I watched in disbelief as universities turned on black academics in the name of diversity

Speechless director Ric Esther Bienstock: I’ve seen how cancel culture is destroying universities (aka "I watched in disbelief as universities turned on black academics in the name of diversity")

"It was my daughter’s reluctance to wear a pair of sandals made of embroidered Chinese fabric that made me realise that something had shifted. When I asked why she wasn’t wearing them, she said: “I just feel like there’s a chance I’ll offend someone.” In that moment, I understood that my daughter was coming of age in a world radically different from the one I grew up in, a world where even the fabric on a pair of shoes could feel politically charged. Where self-censorship had become the safest form of self-expression.

That worry is what sent me back to university to make a documentary. Both of my children were about to enrol in higher education, and I wanted to understand the world they were entering. I’ve spent my career running towards difficult stories. Ebola outbreaks. Human trafficking. The black market in human organs. None of it prepared me for a university campus...

Within a day of my arrival at Evergreen, a student informed me – not in anger, almost as a friendly heads-up – that I was a white supremacist. I am a Jewish woman whose mother survived Auschwitz, so “white supremacist” is not generally how I think about myself. But they explained, patiently, that it wasn’t about intent; it was about the system I benefited from by virtue of being white. My views didn’t matter. My identity did.

I saw the university’s president, George Bridges, get accused of a “microaggression” for using hand gestures while trying to calm down a room of angry students. He wasn’t being aggressive. He was just talking with his hands, the way people do. They mocked him, shouted over him and demanded he keep his hands still. Eventually, he did.

What followed was a near 10-year journey across campuses in North America and the United Kingdom. Again and again, I saw complex issues giving way to ideological certainty. A generation was being taught that disagreement was harmful.

Words I thought I understood had acquired new meanings. “White supremacy culture” no longer referred to neo-Nazis but, in some academic circles, now included traits such as perfectionism, individualism and a belief in objectivity, because, so the theory went, these were “white” values. A “safe space” no longer referred to somewhere that protected you from physical danger. Now it could refer to a place where you were protected from ideas that challenged your world view.

As part of my BBC documentary series, Speechless, I spoke with Erec Smith, a black professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Defending his belief that students should be taught standard English, he had found himself in conflict with some of his colleagues, who had accused him of upholding the language of white supremacy and suffering from Stockholm syndrome, the psychological state in which a hostage or abuse victim internalises the beliefs of his oppressor.

“It’s a strange feeling to be called a white supremacist by a white person,” he told me. “I went through what many theorists would call a degradation ceremony. The point is not to listen to people but to ridicule them and show other people: ‘This is what happens when you speak up.’ I was called a fascist, but who isn’t these days?”

Tabia Lee had felt the same pressure at De Anza College, in California. Hired as the “faculty director for equity and social justice”, she told me that in her first departmental meeting, when she had suggested that people keep notes and set an agenda, a colleague told her to stop “white-speaking” and “white-splaining”. In workshops, traits such as objectivity and punctuality were ridiculed as being part of “white supremacy culture”. 

She dared to fight back. “What are they expecting of me as a black woman?” she asked. “Are they expecting me to be lazy, to not be on time, to not take notes?”

When she tried to introduce alternative ways of thinking, she said, “the clampdown on me really happened”. Soon afterwards, she was fired. The college’s board said she had taken positions that were “adversarial and hostile” to its stance on social justice, anti-racism and equity.

I also talked to Zack De Piero, a former professor of English writing at Pennsylvania State University, who is white and is pursuing legal action accusing the university of racial discrimination. He was asked to watch a professional development video titled “White teachers are a problem” and was warned that “white supremacy manifests itself in language and writing pedagogy”.

At a session commemorating George Floyd – the black man who pleaded “I can’t breathe” as a police officer knelt on his neck, sparking the 2020 racial-justice protests – staff members were led in a moment of silence, with a small twist. “The challenge for all of us today, especially for white and non-black people of colour, is to hold our breaths just a little bit longer,” a facilitator told the group. “To not give in to our privilege… hold it in for as long as you can, to feel the pain.” De Piero describes multiple workshops and training sessions that he felt explicitly targeted his whiteness as a problem.

Carole Hooven, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, stated on television in 2021 that biological sex was binary, a mainstream scientific position. She also acknowledged that gender existed on a spectrum and that she was talking about biology, not identity. But, within hours, the director of her department’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force had accused her of transphobia. Graduate students refused to work with her, making it impossible for her to teach her course. She eventually retired and later told me she thought about suicide.

The same pattern played out in England. Kathleen Stock left her job as a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex in 2021 after her gender-critical views sparked a student campaign accusing her of transphobia and calling for her to be sacked. Among her crimes was the belief that trans women should not have unrestricted access to women-only spaces. I’ll leave that argument to others, but what struck me was the response to it: not a counter-argument, but a campaign to end her career.

These are not Right-wing provocateurs; they are educators who questioned an increasingly narrow consensus and paid for it with their careers, their reputations and, in some cases, their mental health.

Then came October 7 2023, and its aftermath, a catastrophe with a devastating human cost that I don’t want to litigate here. But it turned everything I’d spent years documenting on its head. Activists who previously had been willing to restrict what could be said, in the name of protecting vulnerable groups, seemed to suspend these principles when it came to anyone who supported even the existence of the state of Israel.

I interviewed Momodou Taal, a British doctoral student at Cornell, in New York state, who was one of the leading voices in the university’s pro-Palestinian protest movement. He told me plainly: “I think Zionism is white supremacy. I think Zionism is a form of racism.” When I asked whether that was too simple a lens for a complicated conflict, he replied: “I don’t understand why there’s a call for nuance when we believe it is racism.” He also said: “We hope through our campaigns that other students become more radicalised.” 

I also interviewed Gwen, a trans student. “I’d say that, as a trans person, I’ve been very lucky,” she told me. “Cornell is a very accepting place. I’ve had much more difficulty being Jewish than I have being trans.”

On other campuses, protesters were filmed telling Jews to go back to Poland. Imagine that same line aimed at any other group – go back to Africa, go back to China, go back to India – and ask yourself how the university would react.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives began with genuinely good intentions, opening doors long closed to women, people of colour and other marginalised groups. And that work still matters. But in some institutions, DEI shifted from expanding opportunity to enforcing ideological conformity...

One thing I learnt making my film is that once you start silencing people, you don’t get to decide who uses those tools next. Universities are now living with the consequences.

In England, the Government has introduced a free-speech complaints system for universities, with heavy fines for institutions that fail to protect it. It’s a start. But laws can’t fix a culture. You can fine a university for bad policy; you can’t fine a colleague for freezing someone out, or legislate away the instinct to humiliate and cancel.

Universities should be the one place where difficult ideas can be examined without people worrying about damaging their careers. When we teach students that disagreement is violence, that discomfort is harm, that the proper response to an idea you find threatening is to make sure nobody else hears it, we weaken them.

I think about my daughter and her sandals often. She’s not alone. I hear versions of her hesitation from friends, colleagues and students, people who just decide to hold back, to say less and risk less.

During the filming of Speechless, some students told me theirs is a generation simply trying not to cause harm. But I sense fear. And fear is no foundation for a democracy. Because once we decide that some ideas are too dangerous to hear, we have already conceded the argument to the people who would silence us."

 

Left wingers claim "Zionists" are Nazis, so it's no surprise that Jews can be white supremacists too.

Links - 20th September 2026 (1 - Mark Carney)

How Carney changed rules to allow partisan government ads | Opinion | winnipegsun.com - "Turn on TV or click on youtube and you’ll see them: slick federal government ads, wrapped in flags and patriotism, telling you how strong Canada is.  The slogan is “Canada Strong.” If that sounds familiar, it should. It was the Liberal Party’s slogan in the 2025 election campaign. The party’s slogan is now the government’s slogan. And your tax dollars are paying to broadcast it.  That’s wrong.  Government advertising should tell citizens things they need to know like how to file taxes, how to apply for benefits, or how to stay safe in an emergency.  When it becomes a way for the party in power to promote itself, it stops being a public service and instead becomes propaganda you’re forced to fund.  In 2016, the federal government introduced strict rules requiring all government advertising to be non-partisan. Ads had to be factual and free from political party slogans and identifiers.  That makes sense. Why should taxpayers’ money be used for the government to broadcast partisan slogans?  Those rules held for nearly a decade. But then Mark Carney became prime minister, and the rules suddenly got in his way.  As the Globe and Mail’s Campbell Clark has reported, Carney loosened the rules on partisan government advertising last year. The result is exactly what you’d expect. The Liberals’ “Canada Strong” campaign slogan now shows up in taxpayer-funded TV commercials, and it branded the government’s budget, too... Increasingly, we are seeing a pattern: when the rules don’t suit Mark Carney, he simply changes them.  Consider how he got his majority government. Carney’s Liberals won 169 seats in April 2025, three short of the 172 needed. So he set about collecting opposition MPs.  Five crossed the floor after a concerted Liberal pressure campaign orchestrated by Carney and his cabinet ministers. That’s how Carney clinched his majority. That made him the first prime minister in Canadian history to turn a minority into a majority through enticing floor crossers.  No opposition MP walks across the floor for nothing. The perks of power are fantastic bait, and the Liberals have been happy to dangle them.  The pattern is the same every time. The rules bend to serve the Liberals, never the other way around.  Now consider what the advertising binge costs you.  The federal government spent $78 million on advertising in 2024-25. Carney’s November budget then quietly added another $25 million to the annual limit on its central advertising fund. That’s where your money is going. Ottawa just ran a deficit of $67 billion, massively more than was predicted only a short while ago. Carney has blown through spending projections made just months earlier. Ordinary Canadians are struggling with groceries and rent. And the government is spending millions to buy itself a warm glow during the big game, dressed up in the governing party’s election slogan.  Governments always face the temptation to use public money to make themselves look good. That’s exactly why the guardrails existed.  Carney didn’t just bump up against those guardrails. He tore them down, one by one, whenever they stood between him and what he thought could give him a partisan advantage.  A government that advertises for itself with your money has stopped serving you and started using you. Carney shouldn’t be allowed to use your money for his own partisan purposes."

Gunter: Carney continues Liberals’ historic economic downward slide | Edmonton Journal - "During the first 10 years of Liberal government — the Trudeau years — business investment per worker in Canada fell 18.8 per cent from $20,310 in 2014 to $16,493 in 2024 (inflation adjusted), according to the Fraser Institute.  Over the same period, U.S. business investment per worker rose 31.3 per cent from $23,263 to $30,555, which means U.S. investment levels are now nearly double ours.  If you want to know why our job growth is sluggish, our productivity is falling, inflation is stubborn and the dollar is weak, look no further than the lack of investment. For instance, if few foreigners are investing in Canada, they don’t need Canadian dollars, so the value of the dollar craters. But if you think this was just a Trudeau phenomenon and that Prime Minister Mark Carney (swoon) will turn things around, don’t hold your breath.  Remember Carney had the worst first year of growth of any PM in 63 years. Moreover, business investment continued its decline in 2025. We even slipped into recession at the end of last year and the beginning of this, although we seem to have pulled out of it ever so slightly in the second quarter of 2025.  This prolonged slump has led to fewer new factories, fewer expanded factories and less updating of machinery and equipment. We also have one of the worst performances on research and intellectual property in the developed world. All this together has resulted in less physical productivity per worker and very slow wage growth. (That also contributes to the affordability crisis as wages fail to keep up with rents and grocery prices.)  Despite their boastful ads about Building Canada Strong, it was Liberal policies under Trudeau that directly caused the slump and Liberal policies under Carney that are doing little or nothing to reverse the trend. The Liberals also seem uninterested in or incapable of attracting new private investment. (Have you heard the term “lower taxes” lately?)  Instead, they seem intent on replacing private investment with government subsidies — debt-financed government subsidies.  The new West Coast pipeline from Alberta and the parallel Pathways carbon capture scheme have no private investors, which leads me to think the main costs (upwards of $50 billion) will be borne by Alberta and Canadian taxpayers, even though no politician has had the courage to say so.  Many more of the Liberals’ major projects are likely to follow the same template: Taxpayers pay for the infrastructure, private companies operate the completed ventures. To further understand how counterproductive the Carney Liberals’ strategies are, consider the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit — $1,800 a year per family, ostensibly to counter rising food inflation.  However, the government is doing nothing meaningful to bring prices down. It’s not lowering taxes or tariffs or ending supply-managed agriculture or lessening regulations. All of those might lower retail prices.  Instead, they’re cutting cheques of taxpayer money to help you pay the high cost of their unwillingness to tackle the core problem.  Occasionally, even their subsidize-everything strategy falls apart.  The Liberals are pumping hundreds of millions into new housing builds to help bring down the cost of buying homes. Yet the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates that fewer homes — single family and multi-units — will be started this year (239,000) versus last year (248,000).  The CMHC has said, and the government has accepted, the goal of 500,000 housing starts a year is needed for the next six to eight years in order to close the gap between housing supply and demand.  Just as with pipelines and groceries, the federal government cannot spend its way to solutions, not even under the Great Mark Carney. Yet the Liberals seem to have no other ideas.  Is it any wonder that Canada has fallen to 13th wealthiest country in the world, behind the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands and other peer countries?"

Meme - Tablesalt @Tablesalt13: "This is what headlines look like when you dont have a government funded media."
Bloomberg @business: "Canadians support Mark Carney's management of the economy, even though he's presided over the worst first year of growth for a prime minister since at least 1963, a poll showed."
"Carney Gets High Marks on Economy Despite Recession Talk, Poll Says"

Canada has gone mad 🍎 on X - "The worse Carney gets, the harder they attack Pierre Poilievre.   Mark Carney has more conflicts of interest than any Canadian Prime Minister in history.  Carney fumbled the USMCA talks... skipped key negotiations while a private citizen showed up.   Caught conspiring against Trump on his British cell phone.   Tanked trade deals because his office "wasn't ready."  Buying German subs, sabotaging Ukraine peace efforts (costing Canada auto jobs with Korea), handing another $900M borrowed dollars to Ukraine, and announcing big defence spending with no clear funding.   Plus $3B to bail out condo developers (and himself?).   Worst first-year record of any PM ever... yet the media obsesses over smearing Pierre.   Are Canadians noticing yet 😏"
Comment (elsewhere): "I love how liberals care about the resume now that carney is here but it wasn’t a requirement for Trudeau"

Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "Carney still has a 60% approval rating and the Liberals are dominating in the polls.  The lesson here is simple.   You can spend a decade completely destroying the country, tanking the economy, and replacing the native population with millions of Third Worlders, and as long as you endlessly pander to pensioners you can never lose.  Canada is the world’s first gerontocracy."

6ixBuzzTV on X - "Prime Minister Mark Carney says publicly calling out countries on issues like human rights is ineffective as Canada seeks new economic partnerships. “I do see that lecturing countries from afar is an ineffective strategy,” Carney said. “It’s satisfying, but it’s ineffective.”"
Time to slam the US as "fascist" again

Carney's global quest for photo ops comes with crippling compromises | National Post - "It’s a peculiar axiomatic reality of Canadian public opinion. Whenever the popular loathing of United States President Donald Trump is inflamed, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s approval ratings either solidify or rise... Despite what the Liberal party routinely claims, China is not Canada’s second-largest trading partner. Europe is, by far... The EU is on the lookout for allies. Japan, South Korea and Brazil are good prospects. Canada might have been, but that ship has sailed. Our own automotive sector is reeling from Trump’s intention to dismember North America’s integrated economy but Carney’s long-term low tariff guarantee to Chinese EV producers assures an “economic catastrophe” in the Canadian auto sector, says Brian Kingston, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association.  “Europe was soft on China,” Kingston says. “Look at what the outcome has been: 90,000 auto jobs lost last year because they’ve allowed dumped Chinese vehicles into their market.”  It isn’t only China that weaponizes its strategic vantage points in the democratic world’s economies, and Canada’s foreign-policy autonomy — and our internal security — is now further hamstrung by the Carney government’s trade and security agreements with the fabulously wealthy ruling family of Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood’s primary global sponsor and benefactor.  Just this past month, Volkswagen’s hopes to save its Osnabrück plant and its 2,300 jobs by converting to production of components for Israel’s Iron Dome defence system were dashed by Qatar’s objections. The Qatari sovereign wealth fund holds 10.4 per cent of Volkswagen’s shares and 17 percent of its voting rights.  Among the several commitments Canada has made to Qatar in the hopes of convincing the Gulf autocracy’s ruling Al Thani family to double down on its energy investments in Canada is a June 25 memorandum of understanding between Canada’s Public Safety ministry and Qatar’s Internal Security Force. It’s also under wraps, like the RCMP agreement with Beijing’s Public Security ministry.  The deal is supposed to extend Canada’s cooperation on a variety of law-enforcement portfolios, including money-laundering, financial crime and terrorism. This will be unavoidably awkward, owing to the Al Thani family’s conviction that the terrorist front Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is merely a national liberation movement. Qatar is already notorious in Canada’s national-security circles for the hundreds of millions of dollars it lavishes on the Muslim Brotherhood and its Canadian fronts and affiliates.  Last year, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) published an in-depth study of the reach of Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood in Canada, recommending that Canada’s intelligence agencies keep much closer tabs on Qatar’s promotion of extremist ideology and support for extremist organizations in Canada. “It is imperative to assess their level of penetration, areas of influence, and long-term goals in order to effectively manage the risks posed to Canada.”  Second only to Qatar in its support of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ambitions for a global caliphate is Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime in Ankara. Two weeks ago, in yet another “trade diversification” milestone, Prime Minister Carney announced that Ankara and Ottawa have formally begun negotiations for a free trade agreement.  The Carney government has also embarked on talks for a free trade agreement with the 11-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc, which will require some fancy stickhandling around ASEAN member Myanmar, a brutal and genocidal China-aligned police state. The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force lists Myanmar among only three countries on its blacklist, along with Iran and North Korea.  So it’s all well and good for Canada to be looking for deep-pocketed police state investors and maybe even some customers beyond the United States, at least for now. But the lasting damage to Canada’s national security, diplomatic sovereignty, moral conscience, democratic alliances and international reputation might also be taken into account from time to time."

Mark Carney unafraid to cozy up to dirty dictators | Toronto Sun - "Our Prime Ministerial frequent flyer was on the road again recently. One wonders if he leafed through Dr. Martin Luther King’s first book on the plane. There’s a memorable passage in it: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting is really cooperating with it.”  As such, the places Mark Carney visits are interesting. At the NATO Summit, he spent time with Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has crushed the free press, systematically undermined Turkey’s judiciary, gone after his political opponents, and violated human rights with relish. He calls Judaism a “genocidal, occupying, expansionist” ideology. He is generally regarded as a monster... Another recent stop on Carney’s world tour was China. China, as is well known, is another unambiguous abuser of human rights. In China, Uyghurs, Muslims, Tibetans, and dissidents — as seen most vividly in Tiananmen Square — regularly face forced labour, mass detentions, religious persecution and brutal political and cultural assimilation. China also, it should be noted, illegally imprisoned two innocent Canadian men, and interfered in our elections in 2019 and 2021.  But there was our prime minister, in convivial meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Carney’s own Privy Council Office said the Prime Minister did not “proactively” — that is to say, at all — raise human rights concerns with Xi. “Topics of human rights and foreign interference were not brought up proactively by the Canadian Prime Minister,” PCO initially admitted, before speedily recanting... The latest stop on Carney’s Human Rights Abuser World Tour was Saudi Arabia, just days ago. Here are some of the things that Saudi Arabia does:
• It hands out lengthy prison sentences, or the death penalty, for social media posts about human rights
• It executes hundreds of people, annually, including minors
• It discriminates against women, and regularly imprisons women who are courageous enough to advocate for basic freedoms
• It keeps thousands of migrant workers ensnared in its kafala servitude system, which is often likened to slavery for its abuses and forced labour practices
• It kills critics — as it did in 2018 with Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered and dismembered by Saudi agents in the aforementioned Turkey
And, notably, 9/11...
All of this — Carney’s dalliances with the ruling gangsters in Turkey, China and Saudi Arabia — is morally wrong. It is the opposite of what a Canadian prime minister should be doing. And it is a repudiation of decades of Canadian human rights policy under successive prime ministers.  Ask Lloyd Axworthy, the legendary former Foreign Affairs Minister and a Liberal. He knows. This writer served on Axworthy’s foreign affairs advisory group in Opposition in the early 1990s (alongside Jean Chretien’s principal secretary Edward S. Goldenberg, who passed away recently). I knew Axworthy to be fearless and principled, and resolutely committed to protecting human rights, here and abroad.  Said Axworthy about Carney’s willingness to play footsie with abusers of human rights: “[Carney] keeps wanting to say he’s erasing the Trudeau legacy. Well, it’s not just Justin Trudeau’s legacy — he’s erasing a legacy that goes back a lot of years for a lot of Liberals. I mean, I was a Liberal since I was 17, and I’m finding what he’s doing to be quite disturbing.”"

EDITORIAL: Canada tells investors ‘we’re not ready’ | Toronto Sun - "The difficulty in turning around our economy after a decade of neglect by the Justin Trudeau Liberals should surprise no one because it’s like trying to turn around the Titanic before it hit the iceberg.  For example, the Mark Carney government told the United Arab Emirates last month that it isn’t ready to move forward on $70 billion in investments from the UAE into the Canadian economy because its major projects office, set up in August, hasn’t approved any shovel-ready projects to invest in. According to a report in Tuesday’s Financial Times, this lack of ready-to-go projects is holding back Carney’s plan to double trade with non U.S partners in a decade.  A Canadian official granted anonymity in the story said:  “The PM keeps talking about the $70 billion UAE commitment he secured on his first visit (to Abu Dhabi) in November. None of that has been deployed.”... Former Quebec premier Jean Charest, co-chair of the UAE-Canada Business Council, told the Financial Times that while the major projects office is “only one bucket of potential projects” for investors, it “gave them the only answer they could give them, at this point we’re not ready. But that is the same answer for everyone.”... what this episode demonstrates is that it’s one thing to announce new investment agreements with foreign countries and quite another to deliver them, with Carney claiming he will catalyze $1 trillion in new investments in Canada in five years and double non-U.S. exports in 10.  That’s because there are still numerous federal and provincial laws and regulations that hamper Canada’s ability to build infrastructure “at speeds not seen in generations,” as the prime minister likes to put it."
Weird. Left wingers tell us that signing a MOU is the same as securing investment

Marty York: Mark Carney is a failed economic wizard | National Post - "The consensus in Canada is clear to most of us — even irrefutable — that Prime Minister Mark Carney has done very little if anything to make Jewish people in this country feel safer or more content. His contributions to rising antisemitism and divisive behaviour haven’t bothered most of his supporters, however, judging by the popularity polls... Yet many of Carney’s supporters stand by him because they have a perception, unfounded, that he is an economic guru. He’s not. The supporters rave about Carney’s economic prowess but the truth is that, under him, the Canadian dollar sunk in recent days to the lowest it’s been in a year. What’s more, we are in a technical recession. And, while Carney travels on Canadian tax dollars to watch soccer with his wife, shakes hands in front of cameras with other global leaders, makes “important” and costly decisions (about $150-million) to enter Canada in the Eurovision Song Contest and feeds the Hamas-connected United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) millions and millions of our tax dollars, he is letting down Canadians on multiple economic fronts.  He had sold voters a budget based on assumptions and wishful thinking, even though former PM Stephen Harper tried to warn us about him. In March, 2025, before Carney was elected, Harper accused him of taking excessive credit for helping guide Canada’s response to the 2008 global financial crisis. Carney’s history of leading the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, before moving to the Bank of England, was the backbone of his campaign. He described himself as someone who would bring a steady hand to the economy.  “I have listened, with increasing disbelief, to Mark Carney’s attempts to take credit for things he had little or nothing to do with back then,” Harper wrote in a letter to fundraisers at the time. “He has been doing this at the expense of the late Jim Flaherty (former Canadian Minister of Finance), who sadly is not here to defend his record.  But let me be very clear – the hard calls during the 2008-09 global financial crisis were made by Jim.”  So has Carney been the economic wizard he promised to be? Nope.  Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre — granted, not unbiased — noted recently that Canada is “the only G7 country in a recession.” He added: “Canadians are starving, losing their jobs and missing mortgage payments. And Mark Carney is hiding from accountability.”  Canadians lost 112,000 jobs in the first quarter of 2026 and have the worst per-capita number of job losses in the G7. Business investments have declined for five consecutive quarters. Canada has the worst investments per capita in the G7. Canada has the worst household debt in the G7.  Poilievre also cited Food Banks Canada statistics showing rising food insecurity. But he is not the only one noticing Carney’s shortcomings economically. Annette Ryan, Canada’s new independent Parliamentary Budget Officer, recently acknowledged in a response to Conservative MP Tamara Jansen that Carney’s budget has a 99 per cent chance of missing its targets.  “I think that is a fair statement,” Ryan said, adding:  “Our forecast saw a lot of revenue weakness, especially in personal income taxes.”  And what about Carney’s vow to stand up to, and reach a deal with, U.S. President Donald Trump? Well, that’s gone nowhere. Trump has declined to renew the Canada U.S. Mexico Agreement and economists say more obstacles with this will further unsettle Canada’s financial problems.  And Carney’s plans to accelerate homebuilding by giving $5-billion of tax money to B.C.’s infrastructure? Yep, many questions here, too. According to a recent commentary at the Fraser Institute web site, the plan to buy 2,200 vacant condos in B.C., and convert them into affordable homes, is deeply flawed.   “Using taxpayer dollars to buy existing condos will not increase the housing supply,” the Fraser Institute said. “Instead, it could undermine the competition that’s desperately needed to improve housing affordability in the province. Government should stay out of the condo market.”  Carney justified his economy in early June by saying the recession is part of a “settling-in” period.   But while the “settling-in” period takes place, many Canadians are hurting. More and more."

Carney’s summer spending spree lacks detail and transparency, economists assert - The Globe and Mail - "Mark Carney’s wave of summer spending Thursday included numerous billion-dollar references to new projects in British Columbia and Alberta, but economists are questioning the lack of detail as to where the money will come from.  In his typical rhetorical style, the Prime Minister made several references to “catalytic” investments that will attract more than $200-billion in private capital... As is increasingly the case with major federal announcements, the background documents provided by officials lack important details.  No information was released that explains how much Ottawa plans to spend each year on the various projects, nor how much would be direct spending versus loans. Nor was an update provided as to what the flurry of announcements would mean for the size of Ottawa’s deficit and debt.  Those details will presumably have to wait until the release of the government’s fall budget.  “I’ve been involved with budgets in one way or another since 1977 and I’ve never seen such a lack of transparency,” said Don Drummond, a professor at Queen’s University’s School of Policy Studies.  The former senior finance official is a co-author of the C.D. Howe Institute’s annual shadow budget, where a team of economists attempt to estimate the size of the federal deficit before the budget is announced based on spending announcements made throughout the year.  “We’re trying to generate a ‘status quo’ fiscal update, and we do not know what to do,” he said. “Are these loans? Are they loan guarantees? Are they actual capital purchases, which under accrual accounting we just record as amortization? The answer to all of the above is: ‘I don’t know.’”... Jimmy Jean, chief economist with Desjardins Group, said he understands that some of the lack of detail around the pipeline is due to the fact that the financing structure is still being negotiated.  Mr. Jean said in an e-mail that the government may be planning on drawing from existing funds like the Canada Infrastructure Bank or the Canada Strong Fund for some of these projects, but such information was not provided.  “It’s very difficult to figure out what was pre-committed or not,” he said."
Damn Maple MAGA!
Don't these ignorant "economists" know that Carney has an Oxford Masters and PhD?!

Carney releasing 'strategic plans,' with few results: Tristin Hopper | National Post - "the report reads like a wish list published by a think tank, rather than a position paper from a government with unprecedented powers to actually build out electrical infrastructure.  The report says that, given current trends, Canada must deliver “twice as much power as it does today” by 2050. But as to how this will be done, there’s no new policy in the strategy.  Anytime some specific government measure is cited, it’s something that Ottawa was doing anyway. One example: “The Government of Canada will … continue to prioritize projects of national interest that support electricity system growth.”  In a conclusion, readers are told to register three takeaways from the National Strategy for an Electrified Canadian Economy: “It is time to act,” “it is time to think big” and “it is time to work together.”"
Lots of woke motherhood statements too, but that won't stop left wingers from denouncing him as a "conservative"

Jimmy Ruffian | Facebook - "And Carney has basically stripped every environmental protection and climate change initiative. The relentless pursuit of capital for the privileged few is going to be our end unless we do something."
Of all the hysterical overreactions, navel gazing (imagining that only Western carbon affects the climate) and epic failures to understand things, this takes the cake (so far)

Meme - Wyatt Claypool @wyatt_claypool: "Apparently it demonstrates someone "cares about human rights" by going to a government-sponsored Pride parade in Toronto. You know the same parade whose organizers oppose parental rights, support hate-speech laws and support the terrorist organization Hamas over Israel."
Laura Babcock @LauraBabcock: "Carney clearly cares about human rights. Where was Poilievre?"
Mark Carney @MarkJCarney: "Happy Pride, Toronto. #PrideToronto2026 *Carney waving fist*"

Building Canada Act’s purpose questioned as Carney government marks 1 year without a single project designated - "Nearly a year after Parliament passed the Building Canada Act (BCA) with promises to urgently advance projects across the country, not a single project has been formally designated under the legislation—and policy experts are questioning whether the law was ever capable of delivering the results the Carney government promised.  A new intelligence memo from the C.D. Howe Institute, published June 11, argues the BCA has compounded the very problem it was designed to solve.   “Rather than creating a clearer and more predictable approvals framework, these changes expand federal discretion and further politicize the regulatory process,” wrote George Vegh, a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and Kate Koplovich, a senior policy analyst at the C.D. Howe Institute.   The stakes for Canada’s economic future are large. The number of oil and gas projects in the Carney government’s major project inventory has fallen 76 percent from its 2017 peak, a decline the authors describe as reflecting a “sustained erosion of investment confidence” in Canada’s energy sector over the past decade... Vegh and Koplovich argue that the machinery is structurally flawed. Cabinet ministers and, they say, the Prime Minister’s Office in reality, were granted “virtually unconstrained discretion” over both ultimate approvals and the process governing them. That discretion, they argue, means the government can effectively predetermine the outcome of a hearing before evidence is weighed, with regulators going “through the motions” to produce a record supporting a political decision already made.  The memo also raises a fundamental ambiguity: the BCA may not replace existing review requirements under the Canadian Energy Regulator Act or the Impact Assessment Act (IAA); it may simply add to them, compounding uncertainty for investors rather than resolving it."
Clearly, Mark Carney is a conservative, because he believes that government should play a big role in the economy. But then, left wingers are actively hostile to economic growth, so anything that is aimed at improving it is "conservative" to them

Mark Carney’s 26 trips abroad: A breakdown of the prime minister’s trade deals and travel after 1 year in office - "Prime Minister Mark Carney is living up to his self-avowed globalist status. Since taking office exactly one year ago, the globetrotting former central banker has been outside of Canada 68 days, or 20 percent of his first year in office...   The Hub compiled a list of the 26 travel trips Carney has made so far to other countries (each country visit is counted as a separate trip). We want to understand what deals and partnerships he’s made with foreign nations to see if these new trade avenues will have a material impact back home, and just how soon they could take effect.  Is all of Carney’s journeys to foreign lands bearing fruit, or are they mainly airy flights of fancy?...   Despite the majority of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s 26 trips to foreign focusing on diversifying trade, no major expansive trade deals have yet been signed.  “In terms of his negotiations with trade agreements with new partners, Carney has made important steps towards diversifying trade but has few concrete accomplishments to point to,” Steinberg told The Hub. “Only one new trade agreement has formally been signed, [with Indonesia], and it has not yet actually been ratified yet.”  Steinberg also pointed to reductions in Chinese agricultural tariffs, but noted that this only brings us back to the 2024 status quo, rather than adding net-new export destinations.  While Steinberg believes Carney is on the right track with signing new trade deals, he says it’s too early to celebrate. He adds that trade with the U.S. should still be Canada’s primary focus.  “I applaud the ongoing discussions with other trade partners, especially India, where I see great long-term potential, but most of these discussions have yet to actually reduce any trade barriers,” Steinberg explained.  “Carney’s primary focus should be on renegotiating CUSMA, or at least keeping it alive until President Trump leaves office. Losing CUSMA would hurt our economy more than any potential trade agreements with other countries could possibly help it.”  While laudable, the economics professor sees diversifying the bulk of Canada’s trade elsewhere outside of the States to be a foolhardy exercise."
From March. One left winger slammed PP for criticising Carney for poor progress on this front and claimed that trade deals take 1-7 years to negotiate. If that's the case, he should instead of criticising all the left wingers glazing Carney for his huge success in "signing trade deals", since they're lying

Links - 19th September 2026 (2 - Homelessness)

A judge just hallucinated that homelessness is the same as race or sex | National Post - "an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled that the Region of Waterloo cannot clear a 30-person tent encampment from a parking lot in downtown Kitchener, even though the region owns the lot. The municipality has been trying to do so as part of its plans to build the Kitchener Central Transit Hub, which will eventually connect local and regional bus and light rail services, along with VIA Rail (the kind of integrated transit infrastructure Canadian cities are constantly told they need more of). People have been living in tents on the site since 2021. The region has spent three years trying to clear them through the courts. It passed a bylaw. When the bylaw was challenged, it amended it. It removed the $5,000 fines for people who refused to leave. It created a transition policy to help residents find alternative housing. It offered individualized housing plans to every resident. None of it was enough. To use its own land, the judge ruled, the region must first provide an alternative legal encampment site or a formal “tenting protocol” with equivalent services. The absurdity of the decision is obvious to any sensible observer, but the case is just the latest in a disturbing trend in how this country is governed. Buried in the 88-page decision is yet another instance of an Ontario court overturning settled law to invent a new constitutional right, and in the process imposing a policy outcome that no elected government has voted for and no majority of Canadians has ever endorsed. The number of cases where courts use the Charter to invent new rights and impose the policy fever dreams of out-of-touch progressive activists has become impossible to ignore. The crux of the decision begins at paragraph 204 of the ruling. There, Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael R. Gibson declares that homelessness should be recognized as an “analogous ground” under Section 15 of the Charter, meaning a protected characteristic alongside race, sex, religion, and disability. Homeless people, Gibson writes, possess a “constructively immutable characteristic” and constitute a “discrete and insular minority.” Faced with the awkward fact that homelessness, unlike race or sex, is not actually permanent, he concedes (he has to) that homelessness is transitory. He then asserts this does not matter, because such characteristics are, “while they last,” beyond an individual’s conscious control. Read that twice. Homelessness is immutable, except that it isn’t, but it should be treated as though it is. The judge has redefined “immutable” to mean its opposite. The reasoning would not survive a first-year constitutional law tutorial, and yet there it sits, in a published Superior Court ruling, as the basis for a substantial expansion of equality rights in Canadian law. This argument has been tried before and lost... If the ruling stands, every municipal bylaw in Canada that differentially affects homeless people (encampment clearances, park rules, public-space regulations, loitering provisions) becomes a potential equality-rights violation. And this is not an isolated mistake. Last summer, a different Ontario Superior Court judge struck down provincial legislation removing bike lanes from three Toronto streets, on the grounds that removing the lanes violated cyclists Section 7 rights to life and security of the person. A de facto constitutional right to bike lanes, found by a single judge, against the explicit will of an elected legislature. The pattern across both rulings is strikingly similar. Identify a sympathetic group. Connect their circumstances to a Charter provision. Then tell elected officials what they may or may not do, or what they must affirmatively provide, regardless of what voters and their representatives have decided. Notice that the Charter’s text is endlessly elastic in the direction of the activist class’s preferred outcomes, and remarkably inflexible in any other direction. What has happened, slowly and then quickly, is that a particular reading of the Charter has captured much of the legal academy and the bench. On this reading, the Charter does not merely constrain government action that violates clear individual rights. It empowers courts to assess the substantive outcomes of any law, identify groups disadvantaged by those outcomes, and order remedies that turn out to look identical to progressive social policy. More bike lanes. More tenting protocols. More positive obligations imposed on public bodies. More constraints on resource development. The Charter’s framers in 1982 did not intend this. The text does not require it. No Canadian government has ever been elected on a platform of delegating social policy to the courts. But this is what we have, because the people who decide what the Charter means have decided it should be so. There is a remedy. Section 33 of the Charter (the notwithstanding clause) was designed for exactly this kind of judicial overreach. Both Section 7 and Section 15 fall within its scope. The Region of Waterloo cannot invoke it on its own; but the Ontario legislature can. Thirteen Ontario mayors have been asking Ford to do precisely that since October 2024, when the mayors of Sudbury, Cambridge, Guelph, and ten other municipalities signed a joint letter requesting that the province invoke Section 33 to allow encampment clearances, following earlier court rulings. Ford declined and tried a softer route: the Safer Municipalities Act and $75.5 million for homelessness prevention. The judiciary responded by going further still, inventing a new analogous ground and demanding tenting protocols as the price of regional governance. The case for Section 33 was strong then. It is overwhelming now. That the notwithstanding clause is widely treated by the legal commentariat as illegitimate to invoke is itself part of the problem. The clause exists for moments like this. Decades of constitutional commentary, much of it produced by the same legal class now driving the expansion of Charter rights from the bench, have insisted that using Section 33 is undemocratic, anti-rights, even authoritarian. The result is a Charter in which one half (the rights provisions, indefinitely expandable by judges) is treated as sacred, whilst the other half (the democratic override) is treated as a constitutional taboo. Nobody voted for the judge who wrote paragraph 204. Nobody can vote him out. But Ontarians did vote for the legislature that can override him. Decisions like this are likely to continue until somebody with political authority decides that the democratic legitimacy of elected legislatures is worth defending against a judiciary that has, quietly and with the full approval of most of the legal class, made itself this country’s most consequential legislature."
Damn automobile lobby making it impossible to build public transit! We need to ban cars!
This is why left wingers hate the notwithstanding clause so much - it (temporarily) blocks legislating from the bench to push the left wing agenda

guyfelicella🇨🇦🍁 on X - "Let me break it down for everyone 👇🏼   Everyone is upset that an Ontario judge said you can’t just keep displacing homeless people.  Here’s an idea: stop complaining about homeless people and start demanding governments actually house people. Then maybe the courts wouldn’t have to step in to protect basic human rights.  You can’t oppose encampments, oppose supportive housing, oppose shelters, oppose affordable housing, oppose mental health supports  and then complain that homelessness still exists.  You don’t solve homelessness by pushing people from one sidewalk to another. You solve it by giving people somewhere to go."
Ben Woodfinden on X - "This is a nice strawman.   The Region of Waterloo offered every encampment resident an individualized housing plan. It dropped fines. It created a transition policy. The court said none of it mattered.   What the judge actually did here, and what you're conspicuously not mentioning, is declare homelessness a constitutionally protected class under s.15 of the Charter, something courts have previously refused to do, including in this very case three years ago. You're happy about it because the judge happens to share your policy preferences.   That's all this is. An activist class that can't win these fights democratically cheering when judges do it for them."

Judge rules taxpayers must fund housing where homeless can smoke crack | Toronto Sun - "In effect, Gibson is saying that the people in this encampment cannot be moved until they are provided with housing that they find adequate. The people behind this challenge don’t want to stay in shelters, they don’t want to stay in motels paid for by the local government. They want the region to provide them with housing option where they can continue to smoke crack, smoke meth and consume opioids without judgment.  That’s not an exaggeration — it is in the judgment.  “Emergency shelters are not always appropriate or available for people who lack capacity, have serious mental health, and/or substance use issues,” Gibson writes.  He notes that some people have been barred from shelters due to persistent illegal drug use, which is not allowed in the shelters, but then also says the motels offered by the city are not sufficient.  “Motels do not provide the levels of support required for high-needs individuals; behavioural issues frequently lead to eviction and unsupervised drug use can lead to overdose with no one nearby to notice or assist (a risk that may be mitigated by the ‘buddy system’ in the encampment),” he writes. Gibson arrives at his conclusions by interpreting Canada’s Charter, not in the way it is written but rather through the lens of several United Nations declarations and even a non-binding report.  Citing the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and their National Protocol for Homeless Encampments in Canada report, Gibson invented a new right to housing and stated the government must provide it.  “Adequate alternative housing, with all necessary amenities, must be provided to all residents prior to any eviction,” he wrote.  That line effectively turns Canada’s Charter on its head from a document that protects citizens from government overreach, such as the government trampling on your rights, into one where the government is obligated to provide certain services to you at certain levels. This would hand over control of how our country is run from our elected officials to appointed judges, who, as Ford said, answer to no one."

Ford blasts judges, threatens notwithstanding clause over encampments - "Elizabeth MacIsaac, president of the anti-poverty organization Maytree, said it is “deeply disappointing” to hear Ford discussing the notwithstanding clause again. “Sec. 33 wasn’t set up as a ‘get out of jail free’ card. It has a purpose, and its purpose is to protect the most vulnerable, not to enable a government to override the rights of the most vulnerable. I think it’s the wrong tool for what he wants to achieve,” MacIsaac said. “If Premier Ford wants to see encampments gone, there is an answer to that. And it’s not taking away their rights; it is providing the housing needed, the deeply affordable options for housing that would allow people to live with dignity. But this government hasn’t done that.”"
Only groups the left loves have rights. Ordinary people have no rights

Murder, floods, disorder: Granville strip crime and chaos at untenable levels, hospitality industry says - "“What is happening is continual public disorder, open drug use, and mental health episodes that are frankly scary,” Kershaw said from inside the Roxy Cabaret... business owners saying rising crime and disorder are making Granville’s nightlife and tourism district untenable. Kershaw said nearly 31 fires and the water flowing down from units at St. Helen’s Hotel, the SRO above his club, have caused more than 100 floods in his business, while repeated false fire alarms have driven away customers. “The loss of sales due to this disruption, for me personally, is now in the six figures.” “We’re asking the NDP government to move quickly to relocate these residents to supportive housing that properly serves their needs, and allow business owners to restore the entertainment district Vancouver deserves,” Kershaw said. Crime and emergency calls have surged in the area since the SRO conversions, according to Vancouver Police Department data collected by the Hospitality Vancouver Association. Police and fire services responded to roughly 6,641 calls at the three SROs between 2020 and 2025, an increase of more than 800 per cent compared with the year before the conversions, spokesperson Laura Ballance said. “We give you a snapshot of the past 10 days on this street: a daytime murder in the middle of a busy work week, a major fire with a resulting flood, other smaller floods, and a sharp escalation in street disorder,” Ballance said. Vancouver Police Chief Const. Steve Rai said Thursday that the three social housing buildings in question have generated 18 times more police calls per capita than the rest of the city. “Residents in these buildings are 12 to 16 times more likely to experience violent crime,” Rai said. He added that B.C.’s closing of The Luugat hotel was a step in the right direction."
Clearly, all you need to house people and everything will be okay. Greedy business owners need to shut up and not persecute defenceless homeless people/i>

After fatal stabbing, HVA calls Granville Street SROs ‘a failed experiment’ - "Vancouver police are investigating after a man was stabbed and killed on Granville Street on Monday afternoon... members of the Hospitality Vancouver Association (HVA) are expressing concern after the brazen daylight incident.  The man was stabbed and killed across from the Luugat single-room occupancy housing (SRO) on Granville Street.  “Today, our organization reiterates our ongoing concerns related to the situation on Granville Street, which is dangerous and unsustainable,” the HVA said in a statement.  “We recognize and appreciate the efforts of the Vancouver Police Department to keep the area safe but feel that it is increasingly clear that the BC Housing decision to locate over 300 SRO beds into a concentrated two block stretch of Granville Street is a failed experiment.”  The HVA says it has been calling for the permanent closure of SROs along Granville Street for years... The HVA said there are two other “highly problematic” SROs located within two blocks of each other on Graville Street that are “a real threat to public safety and need to be closed immediately.” In June, the provincial government announced plans to transition supportive housing out of the Granville Street entertainment district, according to Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim.  This announcement came after a fire broke out in the Luugat building on the strip, leaving two people needing treatment for smoke inhalation.  The B.C. government bought the building at 1176 Granville in 2020, and controversially converted it to housing as it sought to shelter the city’s homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic quickly.  It has since generated thousands of emergency calls, with residents setting fires, pulling fire alarms and setting off the building’s sprinkler systems."
Trust the Experts! Double down on Housing First! Formerly homeless people only set fires, pull fire alarms and set off sprinklers because of discrimination and stigma, so we cannot punish them!

After fatal stabbing, HVA calls Granville Street SROs ‘a failed experiment’ : r/ilovebc - "Less idiots than ideologically homogeneous activist-researchers.  When each "study" on this phenomenon qualifies the research conducted and the data presented to conform to the authors' ideological perspective then all credibility should be lost.  A major contributor to such junk science that has unilaterally informed our policies created to address the issue has been the proliferation of "trauma-informed principles" from therapy venues to institutions foundational to our society.  When activist-researchers rely on the stories of purported oppression and traumatic experiences offered as excuses for addiction and antisocial behaviour by addicts, and when such self-serving diatribes are uplifted to a level of unimpeachable truth based purely on identitarian principles and without further investigation, much-less corroboration, then the data which is presented should be ridiculed -- not implemented.  When each study over the past 30 years that is accepted and implemented is produced and influenced by a minority of socialist extremists hiding behind purportedly non-partisan NGOs and other activist organizations -- such as the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, DULF, or VANDU -- then the solutions offered cannot possibly diverge from the praxis of the activist-researchers' chosen ideology.  If more socialism for the lumpenproletariat was the answer then the population of addicts in the DTES would not have grown exponentially in the 25 years since the Four Pillars strategy was implemented.  If utopian narratives surrounding the nature of addiction were accurate then our "trauma-informed" approach to the antisocial behaviours associated with addiction wouldn't have created a new class of repeat-criminals called prolific offenders.  If giving addicts the redistributed wealth of those who actually contribute to society through an ever-expanding suite of entitlements led to positive outcomes then the overdose rate wouldn't have risen 500% since the implementation of the Four Pillars strategy."
"Obviously this is a great comment, I just want to point out that we never really executed on the “four pillars”. To suggest Four Pillars = 500% increase in overdose deaths isn’t completely fair. Harm reduction, prevention, treatment, and enforcement all should have involved housing, access to means in a medical setting, re-socialization, etc.  We basically just turned a blind eye to open use of illicitly sold drugs, tested some of the street supply to prevent a few deaths, slapped a sticker on it and called it the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy. And then we got hostile with our neighbors/local businesses when they complained about the effects of being near SRO/SIS."

Undercover TTC agent : r/askTO - "Saw some uniformed guys the other day, asked everyone for pop except the smelly homeless guy in the back of the car who was having an episode. Gotta love how the TTC is more concnered with collecting their pound of flesh than it is making transit safe for paying riders. This city is a joke."
Undercover TTC agent : r/askTO - "Yet they do nothing about tweakers on the streetcars or subways, needles thrown around the TTC, people jumping onto the tracks causing hour delays, etc etc. the list goes on.  But thank goodness they stopped this one dude from not tapping, that’ll surely improve the quality of transit in Toronto."
"Not only are they doing nothing, they are actively encouraging it. I have witnessed TTC employees working at the ticket booths open the gates to let unhoused/ mentally disturbed people in for free. They don’t want to deal with them so they let them into the subway and trap them with us."
Another aspect of anarcho-tyranny. Naturally, at least one person went around lecturing others about having no "empathy"

Anthony Furey: Toronto's radical plan to turn all homeless shelters into drug sites - "The City of Toronto’s shelter system is still guided by radical policies that encourage the city to hire active drug addicts to staff their programs, push for drugs and drug kits to be provided in abstinence-based facilities and even require that all shelters with children residing in them provide drug services... When it comes to hiring drug addicts at facilities, the document says that: “Shelter programs should plan for the intentional integration of people who use drugs into their staff team.” Paid duties can include helping friends shoot up. Drug dealers are drawn to the vicinity of injection sites because that’s where they find their client base. If a shelter has active drug users employed on site, this suggests that even staff will be liaising with dealers. It’s this sort of twisted attitude that got us to the point where a staff member at the Leslieville drug site was criminally charged for helping a drug dealer when a young mother was killed in drug warfare crossfire as opposed to helping the actual victim. They also seem to want to ruin the chances of people to keep clean. “Abstinence-based shelters are an important option for some people in the shelter system with lived and living experience of drug use,” the guide notes. “While these programs may not directly provide the fullest spectrum of harm reduction services, they remain accountable for employing a harm reduction approach, ensuring that their residents who use drugs are enabled to do so in the safest ways possible.” An abstinence-based shelter would be one where people are not supposed to be doing drugs. They are abstaining. So, no, the people in these shelters should not be “enabled” to use them and yet here we have a city guidebook telling them to make it happen. When it comes to shelters designed to house children along with their parents, the guide informs us that “family shelters are required to use a harm reduction approach to drug use. Family shelter operators are tasked with supporting safer drug use practices, while upholding legislative requirements and identifying any substantive risks to children and the family unit.” Right, because advertising a shelter for children and then enabling hard drug use on site is somehow not a risk to those children? Let’s be very clear on one point here: These are not policies just for drug injection sites. These are policies for all the homeless shelters within the City of Toronto. And the document makes no mention of ways to support people in getting off of drugs. If there is a shelter coming to your neighbourhood, in any form, it will not just be a place for people seeking something to eat and refuge from the cold — which is what well-intentioned people of all political leanings typically think of as a shelter. It will actually, if it’s following these guidelines, be a facility staffed by drug addicts who promote open drug use in the presence of children. What’s concerning is that this guidebook is not new. While it is posted as a current resource alongside other 2025 city documents, it was first authored in 2021. In other words, this has been doing the bureaucratic rounds for almost five years and no adult in the room has yet stepped in to have it removed."

‘Black mandated’ homeless shelter on way, city hall confirms - "Toronto officials are taking applications until Friday for city council’s new “Black-mandated” shelter, where everyone from employees to the homeless could be excluded on the basis of race.  City Hall has also decreed that experience in running a shelter is not a requirement for those submitting applications... The B3 shelter competition follows a similar process for an Indigenous shelter, which could move to construction as soon as this year."
Left wingers love racial segregation

Northern Ont. man defies eviction threat, vows to remain in self-built dwelling : r/OntarioNews - "He should go be homeless downtown anywhere. Somehow thats better."

Northern Ont. man defies eviction threat, vows to remain in self-built dwelling : r/OntarioNews - "People are missing the real issue. The reason he had to build a dangerous shed to live in is because of a local bylaw preventing him from using an RV. Normally, that would be fine, but there is a housing crisis. There are literal cities of tents. Higher levels of government should step in here and end those bylaws, at least until the crisis is over. An RV is perfectly safe. The municipality should be absolutely ashamed for not letting this man live in an RV on his own land during a crisis."
"The problem is they don't get their cut, the costs for the permits and licenses, inspections and what not is owed to them and they want it. Doesn't matter that Canada is burning to the ground around us as long as they get their cut."
Proof that capitalism has failed!

Jonathan Kay on X - "The media’s love affair with homeless encampments continues. A main reason people set them up is to use drugs (banned in shelters). The camps destroy local civic life, & (as in this case) can be fire hazards. There were just 12 ppl here, all of whom were offered shelter space"

Half of Toronto's and 42% of Ottawa's homeless population consists of asylum seekers, fed funding for asylum seekers housing to fall from 95% in 2025/26 to 0% in 27/28 : r/TorontoRealEstate - "Why do we willingly bankrupt ourselves?"
"It helps destroy the middle class and it gives more power to the elites."
"Best way to keep a populace in line is to make them dependent on the government.  Like a quarter of them working for the government."
Clearly, the solution is to virtue signal even harder and encourage the whole Third World to go live there

Longtime tenants no longer feel safe in 55-plus building providing housing to homeless people - "Complaints about drug activity, drinking, thefts and break-ins have prompted a provincial investigation into the safety of a 55-plus social housing complex in Winnipeg's North End.  In interviews last week, residents in the Canadian Polish Manor at 300 Selkirk Ave. said the eight-storey rent-geared-to-income building used to be a peaceful and comfortable place to live, but that started changing last summer.   That's when new tenants with backgrounds of homelessness and addiction, along with other complex needs, started moving in, says Allison Bailey, 62.  "They just brought in anybody, and that's when a lot of the problems really started," said Bailey, who has lived in the building for two years... Richard Stein, 73, who has lived in the building nearly eight years, says in recent months, copper wiring has been stripped from laundry machine power cables and flat-screen televisions in common areas have been stolen. Garbage, discarded needles and human waste have been found in shared spaces... while CBC was in the building speaking with tenants in the lobby, Stein — who has had a tracheostomy, lives with cancer and uses a cane — chased away a man who appeared to be intoxicated, after the man followed someone in through the locked front doors.  "This is what we go through 24 f--ing seven," Stein said. "No f--ing security."... Agnes Breton, 73, who has lived in the building 11 years, said tenants have found people sleeping or passed out in laundry rooms.  "My daughter wants me to move out so badly," she said. People who live there once enjoyed sitting together outside but no longer feel safe doing so, Breton said.  "There's people yelling outside," she said. "The police are here a lot more now because of what's been happening."  Resident Freda Campbell, 69, needed help from police after someone recently discharged bear spray in the hallway of her floor... She's now using a security bar in her suite to prevent people from breaking in.  And Isabelle Lewis, 74, an avid sewer who's lived in the building for five years, previously used an eighth-floor common area with tables for pool and tennis table to lay out her fabric, but she doesn't feel safe using that space anymore. "I'm afraid," Lewis said. "This is not a safe haven."  A Polish restaurant operating out of the building has also had break-ins, with food and cash stolen, said Teresa Szpakowski, who works in the kitchen... Residents were reminded in a recent memo to report any drug-related activity, prostitution, assault, unlawful use of firearms and any other situations that threaten the health, safety or well-being of tenants.  Housing advocates have expressed concern that the provincial NDP government's focus on housing people experiencing chronic homelessness has made other low-income Manitobans, including seniors and families, less of a priority."
These seniors are just awful, terrible, heartless people. They need more "empathy".
When you vote NDP, you're just asking for more Needles, Drugs and Poverty
More proof that the solution to homelessness is just to house people! It's so simple and evil conservative governments just want homeless people to die by not doing that

Canada Proud | Facebook - "The Liberals spent $1.2 MILLION on a project to "help" homeless veterans. The actual project? Giving out cameras to homeless people to take pictures while staff at Egale Canada, a Liberal-funded LGBT organization, handed out nearly $1 MILLION to their own staff. The staff promised they would include the homeless veterans' photos in an art exhibit. Housing minister Gregor Robertson approved this disgraceful project. He needs to resign immediately."
If you don't spend more money on homelessness, you're heartless, lack empathy and want homeless people to die

T.D. Leaker on X - "A Canadian university conducted an actuarial study and concluded 60% of new homeless tent owners were displaced due to high housing costs as a direct result of immigration policy and insatiably appetite for low wage earners. The study was buried for fear of being seen as racist - risking funding."

Managing Risky Behaviours and Challenges to Prevent Housing Loss in Permanent Supportive Housing - "Approximately 10-20% of individuals experience difficulties in PSH that can result in eviction, recurrent homelessness, and/or rehospitalization."
Managing high-risk behaviours and challenges to prevent housing loss in permanent supportive housing: a rapid review - " in an examination of over 12,000 supportive housing applicants in Toronto, Canada, 20.3% had a history of suicide attempts, 17.7% were perpetrators or victims of physical assault, 14.7% had engaged in non-suicidal self-injury, 8.0% had fire safety concerns, 7.9% had damaged property, and 5.9% engaged in hoarding behaviours"
Clearly, the way to end homelessness is to just give homeless people houses, which they can burn down and/or destroy, and where they can kill themselves and beat up other people

Harvard Scandal Proves Science Is Broken

From 2025:

Harvard Scandal Proves Science Is Broken | National Review
Harvard’s dishonest expert on honesty is a poignant symbol of a far larger problem in academia: ideological allegiance replacing the quest for truth. 

A once-prominent Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired this week for outright fabricating data on numerous academic studies of dishonesty and unethical behavior. The timing couldn’t be worse for Harvard: The troubled university currently faces a critical dispute over funding and foreign student visas with the Trump administration. 

Francesca Gino was regularly cited as an authority by prominent left-leaning outlets such as National Public Radio and the New York Times. Both outlets now admit that Gino’s research was likely fabricated. Disturbingly, the flaws in her research were exposed not by the allegedly robust university system of peer review, but by a series of posts by science bloggers. 

No professor has had tenure revoked at Harvard since the 1940s, when the rules for doing so were formalized, according to the Harvard Crimson. This is the academic nuclear option. 

Gino’s first retracted study showed evidence of data fabrication all the way back in 2021, and an investigation into her academic dishonesty lasted for the following two years. Gino initially blamed errors by her research assistants or potential tampering by an unknown outside party. She was placed on leave in March 2023. 

Gino maintains her innocence and states on her private website, “There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result.” On the site, she explains why she filed a lawsuit against Harvard for $25 million in damages, citing reputation damage and lost income. A federal judge dismissed Gino’s claims against Harvard last September.

She received more than $1 million in compensation annually and was the university’s fifth-highest-paid employee in 2018 and 2019, according to the Harvard Crimson. The lengthy tenure and high pay of Gino shows just how far the university’s standards have slipped in allowing this level of fraud for 15 years. 

When independent bloggers and scientists looked at the data, it became clear that she was both exaggerating the size of “nudge” effects and outright fabricating any effect of nudges on behavior. Much of Gino’s research repeatedly tested a series of arbitrary data combinations until arriving at the desired statistical correlation she wanted to believe. 

Specifically, Gino’s “research” was aligned with progressive assumptions about how the world works, stating that small “nudges,” such as putting the signature for an honesty pledge at the start of a form as opposed to its end, can alter human behavior in this case. This type of research was of great interest to the Obama administration, which weaponized it in an attempt to “improve” human behavior in accordance with its ideals. Attempts to change human nature in this manner have long been central to leftist politics. 

Essentially, Gino was designing her studies to generate evidence for a belief favorable to progressives, which effectively ensured that very few in her elite left-wing circles questioned it. She was telling academia what it wanted to hear, so very few looked deeply into it, and instead widely cited it. 

When I previously wrote about this scandal in July 2023, I predicted this was “just the tip of the iceberg,” which has sadly been borne out by recent events. 

Shortly afterward, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, was ousted for plagiarism following investigations by conservative outlets and activists. Media publications focused at first not on the more than 50 clear examples of plagiarism, but instead on the fact that conservatives were the ones finding the plagiarism . . . and of course asked “how serious was it really?” while noting that Harvard’s own board found “no violations of Harvard’s standard for research misconduct.” That’s exactly the problem!

This tenacious redefinition of plagiarism to benefit Harvard’s president followed her testimony before Congress that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the university’s rules only “depending on the context.” 

Politically motivated lying for advancement shouldn’t be surprising, as it’s incredibly easy for researchers to slightly alter their conclusions to fit a progressive narrative, knowing that such results are “too good to check.” 

Like Gino, any social scientist who wants an academic career has a very clear incentive to select only a study design or a dataset that is likely to generate results that are uncontroversial in academia. According to the Harvard Crimson, fewer than 3 percent of Harvard faculty members identify their personal political leanings as “conservative” or “very conservative,” while 32 percent identify as “very liberal” while another 45 percent identify as merely “liberal.” Any group politically polarized to this extent will have a difficult time arriving at the truth without injecting ideological bias, as the easiest way to advance is clearly to flatter the preconceptions of progressive faculty. 

This creates a kind of ideological streetlight effect, in which researchers uncritically accept studies that favor their ideological preconceptions.

An excellent example of this occurred in 2015, when University of California, Los Angeles, doctoral candidate Michael LaCour faked data in a political science study to “prove” that gay canvassers could change voters’ minds in favor of LGBT causes through brief conversations. The resulting study, co-authored with a Columbia University professor, received an immense amount of media attention, including from the New York Times, which set LaCour on an easy path to academic success, even landing him a coveted job offer to become an assistant professor at Princeton University. When it was revealed that LaCour seemingly never conducted any study at all and simply made up the data, Princeton University rescinded its offer, and the New York Times was left asking, “How could this happen?” 

Science is failing because of the strong incentives to lie to flatter progressive sensibilities. Work that flatters them advances and gets promoted in the media. Work that doesn’t is met with direct censorship by the powers that be in universities.

But it’s actually worse than that. 

Most universities — including my own graduate alma mater of George Mason University, with its famously pro-free-market economics program — flat-out demand that potential scientists sign loyalty oaths to “anti-racism” as a condition of employment. Mason demands that “every member of our community” create “an inclusive and equitable campus environment in which every member of our community, without exception, is valued, supported, and experiences a sense of belonging” so that “George Mason University will become a national exemplar of anti-racism and inclusive excellence.” 

Major scientific journals such as Nature openly refuse to publish politically incorrect ideas. Given the incredible pressure of the academic job market, these measures ensure that true inquiry is effectively impossible. 

By definition, such motivated reasoning cannot be truly considered science, as it openly coerces prospective researchers not to investigate their chosen fields outside of strict political boundaries. 

As one of GMU’s own tenured professors pointed out, the wording of GMU’s diversity statement is more severe than the infamous McCarthy-era loyalty oaths to America that progressives still are complaining about decades later. 

“A devout Leninist revolutionary could honestly swear this oath as long as he doesn’t belong to an organization that advocates the government’s violent overthrow,” libertarian GMU economist Bryan Caplan wrote on his blog about a UC Berkeley anti-communist oath from 1950. “Furthermore, he could belong to an alternative Communist Party dedicated to establishing Communism by democratic means. In sharp contrast, diversity statements really do demand your outright, wholehearted agreement with DEI.” 

Harvard’s dishonest expert on honesty is a poignant symbol of a far larger problem in academia: ideological allegiance replacing the quest for truth. Science is dead, and the left killed it. 

 

Weird. Left wingers tell us that white academics are never fired or investigated for dishonesty, fraud and/or plagiarism, unlike black ones like Claudine Gay and Jason Arday.

Ignorant bloggers should just Trust the Science and Trust the Experts. If their findings are not peer-reviewed, they're not credible. 

Links - 19th September 2026 (1 - General Wokeness)

The Way Some Gamers Talk About Pragmata's Diana Is Disgusting, And Must Be Stopped - "I have not yet played Pragmata"

Meet Farah Ahmed, Jason Arday’s colleague | The Spectator - "During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’... Most popular Melanie McDonagh The tragedy of Jason Arday The tragedy of Jason Arday James Dixon Nothing beats writing by hand Andrew Gilligan Why is Cambridge platforming Islamic creationism? Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’... in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together. ‘As Muslim parents we try to protect our children from the rubbish that western society encourages’, but interaction with non-Muslim children in the playground, which is ‘full of the competitiveness and individualism that western culture encourages… moulds their personalities away from Islam.’ As she puts it: ‘western culture is playground culture.’ Ahmed first came to public attention in 2009, when I exposed the fact that she was running two private primary schools, and getting more than £100,000 in public money to do so. At least three of the four trustees of the schools were Hizb ut-Tahrir members or activists, including the wife of Hizb’s then-leader, and the schools’ curriculum closely matched key tenets of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s separatist, anti-democratic ideology... The story caused a political row, but predictably enough the then schools secretary Ed Balls, the Charity Commission and Ofsted did absolutely nothing. Ahmed went on TV, presenting herself as a poster girl for Muslim persecution, though coyly refusing to answer when asked if she had ever been a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir. The two schools, in Haringey and Slough, continue to receive public funding (£382,000 last year) and Ahmed is still a trustee of the body which runs them. Now, however, she has rather clearly moved up in the world... As well as being an assistant professor at the university itself, Ahmed is director of something called the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), part of Camtree, the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange. Camtree is a centre at Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a research fellow and member of the governing body. In summer 2023, IELC, Camtree and Cambridge University ran a conference on Islam, science and education to ‘recognise the role of science as part of a wider modernist and colonial project’, and to ‘consider challenges’ to the view that ‘sees science as “objective knowledge”’. Ahmed was one of the organisers. In December 2023, Ahmed and Cambridge University also organised a conference to ‘unlearn conventional teacher education and move toward Islamically grounded teacher development’. This attacked the ‘secular, neoliberal system of education’ as ‘anti-metaphysical’, and said that teachers ‘need to re-centre our focus on preparing the Muslim learner for the akhira,’ everlasting life after death... IELC’s website promotes (though claims it does not endorse) a site called ‘Salafi Homeschool’. This attacks the fact that ‘many Muslims openly participate’ in celebrating Christmas and warns that ‘repeated exposure [to non-Muslim festivals] can lead to normalisation. Without clear teaching, children may begin to associate happiness, generosity, and togetherness with non-Islamic celebrations instead of the occasions Allah has chosen for this ummah.’ ‘Whether it is “just a roast,” “just a birthday cake,” or “just presents for the children,” these actions blur the clear boundaries of the deen,’ it continues. Salafi Homeschool also warns that by going to state schools Muslim pupils may asked to ‘sing songs with messages that conflict with Islamic values’, or ‘join activities like mixed-gender dancing’... If gaining qualifications in literacy is wrong, if scientific truth is a colonial construct, and if celebrating Christmas is forbidden, we really are almost back to the world of Ahmed’s old Hizb pamphlet, where English is dangerous, fairy tales are evil and biology is blasphemy. Only this time, dressed up in slightly prissier language for a gullible academic audience, it is happening at the heart of the British educational establishment. Once again, I predict, the authorities will do absolutely nothing, ignoring all the evidence outlined in this article. The case of assistant professor Farah Ahmed will become the latest exhibit in the gradual suicide of Britain and the West. When Ahmed says that British society is corrupt, her appointment to this job proves she is surely right."

Meme - "*Superman*
>Maybe the 225 million dollar written-by-comittee Hollywood movie designed for inoffensive mass appeal is the real punk rock"

Meme - "Jesus said "my kingdom is not of this world" so that means you have to stop opposing my... I mean... the left's agenda. The gospel must come first, my dear Christian brothers and sisters"

The Irish Politics Newsletter on X - "This is shocking. At an EU Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, Lynn Boylan lamented that it was “a pity we can’t use our own language.” When it was pointed out that she could, in fact, speak Irish, she backtracked almost instantly: "I wasn’t prepared, so I’ll use English.""
Adam 🇺🇦 on X - "This is superb. Sinn Fein MEP scolds the European parliament for not providing interpreters to let her speak in Irish. She's told that the Irish interpreters are present. She flubs for a moment and then continues in English, because she doesn't actually speak Irish"

Daniel on X - "Remember when people on TikTok were mind blown by Osama bin Ladin’s letter to America and then you go and read it and it’s like “we want to kill Jews. Why do you stop us from killing Jews.”"
Thread by @simonsarris on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "yeah the letter reads like almost comic villainy. "Civilians deserve it, we hate you for your freedoms(!) especially gambling and loaning money with interest, alcohol, various acts of fornication, your anti-WMD stance, and choosing your own laws instead of taking Shariah law"he shoehorns in a lot of what he must have assumed at the time were wedge issues, though many were years out of date by then (AIDs, industrial pollution, clinton scandal). Also strangely incest, which is astronomically higher in Islamic countries. Grasping at anything.despite the grasping, as we saw on tiktok, it works. You don't need to do more than button mash issues to get people to think you've said something intelligent. If you have a 1-in-30 hit rate, if the 1 grazes their political ideals, even if the rest go against, it seems to work!"
We are still told that Islamists do not hate the West for its freedoms

Basil the Great on X - "🚨NEWS: The release of the transcripts around Henry Nowak's murder have revealed that Police Officers went back 6 years in his phone messages to when he was just 12 years old in an attempt to find anything they could use to describe him as a racist. Sickening"
Allison Pearson on X - "This is deeply upsetting. Police were so desperate to prove Henry Nowak was a racist, even after his murder, they went back years to texts he sent as a kid. Shame on them. @HantsPolice"

Meme - Peter McLoughlin author: "Can you imagine if I tweeted "every single day I resist the urge to kneecap immigrant women"? Would I get to keep my job as Professor of Racist Grievances at Cambridge? In Manifesto (2024) we warned you: when the indigenous people are an ethnic minority by 2041 there will be nothing restraining the violent urges of the immigrants who have been trained to hate us."
Priyamvada Gopal: "I resist urges to kneecap white men every day. So, no **I** am the hero."
Left wingers just hate white men. Though they always deny it.

Meme - Priyamvada Gopal: "I'll say it again. White Lives Don't Matter. As white lives. Abolish whiteness"
Shaista @shaistasalam1: "Wrong. All lives matter."
Priyamvada Gopal: "Yes, all lives matter. White lives as white do not."
Left wingers just hate white people

Meme - Tim Worstall: "Apparently if you note the uneven distribution of epicanthic folds among the population of the world then you're a racist. Note that this is a Professor at Cambridge making this claim. Sigh. That's before we get to the interesting ones like sickle cell, thalassaemia, cystic fibrosis and so on. Even uninteresting ones like the observable differences in an Olympic 100m final, the 1500m final and the marathon. And how are we to explain the basics of skin and eye colour without biological differences?"
Priyamvada Gopal @PriyamvadaGopal: "If you believe in the existence biological racial differences, you are a racist. Hope that clears it up."
Readers added context: "While the term "race" is loaded in the literature, biological difference is not. To quote, "there are obvious physical differences between populations some are strongly inherited". E.g. black people definitionally have higher melanin production than white people."

Prof Ian Pace on X - "Priyamvada Gopal likes to present herself as a subaltern. I prefer to think of her as a diplomat’s daughter. Drowning in privilege."
Cosmopolitan Reactionary on X - "It’s hard to imagine, from a Bioleninist perspective, how attending an elite international school in Vienna wouldn’t have coloured Gopal’s politics and contributed to her intense hatred of the West. Presumably she was surrounded by lots of pretty blonde-haired, blue-eyed Christian girls who had no interest in or deference to the Brahmin status she had enjoyed back in India, and when that came to end she felt it viscerally. Naturally, such women gravitate towards “postcolonial studies”."
Variolation was the thing. Too late now. on X - "Demanding that the college porters call her "Doctor" does indicate that, yes. Spoiled little cow, used to extreme deference from lower labouring classes."

Dr. Insensitive Jerk on X - "Politics is Not "Makers versus Takers." It just seems like it is. The battle of Left vs. Right feels like the battle of Flea vs. Dog, but that's the wrong frame. IMO, the real distinction is not between parasite and host, but rather between two survival strategies: Living off the Earth vs. Living off people.
Those sound like the same thing, so let me phrase them better: Politics is not Makers vs. Takers; it is Producers vs. Influencers. It's not Dog vs. Flea; it's Dog vs. Flea whispering into the dog's ear. This framing is better because it explains our career choices; it predicts more outcomes; and it delivers actionable advice. For example, doctors have historically been mostly Republican, while medical ethicists are overwhelmingly Democrat. (I'm in a doctor family.) Doctors tend to be Republicans because they repair things. Conceptually, doctors are plumbers. They operate on physical objects in the physical world, subject to the discipline of impartial physical laws that cannot or should not be moved with your tongue, and sometimes they get sprayed with bodily fluids. Like plumbers, their performance can be measured objectively. (Did the patient die? How many turds on my kitchen floor?) By contrast, consider medical ethicists: They live entirely within the realm of words, and their performance cannot be measured. That's the kind of job that attracts Leftists. Medical schools are another example, and they show why Producer-vs-Influencer is a better frame than Host-vs-Parasite. (This will also be my first prediction, but it won't impress you because it's already coming true.) Unfortunately, while "Doctor" is a producer job, "Medical school administrator" is not. Every administrator made the conscious choice to control doctors rather than to become one. The administrator's job may be vital, but he doesn't make anything real, or even repair it. That's why, when doctors gratefully handed the tedious administrative tasks over to professional bureaucrats, our medical schools turned hard Left. Now medical students are compelled to pledge their loyalty to wokeness. This is actually true. As professional bureaucrats consolidate their control, squeezing the actual doctors out of medical-school administration, we should expect our future doctors to be more influencers, and less producers. That means you might die, but you won't mind because your young doctor will have a fabulous bedside manner. I predict this trend will continue until doctors re-shoulder the burden of medical school administration, under rules that ensure they remain doctors. To get that prediction from the Parasite-vs-Host framing, we must say that medical school administrators are parasites. Certainly some are, probably most of them, but the sad fact is medical schools need administrators as much as they need plumbers, to perform a vital yet distasteful function so the actual doctors won't have to. Ditto for hospitals, which used to be run by doctors, but are now mostly run by MBAs. Double ditto for medical journals, because "Journal editor" is a pure influence job. Thus the medical journals have all turned extreme Left, even though journal editors are not parasites. An actionable prediction: Any influence position will attract the Leftist-influencer personality type, and repel the producer type. So when you create, say, a medical review board with power to approve or deny drug trials, the people who volunteer to serve will mostly be Democrats.
If you don't like the medical example, let's talk about plumbers. A plumber produces something tangible, so most plumbers are Republicans. Unless his income depends on his union status. (About 25% of plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters have union jobs, according to Perplexity, which is usually wrong.) Unions are designed to insulate their members from reality, to allocate jobs and income by seniority or by pull, rather than by output. It's much harder to walk in off the street and get a union job; usually you must know someone. In other words, unions are less about production, and more about influence, so union plumbers will be more Democrat than free-range plumbers. And union administrators will be the most Democrat of all. Some jobs lie midway between producer and influencer. For example, a computer programmer is partly a producer, because he creates a product that must work. His code must execute without error and satisfy the project requirements. However, few programmers face the full test of reality, because their code need not reflect anything in the physical world. The physics in Grand Theft Auto need not be accurate; it only needs to please humans. Thus, coding is a mix of production and influence, so coders are a mix of Republicans, Libertarians, and Democrats. (This is actually true.) I predict the coders who write games are more Democrat than the guys who write CAD software, because CAD physics has to be right, not just look right. You can't get this prediction from the Parasite-vs-Host framing. The influencer personality recoils from the implacable tests of physical reality, so he will avoid producer jobs. By contrast, a producer might take an influence job, because he can satisfy his producing needs elsewhere. A Right-wing author will usually do something real in his spare time, like building his own deck or restoring classic cars. So a few Republicans might volunteer to serve on your Medical Review Board, out of a sense of duty. In a Leftist author's spare time, he will tour wineries. Of all the jobs on Earth, surely the two that are most devoted to pure influence are the politician and the critic. Even an author, who toils in the realm of words, must produce a book. A literary critic does not meet even that low bar. And of course, politics is influence personified, so we should expect most politicians to be the influencer personality type (I.e., Leftist) even if they pretend to be Republicans. So here is my actionable advice: To judge whether a Republican candidate is a RINO imposter, inquire into his hobbies. Ask him to show us a few things he made with his own hands. If he flies a homebuilt airplane, he's a good gamble."

Meme - "The Lesson of the Screw. To build something solid and stable, turn to the RIGHT; to dismantle something, turn to the LEFT."
This is a good response to the supposed Spanish saying about the left liberating and the right oppressing

It’s no wonder respect for the BBC has plummeted - "According to a survey by the think tank Demos, 15 years ago the BBC’s net “pride score” (the proportion of the public expressing pride in the BBC, minus those who did not) was an impressive +48 per cent. Now, reports Demos, that figure is -11 per cent, on a level with “politicians”. Ouch. When the BBC complains that fewer than 80 per cent of households pay the licence fee (actually, 76 per cent by my calculations), despite well over 90 per cent of the population having a legal obligation to do so, it should look closely at a survey like this and be less puzzled. There are parts of BBC output that remain impressive, but overall it is hard to compare it favourably with the peak years of public service broadcasting, in the 1980s and 1990s. The advent of satellite and cable, and more recently broadband streaming, has allowed viewers access to a huge amount of choice, including content enjoying far bigger budgets than the BBC can afford. Unable to compete financially for sports rights in the open market, the BBC is heavily reliant on events that are not allowed to be broadcast on subscription services (the World Cup, the Euros), plus Wimbledon, which is content to preserve its multi-decade relationship with the BBC. Compared with its glory days, these are slim pickings. But it is more than exposure to competition that has undermined the BBC. Its programming choices betray a taste for political correctness that alienates many viewers and listeners. Its online agenda is eclectic to the point of irrelevance. Its occasional editorial mistakes, such as doctoring Donald Trump’s Jan 6 speech, are in sharp contrast to its obligations to impartiality. Its deployment of anti-colonialist historians – such as David Olusoga – leaves it vulnerable to claims of Left-wing bias. These are all self-inflicted wounds. That said, the main reason for the BBC’s decline in public esteem is surely one beyond its control: its displacement as a dominant feature of the media landscape, as a result of technological change. With fewer and fewer people consuming its output, there is less opportunity to build any relationship, let alone pride, or even respect. Drama and comedy are a rarity in the BBC’s output these days, not primarily because of a dearth of talent, but simply because of cost. The BBC is top-heavy with a surfeit of well-paid managers, and thousands of support staff. With revenue effectively static (and declining sharply in real terms), the BBC finds itself relying on cheap elimination contests, reality shows, travelogues and daytime fillers to prop up its schedules. This thin diet would be more noticeable if ITV and Channel 4 had not deteriorated even more than the BBC."
Time to regulate social media, since misinformation is making British people lose trust in the BBC

‘Woke’ is now a dirty word among Democrats - "Socialism may no longer be a dirty word among Democrats, following a wave of hard-Left primary victories, but “woke” certainly is. Prominent progressive figures have distanced themselves from the politics of 2020, when defunding the police and “decolonising” Thanksgiving became articles of faith among the party’s grassroots. That shift could have a seismic effect on the race to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028, which is gradually taking shape. In particular, it could spell doom for Kamala Harris, still seen as one of the front-runners in the contest, whose flirtation with woke politics cost her dearly. The 2024 election was a “wake-up call” for the party, according to Lanae Erickson, senior vice-president of Third Way, the centrist Democratic group. Voters saw the party as more extreme than Donald Trump, she said, a “horrifying” result." Ms Harris admitted during her short-lived campaign that she was never fast on her feet, and was haunted throughout by her former support for policies that were beyond the pale for most voters. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, however, is naturally sure-footed, and managed a deft pivot when she appeared on ABC News on Aug 9. Asked about Francesca Hong, then the Democratic front-runner in the Wisconsin primary with a history of controversial comments, Ms Ocasio-Cortez neither endorsed nor disavowed her. Instead, she laughed it off, saying: “Woke 1 was crazy.” Ms Hong lost that primary, despite what some pollsters had predicted as a double-digit lead... Modern progressives are more ruthless, focused on winning elections while being selective about picking battles, and steering clear of the culture war. Zohran Mamdani is another who has managed to distance himself from his controversial comments... Still, the Left is not out of the woods either. There will still be radical elements who push progressive figures into more hardline stances, and it’s by no means clear what Ms Ocasio-Cortez or some ally will say about the issue of biological men in women’s sports. “AOC was smart to steer clear of Hong and her alienating positions, but many on the Left are still pushing candidates to embrace ideas that will actively repel the swing voters we need to win,” Ms Erickson said."

Giuseppe Conte, leading politician on Italian Left, rejects ‘woke’ ideology - "A leading politician on the Italian Left has rejected “woke” ideology, opening up fractures in the Left-wing alliance that hopes to beat Giorgia Meloni at the next election. The Left’s hopes of presenting a united front are at risk of being undermined by differences, with some politicians cleaving to issues such as LGBTQ rights and others insisting that “woke” agendas needed to be ditched. Giuseppe Conte, a former prime minister who leads the centre-Left Five Star Movement, argues that Italian voters were more preoccupied with low salaries, expensive petrol, hospital waiting lists and the rising cost of living... Mr Conte’s comments were endorsed by Matteo Renzi, another former prime minister, who leads a centre-Left party called Italia Viva. In an editorial on Sunday, he said that if the Left was to beat Ms Meloni’s Right-wing coalition at the next election, it must concentrate on “social issues, economic well-being and people’s daily lives, not woke culture”... Rocco Casalino, a former member of the Five Star Movement and a long-time confidant of Mr Conte, said it was a problem “when a struggle against discrimination becomes a ‘moral religion’, far removed from people’s day-to-day problems”. Mr Casalino, who is openly gay, said some “woke” policies had inadvertently damaged the LGBTQ community, adding: “I’m thinking of women’s sport. If you insist that a transgender person should be considered a biological woman, ignoring the principle of fairness, you give homophobes an excuse to attack the entire struggle for LGBTQ rights.” But not everyone on the Italian Left agrees with him. Ilaria Salis, an MEP, said “woke” culture was “a spectre created by the Right to undermine rights and social justice”... The conservative coalition led by Ms Meloni gleefully accused the Left of suddenly changing tack in the hope of winning votes. The Left “is doing what it did with communism – renouncing it after years of support, having ruined lives,” said Lucio Malan, a senator with the prime minister’s Brothers of Italy party. Ms Meloni touched on woke issues in a rare interview with the New York Times on Friday. In Italy, she is known in as the Presidente del Consiglio or head of the council of ministers. She defended her decision to refer to herself as “il presidente”, using the masculine form, rather than the feminine form “la presidenta”. Feminists have been fighting “the wrong battles”, she said, adding that what was important was the fact that she was able to become Italy’s first female prime minister. She added: “That’s equality, not being called ‘la presidenta’.”"

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Appeasing radical activists will make the West ungovernable - "Montefiore has taken immense care to depict highly charged events as neutrally as possible. “I’m not ideological. I’m not following either a Marxist imperialist or de-colonialist view of history,” he says. “Everyone has forgotten that the creation of Turkey and Israel happened against the will of Empire. Everyone says that it was the British who helped create Israel in 1948, but in fact Israel was an armed revolt against British imperial power… the history is essential for understanding what is happening now: if you want to understand why, for example, president Erdoğan of Turkey keeps talking about wanting to rule Jerusalem, Beirut and Damascus [formerly part of the Ottoman Empire], then it’s all here.” It’s telling that Montefiore feels the need to frame The Cauldron as a primer for the less-informed. Everyone has opinions on the conflict of Israel and Gaza, but many of us would be hard pressed to articulate the finer points of its torturous, millennia-old history. Subjective interpretations of the facts, let alone flat-out ignorance of them, is rampant in the febrile ideological climate that has sprung up with renewed toxicity in the wake of the Hamas attacks. “October 7 changed everything,” he says. “It was years in the planning that did what it was meant to do, which was to put the Palestinian issue at the centre of the world, unleash the ideology of anti-Zionism in Western universities, and nix the Saudis normalising agreements with Israel. The only thing it hasn’t succeeded in is helping the Palestinian people.” The speed and intensity of anti-Israel sentiment that has spread like wildfire through Britain took Montefiore “by surprise”. “There’s nowhere better to live now than Britain or America or France than at any other point in the last 10,000 years,” he says. “Yet that unprecedented comfort, liberalism and freedom have permitted the hothouse of exciting but intolerant radicalisms such as ‘de-colonialisation’, ‘anti-Americanism’, ‘anti-Westernism’, ‘Third-World-ism’ – whatever you want to call it – particularly in many cultural, academic and media institutions in this country.” He thinks that the liberal West has become guilty of ideological complacency. “In the book, I write about the extent to which Western comfort democracies have neglected these institutions and allowed them to manage themselves,” he says – he also means international organisations such as the United Nations and NGOs. “Much of the anti-Western thinking that has sprung up has been driven by a bourgeois graduate activist caste that dominate the NGOsphere and parts of the media, too. But these people specialise in intimidating the middle-aged people who run our main cultural institutions, and it’s essential that our institutions have the courage and principle not to bow to their purity tests and boycotts.” This is one function of democracy: to allow institutions to prosper free from political interference and to promote freedom of speech. “People absolutely have the freedom to preach the destruction of the liberal democracies that protect them,” he agrees. “I’m not in favour of banning or cancelling anybody unless they’re encouraging killing. But a lot of the people on the pro-Palestinian marches in this country, for example, were doing just that. I found myself encountering a few because the Israeli embassy is just around the corner. And while they were full of bien-pensant, white retired-teacher types, whose liberalism one probably couldn’t fault, they were also filled with extreme ideologues, who were backing Iran, and who were backing Hamas.” He thinks that Starmer, who became prime minister nine months after the marches first sprang up, appeased these demonstrations and their anti-Semitic rhetoric, which for months were a weekly feature of London life, partly out of a fear of offending members of Britain’s Muslim community. He fears something similar under Burnham who, days before we meet, apologised for Labour’s failure to immediately demand a ceasefire after Israel launched military action against Hamas (Burnham said that his party “didn’t get it right”). “To Andy, I would say: politicians need to think about the right response for Britain in the wider sense, and not just in the short-term sense of being terrified of losing constituencies,” he says. “The Muslim population greatly enhances this country, but it worries me how scared the Labour Party leadership is of the pro-Palestinian activists. It scares me that when MPs were harassed by [activists] during the election campaign, Labour don’t dare name them.” Has he experienced any abuse himself? “Of course. I’ve received death threats online. But you just have to get on with it.”... Montefiore has long been a champion of a Palestinian state. During the 1990s, he was good friends with the Israeli politicians Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres who, along with Yasser Arafat, won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to bring about the 1993 Oslo Accords. “It’s still the only way ultimately to settle the aspirations of both nations and save them from a future of grinding conflict,” he says. On this issue, however, he thinks Starmer failed to project sufficient power on the world stage when it came to international efforts to bring about a ceasefire. “The recognition of a Palestinian state, for instance, was a [virtue-signalling] absurdity that achieved nothing,” he says. “Instead, it revealed Britain’s impotence in the Middle East and it rewarded a genocidal organisation that is much more nihilistic than humanitarian. And I say that as a champion of a [Palestine] that I’m desperate to see established.” By which he means a Palestinian state without Hamas. What, given the options on the table, might that Palestinian state look like? “Hamas must be dismantled, the Board of Peace plan [which involves an international Board of members overseeing the implementation of a peace agreement] is difficult but plausible, the Palestinian Authority provides a possible structure. But it will be very hard. That’s for sure.”... “If politicians continue to appease sectarian or ideological factions on important matters of life and death, on terrorism, on migration and on gender, then Western democracy will become ungovernable,” he adds. “Public discourse has already got more dangerous. You only need to look at the terrible killing of Ann Widdecombe, who personified the idiosyncratic but honest eccentricity that has always been an essential part of British public life.”"

Meme - @starsandtigers: "Always funny when leftists go "Art is left wing" like they aren't constantly double checking and breathing down the necks of every artist, musician, and actor to make sure they're not right wing and making sure they lose everything they have if they are right wing."
Dan @PapistPilled: "So apparently being Catholic makes you a fascist..."
"HUMAN RIGHTS BEGIN IN THE WOMB"
"Gwen Stefani: From Feminist to Fascist" - matt bernstein