Substack has finally gone mainstream and respectable (I have joined). My account is called Great Capitalism, and my launch post is here: greatcapitalism.substack.com/p/great-capita…

“History will tell if Slade's revival of the fusionist conservative ethos coincided with its death or its revival. But perhaps the greatest irony is that while the New Right might eventually prevail over the old conservative consensus, it will face the same impossible dilemma: How can a free and virtuous society flourish?

They would be smart to ask the fusionists.”

A belated plug for my review of @sladesr’s book for @FreeBeacon.
freebeacon.com/culture/whos-a…

Some day (maybe soon) the shrinking Dem-majority states are going to have big pension and budget problems. When they inevitably ask for a bailout, Congress should emphatically say "No!" nationalreview.com/2026/09/a-seri… (right, @thomas_savidge?)

Yes, the monarchy was deeply implicated in the slave trade. But not the British monarchy.
The biggest African slavers were not pirates or bandits. They were kings. In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat
While Tegbesu was trafficking human beings, the future George III, who had recently become Prince of Wales, was becoming a convinced abolitionist. He wrote a monograph arguing that “slavery is equaly [sic] repugnant to the Civil Law as to the Law of Nature”. He went on, as King, to sign the abolition of the slave trade into law in 1807.
That act prompted incredulous rage among West African chiefs.
In the 1840s, King Ghezo of Dahomey, played by John Boyega in the 2022 film, The Woman King, fiercely resisted such pressure.
“The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth,” he complained.
Contrast his attitude with that of his British fellow-monarchs. Although Victoria, as Queen, was expected to refrain from expressing political opinions, her husband was under less constraint. Albert made his very first speech as Prince Consort to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa. His words are a reminder of how determined Britain was to ensure that ending the Atlantic slave trade did not simply push the commerce eastwards.
“I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion. But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant.”
The difference between the British Crown and contemporary African monarchies can be glimpsed in the story of Aina, a young Yoruba girl owned by King Ghezo of Dahomey.
In 1850, a naval captain called Frederick Forbes came to Dahomey to try to convince Ghezo to stop selling slaves. He was unsuccessful but, during his visit, he was offered Aina as a gift.
Forbes knew that such slaves were generally destined for human sacrifice, so he accepted the child, naming her Sara Forbes Bonetta. When Sara arrived in Britain, Queen Victoria became her godmother, paid for her education and arranged for her to marry a wealthy Yoruba businessman. Are the British really the baddies here?
Critics talk of telling our nation’s story “warts and all”; but they rarely get around to the “and all”. The “and all” surely includes the vast sums devoted to stamping out slavery, calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape as 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. Even if there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not) that sum alone – not counting the billions given in aid – would surely have covered any debt.
What we are seeing is not a debate about history, but an argument about contemporary politics. Critics want to convince us that Britain became rich through exploitation rather than, as was actually the case, through private property, free contracts and independent courts.
The easiest way to demonstrate the negative correlation between capitalism and slavery is to look at the places where human bondage is most prevalent today – in order, North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mauritania. If William III owning shares in the Royal African Company bothers you more than the continuing abomination of slavery in those places, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about your motives.

Talking about the crisis of the West without mentioning pensions and senior healthcare is like talking about a plane crash without mentioning gravity.

Need a crumb of hope about Europe on a Saturday?

Belgium has gone from rapidly closing and destroying its entire nuclear fleet (half of its power before 2023) to quickly relicensing and returning a few of them to the grid.

PM @Bart_DeWever is trying to save as many as he can.

“The CofE ‘now has four times as many bishops as the Victorians had and less than a quarter of their churchgoers.’”

Parkinson (1957) notes that as the Royal Navy and the Empire shrank, the Admiralty and the Colonial Office grew.

👀

I think this was served aboard the USCSS Nostromo.

All the young, hip kids love working for the Unc Tax Center.

I've seen chart crimes, I've seen chart felonies, but this is a violation of the chart Geneva Convention

Must-read

Was going to be annoyed at seeing a Talarico ad in the DC media market but then remembered that I was watching Alabama play the Aggies. You get a pass this time, SEC on ABC.

Read about the problems Total Boomer Luxury Communism here: greatcapitalism.substack.com/p/interview-to…

I like to think that Margo Channing and Angela Channing exist in the same fictional universe and are related.

In the last 25 years the capitalist order has lifted One Billion people out of extreme poverty.

This is not an Alex P Keaton talking point, it is objectively true.

Never taking another taxi as long as I live on principle (it's called self care).

Going to need @cojobrien to run for ANC in Ward 3 so we can have our own local "Dan Sullivan for Senate" scenario.

Inclusionary zoning cuts housing construction by as much as a third, argues a PRI commentary citing a July UC Irvine study.

Builders must set aside homes or pay a fee, which raises project costs and makes fewer projects pencil out.