“The first Americans saw themselves as free men carrying the forward and central liberties and ancient rights of the Anglo-Saxons into this new and beautiful world!”
“In the eyes of America’s founders, our war of independence was fought not to reject this heritage, but to reclaim it and perfect it.”
“As the founding father, George Mason, wrote, we claim nothing but the liberty and privileges of Englishmen in the same degree as we had still continued among our brethren when we were in Great Britain.”
🚨 TRUMP JUST WENT FULL WESTERN CULTURE MODE WITH THE KING
“The first Americans saw themselves as free men carrying the forward and central liberties and ancient rights of the Anglo-Saxons into this new and beautiful world!”
Why everyone want to live in a country with a high average IQ. By Heretical Insights.
Warning: Insightful but a little long (you should see the full article!).
For most of modern economic history, … workers moved from low-productivity regions to high-productivity ones, reallocating labor toward areas where it was most valued. … People left stagnant regions because opportunity lay elsewhere.
In recent decades, however, this mechanism has weakened, and in some countries, reversed outright … Across much of the Western world, people are moving away from economic centers. Instead of moving to where their skills are at a premium, citizens of these countries flee them in droves.
At first glance, this is baffling, like watching water flow up a hill. But a look at the list of anomalous countries suggests an explanation: Third World immigration.
Third World immigrants move to the productive areas, then natives move out due to wage suppression and housing overcrowding:
Immigrants do not disperse randomly across space. They concentrate in areas of economic opportunity, especially so if preexisting ethnic networks are already present to help facilitate the settlement, which usually means major metropolitan centers. As immigrants disproportionately settle in high-employment areas, they absorb a substantial share of local labor demand. This reduces the expected returns for natives who might otherwise move into these regions …
When immigrants arrive, they do not simply add to local labor supply. Some native competitors exit, reducing supply contemporaneously, while others never arrive in the first place, reducing future supply in a way that is harder to observe. Wage suppression is therefore partially masked by native displacement…
Then there is culture:
More natives are leaving productive areas than would be predicted by housing pressure or congestion alone. Something else is at work. That something is immigrant behavior. …
Large inflows of culturally distant, low-trust populations often degrade local living conditions in ways that are not well captured by standard economic models.
Crime is the most obvious channel, but far from the only one.
Political conflict, incompatible norms, misuse of public space, noise, litter, and simple dissatisfaction with becoming a minority in one’s own neighborhood all contribute to native exit. In the United States this process is often mislabeled as “white flight”, but it is neither exclusively white nor uniquely American.
Nor does it require high crime. Even affluent, low-crime immigrant groups can induce native outmigration by transforming institutions. West Coast Asians, for example, have dramatically intensified educational competition, raising the grind associated with schooling and driving native flight from public school districts. …
Early 20th-century Ellis Island immigration did not produce anything resembling white flight. Native-born Americans did not abandon New York, Boston, or Chicago en masse despite dramatic demographic change. By contrast, contemporary California, London, and New York City have seen absolute declines in native populations. The greater the cultural, behavioral, and normative distance between newcomers and locals, the stronger the incentive for natives to leave.
Experience increases dislike:
The standard optimist’s reply to this is simple: “give it time”. Any tension we see now is just a “phase”. As people intermingle, they’ll get used to each other, fear will fade, and prejudice will melt away through everyday contact. This idea sits at the heart of a large chunk of the social sciences, but the empirical support itself is far more lacking. ,,,
Leeuwan et al. (2023) conducted four studies examining whether exposure to immigrants attenuates the relationship between disgust sensitivity and opposition to immigration. It does not. Exposure had no meaningful mediating effect.
Another study found that in Europe, “direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies” (Hangartner et al., 2018)….
History offers little solace. During the Second Great Migration of American blacks from 1940 to 1970, Boustan (2017), examining 70 U.S. metropolitan areas, found that for every black family moving into a central city, roughly two white families moved out. And the long-run attitudinal effects persist to this day. As Vuletich et al. (2023) show, counties that received larger black inflows historically exhibit higher implicit racial bias among white residents today. …
The most optimistic evidence comes from a recent meta-analysis of forty-one preregistered experiments. Lowe (2025) finds that intergroup contact does, on average, reduce prejudice. But the magnitude is vanishingly small (about one tenth of a standard deviation). More importantly, the effect operates predominantly at the interpersonal level. Contact changes how people behave toward the specific individuals they have interacted with, less so how they perceive the outgroup as a whole.
Winners and losers:
In nearly every wealthy country, locals are more skilled than immigrants. When skilled natives are driven out of high-productivity regions by overcrowding and poor behaviors of unskilled (and often economically inactive) immigrants, the national economy suffers. Labor is misallocated away from places where it generates the most value, and aggregate productivity falls below the counterfactual. …
Internal migration has historically been one of the primary engines of upward mobility. The canonical story of “ambitious country kid moves to the big city to better himself” has largely disappeared in high-immigration Western countries. That pathway has been appropriated by immigrants themselves. The beneficiaries of urban productivity are no longer natives seeking opportunity, but newcomers displacing them. ….
Because immigrants cluster in high-productivity areas, and because their presence drives natives out, immigrant incomes are artificially inflated relative to natives.
In Britain, ethnic minorities are overrepresented in London by roughly a factor of three. London’s productivity is about 50% higher than the rest of the country. Were it not for immigration-induced native displacement, white British incomes would be higher and minority incomes lower than observed. Fiscal and income comparisons therefore substantially understate the true cost of immigration relative to natives.
More bulls**t from the globalists:
The pattern of internal migration is also evidence against one of the more sophisticated arguments for mass immigration, which goes something like this: even if immigrants raise the cost of housing, compete with native workers, and strain the welfare system, they provide large economic benefits through indirect channels. Specifically, they free up skilled natives to focus on more complex work, boosting economic growth through specialization of labor. …
While this argument is possible in theory, the actual behavior of natives suggests that this is not the case in practice. If it were, domestic migration should flow towards concentrations of immigrants, not away….
Revealed preferences — everyone wants to move to countries with high national IQ:
You’d also expect to see a very different trend in international migration, if the argument was true. Skilled workers from the First World would move to the Third World to take advantage of the allocative benefits of low-skill labor and because “higher IQ would be in greater demand”. Someone who might be a cashier in the U.S. could move to Brazil and enter the upper-middle class. Westerners would take advantage of the relatively greater IQ premium by moving to South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa en masse. But instead, the unambiguous pattern we see is that of Third World elites moving to the First World.
The reason for this is because more intelligent populations generate large, compounding externalities that operate well beyond individual earnings.
Higher cognitive ability improves competence in complex roles, facilitates innovation, enables large-scale cooperation, and raises economic literacy, all of which scale socially rather than merely individually. The result is that the effect of national IQ on national income is several times larger than the effect of individual IQ on individual income (each IQ point is associated with a 2–3% increase in individual income versus a 6–8% increase in GDP per capita).
In other words, high intelligence has large positive externalities and low intelligence large negative externalities.
National IQ is positively correlated with almost everything good and negatively correlated with almost everything bad. We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the single best predictor of GDP per capita, and conditional on GDP per capita, future economic growth. It is also an excellent predictor of socioeconomic development.
In societies created by individuals with high IQs, everyone benefits. This is why immigrants who move from low-income, low-productivity countries to wealthy, Western countries see gains in their wages (Hendricks & Schoellman, 2017). This wage gain at migration represents the economic benefit migrants get from moving to a high-IQ society, which is able to make better use of their human capital.
Insofar as low-skilled immigrants lower the national IQ of the host society, they generate negative externalities for natives. Any indirect benefits they may provide is offset by these negative externalities. If moving to a high-IQ country raises one’s living standards independently of one’s own ability, the reverse should also be true — that the same person living in a country with a lower IQ should have lower living standards.
With that in mind, immigration lowers national IQ in every Western country except Australia.
Simple version:
Watch what people do. If immigration were broadly beneficial to natives, we would expect them to move toward it — to follow the opportunity it allegedly creates. If it is harmful, we would expect the opposite. And what we observe is not subtle.
Revealed preference indicates that Westerners dislike actually-existing immigration so much that they are willing to pay a heavy price to escape it.
In immigration-heavy countries, people move away from economic opportunity. They leave the very places where their skills would be most valuable and their incomes highest. That is not how a healthy system behaves. It is how a system behaves when something has gone wrong at a more fundamental level. … People do not walk away from opportunity without a reason, and certainly not on this scale.
But remember, in left-speak the “oppressive” groups are the ones with higher average IQs. Which explains an awful lot about how lefties see the world.
Russia is not as mighty as its propaganda wants you to believe.
Russia’s exports are lower than Poland’s, and many Russians still don’t even have access to decent sanitation.
No wonder they are in year five of the three-day Special Military Operation.
Russia is also now losing its war. Russia is still making some territorial gains, but the Ukrainian rate of gain of territory has been higher this year. Ukrainian drones are on top, in both sophistication and numbers, and the Ukrainians have begun launching machine-only assaults — no men in front. Russian casualties to date are more than twice Ukraine’s, and are at their highest rate in the war (approaching 2,000 men per day). The Ukrainians are hitting oil and military targets up to 1,000 km from their border with regularity and in significant numbers, and the Russian transport system (air, rail) is collapsing under economic sanction and the lack of access to spare parts. The annual May Day parade in Moscow has been scaled way down, and there is even talk that Putin is afraid.
Russia’s GDP is only slightly larger than Australia’s (US$1.9T).
If the voice referendum is defeated, Professor Marcia Langton said back in April 2023, that’ll be the end of welcomes to country.
It was meant as a threat, but many Australians took it as a promise: vote down the proposal to give Aboriginal people a special say over how we’re all governed, and that will end all the separatist practices that have grown up over time. Like race-based treaties, flying three flags rather than just one national flag, and welcoming people to lands that supposedly belong to some of us more than to all of us.
But when the voice was duly defeated, because most Australians hated the idea that race would be enshrined in our Constitution, instead of listening and learning, the activist class and the green-left establishment redoubled their efforts to achieve by bureaucratic stealth what they’d failed to achieve at the ballot box.
That’s why people are angry and why substantial numbers have now started to audibly reject welcomes to country, most notably at the official Anzac Day dawn service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance for two years running. Not because they’re anti-Aboriginal or innately disrespectful but because they don’t want to be reminded of division on what should be a day of unity.
And many more, who would never stoop to interrupt something sacred, as I said in a post that has now been watched over 200,000 times, are “booing on the inside”.
Especially when the “welcome” is anything but.
After all, who would welcome anyone to their home or an event with a lengthy rant designed not to include but exclude? … The problem, when Aboriginal people welcome us to “their” country, is the inference that everyone else is no more than a guest. Maybe that’s OK if the event is at a remote community or a facility catering especially for Aboriginal people. But on Anzac Day, any suggestion that people who’ve served our country in uniform might be here only on sufferance borders on the sacrilegious.
Yeah!
The day after delivering the Sydney dawn service welcome, Ray Minniecon said: “If I came into your home, I’d expect you to acknowledge that this is your home, this is your house … and … we’re there to, to show the deepest respect to the host … You’re on our country, you’re in our land, just acknowledge it and respect … whose land you’re on … It’s not that difficult to understand for me.”
I’m sorry, Ray, it is for me. Because your land is my land too and your country is my country just as much as it’s yours. After all, Credlins have been here for 172 years, worked hard to build this nation and have sent four generations to war to defend it, so being Australian is all we know. I suspect that millions of Australians felt that way over the Anzac weekend and the conga line of politicians denouncing anyone who booed as “disgraceful” or even “un-Australian” would have just reinforced popular resentment towards the political class.
At about 900 per cent over budget and seven years late, Snowy 2.0 is three to five times costlier than alternative sources of capacity – gas, battery storage and smaller pumped-hydro projects – according to Rystad data. This rises to five to seven times costlier once additional costs are factored in on a like-for-like basis. …
A $2 billion project became $40 billion. Was any due diligence done? About as much as was done on the carbon dioxide theory of global warming that motivated it.
It is now questionable whether Snowy 2.0 should even be finished. Even if one optimistically assumes Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is correct that the project is more than two-thirds complete, and ignoring sunk costs, the remaining expenditure may still prove uncompetitive with alternative capacity options. The fact there can be serious debate over the merits of completing a project that is already largely built reveals the scale of the disaster.
The bigger damage to the public has not come from the cost blowouts borne by taxpayers. The 2018 announcement of Snowy 2.0 deterred private investment in new capacity. Investors feared competing with a government-funded project that would flood the market from 2021. When that capacity failed to materialise on schedule — and still won’t for several more years — the market was left short.
This has driven higher prices, inefficient secret deals by NSW and Victoria to prop up coal-fired generation, and worsening reliability. Market experts warned of exactly this outcome at the time. Government didn’t want to listen. …
Ideological project:
How did we end up here? … Snowy 2.0 offered a Holy Grail: a new low-emissions project capable of winning bipartisan backing from Labor and within the Coalition under Malcolm Turnbull.
The government refused to let details such as cost, schedule and design risks derail a powerful (and overdue) political narrative on taking action on energy. …
When Labor took power in 2022, did Bowen make sure to get the project back on track? Of course not. Instead he focused on increasing the cost of Snowy’s other project, the Kurri Kurri gas-fired power station, by demanding it be capable of burning green hydrogen — another foolish politicised prerogative.
One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce is scathing about the entire project. Which is relevant, given he was a member of the government that approved it.
‘Like the whole climate cult swindle, it turned into a complete financial disaster,’ laments Mr Joyce. ‘A cost well in excess of $40bn and in excess of a 12-year build for three days of 2000 megawatts of power. Every coal-fired power plant in Australia could have been upgraded for less than the money that was pissed up the wall on Turnbull’s power station in the scrub.’
And Mr Joyce makes this pertinent point:
‘If a public company hid this loss from the accounts at the AGM of the company, there would be possible jail time coming the way of the board members,’ Mr Joyce says.
This week, we learned that the government has spent $318 million investigating war crimes allegedly committed by the approximately 230 Australians who travelled to Iraq or Syria to join the Islamic State or other bloodcurdling terrorist groups.
Oops, my bad. Australia has a specialised federally funded office that investigates war crimes committed by Australians abroad. But only if those Australians are members of the Australian Defence Forces.
The government spent over $318 million over the last decade investigating war crimes allegedly committed by 19 veterans at a cost of approximately $17 million per soldier. So far, only two veterans have been charged: Oliver Jordan Schulz, charged with one war crime, scheduled for 2027 and Ben Roberts-Smith who is facing five counts of the war crime of murder. The other 17 servicemen have been trapped in a legal no-man’s land, awaiting a multi-million-dollar knock on the door.
Everyone else gets a free pass. That includes the 100 Australians who joined Islamic State and are still believed to be alive and abroad. And those who have ventured home.
In 2018, the Australian parliament passed a motion recognising the Isis-perpetrated genocide of the Yazidi community of northern Iraq calling for the investigation and prosecution of individuals who committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Yet, the Australian government has allocated precisely no money for a federally funded office to investigate the war crimes of Australians who are not soldiers, for example, of its own jolly jihadists who camped by Syrian and Iraqi billabongs during the reign of terror of the Islamic State. …
Justice? Only for those in political disfavor. Ben Roberts-Smith is targeted because he is a white man who performed heroically for us. Gotta lower the status of whites, especially their men, eh globalists?
Yet despite Prime Minister Albanese repeatedly saying that Isis supporters who return to Australia will face the ‘full force of the law’, legal experts say that the women are unlikely to face charges in relation to those alleged crimes.
Germany showed how it’s done:
In Germany, in 2023, a woman who joined Islamic State was jailed for nine years for crimes against humanity, including keeping a Yazidi woman as a slave, and membership of a foreign terrorist organisation.
Justice Sotomayor of the US Supreme Court recently opined that:
It is racist to prefer more Scandinavian migrants vs more Somalians, Haitians…
There are several definitions of “racist” floating around, some of them directly opposed to others, so let’s set aide exactly what she meant, but just translate “racist” as “bad”.
Now let’s play a game of how to import voters and fundamentally transform your society. Oh, I see that the globalists are already doing that.
PS: Grok was asked:
@grok is this a mashup of cherry picked, misapplied, and in some cases flat out unreliable numbers? It seems like a common style of the graphic used to push a narrative, not to accurately inform.
Grok replied:
No, these align with published data. Fiscal net lifetime impacts come from studies like IZA (Europe 2024) and similar breakdowns showing Scandinavian/European immigrants strongly positive vs. Somali/Caribbean negative due to education, welfare use, and employment gaps.
National IQs (Lynn/Vanhanen datasets) list Scandinavia ~100, Somalia/Haiti ~67-68. Home-country crime rates and literacy (UN/World Bank) match the figures closely: low in Nordics, high/very low elsewhere.
They’re real averages, not invented. Application to US policy debates is where interpretation varies — group patterns exist, but selection and culture matter too.
For twenty years, the standard textbook claim has been that human and chimpanzee DNA is “98.8 percent identical.”
That figure, repeated in every popular science article, every introductory biology textbook, and every “I fucking love science” tweet about how we are practically the same animal as a chimp, traces back to the 2005 Nature paper by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium.
The headline number from that paper was approximately 35 million single nucleotide differences and 5 million indels … Forty million differences out of three billion base pairs. About 1.2 percent. [40 / 3,000 = 1.3%].
But the narrative was always a political conclusion, arrived at by ignoring the inconvenient part:
But the 35 million figure was never the total observed divergence between the two genomes. It was only the divergence in the portion of the genomes that aligned cleanly to each other. The unalignable regions — sequence that is so different that no reasonable algorithm can map one species’ DNA onto the other’s coordinate system — were excluded from the difference count and quietly placed in supplementary tables where no journalist or undergraduate would ever read them.
This was not a methodological oversight. The 2005 paper aligned roughly 2.4 billion base pairs of the chimp genome to the human reference, out of a total chimp genome of approximately 3 billion. Six hundred million base pairs of unalignable sequence existed.
The truth comes out:
In April 2025, the Eichler lab at the University of Washington published the capstone of the telomere-to-telomere genome program: complete, gapless, diploid assemblies of all six great apes, at the same quality as the human reference. The paper has 122 authors. It has been cited 98 times in the eight months since publication. It is the most authoritative comparative ape genome paper in existence, and it will be for years to come. Yoo, D. et al., Complete sequencing of ape genomes, Nature 641, 401-418 (2025). …
The total structural divergence between human and ape genomes — including all insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions, rearrangements — affects between five and fifteen times more base pairs than the single nucleotide differences that everyone has been counting since 2005.
For the chimp-human comparison, the gap-divergence minimum is 12.5 percent. For the gorilla-human, it is 27.3 percent.
The honest divergence figure for chimp-human is not 1.2 percent. It is somewhere between 12.5 and 14 percent of the genome. …
That is not a refinement. That is an order of magnitude.
Much more at the link. Over 80% of our DNA encodes for the brain, so the 88% figure is much more believable.
Political fallout: If humans and chimps share 86-88% of DNA, and gorillas only share 73% of our DNA, how much do different human racial groups share? How much do they differ?
A lot of modern TV, whether soap opera, drama, documentary, sitcom or panel show, seems to be designed to stave off awareness of the disaster unfolding around all of us in contemporary Britain.
The [boomers] are largely insulated from the realities of modern life, being couped up at home with often little to do but watch TV, relying on it for their awareness of things. …
When reality is unpleasant, it is understandable to take refuge in things that are very different from it. I do this myself, only watching TV dramas from the 1970s which depict a Britain radically unlike that of today. But I watch these dramas painfully aware of this fact, not in denial of it. …
But perhaps the greatest deceit is in the “contemporary” dramas they are given. These show a Britain that nobody under fifty would recognise except from their early adulthood, because it is fossilised in the mid 2000s, and blooms with the thinking of that time. That thinking was fraudulent even back then, but it seemed plausible. Today it lies in ruins, yet the televisual expressions of it continue anyway, flickering eternally on the gogglebox.
On TV:
East London is still mostly White and everyone has an English accent, unpolluted by [Multicultural London English]
The mainstream of political discourse (which is now very left-wing) is the only sensible option. Everything else is crank extremism.
Muslims are nice and integrated.
Refugees are all deserving cases who mean well and just want to help Britain, work hard, and certainly not molest White schoolgirls.
Black men are intelligent and non-violent.
White men are stupid, racist, sexist, violent and insecure.
White people are entitled.
Racists are White
Rapists are White, and usually middle-class.
Mixed-race relationships work and the children they produce are well-adjusted, actually more so than White children since they have to learn how to get along in racist Britain — vital lessons in humility and resilience.
Twenty-somethings buy houses.
Terrorism is committed by “the far-right”, not Muslims or Mossad.
Racist conservatives are in charge of everything and must be dethroned.
Kids go to university and then get professional jobs.
Migrant hotels are an absurd right-wing myth.
Feminism has made life better.
Pakistanis are helpful shopkeepers who shake their heads in disgust at news of White child molesters.
Childless women are happy.
Climate change is real and every sensible person believes in it.
“Racists” have absolutely no just cause and are simply creating trouble because they are hateful idiots.
The Conservative Party (and now Reform UK) are a bunch of arrogant aristocratic racists and the worst thing that could happen is them getting into 10 Downing Street (which, on TV, is where real power lies, not in high finance or global bodies).
In short, you would think that the last twenty years simply haven’t happened and we are currently in 2006.
Modern entertainment is a world of girl bosses, dumb men and savvy women, where no woman or non-white person ever does anything bad or incompetent. How realistic! But if TV makes up a large part of a person’s experience of the world, their political outlook adjusts accordingly …
No wonder the world is dumbing down and becoming more violent and less competent. Culturally boosted natural selection is working hard to reverse the last eight centuries of advances in white countries.
Phil C. comments:
It rings a bell for me as my wife watches a lot of ABC shows and the commonly seen themes on the BBC shows generally contain mixed race families and all the other things. Most of the items he writes about are obvious to those aware of what’s going on. People on the Left think it’s normal of course.
The IPA-commissioned survey of 1,001 Australians aged 18 and over, conducted by independent research firm Dynata between April 23 and 27, found:
49 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the ceremonies should no longer be performed at Anzac Day services. By contrast, only 31 per cent wanted the formality to be continued, while the rest were uncertain. …
Sixty per cent of respondents said they felt the practice now causes division, compared with just 12 per cent who disagreed. …
Institute of Public Affairs deputy executive director, Daniel Wild, said the polling pointed to a significant shift in public sentiment following last weekend. …
‘It is bad enough that Welcome or Acknowledgement of country ceremonies have become pervasive in public and corporate life. But when this overreach impacts on our most sacred of days, enough is enough.’…
‘Welcome to Country ceremonies are anything but welcoming,’ he said. ‘They have become hostile, aggressive, and a form of moral hectoring designed to make Australians feel bad about their nation and history.’
He rejected claims that critics were acting disrespectfully, arguing instead that many Australians believed the ceremonies detracted from the intent of national days.
‘Creating division along racial lines is far more disrespectful to the memory of our fallen than objecting to their inclusion on a completely inappropriate basis,’ Wild said.
Again, our ruling class have adopted the minority position and admonish us to be virtuous/stupid like them. We got lectures after Anzac Day by politicians from Albanese down calling the booing of Welcome to Country “ugly,” “disgusting”, and “disgraceful”, without any attempt to argue for why those ceremonies should be included in Anzac Day. Sheer class bigotry, like Hillary Clinton’s infamous “deplorables” comment.
Even Angus Taylor condemned the booing, merely acknowledging “frustration” and dissenting that WTC is ” devalued by overuse.” How safe, Angus. Show some leadership.
When it comes to the ruling class, Carly Simon was onto something (great song, by the way):
What I find particularly notable is that these “welcomes” are not actually that welcoming. Their focus is not the audience purportedly being “welcomed” but “paying respects” to the speaker’s community.
At Anzac Day in Melbourne, the speaker made zero reference to the Anzacs.
Welcome to Country’ not so subtly implies that non-Aboriginal Australians do not currently belong here, Australia is not their country too, and they need to be welcomed to their own country by Aboriginals – even when they may have been in Australia for generations and may have made enormous sacrifices building our country.
Also, what happens if Aboriginals decide to ‘Unwelcome to Country’ everyone of European descent?
Do all those people have to leave because Australia is “Aboriginal land – always was, always is” and Aboriginal “Sovereignty was never ceded”, so Aboriginals get to dictate who can be here and who can not? Do they get special privilege and status in modern Australia and its policies over and beyond participating in democracy – or do we have a sacred caste whose members are worth more than anyone else?
Maybe sovereignty should be ceded. Which Aboriginal group to do we see about that? Do we have to fight a war or something?
Trump has done more to dismantle the rules-based order in 12 months than the BRICS nations did in 12 years. He didn’t just bend the rules. He dropped his gloves and hit the referee. …
The system was already dying. The pendulum had been swinging toward globalization for decades, and COVID rang the bell at the top. It is now swinging back hard and would have done so regardless of who won in 2024. Trump is a uniquely blunt instrument for an era that demands one — not the cause of the disruption but its most forceful expression. …
Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution calls Trump’s approach “Jacksonian preemptive deterrence.” It is neither isolationism nor empire-building. It is a focused strategy to weaken adversaries and strengthen friends before a larger confrontation — one nobody wants but everyone is preparing for — has to be fought.
The Obama and Biden administrations projected weakness and paid for it: four major theater conflicts, from Crimea in 2014 through the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Middle East theater war of 2024–25. Anemic deterrence invites aggression. Trump’s approach is designed to make the cost of testing America so prohibitive that adversaries think twice. …
China, China, China:
Venezuela. Cuba. The Panama Canal. The cartel designations. The deportations. The “51st state” pressure on Canada. The Greenland campaign. The January 2026 removal of Nicolás Maduro — accomplished in less than 48 hours. To most observers these look like random provocations. They are neither random nor unrelated. They are all aimed at the same target: China.
While America spent the 2000s consumed by Iraq and Afghanistan, Beijing was methodically rewriting its relationship with Latin America — one infrastructure loan, one port deal, one oil-for-credit arrangement at a time. By 2024, China had become the dominant trading partner for South America’s largest economies and had signed Belt and Road agreements with more than twenty Latin American nations. Nobody in Washington had a serious plan to stop it. …
Venezuela … was never going to be allowed to keep its oil fields — the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere — in Chinese hands indefinitely. The only question was when. The answer turned out to be January 2026. This was not about stealing oil. It was about denying China a strategic asset in America’s own backyard. The same logic governs the Panama Canal — built by America, given away for a dollar under Carter, and now strategically reclaimed after Chinese companies moved aggressively to control it. …
Hanson does not mince words on the fentanyl front: 75,000 Americans die every year, much of it deliberately laced into other substances. The precursor chemicals come from China. They flow through Mexican cartels. Designating those cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and going after them with military tools is not cruelty. It is triage on a mass casualty event — and it simultaneously squeezes Chinese influence out of the Americas by severing a critical revenue stream. …
Even when it isn’t about China, it is still about China. The number that should stop every American cold: in 2000, China manufactured 6 percent of the world’s goods. On its current trajectory, by 2030 that share reaches 45 percent. Extended further, there is a point at which China makes effectively everything — at which point it can do whatever it wants, because the rest of the world cannot function without it. America has a closing window to reverse this trajectory.
Globalism got China completely wrong:
Hanson dissects the old bipartisan fantasy with surgical precision. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations operated on the same assumption: the more American money invested in China, the more a prosperous Chinese middle class would demand freedom, and China would gradually liberalize. This was catastrophically wrong. Those trade dollars funded the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history.
American consumers made China rich. China used that wealth to build a military capable of challenging American power on every front. The NSS calls the old trade relationship “free but not fair,” and the results are now impossible to ignore. …
Trump is reverting America to a previous stance:
What Trump is doing is not radical departure — it is a return to American roots. Alexander Hamilton built American industry behind tariff walls. The post-war era of open markets was the exception, not the rule. When it stopped serving American interests — when it hollowed out the industrial base and handed China the supply chains that underpin American military power — the model had to change. The tariffs are not primarily an economic instrument. They are a weapon: forcing American allies to stop trading with China on terms that sustain Beijing’s industrial and military expansion. …
Harnessing the globalist anti-Trump reflex:
Trump uses predictable opposition as a mechanism. European and Canadian elites have a reliable reaction function: they reflexively oppose anything he proposes. So rather than ask them politely — which has never worked — he provokes them into doing what he needs while they believe they are resisting him.
The proof is in the results. During his first term, Trump pleaded with European NATO members to increase defense spending. Defense budgets barely moved. Then he threatened to pull out of NATO entirely. The response was dramatic: Germany hit 2% of GDP for the first time in decades, Poland is building one of the largest armies in Europe, and NATO members collectively committed to 5% in total defense and security spending — a number that would have been considered fantasy five years ago. He did not persuade them. He provoked them.
American strategy:
Preventing Chinese regional dominance in Asia is the non-negotiable core American interest. But the United States cannot concentrate forces in the Pacific while simultaneously babysitting Europe and maintaining commitments around the globe. The math only works if allies handle their own regions — Europe handles Russia, Asia-Pacific allies handle their piece of the Chinese containment line, and America pivots to the decisive theater when needed. Either allies step up or Trump creates conditions in which the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action. …
Trump is attempting a reverse transformation of the American economy: shifting it from financialization and consumption toward production, industry, and military capacity. … He needs enough state direction to rebuild American manufacturing without destroying the market dynamism that makes America innovative. The margin is narrow. The state directing capital in the name of necessity rarely gives that power back.
Not that the media will ever admit that Trump is more than a bumbling clown with no idea or plan, or discuss the relative merits of the globalist and Trump visions.
It is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn’t have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them.
China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running.
Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it’s pretty much game over.
As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties.
Then there’s the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. … If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country’s most industrially and agriculturally productive region.
The Chinese haven’t fought a war since 1979. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist.
On the other hand, China’s been stocking up, and they have nearly half the world’s manufacturing capability.
According to sources, the motion to indict Trump was filed roughly thirty seconds after the failed assassination attempt. “It was obvious by that point that Trump had caused a man to fire several bullets at him,” said District Attorney Jan Marsh. “If Trump were not literally Hitler, no one would have tried to kill him in the first place. It’s time we in the legal system go after Hitler and not the people trying to murder Hitler.”
At publishing time, Trump had been indicted again for Secret Service shooting the would-be assassin.
Democrats “increase the temperature” until something excessively violent happens and then insist that Republicans “lower the temperature” by giving Democrats everything they want…lest more violence happens.
A majority of Australians, as suggested by the Voice to Parliament referendum, disagree with ‘Welcome to Country’ utterances outside tourist settings.
Perhaps even more Australians find ‘Welcome to Country’ particularly abrasive, even insulting, when issued as part of an Anzac Day memorial.
Others are simply exhausted by the messaging on every flight, website, government building, corporate email, and school address…
It is also true that the ‘Welcome to Country’ performance is part of a larger, racially-charged activist movement that includes a shadow-Parliament, enshrined racial privilege, the assumption of inherited legal authority over the land, and special exemptions and status in various parts of government. Even the justice system openly nods to Aboriginal heritage.
‘Welcome to Country’ is tangentially attached to the ‘Land Back!’ movement which brandishes disturbing slogans such as ‘Pay the rent!’ and the ‘Colonies must fall!’ Some of its enthusiasts drench their hands in red paint during marches and carry signs that, arguably, meet racial incitement and hate thresholds. …
That is not to say any particular person giving any particular ‘Welcome to Country’ over the Anzac Day weekend has involvement with the wider activist story, but rather that ‘Welcome to Country’ exists in this cultivated political world which every person listening to a ‘Welcome to Country’ is aware of. They have heard these slogans, seen the signs, and been the victim of aggressive equity policies.
Welcome to country is especially inappropriate on Anzac Day:
These are Australians who are told they have no sacred connection to land and should ‘go back to England’ (despite being born here). Australians have had their ancestors falsely painted as rapists and murders, watched educational institutions tear out the pages of history and replace them with propaganda, been told they are ‘privileged’ because of their skin colour rather than the sacrifices they made, and have been openly discriminated against by society because they can’t tick a minority box.
These people don’t like being reminded of aggressive race activism when they are trying to peacefully remember their dead.
Many agree it is neither the time nor the place. Others would point out that it is impolite to push shades of coloniser rhetoric when remembering those young men and women who died to keep Germany and Japan from violating Australian sovereignty in two wars where those so-called colonisers bore a disproportionate blood cost compared to those who now live here thanks to their sacrifice. Sombre respect is all that is asked on Anzac Day. …
Fringe right groups continue to poison the well, to the delight of the left/media:
Now, for the difficult part, another truth which risks derailing any sensible and valid attempt to dismantle ‘Welcome to Country’ in the future.
A poisoning of the well.
At least some of those who instigated the booing at various ceremonies, as with last year, have connections to unsavoury political movements. Their actions were pre-planned on social media. They said so on their Twitter Spaces and Telegram chats. It is alleged, or perhaps suspected, that the booing is, in some cases, part of raising attention for their movement rather than an organic reaction to ‘Welcome to Country’. Others were stopped from attending by police. These groups are known, as are their beliefs, which stand as an affront to the memory of the Anzacs. …
While many conservatives may agree with their voters when it comes to scrapping ‘Welcome to Country’ across a range of ceremonies, it does not mean they associate with the individuals behind the booing or their activism. …
We have seen groups hijack genuine grievance and kernels of truth as a way to grow their movement in a sanitised way among people who have no idea what the full scope of these beliefs might be.
Just as many young leftists cannot name the river or the sea and have never read Hamas doctrine, conservatives do not understand what some of these people mean when they say ‘patriotism’.
It is with enormous sorrow that I say that many conservative words and causes have been poisoned by these groups, cheered on by the left-wing media, and allowed by the ambivalent right who either don’t know or don’t care that it’s happening.
