We live in a world of wispy signs and symbols that represent forms once substantial but now largely gone. Like smoky tricks from a wizard’s pipe, they enter the popular imagination like a soothing balm. They offer us re-enchantment in the barren plain of our squalid consumer zone.

The pub built just last month by a hedge fund features paintings of old ships and stags hanging under mighty oak beams, as if Henry VIII himself felled the lumber. It is a copy, a fugazzi, but it is a comforting one, just as it comforts people to have men spearheading a patriotic movement who talk like wide-boy geezers from a 1970s Cockney gangster film.

The actual Cockneys either fled to Essex or became submerged in the bottomless oceans of London’s demographic shift. Yet it remains comforting to think of Bob Hoskins-style hard men wheeling and dealing in street markets with Arthur Daley and Dirty Den because the unfiltered reality is too brutal, too gloomy.

When the British left talk about “Tommy Robinson”, they, somewhat famously, never miss the opportunity to call him by his real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. They do this to expose the mirage, the wispy shadow, and disenchant it. They know that the name “Tommy Robinson” creates an image of a brave working-class lad dutifully climbing over the trenches of Ypres or forming a defensive square line at Waterloo. On the other hand, the name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon suggests an interior designer from Hampstead. One can only wonder whether Tommy’s “advisors” came to the same conclusion.

The phantasm of the plucky redoubtable Brit, plucked from barrow and coalmine, plough and forge, then thrust into the maw of grandiose world events, plays well these days.

Yet this misty replication scales up and encompasses the ruling class as well.

Jacob Rees-Mogg conjures the sign of an upper-class Edwardian bureaucrat rushing into the Foreign Office with news on the Bengali Partition. He speaks with a similar cadence to Michael Caine’s Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in Zulu. The ethereal representation is of an aristocrat with effete mannerisms who, when duty calls, will show the same courage and grit as those of a lower station he commands.

In the barren cultural wastes of the 2020s, he is, once again, comforting to have around - a warm, nostalgic blanket of previous greatness and civilised, if austere, behaviour.

However, unlike Bromhead, or literally anyone involved with the British Empire, Rees-Mogg is anti-racist. For while the symbol on display is reminiscent of British imperial greatness and ingenuity, the actual substance underneath is pure Jane Fonda.

He is, fundamentally, a creature of postmodernity camouflaged as modernist. He is no different from the “500-year-old” pub built atop a defunct used car garage.

The sign is Sir Lord Grey, the signal is Lily Allen.

Share

Like every other Tory and mainstream right pundit, Jacob Rees-Mogg uses institutions as bunkers and trenches to cower in while demographic hellfire is rained down upon the native British. Institutions, not people, must be defended or reclaimed. But the issue of the era is that a people are being erased under unending waves of foreign immigrants, it really is as simple as that.

Yet the dancing shadow that is Rees-Mogg rejects the premise that a people even exists to be erased or subsumed. To do this, he deploys history - to be specific, eras of conquests, wars and subjugations. If we adopt this frame and apply it to our current circumstances, are we then to liken the “grooming gang” outrage to Viking raids or the Harrying of the North by the Normans?

Why would we want that?

The fact that the very best minds of the land cannot come up with a better argument for immigration than “being raped, conquered and plundered is cool, actually” speaks for itself.

The true intent of such arguments is, of course, to prevent the germination of ideas within the people that they have a moral right to their own homeland. Actual Edwardians understood that creeds and races of men are not interchangeable, unlike Rees-Mogg, who believes that law and institutions can reconstitute the Third World mass into Englishmen through the adoption of superficial traits and mores.

This is, however, always a work in progress, never resolved. Even if we adopt this frame, there are presumably many hundreds of thousands or millions of people who fail the Rees-Mogg test of who is an English “mongrel” and accordingly should be stripped of their citizenship and removed from the country. But this never happens.

No criterion exists for who has succeeded in becoming an Englishman, because doing so would mean denying access to those who failed. So nobody fails. The outcome is no less ethnocidal and apocalyptic for the natives than if Zack Polanski or Chip-Shop-Debs Rayner were running the nation.

Thus, in the final analysis, Jacob Rees-Mogg exists within the political and media ecosystem as a deceitful ghost that both quells alarm and prevents you from escaping from the house of horrors.

The archetype of the British “toff” is historically one of coldness, often exploitative, indifferent to the suffering of the poor, but also highly educated and, when the situation is truly dire, willing to toil and suffer with those of lower status.

It is an elite class that is willing to endure and suffer hardship with the last white family on a Middlesborough street that people yearn for, somebody who “speaks posh”, representing their concerns sincerely and honestly. The authoritative voice that enters a confused trench under fire or a lost position on an Indian hill to restore order.

Instead, we get fakers, phantoms and actors.

Subscribe now

In recent weeks, there has been some tension in this corner of the Internet, ostensibly regarding the success or otherwise of Restore Britain. The split is between people we can think of as Pro-Restore Britain and the Elite Theorists. In terms of my content, I’ve hardly written or said anything about Restore, but for whatever reason, I’ve come to be seen by the elite theorists as a doe-eyed flag waver worthy of scorn for “falling for it again”.

There’s an important distinction to be made here:

Elite Theory is a political science that posits that a small group will always dictate what happens in a society.

“The Elite Theorists” are YouTubers who create content attacking the right wing.

Specifically, Academic Agent, Blamblas Britannica, Scrump and Evelyn. Together, they have produced at least 18 livestreams and 8 videos attacking and undermining Restore Britain, those involved with the party, or anyone (such as myself) who refuses to attack the party.

A process that began wearing the mask of good faith criticism and advice has gradually descended into the Elite Theorists waging a vitriolic and dishonest flame war upon people they quite clearly regard as enemies. Academic Agent has repeatedly asked his acolytes to stop the slander and lies, but continues to promote and platform the content anyway.

There’s a strong element of Motte and Bailey in which the Elite Theorists stake out the position that, say, Charlie Downes is a Zionist plant or a grifter, or that Rupert Lowe is simply a conman. When called out on it, they flee back to the Motte and demand that you disprove the Iron Law of Oligarchy or a principle of Elite Theory as espoused by James Burnham, Machiavelli or Pareto.

The irony is that nobody involved actually disputes the tenets of actual Elite Theory. It isn’t actually Elite Theory vs Populism, but an intra-Elite Theory drama in which the Internet-bound cohort insults and slanders those who moved into the real world to organise and network. And here’s the thing: they will probably fail.

Nobody needs a lecture on the fact that powerful Zionist influence will try to subvert the party. Everybody knows.

Nobody needs a lecture on democracy being a rigged game. Everybody knows.

Nobody needs to be lectured on how Lowe’s Boomerisms could sink the project. Everybody knows.

It is a process where good people network and organise in the real world, and what’s more, they emerged primarily from our own circles. They read Academic Agent’s The Populist Delusion. They consumed the content, they learned, they went out and tried to put it to use, only for the clique they once admired to pour buckets of stale piss over them.

Elite Theory became drama content because they couldn’t stop running their mouths. It wasn’t enough to say the regime can’t be beaten; they had to infer that everyone was a grifter, everyone a conman or Zionist stooge. Another livestream calling everyone a retard, another condescending, smirking video essay before running back to the thick bush of Mosca’s moustache when called out.

For my part, I consider myself a loyalist, nothing more than a good team player. I see people such as Charlie Downes, Harrison Pitt, Lucy White, Lewis Brackpool and Frank Wright as being representative of the sectarian politics of the future. I’m not optimistic. It is precisely because we are suffering under a hostile regime that people moving in this direction are so critical.

The currency of a Balkanised, sectarian society is loyalty. Loyalty is the prerequisite for achieving anything or building any network. I am loyal less to a political party than to a group. I am loyal to individuals who stick their heads above the parapet and get shot at for speaking up for our people.

Our political parties and organisations are so easily infiltrated and subverted because they lack in-group loyalty. This is the understandable concern about a boomer such as Rupert Lowe; they are loyal to a set of principles and ideas rather than to people.

This is why Restore Britain has a somewhat schizophrenic aspect. People who are tribal in their thinking, such as Downes and Pitt, are rubbing against people who are “Civnat” or universalist in their principles. Which side will prevail? We shall see. Certainly, in terms of the regime and its power dynamics, the race-blind non-tribalists have the advantage structurally. But this project is underway; it is not yet sewn up.

This is why, I believe, the Elite Theorists so often engage in character assassination. After all, if everyone is a grifter and a cynical bullshitter, what is there to support?

It is bad faith masquerading as sober analysis. It is, first and foremost, drama slop content.

I’ve been privy to many private conversations of people scratching their heads in confusion as the Elite Theorist tirades degraded from “value-free analysis” into out-and-out slanderous lies, misrepresentation and venom. And for what? To prove a thesis? To attack the only organisation that has friendlies anywhere remotely near it?

Many lessons have been learned from this sorry episode, but the most important isn’t even political theory, but the importance of loyalty.

Subscribe now

I’ve heard it said that Donald Trump’s predicament in the Iran War is like somebody vacating one empty room only to enter another, then another - an unending labyrinth of empty rooms leading to empty rooms, sometimes with one door, sometimes with many, but it only ever leads to more empty rooms.

My preferred analogy is that Trump has dragged America into a trap, and every attempt to escape only leads them into another trap. In the country life of the United Kingdom, snares have long been considered cruel and barbaric because of the stress and anxiety imposed on the trapped animal. In a snare, the power and aggression of the animal can become its greatest liability. The more desperate and impatient it is to escape, the swifter its doom arrives; stay put, and the slow bleed sets in.

Others have said that war in the Middle East is like Hotel California; once you check in, you can never check out.

Trump checked in to the Hotel California in February 2026. As of September, he’s still there despite declaring victory six months ago.

In June, in what appears to have been an act of desperation, Trump and his team signed on to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). However, a few caveats slipped in that proved deeply troublesome. The cessation of hostilities explicitly extended to America and Iran’s allies “on all fronts, including in Lebanon”, while Iran was entrusted with restoring safe passage, de-mining the Strait of Hormuz and participating in negotiations over its future administration. America, meanwhile, was obliged to begin dismantling its naval blockade immediately. Trump seems to have been equally oblivious to the symbolism of signing the agreement at Versailles.

Essentially, the document said: “You can leave, but your greatest ally will be placed on a leash, and we get to retain our chokehold on the oil supply.” This, understandably, incensed the Zionist faction around Trump and in Israel, and the window closed on peace.

Trump’s next gambit was to beat the Iranians at their own game: to impose a blockade against their blockade. Instead of Iran choking out oil supply, Trump would choke out Iran’s exports to cripple their economy. Despite the genuine pain being inflicted upon the Iranians, they simply had to endure it. Meanwhile, the strategy meant deploying increasingly weary personnel, ships and munitions in the region for an undetermined length of time - the exact opposite result Trump wanted with the MoU agreement.

The “off-ramp” led directly back to where it started.

By late August, the Americans declared that they had finally succeeded in clearing the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian mines, and it was safe for shipping once again. Unsurprisingly, the Iranians merely attempted to re-mine the Strait. This resulted in the Americans striking the Iranian launchers intended to deploy mines, and retaliation by the Iranians against American bases in the region, particularly in Jordan.

The escalation meant the conflict was moving towards one of the larger traps that had loomed over the entire war for months. The more damage done to Iranian critical infrastructure, the higher the risk that Iran will destroy critical infrastructure across the Middle East and tank the world’s energy markets.

Bombing Iran back to the Stone Age could very well result in everyone else going back to the Middle Ages.

Scott Bessent’s “Economic D-Day” would see Iran isolated from the world economy, and sanctions would be placed on any country, large or small, that continued to engage economically with Iran. When asked why such sanctions had not been imposed immediately, Bessent replied:

Why would I want to blow up the Global Financial System?

This particular caper was meant to create such economic ruination within Iran that the long-awaited uprising would occur and the regime would finally be toppled.

Unfortunately, Iran’s largest trading partner is China. What would policies sanctioning Chinese banks and corporations actually look like? The financial costs of carrying out Economic D-Day in earnest would “blow up” America’s economy alongside everyone else’s.

Once again, the room offering escape only leads to another room with more doors, and throughout it all is the slow gurgle of a steadily draining oil supply and diesel gradually creaking up in price.

Rumours and articles have begun circulating that Donald Trump might declare victory and walk away from the entire debacle. In recent months, the conflict has primarily involved tit-for-tat strikes back and forth between America and Iran.

However, by an uncanny coincidence, on the day the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was considering declaring the war over, Iran launched strikes on American bases in Kuwait and the UAE that were not in response to an American attack.

The Institute for the Study of War reported:

Iranian Artesh Spokesperson Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia stated on August 26 that one of Iran’s newest targeting doctrines includes preemptive strikes against US military assets in the region and cited the July 28 attack in Jordan as an example of this doctrine. The Artesh’s latest strikes in Kuwait and the UAE may also reflect this preemptive strike doctrine as part of the regime’s attempts to erode US willingness to continue the campaign against the regime.

A potentially awful scenario now presents itself to Donald Trump in which he takes to the podium and anoints himself as having achieved a tremendous victory, only for Iran to immediately launch strikes devastating American allies and bases across the region.

This is not to mention longer-term embarrassments such as Iran becoming an even stronger regional power instead of being destroyed, and the dire position that Israel would be left in. Such a scenario would represent global humiliation for American power and prestige, and if we can see that, so can the White House. But with a chronic shortage of munitions and interceptors, there doesn’t seem to be much they can do about it.

The impotent lashing out, the sporadic missile strikes, the hyperbolic statements, all amount to nothing, no way out.

Trump has been done up like a kipper.

Subscribe now

At the beginning of 2026, I found myself repeatedly at loggerheads with the MAGA influencers on social media. I disagreed with the performative sadism of making memes and gloating on the internet over people ICE were shooting. I regarded the emerging Iran War as stupid and entirely in service to another people. I also thought the sabre-rattling over Greenland and the subsequent anti-European animosity made gullible dupes of Trump’s supporters.

For that, I was predictably called a Britcuck Europoor, impotently lashing out against the Great Colossus, who went where it liked and did what it pleased. I was ‘Anti-American’.

The thing is, I wasn’t and never have been.

When Dolly Parton died, Donald Trump ordered the Stars and Stripes across the USA to be flown at half-mast. This, I thought, is the America I like—mawkish, perhaps overly sentimental, but also well-meant. I believe Donald Trump would have been saddened to learn that Dolly Parton had died, because, like him, she was an American icon.

As an outsider who has never set foot in the United States (and probably never will), my perception of America comes almost entirely through signs and symbols, personalities, and ‘stars’. In this regard, Dolly Parton was the anti-Trump. Where Trump represents the tough-talking, though amusing, New York sleazeball hustler, Dolly was rhinestone-and-moonshine homeliness and bubbly charm.

It’s how non-Americans want Americans to be; it’s the America we like because it isn’t threatening and signals a benign hegemon who means well. It isn’t ‘radical’ in the same way another icon, John Wayne, wasn’t radical, but a tough and fair dispenser of justice and common sense.

America’s icons tend to be strivers and achievers, despite the forces aligned against them. Dolly Parton, famously, grew up dirt poor in a one-room cabin on the banks of Little Pigeon River, Tennessee. Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Muhammad Ali and Madonna all garnered iconic status as outsiders, regardless of how engineered that status often was.

Woke was a catastrophically poor cultural formula because it fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Americanism, as represented through larger-than-life individuals.

In 2014, as woke was gathering momentum, Dolly Parton appeared at the Glastonbury music festival in England. She was regarded as the ironic act, the act that the feminists and output of the UK’s extreme left education system could laugh at and look down upon. In fact, she brought the house down. For that half hour or so, their cynical, carefully manicured opinions dissolved in an earthy, nostalgia-tinted authenticity that reached ‘under the skin’ of superficial, inorganic dogmas.

In my opinion, Madonna and the rancid message she sent to young women and girls represented an earlier form of woke, more skilful in its message but no less insidious. Dolly Parton, on the other hand, speaks to women as they are, which is why Dolly endured and retained a dignity Madge could only dream of.

In Britain, our icons were born out of long-settled socio-cultural arrangements and institutions. David Attenborough is not a striving go-getter from outside the system; he is the paternalistic voice of God instructing and educating. The fact that British icons also include Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill speaks for itself. Even people who embody the rags-to-riches myth, such as Michael Caine, represent class rather than an individual.

We British are drawn to the ‘free soul’ charting their destiny across untamed landscapes and economic possibilities: the less crass, the more wholesome, the better.

There’s poetic symbolism in David Attenborough and Clint Eastwood reflecting the preferred icons of their respective nations, and both being truly ancient in terms of years. The institutions have decayed and hollowed; the subversion is complete; the lonesome, self-reliant wanderer of the High Plains will also die.

Nothing emerges to replace either. We’re left chasing an echo of a dream.

Perhaps Donald Trump once dreamed of leading a movement where Dolly Partons surrounded him and not Howard Lutniks and Mark Levins. Perhaps ordering the flags of the nation to be lowered for an old country singer is an implicit acknowledgement of it.

In Britain, Bulldog populists stand dumbstruck as the very institutions they look to for succour and meaning spit venom in their faces. As the icons fade and the dreams become harder to grasp, we find ourselves looking for islands in streams in the desert of data centres, asylum seeker HMOs, and Turkish barber shops.

Subscribe now

The British Government recently sent out its “Emergency Alert” to the nation’s phones. The intense, high-pitched squeal we could expect to hear alongside the text: “Moscow has launched” or “Meteor has entered the atmosphere” was instead used to tell us not to use disposable barbecues or fireworks, lest another wildfire start. The modern dystopia of the United Kingdom has various shades, some grotesque, others more akin to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. The emergency alert override warning you not to have a barbecue is firmly in the Brazil category.

Climate Change is a subject that I’m boringly centrist or neutral on. My personal view is that winters are less harsh and summers far hotter than I remember when I was young. Though I’m also acutely aware of my nostalgic tendencies. My natural disposition would always lead me to reminisce about gentle golden nights of inviting summer comfort, contrasted with pristine rolling fields of thick snow like goose feathers. I don't remember it ever being uncomfortably hot for a solid week, but then again, we tend to forget that, most of the time, the pristine snow was dirty slush peppered with dog turds.

Either way, England is in a drought right now. But don’t worry, the mainstream right’s media is on hand to remind us that the 2026 drought is not as severe as the 1976 one.

Here we arrive at the farcical aspect of climate change as a subject. It is absurdly political, with both camps dug in on what seems like an intractable war of narratives.

The establishment is, of course, on the “it’s happening, and it’s manmade” side, and the more populist position is one of flat-out denial that anything is amiss.

Neither help themselves either. The first rays of sunshine do not warrant a heatmap that makes Sussex look like a Venusian volcano. Alternatively, is it really just part of the summer fun that the Cairngorms go up in flames or that parts of southern England went for 52 days without a drop of rain?

The right-wing skepticism usually amounts to arguing that nothing is happening, or that it is happening and that’s a good thing. Polar bears are still alive, and islands in the Pacific Ocean are not yet submerged, after all.

Alternatively, the elite/leftist opinion always comes with a technocratic surveillance grid pocking its laser eyes, peering over their shoulders, getting ready to track your carbon footprint and stuff a Frankenburger in your mouth.

An article in the New Scientist illustrates the frustrating nature of the climate discussion, mixing expertise with a touch of nudge.

It is a sign of the impact of climate change, which is expected to bring drier, hotter summers to the UK. This year shows that even a wet winter isn’t enough to carry the UK through an extremely hot, dry summer. “Currently the situation is that we’re just simply using too much water,” says Kevin Grecksch at the University of Oxford. “We’re not replenishing at the same speed as we’re using water.”

And then.

You may have noticed the crunch of dry leaves underfoot in recent weeks. That’s a sign stressed trees are going through a “false autumn”, where they shed their leaves and even branches in an effort to keep their main stem alive

I hadn’t noticed that, and I’m somebody who wanders among and pays attention to trees often. I have, however, noticed that in the confines of my small and cheap greenhouse, tomatoes are wilting and dying, and I cannot ventilate the structure enough to prevent it. The few plants outside are faring much better, though.

Read more

Whenever Hope Not Hate mention my name, they make the claim that I inspired the American mass murderer, Dylann Roof. Their “evidence” for this claim is a 2014/15 article I wrote with the title “When Jews Turned Blue”, which expanded on a common trope found on /pol/ and 4chan at that time.

In Roof’s manifesto, he also used the trope. I received an email from somebody pointing this out, and I didn’t feel comfortable with the association so I removed the article. Roof’s actual victims were African American churchgoers, and his stated motivation was the Trayvon Martin case and issues more generally related to black people in America’s Deep South.

Not a shred of evidence has been provided by Hope Not Hate that Dylann Roof had ever read my old blog, or even heard of me, let alone that I inspired him. Of course, truth is not their aim, character assassination is.

It appears that there’s nothing I can do to stop my name and face being attached to an atrocity via an outrageous lie because Hope Not Hate is linked to the institutions of power in the United Kingdom, and I am not.

Share

You’re either on board with the program, morally and ideologically, or you’re a problem. And more often than not, Hope Not Hate will be the source cited by the institutions of the land as to who is a problem, and who is “decent”.

Hope Not Hate found the late Ann Widdecombe to be a problem.

Then, after she was bludgeoned to death at 78 years old in her home, they removed their hit piece on her. You could say Hope Not Hate “archived” Ann Widdecombe.

The man now charged with her murder, 28-year-old Joshua Kerry, is said to have had:

According to reports, investigators found newspaper clippings, articles and printed material relating to Reform UK, party leader Nigel Farage and the party’s immigration policies displayed inside the council property where Kerry lived alone.

A source cited by UK media claimed the material suggested Kerry held ‘a profound dislike’ of Reform UK, its leader and its political positions.

Ann Widdecombe was a Reform UK supporter and spokesperson. Did the man charged with her murder have the Hope Not Hate hit piece among his “clippings” of Farage and his party? Were Hope Not Hate tipped off and advised to archive Ann Widdecombe?

I have been highly critical of Nigel Farage and his various parties over the years because I see it as just Toryism with a new paint job. However, I am well aware that that is not how the British left sees him. I believe his life actually is in danger, and that he does indeed need 24/7 security.

The reason for this is that the media and institutions intentionally radicalise their own base into a frothing frenzy, while strangling the life out of anything outside of their purview and flagging them up for character assassination, or worse. When people on the right do this, it is referred to as “stochastic terrorism”. However, the same rules in reverse would see Hope Not Hate or James O’Brien being shut down or censored.

Who “radicalised” Joshua Kerry? It is doubtful that it was a Telegram chat, or a YouTuber, or Elon Musk’s X. It would, in all probability, have been mainstream and respectable outlets, outlets like Hope Not Hate or media using their work as sound sources. Or the Guardian, or LBC.

Kerry was not known to Prevent, the anti-radicalisation unit, because they don’t look for people with his politics. Neither is there a right-wing version of Hope Not Hate that surveills, monitors, and generally hounds leftists. Leftists are not stopped at airports for a device snatch and work-out session by the Counter Terrorism Police.

They face no scrutiny or hardship for their politics whatsoever.

In this way, the British mainstream consensus-making apparatus has become a cauldron of corruption and crazies who never have to face any cost or scrutiny for opinions which are quite literally insane. It is the obsessive adherence to this consensus that delivers the grotesque outcome of a dying boy insisting that he isn’t a racist, as the life drains from his body and the police refuse to take his pleas seriously because he is white.

When an elderly woman is battered to death in her bungalow, likely because she doesn’t like transgenderism and abortion, the institution that flagged her up as a problem will simply remove the evidence as if to declare “case closed”. There will be no ramifications, no consequences, because the system would have to indict itself and its ideological and moral priors.

Indeed, people from within the bowels of Hope Not Hate are just about to enter the new Andy Burnham government.

The heuristic “a system is what it does” is somewhat over-used, but if we apply it to the system of British political power and judge it by its outcomes and not the goals stated by those working for it, what actually is it? It is a machine that seeks to chew up, pulp, and annihilate the nation, people, and mores it claims to represent. Those who advance that process are rewarded; those who hinder it are punished. That’s what it does, not what it claims to be.

Thus the incentives toward sociopathy are baked in. If the standard being set is that a satirical blog post about one group can be held responsible for an atrocity committed against another group in another country, without any evidence the wrongdoer ever read the original material, where does that leave so much of the British consensus-making apparatus?

Are we to dissect the entire “ecosystem” or “influencer network”?

Will we get a little introspection? Or will we simply get more people archived? More cases closed.

Subscribe now

The British political system is currently reconfiguring itself in its latest forlorn attempt to cling to a fig-leaf of legitimacy. To do this, it has been gradually easing its way into a form of managerialism that places real people front and centre of its political messaging, a sort of “Bev, Dave, and Andy” political formula. As the nation sinks ever further into the quagmire of social dysfunction, bankruptcy, and routine bouts of civil unrest, the political formula seems to foreground the mundane everyman (and everywoman) as a meat shield against its own hollowness.

This is nothing particularly new, of course. We’ve long been accustomed to Nigel Farage performatively drinking a pint in a local boozer. You see, he’s just like us and wears a Barbour jacket and everything. At least Nigel Farage actually does drink; anyone unfortunate enough to remember the grotesque spectacle of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich could never conclude that Miliband was a frequent greasy spoon enjoyer. Then you have Keir Starmer’s punchbag shame.

The demise of Starmerism is also the demise of the Westminster technocrat as the public face of Power. The term “elitist” here isn’t entirely accurate because somebody from a Northern council estate, like Angela Rayner, can just as easily belong to the system as a privately educated “toff” such as Jacob Rees-Mogg. Both Rayner and Mogg, and for that matter Shabana Mahmood, are culturally coded to speak to their respective demographics. Keir Starmer had no such constituency; he was entirely a creation of the regime and its laws.

People will point to the various backtracks, scandals, and failures of Starmer’s tenure as the reason he had to be brought down. In reality, he just wasn’t liked by either the public or his own party. Tony Blair was re-elected after he lied to take the country to war and broke the back of the socialist leanings of the Labour Party, but he had charisma, so it was fine. Starmer’s robotic personality and total lack of empathy revealed not just him as something alien and detestable, but, because the system was his only constituency, it, too, was revealed as something cold, hateful and borderline psychotic.

Thus, Starmer had to go not because of policy failures but because of what he revealed.

Notice that nothing here has anything to do with policy outcomes, with increased beds in NHS wards, efficiency of police response times or reductions in crime or immigration. Everything, absolutely everything about the United Kingdom’s method of governance is a matter of perception management. Keir Starmer created the wrong perception of the British State.

So, what perception do the Labour Party and various civil service bureaucracies want to create?

It is, it seems, a sort of “Bev, Dave, and Andy” managerialism.

I’ve often wondered to what degree the Trump administration is influenced by the cultural memetics that have glued themselves to Donald Trump since 2015. Does, for example, the fact that JD Vance is a meme alter his real-world persona and how he views politics? Is policy something entirely separate from internet posts and “influencers”?

The Labour Party, whose MPs are nigh-on 50% female (!), has a very different understanding of itself, far removed from X and social media. Indeed, many of them want to ban X. The most common work background for Labour politicians, especially their members of Parliament, is public affairs and politics, law, political research, special advisors (SpAds), and a variety of media management consultancy and NGO work. Keir Starmer was the embodiment of this system, its avatar.

Unfortunately, when the people this system creates actually enter public life, they seem distant, cold, inept, unlikable, and dull, with a streak of cruelty and even sadism.

And this is a problem because it represents almost nobody and nothing except the system itself.

Enter, then, cheeky chappy (call-me-Andy) Andy Burnham to placate the regime harpies and add a touch of Northern soul to the barren womb of managerial conformity and ugliness. Keir Starmer held up a mirror to the state careerists, and they did not like what stared back at them. Starmer gave them the ick. Starmer was a signal, a flare, that said “we are just power-hungry vultures sucking the lifeblood out of a nation, without humour, and without warmth”.

A term such as “Two-Tier Keir” stung because it was an unpalatable truth about the British power structure as a whole, whose foul-smelling backwash splattered across the pantsuits and power-bobs of Labour ladies. Far better to get Handy-With-Andy, who goes jogging in a hoodie and speaks like a beloved 1980s television show character.

Andy Burnham was the mayor of Manchester during the Manchester Arena bombing, when we didn’t look back in anger. And we won’t be looking back in anger at future atrocities either. However, unlike under Starmerism, you’ll be less likely to have your door kicked in for actually being angry about it on social media.

You’ll be invited to feel, to empathise, to even shed a tear, to perceive it differently from what your instincts are telling you.

Because, when all is said and done, you aren’t ruled by a “regime” populated by mad women and weak, cold men who, as Pink Floyd sang, “radiate cold shards of broken glass” but by Andy from the local post office, by Hannah, the blonde girl plumber, who wasn’t racist and sexist like the Reform candidate, Bev from the gym.

There isn’t a regime; there aren’t culturally-coded perception management techniques and nudge departments; there’s just us ruling ourselves.

The LBC host James O’Brien has become a uniquely loathed figure in British political discourse - and he’s earned every drop of it.

He is the shitlib manifest.

In this moment, he is the vindictive sophist to Keir Starmer’s autonomous android. He is there to twist his heel on your broken limbs, to pour sand in your eyes. No atrocity committed upon the British natives is too grotesque to be blamed on themselves, no victim of his own ideals unworthy of his hate and scorn. There is no logic too complex or convoluted to prevent him from arriving at an argumentative frame that disadvantages you and not the regime.

His resolve to defend the status quo is as absolute and unshakeable as his namesake’s in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nothing is too paradoxical or hypocritical to defend, no grievance or injustice suffered by the natives awful enough to prompt a smidgen of introspection.

His performative, sweating frustration and endlessly exasperated intonations serve as spells cast to purge heretical thoughts and to ward off, forever, thoughts or utterances not sanctioned by a 2005-era Blairite consensus. The institutions are wise, sacrosanct and beyond reproach - you are the ones who are corrupt.

To the unaligned listener, he has become something repellent; he oozes dishonesty, which chafes at ideals of fair play and common decency. Rare is it in this age of infinite talking heads and content churn that giving a person your attention for a 30-second clip is met with such grim resignation, like scraping dog shit from the sole of a favourite boot. You know he “won’t get it” because his purpose is not to get it. Moreover, he is instructing his own side not to get it. No matter how illogical, deceitful, stupid or bankrupt the argument is. Something is better than nothing.

No matter the casualty rate, no matter the blood on the pavements and the gore on the streets that his worldview is responsible for, his structural role is to say to his own side “not one step back” and to his opponents “not one step forward”.

The enemy incarnate, distilled and concentrated like a greasy jam designed to make good people vomit.

Many people ask, “how can outrages such as the Henry Nowak killing be defended by these people?” The answer is, it can’t. But the reaction to it can be foregrounded and judged, sneered at and lambasted. You have no agency; you are simply manipulated because you’re stupid and easily led. Your ignorance and bias are the story, not the corpses. Your valid concerns are worthy only of contempt and scorn.

O’Brien is the symbolic embodiment of this lunacy and, yes, this hatred.

He will cleave to the centre that cannot hold because there is no outside of it for him. A set of cascading failures and changing incentives would never include him - better to continue swimming in the shrinking pond than to bake alive on the crusted mud.

To seethe and sweat, lie and wallow in the moral filth of what his class did to Britain - all with unbridled hubris.

Subscribe now

I’m not usually one for offering commentary on electoral politics as it’s happening, so to speak, but local elections offer a glimpse of the country in the moment - a depressing glimpse, to be sure, like one of those microscope slides that show the bacteria under your fingernails.

Just to clarify for those outside the UK: the Local Elections decide who or what will handle routine administrative work, such as collecting bins, infrastructure, and housing issues, rather than electing MPs and deciding on the government itself. It is at this level that local “grassroots” parties push through the fresh green roots that will rejuvenate our glorious democratic tradition.

The results speak of fracturing, or old allegiances breaking and alliances crumbling.

The old Tory/Labour duopoly continues to be crushed under the weight of the policies they spent decades ramming down the British people’s throats.

My own views on Farage and Reform UK need not be repeated here, but the fact that they’re truly on the march represents perhaps why the party was needed by the establishment to begin with. Similarly, the grotesque Green Party fills a gap created by the dissolution of the Old Guard.

The clip above is not an anomaly but a harbinger of things to come. It is what is happening “out there” before the Westminster spin doctors and public relations departments can work their magic, making it more palatable to the British people.

The opposite of the Green Party fielding candidates that don’t even try to speak English is, of course, the Reform UK voter.

In my essay “Reforming Normies”, I wrote:

The current “Yookay” manifests the crisis that the British State finds itself in. It is not so much a problem with theory or ideology, all of which now ring utterly hollow and false anyway, but the subject population’s lived reality and material existence. The once abstracted “I would not mind if I were the only white person in a space” has become the very real and unnerving “I am the only white person in the space”.

The colossal surge in support for Reform reflects native panic, just as the Green Party has become an explicit vehicle for immigrants to access power. It is my opinion that both of these parties are astroturfed, yet their respective support bases reveal nascent sectarian divisions that will, and are, becoming existential in nature. So-called Muslim Independents are now projected to take 208 council wards, primarily leaving Labour because of their perceived lack of support over the Gaza issue.

If anything, the Muslims and Greens have underperformed in this local election. However, the trend is now clear: sectarianism has fully taken root and will become the all-encompassing driver of politics in the future.

The mainstream will continue to deny that people are increasingly voting in their own ethnic interest. We will endure excruciatingly dull debates on the NHS and “opportunities” because the core of the issue cannot be addressed within their frame of reference. The lies will continue, even as the nation descends into an intra-tribal power-grab.

A Note On Restore Britain

Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party mainly sat out the local elections, concentrating on their home ground of Great Yarmouth because they lacked the time needed to properly vet all the councillors applying.

Given that there’s obviously a huge wellspring of support for Farage’s Reform UK, the challenge for Restore is how to differentiate itself from it, particularly when we factor in the increasing drive toward a symbolic representation based on identitarian grounds. I say symbolic here because, until proven otherwise, that’s what Farage actually is.

However, there’s recently been much chatter online to the effect that Restore, like Reform, is already completely sewn up and in the bag for the Zionist lobby, like every other right-wing populist party. Lowe’s own statements and social media posts are certainly in keeping with that trend, while others in the party in senior positions have expressed opinions to the contrary.

The hot-take prediction economy means that many people wish to form a concrete view and, further, launch attacks on the party based upon that view. My personal opinion is that this issue hasn't been properly ironed out yet and could go either way. I expressed the view when the party started that Counter-Jihad style messaging and ideology would be a catastrophe, and there’s no shortage of people on Xitter gleefully posting screenshots of Lowe’s sympathetic views toward Israel in every replies section.

Unfortunately, the more demoralised the wider party becomes as they’re accused of being just another containment psy-op, the more likely they are to become demoralised and walk away.

Farage’s Reform is surging now, but we shall see that the future will be brutal toward warmed-over Thatcherism peddling individualism in a tribal Britain, and Restore Britain would do well to be prepared for that eventuality.

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

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…

Read more