Links - 22nd February 2026 (2 - Migrants: UK)

'Devastated' restaurateur forced to close business because of migrant hotel next door says loyal customers were 'scared off' by 100 men 'leering and whistling' at groups of young girls - "A restaurateur has told how he was forced to close down his business after an adjoining hotel was turned over to housing asylum seekers who scared off his customers. Jamie Darby, who has owned Ceno bar and restaurant in Southampton for 20 years, says he is reluctantly shutting his doors as a direct result of problems with Highfield House Hotel, which the Home Office uses to house up to 100 migrants. Ceno had been a popular dining spot since the early 2000s but customer numbers fell sharply after the hotel directly above his ground floor restaurant stopped accepting paid guests five years ago, Mr Darby says. He says that while these guests would often frequent his restaurant, other loyal customers have been put off by large groups of young men loitering outside. Mr Darby told the Daily Mail: 'I'm devastated, 20 years of my life have just been thrown away. I've come out of the end of it absolutely skint. 'Everything I had personally was sunk into the restaurant, I borrowed money from family and friends to keep going. We've been forced out. 'The business was successful until five years ago when the hotel started to house illegals. 'It's impossible to run a business with 100 young men loitering around... In the last two years, Mr Darby says his turnover has been halved as customers deserted the once-popular restaurant. The closure has cost four full-time staff members their jobs as well as numerous casual and part time staff... 'My 22-year-old daughter was propositioned - it's just disgusting 'Southampton is a university city and we employ a lot of young students but often they would leave because they were too frightened.' Mr Darby says he hasn't received any meaningful help from his local MP or the police despite pleading with a senior officer to protect him and his staff. He also claims he has been locked out of the shared car park for six months and that hotel occupants caused water to pour into the restaurant by allowing sinks upstairs to overflow while washing their feet. Highfield House has also been the site of weekly anti-immigration protests in recent months, causing further disruption. The demonstrations are regularly met with counter protests from anti-racism groups and there is often a heavy police presence at the scene... 'The hotel owners have ignored our communication for help to assist with ongoing damage caused by the hotel residents and have locked the car park for many months, meaning our customers have been unable to park and access the restaurant.' The popular restaurant has been successful for over 20 years and was rated 4.6 stars on TripAdvisor... 'The business started to fall away when the immigrants moved in. I saw some of the abuse that the immigrants would shout down from their windows above... 'The immigrants burnt holes in his awning when it was bought new. They would play awful music and turn it up on full volume just to be annoying.'"
How silly. Doctors, lawyers and engineers are good spenders
Naturally, left wingers blame the anti-migrant protesters for this

Immigration cannot and should not be the solution to our demographic woes - "There are six reasons (at least) as to why our demographic woes cannot and will not be fixed by immigration. First, as has long been observed, immigrants brought into the country to work will in turn grow old and require pensions and health and social care... Immigrants, almost regardless of where they come from, adopt local fertility patterns... This makes immigration as a solution to ageing simply a Ponzi scheme, something that can only be kept going by ever accelerating inflows. But nothing can continue flowing and growing forever... Britain has traditionally benefited from waves of immigration from high-fertility Ireland and, more recently, Poland. But the number of twenty-something Poles is plummeting (it will halve by the end of the century), and fertility rates in Ireland too have nose-dived. The idea that we can comfortably lead our child-free lives supported by workers produced by others who are prepared to go through the joyful but often exhausting and costly process of bearing and rearing children simply no longer applies. Third, the attraction of coming here reduces as the UK’s prosperity relative to other countries plunges... If fewer and fewer countries are notably poorer and higher fertility than the UK, then the only places we can get immigrants will be increasingly from poorer, more distant places. Many people from Africa and the less prosperous part of Asia are hardworking and in many ways admirable. But they are less likely to have the levels of education and skills which allow them to make a net contribution to the countries they are migrating to. There is good evidence that people coming from, say, Somalia or the Democratic Republic of Congo will never pay into the system in welfare states like Denmark or the Netherlands, and the data would point in a similar direction here too. We have seen how migration has shifted from relatively high human capital countries in Europe to relatively low human capital countries outside Europe over the past decade. Many blame this on Brexit. But in fact the declining demography now common across Europe, with falling numbers of potential workers for emigration, plus their improving economies, means that the helpful phenomenon of the ubiquitous, highly skilled Polish plumber or builder was never going to last for long. The availability of cheap skilled labour from the former Eastern Bloc was fortuitous in the early 2000s but it was never going to last. With more and more migration coming from countries which are culturally very different, we encounter the fifth issue, namely electoral backlash... The sixth issue is moral. It is said that we have more Ghanaian healthcare workers in Britain than they have in Ghana. Why should a poor country like Ghana bear the cost of bringing up a child and educating him or her to the level of a doctor or a nurse only for us to skim them off because we are too busy or preoccupied to have children of our own and train medics of our own? By taking the best and brightest, we are undoing the potential of countries like Ghana to develop."
Electoral backlash is a feature, not a bug. Left wingers want to own the chuds

The unpalatable truth about net migration - "46 per cent of voters want migration to be zero or less. Yet we need to be honest about this issue. Migration is not under control, both legal and illegal. Net migration has come down primarily because working-age Britons and EU nationals are fleeing this country in droves... The largest share of those leaving this country in 2025 were working age Britons under the age of 45. If that trend continued, it certainly would be a disaster for the Treasury. We cannot sustain a situation where close to three-quarters of a million taxpayers are upping sticks for a better life elsewhere. Meanwhile, nearly half of all social housing in London is occupied by foreign-born heads of household. And the NHS has reportedly earmarked £73 million to be spent on translation services. As for the population boom we are projected to experience, it will require more than two million new homes to be built in a decade. Where is the money coming from? How would this in any way contribute to the Exchequer in the long run? “Net zero” migration in itself is a pointless term – and goal – if all we are doing is importing millions of people every decade – whose lifetime cost could be in the billions – while losing our best and brightest to other countries. The Government’s Migration Advisory Committee estimates that the lifetime cost to the taxpayer of the 2022/23 intake of care workers was £2 billion. And migrants allowed to come to the UK to join partners who are already here will cost £5.6 billion over their lifetimes, MAC analysis also found. What really matters is who is coming here, how many of them, and whether they can be integrated. As analysis from Migration Watch has shown, the majority of migrants are not net contributors in taxes. And as our paper examining student visas explained, in 2025, the largest share of visas – a staggering 45 per cent of them – went to students, many of whom bring dependants. In 2023, according to official ONS figures, more than 260,000 visas were issued to dependants of workers, not workers themselves. So the crux of the matter is this: net zero migration in itself would be fine if the people with the skills we needed came and once here they were able and willing to integrate. The current lower net migration we are supposedly forecast – though there is no persuasive evidence that it will continue – hides a very real, and permanent change in the identity of this country."

Nigerian migrant jailed for threatening Good Samaritan British mother with knife in front of her child wins right to stay in UK - "Olajide Shinaba, 32, was jailed for 11 months after he pulled a knife on a woman, described as his friend, who had taken him off the street... The Home Office had decided to deport Shinaba due to his conviction, and his appeal was rejected due to it being 'conducive to the public good'. However, he has now successfully appealed the decision for deportation, after a judge ruled he would have difficulty reintegrating into life in Nigeria."
Nigerian migrant jailed for threatening Good Samaritan British mother with knife in front of her child wins right to stay in UK : r/europe_sub - "Apparently pulling a knife on a woman was an example of successful integration into life in UK."
Suicidal empathy, suicidal empathy all around

Migrant crisis: Foreign nationals are responsible for 80% of all train theft arrests, new data shows - "Staggering new analysis from the Centre for Migration Control, seen by the People's Channel, shows foreign nationals made up 79.3 per cent of arrests for theft of passenger property on Britain’s transport network. According to a Freedom of Information Request submitted by the think tank, 9,771 arrests were carried out across Britain’s transport network in the year 2024 to 2025. Of those arrested, 3,688 were foreign nationals, representing 37.7 per cent. CMC analysis shows foreign nationals are more likely to be arrested than native born people by the British Transport Police for a host of crimes. Foreign nationals made up the overwhelming number of those arrested for stealing, at nearly 80 per cent, and were 36.6 per cent of arrests for sexual offences, 35.7 per cent of the arrests for violent crimes, and 39.6 per cent of arrests for drug related offences. Of these migrant arrests, 225 are linked to sexual offences, 900 to violence, 187 to drugs, and 304 to theft of passenger property. In the UK 5.9 million people hold non-British passports, representing 9.9 per cent of the population, according to the 2021 census... The news comes after data obtained by the CMC from 26 police forces across the country showed that migrants are 34 per cent more likely to be arrested for all crimes than native British people. "
Proof of racist and xenophobic profiling!

Meme - "r/LegalAdviceUK
I'm a student from Azerbaijan studying in England. I'm not sure how to report or navigate police force over here when it isn't an emergency. Can I get some advice?
My English is decent but I am primarily a maths student and that is where my strength exists. Sorry for that. I've done the best I can. I started university in September in England. During this time there was a Freshman's Week when student societys were advertising themselves. I applied to several and joined them. However I am very worried about extremist people within one society I joined. They are very hateful and angry. I noticed the same when attending my local place of worship. There was also very extreme preaching there which would not be tolerated back home in Azerbaijan. I know 999 is for emergencies only. I don't believe this is a life threateneing emergency so I did not want to call it unnecessarily. Is there another person I can report this to. I would prefer to do this ANONYMOUSLY for my safety. If I can't do it anonymously then I am too scared to report it at all. Is there some way I can anonymously report both of them to police force over here?"
The police need to be involved to arrest him for Islamophobia

I've been mugged three times in London, but it's rubbish to say it's not safe - "such narratives about London are nothing new – they’re merely the latest front for conservative panic about multiculturalism and immigration. The prevailing idea is that a city filled with immigrants – or indeed, a city built by immigrants, which is exactly what London is – must be crime-ridden by default. You can see this happening after the London bombings in 2005, when some right-wingers peddled the myth that the city’s large Muslim population was creating “Londonistan” within the M25. (Twenty years on, Londonistan has yet to materialise – unless, of course, you are talking about the excellent range of Middle Eastern and South Asian restaurants now on offer across the capital.) These days, those who want to sow division and fear know better than being that blatantly offensive. Instead, their prejudices are disguised by supposed well-meaning concern for Londoners’ security and well-being."
The things that left wingers will put up with and expect others to put up with to support the cause
Clearly the UAE is deluded being worried about Islamic extremism in the UK
The funniest part is that the journalist, Zing Tsjeng, is Singaporean

The British dream is crumbling, replaced by a nightmare of sectarian division - "Britain is a wonderful, welcoming country that has embraced newcomers fleeing persecution or poverty for centuries. Our gradual affirmation of religious toleration after the English Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment, our individualism, our early adoption of capitalism, our commitment to the rule of law, our pioneering role in the eradication of slavery, all helped forge a culture that to this day remains more open to outsiders than those of European neighbours. It is a reason why so many first- and second-generation immigrants love this country, why so many are doing so well and contributing so much to politics, business, medicine, academia, sport and entertainment, and why it is entirely uncontroversial that Rishi Sunak is our first Hindu Prime Minister. Visiting Britain in the 1720s, Voltaire was stunned. “Go into the London Stock Exchange … and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men,” he wrote in Lettres Philosophiques. “Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.” Fast forward three centuries and we continue to integrate immigrants far better than the French or Germans, an ability dubbed Britain’s “superpower”. Across western Europe, the children of immigrants perform worse than those of the native-born; in the UK, children of immigrants are better at maths than the children of natives, and children born abroad do almost as well, the Pisa tests reveal... There even appears to be a reduction, on average, in geographical segregation of minority communities, an analysis of the past four censuses reveals. Tragically, instead of building on this by embracing a controlled, rational immigration policy to forge a modern, united, multi-ethnic British nation, our ruling elites – first New Labour, and then the Tories, backed by the cultural and business establishment – have blundered so severely that the entire multicultural edifice could now come tumbling down. What could have been a model for others to follow has been ruined by insouciance. The first fraudulent claim was that we could cope with net figures of hundreds of thousands of migrants, year in, year out. On what planet? The staggering inability of the state to build infrastructure, or to allow free enterprise to do so, means that large-scale immigration is inflicting huge costs on the existing population (including earlier migrants) via congestion, rationed healthcare and smaller, prohibitively expensive homes. Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien crunch the data in their brilliant Taking Back Control, from the Centre for Policy Studies. England’s population surged 6.6 per cent between 2011 and 2021 (it would have grown 2.7 per cent without migration) yet during that time the major roads network grew by just 2.3 per cent, the rail network by 1 per cent, GP surgeries by 4 per cent (at a time of ageing population), the number of secondary schools by 4.9 per cent, the net capital stock of machinery and equipment by 4 per cent and, maddeningly, our electricity generation capacity collapsed 14.2 per cent. High immigration has diluted our per capita capital stock: we have effectively become poorer. Housing has grown faster – by 9.6 per cent – but even that isn’t enough to cope with the massive pent-up demand from years of under-building and the concentrated geography of immigration. Home ownership is collapsing, quality of life is deteriorating and the institutional underpinnings of conservatism and capitalism are lethally undermined. The second falsehood was that large volumes of migration – as opposed to smaller-scale, targeted, high-skilled migration – would turbocharge productivity growth and insulate us from the baby bust. Yet productivity has flatlined, even though the UK now has more foreign-born residents than the US; the availability of labour may have discouraged automation. Many immigrants contribute far more than they take out in government spending, but some do not, especially if they don’t work or don’t earn enough... The third error was to leverage mass immigration to camouflage other problems. More foreign students – many of whom stay permanently – subsidise domestic fees. Foreign care workers allow the authorities to grossly underpay staff. We don’t train enough doctors and health workers, or anybody else for that matter: it’s easier to import ready-made workers. The 5.5 million people on out-of-work benefits have been consigned to the memory hole. The success of migrant children allows the complacent to disregard the atrocious educational performance of the white working class. The Government’s final blunder was to ignore the rise of Islamist extremism, out of cowardice and stupidity, while tolerating woke critical race theory (CRT), an ideology that rejects colour-blind integrationism and pits racial groups against one another. Yes, Britain’s superpower is integration, but it turns out that Islamism and CRT are its kryptonite. The authorities did nothing in Batley to protect a teacher chased away by extremists. They haven’t tackled radical preachers and have been useless at promoting moderate, reformist Muslim voices. A toxic anti-Semitism that had been largely eradicated from British life is spreading again. The return of Israelophobic sectarian parties – including the Greens – is the final straw. We need to drastically reduce migration. We need to be much more discerning about who we let in. We can no longer allow our righteous openness to immigration to be perverted and manipulated."

The UK’s migration problem is nothing to do with being too generous. Here’s why - "The upheaval in Sudan now ranks among the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world... The situation in Sudan is a stark reminder that irregular migration to the UK is rarely caused by “pull factors” such as our overly generous social security system or our shadow economy. People flee because their homes and communities have been destroyed and unless the root causes are addressed, crises like this will continue and the small boats will continue their perilous, tragic journeys."
The usual left wing delusions and lies to push the left wing agenda strike again; according to the Refugee Council, in YTD September 2025, "The top five countries of origin of people seeking asylum were Pakistan, Eritrea, Iran, Afghanistan and Bangladesh."

AG on X - "Incredible stuff. The United Arab Emirates is cutting funding for scholarships to allow students to attend UK Universities because of fear of Islamist radicalization on those campuses."

David Atherton on X - "🚨This Beggars Belief🚨 At St Cuthbert's Primary School in Parkfield, Stockton a group of over 10 African migrants viciously attack a mother & other locals, yesterday afternoon. The provocation was the mother said you "shouldn't hit a girl mate" & "there's kids coming out the school". The mother is in hospital. The Stockton police @Cleveland_PCC were called who did nothing. The mother was called a moron by officer 3344 for asking why. This will lead to people taking the law into their own hands, it may lead to major civil unrest."

Asylum seeker sex pest targeted two women on the train in 'terrifying ordeal' before sexually assaulting one - but is SPARED jail after judge is told he 'has no friends in the UK' - "Hamada Salah, 28, who is seeking asylum in the UK, targeted two lone women in separate incidents on a TransPennine Express journey from Leeds to Middlesbrough in February. The victims were left feeling 'objectified' and 'unnerved' after the Egyptian national began showing them pornography, Newcastle Crown Court heard. Salah targeted a woman aged 20, which he said was 'the perfect age for sex', and started touching her legs, before moving to another part of the train before rubbing his groin in front of a 67-year-old passenger."

Policy Exchange - Why is it so hard getting immigration numbers down? - "The report, written by Stephen Webb, a former Home Office director and with foreword by The Honourable Alexander Downer AC, former Foreign Minister of Australia, sets out the incentives in the system that have led to consistently high migration. These include the power of the pro-immigration lobby, mixed incentives within Government, and a human rights case law that has consistently moved in a more liberal direction over the past 30 years. It notes that the problems we are facing in the UK are increasingly shared by other European countries. The report exposes that at least £11m is being spent by NGOs with a focus on migration issues on research, analysis and lobbying – with a further £30m in taxpayer funded grants to universities, most of which have a clear tilt towards liberal immigration policies. The report argues that the policy response needs to change the incentives, whether they be on migrants themselves, employers and renters, other government departments and third countries who do not cooperate on returning their nationals. The report recommends:
An auction system to allocate a limited number of work visas to ensure they go to the highest quality candidates, with the proceeds used to increase wages in the care sector,
A system of ‘sureties’ which impose a penalty on visa holders if they do not leave on time
Illegal migrants to know they will not be allowed to settle in the UK, but will be transferred to safe accommodation on Ascension Island
Tougher laws to block visas and overseas aid going to countries that do not cooperate in returns of their nationals
Much tougher penalties for those employing and renting accommodation to people without the right to be in the UK.
A cross European coalition to reform the ECHR, with a willingness to leave if this is not delivered
In a foreword to the report, former Australian Foreign Minister, The Honourable Alexander Downer AC, said: “The issue of immigration has become one of the most contentious on the Western world…so far few countries have managed the issue well…but the British immigration system is a particular shambles… A British government will have sooner or later to get control of the immigration program. If they fail to do so, we can be sure populists and extremists will get elected who promise to do it.”"

The absurd reality of Starmer’s Britain - "Keir Starmer isn’t “smashing the gangs” that are breaking our laws and flooding Britain with illegal immigrants — he’s going into business with them... The British state, the ruling class, are now using the British people’s own money —taxpayers’ money—to offer far more favourable contracts to private landlords who rent their properties to asylum-seekers and illegal migrants instead of renting them to the British people who need them... Unlike the normal housing market, under these deals landlords are being offered leases with no risk of arrears or non-payment, funding for property repairs and council tax bills, and no fees for letting companies and property managers. In other words, they are being offered big incentives to house the illegal migrants who are breaking our laws while those migrants, too, are being offered even more incentives to enter Britain in the first place —the prospect of their own home. What this means is that, today, the British people are being put in the truly absurd position of having their own money being used by the British state to outbid them in the private housing sector so that the state can prioritise people who break the law... It’s yet another example of the shocking sense of unfairness that I’ve argued has now become a major theme of Starmer’s Britain —a country in which everybody except the British majority are put first... You might as well put a big, a bright, flashing neon sign on the white cliffs of Dover that reads: “free housing for illegal migrants”. Because that’s exactly what is now happening in Labour’s Britain. While Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper have been gaslighting the country by claiming they are “smashing the gangs”, in reality —as everybody can now see—they are strengthening, not smashing, the business model that underpins the gangs. The Labour government, remember, have scrapped the Conservative Party’s Rwanda plan, which was the only serious deterrent Britain had and one that Labour could not even be bothered to wait and see if it had an effect. Labour then essentially decriminalised illegal migration into Britain by overturning the Illegal Migration Act, removing age checks, and making it easier, not harder, for people to stay in the country once they make it here. While maintaining one of the most generous welfare systems for illegal migrants in Europe, Labour have also been approving the vast majority of claims that are made for asylum, providing yet another incentive for the gangs and migrants to keep coming, knowing full well they have a very good chance of being allowed to stay in Britain, forever, if they make it. And now, on TikTok videos that are no doubt being watched from Syria to Iraq, Afghanistan to Eritrea, countless more would-be migrants will be hearing about the apartments and houses that the British state is making available by pushing aside the British people who actually live, work, and pay taxes in this country. And many, I suspect, will simply be laughing at us. Because instead of creating a deterrent, Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, and the Labour government are merely creating more and more incentives for people. Which is why, ever since Labour returned to power, as I warned would happen, the number of small boats has been surging to record heights... I’ve written before about the critical importance of the ‘social contract’— about the critical yet delicate relationship between the people and their rulers... just ask yourself, what kind of protection is this —a ruling class and a state that before our very eyes is prioritising foreigners and law-breakers over its own people when distributing what little housing we have in this country? Ask yourself, too, what kind of organised society is this —one that not only welcomes but rewards those who break our laws while treating the hard-working, law-abiding majority with such contempt, leaving the British taxpayer with a bill of more than £2 BILLION a year for these hotel and accommodation costs alone? And, lastly, ask yourself why should we voluntarily surrender our rights and freedoms to a political class and a state bureaucracy like this, which is at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile toward its own people, who are openly being treated like second-class citizens?... It won’t be members of the elite class who have to live this way, much like it is not members of the elite class who are on waiting lists for social housing, having to compete with dozens of others to rent the same flat, or being squeezed out of buying their own home. No, as usual, it will be the hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding forgotten majority who have to pay the costs of disastrous policies being pursued by the luxury belief class —the elites who like the idea of open borders so long as they do not have to live with the consequences themselves."

Women’s Safety Initiative on X - "We’re building a community of women who aren’t afraid to say that mass immigration is impacting our safety. Mass immigration = mass risk to women"
celia on X - "You’re more likely to be assaulted/hurt by men you know, ladies"
Connie Shaw on X - "Foreign nationals were 71% more likely than Britons to be responsible for sex crime convictions from 2021 - 2023 according to our own government"
Charlie Bentley-Astor on X - "Remember, Britain is now the rape capital of Europe - twice as many instances as France which is second in the league table. In terms of reported instances of rape, the UK is 2nd in the world, only siting behind Grenada..."
Clearly, this is because of increased reporting and is good

Incarceration Works

Incarceration Works
James Q. Wilson’s work showed that removing dangerous people from the streets protects communities.

Sergio Hyland seemed like the perfect advocate. Calling himself a “fierce, relentless, implacable abolitionist,” determined to end incarceration in the United States, Hyland had spent more than two decades behind bars before joining Pennsylvania’s Working Families Party as an anti-prison organizer. His criminal record only burnished his credentials: he had pled guilty to the 2001 killing of a 15-year-old and was later charged in connection with another homicide in 2002. Once he got out of prison in 2022, Hyland launched a website offering “speaking engagements” and “harm/de-escalation tactics” training, and he frequently appeared alongside Philadelphia’s progressive prosecutor, Larry Krasner. The two even shared a news release in April 2025 announcing the Working Families Party’s endorsement of Krasner, which the prosecutor was “honored to accept.” A week later, Hyland was arrested for murdering a 30-year-old mother of two. Police discovered a stockpile of illegal guns in his home. Now Krasner’s office will have to prosecute him.

Not every violent offender commits murder after his supposed rehabilitation, of course. And Hyland has not yet been convicted of this latest charge. But his arrest for a new heinous crime suggests a broader insight that political scientist James Q. Wilson long emphasized: incarceration is often valuable simply because it takes dangerous people out of circulation, removing them from society.

It’s fashionable to blame America’s high incarceration rates on social injustice—and law enforcement—rather than lawbreaking. If policymakers would just provide disadvantaged people with sufficient resources and economic opportunity, on this view, the crime problem could be solved. That utopian vision gained traction during the mad summer of 2020, when activists, rioters, and the mainstream press, reacting to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sought to replace law enforcement with programs that target the root causes of antisocial behavior. “As a society,” wrote activist Mariame Kaba in the New York Times, “we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.”

The truth is otherwise. As Hyland’s case exemplified, violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders—that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again.

Most people are not teetering on the edge of felony, waiting to become, in the Left’s favored euphemism, a “justice-impacted individual.” The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows. Indeed, crime’s concentration is one of the most well-established findings in social science. In 1972, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported that just 6 percent of males in a birth cohort accounted for 52 percent of all police contacts. (Violent crime, in particular, is overwhelmingly committed by young males.) Thirty years later, a similar study in Boston found that 3 percent of males were responsible for more than half of their cohort’s arrests after age 31.

The pattern holds across time and place. In 2014, data showed that three-quarters of state prisoners—the core of America’s incarcerated population—had at least five prior arrests. Nearly 5 percent had 31 or more, a larger share than those imprisoned after just a single arrest. In 2022, the New York Times reported that “nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City . . . involved just 327 people,” or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been “arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.” And in Oakland, a gun-violence-prevention group found that about 400 individuals—0.1 percent of the city—were responsible for most of the city’s homicides. Violence is concentrated geographically as well. It occurs primarily in poor minority neighborhoods, whose members make up most of its victims.

These figures may even understate how concentrated antisocial behavior is. Wolfgang found that the offending minority committed dozens of crimes for every one that led to arrest. Fifty years later, a similar study reported that delinquent youth “self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact . . . with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest.” Combined with the fact that more than 60 percent of violent crimes reported each year go unsolved, the implication is clear: by the time a violent offender ends up in prison, he has likely committed multiple violent acts and many lesser offenses. Again, these patterns are most common among young men “who exhibited more psychopathic features,” the 2022 study’s authors noted, and “who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality.” As a massive study from Sweden concludes: “The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.”

The case for an incapacitation-first approach to crime control follows directly from these indisputable facts. An analysis of the Swedish paper reveals that violent crime would fall nearly 80 percent if perpetrators could be prevented from re-offending after their first conviction and would fall by half if they were fully incapacitated after their third. So concentrated is violent crime among a profoundly antisocial few that making even a tenth violent conviction punishable by life without parole would cut overall violent crime by 20 percent.

It is intellectually interesting to try to discover why the five steal and the ninety-five do not,” Wilson wrote in Thinking About Crime. Yet from the point of view of public policy, he maintained, “such explanations are of little value, because government has no way of changing in any systematic fashion family backgrounds, deep-seated attitudes, friendship patterns, or media images.” Even if government were able to do these things, he continued, “the cost would be frightful—not only in money terms . . . but also in terms of those fundamental human values that would be jeopardized if government possessed the capacity to direct the inner life of the family or to mold the mental state of its citizens.”

Thinking About Crime remains the clearest articulation of a public-policy approach to criminal justice. Wilson began from the premise that a community cannot flourish under conditions of pervasive disorder. Public policy, he argued, must therefore manage crime effectively enough to secure a basic level of order—without utopian illusions but with attention to cost and “fundamental human values.”

Given crime’s extreme concentration, this chiefly means separating the antisocial few from the pro-social many. “What the government can do is to change the risks of robbery,” Wilson wrote, “and to incapacitate . . . those who rob despite the threats and alternatives society provides.” Of the punishments not deemed legally cruel and unusual, only incarceration and capital punishment guarantee incapacitation. Wilson became the leading voice in the latter half of the twentieth century pressing for more prosecutions of the antisocial few and longer sentences to keep them off the streets.

For decades, Americans intuitively accepted incarceration as justified by incapacitation. It fell out of favor, thanks to a long period of success and low crime rates, which provided an opening for activists and critics to make arguments about “mass incarceration.” Now, after years of criminal-justice reforms and anti-policing measures, crime has returned as a kitchen-table concern, but Wilson’s insights have faded from memory. We are not only far from reaffirming his conclusions; we have lost the habit of asking his questions.

Yet today’s debate over crime and punishment typically still begins with the premise that America suffers from “overincarceration.” Nearly 2 million people are held in prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, and other detention centers. As abolitionists and police-defunding advocates repeat, the U.S. rate of roughly 580 incarcerated individuals per 100,000 people remains the highest in the Western world. Starting from this premise, so different from Wilson’s public-policy approach, activists naturally ask whether the nation is locking up too many people.

As Thomas Sowell has observed, criminal justice is the only field where the first question often asked is what benefits the criminal rather than what protects the law-abiding public. Why? Wilson blamed “the causal fallacy”—the belief that “no problem is adequately addressed unless its causes are eliminated.” Embracing this fallacy turns policy on its head: a discussion that should focus on what best serves the community instead becomes a philosophical and anthropological search for the prime mover of antisocial behavior. “Wicked people exist” was Wilson’s conservative answer. That axiom is unacceptable to those unwilling to accept a moral view of human nature. And our discomfort with incapacitating the wicked has grown as the causal fallacy has taken deeper hold.

A half century after Thinking About Crime, the U.S. criminal-justice system has lost sight of its fundamental purpose, while the American public is less willing to accept the need for an incapacitation-first approach.

The modern view wrongly treats crime as a dispute between perpetrator and victim. Television dramas that let victims decide whether to “press charges” reflect this confusion. In reality, prosecutors represent “the People,” the political community harmed whenever one of its members is attacked or the law is broken within its borders. Antisocial behavior is an assault on the social order itself. Each crime signals that law-abiding citizens cannot rely on shared norms, forcing them to approach daily life with suspicion rather than goodwill. Lawlessness drives the law-abiding away; yet their interests must come first.

When they don’t, the results are predictable. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s notorious Day One memo, for instance, laid out an anti-prosecution manual that divided offenses into two categories: a narrow set of “public safety” crimes warranting punishment; and others—such as theft, trespassing, or driving with a suspended license—that did not. Embracing the causal fallacy, Bragg promised to treat “nonviolent and minor offenses” with “root cause” strategies instead. New York went further, barring judges from considering whether defendants pose a risk of re-offending when setting bail. The effect is obvious: dangerous individuals who should be incapacitated remain free.

This mind-set is not confined to New York prosecutors; it reflects a broader cultural shift. Recurring “national reckonings” over race and identity have trained many Americans to see disparities as products of nebulous systemic oppression. Critical theory represents the ultimate root-cause hunt, insisting that hidden forces, not individual agency, explain failure or success. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are justified as attempts to counteract these supposed causes. Today’s social-justice politics begins from the premise that finding root causes defines good policy. No wonder victimhood is coveted: it declares that one has been wronged through no fault of his own, obligating society to make amends. From here, it is only a short step to the ultimate causal fallacy: nobody deserves prison because individuals cannot fail society—only society can fail individuals.

The American Left cannot resist this reasoning. Its progressive wing, ascendant in the Democratic Party today, has embraced an ethic of moral luck, treating individual choices as mere reflections of unchosen circumstances. The Right, by contrast, retains the intellectual resources to return to first principles: so long as a lawbreaker threatens the good order of society, he must be restrained. The Right will need to bring this message forcefully to the places where it is most intuitive yet least familiar.

Wilson’s challenge to America was simple: acknowledge that some people must be prevented from preying upon others, whatever the origins of their behavior. Half a century later, his insights remain unrefuted. The best tribute to his legacy is to restore the habit of thinking about crime as a policy problem—and to reaffirm that incarceration is justified by incapacitation alone. We can keep chasing root causes while communities suffer. Or we can return to the essential work of protecting civilization from acts that Wilson rightly called “destructive to the very possibility of society.”  

 

 

 

Links - 22nd February 2026 (1 - Left and Right Wing Violence)

Lauren Chen on X - "I've come to realize the left doesn't actually oppose crime or violence on principle.  They only oppose it when it hurts their own agenda or allies. Otherwise, they actually cheer it on when it's inflicted upon their enemies, or just ignore it when it can't be exploited.  For example, killing is good when it's a health insurance CEO or Charlie Kirk. But it's bad if it's Renee Good or George Floyd (for the purpose of this argument, we will assume, as leftists do, that George Floyd was actually killed and did not OD). And killing doesn't register at all when it's someone like Iryna Zarutska being murdered by a black man.  The same goes with violence and crime as a whole. Violence against ICE is good. However, violence against ICE protestors is bad. And violence between black gangs is simply unimportant.  Furthermore, stealing from Walmarts and other big chains is good, but "stealing" from indigenous people is bad. Somalis stealing from taxpayers, on the other hand, should just not be discussed at all.  Unlike most people, the leftist views violence and crime as morally neutral tools, with acceptability or importance wholly dependent on who or what these tools are being used against.  Now, you might say, the right acts similarly! After all, weren't the ICE agent's and Kyle Rittenhouse's killings excused by conservatives?  But no, actually, these cases are not the same. The right doesn't excuse these killings because they were perpatrated by conservatives against progressives, which is how leftists view these scenarios.  It is not the "who" that provides justification for these killings in the eyes of the right, but rather, the "why," which is self-defense.  Regardless of the parties involved, conservatives, in general, recognize the right to self-defense. Leftists, conversely, might only recognize self-defense as valid depending on who is using it.  Case in point, according to leftists, the ICE agent was not justified in shooting as self-defense after being hit with a car at a protest. But somehow, self-defense has been the go-to defense for Karmelo Anthony, a black teen who stabbed an unarmed student after getting into an argument at a campus sports event.  Again, for the leftist, the justification for crime and violence comes not from "why," but from "who."  And so, why does this matter? Why is this worth discussing?  It matters because, as we saw with Charlie Kirk, regardless of how law abiding or moral you may otherwise be, as long as you are conservative, it means the left will support any and all violence or theft that befalls you. Unfortunately, the justification for harming you comes from who you are: their enemy.  This phenomenon also explains the leftist indifference to the crimes of minority groups, like Somalis, or trans people, or illegal immigrants, or whatever other protected class. Put simply, in the left's belief system, if a crime happens, but there's no way to use it to gain political power, has it even really happened at all?  Finally, with these revelations in mind, the right must stop entering into debates with leftists assuming they share the view that crime and violence are inherently bad, because though they may deny it, the truth is they do not." Florida nurse' license suspended after threatening press secretary Karoline Leavitt - "Florida has issued an emergency suspension of the license of the nurse who wished childbirth injury on Karoline Leavitt.  The emergency suspension order, obtained by Fox News Digital, reads, "Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD, State Surgeon General, ORDERS the emergency suspension of the license of Alexis Backer Lawler, R.N., ("Lawler") to practice as a registered nurse in the State of Florida."   In a Wednesday post on X, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier praised the move, saying, "Effective today, Lexie Lawler is no longer allowed to practice nursing in Florida,"... Lawler, a former labor and delivery nurse at Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital, was fired last week after posting a video where she wished Leavitt permanent harm during childbirth, saying, "As a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great joy to wish Karoline Leavitt a fourth degree tear."  She added, "I hope you f------ rip from bow to stern and never s--- normally again, you c---."  She later doubled down on her remarks, saying, "So they just murdered a man in Minnesota, they murdered a man in Minnesota, and you motherf------ are coming after me ‘cause I used bad language? F--- you. I’m on the right side of this. F--- you."... Uthmeier had previously called on the Florida Board of Nursing to revoke Lawler’s license, and told Fox News Digital in a statement, "Women shouldn’t have to worry about a politically-driven nurse who wishes them pain and suffering being in the delivery room during childbirth."" Scott Jennings on X - "DEMS: "It's not just the left that's being violent!"
"OK, who on the right is being violent?"
DEMS: 🦗🦗🦗
The left has a problem with violence, it is in its heart right now 👇" BLACK DUMPLING™ on X - "Yeah, Leftists lie about Right wing crime stats endlessly there too.  Some Aryan brotherhood shanks some dude in prison and a Leftist just like you dutifully records it as "Right Wing Political Violence".  Montez Terriel Lee melts some dude in a pawnshop he set on fire during a BLM riot and that's an abstract crime committed in a vacuum as the Biden Admin prosecutor invokes MLK *for the benefit of the Defendant*."
Naturally, this person got blocked by the left winger who was talking rubbish Meme - wanye @wanyeburkett: "It sounds like crazy, far-right, woo woo nonsense, but almost everything you're taught about the last 75 years of American history in the standard high school curriculum is if not a straightforward lie, carefully designed to produce an understanding of that history that's quite..."
Peter Conroy: "It wasn't until Bryan Burrough was doing the media rounds talking about his Days of Rage book a few years ago that I realized how absolutely insane and violent and chaotic the late 60's were. And how *wrong* the whitewashed / peacenik version portrayed a few decades later was" Meme - Thomas Chatterton Williams: "Bluesky is a platform where a person can ask in all seriousness, "who is eradicating their ideological opponents?" and it doesn't even occur to them that this is something the left has done."
Thomas Chatterton Williams: "Bluesky is such a sealed epistemic vacuum in many corners not a single person points out that just this past September Charlie Kirk literally got his neck blown open in public *by his ideological opponent.*"
Evan Bernick, a finite m... @evanbe...: "quick question, who is literally eradicating their ideological opponents"
Thomas Chatterton Willi... @chatt...: "There is a growing and palpable bloodlust and desire to see ideological opponents quite literally eradicated that should give us all extreme pause. It's been a long time since the most meaningful divide in American political and cultural life was between "left" and "right."" Meme - Thomas Chatterton Williams: "The Bluesky moral high ground:"
Corey Atad @coreyatad.com: "the Kirk thing really got to a lot of guys worried that their open veiled support for fascism might come back to harm them"
Occam's Bec de corbin @goodvers...: "if only" unseen1 on X - "Charlie Kirk gets assassinated by a leftist. The right doesn't riot. They turn to God and prayer to make sense of it all. A leftist agitator gets killed while trying to run over a law enforcement officer, the left riots and calls for mass killings. We are not the same." 42% of young liberals say Kirk’s views ‘brought violence upon himself to an extent’: poll - "Conservative Charlie Kirk’s viewpoints mean he brought violence upon himself to an extent, according to 42 percent of young liberal voters polled in a newly released survey.  Young America’s Foundation released the results of its fall survey on Tuesday, which questioned 1,021 registered voters aged 18 to 29 nationwide.  “Surveyed shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk this fall, 70 percent of young voters say that there is absolutely no justification for murdering someone over their viewpoints,” YAF reported. “When broken out along ideological lines, an alarming 42 percent of young liberal voters, however, say that Kirk’s viewpoints mean he brought violence upon himself to an extent.”  Kirk’s murder may have had a small chilling effect on conservative speech on campus as well.  “Compared to YAF’s previous survey conducted in January, young conservatives are now less likely to feel comfortable expressing their views, sliding from 65 percent who were comfortable at the start of the year to just 51 percent this fall,” YAF reported...   About half, 51 percent, said they believe “there is not much opportunity in America today and the average person doesn’t have much chance to really get ahead.”  But dig into those numbers, and a somewhat surprising picture emerges: “Among young white voters, just 21 percent think they have more opportunities than their parents, compared with 41 percent of young black voters and 47 percent of young Hispanic voters.”"
"What was he wearing?" Victim blaming is only wrong when it hurts the left wing agenda
The cope is that DEI just levels the playing field and young white voters just see the loss of privilege as oppression Sensurround on X - "Let's stop pretending this is complicated.  Democrats show up in the streets. Republicans show up in the tweets.   Democrats are perfectly willing to burn, smash, threaten, and intimidate to get their way. Republicans clutch their pearls, refresh their feeds, and argue about exactly how angry they should get.  Democrats understand power. Ugly, blunt, physical power. Republicans understand process, And complain about how it's being subverted.  When Democrats lose someone, they riot. When Republicans lose someone, they write a strongly worded post and ask why the police didn't do more.  Democrats are ruthless enough to scare institutions. Republicans are polite enough to be ignored by them.  One side is dangerous. The other is harmless.  In a world that rewards force and punishes hesitation, that's just losing with good manners" The Democrat Party Is A Domestic Terrorist Organization - "Decades of extreme language, calling conservatives “Nazis,” claiming existential threats are around the corner in order to feed an assassination culture, and justifying the aftermath has brought a level of violence that is only one-sided: The left tries to murder or maim their political enemies.   On Wednesday afternoon, a shooter took the life of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, just as he was answering a question about left-wing violence in the United States.  Left-wing commentators at corporate media outlets — the mouthpieces of the Democrat Party — were quick to justify the violence, suggesting it was justified or that Kirk brought it on himself, even going as far as to suggest it was really a Trump supporter firing a gun in “celebration.”  Democrats have a long history of calling conservatives the most vile things our culture can think of, and their friends in the media spread the message to anyone who watches them.  Democrats have recently been saying they “cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore.”  Just yesterday, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in an interview, “Our only opportunity, our only chance to save our democracy, is to fight fire with fire.”  Murphy brushed off “the fact that we’re blowing up norms,” adding that if you spend any more than “two seconds … being sorry for the fact that the old world doesn’t exist, then your democracy is gone.”   “We’re in a war right now to save this country, and so you have to be willing to do whatever is necessary in order to save the country,” he said. Murphy’s media pal salivated over the sentiment, wondering if there were enough people who believe it.  What do Democrats think is “necessary?” Well, perhaps it is bringing a knife to a “knife fight,” in the words of Democrat National Committee head Ken Martin.  After all, as Kirk pointed out earlier this year, 48 percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justifiable to assassinate Elon Musk, and 55 percent say the same about President Donald Trump. “The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response,” Kirk said at the time. “This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.”  The left-wing penchant for egging on and justifying violence has long been a staple of their political movement.  Democrats did everything they could to make Trump seem like the most evil person on the planet for years, so it was no surprise when Trump was shot last year and a second gunman attempted to shoot him only weeks later.  Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill., said recently that “Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” and then in the aftermath of Kirk’s death blamed Trump for the assassination.  All the way back in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson suggested that if Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater were to win, American families would be annihilated by nuclear weapons. He ran an extraordinarily on-the-nose campaign ad saying as much.   The 1960s was full of left-wing political violence.  President Bill Clinton granted clemency to Puerto Rican FALN terrorists who bombed and murdered their way across America, and President Barack Obama pardoned them. President Joe Biden granted clemency to those convicted of murdering police officers.  Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., threatened Supreme Court justices, and a man with a gun showed up outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house intent on murdering him.   Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-Vt., existential threat language led one of his supporters to shoot at the Republican members of Congress practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game in 2017, nearly ending the life of now-House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.  In 2013, a man intent in killing as many people as possible at the conservative organization Media Research Council went there with a gun and killed a security officer after disagreeing with the group’s stance on gay “marriage.”  Left-wing violence in Nashville, Tennessee, saw Covenant Christian School attacked by someone claiming to be “transgender,” and the Biden administration attempted to cover up the shooter’s writings, which exposed her motive.  More recently, children at Annunciation Catholic School were gunned down while they were praying by another person claiming to be “transgender” with a similarly demonic motivation.  But the left celebrated when Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down a healthcare CEO, and they cheered even harder when Black Lives Matter brought death and destruction to America’s streets.  In the world we live in now, there is no time to try to convince the left to “tone down” their extreme rhetoric. They need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are." ALX 🇺🇸 on X - "Someone doxxed Stephen Miller’s home address, then showed up to his house 24 hours after Charlie Kirk was assassinated to try to intimidate his wife.. These threats forced them to move out to a military base and now activist judges and prosecutors are protecting the criminal…" We Arrive At My Fear - "A philosophical festering has taken root in the minds of the left that their opponents are evil and words are violence. A permission structure formed on MSNBC and other progressive media outlets that the right must be stopped to save democracy. An exculpatory structure formed on CNN and other media outlets downplaying or excusing progressive violence. A triggering event happened with the election of Donald Trump. Then progressive politicians amped up the rhetoric to push the disturbed and violent across the line.  Writing in the New York Times in 2017, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argued that, “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”... Words became violence. Concurrent to Thomas Matthew Crooks pulling the trigger on his gun in Butler, PA, MSNBC had on a commentator arguing Donald Trump was a threat to democracy and needed to be stopped. On a frequent basis, progressive historian Michael Beschloss appeared on Morning Joe on that network, decrying Trump. On Election Day 2024, Beschloss described that day to the Morning Joe crew as, “In the future, historians are gonna look back on this day and say this is the day America made the choice between freedom and democracy on one side and authoritarianism and dictatorship on the other.” Then Trump won.  On January 8, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner shot then Congresswoman Gabby Giffords of Arizona. On CNN, the conversation immediately turned to rightwing violence. CNN, the New York Times, and other outlets pointed the finger at Sarah Palin, claiming she had used the “militaristic” language of “targeting” Giffords for defeat. When it turned out the assassin had mental health issues, the network moved on. On June 14, 2017, James Hodgkinson attempted the mass assassination of Republican members of Congress. As soon as it turned out he was a progressive MSNBC viewer, CNN and other media outlets moved on.  Now, CNN will routinely talk to its audience about rightwing violence as a standalone category of violence. But all leftwing violence must be taken with a heavy dose of “both sides do it” and “why did Donald Trump provoke it.” After both Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk and Joshua Jahn opened fire on an ICE facility, killing two detainees, CNN’s national security analyst Juliette Kayyem rushed to social media to assure the left that the shooters were not of the left. An entire media and progressive infrastructure exists to assure the left violence is never their fault. Donald Trump’s election triggered the left. Now, media outlets and Democrat politicians insist Donald Trump’s rhetoric is to blame, he is a dictator, and Democrats need to get comfortable doing things they would otherwise not do, in the words of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. The Atlantic, beloved by the progressive elite, is even sounding the alarm that leftwing violence is outpacing rightwing violence. Democrat politicians are forcing a government shutdown, scared that their voters might turn physically violent against them. News outlets continue making excuses, blaming Trump, and stacking bodies to see which side is more violent. California Governor Gavin Newsom, after suggesting everyone tone it down after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, went on Stephen Colbert to declare he really does believe Trump will cancel the 2028 presidential election. In the meantime, Charlie Kirk is dead. A gun control activist shot up an ABC station in California. ICE agents have been shot, and detainees killed in Texas. Mourners for Kirk were hurt in Arizona. An explosive device was placed under a local Fox TV van in Nevada. A federal facility in Oregon was vandalized, and employees were assaulted by protesters. That’s just the last two weeks. Until Democrats police their own side, the violence will only increase.  “But January 6!” they reply.  On March 1, 1954, four left-wing Puerto Rican Nationalists entered the gallery of the United States House of Representatives and rained down bullets on the members of Congress, wounding five.  On March 1, 1971, the progressive Weather Underground bombed the United States Capitol.  On November 6, 1983, the “Armed Resistance Unit,” a far-left group affiliated with the Black Liberation Army, bombed the United States Capitol to protest the invasion of Grenada.  I neither deny that some on the right have committed violence nor that Donald Trump stirs the pot.  Too many on the left, in the press, and anti-Trump voices on the center-right, however, seem to think screaming “But January 6th,” is a way to ignore what has been festering on the left and that is now spilling out into assassinations and murders across the United States."
Words the left hate are violence. Violence the left loves is speech Defiant L’s on X - "Are you feeling the love and tolerance?
Protester: "Remove this president or there will be violence""
Overturning an election is only wrong when the right does it - Left

Links - 21st February 2026 (2 - Mark Carney)

Mark Carney's bizarre insistence on using British spellings - "When Canada last had a federal budget in April 2024, the text followed the typically idiosyncratic conventions of Canadian English. Some words, such as “colour,” followed a British spelling. While others, such as “analyze,” went with an American spelling. But the 492 pages of the 2025 budget have been diligently scoured to remove U.S.-style spelling. Harmonize has become “harmonise.” Specialize has become “specialise.” Organize has become “organise.” And the budget is very much an anomaly in this regard. Official House of Commons transcripts continue to employ the prior forms of “harmonize” and “organize,” among others. The official text of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms uses the spelling of “recognize” as opposed to the budget’s spelling of “recognise.” The more than 2,000 historical plaques and memorials maintained by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada also stick to a Canadian-style spelling style at odds with the Carney government... Carney’s insistence on British spellings was made clear to his staff in his first weeks in the Prime Minister’s Office. In a profile published shortly after the April general election, the National Post’s Christopher Nardi cited reports from Liberal insiders that Carney was demanding British spelling in all official correspondence. The new prime minister also demanded a dress code of “formal business attire.” As to why Carney is doing this, it fits in with a general “Europeanization” that the prime minister has been pursuing for Canada. Carney’s first foreign trips were to meet with European leaders, he’s attempted to move Canada within the orbit of the European Union and the 2025 budget even included a promise to “explore participation in Eurovision.” It also might be simple fact that Carney was Bank of England governor for seven years and, just like a North American backpacker who comes home with a British accent following their tour of the U.K., he’s stuck to English customs out of pure Anglophilia. (He also attended Oxford University in his 20s, has a British-born wife and obtained British citizenship.) Carney wears tailored Saville Row suits, and he wasn’t shy about his love of Britishness in his 2021 book Values. Here’s how he described Bank of England headquarters, “Everything I see evokes the history of the Bank and the permanence of its mission. The entrance hall echoes the style of British imperial capitals. Everything appears solid, safe, permanent.” Charles Boberg, a McGill University linguist who has spearheaded regular surveys of the unique quirks of Canadian English, surmised that the prime minister might be trying to de-Americanize official language as a form of protest against a hostile U.S. administration. But as Boberg wrote in an email to the National Post, “it has always seemed somewhat ironic to me that those concerned with Canada’s cultural independence from the U.S. choose to symbolize this by, effectively, emphasizing Canada’s cultural dependence on Britain instead.” He also noted that Carney has thus far steered clear of the more foreign-looking British spellings, such as “gaol, tyre, or waggon.” Canadian English spelling conventions have been famously described by the linguist T.K. Pratt as a “hobgoblin.” Canada’s founding prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, decreed at the outset that Canada would follow British conventions in its English. Nevertheless, the interim 150 years have yielded an organic and somewhat inconsistent mix of both British and U.S. terms. As Pratt wrote in a 1993 survey, “Canadian spellers might claim to be among the most broadminded people writing English today.” And despite popular belief, the trend is not always towards Canadian English becoming more Americanized. A 2010 Kwansei Gakuin University study of Canadian linguistic trends determined that Canadians have been found to actively abandon U.S. spellings. One hundred years ago, for instance, a majority of Canadians regularly used the U.S.-style spelling of “honor.” But surveyors determined that this had plummeted to almost nothing by the year 2000. Other terms, such as “jewelry,” were more malleable, going up or down depending on Canadians’ views of the United States at any particular time."

Canadians will soon pay more interest on national debt than federal funds for health care and child care combined - "Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget is leaving some Canadian economists concerned about the mounting national debt and ballooning annual interest payments eroding more and more of scarce federal resources. The “Canada Strong Budget 2025” projects that, by 2029, federal debt charges will consume one in every eight dollars of revenue Ottawa expects to bring in.  The Liberals’ budget, released this week, not only swaps out reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio for the more modest goal of reducing the deficit-to-GDP ratio, but also projects annual interest payments on the debt to swell due to large deficits, starting with a $78.3 billion shortfall this year. In two years, interest payments on the national debt will exceed Ottawa’s annual deficit, with $66.2 billion to service the debt compared to a $63.5 billion deficit. “It’s essentially doubling down on what the Trudeau government strategy was, and in many cases, is actually accelerating spending, deficits, and debt compared to the Trudeau government’s fall economic statement,” Jake Fuss, Fraser Institute director of fiscal studies, told The Hub, adding that deficit spending over the next five years is almost double what the Trudeau government had planned last year.  By 2029, the compounding federal debt is forecasted to cause interest payments to surpass Ottawa’s combined transfer payments to the provinces for health care and child care. That fiscal year, the federal government projects public debt charges will hit $76.1 billion, while the Canada Health Transfer ($65 billion) and Canada-wide early learning and child care ($8.5 billion) will cost taxpayers a combined $73.5 billion—or $2.6 billion less. The Carney government’s inaugural budget promises “generational investments” of about $280 billion over five years on new infrastructure, productivity and competitiveness, defence and security, and housing. But some economists believe these “investments” will merely result in costly failed programs similar to the governments of Justin Trudeau and Pierre Trudeau. “During Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s tenure, [the government] thought that they could judge things best. They brought in the National Energy Program. And they started supply management…going through the list of things, you often see these things blow up,” said Jack Mintz, a president’s fellow of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. Mintz believes Carney’s technocratic approach, where the federal government acts as an investment banker picking winners and losers for major investments, will more than likely exacerbate federal spending, debt, and interest.  “You’re squeezing out other public expenditures. You’re also potentially squeezing out other private investment, because as the government requires more and more money from the international market, it starts bidding up interest rates in Canada,” Mintz said to The Hub. He added that as the government drives up the demand for borrowing—while also making Canada a riskier investment by making poor investments—interest rates can surge.  All in all, the Carney government plans to rack up a cumulative deficit of $320 billion over five years, growing the net debt from $1.48 trillion to $1.80 trillion (2029-30) in four years.   And on cue to the added borrowing load announced by the Carney Government, on Thursday one of the world’s three major credit rating agencies, Fitch Ratings, downgraded Canada’s credit score from triple-A to “AA+/Stable” due to “persistent fiscal expansion and a rising debt burden weaken[ing] its credit profile.” The top-three credit agency also warned Canada’s increased borrowing may “increase rating pressures in the medium term”—in other words, increase the interest rates on the growing federal debt.   Although interest payments on the national debt are projected to only inch up from 1.8 percent of GDP this fiscal year, to 2.1 percent of GDP by 2029-30, Fuss says Canada may be headed for a dire situation in the not-too-distant future mirroring that of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when interest rates skyrocketed to a point where Canada’s interest payments on national debt hit 6.5 percent of GDP in 1990-91...   Debt interest payments could be even higher if budget projections continue to underestimate actual federal spending. As C.D. Howe Institute president and CEO William Robson highlighted in The Hub earlier this week, the federal government’s spending estimates have been leaping more than $20 billion every year.   In the budget, the Carney government touts Canada as having the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7 at 13.3 percent, compared to the next lowest country, Germany, at 48.7 percent. The G7 average debt-to-GDP ratio is 101.4 percent (excluding Canada)... economists believe that Canada’s net debt is highly misleading because it includes the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) as assets.  “Net debt essentially looks at the total amount of debt, and then it subtracts out financial assets. But included in our financial assets in Canada are the CPP and the QPP, which are valued at about a combined $890 billion in mid-2025,” Fuss said. “And we can’t use those financial assets to actually offset total debt, because we would be compromising the benefits of current and future pensioners.”  Other G7 countries, like the U.S., include pensions as both an asset and a liability, so they aren’t subtracted from net debt like Canada does with CPP and QPP.   “A more accurate measure of Canada’s indebtedness is to look at…total liabilities or gross debt. And if we look at our total debt as a share of the economy, we actually rank fifth-highest among G7 countries at 113 percent of GDP,” Fuss explained. “That’s higher than the total debt burden in the U.K. It’s also higher than Germany, and we’re close behind France as well.”"
Clearly, the solution is to spend even more money. Meanwhile left wingers still say that debt is not high, ignoring that provincial debt is another kettle of fish

Marc Nixon on X - "CBC helped Carney win by selling his anti-America fairy tale. 🇺🇸 Now they’re awkwardly flipping the script suddenly “pro-America” because Canada can’t survive without our biggest customer. It’s not journalism. It’s paid propaganda. Defund CBC now."

John Smith on X - "So Canada via Mark Carney donate's 4.5 billion to Ukraine and Mark Carney's Corporation Brookfield is awarded a 4.2 Billion dollar rebuild contract in Ukraine. Nothing wrong going on here says Mark Carney!"

Sue-Ann Levy on X - "The Canadian $ is now at 71-cents — the lowest since 2003. That’s some economic prowess we’ve seen from Mr. Elbows Up. That’s why people won’t be going to the U.S. this winter not because his trained seals and the Boomers who voted for him say so."

Mark Carney is plunging Canada further into an Islamist-Leftist dystopia - "Canadian leadership and the culture that emanates from it has been dismal for years. Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor and the new prime minister of Canada, is perfectly on message – if what you want is a country soused in basket-case virtue-signalling economics, woke hypocrisy and cringeworthy, dangerous kowtowing to Islamist-Leftist pressure.  Like Britain and much of the Western world, Canada suffers from flagrantly self-harming migration policies. The country finds itself pummelled by Justin Trudeau’s ruinous open-door policy. After the latter let in 1.2 million new residents in 2023, economists talked about Canada’s “population trap” in which the costs of providing infrastructure and capital that volume of newcomers could only obstruct economic growth. This number – 1.2 million – signified an amazingly irresponsible, though familiar, impulse for a Western leader, keener on selling his countryfolk down the river than letting any charges of “white privilege” stick. It is higher than the number of people living in most Canadian cities as well as eight of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories. As has been well documented, it has driven housing costs way up, and with Canada’s severe problems with Islamism, accepting high numbers of people from Afghanistan and Pakistan could well backfire. How many among this new influx are truly committed to the Western values of liberality and toleration? I doubt anyone in Canada knows, and those who want to will be afraid to ask.  The damage caused by Trudeau’s rule could take generations to correct. In the meantime, there are spasms, such as the clampdowns on immigration that followed Trudeau’s policy, such as in Quebec... It is worth lingering on Trudeau a bit longer, as he has surely set the tone of contemporary Canada more than anyone, aggressively carving out all its new sensibilities in line with the culture war. He was the embodiment of post-pandemic political morality: inverted, superficial, slippery, performative. It’s no coincidence that Canada was the first Western nation to see pro-Hamas protesting: on October 8, 2023. Canadian Jewish kindergartens, synagogues and schools have been firebombed since October 7. As the brave Canadian Yasmin Mohammed, former wife of a 9/11 plotter, has said time and again: pro-Hamas sensibilities have become increasingly embedded over a number of years. The rot goes wide as well as deep. Much like his Commonwealth sister-in-arms, Jacinda Ardern, Trudeau was hugely committed to as many harmful net-zero policies as possible, which are still crippling Canada. There are also unresolved questions about Chinese interference in the elections of 2019 and 2021. In his dealings with Mexico Trudeau focused on gender and native rights, apparently uninterested in that little question of trade. This is perhaps not a surprise given his 2014 comment that the Canadian budget “will balance itself”, and his equally telling 2021 remark to reporters, “you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy”. He forced Canada to participate in constant collective self-flagellation over the past treatment of indigenous people, then raised eyebrows for ditching speaking engagements on the country’s first Truth and Reconciliation Day in order to go surfing in British Columbia with his family. But Mr Family is no longer: having divorced his wife, the mother of his two children, he is now popstar Katy Perry’s boyfriend. Katy Perry can have him.  As many have said, it’s a mess. And now Canada has Carney, the so-called rockstar banker, whose tenure at the Bank of England was mired in poor decisions and low growth; something that became obvious as soon as the dust settled on the novelty of his good looks and foreignness. Carney offers a parade of the same awful ideas as Trudeau, reinforcing Canada’s reputation as a woke dystopia. He’s one of the world’s keenest pushers of the Environmental, Social and Governance movement (ESG) – ruinous for businesses and based in shoddy, counter-productive greenist ideology. He spouts empty terms like “innovation economy”.  He was the first to recognise a Palestinian state, possibly the most immoral idea to come out of a Western country in the 21st century, and fell over himself to declare Canada would abide by the International Court of Justice arrest warrant for Bibi Netanyahu. Carney, like his predecessor, speaks out of two sides of his mouth. In rewarding Hamas with a Palestinian state, Carney all but gave the thumbs up to the hate-filled anti-Israel protests on Canadian streets and the terror attacks that emerged from that movement. And then he has the temerity, a week later on the anniversary of October 7, to drone in an official statement that “Canada condemns anti-Semitism in all its forms”. It’s dismal. Carney has inherited a Canada of grotesque “liberal” laws, from the handing out of hard drugs to addicts in British Columbia, to legalised euthanasia. He has inherited a country confused and burnt out by the crippling costs of a poorly thought out, Merkel-style migration tsunami. But he is not the man to do anything about this, even if he could. He’s too busy currently cosying up to China."

Steven Chase on X - "Prime Minister Mark Carney announces he expects to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in South Korea this week."
Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 on X - "This has been his plan all along. He's friends with Xi Jinping from his Brookfield days. He's never called Xi a "tyrant". He reserves words like that for democratically-elected allies like Donald Trump. He's deliberately scuppering Canada-U.S. talks to pivot towards China."

terry l. on X - "I’m almost wondering if Carney is deliberately sabotaging relations with America so he can achieve major trade deals with China, a country that Brookfield has billions invested in. Why hasn’t our Conflict of Interest Commissioner red flagged his holdings in Brookfield? I know why"

Mark Carney says Canada will thrive in a new global system because govt still has money to spend, diversity is our strength, and we're committed to sustainability. : r/CanadianConservative - "Does Mark Carney understand where taxes come from and what drives this revenue?"
"I think he hopes you dont"

For rampant investment, rule of law beats cabinet rule - "So we now have the list of the first five “nation-building” projects the federal government wants to fast-track to fruition. We’ve been down this road before, except that in 1980-81, when the government of Pierre Trudeau and his finance minister Marc Lalonde were pushing mega-projects as a way of dealing with recession, you only needed to be investing $100 million to qualify... Read the parliamentary debates of the day and there’s a certain sad familiarity to it all: “Mr. Harvie Andre (Calgary Centre): “Madam Speaker, this project is not only vital to self-sufficiency, it is absolutely vital to Canada’s economic development … (D)elay has already cost Canada untold billions of dollars and untold thousands of jobs … In the interests of the billions of dollars that are being lost … will the Minister not commit to the House his assurance that this project will get underway as soon as possible so that another year is not lost while people walk the unemployment lines?” That was February 1982. The main difference between then and now is that the Liberal government of the day was actually on board with expanding Alberta’s oilsands. I don’t have anything in particular against the first five projects the Carney government has singled out for regulatory fast-tracking by the new Major Projects Office of Canada. Building a new bureaucracy to help investors through all the old bureaucracy is not the greatest strategy, but two mines, a port, an LNG terminal and a new nuclear power plant at least stand a chance of making money, which should be the test of an investment. No doubt their backers will pitch hard-to-calculate non-monetary spillover benefits but the goal here is to build a prosperous economy: If investments can’t make a monetary return, that means they aren’t sustainable without subsidies or other favours, and subsidies and favours are rickety foundations for long-term wealth creation. (The planned 60 per cent expansion of the Port of Montreal may be an exception to the “profits wanted” rule since it’s a hub for the export of stolen vehicles, a trade that, while lucrative for somebody, is not really in the national interest.) The usual Ottawa bumf explaining the choice of the Fabulous Five was full of tired, unpromising language — ad-man heroic — about Canada standing at “a defining moment … a pivotal juncture … a moment to act with ambition, confidence and purpose,” and how we need to “think big” and “build critical nation-building projects at speeds not seen in generations.” Call me old-fashioned but I figure when you’re spending literally tens of billions of taxpayer dollars you probably shouldn’t rush. Fortunately, despite all its talk, the Carney government isn’t abnormally fleet. It’s 141 days now since the election and still no budget. Speaking of the Pierre Trudeau government, there was lots of ambitious, confident, purposeful visioning surrounding Montreal’s Mirabel Airport, a behemoth built an hour from downtown to help fulfill the vision of a Montreal that was supposed to keep growing at 1950s and 1960s rates, which, thanks to separatism, didn’t happen. Mirabel was a sinkhole for money for three decades until it was finally declared a failure and shut down, its huge but chronically empty passenger terminal demolished. Governments in this country are always unhealthily fixated on visionary big projects. But what a prosperous economy requires is, not big investment in a select number of projects, but lots of investment everywhere all the time. One clear advantage of diffuse, dispersed investment is precisely that it’s harder for politicians to control. The deciders have nothing to do with government but are focused on bottom lines and doing things with as few people as possible, efficiently, and on time. Private operators have a strong profit interest in getting things done at speeds Ottawa certainly hasn’t seen in generations, not dragging projects out so as to maximize the associated employment “gains,” which are actually costs, not benefits. It is good that the Carney government now agrees with what the opposition has been saying for 10 years — though more than a little galling to have the likes of Dominic LeBlanc explain thus how there’s too much regulation. This is the same Dominic LeBlanc who was Mr. Fix-It in the government that brought in much of the excessive regulation. But which would be best for investment in Canada: a system in which you petition cabinet to give you a free pass from regulation that remains in place for everyone else? (Call it rule of cabinet.) Or a system in which you comply with the same legislated, but substantially streamlined, requirements for getting a project done that everyone else has to comply with? (Call it rule of law.) It’s not a hard question. Rule of law works best. Rule of cabinet is what they do in banana republics, and, increasingly, Washington. What Ottawa needs to do at speeds we haven’t seen in generations is de-clutter the regulations it spend the past 10 years intentionally cluttering."

Terence Corcoran: PM Carney’s destructive economic creationism - "The Carney economic agenda is a long and emerging list of interventions in the belief that the state is the entrepreneurial controller of economic activity. If the state is there, it is not capitalism. Free market creative destruction is being replaced by statist destructive creationism. Federal intervention plans seem to expand almost daily. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly told the Financial Times of London last weekend that Ottawa has plans to ride a wave of “economic nationalism” and somehow cajole Canada’s $3-trillion pension system to invest more in Canada — a move Paul Beaudry, former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, said was “very dangerous” and risked creating a “type of crony capitalism.” The Nov. 4 federal budget will also impose major “Buy Canadian” requirements on Ottawa and eventually all Canadian governments covering everything from products and services on up to infrastructure spending, grants, contributions, loans and other federal funding streams. Foreign companies would be required to “develop and build their products and services in Canada.” One of the obvious effects of such Trumpian state-capitalist policies would be to reduce competition by removing foreign firms and products from the economy. Adding to the destruction risk will be Carney’s dedication to the “existential” climate crisis and the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions — while at the same time increasing fossil fuel production, possibly including through new exports via the Keystone XL pipeline to the U.S. and the Northern Gateway pipeline to the West Coast. To erase the obvious contradiction — produce more oil while lowering CO2 emissions — Carney continues to push carbon capture and storage to clean up Canadian oil production... The total cost, and who will pay, for all this carbon and methane capture and reduction is unknown, although government subsidies and costs to oil industry and consumers will certainly run into the tens of billions. Industry Minister Joly also has new ideas, noting recently that government funding is imminent for Canada’s softwood lumber industry — Carney once promised $1.25 billion — to respond to Trump’s tariffs. Tens of billions here, tens of billions there, and then even more tens of billions elsewhere are all part of the Carney economic and fiscal plans. Spend $159 billion over five years on infrastructure , more billions on fixing the military, plus support for industries to expand their control over the Canadian economy and increase exports. A high-risk small modular nuclear power plant program is underway , cost now set at $21 billion but expected to rise in coming years. Ottawa is also getting into the housing business, and increasing major spending as part of a $55-billion apartment construction program and $16 billion for housing for “people who need it most.” I could go on, but space is limited. A question for aspiring Nobel economists: How much of this redistributed money, through spending or regulation, is likely to achieve the kind of growth and economic improvement that would come if the money were part of a corporate capitalist model that led to creative destruction and positive economic transformation?"
Environmentalists will continue to claim that government partly cushioning the impact of their strict regulation is a "subsidy" to fossil fuels
Because to left wingers, "qualifications" are more important than achievements or good ideas, they will continue to praise Carney as a genius economist even as he pushes policies the vast majority of economists say are daft

Elected as a Trump-fighter, Carney now boasting of close Trump ties - "Prime Minister Mark Carney boasted that he speaks “regularly” with U.S. President Donald Trump after facing down criticism in the House of Commons that his government had unnecessarily alienated the United States. “I speak regularly with the president,” said Carney in a French-language reply during question period on Monday, adding that “just over the weekend” he’d been on a call with Trump on the issue of “Ukraine, Russia and China.” Carney also called it a “success” that Canada has largely dodged U.S. tariffs as a result of most Canadian exports being exempt under the terms of the Canada-United States-Mexico agreement (CUSMA). “The real situation is this; we have the world’s best deal with the Americans,” said Carney. At another point, he said to applause from Liberal MPs that “U.S.-Canadian relations are good.” Carney was responding to attacks that had come, somewhat unexpectedly, from the benches of the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Leader Yves-François Blanchet accused Carney of damaging the Canadian economy by pushing away the U.S., and even suggested the prime minister should be spending more time in the U.S. capital. With Canada posting “very bad” economic figures, Blanchet called on Carney to “commit himself now to putting an end to tariffs and prioritizing a trade deal with the United States.” Blanchet is by no means a fan of the U.S. leader, and he represents a party whose animosity to Trump is nearly total... Blanchet’s principal attack on Carney was that he had displeased U.S. leadership to the detriment of the Canadian economy. He even appeared to make specific reference to a March 27 campaign speech by Carney in which he declared that close relations between Canada and the U.S. were at an end. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperations is over,” Carney said at the time... Blanchet would again reference the alleged displeasure of Washington in criticizing the “rare” presence of Carney in the U.S. capital. He urged him to start “seriously frequenting the capital of our principal partner.” To this, Carney said that Trump is a “modern man” who owns a cell phone. “I speak regularly with him, and I send texts to him,” he said."
Too bad Liberal voters are unlikely to realise that they got played and will have some new cope

The 5 nation-building projects Mark Carney is fast-tracking - "Prime Minister Mark Carney says his government’s Major Projects Office is fast-tracking five nation-building projects that represent investments of more than $60 billion and create thousands of well-paying jobs by streamlining regulatory assessment and approvals and helping to structure financing."
Now imagine what they could do if they streamlined regulatory assessment and approvals for everything.

Canada’s Carney talked tough on Trump - now some say he's backing down - "Canadian commentator Robyn Urback wrote: "Maybe Prime Minister Mark Carney's elbows were getting tired."  She said government's elbows up and down approach to negotiations so far could be characterised as a "chicken dance".  Meanwhile, Blayne Haggart, a professor of political science at Brock University, argued in a recent opinion piece in The Globe and Mail newspaper that: "Nothing about Carney's US strategy, particularly his pursuit of a 'comprehensive' trade and security agreement, makes a lick of sense."  Walking back on the DST has achieved "less than nothing", he said."