I haven’t watched Louis Theroux’s documentary on the “manosphere” and I don’t intend to. I’m familiar enough with the man’s oeuvre and with the kind of tricks he employs in service of an ostensible neutrality that’s anything but neutral. In the case of this new documentary, it’s obvious he chose the dumbest and most retarded people to interview precisely because he wanted the subject—broadly speaking: what’s ailing men in the modern world and what they’re trying to do about it—to appear as dumb and retarded as possible.

When you pick stupid, unlikeable people and point a camera at them, all you really have to do is stand back and let them be stupid and unlikeable. You can sort of splutter occasionally and look a bit bemused and not really say anything, which is exactly what Theroux does. The message—You should disapprove—comes across without an extra input or commentary.

It’s quite clever, and it works. Clearly. Theroux has followed this approach with pornstars and “white supremacist” Afrikaners and countless other undesirables, and now he’s doing it with Sneako and whoever the hell those other guys are.

Anyway, maybe once a week I buy a physical copy of The New York Times. This is a habit I’ve picked up over the last year from spending so much time in American airports and helping myself to free copies. There’s also something quite satisfying about reading the news in physical form, given how much time I spend in front of a bloody screen these days, and there’s got to be some benefit to reading the writing of people whose opinions differ radically from your own. I can bear Ross Douthat, but I still have trouble with Michelle Goldberg; although I’m building up a tolerance, slowly. It’s called hormesis, I’m told.

This week, I bought Tuesday’s edition. Making my way through it pretty quickly, as I always do, I came to the culture section at the back and a review of two new exhibitions in Amsterdam that “imagine the manosphere as a terrain to be redefined or expanded through a little creative ingenuity.”

“Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today”—note the plural there—and “Am I Masculine?” are currently running at two museums in the city with unpronounceable, spittle-flecked names.

“Both shows arrive as the subject of masculinity is being reappraised with increased urgency,” The Times says.

“The idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ has gained traction over the past decade, and the discussion has also broadened to include a ‘masculinity crisis,’ in which some men feel unmoored from the attributes that were considered traditionally male.

“The manosphere, which emerged as an online subculture and has become a multimillion-dollar industry, was part of a larger call to action to revert to classical masculine values like physical Strength and economic self-reliance. Somehow, this translated into a summons to bulk up, start brawls and put women in their place.”

The first show features brightly coloured paintings of horses by an artist called Sands Murray-Wassink that signify the artist’s traumatic experience as a young boy who was told he couldn’t play with horses and unicorns; his grandfather, a stern Freudian psychoanalyst, eventually forced him to undergo conversion therapy to address his love of all things equine. There’s also a piece of performance art in which men confront each other with stereotypical masculine gestures—squaring up, puffing out their chests and the like.

The second show, “Am I Masculine?,” “largely focuses on male fashion and popular culture, with some contemporary art works.” The Times uses the word “deconstruct” to describe the curator’s preoccupations, which wouldn’t have been hard to guess, since that’s all the art world and the culture industry wants to do when it comes to identity—or at least the stable identifies that have sustained Western culture and civilisation and made them great.

“In the first room, there’s an emphasis on competition and power, with a kickboxing ring containing classical Greek and Roman sculpture replicas of Apollo and Hercules, videos of boxing and weight lifting competitions and clips of influencers such as Andrew Tate and the fitness guru Brian Pruett.

“As visitors move through the show, they see visual options for masculinity that become increasingly more gender fluid and eventually entirely free of constraints. The last room features mannequins dressed in a range of androgynous outfits—skirts and boxer shorts, high heels and blousy shirts—with images like a Dana Lixenberg portrait of the musician Prince and a photo of the Dutch gymnast Yuri van Gelder covered in glitter.”

There’s also a two-part exhibition called “Ocean Full of Tears,” that imagines “all the tears across the world that men cannot shed,” presumably because they’re too buttoned up and preoccupied with being manly.

None of this messaging is new. In fact, it’s exactly the same message we’ve heard for decades now. Men will be better off if they’re just, well, less like men. Even writers who take the so-called “crisis of masculinity” seriously, like Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, make that argument too, by claiming the problem for young men today is that they’re not shown enough love and appreciation. Basically, young men need a pat on the back and some words of encouragement—they need to be welcomed into the world of self-esteem and care, which is the dominant, feminine, ethic today.

It hasn’t worked so far, and I don’t think it ever will. Then again, I don’t really think the aim is to solve the problem or “fix” masculinity. The aim is to define the problem out of existence, and with it men themselves.

Must watch!

So that thing that keeps happening—it just happened again. A rabid leftist tried, and failed, for the third time in two years to kill Donald J. Trump, the President of the United States of America.

The third time that we know of. There was also an incident with a drone during the 2024 campaign that was hushed up; and we’ve all forgotten, too, about Nikita Casap, the Moldovan teenager who murdered his mother and stepfather, took their savings and tried to buy a drone he could use to drop a bomb on Trump at one of his rallies. He was going to escape to Ukraine afterwards, or so he thought, with the help of Satanists from the Order of Nine Angles.

The mind boggles, really.

At this rate, we could be on course for a half a dozen assassination attempts—ten assassination attempts?—by the end of Trump’s second term. That’s got to be some kind of record, and not the kind of record a president seeks if he can help it; although President Trump, man of great spirit that he is, is taking it pretty well.

I don’t think we can continue to rely on God almighty or the spirit of Shinzo Abe whispering on the wind, “Donuraldo, turn your head!” milliseconds before impact, or just the preternatural luck of maybe the luckiest guy in the world, to stop the unthinkable from happening.

Let’s be real. If people keep taking shots, the law of probability says someone will finally hit the mark.

One thing we obviously can’t rely on is the Secret Service. What a bunch of amateurs. Their security cordon at the Washington Hotel was defeated by an audacious bit of Naruto-running on the part of gunman Cole Thomas Allen. Watch the video: It’s inconceivable that such a thing could happen.

Except it isn’t. A man with a shotgun, a handgun and two knives just Naruto-ran through a Secret Service checkpoint manned by multiple agents, started shooting and injured one of them before being taken down himself.

What next? Perhaps the fourth would-be assassin will moonwalk past the Men and (lamentably still) Women In Black, grab his crotch and shout “EEE-HEE!” before opening fire?

Hold on, I’m just placing a bet on Polymarket. Be right back…

But seriously, at this stage, if you don’t laugh, the only other option is to cry.

What a sorry fucking mess.

Someone—I think it was Mike Cernovich—said the time for games is over. Trump needs to be surrounded by the biggest badasses in America, by tattoo-covered skullcrushers visibly armed to the teeth and visibly tattooed. Delta Force, Navy Seals, Blackwater, the British East India Company—it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t agree more. Trump needs a retinue of spandex-clad Macho Men toting M-60s, bazookas and flamethrowers around him at all times. The vibe needs to be “Viking chieftain,” “warlord of the post-apocalyptic wasteland”—something like that.

Mainstream commentary on this third attempt has been predictable in its emphases and its conclusions.

My favorite assessment came from Robert Reich—little Robert Reich, tiny Robert Reich, so small he could fit in a kangaroo’s pouch Robert Reich.

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Reich blamed… you guessed it, Donald Trump! for the attempt on his own life.

Reich lamented the days when he was Labor Secretary and “the Washington press corps and Washington officials basked in each other’s celebrity” at the Correspondents’ Dinner; when the most uncomfortable thing about the night was wearing a child’s tuxedo and having to exchange pleasantries with people who’d said you’d be better as an extra in Return of the Jedi than a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet.

“Trump has changed much of this,” Reich says, by bringing “grim hostility” to journalism, taunting hacks with names like “piggy” and barring outlets he doesn’t like from the White House.

“There is a close relationship between the Trump era and violence,” Reich opines, before stopping himself briefly to say “the violence of the Trump administration” is “no justification for Saturday’s attack.”

But then he completely contradicts himself and just says it: Yes, Trump is responsible.

“He has changed the script in Washington. He has ushered in an America that is more divided, distrustful and hostile; an America where political opponents are enemies to be overcome and destroyed instead of debated and challenged at the ballot box.”

Barry Soweto, a man I’m told was once the President himself, although I can’t be sure, was quick to condemn the violence. But conspicuous in its absence from his public non-statement was any mention of how the gunman was obviously a radical leftist like the other two—and indeed more or less all the perpetrators of political violence in America today.

No matter.

We know exactly what they’re doing—Robert Reich, Obama, the Democrats, the mainstream media—and why they’re doing it. We’ve seen these triangulations before. The script is written. They don’t want the violence to stop. They want it to work.

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A quick preface before we get into the thick of things. If you enjoy reading my work and you’re only a free subscriber, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Your generous donations are greatly appreciated and put to good use: I wouldn’t be able to write and produce like I do without you. Thank you.

We live in an estrogen-dominant civilisation: That’s one of the main contentions of my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.

In fact, I believe our civilisation may be unique in human history to the degree it promotes estrogen at the expense of the androgens—the masculinising hormones—and in particular testosterone. This has important consequences not just for our individual health and happiness, but for society. It also influences politics in important ways—but the relationship between politics and biology is a tricky one most would rather shy away from addressing, for obvious reasons.

Societies are many things. One thing every society is—although you wouldn’t get much sense of this from reading history, sociology or most mainstream science—is an hormonal environment. A unique hormonal environment. Various different factors—diet, lifestyle, the physical environment and climactic conditions, social institutions—coalesce to promote certain hormones at the expense of others, and the expression of behaviours associated with those favoured hormones.

Hormones, by the way, before we go any further, are biological messengers. They tell our cells and tissues to do certain things, like building muscle fibres or releasing an egg once a month to be fertilised. Hormones exist in an incredibly complicated series of feedback loops with our environment and our behaviour, which can reinforce or contradict the instructions being sent to our bodies at the molecular level.

A man who wins a contest experiences a surge of testosterone, and that surge of testosterone makes him more likely to compete and win again. The loop continues.

An interesting example I use in my new book comes from the ancient world, and a nomadic group called the Scythians, who inhabited a vast expanse of land across modern-day Russia, Ukraine and the -Stans of Central Asia. Because of their hard horseback lifestyle, the Scythians had significant fertility problems. The hard saddles and the tight trousers men wore caused significant damage to their testicles—damage we see replicated today among keen cyclists, who often have very low testosterone. Not only did this hormonal disruption depress fertility, causing fewer babies to be born, but it also appears to have feminised a minority of particularly unfortunate men, who were believed to be afflicted by angry gods.

We owe the estrogen-dominant nature of our civilisation not to one single factor but many. There’s our appalling diets, including our ever-increasing consumption of ultraprocessed foods, loaded with cheap ingredients, additives and harmful chemicals like herbicides, pesticides and plastic chemicals. There’s our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. There’s chronic stress, something our ancestors may never have experienced unless they were enslaved. And then there’s the ubiquity of harmful chemicals known as endocrine-disruptors because they interfere with the delicate balance of hormones, including the ratio of testosterone to estrogen, which determines whether we are male or female—or even something in between. Endocrine disruptors are inescapable today, and the more we lean in to modern lifestyles—the more we wrap ourselves in plastic, use consumer products, eat processed foods—the greater our exposure to these chemicals, and the greater their harmful effects.

Perhaps my most controversial claim is that liberal democracy itself is a low-testosterone political system, because it fails to allow satisfying outlets for fundamental male desires and instincts. As I said before, behaviour exists in a complex relationship with our hormones, reinforcing their effects or frustrating them. Above all else, democracy prevents the expression of something the Ancient Greeks called megalothymia, the desire to outcompete one’s peers. Men can be equal today, but they cannot be better.

That was a rather long preface to what I want to talk about, which is a surprising way in which our lives are estrogenic. A new study shows the microbes we carry in our guts may also be increasing levels of estrogen in our bodies significantly.

It’s been known for a while now that the gut microbiome—the collection of bacteria, yeasts, fungi and archaea in our guts—plays an important role in regulating our metabolic and hormonal health. There are some strains of bacteria, like Lactobacillus reuteri, that can increase levels of testosterone, for example. Other microbes regulate estrogen, and they’re commonly referred to collectively as the estrobolome. The estrobolome can either keep bodily levels of estrogen under control, within healthy levels, or it can send them spinning out of whack.

Researchers took samples of gut microbes from people around the world: from individuals in industrial societies, and from primitive societies, including hunter-gatherers. They took samples from people of all ages, including infants.

The researchers found that the gut microbes of people in industrial societies are much better—seven times better—at recycling estrogen. What that means, basically, is that estrogen that would otherwise be deactivated in the liver and excreted from the body is instead reactivated by microbes using a special enzyme. Rather than being excreted, it re-enters the bloodstream, increasing the hormone’s concentration and effects.

There was a larger diversity of microbes in the estrobolome of people from industrial societies.

Infants fed formula were three times better at recycling estrogen than those who were breastfed. This suggests a key influence on the ability of the estrobolome to recycle estrogen, as you might expect, is diet. The researchers believe processed foods and in particular lack of fibre may be to blame. Indigestible fibre from plant foods is a major source of food for microbes in the gut, but when adequate levels aren’t present in the diet, microbes may be forced to rely on other food sources, including deactivated estrogen, to survive.

One of my most important recommendations for fixing your hormones and your health is to avoid processed food as much as you can, and to learn how to cook so you don’t need other people to make food for you. Feed yourself properly—and the billions of micro-organisms that inhabit your gut.

A quick preface before we get into the thick of things. If you enjoy reading my work and you’re only a free subscriber, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Your generous donations are greatly appreciated and put to good use: I wouldn’t be able to write and produce like I do without you. Thank you.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Last Thursday, ten House Republicans crossed the floor and voted with the Democrats to keep 350,000 Haitians in the US, in opposition to President Trump’s attempts to remove their Temporary Protected Status and deport them.

The bill, led by Democrat Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Laura Gillen and advanced by means of a discharge manoeuvre, passed.

It’s dead in the Senate, of course, but that’s not really the point.

Now for the roll-call of shame. The ten Republicans are, in no particular order: Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, Don Bacon, Maria Salazar, Carlos Gimenez, Nicole Malliotakis, Rich McCormick, Mike Turner, Mike Carey and Mario Diaz-Balert.

Remember those names. Write them down. If one of them is your representative and their behaviour upsets you, give them a phone call and let them know how you feel. Tell them what you really think of them.

Amazingly, one of these ten Judases, Mike Turner, represents parts of Springfield, Ohio. Yes, that’s the same Springfield, Ohio where Haitians were eating dogs and cats—and probably are still eating dogs and cats right now.

A big fat ginger cat—an old lady’s pride and joy, a little child’s best friend—roasting on a spit. A tiny chihuahua chopped up and grilled to fill a flatbread—barely.

Perhaps more than any other issue during the 2024 election, and any other meme, the dog-and-cat-eating Haitians of Springfield, Ohio underlined the insane evil of President Biden’s border policy, if simply unlocking the gate and leaving it wide open could be dignified as a “policy.” More importantly, it galvanized public support for President Trump’s ambitious promise to deport 20 million illegals over the course of a second term.

Dragging and dropping tens of thousands of Haitians into a rundown little city in the Rust Belt, a place that had known only hard times for decades—the loss of manufacturing and then the Opioid Crisis—was like the final globalist reductio ad absurdum. Instead of investment, support, jobs and real hope, the people of Springfield, Ohio were simply to be replaced by people so alien they might as well have come from the Dark Side of the Moon or one of the rings of Saturn.

This was exactly the kind of America-last politics Donald Trump was elected three times to put down forever.

During the Biden Presidency, close to a million people ended up being shielded by Temporary Protected Status, which, in the words of Texas Representative Brandon Gill, became a “permanent amnesty program for unvetted foreigners.” The status just kept on being renewed and then extended. There was no intention of ever making them leave.

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They just created ten thousand Howling Mutants.

Actually, wait. That’s a lie. There’s only one Howling Mutant—pound for pound maybe the greatest, certainly the funniest, Twitter poster of our age—and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. There won’t be another. But you know what I mean. We all stand in solidarity with our hilarious friend as yet another bunch of leftist freaks attempt to ruin his life.

Fuck them.

Before you read any further, if you don’t already follow Howling Mutant on Twitter, go and follow him. The Vice President of the United States does. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

So last week, a very well-liked Twitter poster had his identity revealed by a newly formed activist group dedicated, in its own words, to “identify[ing] and expos[ing] fascists, whether they are wearing khakis, a suit, or a badge.”

Never mind that Howling Mutant is an account primarily dedicated to making jokes about this size of his penis and his wife’s boyfriend’s: He hangs out with right-wing people and dunks on leftists, trannies, race grifters and other weirdos—so I guess that makes him fair game to be doxxed and face opprobrium and probably lose his job too.

The broke take on Mr Mutant’s doxxing goes something like this: “Yet another anonymous right-wing poster has been revealed to be a handsome, successful, popular guy. And look at the people who doxxed him: ugly, weird losers who get their kicks harassing handsome, successful, popular guys because they have nothing better to do in their sad little lives. Another great victory for the right and its coalition of handsome, successful, popular guys!”

I’ll call this the slap-on-the-back take, because it’s mostly intended to make us feel good about ourselves, we happy few, we band of handsome, successful popular guys who’ve been doxxed by leftists.

Yes, Howling Mutant is handsome (no homo), and this only makes his online persona all the funnier—here’s a guy who pretends to be the most Prufrock-esque underground man possible, the kind of dude whose photograph would make a woman scream, without thinking, “THAT’S HIM, OFFICER! THAT’S THE MAN WHO MADE LOVE TO MY THANKSGIVING TURKEY!”—but that’s hardly the most interesting thing going on here.

The bespoke take, by contrast—my take—is that the doxxing of Howling Mutant shows anonymous posters are now back on the menu after a brief period of respite offered by the re-election of Donald Trump. What’s more, this is a first taste of what’s to come if there’s a Democrat in the White House in 2029. So get ready, anonymous posters.

The outfit that doxxed Howling Mutant is called Decoherence Media, based out of Austin, Texas. It hasn’t been around for long, and there isn’t a great deal of information about it besides its own website.

Time will tell whether we can find out who is funding it—it’s a non-profit, so that already complicates matters—but if we look at the people running the operation, we see a familiar pattern.

The two main people behind Decoherence—Tristan Lee and Jennifer Harper—both have connections to Bellingcat, a cutout that’s been used to carry out deniable dirty work for Western intelligence agencies for more than a decade. The agencies pass off classified data to Bellingcat, which then presents them as the results of their own investigations, through a process known as “parallel construction.”

This is exactly what happened when Western intelligence agencies wanted to finger the Russians for shooting down flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, and that same process of handing off “grey” or even “black” data has also been used to doxx and harass people intelligence agencies want to be doxxed and harassed, almost exclusively on the insurgent right wing, from Europe to North America and Australasia.

Other activist organizations like Hope Not Hate in Britain—the group that doxxed me in 2024–have the same cozy relationship with intelligence agencies and use the same tricks. This is well established.

It’s very clear from the official account given of Howling Mutant’s doxxing that we’re looking at a case of parallel construction. His identity obviously wasn’t revealed simply because he got careless posting on his real-life Goodreads profile, as is claimed, in the same way mine wasn’t revealed by a picture of my squat rack on the patio, clothed with wisteris. Hope Not Hate actually said it was, by the way. They also said I’d carelessly posted my first name on my Twitter profile—like I’d ever have done that.

As if to underline the true political nature of the doxxing—and the actual target—Decoherence released a companion hitpiece about Vice President JD Vance and six “fascist and antisemitic” accounts he follows on Twitter. One was Howling Mutant and another was me. This isn’t the first time Vance has been attacked for who he follows and interacts with on Twitter, but it is the first time someone has been doxxed to get at him.

The prototype for this kind of sting is, of course, Douglass Mackey, a.k.a Ricky Vaughn, the Twitter poster who was unmasked by the liberal media, hounded and then railroaded by the Biden DoJ for posting memes about Hillary Clinton in 2016. There was no evidence the memes affected the election in any way, apart from making quite a lot of people laugh at the stupid, corrupt woman who really thought she was going to be America’s first female president. Mackey didn’t even make the memes himself: He found them on 4Chan.

But none of that mattered. Mackey was charged with election interference under a Reconstruction-era anti-Klan statute and found guilty by a partisan jury in New York. His enemies in government waited four whole years, and then within days of the usurper Biden entering the White House, the FBI was kicking down Douglass Mackey’s door and hauling him away.

Trump’s enemies went after all the Big Beasts who helped him win, against the odds, in 2016—Bannon, Flynn, Navarro, Jones—but they also made sure to go after a little guy too, a representative of the ordinary people who organized in a more humble but no-less-meaningful way.

The message was clear: Anonymity won’t protect you. We can find you and we can send you to prison for posting on the internet. So don’t.

The persecution of Douglass Mackey was a testament to the importance of the internet and the “meme war” to Trump’s rise and enduring popularity, but also, just as importantly, a sign of how far his enemies are prepared to go to put the lid back on the America First populist movement.

Thankfully, Mackey’s case was dismissed on appeal. He never went to jail. But for four years his life was effectively ruined. And even before he was prosecuted, he was forced to leave behind his old life and move halfway across America, to Florida, in an attempt to get away from the people hounding him.

In reality, an entire decade was stolen from Douglass Mackey.

Over the last month, we’ve heard talk from prominent Democrats like JB Pritzker of a “Project 2029,” a detailed plan to get even with President Trump, members of his cabinet, prominent supporters and even educational institutions and corporations like Paramount that have come to some sort of uneasy settlement with the admin. The Democrats know they didn’t go hard enough under Biden—Trump got back in—and they want to make sure that mistake is never repeated again. With the midterms, they can smell blood too. By winning back Congress, they can begin laying the groundwork for 2029. Of course they’ll start by trying to impeach President Trump.

I’m in no doubt that if the Democrats return to power in 2029, they won’t stop at prosecuting Pete Hegseth, Greg Bovino, Elon Musk and David Ellison. They’ll be coming for the Douglass Mackeys too, and I mean that in the plural because it won’t just be one poster this time.

So yeah, I’m glad Howling Mutant is a handsome dude. That’s good news. He has a lot of friends rooting for him. I think he’ll be all right. But make no mistake: if 2028 goes the wrong way, there really will be ten thousand Howling Mutants, but they’ll have the government so far up their asses it will be impossible to crack a good joke.

Last night I wrote an opinion piece for American Greatness about Britain’s “Angry Young Women,” and it got me thinking again about the relationship between biology and politics.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs of that piece, to give you a flavour of what I was writing about.

This week, Britain’s New Statesman introduced us to “the Angry Young Women,” an expanding coven of radical, unstable, men-hating activist women. This is maybe the first time a mainstream outlet in the UK has acknowledged the precipitous leftward drift of young women, and the major effects it’s having on British society: on politics, culture, relations between the sexes—pretty much everything you can think of, really.

Whether it’s Israel’s war in Gaza, the “Climate Crisis,” the Patriarchy and racism, or the prospect of a Reform government forcing them out of the workforce and back into the home, there to be tethered to the stove and the marital bed for the rest of their days, Britain’s Angry Young Women are “teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack” at any moment.

They talk about how their “bones ache” at the thought of all the suffering in the world. They use portentous, largely meaningless phrases like “the viscerality of the feminine wound” to describe the pain and “trauma” of being a woman today, which includes, prominently, dealing with men who value them only as sex objects and have repellent views about immigrants, carbon emissions and the rights of transgender people. The Angry Young Women say they want “revolution”: “systematic change.” Racked by chronic fatigue and endometriosis, they find satisfaction in protest, non-binary comedy evenings and pursuing “moral missions.” But even then, that satisfaction is fleeting. “You’ve got to be pessimistic,” one young woman says. The point isn’t to be happy: It’s about being angry and engaged.

It is, as the New Statesman puts it, “impossibly bleak.” Women aged 18-30 are head and shoulders the most progressive demographic in Britain today, and also the most downbeat about their future and everybody else’s. The objectively better a young woman’s circumstances—the higher her social class and earnings—the more likely she is to believe the odds are stacked against her. Young middle-class white women are more likely than minorities to believe British society is “systemically racist.”

My contention, in my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is that politics is built on a biological substrate, and that political changes mirror biological changes, and vice versa; politics and biology exist in feedback loops, influencing each other in a constant, dynamic manner.

The main focus of the book is the civilisational decline in testosterone that’s been taking place. The best studies, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, put it at about 1% years on year, and it’s been happening for decades. It’s becoming harder and harder for men to be men, just because they have less testosterone. The political implications of this are obvious. Or, at least, they should be. But we live in a profoundly misandrist society, one that devalues men and makes it impossible for basic masculine urges and instincts to be satisfied. Our society labels traditional forms of masculinity as “toxic” and testosterone itself, as the primary biological agent of masculinity, as a kind of “toxin” men—and everyone else—would be better off without.

Although the main focus of The Last Men is men and testosterone, I do also talk about women and their hormones, and how changes to the broader hormonal environment could be causing changes not just to women’s health, but also to their attitudes and political behaviour. Like, for example, driving women further and further away from the centre of politics towards the extreme left.

This is something that’s well substantiated by polling and research. Almost all of the polarisation that we’re seeing is actually a result of women becoming more left wing. Men’s political opinions, on the whole, haven’t changed all that much in the last 10-15 years. Women, however, are embracing ever-more-radical positions, displaying an alarming readiness to justify political violence and even murder of people who hold beliefs they don’t like, as recent research from Rutgers University has shown.

And it’s not just happening in the UK: it’s also happening in the US. It’s probably happening throughout the Western world, and I think it’s probably happening for the same reasons.

Broadly speaking, I think there are biological factors at work. Yes, I think the internet and social media are to blame, and women seem to be uniquely susceptible to their traps and snares, but there has to be more to it than that. Blaming Instagram and TikTok is the lazy option, especially since they’re blamed for pretty much everything these days.

Biological changes can’t be ignored. More specifically, I think hormonal birth control could be playing a big role.

This is something I say in The Last Men, and it’s also something I say fairly often on social media, including over the past week, when I’ve been baiting people with viral clips of an attractive young women hiking from Mexico to Canada, blaming her apparent lack of concern for her own safety on the effects of the Pill. (She actually appears to be using the hike to promote her OnlyFans account—which doesn’t really disprove my suggestion her brain is all f*cked up.)

But it’s true. There’s plenty of reason to believe hormonal birth control could be altering the structure of women’s brains in ways that alter their decision-making and self-control, in ways that conduce towards their becoming frothing, pink-haired, septum-pierced, man-hating leftists. Hormonal birth control is taken by tens of millions of women, often beginning in their teenage years, when they’re prescribed it against the risk of unwanted pregnancy, but also to treat skin conditions like acne. In the US, close to 20% of young women in their 20s are now on hormonal birth control. Given the scale of use, we should expect to see effects at the aggregate level, and across a wide variety of domains well beyond personal relationships.

One worrying study, discussed in The Last Men, shows hormonal birth control shrinks a region of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in fear processing and emotional regulation. MRI scans show a significant loss of thickness in the region by comparison with the brains of women who have never used hormonal birth control. There’s also a clear suggestion the effects could be permanent: that women who lose cortical thickness never regain it, even if they stop taking hormonal birth control.

Another study, from 2016, suggests that just three months of using hormonal birth control changes the structure and function of the amygdala, another region of the brain. The amygdala plays an important role in threat perception, among other things.

Leftists have been shown to have smaller amygdalas than conservatives. Indeed, it’s not too hard to see how altered fear processing, emotional regulation and threat perception—in basic terms: a collapse in executive function and decision-making capabilities—could drive women to make increasingly stupid personal choices, including becoming a radical leftist.

Talk of biology and politics makes people nervous, for reasons that aren’t hard to understand. Today’s ultra-liberal model of freedom is predicated on women’s complete liberation from slavery to their own biology; in particular, from the risk, however slight, of unwanted pregnancy. Without that liberation, all the gains of the last century or more are imperilled. Women are no longer equal. This is why any attempt to investigate the harmful side effects of hormonal contraception is greeted with such fury by feminists. It’s also why the investigation must continue regardless.

My hope for the immediate future is that scientists with a real desire to do radical, politically incorrect research will begin to look at this relationship in depth. One thing they’ll do is look explicitly at the relationship between political attitudes and things like use of hormonal birth control. Do women’s views change on and off the Pill? How? What could be the biological mechanisms driving that change?

I can hear the howling already.

Back in May 2025, when Pope Leo XIV was chosen—the first American ever to occupy the papal seat—I predicted a test of “ultimate loyalty” for American Catholics in the coming months and years. I didn’t say exactly when it would come, only that it would. Now, I think, it may be here.

That’s bad news.

There had been some pretty loose talk that Robert Prevost would finally be a “based” pope, largely because his brother is one of those boomers who posts memes on Facebook about Michelle Obama’s ding-dong, pours Monster on his cornflakes at breakfast, and has a tiny Asian wife whose name he either can’t pronounce or can’t remember—maybe both.

But John Prevost had disappointing news even before his brother donned the papal tiara. He had no doubt, he said, that his brother would be “following in [Pope] Francis’s footsteps.”

“I know he’s not happy with what’s going on with immigration,” the brother said, as he rode his lawnmower.

“I know that for a fact. How far he’ll go with it is anyone’s guess, but he won’t just sit back. I don’t think he’ll be the silent one.”

Pope Francis had spent the last few weeks of his life criticising Trump and his flagship policy of mass deportation. In February 2025, he wrote a letter to America’s Catholic bishops telling them that Trump’s plan to turn 20 million illegals into squirty cheese was a “crisis” and would damage “the dignity of many men and women.”

Franco’s also used the letter to criticise JD Vance’s understanding of the ordo amoris, the scheme of “rightly ordered love” which the Vice President had invoked to justify Trump’s immigration policy.

Vance handled the Pope’s criticism with grace, saying as a “baby Catholic”—i.e. a recent convert—he still had much to learn.

Truth is, Francis had always hated Trump. He was just making the most of his final moments to say what he’d wanted to say all along. During the 2016 election campaign, he had travelled to the Mexican border and said it was “not the Gospel” to think “only about building walls” rather than “building bridges,” directly implying Trump was not a Christian.

Of course, it would be nice to have a Pope who supports the idea of borders and national sovereignty, rather than one whose beliefs and public pronouncements differ little from those of an overweight female middle-school teacher with rainbow-colored hair and cat fur all over her sweater.

Still, a man can dream.

Catholicism has been a live political issue for Americans since the Foundation, and the issue of “dual loyalty” stalked American Catholics long before Israel was even a twinkle in Lord Balfour’s eye. Because Prevost is American, I predicted he would feel more intense pressure than an Argentine or a Pole to speak about events in America and, inevitably, to condemn them. This, I predicted, would set him on a collision course with President Trump. It was only a matter of time.

Anyway, I think the moment has come, but it isn’t immigration that’s done it.

In recent weeks, Pope Leo has been increasingly outspoken about the Iran war. This culminated in a prayer vigil on Saturday night at which Leo condemned the “idolatry of the self” and the “delusion of omnipotence” that he believes is motivating the war. This was obviously a reference to Trump, even if his name wasn’t mentioned.

Leo also appeared to take a swipe at Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, saying God does not hear the prayers of world leaders with “hands full of blood” or “who wage war.” Hegseth has led prayers at the Pentagon during the war and publicly in front of the press.

President Trump blasted back on Sunday night.

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Last week saw the seven-month anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s murder at Utah Valley University. Charlie Kirk has now been dead for seven months. And what has happened in those seven months—what has been done?

Also last week: new records were unsealed from the ongoing trial of Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk. Among them is a letter addressed to his transsexual roommate and lover, Lance Twiggs—aka “Luna”—in which Robinson confesses to the murder, no ambiguity whatsoever.

“If you are reading this,” Robinson wrote, “I am likely dead, or facing a lengthy prison sentence. I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I took it.”

“I don’t know if I will/have succeeded, but I had hoped to make it home to you. I wish we could have lived in a world where this did not feel necessary. I wish I could have stayed for you and lived our lives together. I lack the words to express how much I love you, and how very much you mean to me. Please try and find joy in this life. I love you, always, Tyler.”

The unsealed affidavits provide details of Robinson’s communications in the hours after the murder, including messages on Discord in which he again confessed and also talked about planning the murder for “a bit over a week I believe.”

This unequivocal, unimpeachable evidence can now be added to the evidence already in the public domain—text messages, fingerprints, a palm print, cellphone and Google Maps data—all of which points to a single unequivocal, unimpeachable conclusion.

Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk.

Hopefully this will now be enough to silence the grifters, retards, ghouls and shameless profiteers who have done everything they can to muddy the waters since Charlie Kirk was murdered, harassing and defaming his widow and former colleagues, and spaffing away in the process a tidal wave of sympathy and goodwill that could have been used to do something, finally, about the radical left and its campaign of violence against its political opponents. Against us.

I believe, in years to come—assuming, of course, that we win—that the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder will be studied as a textbook example of the right’s lamentable tendency to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s baked in, a Pavlovian response, and it’s just so utterly self-destructive. Something needs to change, right now. The left would never behave this way if one of their own had been killed like Charlie Kirk.

Not that I’m saying Charlie Kirk’s murder was a victory. It wasn’t. It was a dreadful, dreadful defeat; the brutal snuffing out of a once-in-a-generation talent and a man who, if he didn’t become president himself one day, would certainly have played a key role in installing president after president for decades to come.

He had already done that in 2024: It’s hard to believe Trump would have won without Turning Point USA and its big, goofy, untiring and utterly inspirational young leader.

Instead of the right rallying round and accepting the patently obvious working hypothesis that Charlie Kirk had been murdered by a radical leftist—probably to impress his tranny girlfriend who hated Charlie Kirk because of his views about biology and gender—pretty soon we were being told Erika Kirk had commissioned the killing to take over TPUSA and she was going to marry JD Vance after he divorced Usha—Have you seen that TikTok where the plumber says he fitted TWO baths in Erika Kirk’s new house!?!?!?—and, actually, it was Israel that killed Charlie because jet fuel can’t melt human bones so don’t you see he was shot with a palm pistol wielded by a shape-shifting Mossad agent, here look watch this video explainer I found on Rumble…

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My new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is out now in hardcover, audiobook and Kindle formats, from Amazon and all good bookshops.

One of the most gaping holes in pretty much the entire “crisis of masculinity” literature—with books like Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men—is biology, and in particular hormones. And by “hormones,” I mean one hormone in particular: testosterone, the master male hormone, the one that’s responsible for men being men and not women, that governs sexual maturation, gives men extra muscle mass, provides motivation, gives them libido, makes them strive to compete and also accept their place in a hierarchy. Testosterone just doesn’t feature at all. Yet maybe all of men’s problems today, and especially young men’s problems, map to some extent onto the civilisational decline in testosterone levels that’s taking place. The best studies, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, suggest testosterone is declining 1% year on year, and has been for decades.

Jordan Peterson, for example, famously discussed what happens to lobsters if you give them the neurotransmitter serotonin. It became something of a meme, funny for a while, then deadly tiresome. But there isn’t a single mention of testosterone in 12 Rules for Life that I could find. Nor, indeed, is there a mention of it in the follow-up, Beyond Order. Young men, it seems, lacking the order and discipline to clean up their rooms and pet a cat in the street when they see one, don’t have to worry about the biological basis of their failure to summon the will to do even the most basic things—because there isn’t one. Or at least that’s what you’d be led to believe, anyway.

Richard Reeves does mention testosterone in his book, Of Boys and Men, but only in the most perfunctory manner. His concern, basically, is to dispel the notion that men are governed by testosterone, and that that means they’re forever destined to be aggressive, unruly, hard to tame and, ultimately, ill-suited to any kind of role in a modern democratic society.

Testosterone, according to some feminists—and Hollywood director James Cameron—needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history if Progress is to continue. Cameron actually called it a “toxin” in an interview a few years back.

It’s understandable, in a sense, what Reeves wants to do. There’s a powerful reductive tendency at work in Western thought and the broader culture, and it’s apt to deceive us if we aren’t on our guard. Perhaps it’s 2,000 years of monotheism, or thereabouts, that makes us look for a single cause for everything. Once, God was the cause of causes. Now, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins tell us everything can be explained by the “desire” of lines of code in our cells to reproduce themselves. For Freudians, it’s sex. For feminists, the patriarchy and male domination of women. None of these explanations are satisfactory, and people who end up following them religiously make disasters of their own lives—and the lives of others.

“We are not slaves to our cells,” Reeves writes. No, we aren’t. We are our cells. Big difference.

Nor is testosterone simply the “aggression” hormone. That’s one of the most malignant pieces of pop-science I can think of, maybe even the worst; and that’s saying something. Testosterone isn’t just about aggression. It drives a wide variety of behaviours that could and should be classed as pro-social, from faithfulness to one’s partner to ambition, generosity and even the willingness to stand up and defend a minority position in public. And yes, aggression can also be pro-social.

You don’t need to dispense with the idea that hormones powerfully constrain our development, behaviours and attitudes to avoid falling into the “aggression hormone” trap laid for us by misandrists and self-loathing men. You can just look at actual science, at a wealth of experimental data, and you can pay attention to what happens to men when they don’t have enough testosterone. The forum website Reddit is chock full of testimonials of young men suffering great agonies as a result of an inadequate hormonal endowment.

The real task is to recognise that biology and the social are not mutually exclusive domains. A full explanation would take in both and understand the constant dynamic exchange that takes place between them. Biology influences society, and in turn society influences biology—and so on.

One of the great ironies, for me, is that we must turn to a woman for a real understanding of what such an explanation could look like. The great literary firebrand Camille Paglia—herself a “high-testosterone woman,” plucky, adversarial, driven, sensual and libidinous—wrote one of the most profound statements about the respective roles of testosterone and estrogen in shaping the whole of human culture. It’s worth reproducing in full. The quotation is taken from her 1990 book Sexual Personae.

“Man’s genital concentration is a reduction but also an intensification. He is a victim of unruly ups and downs. Male sexuality is inherently manic-depressive. Estrogen tranquilizes, but androgen agitates. Men are in a constant state of sexual anxiety, living on the pins and needles of their hormones. In sex as in life, they are driven beyond—beyond the self, beyond the body. Even in the womb, this rule applies. Every fetus becomes female unless it is steeped in male hormone, produced by a signal from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the center of life. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.”

But even the great Paglia has her blind spots. She treats the hormonal environment as fixed and unchanging—this is testosterone, and this is estrogen: this is man, and this is woman—when in fact, it’s anything but. It’s my contention that every society is a unique hormonal environment, because of various factors ranging from diet to whether, like among the ancient Scythians, the men wore tight trousers and rode horses all day—a nightmare for the testes and male reproductive health, as observers recognised even then.

The modern world is a unique hormonal environment, and its defining feature is a growing surfeit of estrogen and rapidly diminishing testosterone. Until we recognise this fact, and accord it the importance it deserves, we’ll never really understand why a book like 12 Rules for Life could sell 10 million copies off the back of a commandment to CLEAN THOU THY ROOM, delivered and received with the earthshaking force of God speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai.

When President Trump promised the “largest mass deportation operation in American history,” it should have been obvious that extraordinary measures would be needed; an effort of a kind genuinely never seen before.

President Trump—then just plain old Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump—said 20 million illegals would need to be removed, or five million illegals a year for every year of a full four-year term. By contrast, Eisenhower’s charmingly named Operation Wetback removed about a million people in a single year, albeit without the benefits of the technology used by agents today—computers, mobile phones, facial-recognition cameras, and all those weird, wonderful and frankly rather sinister gizmos made by Palantir. Some say the number was more like 300,000, since many of Ike’s hapless victims were counted more than once as they anointed their posteriors for a second time crossing the Rio Grande.

Whatever the figure, it was obviously a lot less.

Since Trump returned to office on the wings of his immigration promise, Herculean efforts have indeed been made to deport hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegals.

We’ve seen high-profile, high-stakes raids deep into “enemy” territory—Los Angeles, Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area, Chicago. The worst foreign criminals and gang members were sent to the grimmest, darkest prison in South America: CECOT, the Centre for Terrorist Confinement, in El Salvador. The President has used Executive Orders to overturn birthright citizenship and remove special protected status from hundreds of thousands of migrants from Haiti, Venezuela and other shithole countries. Courtesy of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” ICE received a budget larger than that of many First World militaries—$180 billion—and now it’s furiously recruiting tens of thousands of new agents and buying enormous warehouses to turn into detention centers and luxury ball pits.

At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security has attempted to convince illegals to leave the country of their own volition, before they end up in the meaty clutches of Tom “Headcrusher” Homan. A Biden-era app that allowed illegals to book a nice leisurely entry into the US was repurposed as “CBP Home.” Illegals can notify the DHS of their intention to leave and claim a free plane ticket.

Adios!

According to official calculations, this multipronged approach has resulted in more than two million people leaving the US over the last year, the vast majority—around 1.5 million—of their own accord.

And, I mean, it stands to sense: If you can make illegals leave without sending Greg Bovino and his stormtroopers flying through their front door, why wouldn’t you?

Work hard, but also work smart. (Someone told me that once, but I forget who…)

In Texas, where there are an estimated 1.7 million illegals, the Republican leadership is working smart. Just how smart is revealed in a new report from The Texas Tribune.

Quietly, without fanfare, and mostly without passing new laws, the Texas state government has introduced a raft of changes designed to make illegals’ lives harder and give them little choice but to leave, long before they’re ever deported.

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The word “microplastic” was first coined in a 2004 paper in the journal Science. The term has actually been around for longer than that—there are isolated instances dating back to the 1980s—but it was never widely adopted or used until the publication of “Lost at Sea: Where Is All the Plastic?” Marine biologist Richard C. Thompson, the main author of the paper, is now called the “Godfather of Microplastics” for his pioneering work. Scientists in the 1970s had noted the presence of tiny fragments of plastics in sea water, but Thompson was the first to highlight just how pervasive they are and to suggest they could be causing enormous harm to the environment, animals and us.

In the 22 years since the publication of that paper, we’ve learned a lot about microplastics—none of it good.

Concern about microplastics has only grown with our dependency on the marvellous physical properties of these long-chain molecules, most of which are derived from petrochemicals like crude oil and natural gas; broken down—“cracked”—into simple molecules and then reassembled into massive repeating units called polymers that can be bent and shaped to our heart’s content.

More than nine billion tons of plastic are estimated to have been produced between 1950 and 2017, but half that total has been produced since 2004, when Thompson wrote his paper. The vast majority of plastic ends up in the environment in one form or another, where it breaks down, through weathering, exposure to UV light and organisms of all kinds, into smaller and smaller pieces: microplastics and their even trickier brethren, nanoplastics. These are “secondary” microplastics, because they start off big and end up small, but there’s a whole class of “primary” microplastics which are small by design, like so-called “microbeads” used in cosmetics.

Important research has already given us a good idea of the extent of the threat, revealing how extensively our world and our bodies have been invaded by pieces of plastic too small to be seen by the naked eye.

Studies have shown, for example, that microplastics now circulate as a force of nature. One of my favourite studies in this regard was published a few years ago. Researchers collected snow from the top of the Hoher Sonnenblick mountain in Austria and analysed the samples for plastic content. They were the able to estimate that 43 trillion pieces of plastic are deposited over Switzerland every year in snow.

That’s 3,000 tons!

Using meteorological data, the researchers were also able to show the distances this vast quantity of plastic travelled to reach the mountain. Around 30% of the plastic—9 tons—came from urban areas within 130 miles of the mountain. Ten percent—3 tons—probably came from winds and weather 1,200 miles away in the Atlantic.

In another study, researchers looked at autopsy samples taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, between 2016 and 2024. They compared microplastic levels between different organs—the brain, liver and kidneys—and also compared levels in these organs over time.

The researchers found that the brain samples contained significantly more microplastics than the kidney or liver samples. They noted a much larger amount of polyethylene in the brain samples than other plastics. Polyethylene is used in plastic bags, bottles and containers.

Even more worryingly, the researchers noted that levels of microplastics increased over time. Concentrations in the brain samples rose by 50% in the eight years between 2016 and 2024.

The researchers believe the results may be explained by the fact that the liver and kidneys are “front line” organs for the removal of harmful substances from the body, so they are better equipped than the brain to dispose of microplastics.

Plastics are lipophilic—meaning they are attracted to fatty tissues—and the brain has the second highest lipid content of any organ in the body, besides fat tissue itself. The brain also has a massive, extensive bloody supply to carry microplastics to it.

Microplastics have now been found in pretty much every organ, tissue and bodily fluid you could care to name: eyes, lungs, heart, liver, arteries, veins, skin, penis, testicles, placenta, womb, semen and the amniotic fluid in which babies gestate for nine months.

We now have reason to believe growing exposure to microplastics could be driving the explosion of chronic diseases we’ve seen across the Western world, and not just in America: everything from obesity and gut conditions like IBS, to cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Microplastics have also been implicated in the worldwide fertility crisis that could see humans unable to reproduce by natural means as early as 2050. According to expert Professor Shanna Swan, by 2050 the median man will have a sperm count of zero: one half of all men will produce no sperm whatsoever, and the other half will produce so few it won’t matter—they’ll never get a woman pregnant.

The problem is existential.

Despite the fast-growing body of research into microplastics—a search on the NIH’s PubMed database of scientific studies yields 21,918 results—there are still basic, fundamental, questions that need answering. Questions like: What are microplastics actually doing to our organs? What’s a safe level of exposure?

Is there a safe level of exposure?

Do different plastics do different things? Are some plastics more harmful than others?

There are even questions about how we measure microplastics in the first place. The development of new techniques and technologies has already shown that early measurements and estimates were wildly inaccurate. More sensitive equipment, able to detect smaller particles, has shown that a typical bottle of water has millions or even billions of pieces of plastic in it, rather than the hundreds we were previously been warned about.

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Welcome back to another instalment in my series expanding on themes in my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.

Francis Fukuyama may be one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented thinkers in recent decades. In large part, this reflects his place as one of the first thinkers to grapple with the end of the Cold War as a world-historical event. But there’s a more mundane reason too. Few actually read what he wrote, but instead get their opinions about the man and his theories second- or even third-hand.

Fukuyama, they say, is that guy who thought history—events? time itself!?—came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989.

With the end of communism, Fukuyama said, there would just be endless commerce, pleasure and elections every four or five years until the heat death of the universe, billions of years thence. Nothing of any real note would ever happen again.

Or something like that.

For many, Fukuyama is the literal embodiment of liberal hubris, of the triumphalism of the “unipolar moment,” when the US—briefly—stood alone as the world’s sole superpower.

Since the publication of The End of History and the Last Man in 1991, Francis Fukuyama may indeed have become that straw man, a kind of self-parody, but the book itself stands on its own merits, independent of its author.

The End of History and the Last Man remains one of the most subtle and persuasive accounts of the triumph of liberal democracy over communism. It’s called the End of History, because Fukuyama believed the evolution of political forms (“History” with a capital “H”) had been completed, and that no more functional system than liberal democracy could be hit upon, but he didn’t believe events or time had ended, or indeed that liberal democracies couldn’t backslide into autocracy or be destroyed from outside.

And yet the book also provides a dire warning about the inadequacies of liberal democracy, even as its strengths were most prominently on display.

Few others had the foresight, or the courage, to suggest liberal democracy’s victory might be a hollow one, but that’s exactly what Fukuyama did, in the final section of the book—before the streamers and ticker tape landed and while fireworks still illuminated the Western night sky.

That warning is heralded by the and the Last Man of the title, which is the part that’s usually forgotten, even by people who have read the book.

So who or what is the Last Man?

The Last Man is a figure taken from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and developed most fully in later books like Thus Spake Zarathustra.

In basic terms, the Last Man is the typical person who exists at the End of History, when all the great quarrels have been settled and there remains little worth fighting over or striving towards. Man turns his eyes away from the stars and down towards the ground, abandoning high goals and aspirations. He settles for a life of consumerism and membership of a political community of millions of people who are all equal, morally, politically and economically; his lot is a material, rather than a spiritual one, defined by things whose value is set in a series of marketplaces.

Here are two crucial paragraphs where Fukuyama introduces Nietzsche’s Last Man and how he represents a pale shadow of man at his fullest, embodying values born of weakness, resentment and the crude strength of numbers.

“Nietzsche’s last man was, in essence, the victorious slave,” Fukuyama writes.

“He agreed fully with Hegel that Christianity was a slave ideology, and that democracy represented a secularized form of Christianity. The equality of all men before the law was a realization of the Christian ideal of the equality of all believers in the Kingdom of Heaven. But the Christian belief in the equality of men before God was nothing more than a prejudice, a prejudice born out of the resentment of the weak against those who were stronger than they were. The Christian religion originated in the realization that the weak could overcome the strong when they banded together in a herd, using the weapons of guilt and conscience. In modern times this prejudice had become widespread and irresistible, not because it had been revealed as true, but because of the greater numbers of weak people.

“The liberal democratic state did not constitute a synthesis of the morality of the master and the morality of the slave, as Hegel had said. For Nietzsche, it represented an unconditional victory of the slave. The master’s freedom and satisfaction were nowhere preserved, for no one really ruled in a democratic society. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was that individual who, schooled by Hobbes and Locke, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation. For Nietzsche, democratic man was composed entirely of desire and reason, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. But he was completely lacking in any megalothymia, content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame in himself for being unable to rise above those wants.”

You don’t have to agree with Nietzsche’s account of the “slave revolt of morality”—the inversion of aristocratic values caused by the Christianisation of pagan Europe—to see the basic point that life in a liberal democratic society offers man a very limited range for self-expression, defined entirely in terms of his being equal with his fellow man.

That strange word in the second paragraph of the quotation—megalothymia—is key to understanding Fukuyama’s account of the End of History. Megalothymia is a variant of thymos, a Greek word that’s usually translated as “spiritedness,” but Fukyama parses it as “desire for recognition.” Plato, in The Republic, famously wrote that thymos makes a man like a “noble dog” who displays great courage and anger in defending his city, but thymos is also about more than just being a brave warrior in defence of one’s own community. According to Plato, thymos is distinct from reason, and yet it can clearly inform and guide reason. Megalothymia is the desire to seek distinction and to be judged better than one’s peers, while its opposite, isothymia, is the desire to be recognized as equal to one’s peers.

For Fukuyama, the triumph of liberal democracy is the triumph of isothymia at the expense of megalothymia.

In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud warned that a society that represses fundamental aspects of man’s nature will inevitably provoke a revolt. And that’s exactly what Fukuyama, drawing on Nietzsche, is saying: A political system that cannot give full expression to man’s fundamental desires—to his thymos—is storing up trouble.

Liberal democracy can satisfy our desire, and particularly men’s desire, to be accorded equal value, but it actively prevents from being better in any meaningful way.

This is the jumping-off point for my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, and my attempt to explore how, by its very nature, modern liberal democracy is hostile to masculinity—or, to paraphrase, how modern liberal democracy is low-testosterone. It’s my contention that all political systems and societies are unique hormonal environments.

What’s interesting about thymos, for my purposes, is that it stands as an almost perfect proxy for the master male hormone, testosterone. It’s testosterone that drives men to compete, to seek distinction, to defend what is theirs and embody the classic virtues we associate with masculinity. In a very real sense, without testosterone, men aren’t men at all, something that becomes abundantly clear if you read testimonials from the low-testosterone sub-forums of Reddit. Men with low testosterone lack motivation and libido, they are anxious and overweight, depressed and lethargic.

If avenues for expressing megalothymia, and with it testosterone, are completely closed off from modern man, we would expect testosterone levels to decline, since a fundamental aspect of having high testosterone is acting like a man who has high testosterone. Hormones exist in feedback loops. And we are seeing a decline: the best studies, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, suggest a 1% year on year decrease, across the Western world, over many decades.

But we can go further than this. It’s not just that life in modern liberal societies drives testosterone decline because megalothymia is outlawed: it’s that there’s also a kind of chemical warfare being waged on our bodies by sedentary lifestyles, obesity and chronic disease and, importantly, thousands of hormone-disrupting chemicals—food additives, pharmaceuticals, herbicides and pesticides, plastic chemicals—that mimic or drive production of the “female” hormone estrogen in the human body. We’re bathed in these chemicals from conception, and they upset the crucial ratio of testosterone:estrogen, with potentially lifelong effects. A male fetus given an infusion of hormone-disrupting chemicals may grow to be a man with lower testosterone, a smaller penis, fewer sperm, more fat, less muscle mass and, of course, significantly less thymos.

These chemicals may even be driving the explosion of transgenderism we’ve seen in recent decades.

On my reading, far from being a shameless apologist for liberal democracy, Fukuyama is a great prophet of the crisis facing Western civilization today, politically, socially and biologically.

Polylactic acid, shortened to “PLA,” was introduced about 20 years ago as a safe, biodegradable alternative to traditional plastics made from hydrocarbons. PLA is made from corn starch and sugarcane, and breaks down quickly into smaller particles—microplastics and then nanoplastics—in the environment. New research, however, suggests…

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Barely a day passes without some fresh horror out of Europe: a crime or case of government corruption that seems so over-the-top, so absurd, that assaults our senses so violently, that it just can’t be true—and yet, somehow, it is.

In the past couple of days, it’s been the case of Noelia Castilo Ramos, a 25-year-old Spanish girl who was euthanized—murdered—by the Spanish government, because she couldn’t live with the trauma of being sexually abused.

Noelia was apparently gang-raped in 2022, and after several attempts at suicide, she jumped from a fifth-floor window.

She survived, but was left paralyzed from the waist down, wheelchair-bound and in unbearable pain.

Noelia sought help ending her life in 2024. Euthanasia has been legal in Spain since 2021.

“I can’t take all the things that are tormenting me anymore,” she said.

She had “no goals or plans,” she added, other than to die and end her suffering.

She was fought all the way by her father, who launched a desperate last-minute legal bid to stop her. He failed.

Noelia was killed at 6pm local time last Thursday, at the Sant Pere de Ribes Social and Health Care Hospital, in Barcelona.

In the days before and after Noelia’s tragic end, it’s been claimed the men who stole her life from her and drove her to seek death were Middle Eastern or North Africa migrants. Quite naturally, that claim was then used as an indictment of the left-wing government of Spain and its immigration policies.

I’ll admit, when I saw the story reported on X, I didn’t doubt that claim for a second.

On closer examination, however, there’s no clear evidence to suggest Noelia was raped by migrants or recent immigrants.

The claim appears to originate with the Catholic advocacy group that represented Noelia’s father, Abogados Christianos. They said their source for the claim was an unnamed relative, who said Noelia was raped while living in a children’s home, but they freely admit there are no court documents, police reports or forensic evidence.

Noelia did spend five years in a child-protection center, between the ages of 13 and 18, but if the gang rape took place in 2022, she was 21, and hadn’t been in care for three years.

In her final television interview, broadcast just before her death, Noelia described abuse by an ex-boyfriend, an attempted rape by two men in a nightclub, and then a gang rape—“tres chicos a la vez” (“three boys at once”)—in a nightclub. That rape took place three or four days before the suicide attempt that left her paralyzed.

The literal facts of the case matter. Either Noelia was raped by a gang of migrants or she wasn’t. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise, nor should we pretend the case isn’t horrific enough without that extra, execrable flourish.

If we abandon our commitment to the truth, things are bound to go wrong for us. Not least of all, we risk handing our enemies—the people who import rapists and murderers into our beautiful countries and allow them to rape and murder with impunity, then punish us for trying to do something about it—a moral authority they do not deserve. Doing that could easily help them to cling on to power, in the face of all the evil they have done and the righteous clamor for justice.

Live not by lies, said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was right.

But there is also another kind of truth that’s equally important, in its own way. I like to call it “directional truth.” Directional truth is different from literal truth in the sense that a statement can be wrong or a half-truth and yet still point to a fuller, literal, truth.

A directional truth is like a finger, and by following the finger with our eyes—by looking beyond the finger itself—we see the bigger picture.

The fact that 25-year-old Noelia Castilo Ramos could, quite plausibly, have been gang-raped by migrants and then killed by the Spanish state because she couldn’t bear the pain, points to a series of truths that cannot be ignored and cannot be doubted.

The first is that deliberate mass immigration, implemented by Western governments without their citizens’ consent, has transformed Western nations beyond recognition. It has made them less functional, less beautiful and less safe. Women, especially, whether women like Noelia or thousands of unnamed, faceless teenagers from across the towns and cities of England, have had their lives turned on their heads by social engineers who care nothing about them and see their suffering as a necessary evil on the road to a new, better kind of society.

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When I read the global insect-farming industry is collapsing, my first thought was—USAID! Of course!

Perhaps the greatest revelation of the Department of Government Efficiency, apart from the sheer, staggering scale of the pork, was just how much of it was being funnelled through USAID—and, of course, where it was going and to whom.

All of a sudden, we discovered that literally everything awful in the world—from drag-queen storytime in Vanu’atu and sex-changes for dwarfs in Morocco, to research into rare aardvark viruses and cat-torture in China—all of it was being paid for with US taxpayer money via USAID.

Fancy that!?

So why not insect-farming too?

It certainly fits the bill. It’s evil and disgusting and runs counter to all our deepest, most fundamental instincts; it serves no real purpose except to degrade, humiliate and elicit sniggers—if not uproarious laughter—from those who came up with the idea and would never, under any circumstances, do it themselves.

In short, it’s perfect.

Well, I did a little digging and, to my surprise, it doesn’t look like the US taxpayer was propping up the global insect-farming industry, not really. USAID made a “request for information” in 2022, meaning it was looking for input on how it could invest in the industry, but other than that it was just a few small-scale projects in places like Uganda, Madagascar and Indonesia to help farmers feed their livestock with black soldier flies or dispose of waste by feeding it to worms—stuff like that.

So, it’s just a coincidence that insect-farming is on its last… legs, ahem, after Kekius Maximus took his gold-plated chainsaw to the United States Agency for International Development.

Anyway, none of this changes the fact that insect-farmers are, indeed, in very deep trouble.

A long article on Mother Jones examines the industry’s woes in detail, from its early days with so much promise, when billions of dollars poured into startups from venture-capital firms and governments; to today’s dismal prospects. In recent years, almost a quarter of the 20 largest insect-farming startups have now failed, including the biggest, Ynsect, which came tumbling down last December.

“Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one unhappy CEO said in a YouTube video.

Plans for further expansion, including the building of a massive insect farm in Nebraska by Tyson Foods, have been placed on indefinite hold.

As if to add insult to injury, moral philosophers are now proposing that, far from being ethical, bug-farming on an industrial scale is, like traditional farming, deeply immoral. Insects, apparently, have some form of consciousness, feel pain and may even have opinions about the final season of Stranger Things.

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They’re calling it Project 2029.

At this stage, the Democrats don’t have a detailed policy document like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation boogieman that stalked the 2024 election, eliciting hysterical claims about the imminent banning of pornography, the abolition of women’s “reproductive rights,” and the creation of immense forced-breeding farms overseen by Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Donald Trump Jr. and Catturd.

Oh my God, it’s like LITERALLY The Handmaiden’s Tale!

But the absence of a detailed policy document doesn’t mean the Democrats don’t know what to do if they win the 2028 election. They do. It’s what they always do, and what conservatives, bless them, have struggled for so long to do themselves: reward your friends, punish your enemies.

The jurist Carl Schmitt called it the “friend-enemy distinction,” the elementary form of political decision-making.

This time, even more than in 2021, the emphasis will be on punishment. Trump has gone much further than his opponents expected, even though Project 2025 was there for us all to read and Trump said he had levelled up and learned from his mistakes; a “retribution presidency” was promised by a man who survived endless lawfare, impeachments, smears, character-destruction and two assassination attempts.

Not only has Trump bucked the conservative trend—he actually has gone after his enemies like James Comey and Fani Willis, and he issued blanket pardons and commutations to the Jan 6th prisoners—but he’s also done things that were simply unthinkable to the liberal mind, lulled into a false sense of security by decades of conservative impotence and self-sabotage.

Trump has closed and militarised the southern border, launched deportation raids deep inside Democrat territory, attempted to overturn birthright citizenship, dismantled DEI, declared war on the cartels and started blowing up their boats at sea, deposed a sitting Latin American dictator, and plenty more besides.

For all these things, Trump, his allies and supporters must be punished. Even if Trump fails to achieve a conservative revolution—and so far the jury’s out—it’s crime enough that he gave Americans the hope one could actually, finally, take place.

Never again.

In a New York Times interview last weekend, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker laid out his stall for Project 2029.

Pritzker and President Trump have clashed directly over Operation Midway Blitz, the headline-grabbing surge of law enforcement, immigration officers and federal troops to the Chicago area.

Pritzker accused federal agents of “acting like jackbooted thugs” and “waging war on our people,” and did his best to tie the Trump admin up in lawsuits. He was largely successful.

Here are the bits from the interview that matter.

Interviewer: “Are there lessons to be taken from the frustration of voters and the way that Trump’s managed to do it?”

Pritzker: “If there’s a lesson, it’s that there should be a Project 2029 for Democrats. Now, remember: Project 2025 also included taking away people’s rights and freedoms. It included tearing down the safety net that holds up our working families and that stands up for the most vulnerable in our society. So there are things about the agenda that I think are reprehensible and anti-democratic. But yes, the speed of the agenda—and it’s not shock and awe so much as when you run and win on an agenda, you can accomplish that agenda and need to do it as soon as possible.”

Interviewer: “What does a Project 2029 agenda look like for you?”

Pritzker: “I don’t think you can speak of it in shorthand, but we’ve got to restore the rule of law, and that means holding people accountable who’ve broken the law. I’m talking about the people in this administration who’ve broken the law and federal agents who’ve broken the law.”

Interviewer: “That means criminally prosecuted?”

Pritzker: “Criminally prosecuted, civilly prosecuted. Whatever it is that we can do. Right? It may be that you can’t criminally prosecute somebody, but that you can go after them civilly.”

After the interview, Fox News contacted Pritzker’s office to ask exactly who the Governor had in mind. Pritzker’s office responded with a press release from January naming Greg Bovino, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, Tricia McLaughlin, Tom Lyons, Rodney Scott and Corey Lewandowski as individuals who “led to the escalation of aggressive enforcement tactics” during Operation Midway Blitz and should be held accountable.

So there you have it. A list, or the beginnings of one.

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The Mongolian gerbil, Meriones unguiculatus, is a small rodent, typically around 8-10 inches from nose to tail. They inhabit the vast grasslands and deserts of Mongolia, the Russian Federation and northern China. Believe it or not, these cute little animals can tell us quite a lot about testosterone.

The pop-science view of testosterone is, of course, th…

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Eight Antifa terrorists rock up at an ICE facility and try to murder an agent. Two of them are transgender. What are the odds? I’ll tell you: 25%. A quarter. We’ll get back to this basic—but very important—arithmetic in a second.

The conviction last week of eight Antifa members for terrorism and attempted murder—and a ninth on related charges—is a milestone in American criminal history. It’s the first time members of Antifa have faced terrorism charges and been found guilty. Antifa has existed for decades, and is responsible for countless outrages. Cities like Portland, Oregon fall entire under its sway, and local government openly colludes with its members to persecute ordinary patriotic Americans.

The incident took place at a Dallas ICE facility in July last year and left one agent seriously wounded, shot in the neck.

Seven of the eight—Cameron Arnold (also known as Autumn Hill), Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris (also known as Meagan Morris), Maricela Rueda, Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto, and Ines Soto—now face between 10 and 60 years in jail. Benjamin Song, the eighth, who was identified as the shooter, faces life. The ninth defendant, Daniel Rolando Sánchez-Estrada, was found guilty of two lesser charges—concealing documents and conspiracy to conceal—but could still spend 40 years in jail.

The verdict was hailed in a statement by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said Antifa had been “allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities” for too long.

She added, ““Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”

The hope now is that wider action will take place to curb Antifa’s activities, and maybe even break up the organization entirely.

And it’s about time. When Charlie Kirk was murdered six months ago, there was an enormous outpouring of sympathy and a broad popular desire to do something about radical leftist violence in America, or so it seemed. It was clear the murder was a political assassination from the left, and the response from liberals in every walk of life, from the schools to the military and federal government, in public and broadcast in gloating videos and posts on social media, confirmed that. The denials and counter-claims—“The killer was a MAGA extremist who killed Charlie Kirk because he thought he was a cuck who betrayed the right”—rang more and more hollow each time they were repeated.

Twelve days after the murder, President Trump designated Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” in an Executive Order, which described the group as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise” that “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities and our system of law.” The Order cited a clear “pattern of political violence” by Antifa and directed all executive departments and agencies to “utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations” by Antifa, and to take action against any person or group providing Antifa with material support or funding.

Trump followed the Executive Order with a national-security memorandum that explicitly referenced Charlie Kirk’s murder to justify action against Antifa.

And then—nothing. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of leftist scalps had been claimed by angry patriots like Rudy Giuliani, who led a tireless campaign for weeks, calling employers from his hospital bed. But the administration didn’t seem to want to do its part. We expected door-kickers and arrests, entire Antifa cells rolled up by the boys in blue.

Nothing.

The lack of action was made all the worse by the shameful, absurd conspiracising that quickly took hold of the online right. Morons like Ian Carroll, who should be delivering pizza and drinking bongwater, now told us that Charlie Kirk was killed by his own wife, who wanted to take over TPUSA and usher in the sacrifice of the Red Heifer and the Third Temple, leading to a breakaway alien civilisation—or something like that. The details don’t really matter: only the retardation and its soul-sapping effects on morale.

Now the Trump DoJ really has the chance to do something and to draw a line under this whole sorry period of inaction and infighting. I really hope it does.

Which brings us back to that little bit of arithmetic I did at the start of this piece.

Estimates vary, but for argument’s sake, let’s say 1% of the adult population of the US now considers themselves to be transgender. If 25% of convicted Antifa terrorists are transgender, that’s an over-representation of 2,500% or 25x. And remember, I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill Antifa who pick up placards to wave and dildos to throw. I mean the worst of the worst: the ones who pick up guns and knives and bombs and go out to kill their enemies. I don’t think this will change when—if—more convictions come.

Put like that, it’s obvious: America has a problem with transgender terrorists.

I’ve said this before.

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It’s hardly been the best of starts for the new ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Iran’s most senior cleric, its supreme leader, hasn’t been seen in public ever since it was announced he would be replacing his father in that most coveted of roles.

I mean, you can understand why, can’t you?

If a senior member of the Iranian regime even makes a brunch reservation these days, he’s liable to get a huge side order of high explosive to go with his shakshouka or whatever the hell they eat instead of avocado toast over there.

Pilaf? Baba ganoush? Rice and peas?

Anyway.

Mojtaba’s father, his wife and his daughter have all been killed by the Israelis, and the rumour is Mojtaba himself was badly injured along with them in the devastating first wave of attacks two weeks ago. They say he’s lost a leg and may not even be fully conscious. He exists purely as a figurehead—albeit an invisible one—while a faction of the Revolutionary Guards does the real string-pulling behind the scenes.

In an interview on Friday, President Trump seemed to confirm this rumor, describing Mojtaba as “damaged… but probably alive in some form.”

Ouch. That’s the kind of thing you say when your friend goes on holiday and you kill their beloved hamster by sitting on it.

The Iranians deny this, of course. They say Mojtaba is only “lightly wounded” and “still active.”

My money’s on President Trump, for what it’s worth. It’s hard to think of a more plausible explanation for why the supreme leader was replaced by an actual cardboard cutout at the official “allegiance ceremony,” in a scene reminiscent of South Park (when they used cardboard cutouts and the jokes were still funny). Surely if the man’s alive somebody could at least have got some grainy camera-phone footage ready for his big debut? I guess not. Perhaps they just do things differently in Tehran.

Laugh all we want at the “cardboard cleric,” but the situation on the other side isn’t really that much better. In fact, “damaged… but probably alive in some form” makes a pretty good metaphor for MAGA right now.

Maybe.

At this stage, it’s still too early to assess the damage. Let’s look at the polling. Aggregated national surveys suggest about 43% of the great American public are pro-Operation Epic Fury and 50% are against. Separate polls of Republicans, however, show overwhelming approval. One poll showed around 85% of Republicans support the war and want it to continue, and self-described “MAGA conservatives” gave the war a rollicking 94% approval. Trump’s personal approval rating is also pretty much the same and may even be a little bit higher since the war?… conflict?… special military operation (two weeks to take Kiev)?… began.

People are screaming like mad on Twitter, but Twitter is mostly a platform for hysterical faggots, people who think Erika Kirk eats babies, and Indians masquerading as e-girls these days, so it’s hard to set much store by what you see there.

At this stage, then, it doesn’t look like Trump has lost his base, and it’s the base that matters.

None of this is intended as a vindication of Trump. It’s a matter of public record that I think the war is a dangerous gamble that shouldn’t have been taken, not only because it imperils Trump’s domestic agenda but also because it further enables Netanyahu’s insane apocalyptic plans to settle scores that should remain firmly confined to the pages of the Old Testament. MAGA has nothing to do with Amalek. With a name like that, Amalek should be deported. Bye bye, Amalek!

Perhaps more than any in recent memory, this war is both confusing and confused—as evidenced by the fact that nobody, not even members of Trump’s cabinet, really knows what to call it, and no clear set of aims appears to have been established.

Trump just said the war will end “when I feel it in my bones.” Okay then.

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