John Frank

Commentary on American, Canadian and international affairs, with a focus on economics, politics, law and war. Fluent in sarcasm.

[Joseph Steinberg @jbsteinberg]

Update: Based on annexes to the 3 factsheets and (hopefully) correct script to merge them with trade data, I get the following:
- ~5.3% of exports affected
- ~2.6pp increase in average effective tariff rate.
Will update with any further errors.

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

Great job Sam.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

I’ve just finished reading Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy.

It ranks, along with Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories, as the best take-down of the lunacy at the heart of the wokeist philosophy.

For Saad, empathy—in itself a perfectly decent trait—has become so grossly exaggerated that it threatens truth, reality, and justice.

Cases in point abound: so they won’t feel bad about themselves, we’ll allow biological men to compete in women’s sports and crush the dreams of thousands of young women; so as not to undermine the self-esteem of minorities, we will permit unqualified candidates to have positions in universities and the corporate world; so that everyone might feel included, we will characterize the meritocracy as “white privilege,” etc.

As I was making my way through Saad’s book, I kept remarking the sharp distinction between empathy and love.

To empathize is to enter profoundly into the experience of another and to endeavor not to hurt that person’s feelings. But to love is, as Thomas Aquinas taught, “to will the good of the other.”

As I said, in itself and all things being equal, empathy is a good thing. But it is not the same as love, which, depending on circumstances, can very much involve hurting someone’s feelings.

When a professor gives a student a “C” as an honest reflection of his work, he might well be insulting him, but he’s also telling him the truth and perhaps even urging him to try harder.

When, in the Confessional, a priest tells a murderer to turn himself in to the police, he’s undoubtedly making that person’s life more uncomfortable, but he’s also willing the man’s good.

Any decent parent knows that showing real love for her children means engendering all kinds of bad feelings in them.

In light of this distinction, we can understand why Jesus didn’t say, “have empathy for one another,” but rather “love one another.” And why St. John the Evangelist didn’t say, “God is empathy,” but rather “God is love.”

It occurred to me as I was reading Saad’s book that one reason Wokeism has seized the consciousness of so many in the West is that Christianity has faded as a cultural force and Christians themselves have forgotten what stands at the heart of their faith.

[Mosab Hassan Yousef @MosabHasanYOSEF]

Islamophobia is noticing the doctrine’s body count before it adds yours.

[Wyatt Claypool @wyatt_claypool]

We need answers from the Canadian and Ontario governments on whether or not we have ben blocking American water-bombers from helping fight Canadian fires.

Montana Senator Tim Sheehy claims first-hand experience as a water-bomber pilot and says Canada "routining blocks US firefighting companies from attacking fires in Canada."

[Stephen Taylor @stephen_taylor]

Remember when Russia spent $10k in Facebook ads during the 2016 US election and Canada began a process of freaking out which ended up deleting its entire news industry off of Facebook and Google News, leading to the nationalization of the news industry?

pretty funny outcome, tbh

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

Karl Marx spent his life denouncing capitalism, private property and bourgeois "exploitation" - while living as a dependent of a capitalist and treating those around him with casual contempt.

Despite railing against the bourgeoisie, Marx never held a steady job and relied almost entirely on financial support from Friedrich Engels, whose wealth came from his family’s textile mills in Manchester. Marx lived in London with his aristocratic wife Jenny, employed a live-in maid and maintained the pretensions of a middle-class intellectual even as his family sank into debt and squalor.

Most telling was his treatment of Helene Demuth, the family’s long-serving maid. Marx fathered an illegitimate son with her in 1851. The child, Frederick Demuth, was quietly handed over to Engels to raise as his own, while Marx continued to present himself as a champion of the working class. Several of Marx’s legitimate children died young in conditions of poverty and neglect, even as he worked on Das Kapital in the reading room of the British Museum.

Marx’s theories demanded the abolition of private property and the creation of a classless society, but he showed little interest in applying those principles to his own life. He lived off the profits of capitalist enterprise, exploited domestic labour, concealed his own sexual misconduct and left his family in financial ruin.

It is, of course, a pattern common among revolutionary intellectuals: the willingness to impose radical equality on others while exempting themselves from its consequences.

[Melissa Rosenthal @MelisOutlever]

Jamie Dimon made two predictions last week that sound like they came from different planets.

On Tuesday's earnings call he said AI spending will blow past $1 trillion next year. That's more than a quarter of all corporate capex in America going toward one technology.

On Wednesday he stood at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and said the best career move for a young person might be picking up a welding torch. He wants 300,000 electricians and welders trained over the next decade, into jobs paying $80K to $100K after a year or two of paid training. No degree required and no debt.

It sounds like a contradiction until you think about what that trillion dollars actually buys. Data centers, substations, transmission lines, cooling systems. All of it has to be built by people with their hands. The capital is flooding toward machines and the bottleneck is skilled trades.

And on that same call, Dimon admitted some departments at his own bank have shrunk 30 to 40% because of AI. The white collar jobs a degree was supposed to protect are the ones disappearing first.

So the world's largest bank is financing the machines and also financing the people machines can't replace. They just put $24 million into Philadelphia shipbuilding.

Something to keep in mind next time someone asks what a safe career looks like.

Read the full piece here: https://t.co/omS59xsLQB

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is beginning. The Mensheviks who make up most of the party simply aren't ready for this.

Oh, and like all Marxists, he's lying. He's definitely bought.

[JayGen 𝕏 er🇨🇦 @JayGenXer]

Canada needs to get some balls.

This woman absolutely nails the GoodLife gym kirpan circus.

Sikh man walks in openly carrying a religious blade, working out shirtless against dress code, filming in the change room… and the second he cries discrimination the gym folds like cheap lawn chairs and apologizes.

Meanwhile regular Canadian women still can’t legally carry pepper spray or a knife for self-defense without the cops treating them like criminals.

This is the insane two-tier society we’ve built.

Rules only apply to the people who don’t scream loud enough about their identity.

DEI and woke ideology didn’t create equality — it created a hierarchy where some groups get to ignore the rules everyone else has to follow.

Equal rights. Equal rules. Equal responsibilities.

No special privileges. Assimilate or don’t come.

That’s not bigotry. That’s how a functional country actually works.

#cdnpoli #CanadaFirst #WokeFail #CommonSense

📺 @thesovereignceo 👈

[Krisztina Maria @KrisztinaMaria]

OPEN YOUR MOUTH. NOW!

I want to say something that more and more people are thinking, but too few are saying out loud.

The leftists who have fallen into a deep conspiracy hole and turned the Jews into the world’s evil… they are not the majority in the West.

Not even together with the islamists.

But it is not the majority that sets the agenda. It is the most aggressive. The ones the media carries forward.

And then there is polite society. The ones who see exactly what is going on, who talk about it around the dinner table, but never in public.

Their silence is not neutral. It gives the most aggressive even more room.

This is not something I say. It is documented reality.

Antisemitic incidents have exploded across the West since October 7, 2023. In France, they nearly doubled in a year. In Germany, they rose by 80 percent.

Christians are the most persecuted people in the world - 388 million live under severe persecution. A record. Again.

Meanwhile, churches across Europe are burned and vandalized, while islam keeps gaining ground in our systems and our parliaments.

That is not an opinion. That is mathematics.

History has shown us what happens when the majority stays silent while an aggressive minority shouts.

Back then, it was not the executioners who were the majority. It was the bystanders.

And remember, they can cancel one voice. They cannot cancel a majority.

In the end, it is always the voice of the people that sets the direction.

Create the necessary counter-pressure. It will matter. It will go down in history. And you will be able to look yourself in the eye when you take your last breath - knowing you spoke when it counted.

Because your innermost voice - the one you also know as your conscience - already knows what is true.

Listen.

Open your mouth. Now.

[Saffiyah @saffiyah_huyyay]

@VladdyGuerr999 @KrisztinaMaria I believe that most Christians are better than you and believe in forgiveness, grace and redemption and ignoring hearsay. That's in in spite of a long history of murdering us at the stake, calling us Christ killers and referring to us as members of the "synagogue of Satan".

[Krisztina Maria @KrisztinaMaria]

2:2 Ask anyone who writes publicly about Jews in this country, or anywhere in Europe these days. The pattern is the same, every time, under every post - if you write that Jews are human beings, an entire chorus turns out to explain why they are not.

They organize. They find each other in the groups and the threads. They are growing in number, and they are growing louder, and they have stopped whispering.

So now I ask - not rhetorically, but actually -

How is the rest of the country supposed to respond to this?

Are we just going to watch while people gather around the right to spread thousand-year-old conspiratorial nonsense about a small people that has lived among us for four hundred years and given this country doctors, artists, merchants and scientists?

Are the rest of us going to do nothing?
Is no one planning to say anything?

The priests, who every Sunday preach from a Jewish book about a Jewish saviour - are they saying anything?

The politicians, who lay wreaths at the memorials in October and speak of "never again" - do they see that it is now something is beginning to happen again, in small steps, in comment threads and closed groups and by now marching in wide-open streets?

The neighbours, the colleagues, the decent ones - all of you who know better and say nothing, because it is uncomfortable, and because "it will probably pass"?

It does not pass. That is what history teaches us, every single time - it does not pass on its own. It grows in the silence. Silence is not neutral - it is the soil it grows in.

Our grandparents saved the Jews across the Øresund in October '43 and gave this country one of the most beautiful chapters in its history. They did not do it because it was comfortable. They broke the law - and they did it solely because their Conscience told them what was true.

They did it because they knew what a Human Being is.

The question is no longer whether the Darkness is gathering in this time.
Anyone who dares to look can see it.

The question is whether we are our grandparents' grandchildren - or merely their shrivelled heirs.

❤️‍🔥🪽

Think☀️

[Krisztina Maria @KrisztinaMaria]

1:2 Let me show you what has happened after that. Every time. Not for my sake - but because you need to see it with your own eyes.

The comment sections have filled up. Not just with disagreement - disagreement is of course welcome, and the sharpest objection that brings facts to the table is the best guest. No, they have filled up with something else.

I have consistently, again and again, been asked who pays me - Netanyahu, Mossad, "the Zionist federation", the hasbara offices, the hidden hand. I have been called a paid shill, hasbara agent, Zionist swine - and worse things that will not be repeated here.

The accusation of the bought voice is the oldest one in the archive - the Jew and his henchmen never speak freely, they always serve something hidden. That was the narrative that made the Jew "the foreign hand" in the inner life of every country - and thereby the obvious scapegoat every time something went wrong.

When the plague came, when the harvest failed, when the war was lost - find the hidden hand. The well-poisoning accusations during the Black Death wiped out hundreds of Jewish communities in Europe - people burned alive for a conspiracy that never existed.

I have been told that the Jews killed Jesus. The deicide accusation - the one that for a thousand years made Easter the most dangerous time of year for Europe's Jews, because the Good Friday sermon turned into Saturday riots.

It drove the massacres of the Crusades along the Rhine in 1096, where entire congregations chose death over forced baptism. It was so deadly that even the Catholic Church had to formally bury it in 1965. In my comment section it is alive and well.

I have repeatedly been lectured that "they own all the media" - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion dropped into countless subordinate clauses. A forgery, fabricated by the Tsar's secret police around the year 1900, documented as a fake in courtrooms and works of history a hundred years ago - and still in operation.

It is history's most murderous document measured by consequence - it circulated in Hitler's inner circle, and it is cited by name in the Hamas charter - the same document which, with a hadith in Article 7, makes the killing of Jews as such, not Israelis, but Jews, wherever they are found, a step in the coming of Judgment Day itself.

The forgery from the Tsar's police ended up as a footnote in an extermination programme that is still in force. Six million people were murdered with that narrative as their intellectual alibi. And now it stands in Danish comment threads, written by people who believe they have discovered something.

I have been lectured that Israel is not the Jews' own longing but the great powers' "bridgehead" - because a people cannot, of course, want anything for itself. It is the same figure, merely scaled up - just as the individual Jew must not have a free voice, the people must not have a will of its own.

Two thousand years of prayer - "next year in Jerusalem" - recoded as other people's chess game. The narrative was systematized as Soviet propaganda during the Cold War and lives on today on both political fringes - one of the places where the ends of the horseshoe touch.

The blood libel from 1144 - rabbis and the blood of children - has surfaced in Danish, in my comment section, in 2026. It is the accusation with the longest trail of blood of them all - from Norwich it spread across the whole of Europe and for centuries sent innocent people to the stake and whole neighbourhoods to the grave, Easter after Easter, town after town.

It was always a fabrication. It worked every time.

And my wife has, on top of that, been called mistress, escort, whore and worse - because when the arguments run out, the Hatred goes after the Woman. That too is in the script, and it is old.

And this is not my comment section alone.

[Krisztina Maria @KrisztinaMaria]

JEW-HATRED IS REAL

A shared experience. My husband Thomas Finn takes the floor.👇🏽

Last week we were sitting at a lunch restaurant down by the harbour in Skagen. High season, thirty degrees, full tables, children and draft beer and fried plaice - Denmark at its most Danish.

A young couple sat down at the table next to us. Mid-twenties, from a mid-sized Danish town, he a tradesman, she friendly and well-spoken.

We fell into conversation, the way you do while waiting for the food - where are you from, what do you do - and the conversation drifted, as conversations do these days, onto the culture war, which he in particular was preoccupied with. Islam, Christianity, the EU, political life.

A completely ordinary conversation between completely ordinary Danes over lunch.

And then he says it. Calmly, out of the blue, as if he were remarking on the weather:

"If you ask me, we obviously need to keep an eye on Islam - but the real threat is the Jews."

Krisztina was about to get up. I managed to put a hand on her leg under the table and send her the look that, between partners who have been together for decades, means - wait.

Not because the sentence didn't deserve an answer - but because I wanted to know how deep the well was before I said anything. So I asked, as neutrally as I could -

"Ok. Well, some people do think that. Are there many around you who feel that way?"

"Yes, pretty much all my friends."

Krisztina tried again, by way of history - "But surely you know the history. They have always been persecuted - and during the war Hitler killed six million of them..."

She never got to finish the sentence.

"Well, they deserved it. They brought it on themselves."

The sun was shining. The plaice arrived.

I looked at Krisztina, and we understood each other without words - not here, not now.

We had driven to Skagen for the day's sake and for each other's, and there were families with children at every other table. You have to know when a conversation is a conversation - and when it is merely an occasion.

So we ate our food in peace, wished them a good day and walked out into the sun.

But the sentence came with us.
And it is still lying on the table between us.

A nice, normal, friendly young couple - and the sentence Europe has spent eighty years promising itself never to hear again, served over lunch, as if he were noting that the food needed salt.

What I want to tell you today is that this sentence was not a bolt from a clear sky. I had expected to hear it out in the open this year.

Because it is not one stray young man in Skagen. It is the surface of something that has grown larger than most people quite notice, beneath us, while we were looking away - and I can document it - as can many others here on this platform - because I, or we, have been standing in it all year.

Over the course of this year I have written a series of exhaustive texts and hundreds of long comments about Jews. About their three-thousand-year history, from Abraham through the exiles to the rebirth of the State of Israel. About their traditions, their scriptures, their way of carrying memory through the centuries.

About everything the Western world stands on without knowing it - that Man bears the image of God, that the law stands above the king, that conscience cannot be owned, that every child should be able to read - foundation stones that are all Hebrew, and which were carried out to us through a Jewish saviour and his Jewish apostles.

I have written about the causes of the persecution, its patterns and its costumes through a thousand years. About the grammar of Jew-hatred - the kind that cannot imagine a human being who freely holds an opinion, or a people that wants something of its own.

And about why it is crucial that the world stands up for and in front of this people - not because they are worth more than others, but because the attack on them has always been the first act in the attack on Man as such. MORE👇🏽

[Liz Churchill @liz_churchill10]

Communist Survivor Lily Tang Williams invites Communist Hasan Piker to debate her on his comment, “Mao Zedong was a Great Leader”

Lily Tang Williams: “Under Mao, people were trading their children’s dead bodies to eat…to survive”

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

Socialism is about power. The DSA is about power.
You matter nothing to them.
You don’t want kings? You don’t want dictators?
Start acting like it.

[Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck]

Nicaragua’s socialist President, Daniel Ortega, has just announced an END to Presidential elections. He’s doing this to stop popular right wing opposition from coming to power.

There’s a lesson here for the west.

The US should cut off all trade ASAP!

[The Food Professor @FoodProfessor]

This is not helping Canada’s food inflation problem. ⬇️

Our food-manufacturing sector is contracting, and its contribution to the overall economy is shrinking.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Fun facts about Mao's Little Red Book.

Ok, so first of all, it's not even a book in the sense of making an argument or whatever. It's not even a piece of propaganda. It's a collection of quotations allegedly from Mao Zedong. It's basically Brainy Quotes Mao Edition.

But let's talk about the way the Little Red Book got used as a piece of cult literature by the Red Guard (youth corps) during the Cultural Revolution.

Eventually, after the Cultural Revolution completely destroyed the schools and everything in them for being the "Olds" of China that had to be destroyed on principle of being part of "old" culture (Boomer mentality, roughly), this book of sayings and quotations by the Chairman became the primary textbook for students for a few years because new textbooks hadn't been written and printed yet. Imagine that circumstance. Imagine that education.

Even during the Cultural Revolution's main active phase before this grim situation, though, one of the main uses of the Little Red Book was for little Communist bastards in the Red Guard to prove their excessive, cult-like loyalty to the personality of Mao Zedong by literally memorizing it.

Red Guards would compete, oh so productively, at memorizing and reciting the entire book of random quotations and sayings, one after the other. It was worse than great shame to miss one or get something wrong. It could result in a beating, maybe to death, by the more loyal. It could result in being cast out of the "red" class and putting yourself and your family at risk or in a bad situation. It basically became a litmus test for fanatical devotion to Mao and Communism.

This was so stringent that people who merely mispronounced a word in their recitation, by mistake, could be accused of dishonoring the Chairman and struggled, or worse. Exhausted? Hungry? Just slipped? You dishonored the Chairman and must be punished, perhaps brutally. Totally psychotic.

This line of behaviors extended to everything Mao during the Cultural Revolution, too. An image or likeness of Mao that in any way got wet, dirty, marked upon, or that even got printed wrong was a catastrophe that might cost you your life, your business, your standing. Insulting the Chairman in any way, even by mistake or happenstance, was dangerous in the extreme.

The purpose of this psychotic cult environment was to raise up a radical youth cult that was so committed to Mao that they would wage war on their own parents, teachers, grandparents, culture, religion, priests, and society, eventually including the sitting premier of the PRC, Liu Shaoqi, who was Mao's chief political rival and target.

Eventually, the Red Guard succeeded at terrorizing the country, murdering thousands, destroying countless priceless cultural and historical and religious artifacts, effectively abolishing the memory of China's old culture (from which it hasn't recovered to this day in any real sense), and, ultimately, deposing Mao's political rival.

Mao Zedong thanked his loyal cult by realizing they posed the same threat to him if the Cultural Revolution Group turned them against him, so he had the Red Guard liquidated and the Cultural Revolution Group destroyed.

That's your reward for helping a Communist get power. The same tools that he made use of and praised when he was weak are his biggest threat now that he's strong, and you're done. DO YOU HEAR THAT, WOKE PEOPLE? It's about you.

So, the Little Red Book is an idiotic book of aphorisms and stupid sayings and quotes about socialism, Communism, and life from Mao Zedong, and it was a weaponized cult tool that led to destruction and ultimately betrayal, even as the next generation who replaced the Red Guard had to go on and learn from it as their only textbook.

May Piker receive his due reward in full, but not by getting his way.