Fake money is warping the economy

Fake money is warping the economy. By Quoth the Raven.

Nearly everything I’ve written over the past few years has revolved around how grotesquely overvalued the market is. Pick your metric. The Buffett Indicator is screaming. Traditional price-to-earnings ratios are absurd. The Shiller CAPE is parked near all-time highs yet again.

Historically, these measures existed to anchor investors to something resembling reality, accounting for cycles, earnings power, and the inconvenient fact that prices are supposed to relate to value. Today, they are waved away by growth narratives and financial influencers who treat valuation like an outdated superstition.

But let’s entertain a heretical thought. What if 40x earnings isn’t overvalued anymore?

By historical standards, it is indefensible. By economic logic, it is laughable. But markets no longer operate on either. The real regime change happened around the turn of the millennium, when quantitative easing went from emergency response to permanent lifestyle choice.

 

 

The market we grew up studying does not exist anymore. Drawdowns are no longer allowed to mature into corrections because the Federal Reserve panics at the first whiff of discomfort. Five percent down? Emergency meeting. Ten percent? Liquidity firehose. Investors have been coddled into submission and trained like Pavlovian dogs to expect rescue at the slightest sign of pain.

That expectation may be the single most powerful force pushing valuations into territory that would have once been dismissed as satire.

Modern monetary theory has quietly poisoned the usefulness of traditional valuation metrics. When money is created without constraint, deficits are celebrated, and central banks openly admit that asset prices are a policy tool, the concept of “fair value” becomes a relic.

Earnings no longer justify prices. Prices justify themselves through liquidity. Stocks stop being ownership claims on productive businesses and instead become dumping grounds for excess capital that cannot sit in cash without being destroyed by inflation.

Picture the environment we are already halfway living in. Economic growth is mediocre at best. Productivity gains are weak. Real wages lag. None of that matters. Liquidity is abundant and relentless. Bonds guarantee negative real returns. Cash is a melting ice cube. Housing is inaccessible to anyone without existing assets. Capital is forced into equities not because they are attractive, but because they are the least bad option left. Under those conditions, valuation multiples do not expand because optimism is high. They expand because participation is compulsory. Fifty or sixty times earnings stops being a bubble and starts being the logical endpoint of a broken system. …

After decades of intervention, investors no longer fear downside. They fear missing out. Buying dips is no longer a strategy; it is an article of faith. Risk has been redefined. Expensive is considered safe. Cheap is considered broken. If the collective belief is that central banks will never allow asset prices to fall in any sustained way, then valuation ceilings simply evaporate. Markets do not top because they are expensive. They top when faith breaks. For now, faith remains disturbingly intact.

So much fake money:

We have never printed this much money. We have never normalized deficits of this scale. We have never openly subordinated market discipline to political convenience the way we do now. Expecting valuations to obey historical limits under these conditions is naïve. It is far more plausible that peak valuations overshoot anything previously recorded, not because fundamentals improved, but because money was debased beyond recognition. …

Sound money matters, but beware the liquidity event in the fake money:

The real takeaway is not that stocks are safe. It is that sound money still matters, regardless of what the equity market does next. Gold and silver could absolutely get crushed during a broader liquidation event. They probably will. Leverage unwinds indiscriminately. But those moments are not failures of the thesis. They are the opportunities. Assets that cannot be printed tend to matter most once confidence in printed ones finally cracks. …

Whether the market crashes tomorrow or levitates into even more absurd territory first is almost beside the point. The endgame has not changed. Only the path has become more distorted, more theatrical, and far more dangerous.

Fake news, fake money, fake vaccines, fake fear of carbon dioxide, … Just as well our media is so curious and honest.

In this era of paper money, unconstrained by physics, markets can never go down for political reasons. Stock markets can plummet, but only temporarily — buy the dip, because the market will be rescued, every single time, by central banks who conjure more paper money out of thin air.

Imagine the political turmoil if interest rates climb to +10% (like in the 1970s) and the housing market dropped 30%. Unthinkable! The ruling class would feel poor, so they would resort to the printing press if necessary to get the prices of their houses back up.

If markets cannot go down, then they must go up. But up against what? The money units, obviously.

So if markets cannot go down, the currency must become debased. Then, interest rates must go up to slow the debasement of the currency. This last happened in the 1970s. USA official rates peaked at 20% in 1979, under Volcker and Carter. The Aussie peak was only slightly lower.

If house prices tank, then houses becomes affordable for young people again. Yippee! Fertility roars back up, and the excuse for third world immigration goes away. Reset. Welcome to the next decade, when the SHTF for the current loose money system.

UPDATE: As I write, paper representing silver is at 99 USD per ounce, and gold is less than 1% below 5,000 USD per ounce. What do you think is going to happen next?

Gold equities are still priced for a long term gold price of around US$ 2,500/oz, and have not moved up commensurately with the gold price — yet. The disconnect between silver equities and the silver price is even more extreme. I’m the editor of GoldNerds so I’m biased, so do your own research.

 

UPDATE: Trump says what the politicians and media won’t say:

 

Notice he talked about mortgage repayments going up — implying he could crush housing prices by raising interest rates. A better way to lower housing prices would be to open up land and remove regulations on building new housing. Cities with few zoning restrictions in the US have much lower housing prices. From the comments:

Houses become more expensive for people because the government fails to develop new cities.

The youth has to fight for space in the same old city because there’s no new place with same facilities.

New people fighting for space in the old city.

This is how you kill the youth, forcing them to spend all their life to afford a place just to sleep. …

Our politicians are sacrificing people in their 20s and 30s for the prosperity of boomers.

Mass immigration is a thing because abortion is a thing

Mass immigration is a thing because abortion is a thing.

Shocking statistic [from the UK} “Since 1968, there have been 10.7 million abortions. There are now 10.9 million foreign nationals living in the country.”

 

 

The bureaucrats justify mass migration by saying it is necessary to provide the workers of the future, because we aren’t having enough babies.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

The weaponization of seeking comfort

The weaponization of seeking comfort. By Todd of Mischief.

How the mass media in the late 20th century trained people to follow the narrative:

Both of us being broadly in the communications field, we didn’t need to explain editorial bias to one another. We understood that it shapes perception less by distorting stories than by deciding which ones are worth covering at all. Even knowing this, my friend felt bombarded by stories that made him uncomfortable on the nightly news whenever a Republican was in power. A “quiet” news cycle was, for him, sufficient reason to vote Democrat. He wasn’t voting for policy so much as for a media atmosphere that allowed him to look away.

He was trading his vote for comfort.

His vote afforded him the luxury of distance from the consequences of policy, from the people those policies affected, from any information that might complicate the reported consensus. The bad news didn’t really disappear, it just went unremarked. But when the “wrong” party was in charge, consequences suddenly reappeared, and the solution was never this or that, but who. …

Democrats = comfortable to consume the media; Republicans = uncomfortable stories in the media.

But then came talkback radio and the Internet:

My friend’s bargain had been simple: vote for the party that keeps the news quiet, and you get to live without the friction of uncomfortable facts.

But that deal required a bottleneck. It required CBS, NBC, and ABC to be the only game in town. Once Rush Limbaugh proved you could route around the gatekeepers, once blogs made every citizen a potential publisher, once social media turned every laptop into a printing press, the comfort monopoly began to dissolve. …

Why left wing protest worked, but right wing protests failed:

Left-wing frustration vented into marches, protests, and riots. These were covered sympathetically by mainstream media and responded to by politicians. A familiar loop emerged: a politician runs as moderate; an issue arises; protests erupt; the media frames the protesters as reasonable; the politician claims to be “forced” to concede. Protesting moved more policy than voting.

Right-wing frustration, by contrast, mainly vented into votes that could pick a politician, but couldn’t hold him to a policy. Early right-wing media acted as a sympathetic voice to listeners, but not a line to Washington. This is why the right could secure intermittent electoral victories but rarely durable political wins. The protest machine on the left never ceased while folks on the right tuned into their radios during the off-season. When right-wing frustration did spill over, the media blamed the media ecosystem itself—another excuse to ignore that frustration and shame it back into the closet. …

But eventually right wingers learned to bypass the legacy media:

Right-wingers grew more comfortable expressing their views. Eventually, with the help of social media, they became visible to one another. Once people could open their phones and find thousands, then millions, saying “this is absurd” in the comments and on social media, the protest scam quit working. The leftist protesters were still there. The media still covered them sympathetically. Politicians still claimed to be pressured. But the spell was broken.

A protest of hundreds posted online gets mocked by tens of thousands as being small. A crowd surrounding diners gets eviscerated by vloggers. Mostly peaceful riots with flames in the background get taken apart in the comments section. And increasingly, the online counterprotest inspires action the way the street protests used to.

My friend chose to vote his way into a quiet news cycle. Now all one has to do for that is curate their feed, and it doesn’t matter what team you are on. You can’t control how people process reality once the information monopoly is gone. …

Now the left is more aggressive and invasive about denying you comfort unless you agree with them:

There is a profound categorical difference between the activism of the 1960s and today:

  • In the 1960s, discomfort was enduredby the protester. Activists risked harassment, violence, and arrest to expose injustice. Their sit-ins were demonstrations in the literal sense—offering themselves as evidence of the system’s cruelty.
  • Today, discomfort is imposed by the activist. Agitators harass and intimidate fellow citizens in the name of justice, even as their tactics become increasingly cruel. When they do incur risk, it’s usually because they escalated the confrontation themselves.

The script has flipped. Protesters no longer sacrifice themselves to truth; they demand the public sacrifice its peace of mind to their emotional claims. Moving protest from the sidewalk into church pews signals that nowhere is off-limits. It switches from persuasion to intimidation. …

If marches are ignored, block highways.

If signs go unread, surround diners.

If chants go unheard, storm churches.

If all else fails, show up at private homes.

The goal is no longer to silence the right — that’s off the table — but to intimidate the middle into compliance.

The bet is that enough disruption, enough social friction, enough invasion of ordinary life will exhaust those without strong commitments and push them toward submission as the price of restoring normalcy. The discomfort is no longer a byproduct of protest; it is the product. The activist is no longer trying to be heard by power, but to make daily life intolerable for everyone else until their demands are met.

No mas:

But this strategy contains a fatal flaw: desensitization.

When discomfort is weaponized — when protest invades private moments — it doesn’t break resistance. It forges it.

This is the irony baked into the escalation: each exposure teaches people not compliance but resilience. They aren’t being radicalized; they’re being hardened. They learn to maintain peace regardless of collective pressure.

This exposes a deeper tension between collectivist and individualist strategies. Collectivism relies on locating an emotional breaking point. But pressure has diminishing returns. The first shock alarms. The tenth irritates. Continued escalation produces the one thing collectivists cannot tolerate: the rugged individual.

The left derides rugged individualism as callous, ignoring that such individuals are often first to clear debris, pull strangers from wreckage, and fix what’s broken. But compassion isn’t the issue. Emotional noncompliance is. The rugged individual won’t break under pressure. He can handle discomfort. Once someone learns to withstand your discomfort campaign, you lose leverage entirely. The old joke says a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. It turns out the same formula applies if they’ve been mugged by liberals.

The left has replaced the comfort they can no longer provide with a discomfort they can no longer make stick. In trying to make everyone feel the weight of their cause, they have produced a generation that knows how to tune them out. 

And the rugged individualists emerge on the right, to oppose the bullying collectivists who want to take their stuff. The cycle of history repeats.

The Hajnal Line, Trust, and Somalia

The Hajnal Line, Trust, and Somalia. By Hunter Ash.

What made Europeans WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic ] — that is, high-trust, individualist, and classically egalitarian?

 

 

The Hajnal line labels the portion of Europe that has historically practiced the distinctive Western European Marriage Pattern. In these cultures, marriages typically happened at older ages, the consent of the bride was more emphasized, and nuclear families — men starting their own households, rather than multi-generational living — were the norm. According to many scholars, this was largely driven by the Catholic ban on cousin marriage.

A prohibition on marrying close relatives inhibits the formation of tight-knit extended-family networks and forces cooperation with non-kin. This in turn requires (and thus selects for) trust.

In many cultures, it is not considered dishonorable to lie to, cheat, and steal from non-clan members. All morality applies only to the extended family group. This makes running large-scale modern nation-states much less efficient, since every clan is constantly grifting off the state for its own benefit, engaging in nepotism, etc. …

The Western European Marriage Pattern is a large part of what made Western Europeans unique and globally dominant.

Somalia And The High Cost Of Low Trust. By Mitzi Purdue at RealClearPolitics.

Anecdote:

Decades ago, long before Minnesota became synonymous with one of the largest fraud cases in U.S. history, I had an experience in Somalia that permanently altered my perspective on aid, trust, and good intentions. It is why I read the indictments differently, not with surprise so much as recognition.

What struck me most about the Minnesota case was not only the scale of the theft but the silence surrounding it. The fraud appears to have operated in plain sight within tightly knit circles, yet few people spoke out.

More than 40 years ago, when I was a rice farmer in California, American rice growers learned of famine conditions in Somalia. Competitors set aside their rivalry and donated an entire shipload of rice for humanitarian relief. I later traveled to Somalia, expecting to see that food had reached people on the brink of starvation.

It had not.

A powerful clan had taken control of the shipment. Once its own members’ needs were met, the remaining rice did not go to feed other Somalis. Instead, it was used to feed animals, while those outside the clan continued to go hungry. …

Cousin marriage –> Clans –> low trust societies –> poverty and fraud. Somalia is one of the worst:

Over time, I found language for what I had observed: the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a concept from game theory that explains how cooperation and trust either compound or collapse.

  • When two parties cooperate, both benefit and trust grows.
  • When one cheats while the other cooperates, the cheater prospers and the cooperator becomes the loser.
  • When both are defective, everyone loses.

High-trust societies solve this dilemma by extending cooperation beyond family and tribe. Laws, institutions, and norms reinforce the idea that cheating ultimately harms everyone, including oneself.

Low-trust societies work differently. Trust is reserved for kin. Outsiders are assumed to cheat. In that environment, cheating is not necessarily immoral. It is often rational, expected, and even applauded.

Seen through this lens, both my experience in Somalia and the Minnesota scandal follow the same pattern. Institutions cooperated in good faith. Clan-based networks exploited that trust. Children and taxpayers paid the price.

Somalia represents the most destructive version of this equilibrium. When trust does not extend beyond blood ties, cooperation cannot scale. Investment dries up. Contracts mean little without enforcement beyond kinship. When everyone expects everyone else to cheat, no one can afford to cooperate.

In that context, Somalia’s ranking of 213th out of 215 countries in per-capita income is not shocking. It is almost inevitable. This is not an indictment of individual Somalis. We know that many, many Somalis live honest, productive lives, raise families, and contribute positively wherever they reside. Individuals can transcend the cultures they are born into. Social systems, however, change slowly and are likely to shape behavior.

Somalia sits at the end of a continuum, but the underlying dynamic is not unique to it. Whenever loyalty to the group eclipses loyalty to shared rules, corruption flourishes. The Minnesota scandal was not an aberration so much as a warning: When institutions assume trust without enforcing it, low-trust behavior fills the vacuum. Somalia shows what happens when that low-trust approach is entrenched.

Oh no, say the leftists, everyone’s a blank slate, all cultures are equally good, and importing the third world is diversity — which is our strength! You broke it, you fix it.

hat-tip David Archibald

The Death Of Australia

The Death Of Australia. By Harry Richardson.

The nation I knew and loved just died yesterday. Actually, it didn’t die, it was murdered by treasonous politicians and lobby groups. ..

Tyranny rarely happened in Australia (nowhere is perfect) was because of legal and political principles developed in the mother country for centuries and continued here because the people believed in them.

The mulitculti brigade who wanted to replace the people with others from non-British/European backgrounds insisted that all we needed to do was to keep those ideals and principles.

It didn’t occur to them (or they didn’t let on) that different peoples would naturally have different ideals and principles.

They wouldn’t admit that we didn’t have magic dirt in Australia that foreigners could step onto and immediately be transformed into “Aussies” with the same beliefs and cultures as the locals.

The new legislation:

Yesterday, the Federal Parliament passed the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism legislation.

Despite the title, the bill doesn’t adequately define antisemitism, hate or extremism. In other words, these will depend largely on the Government to decide what they are.

That doesn’t sound like a big deal but it should terrify you.

That’s because the Government now has the power to define these terms mostly as they like and prosecute people they don’t like with up to 15 years in jail.

A lefty revolution is underway:

The real poison in this bill, however, is that it smashes no less than four of the founding principles of British governance which have held sway here since its founding.

1. Free speech

This principle holds that any citizen is entitled to express any opinion without fear of punishment by the State. …

[Now] citizens are prevented from criticizing powerful groups or their members, who are protected by the Government. Of course, the Government doesn’t refer to these people as powerful groups, it refers to them as “protected groups,” implying that they are protected due to powerlessness and vulnerability.

In reality, the only groups protected are the ones who can “heavy” the Government through either ethnic block voting, campaign contributions, [or] control of media narratives. …

2. Freedom of Association

People should be free to associate, or not associate, with whomever they please. ..

Governments may restrict association only where necessary and proportionate, such as to prevent serious crime or terrorism.

[Now] you no longer have that right. The Government can lock you up for even associating with a group they don’t like. …

3. Rule of Law

Under British and Commonwealth tradition, laws are set out clearly and they are applied to EVERYONE equally by the courts. This is called fairness. Everyone is treated the same.

Politicians didn’t get to punish those with whom they disagree or dislike.

This bill hands sweeping power to the Government to prosecute those people or organisations that it does not like. Even worse, it blatantly removes fairness from the process. … They decide. No ifs, or buts. Total power to do what they want, depending on how they feel at that exact moment. …

4. Retroactive Application

When they passed laws mandating seat belts, they were not allowed to prosecute people who had previously travelled in cars without a seat belt.

Once again, this bill tramples all over that. In 114.A.4 the draft bill states that: “Conduct consti …tuting a hate crime may have occurred before commencement”

Vox Populi:

To be honest, I find it very difficult to be concerned about the fate of Australia, since it’s already a foregone conclusion that it’s going to be a Chinese colony by 2050 or so.

This is exactly the sort of thing that is inevitable when you disarm yourselves, turn your government over to women and foreigners …

So posture bravely all you like about “don’t mess with Texas” or “try that in a small town” or whatever, but no words, no ideology, and no bravado will ever prove an adequate substitute for simply keeping those who don’t share your heritage, your history, your religion, or your values out of your midst.

hat-tip Phil

The Final Death Throes of the Australian Liberal Party

The Final Death Throes of the Australian Liberal Party. By Craig Kelly at Confidential Daily.

This week began with a historic Newspoll showing, for the first time ever, that One Nation had overtaken the Coalition. …

You’d think that faced with such a moment of existential peril, the Liberals would end their futile appeasement of the Left and focus on holding their coalition together by ensuring the Nationals stayed inside the tent. Instead, they did the exact opposite. …

The conservative vote is now fragmenting beyond repair for the Liberals: at just 16% for the Liberals versus roughly 32% combined for One Nation, the Nationals, and “Others,” it is over for the Liberal Party. …

Appeasement and cowardice:

This is not bad luck. It is the logical, inevitable consequence of cowardice, betrayal, and the steady ideological surrender of a party that long ago sold out its values.

Below are [some of] the twenty-two principal causes of death, from the 2013 landslide under Tony Abbott, a moment of triumph where the Coalition won 45.5% of the primary vote to the lowly 21% in the latest Newspoll.

  • The treacherous sabotage of Tony Abbott by his own cabinet colleagues immediately after the 2013 landslide.
  • Abbott’s fatal mistake: appeasing internal enemies by signing Australia up to the Paris Agreement in 2015 without any party-room debate, surrendering sovereignty to global climate hysteria for peace that never came.
  • The surrender to the ABC, allowing a taxpayer-funded propaganda arm of the Left to attack Liberal values unchallenged.
  • A corrupt preselection system that rewards factional hacks and exiles genuine conservatives, leaving the party hollowed out. …
  • Cowardice on education reform, letting children be indoctrinated by Gillard’s “cross-curriculum priorities” where they are taught to despise their country, culture, and history.
  • Failure to scrap Rudd’s “three flags policy,” embedding divisive identity politics and diminishing national unity. …
  • Scott Morrison’s betrayal of his 2019 election promises by committing to Net Zero without consultation, appeasing people who would never vote Liberal. …
  • Climate cowardice, choosing submission over truth and allowing alarmism to deindustrialise the nation and empower Communist China. …
  • Weaponising AHPRA to silence doctors and failing to oppose Queensland’s draconian laws imprisoning doctors for prescribing safe, effective, and proven COVID treatments. …
  • Silence on mass-migration, which is destroying social cohesion, crushing living standards, and pricing home ownership out of reach.
  • Failure to defend Senator Jacinta Price, a rare voice of truth, when she correctly called out Labor for using mass migration as a vote-harvesting exercise, and instead joining the pile-on for cheap photo-ops and cultural pandering.
  • Paralysis over the Mis- and Disinformation Bill, hiding under desks for weeks to sniff the breeze instead of standing up for freedom immediately.
  • Timid opposition to the Hate Speech Bill, which should have been condemned outright as an authoritarian attack on democracy. …

More than half of former Liberal supporters now support other parties. They didn’t leave, the party left them.

The Liberals bent the knee to the ABC, big bureaucracy, activist elites, and the leftist inner-city non-productive class; voters who would never support the party under any circumstances. It betrayed its base, surrendered its culture, and torched its credibility.

Obvious, but it needs saying. The Liberal Party was established by Menzies for the forgotten people, the silent majority, to counter the New Class. But over the decades the New Class infiltrated and corrupted the Liberal Party, to the extent that half the Liberal Party are members of the New Class and too often the Liberal Party does the bidding of the New Class.

The life cycle turns, the butterfly dies, and a caterpillar must be born. The party that emerges to be the main opposition the New Class in Australia will probably be One Nation, or perhaps the Nationals.

UPDATE: Leaving the sinking ship: National Party pulls out of Coalition agreement.

Asked directly if the Coalition was going to split, Mr Littleproud said: “Yes. There’s no other position.”

He added: “Our party room has made it clear that we cannot be part of a shadow ministry under Sussan Ley… We sit by ourselves.”

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Orange is the New Blue

Orange is the New Blue. By Nathan Porter in The Spectator.

I am no longer a card-carrying Liberal. I’ve quit.

I didn’t leave because I abandoned Menzies’ principles. I left because the Liberals did. …

New members are called and vetted to ensure they are not ‘someone’s’ person. Joined Family First once? Rejected. Mutual friends with a conservative? Rejected. The Liberal Party doesn’t want new members….

I’ve joined One Nation.

Here’s the greatest trick the moderates ever pulled: convincing educated conservatives that supporting Australian workers, sustainable immigration, and energy security was somehow ‘unsophisticated’. When did wanting affordable housing become bogan? When did questioning immigration become racist rather than economically rational? When did insisting that Australians should benefit from Australia’s resources become populist rather than patriotic? …

I joined the Liberal Party for real issues. … I care that I’ll never be able to afford to buy in my city, let alone the suburb I grew up in. I care that we never took a vote on the quantity and quality of people coming into our country and that now it’s illegal to question that.

These are not fringe concerns. They are the central questions facing Australia’s future. And the ‘natural party of government’ won’t touch them.

The New Class took over the Liberal Party, which was formed specifically to oppose the New Class, to represent the “forgotten people”:

Dinner-party liberalism has destroyed what remained of the Liberal Party.

One Nation’s growth isn’t happening despite its positions on immigration, national identity, and Australian sovereignty. It’s happening because of them.

The Australian people are well ahead of our political class on these issues. They know that the Australian dream won’t suddenly return by servicing more debt, but by fewer people competing for housing, jobs, and services. They know our current energy policy is national economic suicide. They know that criticising mass migration is not the root cause of declining social cohesion, rising crime, and antisemitism.

One Nation better grow up fast:

And One Nation isn’t what it used to be either. It’s no longer a one-woman protest movement. The party has developed serious policy depth, attracted credible candidates with business and professional backgrounds, and demonstrated it will work constructively in parliaments across Australia.

And then there’s Barnaby Joyce, a former Deputy Prime Minister and Acting Prime Minister of Australia. Barnaby speaks for the everyman and when the everyman who held the second-highest office in the land chooses One Nation over the Nationals, that tells you something about where genuine conservatism now lives.

One Nation, easily derided and starved of talent, has long been the opposition preferred by the New Class. Not controlled opposition exactly, but ineffectual opposition. Tolerated and preferred by the New Class, who made serious contenders for the role of opposition (e.g. Cory Bernadi) go away by starving them of media attention. But now One Nation threatens to outgrow its previously assigned role as the patsy party:

Yes, One Nation has baggage. But name me a party that doesn’t. The difference? One Nation’s errors have been amplified and weaponised because the party threatens the comfortable consensus of Australia’s political class. When Pauline Hanson warns about unsustainable immigration, she’s ‘divisive’ and ‘dangerous’. When the Reserve Bank issues reports saying exactly the same thing in more technical language, it’s ‘economic analysis’.

The double standard is deliberate. It’s designed to keep conservatives corralled in a Liberal Party that no longer represents them. I joined One Nation because conservatism feels vital here again. Not performative. Not managed. Not focus-grouped into meaninglessness.

There’s an energy that comes from actually believing your party will fight for its principles rather than triangulate them away.

Who said Australia was immune to the forces that swept Trump and Farage to prominence?

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Chess is Haram

Chess is Haram. By Basil the Great.

A Teacher in England faces losing their job because they organised a Chess Club

A third of his class is Muslim and Chess is Haram. This is the insanity of the UK right now. …

Muslim Destroys Chess Board

Chess is Haram so no one can play

Why are they so violent?

 

 

A culture based on a population with a low average IQ is bound to be anti-intellectual.

Maybe politics is self-sorting in the West. The left view themselves as the party of the oppressed. Almost invariably (sexual politics aside), the oppressed are the groups with lower average IQs and thus lower economic competitiveness. They hate on the groups with higher average IQs (e.g. Jews, whites, and northeast Asians), who are decamping politically and moving to the right. Muslims hating on intellectual activities like chess fits that pattern perfectly.

Printed on top of that, women tend to fall for the dumb propaganda of the left, so the left is becoming female dominated while the right is becoming male dominated.

How antisemitism grew on Australian campuses

How antisemitism grew on Australian campuses. By Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian.

Last year, many Jewish students were too scared to attend campuses. This year they will not be bullied — and they will attend. Violence is possible. …

The remarks of former ACCC chief Graeme Samuel (a Jew) should be a warning to all chancellors. Samuel said: “I wonder if Julie Bishop ever walked down ANU’s University Avenue, as I did, and faced the comments and jeers of the protesters encamped on ANU grounds for 110 days with the permission of the ANU leadership. The culture of any organisation comes from the top.” …

Allowed to fester — for example, Melbourne campus:

The Marxist-based Socialist Alternative movement held its regular Easter [2023] conference at the University of Melbourne.

What is not widely understood in Australia is that while Marxism went into sharp decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has since been reborn — and is now far more skilful — with the aim of undermining Australia’s capitalist system by creating a community belief that the system is not working. …

The Hamas attack on Israel took place in October 2023. The 2024 Marxist conference brought together groups that were not Marxist but which, for different reasons, sought fundamental changes to systems of government.

They included parts of the Islamist movement, which seeks to overthrow Western culture and is, of course, opposed to what has occurred in Gaza; elements of the First Nations movement, which for different reasons want a different legal system; and left-wing sections of the union movement, which are highly influential within the Victorian government.

The Israeli counter-attack triggered a vicious war in Gaza, and Australian Jews were not only persecuted for events in Israel but as symbols of Western civilisation that many of the assembled groups at the University of Melbourne wanted to dismantle.

The Victorian government under Jacinta Allan allowed regular marches, many of which the Marxist groups helped organise.

Melbourne University students also camped in the Arts West building, refusing to leave for about a week until the university agreed to disclose its ties to weapons companies. …

Zero tolerance for the intolerant:

The vice-chancellor of Canberra University, former ALP leader Bill Shorten, said last month his university has not encountered antisemitism but strongly advocates zero tolerance for antisemitism in all universities. He clearly understands what happened at other campuses and warns against bringing outsiders onto university grounds to generate hate. …

Universities with vice-chancellors of real calibre know Bill Shorten is right: zero tolerance must begin next month.

How many Medina Muslims are there in Australia? What is the cost of monitoring them?

How many Medina Muslims are there in Australia? What is the cost of monitoring them? By Alan Moran.

Albanese is desperate not to antagonize his Muslim voters:

Some of its most active supporters are vociferously anti-Israel, and key politicians have carefully nurtured and are dependent upon the Muslim vote.

Moreover, they would not wish to see further light shone on the 3000 Palestinian visas granted — far more than in the rest of the world combined — with no real vetting of the recipients. Hence, the reluctance to call a Royal Commission or to instigate public inquiries into the Bondi murders. …

How many Medina Muslims are there in Australia?

In [his later period in Medina, Mohammed] called for the killing of non-Muslims or, at best, treating those who refused to convert as inferior citizens while prescribing death for the apostasy of any Muslim renouncing the faith. …

According to former ASIO director general Mike Burgess, out of the Muslims living in Australia, now totalling about one million, only 0.01 per cent (i.e. 1000) can be considered potentially dangerous to the community.

This quantification of what might be called the Medina Muslims’ numbers is at odds with that of Raymond Ibrahim, an American historian specialising in the Middle East. Dr Ibrahim claims 10 per cent is the lowest credible estimate of Muslims calling for violent jihad. In Australia’s context, that would mean 100,000.

Another estimate is that 2,000 AFP officers are monitoring around 25 people each, which would put the list at 50,000. Neither of the Bondi Beach killers was said to be on any watch list.

One thousand people living in Australia following a religion that calls for rejection of the current legal system and death to unbelievers is disturbing; 100,000 creates immense problems.

Must we permanently monitor them? At what cost?

If the watch list were expanded to the 100,000 … and if it were better resourced (as the Royal Commission will surely demand), we could quite easily be looking at a vast increase in staffing.

Grok reports that intelligence agencies like MI5 typically require teams of 12–20 officers per high-priority suspect and at least one for each low-risk target. All else aside, servicing this requires a colossal resource requirement — perhaps 100,000 people (considerably in excess of the number of serving Defence personnel) at an annual cost of over $60 billion. …

Letting them stew in their own enclaves is cheaper, but only in the short term:

It is doubtful that any non-Muslim Australians (and few Muslims) would want to see the proliferation of no-go areas that are evident in France, where Muslims comprise a growing 10% of the population or in Belgium and Germany, which also have high Muslim populations.

Poland (0.1% Muslim) and Hungary (and arguably the US) have decided that the costs in terms of social tensions and finances outweigh the benefits of having significant increases in their Muslim populations. …

At the very least, future policy must surely require rigorous testing of immigrant applicants to ensure they can seamlessly integrate, sifting out the Medina Muslims.

Revisiting the background and current beliefs of those immigrants who are residents, or even citizens, would be a further step. Expulsion would need to be an option for those open to sectarian violence.

A further issue is how to handle those Muslims (probably over 300,000, excluding young children) who were born here, especially since there is evidence that they often are more inclined to extreme views than their parents.

There  is no good ending. Our ruling class made disastrous decisions in the last 50 years, decisions that were never put to a vote or endorsed by most Australians.

Dems Hate ‘America First’ Because They Have Nothing to Offer Law-Abiding Americans

Dems Hate ‘America First’ Because They Have Nothing to Offer Law-Abiding Americans. By Stephen Kruiser in PJ Media.

A frequent recurring Trump Derangement Syndrome theme in the left media is that President Trump’s vision for America is “dark.” …

It is imperative that we bring up projection in almost every conversation about the Democrats, because it’s the lifeblood of 21st century lefties. The majority of what they accuse us of is something that they embody (fascism) or are actively engaged in (shutting down free speech). TDS sufferers who were once Republican love to assert that “both sides do it,” but that’s a truckload of hooey.

The Democrats are the ones who have a dark vision for America, and that’s largely because they don’t want to have a lot of Americans involved in that future; not in any meaningful capacity, anyway.

They are most definitely hostile towards Americans who obey the law, respect law enforcement, and don’t mind waving a flag or two.

Far from having a “dark” vision for America, President Trump is one of the most upbeat presidents in my lifetime regarding the United States, its place in history, and its potential …

Trump is the most patriotically positive president since Ronald Reagan.

Hate: Democrats wish ill upon white Americans who play by the rules:

Trump’s view of the Democrats is rather dark, but with very good reason. Their hopes and dreams for the Republic tend to revolve around its destruction.

It is nigh on impossible to look across the aisle these days and see anything helpful to the cause of freedom going on. Again, freedom for law-abiding patriots. They’re big on granting freedom to violent illegal alien criminals and letting them repeat their crimes.

The disturbing reality when it comes to the Democratic Party is that Dem elites truly do believe that enthusiastic patriotism is dark and scary. Enjoying a hotdog on the 4th of July or going to church are gateways to domestic terrorism in their mentally unwell worldview.

They’ve clung to the unhinged ’60s radicals’ belief that the United States of America is a racist imperial oppressor. Because they’re awash in disconnect, they never acknowledge that the oppressors continue to allow them to complain about their own government.

I continue to refer to the mental instability of the Democrats not because I’m mean, but because the people running the party truly are insane. They champion criminals and incite violence against law enforcement officers because they see it as a way to “get Trump.” I don’t believe that all Democrats are on board with the never-ending nervous breakdown, and that’s why Trump won so handily in 2024. At some point, however, flyover country Dems are going to have to break with the party en masse or else the country may be put on a perilously destructive path from which it will never return.

Racist American

Racist American.

Michelle Obama says she is mindful to try to avoid white-owned brands and others also should be.

 

Comments:

Imagine Melania Trump saying she is mindful to try to avoid black-owned brands and others also should be. …

Imagine if you or I said were mindful to avoid black brands? This is racism at its purest form. Why is she immune from ridicule? We should be calling out this behavior and explain this is causing the radicalized division in the USA. We don’t want or need this…

Yes we should focus on the skin color of the people who make the products we buy. This is a healthy, unifying mindset for American society. Incredible logic.

Matt Margolis at PJ Media:

There’s nothing ambiguous about what she’s saying here. She’s not just saying she tries to buy from black designers; she suggests everyone else should be concerned about the race of the designer whose clothes they’re wearing. Imagine going clothes shopping and, instead of deciding what to buy based on your style, you’re on your phone trying to figure out whether the brand is black-owned or whether the designer is black. …

Then there was her conversation with Tracee Ellis Ross about hair and beauty standards. Michelle really let loose in that one.

“Let me explain something to white people,” she began, already setting a tone that would be unthinkable if the races were reversed. “Our hair comes out of our head naturally in a curly pattern, so when we’re straightening it to follow your beauty standards, we are trapped by the straightness. That’s why so many of us can’t swim… and we run away from the water. People won’t go to the gym… because we’re trying to keep our hair straight for y’all.” She added that “it is exhausting and it’s so expensive and it takes up so much time,” before declaring, “Why do we need an act, a law to tell white folks to get outta our hair? Don’t tell me how to wear my hair. Don’t wonder about it. Don’t touch it. Just don’t.”

The whole rant was dripping with resentment toward white people, as if we’re sitting around obsessing over black hairstyles, when in reality we couldn’t care less. But Obama frames it as some kind of oppressive burden that white America has inflicted on black women, which is both absurd and divisive. …

Michelle Obama repeatedly proves herself to be an insufferable racist, yet the legacy media never calls her out on it.

 

 

The Babylon Bee: Far-Right Extremist Suggests Treating People Of All Races Equally