In one of history’s more memorable exchanges, when Jesus was before Pontius Pilate, facing death, He said a few things, about truth and about the ultimate source of Pilate’s earthly power. But He also said (reported in John 19:11), almost in passing:

Thou couldest have no power at all against Me, unless it were given thee from above. Therefore he that delivered Me unto thee hath the greater sin (King James version).

AI’s theological insight is as follows:

Jesus meant that the person who handed Him over—either Judas Iscariot or High Priest Caiaphas—committed a worse sin than Pontius Pilate because they had greater spiritual knowledge and insight.

Whether He meant Judas or the Jewish religious leaders hardly matters. I suspect it was Judas being referred to.

Timothy Hammons at The Aquila Report takes up the theme of greater and lesser sins:

I was reading in John the other day about the trial of Jesus. During one of His exchanges with Pontius Pilate, He declares, “You could have no power at all against Me unless is had been given to you from above. Therefore the one who delivered Me to you has the greater sin.”

The obvious truth from this statement is Jesus telling Pilate that nothing happens outside the will of God. God is sovereign and nothing comes about that He has not decreed.

But the other point is that Jesus tells Pilate there is one who has committed greater sin than the sin Pilate was committing. Jesus is not giving Pilate a pass for his part in the crucifixion, but his role is not as serious as the role that Judas Iscariot played in betraying Christ.

We are seeing that there are greater and lesser sins. We need this reminder because so many in cultural Christianity always try to say that all sins are equal in nature. I get the impression this error is put forth in order to lessen the wickedness of some sins in comparison with others.

There are several errors in this thinking. First, Jesus doesn’t pardon Pilate for his role in the trial. He just tells him that the one who betrayed him is guilty of the greater sin. Therefore, both Pilate and Judas are in need of repentance and a Savior, but the judgment upon Judas will be greater.

Secondly, we need to remember that sin is usually graded based on responsibility. Those who had the Law of God, but rejected Christ were held to a higher standard of responsibility than those who were ignorant of the Law. This is why Jesus was so hard on the Pharisees, and pronounced judgements of doom upon them in the “woe” passages (See Matthew 24).

The Apostle James shows us this truth as well concerning those who would be teachers of God’s word. My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. Because of the teacher/student relationship, in which the student is trusting the teacher to guide him in the truth, the teacher is held to a stricter judgment than the student. This is because of the greater responsibility that that teacher has. He should know the seriousness of teaching that which is false and the condemnation that he falls under when he teaches falsehood (Emphases in the original).

https://theaquilareport.com/greater-and-lesser-sins/

One of the key messages is that guilt for sin is not unrelated to “knowledge”.

Which brings us, conveniently, to the sins of the various Covid Fathers. Multiple sins and heinous crimes, about which I have written much.

As noted at TOTT News, Kyle Sandilands recently issued an apology for his part in projecting the Covid mythology:

Kyle Sandilands has reflected on his prominent role in Australia’s COVID jab rollout, saying he now believes he was “fooled” by government messaging and was “wrong” for his public actions, including a parody song encouraging uptake of the biological product.

Sandilands made the comments on Kyle Sandilands Live, reflecting on his involvement in the 2021 campaign and his widely publicised parody song, Get Vaxxed Baby.

He said he had believed he was doing the right thing at the time, based on the information being provided by public authorities.

“I was involved, and a lot of people, a lot of broadcasters, TV presenters were – we were all fooled at one stage by the government,” Sandilands said, recalling the song.

He also rejected suggestions that he had been paid to promote vaccination, saying he had simply been trying to communicate what he had been told was an important message.

https://tottnews.com/2026/08/16/kyle-sandilands-covid-vaccine/

See also:

Karl Stefanovic is another public Covid apologiser. AI notes:

Australian television presenter Karl Stefanovic issued a public apology in March 2026 for his role in promoting Channel Nine’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign during the pandemic.

Here is the man himself:

Karl and Kyle are to be commended. Better to fess up than to memory hole. Many have not. Their media jobs at the time meant they had a special responsibility to spread truth and to question, question, question. Neither of them did. But they were far, far from alone.

All of which might (or might not) be considered germane to the outpourings of praise for the late Dolly Parton. As has been pointed out – though not by many, to be fair – Dolly endorsed the American Covid vaccine rollout in 2020-21. She even played on the lyrics of Jolene. Donated to vaccine research.

She, like any others also without guile, simply bought the propaganda and lies of Big Pharma and their allies in government. Trump himself, years later, was still notching his Operation Warp Speed in the “win” column, rather than begging for forgiveness for his Covid crimes.

More than the general propaganda, Dolly specifically bought the false binary offered by those in power, especially Joe Biden and Tony Fauci, that there was a simple public policy choice … between lockdowns and vaccines. Take the jab and you will be free again. It had appeal to the masses, and resonated. The Australian official playbook was similar.

It was always self-serving bullshit. But most of the world bought the line. I was one of the few in Australia – at the time – to call it out. I was supported manfully in this endeavour by Rowan Dean, editor of The Spectator Australia. As he noted recently, the Outsiders program at News 24 (formerly Sky News Australia) was just about the only media outlet in the country to push back.

Dolly’s Covid errors need to be situated among the many layers of Covid crime.

First, we have the Covid decision makers. The ones who actually handed us over into tyranny on a whim. Those occupying the places where the buck stops, per Harry Truman.

Then there were the “experts” who advised, nay, pressured the decision-makers. Their faux-certainty about Covid’s origins, nature and solutions was not merely arrogance. They must have all known the risks of their proposed solutions, devised I advance at CEPI months before the plandemic hit.

Then there were the globalist overlords who planned the whole thing, as a David Rockefeller pathway to world government. These controligarchs have the greatest guilt, of course. The ScoMo class, like Pontius Pilate, was weak. Cornered and spineless. The Bill Gates glass certainly knew it was a crock. It was their idea, after all.

Many of those whom I have called fellow travellers should be called to account, too. They have not been. They profited from their deception. Some, perhaps most, of them knew at the time that the clot-shots were unnecessary, useless and dangerous. The post-Covid, mainstream science, still largely hidden from public view and scarcely contested, says as much. These people should have their very own circle of hell. The media. The academics. The individual journalists. Jack the Insider.

Then there were the Covid ideologues, who welcomed the attack on freedom and who thought that “public health” outweighed private rights. Often these types took to glowering at the unmasked, reporting partygoers to the police, insulting anti-vaxxers at will, praising China, ostracising the dissidents.

Speaking of which, let us not forget the social media companies who silenced opposition and so implemented the most consequential attack on free speech in living memory.

These, too, should be open to all the abuse we can throw at them. Because of their bullying and arrogance. Because of their underlying willingness to lean into tyranny. Because of their claimed (yet undeserved) moral superiority.

What about those in third party institutions whose actions and decisions that resulted from state fiat imposed extra burdens on citizens? And, to be specific, on congregations. Here we are talking about the salvation of souls, not just about physical health. Shutting the faithful out of churches and church services was really something, Covid sin-wise. It is up there.

So … There is plenty of blame to go around.

There might be said to be different layers of Covid sin. The Aquila Report makes some very salient points. And the words of Our Lord to Pilate are freshly worthy of note, in the context of Covid justice. Not all Covid sins are equal. At least seven criteria suggest themselves when assessing and apportioning Covid guilt:

· The extent of knowledge;

· Day job responsibilities;

· The capacity (bandwidth) to access the facts of the situation;

· The context of one’s conforming to the prevailing narrative;

· The aggression in proclaiming the narrative;

· The proximity to decision-making; and

· The willingness to admit error and guilt in the face of new, credible information.

The blame games continue, and so they should. Questioning public figures who use their status and reach to influence public behaviour in contested areas of life, and then are found to have been mistaken in their positions, is entirely fair game. Especially those who accepted state and Big Pharma baubles for joining the crusade for the lockdowns and the injectables.

As for the late Dolly Parton …

I have always had the view that we should leave those grieving to bury their dead, free, at least for a short time, from the vitriol that has applied recently in cases including the violent deaths of Jason Arday, Charlie Kirk and Ann Widdecombe, but also many others, and is now routine in some quarters. Post-death pile-ons are among the most depressing elements of our civilisational decline.

After we have paid our respects, then we should do the delving. But the delving should be considered, fair and proportionate to the Covid crimes, or in the case of Covid’s venial sinners, the Covid misdemeanours.

Yes, Dolly was no Eric Clapton …

Oh, and even the Covid dissidents have their sins to confess. I, for one. I consented to wearing the mask in required public places. Not something of which I am particularly proud. I knew it was bullshit, but I, like others, made a strategic decision. Hills to die on, and all that. Not for me the Monica Smit courage, I am afraid to say. She and others were the real Covid heroes. They incurred real costs, like jail time, and not just reputational costs. Many of working age, with family responsibilities, went along with the charade. Some knew the game. Many, of course, didn’t. The sins of Covid omission (they count as sins, too), we all committed …

Next time, I hope, Covid’s many venial sinners will be far better informed, and will act accordingly. Now, everyone, including musical performers – those who are granted the opportunity – will have far less excuse to join up with the public health criminals and their collaborators, who, no doubt, will maintain their criminality and collab. And, very sadly, all the Covid memory holing and the slithering accountability avoidance will have ensured that many will remain completely ignorant – still – and wedded to official public health narratives.

The con that claimed Dolly Parton was that good. The elites are that good.

Paul Collits

31 August 2026

With apologies to Jerry Herman, the creator of Hello Dolly (1964).

Jimmy Buffett once penned a song referencing Elvis, Oysters and Pearls. Another icon who didn’t need a surname for instant global recognition and acclaim. And much love. The song goes:

Elvis was the only man from northeast Mississippi
Who could shake his hips and still be loved by rednecks, cops and hippies
It’s something more than DNA that tells us who we are
It’s method and it’s magic, we are of the stars

Some never fade away, some crash and burn
Some make the world go around, others watch it turn
Still it’s all a mystery, this place we call the world
Most are fine as oysters while some become pearls.

Dolly Parton didn’t simply watch the earth turn, either. She helped to make the world go around.

This week we lost the second Parton sibling within a month. Coy Denver Parton passed away (at 82) a mere few weeks ago. He was an unassuming farmer.

His younger sister was just about the only human being of our age about whose death there has been nary a celebration, who once parried conversation with Kermit the Frog, who could get away with saying “I have a nice ass too” during a conversation about her outsized (and apparently enhanced) breasts – on national TV – who declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom, twice, and in whose honour American flags flew at half-mast.

Quite the CV. Quite the reach.

A truly beautiful human being with the profile of Nelson Mandela – without the revolutionary politics, dubious legacy and jail time – and the universal adulation to match. Not too bad for a hillbilly gel. The black Americans loved her too. The ground announcer at Comm Bank Stadium had Jolene on auto-repeat Friday night during the epic Panthers Bulldogs game. Dolly’s passing even got a mention on the magnificent NRL podcast, Kenty Blitz, on Kayo Sports.

Quite the reach, indeed.

Saying that someone has a gift for friendship is a bit of a cliché. Dolly had a gift for collaboration. And all of her collaborators were friends. Kenny Rogers was perhaps the most famous. One of the more memorable collaborations was with Emmy Lou Harris and Linda Ronstadt.

Easy to see the attraction, right there.

Alan Jackson once wrote a song, When God Paints.

An ode to the Creator. Well, some of God’s masterpieces come in the form of human beings. And they are not all what we might call conventional saints.

Dolly has had minor sniping over the years. The infamous Barbara Walters interview of 1977 comes to mind. On the one side, a famous interview trying to pull rank and humiliate a younger, emerging star.

See also:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2026/08/28/dolly-parton-barbara-walters-hillbilly-interview/91515693007/

Disgusting stuff. Easily batted away by the great, and still very young, Dolly. Showing grace and composure when very young is a rare gift.

There were also implied criticisms of her husband and her “unconventional marriage, to Carl Dean, who passed away last year. He was the Dennis Thatcher of American country music. A silent partner, out of the limelight and not all over social media. Muchly dismissed, out of envy and low information celebrity journalism.

There is some irony, too, in some of the eulogies. This from the unusually gracious ABC:

There is now a rhythm to how the world – or at least, the internet – processes celebrity death.

A flurry of breaking news alerts, a flood of social media posts, some heartfelt words from those who might have known them.

But this week was different. Dolly Parton was always different.

On Wednesday morning, when news of the 80-year-old’s death pinged onto screens around the world, the sense of loss extended beyond that of a person.

Something bigger was gone.

A magnetic, binding force of humour, humility and humanity.

True warmth and kindness — not just performed but practised and felt by people and communities in unlikely pockets of the world.

This was an artist who improbably found herself at the top of a cultural mountain and somehow figured out what to do once she got there.

It was the loss of one of the last great celebrities.

In a bitterly polarised western world, there has been a rare bipartisan streak to the mourning of her death.

That impact is almost impossible to capture in its entirety, though it has revealed itself in the many, varied tributes.

“Stop saying Dolly Parton was a national treasure,” read one semi-viral social media post this week.

“There are kids here in Hull in Yorkshire who can read because of her. She was a global treasure.”

The same could perhaps be said of kids in Tamworth, where Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, her global philanthropic book-gifting initiative, was rolled out.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-29/goodbye-dolly-parton-one-of-the-last-great-celebrities/107088462

All true and wonderful. God help us all, even Albo met her in 2011. Thank God he hasn’t had a melons moment with Dolly’s passing.

The ABC talks of a polarised world, and expresses wonder at Dolly’s appeal. The ABC has done more than almost any other institution to create the polarised world that we now inhabit. The world inhabited by the ABC thrives on driving hatred, disunity and bile. They don’t get irony. Dolly had another gift. She kept her opinions to herself. She even refused to condemn Trump when everyone expected her class to do so. And I don’t think it was just career-strategic. If only the ABC followed her lead.

I have a two-degrees-of-separation relationship with the great dame. I once had a truly great evening in the back blocks of Nebraska (flyover country, stateside) at a mini concert put on by the conference organisers hosting me, in the local theatre. It featured the late Jim Salestrom, who kindly signed some CDs I bought after the show. Jim played and sang in Dolly Parton’s band from 1979 to 1991. If only I knew that when I met Jim. There might have been a few great stories.

Let’s give the final word to Paul McCartney:

“It is hard to imagine living in a world without Dolly,” McCartney wrote.

“We will always love you. God bless and rest in peace.

“You were the best.”

Indeed. Dolly was a bit of an anachronism in a world driven by hate and relentless self-focused projection.

Authentic. Refreshing. Old school. An unnoticed, inherently conservative icon, without appearing to be so and without being condemned for same. The ultimate argument for permanent things, in human form. Bless her.

When God paints.

Paul Collits

29 August 2026

They say that moving house is up there with life’s worst and most stressful experiences. I know this to be true. Add selling two houses and buying another to the actual move and you move seamlessly towards having the divorce lawyer on speed dial.

Since 1 July 2026, it all just got even worse. All thanks to the scumbags in Canberra. In the three years or so since we last did all this, a whole extra tranche of regulation has been added to the burden of conveyancing. And the cost. There are ID checks. Foreign capital gains tax forms. Land titles Office identity processes. Waving your passports and driver’s licences at the ever increasing copper class.

None of this was previously needed. It still isn’t. But since 1 July, now there is a requirement to produce a marriage certificate. Before you can sell, or, I assume, buy. Not having one to hand, I had to trawl back to the ACT Government for them to dig one out. From 45 years ago. At cost, of course. What moral panic is that about? Stealth selling by devious spouses, perhaps.

And then the final straw. The AML check. Anti money laundering. One of the big issues? I think not.

From 1 July 2026, new AUSTRAC AML/CTF Legislation requires real estate agents, conveyancers, and property developers across Australia to perform mandatory identity verification and customer due diligence for property buyers and sellers.

https://amlsmartguard.com.au/who-we-protect/property-real-estate/

It wasn’t a problem on 30 June. Apparently, it is now. And isn’t it amazing how quickly a whole new infrastructure has been created in the month or so since this latest swindle has landed? With all the bullshit to match. Just look at the website. Tyranny with a benign safetyism face.

The irony, of course, is that the Australian Government is the nation’s leading money laundering outfit. Daylight is second.

The state washes our hard-earned tax money into every scam under the sun. Things to which we morally object. Things to which we have not agreed. Things for which our permission was not even sought. Things not needed. Things never discussed during an election campaign. Things that end up costing ten times what we were promised they would cost. Things that will ruin our economy. Ruin our landscapes. Ruin our communities.

Our current monthly interest bill for Canberra’s debt is $3.5 billion. Every month. That is the cost to us of paying for all of the other scams. Scumbags is too kind a description of these people. Advised now by a clueless, feminised Treasury, whose Secretary recently said, in response to a question about CGT and broken promises, well, we have to get the money from somewhere. These malevolent goons run the world now.

The NDIS scam? Mates’ rates for a whole new outsourced industry of grifters.

There are other examples of the playbook. It was John Howard’s dumbo outsourcing of labour market and Centrelink services that made Kevin Rudd’s wife (and many others) a gazillionaire. Outsourcing remains one of the nation’s greatest ever blunders, all done in the name of “efficiency”. Accountability has gone out the window. One of the big cases of disastrous unintended consequences of the naïve, neoliberal economic theory so worshipped in the 1980s.

But the aforementioned AML bullshit is also a scam. It is creating a new industry to police diddly squat, while at the same time costing real estate agents money and time and conveyancers time. They have to do the work, take the responsibility and bear the costs. Ray White Lismore estimates an annual extra cost of $15k per year for having absorbed the costs of AML compliance. Another blow to our already overburdened businesses.

Then there is the double dipping. Sellers AND buyers have to comply and report. But you have to do it twice. Both the agent AND the conveyancer have to go through the process. It is clipping the ticket twice over.

It is just like the Covid jab. Not needed AND costly. At least, I suppose, this particular scam doesn’t kill people.

This is regulatory strangulation by a thousand cuts. And because you only buy and sell houses every blue moon – unless you are a property flipper, which you won’t be any more thanks, again, to two melons Albo – you will only encounter this regulatory creep rarely.

This is how they do it. Hide taxes (like the repulsive GST). Make them punishing but only once in a while. Keep them after you said you would ditch them (stamp duty). And recruit businesses to do your tax collecting and your form filling. After you have created new scam-businesses to cream off the profits.

Selling houses Australia? Andrew Winter must be shaking his head in disbelief. More like selling out Australia.

It must nearly be time to have a fresh read of Paul Frijters et al’s minor classic, Game of Mates. See the interview here:

But is even worse than this. This is a blatant push by the state to garner ever more data on us. Digital ID by a dozen back doors. We will game you AND we will have even more means at our disposal to track you. Get more tax out of you. To know every last damned thing you are doing. Eyeballs over everyone.

It is Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. The only problem? It is decidedly NOT delivering the utilitarian utopia that Bentham envisaged. The greatest happiness for the greatest number? Rather, we have descending upon us the greatest compliance from everyone. Compliance without reward. Compliance with extra pain.

Meantime, we can all rest comfortably in the knowledge that the political class, at least, has the back of the lap dancer class. With Albo, of all people, leading the charge. Another moral panic with which to distract the punters.

One of the great advances of recent times has been the gradual growth – from a very, very low base – of a more informed citizenry. Many more of us now know what they do, and how they do it. It pretty well explains the rise of One Nation, from nowhere a year or so ago. But we are still losing. Losing everything, in real time.

Paul Collits

27 August 2026

The context for the homily was the instruction given by Christ to His Apostles, and to Peter in particular, in forming His Church. In AI’s version, this meant:

When Jesus told Peter and the disciples in Matthew 16:19 and Matthew 18:18 that “whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven,” he meant that he was giving his followers the official authority to make hard decisions about church rules, teaching, and community discipline that God would back up.

In other words, Heaven has your back. But here and now, questions remain. Our Lord didn’t go into the fine print. It remained a very broad Divine endorsement. Since that time, the Church has defined things like Papal infallibility. That goes to matters of faith and morals, and, decidedly, NOT to other matters. Lord Acton, he of the famous phrase, “power corrupts”, had Papal infallibility rather than the secular state in mind when he decided to contribute to the pantheon of famous political quotes.

A useful reference point for all things Acton can be found here.

https://www.acton.org/research/lord-acton?

The boys and girls of Star Trek got it, too.

Back to the homilist. A very, very good man, by the way. He raised the issue of Catholics being upset during Covid at the Church’s shutting its doors for months and, more specifically and of limited interest to non-Catholics, elements of the congregation not being allowed to receive Holy Communion on the tongue. The latter is a very important issue for traditionalist Catholics.

Leading with his chin, if I might say so. An own goal, to use an old cliché (among many) dragged out by the fictional British banker, Sir Desmond Glazebrook.

Our homilist used the word “allegiance”, and brought in the Episcopate as well as Rome. That is what Catholics owe, not only to the Pope, then, but also to the Bishops.

It was a bad example of the requirement of allegiance, for two reasons. The first is … we had no choice in the matter! We were all locked out of the Sacraments and the Mass. Allegiance didn’t arise.

Which leads us to the second reason why Covid was a very bad example to bring up.

There was much anger in 2020 and beyond. Righteous anger, to be sure. And sheer disbelief at the wanton subservience of the churches (not only the Catholics) to the Covid fascist dictatorship, against which all people, including Catholics, had, not only the right, but also the duty, to resist, with all our might.

There is an old moral rule about the duty to resist immoral laws and immoral regimes. Edward Feser, the eminent and wise Thomist, has written at length about this. AI notes:

In classical natural law theory, as defended by philosopher Edward Feser, an unjust or manifestly immoral law lacks true legal authority and must be resisted when it commands something intrinsically evil.

And this:

In classical natural law theory, the contemporary Thomistic philosopher Edward Feser outlines a strict moral duty to resist bad or unjust laws. Drawing directly from the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Feser asserts that a human law is only binding on a person’s conscience if it aligns with the natural moral law and serves the common good. When a law violates these standards, it loses its status as true law and becomes an act of violence instead.

Gabriel Moens and Augusto Zimmermann also recently weighed in on this.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/07/the-legal-right-to-disobey-unjust-law/

We had plenty to be concerned about, bad law-wise, during Covid, as a recent comment by Dr Judy Mikovits helpfully reminds us, prompted by the release of the Fauci diaries. She lists (at her Telegram page) all of Tony Fauci’s “war crimes”:

Lockdowns…War Crimes
Ventilators…War Crimes
Remdesivir…War Crimes
Forced Masking…War Crimes
School Closures…War Crimes
Silencing Doctors…War Crimes
The Covid Vaccine…War Crimes
Vaccine Passports…War Crimes
Planned Pandemic…War Crimes
MILLIONS DEAD…WAR CRIMES

For which he has not been punished. Instead, pardoned by the very same power structure that unleashed him. A real-life Dr Evil revealed in real time, as they say. (One of Fauci’s lieutenants, David Morens, recently pleaded guilty to having conspired to commit fraud against the United States. Bugger, no pardon from the Biden autopen for him).

The point is, Australian governments also did all of these listed things. They were war crimes here too. Unpunished. And unforgiven. Kelly. Skerrett. Andrews. Morrison. Hunt. Halton. Sutton. And the rest. It is a long list.

Covid revision is very useful, still. We owe it to the truth to remember, to restate, to challenge falsehood, and to seek ultimate justice, however thin our chances are in relation to the last.

If I knew (and stated publicly) in March 2020 that Covid was a crock, then why couldn’t Australia’s order of bishops? They were either gullible and gaslit or actively collaborating with evil. For evil the Covid tyranny was, on a massive, global scale.

And the governments of the day only got away with it because of the fellow travellers, the useful idiots, the curtain twitchers, the Karens, the CHO bureaucrats, the academics and the media all went along with it. AND the churches.

They were and are ALL complicit. And they ALL escaped scot-free.

One thing I found somewhat surprising at the time (February 2020) was the closure (due to Covid) at Lourdes – where I happened to be visiting at the time – of the miraculous baths. Yes, that’s right. They were stopping the faithful from accessing the miraculous waters of Our Lady of Lourdes (feast day on the date of my birth) … because they might get sick! Err. Really? Lourdes, you might think, would be a pretty good place to get sick.

Do Bishops ever make mistakes (to put it very mildly)?

Some readers may not know that Australia’s first and only Catholic saint, Mother Mary of the Cross Mackillop, was, for several months, excommunicated. A major blunder by the then Bishop of Adelaide, a bloke called Sheil. He recanted on his deathbed, merely saying he had been “ill-advised”. AI explains that Mary’s excommunication was:

Officially attributed to alleged insubordination and disobedience, stemming from conflicts over the governance and independence of the Sisters of St Joseph.

Clearly poor middle management, right there. Not by St Mary but by her clerical overlords.

In recent weeks, Vatican officials have been spotted at another Pachamama event, this time alongside the pro LGBT+ cause.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/analysis/pachamama-ritual-performed-by-vatican-official-took-place-at-pro-lgbt-event/

The “mistakes” continue, then. Many of them episcopal.

Meantime, we have been reminded locally, in 2026, that we owed allegiance to the Catholic Bishops in 2020, and why. The same Bishops who bungled their interpretation of the weighty importance of the Sabbath Day and the Third Commandment, rigorously kept front and centre before Jews then Christians for thousands of years. Since Moses was a boy, so to speak. The Bishops who kept the faithful from accessing the spiritual gifts they perhaps, then, needed more than ever, as the brutal and illegal Covid state descended on them from on high. Who quietly got rid of the local Latin Mass. Who made us all sign in before Mass to aid the bullshit contact tracing regime. Who insisted on farcical distancing, the same distancing that Fauci simply made up on the spot. And who kept the churches locked up for far longer than even a rabid Covidista would have insisted. Just to be safe.

The Churches all rolled over, or at east most of them did, at precisely the time when righteous moral pushback was required. When they might have shown “leadership”.

Nary an apology from the Church since, of course, along the lines suggested for the American Church by John M Grondelski at Crisis magazine.

My interest is not in the hearing. I am interested in why there hasn’t been a similar discussion inside the Catholic Church about ecclesiastical performance during Covid.

Bishops across the United States took the unprecedented action of closing churches and shutting down public Masses, in some cases for a year or more. Many Catholics died alone, bereft of the sacraments, including Reconciliation, Anointing, and Viaticum. In some places, it was alleged that Confirmation was “administered” not by episcopal hands but by Q-tips.

And, in the six years since Covid broke out, there has not been any autopsy of the bishops’—and Pope Francis’—decisions. In an era where “synodality” is declared a “style” of ecclesiastical “dialogue” and synodal “conversations in the spirit” dare to deconstruct received dogma and discipline, the de rigueur “dialogues” have yet to reach a public discussion that might suggest the ecclesiastical response to Covid was wrong.

… Have we heard the USCCB conduct such a postmortem? Within itself? With the faithful? Given that the Synodal Secretariat is telling dioceses around the world to review their synodal structures in preparation for the next Roman roundtables, is there any bishop man enough to step up and say: “Let’s talk about what we did during Covid?”

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/when-will-the-covid-era-bishops-be-held-accountable

Nope.

Instead, what we get is a reminder of our duty of allegiance to the episcopate.

In the event of the inevitable, next plandemic, I anticipate a lot less lockstep obedience, both from citizens and from congregations. A few protests outside the churches might well be the order of the day, as well.

Paul Collits

27 August 2026

These days, keeping the punters in the dark is a serious business for the political class in liberal democracies.

Perhaps it always was, but I don’t think so. There once was a noble profession of “public service”, a recognition that we-the-people were ultimately in charge, and that the social contract underpinning representation and political obligation was non-negotiable. The Boston Tea Party proved that the American colonists certainly believed it to be true.

Now? Not so much.

The modern UniParty politician has three main priorities in life. First, to line his pockets during and after his parliamentary service. Second, to do service to the machine. The system. The second helps with the first. And third, to obey the ideological diktats of his globalist masters. Think world government, supranational corporatism, climate change, pandemic planning and execution, manufactured wars, digital tyranny, surveillance capitalism, disappearing rights, open borders

None of this activity has anything to do with the wishes, needs or priorities of the people who vote for these scumbags. Rather, the modern political class engages in the wanton destruction of popular aspirations. They even sneer at the very term “populism”, which I take simply to mean a system whereby the elected, broadly speaking, do the will of the people.

There are two main ways in which the political class seek to execute their core business of keeping us in the dark. One is the memory holing of their crimes and misdemeanours. The other is the creation of endless distractions, as per Huxley’s Brave New World playbook. Joh used to “feed the chooks”, aka the journalist class, with bullshit. And the electoral system from which he prospered left a bit to be desired, gerrymander-wise.

But now, post-Joh, many of the chooks don’t need to be fed. Though they still are. The punters are already, by and large, not remotely tuned in to politics, outside the top and bottom activist quadrants. And the journalist class, certainly those busy managing upwards in the legacy media, are now part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Just look at some of the biggest stories of Australian politics over the past weeks.

A post-Bondi Royal Commission that is a classic case of memory holing. A refusal to interrogate anti-Semites while giving those same anti-Semites legal standing and the privilege of cross examination. A case of “look over there”. Following the script.

Then we had a Governor General intervening in the case of millionaire footy players (well, AFL players) engaging lap dancers in a Pullman (no less) hotel room, and adding (apparently) a little coke to the equation. A scene that had a little of everything, including (again, apparently) an invocation of Albo’s recent public contributions on sexual morality. You might even say that Albo was there in spirit, with the alcohol and coke addled “elite” sportsmen and the harassed lap dancers.

But the Governor General?

“Adding her voice”, as the unserious, Labour sports fanatic Annika Wells called it. Yes, that Annika Wells. She of the free tickets and flights to AFL finals for her family. Sam Mostyn, an activist of old, saw the opportunity to make a rare splash on one her favourite topics.

As AI reports:

Before being sworn in as Australia’s 28th Governor-General on July 1, 2024, Sam Mostyn was a prominent corporate executive and progressive advocate. Her public advocacy centered on gender equity, climate action, and Indigenous reconciliation, alongside past political work as a Labor government adviser in the 1990s.

It must be boring for an activist used to just signing off on legislation and giving speeches that nobody reads. Hence, coming to the aid of the lap dancer class.

Also, we had Melongate itself. Prime Ministers who say they would shag Kylie. Who would appear on podcasts with unserious actors and engage in unserious distractions. And not content with shagging Kylie, we had a pretty unserious approach to foreign affairs.

Finally, we have gotcha questions from the media for Pauline Hanson on the identity of foreign leaders. I have examined that little charade elsewhere.

https://substack.com/@paulcollits/p-211680177

Really?

Of course, Pauline Hanson is herself THE big source of distraction for the political class. The ultimate look over there.

Its motives are obvious. One Nation is the biggest threat to the establishment Australia has ever seen. It has to be seen off. The “look over there” assertions have been equally obvious. She is dangerous. Her party isn’t democratic and bottom-up. She isn’t ready to govern. She will be the cause of a third Albo term of office. ON will split the vote.

The latest to employ this shallow and obtuse line of non-reasoning is, surprisingly, Henry Ergas.

Authenticity of Hanson to keep Labor in power

One Nation’s permanent fixture is eating into the Coalition’s core vote – proving that enduring authenticity beats policy depth.

Perhaps he, too, is now managing up to his establishment paymasters at The Australian. It is, of course, ironic that someone should regard “authenticity” as downside.

There is a pattern here, among the swirling distractions, both natural and politically engineered. Keep the low-information voters trapped in their bubbles. The governing class is aided and abetted in its own efforts by the coming of smart phones and social media, themselves an endless and portable distraction from the serious things of life.

These are merely some of the distractions filling the public space. A distracting RC deflecting attention from the very thing it is there to investigate. Pulling that off takes some serious work. And the shenanigans of tedious footballers can take the eyes of the electorate off the massive threats to our way of life that we now face. They are, in no particular order:

· A trillion-dollar public debt;

· A totally broken electoral system which disenfranchises a third of the population;

· An energy crisis;

· Public policy being made by a rancid combo of ideologues and fools;

· An out-of-control education system that spits out clueless leftist children;

· The successful attacks on our history and on our once great monoculture;

· Corporates out to ruin the lives of their employees by giving in to the feminazis that run HR departments;

· Broken trust in all of our critical institutions.

And not the slightest evidence that anyone in or near office gets it. Enough to be going on with, then.

Back in the mother country, they also have had their political distractions. Think Count Bin Face and the Clacton by-election. And Britain’s problems are even worse than ours, what with the Third World invasion and the Muslim takeover being far more advanced and absent Tony Abbott’s victory over the people smugglers.

So … we have a political class seriously bent on ensuring that the subjugated class remains trapped in a state of unseriousness. This is clear, and strategic. Both the punters and the traditional conservatives among us have played their parts, down to a tee. We have enabled the elites to cruise to victory.

Some years back, the late American public intellectual Father James Schall SJ wrote a book called The Unseriousness of Human Affairs. In it, he argued the Platonic and Pieperian (after Josef Pieper) line that leisure is linked more closely to the Divine, and so trumps the busyness of the day-to-day activities that humans prioritise – like earning a living and political activity – and which so consume us all. Well, some of us. Perhaps the hooked gamers, the addicted consumers of endless YouTube-driven entertainment and Insta reels, not to mention the unemployed whom we subsidise and the working-from-home class are on to something, on this view.

Schall’s argument is as follows, per Amazon:

In this wise and witty book, acclaimed author James Schall illuminates a fundamental truth that will shock ceaselessly busy and ambitious Americans: human affairs are unserious.

Following Plato, Schall shows why singing, dancing, playing, contemplating, and other “useless” human activities are not merely forms of escape but also indications of the freedom in and for which men and women were created. The joy that accompanies leisure, festivity, and conviviality, he demonstrates, gives us a glimpse of the eternal. On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs offers a vital message that is truly countercultural.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Unseriousness-Human-Affairs-Believing-Philosophizing-ebook/dp/B0BZ17T64J

A good summary of Schall’s argument can be seen here, from the man himself:

It could be seen as an inversion of Socrates, who argued that the unexamined life is not worth living. Maybe. Perhaps Schall would see this differently. Maybe he saw the life of leisure pursuits as the higher calling of examining higher, permanent things.

Nonetheless, Schall’s is a lovely vision, and theologically correct. But … Schall could only have made his argument in times of more benign politics.

In an era of more committed and diligent public officials, of a smaller state, of a far clearer sense of duty and of the bases of political obligation, and in a market where the businesses tended to serve the needs of customers. An era of more honest, less systemically corrupt politics, where crooks were more bad apples than the norm. An era when the political class wasn’t actively engaged in the act of de-Christianising their nations. Of replacing their populations and cultures. Of invading the private domain of our domestic lives. Of crushing our spirit and our trust. Of creating fake hysterical health panics and scaring young people to death with climate scams. Of injecting our young and our old with lethal, poisonous vaccines.

Fr Schall’s prescription might be just another route to perdition, as it happens now. And it might also be a prescription that suits the political class just fine.

Back in the day, when the Prime Minister of Australia could get on a ship and travel to London to meet the Queen and watch the Ashes test cricket, staying away for months at a time and knowing that, back home, the 1950s economy would chug along and the governance of the country was a minimalist undertaking.

God’s in His Heaven and all’s right with the world. As our grandparents used to say, with the evidence (perhaps) on their side.

Of course, politics back in the day weren’t always benign. Serious politicians and threats were ignored. Like Enoch Powell. Serious politicians became unserious, too. The wartime hero, Churchill, upon his reincarnation in the 1950s, declined to correct his predecessor Clement Atlee’s creation of the subsequently disastrous British welfare state. He hadn’t read his Hayek (The Road to Serfdom). Thatcher was a serious politician who picked the wrong existential crisis (the economy instead of the culture).

That was then. Schall’s vision of non-involvement in a (relatively) minimal state and a stable society made sense. And it was a world that was untarnished by the not-so-innocent private pursuits of the internet age. Where our young (and not so young) are now a captive generation, ruined by a crazy combination of top-down ideological indoctrination, laissez-faire parenting and utterly confusing relativism. Where leisure is now infected by the creepy and broad reaching politics that Schall rejected.

The case today for steering clear of the business of active citizenship as a “serious” vocation is very weak indeed. The political class today would love us to all disengage and just go away, to leave it all to them.

To engage in private pursuits like reading and music and reflection and blissful rest while leaving politics to the politicians is now an act of suicide. Conservatives have been retreating to the private world of contemplation and to enjoying the good, the true and the beautiful for several generations, while those opposed to us have been quietly remaking our world. OUR world.

Those who have conspired to create the hot mess of everywhere politics have us where they want us. With nowhere to go. The elites create and maintain the narrative. They have the means of control. The duped classes stick to our once safe, now uninformed, spaces and these allow the modern state to rule the roost.

The ease with which we can be seriously distracted is the ultimate indication of the scale of their victory. Those who wish us to live the unexamined life, and to think that WE are winning.

Paul Collits

22 August 2026

They say that life imitates art. Or is it the other way around?

Gotcha questions asked of politicians by B-team journalists have been much in the news of late. What with Pauline Hanson not knowing the name of the President of Indonesia, it is yet another weapon in the Murdoch press’s war on One Nation. (The President of Indonesia? Or is it the Prime Minister? I for one don’t know, nor do I care. I lost interest after Suharto left the building.

https://www.news.com.au/world/asia/pauline-hanson-says-she-doesnt-need-to-know-foreign-leader-names-after-trip-up/news-story/62ef412fd9d4f877193dccf77f847203

A “trip up”, the lamestream media called it. Hanson batted it off pretty easily in a subsequent interview with News 24 (Sky News).

https://www.news24.com.au/politics/australian-politics/i-dont-need-to-know-hanson-defends-not-knowing-names-of-foreign-leaders-in-awkward-interview/video/c8d1889ece4108c9a6f241d7c5f1a86e

One day, she might need to know the name of the Indonesian President. She doesn’t now. Nor would anyone else, pretty much. One day she might need to know. When that glorious day arrives, she will have a hundred uncivil servants willing to bring up to speed. On her current, strictly minimal resources, she is doing pretty well to get across all the big issues and to lay out policies for the recovery of our country from its current parlous state. A parlous state delivered us by polished politicians (from the UniParty), some of whose members may or may not know the names of foreign leaders, but whose political apprenticeships, no doubt, afforded them ample time to learn all the sordid tricks of climbing the greasy pole and joining the ranks of their utterly corrupt seniors.

Integrity and clarity beat corruption and detailed knowledge of procedural politics.

As it happens, the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby covered off on the (lack of) knowledge among politicians of the minutiae of foreign affairs. Way back in the 1980s, as it happens.

Sir Humphrey and the fictional Secretary of the Foreign Office tested their colleague, the PM’s private secretary, Bernard Woolley, with the following teasers:

· Where is the Upper Volta?

· What is the capital of Chad?

· What language do they speak in Mali?

· Who is the President of Peru?

· What is the national religion of Cameroon?

Bernard didn’t know any of the answers, of course. They said … “you should go into politics”. (The episode was about insurgent activity on St George’s Island, a British colony. Neither the PM nor Sir Humphrey had a clue where it was, as it happens. More geopolitical ignorance).

The take-out from all this? Leave foreign affairs to the Foreign Office. That is what it is there for. The bureaucrats leave the politicians to focus on “surviving till Friday afternoon”. While they get on with the (mostly bullshit) activity of international diplomacy, for which they (no doubt) spent years in undergraduate training at formerly great institutions like ANU. I know this because I studied with some of them, back in the day.

One of that University’s more notable Asian Studies grads was one Kevin Rudd. Destined for an initial career with DFAT. Therein ends the fiction, right there, that superior knowledge of international relations makes for an even vaguely passable national leader.

Pauline Hanson has reached much the same conclusion as Sir Humphrey and the Foreign Office Secretary. She may not know the names of the leaders of our trading partners and other notable nations, but, then again, she also doesn’t go around insulting them. Not like “melons” Albo, who has a whole Department (two actually, PMC and the aforementioned DFAT) to make sure he doesn’t undo decades of diplomacy with throwaway lines about female anatomy. (What a very sick, indeed, cringeworthy joke of a man he has turned out to be).

The journalist class – which, incidentally, receives hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from Albo just to do their day jobs – is at a very low ebb, what with the smart-arsed Chris Kenny asking Hanson what he apparently takes to be the tough geopolitical questions.

Don’t believe me? Here is AI search on that Albo funding:

The Albanese Government’s primary media subsidization effort is the Journalism Assistance Fund (JAF), part of the broader $180.5 million News Media Assistance Program (NMAP). The scheme provides eligible private news publishers with $39,000 (plus GST) per full-time-equivalent journalist over a three-year period as a wage subsidy running through June 2028.

Ah, the Journalism Assistance Fund. Not too many voters know about that one. Recipients include the likes of Crikey, aka marxists in short pants. More of our hard earned going straight down the toilet. Oh dear.

The gotcha-question-class of journalism, of course, is but one front in the current all-out war on ON and on the one third of currently unrepresented Australians who support it. There is The Australian’s activist team. And the usual suspects from the Crikey/Saturday Paper/Guardian sub-genre of leftist scribbling. But now, we also have the politically violent children-of-leftists who regular skip classes to take to the streets of our cities and vent their anger and bile against Pauline Hanson. Anger and ideology sufficient to suggest killing her off. Just because she exists.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/students-waste-their-time-and-energy-protesting-pauline/

It is not just the children, too, with the threats of violence. We had the ABC’s advocacy of violence against Gina Rhinehart. And then there was the ON supporting, sixty-something woman who was randomly attacked at Brisbane’s Ekka.

https://www.news24.com.au/politics/australian-politics/elderly-one-nation-staffer-allegedly-spat-at-and-assaulted-in-brutal-group-attack-at-brisbanes-ekka/news-story/7d4fe2d8908e5b081dee26199d188852

An innocent woman, left with broken ribs. Just for existing. And for supporting the wrong team.

No one is suggesting that Chris Kenny’s feeble attempt at journalistic entrapment or similar, less subtle fourth estate attacks on ON’s political legitimacy – its right to exist and to compete electorally – have led to the incidents of political violence and the threats now emerging in Australia. There is no clear evidence of stochastic terrorism here. Yet. But few Brits probably thought, only a little while back, that the constant attacks on (especially) Restore Britain’s legitimacy and the name calling – neo-nazi, far-right, and so on – were a pathway to political kills.

It was only a month or so ago that I suggested that the violence in the UK, seen in the murder and threats of murder directed at right-of-centre public figures, and the subsequent emergence of vigilante groups (like the New IRA and the English lads getting aggro in migrant-infested towns) and the realistic threats of a hot civil war, as outlined by the scholar David Betz, were a great distance from contemporary Australian reality. Stateside, we have seen attempted assassinations (Trump) and successful political murders (Charlie Kirk). Not to mention all the gleeful, leftist celebrations of right-wing deaths. Like that at the murder of Ann Widdecombe.

My earlier optimism about Australia being free of all this now seems like gross naivete. Febrile hatred of political opponents marinates in a stew of drip-by-drip, constant belittlement, marginalisation and bile directed at legitimate politicians with mainstream views supported by huge swathes of voters. December 14 at Bondi comes to mind as a case study of politically inspired vituperation turning to kill shots.

Back to gotcha journalism and the media campaign aimed at denigrating Pauline Hanson. Short story, it doesn’t matter much not knowing what the capital of Chad is. As it happens:

The capital and largest city of Chad is N’Djamena. It sits on the Chari River, right across the border from the city of Kousséri in Cameroon, and serves as the country’s main center for economy, culture, and government.

And Cameroon doesn’t have a national religion. Other than soccer, perhaps. There you go.

Far more importantly, Pauline Hanson knows what Australia’s main problems are. They are not small problems. She also knows how to the solve them. Just as importantly, she gives one the impression that she is inclined to do what she says she will do. A little like Rupert Lowe in Britain and, perhaps on a good day, Nigel Farage and (yes) Zia Yusuf.

Speaking of the real problems in the West …

One of them is that Cameroon’s national soccer team looks very, very similar to that of France. Like Justin Trudeau, they have their own version of black face. The second Ceuta invasion is upon us.

As predicted by those old leftie French writers, Renaud Camus, Jean Raspail and Michel Houellebecq.

With no irony whatsoever, the Third World’s reverse colonialism – revenge colonialism with a soupcon of welfare dependency aspiration – is actively abetted by those same folks who are protesting against Hanson on the streets and who are writing their “respectable” columns in the establishment press. Like Howard’s old Liberal Party, the anti-anti-establishment party is a broad church. Across that broad church, the participants in the get-Hanson faction have one thing in common. They are threatened by ON’s attack on the corrupt system that they ALL support. All of them support the status quo. And, as Dominic Cummings said of the campaign to destroy – yes, destroy – Farage and those to his right, nothing is off the table as far as the establishment is concerned.

There is a continuum of hatred in play. At one end, innocent-seeming, performative journalism. At the other, doing away with your opponents, where all bets are off. Yes, this is a slippery slope argument. Slippery slope arguments are much maligned. But they often turn out to be true and proven.

The comparisons in Australia with Britain are getting more relevant by the day, now that real, active threats of political violence have come down under. They had the aforementioned murder of Ann Widdecombe. And the thousands of threats against Farage, over time. We have arrived down here at a place where to take to the streets in protest against the direction of political travel delivered by both branches of the UniParty is now an act of personal courage and high physical risk. Just ask the poor lady attacked in Brisbane.

First, as we know, they came for the Jews, now routinely hounded and harassed in our “liberal democracy” and across the wide, brown, now violent, land. (The anti-Semites actually have legal standing in “Melons” Albo’s fake Royal Commission designed, on its face to … stamp our anti-Semitism).

Now it is the rest of us they are coming for, in the now very ugly public square. The deplorables. Just to make sure that we all keep our orange tee shirts and our placards in the drawer at home.

Paul Collits

18 August 2026

There is a woman with a broad brimmed hat who walks the streets of our town. She wheels a shopping bag around with her, from which she feeds the birds.

All good.

But lately, standing on the curbs and corners, she has taken to holding up a small sign to drivers which reads … “please don’t kill me”. A benign interpretation might suggest that she is simply pleading with suburban street drivers to slow down. Given the state of the Lismore roads, and the weaving around potholes that is part of life here, this is wise advice.

Or it might be something else. I don’t know what.

There is a bigger problem across the West. Women do-gooders are playing an active role in welcoming to our shores the male dregs of the Third World. The third sector, aka the NGO industrial complex, mostly led by women, is at the forefront of a new international phenomenon. The invitation to our shores of enemies we didn’t know we had. And their activation. Ceuta is but one example. A captivating example at that.

The Noticer News reports:

Spanish gender violence campaigner allegedly murdered by Moroccan boyfriend.

One murder doesn’t make a (northern) summer. But …

The Scottish comedian Leo Kearse does a deeper dive on this:

White liberal women have the survival instincts of a goldfish when it comes to “refugees”.

White liberal women are getting attacked and murdered by those that they seek to defend, encourage, admit to our shores and succour. In numbers too big not to notice. It is arresting stuff.

Richard the Fourth takes it wider still. He unpacks the emergence of the modern liberal woman. He provides the backstory. The political problem of the Western woman. Who mostly votes left. Woke adjacent. Open borders. And the rest. Including “liberal on the right” women. The warriors against “vile misogyny”. Except when it comes to invading Muslims. The most misogynistic people on God’s earth. Bring em in! WTF?

There are trends here, he says, to the way the West is going.

These are telling and sobering commentaries. There is deep stuff.

It isn’t by accident that the woke takeover of the public square in our lifetimes has coincided with the feminisation of public life. Women now make up the majority of university students and Albo’s ministry. And everything in between. As we know. Search CEO of any public institution and you are more than likely to find a woman in charge. Armies. The Commonwealth Treasury. The Reserve Bank. Universities. Police forces. Corporates. The Covid mafia. Boards.

How all this occurred, on our watch, is a bit of a mystery. We know how women colonised public life, and why. They were sold a bill of goods. Anyone want to buy a bridge? We know how and why women went woke. But putting it all together takes more work. Serendipity, I guess. It all suggests that women en masse in public life are stupid. Since most of them merely become wage slaves, third division clerks in the public service who never see their children, and force up the cost of their own housing. But I don’t accept this. Too easy, and not politically correct. Mean girls theory? Where theoretical empathy meets one-on-one bitchiness? One might be arrested for thinking it, let alone saying it.

The bottom line is, in the case of the NGO mass immigration warriors at least, that their actions do not lead to the outcomes they naively sought.

Alas, those women who take to the public domain with vigour and intent, whether in politics, corporates or in the third sector tend not mostly to be like Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir or Jeane Kirkpatrick. Or that other female outlier, the red head from Woolloongabba. Or my friend Bettina Arndt.

No, it has all gone the other way. It isn’t accidental that we have “karens” rather than “kennies” in our vernacular. When was the last woman in public life that defended freedom, sought to reduce bureaucracy, resisted the nanny state, pushed back against corporatist tyranny, stood up for males?

The urge of young women to pivot to ideology is a thing, alas. Is this a case of suicidal empathy, as per Gad Saad?

Dying to be kind, indeed.

You might have expected the females of the West to have a little “empathy” for their daughters and sisters, n’est-ce pas? A bit of sisterly protection of their own against young randy males? Not so. The hierarchy of victimhood apparently rules that out. It seems to be a case of performative, selective misandry.

I am not sure what is going on with our lady friend in Lismore. I hope she is okay. The local coppers at the coffee shop with whom I raised this naturally kicked it down the road … to the ambos.

At any rate, we (as yet) aren’t facing a Third World military-age male invasion here in the country. So, she is probably much safer than our poor female friends in Europe, where migrant rapes and murders and other attacks are a daily occurrence. And not just in the cities. The Muslim invasion is deep into the countryside. Encouraged by liberal women.

A daily occurrence occasioned by official policy and by the “good works” of those who only see “refugees”.

Paul Collits

13 August 2026

A bloke called Father Jason has just published a short but brilliant take down of the Vatican. In the nicest possible way.

He continues a healthy tradition started by St Paul, with whom, it might be expected, I feel a close affinity. Paul famously challenged Cephas “to his face” over some matter or other. I know who I would back to win an argument between those two.

Fr Jason imagines bumping into a time travelling Voltaire – real name Francois-Marie Arouet – and he shares with Fr Jason his thoughts on the twenty-first Catholic Church. Alas, Voltaire, with Rousseau one of the spiritual fathers of the French Revolution – possibly THE worst event in modern history – thinks that the modern Church has got it exactly right. Unsurprisingly, the man of the Enlightenment, a rationalist error bigger than any other in history, a precursor of the radical individualism that so ails us now, lines up with the Vatican blob that is driving the Church back into the public square and aligned with the bad guys.

As Fr Jason lays out, succinctly and lucidly.

Voltaire’s views on sexual liberation are, as one would expect, pretty libertine. The Enlightenment, certainly the French version, was an attack on tradition, on the Church, on the transcendent, and on anything conventional. It was the spiritual enabler of the sixties’ postmodernist revolution. The latter simply completed the work of the French revolutionaries.

So, opening the Church to the world – Satan’s divinely gifted principality – as many of Vatican II’s officials either sought to do, or merely ended up doing, ticked Voltaire’s boxes.

As AI accurately explains:

At the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), periti (singular: peritus) were official theological experts and advisors appointed to assist the Catholic bishops. Nearly 480 priests and scholars served in this role, drafting documents, shaping debates, and providing crucial guidance on complex religious matters.

The periti were the sixties version of online influencers. Or, in James Burnham’s terms, the Church’s emerging managerial class.

It was Michael Gove – God help us all – who, as a Tory education minister, came up with the term “the blob” to describe the embedded British education establishment. Or perhaps he simply borrowed the term for his then noble mission.

The machine.

Well, there is a Vatican Blob. The periti were the forefathers of the Blob. (Not all of them. The future Pope Benedict, a tad liberal then, was one of the better ones). Whether one describes it as communist, per Bella Dodd, or globalist, or relativist, or just new church, it seems that now we have a political church.

Back in the public square, but siding with bad actors.

All in all, the modern Church pleases the returning Voltaire. On Fr Jason’s telling, Voltaire turns out to be woke, too. He digs the modern Papacy’s emphasis on social justice, equality, and … open borders. It isn’t known whether Voltaire was a climateer. What he would have made of Pope Leo’s blessing of a block of ice is not clear.

But Voltaire loves the move away from a focus on personal sin and the embrace of social sin. For which we are all guilty, apparently. Especially climate deniers, like the late Cardinal George Pell.

What would have Voltaire have made of the Church’s Covid regime? Abandoning the Third Commandment at the direction of the secular state? At the direction of the Fauci class. Goodo! All in the cause of relativism. More power to Satan’s principality. Relativism central.

Crisis magazine thinks (correctly) it is time for a reckoning:

In the six years since Covid broke out, there has not been any autopsy of the bishops’—and Pope Francis’—decisions during that time.

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/when-will-the-covid-era-bishops-be-held-accountable

Nope, nothing. The Church has joined the memory holing theory of justice:

My interest is not in the hearing. I am interested in why there hasn’t been a similar discussion inside the Catholic Church about ecclesiastical performance during Covid.

Bishops across the United States took the unprecedented action of closing churches and shutting down public Masses, in some cases for a year or more. Many Catholics died alone, bereft of the sacraments, including Reconciliation, Anointing, and Viaticum. In some places, it was alleged that Confirmation was “administered” not by episcopal hands but by Q-tips.

And, in the six years since Covid broke out, there has not been any autopsy of the bishops’—and Pope Francis’—decisions. In an era where “synodality” is declared a “style” of ecclesiastical “dialogue” and synodal “conversations in the spirit” dare to deconstruct received dogma and discipline, the de rigueur “dialogues” have yet to reach a public discussion that might suggest the ecclesiastical response to Covid was wrong.

Is there any bishop who will convene his “planning committees” and his “listening groups” to prowl his diocese and—without preselection of favorites—undertake an honest hearing of the faithful still in the pews about what they thought of the hierarchy’s performance during Covid?

Or are we to “move on,” “discern the future,” and conveniently forget about in some cases 12 months without Sunday Mass?

Have we honestly faced the hollowing out of parishes where, while Catholics returned to the pews, their numbers were often still not what they were before 2020? Have we asked how “spiritual communions” and “TV Mass” undermined Catholics’ sense and appreciation of sacramentality? Have we questioned whether the bogeyman of “clericalism” was diminished or enhanced when Sunday Mass came again largely to be understood as a matter of dispensable ecclesiastical discipline?

Sickening stuff.

The Covid era has left many Catholics shaken and stirred. With apologies to 007. It was a surrender to the secular state. A flawed, corrupt secular state. An unforgivable surrender. The recent Fauci kerfuffle only brings back the spiritual pain.

A Church with which Voltaire feels comfortable is a Church with much work to do.

But there is one issue upon which the modern Voltaire aligned Church would agree with the great man of the Enlightenment. It is the cause of free speech. A foundational principle of both the liberal establishment and of traditional Catholicism. You would think.

Ah, free speech. Here is a relevant case study that brings the issue into stark relief.

Campion College, the self-described bastion of Catholic higher education in Australia, recently hosted a conference on the 250^th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Great stuff.

https://www.campion.edu.au/adam-smith-conference-2026/

One of the speakers at the conference was one Chris Rath MLC, an openly homosexual (married) NSW Liberal politician. No surprises there, in the modern Liberal Party, of course. And not an issue for the strictly orthodox Catholic Campion College, apparently. The Vatican does this stuff, every other day.

Campion clearly doesn’t mind gay married speakers at its conferences. Free speech!

But God help us if one of Campion’s own staff members gives a speech aligned with the values of the dissident political movement headlined by … the politician (Pauline Hanson). Who happens to be actively supported by Gina Rinehart. Who happens to be a major Campion benefactor.

Oh dear. Complicated times. Campion doesn’t get irony, obviously. Campion’s sad and ready embrace of the zeitgeist is emblematic of the Church’s capitulation. It is blob thinking.

So, yes, there is an issue in the modern woke Church between the private and public squares. As Fr Jason pointed out, in his very sophisticated way.

What would the woke and freedom loving Voltaire think?

Paul Collits

12 August 2026

One thing to say about those trying fundamentally to change (what is left of) our society is that they believe in total victory. Another is that they know how to execute. A third is that they never, ever give up. Down to the last detail.

Whether we think of them simply – often, too simply – as leftists, or as Marxists, or as progressives, or globalists, or sexual liberationists, or feminists, or homosexualists, or climate cookers, or Islamists, it is clear that they work separately and together in myriad alliances to achieve their objectives.

And one shared objective is the deChristianisation of the West. Another is the forced affirmation of homosexuality. As if we don’t get enough of that in our TV crime dramas. Night after night. You would think that every street in every suburb is filled, wall-to-wall, with queers.

Tonight is census night in Australia. A five yearly cause of excitement for demographers and a cause of extreme tedium for the rest of us. Another interaction with that uniquely modern punishment … the online “form”.

It shouldn’t be.

A seemingly non-ideological exercise and a non-political one. It is just about collecting information to help governments and others to provide “better service”. Believe that, believe anything.

A recent missive from John Anderson reminded me of some of the hidden agendas of those seeking to reshape our countries and cultures. A short video explains what they are up to. In shaping our perceptions of who we are. And alerting us to how the powers that be are writing narratives to achieve certain objectives. Revolutionary objectives. It all seems so innocent. In this case, the question is religious belief.

No, I hadn’t heard of Dorian von Freyhold either. His succinct presentation, backed up by some real social science, not what now passes for same in our halls of higher learning, is persuasive. Short story. We ain’t as atheist as the powers that be would have us believe. We are not 39 per cent atheist, after all. More like 26 per cent, when the survey isn’t skewed.

It is all in the way the questions are framed. As the fictional Sir Humphrey explained back in the eighties.

A timeless, mini-classic. Shape the questions. Get the result you want.

Does this matter?

Clever propagandists plant and maintain narratives, as the doyens of public relations, like Edward Bernays, explained long ago. They create impressions that can influence behaviour. And given that man’s greatest need (apparently) is to “belong” to the group, as the Asch experiments of the sixties showed, it is likely that we might be “nudged” towards ticking the atheist box. That simply enables the Rationalist Society and its fellow travellers to embed a false reality, for various downstream purposes. As the Government keeps telling us, the census results influence all sorts of public policies, and the attitudes of politicians towards their voters.

The campaign has been organised and deliberate.

It is all about embedding a new reality. The new reality is … “diversity”. We are now a bit of everything. We are NOT a Christian nation. We are NOT heteronormative. Every answer on the form is a correct answer. No one gets to win. Except the state narrative.

This is what we are like now. Get used to it. And don’t ever forget it. Oh, and resistance is futile. This is how DEI wins. They don’t have to bother with arguments. It is mass formation. It is Orwellian, of course. Remember the means used by Big Brother to recalibrate reality? No new news here. But we owe it to ourselves to recognise every last case study of the long march.

We know all about nudge units … pure evil … from Covid, happily in the news again following the release of the Fauci diaries. The tactics of the deep state have come flooding back, despite the best efforts of the Covid criminal class to memory hole the lot.

Several observers, like the emeritus Bishop of Lismore, the great Geoffrey Jarrett, have spoken of the ordering of preferences in the census form. “No religion” is at the top. But, filling in the form, other things strike you. Religion is defined only by official and narrow denominations, increasingly irrelevant in these times of decreasing Christian sectarianism and a sharpened adherence to what C S Lewis called “mere Christianity”. Those toying with belief in the transcendent and in theism will be disappointed in the only option being “no religion” or a very specific denomination.

Faith is a journey, and all that.

It isn’t just about religion, either. There is a question about your sexual “orientation”. There wasn’t an answer box for “mind your own fucking business”, alas. You either get sucked into the “straight” (a homosexualist term aimed at false equalisation) answer or “prefer not to answer”. Suggesting one has something to hide, perhaps. Hobson’s choice. I do prefer to answer, but not to the question they asked.

There is no opportunity for expressive dissent against the narrative. The narrative is contained in the forms. So, the march continues towards a different society to that which many would prefer, and, perhaps, towards a falsely depicted atheistic, radically liberal utopia.

At least the Brits still have on their census a category called “white British”. So that is something to record, and measure over time. This has allowed the recent work by Matt Goodwin on how the white Brits will be a minority in their own country by the 2060s. And which has given rise to such a cranky debate, with all the usual epithets. As AI notes:

A 2025 report by academic and political commentator Matt Goodwin projects that the White British population could fall to 57% by 2050 and drop below 50% to become a minority by 2063. The analysis attributes this forecast to sustained net migration levels and varying birth rates among different demographic groups.

When, mercifully, I will be long gone but, alas, not my children and grandchildren.

Back to the revolutionaries and their metier. Having census surveys rigged might strike us a small bickies. But the revolutionaries, who work tirelessly, 24/7, are attendant to detail. The devil, literally, is in the detail. They are at their best when the punters are asleep at the wheel. We all do most of their heavy lifting for them.

They have many levers to pull.

Across many fronts, the revolutionaries work to fundamentally uproot our heritage, our belief systems, our raison d’etre. What we cherish. What we work for. Whether you call them evil hardly matters. Their lingua franca is power. And they have it in spades.

They have already achieved victory. These exercises, like the census, are merely mopping up operations.

They think.

But … there are counter-revolutionaries, and they are hard at work.

Like the folks working The Save Europe Act. To take just one example.

There are those who will not simply give up, and say “you won”. Hope is one of the great Christian virtues. Yes, it will all be worked out in the next Kingdom. That doesn’t mean that we don’t simply give up here on earth. Even if it means getting down in the weeds, using hand to hand combat with those who are driven by demonic forces of the utopian radicals who mean to do us mortal harm.

The census merely shows us that the battle is brutal and ongoing.

Paul Collits

11 August 2026

This rag isn’t called the Torygraph for nothing.

The journalist (and Telegraph editor) Allister Heath has referred therein to Rupert Lowe’s “repugnant dance with white nationalism”.

It’s time to call out Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore, a deluded egotist who is toxifying British politics, fanning the fires of racial and religious strife and risks handing permanent power to Andy Burnham’s Leftist revolutionaries.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2026/08/05/joining-rupert-lowes-religious-war-would-be-electoral-suici/

In other words, leave it to us. The Tories! The Boris wavers. Moreover, it isn’t clear that even he knows wherein lies the disagreement:

It isn’t racist to want far less immigration, or to kick out illegal immigrants, or to bid farewell to legal immigrants who refuse to integrate, are stuck on handouts or break the law, or even, under certain circumstances, to strip criminals or terrorists of their citizenship. It is legitimate to worry about the scale of demographic change, the challenge of absorbing large numbers of Muslim migrants, or to fear a clash of civilisations.

These are all Restore policies, and, until Nigel Farage started getting the wobbles and tacking towards his revered establishment, they were Reform UK policies too.

Ironically the UK census refers to “white British” in one of its questions. Oops.

See also:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/07/rupert-lowes-racist-cheerleaders-can-no-longer-hide-their-d/

Heath opines:

I usually spend my time jousting with the far-Left, net zero fanatics, socialists, critical theorists and Islamists. But over the past couple of days, I’ve taken it upon myself to call out a tiny, ultra-vocal group of extremists on the outer fringes of the British Right who threaten to discredit the case for the conservative restoration this country (and the West) so desperately needs.

I don’t relish sifting through the sewage that emanates from their social media. But if not me, who? If not now, when? I’m an equal-opportunity opponent of all enemies of the Open Society and Western civilisation.

Quel heros! As the French might say when not talking about Macron.

The Torygraph is taking on the repugnant right, armed with all the epithets under the sun. He is doing The Guardian’s work for it. It is filled with rage, internally inconsistent, deceptive and, at times, barely comprehensible. This, despite the fact that the majority in Britain has as its primary current concern … mass immigration.

Bottom line? This is MY Overton Window and don’t you racists dare try and extend it.

Meanwhile, ten thousand miles away, the Murdochs’ Liberal Party adjacent press is still relentlessly chipping away at One Nation, with warriors such as the endless Paul Kelly, Greg Sheridan, Gerard Henderson, Chris Kenny and Nick Cater performing yeoman service to the cause of the UniParty.

They are all engaged in what one observer (Josh Ferme) has called “tone policing”.

In Britain, the war is over “demographic security”. In Australia it is about monoculturalism. In other words, it is simply two fronts in the same war.

Of course, and more so in Britain, there is growing recognition, and for many, alarm, at the reality that native Brits will be a minority in their homeland by 2063. But we won’t have to wait until then to feel like strangers in our own place. Needing welcomes to our own country. Or observing thousands of Muslims sitting lingering St Patrick’s Cathedral Melbourne staring at the Christian edifice … with what intent?

Our nations will be lost way before 2063. Britain faster, but we are catching up. It isn’t just Bondi, nor is it just about the growing anti-Semitism. It is about the undocumented student visas. The Chinese real estate push. The kowtowing by Tony Burka to his Muslim constituents. The fact that a half of Australians now have one parent, at least, born overseas. The Lakemba-isation of our cities. The fact that the only football stadium where Albo doesn’t get booed now is where (Indian PM) Modi is the star attraction, following yet another free trade agreement where we hand over more bits of our sovereignty.

So, The Australian’s attack on ON has continued. Then Henry Ergas came along, as he so often does:

Islamism has exploited our culture of confusion

Our aim should be social cohesion, secured by effectively preventing the importation or perpetuation of ancient hatreds and forging common bonds strong enough to sustain diversity.

Alas, paywalled, on 7 August 2026.

Ergas provides a nuanced, deeply thought through, typically scholarly way out of the febrile and feeble debate over Pauline Hanson’s monoculturalism push. His conclusion? That acculturation is a thing, requires commitment from in-migrants, and needs a strong and sustained political class commitment, way beyond simply inviting the invaders in and accommodating their every demand. And flipping the acculturation equation one hundred and eighty degrees.

AI defines the idea as follows:

Acculturation is the social, psychological, and cultural change that happens when two different cultures meet and interact over time. People or groups adopt parts of a new dominant culture while keeping bits of their original identity.

Rupert Lowe, Pauline Hanson and Henry Ergas (as I understand him) want the acculturation to move in the direction of the host, the native culture. They decidedly don’t want it to go the other way. They don’t want us to be strangers in our own countries, cowed before a new zeitgeist to which none of us signed up.

Rod Dreher was talking about Covid tyranny when he said:

When I say, quoting [Hannah] Arendt, that “social atomization” was by far the leading cause of the coming of totalitarianism to both Germany and Russia, this is part of what “social atomization” means: people who had lived in what they believed to be a solid social order, governed by competent people who could be trusted, got to the point where they ceased believing that. “We’re on our own” means “nobody is going to help us, because we can’t trust those who are supposed to have our backs.” We are not part of a cohesive community; we are on our own.

But the case could equally be made that being rendered strangers in your own land – having to put up with two-tiered policing and no-go areas, for example, or sitting on public transport in our global cities where nobody is speaking English, or having Muslim nurses threatening to kill Jewish (Australian) patients – is right up there with the atomising effects of Covid tyranny and non-accountable governments.

We, too, once believed we had a “solid social order”, a monoculture, if you will, when new arrivals in our lands were expected to acculturate, and when our governments were expected to enforce this. Say, by restricting the numbers of migrants, bringing them in slowly, insisting on English as the spoken language, taking only migrants overtly willing to sign on to our way of life, and sticking only to newcomers who were the most likely to fit in.

Archbishop Vigano and Frank Wright get it:

On a very good day, Nigel Farage might get it. In theory, at least. Those on the left, and their violent field officers, clearly see Farage as a hate figure of the far right, and (for some, perhaps including Ann Widdecombe’s alleged killer) worthy of assassination. What a travesty. A category error by the left. Nigel is a moderate, squeamish, vacillating used car salesman of a politician.

Farage’s offsider, Zia Yusuf (oddly) gets it. Most of Nigel’s supporters most certainly get it. The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, is a Nigerian. She may also get it in theory.

The Tory keyboard warriors of the Murdoch press, their British equivalents and the current Pope do not.

Of course, the attacks in Britain on their political dissidents and, by implication, all their supporters – the Reform UK and Restore Britain vote combined easily makes them the largest voting bloc in Britain – are more vicious and pointed than those in Australia. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that Rupert Lowe’s policy prescriptions for reversing the colonialist invasion are more detailed and advanced than Hanson’s. partly because the invasion of Britain is far more advanced than here.

But those attacking Hanson from the centre-right are no less determined than their Brit colleagues to see off the shared threat to the Uniparty. To bury her. The insults here are less sharp, maybe, so far. They are also in code, though. For “unfit to govern”, read “deplorable”. For “populist”, read racist. The Australian’s establishment writers’ guild does think that ON voters are bogans and low-information, merely economically excluded and resentful. Holding grudges.

Err, no. Some of us have read John Locke and understand, at a deep level, the meaning and significance of the social contract and the roots of political obligation. We have read our public choice theory. We know all about the system corruption going on and how we have been screwed by our elected leaders acting all the while against our interests and clearly expressed views, under the cover of representative democracy. Including on the subject of immigration and cultural self-protection.

Speaking of which …

It is ironic that in both the case of The Telegraph and The Australian, most of the (paying) reader comments are in direct and vigorous opposition to the stated views of the journalists. Part of the problem, previously identified, is the failure of the establishment’s journalist class is their revealed ignorance of the deep connections between race, religion and culture, and of the dual threats posed by incomers who either don’t get the local customs or choose quite deliberately to ignore them. Often, to attack them. That this is (currently) a far worse problem in Britain – according to some, on the verge of civil war – than here, should not be a cause of Australian insouciance.

In each country, the punditocracy of the right is okay with stating the problems. When someone steps up and actually seeks to reverse direction, seriously, then, there is general squeamishness. About what nationalism means. It would appear that, for these folks, globalism is still kind-of-funky. Having homelands and actually defending them are considered a bit icky.

We can’t have that. Let’s just keep saying “I don’t know what monoculturalism means”, and hope that gets us through.

The bottom line for the establishment’s gatekeepers would appear to be that it is okay to be a Zionist for the Jews, (The Telegraph is owned by an openly Zionist German company, Axel Springer, after all) but not for the British or for Australians. Come the completion of the takeover, we won’t have our Israel. Now there is an irony.

Paul Collits

8 August 2026

Thanks to Renaud Camus, the vocal, new English identitarians, realist observation of the third world invasion of the West and plain common sense, we are now pretty clear that mandate-free governments across the global north have engineered a replacement of our native populations and (in some cases) thousands of years of culture and binding tradition.

The latest atrocities in Spain have been captured by Karl Stefanovic and The Nowhere Photographer.

The machete carriers and rapists, who appeared almost immediately, suggest planned, hybrid warfare. The clever Ceuta playbook is familiar:

· Invade;

· Bring no (obvious) weapons, so as to by-pass any potential military response and render the home country effectively impotent,

· Activate fifth column progressives in the invaded countries;

· Depict homies as racists;

· Embed invaders in the invaded homeland;

· Change cultures and nations.

Rinse and repeat.

But … Some religious figures have noticed something else about the (mainly Muslim) invasion of the West. Here is Bishop Athanasius Schneider, reported by Lifesite News:

In the brief clip [from 2025], noting the mass influx of Muslim migrants into Europe, the bishop stressed that many of these people are not refugees and that the “mass Islamization” of Europe is part of a plot by the “powerful” to destroy Christianity in Europe. Many X users reposted the clip alongside a video of migrants rushing into the small Spanish territory of Ceuta from the Moroccan border last week.

“Now we are witnessing an invasion. They are not refugees—no—this is an invasion of the mass Islamization of Europe,” the bishop said in the clip. “And so this is a global political agenda by the powerful of the world: to destroy Europe culturally and religiously—to destroy Christianity ultimately in Europe.”

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/watch-bp-schneider-calling-out-islamization-of-europe-goes-viral-amid-spain-migrant-crisis/

For Schneider, there are two key points. First, the invasion isn’t just demographic and cultural. It is also religious. Of course it is. Islam is a religion, and a colonialist one at that. The Jews and the Christians are the infidel, to be conquered and their religions eliminated. Second, Schneider claims that the religious replacement is being organised by global elites who are profoundly anti-Christian.

Hence this is a planned de-Christianisation of Europe, occurring in real time. On our watch.

Gavin Ashenden has written and spoken on the European death wish, from a Catholic perspective:

There is a particular kind of death a civilisation can choose for itself — not conquest, not plague, but a quiet, voluntary letting go.

Europe is in the grip of it now. You can see it in the birth rate, in the open border, in the bishop who will not speak, in the historian who will not defend. This is not, at root, a crisis of policy. It is a crisis of the soul. And it begins with a simple, uncomfortable fact: there seems to be no capacity left for saving our society, for valuing our society as it is. Instead, it’s being overcome by a whole series of different forces and different people.

Gavin Ashenden - 'New English Catholic'

The European Death Wish

There is a particular kind of death a civilisation can choose for itself — not conquest, not plague, but a quiet, voluntary letting go…

Read more

a month ago · 38 likes · 8 comments · Gavin Ashenden.

See also:

So, it isn’t just about Islamification, in Ashenden’s telling. It is also a crisis from within. From our willingness to elect communist-adjacent governments. From our acquiescence in faux-compassion-driven immigration policies. From our giving up on having children. From the failure of two generations of Christian parents unwilling or unable to pass on a once robust, muscular faith. From our agreeing to the feminist revolution, the wanton destruction of the nuclear family, the downgrading of motherhood-in-the-home and handing over our children to be brought up by the state, with tax relief and subsidies. From the failure of UniParty conservative-in-name-only governments to, borrowing from Bill Buckley Jr, stand athwart history and shout “stop”.

All in all, it is a Faustian pact. In some cases, of course, it is casual anti-racism.

Oh, then there is Rome’s cheer-squadding for the new world order as it is emerging. Simply waving it through. The Pope calling mosques “holy places of God” would have the late Cardinal George Pell, among many others, rolling in the graves. I would think. Not much left of the spirit of the mighty Crusades and the Battle of Lepanto there.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/episodes/has-leo-gone-too-far-pope-leo-calls-mosque-holy-place-of-god

One Catholic priest (Fr Jason Charron) sees Islam as the precursor to the Antichrist, no less.

Some distance, then, from the official, kumbaya narrative emanating from beyond the Tiber. Holy places of God or breeding grounds for the AC?

Rome’s accommodative stance on mass immigration – they are all refugees, after all, and so entitled to our undying compassion – and on other secularist dogmas, on the Chinese Communist Party and on the glories of Islam (a long, long way from Pope Benedict’s clear-eyed views expressed in Regensburg in 2006) are all of a piece with the well-planned attack by the last two Popes on tradition within the Church. Prosecuted by Arthur Roche, Rome’s anti-traditionalist henchman. The SSPX brigade are excommunicated while the hordes of Islamist killers are waved through.

Ashenden says, in relation to the immigrant wave:

The difficulty with our secular civilisation, which is engaged in this death wish, is that it has retained certain Christian impulses — compassion for suffering, concern for the stranger, suspicion of cruelty — but it’s detached them from all the other Christian virtues. It’s like a teenager at the wheel of a fast car, blind drunk, absolutely unable to find the controls.

… compassion has been separated from prudence. Who is this stranger that I am taking in? Are they a murderer and a rapist, or somebody virtuous who’s become incapacitated through no fault of their own? Where is the prudence that you’re supposed to exercise? The naivety that the left use in terms of the imposition or the expression of compassion is mind-boggling.

Rome is making the same error. Naivety? It looks to be far more than that. It isn’t even just performative accommodation. They are actively helping to drive it. Aggressively, even. Woke Christianity has been a player. A bad actor cluelessly helping to seal the fate of our nations.

With barely ten per cent of Catholics still attending Mass (on a good day), let alone engaging with debates such as these and, where necessary, resisting Rome’s willing acceptance of just about every secularist narrative going, is it any wonder that the ruling elites have felt completely at ease with marching societies towards radical de-Christianisation?

It is a case of both ethnic and religious cleansing. And it is a win-win for the progressivist establishment. Kill off the repugnant colonialist whites in their homelands and destroying the Western faith of our fathers at the same time has a brutal efficiency about it.

No, replacement isn’t just about whitey. It is about the God-botherers as well.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has noted, variously, the link between communism and de-Christianisation. As AI notes:

Cardinal Raymond Burke views secular progressive ideologies and modern attacks on the traditional family as ideological descendants of Marxist or Communist thought, which seeks to dismantle foundational societal pillars like the church and the nuclear family.

… Burke and other traditionalist Catholic thinkers frequently warn that contemporary cultural shifts regarding gender, marriage, and parental rights mimic historical totalitarian or Marxist efforts to alienate individuals from traditional loyalties and subordinate them to the state or secular dogma.

Bella Dodd, an ex-communist, wrote in the 1950s of the infiltration of the Church by Soviet directed communist plants.

https://www.hprweb.com/2021/12/rethinking-bella-dodd-and-infiltration-of-the-catholic-priesthood/

Just like the Philby, Burgess and Maclean play in London, back in the 1960s. Notwithstanding traditionalist Catholics’ liking of a good conspiracy theory, there is little reason to doubt Dodd’s personal testimony, recorded in graphic detail. The policies coming out of Rome these days are as good evidence as anything for us to take her thesis seriously.

And for the communists in power from London to Melbourne, with few exceptions, the march is occurring at pace. Burke (Raymond, not Tony) and others have also noted communism’s hatred of the family. Hence the raft of policies which, whether by design or merely by effect, have been bedded in so as to now be all but unnoticeable.

Should Western non-believers worry about this? Yes, indeed. As Ashenden points out:

Europe is living on the moral capital of Christianity after abandoning the Christian account of God, humanity, sin, forgiveness, duty, and the common good. I was astonished, in the earlier part of the millennium, when the French set about trying to write a description of the European Constitution and they deliberately left out Christianity, as if our culture had been built on or by anything else — because the left has a hatred of Christianity, and it’s this hatred that makes it almost impossible for us to point out the fact that when you create a vacuum, it gets filled by almost anything.

… The trouble is, once Christianity disappears, inheritance is no longer experienced as a gift or an obligation. It just becomes an accidental accumulation of customs, buried in the obscure anarchy of relativism, where we cannot tell one value from another.

So … There should be a unity ticket between those concerned about demographic security and those who are either committed to Christian religion or familiar with its foundational role in creating the institutions now most under threat from the Third World invasion. Both groups should recognise that culture and religion are both inextricably linked and upstream from politics, and, hence, that the “solution” to the invasion involves both spiritual renewal and a political reset. And deep collaborations.

All this made the Catholic, white patriot Ann Widdecombe the perfect target for a killer marinating in an unholy stew of communism, Islamification, culture-of-death vibes and much celebrated political violence.

But, then again, the invaders and their domestic elite-leftist allies, between them, manage to murder little girls at dance parties, innocent eighteen-year-old white students just walking the streets and anyone else who chances by. It isn’t only those resisting either Marx or Mohammed that are deemed to be legitimate targets in the ongoing war for the West.

Richard the Fourth notes that the secularist voices-against-mass-immigration are on the case.

It is beyond time that the Christians of the West joined the team. The enemy of restorative action is ennui. Ashenden again nails this:

Roger Scruton called the repudiation of home and inheritance oikophobia. But a more Christian phrase might be civilizational acedia — a sorrowful refusal to rejoice in the good one has been given, a kind of despair or depression. This isn’t merely hatred. It is exhaustion, embarrassment, spiritual listlessness.

The fight has all but exhausted we-the-activists, in the face of low information citizens and laissez-faire co-religionists.

It is the yawning gap between the Christian and secular awake on the one hand and the Love Island watching masses on the other that, alas, is likely to give final victory to the weirdly aligned enemies of both.

Upon which, the replacement will be complete. And then we will all be serfs, in our own once sceptered lands.

Paul Collits

6 August 2026

Perhaps Britain’s greatest post-Orwell journalist, and a man of similar skills and grounded ideological stance, Rod Liddle, has died, at the ridiculously young age of sixty-six. Britain – not so much Australia, sadly – has woken today to another tragic loss.

Rod Liddle, famous in Britain, was a journalist of the old school, and he wrote for a wide range of publications in Britain. Most famously, for The Spectator. He was an institution. He was adored by readers. He confounded those who attempted to put him in ideological boxes. He entertained and informed. He resisted the modern woke accommodation. And challenged his readers to do the same.

Alas, he is mostly unknown to Australian readers. We are the poorer for that. We have no equivalent of Rod Liddle. I hope I can explain here why this is a problem.

Of the many obituaries delivered across John of Gaunt’s sceptered isle this day, with nary a single negative word contained therein, I like Allison Pearson’s the best.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/03/allison-pearson-friend-rod-liddle-great-british-freedom/

Dan Wootton’s show had a few good clips, as well as heartfelt memories.

Both are from the heart, and, in common with most of the others, especially those written by current and former journalists and editors at The Spectator, there were personal stories of Rod’s kindness as well as the universally agreed eulogies reporting his peerless and fearless (per Douglas Murray) journalism, and his great satirical skills.

He loved taking the piss out of the absurdities of the postmodern era in which we find ourselves. And he was up there with the best.

My two favourite Speccie writers – they were much more than journalists – were Liddle and Jeremy Clark, he of the Low Life column.

https://spectator.com/article/a-tribute-to-jeremy-clarke-the-spectators-low-life-columnist/

Jeremy’s last act of authorship was to record his own dying days, in the south of France. They remain some of the most powerful pieces of modern writing.

The Spectator’s continuing tradition of fine writing is all that keeps my subscription alive, especially in these days of the inexplicable editorship of the appalling Michael Gove. That reputation for excellence will be that much harder to maintain and sell, now that Rod Liddle has passed.

Rod’s politics were not just interesting and counter-cultural, they were illuminating and they resonate with the current age as it is emerging. Rod is an old leftie, at least an old Labour guy. Seemingly, he has moved right. But … As the cliché goes, he never left Labour. Labour left him.

Rod’s real legacy is a philosophy for our times. Never forgetting his working class roots, and never ceasing to champion the working class, and calling out the traitorous abandonment of ordinary, normal people by the new age globalist, woke elites.

His politics reflect the hybrid thinking of the late Daniel bell, one of the great American public intellectuals of the twentieth century, who wrote about the post-industrial society before anyone else did. He wrote about much else besides, in our age of false binaries and the UniParty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Ideology

The two of them were economic interventionists and social conservatives, to summarise and reduce their thinking unfairly. Realists, you might say. It is a philosophy embraced (to an extent) by J D Vance and by the wonderful Compact online magazine.

They have precisely reversed the ugly hybrid of the neoliberal eighties and nineties, with its Blairite radical individualism married to free(ish) market economics and cultural and moral relativism. The great disease of our times.

Rod was a man of the north. Not like the latest ludicrous usurper to the British premiership, but a real man of the north. He lamented what Thatcher’s de-industrialising economics did to his region, once the powerhouse of the national economy and now struggling on welfare and memories.

(Thatcher’s Britain and its legacy are topics for another day).

Rod pushed back against the modern hybrid ideology, with an exquisite combination of graceful, controlled prose and biting humour. His metier, his oeuvre, was satire. (Forgive the vaguely remembered, inadequate, schoolboy French).

Rod regularly incurred the wrath the offended class, in particular the feminazis, as a result of his acerbic contributions to the transgender and rape gangs “debates”. As Allison Pearson notes:

How right he was about that and so much else. I think back to one amazing column he wrote when Labour minister Jess Phillips was prevaricating, disgracefully, about holding a national inquiry into the rape gangs. “Who could possibly object to being ‘safeguarded’?” asked Rod. “Isn’t it nice that, today, we are all safeguarded? It will not stop us being stabbed, or raped, or robbed – indeed, as we’ll see, it may even make it more likely that we are subjected to some or all of those procedures – but at least we will know that, while the crime is happening, we are being safeguarded.

“Jess Phillips is the safeguarding minister, incidentally. She has the difficult job of balancing the safeguarding of those girls who were gang-raped by almost exclusively Muslim men in towns the length and breadth of our country, with the safeguarding of Labour seats dependent upon Muslim votes (which include her own). It is a nuanced thing, this safeguarding, then. She has to safeguard the girls but also safeguard the “protected characteristics” (a tendency to rape young white girls, I think) of the perpetrators.”

Rod’s assumed “far right” credentials were then assumed by his latter-day enemies, despite his earlier embrace of the causes of female and racial equality, back in the day. He had been once a member of the Socialist Workers Party, when those causes were real and important. Not just the objects of, and vehicles for, today’s pathetic, performative wokism.

So many Spectator readers (and Sun readers and Sunday Times readers) always turned first to Rod when their copy arrived on the doorstep.

They will no longer have that privilege. The rest of us have both a journalistic legacy and a political one to savour.

Rod’s body of work and his political sensibility are a reminder that the key to any possibility to us voting our way of our current mess, an existential threat to our way of life, is for good, socially conservative, patriot Labour traditionalists (not just cranky conservatives) to recognise that it has been their own modern representatives that have destroyed the joint.

Only then, with a truly broad Daniel Bell-like coalition that understands our predicament and feels, viscerally, the impacts of what CJ Hopkins (another modern hybrid guy) calls “globo-cap”, can we get on with the hard work of restoring our politics and our lives.

Only one Australian political party currently comes even close to recognising the backstory and having a plan to reverse the recent trajectory of history. Both branches of the UniParty are too invested in the machine, against which Rod Liddle so railed, to be part of the solution. The modern Labour Party has forgotten the working class – hates it, in fact – and the Liberal Party never really understood it.

Rod despised them both.

We owe it to ourselves to get beyond the grief and to look to the enduring lessons of Rod’s thought, his career and his wonderful life.

Paul Collits

4 August 2026

The dissident classes – that is, you and I – have experienced many radicalising triggers over the quarter of a century since the Year of Our Lord 2001.

Each of us has his or her own uber-trigger. Maybe more than one.

For many on the “far right”, especially in Europe but also, increasingly, here, it is uncontrolled, culture-crushing migration. Particular triggers will have been the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK, or the two-tiered policing, or the generous welfare (and five-star hotels) instantly provided to the rapist-invaders, or the Muslim attack on gay parades in Berlin, or the past week’s hybrid warfare event in Spain where a Hamas-like, African, invading and looting force has crossed the border from Morocco. Or just the general reality of demographic replacement and reverse-colonialism.

The prophecies of the French novelists, Jean Raspail (The Camp of the Saints, 1973) and Michel Houellebecq (Submission, 2015), are coming home to roost. In a sudden rush.

So, the third world invasion of Europe and the Anglosphere have triggered anti-mass migration radical dissent.

For others, the top-of-mind issue will have been the coming of the surveillance state. Or the globalist ideology that has sapped nationalism and patriotism across the postmodern West. Or the woke revolution. Or the permanently disastrous feminisation of public life. Or the corrupt corporatism that has replaced free market capitalism and limited government. Or the whole climate scam. Or the utter degradation of education, a capital crime against the young. Or the neocon forever wars scam.

Which brings us to the Covid plandemic, back in the news again following the publication of the now 85-year-old Tony Fauci’s private Covid diaries, and his subsequent appearance before the US Senate.

Yes, they are still trying to get Covid justice stateside, mostly thanks to the oversight of RFK Jr at Health and Human Services and the noble efforts of the indefatigable Senators, Johnson and Paul. That is what the brilliant US separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches and a bit of spine can achieve.

But it isn’t just the good Senators and the US Constitution that gives them real power. We should not forget the heroic Governors, with Ron DeSantis to the fore. Ron’s Attorney General in Florida is also going after Fauci.

It is also organs like The Brownstone Institute that have kept on with the battle, for fully six years now, and haven’t given up. Searching for truth, above all. All the work of the legendary Jeffrey Tucker, with his torch forever shining on the Covid criminals skulking around and hiding in the darkened corners of the polity.

https://brownstone.org/

See in particular:

https://brownstone.org/articles/fauci-diary-of-a-celebrity/

(Brownstone has its share of Aussie Covid heroes, too … Ramesh Thakur, Maryanne Demasi and Rebekah Barnett. Doing the work. You have got to do the work, as the Lotus Eaters’ Carl Benjamin often says).

It has all come back in a rush, to those of us who were turned from mainstream conservatives to up-for-anything revolutionaries by the emergence of the Covid state. The we-will-never-forget class of 2020.

There is no similar digging equivalent to the American efforts going on down under. Our preening, navel gazing Senators and MPs – loyal servants of the UniParty – like the egregious James Paterson, would rather be attacking Pauline Hanson and One Nation than going big on the real issues. Hanson is the only politician in the land to have some semblance of understanding of the critical importance of Covid justice. The only one to have cottoned onto the true meaning and significance of the Covid tyranny.

Here is a chilling passage from the American Covid hero, Dr Peter McCullough:

While right leaning outlets such as FOX Business, FOX, and NewsMax covered the hearing with key evidence and comments from US Senators, left wing commentators such as Lawrence O’Donnell heaped praise on Fauci asserting he “saved lives.” Fauci’s diary did not indicate he treated or advised on a single patient. He was obsessed with his own aura, not Americans sick with SARS-CoV-2, the virus he helped create. Joe Scarborough dismissed the hearing as “political theatre” while others said America wants to forget the pandemic and move on.

The Australian political class just wants to forget the plandemic and “move on”. It certainly wants us to forget it. Like Fauci, they have all pleaded the fifth. They are afraid to admit anything, anything at all, to the electorate, for fear it will incriminate them. Hence, no Royal Commission, despite Shagger-Albo’s undertaking to have one. We have allowed that to happen. By turning off.

Of course, Australia didn’t have a single Fauci during Covid. We had a lot of mini-Faucis. Who inflicted upon us the state injectables that were unnecessary, useless and dangerous.

· Like Brett Sutton and the other CHOs, enjoying their brief, fascist moments in the sun.

· Like the pro-vaxx pontificators in our largely Pharma-funded universities and media outlets. Think the rabid Jack the Insider (Peter Hoysted) at The Australian.

· Like the almost unflushable Daniel Andrews.

· Like VicPol cops shooting protesters with rubber bullets and belting up old ladies.

· Like Bill Gates’ plandemic planner down under, Jane Halton. She of the astonishingly prescient CEPI meeting just before Covid that predicted almost action-for-action what governments across the globe would do in the face of the outbreak that came a mere few weeks later.

· Like Scotty from AstraZeneca, who gave us the lockdowns, vaccine bullying, National Cabinet and a near-trillion-dollar Covid bill. And who couldn’t even be bothered to front the million Convoy to Canberra protesters in February 2021. Not a single word. Then or since.

· Like the churches who fell effortlessly into line. Wherein a whole generation of Catholic and other Christian prelates, diocesan middle managers all, decided that the Third Commandment wasn’t so important, after all.

· Like the tens of thousands of casual Covidistas. The curtain twitchers. The dobbers. The bureaucrat-gauleiters. The bullies who knew zip about the decisions they were making or the orders they were “merely” following, or the damage their cowardly obeisance to the Covid regime was causing to untold lives.

Oh no, we will never forgive or forget.

There have been only ripples of response in Australia to the one story dominating the whole of the USA. One such response came from the IPA’s Adam Creighton. The admirable Creighton, if you will, with apologies to J M Barrie.

https://ipa.org.au/latest-news/anthony-fauci-was-no-voice-of-science

As an economist, Creighton focused on the damage to the economy that Fauci achieved:

The question of which government official has caused the most socio-economic destruction in history appears to be resolved: Anthony Fauci, the disgraced former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a US congressional hearing on Wednesday.

I would put it slightly differently. I would place Fauci up there with history’s worst serial killers. What with all the vaccine deaths and injuries, now clearly established by “the science” and a thousand peer reviewed studies.

Either way, Fauci’s ability (so far, and with Biden’s autopen pardon) to avoid justice is a metaphor for the entire Australian Covid class’s similar success in escaping the consequences of their actions. Instead, we get the likes of the Liberal Senator Paterson still abusing those who called out the Covid scam.

But Adam C is on message:

The 1000 pages of his private diaries, released this week by Republican senator Rand Paul, have only added to the mountain of evidence that his carefully curated reputation as the selfless voice of “science” was always a joke.

He has emerged as a vain, manipulative apparent liar who whipped up global hysteria about a new coronavirus that prompted governments to unleash the most socio-economically destructive peacetime mandates in history.

The volume of references to favourable media portrayals in his diaries is genuinely shocking. The word “press” appears a staggering 641 times, “award” 80 times and “hero” 49 times, while “peer review”, “meta-analysis”, “risk-benefit”, “learning loss” or “mental health” never got a mention at all, according to Grabien Media founder Tom Elliott’s analysis.

“It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous … person in the country,” Fauci beamed in May 2020. Yet far more incriminating was his February 2020 diary entry that he and a former CDC director both agreed the new virus was “acting like a bad influenza” and “had a case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 per cent rather than 2.0 per cent”.

Yet only a few weeks later in March 2020 he told the House Oversight Committee under oath the mortality rate was “about 3 per cent”, which would have been far worse than the early 20th century Spanish flu, which killed millions. Mass global panic ensued.

All true. All deserving of a custodial outcome for Fauci. And for his Australian accomplices, though this will never happen. Fauci, of course, wasn’t the only global Covid leadership figure who said things and acted in one way in public, and another in private. Remember the public masking and the off-camera non-masking? Remember Boris’s partygate? Remember Matt Hancock’s private snogging with his girlfriend and randy trips across town to “hers”? When such travel was prohibited.

It simply showed they didn’t actually believe their own bullshit. And they were right in their beliefs.

The estimable George Christensen, a Covid hero, has been one of the other (few) Australian voices to have noticed the events in Washington this past week. His summary:

• Fauci’s refusal to answer more than 100 questions fits a long pattern of evasion and institutional protection.

• US taxpayer money flowed through EcoHealth Alliance to risky coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

• The timing of Fauci’s warnings, mRNA development, and pandemic planning raises serious questions about foreknowledge and preparation.

• The vaccine rollout enriched pharmaceutical companies while injuries, deaths, and safety concerns were too often dismissed or censored.

• Australia now needs a full Royal Commission into mandates, censorship, vaccine safety, and the decisions made during COVID.

Nation First, by George Christensen

Fauci Pleads the Fifth

Dear friend…

Read more

a month ago · 28 likes

As Fred Pawle at his Substack notes:

Australian officials and politicians slavishly complied with everything Anthony Fauci said during 2020-21.

Any Australians who rightly defied the Fauci dogma was vilified, and in some cases had their careers destroyed.

Now that we know Fauci was consciously lying about it all, will those who went along with this be brought to justice?

Or is justice just not a thing any more?

https://substack.com/@fredpawle?utm_source=substack-feed-item

It is all coming back – the funding of gain of function research, the bioweapons play, the links to Wuhan, the denial of the lab leak theory, the ease of entry by Big Pharma into the vaccine market, sans adequate testing, the emergency use authorisations, the plandemic industry’s coming of age, the forced vaccinations and subsequent sackings for those who, wisely, didn’t comply, the multiple perjuries, the links to Daszak and the Eco Health Alliance, the cosiness between the EU and Pfizer, the gene-altering therapies contained in the killer-shots.

All downstream from Fauci. This was the global Fauci class. All on Donald Trump’s limp, obsequious watch, by the way.

Christensen, of course, was reprimanded by our Parliament and by most of his then Liberal colleagues for striking out for the Covid truth.

On August 10, 2021, the Australian Parliament formally condemned National Party MP George Christensen for using a speech in the House of Representatives to spread COVID-19 misinformation.

The motion was moved by one Anthony Albanese, who has since been shown to be willing to spread a little misinformation about. Capital Gains Tax, anyone? Negative gearing? Election lies?

The motion stated that Mr Christensen’s remarks were designed to use the national parliament to spread misinformation and undermine Australia’s public health response.

Err, no. George was right then, and now. Australia’s Fauci-driven “public health response” was built on lies. The Covid class lied. People died, and not just from Covid. The latter deaths were relatively few here. The deaths from “the cure” are still to be properly recorded and admitted. This motion was a national, cringeworthy, still unpunished disgrace.

For those among the angry dissidents for whom Covid has been the true radicalising trigger, ON’s undertaking to hold a RC into Covid governance is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for placing a “one” in the ON box, come mid-2028.

Pauline Hanson is not just a latter-day Covid voice of reason. As her previous voting record demonstrates.

https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/senate/queensland/pauline_hanson/policies/264

She voted against prioritising the Covid vaccine rollout? GOOD!

By contrast, the legacy parties, including the then Liberal Senate leader, the appalling Birmo, voted against the ON motion for an inquiry into Covid governance. Note the contrast with the American Covid Senate heroes, Rand Paul and Ron Johnson. The Coalition Senators here who voted for an inquiry can be counted on one hand. They did NOT include Senator James Paterson.

ON’s planned inquiry would constitute justice, delivered far too late, of course, for those of us who can still remember what living in a dictatorship was like, and for whom that memory will last the rest of our lives.

Fauci got a pardon from Biden. The Australian Covid class didn’t need Biden. They simply all gave themselves a pardon. And have relied since upon the sure-fire lessons of Anthony Downs (1972) and his explanation of the public’s “issue attention cycle”.

https://nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/up-and-down-with-ecologythe-issue-attention-cycle

Sooner or later, the very few who are awake will be worn down and will just go away, and leave the rest of us to “move on”. As Orwell suggested in 1984, memory holing is just the ticket. Including, it seems, in liberal democracies.

And go away we did. To our eternal cost. For the Covid state is now embedded, and all the other things that radically trigger we-the-the dissidents are allowed to be done to us. Over and over again. Without the remotest scrutiny.

But why is Covid, six years on, more important even than the aforementioned catalogue of modern Western ills? As indicated, there is no shortage of ills. Why pick on a manufactured health scare that even many on the right see – through the eyes of Hanlon’s razor – as a governance deficit of wisdom rather than morality, where stupidity trumps evil as the true explanation of government failure? After all, it might be (wrongly) argued, the plandemic was a one-off, while all the other evils remain.

But that is the point. Covid will NOT be the only manufactured scare based on gaslighting and fear, and the state has now had its dress rehearsal, where all sorts of tyrannical measures were tried on us. And Covid showed just how evil democratic governments are and can be.

We saw the lengths to which they would go. Nothing was off the table. Nothing. After all, they injected the people who voted for them with lethal poison. They locked us all up. They lied. They gave favours to their mates. They sold our economy down the river. They instituted 1984-style modes of propaganda and mass formation. They shot at people in the streets. They arrested innocent people for mere dissent.

Truth was abandoned, for power.

They broke the social contract. They destroyed trust, through their Covid fascism, in a way far more significant and telling than any of the other (myriad, important) breaches of trust. And trust is the whole basis for political obligation and the consent of the governed.

The façade was removed. We saw behind the curtain. But … the fact that they got away with it is, by far, the worst aspect of it. At least the Americans are still in there fighting for the Covid truth.

All this shows that the Covid tyranny still matters.

Paul Collits

1 August 2026

There is nothing quite like an entitled toff telling the plebs they are cookers.

The Spectator’s resident wet editor, Terry Barnes, has been insisting that Senator James Paterson wasn’t really insulting One Nation and its voters when he recently spoke to the Ramsay Centre.

Here is Barnes:

One Liberal pollie who seems to be working things through is forever-young Liberal frontbencher, James Paterson. His speech, reproduced here, is not as much a ‘spray’ at One Nation as a realisation as to where the Coalition’s support has been haemorrhaging, and why. He particularly acknowledges that populism isn’t necessarily conservatism, and vice versa. Indeed, populism often is about destroying institutions, not reforming or conserving them. Mind you, populism is easier and more fun, and more likely to bring its leaders great power without responsibility.

https://www.senatorpaterson.com.au/news/speech-ramsay-centre-23-july-2026

Forever young? Forever entitled, certainly. Forever of the ruling class. Forever a creature of the elites. The Liberal Party pre-selectors that keep Paterson in office each round clearly haven’t heard of that old footy recruitment rule. No dickheads.

At least Paterson saw the irony of his speechmaking:

I appreciate the irony of speaking about the dangers of populism while dressed in black tie, in a magnificent venue like this and to a crowd of people who’ve just received generous scholarships to attend the world’s most elite universities.

Unlike so many, at least he does get irony. But then he merely dispenses with it. Oops. And there was this:

Whether on the populist left or right, they bring with them a much broader wagon of grudges and resentments.

And they are most often defined by their total lack of regard for our institutions more broadly.

Right now, they also have a helping hand from some foreign state and non-state actors, who see strategic advantage and even profit from weaponising our distrust and amplifying our divisions.

It is easier than ever before for them to do so.

Once they would have had to mount a sophisticated human intelligence operation to influence journalists, editors, or producers who controlled access to the public square in democracies.

Now they can pump our public square full of propaganda by hijacking Western-headquartered social media platforms using inauthentic accounts or by covertly paying mercenary influencers to promote their agenda.

Even easier is secretly putting their thumb on the scale of the algorithm of foreign authoritarian-controlled applications to serve content which divides and distracts us.

The risk today is that understandable discontent with Australia’s recent economic performance – a solvable policy problem – is used as a vehicle to trash our political, legal, and social institutions which have underpinned our progress, prosperity and harmony for centuries.

Ah, that is us, folks. Menzies’ forgotten people. The thirty per cent of the electorate that Paterson wants to keep disenfranchised. Barnes must have been reading a different speech. This sounds to me like an attack on us.

We are the problem. We are out to destroy our sacred institutions? What, like useless elections, broken promises, unmandated policies, corruption, trillion-dollar green boondoggles supported by both branches of the UniParty, tax steals, fiscal incontinence, wasted resources, signing up to the international climate grifter industrial complex? Paris Agreement, anyone?

I think that, rather, our intention and One Nation’s is to restore our once sacred institutions, institutions trashed by Paterson’s generation of scumbag politicians, servants all to the globalist agenda and to the preservation, at all costs, of the UniParty.

Paterson is spinning lies, with a sneering tone, in a penguin suit. He is trying to make it about economic resentment. Really.

I assume that Paterson isn’t a fool. AI reports:

Senator James Paterson holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Commerce. Both degrees were completed at the University of Melbourne.

Then there are the post-grad courses at Harvard.

Assuming that he isn’t a fool, this tripe makes him a gaslighting bad actor, bent on protecting his establishment patch. No one inside the beltway or beyond thinks that political “resentment” is driven by economic circumstances. Not even close. Who wrote this guy’s speech? Does he actually believe his own propaganda?

Then he gets down in the weeds with the likes of Labor’s Murray Watt. Jimbo thinks we are all cookers:

Australians struggling with the cost of living have not suddenly embraced conspiracy theories about chemtrails, the federal reserve, school shootings, 9/11 and pharmaceutical companies.

Whoa!

Note the clever, seamless conflation of the views of conspiracy theorists who have turned out to have been spot on in relation to (say) Covid with those he regards as fringe dwellers.

Joining the dots and making connections used to be regarded as the day job of social scientists worth their salt. This is known as the straw man fallacy. Attributing views to opponents not held by them. (Perhaps there is truth, too, in some of the other “fringe” views. Like chemtrails, as the far more honest Rowan Dean mentioned on air the other day, at what is now known as News 24, in his considered attack on Paterson. Does anyone think that the climate state doesn’t have an interest in, and the means to, geo-engineer the weather, with obvious motivations)?

It was Paterson’s Government that gave us the ScoMo plandemic. Not too many conspiracy theories among the reams of scientific and congressional evidence that Big Parma cooked up lethal injectables and did deals with governments, including Paterson’s, that killed people. That would be blood on your hands, mate. Instead of a craven apology for your lot’s corruption, instead we get half-baked accusations of conspiracy theories. Not too many conspiracy theories in the thousands of peer reviewed studies that showed lockdowns and school closures to be harmful.

Someone should send the good Senator a subscription to (for example) The Brownstone Institute. Some of the smartest folks on the planet have nailed all aspects of the Covid conspiracy. And still are at it.

https://brownstone.org/

To attack those who called out the Covid tyranny is adjacent to defending the state’s performance therein. For which there is NO coming back.

This takes Paterson straight to the “never to be trusted with anything again”, naughty corner of the room. Just dribbling it into the narrative, through throwaway lines, without taking the time or care to defend his bullshit. It is despicable. We pay your salary, cobber. Don’t ever forget this. We might call it Paterson’s Curse.

The Senator should get out more and talk to real people. Get out of the safe confines of the Libtard after dinner speech circuit. Like Hanson is, as we speak. You’re not even original. You are spitting out second hand epithets at enemies that you have only because of the UniParty’s own conspiratorial behaviour.

Is this the same Paterson who got into an ugly to-do with an ageing ON supporter on the hustings before the Farrer by-election.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-07/scuffle-between-liberal-senator-and-one-national-volunteer/106651204

Those in the right-of-centre journalism aristocracy who (rightly) castigate the Legacy Libs for their endless, groundless and tedious attacks on One Nation are missing the point. Yes, it is a case of the Streisand Effect. But this is far more than clueless politics.

The real point is not the dumbness of the strategy but its elite, ruling class intent. In attacking ON and Pauline Hanson in particular, the head-kickers in the Liberal Party are simply reminding those they have already betrayed, over and over, that they are still a part of the UniParty.

They haven’t changed. There was not the slightest remorse in Paterson’s diatribe, of course. The first step towards a reconciliation is saying sorry. Begging forgiveness.

One of the fellow Libtard travellers, Nick Cater, recently attempted to attribute the word (UniParty) to Hanson and ON. Oh no. ON didn’t come up with the notion of the UniParty. That would be Ralph Nader and (later) Steve Bannon (according to AI search). The word became more and more popular the more that the object of Paterson’s and Cater’s political affections crapped all over its supporters and our citizens from a great height. Again and again.

The shared legacy party commitment to a whole raft of tyrannical policies, starting with, but by no means limited to, Covid deceit on an industrial scale, has radicalised a generation of voters who remain totally unmoved by the “arguments” of the establishment and its fellow travelling insider-pundits. Like Hanson is “unfit” to govern. As if their lot are “fit” to govern. Since when are corrupt liars “fit” to govern? They just don’t realise how idiotic they look.

The intention of Cater’s sleight of hand (I believe) was to diminish the whole idea of a UniParty. To make out it is a party-political epithet rather than a revealed reality that blind Freddie can discern. Liberal loyalists who want to preserve the machine, the system that has so rewarded them – not us – are invoking the old standard tactic. Blame the electorate for getting it wrong. Try to bed in the claim that it is we who are out to undermine our democratic institutions. By our recalcitrant electoral behaviour. Ye gads! Splitting the vote!

Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s Svengali and one very familiar with the tricks of the UniParty trade, said there was NOTHING the establishment wouldn’t do to get rid of Nigel Farage, a British moderate but also a perceived threat to the current political duopoly.

We saw how the far-left media (legacy and social) in Britain committed stochastic terrorism in having Ann Widdecombe killed. They demonised her world view, her reform UK politics and her Catholic moral values. The establishment hated Ann Widdecombe. They (in this case the politicised British police) have covered up aspects of her murder. They still are.

The same establishment created a bogus “right wing” plot to kill Muslims at a religious gathering in Suffolk.

They lied in the House of Commons. Another of our sacred institutions. There were no arrests. There was no plot. No “credible threat”.

Now, in Australia, we have the ABC – which received a funding increase to over a billion a year under Paterson’s Government – (arguably) advocating, or at least fantasising about, the murder of Pauline Hanson’s friend, and a true Australian legend, Gina Rhinehart.

Watch it if you must.

https://www.hancockironore.com.au/not-sorry-gina-aunty-defends-torture-video/

No ABC apology forthcoming. What about a police investigation?

Yes, there is ONE Australian institution that ON does want to destroy. The ABC. Will the Liberal establishment commit to this as well? No, I didn’t think so.

The institutions that the respectable right seeks to defend against those they see as electoral usurpers are all riddled with corruption. They are no longer fit for purpose, in their current form and as occupied by those who right now have their hands on all the levers.

How dare those who wield power, whether politicians or the mates in the media, tell US for whom to vote. Those in dinner suits shouldn’t throw stones. Especially when they are snide, talentless shils.

It is wrong simply to castigate the Liberals for being half full of wets. True but not the whole story. Or even the main one. Conservatives versus wets is a false binary, or at least an inappropriate one. The real distinction to be made is between establishment insider/defenders and insurgent/outsiders. And there are very few of the latter in the Coalition. Those so inclined have mostly left the building and found their true home elsewhere. Equally, there isn’t a “conservative continuum” from Liberal/National to ON and the other freedom micro parties, with ON simply further along the spectrum of right-ness. It is a false continuum.

No, there is a divide that cannot readily be breached, or easily accommodated. Like through a new coalition or a preference deal or a non-compete arrangement.

Just say there is a right-of-centre majority after the next election, or, more likely, the one after. Does anyone out there think that the likes of Senator Paterson, or (God help us all) Andrew Hastie, are going to sit down with people who want to do the things – it is a fairly long list – that we want, but that we know the establishment Liberals don’t want, and won’t do?

After all, ON wants to make our institutions again work for we-the-people. No more, no less. Not performative, UniParty “conservatism”, but real democracy. Some call it populism, inevitably with a sneer. Often wearing a dinner suit. Terry Barnes’ feeble rendition of the choice we face – that it is either (good) institution-preserving Libs or (bad) ON institution destroyers – and his equally feeble defence of Paterson show that the UniParty has no clothes.

It also shows that these people simply don’t understand the difference between defending corrupted institutions and re-making them as fit-for-purpose servants of the people whose interests they are meant to serve, but never do.

This is nothing more and nothing less than a UniParty deployment of its ground troops in order to keep a lid on the greatest threat to the machine this country has seen. It is trying to keep a lid on public anger. To this end, in Britain, the cops and Shabana Mahmood (the Pakistani Muslim Home Secretary) lie. The establishment attacks Farage’s financial arrangements. While ignoring real threats on his life.

Here, the scribbling class demonises the main threat to its power across multiple platforms and with different actors. As St Paul said in Corinthians Chapter Twelve, there are different types of work. Not for Christ in this case, but for the state machine and the party duopoly.

With lies and with insults. With exaggerations of internal ON disagreements. With character attacks on ON members (like Malcolm Roberts). With canards about lack of experience in government. And with deranged, personalised attacks like those of Hastie. To eliminate the threat of the dreaded populism. And the “far right”. In other words, to shut down the revolting peasants. They are afraid of giving us the governance and policies that we actually want.

It is another case of tipping the scales. Of gaslighting. Of dressing up our utterly justified turning away from the corrupt order as “a threat to civilisation”. This all suggests an advanced state of delusion on their part. It is interesting that the chief head kickers are NOT the Liberal wets, but the likes of Canavan and those referred to above.

Just so long as we know what the game is, who they are prepared to side with, what they think is at stake – for them, of course, not us – and what is driving their coordinated efforts at preserving the thoroughly rotten politics they have created and which they are determined to defend. Come what may.

It is all hands on deck.

Paul Collits

28 July 2026

In 1927, the French critic and philosopher, Julien Benda, penned a book called La Trahison des Clercs, mostly translated as The Treason of the Intellectuals.

Les clercs’ membership may be most easily defined as not a “layman”. The chattering classes, if you will. Roger Kimball in The New Criterion (1992) provides a useful summary. As AI search helpfully summarises:

In December 1992, Roger Kimball published a seminal essay in The New Criterion reviewing the 1927 classic The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs) by French philosopher Julien Benda. Kimball championed Benda’s ideal of “disinterestedness” and the universality of truth. He warned that intellectuals were betraying their vocation by trading the pursuit of truth for political activism.

https://newcriterion.com/article/the-treason-of-the-intellectuals-ldquothe-undoing-of-thoughtrdquo/

All this came to mind in the context of the Australian establishment’s recent and escalating attacks on Pauline Hanson. And by extension, attacks on us.

They are shit scared.

Why is this treasonous? Well, because the attacks are coordinated and directed at a third of Australia’s population, with the goal of keeping us disenfranchised. When the Liberal Party adjacent establishment is doing it, they should be reminded that the real targets of their attacks on One Nation values and political aspirations are Robert Menzies’ forgotten people. The once Liberal base.

The latest exhibit is Nick Cater in The Australian of 20 July 2026.

How Pauline Hanson fills the gap in our political landscape

A Hanson-led conservative government in which the Liberal and National parties are the junior partners is an absurd proposition.

Most of the thousand odd commenters on this still don’t know what it was about. I certainly don’t. And I wonder if the author does.

And the Australian claims to transmit “world class journalism”.

See also:

Cater, of course, is merely the latest in a line of machine defenders utterly determined to keep the pretenders at bay and to maintain the duopoly in Australian parliamentary representation.

Mrs Taylor, aka Louise Clegg, is a serial offender at (alas) The Spectator Australia. I understand there has been some pushback from readers on this.

Now The Australian is wheeling out David Oldfield to denigrate Hanson.

I was the true brains behind One Nation. Here’s why Pauline is in strife

Everyone has an opinion of what One Nation is – mostly, they’re wrong.

What an unmitigated wanker.

David Who? Many (rightly) will ask. He is so very twentieth century.

Old David attended a few meetings over a quarter of a century ago, in ON’s early days. He is an irrelevance. And, like Cater’s contribution, I have no idea why he was asked to write his piece. Other than to respond to Lachlan Murdoch’s (real or implied) memo … to destroy Pauline and preserve the Machine, at all costs. Or something similar. Maybe the top-down coordination is coming from girly-pops who now edits the Murdoch broadsheet.

It is pathetic. Now they are all howling about Barnaby’s dog.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-23/dog-training-divide-after-barnaby-tv-interview/106943242

Fuck me. Is this the best you have? While our nation burns. Bread and circuses. The oldest trick in the establishment’s book. And THEY dare to critique the surging insurgents for not having all their policies costed. Burqa Burke and his boss must be laughing.

Memo to the Liberals … we hate you. You are finished. There is no way back. You are not worth defending. The word salads produced by Angus Taylor as “directions statements” are risible efforts at rebuilding trust.

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/angus-taylor-unveils-our-plan-in-effort-to-combat-liberals-worstever-polling-slump/news-story/d9a3601d4a471d9b38aa405a78e1ec19

But, mate, what will you actually DO? What will the wets who run your party LET you do?

Memo to the Liberals’ fellow travellers at The Australian and in other tired “mastheads” (as they now love to call themselves). We do not appreciate your canards. We loathe the fact that you are insulting our intelligence. We see through your false assertions. We do not elevate these to the status of “arguments”. We are deeply embarrassed by your siding with Crikey, The Age, The Saturday Paper, The New Daily and the ABC against the only politician to come within a bull’s roar of presenting us with policies that we want. That we actually want. And vibes with which we identify. We know that the Coalition will NEVER deliver on their comfortable, vaguely reassuring rhetoric. They didn’t before. Why would they next time? They are still controlled by their leftist flank. They must know that we know this.

Just watch what is happening to Alex Antic in the people’s republic of South Australia.

Then there is the “splitting the vote” canard. This is simply gaslighting. And projection. They are positioning US as the people to blame if Kylie-Shagger-Albo gets back again. Given the Libs’ current, in-the-toilet numbers, it is THEY who will be splitting the vote by 2028.

The ultimate UniParty arrogance is to assume that they OWN our vote. And that this is a temporary aberration. That we will see the light when the Libs “get their act together”. Nope. As David Flint has argued, Menzies would be voting ON today.

The Liberals and their acolytes, are, at bottom, narcissists. As well as traitors to our cause. The acolytes are simply protecting their own piece of the Establishment action, and their performative place in the system. As they give their polished speeches at CPAC and ARC talkfests, to great applause from the low information conservatives who think that simply restating the problem over and over is enough.

At bottom, it is all about centre-right narcissism. There is some interesting material on how all narcissists talk, as it happens. See Brandon Ord’s work on this.

As the man says, they all do this. They make it about them. Their positions in the power structure. Then, it is your fault. YOU are causing the Albo extension they see coming as a result of us failing to line up behind the Tories.

When people say … in the polls … that they are supporting ON, these narcissists simply cover their ears with their hands and sing “la la la” very loudly.

Their desperation is embarrassing. It is also unnerving for the patriots among us. What else do they have up their sleeves? A modern version of Tony Abbott’s late 1990s strategy of killing off Pauline, perhaps, the result of which was her (brief) imprisonment.

In Britain, there is currently a similar coordinated attack on the right-insurgents pushing back against the corrupt, multi-culti state, with similar, weird cross-party suspects. The Tory supporting Telegraph and the leftists Sky News, for example, are making common cause with The Guardian and other UK Labour supporting the attacks on the likes of Restore Britain, in order to maintain the two-party system. UniParty central.

In Britain, the demonisation of dissident political figures and movements has turned out to be lethal. As we now know, with the death of Ann Widdecombe. It is called stochastic terrorism.

Liz Truss weeps tears for Ann, yet excludes those considered by the Establishment to be beyond the pale from her choreographed events. Ann’s actual colleagues. FFS.

https://gb.cpac.org/

Shame, Establishment, shame. You DO NOT get it.

At least, in Oz, the curious amalgam of anti-insurgent establishment shils aren’t (so far) inciting violence against the dissident pollies. In Britain, they demonise folks like Nigel Farage – of whom I am no particular fan – and they almost certainly led to the brutal, savage murder of the saintly Ann Widdecombe. Create a hate figure, and the odd balls will take up arms and do the rest.

They refuse to let patriots like Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe – heroes both, and mates of Pauline’s – attend their performative “conservative” conferences. The hyper-leftie Fin Review thinks Tommy is an activist thug. I wonder what they think of Joshua Kerry.

https://www.afr.com/world/europe/hanson-is-the-global-right-s-new-star-but-did-she-go-too-far-20260715-p60fej

For mine, Tommy R is a centrist with soft-right positions in response to patent realities. The reality of demographic replacement, of throwing the car keys to the third world rapist-thief. As one example. If you are far left, centrists look like far right. That the best minds of the Australian right establishment make common cause with these pricks makes them beneath contempt.

They don’t get it? Nope, they get it, all right.

Pauline breaks bread in Britain with Rupert and Tommy. Good on her. They say that Oz follows Britain by a decade or so. Let’s hope, if this is so, that Pauline and her successors have good security, into the future.

Meantime, we can only shake our heads at the right-of-centre Pauline detractors, who dress their Machine-adjacent positions in “respectable” vibes about costings and strategy, and who are simply delaying the day when the good guys win. If their word salads actually cut through.

It is all pretty sick making. They basically want to keep a third of Australians disenfranchised. That makes them pretty traitorous, IMHO. Lining up with the left and with Labor and attacking Pauline Hanson is yet another unforgivable offence. Just add it to the longish list. As The Australian’s commenters so clearly understand.

Julien Benda would be spinning in his grave.

Paul Collits

23 July 2026

They say that the devil’s great trick was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. It was a claim made by Baudelaire, and reinforced by the fictional Keyser Soze.

The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote: “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist”. He first published this idea in his 1864 prose story “The Generous Gambler”.

This means that Satan wins when people stop believing in evil. If people do not believe in the devil, they let their guard down. They stop fighting against bad habits and cruel actions because they think evil is not real.

Baudelaire also thought that satan has had a rough time of it:

In Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, Satan is not purely an evil monster. Instead, he is a sympathetic rebel, a wise teacher, and the protector of society’s outcasts. Baudelaire viewed the Devil as a proud angel punished by a harsh, cruel God.

A big call.

It is true that our modern purveyors of evil dress themselves up as good-doers. See under Lenin and Sadiq Khan. These types think that Ann Widdecombe is going to hell.

Here is Kevin Spacey on satan:

Verbal Kint famously says: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. This means that Söze stays hidden by making people think he is just a myth. He operates in the shadows so he can never be caught.

In these end times, talk of the Antichrist is all about. And there is endless speculation over its identity.

Here is a theory. What if satan’s second greatest trick is that he is actually the Antichrist? And that there are many sub-Antichrists, not just one, doing his final work?

Actually, satan came out in the Book of Genesis. In the form of a snake.

Snakes have had a rough go of it ever since. I remember having an open house for the sale of one of our properties, in my home town of Gosford, a few years back. We backed onto bush and the odd snake appeared from time to time. One of the people at the open was coming up the driveway and saw a snake slithering across the dappled concrete. She about-faced and scurried away, at pace.

She was last seen motoring north on the M1 at about 130 kms an hour, somewhere near Port Macquarie … I have no idea where the poor old serpent ended up.

Yes, a tough gig for the slithering ones. But back to satan.

What satan offered to Adam and Eve was the promise of being gods. And much of the unease over our current techno-malaise, a sort of Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Brave New World, revolves around man’s rejection of God and his quest for man-created utopia. Think of the Fabians, think of communism, think of apocalyptic, fear-driven climate crises and plandemics, think of top-down nanny states, with all their religious imagery, think of the mini-me HR gods that run our corporates, think of “the machine”, the deep state, and all of its devilry. Think radical individualism as the evil progeny of 1980s hybrid ideologies. Think modernism and its whacky successor. They are ALL versions of the modern yearning for Godlessness. Think of the fatal conceit of the radical Enlightenment. All are exemplars. And predictors of the current moment.

The great online magazine, Crisis, a safe haven for seriously grumpy Catholics, has just done a piece on this.

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/why-is-peter-thiel-so-preoccupied-with-the-antichrist

And its focus is the tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, a counter-elite type, who also has an interest in the Antichrist. Apparently, Thiel is eyeing up real estate in Argentina for when the balloon goes up and the northern hemisphere is embroiled in a nuclear war or some such Armageddon.

Once, Thiel bought land near Queenstown, too. He even became a Kiwi citizen. Perhaps he got cold feet when he discovered that Bob Carr was going to be one of his neighbours.

Thiel’s lectures were invite-only affairs. Let The Guardian – surely a candidate itself – take up the story:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist

Thiel’s last lecture was on the doorstep of the Vatican, no less.

Here are Thiel’s lectures on the topic, in summary:

Thiel, who identifies as an orthodox Christian heavily influenced by philosopher René Girard, argued that the modern world is terrified of its own technology. He suggested that the Antichrist will rise to power by constantly stoking this fear of Armageddon. By promising “peace, safety, and salvation,” this figure will seduce humanity into giving up their freedom, ultimately unifying the world under an oppressive global state that halts scientific progress.

Peace, safety, salvation. Peace through the new world order? Safety through the Covid state, anyone? Silicon Valley has created eternal life on earth, following a stint in the freezer?

The author at Crisis, the wonderfully named Scott Ventureyra, sets the scene:

In recent years, there has been a renewed public fascination with the demonic, spiritual warfare, and exorcisms. Interviews with well-known exorcists and demonologists, including Fr. Chad Ripperger, Fr. Vincent Lampert, Fr. Carlos Martins, and Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, have appeared across both major and smaller platforms, from Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Shawn Ryan to Capturing Christianity, Pints with Aquinas, and Catholic Answers Live.

Recently, and somewhat related to this overall resurging interest in the demonic, I have asked myself: Why is Peter Thiel so preoccupied with the Antichrist?

I must admit that this is a rather bizarre question to pose about one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures. Typically, discussions revolving around Thiel involve him being the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, the first outside investor in Facebook, a venture capitalist, a political donor, and a patron of various techno-libertarian projects. Nevertheless, in recent years, he has turned his attention toward the apocalypse, Armageddon, one-world government, AI, China, and, first and foremost, in a rather obsessive manner, the figure of the Antichrist.

Indeed. Ventureyra continues:

I do not think one could safely say this is just a passing form of eccentricity. Thiel’s reflections on the Antichrist have appeared in the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge interviews; a First Things interview and a co-authored October 2025 essay titled “Voyages to the End of the World”; the Aspen Ideas Festival, where he reportedly accused Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical of serving Beijing’s interests and suggested that the pope could be a “tool of the Antichrist”; the reported San Francisco lecture series; the Rome lectures near the Vatican earlier this year; and even commentary last year on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Thiel has treated the Antichrist not as a cartoonish religious symbol but as a serious political-theological category for understanding the modern world. One may disagree with his conclusions, but the fact that he is asking these questions at all is something worth paying attention to. Unlike other tech billionaires, at least publicly, he seems to understand that the deepest conflicts of our age are not merely technological or political but also spiritual. They concern what man worships, what he fears, what he is willing to surrender, and what kind of false salvation he is prepared to accept.

Not so much Omen III – in which the bad guy, Damien Thorn, was played by the recently late Sam Neill – but man’s modern secularism-in-comfort. Mindless viral internet content, in the words of one observer:

https://medium.com/@djpangburn/mindless-viral-internet-content-is-aldous-huxleys-drug-soma-come-to-life-dd4b218df552

Ventureyra again:

For Thiel, the Antichrist is indeed a political-theological category, and he’s careful not to reduce him to a mere mechanism, ideology, or an impersonal system. He speaks of Antichristic structures while also taking seriously the traditional possibility of a personal Antichrist—that is, a final figure who emerges through those structures and offers humanity a false salvation from an impending catastrophe.

We must always be reminded that the Antichrist, although leading to the gradual destruction of humanity, deceives with promises to restore and save. He provides a false sense of order against chaos, security against fear, and unity against division. This is why Thiel’s own formulation is so alarming: “The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.” He disguises himself as a being of goodness and of light (2 Corinthians 11:14).

Restore and save. Safetyism is the modern state’s Huxley soma. Again, the Covid state was for our own good. Albert Bourla and Fauci are surely contenders, then. Bill Gates? Surely in the top five candidates. And the Covid state has memory holed the whole thing. Classic satanic tactics.

It is a gripping topic, and a gripping read. As they say, RTWT at Crisis. The author is especially informative on Apostolic and early Church Father exegeses on the Antichrist.

Maybe Peter Thiel is coming out for the second time in his life. In the way of a vaguely remembered story from my childhood about sinister things, I think involving a TV show. “There is another possibility … Frank IS the tiger”.

If the owner of Palantir, with its “fusion of data, surveillance, defense, and state power”, a vehicle for the deepest of states and an enabler of state spying on the people, sees AI and all of its evil works – yes, I do use AI search – as but one of the tools of the Antichrist, with all of its satanic promises to make men gods, obsesses about the Antichrist, then, well, you know …

Or, perhaps Thiel, for all his cerebral persona, doesn’t get irony. Identifying the Antichrist in modern techno terms while his day job involves helping to creating the panopticon that is quite the vehicle of said Antichrist.

Perhaps it is guilt on Thiel’s part. Or not. Or maybe it is that Thiel is Antichrist-adjacent. He is, after all, an insider. He knows what they are up to. How they think. What their plans are. The masters of the universe title is a giant clue. They are really just tech nerds who got lucky. They are not masters of this universe. Yet. But they are working on it. And would appear very much that their metier happens to be satan’s modern work.

All in all, it is a fascinating development on the most serious of topics. For a purveyor of evil – if that is what PT is – he seems a very grounded, thoughtful guy, a guy with apparently good intentions. But that is the point of the Antichrist, and of Thiel’s version of it. The end times obsessed right wingers among us might well conclude … that Thiel may be the Antichrist, but (paraphrasing Don Henley at the 1998 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame awards,) at least he’s OUR Antichrist. Our man in Silicon Valley, Godless central.

Perhaps we are all, at least those of us who are cluelessly “running at danger” (to invoke English cricket’s ludicrous Bazball), ourselves the satanic recruits, the mini-Antichrists. We who are living as if God didn’t exist, and, by extension that satan doesn’t, either. We who are sucking up all of the soma and partying like its 1999. Living the Lennonist dream. No hell below us, remember. Imagine! The late Beatle was surely one of satan’s star recruits in his eternal game plan.

And perhaps Thiel is simply outing us. Maybe not. As Ventureyra concludes, PT seems to be both actor in, and commentator on, our final journey towards the dark side:

So, the question inevitably arises: Where does Thiel personally fit into this apocalyptic and Antichristic narrative? I believe there are a few possibilities worth considering. First, he may be warning us against the Antichristic temptation of our age: the utopic vision of saving humanity through increasing surveillance, AI, emergency politics, the transhumanist project, and a one-world-governance. Second, we must also consider that he may be helping pave the way in which such a world can emerge.

This could be true whether he is doing so knowingly or unknowingly, prophetically or dangerously—perhaps as a critic, participant, or, even worse, as a faithful follower of the deceiver masquerading as a concerned humanitarian. Regardless of these possibilities, Thiel has forced us to consider whether the Antichrist is one that promises to use the wonders of technology in a way that will not only physically and financially enslave us but, most frighteningly, spiritually enslave us in a way that bears upon the destiny of our very souls.

Maybe satan’s third great trick, related to his second, is to have us all running around trying to figure out who the AC is, and taking our eyes off the ball, off the main game, in the way of slowly boiling frogs.

Does satan have even more tricks? Maybe.

His fourth might be the recruitment of so many willing, yet unknowing, collaborators. The devil’s useful idiots. The endless desire of men to be mini-me gods always provides rich and fertile soil for one determined to bugger up God’s salvific plan. And the devil, no doubt, planned that thoroughly postmodern – again, unplanned by us – collab between the very focused, satanic cadre of anti-God activists and the vast soma-taking class of low-information conformists. Jim Jones and the Guyana 900 provided one striking example. He promised salvation and eternal safety, after all. In his case, it was not soma, but Kool-Aid.

To the extent that PT has brought all this to the surface afresh, skilfully if eccentrically, and so very unexpectedly, and so done us all an immense favour, might just be the ace in the hole that saves his reputation. And his bacon. On earth and in heaven.

I hope so.

Paul Collits

18 July 2026

So keen were they, probably under strict orders from the UK’s Muslim Home Secretary, to pin the murder on whitey, and to insist that it wasn’t “political”, that they popularised a new crime … the burglary gone wrong.

It was always palpable and farcical bullshit serving ideological state ends. When they look stupid, and when they know that you know, it should be game up for the two-tier UK police system and for the ideology that underpins it. But no, they have the legacy media on side. It will be memory holed, soon enough.

They know that we know that it was a cover-up.

But there is something about that phrase, burglary gone wrong, that resonates. Or should.

It turns out that both Britain and Australia, and, indeed, much of the once liberal democratic west, have themselves been the victim of two massive burglaries. And they have gone very wrong. For us.

The first burglary is there, in plain sight.

Two Australian prime ministers, a long time apart, have shed light on the nature of the crime. The first is Tony Abbott, who is doubling down on the message he gave in February, stating that multiculturalism has failed, and that – shock, horror – diversity is not our strength. Get outta here!

He is now the President of the Liberal Party, so he is speaking with a tad more “official” voice than he was doing previously. This act, of itself, deserves praise for Ann Widdecombe-style courage. Perhaps it is Catholic guilt – which, for those who have crossed the Tiber, or were always there, is a real thang – over his role in condemning Pauline Hanson to prison, back in the day. Or perhaps it is simply being mugged by reality, in the way of Irving Kristol, the great American conservative thinker. Maybe he was never on side with all that, but simply didn’t know how to bend the Liberal Party to that reality. Maybe it is Abbott’s final go at saving the party that gave him his career. The wets will have a ball with this, of course, and will already be scheming (like Henry II) about how to rid themselves of this meddlesome Liberal centrist.

The second contribution on the topic comes from the great Menzies himself, for whom my admiration is rapidly growing, afresh and by the day.

Menzies was even ahead of the Enoch Powell curve. Brilliant. He saw the simple and patently obvious benefit to social cohesion of having a homogeneous population. That was real social cohesion, not the performative social cohesion of the new left mafia that runs us now.

There is a touch of the Rupert Lowe “I don’t care” approach in evidence here. It is marvelous stuff, and provides a cautionary tale to all the Liberal wets who mention their deference to Ming whenever they can. Oops.

So, the first burglary has been by the later-wave immigrants who have come to Britain and to Australia, essentially to steal. To steal our cultures. Our welfare benefits. Our university degrees. Our suburbs. Our ghastly, third world high rises. In the case of Britain especially, they have come to steal the innocence of our daughters. And all the good hotel accommodation.

It is a burglary gone wrong.

The receipts are in. Enclaves. Scams. The murder of Jews on Bondi Beach. Other expressions of violence. Political bribery in electorates of multiculti flavour. The slow-drip depletion of Australianness. The creation of cities that are unrecognisable as Australian. The creation of non-English speaking sub-strata. Of enforced deference to the invaders.

There is another burglary gone wrong here.

This is the capture of the commanding heights of civil society, the polity, the media, the universities and schools, and the corporates, by the modern, progressive, globalist ideologists. Under the cover of UniParty neoliberalism, the cultural Marxists have stolen the reins of government and have rendered voter-led democracy a relic of a bygone era.

This has been a burglary by a thousand thieves. And there were witnesses to the crime. Worse, the two sets of burglars have joined up, in common cause. A bit like the Great Train Robbers. Two “teams” joined up, in common cause. Combined their resources. Their knowledge. Their desire for victory.

Yes, there are precedents for this.

The red green alliance that we see before us, chanting modern hymns like “from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the sea”, is merely the most obvious manifestation of the masterplan to defeat the West.

Unlike the pathetically incompetent Watergate burglars of Nixon’s Plumbers Unit, goons all, these guys know what they are doing. Their useful idiots are in place. The puppet pollies are doing their bidding, for both venal and ideological reasons. I will hand over my country to leftists and migrant invaders, the burglar exemplars, just so long as you the voter NEVER call me a racist. When I am a careerist, corrupt time server, with my eye on the rewards for service to the cause, who cares? Mostly, the punters will never notice. We have trained them for that.

And the One Nation hating Liberal wets will ensure that Tony Abbott’s refreshing counter-narrative will never, ever take hold. They are bought and paid for.

Pauline Hanson, right now in Britain, having met heroes like Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, and having witnessed up close the aftermath of the Widdecombe assassination, will be acutely aware of the unfolding crisis in Western liberalism. And the lethal dangers to those who dare to resist the establishment.

Back home, small, hateful men like Andrew Hastie and mini-bomb throwers like Louise Clegg (Mrs Angus Taylor) will continue their pathetic, self-obsessed, vindictive campaign against One Nation and (by extension) against the forgotten people that Menzies so championed.

A learning moment, right there. Even a few British Tories have seen the light, and have joined the resistance. No similar awakenings here.

There is something tragically common to the burglaries of which I speak here. The British and the Australian cops are shit at solving burglaries. As we know. A ten per cent clean up rate would astonish us. And we-the-people have been shit at noticing the meta-burglary crimes committed against our way of life and our sacred traditions.

We know now what we have lost. Too late. We have fallen for the burglaries gone wrong narrative. The late Ann Widdecombe, still hardly in her grave, would be spinning.

Paul Collits

16 July 2026

The past week has been a week of deaths. In particular, for the famous.

Four deaths have caught the attention of those who keep up with the news. There wasn’t much in common among our recently departed, other than that they were all getting on in years. Not that “getting on in years” means the same thing, numerically, that it once did.

I speak, of course, of Ann Widdecombe, Derryn Hinch, Sam Neill and Lindsey Graham. Three were political figures – though Hinch’s more famous career was in in media – and the fourth was an actor. You couldn’t get four more diverse figures, whose deaths have meant very different things to different people, and caused very different reactions.

Sam Neill was a great and respected actor and, it seems, a good man. A Kiwi gentleman who escaped the ultimate ignominy of being mistaken for an Australian. He died from various illnesses in a Sydney hospital.

Derryn Hinch was the human headline. He made it his mission in life to hunt PDF files. Hence, he entered the febrile territory of moral panics and me-tooism. I am agnostic about his intent and impact. I confess that I have searched online for Steve Vizard’s hilarious Fast Forward parodies. It spoke to Hinch’s sense of humour that he worked with Vizard on those parodies. Hinch was yet another Kiwi who crossed the ditch.

Lindsey Graham, the American Senator, was the neocon’s neocon. A relic of the Bush 43 era of ill-fated foreign wars intended to plant liberal democracy in places not especially known for their receptivity to same. With awful consequences, mostly.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/12/lindsey-graham-israel-ukraine-foreign-policy-legacy

A Ukraine guy, too.

Israel’s bestie in Washington. As an awake, reformed and remorseful neocon, I don’t especially have sympathy for Graham’s politics. On the other hand, I don’t the share the endless obsession some have with the power of the Zionist lobbying voice stateside.

That is a debate for another time.

The grisly passing of Ann Widdecombe has been most in the news, at least in the mother country. Violent death will do that.

All four will face their Maker, and be asked to account for their actions. You know not the hour …

As you approach old age – I myself am rapidly approaching the allocated three score years and ten – you tend to notice deaths. When you lose a child, as I recently have, especially. Death takes on a whole new meaning and significance.

The fictionalised Thomas More said, famously, in Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons:

Death . . . comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make them any reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth, but roughly grasp them by the very breast and rattle them until they be stark dead! So causing their bodies to be buried in a pit and sending them to a judgment . . . whereof at their death their success is uncertain.

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2016/02/01/death-comes-for-us-all/

The martyr was under the pump. He faced his own death, at the hands of the self-serving Henry VIII’s vicious henchmen, with relative calm. Astonishingly. He even offered his executioner a tip so as to make sure he got the strike right. At least in Robert Bolt’s telling.

That is what Christian faith can do.

Ann Widdecombe’s death was the only one of the four that came as the result of violence. Political violence, as we now know, despite the bungling, ideologised performance of the Devon and Cornwall police and their master, the UK Home Office. The only death of the four that was decided by man and not by God. Just like St Thomas’s.

As far as I am aware, Ann’s death was the only one of the four that was celebrated. One could only imagine the reaction if anyone came out in celebration of the deaths of Graham, or Neill, or Hinch. We would all think it beneath contempt. I hope.

Ann’s death was welcomed by some, clearly. And gleefully, in some cases.

Just like St Thomas More’s.

Thomas Cromwell was cheering that one. Ann was another political martyr, then, dispatched by her enemies. Or, at least, on behalf of them. The many celebrating Ann’s assassination might be seen as the descendants of Henry II’s henchmen who did away with St Thomas Beckett, yet another martyr killed by the state’s acolytes. Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest? They took the hint.

Ann was a meddlesome Christian, too. Who will rid me of this meddlesome “old maid” bigot? Bigot is the new, preferred epithet. Bigot = someone who disagrees with ME. And with the direction of ideological travel.

Will the progressivist cheer squad celebrating Ann’s death also experience King Henry II’s remorse? Yeah, nah. The modern, online perps don’t do guilt. Just reputation management.

Willing death upon one’s enemies is a real thing. It isn’t new, of course. As Gavin Ashenden has noted, it goes back to Genesis and Cain and Abel.

Ashenden’s take is both deep and remarkable. Relevant. And expressed with his usual moderation and erudition.

But willing one’s enemies to die, while ancient, is now turbo-charged. And fuelled by the instant hit occasioned by social media, a decidedly mixed modern blessing. Where the ego of the self-styled pundit is given an immediate opportunity for virtue signalling, recognition and “likes”. Certainly, it is in today’s Britain. It has been much remarked. Dan Wootton has noticed it:

Then there is the performative grief. It is one of the less appealing aspects of our age. There are many, of course. But the self-serving, narrative-driven expressions of empathy are pretty sickening. Worse, the sense of being sickened by it is fading, and fast.

For the rest of us, it is merely deep sadness at what we have lost. Letting the deceased rest in peace, at least until their buried, is a thing of the past. If ever anything provided cause for societal self-reflection, surely it must be this. I am guessing that it won’t.

We have lost something precious, in this passing of respect for death. It is a loss of our essential shared humanity. Desacralisation, Gavin Ashenden calls it.

But, of course, that is what they intended. Raw power has replaced grounded morality. The (alleged) leftist Rotherham killer has done Satan’s work. White or not.

Ah, Rotherham. That rings a vague bell …

Paul Collits

15 July 2026

At the very last economic development do I attended, some years ago now, there was the usual paraphernalia, like what butchers call “facilitators’ paper”, white boards, different tables of the local great and the good, called together to contemplate an economic future for the local area.

I had some sort of leader-role, given my long career in the field. Someone asked me, then a stranger to Lismore (New South Wales), “where do you fit in?” I answered … “I usually don’t”.

I had spent a lot of wasted time over the years trying to climb various very greasy poles, whether in politics or in academia.

I (sort of) got there in the end, but it was pretty short lived. Quickly, I realised that I couldn’t wait to get out. The insider class turns out to bankrupt.

Two of the greatest lessons in life are, I now believe, first, that trying to be an insider is a waste of time, and second, that the establishment is not worth joining anyway. Because, most of those occupying the commanding heights are despicable. In one of a number of ways. They are either bitter and wasting their own time, or careerists, or corrupt, or time servers, or controlling, nanny state karens, or grifters. Think, especially, politics and the academy. Sadly, the two fields with which I became most familiar.

All this came to mind as I watched one of the late Ann Widdecombe’s very last interviews. She was asked whether she believed there was an “establishment”. (She was, lately, a Reform UK spokeswoman and the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, had, just prior, lambasted the establishment over, among other things, its attempts to derail his political career by questioning his reporting of gifts to the House of Commons).

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/nigel-farage-reform-uk-failed-declare-george-cottrell-donation/106883524

Ann said she used not to believe there was an establishment, but that she does now. This reflects the experience of many who were once part of it, and probably didn’t think in those terms, but, latterly, as an outsider, she did think there was an establishment. She didn’t say it, but she might be thought to not hold it in high regard.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters discussed her answer briefly, here.

T

here are different definitions of the establishment.

The old left, personified by the authors of a famous old pol sci article, “Yes Virginia, There is a Ruling Class”. For them it was the rich. The old left, as it happens, got a few things right. Generally, for the wrong reasons, or accidentally. Or they highlighted the wrong people. Or haven’t noticed that their own are NOW the perpetrators of our tyrannical, top-down 2020s misery. We are now largely run by cultural Marxists dotted across all of the public and private institutions that use every modern means at their disposal to enforce their world views. And have so much influence on our jobs and lives.

Notable leftist contributions can be found in C Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, written in the 1950s, Chomsky’s Manufactured Consent. It behooves us to read them. Even Marx got much right, especially in his analyses of the historical development of capitalism. It is just that his solution had a few hairs on it. See under Stalin. (Marx, of course, was funded by Engels’ father, a rich industrialist. No, he didn’t get irony, either).

Others speak of technocracy. Silicon Valley’s masters of the universe, perhaps. But technocracy is a much older (1920s) theory. See Patrick Wood’s book, Technocracy Rising, for the origins and trajectory of this evil little movement.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjS1No8hev2YLbOX_MWnQLMejZTLskQrD

Or they speak of secret societies with annual meetings and Chatham House rules. The Club of Rome. The Bilderbergs. The Council on Foreign Relations. Bankers. The Rockefellers. They have been called “controligarchs”, by Seamus Bruner.

Another theme is the deep state, or its seemingly less dark version, the administrative state. Think Palantir and its creator, the highly connected, enigmatic and possibly dangerous Peter Thiel. The Covid deep state had its origins in the bioweapons bureaucracy that emerged under Bush 43 after 9/11. It morphed over time into the Bill Gates/Tony Fauci/CEPI industrial complex that gave us the globally organised, massively funded pandemic planning industry. We even had our own Oz girl, Jane Halton, at that table.

Others focus on the WEFs, the Davos brigade of annual private jetters who go to Switzerland every January to fuel the local jet fuel provision industry and high-end sex work. Their deeds and misdeeds are captured each year by Rebel News, often in entertaining ways. They are China admirers and globalists who create “global” problems like climate catastrophe so they can enforce global “solutions”. Like net zero.

(It should be noted here that Ann Widdecombe was one of only five MPs – out of 650 – who voted against the British Climate Change Act in 2008).

Ultimately, the WEFs nudged us all towards world government. THAT all started with Woodrow Wilson and, later, John Dewey’s progressive dreams.

Still others talk of the merger between the state and international corporations. Corporatism by another name. Run by embedded, mutually rewarding networks of influence. Think Blair, Epstein and dear old, treasonous Mandy. And Starmageddon.

Network theory speaks volumes, and adds to the emergent picture of the establishment that we now see.

Older theories contribute to our understanding, like the elite theory of democracy and public choice theory. The former is summarised by James Burnham in The Machiavellians. Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy is summarized by AI search:

The iron law of oligarchy is a sociological theory stating that all organizations—even those founded on strictly democratic principles—inevitably devolve into rule by an elite few. Formulated by sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties, it argues that bureaucracy, centralized authority, and the indispensability of specialized leadership naturally concentrate power at the top.

The latter, promoted by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, tells us that (unsurprisingly) public officials have private, self-regarding interests. The modern grifter, careerist politician with eyes on the post-parliamentary prize is now ubiquitous.

These core explorations by political science practitioners often provide sufficient and necessary explanations of the modern, corrupt state that so ails its people.

There is much overlap across these useful modern explanatory theories, to be sure.

Go back even further and you will find Plato, Hobbes and Machiavelli were all over this stuff. In the case of the first two, they were advocates. Plato was a bit of a technocracy guy, ahead of his time. Plato, unlike Bill Buckley Jr, Did NOT think that we could best be ruled by a random bunch, instead of by philosopher kings. As Buckley said:

I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

Plato thought that would be catastrophic.

Clearly, with the modern growth of big government, the spreading tentacles of wokeism, the ideology-isation of the polity, the growth of propaganda as a tool of governance, the uses to which technology can be put and the in-plain-sight, screw-you attitudes of the rulers, we are on a hiding to nothing, establishment-wise.

The Covid plandemic (as we know) provided government with the ideal opportunity to enact tyranny from above, and provided the rest of us with the irrefutable evidence, beyond conspiracy theories, that the establishment exists, has identifiable members with clear intent, and is actively screwing us. Deliberately.

But there are other markers now embed in political practice. The passing of elections as vehicles for voter influence on our leaders. The end of accountability. The absence of mandates for a wide range of policies. Blatant broken promises. Foreign wars not consented to. Winning landslides with a third of the vote. Replacing whole populations without (of course) our approval or agreement.

So, yes, Ann and our fictional Virginia, there is a ruling class. It is run by bad actors who wish us harm. Their work is done in the open. We have all the receipts. The social contract spoken of by John Locke is farcically ignored, such that there is now NO consent of the governed and absolutely no justification for the state, even in its allegedly democratic form, to demand political obligation on the part of the people.

Enough of us now know the democratic project has gone to shit.

Of course, the British establishment is trying to derail Nigel Farage. A former exemplar of the political insider class, the Boris adviser Dominic Cummings, recently admitted it. They will come for you, mate. All the establishment hate-driven dog whistling by the vehicles of establishment power, like Sky News UK – a leftist vehicle that operates at 180 degrees from the much saner and right-of-centre Oz version – and The Guardian (of course), might reasonably be taken to have contributed to the murder of Ann Widdecombe.

It is a theory that doesn’t lack plausibility. The establishment will claim plausible deniability on this. Textbook. This is what they do.

Other current touch points of malign establishment action involve two tier policing in Britain, the promotion of the Third World invasion and its subsequent crime-welfare outworkings, the criminalisation of dissent, where irreverent tweeters get thrown in jail, and the protection racket that gives permission to rapists and murderers to ply their craft. Across Europe. There is even a film about this, Citizen Vigilante.

The Lotus Eaters note that you never notice the establishment as an insider, and it doesn’t notice you, but as soon as you move to the fringes and prove to be a threat, then the wheels are put in motion. The coverups and the memory holing ensue. The gaslighting. The lying police. The embarrassing word salads from the puppet pollies.

And the rest.

Like Ann Widdecombe, I myself only came to see all this latish in life. A hell of a lot became very clear during the Covid period, of course. And, once you see it, you cannot unsee it, if you have half a brain and are not part of the cheer squad for the elites. The two big middle chunks of people in the four quadrants of conformity are either passive supporters of the regime above us, because they benefit from it and think much of the progressive agenda run by the elites is pretty cool, or they are passive opponents, reluctant passengers along for the ride and too scared to buck the system. Too afraid to speak out, to question authority, scared of HR in many cases.

So, yes, it is good to be awake. To not fit in. To recognise the evils extant among those of the establishment. To make a break for freedom. Ann Widdecombe discovered this, God bless her memory. And, at five minutes to midnight, I did too.

The existence of the middle portions of the quadrant of conformity, aka normies, in their millions, reminds us that there is much work still to be done.

Paul Collits

14 July 2026

Since the violent death of Ann Widdecombe, the Venerable Grounded One, some things have become abundantly clear. Perhaps it should be taken to be merely revision of things we already knew, but have been freshly re-crystallised.

Revision is always good. And truth bears repetition. Five lessons suggest themselves.

One. The white guys did it.

The Widdecombe cops could hardly get out the first sentences of their pressers without saying “white”. Twice over, what with successive suspects. Apparently, the BBC put it bold letters. The playbook is familiar. Performative, barely-there grief from the leaders. Don’t look back in anger. No terrorism here. Keep off social media. Keep a lid on unrest. Preserve “social cohesion”, so laughably and selectively invoked.

Do NOT blame the immigrants. Ever. Perhaps in these cases, it is immigrant-adjacent types involved. Perhaps, one day, motives here will be clarified. Not every European rape and murder can be laid at the hands of the Third World’s criminal-welfare class. Just most of them.

Why do progressive whites hate their own? It isn’t rocket surgery, as it happens. Colonialism is whitey’s original sin. It is the ace up the new left’s sleeve. Colonialism is only bad when whitey does it. Even though men have been colonialist settlers and other invaders since time immemorial.

Sensible voices like that of the cerebral and reasonable Nigel Biggar – not many, mind – have demonstrated that each act of colonialism should be judged on its merits and demerits, recognised to have been nuanced and having upside for the colonised.

The Moors, the Muslim activists of yore, were at it way before the Europeans, of course. They ran into trouble with the Crusaders, as we know. Christians who didn’t turn the other cheek.

To take another example, Maoris invaded New Zealand (sorry, Aotearoa) some centuries before the Brits arrived. Being smart, the Maori chiefs in the 1840s figured out that a deal with the “invaders” was the smart play. Since the most recent eighties, they have been milking the woke times for all they are worth. You don’t need to live in NZ for long to be totally taken up with the omnipresent Maori vibe. They drive policy and culture. More reverse colonialism, following their own earlier colonialism.

The famous Maori war cry always designed to intimidate and to remind the enemy who is boss, has even found its way to the antipodes. And in fiction. The estimable Don Gilet, latterly of Death in Paradise, fairly recently played a rugby coach in Midsomer Murders and, suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a haka. It wasn’t plot-essential. But suited to the times.

The Indians seem to have made it a global strategy in recent times. PM Modi spoke to a packed house at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium this week. A rock star reception, by all accounts.

Indian cricket tests in Oz are rapidly becoming home games for the tourists. Indian migrants to Oz now outnumber Brits.

The ghastliness of the Third World invasion of John of Gaunt’s Sceptered Isle needs no re-introduction here. In the case of contemporary Britain, the “merits” of this particular colonialism have yet to be demonstrated. Not much upside for the natives here. Which, for those at the progressive end of the spectrum and oozing guilt from every pore, isn’t a problem. “We deserve it”. Whitey deserves it.

We should all just genuflect before the third world reverse invasion, and the accompanying squalor, crime and depravity. As the Lotus Eaters have pointed out, our real-time dystopia is much worse than the fictional versions, whether The Terminator, Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We all have to affirm it. A little like the homosexualisation of the culture. An attack on Christian values wrapped in modern relativist “virtue”. Hope not hate. Compassion for the gay opporessed. Affirmation is demanded. No heteronormative grumpiness is allowed. Will not be tolerated, by the tolerant. See under Ann Widdecombe.

Two. Death can be weaponised, or doesn’t matter, or should not be given deference and mourning.

Even the fierce combatants in the grisly, muddy trenches of the Western Front allowed the other side to bury their dead, with a modicum of dignity. Not so, now.

The progressive class’s philosophy of total war brooks no pauses for even-handed deference to fellow human beings. The abhorred dead are fair game. Just another tactic. An opportunity for a pile-on.

We might think these people are scumbags. Morally bankrupt. Low information robots for a utopia that can only be reached across seas of blood, and then never reached. Hypocritical. Never getting irony. All of the above. Knowing all this to be true doesn’t much help the hurt for a lost civilisation go away, and the wondering why.

There are performative apologies. First, from the political class. And then from the haters who find that, whoops, she was murdered. I had better protect my brand.

Three. Evil is real.

Evil is all about. On the streets. In the ugliness of the modern world. In the wanton killings of the crime waves. In the nihilism all about. The graffiti. The wanton destruction of the true, the good and the beautiful. The daily acts of petty tyranny, enforced by the deep state. The violence, forgiven in the name of ideology. Political killings when the victim isn’t one of ours.

Two tier policing is emblematic of the times. The evil is in resisting the ideology of multiculturalism. Even social media posts are the trigger for the state to crack down. See under Lucy Connolly. Lock her up! THAT is the evil of today. Racism in the face of invasion and endless crime against whitey.

And yet …

Evil, weirdly, is downplayed these days. Except when it is perpetrated by the divisive “right”. Endlessly. This is yet another cognitive dissonance. We get to define evil.

The modern woke movement is underpinned by relativism. There are no absolutes. It is the core philosophy of social liberalism, the great hybrid ideology of neoliberalism and postmodernism. Anything goes, as the Australian philosopher David Stove described it.

For these moral elites, the notion of evil is a relic of the past. When the oldies talk about evil, it doesn’t exist. When we call it out, it is back!

Four. They hate strength of conviction.

They cannot cope with the committed and compelling articulation of the truth. To the extent that they ever engage intellectually with those who seek and speak the truth. They deny the very existence of truth. It saves them a lot of painful effort and frequent humiliations. The vigorous pushback causes their cognitive dissonance to show itself to their shallow intellects. That cannot be comfortable. So they pivot to hatred and to their own confected morality.

Margaret Thatcher caused the 1970s left to come alive. Hating Ted Heath was simply not fun. Not enraging. Hating Thatcher became the reason for their existence.

Gavin Ashenden has explored this in relation to Ann Widdecombe.

See also:

In Australia, we have had two prime examples, Tony Abbott and Cardinal George Pell. They have been the most hated public figures of recent memory. They have worn the targets on their backs, with enduring courage. Pell was a white martyr. Rigorous Catholicism often seals the deal, of course.

It is as if the progressive class simply gets triggered by moral and intellectual resistance to the regime they have established through raw hard and soft power. Their sixties revolution and the long march through the institutions was meant to kill off all opposition.

They are programmed, like AI robots.

Relics of the old order are to be pilloried, silenced, ridiculed, and sometimes, where absolutely necessary killed off. Yes, some of them see killing the enemy as legit.

These heroes stand out because the courageous are so few in number. Wishy washy never works. The craving desire on the right to be loved never works. But what if you have to pay with your platform? Your career? Maybe your life? There is no denying that the resistance takes courage. A traditional virtue notoriously lacking in these times.

Five. Hinted in the previous four. Violence is okay.

Some of the legacy sixties revolutionaries even suggest it. Dog whistling is a common occurrence, right here. A different form of “social murder”. Trump. Charlie Kirk. The suggestion about Konstantin Kisin. Ann Widdecombe. Will she turn out to have been another martyr, as Gavin Ashenden suggests?

The Southport girls. The endless Grooming Gang girls. Henry Nowak. The poor disabled guy in Belfast.

These are all, in effect, the martyrs on the altar of multiculturalism. Memory holed, all, by the establishment. Ideology has a lot to answer for. All these poor victims only ever wanted was to be left alone, to have the right of free speech, to be allowed to project an identity of traditionalism. Theirs is the only form of identity to be denied by our rulers. To their very deaths. And beyond.

The late Cardinal George of Chicago suggested that he would probably die in his bed. He was far less confident for the next generation of Christian warriors.

He, perhaps, couldn’t have seen the unforgiving speed of the modern world.

These are five uncomfortable lessons of the past week. Safety, so often trotted out by our rulers, seems to be a selective thing, these days.

Civilisational safety is going down the toilet. That is the plan. As are the rights to safety of whites. So long as the illegal immigrant rapists and leftist murderers are safe. From us.

Paul Collits

13 July 2026