Links - 13th July 2026 (1 - IQ)

Meme - Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort: "The reason I don't think the Democrats can ditch wokeness is because even the moderates are unwilling to say "group differences are not caused by past or present discrimination, and there's no reason to care about closing them as long as all groups do better over time."
Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma: "Democrats are not willing to accept "Black people are genetically dumber than white people" for the simple reason that *it is not true*"
i/o @eyeslasho: "I would bet my house that this guy hasn't spent one minute of his life reading any of the scientific literature on the subject, and therefore his tweet should be treated like the garbage framing and garbage opinion that it is.  There have only been two comprehensive published surveys asking scientists who study intelligence about the cause of the IQ gap between US blacks and whites, and in the most recent one (published in 2020 in the journal Intelligence) an overwhelming majority of respondents indicated that they believe that at least some of the gap is due to genetic factors. About half of the respondents indicated that about 50% or more of the gap is due to genetics.  "Because it's not true" should always be treated as code for either "I'm totally uninformed on the subject" or "I'm informed but my moral claim is more important" or "I can't deal with this question so I'm taking the easy way out."   The contempt I have for these people knows no limits. The fact is that the reason(s) for the gap are still an open scientific question, and if you don't acknowledge this you're engaging in bad faith, moral cowardice or ignorance.  (I had to use a screenshot of the tweet because, naturally, he blocked me.)"

Meme - Emil Kirkegaard @KirkegaardEmil: "We just published a study showing that national stereotypes of intelligence are also accurate. It looks like this."
John Carter @martianwyrdlord: "India lol"
"Relationship between national stereotypes and national IQs. Shaded region corresponds to the 95% confidence intervals of the linear regression"
*India with much higher stereotyped IQ than actual IQ*

Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "I was reminded of this yesterday when looking into national IQ estimates.  The "pseudo-analysis" style of critique is to just spit out tons of possible problems, to nitpick, and then to assume that means a whole enterprise is rotten without even checking if the critique holds."
"Pseudo-Analysis. A principal feature of the many critiques of hereditarian research is an excessive concern for purity, both in terms of meeting every last assumption of the models being tested and in terms of eliminating all possible errors. The various assumptions and potential errors that may, or may not, be of concern are enumerated and discussed at great length. The longer the discussion of potential biasing factors, the more likely the critic is to conclude that they are actual sources of bias, By the time a chapter summary or conclusion section is reached, the critic asserts that it is impossible to learn anything using the design under discussion. There is often, however, a considerable amount known about the possible effect of the violation of assumptions. As my colleague Paul Mechl has observed, 'Why these constraints are regularly treated as "assumptions" instead of refutable conjectures is itself a deep and fascinating question...' (Meehl, 1978, p. 810). In addition, potential systematic errors sometimes have testable consequences that can be estimated. They are, unfortunately, seldom evaluated."

Emil Kirkegaard on X - "The US congress is also an intelligence meritocracy. Replicates our prior finding of genetic meritocracy and IQ. Religious groups and race groups with higher polygenic scores for IQ/edu. have higher measured IQs and more success in life."

Alexander on X - "The people I learned about IQ from - in two separate master’s programs - were left-leaning and maybe moderate at most.  This is true of most researchers of human intelligence and cognitive ability in fact, given the large skew left in psychology overall.  But the people who have a sort of axe to grind against this line of research - which remains by the way one of the most robust and replicable lines of research in psychology - are almost always political activists of the far left.  They cannot conceive of individual differences in ability as anything except for a threat against their political ideology.  What I don’t entirely grasp is why they stop at IQ or research on intelligence. For example, we have a lot of (unfair, unequal?) individual differences in humans (and widely researched in psychology):
1. Physical attractiveness. Not everyone is equally attractive and large benefits go to those who are.
2. Personality traits, like conscientiousness. These benefit individual life outcomes about as much as IQ does. Not everyone is equally predisposed to be hard-working and diligent. These are also highly heritable traits.
3. Every other cognitive ability. Memory. Attention. Social cognition. We see big differences across individuals here, too.
The same methods are used to research all of these, by the way. Nothing special, unique, or different is really going on with IQ. Hard to imagine someone being an “IQ denier” without also leveling the same critiques at every other human psychological trait."

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "Low IQ is consistently associated with antisocial behavior, and antisocial behavior is consistently associated with criminality.  So it shouldn't be surprising that those groups with a higher mean IQ have lower crime rates than those with lower IQ nearly everywhere in the world."
i/o research @iointelresearch: "Genetic analysis (GWAS) of antisocial behavior found it negatively correlates with intelligence (rg -0.40) and educational attainment (rg -0.46). The association between lower IQ and higher antisocial behavior is a consistent finding..."

i/o on X - "High-minded new paper advocates restricting public access to genetic data so racistly racist comparisons between groups (especially on cognitive traits between blacks and whites) can't be made. When you think you're losing, you try to rig the game."
Peter Boghossian on X - "If someone genuinely believed an empirical claim, why would they oppose studying it? The argument that research might be “misused” is weak—that’s a call for better studies, not bans. My suspicion? The authors don’t believe their argument. It reeks of special pleading. Can you name another domain where believers argue against more research out of “misuse” fears? I can’t.  Let’s have a real conversation. I invite the authors on my show to discuss this paper. I doubt they’ll accept."
Charles Murray on X - "Back in the early 2000s, I tried to put together scholars on both sides to jointly design a major study testing the effects of racial admixture on IQ. Hereditarians were eager. Environmentalists had zero interest. Now, with so many alleles affecting various traits having been identified, and with big multi-racial genomic datasets available, much more informative studies are possible. Hereditarians are eager to conduct them. Environmentalists want to sequester the data. Inferring the reason is trout-in-the-milk level of uncertainty."
Emil Kirkegaard on X - "Hereditarians: Yay science! Open science awesome! Study all the difficult questions! Release the data publicly! No censorship!
Egalitarians: Nooo, hide the data, fire the offenders, you can't know nothing, what if someone somewhere derives a political opinion I don't want!"
What could the left possibly have to hide?

Alexander on X - "Reading this paper ranking 300 careers by cognitive ability (IQ).
1. The average IQ of tech professionals is similar to social scientists (around 110).
2. Skilled trades are where you begin to see average IQs around the upper 80s and low 90s (varies a lot by trade though)."
(Not just) Intelligence stratifies the occupational hierarchy: Ranking 360 professions by IQ and non-cognitive traits
It also looks at Big 5 and other personality characteristics by occupation

i/o research on X - "David Reich's Harvard team detects recent positive selection for intelligence among Europeans: "We also identify selection for combinations of alleles that are today associated with... increased measures related to cognitive performance.""
i/o on X - "In study after study, modern genetics research is murdering blank slatism, and it's quickly becoming a bloodbath.  Marxist biologist Stephen Jay Gould (who is still widely read and taught in academia) once said: "There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain."  This was orthodoxy for over 40 years because academia wanted it to be orthodoxy. The possibility that psychological traits like intelligence could change in certain groups but in not in others as a result of evolutionary processes put into operation by exposure and adaptation to novel environments outside Africa was morally and ideologically unacceptable.  But science is real, baby, and that well-meaning and rigidly-enforced orthodoxy is now in tatters."

i/o on X - "Something just occurred to me that probably won't mean much to most of you, but it does to me.  Years ago, when I had another (much smaller) account, big left-leaning accounts on Twitter would constantly post scientifically illiterate takes on IQ and I'd show up in their replies and beat the crap out of them and ratio them. This happened all the time.   Sometimes we'd send out the bat signal to @Steve_Sailer , who, if he wasn't too busy with something else, would drop by and calmly super-ratio them. It was a blast, like shooting at fish in a barrel: These accounts had no idea at all what they were talking about.  But here's the thing: I can't remember the last time this happened. No big lefty accounts on X post about IQ anymore. They know that they're going to get pummeled if they do, and my guess is that they also know by now that they're on the retard side of the debate.  I consider this a victory."

High intelligence is not associated with a greater propensity for mental health disorders

Spooky Werewolf Misha on X - "I think IQ believers often go too far in the direction of “if I was born into a slum, I would simply reason my way into a well-paid, nonviolent life.”"
Meme - Do Not @ Me, PhD @UsingLyft: "Black kids with IQs of 100 have the same odds of escaping the bottom quintile of socioeconomic status as white kids"
"Percent of Children Moving Up and Out of the Bottom Quintile, Conditional on AFQT Score, by Race"

Meme - (Black Woman) OmoAuntyNurse @_arike_adey: "Nursing hard af ain't nobody dumb finishing that shit. Passed my iq test and scored in the top 85%, lot's of the doctors I work couldn't even get that high"
"TestYourlQ.org. Results: Your IQ is 86. Your IQ is in the top 85%"

Auron MacIntyre on X - "For all its vaunted capabilities when it comes to contemplating hypotheticals or abstractions high-IQ doesn't seem to enable individuals to understand the lives of those who are lower on the distribution   High-IQ individuals have a very hard time developing a theory of mind for those with lower IQ and understanding how they order themselves  This leads to a cognitively sorted elite developing systems that rely on every mind working exactly like their own and then becoming disdainful of the 80% of people who do not function this way  Perhaps this was less of a problem when martial prowess and other factors were more heavily involved in elite selection but in a world of foxes cognitive capacity becomes the only selection criteria, and lions are left on the wayside  Any elite can become isolated and grow disdainful of the people but an elite selected solely on intelligence seems to be uniquely incapable of grasping what the good may look like for someone who isn't a few standard deviations above  It also seems to encourage the belief that all people are both improvable (at least according to the standards of the current ruling class) and interchangeable  Of course our elite have now become so insuler they are no longer selecting for merit even in the realm of intelligence, only for ideological conformity, for faith in the religion of the elite class, which only separates them further from a vision of the good which would serve other segments of the population  I don't have any immediate answer here but there just is a serious disconnect that will only increase as we encourage cognitive stratification"
The Black Horse on X - "A huge issue here is the isolation of high-IQ individuals from gen-pop and especially from physical hardship. The fact that our present elite class is coddled from birth is a bigger issue than their raw IQ."

Into the Memory Hole on X - "Reminder that the government forbids any further research on the proven genetic links to race and IQ"
Muzzling scientists and obstructing science is only wrong when it hinders the left wing agenda

Fight Mate on X - "Cameraman deserves an Oscar for catching this moment from ever angle..."
Eric S. Raymond on X - "It was difficult for me to watch this video all the way through to the end, but it reminded me of something important that I think a lot of people at and above IQ level 100 don't understand. It's something I only understand myself because travel is broadening.  This video is what like life among the truly stupid is like. The incompetent, spasmodic monkey-dance violence. The pre-verbal hooting crowding out articulated speech. The squalor of people without the cognitive capacity to plan much beyond the next cheap high.  No, the important thing about these wretched people isn't that they're black. It's that they're sampled from a population with an average IQ of 85, and the high time preference that predicts, and the general inability to handle counterfactual hypotheticals that that predicts. If you picked a stupid enough cohort of white people and let them stew in each other's juices for long enough, you'd see the same crap. Hillbilly Elegy anyone?  People of average intelligence (average intelligence for Europeans or Northeast Asians anyway) do not usually understand how stupid stupid gets. When they try to model the behavior of somebody with an IQ of 85 or below, they imagine someone like themselves but with a smaller vocabulary and missing the ability to do specific smart-people things like mental arithmetic or whatever.  It isn't like that. It isn't like that at all.  This video is what it's like."

Family of slain Twin Peaks photographer lament jury deadlock - "A mistrial was declared today in the murder trial of Fantasy Decuir and Lamonte Mims in San Francisco Superior Court.  The pair were accused of robbing and killing photographer and film location scout Ed French, 71, at Twin Peaks overlook in July 2017... While they did not dispute that their client fired the shot that killed Mr French, defense attorneys argued that, at the time of the killing, Ms Decuir was in a “sickle cell crisis” and suffering from opiate painkiller withdrawal.  They added that Ms Decuir had a low IQ, a “lack of adaptive functioning” and suffers from stress and anxiety. As a consequence, they said, she did not act “consciously” when firing the gun."
Weird. Didn't they get the memo that IQ was meaningless

Jeremy Stamper 🇺🇦 (e/acc) on X - "1) There’s only one race: the human race.
2) race is a social construct.
3) there’s no such thing as “intelligence.
4) there are many different kinds of intelligence.
5) the difference within races are larger than the differences between races.
6) Neil DeGrasse Tyson
7) the soft bigotry of low expectations
8) redlining
9) we can’t rule out clerical errors"
The original tweet got deleted (OOP seems to always delete his old tweets after a while) but it was something about the race/IQ taboo

Darkage Possum on X - "In my post graduate program in the 1980's at the youngsters request the chairman took us through the work of Jensen, the dishonest and facile criticisms of it, what happened to his career and everyone else who touched it, and basically said " never speak of this again.  These conversations never happened."  This has really opened up a lot since then.   It was okay to leave it alone as long as policy  was grounded  in the notion of equal opportunity and equal treatment as individuals.  The idea of equity, that group outcomes must be equalized forces confrontation of the fact that groups aren't equal because it is creating huge injustices.  Equality doesn't exist in nature.  It was nice to protect peoples ethnic pride and let that dog sleep but bigger things than peoples feelings  are at stake now"
Bala on X - "If you can't win an argument using facts, logic, or reason, then tabooing that argument is the way to protect your narrative."
Ralph Kaladin on X - ""Truth is not important, only social justice""

Meme - Emil O W Kirkegaard @KirkegaardEmil: "Smarter Nazi leaders more likely to be acquitted at Nuremberg trials."
Clearly, the only thing IQ tests measure is how good you are at doing IQ tests

Measuring Human Capital Across Countries: IQ and the Human Capital Index - "It has been shown that country-level IQ and aggregated performance by school-age children on international assessment tests in math and science are by-in-large capturing analogous indicators of the cognitive human capital. We expand that analysis by comparing country-level IQ to the World Economic Forum’s Human Capital Index (HCI). This index, comprised of several dozen separate indicators, accounts for inputs and outcomes to measure human capital, across age profiles and gender. Two outcomes are of note. First, there is a positive, significant correlation between IQ and the vast majority of the component indicators in the HCI across all age cohorts. Second, because the HCI’s interpretation of educational attainment extends beyond formal education by including indicators such as on-the-job learning and other work-related skills, our finding that IQ is positively correlated with these measures suggests a deeper connection between national average IQ and the fundamental factors of what constitutes the cognitive side of human capital development."

Meme - Asterix Respecter @ArmoricaStan: "Can anyone tell me the average IQ of a house elf? Miss Granger"
"Actually, IQ is a pseudoscience which doesn't measure anything exc..."
"That's wrong, 10 points from Gryffindor. Now, ogres make up just 13% of the population, yet-"
"50, Sir"
"Correct, 20 points to Slytherin"

Thread by @CiurriaMichelle on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Thread on the ableist fetishization of so-called intelligence in academia. I just read yet another article that glorifies so-called intelligence, which is a social construct rooted in eugenics. In an ableist culture (such as ours) in which so-called intelligence is so idolized that it’s a condition of citizenship & personhood, everyone will have anxieties about whether they’re ‘intelligent enough.’ Intelligence is a disciplinary apparatus that mobilizes people into a regime of compulsory (able-minded) intelligence, which conveniently justifies capitalism as a ‘meritocracy’ that both produces and rewards the most ‘intelligent’ (nondisabled) citizens. Capitalism is vindicated by its ability to produce intelligent citizens, who are, coincidentally, from the wealthiest & most elite families! And this capitalist regime of compulsory intelligence also punishes & persecutes the (disabled) ‘unintelligent’ by pushing them out of the economy, forcing them into public dependency, politically disenfranchising them and making them a spectacle of horror for the ‘intelligent’ able-bodied majority, who are compelled to avoid ‘unintelligence’ (in themselves & their offspring) at all costs. Academia is deeply complicit in this charade, and this can be seen seen in the ubiquity of ‘impostor syndrome’: academics have so internalized compulsory able-mindedness that they never feel ‘smart enough’ no matter how many degrees they rack up or how much they alienate themselves from the public by their ascetic intellectual regimens. We subject ourselves to rarefied philosophical defenses of human supremacy and, relatedly, the supremacy of (Eurocentric) ‘intelligence’ above all other human faculties to the point that we - or many of us - internalize this bullshit as scripture and live the rest of our lives in constant fear of being (seen as) ‘stupid.’ Crip theorists consistently debunk the fetishization of intelligence in academia and society in general, and underscore its roots in the capitalist-eugenics regime that uses ‘intelligence’ to uphold racial-patriarchal institutions and hence we are, unsurprisingly, marginalized and silenced. So is the toxic culture of the neoliberal-ableist university. #ableism #academia #philosophy #intelligence #iq #impostorsyndrome @biopoliticalph"
If you don't reward stupid people the same way as smart people, you're a bad person

Jesse Singal on X - "The New Yorker, on Jon Haidt: "He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism" This is completely false. The heritability of intelligence is accepted by mainstream researchers. The debate is over *race*. I don't understand how something like this gets through fact-checking. It's quite frustrating. Spreading misinformation about the present state of intelligence research doesn't help anyone."
i/o on X - "The only consensus — and I do not use that word lightly — scientific finding that is routinely deliberately slandered in the media is the heritability of intelligence.  Literally — and I do not use this word lightly either — no reputable intelligence researcher disputes that intelligence is substantially heritable.  So why does this lie keep finding its way into the pages of even "prestige" publications like the New Yorker? Because intelligence heritability, if it were ever widely-known and understood by the public, can threaten the blank slate foundation of the modern progressive project."
When fact checking is about pushing a left wing agenda, and not checking facts, this is what happens

Meme - RAMZPAUL @ramzpaul: "Interesting. White women who date blacks statistically have lower IQs than black women who date Whites."

Meme - "r/trans
Trans people stay winning! Top 15% IQ and I barely even tried. It's time to destigmatize being your true self.
Your IQ is 86. 16%. Your IQ is in the top 85%"

i/o on X - "The decoding of the human genome brought powerful tools to investigate the relationship between genes, race, and IQ. But fear of where this research might go led the best genetic database in the US to restrict access. The most recent survey of scientists conducting research in this area indicated that findings on human intelligence have been tipping over the past few decades in favor of those who believe race IQ gaps have at least a partial genetic basis.  The left has waged a continuous campaign of smears, misinformation, data suppression, censorship, cancellation, grants withholding, and even physical intimidation and violence, to stop this research. Activist scientist Eric Turkheimer famously wrote that if the hereditarian hypothesis were ever proved correct it would be like an "atom bomb going off.""

i/o on X - "Jonathan Haidt: "I expect that dozens or hundreds of ethnic differences will be found.. the ways in which we now think about genes, groups, evolution and ethnicity will be radically changed by the unstoppable progress of the human genome project."
We already see federal government agencies and universities, as a matter of stated policy, refusing to share genomic data with scientists conducting research into certain types of differences between population groups."
i/o on X - "Institution: There are no innate differences in intelligence (and other psychological traits) between groups.
Scientists: Let's take a look at the genomic data so we can show that this is true.
Institution: No! Only bad people would want to do that kind of research!
Question: If they're so convinced that innate group differences are impossible, then what are they so afraid of?
Answer: They're afraid because they are not convinced.
They're afraid because they know what the existing scientific evidence looks like — and what the clear majority opinion is of those who conduct the research — and they will do everything they can to stop any scientific investigation that might be dispositive.  As activist scientist Eric Turkheimer warned: The effects of a clear scientific finding of innate race differences in intelligence would be like an "atom bomb" exploding."

RiotIQTest on X - "Intelligence researchers often focus on "g," referring to a general factor of intelligence that arises because different scores are positively correlated with each other. But is g found in non-Western groups? This 2019 study by @Russwarne says yes. The authors found 97 archival datasets from 31 non-Western, economically developing nations (shown in dark grey on this map) and performed a factor analysis. The results were clear: 94 (96.9%) of the datasets produced g, which is a strong indication that g is not a cultural artifact of Western culture or economically developed nations. The authors stated, "Because these data sets originated in cultures and countries where g would be least likely to appear if it were a cultural artifact, we conclude that general cognitive ability is likely a universal human trait" (p. 263, emphasis in original).  Moreover, the average strength of the g factor was 45.9% of variance, which is about the same as what is found in Western samples (~50%).  It is important to mention what this study does not show. This study is not evidence that the g in one country is the same as the g in another country. The study also cannot be used to compare or rank order countries in intelligence. Those conclusions would require a different design.  But it is still an important contribution to understanding g. It is not a cultural artifact. It is something that exists cross-culturally and is worthy of study."

Richard Hanania on X - "Study from Sweden shows that children adopted from non-Western countries ended up having lower IQs than native Swedes. The one exception was South Koreans, who actually had higher IQs than Swedes. I guess babies take "Confucian culture" with them when they are adopted?"

Links - 12th July 2026 (2 - Climate Change)

Biased science reports fuelled climate alarm | Financial Post - "The journalistic rule, “If it bleeds it leads,” appears to be widely followed in reporting on climate change. In a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, researchers compared newspaper articles from 10 major outlets in the United States and United Kingdom with scientific evidence from all six IPCC assessment reports from 1990 to 2023 (IPCC being the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body). Their conclusion? “Public summaries of IPCC climate assessments lean toward the more severe end of the technical evidence.”  The biased media reporting takes place in two stages. The first is caused by the unusual nature of IPCC reports, in which the scientific assessments are condensed into a Technical Summary (TS) and then further condensed into a Summary for Policymakers (SPM). “The SPM reaches policymakers, journalists, and the public,” the authors of the NBER paper explain. “Before its release, representatives of all 195 IPCC member governments approve it line-by-line in plenary.” As a result, the SPM is “a politically negotiated artifact rather than a neutral summary of the underlying science.” Using large language models to analyze scientific claims made in these documents, the researchers find that for every IPCC assessment report from 1990 to 2023, the politically negotiated SPMs skew towards the more severe ends of what the scientific assessments actually show. Next, when journalists and editors use the SPM to write their articles, the same shift takes place: the more severe climate impacts are given more weight and emphasis... If journalists favour emphasizing the most severe projected climate impacts, so too do activists and politicians keen on imposing sweeping government interventions. For more than a decade, including in his 2021 book Value(s), Mark Carney backed large-scale climate initiatives premised on the idea that RCP 8.5 (an extreme scenario under which temperatures rise an estimated 4.5 degrees by 2100) was a likely outcome. But RCP 8.5 was always an extreme top-of-range scenario, and the new scenario framework published last month that will form the basis for the next IPCC assessment report excludes it from the range altogether. The emission projections under RCP 8.5, the scenario authors concluded, have “become implausible.” In fact, RCP 8.5 was known to be implausible for years. An article in Nature in January 2020 called it a “dystopian” scenario that was becoming “increasingly implausible with every passing year. Emission pathways to get to RCP 8.5 generally require an unprecedented fivefold increase in coal use by the end of the century, an amount larger than some estimates of recoverable coal reserves.” Ross McKitrick noted in a column in June 2020 that the assumptions RCP 8.5 relied on not only didn’t make sense, they also contradicted each other. But that hasn’t stopped Carney and others from using it to stoke climate alarm. In recent years, both the Canadian Climate Institute, which is funded by the federal government, and federal departments themselves have used RCP 8.5 prolifically."

Steve Guest on X - "Vox with a BOMBSHELL admission in the wake of the demise of RCP8.5.   “Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.”"

Thread by @SenEricSchmitt on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Did you know our Judiciary has its own taxpayer-funded “neutral training pipeline"?  Meet the USAID of Article III.  The Federal Judicial Center. What I've uncovered isn't "neutral" judicial training. It's ideological capture. Take a look at how it's infecting our judiciary. 🧵
The Federal Judicial Center (FJC) is the official research and education arm of the federal courts, created by Congress to train and equip our nation's judges.  It shapes how these judges evaluate evidence.  Its materials influence real court cases across the country every day. You'd assume the FJC is filled with unbiased and impartial legal scholars, especially when it comes to directing judges' continuing education. Let's meet @jrlinkins, Director of Education at FJC. She describes her "heroes" as Zora Neale Hurston (known for her flagrant plagiarism in her extensive work on Haitian Voodoo) and Staceyann Chin (A Chinese-Jamaican Lesbian Poet known for writing smut and reciting it at poetry slams). Unsurprisingly, this is the type of content being promoted by the FJC's leadership. But does this asinine ideology flow into FJC's work? Of course. The FJC has partnered with Columbia University and other left-wing organizations. Together they “educated” over 2,000 judges on climate change nonsense. This is clearly a taxpayer-funded patronage network. While doing the Left's dirty work in the Judicial branch, Linkins quietly funneled kickbacks through ActBlue to Democrats in Congress and Biden's Campaign. Then came the bombshell: The FJC’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, the guide judges use to decide what science counts in court.  They snuck in a MASSIVE new climate change chapter, written by organizations actively suing energy producers. The backlash was so fierce that the FJC was forced to pull the entire climate chapter, but only after it had already been distributed to thousands of judges.  Let that sink in. They laundered Greta Thunberg talking points into the official judicial reference manual.   This taxpayer funded outfit has become infested with pop scientists peddling Davos-approved talking points. This isn’t something we can simply overlook or ignore. The courts are not a branch of the left-wing NGO complex. They are not supposed to be trained by the very left-wing activists filing the lawsuits. They are not supposed to get their “science” from outfits whose explicit goal is to reshape law in favor of climate policy outcome. The rule of law is sacred. It demands real neutrality, not indoctrination from Columbia climate warriors and their NGO allies.  We’re going to keep shining a light on this until the pipeline is shut down and accountability is restored."

Lauren Chen on X - "This is why the left wins all the time.  Each bureaucrat is actually an activist working to ingrain their ideology into our institutions at every chance.  Take this example with the Federal Judicual Center, which has an official manual that instructs judges on how to weigh scientific evidence.  It turns out the climate section was really the work of green activists, meaning they were effectively biasing judges toward climate change activism before cases even got to court.  Now this climate chapter was pulled once it was discovered how slanted it was, but imagine how many more examples are out there in every corner of government, academia, media, and corporate life..."

WALLACE: The Iran shock destroyed the illusion of a renewable-only future - "The closure, first by Iran and then subsequently by the United States (US), of the Strait of Hormuz has caused an international energy crisis with prices spiking above US$100–120/bbl and LNG prices jumping more than 50% from 2025 averages. While the current events in the Straight of Hormuz were not predictable at the time we wrote our paper in 2022, the consequences of emissions policies that advocated for the curtailment, and in some cases the elimination, of vital fossil fuels were nonetheless predictable. As we wrote then:   “North America and particularly the European Union are experiencing the consequences of misguided energy policies that have undermined efforts to sustain energy security throughout the West.” Mintz and Wallace, 2022.  As Western economies raced to reduce carbon emissions, many lost sight of the vital contribution that fossil fuels make to economic resilience and national, regional, and international security. Those policies, especially in the EU, have demonstrated that energy transitions are neither automatic nor inherently secure and have been seen to result in market instabilities, power interruptions, and continued price escalations.  Evidence from Germany’s recent experience demonstrates that assumptions of a smooth, inevitable shift to renewables have seriously underestimated system complexity and have shifted the emphasis to reliability, affordability, and geopolitical resilience. The strategic role of firm energy supply was demonstrated when the EU was forced to spend an additional €6 billion in just 17 days on fossil fuel imports as renewables alone could not stabilize its grid. The EU’s energy bill rose by €24 billion in the first 52 days of the Iran conflict, showing how price escalations and supply insecurity persisted despite aggressive decarbonization policies... since 2015, Canada has implemented regulatory and tax policies that have substantially blocked Canadian energy from reaching beyond traditional destinations to enter the international marketplace. The exception is the performance of the Trans Mountain pipeline... a sobering reminder of the income foregone by Canada because of major project cancellations, like the Northern Gateway pipeline, by the Trudeau government. Canada and Alberta have both maintained legislated or policy anchored net zero commitments, frameworks that are explicitly designed to constrain the emissions profile of hydrocarbon production, at a time when the major points in the Canada-Alberta MOU for a BC coast pipeline remain unresolved. Meanwhile, as European states reassess and evaluate the effects of energy security shocks, Canadian energy could be backfilling against sanctioned Russian oil and gas and curtailed shipments from the Middle East. Despite reassurances, Canada appears fixated on policies for net zero, with few realistic options to increase exports to the EU or to optimize energy security within Canada.  Europe’s strategic policy decision to undermine its own energy production in favour of renewables has exacerbated the effects of the Iran crisis. Europe is now twice as exposed to the Hormuz crisis as is the US and faces an imminent shortage of strategic supplies such as jet fuel — a dual threat to the military and industrial capacity of Europe. Meanwhile, the US has become a major net exporter of refined products, including jet fuel, with shipments to Europe surging to record levels. Europe, by contrast, must import 60% of its total energy and 40%–75% of its jet fuel. The Iranian conflict demonstrates that policies for net zero and renewable energy, commitments that required vast financial investments, are wholly insufficient to maintain energy and economic security. As the fourth largest global producer of crude oil, Canada’s opportunities have been limited by insufficient infrastructure, punitive regulatory timelines, and limited international access. The Iran shock has exposed the false assumptions of uninterrupted global trade and steadily falling demand for fossil fuels."
The widespread cope is that the Iran war shows that countries need to double down on renewables. Reality is no match for climate change hysteria

Sainsbury’s ditching brown eggs is damning proof of the net zero farce - "The rationale behind this apparent scrapping of brown eggs is that, according to Sainsbury’s, its white eggs were found to have a 12.7 per cent lower carbon footprint than brown ones. This magical little figure was fashioned, the company reports, “through a lifecycle assessment with three of our egg suppliers”. This nugget appears in their recently published 2026 annual report.  Further wording adds little flesh to the bones, claiming that the lower carbon footprint is “largely due to better feed conversion” (the report’s authors don’t waste any time explaining whatever that might mean), and “the longer productive lifespan of the white hens”.  “Additionally,” the report continues, “white hens are less prone to feather pecking, leading to higher animal welfare.” It’s a point of no relevance to the issue at hand, of course, but it gives another warm hug of feel-good buzzwordery. Still, Sainsbury’s says determinedly it is “making progress on transitioning our shell eggs from brown to white eggs, aiming towards 100 per cent in our own brand core ranges”. Do you follow? If not, let me help with some clarity here. There appears to be some science, from just three egg producers, that there might be a slightly smaller carbon footprint from hens that lay white eggs, which has something to do with feed. Aside from that, the company’s claim to be “making progress on transitioning” means it’s unlikely to be doing very much very soon. Besides, this shift will only affect its “own brand core ranges”, so lots of other brown eggs will still remain on sale.  Yet this vague garbage is then pushed out as a story about Sainsbury’s glorious charge to net zero... Sainsbury’s messaging simply shows how infected it is by the woke dogma of Ed Miliband and his green agenda – a drive to net zero that makes us all colder and poorer, while having a direct effect on the planet’s annual emissions of less than 1 per cent. As Peter Mandelson was reported to have said: “The Chinese are not listening to Ed Miliband.”"

I’m not giving up meat for Miliband, and neither should you - "Everyone laughed when they saw that unfortunate photo of Ed Miliband trying to eat a bacon sandwich in 2014, but perhaps they’ll come to regret it because the Energy Secretary has just signed Britain up to stringent new climate targets. The Climate Change Committee, which provides independent advice to the Government, says that to help achieve these targets, the public will need to eat 25 per cent less meat.  In response to this claim, a spokesman for the Government has insisted that it will succeed “without telling people how to live or behave”. All the same, I have an uneasy feeling that a certain someone may privately see this as the perfect opportunity for revenge. “Now nobody will be able to eat a bacon sandwich because we’re going to drive all the farmers who produce bacon out of business!” At any rate, I certainly won’t be giving up meat for net zero – and neither should you. Why? For starters, net zero zealots endlessly claim that the farming of meat plays a huge role in causing climate change because cows and other farm animals release so much methane. Yet, a 2021 study found that vegan men fart seven times more than men who eat meat... an awful lot of vegans’ favourite foods – quinoa, avocados, lentils, soybeans and chickpeas, for example – are grown in countries many thousands of miles away. To reach Britain, they have to be transported on long, environment-damaging flights."

Net zero killed British industry, not Thatcherism - "Burnham, like many on the Left, argues that Britain’s economic and social malaise started with deindustrialisation brought about by so-called “neo-liberal” reforms undertaken by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1980s.  While memories of miners’ strikes, union reforms and the privatisation of failing nationalised industries reinforce this popular narrative, the facts tell a different story.  Start with the total output of the industrial sector in inflation-adjusted terms. Between 1979, when Thatcher entered office, and 1990, when she resigned, industrial production rose by a healthy 16pc – barely slowing from its preceding trend. The volume of goods exports rose by 50pc over the same period. Under Thatcher, Britain produced more and sold more to the world.  Even as production and exports grew, industrial employment slumped by 28pc, a loss of 2.1 million jobs. Total employment rose by 6.5pc – a net increase of 1.7 million. In the 11 years to 1990, Britain created as many new jobs as it had done from 1952 to 1979. Similar patterns are visible elsewhere... Through the 1970s, successive British governments had run up massive costs, encouraged overmanning and capital misallocation to delay inevitable structural changes. Thatcherism, grounded in sound economics, represented the moment when policymakers decided to stop fighting the tide.  British industrial production, alongside goods exports, continued to grow steadily after Thatcher left office – under John Major’s Conservatives and for most of Tony Blair’s New Labour reign – even as both administrations stuck with the market reforms of the 1980s. But as production grew, its share of GDP predictably continued to edge lower, along with its employment share.  The decisive negative turn in industry came in the 2000s, when Britain tilted its energy policy towards decarbonisation and in favour of renewables like wind and solar. This process started in the 1990s, accelerated in the 2000s, and ramped up with the 2008 Climate Change Act, subsequent renewables targets, the Carbon Price Floor in 2013, emissions performance standards, contracts for difference and the 2019 net zero law.  However well-intentioned, these policies have resulted in energy scarcity in the UK and some of the highest industrial electricity costs in the advanced world. It is no surprise that trends in electricity availability and output in energy-intensive industrial sectors track closely over time. Energy capacity and production rose precipitously through the 20th century until 2005, when electricity supply peaked. A year later, industrial production reached record highs. Since then, the reduction of electricity capacity, including coal and oil as well as nuclear, combined with a painfully slow build-out of renewables, has cut electricity supply by a fifth, while industrial production has fallen by around 7pc. If Burnham wants to reindustrialise Britain, he needs to reverse net zero, not Thatcherism. Abundant, stable, and competitively priced energy is vital for a healthy industry.  But even then, he could not expect to see a jobs boom in the industrial sector. In the age of automation, that is impossible. The benefits from reviving British industry would stem from faster economic growth and increased productivity. Higher wages, stronger public finances and renewed national confidence would follow, without any need to recreate the factory floor of the 1970s. While Burnham may believe he can bring fresh thinking into No 10, his penchant for demonising Thatcher and appealing to misplaced nostalgia suggests there is limited scope for a course correction once the realities of office hit."

Sir Tony Blair mocks Energy Secretary Ed Miliband over net zero policies - "Sir Tony Blair has mocked Ed Miliband over his net zero policies, in a further attack on the Labour Government.  The former prime minister accused the Energy Secretary on Wednesday of pushing a “quixotic fantasy” and said that China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, did not care about his beliefs... Sir Keir is coming under pressure from his Cabinet to overturn a ban on North Sea drilling, according to reports.   Ministers are beginning to question Mr Miliband’s repeated claim that allowing new North Sea drilling would “not take a penny of bills” because even if they remained the same, prices would fall across the wider economy.   One Whitehall source said: “People keep saying that it won’t take a penny off bills. But if it improves your balance of payments, it helps your currency, potentially letting you get more for your money on all sorts of goods.   A second source said: “There is a growing feeling that we’ve boxed ourselves in with a line that’s technically true but politically useless. People hear ‘it won’t cut bills’ and assume there’s no economic benefit whatsoever.”  The UK emits less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gases within its own borders. In 2025, its net contribution was estimated at 367 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – a 2 per cent fall on the previous year and a 54 per cent decrease compared to 1990.  By contrast, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels were expected to rise by 1.1 per cent in 2025, reaching a record high of around 38.1 billion tonnes. Sir Tony warned Britain would continue to rely on carbon beyond the net zero deadline of 2050, adding: “I don’t understand why you’d shut your own fossil fuel industry and import someone else’s.”... Mr Miliband has been accused of having an “ideological obsession” with net zero, driving him to pursue green policies at any cost.  Earlier this month, he was accused of “covering up” evidence suggesting his flagship schemes could backfire while taxpayers foot a multi-billion-pound bill."

John Tomkinson on X - "In Ottawa, discussion on Alberta’s pipeline are now framed as violence against women. "Violence against nature and the climate are inseparable from violence against humans. One example is climate change as a gendered issue, which leads to systemic disadvantages for all women.""

Miliband defies Starmer over cuts to fund defence - "Sources said the Energy Secretary was pushing back against demands to find capital budget savings of at least 1pc within the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to help fund the long-delayed defence investment plan (DIP)... The pushback will be seen as fresh evidence of Sir Keir’s waning authority as Labour MPs and ministers openly prepare for a leadership competition that could see the Prime Minister supplanted by Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester.  Mr Miliband has been supporting Mr Burnham behind the scenes and is said to have fallen out with Sir Keir in recent weeks after telling him that he felt his position had become untenable."

Poll: Majority of British women think nuclear power is not low-carbon 🤦‍♂️ - "only 31% of British women believe nuclear energy produces no or low carbon emissions... The gap between men and women in this poll is staggering across the board. Men are more than twice as likely as women to think nuclear power is safe (64% vs. 28%). Men want way more nuclear energy in the mix (59% vs. 17%). And when asked about building a nuclear plant in their own backyard, men say yes at 57% while women clock in at a resounding 22%. People tried to offer explanations (most of them had to do with repealing the 19th Amendment, which isn't even a thing in England 😂). There are debates to be had over nuclear power, but one of these debates is not about its carbon footprint being too large. It uses magic rocks to give near-unlimited power while emitting steam (AKA water).  The UK is trying to lower its carbon emissions, but if women think nuclear power emits a bunch of carbon, they are going to be stuck with wind turbines and solar panels (both of which have regular replacement costs with higher carbon requirements)."
Epistocracy is "sexist", so too bad

We can’t afford a $20-billion Pathway to nowhere  | Financial Post - "Given its massive debt and never-ending deficits, Ottawa should not waste tens of billions of dollars in tax credits and cash on a project that has no chance of achieving its public policy objective, even if it does give the prime minister political cover. The boondoggle in question is the Pathways Project, a $16- to $24-billion (excluding cost overruns) carbon capture and storage (CCS) network in northeastern Alberta sponsored by the six largest oilsands companies. Its mission is to capture greenhouse gas emissions from over 20 oilsands sites and transport them via pipeline to an underground storage hub near Cold Lake. Prime Minister Mark Carney has made Pathways a condition for approving any major oilsands pipeline project, on the grounds it would eliminate emissions from drilling, processing and flaring. But such upstream emissions are only 15 per cent of the total. Downstream emissions from consumption in transportation, industrial use, power generation and buildings account for the rest. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith obviously knows this but succumbed to the feds’ extortion because it was the only way to get them on side. In a recent opinion piece, Martha Hall Findlay, chair of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and former Liberal MP, came out against Pathways, which she spent years helping create. She belatedly admits it would entail significant cost “with, frankly, a negligible effect on global emissions.” A dramatically changed world provides a reason for her about-face: “Canada’s priorities are now clearly economic diversification, national defence, national security — nothing less than our sovereignty.” Findlay is correct that geopolitical events make the Pathways project even more indefensible, but without massive government subsidies CCS was never economically viable, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). And another reason for her change of mind existed when she helped create Pathways: Canada produces a mere 1.3 per cent of global GHG emissions; the oilsands represent 12.4 per cent of Canada’s total emissions; and Pathways’ first phase would likely reduce global emissions by less than 0.02 per cent — or one in 5,000 — with an undetectable impact on global temperatures. Even worse, the IEEFA says no CCS project anywhere has ever reached its target CO2 capture rate, and most miss by a lot. CCS projects have a troubled history around the world, with chronic underperformance, ballooning costs and technical failures. For example, in May 2024, Edmonton-based Capital Power cancelled a $2.4-billion project built to capture up to three megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from its gas-fired Genesee generating station in Alberta. The reason? It was not “economically feasible.” Even hard-line green NGOs oppose CCS. Environmental Defence called it a billion-dollar scam based on junk science, with associate director Julia Levin saying: “Carbon capture is unnecessary, ineffective and expensive.” Mind you, her solution is to prevent energy projects from being created in the first place. Then there are the safety risks, which have not been adequately addressed. When stored in deep saline aquifers or depleted reservoirs, compressed CO2 can leak into groundwater or the atmosphere. In 1986, a release in Cameroon killed about 1,700 people. In 2020, the rupture of a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi resulted in dozens of hospitalizations and the evacuation of an entire town. Apart from the dangers of carbon dioxide poisoning, fluid injection can induce earthquakes by altering underground pore pressure, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Unfortunately, Mark Carney is unlikely abandon Pathways. He is using CCS to justify pipeline construction on the false pretence it will make energy projects carbon-neutral. He may even delude himself that purchasers will pay more for “net-zero” fossil fuels, which they never have and likely never will. Even with Pathways going ahead, several Liberal caucus members, including Steven Guilbeault, could jump ship, jeopardizing Carney’s razor-thin majority. The NDP’s Avi Lewis, environmental activists and some members of the media will also be outraged by Carney’s perceived betrayal of the climate cause. Last Sunday marked 20 years since the release of Al Gore’s hyperbolic movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” That sci-fi thriller propelled Gore to centi-millionaire status and contributed to an outburst of collective madness that has cost the world $17 trillion in failed net-zero policies. Although in most places the tide has begun to turn against self-destructive climate hysteria, our government has been slow to acknowledge the new reality. Abandoning Pathways would help Canada catch up with the rest of the world. Too bad it won’t happen under Carney’s leadership."
Time to waste money on left wing conceits and weaken the country further, so the US can annex Canada faster

i/o on X - "Extraordinary. Among the many claims that Al Gore got wrong or grossly overstated were:
(1) An imminent 20-foot sea level rise
(2) The disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro
(3) Polar bears drowning in "significant numbers"
(4) Hurricane Katrina was a direct result of warming
(5) An influx of fresh meltwater from Greenland could completely halt the Gulf Stream, potentially plunging Northern Europe into a sudden ice age
(6) The drying of Lake Chad was entirely due to global warming
(7) Rising carbon dioxide levels historically directly caused the Earth's temperature to rise in a cause-and-effect relationship
(8) Glacier National Park would lose all (or nearly all) its glaciers soon
(9) Arctic summer sea ice could disappear very soon
(10) Low-lying Pacific atolls/islands were currently being inundated now, causing evacuations due to warming
(11) Coral reefs facing imminent widespread destruction primarily from warming
(12) Increased frequency and severity of floods, wildfires, tornadoes, or general extreme weather directly are tied to warming
(13) Himalayan glaciers melting rapidly and will soon lead to depletion of water supplies"

M. A. on X - "Want to manufacture a global climate emergency?  It’s easy: just delete Southern Europe from your dataset.  While the media runs a coordinated meltdown over a standard two-week summer stretch in England, France, and Germany, look at what’s actually happening in Europe's traditionally warmest regions.  Take a look at the real data for Valencia from 2000 to 2026.  The historical average for June sits at 34.3°C (the blue line).  But look at the far right of the chart for this year, 2026.  The temperature has plummeted all the way down to 32.0°C, well below the baseline.  But you won't see this chart on the news.  The strategy relies entirely on rigging the data pool: cheery-pick a tiny geographic window, filter out the cool regions that ruin the narrative, and declare a hot afternoon a global catastrophe.  This is pure geographical narcissism masked as science. Because the major media empires and political institutions happen to sit in London, Paris, and Brussels, they project their local afternoon sweat onto the entire planet.  They’ve rigged a linguistic trap where the narrative can never lose: when Western Europe gets hot, it’s a systemic planetary failure, but when the Mediterranean runs cold, it’s just background noise to be ignored.  Real analysis looks at the whole map.  Propaganda just hunts for whatever local thermometer is high enough to justify the day's headlines."

Tony Aubé on X - "I just came back to my Airbnb in France. It’s 96° outside and 104° inside. No AC. The woman was angry because one of the light was left on, and “they pay for it”. Have a lot of empathy for your French friend. People are surprisingly poor there and the struggle created by socialism is unbelievable for the average American."

Feminism and Liberal Democracy

Feminism and Liberal Democracy

"Maybe it’s the company I keep, but I keep hearing people lament that no matter who you vote for, no matter who is in power, nothing really changes. At most, the pace of change may vary a bit but not the direction.

There’s a name for the worst form of this problem: illiberal democracy. Illiberal democracies have elections but little changes because the safeguards that liberalism requires – open debate, equal citizenship and impartial institutions – have been eroded.

This isn’t just a theoretical problem, it’s the reality in Turkey, India and other states. Those countries were steered to illiberalism by their political leaders. But there is another path to illiberal democracy – one marked by institutional capture rather than executive decree.1 And, as I argued in my previous essay, it’s a path well-trod by feminism. So, is feminism steering some countries into illiberal democracy? In this essay I’ll examine that question using Australia as a case study...

There are fundamental conflicts between liberalism and feminism. So, it should come as no surprise that many feminists have little affection for liberal democracy. Some have “casually dismissed liberal democracy” in the words of liberal feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. Others, including leading academic Anne Phillips, are even more strongly opposed to liberal democracy than they are to liberalism...

So, what do these attacks look like? The surprising answer is - nothing special. It looks like a few feminists on a government committee steering it towards feminist policies. Or a journalist starting from feminist assumptions. Or a judge being appointed because of her feminist views. All very prosaic but, once a critical mass is reached, organisations become political players when they should be impartial...

Liberal democracies run on informed debate – it’s how they find truth and discard error. Without informed debate, liberal democracy withers. Healthy informed debate matters – a lot.

The process starts from information - if that’s flawed, so is debate. So, it’s worrying that universities today are widely criticised for placing ideology above evidence.(1, 2, 3) In politically sensitive fields like domestic violence, ideology is all.(1, 2, 3) As philosopher Susan Haack lamented, even science and philosophy have become “only politics in disguise”.3

Beyond academia, government agencies such as those producing statistics are key to understanding our society, our problems and how to fix them. I’ve written before of a key agency, the Australian Institute of Family Studies which has misrepresented data on sexual abuse, misled the government on coercive control research and manipulated data on domestic violence. But there are many other examples – like the Australian Institute of Criminology that has erased female violence from their research and ignores male deaths on their homicide dashboard. In politically sensitive areas, misinformation dominates.

Informed debate also requires citizens to have ready access to more than one perspective. But, as I’ve written previously, that doesn’t happen with gender politics. In that essay, I looked in depth at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but other media show the same bias. Just like the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald publishes many articles (43 this year) on feminism and none on men’s rights or egalitarianism. Just like the ABC, News.com writes frequently on women’s rights but not men’s rights, men’s issues or egalitarianism (46 articles this year vs 0). I could go on but it should be clear: one side is promoted; the other is absent.

Censorship is obviously an enemy of informed debate and, sadly, it is a reality even if it’s less apparent than a heavy-handed government banning books.

Instead, it looks like a publisher’s staff trying to block publication of a book critical of feminism. It looks like a full shelf of feminist books at my local library but none on men’s rights. It looks like the UN calling on media to self-censor criticism of feminism. It looks like feminist protests blocking screening of a pro-male documentary at Sydney University.

And then there’s the hallmark censorship of feminism and identity politics – cancel culture. Universities are plagued by it, as demonstrated by two recent Australian cases (1, 2) of academics sacked for feminist dissent. Cancel culture has become mundane but it’s still sobering to realise that, in the US, academics are four times more likely to self-censor than they were at the height of McCarthyism. And just as sobering that 65% of ordinary Australians feel they must self-censor.

Surveying the result, informed debate is being misled and suppressed. What remains isn’t enough to sustain a liberal democracy. 

One of the most fundamental commitments of a liberal democracy is to equal citizenship. Consequently, equality becomes the canary in the coal mine – discrimination isn’t just a problem for those discriminated against; it signals a systemic failure.

I’ve written at length about discrimination against males (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) as have others (1, 2). Its presence clearly signals problems in our liberal democracy. But do the problems go even deeper? Even into the law itself? Are men and women still equal before the law?

Law should be how equal citizenship is enforced. If the law doesn’t treat citizens equally, the system itself has been subverted and a dangerous line has been crossed.

Much law proceeds from legislation. So, is there legislation undermining equality? Sadly, yes. The Sex Discrimination Act, Workplace Gender Equality Act, Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Fair Work Act and many state acts (especially domestic violence Acts) are all explicitly discriminatory.4

Many others aren’t explicit but still affect males and females differently. For example, consider the law reform commissioner who justified removing a criminal defence, not because it would improve justice but on the grounds:

the defence was being misused in the sense that generally speaking, it was commonly invoked by men…

Courts also erect barriers to equality. I’ve already pointed out that males are commonly excluded from lists of groups deserving equality before the law (e.g. 1, 2).

The result is some startling double standards. Consider the recent case of Corbie Jean Walpole who poured petrol on a friend and set him alight because he made a joke she considered in poor taste. The man she set alight was put into a medically induced coma, spent months in hospital and had the sweat glands burned off his body. Judge Jennifer English though apparently empathised with Walpole, accepting that Walpole had been traumatised by her own violence and it was “a tragic case in so many ways for … the offender and her family.” Then, in sentencing, the judge explained that she dislikes putting women behind bars.

And she’s not the only one. There’s ample evidence that women are less likely to be sent to prison for the same offence and, when they are, they receive lighter sentences. (1, 2)

In highly politicised areas, the inequalities escalate dramatically. Inequality in family law courts has been criticised by everyone from litigants to lawyers to academics and even family court judges. Similar criticism has been levelled by academics at recent changes to sexual assault and domestic violence laws. Worse still, politicised matters are often judged not in proper courts but in campus kangaroo courts, workplace inquisitions or trauma-informed courts – a problem to which I’ll return later.

Add it all up and, for half the population, equality before the law is limited and conditional – a very long way short of a pass mark. In the words of one academic, the feminist lobby is responsible for “a flagrant assault on the cardinal tenet that all persons are regarded as equal before the law”.

For liberal democracies to function, their institutions must not choose political sides – referees aren’t supposed to kick goals.

But they have. Anyone with experience of universities, mainstream media, the law or the public service will have seen their support for feminism. (For more details see my last essay.) And the reality isn’t in doubt - feminists speak proudly of their influence. (1, 2, 3)

Such institutional capture always represents a failure in a liberal democracy, but some failures are worse than others. If the Board of Water Quality is politicised, life goes on. But if courts prioritise ideology over due process, one of the foundations of a free society is gone. Have things gone so far?

Due process means that accusations are tested impartially through fair and consistent procedures. But there is often little sign of fair and consistent procedure – especially when men are judged outside the legal system.

Ever since #MeToo, trial by media and campus kangaroo courts have cost many innocent men their reputations, friendships and livelihood.

There’s also a grey area – within the legal system but outside the courts. When researching this essay, I was appalled to learn that men can be thrown out of their homes without a court order – in fact without any opportunity to put their side. Police are able to issue these domestic violence orders with literally less evidence than they would need for a parking ticket.5

And even within the court system, men can still be punished without trial. Here in New South Wales, most people in jail for domestic violence assault (60%) and intimidation/stalking (57%) have not been tried or found guilty, they’ve simply been refused bail.

The problems don’t end even if there is a trial.

As I’ve already described, training courses, bench books, peers and media all pressure judges to, as one said, “bend the knee”. The worst problems are seen in trauma-informed courts like the Family Court which stop just a hair’s breadth short of a blanket “Believe Women”. (1, 2, 3)

Legislation can add to the bias. For example, NSW legislation6 forbids juries being told that someone alleging sexual abuse has a history of false accusations – even when, in the words of one judge, the woman is “a compulsive false accuser”.

All these problems are serious but what about that preeminent principle of the criminal law - the presumption of innocence? If that is lost, little remains.

And that presumption has long been under attack because, for many feminists, all men are culpable. For example, Susan Brownmiller in her book Against Our Will, says rape is a process “by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” Little wonder that other feminist academics lament that “legality is a troubling impediment”.

The result is that procedural inequities have effectively dismantled the presumption of innocence – and many pillars of the legal community are prepared to say so. (1, 2, 3) That takes some courage given the huge pressure on lawyers not to protest, as one senior barrister explains:

to even publicly suggest such things as a presumption of innocence for all persons charged with criminal offences but particularly sexual offences is to risk criticism, abuse and ostracism.

When defending the presumption of innocence provokes attack, the legal system is no longer a liberal institution. Like equality before the law, for males the presumption of innocence has become limited and conditional. Law is merely the continuation of gender politics by other means...

A country does not become illiberal only when every safeguard collapses. It becomes illiberal when institutions and protections fail in key areas. And we are long past that point...

To understand why illiberalism is overlooked, we need to start where informed debate ends - because the consequences go deeper than bias. Once the same feminist narrative echoes through enough institutions, it becomes pervasive and then natural, moral, and inevitable. Dissent appears wrong rather than normal pluralism. The questions that can be asked, the evidence that counts and the conclusions that are permissible all shift. 

Today, feminism is generally not even seen as an ideology but merely as common sense. It has become literally a non-issue - so pervasive it’s invisible. Debate may still continue, but only inside approved assumptions. The public can argue over trivia while the deeper premises are treated as settled, moral and beyond challenge.

Even the language is subverted. Disadvantaging males is no longer discrimination but “gender equality”. Censorship becomes “safety”. Dissent becomes “misogyny”. “Gendered violence” leaves no space to talk about violence against men or children. One viewpoint sits alone at the centre of our assumptions.

In the jargon, feminism has achieved hegemony. It’s a contested hegemony to be sure – we see those contests through the lens of popular media as “culture wars” and are encouraged to tut-tut in disapproval. And even as we do, we are surrendering the vantage points from which to see the issues and the space in which to mount a defence.

I’ve tried to make clear the prosaic nature of institutional capture: a few feminists on a government committee, a feminist journalist here, a feminist judge there. Unremarkable, but it persists because the whole rapidly becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Captured institutions have formed a complex ecosystem: some set beliefs, others demand alignment using standards, regulation and accreditation; yet others enact feminist policies and each reinforces the other. They’ve become a shadow system.

The critical point is that the system is insulated from democratic change. Governments may come and go, but the government committee, the journalist and the judge remain. The machinery that keeps producing the same results stays intact. The link from voters to policy has been hacked.

Yet there was no master plan. It grew from alignment, not conspiracy – pragmatism, not totalitarianism. It’s more banal than any plot but also more durable. The result is a democracy that still performs the rituals of elections, but the machinery beneath no longer responds. And that is how a democracy becomes illiberal without anyone quite noticing...

Australia is, sadly, well down this path - but it’s not alone. The UK, for example, also suffers media bias, censorship and problems with both due process and equality before the law (1, 2, 3). In fact, much of the West shows the same worrying signs. There’s little room for ambiguity. Australia has become an illiberal democracy and other nations are following.

Over to you. Liberal democracy or feminism? You can’t have both."

 

Links - 12th July 2026 (1 - General Wokeness [including Ethically Modified Memes])

Diana S. Fleischman on X - "A new paper in Evolutionary Human Sciences examines race memes on x but doesn't reproduce the original memes so readers don't have to be exposed to racism when reading a paper about racism. Here are the "ethically modified" memes."

Meme - Soyjak with Twitter, Facebook, reddit, YouTube logos drawing red X: "SIR! SIR! YOU CAN'T LAUGH! YOU CAN'T LAUGH AT THIS MEME! NO YOU CAN'T VIEW THE ORGINAL EITHER! STOP CHUCKLING RIGHT NOW SIR!!" *No Fun Allowed*

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on X - "During Stalin’s Show Trials, one of the charges against the defendants was that they’d read subversive material, which of course was illegal and punishable by death.   But this posed a problem for the judges: even if it was only to confirm that it was indeed subversive material, reading said material was still dangerous. And so, on the margins next to the evidence of subversive material, the judges would pencil in "Did not read but disapprove."  Just as bees make beehives, leftists reinvent Stalinism from first principles every time they are allowed to have power."

Meme - News Fist @malinformedtv: "There is something deeply haunting about this image. It is the final form of leftism. Every detail stripped, every nuance destroyed, every 'offense' ironed out. The censorship is total, the process complete. Nothing can be talked about as it is, instead it must be abstracted a million degrees from the truth to satisfy the endless hunger to erase a reality that refuses to conform to ideology. Ironically, it is a meme unto itself. The perfect reply to Woes law. Not only can they not understand reality, they cannot even depict it with any accuracy, lest someone be offended."
*Kinda soyjak* "I'm sorry [text removed] but we need him for the football team
Figure 2. Ethically modified schematic reconstruction of meme using the "soyjak" character to ridicule progressive positions"

Meme - "The Four Stages of the Simulacra, from Simulacra and Simulation (1981) by Jean Baudrillard
Grooming gang review kept secret as Home Office claims releasing findings 'not in public interest"
Stage One: Initially, the sign (image or representation) is a reflection of basic reality.
Richard Murphy @RichardMurphy: "The migration policies of Reform and Restore Britain would destroy football throughout the UK. Have those planning to vote for them thought about that?"
Stage Two: The sign masks a basic reality. The image becomes a distortion of the reality. *Richard Murphy's photo*
Soyjak looking like Richard Murphy: "I'm sorry your daughter was raped by a retarded cannibal, but we need him for the football team"
Stage Three: The sign marks the absence of basic reality. The image calls into question what the reality is and if it even exists.
*Kinda soyjak* "I'm sorry [text removed] but we need him for the football team
Stage Four: The sign bears no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum."

“You can’t preach here!” | Ciarán Kelly | The Critic Magazine - "Go and preach somewhere else.”  That dismissive statement is fast becoming the stock response to the expression of Christian faith in modern Britain.   Earlier this year, a video of a lone female police officer went viral after she rejected demands from hecklers to stop a Christian street preacher sharing the gospel in Whitechapel. In the middle of the exchange , bystanders were recorded trying to silence the preacher, shouting: “He can say it in a peaceful place like Hyde Park, go to Hyde Park!”; claiming “this is a Muslim area”. Quite rightly, and to the pleasant surprise of many, the officer was having none of it.   It’s not the first time we’ve heard “Go and preach somewhere else”. In 2008, The Christian Institute assisted two church workers in Birmingham in pursuing legal action after they were prevented from handing out Christian leaflets. On that occasion it was a Police Community Support Officer telling them, “you can’t preach here, this is a Muslim area.”   Others have been stopped from peacefully evangelising at pride festivals.   In each case the underlying message is the same: “Preach if you have to, just not in places where there are people who might not want to hear your message.” And the list of places where offence rules supreme gets longer and longer...  this rubs up against fundamental human rights provisions for freedom of speech, freedom of thought, conscience and peaceful assembly as well as religion.  One of the most serious examples of this form of creeping censorship is found in a court case that took place last month in Northern Ireland. Clive Johnston, a 78-year-old retired pastor, was found guilty of being reckless as to whether his actions might “influence” people accessing abortion facilities when he preached “For God so loved the world” outside Causeway Hospital, Coleraine. This hospital is in an abortion buffer zone.  Clive was found guilty despite the universally accepted fact that he didn’t even mention abortion. He had even taken the trouble to let local police know his intentions, reassuring them that this was not an abortion protest, but an open-air Sunday Service taking place near the hospital with a small group from his local church. This was not good enough for the officers who told Clive he should end his Bible preaching and move it to a “safe space” like a chaplaincy, where he wasn’t at risk of being heard by passers-by."
How ignorant. Don't they know that free speech is only meant to shatter policewomen's spines with sledgehammers, block motorways and throw paint on paintings? If you're not pushing the left wing agenda, like saying that Muslims calling areas Muslim suggests that there're no go zones, you're a dangerous far right extremist spreading misinformation who needs to be jailed

Meme - "Finally gets a Job as a Face Model In a popular upcoming Video Game *pretty girl*
It's a Western Gaming Studio *ugly girl*"

Oxfordshire council launches High Court bid to BAN Union Jacks which 'intimidate diverse communities' - "A Lib Dem-run council has escalated its campaign against flag-raisers to the High Court after a months-long feud over the Union Jack.  Just as patriotic Britons have been urged to fly their banners for the World Cup, Oxfordshire County Council has supercharged its legal battle to ban raising British flags on lampposts.  The council has applied for an injunction to block the Raise the Colours group from hanging the flag in a bid to "protect" its residents and "values"... A council spokesman said on Wednesday: "Residents across Oxfordshire, from Adderbury to Wallingford, have complained to the council about safety risks, intimidation and distress linked to this activity... Former England boss Harry Redknapp decried the anti-flag action in a major intervention last night.  "We are proud to be British - that is what we are. Fly your flags, be proud of your country. Don't be ashamed to be British," he said.  The county has so far spent £15,000 to remove more than 300 Union and St George's Cross flags from lampposts... Council leader Tim Bearder said: "This application is about protecting our residents, our workforce and the values we stand for as a county. "We are proud of Oxfordshire's diverse communities and of our Council of Sanctuary status."... "We have a clear responsibility to keep people safe and ensure our public spaces are welcoming and inclusive for everyone.""
We are still told that left wingers don't hate their countries
Isn't it racist and xenophobic to say that asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and/or "minorities" hate/fear the Western countries they live in?

Why has the English flag become so toxic? - "broader discomfort with the embrace of national self-interest that now marks most elite Britons. Cultural and educational change since the Second World War, and the role of nationalism in causing that conflict, has meant that sincere patriotism has come to be seen as threatening. Anything but the most cautious and hedged enthusiasm for one’s own country is now considered low-status, something engaged in by your ghastly suburban relatives. The recent embrace of national symbols by people who regard the current elites as their enemies is, consciously or not, a reaction against what Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”, an irrational and excessive scepticism of one’s own country and people.  There is now a serious and fundamental divide between the national and post-national visions of Britain, and the public display of flags will continue to be a tangible manifestation of that split, just as it has been in Ulster for many years."

The working-class Bristolians defying Britain’s ‘wokest’ council - "when it comes to controversial flag waving, the council itself has form, with the Palestine tricolour flown from City Hall last year after the Government’s recognition of the state of Palestine. The suggestion that the England flag is being used for jingoism has not gone down well in Torrington Avenue, where it is a local tradition dating back decades... “It even brings tourists to the area,” said Isaac Smith, 31. “You see people driving past filming with their phones.”... In keeping with the Greens’ lurch to the Left under their new leader, Zack Polanski, Bristol’s council no longer just promotes cycle lanes and carbon-neutrality. It is also assertive on transgender rights, declaring last year that women should be referred to as “people with ovaries”. Last year, 18 Green councillors staged a walkout at City Hall when members of the public raised gender-critical matters."

Why does the Left think it owns gay people? - "Recent polling shows something quietly seismic is afoot. According to More in Common, Reform UK now enjoys the support of 25 per cent of gay and bisexual men, putting Nigel Farage’s party out in front before both the Greens and Labour in the community. In France, Marine le Pen’s National Rally has seen similar figures.  For a group long assumed to be a locked-in progressive voting bloc, this is a noticeable shift, and one that’s leaving certain corners of the LGBTQ+ commentariat spluttering.  Drag queens have refused to take part in a Pride event run by a newly elected (gay) Reform councillor. A writer in the obscure magazine Gay45 recently wailed about gays “voting against themselves” – which you’d imagine might be better targeted at the small but arcane group known as “Queers For Palestine” (a slogan so irrational it borders on performance art). The very idea of a monolithic gay community has always been faintly silly. It’s more accurate to speak of a gay population – i.e. wildly differing individuals with wildly differing priorities, just like any other demographic slice.  And you would think that homosexuality being regarded with a casual shrug of “so what” by formerly hostile factions would be cause in the gay world for – if not celebration – at least a satisfied smile. The idea that your sexuality is the big factor that defines your politics – not your nation or your family, or such trifling matters like the economy, housing or defence – seems quaint, even insulting.  But for a small, though very vocal, cohort of gay men, in a world increasingly stripped of deeper meaning, that single characteristic is all they have. Without a cause, preferably one involving gaudy parades and corporate sponsorship, they fear they are nothing. They don’t actually want to be rid of the drama. Their struggle must continue, even if the struggle has largely been won in the West. To continue it, they’ve taken up the cause of transgenderism... This is the vital distinction between what we might call the LGBTQ+ political complex, and gay men as individuals. There is the rainbow tip – all drag acts, glitter, wigs, and officially sanctioned bunting – versus the enormous iceberg of ordinariness beneath.  Most gay men live lives that look remarkably similar to everyone else’s: mortgages, Monday mornings, arguments about whose turn is it to do the bins. This gap between the screeching activist class and ordinary reality is maintained with impressive discipline by the LGBTQ+ establishment, in much the same way that the Stasi once worked to convince everybody in East Germany that their neighbours were all cock-a-hoop for communism. The elephant in the room – the one that the LGBTQ+ establishment has to pretend isn’t trumpeting loudly in the corner – is increasing sectarianism, and the rising influence of political Islam in British (and European) politics. This is a growing shadow over sexual freedom of all varieties. Gay men, being neither stupid nor blind, have noticed this. The denial and frantic cognitive dissonance required to maintain the progressive Weltanschauung in the face of this reality is something to behold. It was captured perfectly in the recent Channel 4 drama Tip Toe, which went to ludicrous lengths to locate the threat to gay men in every direction except the obvious one. Indeed, a friend of mine reports that his partner – an otherwise unexamined progressive – watched the show in baffled amusement before declaring: “Well, I’m definitely voting Reform now.” You will, indeed, search in vain for any TV drama about the real-life murder of three gay men by an Islamist in Reading in 2020, on Channel 4 or anywhere else. Perhaps this dearth of honest representation on screens is why Right-wing gay men are proving popular online. The couple who run the “Nice Boys in the Country” account on Instagram started off sharing bucolic snapshots of their rural life. But posts in support of Donald Trump or demanding Starmer “stop the boats” have seen Alex and Mick Bull garner tens of thousands of new followers. One of the drag queens who pulled out of the Reform-led Pride event stated that the party was “working actively against people like me”. But in fact, Reform has no policy on reversing gay rights. They merely have the intention to follow the existing law that stops men from entering women’s private spaces, and to maintain the sensible safeguards for women that we wisely place around all men. “People like me” in this context refers in fact to transvestites, exhibitionists and fetishists, not gay men. There is a difference... Many gay men, like their neighbours, want to live in a prosperous and stable country which doesn’t treat their safety as collateral damage in someone else’s ideological experiment. Turns out we are, in fact, just like everybody else. Shocking, I know."

Meme - Jonathan Kay @jonkay: "Nine years ago, BLM staged a sit-in that blocked Toronto's Pride parade -and wouldn't let the parade keep going until Pride officials agreed to the following nine demands. At the time, it was imagined to be a random spasm of social-justice weirdness among Toronto activists."
Black Lives Matter - Toronto @BLM_TO: "Apparently to some, our demands are "too Look for yourselves fam #BlackPride"
"Black Lives Matter Toronto, along with various community groups, including BQY and Blackness Yes have the following demands:
1. Commit to BQY's (Black Queer Youth) continued space (including stagertents), funding, and logistical support.
2. Self-determination for all community spaces, allowing community full control over hiring, content, and structure of their stages.
3. Full and adequate funding for community stages, including logistical, technical, and personnel support. Double funding for Blockorama + ASL interpretation & headliner funding
5. Reinstate and make a commitment to increase community (including the reinstatement of the South Asian stage).
6. A.commitment to increase representation amongst Pride Toronto staffing/hiring, prioritizing Black trans women, Black queer people, Indigenous folk, and others from vulnerable communities.
7. A commitment to more Black deaf & hearing ASL interpreters for the Festival
8. Removal of police floats/booths in all Pride spaces.
9. A public townhall, organized in conjunction with groups from marginalized communities, including, but not limited to, Black Lives Matter- Toronto, Blackness Yes, and BQY to be held six months from today. Pride Toronto will present an update and action plan on the aforementioned demands."
Time to jail Christians for disrupting Pride

Meme - Will @Cognitiveldeal: "The idiot element of the far left, note that isn't all of the far left, don't seem to realise that they are the ones constantly spouting hatred and division. At this rate they'll accuse anyone who breathes as being 'far right'..."
Crazed activists with Free Palestine, BLM, Defund the Police, Equality Now!, Anarchy symbol, Everything is Oppressive! signs and Palestinian and Pride flags, one in a trans rights t-shirt, another with his face covered with a keffiyeh, one with purple hair and one with green hair: "You cause DIVISION!"
Man sitting on bench with coffee cup: "REALLY?"
Anyone who doesn't go along with the left wing agenda is "dividing us"

York Revolution forfeits game after players refuse to wear Pride Night jerseys - "A refusal by several players to wear a special Pride Night jersey led to the York Revolution deciding to forfeit an Atlantic League baseball game against Southern Maryland"
Of course, left wingers were bashing them as hateful bigots

Jennuh 💜🏳️‍⚧️ on X - "Having been homeschooled by Christian Fundamentalists, I’m confident in the fact that normal Americans will eventually get tired of the Christian Right’s obsession with hating anyone who’s different while constantly crying victim. Normal people aren’t this pathetic and exhausting"
The projection is off the charts

Creative Deduction on X - "Classical Marxism failed because the working class refused to revolt. So the left did something far more effective - they abandoned the working class entirely.  One of the most significant developments in modern leftist thought was the shift from traditional Marxism to Critical Studies - an approach built explicitly around group identity and the demand for active political struggle. It is the dominant intellectual framework in much of today’s academia, media and corporate culture.  At its core, it is an extension and radicalisation of the Critical Theory developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Critical Theory argued that Western society maintains its power not primarily through economics, but through culture, ideas, language and institutions that shape how people think. Since the spontaneous revolution Marx expected didn’t arrive, it would have to be actively forced through the systematic critique and dismantling of these “oppressive structures”. Revolution, in other words, became something that must be consciously engineered.  This approach exploded in the 1970s and 80s with the rise of Critical Legal Studies. Scholars argued that law was not neutral but an instrument of power used by the dominant class to maintain control. That opened the floodgates. Soon came Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Studies, Critical Pedagogy. All of them share the same core project: identifying hidden systems of oppression based on race, gender, class and sexuality, and demanding active intervention to achieve “equity” (equality of outcome) rather than mere equality of rights. We now call this "woke".  That the revolution must be forced to happen is why modern critical theory is so explicitly activist. As Ibram X. Kendi put it: “It is not enough to not be racist; we must be actively anti-racist.” Passivity is seen as complicity. Neutrality is impossible. Education, under Critical Pedagogy, is no longer about teaching knowledge but about turning students into political activists who view society through the lens of power and oppression.  Critical Studies’ deeply anti-individual core replaces the idea of the sovereign individual with group identity and collective guilt. It rejects objective truth, merit and colour-blind liberalism in favour of power analysis and enforced equity. What began as a marginal academic project has become a powerful ideological machine that now dominates government policy, corporate hiring and education systems across the West."

Rothmus 🏴 on X - "The left just normalized so much insanity that basic self-preservation now gets called “far right extremism.”   Decades of open borders and failed assimilation delivered parallel societies, welfare strain, and crime spikes in city after city.  Green fanaticism delivered energy poverty and deindustrialization while virtue signaling.  Woke ideology delivered confused kids, erased women, and attacks on national identity.  And the result is voters across France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK and beyond are backing the parties the media smears as “far right.”  Those parties are simply saying what was common sense centrist a generation ago.  Secure borders. Citizens first. Affordable energy. Law and order. Protect children. Preserve your culture.  The Overton window got dragged so far left that reality, sanity, and common sense now look radical."

Reddit Lies on X - "Pew Research put a quiz on r/politics and revealed the subreddit is 97% left leaning, with nearly half being the farthest left the poll counted. Reddit is an echochamber, discourse is dead on that site."
Golden Press PR on X - "They still don't realize that their site is an astroturfed echo chamber. Even after kamalas loss you think they would realize that? Reddit and bluesky are now the new tumblrs. containment chambers. They are deceived into thinking they are the majority. They will keep losing"

‘Monstrous’ Equality Act has gone too far, warns Lord Sewell - "The Equality Act is a “monster” that has embedded “flawed ideology” in the British state, a report has said.  Lord Sewell, the Tory peer, said the legislation had given the state too much power to “actively enforce equality” and had done so unevenly.  A Prosperity Institute report, published on Tuesday, calls for the repeal of the act, claiming it has replaced “individual freedom with collective victimhood”.  The paper argues that the act, which came into force just before the 2010 election, means “discrimination is assumed to be the norm”. In a foreword, Lord Sewell wrote: “We built a monster. The original intent of anti-discrimination law was to give citizens legal recourse against discriminatory acts.  “Instead, we created something far more ambitious: a framework that grants sweeping powers to the state and its agencies to actively enforce equality.”  The peer, author of a 2021 report on race and ethnic disparities, added: “The problem is not merely that this power exists – it is that access to it remains unevenly distributed.”  In addition, Lord Sewell noted that class and geography, the two characteristics that “most reliably determine one’s prospects in modern Britain”, were not protected under the legislation...  the Conservatives have pledged to tear up the requirement for public-sector bodies to promote equality by abolishing the public sector equality duty (PSED).  The PSED is part of the Equality Act 2010, and tells public bodies they must promote equality of opportunity between those who have a protected characteristic (such as women, black people and gay people) and those who do not. According to Lord Sewell’s report, the legislation led to a “legal shift from a concept of negative law, in which certain specific acts of discrimination were prescribed” to a more sweeping approach.  The report proposes that the act should be repealed altogether, and that the concept of protected characteristics should be taken out of the law.  The report suggests replacing it with a “bare” anti-discrimination framework which could be bolted on to the Employment Rights Act to protect some groups such as those with disabilities."

Council held ‘safe space meeting’ for ethnic minorities after Henry Nowak’s death - "Diversity and inclusion staff at Southwark council, in south-east London, advertised the meeting for non-white colleagues in the wake of Mr Nowak’s death... The council’s first safe spaces were organised in 2024 following unrest in the wake of the Southport killings.  And a meeting was held in May following the death of Yves Sakila, an Irish-Congolese man who died after being restrained by security guards outside a Dublin department store following an alleged shoplifting incident."

Matthew Schmitz on X - "Helen Lewis and Ezra Klein spend a lot of time here dismissing @herandrews ’s “The Great Feminization.” But important Democrats seem to think that Andrews has a point, even if they’d never say so out loud and their responses are misguided at best.  Graham Platner is now being promoted as the Democratic Party’s answer to “HR-lady politics.” Gavin Newsom is comparing himself to Patrick Bateman, a character who’s unspeakably violent toward women. When it comes to policy questions, these men are upstanding feminists. But in their self-presentation they’re leaning into masculinist messaging."
Thread by @GreenPlusAnE on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Dems can’t do anything about this because it is downstream from the law. The law created HR, and “HR ladies.” Employment law is vague. It was left to HR and the courts to figure it out. In effect it banned hiring for virtue, and mandated HR bureaucracy, diversity training, grievance panels and racial preferences. And Dems worship these laws. This is also why I disagree somewhat with Andrews’ monocausal explanation of feminization. It downplays the role of the administrative state and the overall regime. Women would have different roles and impacts under a different regime."
Matthew Schmitz on X - "Instead of moderating on the substance, they seem to have decided it makes sense to lean into bizarre forms of masculinist messaging (Nazi tattoos are a sign of authentic working-class masculinity; vote for the Patrick Bateman look-alike; Mayor Pete is now a lumberjack)."
Russ Greene on X - "Exactly. Simple example: affirmative action is an 80-20 issue. Just oppose it. But no, too hard."

John Rain on X - "A U.S. situational study found that: Police officers took 1.09 seconds to shoot an armed, aggressive white suspect versus 1.32 seconds to shoot a similar black suspect. Study title: "The effect of reverse racism".
Source : James, L., James, S. M., & Vila, B. J. (2016). The Reverse Racism Effect. Criminology & Public Policy, 15(2), 457–479. doi:10.1111/1745-9133.12187"