The ACT Party’s policies to ensure equality before the law would have been fantastic 50 years ago. But in 20XX, they can only be handcuffs for anyone stupid enough to abide by them.

This week, ACT Leader David Seymour announced his desire to strengthen parliamentary sovereignty, limit judicial interpretation and prevent vague Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation. Seymour said he wants legislation to be interpreted according to its original context and that Cabinet should be in control of defining the meaning and obligations of new bills, not the so-called “activist judges” using “tikanga” to camouflage their nakedly ideological decision-making. Seymour’s wants to nip this potentially parallel legal system in the bud by doubling down on equal rights.

“Today’s policy is about ensuring New Zealanders can move forward under one law for all with one future together,” Seymour said.

The problem with this thinking is that I have asked countless people what makes them a New Zealander, and they never give me the same answer. The only consistency is that anyone can become a New Zealander. But if you can choose your identity, then you can also choose not to be that identity, which means you were never that identity at all.

Seymour’s policy would have worked 50 years ago, when about 88% of New Zealanders were of European ethnicity. Today, the proportion of Europeans in this country barely reaches 64%, and Stats NZ forecasts that only 52% will be European by 2040. And that’s probably including the half- or quarter-European population. The true proportion of people with full European heritage in New Zealand will likely be much lower by 2040.

Demographics is important here because even to begin to talk about the concept of equal rights assumes the presence of a European mind. Rights, like truth, are a technology that only the Europeans managed to invent. Every other group adopted these technologies only after Europeans introduced them into their cultures. Unfortunately, like fish in water, Europeans often assume equality and truth are universal. They aren’t.

Because of this, Seymour can pass all the laws for equality he wants. But if he doesn’t also include a strong enforcement mechanism that punishes tribalism and nepotism, then his laws will only hurt those who respect equality and truth – Europeans.

When a culture that has not yet invented equality and truth mixes with one that has, the former will dominate the latter. Why? Because without equality and truth as the default assumption, humans revert to tribalism and nepotism. In such a world, you don’t want to be the only person who believes in equality. And that is precisely the world that New Zealand is entering.

This is where a bit of game theory might help Seymour create better policy. Aumann’s theory, for example, is a classic of this genre, because it assumes not only common priors, not only objective rationality, but most importantly, mutual trust between the disagreeing parties. Talk about assuming a can opener! The entire theory relies on the participants having the same default assumptions. If one believes in equality while the other believes in tribalism, that’s not a game. That’s called conquering.

In a multicultural society, people’s assumptions are not drawn from data or ideologies, but from deeper sources such as inherent traits and biology. Simply put, people groups are not equal, and many of these fundamental inequalities can create clashes on both the micro and macro scales. If these clashes are allowed to follow their normal pathway (leading to voluntary separation), then they aren’t so bad. It’s only when a centralised power forces various groups to live together that these differences can spiral into serious clashes and even violence.

Game theory offers a useful way to show why groups with unsolvable problems and irreconcilable assumptions might act. Society is essentially a long-term game with a series of fluid, dynamic and uncertain situations of shifting relative strength. If you want to preserve a situation in which groups are deterred from trespassing on each other’s key interests, then there is usually a narrow range of “strategically correct” reactions that, if mutually expected by all players, creates a kind of Nash Equilibrium.

Many of our deepest social instincts have their origin in the evolutionary mental firmware (brains) that calculate solutions to game-theoretic problems that are adaptive to the social needs of coordination and rivalry. Many of our strong moral and ethical impulses emerge out of those biological intuitions, which is why concepts like equality and truth are not universal technologies. Over time, a particular set of circumstances created evolutionary pressures on Europeans that, for whatever reason, didn’t happen to other groups, leading to the development of different ways of interacting with one another.

What happens when various people groups with distinct ethnic strategies which are pre-verbal and pre-intellectual are forced to live together? Well, there are some excellent strategically correct reactions to social pressures. But these don’t exactly line up well with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about how to rationalise those reactions. In fact, these reactions are gigavolt-charged third-rail topics about which it is totally impossible even to have an honest conversation, ironically because the strategically correct move is to display outrage if anyone mentions them.

For example, every human operates according to Lenin’s “Who, Whom?” matrix. The default approach is to look at who is doing what to whom. So, depending on one’s social position, the strategically correct decision most of the time is to accept the reasoning from high-status and/or helpful friends, and to reject the reasoning from low-status and/or enemies. What looks like a double standard is really just a single standard (my tribe first). The ugly details are just laundered through plausibly justifiable opinions about exceptions to this rule.

Because Europeans are wired differently, they developed the technologies of rights and truth. This allowed Europeans to have a different Nash Equilibrium set of strategies. Rather than get bogged down by tribalism, Europeans agreed to a rigid set of abstract rules by which the game can be played. It is to these rules that every European is bound and must refer to justify their behaviours. Seymour wants to maintain these rules.

But in the fast-approaching world, abstract rules governed by technologies like equality will clash with the more concrete rules of “my tribe first.” These two ethical constellations cannot be harmonised or reconciled. You have to pick one, or one has to win out. To use the boring language of game theory, you can’t have a working system of protocols of interaction, pre-verbal rules for behaviour and social ethics without Aumann’s common knowledge and expectations of how people will react.

Said differently, good traffic conditions are impossible if you mix people from different driving cultures. Similarly, no one can predict what an Indian judge might do when a fellow Indian is standing in the dock. Whose rules will the judge follow? The abstract rules of equality that are alien to him, or the concrete rules of tribalism that speak to him on a biological level when engaging with one of his own people? You have to pick one, or one has to win out.

Seymour knows that only one of these systems is compatible with equal justice under law. But what he refuses to understand is that not all groups are wired to choose that one. And you can’t talk the differently-wired groups into respecting rival systems. Could Seymour be convinced that equality is silly? Of course not, he’s a (mostly) European. So why should he expect groups to reject their biological instincts? What if they don’t? What exactly is stopping tribal groups from being tribal, other than Seymour’s empty pieces of paper that basically wash out to “come on guys, let’s play fair”?

This kind of thinking is simply unsuitable for the coming multicultural world. It would have been fine 50 years ago. But it’s time to realise that the things you think are normal and universal aren’t. Not by a long shot. And if you choose to keep following rules that an increasingly smaller number of your neighbours also follow, then you are living dangerously indeed.

Much of the talk about collapsing birth rates assumes that every generation must be replaced. Don’t believe it. A falling birth rate is not, by itself, a crisis. The real crisis is in figuring out why your children aren’t having their own children.

The only people genuinely worried about low birth rates are the farmers of men who want GDP always to go up. After all, they can’t make much money on only a handful of peasants. Rather, a low birth rate is simply a sign that an ecological limit has been reached.

Maybe humanity in certain places isn’t meant to be stacked on top of each other in cubicles filling 100-floor skyscrapers, the same way pandas aren’t meant to live in a zoo. Once that threshold is reached, birth rates naturally go down and reproduction occurs only among those most adapted to survive in modernity, reducing the population to a more viable density. This is a classic Lotka-Volterra equation.

Slower population growth is never an issue, so long as the country can maintain ethnic and racial homogeneity. A smaller country will still exist. However, if a declining native population finds itself competing with immigrant populations, those self-corrective evolutionary mechanisms for finding a viable population density won’t play out, and the nation will die. The only role of a government during a natural decline in population is not to panic and make stupid decisions (like migration) and perhaps to help the average Joe absorb the initial waves of the financial impact of a smaller population.

The baby boom was an historic anomaly. Not every boomer needs to be replaced. In fact, amazing things can happen when there are fewer people around. After the Black Death, Europe entered the Renaissance because the resulting labour shortage raised workers’ bargaining power, weakened the feudal order and created greater social mobility.

But if you are worried about population decline, you should encourage young people to have children. And that requires understanding how mimetic desire works. Because the children might know what to want, but they don’t know how to want.

Mimetic desire means that people copy what those around them appear to value. You can see this in fashion, social trends and politics. The same is true with having babies. The term “baby fever” exists for a reason. If all the women in a female’s friend group are having babies, she will want a baby, too. But the trick with mimetics is that someone must start the chain reaction. That’s why showing babies on TV is so important for pro-natal policies. Watching it feels like the people around you are having children, which triggers something in your brain to want to have children as well. Mimetic desire through media works on men just as effectively as it does with women.

The sad reality these days is that most women turn 30 without ever holding a baby, never changing a diaper and rarely watching one up close. You can’t want what you’ve never seen. Schools and the media have, for decades, also pushed the message that every girl should have a career and that motherhood is something women do when they have nothing left to live for. The media presented childlessness as freedom. And to top it off, we have been completely divorced from our history. We aren’t allowed to be proud of our ancestors. We are encouraged to become atomic individuals, detached from historical continuity. For people raised in psychological captivity like this, low birth rates are inevitable.

Furthermore, the rituals through which couples meet and form families have also stopped being transmitted. Every species has its unique mating rituals, including humans, and if those rituals aren’t performed, the animals will not breed. In humans, mating rituals are partly instinctive, but many must be learned. If these rituals are not taught, the next generation will have trouble reproducing.

If you put a group of unattached young boys and girls in a room with music, and they don’t dance with each other, the disruption of mating rituals has already happened. Most older people don’t consciously know how these rituals are supposed to work, which is why they can’t teach it to their children. They think that young men are supposed to have the courage to approach girls, and that if they can’t, it shows a failure of character. But if that were how human mating worked, approaching women wouldn’t be scary for young men at all, because the men who were scared by it would have fewer descendants. Natural selection suggests something deeper has been disrupted.

If you’re an observer of old books and movies, you already know what it is. The answer lies in what boys and girls fear. Girls are afraid of embarrassment from being too forward. Boys are afraid of embarrassment when they are rejected. So, girls aren’t supposed to be overt, and boys aren’t supposed to cold approach. The correct mating ritual is always covertly initiated by the female. She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way. The male then gets the hint and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he doesn’t, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited.

But for this mating ritual to begin, young men need to know how to pick up a hint, and young girls need to know how to drop one. Before they can learn to do this, they must learn from their parents that performing a mating ritual is necessary and normal. Instead, parents try to shame young men into cold approaching, which causes girls to complain about being cold approached. She says, “Don’t bother me at the gym, don’t bother me at the coffee shop, don’t stop me on the street.” The problem is that when you ask a woman when she would like to be approached, she can only give nonsense answers such as “at the right place and time,” because the real answer is she only wants to be approached by a man she already likes.

Since young women are never taught by older women how to send a plausibly deniable signal, most are at a loss about what to do when they see a guy they like. Instead, they stand around and hope he comes over. No signal. There are hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos of girls acting in this way. If a girl doesn’t know how to send hints, the young men won’t be able to spot the hints she doesn’t know how to drop. When the most basic mating rituals are disrupted to this extent, it’s no surprise that birth rates are dropping.

The question is, why are these mating rituals disrupted? Is it because of some nefarious government plan to depopulate the nations? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The answer is much closer to home. People aren’t playing their proper role in others’ lives.

Playing a role means being a parent to your child, not their friend. It means being a sister to your brother. It means being a grandmother to your granddaughter. It means being a friend to your friend, not being their parent or sister. If you interact with your daughter like a friend, then you are robbing your daughter of having a father or a mother. If you treat your grandson as any other child, then you are robbing him of having a grandmother or grandfather. Your daughter has plenty of friends, but only one father. If you, as the father, do not play that role, your daughter will not learn certain life lessons because no one else can say the things only a father can say. This is simple maths.

I am convinced that if everyone played their precise role in other people’s lives, most problems would disappear. Media messaging and government incompetence are both factors. But if birth rates are low, I suspect the real reason is that each of us thought someone else would play the role we were supposed to play with others and that our children would magically know how to perform the correct mating rituals. But some things need to be taught, and only certain people can teach certain things.

If you are worried about a declining population, you should first remember that you are not free. You are constrained to play particular roles in this life. If you don’t play those roles, then those roles will not be played, and one of the consequences might be that the playgrounds will be empty.

With data centres going up in our backyard, cameras installed on every street and digital IDs smuggled in under the cover of protecting teens from social media, the long-forecasted surveillance state is making a lot of people nervous. Even comedians are starting to joke about it. We should be pushing back against this, right?

Well, I am reminded of the parable of the shoeshine boy. The rule is: if you’re a nobody, then by the time you’ve seen an investment opportunity, it’s too late to do anything about it. Same goes for surveillance. Those cameras and data centres are only the most proximate tip of the iceberg. Most people have no idea how deep the surveillance grid already goes, and how easy it is to track all of us without the need for cameras.

But this topic is not going away. Humans will always be against the idea of making privacy impossible and anonymity effectively a crime. From the perspective of the farmers of men, however, zero privacy makes a lot of sense. After all, they could run the machine much more easily if they knew when a human animal was feeling ill, showing early signs of aggression, or simply hungry. Data can help solve problems, and more data can help solve problems before they become problems.

And like busy little beavers, the farmers of men have slowly but surely constructed their dreamed-of grid. The fences and gates, both digital and analogue, that track, tag, nudge, distract, dangle and train us are as impressive as the pyramids of ancient Egypt. If you could see the surveillance grid, it would surely be one of the wonders of the modern world. And that’s about as neutral as I can be when describing it.

But we should be honest. “Data mining” is a euphemism for spying. If who you are is what you do, then whoever controls the data of what you do will inevitably control you. That’s the goal. The farmers of men are not going to stop just because we protest a few data centres or knock down some cameras. We are far, far beyond the point where any of this can be reversed.

To understand the surveillance grid would require a whole book. All we have time for is a core aspect known as “person-level persistence surveillance.” But it’s the most important aspect since it helps explain why there really is no escaping this wonder of the modern world.

Let’s use one example, the global defence and security company Leonardo. This company has a system called ELSAG SignalTrace, and its job is to collect electronic signals emitted by all kinds of devices. According to the company, its sensors can detect the signals and identify metadata associated with mobile phones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, Bluetooth devices, Wi-Fi sources, RFID tags, vehicle electronics and much more. Then it looks for when these devices often appear together.

Maybe your car contains a particular version of an iPhone, an Audi radio, Bose headphones, a Garmin watch and a key fob. On their own, these devices are boring. But when that exact bundle of devices appears at the same time and place, SignalTrace can turn that bundle into an electronic “fingerprint”. So, even if you remove the number plate on your car, Leonardo will still know it’s your vehicle based on the other signals it receives from the devices all around you.

Of course, there are limits to what its sensors can collect. Many phones randomise their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth addresses to make long-term tracking harder. Devices also vary in how often they broadcast signals and what data they reveal. But researchers have found that some Bluetooth signals remain trackable even when their addresses change because other information in their systems can act as a secondary identifier. Your phone might change its address, but your headphones, watch, car radio and key fob probably won’t, which means the system can infer that the phone’s new signal belongs to the same cluster it saw yesterday.

So, when two or more signals repeatedly appear together, travel along the same route and split off at certain locations, the system knows the owners may be family members, colleagues, neighbours, friends or members of the same organisation. It can then build a pattern of life about those people (known as a “social graph”) without ever hearing them talk or reading their messages. What you do is who you are.

The system isn’t looking for anyone in particular. It’s not trying to solve a crime. Rather, the purpose of person-level persistent surveillance is to collect data all the time, from everyone, because it’s impossible to know which device may become relevant later. When (not if) someone becomes interesting to the farmers of men, it would be highly convenient to know everything about where that person sleeps, where they work, which church they attend, which doctor they visit, who they spend the night with and which political meetings they attend. After all, before you start looking for a needle, you must first create the haystack.

Signals are not private. They are constantly being beamed out from all devices, all day, every day. Leonardo knows how to grab these signals, and there are no laws stopping it from doing so. Again, this is metadata, not texts, phone calls or emails.

The advertising industry has built an entire business around joining these signals. In the trade, they call it identity resolution. Advertising agencies construct their own social graphs that connect (the analogue) names, postal addresses, email addresses and customer records with (the digital) cookies, mobile advertising IDs, “Smart” televisions and IP addresses to generate a unified view of targeted consumers.

My favourite demonstration of this is a piece of software by SilverPush. It allows mobile phones to listen for inaudible codes embedded in normal television audio. A TV can emit a sound above or below the human hearing range but still be picked up by the phone’s microphone. SilverPush’s software can “hear” which advertisement was playing, even if the TV is on mute, and send that data back to the advertisers.

Or have you heard about Facebook’s “shadow profiles”? This is a term for the data created about people who have no Facebook account. How does this work? When Facebook users upload their address books to the site, Facebook will receive the names, phone numbers and email addresses. If ten friends have your number saved under your name, Facebook knows you sit inside ten overlapping social networks without you ever needing to open an account of your own on the platform.

Furthermore, Clearview AI has a facial-recognition database that contains more than 70 billion images gathered from public websites, social media, news reports and other sources. Even if you have never uploaded a single photo of yourself onto the internet, it might be true that a school, employer, sporting club, newspaper or friend has done it for you. One photo can connect an unknown face captured by other cameras to a huge database of names, pages and associations.

Your DNA isn’t safe, either. You may refuse (for good reason) to send your genetic goo to a genealogy company, but it pays to remember that your relatives share parts of your DNA as well. A major 2018 study estimated that about 60% of Americans of European descent could already expect a third-cousin or closer match in a genealogy database. Linking that data to the bundle of all the other data would be child’s play.

By the way, these examples are all from private firms. Governments also collect, but they tend to avoid the more sensitive data that could become a political hot potato if it ever leaked out. Civil servants are sneaky, though. Rather than collect it themselves, governments simply ask private companies for their data. The best thing about this dynamic is that private companies do not have to respond to an Official Information Act request. As I said, civil servants are sneaky.

Hopefully you’re starting to see how it is virtually impossible to hide from person-level persistence surveillance. If the number plate fails, they can use the vehicle’s colour. If the vehicle’s colour changes, use the device bundle. If a device address rotates, use the surrounding devices. If the person leaves their phone at home, use the watch or payment card. If the person never joins Facebook, use their friends’ contacts and photographs. If they never submit DNA, use a cousin. If one company deletes all its data, another copy of that data may be in an advertising company’s databases, a consumer report or a police file.

Person-level persistent surveillance is only one aspect of the enormous surveillance grid being built around us. Every bit of data will be used in some way. Corporations are strip-mining their employees, every consumer product is gathering data, and every public space is turning into a data hunting ground.

But I’ll leave you with one thought. Their surveillance system already knows more about you than you know about you. So, if they know where everyone is, who we are, what we do, and all the other details of our lives, why do they then tell us that deportation of foreigners is impossible?

Why indeed.

This week, the party of Winston Peters (Boomer) announced the Kiwi Kids Grant. The policy would offer tax-free payments of $5000 a year for the first three years of a child’s life, for up to three children. Peters said the goal was to reverse what he called a “population precipice” of declining birth rates in New Zealand and argued $400 million a year would ultimately be much cheaper than relying on increased immigration.

If the strategy is to “grow our own” rather than replacing the population with different people, then at least Peters is on-brand. His Boomer supporters love that NZ First is strong on anti-immigration. But they should check the demography statistics before applauding too loudly.

According to the 2023 census data, of the 1,816,000 people who live in Auckland, the racial breakdown shows Europeans (49.8%) as barely stumbling over the finish line with a majority that wouldn’t even class as a controlling interest at a company. Asians now constitute 31.3% of Auckland residents (Chinese at 11.7%, Indian at 10.6% and Southeast Asian at 5.0%), Pacific Peoples make up 16.6%, Maori are at 12.3%, and those from the Middle East nudge over the line at 2.7%. About 42% of Auckland residents were born overseas.

These individuals are either already citizens or residents or can become citizens or residents if they choose that path. Some might spend their whole lives in this country, while some might go back and forth between their home country and New Zealand many times over their lifetime. But if these people are offered $45,000 over three years to raise their children in New Zealand, how many will take it up? 50%? 85%? 99%?

This is why it’s so important to answer the basic question correctly: what is a New Zealander? As a civic nationalist party, NZ First splits the world into two camps: legal New Zealanders and people who can become legal New Zealanders. Since NZ First believes that a piece of paper can create a New Zealander, the practical effect of Winston Peters’ policy will be offering to pay for foreigners to have more children in this country. Is that NZ “First”? I guess it depends on what you think a New Zealander is.

The party’s Boomer supporters probably have a mental image of who is a New Zealander. And while they’re extremely nervous about immigration, this anxiety clashes with their brainwashing telling them that everyone is equal, and anyone can become a New Zealander if they get the right piece of paper. This creates cognitive dissonance, which, coupled with cognitive decline, makes them clap like seals for policies that will only end up exacerbating the very problem they are trying to solve. Typical Boomers.

And it is Boomers. Go to any NZ First rally, and you will be swimming in a sea of grey hair. I do have some sympathy for them, though. Weapons-grade propaganda is nearly impossible to defend against, and that’s the only type of media that has existed since the end of WWII. The Boomers were hypnotised into accepting their own deracination and cultural subversion. When the future looks random, inexplicable and overwhelming, people enter survival mode, and the self becomes minimal to reduce its surface area to pain. When you are told you can’t live for your people and their larger story, all you have left is to live for yourself and your own story. Narcissism is the expected result of this sustained psychological torture, not some selfish choice.

But when you’re shown the problem, you have a choice to fix it. Those are the rules. So, let’s see if anyone spotted the biggest problem with NZ First’s policy proposal.

The premise behind the policy is that young people, both Millennials and Gen Z, are struggling to form families because they lack sufficient funds. Even double-income households can’t seem to get ahead of compounding daily costs. People tend to only start families when they feel financially stable. The data on this is clear. The exact measurement of “stability” is different for everyone, but it generally can be said to occur when they have predictable earnings, stable housing, manageable debt, some financial buffer and confidence they can withstand a temporary hardship.

NZ First has put a number on what it thinks “stability” looks like: $5000 a year for the first three years of a child’s life, for up to three children. The party’s plan is to take taxpayer money and redirect it to young people earlier in their lives, as a way to increase their overall health and wellbeing (people with families tend to be happier and more productive), rather than keeping that money aside until later in life for things like healthcare to make them feel good when it will also be too late to have a family.

Seems to be solid reasoning. But can you see the problem yet? No? We can reframe the premise a bit to shed some light.

Every Millennial alive today theoretically has two parents, one father and one mother (orphans and partial orphans are exceptions). If that Millennial gets into a relationship with another Millennial, then the combined total of parents connected to those two people will rise to four, along with eight grandparents (again, with some exceptions). The average age of a parent of a Millennial is about 65, while their grandparents would be roughly in their mid-to-late 80s. So, every Millennial can be expected to have access to six different sources of potential funds that could be helping them become financially stable enough to start a family.

Oh…

Did you think about this, Boomer?

It should be obvious to everyone that the entire point of working hard through your life to accumulate wealth is so your children can start their lives at a higher level than where you started. That I have to say this out loud is a black mark on our culture. Every minute your child spends at a job earning money to live is a minute your child can’t spend on more productive work. If you don’t know the difference between a job and work, that would explain why you thought NZ First’s policy proposal was a good idea. You don’t really understand the problem you’re so worried about.

I’m not saying the policy’s goal is wrong. Ensuring the future health of this country through decent birth rates of New Zealanders is a good thing, and the party should be commended for trying to fix it. But no one ever stops to ask how we got to the point where a political party felt it was necessary to step in to perform a responsibility usually expected of parents and grandparents.

Boomers are always saying they believe in the future. They care about the direction this country is moving. Some Boomers, like Paul Henry, will appear to be “doing something” by standing for parliament and trying to repair the country using a political strategy. But vanishingly few Boomers know that $700,000 given to your 25-year-old child is worth far more to them than forcing that child to wait until they are 50 to receive their millions in inheritance. Who cares about having a net worth of $50 million when I’m 50 years old? No amount of money will ever be able to buy back your child’s youth or fertile years.

Boomers have the ability and means to fix all the problems they see for the future, but they would much prefer if the government took the lead instead. You’re telling me that across six different sources of funds (four parents, eight grandparents) none of you thought to use a small portion of the family wealth to ensure your children were financially stable enough to start a family? Really? None of you? No wonder your kids rarely visit your retirement village.

Boomers love to rant and rave about the declining morality of the youth, or the “woke” subversion of culture, and the emaciated currency, all of which are genuine problems. But when it comes to doing something that will materially help their own children, they are clueless, like brainwashed automatons. An embarrassment to their ancestors. Worse, they will even applaud when a political party offers to use other people’s money to support their children instead.

That’s why Boomers love NZ First. The party promises to do all the things the Boomers should have done themselves. As I said, I have some sympathy for the Boomers. It’s not entirely their fault for being the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists in the History of the World. But that sympathy is quickly running out.

The government’s revamped Move-On powers have already had a positive effect on my life, but there’s so much more that could – and should – be done to fix the problem of the “sturdy beggar.”

Just down from where I live is a giant unused carpark. It’s flat and sits next to a major arterial route. It also has no restrictions on types of cars or campervans that can stay overnight. So, naturally, this carpark has attracted plenty of vagrants. At its peak, about three dozen shabby vehicles with shabby owners were semi-permanently camped for more than 18 months, going nowhere, doing nothing.

Then in early July, the police and social services came, and in two days the ne’er-do-wells were all gone. Poof. Massive concrete barriers were then slumped at the entrances to stop them from sneaking in again. Rumour has it that the vagrants were simply shifted around, like a carousel. But my local area certainly feels much safer now without the mangy dogs and babbling weirdos hanging out. Thanks, Luxon!

And it got me thinking: is there anything more the government could be doing about vagrants? I don’t mean mental health seminars or handing out antipsychotics. I mean, do these Move-On powers go far enough to fix the problem? What’s the goal here?

One or two of the people living in that carpark perhaps had a job and were just down on their luck. There but for the grace… But the rest were obvious losers on some form of welfare benefit. How do I know this? Because they weren’t dead. It is extremely difficult to starve in modern New Zealand, since everyone can get free money at pretty much any time. The government will try to get the losers back into work, but it’s also not hard to simply stay on the benefit for life. And many people choose to do exactly that.

The issue I have with the Move-On powers is that they don’t appreciate that the problem is not necessarily the vagrants. The problem is all the people driving to work on that arterial road who watch dozens and dozens of able-bodied people spending their days idle, parasitically sucking on their tax money. The problem is that those citizens might start to get a little resentful and even wonder why they’re working so hard when it’s clearly much easier to do nothing. This is a recipe for quiet collapse.

What can be done to avoid this? Can the Move-On orders be strengthened? Do the attitudes of society need changing as well? Can people be forced into work? Should the government care about the idle as much as the active? All good questions.

And, interestingly, these questions were all answered back in 16th-century England. Admittedly, the political environment back then was very different, as was the economic situation. England felt the threat of invasion by the French (or the Scots, sometimes both), and every Englishman, from the poorest to the richest, was encouraged to own a sword or bow and to be proficient in its use. Everyone was expected to chip in and do their part if they were physically able.

Those who genuinely couldn’t work deserved support, and although the Church was already showing signs of its terminal decline through neglect of its charitable duties, religion was still a source of refuge for the needy. Those who could work and refused, however, were seen as dangerous to the “commonweal”, the shared welfare of the country. But it was difficult to decide who was truly in need and who was faking it.

As early as the reign of Richard II, rules on charity and almsgiving were considered. The argument went that while the giver might feel compassionate, the wider community would always pay a steep price for careless charity. The king saw the elderly, sick and disabled who had worked hard all their lives as “decayed soldiers”, or retired veterans of the economic battle. As such, he owed them some security in their old age.

Since work was always available for those who wanted it and wages were sufficient for an active person to live comfortably, begging was a choice. As such, the king was much harsher on the so-called “sturdy and valiant beggars” who were “whole and mighty in body and able to labour”, but who wandered around asking others to support them.

The king argued that nature punished idleness with starvation, and it was therefore intolerable for an able person to escape that punishment by making honest workers feed him. Begging under false pretences was treated as a form of theft: the idle person was consuming resources that other people had earned through their hard labour. The king was also proud that England was a hospitable place, and tired travellers could always expect a meal or a bed simply by asking for them. But if every charitably open door was being abused by “sturdy beggars,” those doors would soon close, leading to a much-diminished and far less happy commonwealth.

By the time Henry VIII took the throne, laws were introduced that wisely saw idleness as the “mother and root of all vices.” Local officials were ordered to search for those who genuinely had to live upon charity and write them a licence allowing them to beg within a particular area. These licences named the person and set boundaries on their movements. The point was that although the poor deserved help, they weren’t allowed to ask for help wherever they pleased. The corrosive social effects of careless charity meant that all charity must be controlled, local and supervised.

The flipside was that these laws had little mercy for the “sturdy beggars.” A person with no land, employer, trade or good justification for how he earned a living could be arrested as a vagabond. He would then be taken to the town, stripped and “tied to the end of a cart” before being beaten with whips through the streets “till his body be bloody,” according to the law. The punished fraudster was to be given a different licence which only allowed him to beg for food while travelling back to his home town. If he ignored the order, he could be arrested and whipped again until he could be “put to labour for his living.”

Amusingly, the law also stated that students from Oxford or Cambridge could be punished if their begging was not officially authorised by their university. Furthermore, sailors claiming to have lost their ships and goods needed evidence, and travelling fortune-tellers, fake doctors and people who claimed to interpret dreams were also treated as cheats who were living on other people’s gullibility. They got the whip, too.

A few years passed, but the problem of the “sturdy beggar” still wasn’t fully solved, so Henry expanded the system and ramped up its penalties. His first step was to establish enough public works so that vagrants could be given jobs rather than simply ordered to find them. After all, a person with a bad CV might be unable to convince anyone to give him a job. People were also forbidden to give beggars money directly. The poor could visit homes for leftover food, but alms were to be collected and distributed through the church.

Children were brought into the system as well. Idle children aged over five were to be assigned to farmers, craftspeople or other masters so they could learn some useful skills. A child who ran away without a “reasonable” cause could be publicly whipped with rods, just like an adult. The idea was to instil habits of work early, because idleness had a tendency to be passed down from father to son. I’m sure that doesn’t happen today…

Henry then doubled down on the fraudsters. A “sturdy beggar” caught for the first time was whipped. The second time, part of his ear could be cut away or pierced with a hot iron. But if the same loser was caught a third time, he could then be executed “as an enemy of the commonwealth”. Anyone who repeatedly refused to work was only proving to be of no use to society, living only to hurt himself and others. The historian James Froude said everyone supported this rule since they agreed that it was “better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless life.”

But was the “sturdy beggar” problem solved? Did these laws work? Well, they weren’t a failure.

The historian Luke Owen Pike said the laws lasted for about 60 years and were renewed over and over by multiple monarchs, but increasingly severe laws under Edward VI and Elizabeth suggested that vagrancy remained a problem. Prisons contained idle labourers, fortune-tellers, pedlars, tinkers, gamblers, shipwrecked sailors and other “masterless” people. But Pike did not think these laws were a complete success, either. The massive decline in crime during the 16th century was, in his view, the cumulative result of a wealthier England, political stability and the discovery of the New World, which speedily started to absorb a lot of the restless spirits.

Like hitting water with a hammer, the “sturdy beggar” will always be a problem. It’s still with us in New Zealand. But the key difference between Henry VIII’s laws and our Move-On orders today is that the king correctly framed the able-bodied beggars as what they were – fraudsters and parasites. Being a “sturdy beggar” makes you a thief, and criminals should be treated like criminals. It shouldn’t be okay for able-bodied people to be idle while others must work. The former is stealing from the latter. This is intolerable in any civilised society. Luxon should be taking notes.

Of course, no government would ever get away with reintroducing laws from 500 years ago. Yet it is the government’s job to ensure the health of the “commonweal,” and right now, the balance between welfare and work effort is out of kilter in this country. And with so much government money sloshing around and everyone looking to get some for themselves, the “sturdy beggar” will likely be a much more common sight.

I like Paul Henry. He was always a bit of an unserious joker, but I think all his joking around has caused him to be confused about the reality of New Zealand politics.

Part of his stated reasons for getting into politics is to restore the country back to what he considers the “good old days” when he was growing up. He wants his grandchildren to enjoy the same benefits he enjoyed, and so his goal requires rolling back some of the more insane policies accrued over the decades.

This all sounds very… right wing. Or at least conservative. Restoration of a golden era. Preservation of time-worn traditions. These concepts are what most people consider right-wing thought. But if Henry is searching for a right-wing political party to join, then he will search in vain. There is no right wing in this country. There is only one Left, which is orbited by different shades of the confused pseudo-left.

Actually, to be politically confused is the definition of a libertarian. So, perhaps ACT was a good fit for Henry. Libertarians are confused because they think power can limit itself. This philosophy can be dismissed with a single question: how will you force the state to limit its power? This question is about sovereignty. If the state can be forced to limit its power, then the state is not sovereign. If you can limit the state, then you are the sovereign. Obviously, there is no higher power than the state; therefore, the libertarian fails. You cannot make power disappear.

As libertarians, the function of the ACT Party is to occupy the political space of the “right wing” while not actually being right-wing in any way. ACT appears to be a right-wing party because its talking points advocate for smaller government, which is ostensibly a right-wing ideal. But, since there is no power higher than the state, ACT can be left alone to burn all its political energy tilting at these windmills forever and never achieve its goal. In other words, ACT is the perfect containment vehicle for right-wing people who genuinely desire change but don’t understand the system. Like Henry.

What about NZ First? Surely the party of Winston Peters is a “right-wing” party, or at least “nationalist”? Sorry, NZ First is neither right-wing nor nationalist. Ask any NZ First MP for their definition of a New Zealander, and all you will hear is some version of: a New Zealander is any citizen who shares equal rights under one law, regardless of ethnicity. In other words, a New Zealander is someone who holds a legal piece of paper. This is civic nationalism, not nationalism. And there is an important difference.

Nationalism, from the root Latin word natio, meaning a race of people, is the idea that the nation (the extended family) is the most important level of social ties. Nationalism is not racism or a love of the same. It is a love of difference. But difference is much more than just a preference for your own food, music or culture. Difference is also a metaphysic. Difference is at the foundation of what it is to be a thing at all.

Civic nationalism is a bit like having a snooze button on a smoke alarm. Civic nationalism is the idea that an idea can be a person’s primary identity. The problem with civic nationalism is that it’s not easy to enforce a purely idea-based notion of citizenship. In practice, a civic nationalist system becomes “magic soil nationalism”, in which anyone who can physically move their body into New Zealand magically gets to be a New Zealander. I’m sure you can see how this can become a problem.

So, what about the National Party? Sorry, no dice again. National is a conservative party, which sounds right-wing, but that’s because your brain is broken. To see why, ask what conservatives are trying to conserve. A lot of people believe what is being conserved is traditions and the wisdom of those who came before us. But the conservative never seems to conserve these things because the true tradition they are conserving is liberalism, and liberalism is a philosophy of revolution known as Leftism.

Conservatism is a more radically Leftist position than open Leftism. The open Left is a permanent state of revolution, tearing down every tradition. But the moment Leftists succeed on any point, conservatives step in to lock in the Left’s gains, fighting to the death to conserve them. Conservatism operates as a cynical tool of the established order to protect the established order. The National Party is not your friend if you are genuinely right-wing.

But I should define my terms. What is the right wing?

At its core, the right wing simply means the restoration of strong property rights. A rightist is someone who believes in order, stability and security, all of which he considers synonyms. The essence of any rightist philosophy is the union of two forces: the engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought.

A rightist is not a communist, a fascist or even a libertarian. He is something much older, stranger and more powerful. Unlike the conservative, the rightist does not wish to go back to some nostalgic time or golden age, but to locate what is true and good and restore or reinvigorate it regardless of any contemporary prejudices against it. And the first task of a rightist is to take Jonathan Bowden’s advice and kill the liberal within yourself. Change comes from within.

This is what the right wing really means. And as such, there is no right-wing party in New Zealand, and there likely never has been. New Zealand was a left-wing project from the start. The story of British colonialism was a political battle between the “settlers” and the “missionaries”. The settlers shouldered the burden of building the new lands, which gave them considerable political influence in the colonies. But the missionaries always had more influence in London. And that’s what mattered.

Broadly speaking, settlers and missionaries drew their support back in Britain from the Tories and the Whigs, respectively. Whiggery operates from a linear view of historical progress rising from a dark past to enlightened modernity – a kind of secular version of God’s providence. Toryism also viewed history as trending towards enlightenment, but it believed the driving factor was material progress, not spiritual progress. These different views coloured how the settlers and missionaries competed over the best way to govern the colonies.

Occasionally, this tension burst into real warfare. The American revolutionaries, for example, were all Whigs, which meant the Revolutionary War was a continuation of British politics by other means. In fact, two of the leading British generals in that war, William Howe and Lord Cornwallis, were Whigs. Their interest in that war was firstly to ensure the power of their party back in London, which is why General Howe didn’t follow through on the Battle of Bunker Hill by finishing off the defeated revolutionaries. Doing so would have hurt the influence of the Whig Party.

The same tension appeared in New Zealand. The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi was a characteristically Whig victory. The missionaries in New Zealand won the argument eight years before the Treaty was signed when the Whigs passed the Great Reform Act of 1832. The Act weakened the Tories by extending the electorate and increasing the influence of the middle classes. It also gave the missionaries more confidence to enact their Whiggish “liberalism” in the colonies.

The missionaries and Whigs went from victory to victory in the 20th century. Because the settlers were the main political enemy of the missionaries, the act of settling was eventually outlawed in New Zealand. The typically Whig ideology of conservation made it impossible to build anything in this country. Today, a third of New Zealand’s land is little more than a nature reserve for animals, lizards and tourists.

Then came the First World War, which resulted in a huge wartime death toll, high inflation and crippling death and income taxes. Those hurt the most, both in the per capita death toll and the financial disaster, were the political supporters of the settlers, the Tory right wing in Britain. The old civilisation died, and the Whiggish democratic world in which we now live began to take its full form. The centre of the Anglo-American order then moved to Washington after 1918.

The Second World War set this political victory in concrete. The correct interpretation of WWII is that America conquered Europe to destroy the traditional Christian West, which was always the mission of the Protestant Whigs. As I have said elsewhere, the West died on 2 February 1943 with the fall of Stalingrad. After the farcical Nuremberg trials, it effectively became illegal to be genuinely right-wing.

Fast-forward to 2026, and Paul Henry’s dream of restoring New Zealand is revealed to be a pipe dream. There is no right wing. Henry was forced to choose between various types of overt and covert Leftists and the confused libertarians.

But his heart is in the right place (no pun intended). After all, every regime ends. Unfortunately, this one won’t end soon, and Henry’s grandchildren will almost certainly live in a future that is more “egalitarian”, more broken, and far, far more communist than today.

The right wing will return, but only after we kill the liberal within ourselves.

Good news everybody! Another piece of the tired 20^th century may finally be on its deathbed. The university system is in terminal decline, and I couldn’t be happier.

The news comes from a family member who teaches about artificial intelligence at one of the universities. In perhaps the juiciest of ironies, professors have given up trying to detect if the students are using AI to write essays and pass tests. You would think that professors of AI would be able to outrun their students, but you would be wrong. It’s over. The students have defeated the teachers.

On a certain level, given the subject matter, you could say the only test that matters when learning about AI is whether the student understands how it works and presents creative ways to deploy it. Sure, it must be frustrating for the professors to be surrounded by cheaters. But, to be fair, AI was built to improve a human’s ability to perform tasks. It is value-neutral, like a tool. Whether a tool is used for good or evil is entirely up to the user. So, pass, I guess?

If the issue of AI cheating was confined to the technical schools, that might be a sound argument. The problem is that these tools are everywhere now, in all schools and all degrees, including PhD-level courses. No teacher or professor, anywhere on the globe, has a reliable way to check if a student has used AI to pass a test or exam. If a student knows which programs to use, their cheating is essentially undetectable.

And you might be thinking, who cares if a Gender Studies student cheats? But the scary thing is that there’s nothing stopping aspiring engineers and medical students from using the AI tools to cheat either. If you can’t see the existential crisis here, I really hope you don’t have to use a bridge or get heart surgery over the next twenty years.

Thankfully, the engineering and medical worlds have multiple, redundant layers of checks for competency. A degree isn’t a magic ticket to become a doctor. A student surgeon must go through placements, take continuing education, accrue thousands of hours of experience and their every daily action has real-world consequences in the form of blood and death. Someone who cheats on a medical exam will be found out long before they pick up a scalpel.

But if we’re being honest, the existence of AI does question the need for most doctors in the first place. After all, what is a doctor but a walking decision tree? The doctor asks the patient what’s wrong, then uses their knowledge of medicine to diagnose the illness. Yet no matter how smart the doctor may be, there is no human brain on the planet that can outperform an AI that stores the entirety of medical knowledge. I expect most human doctors, except maybe surgeons, will be among the first to disappear in the looming AI job-stealing apocalypse. Surgeons shouldn’t get too comfortable either.

So, maybe the university cheating scandals aren’t that bad after all? I mean, surely the real test going on – the meta test – is whether we can become comfortable dealing with AI for complex jobs like medical diagnoses. Because that day is coming, and may already be here. If a smart machine can diagnose better than any human doctor, we should be excited about that, right? Or am I missing something?

I don’t think I am. In fact, I reckon we’re about to return to a type of guild system. Call it neo-guild. Under the guild system, prices were fixed. There was barely any such thing as a “free market.” The price for a carved wooden chair was the same everywhere. But there was still plenty of competition. It just happened at the level of quality. Fixed prices forced carpenters to get better at carving chairs, which led to the birth of artisanship and the production of unbelievably high-quality furniture and other items.

Something similar may be happening again due to AI. Right now, AI models are owned by private companies. But it’s not unreasonable to expect a government to eventually nationalise a mature AI database, or build its own, and deliver it as a public utility. If that happens, the price of using AI would drop to nearly $0. By plugging into the free AI, anyone could access the entirety of medical knowledge, for example, and set up their own clinic. The problem then becomes: how would a patient choose which clinic to visit? If they’re all using the same AI tool, what’s the deciding factor?

The answer would be quality. Does the doctor have a good bedside manner? Does the doctor have good intuition or judgment? Does the doctor keep up with the latest evidence? If patients retain their ability to choose their clinic, the “market” would filter out the cheaters and reward the doctors who can both deploy AI effectively and deliver the highest quality. Doctors who actually knew their stuff could then charge higher rates. This would create a positive incentive for student doctors not to cheat on their examinations and learn what it takes to become a quality doctor, since quality will be the only way to compete in a world with zero-cost AI.

Seen in that light, the AI cheating problem is simply acting as a filtering mechanism that will improve the overall outcome of medicine by forcing the unintelligent and the dishonest out of the doctor pipeline. The easy option of cheating means the real test is not whether you can pass tests, but whether you know the subject. Said differently, AI cheating tools might be giving us better doctors once the dusty old 20^th century university system can rebalance their efforts to reward quality of medical service over empty degrees.

But in the coming world, what’s the point of universities? A person who cheats is only harming themselves. So why cheat at all? Did you ask this question? How about this: why were the universities so easy to fool? Answering that question reveals why universities deserve to fade away.

For a typical degree, there are no consequences for failing a test. None whatsoever. Some career paths will kick a student out if they fail too many times, things like medicine, aviation or law. However, for almost every other degree pathway, the student can fail as many times as they wish, so long as they maintain a minimum standard (very low) and are willing to pay the $4500-$6500 fee.

In other words, the incentive structure is not for students to learn anything. No university gives its graduates exit exams to measure how much they’ve learned since they sat their entrance exams. Rather, the incentive is for students to pass their exams using any means available, so they don’t have to pay to take the course again. In the past, that meant reading the textbooks to learn what the professor believed and repeat it back to him on the test. Now it means using AI to cheat. The university doesn’t care if students learn anything. It will take their money whether they pass or fail.

The modern university is a business that hands out defective degrees right next to legitimate degrees. And it gets away with this because society hasn’t figured out a way to objectively measure the quality of graduates. At the very minimum, universities owe students their money back, and if they don’t pay up the students should sue for breach of contract. Unfortunately, the universities saw this coming a long time ago and set up a liability shield right there in the terms and conditions on every degree: “At the conclusion of this course, students will show a proficiency in...“ Who decides what “proficiency” means? Well, it certainly won’t be the student.

Under this incentive structure, you’d be stupid not to use AI to cheat. If only a “proficiency” must be shown to gain a degree, rather than a demonstrable transfer of knowledge, then the value of that degree is based on whether a graduate can trick their future employer that they are competent. Graduates who cheated quickly figure out that this is a bad strategy. You might be able to fool your engineering professor, but you won’t be able to fool that fully laden 40,000 kg truck passing over your badly built bridge.

The problem is that the bridge-building company can’t simply hire engineering graduates and hope the load calculations can be done by the AI anyway. Just like in medicine, the engineering sector still requires a method to filter out who is competent and who cheated on their exams. Billion-dollar contracts and the lives of real people depend on getting those questions right. If the signals from the universities can’t be trusted, then what signals should the companies look for?

The answer is SAT and IQ tests.

The SAT is a standardised exam used to assess a student’s reading, writing and maths skills, while an IQ test measures cognitive abilities such as reasoning, problem-solving, pattern recognition, memory and verbal acuity. The neat thing about these tests is that they are both reliable and don’t require a university at all. You can test children directly in high school, find the smart ones, put them on a course, mentor them to become high quality professionals and then pair them with super AI.

In the coming world, I really don’t see any room for universities, and I couldn’t be happier. Don’t feel sorry for them. They did this to themselves.

You told us about wanting to become a player rather than a volunteer, right? The note was something about being sick of doing the same things over and over, expecting different results, slowly turning you insane. I get it, believe me. Politics is entertainment, and it is certainly entertaining. But you want to evolve, to mature, and do something that works, that really moves the dial. You’re nodding. Then I’ll be as brief as possible.

I count three maybe four helicopters. Concentrate. First, here’s the good news: this world has rules. The system operates in expected, defined parameters because humans built it, and humans hate arbitrary power. Kill one god and we invent another before sunset. Don’t ask me why, it’s hardwired. All I know is that for humans to live in this world it must at least have the pretence of being ordered. Like I said, this is good news for you.

In a system based on rules, leverage is the language of power. If you don’t have leverage, you have nothing. Listen to me: the people will not just wake up. They will not just do the right thing. People will not “just” anything. If you want something to happen, take fate by the throat and make her submit. Leverage is not posting on Twitter. It’s not attending a rally. It’s not even voting or writing a strongly worded email to your local politician. Those are volunteer activities. You want to be a player? Start thinking in systems. Since the language of power is leverage, players must learn how to speak power.

We’ve noticed that you’re interested in a few Bills presently before Parliament. That’s fine. But I want to ask, why are you interested in them? Why do these Bills bother you so much? When did you hear about them? Who told you about them? Why do these issues worry you now? Why these issues specifically? Think hard, it’s important. I can hear uniforms rustling. They’re outside now.

Of course you don’t know the answers to these questions because you are always reacting to someone else’s agenda. All your efforts are the thin edge of someone else’s wedge. You aren’t in control of your own mind. There’s no agency in your activities. You’re acting like a volunteer. But you want to become a player. A player knows why he does things. A player has a strategy. Volunteers think they have a strategy, but they are just blindly using tactics chosen by those who actually do have a strategy.

One example, then I have to move on. Not that long ago it was unthinkable for homosexuals to be married. Marriage was between a man and woman. But a handful of people decided to spend their life on this single issue, ignoring everything else, until they changed the law to give homosexual marriage the same rights as normal marriage. They didn’t deter. Nothing could distract them. Other issues were of no interest to these determined people. They picked a goal and they worked every day to achieve it. Don’t argue. Memorise it.

Players need a goal. What’s your goal? Choose something concrete. Don’t just say “freedom.” That’s too abstract. By choosing a concrete goal, then you can start working backwards on how to achieve it. The key is to pick one goal and not get distracted. No matter how boring your goal appears to others, or if everyone else moves on to other issues, you must stay focused, listen to me – you must stay focused for as long as it takes. That could be years, decades or long after your own death. Being a player is a 24/7, 365 sort of thing. You’ll have to trust me on this.

Did you hear that? Sounded like metal on metal. Got to be quicker. Ok, once you have a concrete goal, you can move from politics to policy. This is what maturing looks like, and things ironically become much easier when you do this. Remember, the system has rules. When you have a specific policy change in mind, you will automatically be involved in the machinery of state. This is the civil service and, more importantly, the extended civil service (things like media, NGOs, universities, big corporates, etc.). You will be playing as a player in the world of rules. Actually… no, I can’t tell you the next part. I’ve already crossed a line.

Ok, write this down: you’re not unique. Again, that’s a good thing. If you have a concrete goal, chances are other people also want that same goal. Your mission is to gather as many like-minded people as possible into a network and use these volunteers as the thin edge of your own wedge. I need to stand a bit closer to the window so I can hear any footsteps. I’m not ignoring you. This next bit is critical. Only the player is the leader. Everyone who joins the network is a volunteer, and volunteers follow orders. The reason this is so critical is because discipline is the secret ingredient of leverage.

With a concrete goal, a strategy and a network, you can pick a target politician. Tell this politician in no uncertain terms that your network is ready to vote, but only for a politician who furthers your goal. Your leverage is selling thousands of votes to the highest bidder. But their agreement is not enough. A few of your people must be also on the politician’s team as advisors and your agenda must be an explicit part of his platform. Those are the conditions for your support. And if he does not follow through on your goal once elected, your network will make his political existence a living hell.

Don’t threaten the politician. That’s illegal. There are plenty of other thin necks to squeeze. If you want to make a politician do what you say, keep an ear out for any local business acting counter to your goal. When the opportunity arises, send your army of volunteers to protest that business. Make a very, very loud noise. Shine a spotlight and force that company to alter its practices. Use your leverage. Then every other board notices. Every CEO asks the same question: ‘How do we avoid becoming next?’ Now you’re using businesses as your proxies. Shh, I can hear doors opening.

This is the part no one understands. Businesses today fly rainbow flags because they are always searching for the path of least resistance for making the maximum amount of money. Corporates don’t care about “Gay Pride.” But the homosexuals made a lot of noise and caused enough financial pain that now every company loves the gays. In fact, businesses love gays so much that they used their own money to lobby governments to pass anti-discrimination legislation. The maths was simple: the activists made it clear that supporting their gay agenda was the path of least resistance, so businesses did all the political heavy lifting to change the laws. Thin necks = squeezed. Agenda pushed. Job done. There’s another rule, but if I tell you that one...

Once you understand leverage, politics never looks the same again. But none of this will work if your volunteers all think they are players. Their opinions are irrelevant. Their cultures are irrelevant. Their postcodes are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that when you tell them to jump, they turn up outside a local dentist’s clinic and make a loud noise until that business changes its policies to support your goal. And then you say they should vote for this or that politician, there can be no argument. Volunteers must do what they are told or the whole thing falls apart.

I’ve got maybe thirty seconds. The helicopters are circling now. Focus. Focus. If you have enough people, you can get away with anything. When those people have the same goal, they have a uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army. Show them you can move the ratchet towards that goal one step at a time. Show them that you aren’t distracted by what’s cool or trendy. Show them the future will be better if they follow your instructions. Footsteps on the stairs.

Listen, without leverage, you have nothing. These are the rules. Don’t like the rules? Then stay in wonderland as a volunteer. But don’t cry when you get the same dismal results.

Time’s up. They’re in the hallway. I need an answer. What will it be? Player or volunteer?

Pop quiz: are the people who make movies your friends or enemies?

Most of you would answer this correctly if it were asked in a neutral environment, like a conference room. You understand that Hollywood is run by enemies who are happy to finance movies they know will bomb terribly, so long as they can be used to control a narrative. But, apparently, many of you still fail the test every time it appears in the wild.

The test I’m talking about is the movie Citizen Vigilante. You’ve no doubt heard of it. The movie was made by a garden-variety filmmaker, no one special. It’s about a (white) man who goes around punishing and sometimes killing immigrants who have broken the law. The movie was banned in Germany but was then picked up by Elon Musk, who suggested it was a timely and important story.

But if you agreed with Musk, you failed the test. Propaganda doesn’t stop being propaganda just because you like it. Even if you know the propaganda and how it works, it will still affect you if you want it to. That’s why you must be extremely careful when consuming any media, especially the things that look like they’re “for you,” because they certainly are. Just not in the way you expect.

I could analyse this dynamic from many angles because propaganda is a topic I know well. But in the interest of limited column inches and your precious time, I’ll focus on one aspect: how movies become political containment.

Containment has a distinct and consistent meaning, which is simply: those in power give the appearance of handing the people what they want in order to stay in power. This concept is not difficult, confusing or controversial. Any modern regime is maintained less by brute force than by an unrelenting, enormously sophisticated and massively effective campaign to contain political and cultural activity within narrow boundaries.

The most memorable example of containment was Constantine’s use of Christianity as a political tool to unite Rome, when that new religion was still operating as a subversive force. Constantine’s actions neatly defused Christianity’s subversive message while also strengthening Rome by merging the church with state power. Containment doesn’t need to be big and flashy. Most of the time, it appears as false binaries: Labour or National (but don’t ask if democracy is a good system).

In 20XX, containment is mostly in the rhetorical/media messaging component of what is a wider counter-insurgency operation conducted by the global regime. For the last 100 years or so, the overall strategy of those in power has been focused on one goal: stop Europeans from coalescing. In pursuit of this goal, the current regime fought the largest and bloodiest war in human history, and it hasn’t slowed down since 1945.

In fact, the war on European political independence only shifted up a few levels. Modern warfare is not waged with conventional weapons, but rather through “spin,” which is to say, through the manipulation of media. Modern warfare is best understood as doing war things but not calling them war. What most people consider “war” is anything that goes “boom.” But the real warfare is opening your borders, undermining your culture and brainwashing your children into thinking they’re the bad guys.

So, to recap, there is an overt (meaning, not hidden) containment operation by the global regime to ensure that European people cannot coalesce politically. All policies – from immigration to climate change, transgenderism to digital IDs, central banks to offshoring jobs – are the result of that single goal. This containment is well-funded and taken seriously by everyone involved. None of this is hypothetical. It is all written down in government white papers and is part of countless NGO strategies.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking, “Well, isn’t it good then that a movie explicitly shows a European man pushing back against this horrible agenda?” And you’d assume this was a decent point.

But let’s test your Media Literacy 101.

When you watch a movie, does your brain know it’s not real? Careful now. I realise we tell ourselves that movies are fake. But have you ever quoted a movie line in the middle of a conversation and had the other person look at you funny? Have you ever had bacon and eggs for breakfast? Take your phone out and scroll through photos of yourself. How many times are you shown leaning on something, like a wall or a doorframe?

That last example is interesting. Did you know that Soviet intelligence during the Cold War generally knew when a person was an American because Americans were always leaning on things? Other cultures (before globalisation) didn’t lean on things. Why were Americans always leaning on things? Because that’s what movie stars like James Dean or Jimmy Stewart did, and people tend to unconsciously copy what they see. Why do we copy the mannerisms of fake movie stars? Because our brains can’t tell the difference.

One of the key discoveries in 20th-century psychology was that images on a screen are treated by the brain as real, lived experiences. That’s why you feel fear when the monster appears, or a tingle when a sex scene starts. Your forebrain knows it’s not real, but your hindbrain is filing it away as “a real memory.” Try as you like, the forebrain cannot control the hindbrain. And the regime knows this.

As such, you live in the most propagandised society in history. You’ve seen more kids get bullied on TV than in real life, watched more weddings than you’ve attended, mourned over more characters than people, seen more people be killed than the best soldier and had more relationship flings than Casanova. Your mind recorded it all as real. Propaganda erases real memory by creating false memories.

In the movie The Matrix, part of the training for the main character, Neo, involves learning to fight. But he never goes to the gym or the dojo. Instead, he lies in a chair, plugged into a computer program that downloads kung fu, karate and drunken boxing directly into his brain. He “learns” all these fighting arts without needing to physically practice them. Since all lessons the body learns are stored in the brain anyway, the Matrix software bypasses the body and goes straight to the brain. That’s what movies are doing to your brain. You learn how to work, how to want, how to desire, how to hate, how to love, without ever needing to physically act out any of these experiences. They are downloaded directly into your brain.

This is what the German government missed when it decided to ban Citizen Vigilante. The government knows the political temperature in Europe is rising, especially in Germany. Normal Europeans – brainwashed as they are – have started to notice they are being replaced by generally unassimilable and violent immigrants. Because of this, young male Europeans are beginning to see themselves as a group. They are starting to coalesce. Obviously, the corrupt German government doesn’t want this to happen.

The logic behind banning Citizen Vigilante was the rational fear that European men might enjoy a film that taps into their deep, unspoken desire to fight back against the immigrant invaders. They don’t want a young European male on the screen buying a gun and a cool trench coat to deal with the problem personally.

But while the German government worries that viewers will think, “That’s what I want to do,” containment propaganda means their brains will actually think, “That’s what I’ve already done.” The forebrain watches a movie, but the hindbrain absorbs a fake memory. When you watch a character who looks like you on the screen fight back against immigrants, your brain thinks “something has been done.” Therefore, you don’t need to do anything. That’s the containment.

Sure, there might be a few copycats who decide to act out what they see. After all, as with non-Americans leaning on things, the main purpose of propaganda is to get you to do something. But almost always, that instruction is to do nothing. To accept, to submit. Propaganda doesn’t care what you believe so long as you do it from behind a screen, sitting on a chair, like Neo. That’s why movies like this are extremely effective containment propaganda. If your brain thinks something has been done about violent immigrants, then the body does nothing. And that’s the entire point.

They’ve been at war with your mind longer than you’ve been alive.

It was about this time, 11 years ago, when I was in London, news emerged about foreign men and rape gangs across the UK. The horror story of Rotherham was on all the front pages, and I remember thinking, surely this can’t go on. Surely something must be done.

Yet nothing has been done. In fact, it is getting worse because the importation of foreign men has not slowed down, men who have no kinship with the young women in the societies they now call home. Moreover, nothing can be done because the modern police have no idea how such men think about women on a fundamental psychological level. They think they do, but they don’t.

The police are trained to believe that all men are alike, no matter where they come from. They have forgotten that by the time the police are called to any disturbance involving a British or Kiwi man, the system has already done 90% of the work to control that man’s behaviour. Police are only summoned when one of these domesticated men loses his mind. The police force can afford to be proportionately small and light-touch in both New Zealand and the UK precisely because native British and Kiwi men have been broken like horses to largely police themselves.

This domestication begins from an early age when every boy is shamed for being a boy. Each natural boyish impulse is immediately guardrailed with rules, punishments and incentives the moment it manifests. He is told to conform to the standards set by older men and women, ostensibly in the interests of social stability. And if you can carrot-and-stick a young boy for long enough, he eventually loses the fire and willingly puts on the tie (a symbol of castration) before heading to the office cubicle. You would be shocked by how much of a state’s resources go into controlling and redirecting the masculine energy of its 15–30-year-old young men.

But what happens when the government imports millions of foreign men who have skipped these domestication pressures? What happens when those foreigners come from societies with disgusting cultural norms and extremely alien views about women? What should the police do with such people if the level of self-policing they have been trained to expect does not exist among these foreign men? Well, picture wolves and sheep. Picture Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale or Oldham.

The UK Grooming Gang Inquiry showed that the procedures of domestication failed on these foreign men. It revealed that these systems were built to domesticate a certain kind of male: the Anglo, or more broadly, the European. They were not set up to break the will of males from other races and cultures. The mistake of these systems was to treat all males as the same, in the name of equality and anti-racism. Despite daily evidence that not all men are the same, the system has refused to adapt by applying varying levels of domestication pressure to the different groups of men who now live in our society. The result was horror for thousands of young women.

The correct conclusion of the Inquiry is that our normal systems no longer work inside a multicultural society, and they have not worked for a very long time. The inadequacy and rust are everywhere visible. Young people are not drinking alcohol anymore, restaurants and clubs are failing, and the kids prefer to stay home with Netflix rather than hang out in public spaces. Maybe it’s the economy. But there’s a good chance these are lagging indicators of young people feeling unsafe and disconnected due to the higher number of undomesticated men milling around. The police can’t protect everyone, so the young people are responding on their own by changing how they act.

For example, in Paris, London, Berlin and even Auckland, young women are beginning to realise why other countries encourage their women to cover up. It’s not to control the women. Those mechanisms were put in place by men to contain men, not women. Obviously, burqas and hijabs oppress women; I’m not arguing with that. But oppressing women is not the primary purpose of these clothing options. Women covering up is a sign that the domestication of men in that society is either unsophisticated or inadequate. If the men can’t be controlled, then the women will not be free.

I doubt this has much to do with Islam. After all, about 15,000 Bosnian Muslims live in the UK, and no (reported) rapes of British girls came from that community. A lack of impulse control doesn’t just occur in pre-civilised cultures. Recall the “wilding“ incidents in New York among black American males. Also, many women have stories of ex-boyfriends becoming stalkers or acting creepy shortly after a break-up. Even in rural Europe up until WWII, women covered their bodies as a matter of course. Some places more and some places less, but they all covered up. The reason they were required to do so was to protect them from being raped. That isn’t a joke or a rationalisation.

The reality is that unless overwhelming control, laws and social shaming are brought to bear, men will pursue women for sex. In places lacking such laws and norms, the men are largely uneducated if not totally illiterate, and there is little in the way of strong police authority. Men from these societies are aggressive and hormonal. If a woman walks down the street in little clothing, she’ll be assaulted because the men lack impulse control. In the same way that British and Kiwi men don’t know what it’s like to be really hungry, we also don’t know what it’s like to be really horny. We have many pressure-release valves and effective, persistent domestication procedures. Other places do not.

The leaders of these backward countries understand that other men have no impulse control. However, they lack the resources and intelligence to develop effective domestication procedures. The only power they have is to require women to cover up. From their perspective, the danger isn’t that a woman’s sexuality is so alluring that it must be contained. Rather, body coverings are an acknowledgement that undomesticated men can be incredibly impulsive, so it helps if women participate in their own safety since the police and state will be impotent.

The concern over male behaviour is innate to males everywhere. How else can expressions like “dressing modestly” be explained? Or even “dressing provocatively?” And where did the “she was asking for it” defence of rape cases come from? All these expressions accept the implied but universally understood notion that without external forces or domestication, most men can’t control their sexual impulses.

True, sex shaming often is targeted at women rather than men. This just reinforces my point because it reflects the common perception that women can control sexuality by covering up. It also assumes men can’t control their impulses, so how could he be blamed for something he cannot control? Of course this is unfair, and feminists are correct to fight it. But we are asking what happens when millions of men from ancient cultures are imported into a society that operates with an ideology that claims it would be “racist” to pressure these men with harsher domestication procedures than those used on the native men.

If, as a male, you are right now controlling your sexual instincts, understand that this is because you were born in a country where the laws against your male impulses are quickly felt at the round edge of a police baton. You were raised in an environment that taught you to control your sexual impulses. But those sexual impulses have not disappeared. They were channelled into consumerism. Even in enlightened New Zealand, sex still sells. Is there a single product that hasn’t been sold with an attractive woman next to it? Sex sells cars, boats and even airline seats. Companies do this because, although men are trained not to objectify women, their natural instinctive impulse is to look at a scantily clad woman. We are biologically wired to do this.

Don’t believe me? It’s Friday night. Go to any busy city street and watch the eyes of any man on the street when an attractive woman passes by. I’m not suggesting those men are thinking of raping the woman. They probably aren’t thinking of sex at all. But they watch the girl because they can’t help it. Even when they’re talking on the phone, they don’t even pause. Their eyes still move.

Here’s the thing. If there are a hundred men on that street, it only takes one to lack impulse control to make the entire city unsafe for all women. Absent cultural programming and the apprehension of the blunt-force application of the law, the number of men who lack sexual impulse control will quickly exceed the threshold beyond which it is safe for women to dress how they wish. Try some mathematics instead. When X% of a male population misbehaves, then it isn’t safe for any woman on any street because there is a high likelihood that one of those X% would be on any given street at any given time. My contention is that X is probably a single-digit number. Perhaps even 0.X%.

Women feeling compelled to cover up on the train is a proximate result of the same distal failure that led to the rape gangs in UK towns. The system is not prepared for the world it has created. Covering up, avoiding public spaces or not drinking alcohol is a straightforward reaction by women based on a practical necessity to maintain social order, absent a strong police force and effective domestication procedures to control the young foreign men. In an unsafe environment, you do what you can to survive.

Said differently, since there is no sign that multiculturalism will be reversed, like it or not, the burqa or its equivalent is coming to a town near you. Pick any colour you want, so long as it’s black.

One burned bus. One measly, burned-out bus… That was the extent of the outrage in Ireland last week after an African invader almost beheaded an Irish man in Belfast.

Look, I’ll be the first to say that burning public transport to protest government policy is a non-starter. You must understand that your anger is their agenda. The regime wants you to protest because no matter what you’re angry about, someone, somewhere is hoping for the chance to twist that anger into support for their pet policy.

The security state probably fainted in joy when it saw the burned-out bus. Perfect evidence to justify stronger security laws. And the rest of the UK government smiled when its domesticated “anti-racist” counter-protesters came out in support of migrants. That was perfect evidence to justify opening the borders even wider. To protest is to willingly become the thin edge of someone else’s wedge. Don’t do it.

You can’t win by pressing the buttons they give you. The electrical signals go nowhere. Your protests are energy sinks. Your social media posts are data for advertising. Your votes are just paper. If these activities changed anything, would they let us do them? It should take two seconds to answer that.

If you’re sick of bad things happening every other day and want to see real change for the better, then I’d like to introduce you to a button that works. The regime has convinced you that this button no longer exists. But this button is as fresh as the day it was created, and all the wires on it are still directly connected to power. It’s a beautiful button, with a shade of purple. I call this the Fix Everything Instantly button.

The great thing about this button is that you can press it any time you want. All the misery, managed decline, lying interests, pointless suffering, bureaucratic malaise, ethnic hatred, systemic fraud, empty culture, purposeful deracination and other cancers of the modern regime will disappear the moment you press the button.

What is the Fix Everything Instantly button?

Very simply, it is the “Elect A King” button. Notice I didn’t say “Appoint A King.” Only god can appoint a king, and no matter what the farmers of men have told you, the people are not god. Vox populi, vox dei was always a cynical lie. However, the people can elect a king because an alliance with a king is the only way to defeat an oligarchy. Defeating an oligarchy requires integrating monarchical and democratic power; only democracy can supply the energy, and only monarchy can supply the direction. That’s why the oligarchy works so hard to stop us from pressing the button.

Electing a king turns the tables on the oligarchical regime by using its sacred process (voting) against itself. After the button is pressed, all that’s needed is one final election where the people vote for the best possible king, and then everyone can stop worrying about politics. I’m sure you’re sick of politics. I know I am. Imagine how good it would feel to never think about politics ever again! Think how much happier you’d be.

At this point, your brain is no doubt sending signals of discomfort about the button. After all, one of the most successful propaganda tricks of our time is that a king is a man with “too much power.” By contrast, modern democracies ruled by oligarchs are much “fairer” because the power is “distributed” among a bunch of mini-kings instead. But it’s worth pointing out that real kings had far less power than the convoluted oligarchical structure we live under now.

This regime taught us all from birth that monarchy is the most evil of evil things. But try to reach deep inside your brain, down to where the “dirty” bits haven’t been washed out by the propaganda. Those bits of your brain aren’t “dirty”; they are the parts that are still working. I want to speak to these parts of your brain.

Think about your favourite restaurant. Why do you like it so much? Is it the décor, the food or the service staff? It’s probably all these things, right? Well, I’d like to suggest that the true reason you like this restaurant so much is because it works. And the reason it works is that it is a monarchy. One person, the chef de cuisine, runs the entire restaurant. Every decision goes through a single point. The restaurant works because it pressed the Fix Everything Instantly button.

Now, consider if that same restaurant was operated by the Department of Eating Dinner.

How do you think the food would taste? Imagine ordering a medium-rare steak over a phone line accessible only between 10 am and 3 pm. The kitchen wouldn’t be in the back; it would be in China. You want a romantic table by the window, but the algorithm finds a spot for you under the stairs since it’s “quieter.” And what would the gravy taste like if it were organised by a committee? The mind truly boggles.

The lesson here is that everything in this world that works is a monarchy, and everything that doesn’t work is a bureaucracy run by an oligarchy. Monarchy works because it is fundamentally an aesthetic institution. The king is the sovereign over his property. Sovereignty means there is no power above the king. If the king doesn’t like how the gravy tastes at his restaurant, then the gravy gets changed. If the king wants tomato sauce to replace gravy, then tomato sauce it is. If you don’t like tomato sauce, then you are always free to move to a different monarchy where the king likes gravy.

Similarly, if the king on whose property you reside – say, in Belfast – prefers having a bunch of barbaric Africans running around beheading people, then that’s the king’s choice. I don’t know why any king would want that, but it’s his property, not yours. If you don’t like barbaric Africans running around beheading people, then you are welcome to move to the property of a king with a different aesthetic. Far from being enslaved, the beauty of pressing the button is that it gives you options. It makes you more free.

The button’s power is simply the restoration of strong property rights. The button does not reset or nullify any existing deeds or claims of ownership. It does not steal anything. Any claim of private property is a claim of political sovereignty. All legitimate property is private. If you own the title to a piece of property, then pressing the button will formalise that ownership. Pressing the button makes you the absolute ruler of your own property. If you wish to sell the property, go ahead. If you wish to build a skyscraper, you might have to negotiate for resources from other properties, but it’s technically possible.

Strong property rights are the shortest way to Fixing Everything Instantly. Even a casual understanding of the tragedy of the Commons proves this point. That’s why the button works. Anyone attacking the idea of private property should be considered an enemy. They are trying to hurt you.

That’s why anything morally permissible to do to a robber is morally permissible to do to a socialist. A socialist who wants to violently seize your property is not your “political opponent”. He is a thief. Treat him accordingly. If someone says, “I believe your property is actually my property. Let’s debate about it,” the proper response isn’t to engage in debate. It is to recognise that this person is a threat. The only way to be safe from evil people like this is to press the button.

Ireland’s problem is the same as New Zealand’s problem, which is the same as America’s problem and Australia’s problem. In fact, there is only one problem in the world today: kinglessness. Whenever you see any problem with governance – from a free-range African lunatic nearly beheading people and a new climate change scam, to a preteen sex-change clinic and an ugly building – the ultimate cause is always the same: the incomplete application of Chapter IX of the Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius.

But as Nietzsche said, the age of the kings is gone because their subjects are no longer worthy of them. You can’t just press the button and remain a degenerate, uncaring, mediocre piece of human biomass. You must become worthy of having a king. You have to want to be the kind of person a king would want to protect. Pressing the button is a dialogue. You get safety and a happy life without politics. The king gets a people he wants to govern well. It’s a beautiful system – and it works.

Do you want to Fix Everything Instantly? Or do you like living in a world where a random daylight beheading is normal? The choice is yours. It’s always been yours. As Thomas Carlyle said, “It is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they.”

So, will you press the button? It’s right there.

It’s always fun to uncover the hidden fences or gates used by the farmers of men to keep us all safe, productive and not rioting.

For example, you’ve no doubt heard that only three things in life are guaranteed: death, taxes and that teenagers will always rebel. The only way to cope with these horrors is to forget about them so you can pretend they don’t exist and can’t hurt you.

Taxes were, for most of history, impossible to forget about. They were a consistent character across all levels of society, year-round. Today, modern life is set up so that you don’t have to think about taxes at all. A lot of political energy goes into this. Each of us is taxed multiple times each day, but it doesn’t feel like we are taxed.

Last week, between filling out screeds of expenses forms and talking to my accountant, I realised exactly why the system does not want us to think about taxes. Few things in life are as demonically enraging as seeing a third of your work effort disappear into the hands of the state. If I also had to see the greedy hands of a tax collector snatch a chunk of my pay each time an invoice was paid, I’d probably go ballistic.

I understand why taxes are necessary. While I might “own” my house, I don’t own the public roads that lead to my house. If I use those roads for commerce (buying or selling), then it’s only fair that I pay the state for the privilege. Likewise, my business must pay taxes because it’s the government’s responsibility to teach people how to read so they can understand the advertisements I use to sell my goods and services.

But I’m also not stupid. The Treasury does not sit down and calculate how much money it needs each year and then set the tax rate to generate that revenue. The Treasury pitches for a tax rate as high as it can get away with and then thinks about how to spend your money on roads and all the other dumb stuff governments like to build. If the Treasury thought it could get away with a 50% or 99% tax rate, it would do so. The tax rate is almost entirely decoupled from the fiscal planning.

Most governments have settled on a tax rate of about 30%. Why this percentage? The answer is complicated, but it boils down to being just high enough that people don’t riot. Which sounds weird because modern people are rather docile.

It’s not weird. Rioting over taxes is the core fear for every government. Technology progresses, but humans don’t. The homo sapiens walking along the street are the same animals that not too long ago used to bring their children to watch a public execution. We’re much more domesticated today. But if people miss a few meals in a row, you’ll see how wild things can get. If you had to file your taxes last month, then you know what I mean. It’s guttural, isn’t it? Vengeance, revenge, malice, hatred. Evil, but tasty.

The system knows what humans are, and the farmers of men know their history. David F. Burg’s encyclopaedic survey of tax rebellions found that over the last 4300 years of human civilisation, taxes were a major factor in about 400 wars, rebellions, uprisings and revolts (not counting the thousands of local uprisings that never entered the historical record). Taxes have helped build civilisation, but tax collecting has often been the end of governments.

The reason the farmers of men get nervous about taxation is that it’s the only real time when the abstract entity of the “state” becomes personal. That’s why tax collecting and tax avoidance are the world’s longest-running arms race. For millennia, farmers have hidden crops from assessors. Merchants have smuggled goods past customs officers. Villagers have burned tax records. Crowds have lynched revenue officials. Entire empires have been shaken by disputes over who pays, how much they pay and who has the right to collect.

Ancient Egypt experienced revolts against tax demands. Imperial China had to deal repeatedly with peasant uprisings over land taxes and grain levies. The Roman Empire struggled to break tax resistance in its far-flung provinces. Medieval Europe was riven by a flowing succession of anti-tax rebellions. The Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, Bourbon France and every European colony all confronted unrest fuelled by tax grievances. Even the founding myth of America was a revolt against taxes.

Tax collectors are among the most hated figures in history because taxation requires a real person to count, inspect, measure, assess and demand payment. In pre-modern states, rulers often outsourced tax collection to “tax farmers” who paid the ruler a fixed sum and then took a slice from the top. In France, tax farmers were seen as a defining feature of the ancien regime, symbolising corruption, privilege and exploitation.

By the late eighteenth century, the French monarchy needed revenue, but the clergy and nobility enjoyed exemptions while the Third Estate (that’s us!) bore most of the burden. A major 2026 NBER study on the French Revolution found that areas subject to heavier taxes experienced more riots before 1789 and lodged more complaints against taxation. Areas on the high-tax side of historical tax borders experienced significantly greater unrest than neighbouring low-tax areas. These taxes helped fuel the later violence.

The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was another example of what happens when the arms race between tax collection and tax avoidance spins out of control.

The king imposed a poll tax to finance his military campaigns in France. Poll taxes were hated because they fell on individuals rather than property. England was already struggling with labour shortages, wage controls and social tensions following the Black Death. Soon enough, angry rebels marched on London and started executing officials associated with the tax. They quickly forced the young King Richard II into negotiations, and although the revolt was eventually crushed, the poll tax was never levied again.

Taxes create social tension like a pressure cooker, just waiting to explode. People generally tolerate high taxes if they believe the burden is shared, but they will be far less tolerant of taxes if elites appear exempt. Similarly, taxes imposed by distant governments are often seen differently from taxes imposed by local institutions. Intrusive inspections, confiscations, corruption and inconsistent enforcement also provoke more anger than the tax itself. Anger at taxes can also turn particularly incendiary after harvest failures, inflation, recession or famine.

We still have taxes, but it’s interesting to ask why uprisings and revolts don’t seem to happen anymore. While there’s still a lot of anger around, it never seems to be directed at tax collecting. Why not?

Maybe the reason is that our economies have become so robust and layered with redundancies and pressure valves that wars, inflation, crop failures, political crises or recessions can’t ever coalesce into a single major flashpoint. The pressure cooker of taxes never really rises to explosive levels. Or perhaps the state’s control over the media makes it easy to channel our pressure-cooker grievances into faux outrages. We are given our 15 minutes of hate each day to release the pressure.

But while I was doing my taxes this year as a contractor, I started to see how PAYE might be one of the greatest inventions of social control ever developed. Pay As You Earn (PAYE) is the taxman’s version of taking a slice of the cake before it reaches your plate.

This invention is genius because humans are simple creatures. If we can’t see something, it no longer exists. Object permanence is a myth. If you stop thinking about that time your best friend in high school stole your lunch, you can trick yourself into believing you’ve forgiven your friend. But the truth is that 99% of forgiveness is just forgetting. Out of sight is out of mind.

Given the history of tax collection, PAYE allowed the state to generate its beloved tax revenue more efficiently while also serving as a silent release valve for the angry tension of tax collection. After all, if we don’t see someone taking our taxes, there’s nothing for us to get angry about. No anger, no uprisings. PAYE is best understood as a form of state control. If you run the numbers, I suspect PAYE does more to reduce overall violence in society than any other institution, including the police.

I love finding these hidden layers of social control. Most people simply have no idea about how much energy and effort the regime spends on keeping the pressure cooker of public grievances from exploding into violence. It’s like stumbling onto a strange fence or finding a camouflaged gate that you didn’t know was there.

And each discovery of unknown fences and gates just reinforces that we live on a farm. What you do with that information is totally up to you.

It seems darkly ironic that a person like Donald Trump will be the President of the United States just as the country marks its 250^th year of independence.

Trump is the quintessential American. He’s not corrupt – not exactly. He’s just doing what every American does when they get a sniff of power. There is no honour amongst criminals, and America was founded by political and religious criminals. Despite what you have heard, every one of the “Founding Fathers” would be wildly happy with the present state of the country 250 years after they illegally broke from the British Empire.

The American Revolution changed everything in this world. Sure, you can’t get the American Revolution without the English Glorious Revolution, and you can’t get the Glorious Revolution without the English Reformation. Once you undermine the “divine right” part of monarchy, it’s inevitable that you’ll see the “of kings” part as no longer necessary either.

In other words, the American Revolution was a criminal left-wing project from the start. Once people start thinking they can interpret god’s words for themselves, they quickly believe they can rule themselves as well. After all, the king is over there, way across the Atlantic. If the king is just a man, then why can’t I be a king? The past is a foreign country, and so are we. We deserve to be kings, and by our example, so too will follow the world!

Today, the world has followed the Americans, and we have been told to admire the men who fought so hard for “freedom” against tyranny. But Peter Oliver was there in 1776. He saw it all. And as a Tory judge based in Massachusetts, he has a unique vantage point that makes his write-up an important primary source for what really happened.

In his short but excellent book, Origin And Progress Of The American Rebellion, written in 1781 (but not published properly until 1961), Oliver says the idea that the Americans were acting for liberty or constitutional principle is a lie. In fact, they were just a bunch of low-life smugglers whose criminal interests were being threatened by Britain’s enforcement of trade laws after 1763. The whole revolution was a sham, said Oliver.

Oliver says the Boston Tea Party was not about the tea being too expensive because of tariffs. It was because the British Tea Act allowed the East India Trading Company to sell tea without a tariff, making it cheaper than the smugglers could sell it for.

These American smugglers had amassed great wealth by evading the trade laws, and the good and loyal people in the colony were losing their businesses because of the undercut prices. During its wars with France, Britain often looked the other way because overall trade with America helped sustain its empire, which Oliver says led to the smugglers believing their activities were a right. Eventually, the King decided to clean up the American economy.

Guess who didn’t like the changes?

You’ve probably heard of Samuel Adams. He’s one of those Founding Fathers we’re expected to admire. Here’s how Wikipedia describes Adams:

“Samuel Adams was an American statesman, political philosopher, and a Founding Father. He was a politician in colonial Massachusetts, a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents and one of the architects of the principles of American republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States.”

“The principles of American republicanism!” Indeed. We are still enjoying the fruits of these “principles” today. If you smell something fishy about Wikipedia’s suspiciously gushing picture of Adams, congratulations, your brain isn’t broken. Let’s compare that to Oliver’s description of perhaps the most important figure in early American history:

“I shall next give you a Sketch of some of Mr. Samuel Adam’s Features; & I do not know how to delineate them stronger, than by the Observation made by a celebrated Painter in America, ‘That if he wished to draw the Picture of the Devil, that he would get Sam Adams to sit for him:’ & indeed, a very ordinary Physiognomist would, at a transient View of his Countenance, develop the Malignity of his Heart...He was so thorough a Machiavilim, that he divested himself of every worthy Principle, & would stick at no Crime to accomplish his Ends.”

Hmm, quelle difference! Wikipedia’s Adams sounds like a great guy who would surely use all the correct legal and political channels to calmly push back against Britain’s new laws. Of course he didn’t. Adams was a horrible man who would “stick at no Crime to accomplish his Ends.”

For example, Oliver recites what happened in 1765 when Adams and his criminal crew whipped up “the people” to put “political pressure” on a local magistrate:

“In a short Time after, the Mob plundered Mr Hutchinson’s House of its full Contents, destroyed his Papers, unroofed his House, & sought his & his Children’s Lives, which were saved by Flight. One of the Rioters declared, the next morning, that the first Places which they looked into were the Beds, in Order to murder the Children.”

I must remind you that these are the people we have been told to admire as history’s torchbearers of freedom and light. Without the righteous, kind-hearted folk like Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin (Oliver has some insights into this filthy character as well), the world would still be in the grip of the worst evil imaginable: monarchy. Targeting children? Perfectly acceptable for such a grand project.

Oliver will have none of this nonsense. The American revolutionaries were the furthest thing from admirable, and if there were any reasonable arguments for a break with Britain, then those arguments should stand on merit. Instead, the revolutionaries resorted to vicious terrorism, constant duplicity, rampant mendacity, systemic corruption and outright fraud.

The American Revolution was basically a criminal outrage of the mob, led by leaders who were either unscrupulous, deluded – or both. You have been lied to for a long time.

Speaking of lies, we should briefly talk about the phrase “no taxation without representation.” No doubt you’ve heard it before. The American revolutionaries used this phrase to argue against being taxed without having their own elected representatives in the British Parliament. That sounds reasonable, right?

Well, again, this is a distortion of America in the mid-1770s.

Aside from trying to clean up the mafia-like smugglers in America, a key reason the British Parliament introduced laws to increase taxes was to help defray the costs incurred by its military in protecting the vulnerable colonies.

As mentioned above, the British weren’t the only ones trying to conquer America. The French (and Spanish) were hot on their heels and had already taken large chunks of Canada and the American continent. The French and British fought open warfare many times in the 1700s, but they also fought small-scale guerrilla warfare in the colonies as well. The French were especially good at recruiting the Indian tribes to target and kill American settlers along the frontier. In mid-1754, a Virginia military unit under the command of the 22-year-old George Washington had had enough of this violence and ambushed a French contingent near the headwaters of the Ohio River.

According to Oliver, the French governor of Quebec was proudly displaying hundreds of American settlers’ scalps in his city office, and used to laugh with guests at the macabre display. France was determined to collapse the colonies.

These tit -for-tat killings soon escalated and became such a problem that the British military authorised a major campaign of constructing forts along the American frontier. From these positions of strength, British troops could campaign to push the French and Indians away from the settler towns. These extremely expensive operations lasted for years, but the campaign was extended until the job was done.

Eventually, the French and Indian War in America became the Seven Years’ War in Europe, Asia and Africa. It was this war that determined that English, rather than French, would be the global language. Once that war was over, the British King felt justified in asking the settler colonies (not just the Americans, by the way) to help contribute financially to their own defence.

Yet the American settlers refused. They even invented the phrase “no taxation without representation” to frame the new taxes as a tyrannical imposition when, in reality, the taxes were a reasonable request to contribute financially to their own safety. The Americans knew they were lying at the time. They were not duped. They chose to cut themselves from Britain. They chose to be immoral smugglers. They chose to use terrorism and war to further their criminal enterprise. And they did all this before America was even a sovereign country.

Lies, lies, lies. A full 250 years of lies. The lesson of the American Revolution is that not only can evil win, it will win so completely that everyone will believe it was good.

While there is no such thing as a neutral primary source, and history is written by the victors, I am thankful for eyewitness accounts like Peter Oliver’s. What’s cool about these short books is that they’re all available online. Go read them yourself.

You might find some other lies hiding in plain sight.

Bishop Brian Tamaki is one of the only people in politics who clearly feels he has a right to rule. His main issue is that society has rejected the Christian god and fallen into nihilism. Tamaki wants to reverse this.

Thankfully, he’s getting a bit long in the tooth, so his chances of gaining any real power are slim. But his analysis of society, along with his panacea to fix it, seems to be common, all too common, amongst the young and power-hungry. I hear many people say a return to Christianity is the only way to solve our nihilism and ennui.

But if life is not absurd, if life has any meaning at all, why would you want to go back? If something is broken, then it broke because it wasn’t strong.

More importantly, why would you let your political enemies control the idea of progress? I want to go forward while looking forward, not forward while looking backwards. After all, the future is demonstrably more important than the past.

Tamaki is certainly correct that Christianity has declined. For example, Christians no longer burn people like me. If you go back 500 years, Thomas More was immolating people for reading the Bible in English because he said that was giving in to the Lutheran heresy of reading the Bible in a vernacular language. Burning people for reading the Bible in English is very far from atheism but is anything like that happening in Christian countries today? No. If this isn’t nihilism, I don’t know what is.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase “god is dead” reflects this slow decline. It is a message that the Christian belief has become unworthy of us now. Ultimately, that’s good news for Nietzsche because he sees Christianity as a life-denying long process of exhaustion that prevents future revaluations of values. Nietzsche wasn’t interested in undermining the foundations of Christian morality because the actual content of Christianity is already self-undermining. In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the madman who proclaims “god is dead” is talking to a bunch of atheists in the marketplace. They already don’t believe: “As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.”

Tamaki’s mistake is to think nihilism is a consequence of the death of God. But nihilism comes from Christianity. This is a religion that puts all the worth of our life in a world beyond, and calls this world sin-cursed, a fallen world, which is all going to be burned away after the day of judgment. All our vainglory, all our pursuits, all our desires, selfish ambitions or pleasures, or even just fulfilling our base impulses, that’s all sinful. Everything human beings do in some sense is sinful. We’re originally sinful.

For Nietzsche, Christianity is otherworldism. It’s a form of valuation that undermines the very act of valuing itself. It’s the will aiming at something which undermines willing in the here and now. The Christian ideal orients itself to this world beyond. All the ends at which our will is directed in this life take place in another world which is inaccessible to us while we’re alive. As such, the good life becomes impossible in this world, and the true world is only accessible after death.

Nietzsche calls Christianity a kind of medicinal poison that is useful for humans at a certain time and place, such as for the Roman slaves. In the first century, there was an immense longing among the Roman proletariat for their miserable lives to end. Christianity was readily adopted because it made existence tolerable for the slaves by preserving their life while also weakening and exhausting it. Christianity harnesses despair with its celebration of martyrdom, or the self-torture and slow death of the ascetic monk.

The ascetic monk got the thumbs up from Nietzsche for showing great courage in self-overcoming. The monk’s ability to transcend his base animal impulses signals a way forward for nature making a leap in the form of mankind. The monk expresses a will to nothingness, but at least it’s still a will. At least it’s still a desire to negate something. Because the monk’s self-overcoming is wrapped up in the nihilism of Christianity’s otherworldness, his strength of character is ultimately a dead end for humankind. The Christian is Nietzsche’s vision of the last man. For the rest of the us, however, Nietzsche says Christianity can only turn us into a domesticated, pathetic and guilt-ridden mankind that is unable to will at all. We become a series of “great ant organisations,” instrumentalised individuals that are machines of production and consumption.

Tamaki sees the same thing, but I think his blame is heading in the wrong direction. Christianity can be a medicinal poison, but it’s still a poison. It’s not good to take poison. If nihilism is rampant, then that’s just proof Christianity has won.

To the extent that Nietzsche respected Christianity, he was pro-Catholic Church as it appeared in the Renaissance era. He wished that Cesare Borgia should become pope. He says when the popes were fathering illegitimate children, selling indulgences, raising armies, assassinating each other, at that time, the values of paganism sat on the throne of Christianity. He says life sat on the throne. Whatever you want to say about the Catholics back then, they were alive. They had ambitions. They had passions. They were not like Jesus. Then the Protestant Reformation pulled humanity back down into the crab bucket.

Tamaki often complains that the “woke” see the world as a battleground between oppressed and oppressor. Nietzsche thinks this, too. Except he says the slave morality of Christianity driven by a form of envy is the real origin of “woke.” Envy is like an explosive fuel that threatens to blow up society. So, to get out of this bind, Christianity performs a neat trick by convincing the “oppressed” to take imaginary revenge on their “oppressors” at the day of judgment. Accept your position, feel envious, but do nothing. Just wait.

Yet people are people, and people need something to do with their envy in this world. They can’t wait for the next world. When people adopt Christianity, they still need an outlet for their innate capacity for cruelty. So, the priests turn this cruelty back in on the convert with the weapon of guilt. They become cruel to themselves. Guilt is you punishing yourself, and as such it behaves like a tool of social control.

Nietzsche wants to escape the crab bucket of Christian nihilism by encouraging great experiments with creating values. He thinks it’s possible for humans to do this, because values aren’t discovered (which is what Carl Jung thought), they are created by humans, for humans.

Every set of values ranks things from best to worst, or from positive and negative. Then there’s a rank ordering within each of those, which aims for things we want more than other things. Obviously, there will be constraints on the possible range of values, given our biological limitations. But the ultimate creative act of will is to make a new rank of values, which is what Jesus did. Jesus put things like pity or faith as the highest values compared to the worldly values of the pagan world. So, it’s not like we’ve never reevaluated our values before.

The revaluation of values has happened many times in history. Every world religion is in some way a revaluation of values. That’s why it’s so strange to hear people like Tamaki say it is impossible for humans to create values. Jesus did it, and Nietzsche thinks Jesus is only a man. So, from Nietzsche’s perspective, a man can create values. We can create new values, too.

However, Christianity stands in our way of a revaluation of values because of its claims to be universal. The universalist stands truth on her head by ignoring perspective. The universalist view of the truth is topsy-turvy because there is no pure seeing. There’s always an eye that has to see. There is no immaculate perception. Nietzsche says people will have differing perspectives on values and he doesn’t expect these values to have any union. They will, in fact, go to war with each other because destruction itself is a form of creativity. He’s not being nihilistic or bloodthirsty by saying this, he’s being historical.

For Nietzsche, a revaluation of values would be the birth pangs of a more life-affirming world where we live in truths that are more admitting of perspective. It is a world that allows us to become kings of our own “little free cities” where we can make our own experiments with how to govern ourselves and follow different values. Again, many of these free cities will be failures. Many of them will come to war with each other. But that’s just part of how nature experiments with her creatures.

The only thing that can advance the human species is a competition between values, not the stultifying complacency of trying to get everyone to agree on the same values. Nietzsche thinks there will be new legislative figures, like Plato, Jesus, Muhammad or the Buddha, who will create these revaluated values.

The way I see it, we have to move forward while looking forward. The author of the future will be whoever can jettison the nihilism of Christianity and accept that this world is worthy. Tamaki is too old to change his mind, but if he’s so worried about nihilism, he should first check if the call is coming from inside the house.

What first comes to mind when you see the government signalling that its proposed under-16 social media ban doesn’t go far enough?

Education Minister Erica Stanford said papers for her wider programme of work on countering the harms of social media were going through cabinet and the government would have more to say “next month.”

“The government is steadily progressing with work on social media and online harm policy, and due to this, Catherine Wedd’s Member’s Bill is being deprioritised in place of wider work,” she said.

Wider work, huh? Basically, we’re getting digital IDs. No doubt your response to this news would be best characterised as concerned. Maybe a soft chill ran up your spine. Political scepticism 101 teaches that any time a politician says, “won’t someone think of the children!” they are getting ready to do bad things to taxpaying adults. Even if you aren’t well-versed in Machiavellianism, removing anonymity from the internet doesn’t sound great, right?

Well, I’d like to suggest a different way of thinking about digital IDs. Napoleon I (Bonaparte, of course) said it best: never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

As always, I recommend thinking strategically about everything. If you don’t have a strategy, why are you even involved in politics? Just go home. If you do have a strategy, then the way you decide if an action is useful is whether it makes the next action easier. Anything that helps you win is strategic, no matter who performs the action.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while. The problem is that too many people assume that anything their political enemy does should automatically be opposed, simply because the enemy is doing it. But thinking strategically requires a sense of distance, not to mention clear-headedness. Sometimes, your enemy will use a tactic or suggest a proposal that is perfectly usable by your side as well. A good tactic (tactics support strategy) is good no matter who suggests it. The trick is in how you frame it.

Here are a few quick examples. 1) Immigration isn’t a bad thing if the people arriving in your country are from compatible cultures and ethnicities; 2) taking care of animals and plants is a deeply nationalist idea, environmentalism does not belong to the communists; 3) and social welfare operated by a strong religious institution (such as the church before the English “Reformation”) made everyone’s life better.

To oppose immigration, environmentalism or welfare strictly because the communists who rule us today are using these ideas is to mistake framing for enemy action. The communists have captured those concepts and reframed them to help boost their power. But all good concepts and policies are politically neutral, so, as with babies and bathwater, don’t reject a good thing just because your enemies are doing it.

Let’s swing back to the topic at hand.

Should we oppose digital IDs that link our real identities and names to our internet data?

First, we must understand what the internet is. The internet is not a TV with email. That might be how you and I use it, but the internet is not classed a form of entertainment. The internet is best thought of as a giant series of databases. Some of these databases look slick and smooth, such as Facebook or YouTube. But under the hood, every single website you’ve ever visited is just a glorified database.

As such, there is no such thing as online privacy. Back in the 1990s, it was technically possible to surf the net anonymously, but to set up a private online session required flicking so many digital switches that even an airline pilot would be daunted by the procedure. No matter how you try to cover your tracks, little pieces of digital exhaust (data) will always be generated when you are online.

Fast-forward to 2026, and the ability to trace online users is easier than ever. Your local fish and chip shop probably knows you better than you know yourself, given how easy it is to paint a picture of customer habits. Not only does each person carry a highly complex tracking device (smartphone), but almost everything we interact with is connected to the internet. Even if you think you’ve escaped the all-seeing eye, the biggest databases will have a “shadow profile” of you built from all the data generated by interactions with your friends and acquaintances. No man is a digital island. There is no escape.

In other words, digital IDs are already here; they’re just not operated by governments. Private companies know everything about us, and they use this data to sell goods and services. Governments must still play by privacy rules when using any data about their citizens. But international companies have a million ways to skirt around those rules. Thankfully, it is in the interest of (most) businesses to keep their customers alive and healthy so we can buy more of their stuff. Nevertheless, there is so much data about each of us that if it ever fell into the wrong hands, things would get sketchy, frighteningly fast.

This is where strategic thinking is so beneficial. Is all this data good or bad? The answer is: for whom? If the current communist regime has access to the dark depths of data about each of us, then that’s obviously bad. But when (not if) my friends gain control of the government and all that data, this will be a very, very good thing.

The current regime is happy to create digital IDs because, like all regimes, it assumes it will be in power forever. This mindset is baked into the “Western Christian” psyche. In this model of the world, every regime will rise and fall until the last regime, which will reign unopposed for eternity. Obviously, this last regime is meant to be god’s, but we silly humans think it will be temporal as well. Hence why every “Western” regime thinks it is the End of History.

Of course, I’m willing to bet that the current dysfunctional, weak-shouldered communists won’t be the last regime to grace this planet. And when history restarts, I want a system that will ensure none of those people ever get power again. I’m thinking 10, 20, 50 years ahead. And guess what? This regime is stupid enough to build that exact system right now!

Sure, digital IDs and mass data harvesting will shrink my privacy, and the databases will mean anyone who doesn’t submit to the current regime will have a tough time. Yet it’s not like we have much to lose. We are already outside of power. What are they going to do, take away the power we already don’t have? We know we are ruled. Digital IDs change nothing in that regard.

However, precisely because the current regime is stupid and weak, they don’t realise that their strongest defence is their anonymity. Since it is impossible to tell just by looking if a person is a communist, such people have managed to exist in broad daylight for more than a century. Because of this camouflage, when people refer to a “they” who rule us, it’s always hard to describe who “they” are. This has always been the regime’s best protection.

Now the arrogant communists are giving us the greatest gift of all: the ability to show, without fault, exactly who “they” are. This is strategically important because an enemy must be defined before it can be defeated.

Given that everyone will be captured by digital IDs, the enemy will also be caught up in its own data harvesting. In fact, they will likely be enthusiastic about participating in the digital ID system since it will be framed as a technology of power to bolster the regime.

They don’t suspect that their own digital IDs will mean none of these people, or their families, will be able to hide. The data will connect everything they do, from how many times they pick up their phones each hour to their exact DNA combination. By asking the databases simple questions, the next regime will create a perfect picture of the enemy and ensure they never come close to having power again.

From a strategic perspective, I want more digital IDs.

I want more internet surveillance. I want less privacy. I want the databases to be filled with the smallest, innocent particles of data exhaust gathered by any and every object and device, from the kitchen fridge to the traffic light cameras. I want to win, so I must know my enemy better than it knows itself. And I want this data gathering to begin while my enemy thinks it will rule forever, not after it loses power. I want them to be relaxed about digital IDs. I want to have the data that shows exactly who they are today.

All I’m saying is maybe we should listen to the wise advice from a long-dead French dictator before yelling about a “control grid.” Have you thought about this strategically?

For whom are digital IDs good?

It always makes me laugh when I hear people say, “the prime minister is ruining New Zealand!” as if Christopher Luxon is swinging his gold sceptre like a Greek tyrant.

The reality is, no leader in a modern democracy has 0.001% of the power needed to “ruin” the country. Luxon isn’t in command. He doesn’t make any real decisions. This is not Luxon’s New Zealand; it never was, and it never will be. Luxon is a functionary, a conduit. He occupies the same empty seat as did the dissolving lettuce Chris Hipkins did.

The visible political class are never in power, only the elite power brokers within their ranks are. And their power persists no matter who is sitting in the big seat. Complaining about what elected politicians do or don’t do imbues them with more power narratively than they really have, and therefore, in a paradoxical sense, gives them a sense of legitimacy they otherwise didn’t have. This illusion is very useful to the real power brokers.

People still think of a prime minister as a king, but they also believe in bottom-up democracy. People can hold these two conflicting ideas simultaneously because they are trained from birth to think of themselves as a civic movement that can impact the will of the king. But if you stop to analyse this for a moment, you’ll realise that no elites will ever let the people organise in a way that allows them to overthrow those same elites.

The question of legitimacy is key to understanding politics. People think they know what this word means, but the popular concept of legitimacy is wholly false and often backwards. This mistake is a result of thinking that public opinion matters, that power comes from consent of the governed. This basic error makes the discussion of, and solutions to, real power struggles impossible because the moment there is a critical bursting of pressure on someone like Luxon, power simply parachutes in a new empty suit to take his place.

The formula for legitimacy is simple: to whom, and for what? Let’s begin with a quote from Hume.

“Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is affected, we shall find that as the force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion.”

Hume is saying that an organised minority will always, always, defeat the disorganised majority. That’s one of the axioms of politics. You can’t get outside of this. Anything that disagrees with that axiom is wrong. It’s not flawed. It’s not a difference of opinion. It is wrong.

Being legitimate doesn’t mean that you rule or don’t rule. It bears no significance on ruling whatsoever. It is a filter over which people view power. Legitimacy comes by ruling. Ruling does not come by legitimacy. Power legitimises itself and legitimacy can be reframed by power. Governance and government are not the same things. The only legitimacy that matters is internal. Public legitimacy comes from the masses outside looking in and expressing their emotions regarding a process they do not understand, nor can meaningfully influence.

The reality of modern democracy is that a leader does not need to be popular to be elected. A leader does not have to be liked. A leader can be despised by the population and remain in power, like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Jacinda Ardern. That’s because a population need not find its leaders legitimate. It only needs to submit to their rule.

When you confront people with the reality that a prime minister isn’t actually in power, it can sound a bit tinfoil hat-y. That’s why I like to use Neema Parvini’s analogy of pro wrestling.

Vince McMahon is the one in control of the whole wrestling story, not the audience. And especially not the wrestler. The wrestler doesn’t control his own fate. The wrestler can make some variations on his story, but the narrative remains beyond his control. I believe the average person’s political IQ could quadruple if they understood that there must necessarily be a Vince character somewhere in the political system. A scripting team always sets the broad agendas, and this team does not care who advances that agenda, so long as the agenda is advanced.

Politicians are a lot like pro wrestlers. They spend all their time debating in parliament for no reason at all because the decisions have already been made. It’s not about the war. It’s not about the oil. It’s not about the spending cuts. It’s about the narrative set by people who rarely are seen in front of a camera. As long as people focus on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of someone like Luxon, this will neutralise any action against those real power centres.

It used to be that the system would try to make you believe in the pro wrestling fakery of politics. But I don’t think this is true anymore. Instead, the system has worked out that it’s just as good to have people be sceptical of its narrative as to have them believe in it. Scepticism means you’ll treat the narrative with more attention, and that the narrative will be sent to both sides. By creating a partisan split, politicians end up becoming more legitimate to everyone again, even the sceptics. It’s a neat trick.

Understanding legitimacy is critical for any group looking to engage in politics. For a political group to become viable with the masses, the common wisdom is that it must have an air of legitimacy. But this is the fastest way to kill political energy. If an insurgent counter elite is attempting to dislodge a system, then being promoted as legitimate by that system would be fatal to the agenda of that counter elite.

Legitimacy is not something to seek out from the current system because if you are legitimised by that system, then you won’t be ruling it. If you are ruling in the system, then you will be legitimised by it. Legitimacy is only imbued by the fact that you are already in power. Because you are in power, you are legitimate. It’s tautological, but that’s how it works.

The idea that a political movement must shed its outwardly revolutionary rhetoric to gain public legitimacy is baked into all thinking on the right. The paradox is that to get into government to do the things you want to do, you have to swear you’ll not do the things you want to do. But then when you get into government, you can’t do the things you want to do anyway because the way you gained that legitimacy in the first place was to completely dilute what you stood for into an indistinct sludge.

This is why all populist parties on the right end up as a confusing mess. Electoral viability dictates that all political parties must fit into the larger managerial system by taking on a particular rigid shape. The bureaucracies, including the money power, are all more powerful than any party. The National Party, for example, has taken the shape that the institutions and bureaucracies around it have forged it into. Any party that has wielded as much power as it has over such a long time must necessarily turn into something that looks like the National Party. This goes for the Labour Party as well. But precisely because they have been moulded by the system, both parties can be dispensed with by that system at any point if they do not follow the overall agenda scripted for them.

This is why total rejection, total separation, from the system should always be the real goal. Modern democracy is constructed only to manage its own decline. That is all it can do. We were once led by strong men, and now we are led by weak men with shoulders too narrow and backs not strong enough to shoulder the burdens of their predecessors. Imbuing the weak men like Luxon, Hipkins, Peters, Seymour or anyone else part of the current system with agency and power they do not have is a huge error. Even if they agreed to put all their earnest efforts towards halting the decline, they would be incapable because they are not great men.

You don’t hate Luxon, you hate modern democracy in general. You hate the Reserve Bank. You hate managerialism. You hate managed decline. Until you are directly attacking the supporting structure of managed decline, it won’t matter what you do. There is nothing you can do from inside the system to halt the decline or change the direction of the agenda. Politics, proper politics, must begin with separation from the system, a complete and utter rejection of its framing and suggested pathways for “legitimacy.”

If you want to de-legitimise something, try and de-legitimise the idea of electoral politics out of your mind. As I always advise, start from first principles. That is the only way to become indigestible to the current system. If you can do that, you will be well on the way to creating your own legitimacy.

After all, that’s the goal, right?

The conspiracy theorists have won the conversation beyond their wildest dreams, but they have no idea what to do with their victory.

Consider this story:

“Kathleen Kelly got two doses of the [Covid-19] vaccine to keep her shop open during the pandemic, but she suffered a devastating allergic reaction to the jab. Since then, she has had 11 surgeries to her heart and been admitted to hospital 29 times.”

That’s just the latest media coverage of injuries likely caused by the Covid-19 vaccines. Kathleen’s tale was recorded by A Current Affair, a major news show in Australia owned by Nine Network. Here’s another story from this week from The Telegraph in Britain:

“When Nikola Brindley was asked to have AstraZeneca’s Covid jab in July 2021, she agreed without hesitation. But within hours, Brindley was in A&E fighting for her life as an allergic reaction began to shut down multiple organ systems. ‘I collapsed on the doorway, and pretty much lost the ability to walk,’ she recalls.”

I think we’ve got another decade of these stories being drip-fed in a way that normalises the idea of mass vaccine injuries while ensuring enough time has passed to limit public outrage and any calls for retribution or compensation. This is classic propaganda.

When people are presented with a problem designed not to be solved, most will rationally conclude it is unsolvable. The more times the problem is raised and unsolved, the more likely people are to think it is unsolvable. Not too long ago, news that Covid vaccines caused harm would have been shocking. Now it’s a sidebar piece in the “medical” section of a newspaper. The stretching out of such revelations through numerous takes, teases and slow, continuous release neuter the information. Even the most explosive revelation, when repeated but not resolved, becomes numbing. Nothing being resolved is key to learned helplessness.

Very simply, what is no longer revelation is normalised. The system marches on. The slippery slope gets slipperier. The propagandists know exactly what they’re doing, so it’s not entirely your fault that you fall for their tricks. The human brain can get used to anything. It has an almost infinite selection of ways to cope with trauma: Stockholm syndrome, trauma bonding, dissociation, reaction formation, cognitive dissonance, learned helplessness and dozens of other brain acrobatics.

Do you want to know the scary part? Normalisation will even work just as well on those of us who knew the truth about the Covid-19 vaccines from the start.

This brings up an important point. Knowing the truth means nothing on its own. Truth is not power. Power is power. Power is not really even enhanced by truth. If you don’t have power, you will only ever be a peasant who knows things. That’s all.

In fact, knowing things is usually just another coping mechanism. When a person has power, he can act. When he lacks power, he wants knowledge. Those who say “knowledge is power” have been castrated. Only power is power. Knowledge is masturbation in the absence of power. The weak man’s consolation for impotence is to pretend to have knowledge.

Knowing the truth about Covid-19 vaccinations did not matter one iota to the regime. If things had gotten worse, they would have arrested me all the same and forced a vaccination into my arm. That’s power. And now that more people know the truth about the vaccines, this knowledge will not stop the regime from taking its next step, nor can this knowledge compel that regime to face justice for its actions during the pandemic.

The truth is, knowing is not half the battle. The reality of power is that, for an event to happen, the public only needs to allow it in the moment. The moments before and after the event do not matter. Those who gained power through the event do not care that you know about it afterwards. By the time you’ve put the puzzle together, the planners will have all the power, and you will have none.

The only time power might be concerned about knowledge is when a technology appears that drops the half-life of a secret from months to just hours. The internet is just such a technology (infinite knowledge, zero power). People pick up on the plans of power far more quickly with the internet, and they can use this technology to pass this knowledge on in real time, so everyone can watch as those in power perform their little tricks. Yet even if you could watch a conspiracy play out live on YouTube, would that give you any extra power? Of course not. You can use knowledge as a defence against feeling impotent (“I know what’s going on!”). But it doesn’t work when power has all the guns and soldiers.

The lesson of Covid-19 is that power does not care if you know. Knowing things does not stop evil from winning. Lies are only destroyed by power. Knowledge must be transmuted into action, or it remains masturbation.

The TV personality Alex Jones understands this now. Last week, Jones’ show InfoWars was forced to close after a US court fined Jones $1.4 billion (yes, you read that correctly) in a civil lawsuit for defamation. Jones was found to have made persistent false claims (according to the court) about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.

Jones had plenty of knowledge about what really happened at Sandy Hook. Some might even say he knew the truth. Jones made a decent living for more than two decades, knowing true things and explaining them to his audience. But none of his knowledge mattered in the end because the truth brought him no power. Power had power, and power used its power to crush Jones like a bug.

For years, Jones was also screaming about the dangers of fluoride in the water, and it turned out he was correct. The “scientific consensus” today is that fluoride either slightly or quite dramatically lowers children’s IQ when exposure is high enough. This danger threshold is exceeded and doubled in many US municipal water supplies. One meta-analysis reviewed 74 studies and found significant inverse associations between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ. Another longitudinal cohort study found an association between prenatal fluoride exposure and children’s cognitive outcomes. Yet fluoride is still being added to drinking water in most places in the US. Power does not care about the truth; it only cares about a more effective lie.

Or consider the collapse of the global warming narrative. The reason the Green Party never seems to gain any political momentum is that not one of their breathless climate change doom narratives ever came true. The environmentalists screeched about the end of the world, but it never came. We’re still here, and the world is using more oil than ever before.

And yet, every other day, there seems to be another crazy restriction on goods and services in the name of saving the climate. Just this week, Amsterdam decided to use the same propaganda tricks deployed against smoking to stop people from eating meat and using fossil fuels, flights and high-carbon products. Everyone knows the truth that the climate change narrative was nonsense, yet power does not care. Power only cares about a more effective lie.

Power can abandon any ideological position when reality starts to hurt it more than you. Power never believed in “renewables” or “Team of 5 million,” that’s stupid. Power creates unsolvable problems on purpose for the benefits of social engineering. Ideological justifications are post hoc to the agenda. Power can change its mind whenever it likes – one moment it is pro-climate, the next moment it is pro-business – because power, not the truth, is the only thing that matters to power.

We’ve entered a strange point in human history where everyone knows what’s going on, even down to the names and home addresses of the powerful. Yet, none of that knowledge translates to power for the average person. All the levers we are offered to pull, such as voting, protesting or boycotts, lead nowhere. We can yank on those levers all we like while saying “I know what you’re up to,” and nothing will happen.

I know it feels powerful to know things. You’ve been told that truth will defeat lies, which convinces you to gain more knowledge. But truth is only a weapon if you already have power. Yes, you were right. You know the truth. What has this knowledge done for you? How has it gained you any power?

The goal of this column has always been to outline what you should practically do if you’re interested in power. If that’s what you want, I encourage you to read through the archives.

But if you take one thing from this column, it should be that only power is power. Everything else isn’t.

It’s a pity that US President Donald Trump is seen as a 6ft 3in buffoon, because he has an uncanny knack for accidentally revealing the nature of the permanent bureaucracy and the insidious mechanisms of the American Empire.

Trump often cuts to the core of a problem by thinking from first principles. I’m not sure if he does this on purpose, but regardless of intent, thinking from first principles strips away the shaky scaffolding of solutions that no longer make any sense because the problem has changed. No matter how complex the scaffolding, even a small zephyr can blow it away with a simple question: Why are we doing it this way? Trump loves to ask this question, and the US civil service often has no good answer for him.

What did Trump say? Well, as you’ve probably noticed, the dumbest war in the history of the United States is presently happening against Iran. But also, this war is both not happening and happening at the same time. Trump is talking to Iran, but he is also talking to himself on social media. Iran is talking about Trump on social media, rather than directly to him. It’s the most schizophrenic, hyperreal and deeply American war I’ve witnessed.

Nevertheless, Trump says he is keen to talk with Iran, but he also decided to recall his “special envoys” from their trip to Pakistan, where the presumed second round of peace talks was to take place. Trump thought it would be a waste of time. Then he told the Iranian leadership that if they wanted to talk, they should give him a call on the phone.

Serious, professional diplomats rolled their eyes at this. But Trump figured that if a President wants to make deals with other nations, surely he should be using the most efficient means and technology to do so? This is thinking from first principles.

Thinking in this way means constructing your reasoning from a clearly defined problem by separating the underlying facts from assumptions made based on them. In science, this means starting with what the evidence shows us to be true. A scientist doesn’t say, “We know the Earth is flat because that’s how it looks and that’s what everyone thinks is true,” a scientist says, “A reasonable hypothesis is that the Earth is flat, but until we have tools that can prove or disprove that hypothesis, it is an open question.”

The problem is that most people don’t think from first principles. So, you can get entire fields, like palaeontology, persisting for decades with no one ever asking whether dinosaurs were real at all. I’m not saying dinosaurs are fake, but why is it that no young palaeontologists are encouraged to ask this question in their freshman year? Maybe we are wrong about really big things, but no one notices because no one ever asks. They just keep adding more scaffolding and calling that a “career.”

Reasoning from first principles seems like it would be exhausting. You’re telling me I need to rethink everything I’ve ever heard from scratch? And if I’m wrong in a deep part of my tree of knowledge, I need to revisit the entire branch structure rooted in that flaw? No thanks. But while it can be exhausting, it’s also a lot of fun to finally figure out how the world really works. The reward for being wrong is that you get to build a better model of reality, which can open up incredible value. We call it arbitrage.

Thinking from first principles allows you to spot solutions that might have been missed if you were to use the received wisdom. In Trump’s case, the problem was state-to-state communication. He knew the best way to talk was directly with a counterparty, and the best technology for talking is a telephone. So, why not just ask the Iranians to dial the White House? Why not indeed.

The reason no other President suggested the same thing is that they are surrounded by advisors who insist the process of government must be done in this way, not that way, since this is the way it has always been done, even though they always struggle to explain why this is, actually, the best way. They do this because civil servants are trained to follow procedure, steaming ahead like a container ship. They are not trained to think from first principles.

Therefore, the procedure of government has convinced itself that it needs diplomats because such people are trained in the nuances of foreign cultures. It also needs embassies in capital cities because, according to procedure, it’s always best to sit across from the person you’re talking to. The status quo works, according to procedure.

Yet while these reasons are all sound, they are the scaffolding, not the foundation. They assume the problem of state-to-state communication is the same in the 21^st century as it was in the 18^th century. Embassies made sense back then when communication was done at the speed of a horse. But in the age of the internet, let alone the telegraph (first introduced in the 1830s, for crying out loud), communication can be achieved at the speed of light. Two leaders can quite literally pick up the phone or write emails.

Because the solutions to the same problem have changed, there is no procedural justification for embassies or even a foreign service in 2026. There just aren’t. Trump cut right to the core of the issue. He looked at the technologies of 2026 and found an obvious solution to the problems of the 18^th century: the telephone. His little question of “why?” blew down the entire scaffolding of a pretentious, outdated civil service.

But in so doing, Trump also revealed the true purpose of US embassies. Let me give you a hint: it’s not diplomacy.

As I said above, there are no procedural reasons for the US to maintain embassies around the world. Trade does not need embassies, and in 2026, if the US President wants to speak to another leader, he can pick up the phone. However, there are many political reasons for US embassies.

Say you are a young, talented person in Wellington. What should you do to get ahead in life? If the US did not have an embassy in Wellington, your plan should be to seek out and befriend the local big-wigs, oligarchs and influential families. The speediest way to win is to find a gap in the local aristocracy, ingratiate yourself with those in power, and hope to receive an invitation to the royal court.

But the moment a US Embassy opens in Wellington, it immediately creates a second, rival royal court directly in the middle of the city. Now all the power-hungry young strivers have an alternative path to get ahead in life.

Here’s how this works: each Thanksgiving, at every US embassy around the world, the staff sends out invites to all Kiwis working day jobs at the embassy and to any prominent local expatriate American in the city. The embassy staff will also invite anyone in the capital city whom they think is cool. So, let’s say you get an invite to the party. Just after arriving, you spot Josephine across the room and move in to say hello. Now, both of you know exactly how cool you are because you each got an invite. You will leave that party with a pocket full of business cards. Now you have joined an informal power network connected to a rival royal court.

Connection to this informal power network means you will begin to matter to the US embassy. Your new goal will be to become more visible to the embassy by speaking out against the status quo of the New Zealand system, thereby planting the first fragile seeds of a future civil society modelled on the American system. Soon enough, the only way you can gain more power will be to do what the Americans want. The more you help to turn New Zealand into the 51^st state, the more you will matter to the US embassy.

Being part of a rival royal court in your home country is generally unwise and a good way to get killed. But if that rival royal court is a tentacle of the largest and most powerful country on the planet, there is no choice at all.

This is how American imperialism operates. The main function of the US embassy is to create rival royal courts and agitate for political change to create US satellite states and vassals. Diplomacy is a side gig. The purpose of a rival royal court is to prey on local power-hungry people and turn them against their own governments. If you’ve ever wondered why all capital cities have the same kinds of people, businesses and buildings, there’s your answer.

That’s why I admired Trump’s first principles thinking. He wanted to solve a clear problem, and by asking a simple question, he accidentally revealed the insidious machinery of the US empire.

Imagine what else he could uncover by thinking from first principles about, I don’t know, education, welfare, law, the military…the list is endless.

For a supposedly “Christian” culture, we sure do celebrate a lot of Satanic rituals out in the open, with state funding.

In my opinion, the worst of these Satanic rituals is ANZAC Day. The commemoration is an almost perfect distillation of everything the character Jesus Christ spoke against. Thinking that something good can come from violence is the very definition of sin. And the worship of the illusory “peace” that comes from violence is the definition of Satanic.

Now, if you’re a modern Christian, you likely haven’t heard Jesus’ message described in this way. There’s a reason for that. Power is shy, and it doesn’t want you to know about how power works. Power relies on everyone thinking that good things can come from violence. Power wants you to believe that sin is adultery or jaywalking. Power doesn’t want you to understand what Jesus meant by sin, and if we’re being honest, you don’t really want to understand it either. After all, a lot of things would have to change in your life if you did.

Everything I’ve written so far above can be found in the New Testament. It’s all right there. French academic Rene Girard learned how to correctly read the bible in a way that had been lost to time, and soon rediscovered that Christianity is a praxis before it is a religion. Jesus said you either live in the Satanic world or you live in the Kingdom of Heaven, right now. You don’t have to die to get there. Christianity is how you act today, not what you believe. Girard’s great achievement was explaining that the core of Jesus’ message is refusing to copy each other (mimicry).

In his magnum opus, Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World, Girard wrote that once humans have secured food, water and shelter, the rest of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can be summed up as “what do I do now?”, which boils down to “what desires should I pursue?” Girard said no one desires organically. We are always copying human models and adopting other people’s desires. An object or goal is never desirable on its own. It only becomes desirable to us when another person also desires it. Girard said the things we want are always mediated by the gaze of another person.

This would be fine in a world of infinite resources. But in this world, an object or goal cannot be owned by two people. Private property is binary: you either own something or you don’t. Very quickly, the desire for an object or goal can spiral into a competition, which inevitably turns into a rivalry. At some point, the object or goal is no longer the focus of desire. Instead, both rivals begin to see the other as the stumbling block, or “skandalon,” the Greek term for Satan. The focus of desire then shifts away from the object or goal and to eliminating that rival, usually through violence.

But since neither rival is conscious that their desire is mediated by the other, the competitive tension they feel seems to come from somewhere else, from outside the rivalry. The rivals copy each other so tightly that they almost become the same person, like twins. Neither can see that this is the problem, because if one of them did, he would instantly be different, and the rivalry would evaporate. Difference leads to peace, while sameness (copying) leads to violence.

You can see this unconscious rivalry playing out in the Strait of Hormuz.

The conflict is layered with hundreds of complexities and excuses, each designed to distract from the truth that the US and Iran desire the same thing (the Strait). They are pure Girardian rivals. Both sides are firmly convinced that their desire to control the Strait is not a result of mimicry, but that they are thinking for themselves. They have deployed entire theories of geopolitics, economics and statecraft to justify their desire to control the Strait. But it is a very basic rivalry. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The resolution of such a rivalry can take two forms. First, the two rivals could copy each other so tightly that they escalate into violence, leaving one side destroyed and the object or goal controlled by the survivor. The second path is that the rivals copy each other so tightly and become so alike that they look for an external source of the tension, since each will say, “I can’t possibly be the problem.” This is the creation of a scapegoat.

When everyone is acting the same way, the tension must be coming from outside, so goes Satan’s logic. The conclusion is that the one who is different is the problem. Therefore, the rivals will continue to copy each other by agreeing to commit violence on the scapegoat. And once the scapegoat is destroyed, the rivals feel peace. However, the tension will soon return because the rivals still have not moved past their mutual desire for the same object or goal. They remain as twins.

This is the flat circle of human nature. Girard says humans are the wanting creatures, but we don’t even know how to want. We are evolved to desire, but our desires are never our own. This flaw is so deeply rooted that all civilisations, with no exceptions, were built to both contain rivalries and to leverage them to create power. It is the leveraging of rivalry for power that Jesus referred to as Satanic.

Satan, according to Jesus, is not some mystical entity with a pitchfork. Satan is that quiet whisper, a sudden thought, that if you just get rid of that guy/girl, then you will be happy. Peace is possible through the sword. To participate in a Satanic ritual is to believe that good things can come from violence.

The tricky thing about Satanic rituals is that they come in many flavours and are often hidden by happy, fun stories. A good example is organised sports.

Every rugby team is a rival precisely because they are the same. Rugby teams are copying each other so tightly that they have essentially become twins. They desire the same thing: to win the rugby game. But since only one team can win, the way to resolve the tension is for everyone to pretend the rivals are fighting (tackling, running, etc.) and pretend that one team is destroyed (gets fewer points). Sport is a diluted Satanic ritual. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Another example is elections. Every three years, we copy each other by picking a political party to support. Some of these parties are wildly different, but that difference is an illusion. We are all competing for the same desire: to win power in government. Yet rather than killing each other in the streets, we have invented a system of counting heads. The “side” with the most supporters wins. But don’t fool yourself. A modern election is just a sophisticated pressure valve to prevent real violence between rival groups.

Satanic rituals also appear in our stories about why violence in the past was good, and why we, today, are the good guys. The further back you go, the dumber these stories sound. The Romans thought they were the good guys, but this story obscures the fact that they killed all their rivals. If the Etruscans or Carthaginians had won, they would have had the same story.

Our story, our Satanic ritual, is ANZAC Day. But because it’s so close to us in historical terms, we can’t see that it’s the same old lie.

In 1914, the British Empire got caught in an out-of-control rivalry with its European rivals, which resulted in the world-ending conflict called WWI. New Zealand joined this war by accepting the implicit justification that using violence on behalf of the British Empire would result in peace. In doing so, New Zealand actively chose to participate in a gigantic Satanic ritual that allows us to believe we are the “good guys” because we killed the “bad guys” in Europe. Today, we actually celebrate the Satanic ritual of WWI.

ANZAC Day is even treated like the birth of our nation. Before WWI, New Zealand was a colony. After WWI, New Zealand began to see itself as a proper country. Why? Because Girard pointed out that defeating a rival is always the genesis of a new identity. The victor can finally say, “I am this, not that,” and peace appears to return.

But that peace, that identity, rests on a mountain of silenced rivals. ANZAC Day is our way of hiding the bloody foundations of our world. The truth is, ANZAC Day is our collective worship of the ancient Satanic idea that something good can come from violence. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how Power can leverage this idea to make us do terrible things.

Girard neatly explained Jesus’ framework for a world where Satanic rituals are no longer necessary. As Jesus told the thief who refused to copy everyone else: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” When someone slaps you, turn the other cheek. Don’t copy their violence. No copying, no rivalry. Difference is peace. Sameness is death.

Power does not want you to know this. Power wants you to celebrate ANZAC Day. Maybe it’s time we asked why.

If it’s true that what’s happening in Iran is about the US creating a final way to step back from the Middle East and turn its full attention to the real strategic challenge of China, what does that mean, exactly?

Running an empire ain’t easy. Every empire eventually learns that its own imperial troops are insufficient to maintain security and peace across the entire realm. Supply lines quickly get overstretched.

What’s needed is local assistance, solid propaganda and clever balances of power. The trick is to find two regional heavyweights and play one off the other politically. These two balanced powers will then do the heavy lifting of maintaining peace in the region because it is in their interest to do so. Iraq was once the strategic balance for Iran, but now that Iraq has been cast into the pits of anarchy, Washington is hoping to balance Iran with Israel. At least, that’s my read of the situation.

Once Washington is happy with the new status quo in the Middle East, that will free up a lot of brain space to concentrate on managing the much more difficult imperial problem posed by a rising power like China. If you thought the Middle East issue was tough, consider that China and the US are deeply tied together in every conceivable way – economic, technological, military and ideological all at once. That was never the case in the desert.

It’s important to point out at the start that there are no good reasons for the US and China to become rivals, but plenty of bad reasons. The real conundrum is that everything changes eventually, and the key question both Washington and Beijing are asking is: What happens if they start walking down the wrong path?

At its core, the US/China rivalry comes down to three things: size, ambition and the simple fact that both countries matter a lot to each other.

Unfortunately, the US has never faced a challenge quite like this. China is not the Soviet Union, and the rivalry cannot be described as a new Cold War. Unlike the USSR, China is not cut off from the world and is tightly woven deep into the US economy. Nevertheless, by some measures, China is already the world’s largest economy due to its domination of global manufacturing. It is also pushing hard to develop the technologies that will define the next few decades, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biotech. As such, only the US and China can be said to have modern militaries today (defined as access to frontier AI systems). Everyone else is still trapped in the 20^th century.

Because of this, Washington is worried that China’s behaviour increasingly looks assertive. China’s military has rapidly grown in both absolute and strategic terms and now has the potential capability to challenge US forces, especially near China’s shores. In places like the South China Sea, it has shown it can slowly change the political situation on the ground (and on the waves) without triggering a serious response from the US. China regularly pushes other Western Pacific countries around and gets away with it. At the same time, China is using economic tools to exert pressure in new ways that often fall outside the traditional US-led global system.

But calling China a “threat” is misleading. That’s not Washington’s model of thinking. Competitor, yes. Adversary, sure. But a threat? That’s a bit too strong. But does China feel the same way? How does China think about the US?

To understand China’s actions, you have to start with how it describes its own story.

Chinese leaders do not think of their country as “rising.” They see it as returning and reclaiming a place it once held before a long period of decline and humiliation. That idea of “rejuvenation” is the overt narrative in almost everything China does. The Chinese people and most of its leaders are increasingly believing the erroneous view that the US has weakened itself through long wars, financial shocks and internal political division. China, by contrast, sees itself as having spent decades building economic strength and stability.

China is determined not to fall behind again. Chinese leaders believe they missed earlier industrial revolutions, and they are not going to miss the next one, centred on AI. They want to lead the era of artificial intelligence, not follow it. By this logic, China’s president Xi Jinping has encouraged Chinese officials to adopt greater directness, both at home and abroad. The tone of its diplomacy has also hardened. Its actions in places like Hong Kong and Xinjiang reflect a leadership that is less concerned about international opinion and more focused on internal control.

But the Politburo is fully aware of the serious pressures facing China. Its society is ageing rapidly. Its environment is under strain. It has huge amounts of debt. And it is trying to become a fully developed economy without making political changes. Managing all this is proving to be far more difficult than Beijing expected, but it’s doing a decent job.

The thing is, China has also started to act like it believes its own story about communism and the inevitable “clash” with capitalism. This attitude shows up again and again in its diplomacy, its military posture and in its economic behaviour. China thinks it smells blood in the water seeping from a weakened US empire, and has decided that the original communist prophecy must be true. Although the entire Politburo may not believe this, enough of its members appear to. And if they convince themselves to believe too strongly in the communist dialectic, they may begin to misjudge how far China can push the US. After all, overconfidence can be just as dangerous as weakness.

The US is not blind to the changing worldview of Chinese elites. US presidents come and go, but there is broad agreement across American politics that the relationship with China requires a measure of consistency. That’s why the so-called “trade war” didn’t start with Donald Trump and didn’t stop when Joe Biden (briefly) took control. The problem is that the US strategy has, for many years, felt reactive rather than proactive. Instead of setting out clear long-term plans, it has tended to respond to China step by step on trade, technology and security.

So, what parts of China’s rise can the US live with, and what parts can it not? The first step to solving this problem successfully (for everyone) would require the US to be clear about international red lines and then actually enforcing them. It would also mean accepting that the US is no longer in control of the pace of its relationship with China.

Alliances will be more important for success. One of America’s biggest advantages is the “international community, which is a euphemism for its empire. But maintaining those relationships takes work, especially when economic security is seen as national security in East Asia. Those partners also need to see more political unity in the US. Political division and economic pressures at home are increasingly shaping Washington’s foreign policy in ways that are not always helpful. If the US wants to compete effectively with China, it needs to get its own house in order. This means that once Trump’s term is over, the US empire will work very hard to block another disruptive figure from entering politics. Goodbye MAGA, we hardly knew thee.

The biggest risk is miscalculation. If we go to the darkest corner of the room and imagine the US/China relationship breaking down completely, even the most sober analysts fear it could result in a war on a scale the world has not seen since the 1940s. The US and China are the two most powerful militaries on the planet, likely with weapons no one knows about. A direct war between them would be catastrophic.

Taiwan is the most obvious flashpoint for most observers. But I doubt an invasion is on the cards. China seems to get more bang for its buck by using a slow squeeze to wear Taiwan down over time. It will likely use economic blockades, aggressive pushing and shoving in the waters and heavy political pressure. That kind of approach will be much harder for the US to respond to. In many ways, a D-Day-style assault on Taiwan by China is probably the preferred option for Washington, simply because that would be the easiest to deal with (in strategic terms). Countering a messy, grey-zone pressure campaign will be much more difficult, and one that the US system isn’t really designed to deal with.

Both sides are aware of the risks. Both sides see this problem as pass/fail for the future of their societies. Yet both are inexorably moving into uncharted historical territory. China sees itself as coming back, while the US sees itself going nowhere. Can these misaligned visions be managed without leading to conflict?

Easier said than done. But it can be done because it is in everyone’s interest to ensure that it is done.