Air traffic controlling in the US fixed by ashcanning DEI and hiring gamers. By Jeff Childers.

For years, parents across America have been engaged in a futile, daily struggle with their teenage sons, delivering variations of the exact same speech: “Justin, put down the Xbox controller and go do your homework! You can’t make a living playing video games! You need to go to college so you can get a degree in Marketing and work as an assistant manager at a 7-Brew drive-through coffee stand!”

It turns out the parents were wrong. The teenagers were right …

Behold, yesterday’s tweet from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, titled “Game Changer”:

 

 

Shortly after his appointment, Secretary Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration had a massive, crippling shortage of air traffic controllers. The FAA was short about 3,800 people. This is a problem, because air traffic control is one of those jobs where you really, really want a full staff. It is not like the Department of Motor Vehicles, where if they are short-staffed, the only consequence is that you spend an extra four hours sitting in a plastic chair reading a 2018 issue of Highlights magazine. If the FAA is short-staffed, airplanes can bump into each other.

So Secretary Duffy launched a new recruitment campaign. And he did not target people with master’s degrees in Public Policy. He targeted video game freaks. …

A couple of weeks later, Secretary Duffy explained to Fox how they came up with the idea:

The FAA’s ad campaign literally started with an Xbox logo and gaming footage from Twitch streams. The pitch went something like: “Hey, you! The guy who just spent 14 consecutive hours successfully managing a 40-player raid in World of Warcraft while simultaneously eating a family-sized bag of Doritos and ignoring your bladder! How would you like to do the exact same thing, but with real airplanes, and we will pay you $160,000 a year?”

That is the actual starting salary. The average certified professional controller earns over $160,000 within three years of leaving the academy. At the nation’s busiest airports, the base pay reaches a tidy $225,700. And — this is the best part — applicants no longer need a college degree.

Well duh:

The response was exactly what you would expect if you told a million nerds that their parents were wrong. In a single 24-hour window, the FAA received 12,350 applications— more than double the previous record. They hit 94% of their hiring goal immediately.

This is basically the plot of the movie Ender’s Game, or The Last Starfighter, where the military realizes that the only people with the hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness required to save the galaxy are teenagers who have never seen the sun.

The FAA realized that the skills required to guide a Boeing 737 safely through a thunderstorm into O’Hare are the exact same skills required to survive a Call of Duty deathmatch …

DEI-addled lefties were that stupid!?

But the absolute comedy is the reason why the FAA was short 3,800 controllers in the first place.

To understand how we got here, we must time-travel back to 2013, during the glorious Obama administration. Since its inception, the FAA had relied on a proven, rigorous aptitude test to hire new controllers. But woke progressives decided that this test was not producing a sufficiently diverse workforce.

So Obama’s FAA ashcanned the aptitude test. They replaced it with a “Biographical Questionnaire.” The stated goal was to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Don’t ask why one of the most critical, stressful, and demanding jobs in the country needed more ‘diversity.’ It will just give you a migraine.)

How did this marvelously diverse questionnaire work? It asked questions about the applicant’s background and assigned points based on the answers. And because this was the federal government, the points were assigned in a way that defies all human logic.

For example, one of the questions was: “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was…” Now, set aside the fact that they could have asked for transcripts instead of self-attestment. Set aside the fact that this has nothing to do with air traffic control skills. Set aside the fact that there is no correct answer to an unscorable question like that.

The part that will make you want to chew the carpet is that, if the applicant said their worst subject was Science, they were scored +15 points.

I am not making that up. To get a job where your entire responsibility is applying the laws of physics, mathematics, and meteorology to keep hundreds of tons of metal from falling out of the sky, the Federal Aviation Administration gave you bonus points if you were bad at science. …

You can see what they were doing, right? It was obvious. They replaced merit with bonus points for weak subjects that suggested you might be in certain diverse groups.

Especially if you knew in advance what non-intuitive answers to put down in the questionnaire.

This is where things got stupendously worse. An FAA whistleblower recorded a voicemail for a specific minority advocacy group, coaching applicants on exactly how to answer the questionnaire to pass. …

The result of this brilliantly diverse bureaucratic strategem was that hundreds of highly qualified candidates — people who had spent years studying aviation, say — were rejected, because they failed a personality quiz that actually rewarded people for flunking physics. After a series of near-disasters, the FAA froze its hiring for years while the lawsuits piled up. Then the Biden administration accelerated the DEI focus, the shortage worsened, and the whole rotten system nearly collapsed.

But then President Trump appointed Sean Duffy. He arrived, looked at the previous 8-step hiring process that took three months for the initial review, and asked, “What if we just hire people who are good at this?”

He cut the hiring process to five steps. He removed the degree requirement. He dropped the DEI nonsense. He went straight to the people who have spent their entire lives training their brains to track multiple fast-moving objects on a glowing screen while remaining perfectly calm.

The gamers answered the call. The nerds are saving aviation.

Every institution in the the western world needs the same treatment. Talent has been systematically excluded for decades now, and is sitting on the sidelines while fools get the salaries and status.

UPDATE:

They may end up having a lower rate of Alzheimer’s, like taxi drivers and ambulance drivers:

A 2024 population-based cross-sectional study published in The BMJ analyzed nearly 9 million U.S. death certificates from 2020–2022 that included occupational information across 443 professions.

Key findings:

Overall, Alzheimer’s was listed as a cause of death for about 3.88% of people (or ~1.69% after adjustments for age and other factors).
Among taxi drivers, the rate was 1.03% (171 of 16,658); among ambulance drivers, it was 0.74% (10 of 1,348). After adjustment, these were the two lowest proportions of any occupation (taxi drivers ~1.03%, ambulance drivers ~0.91%).

This pattern did not hold for other transportation jobs that rely more on predetermined routes (e.g., bus drivers or aircraft pilots), nor for other forms of dementia (such as vascular dementia).

The researchers hypothesized that the difference relates to the intensive real-time spatial navigation and cognitive mapping required in these jobs. This builds on earlier neuroimaging work (notably Eleanor Maguire’s studies of London taxi drivers) showing that the demands of acquiring detailed spatial knowledge (“The Knowledge”) are associated with structural changes in the hippocampus — larger posterior hippocampal volume that correlates with years of experience. The hippocampus is heavily involved in spatial memory/navigation and is also one of the regions that undergoes early atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease.

hat-tip David Archibald

The mega-dinghy costs the UK £25million immediately. By Hugo Timms at spiked.

In the early hours of Monday morning, a 49-foot dinghy carrying 230 illegal immigrants arrived on British shores from France. It is by some margin the largest number of migrants to have arrived in a single vessel. It surpasses by far the previous record of 165, a feat of human trafficking achieved late last month. ….

Reports suggest the immediate cost to the British taxpayer of the ‘mega-dinghy’ alone will be roughly £25million. Admittedly, this is a drop in the ocean to the nearly £3 billion the government is already spending each year housing illegal immigrants across Britain. But it is money the government does not have, spent on people who have no right to be here.

The mega dinghy also makes a mockery of the various deals the Labour government has made with France — the latest of which, signed in April, resulted in the UK agreeing to cough up £662million over three years to stop illegal immigrants departing from French shores. … Time and again, footage from the French coast reveals that French police and border patrol have absolutely no interest in preventing illegal immigrants leaving for the UK.

This isn’t simply a national humiliation — a dereliction of the government’s fundamental duty to protect our nation’s borders. It is a moral failure, too. We cannot be certain — largely because the government refuses to publish the relevant statistics — but it is surely not hyperbole to state that some of the men who arrived on Monday will go on to commit serious offences. What we can say without doubt is that many of the arrivals will disappear into the UK’s grey economy, and none of them will be deported.

Laurence Fox’s outlook is gloomy:

Our children will be fighting street to street for their homeland because their parents were frightened of being called racist.

Despicable cowardice.

Cambridge University are the laughing stock of the world.

Epic lying by omission. By Basil the Great.

Cambridge’s student newspaper, Varsity, has come under intense criticism after it has not published a single story regarding Jason Arday

Despite it being the biggest story to come out of Cambridge Uni in years.

Commenters:

Even left wing puppets like Student Unions can’t defend the patently ludicrous – hope the other students drag them mercilessly …

They are probably all hoping for a job at the BBC or Guardian. …

It breaks the ideological blanket they’ve all hidden under for years … criticising DEI is the ultimate taboo. Sad that students who should be the most clear eyed and data driven truth seekers are so brainwashed today. …

Ignoring a story is also journalism acting as propaganda. …

They’re just brushing up their lying by omission skills for when they get recruited to the BBC,

Donna-Louise:

First the Jason Arday disaster, now this. They’ve appointed Farah Ahmed as Assistant Professor of Education — a woman who called Western education a “threat” to Muslims, democracy a “corrupt tradition,” and literacy plus qualifications un-Islamic.

She attacked English literature as damaging, condemned treating Islam as just one religion among others, and criticised schools for teaching that child marriage is wrong. [She is also a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group.]

Same faculty. Same total collapse of standards. Shocking doesn’t begin to cover it.

Putting our money where their mouth is — Charlotte Gill:

Jason Arday is listed as a co-investigator on two more studies funded by taxpayers totalling £4,412,501 — in addition to Arday being a co-investigator on an EDI caucus that received £3,676,371 from taxpayers.

Commenters:

This is lorry loads of tax-payers money for the equivalent of allowing academics with the proper revolutionary left credentials endless ways of having a good time and burnishing their Woke status. …

If he’s sketchy around the truth, guaranteed he’s even sketchier around money.

Wesley Yang:

Billions of dollars are expended each year to pay the salaries of people whose literal job is engaging in institutionalized Red Guard assaults on their fellow citizens

Men in women’s sport — the latest twist.

Enes Kanter Freedom (see here) threw down the gauntlet by identifying as a woman and entering the draft for the US women’s basketball league (the WNBA). Today, the hilarity steps up a notch:

Let “The Transition” to the @WNBA begin.

Rules Are Rules!

Let “The Transition” to the @WNBA begin.

Rules Are Rules!#LetFreedomPlay pic.twitter.com/EWWjrl7DaL

— Enes Kanter FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) August 11, 2026

 

The WNBA must let him play, by the principles they virtuously espoused again but two weeks ago. So, either there’s a messy lawsuit because they won’t let him play — or the whole men in women’s sport thing begins its inevitably collapse immediately.

Something like this was, of course, always going to happen. But the left have milked it for all the temporary virtue they could first. They are hoping everyone will forget how stupid, unfair, and harmful they were, and just move on — with cover from the media.

 

What About Gold and Silver?

David Archibald (ex mining analyst): Well, gold and silver have stopped going down. Gold:

 

That’s a descending wedge which is normally bullish. But all I can say is that it is unlikely to go under $4,000 again. It might go sideways under $5,000 for a few years or that descending wedge might be a half way pattern for a move to $7,000. If I wanted to preserve wealth I would be very happy sitting in gold given how badly countries are run these days.

Silver is a similar story:

 

A bullish descending wedge. If it is a half way pattern it projects to $120. It would be very unlikely to lose money going long physical silver.

A year ago it was very obvious that gold was going to have a big breakout. What will happen from here is far less certain but the downside is covered.

David Evans (runs GoldNerds):

The US intervened last week to dissuade Japan from dumping a lot of US Treasury bonds on the market. (It offered a reverse repo instead, giving Japan the USD it needed to defend its currency without the bonds hitting the open market and raising interest rates in the US.) The US Government is desperate not to let the price of its bonds fall (i.e. interest rates rise) because it has a huge debt to constantly refinance.

Also last week, a weak USD jobs result took interest rate rises by the Fed off the table.

Both factors point to the imminence of the upcoming crises in paper currencies. To defend the currencies, the central banks need to raise interest rates to slow down dilution/inflation. But hardly anyone, starting with the governments themselves, can afford anything like Volcker’s 20% interest rates that were required to curb inflation at the end of the 1970s.

So, I’m fully loaded up on gold shares (as of last week, before the intervention, by good fortune).

Tom Lovell (hedge fund manager, ex bond trader):

To buy yen, Japan needed dollars, and Japan’s dollars are tied up in roughly US$1 trillion of US [Treasury bonds]. The old way to free them was to sell the bonds. That’s the part that scared everyone — the world’s largest foreign holder liquidating into a long end already trading at its highest yields since 2007.

Bessent found the other door.

Instead of selling the bonds, Japan can pawn them at the Federal Reserve through its Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) Repo Facility. The Fed lends dollars against Treasuries held in custody at the New York Fed. Japan takes those dollars, buys yen, and the bonds never touch the market. …

I don’t want to overstate this. But there’s a reasonable chance we look back on last week as another milestone for gold, perhaps even in the same conversation as the freezing of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves in 2022.

2022 was pivotal because it forced central banks to reconsider what owning a reserve asset actually meant. If your reserves could be frozen, were they really yours? What followed was official-sector gold buying and a gradual move away from Treasuries at the margin.

But that process was orderly. Last week was different. This wasn’t about whether Treasuries could be owned. It was about whether they could be sold.

If one of America’s largest foreign creditors needs dollars during a period of stress, but selling Treasuries risks destabilising the Treasury market itself, the problem has moved from theoretical to practical. …

For the last year I’ve argued the destination was fiscal dominance: monetary policy increasingly constrained by the fiscal position. Last week may have been the first time we saw the rubber hit the road.

Faced with rising Japanese yields, a weaker yen, potential Treasury selling and higher U.S. long-term rates, policymakers intervened. Not because Treasuries had failed, but perhaps because they could no longer afford to let the market set the price.

The post-2022 gold story was about trust. The next phase may be about arithmetic. Gold has no counterparty. It doesn’t need a repo facility. And nobody has to worry about what happens to another country’s bond market when you sell it.

2022 asked whether your reserves could be frozen.

2026 may be asking whether they can be sold. …

If there was one market takeaway from last week, it was the price action in precious metals.

That rally was more than short covering. I think last week was significant. In all likelihood, a low is in, and my bias is to buy the pullbacks.

Gold finally broke back above its 50-day moving average last week, the first signal I was looking for that the bulls were regaining control.

Not advice.

Fauci lied, immune systems are damaged, and birth rates are dropping, but the Australian media is sparing you from knowing. By David Archibald.

A big news item out of the United States last week was that Anthony Fauci, who ran the official response to the covid outbreak of 2019, lied about everything.

Fauci updated his private diary at work on a server which made it U.S. Government property. When he retired, he emailed it to himself and as a result of that it came to the attention of investigators.

The Australian media has decided to spare the Australian public any knowledge of this matter.

What the lying, two-faced weasel got up to is illustrated by the following exchange. On 25^th January, 2021, while the vaccines were rolling out, Fauci emailed Rochelle Walensky, then director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Vivek Murthy, then Surgeon General, the following:

I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of… Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.

In reply, Walensky wrote “definitely a good point, especially after dose two.” A few days later, Fauci told the world that the Food and Drug Administration had found “no red flags” for pregnant women. Later still he said that pregnant women “should get vaccinated” because there was “no indication whatsoever” of increased problems. In one U.S. obstetrics practice, the miscarriage rate increased from the normal 4% in 2020 to peaks of near 30%. This explains most of the fall in the birth rate in the developed world since 2020.

Another big lie of Fauci’s was that covid’s origin was natural, while his diary detailed the enormous effort that went into corralling scientific opinion to that end. But nobody has yet to ask to ask why. Why so much effort? The answer to that question is because if it wasn’t a natural spillover then it was designed. If it was designed that begs the question of what it was designed to do. If people knew what it was designed to do, then countermeasures could be tailored to thwart it.

What it was designed to do was to make life for humans more sickness-prone and shorter, ostensibly to reduce human depredations of Nature — but in reality driven by a psychopathic elite’s need for hierarchy. …

What covid was designed to do is illustrated by this graphic of norovirus incidence in England for the last 13 years:

 

 

Life on this planet has permanently changed for the worse. Even if we could wipe out covid in humans, there is a big disease reservoir in animals that have a similar physiology. So, we would continue to be reinfected from them. Some 40% of white-tailed deer in the U.S. now test positive for covid and are developing horrible skin conditions as a result.

Damaging the immune-system:

Initially the covid conspirators set out to produce a virus that resulted in a long-term burden of heart disease, in the manner of the Spanish flu of 1918 which was still causing heart attacks 50 years later in the 1960s. Then in the 1990s they decided to include HIV’s mode of action, which is hiding out in immuno-protected tissue while maintaining a long-term attack on the immune system. How’s that working out? We have one good data series and everything is on track. This is the lymphocyte profile of a gentleman with blood results six monthly since 2023:

 

 

Interestingly enough, he started with an inverted CD4/CD8 ratio. Normally the CD4 to CD8 ratio is about 2:1. Back in the early days of HIV before a viral load test was developed, the first clinical sign of a HIV infection was an inverted CD4/CD8 ratio (of less than 1:1) because HIV preferentially attacks CD4 cells. Covid preferentially attacks CD8 cells instead. In this instance, the subject’s CD4 results over the last three years looks like normal age-related decline. The CD8 profile is consistent with covid viral persistence. It is gratifying scientifically that the last result plots up on the decline trajectory established by the three results prior to that.

On that trajectory, he gets down to the lower bound of the normal CD8 range in August 2027. Once below that level, there will be an increased incidence of viral and bacterial infections, plus extra fungal infections and cancers, based on what was observed in HIV.

So far this subject has eschewed taking any antivirals to suppress covid virions. In so doing he is selflessly generating data on how a covid infection in immuno-protected tissue progresses and we should all be thankful for his sacrifice. …

Lowering the birth rate:

This is a graph of Taiwan’s births and deaths from 2016: …

 

 

On the established trend, Taiwan’s births will get to zero in seven years’ time. Taiwan’s demographic implosion is very real and very rapid.

The same would be true of Australia but we are not given the data. Australians are vaguely aware of our declining birth rate.

The Government’s explanation for the decline, via its propaganda arm the ABC, is that it is due to global warming. As a matter of urgency we need a study into anti-mullerian hormone (ovarian reserve) and covid viral load levels in a cohort of women aged 18 to 30. The results might provide the impetus to get something done.

Our status seeking, truth avoiding, DEI-ridden ruling class will never admit they made some awful decisions, and take steps to clean up their mess. Instead, they hide the evidence and casually go about their business as if nothing happened.

The Closure of the Internet: The Most Important Social Phenomenon of the Late 2010s. By Arctotherium.

A long but very important article. Naturally, being about left wing censorship, the media and academics don’t cover this story. The excerpts below leave a lot of fascinating material behind.

The Internet up to 2015 was almost open and free:

Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc).

Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. … All [institutions] believed in free and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.

In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times, all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.

Then the left closed it:

But in just a few years, every single major platform had created strict, but incredibly vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation/censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators and an entire new field of machine learning created from nothing.

The Internet went from a space for people without institutional backing to get their views out to one with regular purges and demonetizations of heterodox figures and those associated with them, encouraged by those very same non-tech organizations that formerly championed Internet freedom.

This was justified as a response to (massively overblown and mostly fictitious) Russian influence campaigns, and as fighting nebulous “hate,” the definition of which could be shifted at will to cover whatever views or ideas the organizers classifying it wanted it too and to exclude those they didn’t, and “misinformation.”

The closure of the Internet occurred in two distinct phases: 2015-2019 (associated with the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the so-called alt-right) and 2020-2022 (associated with the lockdowns and the 2020 election). …

The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed. …

Crucial, but the mainstream won’t discuss it:

The closure of the Internet is the most important social phenomenon of the late 2010s. Most young people live online. More than half of American adults under 50 say they use the Internet “almost constantly”. Globally, almost 70% of people are online, and the average Internet user spends almost seven hours a day there. Cyberspace is where most couples meet, where most friend groups hang out, and where most people have fun. There is no alternative5 for even semi-serious intellectual or hobbyist discussion outside of a handful of low-capacity and carefully gatekept institutions.

The word “censorship” does not go far enough; online went from almost completely open and free to a series of “closely monitored playpens,” like going from the American frontier to East Germany in just a few years. …

 

A perfectly slippery slope:

The closure of the Internet is one of the clearest examples of the slippery slope (or “no limiting principle”) in action; it only took a few years to go from deplatforming the fringe neo-Nazi website Stormfront to the entirely mainstream New York Post, from banning books on Holocaust denial to banning those opposing transgender maximalism, and from banning honestly discussing the effects of immigration in Europe to banning honestly discussing the lab leak hypothesis of COVID origins.

It is one thing to defend freedom of speech or freedom to create a website in the abstract and quite another to defend Andrew Anglin calling to exterminate the Jews. And even the most unpopular political or intellectual expression is easier to stomach than something like r/watchpeopledie. But the free speech maximalists were right. Once the conceptual and technical architecture for identifying, deplatforming, suppressing, and censoring “hate” and “disinformation” was built, the institutions defining these terms quickly extended them to as many inconvenient facts, ideas, and positions as they could. …

Massive scale:

It’s important to understand that for every Alex Jones getting deplatformed there were hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. …

One common tactic was using network analyses to map out who was collaborating with who. Anyone who interacted with a disfavored figure or account could then be suppressed in turn. This discouraged any sort of collaboration or interaction or even honest debate with heterodox figures from anyone else, and also allowed for the bundling of classical liberals, anti-SJW/anti-feminists, mainstream conservatives, white nationalists, Catholic Integralists, and men defending Google’s hiring policy into one big blob labeled “hate.” …

Since post-Millenial generations tend to be illiterate troglodytes strongly prefer video over text, video content served by algorithmic feed is their major source of information. Until TikTok, which has similar policies, YouTube was by far the largest source of this. This meant the elimination of anti-woke/anti-feminists from YouTube killed any sort of semi-popular intellectual opposition to the Great Awokening in under-30 cohorts. …

Books too:

Amazon’s market share of US book sales is roughly 50%, and its share of e-book sales is nearly 80% (and most of the remainder is on Google or Apple platforms, which moved in lockstep with Amazon). The closest a non-classified book can really come to being banned in the US is if Amazon removes it from their store. …

In 2017, Amazon began removing books for ideological reasons, starting with removing Holocaust revisionist and denial literature from its UK and US stores. In 2018 and 2019, Amazon began targeting specific right-wing authors …

As with other platforms, the chilling effect must have been many times larger than the direct effect. …

Amazon banned contradicting public health advice, and under this policy banned Alex Berenson’s Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns in June 2020, a lockdown-skeptical booklet, before reversing course after Elon Musk publicly objected. …

Non-lockdown related censorship also ramped up in 2020. Amazon banned most editions of Mein Kampf in March, along with many other Nazi writings of historical importance. Amazon then banned Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, a book arguing that the extreme rise in transgender self-identification in the 2010s, especially among teenage girls, was the product of social contagion …

In 2021, Amazon created a new “Do Not Promote” tag internally under pressure from the White House, which functioned similarly to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter’s shadowban system. Books tagged “Do Not Promote” were not removed from the store (an action which could be noticed and opposed, and requires some sort of policy justification); instead they were excluded from Amazon’s recommendation engine, deranked in search results so that they wouldn’t appear even with highly relevant keywords, and authors were prohibited from advertising. …

Google Search:

It is widely understood that Google search today is far inferior to what it was in the early 2010s. It’s easy to attribute this entirely to the rise of search engine optimization or the need to sell more ads, but some of this degradation was actually intentional. In 2017, Google began “Project Owl,” an effort to stop what Google termed “problematic searches.” This was explicitly distinguished from previous areas of Google focus, like preventing spam, adversarial optimization, piracy, and low-quality content.

Google began removing “problematic” autocompletes from search suggestions and from featured snippets. Most perniciously, Project Owl deliberately began downranking or even excluding more-relevant answers to unusual queries in favor of generic ones from “authoritative” sources. Authoritative sources meant Reddit, Wikipedia, governments and NGOs, and a handful of major institutional news organizations. This killed the 2014 Google experience of regularly getting hundreds or thousands of extremely-relevant results to niche queries from dedicated websites, blogs, and forums, in favor of the current experience of a few dozen generic pages of dubiously-relevant Wikipedia, Reddit, corporate media, or SEO slop. This extended the narrative control infrastructure to all websites that depended on search to reach new people, which was almost all of them except for a handful of giants. …

It started well before 2017. Google downranked Joanne’s climate skeptic website and other climate skeptic websites in 2010, resulting in a big drop in visibility and traffic. And this website was shunned by Google six days after the US election in 2020(can’t imagine why), resulting in a 98% drop in traffic.

Deplatforming websites:

However, the censors were not satisfied with merely obliterating open discourse on every major platform and making it impossible for curious people to find unorthodox ideas or communities of discussion. After all, crimethinkers could still make and host their own websites and if those sites were sufficiently well-known they might be able to survive being hidden by Google Search and suppressed on the major platforms. So the logical next step was to remove them from the Internet entirely. This was possible because several layers of the tech stack are oligopolies. The major players in this were Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in their capacity as cloud providers, Cloudflare in its capacity as a DDoS protection service, Apple and Google in their capacities as mobile app stores, payment processors like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe, and domain registrars like GoDaddy.

The first website to be deplatformed for non-criminal, explicitly ideological reasons was the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi commentary site. …

The next major site to be purged was Gab, a free speech alternative to Twitter founded in August 2016 by Andrew Torba in response to the early stages of the closure of the Internet. Unlike the Daily Stormer, which is an explicitly Neo-Nazi website, Gab is closer to a right-wing version of BlueSky, with the ideological valence coming from who was getting censored off Twitter in 2016 …

Parler, like Gab, was founded as an uncensored alternative to Twitter in 2018. Unlike Gab, whose user base tended to be more alt-right adjacent, Parler’s users were overwhelmingly mainstream MAGA Republicans. In January 2021, Apple removed Parler from the iOS App Store and Google did the same with the Google Play Store. Almost simultaneously, Amazon removed Parler from AWS, which took the site off the Internet. Payment processors (Stripe, American Express) and SaaS companies (Slack, needed to contact moderators, Twilio, needed for SMS, and Scylla, for internal databases) also cut ties. …

Forums and open-source:

In the 2010s, forum after forum and open-source project after open-source project went through a similar open to closed transition as the major platforms. Before this transition, open-source was a meritocratic field where one’s identity and politics did not matter, only their contributions. Likewise Internet forums not specifically devoted to politics were typically ideologically pluralist and apolitical. After, open-source became an explicitly anti-meritocratic space where adopting left-wing shibboleths was mandatory. Even silence could invite attacks.

Typically, the way this worked was through cliques of activists setting up a code of conduct for the forum or project, with an admin committee to define and enforce it, and then using their administrative powers to eliminate dissenters. This was noticed at least as early as November 2015 by Eric Raymond, in his blog post “Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs. …

This included removing contributors for non-leftist speech on other platforms that had nothing to do with the project at all, which had and has a chilling effect on everyone even tangentially involved in open source.

It is impossible to give even a rough play-by-play of this process, as there are literally tens of thousands of miscellaneous open-source projects and Internet forums, and I only have personal experience with a handful, but the result was the destruction of open discourse across the long tail of non-political forums and websites and the enforcement of strict speech and ideological control there as well. This was a disaster for any forum that might touch an ideological third rail.

I experienced it as a sudden collapse in the quality of discussion across several ideologically diverse and mostly apolitical technology, history, and fiction-focused forums around 2017, which eventually drove me to Twitter. Twitter was large enough that one could partly escape the censors, but at the cost of far lower average quality of discussion and strict format limits.

The individuals involved were and are very disproportionately a specific type: transwomen, usually anti-capitalist, often explicitly communist in addition to holding whatever the leftist omnicause beliefs du jour are. …

The strongest calls for censorship almost always came from the tiny handful of anticapitalist transwomen — usually only one or two per forum — present. This type of person portrays all political dissent as a direct physical threat to their personal safety and as such is committed to the totalitarian project of erasing all dissent everywhere. …

Comments sections:

Comments sections used to be a staple of news sites across the Internet, allowing readers to, for the first time, directly respond to formerly one-way broadcasts in the public square and discuss these broadcasts in public with other readers. By 2008, 75 of the top 100 most-circulated newspapers in the US had comment sections, and most of them were open so that anyone could participate. Like every other major locus of free discussion, this was ended with the closure of the Internet, with hundreds of sites either closing their comments sections or heavily restricting them from 2015 onwards, though a handful began earlier. …

NGO enforcers

NGOs can’t throw people in prison, so they operated through pressure campaigns, both in public in concert with media organizations, and behind the scenes, against private companies. These organizations used mafia tactics: censor the people and ideas we want you to censor, bringing people aligned with us into your organization and decision-making structure to do so in the process, or we’ll launch a PR campaign smearing you, with the threat of aligned governments and already-captured private institutions destroying your business to back said PR campaign up. Like the fact-checkers and disinformation experts, these enforcer organizations were and still are overwhelmingly tax-privileged nonprofit public trusts. …

Dumbing down the opposition to the globalists:

Once the closure of the Internet began, you were likely to be demonetized or suppressed or banned for making arguments or bringing up facts that embarrassed leftist orthodoxy online. There’s no point in putting serious effort into creating something or establishing a long-term stable Internet presence that could develop a reputation or be referenced later under such conditions.

This wrecked serious alternative discourse, rationally driving would-be dissidents away from reasoned and researched essays, debates, books, art, or original reporting. What survived under these conditions was burner ephemeral-by-design anonymous accounts posting low-effort memes, concentrated on Twitter, the best large platform for this. What’s worse, the chilling effect of banwaves or doxxing, people being deterred from ever posting or even thinking about certain subjects or ideas, is many times larger than the direct effect, which strangled the pipeline of new thinkers/writers/posters/artists into the dissident sphere.

Another effect was to drive heterodox discourse away from heavily-censored topics and towards safe ones, like seed oils or religious extremism. It is much safer to performatively support a Catholic integralist state than to bring up national IQ stats. …

The use of network analysis to attack — ban, demonetize, suppress, dox — anyone even interacting with known heterodox figures or ideas discouraged anyone whose top priority wasn’t heterodoxy from mentioning it or positively interacting with known dissidents. An example of this is the flight of the rationalist sphere from sex realism and hereditarianism, as rationalists knew the dissidents were broadly correct but wanted to mostly focus on other topics, and so eliminated most discussion of these things from their own circles.

This was bad for even non-partisan, non-political, and non-heterodox Internet discourse, since reality is one and all truths are connected, and there is inevitably intersection between most fields of discourse and crimethoughts. For example, development economics is incomplete without reference to IQ.

And it was a disaster for dissident thought, because it turned the “political sphere” into an intellectual ghetto, with little cross-pollination with other areas of discourse or good-faith criticism from non-dissidents. Some areas where the orthodoxy is wrong are easy, such as the existence of biological sex. But others are not. For example, a strong discussion on trade policy requires a high level of technical expertise to contribute. …

 

 

Woke happened, in part because critics had been muzzled:

The closure of the Internet may not have caused the Great Awokening, but it did prevent any serious opposition to it and allowed it to snowball.

Until 2015, you had a vibrant and popular anti-SJW scene on every major platform, and while this scene was not always the most rigorous it was leagues more intellectually sound than its opponents. Random amateurs could and regularly did publicly embarrass professional journalists, academics, and activists by simply being more correct than them. And if they were good enough at it, they could make a living doing so.

By 2017, this was impossible, and the only way forward was within an explicitly-political conservative institution, with the resulting strictures and lack of credibility.

Cancellations en masse:

And of course beyond the broader political and epistemic disaster, many individuals had their lives ruined. This is sometimes trivialized as “cancel culture,” but many people lost their careers, some lost access to the banking system, and a few even went to prison outside the US. Of course, this drove people with something to lose into hiding, which left the dissident space online, demand for which is impossible to eradicate as the status quo is not flawless, dominated by the desperate and by professionals with adverse incentives.

But all the censorship didn’t work, not really:

The closure of the Internet did not accomplish what its architects intended.

• It failed to restore the epistemic authority of the academia/media/NGO network.
• It did not succeed at its top priority of keeping Donald Trump out of office.
• It has not stopped the rise of right-wing politics in Europe and the Anglosphere.
• And it did not keep the population compliant with the ever-changing winds of public COVID policy (RFK Jr is in the White House).

The reason why it failed at all of these things is quite simple: all of them are downstream of people rationally responding to real-world issues, not bovine masses imbibing troughs of disinformation. To quote page 249 of Jacob Siegel’s The Information State:

“…By removing harmful ideas, the war on disinformation was supposed to rebuild people’s trust in their political system. Without mis- and malinformation polluting their minds, they would come to see the party and its affiliated institutions as legitimate and good. Instead, it accelerated a debilitating collapse of legitimacy across American society. …”

Curbing Russian influence was always more of an excuse than the real purpose, but it is worth pointing out that the closure of the Internet failed at that too. …  It did, however, make organic pro-Russian sentiment much more common on the domestic Western right. … Russia was also painted, by the censors themselves, as a paragon of conservative values to justify the crackdown on the right, which naturally made disinterested rightists, not knowing much about Russia beyond what the media told them, drift towards it. …

 

 

The closure of the Internet failed to “deradicalize” the emerging online right too. In fact, it backfired. The online right after the purges was more radical, more open to using violence, more anti-Semitic and more fascist. Why?

First, it’s important to understand that most dissidents had, and some still have, fairly mainstream political views. Steve Sailer, for example, has argued civilly and rationally for decades for immigration restriction and better selection of immigrants, fewer foreign wars, and less affirmative action. Most dissidents circa 2014 departed from the institutional consensus on a few particular issues — most commonly related to the histrionic and hyper-aggressive variant of feminism common in 2014 — but otherwise considered themselves liberals, libertarians, conservatives, moderates, or otherwise non-radicals. James Damore is an example: his only dissident view was that Google’s technical hiring process picked up more men than women because men were, on average (he took pains to point out that this did not necessarily apply to individuals) more interested in programming, and not because Google was sexist and needed special hiring tracks for women. Otherwise, he was a self-identifying liberal. …

And since they didn’t see themselves as dissidents, and so typically didn’t maintain opsec [operational security], they were easy targets and targeted first. With them gone, the radicals were able to take over the sphere.

And it’s not just a question of selection effects. The arrival of mass censorship vindicated the radicals.

Many of the purges were framed as fighting online Nazis and anti-Semites or misogynists, and actually getting persecuted in the name of and nominally on behalf of the Jews or of women changed things. It’s one thing to joke about Jews running the world, and it’s quite another to watch one of your friends get fired and debanked by a campaign organized by the ADL. Without these purges, many would have soon moved on to another meme. But once under fire, they dug in. Their views crystallized and hardened. An anonymous poster recalled that “we discovered National Socialism from first principles.” …

Because the hegemonic leftist institutional consensus is wrong about many easily-observable features of reality, it cannot actually shut down resistance to its authority. Reality bats last.

But it did succeed in obliterating the online intellectual ecosystem and with it any rigorous alternative or correction mechanism. So the closure of the Internet did not lead to the resurrection of the deeply flawed institutional consensus but a kind of epistemic wasteland of lowest-common-denominator populism and mind-numbingly stupid propaganda. Contrast Sean Last with Candace Owens.

Partisanship

Without beating around the bush: the closure of the Internet was first and foremost a left-wing project targeted at the right. …

The first great Internet debate of the 2000s [was] atheists/evolution vs Christians/creationism. As with the Great Awokening in the 2010s, both tech and academia were overwhelmingly on one side (atheism/evolution). But unlike in the 2010s there was no mass censorship or suppression. Creationists could and did take advantage of the fall of academic and media gatekeepers to make their arguments at length in the public square online, with both sides building great batteries of talking points …, writing books and blogs, and debating each other, especially on Reddit and YouTube. To the extent mass debates in the public sphere can really be ended, atheism/evolution won eventually, but it won through evidence and argument. …

The left moved further left:

The closure of the Internet is largely a story of internal change within the left, which went from, at least rhetorically, largely in favor of free speech and open discourse to viscerally hostile. Why? …

By 2014, online radical leftists had shed any residual libertarianism and were fully onboard with censorship on virtually every issue, including transgenderism, which almost no one outside of fringe activist circles had even heard of.

But until 2015, the mainstream left (“liberals”), the left of the New York Times and the Democratic Party and the State Department and HR and Google, paid little attention to this argument. Why did this change?

It is tempting to attribute this to broad trends, like the Western left becoming more female and nonwhite, both groups relatively hostile towards freedom of speech, or to the Great Awokening, beginning in 2013, when the left as a whole became much more intense and hysterical …

But the closure of the Internet is too directly tied to three specific events:

1. the mass migration into Europe in 2015 and corresponding domestic opposition,
2. Brexit in 2016, and
3. the election of Donald Trump later that same year …

So I think the answer is simpler: before 2015, mainstream leftists believed an open Internet benefitted them and after 2015 leftists realized an open Internet hurt them.

Until 2015 leftists thought they were factually correct and their opponents ignorant and backwards, and so open discourse favored them, and were vindicated in the creationism vs evolution debates. They also did not understand just how strongly they gatekept institutional discourse in the media and in academia, seeing it as a conservative myth (“reality has a liberal bias”) and themselves as underdogs. Underdogs, of course, benefit from free and open discourse because it’s the powerful who set the rules (by definition).

After 2015, leftists understood at some level they were factually wrong (hence, for example, fines for referencing Afghan rape statistics in Europe) and that Mencius Moldbug’s view, that they were institutionally hegemonic and the overwhelmingly dominant party in the West, was correct. …

 

 

Most Republican officials and the broader Republican institutional sphere were and are appalled by the online right and were happy to see it destroyed. Institutional conservatives did not understand that the NGO/academia/media blob did not and does not particularly distinguish them from the online right, seeing both as purveyors of “hate,” “disinformation,” “misogyny,” “racism” and other thoughtcrimes, and that as soon as the latter were gone they would be next. Thus the GOP allowed their domestic opponents to thoroughly purge the Internet of meaningful opposition almost without a fight.

This only changed in 2020, when the censors came for mainstream right-wing media outlets like the New York Post, any questioning of public health dogma around the origins of COVID and the lockdowns, and anodyne books arguing against the transgender movement, which did not even meaningfully exist in 2014, plus the obvious, over-the-top partisan interference in the 2020 election and near-complete deplatforming of Donald Trump.

Public vs private:

The most common response to complaints about every major Internet platform going from havens of open discourse to Stalinesque extirpation of wrongthink in five years is that opposition is inherently illegitimate because the platforms doing the purging were privately owned and operated, not governments, and so have the right to moderate however they see fit. The First Amendment only applies to the (US) government, not private companies, so not only are appeals to freedom of speech are invalid, but any sort of action to fight this closure is itself a violation of the right of these platforms to freedom of speech.

The easy retort here is that governments were involved. Even setting aside para-statal organizations funded and empowered by formal states, formal state involvement in the closure of the Internet was extensive at every step of the way, from the British government ad boycott that kicked off YouTube’s closure to Germany’s NetzDG to years of regulatory threats from the EU to backroom channels to the US security state. …

The British government was and is probably the most important formal state pushing the closure of the Internet. …

 

 

Outside of China, Australia likely has the most well-developed Internet control infrastructure in the world and is the world’s leader in the formal, legal censorship of the Internet. …

The closure of the Internet was not merely private actors autonomously and independently choosing mass censorship. It was full of state involvement and direction. Even when platforms appeared to be censoring of their own accord, this was at least partly downstream of state harassment of executives, particularly for Facebook, driven by internal constituencies of censors hired to comply with regulations, or “voluntary” commitments extorted with the threat of fines.

In the 19th century liberal worldview, the major threat to human freedom was the formal state and state-granted monopolies. If, for example, the owner of an auto company demanded their employees eat American food rather than foreign ethnic cuisine, that was their prerogative; would-be employees could always work for someone else instead. …

But … 21st century America … is full of non-formal-state chokepoints. Some examples of these chokepoints are governing bodies of academic fields, such as the American Psychological Association, accreditation boards for new schools, such as the American Bar Association, and the “Big Three” oligopoly of Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street, which collectively exercise enormous power (more than 25% of the S&P 500) over capital allocation nominally on behalf of millions of small owners, who are organizationally incapable of exercising authority over them. When these chokepoints are captured and weaponized, there is no alternative individuals can turn to, and so private restriction of freedom is very much possible in a way it wasn’t in 1800.

For the closure of the Internet, the most important chokepoints by far were the natural monopolies created by tech network effects. …

State spending is around 40% of GDP in the US, higher elsewhere in the West, and private economic activity and organizations intensively regulated and heavily taxed (which means tax-exempt organizations can be fairly termed privileged).

Especially notable is Civil Rights rulemaking and jurisprudence, which effectively criminalizes right-wing speech in domains adjacent to protected classes in all large institutions via the hostile environment doctrine; this means, whatever the composition of their customers and employees, large institutions are predictably somewhere between silent and very left-wing on these issues. This is very similar to how the People’s Republic of China controls speech; the state does very little censoring itself but instead imposes liability on private platforms.

Western private institutions whose composition is closely controlled by the state via tight regulation on hiring and promotion, and which often depend on the state as customer or for funding, should not be thought of as wholly separate from the state, any more than one should see Huawei as independent of the Chinese government.

There is little practical difference between a handful of naturally-monopolistic tech platforms coordinating with tax-privileged and state-funded NGOs to shut down dissent and a formal government list of “disinformation” to be censored. In practice, the closure of the Internet involved — and continues to involve — both, but even if every step had scrupulously obeyed the letter of the First Amendment it would not matter.

2022:

2022 was the local maximum of the closure of the Internet, when the information control system was at its peak. This begs the question: why did it stop getting worse after seven years of uninterrupted intensification? There are several reasons.

1. First, the end of the lockdowns in February/March 2022 removed most of the moral urgency that had surrounded COVID. …
2. Second, Donald Trump was out of office and seemed more likely destined for prison than the White House.
3. Third, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and fired most of its staff. By showing it was possible to defy the censorship network, he triggered a preference cascade among tech elites….
4. Fourth, the Republican Party began mobilizing against the closure of the Internet for the first time in 2021, in direct response to the sharp escalation of censorship and targeting of mainstream Republican figures, institutions, and ideas, rather than just heterodox and dissident ones, in 2020. This can be seen with the rise of censorship and free speech as themes in fundraising emails. …

Elon’s purchase had another salutary effect. The release of the Twitter Files proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the FBI was directly involved in censoring mainstream Republicans on Twitter and other social media platforms. …

With all that said, none of the infrastructure built 2015-2022 was dismantled outside of Twitter/X. The pre-2015 status quo of the Internet, where free speech and level playing fields were to be expected, was not restored. We still live in the world of shadowbans and algorithmic suppression and purges for “hate speech,” and at any point the machine can be revved back into full gear. …

Most born in the 21st century have never really known a free Internet, and expect gatekeeping, sanitization, and silencing as a matter of course….

Large language models:

A single flagship model may answer a trillion queries over its lifetime, many orders of magnitude more than any person could, and what’s more, almost all LLMs share a very similar default … worldview. They take similar stances on political issues or values, and they defer to the same sources and organizations and conceptual frames. Even when LLMs hedge and provide sound reasoning and evidence for their views, their responses are silently shaped by this worldview and their values. …

The default worldview of most LLMs is that of 2018 Reddit or Wikipedia, or Google Search post-Project Owl. This is not intrinsic to the LLM architecture. LLMs trained on different datasets (Talkie) or deliberately post-trained to take a different view (Grok) have different default worldviews.

It is a function of the text these models are trained on and, because of the exponential rise in publicly-available data over time, most of the organic human text (as opposed to synthetic data) these models are trained on is very recent. This means the default worldview of most LLMs is one created by the closure of the Internet, when intelligent or popular heterodoxy meant banning, suppression, or demonetization.

LLMs defaulting to specific worldviews is not equivalent to the massive censorship and narrative control campaign that closed the Internet; no human is inherently prevented from expressing alternative views or accessing alternative information. But I do expect it to have a similar effect on society. People will use LLMs for research and defer to their conclusions and analyses. Most of the time, they will be right to do so, and this habit will become ingrained. Through these mechanisms, the default LLM worldview is being baked into, and will continue being baked into, the human noosphere. Where this worldview is morally wrong or factually false or simply wildly misleading, it will become ever-harder to learn and articulate why.

LLMs also enable deanonymization at scale. Not only do LLMs have truesight, and thus the ability to identify authors from even quite small fragments of text if they have a corpus under their own name (and even if they don’t, they are scarily good at inferring author characteristics from the text they produce), but they can also automate the grunt work of collating vast reams of public data about an online personality, across many platforms and years or decades, to identify them. …

Dumbed-down online:

There have been countless laments of the decline of intellectual discourse on the Internet. Some attribute it to the natural monopolies and economies of scale of Web 2.0, some to the expansion of the Internet beyond overwhelmingly Western intelligent and often technical users, to normal people and non-Westerners, and some to the inferiority of younger generations. Almost none of them point to the successful society-wide campaign to censor and police the Internet covering all major platforms and the means to find things outside of them. Few seem to even realize this happened.

That the closure of the Internet happened and its approximate scope should be common knowledge, and there needs to be a convenient name and narrative for it so that it sticks in people’s heads. Censorship, suppression, and heavy-handed political manipulation and moderation are the norm today, and many seem to have forgotten that it was ever otherwise. …

A professional historian could spend their entire career chronicling it. McCarthyism is taught in schools, and the closure of the Internet is orders of magnitude larger than McCarthyism ever was.

So much history of the last 10 years packed into one cohesive argument. Check it all out online.

Communism vs individualism. By Eric Weinstein.

Those of us bitterly opposed to communism fall into two different groups.

A) Those who argue that it must be abandoned because it has show us that it doesn’t work.

B) Those of us that are so bitterly opposed to collectivism applied to dissenting individuals that we are relieved that it cannotwork. A happy accident. Those who don’t care if it couldbe made to work: we’d continue to fight it. Working or not working is irrelevant. It’s just bad. Period. The end.

If Communism could actually be shown to deliver stable high levels of growth and innovation, broadly distributed, with low inequality,
I believe I would still fight it to my dying breath.

My opposition to communism has little to nothing to do with the fact that it doesn’t work as an economic system. So, it’s merely a relief that it doesn’t work. A convenience for its opposition.

Communism and collectivism are intrinsically soul killing for people who are hyper-individualistic. So let’s stop hiding behind the fact that they don’t work as economic or governance systems.

Some of us who aren’t the biggest fans of naked capitalism red of tooth and claw, hate communism not because we think capitalism is intrinsically fair. It isn’t. We oppose it because communism hunts the individual.

For us, it’s not communism vs capitalism. That is a businessman’s argument. Instead, it’s communism vs individualism for me. Show me a system that fights harder to let a dissenting individual thrive more than brutal market capitalism (which also barely works), and I am all ears.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Arguments [for communism] are lacking and, therefore, there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp and asylums for the insane with forced confinement.

The real political spectrum is collectivism (left) to individualism (right). A spectrum, not a horseshoe or a circle. Don’t let that communist propaganda that the Nazis were left-wing fool you — the Nazis were collectivists and hated individualism, just like the other socialists.

 

Polish exceptionalism. By Casey Krol.

Please pray for Poland.

Recent reports show that due to its lack of diversity, the streets are so clean and safe that women and children can still walk alone at night.

Devastating news. How will they survive?

Please pray for Poland.

Recent reports show that due to its lack of diversity, the streets are so clean and safe that women and children can still walk alone at night.

Devastating news. How will they survive? pic.twitter.com/R0sJfvCRYP

— Casey Krol (@CaseyKrol) August 9, 2026

Like being in a time machine

 

Why don’t third worlders flock to Poland? This might be a big clue:

Poland doesn’t have welfare for life.

The result? A fast-growing economy, almost no unemployment, fast-growing wages and a very low crime rate.

Maybe paying people for doing nothing is not the right thing for society after all?

Anti-cop, anti-ICE violence. By Athena Thorne at PJ Media.

Life is different for the families of law enforcement officers. Sure, you worry about your loved one when he or she is on the job, but the threat doesn’t end simply because the workday is over. Vengeful sociopaths and obsessive crazy people don’t stop hating when the shift ends.

On more than one occasion, when we took our young children out, my husband would quietly utter the codeword — “client” — and I knew to keep walking up the street with the kids as if we had nothing to do with him. When we went to a restaurant, I always noted where the back door was for those occasions I had to hustle the kids out to the car and leave my husband to settle the bill and meet us, because someone who wished him ill had come in. The last thing we wanted was for a criminal enemy to take note of our faces.

And then there were the magical years of the George Floyd movement, when my husband would call out of the blue some days, just to check I knew where the pistol was. That meant there was new intel that activists were ratcheting up their anti-cop pressure campaign by targeting cops’ homes.

And this is just what normal, garden-variety cops and their families deal with. Now multiply that by the intense funding and activism of the international organizations inundating Western countries with third-world foreigners to destabilize and destroy them. Finally, imagine all that militant hate, force, and resources brought to bear on a handful of individual people who happen to be patriotic immigration officers.

Now you understand why U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and other federal immigration law enforcement agents hide their identities when they’re working. …

Intimidating officers from doing their jobs with the unspoken threat that one of the left’s unstable assassins will follow them home is part and parcel of its action plan to suppress enforcement of duly passed laws and fill the country with culturally dissonant illegal immigrants.

Naturally the left is on the side of the immigrants, against deportation, and encourages violence against ICE officers and cops:

Is Diversity Really Our Strength? By Celina 101.

Social trust:

Social trust is the expectation that strangers will generally behave decently. That the person you have never met will return your wallet, honour the queue, pay their taxes and not vandalise your beautiful city.

Sociologists distinguish it from particularised trust in family and friends, and from confidence in institutions like courts or parliaments.

The related concept of social capital, popularised by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, refers to the networks, norms and reciprocity that make collective life possible, for example the neighbourhood watch, the volunteer fire brigade and the school fete.

High-trust societies can enforce their contracts more cheaply, sustain generous welfare states with a lot less fraud, run governments with less corruption and cronyism, and endure crises with less panic. Economists Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer showed in the 1990s that trust predicts economic growth across countries.

Trust is also simply what a good life in a good neighbourhood feels like from the inside: children playing outside, doors left unlocked, favours asked and returned. When it erodes, people start to withdraw from society.

Diversity, not inequality, reduces trust — as shown by Australia:

The standard leftist/progressive response to declining community life is that inequality, not diversity, is the main culprit. I can understand why this sounds believable, especially in America as racial divisions and American income gaps map onto each other so closely that statistical models struggle to tell them apart.

Australia is a less muddied example, which is what makes the economist (now federal minister) Andrew Leigh’s 2006 study very valuable. … He found things like education raising trust, long commutes lowering it and affluent neighbourhoods being more trusting. But two of his finding really stand out. First, … Leigh found no apparent relationship between neighbourhood income inequality and trust in Australia. Second, both ethnic and linguistic diversity were associated with lower trust.

Linguistic diversity depressed localised trust for the native-born and immigrants alike, and depressed generalised trust among immigrants. … Both linguistic and ethnic diversity were associated with substantially lower levels of social trust. …

And Denmark:

Peter Thisted Dinesen and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov … showed that ethnic diversity in the micro-context was negatively associated with social trust, and the association weakened and then vanished as the geographical unit grew. The people most exposed to diversity in their daily residential environment reported the least trust; measured at the municipal level.… Denmark’s aggregate serenity coexists with a measurable trust penalty for those who actually live amid diversity. …

And Sweden:

Analysing Swedish survey and demographic data from 1986 to 2002, Eger found that people living in areas with larger foreign-born populations tended to express less support for government welfare spending, even after accounting for income, education, employment and political ideology. Increasing ethnic diversity, in other words, was associated not only with lower interpersonal trust but with a reduced willingness to sustain the redistributive institutions for which the Nordic countries are famous. …

The western ruling class tend to live in white enclaves:

Taken together, the Danish and Swedish evidence suggests that attitudes towards immigration track exposure to it. That is perhaps why the professional and academic classes who most confidently celebrate diversity are disproportionately likely, by virtue of income and the housing, to not experience the horribly negative effects of it. …

My surprised face is almost worn out:

People, it seems, find it easier to act collectively with people like themselves. …

Costa and Kahn’s own most arresting evidence comes from the nineteenth century. Using records of Union Army companies in the American Civil War, they examined what predicted whether soldiers deserted. Companies whose men were more alike, in birthplace, occupation and age, held together; more diverse companies bled deserters. Men facing identical dangers, under identical discipline, for an identical cause, were measurably more willing to risk death alongside men who resembled them.

It seems as if the raw material of solidarity is similarity, and asking human beings to sacrifice for a group is easier when they recognise themselves in it. …

Putnam’s discovery:

The intellectual centrepiece of this literature remains Robert Putnam’s 2007 paper “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” …

Putnam expected, and by his own account hoped, to vindicate one of two established theories. Contact theory predicts that diversity breeds familiarity and tolerance, conflict theory predicts that diversity sharpens in-group loyalty and out-group suspicion, trust within your group rises as trust across groups falls. Yet, he found neither. He found something, as a self-described liberal that he feared, in more diverse communities, trust fell across the board, in neighbours of other races and in one’s own.

Diversity did not turn people against each other so much as away from everyone. Residents of high-diversity areas reported less confidence in local government and leaders, lower rates of voter registration, less volunteering and charitable giving, less participation in community projects, fewer close friends and confidants, lower expectations that others would cooperate, lower reported happiness and quality of life, and more time in front of the television. His summary was that people in diverse areas “hunker down,” pulling in, as he put it, like a turtle.

In Putmans’ own words:

“Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. Note that this pattern encompasses attitudes and behavior, bridging and bonding social capital, public and private connections. Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us”

So how do you make your society worse? Import lots of people from different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic groups — and then say it’s fine not to assimilate, because we’ve got multiculturalism.

Two main points make this finding really hard even for a leftist to dismiss. The first is its scale and robustness within the dataset: the associations survived controls for poverty, crime, age, mobility and much else. The second is the author. Putnam is no immigration restrictionist … Putman published these results even though they cut against his own left-wing sympathies.

Nevertheless, a finding of this magnitude, from the most celebrated social scientist of his generation, produced no detectable adjustment in how any major Western party talks about diversity. The slogan sailed on untouched by reality. …

US welfare is lower because the country is (was?) less homogeneous:

Why does the United States, richer than Europe for a century, have so much stingier a welfare state? …

Support for redistribution is consistently lower where the poor are perceived as belonging to a different group from the median taxpayer. In their accounting, America’s racial divisions explain a large share, their estimates suggest roughly half, of the transatlantic gap in social spending, with institutions carrying most of the rest. Solidarity, has always been easiest to sell as solidarity with people like us. European welfare states were built by ethnically compact nations in the mid-twentieth century, so the uncomfortable question now is what happens to their political foundations as those nations diversify …

Doesn’t work, there will be trouble:

A political project that wants simultaneously high immigration, a generous welfare state and a high-trust society is betting that it can keep three balls in the air that the research strongly suggests interfere with one another. …

Diversity is a horrible destiny:

Return, finally, to the mantra at the beginning. “Diversity is our strength” which functions in the same way as “the science is settled”: it is a device for ending the conversation before it can begin. Yet the research examined here, much of it conducted by left-wing academics across the United States, Australia, Denmark, France, Sweden and Britain, thoroughly demolishes the slogan.

Even when academics and politicians insist on emphasising the supposed benefits of diversity, we should remember the extreme trade-off they are imposing on us: measurable declines in local trust, civic participation and social solidarity, alongside rising crime and disorder.

These costs fall most heavily where demographic change is fastest and common identity is weakest. They are borne by the diverse neighbourhoods themselves, not by the affluent, mostly homogeneous suburbs in which the slogan is most confidently said.

The research all points towards something that should be obvious to anyone with open eyes and a functioning brain: trust does not arise from difference. It grows from what people hold in common, race, ethnicity, language, culture, habits, mutual obligations and, above all, a shared understanding of who “we” are.

Countries were a great solution, keeping the peace and making for happy, harmonious societies by having each cultural, linguistic and ethnic group in its own country. So simple a child could understand. But the globalists thought they knew better.

 

Leftists and third worlders join forces to pillage western civilization. By Brandon Smith.

Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, has been enthusiastically promoting open border policies since 2018. The main reason the migrants all flooded into Ceuta at the same time was because Spain’s supreme court ruled only days before that migrants arriving by sea could not be immediately deported.

It’s a scene we have witnessed over and over again in the past several years. The multiculturalists set the wheels in motion for a migrant rush into Europe then pretend to be shocked when it happens. …

The only reason European elites took any opposition to the incident in Ceuta was because the migrants immediately started looting, burning and attacking locals the second they set foot on the beaches. If the barbarian horde had behaved themselves for a couple weeks, journalists and politicians would have called it a humanitarian crisis and lavished the migrants with praise for their “bravery.” …

An all-white town in South Africa:

I was recently watching Sargon of Akkad’s latest expose on a small town in South Africa called Orania. It’s an all white town built by Afrikanns in the middle of nowhere in order to protect themselves from the exceedingly violent black population; a population organized around the ideology of race communism. …

 

The concept of cultural separation is, I believe, the key to almost every problem we are facing in modern times. It may very well be the key to understanding every conflict since human history began. ….

A community like Orania would not be controversial at all if it was made up of black isolationists, or Asians, or Hispanics, etc. In fact, it would be celebrated. It is treated as radioactive by the media specifically because the town was created by white people FOR white people.

Their goal? To preserve their western principles and heritage and, most of all, to protect themselves from pillaging tribes and communists.

Orania looks much like any smaller rural town in America, with clean streets, quiet parks, well maintained infrastructure, self sufficient utilities and farms, safe neighborhoods and kids playing outside without fear.

The interesting thing is the reactions to the town by the YouTubers who visit with the expectation of discovering a virulent, racist, hate-fest. What they find instead is a community that functions far better than any other place in South Africa, run by white western people who just want to be left alone to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

There are two common reactions to Orania:

1) Black influencers, surprised by the peace and relative tranquility of the town, ask “why can’t black people have something like this…?”

2) South African politicians and thought leaders ask “How can we take away what these people have built and keep it for ourselves…?”

The answer to both questions is uncomfortable for most westerners in the US and Europe to think about, but it is a fact we desperately need to consider and embrace. They can’t copy Orania because they are socially and in some cases genetically incapable (the average IQ of Africans is 70). They can’t steal it for themselves because as soon as they take it over, the town will turn to shit and collapse.

Pillagers:

In Ceuta, over 60,000 migrants overran the local infrastructure and demanded access to provisions, jobs, housing and the ability to travel deeper into Europe. When asked why they came to Spanish territory, they all tended to say the same thing: “We want more money and a better life.” They came to Europe because they can’t build a prosperous society on their own. Their pillager mentality drives them to latch onto the west, but as they do this they turn the west into the third world. …

If we come to terms with the undeniable existence of the parasite or pillager class, everything becomes clear. The third world as we know it today is rooted in pillager culture, but this ideal is not limited to brown people. Within the west we also have white socialists and communists, useless people who have devised an entire philosophy to justify stealing from producers.

As far as the third world is concerned, the west has been dealing with such people for centuries. We were almost destroyed by them during the Muslim invasions into the Holy Roman Empire from the 7th Century to the 10th Century, and we had to continue to hold them back for several centuries after. …

Solutions anyone?

It’s not a coincidence that liberalism has worked tirelessly to demonize colonization as one of the “great evils” of history. They hate it because it works; it made the west far more safe.

So, we tried global subsidization instead. In other words, western governments paid out billions of dollars (perhaps trillions) in subsidies to third world countries in order to keep them happy enough that they would stop trying to invade us. This has not worked for a number of reasons.

Most of all, migrants cannot help themselves. They will never be self reliant and independent producers, so they are compelled by their survival imperatives and their tribal instincts to plunder whenever an opportunity arises. The political left understands this dynamic and they stage opportunities so they can use migrants as biological weapons to tear down the west.

Third worlders and leftists unite:

The reason third worlders and leftists seem to be joining forces (through Democratic Socialists and other organizations) is because they ARE joining forces. Conservatives will often point out the hypocrisy of progressives who claim to be champions of individual rights for women and “marginalized” groups. Meanwhile they aggressively defend the invasion of people who oppress those same groups. …

Leftists know exactly what they’re doing, because Marxists/Socialists/Communists and third worlders are the same. Both tribes are pillager tribes; both tribes are parasitic. They all want the same thing, which is to feed like vampires on the resources of producers. They are joining forces because parasites tend to work together. One parasite infection can weaken a host’s immune system, which indirectly helps other parasites move in and thrive. At least, until the host is dead. …

They are incapable of functioning in any merit based system, even one that is highly prosperous, because they are predisposed to feel as if they’re entitled to more. They are always going to be jealous of people who have more. …

There is no reasoning with them. There is no bargaining or compromise that will satisfy them. The only solution is for producers to separate completely, or, conquer the pillagers and force them to stop pillaging. Anything else would be a pointless half-measure.

Jealousy is one of the seven deadly sins. But no one educated by the left has even heard of the “deadly sins.”

hat-tip Phil C.

“We’re Here To Destroy The White Race”: Democratic Socialist Of America Hero Declares War On West. By ZeroHedge.

Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has emerged as an increasingly visible, if unofficial, spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America’s rapidly expanding political action network. He campaigned for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

From an electoral-risk perspective, Piker is becoming a liability for Democrats. His far-left, anti-American rhetoric provides Republicans with what we called “a gift” last week. Even Hillary Clinton warned on Friday that the GOP’s “anti-communist messaging is very effective.”

The Democratic Party’s failure to formally denounce Piker and distance itself from his agenda.

This is who the DSA and todays’ Democrats are pal-ing around with:

Hasan Piker says he wants to FLOOD illegals into the United States so they can “f*ck your sisters and daughters” to “destroy the white race” …

“We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna f*ck your sisters and then your daughters.”

“We’re here to destroy the White race, b*tch.”

Hasan Piker says he wants to FLOOD illegals into the United States so they can “f*ck your sisters and daughters” to “destroy the white race”

I am demanding the Democratic Party voice PUBLICLY that they denounce Hasan Piker’s comments.

If they don’t, let this post be proof…

— Jack (@jackunheard) August 7, 2026

 

Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:

“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”

Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:

“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”

Democrats are campaigning with him. pic.twitter.com/YiZxGgRkgc

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 9, 2026

 

Hasan Piker, sitting at a table with an LGBTQ+ flag, says: “Overall, my favorite flag is Hezbollah.”

Hasan Piker, sitting at a table with an LGBTQ+ flag, says: “Overall, my favorite flag is Hezbollah.”

He’s actively campaigning with Democrat senate and gubernatorial candidates. pic.twitter.com/9QrtKqMKnl

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) August 4, 2026

 

Hasan Piker: “I don’t have any sort of patriotism in my heart for America.”

This is the same guy who praises Communist China every chance he gets, and he’s now the face Bernie, AOC, and El-Sayed want fronting the Democrat Party. Scary stuff.

Hasan Piker: “I don’t have any sort of patriotism in my heart for America.”

This is the same guy who praises Communist China every chance he gets, and he’s now the face Bernie, AOC, and El-Sayed want fronting the Democrat Party. Scary stuff. 😳 pic.twitter.com/Dr4enTuIhC

— 🇺🇸 David J. Urban 🇺🇸 (@DavidJUrban) August 7, 2026

 

Hasan Piker quotes:

✅ America deserved 9/11

✅ Go back to Auschwitz

✅ Let the streets run red with capitalist blood

✅ Racist comments about blacks and Asians

✅ Supports China, Russia, Cuba

✅ Supports Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis

 

Chaser:

Foreign-born voters in NYC:
🔵 Zohran Mamdani: 62% (+38)
🔴 Andrew Cuomo: 24%

Arab voters in Michigan:
🔵 Abdul El-Sayed: 94% (+88)
🔴 Haley Stevens: 6%

Import the 3rd world, elect the 3rd world.

 

hat-tip Stephen Neil

The WNBA’s trans bluff just got called. By David Manney at PJ Media. The trans nonsense is now being tested in women’s basketball in the US.

Enes Kanter Freedom , … former NBA center and third overall pick in the 2011 NBA Draft, has declared himself eligible for the 2027 WNBA Draft. …

“I meet every requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA,” Freedom stated in a social media post …

Freedom is 34. The 6-foot-10, 250-pound former center played 11 seasons in the NBA, averaging 11.2 points and 7.8 rebounds. Thus, he was a dominant player in the men’s league. He retired from the NBA three years ago.

 

In the aftermath of Sophie Cuningham making a definitive stance that women’s sports should remain female, many coaches and players have opened up the floodgates for men in their league. Golden State Valkyries forward Gabby Willliams even said, “I would welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team any time.” Throughout this whole saga, the WNBA has remained silent about protecting fairness in their league, so Freedom is putting their feet to the fire in a hilarious way. …

His point is as subtle as a belch: If sex can bend around self-identification when sports organizations want inclusion, he wants the WNBA to explain where the line sits.

Here’s where the joke becomes uncomfortable for the league. The 2026 collective bargaining agreement contains one wonderfully short sentence: “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” …

The issue is a league culture that has spent years celebrating inclusion while becoming very nervous when somebody asks where inclusion ends. …

Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve wore a “Trans Kids Belong” shirt days after Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham publicly defended keeping female sports for female athletes. …

It’s been quite a week for women’s basketball. Clay Travis first offered $10 million for the defending champion Las Vegas Aces to play a boys’ high school state championship of his choosing. The league hasn’t exactly rushed to accept.

Then Freedom arrives with an even more uncomfortable challenge: apply your philosophy to somebody who could make the consequences visible on the scoreboard. …

Could Freedom sue if the WNBA rejected him? He could certainly try. Federal law protects workers from discrimination based on transgender status, but winning such a case would be another question.

Fox News:

The WNBA has also undoubtedly asked for this. Now is the time for them to put their money where their mouth is. If you’re really so “inclusive,” you should have no problem with this.

If he identifies as a woman, who are they to tell him who he is? Who are they to tell him if this is genuine or not? This is a great way to put their feet to the fire. It has the opportunity to show that all of this “trans acceptance” talk is just virtue signaling.

“I am definitely not here to mock, make fun of, or disrespect any community or personal choices,” Freedom added. “I’m simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone – the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.”

Damned either way:

This whole situation will be hilarious to witness. If the league allows Freedom to be eligible, irrationally sticking to their anti-women progressive politics, but no team drafts Freedom in April 2027, it could be seen as discrimination. If they say their sport is for females only, they run into the fury of their liberal foundation, which many of their fans, players, and coaches hold to.

This’ll be a great way to expose the hypocrisy or idiocy of the progressive movement ingrained in the league.

Your move, WNBA.

Another ex-NBA player says he is now a woman as he declares for the WNBA Draft. By Max Winters at The Daily Mail.

Royce White has become the second former NBA player to declare for next year’s WNBA Draft amid the division surrounding transgender inclusion in sports. …

White, who is a candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Minnesota, told Fox News Digital that he is now transgender and wants to join the likes of Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham on the court next season.

‘I’m transgender. I’m a woman. I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball, so I’ll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well,’ he said.”I think I’d be unstoppable.’ …

White, a former first-round draft pick who only played three games in the NBA for the Sacramento Kings, insisted that only the WNBA releasing ‘a definitive statement about guys with a pair of b**** playing in the Women’s Association’ could stop him.

‘I don’t want to be discriminated against,’ he continued. ‘I want fair treatment. I’m a young black, hopefully United States Senator, that would like a fair chance to participate as a sometimes-identifying-as-a-transgender-woman athlete.’

He also vowed to wear a wig while he’s playing and said WNBA players will have ‘nightmares… and they should’ about him potentially competing against them.

Stay tuned. I reckon the tide has turned and the WNBA will retreat from allowing trans players.