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 trouble before for suggesting there’s such a thing as “leftist physiognomy”—a distinctive set of physical features that instantly identify a person as a leftist, especially a radical one—but I’ll happily defend that position, no matter how loud my critics scream and stamp their feet.

The very first hitpiece that was ever written about me, four years ago now, largely focused on comments I had made on a podcast, about leftism as a biological phenomenon. I noted that the Antifa rioters arrested in Portland during the Summer of Floyd were all, to a man, woman and whatever the third thing is they think they are—“hideously ugly, malformed people.” My exact words. Google “Portland Antifa Mugshots” yourself if you don’t believe me. Tell me I’m wrong.

Granted, there are some pretty weird people on the right too, especially on the fringes, but as a rule of thumb I think leftists are an ugly bunch, and it has something to do with the ugliness of their motivations, which include “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialisation,” as the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski described, as well as a “titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful” (Bronze Age Pervert). There’s also some scientific research to back me up. One study showed people rated as better looking were more likely to identify as conservative and Republican, and to feel their actions could influence politics. Another study found that participants consistently rated conservative politicians as more attractive than leftist politicians, and that this translated into more votes, especially in “low-information” elections where voters don’t really know much about the candidate beyond how they look.

Anyway—there had already been some clear indications that the murder of Anne Widdecombe was a political killing before we knew what the man arrested for her killing looked like, or anything much about him. We still don’t know much about him, but I think we know enough to draw some meaningful conclusions.

Widdecombe was about as well known as a right-wing politician could be in the UK. She served for 23 years, from 1987 to 2010, as Conservative MP for Maidstone, occupying cabinet roles in the John Major government, and then shadow cabinet roles under William Hague, in opposition. Always a strong Eurosceptic, she left the Conservatives and joined the Brexit Party, which later became Reform, and was Member of the European Parliament for South West England until 2020. She then served as Reform’s immigration and justice spokeswoman. She was a staunch traditionalist and famously didn’t mince her words or back down from a challenge. She was not ashamed to be anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-law and order, and patriotic. She famously converted to Catholicism in 1993 when the Church of England decided to ordain women.

After retiring from Parliament in 2010, she became a celebrity in her own right, taking her pugnacious character onto the nation’s screens at prime time. She starred in Strictly Come Dancing—our version of Dancing with the Stars—and demonstrated remarkable staying power despite her two left feet, becoming an underdog fan-favourite and surviving for nine weeks on the strength of popular support alone. She was runner-up in Celebrity Big Brother, and featured regularly in a variety of panel shows like Have I Got News for You, Question Time and Loose Women (think The View), as well as documentaries. She even made a cameo in Doctor Who. She toured theatres and wrote books.

It was only natural, given who she was, what she was known for, and the current political climate, that people would immediately suspect a political motive when news broke that she had been violently killed in her own home. The police and the left-wing British government, however, chose to run with a different angle, the “burglary gone wrong.” It wasn’t a totally implausible alternative. Elderly people are killed during burglaries, intentionally or otherwise. Widdecombe was 78. It quickly became clear, however, how self-serving this interpretation was.

A local man was arrested. The police enthusiastically, lingeringly described him as “white” at a press conference: an obvious attempt to dispel rumours Widdecombe was yet another victim of a recent arrival to the country. The Police are increasingly tight-lipped about the ethnicity of crime suspects, for reasons that aren’t hard to guess. Shortly after, the man was released and police said he was no longer a suspect.

The “burglary gone wrong” narrative collapsed when Joshua Kerry was arrested and it was revealed he had probably travelled nearly 300 miles, from Rotherham, in the North of England, to attack her.

Nobody drives 300 miles to “randomly” murder someone. This must have been a targeted attack.

Reform leader Nigel Farage felt confident enough to say last week that Kerry was a “hard-left activist” who “hated anyone with an opposing view” and was “an intolerant individual obsessed with Soviet communism.” There had been rumours communist materials had been found at his home, and internet sleuths dug up evidence Kerry was involved with a political party called “Your Party,” founded by former Labour leader and doctrinaire old-school socialist Jeremy Corbyn. A female member of Kerry’s family, on the very day Widdecombe was killed, had made comments on social media about Farage’s security arrangements and whether they were justified. (Farage has been embroiled in a scandal over a £5 million private gift he has used to pay for increased personal security, among other things. He chose to step down and trigger a by-election in his constituency as a vote of confidence in his fitness as an MP.)

Those comments from Farage were made before it became public knowledge at the weekend, thanks to Britain’s Sun newspaper, that the suspect’s bedroom walls were found covered with news clippings about him. A source from the police told the paper, “The articles on the walls were all about Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, his party and their immigration policies… It would appear he had a profound dislike of the party, its leader and its policies.”

The British government has been largely silent about the case. Farage was right when he also said that if a left-wing politician had been murdered and there was even the suggestion of a political link to the right, it would be 24/7 news and the government wouldn’t stop talking about it. The blame would be pinned directly on him.

That silence, a refusal even to countenance the idea of there being targeted left-wing violence, is bad enough. There are more sinister possibilities. Two days after Kerry’s arrest, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that police had foiled a terror plot against a large Muslim gathering. Twelve men—presumably “right-wing extremists,” because who else would target a large gathering of Muslims?—had been arrested. Mahmood told Parliament the arrests had “undoubtedly saved lives.” But days later the suspects were released and police said they “found no evidence to support anyone being charged with any offences linked to the alleged threat.” Reform’s Shadow Home Secretary, Zia Yusuf, called for Mahmood to resign over the affair, saying she had “misled Parliament” and was a “disgrace.” He stopped short of saying what many others were saying: That the government had cooked up the plot to distract from the Widdecombe case.

Far-fetched? Maybe not. In recent years the British government and intelligence services have taken to stage-managing the public response to traumatic and embarrassing events in an increasingly obvious way. It’s called “controlled spontaneity,” and it’s not unlike what the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service was doing to cover up anti-white murders; for example, the murder of Donald Giusti, who was kicked and stoned to death by a group of Somalis in a park in Maine. The response to the Manchester Arena suicide-bombing is one instance where controlled spontaneity was used to divert attention away from justified outrage at government policies and the presence of Muslim extremists in Britain, towards vapid public expressions of “unity” and forgiveness. Crowds were encouraged to sing the Oasis song, “Don’t look back in anger”—as if anger is an illegitimate response to dozens of children being killed and maimed at a pop concert by a man who should have been left tending goats in a fly-swept village in North Africa.

Police could easily have been told to nab a group of idiots saying edgy things on the internet or WhatsApp. Such people are not in short supply.

The internet was also apparently purged of all references to Joshua Kerry. The left-wing activist group Hope Not Hate—the group that doxxed me in 2024, possibly with the help of the intelligence services—deleted its web page about Anne Widdecombe. The page had described her as “homophobic and sexist,” accusing her of “embracing… dangerous and divisive politics” by joining Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. Thankfully, there’s Internet Archive to preserve exactly what was said. Still: evidence was deliberately being scrubbed.

We need not only speculate. Violence is now, without doubt, a part of British politics, just as it is now, without doubt, a part of American politics. In both cases, the targets are far more likely to be right-wing than left-. Farage, as Britain’s most prominent right-wing politician, has borne the brunt so far, not only of the standard rhetoric—Nazi, fascist, racist, etc.—but also of physical attacks in public. He’s been “milkshaked”—had a milkshake thrown over him—multiple times. In 2019, obese comedienne Jo Brand said, on the BBC, that she would have preferred if someone had thrown acid over Farage instead. “Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?” she said.

The BBC decided, somehow, that her comments were not incitement to violence.

It’s not hard to see where this is going—where it has already led, if the murder of Ann Widdecombe is indeed a political killing. It’s exactly the same process that led to three attempts on the life of President Trump, the murder of Charlie Kirk, an attempt by a transgender man to kill Scott Bessent and burn down the Heritage Foundation, an attempt to kill a Supreme Court justice at his home, vehicle attacks on ICE agents and ambushes outside detention centres…

In the US, at least, you have a right-wing government that’s in a position to confront the problem of left-wing violence and actually do something about it. The Department of Justice and the State Department are finally coming to life to tackle the radical left at home and abroad. The conviction of an Antifa terror cell in Texas that attacked an immigration facility has provided a strong precedent for pursuing other cells and putting their members in prison for hundreds of years. Last week, Marco Rubio held a meeting with foreign representatives of around 70 countries to discuss the threat of transnational left-wing terrorism. In a remarkable speech at the conference, Rubio called leftism a “revolt of the worst against the best; of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”

“It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, cannot create, cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can,” Rubio said.

“It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, liberation; an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and right, on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness, and have nothing else to offer the world.”

The speech could have been written by me—or by someone who reads my Tweets.

In the UK, by contrast, the left remains in power and probably will remain in power until 2029, which is the earliest a general election has to be called. A new Labour Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, was installed this week, without contest, and he’s brought radical leftists, including former members of Hope Not Hate, into Downing Street with him. A member of the Muslim Council of Great Britain too. The right is still on the outside, looking in. Nigel Farage could lose his seat, and even if he regains it, he will be subject to further measures from the “Donald Trump playbook.” Reputation destruction, spurious investigations, lawfare, harassment by the media and activists. And always the possibility of that other thing too, stalking his every move.

It’s going to be a long three years.

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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In my latest book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, I equate the Ancient Greek notion of thymos, often translated as “spiritedness,” with testosterone, the master male hormone. This equation is central to my argument about liberalism as a distinctive hormonal environment; indeed, I think all societies and political systems have unique hormonal characteristics and we can see them manifested in various ways, like in fertility rates. Liberal-democratic capitalism, by its very nature, is hostile to testosterone and the expression of certain behaviours associated with testosterone—and that’s even before we get on to the wide range of lifestyle and environmental factors, including toxic chemicals, that are wreaking havoc with our hormones today.

My point in equating thymos and testosterone wasn’t to make a metaphysical or ontological argument. I’m not trying to suggest that when, say, Homer or Plato used the word thymos, what they really meant was testosterone. The Greeks weren’t misdescribing or attempting to grasp at the concept of a messenger molecule in the blood with certain effects, useful or harmful (testosterone wasn’t actually discovered until the early 20^th century). Nor am I trying to explore, in any depth, all the various meanings of thymos in Greek texts and how they changed and developed over time, as they did. Plato’s use of the term—as part of his famous “tripartite” division of the soul—is different from Homer’s. I’m not a classicist as such; although I was a very capable Latinist.

I’m simply making the observation that the kinds of behaviours and emotional states associated with thymos—things like desire to compete and political attitudes like patriotism and hostility to outsiders, but more fundamentally just the ability to be a man—are also associated with testosterone. And so one might usefully be seen as a proxy for the other, even if they aren’t the same or coterminous.

This allows me to do some interesting things with Francis Fukuyama’s account of the development of political systems, as laid out in his most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama frames the progression towards liberal-democratic capitalism as one of thymotic struggle, leading to an end state in which certain aspects or types of thymos prevail at the expense of others; this leaves man in a precarious state, with potentially explosive consequences, because his drives and desires simply cannot be fulfilled.

Fukuyama glosses thymos as “the desire for recognition,” a part of the soul that strives for recognition of worth and dignity. Characteristic emotions are pride, anger and shame. Following Plato, Fukuyama sees thymos as separate from basic desires and appetites, and from reason.

“Thymos is... the seat of judgements of worth... the propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value... Today we would call [it] ‘self-esteem’... It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger.”

Central to Fukuyama’s account are two distinct types of thymos: isothymia and megalothymia. Isothymia is the desire for equal recognition, to be seen as equal with one’s peers. Megalothymia, by contrast, is the desire to be recognised as better.

It’s the desire for recognition that drives history, says Fukuyama. Liberal democracy—the End of History—is the first political system that grants universal recognition of equal dignity for all men; but what then for megalothymia? Can we still be better? Fukyama says no, not really, and predicts this could lead to rebellion against the prevailing order and what he calls “immense wars of the spirit,” as men seek to assert their superiority in the oldest way possible.

Fukuyama’s assessment of the triumph of liberal-democratic capitalism is actually far more pessimistic than most people think: They remember The End of History but they forget the second half of the book’s title, which is an explicit reference to Nietzsche and his Last Man, a shadow of man in his fullest self who arrives with the death of God.

But if, as I contend, there is a deeper, biological, element to the appearance of the Last Man, that makes the problem described by Fukuyama even thornier still. Not least of all, because it suggests thymos is not simply a fixed quantity that men possess. Thymos can be diminished, and with it the possibility of masculine endeavour at all…

Since I’m writing about thymos, here are some further references if you want to do more reading.

On thymos as a general concept, here’s Douglas Cairns in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

“Thymos... is one of a number of terms in Greek which associate psychological activity with air and breath. In the Homeric poems, thymos is one of a family of terms associated with internal psychological processes of thought, emotion, volition, and motivation... No post-Homeric author can rival that range, but something of the richness... re-emerges in Plato’s conception of the tripartite soul in the Republic and the Phaedrus. Plato’s thymos represents a pared-down model of human agency typified by one central desire or aim in life [honor/victory] but also exhibiting whatever further capacities... are necessary to enable it to pursue that aim...”

Recent scholarship has produced some interesting accounts of thymos, especially in the work of Plato, that I think bolster my argument about its relationship with testosterone.

Josh Wilburn, in The Political Soil: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City (2021), argues that thymos, for Plato, is the “distinctively social or political part of the human soul.” Thymos is what allows cooperation, cultural production, political behaviour and patriotism, including the defence of the city (polis). Wilburn also emphasises the biological foundation of thymos in Plato’s works (located in the chest, close to the heart); although, of course, this does not mean hormones.

Chad Jorgenson, in The Embodied Soil in Plato’s Later Thought (2018), claims that a focus on honour or self-esteem misses what is truly distinctive about thymos: the drive to excel and to exceed. Thymos requires a rational orientation, but it is, at base, a primitive and irrational series of desires.

A very good doctoral dissertation by Nathan Rothschild, supervised by Martha Nussbaum, argues that thymos, as spiritedness, really means defending what is “one’s own” and “motivates action aimed at defending what it takes to be one’s own from alien threats.”

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”

That’s a rather more concise way of expressing “Chesterton’s Fence”: a principle that urges us to exercise caution before we sweep away institutions, practices, buildings and structures without fully understanding why they came to exist in the first place.

The fence is a homely example, befitting the great fat man himself, but real-world instances have been devastating and tragic and anything but quaint.

Take China’s “Four Pests” campaign, begun under Chairman Mao in the late 1950s. In the name of maximising agricultural output, farmers were encouraged to massacre sparrows wherever they were found, since they eat grain. Less grain, lower yields—no Great Leap Forward. But when the sparrow population collapsed as intended, insects like locusts ravaged the crops. Famine ensued. Millions died.

The humble sparrow, it turned out, played an important role in keeping insects and other pests in check, a role that more than balanced the annoyance of a bit of lost grain.

These days, if I reach for an example to illustrate Chesterton’s fence, I might reach not for Chairman Mao and his little birds but for breastfeeding. Breastmilk is the natural food for babies and infants, a food perfectly suited to a young child’s nutritional needs, and what’s more, it’s free. Mothers produce as much as is needed, for as long as needed. Yes, a very small minority of women have trouble producing breastmilk, and some children, including the author, have trouble latching on, for one reason or another; but these are problems that can easily be remedied with breast-milk exchanges and bottlefeeding. In short, there’s no good reason why every child shouldn’t be fed with breastmilk.

That didn’t stop corporate food makers from selling mothers a product—baby formula—that they didn’t and don’t need. For decades, formula has been sold as a safe, healthy alternative to breastmIlk right from the get-go, as soon as baby is born. In fact, it’s often been marketed as a superior choice to breastfeeding, not just for baby’s health, but also for mum too—especially if she’s a busy professional who’s short on patience and time.

Today, about 15% of American babies are never breastfed, and the majority—around 70%—have their feed supplemented with formula during the first six months. Generally, rates of formula use are highest in the Developed World, but the Developing World is catching up fast. Global formula sales have more than doubled since the year 2000.

Over the same period, more and more research has revealed exactly what formula-fed children miss out on. We know that breastfed children tend to have higher IQs and significantly lower incidence of allergic conditions than children who go without. Breastmilk supplies nutritional compounds, including vital immune factors and sugars that encourage the growth of healthy bacterial strains in the gut, that no shop-bought formula can replicate; although smart-Alecs are now trying to create “lab-grown breastmilk” in bioreactors, an endeavour that will also fail.

In truth though, there are still plenty of things we don’t understand—or are only beginning to understand—about breastfeeding and its importance to children’s development.

A new study shows that breastfeeding may have help infants develop self-control, by giving them regular training in recognising when they’re full. This training translates to other impulses and behaviour—to what researchers call “executive function”—and may have long-term ramifications, including reduced likelihood of overeating and obesity.

Researchers have known for some time that early childhood is a key period in habit-formation and the development of self-regulation. Until now, the role of breastfeeding in those processes had been unclear.

It was hypothesised that breastfeeding might play a role in the emergence of self-control, because babies take the lead. When bottlefeeding, mothers have a visual guide to how much has been consumed—the amount of liquid in the bottle—and may encourage their babies to finish the contents even when they’re full. Bottlefed babies may consistently be trained to overeat. By contrast, when mothers breastfeed, there is no visual guide. They must wait until their babies choose to stop.

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In my book, The Eggs Benedict Option (2022), I argued that our “plant-based future” would not arrive on the back of government meat bans, as many people fear.

For one thing, meat bans—and bans on animal products more generally—would be just too unpopular, and governments do have to pay attention to what people think, even as they try to manipulate it and “manufacture consent,” to borrow a phrase from Noam Chomsky, Satan torment his soul.

Among other evidence, I cited a poll from Australia that showed something like 75% of all men would rather lose five years off their life—it might have been ten actually—rather than give up their beloved steaks and ribs and pork chops. Quite right too. I’d probably go further and say I’d rather not live at all.

Market research shows people don’t want to give up red meat and eggs and dairy products, at least not given a free choice. This has been reflected in the dismal failure of “alternative protein” brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger, which have had billions of dollars pumped into their hype campaigns, replete with celebrity endorsements and warm pats on the back for consumers—but still nobody wants to eat them. This lack of interest was on show hilariously during the pandemic, when meat products were cleared from supermarket shelves, leaving full rows of untouched “plant-based” burgers, shrivelled soy sausages and vegan “cheese.” In 2019, Beyond Meat shares were trading at more than $200. Now they’re about $0.66, which is about 66 cents more than they’re worth.

Companies that sell these products have been forced to pivot. Hard. Many have completely changed their marketing. If you saw Oatly’s appalling “Help Dad” campaign from a few years back, you’ll know exactly what I mean. A tragically unhip father enters a darkened kitchen late at night and heads for the fridge to grab an ice-cold glass of cow’s milk. A light turns on, illuminating a face in the corner of the room. “Well, well, well. What do we have here?” Broccoli hair and an unheimlich visage—it’s the poor father’s Zoomer son…

Consumer research says this is a better strategy. Instead of trying to convince people your ungodly slurry of oat-protein, vegetable oil, texturisers, flavorings and preservatives is a kind of milk that’s every bit as nutritious and tasty as the real thing, you make them feel ashamed to want the real thing in the first place. You tell them it’s destroying the planet and they have the full disapproval of all right-thinking people, especially the younger members of their family—and Bob’s your uncle, people are more inclined to plump for the plant-based option. Manipulation, pure and simple. The choice still remains, at least formally, but the guilty conscience and our wormish desire to be good and liked does the rest.

There are other means of manipulation, too. During the pandemic, our betters praised the supply-chain disruptions and price inflation as a spur to necessary “behavioural change.” An op-ed from The New York Times sticks out in my mind for the brazenness with which it pursued this angle. “You want to buy meat? In this economy?” was the headline.

“Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat,” the author, Annaliese Griffin, wrote, as millions of Americans were struggling to put food on the table.

“While hunger and food insecurity are a very real problem in the United States and globally, middle- and upper-class Americans still have more choices at the grocery store than perhaps any food shoppers in history. Climate change has motivated some to eat less resource-intensive meat and more vegetables, grains and legumes, but this movement has not reached the scale necessary to bring needed change—yet.”

Griffin even praised the 1917 Lever Act, which gave the wartime government the power to requisition food to prevent hoarding…

As I said, though, I don’t think it will come to that. Governments, including the British government, which is committed to reducing meat consumption, do float the idea of things like carbon taxes to “offset” carbon emissions for “polluting” products, but again, I think these are more likely to be last-resort measures than first choice. There are plenty of other ways that people can be dissuaded or prevented from eating animal products, and what’s more the general public doesn’t even have to know what’s going on. One day they just wake up and meat is too expensive to have for supper, so they eat something else.

One way involves allowing the infrastructure that supports animal farming to decay.

Just last week, I saw an article in Farmers Guide, “the UK’s leading monthly farming magazine,” about the state of abattoirs in the country. Abattoirs—slaughterhouses­—are closing here at a rate of 10% a year. Back in the 1970s, there were 2,500 abattoirs in the UK. Now there are fewer than 200, and numbers are still falling.

It’s not hard to imagine what the effects of continuing closures might be. Certainly it will affect the price of meat—livestock will have to be transported further for slaughter—but it’s also likely to reduce the availability of meat full stop. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has warned that 43% of farmers would stop selling their meat locally if their abattoir closed.

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Is the looksmaxxer a morality tale for our time—a sort of Hogarthian parable about everything, or at least some of the main things, that ail us as a society in 2026?

After all, could there be a greater indictment of the vanity of the vainest society in history than a young man who devotes his entire waking life to improving his appearance, and not only that, documents every second on camera for a legion of adoring fans and imitators? An otherwise perfectly handsome, fortunate young man obsessing so much over his looks that he spends a portion of each day hitting his face with a small rock hammer, including when he’s out at nightclubs? (That’s “bonesmashing,” by the way, a practice that’s supposed to encourage the growth of bone tissue in the cheeks and jaw, providing further shape and contour to the face, for a more masculine hunter-gatherer-type look.)

There are other, darker, interpretations of looksmaxxing. There’s one, for example, that situates it at a biological level, as a kind of morbid symptom of prosperity and the aimlessness that comes with it. I’m not the only one who’s seen clear parallels between the rise of looksmaxxers and the so-called “mouse utopia” experiment conducted by John Calhoun. Mice were allowed to reproduce for generations in a controlled setting absent the threat of predation and in which all their basic needs—food, water—were catered for lavishly. After a certain number of generations of normal reproduction, things took a very strange turn. Among the wealth of sudden bizarre manifestations was a class of mice Calhoun dubbed “the Beautiful Ones.” These mice would obsessively clean and spruce themselves all day long. They did nothing else. They had no interest even in reproduction: only in themselves and the perfection of their image.

The implication: Freed from the struggle for life that has defined all living creatures since they crawled from the primordial soup, mice stop functioning properly. The mechanisms that allowed them to adapt, survive and reproduce no longer prove adaptive or tend to reproduction. In fact, they prove fatal.

And maybe humans too. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, wrote similar things about modern man and his “surrogate activities,” pastimes that offer no real compelling substitute for the genuine struggles of life but are the only avenue for fulfilment left today. Man essentially drives himself to distraction, in whatever way he can, because that’s all there is left to do.

Certainly, looking at looksmaxxing’s current poster-boy Clavicular—real name: Braden Eric Peters, age: 20—it’s hard not to ask: How is this going to end? “Badly” seems to be the near-universal answer. After achieving exit velocity in mere weeks and months, he now appears to be coming back down to earth equally fast.

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This is a long essay I wrote back in 2024 for American Mind, before Donald Trump won the presidency.

“Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online,” ran a headline at the Associated Press a week ago. “They also spread false information.”

The story focused on the spread of a claim about voter registration in key election states. According to an anonymous user on Twitter whom the AP declined either to name or to link, huge numbers of voters are registering in those states without the use of photographic ID, providing social security numbers instead. The implication is that this is a prelude to large-scale voter fraud of the kind that obviously didn’t take place during the 2020 election and could only take place in countries that aren’t America. Especially countries whose rulers the State Department has decided it doesn’t like: places like Venezuela, Uganda, and Russia.

The offending tweet went viral, and pretty soon X/Twitter’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, was pitching in. “Extremely concerning,” he replied. So concerned was Musk about the claim that he came back later to reply for a second time. “Extremely concerning,” he posted again.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene commented on the post, which had now leapt from X to Instagram, like a spark carried on the wind into a bed of dry leaves. Not long after, Donald Trump carried the fire to his own social media platform, Truth Social. “Who are all those voters registering without a Photo ID in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Arizona??? What is going on???”

Despite valiant attempts by state election officials to disprove the initial claim—which they said was based not on actual figures for voter registration but on requests made to the Social Security Administration to verify the identity of persons who had registered to vote using their social security number—the post attracted 63 million views in three days on Twitter alone. A detailed rebuttal from Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richter, by contrast, received just 2.4 million views.

In 2024, it seems, fake news gets halfway around the internet before the fact-checkers have a chance to get their pants on.

According to the Associated Press,

“The incident sheds light on how social media accounts that shield the identities of the people or groups behind them through clever slogans and cartoon avatars have come to dominate right-wing political discussion online even as they spread false information. The accounts enjoy a massive reach that is boosted by engagement algorithms, by social media companies greatly reducing or eliminating efforts to remove phony or harmful material, and by endorsements from high-profile figures such as Musk. They also can generate substantial financial rewards from X and other platforms by ginning up outrage against Democrats.”

These anonymous muck-spreaders enjoy certain innate advantages as well as the favor of powerful algorithms and powerful patrons. They’re exploiting a “long history of trust in American whistleblowers and anonymous sources,” an academic expert told the AP. Their very anonymity provides a kind of “allure of covertness” that just makes people believe they “know something that other people don’t.”

It wasn’t always thus. In the past, the article notes, anonymous internet profiles were often used for good. “People have used anonymity on social media to avoid persecution by repressive authorities or to speak freely about sensitive experiences.” Left-wingers have used anonymity to their advantage in the U.S. as well, such as during the Occupy Wall Street protests over a decade ago. Any potential implications of this last fact, including that U.S. authorities might also be seen as “repressive,” remain completely unexamined. No mention is made either of prominent anonymous missives from the Left during the first Trump presidency, including a 2018 New York Times opinion piece, “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration,” by a man who two years later would reveal himself to be Miles Taylor, Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security. “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” With friends like these, Trump hardly needed enemies.

The rise of the right-wing anonymous disinformation-poster, by contrast, is a much newer phenomenon. It’s tied, the Associated Press tells us, to “a decline in public trust in government and media through the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic.” Trump is to blame, of course—when isn’t he?—but so is Elon Musk. Musk has protected anonymity on his new platform, including by updating X’s privacy policy to ban people who “doxx” anonymous users (reveal their identity), and has provided financial incentives for posts to reach as many other users as possible.

The article stops short of arguing that internet anonymity should be abolished, but it makes clear that users “shouldn’t be allowed to spread lies without accountability.” Exactly what “accountability” means in this case isn’t explained, beyond reference to enforcement of “terms of service” and “content policies that promote election integrity and information integrity generally.”

Okay, then. Should anonymous users be sanctioned or banned if they say something that later turns out to be false or only partially true? Does their access to information and their intention in making such posts matter—and how would these things even be judged? Should algorithms be used to prevent users from posting at all on certain topics—say, racial crime statistics or adverse effects from vaccines or names in Jeffrey Epstein’s “little black book”? Or what about the health benefits of eating meat and eggs? Who gets to decide? Why? How? These are all serious questions, and there are plenty of others.

Ultimately, what matters according to the Associated Press are the consequences of not doing something. This isn’t just about social harmony or the health of American democracy. It’s about national security. Because behind it all lurk America’s enemies, China and Russia, with their shadowy bot armies and Byzantine networks of disinformation, always looking “to sow domestic discord because they think weakening our social fabric gives their countries a competitive advantage.”

It’s no wonder that anonymous posters are under attack again. It’s an election year. The looming spectre of another four years of Trump rule, facilitated in some part by anonymous figures with funny names like “Raw Egg Nationalist,” is causing great worry among the liberal regime. Terror, actually. Which is why the attacks on Trump, on his family, friends, and allies, and on the modes of communication and organization he uses so well, are becoming more and more desperate by the hour.

But it’s not just in the U.S. There’s a general assault on internet anonymity across the Western world. In the E.U., there have been determined attempts to eliminate internet anonymity for over a decade, with bans on anonymous sites and proposals for far-reaching laws that could allow the state access to all private electronic communication, ostensibly as a means of combatting child sexual abuse. The European courts have struck occasional blows in favor of anonymity, however. One prominent example is the case of Standard Verlagsgesellschaft MBH v. Austria (No.3), from December 2021, in which the European Court of Human Rights decided that the right to freedom of expression within the E.U. includes the right to post anonymously on the internet.

France’s Emmanuel Macron has made himself perhaps the most prominent foe of internet anonymity in the E.U. The French president voiced his opposition to internet anonymity during the 2022 presidential election. “In a democratic society, there should be no anonymity,” he said. “You can’t walk around in the street wearing a hood. On the internet, people allow themselves, because they are hooded behind a pseudonym, to say the most appalling things.” This wasn’t the first time Macron spoke out against the hood-wearers of the internet. In 2019, during the “Great National Debate,” a series of debates organized in response to the Yellow Vest protest movement, he wanted to move “towards a progressive lifting of all forms of anonymity.”

Macron found a vigorous opponent in his own secretary of state Cédric O, who wrote an article at Medium in 2020, a few days after the ghastly beheading of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty by a Chechen refugee in a Paris suburb. Paty had allegedly shown one of the famous Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons to his class as part of a discussion on freedom of expression, a crime for which a local imam decided the teacher must be made to pay the ultimate price. The organizers of the killing had used social media to drum up support for the murder, and many were asking why they had not been apprehended before the killing took place. In his Medium essay, O stated firmly that “the issue of ‘anonymity’ online is a very bad fight.” Sometimes anonymity is courageous and necessary, when an individual is placed in a situation where they “dare not take responsibility for their words.” Furthermore, most anonymous posters aren’t really anonymous at all: they are pseudonymous. The state always has ways to find people who post online and break the law. Requirements to identify oneself in order to post online “would not only be easily circumvented but also legally very uncertain,” he added.

In England, internet anonymity has also become a growing political issue in recent years. There was something of a brouhaha about it after England’s defeat in the final of the postponed Euro 2020 tournament. When the game reached a penalty shootout, England’s Manager Gareth Southgate chose three black players to take the crucial last three kicks. All three missed, in dismal fashion, and England lost. Yet again, football wasn’t coming home. The mood was extremely sour, and the media reported a “flood of online racial abuse.” I have no doubt there were racist comments, but many, if not the majority of them, appear to have come from abroad. Amusingly, it was revealed that of 207 social-media posts deemed to be criminal by British police, just 34 of the accounts responsible, about 20 percent, were actually in the U.K. The remaining 123 were foreign. Much of the so-called “racial abuse” was simply disgruntled fans pointing out the rather obvious fact that Italy had won because their manager chose the best players to take the penalties, rather than attempting to contrive a propaganda coup that would finally usher in a post-racial Britain of happiness, harmony, and love for one’s fellow man, whatever his skin color. But things didn’t work out that way, and so a new narrative was spun, in which the brave, abused Three Lions became a symbol for how much further Britain still had to go along the road to racial justice.

Polling suggested that 78 percent of the public now favored compulsory identity verification for social-media users. A petition calling for just that accrued over 700,000 signatures and was presented to Parliament for consideration. The official response from Boris Johnson’s government was tepid.

“The government recognises concerns linked to anonymity online, which can sometimes be exploited by bad actors seeking to engage in harmful activity. However, restricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity.”

Since then, however, the official atmosphere has become significantly more hostile. The recently passed Online Safety Act, which aims to make the U.K. the “safest place in the world to be online,” has been described as a “censor’s charter” and an “extremely complex and incoherent piece of legislation” by its critics, who are numerous. The original bill was first proposed in 2019, largely in response to the tragic suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who was found to have accessed pro-self-harm and pro-suicide content on social media in the run-up to taking her own life. The bill was intended to impose a “duty of care” on social media providers, to prevent children and other vulnerable groups from being exposed to harmful content. But in the four years between its proposal and passing into law—a grand total of four prime ministers and five digital ministers later—the bill ballooned out of proportion to its original aim, and now included provisions for age checks for porn sites, a new criminal offense of “cyberflashing” (sending unsolicited nudes electronically), and measures to target advertising scammers.

Significantly, the bill now targeted anonymous trolls too, with a clause requiring that social media companies give the option for users to verify their identity. Another clause allows Ofcom, the state media regulator in the U.K., to ask tech companies to identify child pornography “whether communicated publicly or privately.” Nobody could object to pedophiles being pursued and brought to justice for their heinous crimes, but the clause means, potentially, that tech companies will be required to break private encryption to scan users’ personal messages, a power that could easily be abused. Indeed, the secretary of state has been granted wide-ranging powers by the Act to direct Ofcom on the exercise of its functions as regulator, including the content of its code of practice. When the bill passed, several providers of encrypted communications suggested they would leave the U.K. rather than comply with the rules.

This broad anti-anonymity drive has made for strange bedfellows. Jordan B. Peterson, for example, would have us believe that the desire for anonymity is simply a vehicle for pathology, and therefore must be opposed as such. As a student of totalitarianism and a great champion of the work of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, JBP ought to know better. You’d think he’d be the first to stand up and say that freedom of speech, the “foundation of Western civilization” in his own words, must be defended; that any infringement on the ability of individuals to speak their mind freely, whether they be internet trolls in their mother’s basement or political dissidents in the jaws of the world’s most oppressive regimes, is an infringement too far. What affects the rights of one affects the rights of all. But no, this is not what Jordan B. Peterson believes.

To the surprise of many, after his reinstatement on X in November 2022, Peterson wasted no time in directly petitioning its new owner to censor “anonymous troll demons.” Peterson’s account had been in limbo after he refused to remove a tweet about the actor formerly known as Ellen Page. “Don’t allow the anonymous troll-demons to post with the real verified people @elonmusk,” he posted. “Put them in their own hell, along with others like them.”

Six months later, he was still at it. Only now he was venting his spleen in bizarre, gnomic 280-character prose-poems.

“Most anonymous troll-demons

Are derisive cowards

And they are much more likely than others

To be

Narcissistic

Psychopathic

Machievellian [sic]

And (because that’s apparently not enough)

Sadistic

So defend them all you want

But know who they are

And who you’re standing up for

For every one brave whistleblower

There are a thousand evil slugs”

Peterson likes to insist, on the basis of some experimental data, that anonymous Twitter posters tend to exhibit the so-called “dark triad” traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism), and that this alone justifies limiting their reach, or even banning them, for the greater good. He may be right about the personality of the average hardcore Twitter troll. They probably aren’t worth knowing or listening to—but that’s what the “mute” and “block” buttons are for, boomer. I suspect Peterson’s opinion of anonymous Twitter users may also be colored by his own experience of being trolled, to an extent that’s incompatible with expressing anything like an unbiased professional opinion. It’s not hard to see how constant reminders that the good professor hasn’t even cleaned his own room yet—so why should we?—might dispose him poorly toward anonymous posters in general. But sometimes the truth hurts.

If we’re not careful, we can easily get dragged into the weeds when we start talking about internet anonymity. Before we know it, we’re talking about football games and psychology papers about Big Five personality traits, all of which serves only to distract us from the hard realities of power and the control of information that really animate this issue and make it so vital.

The future of internet anonymity is not simply about mis- or mal- or disinformation, about ensuring that people have access to a nourishing diet of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Nor is it about foreign influence over domestic politics, or a question of creating new societal mechanisms to limit the effects of harmful pathologies. This is about ordinary people having the ability to speak and think freely, and most of all to say and think things the authorities don’t want them to say or think. In the wake of the pandemic, and the emergence of a new, even more intimate, nexus of government and private power, the term “authorities” must be expanded significantly beyond the state, traditionally conceived, to include Big Tech and social media companies, corporations and asset funds, and Big Pharma and NGOs.

Today’s authorities don’t need to harness anonymity to spread false information: they can just do it openly without any risk of sanction whatsoever. And they do. Witness the Russia collusion hoax, Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell,” the “100% safe and effective” vaccines for COVID-19—and so on. The authorities and their lackeys and myrmidons, from Washington Post commentators and talking heads to celebrities and social media influencers, are free to take whatever line they choose or are told to choose, to contradict themselves openly and then deny they’ve ever done so. We never claimed the vaccines could stop transmission of COVID, even though there’s video footage of us actually saying that on multiple occasions! The rent-a-gobs keep their plum gigs and endorsements, retain their influence and trusted status, however egregious their crimes against the truth.

If we want to understand what is truly at stake with internet anonymity—the right to speak and think freely, in opposition to the authorities—we need look no further than the case of Douglass Mackey, a.k.a. Ricky Vaughn, a man who may very well soon be in jail for the grand crime of distributing memes during the 2016 election cycle. Mackey is currently appealing his conviction under Title 18, USC Section 241, one of a series of statutes originally passed in 1871 to stop the Ku Klux Klan from suppressing the black vote in the South. For distributing memes on Twitter that he didn’t even make, including one that encouraged Democratic voters to vote by text message—an impossibility—Mackey was found guilty of voter suppression. Never mind that prosecutors couldn’t find a single instance of a person whose vote was suppressed or improperly cast because of Mackey’s memes: Mackey had to be punished, because he was a captain in the army of anonymous Twitter and 4chan posters who energized the Trump campaign and relentlessly mocked, with great inventiveness and flair, the hideously corrupt, entitled warmonger Hillary Clinton. Mackey’s exact contribution to Hillary’s downfall is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify, but contribute he did, and visibly. Mackey’s enemies had to wait four years to get their revenge on him, but as soon the opportunity arose, they grabbed it with both hands. Just days after Biden took office in January 2021, Douglass Mackey was in handcuffs at West Palm Beach Police Department.

As I noted in a piece last year for this publication, what’s so worrying about the use of Section 241 to prosecute Mackey is that this is the first time the Section has ever been used against someone acting in the realm of speech, rather than using physical violence or intimidation like the Ku Klux Klan did. This has the clear potential for a “chilling effect” on free speech, especially since it’s far from clear whether protected speech should fall under the power of the Section. Legal scholar Eugene Volokh has noted that there’s absolutely no reason to believe it’s constitutional to prosecute lies that prevent people from voting. After all, virtually every single political candidate lies at some point during his career.

The regime doesn’t intend, or even need, to prosecute every anonymous poster. It just needs to make an example of Douglass Mackey, to send him to prison and make clear the potential consequences of free expression on the internet, to have the desired effect. The truly deranged anonymous posters won’t alter their behavior, of course, but they aren’t the ones who matter. It’s the more persuasive, more thoughtful posters who will think twice before they make a great meme or post during the election cycle, and that will be enough. Make no mistake, though: there will be other prosecutions.

I’ve been talking for the last few paragraphs about the Democrats and the American Left, but we shouldn’t think the threat to anonymity is merely an issue of creeping leftist totalitarianism. It isn’t. The Right, or what passes for the Right today, is just as guilty. Sam Melia is a name you probably aren’t familiar with, but his prosecution by the British government is every bit as cooked-up as Douglass Mackey’s and portends a dark future for freedom of speech even when the Right is in power. Although Melia’s case doesn’t directly concern internet anonymity, the issues are fundamentally the same.

At the beginning of last month, Sam Melia, a young father from the U.K., was sent to prison for two years for being in possession of some stickers, which were not illegal. This shocking fact was willingly admitted by the prosecution in the trial and accepted by the judge. The stickers stated basic truths about the pace of demographic change in the U.K. and urged readers not to feel guilty about being patriotic and white. That was it. Here’s a selection of the slogans: “Nationalism is nurture”; “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066”; “Diversity: designed to fail, built to replace”; “Love your nation.”

What was at issue in the case, rather than the legality of the statements made on the stickers, was Melia’s imputed intention for having them. The prosecution claimed Melia’s goal was to “incite racial hatred,” and that’s what he was convicted for. The intent to incite racial hatred was inferred, it would appear, on the basis of a copy of a book by Oswald Mosley in Melia’s possession and an ironic image of Hitler that was stored in a garage gym where Melia and his friends worked out during lockdown. To call this a flimsy pretext would be an understatement.

In truth, Melia’s conviction has much more to do with his membership in a right-wing group called Patriotic Alternative, which has been identified as an “extremist” group by the U.K. government for its stance on immigration and the lockdowns and social restrictions during the pandemic. It’s not illegal to be a member of this group, however. Melia’s prosecution began when a dossier was handed to the police by Hope Not Hate, a leftist activist group that receives money from the British government and specializes in revealing the identities of right-wing activists and personalities. Melia’s wife, Laura Towler, believes Hope Not Hate were angling for an investigation of her husband on terrorism charges, but over the course of an investigation that lasted five years, the best the police could come up with was the stickers and the incitement charge. Still, it was enough to see Melia sent to prison for two years. Like Mackey, Melia had to be prosecuted for something, and he was.

The Conservative government in the U.K. is terrified of being held to account for the many wretched betrayals of its 14 long years in government. The party has betrayed its true constituency, the patriotic British people, and it has betrayed the nation’s great traditions and history. And of all those betrayals none is more wretched than the party’s determination to continue the demographic replacement policies of their New Labour predecessors. Britain’s policy of mass immigration was designed to destroy the Conservatives and change the country in a way that would be impossible to reverse. And yet, instead of reducing net migration drastically, as they’ve promised at every general election since 1997, last year the Conservatives allowed net migration to reach a record level of over 700,000. That’s 14 times the level—around 50,000 a year—when New Labour came to power. It’s not a wonder ordinary people, especially on the Right, are angry and looking for other patriotic alternatives.

This is why, when the failures of decades of government immigration policy were recently on unmistakable display, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a raft of new measures designed to combat both “Islamists” and the “far-right,” even though the far-right had nothing to do with the massive pro-Palestine demonstrations in the capital or the victory of George Galloway in the Rochdale by-election, which Galloway hailed as a victory primarily for British Muslims and their families back in the Middle East and Pakistan. “In recent months we’ve seen a shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality,” Sunak said at a press conference outside 10 Downing Street. Britain’s streets have been “hijacked” by extremist groups, and “now our democracy itself is a target.” A new “robust framework” is therefore needed to combat these dual threats, including a greater focus on anti-terrorism policing.

The same tack is being followed by Germany’s left-wing government, which has pledged to eradicate the “far-right” as its highest priority, especially the surging Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party, at the very moment when the effects of its own mass immigration policies are threatening to tear the country apart at the seams. This is a cynical policy of scapegoating, nothing more. A policy that aims to distract the German people and prevent them from responding to the true threat to their nation and way of life.

Anonymous users may indeed be dominating right-wing discussions online. And they may indeed spread false information. But they also spread the truth, and so long as they continue to do that, their right to exist should be defended by any and all who really care about the future of freedom. There’s either freedom for us all, or freedom for none. It’s that simple. Freedom to speak, freedom to think—and freedom to reach for the “mute” and “block” buttons, as you please.

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“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake.”

You can say that again.

That was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito last week, dissenting against the 6-3 majority decision to uphold so-called “birthright citizenship,” which means children born on American soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, automatically become American citizens—with red, white and blue in their veins.

Or that’s the theory, anyway, because we know what the reality looks like. We’re also possessed of the common sense, or some of us anyway, to know that a dog born in a stable is not a horse. (I once made a girlfriend of mine cry, during an after-dinner argument about immigration, by saying just that. The logic was so simple, so crystalline, so alien to her soft feminine mind that she had no option but to do what women always do in that situation—open the floodgates. Needless to say, ours was not a long-lived relationship.)

On his first day back in office, President Trump issued an Executive Order to end birthright citizenship, which relies on a very particular interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth was passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to guarantee the rights of the newly emancipated slaves against prejudicial laws being passed by the Southern states. Despite a veto from President Andrew Jackson, the Amendment passed.

In the decades that followed, however, the Amendment took on a life and a logic of its own. Provisions that were obviously intended only to apply to America’s slaves and the descendants of her slaves, suddenly came to apply to—everyone in the world. Literally. Everyone in the world. If you could just get to America and give birth, your child would be an American. You could come by plane or you could cross the Bering Strait in fur boots like an ancient hunter-gatherer—you could ride a giant fly like in one of those new Gigachad edits—but so long as you arrived on American soil and crapped out a live baby, that baby would be American. And then that made getting American citizenship yourself—and for your entire clan back in Squatemala—a whole lot easier. That’s chain migration, or as I like to call it, ball-and-chain migration, but it’s America that ends up in fetters.

The irony of this situation was not lost on Justice Clarence Thomas, himself the descendant of freed slaves. He offered a dissent tinged with both anger and sadness.

“The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens… In doing so, the Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

“Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans,” Thomas continued.

“They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority.”

Anyway, no use crying over spilt milk. Birthright citizenship stands. Children born in the United States, simply by virtue of being born there and not in El Salvador, Uganda or China, are US citizens. The framers of the 14th Amendment, and the Founding Fathers themselves, are still spinning in their graves, as they have been for decades if not the better part of a century—maybe even 250 years. They’re unlikely to stop rotating any time soon.

In the long run, of course, if America is to be saved, something has to be done. Birthright citizenship has to be struck down. As long as America still cleaves to the “magical soil” idea of nationhood, it will be impossible to avert demographic disaster and ensure a future for… you know what I mean.

The world’s entire population simply cannot be Americans-in-waiting, whatever a bunch of men and women in silly robes have to say about it.

In the meantime, there are things the Trump administration can do to mitigate this unfortunate decision.

President Trump has actually been quite sanguine. In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process. No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship! They will have my Complete and Total support!”

One thing the Trump administration is apparently planning to do is to prevent the arrival in the US of pregnant women from foreign countries. This is the most brazen kind of birthright citizenship scam—it’s often referred to as “birthright tourism”—and in recent years there’s been intense focus on schemes set up specifically to catapult pregnant women into the US to claim citizenship for their offspring, especially from China.

One well-publicized case involved 100 Chinese nationals who maintained apartments in California that were used by other Chinese nationals to give birth. The scheme is believed to have served at least 500 customers, who were each charged as much as $80,000. Another birthright-tourism scheme may have provided services to 8,000 women; half were from China.

Nobody knows exactly how many babies are born this way each year. It’s probably tens of thousands. Maybe more. Peter Schweizer, author of The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon, reckons 100,000 Chinese babies have been born in the US each year for the last 13 years.

Other estimates suggest the figure is about 26,000 foreign babies.

Either way, the figure should be as close to zero as possible, and the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department have all the means necessary to prevent birthright scams, whether they involve organized groups or individuals. As Stephen Miller told Jesse Watters on Tuesday, the admin will be scrutinizing visa applications even harder. Pregnant women might even be barred from entering the US altogether. Why not?

A legislative route to repeal is unlikely to succeed, as is a constitutional amendment. In the end, what’s most likely to happen is that four, eight or 12 years down the line another challenge to this insane interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment will come before the Supreme Court. By that time, there will be fresh bums on the bench, hopefully conservative ones. Hopefully better than Trump’s unreliable picks, especially Amy Coney Barrett, who has decided to make herself a rod for Trump’s back—for reasons known only to her.

In my latest interview, with Andrew Gold, I talk about my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, at length. We start with Alex Jones and the “gay frogs conspiracy theory”—which isn’t a conspiracy theory at all—and work our way onto endocrine disruptors, transgenderism, declining testosterone and sperm counts, the political implications of testosterone decline and much, much more. This is a great interview with extremely high production values. Watch the first 15 or so minutes here, and then the rest here.

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An incel, a rabbi and a female police officer meet outside the headquarters of the world’s largest porn website.

If that sounds like the beginning of a very politically incorrect joke, it isn’t. That’s exactly what happened a week ago in Montreal, Canada, when unfuckable incel nutjob Seth Scott Hatfield travelled from Alberta to attack the headquarters of Aylo, owner of Pornhub and other adult websites.

Chaos ensued.

Hatfield, clothed in Rhodesia-pattern camo and armed with an SKS rifle, opened fire, killing a police officer; a female police officer mistakenly killed a a man reported to be a rabbi (I guess he was just in the area, huh?); she was shot; and then Hatfield was taken down himself. Another civilian suffered minor injuries.

If the target of the attack didn’t provide an obvious motive, authorities soon discovered a 104-page manifesto in the shooter’s hotel room. Hatfield was, as I said, an incel—an involuntary celibate, a dude who simply can’t have sex because he’s too ugly, too short, too bald or some unholy combination of the three—and he had been nursing murderous hate against women and something referred to as “hypergamy,” where a small number of 10/10 Chad men have all the sex with all the women, and the rest of the men have to satisfy themselves with their pillows or an apple pie like in that famous teen movie.

It sounds stupid, and it is. But that’s not really the point.

In the “definition” section of his manifesto, Hatfield defines “hypergamy” as “the opposite of monogamy, or namely a phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically and culturally to just one male.”

But it isn’t just sorority girls with triple-figure bodycounts who need to be brought to heel, Hatfield says. Because today we live in a “hypergamy state,” a society where hypergamy is “the dominant mode of intimacy,” for reasons that are political, economic and ideological. In short: It’s capitalism, not women themselves. And so the entire system needs to be destroyed if incels are ever to have a chance to enjoy the loving embrace of a woman who isn’t their mum or grandmother.

Among Hatfield’s specific targets are the porn industry; pickup artists; plastic surgeons; prominent businessmen; real-estate brokers; politicians responsible for mass immigration; fur farmers; polluters of the environment; Zionists; figures in the crypto industry; automobiles (cars let women drive places and have sex with random men); and me—although he doesn’t call me by my name.

There are at least three related categories in Hatfield’s bizarre schema into which I obviously fit: three groups who he claims sell fake solutions to the fundamental problem of the hypergamy state. Hatfield calls each of them “swindlers.”

First there are the “weightlifting swindlers:”

These are often barely distinguishable from ‘alpha male’ / ‘masculinity’ swindlers, if they are not themselves also of that category that is. The main difference between them is that weightlifting swindlers place most or all of their emphasis on weightlifting itself, sometimes even to the point of holding the laughably stupid belief that only males who lift weights can have valid opinions. They sell instructive programs, and products such as supplements and weights to their victims, and profit thereby. They are very common, and have a very large number of victims simply because weightlifting is an easy and mindless activity that practically any male can do, and because weightlifting generally is marketed to us as an elementary and firm solution to involuntary celibacy. The bourgeois class wants it to be this way, because many of them are essentially weightlifting swindlers themselves, who profit off of the colossal quantity of desperate males who buy their supplements and other products in an effort to look better, i.e. to obtain intimacy. People greatly underestimate the wealth and influence of the gym/weightlifting industry.

Then there are the “diet swindlers:”

These come in many varieties, preaching to us that this diet or that diet is the ultimate and true one, and is the only one that is actually healthy and natural for humans. Diet swindlers make their money from the food products that they sell, or directly from the donations of their followers.

Finally, there are the “Nietzschean swindlers:”

This is a category that has only appeared relatively recently, and perhaps it is only a subcategory. They base their teachings heavily on the writings of Friederich Nietzsche and other similar thinkers; and their advice to men basically comes down to weightlifting and the adoption of a Nietzschean outlook on things. Those who fall under the influence of this category like to style themselves as hyper-reactionaries, and they pretend that they are somehow similar to the chariot-riding warriors of the bronze age, when in reality they are mostly sexually starved men of the present day. They are sometimes also quite dissolute and obnoxious. The main problem with Nietzsche’s philosophy is that it boils down to empty egoism and meaningless praise of the haughty, aggressive, and confident people simply because they are ‘successful’. We ourselves, the dispossessed, are not that however, that is not what we are; and no amount of lifting weights and trying to think like a bronze age warrior is going to make us that. This isn’t the bronze age anymore, and so bronze age solutions do not work for today’s problems. What is needed rather is a sound scientific understanding of the material conditions around us, and the willingness to take effective action to combat the hypergamy state. Such action goes far beyond the level of weightlifting and idle Nietzschean fantasizing. Because there are not many Nietzschean swindlers, they are not as great of a problem as christianity or speculation swindlers, but they should still be denounced and refuted like all other swindlers should be.

Chillingly, Hatfield suggests a campaign of “selective, decentralized mass terror… comprised of calculated, surgical strikes against the most culpable elements of society.”

Basically, that means killing porn stars, pickup artists, plastic surgeons, prominent businessmen, real-estate brokers, politicians responsible for mass immigration, fur farmers, polluters of the environment, Zionists, figures in the crypto industry—and me.

Given the limits on self-defense imposed by British law, I shall be sleeping with a sharpened spoon under my pillow from now on, and carrying a folding travel fork and whistle with me wherever I go. Incels, you have been warned.

When I first heard the killer was an incel, before I read his manifesto, I expected there to be yet another moral panic about right-wing extremism, the manosphere and maybe even about me, since I’ve recently been pegged as one of the world’s most prominent “masculinists” in an Atlantic cover story entitled, “The Men Who Fear Women.” But that hasn’t happened, and the truth is, I don’t think it will. The shooting story has already all-but disappeared. There simply isn’t a way to spin Hatfield’s beliefs as a coherent worldview that could link him to groups Western governments and the media want to demonize and use to justify further curbs on freedom of expression. I mean, the guy wanted to kill the Raw Egg Nationalist, author of the Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbook, The Eggs Benedict Option and The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.

So what should we make of all this?

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Broke: Communism was created by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the mid-19th century.

Woke: Communism was unleashed by the French Revolution, which began in 1789. Robespierre and the Terror prefigure all the totalitarian excesses of the 20th century—the dictators, the show trials, the gulags, the killing fields, all of it.

Bespoke: Communism is an ancient phenomenon, perhaps as old as humans themselves. It is fundamentally a way of life and, as such, is rooted in human biology rather than philosophy, economics or ideology.

On Friday, President Trump was back at the Washington Hilton, the venue where, at the end of April, yet another crazed left-wing gunman tried—and failed—to end his life. The President was addressing the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference, and his remarks, aptly, focused on the threat to America from radical left-wingers hell-bent on destroying everything that is good and right and proper.

From communists, to use the President’s own words.

“This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence, in my opinion, 250 years ago,” Trump said.

“They will close your churches in this country, if they go communist, and they’re trying to. They will kill your people, and that’s what they’re about. They want to end religion, they have to end religion, because their ideology doesn’t work if you have strong religion.”

President Trump referred to the recent elections in New York, in which three radical candidates won their primary races thanks to endorsements from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has said he wants to “seize the means of production” and is proceeding with an agenda of rent and price controls, seizure of private property from landlords, and even race-based taxes for the city’s ever-dwindling white population.

“And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently, they’re communists; they’re not social democrats,” Trump said.

“They want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”

Communism is “very easy to sell” as a proposition, President Trump continued, but its actual effects are always devastating.

“You’ll live in squalor, there will be no food, there will be no housing, there will be no military, there will be no law and order, there will be no nothing. You’ll be a third world inhabitant in every way. And everyone will suffer or die.”

So far, so good. Not a word out of place.

But then President Trump said something very interesting, very enigmatic. He said all those things we associate with communism today—the grand promises of freedom and happiness, the miserable, pathetic reality—have been “happening for thousands of years... by different names.”

Thousands of years? Different names? What on earth could President Trump mean?

When? What names?

He didn’t say.

President Trump later enlarged on that theme in a post on Truth Social, but again—speaking in riddles, leaving us to fill in the blanks.

“The Communists are finally making their move,” he wrote.

“I’ve been waiting and preparing for this for a long time. It’s easy to be a Communist—All you have to do is say, ‘I’ll give you everything’ but that means you’re taking it away from others that have earned it. Over thousands of years, that Ideology has not worked once. The game is on. Enjoy watching!”

Clearly, the President of the United States believes communism is not just an ideology or a political movement of the modern era, but something much older, much deeper, more fundamental. The obvious question is: Where did he get such an idea?

Has President Trump been reading the largely forgotten Lothrop Stoddard, and his 1922 book, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman? Stoddard believed the rising threat from anarchists and communists, which had already claimed the lives of multiple heads of state including President McKinley, was nothing less than the challenge of a biological underclass, a seething mass of freaks and failures whose sole power was their vast weight of numbers and their murderous hatred for the well-turned-out and successful. Such people have always existed, but modern conditions have multiplied their ranks enormously, so they now pose an existential threat to civilization itself.

Or perhaps the President has been reading something a bit more recent. How about the pseudonymous “neo-reactionary” writer Spandrell, and his famous essay, “Bioleninism”? According to Spandrell, Leninism as a political strategy—the creation of an ever-expanding “coalition of the fringes” to seize power—far predates Lenin himself, and can even be seen in populist movements from the ancient world, which promised to take the landed wealth of the aristocrats and optimates and redistribute it to the lower classes, the plebes.

Maybe Trump’s been reading Bronze Age Pervert, who contrasts the “yeast life” that defines most of humanity for most of history—undifferentiated reproduction, stifling conformity, rule by obese women and fearful old men, the communal slop pot and the smoke-filled longhouse—with life in the ascent, as represented by the mysterious Sea Peoples, the Greeks of the Agonal Age, and more recently men like Hernan Cortes and his conquistadores.

There’s even a slim chance President Trump has been reading my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, which investigates the biological basis of political attitudes, especially the role of testosterone. Give a man a dose of testosterone, scientists tell us, and you’ll reliably increase his “parochial altruism”—his kindness towards members of his tribe, and aggression towards outsiders—as well as his comfort with “advantageous inequality,” which is science-speak for hierarchy and people getting different rewards on the basis of their competence. These are fundamental organizing principles of the difference between right-wingers and left-, keyed in at the level of a steroid molecule produced in the testes. On my account, the civilizational collapse in testosterone levels we’re seeing—about 1% year on year, across the Western world—is intimately tied to the continuing leftward drift of society, with all its terrible consequences.

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Anthony Bourdain. The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski never knew of him, I’d guess, but he understood his type well. Bourdain was an oversocialised leftist. A man who, to avoid a deep sense of guilt and worthlessness, overidentifies with the system and presents conformity with its values as a kind of rebellion. That might sound complicated, but it’s really not.

“Generally speaking,” Kaczynski writes, “the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society… for a long time… Leftists, especially those of oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming… that society is not living up to these principles.”

Everything Bourdain sold as edgy and punk, the mark of a free thinker and a free spirit—travelling the world, drinking a pint at 4pm in an empty bar, eating an oyster, having that extra slice of French toast, mass immigration as a way of brightening up our pale, stale, male countries—was indistinguishable from the spirit of our age.

In many respects, he reminds me of Henry Rollins, an oversocialised Gen Xer who also sells conformist rebellion to the masses. Rollins was once a tough-guy, a “hardcore” Orange County punk who rhapsodised on the harsh discipline of the barbell and the weight room. Then he started doing “spoken-word” tours. Although he still does that thousand-yard-stare thing and crosses his tattooed arms like he’s about to cave your head in, Rollins now, in his mid-60s, looks like a middle-aged lesbian— with the politics to match. In truth, though, nothing has changed about Henry Rollins. He was always a spiritual lesbian. But the music was loud and aggressive enough, and perhaps we all were innocent enough, not to notice.

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On Friday morning, I was on the ground in Makerfield, conducting a post-mortem of Andy Burnham’s victory in a by-election that could dramatically alter the course of British politics. If Burnham now challenges Keir Starmer and becomes Prime Minister, then calls a snap election off the back of the inevitable popularity-bounce, Britain could have five more years of radical left-wing government instead of three. What a disaster that would be.

As I walked the streets of this average Northern town, people stood stupefied, gazing up at the sky in disbelief. I visited the local Games Workshop store where young men in pungent t-shirts were unable to paint their Primaris Space Marines, so violent were their fits and tremblings. Blue paint everywhere, including on the parts that should be skin-colored. The atmosphere at the gaming tables was funereal: heads bowed, silence, dice at a standstill.

All said the same thing: How could this be happening? We were told Restore would win…

Gradually, as these dumbstruck boys and girls began to recover from their collective stupor, I was able to extract from them a more coherent picture of just what went wrong for Restore.

Here’s what I discovered:

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Do men need estrogen? After all, it’s the female hormone, right?

The short answer is yes, men do need estrogen. What differs between male and female is not the type of hormone they need—testosterone for men, estrogen for women—but the specific ratios of both hormones they have in their body. Men have mo…

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I wrote this essay in January of 2024 for American Mind as a kind of primer on Britain’s grooming gangs for an American audience. My main purpose was to raise awareness of the scale of the problem, on the occasion of a fresh report into abuse in Rochdale. Now that the grooming gangs are back in the news, thanks to Rupert Lowe’s “public inquiry,” I thought it would be a good idea to reprint this essay, the contents of which I believe still stand today, two years later. If you enjoy my writing and want me to continue producing essays and all the content on this Substack, please consider upgrading your subscription to a paid one. You’ll get full access to the entire archive, including podcast episodes, a fitness programme, essays, nutritional advice and recipes, as well as all new paid content. Your generosity is greatly appreciated.

A decade after the Jay Report detailed the methodical sexual exploitation of white English teenage girls by Asian Muslim “grooming gangs” in Rotherham, England—and the explicit efforts of the police to suppress prosecution in order not to appear racist—a new report has just come out describing a nearly identical set of circumstances in Rochdale, outside Manchester.

Though it may sound outlandish, the report suggests that the British government allows white British children to be raped, on an industrial scale, by gangs of Asian Muslim men, and routinely attempts to silence the victims and avoid investigating the perpetrators. That’s what an objective description of the evidence tells us. Forget what you think you know about what the British government or any other government is supposed to do, and just look at the facts. Look at what happens.

In recent decades, thousands of overwhelmingly white British children have been groomed and sexually abused by Muslim men of Asian descent, while the authorities, including social services, the police, and the Crown Prosecution Service, have largely turned a blind eye to what was happening. There have been trials, police investigations, newspaper stories, opinion pieces, television documentaries, and parliamentary debates—but still the grooming and the rape continue. And still there are apologists who tell us that the problem doesn’t even exist at all, though their voices aren’t quite as loud as they were ten or 15 years ago.

The majority of people convicted of child sexual offenses in the U.K. may be white, as you’d expect in a nation that is still predominantly white. But the nature of their crimes is different: usually individual, very occasionally in small groups, but nothing like the systematic, racial- and religious-based phenomenon we’ve seen with Asian grooming gangs, which often organize themselves around taxi companies and takeaway restaurants.

A 2017 study by a think tank claimed that 84 percent of people convicted of gang-related child-grooming offenses in the U.K. since 2005 were Asian men. The number of convictions, 222 out of a total of 264, belies the tremendous scale upon which abuse has been taking place. It was suggested in Parliament that somewhere between 250,000 and a million children may have been abused by grooming gangs nationwide, on the basis of extrapolation from the number of cases in northern towns like Rochdale and Oldham. Even if this is a high estimate—demographics in the south of the country are quite different from the north—we’re still likely to be talking about many tens of thousands of children.

Around the turn of the millennium, it was an open secret that Asian grooming gangs were operating in many towns and cities across the north of England and the Midlands, but the matter received police attention only by chance. The first probe in the Greater Manchester area began in 2008 when a local teenager was arrested for vandalism at a curry house. In police custody, the young girl revealed that she was being abused and raped by a gang of local Asian men. Although she provided a detailed account of the abuse and evidence, including a pair of her own underwear that contained the DNA of one of her abusers, the investigation was dropped, inexplicably.

It was only two years later, after repeated complaints by a local youth project, that the charges were picked up again, culminating in Operation Span and the conviction of nine Asian men for child sexual offenses in 2012. At the same time as hailing the convictions as “a fantastic result for British justice,” Greater Manchester Police, under significant public pressure, launched an internal investigation into why the allegations had not been investigated properly when they were first made.

That report took nearly four years to be made public, in 2015. Greater Manchester Police admitted misconduct, and several officers were named, but not a single one was subject to disciplinary action. The report took so long to emerge because it had to be redrafted several times, for reasons unknown. It was also redacted to protect the identities of the victims.

Grooming gangs were back in the British news in 2017, with reports of a shocking rise in their numbers and activities in the Greater Manchester Region. The number of suspected paedophiles in the area had doubled in a period of three years, reports of grooming had quadruped, and it was taking up to five months for the police to investigate incidents of online child abuse, according to newspapers.

The Betrayed Girls, a BBC documentary on abuse in northern towns like Rochdale and Oldham, also aired that year. The documentary featured testimony from victims and individuals involved with the police and social services, and pointed to wide-ranging failures by the police and child-protective services to take accusations of grooming gangs seriously. In response to the documentary, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham commissioned a new investigation into Operation Span and Greater Manchester Police’s handling of grooming-gang cases going right back to the early 2000s.

The results of that investigation have finally been released, and they fully substantiate the litany of accusations put forward in The Betrayed Girls. Despite everything the British public has already heard about grooming gangs—including the hideous story of Charlene Downes, who may have been chopped up by her abusers and sold as kebab meat—the report still makes for shocking reading. Most shocking of all the betrayals on display is that of Victoria Agoglia, a 15-year-old girl who reported to the police that she was being abused under the influence of drugs and alcohol. As in so many other cases, the police failed to intervene, but this time the victim was murdered, injected with a lethal dose of heroin by one of her abusers. Scarcely less appalling is the case of Child 44, who had an aborted child taken from her by police without her consent, which was then lost in a freezer. Child 41’s reports of abuse were discarded because the police believed she was a “willing participant.” I could go on. A catalogue of horrors and gross dereliction of duty.

It’s now clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the institutional failures of the Greater Manchester Police and local authorities allowed the grooming gangs in Greater Manchester to continue operating and to grow, even after the conclusion of Operation Span and its “fantastic result for British justice.” By refusing to give credence to a multitude of plausible allegations, the investigation claims, as many as 96 known groomers were let off the hook and have probably continued to rape and abuse teenage white girls. I suspect the number is far, far greater than that.

Damning as the new report may be, it’s hard not to conclude that it’s also part of the problem. Instead of telling us conclusively why the abuse took place and why the authorities failed to take it seriously, the report simply obfuscates and evades. The racial and religious motivations that lie at the heart of this abysmal saga are only hinted at, if they’re even mentioned at all. The report itself is just another betrayal.

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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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