Women like Candace Owens blame big pharma and the medical institutions they say failed her. A lot of the crowd that has gathered in her support are women too, they have even raised over a million dollars for her parents. The loudest voices on the other side, the ones insisting she be held fully responsible, are men like Matt Walsh, Stephen Crowder, and Asmongold.

It’s a pretty clear split between the sexes over how this should be seen. I even saw a text exchange go viral where a couple broke up over the Clancy case, ending a three-year relationship. The girlfriend was sympathetic to Clancy, and the boyfriend ended things over exactly that, telling her he couldn’t see her as the future mother of his children. Real couple or not, it’s become a meme genre by now, with more examples like this one.

Asmongold’s version was that she snapped, and he describes it as the OJ Simpson trial for women. Crowder’s was that it doesn’t matter if she was mentally ill or not, and I think that’s a common male reflex: they did it, no excuses, put them away from the rest of us.

And the counter is that a lot of these people were failed first, by a society that shut down its psychiatric care. And there’s a difference between a psychosis someone walked into through drugs or some other self-inflicted spiral, and postpartum psychosis.

Somewhere around one or two births in a thousand end in postpartum psychosis, roughly the same number in a Swedish study running over decades and in studies from the US.

Baby blues are much more common, and so is postpartum depression, and I think that’s part of why so many women are sympathetic to Clancy. Many of them have some reference point for not being themselves after a birth. This is also where it separates from the psychosis cases people file under self-inflicted, because on some level these women feel it could have been them who needed help.

What postpartum psychosis does is loosen a person’s grip on what’s real. And most of the one or two in a thousand who get it never harm anyone.

Women losing their footing after childbirth is described as far back as the ancient world. The word hysteria itself comes from the ancient Greek for womb. The organ associated most directly with female reproduction was also taken to be a source of instability, even madness.

Bad but normal, mad but abnormal

Male violence tends to get read as bad but normal. Male criminality makes cultural sense to our perspective of male aggression.

Female violence on the other hand comes across as mad and abnormal. A female crime is something that requires an explanation. And the explanation almost always bends towards society regarding her as the weaker sex in need of protection, and that she lacks full agency, either being manipulated by someone who holds agency, a man, or she has lost it mentally.

Male chivalry, and our paternalistic instinct to protect women, is a strong driver here — and rightly so, but it also creates an incentive for women to appear weak and in need of protection. As the saying goes, a woman’s strength is her appearance of weakness. The same instinct that protects women can also make it harder to see them as fully responsible agents when they do something terrible.

A woman doesn’t only break the law, she also breaks the idea of what a woman is. The woman should protect and nurture the child above all else, and when she doesn’t we regard it as madness.

I lifted this at a seminar years ago back in university, with a criminologist joining us for a political science course in regards to a notorious Swedish murder case. His response was that there is too little data to statistically prove the bad and normal, mad and abnormal thesis. But I rather think that the lacking of data in itself supports the theory about being abnormal, and therefore in itself requires an explanation.

The nanny and the pastor

In 2004, in a small place called Knutby in Sweden, a young woman 26 years old worked as the nanny for the local Pentecostal pastor, she shot and killed the wife of the pastor and then went over to shoot a neighbor, also a member of the congregation, the neighbor survived. The nanny’s name was Sara Svensson.

The pastor, Helge Fossmo, who had a sexual relationship with Sara, was the one convicted as the mind behind it and given life. He got the full moral weight, life in prison, while Sara got psychiatric care. In the narration to the nation through the media, Sara was rarely mentioned by name. Her role was the nanny, and every soft, feminine-coded word was applied to her. The Swedish word for nanny even contains the word for girl, barnflicka, literally “child-girl”, so it was a 26-year-old girl. Two months before the shooting she had already attacked the wife with a hammer while she slept. A grown woman picked up a weapon twice, first an attempted murder, then a murder, but in the telling she stayed the girl.

Picture a twenty-six-year-old man who cut the family's grass, sleeping with the woman of the house, talked into fetching a gun and shooting her husband, after an already failed attempt, then sent next door to shoot again. Very few would defend that "garden boy" as sick and dependent and passive. He'd be a bad man who picked up a gun, and the manipulation from his lover would be a mitigating detail, not his whole identity to explain why he was a victim.

The story about the nanny can be extrapolated to the general story of a woman as something that things happen to rather than someone who does things.

Back to Clancy

So when I look at the debate and argument around Lindsay Clancy, the men around are reaching for bad, hold her to account for her actions, and the women are reaching for mad.

I’ll set aside the question of how a society should deal with mentally ill people when they do something terrible. For Lindsay Clancy, whatever the jury decides, she was clearly very sick before the murder. She was heavily medicated, and she had checked herself into a psych ward earlier that same month, telling them she was having dark thoughts and needed help.

One thing I think is missing from the discussion around this case is that it’s also a question of leadership. I believe in the old expectation that a man protects his family. Not to lift the act off her — but in general terms it’s the man’s responsibility to pick up his staff, as the shepherd, and carry the wellbeing of his family. And this family had not been well for a long time.

If you’d like to read more essays like this, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support my work.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber? Thank you. If there’s someone you think would enjoy these essays, a gift subscription is a wonderful way to support the project.

Give a gift subscription

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

People act on the stories their side tells, and lean on them to justify what they do. That's why the stories so rarely line up. The clearest case I know is the Anglo-Boer War where the British justified their concentration camps of Boer women and children as an act of protection, and the Boer story as an act of genocide.

Reading Mandela, I had no idea he wasn’t born as Nelson. Nelson is a British name, and I simply assumed it was part of the British domestication process that the black tribes had drifted culturally towards the West and started giving their children British names. What actually happened is that on his first day of school, the boy then called Rolihlahla was given the name Nelson by his teacher, who handed British names to all the children. He’d come to school from the hut he lived in, barefoot, no electricity at home, and coming home to his family from his first day of school with a new name. You can almost picture him coming home: Mum, you can call me Nelson now.

Reading about his childhood, you get a sense of how it had always been for the Xhosa, or any other sub-Saharan tribe, right through history.

That first day was also the first time Nelson traded his traditional cloth for an actual pair of trousers. The college where he later received his law degree was British too. So Rolihlahla walked barefoot out of his hut and into a Western system that lifted him up into a lawyer in a suit.

Get carried far enough by someone else and you start to lose track of what's actually yours. It happens to a person, and it happens to a whole people. Take for example a diversity hire. If that person isn’t honest with himself about why he’s there, it’s very easy to land on the conclusion: This is what I’m worth.

And this is the situation in South Africa with Black Economic Empowerment, where companies are bound by law to hire on the basis of race. Ask one of them whether he got there on his own merit, and he’ll almost certainly say yes. However, that answer can't be true for all of them, because the quota exists.

It’s also why Starlink isn’t available in South Africa. Elon Musk was born in Pretoria but he won’t operate in his home country, because to do so he’d have to hand over a share of the company to black owners.

There are today more race-based laws in South Africa than during apartheid. The white minority are being treated as second-class citizens, and what surprises me is how few people outside South Africa have any idea it’s happening.

In Sweden, where I am now, the diversity hire can still be described on the individual level. The incentives are such that a company might hire a minority even when that person isn’t the best fit.

The company takes the tactical loss of hiring someone who performs a little worse for the strategic gain of ticking the diversity boxes. The bad press a homogeneous workplace draws is very expensive, so lots of businesses prefer weaker teams.

But in South Africa it’s no longer about individuals and small tactical losses. The losses are so many that the tactical pain for strategic gain has become a strategic loss. And underneath it all sits the same individual, the one who got the job for attributes that have nothing to do with the work, who believes they earned it on merit. Take BEE away and they will discover that the market values them very differently.

This is the journey Mandela was taken on, together with his whole generation not just under apartheid in South Africa, but the entire colonization of Africa. The Western man put clothes on them, gave them European names, taught them to read and write, handed them infrastructure and cars and a place inside an organised society. But when the support ended, Africa became once again Africa, and Zimbabwe is the sharpest example.

The black tribes looked around at one another inside the infrastructure, and the story that emerged was — we can run this ourselves. We're poor because we were robbed of our land, and whatever we never built, we didn't build only because we were held back.

So they are taking back what has been “taken from them”, and now they face their real market value.

That is more or less what happened to South Africa and Zimbabwe as a whole. First came the outside pressure against the old regime, with sanctions and condemnation. Then, once the transitions came, the entire West aided the new present-day regime. Rhodesia was called the breadbasket of Africa and today people in Zimbabwe go hungry. Mugabe had been schooled into the same Commonwealth system as Mandela and the two of them even passed through the same university in South Africa. They believed they could run it, and when they finally got to prove it, they took two of the most functional countries on the continent and turned one into a ruin and set the other down the same road.

If you’d like to read more essays like this, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support my work.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber? Thank you. If there’s someone you think would enjoy these essays, a gift subscription is a wonderful way to support the project.

Give a gift subscription

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

It’s an amazing achievement, and there’s a small detail I like: he pushed off from Kåseberga, which is where Ales stenar sits. A stone ship up on the cliff, sixty-odd boulders laid out in the shape of a hull. So he left from under a monument to our old Norse seafarers.

And when I read the headline “first person” my mind went to the old myths from those seafarers.

I thought of Beowulf, who lived in southern Sweden. We don’t know exactly where, but one of those many stone ships or burial mounds we have in Sweden could very well be his. And he too, in the poem, swims the open sea in a legendary contest.

The way the story goes, Beowulf swam against a warrior named Breca, the two of them swam out on the open water for days, like Kubkowski.

Beowulf swims with his sword on him and his mail still on his back, and while he’s out there sea monsters start to attack him. They pull him down under and try to drown him, and he kills them all with the blade before he finally makes land.

So when the Pole climbed onto that beach in Dziwnów, I couldn’t help it. I saw Beowulf coming ashore.

A man swimming for days in the northern sea in armor, fighting things in the dark water, Kubkowski himself struggled with hallucinations during his achievement. He swims a hundred miles across cold water in two and a half days without rest. Take the monsters out of the Beowulf swim and what you have left is a man crossing an impossible stretch of sea on endurance alone. We just watched someone do exactly that, on a live tracker, with a boat full of witnesses.

In the poem, though, the swimming contest is a side matter. Beowulf is remembered for Grendel.

Grendel is the thing tormenting King Hrothgar’s hall over in Denmark. Night after night he comes and kills, and nobody can stop him.

Grendel is a troll in our Norse tongue, but maybe best understood as an ogre in English. But like the swim, I picture something that could actually hold some truth. Some archaic Neanderthal grown into a troll in our sagas.

Grendel carries no weapon, he fights bare-handed. And the ordinary response to a beast you can’t kill is to bring more — more men, heavier armor, a bigger sword. It's a very human instinct: when something isn't working, we tend to just do more of what we're already doing, only harder and stronger. But Beowulf decides to meet the creature with nothing in his hands to face this beast on equal terms. No sword, and no shield to hide behind. And it's his courage that finishes it — he rips the beast's arm clean off.

We treat the old poems as fiction, but every so often the present does something that makes those old lines feel like a record of what people were once capable of.

A Pole swims out of Sweden, past a stone ship raised by the people who lived alongside men like Beowulf.

If you’d like to read more essays like this, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support my work.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber? Thank you. If there’s someone you think would enjoy these essays, a gift subscription is a wonderful way to support the project.

Give a gift subscription

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

I had finished a thin Swedish book only a few days before this happened, a hundred-odd pages, arguing that borders like that one should not exist. My wife gave it to me just the other week. The timing turned it from a dusty artifact into a prediction reality was about to test.

The book is “The Power of Migration: Why We Need Open Borders” by Johan Norberg and Fredrik Segerfeldt, both well-known free-market advocates in Sweden. It came out in 2012, in the golden hour of Swedish migration optimism, when the Swedish Centre Party, our nominally free market party, talked about Sweden growing into a new settler nation of forty million and meant it as a goal. Anyone who doubted the project was written off as frightened or ignorant, and independent outlets like mine were named “sewer media” by the authors of this book.

Their case is that where a man is born is a moral accident. Freedom of movement lets the poor multiply whatever their labor is worth. And when the welfare state or the labor market strains under the newcomers, the strain is a flaw in the system, to be reformed away, never a reason to slow the movement itself. The freedom of movement is treated as a core human right never to be infringed, and why should our rights differ from theirs? A rhetorical question the book keeps returning to.

Karl Oskar becomes a migrant

They saved their best move for the epilogue. A family stands on a shore looking at a new country, having left hunger, a land where they could not vote or worship freely, and a dead child whose memory travels with them in a pair of worn little shoes. The authors frame it as an African family on an overloaded boat, everything in the scene pointing across the Mediterranean toward the coast of Spain, and then comes the turn: this family is one of ours, a Swedish family from more than a century and a half ago. They are Karl Oskar and Kristina, from Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, the most famous emigrants in Swedish literature, our covered-wagon saga heading for America. The book closes on them with a question aimed straight at your conscience. Are they welcome?

It’s an emotional trap, where they are shrinking a whole civilizational question down to one family on a beach. The Swedes who crossed to America walked into an expanding settler state actively calling for European farmers. A country never receives only Karl Oskar and Kristina. It receives people together with everything they carry across generations: families, loyalties, norms, culture and their understanding of political order.

The deeper story of the book is that we are all migrants, that humanity spread across the earth by moving, so movement is our nature and our nature should not be caged. The very movements they refer to often came with conquest, displacement and subjugation, and sometimes ended with entire peoples and political orders being wiped off the map. Human movement is ancient, and so is territorial loyalty, and so is the disappearance of the people who lost the ground. They keep the first half of the story — that human beings have always moved — and completely ignore the consequences of it.

They discuss immigrant overrepresentation in crime, but ultimately remove it from the question of migration. Since most immigrants are law-abiding, they argue, crime should be treated as a matter for the police rather than as an argument against immigration. And it’s the same line of reasoning with whatever else the newcomers bring: unemployment belongs to labor-market policy and welfare dependency to welfare reform. Together, they create a model in which migration itself can never be treated as a cause.

So the right to move becomes the fixed point, and the society doing the receiving becomes the variable that has to bend.

My children are asked to give up an inheritance for it, and I do not mean the money or property I will leave them. The harder inheritance to preserve is a country of their own: a place where they do not have to feel like strangers in their own land, still running on their language and their norms, where they can cross a public square without feeling like guests.

These liberals grasp inherited property without trouble, but an inherited society is incomprehensible to them, because no one holds a title deed to it. A civilization is handed down whole or not at all. In the old way of life up here in the Scandinavian North, you couldn’t sell your farm without the kin holding first claim.

The individual

One person can, of course, be met with compassion. When two strangers meet, the encounter may be individual. When tens of thousands start to move, peoples and political orders meet. Politics comes alive at that collective level.

Open the border all the way and that single family becomes something larger - the tens of thousands who crossed at Ceuta. What arrives on those terms builds its own order, ring after ring of shantytowns around the capitals, until the numbers themselves become the politics.

South Africa’s old order was built by a minority that was relying on foreign labor, and told itself that the arrangement could run forever. That minority raised its own political adversary and fed it until it outgrew them many times over. They grew numerous enough to demand a political voice, and once they had it, the ballot carried the country to the black majority. I wrote the long version of that in my book: When Migration Becomes Conflict.

Are they welcome?

They end the book by putting a Swedish family on the beach, asking whether they are welcome, and urge us to apply our emotional response to Africans.

So, are they welcome?

No. Because compassion for the person who wants to enter cannot cancel the rights of the people who already live there.

If you’d like to read more essays like this, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support my work.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber? Thank you. If there’s someone you think would enjoy these essays, a gift subscription is a wonderful way to support the project.

Give a gift subscription

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

But there is one thing from my previous criticism I’ll backtrack from in a moment, and it’s the casting of Page.

The film’s real problem besides its multicultural casting is that Nolan was kind of true to Homer’s sequence of events — the cyclops, the giants, the lotus-eaters, Circe — while replacing Homer’s hero. The map is the same, but the man who moves across it is not.

The Odyssey is a story about Odysseus. It’s not a story that merely happens to him. The plot is his personality in motion. Swap out the character at the center and keep every station of the journey intact, and you haven’t necessarily kept the story at all. Take the detective I referenced in my last essay, the one who takes his fifteen-minute union break for coffee right after a breakthrough that would send any other cop sprinting for the door. Cast that very same detective archetype into Sherlock Holmes, and have him following every clue Conan Doyle wrote through to the same resolution. You’d technically still be watching the Holmes story, but you would not be watching Sherlock Holmes.

Homer’s Odysseus is a remarkably complete man. He fights in the front rank alongside Ajax and Achilles, but fighting is the least of what defines him. He is a king and a leader, rhetorically gifted, charismatic, cunning, funny, driven by a hunger for glory, and homesick in a way that aches through the entire poem. His wit does not compensate for some deeper weakness. It completes a man who is already formidable in every other respect. Nolan’s Odysseus is heavy, guilt-laden, and turned inward, which is close to the opposite of a leader who has to be present in the room he occupies rather than withdrawn into his own head.

Anton Stigermark wrote a review making the point that Nolan has recycled the archetype of Oppenheimer and poured it into Odysseus. I agree with the recycling but it just doesn’t fit. Oppenheimer creates something whose consequences escape his control entirely. He cannot know who will use the bomb, against whom, or why, and that uncertainty, that loss of control over his own creation, is part of his torment. Odysseus devises a strategy whose purpose and target are perfectly clear to him from the start. He is not haunted by not knowing what he unleashed. He knows exactly what he did and takes pride in having done it.

And a trick like the Trojan horse is a one-time act of originality. It’s not a weapon that changed warfare. Try it again and the only thing left is a faint echo of the original rather than a repeatable threat. The atomic bomb is the complete opposite, a discovery that persists once made, sitting in the world ready to be used again by anyone who has it, regardless of who first built it. Odysseus can be honored, and honors himself, as the man who decided the war, but he never released a weapon beyond his own control. He himself is the weapon, and he takes unabashed pride in it.

Where others see only fight or flight, Odysseus insists on a third way, the trickster’s path, and nowhere is that clearer than with the cyclops. He tells the giant his name is Nobody, so that when they blind him and he screams that Nobody has done this to him, the other giants shrug and go back to sleep. But then Odysseus, fleeing the cave, cannot let the deed go uncredited and turns to shout the truth back at the cyclops: it was not Nobody, it was Odysseus!

That single act of pride lets the cyclops curse him by name to his father Poseidon, and that curse is what drags Odysseus and his crew through the entire ordeal of the journey home. He is clever enough to become Nobody, and too proud to remain Nobody, and that flaw is the engine of the whole epic. Nolan removed it completely. Matt Damon plays the weight competently, because that’s what he was cast to play, but he never gets near the Homeric lightness that makes the character whole. Watching him, I kept thinking of Matthew McConaughey instead, as a useful measure of what Damon’s version is missing. McConaughey has built a career on characters who treat rules as obstacles to route around rather than boundaries to respect, who carry real charm alongside real purpose, and that combination of playfulness and intent is much closer to Homer’s Odysseus.

Our era carries a heavy expectation that a man who has been to war must come home broken, and treats him with suspicion if he doesn’t suffer on a psychological level for what he has been through. A lot of modern storytelling tends to ask how suffering changes a man, but in Homer it’s whether suffering can prevent a man from remaining himself.

Homer’s Odysseus doesn’t begin the poem as an incomplete man waiting for suffering to repair him. He’s tested, the gods try to break him, and he is restored to his own name and throne. Recast that hero through the therapeutic psychology of this particular decade, and the story stops being timeless the moment the cultural shift occurs, which in my view is already underway. I have a hard time imagining anyone returning to it in seventy years the way audiences still return to monumental historical epics such as Ben-Hur.

The Casting Choice I Got Wrong

When it was rumored before the film’s release that Elliot Page would play a Greek warrior, I reacted the way most people did: What is this joke? Having seen the film, I have to backtrack. Page is not playing a mythic hero. Page is playing a Greek warrior boy.

When I studied military history at the Swedish Defence University, one of the classic cases we worked through was the Battle of Visby, where the men of Gotland gathered to face the Danes outside the town’s ring wall, and the line included twelve-year-old boys standing alongside old men with one foot already in the grave. Run that through the feminist analysis our era insists on applying to everything, and you arrive at the question: why not a strong woman instead of a small boy? A twelve-year-old boy is weaker than a grown woman, the boy still has decades of potential contribution ahead of him that dying in that line would erase.

My answer is that we were never fighting just to win that battle, or even that war. We were fighting for the generations ahead, and out of that longer calculation we evolved strong gender-normative lines. Draw a line anywhere and some individual cases will fall on the wrong side of it, cases that could just as easily have gone the other way, but that’s beside the point I want to make with Page.

Take sports, for instance, since all training for combat or the hunt eventually shows up there too: women turn out to be physically equivalent in contest to young boys rather than to grown men. National women’s football teams find their competitive match somewhere around fourteen-year-old boys, and don’t reliably beat them. Homer’s war lasted ten years, and its youngest recruits may have been nine or ten when it started, meaning a teenager during the war, an age at which a grown woman playing the role is a genuinely defensible solution with a long theatrical history behind it. Cast an actual thirteen-year-old with no acting experience and you’d likely get someone struggling to convincingly play himself, and Page is playing a young Greek boy warrior.

I laughed when the first clip appeared, showing Page running in armor and looking like a small boy, but then in the cinema, seeing that she was actually playing a small boy, she nailed it. Probably better than a young boy would have.

Set the casting arguments aside, and what remains of Nolan’s portrayal is an old story carried by a different man from the one it was written to hold. He gives us the whole journey home from Troy. He just forgets to bring Odysseus.

If you’d like to read more essays like this, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support my work.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber? Thank you. If there’s someone you think would enjoy these essays, a gift subscription is a wonderful way to support the project.

Give a gift subscription

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

My countryman Anton Stigermark put his finger on the mechanism in an essay on his Substack called “The Ideology’s Immune System”, and I will apply his framing to the trans question.

His original example is mass immigration. The introduction of multiculturalism and mass migration to Sweden was more of a revolution than regular politics. Our society is unrecognizable from one generation to the next, and yet the decent citizen is expected to accept its premises without question, even as the transformation reaches into every corner of daily life. Whoever declines to accept those premises is, by definition, a racist: someone acting from morally corrupt motives, and therefore someone nobody needs to listen to. The quality of the person’s arguments loses its meaning entirely.

It is the same logic that guards feminism and gender transition. Feminism is a dominant political current with enormous influence on our society, and it would be strange if people didn’t want to ask critical questions about it. Those questions are deflected through protective constructs, and one of them is the incel — a status you acquire simply by questioning the premises. The construct recasts everything you say as the bitterness of a small, resentful man, and from that moment your objections have no standing, however sound they are.

You’ve reached the point where the essay moves from theory to practice. The rest examines how this mechanism plays out in everyday conversations, why certain arguments never receive a hearing, and why challenging the prevailing narrative often carries a social cost.

Read more

The 27-year-old woman who vaginally raped a 14-year-old girl is a man. A trans person, legally registered as female, which under Danish law — and increasingly across the entire Western world, Sweden included — means the press, the courts, and the statistics all describe him as a woman. The legal paperwork says woman, so everyone plays along. Don’t look at the person in front of you. Look at the papers.

The law breathes life into a fiction, and the rest of us are expected to perform in it.

A campaign leaflet from a Swedish Centre Party candidate. The candidate presents as a woman while running for office.

Spain recently had its own version of this. A man facing charges for harassing a woman chose to legally identify as female — in order to sidestep Spain’s harsher sentencing framework for men’s violence against women.

Some men will game the system out of cold self-interest, like the Spanish example. Others do it as satire — like Lauren Southern who legally changed her gender in Canada precisely to demonstrate how absurd the process is. Much of what goes viral belongs to a third familiar category: male athletes who couldn’t compete against men, entering women’s sports to dominate them instead, which is its own particular flavor of narcissism.

But there's a fourth category. Cases in which biological males gain access to female spaces on the strength of a legal gender identity and are then accused of sexual misconduct or indecent exposure. The Wi Spa case in Los Angeles became one of the best-known examples, and similar incidents have repeatedly been reported.

One possible explanation for some of these cases has a name. In the 1980s, the Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard coined the term autogynephilia.

Blanchard defined autogynephilia as a biological man who becomes sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman. A transvestite enjoys wearing women’s clothing and doesn’t necessarily claim to be a woman — a phenomenon we’ve had openly in Sweden for decades, long before the current wave, and one you might regard as the gateway drug to what came after. What Blanchard described is that the arousal comes from the idea itself, from the fantasy of being a woman, and above all from being treated as one inside the female domain.

Blanchard drew a clear line between two categories of male-to-female transsexuals. The first are homosexual transsexuals, biological men attracted to men, often markedly feminine from childhood, who in their gender dysphoria come to identify as women. The second are the autogynephiles, biological men attracted to women, who are aroused by perceiving themselves as women and by inhabiting female spaces.

Read that second definition again, and then think about documented cases of legally female inmates placed in women’s prisons who later sexually assaulted fellow prisoners. I didn’t have to search long for examples. One possible interpretation is that some of these cases fit the pattern Blanchard described four decades ago. If his theory is correct, access to female spaces may itself become part of the erotic fantasy.

One can assume the inclination has always existed in some measure, the way homosexuality has. What’s new is that our era has flung open the doors. Things that previous generations kept firmly in the closet now walk out into the open, and beyond that, they demand our participation. It’s no longer enough that the law recognizes the fiction. Everyone must play along, because the whole theater rests on our lip service. Ordinary citizens, to make a broad categorization, remain quietly confused by all of it, while those of us standing outside the theater keep pointing at the stage: the emperor is naked. This is a man, and he does not belong in women’s changing rooms.

The hegemonic ideology of our time is feminism, a distinctly feminine ideology that rose in direct reaction to the masculine centuries that preceded it. And feminism rests on a foundational claim about equality — a claim that has always been conveniently fluid, shifting its meaning depending on whether you’re talking about individuals or collectives, and shifting again whenever the argument requires it. Point out a pattern at the group level and you’ll be handed a single female counterexample, as if that settled the matter.

During my crisis management course in political science at the Swedish Defence University, a girl in my class announced at a seminar that one of the main goals in managing a severe civil crisis was to ensure the same amount of food for women as for men. I remember wrinkling my face and wondering what she was on about. Setting aside the extreme centralization and control her suggestion would require, I simply stated the obvious: men eat more than women. She immediately switched levels, from group to individual, countering that some girls actually eat more than guys.

Looking back, one of the things I actually got the most out of my studies there had little to do with the course content. It was anthropological: the chance to observe up close the people who would later fill the upper levels of government.

But one version of the equality claim became broadly reigning: that there is no meaningful difference between the sexes. That premise is what justified opening every traditionally male domain to women.

Follow that lie to the end of the road. If there truly is no difference between the sexes, then what does it matter if a man walks around pretending to be a woman? What’s the objection? Our society has already conceded the premise.

What we’re living through today is the end of that road.

There’s an old Swedish expression about someone lying so outrageously that the beams of the house begin to creak. It’s simply an exaggeration, the kind of saying that suggests the lie is so immense that even the house reacts to it. But I think we can read it another way. A house built on sand cannot carry its own weight forever. A society built on falsehoods cannot either. The first heavy snowfall is enough, and the beams begin to give way.

If the foundation is visibly sand, why doesn’t anyone renovate the house and fix the foundation? Blanchard laid out his findings four decades ago. And yet the moment anyone asks what is actually driving this, the vilification begins.

It’s a mechanism that deserves an essay of its own. A countryman of mine, Anton Stigermark, has given it the best name I’ve seen: the immune system of the ideology. In The Immune System Attacks the Wrong Cells, I explain why so many otherwise sensible people end up directing their skepticism toward the messenger instead of the men in the dresses:

If you'd like to read more essays like this, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support my work.

Subscribe now

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

Watching it again in 2026, I’m no longer so sure.

The pace of AI development has been astonishing. Ideas that felt speculative when we made the film now feel strangely familiar. That’s why I’ve added English subtitles and decided to publish it here.

I don’t want to say too much beforehand. Part of the fun is discovering where the story goes on your own.

The film runs for about five minutes.

And if you find yourself laughing at the ending, you might also ask yourself whether you’re laughing at the characters—or at a future that’s arriving faster than any of us expected.

Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

My best mate slept over, and we watched the game together. If it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have watched it at all. Few kids loved football the way he did — he ended up making a career of it, too. He never became a professional player, but he had an eye for the game which eventually made football his profession.

When Sweden took bronze that summer, it was our best result in close to four decades. We have one silver, from 1958, when we lost the final to Brazil on home soil, and nothing since had come near it. I was ten years old, just about to turn eleven, and I did understand, in the way children understand things before they have words for them, that what I was watching was a powerful expression of belonging — millions of people, feeling the same thing at the same moment, for the same reason.

Thirty-two years later

I know I have seen matches since that last one in 1994, but I don’t remember them, I couldn’t even tell you who was playing. You might as well have talked to me about the weather. So when the World Cup returned to the United States this summer, thirty-two years after that Swedish bronze, my only interest in it was nostalgic, a faint signal from a summer far too long past.

Then I read about Norway.

Our neighbor qualified for its first World Cup in twenty-eight years and proceeded to play far above anyone’s expectations — winning its opening matches, surviving the group, and then, in the round of sixteen, knocking out Brazil with two late goals before finally falling to England in the quarter-final. The deepest run in Norwegian history. I still haven’t watched a single one of their games. I have seen highlights, though, and my first thought was a simple one: here, at least, was a squad whose demography actually reflected the country it played for. Norway is Sweden’s closest neighbor in geography, in language, in culture, it’s just the whim of history that we are not regional parts of the same country, and for nearly a century, we even were.

But what truly caught my eye was the expressed identity. The chant, first: a single syllable — Ro! Row. Tens of thousands of people moving their arms in unison, rowing an invisible longship across the Atlantic, the same crossing our ancestors made a thousand years ago. A mass ritual, hypnotic to watch even on a screen. And then the photograph: before departing for America, the Norwegian squad posed at the edge of a fjord in full Viking regalia with swords, shields, longships in the background, grey Nordic light. An epic team portrait, deliberately mythological.

The Viking photograph did not pass quietly in Norway. The critics reached for their darkest vocabulary.

In the country's biggest paper, Aftenposten, one critic argued that the image radiated a troubling masculinity aesthetic — a "toxic boyish vibe," in her words — unbecoming of a nation that prides itself on peace mediation. Another commentator called the staging chauvinistic and exclusionary, telling NRK it echoed imagery that far-right movements were cultivating a decade ago. And even before the photograph, a researcher had warned in Klassekampen that pairing Norse symbols with a hyper-masculine idealization of the national team drifts uncomfortably close to the symbolic language of neo-Nazi and fascist milieus. Even the rowing chant drew some of the same suspicion: a celebration of an age of raiders.

And the Vikings did loot, burn, and enslave — though, to be fair, there are also accounts of English girls preferring the Scandinavian visitors on account of our looks and good hygiene. A thirteenth-century chronicle attributed to the English monk John of Wallingford complained that the Danes combed their hair daily, bathed every Saturday, and changed their clothes regularly — and that by these devious means they seduced the noblemen’s daughters of England. The vanity runs deep in the northern bloodline: already Tacitus, writing of the Germanic tribes a millennium earlier, noted how they dressed their hair with elaborate care before battle. Groomed for war, and for the women, in that order.

The critics are drawing the wrong conclusion from the Norwegian team and chant.

Why does modern Western culture so often interpret male solidarity through the language of danger?

Eleven men in the costume of their ancestors, by a fjord. No one is harmed, nothing is threatened, yet the immediate interpretive frame is danger: toxicity, chauvinism, fascism. Our culture has developed a habit of treating masculine solidarity as inherently suspect, a loaded weapon waiting for a cause.

The Viking imagery is a powerful symbol, and no powerful symbol is innocent — that is precisely what makes it powerful. Even the Christian cross would not pass the left’s test of innocence.

Human beings assemble around stories, stories of origin, of hardship, of crossing dangerous water together. Norway reached for its story, and the story told them what such stories always tell: you are a people, you come from somewhere, you are in this boat together — ready to raid foreign lands.

Subscribe now

Sport as formalized combat

The military historian Martin van Creveld argues in Wargames that organized sport is, at root, formalized combat — either preparation for battle or a substitute for it. Sometimes we play so that we do not have to fight, channeling the tribal instinct into a harmless vessel, and sometimes we play in order to prepare to fight, keeping the martial virtues — courage, discipline, loyalty, sacrifice — alive in peacetime bodies. Every society that has ever staged games has done both at once, whether it admitted it or not.

Trace football back far enough and you reach the Roman harpastum, a ball game so violent it was essentially regulated battle. Medieval and early modern “folk football” in England pitted entire villages against each other, with occasional deaths. Even the codified matches of the nineteenth century were affairs of shin-hacking and brute force that would horrify a modern referee. What we call football is the end product of a millennia-long project of domestication: the same tribal contest, progressively stripped of its blood.

Seen through van Creveld’s lens, the Norwegian team photo is an honest confession. Sport never stopped being what it always was — the tribe, arrayed for battle, watched by its people. Norway simply put the costume back on.

But domestication has a price, and modern football displays it every week. The game has never been safer, and never more theatrical. Players collapse under phantom contact, writhing and clutching their faces when no one has touched them, performing agony for the referee’s benefit. The crowd, which once came to watch controlled tribal violence, now watches controlled simulation of grievance. It is hard to think of a purer image of a certain kind of late-modern condition with maximum safety, maximum drama, minimum authenticity.

The most electric moments of Norway’s World Cup were the synchronized rowing, and in a photograph by a fjord, in the feeling that something real was happening. We have become masters at taming our tribal impulses, with no real rituals of belonging left in our society.

We have dismantled nearly every ritual that once transformed individuals into a people.

We often describe ourselves as individuals, yet the moments we remember most vividly are almost collective moments. A funeral. A wedding. The birth of a child. They are the moments that remind us we belong to something larger than ourselves. And the only way a longship moves at all is that the crew rows together. A rowing crew cannot be a collection of individuals. When the team came home from the quarter-final defeat, tens of thousand of people gathered at the royal palace in Oslo and rowed, together, after being greeted by the Norwegian king. They were not celebrating victory, there was no trophy to lift. They were celebrating togetherness.

It was the lived shared story that moved so many in Norway, and far beyond it, so deeply.

Looking back to that summer evening in 1994, I barely remember the match itself. I remember sitting beside my friend. And I remember Sweden feeling, for a brief moment, like one people. It was about us.

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

Subscribe now

When the first images from his upcoming film The Odyssey appeared, much of the public wasn’t talking about Homer’s epic story. They were talking about the casting decisions. A young black girl from Africa cast as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, a biological female who has legally transitioned to male, confirmed as part of the cast. The specific role has not been publicly announced, but the rumor that spread was Achilles, and the rumor alone was enough to set the tone of the conversation.

The casting itself is not particularly interesting. We have seen this constantly the last decade. What is interesting is why a director who clearly does not need to prove himself to anyone makes these kinds of decisions.

Since 2024, the Academy Awards require films to meet specific representation criteria in casting and crew composition to qualify for Best Picture. These are checkboxes and a film that fails to meet them is ineligible regardless of its artistic merit. If you want the industry’s highest recognition, your film must conform to a set of ideological requirements that have nothing to do with storytelling.

Casting decisions are made with an eye to the people who will judge the film rather than the people who will watch it.

In academia, this happened decades ago. Papers are written for other academics, reviewed by other academics, published in journals read almost exclusively by other academics. The incentive structure rewards citation counts and peer approval. Whether the research means anything to the world outside the university is largely irrelevant to the career of the researcher.

Same goes for films that are increasingly produced for critics, festivals, juries, the Academy, and cultural journalists. The distance between critical acclaim and audience enthusiasm has become its own phenomenon.

This is what happens when a cultural elite begins producing for itself.

There is a phrase that captures this kind of disconnect, often attributed to Marie Antoinette. Let them eat cake. Whether she actually said it is beside the point. What the phrase captures is the moment when an elite has lost contact with the population it nominally serves and doesn’t realize it.

The Oscar ceremony’s television ratings have been declining for over a decade. The industry's explanations are almost everything except the possibility that the audience has concluded the product is no longer made for them.

Telos is the Greek word for direction, purpose, the end toward which something moves. A civilization’s stories are its telos. They carry the sense of who a people are and what is worth fighting for. The Iliad was a story about who the Greeks were and what was worth fighting for. It offered young men an ideal of courage and honor that shaped how generations understood duty.

Now imagine that story remade for the evaluators. A transgender Greek warrior, at fifty kilos. A Helen of Troy who bears no resemblance to the civilization that produced her. Who would dream of going into battle alongside that version of the myth? Instead of an epic that stirs something in the blood, you get a disillusioned freak show produced by people who feel no connection to the source material and no obligation to the audience that once drew meaning from it.

Civilizations rot from the head down. First the telos goes — the meaning, the self-respect, the identity, the spark. When that dies, everything else follows. The willingness to defend a country disappears, because who would risk their life for a nation that no longer feels like their own? Future visions evaporate. The population votes for whichever party promises the most in the moment. When that party fails to deliver, they vote for the opposition, which meets the same fate at the next election. And so it goes, round and round, a civilization running on inertia with no one at the wheel who dares to take out a real direction.

Share

If cultural institutions stop serving their audience, the audience will eventually look elsewhere. That is exactly what happened with Citizen Vigilante.

Uwe Boll produced outside the legitimate sanctioned narrative and told a story that no one within the cultural elite are allowed to tell. And the film succeeded because it spoke directly to an audience that recognized their own reality on screen, an audience that the institutional culture industry has actively alienated.

This pattern is visible well beyond film. In journalism, the dynamic is particularly ironic. The profession whose stated purpose is to hold power accountable has become one where what matters most is how you are perceived within the profession itself. Journalists write for other journalists, get awarded by other journalists, and measure their careers by recognition from an establishment they were supposed to scrutinize. And the same profession that has abandoned its own mandate looks down on and smears the citizen journalists who actually do the work of holding power accountable. The grooming gang scandal was not broken by the institutional press. The Rotherham story was carried by independent reporters and bloggers for years before the mainstream media touched it, and when they finally did, they treated the people who had been covering it as the problem rather than as colleagues who had done their job for them.

The same tendency runs through publishing, television, music, and every other corner of the culture industry. What they produce is increasingly made to impress each other rather than to serve the people who were once the reason for their existence.

They may still possess the awards, the prestige, and the ceremony. But the distance between the institution and the audience has grown so wide, and the fatigue with race swapping, gender ideology, girl bosses, and the evil white man as the only acceptable villain has accumulated to such a degree, that people are simply fed up. And with that fatigue, the stories people actually consume will increasingly come from outside those institutions.

Nolan will probably make a beautiful film in a purely technical sense, and he will probably win his awards. It will be discussed mainly by the people who give those awards and the people who write about them. And they will dismiss all criticism as racism and sexism, the way they always do, because the possibility that the audience has legitimate reasons to reject what is being offered is laughable.

But somewhere outside that conversation, someone with a camera and no institutional backing will make something that millions of people actually want to watch. And everyone at the ceremony will be upset, the same way the institutional journalist gets upset at the citizen journalist doing the work they themselves should have done — how dare they, who do they think they are.

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

But what makes the case worth writing about is not the attack itself. It is the court’s reasoning.

The district court ruled that the crime should not be classified as attempted murder. According to the court, it could not be established that the attackers would have acted the same way had they been certain the victim would die. They swung at his neck, but perhaps they didn’t grasp that this could kill him. They chopped off his hand, but perhaps the connection between severing a limb and bleeding to death was not obvious to them.

They were sentenced for aggravated assault. Six and a half years for one, three and a half for the other.

Across the Western world, courts routinely reduce sentences when the perpetrator is deemed to have diminished cognitive capacity. A 21-year-old foreigner in Norway raped a 13-year-old girl and received six months, because his IQ was considered too low for him to fully comprehend what he had done. And just recently in England a man threw a three-year-old child to the crocodiles at a zoo and was released on bail after being deemed “unfit” for interview. He was there with his two carers and had low cognitive abilities.

The logic behind these decisions follows a model that most Western countries accept by default. If someone genuinely did not understand the consequences of their actions, the reasoning goes, then the moral weight of those actions is lighter. Reduced understanding means reduced guilt, and reduced guilt means a reduced sentence.

The focus is on individual moral responsibility, and that punishment should be proportional to intent. Someone who truly did not intend harm deserves less punishment than someone who did.

I would rather see the focus shift to “how dangerous is this person likely to be tomorrow?”

The less capable someone is of understanding the consequences of his actions, the more unpredictable he becomes. And the more unpredictable someone is, the greater the risk they pose to everyone around them. A person who swings a machete at someone’s neck without understanding that it might kill them is not less dangerous than someone who does it with full awareness. He is more dangerous. Because with the person who understands, you can at least have a conversation. You can trace the logic, evaluate the motive, assess whether the circumstances that led to the act are likely to recur. With the person who doesn’t understand, you have nothing. You are operating blind, and blind is where the public ends up when that person is released.

The court in the machete case will release these two men into society, one in roughly three years, the other in roughly six. Two people who, according to the court’s own reasoning, do not understand that attacking someone with a machete can be lethal. And within the current legal framework, it functions as a reason to let them out sooner rather than later.

We have already been through this exact shift once before, with drunk driving.

In the early twentieth century, being drunk behind the wheel was treated with something close to cultural sympathy. If a man drove into a tree after a night out, the reaction was closer to pity than outrage. Being drunk functioned as an explanation and explanations often became excuses. We still have that explanation and excuse intertwined culturally in other contexts of doing something stupid.

The logic back then was identical to what we see in the machete case. The man was impaired, his judgment was reduced and therefore his responsibility is lighter.

In Sweden, driving under the influence was not even illegal until 1925, and the cultural attitudes lagged well behind the law for decades after that. There is plenty of old television footage from where people openly discuss driving after several drinks as though it were a matter of personal preference.

And then, gradually, over the course of several decades, the framing shifted. Society stopped asking how blameworthy the drunk driver was and started asking how dangerous he was. The impairment that had once been treated as a mitigating factor became the very thing that made the act unforgivable. You chose to drink and you chose to drive. The fact that you were too impaired to understand the risk is precisely the problem, because a two-ton vehicle operated by someone with no judgment is a threat to everyone on the road.

Today, nobody in the Western world could publicly defend drunk driving. The cultural shift is total. Our laws reflects it, and the norms reflect it, and the social consequences of being caught are severe. We moved from an explanatory model — he was drunk so it is understandable, to a risk model — he was drunk so the danger was even greater.

Society already accepts that reduced judgment can justify greater intervention rather than less.

There is, of course, one obvious difference. The drunk driver chose to drink before getting behind the wheel. A person with a severe cognitive impairment did not choose his own limitations.

But if a person is so cognitively impaired that he cannot understand the consequences of swinging a machete at someone’s neck, then by definition he cannot govern his own behavior in public. Someone else must, and if that someone is a family member, a guardian, an institution, then the accountability should fall there. If no one is willing to step forward and take that responsibility, then the state must find a way to manage the risk, because the alternative is releasing people into public life who the courts themselves have declared incapable of understanding what they do.

We no longer excuse drunk drivers because their judgment was impaired. I suspect one day we will wonder why we ever used the same argument anywhere else.

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

There is a moment early in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne, having completed his training in the Himalayas under Ra’s al Ghul, is presented with a final test. A captured murderer kneels before him. Wayne is told to execute him. He refuses, and instead turns on his former teachers, destroys the compound, and returns to Gotham City to become Batman.

Batman believes in the system, and he believes Gotham can be saved, that the courts and the police just need a push in the right direction, that if he can clean out the corruption the institutions will function again. He operates outside the law, but in service of the law. He is a heroic vigilante, morally clean through and through, both as Bruce Wayne and as Batman. He catches criminals and delivers them to a justice system he still trusts to do the rest.

Now consider what happens if Wayne makes a different choice in that scene. If he executes the murderer, picks up the sword and does what Ra’s al Ghul asks. He would still return to Gotham. He would still fight crime. But the character would be fundamentally different because we would know, and he would know, that the line has already been crossed. The moral purity would be gone, and with it the certainty that he is better than the people he fights. He would become something more complicated, something harder to root for and harder to dismiss, and also in it more real.

He would become an anti-hero. And he would look a lot more like Sanders in Citizen Vigilante.

What defines the anti-hero is his relationship to morality. Unlike the traditional hero, he is flawed, compromised, selfish, sometimes cruel, sometimes hypocritical. He has crossed lines that the classic hero never would. He is in other words recognizably human.

And Sanders is morally compromised. Boll makes this clear from the beginning. He sleeps with prostitutes. And as a businessman, he is ruthless. He takes over his father’s property company and manages it with a coldness that makes the polar opposite to the rich philanthropist in Bruce Wayne. You can watch him operate and think, I don’t like all about this guy. And that response is part of what makes the film work, because the follow-up question is there: I don’t like him, but is he wrong? When he goes to the rape victim and asks whether she feels justice has been served, when she says no, when he tracks down her attackers and kills them, and when she learns what happened and for the first time in the film you see something like relief on her face — the question of whether you like Sanders becomes secondary to the question of whether what he did was just.

Batman would never do this, he would catch the rapists, restrain them with cable ties, leave them on the steps of the police station with evidence attached, and trust the system to process them. He regards the system as corrupt but salvageable.

Subscribe now

Citizen Vigilante takes place in a world where that faith is no longer available. Sanders doesn’t bring perpetrators to the legal system, he takes care of them after the legal system has sentenced them. The judge who releases the rapists does so deliberately, citing their difficult backgrounds and the need for understanding. The system fails the victim through ideology. And once the system has made its position clear, once it has announced that it will prioritize the perpetrator’s cultural context over the victim’s destroyed life, the Batman model breaks down entirely. There is no point in delivering criminals to a system that has already declared its intention to release them.

This is where the anti-hero enters. When the gap between law and justice becomes wide enough that working within the system means participating in the injustice, the hero who respects institutional boundaries becomes irrelevant. Imagine Batman storming in when Sanders is about to bring his justice to the gang rapists, he would try to defend the rapists, insisting that they had already been judged according to the law, that the absence of a prison sentence does not give anyone the right to take matters into their own hands, and then attempt to restrain Sanders.

In that moment, the audience’s sympathy would likely split between Batman and Sanders, along the same fault line as their understanding of justice.

Now ask yourself this question.

If both Batman and Sanders lived in your city, which one would make you feel safer knowing he was out there?

Your answer probably says less about either man than about how much faith you still place in the institutions around you.

It’s about the kinds of heroes each era longs for.

Superman is a fantasy about what would happen if someone with godlike powers chose to protect humanity. Batman is a man with no superpowers, but he is still a fantasy about what would happen if a billionaire with unlimited resources dedicated himself to justice. The anti-hero is a fantasy about what happens when an ordinary man, someone like you, reaches the point where he no longer believes justice and the law are the same thing.

That is why these stories resonate more deeply than superhero narratives in periods of institutional failure. Superman reassures you that someone stronger is watching over you. The anti-hero offers no reassurance at all, he confirms what you already suspect, that nobody is coming to save you, and asks what you are prepared to do about it.

The Punisher is worth mentioning here because he is the closest comic book equivalent to Sanders. Frank Castle is a former Marine whose family is killed by criminals. When the justice system fails to convict them, he begins a one-man war against organized crime. He is brutal, methodical, and completely uninterested in working within the system. He has been one of the most popular characters in American comics for decades, and his skull logo has been adopted by military and law enforcement personnel worldwide, which tells you something about how even the people inside the system feel about its capacity to deliver justice.

Armie Hammer, who plays Sanders in Citizen Vigilante, was at one point close to being cast as Batman. There is something fitting about the same actor who almost played the hero believing in the system, ending up playing the anti-hero who has given up on it. It mirrors the broader cultural trajectory.

When vigilante narratives resonate on this scale, when a low-budget film about a man who kills rapists and the judges who freed them earns 67 million dollars in its opening days, it suggests that a growing number of people have lost faith in the system’s ability to deliver what it promises.

The hero says: the system works, it just needs help. The anti-hero says: the system has become the problem.

Boll’s dedication at the end of Citizen Vigilante reads: “This film is dedicated to the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.” That is the realm of the anti-hero, between the world as institutions describe it and the world as people experience it.

The anti-hero hasn't fundamentally changed over the past fifty years. What has changed is the society watching him. Every era embrace the stories that make sense of the world it inhabits.

As long as that gap keeps growing, so will the audience for those willing to step into it—even if only on screen.

The space between law and justice.

Subscribe now

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

A low-budget European film premiered just a few days ago. It has already earned tens of millions of dollars, been banned in Germany, and become one of the most talked-about cultural events in Europe. But what interests me isn’t the controversy. It’s the man who made it.

They shot the film in Croatia, set in an anonymized European city that could be anywhere in Western Europe. That anonymity is deliberate and surprisingly effective. The problems the film depicts — immigrant violence, a justice system that protects perpetrators, institutions that prioritize the multicultural narrative over the safety of their own citizens — are not German problems or French problems or Swedish problems. They are European problems, and the film captures that shared condition without needing to locate itself in a single country.

The plot is straightforward. A woman is murdered by an immigrant in front of her child. A young girl is gang-raped by immigrants, who are then released without prison sentences. The judge explains that we must understand what these men have been through, that they come from difficult circumstances, that we must be forgiving. An American ex-military officer named Sanders has come to Europe to take over his late father’s property business, and he goes to the victims and asks them a simple question: do you feel that justice has been served? They say no, and he takes matters into his own hands.

The film had its premiere days ago and has already earned 67 million dollars. It is the most culturally relevant film I have seen in a very long time, and it is relevant because it says what everyone already knows and nobody in the institutional culture industry is willing to put on screen.

Boll ends the film with Sanders, still uncaught, delivering a message directly to the audience: “I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.” And after that, a dedication from Boll himself: “This film is dedicated to the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.”

In 2022, the German filmmaker Uwe Boll published a book. It was about the things you’re not supposed to say in Germany — immigration, Islamism, the justice system, the gap between what people experience and what the establishment insists is true. This is the kind of book that people write when they wake up. You see the problems, you feel compelled to speak, and you reach for the most available medium: write a book, start a podcast, inform people about the crazy stuff going on, to tell people to wake up because this is insane.

When I entered political activism as a teenager in the late 1990s, nobody supported the cause from within their profession. That was the spirit of the time. You got so heavily ostracized that it was considered impossible. Even professors, and I write “even” because it is one of few positions where it is extremely hard to get fired, quite a lot of them started talking openly as political commentators in Sweden in the mid 2010s, but the thing they all had in common was that they were retired.

They do excellent work, and their academic titles still carry weight. But the fact that they are retired means, logically, that there are many active professors who think the same way but are waiting. They sit within the most protected professional role in society, with tenure and academic freedom as explicit institutional guarantees, and yet they wait until they are no longer inside the institution before they speak. As Aristotle put it, the only one who can survive entirely alone is either a beast or a god. But I think we are entering a cycle where you no longer need to be either to act on what you see. There are enough of us now that the isolation is no longer total.

Looking back at this time the pattern was: you wake up, and you leave, or you wait to speak up until after you leave. You leave the thing you were good at to enter a space where you work with commentary, rather than creation within the craftsmanship that you had mastered. The journalist becomes an activist, and the celebrity starts a podcast. The entrepreneur donates to dissident causes.

I think a clear international example would be Russell Brand. He was known as an actor and comedian, and he is genuinely talented at both. When he woke up, he started a podcast and became an opinion maker. He has been enormously successful at it, I am not saying there is anything wrong with it. Brand has reached millions of people and shifted conversations. But he largely left his craft to do it. The acting and the comedy became secondary to the commentary.

This has been the dominant model since my awakening in the 1990s. Wake up, step out, and start talking, or handing out flyers back then. But I think we are entering a different cycle.

Uwe Boll woke up somewhere along the way, I don’t know when, but he released a book in 2022. If he had stayed with that, continued down that line, maybe done a lot of guest appearances on different podcasts, joined the AfD and run for parliament, he would have fitted within that pattern. But he did something else — he made Citizen Vigilante.

The book is not what is banned in Germany, and the book is not what has people across Europe talking.

The success of this film is because Boll took his awakening back into his actual craft. He did what he knows how to do, make films, and he poured his understanding of the world into that craft. The result is a piece of culture that smashes through the barrier to the broader societal discourse through entertainment.

Mel Gibson did something similar. When he fell out with Hollywood, he could have become a commentator. He could have started a podcast, written op-eds, joined the growing ecosystem of dissident media. Given his name recognition, he would have been enormous. Instead, he went independent and made the films he wanted to make without Hollywood’s ideological filter.

Elon Musk is the most visible example of the same principle. When Musk woke up to the problems of censorship and multiculturalism, he didn’t leave entrepreneurship to become a media commentator. He bought Twitter, and he took his competence, building and acquiring companies, and applied it to the problem he saw. The result is a platform that has fundamentally altered the information landscape in ways that no podcast or alternative media outlet could have achieved, and it is through that platform that Citizen Vigilante itself reached much of its audience.

What these people have in common is that they did not leave their domain. Their work became their politics.

And this applies far beyond celebrities and billionaires, you can think of it at every scale.

A business owner who wakes up doesn’t need to become a political commentator. He can ask himself where he places his production. Does he manufacture in his own country? Which suppliers does he use? Which subcontractors does he hire? What kind of product does he sell, and is it something he genuinely wants his customers to consume? A business run with awareness becomes a form of resistance in itself.

I think we are moving into a time where people can have impact from within their professional role, where the craft and the conviction stop being two separate compartments.

No more two silos. One where you do your job during the day, and another where you fight for what you believe in after hours, and the two never touch.

What Boll represents, and Gibson, and Musk, and increasingly others at every level, is the collapse of that separation. The work and the conviction flow into the same channel.

The most effective resistance may not come from people who left everything to fight, but from people who stayed where they were and brought the fight into what they do.

Boll said it through Sanders: “I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.”

I think what he means is simpler than it sounds. Take whatever it is you are good at, and stop pretending it has nothing to do with the world you live in.

Subscribe now

The next essay will look at why the anti-hero has become our era’s defining cultural figure. Read part II here.

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

It was funded by twenty-three thousand ordinary citizens, contributing to a crowdfunded inquiry led by Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe, because the government had declined to conduct one itself. The result is a 219-page report estimating that at least 250,000 young, predominantly white British girls were subjected to systematic rape, trafficking, and torture by organized networks of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men.

The patterns had been documented piecemeal for years through local inquiries in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Oxford, Newcastle, Huddersfield, and dozens of other towns.

The underlying question is why every institution in the country made the same decision that made it possible for the organized rape of young British girls to continue.

Share

Every civilization rests on stories, and some stories require almost no force to sustain. Gravity needs no propaganda department, and that is of course a natural law, but the point holds for civilizational stories too. A story that is compatible with reality is self-evident and no one needs to be persuaded of it. Our present civilization carries the weight of stories that contradict the observable world, that there is no meaningful difference between the sexes, or that there are more than two of them. These stories require constant institutional pressure to survive, because without it they would collapse under the weight of what everyone can see with their own eyes.

The story that mass immigration enriches society, that diversity is a strength, that all peoples are functionally interchangeable and that any friction is a temporary adjustment cost — this story requires an enormous apparatus to maintain. It requires media that report with an eye to political consequence rather than factual accuracy. It requires police forces that calculate which community will produce backlash before deciding how to enforce the law. It requires social services that categorize abused children as making “lifestyle choices” rather than confront the ethnic dimension of their abuse. It requires a school system that teaches integration. It requires speech laws that criminalize the wrong kind of observation. And it requires dedicated state units whose entire purpose is to manage what the population thinks.

A truth that is self-evident needs no enforcement. But a lie that requires police, media, intelligence services, NGOs, hate speech legislation, and narrative management units to sustain is a fiction that is getting more expensive to maintain by the year. Think of it as an extension of the gravity metaphor. A small lie is like holding a feather and claiming it defies gravity, you can hold it up with almost no effort, and you could probably keep it there for the rest of your life if you wanted to. A big lie is a heavy object, and the longer you hold it the more strain it puts on your muscles. The question becomes: how heavy is the lie, and how strong are you? The state becomes a kind of wizard, arms shaking, trying to hold an increasingly heavy object in the air while insisting it floats on its own.

The police in Rotherham knew that Pakistani grooming gangs were systematically exploiting white girls, social services knew, teachers knew, and media knew. Doctors who treated genital trauma in minors knew. All of these institutions made the same calculation, at the same time, for the same reason.

To act would mean confirming the picture the nationalist opposition had been painting for years. It would mean admitting that the multicultural project had produced something monstrous. And it would give ammunition to the people the entire institutional apparatus was designed to marginalize.

So the institutions chose the multicultural project over the children. They chose it because the institutional incentive structure made it the path of least resistance. People are predictable — they will almost always move toward whatever produces the least personal friction. Confronting a minority community meant accusations of racism, career risk, institutional review, media scrutiny. Not confronting it meant the abuse continued, but quietly, in working-class neighborhoods where the victims had no voice and no media interest in amplifying theirs.

The cost of that calculation was paid by the most vulnerable people in the country. Girls as young as eleven, drugged, raped, trafficked, passed between groups of men, told they were white trash, told they were kuffar, told they deserved it. In some cases for years before anyone intervened, and in some cases no one ever did.

One example from the report: a twelve-year-old girl was being repeatedly raped by Pakistani Muslim men. The response from social services was to arrange an information session about contraception. She was later diagnosed with multiple sexually transmitted diseases. No intervention was made despite repeated signals.

Sweden has also experienced a remarkably similar pattern after the many sexual assaults at the We Are Sthlm festival 2014-2015, where the institutional instinct was likewise to minimize or delay public discussion of facts that were considered politically sensitive.

It was not that journalists failed to discover this story or any other of the 250 000 victims. It was that the story was managed according to a principle that has quietly replaced neutrality in much of Western journalism: consequence-aware reporting.

Consequence-aware reporting means you do not ask “is this true?” and then publish. You ask “what will happen if we publish this?” and then decide. The calculation is political, and if reporting on grooming gangs strengthens the nationalist opposition, then the responsible thing to do is not to report, or to report in a way that shifts the focus from the perpetrators to those who talk about them.

The framing is that the problem is never the problem, it is the reaction to the problem that is the problem. The story about the Belfast knife attack is that it is a “far-right trigger event”. The grooming gangs are not the story, the “exploitation of victims by the far right” is.

The British department The Research, Information and Communications Unit, RICU, is a Home Office team established in 2007 and modeled on the Information Research Department, a Cold War propaganda unit that ran from 1948 to 1977. Its original mandate was to counter al-Qaeda recruitment. Its actual function today is much broader. RICU monitors public narratives, flags what it calls “hostile narratives” and “far-right adjacent talking points” to social media platforms, coaches the language that public officials use, and produces what it calls “strategic communications” designed to bring about “attitudinal and behavioral change.”

The state does not merely enforce law, it produces reality. Or more precisely, it produces the version of reality that the current political order requires. RICU is the institutional proof of this. Sir William Shawcross, in his 2023 review of the Prevent strategy, observed that the threshold for what RICU classified as Islamist extremism was high, while the threshold for what it classified as right-wing extremism was remarkably low. Reading books about grooming gangs was flagged as a potential indicator of far-right susceptibility, and so was reading Shakespeare.

The unit that was created to stop terrorist recruitment is now monitoring citizens who notice patterns that the state would prefer they didn’t.

I have personal experience of this. The Swedish National Defence University, the same institution where I studied for four years, published a report identifying me and much of the Swedish opposition as potential triggers for lone-wolf terrorism. The claim was that what we said or reported on could inspire someone to commit acts of violence. It is a very real battle of narratives. And there is an irony with their conclusion: if the standard is that speech can trigger a lone actor, then their own report, painting us as a terrorist threat, could just as easily trigger a lone actor to come after us in the name of defending democracy.

The standard is never applied in both directions.

There is a question beneath all of this that I have been circling through this entire series, and it is this: why does the multicultural project require such an enormous machinery of enforcement?

If diversity were self-evidently a strength, if the integration of radically different populations into a single polity were a natural and frictionless process, then you would not need RICU. You would not need hate speech laws. You would not need consequence-aware journalism. You would not need police forces that calculate ethnic backlash before enforcing the law. You would not need an institutional apparatus that treats the citizens’ lived experience as a narrative threat.

You would not need any of it, because the reality would speak for itself, the way gravity speaks for itself.

The apparatus exists because the story it protects cannot survive contact with unmanaged reality. And the size of the apparatus is a direct measure of the distance between the story and the truth. That distance has been growing for decades, and the machinery required to bridge it has grown with it.

This is the hidden connection between the Lowe report, RICU, the grooming gang cover-up, the media’s consequence-aware framing, and the two-tier policing I wrote about in the previous essays. They are all manifestations of the same underlying dynamic: a political project that can only survive as long as the state is strong enough to absorb the consequences of its own fiction.

Every consequence absorbed weakens the state a little more. Every cover-up erodes trust a little further. Every girl sacrificed to protect the narrative makes the narrative a little harder to sustain. And at some point, the cost of maintaining the lie exceeds the state’s capacity to pay it.

On the very day Britain was discussing one of the largest documented sexual abuse scandals in its modern history, the Royal Family marked the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, highlighting the suffering of women and girls abroad. There was no mention of the hundreds of thousands of British victims dominating the national conversation. The contrast illustrated a broader institutional instinct: some forms of suffering are easier to acknowledge than others.

The Lowe report exists because the state refused to produce it. Twenty-three thousand citizens funded it themselves. That fact alone tells you where we are in the cycle. When the population begins to build its own parallel institutions of truth because the official ones have been captured, the machinery of narrative control is already failing.

RICU can flag content on social media and it can shape the language used by ministers and public officials. It can help define which narratives are considered harmful. What it cannot do is unflag a 219-page report documenting 250,000 victims. The story is out, and no strategic communications unit can put it back.

The first thing to collapse is never the lie itself. It is the cost of maintaining it.

Subscribe now

This essay concludes a broader series exploring remigration and the modern state. If you enjoyed it, you may also like:

Further reading

• When Migration Becomes Conflict

• Parallel Order

• Orania: Building a Nation

• Among Boers and Britons

Available on Amazon.

The rain always comes at Midsommar. If Swedes ever run out of things to talk about, the weather on Midsommar’s Eve is always a safe place to begin. It wouldn’t quite feel like Midsommar without it.

I was about to write the last essay in the remigration series, but sitting here, listening to my girls outside, it felt wrong to think about something grim on Midsommar’s Eve. So you’re getting this instead.

Once a year, Sweden pauses. Families gather around the maypole, meat goes on the grill, and tables fill with herring, sour cream and new potatoes. Politicians reach for it whenever they need a shorthand for Swedish culture, but it isn’t about Sweden in any narrow political sense.

Sweden has a peculiar relationship with this holiday. Our neighboring countries tied the holiday to the Christian calendar, celebrating the feast of St. John the Baptist. Sweden never quite made that connection. Midsommar remained tied to the turning of the seasons, the knowledge that from here the nights get longer. Winter is coming, way too fast.

You won’t remember the meetings, the deadlines, the inbox you finally cleared on a Friday afternoon. Time is finite, and it gets invested somewhere, and most of where we invest it leaves no trace in us at all.

What leaves a trace is different.

Smells. The sound of a particular laugh. Rain on canvas. The associated feeling from a day like Midsommar. Your daughter’s laugh. Someone waiting for you.

The moments where something was actually at stake, or nothing was at stake at all, and either way you were fully present with someone you love.

The calendar demands a pause, and Midsommar is that pause. Inside it, something accumulates: associations, textures, memories. I remember Midsommar from my own childhood, and my daughters will remember this one. That quiet chain of shared memories, stretching from one generation to the next, is what we call culture. You can read about it , but it needs to be lived within that chain to be fully understood.

There’s a version of Swedish cultural identity politics that reduces Midsommar to a checklist, of how to be Swedish or to become a Swede. Boil the potatoes this long, arrange the herring just so, put on the right clothes, sing the right songs and dance around the maypole. Follow the instructions and you’ve performed Swedishness correctly in a live action role play fashion. It confuses the ability to perform Swedishness correctly with the ability to carry it forward.

Traditions survive because people choose to enact them, year after year, imperfectly, in the rain, with children who are more interested in the magic of the moment. They evolve slightly with each generation, the songs change, the food shifts, the politics around them come and go, but something essential carries forward. And that something is harder to name than it is to feel.

The rain stopped while I was writing this. My daughters just came in with all their flowers ready to be assembled. We’re going outside now and long after these flower crowns have withered, the memory will remain.

Perhaps that is what culture really is, the memories we create together.

Last week an African man threw himself at an Irishman in Belfast and tried to cut his head off. Bystanders intervened and saved his life, though the victim lost an eye and was severely slashed. The attack triggered protests in Belfast and across other major cities in Northern Ireland that have been going on all week. Cars have been set on fire, immigrant properties attacked, and at least twenty-seven people made homeless.

At the same time, South Africa is experiencing what may be the worst wave of what the media calls “xenophobic attacks” since the end of apartheid. Local black South Africans are attacking immigrants from Mozambique, Malawi, and other sub-Saharan countries who have come in and undercut local wages. In the town where I usually stay, five illegal immigrants have been killed.

These two events, happening simultaneously on different continents, are being framed as entirely different phenomena. The Belfast protests are “far-right violence” and the South African attacks are “xenophobia.” The underlying frustration is the same, people who feel that outsiders have arrived who should not be there, and a state that will not act.

But in South Africa, the trigger is wage dumping, and the response is murder, and some of them murder in public execution style. Among the black tribes, extreme violence is culturally closer to the surface. In Belfast, the trigger was an African man attempting to behead a local on a public street, and the response has been riots and displacement, but so far no one has been killed.

The South African version of this has been recurring since the end of apartheid, coming in waves roughly every few years. I was in South Africa in 2008 when one of the earlier waves hit. What I saw was grotesque, and one of my strongest memories from that time, being a young European adult just encountered Africa. In one case, locals had hammered a plank with nails through an illegal immigrant’s leg so he couldn’t run, then poured petrol over him and set him on fire. The police stood next to him and watched, unable to do anything.

The police are in an increasing number blacks themselves, living in the same neighborhoods where most of these attacks happen. The perpetrators are, in some abstract sense, their neighbors. It makes it difficult to enforce the law when the law enforcement is embedded in the same community as the lawbreakers, and when the underlying grievance, that outsiders are coming in and undercutting wages, is one the police officers themselves may share.

Immigrants from poorer African countries come to South Africa because it remains one of the better-functioning economies in sub-Saharan Africa, built on the remnants of European civilization. They are willing to take jobs at a lower cost than locals. Which is the same framing we had in Sweden when mass immigration began — they will do the jobs Swedes don’t want. The reality was always that they were willing to do those jobs for far less money than Swedes would accept.

South Africa’s rainbow nation government has never prioritized border enforcement. There is a political sympathy for immigration rooted in the liberation struggle’s universalist language about solidarity and shared African identity. The illegal immigration is massive, and the state does very little about it.

Now move to Belfast, and watch how the framing works.

The Guardian published an article with the headline: “How Belfast knife attack became the latest far-right trigger event.” The framing is that the nationalist right sits around waiting for something like this to happen, and then pours petrol on the flames to divide society. As if the attack itself, an African trying to behead an Irishman on a public street, is not the thing that divides society. As if the division only begins when someone objects to it.

The Belfast Telegraph ran a piece by their political editor Susan Breen with the headline: “Barbaric knife crime didn’t arrive in Belfast with a refugee — it’s been here for decades.” The argument is that Northern Ireland has a violent history, which is true, and that therefore knife crime is nothing new, which is a spectacular act of misdirection. Yes, Northern Ireland has been violent, and nobody in Belfast needs to be told that their country has a history of conflict. But a foreigner attempting to decapitate a local on the street is new, and there is a difference between a people's internal conflicts and opening your borders to strangers who want to kill you.

These two articles could have been written about Sweden. The framing is identical whenever something like this happens in the West, the first response is always: don’t let this create division. The second response is: this has always been a problem. The third is: the real danger is the far-right reaction.

I can set my watch by it.

Northern Ireland is roughly where Sweden was in the 1990s. They are late to the multicultural experiment compared to the rest of Western Europe. The problems are beginning to surface on a smaller scale, and the population is reacting the way any population reacts when it sees what is coming and feels unheard.

The difference between Northern Ireland today and Sweden in the 1990s is twofold. First, the Northern Irish have the entire European experience to point to. When we in Sweden began raising concerns in the mid-1990s, there were few comparable examples to reference. There were American ghettos and South African townships, but the European experiment was still young, and the mood was different. Today, every Northern Irish citizen can look at Sweden, France, Germany, Belgium, and see exactly where the trajectory leads.

Second, the digital infrastructure is different. In the 1990s, Swedish opposition to mass immigration existed but had no way to reach a broad audience. There was no internet, no social media, and no alternative media. The establishment controlled the narrative completely, and every established party supported continued immigration regardless of public opinion. There was never a referendum, because the result would have gone the wrong way, just as it did the only time we Swedes were allowed a local referendum in the municipality of Sjöbo, a mistake by the establishment that hasn't been repeated since.

The Northern Irish have both of these advantages and are still being ignored. They have spoken to politicians, and made clear that this lacks popular support, and it continues anyway. When the parliamentary route produces nothing, some people will take the extra-parliamentary route. And it is the same observation in Belfast, in South Africa, in Sweden in the 1990s with the arson attacks on refugee housing, and everywhere else where the pattern repeats.

El Salvador under President Bukele, the country went from one of the most dangerous nations in the world to one of the safest, by doing what every human rights organization said you must not do. He locked up the gang members, tens of thousands of them, without the procedural delicacy that Western social liberal institutions demand. And the citizens can now walk their streets in peace for the first time in a generation.

When confronted with accusations of human rights violations, Bukele reframes the question. Whose human rights are we talking about? The criminals’ or the citizens’? I focus on the human rights of the law-abiding population.

The entire immigration debate has been structured around a false dichotomy between racism and anti-racism. The establishment frames it so that opposing immigration is racist, and since most people do not want to be racist, they accept a policy they fundamentally disagree with. In Sweden, both things have been simultaneously true for decades: a majority considers itself non-racist, and a majority says we have taken in too many immigrants. The establishment has exploited the first to neutralize the second.

And Bukele’s framing of human rights breaks that. It shifts the conversation from whether you are a good or bad person to whether the natives’ right to safety and continuity is being upheld. We are standing up for our human rights. Our right to walk safely at night. Our right to a functioning society. And most importantly our right to a future that looks like us. And times like these remind us that rights don't just exists they are being upheld by men capable and willing to uphold them. Like the old saying goes freedom can’t be given, it needs to be taken, because whatever someone gives you can just as easily be taken away.

There is one final observation from this week that I want to leave you with.

For decades, the establishment across the West has used the same narrative device. They find a well-integrated immigrant, preferably a doctor or an engineer, someone who speaks the language, contributes to society, and is genuinely likeable, and they let that individual represent the entire group in the public image. Look how well it works, look how functional these people are. The entire media portrait of immigration has been built on these carefully selected individuals, while every problem has been pushed out of frame.

When the narrative shifts, and it is shifting, then the South Sudanese man who tried to behead an Irishman who gets to represent the group, the logic works in exactly the same way. Neither image is the complete truth of migration, but understand the power of the representative image, and understand what happens when the establishment loses control of which image the public sees.

Subscribe now

My books When Migration Becomes Conflict, Orania: Building a Nation, Parallel Order and Among Boers and Britons are all available on Amazon.

PS. Last week I attended the Remigration Summit in Porto, Portugal. Martin Sellner, Eva Vlaardingerbroek and a coalition of activists from across Europe launched the Save Europe Act, a pan-European campaign built around the European Citizens’ Initiative mechanism.

If the initiative reaches one million valid signatures, the European Commission will be required to formally consider it and issue an official response. The campaign advocates stricter immigration, remigration, stronger border controls and the removal of incentives that function as pull factors for migration.

The initiative surpassed 150,000 signatures within days of launch.

You can read more and sign at save-europe-act.com.

An eighteen-year-old British student named Henry Nowak was stabbed to death on December 3rd, 2025. His killer, a Sikh man named Vikrum Digva, stabbed him five or six times with a twenty-centimeter Persian knife designed to puncture armor. While Nowak lay dying, Digva’s brother called the police and told them they had been attacked by a racist white man. The mother came and hid the knife. When the police arrived, they believed the family, and handcuffed Nowak. He told them he had been stabbed. The officer replied: “I don’t think you have, mate.” Nowak died in handcuffs.

We only know any of this because the bodycam footage was recently released during the trial.

This is the future we got, and it exists on the ruins of a future that never got built.

And as I am writing this I receive a message from a friend about an African man who just tried to cut the head off a young Irishman in Belfast. Fortunately bystanders intervened and saved his life.

I will take the Swedish examples over the British ones, because I know the climate here from the inside. But it is obvious that the climates are similar and lead to the same anti-white outcomes. In Sweden, the murder of Daniel Wretström, the brutality of which most people still do not understand, has never received public restitution. James Waite, killed a couple of years later, equally brutal, and equally forgotten. Tommy Lind, whose emergency call was dismissed by dispatch, reportedly because a distressed Swedish man using raw language about his attackers sounded like a drunk racist making things up. It took the police an hour and a half to arrive, and Tommy Lind died under terrible suffering.

In the period leading up to Daniel Wretström's murder, Prime Minister Göran Persson publicly vowed to "crush" the nationalist movement, and young nationalists increasingly saw themselves as legitimate targets rather than political opponents. And when we changed government and got a right-wing prime minister, he said that if you put group against group you should expect to face consequences yourself. He said this in the context of a Swedish patriot being attacked. That is the sentiment from the left and right alike.

These examples illustrate quite well why I was unfortunately not surprised when I heard about Henry Nowak. I have never dealt with British police, but I have dealt with the Swedish police during my years as a young activist, and I have my own memories. We were frequently attacked by AFA, Antifascist Action, recently designated as a terrorist organization in the United States, though not yet in Sweden or the rest of Europe. And when the police arrived, the modus operandi was to treat us as the guilty ones. We were bundled together, and questioned for disturbing the public order.

One example stands out, though it is far from the only one where we were attacked and one of us ended up in court while none of them did. Around ten of us were out distributing leaflets when we were stormed by roughly thirty masked AFA members carrying clubs and baseball bats. The definition of terrorism was met to the letter, silencing opposition through political violence. However, it ended with one of our attackers sitting in court as the plaintiff, one of our guys sentenced to five years in prison for defending himself, and no charges brought against the people who attacked us.

Europe has had violent internal conflicts before, communists against fascists, in societies that were entirely homogeneous. Group against group is not new, and is the core definition of politics. But the nature of this division is new to us. Those were ideological conflicts within a people. What we have now, to borrow our former prime minister's words, is group against group along ethnic lines. That is the new condition, introduced with the multicultural society. And it produces a new kind of state.

Take Sweden in the 1950s and 60s. It was not a perfect society, way too socialistic for my taste, but it was homogeneous. And more importantly, it was a society that believed in its own future and acted accordingly. Large investments and projects carried out in the spirit of the ancient wisdom that the older generation should plant trees whose shade they themselves will never sit under. We developed nuclear energy and world-class infrastructure in a small country with limited resources. We manufactured our own cars, our own fighter jets, and had a degree of self-sufficiency that today feels completely unreal. It was a country that was going somewhere. And to connect it to what we have today, to the situation that produced the victims Nowak is a symptom of, the police back then had one job: uphold the law.

Now look at what the police do in a present day fragmented society. They don’t primarily uphold the law. They manage relationships between groups. They calculate which community will produce the most backlash if confronted and which can be handled without consequence. Licensed by the state, as our former prime minister put it — we must not put group against group. That statement dissolves our own group. It frames the problem as though our society is failing because we Swedes, or Europeans, have not been welcoming enough. And when we express even a basic in-group preference, it is treated as hostility toward the outsider, and it falls on the police to sort it out.

In the Rotherham scandal, Pakistani grooming gangs sexually exploited young British girls for decades. The police knew. Social services knew. They did nothing, because acting would mean confronting a minority community and risking aiding the patriotic opposition. The cost of that calculation was paid entirely by working-class white girls whose protection was not worth the institutional discomfort.

This pattern is the product of decades of policy designed to manage diversity rather than uphold a single standard of law.

It used to be that the police responded to what happened, established facts, applied the law. In a fragmented society, every police action risks becoming political. George Floyd being the most obvious example. Every arrest, every investigation, every use of force is filtered through the question of which group the suspect and victim belong to. The law becomes secondary to the management of group relations.

The entire energy of the state goes into managing all the different groups constituting the new citizenry — mediating their competing demands, balancing their representation, suppressing the native opposition. We have stagnated. In many aspects we are going backwards, because the effort of administrating our own incoherence consumes everything else.

The concept of a neutral law that applies equally to all has within the multicultural state ceased to function, because the society is no longer unified enough to sustain it.

This is where Britain is. And where Sweden, a few years behind, is following.

Read more

The first essay in this series ended with a party that had widened its definition of Swedish until its own deportation policy began to feel like self-amputation. If Swedishness is cultural, then culturally Swedish teenagers are Swedish, and deporting them doesn’t feel right in their hearts.

This should have been an opening for Alternative for Sweden.

Subscribe now

AfS was founded in 2018 as a direct response to what its founders saw as SD’s retreat from the immigration question. Where SD moved toward “open Swedishness” and coalition respectability, AfS positioned itself as the uncompromising alternative. The party that would say what SD didn’t dare — remigration. Not just stopping new immigration, but reversing the demographic change that had already occurred.

A single-issue party with a single, clear purpose. In theory, the sharpest possible instrument for the one question that matters most to its base.

But in practice, something else happened.

Read more

Sweden’s migration minister recently said that something “doesn’t feel right in my heart.”

He was talking about the deportation of minors who have turned eighteen. Teenagers who speak Swedish, attend Swedish schools, have Swedish friends, live Swedish lives. Swedish in every sense except blood.

Subscribe now

A few years ago, the Swedish right would have dismissed that kind of language. They would have called it naive, emotional, the soft sentimentality of people who don’t understand that politics requires hard decisions. Now they're using it themselves, and with an election approaching, the deportations have little public support — 77 percent oppose them in a recent poll.

Our moderate right government halted these deportations with the support from the Sweden Democrats, who built their political identity on a concept called “Bevara Sverige Svenskt” — Keep Sweden Swedish. They would never use that slogan today, because it refers to ethnic nationalism. In their pursuit of power, they left the idea of ethnicity behind, because it didn’t generate enough popular support. They found more success with a broader concept of what they refer to as open Swedishness — the idea that anyone can become a Swede as long as they adapt to the culture.

What they did, in effect, was widen the definition from ancestry to assimilation, from who you are to how you live.

If being a Swede is cultural rather than ethnic, then a teenager who has grown up in Sweden, speaks the language, shares the norms, and loves the country is, by their own definition, Swedish. Deporting these youngsters begins to feel like expelling a fragment of your own society. So in one sense the party remains true to its foundational instinct — keeping Sweden Swedish. But widen the concept of Swedish far enough, and migration replacement can be framed as: we’re just replacing ourselves with ourselves.

A political decision is a line, and it has to be drawn somewhere. Every line creates cases on the wrong side. This deportation pause, put in place due to some individual cases, may save someone who should stay, but it also lets others stay who definitely shouldn’t.

At its core, politics is collective decisions that handle categories, and some individuals will inevitably find themselves on the wrong side of what the decision intended — in both directions. Someone who should be allowed to stay gets deported. Someone who should be deported gets to stay.

And the more individual stories become visible, selected by media or gone viral on social media, the more obvious the bluntness of the line becomes.

The Swedish government has now halted deportations of minors who have turned eighteen, because media pressure built around a handful of sympathetic cases. The sympathetic teenager highlighted in the media becomes the face of the policy, while the less sympathetic cases, of those who really should go, disappear into statistical darkness. The ones no camera will find, because their stories don’t fit the narrative.

The question is what you do with these cases, on both sides of the line. Media can find someone who should be allowed to stay despite the rules saying otherwise. But for every such case, there are others who are not caught by the rules at all, who meet the formal criteria to remain, but who by any honest assessment do not belong and should leave. The line fails them both, in opposite directions.

There used to be a time in Sweden when you could write to the king.

If a decision struck you unjustly, too blind to your particular circumstances, you could plead to the crown directly. The rule still stood, but through royal dispensation the individual case could be lifted out of the rule without weakening it.

In the current system, one emotional edge case often leads to a general rule change. One person should be allowed to stay, so the whole system gets paused, and suddenly a lot more people are allowed to stay who definitely shouldn’t. The exception swallows the rule.

The king, before the constitutional reform of 1974, could grant mercy in the singular case without altering the general order.

And the exception would cut in both directions. Someone who had technically met the criteria to stay but clearly did not belong — who had spent their time in Sweden tormenting Swedish children, using ethnic slurs, treating the country as a place to extract from rather than belong to — the king could remove them too. The same visible personal judgment that could let someone stay could also send someone home.

The king would stake his judgment publicly. If he let someone stay who later committed serious crimes, that would not be “the system” failing. It would be the king’s judgment failing, and he would carry it for life. His firstborn would inherit the institution and its memory. When a real person puts his name behind a decision, something fundamentally differs from the machinery of government, where most decisions are made by anonymous civil servants and everyone can say they were just following procedure.

A system of royal dispensation would of course be vulnerable to favoritism and media-driven mercy campaigns. That is part of why modern states moved toward procedural systems in the first place. But we are talking about individual cases, relatively low stakes in isolation, and it would disarm the very mechanism that is causing the current problem — media using individual stories to change the general rules. Instead of a pressured migration minister stating it doesn’t feel right in his heart, he could refer the case to the nation’s conscience through the king and let the individual put forward their plea.

And from the petitioner’s side, the point becomes almost stronger.

Before the king, a person must appear as an individual. Who are you? What have you done? Why do you belong here? What would Sweden lose by sending you away?

That forces something the current system does not require, an articulated case for belonging. Not the assertion of a right, “I have the right to stay”, but a request: “I am asking to be allowed to stay, and here is why.” Gratitude, respect for the country, understanding of the law, responsibility for one’s own situation. It reveals something about a person’s character. And the community could speak too. References, both good and bad, the neighbors, the teachers, the employers, classmates.

Sweden stops being just a place you apply to remain in. Sweden becomes someone you address.

And consider the cases on the other side. The ones who stayed, who technically checked the boxes, but who spent their years calling Swedish children “Swedish devils,” who called Swedish girls “Swedish whores.” Imagine them standing before the king, making their case for why they should be the exception to the rule and be allowed to remain. And with the exception cutting both ways, young Swedes could petition the king themselves — why is this person still here, given what they have done to us?

When politicians say “it doesn’t feel right in my heart,” it is sentimentality, a feeling that says this is sad. Conscience asks something different: what is right in this particular case, without destroying the order?

The Swedish right with the Sweden Democrats is softening because the concept of Swedishness has shifted — as a consequence of their own logic. They moved from ethnicity to culture, and now culture is pleading its case back at them. But the fundamental problem of politics still remains. Collective decisions can never fully accommodate individual fates.

In the process of dismantling the king as a political entity, Sweden also became faceless. It is not that long ago that we understood that order alone is not enough. Someone must also carry the burden of the exception. The constitutional reform of 1974 transferred the king’s remaining powers to the government, ending a tradition that had existed for over a thousand years.

The real danger is not that modern politics lacks compassion. It is that compassion now arrives collectively, impulsively, through media pressure and emotional waves, rather than through visible personal judgment carried by someone forced to live with the consequences.

Today there is only the system, and our system has no heart to feel right or wrong in.

Subscribe now

My books When Migration Becomes Conflict, Orania: Building a Nation, Parallel Order and Among Boers and Britons are all available on Amazon.

The Graveyard of Parallel Orders

History is littered with attempts to build parallel societies. Everything from hippie communes in the American countryside, libertarian compounds, all kinds of sects that withdrew from the modern world to build their own version of it, back-to-the-land movements across Europe. The impulse is as old as life itself: the existing order is broken, so we leave and build our own. We have plenty of successful historical examples as well. And to keep it related to South Africa, it is kind of the history of the Boer pioneer. I don’t know how many times they have left to start anew, but the internationally recognized Boer republics of Transvaal and the Free State must be counted as the more successful ones. I write internationally recognized just to distinguish them from all the other attempts at Boer republics in the same era.

But when counting in all the attempts to establish aside of the present order, almost all of them fail. Even my ancestors with the Vikings had some success, but still most of them failed over the centuries. Our attempts in America and Greenland only survived a couple of hundred years before dying out.

Most communes dissolve when the founding energy fades and nobody else joins in on the adventure. The libertarian projects attract people who share an ideology but not a culture, and discover that agreement on the non-aggression principle is a thin basis for community. The sects hold together as long as the charismatic leader holds together, and when he falls, everything falls with him. The back-to-the-land movements may grow at a slow pace, but most of them are just friends orienting toward each other.

There is a burst of idealism, a period of intense activity, followed by a slow absorption back into the society they tried to leave. The graveyard of parallel orders is vast, and most of its inhabitants are forgotten.

But there is another way to look at all these losers in the graveyard.

Nassim Taleb argued that failed entrepreneurs should not be viewed as failures in the conventional sense. They are the fallen soldiers of economic evolution. Without them, without their willingness to risk everything on an idea that didn’t work, the successful ventures that followed would never have found their path. The information generated by failure is what makes future success possible. The entrepreneur who goes bankrupt trying to build something new has contributed more to the economy than the bureaucrat who never risked anything at all.

I would say the same principle applies to parallel societies. Every failed attempt contributed something to the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. They were scouts sent ahead into hostile territory. Most of them didn’t come back, and honestly, some of them probably shouldn’t have, given how strange the attempts were. But the ones who followed can still learn from their points of failure.

Orania emerged from a landscape shaped by every failed attempt that came before it, and from a people with a very specific set of conditions that most parallel projects have never had.

The Sly Roundabout Way

Political science has a well-established framework for what makes a city viable. Strategic location, access to trade routes, natural resources, a primary industry that generates employment across multiple economic layers. Singapore has its port and so do Hong Kong with a key position to China, and Malta sits at the crossroads of the Mediterranean.

There is no strategic position for Orania that any power would covet. It sits in the semi-desert of the Northern Cape, by the Orange River, in a landscape so barren that it was essentially uninhabited when the first families arrived in 1991. The conventional analysis would say that this cannot sustain a community, because there is nothing here.

And that is precisely why it worked.

Friedrich Hayek once observed that the way to introduce something the state cannot stop is “by some sly roundabout way.” He was talking about competing currencies, but the principle applies here as well. Orania introduced a parallel society — its own currency, its own bank, its own schools, its own council, its own labor model — in a place where the state had no reason to care. The state looked at the semi-desert and saw nothing worth fighting over.

Had there been a mine or a vital port, the government would have intervened to make sure they maintained control and got their cut. Every conventional advantage that political science says a city or small state needs would have been the very thing that attracted the state’s attention and made the project impossible.

The absence of obvious value bought Orania the one thing every parallel project needs and almost none of them get: time. Time to build, to grow, to establish facts on the ground that become progressively harder to reverse. By the time the South African state began to pay attention, Orania was no longer a handful of families in the desert. It was a functioning town with its own infrastructure, and a legal precedent established through a court settlement in 2000.

Hayek’s sly roundabout way applied to sovereignty itself.

Orania’s Primary Industry Is Its People

In a normal city, the primary industry comes first and the people follow. A mine is discovered, workers arrive, a town forms around the economic activity. The people are there because the resource is there, and if you remove the resource the town will die. This is the story of countless mining and factory towns across the world.

For Orania the people came first, and then the economy followed. The only thing that was there was a group of people who wanted to live together, preserve their culture, do their own labor, and build a future for their children.

Our present day infrastructure may push us to reconsider the old requirement of a primary industry. It has never been easier to work remotely, commute on affordable flights, or keep a family together across distance through daily video calls. The digital economy allows people to bring their economic activity with them. A software developer in Orania generates the same output as a software developer in Pretoria, but his presence in Orania contributes to something the presence in Pretoria does not: the critical mass of a community that sustains itself through the commitment of its members.

The chairman of the Orania Movement, Joost Strydom, phrases it simply: “demographics is destiny.” The town doesn’t need a gold mine. It needs families who want to be there, and that is the primary industry. And it comes with its own challenge: every family that wants to move to Orania must first answer the question that no conventional city needs to ask — how will you sustain yourself?

I began this series at a book launch on a Saturday night in Orania with the legendary John Edmond, watching young fathers settle into their seats while mothers kept an eye on children running around. I end it with the same image, because it is the image that matters most. The children are the point, not the debates about sovereignty and identity and geopolitical fault lines. Those are all in service of something simpler: a future where these children grow up in a land that is theirs.

The scouts who fell in the front lines of parallel orders were looking for the same thing, and most of them didn’t find it. Orania, against all conventional expectations, did. Because of a people who decided to be somewhere together, in a place nobody else wanted, and build.

That is the sly roundabout way. And by now, it is very hard to stop.

This is the final essay in the Orania series. My books When Migration Becomes Conflict, Orania: Building a Nation, Parallel Order and Among Boers and Britons are all available on Amazon.