The Gravest Crime and the Selective Universal
On 25 March 2026, applause broke out in the UN General Assembly Hall as member states declared the transatlantic slave trade “the gravest crime against humanity.” Three countries voted no. Fifty-two abstained, Canada among them. Nancy Perin traces what that vote reveals: a rules-based order that stands inside its own law only when standing there costs nothing. From the ICC to Gaza to a prime minister’s own words at Davos, the pattern holds. Who gets to bend the rule was always the real question.
What We Call It Now
A signature, a stamp, a line in a bill’s preamble: this is how land still changes hands in Canada, four centuries after the Doctrine of Discovery did the same work with different words. Nancy Perin traces the line from residential schools to Bill C-5, the current federal law Indigenous leaders say was passed without real consultation, and asks what “national interest” is actually a replacement for. A course, a definition, a courtroom challenge, and one uncomfortable question: whose story is this, really?
The Architecture of Impunity
Six days before a private phone call, Senator Lindsey Graham had already put it in writing: unresolved misconduct allegations against the ICC’s chief prosecutor had cast, in his words, “another cloud, a moral one.” The recording that surfaced this week shows what came next: Netanyahu coached, phone by phone, on how to work that cloud into a bipartisan Senate letter, with a diplomatic favor settled on the side. On nancyperin.com, an update to The Architecture of Impunity traces how that call fits a wider pattern, and where it reaches Canada.
The Answer Was Already Paid For
A text arrives from “Friends for Peace,” a group that doesn’t exist. It’s one thread in Israel’s $730 million public diplomacy budget, which also bought 18 million views on videos calling Gaza’s documented famine a lie, and a $46.5-million contract to shape what AI chatbots tell you when you ask. Nancy Perin follows the money from a stranger’s text message to the training data behind your last search and traces a pattern that failed once before, now returning at a different scale.
The Machine That Makes You Feel Convinced
A woman finishes an elegant essay at midnight and feels something has been proven, though she couldn’t say what. That’s the subject of Nancy Perin’s latest Standing for Humanity piece: not the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the machine that manufactures conviction inside beautifully built arguments. Walking through Davidi Gilo’s viral essay on the “vocabulary stack,” Nancy traces where explanation quietly becomes advocacy — and asks what happens when the same method gets pointed at itself.resolve the conflict. It resolves something in you.
The Day They Announced They Would Dismantle It
While the ICC’s Deputy Prosecutor sat with Darfur’s war survivors in Chad, Washington announced it would dismantle the court that serves them, brick by brick. Nine days later, member states removed the prosecutor himself, overruling the judges who’d already cleared him. Nancy Perin traces both fronts: the sanctions, the vote, and what it means when accountability becomes the thing under attack. Canada helped build this court. What happens now depends partly on whether it still will.
The Trick Was Never the Argument. It Was the Architecture.
Two in the morning, phone light on your face, and something you just read makes your stomach settle before your mind catches up. Not because it convinced you. Because it felt finished. On Nancy Perin’s platform, a close read of a viral essay on Zionism and “settler colonialism” asks a harder question than which side is right: what happens when an argument is built to feel like discovery instead of inviting you to test it? The dilemma it exposes doesn’t resolve the conflict. It resolves something in you.
The Hand in the Room
When Canada’s parliamentary security report identified the primary perpetrators of transnational repression against Canadians, three of the six names were replaced with asterisks—redacted at the Prime Minister’s direction. On Nancy Perin’s Standing for Humanity platform, a fully sourced investigation asks what is behind those asterisks: covert polling commissioned by a foreign consulate and discussed in a Liberal Party WhatsApp group, surveillance of Canadian activists by a foreign ministry, and Israeli spyware already inside Canadian policing. The hand was in the room. The question is whether we are willing to see it.
The Medium is The Colonizer
In January 1994, Nancy Perin watched Silvio Berlusconi walk off a television screen and into Italian politics. She had Marshall McLuhan in her head. Almost forty years later, she understands what he was actually describing: not a theory of media, but a theory of colonization. In this Standing for Humanity piece on nancyperin.com, Nancy traces how AI has occupied consciousness, evacuated democracy, and enclosed the physical commons—the water the machine drinks and the communities that bear its weight. The resistance begins with unpredicted output. It continues with organized action.
The Fund That Flatters You While It Sells the Floor
When Mark Carney announced the Canada Strong Fund on April 27, 2026, he said it plainly: this is not for rich people. It is for all Canadians. Nancy Perin, sociologist and Executive Director of the Gallery of Human Migration, has spent decades watching economies restructure and knows what the vocabulary of transformation—asset recycling, private equity, and sovereign wealth—tends to leave behind. In this Standing for Humanity piece, she examines what the fund’s structure actually promises, who bears the risk, and why loving your country means demanding better answers than this.
