The South Africanization of California and the left’s obsession with race

The South Africanization of California and the left’s obsession with race. By Christopher Rufo.

Race-based politics isn’t working for South Africa:

After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. …

South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights, and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational, and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools, and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts, and assessed the success of initiatives.

Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. South Africa now struggles — literally — to keep the lights on. Power outages are so common that many middle-class families buy generators. Suburban homes regularly feature tall security gates and electric fences to fend off violent thugs. …

Corruption is rampant. South Africa’s race-based procurement model shows “systemic signs of corruption and political interference,” according to the World Bank and the OECD. President Cyril Ramaphosa boasts an estimated net worth in the hundreds of millions as of 2015. Former president Jacob Zuma has faced a litany of corruption, fraud, racketeering, and money-laundering allegations.

Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.

But California is giving it a try anyway:

Three decades later, the South Africa model is being replicated in an unlikely place: California. The state’s leaders have increasingly embraced a radical, race-based vision of politics that echoes South Africa’s post-apartheid experiment in racialized government. …

During the administration of Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s racialist project has kicked into high gear. Race is becoming an organizing principle of public policy, shaping everything from education and data collection to bureaucratic decision-making and wealth redistribution.

South Africa sorted its citizens by race to deny rights, and now California does the same to distribute benefits. The road between Pretoria and Sacramento is shorter than you would think. …

Newsom ordered state agencies to create or update their strategic plans to “more effectively advance equity.” When agencies “identified disparities,” the governor instructed them to respond by changing their organizational “mission, vision, goals,” and more.

What this meant, in practice, was that California would increasingly conduct government business on the basis of race. The order encouraged bureaucrats to adopt “inclusive practices,” help “disadvantaged business enterprises” access federal infrastructure dollars, and administer state programs through a racial equity lens. In other words, the executive order effectively enshrined the principle that California’s government would prioritize citizens based on the color of their skin.

Newsom’s order echoed talking points from post-apartheid South Africa. In California, the governor emphasized the need to “address[] disparities for historically underserved and marginalized communities.” In South Africa, the government sought to “remove discriminatory barriers of the apartheid past.” Both created a permanent bureaucracy devoted to the racial transformation of society ...

It is not an exaggeration to say that California’s public institutions — from state government down to school classrooms — have been infected by racialist ideology. …

Institution after institution, agency after agency, the effective message is the same: the United States of America is rotten with racism, white people are oppressors, the government must equalize outcomes, and wealth redistribution is justified to achieve that end. This is what the racialist project demands. …

Having racialized politics, the left now wants to tax Whites and Asians more — to pay the other races. No principles, just votes.

Despite all the progress that California’s racialist revolutionaries have made during the Newsom administration, progressive activists outside government, and Democratic legislators inside of it, want to go further.

The California Budget & Policy Center published a paper in April 2021 outlining how the state could use tax policy to pursue “racial equity.” …

The solution, according to the group, is to use ostensibly race-neutral means to raise taxes on whites and Asians in order to funnel the money to preferred races. …

To understand where all this is going, consider today’s South Africa. Since 2011, GDP per capita in South Africa has declined, infrastructure has deteriorated, and the unemployment rate is the highest in among G20 countries. The South African experiment also demonstrates that once a government chooses the racialist road, it must walk down it further and further. …

On and on it goes. These measures are far more than the ad hoc diversity trainings common during the era of “peak woke,” or toothless symbolic announcements. These policies and proposals represent a concerted effort to strip wealth from whites and Asians and redistribute it to favored racial groups. …

Left wing ideology (all large groups of people have identical statistical characteristics, so unequal outcomes is evidence of discrimination) comes with a heavy price:

California’s racialist revolutionaries seem incapable of grasping a simple truth: all these heavy-handed policies will not work. No matter how much wealth is seized, no matter how much government spending is redirected to favored racial groups, outcomes in the real world will never look the same as a Census table. These policies failed in South Africa, and they will fail in California, too.

The revolutionaries also refuse to recognize another obvious fact: rather than being the racist nightmare they make it out to be, America has had formal legal equality among the races for more than 60 years, not to mention a robust welfare state and decades of affirmative action policies. …

Easy solution: treat persons as individuals, rather than as stand-ins for their group identity. But then, where would the left get their votes from?

The solution, according to the group, is to use ostensibly race-neutral means to raise taxes on whites and Asians in order to funnel the money to preferred races.

Heat, literacy, and air-conditioning

Heat, literacy, and air-conditioning. By Ed West.

Different climates have enjoyed advantages at different points in time.

For most of history, industry and scholarship in southern Europe benefitted from significantly longer hours of sun and daylight much of the year compared to the north, allowing for more hours of work and study. James Belich noted in The World the Plague Made that this all changed with the expansion of the Basque whaling trade in the late medieval period, providing cheap wax for candles.

England and the Netherlands subsequently overtook the south in their levels of literacy, a transformation usually attributed to Protestantism, although this technical solution to a physical disadvantage certainly helped. As the northern countries grew richer, and were able to use more energy, so the climate came to be an advantage. Cooler areas of Europe in particular benefitted from a relative absence of vector-borne disease, dangerous insects and food poisoning, which made hotter regions of the world more lethal.

Yet the biggest curse of the lower latitudes is that heat makes us sluggish — since people struggle to work above 23° centigrade. As Maarten Boudry writes on his substack, ‘For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C, office performance drops by almost 9 percent.’

I see that. I’ve been trying to write this in temperatures of up to 34°, which equates to a production level similar to a moderate hangover. If only there was some sort of technology that could make my home cooler.

Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call ‘the 60s’, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.

The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin.

Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global ‘sunshine belt’.

Among the most notable beneficiaries of this technology are the financial powerhouses of Dubai and Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew famously said of air conditioning that it was ‘perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics… The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.’ …

Japan has almost universal air conditioning, with 91 per cent of homes equipped, compared to 88 per cent in the US. China is home to more than 500 million aircon units, is the world’s largest manufacturer, and has also seen an economic shift towards the south. Vietnam, also likely to be a major economic power by mid-century, is as dependent on this technology as it is on its people’s ingenuity. The development of aircon, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of tropical diseases, has shifted the centre of gravity away from the cold regions of the earth – just as the globe is warming up.

The article is mostly about the reluctance of Europe to use (allow!) airconditioning, due to their belief in the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. But that’s an interesting intro, quoted above.

Here in Perth Australia, the invention of evaporative air conditioning changed everything. Prior to 1970, Perth was a hot, small, sleepy town — where many people slept outside on their verandah during the hot summer nights. Evaporative air conditioning is cheap to run, costing only about a tenth as much as regular air conditioning. However, it only works in dry air — it is perfectly useless in humid climates. But it suits Perth perfectly, because Perth only has at most a handful of humid days each summer. With cheap aircon, Perth grew fast and blossomed.

We live by our “evap” in summer, leaving it on 24/7 for several months. It knocks about 5 degrees C off the temperature inside.

President Trump’s primetime address reveals the US election system is severely compromised, publishes intelligence evidence

President Trump’s primetime address reveals the US election system is severely compromised, publishes intelligence evidence.

Perhaps the most important Oval Office address since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Matt Vespa at Townhall:

Trump announced a massive declassification of documents showing how exposed our election system is to hacking and foreign interference. Top White House aides and intelligence agency chiefs have all reviewed and authenticated the documents.

The documents highlight major areas of concern. Starting in 2020, Beijing carried out the largest-ever compromise of election data. Some 220 million American voters’ files were meddled with by Chinese intelligence services. China signed a data exploitation unit for this project.

 

 

Members of the Deep State within the IC worked to suppress and downplay the scope and impact of China’s election interference. U.S. spy agencies discovered that the voter data breach in 18 states was bought, stolen, or hacked by China. That breach was kept hidden; Trump, who was still president at the time, was not informed, nor was Congress. The line was that the 2020 election was the most secure in history.

CIA reported in mid-2018 that the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements opposed to Trump. In mid-2019, China’s approach was to undermine domestic confidence during the first Trump presidency. The Chinese government aimed to identify anti-Trump reporters and pay them large sums of money to produce stories that cast Trump in a negative light. …

The FBI obtained raw intelligence indicating that China’s activities included efforts to produce illegal ballots for Joe Biden. These were kept out of the presidential briefing.

One analyst admitted to intentionally downplaying Chinese election activities. Another official stated she was running a shadow government to keep intelligence on China’s election interference away from the media and the White House. Numerous burn bags have been found. …

Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors have the ability to compromise our election infrastructure. …

Trump also said they’re releasing a report from the Department of Homeland Security, where they found 270,000 noncitizens are enrolled to vote in our elections. The real number is likely higher since blue states refused to turn over their voter rolls. …

Can’t we just move on, say the left/media, by Clandestine.

This clip is extremely important, because it reveals how the Dems/MSM plan to counter the revelations about 2020.

They are going to try to shame MAGA into “letting it go”, because it happened 6 years ago.

They are using the Hillary “what difference does it make” defense. They are going to try to belittle and dismiss the magnitude of the findings, in a desperate attempt to avoid accountability for their treasonous activity.

They have been caught, and they know it. Their only remaining hope is to convince the American People that it’s not a big deal.

 

Make voter fraud detectable again. Cynical Publius:

All the GOP wants to do is make voter fraud detectable and provable. That’s it.

For some odd reason Democrats support systems that make voter fraud nearly undetectable to a standard a court wlll recognize. Odd, doncha think?

Complicit media NBC and ABC refused to air the address. Andrew Kolvet:

So let me get this straight. NBC and ABC will happily report:

  • The vaccine is safe and effective
  • Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation
  • Joe Biden was at the top of his game
  • Kamala Harris was nominated in a democratic process
  • BLM riots were mostly peaceful…

But they refuse to carry the President of the United State’s primetime speech about whether or not evidence exists of foreign election interference?

Cynical Publius again:

Cue an entire U.S. social media industry defending China from allegations that it has meddled in our elections.

Catherine Salgado at PJ Media:

Unfortunately, according to [Trump], between our enemies around the world like the Chinese and Iranian regimes and their collaborators in the American media and “Deep State,” malicious actors have stolen voters’ data, hacked electronic voting machines, manufactured fake ballots, and bribed fraudsters. It’s an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” And both Joe Biden and Barack Obama apparently benefited. …

One of the most significant revelations in Trump’s speech regarded the 2020 election. “Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden,” Trump said, confirming election interference from our number one enemy on behalf of Biden….

The scheme goes back for years. … “Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags … and this is a group of bags that were used to destroy information given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned … These bags were supposed to be at a different level, by different people, incinerated … but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky.”

They knew:

He also discussed electronic voting and ballot counting machines. “Tonight, we’re publishing a series of previously classified U.S. intelligence community assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack. As one assessment states, we judge that the United States adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure,” Trump said.

And yet, whenever the federal government obtained evidence of election fraud, it buried that evidence. Trump pointed to the highly questionable Los Angeles mayoral election this year and mentioned just one organization in Michigan that was bribing people to fill out and submit falsified ballots. “The FBI agents working on the case believed that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it,” Trump explained. …

Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls, and yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail.” That is indeed a situation that belongs to a Third World hellhole, not to the USA.

Don’t be gaslit by the media: Most political violence is by the left

Don’t be gaslit by the media: Most political violence is by the left. By Sarah Anderson at PJ Media:

From the US State Department:

Historically, most politically motivated terrorism in the West has been carried out by violent far-left groups and individuals. Between 1970 and 1980, far-left terrorists were responsible for 93% of terrorist attacks and 58% of terrorism-related deaths.

Since 2016, far-left terrorist plots and attacks have sharply increased in the United States and Europe, with a growing trend of violence against individuals.

Far-left anti-government terrorism now accounts for more attacks and plots in the United States than any other ideological category. Far-left actors were responsible for 63% of all recorded anti-government attacks or plots as well as three out of the four anti-government fatalities in the United States in 2025.

In 2024, there were 21 attacks in the European Union attributed to far-left and anarchist terrorists, as compared to 24 attacks from jihadist terrorists that same year. Of the 45 reported terrorist attacks in Europe in 2025, 12 were attributed to far-left and anarchist actors.

The article:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invited the foreign ministers and other senior officials from over 60 countries to Washington, D.C. for a summit on combatting the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.”…

So far, the State Department has designated various Antifa groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations …

[Rubio] accused many in the press, academia, and other legacy institutions of dismissing left-wing violence as a “right-wing fever dream.” He added that “a bomb planted by a Neo-Nazi group” is often labeled a “nefarious and murderous act of evil,” while a “bomb planted by a Marxist Revolutionary” is “just merely a tragic excess of idealism.”

Rubio went on to say that many people here in the United States dismiss acts of violence and terrorism if it benefits the left-wing cause and that it’s time to put an end to that. He pointed to the George Floyd riots from the summer of 2020 and how media outlets called them “mostly peaceful” despite all the obvious violence and crime we saw with our own eyes, as well as other more recent examples, like Charlie Kirk’s murder, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, violence against ICE officers, and a transgender individual shooting up an elementary school. He listed numerous examples from other countries as well.

 

 

 

Then he dropped this, which was the best part of the speech in my opinion. This is exactly why I like this guy:

“This is a distinctive and unique evil.

“It has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and cowardly against the strong and the good.

“It’s perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacies, by seeking to destroy those who can.

“This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist, Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same.

“It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, and liberation; an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built; to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer.”

No wonder the left hate meritocracy and love “equity.”

UPDATE: More worth watching:

“You are here because two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was BURNED on over 80% of her body in her own home, in Greece, and she died, executed by a fire bomb because her daughter dared to stand for office!”

“Far-left political terrorism is NOT a recent day modern novelty. It is NOT a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians.”

“For most of the modern era, it was in fact the DOMINANT form of political violence.”

“You are here today because for five days this winter, the lights went out in Berlin. The longest blackout in the city since the Second World War sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power in the freezing cold and left an 83-year-old woman dead.”

“You are here and you came because a month after that Berlin blackout, a French 23-year-old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs.”

“You are here because your political leaders are being attacked and stabbed and shot in your streets — because your businesses have been bombed, because your railways have been sabotaged, because your police officers have been beaten and burned!”‘

“You are here because this is real and it is getting worse and it can no longer be denied and it can no longer be ignored because it is time to crush this evil forever!”

 

 

“In one 18 month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil — a rate of nearly 5 a day.

The overwhelming share of that violence came from Left-Wing extremists… these are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence, it simply doesn’t exist or it’s being exaggerated — but it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it.”

 

Vibe-producing is nearly here: Hollywood is finished

Vibe-producing is nearly here: Hollywood is finished. By Huff.

AI is making it easyto make movies to order, by “vibe-producing”. The trailer below was made simply using this prompt:

Look at every ‘Ryan Gosling as White Panther’ meme on the Internet. Now make a full-length trailer for that movie.

 

 

Not perfect, but not bad for the amount of effort involved. As AI gets better, and the prompt includes a story arc, decent movies will be coming out. The leftist monopoly on movie production will be broken.

Cultural whiteness versus ethnic whiteness

Cultural whiteness versus ethnic whiteness. By the Feral Historian.

Being white isn’t really a question of color. It’s a whole mental outlook.

Cultural whiteness:

We see this idea from the other side with recent talk about dismantling whiteness and white supremacy. “White” not simply as a collection of ethnic groups native to Europe, but as a cultural foundation of Western civilization. It is essentially in part that social cohesion, which is often called high trust society, that general respect for people and their property.

While it’s certainly not been a universal and is generally in decline, it’s been widespread enough in the west that it was considered normal. The high trust society is one of the core social technologies of Western civilization. It’s also a prerequisite for democratic government that isn’t just big group dominance. …

Traditionally, one of the great strengths of the West has been its ability to absorb people from other civilizations, turning them white, so to speak, in keeping with this concept of white as a mental outlook. People from anywhere could become Roman or French or American by adopting the culture. Over the course of a generation or two, being part of those cultures and societies was not a
fundamentally ethnic distinction.

Attacks on whiteness then are attacks on this western idea of culture over blood.

 

 

And that’s ultimately what this story [the Camp of the Saints] is about. Less the elimination of the white race than the destruction of that cultural foundation that serves as the scaffolding for democracy, for industrial civilization, advanced science, and progressive politics. Including that strain of progressivism that’s fixated on destroying the foundation that makes its own existence possible. …

Two distinct forms of “whiteness”:

You are probably having the same reaction as most people that casually pick up the book, assuming that that bit about how many will be white is referring purely to race. But if we look at it in terms of what the Hamadura character explains most clearly, though it shows up at a few other points in this book, it says something quite different.

The two things coexist in this story. Cultural whiteness and ethnic whiteness. Just so that we can distinguish here. Two distinct and separate concepts.

Ethnic whiteness:

[In the book] Many of the new regime mean it in explicitly ethnic terms. For example, the Paris Multi-racial Commune, a collection of communists, race-baiting loudmouths, and immigrant activists styling themselves as a new government, are united by their fixation on destroying the native French.

In one instance, a self-loathing French woman is speaking of her campaign to breed out the native population. Only a white woman can have a white baby. Let her choose not to conceive one. Let her choose only non-white mates. And the genetic results aren’t long and coming. in the first provisional government. By the way, Elise was named minister of population.

Is cultural whiteness possible without ethnic whiteness?

Now, this is the point where this book gets really dicey. One of the questions this story implies without directly asking is how intertwined are culture and ethnicity.

It directly acknowledges that ethnically non-white people can be culturally white, which seriously is one of the most inclusive ideas that you can express. You of different background can join our tribe and become part of our society. Not just live among us, but really become one of us.

The Camp of the Saints is not … some screed proclaiming an inherent genetic superiority of European peoples. But it also, when taken altogether, implies that white culture is impossible without a critical mass of ethnically white people.

Is that really the case? Setting aside whatever our particular ideological alignments demand, we honestly don’t know.

The example of Japan suggests yes, they have an orderly, prosperous society, that high trust thing. Again, the Japanese might be whiter than we are in that cultural sense. How much of that is due to cultural exchange is open for vehement argument, but they have a good thing going there and absolutely rank high in the functional society scale.

On the other hand, the entire experience of postcolonialism suggests no. The British, the French, the Dutch left and things just ran down. There comes a point when it can’t all be blamed on a history of exploitation and racism. And we’re well past that point.

And it’s not just a question of how big the cities are or how bright the skyline shines at night. China has built some damn impressive cities in a massive economy over the last few decades. Unquestionably one of the great civilizations both today and historically. But at least today, it’s a low trust society.

Trust is vital to cultural whiteness:

I’m reminded of a conversation from many many years ago with one of my economics professors originally from China about doing business there. Basically that in the west we start with the assumption that the other party is legit and operating in good faith and we lose trust if they lie if they just seem shifty or they fail to deliver as promised. In China, it works the other way. Trust has to be built up from nothing. And since both parties expect the other to cheat them in some way, both are looking for ways to cut corners. …

A low trust baseline radically affects every level of social and economic interactions. It’s not just about convenience or business deals. It’s the foundation of how people interact with each other. Do you help a stranger change a flat tire? Do you spot a co-worker for lunch if they’ve lost their wallet? Can you have something delivered to your house and not have it stolen by porch pirates? What do you assume about the people that you encounter throughout the day? What do you assume they assume about you?

The story talks some about the new regime built on a brotherhood of mankind, the end of racism achieved by subjugating the whites, but it’s also a story about rapidly transitioning to a low trust society. Corruption and decay follows. …

Trust is necessary for color-blindness:

Incidentally, it seems likely that a high trust society is a necessary precondition for a non-racist society. Otherwise, race is just another in the long list of reasons to assume the worst of strangers.

Anyone who honestly thinks of themselves as anti-racist should be among the staunchest defenders of white culture, if for no other reason that no one else cares about not being racist….

The stupid woke left:

Overall, The Camp of the Saints is an unflattering portrayal of everyone it turns an eye toward, but it’s mostly an indictment of the irrational self-loathing that was really taking hold in the Western world at the time and has just festered since.

It takes on the lunacy of the whole movement that professes to be for alleviating poverty, fighting racism, giving the people a voice, and then directs all its attacks on the civilization that has done far more in service of those ideas than any other.

And it warns that we must temper compassion with a hard edge of realism… It assumes that if the West falls, the entire world suffers, and if history and the state of the world is any indication, it’s not wrong. …

Some thoughts on immigration:

No country has to let anyone in. It would be perfectly within their sovereign rights for any nation, whether France or China or Eritrea, to say, “Piss off. If you weren’t born here, you can’t live here.”

Just as it’s reasonable to be selective about who is let in, diversity is not our strength. Our strength is in coming together around the things we have in common. Western cultures have gotten rather good at finding those things, of integrating immigrants into the wider culture and value system.

Recolonization:

But with some people, they’re just isn’t enough to build on. Charity comes with a cost and it has to be balanced. Of course, you can argue that there’s a moral duty to help to provide an opportunity for a better life. But if you take that tack, none of the arguments for large-scale immigration from the third world — you know, fleeing from war, religious persecution, economic opportunity, lack of infrastructure, healthcare, education in their home countries — all of these could be addressed more effectively, more extensively, and more long-lasting, and with fewer downsides in the home countries with some form of recolonization. Make the places they’re running from like the places that they’re running to, save them the trip.

Yet, the activists go into a tizzy, if you say so. I don’t think it would be a good idea. It wouldn’t be worth the blood and treasure, and I want no part of it. But it would do everything that the migrants-welcome crowd claims to stand for and do it better, revealing some insincerity, or at least severe naivety in their stated reasons.

Being for or against ethnic whiteness is racist, but favoring cultural whiteness is not. The left likes to obscure this point and call everyone else “racists” — but what would they know, they voted for that most racist of proposals, The Voice.

 

Taxpayer-funded jobs are the payoff for being on “Team Left”

Taxpayer-funded jobs are the payoff for being on “Team Left”.

Exhibit 1, by Craig Kelly:

 

If you drag yourself out of bed at dawn to grind away in a real wealth-creating job, congratulations — you’re getting absolutely screwed by taxes so some lazy grifter can pocket $400K a year plus $60K super.

Almost half a million dollars for a “Multicultural Coordinator.”

Half a million dollars for a completely useless parasite — a fake “job” manufactured for a Labor Party hack.

And then you wonder why Australia is circling the drain, productivity is in the toilet, and living standards are collapsing for everyone actually producing value.

Why the hell would anyone bust their arse to invest, take real risks, and build a business when you can just suck up to the political correctness machine, push the woke agenda, and rake in half a million dollars doing sweet FA?

Exhibit 2, by The Heartlands Tribune in the UK:

Westminster has built a country where we spend more money on the planning paperwork for a single road than it costs other nations to build an entire mountain tunnel.

This isn’t a system accidentally strangled by red tape: it is a highly lucrative industry. A vast priesthood of consultants and lawyers is making a fortune they have no interest in the work being done.

It is corruption by bureaucracy, and working-class communities are footing the bill for projects that never even see a spade in the ground.

The absolute paralysis of modern Britain was laid bare in a recent parliamentary committee. …

  • Take the Lower Thames Crossing. The planning application alone has swallowed more than a quarter of a billion pounds. For that exact same amount, Norway actually constructed the world’s longest road tunnel. We spent it on paper, and we have not even turned a sod of earth. This is a permission state eating itself alive.
  • Look at HS2, the most expensive railway line on earth. Part of the reason it cost so much is that we are spending £121 million on a specific “bat tunnel” to protect a few hundred bats living in a nearby wood, a wood the line does not even pass through.
  • Look at Hinkley Point C, the most expensive nuclear power station in human history. For eight years, developers locked in a multi-million-pound wrangle with regulators over installing an underwater “fish disco”, an acoustic deterrent to stop fish swimming into the pipes. 20 years ago, we built nuclear fleets at a fraction of the cost. Today, we sacrifice national infrastructure to the gods of endless compliance.
  • The final absurdity is the plan to reopen just 3.3 miles of an existing railway line between Bristol and Portishead, a route already built but closed during the Beeching cuts. The planning application is 80,000 pages long. Over one thousand of those pages are about bats.

We have created a system that trades in paper while the real economy rots. The working class pay the price for this institutional cowardice. They pay for it in soaring energy bills, missing homes, broken transport links, and a country that cannot build the future it keeps promising.

The purpose of the system is revealed by what it does. Naturally you only get these jobs if you have left credentials or at least express the woke pieties as required.

Two visions of society: 1776 and 1789

Two visions of society: 1776 and 1789. By Gerson Moreno-Riano at First Things.

1776:

America’s 1776 revolution was a revolution of covenant. The Declaration’s claim that all men are “endowed by their Creator” with unalienable rights is not decorative; it is the load-bearing pillar of the entire structure. Rights precede government because they come from God, not from the state.

That is why the American experiment could limit government at all: if rights were the state’s gift, the state could just as easily be their author and their undertaker.

Even the American Revolution’s radicalism — breaking with a king, disestablishing churches — was a revolt against a specific institutional arrangement, not against the idea of a transcendent moral order standing above human will. The Founders dismantled a throne; they did not dethrone God.

1789:

France’s 1789 revolution dismantled both. Lafayette’s constitutional-monarchist moment was real, but it did not hold the field. Within four years the revolution he helped launch had passed through the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Cult of Reason enthroned in Notre Dame, and into the Reign of Terror. That trajectory is not a betrayal of 1789’s logic; it is its executor.

When rights are re-grounded in the “general will” rather than a Creator who stands above the state, the general will becomes infinitely elastic — and, in Robespierre’s or any revolutionary’s hands, infinitely lethal.

This is always the outcome of any mass political movement that dethrones God and the dignity of human life. …

America at a crossroads in 2026 :

The American order rests on a specific anthropology: human beings as both image-bearers and sinners, incapable of the perfect virtue utopian schemes require, yet possessed of a dignity and possibility for renewal no government or human actor may licitly cancel. That is why the Declaration of Independence is a call to renewal, and the Constitution builds in checks, balances, and federalism.

The French revolutionary tradition, and the socialist and Marxist movements it fathered, rest on a different anthropology: human beings as infinitely malleable, sin — if it exists at all — as a structural defect of unjust systems rather than the human heart, and the state as the proper instrument for re-forging both. …

Mamdani, NYC mayor, is the 1789 future

When American activists describe rights as whatever the collective currently wills, or treat institutions as illegitimate simply for predating the revolution’s verdict, they are reasoning in 1789’s destructive revolutionary tradition, not 1776’s — whatever their intentions.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Under Trump, America and its allies occupy a position of global preeminence not seen since the end of World War II

Under Trump, America and its allies occupy a position of global preeminence not seen since the end of World War II. By Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness.

With a whimper rather than a bang, the world has become a different place than it was in January 2021, when Donald Trump left office.

Almost everything we are now told [by the media] about the global status quo is mistaken — largely because critics focus only on what Trump says rather than on what he does. …

Summary:

We are not bogged down in a forever war with Iran; we are engaged in over four months of frustrating negotiations with a theocracy that has no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons and ability to bully and undermine most of the Middle East.

Israel is not without friends and is more regionally dominant than at any point in its history. Radical Islam — whether in the form of the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis — is at its weakest point in half a century.

China is recalibrating nearly all of the assumptions it has held for the past two decades. Russia is humiliated and hemorrhaging. Latin America is more pro-American than ever before. …

Almost all illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America has abruptly ceased, for the first time in history. …

Middle East:

The Middle East is now suddenly a different place. Whatever the final denouement with Iran, Tehran has lost a half-century and half-trillion-dollar investment in its military and nuclear industrial complex. The once-feared bully of the Muslim Middle East has been humiliated and exposed as a paper tiger, with its economy, and perhaps its very existence, now dependent on the disposition of the Trump administration. In its sporadic missile launches, Iran often leaves Israel alone because it knows the Jewish state can target any of its unhinged leaders whenever hostilities resume.

In a development that would once have seemed surreal, Israel is providing intelligence and missile defense to the Muslim Gulf states, which are effectively fighting alongside the United States and Israel against a fellow Muslim nation.

Hamas has been crushed. Hezbollah’s once-feared missile arsenal and many of its crazy leaders have been largely eliminated. The Houthis, lacking any credible air defenses, know that every missile they launch at Israel or into the Red Sea could cost them another port facility or power station. Lebanon is reawakening from its 50-year coma.

Russia lost its last client in the Middle East with the fall of the Assad regime. Neither China nor Russia can any longer supply Iran by land, sea, or air. Nor can they either purchase its sanctioned oil. …

Energy:

Soon the Strait of Hormuz — Iran’s supposed trump card — will be nearly as irrelevant to global energy markets as it is already to the United States. Existing pipelines that bypass the Gulf are being expanded. New ones are planned or already under construction to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf of Oman beyond the Strait. The United States is the largest producer of oil and gas in history and does not need Middle Eastern oil or gas — or, for that matter, much of anything else besides. …

Europe:

Europe publicly despises Trump. Privately, however, many Europeans concede that his antics compelled them to meet their long-neglected 2 percent defense commitments and inspired their new pledges to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. …

Europe now quietly acknowledges that Trump was right — and just in time to accelerate rearmament as Russia pressed westward. If left unchecked, Europe’s embrace of near-total disarmament, shocking demographic decline, unending hostility toward fossil fuels and nuclear energy, mass illegal immigration from the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, and steadily expanding socialism will turn the continent into a third world hellhole. …

Russia:

Our rival Russia is now in its weakest political, economic, and military condition since the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. Had anyone predicted five years ago that Russia would be importing gasoline or that buildings around the Kremlin would routinely be struck by drones, he would have been dismissed as delusional. Nor could anyone have imagined Russia suffering perhaps well over one million dead, wounded, missing, or captured in a Stalingrad-like slog of its own making in Ukraine — while losing perhaps half its arsenal of ships, tanks, and aircraft.

China:

It is stagnating almost as rapidly as it once rose, burdened by a fertility rate of just 1.0. …

An aging, increasingly isolated, and deeply paranoid leader knows that an invasion of Taiwan could prove as disastrous for China as the wars in Ukraine and Iran have been for Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, a gradually awakening West seems to be finally weary of Chinese mercantilism and is starting to demand reciprocity in trade. …

Military:

Meanwhile, with the departure of the Biden-era DEI apparatus, the U.S. military has exceeded every one of its recruiting targets, all of which had, in recent years, been anemic….

Its weapons procurement system is undergoing revolutionary changes, placing as much emphasis on quantity and affordability as on quality.

Small, high-tech defense start-ups are finally being given the chance to compete with ossified conglomerates that have long relied on lobbyists to preserve their costly monopolies. Even left-leaning Silicon Valley, once largely hostile to the defense industry, is now emulating the World War II-era War Production Board in its eagerness to ensure U.S. global supremacy in next-generation weaponry. …

Tech:

America is pulling ahead in most of the next-generation fields of rocketry, satellite launches, space exploration, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and cryptocurrency. Its stock market is at record highs. …

Conclusion:

America’s allies are growing stronger, while the China–Russia axis grows weaker. …

Add it all up, and the picture is almost surreal: at the very moment the Left insists that the United States has grown weak and isolated, America and its allies occupy a position of global preeminence not seen since the end of World War II.

Socialist mediocrity

Socialist mediocrity. By Trivael Le Pogam.

I’m on a “air-conditioned” train [in France] where it’s 26 degrees. The WiFi doesn’t work. No one says a word.

And that’s what fascinates me the most: not the breakdown, but the collective acceptance.

The socialist state has pulled off a psychological feat. It’s made us internalize that a mediocre service, paid for at exorbitant cost, is normal. That it’s even what “public service” means.

The same service in a free market would cost a fraction of the price. And if the AC broke down, you’d be refunded within the hour, because a competitor is waiting right next door for you to switch shops. …

Everything government touches turns bad:

Education: plummeting standards, teachers burning out, PISA rankings in freefall.

Healthcare: months-long waits, hallways full of gurneys, caregivers fleeing.

Transport: delays, breakdowns, strikes, prices exploding. Justice: years for a judgment. Police: overwhelmed, demoralized.

Colossal budgets. Record-high tax takes in Europe.

Result: everything’s rotten.

Why markets are better:

Because two things are missing that only the market provides: skin in the game and prices.

Skin in the game first. An entrepreneur who delivers a lousy service goes bankrupt. He loses HIS money, HIS reputation, HIS years of work. A bureaucrat who mismanages a public service loses nothing. He’ll get promoted, transferred, or at worst he’ll coast to retirement. Failure has no personal consequences. So failure repeats, indefinitely.

Prices next. Hayek showed it: market prices are an information system. Every price aggregates millions of individual decisions and signals where to allocate resources. When the state sets prices or subsidizes at a loss, it destroys that signal. No one knows anymore what anything is worth. We sprinkle money at random, we waste, and we call it “public investment.”

Mediocrity guaranteed:

That’s why the bureaucrat is the worst possible steward of your taxes: he spends other people’s money, on other people. No incentive to save, no incentive to serve well….

The problem isn’t this minister, that government, this reform. The problem is structural. A monopoly without competition, without prices, without skin in the game, will ALWAYS produce mediocrity. No matter who’s running it. No matter the budget.

If you’ve grasped that, you’ve grasped 90% of political economy.

The question the bureaucrats hate:

So do one simple thing: explain it to your loved ones. Next delayed train, next emergency room wait, ask the question: “Who loses money when this service sucks?” Answer: no one.

To illustrate the point, France snd Germany were similar in most ways in the 1960s and 1970s. Dynamic, productive, rising living standards. Then they diverged, as Michael Arouet explains:

France used to be an innovative, fast-growing country. Then it elected socialist Mitterrand as president in 1981 and moved to big state and high taxes. It has never recovered since then

Isn’t it ironic that Germany and the UK want to repeat the same mistake?

Now all of Europe is succumbing to the bureaucracy and their disastrous energy and migration polices. But the US has reversed course from that fate, and is recovering and forging ahead fast — as measured by GDP per capita, technology, its military, is energy prices, or its net immigration from the third world. Exception : NYC.

Australia? Our bureaucracy and the Labor Party are intent on aping the Europeans, and we will reap similar results. What a waste.

A generation of leftism ruined the world for today’s youth

A generation of leftism ruined the world for today’s youth. By Devon Eriksen.

Teens can’t have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don’t care about civilization, but will work cheap.

Teens can’t have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.

Teens can’t have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.

Teens can’t have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.

Teens can’t have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.

Teens can’t have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.

Teens can’t even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.

Teens can’t have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.

And the progressive left boomers don’t even realize it is happening:

And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles…

Except.

Except the elders don’t understand that any of this of this is happening.

  • They haven’t had a child in the household since 1997.
  • They haven’t looked for an entry-level job since 1973.
  • They haven’t gone on a date since 1981.
  • They haven’t been laid off… ever.

They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.

A world of left wing nonsense, and a generation of progressive elders who believed it. We must first dispel the nonsense (the battle of reality versus leftist ideology), then fix the policies.

Bringing down housing prices

Bringing down housing prices. By Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian.

Australia is attempting to cram approximately 11 million households into 10 million homes. It needs between 250,000 and 300,000 new dwellings a year, but in 2025, building starts came in at only 196,000.

Australia now has the highest level of mortgage stress in the developed world. Sydney households need 62.6 per cent of income to service a new mortgage. …

A major problem is banking policy:

Australia has too much household debt, with banks that have lent too heavily into mortgages and too cautiously into the construction sector that would relieve the housing shortage. ,,,

APRA’s capital framework treats residential mortgages as less risky than commercial and development lending, so banks drive mortgage lending hard while rationing development finance.

The result is a system that simultaneously inflates demand through abundant mortgage credit and constrains supply through tight construction lending. Australia has by far the largest proportion of residential mortgages as a share of bank assets of any comparable country.

Generous mortgage lending, set against the few homes actually being built, inflates the price of existing housing. Inflated values then justify still larger borrowings. …

Why don’t the banks lend enough money to developers?

Bankers demand fixed-price building contracts before they will lend. Builders are then forced to take the rising cost risk. Once again, builders have been caught between fixed-price contracts signed before recent cost spikes and the much higher costs of actually delivering them. This is a direct path to insolvency. …

When the Australian Government boosts the money supply with low interest rates and more, as it did during covid, it boosts CPI and building costs. This sends developers broke, because they have fixed price contracts. What developer wants to risk that again?

A building development only proceeds when the expected revenue exceeds the full stack of costs: land, construction, holding and finance costs, and a margin large enough to compensate for the risk being taken. …

Housing starts will not increase materially because the conditions required to unlock a significant increase in new dwelling supply (developer confidence, accessible finance, affordable construction costs and a skilled workforce) are all deteriorating simultaneously. This creates a supply problem. …

This has been further exacerbated by a very high rate of immigration. …

It is little wonder that our hospitals, schools, roads and ambulance services struggle to keep pace. Dwelling supply has fallen well short of the new demand.

A growing majority say house prices have to fall. Even owners. By Shane Wright in The SMH.

Sixty-one per cent of people supported a decline in property prices, an exclusive Resolve Political Monitor Poll has found, with a majority of every age, political and income group agreeing that prices were too high.

On the property market, money is exchanged for housing. It’s not just the supply and demand for housing that matters, but the supply and demand for money. It’s symmetric.

But the role of money is never questioned in the media, so people overlook it. Australian dollars are a commodity, just like any other, except they are manufactured by a monopoly of banks and government. Easy money since 1982 has driven all asset prices to the moon, because there is a glut of money. It took 20% interest rates in 1980 to bring the last bout of inflation under control, but debts were much smaller then. What government can afford 20% interest rates today?

It’s nice to see recognition that nose-bleed housing prices are socially harmful, and that a general consensus is developing that they need to be brought down. But unwinding a bubble in a controlled fashion is difficult.

The Bankers bullied Australia into Net Zero

The Bankers bullied Australia into Net Zero. By Joanne Nova.

We got another reminder this weekend of how Australia was sold out by our politicians — effectively coerced by large foreign financial forces. When Australia adopted “Net Zero targets” in late 2021 it was against the wishes of the voters. …

The Prime Minister and Treasurer laid it out with an extraordinary admission that “Global Financiers” threatened to jack up our national interest rates by 1.5%, which would have sparked a “17% investment collapse” (according to their models) and thus presumably a stock market crash. I’ve talked about this in speeches ever since, but hardly any political commentators seem to recognize the significance.

Foreign banks were setting Australian domestic policy with threats and intimidation.

The money changers look, act and smell like the One World Government we didn’t realize we had.

It is also a lesson in the peril of holding large debts. …

Scott Morrison before the bankers’ threats:

Scott Morrison had gone to a “climate election” in 2019 with no Net Zero target and astonished the pundits by winning. People forget how shocking the 2019 election result was. Sportsbet was so sure the Labor Party would win with their big climate action plan, they paid out $1.3 million dollars two days before the election was even held. …

Then, via Paul Kelly in The Australian:

Mr Morrison described the forces that drove his thinking: “I became convinced in early 2021, if not late 2020, that regardless of what we thought, global markets, capital markets, business, had already made up their minds. The world was moving to a new-zero economy. Australia had one of two choices –- to be part of that or be ostracized from the global economy.” ….

So the Australian PM buckled to the bankers:

Two years later, Scott Morrison set a Net Zero Target anyway, just in time for the Glasgow UN shindig. While Morrison got what he thought he wanted, it doomed the conservative Coalition.

They had thrown away one of their best weapons against an absurd Labor Party platform which was trying to change the weather. By pandering to the Woke Energy Gods, they had inadvertantly endorsed them. They could hardly criticise the Labor Party when they wanted the same goal. Six months later they lost the next election. Perhaps this was the point of coercing the Liberals into setting targets? Sabotage — to neutralize them in the political arena? …

The right choice is always the one closest to the truth. The conservatives picked the wrong side. They didn’t do their homework. …

Scott Morrison ignored the truth:

If Scott Morrison had paid a team of skeptical scientists and engineers to audit the mess in climate and energy policies — he would quickly have found out that the weather has always changed, the storms were always bad, the models are horribly wrong, and the random generators were doomed in the current form and hideously expensive.

Joanne and I could have explained it to him. Sigh.

The vibeshift explained – uniparty politics is over

The vibeshift explained – uniparty politics is over. By The Noticer.

One Nation hasn’t quintupled its vote over the past year by saying or doing anything new, it’s saying the same things it’s said for years, at least for the past decade since Pauline Hanson returned to parliament. For all its faults, it is consistent, and Pauline Hanson is the most consistent politician in Australia.

The player hasn’t changed, the game has.

The answer to why this is happening is, therefore, not to be found in the player, but in the game. The rise of One Nation is a symptom, not a cause. …

So what changed?

One Nation’s brand of politics was being artificially suppressed by Big Tech until Musk and Zuckerberg reversed the post-2016 censorship agenda.

After Trump won the presidency and the Brexit vote up-ended British politics in social media fuelled populist revolts, the leftist establishment got together and concluded that they needed to stop people having the freedom to say things they didn’t like and talk themselves into voting against things they didn’t like, in order to save “democracy”. They concluded, correctly, that if people have the freedom to use social media to circumvent the mainstream press’s gatekeeping of political discourse, they might all talk themselves into patriotism and vote accordingly.

Less than three years on from Zuckerberg de-censoring Instagram and Facebook, and less than four after Musk de-censored X, “right-wing populist” parties have surged to lead the polls in Britain, France and Germany, and are now backed by a quarter of Europeans.

Australia is not special. We all use the same American social media sites used by our European cousins, we are subject to the same terms of service they are. The leftist establishment was literally screeching about how the restoration of free speech on social media would “threaten democracy” by enabling the populist right to win more votes, for the simple and obvious reason that in the absence of suppression it naturally gets more popular.

Why the move away from Liberal Party?

The voter base didn’t identify with what the Liberal Party was selling and then all of a sudden have a change of heart, they simply didn’t think there was a viable alternative to uniparty blue and uniparty red. They were demoralised and checked-out. This illusion of the two-party system was manufactured by mainstream media, an illusion which a couple of years of speaking freely on relatively uncensored social media shattered.

This was a somewhat inevitable process, because the actual policy preferences of right-leaning voters were radically out of sync with the manufactured “centre-right” consensus.

Polls reveal interesting trends:

The poll showed One Nation is pulling more votes than Labor from those who earn less than $45k/year. Labor, the traditional “party of the working class” is, however, 7% up on One Nation with voters earning more than $125k/year.

Objectively, One Nation is now the party of the White working class.

Meanwhile Labor has become the party of (non-White) immigrants, now winning only 23% of voters who speak no languages other than English in contrast to 39% of the vote from people who speak another language. …

The vibeshift:

The new right-wing base is increasingly secular and economic nationalist, and where they differ with the left is on immigration and race, not Jesus and tax policy. All they lacked was a way to form a critical mass around a political movement that actually represents them, so once Big Tech in America decided to turn off the woke censorship to get Trump re-elected, this vibeshift became inevitable.

One Nation’s policies remain far more popular than the party itself, the sky is the limit, and by sky I mean its own incompetence. It is a deeply unprofessional party, benefitting by default from a vibeshift it didn’t create.

But One Nation will remain the dominant electoral force on the Australian right for the foreseeable future unless another party comes along that can do One Nation’s brand of populism better than it can. Whether one can remains to be seen, but it won’t be the Liberal Party — no matter how hard they try we’ll never believe they’re sincere, nor should we.

As former PM Bob Hawke admitted after retiring from parliamentary politics in the early 1990s, there was “an implicit pact between the major parties to implement broad policies on immigration that they know are not generally endorsed by the electorate” and “they have done this by keeping the subject off the political agenda”.

Well, now it’s not just on the agenda, where you stand on it fundamentally defines what side of politics you’re on. The uniparty is over, the politics of identity has arrived.

Climate change is not the issue that created the vibeshift, though it contributed. The vibeshift occurred when mass third world immigration became too much and too obvious.