Substack Notes 13.4 - The Great Scandal
Mar. 11th - Apr. 4th, 2025
What would it take for you to condemn your side?
On Jan. 6th, 2020, many conservatives experienced a moment of clarity. While the specifics of that day have proven to be mired in corruption and propagandistic distortion, the fact that there was civil disorder at the U. S. Capitol Building, that Trump didn’t urgently move to disperse or condemn it, and that people ended up injured was an undeniable stain on the man and on his party.
It’s interesting to consider what similar event will be required to make many progressives acknowledge that their coalition is fairly unpopular, often harmful, and sometimes violently evil.
At some point, I believe, there will be a political scandal unearthed regarding our government or leftist activism or foreign interference or ballot harvesting that qualifies as a scandal. It will be:
1.) Clearly true and well-supported by evidence
2.) A plot that indicates important people or issues
3.) An act (or entailing acts) that flagrantly violate our norms or laws.
It will be compelling news, even for a large percentage of self-described progressives.
It’s possible that some of the media hysteria we’ve seen in the past few months has been an effort to conceal or distract from a story like this.
I recently heard about millions of illegal immigrants being granted social security numbers and qualifying for social welfare programs. If this were true it would certainly qualify.
When (if) the scandal breaks, the reactions will be curious, but predictable. Some will try to generate moral equivalencies, some will try to staunch the wound (claiming that the plotters were isolated, and not representative), some will go on the offense or lunge away, towards distractions.
The real question that an issue like this should raise for news viewers and voters is: what would it take for your trust in the establishment to be shaken? I don’t begrudge people their criticism of Trump or Musk. I have my own criticisms. My complaint is that people, because they oppose Trump/Musk, are acting as if Trump/Musk’s opponents (nonprofits, federal judges, national politicians, leftist billionaires) are reliable, or trustworthy. Criticizing Trump is a worthy and defendable position at this point, in my opinion. Pretending that the Democratic Party isn’t awash with radicals and grifters and the mentally ill is not. You may feel forced into affiliation with a side by our bipartisan system, and when it comes to voting you may indeed be forced. But let’s not pretend the people who have been lying for years now (Covid vaccines, misinformation, bureaucratic capture, immigration policy, Biden’s fitness, political polling) care about the things they pretend to care about. What will it take for your faith to be dealt a final, tragic blow?
I guess we’ll see…
Mar. 11th, 2025
:Today a paper which proves my contention that governments ought to get out of the grant-making business. The “study” was funded by NIH, and conducted by “top” scientists at Harvard. Its conclusion, that replacing butter with seed oils causes you to live longer, is absurd. But I’ll have to take time to demonstrate that to you. And others, also working on the government dime, will have to deal with it, too, spending valuable resources sifting through it. It would have been better had this study never been funded.
Government grants cost more than the give.
The peer-reviewed NIH-grant paper is “Butter and Plant-Based Oils Intake and Mortality” by Zhang and a host of others in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Now I have already warned you about the sins and excesses of epidemiology (here, here, and here, in that order). Everything that I showed you that can go wrong in epidemiology has gone wrong (mostly) in this paper. Take time to review those lectures. Anybody can read them. Don’t look at another epidemiology paper until you do.
Here’s today’s “discovery”:
Findings In this cohort study of 221,054 adults from 3 large cohorts, higher butter intake was associated with increased total and cancer mortality, while higher intake of plant-based oils was associated with lower total, cancer, and cardiovascular disease mortality.
Meaning Substituting butter with plant-based oils, particularly olive, soybean, and canola oils, may confer substantial benefits for preventing premature deaths.
To “discover” this they scoured through questionnaires, on which, among other things, people were asked twice yearly to remember how much butter or oil they ate and in what forms. How much did you eat last November? Can you remember? Be specific. Be exact—and by exact I mean to the nearest fraction of a teaspoon. We’re doing science here.
Worse, the questionnaires when asked twice of the same people showed that people didn’t answer the same; roughly half the time they answered differently. No surprise, given the fallibility of (eating) memory. But it means a lot of error was ignored in our authors’ model, as we’ll see.
Worse again, this (my emphasis):
“The intake of plant-based oils (corn, safflower, soybean, canola, and olive) was ESTIMATED based on the reported oil brand and type of fat used for various cooking methods, including frying, sautéing, baking, and salad dressing, and all of the food composition data for calculating oil intakes were updated EVERY 4 YEARS.“
Worse again again, the uncertainty in these estimations, like in the food recall in the questionnaires, was ignored. (In the lectures, I call the claim that “X causes Y” but where X wasn’t measured, and a guessed substituted, and the whole “proved” with wee p-values, the epidemiologist fallacy.)
Worse again again again, and maybe worst, those with “with a history of CVD, diabetes, or cancer” at the start of the study were excluded from the data! Could any of those excluded people have got sick, especially diabetes, from porking out on seed oils? The end of the study did include those who died of these diseases, and therefore must have developed any of these during the study. Could a tiny pat of butter, as we’ll see, have caused cancer and killed that quickly?
They also “stopped updating dietary data after diagnoses of diabetes, stroke, or cancer”. To avoid, they say, “reverse causation”, because some might have changed diets after diagnosis. What about the idea of simply tracking who changed and who didn’t? Rejected.
Mar. 20th, 2025
:there seems a sudden uptick in violence, rage outs, extreme positions and actions, and a general “losing of the plot” going on in the last few weeks.
it seemed to coalesce out of nowhere. but it didn’t.
it’s a recursive dogmatic worldview losing traction and imploding into a bed of pre-bunking and pre-preparation for precisely this.
for a great many people who have been isolated in a great many echo chambers, the bumpy part of re-entry to reality is starting and the self appointed "moral majority" coming to terms with the fact that it was never either of those things is going to cause mass scale breakage.
you're going to see this kind of attack, threat, vandalism, and rage because when the stories they have told themselves become too absurd to sustain, it's the only outlet left to externally validated zealots whose external referents have long been fantasies.
orwell understood:
“And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”
it’s about to be a really strange time in america. the zeitgeist has moved and the wokester warlords and DEI dictators have lost their prominence and power.
it’s not coming back.
now comes the part where they go wild at the dissolution of their imposed ascendency.
this will get surreal.
Mar. 27th, 2025
Mar. 27th, 2025
:"the good news is that globally, elites trust one another more and more... the bad news is that in every single country polled, the majority of people trusted their elites less."
they literally think this is a "messaging" problem and that if they just explain it a more pedantically patronizing fashion this time, we'll all come to our senses and learn to love obeying them.
they are iron bar sure they are both right and righteous. evidence does not matter. opinion does not matter. ends justify means and we, your betters, those who matter, are sure that our ends are good.
this is how you construct an atrocity mill, a totalitarian, authoritarian systems that live out the beating nightmare heart of CS lewis’s famous admonition:
Mar. 28th, 2025
:
The bi-directional relationship between egalitarianism and modern safety ideologies is best understood through Hobbes’ relationship between protection and obedience. The narrative is that everyone must come together. The desire for a totalitarian state is primary. The narrative of total protection from a hypothetical, unprovable risk is secondary. Everyone must do the same. Everyone must constantly be paranoid. Everyone must participate in consensus-making security theatre. “Peace and Safety”, the slogan of the Antichrist.
The metaphysics of consensus creates two problems. I will start with the lesser problem — it creates a totalitarian police state.
The greater problem is that it creates a metaphysics of imitation and homogenization. It is itself evil. It destroys the souls of men it infects. It destroys the soul of civilizations it infects.
Mar. 28th, 2025
:As CEO of National Public Radio, I expect to be scrutinized. So, I wasn’t surprised this week when conservative activists started circulating various tweets and other things I’ve said over the years. They are really going after me — I’m Public Enemy Number One on conservative Twitter! I’m being portrayed as an uber-progressive resistance liberal who works in privileged white woman cringe the way that Michelangelo worked in marble. My critics have seized on quotes like “America is addicted to white supremacy” and “I’m so done with late-stage capitalism” to hold me up as an avatar for midwit coastal elite groupthink.
I have to say: I’m surprised by the uproar. I expect scrutiny, but I did not expect to become the subject of a multi-day media frenzy. And please keep in mind: I’m not accused of wrongdoing — I’m accused of being extremely progressive in an obnoxious way. And I feel compelled to ask: Who the fuck did you think was running NPR, you fucking morons? Wasn’t it definitely going to be someone with my behaviors and opinions? Are you truly shocked that I’m basically the “Ruthkanda forever” girl grown up and in charge of a major media outlet?
…I didn’t leave my interview and see a Jamaican nurse and a guy in a DeWalt Tools t-shirt sitting in the lobby waiting their turn. If this job hadn’t gone to me, it would have gone to one of the umpteen functionally-identical “me”s who inhabit places like NPR. If I wasn’t someone who obsessively polices language to signal that I’m familiar with the norms of elite culture, then I’d call you “a bunch of fucking retards” for not knowing that.
Mar. 29th, 2025
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A small number of criminals commit the vast majority of crimes. One famous study found that just “1% of the population [is] accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions.”
A car can’t move in two different directions at once. The leftward (and often violent) turn of many Democrats, and their media-fed intransigence and outright hostility towards positions and policies which are supported by most Americans, is leaving the party divided and much less effective.
Mar. 29th, 2025
:Nurse Jennifer Melle has been given a final written warning and referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) for calling the convicted paedophile ‘Mr’ and ‘he’ in a conversation with a colleague to whom the sex of the patient was relevant. As Jennifer says, ‘this was a real-life medical scenario that required accurate terminology to avoid any doubt between medical professionals.’ The paedophile, who had been escorted for treatment from a men’s prison and was male according to his medical records, overheard the conversation and angrily demanded to be called ‘she’.
Jennifer calmly replied, ‘sorry I cannot refer to you as “her” or “she”, as it’s against my faith and Christian values but I can call you by your name.’ The paedophile lunged at Jennifer, who is originally from Uganda, shouting several times that he was a woman and would call her ‘n*****’ if she ‘misgendered’ him. The abuse of Jennifer was witnessed by several other patients and staff, and a white colleague who also called the paedophile ‘he’ was not subjected to the same vitriol. After this traumatic and distressing event, Jennifer should have been offered support at work. Instead, an NHS manager took her to one side and told her that she ‘had to respect equality and diversity’ according to the NMC code of conduct. She has been placed on restricted duties, thereby effectively depriving the public of another dedicated senior nurse. She has also been referred to her independent regulator, who is investigating her fitness to practice because ‘she referred to a patient in a manner inconsistent with their gender identity.’
:
Just days after its founder and chairman, Stephen Ireland, was convicted of numerous paedophile offences, including the rape of a 12-year-old boy, and a senior volunteer was also found guilty of child sexual abuse offences, Pride in Surrey opened ‘Pride Hub’ in Egham. It was created by Stephen Ireland, who described it as the place to go to get ‘sweeties’, and opened by members of the crystal meth smoking polycule he was in. At the same time, a Pride in Surrey group has helped launch the petition ‘Stop gender critical beliefs being protected under the Equality Act’, saying it ‘hinders progress towards equality’. It doesn’t feel that much is being learnt from the scandal - Surrey Police, for instance, which chauffeured Ireland around in rainbow-painted police cars, still have images of him on their social media.
Incidentally, another LGBT organisation aimed at children that was run by a convicted paedophile is LGBT Youth Scotland. It has a section on its website about its history, which mentions some of the child abusers it has employed and adds that the media makes its work difficult by sometimes mentioning them.
The thing people always get wrong is that places like Vermont or Copenhagen—idyllic ethnostates where people leave pies out for strangers and the currency is old timey "put it on my tab, Sam" type ledgers—are great for the people who have lived there for many generations, and yes, the descendants of those people are responsible for allowing them to be destroyed, but you cannot recreate such places from scratch.
They take years of organic cohesion based on highly communal, Tall Poppy Syndrome-type principles that grind down bad behavior via a panopticon of grandmothers and aunts. Attempting to build them from scratch is what happened during the New Age Movement in California—it ends in geodesic domes, group sex rites, and megalomaniacal cult leaders, not "high trust societies." Just look at all the attempts at "network states"—all are clearly headed towards weird techno-cult status.
To build true high trust societies requires centuries of hardcore religion, anti-market cooperation, and the pressure of outside forces attempting to constantly take your sh*t (a la natives or imperialists). And even then, what do you end up with? A bunch of great great grandchildren so bored that they either leave to become urban sodomites or stick around and demand that local resources be dedicated entirely to empowering distant foreigners to move in.
Mar. 30th, 2025
Katherine Maher released a statement last year addressing Uri Berliner’s criticism of NPR. Notice the tone, and the focus:
Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.
It’s all about feelings. At no point in this statement or since then has she actually addresses the specific claims Berliner made…
More and more people are coming to understand the nature of the Blob. Those who claim not to are increasingly its agents.
Jon Stewart and Ezra Klein get a lesson in this YT video…
Mar. 30th, 2025
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Thórsdóttir eventually gave birth to a child—a son—when she was 23 and Asmundsson was 16. She claims, again contrary to news reports, that their sexual relationship was long over by then, having lasted only a few weeks. What is undisputed is that she forced the boy to pay child support for 18 years, long after she had met and married another man, which occurred about a year after the child’s birth. She also opposed numerous requests by her child’s father to form and maintain a relationship with his son. Overall, she treated the boy shamefully.
Naturally, if a male government minister had been found to have been sexually involved with, impregnated, and then split from a 15- or 16-year-old girl when he was 22, especially when he was part of a religious organization in which he had some degree of moral or spiritual influence over her, there would be no public doubt whatsoever about his culpability.
Mar. 31st, 2025
There’s a valid and revealing experiment to diagnose Leviathan’s scale in intent in our country: federalism.
We can see a growing expansion of taxation and regulation in blue states. New taxes in Maryland. Absurd licensing requirements in New York. Smothering environmental regulations in California.
Meanwhile more and more of the power and resources of those state go toward instructing children in progressive values, subsidizing homeless, dealing with the effects of breakdowns in public safety. A vast amount of spending goes directly to nonprofits without any appreciable benefit whatsoever.
This is a process that is continuing-and accelerating. It is chasing low-income workers and valuable companies out of these states. THIS is why federalism is so distasteful to progressives. If people have the freedom to buy and move and work where they choose they will leave. Progressives would strongly prefer that their priorities be implemented nationwide, without any public consent or feedback.
They know what’s best for everyone, after all.
Le Pen’s sentence confirms an ominous anti-democratic tactic emerging across Europe, namely attacks on the passive suffrage of opposition politicians. At the start of this month, the Central Election Bureau of Romania withdrew Călin Georgescu’s right to run for office there, months after Georgescu emerged as the frontrunner in the first round of the presidential elections and the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the vote. In Germany, schemes to attack passive suffrage have also been gaining ground, with the CDU and SPD openly planning to use this measure against anyone convicted more than once of the broad and ill-defined speech offence of “incitement.”
Mar. 31st, 2025
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A new paper reveals significant publication bias in field studies of racial discrimination in hiring. Studies that fail to find discrimination - or that find discrimination favoring disadvantaged groups - are less likely to be published.
Apr. 1st, 2025
:When liberals feel comfortable around you—especially if, like me, you’re black, and they assume by default that you’re on the Left (an intellectually lazy assumption)—they tend to speak freely and boldly about their politics, often signaling their ideological leanings without hesitation. In private, one-on-one conversations, I’ve noticed that liberals instinctively try to build camaraderie by sharing views they assume will resonate with you. Rarely do they pause to gauge where you actually stand politically before launching into tirades about how “evil,” “stupid,” “racist,” “white-supremacist,” “bigoted,” or “Nazi-like” Republicans, Trump supporters, and Joe Rogan listeners are. Their worldview seems to leave little room for the possibility that they could ever be misguided, intolerant (despite their professed commitment to tolerance and acceptance), or lacking in humanity.
Now that the activist stranglehold on institutions have started to slip, new studies and meta-studies are appearing which contradict the central claims of gender medicine:
1.) gender transitions promote psychological wellbeing
2.) gender transitions prevent suicides
3.) transitioners have very low rates of regret
The statistics for (3) have been very weak and ambiguous and only based on ADULT data but have been used for years to justify juvenile gender transitions.
Expect to see the narrative change drastically. Gender transitions worsen mental well-being, do not prevent suicidality, and transitioners from the past 5-10 years will experience very high rates of regret. Lawsuits, scandal, and recriminations are on the way.
Don’t let people pretend they didn’t claim things they did or try to sweep the gaslighting under the rug. This happened (is happening) and it happened because of the words and actions of thousands of alternately greedy and cowardly professionals.
Apr. 3rd, 2025
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For all the talk about voting machines or mail-in ballots, the foundation of election corruption is found in the voter rolls of the various states. Trump’s executive order focused primarily on illegal aliens and non-citizens in voter rolls, but doesn’t address the duplicate (or triplicate, or worse) registrations spawned by moves, name changes, or repeated government interactions that spawn registrations, or the fact that individuals who have no interest in taking part in the voting process get dumped into a list of voters who may wind up being sent mail ballots simply because they exist.
My critics say I’m overreacting when I point out the disparity in voting patterns between states with Automatic Voter Registration (plus Washington, D.C.) and states without AVR. The contrast is stunning; in 2024, Kamala Harris won just five electoral votes that were not assigned to states with AVR…
Apr. 3rd, 2025
”The social decay afflicting America since the 1960s is far worse among the non-college-educated (as Charles Murray showed in Coming Apart) so avoiding downward mobility is much more important than it once was.
This is not helped by the fact that a combination of preferences for the poor (especially blacks and Hispanics) plus a bias for the very rich who have connections and can donate large sums of money, leaves middle class children with a much higher bar. Pay attention to the scale and notice that you need to be at the 99th percentile of American household income to have the same chance as someone at the 20th percentile. Merely being upper-middle class (say, 95th percentile of household income) puts you in the worst position.
Helicopter parenting has gotten so intense that it even continues into university, turning what was once the start of independent adult life into a further extension of childhood. The effects of this are widely lamented: the pressures of Ivy League admissions are said to be crushing kids into status-obsessed zombies.
Why is natalism so sociologically right-wing? My three-part answer:
To be a natalist, you have to reject the classic green view that human population (and/or population growth) is too high. This instantly puts you in conflict with the mainstream environmentalist movement, a major faction of the left.
While feminism officially blesses all women’s life choices, the truth is that mainstream feminists generally regard traditional female roles with thinly-veiled disdain. If women’s overriding priority should be career advancement (or political leadership), even one child looks like a mistake. And the feminists are, of course, another major faction of the left.
The standard polarization dynamic quickly amplifies the preceding fundamentals. Journalists aside, I doubt there were any pro-children Democrats in attendance. But if there were, they likely felt unwelcome. They won’t return — and will share their negative experiences with their social network.
Michigan notably ran the 2024 election with 83% of its population registered to vote, when only 77% of any state population is over the age of 18 and therefore eligible to cast a ballot.
Apr. 4th, 2025
:And let’s be clear: if the U.S. wants to scale back its security commitments in Europe, fine—go ahead. European nations should take more responsibility for their own defense. But let’s not pretend this is just about fair burden-sharing. The U.S. is not merely stepping back; it is actively undermining its closest allies while cozying up to authoritarian regimes.
…
To argue that the Trump Administration is “actively undermining its closest allies while cozying up to authoritarian regimes” is quite a claim, one that requires some evidence. How is the US actively undermining Denmark? A failure to make Denmark better off does not make the kingdom worse off. And what does it mean, specifically, to cozy up to an authoritarian regime? Did the Trump Administration send materiel to Russia, or is talking to Putin just a return to diplomacy? In the absence of evidence, your claim is a just-so story.
Put another way, how is the following not “cozying up” to an authoritarian?
Germany: Germany was Russia's largest gas customer, importing approximately 35 billion cubic meters annually before the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged in September 2022
Italy: Italy imported around 22 billion cubic meters annually, accounting for a significant portion of its energy needs
France: France relied on Russian gas for 13.5 billion cubic meters per year before supplies were reduced due to the Nord Stream shutdown
Austria: Austria depended on Russian gas for more than 80% of its supply, importing approximately 6 billion cubic meters annually
…
There is a massive gulf between talk and action.
Regardless of your opinion on Derek Chauvin’s conviction, does it not seem odd in retrospect that, suddenly and inexplicably, society’s rage was channeled toward a single cause (‘systemic racial injustice’)? Supposedly this injustice had existed since the country’s founding. So why choose the middle of a pandemic to ‘right the wrong’? And, as devilishly as Chauvin was portrayed, there was never any evidence he was motivated by racial animus. So what was that whole rioting/burning/looting thing about?
Given how quickly the ‘outrage’ faded from public memory, we can now be relatively certain the whole saga was a prefabricated Psy-op—designed by the Democrat Party and facilitated by the corrupt media (oh wait, same thing). And the motive is easy to spot. After all, that was the year of Biden vs. Trump 1.0—a race between the man who served as VP to the nation’s first black President vs. the man whom the media had baselessly painted as a white nationalist. What better time to fan the flames of racial division?
Apr. 4, 2025
:Some estimates place the prevalence of burnout in high-achieving professional women at 40%. This often happens with above-average intelligent and conscientious women who find it easy to believe they don’t tick like other women do. This differs from other forms of depression; it doesn’t arise from a lack of confidence in one’s abilities or feeling worthless, and rarely responds to antidepressive medication in my experience.
Spurred on by the positive emotions each promotion brings, they ride the wave of career success well into their 30s. Feminist ideas play a significant role in shaping these beliefs—ideas that assert it’s just as normal not to want children, that family is right for some and wrong for just as many others, and that kids are an oppressive drag on the progress of ambitious women. These women are led to believe their careers will always provide the same level of meaning and that they can decide on children much later—they have plenty of time and reproductive technologies on their side, or so they think.
Instead of acknowledging their true aspirations, these women follow societal pressures, sacrificing their most fertile years pursuing degrees and careers. By the time they reassess their goals, they face a much narrower pool of opportunities, leaving them asking, "Where have all the good men gone?" The feminist narratives they’ve internalized fail to align with the increasing intrinsic desires for connection and family, as the hormonal feedback of declining ovarian reserves hits in their 30s.
