Substack Notes 15.4 - The Double Standard and Narrative Construction
Reviewing a Parade of Bad Ideas from 2025
Jan 11, 2026
This is a backlog of Substack notes from last year. I’ve been busy teaching and tutoring (although I plan to post an essay about the current media frothing around the shooting death of Renee Good tomorrow) so I thought I would finally post this.
The procedure is now familiar, and well-worn: find some controversial aspect of what the right or the heterodox or institutional critics or President Trump’s administration is doing (minor, quickly forgotten, dubiously sourced - doesn’t matter) and pretend as if it’s a major issue, a norm violation, a crisis.
Ignore the fact that presidents and institutions and thinkers having been doing and saying precisely these kinds of things for decades (without public criticism). Ignore the sharp (and undeniable) leftward turn of elites and their chosen political vehicles over the past 20 years. Ignore the fact that every national policy entails mistakes and losers and victims (yes: every single one). Most of all ignore the larger context of the policy debate. Ignore the harms of vanishing law enforcement in our cities, tens of millions of illegal immigrants allowed into the country (encouraged to come, for a time). Ignore the billions of dollars lost to fraud, the thousands of lives lost to unaddressed epidemics of urban murder, the deaths linked to fentanyl (probably close to a million at this point). Ignore all of that, and focus on whatever triviality s currently being urgently debated on CNN tonight.
Everyone evaluates those in agreement versus those opposed differently. It’s human nature. But the tendency has become so warped, so enormously overblown, that it’s shocking every time you see it now. One cannot help but wonder exactly what’s going on. Is this merely cynical dishonesty? Is the person so blinkered by their worldview that the counterfactuals haven’t occurred to them? Or are they perhaps that poorly informed?
Let me be very clear: there’s nothing that reformist elements can reasonably say or do, nothing that’s been proposed or debated, which could cause as much harm and policy disarray as the fact that our Southern border was basically unguarded for years. And there’s nothing that reformers could do, no matter how welcome or beneficial, that would receive a fair hearing in the mainstream. There’s no element of Project 2025 (which we curiously hear very little of these days) that could ever, in any conceivable reality, equal the tragedy and loss of thousands of young, black lives lost to gun violence every year in cities under the control of progressive politicians (which situation never even warrants mention, much less proposed solutions). This is why I sincerely doubt reports that independents are moving leftward electorally.
(Above) The elite class is now represented by the Democratic Party
It’s not that Republicans aren’t inept and corrupt and ideological - it’s that the elite class (which is now represented by the Democratic Party) has avoided the introspection and correction necessary to recapture the center. They have used their privilege and status to shield themselves from a very plain and important reality:
Many of the ideas that they pretended to be certain about (and about which they implied that doubt or dissent were types of thoughtcrimes) were WRONG.
Until they acknowledge and respond to this reality they will be unable to reform themselves sufficiently and they will be unable to regain national political power (inshallah).
Instead of addressing their fake certainties and the harm they have caused, they have chosen a strategy of catastrophizing, narrative confabulation, and distraction. But Americans are less concerned with narratives than they are with basic safety and prosperity, and it is precisely in these key areas that the left is found most wanting.
Hey, remember when Nixon and his cronies broke into the Watergate and bugged the DNC. And they got caught and the media focused on nothing else for the next year?
And then Obama bugged Trump tower and worked with the Clintons on the Russia collusion hoax based on the bogus Steele dossier and the mainstream media was totally silent?
Welcome to the casino economy, where the only exit to prosperity may come in the form of a meme coin, FOMOing into a short-term, ultra high strike price call option, or driving oneself even further into debt to purchase Airbnb rental properties.
You can’t blame Americans for deciding to risk it all on Red 21 instead of accepting their fate on the never-ending debt treadmill.
It’s widely believed that slavery is what made the United States an economic powerhouse in the 19th century, and thus that the nation’s prosperity today ultimately rests on this foundation.
Economic historians, however, overwhelmingly disagree. The slaveholding South, they point out, was always much less prosperous than the free North. Thus, slavery couldn’t have been the main source of America’s wealth, either back then or now.
Some dislike this conclusion, perhaps because it seems to weaken the case for reparations and perhaps because it challenges a popular critique of the US and of capitalism. Whatever your views on those issues, though, it’s surely good news that slavery wasn’t particularly economically beneficial - contrary to the arguments of pro-slavers.
The belief that US juries routinely discriminate against Black defendants is widespread. But a new study challenges the presumption.
As shown in the graph below, Black defendants with stereotypically Black names are no more likely to be prosecuted than those with stereotypically White ones. (In the American grand jury system, the decision to prosecute is almost always made in the absence of the defendant.) The authors conclude that “racial bias explains at most 0.3 percent of the Black-White felony conviction gap.”
This is oneofmanystudies suggesting that people greatly exaggerate the level of discrimination in the US and the modern West (which isn’t to say, of course, that discrimination has gone to zero).
Why do some people lead lives of crime while others never so much as steal a paperclip from the office? Poverty, peers, and personality presumably all play a part. But one factor stands head and shoulders above all of these: intelligence.
Decades of research show that, along with biological sex, IQ is one of the strongest predictors of criminal behavior. People with lower IQs are more likely to offend than their higher IQ peers.
I never claimed to be a great teacher, maybe not even a good one. But I do know this: I went to work every day determined to give my students everything I had.
Can the Department of Education say the same? Can the bureaucrats, the superintendents, the policymakers who invent these slogans honestly say they gave everything for the children?
If not — they should resign. For the good of the kids. For the good of the country.
This is a long exploration of the bureaucratic super complex-’the Blob’-which long ago acquired a life of its own and gobbled up companies, institutions, sectors, and political parties. Now it seeks to digest the entire country.
Remember the Illinois school superintendent who was a convicted criminal and illegal alien? Does anyone believe that DEI had nothing to do with his positioning near the apex of the educational system?
…this woman had chosen simplicity. Her sign read only one word:
TRUMP
— with a circle and slash through the name.
I stood there for five minutes and watched the ritual play out.
A car would pass, the driver laying on the horn in a jubilant staccato.
A pedestrian would stop, blink in theatrical surprise — someone hates Trump?! in Montpelier, Vermont?! — then beam with delight, fold their hands in gratitude, and say, “Thank you.”
Another passerby slowed down just long enough to pump two clenched fists in a little semaphore of solidarity, grinning as though the act itself had lightened their day. Each reaction was a miniature celebration.
And the woman? She responded the same way every time. A small smile. A single nod. Nothing more. She never spoke, never matched their energy, never even raised her hand.
She acknowledged each interaction with the serene detachment of a monk, and then reset to neutral, waiting for the next.
Something about the peace of long Vermont drives lets me solve find-the-language-for-a-feeling problems, just as the shower or the drawing table often lead me to solve work-work problems. And that worked again — during the drive to Calais, I came to understand why the whole scene had felt uncanny and creepily familiar.
The woman was doing something I’d seen before, just never in the flesh.
I’ve seen real life interactions that belonged online — usually florid, unhinged rants that felt like a Facebook comment thread brought to life. But this was different. What felt familiar wasn’t the content, but the structure.
This was the infrastructure of online life transposed into the real world.
She wasn’t protesting.
She was collecting likes.
Yes. It’s almost as if the left (the side of the spectrum which Randi Weingarten conflates with the ‘moral arc’) became increasingly radical and totalitarian… and implicated with elite power structures. It’s almost as if the teachers’ unions are on the wrong side of history. Certainly it can’t be assumed that they (and dishonest power brokers like Randi Weingarten) are on the RIGHT side, simply because they claim to be.
Forget moral arcs and historical directionality. If you believe that institutions should exist to help the poor and create opportunity then public education is FAILING. It’s providing lavish sinecures for endless administrators, and reliable paychecks for incompetent, cynical teachers… while it ruins the character and future of millions of disadvantaged kids. Probably no institution has been as damaging to the United States as the public schools, and I say this as a teacher myself.
Certain ideas are more closely linked to violence than others. Such ideas shouldn’t be censored or suppressed... but they should be identified. Believing that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the United States, or that ICE is an illegitimate incursion into American civil society, are such ideas. Believing that there’s a trans genocide appears to be one of those ideas. Basically, any belief that YOUR group is at risk of existential attack by ANOTHER group probably gives rise to violence.
Sometimes such ideas are accurate, obviously. I’m not saying they’re necessarily invalid. I’m saying they tend to foment violence, and we should be honest about that and careful about how we use language or try to incite resentment or anger for political ends.
Then we get to the statistical deceptions. The New York Times wants you to believe that crime isn’t a problem in Charlotte specifically or in the United States more generally, because it is in decline:
… In Charlotte, overall crime was down by 8 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the police, while violent crime was down by 25 percent.
…Today, Mr. Trump’s critics fear that he will use the death of Ms. Zarutska to justify sending federal troops into American cities, as he has already done in Washington, despite statistics showing a downturn in violent crime nationwide.
You can smell the lie an ocean way. In truth, however the statistics might be trending at the moment, the United States has wildly high crime numbers compared to many other Western nations. And the Charlotte homicide rate hit a three-year high in 2024, surpassed in recent history only by the extremely violent Summer of Floyd in 2020. In 2025, city homicides have so far slipped back towards the mean, but they’re still hovering between nine and twelve per 100,000 residents. For comparison, that is at least eleven times higher than the German homicide rate. These are eye-watering numbers.
The normies are ready for a reckoning. They are not revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries, but they want a just social order and they increasingly sense that one is not to be had under liberalism. They don’t process this on an intellectual level, but they feel like there is no way to vote themselves out of this. Stephen Miller’s rejection of trite ACLU pieties reflects, at a high level, the wish among the ordinary people of America for justice not in conflict with positive law. They don’t see the benefit of having their flag burned and their faith mocked and their heritage derided; the freedom they were supposed to enjoy in exchange, David French’s “blessings of liberty,” ring hollow now. It has been made very clear to them, if only intuitively, that there are millions of people who hate them, and would be happy to see them dead, if not actively participate in their liquidation, and that their innate good nature and willingness to leave people alone have resulted in a great barbarian horde that seeks nothing less than the wholesale destruction of their society.
The normie understands that this horde exists due to the support of the system, and if they don’t know the particulars, they are aware that their enemies are given state or state-adjacent jobs, or else funded by non-profits or NGOs.
It’s eye-wateringly expensive and stuck in endless gridlock. If you pay attention to the news, it’s one alarming headline after another, from organized crime to sexual assaults to home invasions to a car theft epidemic. Add to this: housing shortages, homeless encampments and a public transit fentanyl zombie invasion, not to mention all the LCBO booze heists that even in-store rent-a-cops won’t shut down.
Despite all these serious problems, we have a deadly unserious mayor—one who speaks in mushy progressive slogans, bankrolls all her pet projects, dances like a broken washing machine at every public appearance, and believes there is no problem a bike lane or tax hike won’t fix.
It’s like she walked off the set of Southpark, which would be funny were it not for all the aforementioned overlapping crises. This is the opposite of “cometh the (wo)man, cometh the hour.” Because the hour hath cometh and our sanity goeth.
Germany has a very robust public sector; something like 12% of everyone works for the government. By going after AfD members who work for the state, left-leaning Minister Presidents and cabinet ministers hope to intimidate broad portions of the population away from supporting their political opponents. It is that blunt and stupid, what they are doing here.
...Outside the strictly political sphere, the German ruling elite are overwhelmingly located in the civil service, particularly among the nearly 1.8 million Beamte – those civil servants who enjoy especially generous pension benefits and job security equivalent to that of a tenured American professor. The elite want to cleanse their own ranks of the opposition by way of establishing the bureaucracy as a stronghold against the AfD, in the increasingly likely event that the party enters government somewhere in the East.
If you’ve been following American politics for the past five years, you may have noticed an unhealthy pattern: The left, which controls most cultural institutions, uses soft power to shape them in an ever more progressive direction. The right, which controls few cultural institutions but does possess political power, passes vague and heavy-handed policies intended to undo the left’s handiwork (and then some). Core to this pattern is the fact that the left tends to view the institutions it controls as politically neutral when, in fact, they are stamped throughout with their own sacred values. The right, in turn, tends to see their scorched-earth responses as justified by a sense of powerlessness over the leftward direction of American culture.
the drama of postliberal populism is intensely personal, serving up figures who become the focus of profound loyalty and intense opposition, who present themselves as champions of the forgotten man while they’re attacked as strongmen in the making.
The drama of postliberal progressivism, in contrast, is a drama of ideological influence and institutional power, in which activists and elites effect dramatic change outside the democratic process and then try to survive or sidestep backlash from the voters. It’s a drama where sudden changes seem to just happen — unprecedented waves of immigration on both continents, a radical shift in official American norms around race or sex, a new regime of euthanasia in Canada — without having a singular progressive leader who claims responsibility and provides the policy with a charismatic face.
…It would be immensely helpful to our debates if more sincere liberals could be persuaded that this style of progressivism really is a postliberal form of politics, that its authoritarian tendencies are not just invented by fearful conservatives and that it can make moves against its enemies — like arresting them for tweets, let’s say — that would be screaming front-page news if populist governments made them.
Beginning around 2020, progressives began indoctrinating American schoolchildren with anti-American, anti-white Marxist ideology in the form of Critical Race Theory in K-12 classrooms. Even more appalling, when parents protested, progressives told the nation it wasn’t happening, that CRT was an arcane university legal theory, that it had nothing to do with Marxism, that what was actually being taught was the history of slavery in this country, and that critics were, you guessed it, racist. But in reality, as RealClear Investigations reported in 2021, public and private schools were trainingteachers, staff, administrators, even parents on CRT, school administrators saw it as an indispensable tool for dismantling racism — since when did that become the point of grade school? — and one survey found that, less than a year after the murder of George Floyd, 8% of K-12 teachers said they had taught or discussed CRT with students, 20% of teachers in urban schools said the same, and the Association of American Educators found over 4% of teachers were required to teach CRT. In my own experience, whenever I met someone who scoffed at the notion that CRT was being taught, or that CRT is a form of Marxism, invariably it turned out that the person couldn’t define CRT themselves. Like a protester chanting “from the river to the sea” who cannot tell you what river or what sea, they were simply repeating a leftist talking point that they had not even bothered to google before deciding it was true.
When Rep. Pocan, Snyder, or others claim “there is no organization called Antifa,” the truth is there is no single organization called Antifa. There are, instead, many Antifa organizations, and they work together, largely peacefully, but with few qualms about using calculated violence against civilians for political purposes. So no, it’s not an organization. Antifa is an ideology, a protest movement, and to a degree, a terrorist network.
It is absolutely imperative to get these sorts of people out of politics. They are crazy and they are doing everything in their power to destroy civilisation. They are insulated from a lot of the economic chaos they wreak because they’re overwhelmingly government bureaucrats, university types and hipsters who are to varying degrees reliant on the state to make their living. They’re renters rather than owners, they live near the city centre rather than in the suburbs, they’re young rather than old (h/t Apollo News for that link) and they think what they’ve done is just fantastic.
This is all in line with the Eustace Mullins quote, whereby the upper elites controlling society can determine which of these disparate groups win and which ones lose simply by adjusting the size and influence of the group by impacting their funding and reach:
[the central bank owners] adopted the Hegelian dialectic, the dialectic of materialism, which regards the World as Power, and the World as Reality. It denies all other powers and all other realities. It functions on the principle of thesis, antithesis and a synthesis...Thus the World Order organizes and finances Jewish groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Jewish groups; it organizes Communist groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Communist groups. It is not necessary for the Order to throw these groups against each other; they seek each other out like heat-seeking missiles and try to destroy each other. By controlling the size and resources of each group, the World Order can always predetermine the outcome. In this technique, members of the World Order are often identified with one side or the other. John Foster Dulles arranged financing for Hitler, but he was never a Nazi. David Rockefeller may be cheered in Moscow, but he is not a Communist...a distinguishing trait of a member of the World Order, although it may not be admitted, is that he does not believe in anything but the World Order. Another distinguishing trait is his absolute contempt for anyone who actually believes in the tenets of Communism, Zionism, Christianity, or any national, religious or fraternal group...If you are a sincere Christian, Zionist or Moslem, the World Order regards you as a moron unworthy of respect. You can and will be used, but you will never be respected.
Rejecting hate means rejecting the devil in all its forms, not just anti-Semitism but Islamophobia too. Yet even the very concept of ‘Islamophobia’, although originating with hardline Muslim groups linked to unsavoury regimes, owes its continued existence to Christian guilt, and the new sins of prejudice which emerged out of post-war taboos. It is a sense of guilt that obviously sectarian activists with an illiberal agenda have been quick to use to their own advantage.
...
Without that sense of guilt, the idea of paying for Mr Al-Shamie to live in Britain, in subsidised housing, and tolerating his obviously hostile views, would have been totally absurd, as would the widespread settlement of Muslims in Europe. The war made us repulsed by ethnic chauvinism, but the sense of repugnance has extended to a degree of self-hatred which, as Wallis Simons argues, is actually dangerous for Jews.
If there’s one writer who should be required reading for American voters, it’s Thomas Sowell…
Trying to teach modern schoolkids writing and critical thinking is a bit like trying to teach chimpanzees to speak human languages, or to teach profoundly neurologically impaired people to communicate by ‘guided’ pointing at an alphabet print-out: you’re never quite sure if you’re making progress, and you often have the persistent and anxious sense that you’re actually doing all of the work.
Seems like you've said a mouthful or two there which I'll take a closer look at later, but something to pay my dues as a "grammar-nazi" 😉🙂, I think that should be "TENS of millions". HTH ... 🙂
Epic - thanks for compiling, James.
> "tends of millions"
Seems like you've said a mouthful or two there which I'll take a closer look at later, but something to pay my dues as a "grammar-nazi" 😉🙂, I think that should be "TENS of millions". HTH ... 🙂