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Is it too soon to write the obituary for the Iran war? Are reports of its demise greatly exaggerated?

A deal has, apparently, been made; although the details of that deal haven’t been revealed in full yet. We have some idea—Iran renouncing its nuclear ambitions and handing over its enriched uranium, most notably—but the specifics, the nitty-gritty, remain to be established.

The fact that a deal has been made at this time, with the Iranian regime still intact and Israel still fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon, has been enough for some to declare the deal a non-starter—even a betrayal. As I type, Mark Levin’s heart rate has been dangerously elevated for the better part of 18 hours. I hope he calms down soon, for his own sake. Israeli officials are saying the US has somehow “screwed” their country, which is pretty rich really, because if this is what getting screwed looks like—having the world’s most powerful nation fight your mortal enemy, Amalek, for you, with her own blood and treasure and Tomahawk cruise missiles—well, I’d love to know what winning is like. It must be great.

Publicly, Netanyahu has been gracious and thanked Trump for achieving peace, but you can bet he’s dropped the most furious shit of his life in private. Cracked toilet bowl. Water and poo everywhere. Imagine the smell. Bibi knows his political survival depends on being the tough guy and beating his enemies to a pulp—or, rather, being seen to let America beat his enemies to a pulp—so there’s a very real chance a “premature” deal means he’s out at the next election, maybe sooner, and probably ends up being prosecuted for corruption. And he is very corrupt.

Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, has vowed on Twitter that Israel doesn’t take its orders from the US, as if anybody believed the contrary, and said the fight against Hezbollah will continue so long as Israel deems it necessary. “Israel is not a banana republic,” he wrote, despite bananas being Israel’s largest fruit export in 2025, something I didn’t know (I thought it would be dates). No conquered territory will be returned either, Ben Gvir added. Israel has now pushed beyond the Litani river in southern Lebanon and occupied Beaufort Castle, a stronghold it last held during the war in 1982.

Israel remains the fly in the ointment of any peace deal. Events in Lebanon could easily be used to precipitate a return to hostilities between the US and Iran. President Trump is reported to have called Bibi “f***ing crazy” because of Israel’s strikes in Lebanon over the past couple of weeks, which have been massively disproportionate and obviously timed to frustrate the negotiations and make peace impossible.

Then again, there are signs—cosmic signs, portents, call them what you will—that this really is it. Somehow it just feels right that events should coalesce this way, on Sunday 14th June: President Trump’s 80th birthday. The day of UFC Freedom 250, on the White House lawn.

Bread and circuses, people are saying. Real Roman Empire hours. Gladiatorial games in the capital on the emperor’s birthday, the emperor present and receiving homage from the fighters—morituri te salutant!—a fearsome storm suddenly splits and avoid the emperor’s palace, and we have peace, at last, with the Parthians. All on the same day, the sacred day consecrated to the all-power Sky-Father.

If the muse History is trying to tell us something, I’ll leave it up to you to decide what her message is.

Anyway, if the Iran war really is done and dusted, that’s a great thing. I can fill my oil tank for the winter, and more importantly President Trump can get back to his domestic agenda, which is in need of some serious work.

In recent weeks we’ve heard a lot of talk—and seen some clear evidence—that President Trump’s flagship policy of mass deportations has started to slow considerably after a flying start. Former Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who led daring raids into sanctuary cities just a few months ago, has now become one of the admin’s most vocal critics. His criticisms have garnered a lot of attention, and if they’re true, we should be worried. Bovino says the admin has all but abandoned the original goal of deporting tens of millions of illegal immigrants and is now committed only to removing the “worst of the worst.”

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Enter the men who fear women. Or is it the women who fear men?

“The men who fear women”: That’s the title of Helen Lewis’s latest cover story for The Atlantic. It’s currently making a big splash as she travels the podcast and interview circuit—PBS, The New York Times, NPR—explaining what she calls “masculinism,” a movement that apparently wants to put women back in the kitchen where they belong, having stripped them of all their political rights.

Sounds scary, huh? As the title suggests, though, it isn’t the women who are scared (although perhaps they should be)—it’s the men.

You may remember Helen Lewis from her car-crash interview with Jordan Peterson for GQ, way back in 2018. She was the one who really got up the good professor’s nose, needling and poking and making him look like a sulky teenager sitting atop a huge pile of mess in a fusty, darkened bedroom—the precise demographic Peterson arrived on the scene to rescue from its own retarded development and the scorn of polite society. In hindsight, although Peterson’s star would continue to grow, that interview was probably the beginning of the end for him, revealing the limitations of his philosophy and the personality behind it. Most of all, Lewis goaded Peterson into showing the true extent of his fragility: the brittleness that, in time, would make it impossible for him to continue in his valuable role as surrogate father to an entire generation of angry, confused, demoralised young men.

So what is “masculinism”? Wilson describes it as a “movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.” There are religious “masculinists”—not just Christian, but also Muslim—and there are secular “masculinists.” For Lewis, the religious masculinists are exemplified by a guy called Doug Wilson, an evangelical pastor whose self-created denomination has 170 churches US-wide and counts Secretary of War Pete Hegseth among its members. Wilson even led a prayer service at the Pentagon in February.

“Wilson believes that women should ‘not ordinarily’ hold political office,” Lewis writes, “and should never serve in combat roles in the military.

“Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits and choice of television programs.”

The Nineteenth Amendment would be repealed, and voting would take place “the same way we do it in our church structure… by household,” Wilson told her.

Wilson has choice words for every shade of woman he doesn’t like. They’re “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes, “Jezebels.” Gloria Steinem and another prominent feminist are “a couple of cunts.” Indeed, Wilson’s “twinkly, avuncular” persona one-on-one, in the flesh, is rather different from his public and especially his online persona, Lewis notes. In public life, Wilson’s “performative trollishness”—she uses the pro-wrestling term “kayfabe” to describe it—has one aim: “He wants feminists like me to get angry with his most outlandish proposals, making ourselves look like scolds or Chicken Littles in the process,” thereby proving his point about the unsuitability of women for front-facing roles in society. Clever game.

But Lewis notes that, despite the kayfabe, Wilson is deadly serious. He would repeal the 19^th Amendment, given the chance.

Wilson, as I say, is the archetype of the Christian brand of “masculinism.” But there’s also the influencers Andrew Tate and Sneako, Nicholas J. Fuentes, another pastor called Joel Webbon—and there’s me. She calls me an influencer “albeit one who knows a lot of $10 words.” There’s even a woman, Helen Andrews, who I’ll get back to in a moment.

When I spoke to Lewis at the beginning of the year, I was in Washington promoting my new book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. I must say, I thought she’d mellowed considerably since I’d last seen her, baiting Jordan Peterson like a scene from a seventeenth-century woodcut. It was clear she’d read my book closely, or so it seemed, and her comments and questions were smart and incisive—and not entirely unsympathetic either. She even complimented my striped dressing gown (it was early and I was still in bed); although she described it as a set of pyjamas in the final piece. If you’ve been following my work, you’ll know I’m not a fan of pyjamas, or any item of clothing that risks overheating the testes, compromising hormone production and fertility.

Still, I knew that I would not get an easy ride. And, of course, I didn’t. Apart from the “$10-dollar words” quip, there’s much Lewis gets wrong in point of fact about my new book. She says the argument, about testosterone decline and the draining of masculinity, is directed against “elites.”

“He lays the blame at the feet of the elites,” she says.

“They are keeping you fat; they are unhappy with risk taking and hierarchy; they are calling masculinity toxic.”

Either Lewis didn’t read the book as closely as I thought she did, or she’s trying to fit me and my work into a theoretical straitjacket that’s a few sizes too small. The argument of my book is not about elites vs the people. It’s about liberal democracy as a political system, and what is and isn’t possible within the confines of that system. Nobody designed that system, and nobody is in control of it. I certainly don’t believe there’s a shadowy cabal of people with a checklist of things to do to “destroy masculinity,” like making men fat and useless and discouraging the forms of risk-taking necessary for boys to develop into fully fledged men. In my chapter on the “gay frogs conspiracy theory”—“they’re putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay”—I explicitly reject the notion that social engineers are polluting the food and water supply with gender-bending chemicals, even though there is evidence that companies like DuPont and 3M hid toxicity data about “safe” chemicals from regulators for decades, causing enormous harm.

But that doesn’t mean powerful individuals, like Stephen Colbert or Joy Behar, don’t use tropes like “toxic masculinity” or calling all forms of male association “gay” to pursue their own ends; and the baleful state of the average man does indeed tend towards the maintenance of the status quo, which is one of the main reasons nothing much is done to help men.

It’s also wrong to say, as she does, that my focus is on feminism. My focus is on liberal democracy, which predates and encompasses feminism.

What Lewis wants, most of all, is for masculinism to be an actual thing, a coherent movement—because otherwise what would be the point of writing a 3,000-word piece for The Atlantic? If masculinism is just an odds-and-sods collection of dudes with retrograde views about women that you, as a modern liberated woman, don’t like, so what? Those five full spreads could be better filled with a piece about President Zelensky or trans kids.

The key to “masculinism,” Lewis claims, is that it provides a kind of unifying ideology for MAGA, which would otherwise lack one.

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You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. That was my message a few weeks ago when I reflected on the continuing wins—meaningful wins—of the Trump administration and how easy it is to miss them amid the fire and epic fury of the war with Iran, now in its fourteenth week.

On that occasion, I was referring in particular to the news that the “adjustment of status” loophole—I’d never heard of it—was being closed by immigration services, and with it the possibility of permanent citizenship for millions of foreign workers, legal and illegal.

Basically, the loophole has allowed foreign workers to remain in the US and “adjust” their visa status to permanent residency, without ever leaving the country.

This has been permissible since the 1950s, but it was only ever supposed to be used in exceptional cases. Instead, it’s become the norm, making it far easier for hordes of foreign workers to become hordes of American citizens—which is how we’ve ended up at this juncture, with a president elected on the promise of the “largest mass-deportation operation in US history.”

“We’re returning to the original intent of the law to ensure aliens navigate our nation’s immigration system properly,” said Zach Kahler of US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“From now on, an alien who is in the US temporarily and wants a green card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances. This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes.”

As I wrote, the change will now make it harder for low-wage employers to dangle the prospect of legalization in front of the foreign workers they import, and it will also reduce the power of activist judges and bureaucrats, because overseas embassies have much tighter rules for approving permanent visas and they generally can’t be overruled. Temporary migrants who overstay will automatically be barred from applying for a green card for ten years.

The news was greeted with dismay by leftists, who began screaming at the top of their lungs and pissing their pants. Always a good sign, I think. But it was hard to hear that screaming, because right-wingers were also screaming— and pissing their pants. But they were screaming about Iran, Israel, Thomas Massie and Brigitte Macron’s withered penis.

My conclusion wasn’t, obviously, that these victories on the home front somehow cancel out the things Trump has done and is going wrong, or should make us drop our criticism of this policy or that. Ever the moderate, ever the man seeking after the immortal Golden Mean, I simply wanted to suggest perhaps a little perspective is in order before we go ahead and say Donald Trump has abandoned America and MAGA and what we really need is a Dan Bilzerian-Sneako ticket for 2028 to sweep away the Epstein Class and usher in a new golden era of rule by based influencers who have never, EVER taken money from a foreign interest group and never would, inshallah.

Anyway, on that same very reasonable theme, I have some more good news at risk of going ignored. President Trump’s war on H-1B fraud is bearing some very tasty fruit.

The New York Post reports that the bottom of the housing market in Dallas, one of the most over-inflated markets in the US, has completely fallen out—and it’s fallen out because of changes the President has made to the H-1B system, including that headline-grabbing $100,000 fee on new petitions. That measure alone has priced out the staffing firms and mid-tier contractors that made up the vast majority of H-1B applications. Trump has also raised minimum salary thresholds for applications, directed the program to give priority only to the highest-paid workers, and launched a Labor Department initiative called “Project Firewall” to target employers that abuse the system.

I had no idea that, more than San Francisco, Seattle, Silicon Valley or anywhere else in the US apart from New York, Dallas has been ground zero for the H-1B revolution that has transformed so much of US high-tech industry and the areas where it is based. During the Biden Presidency, 32,000 new H-1B approvals were granted for the Dallas area alone.

Those new arrivals, mostly from India, poured into the suburbs—places like Prosper, Frisco and Celina—and caused the population to triple.

Collin and Denton counties became the fastest growing counties in the US with a population of more than a million.

In Frisco (pop. 235,000), Indians went from 6% of residents in the early 2010s to about 20% today.

Since the Trump assault on H-1Bs began, however, there’s been a vicious course correction. Home prices in the some parts of the Dallas area have fallen as much as 9% over the last year, double the decline in the wider region.

Realtors told The New York Post that demand from South Asians, in particular, has collapsed. One builder from north Texas who designs houses with special “puja” rooms for Hindu rituals and “spice kitchens” says sales to South Asians have fallen from 70% of his total sales to just 30%. He’s now sat on a backlog of 125 luxury homes under construction.

This is good news for the residents of Dallas, where the median sale price ballooned close to $470,000. But it’s also a powerful illustration of one of the central contentions of the MAGA movement led by Donald Trump. Reversing mass immigration will make life better, not worse, for Americans, and it will get better fast. Few things make life better than being able to afford a home of our own—puja room or no.

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I call processed food—or, rather, ultraprocessed food—“weaponized food” with good reason. Ultraprocessed food is weaponized food, because it is specifically designed to assault and overpower the senses, brute-forcing the body’s natural mechanisms of satiety, inhibition and moderation. The end result: You can’t stop eating it—with all that entails, like obesity, diabetes and pretty much every other form of chronic disease you can think of, from Alzheimer’s to ass-cancer. (Yes, I said Alzheimer’s: A new study shows over-50s who eat the most ultraprocessed food have a 56% greater chance of developing dementia over a period of a decade than those who eat the least. That’s a significantly increased risk.)

The weaponization of processed food is different from any other kind of fiendish design that’s ever been applied to food. Yes, cakes and desserts are designed to be delicious and make you want to eat more, and they always have been, but that design was primitive and utilized none of the sophisticated techniques of modern science, neurobiology and advertising. The dude who invented key lime pie or crème caramel—Spanish flan to you Americans—did not do so wearing a white coat in a multimillion-dollar laboratory, surrounded by other dudes in white coats, applying knowledge he learned as a PhD student at Cornell. He did it in a kitchen, with the knowledge of his palate and training as a chef

You could say, quite justifiably, that the design of delicious food was once an art, and had a kind of heroic human element to it that the design of spray cheese, Dr Pepper and Hot Pockets lacks.

The industry euphemism for this new devilish design is “hyperpalatability.” Huge food makers pay big money to armies of scientists who experiment on their products, twiddling knobs and altering sensations like sweetness, saltiness, crunch and chew until consumers reach the so-called “bliss point,” a crescendo of pleasure that makes them eat more, faster. A famous study by Hall et al. showed we eat processed foods 30% quicker than normal foods. The body’s normal mechanisms to signal hunter and fullness, reliant mostly on the release of hormonal signals, don’t have a chance.

Once you pop, you just can’t stop. Really.

That means when we eat ultraprocessed foods, we overeat. And when we eat ultraprocessed foods most or all of the time, we overeat most or all of the time. Which is not good.

The dramatic effects of consuming this food were illustrated in a documentary that aired during the pandemic, in the UK. In “What Are We Feeding Our Kids?”, Dr Chris Van Tulleken spent a month eating a diet of about 80% ultraprocessed food. This is the diet of at least a fifth of the adult population of the UK. Children aged between two and five in the UK not get two-thirds of their daily calories from ultraprocessed food, and children of the same age in the US and Australia aren’t far behind them.

At the start of the experiment, Van Tulleken was by all metrics a normal chap, probably a bit on the skinny-fat side, but still not someone you’d consider unhealthy or chronically ill by modern standards. That changed dramatically by the end of the experiment. After just four weeks, he had gained a significant amount of weight. He suffered constipation and hemorrhoids. He couldn’t sleep, either, and began raiding the fridge in the middle of the night, despite by his own admission not being hungry. His libido disappeared. He developed anxiety and severe mood swings.

Even more shocking, though, were the changes that took place in his brain, as revealed by MRI scans. Areas of the brain associated with reward signals and automatic behavior were rewired in the manner typical of a drug addict. What’s more, they persisted long after the experiment ended and his diet returned to normal. Almost half a year later, when he was able to sit down without wincing because the hemorrhoids were gone, and the excess weight and anxiety had been shed, his brain was still sending him signals to go out and score some crack… I mean, ultraprocessed food. Sorry.

The rewiring, it seems, could be permanent.

There’s no doubt, in my mind, that the transformation of our diets over the last century, from locally produced whole foods to factory-made ultraprocessed food, has been a disaster for our health, and it’s getting worse. Secretary of Health and Human Service Robert F. Kennedy Jr. feels the same way too.

How did we arrive at this juncture?

A big part of answering that question involves looking at the food companies themselves: how they created these new products, and how they stimulated demand, since the products didn’t exist and therefore nobody wanted them not so long ago.

It’s becoming clearer now that a key time period in the transition was the 1980s, when ultraprocessed food as we would now recognize it began to be developed and sold in large quantities, thanks to aggressive marketing with a particular focus on children and parents who might otherwise be hesitant to feed it to them. A central role was played by tobacco corporations, which acquired food companies and then used decades of expertise in hooking consumers on cigarettes to create a whole new market of captive eaters.

The latest edition of the American Journal of Public Health focuses on ultraprocessed foods, and features an extremely illuminating article on the role of one tobacco company, Philip Morris, in marketing the Lunchables brand of kids’ food.

Philip Morris Companies, the conglomerate behind Marlboro, bought General Foods in 1985, when the Lunchables product was still in development. Two years later, it bought Kraft and merged Kraft with General Foods to create the second-largest food corporation in the world. Lunchables were brought to market in 1988, and the brand continued to be developed by Philip Morris until it sold Kraft in 2007.

During that 23-year period, there was essentially no division among Morris’s cigarette, food and alcohol divisions: The same know-how, the same techniques of development and marketing, were applied across all its products. The company called these shared techniques “technical synergies,” and the development of Lunchables was, in a real sense, a model case.

The documents weren’t intended to be seen by the general public. They aren’t flattering. They had to be extracted from Philip Morris through litigation; although the litigation was actually focused on its cigarette products. This shows how inseparable the development of all its products was.

Here’s some of what happened.

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As it’s Friday afternoon and I’ve just returned from one of my favorite dairy farms—Hurdlebrook, in Babcary, Somerset—bearing enough raw milk to sustain a warband of steppe nomads through many days if not weeks of pillage and conquest, I think it only correct and proper that I should write for you today about this true food of the gods. The white stuff. Milk, glorious milk. Or, rather, stuff that’s being called milk but isn’t anything of the sort.

The enterprise to replace natural foods like meat and milk with synthetic alternatives, whether by means of genetically modified micro-organisms or by endlessly replicating animal cells, continues at great pace and great cost.

We’re told it’s necessary to save the planet from climate change, since traditional agriculture is apparently so damaging, and we’re also told these new products will be identical to the ones they replace, not only in taste but also in nutritional content. They may even be better for us, experts say.

It’s a fool’s errand for a number of reasons. Theological—because we are trying to usurp the creative powers of the one true Creator himself, so in some cosmic sense of course we’re bound to fail. But also nutritional, that is biological, for the simple fact that we don’t actually know anywhere near enough to replicate natural foods, molecule for molecule.

This latter problem is the problem of “nutritional dark matter.” A scientist called Albert-László Barabási, of the Harvard Medical School, coined that term in a paper from 2020.

“Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components,” Barabási wrote—and yet there are thousands upon thousands of nutritional compounds in food, meaning we understand only a tiny minority of what makes up the stuff we shovel in our gobs on a daily basis.

Meat. Fruits and vegetables. Milk. Every and any food. Thousands upon thousands of compounds whose existence we are aware of, but about which we know nothing. Many, probably most, of these compounds don’t even have a name.

The analogy with so-called “dark matter”—the 85% of stuff in the universe we know is there but lack the ability to see, even with our most advanced gadgets and gizmos—is in no sense hyperbolic.

Throughout history, the only real test of nutritional dark matter has been whether people successfully eat a food—and have done for a long time. That’s how we know it’s safe and wholesome.

One example I like to trot out involves liver. Back in the 1950s, scientists did drowning tests with rats. You put a rat in a vessel of water it can’t get out of and time how long it takes to give up swimming and die. Unpleasant, I know. Anyway, in this case, the scientists gave some of the rats liver to eat before they lobbed them into water. And what happened? The rats that ate the liver swam far longer than the rats who ate the standard chow. The scientists tried to find the exact compound in the liver that turbocharged the rats, but all they could do was show it wasn’t a b-vitamin. Today, in 2026, we still haven’t found that compound. But we know it’s there.

That’s nutritional dark matter. In that case, good nutritional dark matter. But there’s bad too, or stuff that could be bad.

The potentially bad is shown in a new study of synthetic or “synbio” milk, which is made by a genetically modified fungus in a bioreactor. The process is referred to as “precision fermentation,” and it’s basically just like brewing beer. You take inputs—protein, carbs, fat, micronutrients—feed them to a microorganism in a big vat, the little creatures do their thing, and then you’re left with a final product—in this case, “milk.”

As I say, the makers of these products claim complete equivalence with the real thing. One brand of synbio milk, UnReal Milk, says their product replicates “the nutrition, taste, and texture of traditional dairy.”

Scientists beg to differ. A new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found 236 fungal proteins and 93 unidentified fungal metabolites in synbio milk. None of these compounds are found in cow’s milk and, what’s worse, not one of them has any human safety data. We simply don’t know what eating them will do to you, in the short or the long term.

The study also showed significant differences in the amino-acid profile and nutritional profile compared to cow’s milk.

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Every rose has its thorn. Just like every night has its dawn. Just like every cowboy sings a sad, sad song. Every rose has its thorn.

I wish I could lay personal claim to this profound wisdom, so poetically put, but of course I can’t. That honor must go to Bret Michaels, sweet swan of Butler, Pennsylvania and lead singer of eighties glam-metal band Poison.

I guess I must have first encountered “Every Rose” watching Beavis and Butthead at my friend Ethan’s house—or was it Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey? Whatever the case, the words have stayed with me ever since, guiding me on my way down life’s long and winding path.

Later, thanks again to Bret, I discovered “Talk Dirty To Me,” with its thrilling cerebral refrain, “Down the basement, lock the cellar door, and baby, talk dirty to me.” I must confess, however, I’m still not quite sure what an “Unskinny Bop” is. There’s time.

Anyway, I was disappointed to re-discover every rose does indeed have its thorn. Yesterday, Bret Michaels pulled out of the Freedom 250 Great American State Fair, making him the fifth artist to do so.

Michaels blamed “threats” and “safety concerns” for his decision.

“When this opportunity was originally presented to my team, it was described as a celebration of our country through music and a chance to honor our veterans, active military, first responders, teachers and hardworking Americans from all walks of life,” Michaels wrote on Instagram.

“As the son of a veteran, and coming from a family that has proudly served, that is something I have always been honored to support.

“As many of you know, I’ve spent my entire career bringing people together through music, positivity and good vibes. My shows have never been about politics. They’re about giving people a place to come together, have a great time and forget about life’s stresses for a few hours.

“Unfortunately, what was presented to us as a celebration of our country has evolved into something much more divisive than what I agreed to be a part of. Concerns have also been raised regarding the safety of my fans, band, crew, family and myself, including threats that are completely unfounded and unforgivable. Because of that, I have made the difficult decision to step away from this performance.”

Thankfully, there is still one man left standing from the original lineup for the Great American State Fair. And what a man he is. The man who invented hip-hop music and dancing, the original white boy with motion, the king of the wiggers—Vanilla Ice. My good friend Jack Posobiec tells me Mr Ice—real name Robert Van Winkle—will be joined onstage by Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan for a special rendition of “ICE ICE Baby,” which will culminate with a breakdance battle between the two men, adjudicated by Stephen Miller.

“It’s gonna be an epic party,” Winkle has said.

I can’t wait. Really.

Banish that image of Homan doing the Worm from your mind, because there’s a serious point to be made here. The Trump vibe shift is well and truly over. As a friend of mine put it to me, “If even that old dude from the Rock of Love won’t play a concert for fear of being associated with Trump, I think it’s finally over”—“it” of course being the idea that Trump is cool and it’s fine, at long last, to say so in public.

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Testosterone decline. I think you know by now that’s the subject of my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. And if you don’t—well, it is. In recent decades, there’s been a precipitous decline in testosterone levels—at least 1% year on year—across the Western world, with no signs of stopping, and this has clear social and political consequences, or so I argue.

Something I touch on in the book, albeit only very briefly, is the possibility of a much longer-term trend of testosterone decline in human history. How long?

How about 80,000 years?

Testosterone levels may have been declining since the distant Stone Age, and we know this not because we can test the circulating levels of androgens of primitive hunter-gatherers—there are no Paleolithic soft-tissue samples—but simply by looking at the structure of their faces. Scientists say craniofacial feminisation of male hunter-gatherers and early farmers is a clear index of declining testosterone, and they think it might have something to do with the growing importance of cooperation and social complexity in primitive life.

This is a possibility that was first put forward in 2014 in a paper published in the journal Current Anthropology. “Craniofacial Feminization, Social Tolerance, and the Origins of Behavioral Modernity,” by Robert L. Cieri at al. takes as its central problem the emergence of something called “behavioural modernity,” which is defined as a distinctive complex of behaviours associated with human life in its current form. These include rapid technological innovation, evidence of forward planning and the capacity for abstract and symbolic thought.

The central issue is that Homo sapiens existed for between 100,000 and 150,000 years before the first sustained evidence of behavioural modernity emerges.

So why did it emerge? And how?

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You are what you eat. That one’s simple enough. You are what what you eat eats. Try saying that in a hurry. But, again, simple enough. If you feed an animal a sub-optimal or even a maladaptive diet—let’s say you immobilise a cow and stuff it full-to-bursting with genetically modified corn and soy—the food that animal produces will not be as nutritious as if it had eaten the proper diet. You’re also what your parents eat. Allow me to explain.

This statement is true in the obvious sense that, if you’re a child and you live in a household where your parents cook badly or don’t cook at all, you’re going to suffer as much as they do, especially if all they stock the cupboards and fridge with is ultraprocessed food.

Lucky Charms, Cheetos, Hot Pockets, Pop Tarts, Hot Dogs, microwaveable burgers, soda etc.

And what’s worse, living in such a household will make more of a difference for you, since you’re a child, passing through crucial developmental stages that can’t be passed through again—and you won’t have a choice, either. It’s not like you can choose to spend your pocket money at the organic farmers’ market every Saturday instead.

The statement is true in another sense. What a mother eats during pregnancy can have profound effects on the development of her baby. This is intuitive knowledge—ancestral wisdom—possessed by many small-scale societies. The great dentist-cum-anthropologist Weston A. Price, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), discussed the lengths to which people in traditional societies would go to provide the most nutritious food during and also after pregnancy, when a mother was breastfeeding.

The Maori of New Zealand, for example, would travel great distances to acquire special kinds of shellfish, including enormous spider crabs, to feed pregnant women. Shellfish and crustaceans are among the most nutrient-dense foods known to man; although sadly the seas and oceans are now so polluted seafood is not something you should eat regularly.

Scientific research confirms the benefits of this natal and post-natal care. Studies show, for example, how drastically consumption of eggs during pregnancy can benefit the developing fetal brain and how the breastmilk of vegan mothers lacks crucial nutrients, like vitamin b12, which can lead to potentially life-threatening deficiencies in babies and infants.

But the statement is also true in yet another sense. What your parents eat before they conceive you can also have profound effects on your health. This is the science of epigenetics, and it’s revolutionising our understanding of inheritance.

Previously, it was the biologist’s dogma that inheritance took place only at the level of the gene. The information that gets passed on from parents to offspring is contained in their genes. The only way to alter inheritance is either to change the parentage—one or both—or to introduce mutations to the gene.

Different genes, different information, different inheritance.

Except it’s not that simple. We now know that environmental factors can change what’s known as the expression of the gene. Without getting into too much unnecessary detail, that just means there are different ways a gene can be activated—or indeed turned off.

A new study shows that fathers who are obese pass on severe metabolic dysfunction to their children not because of genes, but because of epigenetic changes to their sperm.

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Amidst the sound and the fury—the fire and the fury?—of the war with Iran, it’s been almost impossible to maintain a sane, levelheaded grasp of President Trump’s wins and losses.

Things have hardly been made better by the election challenge to Rep. Thomas Massie, whose ousting has led some to claim America is no longer an independent nation, but now exists solely as a far-flung satrap of Bibi Netanyahu’s Greater Israel. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Twitter has been unbearable in recent days, and that’s saying something. I’ve stuck to posting videos of cats doing the scuba dance and outrage-bait about the casting in the new Christopher Nolan Odyssey film. My cortisol remains unspiked.

My position, though, if it matters, is this: There is a third way. You can recognize Thomas Massie is probably an arsehole, that his “heroic” championing of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims is probably little more than a tactical move in a long-running vendetta with Donald Trump—I think Massie mentioned Epstein three times before 2025—and yet you can also say his ousting was a bad day for America. You can think Thomas Massie is not a great lawmaker, and that the influence of Israeli interest groups on the election, and on American politics more generally, is reason to be upset, which of course it is.

In short, you don’t have to be “for” or “against”: You can be both or neither—and don’t let anyone else bully you into believing otherwise. At this precise moment, when so much is it at stake, a little bit of subtlety, a little bit of calm and equanimity, can go a long way.

Case in point: On Friday, the Trump administration quietly stacked up another huge win on the immigration front. The US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) closed a loophole that’s been used for decades to legalize or provide effective amnesty to millions of temporary immigrants.

While so many “right-wingers” are frothing at the mouth about the Strait of Hormuz or speculating what percentage Jewish ancestry Dan Bilzerian has (EVERY SINGLE TIME!), leftists are crying and mewling about how “evil” this new immigration policy is and how it will cause “incalculable” damage to the millions of economic migrants currently in the US.

I think there’s a lesson there. Maybe sometimes your enemies have more interesting things to say than the kids you feel comfortable hanging around with, as amusing as it might be to hear them blowing raspberries, making their armpits fart and slapping their chops from side to side at high speed like a Basset hound.

The loophole is the little-known “Adjustment of Status” pathway that allows temporary migrants to remain in the US and “adjust” their visa to a green card, giving them permanent lawful residence.

Of course, the pathway was never actually intended to allow this. In the 1950s, Congress decided migrants could adjust their visas without leaving the US, but that this should only happen in exceptional circumstances, tantamount to a Special Act of Parliament. “An administrative grace” is the precise term, if I remember correctly.

“We’re returning to the original intent of the law to ensure aliens navigate our nation’s immigration system properly,” said Zach Kahler of USCIS.

“From now on, an alien who is in the US temporarily and wants a green card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances. This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes.”

The change will now make it harder for low-wage employers to dangle the prospect of legalisation in front of the foreign workers they import, and it will also reduce the power of activist judges and bureaucrats, because overseas embassies have much tighter rules for approving permanent visas and they generally can’t be overruled. Temporary migrants who overstay will automatically be barred from applying for a green card for ten years.

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I couldn’t really have come up with a better title for a hitpiece if I’d tried.

Back in 2022, Mother Jones wrote a takedown about my previous book The Eggs Benedict Option and called it “Blood, Soil and Grassfed Beef,” which I thought was pretty cool. Cool enough, indeed, that I ended up reclaiming the slogan and turning it into a t-shirt for sale on my website. I think it might still be up there, and if it isn’t, I’ll make sure to bring it back. Maybe we’ll do a new design.

The author of that piece—Eamonn Whalen?— said the book read as if “Tucker Carlson wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which I also liked.

I sometimes think it would be better if my detractors just ignored me and didn’t say a word, in rather the same way Donald Trump’s critics just make him look better, whatever they write about him—in whatever language they write about him.

“IST DONALD TRUMP EIN SEXMONSTER?” asked a German magazine, maybe Der Spiegel.

(I think I made that slogan into a t-shirt too…)

Now this latest piece about me, the cover story for the June 2026 issue of The Atlantic, is called, “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” I mean… yes. Not all the time; but certainly a bit quieter than the current norm. How about a 25% reduction in volume?

The author is Helen Lewis, whom you may remember from that really excruciating GQ interview with Jordan Peterson in 2018. Looking back, I think that was probably when the wheels started coming off the JBP bandwagon. He probably just had a bad day—perhaps he’d had a spoonful of cider vinegar?—but he came across as sullen, moody, entitled, like a spoiled teenager and not a leader of men. Lewis was undeniably combative, and she seemed to enjoy getting a rise out of the professor, or multiple rises out of him, but I’m not sure what he was expecting. He’d been into the lion’s den plenty of times before.

So I was quite surprised when I received a message from Helen on Substack asking if I’d speak to her for a piece she was putting together. I imagined it would be hostile to some degree—I mean, pretty much all mainstream coverage is—but she turned out to be extremely personable.

Actually, we got on really well. I liked her and she liked me. When we spoke by Zoom—I was in Washington promoting my new book—it was very clear she had read The Last Men and thought about it quite carefully. She had also done plenty of research into me, and had some incisive things to say about me, my work and the broader scene of which I’m a part. We spoke for well over an hour, me lying in bed in a rather nice new dressing gown I’d picked up in Austin a week earlier.

Basically, the premise of the piece is that there’s a rising movement called “masculinism” within MAGA that provides a kind of glue for a movement that still, a decade later, lacks a consistent unifying ideology.

Here’s what Lewis says:

“But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.

“The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. ‘People ask me what the New Right is furious about,’ the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. ‘And i think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.’”

And it is an “unlikely constellation” Lewis brings together in her essay. Doug Wilson, Nick Fuentes, Joel Webbon, Sneako, Andrew Tate, and even Helen Andrews, who has been a pretty powerful critic of the feminisation of the workplace and education—as well as me. Of those four, I’d probably say I have more in common with Helen Andrews than anyone else.

I’m not sure “masculinism” really is a unifying ideology for MAGA. As much as I’d like to deny it, I do share some concerns in common with Nick Fuentes and Joel Webbon. And men’s problems, especially men’s health problems but also the broader issue of feminisation, are now prominent and being taken seriously in a way they weren’t under President Biden. Or during the first Trump presidency, for that matter. But whether this is what holds together MAGA, now or in the future—don’t bet on it.

Anyway, I think I come off pretty well—better certainly than Wilson, Fuentes or Webbon—and I can overlook the one or two jibes, which include being called “essentially an influencer—albeit one who knows a lot of $10 words.”

More seriously, I think Lewis mischaracterises the argument of my book, to make it fit in with her general thesis about the “anti-elite” temper of MAGA masculinism. When we spoke, I thought her grasp of the argument was much better.

“He lays the blame at the feet of the elites,” Lewis writes.

“They are keeping you fat; they are unhappy with risk-taking and hierarchy; they are calling masculinity toxic.”

My argument is about liberalism as a political system. I don’t think anybody is in control of liberalism, in the same way I don’t think anybody has deliberately poisoned the food supply and the environment with estrogenic chemicals (and I actually say that in my chapter on the “gay frogs conspiracy theory”). I’m interested in the constraints of the system and the incentives it offers—and how people respond to them. If Kamala Harris or CNN’s Dana Bash or George Takei doesn’t take testosterone decline and traditional masculinity seriously, that’s not because it’s part of some elaborate plan for controlling the masses, even if testosterone decline, as I argue, helps uphold the liberal status quo.

I’ll be interested to see where this “masculinism” argument goes. I think it will stick around. In fact, I think it will be used to try to drive a wedge between Trump and his female voters, by presenting MAGA as a clear and present danger to their autonomy—and, increasingly, a movement led by weird misogynist dudes who probably have a terrifying internet history they’d rather keep under wraps. This isn’t new. It’s as old as Megyn Kelly asking then-candidate Donald Trump why he made so many disparaging remarks about women—to which he famously replied, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” Trump has deftly handled charges of misogyny and smartly avoided doing things like supporting a federal ban on abortion, making it hard to support the Handmaiden’s Tale fantasies many liberal women have about his presidency. The difference now, I think, is that MAGA is passing out of Donald Trump’s hands, and it’s not yet clear whose hands will receive it. Given the wrong successor, women could easily be driven away in large numbers.

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If you’re sensing a pattern here, look: I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. My next opinion piece will not be about any part of the male appendage: meat, veg—no. Neither. I promise.

Today I watched a short video of actor Javier Bardem at the Cannes Film Festival. He was being Javier Bardem, by which of course I mean a typical Hollywood liberal.

Bardem is known for his grandstanding, and like many other actors, directors and film people, he never lets a good opportunity and a captive audience go to waste. And the Cannes Film Festival, where everything is about films and the people who make them, is exactly that.

Just occasionally, something strange and magical happens when a film person extemporizes at Cannes. The funniest time I think was when Lars Von Trier, that naughty Danish director of films like Nymphomaniac and Antichrist, started waxing lyrical about his admiration for the Third Reich, and Kirsten Dunst had to sit next to him like a huge anthropomorphic citrus fruit, without laughing or screaming or showing any visible emotion at all. Excruciating. It was probably her best piece of acting to date, which isn’t really saying much, I know.

But that was an amusing outlier. Ninety-nine times it’s just tedious right-on moralizing about the world’s problems from people who are probably least well equipped—even less than politicians—to diagnose, let alone, treat them.

And that’s exactly what Javier Bardem gave us: 66 seconds of tedious right-on moralizing about “toxic masculinity” and its relation to—well, I think you can guess. (Hint: it’s between your legs, chaps.)

Bardem’s new film, The Beloved—original Spanish title: El Ser Querido—“centers on a legendary director (played by Bardem) who reconnects with his estranged daughter (Victoria Luengo) by offering her a role in his new project. This brings them closer but reopens old wounds, exploring themes of family dynamics, power imbalances, absent or damaging fathers, male aggression, and patriarchal structures,” or so Grok says anyway.

Looking very grave, Bardem tells us “toxic masculinity” comes from “the bad education we have received for many years,” and it’s particularly bad in Spain—where the film is set and where Bardem comes from—because of its “machista” (misogynist) culture and “an average two women killed monthly by their ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends.”

We must be “fucking nuts,” he says, to have “normalized” this.

And then, of course, he comes to President Trump—and the real “explanation” for “toxic masculinity.”

“And that problem also goes to Mr. Trump or Mr. Putin or Mr. Netanyahu, the big balls man. You know what I’m talking about: saying my cock is bigger than yours and I’m gonna bomb the shit out of you. It’s a fucking male toxic behavior that is creating thousands of dead people.”

Bardem is obviously a flaming retard, but the “small penis theory of history,” as I call it, is actually quite important. It’s symptomatic of our culture’s inability to understand men and their motivations, and of how men today are deprived of opportunities to give their masculine impulses a meaningful, satisfying outlet. The small penis theory of history is used to craft and market films like The Beloved, but the effects go much, much further than that.

It’s why we seem to be so obsessed with Hitler’s wiener, 80 years after he shot himself in the Führerbunker (or perhaps fled to Agartha). Just recently, we heard the news the Austrian Painter might have had a micropenis—genetic analysis suggests he had Kallman’s Syndrome—as if this somehow could explain why he invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland and half the rest of Europe.

In fact, pretty much any prominent male figure from history is likely to be accused of having a small penis or some form of sexual dysfunction, especially if they’re famous for conquest and world-domination.

Look at Ridley Scott’s awful Napoleon film, for example, where the World Spirit on Horseback’s entire career, all that agony and ecstasy, is reduced to a cod psychosexual drama over his serially unfaithful first wife, Josephine Beauharnais. “The world, for Josephine,” the film’s posters read.

The small penis theory of history is part of a broader complex of jibes and insinuations that strike at the heart of traditional masculinity today. Most powerful of all, by far, is the claim that male association, even friendship itself, always contains a hidden core of gayness.

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As one of the more prominent online health gurus—Tucker Carlson called me the “spiritual leader of the broscientists” in his documentary The End of Men—I get asked a lot about supplements and techniques to improve masculine vitality, usually meaning testosterone levels. Should I take zinc and vitamin D? Ashwagandha? What do you think of red-light panels? I should retain my semen too, right?

“Retaining your semen” might sound like a funny thing to do, but it’s actually becoming a pretty common practice, especially in the “redpill” community and on the more youthful end of the right-wing spectrum. “No Nut November”—a month of zero masturbation—and a broader vow of “nofap” are presented as ways for men to reclaim their self-control and their health, by breaking with harmful dependency on pornography and sublimating their sexual desire into an outlet that’s more productive than self-abuse.

There’s a long tradition of male sexual abstinence for spiritual, intellectual and physical purposes. Everybody from great religious leaders and philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, to nineteenth-century race scientists and sportsmen—boxers, football players, athletes—has sworn by the benefits of a man retaining his semen. Some even dignify or mystify it with names like “manly essence” or “vril,” and describe the heedless loss of semen as a form of self-enervation or deflation, like running down a battery or letting all the air out of a tire.

Science-wise, there isn’t actually a great deal of research into the benefits of abstaining from ejaculation as a man. There’s at least one study I know of that shows a significant testosterone boost from abstinence over a period of about a week, before returning to baseline levels. This suggests, at the very least, that ejaculating once every week or so may be optimal for male hormonal health.

But like I say, there isn’t a great deal of science to draw firm conclusions from.

My general point, in the absence of definitive scientific evidence is a more basic behavioral one. If you can’t stop touching your penis, you’ve got a problem—just like if you can’t stop drinking or compulsively doing anything else, for that matter. We live in a world of instant gratification, and all signs in our culture point in that direction— consume, consume, consume—so you’re not going to be dissuaded from spending all your time browsing the internet with your left hand unless you decide yourself that something’s wrong. Much larger exercises in self-control—building a great physique, creating the life you really want—can then follow from a simple willed act of refusal.

Or that’s the theory, anyway.

We had some news this week that should, on the face of it, concern any young man currently mulling over what to do with the contents of his balls.

According to a Swiss study from 2023, the hantavirus can remain present in a man’s semen for up to six years and could also be sexually transmitted.

The study looks at a 55-year-old man who went to South America and caught the virus. That’s where the unfortunate passengers of the MV Hondius cruise ship also appear to have picked it up—the so-called Andes strain, which can, unlike other strains, pass from human to human.

Although the virus disappeared from the man’s blood, urine and respiratory tract, genetic material remained present in the man’s semen for 71 months. That’s one month shy of six whole-ass years.

In short, it looks like the testes could act as a long-term reservoir for hantavirus and, just as importantly, that it could be transmitted sexually.

This phenomenon has been documented before, perhaps most notably for the Ebola and Zika viruses. The World Health Organization has linked outbreaks of Ebola to sexual intercourse, and male cases are told to have their semen tested every three months until they return two consecutive negative tests.

So what does this mean? Should every man zip up his sack tight—or empty its contents furiously into the nearest sink?

Actually, calm down: The study doesn’t really mean anything. First of all, there have barely been a dozen cases of hantavirus linked to the Hondius cruise from Hell, so there’s a vanishingly thin chance, fellas, you’re incubating the virus in your two veg as you read this.

Reporting on the study has also been disingenuous to say the least. Some media outlets—Britain’s Daily Telegraph among them—chose to report the virus had been found in sperm. Sperm and semen are not the same thing. Sperm are the swimmers; semen is the substance they swim in.

Remedial biology lesson over.

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“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand t…

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Councillor Gibbins pressed the button. The assembled crowd held its breath. For a few moments, the hulking machine—looking like some unholy bastard-child of a wood chipper, a cement mixer and a tractor—sat idle, unmoving. And then—

With a loud rattle and a series of clanks and a strange gurgling noise like water going down an enormous drain, the contraption sprang to life.

The machine began to move along the road, slowly filling in the deep holes with a thick dark steaming treacle-ish substance.

The smell was anything but sweet.

From within the great metal hull, a sound very much like the muffled agonizing screams of humans being contorted, compressed, heated, liquified and canalized could be heard.

Councillor Gibbins smiled at his handiwork.

“Promises kept,” he said, as the first flashbulbs went off.

On the pavement nearby, Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, was being questioned by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

“Mr Tice, many voters have serious concerns about Reform. On a number of occasions you’ve had problems with candidates who have expressed views that have been extremely offensive. Now, one of your councillors who’s been elected here, in Sunderland, is turning Ni—”

“No, Laura, I know what you’re going to say, and I’m simply not going to have it. We’ve heard all this smearing and sneering before. Let me tell you what people are really concerned about. I’m going to talk about the scourge of anti-semitism, which is the greatest threat facing us here, in particular in London, and elsewhere across the UK. That’s what people are really concerned about. We stood up strongly for the Jewish community. And as people say daft things, of course it’ll be looked at. But you know, let’s just remember we’ve got a party that has been successful; that is not the anti-semitic Green Party. That’s what people are most worried about.”

“But Mr Tice, look, I can see a pair of teeth sticking out of the tarmac—and look! there’s what appears to be a big toe or a thumb! There’s a pair of lips! Mr Tice! Your councillor is melting Nigerians before our very eyes and using them to fill holes in the road and all you—”

“No, I’m sorry, Laura, I just can’t accept that. I condemn anything that’s wrong and inappropriate. The key point here is that voters have heard all of this smearing and sneering against us and they’re sick of it. They want action. They want a party that can deliver. And that’s what Reform is doing here today. We’re doing what Labour and the Conservatives both refuse to do, which is sort out the terrible state of Britain’s roads. Now, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m off to County Durham. One of our other new councillors has just come up with a marvellous way to create totally renewable, eco-friendly fertiliser for our hardworking British farmers, and best of all it will help get net migration down…”

The biggest story of last week’s local council elections in the UK wasn’t the victory of Glenn Gibbins in Sunderland, a man who was discovered to have joked—on Facebook of all places—about melting Nigerian immigrants to fill potholes.

A bigger story: So far, Reform haven’t suspended or ejected Glenn Gibbins from the party, despite the screeching and gnashing of harridans like the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and the childless cat-ladies of X. Instead, Reform MP Robert Jenrick posted a video on X today in which he trumpeted Reform’s efforts—to fill potholes. The British public are tired of empty moralizing and vacuous grandstanding, and Westminster is, at last, waking up to that fact.

Like with Trump, the spell of “propriety” may finally be broken. That’s big news indeed.

But the biggest story is, of course the scale of Reform’s victory, which may or may not, in percentage terms, be quite as large as in the 2025 elections, but even so has taken place on a much wider scale, nationwide.

Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, said his party’s sweep—about 27% of the national vote—had brought a “truly historic shift in British politics.”

Wins came across the UK, including in places that were traditional Labour and Conservative strongholds: Reform stole from both left and right.

“We won the biggest national vote share for the second year running, gained more than 1,450 seats and took control of 14 councils,” Farage said.

“We won those seats right across the country, from Wakefield to Walsall, from Sunderland to Suffolk, and everywhere in between. And in Wales, we came from nowhere and finished a close second, winning 34 seats in the Senedd and ending 27 years of Labour rule.”

The Conservatives, by contrast, Reform’s main competitor right of the center, have been reduced to a “rump” in Farage’s words: a regional party that doesn’t even have a heartland, a place where its candidates are safe, anymore.

As The New York Times put it in an article on the “four key takeaways” from the elections, “Britain has entered an era of multiparty politics.” The century-long period when politics was dominated by Labour and the Conservatives is at an end, or looks to be. At long last.

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“When a federal judge shot down a Trump administration policy of holding immigrants without bond last December, it seemed like a serious blow to the US president’s mass deportation effort,” The Guardian told us about a week ago.

“Instead, a top justice department official insisted the ruling wasn’t binding, and the administration continued denying detainees around the country a chance for release.”

That case, The Guardian claims, illustrates a “broader pattern by the US government’s executive branch,” which is now openly defying orders from the lower courts.

The Trump administration, it seems, is learning. Instead of pretending things are a-okay and hunky-dory with the three branches of government—executive, legislative, judicial—each one balancing the other two to ensure the preservation of the Constitution and the American way of life, with no single branch getting too big for its boots and claiming powers that aren’t within its rightful domain, the Trump administration has dropped the pretense entirely.

The judiciary is staffed by activists who will do anything in their power to frustrate President Trump’s second-term agenda, especially his immigration policies—Constitution, law, will of the American people be damned. Let’s not pretend otherwise. If we do, nothing will get done.

We’ve all seen it. If an Obama-appointed judge doesn’t want Kilmar Abrego Rapisto to be sent back to Squatemala where he comes from, or to President Bukele’s jungle-prison hellhole CECOT for an unforgettable extended vacation—well, that’s that. He’s not going. It doesn’t matter if Mr Rapisto is known to have entered the US illegally multiple times. It doesn’t matter what crimes he committed—let’s say he was working with the cartels to bring more migrants into the country illegally, and molesting young female migrants when he got the chance (one of the perks of the job).

No, Mr Rapisto—and we’ll refer to him as “Baltimore Man” just to generate some extra sympathy he doesn’t deserve—Baltimore Man has to stay.

Oh yeah, and by the way, you can’t deport anyone else either, because this is actually a “nationwide injunction” that covers all other possible cases where you want to deport an illegal alien.

Sorry about that.

Honestly, watching this happen time and again over the last year from my little Hobbit-hole in the Westcountry, on the other side of the Pond, has been frustrating enough. I can only imagine how much worse that feeling must be for Donald Trump or just Average Joe MAGA, who cast his vote for Trump on the strength of a promise to deport 20 million illegals in the “largest mass deportation operation in US history.”

The Guardian, drawing on a review by the Associated Press, documents hundreds of refusals to follow court orders, many in individual immigration cases, but also in cases involving government layoffs, spending cuts and economic policy. AP estimates about one in every eight orders blocking the Trump administration from doing something is now just being ignored.

Seven hundred lawsuits and counting have been filed to bring the Trump administration to heel. No luck so far.

Of course, The Guardian and AP think this is a dangerous development for the American republic and obviously the fault of Donald Trump and no-one else.

“The federal government should be the institution most devoted to the rule of law in this country,” said a Georgetown law scholar who spoke to The Guardian.

“When it ceases to feel itself bound, respect for the law is likely to break down across the country.”

And I mean, they’re right: The American republic clearly is in grave peril, just not for the reasons The Guardian and AP and your average university legal eagle think. The separation of powers is a good thing, and in a properly functioning polity it keeps everything and everyone in check.

But America now has an “imperial judiciary,” to borrow a phrase from Amy Comey Barrett’s searing response to her colleague Justice Jumanji Brown Jackson, a woman whose knowledge of the Constitution, law and indeed basic logic could be tattooed on a gopher’s nutsack with a square inch of crinkly skin to spare.

The great early observer of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville believed American lawyers hid “at the bottom of their soul… a great repugnance to the actions of the multitude, and a secret contempt of the government of the people.” This, Tocqueville believed, was the closest America, as a democracy, could come to maintaining the old aristocratic principle that was fast-disappearing even in Europe.

Only the judges, said Tocqueville, could be expected to act in the interest of the common good, even when the common will wanted to do otherwise. The judges were the party of order, form, tradition, hierarchy, obedience to principle.

Tocqueville’s main worry was, as we well know, the tyranny of the majority—a phrase I believe he coined. He had no conception of the opposite: a tyranny of the robed minority, a judiciary whose “secret contempt of the government of the people” is no longer secret, but rather on full defiant display.

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The Great Reset. You don’t hear much about that these days.

(That’s a Paul Skallas joke, by the way. If you don’t know who Paul Skallas is—don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much.)

But it’s true. You really don’t hear much about the Great Reset these days. In fact, you don’t hear anything at all.

For the first two or three years of the pandemic—certainly until 2022—the words “Great Reset” and the execrable slogan “Build Back Better” were on the lips of every budding Swiss Palpatine; every politician, captain of industry and Hollywood Pharisee; every Scandianavian climate-freak and every New York Times-bestselling author in an ill-fitting suit.

Because of COVID-19, we were told, our lives were destined to change forever. The pre-pandemic world was gone. Vanished. Kaput. Never coming back.

The global crisis caused by the novel coronavirus was a perfect opportunity to “reset” the global economy and society on new terms, to create a fairer, more inclusive, more environmentally friendly and sustainable world. A world that would be equipped to meet the great challenges of the 21st century—climate change and a global population of 10 billion by 2050—in a way that benefits everyone. That was what the Great Reset was all about.

And then—nothing. Like it never happened. Sure, you’ll still see people post about the Great Reset on X or Facebook, maybe the occasional boomer or crunchy homesteader mom, but you won’t hear Leonardo Dicaprio, Greta Funbags or Prince—now King—Charles III talking about it. Not any more.

Events escaped the globalist class and shook their sense of certainty about the future. The Ukraine War, in particular. But there was also, I think, a desire to avoid negative publicity and all the various “conspiracy theories” that were circulating about the abolition of property and privacy and the great happiness that would reign in the year 2030 as a result.

I’m sure there are other reasons too. Mr Great Reset himself, Klaus Schwab, even got MeToo’d recently and had to resign from the World Economic Forum, which he founded way back in 1972. He now sells dodgy online courses like a manosphere grifter or a failed academic.

In 2022, I wrote a book called The Eggs Benedict Option about the plan for a global plant-based diet and how it would be a disaster for our health and our freedom. I chose the Great Reset as the framing for my book because, well, it seemed a pretty obvious thing to do. A central part of the Great Reset vision of the world is the more-or-less complete renunciation of animal foods, to be replaced by “healthier,” “more sustainable” diets built around plant proteins, insects and new high-tech products like “plant-based meat” and “lab-grown meat.” I compared this vision of the future to the first Agricultural Revolution, about ten thousand years ago, which I called the “first Great Reset:” a transformation of every aspect of Neolithic society that took place with the spread of fixed-field agriculture and the growth of the first cities and states.

The adoption of a global plant-based diet, I warned, would continue a trend that has been going on for a century now and made us unhealthier, unhappier and more dependent on government and the medical industry than ever before in human history. Corporations, in particular, would come to control every aspect of the food supply, from field to plate—or bioreactor to plate, as the case may be.

Looking back at that book now, and it was a pretty big success, I can’t help cringing a little because of my use of the Great Reset label. It really does feel anachronistic. Even at the time I tried to distance myself from the more outlandish theories about Klaus Schwab and his supposed plan for world domination, which some tried to link to his father’s Nazi past and his own role working on the Apartheid government’s nuclear-weapons program.

But the Great Reset, and the plan for a global plant-based diet, hasn’t really gone away.

We got a reminder of that over the last couple of days with the news that Amsterdam has now become the first capital city in the world to ban all public advertisements for meat, as well as fossil-fuel products like cars and flights.

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“On the rocky slopes of Gibraltar, a troop of Barbary macaques lingers near a popular tourist overlook. An adult female pauses mid-stride, crouches beside a patch of rust-red earth poking through the concrete road, and begins pinching off small fragments with surprising precision before popping them into her mouth. She chews, swallows, and moves on. It looks bizarre. But according to a new study, the dirt may help her body cope with the chocolate bars, ice cream cones, and potato chips that visitors keep slipping her despite rules against it.”

They call it “junk food” for good reason, but what if it really was, quite literally, junk—like, of less nutritional value than dirt? Well, that’s exactly what new research on the famous monkeys of Gibraltar suggests. Sort of.

Thanks to the island’s tourists, some of the monkeys now consume a significant amount of ultraprocessed food—biscuits, chocolate, bread, crisps, cheap ice cream—and they’ve also taken to eating pawfuls of calcium-rich red earth, known locally as terra rossa.

The two things seem to be closely related. While other monkey populations have been known to consume dirt, none does it quite like the macaques of this strategically vital rocky little British colony, perched between Europe and Africa.

Over a period of about two years, researchers spent hundreds of hours observing 230 monkeys. During that time, they counted 46 separate incidents of what appeared to be deliberate dirt-eating.

By examining the sites where the monkeys foraged the dirt, the researchers were able to establish the creatures had not been digging up insects, seeds or eggs: They wanted to eat the dirt. The researchers also studied video footage of the dirt-eating and noted a distinctive pattern of harvesting and eating that looked totally different from the monkeys’ normal “ground-feeding postures.” The monkeys ate smaller pieces of dirt and even larger fragments measuring centimeters across.

The vast majority of the dirt-eating took place among groups living on the central and upper portions of the great rock, where the terra rossa—and the tourists—are most heavily concentrated.

Tourist numbers drove the behaviour. When more tourists were around, in the summer months, the monkeys ate more human food, and they also ate more dirt.

On a number of occasions, researchers saw monkeys eat dirt directly after consuming human food.

Monkeys in the area called Middle Hill, by contrast, logged no human contact during the study, and not a single case of dirt-eating was recorded. Interestingly, other researchers who had studied the monkeys of Middle Hill many years earlier, when the monkeys there did come into regular contact with tourists and military personnel, said they remembered incidents of dirt-eating.

The researchers have two theories to explain the monkeys’ behavior. The first is that the monkeys were eating the clay as a kind of buffer or detoxicant. Ultraprocessed food couldn’t be more different from the monkeys’ natural diet—herbs, leaves, seeds and a small amount of insects—and the researchers believe this could irritate their digestive systems and cause harmful changes to the composition of their gut flora. Particular kinds of clay are known to absorb harmful substances in the gut, alter stomach acidity and promote the growth of beneficial bacteria.

The second explanation—the explanation I favour—is that consumption of human foods is causing malnutrition in the monkeys, deficiencies in key minerals and nutrients, which they attempt to remedy by eating the clay.

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I haven’t watched Louis Theroux’s documentary on the “manosphere” and I don’t intend to. I’m familiar enough with the man’s oeuvre and with the kind of tricks he employs in service of an ostensible neutrality that’s anything but neutral. In the case of this new documentary, it’s obvious he chose the dumbest and most retarded people to interview precisel…

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Must watch!