bring her back to Ottawa – who actually placed her in leg shackles. If any of these theatrics was justified, Lich would indeed be the greatest criminal threat this country has seen since the FLQ Crisis or the Riel Rebellion.

Only when the case finally made its way into a courtroom, however, was the true nature of the prosecution’s animus fully revealed. “This should not be the trial of the Freedom Convoy,” Greenspon declared at the outset. Yet that’s exactly what it became: a punitive effort to hold Lich and Barber accountable for the actions of others – most of whom were never charged with anything or who had their charges dropped. As the evidence shows, Lich worked tirelessly to make the Freedom Convoy a peaceful, law-abiding and community-minded event."