Make no mistake: the modern left is a class-based ideology.
Its believers like to imagine that working class people might vote for protectionist trade policies to protect their jobs… or that the urban masses might vote to keep the spigot of transfer payments open. They - in their own imagination - are called to a higher mission. They believe in democracy, in women’s rights, in aid to the poor. They believe these things - according to themselves - because they are good and right. They are the ingredients of a worthy society. Others may be blinded by self-interest (bless them) and prejudice and fear… but not ‘the elect’. The Elect, guided by their educations and their innate compassion, only desire the good of the entire world. This self-assurance makes this class dangerous, and intransigent. They cannot re-examine their assumptions because doing so would challenge their self-conception, and threaten their livelihoods. Classes generally create worldviews which support their own interests, and they are rarely honest about this fact. It is uncommon for a class to have the degree of cultural and political power which this group has though.
Forget the fact that all of their values (“democracy”, “women’s rights”, “aid to the poor”) are drawn extremely narrowly, and framed in such a way that the ‘solutions’ bolster the class’s political power and social privilege. Forget that many of the most efficacious proposals to further these goals (delegating authority and functions to local communities, where voters have much more influence; defining the term ‘woman’ and legally protecting women from predators and from ideological encroachment; creating policies that strengthen poor families and improve poor public schools) aren’t just not supported - they are vociferously opposed by this class. Forget the curious fact that the so-called beneficiaries of these goals are rarely consulted about their own interests or views - rather, the policies are created by political committee and academic theorists and then imposed on society.
All you need to know about this class is that its political attitudes are strongly correlated by class, and that its most cherished items have nothing to do with helping the marginalized or protecting democracy. Most of their political energy during the past decade has gone into capturing institutions, and in using the federal government to siphon resources from taxpayers (including trillions from the poor) and distribute it to themselves. A party concerned with the poor doesn’t levy inflationary spending policies and send the bulk of the wealth extracted to corporations and government agencies and nonprofits. A party concerned with the poor doesn’t enthusiastically celebrate proposals to forgive billions and trillions of dollars of student loans, mostly held by the very wealthy, at a larger cost to the poor and the working class. A party concerned with the poor doesn’t turn a blind eye to public school failure and public safety collapse in poor neighborhoods.
This is a technocratic social entity. It believes that problems and challenges are all simply systems of social inequality and miscalibration. It holds that all social ills - crime, ignorance, gluttony, chaos, loneliness - can be addressed by education and spending and study. Coincidentally, the people who will manage all of these programs and distribute the funds and educate the commoners and perform the research just so happen to be this class. The monopolization of cultural and political and economic power and control in their own hands is one malign aspect of this ideology. The definition of natural, adaptive features of human society (inequality, competition, challenge, failure) is another. Defining these phenomena as ‘problematic’ and deserving of managed solutions expands their class power far more, imposing their concepts and tools onto every aspect of communal and individual life.
The real litmus test of this approach must surely be its success. Are the theories and the programs and the daily activity of professionals and policymakers and activists making things better? Pick a social problem at random (mental illness, crime, loneliness, educational failure, obesity, chronic disease, poverty) and then ask yourself: are things getting better?
Bad assumptions and flawed ideas will only ever lead to suboptimal outcomes. The outcomes are not the point, though. The power gained in dealing with the problem is. By this measure, our technocratic class’s fortunes have never been brighter (or were until recently). Discerning observers might notice that the worse these problems become, the more the self-appointed managers seem to flourish. How curious.
they are also often not the tests one thinks they will be. “better” or “more moral” or “more flourishing” really matter a lot less than you think when you’re fighting in your own streets for your own culture.
it comes down to commitment, to belief in your way of life and its rightness and its worthiness of being fought for.
it comes down to your willingness to organize and to fight.
this is why demoralization is so damaging. it’s the suppression of the societal immune system.
a society that comes to hate itself cannot long survive.
a society that cannot or will not protect its way of life will fail when faced with other ways of life seeking to dominate it.
if they are committed and you are not, being better and smarter and having more stuff does not matter. you’ll get eaten. it’s the law of the jungle. nothing can change that fact.
it’s the ultimate test of societal fitness: defend your way of life or lose it.
Progressives wish to increase corporate taxes and claim "taxing corporate profits doesn't impact consumers." They’re wrong.
Trumpists support the return of the days of high tariffs and claim “tariffs are a tax on corporate profits, not consumers.” They’re also wrong.
There is no thinking going on in either of these cases. They’re perfect examples of “my side says X so I support it.” The two claims are evidence of an inability to understand market economics. That or someone is lying to advance an agenda. Simple rule of thumb, if you must lie to convince people your policy is good, you’re wrong.
I can explain it; I just won’t excuse it.
People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
-- Helen Keller
There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.
It may look like some sort of mechanical narwhal, but it is assessed to be an invasion barge. Maritime experts have been watching Chinese developments very closely, and the construction of these unusual vessels could not go unseen… They have been photographed operating linked together as a single extended, deployable pier.
Harvard’s faculty and administration… want to be left alone to practice racial discrimination in admissions and hiring, and to let the Palestinian “cause” be used to intimate Jewish students. And they act as if government funding is some natural right. If colleges think that they can now pose as champions of free speech, the only appropriate response is to laugh bitterly.
To me, the Woke preaching and anti-Israel protests are negative externalities, not public goods. Admitting a wealthy Nigerian student instead of a middle-class Asian-American is Harvard’s idea of fairness, not mine.
Research has a positive externality, but I would not defend the current system. It involves too much overhead, cronyism, conformity, fads, and disciplines that are not really science. With little or no accountability for results. I would prefer to see much of the funding going to: prizes; support for young researchers; and institutions other than universities.
Democrats have a serious problem understanding the opposition they face on issues related to ‘gender identity.’ Their mental model of the phenomenon is broken because it ascribes all opposition to the Republican Party and evil designs drawn up in prayer-filled backrooms. This caricature is false and misleading. It does not help Democrats to understand the real world, or to win elections.
Every opponent of the state taking children away from families in the name of their ‘gender identity’ is explained away as a bigot. Every opponent of male bodies in female sports is dismissed as a right wing reactionary. Women who object to naked male bodies in their restrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, gym showers, and prisons: these women are all exactly the same as white supremacists, to Democrats.
But in reality, the opposition to ‘gender identity’ originated on the left.
With Trump’s enthusiasm with Latino voters and the slam dunk surge of conservative and Republican voters alike on the way, in a worst-case scenario, while things may be ugly and fraud may persist, Trump is on pace to win Texas no matter what, by 3.5 to 4.5% in a worst-case scenario. This trend of another 1-2 points left can be sent in reverse by outperforming expectations, especially in places Republicans should be dropping every last nickel on – like Harris, Bexar, Dallas, Tarrant, Denton, and Collin Counties. There aren’t enough voters in the Rio Grande Valley to offset the massive, more likely to vote populations settling into the affluent suburban areas near Austin and Dallas.
I think it is most likely, once the dust settles, that Trump winds up with a certified victory in Texas between 7 and 11 points; however, once Trump is gone – my grim reminder persists – Texas will be blue by 2032 if major work is not done to dent Democrat margins in a handful of sprawling and rapidly urbanizing counties.
The Dean of DEI at Brown’s medical school has just been promoted to VP of Campus Life:
Patricia Poitevien MD, MSc, FAAP is the Senior Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University. Dr. Poitevien’s research focuses on inclusion and mentorship of underrepresented learners in academic medicine, bias in assessment and the impact of racism on medical education. She was a founding member of the Association of Pediatric Program Directors (APPD) Learning Community on Underrepresented Minorities in Medicine a (UIM) and is currently the Immediate Past-President of the APPD. She has lectured nationally on disparities in medical education and in healthcare and has led numerous workshops on building diverse and inclusive environments within academic medicine. She has published on professional identity formation and belonging for underrepresented in medicine (UIM) learners, using a competency based medical education framework to advance anti-racist medical education and utilizing simulation in faculty development to address bias in the clinical learning environment. Her interests include recruitment and mentorship of UIM trainees and faculty, competency based medical education and professional identity formation for UIM learners.
Anti-racist medical education sounds fun and definitely won’t get patients killed. Although she graduated medical school in 1998, she didn’t receive a medical license until 2018. Reminder that if you step onto her campus, half of the students would find it justified to kill you for disagreeing with them.
The Roman Empire proper: Iberia, Italy, the Balkans and western Anatolia, plus all of North Africa west of Egypt still remained the largest and most powerful state in western Eurasia, but at that juncture, it felt like the Mediterranean was on the verge of disintegration. Inevitable as this eventual rupture might have been, circumstances conspired to forestall it by three centuries, until the armies of Islam swept decisively across the southern and eastern shores of what the Romans called the Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea.” In the meantime, “the Crisis of the Third Century” instead proved a temporary reprieve as a series of strong rulers promoted through the ranks of military officers held the Empire together by sheer force of will.
But these saviors of Romanitas did not come from Rome’s old aristocracy; in fact the vast majority hailed from the Roman province of Illyria, roughly today’s Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania. This frontier region, in a strategically key position between the west’s expansive Latin-speaking provinces and the venerable eastern territories dominated by Greeks, Egyptians and Syrians, furnished the lion's share of Rome's rulers between 268 AD and 578 AD. The ancient Greeks referred to all the native tribes of the region as Illyrians, hence the Roman-era province’s name. The Illyrians remain culturally and linguistically mysterious to us. When the Illyriciani came to power in the late third century AD, culturally Illyria remained mostly an extension of the Latin-speaking west, with the exception of some Greek-occupied areas in its southern and eastern fringes. But the toponyms and evidence from given names indicate that pre-Roman Illyria was occupied by an Indo-European-speaking people whose languages were only very distantly related to Latin or Greek.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I continued, “it’s difficult and excruciatingly frustrating at times. But, in many ways, Madagascar is more real than the U.S. Many people in America are accustomed to having things, and the money to buy them, but don’t have close-knit communities of friends and family. The reverse is true in Madagascar.” She was nodding, ruefully.
“But sometimes things would be nice,” she offered.
“Oh yes, they are.” I conceded. “I guess it’s very easy for me to think that I would rather have community than things, but how do I know? I like my things, my comforts, but I have never had real community, so have no idea what we have given up for a few possessions and comforts.”
In further revelations, the FHFA’s letter reveals that Letitia James has a history of lying on loan applications. Years previously, Ms. James and her father co-signed mortgage documents stating they were, in fact, husband and wife. Because couples are viewed as less risky for lenders (due to their joint income, joint credit, etc.), it’s common for lenders to only offer certain loans and/or Interest Rates to married couples.
At this point, it’s fairly obvious where the inspiration for the Trump Civil Fraud lawsuit came from. Letitia James must have assumed, because she was a prolific loan application bullsh** artist, that everyone was. So, to fulfill her deranged campaign promise of ‘getting Trump’—where was the first place she thought to look? In Trump’s loan documents of course!
…
If true, this one might be the worst of them all. In 2001, Letitia James secured a ‘Conforming Loan’ to purchase a five-family dwelling in Brooklyn, NY. Conforming Loans are mortgages backed by federal loan agency Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. These loans have better rates and terms than you would get from a private lender, as they are intended for “lower and middle-income borrowers.” Then, in 2011, James applied for the Home Assistance Modification Program (“HAMP”), a Great Recession-era program intended to reduce the mortgage payments of property owners facing financial hardship.
Shockingly, the issue here isn’t even that Letitia James exploited federal programs designed for struggling property owners (which she clearly is not). That’s just gross (not unlawful). The issue is that both aforementioned loan programs are ONLY available if the subject property contains 4 units or less. Again, the property that ‘Tish James purchased contains 5 units. So (if the FHFA allegations are true), what did Letitia James do? She did what Letitia James always does. She lied. Continuously. The FHFA alleges that, on several federal forms and applications, James clearly described the property as a 4-unit dwelling. Oops.
…despite the Mainstream Media’s proclamations that ‘no one is above the law’, Letitia James’ Civil Fraud lawsuit against Trump would only ever have been filed against one person: Trump. No one else in his position would ever have been subjected to such a rigamarole.
On the other hand, if an average private citizen committed the fraud that Letitia James is accused of? They would face investigation by the FHFA (or even the FBI), followed by indictment, a criminal trial, and penalties of 7 years (or more) in prison, as well as fines and restitution damages.
Where Letitia James was expecting to avoid prosecution by virtue of her public persona, President Trump was specifically targeted for his. That is not ‘equal justice for all’. That is corruption.
Apr. 18th, 2025
Sean Fischer:
House Republican Riley Moore went to the super maximum security prison in El Salvador to take some photos in front of the inmates. “I just toured the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” he writes, with pictures of him giving a thumbs-up, shirtless inmates standing at attention behind him. Moore gave a double thumbs-up in front of the men, densely packed in their cold metal bunk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took the same tour recently, posting a fun video in front of caged, tatted men.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) tried to visit that very same prison in El Salvador this week. He was calling for the release of a mistakenly deported Maryland man, but was denied access. It seems as though Cory Booker is planning a similar trip.
The El Salvador supermax prison is becoming the new Ohio Diner. It’s the new Iowa State Fair. It’s the new Jeffrey Epstein jet: It’s where every political leader needs to visit, the place to see and be seen if you’re ambitious and in politics today.
…it is hardly surprising that the Trump White House has universities in its crosshairs. Academe is a uniquely vulnerable target: an ideological enemy camp dependent on state largesse (especially in the form of grant funding, for both public and private institutions) and accordingly subject to federal oversight. This means that academics need to contend with the fact that campuses have become ideological monocultures out of sync with the surrounding political landscape. Self-preservation demands significant reform. By and large, these are reforms we academics should have done anyway, and years ago.
Now, apologists for the monolithic partisan status quo in academia often attribute it to self-selection. Republicans, these apologists say, tend to value commerce more than Democrats do, and are thus a lot likelier to wind up in the commercial sector than in a doctoral program. Democrats, this reasoning also says, are likelier to have non-commercializable values (concerning matters such as art, culture, justice, and the environment). Since academia is a setting where ideas are ostensibly not under constant pressure to be commercially profitable, it would make sense for commerce-averse Democrats to wind up in the academic profession.
Anyone who has interacted with the many intellectually curious right-wing people who spend time online posting about ideas, art, and literature will find such generalizations implausible. And certainly this explanation can’t account for the 42-to-1 partisan imbalance in certain disciplines. Instead, I believe there is a persistent, subtle “screening” that keeps Republican would-be academics out of the professoriate. This screening goes back decades and has excluded not only people who are vaguely MAGA or proto-MAGA, but also other types of people on the right: free-speech libertarians, religious conservatives, and skeptics of the idea of progress.
Academia today is hardly a realm of pure, non-instrumental thought. As they have become more monolithically progressive, many disciplines have reconfigured themselves to serve a kind of “epistemic support department” function for the Democratic Party coalition, seeking to produce ideas which will be politically profitable for this coalition, and devaluing other ideas that are not, in a partisan sense, “with the times.” This partisan self-instrumentalization in academia accelerated after Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016.
We doubt God, for an obvious example. This is the least religious generation in history. Apparently young women have “abandoned” religion, are “fleeing” the pews, and forgetting faith, when really I think many of us never knew it. This is a generation that doesn’t understand how to have faith, never learnt the habit. And adults shrug this off because they think this is simply doubting the existence of God, but no, this is more than that, this is doubting good. This is not just a lack of faith in religion; this is a lack of faith in right and wrong. More and more of us doubting morality, seeing no benefit to being a better person, because why, what does it matter?
Then we doubt our relationships, each other. Young people are crippled by doubt about relationships, utterly crippled. Scroll through the attachment forums, listen to the confessions and conclusions, read about relationship anxiety and relationship OCD, look at the labels and diagnoses, the endless, endless doubt over who to be with, why be with anyone, the agony and confusion. The sexual revolution destroyed trust and now we better be doubtful, how else can we protect ourselves? So we second-guess everything. We hesitate and hold back. And I always think this about falling marriage and birth rates; I am just not persuaded that so many young women object to having families for ideological reasons. We don’t dislike marriage, we doubt it. It will never work, so why try.
“A lot of these people truly believe that Germans shouldn’t be allowed to cast their votes beyond the narrow confines of the political cartel that runs the Federal Republic, so they’ll try to try to remove the opposition from the board entirely, via legal trickery.”
these eight august universities have become a self-sucking, self-congratulatory quagmire from which i doubt very much they will be able to extricate themselves.
they have become dependencies, tepid bards accustomed only to singing saccharine songs for substantial suppers in a world that’s rapidly moving on.
harvard faculty photo: dean of diverse equity (not to be confused with the dean of equitable diversity)
their administrative bloat has become legendary to the point of turning meta as deans of diversity dean deaning are in turn overseen by diversity obersturmbannfuhrers on and on past madness and into farce.
at harvard, administrative staff grew from 1,222 in 1969 to 6,543 in 2021, a 435% increase over five decades. the deep hilarity of this figure is that their undergraduate student population was 6,700 in 1969 and 7,153 in 2021. the ratio of admin to students rose from 1 per 5.5 (already absurd) to 1 per 1.1. we’re basically at the point of each student having their own administrator despite having moved from paper records to the internet age.
the other ivies look much the same.
…
the staff and faculty have been chosen for ideological purity, race, gender, sexual identity, and “diversity statements” that have turned interviews and tenure tracks into struggle sessions.
In one school district after another, angry parents found themselves ignored when they made the case that they should have the right to shield their children from certain books or teachings.
During the Biden administration, acting on complaints that these parents might pose a danger to school boards, Attorney General Merrick Garland went so far as to tell the FBI “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” The school lockdowns that took place during Covid caused millions of parents to become far more aware than they had been to what their children were learning in the classroom. Many of them weren’t pleased. A movement was born, led by Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups.
In the absence of a credible answer to the obvious and legitimate question—Why are racial disparities in America so vast?—the average, morally serious person may understandably conclude that the country is saturated with racism. Not just casual racism, but powerful, stultifying racism—the kind that shapes destinies and produces vast inequalities in life outcomes.
One need not be a zealot to wish to oppose such racism—and to come, quite reasonably, to regard the praise so often heaped on America by conservatives as nothing more than patriotic cant. America is not liberal. Not free. Not glorious. It is wicked. Racist. White supremacist.
Matt contrasts Kendi’s views with a ludicrous strawman version of Nathan Cofnas’s:
Ibram Kendi said it wasn’t good enough to not be racist, you had to be anti-racist in a very specific way. And there’s a counter-view, perhaps most forcefully articulated by Nathan Cofnas, that it’s not good enough to reject Kendi’s brand of anti-racism, you need to work to rehabilitate racism so that people can hold their heads high and believe in a hierarchy of races.
I’ll let Cofnas defend his own views against Yglesias’s calumny. But I will note that this is a false—and grim—dichotomy that overlooks an obvious, reasonable alternative: we can and should investigate the roots of racial disparities, just as we do with sex disparities. And we ought to discuss them judiciously but honestly, offering careful, qualified, and candid answers to legitimate questions.
At present, the best-supported answers suggest that differences in key traits—such as IQ and self-control—likely account for much of the observed racial disparities, while the role of racism appears comparatively limited. These differences are, in all probability, partly genetic in origin and resistant to meaningful intervention. They are, in short, realities we will have to learn to live with.
“There are three primary reasons for declining confidence in higher education — political agendas, colleges not teaching relevant skills, and cost,” [John] Halpin says.
Colleges are not producing graduates that society wants to hire, anymore. The academy has failed the society it serves, becoming a radicalization engine that charges exorbitant tuition instead of turning out the knowledgeable, productive citizens needed for the future of American civilization.
Steve Kornacki laid out the numbers last week.
We see this — white women with a college degree. The only group of white voters that is on the left. “Do you want to continue DEI programs or do you think they should be ended?” White men, no degree? “End it.” White men with a degree? “End it,” they say. White women no degree — “end it,” they say. White women with a college degree? Completely different. By a nearly 40 point margin they say to continue DEI.
Our form of government is showing its cracks because it was designed for aristocrats, not plebs—nonetheless the industrial revolution, and the logic of the machine that comes with it, and the tilt towards Germanic thinking that it facilitated, have conspired to turn the people of the West into a universal plebian class. The incentives of industrial markets have a way of combining with the incentives of democracy to elevate the lowest, most short-term type of thinking and give it the sheen of virtue.
The founders of the United States, despite (or because of?) their own fractious differences and self-serving motivations, designed a system to frustrate the ambitions of those who enjoyed ruling over other people, avowing that their form of government was good and useful exactly insofar as it does one thing, and one thing only:
At its core, gender-affirming care rests on two claims. First, it posits that biological sex is not a fixed binary but a malleable continuum, shaped by traits like sex chromosomes, hormones, genital morphology, and other physical characteristics—most of which doctors can alter with hormones and surgeries. Second, it asserts that a person can have a “brain sex”—equated with “gender identity”—that diverges from his body, creating a mismatch that drives gender dysphoria. The goal, then, is to align the body with this purportedly immutable “brain sex” through hormones and surgeries.
Both premises are scientifically untenable. Sex is not a spectrum. It’s a binary biological reality defined by reproductive function: males have the function to produce sperm, and females, ova. No hormonal or surgical intervention can change a person’s sex. Likewise, the notion that a person can have a “brain sex” incongruent with his body defies both biology and logic. Our bodies are an integrated whole, not a patchwork of independently sexed traits.
The decline of Western civilization has followed the decline of Christianity. Several generations grew up in broken homes and schools with no moral foundation. Nature abhors a vacuum, so the secular cult of The Current Thing has filled the void.
…this is the natural modus operandi of the progressive Left. These things are what they do. You know the old saw that “power corrupts,” as if office seekers were naturally good people who are then perverted by power? Well, throw it out for the whiggish rubbish that it is. The reality is precisely the opposite – the Left gains power this way because of the fact that the corrupt are seeking power. It’s not as if these people get into positions where they can exercise power and then it goes to their heads. No. They seek out positions of power specifically because they want to implement exactly the type of process detailed above and are perfectly willing to disregard or procedurally manipulate whatever impediments might stand in their way. They don’t “play fair” because they don’t see any reason to and never had any intention of doing so to begin with.
Holding these numbers constant, it won’t be long before much of Europe becomes colonized by Muslims in such numbers that Europe will only be a shadow of itself in terms of culture, politics, and religion. European liberal progressives—besotted with toxic toleration—never stop to think about the deep ideological asymmetries that could mean their civilization is overrun.
Lionel Shriver’s Mania came out last year, to almost no mainstream fanfare. That’s not surprising. The book is scathing, unsparing, and brilliant; which is to say, culturally radioactive. It tells the story of a United States overtaken by a movement for “Cognitive Equality,” a world in which IQ is denounced as hate speech, intellectual disability is rebranded as “alternative processing,” and the gravest sin imaginable is to suggest that some people might be smarter than others.
…what Mania captures — in ways that are only now becoming clear — is not just the absurdity of insisting that identity overrides biology.
It’s the slow, systemic dismantling of discernment itself. About our society failing to recognize the reality that no, not every perspective is equally valid.
Not every person is equally smart.
Not every religion is equally deserving of respect.
And in that sense, the world she imagined is the world we now live in.
Because we’re there.
In Mania, the institutions don’t just affirm nonsense — they punish dissent. The protagonist nearly loses custody of her children for using the word “stupid” at home. Surgeons are hired without reference to qualifications. Elite universities switch to lottery admissions in the name of fairness. And when people express concern, they’re told they’re bigots. Or worse, deniers.
At the end of January, six police officers walked up to the front door of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, in Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom. After briefly speaking to the middle-aged couple in front of their young daughter, they took them into police custody, where they would go on to be incarcerated for eight hours under suspicion of having sent “malicious communications.”
The reasons why Allen and Levine were arrested are astonishing. Unhappy about their daughter’s primary school, they had raised questions about the process of choosing a new headmaster in a parents’ WhatsApp group. When the school’s leadership got wind of the criticisms, it referred Allen and Levine to the local police—who promptly sent over half a dozen officers to arrest them.
As a result of these broad prohibitions and the ease of enforcing them, Britain has quickly become one of the continent’s leaders in prosecuting—and even jailing—people for speech. As the Times of London recently reported, “officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests [under section 127] in 2023.” This means that, on average, over 33 arrests are made every day for what people in the United Kingdom have said on the internet.
In one particularly egregious case, a 21-year-old woman was criminally prosecuted for referring to a soccer player by the n-word on social media—even though she herself is black. In another case, a Scottish grandmother fell afoul of draconian laws establishing effective no-speech zones around abortion clinics. 74-year old Rose Docherty silently held up a sign reading “coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want”; four police officers promptly arrested her. In yet another case, an autistic 16-year-old girl was manhandled and arrested by police in West Yorkshire on the suspicion of a homophobic hate crime for saying that an officer resembled her “lesbian nana.” (The girl’s beloved grandmother is lesbian.)
If I were teaching a course in organizational behavior, I would assign Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey’s characters Randle McMurphy, Nurse Ratched, and Doctor Spivey are organizational archetypes. They exemplify people you can find in any setting.
McMurphy is the rebel. He seeks to achieve goals. If rules get in the way, then they are silly and should be broken. This archetype thrives in small startup companies, which are desperate to gain a foothold in the market and achieve profitability.
Rebel behavior can be found more often in males than in females. In politics, rebels tend to be radicals, including radical libertarians.
Nurse Ratched is the proceduralist. She is a stickler for existing rules and norms. She is the opposite of the rebel, in that she has no higher goals. She only wants to remain in control. Obtaining conformity to rules and norms serves that end.
Dr. Spivey represents another organization archetype, the pleaser. Meek and unobtrusive, Spivey is an almost-forgettable character in Kesey’s novel. He would seem to outrank Nurse Ratched, but he readily submits to her dominance. He does not want to rock the boat. To get along, he goes along.
I heard a story — and I believe it to be true — from a teenage boy I employ. He’s been helping me with errands and chores for a couple years. The kind of work you’d assign to a reliable son or a good husband, if you had one.
He has a younger brother, age 8, who’s just finishing third grade. When the boy was in second grade, their parents had to fight — hard — to get him out of a weekly classroom ritual called “Gender Circle.”
Every week, the kids gathered for a story. Sometimes it was a Pride parade book, like Grandad’s Pride. But often, it was a transition tale: a trans child, animal, or magical creature. And after enough stories, something settled in for the boy — the way fairytales do. The idea that growing up happy meant changing who you are.
That becoming a girl was just part of becoming an adult.
He came home in tears. Not because he was bullied or shamed. Because he was confused. He didn’t want to be a mommy. He didn’t understand that not wanting it was allowed.
At “Gender Circle,” kids introduced themselves with names and pronouns — updated weekly, in case anyone changed. And when someone did change, the class erupted into celebration. The teacher led them in a “Welcome Song.” The child got a star moment. The new identity was practiced and praised for days.
A political party shows its values through what it defends.
Leave x alone is the perfect meme template for the modern left. Like possessed lemmings, they keep dying on hills that are 80/20 issues against them. Woke remains deeply entrenched in lawless blue zones that openly defy orders on trans, DEI, and deportations. The DNC’s three main constituents are broken brain boomers, mentally ill overeducated birthing persons, and the illegal/welfare surrogate children they virtue signal about but live far away from.
In 2020, Nature magazine endorsed Joe Biden for U.S. president. A pre-registered, large-sample experiment found that the endorsement didn’t change people’s view of the candidates - but it did cause them to lose trust in Nature and in scientists in general.
Thanks for reading! I’m working on a piece about the LGBTQ educational requirements for elementary schoolers in Maryland, and a deeper dive into the newest political form that has spread across the developed world: soft totalitarianism.
I will also release a special ‘feminism’ edition of my Substack Notes posts soon.
I recently got a new dog, and work has been busy (plus I’m still recovering from my concussion 2 weeks ago), so I’ve been engaging with Substack less than usual but stick around: more will be appearing soon.
