We are now hurtling towards the end of 2026, the six month mark now nearly 2 months in the past. This time of year always makes me reflective — the change of seasons, the beginning of a new school year, looking down the barrel of increased age — and on the island where I live on the north western edge of Europe, it is always a striking turn. The days are shorter, the mists start rolling in, even in the city the air itself becomes laden with the fruitfulness of the impending harvest. But this year I have spent the last 8 months listening to Bible in a Year by Ascension Media — and that has made me even more reflective than usual. Since we are now well past half way through the year— and I am at a personal crossroads in multiple ways, I thought I would share with you the impact that following these Bible lessons has had on me.

Have any of you have been drawn towards Christianity in recent years? Either returning to your childhood religion that you had abandoned, or abandoning the secular, atheist world you grew up in, to declare yourself a believer in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour?

As I have watched the world I once knew disappear, replaced by the utter madness and sinister darkness of woke ideology in this culture war, it has made me contemplate God for the first time in my life. I have not converted. I have not been catechised. But I have spent the last 8 months listening to Bible in a Year by Ascension Media. I am now more than half way through — and I am at a personal crossroads in multiple ways — so I thought I would share with you the impact that the Bible lessons has had on me.

But first, a very big caveat. By contemporary standards, I have had a traditional education in the Western (ie Christian) canon. But contemporary standards are low. So I am coming at this very much from a superficial knowledge. I did study Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Medieval and Renaissance history, the fate of Christians under Nero, I sang hymns in choirs — but that was thirty to forty years ago. The sum total of my direct religious instruction was one year of RE (religious education in the British curriculum), when I was 15-16, taught by a charisma-free member of the Plymouth Brethren sect. (If you have never heard of them, look them up. Suffice it to say, they do not have an automatic crossover appeal to secular teenage girls.) My abiding memory was scoffing at the smoky angels shouting ‘holy, holy, holy!’

Other than that, my impression of religion, Catholicism in particular, was shaped by the view held by my lapsed Catholic parents: that it had created great art, but as far as it was practiced by the laity, it was a backward, superstitious, and repressive force.

So all these years later, I come to the Bible in the humblest possible way. An ignoramus of the highest order. A tiny speck in the cosmos, smaller than an ant contemplating a waterfall. This entire essay is me attempting — not to pass on my wisdom, God no. It is me attempting to even begin to process my thoughts on this foundational, awe-inspiring thing. It is me, unworthy and unschooled, daring to think out loud on a subject that far greater minds have pondered, for thousands of years. When I put it like that, I question my judgment for doing this at all.

Imma do it anyway. Because saying things out loud is important.

Today, I see a return to paganism all around me. I see it in female performers - rappers and singers — who are clearly channeling the succubus and making open references to the demonic. I see it with the liberal female’s devotion to abortion — of all things — which is starting to look like a religious practice of child sacrifice.

And this is very important context: as a child, in my family home, paganism was a considered good thing. Which is why it feels almost bewildering to me as I watch a sinister paganism rise up around us. I am the last person I would expect to be saying this. My father, a history buff would express his sympathies with the pagan gods of the Celts and the Romans, and declare them far superior to the severe monotheistic version. He would also often discuss the cruelties of those societies — he was a history buff after all — but somehow, when it came to the cruelties of Christian societies, he directed the blame at Christianity. When it came to the cruelties of pagan societies, he directed his blame at man going too far.

You know how when you have or hear a good idea, it feels like a light goes off in your brain? (Hence the lightbulb metaphor.) When something in Bible really lands with me, it is not the lightbulb that is activated, it is another well-worn image. I can feel it, quite literally, in my gut. The word profound is not nearly deep enough. It’s visceral. And there comes a heavy realisation that I am in presence of truth. Not truth is in: it is true that my name is Jenny and I am 50 years old. Or, Paris is the capital of France. Truth as in: I am in the presence of a power which I cannot describe with any word.

This, in turn, produces a feeling of dread. Not the dread you would have on Sunday night when you hadn’t finished your homework. Or the dread that comes when tax season rolls round again (side note: why does it always feel like tax season!?).

This dread, like the feeling of physical truth in the gut, is deeper. It is a feeling that, in a nanosecond, crystallises all your past actions into one singular question: have you acted in accordance with this truth? The answer is too uncomfortable to dwell on for long.

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This sequence of feelings was my first reaction to daily exposure of the Bible. A second one was how dramatic, even cinematic, it is. From the very first lines, it is just perfectly taut. A masterclass in the power of brevity. Also: how it is clearly the basis for so much of our shared literary and popular culture — from Lord of the Rings, to the Game of Thrones levels of sex and violence. How it really is the greatest story ever told.

But most strikingly, how so much of it describes our current world. This shakes me to my core. It really does. Being confronted with the reality that people thousands of years ago were experiencing the same crises as us hyper-moderns, us digitised heathens — genuinely blows my tiny mind.

So here are just three of the passages that have stood out to me so far.

All is vanity — Ecclesiastes

This one resonates with me on multiple levels. I have always struggled with my own ambition. It was always there, but it also made me uncomfortable. Perhaps it was my generational bias against being a try-hard; perhaps it was my fear failure; perhaps it was my Irish DNA discouraging any attempts at getting too big for my britches. Who knows? But it took me years to come to terms with the fact that I could, and should, put my own words out into the world, as if I was somebody. And I still often think that it is preposterous that what I do for a living is merely think up things to say, and then say them. I mean, the audacity!?

In Ecclesiastes, paradoxically, the emphasis on the futility of man’s intellectual endeavours is immensely comforting. It says to me: you are just one of an unfathomably long line of triers and seekers, and as they came, you will go. What a relief, to hear that my inability to fully understand, to see the future, to know it all, is as it should be. I know there are many, many people who go through life feeling they must be perfect at all times. (You may have noticed, from my typos, I am not one of those people). I would direct them to Ecclesiastes. Toil, striving, longing, anxious over-effort, and determination to control are a waste of human capital and will never bring enlightenment.

Years ago, I worked as the speechwriter for the New York City Fire Commissioner. I was there over the tenure of two different commissioners. When the first one, with whom I was very close, retired, there was a big build-up to the transition. The announcement, the retirement party, the swearing in of the new one. Lots of press. The mayor. Attention. Then, on the first day of the new commissioner’s reign, the work of the first one was quietly left behind. All that remained as a record was his portrait photograph on the wall. I’m not saying his years on the job were dismantled in an aggressive way. It was just that, in a matter of hours he went from being The Boss, to being The Past. Just like that.

This was a starkly poignant lesson to me at the time. I revisit it often, when I edge too close to lamenting my own lack of power, or overly identifying with a famous stranger. And there, in Ecclesiastes, I found a similar message: “There is no remembrance of former things.”

Our fight is not with flesh and blood — Ephesians

Since we live in a time of moral disorder and flagrant misrule, it is easy to despair and sink into a pit of anger. Woke ideology has inverted our moral code. It punishes the hard workers and serves those who do harm. Hatred against specific groups could easily gain a foothold in the mind. For example, I live in the United Kingdom, which is right now in the grips of a growing Islamification which has caused unspeakable harms to the indigenous British. How do I reconcile this reality with my upbringing and my conscience, that tells me to treat all people equally? How can a harmed people express real grievance without allowing it to curdle into tribal hatred? This is spelled out in Ephesians: “Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness.” The true battle is spiritual, rather than against other people. I admit, this raises morally complex questions that I am not able, at present to answer. For example, how does one conduct oneself in a spiritual war? How do we treat an individual evil-doer? But as a framework it is immensely helpful as it simultaneously lifts our eyes to the bigger prize — the spiritual battle — while also validating our need to fight against an injustice, while also keeping us from simply acting out against whomever we find in front of us.

Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Jeremiah chapter 12

Another crucial point that raises questions highly applicable to today, but does not answer them, comes in Jeremiah. In the dialogue between the prophet and God, Jeremiah asks a question we all ask.

“Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?”

How many times have we had reason to ask ourselves this, in today’s world? How many people — including several of my friends — have done the right thing, only to be punished and maligned and impoverished, and seen their persecutors celebrated and rewarded?

The answer, I suppose, is that this world and all its people are fallen. That is how we started out. That is how we continue. And to build lives of worth, we must learn to live with this burden — and do good anyway.

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Two extremely different stories in the last 2 weeks pointed to one grim conclusion: there are many, many women out there who simply cannot, will not, be held accountable — or even allow other women to be held accountable. The lack of discernment, the extreme enmeshment, the extreme emotionalism are so bad that it is now bordering on a mass psychosis type situation.

So what are the stories I am referring to?

First, ‘bartender’ turned social justice warrior congresswoman AOC hard launched her new era. The young woke firebrand era is over. The sensible grown-up era has begun (she’s running for president).

‘Woke 1 was craaaazy’ she told ABC News — attempting a rebrand of the most toxic and insane political movement of our lifetime. This was an effective signal: telling the young women who were the most lethal soldiers in the woke cultural ground war not to worry about it — that it’s all ok! That little voice telling them they caused harm and should feel bad about it? Immediately silenced because queen bee AOC just absolved them with a cutesy gay catchphrase. Girls love a cutesy gay catch phrase.

AOC said this with a flirtatious little smirk and a batting of her lashes. And just like that, the liberals breathed a sigh of relief. Just forget about all the injustices, the violent crimes, the abuse of children, the destruction of civil liberties, and the flagrant unfairness of the woke era! We don’t need to talk about this any further, because that would make us uncomfortable.

AOC is trying to hoodwink us into thinking that woke was just this hurricane that appeared from nowhere, instead of a movement that she actively drove forward, participated in, and greatly benefited from. Over my dead body will she and her glib fellow zealots get away with this. In her flirty little brand refresh is an implicit threat - that a Woke 2 is coming. And I, for one, do not intend to let that happen.

As part of her new, I’m a sensible grown up now, I swear! schtick, AOC also started posting cute videos of her injecting herself with hormones, in order to freeze her eggs. Male conservatives immediately took to social media in consternation.

But these videos, in which she’s leaning into the camera while jabbing her finger, admonishing her viewers, ‘don’t be weird’ with a playfully sassy look on her face— will work extremely well on a certain type of woman. The same type of woman who looked at Kamala Harris and saw, not an objectively terrible and unqualified astroturfed diversity hire — but a relatable boss bitch who was trying but not quite succeeding to do it all. The more messy Kamala seemed, the more these white liberal women adored her. It was validation of all their own insecurities.

In other words, many liberal women strongly relate to the *bad qualities* of other liberal women, and are threatened by the good qualities.

The second story I want to talk about is on another level — far darker, but also driven by a female obsession for unearned absolution, and on centering themselves. I wrote about the bizarre phenomenon of the Lindsay Clancy fandom this week for Spiked. I won’t go into the details of the case, as you likely already know them, and if you don’t you can find plenty of good summaries elsewhere. I’m not directly comparing AOC and Lindsay Clancy — I am comparing how women react to AOC and Clancy. The two stories are different in terms of weight and context, of course, but they are on the same spectrum of contemporary female self-obsession and very poor judgment.

In my experience, many women — the immature kind — see outside events not as outside events, but as reflections or even amplifiers of their own personal inner world.

Even in my mostly normal, not insane friend groups, I have noticed these tendencies. In my friends and in myself. A friend gets good news or is successful at something — and even though you might be loath to admit it, you immediately feel exposed to the entire world as the failure you really are. It is much more bonding when we are all *less than*.

Especially when I was younger, I had this reaction as much as the next chick, and I have had to make a conscious effort to suppress it, ignore it, and with a big, wide smile, say “congratulations!’ With all the warmth and authenticity I could muster. I have done this so many times, in fact, that I have trained my nervous system and now it is 100 percent genuine. (Side note: being middle aged has some serious advantages, because you finally realise that not everything is about you.)

The inverse is also true. The pain of seeing your friend succeed often comes along with the female urge to defend and explain away the worst possible female behaviour. Some women say that this is intra-sexual competition: women are driven to enthusiastically support other women ruining their own lives because it takes them out of the game. There might be something to that theory, but it’s not what I have observed in the wild. I think women rush to prevent harsh judgment on those who actually deserve it out of a deep fear of being punished themselves, out of a huge gaping sense of worthlessness and lack. By over-associating with the terrible behaviours of other women, we make those women our peers. And because they are our peers, we defend and protect and rescue them — the way we wish ourselves to be defended, protected and rescued. This is grotesque to watch, because the women doing it are so profoundly lacking in dignity and fortitude, that they would rather make a holy show of themselves and their rubbery tear-stained faces, than just simply act like a grown, capable, adult woman.

That is what I hear when one supporter said outside the courthouse last week: “We are so grateful that someone is hearing us, and we can shout from the rooftops that finally, someone is hearing that we, as women, we do need help. And we do need support. We love you Lindsay.”

Which is it, ladies? We said we wanted to be fierce, independent women. But now we are running around defending a murderer because “we need support”?? “We need help”?? This woman doesn’t want help. She wants to live in a fairy princess land where nothing is ever hard and everyone feels sorry for her and praises her all the time. And it is pathetic.

Judging from the internet, for many women, there is quite literally no bottom to their well of emotional neediness. There is no amount of validation and praise that could ever fill them up. The supporter actually said that Clancy’s lawyer was finally giving women a voice. Massachusetts has a female governor. Boston has a female mayor. Women dominate all prestige industries. Women dominate medical and nursing jobs. And still, they complain. How much more of a voice do these crazy bitches need?

Then there is the huge discomfort with female tears. Men have it. Women have it. Interestingly, this was cleverly rebranded as ‘white women tears’ during Woke 1 and used to appallingly racist and destructive ends. But there is truth to the observation that, for all the suffering they have endured, women also occupy an extremely privileged position in the human psyche — and the sight of an upset woman often triggers automatic protection instincts in other people.

Look, I am a woman. I too struggle with this. How many times have I done that thing we do: assure a friend that no way, they are absolutely not to blame in a situation where they may be a teensy teensy bit to blame — I am past 50 years of age, and yet it is still hard for me. Our drive to reassure and to comfort those we care about is very strong. And for some reason, it is especially strong with other women we care about. Because our feelings are so incredibly finely tuned to each other, for most women, anything that disturbs the harmony between us is incredibly uncomfortable.

This goes double for mothers. For many people, it is just impossible to accept that a mother would hurt her children, and when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that it happened, they make excuses and whitewash it. I wrote about my own experience with this phenomenon, after the death of my friend when she was just 15 and I 14, at the hands of her own mother, which I am embedding here.

Crucially, we are also socialised to stand up to boys and men, and we know that in most cases, in a fight with a man we have an ace up our sleeve — our cultural honour code that shames men for hitting women. (And yes I do understand that violence against women happens, frequently, but these two contradictions live side by side.) So in a fight with a man, we can safely bet that other people will take our side. In our conflicts with other women, however, we cannot be assured public sympathy, we are on more treacherous ground, and therefore we calibrate accordingly.

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The internet, rights, independence —- our access to all of these things were predicated on the fact that women were agentic adults who could behave reasonably and responsibly. Hey, ladies! Keep this up and you are going to ruin it for the rest of us.

When men commit these kind of crimes — one particularly horrifying case in Ireland a few years ago involved a man, a hatchet, several teenage children, himself and his wife — other men will not stand up to defend him. He does not get his own male fan club. He goes to his own grave shrouded in shame. As it should be. As it should be with Lindsay Clancy. Because it may well be that she was poisoned by her medication; or that she was suffering from a condition that diminished her criminal responsibility. But either way, those three children are still dead, at the hand of the person whose job is was to cherish them. And that woman must never see freedom again. Anything else will be a crime of the highest moral order — the sacrifice of children in order to protect the feelings of an adult.

Yet many women cannot — and I mean cannot — look upon the crimes of another women (or any member of their pre-ordained pet groups) without going to extraordinary, mind-melting, lengths to excuse it away. They cannot help but inject themselves, their own sob story, into other people’s business. The destroyed, hollowed out remnants of the Clancy family is now just the background scenery in front of which they can act out their own sad dramas.

Call me Pollyanna, but I just refuse to believe we are not better than this. Women are absolutely capable of honour and stoicism. Marie Antoinette was perhaps the most famously indulged and frivolous women of all time, and she went to the guillotine by all accounts with bravery, dignity and no self-pity. I am starting to suspect that without God — a benign and supernatural authority figure — it might be impossible for women, but men too, to reach that state of dignity. Lord knows we could not be farther from that standard now.

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Chapter 1

Welcome to Crazytown

Woman 1: “I said what I said. I don’t give a flying fuck.”

Woman 2: “His children are better off without him. They need to learn to stop being like their dad. And enjoy the blood money, kids!”

Woman 1: “I’m standing on business, fuck Brian Thompson. I don’t give a fuck he died.”

Woman 2: “I liked it.”

It’s May 2026. A young man is about to stand trial, accused of gunning down, in cold blood, a health insurance company CEO by the name of Brian Thompson. Thompson was a 50 year old Minnesota family man, former high school athlete and valedictorian, originally from Iowa. At the time of his death, he and the company he led, UnitedHealthcare, were facing a lawsuit for alleged fraud and illegal insider trading. Instead of facing those allegations in a court room, Thompson was summarily executed on a Manhattan street on a dark, cold, December morning in 2024. By, the government claims, Luigi Mangione: a young, handsome rich kid who decided he did not like the American health care system and so took upon himself the role of judge, jury, and executioner. Mangione, due in part to his good looks, and in part because of the Commie-fication of Gen Z, has become a Robin Hood meets Charles Manson figure — with a vocal number of nubile young women worshipfully defending him.

Women like the ones quoted above, who turn up to every hearing to demand ‘justice for Luigi’. Outside the courtroom, Woman 1 — a softly spoken, oddly expressionless Ashley Rojas — was neatly dressed in tight capri pants and peep-toe heels, with a press pass dangling from her neck. Woman 2, Lena Weissbrot, brought more of a Harley Quinn vibe, appropriate to her edgy gamer online persona. Weissbrot, who made a rap song about “billionaires in body bags” under the stage name Fellatia G was also reported to be a Fulbright Scholar.

Welcome to Crazytown, a brave new world in which the fairer sex has gone fully rogue; in which young western women with smart phones and large social media audiences scream and curse about the patriarchy, the American Gestapo, climate extinction, the dictator Trump, and a host of other digitally enhanced, neo-Maoist fairy tales. In this psychodrama of their own making, they have cast themselves as angry, angry princesses out for revenge. The Shieldmaidens of the Internet. The screeching Furies of Crazytown.

My name is Jenny Holland, and I will be your guide. If this is your first visit to Crazytown, if you feel as if you have just woken up from an epic bender to find the world as you once knew it is gone, allow me to explain.

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After much deliberation, I decided to go see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. For weeks, I held off, because the race-switching, the trans soldier, and the terrible dialogue, made it sound like woke trash.

And The Odyssey is woke. It is woke AF.

But weirdly, it is so woke, it sails to the very end of woke, and accidentally falls off the cliff into anti-woke. It is so subversive, it subverts its own damn self, without meaning to. Somehow it is both an extremely tiresome lecture about how men should feel terrible about being successful warriors, and a compelling display of martial prowess and male camaraderie.

This is not so much a review of the movie as an analysis of how the movie is a map of our cultural landscape. My contention is that Nolan, like his hero, sets out to arrive at a specific place. But Nolan is diverted by his own awkward political contradictions and ends up going in a bunch of different directions, which leaves the viewer confused. And, like many things in our AWFUL dominated culture, in the film a bunch of angry, disapproving women, ruin it for everyone.

The movie is actually worth seeing. It has so many different issues going on at once that, even though I don’t think it was a well-executed film, it certainly got me thinking.

A quick note on sourcing. I have not actually read Homer’s epic poem. And I did not have time to read the whole thing between last weekend when I saw the film, and writing this essay. So I used a variety of sources— Tom Holland, Claude AI, Dr. Scott Masson being the main ones — and I learned that the differences between Homer and Nolans’s versions are extremely significant.

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Like other Nolan movies I’ve seen, Odyssey is confusing and much of it is shot in such dim light that I had trouble following what was going on. But by far the biggest problem I had with the film — were the women. The female characters ruined what was almost a great movie.

Which is a real shame, because Nolan’s Odyssey is excellent when it focuses on men doing manly things. The movie captures brilliantly both the brutality and the poignancy of a band of men fighting in a war together. Their fear, their survival instincts, their strength, their violence — and most movingly, their intense bonds with each other. As a female human, I find watching this almost mesmerising. Women, with our chatty sociability, have a very different form of bonding.

Nolan’s film actually portrays the pathos and the glory of men fighting in war extremely well.

But then, he deliberately undermines this heroism, by throwing in a bunch of scowling, hostile women who demoralise and undermine the men, who crap all over the concept of honour, and who inject a 21st century ideology into a profound and timeless story.

The worst of the bunch is Athena. In the poem, according to the scholars I listened to, Athena is almost in love with Odysseus. His cunning is a good thing. It leads to his victory and makes the goddess favour him. As a result she guides him, bestows favour on him, and protects him from other gods. In the movie, however, she is a frowning killjoy who, it is implied in a confusing flashback, was also a victim of Odysseus’s men in the siege of Troy. By doing this, Nolan is depriving both his hero and his audience of a crucial message of the book: that to be a strong winner is a good thing, actually. In the movie, being a strong winner just pisses off all the embittered women.

A very close second is Helen of Troy. The casting of a Kenyan actress in this role generated a lot of commentary. But her skin colour was not the problem. Her attitude was. In Homer, it is never made explicit whether Helen went willingly with the Trojans, though it is strongly hinted at — and she expresses self-loathing and guilt over the lives lost in the campaign to get her back. But in 2026 Hollywood, a woman cannot be anything other than a virtuous boss bitch who has never done anything wrong in her life. In the movie, she is like your bitter ex, full of resentment and taking zero accountability. She’s churlish and sanctimonious. This makes her the opposite of beautiful. She is so far from being a paragon of female virtue that is is laughable. And Menelaus, her husband and Odysseus’s brother-in-arms, whom she wronged by running off with Paris, is made into a brute who is proud of the scars on Helen’s face. The film is strongly implying Helen was punished by her husband, rather than what Homer says, which is that when they are reunited Menelaus is overcome by her beauty and immediately forgives her. In the book, Helen is radiant and composed when she meets Telemachus, not brittle and reproachful, as she is the movie.

Meanwhile Calypso, the sorceress who traps Odysseus for 7 years, is transformed into a new age wellness chick who just wants to help Odysseus heal his trauma. Circe, another witch, instead of being a beautiful, beguiling creature, is played like like one of those women you see screaming into their dash cams about how terrible Trump is. Nolan invents an entire monologue for her character which can essentially be reduced to: “men are trash.”

The biggest female character is Odysseus’s long-suffering and faithful wife, Penelope. In the film, she is constantly pulling these twisted, tight-mouthed faces, which in Ireland is colourfully described as ‘having a face like a slapped arse.’ She is given the most ridiculous and anachronistic line, in a film full of them, when she scornfully tells her son: “My knowledge, my years of experience, are nothing compared to the bristles on your chin.” Years of experience? What is this, LinkedIn?

Why can’t these shrill and domineering women just let men have their own thing?

And while I’m at it, Odysseus’s son Telemachus is another attack on masculinity. I know that in the original he is also a bit weak, but in the film he is made extra pathetic. In the final moments of the film, as he is supposed to be in his moment of triumph, his costume reminded me of a sci-fi version of Richard Simmons’ aerobics outfits in the videos from the 1980’s. Totally inexplicable decision, unless Nolan was actively trying to humiliate him.

So how does the movie undermine its own self? One, by effectively dramatising the siege of Troy, which, I’m sorry woketards, made war look cool as fuck. But also, in the strange tale of the character Sinon. This character is played by the trans-identified Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen Page, who in real life is a diminutive human female who has cut off her hair and her breasts and started lifting heavy, thinking this makes her a man. But Sinon is not even a character in the Odyssey, Nolan has dropped him in there from a later story by Roman poet Virgil. Nolan’s Sinon is a small, weak peasant boy who is tricked into serving in the war, then tricked again into telling the Trojans that the horse — which is actually filled to the brim with Odysseus’s warriors — is just a gift, thus convincing them to bring it in through their gates. This is also a departure from the original, as Virgil portrays him as an active aware participant in the ruse.

In Nolan’s retelling, he’s this small vulnerable person, deceived and used by the more powerful, more experienced, adults around him, then once he’s outlived his usefulness, is killed off. And Nolan’s choice for this role was…a young trans person? How else can you possibly read this, other than as an admission that young people who are claiming a trans identity and opting for these harmful medical procedures, have similarly been duped for the nefarious purposes of dodgy adults?

I really think it is possible that Nolan set out to make an overtly woke movie, but ended up making an anti-woke movie through showing that heroism and sacrifice do exist.

But overall, the Odyssey was an exercise in demoralisation. Damon’s Odysseus feels bad about his survival. He is no longer a heroic, extraordinarily capable, and strong figure — he’s depressed and full of self-doubt. When he finally gets back to his home, he has survivor’s guilt, as well as shame that they won the battle for Troy. His men — the men he was shown as having such deep bonds with in earlier parts of the film — are portrayed as monstrous for the sack of Troy. The message is ‘war is always bad’ and ‘glory doesn’t exist’.

As far as Nolan is concerned, the movie is just a story of a guy with PTSD, who is pissing off his wife by taking too long to get home.

We should not be teaching our men to feel guilty about surviving against incredible odds. We should be celebrating their strength, not making them feel guilty for it. We are all indebted to the long-forgotten men who killed for the survival of their communities Only in our extremely safe and comfortable world do we not recognise this.

I also think it is odd, if not sinister, that Nolan includes some of the supernatural elements, but removes the full panel of gods that are active participants in the poem. It’s like he’s trying weave magic into his politically correct movie, in order to add to its power. Dr Scott Masson, in his video about the film, explained that the Odyssey was the world’s first educational text. It was a particular form of education, an education not just of the mind, but also of the soul. He says the Odyssey is psychogogy, a word that is no longer in use but is “effectively a journey of the soul,” that contains “passions, appetites, spirit, as well as reason or logos. It involves part of us that the mind simply doesn’t include.”

None of that makes it into the film. Because our culture no longer accepts that we need to educate not just our minds, but our souls as well.

Concepts like honour have been replaced by damaging imitations, like self-esteem, or flattery. Our society is now overrun with ‘suitors’ — the men who camp out in Odysseus’s castle when he is away, and want to enrich themselves off of everything he has built.

As I sat watching the movie last week, my thoughts kept turning to the small Spanish territory of Ceuta, which just the day before had been overrun by Moroccan men who had stormed its beaches, reportedly lured by NGOs and the promise of the socialist Spanish government’s amnesty.

And how many times have we watched a well-fed, well-kept woman stand up in public and sneer — sneer — at men and masculinity. How many examples of unearned female contempt? How many women have made fools of themselves by pretending they were tougher, stronger, harder, than men and therefore entitled to threaten them?

The death of the male hero has been a cultural calamity.

We are going to need the male hero archetype again. How incredibly foolish we were to think we were more civilised than that. That we could trade the hulking warrior for the pencil neck geek with a dozen degrees and a suit. That man, it turns out, has not protected his castle. And now we are all exposed.

Mae West once said: “when women go bad, men go right after them.” Turns out, it works in reverse too.

Without the male hero, women go sour. They become unhinged. Without female support while they do hard things, men go weak. And then we are all in danger.

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When people ask me what made me go from being an Obama and a Hillary voter to supporting MAGA, my answer is easy. Two things: 1) woke ideology and 2) Covid.

Covid was so radicalising to me. The response to Covid among not just American, not just British, not just Irish, but pretty much every single rich nation’s elite institutions, was so appalling that it turned me from being a believer in and a part of the liberal order and professional government class, into an out-and-out populist who thinks we need to fire all bureaucrats.

Never again will I trust, on faith, anyone with a credential.

So watching the last two weeks as the fake national hero Anthony Fauci get a long-overdue moment of national disgrace was satisfying. Not nearly enough of a punishment, but it was satisfying.

But it also brought back a lot of my anger from that time. It was particularly infuriating to read Fauci admit to his *diary* things people were monstered for saying in public: that the virus could have originated in a lab and could have been manmade; that the illness itself was basically a bad flu; and that the vaccines were not working the way they had hoped.

And it got me thinking — how did anyone take this little garden gnome seriously in the first place? Why did millions and millions of grown up Americans — mostly smart people with degrees and good jobs and such, latch on to him like he was their personal saviour?

It’s not like he was particularly convincing at the time. It’s not like things did not feel *off* about so much of the coordinated responses we were seeing across multiple countries. And it did not take long before it was clear to anyone who was thinking critically and with an open mind, that the dissenting doctors were just as, if not more, convincing that the state-approved, TRUST THE SCIENCE, mediocrities.

So how come so many people went along with it?

That question has many answers. But I think one of the reasons — and there are no doubt many others — is that the richest, most educated people in the west were primed to succumb to a bureaucrat and media driven fear campaign — whether it was over fake white supremacy or COVID. How? By years and years of spiritual poverty and material excess. The safest and most well-off among us are untested by hardship, and so full of a sort of confused, diffuse fear, that any sound judgment they may have had in the past is completely gone.

Liberalism was one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Today, it is collapsing.

And the failures of liberalism have destroyed peoples minds. It created a society so successful that now all of us — even poor people — are to some degree spoiled, entitled and immature. And so we are totally unfit — in a literal sense— for any crisis: be it moral, financial, physical or spiritual.

And Dante Alighieri — yes, the 13th century Florentine poet — predicted this exactly.

I’m Jenny Holland and this is my channel, Saving Culture from Itself. Think of it as Personal Politics for the Politically Homeless — where you can find a little bit of common sense to help you fight the woke cultural revolution.

Let’s remind ourselves about the insanity of time.

LA Times said of Fauci: “So now expert is the new sexy, from the specs to the striped socks, immunology is the new rock n roll. We all feel it.”

The New York Times wrote: “300,000 people with the virus have died”. (For contrast, 1991 headline: “31,196 Americans died of AIDS.”

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, crying actual tears about “impending doom” if we didn’t all take this experimental medical product.

Mika, from Mika and Joe said: “You are the problem. It is the unvaccinated who are the problem. Period. End of story.”

Don Lemon said: “the only people you can blame — this isn’t shaming, this is the truth, maybe they should be shamed — are the unvaccinated”

Dr Leana Wen said: “Frankly we know that we can’t trust the unvaccinated”

Biden said: “our patience is wearing thin” and “this is not about freedom or personal choice.”

Arnold Schwartznegger said: “screw your freedom.”

Howard Stern, that paragon of moral virtue and wisdom, said: “when are we going to stop putting up with the idiots in our country and just say, it’s mandatory to get vaccinated.”

CBS poll claimed that 49 percent of respondents answered yes to the statement:“the unvaccinated are making me upset.”

Meanwhile, Fauci was writing in his diary that the vaccine did not, in fact, stop the spread, but officials should not say that publicly lest it undermine vaccine mandates.

Horrifying.

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The hate machine just drove the Fauci worshippers into a frenzy.

Let’s flash back to the early 2020’s. Julia Roberts — JULIA FUCKING ROBERTS — swooned over him. Brad Pitt played him on SNL. There was a Fauci Friday hashtag. Fauci bobble head dolls. Fauci yard signs.

People took to Twitter to write things like:

“Fauci is a national hero” “He has worked tirelessly to save us from COVID.” “Fauci is a hero and a real doctor”. And “even at 80, a sex symbol.”

One Tweet in particular was extremely telling: “Dr Fauci is a hero and a global treasure beyond us mere mortals but he’s also one of us — nerds who find the scientific method & research process so ‘electrifying’ that it’s our life’s calling.” This was a woman with lots of letters after her name.

Joan Baez wrote: “I wonder if you have any idea how important you are to us, our health, our sense of hope, and that we won’t go under, not just yet.”

This letter, which Fauci included in his diaries, reminded me of something, if you don’t mind my inserting a quick personal story. My father died when I was 28. He was my north star, and losing him was devastating. Shortly after his death, I attended a talk given by a senior columnist at the newspaper where I worked at the time. I have no memory now of what he said, but I was so moved by it I wrote to him, an effusive outpouring that I now recognise was not really prompted by anything he actually said in his talk, but rather an overwhelming need on my part to find a fixed point on which to focus all my floating longing and loss. He, an older man, became for a moment, that anchor that I needed. I do remember that his reply to my email was kind, but also sort of bewildered that some young woman had poured her heart out to him after he gave what was a pretty humdrum talk to a bunch of underlings. So much so that I was pretty embarrassed that I had sent it at all.

I sense that same longing for safe harbour in Baez’s letter to Fauci. An excess of feeling that needed somewhere to go. A desperate need for an anchor in a time of uncertainty and fear.

Except, of course, Fauci was responsible for the most consequential and damaging government policy perhaps in all of American history, and Baez was a rich and famous old woman who should have known better.

People like Joan Baez, and me, and the others I mentioned, we have lived our whole lives in a comfortable world. A world in which the focus could remain on the inner self, and on fulfilment of that inner self. In our world, that fulfilment comes via an individual’s journey through various institutions. These institutions provide the individual with varying levels of status, various bonding experiences with their peers, and eventually — one hopes — financial and material rewards that ensure they will be able to sustain and pass on this trajectory into the future.

For every hysterical Fauci groupie, there were many more people who just went along with it. People who thought it all seemed a bit weird, but decided it was easier to just flow with the tide instead of swim against it.

Liberalism produced a society in which being credentialed and being around other people with credentials was the highest possible calling for millions. It was not being strong. Or wise. Or capable of building things. The highest possible honour, was to be credentialed.

These people had every reason to suspend critical judgment and follow along with patently absurd mantras like ‘trust the science’. Not just their livelihoods, but their sense of self-worth, depended on it.

Science replaced faith in a supernatural God. Fauci became Jesus.

But there were two ways people failed here — the ones who worshipped, and the ones who just went along with it.

I read Dante’s Inferno when I was a schoolgirl, and from time to time I revisit it. In Canto III, at the river before crossing into hell proper, Dante meets souls who in life, never took a side. They lived “without infamy and without praise.” The fence sitters. These are the kinds of people who today say things like, ‘ok, sure, some of the Covid mandates were over the top, but the science deniers were dangerous!’

But it’s the punishment that Dante gives that that is scarily apt. These souls are damned to chase, in eternity, a constantly changing, meaningless banner. Wow. That sounds to me like the Omnicause.

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Friends, Romans, Culture-savers! I am in the final chapters of my book, so instead of writing a whole new essay this week, I am instead going to share with you something I wrote in 2020, when the embarrassing capture of the Smithsonian first came to light. I was reminded of this essay this week because Anthea Hartig, President of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, was grilled at a Congressional hearing, in particular by Congressman Brandon Gill. This essay, written 23 July 2020 before I started my Substack, was in response to the insanely racist graphic that was part of the Museums as Sites for Social Action (MASS) toolkit. MASS Action launched in 2016 as a collaborative project centred on the question of how to transform museums from the inside out.” (source here via Claude.) At the time I wrote this, the identities of the people who wrote the document had not yet come to light in published reports. The piece is more satirical than journalistic. Thanks for your patience while I finish my book, on this very topic — affluent, white, liberal, women and their destructive takeover of our culture! I’ll be back to regular scheduled programming in a week or so!

It’s really starting to feel like the US cultural elites have been taken over by a group of earnest 14 year old girls at a Model UN conference.

First, The New York Times Mean Girls sorority was exposed by Bari Weiss’s resignation and public denunciation of her bullying at the hands of her liberal colleagues. (For what it’s worth, I worked at The New York Times for three years, when Millennials were still actual babies, and I do not recognise the shockingly unprofessional behaviour she describes.)

Then it was the turn of the venerable Smithsonian Museum of African American History. In a series of pages chock-a-block with links, this institution devoted to preserving and curating American history instead deluged readers with all the BS that comes standard in the new racists’ handbook: whiteness, white privilege, yada yada yada.

But absolute winner was a graphic document, seemingly created by museum staff, titled “Aspects & Assumptions of WHITENESS & WHITE CULTURE in the United States.” The nasty whiteness words in big capital letters to emphasise its big, bad nature.

It helpfully breaks down what white culture is. After combing through the other pages on the site, I was pretty certain that as far as the ladies at the Smithsonian are concerned, whiteness is the opposite of what Americans should be.

Here are some of the signs to watch out for.

“Self-reliance,” “independence & autonomy,” “in control of their own destiny,” “objective, rational linear thinking,” “hard work,” “work before play,” “plan for future,” “delayed gratification,” “follow rigid time schedules,” “English common law,” “protect property & entitlements,” “intent counts,” “decision-making.”

Oh, and “steak and potatoes.”

Accompanied by helpful graphic elements like a workman holding a hammer and wearing a hard-hat (BOOOO), or a beaker (BAD SCIENCE), or the scales of justice (THAT’S RACIST!)

Vigilance is required to defeat white supremacy guys!!

Hmm…Ok…So…using my powers of inference here…dependence, no agency, irrational, lazy, shiftless, indulgent, disorganised and lack of self control are…non-white culture?

Wait, that sounds familiar. It’s reminding me of something…Oh yeah, the racist 19th century stereotype of the shiftless, lazy and irrational Negro.

Well. This is awkward.

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I can just imagine the meeting where the 14 year old girls who are apparently now in charge of one of America’s most august institutions came up with this genius idea.

“You guys, let’s help the people understand how bad whiteness is using pictures.”

“Totally! I read about that in this book by Judi Katz.”

“Oh my god my dad is always telling me to plan for the future, and he is so annoying! Those things are just the worst!!! Let’s save all the black people by listing them…”

(In my imaginary reconstruction, the 14 year old girls in charge of the Smithsonian are white. In reality they are also people of colour, but that just makes the whole mess even worse.)

At least in high school the adults are nominally in positions of authority and steer the children away from embarrassing themselves publicly. Clearly, that’s not the case at the Smithsonian.

The museum acknowledged as much when they removed the graphic, but not before it was tweeted out by Donald Trump Jr and therefore preserved for all future generations, which is very much the mission of the Smithsonian, (sometimes referred to as “the nation’s attic”) so well done all. You managed to perfectly capture how very racist “anti-racism” is, and share it with the world. Mission accomplished.

I think anyone who is not in the grips of a rabid ideological possession can see now that Millennial white liberalism is the most toxic, racist, elitist and (oddly) immature movement to come along since, well, ever.

It’s the weird childishness (“steak and potatoes is racist”) of it that separates it from overtly aggressive, macho ideologies like National Socialism. But don’t be fooled, once these kids have been laughed at enough times by plebes they will become every bit as totalitarian as their German forbearers. They have already picked out the same colour scheme.

In the 2018 movie Entebbe, about the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight full of Jews, there is a grimly funny scene in which the idealistic, leftwing sheltered young German intellectual turned terrorist defends himself against charges of anti-semitism even as he is separating out the Jewish hostages from the non-Jewish hostages. “I’m no Nazi,’ he protests, even as he singles out the Jews for execution.

If the children who are now apparently in charge of everything had been taught how to think, they might have had the humility to recognise that fervour does not make for sound policy, and that emotional attachments to utopian landscapes can lead one to some very tricky situations. The road to a perfect society starts off in song and camaraderie, all the Darbys and Jessicas and Ninas basking in the warm glow of their righteousness. But it ends up strewn with bodies rotting in the street.

Save us from these child-rulers.

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If you ever find yourself in a pit of despair, and you are of a populist inclination, I recommend going onto YouTube, and watching . Or better yet, reading one of her books. She is one of the most reliably sane, reassuring, and balanced commentators at work today. She does this while remaining sharp and analytical, and doing the reporting that leaves you feeling like a) you know more than you did before and b) there is hope for us after all.

I have reviewed two of her books, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, and Second Class: How Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. Both of them were the kind of books that made you want to repeatedly stand up and cheer while reading them.

A few weeks ago, she joined me for her discussion of her latest work, The Jews and the Left.

It’s another white pill, unabashedly pro-American, contemptuous of the toxic fad of victimhood.

I will be spending the rest of the month finishing (I hope) my book, so look out for some of my favourite archive pieces, and I’ll be sharing content from my YouTube channel as well.

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The first time I set foot on American soil was the summer of 1976. I was a few months shy of a year old — a fat Irish baby with skin the colour of full cream milk. I obviously don’t remember the occasion, but I feel like I do, because family photographs commemorated it. My grandparents, Dot from the Bronx and Al from Brooklyn, beaming in the arrivals terminal at JFK airport, and me scooped up in my tall grandfather’s eager embrace.

It was just a visit, we returned to Ireland a few weeks later — but old photo albums tell me it was the perfect American summer. Photos of me and my cousins in an inflatable kiddie pool in our grandparents backyard, our long-haired teen uncles and cousins sitting watching us in denim cut-offs, looking totally blazed. In one photo, an indicator of what my personality was to become and also the generally laid-back attitude to babies that was the fashion of the time, I have raised an empty —? — beer bottle to my lips, as my uncle smiles benignly at the camera. There I was, a fat happy baby, in a paddling pool, with a beer. (I have turned my house upside looking for these photos, to no avail.)

When I was growing up, my Belfast father would speak in rhapsodic terms of his first trip to America. No sooner had he arrived, he made a friend, a black guy from Queens called Reggie. They worked together at the New York State Power Authority, doing what I do not remember. From then on he swore that New York City was his spiritual home, a place far more welcoming than the dank streets of his actual hometown. He claimed the Big Apple more than he ever claimed his native land.

Similarly, my husband thought he’d arrived in the land of milk and honey when he visited America as a 14 year old boy in the late ’80’s. They made cakes out of ice cream! They had a whole room in their homes — just for kids to play in! He met crime boss John Gotti! Anything was possible!

Dogs On The Line

John Gotti and the Ice-Cream Cake

It’s the summer of 1988. The doors of the Boeing 747 swing open and the heat hits me like a shovel to the face…

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2 months ago · 17 likes · 1 comment · Brian Donnelly

I, on the other hand, was raised in an environment of reflexive anti-Americanism. It wasn’t too bad, I did have my America-boosting dad to moderate those impulses and my down-to-earth American family. But as it is today, Europe-worshiping intelligentsia looked down on much of American culture, and I have to admit I did as well. It was just the water in which we swam.

In the last decade, that reflexive anti-Americanism became the norm among the educated, blue state, American middle class. It hardened into a politics of resentment and liberal extremism. It has gotten so bad that now there are many young people who genuinely associate the American flag with fascism. The historical illiteracy of this is mind boggling.

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So this year, I’m going to try patriotism. Even though it does not come naturally. But watching from afar as this great nation strains under the weight of its own elites turning against it, I know what side I fall on. The side of decent, regular, Americans who are the most tolerant and open people probably on this earth.

And it’s 250 years since the signing of the declaration of Independence! What an achievement! And I’m so sick and tired of ‘my side’ constantly shitting on the USA, to the point that they would be happier seeing the entire nation destroyed than recognise that their ‘goodness’ and ‘liberal values’ have curdled into something unrecognisable and destructive.

A few months ago, an American tourist visiting a small village, not that far from where I live, went viral after she posted a video about being insulted by locals in a pub, demanding to know who she voted for. “That moment when you go into a Northern Ireland bar and are immediately accused of being a bad person because you are from the United States,” says the tearful woman who runs the TikTok account Law’s Life.

I found her account quite plausible. Ireland has the reputation for friendliness, not America, and yet I have always found America the far friendlier place.

By contrast, the World Cup has provided a steady stream of heartwarming videos of Europeans being delighted with Red State America — friendly people and big box stores, huge sodas, and generous, helpful people. In one video in particular an Irish couple visits a place called Liberty Restaurant in Alabama and the owner picks up their entire tab. “we could not be any more grateful for how friendly and how welcoming you were here in Scottsboro,” the man says.

@justamyjaneWhen they say southern hospitality is the best in the world, they aren’t lying! Completely overwhelmed by the kindness of the staff in Liberty Restaurant & Diner in Scottsboro, Alabama, USA 🥹❤️🇺🇸 #southernhospitality #alabama #irishinamerica

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Abundance. Openness. Friendship. Opportunity.

That is the America that my father and my husband recognised instantly.

And of course, freedom. Freedom is so intensely associated with America that it has become a tired cliché. Is this why we have so casually maligned it, thrown it away, or even worse — pretended we never had it in the first place?

Perhaps this era of a freedom-hating liberalism (contradiction though that might be) will bring us to a more profound understanding of what freedom is, and its immeasurably precious value.

It’s not F150’s or Gay Pride. It’s not “free to be you and me”. It’s far deeper than marketing schtick or dumb platitudes. I’m going to quote — extensively — from writer and filmmaker Eli Steele, who is the great-grandchild of slaves, and the grandchild of a man who grew up in the segregated south, and also the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. He is, he writes in this beautiful essay, “the first male on my father’s side to be born free of any government-sanctioned racial oppression.”

“To fully embrace freedom is to be exposed, fully visible, flaws and all, no longer able to pretend that what becomes of you is somebody else’s doing. The inner freedom was always the real thing. But America is the rare country that also tore down the outer walls that stood in its way, which is why to waste the choice here, where nothing stands between us and it, is the deepest betrayal…

The strangest thing about my lifetime is that far too many in this country with every freedom written into its laws have spent years insisting they are not free. After the great collisions of the 1960s, at the very moment we should have moved forward into freedom, many of us turned around and retreated into race and tribe instead. The laws were on the books and the doors were open or beginning to open and yet we still told ourselves the doors were shut.

While many builders and thinkers among us keep pushing the country toward what it has never been, many others have turned to face the other way, ransacking the past for someone to blame for every failure of the present. We have become a backward-looking people, and grievance has become one of our largest industries. The strangest part is what it did to freedom itself. A movement rose insisting that blacks and other minorities were not free, in the safest and most prosperous decades that any minority has ever known. And millions of whites were told that to defend themselves against the charge of racism was itself proof of racism. Many of them discovered that it was easier to go silent than to be brave, and so they surrendered their own voice rather than risk a word. That is why the few who did speak out made the news. That is the quiet tragedy of my lifetime. Not that the country was evil, but that a free people, handed the widest liberty in human history, grew so frightened of a single accusation that they chose to give the freedom back.”

Man of Steele’s Substack

Cradle Americans

Hi all…

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2 months ago · 171 likes · 56 comments · Eli Steele

Fifty years ago, when I celebrated the Bicentennial as a babe in arms, few could have imagined that just five decades later, half of the country and most of its institutions would have turned on the country in such a vicious way.

I wish I could get through to the self-loathing American liberals — who at this point resemble your bitter, boozy ex who won’t ever get over the fact that you broke up with her and moved on to a happier, more relaxed and younger woman. ‘Just let it go,’ I want to say, shaking the liberal by the shoulders and looking them square in the eyes.

There is happiness ahead, if you just let go.

So this holiday weekend, even though I’m not there to celebrate with you — I am wishing and praying for independence once again. Independence from fear, from guilt, from self-loathing, that is my prayer for the millions of Americans whose minds are captured pernicious lie — that the United States is somehow uniquely evil.

It is the opposite. The nation and its people — all of you out there— are uniquely free, uniquely fair, and uniquely generous.

I salute you, my fellow Americans.

Happy birthday. And God bless the USA.

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In it we discuss the Lowe Rape Gang Inquiry report, and the blowback it received from the right (!?).

We discuss the manipulation and love bombing techniques used by pimps generally to get their claws into vulnerable women and girls, and how that is reflected in the rape gang report.

We discuss the reality of how white women are viewed and treated by many Muslim men.

We discuss the mind-boggling naivety of white, affluent, western liberals concerning not just the present reality of violence from these men, but also their long history of brutality and violence — including white slavery — citing the work of on this topic.

We agree: if you come to Europe/the West, you either respect our values, or you get out.

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I would like to introduce you to the story of Thaïs d’Escufon, a 26 year old French woman who in the last few days has gone viral outside of France, after she was convicted of “public insult” by the Paris public prosecutor’s office.

Why? Because, in 2023, she appeared on French television panel, discussing rapes committed by an “individual” who had committed multiple crimes and who was under a deportation order, yet had been in France since 2009. (The man, originally from the Central African Republic, has since been convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison for raping two French women on the same day, in Paris, in November 2023.)

In an argument with a fellow female panelist, who was insisting that the threat to women came from men generally, d’Escufon — who was already a well-known ‘far-right’ activist in France — replied, “immigrant, black and Arab men.”

The next day, a complaint against d’Escufon was lodged by Olivier Klein, the “delegate” for the “French Interministerial Delegation to Fight Against Racism, Antisemitism and anti-LGBT hate” (that’s the very long name for a high-level government unit that works across various French ministries to monitor hate crime.)

Following on from the complaint, the public prosecutor in Paris charged the young woman with “public insult/injury on grounds of origin, ethnicity, nation, or race” (injure publique en raison de l’origine, l’ethnie, la nation ou la race).

Last week, she was tried and convicted of this crime. While the prosecutor had made it known she wanted to imprison the young woman for four months, after a video that Thaïs made about her plight went viral, the court limited its punishment to a thousand euro fine.

I strongly recommend you watch her video. In it, she recounts how she herself was followed home by a Tunisian man, who forced his way inside her empty apartment and essentially held her captive before she was able to convince him to leave. She was terrified but mostly unharmed.

When I heard her story, I was stopped in my tracks. What happened to her — the incident with a Tunisian man, the subsequent prosecution by French authorities — shocked me. But it did not surprise me in the slightest. Because, regarding the prosecution, that is becoming the norm in Europe when dealing with crimes committed by foreign men — the system blames the victim. But her story of being attacked by a Tunisian wasn’t remotely surprising either. Because when I was 16, it happened to me.

I was in Paris for the summer, to improve my French, staying with friends of my mother’s. It was in the 20th arrondissement, which was then (and I think still is) a working class community with a lot of immigrants from north Africa.

One day, I was walking back to the friend’s apartment. It was a lovely sunny day. I was dressed head to toe in baggy black clothes — a skirt down to my ankles, a long sleeved shirt, and sun glasses. On my feet, I wore DM boots that went up to my calves — as was the fashion at the time for bookish, indie girls like me. At that age, I did not want to be seen.

As I walked down Rue de Ménilmontant, lost in my own world, I bumped into a young man about my size. I had a tendency, especially in big cities, to always walk with my head down so as not to attract attention from men. But when I physically ran into this particular guy, I had to look up at him, and we locked eyes. I immediately hurried away. But I already knew I was in trouble.

He began following me, staying close behind. Whispering things, trying to get me to talk to him. I ignored him. Walked faster and more purposefully. It was the middle of the day. The street was crowded. I had a fair few blocks to go before I got to the place where I was staying. I was so accustomed to being cat-called, followed, chatted up on the street, that at first I was fairly confident that I could lose him.

I was wrong. I could not shake him. Soon, it became apparent that he was not going to give up. The door to my building was approaching fast.

I started to worry. Did I keep walking, so that he would not know where I lived? But until what point? How far would I have to go? I was surrounded on the street by Arabs — some women, but a lot of men. I could go into a shop, I thought. But then what? I was an odd looking white girl who wasn’t even French, I certainly did not feel confident that if I asked for help, it would be forthcoming.

I decided to make a break for the door, in the hope that I would get into the building faster than he could follow me.

But when I broke into a sprint, so did he. I got the door open, stepped inside, but he was right behind me and even though I tried to close the door on him, he was stronger. He pushed his way in.

So there I was, in a pitch black corridor, this stranger grabbing me from behind. At the end of the corridor, was a courtyard. The courtyard was bathed in daylight, and the door to the apartment was there. But before I could get into the light, I had to do something about this creep who, by this point, had me in a headlock.

Now that I’m 50 years old, the reaction I had at the time to this frightening situation surprises me. I immediately went into fight mode. Since he wasn’t that big, I was able to turn around with him hanging off me, and then slam myself backwards into the wall — with him taking the force of all those blows against the wall. I looked down, and saw he was wearing sandals. So I stomped my DM-clad feet as hard as I could into his exposed toes. We ricocheted down the corridor this way. But I was not strong enough to get him off me.

Tumbling out into the open courtyard, he got the better of me and shoved me against the wall, right at the door to the apartment. Now I was completely stuck. His face was close to my face. He was kissing me, groping my breasts and trying to reach between my legs. I was squirming and fighting back.

So, totally caught by this man, we began to talk. Negotiate even. Exactly as Thaïs describes with her attacker. He laid out his case. He told me he was from Tunisia. He was 19. He had just arrived in France. He was desperately lonely. He asked me where I was from. When I replied, Ireland, he beamed, and almost became sycophantic. You are foreign here, just like me!

He tried bargaining with me. Just let me see your eyes, he said. If you let me see your eyes, I will leave. I refused and refused — I am extremely stubborn. But eventually, I agreed. I took of my sunglasses. He marvelled at my eye colour. I still remember his eye colour, very light brown, almost a topaz. The forced intimacy was repugnant. His desperation was bewildering.

But he did not leave. Instead, he made a new request, of some other part of me he could access. I got angry. I have a temper. I smacked him in the face.

And then, terrifyingly, he went from conciliatory, pleading and transactional — to angry and threatening. He grabbed my wrist. Do not hit me, he said in a low voice. I do not hit you, so you do not hit me. And at that point, it finally dawned on me that , really and truly, I was at his mercy. I had miscalculated: his size and his willingness to allow me to fight back, I took as a sign that he wasn’t that dangerous, that he wasn’t a full grown man. I realised that actually, as far as he was concerned, he had been trying to access me sexually the easy way. And that if I continued to resist and fight, he would do it the hard way.

On a terrace above us, another man appeared. He was, maybe, the building’s custodian and he too was foreign — my guess at the time was he looked Somalian or something like that. He watched us from above. I was afraid if I asked him for help, not only would he not help, he would join in.

From then on, I acquiesced. There was no way I was going to risk opening the door to the empty apartment. So I gritted my teeth and did what the Tunisian asked me to do. For the sake of decorum, I won’t specify, but on a scale of 1 to 10, it was about a 6.5 or 7. I was a virgin. In the aftermath, I developed a somewhat reckless attitude towards my encounters with men, and I came to despise and fear what was left of my innocence. So I quickly got rid of it.

That was in 1992.

In the early 1970’s, my mother was accosted on the Parisian Metro by an Arab man, who sat down on the bench next to her, and began fondling himself. After trying to ignore him, she dumped the French fries she was eating onto his crotch. (I guess I take after my mother.) In response, he hit her so hard, one of her shoes flew off her foot and onto the train tracks. No one on the Metro tried to help her.

I marvel not just at how much young women have been in the firing line for generations. Historically, young women have always been preyed upon by men. But even more, I marvel at how this continued to be ignored by a society that deemed itself enlightened, well-ordered, advanced, safe.

Note how I state the ethnicities of these men, but I am not making a larger sociological point. Nor am I being brave in recounting some ‘trauma’ — it affected me for a time, then receded into the corners of my memory. All I’m doing, upon hearing Thaïs’s story — is saying, me too. Moi aussi. Oh the irony.

Just by doing that, I am — like Thaïs did on French television — speaking what is unspeakable in many quarters.

Obviously, us women know that white men are predators too. Obviously, we know this. But the fact is that we open ourselves up to condemnation when we say: look at all these sex crimes being committed by men who are not white! Face this truth! It doesn’t make crimes by white men disappear or matter less, but just FACE THIS TRUTH!

The liberal power structure cannot. To face this truth would bring about the end of the liberal power structure.

The cognitive dissonance this has caused is in part what is driving liberal elites quite literally insane. To the point where a female prosecutor would look at this young woman and demand she go to prison for simply speaking out loud what she had experienced.

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The liberal power structure is preserving itself off the backs (quite literally) of girls and young women. This cannot go on.

Vive la révolution.

Long live the revolution.

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You can read about Thaïs case and donate to her here:

https://www.patreon.com/cw/ThaisdEscufon

Since last week, the UK has been convulsed by anger over the horrifying death of one of its sons, a young man called Henry Nowak who was brutally and seemingly without any reason, stabbed to death by a Sikh man last December.

The trial of the accused, Vickgrum Digwa ended last week in a conviction and he was sentenced to 21 years in jail. This was not, critics have pointed out, the heaviest possible sentence he could have received.

The case was not at the top of people’s minds until body cam footage from police officers who responded to the attack was released in recent days. And it has shocked, horrified, and enraged people not just here in the UK but across the world. Because it showed Henry, lying on the ground telling police he had been stabbed, and that he could not breathe, but police chose to believe the man who had stabbed him, because he had claimed that Nowak had been racist towards him. Henry died on the spot, in handcuffs.

The last words he — the innocent victim of a crime — heard were his rights being read to him by cops. This, after he was set upon while walking home from a night out with friends, stabbed several times, chased down the street, and stabbed again.

It is time to ask an uncomfortable question: how many people has white guilt killed?

The video is all over the internet, and many of you may have seen it. I myself have not. I have a policy never to watch videos of people dying — I feel it is an assault on a person’s dignity to have their last moments made public, even if there is a public interest which in this case there was. But also, my tender heart cannot stand it. Especially in this case, a boy close to my son’s age, being treated so callously, so cruelly, so incompetently, by state employees whose sole job should have been to protect him.

In Henry’s final moments of life, his now-convicted murderer was given the honour of being believed, that he, not the boy who lay dying, was the victim. According to media reports, Digwa was not handcuffed, unlike his dying victim, and after he was finally arrested, the police brought him into the station kitchen and offered him a selection of food.

According to new reports, Digwa’s entire family got in on the race-baiting, ass-saving act. His mother made the murder weapon disappear. His brother called police instead of an ambulance, and said: “we’ve just got attacked racially by some white person. He’s physically attacked my brother, we’re Sikhs, we wear a turban, and he’s just attacked my brother.” That was a lie.

He went on: “I can’t let him go until this gets sorted. I am not being racially attacked and letting him get away with it.

According to Brendan O’Neill, who unlike me was brave enough to watch the video, the body cam footage shows Nowak as “he writhes in terror and agony and cries out ‘I’ve been stabbed!’, a voice in the background – presumably that of the lowlife who murdered him, Vickrum Digwa – says: ‘He hasn’t been stabbed.’ A female officer responds. ‘I know’, she says. ‘But we have to check, don’t we?’

I know? She responded with I KNOW.

The other officer, responding to Nowak informing them he’d been stabbed, said, “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Mate? He called this dying young man — who he was in a position to help, but chose not to — mate.

On the Lotus Eaters podcast, they discussed a longer version of the video in which the father of the stabber can be heard saying they are propping up Nowak because “his mouth keeps filling with blood.”

Yet when the police were there, the same family all just stood around as he bled out internally, pretending to be victims.

This is so insane.

The first waves of horror over this story pointed to the bizarre parallels with the George Floyd case, because it involved police, and because Henry also told police he could not breath.

But I kind of hate that comparison, because this story is so, so, so much worse. Floyd was a middle aged felon who did not deserve to die in an undignified way — because no human does. But nor did he deserve any of the hysterical and entirely made up accolades heaped upon him in his death. He was a crackhead and a low life, and nothing more. His passing should not have garnered any attention whatsoever.

Nowak was a beloved son, just starting out with his whole life ahead of him. The first in his family to go to university. This happy event - supposed to be an example of upward mobility — turned out to be his death sentence.

Allison Pearson, one of the few remaining British journalists with bravery and integrity, has written unsparingly about the horrors of this story. She also said that she had received an email from an “experienced Hampshire police officer” (Hampshire is the county in which this happened) who told her “officers are encouraged to respond differently depending on the ethnic backgrounds of those involved. The same officer described a culture in which promotion was influenced by diversity targets rather than merit alone.”

Eli Steele has been writing recently about the power of white guilt. He wrote of Nowak case and how police handled it, “an entire moral order has taught them that accusations of racism carry an almost sacred weight, and that to question such an accusation is more dangerous than to doubt the word of a dying boy. In this order, whites are treated not as individuals but as a permanent defendant class, bearing a collective guilt that must be continually paid down.”

This is not just an American problem, as Nowak’s death shows. Steele posits that white guilt is rooted not in a desire to be kind, or a type of suicidal empathy — but something more primal: fear. Collective guilt has been assigned to white people, from America to England to Australia to Ireland to Scotland to New Zealand. And so white people are afraid.

In England, white guilt is practically the new state religion. Within the last decade, white guilt has been the guiding principle behind the deaths of multiple white children and young people. The bitter irony is that what happened to Henry Nowak actually is systemic racism — just against white people, so we all have to pretend not to notice, or else. The fact that we have been browbeaten by race grifters for nigh these last ten years, about our internalised racism, about systemic racism, about institutionalised bias, as white people were being victimised by these very things — is simply too much to bear any longer.

Following the Manchester Arena bombing by a first generation immigrant Islamist, it came out that a security guard thought there was something suspicious about the man who turned out to be the bomber, but did not want to be accused of racially profiling him, so he did nothing. 22 people were killed, and the youngest victim was eight.

Following the Southport mass stabbings, after the media initially reported the killer as being a Welsh choirboy, it came out that the head teacher of the school Axel Rutakabana attended, had described him as “very high risk” with a “sinister undertone” — she was immediately accused of racial profiling. Three little girls were killed in that attack.

Paranoid schizophrenic foreigner Valdo Calocane, who had a warrant out for his arrest, went on a stabbing spree that killed three people in Nottingham in 2023. Two of his victims were university students— young and in the prime of their lives. The third was the university caretaker. Despite his history of violence, he was not sectioned, because staff at a psychiatric hospital thought there was an ‘overrepresentation of young black males in detention.”

And I’m not even going to mention the thousands and thousands and thousands of white girls who were trafficked — I’ve written about that before.

Keir Starmer, meanwhile, is acting like Elon Musk is his personal middle school bully. “He’s trying to whip up division!” He bleats. “We need to assert who we are as a country! We are a reasonable, tolerant people!”

“We take Grok on and fight, because that’s who we are as a country!”

Yes, the Prime Minister actually said those words. Starmer could be dragged into the pits of hell by a pack of wild-eyed assassins and he would still be screaming, ‘we are a reasonable and tolerant country!’ as he disappears from sight.

Why would anyone want to be ‘reasonable and tolerant’ over the murder of Henry Nowak, Prime Minister?

Liberals, progressives and leftists are in a fugue state. It now seems the fear of being tarred as racist is stronger than their own will to live.

A head of steam is building here, the atmosphere is becoming febrile. We need to start saying things that are true, but that white liberals and progressives are still too afraid to say. It’s a safety release mechanism, at this point.

So let’s get some things off our chest, shall we? We need to hurl true words, before it is too late for words altogether, and all that’s being hurled are hard objects with the intent to maim.

Deep breath.

All the British civil servants who aided and abetted the training programmes that turned out monstrous officers like these, should be fired and denied their pensions. The police officers should be prosecuted. British taxpayers are literally paying for their own destruction.

George Floyd was a lifelong criminal and not worthy of any of the protests or statements honouring him. Everyone who took a knee for that creep is a chump or a charlatan.

White people alive today are not responsible for the crimes of history. End of. Not a single one of us. No exceptions. (Isn’t it crazy how this is an edgy thing to say?)

I do not accept any collective guilt whatsoever.

There is more anti-white racism than racism against people of colour in most parts of the west. This has been true for most if not all of my lifetime. I have certainly witnessed anti-white racism far more than I have witnessed anti-black or anti-foreigner racism, by a considerable margin.

Why don’t we do a bit of our own ‘calling out’, since we’ve been terrorised by those ‘calling’ us out for years? Since this disease originated in America, let’s mention just some of the American race grifters who have built personal fortunes by turbocharging white guilt:

Ibram Kendi can get bent. His scam does not work any more.

Robin D’Angelo is an idiot, and a racist.

Joy Reid is an obvious sociopath who loathes humanity.

I could do this all day.

I do think that the tide is turning. I think the British government is experiencing something of an ‘oh, shit’ moment. The optics — pardon the phrase — are just too awful on this for even the most craven spin doctor.

But never forget. And leave the forgiveness to Jesus — the rest of us have work to be getting on with stopping this white guilt insanity before it kills any more of our children.

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Imagine you are living a totally normal life in the United Kingdom. You’ve never been in trouble with the law. One night, you are awoken from your sleep by a loud banging at the door. It’s the police. You are dragged from your home, thrown into a cage in the back of a police van, and taken to the station where you are held for many hours. You have no phone and no one will tell you why you are being held.

Imagine you are a woman out enjoying a beloved hobby, horse riding. Two strange men appear while you are in an isolated area, armed with screwdrivers, and physically attack. While in a state of panic, on the phone with the emergency services, you use a slang term in reference to one of the attackers. The 999 operator sends police to save you from the attackers, but also reports you for the language you used. The police come back, this time to investigate *you* with a racially aggravated crime.

Imagine you are a young female student at one of the best universities in the world, where you were given a place after years of hard work at your studies. You and some fellow women decide to start a union for women only. The social ostracisation is so extreme that things like being spat on and called a fascist in the street become a normal occurrence.

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Imagine you are a young man, studying at a different university, where you get into a minor verbal disagreement with a female student who takes offence at your political opinion on Israel. In response to her taunting you about not wearing your ‘Jewish hat’ — you are not even Jewish — you respond with a taunt of your own, calling her keffiyeh a tea towel. You are then suspended by your university for seven weeks. You are barred from campus and given 48 hours to vacate your student accommodation. The local police department refers your “case” to the local prosecutors.

These are all real things that happened to real people, here in Great Britain. They are all cases that came to The Free Speech Union, whose mission is to help people in the UK get out from under the massive legal, social and psychological burden that comes when your right to speak freely is taken away.

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In the UK, the crisis of free speech is so bad it is difficult to actually believe it is happening, even as it keeps happening. How can this be the nation that basically invented the concept of rights, of rule by consent? The country that birthed the most versatile language of all, so effectively used by its children Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, John Donne? How is it possible that the same country that forged the building blocks of the modern world and its riches, is now a country beset by petty, censorious, snitches, ruled over by a cadre of DEI-stricken fools, and power hungry grey men?

All of this was debated on Wednesday night by the Free Speech Union, an organisation started by Conservative writer Toby Young, in response to an increasingly dire climate around political and social issues.

I appeared on a panel at the event, discussing a forthcoming book by the FSU’s director of case management, Ben Jones. His excellent book, Island of Strangers, is a whistle stop tour through what is , fundamentally, a spiritual crisis that this once-great nation is undergoing.

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He writes that the UK government’s terrorism prevention programme, called Prevent, considers CS Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Aldous Huxley red flags for right-wing extremism.

That the same programme was “teaching millions of public sector workers that concern about mass migration is a ‘terrorist strategy.’”

That it is now par for the course for acts of sexual violence to be treated with “extraordinary clemency while perpetrators of speech crimes are terrorised.”

And that the “UK state has begun to enforce Islamic blasphemy norms in order to maintain the peace.”

Jones’s book goes beyond a mere litany of outrages done by woke bureaucrats-turned-tyrants. He accurately diagnoses the root cause of the disease. This is not a problem of mere disagreement, he makes clear. It is a fundamental crisis of the western soul.

“To purify ourselves, we must embrace unlimited diversity. We must cease to exist as a single historical category…we must atone and dissolve ourselves in the common mass of humanity, the ‘global majority’. We must be diverse, and in so being, cease to exist.”

No longer are we two sides of the same coin, arguing over policies under a shared moral umbrella.

“We have a fragmented landscape of rival societies and belief groups each with their own set of sacred ideas…and many with a willingness to impose these ideas on non-believers, and an ambition to capture the power of the state in order to do so. In the case of Islam, we do not have anything so trivial even as a rival society, but a nearly fully-fledged rival civilisation.”

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There is, he notes, a marked difference between a confident, insurgent Islam — which enjoys among its faithful an almost total continued adherence to its tenets, from cradle to grave — and the feeble native Christians. He writes: “White British parents today are the uncertain products of a confused culture that has gone through sixty or seventy years of radical social change, the upending of norms about sex, family and marriage, the decline of Christianity…and therefore are utterly unmoored. Church of England retention is just 46 percent in adulthood.”

How are these contradictions currently managed? By removing liberty — an attempt to suffocate the truth.

“Authoritarianism is implicit in the management of diversity. Its name is empire. And that’s how modern Britain, Empire 2.0 is governed.”

One of the most resonant things he writes is how sudden was the advent of this new woke religion. He even marks the year — 2013 — and watched in real time as “a new cohort of angry North American postgraduates” arrived in the UK and transformed not just his university but entire societies into “ruthless engines of identity politics and division.”

This is exactly what I witnessed, in more minor form, and in exactly the same time period. It was, essentially, a reverse, ideological colonisation.

He writes: “With astonishing rapidity, these pieties came to be mouthed by CEOs and university vice-chancellors, army officers and clergy. And if you defied them in your workplace, you would be sacked, end of story.”

This new creed, that he calls diversityism, has broken Britain. His conclusions are stark. The UK has been brought to its knees by the clash between “two radically different conceptions of rights, law, and how to organise society.”

For any liberals still in possession of their critical thinking capabilities, this book might shock. Because it makes clear that two of the most dearly held beliefs of contemporary liberalism are mutually exclusive — and the implications of this are…complex.

“You cannot have diversity and freedom of speech.”

This is why Jones’s book is a must-read. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of this blunt phrasing. It might even be enough to wake the remaining centrists from their self-induced slumber. Well, probably not.

There is some good news in here — though it comes weighed down with the inevitability of dark days ahead. “The symbols of Englishness and Christianity are becoming a form of resistance identity,” Jones writes.

In a way this is excellent news, for it seems to me the best way to ensure that a group of people rally around a shared identity, impose social cohesion, and produce lots of babies, is to tell them that they are oppressed. It worked for the Irish, it works for the Palestinians, so why not the English too? Among the English, the demoralisation that came from being told your side, your heritage, are shameful is lifting. In fact, that shame is hardening into something different — resolve. Resolve that we will not be made to feel bad about our culture by a group of deranged, perverse, self-loathing, bureaucrats.

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Every time I think I’m out they pull me back in!

No, not the mafia — or at least not the old Italian mafia. The white liberal woman mafia. I would like to move on to other topics, but then one of them goes and does something so telling, so…annoying, that I cannot let it pass without comment.

This time, it is British feminist author and Atlantic contributor Helen Lewis.

Last week, Lewis published a piece in the Atlantic entitled the Men Who Just Want Women to be Quiet.

First off, this is a hilariously terrible title, as men everywhere (including liberal ones) no doubt immediately thought — women being quiet?? That sounds so… nice.

So they changed the headline, to The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote. Which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but it is more specific. The article is long and wide-ranging, and almost I agree with almost nothing in it. But since Lewis and I agree on at least one thing — she describes herself as ‘gender critical’ — I’m going to try to treat the arguments she makes with some respect.

So her premise in the Atlantic piece is that MAGA men are deeply conservative reactionaries. The star of article is Pastor Doug Wilson, who heads the church that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth attends, and is the first boogeyman she introduces us to. I’m being a little unfair to Lewis here, she doesn’t present him as a boogeyman exactly. She says he’s ‘twinkly and avuncular’ and likes to play guitar. She also quotes him using very vulgar language, which somewhat surprised me as I’ve heard him interviewed a few times and he seemed like a very buttoned down kind of guy. But he wants to “fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.” Included in that fightback is his belief in ‘household voting’ — in which only the man of the family votes. He is a “prominent voice” of a term I’d never heard until reading this — ‘masculinism.’

More generally, she explains, ‘masculinism’ is made up of “ constellation” of men, Lewis says, some religious, some secular, some “even Muslims.” Even Muslims!? Ya don’t say!? Get outta town!

She includes in the piece a variety of quite disparate men to buttress her argument.

She writes: “Among Gen Z-ers, Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir is Nick Fuentes.” I don’t think Fuentes is intellectual heir to anything. He’s a young man who deliberately and effectively provokes old people and po-faced woketards. Of course I cannot say how many of his followers are actively plotting to send ‘women to the breeding gulags’ as Lewis quotes Fuentes as saying, but I do know that many young men think of him as a crass and edgy entertainer, not a leader they would follow into battle. He is more a Gen Z Lenny Bruce than a Gen Z Hitler. To Lewis’s credit, she includes in her article that Wilson called Fuentes’s takes on women ‘absurd.’

Another interviewee is Charlie Cornish-Dale, also known online as Raw Egg Nationalist. Her interview with him is amusing because she seems rather taken with him, in spite of herself. He’s ‘languorous’ and ‘likeable’ and ‘swole.’ He conducts the interview from his bed, in pyjamas. This is because it was done at 6am, which is a time when most people are in their bed, but the editorial decision to put this unnecessary detail into the finished article adds a disconcerting bedroom vibe which is somewhat distracting. (I also interviewed Cornish-Dale last year, and he is indeed charming, even when being interviewed outside of bed.)

Charlie presents another mystery to Lewis. She includes the fact that he is a religious historian with a Ph.D from Oxford, titled: Migrations of the Holy: The Devotional Culture of Wimborne Minster c. 1400-1640. Then she proceeds to diminish his credentials by calling him an “influencer” who “knows a lot of $10 words.”

His most recent book, a sweeping cultural critique called The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, contends that politics, environment, and culture are all contributing to a decline in manly men. This, for Lewis, is “confounding” because “it seems equally perturbed by falling birth rates and Brokeback Mountain winning three Oscars.”

To call this confounding, is in itself confounding. Socio-cultural-political critiques always draw from a wide variety of sources. It’s yet another example of an infuriating tendency of the liberal commentariat to be confused by — or pretend to be confused by — an intellectual argumentation style that is *completely normal.* This happens all the time when liberal-progressives who pride themselves on ‘seeing both sides’ and having ‘nuance,’ attempt to grapple with intellectuals on the right. It’s the ‘I can see both sides’ liberals that infuriate me the most. Because they cannot, in fact, see both sides.

Why? I think it’s because if they do genuinely give the right a fair hearing, they might wind up — horror of horrors — agreeing with them. And thus be exiled, non-personed, from the liberal-progressive side by the woke witch-finders general who are still able to bully them into submission. So rather than run that risk, they instead do this deeply dishonest mystification ploy where they scratch their metaphorical chins and pretend not to understand the perfectly understandable points the right is making.

It is like watching a bunch of men in lab coats poke a stick at a rock over and over and over, while asking each other: ‘what is this strange, hard, heavy, jagged, grey, entity? What does it meeaaan? Is it dangerous??? I think it’s dangerous! It must be Trump’s fault!’

Speaking of Trump, like any good liberal, Lewis finds a way to tie it back to him. She writes: “the MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first black president, and to a growing Latino population.” She then slightly pulls back from that outright misrepresentation, and opens the frame, but only just. “The multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction.”

This is a very sly phrasing. She’s not being forthright and saying clearly: MAGA is not a racist or nativist movement. She’s subtly shifting the emphasis from *white men* being suspect reactionaries, to *all men* being suspect reactionaries.

I will agree on one point she makes: I think a movement that organises around the principle of taking away the vote from adult women is an extremist movement. Removing female suffrage is an extremist position. But it’s not MAGA’s position. And her article definitely leaves the reader with the impression that it is MAGA’s position.

Lewis is what passes for objectivity in the libtard media. In fact, she seems to come in for quite a lot criticism from the left. Yet, interestingly, when it comes to dissecting the extremist positions of young, left-wing women, Lewis is more generous (see my point above about the woke witch-finders general). In a tweet about the New Statesmen article about far-left women and their very real radicalism — which I covered a few weeks ago — she wrote: “What unmet political need is being revealed here?”

It would have been interesting had she asked the same question of her own right-wing male subjects, instead of just throwing them into a rhetorical tumble dryer and pulling out the wrinkled conclusion — misogyny!

I am not suggesting that Lewis or any other liberal writer should only focus on what is interesting to me. That is a common lament that liberal writers themselves do, for example if one points out crime statistics, or other inconvenient realities. I am saying, that the plank in their own eye blinds them as they try to discern the speck in the other’s. Their fear-driven fixation on the outcome means they totally misread the process that led to the outcome. This is almost always accompanied by a wilful blindness to the extremism on their own side.

Masculinism, in so much as it is anything, is indeed a reaction. But it’s not a reaction to, as she claims, male ‘loneliness’ or lack of educational achievement, stagnant wages or “the deadening effects of day-trading” (No idea what she’s on about there.) Or at least it’s not only a reaction to those things.

A more honest way to describe it is as a reaction to the crisis of femininity — as in, women behaving extremely badly.

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A lovely example this week came from the Mangionistas: three absolute moon beams who are like a TikTok-Girl Boss-OnlyFans Manson Family.

I hate to say this — I really do - but even I, an INDEPENDENT WOMAN and ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITAN, look at those chicks and think….hmmmm, maybe giving us the vote was a mistake.

I jest. But we all know that the Internet is causing a serious outbreak of female mental illness — some of us just chose not to look at it directly, or blame men for it. Just today, as I was absent-mindedly scrolling X while eating my lunch, I came a cross a rather horrifying young woman who claims to be a church-going Christian, who also makes Internet porn, and has been posting a series of reels in which she tells her audience that her husband is not aware that the baby she is carrying might not be his. This young lady, whose name is allegedly Cierra Mistt (???), has been doing a ‘big reveal’ of who the baby daddy really is. She has two older children, by the way. She delivers all this gross drama with an upbeat, cheerful demeanour, as if she was discussing her favourite recipes. This is deep sociopathy. This is End Times stuff.

Are we women at all prepared to consider how this kind of behaviour, variations of which are all over the internet, affects men?

In 2016, Camille Paglia said “you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men.” In my experience that is true, because masculine men are not particularly agreeable. But a strong man matched with a strong woman is at least something of a hedge against the kind of disordered behaviour these young women are exhibiting, and that young men exhibit too.

Most of all, I find it galling that Lewis opens her article with a jumpscare about Doug Wilson advocating for husband-only voting from his compound in Idaho, when in Lewis’s own country something very similar is already happening. There were reports from the Manchester by-election back in March, when campaigners said family voting (ie one member of the family telling others how to vote) was rife. And a recent Henry Jackson poll of, ahem, religiously affiliated people found that in the UK, more than 80 percent thought women should take “a more traditional role in society,” and about the same number of these co-religionists think homosexuality should be outlawed. But the religion in question was not Christianity. It was Islam — truly the plank in the eye of the modern progressive feminist.

The authoritarian tendencies that Lewis is concerned about among white Trump-supporting men in the United States, are actually in full flourish here in the UK. It’s just that the men here cannot be coded as ‘right-wing’ because they have the wrong skin colour and the profess belief in the wrong religion. This is akin to writing a lengthy think piece panicking about the arcane flaws of American fire suppression techniques, while standing in your own house in London that has just gone up in flames.

Look, at the end of the day, most women want healthy, manly men. In fact, they need healthy, manly men. And healthy manly men need sane women. Both are in short supply right now. But perhaps if smart liberals like Lewis could just confront head-on the problems that we are really facing, we would stand a chance of achieving a natural balance, and a flourishing of human happiness.

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A few weeks ago I came across a very interesting 2023 study written by two academic researchers in the field of psychology. Its thesis, in a nutshell, is that pathological narcissism is associated with greater involvement in feminist activism.

Ha! I hear the male chauvinist crowing and the angry feminist screeching all from my little office here in the UK.

My amusement aside, there were two other very interesting and somewhat more surprising elements to the study. The first was that their findings did not only apply to women feminists. But male feminists as well.

“Paralleling previous research, higher pathological narcissistic grandiosity was found to be statistically significantly related the greater involvement in feminist activism. Unexpectedly, gender did not moderate this relationship. Also, high pathological narcissism was related to stronger self-identification as a feminist.”

This too was not as surprising as the study’s authors seemed to think it was — male feminists are an infamously dodgy bunch. My favourite among this cast of charlatans is a fellow called TherapyJeff, a pasty, squeaky voiced, weakling who makes TikTok’s about what a tremendous ally he is to women, which is why he refuses to sleep with only one. I guess he feels it wouldn’t be fair to all the others.

The authors also wrote: “While pretending to be pro-social, individuals with high narcissistic traits tend to have low empathy and to be primarily interested in satisfying their self-centred needs…Therefore instead of striving for reasonable solutions, individuals with high narcissistic traits will rather be interested in keeping the perception of problems going to maintain their highlighted position. Also, individuals with high narcissistic traits may use the resources of the activist movements for their own private purposes, thereby causing irreparable financial and reputational harm to the activist movement.”

This finding was true across activism in general, not just the feminist subset.

And it explains every single woke cause that we have had inflicted on us since the late 2010’s. The “homelessness crisis” in California — basically an industry of highly paid professionals who oversaw an explosion in the homelessness problem they were being paid handsomely to fix; the BLM grifters who incited Americans to set their neighbourhoods on fire, then used the cash they raised from guilty white liberals to buy big homes for themselves; the gay industrial complex queens who, once they had won the right to marry, needed a new cause to justify their elevated egos, victim complexes, and NGO salaries — so set about creating a generation of eunuch children; etc etc etc.

It’s nice when academic research confirms what you can see with your own damn eyes.

But the most significant finding in this article, for me, was that the feminist movement was not entirely made of narcissists. In fact, within feminist groups there is another consequential personality type: the altruists. As in, people who are driven by a sincere desire to help, not a self-serving desire to be seen as helping, for personal gain.

So, according to their study of nearly 500 people, feminist activist organisations are essentially places where men and women with “dark-ego-principle” motivations work side by side with men and women who sincerely want to do good in the world.

This, my friends, sums up very neatly the whole of the crisis of liberalism that is the focus of much of this Substack.

The report is quite short, and bounded by academic speak that precludes its authors from making sweeping generalisations about the findings. But I am not hampered by academic restrictions, and to me, the authors have (perhaps inadvertently) hit upon the very dynamic that has driven much of western society into crisis. That dynamic is the interplay between malevolent actors and a whole bunch of ‘nice’ people who run interference for them.

I have written about this more times than I can count.

In particular, these findings reminded me of one of the most controversial and exploited incidents this year — the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis, which over the course of a month or so generated a tonne of, essentially, far-left propaganda ops.

When Renee Good was shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis in January, one of the more intriguing elements to her story was that of Renee’s female partner, a woman named Rebecca, or Becca.

Renee was described by her brother as ‘dandelions and sunlight’, a woman who was ‘warm and steady.’

“She believed that kindness mattered, and she lived that belief.”

I take him at his word. You can take all the caveats you want out of that, clearly her own brother, in eulogising his sister, is going to give the most glowing interpretation of who she was. But, it is my opinion, based on the many news reports of her life and death, that Good was an altruist type.

Judging from the video footage from the January altercation that led to her death, widely shared on social media at the time, I believe that her partner Becca, was not.

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I understand that in psychology, altruism is a contested concept. But let’s just take it at face value, how the word is commonly understood.

Obviously I do not know these women personally, so I am surmising here. Also when I say Renee was ‘an altruist type’ — don’t equate that with me saying she was a truly good person, I don’t know that — nor am I saying she was doing what she was doing for good reasons. What I mean is that I believe she was motivated by a desire to help, not a desire for power. That’s my guess.

But there was always something very off about Becca Good.

Shortly after Renee’s death, reports started popping up on social media that Becca had criminal reports filed against her, in the years leading up to the shooting, including for child abuse. If you Google that, you will find a lot of news stories ‘debunking’ those claims — except not really, because actually the stories are reporting that Renee had no criminal record, not Becca. When the claims were not about Renee in the first place. It’s suspiciously murky and confusing.

But whether the claims about are Becca are true or not, just judging from her behaviour toward both the ICE agents who they were confronting, and her own supposedly beloved wife, make it clear — in my opinion— that Becca is a malignant person.

The video footage, in case you missed it, showed Becca posturing and taunting the ICE agents, from outside the car. She can be heard yelling to Renee, who is sitting behind the wheel of their car, to ‘drive baby drive.’ This was in direct opposition to the orders that ICE were shouting at Renee, to get out of the car. In this extremely tense and dangerous situation, Becca’s actions — again, in my opinion — directly led to Renee’s death.

Renee’s death, in turn, served as a major propaganda win for far-left activists, bolstering, in their minds, their claims that ICE was a new Gestapo, wantonly murdering innocents on the streets of America.

So we see that, once again, the do-gooder gives their all in service to an agenda — not a cause.

On a macro level, the narcissist-altruist paradigm described by these researchers, resonates with the endless stream of mostly white liberal women losing their minds over the latest ginned up media hysteria campaigns about imminent fascist takeover by Trump and his supporters.

One of the reasons I return to this topic over and over again, is I can put myself in their shoes. To some degree, I grew up in the same world as they did. A world in which we were all taught from a young age that the story of humanity was one of progress fighting against backwardness; of liberalism and socialism fighting against nazism and fascism — to the point where the terms progressive and liberal and socialist became synonymous with *being a good person.*

Looked at through a very narrow lens, it made sense. But that narrow lens left us ill-equipped to see the sophisticated emotional manipulation the narcissists were carrying out.

It is my belief is that many of these activists are actual altruists, who end up in service to, not the *cause,* but to the narcissists in their organisations/movements. This is a very toxic interpersonal dynamic, which causes high levels of dysfunction or malfunction, that in my opinion defines much of the liberal-left. It also partly explains the levels of emoting and irrational behaviour we see from the activists. Dealing with a narcissist on an individual basis is crazy-making. Dealing with an organisation full of them, while also trying to “fix” the problems of the world, problems with which you are emotionally enmeshed and upon which you have based your own self-worth, is enough to drive a woman utterly mad.

It reminds me of the sadist-masochist dynamic. The question really is: Why is this self-abnegating, self-flagellating, self-destroying impulse so strong in so many white liberal women?

Maybe it’s easier to answer that question with a negative: as in, why are some women not?

For that, I turn to the person I know best — myself. I think that I am, fundamentally, not a particularly altruistic person.In fact, I have long thought of myself as a little bit on the selfish side. I care for the people I love, the people close to me. I protect them and would defend them to the death. However, for the most part, I do not and never have lost sleep over the horrors (real or imagined) being meted out to large groups of people in far-flung quarters of the earth. Which is not to say I am totally indifferent to the suffering of others — but I just instinctively knew that nothing I could do would make a difference. I have always followed the news closely, even as a child, but I have never even volunteered at a local soup kitchen. Hearing reports of human suffering spurs me to gratitude that I am spared from the horrors, it does not spur me into action to somehow try and stop it. This used to seem like a bad thing. Now, I’m wondering if my selfish instincts were actually a protective shield against having my emotions hijacked by malevolent, power-hungry, fake, do-gooders.

It will never stop being strange to me that an era in which society tried to make females into highly educated GirlBosses, actually turned half of them into supine handmaidens for extremists masquerading as crusaders for justice.

The only thing that will fix this — from a personality standpoint — is discernment. Get some. Make sure your kids get some. Use it as your armour, and your ammo.

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Everywhere I look I see women drowning in rancour against their male counterparts.

There is a tendency to look upon female hatred of men as a sort of insignificant, or even justifiable phenomenon — one that does not have any particular implications for society as a whole. But of course it does. There are countless women who have suffered at the hands of men, and therefore have a mistrust of and aversion to them as a result. Violence, abandonment, betrayal — these are timeless challenges that men have thrown at women. Torrents of ink have been spilled lamenting this reality.

But what is happening now is not a reflection of that long-standing reality. It’s something else.

“On the internet, men and women have never been more alienated from each other,” wrote the New Statesman a few weeks ago.

One young leftie woman interviewed for the piece was asked how she felt about men. “I don’t care for them,” she says.

I have a rather complicated personal connection to this topic (other than just being a woman!) which is why this essay is a bit longer than usual. My own father wrote a book called Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice. It would turn out to be his last book in a long career of journalism and fiction writing. He died before it could be published. I read the draft with him in the cancer ward in a Manhattan hospital. After he died, my mother and I finally managed to get it published, and I wrote the foreword.

That book took up an enormous amount of my attention and energy for a number of years — and so naturally enough did the topic, men’s hatred of women. I had never called myself a feminist, and although I was very pro-woman generally, when my father initially explained his argument, I was actually skeptical. I thought that men mistreated other men just as much, if not much more, as they had women. But my father made such a compelling case – that much of civilisation had been built on the male desire to control and dominate the female – that I by the end largely accepted his premise.

So when I point out that, in fact, we have a misandry problem, I’m doing so despite being intensely familiar — intellectually, historically, and personally — with the many ways men do women wrong.

Decades later, in an utterly changed and topsy-turvy world compared to the one in which I last saw my brilliant, liberal, secular father, my alarm is no longer over how men view women.

It’s over how women view men. There has always been and will continue to always be an undercurrent of men who hate and fear women. But if we saw men routinely talk about women the way that women routinely talk about men, if contempt for women was as mainstream as is contempt for men, it would be declared a worldwide emergency.

I’ve seen a couple of examples of this recently that really gave me pause.

Somehow, I came across the story of Ann Marie Tendler, the ex wife of a mildly famous American comedian. I’m only aware of it because I stumbled upon a very good YouTube summary of Tendler’s memoir, which was billed as a tell-all but is, according to even feminist critics, a navel-gazing, score-settling, bitch-fest.

Tendler seems to me to be the perfect representative for the collective female derangement. She has a fair grievance — her famous husband impregnatedsomeone else while still married to her, and now he constantly posts about his domestic bliss, which is a truly awful betrayal. But because of her own descriptions of her long history of bitterness, unhappiness, lack of drive, lack of success, and her openly expresses her hatred of men, any sympathy points vanish.

Tendler is, by her own admission, a woman who, before marrying a celebrity, failed cosmetology school, and quit every job she’d had. In her teens and 20s, she dates a series of older and/or more successful men, including a tech millionaire, when she is a hairdresser living in Queens. Post-divorce from the famous comedian (his name is John Mulaney if you care - I don’t), she dates a series of non-entities that only confirm her contempt for men.

She is “destroyed by a situationship with a man named Javier.” She wheels her dog around NYC in a baby carriage. In an argument with one of these many boyfriends, over why she claimed she did not want sons, she says: “I hate men. I hate them so much. Men are the cause of all my problems. Men are the cause of everyone’s problems. They are stupid and they are arrogant. They think everything they say is true and right. I hate them so fucking much I don’t even know if I can fuck them anymore.”

Her therapists gingerly suggest that, actually, her rage may actually “be anger toward her mother or other maternal figures.” According to her book, her mother was full of rage herself. But Tendler counters with: “the field of psychology was developed by white men using white men as the baseline standard for behaviour and sanity.”

She is every AWFUL stereotype, come to life. And she is hardly alone.

Another prominent example is an Instagram account by the name of Words of Women — with a following of over 600,000 people. The woman behind it, Lauren Martin, produces a steady stream of vitriolic, despairing, and hate-filled content, aimed mostly at men. Like Tendler, she has a history of mental illness. She openly dissects her crumbling marriage to what sounds like a rather long-suffering man. She obsesses and cries over the usual Democratic talking points. She disparages other women, and her own children. She seethes and grinds her jaw and blows rage from her nostrils like a cartoon bull. Mostly from what looks like a very spacious and well appointed closet. In one post, she says: “you know what I think we need to start doing? Kicking men in the fucking balls.”

“Angry, crazy women are cool now.”

Not really.

Her comments section is a smorgasbord of women encouraging other women to double down on their very stupid opinions.

One of her commenters says: “having a man is honestly so embarrassing rn.”

Another commenter outrageously opined that men don’t understand what it’s like to be the targets of physical violence, therefore they walk around in a kind of Pollyanna fugue state where they skip about the place thinking nothing can ever go wrong. I cannot fathom the level of pig ignorance it would take for a grown adult to think that.

Not surprisingly, her audience seems to be full of women who think they could actually take on men in a physical contest?

“I’m glad you are feeling the rage. I am Canadian Gen X and menopausal so I am actually preparing for potential war with the US.”

“Add a little menopause to the mix and you’ve got one hell of a warrior!”

Be real, ladies! You are a quivering, emotional wreck who wouldn’t last 2 seconds in an actual fight!

Woke ideology, and its very vocal subset, feminism, are the perfect masks for all sorts of pathological behaviour, and the perfect tool for avoiding accountability.

Both the woke ideological superstructure and feminism, place the blame on our lack of success, and responsibility for our happiness, on external factors that we do not control.

Fellow Substacker, doctor Hannah Spier, expressed very eloquently the impact feminism has had on generations of girls and women.

“That was the key shift. Feminism did not only change laws or employment patterns. It changed the interpretive frame through which girls and women were taught to understand life’s disappointments.”

I’m a 50-50 person. Meaning when things go south, and it comes down to blame, in a general sense, I believe, it should be shared between the sexes. We are two sides of the same human coin. This is incontrovertible, I’m afraid. Even in today’s world where women can ostensibly live happily independent lives, and some do — including several friends of mine — if women en masse were better off alone, we would see a concurrent flourishing of female happiness and fulfilment. Are we seeing that? No. We are seeing the opposite.

Even taking into account the structural disparities between men and women in what is commonly referred to as the patriarchy, even under those systems, women always had ways of making up for their lack of power and influence in one sphere with power and influence in another sphere. Women are human. Humans are irrepressible. And a motivated woman is more irrepressible than most.

And yet, the modern middle class woman does not see this. They only see how hard-done-by they are. One UK-based writer whose brand is angry-and-overwhelmed-menopausal lady, wrote: “every woman I speak to is angry.”

Women who hate men seem to have several other negative characteristics as well.

They become self-obsessed. Intense solipsism is something I have noticed among women, in particular feminists, for some time now. I have recognised it in myself too. As in: I spend, and have spent as a younger women, an inordinate amount of time thinking about how I was perceived, how I looked, how I related to others and what they thought of me. A lot of I, I, I.

Women who are diagnosable narcissists on top of that take this to truly toxic extremes.

In a very revealing 2007 documentary about English revolutionary feminists of the late 20th century, women look back on a movement that at the time may have seemed lost to history — but which has made a roaring comeback since. Thanks to woke.

One woman said: “we were all about us. Keep the focus here. Keep the focus female.”

When I’m scrolling through left-wing women’s accounts on TikTok or Instagram, I’m really struck by the self-focus. It’s actually very suffocating, attaching yourself so fiercely to thoughts of self. It means that random occurrences, random utterances, take on outsize significance. It’s incredibly freeing to move through the world, un-self-conscious. To not notice.

Women who hate men also lack the moderating effect that living in a harmonious relationship with a man provides. (This one works both ways.) Having to contend with a male partner, in all his rude maleness, forces you to be at least somewhat flexible, it forces you to contend with another’s point of view. Men are mysterious creatures to us. When I was growing up, society did a terrible job teaching me what to expect when it came to dealing with men, and it’s only gotten worse. Just as a woman will soften a man in a happy relationship, so will a man calm a woman. You learn so much from intimate relationships, about yourself but also about the opposite sex. You learn that all the platitudes you were taught are almost all wrong. Of all the disastrous results of socially encouraged misandry is that it makes it much harder for girls to experience long-term, committed relationships with men.

It’s also terrible for the children of these bitter, angry, women.

In the feminism documentary, a woman talked about how women in the movement were judged for having husbands, boyfriends, and even sons. “A lot of radical feminists felt you should give them up. A lot of them were saying you should give up boy children. I can’t believe it now, it was so cruel and horrible.”

The documentary’s VoiceOver tried to make this inconvenient evidence less damning: “Some separatists were forced to make an agonising choice between their sons and their politics.”

Forced? Forced? Forced by whom, exactly? Was a camp commander standing over any of these women, holding a gun to their head? Or was it that they were simply being confronted with the implications of their own terrible, toxic, and stupidly myopic ideas?

Even if they are not actively abandoning their children, it is very difficult to model happiness for your children if you are unrelentingly negative about your husband, or if you find domestic life an unrelenting bore.

As Lauren Martin said herself in one of her Instagram posts: “I’m just going to say it. I’m not enjoying my children right now. It is a loop of the same bullshit every single day. Of, like, Ms Rachel and Peppa Pig or reading the same book, Ariel, Ariel, Ariel and screaming and not eating dinner…Really it’s not fun. It’s not fun at all. I have to drive half hour to daycare, half hour back and they’re crying, and saying ‘almost home, ok fine! Still crying…And I’m like, ‘can you just be good.’”

In another post, she advocates that her followers arm themselves. “I think the time has come where passive, peaceful resistance in your own home might not benefit. I think we have children to protect.”

Funny how comfortable she feels publicly stating how her actual children are making her unhappy — surely one of the worst things a child could hear – but tells of over half a million people to buy guns to “protect” unspecified other children.

The dire implications of this discord are worse than just joylessness among the youth. It threatens the survival of this particular demographic.

As the New Statesman found, “young women are twice as likely not to want children as young men.”

Am I being hyperbolic when I suggest that this outbreak of man-hatred in middle class, educated, women, threatens to be an extinction-level event of this group? Two weeks ago, I wrote that we need to leave a door open for the younger women to walk through. But for the slightly older demographic — women like Martin, Tendler, and the many, many, angry Gen X women — they are going to have to learn the hard way how miserable life is when you hate half of the human race.

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Last week, I wrote about the radicalisation of young, white, middle class girls, and how this was a political if not national crisis.

Well, that very same weekend we got further evidence that the boys are radicalised too — when an adult-in-name-only tried to assassinate President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Obviously we already knew that liberal-left men have also been radicalised. We’ve seen left-wing young men assassinate Charlie Kirk, shoot the president in the ear, and riot, loot, threaten political opponents for ten years now.

But Cole Thomas Allen, the 31 year old arrested for storming the mezzanine outside the ballroom where Trump, his cabinet, and America’s premier media were all gathered, was striking in his naive foolishness.

I’m going to treat this very, very serious matter in a non-serious way. This is partly a coping mechanism to ease my horror that this is actually happening to our society; and also because as violent as these people are, there is also something just deeply unserious about them.

What can I say? I have a heightened sense of the absurd.

I’ve been interested in terrorism and terrorist movements for my entire life — even as a child, partly due to my father’s journalism and the fact that his family lived in an IRA stronghold in Belfast. So he had lots of experience of it.

But this is the first time I saw the actions and pronouncements of a would-be terrorist, and thought, hmmm, he seems kind of familiar? This is no swivel-eyed, bomb throwing anarchist, or AK-47 toting, plane-hijacking Palestinian, or leather-jacket wearing, car-bomb planting Belfast hard man.

This guy reminds me of someone I could be related to! Sorry, let me refine that so as not to impugn my relatives, as absolutely none of them are as homicidally simple-minded as this guy.

He’s like someone who posts on LinkedIn.

He went to CalTech!

He was Teacher of the month! (Not even of the year. Sad.)

He has a side hustle in video game development.

After the foiled attack, Trump called him a whack job — which is partly true (and it’s also my favourite insult, out of many insults that I love). But Cole also is — by the current Democratic Party standards, totally normal.

His views, all of which are factually incorrect, are totally commonplace. They are shared by millions and millions of people, not just in America, but across the world.

The photos of him that beamed around the world produced yet another sharp slap of cognitive dissonance. From his Jim-from-The-Office half smile, to the bizarre selfie he took right before carrying out his attempted attack, in which he looked like he was about to go serve canapés at a drinks reception for humanities professors at Columbia University. Over on Reddit — not where I usually go for calm, reasoned analysis — one poster spoke for many in the nation when he said (in all caps) WHY IS HIS TIE TUCKED INTO HIS PANTS???

Over on Bluesky, Cole didn’t make sense either, posting his Trump Derangement Syndrome earlier this month:

“Trump is literally one of those villains that if you beat his ass hard enough, he’ll join your team. Don’t really have any other insights to this, it’s not really actionable cause no way schumer just canes him into acting his age, but, like, it would probably literally work on him,” he wrote.

But the screed he sent out minutes before commencing his unsuccessful attack was so utterly strange, full of bureaucratic check-boxes and caveats, that I just have to share it. So here is my analysis of his manifesto.

The first line reads:

“Hello everybody!”

That’s quite an opener. It’s like he’s sending out a team email to remind people of an upcoming meeting.

“So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today…”

Golly gee, ya sure did!

“Let me start off by apologising to everyone whose trust I abused.” What?? He starts off his murder manifesto with an apology?! That is so lame.

“I apologise to my parents for saying an interview without saying it was for ‘Most Wanted.’” WINK WINK

“I apologise to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.)”

Are we sure this guy knows what a ‘MANIFESTO’ is??

But wait! There is more apologising to be done!

“I apologise to all the people I travelled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.”

What a thoughtful gun-toting maniac!

Aaaaand…there’s more apologies.

“I apologise to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.”

So, he’s saying sorry to every single person who has been abused and/or murdered…ever? Past, present and future? He really needs a thicker skin if he’s going to be a terrorist.

“I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies”

Cole, dude: are you a cold-blooded killer or are you not a cold-blooded killer? Are you familiar with how murder works? It usually involves weapons — even using weapons, yikes! — and hurting people with them. This goes even more for terrorism. Saying sorry over and over kind of ruins the whole look.

“On to why I did any of this:”

Alright, now we are getting somewhere.

“I am a citizen of the United States of America.”

Ok?

“What my representatives do reflects on me.”

Does it though? What about what you do? Does your wanting to commit murder reflect on you at all?

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

First, allow me to interject with a few style tips. The first half of this sentence sounds like the set up to a terrible joke: a pedophile, rapist, and traitor walk in to a bar…the barman says: what are you having?

As for the second half: we don’t use the verb “coat” with the noun crimes. We commit crimes. We coat our hands with, say, lotion. Or paint, or blood — which is what I think you maybe were going for? We do not coat other people, or their hands, with crimes. Nor do we use the phrase his crimes are on my hands…Are we sure this person is 31 and not 13?

(Well, to be completely honest…

[oh go on then!]

I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

Thanks for clearing that up Cole. I get it. We’re all busy.

“While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format but I’m not military so too bad.)

“Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel)…”

He’s pretty polite for a would-be assassin, I’ll give him that.

“They are targets, prioritised from highest-ranking to lowest.”

“Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armour because centre mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*.”

I’ve never known a wannabe mass shooter to be so concerned with not hurting people?

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me.)

Capitol Police; same as Hotel Security

National Guard: same as Hotel Security

Hotel Employees: not targets at all

Guests: Not targets at all

“In order to minimise casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration though walls.)

“I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Cole, buddy, I don’t think you are cut out for this murder stuff.

Then, he gives five “objections” to his plan, and a rebuttal to teach. I won’t quote each one but overall, this gives the impression that he is a huge nerd trying to make sure he has buy-in from all his fellow nerds before they all do something naughty. Again — not something I expected in an assassin.

His second objection was — and I’m not making this up:

“This is not a convenient time for you to do this”

?????

When is it ever convenient to assassinate the leader of the free world? It’s not exactly something you can do on your way home from work.

His rebuttal to the convenience objection:

“Do you think when I see see someone raped or murdered or abused I should walk on by because it would be ‘inconvenient’ for people who aren’t the victim.”

What? I feel like you have to have the mental capacity of a child to make this statement, not a 31 year old man. I get that this guy was good at math, but what an idiot.

He’s taking the moral logic of a simplistic hypothetical— being face to face with a violent crime happening in the moment, in front of him — and applying it to a gala event, attended by people he thinks have done bad things at other times. He’s trying to make the case for a strategic act of political insurrection by using a completely different, unrelated, context. That is the thinking of a child. An actual child.

Then he quotes Jesus — “yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” — wildly misapplying the Biblical text, which he then rebuts with some word salad in which he tries to sound like a Very Wise Judge or something. But it’s so detached and abstract, it is profoundly odd.

“No one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.”

Who is ordering whom? What is being ordered?? And why can’t this guy write good!?

He goes on for a bit more, thanking everyone as if he just won an Oscar or something, then adds a p.s.. Again, like I did when I was writing in my diary as a child.

But this post script is a doozy. He goes off on a rant about how bad Trump’s security is. Yes. He actually complains that the Secret Service is not doing it’s job. Which, I mean, right. That’s correct. But a weird concern for someone who thought he was about to kill a president?

Cole is an excellent encapsulation of where I think a lot of young, well-educated, American liberal extremists are: they have the emotional maturity and moral reasoning of very young children, but they are fluent in the bureaucratic, professional, project-management language (also therapeutic language) of adults.

They are so trapped in their own fog that they cannot see past their own nose. Much like the middle class white girls who love to knit and crochet but also love Hamas, it is jarring. It’s artificial. It’s like watching a badly programmed robot try to be human-like.

I’m surprised he didn’t sign off his murder manifesto with something like ‘Ok, so hopefully that’s all clear and you guys can support me in murdering the president. No worries if not!’

People did not used to be like this. I’m running out of adjectives to describe these nut-jobs.

He is more Reading Rainbow than Day of the Jackal.

Which sounds cute, maybe? But the fact that we now have amateur child soldiers in adult bodies is a cause for deep concern.

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Cole is 100 percent a casualty of the information war. He repeatedly references a list of media lies as evidence that what he is doing is worthy. “Teenage girls being abused by this administration”; “fishermen executed without trial” and people being “raped in detention camps.”

Mark Halperin did an excellent job of dismantling all of these wild claims — but if you are still in doubt, ask yourself this. If the media really had actual, hard, evidence of this don’t you think we would have seen it all over the internet? Instead, they use misrepresentation, inference, and questions in order to create the impression of reality. But their most powerful trick is to point to a lie, and call it an obvious truth — because simply by declaiming something, they shape reality. The moral of the Emperor’s New Clothes has been forgotten.

When I call Cole a casualty, I do not mean to absolve him of his crime, or imply that he is not responsible for his actions. He alone bears that responsibility, as the media did not force him at gunpoint to commit this crazy act. What the media did do, however, is create the environment in which he was formed. They designed the game that he was a player in.

I just started reading Jacob Siegel’s new book, The Information State. I cannot recommend it enough. It is very helpful for understanding the environment we are currently in. I’m only 2 chapters in, but already I have come upon invaluable nuggets about how the modern age has been shaped by the belief (mistaken, in my opinion) that information is our most necessary tool, our most trustworthy and unfailing guide. Starting in the 16th century, man started building “a new kind of society based on the belief that the ultimate truth is found in information.” Then, with the great American experiment with democracy, “Democratic politics gave everyone a say. As a result, it became valuable to have things to say, and that value was commodified, traded, and subject to runaway inflation. In the past, people might have attached no great significance to the formless mental impressions flitting through their heads. Now many started developing a proprietary relationship to their opinions.”

I see this constantly. I try to guard against it myself. I lament just how emotionally attached people, liberals and leftists in particular but not exclusively, have become to their opinions.

The information age has also led us to believe, mistakenly, that being in possession of information somehow makes us smart. Cole Allen proves that is not correct.

Siegel writes:

“It turns out that the most informed citizen who dutifully consumes the news is also easiest to propagandise.”

I have yet to see a deeper explanation of how we ended up with a country full of young zealots willing to commit murder in service of their mistaken beliefs.

The most upsetting thing about this sorry episode was my realisation that these fanatics are going to keep going until they get what they want.

Remember that next time you have the chance to vote.

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Something rather extraordinary happened last week in UK media. The New Statesmen, the bible of the left-wing cultural and policy elite in this country, came out with a paradigm-shattering story, about sex-based political extremism.

In essence, they admitted: We have an extremism emergency.

Of course, the media generally has been telling us this for some time.

However, until now media warnings about this dangerous radicalisation, got only wrong one small detail: the people who were being radicalised. And the New Statesman, of all places, has corrected the record.

Turns out, it’s not the boys being radicalised to hate women through the Manosphere, as so many chattering class Cathy’s have hysterically claimed. According to polling commissioned by the New Statesman, boys are quite found of girls, actually.

So the left wing media has actually admitted that it’s girls being radicalised to hate men, through far-left political ideology, including but not limited to, feminism.

Not only did everyone in the liberal media get this part wrong — they have also been one of the main vectors of the ideology that has transformed these young women into miserable and hopeless extremists who hate men, and love Communism.

Good job everyone!

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Are you as shocked as I am? Ha. It’s almost as if all the thousands upon thousands of images we have seen of young women losing their goddamn minds over the outrage du jour, actually meant something!?!? Who could possibly have foreseen that ceding the Academy, the media, and the policy making class to bitter middle aged hags and Girl Boss sociopaths — might not have been the best idea?!?!?!?!?

To quote the late, great Private Eye — surely some mistake?

But no. The right-wingers were correct — again!

Whoops!

You must watch this short podcast conversation between the female pollster who came up with the shocking numbers and the female New Statesman writers, contemplating in real time, and evidently for the first time, the dire consequences of the actions of the liberal-left intelligentsia of which they are very much part. Three generations of propaganda with no institutional pushback or balance to speak of, as one of them said: “obviously [had] very bad ramifications for British society if one group is so alienated.”

Their conversation is so funny: they seem to be …surprised?

The host of the podcast asks: “I think particularly on on the right of politics, there’s this image of sort of overeducated young women who who come out of university with these kind of radical political opinions and they’re the reason why we’re not getting enough babies born and that kind of thing. I mean, is there is there any sort of grain of truth in in that? Frankly?”

I will spare you the time of listening to the young female journalist try to not answer the question: yes. Yes, there is truth to it. Obviously. Of course there is. Jesus H. Christ.

So many telling and appalling stats in the piece — and I’m quite sure you would get similar numbers in the US. Here are the key findings, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has been watching and taking seriously the woke takeover of the culture.

Women aged 18-25:

• Are deeply misandrist

• Hate capitalism and love communism

• Are obsessed with Palestine

• Are obsessed with the Epstein files

• Despair and panic over the future and feel hopeless

• Do not want to have children

• They are mentally and/or physically unwell

It’s as bad as the most wild-eyed MAGA fiend (ie, me) has been saying.

The polling also found that this was among white, affluent young women. It was they — not working class girls, not non-white girls — who felt despair, man-hatred, and that Britain was irredeemably racist. It is also women in middle-class profession who were also less likely to feel ‘valued by society, and less likely to believe that if they work hard they will succeed in life when compared with their working class counterparts.”

This is the eye of the storm right here. A coming together of gentle parenting — shielding children from any negative feelings and putting zero demands on them, taking their physical discomforts and mild aches and pains too seriously; overly politicised childhoods — especially parents openly discussing their own progressive/left-wing views, which are almost unrelentingly negative about society; politicised culture — where musicians and writers cosplay as revolutionary types; and social media echo chambers, or perhaps as they should be characterised — hypnosis machines.

Older women are responsible for laying this burden on young women. For filling their tender young minds with fear porn, alarmism, slandering men, failing to teach or model gratitude for the immense physical comfort we live in, failing to reign in the worst emotional excesses of female youth, failing to open a goddamn window and let some fresh air in — metaphorically speaking — instead of just keeping them locking inside an emotional prison. These young women have had their minds broken. They did not do this to themselves.

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Women have dominated all the systems these young, privileged girls grew up in: education and media and culture. I’m surmising but I’m pretty sure that these young women also grew up with mothers who were progressive-left, white collar professionals in varying states of emotional and spiritual disarray themselves. These older women — likely — never imposed discipline or expected girls to learn emotional self-control, and openly expressed their own disillusionment with men, or hen-pecked and disrespected the father — if there was one.

Unlike the Boomer women revolutionaries who set this disaster in motion, Gen Z left-wing extremists did not chose this worldview. It was imposed upon them, by said Boomer and Gen X women revolutionaries, soft revolutionaries as they may be, who thought they were making the world a better place.

Said the writer: “so poor is their view of capitalism that they actually have as favourable a view of fascism.”

Said one young woman, TikTok creator Phoebe O’Brien, quoted in the article: “I want to be an instrument of the revolution.”

The problem is most concentrated with the white middle class girls. They are being radicalised through woke ideology that teaches them to hate everything they are supposed to love: men, family, children and homeland. And this risks becoming a political, if not national, emergency.

O’Brien is clearly demonstrating symptoms of cult-levels of mind control. The Epstein files had her “teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack.” Just by way of a brief comparison, on 9/11 I was running across the Manhattan Bridge about a mile from the Twin Towers, when the second tower turned to dust before my very eyes — and it did not cause me to even come close to an anxiety attack.

“She said she felt anxious seeing injustice and doing nothing. It was a physical sensation in the centre of her body,” the article claims. O’Brien is quoted as saying: “‘The only way I’ve found to release the negative sensation is to act.”

“I feel a lot of guilt, even though I didn’t commit any war crimes,” said another girl, who “spent much more time on her activism than her university work.”

Then there are the incentives: O’Brien’s account grew “rapidly” once she started doing political content. After Oct 7 2023, her account “just became all about the war.”

“‘Not caring’” about the news was inconceivable to the women I met,” the author writes.

I was once a left-wing young woman. But I was a left-wing young woman in the 1990’s. And reading this makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of Nam.

Aside from the huge political brainwashing component, there is also a competency element.

The thing that attracted me to the Socialist Worker’s Party when I was 20 years old, was that I was frustrated and embarrassed by my own inabilities, especially to earn money. I was a student, and had only ever been a student, and did not yet have the confidence, that comes from experience, that I would be able to simply take care of myself in the big bad world. I was in an emotionally and physically intense relationship with a man I loved deeply, but who would not commit to me, and this made me feel alone in the world, on edge. I was far away from my family. I was studying (or not, as the case may be) post-modern theories of literature that I found opaque, impenetrable, and joyless, but upon which my academic success depended. That frustrated me further, it turned me from the naturally curious and enthusiastic student that I had been in high school, into a disaffected and alienated university student who would rather smoke hash in my bedsit and even go to boring Socialist Worker Party meetings. That’s how much I hated reading Foucault.

All of these things made me feel very insecure, and I turned that outward and blamed — although very half-heartedly — the system I was living in. It wasn’t based on a rational analysis, it was based on feeling. The lefty slogans fit neatly into the hollowed out spaces that my feeling of lack had created within me. When I come across at pictures of myself aged 20, I have a haunted, drawn, look on my face. So in some respects, I’m not so different from these girls in the New Statesman. But for a few tweaks in the time-space continuum, I could have been one of them.

I got lucky in this timeline. Once I got more exposure to the inner workings of the left-wing party I had joined, my rational analytic side kicked in, and it was soon clear to me that these people were, I think the political science term for it is…full of shit. So my active involvement in far left politics was done and dusted after a few months. But I also had the benefit of a society that did not reinforce and reward ever more extreme displays of ideological fervour. I was a young person in a world of grown ups who would challenge you on your silly ideas, or simply dismiss them out of hand. I had a father with whom I was very close, who challenged my politics in a way that was affectionate and fun, not contentious and emotional.

When, at age 23, I went to work at The New York Times, it was not a newsroom run by woke zealots. It was a newsroom run by old-time professionals, mature adults. Working there also vastly increased my confidence in my professional skills, paid me a decent salary, and I would never again need to rely on a hideously dumb political thought system to make sense of the world.

In short, when I was a university student, I was demoralised. When I joined the adult world, I got over it. My politics changed accordingly.

Today’s young university women are not getting the opportunity to grow up. These young women are also being told, over and over and over again, that men are bad. Television tells them this. Schools tell them this. Media tell them this. Pop culture tells them this. And in many, many, cases, their mothers tell them this.

This was another terrible thing that I was spared as a young lefty. In addition to having a very close relationship with my father, who, again, had just the right balance — pride in my fierce argumentative nature, but not letting me win every time, like a sop — in my Gen X circle, young men and women were very integrated. We were friends with each other. Sure, we had our hearts broken, and we broke hearts — but our expectations as girls were not set at any extreme. We were not taught that boys were all rapists, or that they had to fit exactly into a perfect mould of correct political opinions. If I had to describe the complexities of inter-sex relationships of that era with one single word, it would be natural. Our relationships were pretty natural.

Growing up, we were mostly free-range — meaning by the age of 20 we had all travelled extensively without adult chaperones; we all had part-time jobs, and none of us had chronic conditions that hampered our ability to life a full life.

None of this is true any longer. Girls (I know technically they are adults, but mentally and morally they are adolescents) need an equivalent of King Randall, a young black man who runs an academy for boys in which he teaches them fundamentals ranging from how to speak respectfully to women, to how to pump gas and fix a flat tyre, to how to pay a utility bill and speak on the phone. There should be a place like this for girls and young women— just to ease their transformation from child and teen, into an adult who can handle her responsibilities without having a mental breakdown.

This is perhaps why it’s the middle class girls who are the most susceptible to this propaganda onslaught (in addition to be, in my opinion, the prime targets of it). They are the most sheltered, the most paid attention to — and therefore the least resilient, the least practical, of their cohort. It’s impossible to feel good about the world when you have zero skills with which to claim your place in it.

The author of the piece is herself a young woman, and a lefty, who had, when she was a student, participated in many of the same activities and debates as the women she is profiling. (The left doesn’t really change that much). “But,” she writes, “it felt like the divides had grown wider since then — particularly among women who had gone to university, who were significantly to the left of their peers who hadn’t.”

“It didn’t feel like students just trying on radicalism for fun,” the author wrote.

I know that many of the women profiled in this piece would not extend any courtesy or grace to people like me. It is likely that they would harass, cancel, and socially punish anyone who would dare to disagree with them. But still, we need to leave a door open for these broken girls to walk back through. While I’m not a fan of characterising adults who do bad things as victims, these young women never really stood a chance against weapons-grade propaganda, which is all they have ever known. Responsibility for their demoralisation lies with adults — either foolish or malignant — who foisted their embittered worldview onto them.

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A few weeks ago, I ventured out to an arts event here in Belfast — something I do rarely these days. It was entitled Working Against the Clampdown: Who’s Afraid of the Arts?, and it was part of the Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics.

I was there with Sara Morrison and Rosie Kay. Both are outcasts from the publicly funded arts sector in the UK — Rosie having been kicked out of her own very successful dance company — the Rosie Kay Dance Company - by her own dancers, who complained to her board alleging ‘transphobia,’ which led to the board launching an investigation into her, and ultimately, the dissolution of the entire company. Sara, as I have written about here and here, was similarly treated by her employer, the Belfast Film Festival, after she spoke in favour of women only spaces at one of Kellie Jay Keen’s Let Women Speak events in 2023.

On a rainy night in late March, sitting in the audience with these two women, l listened to salaried grandees discussing the challenges they faced while existing off the largess of the British taxpayer. It was an experience of cognitive dissonance so sharp it felt like a slap in the face.

At the talk, local arts professionals — mostly administrators of non-profit or lobby groups that oversee productions and events — earnestly and with considerable confidence praised themselves and the arts sector generally for being brave warriors against malign, reactionary, right-wing and religious extremists. That there was another Culture War being waged, by them, against many others — they seemed disconcertingly unaware of.

To give you an idea of the grandiose tone of the evening’s panelists, the Belfast event’s blurb read:

“From the fear of funding withdrawals to online harassment, the pressure on artists to self-censor is mounting. In a landscape of political sensitivity and institutional caution, how can we embrace an ethos of courageous advocacy - rooted in radical kindness and a fierce commitment to human rights?”

One of the panelists was Ruth McCarthy, the director of an organisation called Outburst, which bills itself as making “queer art and revolutionary imagination in Belfast and beyond.” She was at great pains to tell the free event’s tiny audience of about 16 people, plus six TERFs (in fairness it was a miserably rainy Tuesday night), how hard people in her orbit work, spending that taxpayer money.

Of great concern to her was a 2024 ‘letter of expectation’ from the local minister who oversees the doling out of grant money. The minister is a member of the only real conservative party of any size on this island, whose constituents are mostly religious Protestants, many of them working class or rural. The letter told the arts community here that they should allocate to programmes that address groups who are not normally represented in the arts world. People who feel, the letter said, “that the arts aren’t quite for them.”

It seemed as though McCarthy considered this as an existential threat. And she went out of her way to position herself as a young-at-heart Riot Grrrl who now fights valiantly to protect artists from governmental oppression. Except by governmental oppression, she seemed to be mainly referring to funding cuts, which she characterised as “an insidious form of censorship.”

“My job is to hold that line so artists can work behind it safely,” she said.

Safe from what? Accountability? Taste? Popularity?

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Another panelist, a DJ and ‘curator/producer’ talked about how brave he was to do a show in Belfast following the 2024 “riots” (spoiler alert: the “riots” in question in no way threatened people like DJ-curator-producers); and how his “heart was beating out of his chest” because he’s been invited to do an event in New York, where he thinks he could pulled out of his car by ICE.

Their collective bravery was only matched by the social and historical significance of their work, with McCarthy crediting ‘arts and culture’ with ending the Troubles.

This all has a distinct pre-revolutionary France flavour to it, doesn’t it? Gives me Petit Trianon vibes. Luvvies swanning around playing dress up as financial and social calamity loom.

In any event, they were rudely awakened from their reverie when Sara and Rosie — women who had experienced first hand real censorship, women who lost their livelihoods and reputations, at the hands of people just like panelists — piped up. Initiating an unsanctioned q&a session, Morrison simply blurted out from the audience, “But you cancelled me, Ruth!”

The panelists — at the risk of repeating myself, all recipients of government funding — reacted to the unexpected input as though someone let out an enormous fart. Lots of tut-tutting, lots of it shouldn’t be allowed! How dare a genuinely aggrieved, truly censored woman appear at their little pity party and steal their thunder!

McCarthy’s platitudes were particularly galling, because she had actually participated in an ideological witch-hunt against Morrison. In her position as artistic director of Outburst, she wrote a letter to Morrison’s employer, the Belfast Film Festival, in July 2023, attacking Morrison as having “legitimis[ed] an anti-gay fascist” and for having “stood on the same platform and legitimised anti trans campaigner Posie Parker…an anti-queer crusader.”

The letter was only one of a series of complaints made against Sara over her participation in Let Women Speak, which she did on her own time and did not mention her employer or job. Ruth’s letter was entered into evidence at her employment discrimination tribunal last year. Soon after the letter writing campaign against her, Morrison left her position and has not worked in the arts sector in Northern Ireland since.

I don’t want to crap over the arts generally here in Northern Ireland. I have friends here who make art — films, dance, novels, paintings — that I have been very impressed with and deeply moved by. There are some very talented people here. Over a decade ago, when I first moved back here, I would take full advantage of the plethora of free events put on by arts groups and the local city government, and thought it wonderful to have them.

That was the before times. Before the Culture War turned into a hot war of reputation destruction.

For fairness and transparency, I will state that I am a friend of Sara’s, and have followed Rosie Kay’s story, with great sympathy, for some time. And in case it is not abundantly clear, I am unabashed, very vocal critic of the left and wokeness in general, as well as the failings of the professional managerial class in particular.

But I wasn’t always those things. In fact, for a long time, I probably would have taken this bunch of people quite seriously, and thought myself on the same side as them. That is, until they proved themselves not so much arts professionals as apparatchiks in a money laundering system designed to inflate the egos of middle class arts graduates and keep the tax payer (who funds them all) at arms length.

How do they keep the tax payer Average Joe at arm’s length? By funding activities that not a single regular person would ever pay to see. For example, one Outburst artist-in-residence focuses on “queer food, foraging, and relationality.” His projects have included “cruising and foraging walks” and “scripted massage performances” [does this mean someone gets a hand job whilst reciting lines, on stage? Ed]; and “the production of hedgerow wines that explore how marginal or liminal spaces can become fertile ground for queer world-making.” He “reclaims the hedgerow as a space of resistance and connection.”

Another collaborator does interdisciplinary work on dyke/lesbian/queer relationships to land/ecology.

Outburst was also thanked by the filmmakers of this nasty little piece of propaganda, portraying a man who demands everyone go along with his delusion that he is a woman, as some kind of Rosa Parks figure. The trailer alone is enough to prove my point: woke people cannot make good art. If it’s good art, it ain’t woke.

I’m not saying there is anything censorship-worthy in the silly, masturbatory projects that these pretentious administrators boast about. It might even be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon! If you enjoy soliciting other men for sex and berry picking at the same time, fill your boots, son (as the farmers here say.)

However — to think that such, uh, niche and arcane pastimes are somehow entitled to public money? That the office managers who shuffle the papers and schmooze the civil servants in order to get their hands on that money, are somehow fighters for truth and justice? No. Does the culture really lose anything if we don’t get to see a show about queer hedgerows? No.

Contrast this, the woe-is-me, ‘look how hard we all work’ attitude of the arts people with the fuel protests last week. The farmers and hauliers were protesting the high rates of fuel tax. The high rates of fuel tax (with built in increases every year) are a result of an anti-carbon policy implemented by the Irish Green Party, who were chucked out of office in the 2024 election. Nonetheless, the money grab fuel tax lives on. According to Nick Delahanty, an Irish businessman who does better journalism on X than any of the ‘real’ Irish media, the Carbon Tax has put over 6 billion euros in the government’s pocket since 2020.

Just one tiny example: Some of the projects funded by the Irish government with the Irish taxpayer’s money include 400,000 euros for a “multifunction space for yoga, art, mindfulness, stargazing, Tibetan drum sound therapy, journaling, spa treatments, a choir and talks,” Delahanty posted on X.

So liberal arts graduates are supported in largely fake and unnecessary jobs by a huge wealth transfer from the taxpayer to the NGO’s, which then redistributes the money to the pet projects that they deem worthy. Ordinary people get very little say in how all this works. Even if the levers of democracy were healthy and functioning, from a cultural and taste standpoint people like Outburst might as well be living on a different planet to the majority of tax paying residents — who would not have the slightest bit of interest in buying a ticket to see their ‘queer art.’

As a result, these arts professionals invent an oppression storyline for themselves, so they can justify their continued existence; so that they can remain in this fugue state, where they are groping blindly for meaning and relevance — but instead slam into unwelcome reality when confronted with real ones like Sara Morrison or Rosie Kay.

You cannot be on the receiving end of government largess and also position yourself as a brave fighter of the system. You ARE the system. You cannot be a rebel while sucking on the teat of The Man (and no, that’s not a mixed metaphor — these people claim to believe men can have babies and lactate.)

The truth of the matter is that the professional arts is entirely, homogeneously, sterilely, boringly, politically orthodox and utterly non-diverse. The fact that they seem to think they are the underdog would be funny, if it were not so embarrassingly untrue.

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