The DSA Platform vs. Mao's Original Platform: A Side-by-Side Reading Plus Guangxi: A Case Study

Insurrection Barbie on X

The DSA Platform vs. Mao's Original Platform: A Side-by-Side Reading Plus Guangxi: A Case Study

The DSA's 2025-2026 program was ratified this year. Its authoritative text is public at platform.dsausa.org. Mao Zedong's founding platform — the Common Program of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference — was adopted on September 29, 1949, and served as the constitution of the People's Republic of China until 1954. Below is a side-by-side comparison of the two:

Both frame politics as a war between "the working class" and "the capitalist class." The DSA platform says: "We stand against the capitalist class and the politicians that serve their interests" (DSA Program). Mao's platform: China's revolution unites the working class and peasants against "imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism" (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both demand a new rewritten constitution. DSA: "Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program itself was the new constitution, replacing the pluralist 1946 Constitution of the Republic of China.

Both call for a single unicameral legislature. DSA: "proportional representation in a single federal legislature" — meaning the abolition of the U.S. Senate (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program established the National People's Congress as "the highest body of state power" — unicameral by design (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both eliminate independent judicial review. DSA: "Limit the Court's power of judicial review which it uses to effectively create and abolish laws outside the legislative process" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program subordinated all courts to "democratic centralism" (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both nationalize the "commanding heights." DSA: "the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control" and "public ownership over major transportation and energy infrastructure and natural resources" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program: "development of production through socialist relations of production," with the state prioritizing "the state-owned economy" while tolerating small private enterprises in a "mixed economy" transitional phase (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both defend America's geopolitical adversaries against sanctions. DSA: "End economic sanctions that impact the sovereignty of countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program based its foreign policy on "respect for mutual sovereignty" — the identical rhetorical formula he used to justify supporting Kim Il-sung's invasion of South Korea and every anti-Western regime that followed (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both demand reduced U.S. military capability. DSA: "Greatly reduce the U.S. military budget, close overseas bases, and bring troops home" (DSA Program). Mao dissolved the Nationalist army and reoriented Chinese military doctrine around anti-imperial "self-reliance."

Both weaponize "fascism" as an expandable enemy label. DSA: "Only a party that fights for working people can win the battle against fascism" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program aimed to eliminate "feudal, compradorial, and fascist ideologies" — a category eventually used to justify killing 240,000 shopkeepers in the 1952 Five Antis Campaign (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Those are just the highlights.

Here is the objection I will get from from the lovers of the common good utopia on the left: "That's ridiculous. The DSA is not Mao. It's Scandinavian social democracy. You're being hysterical."

Every Marxist-Leninist party that has ever taken power on a moderate platform has purged its coalition partners and begun killing within a decade. Every single one. There are no exceptions.

The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, in coalition with King Sihanouk and moderate Cambodian nationalists. Within 72 hours they had forcibly evacuated the entire two-million-person population of Phnom Penh at gunpoint into the countryside. Currency was abolished the same week. Wearing eyeglasses became evidence of being an intellectual, punishable by death (Britannica / Khmer Rouge). Within four years they had murdered 1.7 to 2.2 million of their own people out of a population of 8 million which was the highest percentage of a nation's own population killed by its own government in modern history (Museum of Communist Terror, Wikipedia / Killing Fields).

Fidel Castro told Herbert Matthews of the New York Times in 1957, on the record: "I have said clearly and definitely that we are not communists." His 26th of July Movement's public platform was the restoration of the 1940 Cuban Constitution, free elections within 18 months, and freedom of the press. He seized Havana on January 1, 1959. Eleven days later the first mass firing squads began operating at La Cabaña fortress, and they were personally supervised by Che Guevara. The free elections promised in 18 months were never held. (Britannica / History Will Absolve Me, Cuba Archive).

Lenin's Bolsheviks ran on "Peace, Land, Bread" and in the November 1917 election for that Assembly the freest election in Russian history the Bolsheviks came in second, with 24% of the vote. When the Assembly convened on January 5, 1918, Lenin let them meet for 13 hours and then dissolved it at gunpoint. It never reconvened. The Red Terror was announced September 5, 1918, just ten months after the coup. By 1923, five million peasants, the same peasants that were promised "bread" were dead from the Russian Famine which was largely caused by forced grain requisitions from the Bolsheviks who had promised them land (Britannica / Russian Revolution).

Hugo Chávez told voters in 1998: "We are not going to expropriate. We are not communists." He then won 56% of the vote and within eight years his government had shut down the country's largest independent television station, packed the Supreme Court, and rewritten the constitution. Within fifteen he had expropriated 1,168 companies. By 2018 the country had 130,000% hyperinflation. By 2024 GDP had collapsed 78% and eight million Venezuelans — a quarter of the population — fled the country (Funds Society, SECO 2025 report).

Daniel Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua in 2006 as a reformed democrat who had accepted pluralism. In 2018 he killed at least 355 protesters (BBC). By 2023 he had stripped 222 political opponents of their Nicaraguan citizenship and deported them to the United States, including priests and former revolutionary comrades. In 2023 he sentenced Bishop Rolando Álvarez — a Catholic bishop — to 26 years in prison (Human Rights Watch). Catholic convents were shut down; the Missionaries of Charity were expelled; the Jesuit University of Central America was confiscated by the government.

Mao's own timeline is the most instructive of all. The Common Program was adopted October 1, 1949. Land Reform executions began within one year and killed up to five million landlords by 1953. By 1957, when Mao invited intellectuals to critique the Party in the "Hundred Flowers Campaign," half a million to 1.3 million people were arrested and sent to labor camps (Britannica / Anti-Rightist Campaign). By 1962 the Great Leap Forward famine killed 30 to 45 million people. By 1968, in Guangxi, the Party was organizing cannibalism.

They all started as moderates.

The Great Leap Forward alone killed more human beings in four years than every American war in the history of the United States combined, times thirty. The Great Leap was caused by a room full of central planners in Beijing who believed they could out-think markets, farmers, and physics. So they ordered peasants to melt down their cooking pots and farm tools into backyard steel furnaces which made 99% of the resulting steel unusable (MME Revise source booklet). Then they ordered the extermination of sparrows because sparrows ate grain. One billion sparrows were killed by citizens banging pots until the birds dropped dead from exhaustion. Without sparrows, locusts exploded and a 2025 NBER study calculated that the sparrow extermination alone caused approximately 2 million deaths (NBER).

Mao's own words to his own staff, on the record were: "50 million may have to die … you can't blame me when people die" (Hudson Institute).

Strangely, the American college graduate has never heard of the Great Leap Forward and instead has been told that the Cultural Revolution was about "excesses" rather than mass genocide. The university they attend assigned them The Communist Manifesto but never assigned The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press). See that's the book that documents the 94 million deaths attributable to communist regimes in the 20th century. All of whom by the way started as noncommunist moderate socialists. The Black Book of Communism is one of the most heavily peer-reviewed works of political history published in the last thirty years. It is also, unavailable in the modern American university curriculum.

In case the facts presented above are not enough, let's review what happened on June 18, 1968, in the Chinese province of Guangxi. In a 1983 internal investigation of the Chinese Communist Party itself, and further documented in Donald Sutton's academic study The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, archives told one of the most horrifying stories I had ever read.

Wu Shufang was a teacher who taught geography and she spent the spring of 1968 as the target of a series of "struggle sessions" — the Cultural Revolution's signature ritual, in which she was dragged to a stage, forced to wear a dunce cap listing her crimes, made to kneel, and beaten while a crowd shouted denunciations. Her crime was that she came from an educated family and belonged to the "stinking ninth category" of class enemies.

In the end her students beat her to death on the morning of June 18.

Then the student leaders forced four of her fellow teachers to carry her body to the river and they forced one of the teachers — a colleague, who had shared a classroom with her — to slice her open so they could remove her heart and her liver. The remains were carried back to school and then seventy or eighty students ate her flesh in the school kitchen (Sutton, Time magazine, 1993).

Another group of students, in a smaller ceremony, cooked additional parts of her body in an earthenware pot in the private lodging of the vice head of the county Revolutionary Committee. Four of the students actually ate the meal in his presence.

A third group of students barbecued her flesh on a walkway outside classrooms 31 and 32 (Sutton).

This happened at a public high school in the middle of the afternoon. It happened while the "moderate" institutions of Chinese socialism — the neighborhood committees, the workplace units, the student associations, the local party branches — were all operating exactly as designed.

Wu Shufang was one of at least 421 named human beings eaten in Guangxi Province in the summer of 1968 (Wikipedia / Guangxi Massacre). Song Yongyi's archival work documents cannibalism in 27 of Guangxi's 40 counties — two-thirds of the province (Radio Free Asia interview with Song Yongyi).

Here are some of the others:

Zhang Boxun, primary-school teacher, Huangmao Street, same day, June 18, 1968. Denounced as a rebel-faction sympathizer. Tried to jump into a river to escape a struggle session. Caught. A militiaman named Guo Lixiang cut out his heart and liver with a five-inch knife. His flesh was cooked in an earthenware pot at the local government's Foodstuffs Depot. Over 80% of the unit's members ate the meat — some under duress (Sutton).

Two children, ages 11 and 14, Pubei County. Their father was beaten to death for belonging to the "fifth category" of class enemies. The local officials said, according to the primary-source record: "It is important to eradicate such people." The children were killed and eaten (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Liu Xiulan, 17 years old, daughter of a landowner. Gang-raped by nine people, who then cut open her belly and ate her liver and breasts. Her entire family was wiped out (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Gan Dazuo, Datuan village. Castrated and disemboweled while still alive by his own clansmen. His last recorded words: "Wait 'til I'm dead, then cut" (Sutton).

Chen Guorong, May 14, 1968. Ambushed by an 11-man militia. Killed with a large knife. His liver was cut out and shared among 20 participants as a night meal (Time magazine).

Five people in Shangsi County, October 1968. Militia leader "cut open the bellies of five people, ripped out their livers, cooked them and sat down together to eat them. The next day, they killed four more people and ripped out their livers, which they shared with the other people on the production brigade, who all got to taste a mouthful each, to symbolize the dictatorship of the proletariat" (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Every one of these deaths was carried out by "the revolutionary masses" against people the local Communist Party had labeled "class enemies," in a province with no famine (Bitter Winter). This was not desperation. There was food. This was cannibalism as political ritual.

The 1983 official CCP investigation of Wuxuan County alone found:

56 victims had their hearts and livers cut out.

18 victims were consumed completely — "down to the soles of their feet."

13 victims had their genitals eaten.

7 victims were cut up while still alive.

In Binyang County, every family was required to send a member to the eating hole to eat human flesh (Sutton). In one Wuxuan work unit, two young girls whose political standpoint was suspect were forced to eat the flesh to prove they were on the right side (Sutton).

"Cannibalism enabled the ringleaders in these obscene acts to distribute the blame among fellow participants and thereby protect themselves" (Sutton).

The eating was administered as a loyalty test and refusing to eat people meant you would be the next target. What starts as "the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control" ends, in every historical instance, with the population being compelled to participate in mass murder so that nobody can safely testify against the party. That is the endgame of every ideology that believes there is no legitimate safeguard between the individual and the state — no independent institutions, no protected property, no countervailing courts, no free press, no sovereign local jurisdiction, no owner of anything the state cannot take. In that arrangement, the party runs out of external enemies within a decade, and the machinery it built to destroy them starts destroying the party's own founders, the party's own coalition partners, and finally the party's own supporters.

Of the estimated hundreds of thousands killed in Guangxi and the 421+ documented cannibalizations:

15 people were prosecuted for cannibalism, with sentences up to 14 years.

91 Party members were expelled — none was severely punished.

The provincial party boss who orchestrated the entire campaign, Wei Guoqing, was never punished. He rose to the CCP Politburo, served as Director of the People's Liberation Army's General Political Department, and died peacefully in 1989. On October 24, 2024, Xi Jinping's government reburied Wei Guoqing's ashes with full military honors at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery — the CCP equivalent of Arlington (Radio Free Asia, 2024).

The current Chinese Communist Party the same party the DSA idolizes buried the man who supervised the cannibalism of 421 human beings, with full military honors, less than two years ago.

In 1981, 43% of the world's most extremely poor people lived in China. Mao had been dead five years and his planned economy had killed 65 million people, produced brittle backyard steel, starved the countryside, cannibalized the schools, and left the population as poor per capita as sub-Saharan Africa.

Then, in 1978, Deng Xiaoping restored private property in the countryside, deregulated prices, welcomed foreign capital, and allowed markets to reallocate labor and goods.

By 2020, China's share of world extreme poverty was less than 1%.

Roughly 800 million human beings were lifted out of extreme poverty (World Bank Poverty and Inequality Update, Fall 2025, Aeon on the World Bank's own data).

Every socialist experiment in history has produced starvation, tyranny, mass killing, and emigration. Every mixed-market economy in history has produced feast, freedom, and immigration. There are zero counterexamples. Not one. Ask a DSA member for the socialist country they would move to.

Links - 24th September 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

Do the Rich Get All the Gains from Economic Growth? - "Adjusted for inflation, the US economy has more than doubled in real terms since 1975.  How much of that growth has gone to the average person? According to many economists, the answer is none or close to none... these depressing conclusions rely on studies and data that are incomplete or flawed. They understate economic growth for the poor and the middle class because they use measures of prices that mis-measure inflation. Some studies leave out important components of compensation such as fringe benefits which have become increasingly important in recent years. And some studies include the elderly which lowers measured progress because the elderly are an increasing share of the population and they are less likely to be working full-time if at all... Many of the most pessimistic studies about the fate of the American middle class ignore the changes in the American family since the 1970s and the effects have had on the way we measure changes in household income... the biggest problem with the pessimistic studies is that they rarely follow the same people to see how they do over time. Instead, they rely on a snapshot at two points in time. So for example, researchers look at the median income of the middle quintile in 1975 and compare that to the median income of the median quintile in 2014, say. When they find little or no change, they conclude that the average American is making no progress.  But the people in the snapshots are not the same people. You can’t use two snapshots to conclude that only the rich have made progress. It’s possible that everyone from the earlier snapshot has actually gotten richer and then been replaced by different people whose incomes will also rise. This is especially true when there is immigration. If new immigrants are disproportionately less skilled than Americans already here, measured incomes can fall even when those who are already here have steadily improving economic prospects. And when marriage rates are falling and people are increasingly living on their own, household income can fall while every individual is doing better. Estimate of economic progress based on household income are distorted by these effects.  What the snapshots show is that the rich today are richer than the rich of yesterday. If the rich people are the same people as yesterday, then one’s class determines one’s fate. But if they are not the same people, the snapshots tell you that the dispersion of income has increased. That may or may not bother you, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a distinct group called “the rich” who are capturing all the gains while the rest of us tread water. How important are these issues? One way to find out is to follow the same people over time.  When you follow the same people over time, you get a very different story from the standard one.  When you follow the same people over time, the largest gains over time often go to the poorest workers; the richest workers often make no progress.  The most dramatic claims by the pessimists that no one is making progress other than the rich are wrong. A study by Leonard Lopoo and Thomas DeLeire for the Pew Charitable Trusts uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and compares the family incomes of children to the income of their parents... 93% of the children in the poorest households — those in the bottom 20% — surpassed their parents. Only 70% of those raised in the top quintile exceeded their parent’s income... Julia Isaacs’s study for the Pew Charitable Trusts looking at the late 1960’s up to 2002 finds that children raised in the poorest families made the largest gains as adults relative to children born into richer families. The children from the poorest families ended up twice as well-off as their parents when they became adults. The children from the poorest families had the largest absolute gains as well. Children raised in the top quintile did no better or worse than their parents once those children became adults... Moving forward in the time of the analysis, Gerald Auten, Geoffrey Gee, and Nicholas Turner of the Office of Tax Analysis in the Treasury Department used tax returns to see how rich and poor did between 1987 and 2007. They find the same encouraging pattern: poorer people had the largest percentage gains in income over time... The median income of the people in the top 20% in 1987 ended up 5% lower twenty years later. The people in the middle 20% ended up with median income that was 27% higher. And if you started in the bottom 20%, your income doubled. If you were in the top 1% in 1987, 20 years later, median income was 29% lower... Splinter’s numbers don’t control for age. Presumably the lowest quintile workers in 1980 are going to be younger so perhaps the growth we see is just normal raises as workers gain experience. So I asked Yonatan Berman who has been working with the same data to do a similar calculation but restricting the sample to workers who start out 25–30 in 1980... All groups, and not just the richest, gain over their lifetime. The poorest workers make the largest percentage gains. The two lowest quintiles see their incomes more than double over their working life. The absolute gains for the three lowest quintiles are $18,800, $22,300, and $23,800. While the rich have larger absolute gains, the variance is much larger.  Finally, this is labor income. It does not include any measures of fringe benefits, benefits that became larger part of compensation over this period. No government transfers. No capital gains. And I would argue that the national income deflator imperfectly controls for improved quality of the goods we consume. This biases it upward meaning real growth is understated for all groups. Going in the other direction — these numbers are for workers — people who had earnings at both the beginning and the end of the period, so this probably overstates the increase in labor income of people at the bottom. The American economy isn’t just helping the richest Americans. Prosperity is being enjoyed widely... This does not mean that everything is fine in the American economy. There are special privileges reserved for the rich that help them reduce their risk of downward mobility — financial bailouts are the most egregious example. There are too many barriers like occupational licensing and the minimum wage that handicap the disadvantaged desperately trying to succeed in the workplace. And the American public school system is an utter failure for too many children who need to acquire the skills needed for the 21st century. But the glass is at least half-full... the proportion of households with two earners has actually decreased since 1980. (See Table H-12 here from the Census Bureau.) That’s because while more married couples are households where both spouses are working, the marriage rate has fallen." ‏ً on X - "The absolute funniest part of capitalist ideology is that they someone managed to convince everyone that "freedom" meant like...the freedom to choose between 63 kinds of shampoo, and not like...the freedom to quit a job you hate without losing your health insurance."
Canada has single payer healthcare but left wingers there are just as miserable, because left wingers are always miserable

Polymarket on X - "BREAKING: Florida becomes the first state to block welfare cash from being spent on tattoos, theme park tickets, video games, vapes, & other non-essential purchases."
Paul on X - "Welfare can be used on Tattoos, Theme park tickets, Video games, vapes, and other luxry goods?"
Left wingers just accused this of being fake news and people believing it of being stupid

No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health

End Wokeness on X - "Here's the cabin that Dolly Parton grew up in with 11 siblings. No electricity or water. Dolly died worth $650+ million, after $500 million donated to charity! This is America."
Clearly, she oppressed lots of people by getting rich and it's good that she died

Krystal Ball on X - "There is very simple math behind the need to tax billionaires. Billionaire wealth is increasing at an accelerating rate vastly outpacing the overall rise in GDP. This means that their wealth is not growing because the whole pie is growing. Their wealth is growing at your expense and the trend is accelerating. If you are not a billionaire and you and your children want to own things, this is your fight."
Crime In NYC on X - "If “the whole pie” remained at a constant size while their share grew, then your “very simple math” would make sense."
Left wing zero sum thinking again. They think they are poor because other people are rich.

Meme - Josh Howerton: "When Christians use the word "generosity" they mean "generosity with your own money." When progressives use the word "generosity" they mean "voting for the government to forcibly redistribute other people's money.""
sasseite @RespectableCon: "Presented without comment."
"Charitable giving by county in 2013. Percent of income given to charity *high in Christian/left wing areas, low in secular/right wing areas*"

The Kobeissi Letter on X - "BREAKING: Nike stock, $NKE, collapses to its lowest level since September 2014, now down -78% from its all time high seen in 2021. The stock has now officially erased over -$200 billion in market cap since its record high."
Lauren Chen on X - "EBT is reworked so that people need to spend their own money to get junk food, and now Nike's stock is collapsing. lol. lmao, even"

Meme - "WHY IS IT OKAY FOR BEYONCE TO MAKE $60 MILLION... _BUT NOT OKAY FOR A CEO WITH 3,000 EMPLOYEES TO MAKE $5 MILLION?"

Meme - Richard Hanania: "Businesses are fleeing blue states to go to red states. Biggest losers in terms of corporate headquarters are SF, LA, NYC, Chicago and SD. Biggest winners: Dallas, Austin, Houston, Phoenix, and Nashville. Capitalism just works better than statism. Why can't people admit it?"
"Southern hospitality. Net change in number of company headquarters from relocations, 2020-25"

Meme - Basil @LinkofSunshine: "NYC ran an experiment: a separate minimum wage for construction workers on buildings above 99 units ($72.50 an hour) As a result, almost all construction has been scaled back to 99 units, and we've built significantly less housing"
"Filings for new buildings by number of units"
Clear proof that the solution is to not have any exemptions and to pay all construction workers on buildings "fairly", and that the housing shortage is due to greedy capitalists and we need to seize houses to end it

Meme -
qasimrashid: "A reminder that it is always the right time to tax billionaires out of existence and protect working people, our democracy, and our future humanity"
qasimrashid: "NASA used our tax dollars to successfully complete a historic trip around the moon. Bezos skipped out on paying taxes and built his Blue Origin New Glenn rocket to explode on a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Tax billionaires out of existence."
"Me when I have no idea how rockets work and know nothing about the history of NASA SLS or Orion."
When left wingers are very clear that when they say "tax the rich" or "tax billionaires", they are spiteful and mean to tax them until they are no longer rich or tax them until they are no longer billionaires. The primary motivation for left wing taxation policy is not to raise money but to punish the rich and successful (at any rate, those more rich and successful than them).
Blue Origin New Glenn's explosion didn't kill anyone. The Challenger disaster killed 7 people and Columbia killed another 7. This is proof that the US needs to confiscate Jeff Bezos's wealth to fund NASA

Stephen Moore on X - "Americans now pay more in taxes than they spend on food, clothing, and shelter combined. Think about that. Government has become so big and bloated that taxes cost more than life's basic necessities. Every American taxpayer should be outraged."
Of course, left wingers demand even higher taxes, because they think only the "rich" will pay them

Robert Schultz on X - "people will be like “but if we raise taxes on billionaires then the billionaires will just leave!” and it’s like, oh really, you’re saying we’d either gain more money in tax revenue or lose the weirdest people with the worst vibes? sounds like a win-win"
involuntary sentient on X - "The weirdest people with the worst vibes who are also the ones stealing all our money. So like...the cause of the problem will leave. Oh no."
Left wingers just hate rich people. Good luck paying for social spending when all the rich people leave
Left wingers think they are poor because other people are rich. Weird how when there were fewer billionaires, people were poorer

Handre on X - "$17 billion for 3.4 miles of subway tunnel. That works out to roughly $5 billion per mile, making the Second Avenue Subway the most expensive transit construction project in human history, per mile, by a significant margin. Madrid built its entire metro expansion in the early 2000s at under $100 million per mile. You are not misreading those numbers.  The Metropolitan Transportation Authority spent 86 years planning Phase 1 (the stretch from 96th Street to 63rd Street, opened in January 2017) before finally breaking ground in 2007. Decades of studies, committees, environmental reviews, and public hearings. Nobody personally paid for those delays. Nobody got fired. No executive absorbed the cost of a decade's worth of inflation, redesigns, and contractor overruns. When you insulate decision-makers from financial consequences, you get exactly this: paralysis followed by extravagance.  Free market economists have a term for what drives this: the calculation problem. Without real prices generated by voluntary exchange, planners cannot rationally allocate resources. The MTA doesn't discover the most efficient tunnel route through competition. It negotiates with unions whose contracts prohibit obvious efficiencies, hires consultants paid by the hour with zero incentive to finish, and answers to politicians who measure success in ribbon-cutting photos rather than cost per passenger mile.   The deeper issue is who pays. New York State taxpayers, federal taxpayers, and future riders through fare revenue all absorb the tab. The people who made the decisions that produced $5 billion-per-mile costs face no personal liability. A private developer whose budget overruns sees his equity evaporate. He has skin in the game. The MTA's leadership has a salary and a pension.  Phase 2 (96th Street to 125th Street, 1.5 miles) carries a projected price tag above $7.7 billion and has just broken ground. The political class will tell you this is what world-class infrastructure costs. What they won't tell you is that Tokyo, a city with arguably the most sophisticated rail network on earth, builds subway lines at roughly $250 million per mile, using private operators who survive only if they perform."
This doesn't explain why Anglo countries are prone to this sort of cost inflation

Austin Padgett (LudwigNeverMises) on X - "The money you save using cheaper labor in China is three times less than what it costs to ship the stuff all the way back here. The reason it is impossible to build in the US is we made it illegal. And so the industrial ecosystems developed in China. Avg labor cost as a percent of manufacturing revenue
China- 11%
US-14%
Difference- 3%
 Trans pacific shipping as a percent of manufacturing revenue- 10%  10 percent is over three times more than 3 percent.   So if it costs three times more to ship stuff halfway across the world than we make in labor savings why are we manufacturing so much in China?  The idea that we lost our production to foreign slave labor has elements of truth in the rare cases which prove to be exceptions to the rule.   But generally it is a pernicious leftist myth that distracts people from the real causes of our failure and creates a sense of fatalism that prevents us from solving the problem.   Interior China didn’t out compete coastal China even though the labor cost is lower. The whole point is skilled labor, the technology to maximize labor efficiency and the synergy of industrial hubs.   100 people picking rice in a field can’t compete with a tractor.   We can make stuff in America and we can make it not only cheaper, but also BETTER than anything the world has ever seen.   We’ve done it before, we can do it again. In fact we’ve already started."

Mark Grote | Facebook - "If you care about affordability, you must look at what is happening to Seattle. For years, state leadership has used liberal loving "tax the rich" policies as a low-risk political tactic, replacing a culture of achievement (the few) with one of resentment (the many). The results are now undeniable:
A "Zombie" Downtown: High-tech hubs and corporate job creators have been chased off by aggressive corporate, employee, and wealth taxes, leaving behind a skyline of vacant offices. Seattle now has the highest vacancy rate in the country.
The Hidden Cost: Because the tax base has eroded, the burden is shifting directly onto local homeowners even before now. Our personal King County property taxes are up 77% since we built our house in 2010 - and that before these recent headlines, painting a foreboding future for taxpayers.
A Shrinking Pie: Rather than focusing on growing the economy to expand opportunity for everyone, lawmakers have used these policies to alienate the very engines of growth that fund our state services. Their hubris never looks at the results of these terrible policies. It's just one bad idea that leads to another.
We are now trapped in a viscous cycle where service dependent low income earners flood the market while business flight shrinks the tax base, forcing the government to squeeze residents to make up the shortfall. Unless we shift away from a strategy of envy or "soak the rich" to one that attracts upward job creators, your taxes—and your cost of living—will continue to spiral upward, not only driving away job creators and tax revenue, but driving all of us away as well."

Meme - Freyja Katra, Girl IRL Cat URL @FreyjaErlings: "A thing they don't tell you about the "push a button for a million dollars but someone you don't know dies" hypothetical is that literally every billionaire is effectively pressing that button as much as they can all the time because that's how exploitation works"
Left wingers have a zero sum view of the world and think that for someone else to be rich, others must be poor

Is Met Gala sponsor Jeff Bezos evil just because he's rich? - "Our politics have been analogized to Veep. A more apt comparison some days is that we are living in a cartoon. Every good cartoon needs a supervillain or three. Our supervillains created millions of jobs, made goods cheaper and far easier to obtain, and revolutionized access to information, among other terrible, terrible things.   I am referring to billionaires. Reasonable people will debate, and disagree on, the best way to sketch out the tax code. Protestations to "tax the rich" have long been central to progressive politics. But last week's Met Gala was a reminder that there is something else undergirding those calls: what seems like legitimate hatred or, at a minimum, disgust. Why?...  The common theme here is that Bezos et al. are, in effect, not just subject to an unfair tax rate. It is that they are evil. He is not paying his "fair share," he is throwing people out onto the streets, he and others must have abused the law... it's also important to interrogate the basic idea that someone is evil because he is rich, which has become common wisdom in certain circles. There are certainly wealthy people who are rotten. Making a product that others want, though, does not make someone a bad egg. Amazon, founded by Bezos, allows people to get items much quicker and often for considerably less money. As of December of last year, the company employed 1.58 million people. He is our cartoon villain?   There are other examples. Sergey Brin and Larry Page gave the world near-unfettered access to information with Google. Maybe it's even how you found this article. (Thanks.) Steve Jobs effectively put computers in our pockets, facilitating more intimate communication and connection with friends and loved ones near and far. Elon Musk, for all of his controversy, helped pioneer the modern electric vehicle and is investing in technology to help people with neural issues regain function. Why is this never a part of the story?  This ire is not constrained to the yearly Met Gala. Perhaps nothing captures it better than a video New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed last month, standing on the street, sneering while he informed constituents that "today, we're taxing the rich." The proposal: a pied-á-terre tax on luxury units whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Why sneering? Because Mamdani was outside of one such unit. He pointed upward at the penthouse and named and shamed its owner, Ken Griffin. Perhaps there is a conversation to be had about an additional tax on high-end, part-time residences. A government leader expressing such revulsion for a constituent is another thing entirely. One of the two men has a lot of audacity, and it is not the private citizen.   Griffin, after all, is a major contributor to the New York economy, though he has reportedly begun scaling back in response to the video. He is also a major philanthropist, having given away billions of dollars. Bezos, meanwhile, recently gave a $100 million donation to a charity funding early childhood education in New York. Will Bernie Sanders add that to his list of Bezos expenditures?"
Left wingers hate success, after all.

Rock Chartrand on X - "The buyer is just as "greedy" for wanting lower prices as the seller is for wanting higher ones. The employee is just as "greedy" for wanting higher wages as the employer is for wanting lower labor costs.   The free market channels these competing interests into voluntary exchange instead of coercion, and the resulting price is whatever both parties find acceptable. Neither side gets everything it wants, but both walk away believing they're better off than before, or no change takes place."
Turd Ferguson on X - ""Greed" is a term always applied to other people's wants, and never to our own."

Possum Reviews on X - "Remember how pissed Democrats got when the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron rule in 2024? That was the rule that enabled government agencies to make up their own interpretations of ambiguous regulations. This effectively gave them the power to fine people for made-up violations whenever they felt like it. Naturally, they would enforce their own rules selectively and arbitrarily.  Of course they couldn't do that on paper, but in real life, not everyone had the resources to sue the government when the EPA or FDA hit them with a bogus violation and fined them for something that was perfectly legal a week prior. This resulted in veterans being denied benefits they previously qualified for, made criminals of the owners of legal firearms, and the EPA used an absurd definition of "navigable waters" to justify fining farmers for filling in puddles.  When fines for trumped-up violations were imposed, they could force someone to pay money to a third party, including politically-aligned NGOs. In other words, when the Democrats controlled the government, they used this power to essentially bully political enemies out of their money and give it to themselves.  This isn't a conspiracy theory or even a secret. The Obama administration considered it a legitimate method of fundraising for Democrat-aligned organizations (and therefore themselves) without going through Congress. The Trump administration tried to stop it during his first term, but then Biden started it up again under the pretense of "environmental justice".  But then the Supreme Court overturned Chevron in 2024, and now the Democrats are broke. I don't think that's a coincidence."

Meme - "1. WE FORCE YOU TO PAY FOR ROADS, SCHOOLS, AND HEALTHCARE..
Man in tie: "It's for the common good!" *roads schools healthcare*
2. THEN WE TELL YOU THAT YOU DIDN'T BUILD ANYTHING BECAUSE YOU USED IT.
Man in tie: "You didn't build any of this. You just benefited from it."
3. SOMEHOW THE PEOPLE WHO PAID THE MOST ARE TOLD THEY OWE EVEN MORE TO THE PEOPLE WHO PAID THE LEAST.
Man in tie: "You successful people owe them even more!"
4. AND IF YOU OPPOSE BEING FORCED TO PAY FOR THEM BUT USE WHAT YOU ALREADY PAID FOR, WE CALL YOU A HYPOCRITE.
Normal man: "I oppose being forced to pay, but I'll use what I already paid for."
Man in tie: "HYPOCRITE!"
"Our philosophy: guilt the producers. Glorify the takers."
"A MARVELOUS SYSTEM-ONE THAT ALWAYS FINDS GUILT IN THE TAXPAYER AND VIRTUE IN THE TAX COLLECTOR.""
Left wingers are never grateful to the rich people who keep the gravy train going, because they feel entitled to all their property in perpetuity, and think if they keep any of it for themselves, that's "theft" and "subsidies for the rich"

Meme - "U.S. STATES GAINING vs LOSING NET INCOME (AGI) FROM MIGRATION
BASED ON IRS DATA FOR TAX YEARS 2022-2023 Shows the net amount of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) that moved into or out of each state due to interstate migration.
STATES GAINING (NET INCOME INFLOW)
Florida +$21B
Texas +$6B
South Carolina +$4B
North Carolina +$4B
Tennessee +$3B
Arizona +$3B
Nevada +$2B
Idaho +$988M
Georgia +$746M
Colorado +$715M
Alabama +$540M
Maine +$502M
Montana +$500M
Utah +$477M
Arkansas +$447M
STATES LOSING (NET INCOME OUTFLOW)
California -$12B
New York -$10B
Illinois -$6B
Massachusetts -$4B
New Jersey -$3B
Pennsylvania -$2B
Ohio -$2B
Minnesota -$1B
Michigan -$956M
Virginia -$912M
Louisiana -$799M
Oregon -$476M
Connecticut -$460M
Kansas -$361M
Indiana -$326M
This measures the net amount of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) that moved into or out of each state-not total wealth or assets.
Source: IRS SOI Tax Stats Migration Data (2022-2023) I Analysis: Realtor.com"
I wonder what common thread links most of these

Links - 23rd September 2026 (2 - 'Indigenous' Peoples: Canada)

Assembly of Treaty Chiefs call for premier, UCP treason investigation
They know the gravy train will stop if Alberta becomes independent
Left wingers hate freedom movements and equal rights if they hurt the left wing agenda
Complaining about foreign interference is rich given the amount of US funding of ecological and indigenous groups in Canada to keep it poor/i>

Meme Jonathan Kay: "Love how the esteemed "judges" appear with a wall of shoes, symbolizing those 215 "unmarked graves" in Kamloops they haven't quite gotten around to finding. Looks very professional and impartial"
"A panel of seven judges will hear evidence on behalf of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal this week at the daphne art centre in Montreal."

Artur Wilczynski on X - "Canada has work to do to address the ongoing systemic racism and challenges faced by Indigenous Peoples in this country. I do not agree that those challenges constitute a “continuing genocide”. Words have specific meaning."

Don't take verdict of 'continuing genocide' on Indigenous seriously | National Post - "at the Daphne art centre in Montreal, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) declared Canada guilty not only of genocide but “continuing genocide,” citing residential schools, alleged mass graves and current government policies.  Many Canadian media outlets reported the story uncritically, treating the non-binding ruling as major news and describing the panel as being composed of “international human rights experts” — despite the fact that it consisted of only seven panellists, including a psychologist, a documentary filmmaker and an Indigenous rights activist. The coverage omitted the fact that five years after it was announced that graves had been found, no excavations have begun at any residential schools, despite millions earmarked for the work, proving that some outlets readily accept and publish the words of activist groups as unquestioned truth without providing balanced information to the public. The PPT was founded in Italy in 1979 and is actually an NGO that describes itself as an “international opinion tribunal.” On its website, it describes its 57 sessions so far as “ensuring the participation of peoples and social movements and creating a working agenda for human and peoples’ rights at the global level.” It does not have any type of governmental, United Nations or judicial mandate. Therefore, any ruling from it is purely symbolic and non-binding.  Nevertheless, the Canadian Press’s story — which was picked up by CTV, CP24, the Toronto Star and CityNews, among others — described the tribunal variously as an “international panel of human rights experts” and a “panel of seven judges” that was “mandated to look at missing and disappeared children and unmarked graves at Canada’s residential school sites.”  In reality, the seven-members of the PPT’s panel for the session in Montreal, which laid this very serious claim at the feet of our country after just a week of hearings, are best described as activists rather than impartial, high-level human rights jurists, judging from their bios published on the panel’s website. Some of them, like Carlos Castresana, have law degrees and have been involved in various United Nations bodies. Others have credentials but are clearly not neutral arbiters. For example, Valmaine Toki, a Maori woman from New Zealand, is an Indigenous rights scholar, lawyer and Indigenous rights advocate.  Andrew Woolford, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba, is a researcher who focuses on genocide. His upcoming book, “Genocide in Canada: A Critical Approach,” is described as an exploration of “settler colonial genocide in Canada, overcoming the limitations of the traditional genocide concept and its legal formulation and demonstrating that settler colonialism threatens the existence of Indigenous peoples.” Woolford is not a judge. Nor is he a neutral academic. And judging by his book, he had already come to a conclusion about whether Canada is guilty of committing genocide before arriving in Montreal.  Others on the panel don’t have any legal experience at all. Carlos Beristain is described as a researcher with a PhD in psychology who investigates human rights violations in Latin America and has served as an “expert witness for medical and psychosocial evaluation” for human rights victims.  Ellen Gabriel, a Mohawk activist from Quebec, has a bachelor of fine arts degree from Concordia University. She has no legal training and is in no way qualified to rule on genocide. Seánna Howard has been working as an associate clinical professor, teaching international human rights and Indigenous peoples, and the international human rights advocacy workshop at the University of Arizona for almost 21 years.  Howard has never served as a judge, and her department’s website outlines clearly how her work revolves around Indigenous activism. It’s hard to see how she would be able to make a neutral assessment of Canada’s “continuing genocide.”  Despite the lack of qualifications of the panel members and their activist backgrounds, several news outlets suggested through headlines, and by virtue of simply parroting the ruling, that they were qualified and impartial enough to make a judgment on whether Canada committed, and is still committing, genocide — a very serious crime in international law.  All the panellists are, of course, entitled to their opinions, but the Canadian Press portrayed what went on as a “trial,” and their opinion as a “judgment” handed down by “judges,” making it sound like some sort of official proceeding, which it most certainly was not.  The Canadian Press story also did not include any voices to present counter-arguments or the fact that no unmarked graves have actually been confirmed at any residential school. This illustrates how an unbalanced wire story can be picked up and quickly under-inform the public. Other news stories, including those produced by the CBC, Global, APTN and National Observer, were also absent of skepticism.  The Globe and Mail recently came around to the fact that no human remains have been confirmed at Kamloops. How long will it take other outlets to do the same?"...  Words do have meaning — especially a word as grave as “genocide.” To activists, however, it is often just a rhetorical tool, a means to an end. It is time for media outlets to recognize this and stop uncritically parroting the pronouncements of unqualified activist panels."

The Canada ‘genocide’ is a tale for the 2020s - "May 2021 was an era more febrile than factual, and it’s no coincidence that the gothic stories about murdered indigenous children, followed by furious national protests, emerged just after the first anniversary of the killing of George Floyd. The Canadian politician Carolyn Bennett made the connection explicit: “This week has opened the eyes of many Canadians, just like George Floyd did.” Hey, so America is having race riots and national self-flagellations? Well, Canada can do that, too! ... the story didn’t “create itself” —  it was pushed by activists and politicians who saw an opportunity to bully and silence people while scoring virtue points.  The few journalists who did scrutinise the graves story, such as Terry Glavin, whose articles  about this saga are lucid and enraging, were vilified as genocide enablers. Anyone who dared to question  allegations of mass child murder was accused of “residential school denialism”, which several Canadian politicians sought to make a crime on a par with Holocaust denialism. One such politician is Leah Gazan, a New Democratic Party MP. Gazan was in the news for a different reason two months ago, when in a press conference she referred to “the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”, which is a yet further elaboration of the ever-expanding LGBT acronym. When many pointed out that it sounds more like a wifi password than shorthand for oppressed people, Gazan dismissed them as “bigots”.  Because that’s the modern activist playbook right there: make a wildly extreme statement, bandy around terms like “genocide” and denounce anyone who doesn’t swallow it all unquestioningly as a fascist. Then move on to the next cause and destroy their credibility too... it combined voyeuristic ghoulishness with white guilt and scolding — it couldn’t have been more of a 2020s story if it had somehow involved Taylor Swift.  Activists and politicians love to talk about accountability, but only in regard to other people. When it emerges that they’re the ones who screwed up, who denounced innocent journalists, exploited the pain of vulnerable people, muddied the facts of a real tragedy, used graves for a photoshoot with a teddy bear, suddenly the past — ie five years ago — is ancient history and we should all get over it."
There're left wingers still clinging on to the lie, but those who want to get over it do the same with covid too, while still obsessing over slavery etc from much much further back

There is no reconciliation without truth - The Globe and Mail - "Five years after the startling announcement that there were hundreds of possible unmarked graves near a residential school in Kamloops, B.C., there has been no public confirmation of the discovery of any human remains. That is reality, one reality... The fact of the crimes committed against Indigenous children at residential schools over many decades does not automatically validate claims that hundreds of students were dumped into unmarked graves in Kamloops and other residential schools. That is an extraordinary assertion, one that requires proof.  That should have been the starting point for the media in May, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation first issued a press release announcing the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” through the use of ground-penetrating radar that identified subterranean anomalies.  The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion. The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found. Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made reference to “mass graves” (a historically fraught phrase that does not appear in the Tk’emlúps 2021 press release).  Perhaps it will be proven, some day, that there are hundreds of unmarked graves at Kamloops. But it was not proven to be true in May, 2021. It is not proven to be true today.  The media changed the description of what had been discovered at Kamloops through the summer of 2021 to possible or probable graves, particularly after an expert working on the Kamloops site made clear the limitations of ground-penetrating radar. Indeed, by February, 2026, the band itself issued a press release referring only to “potential burials.”  That evolution in language does not erase the initial failure of journalism. The lesson of 2021 should be: assertions about residential schools should be listened to carefully, and then, just as carefully, held up to scrutiny.  Politicians also helped to fuel public perceptions that the bodies of hundreds of children had been found. John Horgan, then B.C. premier, called Kamloops “a tragedy of unimaginable proportions” in the wake of the initial announcement. Mr. Horgan had no way of knowing whether that was true.  Former prime minister Justin Trudeau made much more dramatic pronouncements that were also not founded in fact. Three days after the Tk’emlúps announcement, Mr. Trudeau ordered that the Canadian flag be flown at half-mast at all federal buildings “to honour the 215 children whose lives were taken at the former Kamloops residential school.” Like Mr. Horgan, the former prime minister had no factual basis for that and other similar statements. Unlike Mr. Horgan, who died in 2024, Mr. Trudeau still has the opportunity to set the record straight. He has not; neither has the current Liberal government. Nor has Ottawa provided clarity on how the hundreds of millions of dollars sent to First Nations to establish whether the soil anomalies are human remains have been spent. Canadians are owed an explanation.  First Nations are owed a greater debt. Lasting reconciliation between Indigenous communities and the rest of Canada has barely begun. But that reconciliation must be founded on the truth, wherever it leads."

Jonathan Kay on X - "amazing: On Friday, when @globeandmail (finally!) admitted that no actual “unmarked graves” are known to have been found at Kamloops, their social media ppl, out of sheer habit, tweeted the old lie that “remains” were found. They hastily deleted it but forgot to delete the thread"

Jonathan Kay on X - "Wow. The editorial board of the Globe & Mail just flat out admitted that it screwed up by failing to scrutinize the false 2021 claims that “unmarked graves” had been “confirmed” at Kamloops. It’s taken five years, which is a disgrace, but give them credit for finally saying it"
Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers on X - "In 2021, Canadian media and institutions basically hallucinated the discovery of 215 children’s bodies in a mass grave near a former Catholic residential school.  The evidence: radar saw soil disturbances that could have been tree roots.  A wave of church arsons ensued.    People making the case for censorship often urge that destructive manias like this can be suppressed/soothed if we prevent people from communicating about them.  And here was a perfect case: false information was being recklessly (or maliciously) amplified, leading to literal hate crimes.   Shouldn’t the censors do something?   But the mass-grave craze infected the censorship class, so opposition got targeted instead.  At least one “disinformation” NGO categorized skepticism as “hate speech,” and Canada even saw efforts to criminalize so-called “denialism” (drawing an absurd comparison to the Holocaust).    Good for the Globe and Mail to come clean."

Jonathan Kay on X - "So how does this work, @LeahGazan Does the entire editorial staff of the Globe & Mail go to jail, or just the editorial board ?"

Jonathan Kay on X - "If anyone wonders how these two loons are coping with the @globeandmail editorial admitting that there aren’t any “unmarked graves” in Kamloops, an update:
— Carleton: the Globe has been taken over by conspiracy theorists
— Gilmore: the Globe is affected by gas poisoning"
Meme - Sean Carleton @SeanCarleton: "Absolutely appalling editorial by the Globe and Mail that buys/perpetuates all the false framing of the far right and platforms an anti-Indigenous conspiracy theory my research has debunked."
Rachel Gilmore @atRachelGilm...: "Someone should probably find out if there was a gas leak at the Globe and Mail. Short of that, it's hard to fathom why their editorial board thought it was a good idea to publish their piece on potential unmarked graves at residential schools. This navel-gazing, both-sides Show more"

Globe digs itself even deeper with mea culpa about Kamloops coverage | National Post - "Ironically, for a piece centred on journalistic shortcomings, this defensive editorial not only itself contains significant journalistic shortcomings, but fails to deliver the only conclusion that merits genuine approval.  In the first paragraph, they admit that they wrongly accepted as true the 2021 allegation of “unmarked graves” near the former Kamloops, B.C., residential school without a shred of evidence to back up the claim. Fine. But in the very next paragraph, they state: “3,200 Indigenous children, at least, died at residential schools, according to the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Not true, according to Nina Green, an independent researcher whose website Indian Residential School Records is a documentary treasure trove on this issue. For many years, it has been Green’s regular habit to send mass emails to politicians and journalists across Canada, including the Globe, correcting the errors she finds in their reportage. With attached receipts, of course. (The Globe has never responded to them, Green tells me.)  In her latest missive, which unpacks the Globe editorial, she writes that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) claimed no such thing. The TRC states that 423 named children died “on the premises” of a residential school, or 832 when the named and unnamed registers are combined. Which amounts to 832 children “out of the 150,000 children alleged to have attended the 139 schools over a period of 133 years” —  a little over six deaths a year in the entire residential school system.  For another error, the Globe editorial states that an unnamed “government official” in the early 1900s considered deaths at residential schools to be the result of negligence so pervasive it “came unpleasantly close to manslaughter.” But the source was not a government official. Toronto judge and reformer Samuel Hume Blake wrote a pamphlet in the form of a letter to the Minister of the Interior in January 1907. His subject was not the residential schools, but the “lack of sanitation in Indian homes on reserves” that led inevitably to tuberculosis. Blake wrote: “(D)oing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death brings the Department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.” (My emphasis.) Amongst other recommendations, Blake called for the establishment of clinical centres with trained nurses to give instruction to Indian women and children “in the ordinary hygienic rules — the non-observance of which cultivates tuberculosis and scrofulous affections — principal causes in the high death rate.” The Globe’s error turned beneficence into wickedness. Many Canadians now feel they have been gaslighted for five long years. Not just by the Globe and the CBC. With the exception of the National Post and independent media like Rebel News, True North, Juno News and the Dorchester Review, Canadian journalists as a whole showed virtually no curiosity regarding a story absolutely riddled with implausibilities. For example, Kamloops always had Indigenous staffers. They would have been aware of these alleged burials. Yet we are to believe there wasn’t a single whistleblower amongst them in all these years? No missing-child reports filed by families whose children allegedly never came home from school? Please. The consequences of choosing advocacy over journalism have been dreadful: aside from 100-plus burned or vandalized churches (including two deaths) and a marked rise of anti-Catholicism, we have also seen a heavy price paid by honourable scholars who voiced their evidence-based skepticism from the get-go. Misleading media endorsements have been largely responsible for trivialization of the Holocaust and a race for supremacy in virtuous distancing from “denialism” amongst professional associations, school boards and universities, not to mention cabinet ministers. It is because of these harms, intimately connected to media dereliction of duty, that I believe the Globe editorial should not have been written by the board, but by the editor-in-chief, David Walmsley, at whose desk the buck stopped on how the Kamloops story should be framed. And the final words of that editorial should have been the announcement of his resignation.  For this was not just a sorry-we-goofed error in need of correction. Chief Roseanne Casimir asserted, in a resolution put forward at a July 2021 meeting of the Assembly of First Nations, that “the mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School reveals Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous peoples.” Yes, she said “mass grave” — implying it was a horrific massacre — and nobody in the media said boo. That’s a blood libel of priests and nuns and missionaries who aren’t here to defend themselves.  Worse, the allegation was directly implicated as motivation for an all-party Parliamentary resolution recognizing the residential schools as a “genocide.”  The Kamloops fiasco has changed this nation for the worse. Canadians were made by their government to feel shamed, demoralized and bitter in being labelled génocidaires. The breadcrumb trail from these feelings leads directly to the media. Sorry, but a head must roll for that. Reconciliation? When First Nation leaders join other Canadians in calling for an annulment of the genocide resolution, we will know that the reconciliation process has begun."

Blacklock's Reporter on X - ".@SenateCA panel votes 7-1 to rewrite gov't bill #C9 to outlaw Indian Residential School "denialism" under threat of two years' jailing: 'It can involve minimizing or denying the deaths.'"

Tamara Lich 🇨🇦 on X - "What do you call a country that criminalizes beliefs, thoughts, speech and questions? 🧐"

Cory Morgan on X - "The body count at the Kamloops residential school site remains at zero. I said it before, and I will say it again. I dare you to charge me. Then we will get some shovels out during the process of discovery."

Aaron Pete on X - "I'm prepared to go to jail over this.  My grandmother Rita Pete went to St. Mary's Indian Residential School. She experienced terrible abuse. As a consequence, she struggled with alcohol use most of her life.  My mother was born with FASD as a consequence of her using alcohol to cope with her trauma.   I am Chief of my community Chawathil First Nation. I am working to address the longstanding impacts of these past policies through renovating homes, building new homes, creating childcare, and growing businesses through economic development.  I have interviewed people who went to Indian Residential Schools. I have interviewed people who believe Indian Residential Schools were awful, horrible schools, meant to remove the Indian from the child.   I've also interviewed people who believe they were well intended,  generous investments by Canadian taxpayers meant to assimilate a society and had shortcomings.  Like with many things, the history is dark, complicated, and with any policy that existed for a long time, across a whole country - there were different experiences.    No one story tells us everything. No report shares the full experience of the individuals who went. No commentator today can disprove someone's lived experience with statistics.  The path forward is not to criminalize speech, questions, or debate.   The path forward is empathy for past attendees.  The path forward is truth based on facts. The path forward is real conversations. The path forward is to lean into complexity.   If the government criminalizes this, then I will be a criminal for having these conversations.   If I am a criminal by the laws definition, then I am committed to going to jail over this."
Damn Uncle Tomahawk!

Melissa Mbarki on X - "No “mass grave” was discovered at the site of the Kamloops Indian residential school five years ago. Even the Tkemlúps te Secwepemc Nation at Kamloops refuted that characterization within a week of the initial round of shocking headlines. Ever since, the Tkemlúps have gone back and forth on the subject, aided by $12.1 million in federal funds, from “probable burials” to graves to “signatures that resemble burials.”  The hundreds of graves “found” at Marieval in Saskatchewan, where Trudeau famously posed kneeling at a gravesite holding a teddy bear, were ordinary burials in a Cowessess community cemetery where gravestones had been removed. Cowessess elder and former Marieval student Lloyd Lerat said this about the graves: “We’ve always known these were there.… It’s just the fact that the media picked up on unmarked graves, and the story actually created itself from there because that’s how it happens.”  The 182 graves “discovered” near the old St. Eugene’s residential school in B.C. at the Ktunaxa community of ʔAq’am were burials in a former pioneer cemetery later associated with a hospital and a Catholic mission that had lost its wooden crosses to grass fires over the years. “There’s no discovery, we knew it was there, it’s a graveyard,” Sophie Pierre, a former St. Eugene’s student who served for 25 years as the Ktunaxa tribal chair, explained later. “The fact there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.”  The 160 “unmarked graves” reported on Penelakut Island were not newly discovered. Some were associated with a cemetery, others were inferred from ground penetrating radar research, and more were the result of archeological surveys on the island’s foreshore. Twenty years earlier the RCMP had excavated a rumoured residential-school burial site on the island and came up with nothing."

The Reclamare on X - "Apl 3, 1915 Lytton BC "As the Indians are so anxious to get their children taught, and have gone to the expense and trouble in building the school, I would strongly recommend that the Department sanctions their wish and supplies them with a teacher""
How disgraceful. Their memories need to be wiped from history for asking for Genocide!

Meme - "-"We are just trying to protect our sacred land"
- Their sacred land... *lots of trash scattered around*"

Cowichan Tribes seeks federal help to deal with mountain of waste | Vancouver Sun - "Cowichan Tribes is urging the federal government to ensure that a growing mountain of construction waste and garbage that threatens to leach toxic chemicals into the Cowichan River is cleaned up and the owner prosecuted.  “The tools to combat the pollution of reserve lands are primarily under federal jurisdiction, including the Indian Act and the Indian Reserve Waste Disposal Regulations,” the nation said in a statement on Monday. “However, the government of Canada is reluctant to prosecute polluters.”  The garbage pile is on three lots on Cowichan Tribes reserve land near the Allenby Road Bridge over the Cowichan River. The province’s Environment Ministry has ordered James Anthony Peter, who lives on one of the lots and controls access to all three, to submit a plan by Nov. 17 to clean up the properties.  The 290,000 cubic metres of waste contain elevated concentrations of copper and zinc and other “substances of concern,” including heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, iron, lead and manganese, according to recent environmental reports...  Cowichan Tribes said it has been “deeply concerned” about illegal dumping of garbage, construction and industrial waste and contaminated materials on reserve lands...  Cowichan Tribes said those lived on the reserve are served through a curbside collection program that provides garbage pickups two days a week, and recycling and compost collection one day a week."
It's racist to prosecute indigenous people, so
Clearly, they need their trash collected three days a week, while most Canadians have it collected every week or every two weeks

Revenge of the Blob: good teachers are under siege

Revenge of the Blob: good teachers are under siege | The Spectator

Jolyon Maugham has a point. There is a need for an inquiry in the aftermath of Jason Arday’s tragic death. But, not for the first time, the Good Law Project director has identified the wrong target.

It’s not the press that needs to be investigated and held to account. If newspapers and magazines, including this one, err or fail, libel or traduce, then the courts can sanction and readers can desert. We survive, to publish, by public demand. The real focus of inquiry – sustained and detailed – should be Cambridge University and, in particular, its Faculty of Education. They were Professor Arday’s employers. Indeed, more than that, they were his champions and cheerleaders, beckoning the limelight to vaunt his appointment.

Arday’s death is a cause of profound sadness. The reasons for it cannot yet be known. Professional physicians, and indeed the Samaritans, caution against attributing suicide to any single cause. A proper respect for his life, and indeed all those who may struggle with thoughts of self-harm, suggests that caution should be exercised before judging what led to his passing.

But the attention drawn to Cambridge’s role in this affair is more than merited. The university’s Faculty of Education, where Arday was professor of the sociology of education, is one of the most prestigious teacher-training institutions in the country, responsible for preparing thousands of graduates for classrooms in state schools across the country.

Its existence, and eminence, is underpinned by the taxpayer and guaranteed by the government. Support for tuition, and research, flows from your pockets. Those who graduate from the institution form the minds of the next generation. We all have an interest in how its funds are spent and how it shapes our children’s learning.

I first raised concerns about what education faculties at our universities were doing more than a decade ago. I specifically questioned the priorities and ideological orientation of those in charge of teacher training in higher-education institutions such as Cambridge. I feared that, despite the noble idealism and genuine commitment of the overwhelming number of teachers in our classrooms, the academics preparing them for their vocation were letting them, and us, down. There was, I suggested, perhaps incautiously, a ‘blob’ of university professionals whose values, and approach, was inimical to educational excellence.

I was derided for daring to question their credentials and authority. One of those most vehement in their criticism was Hilary Cremin, the head of the Education Faculty. Professor Cremin was the individual who praised Arday on his appointment as ‘the best in the world in terms of the research that you do’. Whatever her motivation for that encomium, a single sentence should not define a career. But Professor Cremin, helpfully for us all, has written at length recently on her own educational philosophy and world outlook. So we can judge her by her own, considered, thoughts.

The range of her thinking is laid out in her book, Rewilding Education. Charles Moore touched on its flaws in these pages last week. It would require more space than either Charles or I are allowed, and more tolerance on the part of our readers than we have a right to expect, to go through its idiocies.

The work actively rejects not just the need for discipline, knowledge and testing in schools but the very idea of our schools themselves. They are damned as embodiments of a failed neo-liberal notion of modernity built on the flawed principles of the Enlightenment. Michel Foucault is cited promiscuously and approvingly. Foucault was, to be fair, a stern and consistent critic of the Enlightenment. So consistent, he welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution and the theocratic bloodshed which followed. So there is that.

And indeed Cremin is nothing if not thorough in her disdain for Enlightenment principles – as we can see in her approach to questions of evidence, proof and logic. She is specifically sceptical of ‘empirical truth’, which she sees as ‘favouring a modern, urban, liberal, Western view of the World’. Instead of this ‘epistemology of the North’, Cremin argues that we might want to achieve ‘cognitive justice’ by ‘foregrounding the epistemology of the South which challenges the dominance of the Eurocentric thought of the global North’.

The book exhibits all the weaknesses of modern academia: solipsistic personal reminiscence is treated as ‘fieldwork’, spurious authority is sought by citing other works, themselves written in impenetrable jargon, statistics are deployed in an effort to prove a point but without any recognition that correlation does not equal causation.

Cremin cites some of her own work as ‘evidence’ for her assertions. Specifically, 11 of her own ‘poems’. These include stanzas such as this from a poem called ‘Postscript’:

Meet my eyes

Know my voice

I am

Researcher

Sharing songs

Walking with

Dancing through.

Should we not be persuaded by Professor Cremin’s own verse as proof of her wisdom, we are also treated to a passage where she advertises the virtue of ‘rebellious research’ – specifically an ‘expressive dance’ with an MPhil student in a workshop. The rebellious researchers ‘danced our academic trajectories’ in ‘a form of embodied conversation…circling around each other, moving in and away, connecting and disconnecting… [as we] expressed our hopes and fears for the future of academia’.

Reading this dreck, I certainly found my body reacting in its own distinctive way, reflecting my own hopes and fears for the future of academia.

Professor Cremin is not a junior research fellow feeling her way to an understanding of her discipline; nor is she Titania McGrath’s woker sister. She is the woman responsible for what those who are supposed to be our best teachers are themselves taught. And yet in her major published work she doesn’t just display ignorance, she flaunts and celebrates it. By dancing on the grave of learning.

Professor Cremin is not an isolated example. Certainly not in Cambridge, anyway. As Andrew Gilligan has reported for The Spectator’s website, one of the other Education Faculty academics, Farah Ahmed, has denounced ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims but has encouraged her co-religionists to make an exception for engineering ‘to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad’.

The screaming tragedy of this affair is that while Cambridge – and other university education faculties – are peddling this toxic nonsense, there are examples of how genuinely to transform the opportunities of working–class and ethnic minority children across the country which Cambridge and much of the rest of the educational establishment deride or ignore.

This month we have been able to compare the performance of schools across England, at A-level and GCSE. We can discern which schools are doing well. Those you might think it would be wise for institutions like Cambridge to celebrate and learn from.

There is a rich diet of data from which to draw. But perhaps the best single reference point is a measure known as Progress 8. It is the brainchild of the wonderful Lib Dem former schools minister David Laws and it analyses how much the educational performance of children has improved while in school – in crude terms, the value added. It looks at the level children have reached on entry to secondary school – their scores in tests at the end of primary school – and then records the progress of that cohort at age 16, after GCSEs have been taken.

It is fairer than looking just at A–level performance because many secondary schools have no sixth forms. And it is fairer than looking at GCSE results on their own, because it takes full account of the prior attainment of students. So schools with less well-educated or disadvantaged intakes have that challenge factored into the overall judgment.

It’s worth noting that we have this measure, and thus the ability to identify the best state schools in the country, only because we have Sats at the end of primary school and GCSE exams at age 16, both interventions which Professor Cremin and her allies in the teaching unions hate.

The school in England which performs best in Progress 8 measures is a state comprehensive in Wembley: the Michaela Community School. It is followed closely by Mercia School, another comprehensive in a working-class area of Sheffield, modelled directly on Michaela. Also in the top ten are sister comprehensives in Hackney: Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy and Mossbourne Community Academy. All serve poorer, multi-ethnic communities. All are non-selective in who they admit. All transform lives with performance at GCSE which transcends what many fee-paying independent schools are capable of.

One might hope that these schools and their leaders would be celebrated by professional associations, lauded by a left-wing government for the opportunities they are extending to working-class children and held up by the university education departments which train our teachers as the models to emulate.

But instead they are stigmatised, shamed and shunned. The teaching unions and school leader bodies which are supposed to fight for better educational outcomes are either scornful or embarrassed by these schools. Labour ministers mock or belittle. Those in higher education sneer and denounce. The achievements of Michaela’s headteacher, the inspirational Katharine Birbalsingh, are derided and attributed either to selection (which the school does not and cannot practise) or statistical legerdemain. Mossbourne Victoria Park has been targeted by teaching unions and left-wing activists precisely because it is successful, with anger directed in particular at its strict behaviour policy.

A calm and purposeful environment in which teachers can teach and pupils learn might seem a curious educational feature to find objectionable in a school. But that would be to misunderstand what drives the ideologues within our university education departments and their union allies. What unites so many of the schools which do best in the Progress 8 measurement is their belief in formal uniform, high standards of behaviour, academic rigour, regular testing, direct instruction with a didactic approach from teachers and an avoidance of the ‘group-based’ or ‘child-centred’ learning which the university teacher trainers believe in.

The success of these schools is a ringing, powerful, empirically sound and uncontestable refutation of all the theory and ideology to which Professor Cremin and her allies have devoted their careers. They hate these schools as the Magisterium hated Galileo – all their pretended authority is undone by the hard truth of proven evidence.

What makes this lesson urgent is that the cause which Professor Cremin and her allies affect to believe in – the liberation of the poorest and the marginalised – is advanced by the schools whose methods they abjure and whose leaders they scorn.

There is nothing base or ignoble, indeed there is an idealism and compassion, in wishing to give young people from communities scarred by prejudice additional help to succeed. There is everything to be said for asking how we might better help children living with autism or other disabilities get the best opportunities to flourish. It is both economically enlightened and ethically admirable to want to give students from our poorest backgrounds the best possible educational experience. That is what Katharine Birbalsingh does at Michaela, what happens at Mercia School and what they ensure occurs at both Mossbourne Academies. It is what the free schools, academies and other comprehensives do when they embrace traditional teaching methods, rigour in the curriculum and regular testing.

If we want to ensure that more young people from ethnic minorities, poor backgrounds or living with disabilities succeed then we need more schools like these. And if the government wants to know where to find the money, then I have a suggestion. Perhaps, when any future inquiry inevitablyconcludes that the Cambridge Education Faculty should be closed down, the funds liberated thereby could help?

Related:

Neil O'Brien on X - "It's not just "garbage" - bits of our universities have flipped from promoting knowledge and high standards to actively trying to destroy them. Via @michaelgove"

Marcus Walker on X - "The reputation of Britain’s universities will continue to collapse until this entire framework of thinking is driven out of them."

John Duffield on X - "Jason Arday's boss at Cambridge. No one as been held to account for the scandal & corruption of Arday's appointment. Until they are this story will not go away. Why the story ran & ran. It was not motivated out of personal spite towards Arday."

Eric Nelson on X - "My son was going to college to be a special ed teacher. A professor said it was colonialist to expect a journal article to contain empirical evidence. His classmates all agreed. He changed majors."