Andrew Devine

I’m in Uzbekistan with armed security and one of my children’s mothers is sending me pics of an Easter egg hunt set up around the house. I make hundreds of millions of dollars and she watches Dora the explorer. The duality of existence.

Interesting that they always use Jo Cox as an example of a murdered MP, and never David Amess

Come for the naiveté; stay for the stupidity.

Many people mistakenly think that the main battles in society are between the haves and the have-nots. But what’s really happening is that the haves are trying to seize money, resources, and status from the have-mores—and they disguise this motive as concern for the have-nots. You even saw this recently in New York, where Mamdani failed to win over poor and working-class voters. But he did win support from the upper-middle class. Then, when you move to the very top of the income scale, the dynamic flips again—the wealthiest New Yorkers were more likely to back someone like Cuomo. So a lot of these political battles, especially around socialism, aren’t being driven by the poor. They’re being driven by people who are doing well, but who are angry they’re not at the very top. It’s less about the 99% versus the 1%, and more about the 9% versus the 1%. The bottom 90% aren’t really part of that fight. I’m reading We Have Never Been Woke by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, and he makes a similar point. He notes that during the Occupy Wall Street protests in the early 2010s, most of the participants were white, college-educated, upper-middle-class people—people who were objectively doing fine, but were upset they were in the top 10% instead of the top 1%.

The latest "Welsh choirboy" and what it reveals about "misinformation"... Last year Abdullah Khan, a self-described jihadist, set fire to a pub owned by Conor McGregor then stabbed a police officer in Dublin while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. Just an everyday street scene in Europe these days, then. But what made this interesting was the state and its media outlets rushing to condemn any speculation that this brown man, who stabbed people while shouting "Allah Akbar", might be a Muslim and might be motivated by Islamism. They insisted that he was “an Irish citizen and born in Ireland” - a lie by omission on a par with “Welsh choirboy”. Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Assistant Garda Commissioner for the Dublin Metropolitan Region Paul Cleary, said there was a lot of misinformation about the incident circulated online. "We have some people with their own agenda trying to use incidents like this to inflame situations for their own ends," he said. Fortunately, we now have social media so people can see the truth for themselves. No wonder European governments want to shut social media down. And now those same media outlets who condemned people for sharing “misinformation” are blithely reporting that “misinformation” as fact.