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Peggy Noonan is not a columnist I agree with on everything but she seems at times to have a knack of getting to the nub of a trend, a cultural shift, or however else one wants to call it. She has this WSJ ($) article out about the socialists now pushing – successfully it seems – to take over control of the Democratic Party. It means that the US will at some point face an unappealing choice if, say, JD Vance, who appears to be quite hostile on the free market, is the Republican Party nominee. (For what it is worth, that’s not a foregone conclusion in my view.)
A few paragraphs:
Socialism is not a passing thing but an arriving thing. It must be taken seriously as a factor in our politics and the Democratic Party. A CNN/SSRS poll issued this week reported 34% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as “democratic socialists.” That number won’t be depressed by the success of Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Michigan on Tuesday by racking up huge margins in progressive enclaves and university towns.
Socialism’s most enthusiastic promoters are quick and clever—comparatively well-educated, very online. Their talent lies primarily in media, having been immersed in it from birth—the internet, its apps, its entertainment and information flow. They know all about how people get and absorb a feeling, an impression; they know how to produce a sensation, as opposed to a thought. One of the great tricks in life is to have a talent suited to your times, and they do.
I am sorry to say these democratic socialists never strike me with their warmth, as, say, your great-uncle Billy was warm when he spoke about the Industrial Workers of the World. Today’s socialists strike me as colder, less human, fiercer and occasionally sociopathic. In general, they appear to have an idea of history rather than attachments to existing people and institutions. Most strike me not as people who love America and wish to make it better, but people ready to exploit its freedoms to build a movement that if successful would transform America’s fundamental nature. It will no longer be the freedom place but something else, and more common.
I think the lack of empathy and a sense of rootedness to the realities of most people is what will hopefully be fatal to these folk (consider that lout, Hasan Piker, with his apologetics and even open admiration for the Soviet Union, Mao and even N. Korea and his hatred of Israel). But the implosion of this trend is not a given. It has to be argued against, unpacked and exposed. My worry is that too few are doing it. (In Piker’s case, I see him as someone who is trying to be more and more disgusting and outrageous in pursuit of attention. However, there is a chance that he actually believes what he writes and says, and that he has gone psychotic, which is where I think the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are now these days.)
Noonan identifies what she thinks are three causal factors behind this resurgent socialism, or at least a desire by socialists to proclaim that is what they are, rather than use euphemisms:
A voter who is 25 was in grade school during the 2008 economic crash, and saw everything—frightened parents, lost jobs. In the years after, he saw bailouts and no one on Wall Street paying a price. It lessened his allegiance to the free-market economic system.
A voter who is 25 also sees AI rising, and wonders if the economy as it exists today has a place for him. Will he be able to afford a house someday? Widespread home ownership brings a feeling of investment, of stability and satisfaction. What does its absence bring?
The Cold War has receded as a living memory. The enforced communism and socialism of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was a disaster—shortages, drabness, economic lifelessness. Censorship, secret police, all the bad things big unaccountable governments bring. That was long ago. “Socialism” now is a dream of Scandinavia—national healthcare, generous benefits, equal enjoyment of resources.
As religion recedes, politics takes its place. The young have been educated within a general framework of assumptions and language of the left—structures of power, oppressor groups, critical theory, intersectionality.
Towards the end of the article Noonan (a former speechwriter for Reagan), has this:
It’s our view here that free-market capitalism is organic and flows upward from the human person—man wants to build, trade, invent, provide for and rise, and he erects laws and a way of economic being that allows the realization of those desires. Economic freedom works with human nature. The rules and regulations it produces, the economic framework it creates, are like what Churchill said of democracy: the worst system except for all the others. Socialism is a more abstract and ideological vision of justice that doesn’t flow up but must be imposed from the top down. It isn’t based on the natural, or on man as he is; it’s a construct that involves coercion.
There is a problem with the Noonan article, however, which slightly taints it. I would dissent from saying that capitalism, or open market economy, is the “worst possible system except for all the others”, to borrow from Churchill, because I think that concedes too much to those who want to tap into the idealism of youth. That sort of perspective does not appeal to people with ideological fire in their belly. It also sells free market capitalism and several private property short. “The free market“ is a term that covers the idea of people using their skills and talents to obtain their wants and goals in voluntary interactions with their fellows, recognising that ownership of property – an extension of the of idea of humans as owning their own lives. This is not just the “least-worst” state of affairs. It is a positive, glowing, glorious good set of values to set out and defend. Defenders of the classical liberal tradition, to use that term, need to stop the throat-clearing urge to half-apologise for this worldview before getting going. When they do that, they’ve already lost people.
There is intriguing paragraph, regarding a biography of the French political figure Andre Malraux, about whom a biography has been written:
At a Gaullist campaign rally in 1968, Malraux put his finger on a weakness of conservative economic thought. “ ‘Capitalism’ does not carry us in its heart,” he said. By inference, it’s also hard to carry capitalism in your heart. It isn’t a great belief, only an economic system. Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.
Definitely one of the better articles on what has been going on in the US, in my view.
“We are Jason Arday,” say the Cambridge faculty.
“We are Jason Arday,” say the British academic establishment.
“We are Jason Arday,” say humanities faculty throughout the West.
And you know what?
They are all correct.
– Dinesh D’Souza
When I was a teacher, many years ago, the Times Higher Education Supplement was on every staffroom table and was considered the voice of the progressive establishment. Perhaps I should not be surprised to see its modern incarnation, Times Higher Education, receive the sort of treatment that was once reserved for the tabloids when they got too nosey about people in power. Progressivism always has the progressivism of a generation ago among its prime targets. Jack Grove of Times Higher Education writes, “I was reported to police over Arday case. I was just doing my job”:
[…] I decided, on second thoughts, to take the voicemail at my desk, about 10 minutes away in Holborn.
I was shocked to hear it was from the Metropolitan Police, asking me to call them back. Why? Nothing remarkable had happened to me in the previous year. When I rang back the officer explained a complaint had been made against me regarding the University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, but the matter was now closed.
But it was important, the officer explained, that I didn’t contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health.
However, I hadn’t emailed Arday in four months – my last direct email had been in September, offering formal right of reply to allegations that he had plagiarised his PhD.
That allegation was not made lightly: I had assembled a 63-page report which detailed how he had apparently used, without proper citation, huge chunks from a thesis written in 2009 by another student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, now a highly respected education academic at Brunel University of London. Further checks found passages that seemed to be lifted from the work of researchers based in the US, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the UK. In total, I submitted 97 pages of evidence to both Cambridge and Arday’s awarding institution, Liverpool John Moores University, for their investigation.
Serious allegations, certainly. Deeply embarrassing and distressing, definitely. Although Arday was eventually cleared of plagiarism by an LJMU review, a frenzy of coverage led to Cambridge opening an investigation into Arday’s academic record and CV, followed shortly afterwards by Arday announcing his resignation.
But were my inquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive and allege some sort of thought crime, particularly if one writes about anti-Jewish racism and violence, free speech, the Middle East, Islam or trans issues. I write about all of them.
I recognised the moment for what it was. A rite of passage, and an attempt to place a boundary around my speech. Informing her as I did so, I reached for my phone and began recording, as much for posterity as for evidence.
– Jonathan Sacerdoti
Long-time Samizdata readers will know that one of my hobbies is to read The Times (of London) from a hundred years ago. It is often the case that the most interesting articles are also the shortest. Take this one for example:
The brevity of the article may have something to do with the brevity of The Times. This article appeared in the 10 May 1926 edition i.e. in the middle of the General Strike.
I never cease to be surprised by the amount of censorship – formal and otherwise – that went on a hundred years ago. The era was not part of Keir Starmer’s “proud tradition of free speech.” Or maybe – come to think of what Starmer understood by “free speech” – it was. Anyway, I had to find out what all the fuss was about and if you click on “More” you can find out too.
WARNING: Not safe for work… or anywhere else for that matter.
→ Continue reading: A painting is withdrawn
I have visited this topic about forest/open heathland fires, the positive externalities of private property ownership, Tragedy of the Commons and the unintended consequences of Green not-so-benign neglect before (remember those bad fires in Australia?), but here’s a reminder, given recent fires in Spain, France, Greece and my native Suffolk in the UK:
Wall Street Journal:
Under its Green Deal and related policies, the European Union is designating 30% of the continent as nature-protected by 2030. Goals include increasing the amount of deadwood and the density of tree cover in forests. Whatever their environmental merit, such measures increase the amount of highly flammable fuel for fires, make it easier for blazes to spread and harder to extinguish.
The EU also wants at least a third of this protected land to fall under “strict protection,” which means it will be left “essentially undisturbed from human pressures and threats,” according to European Commission guidance. It allows for some natural disaster prevention measures, but only “when such activities are compatible with the conservation objectives of the areas on the basis of a case-by-case assessment,” the guidance says.
Ranchers and farmers in Spain and France have historically managed their land to mitigate the risk of megafires. But the EU’s regulations have made it harder for small farms to survive across Europe, accelerating a rural exodus. Red tape often hinders those who remain from carrying out preventive actions like controlled burns.
The European Forest Fire Information System publishes maps and data, updated daily, on the current blazes. They show considerable overlap between the protected nature areas in Spain and France and the wildfires. That suggests in addition to the vagaries of weather, a policy failure.
Blaming climate change is the default explanation these days for any natural disaster, but Europe’s costly solutions will make little difference to global temperatures. Better forest management and fire prevention can make a difference, however. And they would reduce the CO2 emissions from fires that now overwhelm much of the reduction from electric vehicles or other climate nostrums.
Some advocates of “rewilding” claim that fires are part of nature, and that over time, fires will trigger a response in the form, for example, of more fire-resistant species (also, certain seeds are only germinated once a fire has happened). That sounds plausible, but the problem is that in a densely populated part of the world, such as the UK southeast, people want the loveliness of nature but without a raging fire nearby, however “natural” that is. And it is worth remembering that even if you take out the Man-made global warming argument and accept that fires are part of nature – they are – that much of our visually attractive landscape is not the result of Man leaving nature alone, but of crafting and caring for it. (This all makes sense once, like good students of Aristotle, we recognise that Man is as much part of nature as a beetle, shark or buzzard).
In the meantime, I am doing the very non-atheist thing and praying for rain.
“The modern socialist imagination is a magical kingdom where doctors, nurses, professors, builders, electricians, and day care workers all report for duty because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a compelling Instagram video.”
– “Ivana“, a Substack author.
The whole item is a gem. It is also funny because it is true, even if I quibble about the author’s comment that housing is a “right” and that big business should be broken up by anti-trust. Even so, for political perceptiveness, this is good.
Justin Bronk has published a very interesting update on RUSI: Four Years On: An Update on the Air War Over Ukraine
“Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor”, writes the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare.
Bakare has made strenuous efforts to be fair to Arday, but, alongside the extensive evidence of plagiarism and the extreme physical unlikelihood of Arday’s claim to to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, ten of those days with a hairline fracture in his leg, the pattern of behaviour Bakare describes below is difficult to explain away:
In an open letter to the government minister Jacqui Smith in July 2025, which outlined Arday’s experiences, he claimed to have been “threatened with a knife, physically assaulted and spat on; [had] rape and death threats being made to him and his family; bananas and bullets being posted to him via the university campus; and corrosive substances and mutilated animals sent to his family home”.
In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.
The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.
The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.
He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
and
Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.
In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.
He’s going down, and the only remaining question is which of his gullible academic sponsors he will drag down with him.
Some people say the government has abandoned us.
I know what they mean – our governments have abandoned their primary function of defending us and our borders.
But in every other area, they are suffocating rather deserting us!
– Alice Smith
This one’s fairly simple. Some communities are more cohesive than others. You’d be surprised how much a prosperous suburb with engaged residents has in common with an inner-city estate with a dominant (often minority ethnic) community. Sure, there are points of tension, but local officers at least know who to speak to. In places where there’s actually a community to begin with, a neighbourhood policing team can make a difference.
On the other hand, some ‘communities’ are chaotic, transient and divided. They’re riven by gangs and organised criminals. As tactics like stop and search and use of force become hotly contested, these communities become abandoned by police officers worried about losing their jobs. The community leaders who do exist are often hostile. A neighbourhood policing team’s at an immediate disadvantage – their role becomes more like counterinsurgency than policing. George Dixon wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. Well, he would, until the IOPC had him up for assault.
These are places which, unfortunately, politicians like to ignore. They pretend they’re policed by consent. It’s easier to blame the police for societal problems law enforcement can never, and will never, solve.
– Dominic Alder
If you are interested in policing in the UK and all things Plod, I recommend Dominic Alder.
Seventy-five men fly into Britain each spring with a handpiece in a canvas bag, and between them they take the wool off something between one and a half and two million sheep. They arrive after the first of April. They are gone by September, most of them long before. They claim nothing, bring nobody, occupy no housing list, no school place, no waiting room. They work at a speed almost no one in this country can currently match, and then they go home to shear in their own summer.
In January the Home Office announced that they were no longer welcome.
– Gawain Towler
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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