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And just like that, bag pipes became my favorite instrument. Say no to Islam.

Save the west.

The federal trial of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan begins today, as prosecutors allege she helped an illegal alien escape arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this year.

Dugan is charged with obstruction of federal proceedings and concealing a person from arrest over her alleged actions involving Eduardo Flores-Ruiz.

Flores-Ruiz is an illegal alien who has since pled guilty to re-entering the U.S. and no contest to one count of battery.

And just like that, bag pipes became my favorite instrument.

The federal trial of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Duga

Patrick says

The federal trial of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Duga

How likely is it that judge will convict another judge, especially if both are Dems?

Remember the Wisconsin judge who tried to help sneak a criminal illegal alien out of the courthouse? Welp, she’s been convicted by a jury. Yesterday, the New York Times ran the story headlined, “Judge Convicted of Obstructing Agents as They Sought Undocumented Immigrant.”

I wouldn’t even try handicapping Judge Hannah Dugin’s appellate chances, given how unusual this case is. But, barring an appellate miracle, she now faces sentencing of up to six years in prison. Even if she never serves hard time, the felony conviction will end her judicial career and will probably ensure she never even works as a lawyer.

At trial, Dugin’s lawyers brought in a powerhouse character witness— a popular former mayor. He testified to rapt jurors that he’d known Dugin since she was 11 or 12, that she was “very honest,” and that he was “sure she’ll tell you what really happened.” Then Dugin declined to testify, rendering the mayor’s efforts immediately impotent.

Judicial prosecutions are vanishingly rare. I wouldn’t say it doesn’t exist anywhere, but I could not find another modern example. For a judge to be prosecuted at all, their case has to run a treacherous gauntlet of collegial protection, institutional deference, immunity doctrines, and raw politics that effectively foreclose all but the most egregious cases of judicial misconduct.

Consider, for example, this Reuters Special Report from 2020:

Special Report: Thousands of U.S.
judges who broke laws, oaths
remained on the bench
By Michael Berens and John Shiffman
June 30, 2020

So once again, the Trump Administration has shattered “norms and customs” and modern records, by successfully prosecuting this unicorn-like case through to conviction— even though Judge Dugin’s misconduct, while unacceptably lawless, arguably does not even rise to the “most egregious” levels of judicial misconduct.

Republicans are launching a new U.S. House caucus aimed at confronting what they warn is the growing influence of Sharia law inside the United States.

Texas conservative Reps. Keith Self (R-TX) and Chip Roy (R-TX) have just announced the formation of the “Sharia Free America Caucus,” Fox News reported.

The effort reflects a broader push among conservatives to address national security concerns tied to radical Islamist ideologies.

The Kennedy Center’s governing board has just voted unanimously to rename the Washington, D.C., performing arts complex after President Donald Trump.

On Thursday, the board voted to change the venue’s name to The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

The move is a major symbolic victory for Trump, who has made the institution a cultural priority of his second term.

Trump had publicly hinted at a renaming, and the unanimous vote marks the most significant step to date.

It remains unclear when the change will formally take effect, and the procedural path forward has not yet been announced.

Beyond their immateriality, one of the challenges in addressing DEI is the sheer scale of the criminal enterprise. The rolls of the guilty number in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. They permeate the institutions. Putting them all on trial individually would be a Herculean task. Moreover, in most cases their individual culpability is quite minor. Odious as their ideological commitments may be, they’ve probably not done much more than make a remark on a hiring committee to the effect of ‘But are we sure we want to hire another white guy?’ Some of them have done more than that, but very, very few of them are guilty of anything that rises to the level of illegality that you could throw them in jail for even for a few months, let alone justify their mass slaughter.

Yet as a class, the damage they have done has been immense. As a class, they’re responsible for destroying millions of lives. As a class, they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of suicides on their hands. As a class, they’ve stolen careers from millions, and through this they have stolen hundreds of billions of dollars, all of which represents families that were never started, babies that were never born, inventions that were never brought to market, scientific breakthroughs that were never made, era-defining creative works that were never produced. The civilizational damage these termites have done to the arts, to scholarship, to the sciences, and to technology is almost impossible to overstate.

To not hold them accountable would be a monstrous miscarriage of justice.

This is really a special case of a more general tactic that the managerial class has spent the last century perfecting. Every question is handled by a committee or a system or some other impersonal mechanism. The result of this is to diffuse accountability through a giant formless mass of human oatmeal. All of them are a little bit culpable, but no one person is entirely or even primarily responsible. It is therefore difficult to know where to direct one’s fire. There are very few high-value targets, and simply removing one person here or there has no actual effect on the system, since individual functionaries are easily replaced.

The answer to this is actually quite straightforward, requiring only the ruthless will to carry it out.

Since the locus of responsibility is at the systemic level, the systems must be targeted. Which is to say, the institutions. Which is also to say, the people staffing the institutions, as a class. Because they act collectively, and refuse all personal accountability, indeed using organizational opacity to make personal accountability impossible, collective accountability is the only possible solution.

The end goal is simple: to take their power, and to take their wealth. This requires something more than memes and podcasts. Ultimately we are talking here about access to material resources. Young white men need to be able to afford houses, they need to be able to support families, they need access to real, tangible property and prosperity. ...

The obvious place to begin is in the courts, and the necessary elements for a courtroom feeding frenzy are already in place. The 2023 Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard established that affirmative action in university admissions is unconstitutional; of course, universities have by and large ignored this ruling (thereby leaving themselves open to further legal action). ...

Most recently, just a couple of days ago and in clear response to the Compact article, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission put out the word to white men to bring DEI-related discrimination to their attention (unfortunately, there’s a 180 day statute of limitations on EEOC complaints, but this is only one potential avenue of many). ...

The universities are all quite clearly guilty of grievous violations of civil rights law, and there is no reason not to turn that body of law against them via class action lawsuits seeking to extract ruinous penalties. This can be paired with a broad spectrum of federal actions: DOJ investigations paired with massive fines; cutting off the supply of research grants; cutting off the supply of federal student loans. Similar actions can probably be pursued at the state level. Here it is worth pointing out that Trump is being very stupid in allowing 600,000 Chinese exchange students to be brought in for the purpose of propping up the universities; quite aside from the national security risk, there is no reason to prop them up, and he should instead be doing the opposite.

Meanwhile, private class action lawsuits – for example, from young white men and their parents, or young white male academics – can be launched on the basis of admissions and hiring discrimination. Apart from possible punitive damages, these would turn up internal documents in discovery, which could then be used to inflict reputational damage. University faculties and staff are notorious for leaving internal paper trails in which they admit to flagrant violations of civil rights law in service of racial justice.

The overall strategy would be to starve the universities of capital flow, while simultaneously raiding their capital reserves, with the goal of driving them to bankruptcy. The process can be accelerated enormously just by removing accreditation: without the ability to grant degrees, a university ceases to be a viable enterprise. When it enters receivership, its assets – real estate, patents, copyrights, whatever remains of its liquid capital, trademarks, physical plant such as laboratories and IT infrastructure, everything – are acquired by a third party, which then has the opportunity to reconstitute the institution under new leadership. ...

The result of this would be to achieve almost immediate turnover of the personnel in higher education. Universities would no longer be fortresses of civilization’s enemies, but realigned with Western civilization. Enemies would be punished and friends rewarded, at massive scale. ...

So much for the universities. What about the private sector? The movie studios, the publishing houses, the television networks, the large corporations, the financial institutions? These are of course also just as guilty of systematic discrimination on the basis of race and sex; they are at least equally tempting targets for plunder or expropriation; and, crucially, they are also failing due to a decade of substandard products and services. Hollyweird just had one of its worst years on record, for instance.

Once again class action lawsuits and DOJ investigations are an obvious strategy. Proving discrimination in the case of any individual applicant is usually impossible, but demonstrating systemic discrimination should be very easy at the statistical level. Did a corporation have a DEI policy? Did white men comprise an obviously tiny fraction of new hires during the Cancelled Years? OK then, the organization is guilty of illegal discrimination, and we are now fining you one googolplex dollars; since you can’t pay that, your assets now belong to the plaintiffs, and everyone who works at your company is out of a job.

As an example, every white male software engineer who’s struggled to find employment over the last few years could target IBM, which under Arvind Krishna is on the public record as discriminating against white male software engineers as a matter of policy. ...

Blackrock has something like $13 trillion in assets under management, and around $160 billion of its own liquid capital. For its role in ESG, its direct assets should simply be fined away from it, Larry Fink should be thrown in jail, and its assets under management put in more responsible hands.

HHS to Immigrant Sponsors: Pay What You Owe for Immigrants Who Use Medicaid or Face Collection

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has told the sponsors of immigrants that they must repay taxpayers for Medicaid benefits for which the immigrants are ineligible yet received despite the sponsors’ vow of financial support.

Jim O’Neill, deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, notified the sponsors by a letter dated December 11 that became public this week.

The crackdown comes as the federal prosecutors arrest and charge Somali fraudsters in Minnesota with bilking taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid, federal housing, and other money.

Under various laws and programs, foreign citizens can ‘permanently reside’ in the U.S. as non-citizens. It’s not U.S. citizenship, but it’s not not citizenship, either. Biden used one of these programs, for example, to submerge midwestern towns with Haitians who can’t drive. (Ditto for Somalis and many other failed-state refugees.) The rules are complex and arcane, which is why Biden also paid lawyers to help the migrants.

One of the rules requires each permanent resident to have a sponsor, an individual who demonstrates sufficient assets and income to support the person if they ever become a financial burden on the state.

There’s even a sponsor form, the I-864, which includes a contract. The contract puts the sponsor on the hook for any welfare given to the immigrant by any local, state, or Federal agency. Here’s the relevant language from the form:

What If I Do Not Fulfill My Obligations?
If you do not provide sufficient support to the person who becomes a lawful permanent resident based on a Form I-864 that you
signed, that person may sue you for this support.
If a Federal, state, local, or private agency provided any covered means-tested public benefit to the person who becomes a lawful
permanent resident based on a Form I-864 that you a signed, the agency may ask you to reimburse them for the amount of the benefits they provided. If you do not make the reimbursement, the agency may sue you for the amount that the agency believes you owe.
If you are sued, and the court enters a judgment against you, the person or agency that sued you may use any legally permitted
procedures for enforcing or collecting the judgment. You may also be required to pay the costs of collection, including attorney fees.

Right about now, you’re probably thinking this sounds great, and wondering why you never heard of it before. The reason is simple. The Democrats passed this law to ‘prove’ immigrants wouldn’t be a burden, and then promptly broomed it via their favorite tactic: selective non-enforcement. Two tiers of justice are better than one!

So far as I can tell from court records, the government has never before sued a sponsor. After all, the contract only says the agency “may ask for reimbursement.” May. Not “must.”

One imagines the interview. The sponsor, ready to sign, stumbles over the liability paragraph. He holds the pen, blinking, unsure, and looks up querulously at the free immigrant attorney. “Does this mean…” they begin to ask. They needn’t finish the sentence. The lawyer waves her cigarette airily and says, “don’t worry about that section. They never do anything about that.”

But, barring an appellate miracle, she now faces sentencing of up to six years in prison. Even if she never serves hard time, the felony conviction will end her judicial career and will probably ensure she never even works as a lawyer.

Yesterday, Al Jazeera ran a very encouraging story headlined, “US bars five Europeans over alleged efforts to ‘censor American viewpoints.’” Not just any Europeans. The State Department banned entry to the US by five top architects of the censorship-industrial complex, including the European Union’s top minister for criminalizing speech, sorry, I meant for “digital safety.” Who is French, by the way.

In yesterday’s statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio correctly called the five individuals “radical activists” who had “advanced censorship crackdowns” against American speakers and American companies like Elon Musk and X. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” he added.

“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio explained.

Ironically, the now-banned French minister, Thierry Breton, complained that he was being censored, and compared the travel ban to, wait for it, McCarthyism. (This is where I must defend “Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy, about whom everything you’ve been told is a liberal lie, and who was an American hero who liberals drove to an early grave and then salted the reputational earth. But I digress.) “To our American friends: Censorship isn’t where you think it is,” Mr. Thierry insisted.

Dainty French President Emmanuel Macron, whose handsome wife accompanies him everywhere, called it intimidation and coercion. “These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty,” Macron whined. “The rules governing the European Union’s digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe.”

Nobody’s trying to determine your stupid European rules. We just don’t want speech terrorists in this country. We don’t hate them; we just feel better when they aren’t around. And yes, this is what we voted for.

Earlier this month, the EU fined Twitter/X an eye-watering $140 million for a bunch of made-up nonsense, which everyone knows was actually meant to punish the social media platform for helping European citizens speak more freely, and for Musk’s recent advocacy against British rape gangs. The fine was levied under the so-called “Digital Services Act,” or DSA, which was passed in 2022 during the pandemic.

Not coincidentally, the now-banned Thierry has been called the “mastermind” behind the DSA.

The Trump Administration is once again “shattering norms and customs,” by punishing the individual officials behind anti-American activities, rather than treating them as if they were diplomatically immune from blowback. And it is driving the Europeans nuts.

@JoyceCarolOates
You're pretty smart. You have to be to be a writer.

If you try, you will understand that Trump was elected to spite you.

Why would anyone want to do that? Think. Feel.

Voters are not stupid or evil.

They're resisting the cruelty and contempt of the woke left.

Dec 25, 2025

You read last week’s essay by Jacob Savage in Compact. It was an aching lament, which allowed its readers to feel a pang of injustice, maybe for the first time. It wouldn’t have made a ripple as a polemic. But once you’ve realized that injustice took place, what to do about it? John Carter wants you to get good and angry, and sue every organization who participated into oblivion.

"Once again class action lawsuits and DOJ investigations are an obvious strategy. Proving discrimination in the case of any individual applicant is usually impossible, but demonstrating systemic discrimination should be very easy at the statistical level. Did a corporation have a DEI policy? Did white men comprise an obviously tiny fraction of new hires during the Cancelled Years? OK then, the organization is guilty of illegal discrimination, and we are now fining you one googolplex dollars; since you can’t pay that, your assets now belong to the plaintiffs, and everyone who works at your company is out of a job."

The low overhead and parasocial branding of podcasts makes them resistant to any conventional institutionalization. A TV or radio program might change hosts over the years, but podcasts are largely inseparable from the personalities of the podcasters. The People’s Policy Project isn’t a podcast, but it’s funded via a podcast platform. (Bruenig also has a successful podcast with his wife Liz1.) Current Affairs looks more like a conventional magazine, but as the 2021 blow-up showed, Robinson maintains outsized personal control over the organization, and as anyone who peruses the site knows, his lengthy blog-like screeds regularly grace its pages.

In one sense, the success of these enterprises supports Robinson’s assertion that “white men are doing fine.” People like him, Matt Bruenig, Will Menaker, Matt Christman, and Brace Belden are all evidently thriving—finding audiences and making money. But, in light of Savage’s argument, it does seem notable not only that they are all thriving outside of mainstream legacy institutions, but also that their projects have all avoided institutionalization—an imperative Robinson made explicit when he reasserted his personal ownership over Current Affairs. Because this seems to be how—as brash, assertive, opinionated white males—they avoided becoming casualties of the identitarian pressures that overtook elite professions in the 2010s.

https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918

When Millennial Woes dropped this banger back in February, he probably didn’t anticipate how it would become one of the year’s most ubiquitous replies.

It pinpoints a rhetorical move you see on Twitter all the time. You make a very straightforward observation that contradicts liberal orthodoxy, and you find yourself in a hall of mirrors. “Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘woke’…” or “there’s no evidence that’s happening…” or “antifa is just an idea” or some other obfuscator maneuver.

Copy-pasting the tweet dismisses the leftist who’s being strategically obtuse in order to avoid facing the internal contradictions of his worldview. Instead of having the same agonizingly 101-level conversations over and over again to simply agree on basic terms, just hit them ‘em the screenshot.

Most people simply ape the beliefs of high-status people, even if those beliefs are irrational and smooth-brained. We’d rather be wrong with the right people, than right with the wrong people. In other words, we’d rather be left than right. This is why intelligent people believe unintelligible things. It’s why pronouns are in email signatures. And it’s why the right will continue to lose the culture war—because being right doesn’t matter. ...

At university, I used to troll people by defending incest. More precisely, I’d argue that there was no rational basis for condemning sex between consenting adult siblings, provided they didn’t reproduce (which is obviously dysgenic).

Predictably, this evoked a strong disgust impulse among my classmates. Some would even say, that’s disgusting. To which I would respond, some people find homosexuality disgusting. Should we outlaw that too?

Not wanting to seem like bigots (nothing could be worse than that!) they began scrambling for reasons why incest should be outlawed. There’s an, uh, power imbalance between siblings. It’s… It’s… unfair on the parents! These were clearly just post-hoc justifications for their revulsion.

I believe most people’s political beliefs operate according to the same logic (or rather, lack of logic). Yes, they can cite statistics about crime rates, studies about immigration’s economic impact, or data about climate change. But these are usually just post-hoc justifications for gut feelings. ...

To change the mind, you need to first change the things beneath the mind. Namely, the brain stem, the gut, the aesthetic sense that operates below conscious thought. You don’t do this with statistics and syllogisms. You do this with art and propaganda.

Art bypasses the rational faculties of the mind. It shapes our appetites and intuitions. That, at the very least, is what Plato thought. That’s why he wanted artists banned from his Republic. It’s why he considered poets and painters enemies of the state. ...

I would, in other words, bypass rational argument altogether and instead manipulate the pre-rational substrate of belief. I would do this by leveraging status, aesthetics, and celebrity endorsement. ...

Sillygists like Ben Shapiro say ‘facts don’t care about your feelings.’ But feelings don’t care about your facts. In our ocular culture, all that matters is the vibe, the aura, the aesthetic appeal. And Ben Shapiro—Yahweh bless him—has none of those things. Like most members of the intellectual dork web, he is a nerdy little motor-mouth. Which means his ideas, no matter how ‘correct’, are low-status. And low-status ideas don’t spread (at least not to the right people).

If you want to win the kulturkampf, you need to seize the memes of production. You need, in other words, to appeal to artists, musicians, and the glitterati. Because these are the people who sculpt the pre-rational substrate of belief.

Art is infinitely more powerful than policy papers. But right-wing sillygists remain obsessively invested in the latter, while almost completely neglecting the former. And, it turns out, you can’t win a culture war if you have no culture. ...

The bourgeoisie are no longer shocked by the bohemians. In fact, the bourgeoisie have become bohemians. Lululemon promoted an event about ‘decolonizing gender’ and ‘resisting capitalism.’ Amazon donated millions to Black Lives Matter. And it’s probably only a matter of time before Lockheed Martin releases a line of anti-imperialist missiles.

In short, the culture that the counterculture was countering is gone. The forbidden has been franchised, subversion has been suburbanised, and the profane has become protocol.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

Everything except, of course, racism. And sexism. And homophobia. And transphobia. And ableism. And noticing patterns in crime statistics. And suggesting biological sex might be real. And appropriating cultures. And not engaging with other cultures. And gentrifying neighbourhoods. And avoiding diverse neighbourhoods.

There is, in other words, still one way to shock the bourgeoisie left. Namely, to go right. To quote John Psmith:

"In the last decade or so, a small coterie has discovered that the ultimate transgression is to become right wing. That group has had disproportionate influence on the recent direction of the American right, so disproportionate that it may destabilize the entire frozen conflict that defines American politics. This is the group that Curtis Yarvin has been calling ‘Dark Elves,’ and he’s correct that they have something to offer the right that it cannot achieve on its own." ...

Tweedy conservative intellectuals pen essays defending the classical canon and lamenting architectural brutalism. They write books with titles like The Death of the West and The Benedict Option. But what do conservative politicians actually support? Tax cuts. Deregulation. The prerogatives of developers to demolish historic buildings. The right of corporations to reduce every town on earth to the same interchangeable combination of chain restaurants, big box stores, and parking lots.

I would, in other words, bypass rational argument altogether and instead manipulate the pre-rational substrate of belief. I would do this by leveraging status, aesthetics, and celebrity endorsement. ...

we really need to take a look at how we got to here.

here is my model. it also explains why marxism and collectivism has near perfect overlap with DEI and ideologies of gender confusion ideology to the point where it frequently gets derided as “gay race communism.”

it all has the same center: externalized identity. a lack of sense of self and a subsumation of the individual to the collective.




you don’t just wind up in the street one day protesting for something you neither understand nor even have the basic facts about.

this does not happen to healthy people.

it happens to people whose identities are not contained within themselves, who derive their sense of self from membership and participation in ideologies.

these are not “people with ideas” they are “people who are their ideas” and that’s a VERY different kettle of fish. (or in this case, more like a bag of weasels)

people who have ideas can change their minds. they can say “oh, hey, that’s new information, i should revise my view.” this does not challenge their self-conception.

but people who are their ideas cannot. they experience all disagreement and contradiction as a form of personal attack because the lines between the idea and the self are absent. they, quite literally, experience having to change their mind as erasure.

and no human wants to be erased. so the mind throws up all manner of tricks to prevent it. it discredits the source, it denies the data. given sifficient committment to belief, the power of the distortion field can become near infinite. a mind refuses to see a semi-truck bearing right down on it because “that truck cannot be there, it must be a lie from the reactionary running dogs.”

this is exactly why this externalized identity state is the end goal of cultists and political movements who want captured, mindwiped adherents. it’s why it has always been the center of marxism: not family, not country, not self, and certainly not religion: the party and its tenets of the “new man” and the “soviet woman” that deny ethics, biology, and sense.

not individualism, collectivism. the idea above the self. see now why this is such a dangerous idea? in full flower it at once enables and excuses atrocity and twists the sort of being beastly to others that the unindoctrinated would immediately recognize as hideous and inhuman into something that seems like virtue. it’s how school kids turn in their parents to the secret police.

and these sorts of ideas and indoctrination are far easier among people with poor mental boundries or history of trauma. if you want to ask a question that will really keep you up at night, ask this:

“if your goal was a marxist global collective and inculcating children into such was easier to the extent the children were traumatized and concussed with mood and mind altering drugs, how would you change the school system to bend them to alliance or, at least, to submission?

might you mire them in impossible struggle sessions led by the most marginal among them as one long episode of “how many fingers am i holding up winston?” until disavowing the evidence of your own eyes and ears is the only means to survive unassaulted?

yeah. not pretty, is it?