Links - 4th February 2026 (3 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

Thread by @mishtal on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "These are seven days that shatter the 'Nakba' myth. What actually happened after the 1947 UN partition vote is nothing like the story told in activist circles today. Thread ⬇️⬇️⬇️
All week we've seen people repeat the ‘Nakba’ narrative as if Jewish militias suddenly attacked passive Arab communities and drove them out. But the days after partition tell a story of murderous Arab violence and mobilization. And I will use mostly Arab newspapers to show it.
The morning after the UN vote, the pages of Ad-Difa and Al-Wahda were saturated with threats, anti-Jewish invective, and demands for an 'Islamic Front' to rise. Al-Wahda’s headline: “O Arabs, the West has chosen your enemies. Will you remain stunned, or will you prepare?” By day two Arab violence had erupted throughout the mandate. The Palestine Post reported seven Jews murdered in multiple attacks on 30 November. Look at Ad-Difa’s own front page on the same date. Its headline describes the murder of Jews. The article described bus ambushes around Jerusalem, attacks in Lod, Tulkarm, Haifa and Jaffa The war had begun - and it had begun with Arab-initiated violence. Day three. The front page of Falastin is entirely about Arab mobilisation and anti-Jewish actions. The newspaper boasted about anti-Jewish pogroms throughout the Middle East: homes burned in Aleppo, attacks in Baghdad and Cairo, shootings in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa. On the same day, the Palestine Post described Jewish calls for restraint. It also reported that Arab families were leaving mixed neighborhoods to avoid the violence their own side was generating - a detail that matters deeply for refugee debates. Day four - Arab newspapers continue to chronicle attacks - and celebrate them. Ad-Difa’s front page led with ongoing Arab violence and noted that 49 Jews had now been killed - a cumulative total reported without any suggestion of regret. Day five: HaTsofe reports on the start of Jewish defense as Jews were killed in 'unprovoked attacks.' The article included striking details: Residential Jewish streets attacked, Families trapped in homes, Jewish houses burned, Snipers targeting rescue workers. Day Six: The Palestine Post reports attacks on remote Jewish settlements and notes Arab-on-Arab violence - the murder of a man who 'broke ranks' by not supporting the uprising. This coercive internal atmosphere is erased in modern ‘Nakba’ narratives. Day seven. A call from Egyptian students for battle. They pledged - in blood - not to return 'except victorious or as martyrs.' The seeds of the irregular armies that within weeks would invade and attack Jewish outposts. Al Wahda also boasted of attacks on innocent Jews in Aden
These seven days show the reality behind the ‘Nakba’ myth: Arab leaders chose violence from the start, and the region followed. The tragedy that came after wasn’t the result of a Jewish plan, but of a war Arab elites launched - and lost."

Peter Baum on X - "FACTS Many supporting the false narrative that Jews / Zionists stole Palestinian land may wish to read The Land Question in Palestine by Kenneth W. Stein . Through diligent and meticulously researching and identifying land transfer documentation from a number of historical legal , and thankfully still maintained sources , Arab , Jew , Palestinian , Zionist and British , Stein has listed numerous land sales from Arabs to Jews prior to the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. To a political researcher such as myself it is unsurprising how many Arabs yelled foul at the false narrative of a Zionist land grab whilst duplicitously selling at overinflated prices to those very same Zionists they were accusing of land theft . Both Churchill in several speeches and the Arabs themselves in recorded testimony under oath to various commissions notably the Hope Simpson and Peel Commissions stated that no Arab Palestinian land had been stolen but all legally acquired. As just one glaring example appendix 3 of the book which exposes numerous such legally documented land sales is as follows."

Adin - عدین - עדין on X - "A reminder of how the Nakba began. More than 200 Jews were killed by Arabs in the first month after the announcement of the 1947 UN partition plan, Not a single Arab village had been conquered yet, There was no "Plan Dalet" Much more Jews were killed by Arabs than vice versa."

Nicole Lampert on X - "The Second Intifada saw scores of terrorist attacks - bus bombings, cafe bombs, beach bombings - which killed more than 1000 Israelis, mainly civilians. For @BBCNews that makes it a ‘largely unarmed and popular uprising’. WHO IS WRITING THIS PROPAGANDA? Story below so you can see what it looks like and how they haven’t mentioned ALL THE VIOLENCE?"
Nicole Lampert on X - "Unbelievably, @BBCNews has done a THIRD version trying to explain what Intifada means and STILL doesn’t mention the actual violence of the first and second Intifadas."

Dr. Einat Wilf on X - "One of the biggest and lesser known stories of Nov 29 is that the lands allocated to a Jewish state (two color map) were essentially those the Zionists reclaimed from malaria through land purchase, science and education (the two-tone blue map is the incidents of malaria and the middle map shows Jewish land ownership of those lands reclaimed from malaria). Moreover, the sudden and extremely rapid increase of the Arab population in the 1920’s and 1930’s in this barely populated backwater region (this was the highest population increase rate in the world in 1931/2) was only in part due to immigration spurred by Zionist development of the land. The major share of the massive Arab population increase was thanks to Malaria eradication, which was the work of the Galician born famed microbiologist and ardent Zionist Dr. Israel Kligler (credit to the great historical work of Anton Alexander). With this knowledge it remains even a greater tragedy that the now much more numerous Arabs of the land directed their efforts towards brutally fighting Zionism rather than choosing to live side by side with an emerging Jewish state. More than a year after the Oct 7 massacre we mark once more the Nov 29 moment when the Jews said yes to the UNGA plan of partition (having prioritized having a state, even if tiny and mostly desert and lands reclaimed from malaria and no Zion and no Judea) and the Arabs said no and proceeded to wage a brutal war to the present day (having prioritized - still - the goal of the Jews not having a state at all and of any size). (Note on map titles: for twenty centuries, before a campaign of denial was underway, it was well understood that the name “Palestine” merely denoted the Roman/Christian/Colonial/European name for the geographic region where the Land of Israel was and was therefore deeply associated with Jews and the their continuous connection to the land. Hence the League of Nation in establishing the mandate recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" as the "grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country” and which is why the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra of Jewish musicians became the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra…)"
Judea Pearl on X - "Why do Palestinians hit the roof when they read the 1922 text of the League of Nations decision? Because The Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine uniquely states: “…recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine…” None of the other League of Nations Mandates (Iraq, Syria/Lebanon, Transjordan, Tanganyika, Cameroon, Togoland, Nauru, South West Africa, etc.) contain anything like this language. No other League of Nations decision or report uses the phrase “historical connection” to justify the self-determination rights of a particular people. This is what makes Palestinians red furious -- historical connection is the one thing they lack. @EinatWilf @adam_louis52328 @AkaLazarus @dansenor @AndrewPessin @LekhtNaya @GadSaad @emilykschrader"

David Bernstein on X - "The loony anti-Israel Mondoweiss lays its cards on the table: in a future one state Palestine, no rights for Jews--and preferably no Jews. Mondoweiss also happens to be a purveyor of antisemitism of longstanding. But like I try to emphasize, many antizionists are *worse* than mere antisemites. Most antisemites aren't Nazis and aren't genocidal. Many antizionists are at best indifferent as to whether satisfying their agenda means the genocide (real genocide, not "genocide") of the Jewish population of Israel, and some affirmatively support it."

Academic reported to police after saying ‘Zionist’ Jewish schools should be ‘put to an end’ - "Community groups say social media posts by the controversial academic Prof David Miller about their children’s education has left them in fear. Prof Miller, who has long campaigned against Zionism and the state of Israel, posted a series of messages on X in which he criticised the presence of around 140 Jewish schools in Britain. He accused the schools of radicalising their pupils into Zionism by arranging tours of Israel and offering routes to recruitment by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF)... In February this year Prof Miller attended the funeral of senior Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon to report on the event. He was detained at Heathrow Airport under the Terrorism Act 2000 for nearly four hours by Counter Terrorism Police on his return from Beirut. Following his release from detention, which did not result in his arrest, Prof Miller claimed “it was a sign of the way policing operates under immense pressure from Zionist groups”."

Why is Norway so fixated on Israel? - "Large amounts of Norwegian state expenditure has gone towards projecting their hatred towards Israel or to quenching a deluded fixation with shaping things in Gaza. Imagine writing a budget for your country in which you order another country to do things. Israel “must take responsibility” for the reconstruction of Gaza; Israel must “prosecute offenders”; Israel must be “reminded of the ICJ ruling” – the list goes on. The delusion is left unchecked by the arrogance. Norway has been an enthusiastic supporter of the defective International Criminal Court’s schemes against Israel from the outset. It has repeatedly threatened to “arrest” the democratically elected prime minister of Israel, who hasn’t been anywhere near Norway in a quarter of a century and seems unlikely to pop over for a smorgasbord anytime in the near future. But what is curious is that this posturing from Norway takes place whilst it consistently refuses to designate Hamas as a terrorist group and earlier this year happily laid out the red carpet in Oslo to the foreign minister of Iran. Then, in an act almost designed to cause offence, the Norwegian prime minister last month chose to attend a controversial event to commemorate Kristallnacht run by a nonprofit that has accused Israel of genocide... During the Second World War, Norwegian collaborators under Vidkun Quisling, a traitor so complete that his surname entered the English lexicon, happily sent their few thousand Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz to be murdered for being Jewish. Norway’s great author, thinker and even modern day idol Knut Hamsun was a Nazi sympathiser who gave his Nobel Prize for Literature to Joseph Goebbels in 1943."

Oli London on X - "Bill Maher asks pro-Palestine commentator Ana Kasparian which Middle Eastern city she would be able to live in while wearing her short dress. “What city you think you would be comfortable in that dress?…why couldn’t you wear that dress?”"
Left wingers claim that solidarity is unconditional and not holding left wing opinions doesn't mean they deserve to die, then celebrate Charlie Kirk being assassinated for his beliefs

𝔸η𝐓 on X - "This meltdown is absolutely hilarious... Ana Kasparian appeared on Bill Mahers show. She is the Armenian co host of The Young Turks, a show that shares the same name as the group that carried out a very real genocide against Armenians. Yet she shows no issue with that history, since she stays far more fixated on her hostility toward Jews. On the show, Bill completely tore apart her position on the Middle East, especially regarding Muslim majority countries. When he asked her which Muslim majority country she would personally feel safest and most comfortable in, she froze. She could not answer, for reasons that are painfully obvious to anyone watching. So of course Cenk was probably at his keyboard afterward, huffing and puffing, sweating through his shirt, and hammering out this rant in a frantic attempt to defend her and smear Bill Maher as a racist. 😂"
Karyn on X - Neither Ana or Cenk can reconcile reality with their world view so all inconvenient facts must be thrown into the fiery pit of "racism" and geopolitical "destabilization" caused soley by the US and Israel whose very existence is of course an act of "gen0cide""
𝔸η𝐓 on X - Exactly, it's the most primitive and pathetic form of gaslighting. There is not even an ounce of effort put into sounding intellectually coherent.. To them everything is simply "racism.""
Karyn on X - 💯! Because for the left, righteousness automatically resides with the "weak." And savagery thats carried out by the "weak" if it's acknowledged at all, is morally outsourced to a disproportionate power."

Green Beret Nap Time on X - "Did you know that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was founded by two Palestinian-American activists with deep ties to terrorism, Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad, both of whom participated in the secret 1993 meeting of US based Muslim Brotherhood affiliates where Hamas supporters discussed creating a new "neutral" entity to influence US opinion while masking their true agenda? Thread and Substack article on CAIR and their foreign funding sources, their public expenditures in the US, and their anti-American Islamist agenda dropping tomorrow morning."

UNRWA on X - "Across the region and beyond, #Palestine Refugees continue to await a just and lasting political solution. Their displacement has lasted to this day due to the absence of a resolution of their plight by the international community. #UNRWAworks everyday to support them."
Dr. Adi Schwartz on X - "Nice try. The problem is that no Palestinian ever made this claim. It's a Western talking point intended to wash away Palestinian rejectionism. Not in 1949 and not today - Palestinians are not looking for a "political solution," despite being offered one many times. They were looking, and are still looking, to undo the State of Israel."
Eylon Levy on X - "Just imagine of 20 million Indians and Pakistanis were still "refugees" pending a "just and lasting political solution"? Or if the millions displaced from North Korea were held in South Korean refugee camps till that conflict was solved? The 1940s are over. Move on."

Eyal Yakoby on X - "UNWRA is furious that Israel raided their terror base (office) in Jerusalem this morning. They never were outraged about the Hamas data center directly below and in their facility."

Israel Foreign Ministry on X - "UNRWA was established to operate for 18 months. It has now existed for over 75 years. Instead of solving a temporary issue, it perpetuated and even grew the refugee status. UNRWA has become part of the problem."
Hussain Abdul-Hussain on X - "Abdul-Nasser agreed to an UNRWA project to resettle Gazans in a new city near Suez Canal. UNRWA would have footed the bill of diverting some Nile water to Suez. U.S. would have paid for construction of Aswan Dam. But Muslim Brotherhood and Communists started a riot (like they do) and kept Gazans in misery for another 75 years and counting. World should de-Muslim Brotherhood."

Etan Nechin on X - "As Israel demolished sites, defunds and demonizes UNRWA, their heads speak out to Haaretz. “We do not radicalize Palestinians. Their lived existence does.”"
𝔼𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕠𝕥 𝕄𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕟 🎗️ on X - "The European Union disagrees, as does every body that’s ever reviewed the textbooks in @UNRWA schools."

Stu Smith on X - "You can’t make this up. CAIR Florida holds a presser to denounce DeSantis for labeling them a “foreign terrorist organization” and then brings in the National Lawyers Guild as character witnesses. NLG’s International Committee employs Charlotte Kates, a leading figure in Samidoun, a PFLP-linked outfit described as a terrorist front. If you’re trying to beat the terrorism rap, maybe don’t roll out your friends who literally put Samidoun’s leadership on payroll."

Ella Kenan on X - "Did you ever hear of The Conference of the Future? It took place in Gaza in 2021, just months after Operation Guardian of the Walls. This wasn’t some fringe event. It was officially endorsed by then Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. The conference’s theme? That Palestinians were “closer than ever” to collapsing Israel and realizing the vision of a single Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.” It wasn’t just rhetoric. Discussions included what would be done with Israel’s infrastructure, how to handle the nuclear reactor, what to do with Israeli hi-tech companies, which Israelis would be executed, and which groups would be denied the right to emigrate once the Palestinian takeover was complete, since they are considered vital to the economy. Read more here. This video is taken from the series 'Enemies' by @kann , the research was done by @MEMRIReports"

shevereshtus on X - "Jews have never been as unequipped for a fight as they are the Narrative Wars. @GadSaad believes, in the Jewish spirit, that by being accurate, factual, and pointing out inaccuracies, you will win the debate. That works in a yeshiva. That used to work in Academia. It might kind of work on a very specific kind of podcast. It does not work in the real world, when addressing people like Ana Kasparian, Joe Rogan, or Nick Fuentes. They, their audience, and increasingly the public-at-large, do not care about facts. They do not care about being accurate. They do not care to admit they are wrong. It’s a narrative war. Their ideology is ‘Israel is evil.’ There is no amount of facts you can bring, no amount of pictures of Jews and Arabs co-existing, no comparison with the surrounding countries, literally nothing you can say will change their mind because narratives are about how they make you feel and who is saying it, not how accurate they are. That’s why the ‘LGBTQ+ for Palestine!? That’s like ‘Chicken for KFC!’ is a useless line. They either don’t know what’s happening in Gaza to members of that community, or they simply do not care, because the overarching narrative is that Israel is evil, therefore those who oppose Israel are good, and you don’t condemn the good guys when you’re in a fight against evil. As long as we don’t realize this, internalize it, and change the way we interact with the public, we will keep losing ground."

Dan Burmawi on X - "The new Syrian “army,” which is essentially Al-Qaeda fighters rebranded and legitimized by President Trump at the request of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is now chanting “Gaza, Gaza.” As I said from day one: Syria will become a hub for terrorism in no time. Israel will eventually have to deal with this threat, and when that happens, the West will accuse Israel of “destabilizing” another poor, innocent country."

EU Admits Abbas Deceived It on Terrorist Payments After Israeli Intel Briefing - "Israel succeeded in changing the European Union's stance toward the Palestinian Authority, and forced Europeans to publicly acknowledge for the first time that Abbas continues paying salaries to terrorists, despite his commitment to stop. At the end of November, a meeting was held in Brussels between senior Palestinian Authority officials and representatives of donor countries. On the agenda: examining the reforms the Authority committed to implement – chief among them stopping payments to terrorists and their families, a reform the Palestinians declared had already been carried out. The Authority's commitment to reforms didn't stem from goodwill, but from financial distress. Unlike the past, the Europeans decided to stop serving as an "open wallet" and conditioned continued aid – hundreds of millions of euros – on meeting commitments. A day before the meeting, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar issued an unusually detailed declaration: The Authority not only hasn't stopped payments to terrorists – it has actually increased them. The only change: instead of transferring the money through a designated fund, the Authority found alternative and covert channels... The report also quotes Abbas himself, who said on February 25: "If we have only one penny left, it will be given to the prisoners and martyrs. I will not allow anyone to remove any commitment or penny given to them. They are more honored than all of us.""

Exclusive | NYC principal denies request for Holocaust survivor to speak at school: 'Given his messages' - "A Brooklyn middle school principal denied a parent’s request to have a Holocaust survivor speak to students about antisemitism — saying the victim’s pro-Israel views are not appropriate for a public school. MS 447 Principal Arin Rusch wrote to the parent Nov. 18 claiming Nazi labor camp survivor Sami Steigmann’s opinions would not be “right” for the Boerum Hill school. “In looking at his website material, I also don’t think that Sami’s presentation is right for our public school setting, given his messages around Israel and Palestine,” Rusch claimed... Steigmann, 85, does not discuss the Israel-Hamas war on his homepage or in his bio... The city Department of Education defended the principal’s decision to block Steigmann from speaking at MS 447. “We do not shy away from teaching history in our classrooms, and we are proud to have welcomed many Holocaust survivors into our schools, including MS 447, to share their stories. We thoroughly evaluate every classroom speaker and are careful to ensure speakers maintain political neutrality, especially on contentious current events, as required in a public school setting,” DOE spokeswoman Nicole Brownstein said... Steigmann told The Post Tuesday night it was wrong for the principal to reject him, saying he doesn’t talk about Middle East politics in public schools, and would certainly agree not to if asked. “She didn’t even have the courtesy to call me,” Steigmann said. The situation is just the latest controversy in the city public school system that has outraged Jewish activists. The chancellor was forced last year to apologize for linking a “Stop Gaza Genocide Toolkit” in a Department of Education newsletter, sparking outrage in the Jewish community. An anti-Israel student riot at Hillcrest High School in Queens in November 2023 also forced a Jewish teacher who was targeted to take shelter in a locked office."

Holocaust museums are 'false propaganda,' AMP chief warns | The Jerusalem Post - "Holocaust museums are “false propaganda,” and Israel has blackmailed the world with the Holocaust, said Osama Abu Irshaid, national director of American Muslims for Palestine, in a speech published to YouTube last week. Irshaid, who also serves on the board of the nonprofit United States Council of Muslim Organizations, said, “Israel has blackmailed the world with the Holocaust” and that “if you call what is happening in Gaza a Holocaust, you are labeled antisemitic.” He accused Jews of having “a monopoly on the victim mentality” and called for the formation of a new narrative called the “Palestinian genocide” narrative. He went on to criticize Holocaust museums as a project of the “Zionist lobby.”... AMP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which means it is exempt from federal income tax, and donations made to it are tax-deductible. In July 2024, a Virginia court ordered AMP to provide internal and financial documents to Virginia Attorney-General Jason Miyares as part of an investigation that the charity may have been funneling funds to Hamas. Then, in March of this year, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions announced it was investigating AMP for its connections to Hamas-linked organizations and its relations with Students for Justice in Palestine and unrest on American campuses."

Hen Mazzig on X - "“According to the latest data for 2024, Palestine was the single largest recipient of humanitarian assistance on the planet, receiving approximately $3 billion in a single year — surpassing even Ukraine, Sudan and Syria. So why is the result so catastrophic?” Part 2 from my debate at Cambridge University on Thursday against the motion: “This House Believes The International Community Has Failed Palestine.”"
Clearly, they didn't get enough money

Jonathan Harounoff on X - "The verdict of this @cambridgeunion debate was etched into the walls long before any of us entered. I stepped into a chamber charged with hostility, a sea of European keffiyeh-clad students who hadn’t come to listen, only to inflame and be inflamed. But it is precisely in rooms like this, where reason is drowned out by rage, that facts matter most. The motion: “This House Believes the International Community Has Failed Palestine.” Yet the opposition turned the floor into a theatre of one-sided condemnation, fixated on demonizing Israel and carelessly tossing out words like “apartheid” and “genocide.” Not once — not once — did they utter the name Hamas, nor acknowledge decades of failed Palestinian leadership that has poured billions into corruption and terror rather than the wellbeing of its own people. In that chamber, silence spoke louder than their speeches. And that is exactly why I spoke. “History shows clearly that from 1947 onward, the most decisive blows to Palestinian national aspiration came not from outside, but from within: from Arab states storming into war at every opportunity, from factionalism and widespread corruption, and from leaders far more committed to eliminating Israel than to building a viable state. It is worth talking about agency and accountability, and about ending the pretence that the absence of Palestinian prosperity is solely the fault of outsiders, while absolving Palestinian leaders of every decision they themselves made. But I know how debates like this one unfold. I saw it as a student here ten years ago when this Chamber voted that Israel was a rogue state. I watched speaker after speaker in favour of the motion demonize and delegitimize Israel, without once asking why Palestinian leaders had betrayed their own people and failed to deliver the freedom they promised.” An honor to enter the lion’s den alongside @HenMazzig and @KaleemChattha Video credit: The Cambridge Union"
The international community has indeed failed them - by coddling them despite their intransigence and terrorism

American Strong Gods

Though the term isn't used here, globalism would be a good summary of the long 20th century: 

American Strong Gods

"With its “you can just do things” energy, Trump 2.0 seems to be the first administration serious about delivering on democratic demands for real change in American governance since FDR...

There’s a 2018 quote by the late Henry Kissinger that’s circulated recently, in which he mused about whether “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” If that wasn’t true in 2018 it certainly is now. I believe that what we’re seeing today truly is the end of an era, an epochal overturning of the world as we knew it, and that the full import and implications of this haven’t really struck us yet.

More specifically, I believe Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century...

In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.

Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.

The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.

As Reno catalogues in detail, new approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character, vilify collective loyalties, cast doubt on hierarchies, break down all boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of all moral and relational duties. Aspiration to a vague universal humanitarianism soon became the only higher good that it was socially acceptable to aim for other than pure economic growth.

The anti-fascism of the twentieth century morphed into a great crusade – characterized, ironically, by a fiery zeal and fierce intolerance... The singular figure of Hitler didn’t just lurk in the back of the 20th century mind; he dominated its subconscious, becoming a sort of secular Satan, forever threatening to tempt mankind into new wickedness. This “second career of Adolf Hitler,” as Renaud Camus jokingly calls it, provided the parareligious raison d'etre for the open society consensus and the whole post-war liberal order: to prevent the resurrection of the undead Führer.

This doctrine of prevention grants enormous moral weight to ensuring that open society values triumph over those of the closed society in every circumstance. If it’s assumed that the only options are “the open society or Auschwitz” then maintaining zero tolerance for the perceived values of the closed society is functionally a moral commandment. To stand in the way of any possible aspect of societal opening and individual liberation – from secularization, to the sexual revolution and LGBTQ rights, to the free movement of migrants – was to do Hitler’s work and risk facilitating fascism’s return (no matter how far removed the subject concerned from actual fascism). It was established as the open society’s only inviolable rule that, as Reno puts it, it is “forbidden to forbid.” Thus a strict new cultural orthodoxy was consolidated, in which to utter any opinion contrary to the continuous project of further opening up societies became verboten as a moral evil. Complete inclusion required rigorous exclusion. We are familiar with this dogma today as political correctness.

The end of the Cold War then sent the open society consensus into overdrive. Far from moderating its zeal, the fall of Soviet communism (liberalism’s last real ideological competitor) seemed to validate the moral and practical superiority of the open society, and the post-Cold War establishment doubled down on the belief that the whole world could and should be rebuilt in its image, ushering in the end of history.

The crusade for openness took on for itself a great commission to go and deconstruct all nations in the name of peace, prosperity, and freedom. This conviction was only reinforced by the 9/11 attacks of 2001, which seemed to help demonstrate that the continued existence of closed-minded intolerance anywhere was a threat to tolerance everywhere. As one hawkish politician quoted in Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe put it not long afterwards, “We [now] live in a borderless world in which our new mission is defending the border not of our countries but civility and human rights.”

If you’ve been wondering why USAID was spending $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbian workplaces, $500,000 to “expand atheism” in Nepal, or $7.9 million to catechize Sri Lankan journalists in avoiding “binary-gendered language,” this is why. It’s the same reason the U.S. government was pouring millions into funding “charities” dedicated to breaking U.S. immigration law and facilitating open borders migration: they believed they were fighting the good fight against the closed society in order to stop zombie Hitler (while skimming a whole lot of cash on the side for their good deeds). It’s also why, for decades, anyone who’s objected has been automatically tarred as a literal fascist.

Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance. There was a very direct and deliberate connection. As Carl Schmitt noted early in the twentieth century, an “elemental impulse” of liberalism is “neutralization” and “depoliticization” of the political – that is, the attempt to remove all fundamental contention from politics out of fear of conflict, shrinking “politics” to mere managerial administration. This excising of the political from politics was at the heart of the post-war project’s structural aims. Just as Schmitt had predicted, the goal became to achieve perpetual peace through an “age of technicity,” in which politics would be reduced to the safer, more predictable movements of a machine through the empowerment of supposedly-neutral mechanisms like bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, and expert technocratic commissions.

Actual public contention over genuinely political questions, especially by the dangerously fascism-prone democratic masses, was in contrast now judged to be too dangerous to permit. The post-war establishment of the open society dreamed instead of achieving governance via scientific management, of transforming the political sphere into “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering,” as Popper put it. The operation of this machine could then be limited to a cadre of carefully selected and educated “institutional technologists,” in Popper’s phrasing.

Thus the great expansion of our modern managerial regimes, including the American “deep state” that the Trump administration and Elon Musk are now trying to dismantle. Characterized by vast permanent administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, such regimes are run by an oligarchic elite class of technocrats schooled in social engineering, dissimulation, false compassion, the manipulation of allegedly-neutral processes, and a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance. The obsessive management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship also became an especially key priority in such regimes, with the objective being both to constrain democratic outcomes (to defend “democracy” against the masses) and to generally suppress serious public discussion of contentious yet fundamental political issues (such as mass migration policies) in an effort to prevent civil strife.

Nor was this managerial impulse toward depoliticization limited to the national level. The creation of a “rules-based liberal international order” – in which all political contention would be managed by quasi-imperial supranational structures (such as the UN and EU) and war between states would become a relic of the barbaric past – was the pinnacle of post-war Western ambitions. Backed by the military power of the United States and its allies, this new international order would show zero tolerance for unauthorized conflict, depoliticizing the world and allowing open societies to flourish in peace.

The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.

That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die...

“we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere.”

Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.

But, as reality began to intrude over the past two decades, the share of people still convinced by the hazy promises of the open society steadily diminished. A reaction began to brew, especially among those most divorced from and harmed by its aging obsessions: the young and the working class. The “populism” that is now sweeping the West is best understood as a democratic insistence on the restoration and reintegration of respect for those strong gods capable of grounding, uniting, and sustaining societies, including coherent national identities, cohesive natural loyalties, and the recognition of objective and transcendent truths.

Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth. And that in turn requires a rejection of the pathological “tyranny of guilt” (as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner once dubbed it) that has gripped the Western mind since 1945. As the power of endless hysterical accusations of “fascism” has gradually faded, we have – for better and worse – begun to witness the end of the Age of Hitler.

Energetic national populism is, then, a rejection of all the core obsessions and demands of the twentieth century and the open society consensus that so dominated it. The passionless reign of weakness, tolerance, and drab universalist utilitarianism being held up as moral and political ideals seems to be ending. And that means the gerontocracy of the Long Twentieth Century is finally dying off too. This is what Trump, in all his brashness, represents: the strong gods have escaped from exile and returned to America, dragging the twenty-first century along behind them...

[Trump's] blitzkrieg of executive action has struck directly at the three pillars of the Long Twentieth Century: closing the nation’s borders and purging the state of the latest ideological evolution of open society orthodoxy (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) while inspiring the broader culture to do the same; moving to dismantle the managerial state, including by affirming the elected Executive’s direct, personal control over the sheltered proceduralist (i.e. democratically uncontrollable and unaccountable) bureaucracy; and transforming U.S. foreign policy by rejecting liberal proceduralism in the international sphere as well, putting national interests ahead of the interests of the “international order” and declining to automatically play the role of global rule-enforcer.

The very boldness of this action reflects more than just partisan political gamesmanship – in itself it represents the stasis of the old paradigm being upended; now “you can just do things” again. This mindset hasn’t been seen in America since FDR and his revolutionary government remade the country and established the modern managerial state; no one has dared to so much as jostle the machine he created since the end of WWII. Now Trump has...

The Trump Doctrine is simply a rejection of the neurotic, confrontation-avoidant post-war consensus in favor of the restoration of standard muscular, Western Hemisphere-focused, pre-twentieth century American foreign policy, in the style of a president Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, or Teddy Roosevelt...

It is little wonder then why Trump so horrifies the aging aristocracy of the Long Twentieth Century: they fear above all the return of the strong gods, which their whole project of moral and political world-building was conducted to preclude.

Note, for example, the appearance of increasingly panicked admonitions (in between or in haphazard fusion with accusations of fascism) about the imminent danger of “Christian Nationalism.” This is a term that welds together two strong gods – nationalism and religion – and so is a particularly triggering phantom. This is also why a certain type of limp conservative (known most politely online as the “cuckservative”) displays particular hysteria about Trump and populism. This type really is a conservative, in the sense that his priority in life is to prevent change to the status quo, decrying any decisive action, including any legitimate exercise of democratic power, that risks disrupting the open society consensus. Although he may mouth selective disagreement with progressive “excesses” that also risk undermining that consensus, at his core such a man is foremost a servant of the weak gods of managerial timidity.

For eight decades now the old elite, left- and right- wings alike, has been unified by their shared prioritization of the open society and its values. Although it may have surprised some Americans to see previously right-coded figures like Dick Cheney side with the political left in the last election, it should not have. Cheney was a radical proponent of the open society consensus – just in the form of neoconservatism, the American church militant of imposing the gospel of openness around the world at the point of the sword. In this he was never that different from dedicated leftists like George Soros, who founded an activist institution named quite explicitly after his objective (the Open Society Foundation) and used its vast network of influence to subvert and deconstruct conservative cultures around the globe, including in the United States.

That both men would do this as powerful scions of the same Western establishment is not contradictory but completely logical, given that what united that establishment was the open society consensus. Even the most radical “counter-cultural” rebels of the 1960s were really no such thing, given that their goals were identical to those of the post-war establishment: to progressively advance the opening up of society. They disagreed only on the pace of change, and the establishment soon accommodated their zeal and brought them into the fold.

Trump and populist-nationalist movements are the first real break from this consensus since its conception. They herald the arrival of a very different world.

Despite its obsession with “openness,” the world of the post-war open society has in truth always been, in its own way, a strictly enclosed and deeply stifling place. It is a world in which human nature, indeed our very humanity, is viewed with great suspicion, as something dangerous to be surveilled, suppressed, and contained – or, even better, remolded into a reliable cog to fit safely into a predictable, riskless machine. Its dream of a world of perfect freedom, equality, rationalism, and passivity has always been one “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe,” as Ernst Jünger once put it.

From the very beginning of the Long Twentieth Century, some clear-eyed liberal thinkers, such as Leo Strauss, could foresee that attempting to entirely ignore the realities and banish the values of the “closed society” in pursuit of “a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled” was always liable to end only in rebellion, bloodshed, and self-destruction. Open society liberalism’s dogmatic pursuit of negation would, Strauss warned, undermine the very virtues – like loyalty, duty, courage, and love of one’s own – that all societies rely on to survive and sustain themselves. As Matthew Rose astutely observes, Strauss understood that the strong gods of the closed society “are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-minded.” And, that a “society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a society that cannot question them.”

Such warnings were ignored, however. The traumas of the twentieth century made ideas like nationalism, or even any clear distinction between “us” and “them,” into taboos that were impossible to discuss seriously. That finding the proper balance between “closed’ and “open” values is necessary to maintain a healthy society was a fact carefully ignored for decades.

Now the strong gods are nonetheless being haphazardly called back into the world as the vitalistic neo-romanticism of our revolutionary moment of reformation tears down the decaying walls and guard towers of the open society. Their return brings real risks, or course – although the return of risk is kind of the point. The thing about strong gods is that they’re strong, meaning they can be fearsome and dangerous; which is precisely why they also have the strength to protect and defend. It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger, and war.

But we no longer have much of a choice in the matter; the strong gods’ restoration has become inevitable, one way or another. We’re living in a whole new century now. The Long Twentieth Century has run its course, the world it bequeathed to us in the West having proved a wholly unsustainable mix of atomization, listlessness, self-abnegation, and petty impersonal tyranny. Our societies will either accept the offer of revitalization or fade out of existence, to be replaced by other stronger, more grounded and cohesive cultures.

As Reno rightly concludes in Return of the Strong Gods, “Our time – this century – begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home.” God willing, we can all find that home again as we enter the twenty-first century."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 4th February 2026 (2 - Migrants: US)

Schrödinger’s Government - "I think we are watching something in Minneapolis that is amazing and terrifying at the same time. It appears to me that a strange new form of governance is emerging in modern democracies, especially in America where the strongest protection of individual liberty exists. It is a governing system that exists in a state of perpetual contradiction and it has spread to Washington where Democrats recognize there are actual immigration laws they don’t like, but instead of attacking them and changing them, they want to defund the agency charged with the enforcement of the laws and the removal of those who broke them to stop the law from being enforced. They want to play another round of “Defund the Police” with national security and sovereignty in the balance. So, law exists but it doesn’t exist because it can’t be enforced. In this new system, the fundamental legitimacy of democratic processes, elections, legislation, and judicial rulings becomes conditional, subject to acceptance by those affected. If you (and an extreme minority composed of other chaos agents) disagree with an electoral outcome or dislike any passed law (whether newly passed or settled), you can simply declare it invalid, at least for yourself. The social contract that binds citizens to respect democratically enacted rules, even those they oppose, becomes entirely situational and voluntary. This rejection of authority operates parasitically within the very system it denounces. Those who refuse to accept certain laws simultaneously invoke other laws and constitutional protections as absolute shields. They weaponize rights to assembly, speech, and due process—protections they claim are inviolable—while coordinating sustained campaigns of civil disruption designed to make governance impossible. The asymmetry is deliberate: the system must respect procedural limits and individual rights even as those same individuals work to paralyze it. You can even use the system against itself, tying it in knots by using its own processes to delay judicial outcomes for weeks, months, and in some cases—years. The result is a kind of legal donut hole, a void where law simultaneously exists and doesn’t exist. Authorities face an impossible dilemma. To enforce laws against coordinated, prolonged disruption, they must often employ measures—curfews, dispersal orders, mass arrests, deployment of the National Guard—that themselves test constitutional boundaries. The chaos is calibrated precisely to this threshold: intense enough to demand response, but conducted under enough legal cover that any forceful reaction can be framed as “fascism” or tyranny. The protesters/activists/chaos agents become simultaneously lawbreaker and victim, revolutionary and rights-bearer in a scenario where they always carry the presumption of innocence and the stewards of the law always bear the presumption of guilt. This creates what might be called Schrödinger’s government—a system hovering between legitimacy and illegitimacy, authority and impotence, depending on who’s observing and from what angle. To its defenders, it remains a functioning democracy upholding civil liberties even under pressure. To its detractors, it has lost all moral authority and deserves only resistance. Both states coexist, neither fully collapsing into the other. What makes this situation particularly unstable is its self-reinforcing nature. When one faction successfully employs this strategy—rejecting laws while exploiting legal protections—it establishes a template others will follow. Each iteration further erodes the shared assumption that democratic processes, however imperfect, produce outcomes all must provisionally accept. The notion of loyal opposition, of respecting institutional legitimacy even when wielded by opponents, gives way to permanent contestation. This isn’t simple civil disobedience in the traditional sense, where protesters accept legal consequences to dramatize injustice. Nor is it revolutionary politics that openly seeks to overthrow existing structures. Instead, it occupies an ambiguous middle ground: using the system’s own rules and protections to create ungovernable situations, then claiming persecution when authorities respond. The quantum superposition of lawfulness and lawlessness persists until someone observes it—and even then, what they see depends entirely on where they stand."
When left wingers say that "nobody is above the law", they mean the selective application of certain laws to people they hate, i.e. anarcho-tyranny

Idiot protesters besieged Los Angeles restaurant after mistaking airport security workers for ICE - "A large mob of protestors surrounded a restaurant in Los Angeles after mistaking airport security workers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The demonstrators gathered outside of Ten-Raku, a Korean BBQ spot in Lynwood, on Wednesday night after hearing reports that federal officers were allegedly inside. In reality, they blared airhorns and whistles and shouted at off-duty TSA officers who were just trying to enjoy dinner... When approached by Fox 11, a woman with long curly hair, who is believed to be one of the protest organizers, refused to comment because she doesn't 'trust Fox.'... The outlet also went to ask restaurant employees about the situation, but the woman told them not to speak with the station. She was seen holding a megaphone with one hand as she used her phone to record the scene in the other. 'Yeah sorry to you. Nobody's gonna talk to you,' she was heard telling reporters. Meanwhile, other protestors attempted to hide behind trees as they recorded the scene... After being told the authorities inside were TSA agents, the man told the reporter: 'You wouldn't understand. People get very emotional so they easily make mistakes... This is also not the first case of mistaken identity, as a group of software engineers were targeted in Minneapolis after protestors assumed they were ICE agents. The five men had been dining at Clancy's Deli when anti-ICE protesters gathered outside the restaurant's front windows and shouted obscenities at them a little over a week ago. 'Get out of our f***ing neighborhood,' one protester was heard yelling in a clip obtained by Alpha News. Another shouted: 'If you're not with us, you're against us.' One demonstrator even went as far as calling them pedophiles and another screamed 'I hope you die,' the news outlet reported. A victim, known as Lee, claimed the mob's ringleader said the group, who are not affiliated with ICE, deserved to be harassed because they were 'white privileged males.' He has alleged that the restaurant owner was responsible for the chaos by falsely claiming the group of software engineers were federal agents."

Protesters besieged Los Angeles restaurant after mistaking airport security workers for ICE : r/NewsWorthPayingFor - "It's ironic that these mobs are profiling people then confronting them and asking for identification. lol"

Idisobey | Facebook - "WOW 🚨 American women went vial after she attended an event and it turned out to be a training event for ICE protesters It was held at the Center in Hampton, Virginia and they are training people to resist ICE and this is where all the whistles come from. the REAL REASON Democrats are trying to pass bills to stop ICE from wearing masks was discussed The reason reason Democrats want ICE to not wear masks because they are planning on documenting all of them and then prosecuting them when they get power “So she's trying to pass a bill to require ICE agents to identify themselves because they have committed civil rights violations in our state. — I am advocating for their identities to be documented so they can be held accountable in a court of law” “Today I found out where all the whistles come from for all the protests — So today we hopped in the car and went to Hampton, Virginia, to the LGBT Center for this meeting. Know your rights training on immigration.”"

Templar Mind | Facebook - "When men worth millions stand on red carpets, draped in designer fabrics, and call for "revolution," they're not speaking for the people. It's a casting call for the masses to play the role of "useful idiot" in their latest fantasy drama. At the Sundance Film Festival...that annual gathering where the elite absolve themselves through empty gestures and pat each other on the back...Giancarlo Esposito, the actor who portrayed Breaking Bad's drug lord, Gus Fring, stepped beyond performance and into provocation. He explicitly called for "a revolution," speculating that if millions stormed Washington, authorities "would only kill 500 or 50 million... but the rest of us would survive with a new world." Fifty million corpses. This is the human cost he finds acceptable for his vision. Notice his phrasing: "The rest of US would survive." Not you. Not your children. "US"...the protected and pampered caste, who will watch from safety while you provide the sacrifice for their ideological theater.
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We're witnessing a spiritual sickness dressed up as compassion and wrapped in platitudes. These actors live in such extravagant wealth that it would make Roman emperors green with envy. They are products and beneficiaries of the American economic engine that they claim to despise. They are precisely what Suzanne Collins depicted in The Hunger Games: Capitol citizens, painted and pampered, orchestrating violence from a safe and comfortable distance. They want you in the streets. They want your sons and daughters among the fifty million casualties... While they virtue signal from their mansions in the Hollywood Hills.
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They are animated by modern Marxist ideology that views America not as humanity's greatest experiment in order and liberty, but as a mistake requiring correction through violence. They align themselves with radical politicians who use identical inflammatory rhetoric. They speak of "burning it down" because they have never built anything beyond fictional narratives. a revolution would devour the very luxury they depend on. When systems collapse, film festivals disappear and residual checks stop. But arrogance shields them from this reality. Do not let comfortable elites incite you to violence in the streets. They project their spiritual emptiness onto the nation and expect you to fill the void. Their revolution is theater; your suffering would be real.
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The United States was forged through ordered liberty, covenant faith, and constitutional law...not the chaotic fantasies of actors who think real life is just another screenplay. Let them cosplay as ungrateful revolutionaries. We have a civilization to defend, a faith to preserve, and a future to build for our children. Deus Vult."

"This is all very planned. They know what works. It's like a war out there." - "For weeks, the media have claimed that the protests against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis and other cities are peaceful and that protesters are not interfering with law enforcement operations. Hailey West, an independent journalist covering the protests, found something different. “Interference is constant,” she told Public. “It’s like a badge of honor out there.” She described the “physical pushing of officers” by protesters who are “trying to break through a [police] line. They’ll send people who are mentally ill or disabled in a wheelchair to the front of the line.”... West described a situation of rising violence. In one instance, protesters threw tear gas at ICE agents, but hit the van that she and other reporters were sitting in instead. “You have this massive group of protestors following all the vehicles,” she said. “They were throwing tear gas canisters, and one of them ended up being thrown on top of our vehicle, bounced off, went underneath the vehicle, and started filling the car up with tear gas.”... West said that the protesters are “instructed to cause as much chaos so they can.”"

Nightingale Associates on X - "Apartment landlords are feeling the strain placed on their portfolios by the Trump administration's immigration enforcement actions. Ariel Lopez owns 300 apartments in Miami-Dade County that are operating at a 30% vacancy rate. Typically, that rate is closer to 2%. “Not only did a lot of my tenants disappear, but slow paying became more of a norm, because people are living month to month trying to figure out if they're going to be here or not,” said Ariel Lopez, owner of South Florida-based multifamily landlord The Lopez Cos. “It's created a lot of havoc for the multifamily sector.” -Bisnow #CommercialRealEstate"
Weird. Left wingers keep mockingly asking how illegal immigrants being deported has improved people's lives

Meme - Lord Farquaad: "DEMOCRATPARTY: GO AND FIGHT FEDERAL AGENTS. SOME OF YOU MAY DIE, BUT ITS A SACRIFICE I AM WILLING TO MAKE"

Meme - Masked Democratic Party prodding MTF, Balaclava-clad Antifa with rifle and Antifa with black beanie and red mask: "C'mon, they're fascists..."

Meme - "The irony of Tim Walz encouraging people to protest ICE while standing behind his fortified walled mansion is a perfect picture of the left"

Meme - "BOOM: ICE just flipped the script in Minneapolis - agents are now photographing the harassers, logging faces, and sending evidence up the chain for criminal charges. The stalkers thought intimidation was free. Turns out it comes with paperwork, case files, and consequences."

Meme - "AY MATE, TRUMP IS HOLDING MIGRANTS IN CAMPS LIKE A NAZI
America vs Australia
Birthright citizenship vs No birthright citizenship
Detention centers. Some allowed in until court date vs Zero tolerance policy, held in offshore detention centers
Path to citizenship through DACA and IRCA vs No path to citizenship
Sanctuary cities vs No sanctuary cities
Deportation requires due process even for criminals vs No due process required for deportation, criminals can have citizenship revoked"

Meme - CynicalPublius: "One shows the illegal internment of lawful residents. (Democrat run.) The other shows the lawful internment of illegal residents. (GOP run.) It's actually a useful contrast."
Not Your Average Liberal: "When History Repeats Itself... Japanese internment camp, 1942. Alligator Alcatraz, 2025"

Will Ricciardella on X - "Where in immigration law does it say you can enter illegally and stay, so as long as you don’t commit a violent crime? Who voted for that rule? Which member can be voted out for it? No one did. Yet that’s now the baseline for how much of the law Americans are supposed to ignore. Convenient."

Sunny on X - "“We can’t enforce federal law because criminals and their supporters will get violent if we do” is a mainstream left-wing position that would have been universally considered insane like 5 years ago."

Meme - "The last line in the speech at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, October 28, 1886
"There is room in America and brotherhood for all who will support our institutions and aid in our development. But those who come to disturb our peace and dethrone our laws are aliens and enemies forever." Armin Navabi"

Common Sense Extremists on X - "“We need a less mean way to deport people!!!” There already is. The Trump administration literally offers $1,000 and a free plane ticket to anyone who voluntarily self deports. Anyone still here illegally is asking for it at this point."

johnny maga on X - "Illegal convinces immigration agents to let her daughter say bye to her husband, facilitates in his escape from custody. This is why I don’t feel bad about the “ICE arrested a 5-year-old” hoax."

The Impact of Sanctuary Policies on Immigration Law - "Immigration policy is not a local preference. It is not a city ordinance. It is not a state experiment. Under the Constitution and federal statute, immigration law is national law under Article I, Section 8, Clause 4. It is written by Congress, enforced by the executive branch, and applied uniformly across the country. City councils and statehouses do not get to decide immigration policy for the rest of the nation. Congress does. That distinction matters, because much of what now defines the immigration debate is not coming from Congress. It is coming from municipalities and state governments attempting to carve out “sanctuary” regimes that limit cooperation with federal enforcement, restrict information sharing, and in some cases actively obstruct federal immigration operations. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not a private agency. It is an enforcement arm of the federal government. Entering the U.S. without inspection is a federal offense. Overstaying a visa is a civil violation. In both cases, the legal remedy established by Congress is removal from the country. Cities and states are free to advocate changes to that law. They are not free to nullify it. Yet across the country, local governments have adopted policies that do exactly that. They refuse to honor immigration detainers. They prohibit local law enforcement from notifying ICE when individuals in custody are subject to removal. They decline to transfer individuals already arrested for separate crimes into federal custody. These choices do not repeal federal law. They do not stop federal enforcement. They simply change where and how it occurs. When local governments block cooperation inside jails and court systems — where arrests can occur smoothly and without danger to the public — enforcement does not vanish. It moves outward. It moves to homes, workplaces, parking lots, and streets. It forces federal agents to conduct arrests in public spaces that would otherwise mostly occur in controlled environments. That shift is not accidental. It is the direct operational result of non-cooperation policies. The consequences are predictable. There are more visible confrontations. There are more chaotic encounters. There are more bystanders. There are more opportunities for escalation. And more individuals are swept up who would never have been part of an enforcement action, had local authorities transferred custody in the first place. When ICE executes operations and encounters multiple individuals unlawfully present, federal agents are not granted discretion to ignore the law because of bad optics. They are sworn to enforce the statutes Congress passed. They will carry out removal proceedings as the law requires. This is the contradiction that sanctuary policies create. Local leaders publicly condemn enforcement while structurally forcing it into more disruptive forms. They restrict jail cooperation, then express outrage when arrests occur in neighborhoods. They refuse transfers, then criticize the outcomes that refusal produces. The system is not de-escalated. It is displaced. Another consequence follows. When enforcement shifts to broad field operations, non-violent individuals who might never have entered the system through jail transfers are more likely to be encountered through association. This widens the scope of enforcement while simultaneously fueling the very images and narratives local officials claim to oppose. The next question is not rhetorical. It is political. Why are Democratic city and state governments increasingly willing to ignore or obstruct federal immigration law rather than work to change it? The answer does not appear to lie in legislative realism. Congress remains the only body empowered to rewrite immigration law. Yet coordinated municipal non-compliance creates national consequences without national debate. It allows elected officials to signal moral positioning while avoiding the burden of passing enforceable federal reform. It shifts accountability away from Congress and onto frontline officers, local police departments, school systems, hospital networks, and taxpayers who must absorb the operational effects. Media dynamics amplify this approach. Enforcement carried out quietly through custodial transfers inside jails rarely generates headlines. Enforcement carried out in neighborhoods does. Images move voters. Confrontations move polls. Family separations on television produce far more political utility than statutory rewrites in committee rooms. This is not a new tactic. Americans saw it during the Elián González case in 2000, when federal agents forcibly removed a Cuban child from relatives in Florida to return him to his father in Cuba. Many Democrats then defended federal authority and enforcement. Many Republicans condemned the images. Today, the alignments have reversed. The playbook has not changed. What has changed is the scale. The current posture of many city and state governments is not simply humanitarian concern. It is an attempt to unilaterally relax immigration law through obstruction rather than legislation, while positioning future electoral advantage over present legal reality. None of this alters the fact that immigration policy remains federal. None of it changes the laws already on the books. And none of it removes the consequences from the communities forced to live inside the governance gap. The alternative now being pursued is not reform. It is fragmentation. A patchwork of municipal resistance that weakens national coherence while creating the very enforcement conditions it claims to oppose. City councils do not govern the border. Governors do not set immigration codes. Immigration policy belongs to Congress because immigration is not a local issue. It is a national one. If the law is wrong, change it. If the system is broken, rebuild it. But stop pretending that obstruction is compassion, and stop forcing federal law into the streets while denying responsibility for the results. The Constitution already gave us the tool."
Left wingers have very poor civics knowledge
Nobody is above the law - unless it hurts the left wing agenda

Meme - C3: "Ok so hear me out... If ICE is the "American Gestapo" and Barack Obama awarded ICE and Tom Homan then wouldn't that make... Obama literally Hitler?!"
Stephen King: "ICE is the American Gestapo."
"Barack Obama commended ICE and specifically honored Tom Homan"

Tom Homan warns left-wing groups funding attacks on ICE: 'Justice is coming' - "Border czar Tom Homan vowed Thursday that far-left groups funding and coordinating attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and operations will face consequences. “About the organization and the funding of the attacks on ICE, I’m not going to answer a lot about that because I’m not going to show our hand, but they’ll be held accountable. Justice is coming,” the border czar declared during a press conference in Minneapolis. Homan also decried the harsh rhetoric coming from Minnesota and across the country directed at ICE and other immigration law enforcement officers, pleading with everyone to tone it down. “I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop. I said in March — if the rhetoric doesn’t stop, there is gonna be bloodshed. And there has been. I wish I wasn’t right. I don’t want to see anybody die,” Homan said. The border czar, whom President Trump dispatched to Minnesota earlier this week, explained that if there was less hostility towards the feds, then the Trump administration would be able to draw down its presence in Minneapolis by an even larger amount than it is currently planning... “Based on the discussions I’ve had with the governor and the AG, we can start drawing down those resources,” Homan said, noting that the feds will likely now be able to target criminal illegal immigrants “in a jail with much less people.” “So the drawdown is going to happen based on these agreements, but the drawdown could happen even more if the hateful rhetoric and impediments stop.” The border honcho had long called for access to local jails in Minnesota as a condition for reducing personnel on the ground. Homan did not specify how large the drawdown will be, but caveated that it will be “dependent upon cooperation” from local authorities and that there will be redeployment if cooperation stops... Homan, who vowed to stay “until the problem’s gone,” crowed that “we’ve made a lot of progress” since Trump sent him to the beleaguered city earlier this week."
What a Nazi. The person who employed him must be held accountable for pushing fascism in the US!

Meme - "With 20,000 agents conducting operations out of 400 offices across all 50 states... why is the only state with people getting shot by ICE a sanctuary state with a blue Governor calling them gestapo and calling for resistance by residents?"
The cope is that this proves that Trump is vindictive and attacking his political opponents. Specifically someone who ran against him

Meme - *Bike fall meme*
"The Left"
"Interfering with law enforcement"
"FASCISM!"

Britain's obsession with ICE killings shows we have learnt nothing from George Floyd - "This is not America. This was the mantra that was said to progressive activists in Britain after their importation of American politics in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. The 2020 “awokening” globalised the BLM style: activists around the world adopted and regurgitated American talking points on race and police brutality that didn’t map well onto their own particular countries. Real problems were substituted for, to slightly paraphrase Alex Hochuli, “mediatised representations of someone else’s problems”. Fads and terms that got their start in American academia migrated across the Atlantic like “Bipoc” (“black, indigenous people of colour”) and “white supremacy” as a mystical power of world-history. Almost six years later, we’re still binge-watching American politics to the exclusion of Britain, Europe and the rest of the world... Many Britons, on both the Left and Right, are attracted to this delirium. It seems, to them, like that there really is a duel between two properly polarised ideological world-views for conquest of the American republic; and that they are part of it. It’s why every mid-term and presidential election are billed as the most important elections of our life. The fate of humanity depends on it!"

Fatalism, Islam, Innovation and Modernity

This also ties into the myth of the Islamic Golden Age:

"The Islamic view of the relative insignificance of everything we see with our own eyes is that this world is merely a way station. While martyrdom is the extreme reaction, it is not the only reaction to this view of the world. The question arises: Why bother, if our sights are trained not on this life but on the afterlife? I believe that Islam’s afterlife fixation tends to erode the intellectual and moral incentives that are essential for “making it” in the modern world.

As a translator for other Somalis who had arrived in Holland, I saw this phenomenon in various forms. One was simply the clash of cultures when immigrant Muslims and native-born Dutch lived in close proximity to one another. In apartment complexes, the Dutch were generally meticulous about keeping common spaces free of any litter. The immigrants, however, would throw down wrappers, empty Coca-Cola cans, and cigarette butts, or spit out the remnants of their chewed qat. The Dutch residents would grow incensed at this, just as they would grow incensed by the groups of children who would run about, wild and unsupervised, at all hours. It was easy for one family to have many children. (If a man can marry up to four wives and have multiple children with each of them, the numbers grow quickly.) The Dutch would shake their heads, and in reply the veiled mothers would simply shrug their shoulders and say that it was “God’s will.” Trash on the ground became “God’s will,” children racing around in the dark became “God’s will.” Allah has willed it to be this way; it is there because Allah has willed it. And if Allah has willed it, Allah will provide. It is an unbreakable ring of circular logic.

There is a fatalism that creeps into one’s worldview when this life is seen as transitory and the next is the only one that matters. Why pick up trash, why discipline your children, when none of those acts is stored up for any type of reward? Those are not the behaviors that mark good Muslims; they have nothing to do with praying or proselytizing.

This, too, helps explain the notorious underrepresentation of Muslims as scientific and technological innovators. To be sure, the medieval Arabic world gave us its numerals and preserved classical knowledge that might otherwise have been lost when Rome was overrun by the barbarian tribes. In the ninth century, the Muslim rulers of Córdoba in Spain built a library large enough to house 600,000 books. Córdoba then had paved streets, streetlamps, and some three hundred public baths, at a time when London was little more than a collection of mud huts, lined with straw, where all manner of waste was thrown into the street and there was not a single light on the public thoroughfares. Yet, as Albert Hourani points out, Western scientific discoveries from the Renaissance on produced “no echo” in the Islamic world. Copernicus, who in the early 1500s determined that the earth was not the center of the universe but rather revolved around the sun, did not appear in Ottoman writings until the late 1600s, and then only briefly. There was no Muslim Industrial Revolution. Today, there is no Islamic equivalent of Silicon Valley. It simply is not convincing to blame this stagnation on Western imperialism; after all, the Islamic world had empires of its own, the Mughal as well as the Ottoman and Safavid. Though it is unfashionable to say so, Islam’s fatalism is a more plausible explanation for the Muslim world’s failure to innovate.

Significantly, the very word for innovation in Islamic texts, bid’a, refers to practices that are not mentioned in the Qur’an or the sunnah. One hadith translated into English declares that every novelty is an innovation, and every innovation takes one down a misguided path toward hell. Others warn against general innovations as things spread by Jewish and Christian influences and by all those who are ruled by misguided and dangerous passions. Those who innovate should be isolated and physically punished and their ideas should be condemned by the ulema. It was precisely this mentality that killed off astronomical research in sixteenth-century Istanbul and ensured that the printing press did not reach the Ottoman Empire until more than two centuries after its spread throughout Europe.

Zakir Naik, an Indian-born and -trained doctor who has become a very popular imam, has argued that, while Muslim nations can welcome experts from the West to teach science and technology, when it comes to religion, it is Muslims who are “the experts.” Hence, no other religions can or should be preached in Muslim nations, because those religions are false. But look more closely at his point: Naik is implicitly acknowledging the success of the West in this world. All Muslim nations have to offer, he concedes, is a near-total expertise on the subject of the next world."

--- Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now / Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Links - 4th February 2026 (1 [including SNAP/US Government Shutdown)])

Jake on X - "AOC was caught on camera in the halls of Congress saying: “They’re learning that Democrats are not weak… and next time we just have to hurt Americans more to make them fold.” Look out, America. This is what Democrat socialists are all about — flexing power, bragging about pressure tactics, and openly admitting the strategy is pain, not policy."

HustleBitch on X - "🚨 THE SNEAKER MARKET JUST COLLAPSED - AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY
A sneaker shop owner says the entire market “died overnight.” And the numbers are insane:
• Shoes that were $500–$600 now won’t move at $300
• Jordan 1s sitting for $90
• Dunks and GRs gathering dust
• Even HEAT priced under retail isn’t selling
• Yeezys - once the safest resale shoe on earth - are tanking everywhere
He straight-up asks: “Does anyone wanna explain why shoes are literally just dying right now?” And the weirdest part? Nobody’s selling OR buying - the whole ecosystem is frozen. Something broke but nobody can agree on what. What REALLY killed the sneaker market - the economy, the hype dying… or is the whole resale game finally collapsing?"

Glenn Thrush on X - "Tim Mellon, the GOP donor who gave Trump $130 million to pay troops, has a history of negative comments about Black people. When a @nytines reporter w/ a Hispanic surname contacted him in 2020 in English, he replied with the Goya slogan -- in Spanish."
Catturd ™ on X - "Dude just paid the military with his own 130 million dollar and these lowlife scumbags immediately wrote a hit piece on him - trash people."

Meme - "> Food stamps get cut
> DoorDash stock drops by 30%"

Meme - *Who killed Hannibal*
*Senate Democrats shooting SNAP Recipients"
"Look at what Trump is doing to the poors!"

Meme - "Democrats in October: "This is Trump's shutdown! He's keeping the government closed!"
Democrats in November: "I can't believe the Democrats CAVED and reopened the government!!!"

Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock on X - "The average SNAP benefit is $6 a day. And you just took that away from 4 million people."
Calley Means on X - "Democrats are actively lying to the American people on SNAP. Raphael - can you explain how SNAP doubled in 2020 and didn’t come back down? Anyone who suggests SNAP should stay forever at COVID levels (or not acknowledging there is clear fraud here) is not serious."

Meme - "If you make $70k per year you pay around $36 per year for SNAP benefits. Let that sink in just $36 for the year"
Ruben Bastidas: "Everytime I buy groceries I pay for 100% of it. Let that sink in"

* I offered our best part-time worker a full-time job with a raise and benefits, but she said no because she would lose her food stamps. What now? - "her refusal is rooted in a very real problem known as the "benefits cliff." The benefits cliff describes the point where even a small increase in income triggers a sudden loss of essential benefits like SNAP or Medicaid. For a lot of low-income workers, the value of these benefits far outweighs whatever raise you may offer them
Clearly, this is proof that greedy billionaires only earn their money by underpaying their workers and are relying on taxpayers to feed them, so they're getting corporate subsidies. Of course, left wingers never conclude that to stop these "subsidies" that supposedly allow greedy companies to underpay workers at minimum wage, they can just end SNAP, and they'd be forced to raise wages

FOODS TYPICALLY PURCHASED BY SUPPLEMENTAL NUTRITION ASSISTANCE PROGRAM (SNAP) HOUSEHOLDS (SUMMARY) - "SNAP households spent somewhat more on soft drinks than non-SNAP households (5 versus 4 percent)."

Ending SNAP Subsidies For Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Could Reduce Obesity And Type 2 Diabetes - "To reduce obesity and type 2 diabetes rates, lawmakers have proposed modifying Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to encourage healthier food choices. We examined the impact of two proposed policies: a ban on using SNAP dollars to buy sugar-sweetened beverages; and a subsidy in which for every SNAP dollar spent on fruit and vegetables, thirty cents is credited back to participants’ SNAP benefit cards. We used nationally representative data and models describing obesity, type 2 diabetes, and determinants of food consumption among a sample of over 19,000 SNAP participants. We found that a ban on SNAP purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages would be expected to significantly reduce obesity prevalence and type 2 diabetes incidence, particularly among adults ages 18–65 and some racial and ethnic minorities. The subsidy policy would not be expected to have a significant effect on obesity and type 2 diabetes, given available data. Such a subsidy could, however, more than double the proportion of SNAP participants who meet federal vegetable and fruit consumption guidelines."
Weird. In Gaza Israel is accused of fattening Gazans to death, but in the US, if you think there should be restrictions on what food SNAP can buy, you're a monster

Kalshi on X - "JUST IN: US Health Secretary RFK Jr. says food stamps will no longer be allowed to be used on sugar and soda"
Lauren Chen on X - "It's been reported that the average weight of a woman on SNAP benefits is 212 lbs. The average weight of a woman not on SNAP benefits is 146 lbs."

Meme - Satan: "Suicide is never the answer. You gotta outlive your enemies."
tay I 5 @tayisnotokay: "this is strangely motivational"

Meme - "Welcome to Jurassic Park. We have:
NOT a jurassic dinosaur *Tyrannosaurus Rex*
NOT a jurassic dinosaur *Triceratops*
Definitely NOT Jurassic dinosaurs *Velociraptors*
Oh, finally a Jurassic dinosaur (5 seconds on screen) *Brontosaurus*
Surprise! Other dinosaurs from Cretaceous period! *Gallimimus flocking scene*
Seriously? WTF is this? The final evolution of Joe Dante's Gremlins? *Film version of Dilophosaurus*"

Meme - MR. OBVIOUS @ObviousRises: "I'm half Filipino and half Mexican. I have Spanish blood on both sides including my name. I can hear the calls for expansion, conquest, the stars, and war in my blood. I'm built different."
Canuto Shippuden @YamiMarika: "Bro you are not the conquistador you are the conquistado"

Meme - "r/TrueOffMyChest
SilverMedalss
My husband is the moderator for a few different subreddits, and he genuinely thinks it's a job
Edit: To all the profile-lurkers, my husband is no longer a moderator, and has a (real) job now FYI
my husband refuses to look for a job even though I think it would be good for him (And we could use the additional income), but he just says he's, "got too much on his plate already". That being monitoring these stupid subreddits. And Everytime I bring it up he claims what he's doing is un labor similar to that of a homemaker. But he doesn't clean or cook or do any of that the way he used to. He just mor stupid subreddits. I don't know what to do. Sometimes I want to leave him because I believe I may not be able to reach him."
PowerModerator: "I'm seeing many bigoted comments down there so I just want to make this clear : any hate towards moderators will result in a permanent ban from this subreddit with no warning, This includes, but is not limited to, calling moderation a "fake job" or saying that we "do it for free". Moderation is one of the most useful jobs to society. Behave. Or get banned."
SilverMedalss: "Nick?"

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "In Dallas, Texas, an Islamic imam got very angry when he saw a fellow Muslim talking to a Christian preacher. He then called the police and threatened to get him arrested and ban the man from his mosque if he keeps ‘talking to Christians.’ This is what a cult looks like."

Man suffers stroke from excessive daily energy drinks - "Doctors have suggested that consuming high-caffeine energy drinks could potentially lead to a stroke by elevating blood pressure. A case study detailed a man in his 50s who suffered a stroke and alarmingly high blood pressure, attributed to his daily consumption of eight energy drinks. His blood pressure returned to normal and medication was no longer needed after he stopped drinking the high-caffeine beverages. Medical professionals concluded that the patient's excessive energy drink intake was a significant contributing factor to his secondary hypertension and subsequent stroke. The Government has announced a ban on high-caffeine energy drinks for under-16s, with doctors advocating for further regulation and specific questioning by healthcare professionals."

Pensioner ‘fined £250 for spitting’ after leaf blew into his mouth - "A man has claimed he was fined £250 for spitting after a leaf blew into his mouth in Lincolnshire.  Roy Marsh, 86, was given the financial penalty after the incident in Skegness earlier this year. He is now calling for “responsible” litter enforcement.  East Lindsey district council (ELDC) told the BBC the enforcement teams, who work on behalf of the authority, would “only approach individuals who have been seen committing environmental crime offences”."

Mark Zuckerberg prepares to abandon Metaverse - "Meta shares surged by $100bn (£75bn) as investors cheered plans for Mark Zuckerberg to rein in spending at his struggling “Metaverse” unit.  Mr Zuckerberg is plotting steep budget cuts as high as 30pc at the division, which has been developing virtual reality (VR) gadgets and games, according to reports.  The Metaverse project has divided Wall Street, with some shareholders concerned about the costs involved. Meta’s virtual reality efforts have lost at least $70bn since 2020, with $4.4bn of this occurring in the most recent quarter.  In a sign of the unease, on Thursday, Meta shares surged the most since July on Mr Zuckerberg’s spending cuts plan. They rose by 5.5pc, adding $93bn to the company’s value... Mr Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, launching a spending spree on so-called “Metaverse” technology.  The innovation promised a kind of 3D internet that meshes with the real world...  the technology has largely been a flop... Mr Zuckerberg has quietly stopped mentioning the Metaverse in his public appearances and Instagram videos, instead promoting Meta’s efforts in artificial intelligence (AI)."

Pluralistic: Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain; The Bezzle excerpt (Part IV) (21 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - "A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.  Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google:  But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren't hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They're the SEO equivalent of script kiddies, and they're running circles around Google:   Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query:   Google insists that this isn't true, and if it is true, it's not their fault because the bad guys out there are so numerous, dedicated and inventive that Google can't help but be overwhelmed by them: It wasn't supposed to be this way. Google has long maintained that its scale is the only thing that keeps us safe from the scammers and spammers who would otherwise overwhelm any lesser-resourced defender. That's why it was so imperative that they pursue such aggressive growth, buying up hundreds of companies and integrating their products with search so that every mobile device, every ad, every video, every website, had one of Google's tendrils in it.  This is the argument that Google's defenders have put forward in their messaging on the long-overdue antitrust case against Google, where we learned that Google is spending $26b/year to make sure you never try another search engine: Google, we were told, had achieved such intense scale that the normal laws of commercial and technological physics no longer applied. Take security: it's an iron law that "there is no security in obscurity." A system that is only secure when its adversaries don't understand how it works is not a secure system. As Bruce Schneier says, "anyone can design a security system that they themselves can't break. That doesn't mean it works – just that it works for people stupider than them."  And yet, Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."  Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.  A viral post by Housefresh – who review air purifiers – describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete: You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference... The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"  They broke the deal.  Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right...   In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined (ahem) Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good." When counterfeit money circulates in the economy, anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can, because the longer you hold it, the greater the likelihood that someone will detect the fraud and the coin will become worthless. Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money.  An internet run by Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good. It's not just that BH&G can "test" products at a fraction of the cost of Housefresh – through the simple expedient of doing inadequate tests or no tests at all – so they can put a lot more content up than Housefresh. But that alone wouldn't let them drive Housefresh off the front page of Google's search results. For that, BH&G has to mobilize some of their savings from the no test/bad test lab to do real rigorous science: science in defeating Google's security-through-obscurity system, which lets them command the front page despite publishing worse-than-useless nonsense.  Google has lost the spam wars. In response to the plague of botshit clogging Google search results, the company has invested in…making more botshit:"

Degree Requirements for Police Officers Will Not Make Us Safer - "Relegating police training to outside universities smacks of duty shirking; it should be the responsibility (and purview) of police departments to train law enforcement professionals effectively. Furthermore, the ever-expanding realm of credentialism further shrinks the available pool of quality jobs for working-class Americans, who, despite the increasing technological complexity of the economy, remain the largest economic and cultural bloc of the general population.  A close inspection of the historical and increasingly severe push towards “credentialism” reveals that it should not only be questioned cautiously, but rejected outright... Outside of careers in academia, university degrees may no longer be the most optimum training route for employment—indeed they may never have been in the first place. Considering that university tuition costs are rising faster than inflation rates at a time of high unemployment, it seems reasonable to review the arguments against enjoining university degrees for blue-collar occupations... Allan Bloom in his seminal work The Closing of the American Mind argued that American university education was evolving into precisely what Emerson feared—a mere credentialing process for the professions. Bloom argued that by the 1980s, the American university experience neither inculcated students in the values of the Western canon nor encouraged critical thinking. This left graduates not only unemployable, but uninformed. Both of these thinkers understood that molding the university degree into an imperative for employment not only left students unprepared for analytical innovation, but also transmuted academics into subordinate employees of their own students... nation-wide 86 percent of departments report a deficit of officers. This situation will presumably worsen as a glut of officers hired in the 1990s become eligible for retirement... if there is not a corresponding increase in potential pay (Jones-Sawyer did not proffer any legislation to increase police pay), the result will almost surely be a gross decrease in applicants for police positions, at a time when police departments are already compromised by so many officer vacancies. The effects of such a position can already be discerned; for although most police departments still permit applicants without degrees, a growing percentage require bachelor’s degrees and even master’s degrees for advancement within the ranks"
Too bad he doesn't look at education and performance or public safety (the latter despite the title)

Interpreting Italo Svevo—When Literary Orthodoxy Misses The Mark - "Although I was relieved to learn that literature in Italy has not been taken over by social justice activism as has happened in the U.S., Italian literary studies are not immune to rigid orthodoxies.  The study of 20th-century Italian literature is strongly “theory-driven,” and dominated by two schools of thought: the Marxist, and the psychoanalytical (or Freudian) school. In the past, there was also a Catholic school in Italian literary studies, but it is no longer prominent... Marx’s ideas have been debunked by economists; Freud’s ideas have been debunked by psychologists. These facts are irrelevant to many scholars in the humanities, who believe that they can safely ignore developments in other academic disciplines even when they base their work on these very disciplines... Due to their ideological commitments to Marx and Freud, Italian literary scholars have failed to recognize that the key to understanding Svevo’s novels lies in the influence that Darwin and Schopenhauer had on Svevo’s thinking and his literary work.  Svevo’s is not an isolated case.  The notion that literary fiction may reflect ideas derived from science or philosophy is more foreign than ever to current literary scholars. This is inevitable given how concepts of science, reality, evolution, and human nature have been banned from contemporary literary discourse. Unfortunately, as literary studies become more entrenched in dogmatic ideological orthodoxy, they also become more detached from the realities of novelists, their lives, and their work—and less helpful to readers who consult the opinions of experts in the naïve hope that these will shed light on what they are reading."

Margot Cleveland on X - "KBJ suffers from misconception that if something’s really really good, in her eyes, it’s constitutional & if it’s really really bad, it’s unconstitutional. Unfortunately, this same theory is shared by every liberal judge, law professors, media, civics teachers & I daresay public"
Don Wolt on X - "KBJ's Greatest Hits (Volume 1):
🔸"Experts" should have more power
🔸Blacks are disabled
🔸Listing people's biological sex in passports is cruel
🔸The First Amendment shouldn't hamstring the govt
🔸I can't define the word "woman""

Meme - "@lonewanderer882: Why every african nation has the same history? it's always some shit like "The rebels led by Abdal Faruq Mutobombo have declared war on the ruling party, the Front for Liberation and Love, which is responsible for the famine that has hit the nation from 1920 to today... And then started another civil war who killed 18 billion of citizen""
"EVERY AFRICAN, REVOLUTIONARY AFTER TAKING POWER *laughing men*"

Charlie No-Face Legend: True Story of the Glowing Green Man - "He was severely electrocuted. His nose, lips, ears, and eyes were all gone or misshapen. His arms were maimed. One of his hands was blown clean off. His suffering was unimaginable.  Somehow he survived. Doctors marveled. But Ray didn't have much of a life after that, at least for a while... He managed to dodge notoriety until he began craving a respite from the prison his life had become. He started walking the local highways. Always alone. Always at night.  This is where the man becomes the legend."

POLITICOEurope on X - "Japan has rebuffed the EU’s offer to join its plan to use frozen Russian state assets to fund Ukraine — dashing the bloc's hopes of securing global support for the initiative."
Denise Wu on X - "Japan is currently facing harassment from China. Has Europe offered Japan any assistance? This is a common complaint from Asia. Europeans often ask for help, but when they need it, they remain silent."

Meme - "They want to undermine the Constitution"
mike solana @micsolana: "believe them"
"The New York Times. The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous? One of the biggest threats to America's politics might be the country's founding document."
Of course, when left wing judges find something the left hates unconstitutional, the Constitution is Sacred

Meme - *Concert*
"We sold pussy to be here!! We <3 Drake OVO"

COE problem solved: Singaporeans can now own their dream car and park it in Johor Bahru, and even keep the car forever! - "Thanks to a clever new venture, as reported by the Malay Mail, Carlogy Malaysia, a one-stop automotive lifestyle hub in Skudai that’s rewriting the rules of car ownership for Singaporeans, car enthusiasts from across the Causeway can now buy, park, and pamper their prized vehicles, minus the dreaded Certificate of Entitlement (COE) price tag...  At the heart of this smart motoring revolution are co-founders Heeraj Sharma and Regis Tia, who’ve turned their shared love of performance cars into a thriving cross-border business. Located in Skudai — the sweet midpoint between Woodlands Checkpoint and Tuas Second Link — Carlogy Malaysia is like a five-star resort for cars. Think of it as your car’s private man cave, complete with 24/7 security, air-conditioned storage, detailing services, and even a café for when you drop by for a weekend joyride.  And you can even livestream your car via real-time CCTV from anywhere. Because what’s the point of owning a Porsche or a Lamborghini if you can’t lovingly stare at it during Zoom meetings, right?... Now for the fine print: Yes, Singaporeans can own Malaysian-registered cars. The only catch is that you can’t drive them back into Singapore.  Singapore’s Land Transport Authority strictly prohibits citizens, permanent residents, and long-term pass holders from using foreign-registered vehicles in the city-state, but for weekend drives, road trips, or track days up north, Johor and beyond are your personal playground."

Meme - Piers Morgan @piersmorgan: "You really need to get laid, you deluded little twerp."
Nicholas J. Fuentes @NickJFuentes: "You need to go get your wife bro"
1stclassclips @1stclassclips: "She's getting her back blown out while Piers is seething on X"
celia.walden: "Wanted. Pool boy. no experience needed"
celia.walden: "When the husband's away Mr Suds comes to play. #youmissedaspot #everydaysexism #notanobject #ButtIWantToBe #Speedo #HollywoodLife #HawaiianTropic *muscular black man in speedos washing car*"

∿ on X - "the sooner you realize that the US is like 47 Albanias and 3 actual countries in a trench cost masquerading as a superpower the more clarity you’ll have"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Every US state has a higher income than England."

Meme - David Hookstead: "Did we cancel D-Day because of a little rough weather? No. Play the damn game."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "D-Day was delayed by a day because of the weather"

Meme - "r/kitchencels. Decided to get into meal prepping and just made 7 days worth of the most absolute dogshit pasta I've ever tasted. Now I have to come home from my horrible minimum wage job everyday and sit down and forcefeed myself this slop like a good little lave. I'm 24 years old and I've never kissed a girl."

Meme - "Locals who live in a city who's economy is based entirely on tourism when they see a tourist in town *angry stare*"

Thread by @SydneyLWatson on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Sometimes I forget that leftists cheered little girls drowning in floodwaters because those little girls were from Texas and probably came from conservative families.  Nothing after that should surprise me, and yet, the vile things these people say still leave me speechless. Like...this is a teacher.  Who is gleefully admitting he enjoyed watching someone get shot to death. On repeat.  What in the literal fuck?"
Left wingers are full of "kindness" and "empathy" and against "hate"

Clinton on X - "Tonight while I was grilling steaks for dinner, my son said, "Dad, one day I will help you with bills, groceries and rent." My eyes teared up. He'll be 38 next week."