Lady Dedlock

"What comes around is all around." Richard "Ricky" LaFleur

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.

The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.

1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.

2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.

3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it.
This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.

4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but "in its name." Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.

6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.

7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.

The answer is not another theory.
It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.

The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.

Prove it wrong.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.

[☕️ Coffee & Covid News 🇺🇸 @jchilders98]

Fine. I made the list. It's still growing.

Trump 2.0 Accomplishments (as of mid-July 2026):

* Negative net migration for the first time in 50 years
* 2.6 million+ illegal aliens removed (including 650,000 arrests and 400,000 convicted criminals) + 2 million self-deportations induced by ending incentives
* Fentanyl trafficking crushed 56%+; overdose deaths down 21% monthly since inauguration
* Laken Riley Act signed and aggressively enforced
* Catch-and-release ended (99.9% drop); zero releases into the U.S. for eight straight months
* Record-low border encounters; Darién Gap migration cut 99%
* Largest one-year homicide drop in U.S. history; violent crime (rapes, robberies, assaults) down significantly
* Targeted crime operations in major blue cities delivering record-low murders in several metros
* Law enforcement officer deaths down 25%
* Tren de Aragua, MS-13, and other cartels dismantled; international drug cartels designated as foreign terrorist organizations
* Antifa designated a domestic terrorist organization
* Gas under $3/gallon in 43 states; record U.S. energy production and exports at all-time highs
* 654,000+ new private-sector jobs (all net gains to native-born Americans); 671,000+ jobs added since January 2025
* 4.3% GDP growth in Q3 2025; largest blue-collar wage growth in 60 years; real earnings up ~$1,100 annually
* Inflation tamed to ~2.4% core CPI (down ~70% from Biden peak)
* One Big Beautiful Bill passed (July 2025) — making 2017 tax cuts permanent, No Tax on Tips, Trump Accounts for newborns, senior deductions
* $5T+ in deregulation savings + $215 billion in government efficiency cuts ($1,335 per taxpayer)
* $10T+ in reshored/domestic investments secured
* Trade deficit at lowest level since 2009; $300 billion+ in tariff revenues collected; Predatory global tariffs shifted in the US’s favor for the first time in modern history
* Stock market record highs
* Gaza ceasefire + hostage release secured; 12-Day War (Israel-Iran) ended; multiple additional peace deals/accords (Armenia-Azerbaijan, India-Pakistan, DRC-Rwanda, Cambodia-Thailand, Kosovo-Serbia, Egypt-Ethiopia)
Iran’s nuclear capability destroyed + maximum pressure campaign (450+ sanctions designations)
* NATO allies leaping toward 5% GDP defense spending
* 85+ detained Americans released; Abraham Accords expanded
* Strikes on Houthis, Iranian assets, and narcoterrorist vessels; Nicolás Maduro captured
* Record military recruitment goals met; largest military investment in decades with AI integration; F-47 sixth-generation fighter unveiled
* VA backlog reduced 60%; 3 million disability claims processed; 51,936 homeless veterans housed; benefits restored for vaccine-mandate discharges
* Transgender enlistment barred; DEI eliminated across military and federal agencies
* Over 269 executive orders signed in the term (230 in first year alone — highest first-year total since FDR); 81 memoranda + 158 proclamations
* DOGE-driven bureaucracy cuts; IRS IT budget savings of $2B; wasteful contracts eliminated
* DEI discrimination banned in federal contracting and agencies; race-based hiring ended
* Gender ideology extremism curbed in schools, medicine, and government (minors protected from chemical/surgical procedures)
* MAHA reforms launched: Presidential Commission established; Most Favored Nation drug pricing with 16+ major pharma companies; 8 artificial food dyes phased out (40%+ industry compliance); Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act; marijuana reclassified to Schedule III; childhood vaccine schedule revised from 72 to 11 consensus shots; expanded IVF access; $50M autism initiative; new whole-foods dietary guidelines
* Withdrew from WHO
* Crypto regulatory framework via GENIUS Act; Strategic Bitcoin Reserve created; Operation Choke Point 2.0 ended
* Sanctuary city funding cuts implemented
* Election integrity and citizenship verification measures expanded nationwide; USPS program pending; SAVE Act drafted and run at Congress several times now
* Energy dominance unleashed: National Energy Emergency declared; 6,000+ drilling permits approved (55% increase); 13.1 million acres opened for coal leasing; record LNG exports (>100 million tons); nuclear projects advancing toward online status; major energy export deals ($100B South Korea, $200B Japan); Paris Agreement withdrawal
* US becomes net oil exporter for the first time in history.
* Trump Accounts launched for newborns with federal seed funding + corporate matching
* Farmer aid secured; skilled trades and domestic manufacturing (semiconductors, autos, heavy equipment) expanded
* Over 100,000 fraudulent visas revoked; 275,000 illegal aliens removed from Social Security rolls; benefits terminated for 1.4 million illegal aliens; H1-B crackdowns and $100,000 application fees
* 62,000+ missing migrant children rescued; Alien Enemies Act invoked against gangs
* $2B sent to rebuild Western North Carolina
* John Bolton arrested and pleaded. James Comey arrested. John Brennan under investigation (probably facing a grand jury).
* RussiaGate grand jury set up and running in Florida.
* DOJ/ODNI seized Fulton County 2020 ballots. Trump is still working on Plans B, C, D, etc, with a ‘new’ integrity announcement scheduled as soon as tomorrow night.

[Hesse Philosophy @HermannHessed]

“There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!”

— Hermann Hesse

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

Extracts from article in Spectator 16th August by Brendan O’Neill:

Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of ‘decolonisation’ and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unravelled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. . .

This is the poison chalice of the state religion of diversity. It lays traps for the very people it celebrates. It handpicks members of ‘the oppressed’ for moral anointment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials. That’s the toxic bargain of identity politics: it builds teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace is often twice as fatal.

And what a pedestal they made for Arday. They worshipped him as ‘the best in the world’. They beatified him as a black wunderkind whose very presence in a place like Cambridge might help to wash away its sins of whiteness. They canonised him as a living monument to ‘decolonisation’. It was precisely this, their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black saviour, that made them turn a blind eye to the questionable elements of Arday’s CV and life story. They sacrificed their due diligence to the god of decolonisation.

And Arday suffered. He was both poster boy and sacrificial lamb of the diversity crusade. Even as he gained from it – reaching the dizzying heights of a Cambridge professorship – he was being damned by it. The foundation of myth and sand his starry career was built on was untenable. Its collapse was a given. It is a testament to the ideological blindness of the inhabitants of our ivory towers that none of them foresaw it. . . .

The Faustian ruthlessness of it all is mindblowing.

. . . The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it.

I and others have been arguing for years that the politics of identity is a disaster for all, black and white alike. White kids are overlooked, black kids are patronised. Whites are branded ‘privileged’, blacks ‘oppressed’. Whites are seen as the beneficiaries of historic crimes who must atone for past sins, blacks as history’s perma-victims who require the gracious helping hand of the state. We are demonised or infantilised according to the accident of our race.

Enough. Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

True

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

This this thisity this.

[Stella O'Malley @stellaomalley3]

‘The solution was a new ideology that allowed highly educated elites to regard working-class people with contempt while still seeing themselves as champions of the oppressed.’ 💯

[Stella O'Malley @stellaomalley3]

Brilliant analysis 👇

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

America has been on such a run that people worth 10MM sit around complaining about how evil “the rich” are.

[eugyppius @eugyppius1]

When I left the US for my job in Germany, I sold my little row house to an old professor who had been forced out of his position because the racism brigade had canceled him for some trumped-up bizarre reason. I invited him to dinner on one of my last nights in America to show him how the place worked, and he was a broken man – looking over his shoulder, thanking me for everything, timid. I felt just terrible. I made Königsberger Klopse in my open kitchen while he sat at my table and spoke bitterly to me about his experience and how the diversitarians had besieged his classes and harassed him at his office, how he couldn't continue. I saw the tears in his eyes. I feel nothing about Arday's death. I feel absolutely nothing.

[♀️Jennifer Gingrich ✡️ @fem_mb]

The shock of someone taking their own life can make people react by saying that they were always just a victim. Sometimes that's true, but it really isn't in the case of Jason Arday.

It seems to me that Arday - a middle-aged man with an adult daughter - was infantilized by his supporters in life, and is being treated the same in death.

Yes, Cambridge University officials have a lot to answer for. They lauded a fraud as a generational genius. They gave him a highly-paid position educating young people whose parents paid a lot of money for the privilege, and accused those students of racism when they pointed out that he taught them nothing. They took his ridiculous backstory at face value and helped spread a near-legendary reputation that was inevitably going to be exposed, leaving him humiliated.

But Arday is the one who told all the lies about his life. He wasn't a child who didn't know better. He took that position and salary knowing he didn't have the qualifications for it and that his students would not benefit from his tutelage. By all accounts, he barely showed up for classes at all: he was usually late and left hours early.

It's a tragedy when anyone takes their own life and I'm sorry that he did, but if he was a victim, it was only of his own lies. Those lies deserved to be exposed and ridiculed.

[Venice Allan @roseveniceallan]

The people who enabled Jason Arday’s lies will blame the people who exposed them.

[KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat]

🚨NEW: Joe Rogan says he personally knows 5 women who got miscarriages after taking the COVID vaccine, calling Fauci a “sociopath.”

“He knew that women were getting miscarriages and he lied about it.”

“He said privately in a text message it seems there’s a cytokine storm causing miscarriages after the second dose and was publicly out there promoting the idea of pregnant women getting vaccinated.”

“I personally know 5 different people who got pregnant during the pandemic, got vaccinated, and had miscarriages.”

“That guy’s a sociopath.”

“You need to go and objectively read up on what that guy did with AZT and AIDS in the ’80s.”

“He knew there was an issue with women having miscarriages and that mother f*cker still openly promoted it on television.”

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

In an interview, @JanJekielek asked me to justify my claim that the Fauci Diaries is like the Pentagon Papers in historical significance. My answer:

The Pentagon Papers proved that the entire official story of the Vietnam War was a lie from beginning to end. The official story collapsed and trust in military elites collapsed. So too now with the Covid era.

There was also supposed to be an official history and story of Covid. A pandemic came, probably because of climate change. Scientists got to work, first with common-sense public health measures and then with the inoculation that ended it all. The only real problem was disinformation and the vaccine hesitant, which had to be crushed with censorship and mandates.

The Diaries reveal that this story is a lie. The lead voice of science himself worried that the pandemic was lab-made and scrambled to avoid blame. Otherwise, he paid no attention to science other than refreshing his webpage set to Our World in Data. He never once show concern for the howls of pain from the public (and kids) due to lockdowns but instead collected celebrity endorsements, cash prizes, and other emoluments. Before the shot even came available, he privately notes that mutations make it useless. He then found out that the potion is dangerous and said nothing. He further reveals how he worked from within to undermine and defy and destroy the administration for which he worked. This diary ruins him forever – and reveals that nothing he ever said can be trusted – and he takes all his cohorts and the entire pandemic response the world over down with him.

https://t.co/2aQgi7PXNF

[Anna Khachiyan @annakhachiyan]

One of the ugliest and most distasteful qualities women have is the urge to revel in subversion, almost like it combines a sense of superiority with an erotic thrill. It’s bad enough when AOC or some random e-girl does it and everyone guffaws like a circus seal. And I’m not even a pro-life zealot on this issue, but when applied to expanding abortion, it’s beyond what should be permitted in any civil society.

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

On a related issue, I saw Nick Bostrom on Rogan a couple weeks ago talking about how universal basic income would give people so much time that they would have to be taught at college how to enjoy their lives in productive ways. Like they would attend school, not really learn anything because AI does all the learning already, and just learn "life skills" like some crack addict out on parole. And somehow everyone would spend their time painting or learning piano.

But let's be real for a minute. We've got entire swaths of the Rust Belt where huge portions of the population are on "disability." They've just been paid off to leave everyone else alone basically. And what are they doing? Drinking, using opiates, cooking meth. I find it very hard not to think that this is the future of UBI combined with AI.

[Anna Khachiyan @annakhachiyan]

The white American middle class are literally the best people on the planet. All my life I grew up with people dunking on them for their cordial relations and stuffy mores and middlebrow taste but it turns out that everything runs on their largesse. When I was an immigrant kid growing up in Central Jersey much like Hasan Piker this was a nice country with a good standard of living and a decent intellectual discourse thanks to them. Anyone who talks down to them is moralscum.

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

Today’s Spectator… made me laugh anyway. Rest in peace a warrior of sarcasm & wit. You will be missed

[Auron MacIntyre @AuronMacintyre]

If you ever see this man on YouTube stop whatever you are doing and listen because you’re about to learn something incredible

[Boris Johnson @BorisJohnson]

Heartsick at the death of Rod Liddle - an outrageously funny and gifted writer with a beautiful conversational style. He had a unique talent for finding the thing that was obviously true but supposedly unsayable and then saying it with such panache as to give the maximum possible offence - and to all the right people. Spectator readers absolutely loved him.