How quickly time passes.

I remember September 10th 2025 pretty much as if it were yesterday. I remember scrolling Twitter—it was the afternoon here, a Wednesday—and I remember seeing the first short frantic video from Utah Valley University. You could hear people screaming and they were running, but that was it. The caption said a gunman had opened fire at a Charlie Kirk event.

I remember sending my good friend Jack Posobiec—Charlie’s best friend—a message.

“Is Charlie okay? What happened!?”

“I’m trying to find out right now…”

I had known Charlie was back on the debate circuit for the first time since devoting all his considerable energies and talent to President Trump’s re-election campaign, but I hadn’t been following closely. And then there I was, glued to Twitter, like so many other people, waiting to find out if the unthinkable had really happened.

I remember the first video of the shot itself, a video taken from a distance. Then came the sickening close-up that left absolutely no doubt about the reality of what had happened. I knew Charlie was dead even if I didn’t want to think or say it.

As shocking as that second clip was—it still ranks as one of the worst things I’ve ever seen—I found it impossible to look away. I remember watching it multiple times with gritted teeth. It wasn’t from some morbid curiosity about what it’s like when a person dies, or just sheer disbelief. No: It was from a sense that I had to watch because these were the stakes, this was the world we now lived in and refusing to accept that—looking away—would be a dereliction of duty somehow.

Of course, thoughts like that only coalesce, take definite form, after the event, but I think that’s what it was. I knew something had changed in that instant when the bullet struck Charlie’s neck.

In the months, and now the year, that has passed, the shock of Charlie’s murder has scarcely diminished. Far worse, it’s been compounded by viciousness and stupidity made all the more vicious and stupid for being clothed in the garb of concern and a righteous desire to get to the truth. The killing should have been a moment for the right in America to come together, to put aside petty grievances, stop nitpicking and face the threat that stands, with loaded weapon, in front of it: the threat of the radical left. Charlie’s murder, like the multiple attempts on President Trump’s life, was a statement of intent that should have been impossible to ignore.

We are going to get what we want and we’ll kill you if we have to. You may be a husband. You may have kids. You may only be talking to students on a college campus and exercising your First Amendment rights—we’ll kill you anyway.

But ignore it, the American right did. Or too many of them. Instead of unity there was—well, I think we all know. I won’t rehearse the various theories here or dredge up the slander. That stuff deserves no more attention than it’s already received. It deserves no attention at all, and never did. The fact it’s received so much is a dismal testament to the twisted incentives of social media—our new “attention economy”—and self-destructive patterns of behaviour so many right-wingers seem to find impossible to shake off, like one of Pavlov’s wretched dogs, still kicking out long after the electric shock has been withdrawn.

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Events of the past month or so have been a startling reminder of the vacuity, but also the brooding malevolence, of feminism at its very worst. I’m talking, of course, about the Lindsay Clancy case, which I’ve written about multiple times.

Hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of American women gobbled up and regurgitated insane theories about a case in which the defendant had already admitted the crime of which she was accused—killing her three young children—and all that remained to be decided was whether she actually was a murderer or lacked the responsibility, on account of mental illness and overmedication, as the defence alleges.

On display in the feminine response, on TikTok, Instagram and X, was not just a terrifying sense of entitlement—There’s no way a woman could do what Lindsay Clancy has admitted to doing!—and an emotionality and absence of logic that would make even the most ardent male chauvinist eat his slippers. There was also an overwhelming, annihilating hatred of men. It’s a hatred that bears no relation whatsoever, as far as I can see, to the objective position of women in American society today.

This may be the great paradox of feminism: that as society becomes more equal, women become less not more contented. Rather than leaving women with a growing sense of satisfaction as all barriers to equality, real and imagined, are smashed into pieces and driven into the earth by stilletoed heels, emancipation only makes women more angry, more discontented. That anger and discontent takes on an increasingly diffuse character. It becomes an attitude, and not a very nice one.

Most “liberated” women don’t know what they’re so upset about, but they do know who and what is responsible. Men. The Patriarchy. And in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Patriarchy and all that diffuse hatred are congealed in the sad form of her husband, Patrick, the man who returned home from getting takeout food and medication to discover his wife lying paralyzed in the snow, her wrists cut, and his three beautiful children strangled to death in the basement.

He’s actually the one who killed the children, pushed his wife out of the window and convinced her she did it—because who else would? Isn’t it obvious?

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, recognized this paradox as perhaps a general feature of leftist psychology. The “oversocialized” leftist—the leftist who has absorbed society’s cherished values just a little too much—revolts even though society is firmly devoted to the causes he champions. Maybe Ted was right. But it’s women on both sides of the aisle who are batting for Lindsay.

Vacuous and malevolent—those were two words that entered my mind again today as I read a recent opinion piece in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “Ukraine’s fight against Putin shows what women are really capable of,” was the headline. The piece was by a woman called Zoe Strimpel, the author of the book, Good Slut: How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free. I’ll spare you the blurb.

Full disclosure: I actually knew Zoe Strimpel at Cambridge, way back in 2012, when she was reading for an MPhil in gender studies. I’ve not kept up with her career since, but let’s just say I wasn’t surprised to rediscover her, 14 years older, still defending the indefensible.

The war, Strimpel says, is bringing much-needed change to Ukraine. It’s altering “the perception of what women are capable of” and making Ukraine a more equal society, at long last.

“Critics have, predictably, lambasted me for my ‘Pollyanna-ish’ belief in female strength and progress, but the rapid evolution of women’s status in the war effort of President Zelensky’s forces is proving me right,” Strimpel says.

“Ukraine, still a macho society, is nonetheless becoming the most extraordinary example of women bucking all the stereotypes about being too cuddly and weak for war. Not that it matters, but these aren’t big butch broads; many are beautiful, slender women who could easily coast on their looks without bothering to do combat training and learn to operate drones.”

Women are occupying combat and other frontline roles in growing numbers—21% of officers are now women, up from 4% in 2023—and they’re also leading the fight to develop new tech and weapons to beat the Russians.

Strimpel reserves her most fulsome praise for a woman by the name of Iryna Terekh, who runs the weapons startup Fire Point, which has already developed Ukraine’s first home-grown cruise missile, the pink Flamingo. Terekh is an archetypal “good slut.” She’s a “stunning brunette with high cheekbones, luscious glossy lips and chic, understated garb,” but she’s also lethal. Literally. You get the feeling that’s how Strimpel would like to see herself: a sexy bitch, blowing dudes up from very far away while wearing a nice little cocktail dress. There’s less mud and blood like that.

But it’s not all Progress. The rest of the article focuses on the ongoing discrimination and “entrenched sexism” women face in Ukraine’s armed forces. One woman, Alya, a former dancer, was told she was just “a beautiful doll” and “she can’t be smart enough” to be a battlefield surgeon. Or what about Katya, who joined an army brigade, “but instead of fighting Russia, she was forced into her own little war with rank misogyny”?

There’s an air of unreality about the whole article. Is this actually real? Are we actually being told the great benefit of the Ukraine war is that it’s creating a new nation of feminist “good sluts” like Zoe Strimpel?

Yes, we are. The “feminist transformation of Ukraine,” forged in the crucible of war, is a good thing. But Strimpel goes even further. We must follow Ukraine’s example—or else. “Now the rest of the world has to catch up,” she boldly proclaims, “before the enemy is at our gates too.”

It’s tempting to dismiss the article as barenaked propaganda, especially after that final line. The British media, including The Daily Telegraph, has been among the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the war, presenting Putin’s ambitions as an existential threat to the whole of Europe—an egregious falsehood. Indeed, the British government has been singled out by the Russians for its unwavering support of Ukraine, which includes providing long-range missiles and drones that are now being used to strike targets deep inside Russia itself. Just a few days ago, the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, visited Kyiv and pledged his continuing support for the war. In response, a Kremlin spokesman accused Britain of “methodically and regularly [adding] fuel to the fire and methodically and regularly [hatching] schemes to prevent the slightest progress in the peaceful settlement process.”

In recent weeks, there’s been talk of “radical” mobilization changes in Ukraine as the country faces manpower shortages in key roles. Could women end up being drafted? It’s possible; although it would be controversial. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has already announced his plans to recruit an additional 300,000 soldiers after the state Duma elections next month. Many soldiers fighting on the Russian side are now coming from abroad: volunteers from Africa, and tens of thousands of North Koreans.

The opinion piece may just be a cynical attempt to grease the skids for bringing larger numbers of Ukrainian women into the war, to make it palatable for a wider European audience. That’s exactly what Katya, whom I mentioned earlier, wants to happen. She “finds Israel’s conscription of both sexes inspiring.”

“I would like to see the same in Ukraine,” she says, “because everyone needs to be protected. I think there should be mobilization of women, like there is with men. Everyone needs the same kind of training, women included.”

Propaganda or no, this is feminism all the same. Myopic, monomaniacal. Red in tooth and claw. An ideology that’s alive to the minute struggles and suffering of women, but completely dead to the brute struggles and suffering of anyone else, whether they be three murdered children, one of whom was a little girl, or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men.

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Nobody makes conservatives look worse than conservatives themselves. There, I said it.

It’s an unfortunate conclusion I’ve come to recently as I’ve ruminated, at length, on the conservative—and by that I mean “right wing” in general—propensity for self-sabotage and self-destruction. “Brooded” might be a better word, because it seriously pisses me off, since I’m the opposite of left wing and I want, desperately, to win and prevent the scum of the earth from engulfing what remains of my beautiful country and destroying everything and everyone I love.

But to my point: Look at William F. Buckley, the Grand Dame of 20th century conservatism. What made him such a tragic laughable figure wasn’t the prissy demeanor, the tightly buttoned suits, the club ties and the smarmed lacquered hair. It wasn’t the bizarre diction: that oh-so-affected manner that placed him on an island somewhere in the mid-Atlantic—not quite on the shores of Britain, and well east of the East Coast.

The Azores, maybe?

It was the very terms of the endeavor Buckley was engaged in, as he himself defined it. A definition that has, for reasons known only to conservatives, stood the test of absolutely embarrassing self-defeating retardation to plague us still to this very day.

The Conservative, Auntie Bill told us, “stands athwart history yelling ‘STOP!’”

Can you imagine anything more pathetic, more futile to do with your time than to stand athwart history yelling “STOP!”?

Never mind the caviling archaism of the adverb—a word that would have been better left in the senior common room of a minor Oxford college in the eighteenth century, where it belonged, along with the port and stale biscuits—just how does one stand athwart history yelling “STOP!”?

More importantly, what does it achieve?

The answer of the 20th century is absolutely unequivocal: nothing. Not a damn thing. Conservatives have conserved not one institution, value, ritual, custom, not even the local tea room or library. Instead, for a century or more conservatives have fought a lunging, flailing rearguard action, defending positions that scarcely a decade or two before had been at the cutting edge of the liberal agenda.

Homosexuality in Botswana? Decriminalized! BOOM! The libs are the real racists!

And so on, and so on.

If you want to know why I’ve been so exercised about the right and its uncanny knack for tying its own shoe laces together and falling flat on its stupid face, the answer is mainly events in my native Britain, where the right wing seems hell-bent on cannibalizing itself at the precise moment a genuine route to power lays open, at last. But I’ve been keeping my eye on the other side of the pond too, and signs aren’t great there either. (By the way, if you want to read some of my thoughts on why right-wingers behave like this, check out these essays (one and two) I wrote.)

American case in point: this new AI MAGAtard meme. Now, the MAGAtard isn’t a new creation. That one-toothed, deformed, inbred variation on the Wojak template has been around since at least 2018, according to Know Your Meme.

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Six years on, we still struggle to answer basic questions about the COVID-19 pandemic—questions like, was it a natural “spillover” from the Wuhan wet market, as the Chinese Communist Party maintains, or was it the product of lab research that somehow broke containment?

Both scenarios beg yet further questions, questions that center on the how.

Take the second scenario. How did laboratory samples of a rare bat coronavirus end up infecting people outside the laboratory where they were being worked on? What was the exact mode of transmission? When did it happen?

In recent weeks, in the ongoing quest for answers, our attention has been focused on Anthony Fauci, the man who coordinated the pandemic response in the US and who appears to have been responsible for funding and coordinating gain-of-function research into rare coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

At the end of July, Fauci made a remarkable appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He remained silent except to invoke the Fifth Amendment over 100 times. Material from Fauci’s work computer was also released by Senator Rand Paul, who chaired the Committee. It showed Fauci expressing early skepticism about the wet-market theory, contradicting his public statements and ultimate endorsement of that theory.

For his refusal to testify before the Committee, Fauci may now be referred to the Department of Justice, since his preemptive pardon from President Biden removed the possibility of self-incrimination the Fifth Amendment exists to safeguard against.

Overshadowed, understandably, by these dramatic events was an investigation from The New Atlantis into biosecurity failures that took place in Wuhan on the eve of the outbreak.

The investigation still isn’t enough to prove the virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, but it does provide valuable context that has been missed so far. It gives us some idea of the how. Dan Silver, who led the New Atlantis investigation, presented much of the evidence to the World Health Organization (WHO) when it made its own official investigation into the origins of the pandemic, in 2021. Although investigators from the WHO acknowledged Silver’s contribution, their official report made no mention of worrying lapses in safety protocols around the handling and disposal of potentially infectious biological waste in Wuhan, in the spring and summer of 2019, just months before COVID-19 was circulating among the general population, as we now know.

As early as May of that year, the system for disposing of hazardous biological waste in the city of Wuhan began to break down. At that time, only three companies in the whole of Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, were licensed to collect and dispose of the waste produced by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In a period of just over a week in mid-May 2019, two of those companies, including the Institute’s official contractor, suffered devastating fires at their premises, knocking them out of action.

This left the Institute reliant on a new contractor located nearly 200 miles from the city. Routines for waste disposal would have changed significantly, requiring “improvisation” from both parties.

“If that improvisation occurred without a corresponding reduction in research activity,” Silver writes, “the period represents an expanded window of risk in which the margin for error or mishap was thinner than usual.”

In short, hazardous waste was more likely to have been disposed of incorrectly, with all that potentially entails.

There’s more. While the local system for waste-disposal was coming under unusual strain, other publicly available documents show that the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had accumulated nearly two metric tons of hazardous waste over a period of 25 years, in contravention of strict regulations that prohibit waste from being kept for more than a year. A procurement document from June 2019 shows the Wuhan CDC acknowledged there were “hidden safety concerns” about this mountain of waste, but the nature of those concerns isn’t stated. The contract to dispose of the mess went to the only available company in the province—the one that was 200 miles from the city.

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If you’ve ever dated a Puerto Rican woman—and, for my sins, I have—you’ll know exactly what a shit test is.

The feminine shit test is a ruthlessly calculated exercise. A test or series of tests designed specifically to gauge exactly the kind of man you are, with a view, ultimately, to your reproductive fitness. Pass or fail.

Will he protect me?

Will he make a good father?

Is he a doormat who’ll put up with anything to keep me around and let me get my way even when I’m being pointlessly destructive and unpleasant; or will he put his foot down and assert his masculinity like a good naked ape by bonking me on the head with a large stick and carrying me back to his cave, so I can calm down?

Sometimes, these tests are innocuous—little things—that you think aren’t invested with any value at all, but other times it’s a Chernobyl-scale meltdown and you either come in and drop a concrete sarcophagus over the whole flaming mess to contain it, or you get a lethal dose of radiation and all your skin falls off a few days later.

Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but if you’ve faced a shit test, especially from a Puerto Rican woman, you’ll know what I mean. Things can get explosive.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a shit test. In fact, it was probably the largest shit test in all of human history. A global shit test. The ultimate shit test. The shit test to end all shit tests.

For going on four years, governments around the world and all their associated organs—Big Pharma, the media, NGOs, universities, big business—put their citizens through a series of tests that allowed them to discover, in fine detail, exactly how much overreach and arbitrary intrusion their citizens would tolerate.

Turns out, it was a lot. Probably more than governments and behavioural “experts” ever expected. It certainly surprised me, and I’m a lifelong misanthrope who regards the average person as little more sentient than a woodlouse (I think you call them “pill bugs” or “roly-polys” on the other side of the Pond).

Much of what went on was simply absurd—but that was the point. In the Middle Ages, there was this phrase, “Credo quia absurdum est”: “I believe [in God] because it is absurd.” The belief in absurdity is the ultimate test of faith, since there can be no grounding in rationality, no evidence of the eyes and ears and other senses to tell us our belief is justified. It’s weird and stupid and you’ve just got to get over it if you want to demonstrate your worthiness and join the club and maybe one day enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Tyranny is like that too. Making people stand six feet apart for no justified medical reason whatsoever or wear masks with holes in them that are much larger than the virus they’re supposed to contain, or getting people to report on each other for going out for one too many walks each day—all absurd, all without any basis whatsoever in a rational assessment of the situation or the risks involved. But people did it, and they did it enthusiastically and, for the most part, without question.

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For the ancient Greeks, it was the shapely buttocks of the famous statue of Aphrodite kallipygos—literally “Aphrodite of the beautiful arse.” The female ideal also included small, pert breasts; pale skin indicative of leisure indoors, away from the sun; and fair reddish or blonde hair. The male ideal, by contrast, was that of the athlete, the body shaped by training in the gymnasium and the wrestling school (palaestra) for competition and, ultimately, war. Defined but not excessive musculature; broad shoulders and narrow waist; tanned skin glistening with olive oil and exfoliated by the scraping of a bronze strigil. And we know the Greeks preferred dainty genitals too—at least in art—as a sign of masculine continence and self-control.

In our own time, one of the more enduring and coveted signs of health and beauty has been “six-pack abs”—visible, taut musculature of the core—and bulging biceps. But of course fashions change, and now we’re on our own callipygian bent, and it’s not just the women with their endless “booty workouts” and BBLs stuffed into tight Lululemon yoga pants like obscene Christmas hams. Just the other week I opened the lifestyle section of a newspaper magazine and was told powerful glutes are now the “must-have” physical status symbol for men too.

We seem to be going much further than the ancient Greeks and their love of the perfectly rounded posterior. If the latest news from the White House is anything to go by, we’re actually regressing to a much deeper, more primitive state, something like Freud’s anal stage writ large, when the child is fascinated and thrilled by what comes out of its body in solid form. According to The New York Times, some of the most powerful men in the world now want, more than anything else, a bum that doesn’t need to be wiped.

Apologies if you’re reading this over breakfast, lunch, dinner—brunch even or just a small snack. You might want to save the rest of this article for later.

This strange new fad is the work of one man, a 63-year-old doctor called Sean O’Mara. O’Mara has introduced a new diet he’s dubbed the “Living Diet” to the White House, and it’s being credited with miraculous results. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, claims the diet has reduced his visceral fat by 40%. President Trump is said to have complimented the Vice President on his new trim physique. And yes, looking at the Vice President, he does look like he’s in significantly better shape. Howard Lutnick and Sean Duffy are on the diet too.

The Living Diet involves eating only meat from grass-fed ruminants—cows, bison, elk, venison, sheep—and as many different kinds of fermented food as possible—raw milk, kimchi, blue cheese, kefir, kvass (fermented rye beer), live yoghurt, sauerkraut. The real aim of the diet is to populate the gut with a wide a variety of beneficial bacteria, which ramp up the body’s metabolism, burning more calories and helping the dieter lose weight effortlessly.

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Yesterday I read a new case report about a man in India who developed severe psychiatric delusions as a result of testosterone therapy.

Testosterone therapy is often prescribed to men whose testosterone levels are low. While some may have low testosterone for lifestyle reasons—obesity, poor diet, lack of sleep, exposure to harmful chemicals—others simply can’t produce enough of the hormone for natural reasons, like a congenital defect. In both cases, doses of the hormone can be administered, either by injection into the blood or by application of a gel that soaks into the skin.

The Indian man, aged 45, arrived in hospital after experiencing a wild change in his behavior. Over the course of just a few days, the man had “developed intense religious beliefs, became highly suspicious of his neighbors, and required very little sleep. He also reported hearing voices, including the voice of God and voices seeming to come from parts of his own body.”

The man had never experienced any mental illness, and there was no history of psychiatric disorders in his family.

A year earlier, he had been diagnosed with osteoporosis and low testosterone, so doctors put him on testosterone therapy. He received shots of the hormone once a month thereafter. His psychotic break coincided with his latest dose, so the doctors decided to stop the treatment. Testosterone, like all hormones, can have significant effects on psychology and behavior, especially if administered in doses that exceed the body’s natural production—this was already known.

Over a period of two months, his mood became stable again. Doctors decided to administer a lower dose of testosterone, and monitored him closely. The symptoms did not return.

Looking at him again in close detail, the doctors recognized the tell-tale signs of Klinefelter’s syndrome, a genetic abnormality that causes men to have an extra X chromosome, making them XXY instead of XY. Men with Klinefelter’s have smaller testes, less body and facial hair, wide hips and narrow shoulders, tall stature and brittle bones.

So why am I telling you this? Two reasons: to demonstrate 1) that hormones and drugs can induce radical effects on human psychology and physiology, and they can do so rapidly (on this, read my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity); and 2) that our understanding of the side effects of medical treatments is often limited, and in the final instance can only be fully informed by considering the patient’s individual history and biology, including their genetic profile.

This matters right now, of course, because of events playing out in a Massachusetts courthouse, where Lindsay Clancy is on trial for the murder of her three young children. Clancy has admitted the killings, but claims diminished responsibility on the grounds of severe postpartum depression, auditory command hallucinations—voices telling her to kill—and overmedication with more than a dozen prescription drugs.

This will be my third piece of detailed analysis on the case in a week—given the gravity and complexity of the case, I feel justified in returning to it more than once—but this time I want to consider a different aspect.

In the other pieces, I’ve skirted around the issue of Lindsay Clancy’s responsibility for the heinous crime and focused instead on the insane reaction from the public, especially women, which has revealed something of the depth of entitlement, the persecution fantasies and sheer hatred of men that thousands, maybe even millions, of American women nurse within their breasts today.

It’s a scary prospect, bordering on a mass psychosis, and I think we have to ask serious questions about the role of women in American society and their suitability for exercising judgment in any kind of public capacity at all.

Should these women serve on juries?

Should they vote?

Should they be allowed to decide anything more complicated than what they want for breakfast—toast or oatmeal, eggs and bacon, a glass of orange juice?

A Pop Tart?

Yeah, I’m being kinda glib right now, I know, but tell me you’d want one, some or all of these women deciding your fate, because I know I sure as hell wouldn’t. Just throw me straight to the wolves and let them eat my privy parts instead.

Anyway, I’m going to get much closer to the question of Lindsay Clancy’s responsibility this time, by focusing on the drugs she’d been taking prior to the killings.

Even if the jury decides that Lindsay Clancy murdered her children in cold blood, we cannot—we should not—dodge the fact we know far too little about many if not all the drugs Americans are increasingly reliant upon to live semi-normal lives today: anti-depressants, anti-anxiolytics, mood stabilizers, sleep aids.

In America, rates of polypharmacy—defined as taking five more medications at the same time from five or more different unique drug classes—now run at an average of about 34% of all adults. That means one third of all adults are on five or more medications at the same time from five or more different unique drug classes. For ages 45-64, the figure is 38%, and for ages 65 and above, it’s 50.9%.

Sertraline, lorazepam, hydroxyzine, buspirone, benadryl, trazodone, fluoxetine, zolpidem, mirtazapine, clonazepam, quietiapine, diazepam, lamotrigine, amitriptyline—over a four-month period, between September 2022 and January 2023, Lindsay Clancy was on at least 14 different medications, many in combination at the same time. It’s not clear exactly which combinations she was taking, when.

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Inside the Plymouth courtroom, there’s agreement: Lindsay Clancy killed her three children. What’s at issue isn’t the basic facts, what Clancy did and didn’t do. She’s freely admitted to killing Cora (5), Dawson (3) and Callan (8 months) Clancy.The M

Lindsay Clancy doesn’t dispute that on the evening of January 24th 2023, after she asked her husband, Patrick, to fetch takeout food and some medication from the local pharmacy, she strangled the children in the basement of the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, using a set of exercise bands, then attempted to commit suicide by slitting her wrists and jumping from a second-story window. When her husband returned, he found her outside, still alive, called 911 and then discovered the children downstairs.

The call is so harrowing the judge refused to release the audio to the general public.

What’s at issue, rather, is a second-order moral question: Was Lindsay Clancy responsible for the killings? Was it murder—deliberate, premeditated—as the prosecution alleges; or did Lindsay suffer from severe postpartum psychosis, auditory command hallucinations—voices in her head telling her to kill—and massive overmedication of prescription drugs, as the defence claims in mitigation?

There’s compelling evidence on both sides. This is a genuine moral conundrum, one that admits no easy answers. There’s clear evidence of malice aforethought. Before the killings, Clancy made repeated internet searches asking questions like “how to slit throat to die,” “Where is the carotid artery?” “How to turn airbags off on Kia Sorrento?” and “Can you treat a sociopath?” Other digital evidence, including Apple Watch and phone data, suggest she acted in a rational manner: She created an opportunity to have her husband out of the house so she could kill the children. But it’s also hard if not impossible to dispute that Clancy was of anything but sound mind in the months, weeks and days leading up to the tragedy. She also Googled “hallucinations,” “intrusive”—meaning “intrusive thoughts”—“psychosis,” and “postpartum depression,” and she tried to find out information about the various drugs she had been prescribed, which included anti-anxiety drugs, SSRI anti-depressants and a powerful antipsychotic called Seroquel with a worrying array of side effects. Clancy’s personal journals describe deepening anxiety, panic attacks, emotional numbness, murderous thoughts and suicidal ideation after starting Seroquel. She had repeatedly sought psychiatric help and even been hospitalised weeks before the killings. She and her husband—now ex-husband—have both filed malpractice and wrongful-death lawsuits against her medical providers, alleging she was improperly diagnosed and prescribed drugs that made her condition worse.

Here isn’t the place to go over all the evidence for Lindsay Clancy’s guilt, or to consider the complex issues involved in attributing blame, especially to those under the influence of powerful drugs and with a history of serious mental illness. I have my opinions, of course, about a woman who would strangle her own children to death and whether such a crime could ever be mitigated by circumstance. My interest here is in the public reaction to events, and what it says about the American public today, and American women in particular.

The trial has generated a media circus, and by that I mean a social-media circus. While the basic facts of the Clancy case are agreed by both prosecution and defence inside the courtroom, outside everything is up for grabs. Wild theories are circulating, calling the trial a sham and a coverup. Despite admitting her guilt, Lindsay Clancy did not in actual fact kill her children. She was framed. Her husband pushed her out of the window after strangling the children himself. He was the voice she heard in her head, telling her to kill, only he was whispering in her ear. He did it so he could start over with his new wife, a fertility doctor in New York. I know a narcissist when I see one.

These claims aren’t fringe claims. They’re each garnering tens and hundreds of thousands of views, likes and shares—millions, cumulatively. Patrick Clancy and his new wife have been attacked directly, with leaks of personal information and death threats. For the most part, though, the theories have simply done the rounds online, as such theories do, and they’ve created a thick fug of suspicion over a man who has never been suspected of wrongdoing, at least not from prosecutors anyway.

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Over Easter, Matt Ford suggested Donald Trump might one day soon be hunted down by the International Criminal Court and put on trial like a mass-murdering warlord from the Balkans or the Congo.

“There will be no post-presidential peace for Donald Trump,” Ford thundered in the pages of The New Republic, before providing a litany of high crimes and misdemeanours that would justify a meeting with fate at the Hague.

“The shuttering of the Kennedy Center may be the least of Trump’s second-term sins,” Ford opined.

“In the first year since returning to power, Trump and his subordinates have pushed the country toward fascism and oligarchy. He has turned Washington into an orgy of corruption and self-dealing beyond even the most cynical observer’s imagination. He has transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol into a lawless paramilitary force that has besieged American cities and killed at least five U.S. citizens and 22 foreign nationals. He has abused Americans and their immigrant neighbors alike simply because he can.”

Given everything that happened to Donald Trump during his first term and then the four long years of the Biden presidency, it should come as no shock that his enemies are already thinking of ways they can punish him, his family and his supporters as soon as they have the power to do so.

The plan for retribution—and there is a plan, rather than just a diffuse sense that Trump must be punished—is now taking shape under the rubric of “Project 2029.” The name is a knowing wink towards the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, which set the agenda for the second Trump administration in so many different ways. Although the main focus is on 2029—there’s still no clear frontrunner to lead the party at the moment, with recent polls suggesting Gavin Newsom might not be the favourite—a win at the midterms will allow the process of retribution to begin in earnest.

Back at Easter, there were some intimations of exactly what might happen if November goes the Democrats’ way, but now Reuters has added some real meat to the bone.

According to Reuters, “Senior Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and committee aides have discussed using hearings, subpoenas and document requests to obtain records from entities tied to Trump’s political and business orbit... It is a bet that investigating private companies and outside financial players will prove more fruitful than directly confronting a White House they expect to resist oversight.”

Impeachment, that bluntest of weapons, is out. Democrats have finally learned their lesson, it seems. They know impeachment is unlikely to succeed and that President Trump will be able to turn proceedings to his advantage, portraying himself as the victim of a merciless witch-hunt (imagine that!).

“No one wants a failed vote on day one,” a senior Democrat aide said.

“The focus is on building a body of evidence through investigations that can hold Trump accountable.”

A number of major companies have already been singled out. Among them are Apple, Alphabet, Blackstone, BlackRock and Palantir. No surprise, companies owned by Elon Musk—whose support was instrumental in returning Trump to the White House and who oversaw the Department of Government Efficiency—are also targets.

Reuters continues, “Democrats are expected to examine Department of Homeland Security contracts, financing for Trump’s planned White House ballroom, corporate donors and alleged pay-to-play arrangements, two sources said. They also plan a probe of Trump-linked financial vehicles including 1789 Capital—a venture capital firm where his son Donald Trump Jr. is a partner—and foreign sovereign wealth funds whose investments in Trump family-linked entities could raise questions about administration influence, the sources said.”

Party leaders have now begun sending out letters in advance of subpoenas after the midterms. These include requests for information from Paramount Skydance about its dealings with the Trump administration and the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery deal. They want information about Alphabet’s $24.5 million settlement with President Trump, and they also want answers from private prison operator GEO Group and security company Salus Worldwide Solutions about their contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Commodity traders have been asked about sales of Venezuelan oil since Nicolas Maduro was deposed in January.

At this stage, of course, the letters have no power, and the recipients are in no way compelled to respond. But they serve as signals of intent, warnings that the price of cooperation with the Trump administration could be about to increase steeply. As a strategy, it’s likely to have some effect, and given Trump’s current low favourability rating, largely thanks to the Iran war, the warning will be felt. The Democrats have reason to be confident.

Republicans will be campaigning on accountability too, albeit of a different sort. In the last couple of days, we’ve also learned the GOP will focus on the Democrat party’s violent lurch towards the left or “communism” as President Trump has described it, and on the inability or unwillingness of the party’s leaders to stop it.

According to Axios, via Republican sources, the party is going to tell America, “but they’re worse.”

“Yeah, you’ve got your gripes with us—maybe you’re still pissed about the price of gas, maybe you think things went too far in Minneapolis, maybe you’re just tired of Donald Trump—but trust us, they’re worse. Much worse.”

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“After years of enduring severe pain from a broken back, navigating the obstacles of the health insurance system and witnessing similar experiences of countless others, I learned that United Healthcare would be holding its annual investor conference in New York City on December 4, 2024; although the specific location was not publicly disclosed.”

The defendant spoke with little emotion as he read a prepared statement.

He described how he researched the conference online and discovered it would be attended by executives of the firm, its board and prominent investors.

He described how he emailed the firm, “posing as an investor at a firm managing over $50 billion in assets and requesting information about the conference. Unlike my previous interactions with insurers, I received an immediate response within an hour.”

“Before traveling to New York, I used a 3D printer to make part of a gun, and I equipped the gun with the silencer and magazine,” he continued.

“My travel to New York and email to United Healthcare was with the intent to shoot Brian Thompson.”

“On the morning of 4 December 2024, I shot Mr Thompson in Manhattan and he died. When I did so, I understood that my actions would place him in fear of death or serious bodily injury. I knew what I was doing was illegal.”

On Friday morning, as you may know, Luigi Mangione pled guilty in Manhattan federal courthouse to two stalking charges related to the murder of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of United Healthcare.

Interstate stalking resulting in death and stalking through the use of interstate facilities resulting in death—Mangione hadn’t made any kind of deal with the feds. Those were the only charges that remained after prosecutors lost their bid to hit him with a murder charge and the death penalty, which would have been richly deserved. A weapons charge was tossed by the judge too. That left two lesser charges of stalking.

The good news: Mangione still faces a second-degree murder charge in the pending state case; no death penalty, though.

But that trial, and a “marquee conviction” for local DA Alvin Bragg, may also be at serious risk.

Says The New York Post, “Just hours after the healthcare-hating pretty boy copped to charges in Manhattan federal court, which could land him life behind bars, his bulldog legal team filed papers asking to have his separate state murder case tossed out over double jeopardy.”

Mangione’s lawyers entered a motion to dismiss the state charges against him, claiming he was a “pawn” for federal and state prosecutors who have “have sensationalized this case and misapplied statutes in an effort to overcharge him.”

“By explicitly coordinating and planning the order of prosecutions against Mr. Mangione so as to maximize his punishment and increase each government’s chances to convict him, the facts here do not allow the District Attorney’s Office to continue to prosecute Mr. Mangione under the Fifth Amendment.”

Double jeopardy laws stop a person from being prosecuted more than once for the same crime. New York has a specific statute that prevents “a second or subsequent prosecution in New York State Court arising from the same transaction or occurrence as a previous case.”

Could this plan work?

I’m no legal expert, but two lawyers who spoke to The Post think so. They reckon the words of the New York double-jeopardy statute can be twisted in such a way prosecutors will have a very difficult time pursuing the case. Bragg’s office will be forced to “argue that the [stalking and murder] statutes are designed to protect against different evils, [that] there’s different facts that weren’t covered in the federal plea and charges.”

Who’s to blame for this unfortunate situation? Someone must be. The Post’s legal eagles both lay the blame squarely at the feet of the feds, who “sabotaged and torpedoed” the state case by pursuing their own after the judge had “gutted” the charges against Mangione.

“They should have dismissed the case and let the state [case] proceed,” one of the lawyers said.

On X, people are suggesting the feds might even have done this on purpose, since Bragg is a Soros DA and the man who got Donald Trump convicted of 34 felonies in his “hush money” case. But what’s that rule of thumb—never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity? Godwin’s Law? No, that’s the one about Hitler…

The great risk, of course, is that if he manages to dodge a murder charge altogether, Mangione’s star will only rise further. Mangione will farm even more aura and become even more of a hero to the worryingly large number of people who believe he is exactly that—a hero.

On Wednesday, two days before Mangione entered his plea, voice-of-a-generation Hasan Piker appeared on the New York Times podcast and yet again sought to justify the killer’s actions.

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This is a direct follow-on from my piece about Rod Dreher, which began a series of exploratory essays about the conservative character. I’m trying to understand some of the more destructive quirks of conservatives and the movements they find themselves a part of, not because I want to poke fun at them, but because right-wingers need to do something about them if they actually want to win.

In four separate experiments, researchers from the University of Queensland, Australia showed nearly 5,000 adults in the US and UK a series of hypothetical scenarios designed to gauge their empathy for political allies and enemies.

The researchers were shocked to discover that conservatives, not liberals, turned out to be the nice guys.

“Conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives,” the researchers noted.

“This pattern—neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical in the expected direction—remains surprising.”

Surprising, maybe, but the results were unequivocal: Liberals made harsher moral judgments about “outgroup members” and also saw conservatives as “more harmful than conservatives saw liberals.”

In fact, I don’t think these results are surprising at all. They’re only surprising if you are yourself a liberal, and a naïve one at that, meaning you take yourself and other liberals at their own self-estimation: as the nicest, most moral people of all, the historical agents of equality, human rights, emancipation and Progress, who would never do anything nasty or low or that wasn’t in the interest of the Greater Good and all that. But if you actually look at the way conservatives behave—and again, as I did last time, I’m using “conservatives” as a broad term to include right-wingers more generally—you’ll see that conservatives are almost always, without exception, the ones who defer to morality and principle, expecting their opponents to do the same. Of course, their opponents do no such thing.

Conservatives almost always, fail, to pull the trigger on their enemies—metaphorically and literally. Leftists have no such qualms. Just ask Tyler Robinson.

But it’s even worse than that, I think. Because not only do conservatives fail to pull the trigger, they fail to identify their enemies in the first place. Rather than keeping their friends close and their enemies closer, so they can watch the latter and dispatch them when the time is ripe, conservatives mistake enemies for friends and completely let their guard down, inviting a knife through the ribs. Or they believe, no less disastrously, that every enemy is really a friend-in-the-making, and if they could only sit down and have an open and honest “dialogue,” all differences would disappear and everything would be hunky-dory. Fat chance.

Wasn’t that the signal failure of the first Trump presidency? That the outsider president simply didn’t recognise who within his administration was actually working against him and against the goals of America First—Pence, Pompeo, Barr, Bolton, Kushner, Fauci...—before it was too late? By the time Trump figured out what was really going on, his first term was over and he was being labelled a “threat to democracy” by some of the very people he had appointed. Mercifully, the notoriously stubborn Trump does appear to have learned a lesson or two from the 2017-2021; pre-election talk of a “retribution presidency” was not entirely misplaced.

Overall, then, you could say conservatives have a problem with the “friend-enemy distinction.” I’ve said this before, multiple times in fact, but I increasingly think an unsophisticated reliance on this concept, originally derived from German jurist Carl Schmitt, is a problem in its own right, and perhaps yet another example of how so many conservatives are raped—which is to say, programmed to repeat the same traumatic mistakes over and over and over again.

The “friend-enemy distinction” comes from Schmitt’s 1932 book The Concept of the Political (Der Begriff des Politischen). The bit that always gets quoted is this single sentence, as if it can stand totally alone, without any further contextualisation or interpretation.

“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”

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The second Trump administration is the first pro-androgen administration in American history, and probably the world.

Granted, there have been some pretty masculine societies in the past—ancient Sparta, anyone? The Vikings?—but there isn’t a single government that has concerned itself with androgens (male hormones), and testosterone in particular, the way Trump has since returning to power last year.

For most of history, it wouldn’t have been possible for a ruler or government to do this, at least not directly. Yes, rulers and governments could do all sorts of things to enhance the vigour and vitality of their male subjects, but they couldn’t get at the biological substrate responsible for making them men: for sexual differentiation in the womb, then through childhood and puberty; for muscle mass, libido, motivation, striving, courage and aggression, for patriotism and the ability to function as part of a hierarchy. Testosterone wasn’t properly discovered until the early 1930s, when it was isolated from vast quantities of male urine; although nearly a hundred years earlier, experiments involving transplanted rooster testicles had identified a mysterious substance that was responsible for male characteristics and behaviour.

But now governments can get straight to the source—and not a moment too soon. The simple fact is, testosterone levels are declining and have been for some time, and if we’re not worried about that, we should be. All the best research, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, points to a decline of about 1% year on year, taking place over decades, across the Western world. This is part and parcel of a broader decline in male reproductive parameters, including sperm quality and sperm counts. According to Professor Shanna Swan, a reproductive-health expert at Mount Sinai University, New York, on current trends the median man will have a sperm count of zero by the middle of this century. That means in less than a generation one half of all men will produce no sperm, and the other half will produce so few—well, what’s the point? They won’t be able to get a woman pregnant with such a jejune cocktail.

There are many likely causes for the decline in testosterone and male reproductive health: obesity, sedentary lifestyles, chronic stress, lack of sleep, exposure to a class of chemicals called endocrine-disruptors, which interfere with the body’s natural balance of hormones. By a kink of industrial chemistry, it turns out pretty much all the new chemicals we’ve created over the last century or so mimic the female hormone estrogen in one way or another. Estrogen-mimicking chemicals are everywhere: they’re in the food, the water, the air; they’re in the coating of your non-stick frying pan, your deodorant, the receipt in your pocket and the polyester underpants you’re wearing. We can’t avoid them. We can only mitigate our exposure, and we should.

Over the last month, we’ve seen two headline-grabbing policies from the Trump administration regarding testosterone.

The first, announced by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., aims to widen access to testosterone-replacement therapy (TRT), so more men with low testosterone will be able to get it. This involves removing a use-limitation on the therapy—a statement that the safety and efficacy of TRT had not been established—and also updating warnings associating testosterone with prostate cancer.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the second policy a few weeks ago, as a way to ensure America’s soldiers, sailors and airmen “operate at their absolute best.” There will now be mandatory annual screenings for testosterone deficiency for all service members over the age of 30, which is when scientists generally reckon testosterone begins a natural decline. Those with low testosterone will be offered the choice of TRT. Hegseth said the new programme is “not about artificial enhancement,” but “restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”

The irony of this policy is that it’s the inverse of the Department of War’s new transgender rules, expanding access to testosterone for health-optimisation at the same time as it’s withdrawn for the purposes of gender-transition. Critics have noticed this, of course.

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Many a true word was spoken in jest. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Real chestnut.

Anyway, that’s exactly what I thought when I saw the latest clip of pudgy leftist idol Hasan Piker doing the rounds yesterday.

I’m not sure exactly when the clip is from or the wider context, but what’s clear enough is that he’s “joking” about exterminating white people—and having some fun raping white women and girls on the way to that end.

Grok tells me, from the doughiness of his ever-so-punchable face and the retarded man-child outfit he’s wearing, that the clip is probably from somewhere around 2018-2020.

Piker first began streaming in the spring of 2018, while he was still working at the Young Turks, a gig kindly given to him by his uncle, bestiality advocate Cenk Uyghur. Before that Piker had failed miserably as a “redpill” guru dispensing crass dating advice to spoiled chonky dorks just like himself.

Here’s what he said in the clip, in full.

“We’re gonna bring in immigrants to this country just so they can fuck your sister and then maybe your daughter… We’re gonna destroy the white race, bitch.”

Charming.

“Joke” or not, this is what leftists today actually want to do, even if they’re plausibly white-passing like Piker. Perhaps more so, in fact, if they’re plausibly white-passing like Piker. They want to cleanse the entire planet of the stain of “whiteness,” which is seen as something like a new kind of Original Sin, and they think no means should be off the table: murder, rape, nuclear weapons, biological warfare (mass immigration). If that makes it sound like some kind of apocalyptic religion, well it is. And given the chance, its devotees wouldn’t think twice. Their numbers are growing every day in the US, and around the world.

I said as much on X yesterday, quoting the clip, and others, like Congressman Brandon Gill, said the same thing too. Gill has been consistently great at denouncing this kind of disgusting murderous crap.

We can debate whether the leftist project has, from the very beginning, been an anti-white one—I’d say yes, and point to, for example, Lenin’s plan to “set the East ablaze” and destroy Europe with Asia and its sheer weight of numbers—but really that’s an academic debate at this point, to be had at some other time, when these people aren’t breathing right down our necks. If anti-whiteness has for decades been the unofficial ideology of American government, with institutions like the Community Relations Service and policies like Affirmative Action, it’s now fast-becoming the official ideology of the Democrat party. The Democrats, if you hadn’t noticed, have taken quite the lurch left since the disaster that was the 2024 election.

Aside from Piker himself, endlessly touted as the voice of a new, more radical generation, the most prominent example is, of course, New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is a Third World race communist through and through, even if he’s trying to appear at least a little more reasonable from the comfort of Gracie Mansion. Just a quick search will yield videos of him talking about “seizing the means of production” and taxing white neighborhoods more heavily than non-white neighborhoods. You can also find embarrassing college-era scribblings about how bad it made him feel to be rejected by all the attractive blonde girls. There’s nothing like sexual resentment to generate murderous hatred of white people—don’t underestimate that. Then there’s his dad, Mahmood Mamdani, an academic who blames all the world’s ills on the White Man, including the Rwandan Genocide, in shitty books with shitty titles like, When Victims Become Killers.

Piker and Mamdani are both affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, a radical group that’s leading the “hostile takeover” of the Democrat Party, as some are calling it.

DSA candidates are now routinely trouncing establishment picks in key contests. Mamdani endorsed three such candidates in a recent series of Congressional primaries in New York. All three won. Here’s a description from The Spectator of one of them, Darializa Avila Chevalier

But the eyepopper is the victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old DA member and PhD graduate student, in East Harlem and the Bronx. She defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and will easily become the most radical House member since Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party represented the same area in the 1940s.

The night before his election in November, Zohran Mamdani filmed a video honoring his “radical” hero, Marcantonio.

Chevalier’s views would send even Marcantonio into orbit. DAC—as she will inevitably be dubbed—is so ideologically extreme that Jeff Maurer, a former writer for unrelentingly left-wing comic John Oliver’s HBO show, is gobsmacked by her. Maurer began his latest Substack post by announcing “My challenge is to find words to describe just how bonkers this Cirque du Soleil-level s-show truly is!”

DAC has called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders. As recently as last week, she refused to back down on those views when given an opportunity: “All deportations are wrong,” she says, even for those convicted of a crime.

She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the militant student group behind the violent 2024 occupation of Columbia after the Hamas attacks in Gaza the year before. CUAD is explicitly anti-Enlightenment: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one...”

Chevalier called the United States “a f—— disgrace,” and referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land. She’s written favorably about communism and seizing “all properties from landlords.”

She has criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel, and is known as a key leader in the “left of AOC” faction of Democratic Socialists of America.

DAC isn’t even the worst. There’s Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez, James Talarico, and Francesca Hong, a woman who should, by her own admission, be strapped to a bed in a lunatic asylum.

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I often get asked, “Charles, if you had to give people one piece of advice to transform their lives, what would you say?”

The obvious answer everyone expects, what with my being a “right-wing bodybuilder” and all, is “EXERCISE AND LIFT WEIGHTS!” And while I do think we ought at the very least to be moving a lot more than we do, and that men really should…

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“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.” (Industrial Society and Its Future)

The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski didn’t have much to say about conservatives, and what he did have to say wasn’t flattering—but it was totally right.

Kaczynski believed the conservative, unlike the leftist, was not a primary manifestation of the “craziness of our world”—i.e. the modern industrial society that must be destroyed for the good of humanity and world. As a result, he didn’t feel the need to examine the psychological basis of conservatism in any detail. Leftism, according to Kaczynski, is driven by two main character traits: “oversocialisation”—overidentification with social norms—and “feelings of inferiority,” which is pretty self-explanatory.

Even so, what Kaczynski does say about conservatives is penetrating and useful. That conservatism in the modern world is, in some fundamental sense, a loser doctrine built on a series of mismatches between conservatives’ professed aims—“conserving”—and the things they actually do and advocate for. Their staunch support for capitalism and the free market, in particular, the most transformative productive forces in the history of mankind, means the only things they end up conserving are… capitalism and the free market.

“Fools,” Kaczynski says. Or, to use a language I’m beginning to develop myself, raped.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the conservative character, mainly because I want to understand why conservatives behave in such a self-destructive, self-sabotaging manner and have done so for basically as far back in time as you care to look. We see this in the US right now and we also see it on this side of the Pond, in the UK. It’s unmistakeable. Power has been won or the road to power seems open—but then the raped retraumatise themselves, as raped people do, and the whole thing starts to fall apart. They can’t help themselves. They do everything they can to thwart themselves and to drag as many people down with them. They’re not content with suicide. It has to be a murder-suicide and—guess what?—you’re going with them.

A few notes before we continue. First, on terms. By “conservative,” I also mean “right wing” more generally.

Yes, the two labels aren’t co-extensive. More often than not there’s antagonism between conservatives and those who consider themselves right-wing and not primarily conservative. What usually happens is the conservatives “punch right,” sacrificing anybody to the right of them whose views they believe are discrediting in the eyes of their opponents; and in return the right-wingers engage in absurd purity-spiralling and accuse the conservatives of cucking, being bought and so on. But both groups are seen as a single team by their enemies, even if they don’t behave like one, and they do share plenty in common, not only in terms of beliefs and goals, but also psychological makeup.

Being on the outside, in opposition to the left, has shaped conservatives and right-wingers in the same important ways. Even when they’ve been in power, the general trend of democratic society has been leftward, frustrating their efforts and shaping their thought and behaviour in ways that reinforce and exacerbate the weakness of their position. They anticipate their efforts will fail, which tricks them pre-emptively into seeking out ways of failing for which they themselves are completely guilty. They fool themselves into thinking that they somehow “own” their own defeats just because they’ve chosen them of their own free will, and strangled their friends and allies with their own hands instead of waiting for their enemies to do it. Rather than victory, they choose failure and death: a “principled last stand”. From now on, unless I say otherwise, I’ll be referring to conservatives and right-wingers interchangeably.

Second note: I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the basic human instinct to conserve things, and it is a basic human instinct that you’ll find in every single human society that has ever existed. In fact, I think it’s good, and I can think of plenty of things that we should fight to conserve. But conservatism and the right wing are about much more than just expressing or satisfying this instinct. The instinct to conserve is not pathological, but “conservatism” as a political philosophy might be.

Third, I don’t think everything that’s wrong with conservatives is the result of some kind of archetype. Not everybody who is conservative or right-wing fits the type. Very many don’t—but very many do. That character, regardless of whether or not I describe it fully or correctly, isn’t an explanation for why conservatism exists either. Kaczynski didn’t believe “oversocialisation” or “feelings of inferiority” are the reason why leftism exists: He believed they explain why certain kinds of people are attracted to or become leftists, and why they persist in being leftists. That’s what I’m trying to do too, to explain that attraction and persistence, or at least to begin to. Personal history and inheritance, by which I mean genetics, are obviously important to a significant extent. Social psychological research suggests political attitudes might be as much as 40% heritable from our parents. This is a subject that can be attacked from multiple angles, and almost certainly has to be.

So, my basic position is this—and humour me, because I’m still ironing it out. Conservatism, as expressed through the conservative character, is a kind of trauma-response. By that I mean it’s something like a state of learned helplessness, whereby an animal or individual is conditioned to believe it has no agency, for example by being restrained. When the restraints are removed, the animal still believes it’s powerless. Or it might be the result of something like Pavlovian conditioning, wherein a repeated trauma, say an electric shock, gradually conditions an involuntary response in an animal, such as flinching, even when the shock ceases to be delivered. The expectation is enough to elicit the response. And in particular, the conservative character is a trauma-response to decade upon decade of social and political failure.

Without putting too fine a point on it, we should remind ourselves that conservatives have lost every single battle they have fought over the last century, on every single terrain. Any notable victories they’ve won—like Spain, for example—were short-lived and quickly overturned. At best, conservatism is simply a rearguard action that is doomed, in the end, to fail. “What have conservatives ever conserved?” is one quip, and of course it’s true. Try to think of something. Another quip: “In ten years’ time, conservatives will be defending what liberals are promoting today.” Is it unfair though? I don’t think so.

A rearguard action—which leads us nicely on to William F. Buckley. We have many things to thank William F. Buckley for, or so I’m told, but I’d like to thank him for providing the most obviously raped definition of conservatism that’s ever been given: “Standing athwart history yelling STOP!” The image of course suggests a man attempting to straddle a speeding train, but it could just as easily be a small woman screaming “STOP!” as a huge hairy man—perhaps a newly arrived doctor or engineer from Iraq—forces himself upon her and invades her body. No man can stop the progress of history, just as no women, really, can fight off the unwanted advances of a man who’s crossed the whole of Europe and the English Channel in a dinghy with one single purpose in mind.

Rape is, of course, an unpleasant thing, and I don’t mean to trivialise it by comparison. I wanted a harsh metaphor but one that also rings true and actually works as an analogy. I think this does.

I’ve been thinking this way for the better part of a year, but I only started committing my thoughts to screen last week because of Rod Dreher. I consider him to be an archetype of the raped conservative. He’s now calling his friend—now definitely former friend—JD Vance a “von Papen conservative,” because of his supposed embrace of “anti-semitism” and the groyper movement led by Nick Fuentes. Franz von Papen, if you didn’t know, is the German politician who entered a coalition with Hitler and the NSDAP, thinking he could control the soon-to-be dictator. This wasn’t the first time Rod had criticised Vance in a way that looked very much like a public betrayal, but it was certainly the worst—for now.

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I wrote this one for American Greatness, in the immediate aftermath of the murder of British politician Ann Widdecombe two weeks ago.

When I saw the first picture of Joshua Kerry, the man accused of murdering former British MP Anne Widdecombe, I knew without a moment’s hesitation.

“This man is a leftist. The worst kind.”

I said so on X, too.

I’ve got in tro…

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There are only two things that scare me, dear reader, and one of them is nuclear war.

The other? Carnies. Circus folk. Nomads, you know. Smell like cabbage. Small hands.

Truth be told, I’m actually not scared of nuclear war—I was born in 1987, barely two years before the Wall fell—and it’s a long time since I’ve been anywhere near a circus.

Here are some things that do scare me. I’m not one for enclosed spaces, and I have a recurring nightmare about being forced to watch people eat with their mouths open, smacking their lips and sending half-chewed fragments of food spinning through the air and into my face. I wake up in a cold sweat every time. Worst of all, though, by far, is the fear that I myself might never be able to eat meat again. I shudder just to think of it.

I first came across the terrifying prospect of a “meat allergy”—an allergic inability to consume red meat—when I was researching my 2022 book, The Eggs Benedict Option. The book was about the plan for a global plant-based diet, and naturally I discovered some rather daft suggestions about how we’d get there: how millions upon millions of meat-eaters would be persuaded to give up their beloved steak, pork chops and bacon for the good of the planet. Or not. After all, why go to all the effort of persuading people if you can just take the decision out of their hands entirely?

I found a video of a Princeton bioethicist called S. Matthew Liao speaking at some globalist shindig in 2016. He suggested we could all be given gene therapy to make us allergic to meat, just like a natural allergy transmitted by tick bites. Problem solved. Liao also suggested gene therapy might be used to shrink us by about 25%, to reduce our carbon footprint, quite literally.

The condition Liao referred to, I soon learned, is “alpha-gal syndrome,” named after a sugar molecule that’s found only in red meat—beef, pork, lamb. A bite from a lone-star tick introduces a compound into the blood that resembles alpha-gal enough to sensitize the immune system to it. The tick gets a tasty little feast of blood, and you end up being unable to eat meat ever again. When you eat meat, your body suffers an allergic reaction. It can be so severe you die.

In fact, in 2024 there was the first recorded case of a death from alpha-gal syndrome. A 47-year-old man from New Jersey collapsed and died within hours of eating a hamburger. After an autopsy proved inconclusive, his wife went to experts at the University of Virginia’s medical school, who tested blood samples. They found the victim had been sensitized to alpha-gal, and that he had died from an extreme allergic reaction. The wife then revealed her husband had suffered a dozen or so bites on his ankles from ticks that summer. Case closed.

There’s since been a second confirmed death, in Australia.

We’ve only known about alpha-gal syndrome since the early 2000s, thanks to the testing of a cancer-drug called cetuximab. Researchers were able to show a link with the lone-star tick, and also to identify cases that stretched back into the 1990s in the southeastern US, where the tick flourishes. They identified anecdotal reports dating back even earlier, to the 1980s, including in Australia.

The CDC estimates as many as 500,000 Americans could have alpha-gal syndrome. The vast majority, of course, won’t have a diagnosis. In truth, the number is likely to be much larger.

New research suggests as many as 1 in 4 adults in some states carry antibodies for alpha-gal.

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It’s become a commonplace of social-media health talk: “I went on holiday to Europe [from America] and all I did was eat croissants / gelato / pasta / bread etc. for a fortnight and still I lost 10 pounds! What’s wrong with the food in America!?”

There is something wrong with the food in America. The food is better in Europe. It’s not just that Europe has deeper food traditions and the use of fresh local ingredients still remains the norm, but also that food is regulated in a different way. Americans do things with food and to food that can’t be done in Europe. Take additives, for example. In the EU, there are around 2,000 additives licensed for use in food. In the US—nobody knows. The FDA’s “Generally Recognised As Safe” (“GRAS”) pathway has allowed food-makers to create new additives, declare that they’re safe and introduce them to the food supply without even telling the FDA. This has been happening since 1958. Insane—there’s no other word for it.

Even so, things aren’t perfect over here. Far from it. Just like in America, agriculture and the food system in Europe are subject to power, money and the influence of corporate interests. That influence is only growing. A recent exposé in The Guardian provided a valuable window onto exactly how these corporate groups get what they want, which in this case was blocking “some of the most sweeping farming reforms in EU history, including a plan to cut pesticide use in half.”

You’ve probably never heard of Copa Cogeca. I hadn’t, and I’m supposed to be a health expert (forgive me). According to The Guardian, “Copa Cogeca describes itself as the voice of 22 million farmers across the continent, and enjoys unrivalled access to EU lawmakers. It has even been described as a ‘partner in policymaking.’

Copa “swung into action…when the EU launched plans for radical farming reforms in 2020 in response to concerns about climate breakdown and the nature crisis.”

By February 2021, the group had “set out its lobbying strategy.”

“Dozens of documents recording internal Copa Cogeca meetings, obtained by Grilled—an investigative journalism project focused on food systems—and the Guardian give a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the lobbying firm.”

The exposé is something of a mixed bag. It shows the lobbying group fighting against what I would consider to be harmful climate-change-focused policies like cutting red-meat consumption—policies I want farmers to fight against, for their sake and for the sake of our health—while also attempting to stifle new regulations on pesticide use, which I’m very much in favour of. Lobbying like this is, at best, a mixed blessing, and at worst a nightmare.

Copa were particularly worried about the EU’s goal of cutting pesticide use by half, to protect biodiversity, especially bees and insects. The group’s main strategy was to delay.

“The European parliament elections are in 2024,” a note from September 2022 states.

“Perhaps it is worth delaying until then. We must force the [European] Commission to abandon its objectives.”

In order to bog the EU down, Copa demanded a fresh impact assessment for the policy, which took six months to complete. When the EU then released an official report on the policy, Copa described it as “offensive” and presented EU ambassadors with its own privately commissioned research into the economic impacts of the policy. The ambassadors “showed understanding,” the group recorded in a set of minutes.

The safety licence for the pesticide glyphosate was also due to elapse, and the group was worried it might not be renewed. Glyphosate is the most widely used pesticide in the US and has been linked to a range of harms from reproductive issues to cancer. Bayer, one of the main manufacturers of glyphosate-based herbicides, has already settled billions of dollars of claims for illness caused by its Roundup products, and faces thousands more claims and billions more dollars in payouts. Copa told its members to pressurise their local representatives to ensure the licence was renewed.

It was.

Eventually, the pesticide regulation was withdrawn altogether, a few months short of the 2024 elections. The EU is now also considering removing periodic safety reassessments for pesticides that are already licensed for use.

Thomas Waitz, a Green MEP from Austria who sits on the agriculture committee, told The Guardian, “Copa Cogeca focused on sabotaging, delaying and ultimately killing the sustainable use of pesticides regulation. They are acting in the interest of large agrichemical multinationals and against the wellbeing of small and medium farmers.”

Otherwise, the report shows Copa fighting against policies aimed at reducing red-meat consumption (good), and also pushing to redefine what a factory farm is (not good).

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An unjammable fibre-optic kamikaze drone—a drone you fly directly into a target to kill it—was recently discovered in a cartel compound, 500 miles from the US border. You probably won’t have heard about this, but it’s big news. Or it should be.

It’s yet another indication of how closely drug gangs are coming to resemble state or quasi-state actors, not just in the territories they control and administer, but in the threat they pose to real states, including the US. The classic definition of the state, derived from sociologist Max Weber, is an entity that monopolizes violence within a set of given borders. And while the cartels have been using military-grade equipment like .50 calibre machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades for some time, their determined attempts to acquire the latest drone capabilities reveal a greater ambition: to achieve technological and tactical parity with second- and maybe even first-tier nations.

The kamikaze drone in question was discovered by accident, when the Mexican military searched a property in Dolores del Rio. The authorities had been alerted to possible criminal activity at the address, and when they arrived, they discovered the usual paraphernalia—bombs, guns, ammunition—associated with cartel violence. But they also discovered a weapon that, until now, has been entirely confined to warzones and to one warzone in particular.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that South American drug cartels and paramilitaries have been paying close attention to Ukraine, where drones are revolutionising warfare in a way that even a hobbyist with a 3D printer and a chip on his shoulder can replicate. Cheap, mass-produceable weapons can be used to destroy tanks and other equipment worth tens of millions of dollars; to eliminate entire squads of soldiers single-handedly, on the battlefield or before they even arrive on it, as they sit huddled in the back of an armoured-personnel carrier; to assassinate important military and civilian leaders; or to strike deep behind enemy lines, crippling vital military, energy and communications infrastructure.

We see evidence of the brutal effectiveness of drones, often from their direct perspective (“FPV” or “first-person view”), in videos on social media, every day. As much as anything else, these videos serve as propaganda and statements of intent: to show Ukraine is still very much in the fight, and that nobody and nowhere is safe from a technology that continues to evolve at a frightening pace.

In the early stages of the war, which began in the spring of 2022, drones weren’t that important, but as the war has progressed—it’s now been going on for longer than World War I—the drone has become its signature weapon, and especially that of the battered but unbowed underdog.

Ukraine is producing millions of drones annually. The target for 2026 is between five and seven million. It’s estimated around 9,000 are deployed a day, for short-range missions over the battlefield zone, but also, increasingly, for long-range strikes far beyond Russia’s western borders. New one-way drones—drones that aren’t intended to return to sender—can travel up to 2,000 km, which puts targets in Siberia, including air bases that house Russia’s nuclear bombers, well within their range. In June of 2026, drones conducted close to 2,400 deep-strike missions in Russia.

President Zelensky’s latest “influence operation” to bring Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table within 40 days is built on targeted drone strikes against critical infrastructure that previously were off-limits, either for fear of escalation or because Ukraine lacked the ability to hit them.

The strategy appears to be working. There are fuel shortages in Russia and widespread popular anger as Russians discover that their strongman leader can no longer do what every strongman leader must: keep his own people safe.

In the crucible of war—perhaps the ultimate testing-ground and incubator of rapid innovation—the drone continues to adapt. Wireless technology, for example, has given way to wiring—miles and miles of fibre-optic cable in a spool on the back of the drone—so that it can’t be jammed by electronic countermeasures. The Ukrainians are also integrating AI targeting, allowing drones greater autonomy on the battlefield and deploying them in massed “swarms” that are almost impossible to eliminate before they hit their target.

The cartels haven’t just been watching from afar, mouths agape, like you or I. In July 2025, it was reported that cartel soldiers were being sent to Ukraine to join the “international brigades” of foreign volunteers specifically so they could learn the very latest techniques in drone-warfare. Ukraine may very well be the only country whose military offers a comprehensive training curriculum in every aspect of drone-warfare, from their and deployment, to piloting and “real-time battlefield coordination.”

Website Defense News reported, “The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) launched a joint investigation with military intelligence after Mexico’s National Intelligence Center warned in early summer that Mexican volunteers had joined Ukraine’s foreign fighter units specifically to acquire first-person view drone capabilities. The probe has since expanded to include Colombian nationals, raising concerns about Ukraine’s inadvertent role as a training ground for transnational criminal organizations…

“The investigation centers on several Spanish-speaking units within the International Legion, particularly the tactical group ‘Ethos,’ operating in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions. Ukrainian investigators reportedly suspect that some Mexican and Colombian volunteers intentionally sought placement in drone operator units to later use this training in the service of foreign criminal organizations.

“One noteworthy case is that of a Mexican national operating under the alias ‘Águila-7,’ who registered in March 2024 using fraudulent Salvadoran documentation. Posing as a humanitarian volunteer, he completed comprehensive drone training in Lviv while demonstrating exceptional technical expertise that eventually had instructors suspicious.”

Águila-7 demonstrated “extensive technical knowledge,” including familiarity with “electronic warfare countermeasures and thermal detection avoidance.” Background checks suggested he had been a member of Mexico’s GAFE special forces, many of whom end up working for the cartels, which offer much better pay and regular bloody work.

Members of Colombia’s FARC guerrillas were also discovered among the international brigades. They had apparently travelled to Ukraine with forged Panamanian and Venezuelan papers. Further investigation revealed a sophisticated pan-Latin-American operation, where private-security firms obtained fake papers and coordinated the “placement,” via front companies, of cartel and guerrilla operatives in Ukraine.

An SBU official is quoted as saying, “We welcome volunteers in good faith. But we must now recognize that Ukraine has become a platform for the global dissemination of FPV tactics. Some come here to learn how to kill with a $400 drone, then sell this knowledge elsewhere to the highest bidder.”

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I promised myself I would not write about The Odyssey.

“Charles,” that little voice in my head began to say, “there is absolutely nothing of value to be written about that cursed film, certainly not in an opinion piece. Enough ink has already been spilled, enough Tweets have already been Tweeted, including paid sponsorships dispensed from a hasbara fund so deep it would make even our man in Tel Aviv swoon from vertigo. Just leave it be.”

After a brief pause, the homunculus piloting my meat-suit continued: “Remember: You’ve posted the hilarious memes and called her Helen of Detroit—for which you received furious copyright strikes from the film studio—and you’ve also offered compelling analysis of why the film is not a ‘Trojan Horse” expertly crafted to smuggle an anti-woke message into the very heart of Hollywood’s wokest of wokes. People can figure out for themselves that a guy like Jonathan Pageau—the sort of theory-obsessed blowhard who can’t read a menu without pontificating about the symbolism of the entrees in Leviticus—is just talking out of his French-Canadian trou du cul. (Yes, you could make a Troy joke there, but don’t.)

“Leave it be. The idiots will see the film in IMAX and order the special Elliott Page popcorn bucket, then post their glowing reviews on Reddit for updoots. The sensible ones with an ounce of self-respect will stay at home and watch the superlative Armand Assante made-for-TV adaptation instead. Do something better with your time, Charles. You are better than that.”

And, you know what? The tiny dude what lives in my head was right. I am better than that. I’m not going to waste any time writing about the latest big-budget attempt to subvert Western civilization and justify infinity mass immigration. I’m going to write about something that really does matter. And what’s more, it’s going to be something that otherwise wouldn’t get the attention it deserves.

So here goes.

This week we were told the State Department is going to start charging green-card applicants a $100,000 bond for their applications. This is a good thing. Very smart. The Trump admin is doing lots of smart things at the moment—if we can agree to put Iran to one side, and I hope we will.

Spokesman Tommy Pigott said the Trump admin is considering the move to ensure immigrants are “financially self-sufficient” and “contribute to our society more than they take from it.”

“We are working closely with the Department of Homeland Security to introduce commonsense and effective procedures to enforce U.S. laws, restore the integrity of our immigration system, and protect American public benefits programs from the financial burden of foreigners who arrive with major expensive medical or other needs,” Pigott said in a statement to The Hill.

“As part of this comprehensive initiative, the Department is exploring the use of a long-standing legal authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to require certain visa applicants—those who are otherwise ineligible for a visa because they are likely become a public charge—to post a bond as a way to demonstrate they have access to the funds needed to support themselves,” he added.

The $100,000 fee for green-card applicants will be a steep increase on current charges. The money will be collected from individuals or family members in the US and then returned at a later date.

According to The Hill, “The traditional green-card application fee depends on the specific category and whether the applicant is applying from inside or outside the U.S.

“The standard filing fee for Form I-485 is $1,440 for those applying within the country, but those who need to apply for a work permit and travel documents incur additional fees unless filed concurrently under specific conditions.

“A $325 DS-260 visa application fee is traditionally paid by those applying from outside of the U.S. through the Department of State’s online Consular Electronic Application Center portal.

“The payment is followed by a $235 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services immigrant fee to process their packet and produce their card after the visa is approved.”

A similar bond system has been introduced for visa applicants from over 50 African countries, who now have to put up a minimum of $15,000 to come to the US. If they don’t leave, the money is forfeit. Needless to say, applications for visas from Malawi and Zambia and 48 other nowhere countries are down considerably.

This new green-card fee will have an even greater deterrent effect, and applications for permanent residency will tumble.

The Trump admin’s pivot to a quietly-quietly approach when it comes to immigration, of which these new visas rules are just the latest example, is already working nicely. Not long ago, I wrote about the closing of a major immigration loophole by the Citizenship and Immigration Service, a loophole that has been used to grant citizenship to millions of immigrants. The “Adjustment of Status” pathway allows permanent citizenship to be granted to immigrants without leaving the country to apply. Although this was authorized by Congress in the 1950s, it was intended only as an “administrative grace” in very special cases. Closing that loophole now means millions more immigrants could effectively be barred from obtaining permanent citizenship.

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