On the day Donald Trump descended his golden escalator in 2015 and announced to the world that he was running for president, the world knew that we were in for a good show. Left-liberals had a perfect embodiment of a villain, and right-leaning conservatives and nationalists finally had a great, loud, politically incorrect champion.

The idea that politics was mere entertainment was not new when the Trumpian age began, but there can be little doubt that the TV show aspect came to the fore. Indeed, the hallmark of the Trumpian age is that there was almost nothing outside of the sales pitch and the various narrative threads. The comparisons to Jerry Springer or professional wrestling were both legion and entirely accurate. There were storylines instead of strategy; heel-turns and enemies of the week rather than ideology. There was even the archetypal three-act structure of New Hope, backlash and defeat, followed by triumphant return.

Trump’s uncanny knack for creating new perceptions of reality through force of personality and bombast often seemed to contain reality itself, like sitting in the cinema and becoming so engrossed that you forget who you’re with, or where you’re sitting. The last ten years were a bewildering storm of imagery and iconic photos of Trump. The “fight, fight, fight” defiance post-assassination attempt, the mugshot, the sombre, gloomy walk toward a podium in an aircraft hangar, Trump barking at the boy mowing the lawn.

Yet, ever gnawing in the back of the mind, at least, was the question of where this would all end. Would Donald Trump simply shuffle off to play golf after the second term? Would he be impeached at some point? Would he enact the mass deportation schemes?

Fundamentally, we now see that the final act of the saga is ending more like a tragedy. The war with Iran has untethered Donald Trump’s nemesis, his greatest foe: hard material reality.

The Venezuela escapade that preceded the Iran war was typically Trumpian - no casualties, amazing visuals, cartoonish bad guy snatched, back in time for cornflakes. This Tom Clancy-style derring-do likely increased the administration’s confidence to take the next step, to go for the Big One.

Unfortunately, the nature of the bear trap that Trump has ensnared himself in is entirely his belief that he could talk, shout, and post on social media his way out of any situation. Some of the old magic still lingers, such as manipulating markets through statements to quell their panic, but that’s dwindling.

The idea that you can announce negotiations that aren’t actually happening, to sway public opinion, now seems farcical and insulting. Demanding “unconditional surrender” because of its connotations with World War II and Eisenhower also falls flat.

The military bases remain wrecked, the military personnel remain dead, critical supply chains remain blocked, and Iran’s hypersonic missiles remain active. The Epstein Files could be ignored or tampered with or downplayed, but a farmer’s inability to spray fertiliser on his crops cannot, nor can empty petrol nozzles.

The Trumpian Age, as a grand saga, is becoming a tragedy and a cautionary morality play. It is the story of a supreme narcissist who came to believe that he could flout the laws of nature and physical constraints through sheer force of personality, like a wizard or an illusionist, conjuring memetic spells to hypnotise his legions of followers. Yet the nature of the bear trap negates any such rhetoric or bluster because it is tethering MAGA to a different form - a different, harder existence.

A fork in the road stands before the American Government. One road leads to a full retreat, defeat and flight from the chaos it created, leaving Israel to fend for itself and facing a rout from the Middle East and severe loss of prestige on the world stage. The almighty petrodollar would be brought into question, and therefore also America’s ability to accrue endless debt.

Alternatively, it is the road toward escalation, a full-blown invasion, and stacks of body bags in what would undoubtedly become a bloodbath that could fail anyway.

No anecdotes can change this, no funny little dances, no lambasting allies as cowards and no sad utterances that America can simply leave, nothing can change the paucity of options.

During and after Trump’s last presidential run, his loyalists took to telling naysayers to “get in the crystal”. Yet it is now quite clear that it is Trump and his loyalists who inhabit a separate astral plain.

The options available to Trump within the confines of his own mind seem infinitely more rosy, less existential, and less real. In this fantasy realm, Iran acquired Tomahawk missiles and fired them at their own girls’ school. Iran is on its last legs, and the rebels will storm the offices of the state at any moment. It’s just a matter of time before the fleets of other countries arrive in the Strait of Hormuz to form a grand coalition - under Trump’s sovereignty, of course.

Trump’s version of vainly ordering long-lost Panzer divisions into battle is to regurgitate patter and old one-liners, to do the funny little dance from the rallies one more time.

This, all the while, Trump himself becomes a meme via Iranian AI propaganda.

The man who once held perceptual reality in his hand now finds himself crushed in the grip of physics.

But then again, the same could be said for the West writ large. The postmodern reality television era was only possible in times of plenty, when the circus encompassed everything because we never had to think about the bread. But as fertiliser stocks deplete, inflation soars, and policies emerge to ration fuel, the desert of the real will return.

The intricate lattice of supply chains, critical infrastructure, energy demand and supply, and just-in-time economic models has, like Trump, been revealed as a fragile sham.

The Retard War began on the 28th of February 2026 when the Americans bombed the spiritual leader of Shia Islam and 160 girls in an Iranian school. This was it, then. This was why the woke was put away, this was why Trump’s myriad legal challenges and court cases were mysteriously dropped. This, as ordained by God, was why Trump survived assassination. It wasn’t a “forever war”, because it wasn’t a war, it was a “special military intervention”, or a “precision strike mission”, or something.

The grand strategy was to prevent Iran from ever attaining the nuclear weapons programme that had been obliterated the previous year. As well as regime change, disarmament, and allowing Iranian women to post on OnlyFans. Soon after, the regime change section was walked back. What remained was the dedication to drag the wild-eyed mullahs and Islamo-zealots into the 21st Century and secular sophistication, at least according to God’s Chosen People and the Christian Zionists preparing for the Rapture and the world being bathed in whirling plumes of fire and death before Christ’s return.

The Retard War differed from previous sojourns into the sands of Arabia and mountains of Persia in that the post-Fukuyama End of History intellectual framing had been dispensed with entirely; instead, the Retard War ran on memes and slick edits of Hollywood franchises and HBO series. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth adopted the persona of cold technocrats from early-2000s shows such as The Bourne Identity or Tom Clancy films, but more so. It was a living, breathing pastiche of media depicting war planning decades ago, the fish finger to Baudrillard’s freshly caught cod. A copy of a depiction of a cliché based on Robert McNamara or Donald Rumsfeld.

It was no longer enough to talk matter-of-factly about assets or forces; the Retard War demanded “War-Fighters” and “Warriors”, because hyperbolic language plays better in social media algorithms.

The problem was that the Washington social media teams had entered the meme game just as the social capital of Zionism had reached rock bottom, and the general consensus online was that Israel was a warmongering lunatic state that had corrupted all of the institutions of power in America. In the face of such animosity, the greatest advocates of The Retard War simply reheated 20-year-old counter-jihad propaganda while posters online attempted a “might makes right” moral framing, thus the messaging was a gloopy porridge of both victimhood and will-to-power.

But nobody really cared.

The Retard War grand strategy was to decapitate the Iranian regime by killing an 86-year-old theocrat with cancer, in the hope that the disorganised masses would spontaneously rise up and coordinate a new government to replace the Revolutionary Republic. Alas, this plan was hampered by American and Israeli war-fighters killing any figureheads in Tehran and Donald Trump rejecting the (West’s) favourite substitute, the Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi. Moreover, the Iranian state didn’t actually run on the whims of a Dr Evil Palpatine individual, but had a sprawling bureaucracy and civil service to keep the nation ticking over despite the bombs and assassinations.

Washington, having spent the previous month insulting, annoying, and threatening their own friends and allies in Europe over Greenland, was nevertheless somehow surprised by European reluctance to participate in the new Middle Eastern adventure. For their part, European nations feared the internal threat from the millions of restive Muslims they’d imported against the express wishes of their populations. Diversity was such a strength that geopolitical decision-making now had to consider the realities of historically insane immigration policies.

Except, of course, for the centre-right. In the weeks prior to the outbreak of the war, the British right had undergone a fierce debate in which parties such as Reform UK and the Tories tried to distance themselves from the “extreme” elements of the right who advocate mass deportations. To return Pakistanis to Pakistan was framed as unethical and inhumane. However, when the Americans and Israelis launched an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, such grandstanding immediately evaporated, and the British centre-right instantly demanded that we dive headlong into the conflict.

To the mainstream right, the idea of people being returned to the land of their ancestors is infinitely more abhorrent than high definition clips of little girls choking on pulverised concrete or being dragged out of rubble clutching teddy bears. The demographic apocalypse of the British Isles is for cranks and crazies.

The real adults are adopting faux Churchillian tones and feigning a grim determination to do what is necessary for Israel. Meanwhile, their deluded supporters are allowed to outsource their anger and frustration at atrocities such as the rape gangs and the pointed elbows of Britain’s expanding Islamic population. Bombs falling in Iran, which is also Islamic, allow for a sense of long overdue catharsis, and even if it’s misplaced and orchestrated for them, it’s something.

Of course, the collapse of a Middle Eastern country containing 92 million Muslims will create an unprecedented tsunami of displaced people washing up in the English Channel, and we still have a Labour government that will almost certainly settle them in the country, but who cares when we get to wrap ourselves up in WWII nostalgia and pretend to ourselves that it is 1939 all over again?

British boys from Carlisle, Dundee and Chichester may well face immolation by a Shahed drone in the arid mountains of Persia, but that’s a price worth paying to keep the most psychotic, corrupt and incompetent cretins in recent history content.

It does, however, seem to have dawned on the wider British establishment that this war is a Retard War and they’re not just looking at possible Islamic terror attacks or sleeper cells allowed in because of their own retarded and malicious refugee policies, but also to energy shortages and economic collapse. And even the Labour Party, unlike the British centre-right, isn’t stupid enough to wear that as a badge of honour.

On the broader world stage, one gets the impression that the war is the Götterdämmerung of MAGA and Trump. The betrayal is so staggering, so complete that it defies definition. It is, though, emblematic of a post-narrative, post-intellectual era in which the powerful can “just do things”; it’s just that in reality it isn’t Conan the Barbarian but a tattooed prick pretending to be Ed Harris collapsing the world so Israel can steal land and fulfil a grander project. The faux “might makes right” framing is utterly hollow because in 2026, everyone can see that the fox-like schemers and corrupters have the mighty leashed like a dog.

We can but hope that this conflict comes to a close soon. Yet, it now seems that Russia and China are shuttling money, intelligence and weapon parts into Iran because they think the Great Retarded Titan has become ensnared in his own hubris - and as always, it will be poor white boys who die.

I do not want our people to be in any way involved with this mess, and so far, we aren’t, but neither do American boys from North Carolina, Virginia, or Ohio deserve this.

We all deserve so much more than this, the most Retarded War in History.

Carl Benjamin, on the Lotus Eaters, recently compared the right-wing ecosystem in Britain to the Middle Ages, with various dukes and barons now expected to declare for either Restore Britain or Reform UK. There are, no doubt, a few sorry sods out there raising their banners for Kemi Badenoch, but in the social media ecosystem, it’s essentially binary.

After some initial confusion, streamers, bloggers, and podcasters are now moving to weaponise their platforms in defence of their champion.

It has come to my attention that a tweet I made just after the announcement has appeared on a few pro-Reform blogs:

Jack Hadfield, writing on the pro-Reform, Tory-Boy outlet Pimlico Journal, describes it as:

There are far too many who care only about signalling their ‘based’ credentials online, rather than implementing change in the real world. This commitment to being the ‘beautiful loser’ is represented best by this tweet which flew around the Lotus Eater sphere after Restore’s launch.

…This is an attitude which plagues the British Right. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Politics is not a game in which the loser receives a consolation prize and a pat on the back. The stakes now are too high. Either we take power, by whatever means, or we’re done for. A future where there is no right-wing government in 2029 looks incredibly bleak

The “beautiful loser” line was coined by Sam Francis in his essay, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. The essay is a diatribe against the feebleness of mainstream Conservatism in the face of the mad dog left, their willingness to buckle and suck up the losses while being consoled with gigs in mainstream newspapers and television slots.

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Nigel Farage, who literally states that Islam will have to be embraced or defeat is inevitable, is the very essence of a beautiful loser, and those who follow him routinely fall for it again, and again, and again. Even if Reform UK wins an election in 2029, the country will not be saved precisely because the party is comprised entirely of the beautiful losers described by Francis.

Yet, even the idea that the Reform UK Party are mere losers is the charitable interpretation. In truth, it is a second defensive trench hastily dug by the Conservative Party, the beautiful traitors who wrecked the country in the first place.

Thus, there is no scenario in which “we” take power in 2029 under a Reform banner; there is simply a consolidation of the centre within a new containment zone.

The question then is what to do in the no-win situation we find ourselves in when we look clearly and honestly at the political battlefield.

I was not on the “Farage Train” before Restore Britain existed. I had given up on the idea of a political solution.

To posit “taking power by any means necessary” while in reality advocating for a party which will likely have Robert Jenrick as a leader in a few years is a bit of a howler, to say the least.

The grim reality is that we’re rats in a trap. It is indeed true that we’re running out of options; the choice before us is whether to remain in the trap and slowly die out, or chew through our leg and break free of it.

When Alex Phillips warns Young Bob to think carefully about his future, she’s signalling that there are consequences to moving outside of the containment zone - fewer slots in the GB News, Talk TV punditry, no gigs in the Spectator, no invitations to dinners in the Cotswolds.

Just turn away your gaze from the fact that Hope Not Hate vets the members, or that Farage openly despises the idea we exist as a distinct people, or the flood of Boriswave Tories replacing grassroots. Like Cowslip’s Warren in Watership Down, just scoff your face on the conveniently provided lettuce while pretending not to notice the shiny wire laid about here and there.

Did an Indian Buddhist with a Jewish husband endorsing a Sri Lankan Muslim promising he’ll defend Christian values make you raise an eyebrow? Just enjoy the fodder and don’t think about it.

The actual dividing line between the two parties isn’t policy, but trust.

Nobody forced or tricked Farage into filling up the ranks of Reform with Tories; he did so freely and enthusiastically because he views his base as gullible marks who had nowhere else to go. I sympathise with the Reform base more than Farage does, my own family are among them. Yet, despite the fact that it would be better to have a Reform councillor at the local level than a Green or a Labour councillor, when Farage thought the coast was clear and the base was locked in, the knife went straight into the backs of those who thought they were on an anti-Tory, anti-establishment ticket.

The danger of the actual Tory Party being reduced to “Zero Seats” or, at least, having their backs broken was that too much fertile ground was cleared on the right of British politics. Who knows what shoots may begin to sprout through the ground?

This, in my opinion, is why Reform UK exists. To fill space until, eventually and inevitably, folding back into the Conservative Party.

They aren’t trusted because they don’t deserve to be.

Restore Britain is something of a wild card, an unstable element that has been introduced to a tightly controlled system. This is not particularly complicated unless you have incentives to view it differently.

Most of us, however, are not too concerned about being dropped from GB News, the trendy Art-Ho network, or whatever…

As I’m sure many people will be aware, Rupert Lowe launched the Restore Britain Party on Friday, 13th February. Fittingly for the state of the country, Lowe’s promotional video was sombre in tone, no fanfare, no gloss or razzamatazz, just a man who could have spent the rest of his life on his farm being dragged back into public life by an ancient sense of duty. Small surprise, then, that Lowe is frequently being hailed as our Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus.

As I noted recently, there’s a new era of sincerity emerging where the bullshit and spin have been snipped away like fatty blubber on a steak.

The Restore Britain think tank, which preceded the launch of the party proper, had only just concluded their inquiry into the rape gangs, which revealed horrors and barbarism that are difficult to comprehend. This matters because the monstrous abomination the British establishment and media class have become is exposed and even complicit in what is the worst atrocity on these isles for at least 500 years, perhaps ever.

The grim shadow of what would, if the victims were another race, be called a crime against humanity, goes some way to providing context to the low-key launch of Restore Britain.

Rupert isn’t offering us a good time, or vibes, or ways to open up new revenue streams and hustle. One is reminded of the famous Ernest Shackleton advert:

Let us be wide-eyed and clear-headed about this. There is little chance of success; we’re all jaded and cynical, and I, for one, had secretly given up entirely on a political solution being possible. And perhaps it isn’t.

I’m supporting Restore Britain, but I’m fully aware of the nefarious forces out there that will descend to subvert, redirect and hijack the energy and potential. The obstacles to success are truly monumental. We must navigate between the Scylla of making unreasonable (and possibly illegal) demands on the party regarding ethnic activism and ideals, while also preventing a lurch toward the Charybdis of Zionist containment and Tommy Town.

Compromises will have to be made, and people are going to argue and bicker about those compromises.

All of which fails to even mention the siren call of Farage and Reform, which now nest in the political terrain that Restore must occupy. Yet, in his arrogance, Farage has grossly misjudged the public mood by stuffing his party with Tories. Indeed, there is a very strong case to be made that Reform is not much more than a holding pen for the backstabbing bastards who created the mess we’re in in 2026.

The obvious line of attack from Restore supporters towards Reform must concentrate on the fact that the party is simply a Tory Party 2.0 and bind it to the term “Boriswave” forever.

Let us not forget, Reform was supposed to be the means by which the “uniparty” was destroyed. It is my view that that was a ruse to prevent the right wing of the mainstream from shrivelling up and dying because of their treachery.

Yet already I see the same old tired arguments about splitting the vote, that Labour or the Greens will be a horror beyond what we have endured so far. This is to misunderstand the central dynamic of British politics; there never was a right-wing vote on offer to begin with. The vote was split between two Tory Parties!

It is precisely this skullduggery and swindling that have burned out so many people in Britain. It is why many people will roll their eyes at the prospect of another trip around the Cape of Hope, only to break against the rocks of despair once again.

As I said on Xitter, I’d prefer an honourable defeat supporting an honest man such as Lowe than have another “fell for it again award” at the hands of Farage and his Tories.

We are too late, we have been conned one too many times. What can even be done now? Is it all just cope? Maybe.

Yet, it is this dogged, grim attitude that I find persuasive. We are about to have the fights and discussions that we should have had 20-25 years ago, but here we are. A few people who are well-known have said to me privately that “this is it tbh”, meaning that this is the last throw of the dice in terms of politics.

We are too late, we are beset by bastards and forked tongues on all sides. We are too few in number, and it will all probably end in disaster. Yet there is a flicker of hope regardless.

For now, at least, we have the chance to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I’m going to take a gamble and write a quick take that could age horribly, relating to a curious social media phenomenon I’ve been watching for a while. I say it could age horribly because the silver and gold markets, and the price of the dollar, are all in upheaval as I’m writing this.

The story begins over the Christmas holidays when YouTube and Xitter suddenly started promoting an economics channel with an AI “Asian Guy” commenting on the price of precious metals. The videos were slick, and Asian Guy’s synthetically-generated voice was pleasant to listen to. The background featured AI-generated impressionistic images that related to what was being said.

As somebody who has laboriously edited video essays, it’s something of a gut punch to see AI cranking them out by the bushel. And when I say cranking them out, I’m not joking. There were at least three or four videos per day that were packed with information about market manipulation, the suppression of precious metals, the fake nature of the dollar, and so on. All of which, naturally, had been pilfered and scraped from the work of others and posted online.

Moreover, it seemed to me as a casual observer that Econ YouTube was being saturated with this content; there was seemingly no end to the number of channels posting AI Asian Guy’s material and real people, except the big names like Peter Schiff, were being buried.

The message has been consistent since late December, when the content began appearing:

*Buy silver and gold (especially silver).

*The dollar is dying, so get prepared.

*Crypto is trash, dump it.

*Western financial institutions are suppressing the price of silver and lying about their holdings, and are about to be exposed.

Fast forward to late January 2026, and the price of silver has blasted to $107–$110 per ounce from the mid-$70s in late December, and gold has rocketed from around $4,325–$4,340 to past $5,085(!)

It would seem that the AI Asian Guy has been vindicated on everything.

One of the stories he/it spread widely was that JP Morgan was short millions of ounces of silver and risked a collapse or a bailout. AI Asian Guy reported on an internal memo of an emergency meeting. Yet, upon searching for the truth of that memo, the source appears to be AI Asian Guy himself.

The net effect of the endless churn of AI Asian Guy’s content will be to send people stampeding to buy silver and to lose whatever faith they had in the system and its financial institutions. And let us be honest here, faith in these institutions is already pretty pathetic.

I shall certainly not be leaping to the defence of the institutions of The Money Power.

But AI Asian Guy clearly represents coordination and networking aimed at achieving a specific goal. Or, to put it another way, are they reporting on the news or creating it? Are they responding to chaos in precious metals and “de-dollarisation” or helping drive it?

There can be little doubt that people who took the advice of this curious, AI-centred campaign and bought silver bars in December or early January will not be regretting it now.

Yet the irony is that content exposing market manipulation and financial intrigue could easily be construed as engaging in such manipulation and intrigue itself.

Of course, the world of finance is under more duress than a viral social media campaign with a pleasant but fake Asian Guy. Donald Trump seems dedicated to yanking on levers and stamping on delicately-constructed supply chains like a drunken cow. There are wars, threats of tariffs, alienation of allies, and the ever-sinking abyss of debt. The long-term trends were already baked in.

Perhaps AI simply allows all these narratives and tendrils to be formulated into a coherent picture, which is 80% real and 20% questionable.

AI Asian Guy appeared just before China declared that silver was a strategic asset that warranted strictly regulated export licenses. Thus, just in time for a squeeze that potentially exposes Western vaults and, beyond that, the fragility of fiat money. The campaign increases the strain on central banks and fake contracts by creating demand for metal that is already in short supply.

Do I have any sympathy for these institutions? Absolutely none.

Yet, I’m reminded of a line from a Hannibal Lecter book where Mason Verger says:

When the fox hears the rabbit scream he comes a runnin, but not to help.

There are schemers laying plans, and organisations and nations plotting. Perhaps plans within plans.

For whatever reason, I cannot help but think that this hollow-eyed Asian Guy artificial intelligence is their avatar. Inscrutable and unknowable.

What’s more, for now at least, we can assume that, whether Western, Asian, or simply a financial network, AI Asian Guy is operated by humans.

One day, maybe not.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Karl Rove.

My first impression of 2026 is that the news cycle’s velocity has been cranked up to Warp 9 and that this is partly intentional. What was once called “World Events” is simply whatever Donald Trump vomits onto his Truth Social platform.

Back in the mists of ancient history, during the Christmas holidays three weeks ago, I was paying attention to the odd behaviour of the silver markets. Essentially, the price of silver has been suppressed for years by Western financial institutions for their own nefarious purposes: to cripple a potential competitor to the dollar, and because those same institutions had been promising clients silver they didn’t have.

Western vaults were pitifully short on shiny metal, and the dirty secret was getting out. Moreover, China had been hoovering up the world’s silver supply for years, and on January 1st was set to block it from leaving their country on the basis that it was a strategic material. Silver is not merely a precious metal; it is used in solar panels, smartphones, AI data centres and pretty much every gadget and device en vogue in the 2020s.

Thus, a critical component of the modern world was drying up, and the price began to surge. Elon Musk tweeted:

This is not good. Silver is needed in many industrial processes.

Particularly, his own industries.

What, exactly, would happen if the highest-profile and curiously nepotistic tech corporations gradually began to run out of the lifeblood of so many of their investments and components?

It didn’t really seem to matter because the sight of America’s USS Iwo Jima and USS Gerald Ford looming in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela, and the subsequent kidnapping of President Maduro by Delta Force, were infinitely more attention-grabbing than a few lines on some graphs.

What was called “Operation Resolve” seemed to be designed with maximum social media virality baked into it. In the make-shift Mar-a-Lago war room, the Twitter X featured prominently as a backdrop.

In the regime change that wasn’t, the news was being both monitored and created simultaneously.

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Ten years ago, I arrived at my parent’s house during the Christmas season to discover my father and one of my brothers enjoying a glass of whisky together, and they offered me a dram. I enjoyed its ritualistic, bonding nature, but I found the whisky itself to be a bit of a chore to drink, me being an absolute novice to the activity.

To be quite blunt, the whisky tasted like ointment, or TCP or some other medicinal fluid that made the eyes crunch. The whisky itself was not just budget fare, such as Bell’s or Famous Grouse, but aesthetically elegant and high status. Yet the medicinal flavour was so intense I thought perhaps it was the detergent my mother was using on the tumblers. I kept my silence and didn’t bother with whisky again for years.

During my trips around the United Kingdom and Ireland in recent years, I (naturally) turned my attention back to whisky and discovered that what I was drinking didn’t have the ointment taste; indeed, it was pretty sublime. There was a mystery here.

This year, I finally uncovered the answer to the riddle. The whiskies my father and brother favoured were all heavily smoked or peated, which means the malted barley is dried over peat smoke. Brands such as Laphroaig, Lagavulin, or Ardbeg are all heavily peated, and this is precisely what would be found at my father’s table.

Given that this is an indulgent season and enjoying drinking is an obvious indulgence, here are a few fine whiskies I’ve discovered with a clear bias against the peated ointment taste.

Oban Little Bay

As noted in my post on my trip through Scotland, Oban on the West Coast of Scotland is a place dear to me and with which I have deep familial and personal ties. The Oban distillery sits just a street back from the lovely promenade and is hemmed in on all sides by modernity, and cannot expand any further. The branding and blurb lean into the idea of smallness, small casks, small operation, small batches. Oban itself is Gaelic for ‘‘Little Bay’’.

It was during the distillery tour that I asked the guide whether Scottish whiskies had to have a medicinal flavour because of the process, and was told, flatly, no. Indeed, the very nectar he was selling proved this point.

Little Bay is smooth and fruity, with only a hint of peat, nurtured in oak casks. The website Malts describes it as:

Oily, waxy and nutty, balanced by ripe orchard fruits. Notes of almond fruit cake on denser Christmas pudding, with cereal and orange behind

I certainly didn’t get any hints of Christmas cake, but in my imagination at least, there was seasalt and a splash of brine. Little Bay is a zesty, too-easy-drink whisky that aims to please. It’d make for a great crowd pleaser, and I’ll be showing up at the family get-togethers over the holidays with a bottle.

Bushmills 12 Year Old

The Bushmills distillery in County Antrim is the oldest licensed distillery in the world, having been in operation since 1608. Despite cultural tropes, Irish whisky hardly uses peat at all, and as a result, Irish brands tend to be far smoother. I visited the distillery with my father back in the spring. It is located near the Giant’s Causeway and the beautiful Irish Sea coastline, in a somewhat forgotten corner of the United Kingdom.

The freebies on the tour were divine, spurring the old man to say he felt like ‘‘angels are dancing on me tongue’’.

The 12-year-old matures in bourbon casks brought in from America, and then slumbers still longer in marsala casks (barriques) from Sicily. Like Little Bay, Bushmills has a fruity zest, but it is decidedly more Christmassy, with notes of honey, brown sugar, cinnamon and ginger.

Unlike many other brands, there’s something workhorse and earthy about Bushmills, something grounded. The well-advised festive walk to offset cardiac problems and general bloating during the festivities would be complemented perfectly by a dram of the nutty, no-nonsense Bushmills 12 Year waiting at the end with just enough seasonal spice to keep you in the spirit, so to speak.

The GlenAllachie

Having reached a rather depressing milestone this year, my wife bought me a bottle of GlenAllachie 12 Year, and it is without a doubt the nicest whisky I’ve ever had.

Situated in Aberlour, just north of the Cairngorms, GlenAllachie offers a sumptuous, indulgent, rich whisky matured in virgin oak, and casks of sherry, port and rum. In 2025, it won the ‘‘World’s Best Single Malt’’ at the World Whiskies Awards, and I can see why (As well as why my other half came across it).

The GlenAllachie is about as close to a Christmas cake in a tumbler you’re likely to get. It’s sherry, chocolate, figs, dark roasted coffee and stewed apples all squabbling for attention in your mouth.

Thijs Klaverstijn, over at Words of Whisky website, gives his take on where blender Billy Walker has taken his brand:

However, Walker is also giving the people what they want. These kinds of profiles have now long been popular with a large contingent of drinkers. Big, bold, brash flavours are often favoured over a certain delicate complexity. And I will say, his whiskies are never boring, which would be a cardinal sin, and there’s always a base level of balance. Especially the latter is a testament to his skill as a blender.

There’s certainly nothing boring about GlenAllachie; it’s a banquet.

Yet, I would savour it for a quiet moment over the festivities. That reflective time when the kids, in-laws and wider family and social circle have shuffled off, and that odd downtime arrives. Perhaps with an old friend, recounting those who have passed and any suffering that has occurred over the year.

GlenAllachie is opulent and luxurious, yet, like all whisky, it carries a certain melancholia. The aura of cold desolation and damp sea frets nestles within the cinnamon, figs and caramelised brown sugar notes. It is this odd juxtaposition that we feel over Christmas, luxury bound with loss, heartburn and heartache.

I mentioned at the start of this piece that I first drank whisky by walking in on my father and a brother. Perhaps this is at the root of it, not drinking per se, but ritual.

Merry Christmas, and why not treat yourselves to a wee dram?

Addendum: I may yet discover a fondness for peaty whiskies next year…

Podcasting giant Tim Pool recently allowed us a little glimpse into the upper echelons of the podcasting industry. Things are tough at the moment, says Pool. The election cycle is far behind us now, the midterms are still a ways off, so the market for politically driven podcasts is relatively inert and dry.

According to Pool, everyone’s fave podcasters will have to crank out a bit of cultural stuff to keep the revenue stream open and the algorithms humming until the next lucrative news cycle arrives. There is, though, a conspicuous outlier on the right-leaning podcasting circuit who isn’t suffering in the drought like everyone else, but instead, is surging in popularity. Namely, Candace Owens.

Pool describes podcasters as a marine biologist would describe hagfish, horseshoe crabs, and sleeper sharks: bottom feeders at the furthest depths of the ocean floor, forever in search of content morsels. In this regard, the murder of Charlie Kirk was the equivalent of a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza, a whale-fall.

Candace Owens has gained notoriety because, to keep the Charlie Kirk storyline current, she simply invented conspiracies and slanderous allegations, and tied Kirk’s murder into a larger conspiracy theory she has about the President of France’s wife actually being a man.

Yet, Owens’ excessiveness has spurred other podcasters such as Tim Pool to now view her as a traitor to Kirk and the right more generally. So now they have new content as well in the form of responding to Owens. This somewhat cannibalistic approach to content creation is nothing new, but it does stand out that, at its root, there appears to be nothing of any substance at all.

The fact is, there simply isn’t enough news to justify hours of talking content every single day. Yet the background hum of chatter must chatter on, and so streamers and podcasters increasingly rely on external sources or other podcasters as props.

We can watch Tim Pool watching Candace Owens watch the reaction of Turning Point USA to her allegations. We can listen to streamers listen to experts on animal health watching Hasan Piker electrocute his dog, while streaming, of course.

Prominent podcasters and streamers have now moved far from being deliverers of news and opinions, and have instead become the central characters in their own story arcs. In this way, audience engagement is locked in to the person themselves rather than their opinions on politics or ideology.

Nick Fuentes’ journey from the banned hinterlands to Tucker Carlson and beyond has resembled the leader board of an old fighting video game, such as Street Fighter II, with Piers Morgan or Joe Rogan waiting like end-of-game bosses.

It’s easy to be glib, yet there probably will be real-world consequences because of the surging anti-Zionist sentiment on the right - almost all of it generated via podcasts and streams.

The story of collapsing support for Israel on the right is a story of large Zionist-friendly podcasts failing to gatekeep and contain insurgent streamers and content creators. It is Ben Shapiro’s brand of boot-strapping pulling Reaganite economics and identity politics for Jews only, failing in the marketplace of audience retention against Tucker, Fuentes, and even Ana Kasparian.

Shapiro held an emergency broadcast stream detailing to his dwindling audience how serious the situation was becoming, and Konstantin Kisin’s Triggernometry platform appeared to be dispatched to America on an emergency podcast tour to shore up support and generally hold the line.

Who controls American foreign policy is not inconsequential; it does matter. Yet, the battlelines and hot zones amount to listener capture, who is listening to whom on their dog walks and on night shifts as ambient noise.

It is, fundamentally, a question of Tucker Carlson drinking Ben Shapiro’s milkshake.

We can hold our nose as the underwater UFO content appears the day after our latest political hope, we sympathise that there are lots of milkshakes, and many audiences to capture.

Perhaps the broader issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a saturation point for long-form audio content. There’s no Candace Owens take too barmy, no Tim Pool show too tepid. Leftist streamers routinely do eight-hour shifts playing video games or commenting on each other, or the other content mine, having a window to Xitter open so that the cues and props never end.

Does nobody listen to music anymore? Does nobody ever just enjoy silence?

Of course, there’s a bitter irony within all of this because I, too, do audio content. I recently noted on my Monthly Review podcast, where I discussed the saturation of long-form audio, that I was doing the same on my podcast, and the hypocrisy is apparent. Thus, like late-stage Kurt Cobain, you can lambast the medium using the medium. The only difference is that small- to mid-sized content creators are now like ants scuttling between elephants' toes.

Years ago, Peter Hitchens wrote an article in the Daily Mail moaning that pop singer Robbie Williams had been spotted in public wearing large headphones. The point Hitchens was making was that Williams epitomised the (then) aloof youth culture that had closed itself off from wider society and become a world unto themselves.

The fact that there appears to be a nigh-on infinite demand for hearing people talk reflects the profoundly atomised and dislocated mass of individuals out there. The market share and the number of people in the algorithm, or all people in the real world, with ears to listen and the willingness to do so. Formerly, it was understood that radio was a third space, usually middle-of-the-road and almost always focused on music.

The stream or the podcast is a personal experience; it’s just the listener and the device.

As such, it has become the ambient, personalised, algorithmically selected noise of a fragmented existence, where conversation is rare and social gathering is a chore or non-existent.

Joe Rogan isn’t interesting or intellectually challenging; he’s company.

For all the hyperrealism, content cannibalism, and self-referential arcs, at its core, the podcast phenomenon is a campfire for one.

One of the reasons I prefer to focus on the nuts and bolts of British life is its rawness and visceral nature. It is the cold, clinical LED lights, barely illuminating empty streets and decayed town centres, vacated by the everyman before the wildings come out. Managerial bloat and regulatory overreach everywhere you don’t want it and nowhere that you do.

In an age in which the mainstream is all but dead and even the fake is fake online, the daily grind of British life, with its squalor and incoherent political formulas, has a grounding to it in all its vape shop, Turkish barber misery.

There is a line of thinking on the Right that holds that reality is a creation of Power, a never-ending public relations campaign that can mould and shape perception to a nigh-on infinite degree, and the public will constantly, without fail, be bamboozled and befuddled enough to go along with whatever the new narrative is. I do not entirely agree with this assessment.

I believe that sooner or later, material realities will cut through the fog of nudging and management technique, and grim, stark reality will reveal itself to all.

A family sitting in the cold during winter, watching mould creep across their walls, will not be convinced of Ed Miliband’s latest Green Energy boondoggle that put them in that situation. I’ve argued before that the “Boriswave” of immigrants shattered many illusions because the abstracted principle became a lived reality.

A ruling entity that is worth its salt has to deal with what is, not what ought to be, with reality as it stands and not as their ideological priors determine. The irony, of course, is that the reality of modern Britain is the result of decades of left-leaning ideals combined with neoliberal economics.

As reality and electoral annihilation confront the Labour Party, they are at least paying lip service to some of the problems heaped upon them by their ideals. As they attempt to do so, their left, woke, flank is being carved off into a thoroughly astroturfed Green Party insurgency headed by the aesthetically challenged Zack Polanski, a gay Jewish hypnotist.

Labour policy wonks and focus groups understand that the optics of the “small boat” migrants combined with a relentless churn of headlines of sexual assaults and stabbed dog walkers is political cancer and, at least in terms of PR, something has to be done. The Green Party insurgency has emerged as the chunk of the left that flatly refuses to move on from the peak woke years of 2020/22.

It is already being claimed that Shabana Mahmood’s draconian new policies will increase the use of the “safe and legal” routes, which, again, will not change the fundamental problem people see with their own eyes in the physical world, of what has been done to their nation.

Mahmood has toured the media claiming that, whether the mainstream likes it or not, there is a genuine and serious problem with illegal migration and that the system is broken.

She also, quite correctly, claims that brown people like her are increasingly under threat by a backlash emerging to the entire situation. Aaron Bastani recently made a similar point that, as the situation deteriorates, all non-white minorities will be lumped into the same basket as the newer influx.

The framing here is clever; essentially, unending panic and anger over immigration is a threat to already established immigrant communities. This serves to kneecap white liberals, who can now be cast into the roles of aloof nutters not facing actual issues, either from the white working-class or minority groups.

Yet, even the Greens are beginning to get a dose of reality.

Recently, the deputy leader of the Green Party, Rachel Millward, became the epitome of the hypocritical white liberal nimby by opposing the settlement of illegal immigrants in her 96% white East Sussex enclave. Amid much ribaldry on social media, Millward claimed it was wrong to house such doctors and surgeons in local army barracks, which is… convenient to say the least.

She also noted that it was unsafe for both locals and migrants. Despite having spent years declaring “refugees are welcome” she obviously thinks they should be welcomed in struggling working-class areas, or inner cities, or, well, anywhere except near her shire.

In my essay Reforming Normies, I wrote:

Moreover, the sheer quantity of foreigners has resulted in the immigrants being an unindividuated Other, like a rapidly rising tide of unknowable threats and differences becoming intolerable. Nobody has any interest that this person came from Somalia or Afghanistan or is a Kurd — all are rolled up psychologically into a perceived wall of migrant otherness. The hegemonic values insist that we view people as nothing more than individuals, but it is now becoming clear that, in reality, this cannot scale up to the degrees demanded, so yet another fracture appears in the machine of truth production.

The stunning hypocrisy of the Greens and, for that matter, the Liberal Democrats is that despite their virtue signalling, they’re conscious of the uncomfortable realities of the outcomes of their own ideals. Yet they still pursue them for others, not for themselves.

When Elon Musk described England as inhabited by unworldly Hobbits who have no experience of the world's harshness, it was widely assumed he was referring to the working class. Yet the howls of outrage from certain quarters of England revealed that he was talking about the Rachel Millwards and Green Party adherents.

At least the Hobbits were unaware of the men of Gondor making a desperate stand to hold back the tide; people such as Rachel Millward (and there are many of them) are seemingly well aware of the tensions and abuses in places such as Epping, yet wish only to increase their misery and shield themselves and their constituency from it.

It is absolutely contemptible.

The issue, of course, is that the high status values of liberal socialites are entirely at odds with how things are in the real world. Moreover, these same liberals have revealed preferences that tell us they’re fully aware of their hypocrisy! Even Millward’s own constituents want her and her dimwitted ideals to get lost.

It is commonly held that the average Reform voter, or nationalist, is living in some bygone age of quaint telephone boxes, kids playing football using their jackets as goalposts, and a homogenous society.

There is truth in the claim that many of us have an addiction to nostalgia, yet it is the Greens and Lib Dem swathes of England that seem stuck in the past. Rachel Millward is an anachronism, a throwback to 2014 and a time when her values remained abstract, not visceral, and lived cheek by jowl with Third World imports.

The open borders, multicultural dream is not something unfurling, it is not a sunny upland we’re heading towards, but a dystopian reality almost everyone hates. The Green insurgency is not a new movement, but a decades-old movement dedicated to keeping a failed, catastrophic ideal alive in the face of hard truths that debunk it.

One of the reasons I prefer commenting on my own country’s affairs is that there’s a sordid realism and harshness to it that I have real-world experience with. I do not doubt that America has its own equivalent to the filthy mattress above a kebab shop and diversity bollard aesthetic of our “Yookay” but I’m too distant to appreciate it fully.

Instead, my experience of America happens entirely through screens of one sort or another, which means that almost everything I see is presented as entertainment, a Big Show. The show that’s running at the moment is a civil war within the Conservative movement centred on Zionist power and influence over the Trump administration and American foreign policy. That said, Zionism has been under sustained scrutiny and attack from across the political spectrum since Israel began its questionable activities in Gaza after the October 7th attacks in 2023.

Recently, the cordon sanitaire surrounding Nick Fuentes has been broken, and the Zionist camp has declared that enough is enough and come out fighting.

When I say come out fighting, however, I mean a series of speeches and podcasts that moan and adopt a Hillary Clinton frame of lambasting the rise of the deplorables. The Tucker Carlson/ Fuentes interview was the final straw; the state of Israel and its supporters cannot be allowed to receive this level of scrutiny, and battle formations have to be deployed.

Yet, it can’t be denied that the battle formations the Zionist camp has thus far deployed have been under-equipped and, well, a bit cringe. I’ve been watching this from afar in the form of people talking, and people talking about people talking, and having something of an “is this all you can conjure, Saruman?” moment.

A few weeks ago, Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks enacted an impression of the Happy Merchant meme when lambasting Jewish billionaire and Zionist Larry Ellison, complete with a sneering nasally voice and hand rubbing. From what I can tell, neither she nor the Young Turks faced any consequences for this at all. Indeed, much of the geopolitical YouTube scene centres its content portfolio on Israel corrupting America’s political institutions, and nobody is being censored.

This new trend runs against the received wisdom of online right discourse in that “they” were usually portrayed as an almost omnipotent, shadowy force that always emerged victorious, always had another lever to pull.

There’s a trope in Hollywood movies when the “system” is on the rails in the face of an insurgency. It features an establishment figure (think Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, or Ned Beatty in Network) who angrily and reluctantly places the rebellion into a broader Machiavellian context. There is a devastating monologue in which the childish rebellion is revealed as ignorant, naive, and idealistic. It is the “you can’t handle the truth!” moment.

Mark Levin is a Boomer who seems to have modelled his persona on Hollywood tough guys and truth nukers of a bygone era. Still, he can’t justify or contextualise America’s slavish devotion to Israel either. There were insults galore, but no dramatic moments of exposition where Israel was placed as the pivotal linchpin of American power.

There are no speeches like:

The world is an integrated system, Mr Carlson. You launder your holier-than-thou morals on your piss ant little podcast, you underhandedly insult the Jews because you think it’s revealing a great truth, but you’re a child. If Israel goes, Suez goes; if Suez goes, so does the Middle East and Europe’s energy supply; if we lose Europe, we’re surrounded. Am I making things clear to you, Mr Carlson?

But nothing is forthcoming of this nature; they simply regurgitate the post-war morality as a permanent and unalterable dogma that may never be challenged.

In a sense, Zionist power looks more like a JJ Abrams mystery box, a MacGuffin used to drive the plot, with nothing much inside it.

Whatever the truth of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the rather sordid interaction between influencers and donors featuring emergency Zoom calls and meetings to ensure everyone stayed on message added to the disenchantment and the aura of corruption and swindling taking place.

Is that really all there is to it? Is it really just blackmail, bribes, and buggery all the way down? No esoteric rites of passage, no grand Machiavellian justification in the name of the greater good?

Then again, this is simply people talking on podcasts, and the reactions and counter-reactions flying back and forth. It’s like watching old galleons firing cannonballs into each other’s masts and rudders, but as podcasts. All of this talk will not have prevented a single shipment of American arms from being sent to Israel, nor the next billion in aid.

Yet, while acknowledging that, the fact remains that the future of American/Jewish/Israeli relations could very well be on the line. Reuters reports that:

U.S. law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher said Wednesday it has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League to launch a coordinated effort to provide free legal services to victims of antisemitism.

Gibson Dunn and the ADL said the initiative includes 39,000 lawyers across 35 U.S. states, and that 40 law firms have agreed to receive client referrals or serve as co-counsel as part of the network.

How this literal army of lawyers is to be deployed remains to be seen, but it is proof that the current situation is transcending the podcast circuit and entering the realm of the real.

This takes me back to where I began: the hyperreal nature of American discourse and its abstractness. There is a scenario where what we’re witnessing is a rogue faction getting their “ducks in a row” in preparation for a Tucker Carlson presidential run. Another scenario is that all of this energy will be redirected into the Republican Party and neutralised, and another where, quite literally, nothing ever happens.

There’s a sense that the curtain has been pulled back, and not very much has been revealed, so far, and the nature of the discourse is such that we can’t help but wonder if we’re looking at just another curtain.

I spent the last week watching the prices of silver and gold surge, hoping that the two silver coins I bought to combat Klaus Schwab in 2021 might increase in value. My knowledge of markets and commodities is almost non-existent; the finer details of Western economics, sifting through the nuances, are like reading the entrails of a dead crow for signs o…

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I have an awkward relationship with Digital IDs as a subject of discussion within the zeitgeist. I am simultaneously accused of being a paranoid technophobe who kicks up a fuss and panics about nothing, while also being patted on the back for being prescient. The truth of it is, I should probably take the proverbial L on Digital IDs because I thought they were imminent during COVID and that, indeed, Digital IDs would be the off-ramp. None of this happened. The entire COVID saga was memory-holed, and a great deal of speculation and theorising went with it.

To an extent, anyway. It was obvious in the real world that the digital surveillance grid was unfolding, even if for no other reason than that it was simply easier and more efficient for people to use their phones for everything rather than fumbling with cards and documents. My original analysis of the digital surveillance state drew on Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power. The power structure would push for more intrusion, more data, and more tracking, simply because it is an inherent aspect of Power to expand itself and its remit.

The expansion of the digital grid as an emergent phenomenon could rumble away until the regulation or technological capability allowed Power to formalise its control.

And now the British State has formally announced that Digital IDs will be made compulsory, and everyone is up in arms about it. The right are angry because they know the state hates them, the Britlibs are angry because they think it’ll be used as a racist tool against minorities. The older hard left are seething because the Tony Blair Institute and his billionaire donors are behind it. A few old-fashioned liberals are opposing it because it’s illiberal. There are also questions about the feasibility of even implementing the Digital ID, given that Labour is a profoundly unpopular government.

I have long suspected that Keir Starmer’s role is to get a few key issues resolved, popularity be damned. Like a bank robber going in through the front door, all guns blazing, rather than sneaking around in the dead of night.

Given that this subject is likely to dominate the discourse in the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future, I have decided to embed some of my older videos and essays in this post before moving on.

In 2023, I attended the Witan Conference and delivered my first-ever public address, face-to-face, on the subject of Digital IDs, surveillance, and their nightmarish potential. Ironically, this is the speech that led to me being doxed precisely because the digital surveillance state is already so advanced.

The speech is here:

It isn’t discussed enough, but the Online Harms Bill will slot neatly into Digital ID in the guise of age verification.

In this video essay, I explored how digital technology creates a gamefied real-world experience:

How Technocracy Undermines the Foundations of Liberalism.

What the incentives of a “woke” social credit system would look like, in contrast to China’s:

Here, I look toward localism as a potential safeguard to the technocratic surveillance state:

I do not doubt that my content portfolio on the technocratic surveillance state will increase now that the Digital ID has finally been given the green light. My initial impression is one of surprise at the widespread outrage and opposition to it.

Will it be enough? We shall see.

“Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.” – Jimmy Conway

Criminal networks benefit from honest men because their nefarious deeds are given a veneer of legitimacy. A cheerful, trustworthy face attracts the crowds and makes the product pitch easier, whether it is stolen goods or a long con. The smiling face of the slick salesman runs the restaurant out front, while the killing, thieving, and larceny take place out the back and out of sight. Come on in and see the wares, we’ve got precisely what you’re looking for.

The incentives don’t hurt either. Nice car, nice family, status, connections, and prestige. There may be a pang of doubt here and there, but how bad can it actually be? And anyway, it isn’t as if the naysayers are morally beyond reproach. They don’t get it; they have little understanding of how the real movers and shakers operate, the adults.

Yet, there was that business of the guy who disappeared last year. And how come that building was burned down at such a convenient moment? Probably an explanation for it.

The wider network seems unperturbed by the external critics, perhaps irritated, but not fearful. This is reassuring to the Face because it exudes confidence and self-assurance. The time has come to inject a little balance, to be the mediator, the rational guy conscious of both sides, but not betraying his principles and fundamental belief in the network. Let us crack open the shutters and invite a little sunshine in, which will put everyone at ease.

He can thus remain loyal and entertain the critics who are screaming at him night and day, claiming he’s a front for a criminal empire. He’ll ask some questions in public. It’s all above board.

A good man in a terrible situation, unaware that he isn’t supposed to ask questions or let the sunlight in, but act as a bulwark. His honesty means he can’t be blackmailed; there are no compromising photos or real estate swindles. Unlike so many, he has no blood on his hands.

They arrive to offer a quiet word. They tell him it’s complicated, that he doesn’t have to concern himself with what’s been happening behind the wider scenes, because he’s doing such a good job selling the product. Yet, the honest actor no longer really knows what the product is that he’s selling or how the wider public benefits from it.

His popularity and likability, once so lucrative for the network, now make him more of a threat than an external enemy because he’s within the walls. He won’t shut up, he doesn’t see sense, and flirting with actual enemies in this way threatens to unleash a cascade effect of internal affairs being picked over and the leadership being implicated.

He has to be dealt with. But who will take the fall? Why, all of those screeching, holier-than-thou lunatics who everyone knows are our true foes. The fact that the Feds can have casus belli to tear apart the networks they have lined up against us is the meatball on the pasta sauce.

The call is made…

The problem with the hot-take culture of social media is that speculative ruminations, which may turn out to be wrong, are often disincentivised. The algorithm prefers that you pick a hill to die on or a hill to charge, not to stay put and ponder. Yet, I can’t help but conclude that if I were a British leftist of the LBC and Guardian stripe, I’d be absolutely convinced that the current American administration is attempting a “regime change” in the United Kingdom.

The problem with such speculation, of course, is that the Labour Government is so incompetent that it is difficult to assess where the stupidity ends and the external sabotage begins. To list examples of where the Trump administration could be undermining Starmer’s regime is simultaneously to list examples of policies so venal and at odds with “Western values” that they amount to an open goal.

This year, there’s been a steady background noise in Britain of “civil war” brought about by the sheer scale of mass immigration, crimes against native women, censorship, two-tier policing, and all the rest. Yet, I’m not the first to notice that the civil war narrative was propagated from a network of podcasts with a distinctly pro-MAGA, pro-Zionist slant. However, we must tread with caution. I actually agree that we’re in danger of lurching toward sectarian conflict, in England in particular. Nevertheless, the British deep-state, Neocon outlet The Daily Telegraph has repeatedly published articles citing an impending civil war, not ethnic-conflict or possible sectarian tensions.

The atmosphere in which Keir Starmer has to operate is one of a perpetual looming crisis brought about by his own policies (rather than the Boriswave) that could spell doom for the country. The beneficiaries of this narrative are not actually the British right, who have no means to conduct any conflict, but large-scale podcasters who generate traffic, and the Trump administration, which can feel vindicated in its own ideals. The MAGA base can use the UK as a cautionary lesson.

Naturally, this leans into the traditional Counter-Jihad framing of the American and British right being pro-Israel and anti-Islam in a conflict of “values” that always align with Neoconservative ideals.

The introduction of Islam here is vital because the MAGA impression of Britain, and most certainly of the Labour Party, is that we’re effectively a caliphate operating under shariah law. Again, this is not to understate the actual problems we have, but to point out that others have noticed them too and might logically seek to use them to their advantage. The Labour Party is indeed heavily reliant on the Muslim vote, and that means they’re hamstrung when it comes to issues such as the Israel/Palestine situation. The party leadership is forever in a state of tension with its base, whether Islamic or just leftist, as to the degree and nature of their support for Israel and pro-Zionist narratives.

From the perspective of the Trump administration and its backers, the Labour Party must seem like a profoundly weak and compromised ally when it comes to the Middle East.

When discussing the British Government in this context, it is not so much the old debate between malice and incompetence, but sabotage or stupidity.

Added to the civil war narrative, and neatly complementing it, is the truly appalling state of free speech in the UK. This too has been picked up on by the Trump administration, particularly JD Vance, and Starmer was thrown a curveball in Trump’s presence by being asked directly if he thought free speech was under threat by himself. While I welcomed these interventions, I couldn’t help but notice that Starmer’s political capital was publicly damaged as a result because he had to awkwardly lie that our free expression was as robust as it always had been.

Once again, the idea being seeded was that the UK is a totalitarian basket case and Keir Starmer was responsible, despite the draconian laws cited being in place long before his tenure.

Like the civil war narrative, the populist podcast and right-leaning media scene is correctly placing Lucy Connolly’s outrageous imprisonment around Starmer’s neck like an anvil. This is, naturally, to be expected, as it is an ideological slam dunk. There are views and clicks in it, and there is also a genuine case of a woman having been locked up while allies and friends of Labour run free.

Yet, it is now being reported that Lucy Connolly is set to travel to the US to give testimony before Congress, and likely accompanied by Nigel Farage. The New Statesman seems to have cottoned on to the play:

The case has since become a right-wing cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic. Her release this week is being closely watched in Washington. “There’s great interest in Lucy’s case among the admin. It illustrates the harms JD Vance warned about in Munich,” one Washington insider close to the administration told me. Nigel Farage has said about the case that his “American friends cannot believe what is happening in the UK”.

Nigel’s friends in Washington could have highlighted the Palestine Action story that has seen hundreds arrested for wearing T-shirts and an insane overreach of the UK’s anti-terror legislation, but they didn’t. Indeed, Trump’s America is quite comfortable censoring in the name of combating antisemitism. And why is Nigel Farage touted as Lucy Connolly’s chaperone and not, for example, free speech guru Toby Young?

The purpose of the Trump administration galloping to defend free speech in the UK is not really about free speech, but about undermining the Labour Government, which is fair enough. However, we now see Nigel Farage entering the fray as our champion. Farage and his party, Reform UK, have been the primary beneficiaries of all of the narratives above and Labour’s staggering incompetence. With Nigel Farage as Prime Minister, MAGA and Trump would have an ardent ally and fellow traveller in Number 10 Downing Street, unencumbered by an Islamic bloc vote, shorn of the Euro technocrat circle that Starmer prefers, and a compliant client on matters such as Russia and Ukraine.

Moreover, internally, Reform can act as the off-ramp from two-tier policing and the illegal immigrant crisis and become a theoretical balm for the nation’s many wounds.

What’s standing in the way of all of this is that Starmer still has years left before he has to call an election. Unless, of course, some disaster collapses the Government. Perhaps a disaster on the scale of the British economy finally going belly up, and the country requiring the IMF to intervene and manage our affairs. Which is precisely what the Daily Telegraph reported this week.

It is difficult to refute that the stage is being set for Nigel Farage, and that forces higher even than Labour’s incompetence are helping to write the script.

The blog will be quiet over the next week or so because my other half and I are going away for a break. I’ve long accepted that if I travel through customs or a major airport, I’ll be hauled in for a “chat” as my devices are searched. It’s a surprisingly common phenomenon that people tend to speak about in closed group chats but not publicly. From what I can gather, if you’re “marked” by the state security apparatus, then the system pings when your passport is scanned, and you’re asked to come for an interview where your ideas and views are discussed with lovely gentlemen from the counter terrorism squads.

Mark Collett was recently kicked out of Sweden and banned from the entire EU Schengen Zone for fifteen years. He was called:

A threat to public order, the fabric of society and the values on which Sweden and Europe are built

Besides trips to Ireland, I haven’t left the United Kingdom since 2010 and, by the looks of it, I never will. This is why my travel vlogs and blogs tend to be very much “on the doorstep” as it were, and to be honest, I’m fine with this. I’ve never been to Wales or much of the South Coast of England. There are parts of Cumbria I’d like to delve into more, and I haven’t been to the Scottish Highlands since I was a boy.

We like to tell ourselves that there remain pockets and corners of the British Isles where Old Gods slumber, and legends wait to be reborn. The metaphysical and enchanted realms hold fast for us to escape into. Where the sacred is holding the line against the profane.

It is for this reason that there’s been so much controversy over a mosque being built in the vicinity of the Lake District. It is, correctly, perceived as a foreign intrusion and victory over a place that is distinctly, and spiritually, ours. Yet such thinking is incomprehensible to dead-eyed wraiths within governmental planning departments because it isn’t quantifiable, and anyway, we can’t be racist. To the managers, there is not one iota of difference between the Lake District and Bradford town centre. Tintagel and Tower Hamlets are “equal” in the sense that both are utterly devoid of cultural and identitarian significance. Both are subject to de-territorialisation in equal measure.

There’s more than an element of Douglas Adams’ Last Chance To See in attempting to reach an unmolested, authentic experience when planning a “staycation”. We scamper about as if we’re on a melting iceberg, trying to avoid the cold, harsh depths of the Yookay.

It’s a gamble, a roll of the dice.

Your identity can be reaffirmed, your sense of blood and soil emboldened, or you can be left utterly despondent and demoralised. A friend of mine who is hurtling toward the “far right” at breakneck speed, recently went to the Lakes and witnessed foreigners of one hue or another washing their feet in a pristine stream. Retelling the story, he suggested that it might have been better not to go at all, because then his idealistic inclination would not have been challenged and defeated. However, this is just a retreat, and we’ve already retreated so, so far.

For reasons that I’m sure my readers will understand, I shall not at present reveal where I will be going, though when I return, I shall write up my findings.

I have a feeling that I shall be pleasantly surprised, but we shall see…

A few years ago, on a hot summer day, I was walking my dog in the fields around Blyth and noticed what appeared to be an airborne convoy of military aircraft heading toward Newcastle Airport. The scene I found myself in, alone on the land, staring up at the military hardware of the British State, reminded me of a piece of artwork from Dune in which a Fr…

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Legend has it that the Age of Woke began around 2012, when the corporate world and banking sector grew weary of leftist activists camping on Wall Street and decided to pour vast amounts of money and resources into redirecting their energies toward ideas less likely to affect their bottom lines. Out went the structural critiques of capitalism, in came the pride flag, out went the focus on the 1% (whoever they may be), in came amorphous allusions to whiteness and white privilege. This “Great Awokening” would bring into the centre ideas usually found on the periphery of leftist thought, and relegate the core, which is to say economics, to the periphery.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The Age of Woke will go down in history as uniquely cringeworthy; however, unlike a poorly drawn tattoo or a mullet haircut, many of those surgeries will be there for good.

Within the logic of the “Woke Mind Virus” was a faulty piece of wiring that was present all along but not too much of a problem until October 7th, 2023. Where in a worldview rooted entirely in identitarian power dynamics did Jews and Israel sit? Were they, too, a vulnerable minority group? Or were they “white”? And further still, where did Israel sit as a country propped up by the West and predicated (as they saw it) on oppressing powerless non-white people? Generally speaking, the left opted for the safer route of lumping Israel in with the general theory of white privilege, albeit the plot holes and paradoxes were skipped over, mainly.

This meant that when Zionism sought to retaliate against Hamas and other forces aligned against it, it discovered that a considerable number of people embedded within institutions across the West, and particularly in America, agreed with the terrorists!

Conveniently, then, the re-electing of Donald Trump meant that woke would be “put away” because it had become a rival node of power within the system. The institutions were purged of their mad progressive ideas so everyone could return to the 1990s. The Mad Dog left would be taken out back and put down like Ole Yella.

In America, at least, the woke left seems to have taken a drubbing, but I argued a while ago that the possibility of a similar purge taking place in the United Kingdom was doubtful. Yet it can’t be denied that the most egregious and irritating form of woke has indeed receded, and we are in a new paradigm.

The idea that a movement can be relegated to obscurity because its institutional and corporate incentives have been severed is, in my view, becoming a flawed perspective. The human capital that constitutes the ideology does not simply evaporate because the incentives have changed; instead, a more militant rebranding emerges, half in and half out of institutional power structures.

And this is where the post-woke left is now.

The rainbow flags have been replaced with Palestinian flags, and the purple hair has been replaced with a keffiyeh.

The recent Glastonbury debacle, where a black rap artist led the crowd in chanting “Death to the IDF” saw an institutional backlash, though not because the same person also gloated that native Brits would never get their country back. Owen Jones, long regarded as emblematic of the entitled leftist wet lettuce who never knew struggle for a cause, now claims he is prepared to go to jail for his stance on the Israel/Gaza issue.

Across the left, the term “Zionist” is spat out with contempt, and associated with a corrupting force that dictates institutional policy across the West. One young lady on TikTok claims to yearn for the end of the West, because of its unending support for the genocide in Gaza.

I leave my readers to ponder how such a young lady would survive in a state of nature, but the dedication to the cause and the contempt shown to Power are pretty apparent.

More problematic is that the “West” and Israel are inextricably linked in their world view, and in terms of power dynamics, it is difficult to refute. During the Glastonbury affair, the revealed preferences of the mainstream right were, predictably, to instantly white-knight for the IDF and leave the insult to their own countrymen ignored. Objectively speaking, some of the reports of atrocities coming out of Gaza are truly horrific, yet the toilet seat warmers on the centre-right are happy to defend it. The thousands of dead children, families buried alive under rubble, starvation lines, and general sadism — none of it seems to faze the smug idiots of Julia Hartley Brewer-style punditry.

Thus, within just two years, we have gone from culture war dynamics wherein the left wanted to trans the kids, to the right turning a blind eye to piles of dead kids (many with headshots). A right servile to Zionism is now compromising the successes in pushing forward the discourse on demographics and nativist sentiment.

Moreover, the anti-establishment energy is drifting to the left because the toilet seat warmers are handing the left that most incendiary device, a legitimate moral cause. Leftists such as Aaron Bastani are now easily able to score their own rhetorical headshots on people such as Matthew Goodwin by asking why they put the interests of a foreign regime over British interests.

Israel is an anvil made of solid lead hanging around the neck of the populist right, and it simply does not have to be there. Naturally, the anti-Zionist left is also more than happy to highlight the pay-offs and backhanders used to grease the wheels of the pro-Zionist right.

In the midst of all of this, Keir Starmer’s dithering and confused Labour government finds itself in a truly horrible position. Formerly, it was received wisdom that while the British right consisted of numerous micro-parties ready to undermine the Tories, the left was primarily confined to the Labour Party. Therefore, Labour could lurch to the right, further to the right than the Tories, in a Machiavellian power move. And this is precisely what Starmer did in his “Island of Strangers” speech (recently apologised for). Disillusioned leftists can vote for the Green Party (who currently have as many MPs as Reform UK), the Liberal Democrats and now, what seems to be an emerging Corbynista Party that will place the Israel/Palestine issue front and centre. Starmer is being squeezed on his right, and now his left flank is about to be exposed too.

To return to the main point, this was supposed to be the post-woke age in which crazy leftists had been put in a holding pen and we all returned to the ‘90s.

Fundamentally, the outcome is one of an overproduction of consensus-maintaining apparatchiks. The ideological logic has not receded with the incentives; it is “baked in”, and the attempt to reel in the managerial ideology has resulted in millions of educated people milling around within the framework of institutional power, seeking catharsis.

As usual, the biggest loser is the political centre, which in the context of British politics refers to the Blairite centre. The populist right gnaws its way in from the fringes on mass immigration and the failure of multiculturalism, and now a new front is opening by a left energised because saving the kids is more morally sound than transing them.

It would seem that we are finally entering an era wherein the British centre can no longer hold. I for one will not lament its passing.

Watching events unfold in the Middle East, I have been reminded of a scene in the original The Godfather film. Or specifically, one story arc that culminates in the death of the Godfather's eldest son, Sonny Corleone. It is a famous, iconic scene that most people will be familiar with. Sonny, played by a young James Caan, drives up to a toll-booth on a causeway; the operator ducks for cover, and stereotypical gangsters with Tommy guns pop up on either side of Sonny and open fire, riddling him with bullets.

The scene in which the Godfather, Vito Corleone, laments his son’s death in the morgue by stating “look how they massacred my boy” has become something of an internet meme. However, what tends to be less regarded is the wider trap laid for Sonny, which ultimately results in his death.

In the narrative, Sonny’s hot temper, rage, and impulsive nature intimidate and scare the rival Barzini family. Having incapacitated the Godfather himself, they now find they have to deal with Sonny, who is a bit of a loose cannon.

Sonny’s volatile nature is displayed for all to see when he receives a call from his sister, Connie, who informs him that her husband, Carlo, has beaten her. Sonny drives, enraged, to their apartment, whereupon he proceeds to beat Carlo half to death in public. Despite his father chastising him earlier for not controlling himself in public and letting others see what he’s thinking, Sonny has done just that.

The Corleone family’s enemies now have more insight into Sonny’s psychology. Not only is he impulsive, violent, and prone to anger, but he is also profoundly devoted to his sister and his family, and he will throw caution to the wind if the right buttons are pushed.

Thus, the Barzini family recruits Carlo and orders him to beat Connie again. The bait is laid carefully in the trap, and true to form, Sonny rejects appeals to calm down and rushes off to kill Carlo, not knowing that men with less scruples have calculated his exact move.

Sonny’s arc in The Godfather is something of a retelling of Achilles’ story in Ovid. Achilles’ hubris and rampage after the death of Patroclus reveal to his enemies a weakness. Or, more famously, his heel.

Few people would dispute that Donald Trump is one of the most impulsive and bombastic politicians on the world stage in recent history. Similarly, few people would dispute that the Western elites, and the American elites in particular, show unwavering loyalty and devotion to Israel. They’re proud of it and signal this at every given opportunity.

We can assume, then, that if we have noticed that, then so too have others around the world. Trump’s impulsive nature, combined with America’s slavish devotion to Israel, may not exactly strike the same tones as a tough guy defending his sister from becoming a battered wife. Still, it amounts to something similar in a geopolitical sense. It is a weakness that can be exploited, not a strength.

One can delve into the broader incentives such as China’s Belt and Road project, Russia’s losses in Ukraine (primarily due to American and European armaments), and the wider emerging ‘‘Great Game’’ of the 21st Century. Still, one would have to be naive indeed not to place oneself in the offices and strategy planning of the BRICS nations and view the mountain passes and plains of Persia as potential killing fields for America’s hubris and arrogance.

Is this a prediction? No. It is a concern. The fact is that Western elites have become predictable and arrogant. They’ve become prideful, and, unfortunately, I fear that white boys from Alabama and even perhaps Teesside will bear the brunt of that fall.

On May 19th, 2025, the anti-white organisation Hope Not Hate “doxxed” my real name and identity in a gutter trash article full of lies, cherry-picked and out-of-context quotations, and cheap smears. The hit-piece article followed what seemed to be an extensive campaign of spying and intelligence gathering more in keeping with East Germany or the Soviet Union than a supposed “liberal democracy”. I was advised to take a step back for a while as the hit-piece played out, which explains the lack of activity over the last week. However, there are a few points I’d now like to highlight and address in response.

* After learning of an address I left years ago, Hope Not Hate proceeded to harass and question the current tenant of the property (whom I do not know) to elicit still more information about me, in particular my full name and personal details. The Hope Not Hate activists claimed to be mere journalists interested in interviewing a “popular YouTuber”. Despite this, the current tenant found the behaviour so perverse and unsettling she called the police.

* Still unsatisfied, the Hope Not Hate activist Harry Shukman returned to the property the following day and pushed a letter through the door, offering the tenant a bribe in exchange for any letters or documents bearing my name. This could severely violate the Data Protection Act of 2018 and the Bribery Act of 2010. However, as is so often the case, this organisation frequently appears to be above the law.

* Hope Not Hate activists then went door-to-door in the area where I once lived, interrogating residents about my whereabouts, identity, and activities. One former neighbour contacted me to say she was deeply concerned at the “odd” behaviour of the two activists posing as journalists (Harry Shukman and Patrik Hermansson), whom she found suspicious and dishonest.

* The photo of me Hope Not Hate posted in their smear article was taken from a private, invite-only conference that clearly stated that no pictures were to be taken without consent and that hidden cameras were disallowed. I did not consent to the photo Hope Not Hate took of me with a hidden camera after they entered the conference on false pretences.

* The article Hope Not Hate published on me is headlined with the outrageous slander that I “inspired a terrorist”. By this, they’re referring to the American mass murderer Dylann Roof. Not a shred of evidence is provided to support this claim, and there is no evidence that Dylann Roof had ever read my material or even heard of me. Moreover, Roof’s influences are documented by himself and the American legal system, and my work is never mentioned or referred to. The phrase “If Jews turned Blue” was common on message boards and forums in the early 2010s, which Roof was familiar with.

* The bulk of the Hope Not Hate hit-piece relies on cherry-picked quotes and out-of-context statements made a decade ago on a blog that no longer exists. Many quotations attributed to me seem entirely made up. In the most popular article I’ve written on Substack, I state explicitly that people should stay away from the unrest resulting from the murder of three English girls at Southport. Naturally, the fact I’ve spent years telling people to be sensible and not get themselves in trouble or commit violence runs against the picture Hope Not Hate wish to paint of me as a deranged “Fascist” stoking up racial tensions, so it is entirely ignored.

Hope Not Hate described me in the most hyperbolic and incendiary terms because they wish to fire up a flare that highlights me as a person to be un-personed. According to Google, I “inspired a terrorist”, thanks to Hope Not Hate. It is obviously ludicrous, yet in their eyes, it’s a little white lie worth telling because it acts as a mechanism of psychological torment upon an individual they see as challenging the consensus. It points me out for the convenience of other institutions in a network of institutions that create and impose a consensus on the United Kingdom.

Yet, these little white lies the power structure’s institutions have told themselves over the years stack up, little by little, bit by bit, alongside the dead bodies and rapes. None of this concerns Hope Not Hate, naturally, who have turned slander and torment into a business model and career opportunity, but the larger society becomes ever more degraded and miserable.

Fundamentally, I’m just a middle-aged blogger who comments on culture and politics; I never pretended to be anything else. I’m not responsible for the United Kingdom becoming a surveillance state where shady NGOs masquerading as “charities” snoop and run intel ops on the population. It is not because of me that the exasperated American Government lectures the British Government on their apparent contempt for free speech and Classical Liberal mores or that our country is often regarded as a dystopian clown show.

Yet, the power structure itself, with Hope Not Hate acting as a goon squad, appears to think that the problems they’ve created will vanish if they just censor harder, slander more and pump up the number of people residing in jail for disagreeing with what power does and says. Why, if the foundations of this great society are so sound, does an organisation like Hope Not Hate need to exist? The assumption is that outliers from human nature are the system’s critics and not that British society, as it is structured, is built on nothing but oppression, disregard for the majority’s wishes and contempt for the human condition.

The fact is, the rot and decay at the heart of British society is not bloggers or YouTubers but the institutions of power itself.

I will no doubt have more to say on this in the future. For now, I want to thank everybody who has supported me, both privately during this recent affair and those who contributed financially to my work. I could not do this without you. Thank You.

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“It’s not just a question of getting to the Castle, but of getting to the right department in the Castle, and then finding the right official, and even then it’s not certain that he’ll be able to help you.” Franz Kafka’s The Castle.

Under the Joe Biden presidency tens of millions of foreigners flooded across America’s borders without so much as a whiff o…

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