Tell me you don’t understand market.
Anyone who talks about “the” science is clearly an idiot and best ignored.
The science is clear: we can’t afford to burn the reserves we already have, let alone develop new ones. Existing & approved global oil & gas reserves *already* far exceed what we can safely burn if we’re to stay below 1.5C. The minister used to say this herself #Jackdaw 🧵3/4
Iain SM retweeted
You won't stop the carnage we see in France by passing a few immigration reforms -- as British politicians are now suggesting.
Tighten immigration, sure. But the problem we face is much bigger than this.
What we are witnessing is a highly-coordinated, deeply ideological and concerted war on not just France but the West more broadly.
At the heart of it is a 'Red-Green' alliance of left-wing extremists, Islamists, and the Palestinian movement that has now morphed into a revolutionary movement.
It wants nothing less than the destruction, dismantling, or 'deconstruction' of Western civilisation.
And it is benefitting from a wider circle of 'tacit support' within our own Western institutions -- our schools, universities, media, publishing, and more.
These activists are now exploiting a West that has become dangerously divided, deluded, & demoralised.
While the West has certainly eroded itself and emboldened its enemies through mass immigration and broken borders, it has also taken a sledgehammer to its own foundations by teaching its own young people to hate who they are -- to hate their own history, culture, identity, and inheritance.
Scruton called this Oikophobia. Furedi called it the war against our past. In France, Philippe de Villiers calls it 'Memoricide'. The stripping away of any sense of who we are. It is cultural vandalism against ourselves.
China, Russia, Islamic states, they are all laughing at us.
We have cut our own young people off from the West's distinctive and proud history by either telling them our nations are racist and embarrassing or bombarding them with historically illiterate documentaries and Netflix shows that present the West as evil.
Unsurprisingly, they now feel little attachment or loyalty to their own nations while many young people today, put simply, don't even know who they are.
With no strong sense of national identity, and no real understanding of where they are from or what their ancestors built, they have become completely disoriented, bobbing around on a sea of globalism and phone-induced narcissism.
The young French destroy their country because they feel no loyalty to their country.
Somebody said to me recently the West resembles a bouquet of flowers on the mantlepiece -- it is still beautiful but if you look closely it's roots have been cut off and it is now slowly dying in the vase.
In the first instance, France is suffering the effects of all this, looking on at a generation that clearly hate its own nation or at least feel no attachment to it.
But this deeper malaise is now visible in pretty much every Western state today, having been encouraged by a political class that decided it was a good idea to redefine Western nations as empty vessels that are merely here to show empathy towards everybody else.
Immigration reforms might help but what we are facing now is actually much bigger than any of that.
As Scruton, Furedi, Caldwall, Phillips, Murray, Lasch and others have been warning us for many many years, there is a war against the West and before it even really begins we are already helping our enemies by cutting off our own legs.
Today it is France, tomorrow it will be everywhere.
Far better to put it out of it’s misery once and for all. Abolish.
So BBC Three, Scotland and R4 Extra are going. We are watching the death by a thousand cuts of a great British institution.
From major sporting events, to national celebrations, the BBC has a unique ability to bring the country together. But, successive Governments have left our BBC in a state of managed decline.
@LibDems are calling for a permanent charter to end this cyclical uncertainty hanging over the BBC’s future and protect it for generations to come.
Once the BBC is gone, it is gone for good. It's time we made the choice to save it.
Iain SM retweeted
Absolutely stunning essay by @DouglasKMurray about the crisis in France. It includes this quote.
thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-f…
“You can reason with a cynic. He follows his interests, so if you change his incentives, you change his behavior. A disconnected believer, you can't. Every failure becomes more proof that you need to push further in the same direction.”
There's something fascinating about Macron, and a question that keeps coming back: is he cynical, or does he actually believe what he says?
My take: he believes it. And that's far more worrying.
Look at his path. His father was a neurology professor at a public hospital. His mother was a physician for the French social security system. His grandmother, a public school principal, partly raised him. Then the elite track: Henri-IV, Sciences Po, ENA (the school that trains France's top civil servants), the Finance Inspectorate, deputy chief of staff at the Élysée, Minister of the Economy, President.
From birth to power, he never really left the orbit of the State.
People will say: "He was a banker at Rothschild." Sure, for four years. But investment banking isn't entrepreneurship. You advise deals between large institutions. You don't risk your own capital. You never lie awake wondering how you'll make payroll. It's a world of networks, access and files. An extension of the high civil service, not its opposite.
He never started a company. Never hired anyone with his own money. Never watched a customer walk to a competitor. Never got a tax audit and wondered if his business would survive it.
For him, the reality of building something simply doesn't exist. It's not contempt. It's a blind spot.
The image that comes to mind is a beautifully machined gear, spinning perfectly, that doesn't mesh with anything. It spins in a vacuum.
His whole worldview works like that. Inside his world, everything is coherent. Every step follows logically. The reasoning is brilliant. But the axioms are wrong. And when you reason flawlessly from false premises, you reach false conclusions with flawless rigor.
The most interesting part is what happens when reality knocks on the door.
When you fail, you have two options. You can say: "I was wrong. What I've believed for fifteen or twenty years is false." That's brutal. It's an identity collapse. Or you keep the cognitive dissonance and explain the failure some other way: people didn't understand, we didn't explain it well enough, the reform didn't go far enough, the opposition blocked it.
It's the exact same mechanism as "that wasn't real communism." The model is never wrong. It just was never applied properly. Reality is wrong, the theory is right.
And meanwhile, the country burns.
That's why "cynical or disconnected?" is the right question. You can reason with a cynic. He follows his interests, so if you change his incentives, you change his behavior. A disconnected believer, you can't. Every failure becomes more proof that you need to push further in the same direction.
I think this explains much of the madness of European leadership. Not a bunch of villains plotting in a back room. Possibly sincere people, shaped in the same mold, raised on the same ideas, plugged into a system that is a flat denial of common sense. People so cut off from reality that their sincerity is what makes them dangerous.
Macron is the purest embodiment of it.
When you build a company, reality corrects you every single week. A customer who doesn't pay, a product that doesn't work, a competitor who moves faster. You don't get a choice: adapt or die.
The State never dies. It never gets the bill. And people who have only ever known the State end up believing reality is just one opinion among many.
The problem isn't that he lies. The problem is that he can't see.
Iain SM retweeted
Brutaler Leitartikel im konservativen Le Figaro. Eine Abrechnung mit Frankreichs politischem System und seiner Elite.
„Eine Justiz, die gegenüber Straftätern nachsichtig ist, gegenüber anständigen Bürgern aber unerbittlich. Das unbegreifliche Privileg dieser linksextremen Milizen, die ungestraft zerstören, Brände legen und töten. Eine unkontrollierte Einwanderung, bei der sich ein Teil der Einwanderer gegen das Land auflehnt, das sie aufgenommen hat. (…) Eine politische Klasse – die verschiedenen Spielarten des Sozialismus, die uns seit fünfzehn Jahren regieren –, die sich Leichtfertigkeit, Blindheit, wenn nicht sogar wohlwollende Duldung vorwerfen lassen muss.
Die Ermahnungen Emmanuel Macrons an eine Polizei, die seiner Ansicht nach nicht genügend „Empathie“ gegenüber jenen zeigt, die sie mit Schrauben, Pflastersteinen oder Feuerwerksmörsern angreifen, werden als unauslöschlicher Makel in Erinnerung bleiben. (…)
Wenn die extreme Linke, Straftäter und Plünderer Frankreich innerhalb weniger Stunden völlig auf den Kopf stellen können, dann liegt das vor allem daran, dass eine von sich selbst berauschte technokratische Monarchie systematisch sämtliche moralischen, sicherheitsbezogenen, kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Schutzmechanismen eingeebnet hat, die eine Gesellschaft zusammenhalten. Die nützlichen Idioten Jean-Luc Mélenchons tragen nicht nur die Kufiya, sondern auch die Krawatte.“
If only they were French.
Paris is my favourite city in the world.
The French (that's the people, not the government) just do things right.
They understand the power of people and collective action, and they're not afraid to use it.
There's a lesson here for all of us.
Those in power should fear the collective strength of society, not the other way around.
Solidarity with the French. 🇫🇷✊
Iain SM retweeted
Many in the comments are saying: "The French voted for this."
Fine. Now ask yourself a better question.
Why is it the same story in every Western country at once? France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Belgium, Canada. Different languages, different histories, different voters. Same outcome. Same open-border policies, sold in the same beautiful packaging: progress, inclusion, integration, "our values."
When dozens of peoples who never coordinated end up with the exact same policy, it wasn't the peoples who decided. It was the class that governs all of them. Same schools, same forums, same networks. For decades, they have systematically lied to Europeans about what was happening and what it would cost.
They tried it with you too, America. You came close. What saved you was your Constitution, and a handful of people like Elon Musk and the All-In crew who refused to stay quiet when silence would have been easier.
But don't celebrate too early.
The West is not a country. It's a civilization. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and every nation that inherited or built on what came out of them: Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and allies like Japan who share its institutions and its fate.
If Europe falls, you don't get to watch from across the ocean. You lose half your civilization, your oldest allies, the cradle of everything you believe in. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic has any interest in waking up to an Islamist Europe.
So understand that this fight has two levels.
There is the national fight. Every people has to win its own battle at home, at the ballot box, in its own institutions, under its own laws. No one can do it for us. You can't vote in France, and we can't vote in Ohio.
And there is the civilizational fight. The West is under attack on two fronts at once. From the inside, by a soft communism that hates its own history and wants to dissolve nations into a managed mass. From the outside, by Islamism, which sees our weakness and fills the vacuum. And the two have found each other: Islamo-leftism, where the far left defends the very ideology that would crush it first.
The national fights are the battles. The civilizational fight is the war.
And here's what the other side exploits: your kindness.
Western civilization produced something rare in human history: a moral instinct to extend compassion to strangers. To the refugee, the outsider, the weakest. It's one of the most beautiful things we ever built.
The globalist class turned it into a weapon against us.
Gad Saad has a name for this: suicidal empathy. Empathy that no longer asks who it protects and who pays the price. Empathy that cares more about how it looks than about what it causes. Empathy so detached from reason that it ends up sacrificing your own people, the girl attacked on her way home, the worker priced out of his neighborhood, the town that no longer recognizes itself, just to signal virtue toward strangers.
And every time you object, they don't answer your argument. They question your heart. "Where is your compassion?" That's the trap. They know a decent people will hesitate before being called cruel. They've been running that play for thirty years.
Now add the money.
A few left-wing billionaires understood long ago that you don't need to win elections if you can shape the institutions around them. The Gates Foundation became one of the largest funders of the World Health Organization. George Soros's Open Society Foundations have spent billions funding NGOs, advocacy groups and legal networks, with Europe as a major focus. Unelected, unaccountable, and extremely well organized.
And it's not only private money. Brussels funds NGOs with taxpayers' money, and those same NGOs then lobby Brussels for the policies it already wanted. A closed loop. Citizens pay for it. Nobody ever asked them.
This is the supranational machine: Brussels, the galaxy of NGOs orbiting it, the foundations feeding them, and the political class moving freely between all three. It answers to no voter in any country. It does enormous damage. And it can't be voted out, because no one ever voted it in.
And if you want to know where its center of gravity is, look at Washington.
The Democratic Party is its political headquarters. Not because every Democrat is a globalist, but because that's where the whole network converges: the big foundations, the NGO galaxy, the international organizations, the legacy media, the platforms. Same donors, same people rotating from one to the other, same worldview. Brussels is the branch office.
Covid showed it in real time.
Within weeks, almost the entire Western world adopted the same playbook. Same measures, same messaging, same "trust the science." Anthony Fauci became the face of the official line far beyond America's borders. The Gates Foundation, co-founder of the global vaccine alliances and one of the WHO's largest funders, sat at the center of global health policy. And anyone who questioned the line was branded a spreader of misinformation.
The lab-leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory" right up until it became a respectable one. And in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in writing that senior Biden administration officials had repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to censor Covid content, including humor and satire.
Government, foundations, international organizations, platforms. All moving in the same direction, at the same time, and no voter ever consulted.
That's the machine. Covid was the moment it stopped hiding.
That machine is what has to be taken apart. Defund the NGOs living off public money. Bring decisions back to elected national parliaments. Make every foundation that shapes public policy as transparent as a political party.
Compassion is a Western virtue. Letting it be used against us is not.
So let's not fall into the trap.
The trap is Western nations turning on each other. Americans mocking Europeans, Europeans sneering at Americans, each country telling itself "they deserve what's happening to them, they voted for it."
I'm pro-border. I'm pro-nation. I believe every people has the right to decide who enters its home and to defend its own culture. That will never change.
But what we face today is not one nation attacking another. It's an attack on the civilization all our nations belong to. And a civilization under attack cannot afford to let its members watch each other burn.
When you see France on fire, don't say "they chose this." Understand how it happened. Understand who did it. And understand that the same people are working on you.
The West has to stand together against this, fully, without ambiguity, and its peoples have to understand each other. National pride and civilizational solidarity are not opposites. They are the same fight at two scales.
A Frenchman voting to take back his borders and an American voting on November 3rd are on the same front, in the same war, for the same civilization.
We lose it separately, or we win it together.
To every American, and to everyone watching France burn from abroad:
Do not blame the French people for this.
We never asked for it. We never voted for it. And the one time we were clearly asked, we said no.
Here are the numbers your media won't show you.
70% of the French say there are too many immigrants in France today.
79% want a tougher immigration policy.
77% disapprove of the government's record on immigration.
83% want foreign criminals and long-term unemployed foreigners sent home.
And no, it's not just the old. 69% of French 18 to 24 year olds support suspending legal immigration for three years.
This is not a fringe. This is the French people.
In 2005, we were asked if we wanted the European Constitution. 55% voted no. Three years later, our politicians passed the same text under another name, through parliament, without ever asking us again.
That is modern France in one sentence. The people say no. The elites do it anyway.
So who is responsible? The politicians who lied to us. A class of leaders formed in the same schools, the same forums, the same networks, loyal to each other before they are loyal to their nations.
In 2017, at Harvard, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, bragged about his Young Global Leaders program in four words: "We penetrate the cabinets." He added that it was true in France. Emmanuel Macron was one of his Young Global Leaders.
It's the same project in Brussels with Ursula von der Leyen and in Paris with Macron. Borders treated as an obstacle. Nations treated as relics. The people treated as a problem to be managed.
What you are watching in France is not the French people failing. It is the end of the globalist project, an abject, quasi-communist dream of a world run by unelected planners. It is collapsing everywhere in Europe at once, and the West has to cut this cancer out before it takes the rest of the body with it.
The peoples of Europe don't want this. They never did.
So when you see our town halls burning, don't say "the French chose this."
The French never chose this.
They were forced into it.
If you're French and you agree, repost this so the world hears it from us.
If you're American, look at us carefully. Then choose differently on November 3rd.
Macron urgently needs to import more votes.
Pour ceux d’entre nous qui aiment la France, cette nuit a été tragique, surtout après l’effroyable vandalisme culturel survenu à Limoges. Les barbares ont gagné. Et le président Macron brille par son absence. Si l’establishment français, parfaitement inutile, continue sur cette lancée, il ne sera même pas nécessaire de procéder à un second tour lors de l’élection présidentielle du printemps prochain : Mme Le Pen obtiendra 50 % des voix dès le premier tour. Une tragédie est en train de se jouer.
This fool still doesn’t get it.
These fools still don’t get it, do they?
* A marginal vote on an advisory referendum 52-48 and NOT the largest vote in British political history.
* Russian interference.
* Financial impropriety within the Leave Campaign.
* The £350 million a week lie.
* Completely mixed messages about membership of the Single Market (Daniel Hannan)
Need I go on?
We need to rejoin asap.
#RejoinEU
Fanciful claims you say? Fancy.
Key is a campaign showing voters being in EU would help UK to boost its economy, cut cost of living, invest in health + public services and have a stronger voice gobally. Without making fanciful claims like Brexiters did, storing up problems down the line.
theguardian.com/politics/202…
For many people age brings wisdom.
The Brexit vote was largely delivered by legions of 'Little Englanders,' many of them elderly. Remain was popular with most Scots, with those in Northern Ireland, most people in our major cities, & most of the young. Even if we eventually rejoin we will never get a deal as good as we once had. Their insularity, xenophobia & ignorance have impoverished this country & robbed us of our EU-wide rights. They should feel deeply ashamed for saddling us all with a chocolate tea set, of course many will not & still cling to the old nonsense.
