He’s done it again. Elon Musk has broken X.

I say this pretty much every week, so call me dramatic if you will, but it really does feel like each fresh “quality of life” update makes what is already an unusable hellsite even more unusable and even more hellish somehow.

Over the last few days, some H-1B hire has clearly been fiddling with the knobs and levers, because the algorithm now seems hellbent on populating my feed with posts that are all about the same thing. The omnipotent AI that controls the food supply has decided, by observing some minute kink of my attention, to serve me up an endless buffet of exactly the same meal, over and over and over again.

I scroll, I scroll, I scroll but nothing changes.

Over the last day or so, pretty much every single post on my timeline has been a meme about Vivek Ramaswamy. I hovered over one for a moment—I think it was Vivek as “Abraham Stinkin,” complete with stovepipe hat and chinstrap beard—I had a brief chuckle, and now I just can’t get rid of him.

Today I’ve seen Vivek as “Chief Shitting Bull,” “Shartin’ Pooper King Jr.,” “Dwight D. Icantshower,” and the extremely immature, but nevertheless very funny, “Adolf Shitler.”

(I’m of the opinion that, as a man gets older, he comes to realise the things he thought were funny and cool at age eleven are the right things to think are funny and cool as an adult too. An eleven-year-old Charles Cornish-Dale would definitely have laughed at “Adolf Shitler.”)

Some of the film memes were pretty good too. Forrest Dump gets an A-, but my personal favourite was “No Country for Indoor Plumbing,” with its tagline, “There are some things you just can’t flush.”

Again, eleven-year-old me—rolling on the floor, gasping for breath, eyes cloudy with tears.

But I have a feeling the GOP increasingly feels the same way about Vivek: that he’s become a tiresome tom-tit that refuses to disappear round the U-bend. Unfortunately, for the GOP, Vivek Ramaswamy is still running for Governor of Ohio, and the election is mere weeks away.

Vivek has been making headlines after releasing a new attack ad against his Democrat opponent, Amy Acton.

The 60-second ad stars Acton’s own mother, Donna Arthur, and gives air to some very dirty laundry. The mother says the daughter “has a serious problem;” is a “liar;” “lies about her past,” claiming she “grew up living in a tent;” “has lied her entire life;” and “needs help.” The mother urges Ohioans not to vote for her daughter, because she’d make their lives worse. The mother also insists she loves her daughter, and is speaking out for that very reason.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel grubby just watching it. I went and sat in my cold-plunge barrel in the rain, then covered myself with olive oil and scraped it off with my custom-made brass strigil from Etsy. Only then did I feel clean again.

But here’s the thing. The video missed an important fact about Amy Acton’s childhood: She was almost certainly raped by her stepfather when she was ten years old. Acton was removed from her childhood home by social services and, by her own account, hasn’t seen her mother since 1978. Her brother corroborates her story. Despite the stepfather being charged with rape, the mother stayed with him till his death.

When you know those facts—and, trust me, the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign knew those facts—the animosity between mother and daughter takes on a whole new light.

Now, politics is a contact sport. We all know that. President Trump is maybe the best full-contact athlete in the world of politics today. Just ask Rosie O’Donnell, Meghan McCain, Hillary Clinton. Trump knows, as well as any postmodernist, that the personal is political, and vice versa. When the Access Hollywood “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape dropped in 2016, Trump lined up a half a dozen women who claimed Bill Clinton had raped them and brought them to the studio for the next presidential debate. Sure, rape can be political ammunition, especially when your president could be the wife of an alleged rapist and she’s making out she’s a great champion of women.

But saying a candidate is unfit for office because she was raped? Say what you want about President Trump, but I don’t think he’d do that.

Of course, Vivek denies that’s what the ad is actually saying, and he’s had some full-throated endorsement from President Trump and some rather less enthusiastic support from the VP.

Vivek has said the ad isn’t about the abuse Amy Acton faced but a lifelong pattern of “dishonesty” and how that should disqualify her from public office. He’s not embarrassed about the ad at all, he feels not even a blush of pudeur. In fact, he’s paying $4 million to make sure as many Ohioans see the ad as possible before casting their votes.

Do you believe him? I don’t, and here’s why.

Read more

Welcome to REN’s roundup, a blast featuring some of the most important stories I’ve been reporting on this weekend. Each Sunday, I’ll give you five full stories covering everything from the latest developments in MAHA-world to events in the Middle East. The roundup is free to read, but if you like it and you like the rest of the content on In the Raw, please consider subscribing. For the cost of a couple of boxes of eggs a month, you’ll get access to exclusive essays, fitness guides and nutritional advice, podcast episodes and much more. You’ll also have my eternal gratitude, and who knows when and how that might come in handy…

Top RFK Jr. MAHA Advisor Calley Means Quits Over Stalled Agenda

A senior advisor to RFK Jr. resigned this week over frustrations that the Make America Healthy Again crusade has hit a brick wall.

Calley Means was one of RFK Jr.’s top advisors and is generally credited with bringing Kennedy and Trump together during the 2024 election campaign.

His departure two weeks before the midterms is the most high-profile sign of growing disillusion within the movement.

In a prepared statement, however, Means praised President Trump and Secretary Kennedy for the progress they have made.

“I leave with tremendous respect for President Trump and RFK — two historic figures who are committed to confronting a corrupt DC bureaucracy that is doing everything possible to protect the status quo,” Means said.

“The past two years have seen historic policy and cultural change to confront the chronic disease crisis and healthcare incentives that profit from us being sick. This movement is in the first inning and just getting started.”

Two officials with the administration said Means was frustrated about “what he saw as a lack of progress on MAHA priorities.”

“The breaking point came this week. Means had been scheduled to meet with Kennedy and White House officials to discuss defining ultraprocessed foods,” Politico reports.

The meeting was postponed.

One of the officials described the postponed meeting as “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“Calley’s been pushing very, very hard for this, but it’s been a very opaque process and has been just continuously stonewalled.”

Means had been hoping an established definition for ultraprocessed foods would allow the eventual regulation of many food additives that are associated with the chronic disease epidemic in America.

Politico notes, “Means, who initially served as a White House adviser and later became a senior HHS adviser, was heavily involved in early Trump administration wins on food policy, including revamping the dietary guidelines, getting a smattering of big candy and food companies to voluntarily remove artificial dyes from their products and restricting unhealthy drinks from food stamp coverage in 17 states. He also worked on an executive order, signed by Trump in April, that directed federal agencies to boost research efforts into psychedelic medicine and on efforts to increase nutrition courses taught in medical schools.

“But many MAHA adherents felt the movement lost momentum in February when Trump signed an executive order to increase production of the herbicide glyphosate. MAHA activists have long argued that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is poisoning the food supply and driving increases in chronic diseases.”

Means, like Secretary Kennedy, was disappointed with President Trump’s glyphosate order.

In recent months, he apparently began to feel the MAHA movement was being “subverted by special interests.”

“There are a lot of presidential promises within the MAHA movement that have been pretty blatantly subverted by special interests, and that’s completely driving his decision to step to step aside and resign,” one of the officials said.

Read the original story on Alex Jones Live: https://www.alexjoneslive.com/2026/10/25/top-rfk-maha-advisor-quits-over-stalled-agenda/

Noncitizen Voting: DoJ Moves to Block 20,000 California Ballots

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has moved to prevent the state of California from counting 20,000 mail-in ballots it says may have been case by noncitizens.

The DoJ claims that once the ballots have been counted, there will be no way to separate them from the legitimate votes of US citizens.

First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli and Attorney General Todd Blanche are leading a motion before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that would force California to put aside the disputed ballots and verify the citizenship status of the voters before accepting them.

“Every minute that goes by, American citizen votes are being diluted in the state of California,” Essayli said.

“It’s an emergency, and we expect the courts to treat it as such.”

The DoJ identified around 20,000 probable noncitizens who received mail-in ballots in California and asked state officials to review the list of names within 48 hours.

When the state refused, the DoJ sued, in a bid to prevent the ballots being counted until the citizenship status of the voters could be confirmed.

“California election officials were given an opportunity to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls and to sequester ballots returned from suspected ineligible voters. They refused,” said Essayli.

The dispute with California is part of a wider Trump push to prevent noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

Recently, Alex Jones Live reported that a judge blocked the DoJ’s attempt to check voter rolls against a federal immigration database.

In a 78-page decision, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan—a Biden-appointee—said the DoJ had downplayed the risk that its attempts to combat voter fraud could disenfranchise US citizens.

“The challenged policy ​represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote. But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always ​placed it: with the states,” she wrote.

The case concerns the so-called SAVE database, which contains details of the immigration status of individuals in the US.

In June, in a separate case, Judge Sooknanan blocked the Trump admin from using the database to check the accuracy of voter rolls.

That decision was temporarily paused by the Supreme Court last month.

The Trump administration has made voter fraud a key priority.

Last year, President Trump ordered the DoJ to crack down on voter fraud, which led the Department to demand unredacted voter rolls from almost all 50 states. Voter rolls include sensitive data like Social Security numbers.

Eighteen Republican-led states complied, and the voter-roll data was cross-checked with the SAVE database to allow ineligible voters to be removed.

The DoJ has sued 30 states that have so far refused to hand over their data. It has lost 26 cases so far without a single victory.

Read the original story on Alex Jones Live: https://www.alexjoneslive.com/2026/10/24/noncitizen-voting-doj-tries-to-block-20000-california-ballots-from-being-counted/

US Intelligence: Iranian Plots to Murder Americans Abroad at “Advanced Stages”

Iran has reached the “advanced stages” of plans to murder Americans abroad, according to US intelligence.

According to Axios , “U.S. intelligence finds Iran has ‘substantially increased’ its efforts to target American diplomats and officials in the Middle East and beyond.”

Axios claims to have seen a memo sent on Friday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The intelligence is claimed to be one reason the State Department has withdrawn personnel from American embassies across the Middle East.

Embassies in the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Qatar and Jordan have had staff recalled to the US.

Attacks on Americans could be launched by the Iran-backed Houthi Rebels in Yemen.

Says Axios, “In the one-page, unclassified memo obtained by Axios, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton warned Rubio that intelligence about Iranian assassination plots needs to reach more U.S. personnel than are currently authorized to receive it.

“The memo does not identify specific targets, countries outside the Middle East or the nature of the plots, but says the underlying intelligence has already been shared with senior State Department officials.

“Clayton offered to downgrade as much of the sensitive intelligence as possible so Rubio could share it more widely with personnel potentially at risk.”

At a rally in Florida on Friday, President Trump said the US may resume strikes against Iran soon.

Addressing the crowd at Fort Myers, Florida, the President said Iran now has two options, and he believes the Islamic regime’s leaders will choose the hard one.

“We may do another little Epic Fury, or they’ll agree,” Trump said.

“If they’re smart, they’ll just say, ‘Let’s get down to business.’ But I doubt they’ll do that because perhaps they’re not smart.”

“Epic Fury” is the name of the initial operation against Iran that began on 28 February. Tens of thousands of US service members in the Middle East took part, and over 13,000 targets in Iran were hit.

Peace talks continue to stall, as the US maintains its economic and military blockade of Iran.

While the US has increased its sanctions, Iran has said sanctions need to be lifted before negotiations can resume.

In an interview this week, the US ambassador to Turkey said the US could “absolutely” strike Iran as soon as this weekend.

“The president is very clear. He’s open and available and accessible to a deal. And we’ve been at the table for months and months and months,” Tom Barrack said.

Barrack added that President Trump wants to “bring the temperature down,” but also warned that Iran would pay a price for threatening the US, its allies and the rest of the world.

The ambassador said Trump has no interest in “regime change,” but wants “rebalancing” so “there’s no hostages, there’s no threats, and the world can calm down.”

Read the original story on Alex Jones Live: https://www.alexjoneslive.com/2026/10/24/us-intelligence-iranian-plot-to-murder-americans-abroad-at-advanced-stages/

Trump Blasts Judge Over Delay in Tyler Robinson Trial

In a post on Truth Social, the President gave Judge Tony Graf both barrels ahead of a hearing concerning the trial date of Tyler Robinson.

“The judge in the Charlie Kirk case is doing a terrible job!” President Trump wrote.

“This case should be tried within a month, not three years — and it should be over with! The judge is desecrating the memory of the Great Charlie Kirk, while taking forever to ask questions that people already know the answer to. The whole Country is mocking him and our ‘Legal’ System. JUSTICE FOR CHARLIE!”

At the hearing on Friday, the judge decided he needed more time to set the date of the trial.

He set a new hearing for 9 November.

Robinson’s lawyers have asked for the trial to begin in the third quarter of 2029, in order to give them a chance to challenge the state of Utah’s request for the death penalty, gather further evidence and seek a change of venue.

Prosecutors want the trial to begin on 31 January 2028.

Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, said in a separate finding that the defense’s request was “grossly out of line with comparable cases,” and asked for the trial to begin no later than 4 October 2027.

Robinson, 23, has pled not guilty to seven counts including aggravated murder for the shooting of Charlie Kirk.

Read the original story on Alex Jones Live: https://www.alexjoneslive.com/2026/10/24/trump-tyler-robinson-should-be-tried-within-a-month-blasts-judge-for-delaying-trial/

Trump Vows to “Veto Everything” if Democrats Win the Midterms

President Trump has vowed to “veto everything” if the Democrats win the midterm elections.

“I think the Republicans are going to win—but if there was gridlock, what happens is I veto everything, and then the Democrats come and want to make a deal,” the President told reporters at the White House.

President has used his veto twice so far during his second term.

By comparison, in his first term he used it ten times.

President Biden vetoed 13 times.

So far, at least 22 million people have voted early in the midterms, according to Florida’s Election Lab.

Ten million have voted in-person, and 12 million have returned mail-in ballots.

A total of 59 million early ballots have been requested.

President Trump has promised to provide $5,000 dividends to Americans if Republicans retain control of the House and the Senate.

He has said the dividends will be payments from his flagship tariff policy as well as new investments in the US.

At the beginning of the month, President Trump also promised that further strikes against Iran would not take place until after the elections.

President Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., has allocated around $500 million for the midterms.

In early September, Alex Jones Live reported that the Democrats are already laying the ground for post-midterm investigations into entities tied to Trump.

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

Senior Democrats are planning to take a more cautious approach than during Trump’s first term, Reuters says, because they don’t want the President to be able to portray himself as a “victim.”

“We’re ​not going into this to impeach,” said a senior Democratic aide, describing the thinking among party leaders and committee staff.

“No one wants a failed vote on day one. The focus is on building ​a body of evidence through investigations that can hold Trump accountable.”

Regaining the House in November would allow the Democrats the ability to issue subpoenas, compel testimony and evidence, hold hearings and pursue proceedings for contempt.

Democrats expect attempts to compel the executive branch will fail.

Among the companies that have already been added to the list of targets are Apple, Alphabet, Palantir, Blackstone, BlackRock and companies owned by Elon Musk.

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

Read the original story on Alex Jones Live: https://www.alexjoneslive.com/2026/10/25/trump-ill-veto-everything-if-dems-win-midterms/

And now for something a little different. A while back—a year? has it been that long!?—I posted my last academic article, which was published just a few weeks before I was doxxed. I’m hoping it won’t be my final academic article. In fact, I’ve been going over some of my old work, and my DPhil thesis, and thinking about publishing some more essays about medieval and early-modern England. Perhaps I’m just feeling nostalgic for serious historical scholarship, I’m not sure. Anyway, I felt like posting another academic article from my time at Oxford. This is one I greatly enjoyed writing. In my journeys through various archives, I discovered another series of printed sermons that suggested the argument of a very famous book, David Underdown’s Fire from Heaven, was seriously overstated. Underdown argued that the Dorset county town of Dorchester was transformed into the most Puritan town in England after a great fire in 1613, which the local preacher, John White (one of the founders of Massachusetts), argued was a judgment from God on the sins of the townsfolk. With the evidence I found, it became clear that there was already a vigorous attempt to reform the character of the town decades before the Great Fire. Underdown had totally missed this. That’s a rather long introduction, I know.

How quickly Protestantism took root in Dorchester we can only guess. In the sixteenth century the town had no great reputation as a centre of reformation; it was Poole that was said to have contained ‘the first in that part of England were called Protestants’ (Underdown 1993, 17).^[i]

Central to the story of David Underdown’s book, Fire from Heaven, is his claim that between the accession of Elizabeth I, in 1558, and the Great Fire of 1613, which destroyed most of the town, Dorchester was essentially an unregenerate place. Home to just a few zealous Protestants, it was otherwise part of a broader Dorset scene ‘much infected with recusancy’ and ‘popery’ – a culture ‘festive’ but not fervid for the Word of God. And so the town’s sudden transformation into ‘the most Puritan town in England’ was all the more sudden and all the more transformative: a revelation conducted through the preacher John White, and received and implemented with popular enthusiasm and support.^[ii]

By 1600, claims Underdown, ‘few, if any, of the governors of late Elizabethan Dorchester seem to have had any vision of an alternative to the way their community, and its problems, was run’ (Underdown 1993, 23). One of these governors was George Trenchard. He was variously a justice of the peace and then sheriff of Dorset, and MP for Bridport, Dorchester and, finally, the county. The Trenchards hailed from Wolveton House, to the north of Dorchester, and had been among the central cast of local politics for some time. George’s grandfather had been one of the commissioners for church goods, local officials appointed during the reign of Edward VI to survey goods and plate in advance of its confiscation and sale. His father, Thomas, who was high steward of Dorchester, had married into the notable Horsey family of Clifton Maybank, the serene manor house where the poet Thomas Wyatt had died. Despite noting that George appears to have been an enthusiast for reform – or at the very least, a keen-nosed hound of Dorset’s remaining Catholics – Underdown still means him to be included among his fellow governors, who lacked a godlier vision of their community. Pursuing Catholic recusants county-wide, Trenchard also raised concerns about the lax conditions that allowed ‘papists [to] live at ease’ in the common jails. His highest-profile targets were missionary priests, owing to their role as direct agents of the pope and fomenters of sedition, especially after a series of plots that had elicited savage penalties in response. His most famous discovery would come at Easter 1594, when he rooted ‘blessed’ John Cornelius out of Chideock Castle, a notorious den of popery. Cornelius was then taken to Wolveton for confinement and examination before his execution, which was of course widely publicised. Other of Trenchard’s deeds, especially his role organising and coordinating local defence during the Armada crisis, received somewhat less publicity; although they surely watered the reformed faith far more than did the blood of a single aged priest (Lloyd 1967, 94, 118-21).

These facts about Trenchard are well known. But other, potentially more revealing, facts about him have managed to go unnoticed, even by Professor Underdown. Significant enough, certainly, to complicate his portrayal of Trenchard, these unnoticed facts must also complicate his wider narrative about the town; in 1600, Dorchester was perhaps not quite so unregenerate, nor its governors quite so lacking in moral vision, as he has claimed.^[iii] The main evidence consists of a series of sermons preached in Dorchester in 1585 by the minister William Chubb, a returning native of the town. Both concern aspects of God’s temple: the first, its building; the second, ‘what the temple is’. It is uncertain whether Trenchard commissioned the sermons, but when they were printed the next year, and again the year after, each edition was dedicated to him in the same fulsome terms (Chub 1585a). The praise lavished on him, and other evidence, including Chubb’s other published works and a few surviving biographical fragments, reveal that Trenchard was perhaps as keen a patron of sermons as any of Dorchester’s later godly governors. More substantially, it would appear that as early as the 1580s an alliance between magistracy and ministry – between the secular and the ecclesiastical arms of government – was in embryonic form in the town, and with important links beyond it. Trenchard’s place within this embryo alliance is confirmed by another dedication, also unremarked until now (Mayo, 1591). Whether or not any of this falsifies the central premise of Fire from Heaven, it does indicate, at the very least, that long before a chandler’s tallow ‘blazed up’ and out of control one August afternoon, that later godly fire was already being kindled.

*

About William Chubb, the preacher, far less is known than about George Trenchard. It is in the dedicatory preface of the two printed sermons from Dorchester that Chubb’s birthplace is revealed: ‘the Towne of Dorchester, my native towne’, he writes. Otherwise, there are a scattering of references to William Chubbs in ecclesiastical registers. The appointment, on 17 October 1572, of a William Chubb as rector of Norton-sub-Hamdon, in Somerset, is listed in the register of the bishop of Bath and Wells, as well as his deprivation, some three years later, on 13 May 1575.^[iv] On 22 February 1582, a ‘Willimus Chubb’, master of arts, was licensed as a preacher, according to the register of the archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal.^[v] The reference to the preacher’s qualification, master of arts, leads nowhere: to no record of a William Chubb at either Oxford or Cambridge during the sixteenth century, apart from a William Chubbes who was the first master of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1497 and died in 1505 (Venn and Venn 1922, 336). The register of the bishop of Bath and Wells provides another clue: a record of the death of a William Chubb who was vicar of Frome, also in Somerset, on 9 September 1597.^[vi] Were these three William Chubbs one? The vicar of Frome who died in 1597 was undoubtedly the author of the Dorchester sermons: the dedicatory preface to the printed editions closes with the words, ‘Written in Froome Zelwood, the xii. of December. 1585’, and the preface to another of Chubb’s printed works, a more substantial spiritual guide, was also written from there, again in 1585 (Chub 1585b). It is quite possible, indeed probable, that Dorchester’s Chubb was the preacher licensed by Grindal, and there is even some reason to believe he had also been the rector of Norton-sub-Hamdon. The proximity of the two livings is suggestive. Even more so is Norton’s patron: in 1572 it was Adrian Stokes, the second husband of the deceased Lady Frances Brandon, the duchess of Suffolk.^[vii] Stokes appears, by all accounts, to have been ‘earnest in religion’, and he served on a number of local commissions to enforce church attendance and discover recusants, and on Parliamentary committees on religion and Church government. If Stokes had sought to install a godly minister, the younger Chubb of Dorchester may have proved too hot in his convictions: the deprivation, three years later, could easily have been for some act of nonconformity.^[viii]. Until 1580, Frome Selwood was also in the patronage of another, even more prominent, reformer: Sir John Thynne the elder, the builder of Longleat House. Thynne had been a close ally of Edward Seymour, the earl of Somerset and lord protector between 1547 and 1549, and it was from him that he had purchased the manor and advowson of Frome Selwood.^[ix] A pattern?

Pattern or no, if the William Chubb who preached the Dorchester sermons had first been installed at Norton-sub-Hamdon, on the border of his native Dorset, and ejected soon after, the force of his ejection had not been all that great; for he had come to rest barely thirty miles away, and comfortably, it would seem, with the patronage of a powerful family to cushion him. For that soft landing he would later thank Thynne the elder’s son, also John, in another dedicatory preface, discussed below.

It is not entirely clear from the preface to the Dorchester sermons whether Trenchard actually commissioned them or simply provided the impetus or inspiration. The courtly tactfulness and circumlocution, while customary of such a preface, are something of a hindrance in this regard. Because of Trenchard’s desire for ‘the exercising of preaching’ in Dorchester, and on account of his ‘liberality for the furthering, continuing and establishing thereof’, Chubb was

not onely moved with a comfortable minde for my native country, to see the prosecuting of so good a purpose, but was also bent upon the same argument to preach these two Sermons following, which as well in thankfulness for your proceedinges, as in signification of mine unfained goodwyll, I humbly present unto your worship…

So Chubb may have taken some opportunity, if he were visiting Dorchester, to lend his oratorical talents to Trenchard’s campaign for an enhanced preaching ministry; or he may have been invited for that purpose, either by Trenchard or another Dorchester worthy.

Sermons were often printed after their delivery (Blench 1964; Wabuda 2002). In this case, it is unclear who paid for the printing. Chubb may have had the sermons printed as a gift to Trenchard, to court his favour, if it had not already been won completely, or to cement an existing friendship – or, indeed, to thank him for an invitation to preach. Another of Chubb’s sermons was printed and dedicated as a gift to William Paulet, the third marquess of Winchester, by whose patronage and friendship Chubb also appears to have benefitted.^[x] The printing was a

signification of that hartie good will and grateful affection I owe your L. which I would to last so long in memoriall, as my selfe and my poore familie have occasion to use your L. great favour, alreadie assured to our continuall comfort and stay (Chub 1587).

Paulet’s, interestingly, is a name that features only once in Fire from Heaven, and then only by his title and in passing: Dorchester was careful to elect clients of the marquess to Parliament, after the death of the second earl of Bedford, the then-prevailing magnate, in 1585 (Underdown 1993, 8-9).

So it was through both the marquess’s considerable influence and also the continuing patronage of the Thynne family that Chubb was kept in ‘continuall comfort and stay’, and by the time he preached the Dorchester sermons, he already had a good reputation upon which to build. In the same year as the Dorchester sermons were printed, Chubb was author to The true travaile of all faithfull Christians, a spiritual manual for the lay reader, of the same genre as Arthur Dent’s hugely popular Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven (although unlike the Plain Man’s Pathways, The true travaile does not take the form of a dialogue among a small cast of characters, but is divided into a series of prayers and disquisitions on basic questions of the faith).^[xi] He dedicates the work to John Thynne, the son of John the elder, now deceased, and hails in the preface the ‘continual favoure I have found at your handes (right worshipfull) especially of late in London, as well by writing as by your personall travel’.

This ‘favoure’, ‘writing’ and ‘travel’ must have consisted of written recommendations or introductions, and it is possible that Chubb actually met Trenchard through his patron. Sir John Thynne the elder, at least, had a connection with the Trenchards, if at a single remove: in 1540 he had bought from Sir John Horsey (of Clifton Maybank) the former Augustinian priory that would become Longleat House.^[xii] Equally or more likely, Chubb could have met Trenchard through William Paulet: Trenchard and Paulet were both trustees of Dorchester’s grammar school, and engaged in a number of other charitable ventures together.^[xiii] Nevertheless, given that Chubb and Trenchard were both natives of Dorchester – maybe contemporaries, although no evidence of Chubb’s age exists – they could just as easily have met in school, the town square or one of Dorchester’s parish churches as in London or elsewhere. They could even have met at Wolveton itself, where Trenchard was known to invite radical ministers to dine, among an otherwise rather motley crew of dinner guests, including Sir Walter Raleigh – the ‘atheist’ – on one occasion (Lloyd 1967, 254-58).^[xiv]

Returning to the preface of the Dorchester sermons, no further details of Trenchard’s ‘liberality for the furthering, continuing and establishing’ of preaching in Dorchester are given, but it seems reasonable to assume that he was, at the very least, paying for visiting preachers like Chubb, even if not Chubb himself in this instance, or instead paying for supplementary preaching from the town’s resident clergy. Visiting preachers were far from unknown in the county in the 1580s, even the 1570s. In 1571, William Kethe, a Marian exile who had recently preached for a time in the Minories, a hothouse of nonconformity in London, was brought to the quarter sessions at Blandford, where he gave an inflammatory sermon against traditional pastimes – church ales and Sunday sports (Kethe 1571).^[xv] The corporation of Wimborne Minster began to pay for lectures by visiting preachers in 1576-77, when a preacher visited from nearby Piddle, and it continued to pay for itinerant sermonising until the end of the 1580s, by which time a lectureship – a dedicated preaching position with its own yearly stipend – had been established.^[xvi] Apart from Chubb’s two sermons, the earliest printed evidence of visiting preachers at Dorchester comes from 1613, the year of the Great Fire, when William Jones preached a Christmas Day sermon on the subject of ‘the mysterie of Christes Nativitie’ (Jones 1614). Underdown notes that preachers from the surrounding area were visiting Dorchester earlier than this; although he provides neither names nor dates (Underdown 1993, 27).

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If pharmaceutical companies give doctors gifts and other perks—free food, payments for consulting, seats on advisory boards—the doctors are more likely to prescribe their drugs. Who would have thought? But that’s exactly what happens, according to a new large-scale meta-study. I, for one, am not surprised.

Overprescription of drugs has been in the news a lot lately, and not just because RFK Jr. has made it a major target of his Make America Healthy Again crusade. The defence in the Lindsay Clancy case hinged on the claim that she had been taking enormous quantities of drugs—I think it was 14 in total—and that those drugs affected her mood and sanity in ways that explained but didn’t excuse her brutal murder of her three young children. The question wasn’t whether she killed her children (she admitted that freely), but whether she could be judged responsible and therefore guilty. The Clancy defence said no; the prosecution said yes.

It’s worth dwelling on this for a moment. At various points over a period of just three months, Clancy was on anti-depressants, anti-anxiolytics, mood stabilisers, sleep aids and also over-the-counter medicine: Sertraline, lorazepam, hydroxyzine, buspirone, benadryl, trazodone, fluoxetine, zolpidem, mirtazapine, clonazepam, quietiapine, diazepam, lamotrigine, amitriptyline. It’s not clear which combinations were in her body when, but that issue belies the more general point, which is that nobody—and I really mean, nobody—knows what any of the possible combinations of these drugs could do. The combinations that entered Lindsay Clancy’s body have never been studied. When drugs are tested, they’re usually tested in isolation, and what’s more, testing does very little to capture individual and group genetic differences that might also have serious consequences for users, increasing their susceptibility to harmful side effects.

So, as I argued, Lindsay Clancy is, quite literally, the n=1—the unique subject—and that means if we want any idea of what being on those unknown permutations of drugs actually does to a person, we have to look at Lindsay Clancy and what she actually did. And that means, however much we may not like it, taking seriously the claim the drugs made her kill her children, or at least contributed to her actions in ways that make it harder to blame her.

Of course, there’s other evidence in the case that suggests Lindsay Clancy knew exactly what she was doing. But my purpose here isn’t to drag up all the details and relitigate them. That will inevitably happen when the second trial takes place, and we can have all the same debates again—hopefully with some resolution this time.

Overprescription is a very real problem, and it’s not just limited to being loaded up on a dozen or more drugs at once. To be prescribed a single wrong drug is overprescription. To be kept on a drug for too long is overprescription. Polypharmacy—the taking of five or more drugs from five or more different classes of drug at once—remains the most striking example. In America, rates of polypharmacy now run at an average of about 34% of all adults. That means one third of all adults are on five or more medications at the same time from five or more different unique drug classes. For ages 45-64, the figure is 38%, and for ages 65 and above, it’s 50.9%.

It’s a problem with a gender dimension too. One study claims an American girl born in 2019 will now spend 60% of her entire life taking prescription drugs, as opposed to 48% for an American boy born in the same year. That’s 47.5 years of solid medication versus 37. Part of the difference lies in the early prescription of hormonal contraception, which teenage girls are given for skin issues too, but girls and women are also much more likely to take psychotropic drugs and painkillers too.

Which is why this new meta-study—a study of studies—is important. It shows that a real driver of overprescription in America today is the relationship between physicians and drug companies. Drugs are being prescribed to patients not because they need them, but because companies give out freebies and make doctors feel very special and obliged to reciprocate in kind. We knew this already from the disgraceful involvement of the Sackler family in the opioid crisis, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, but now we know the phenomenon touches a much wider range of drugs than opioid pain pills. The vast majority of the studies reviewed—82 of 93—are from the US, and cover millions of prescriptions.

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Since the Second World War, the left has done its very best to pathologise being right wing: not just explicit identification with parties of the right, but also the basic attitudes, beliefs and stances associated with being of a conservative temperament. The goal of that endeavour is to discourage and even punish right-wing affiliation, to the social and electoral benefit of the left.

Theodor Adorno, of the Frankfurt School, landed some heavy early blows with his 1950 book, The Authoritarian Personality. Rooted in Freudian ideas of repression and the Oedipus complex, the book argued for the existence of a specific personality structure that predisposes people to undemocratic and fascist beliefs. The book produced a special tool called the F-Scale—literally, the “Fascism Scale”—that measured nine key components of the authoritarian personality. These included “conventionalism” (rigid adherence to middle-class values), “anti-intraception” (opposition to the subjective, imagine and sentimental) and “authoritarian submission” (uncritical acceptance of authority figures within the in-group).

Critics pointed out that The Authoritarian Personality had nothing to say about the traits shared by, say, Stalinists. Didn’t they also worship power, persecute dissent, believe hysterical conspiracies about their enemies and lapse into terrifying pogroms and bouts of mass-murder? The historian Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites, said the book effectively made leftism the sole bastion of true mental health, and risked defining large swathes of American society as a kind of open-air “insane asylum.”

But these criticisms are moot, really: Adorno wanted to obfuscate leftist terror and he hated the average American and his entire way of life.

That pathologization, inspired by Adorno and others, continues. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I saw a new scientific study that claims “people who favour group-based inequality”—read: conservatives—have lower levels of gray matter in a region of the brain linked to empathy. Literally: if you’re a conservative you have a shrunken empathy-centre in your brain. The other way of framing it, of course, would be to say liberals have an enlarged empathy-centre, too big perhaps, since it makes them believe countries are just lines on a map and goat-herders from the Middle East and tribesmen from Papua New Guinea have an equal moral claim on their time and resources as their own children. But the default—the idea of the conservative as a mental, moral, even physical, defective—is now powerfully enshrined, and so we naturally think of things that way. Or many of us do.

The funny thing is, though, there’s a considerable body of credible work in the social sciences that tells the opposite story. It’s leftism that’s a pathology. Or, rather, leftists tend to be more mentally ill, unhappier, more neurotic and emotionally unstable than right-wingers. Narcissism and psychopathy have also been associated with “anti-hierarchical aggression”—the desire to destroy society—and Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy predict “virtuous victimhood signalling,” the claims to moral superiority that accrue to the persecuted in today’s leftist worldview. Whether, a fortiori, that means leftism itself is a mental disease, we can leave to some other time. I certainly know what I believe, and I enlarge on this theme at length in my new book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.

Which brings me to the real subject of this missive: James Talarico. Or, as President Trump likes to call him, James Talafreako. Talarico, a Democrat, is currently running in the US Senate race in Texas. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know he’s been mysteriously absent from the campaign trial—nine days in total. He appeared virtually at a campaign event on September 30^th and told supporters he was feeling unwell. He didn’t reappear until last Friday. So conspicuous was his absence, that his opponent, state attorney general Ken Paxton, demanded “proof of life,” which is the kind of thing you do during hostage negotiations with Hezbollah or FARC (there was a bad Russell Crowe film with that very title and premise). Talarico said he’d “had the flu.” Then, on Sunday, came a stunning revelation. Talarico had, in fact, been in a mental institution in Ohio. On X, independent journalist Nick Sortor posted a short clip of a conversation in which a female employee at the Lindner Center of Hope said Talarico had “just been discharged this evening.”

“While I sympathize with those dealing with mental health crises, this man is CLEARLY not suited to become a US Senator representing over 30 MILLION TEXANS,” Sortor wrote.

“The job doesn’t get easier after being elected—it only gets MORE stressful. And Talarico clearly can’t handle it. I pray he gets the help he needs, but Texans need a real representative they can rely on.”

The speculation that Talarico was actually in a padded room rather than “in bed and, you know, drinking lots of liquids” (his words) had begun well before Sortor posted the clip on X. Given the kind of ridiculous stuff Talarico regularly says in public—there are six biological sexes, “God is non-binary,” it’s “abusive” to deny a child’s gender identity, “White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus [of racism]”—it seemed only natural that an unexplained absence would lead to such speculation. I mean, where else would he go? The beach?

Needless to say, the Talafreakout story went mega-viral. Elon Musk boosted it on X and President Trump even alluded to it. “I don’t think it was the flu,” he told reporters.

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I remember that feeling well, the mixture of horror and fascination—the inability to look away even though a big part of you wants to. The Latin root of “fascinate,” fascinum, means a charm or enchantment. Witchcraft. To be deprived of your will by supernatural means. To be under a spell.

I spent a decent chunk of my childhood on the island of Malta, just off the North African coast, where the tuna go to breed and the great whites follow. When my grandfather was stationed in Libya in the 1960s (officer, Royal Air Force), he bought a farmhouse on the south of the island so he and his family, including my mother, could escape the brutal summers in Tripoli. It was only 40 degrees C in August, as opposed to 50, which was a mercy, I suppose, though only a small one.

I remember being very young and heading down to the beach at Delimara laden with glass bottles of Fanta, hard, dark Maltese bread and packets of fatty salami that would sweat in the afternoon sun. We’d spend long days there swimming and my parents would lay and read and I’d go hopping off across the salt pans looking for stuff to poke. I remember, so vividly, staring into simmering rockpools and peeling back seaweed and lifting up stones to reveal shapeless creatures that sucked and oozed and fixed me with their eyeless gaze.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve felt that strange feeling again—the four-year-old confronted with a writhing anemone—as I’ve watched the ongoing media circus over Jane Doe and the Cornell Seven.

Unless you’ve been living under a stone yourself, you’ll have some understanding of what’s been going on. Girl goes to frat house, gets drunk and does drugs with a bunch of fratboys, they all have sex, and after first being okay with it, she later decides that, actually, she was raped.

The events took place nearly two years ago. Jane Doe went to the university first to complain, and they disciplined the boys, excluding two of them and closing the Chi Phi chapter. Police decided, however, that there was no evidence of coercion and declined to bring charges. Now Doe has brought a civil suit, and after the media outcry and the inevitable barrage of women on TikTok, Instagram and BlueSky screaming “I am Jane Doe,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul has appointed Letitia James—that Letitia James—to reconsider criminal charges. Even President Trump has commented on the case, in support of the boys, of course.

Everything is obviously not quite as someone like AOC would have you believe. On stage in New York last month, she described the incident as a “gang rape,” and said it was part of a “culture of rape, sexual assault and pedophilia” at elite universities. I’ll spare you all the gory details, save for one, because I think it says a lot. During the course of the “gang rape,” Jane Doe is alleged to have sodomized one of her “rapists” without his approval. He told police that at the time of the initial investigation. After the unbidden bumming, our “victim” allegedly began performing bodybuilding poses—naked, one assumes—in front of the other men, before resuming sex. I think they call that a “mogging.”

While you might doubt whether it’s even possible for a woman to assrape a man, one look at Jane Doe will tell you otherwise. Maybe a woman can assrape a man. Jane Doe has a heavier deadlift than many male fitness influencers I know. I’ve joked on Twitter that if Vince MacMahon were still in charge of the WWE, as he rightly should be, he’d already have signed Jane Doe and pitted her against Brock Lesnar’s daughter in a hell-in-the-cell match.

Really, you’ve got to laugh.

And yet, this is deadly serious.

I’ve seen plenty of cheap moralizing on Twitter, including from renowned internet tough guys, about how the whole thing is “degenerate” and if you’re interested in it you’re “degenerate” too. If people just stopped paying attention, the logic seems to be, stuff like this would stop happening. Just look away. Oh yeah, and don’t let your daughter go to college.

It is disgusting and unedifying. But no, this stuff isn’t going away, whether you look at it or not, whether you send your daughter to college or not.

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I’ve been rather preoccupied in recent months with my latest book and with writing about politics and culture, but I’m going to devote more time to my bread and butter: health and fitness. Although I think esoteric health Twitter—and Twitter more broadly—is pretty much over now, I don’t want that to stop me from writing about topics I know brought many of you to my Twitter profile in the first place and to here. Please forgive me if I’ve been remiss.

Today, I want to discuss two new studies, both on the subject of chemical exposure.

The first is a study of antifungal use during pregnancy. Mothers-to-be are generally advised that over-the-counter antifungals, including topical medicines and pills, are perfectly safe to use during pregnancy. New research from Denmark, however, suggests that isn’t the case, and that more research is needed—fast.

Scientists looked at hormonal data from nearly 600 mother-child pairs, and also performed lab experiments on human fetal adrenal tissue and pregnant rats. They found that children whose mothers used a particular class of antifungals—azole-based compounds—during pregnancy had altered levels of adrenal hormones up to three months after birth.

Although levels of adrenal hormones remained within the normal range, “the results suggest that fetal development may have been affected,” one of the researchers said. It’s important to note that fetal development wasn’t the subject of the study, only hormones, but the link to altered development is clear. Adrenal levels are responsible for regulating, among other things, glucose metabolism, blood pressure, immune function, reproductive development and growth more generally.

Follow-up experiments using fetal adrenal tissue and pregnant rats confirmed the findings from the mother-child data,.

It’s not news to me that antifungals have endocrine-disrupting effects. Some time ago, I made a post on Twitter about research that showed clotrimazole, a key ingredient in many anti-fungal foot creams, is a very potent aromatase-inhibitor. Aromatase is an enzyme produced by adipose tissue that converts excess testosterone into estrogen. If you inhibit aromatase, you inhibit the conversion of testosterone into estrogen—and that means more testosterone. I joked that maybe foot creams could be the new esoteric testosterone booster.

Jokes aside, though, this new research is a clear warning to avoid using antifungals during pregnancy. Further research is now needed to assess the potential developmental effects, and given the broad range of processes adrenal hormones are responsible for regulating, I’d expect a broad range of studies to be necessary.

The study is also a warning, I think, that we need to look again at common over-the-counter medicines that are assumed to be safe during pregnancy, as well as more powerful prescription medicines like SSRI anti-depressants. It’s a constant refrain of my work on medicine and food that regulatory frameworks, including testing regimes, are grossly inadequate, and this research is yet another reminder of that.

The second study links autism to chemical exposure, which isn’t exactly new or interesting in itself. But what is new and interesting is the method. Instead of looking at urine or blood samples from children or from their mothers during pregnancy, this new research used baby teeth. Baby teeth, which begin developing around the fourth month of pregnancy and continue to form until about age three, act as a permanent record of chemical exposure, unlike blood and urine, which only capture short-term exposures. Many chemicals have short half-lives, breaking down within a matter of days or even hours, which mean they can easily be missed in blood and urine samples. Not so the teeth, however. You could almost think of them like trees, laying down durable rings that remain long after the chemicals have otherwise left the body.

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Kill chiggers. Behead chiggers. Roundhouse kick a chigger into the concrete. Slam dunk a chigger baby into the trash can. Crucify filthy chiggers. Launch chiggers into the sun. Stir-fry chiggers in a wok. Toss chiggers into active volcanoes. Zap chiggers with a Moonraker laser. Pilot a kamikaze FPV drone into a chigger’s bedroom while he’s sleeping…

At last, the time has come. President Trump has declared TOTAL CHIGGER DEATH (TCD).

Well, not quite. In an Executive Order released last Tuesday (No. 14433: “Eliminating Disease-Carrying Pests and Restoring Enjoyment of the Great Outdoors”), President Trump authorized various parties, including the Secretaries of the Interior and of Health and Human Services, to eliminate ticks and mosquitoes in the District of Columbia, using “safe and effective, non-chemical, and technology-enabled methods,” and to “invest in pioneering approaches to eliminate these pests throughout the country.”

What this actually means is that the District of Columbia will now serve as a testing ground—a pilot study, if you will—for a whole new range of methods to kill mosquitoes and ticks; methods that won’t, hopefully, increase the substantial burden of toxic chemicals the environment, and by extension Americans’ bodies, already have to bear.

The goal is to reduce populations of mosquitoes by 90% and ticks by 50%, in under two years. Agencies will develop a framework to regulate new technologies and approaches, and call for new research and also private innovation to produce them. We already have an idea of what to expect. With regard to mosquitoes, we’ve seen the introduction of bacteria species into wild populations to make them sterile, the use of CRISPR gene-editing for the same purpose and even the creation of tiny killer drones to intercept and vaporize them in mid-air. Pretty cool, huh? For ticks, there’s ongoing research into vaccines against Lyme disease and also vaccines that make ticks dismount or block the release of the Lyme pathogen. There are also attempts to target reservoirs for ticks, like white-footed mice, and to genetically modify ticks to stop them from reproducing, again using CRISPR. No doubt we’ll see more cool stuff in the months and years ahead.

If those new technologies and approaches succeed in the DC swamp, they can be rolled out nationwide—and then we really can declare a state of TCD.

Honestly: this is wonderful news, and not a moment too soon.

I’ve warned for years about the threat to Americans’ health from tick-borne diseases, including Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and my personal nightmare, alpha-gal syndrome, a.k.a. the red-meat allergy.

Imagine never being able to eat red meat again!

Imagine dying after eating a hamburger at a barbecue!

That’s actually happened, by the way. Two years ago, there was the first recorded case of a death from alpha-gal syndrome, caused by a bite from the lone-star tick. The tick injects a compound that resembles alpha-gal, a sugar molecule found in red meat. The resemblance is close enough to sensitize the immune system to alpha-gal, and that leads to an allergic reaction every time the person eats red meat. The reaction can range from very mild—a bit of gastric discomfort, maybe some farts—to vomiting, severe diarrhea and even death.

The first recorded fatality, a 47-year-old man from New Jersey, ate a burger and was dead within hours. 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 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. Mystery solved.

A second death from alpha-gal syndrome has also been confirmed in Australia. Truth is, there are probably many more who’ve died from it and simply gone undetected, because nobody was looking for the allergy. So it goes.

Even if only a small number of people have actually died from alpha-gal syndrome, it’s making the lives of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans a misery. The CDC estimates as many as 500,000 Americans could be affected. The vast majority, of course, won’t have a diagnosis, but they will experience symptoms, from mild to severe, every time they eat red meat. At the mild end, most will have little reason to suspect, and even when people experience worse symptoms, their first thought is unlikely to be, “Do I have a meat allergy?” They’re more likely to blame their wife or mother-in-law’s cooking, or UberEats for delivering the takeout food cold and riddled with thick black hairs.

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“The conditions are grueling. Temperatures regularly soar above 110 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, then drop sharply overnight. Water is scarce and the dust and sand get everywhere. But at least they are working above ground. This elite group of Ukrainian drone operators has spent years hunting Russians from dugouts in Ukraine. They are still doing the same—but in the desert in northern Mali.”

According to a recent report from CNN, Ukrainian drone specialists are now being deployed to Africa to fight a hidden war against Russian soldiers, not just in Mali but also Sudan and Libya. At present, the numbers of Ukrainians in Africa are small—there are just 15 in Mali, says CNN—but if their numbers grow, as they’re likely to, so will the damage to Russia’s vital economic interests. Maybe these intrepid warriors will help bring the war back home, now in its fifth bloody year, to an end.

CNN spoke to a drone operator embedded with the Azawad Liberation Front in Mali, which is currently fighting about 2,000 Russian troops propping up the military regime of Assimi Goïta.

“I coordinate their operations remotely,” he told CNN.

“The signal from their drone comes to me over the internet, and I immediately tell them via radio what to do and where to fly.

“They go out on missions, then return to me, and we go over every detail of their actions. I don’t go out to the front lines myself—that was a direct order from my superiors.”

Soldiers are now travelling from Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso to Mali to receive training from the Ukrainians there, CNN reports.

The purpose of the mission is twofold. First, the Ukrainians want to undermine the idea that Russia is a reliable ally in the region, with everything that entails for the war in Europe and Russia’s chance of winning it. And second, they want to test their newly developed equipment under totally different conditions, so they can improve it and develop new tactics.

Drones have come to be the most important technology in the war in Ukraine, claiming the lion’s share of thousands of casualties each month. Both sides are making millions of drones a year, and deploying them in a range of missions, from long-range strikes on infrastructure, to reconnaissance and assassinations on the battlefield and behind enemy lines. The video footage from drones has become one of the main propaganda tools of the war, a reminder that no-one is safe anywhere and that massive numbers of soldiers and expensive equipment like main battle tanks count for far, far less than they once did. Ukraine has become a hub for cutting-edge drone warfare, drawing combatants from around the world—and even cartel members from South America, as I wrote for American Greatness recently—to learn the very latest ways to maximise damage at minimum cost. The Ukrainians are only too happy to market themselves as the world experts in drone-warfare, which they are, and to share their knowledge when it benefits them.

Conditions in Africa, and the kind of war being fought, are very different from the morass in the Donbass.

“Dust and heat cause equipment to fail faster. Filters, cooling, electronics protection, batteries… everything works differently (and) requires serious adaptation,” a Ukrainian intelligence source explained.

“In Ukraine, it’s high intensity, massive strikes, constant pressure. Here it’s more of a maneuverable war over large territories, ambushes, route control, working in small groups and depending on knowledge of the terrain.”

The first suggestion Ukrainians were in Mali came two years ago, when Azawad ambushed and killed a large number of Russian Wagner Group fighters near the border with Algeria. A spokesman for Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence said his country had provided the rebels with “necessary intelligence,” which led the regimes in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso—all Russian allies—to file a complaint at the UN that Ukraine was sponsoring terrorists.

Earlier this year, Ukrainians were also involved in the capture of the strategic town of Kidal, in the north of Mali. Azawad linked up with Al Qaeda militants and launched a simultaneous strike against Russian troops in the town, forcing them to retreat. Russia’s Defense Ministry accused “Ukrainian and European mercenary instructors” of training the rebels for the attack.

By all accounts, Ukrainian drones played a key role in the victory at Kidal. The rebels have “rudimentary” equipment and show little discipline. What they lack in tech and training, they make up for in enthusiasm. But there’s no question this is a relationship of “convenience, not necessarily conviction.”

“Culture and religion are different, but when you are being attacked by the same idiots, ideological differences fade into the background,” said the Ukrainian intelligence source.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

In the last decade, Russia has emerged as a powerful new player in Africa, especially the resource-rich but acutely unstable Sahel region, below the Sahara. There are now as many as 5,000 Russian troops dotted across a number of different countries, from east to west. In exchange for military support, ranging from close protection and training to direct combat roles, Russia receives access to a wealth of resources that can be used to keep the war machine grinding slowly through the rich black chernozem mud of Ukraine.

The new African model was established by the Wagner Group, a private military company founded by long-term Putin ally Yevgeney Prigozhin. Wagner entered Sudan first, in 2017, to train Sudanese government forces in exchange for gold-mining concessions. The next year, they were in the Central African Republic, first providing training and then fighting alongside government forces in exchange for rights to gold, diamonds and timber. Since then, Russian forces have taken up residence in Libya, Burkina Faso and Niger. In 2023, after Prigozhin’s abortive coup and murder, Wagner was merged into the conventional armed forces, and the Africa Corps—a name to conjure with—was established to continue the work.

Space has been created for the Russians by the dramatic and sudden withdrawal of European, especially French, power in the region. Between 2022 and mid-2025, a domino-like series of coups and reversals saw France lose almost all of its long-established military bases in West and Central Africa: bases in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Ivory Coast and Senegal. The new regimes simply told the French to leave, and they did. Françafrique—France’s lingering domination of its former colonial possessions in the Dark Continent—has now all-but unravelled and been replaced by Russafrique. In many places, like Mali for instance, Russian forces entered practically the same day as the French left. It’s hard to see this as a coincidence.

How much money is Russia making from its African operations? The most frequently cited estimate comes from the 2023 “Blood Gold Report,” which claimed more than $2.5 billion in gold had been extracted from the Central African Republic, Mali and Sudan since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—or about $114 million a month.

However much money Russia is making, it’s a lot, and it’s needed. Africa now functions as “the Kremlin’s alternative treasury.” Because Russia is blocked from the global financial system, the country has had to turn to gold bullion to finance the war. Russia’s reserves hit a record $310 billion in December of last year. Gold is now regularly exchanged for weapons or for cash to buy equipment from allies including Iran and North Korea. For example, Russia’s Yelabuga drone factory paid the Iranian manufacturer Sahara Thunder about $104 million for 6,000 Shahed drones and other equipment, mostly using gold bars. An elaborate network of shell companies, cut-outs and go-betweens, from Africa to the Middle East and Turkey, helps Russia to process the gold in various ways and plough it into guns, missiles, drones, other equipment and mercenaries.

But what it all comes back to is direct control of resources in Africa—not just gold, but diamonds, uranium, manganese, oil and timber—and the use of extreme violence to maintain that control. Russian forces in Africa have already become notorious for their brutality: torture, murders and massacres. In one outstanding instance, Wagner forces are alleged to have murdered as many as 500 civilians in the town of Moura, Mali and buried them in mass graves, between 27 and 31 March 2022. The military regimes the Russians support are no less brutal; violence brought them to power, and could easily be their undoing.

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The food you put in your mouth can have a profound effect on your health—and not just your physical health, but your mental health too. Who would have thought?

I would have, for one, and I’m sure you would have too, but it seems the scientific community is only just starting to catch up with grandma’s time-honoured wisdom: You are what you eat.

There’s now a well-established link between consumption of ultraprocessed food—factory-made food that contains ingredients and additives you wouldn’t find in a normal kitchen—and poor mental health. Studies have shown that people who eat more of that plastic-wrapped crap tend to suffer from mental-health problems: depression, anxiety, brain fog and even developmental disorders like autism and ADHD. The more a person eats, the research tell us, the worse their symptoms get.

But one thing we haven’t had is an intervention study: a study where researchers alter the amount of ultraprocessed food people eat and see what happens to their mood.

The existing studies have all been population studies, which simply examine trends among segments of the general population and compare them. These establish correlations, often extremely robust ones, but they’re a less clear guide than studies that control and tweak variables with proper care and rigor. Studies that do that tell us much more reliably about causation.

In this case, does eating ultraprocessed food cause mental illness?

Now, thankfully, that gap in the research has been filled, and hopefully this new work will be a spur to further work and, more importantly, to meaningful policies that promote the consumption of real food as an alternative to reliance on drugs.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara took 20 adults with depression who ate a considerable amount of ultraprocessed food and put them on a diet that contained less. Each person ate their standard diet and then the less processed diet, so comparison would be possible not only between individuals but also in each individual case. In a small study this also helps isolate and control the variables, making it easier to draw meaningful conclusions.

The participants were aged between 18 and 80. All of them had a primary diagnosis of depression and ate a significant amount of ultraprocessed food, as determined by means of a special screening tool. Seventy percent were female, two-thirds were on at least one medication and, on average, the participants had lived with depression for 13 years when the study began, with most also suffering from anxiety.

The participants agreed not to change any other aspect of their lives apart from their diet: they took the same medications, continued attending therapy if they were, exercised the same amount and kept the same sleeping pattern as far as that was possible. This was all done to isolate the effect of the dietary intervention.

The effect was dramatic. On the standard depression scale, scores fell from a baseline of 21.6 to around 8 on the healthy diet. Symptoms of anxiety also decreased no less dramatically.

In fact, the effect was even more dramatic than users of anti-depressants typically experience. A large-scale meta-analysis published in the British Medical Journal, considering data from 242 studies of anti-depressant use dating all the way back to 1979, showed that just 15% of users derived a benefit they wouldn’t have derived from the placebo: the remaining 85% derived no benefit whatsoever. What’s more, those who should benefit the most from anti-depressants—those who have severe depression, comorbid anxiety and suicidal thoughts—actually benefit the least from their use. Most clinical trials of anti-depressants deliberately exclude these people for that reason, even though the drugs are marketed specifically for those groups.

Worse than that even—could there be anything worse than that?—is the fact we’re still no closer to proving the dominant theory of depression, decades after selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were approved for use on the basis of that theory. There isn’t actually a shred of real evidence that depression is caused by serotonin deficiency.

And yet when people are depressed it’s to anti-depressants that they turn—or, rather, are turned.

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I learned a new word today.

Normally I like learning new words, but in this case I’m not so sure.

“Mankeeping.”

It’s close enough to “housekeeping” that you can probably guess what it means, but if you can’t, science website PsyPost has you covered.

“The term describes the effort women exert to compensate for the decline in their male partners’ social networks. It involves behaviours like organizing social events, encouraging men to reconnect with friends, and serving as a primary or sole source of emotional support to prevent the men from becoming isolated.”

Right. Got it.

“Mankeeping” is the central concept for a new study published in the journal Sex Roles. Researchers created a 46-point “Mankeeping Scale” and administered it to hundreds of women in the US and the UK. The women were asked questions about “the actual behaviors women perform to manage their partners’ social life, the emotional impact of that labor, and a recognition that their emotional support is often unequal or unappreciated.”

The researchers found that women who saw themselves as doing more “mankeeping” had “lower relationship satisfaction and higher levels of relationship burden and burnout.” Doing extensive “mankeeping” was also “positively correlated with women’s self-reported depression, anxiety and stress.”

It wasn’t simply recognizing that one’s boyfriend or husband lacked friends and was struggling: It was having to do something about it that ended up having an “emotional impact” and was “associated with poorer mental health.”

The researchers also found that women who “held more traditional beliefs about gender roles” were more likely to engage in “‘mankeeping,” and so to be less happy with the state of their relationship.

The idea that women are underappreciated and receive inadequate recognition for the things they do, especially around the home, is hardly a new one. It’s an idea that, paradoxically, is being asserted with greater vehemence the more equal society becomes, the more women work paying jobs, and the less they do, on average, in the domestic sphere.

Surely you’d expect the opposite to happen? Apparently not.

In recent weeks, to the tune of Paris Paloma’s godawful song “Labour”—bet you can’t guess what that’s about—the women of America have staged the freakout to end all freakouts, jumping to the defense of a woman who brutally strangled her three children with a rubber exercise band, simply because they think her qualities and “labor” as a mother weren’t adequately recognized by her closet narcissist Gemini husband, who probably staged the murder so he could shack up with a new woman, no strings.

I’ve written about this more than a handful of times now, so I’m sorry if I’m trying your patience, but I really do think we need to try and understand where all this anger and indignation is coming from, and in particular that bizarre sense of persecution that seems to have no objective correlate in reality.

I have my theories, as you might expect.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of radical feminists began picking apart Marxist theory to reveal its hidden patriarchal inner lining. One of the key texts they prised open was Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, written not long after the death of Karl Marx and drawing on extensive anthropological and historical research.

The Origin is a pretty radical text in itself, arguing all ancient pre-class societies were “primitive matriarchies” where women ruled the roost because they controlled the means of reproduction, and that the first class society was the first patriarchal society, because the first form of true property was women, under the ownership of their husbands. The implications of this account of history were that the destruction of capitalism would be the end of patriarchy. Indeed, it would be more than that: It would be a return to primitive matriarchy, since women would once again own themselves, their bodies and the means of sexual reproduction. Women had every reason, therefore, to support the program of Marxist revolution.

These new feminists agreed, but not entirely. They noted that Engels—and indeed Marx—had a lot to say about the labor of the mostly male agricultural and industrial workforce, but very little to say about what women do in the home. Is that not labor too? Does that not have value? Is childbearing and cooking and cleaning, “for free,” not a load-bearing structure for the wider economy—the Marxist “mode of production”?

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Testosterone: “the aggression hormone.”

When legendary film director James Cameron called testosterone “a toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system,” he was simply repeating what we’ve come to accept as a truism about the master male hormone. Testosterone makes men aggressive. In fact, it’s responsible for all the regressive behaviour we’re now supposed to associate with traditional forms of masculinity—so-called “toxic masculinity”—and we’d be far better off if there was less of it all round. Men would be much nicer, and maybe we’d finally have world peace and a female president of the United States.

The reality is rather more complicated than that. The science of hormones is not so simple. As we’re coming to understand more and more, the “female” hormone estrogen plays a key role in aggression in animals and humans. In a study I never tire of discussing, male macaques had soy isoflavones added to their diet—plant compounds that mimic estrogen—and their behaviour changed in very interesting ways. Macaques are social animals, but these ones withdrew from the rest of the troop and became more submissive on the rarer occasions they interacted with their fellow simians. At the same time, however, the number of aggressive incidents rose dramatically.

Shy, submissive—but also nasty, sneaky and vicious. What a combination.

I often describe these unfortunate macaques as “incel monkeys,” not least of all because there are clear parallels with human behaviour, as modulated by estrogen.

A new decade-long study, this time of fish, builds on what we know about the role of estrogen in modulating aggression. It also raises worrying questions about the growing pollution of the environment and our bodies by chemicals that mimic the hormone. These chemicals have been linked to more or less every chronic disease in the Developed World and to a precipitous decline in fertility markers, especially sperm counts. One expert, Professor Shanna Swan, believes natural reproduction could become impossible in less than a generation if sperm counts continue to fall like they are—a scenario that’s often dubbed “Spermageddon.”

Scientists in Canada added a synthetic form of estrogen (EE2) that’s commonly used in birth-control pills to a small lake over a period of three years. They expected the male fish in the lake would become passive—feminised—but instead something else happened. The male fish became wildly aggressive. Rather than guarding their nests full of eggs, they abandoned them to chase other fish nearby. In the third year, the population of fish within the lake suffered a catastrophic collapse. The nests stopped being properly cared for and eggs began disappearing. The male fish themselves lost physical features associated with sexual selection and attracting a mate, which made them less likely to reproduce.

Three lakes reserved for special scientific research were used: one to which the synthetic estrogen was added in increasing amounts, and two more that were used as controls for comparison. The total amount of estrogen added to the main lake was between 5 and 6 nanograms per litre, which is a concentration regularly found in rivers and lakes worldwide. This is important, because it means the experiment was realistic, simulating conditions that are now common because of widespread pollution by natural and synthetic forms of estrogen like birth control, but also plastic chemicals, strain-resistant coatings, fire retardants, pharmaceuticals, personal-care products and even compounds found in sunscreen.

Snorkelers filmed interactions among the fish in the three lakes. Hundreds of videos were analysed for the amount of time each male spent guarding his nest, how many times he chased other fish away from the nest, and how many other fish were in close proximity to it. The videos were randomised so viewers had no idea which lake the footage came from. The researchers collected nests and counted eggs using a microscope, and also examined male fish taken from the lakes, with an eye in particular to the nuptial tubercles and fat pad on their backs they use to clean eggs in the nest.

As I mentioned earlier, the researchers were surprised by their findings. Under controlled conditions in a laboratory, male minnows exposed to EE2 became less aggressive; although like their counterparts in the lake, they ended up suffering serious reproductive effects. The male lab fish also spent less time guarding their nests and fertilising fewer eggs.

So why the difference? Why the aggression?

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If the lone male juror isn’t the hero we need, he may very well be the hero we deserve.

I’m talking, of course, about the African American man who refused, against the wishes of the other 11 jurors—nine female, two male—to find Lindsay Clancy not guilty of the murder of her three children by reason of mental disease or defect.

His lone stand may not, in fact, conjure Horatius Cocles defending the pons Sublicius against the rampaging Etruscans, as some of us initially thought; nor indeed Spengler’s legionary who refused to abandon his post during the eruption of Vesuvius, simply because no-one had told him to do so—forgive me that reverie, please. But the case does, at least, tell us something about the nature of justice in America in 2026: where America is, and where she’s heading.

The tl;dr? Nowhere good and somewhere even worse than that. Sorry.

On Friday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis offered the lone male juror “asylum” in Florida if his persecution continues. And he is being persecuted: hounded, his reputation, such as it is, impugned, simply for his refusal to absolve Lindsay Clancy of her guilt.

After days of speculation and discussion about the man responsible for bringing the Clancy case to a mistrial—including interviews with jury members who expressed their anger at his “arrogance” and inability to “articulate anything” during the deliberation—NBC 10, a local Boston station, released a report that revealed his history of alleged domestic violence, a restraining order against him and some $12,000 in unpaid rent to his landlord.

DeSantis called the report a “new low for legacy media.”

“A man objected to allowing a woman to kill her three kids and get away with it, so NBC is trying to smear that juror, whose identity should be protected,” he wrote on X.

“If the juror is being harassed, Florida will provide asylum—I’m sure he’d be welcomed and appreciated.”

The Lindsay Clancy trial obviously isn’t the first time there’s been a media circus surrounding a high-profile legal case.

One of the best examples dates all the way back to 1954: the Sam Sheppard murder trial. Newspapers published jurors’ photos and addresses; jurors were snapped entering and leaving the courthouse and given opinions and comments from members of the public. Twelve years later, the Supreme Court struck down the guilty verdict, citing the “carnival atmosphere” and the failure of the judge to shield the jury from the media.

Many of us, myself included, will remember the insanity of OJ—“If the Bronco doesn’t fit, acquit!”—and then more recently the frenzy of the Casey Anthony trial. In the OJ case, jurors were sequestered for months with heavily restricted access to newspapers. Their contact with the outside world was scrupulously monitored. And yet still they managed to reach the wrong verdict.

Oh yeah, and Derek Chauvin, America’s foremost political prisoner, was tried in a courthouse behind barricades manned by the National Guard. Don’t tell me that was fair.

Lee Kuan Yew, the great visionary leader of Singapore, abolished trial by jury in 1969. Juries had already been restricted to capital cases in the fledgling city-state ten years before. Lee articulated his reasons for the ban clearly. He famously told a story about how, as a young lawyer, he had managed to get four Muslim men off the hook for murdering a British Air Force officer and his family. Lee did this with standard lawyerly techniques. He picked holes in testimony and he appealed to the “weaknesses of the jury: their biases, their prejudices, their reluctance really to find four Mussulmen guilty of killing… an RAF officer, his wife and child.” Although Lee knew he had “discharged his duty” as a lawyer, he knew he could have “no faith in a system that allowed the superstition, ignorance, biases, and prejudices of seven jurymen to determine guilt or innocence.”

The jury system, Lee said, was a “foolish, completely incongruous system” imported from Britain and completely unsuited to Asia, and especially to a multiracial, multi-religious state like Singapore, where a lawyer could play on the tribal loyalties of particular ethnic groups, rather than a shared commitment to an objective ideal like justice and the truth. Lee said all these things in parliamentary speeches, and in a 1977 BBC interview.

America in 2026 isn’t much different from Singapore in 1969. A burgeoning multi-racial state where deep Anglo assumptions that had once ruled can no longer be taken for granted. That writing was on the wall with the OJ trial, for those who had the presence of mind to see it. It was clear even then that certain kinds of crime, with certain defendants, in certain parts of the country would probably never yield a fair result. When the OJ trial was held Downtown, with a jury pool that was more heavily African American, you got one result. When the civil case was later held in Santa Monica—where the murders actually happened—you got another. Same case, same evidence.

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How quickly time passes.

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

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

“Is Charlie okay? What happened!?”

“I’m trying to find out right now…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Azores, maybe?

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

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

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

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

More importantly, what does it achieve?

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

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

And so on, and so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will he protect me?

Will he make a good father?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should these women serve on juries?

Should they vote?

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

A Pop Tart?

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

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

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

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

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

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