Russian culture and corruption is losing them the war in Ukraine. By Waterfronts, via Lawrence Person.

 

Once upon a time, the Russian military was supposed to be the second most powerful on Earth. Today, the Russian military isn’t even the most powerful military in Ukraine. …

From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the nation’s armed forces have been subjected to a strange humiliation ritual, partly because of the cunning and innovation of their Ukrainian rivals, but partly because of the sheer bumbling idiocy of their own commanding officers. …

The situation has deteriorated even further in 2026. Russia is losing troops at an unprecedented rate, expending more lives, more munitions, and more state wealth. Even as they capture less and less territory each month, his battlefield commanders are making increasingly poor decisions, and they’re openly lying to their higher-ups when their attacks inevitably fall apart. …

In the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin and his inner circle are being fed a constant stream of false victories when on the front lines, Russia’s spring and summer offensive has fallen flat on its face. …

Moscow still hasn’t learned its lesson. Military planners and strategists all up and down the Russian military, from the unit level on the battlefield to Vladimir Putin himself, still base their decisions and expectations on an aggrandized version of the Russian military that simply does not exist. …

Rampant dishonesty:

Over time that problem is fused with another one. The fact that Russian leaders, again from the unit level all the way to the top, simply refuse to give each other honest assessments of what’s happening. At a certain point, those leaders realized that they could get away with reporting advances, victories, and other good news that didn’t actually exist. …

The problem often starts small on the front lines. A Russian army captain sends a small unit to plant a flag and takes a few selfies in a contested area before that unit is annihilated in drone strikes. And then the captain sends those selfies to his major, claiming that today his forces took the territory in the picture. That same day, the major gets several similar reports from other captains. So he reports to his colonel that the front line has moved up by a few hundred meters when in reality most of the forces under his command have not moved at all. …

That’s a throwaway example, of course, but you get the idea. And that news then travels up the chain until it reaches somebody like chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, Valery Gerasimov. We put the spotlight on Gerasimov in particular, because this is how you get statements like the one he made this past April, when he claims that Russia had captured a total of 80 settlements and over 1700 square kilometers since the start of the year. According to independent war monitors, Gerasimov tripled the amount of territory that Russia had actually taken. And of course, he failed to measure the territory that Russia had lost. …

Even Russia’s milblogger class was calling bullshit in the aftermath. …

The groupthink of progress, that no one — out of realistic fears — dare dispute:

But those institutional miscommunications, combined with the Russian military’s inflated perception of itself, combine to form a third problem, a demand for forward progress at all costs. …

At this point in the war, commanders and higher-ups have gotten very used to the idea that their troops are consistently moving forward, consistently taking territory, and consistently getting Russia closer to victory. But now that lie has become too big to fail. And if individual Russian commanders were to report results that don’t align with that lie in places Russia wasn’t expecting, then they are at risk of being demoted, relieved of duty, or even worse. …

As a result, each level of Russian leadership places immense pressure on the next level below them, all the way down to the frontline soldiers. Because their commanders need to deliver forward progress. And because their commanders won’t get into any real trouble if they sacrifice more lives in exchange, those frontline troops are at immense risk of being ordered forward into incredibly risky assaults. …

Of course, it’s not unusual that a soldier on the front line of a major war would face some risk. But there’s a difference between being asked to advance as part of a coordinated push on a well-defined, well-scouted target and being told to sneak into a zone where there’s been no prior scouting and where Ukrainian surveillance and kamikaze drone coverage is expected to be overwhelming. Those are the kinds of situations that Russian soldiers are being ordered into. Not because there’s any expectation that they would succeed, but because their attempt gives their commanders enough plausible deniability to report success. …

Sometimes it works. But the costs of munitions, funds, supplies, and especially human life are so much greater than the value of what Russia’s actually capturing. …

Who dies first?

Nor does Russia particularly care which soldiers get sent to the meat grinder. More and more sources from within the Russian military report the troops are sent into assault units regardless of their other qualifications, including skilled recruits who could make meaningful contributions to enhance Russia’s overall situation. Soldiers with experience in electrical work, logistics management, and even the medical field, have been reassigned against their will to assault brigades, often without explanation. At times, those reassignments come after they were recruited into the military on the promise that they’d be working with their advanced skill set. …

At the best of times, Russian troops were being sent forward into these high-risk assaults with at least a few things going for them: A little bit of training and prep time, a decently well supplied sustainment infrastructure to keep them alive, a possibility of MedEvac if they’re wounded, and a possibility that reinforcements would soon join them if they survive. …

Today, though, that entire support infrastructure has been torn to shreds. Yet, the expectation of forward progress still remains. So, these soldiers are still ordered forward, but they’re overexposed, under-supplied, and isolated compared to what was already a bad situation. When they’re wounded, they aren’t evacuated. They die slow, horrific, predictable deaths. To the point that instead of the usual ratio of killed to wounded in modern war, one killed for every three wounded, Ukrainian assessment suggests that Russia’s balance looks more like two soldiers killed for every one wounded. …

Even worse, the soldiers who are wounded will often be sent back to combat. Every so often, video footage emerges from the front lines depicting soldiers on crutches or in wheelchairs bearing visible shrapnel wounds or dealing with limbs that won’t work like they’re supposed to, forced back into assault units where their death is all but certain.

The corruption in choosing who dies first:

Take an article published this April by The Economist, where a dozen Russian contract soldiers describe a system where low-level infantrymen will bribe their commanders for a position away from the front and then spend a high share of their remaining wages financing their commander’s lifestyle while carrying out unpaid labor on the side. …

As one soldier in that article described, troops often start giving up a portion of their paychecks to buy decent drones or body armor or other assets that might, you know, keep them alive. But then also, quote, ‘You’ll pay forever so they don’t send you to the meat grinder.’

Other Russian commanders have purportedly forced troops to pay exorbitant sums to stay alive and sometimes just to avoid being shot on the spot. …

According to recent reports by exiled Russian journalists, low-level commanders operate more like gang leaders than actual military personnel, in increasingly sophisticated structures that are informed by the high proportion of ex-convicts that now swell the Russian ranks. Often when new troops arrive, commanders confiscate their bank cards and ping codes and threaten violence against those who don’t comply. And when those soldiers are killed, they’re formally reported by their commanders as missing. A change that ensures that money will continue flowing to their accounts. …

Think of frontline soldiers as a pure revenue stream, and even some of Russia’s most asinine decisions start to make sense. When a soldier is wounded in combat, that soldier still receives a paycheck. And if they can be kept on the front lines, then the process of extortion can continue. …

When a higher skill Russian recruit shows up in one of those units, commanders know that they’re likely to have more money, partly because they’re going to be paid on a better contract, and partly because they probably have some form of savings squirreled away from their civilian life. Trap those soldiers in an assault unit, and there’s no limit to what they might be willing to pay in order to avoid the meat grinder. But if they seem as if they’ll cause trouble, then the meat grinder is right there for their commanders to use. …

Awful Russian culture (passed down through their Mongol ancestry?):

Those incentives also help explain increasing reports of physical torture of Russian soldiers by their own commanders on or near the front lines, including soldiers who’ve already been wounded. Our own Warfronts team has encountered footage of Russian troops who’ve had multiple limbs amputated due to combat wounds who were then cling-wrapped onto trees and extorted further. Videos like that can be sent to a soldier’s family who will then ends up paying even more to spare the life of a person who’s locked into conscription or contract by the Russian state. …

The Western tradition of military service demands leaders who will do just about anything for the men serving under them, while Russian officers torture their subordinates for money. …

Quoting researcher Alexandra Arapova [Russian families] are saying that literally we paid everything to have our father, brother, husband not to be killed. In many cases, superiors, they use torture to take money from the soldiers. …

As for the scale of the brutality, we can’t know for sure, but judging by the available information, this kind of treatment is everywhere. One Russian exile outlet, Radio Echo, obtained accounts from soldiers like these, and over a 6-month period in 2025, Radio Echo indicated that they had received almost 12,000 complaints of corruption and violence by Russian commanders against their own men. …

Dysfunctional army:

It’s here that we find the real root of Russia’s ongoing military incompetence. Where Ukraine has spent the last four years learning, adapting, and innovating on the battlefield, Russian generals, defense industrial elites, and low-level battlefield commanders have been building a deeply corrupt machine at every level of the Russian armed forces. That machine exists to extract wealth for the direct and personal benefit of people lucky enough to wield power at the expense of frontline soldiers who aren’t so fortunate.

Vladimir Putin’s military is overrun with people who don’t particularly care about conquering Ukraine as long as they know they’ll be set for life in the post-war Russia that comes next.

That explains a lot.

UK immigration: Protests and riots failed, but violence works: the lesson from Belfast. By John Carter.

We’re not advocating, but the facts speak plainly.

Last week there was a minor uprising in Belfast. Hadi Alodid, a gentlemen of Sudanese extraction, enriched the face of Stephen Ogilvie, a local bloke with special needs, providing him with extensive tribal scarring in a generous act of cross-cultural exchange, and only claiming two of his eyes in payment. The entire incident was caught on video. …

Belfast exploded the next day. Yes, I was surprised too. Not a city noted for its hard lads, Belfast.

The uprising was variously described as a protest and as a riot, but it was neither of these.

Protests and riots don’t work:

A protest is when an angry crowd gathers to chant some slogans and wave around some signs, pretending that their numbers are a display of power, and deluding themselves that Power will redress their grievances because a noisy lump of quivering biomass is somehow intimidating to Power.

A riot is an explosive release of emotional energy that results in some property destruction and futile confrontations with armoured riot police, typically ending with the rioters being rounded up and jailed.

In some cases, it’s true, protests and riots appear to produce political change, but this is almost invariably because Power has orchestrated these little carnivals in order to sanctify the policies it’s already decided upon under the guise of ‘bowing’ to ‘pressure’ from the ‘public’. (The Canadian government, by the way, has long since mastered a non-violent variant of this dark art: practically every ‘public policy research group’ in the country is funded by the government to pressure the government to do what the government already wants to do.) …

Not a protest, not a riot, but something quite different:

There were no signs being waved around in Belfast, no chanting of slogans.

While there was a great deal of violence, it was not random and senseless, but methodical and carefully targeted. It unfolded with the tight discipline of a coordinated military operation.

The day before the uprising started, a communique was sent out to local businesses, instructing them to close before the fun started. At the appointed hour loose formations of young men, indistinguishable in black hoodies, fanned out across the city.

Barricades were set up all over Belfast; these were lightly manned, reportedly often with minors, and seem to have been intended mainly to slow down the police. In a few places men in balaclavas established checkpoints, pulling out migrants when they found them and roughing them up.

Meanwhile, highly mobile groups of young men targeted houses, cars, and businesses known to belong to migrants, breaking their windows and firebombing them.

When there were civilians inside, they evicted them first: as far as I’ve heard, no one was killed, or even hospitalized. By the time emergency services arrived on the scene they’d already moved on to the next targets.

There do not seem to have been many direct confrontations with riot squads. There were a few videos of small numbers of skirmishers lobbing bricks or petrol bombs at police vehicles while using wheelie bins to shield themselves from a water cannon. It looked like they were mainly trying to keep the police occupied, so that the real work could proceed unimpeded elsewhere.

These young men had no interest in providing fodder for the media cycle. They left their phones at home in order to avoid being tracked. They kept themselves masked, and were at pains to politely discourage bystanders from recording them. …

This combination of identical black clothing, identity concealment, mobility, and property destruction are classic black bloc tactics. In North America black bloc is generally associated with Antifa, and as far I know, the tactical doctrine was first developed by anti-globalization activists at WTO meetings (remember when anti-globalization was a leftist position?) …

Due to the Troubles, the citizens of Northern Island were already organized:

The violence was largely contained to Belfast’s Protestant neighbourhoods, strongholds of loyalist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association. These were formed in response to the Irish Republican Army’s terrorism …

Some of the paramilitaries’ leadership were seen on the streets, although they did not participate directly, and seemed to be just observing. Officially the paramilitaries played no part in orchestrating the violence, which is a line that both the paramilitaries and the police are sticking to, but then of course they would: the leadership isn’t about to confess to criminal activity, and the authorities much prefer a narrative of a spontaneous eruption of disorganized racist thuggery because that doesn’t imply that they don’t actually have a monopoly on violence in Belfast. My working assumption is that this is nonsense, and that the uprising was in fact organized by the loyalist paramilitaries. …

The IRA does not seem to have played any part in this, and indeed the IRA’s communist boomer leadership actively discouraged Belfast’s Catholics from taking part. They could not, however, motivate their people to actively interfere with the loyalists: the Catholics seem to have mostly watched (there were reports that some of their young men joined in the fun, but who knows). …

The message:

The uprising in Belfast was not nihilistic violence for the sake of violence, though I’ve no doubt the lads were enjoying the opportunity for mayhem.

It was violence towards a specific political objective: driving the foreigners out.

• Migrants whose domiciles were destroyed were directly deprived of housing.
• Migrants who managed to avoid this were made to worry that they will be next.
• Landlords taking government money to house migrants, or even thinking about doing so, now need to worry about the immediate cost of repairs and the ongoing expense of higher insurance premiums, making the Home Office’s lucre a lot less attractive.
• Landlords also need to worry about escalation: reportedly, letters were circulated which heavily implied that bricks and petrol bombs were just the first step on the violence ladder, and that the paramilitaries would be quite happy to take more decisive measures against the landlords themselves should the message not be received.

All of this is very sad, and I don’t want to seem heartless. The immigrants whose houses were destroyed were probably innocent; there was one particularly touching video of a nurse from Ghana or somewhere. Unfortunately, that is the nature of these things. They were brought in by the government en masse as a form of biological warfare against the native population. The government wants them there, the people want them gone, and the government refuses to listen, so, this is what happens.

It worked:

Only 27 migrants were actually made homeless by the arson, but reportedly, quite a few are already clearing out on their own.

The British government quite naturally condemned the violence, organizing a rally against racism in the aftermath, but it also responded by instructing the media to emphasize that it would be cracking down on illegal immigration into Northern Ireland. Underneath the condemnation, there is a clear message to all of this: in this case, violence worked.

It worked last year, too:

That message has been sent before in Northern Ireland. Exactly one year to the day before the uprising in Belfast, there were riots in the small town of Ballymena after the courts let two gypsy boys off with delicate wrist taps for raping an Irish girl. The rioting went on for two weeks, and resulted in two thirds of the gypsy population clearing out. Again: violence worked.

English protestors failed epically:

Contrast Ballymena with the other major British protest movement last summer: the anti-migrant hotel protest in Epping, a London exurb populated largely by Londoners driven out of their city by diversity, which started when one of the migrants diversified a teenage girl. In contrast to the eruption in Ballymena, the protest in Epping was explicitly non-violent: the only violence came at the hands of the cops arresting people for flying Union Jacks.

The mothers of Epping spent months gathering outside the migrant hotel, holding signs and raising awareness. The council also fought the migrant hotel in the courts, and enjoyed early success when a judge found that the location was zoned as a hotel but not as a migrant dormitory, essentially telling the Home Office that they didn’t have a loicense for that. This legal victory was short-lived. The decision was overturned almost immediately by a higher court judge, who explicitly found that whatever the concerns of the people of Epping as to their children’s safety, these were outweighed by the human rights of the mystery meat that had washed up on Britain’s shores, and by the government’s interest in housing them.

The migrant hotel in Epping was eventually shut down, but this likely had more to do with the government’s switch to ‘Operation Scatter’ in which migrants were garrisoned in smaller houses all over the country, rather than concentrated in a few large centres, than it did with the government responding to the concerns of British subjects.

Plain facts:

In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not. …

The British people have voted for lower immigration in essentially every election since the British establishment destroyed Enoch Powell, and every government they’ve voted into power, whether Labour or Tory, has increased immigration.

The British people have used social media to raise awareness of the problems caused by immigration, and the British establishment, whether Labour or Tory, responded by imprisoning more Britons for mean tweets in one year than the Soviet Politburo sent to gulags for political crimes throughout Brezhnev’s entire term.

They’ve used the courts to try and defend their rights, and the British establishment responded, lol, you don’t have rights, immigrants do.

The British people have patiently pursued every avenue for peaceful redress of their grievances, and have been shut down at every turn by an establishment that doesn’t want to hear it.

So:

As the Americans say, there are four boxes: soap box, jury box, ballot box, and ammo box. Whether the Brits as a whole can crack open the fourth box remains to be seen.

If the ruling class obstinately disobeys, infuriates, and endangers the electorate,  they’ve torn up their mandate to rule. Perhaps democracy can rescue the situation; let’s hope so.

Abolishing Multiculturalism. By The Noticer.

Pauline Hanson … never pretended to be a White nationalist, and has consistently stated her rejection of White nationalism every time she’s been questioned on it. Say what you want about Pauline, for all her faults she has been ideologically consistent throughout her political career. …

If you want White nationalism, you will need an actual White nationalist party with an actual White nationalist leader. Some blokes tried that recently and the government listed them as a prohibited hate group. If their legal challenge to overturn this fails, Hanson has vowed to repeal the hate group law, which might be the only lifeline to decriminalising White nationalist organising in Australia. But neither Pauline nor her One Nation party will ever adopt White nationalism explicitly themselves. …

How about moving on from multiculturalism?

Multiculturalism is not simply the trivial presence of other cultural practises within Australia, this is a false impression the political establishment presents to obfuscate its political reality. “So you want to abolish multiculturalism? Well I guess that means no more Chinese takeaways for you chud!” The leftist commentators parroting this strawman are idiots.

In reality, multiculturalism is the institutionalisation of minority ethnic and religious lobbying. When Anthony Albanese or Tony Burke talk about “modern Australia” being “multicultural”, this is what they are actually defending.

Every time a new “hate speech” law is passed, or a new DEI regulation to discriminate against White people is adopted, it is done so at the recommendation of these minority ethnic and religious lobby groups. There is a whole department of government dealing with “Multicultural Affairs” which exists for the sole purpose of granting taxpayer money to these lobby groups and facilitating them telling the government to pass more hate speech laws and adopt more DEI regulations.

If Pauline Hanson is serious about abolishing multiculturalism, it can’t just be empty rhetoric about how people “need to assimilate” like we have heard for years from the Liberal Party whilst they’ve been complicit in funding and institutionalising this multicultural bureaucracy, a multicultural bureaucracy that has now morphed into a multicultural police state that jails people for offending or criticising the multicultural bureaucracy and its agenda.

Eliminate the parts of the bureaucracy that discriminate against whites and Jews:

One Nation, therefore, must commit to abolishing the entire bureaucratic regime of multiculturalism — all of these multicultural lobby groups need to be defunded and jettisoned from the political process. …

The multicultural bureaucracy only tolerates antiwhite anti-freedom leftist activists within its ranks, marginalising not just Jewish groups which refuse to toe the line, but also groups such as the British Australian Community which are never given a seat at the table even though they represent the largest ethnic group in the country!

Let’s have color blindness, and end the racism by our government (such as the Voice etc., cough cough). You’re Australian if you assimilate to the Australian culture, but don’t belong here if you cannot or will not assimilate. And, of course, mass migration is too fast to allow assimilation of all, so it must be stopped.

USAID money dried up, now European MEPs chant “Send Them Back”. By Hélène de Lauzun at The European Conservative.

The announcement of the European Parliament’s final vote on the Return Directive was met with a burst of jubilation in the chamber, where energetic cries of “Send them back” rang out, reflecting the MEPs’ enthusiasm at having succeeded in passing the first genuine measure to seriously restrict immigration at the European level. On the opposite side of the chamber, MEPs responded to these exclamations with vigorous — though minority — cries of “Shame on you.”

The choice of words is not insignificant; some even see it as a foreshadowing — still a fantasy at this stage — of remigration.

Through a number of key measures, the directive drastically changes the landscape for the management of illegal immigration. Previously, an obligation to leave the territory remained a national decision. From now on, thanks to the Return Regulation, these decisions may be converted into a ‘European Return Order’ — an obligation to leave European territory. …

On the Left as well as in the centre, the prevailing mood was one of exaggeration and dramatisation. Abir Al-Sahlani, a left-wing MEP from the Renew group, said she had never felt “as unsafe in Parliament as she did after the vote.”

Flopping Aces:

Europe just experienced one of the fastest religious conversions in political history.

For years they called basic border enforcement “fascism.” They called deportation “cruel.” They called any suggestion of returning people who had no right to be there “far-right extremism.” NGOs and center-left politicians treated the very idea of stopping the invasion like it was a moral crime. They cashed the checks, ran the programs, and lectured the rest of us about compassion while the flow continued.

Then something changed.

Voters started punishing them. The American money tap (that sweet USAID slush fund) got turned off. And suddenly the same people who spent a decade calling enforcement racist are passing the strictest migration law in EU history … complete with return hubs in third countries, expanded detention powers, and home raids without warrants.

The same ministers who once clutched their pearls are now hugging each other on the parliament floor while chanting “send them back.”

It’s almost like none of it was ever about principle.

It was about cost. When open borders started costing them elections and free American money, the moral clarity arrived overnight. The “compassion” dried up the second it threatened their power and their funding. Everything before that? Just expensive theater paid for by someone else’s taxpayers.

They didn’t have a change of heart. They got hit in the wallet and at the ballot box at the same time. And like every other elite class in history, they immediately discovered that reality is suddenly very interesting when it starts hurting them personally.

Three things made these surprising “historic” reforms possible:

First, “far-right” (moderate conservative) parties have been ascendant in Europe, a trend that accelerated after President Trump’s re-election last year. Conservative and “reform” parties now make up about a third of all elected EU members.

Second, center-left parties — also about a third —  joined the conservatives to pass the new anti-migration policies. Only the far-left parties (Greens and socialists) opposed the new package and shouted “shame!” at their colleagues after the vote passed. …

Third, the center-left’s course correction from pro-migrant virtue-signaling to pro-sanity common sense followed continuous pressure from the U.S. over the last 18 months, which ceaselessly argued that Europe was destroying itself with its open-borders migration policies, and often linked them to America’s pullback from NATO. … A majority of EU voters now want ICE-like migration policies.

You might fairly ask why I linked this political tipping point in Europe to Trump’s re-election. After all, as the experts always remind us, correlation doesn’t prove causation. Maybe Trump’s election and the rise of sanity in Europe were both caused by some other third factor. To answer, I would point to one specific policy decision, the closure of USAID, and to one person, President Trump, over whom the EU leaders fawned at yesterday’s G7 Summit. …

Think-tank analysts estimate that up to $2.3 billion annually in U.S. aid ($23 billion every 10 years) was tied to Europe’s “migration management” work. USAID’s closure effectively zeroed this out, leaving a sudden, large gap in financing for development and protection projects in the countries of origin and transit.

In other words, USAID paid the countries where migrants came from, and it paid the countries through which they traveled on their way to Europe. No longer.

The USAID money spigot is closed. Now the EU is reversing those incentives — by paying origin countries to “host” their own migrants. And, whether it was through tariffs, NATO drawdowns, or energy markets, President Trump has beaten European politics in arm-wrestling.

Follow the money … all the way back to the American taxpayer.

Chaser:

For the first time, deportations from Austria are now outpacing new asylum applications.

An average of 40 people per day are being deported from Austria, with roughly 10 of these being for convicted criminals.https://t.co/pWE65mV8J2

— S 🇦🇲🇱🇧 (@Shifty_Coffee) June 20, 2026

Britain in immigration turmoil.

Wall Street Mav:

Rotherham where white young girls were gang raped by Pakistani men with impunity.

The police (also of Pakistani ethnicity) in Rotherham were complicit and joined in the rapes according to the victims.

 

The British Patriot:

Massive crowds of British patriots have flooded the streets of Birmingham to call for remigration.

Britain’s second-largest city now has over 340,000 Muslims.

🚨BREAKING: MASSIVE crowds of British patriots have flooded the streets of Birmingham to call for remigration.

Britain’s second-largest city now has over 340,000 Muslims.

They want them all gone. pic.twitter.com/PzJ9g8LtX0

— The British Patriot (@TheBritLad) June 20, 2026

 

Who will prevail? Will Islam conquer Britain? Find out in the next 30 years.

The left runs on taxpayer cash. By Fugitive Caesar.

Leftists are getting angry because around 10-15 million Leftists are paid to do cushy high-paid fake jobs, based on credentials and a claim to unique technical authority.

The education sector over produces people who consider themselves “elite”. Those people then found ways to use government to get them good jobs — as in jobs that pay well, even if they are bullshit jobs. In so doing, these people took over the main party of the left in each western country.

Thus, they are strongly motivated by money and status. Big government is essential for their livelihood, and the livelihood of all their friends, so they need the leftist bureaucracy in power regardless of the cost to the rest of us..

Tldr: Too many chiefs and not enough Indians, and all those chiefs must (?) get paid.

Wall Street Apes:

Democrats are creating fake jobs for themselves and getting massive salaries. … The fake jobs are from companies funded by our tax dollars.

Example:

Texas Democrat Rep James Talarico has a second part time job as a “DEI consultant” and gets paid $83,333 per year … as a consultant for MAYA Consulting, now rebranded as VIDA Collaborative, which is a firm focused on “equitable education” initiatives rooted in DEI. It’s 100% a fake made up job, they do things like promoting “RaceTalks” and addressing “systemic barriers,” “white supremacy culture,” and “cisnormative assumptions.”

It’s all fake, obviously this is a fake made up job that was only invented to do things like launder our money.

But here’s where they criminal part comes in, they get taxpayer funding. MAYA Consulting, now VIDA Collaborative, has received substantial taxpayer money through contracts with the Texas Education Agency and individual Texas public school districts. …

The modus operandi:

Democrats give funding to these obviously fake companies promoting the typical nonsense …

Then these companies turn around and make Democrats “consultants” and pay them $80,000+ dollar per year.

Commenters:

90% of dems in politics don’t have/have never had real jobs. They don’t own businesses, never built, produced, serviced, been in retail. They are poli-sci majors, and prof gov leeches. Professional talkers. A class of useless people.

They hate Trump and Musk (especially DOGE!) with a burning passion because they threaten their money and status. Who wants to become a Sheryl Cowan (graphic at the top of this post)? Hence the rage of a privileged class.

The big government mateship dance: Linfox and Chris Bowen. By Craig Kelly.

Linfox’s Fox Group, owned by trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, donated $500,000 to the Australian Labor Party during the 2024-25 financial year. This contribution was part of a broader pattern of bipartisan giving by the logistics giant, which also provided an identical $500,000 donation to the Liberal Party in the same period.

This week, Chris Bowen handed $19.63 million of your hard-earned money straight to Linfox, the company owned by billionaire Lindsay Fox (net worth ~$6 billion), so they could buy 26 electric trucks.

That’s $775,000 per truck — taxpayer-funded. Nice.

 

 

If these electric trucks are so great as Bowen claims, why the hell does a billionaire need a $775,000 gift per vehicle from struggling taxpayers?

Why can’t Lindsay Fox reach into his own $6 billion pocket?

It’s rampant:

This is just the latest episode in Bowen‘s and Labor’s taxpayer-funded billionaire mateship program.

He’s already shovelled tens of millions to his other billionaire buddy, Twiggy Forrest.

Same script, different billionaire.

Jobs for the left:

Let’s be honest: Bowen isn’t “investing in the future.” He’s buying future job security.

He’s using public money to build favours and networks so that when Labor gets booted at the next election … he’ll land softly on some cushy board or consultancy gig funded by the very billionaires he’s busy enriching right now.

Hypocrisy:

Meanwhile, Labor has the gall to clutch their pearls and scream about Gina Rinehart supporting One Nation. The hypocrisy is beyond rancid.

• Billionaires getting taxpayer handouts from Labor? That’s “strategic industry policy.”
• Billionaires exercising free speech and supporting a conservative party? That’s a “threat to democracy.”

The big government mateship dance:

1. Linfox donates $500,000 to the Labor Party.
2. Labor minister uses government funds to subsidize Linfox $19.6m of trucks. (Linfox should have paid for them entirely on its own.)
3. Linfox or someone will take good care of the Labor minister when he leaves politics.

Losers? Taxpayers, competitors to Linfox, trust and honesty, the free market and efficiency, the Australian economy, …

Iran Wins $300 Billion Cash Prize For Placing Second In War. By The Babyon Bee.

The leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran was reportedly overjoyed to learn they had won a grand total of $300 billion for coming second place in the war against the U.S.

Despite suffering catastrophic damage, the Iranian leaders were seen dancing in the streets, grateful for the opportunity to have participated in another war.

“This is the happiest day of my life! I’m going to buy so many missiles!” said Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as he moonwalked across the desert sand. “Super stoked to try again next year!” 

Iran War Misconceptions. By Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness.

Shorter than recent Democrat wars:

The shooting portion of the Iran “War” lasted about 40 days — far shorter than Barack Obama’s 2011 congressionally unauthorized seven-month bombing campaign against Libya.

Bill Clinton’s unauthorized 78 days of bombing Serbia in 1999 hit bridges, schools, hospitals, monuments, and power plants — far more indiscriminate targeting than anything in the Iran War so far….

Fabrications and distortions:

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and is now closed, so the war was a failure.

The Strait was open because an appeased Iran had no reason to close it — given that no nation on earth dared to end its nuclear dreams of dominating the Middle East, funding anti-Western terrorists, and threatening Europe and the U.S.

So the rub was always disarming Iran and then dealing with its inevitable desperate strategy of closing the Strait.

Trump’s agreement will simply be a copy of Obama’s earlier Iran deal.

Obama dealt from a position of abject weakness. Iran assumed correctly that Obama would offer endless concessions and cash, while never considering force. …

Trump is dealing with a bankrupt Iran, a neutered military, a restive Iranian street, a wounded regime, and the specter that the U.S. can do whatever it wishes militarily to a shattered Iran for the foreseeable future.

The U.S. is bereft of allies and strategically isolated in the war.

During the war, the unthinkable occurred when Israel de facto became an ally of the Arab Gulf monarchies.

Other than a few rogue nations and Arab terrorist clients — the weakened Hezbollah, the crushed Hamas, and the wary Houthis — Iran has zero friends.

Neither China nor Russia offered Iran much in the way of aid, other than satellite imagery and some smuggled supplies. Both lost their once-prominent positions among clients in the Middle East who deeply resented their siding with Persian Shiite theocrats over Arab oil suppliers and arms buyers.

Israel has more combat aircraft than the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The Gulf monarchies do so as well. Both Israel and the Gulf states have been flying bombing missions against Iran. There is a far greater chance of Arab-Israeli rapprochement after the war than before it. …

The Iran War was a betrayal of MAGA’s commitment to no “forever wars.”

The second Iran intervention, following up on the initial June 2025 bombing, was certainly an optional and preemptive action. …

Yet there still are no ground troops in Iran. The loss of 13 soldiers, while tragic, is less than the two-week fatal-accident rate of the military.

There is a good chance that less than six weeks of active bombing achieved far more than 20 years in Afghanistan and a decade in Iraq — at a fraction of the human and fiscal costs.

The problems of Iranian nukes and Iran’s rapid production of conventional ballistic missiles (with Chinese help) could not be kicked down the road any longer. It fell on Trump to deal with it. What would Kamala have done?

A good government protects its people. By InfantryDort.

The British Isles are beginning to remember what every civilization eventually remembers:

A government that cannot protect its people eventually loses the moral authority to govern them.

Everything that follows is just the timetable.

 

A society that does not protect its young women soon ceases to exist. Biology 101.

Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia. By Scott Scheall.

Most people don’t realize how fundamentally broken the institutions for training tomorrow’s policy-makers are.

The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.

An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.

Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence.

The professoriate, with some justification, views administrators less as leaders to be admired than as annoyances to be tolerated. For a productive academic, a move into administration, high salary and resplendent office notwithstanding, seems less like a promotion than banishment.

The incentives flip for those who do not manage to develop fruitful research programs. Within a few years of entering academia, young professors often find that they are not likely to produce the publications, citations, and grants that tenure requires. By this time, though, they have invested almost a decade of their lives in the study of specialized topics that leave them poorly equipped for comparably remunerative work outside the university. For them, an administrative position seems like salvation. …

Administrators see faculty not as the prime movers of learning, the front line advancing the university’s scholarly mission, but as fussy nuisances to be managed or otherwise ignored.

Deans, provosts, and even presidents are now disproportionately drawn from the large pool of unsuccessful academics. The talented stay where they are; the rest become overseers, having drifted into positions where scholarly talent has no purchase. …

Inevitably:

The consequences of academia’s misincentive structure are harmful. Instead of being deployed in support of rigorous research, limited resources are redirected, by its own administrators, to the university bureaucracy. Hiring and promotion decisions reward the administration’s favorites, the compliant box-checkers, rather than more accomplished, if less accommodating, scholars. Instead of focusing single-mindedly on scholarly excellence, young professors are encouraged to build alliances with administrators. …

The mission of a university is the disinterested pursuit of truth through rigorous scholarship. The internal labor market of a university, however, tends to place those who fail at this mission in positions of authority over those who succeed.

In universities, the incompetent supervise the competent….

Stanford now employs some sixteen thousand administrators and staff persons to support a faculty one-seventh this size. [And only 22% of this year’s incoming class are white.]

Contemporary American academia is just the kind of social system about which Hayek warned, one that promotes individuals with personal traits inconsistent with the system’s alleged objectives. Those who fail at the basic academic mission too easily find snug sinecures from which to tyrannize those who succeed.

Administrators are mostly failed researchers. They have higher salaries and decide policies — like DEI for admissions. But they are mostly superfluous, given that universities did quite well with only a few administrators until the 1980s. Administrative positions are often soft jobs for people with the “right” politics, put in charge of the institutions that train — and obviously indoctrinate — the young people who will be tomorrow’s opinion-makers.

The political types decided a few decades ago that truth didn’t exist and only power matters (aka critical theory). But researchers are truth seekers — they are the reason universities exist and why universities are valuable. Or used to be. Modern universities are mostly run by political types who favor power over truth, on higher pay than the truth seekers, churning out new generations of power mongers.

The Engines of Truth Are Stalling. By Thomas Barlow at Quadrant.

In the 1970s and 1980s, academic staff made up more than 60 per cent of the Australian university workforce. Today, the ratios have flipped, with non-academic staff now making up around 60 per cent of the total workforce. …

The implications should be clear. An administrative class will typically find prestige and revenue more interesting than truth, and bureaucracy always rewards conformity. So, while we may still imagine universities as being full of people beavering away in labs and libraries, trying to discover or invent something new and true and potentially controversial, only a minority are personally pursuing such goals. For the administrative majority there is a different agenda.

You can see this distinction on YouTube. Look up the infamous 2023 congressional hearing on anti-Semitism, at which the then presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT squirmed like clumsy politicians. Then compare their feeble efforts with almost any public talk or interview recorded in the late twentieth century by someone like Richard Feynman or Milton Friedman. You’ll gain an immediate grasp of the contrast between administrative and truth-seeking psychology. …

Mass training centers:

Fifty years ago, hardly anyone went to university. In developed nations, only about one in ten school leavers attended university. Today, university enrolment rates globally are around 40 per cent. … In Australia, in 2024, 57 per cent of those aged twenty-five to thirty-four had a university degree. …

One does not need to be a genius to grasp that teaching students with a broader range of intellectual abilities will likely necessitate a watering down of content and a lowering of standards. …

Easy marking and grade inflation are a gauge for this “consumer is right” mentality, in which regard it seems telling that a Harvard analysis last year … showed that A’s now make up 60 per cent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates, up from less than 25 per cent twenty years ago.

Although I am not aware of a similar study in Australia, the incentives and behaviour here are similar. Australian universities now accrue $12 billion a year (or 27 per cent of their total revenues) from fee-paying international students. All that money has proved a persistent inducement for soft marking, low fail rates, and lowering standards in parts of our institutions. …

Funding by bureaucracy:

Partly this trend is a consequence of funding frameworks that systemically encourage quantity of outputs rather than quality of outcomes. One manifestation of this has been an explosion in the number of people pursuing PhDs, often without regard to their actual ability for knowledge discovery. (In Australia, our universities graduate around eight PhDs for every new academic position opening.)

An even graver symptom, though, is the volume of research production. There are now over 6 million supposedly peer-reviewed papers being published each year across all languages and fields. Many of these papers are completely useless and irrelevant. Many are never cited or even read by anyone other than their authors. The modern scientific literature is one of history’s great triumphs of quantity over quality. …

Political bias that reflects that of the funders:

The political bias of the Western academy is often downplayed. The more hubristic on the Left see the one-sidedness as evidence that intelligence correlates with their own views—a position that requires wilful blindness of the considerable variations in academic political attitudes over time, countries, and different disciplines. …

As universities turn into political monocultures, they typically experience a narrowing of scholarship. …

“Fact checkers”:

But there is another, and greater, corruption as well. For, having been accorded special status as arbiters of what is true and false, a growing cohort of politically minded individuals in Western universities have begun also to set themselves up as arbiters of what is right and wrong. This has led to the emergence of ideological gatekeepers in a host of disciplines, who strive to shut down heretics while offering an easy ride for those who conform to their favoured political narrative. …

In 2024, a study of over 6,000 faculty at fifty-five universities and colleges in the United States conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 27 per cent of faculty say they are unable to speak freely for fear of reprisals from students, administrators or other faculty. An astonishing 35 per cent of faculty said they had toned down their writing for fear of consequences — a four-fold greater rate of self-censorship than was reported for a similar survey in 1958, during the McCarthy era. …

One especially prevalent example of politicisation is identity-based discrimination in hiring, promotions, and admissions. Typically, it is the administrative class, not the scholarly class, that most keenly prioritises identity over truth. Yet it is remarkable how quickly the scholars have fallen into line.

I have watched academic discussions, in which participants have felt compelled to contextualise their contributions with either prideful or self-denigratory observations about their own personal cultural and sexual identities — as if who they are matters more than the truth of what they have to say. There is even a campaign in parts of the scientific community to get authors of scientific publications to cite others not based on their work’s relevance but based on criteria of ethnicity and sex. This is called “citation justice”. …

Are universities worth reforming, or should we just burn them down?

Most universities still have many faculty members who are genuine knowledge seekers in the old-fashioned sense: people who believe in the truth, who love their disciplines, and who want to adhere to rigorous scholarly ideals. This is a fact that must be remembered, no matter how bad things seem. Such people really do still exist — and in significant numbers.

The problem is that they have been sidelined. Yet if there was a way of handing them the institutional reins, and if research-granting schemes could be redesigned to identify these types rather than the blowhards and activists, we would quickly rediscover the treasure that sits within our institutions and the ethos of the academy would change very rapidly.

Over the centuries, universities/monasteries have been through previous cycles of politicization and decay, but eventually recovered. So, they probably will this time too.

Does money buy happiness? By Ihtesham Ali.

A Princeton Nobel laureate said no above $75,000. A Penn researcher with 1.7 million data points said yes. …

No, above US$75k per year:

In 2010 [Daniel] Kahneman and his Princeton colleague Angus Deaton published a paper that became one of the most quoted findings in the history of social science.

They analyzed 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and concluded that emotional well-being rose steadily with income up to about $75,000 a year, and then flattened out completely. Above that line, the extra money was not buying any more daily happiness. 

The headline traveled around the world. Every news outlet ran the number. …

Yes:

For 11 years almost nobody seriously challenged it. Kahneman had a Nobel Prize in Economics, the sample size was massive, and the conclusion was emotionally satisfying in a way that made everyone feel a little better about not being wealthy.

Then in 2021 a 33 year old researcher at the University of Pennsylvania published a paper that quietly destroyed the entire finding. His name is Matthew Killingsworth.

He had spent the previous decade building a smartphone app called Track Your Happiness that pinged users at random moments during their day and asked them a simple question.

How do you feel right now, on a scale from very bad to very good. The app was designed to catch happiness in the act, not to ask people to recall it later.

By 2021 he had collected over 1.7 million real-time happiness reports from 33,000 adults. When he plotted income against in-the-moment well-being, there was no plateau anywhere.

The line just kept rising. People earning $200,000 were happier on average than people earning $100,000. People earning $400,000 were happier than people earning $200,000. The curve flattened slightly but never stopped climbing.

The famous $75,000 ceiling that the world had been quoting for 11 years simply did not exist in his data.

The resolution turns out to be more interesting:

Now there were two Nobel-quality findings sitting in direct contradiction with each other. One of them had to be wrong, and neither researcher was willing to walk away. …

Kahneman called Killingsworth and proposed something rare in academic science. He called it an adversarial collaboration. The two of them, joined by Penn psychologist Barbara Mellers as a neutral referee, would sit down together and reanalyze the raw data from both studies, line by line, until they figured out which one of them was wrong.

The paper they co-authored was published in March 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the answer they reached was not what either of them had expected.

Both of them had been right at the same time. They had been measuring two different populations without realizing it.

When the team broke Killingsworth’s 1.7 million data points apart by baseline happiness, the picture clarified completely. For the happiest 70 percent of people, more money kept buying more happiness all the way up to $500,000 a year, with no sign of slowing down.

For people in the middle, the same pattern held. But for the bottom 20 percent of the sample, the ones who were already unhappy before the question of money even came up, the curve flattened almost exactly where Kahneman’s original paper had said it would. Above roughly $100,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, more money did nothing for them. …

Conclusion:

If you are not already unhappy, money keeps buying happiness for a much longer stretch than Kahneman’s original paper suggested. The runway is wider than the world has been telling itself for a decade.

If you are already unhappy, money does almost nothing past a certain point. There is a ceiling, but the ceiling is not about income. It is about the underlying state of the person collecting it.

The deeper insight:

The single biggest predictor of in-the-moment well-being is not money at all. It is whether your mind is on the thing you are doing.

His most cited paper, written with Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, is titled A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. The data from the [Track Your Happiness] app showed that people are mentally absent from what they are doing 47 percent of the time, and that mental absence is one of the strongest predictors of unhappiness in the entire dataset. More predictive than income. More predictive than the activity itself. More predictive than almost any demographic variable you could measure.

Which means the unhappy 20 percent that Kahneman’s plateau actually described were probably not unhappy because they did not have enough money. They were unhappy for reasons that more money could not reach.

The reason the curve flattened for them at $100,000 a year is the same reason it would have flattened at $300,000 or $700,000. The thing they were missing was not buyable.

The most uncomfortable line in the entire 2023 paper is the one that nobody on the internet quotes. The authors note that the relationship between income and happiness, while real, is much weaker than the relationship between attention and happiness.

A person earning $40,000 who is fully present in their own life will, on average, report higher in-the-moment well-being than a person earning $400,000 whose mind is somewhere else.

The fight about money was the wrong fight the entire time.

Takeaway:

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you catch your mind drifting. Stop. Put your phone down. Look at the room you are in, the person across from you, the food in front of you, the work you are actually doing. That is the part the apps cannot sell you and the salary cannot buy you.

The data has been clear for over a decade. The plateau is not in your bank account. It is in your attention.

 

Principles for a Grand Alliance of Centrists. By Edward Ring at American Greatness.

There is a common thread shared by most disillusioned voters. They believe that America’s ruling class has abandoned its fellow citizens. They’re right.

Notwithstanding notable recent defections, America’s elites view ordinary citizens as no longer necessary.

• Because of globalism, they are replaceable.
• Because of automation, supercharged by AI, they are superfluous.
• Because of environmentalism, they are unsustainable.

A plurality (at the least) of America’s elites have decided the nation’s middle class is disposable, and this is the real reason they continue to push woke degeneracy and extreme environmentalism, designed to lower birthrates and reduce standards of living. …

While America’s tradition of assimilation is under attack by an elite-driven obsession with racial segregation and mutual resentment, marketed as multiculturalism, America nonetheless remains the robust product of more than 250 years as a successful melting pot. …

Build a coalition to oppose our hostile ruling class:

We have merely to unite those millions of Americans who want to save their nation from an elite that has declared war on their way of life and their future.

This isn’t as hard as it seems for two reasons. First, most Americans don’t want to live in a divided nation, and they don’t want to live in a culture that has devolved to cater to society’s lowest, most abnormal, deviant, hedonistic, psychotic, sociopathic, dishonest, crooked, lazy, defiant, bizarre, militant cohorts of individuals, regardless of the fact they’ve become politically organized and demand equality of outcome in every imaginable context. Most Americans understand the inherent necessity and benefits of nuclear families, hard work, and immutable standards for achievement and recognition.

 

Antiwhite ‘Anti-racist’ Communists led by Tranny Satanist with Blue hair.

This is the Modern Left.

This is our opposition.

These are the people voting to destroy our nations.

Seriously what are we even doing? pic.twitter.com/1ElT3ieWkC

— Lozzy B 🇦🇺𝕏 (@TruthFairy131) June 18, 2026

Antiwhite ‘Anti-racist’ Communists led by Tranny Satanist with Blue hair

 

Second, America’s culture of common sense and unity is threatened by a fractious coalition of fanatics and lunatics who are relatively small in number and who harbor an innate antipathy toward each other that is only held in check by rivers of money flowing to them from globalist billionaires, opportunistic corporations, environmentalist pressure groups, and government unions. Their resources are money and anger. They win elections because all that money, and all that anger, is used to brainwash voters into thinking that tolerating decadence and chaos is compassion, that people who oppose extreme tolerance are bigots, and that recognizing the indispensability of fossil fuel is, somehow, “fascist.” Trump’s victory in 2024 is proof that this brainwashing, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, is wearing thin. …

The old Reagan coalition is no longer functioning:

During the final decade of the Cold War in 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reelected by a landslide. His “big tent” approach brought together fiscal conservatives, neocons, and conservative Christians. Scarcely a generation later, in 2004, George W. Bush also won a decisive victory by unifying these same factions.

But the model that worked then will not work today:

• Conservatives who claimed to favor smaller government have to answer for their failure to stop a bipartisan public debt binge that started in 1980 and has gotten progressively worse.
• Neocons have to answer for a foreign policy that has, among other things, destabilized the Middle East, created a surveillance state at home, and delivered endless wars with no exit strategy.
• As for conservative Christians, the Left has unfairly but successfully defined them as anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-“trans,” and is using them to stereotype all conservatives as dangerous extremists.

Populist leaders like Trump, Farage, and Hanson are — perhaps accidentally — building new centrist coalitions:

Trump recognizes something the leftist leadership of most Big Labor unions deny — the vast majority of their workers love America, believe in traditional values, and want politicians who will first protect them before prioritizing economic refugees that arrive illegally by the millions.

What captured media institutions desperately call “far right” are in fact commonsense reforms that most Americans support. …

What unites the populist Left and populist Right is a recognition that America’s business and political elite share a vision that abandons normal citizens. They correctly recognize that we have been governed by a donor-fed uniparty, dominated by special interests for whom profit and power are acquired because of failing bureaucracies, punitive regulations, scarce and expensive commodities, a massive dependent class of citizens and noncitizen permanent residents, and corporate consolidation of wealth.