I recently watched a fascinating discussion between a Chinese woman, who is apparently a political philosophy student and lecturer, and film director Christopher Nolan. What makes it interesting is that the Chinese woman, Zhong Shu, is an “outsider looking in” at Western cultural tropes and Hollywood in particular. She allows us to get a sense of how others see us.

I haven’t seen Nolan’s The Odyssey, but I am, of course, fully aware of the discussion and controversy surrounding it. Zhong Shu looks straight past the woke aspects of the film and drills down into the nature of myth and heroism as depicted in modern Western media.

The ancient Greeks, she reminds Nolan, did not even have a word for atonement, and Homer most certainly did not lament or feel guilt for the victory over Troy. Nolan speaks of cinema as being a universal language, but Shu gently points out that atonement, guilt, or the idea of deconstructing great men and heroic archetypes are specifically Western. She even asks Nolan if he is “the bard of a civilisation at dusk”.

There’s a hint of Oswald Spengler here, with Nolan existing within a hermetically sealed metaphysical cultural dome, but his Chinese interviewer being aware of it. Nolan assumes that his particularly Western and postmodern priors apply equally to both other parts of the world today, and even to Hellenic Greece.

The most interesting part of the discussion was when Shu asked Nolan if we should apologise for greatness, meaning should heroes be broken down and reduced to merely human, and Nolan appears to accept that great men should be rendered more recognisably human.

I haven’t watched The Odyssey, but I did recently watch The Death of Robin Hood, and every last one of these tropes applies to that film as to Nolan’s retelling of Homer.

Robin Hood, the quintessential English folklore hero, played by Hugh Jackman, is a broken-down old relic, tormented by his past, which is revealed to be a life spent slaughtering innocents and stealing for his own gain. The myth that partly sprang up around him during his life is a lie. His real life has wrought carnage on everyone he ever met, and now, as he begins to yearn for death, a lifetime of butchery and brutality heaps up around him, forming a cage of guilt and despair.

This isn’t so much Robin Hood and his merry men, but Robin Hood and his marauding psychos.

Moreover, the film was shot in Northern Ireland using a desaturated palette, in what appears to be a rainy November. Personally, I rather enjoy the misty and grim aesthetic of parts of the United Kingdom, but a good time this film certainly is not.

So here, once again, we have a popular myth, a traditional hero, being reduced to a guilt-ridden old basket-case waiting for the end. The Death of Robin Hood at least avoided flooding the screen with favoured groups, but the price we pay for that is a subtext that says: “You brought nothing but misery to the world, White man, and now it’s time to atone and die.”

In his defence, when asked about similar tropes in his movie, Nolan takes a swipe at “amateur movie critics” on YouTube. I can imagine that online pundits like myself would moan about The Death of Robin Hood as not being related to Robin Hood and as a boring, miserable experience. However, Nolan would counter that if all stories were made according to a template or formula, every film would be the same.

He isn’t entirely wrong. Robin Hood is an 800 year-old tale. Do we really need another film with a heroic swashbuckling protagonist wearing a bycocket hat with a pheasant feather and performing amazing feats with a bow? Haven’t we seen it all before?

Naturally, such a film could be firmly set within the “hero’s journey” framework, never veering away from the formula.

The problem with this argument is that boredom with an exhausted formula is exactly what amateur critics of mass media are complaining about and have been for at least fifteen years. Every White male protagonist is essentially a traumatised, self-loathing wreck like a Boomer who just left his first viewing of Schindler’s List. Everywhere, regardless of place or time, is ethnically similar to modern-day Los Angeles. The sacred is desecrated, the heroic reduced to cowardice or venality, the feminine twisted into an avatar of masculine virtue. It is relentless.

These tropes are not natural variations on a theme. They’ve become the entire symphony. Yet Nolan suggests that a modern audience would reject traditional archetypes and heroic figures. They must be flawed, they must be insecure and uncertain, they must be conflicted.

The Death of Robin Hood flopped, whereas Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which subverted the subversion, was widely applauded. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy has become a monolithic example of cinema done well.

In many respects, there’s nothing that can be done about mass entertainment because the people who influence it are hostile to traditional European and Western culture. The industry has baked in policies that require “representation” of client groups, including writers and producers.

Yet the question lingers: what would, for example, a modern iteration of, say, Robin Hood actually look like that didn’t make you feel like you’re crawling out of a bloody car crash?

In 1976 Robin and Marian largely answered that question. The legend remains intact, but the characters, played by Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, are aging romantics feeling the weight of the years. It is a story of love and regret. Connery’s Robin is more of a skilled soldier than a sociopath. Robin and Marian, like The Shootist or Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, belong to a particular 1970s doom-and-gloom sensibility that heralded the “end of legends”. It veered from and tinkered with the lore, but it didn’t annihilate it.

In 1991, Kevin Costner’s Prince of Thieves did gangbusters at the box office, serving up exactly what a “modern audience” wanted. Costner’s Robin Hood was morally upstanding, Marian was beautiful and feminine, and Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham was a wonderful bastard. There was no introspection or navel-gazing. The mood was optimistic and perhaps reflected a wider world in which liberalism was triumphant and the economy was doing well.

The idea that mass entertainment inherently reflects the mood of the zeitgeist is a curious one because while it is true that 1991 was a more optimistic era than 1978, Star Wars also did gangbusters in 1977. The 1970s were a famously gloomy era, especially in terms of cinema.

I think it’s fair to say that the 2020s are an age of shattered identities and distrust in institutions; they are culturally stagnant, and digital media has failed to offer anything to be hopeful about in terms of creativity. The AI revolution is widely dismissed as generic “slop”, and Hollywood and streaming services seem utterly incapable of anything other than cannibalising the past.

Returning to the perspective of a Chinese intellectual, this is what Zhong Shu sees from the outside: a civilisation at dusk that has grown obsessed with its own dissolution. In this climate the only path to higher virtue appears to be the systematic gnawing away of the very forms that once grounded it, accompanied by compulsory guilt and anxiety.

To inject into this malaise a heroic archetype without such traits would be nostalgic throwback - anachronistic, of the past. This is what Nolan means when he says that modern audiences would reject traditional forms of heroism. The more prescient question that writers and those who influence mass culture should be asking themselves is: How do we get out of this trap?

How do we get to a place where we are post-critical race theory? Or post-postmodern without it seeming anachronistic or mere nostalgia bait?

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms succeeded where most failed precisely because it is an antidote to the usual cynicism one finds in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros. It accepts that the world is fallen, full of schemers, and nihilistic. It begins there, says “Now what?” and, as a result, spawned one of the best memes of the year:

The “Get up!” image implicitly states that, yes, you’ve been knocked down, but you can’t just stay there dwelling upon it and feeling sorry for yourself. It does not deny the injury happened. Moreover, the protagonist, Sir Duncan the Tall, succeeds because we’re already aware of what happens to people with noble virtues in Martin’s world. We know it’s full of plotters and backstabbers, it revels in it, yet against this a big man with a good, honest heart seems like welcome relief.

A story about an aging, tired Robin Hood should work this way too, but even more so, because the audience already has built-in knowledge of a legendary folklore hero. A metamodern incarnation of the 60 year-old Robin trope can be cynical and regretful, but that is where the story begins.

He should not spend 90 minutes tormented with self-loathing, then die. He should go off on an adventure with a young protégé from whom he learns of the importance of the legend surrounding him — that the poor and downtrodden need his myth to believe in, that there’s a world outside of himself.

That, ultimately, believing in something is better than believing in nothing. Even if that something is not much more than a flickering candle as dusk turns to night.

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There is a scene at the end of Chinatown when Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) stares in shock at the newly dead body of his lover, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Famously, Jake’s associate pulls him away from the carnage with the line:

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

The line, on one level, obviously highlights the ethnic foreignness of Chinatown. On a deeper level, though, it speaks to the intricate web of lies, corruption, sleaze, and incest that has led to the death. It’s saying that in this world, untruths are true; there are plots inside schemes, and everyone is on the take, and trying to reach any catharsis or justice is simply futile. It’s as apt a description of the director Roman Polanski’s personal life as of his film.

I’ve been thinking about the end of Chinatown, and that line, quite a lot recently while observing the aftermath of Ann Widdecombe’s murder. Distrust in institutions is so widespread now that anything the police or government say will be met with severe skepticism and outright rejection. That said, the narrative that we’re supposed to accept is, as of writing, that a White British man with special needs drove five hours from Rotherham to Widdecombe’s house in rural Dartmoor, battered her to death, then drove five hours back home. And the authorities insist that the murder was not politically motivated, which only leaves us asking why he did it and what manner of disability he actually has.

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Despite Ann Widdecombe being famous for her devotion to Christian morality, and the British left openly celebrating her death, we were also expected to discount the possibility that politics could have motivated the killer, until that changed and anti-terrorism police took charge.

Whatever the truth of Widdecombe’s murder, she certainly isn’t the first well-known Brit with sincere moral convictions to die violently or under strange circumstances.

During the 1980s, the British State continually had to fend off opposition to nuclear power, both to its civilian uses as a replacement for coal and to its military role. The CND, feminists, environmentalists, Marxists, Scottish Nationalists and youthful members of the Labour Party all vehemently opposed nuclear weapons, and because of the threat it posed to the miners and, by implication, their Unions.

Hilda Murrell

One highly respected opponent of nuclear power was the elderly naturalist, Hilda Murrell. She was a horticulturalist and founding member of the environmentalist Soil Association who had made her name nurturing roses. Like many opponents of nuclear power, Murrell homed in on the problems produced by nuclear waste, which she viewed as the “Achilles’ heel” of the industry. In 1978, she wrote a paper titled What Price Nuclear Power?

In 1984, ahead of the first inquiry into the construction of a nuclear power plant, Sizewell B, Murrell prepared another paper called An Ordinary Citizen’s View of Radioactive Waste Management. She told friends and relatives that she felt she was being watched, that she would receive phone calls where nobody spoke on the other end, and that there was a steady stream of “tradesmen” turning up to her house with excuses as to why they should be allowed in.

She believed she was being spied upon by the British State, and that they wanted her to know it. Murrell had a nephew, Robert Green, who had his own travails with the British State because he was one of the few people on the inside involved in the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War.

On the 21st of March, 1984, Murrell’s home in Shropshire was burgled, and Murrell was abducted and driven off in her own car. There were signs of a violent struggle in her home, and the phone line was cut; the phone itself was half off the hook. Murrell’s body was found days later in a small woodland copse on some farmland. She was half naked and had slashes across her hands and abdomen. She died of hypothermia.

A local farmer insisted that in the intervening days he had searched the copse himself and that Murrell’s body could not have lain there for that length of time. A sixteen year-old boy, Andrew George, who did not fit the description of the driver, and who couldn’t drive, became the suspect and was eventually convicted of the crime. George certainly was in Hilda Murrell’s house. The Labour MP Tam Dalyell, investigative journalist Judith Cook (who wrote two books on the murder), and Murrell’s nephew all remained extremely skeptical.

There are essentially two theories on the murder of Hilda Murrell: either a burglary gone wrong, or a state operation. Both have paradoxes and loose threads.

The official cause of her death was hypothermia.

Willie McRae

A year after the Hilda Murrell case, prominent Scottish Nationalist Party member and anti-nuclear campaigner Willie McRae passed away under similarly odd circumstances. McRae had successfully campaigned against nuclear waste being stored in the Galloway Hills in Scotland. According to McRae, the British State should put “nuclear waste where Guy Fawkes put his gunpowder”.

McRae claimed that his office in Glasgow had been broken into and that he was under surveillance. He noted the registration plate of a car that routinely circled his place of work and handed it to the police. However, the police claimed that no such number or vehicle existed. Both McRae and the Scottish police knew very well that Special Branch and MI5 did not have their cars registered with the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency).

His files on his anti-nuclear activities routinely disappeared or were rifled through. In one instance he was informed that Scottish Police had taken files for “safekeeping”.

Perhaps not without reason, Willie McRae became increasingly paranoid. He was prone to bouts of heavy drinking and depression. He began carrying an old pistol that he had acquired during his time in the British Army serving in India.

On the 4th of April 1985, McRae’s flat suddenly caught fire. Passer-by Pat Gallagher, a forklift driver, hurriedly bolted into the building to help and said he saw a man in a boiler suit carrying a briefcase leaving as he entered. Gallagher asked about the fire and the boiler-suited man simply replied that he was “in a hurry to get to work”. Gallagher then pulled McRae out of the building despite McRae fighting to re-enter and retrieve his files.

Despite everything, McRae was widely reported to have been in good spirits because he’d made a major breakthrough in his work against the British State, citing “I’ve got them!”

That evening, having just survived near asphyxiation, McRae left Glasgow to drive to his remote cottage in Ross-shire in the north of Scotland. Before his departure, McRae joked with a policeman while buying whisky. The policeman noted that two men were following McRae.

Two Australian tourists found McRae in his Volvo the next morning. He was 90 feet off the road on the heath straddling a small burn.

McRae was unconscious and transported by ambulance to Inverness hospital. However, here it was discovered that he had severe brain trauma, and so was then taken to Aberdeen hospital, where it was discovered that McRae had actually been shot in the head.

Back at the crash site, things get even weirder. McRae’s pistol was discovered far from his crashed car, in the small burn. In this scenario, McRae drove off the road and careened across thick heather, only to then shoot himself in the temple and throw his pistol 60 feet, where it landed in the burn.

The alternative theory is that the police removed the car thinking it was simply a mundane crash, only to later return the car to the wrong place. This could explain the mysteriously flying pistol. If McRae had committed suicide, he could have just dropped it out of the window. However, publicly, the police flatly denied ever moving the car; it was only found years later in internal records and documents.

Whatever the case, the official cause of death was suicide.

Jill Dando

Unlike the cases of Hilda Murrell and Willie McRae, the case of Jill Dando will be familiar to most people in the UK and perhaps even farther afield. Dando was one of the most popular and prominent BBC presenters during the 1990s. According to the Guardian:

As Dando was about to put her keys in the lock to open the front door of her home in Fulham, she was grabbed from behind. With his right arm, the assailant held her and forced her to the ground, so that her face was almost touching the tiled step of the porch. Then, with his left hand, he fired a single shot at her left temple, killing her instantly. The bullet entered her head just above her ear, parallel to the ground, and came out the right side of her head.

The precise nature of Dando’s awful death has never been in dispute. The controversy is who and why.

The original investigation and criminal proceedings focused on “local loner” Barry George, who had clippings of Dando and a somewhat odd interest in female celebrities. In 1983 George had been arrested for stalking Princess Diana while carrying a rope and knife. Dando was not dissimilar to Diana in physical appearance.

However, being a weirdo does not impute to an individual high-level assassination skills. After being convicted of Dando’s murder in 2001, George was acquitted in 2008.

The theories into Dando’s murder in many ways map onto the changing attitudes of British society. In the early 2000s, besides ex-boyfriends or lone nuts, the focus was primarily on Serbia reacting to the NATO bombing campaign and support for Kosovo. Dando had been the face of Britain’s humanitarian effort during the Balkans campaign. Three days prior to Dando’s murder, NATO had killed 13 journalists in Belgrade by bombing the state broadcaster.

More recently, this theory of Dando’s death has lost steam and been replaced with a theory that she was set to expose a massive paedophile ring centred on the BBC and Jimmy Saville. The theory gained traction following a Netflix show called Who Killed Jill Dando?, but also leans into established facts that there indeed was (or is) a network of child abusers prominent within the BBC and the institutions of British power and influence.

Moreover, the argument goes, as presenter of the BBC flagship Crimewatch program at the time, Dando had the connections and platform to highlight the issue if she so wished.

I personally find it difficult to believe that the BBC would have green-lit a profoundly damaging investigative report into itself. Then again, Dando had the profile to simply write a book, or perhaps have a documentary aired on another station. Perhaps worst of all is the simple fact that no evidence exists to support this claim beyond an anonymous source cited in the Daily Star.

Regardless, we are left with yet another mysterious case that lingers in the national psyche. Another high-profile, much-loved figure with genuine decency, professionally murdered by forces unknown.

Dr David Kelly

In the aftermath of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell’s “dodgy dossier” that sold the Iraq War to the British people as a matter of extreme emergency, Dr David Kelly, a veteran specialist on biological warfare, was revealed to be leaking criticisms to BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan. Kelly accused the Blair government of “sexing up” the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and claimed that the 45-minute threat posed by his regime simply didn’t exist.

The implications of Kelly’s revelations did not merely embarrass the Blair Government; they highlighted the moral bankruptcy of the American neocon agenda by implication.

As a UN weapons inspector, Kelly had promised his Iraqi contacts that if they simply complied with the (unending) demands of the United States and United Kingdom, their country would be spared from invasion. Kelly eventually recognised that war was going to happen regardless and that his contacts would likely be killed. Kelly feared that he would himself be cast as a liar.

Eerily, Kelly even predicted the exact nature of his death. As the Irish Times wrote:

Mr Broucher said he asked what would happen if Iraq was attacked despite Dr Kelly’s assurances. “His reply was, which I took to be a throwaway remark: ‘I will be found dead in the woods.’

“I thought he might have meant that he was at risk of being attacked by the Iraqis in some way,” Mr Broucher said.

“I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines.”

Kelly, coming under extreme pressure from the press, the Government and the intelligence services, went for his afternoon walk on the 17th of July, 2003. His body was found the next morning by volunteers searching for him. He had taken an overdose of his wife’s arthritis pills, despite having a lifelong aversion to taking pills. He had apparently cut his wrists with a pruning knife, though he sliced the wrong vein, and it was noted by the volunteers that almost no blood was either on or around him.

Moreover, a thermal imaging helicopter had passed directly over the spot where he was found the previous day and detected nothing. This led many to suspect that he had been abducted and his corpse returned to the spot in the woods later.

After the volunteers found Kelly and went to inform the police, they stated to the Hutton Inquiry that in the intervening time Kelly’s body had been moved from being slumped against a tree to lying flat on the ground.

Despite the oddities surrounding the David Kelly case, Lord Hutton, a Blair appointee who was regarded by Blair as a “safe pair of hands”, placed a 70-year restriction order on Kelly’s postmortem, photographs, medical records and his toxicology report to “protect the family’s privacy”.

The official cause of death was haemorrhage (heavy bleeding) caused by incised wounds to the left wrist. The Guardian reports that the pathologist who carried out the autopsy called it:

a textbook case of suicide but he would have “dearly loved” to have found evidence of murder.

Conclusion

The term the British intelligence agencies use to describe an assassination or sanctioned murder is “Wet Job”. They apparently borrowed this phrase from the Soviet Union, where similar work was referred to as “Wet Work”. Am I saying that Jill Dando or Willie McRae or Hilda Murrell are examples of MI5 doing Wet Jobs? No. My honest opinion is that I have no idea. Neither am I implying that Ann Widdecombe was killed by the deep state. In all probability, it was a mad leftist.

The problem is the cultural context is one in which these odd mysteries and unresolved questions heap up and loom over every conversation, every instance of government involvement is treated with profound suspicion, and when one digs in a little, there’s usually something and not nothing.

Culturally speaking, the British intelligence services represent something seedy and squalid. There is the whiff of a depressed John le Carré careerist stirring a cup of lukewarm tea, lingering outside of graffiti-covered, piss-smelling bus shelters, and spying on somebody who has a moral core.

There is also the ancient Anglo liberal spirit at play, perhaps. We assume the state is malevolent, untrustworthy, shifty, and that its minions must be of low character. The boiler-suited man with a briefcase fleeing the mysterious fire in the Willie McRae case embodies it.

We wonder to ourselves, do such people exist in the British State? Still today, when everything is digital and gay? And when we say so out loud, with sincerity, we almost always get the reply that is the equivalent of:

Leave it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

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I have to credit this phenomenal 8-hour documentary for helping me with this article.

Before Hope Not Hate went public about the surveillance operation they’d been carrying out on me, there were tremors within my real-life social circle that something was not quite right, because two young men had been around asking questions. Messages swirled around, both directly and indirectly to me, querying whether everything was alright and who these two young men with such a keen interest in me actually were.

Naturally, the Hope Not Hate employees claimed they were mere journalists with an interest in YouTubers, rather than what they are, which is a deeply immoral institution that routinely bends the truth and the law to achieve their ends, which is to “expose” people with opinions not aligned with the power structure.

From a single photo taken of me at a private event, and against my consent, they had somehow managed to find a previous address and intended to “doorstep” me. The purpose of doorstepping a target is primarily psychological. It destroys the target’s sense of security, it surprises, it sends the message “We found you, and we can return to question you whenever we feel like it”.

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In the 2010s, when Islamic terrorism was more rampant across Europe than it is now, content creators and commentators online began to notice that the responses of the various governments had become standardised and mass-produced. To begin with, it was the act of terrorism itself and questions related to mass immigration. Gradually, though, people started to see the coordinated and replicated responses. This was the era of “Pray for Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid” and so on.

Love and tolerance never did actually win. A bloated surveillance state did.

European authorities had adopted plans of perception management in lieu of a plan to remove a violent and historically antagonistic religion. Don’t call for mass deportations, place a candle in your Facebook avatar to show your solidarity with peaceful Muslims, and the Europeans who were slaughtered. But mainly the peaceful Muslims.

The problem for the regime was not so much that they were increasingly sitting atop a pile of their own dead citizens, but that the most obvious and glaring solution was beyond the pale and “far right”. The purpose of the perception management mind-benders was to roll out a narrative that led the panicked masses back into a frame that the neoliberal consensus was comfortable with. Like sprinkling pellets on the ground to lead chickens back into their coop.

This profoundly cynical and somewhat sociopathic managerial damage control was viewed by those on the “outside” with a degree of horror and fascination.

I’ve spent the last few days viewing the reaction to the Henry Nowak murder with a similar degree of bafflement, repulsion, and horror. I’ve watched segments on Sky News, Channel Four, LBC, Novara Media, GB News, and statements from the Government itself.

Millennial Woes has done an excellent piece explaining the details of the story.

Here, it is important to draw a distinction between the waves of Islamic violence cited earlier and the violence endemic to the “Yookay”. Today, violence and murder speak more to a rising tide of chaos, sporadic savagery, and cold indifference to death, rather than networks of highly coordinated religious zealots with ties to other networks across the Islamic world. In the Yookay, an Afghan could stab you to death while you walk your dog, and there’d be no rhyme or reason to it, no larger ideological aims or geopolitical grievance.

It is more Cormac McCarthy than War of the Flea.

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Where the two strands of barbarism converge is the fact that managerial liberalism and its policies are ultimately responsible for both, and in both cases, its defenders have to explain, lie, squirm, and bullshit their way through the news cycle. It could always be argued that Islamic terrorists weren’t representative of all Muslims, and indeed, were just a tiny minority. An element of plausible deniability was available.

The Henry Nowak case has none. It is a straightforward question: Are the institutions of power anti-white?

The mainstream has long scoffed at the allegation of “two-tier” policing as a far-right or populist trope, but the problem is, they all championed a multitude of policies and legislation, training modules, and advisory guidelines to ensure and insist that groups the Equalities Act designated as having “protected characteristics” were, well, protected.

Let us just remind ourselves of what happened on the fateful night of Nowak’s murder. A Sikh called the police to allege a racial offense had been committed against him by a young white man. When the police arrived, they proceeded to handcuff the obviously severely wounded young man despite his repeated claims to have been stabbed and that he “couldn’t breathe”. Indeed, the generally derisive attitude of the police was ghastly in and of itself, but the true question is why the officer made the choice in that moment to believe the brown man and his family and not the wounded white man.

Why, ultimately, was the young white man’s life devalued in this way?

The primary response of left/liberal commentators was to claim that yes, this was an appalling display of police incompetence, but that it wasn’t a structural issue.

Aaron Bastani of Novara Media, a leftist many on the right have some sympathy for, explained it thus:

Hampshire Police proudly boasts of what it describes as its “Race Action Plan”:

Their guidelines span the entire gamut of DEI social-justice sound bites, complete with reverential mentions of George Floyd. They also include:

Bastani wishes to frame the police response in terms of incompetence, that the police have become unprofessional and somewhat inept. There is obviously truth to that, but even if we grant that the police who arrived at the scene of Henry Nowak’s murder were utterly useless, the decisions made in the moment did actually correspond with the policies and training as stated by Hampshire Police.

This is to restate my argument on whether the system is simply incompetent or malicious. If incompetence were the only factor, we would, by default, see outcomes that benefited white natives from time to time, even if only by accident. But we never do.

To be fair to Bastani, he put these concerns to another leftist on his show, wherein he adopted the “right-wing” side of the argument and asked whether there was truth to the claim that British justice was prejudiced against white people. His guest expressed surprise and even shock at the suggestion and said there was no evidence to make a serious argument that the natives were treated worse than minorities. To which, somewhat admirably, Bastani broadened the discussion to encompass the “Grooming Gang” crisis. Once again, and despite myriad examples of inquiries and court proceedings stating quite explicitly that child protection services, police, and local politicians were mortified by being called racist as the catalyst, it was denied by the leftist guest, and complex inter-class material factors were used to explain the issue.

Meanwhile, the News Agents podcast also raised the possibility that there was indeed two-tier policing in the United Kingdom. However, their resident expert on the police reminded the audience that black men were most likely to be stopped and searched, and a young black woman was stripped-searched in a London police station once.

On LBC, the utterly repellent James O’Brien almost entirely neglected the racial components of the case, instead devoting his show to moaning about Nigel Farage’s reaction.

What Did They Expect?

To believe the narrative of the British political and media mainstream (Bastani is not entirely mainstream, it should be said) is to believe that some groups can be protected by the law and be granted special dispensations, and another group not, and that somehow this will not result in perverse outcomes.

It is to believe, quite literally, that everyone is equal but some are more equal than others, and that when such policies are manifested in late-night scuffles, inter-ethnic rape scandals, and killings, there would presumably be some Marxian sky-fairy that would descend and deliver the perfectly “equal” results of the policies.

Alternatively, the foundational thinking of such ideological frameworks is sheer lunacy.

In 2020, the BBC reported that the security guard at the Manchester Arena bombing that massacred 22 people, mainly young girls, at an Ariana Grande concert, shied away from approaching the terrorist because he worried about being called racist:

I felt unsure about what to do.

It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male.

I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race.

I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble. It made me hesitant.

I wanted to get it right and not mess it up by over-reacting or judging someone by their race.

It’s easy to scoff at the young man, Kyle Lawler, who was 18 at the time. But he wasn’t incorrect that if he had accused an Asian man of being a terrorist when he wasn’t, he would probably be fired and perhaps even prosecuted or hauled out into the public sphere to be demonised.

Similarly, and not widely discussed, is that Southport killer Axel Rudakubana’s school teacher, Joanne Hodson, had tried to raise the alarm but was warned off by a mental health worker, according to The Spectator:

On sharing this draft, Hodson found herself ‘met with hostility’ by both the boy’s father and a mental health worker, Samantha Steed. Indeed, Steed went so far as to accuse Hodson of ‘racially stereotyping’ Rudakubana as ‘a black boy with a knife’, in her response to him looking her dead in the eye and stating he had intended ‘to use’ the knife he took to his previous school. Cowed with the threat that she was ‘racially profiling’ him, Hodson deleted the phrases.

The result is three more little girls butchered for anti-racism, and once again, a member of the public has to face the Hobson’s choice of saving lives or making a mistake and then having their careers and lives destroyed.

The question arises, however, of what precisely it is that so terrifies these people in the first place, and the answer is the state bureaucracy, of course. The state for which the police are the primary muscle.

Thus, it is, of course, true that a security guard or a school teacher is not representative of the British police, but it is the prospect of becoming entangled with the state and its organs that places dread in the hearts of ordinary people. And the reason for that is because everybody knows full well that it is “woke” and the police have made it loud and clear that they represent the tip of the woke spear.

The police, unlike a binman or a minimum-wage security guard, have specific guidelines and training that imbue them with the morals and ideological priors of the state.

Despite all of this, we’re expected to believe that all of this dogma, myriad incentive structures, and straightforward fear are not informing the decisions of authority and are perfectly compatible with “equality before the law”.

Moreover, Vickrum Digwa and his whole family, unlike liberal leftists, saw straight through it all, and that is why they played the race card to begin with. Regardless of guff about class and economic status, minorities have an incentive to game the system, and white people have an incentive to not trip the explosive minefields placed under their feet.

The results speak for themselves: death, rape, injustice, fear, double standards, and lies, heaped one on top of the other like body bags in a soggy pit.

‘‘Perhaps the police officers in the Henry Nowak case took it a little far, these policies sounded nice in the workshops and policy think tanks, surely we can’t be at fault? It must be incompetence, they just didn’t follow the training properly…’’

Of course, it is both systemic and structural. Both terms the left used to understand well, but somehow forgot.

Structural racism refers to the societal systems, institutions, and policies—such as those in housing, healthcare, education, and criminal justice—that interact to perpetuate racial inequities. It operates continuously even without overtly racist individuals, as historical biases are embedded into the everyday functioning of these structures.

The policeman is called to a scene. Before him, a white boy writhes on the floor, claiming he’s been stabbed, and a brown family claims they’re the victims. The policeman handcuffs the white man, and he dies.

Must be just incompetence, just a one-off, don’t ask any bigger questions.

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The Western way of life in the 21st Century is predicated on a model of infinite growth. Growth is maintained by inputs; one of those inputs is oil, another is human beings. The growth doesn’t always occur, and the people may not be optimal, but such a state of affairs merely requires more inputs as corrective measures. The line on the graph doesn’t always go up, but it should.

The political class will tinker with policies that reduce or seek to replace the energy inputs, or swap the inflow of people from one part of the world with another, but the arrow flies straight, and the direction of travel is absolute.

In the United Kingdom, the system has cushioned itself against uncomfortable political shocks by containing the extremes of both the left and the right, imbuing them with policies and ideas that would not prove existential to the system writ large.

Still, the nationalist, or dissident right, routinely flirts with ideas that would indeed prove existential for the system, though perhaps not so much for the people. Implementing policies that would not merely halt the inflow of people but actively seek to create an outflow of millions would, as mainstream pundits are eager to point out, make the debt unsustainable and cause an economic calamity.

An aging population with an upside-down pyramid structure cannot make the line go up, and by definition, it is not growing but shrinking. Of course, these dynamics could correct over the long term, but fundamentally, these policies are more than the current system could maintain, and it would die.

The question is, should we care?

To argue that, on the contrary, mass deportations would result in an economic boon is to argue within the logic of the current paradigm. The question would arise as to how the colossal national debt would be paid, or if the burden should be passed onto a far smaller and older population, and there would be a temptation to simply renege on any obligations and absorb the pain that would follow.

Naturally, this does not even begin to mention the massive civil unrest, geopolitical isolation, and pariah status that would inevitably be imposed on the United Kingdom.

We begin to see, then, why the current regime dedicates itself to locking out such a politics from the system; it isn’t “restorative” but revolutionary in its outcomes.

If the continuation of a distinct people becomes the ideological centre rather than economic growth and consumerism, the system’s ontological priors are reversed, and hardship can be justified for the greater good. Fewer consumer goods in exchange for a nation upon whose streets a teenage English girl can walk in safety is a relatively small price. Hyperinflation, not so much, though long-term demographic trends can be viewed with such horror that pretty much anything can be justified to avoid that outcome.

Yet it is the scrubbing out of the system’s first principles and replacing them with new ones that creates a revolution, not “reform”. This is not to say that eating curry or tomatoes in January should be banned, but rather that the population’s ability to do so would not form the philosophical spine of the new, revolutionary regime.

Iran is a revolutionary state in the truest sense, and has paid the price for it. Indeed, Iran, unlike revolutionary states such as 18th-century France or Bolshevik Russia, rejected atheistic secularism and returned to God, in essence, reforging De Maistre’s Great Chain of Being in the height of modernity. What resulted was a widely despised nationalist theocracy openly contemptuous of Western liberalism and materialism.

Wars were endured, attempts at internal subversion thwarted and ruthlessly punished, unending sanctions packages absorbed and worked around. The term “rogue regime” is interesting here because it begs the question “rogue relative to what?”

Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote that revolutionary regimes, because of their chaotic nature, “liquidate weakness and bring forth strength”. Far from liberating the people, the revolutionary state will inevitably expand its bureaucracy and managerial apparatus massively, even if only to deal with its myriad enemies within and without.

Similarly, the revolutionary state will have to become comfortable with establishing “escalation dominance” over its enemies, both internally and externally.

To state that you’re willing to endure economic hardship to attain a homogeneous population is to escalate the discussion into unfamiliar and unnerving territory for the current paradigm. It is to raise the stakes, to say that you will not barter or bargain over the first principle.

It was demanded of Iran that it bend the knee to Zionist and American hegemony, and it refused. However, it is now clear that, despite what Western news agencies reported, becoming a nuclear power was not a core principle of the Iranian regime; sovereignty was.

Sovereignty meant more to the Iranian regime than capital inflow, consumer goods, or even pharmaceutical products. To maintain it, the nation had to become a fortress, both physically and psychologically.

The revolutionary state’s willingness to endure greater hardship and violence means it is better prepared for escalation than a hegemonic order seeking to secure itself or tie up loose ends.

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The war between Israel/America and Iran has produced a remarkable state of affairs where Iran was forced to choose between surrendering its sovereignty or choking out the world economy, and chose the latter.

Thus, the regime has escalated to such a degree that the hegemonic order of neoliberal globalism is itself now being strangled and potentially permanently ruined, and it all stems from a revolutionary fervour with a set of core beliefs external to the hegemon’s.

The Right In Disarray

Before Donald Trump’s second term, the so-called “Dissident Right” was a somewhat passive online network of people sharing ideas, memes, and videos that, while often incoherent, did, in fact, agree upon a set of core principles.

It was acknowledged that, for example, racial differences were real, that the replacement of white people across the West was well underway, and that what was referred to as “Clownworld” or “Globohomo” was nothing but a nihilistic economic zone sapping the vitality and life-essence out of everyone. Nothing was agreed upon more than its opposition to fighting “forever wars” and “dying for Israel”.

If real-world networking and organisation were difficult and rife with infiltrators and “Feds”, the nature and scale of the problem were at least commonly understood and agreed upon.

Trump’s second term has smashed this consensus to pieces.

Now, wars for Israel were reframed by MAGA influencers as embodying the Anglo-Saxon spirit of conquest. They weren’t conned and lied to; they’d simply adopted a cold Machiavellianism and pitilessness that justified smacking the “browns” around. Indeed, at a higher level, it could be explained by the need to keep BRICS Third Worldism boxed in.

Such an analysis may or may not be true, but it can hardly be described as revolutionary opposition to Clownworld. A system that, a mere 18 months ago, openly and proudly discriminated against white people and whose Civil Rights Act undergirds copious anti-white legislation, is suddenly worth fighting and killing for.

Whatever anger and resentment that existed has been pulped and used as filler in the latest batch of patriots defending Israel.

Small surprise, then, that many view Iran with a degree of sympathy. After all, here is a nation that has genuinely revolted against the hegemonic order. Iran’s defiance becomes a proxy for the impotence of dissidents in the West, ground down by lies, corruption, false narratives, and containment.

The bitter irony in all of this is that, depending on how hard the landing is, the pain inflicted upon the West resulting from wave after wave of energy shortages, inflation, low crop yields, and civil unrest, will create conditions not too different from those that would have occurred under a rejection of the status quo.

However, the core principle remains the same: Do we survive or not?

We are not a system, but a people. We were a people before oil refineries and logistical hubs, before high-yield fertilisers and just-in-time supply chains, before Amazon data centres and the invention of the telephone, the steam engine, the printing press, political correctness, or World War II.

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A recurring theme of 1990s Hollywood is the soul-sapping tedium of what today we might describe as “normiedom”. Unlike in 1970s-era media, the institutions of power are usually portrayed as morally sound and reasonably honest (The X-Files notwithstanding). Professional, though technocratic and dull. Unlike the 1980s, however, the American Dream is hollow.

A population armed only with leaf-blowers, driving through relatively crime-free suburban estates featuring affordable houses the size of castles, is today looked upon with teary-eyed nostalgia, a “look what they took from you!” lament that the 90s were a Golden Age.

It wasn’t that the system was evil, but that it was boring and lacked any meaning beyond consumerism and the 9-to-5 treadmill of paying for a mortgage and pension package. As Tyler Durden says in Fight Club:

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.

The 1994 James Cameron/Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-‘em-up True Lies is ostensibly an action film about secret agents chasing down generic Iranian terrorists who are trying to get a nuke (I know), but really it’s fixated on the era’s existential questions.

Arnie, somewhat laughably, presents himself to the world as a banal computer salesman, content with his nice house, wife (Jamie Lee Curtis), and teenage daughter. By night, he’s a James Bond clone gunning down international crime and terror syndicates. Meanwhile, not being aware of her husband’s ultra-masculine secret, Jamie Lee Curtis is becoming sexually frustrated and depressed by the humdrum nature of their lives.

In an amusing but farcical plotline, Curtis engages in an almost-but-not-quite affair with a slimy used car salesman, Simon (Bill Paxton), who pretends to be a secret agent. Thus, everyone is lying to everyone else, but the common denominator between them all is that everyday life is dreadfully dull and to be viewed with contempt.

Indeed, it is implied throughout that the wife of a man with a boring job might be justified in having sexual encounters with more exciting men.

This aspect of 90s pop culture fascinates me, not just because I grew up in it, but also because from the perspective of the 2020s we can look back on it and see the fractures and fault lines that were not apparent at the time. In an age when the 90s are viewed fondly as an era just before everything went to hell, the decade can seem extraordinarily self-indulgent and spoiled, at least in terms of media.

It’s as if the game of civilisation had been completed, the end of history reached, and all anyone wanted to do was moan about the lack of excitement and purpose, to navel gaze while listening to the Smashing Pumpkins.

The system of government worked well enough, houses were affordable, most people were white, and you had access to a vast array of goods and services before the negative impacts of neoliberalism bit too deeply.

A degree of contempt nested within the stability, a resentment that, having reached the end of the rainbow, all that was on offer was a larger lawnmower and a six-pack of Bud in the garage.

True Lies is the end of Schwarzenegger’s Golden Age as a Hollywood action star. It wasn’t that he was too old (he was 46) but that the action movie itself had devolved into self-parody. In the final act of True Lies, when husband and wife are engaged on the real mission to thwart the Iranian terrorist plot, Curtis quips that she “married Rambo”. This was a trend in action movies that began with Die Hard, whose script is littered with references to other action films and stars.

Now, you no longer merely had the protagonist in an action film; you had a protagonist who was aware of himself as an action hero and offering meta-commentary on it.

This little trick works well in narrative terms because it means the hero has more in common with the viewer, as both are outside the medium, looking in.

However, over time, this descended into self-parody, which is exactly what True Lies is and why Schwarzenegger’s career went downhill in the 90s.

The highly-successful 80s action movie gradually died in the 1990s because people became bored with the formula and sought ways to break it apart, deconstruct it, and make fun of it — just like they did with everything else.

In his 2004 documentary The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis depicted the era as a mixture of comfort and Prozac, luxury and existential dread. A market-driven consumer paradise where goods were sold that emboldened the sense of self and individuality within the masses. Everybody was special and unique, and psychology became yet another monetised function that made each person feel that their needs and frustrations were theirs alone, even if millions were receiving the exact same treatments and diagnoses.

According to Curtis, the neoconservative movement in America felt the need to inject a new “Great Other” into the cultural psyche to fill the void created by the collapse of the USSR.

A cultural artifact such as True Lies carries all of these tropes. It is perhaps not surprising to learn that Hollywood was dripping the “Iranians with nukes” narrative into the media landscape as long ago as 1994, but they were. Moreover, in an age before political correctness had fully extended its talons, stereotypes and planting the idea of a generic Middle Eastern terrorist coming to explode nuclear bombs within the heart of the American dream, was not done with much subtlety or sophistication.

The central question of how to fill the void remained unanswered. Fighting them over there so they didn’t have to be fought in a Marriott hotel set-piece was all well and good, but it’s hardly surprising that people would begin to question the foundational pillars of the society itself.

True Lies is a mere switch your brain-off daft action film, but the “lies” are indeed the convenient fantasies constructed to give life meaning and purpose. It’s no surprise that, at the end of the 90s, American Beauty would seek to tear down the fabric of this monotonous existence, and The Matrix would depict it as entirely fake and question the nature of reality itself.

It can be argued that the groundwork for “woke” was planted in 90s nihilism. As in the action movie, the culture became increasingly self-critical and deconstructive, turning back on itself as its own assumptions and myths lost their authority.

Watching True Lies recently, two jokes told by lecherous, comedic side characters left a sour taste in my mouth. One scene depicts Arnie using military-grade goggles to catch his 14-year-old daughter stealing money. His partner and friend quips that she’s likely stealing the money to pay for an abortion, and that she is being brought up by Axl Rose and Madonna. In another, Bill Paxton remarks on Jamie Lee Curtis’ good looks by saying she has an “ass like a 10-year-old boy”.

In both instances, Arnie has to play the role of the put-upon conservative dad at a loss to understand the lewd, weird, and even perverted jibes of unpleasant, greasy side characters.

Fundamentally, the true believer in the 9-to-5 therapeutic system of capitalist managerialism couldn’t do anything except express confusion and repulsion at the undermining of traditional mores.

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The world of the carefully curated design for life was only ever waiting for a slight nip and tuck to corporate and political incentive structures, and the outlining of degeneracy and nihilism could become an official diktat.

To rewatch these somewhat forgotten relics of 90s culture as they are, not as nostalgia dictates, is akin to studying small larval creatures that will eventually become a swarm of civilisation-consuming slugs - to such a degree that people would yearn for the security offered by its predictability and boredom.

And the question of finding meaning within this structure remains unanswered.

I recently watched an interview with John Mearsheimer discussing the Iran War in which he expressed his concern that the Jewish people, rather than merely the “Zionist Lobby”, will be blamed for the debacle. Mearsheimer’s now-famous book, The Lobby, detailed the extent and political power of Israeli-aligned power players in shaping American foreign policy objectives, and their sprawling network of censors and incentives to ensure that everyone stays in line and doesn’t ask too many questions.

Those questions are certainly being asked now. As I noted to Millennial Woes recently, we seem like squishy moderates on the issue compared to what people with far greater platforms than ours routinely say.

When I first began consuming content on the “JQ” around 2013, YouTube was a far freer, less restricted place, though actual white nationalist content didn’t amount to much more than perhaps two podcasts and five articles a week. William Luther Pierce’s monologues, mash-ups of Hitler speeches and documentaries questioning events in World War II, were commonplace. A documentary on the history of Hollywood and the content of the movie industry, called An Empire of Their Own, made an impression on me, as did Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique.

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It appears that severe economic strain and crippling energy prices are now baked into the near future. I am a pessimist by nature; studying Spengler’s The Decline of the West merely formed an intellectual and philosophical underpinning for what I felt in my gut. Why were great works of art and musical symphonies a thing of the past? What was the eerie hollowness inherent in a zeitgeist that only concerned itself with money?

A difficult question arises if one forms one’s worldview on the premise that things will only get worse, not better. Namely, what is to be done? Or what can be done? Are there no political solutions? What if we were all materially better off?

A few years ago, I wrote an article asking whether the West was an elephant tottering around on fragile stilts. While my focus was primarily on internet cables rather than energy supplies, the disconcerting truth that our technological marvel of modernity is propped up on flimsy balsa-wood foundations has re-emerged amid the war in Iran.

Never a platform to shy away from hyperbole, the Daily Mail carried this headline:

It is impossible to say whether this doomsday forecast will come to fruition, but at least some degree of pain seems unavoidable at this point. What the article will not mention, of course, is that the population is now highly “diverse” and, given enough strain, likely to fracture into ethnic and identitarian lines, drastically compounding the stress on society.

Here, we witness the agonising folly of creating a multicultural society lubricated with debt-wealth and childish ideals conjured up in focus groups. The truth of it is that multicultural Britain has never been stress-tested, not really. A homogenous country can withstand famines and wars, economic collapse, and cold, but a society divided against itself by government decree? A nation comprised of rival tribes and the wandering waifs and strays who washed up on the shore for lucre?

I’m a pessimist, but not a nihilist. To return to the question of what must be done if gradual decline is inevitable, like the changing of the seasons, the answer I came to long ago was that the damage and suffering must be mitigated as much as possible.

Pro-immigration advocates, such as Zoe Gardner, have already made it clear that no numbers of murders and rapes offset the alleged advantages of mass immigration, as she states here:

Drill down through sanctimony, and what Gardner is essentially arguing is that we must import foreign human biomass because we are not sufficiently replicating our own human biomass. If we fail to do so, then the “system” comes under duress. Fundamentally, the system of infinite growth and neoliberal economics must prevail, not distinct ethnicities. In this frame, humans are no different from the energy supplies currently burning in the sands of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, a resource or capital that greases the Globalist Tower of Babel.

Yet, we now see that the system is cracking at the macro level, regardless of how many immigrants we have paying for pensions and acting as human quantitative easing for the bond markets.

The already highly dubious merits of the pro-immigration argument become untenable if the raw infrastructure is in flames. All that remains are minority white towns and cities, poisoned with seething sectarianism and resentment. All for nought.

The argument that “you may not like immigration, but it keeps the system running” assumes that negative outcomes can be offset, but they now seem to be arriving anyway. The multi-ethnic tinderbox has thus created a situation worse than simply being poor, worse than facing “hard times”; it is a force multiplier of misery and strife.

It is true that a white-only UK would have too many old people relative to the young. It would be a challenge, it would be a struggle, but eventually, thanks in no small part to the housing stock being easily affordable due to a declining population, people would settle, and the situation would improve. There are worse things than being poor. There are scenarios that are infinitely worse than returning to the diets our people had in the 1950s; it’s just that so imbued are we with the spirit of progressivism that spells of hardship have become unthinkable.

The satanic bargain our civilisation has been built upon is that we can inhabit an eternal summer, the days will be forever long, the harvests rich, and the honey sweet. All it has cost us is our land, our future, and our souls. The very idea that we should lower expectations, make do, and retreat to restore our energy, is anathema.

Hard times are coming, whether because of the latest madness in the Middle East or some other, as-yet-unknown factor. What would have been hard times in a high-trust, homogenous society will instead be hard times alongside foreigners gaming the systems and the handouts based on their own tribal, in-group loyalties that have been expunged from the natives.

So what is to be done?

The answer that I have given for years is localism and trust networks.

A few years ago, I spent a few days clearing brambles and undergrowth from an old man’s garden. I knew him from the local pub. It wasn’t a big job, cutting back with shears, strimming and rough turning over of the modest patch of soil. A few weeks later, he suddenly appeared at my door with cardboard boxes stuffed with seed potatoes ready to be chitted. So many, in fact, that I didn’t have the growing space for them all. I could call it even here, a favour for a favour. Instead, I intend to bring him a basket of leeks, beans, and tomatoes in midsummer when I go to the pub.

Rather than wax lyrical about localism or growing vegetables, let us instead consider what has taken place between men entirely outside of the system.

1. Firstly, the isolating shackles of atomisation must be severed, and contact must be made with other men in the area

2. A common ground has been found through conversation, and a favour offered

3. The favour is subsequently reciprocated by the delivery of an abundance of goods

4. The foundations will, in the future, be built upon by a further exchange

5. With trust now established, further favours and services can be arranged. For example, the old man has a friend who is a retired mechanic, and he has a son who knows a lot about fixing computers.

Nothing grandiose is taking place here. There are no grand unifying theories or ideologies. It is instead the awkward, tentative steps back away from the isolated individual reliant on systems and the embryonic emergence of trust networks. It is what will bolster the native population in the face of imported tribalism (who are doing the same), what will survive when the stilts crack and splinter under the bloated bulk of the elephant.

It is what will remain when politics and everything else fail.

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Two different worlds have occupied my thoughts recently. One is a world in which amoral, degenerate elites treat those under their vassalage as mere objects to be tortured and exploited. The other is the latest Game of Thrones spin-off.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is currently receiving rave reviews from both mainstream and movie-critic YouTube channels. Set 80 years before the main Game of Thrones saga and based on the book The Hedge Knight, the new series is being lauded as post-woke and a return to traditional heroic archetypes and morality.

The story is centred on a big strapping lad who has a heart of gold and fancies himself as an honourable knight. Duncan the Tall (Dunc) is the antithesis of what we’ve come to expect from Westeros and its cynical view of power and human nature.

We’ve been here before, of course. This is essentially the Ned Stark arc.

Seven Kingdoms is far more concerned with life from the perspective of the smallfolk commoners than previous sagas, and Dunc strives to be their idealistic champion. The plot gets rolling properly when a psycho Targaryen prince breaks the fingers of a girl enacting a story on stage in which a dragon (symbol of House Targaryen) is slain. Dunc, disregarding the hierarchy of Westeros entirely, gives the prince a damn good hiding.

Thus, Dunc is upholding the values of the knight by protecting the innocent, and those values are now at odds with the powerful people who rule, and he now faces being executed for it. Luckily for Dunc, his companion is a young Targaryen boy called Aegon (Egg) who can speak up on his behalf.

The stories, then, are a newer incarnation of the good man in a bad world trope with his sidekick, similar in theme to Don Quixote or Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. A somewhat grimmer version is Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

As of writing, the show is not finished, though it does appear to be gaining in popularity by the week as people realise it isn’t just more misery and cynicism wearing woke lipstick.

Yet, it is interesting to juxtapose the popularity of The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms with real-world political and cultural trends at the beginning of 2026. The show everyone is talking about is philosophically rooted in the heroism of a good man defending the innocent at great risk, while in the real world, our world, we are deluged daily by the latest horrors and sordid details of the Epstein files. Every day is a new revelation of the degree to which our elites despise us, more often than not, a tribal, ritualistic contempt.

When the original Thrones saga aired in the 2010s, people had the luxury of enjoying the spectacle of schemers and cynical players interested only in personal gain. There’s a ruthlessness that can be admired in an abstract sense. We could place ourselves in the role of this or that ruler and mull over the dastardly deeds we could justify, and if that resulted in a few hundred smallfolk being raped and butchered, well, they just have to suffer as they must.

In 2026, however, it’s pretty obvious that we are the smallfolk, and it is demanded of us that we suffer at their pleasure, and for their pleasure, and they’ll video it, and gloat about it in poorly written emails.

Moreover, our tormentors don’t have aura, or charisma, aren’t sharp intellects, and don’t deserve to rule or hold any power at all.

We do not get Tywin Lannister; we get a giggling, lying, moronic sleazeball like Howard Lutnick. We get Peter Mandelson in his crusty undies and Bill Gates’ warty penis. We get a political class that tries to woo us over with promises to put a penny extra in our pockets, while the masses speculate over whether the rumours about eating babies are true. We get pledges to fix the potholes in the roads, while the Palantir surveillance grid they used on the Palestinians is rolled out at the behest of those vacationing on Epstein’s island.

Ours is a society so corrupt that benign words such as pizza, hotdog or jerky come wrapped in an ominous cloud of foreboding and dread.

We have arrived at the meat and pulp-stained gates of suffering as we must.

Small wonder, then, that the cultural psyche has shifted from revelling in cynicism and amorality towards crying out for simple, good old-fashioned moral groundedness. We ask ourselves who the “good ones” are, and more often than not these days, it creates strange bedfellows that transcend traditional political camps that now seem increasingly redundant. Sincerity and authenticity are becoming lucrative forms of social capital because, in an age of unbridled corruption and cynicism, ideology has become the carrot dangled before the eyes of the easily duped.

People will downplay or minimise the grotesqueries of the elite class in the vainglorious hope that in doing so they can eke out a few concessions from them. If you turn a blind eye to your rulers calling you goyim cattle, you could possibly be rewarded by more illegals being deported.

Park your purity spiral and your morals; this isn’t how the game is played.

Yet, despite it all, it feels as if we live in a time when the system has never been more exposed and vulnerable. It turns out that truth actually is a powerful weapon, more powerful than ideology.

In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Dunc is told that he will face a “Trial of Seven” which amounts to a duel between himself and House Targaryen. Essentially, this means that Dunc has to assemble a ramshackle coalition willing to fight the powerful and highly trained warriors of the ruling class, and unsurprisingly, few wish to do it despite being knights with oaths. Fight for truth, against the odds, or kneel before cruel and corrupt power.

Dunc, in his innocence, expects the other knights to rally to his side, and when they refuse, he asks if there is a single true knight among them. There they sit, in their expensive garments, resplendent in their pomp and ceremony, yet they are revealed as frauds and cowards by the man with integrity.

I am of the opinion that there is a synchronicity between where the political discourse is heading, and the popularity of this most recent sojourn in Westeros.

What drives a man such as Thomas Massie onwards to uncover the horrors of Epstein Island, and why hasn’t he succumbed to Zionist money? Why does Rupert Lowe choose to wade through the filth and sadism of Britain’s so-called “Grooming Gangs” and the mass rape of English girls by mainly Pakistani men, when he could retire to his farm?

Perhaps it is related to why I trust leftists such as Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian more than Nigel Farage these days. Fundamentally, we’re all just bored with the bullshit and want truth, even if spoken by people with whom we disagree on other issues, such as demographics or economics.

The currency of the future is honesty and integrity, not spin and narrative.

Contemplating the nature of the Epstein scandal recently, I noticed that, beyond the Jewishness of it all, there was also the total dominance of Baby Boomers. Elon Musk, despite his best efforts, was shunned by the clique, and he’s Generation X. Yet, is it feasible that Millennials would engage in these acts? Somehow, I do not think they’ll be inclined to as previous generations have.

In the often derided Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, the Millennials are allotted the “hero” archetype. They are the generation that will restore trust in institutions. Personally, I’ve often regarded Millennials as a humourless, overly serious and po-faced generation. Yet, perhaps the shift toward sincerity that we may be witnessing is a symptom of them settling into institutional positions as the Boomers finally wither and fade.

As it stands now, we witness only a few hardy souls demanding truth and exposing untruth and venality.

Spenglerian Perspective recently touched on this theme, concluding somberly:

They tripped up Musk while keeping Thiel; they will do the same to Reform as they did to Trump 1.0. Fighting against this purely with an ideological narrative of our own is futile because 1., the age we are entering into is a post-narrative age, and 2., when the establishment is exposed, it only leaves the people to create a million conspiracy narratives of their own which all point to a gnostic second-religiousness that tells us “It’s all too futile to stop them”. This leaves future history back in the hands of elite factions, which steadily consolidate in individual men who are powerful enough to dismantle the system and “restore the republic” through empowering themselves and their families alone, regardless as to how many of us it will hurt. In that grain of knowledge is the path forward.

The prospect of elites of the calibre we have now in the West ruling over us as Caesars, shuffling us into a Palantir digital panopticon forever, is too terrible to contemplate. Yet it is happening while they’re being delegitimised and exposed as never before, and one can’t escape the feeling that it is a race against time.

Truth alone is a mighty weapon; truth with power to back it up is even better.

We will always be ruled by power, but is it really too much to ask that the power that rules us isn’t the scum of the earth?

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This Christmas, I finally relented after years of pressure and agreed to go out for a night on the drink in Newcastle with an old friend, Alex. I stipulated that we stay away from the Bigg Market and linger around the Haymarket, which is more suitable for our age group, and the deal was done.

As the day approached, I began to ponder the chances of me becoming a viral video on X depicting an immigrant stabbing me to death. This is a sort of morbidly meta view of social media dynamics and virality, in which there’s an iPhone, CCTV footage, clickbait, and 12 hours of rage awaiting every one of us.

Still, exaggerated as it may seem to envision one’s untimely death at the hands of an immigrant and becoming viral content in the process, it does speak to the general aura lingering over perceptions of English cities. It’s a perception that certainly wasn’t there back in our glory days of hitting The Toon.

I took the bus from Blyth to Newcastle around 5.00 pm, just in time for the evening rush. The buses exemplify the hyper-regulated aesthetic common in third spaces these days, which has scraped out all frivolity and humanity, leaving only a purely functional vehicle. Long gone now are the woollen tartan designs on the seats, often with an ashtray on the back.

Instead, we have a heavy grey rubber substance, presumably complying with some health and safety diktat. The spaces allocated to the disabled seem to encompass half the seats on the bus, and the décor is a series of woke corporate ads and myriad handles and railings, also grey, to ensure that slipping or falling is an impossibility.

Halfway to Newcastle, in Benton, the bus begins to fill up with Indians, presumably working in the recently built “Business Park” nearby. A utilitarian workforce boards utilitarian public transport, while outside in the gloom, LED street lights create a permanent liminal landscape.

Regardless of the passengers’ ethnicity, everyone stares at their devices until we reach Newcastle.

The Haymarket bus station seems colder and shabbier than I remember. There are more foreign faces, and a single homeless man is white. The foreigners are waiting for buses to take them to relatively obscure corners of the North East like Dinnington and Seaton Burn, which still startles me after all these years.

I cross the road to Percy Street and make my way toward the Three Bulls Heads, where I will be meeting Alex.

There’s a large and seemingly plush and swanky Chinese restaurant on the way, as well as bizarrely, a large Somali barbershop. I make a mental note of the barbershop for conversation later in the evening. Percy Street is prime real estate in Newcastle. I find the idea that a Somali immigrant can establish a business cutting hair between such local landmarks as the Three Bulls Heads and the Hotspur to be ludicrous. Besides, everyone is suspicious of all these barber shops popping up everywhere like mushrooms.

Not much has changed at the Three Bulls; the décor is a bit brighter than it once was, and their beer selection has been (thankfully) expanded. I glance over to the corner on the right, beside the disabled toilets. It was there, in the late ‘90s, that 8 or 10 of us would gather every Saturday afternoon. It was there that I watched rolling news coverage of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the fallout. I remember the faces present, the packets of Lambert & Butler cigs on the table, the horribly crude banter that seemed funny, the arguments and gossip, the vitality. All in that corner.

My friend Alex arrives shortly after, and I point over to the corner. He, too, remembers it and jokes about the abuse the disabled toilets got. Still, though, where once there were ten of us, there are now just two.

Despite my personal recollections, neither Newcastle nor its pubs are mere dusty relics of bygone days; on the evening in question, it’s rowdy, and there’s a football match on, Newcastle vs Aston Villa. I have no interest in the football, and never did, and that too gets rolled into the conversation.

Upstairs in the Three Bulls, I notice an attractive barmaid who is a perfect rendition of the archetype of the Geordie barmaid. Long brown hair, pulled into a ponytail, dressed all in black, terse school teacher mannerisms, an attempt to downplay her accent, which doesn’t quite work, the features of the actress Anna Friel. Again, things may change, but others remain the same.

We settle in to drink rounds of an IPA called “Neck oil”, which is a bit too fruity but goes down well.

Unsurprisingly, the conversation turns to politics, particularly immigration. Alex has two young daughters, and the relentless churn of migrant-related sex crimes against English females is turning his hair grey and keeping him awake at night. This sentiment is everywhere, as I’ve noted in other writings and broadcasts. All of my family shares it, and everyone they talk to does. Where is all this heading? What will it be like when X becomes a teenager? Has the government become demented?

What, for example, are the processes that led to a bus in Benton filling up with Indians? Or, for that matter, the ability of a Somali to open a barbershop on Percy Street right alongside some of Newcastle’s most iconic pubs? How does all this work?

Ten years ago, I was regarded as hysterical, and my diatribes were met with rolling eyes and sarcastic yawns, but not any more. Now I find myself the centrist, the cooler head.

The framing of these discussions is in and of itself interesting because family and friends will concede that “Newcastle is not as bad yet as…” but implicit within such a statement is that mass immigration is inherently harmful.

Over the course of the Christmas season, my father had railed that English football fans would be violently antagonistic against each other over a stupid sport, but were seemingly blind to something such as the grooming gangs. It is a common criticism of Englishmen, and looking around the bar and hearing the yells and swearing at the football, it is tough to refute or not take seriously.

We venture to the next bar down, formerly the Goose & Garden, now called The Magpie. It’s an expansive space like a barn, and men in their 40s and 50s yell and jeer at the multitudinous flatscreens showing the game. Curiously, there’s a younger generation in the mix who pay no attention to the football because they’re engrossed in their own screens. Neither are the Zoomers wearing Newcastle FC regalia; instead, they wear the baggy, androgynous uniform they seem to wear all the time.

Looking at the scant presence of anyone under 25 and the heavy (literally) presence of men in their 40s and 50s makes me realize that the same people are propping up Newcastle’s pub scene in the 2020s as were doing so in 1997, which is to say, my generation.

Six pints down, and we loop back up toward Haymarket and enter the Percy Arms. Colloquially called “The Percy”, the old pub is far smaller and more intimate than what we’ve seen so far. Long sofas along the walls, people sitting at the bar, and groups all within earshot of one another cram into what is an excellent example of an old-fashioned English pub.

Newcastle always had an array of obscure backstreet pubs frequented by the working class coming in from the West End and areas such as Cowgate. I had wrongly assumed that such pubs, along with their customers, would never have survived the changes of the previous decades, yet they were thriving in the Percy, as if preserved in amber set in 1999.

If I were to do the night over again, I’d have spent the whole evening in the Percy, but 7-8 pints down, I was beginning to reach what I can take these days, so we decided to get a greasy pizza for old time’s sake.

Walking through Haymarket bus station once again, I noted that the number of homeless people preparing to spend the night in borderline freezing temperatures had now swelled to four.

All of them were white British natives.

Thus, it is impossible to ignore the grim realities and twisted juxtapositions inherent in British life. You can try and push it out of mind all you want, but there remains that little bell tinkling away, demanding that you mention something about migrant hotels and HMOs (Houses of Multiple Occupancy). Are the same processes at play that led to a Somali having a barbershop on Percy Street? Or the Indians boarding the bus in Benton?

Of course, I can and often do speak at great length about managerialism, the institutionalised anti-whiteness, the rotting incentive structures, and general trends within the culture and politics that create such outcomes. But the point is, this is normie street, this is me and everyone in the real world witnessing it with our eyes. You do not need to be schooled in the dark arts of online right literature to understand the injustice and sheer brutality of the current system.

The pizza shop was owned by some stripe of Europeans from the south-east, such as Bulgarians or Macedonians, or perhaps Turks or Kurds; it’s hard to tell. The place was dominated by a leathery-faced patriarch who looked like an older Leonard Cohen, and the food was a bland but spicy slop. The exterior was a gaudy display of yellow neon lighting, and a constant churn of activity bustled around the place - taxis, foreigners wandering and shouting something, then wandering out, and takeaway drivers picking up orders.

It was a network of sorts whose real activities I could only imagine, though in fairness, I did not intuitively get the worst gut feeling I’ve ever had. Still, though, our people were sleeping in the cold in a bus station while these people were thriving.

After we left the pizza shop, Alex made for the bus, and I had twenty minutes to kill, so I went for a final quiet pint at a bar on the corner of Haymarket called The Junction, though it used to be called Old Orleans. Unusually for me, I’m hit with a genuine wave of nostalgia for the first time. I came here many years ago on a date; a barmaid I’d pestered for weeks finally relented, and we agreed to meet at the Old Orleans. She turned up wearing sluttish see-through lace pants. She, too, was that archetype of the Geordie barmaid.

Feeling tired, drunk, and mildly sick from the pizza, I ruminated over my night back out in Newcastle. I didn’t get stabbed, at least. In fact, it didn’t seem to be very dangerous or even very lively at all. It was both reassuringly familiar and yet strangely cold, oddly hollowed out or exhausted, in an intangible way. Not in the drastic, shattering manner in which other parts of the country have shifted in terms of identity.

When I went on the date in Old Orleans, it seemed richly designed and high status; it was certainly expensive. Yet now it seemed worn out and shabby, I wasn’t sure whether it was just me or the old town.

In truth, I think it is probably both.

Britain has undergone such profound social change within a short time that it is perfectly reasonable to speak of it in terms of a before-and-after in the same manner we would describe before the French Revolution and after, before World War I and after, before the Great Plague and after.

Liberals would either accept or deny that something had happened t…

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Autumn has arrived to call time on my third growing season at the veg patch. I still have some hardier brassicas, such as cabbage, sprouts, and broccoli, in the plot. Still, the good times are indeed over, and my decidedly unexciting overwintering crops, such as leeks, onions, and garlic, are almost ready to go in. Looking back on the growing season, I can recount my successes and failures.

I planted tomatoes for the first time and found them to be an astonishingly weak and needy plant. First, as seedlings, there wasn’t enough daylight; then, as plants, it was too cold; then they had too much water; then they demanded expensive fertiliser. During the summer heatwave, it was too hot.

Conversely, a great success story this year was the scarlet runner beans. As the tomatoes cried out for attention in the greenhouse, the scarlet runners happily climbed a makeshift trellis and delivered copious numbers of foot-long (!) pods.

I had a huge potato harvest, though the peas turned out to be a complete disaster as I once again didn’t account for how tall they would grow.

Sitting alongside my onion and leek seedlings are a few rarer, more unusual plants that I’m experimenting with.

And there’s a story behind that…

Unsurprisingly, the YouTube algorithm pushes gardening “content” quite aggressively onto my video feed. Earlier this year, I was recommended a video titled 15 Forgotten Vegetables Medieval Farmers Grew That NEED to Come Back. The video, which I suspect was primarily AI-generated, listed numerous herbs and vegetables from the Middle Ages that have since fallen out of our daily diets. Despite the “slop” nature of the content, I was intrigued by the premise and investigated further.

I have to admit I hadn’t given much thought to how our food has changed over the centuries. If William Shakespeare saw a potato at all, it would have been considered an oddity, perhaps an aphrodisiac. The Romans never knew what a tomato was. Neither did Leonardo da Vinci.

As European men sailed on into the uncharted, untamed wildernesses of the world, they returned with novel crops that slipped into our daily diets until we no longer recognised them as foreign. Traditional crops that would have been familiar to a medieval monk or peasant were pushed to the edge of the plate, so to speak, then forgotten about entirely.

Who today has heard of Good King Henry? It was also called “Poor Man’s Spinach” or “perennial goosefoot”. Another is lovage, a relative of parsley and celery. Tansy is a pretty aromatic plant with bright yellow button flowers and a wide array of uses, some of which seem decidedly dubious, if not downright dangerous. Then there’s skirret, a relative of the carrot and parsnip that forms a thick mop of nutritious bulbs. Another root vegetable we don’t hear much about these days is salsify, which is said to have a seafood taste.

The list of foods we no longer eat, grow, or even remember is long. The administration of Emperor Charlemagne produced a document titled The Capitulare de villis which, among many other administrative edicts, prescribed which plants were to be regarded as beneficial to the people and the Empire more generally.

The further I read about the changing tastes and culinary habits of Europeans, the more I felt as if I were in a murder mystery. Why, for example, had I never even heard of lovage, never mind seen it in a supermarket? Was skirret really an inferior potato or carrot that had to be tossed into the historical and cultural phantom zone? Was it a conspiracy? If Good King Henry is a poor man’s asparagus and spinach, why wasn’t it readily available?

The first clue dawned on me when I realised why I suddenly wanted to order seeds and try to grow some of these forgotten plants: they were perennials.

(A plant that is sown and goes through its entire lifecycle within a year is called an annual. A tomato or a bean is an annual. A plant that sits in the ground for years and years, delivering crops seasonally, is called a perennial. Rhubarb or an apple tree is a perennial.)

As we head deeper into the mystery, we discover that it is not so much the case that tastier foreign crops displaced and replaced older, native ones, but that herbs and vegetables began to be chosen for their growing cycles. For a medieval monk or peasant, the incentive was to grow reliable crops that required minimal effort and were as close to the kitchen as possible. Therefore, a tough, hardy crop such as skirret or lovage was ideal as, once planted, it delivered year after year.

It is, quite literally, a matter of rootedness.

To be sure, the Middle Ages gardener did not only grow perennials, but also annuals, which fit into a more rhythmic existence where core crops were settled and the plot merely needed to be tended.

The problem is that such a system does not replicate or survive well in a mass, scale-based civilisation. Indeed, during the Industrial Revolution, the peasantry was mainly shuffled off the land and into the mills, mines, and yards. Food staples became rationalised; the incentive was toward scalability and efficiency.

A landowner or a market shareholder needed to be able to assess costs and benefits across the entire year. The market needed to adapt quickly to weather, rotted seeds, or problematic supply chains. Workers needed to be supplied with nutritious food at ever greater volume. Here, a crop such as a potato outstripped the skirret on almost every metric except durability and hardiness.

The deep roots were severed and replaced by a more transient, market-friendly model. Europeans ceased to be part of the natural order, no longer bringing it forth into life but commanding it through technique. Nature became a uniform standing reserve, its rhythms subordinated to production schedules and profit margins. That transformation shaped more than crops; it shaped our senses.

We never truly decided that celery was tastier than lovage — it isn’t — we simply had our choices made for us by a mechanised system that required mildness, uniformity and speed.

It is a story of the triumph of the “Reign of Quantity” regardless of culinary tastes and aesthetics. Technique favours the generic, the Disneyfied, and the bland, which is why so many people would view the clumpy mass of gnarled roots of the skirret plant as hideous, and the childlike orange demeanour of the carrot as comforting and familiar.

Yet, as this society of mass and scale slips ever further into outright madness and nihilism, we yearn for an off-ramp, a bolt-hole that will take us back to rootedness and belonging. How often have we unknowingly wandered past a clump of Good King Henry by a crumbling old wall? Or a tangle of lovage nestled in a hedgerow?

My interest in these vegetables began because they were perennials, because they’d be there regardless of other conditions. The definition of perennial is:

lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.

It is a glimpse into another, older world, where time operates differently and independently of the demands of digitised processes; it is of the past, and very probably of the future too.

In a world that has passed beyond uniformity —the standardised, the generic —perhaps they will have their revenge.

The first time I ever saw the term “multiculturalism” was in a Sunday Times article around 2003, either written by Gordon Brown or featuring him, and I intuitively knew I was being lied to. I disliked the vagueness of the term, which felt entirely made up. Phonetically, it was ugly, with too many consonants cluttered too closely together. The sentence containing the term stated with insistence that multiculturalism was a fact, an objective lived reality, and that it had been for a long time. Multiculturalism was not something that was to come, but something that was already here. Britain was multicultural, and would not become so at some point in the future. This I knew to be false. Having spent almost my entire life in the North East of England, I knew that there were not many cultures or peoples; there was just us.

The general impression I had was that England was in the process of being terraformed by something similar to a science fiction World Engine. Moreover, I knew that we had never been asked, and that there wasn’t even much discussion about it. A question haunted my thoughts: if Britain was to become many cultures, then what would happen to us?

I was a grown man in my twenties, and that meant I had already accumulated decades of life experience before the term “multiculturalism” became formalised. I saw the Britpop band Pulp at Gateshead Stadium in 1995, and Britain was not as multicultural back then. I had spent years drinking in Newcastle and all across the North East, and nowhere was it multicultural. Bank Holiday Mondays in Whitley Bay were not multicultural, and the awful, backbreaking job I had in North Shields, surrounded by violent chavs, was not multicultural.

It was just us.

We didn’t have to discuss multiculturalism or immigration much because it didn’t matter to us. Places like London and Birmingham were known to have immigrant populations, but the perception was that they were static, an outlier not to be overly concerned about. The ethnic minorities were actual minorities, comprising 5% of the entire population, and even then, they were concentrated in a few areas.

In my adulthood, we have moved from a situation where immigration and multiculturalism were hardly discussed or even considered, to a situation where we discuss almost nothing else. The terraforming of England has cast into shadow every other facet of life; there is no escape from it, no outside of it. So all encompassing has it become, so normalised, that we hardly even remember what it was like not to be confronted by it every day.

There’s only so much mental energy, psychic dynamism, that a country has at its disposal, and in Britain, multiculturalism and mass immigration consume almost all of it. Right-wing conservative-minded people expend energy attacking it, liberals defending it. The power structure funnels colossal resources into managing, protecting, and expanding it.

In the name of multiculturalism, we have rewritten our history to place black and brown people in our past, choked ourselves on censorship, and strangled ourselves on regulation to ensure the wheels of the project keep turning. There is the core issue of raw numbers coming in, and the results of that in a physical sense in the real world. Then there’s the energy poured into the secondary effects and unending expanse of managerialist solutions to problems created by the initial act.

An issue such as Two-Tier policing exists because multiculturalism exists. Racial Equality Laws that form the foundation upon which Two-Tier policing occurs exist because multiculturalism exists. This disparity then sparks an intellectually charged debate regarding the problem, or whether the problem even exists. Statistics are required to prove the case one way or another, and then the reliability of the statistics is brought into question.

The perceived injustice of Two-Tier policing then gnaws away at the legitimacy of governance, thus creating further problems and discursive dynamics on the nature of government.

An organisation such as the BBC may hide from view the ethnicity of a murderer or rapist. Their logic in doing so is to keep greasing the wheels of the project, but in so doing, they merely open up another avenue of distrust and anger. To state boldly that an immigrant from, say, Africa, committed a terrible crime would play into the hands of “the far right”, so they play fast and loose with the facts to keep the metanarrative stable. This then creates a new dialogue.

Every single day, the country's political life is consumed by one issue or another related to multiculturalism. An entire conversation can take place around the chronic lack of housing, with one side arguing that there’s too much regulation and the other that there are too many people in the country. The same debates occur about NHS beds, traffic on the roads, available schools, the job market, or the lack thereof.

What may or may not be said or revealed. Who may or may not appear in a historical drama, or what the drama is about, and whom it offends.

The core of the regime, its spokesmen and water carriers, feign an ignorance in the face of these developments. In their framing, Britain is ticking over just fine except for a few outliers here and there. Nothing has changed, and if you point out a discrepancy, such as the ethnicity of Anne Boleyn, you’re inflating a minor issue of no importance.

The Death of Satire

The English comedian, Harry Enfield, made a return to the BBC between 2007 and 2012. Compared to his more observation-based comedy in the early ‘90s, there was clearly a more reactionary turn in his 2000s work. Targets included a multitude of establishment celebrities and pompous television presenters, Eastern European immigrants, the band U2, and, most brutally of all, upper-middle-class liberals.

Enfield was doing what all court jesters should do: delivering uncomfortable truths to those in power. The jester’s often painful or embarrassing jibes can be taken in good faith and acted upon, ignored, or worse. The idea is to convey what everyone outside the court is thinking and how the ordinary person perceives those with power and influence. While Enfield’s work of this era certainly merits a more focused analysis, here I’d like to zoom in on one sketch based on a favourite Enfield target, the show Dragons’ Den.

Enfield excoriates the ludicrously pompous panel of wealthy, high-status business owners and their seeming right to supreme arrogance justified simply by their wealth. In one skit, Enfield and Paul Whitehouse arrive to pitch an idea as bumbling English entrepreneurs trying to get the “Dragons” to invest in their concept called “I can’t believe it’s not custard”. The Dragons, also played by Enfield and Whitehouse, sneer and spit venom at the Englishmen and their stupid idea, swiftly sending them away with no investment whatsoever.

The two white men later return, adorned in black-face and Jamaican accents with a pitch called “Me kyan believe it nat custard” and the Dragons fall at their feet, showering them with money. They then begin to compete with each other in sycophantically grovelling, fearful that the least enthusiastic of them will be deemed racist.

The sketch hits like a thunderbolt because Enfield holds up a mirror to a particular class of people, saying, “This is what you are!” We, as the common folk, take great delight in this lampooning because we know it to be a painful, somewhat grotesque truth. In an ocean of noise, it is a clear, bright signal that something is not right.

It is both a commentary on multiculturalism and a critique of those with power and influence. Yet, for some reason, this sketch lands harder than, say, a Spitting Image sketch in the 1980s targeting Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. There is a sense that an agreed-upon lie is being teased out into the glare of daylight and unceremoniously prodded and kicked about. The morality of the pretentious Dragons is a sham, and as such, their status is deflated before us.

Enfield revealed, in that single clip, the inherent fragility of the managerial classes dedicated to propagating via “virtue signalling” the values of the multicultural state. The millionaires of the Dragons’ Den panel adopt the attitudes and worldview of brutal free-market meritocrats, with the only subject of interest to them being whether or not a product or service is worthy of investment. Enfield implied that this worldview was a lie, a charade, and that they were no more outside of the central multicultural metanarrative than a Guardian journalist. The Dragons’ Den panel, and therefore neoliberalism, was not an alternative or competitor, but rather subordinate to the politically correct dogma of the age.

From the perspective of Britain’s liberal elite, Enfield committed a multitude of sins against them and their values, which probably explains why, after his show was shuffled off to BBC 2 to die, they never allowed themselves to be confronted with such lampooning ever again. The external frame from which people can gaze back into the general narrative would be kept permanently locked out.

Yet, this also marked a transition from a Blairite neoliberalism, in which the justification for mass immigration was to infuse British society with fresh energy and dynamism, into a more stagnant form wherein the upholding of the multicultural order became its own justification.

Strength In Division

Almost twenty years after Harry Enfield’s show aired, the narrative has been hermetically sealed for a generation and can only reference itself when attempting to make sense of British society.

Our diversity is our strength, but we must be ever vigilant against those who would seek to divide us.

After a recent terrorist attack in Manchester, in which an Islamic radical attacked a synagogue, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood warned the country against becoming too divided over the issue. Yet, just a few days before the terror attack, Shabana Mahmood was herself at the heart of the discussion because she insisted that she was English. Many people disagreed.

Indeed, the entirety of the previous week had seen the Labour Party make stern speeches about the “Far Right” and Nigel Farage’s party Reform. The week before that, everyone was arguing about whether migrants were eating swans, and the week before that, the media machine whirred away in disbelief that Farage was changing the rules around migration settlement and proposing deporting up to 600,000 people. The week before that, a giant Tommy Robinson rally flooded into London to protest for free speech and an end to mass immigration.

Before the Robinson rally, a campaign of English flags was hoisted across the land, serving as a form of ethnic territorial marking. There was the story of the Scottish girl wielding an ax, and before that, the long, drawn-out saga of protest and betrayal of the Epping migrant hotel.

These stories were national news stories that leaped clear and free of the Xitter timeline.

The State and the establishment media like to paint a picture where unrest, acts of barbarism, or disputes are minor outliers to what is overwhelmingly a positive experience.

Obviously, this isn’t the case.

We do not merely “rub along” while an aloof state attends to economics and foreign policy; the primary activity of the state and media is desperately attempting to hold together the society it has created. Multiculturalism has become the axis around which everything revolves and shifts.

We can imagine Dutch society in the Middle Ages, driven by the impulse to reduce flooding by the sea, to wall off the flow, obsessively drain marshlands, and dig out dykes. Water, the sea, would have occupied the thoughts of every burgher and peasant, farmer and painter. Society would have been warped and buckled by the threat, and driven by a Faustian will to overcome it incrementally.

Japan’s unfortunate location atop tectonic fault-lines that routinely result in earthquakes tearing apart its cities could also be comparable.

I am often reminded of a curious Japanese anime from 1995 called Cannon Fodder. The story takes place in a fictional city, entirely walled, that dedicates itself to firing cannons across its defensive lines into the wasteland beyond. The basis of the entire social order and all of its resource management is to keep the cannons firing at the same rate, forever. The need to keep the cannons firing undergirds its education system, career paths, and intellectual life. There is no outside of the frame of firing the cannons, merely arguments about how best to keep them firing. Similarly, there is no real indication that an enemy is being hit, or even if an enemy exists. It is a society built on an absurdity. Yet the absurdity has become so normalised and entrenched in the city’s life that nobody can remember anything else.

There will be more atrocities in Britain because of multiculturalism. There will be more people going to jail for speech. There will be more hollow statements about unity being found in division, while division is also a threat to society. And every time it happens, the regime will insist everything is fine, and we’re bound to have a few bumps in the road before we can cruise along in normality.

But normality never actually arrives. Or rather, the unrest, the existential angst of the natives, the censorship and rapes and knife crime, and the alienation are the normative state of things, not, as we are told, bumps in the road.

An alternative timeline was possible. There would have been too many old people relative to young working people; the precious GDP would have collapsed. There would have been abundant housing, which might have resulted in easing the strain on family formation. In all probability, a different economic model would have become necessary. There would still have been a gravitational pull on society, in all likelihood centred on an ageing population.

In the here and now, though, in our timeline, it is demanded of us that we keep those cannons firing.

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, but of more serious ones they cannot.”
- Nicollo Machiavelli

The aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination has moved the Trump administration to clamp down hard on its adversaries, though it remains to be seen just how hard. Thousands of leftists are said to have been fired from their jobs, with Vice President JD Vance actively encouraging the base to report anyone celebrating Kirk's murder, or just being too much of a repulsive leftist in general. Left-leaning social media tech platforms such as Stream, Reddit, Twitch, and Discord have been summoned to appear before Congress to explain themselves. It is commonly held that these platforms are essentially factories for producing left-wing lunatics with insane ideologies and a nihilistic outlook that amounts to a societal cancer.

The day of writing, Jimmy Kimmel was fired from his comedy show for spreading the false information that it was people on the right-wing who killed Charlie Kirk. Horror writer Stephen King has been forced to apologise for also spreading lies about Kirk’s views. The message is increasingly and refreshingly clear: bend the knee or else!

At the legislative level, the wheels seem to be gradually grinding into motion that will result in leftist networks being declared terrorist organisations, with Antifa being the first placed on the chopping block. Across the West in the post-9/11 world, being called or said to be associated with terrorism is a byword for being an enemy of the state.

As somebody who saw the online right purged for years and eventually clinging on to Telegram as a last redoubt, I of course have no sympathy whatsoever with the Left or remorse that the tables are finally being turned. Indeed, seeing some of the most loathsome shitlibs on earth being reduced to squealing “Whatever happened to the tolerant right?!” is pleasantly cathartic.

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The few remaining “Classical Liberals” who make defending free speech their main activity have a few comforting bromides they enjoy telling themselves. When it comes to the suppression of right-wing ideas, they like to say “sunlight is the best disinfectant” or make warnings that ideas will be driven underground to fester and stew in a broth of hatred, never truly being defeated. The assumption is, usually, that the supposed liberal centre is an undefeated heavyweight champion of rational argumentation and empirical thought that can stand toe-to-toe with any other worldview and emerge victorious.

It is rarely, if ever, introspectively investigated that perhaps censorship is necessary because, in truth, the liberal champion has feet of clay and a glass jaw. The daily churn of radio talkshow manure sets up this dynamic perfectly by supplying itself with untrained sluggers and marks that the host can run rings around before decking them or simply cutting them off. You’ve had your say and, surprise surprise, left-leaning liberalism has won once again in the marketplace of ideas.

Nonetheless, the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant or that a point of view could be driven underground to fester in a swamp of hate is worth interrogating, as this has been the situation in the United Kingdom for some time. Around 2017-18, Hope Note Hate pretended to mull over the ethics of censoring opinions they didn’t like, then moved in tandem with the Government to initiate full-bore removal of platforms and silencing of people with politically incorrect sensibilities.

Censorship does indeed work. If one’s goal is to propagate a set of thoughts and opinions that one wishes to see adopted by a wider audience, then there’s little doubt that censorship works by simply cutting the transmission. If there’s no longer a signal, there’s nothing for an audience to detect. However, what actually took place on a platform such as YouTube was an evolutionary pressure being placed upon content creators. Or rather, a “tall poppy” effect in which those who were setting off the alarm systems loudest were cut down. Those who survived had to adapt or be culled, but this did not mean that the ideas went away; it simply meant that how they were expressed changed.

The offending words or terminology were given substitutes. People spoke of “mid-century Germans” or “a certain group”. Often, the language of the liberal centre itself was adopted and deployed ironically, such as diversity, urban youth, or “religion of peace”. There was a noticeable lag in audience response, with many lamenting the passing of a more overtly edgy age. However, there was also a degree of buy-in by people who enjoyed deciphering the coded language and jargon.

There was, then, some truth to the Classical Liberal premise that ideas they disliked would thrive in the dark, festering and growing stronger. The British Government’s censorship apparatus even considered further regulatory pressure, using the draconian “lawful but awful” descriptor for content.

A question then arises when we move away from the microcosm of the internet and scale up the speech codes and censorship to encompass the entirety of British society. The digital and the real no longer inhabit spheres disconnected from one another, and one cross-pollinates the other. But in the real world, social pressures apply that do not exist online, such as how to navigate the HR department at work or a suffocating relative. People did not change their perception of the world; they just weren’t able to express it with honesty. Thus, similarly to the online world, in the real world, the ground has not been salted by censorship, but made fertile.

It is worth dwelling on our post-censorial intellectual landscape because it informs the reality of where we, in Britain, find ourselves in the current moment.

Censorship and speech codes are not coming; they are already here and have been for years. Yet paradoxically, the country feels as if it’s lurching further rightward. This is primarily because the material conditions and brutal realities of post-Boriswave Britain have resulted in multiculturalism being nigh on inescapable.

However, in terms of discourse and the airing of political ideas and agendas, the censorious landscape has produced the odd outcome of the Regime no longer knowing who thinks what or what their true aims are. Jonathan Bowden once remarked that he pitched his speeches and talks with an eye on going over the heads of censors and state actors, not just in the moment, but also in the future when more legislation was passed. This is what has taken place in recent years on the British right, not just in terms of form but content. The British State accidentally imposed an incentive structure that rewarded slickness, high status, professionalism, and speaking above the heads of officialdom and activists.

The ability to “hide your power level” drastically lowers the bar to entering institutions, thereby increasing the individual’s influence and enabling them to assist like-minded friends also to enter institutions. Furthermore, the relatively high-status environment attracts more talent from professional classes because the plausible deniability of not being tied to a particular dogma or banner decreases the potential costs.

Twenty years ago, the BNP was an overt enemy in plain sight that the Regime could fully unload on. Then they replaced it with their own, more palatable version of nativist discontent: UKIP. The successor to UKIP, Reform UK, is under attack both internally and externally, not from a consolidated bloc, but from individuals further to the right than they are. Yet herein lies the nub of it: are these people individuals? Or are they an organised network? The post-censorship political landscape resulted in a post-structural political landscape with a stochastic aura.

In their typically imbecilic investigation into the Basketweavers, Hope Not Hate claimed:

The Basketweavers could be the most important far-right network you have never heard of. Operating in the shadows, it is an interconnected group of extremists who want to build their own society away from the mainstream.

Despite their secretive nature, the Basketweavers may be among the largest far-right networks in Britain, with chapters in London, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sheffield, and beyond. There were approximately 1,300 vetted members in the UK Basketweaver network as of September 2024. Estimates on Basketweaver turnout vary, but according to one senior figure, approximately a fifth of vetted members regularly attend events.

The Basketweavers are breaking no laws, running for no elections, and drafting no policies. Yet the state apparatus goes after them anyway because what they fear is a version of the Fabian Society emerging from the dissident right-wing sphere. Suddenly, the paranoia and often unhinged mindset of the British State is revealed. Not only do they fear mass uprisings and a collapse of social cohesion from the working class, they now have to worry about clandestine networks of schemers, plotters, and infiltrators, hidden agendas by optics-friendly dissidents quietly pulling levers and opening doors for like-minded individuals; in other words, doing exactly what the Regime did while constructing the current paradigm.

The irony is, of course, that it was the present system that created the exact conditions for such networks to come into being. It isn’t by chance that the name “Basketweavers” is deliberately benign and dull.

Is the Regime justified in its concern about individuals operating covertly with a wink and a special handshake? Well, as a humble blogger, I would not know of such activities. However, I, as well as you, have watched an interview or heard a debate and asked myself “Is he one of ours?”

Yet this “movement without a name” is simply another version of everyday mundane reality. In these real-world interactions, people assess the opinions of their co-workers by dropping the name of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage into the conversation. It is a litmus test of friend and enemy. When operating within institutions, however, it appears to the system like a mortal threat, which, according to Hope Not Hate, they think of as S.P.E.C.T.R.E. from James Bond, or the wreckers of Stalin’s USSR. An enemy that is everywhere and nowhere, gnawing away at the fabric of society, like the Fabian Society once did.

In the obscure and calming world of glaciology, there is a phenomenon called a “moulin” which is a body of water sitting atop an iceberg that gradually trickles into the superstructure, undermining it incrementally. All seems well, externally, until one day, a cliff-sized chunk of ice cracks off the face and collapses into the sea. The British State’s increasing paranoia and incoherence are attempts to protect itself from the moulins appearing on its surface. Are the crevices and cracks connected or controlled? Is this or that protest a psy-op by the state itself, or has it been hijacked? Is somebody such as Matt Goodwin still a state asset, or has he actually “gone native”? How far can state assets go before they actively facilitate and not contain the “far right”?

It is both tragic and exhilarating that the discourse in Britain has descended into a macabre hall of mirrors. Yet, I’m also cautiously optimistic about the potential that “we” have people everywhere.

I have, of course, no idea how far and deep this process has so far reached; I am, after all, a humble blogger.

I have a long and sentimental history with Scotland, yet despite that, I hadn’t visited since the late ‘90s. Many of my earliest memories are of making the seemingly long and arduous journey from the North East while gawping out of a car or bus window at the increasingly desolate and rugged landscape. An uncle had moved to the Western coast, outside of …

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Earlier in the year, the Roger Scruton Foundation organised a conference that was attended by a variety of figures from right-wing and conservative circles. In attendance as speakers were Robert Jenrick, Rupert Lowe, Robert Tombs, Thomas Skinner and Danny Kruger. The audience featured Carl Benjamin and a collection of the “Based Zoomers” such as Connor Tomlinson and Charlie Downes, who are now becoming prominent features of the British right.

Many such conferences take place during the British summer now, some more public-facing than others. What marked out the Roger Scruton Foundation’s get-together, though, was the significant overlap between the younger, more edgy and online right and an older and more establishment Tory-leaning generation. The conference (which can be viewed in full here) went smoothly enough until the final segment when the audience were invited to ask questions. The questions were pointedly focused on identity, demographics, and what it means to be English in a multicultural Britain. Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) pointed out that if anyone can claim to be English, then the authentic English could not claim to be threatened with becoming a minority in their own homeland.

Similarly, another question from a young man in the audience highlighted the futility of advocating local politics in an age of ethnic bloc voting in areas such as Rotherham. When panellist Robert Tombs responded by arguing that education, not ethnicity, is what matters, the contempt and weariness of the audience with such a tepid response are audible in the video. The dividing line is stark and clear. The younger generation of the British right wants answers from the mainstream British right to existential problems, in large part created by the mainstream British right, and they’re not getting them. However, the very fact that they’re present, suited up, and openly demanding such answers seems to rattle and scare the mainstream. And rightly.

The incident did not go unnoticed. An article appeared in The Spectator titled “Demographics is the new dividing line on the right” and more recently, Robert Tombs himself has responded with an article in The Telegraph called “Being English is not a matter of your ancestry” which is a more fleshed-out rebuttal of the remarks at the event.

What I find fascinating about all of this is that the emerging generation of young men on the British right often appears like an elite in-waiting. This, even though they’re intellectually aligned with more traditional, working-class nationalist movements. Suddenly, from the perspective of the Old Guard, the radical element is not wearing a bomber jacket outside a Greggs in Burnley, but right there in the conference room with a well-fitting suit and clipped “posh” accent.

In his Telegraph article, Tombs writes:

“You can’t teach someone to be English”, called a heckler at the end of a conference last month on How to Save England. “Of course you can,” I replied. “That’s how we all learn it.” “Rubbish,” he replied: for him, Englishness seemed to be (I couldn’t quite hear) about “ancestry”.

This brief debate was unfortunately stopped by the chair so that we could go to the pub. But the day’s discussion got huge numbers of viewers on YouTube, a longish report in The Spectator, and a rather overwrought follow-up article in The Critic magazine accusing me (along with other “self-identifying conservatives” such as Fraser Nelson and Niall Ferguson) of being a defender of multiculturalism, and by implication of mass migration.

The problem is that Nelson, Ferguson, and Robert Tombs are defenders of and advocates for multiculturalism. There’s hardly a single post on Nelson’s X timeline where he is not holding the line on behalf of mass immigration in one form or another. In a recent interview, Ferguson argued that Europe would die without African immigration. But the purpose of Tomb’s article is to respond to the points raised at the Scruton Foundation shindig, so he continues by invoking the Tory-whisperer-in-chief, Katharine Birbalsingh:

Frankly, I thought this was laughable, and have been joking with friends about being a Lefty. But in the present fraught climate, the issue needs to be addressed. I should explain that my intellectual sins had been to praise Katharine Birbalsingh (invariably though inadequately described as “Britain’s strictest headmistress”) and to have commented that to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that “becoming English was possible”, on the condition that it was encouraged, taught, and indeed required.

By this criterion, my mother would not be English, but a ten-year-old girl from Somalia who had had lines from Kipling drummed into her would be. Yet the question that is never answered is, should we deport all the children and families of those who fail to meet the educational standards of the Birbalsingh model?

Tomb’s article is infused with a sense of urgency that would, perhaps, be lacking in a more left-leaning essay covering the same issues. He writes:

But the question of integration and eventual assimilation is no less urgent. There are now, and in the future will be, many children in England who were born elsewhere, or who are descended from a foreign-born parent. Many will have darker skin than mine. We have a very clear choice. Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, “ethnic minorities” in a tribalised England.

None of these arguments are new, and have been the centre ground of British politics for nigh-on thirty years, at least fourteen of which were under a Conservative government. Usually I’d make arguments rooted in the ethnic interests of the English people. However, let us consider what exactly is being touted here as the more “humane” course of action. The people we think of as “English” are simply expected to fritter themselves away in the bottomless oceans of the Third World. Indeed, this is insisted upon as part of the integration process.

Moreover, despite the lip-service paid to conservative bromides such as individualism and limited governance, when scaled up, the Birbalsingh model would amount to a colossal technocratic beast engaged in brainwashing up to 30-40% of the population, with that percentage increasing over time. The desired outcome, as stated by Tombs, is a process of replicating Englishness through social engineering. Leaving aside the obvious problem that such a scheme could simply be voted away, the final vainglorious cope for the centre-right is to create a vegi-burger incarnation of the English, a “Beyond English” identity akin to Quorn or Uncle Bill’s Franken sausages made out of 3-D printed slurry.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the entire multicultural enterprise is based on lies and coercion, and any corrective will by necessity appear authoritarian and unpleasant. Take, for example, the trend of inserting non-white people into historical roles or period dramas. Yes, that is a “woke” manoeuvre to unmoor the majority population from their rightful claim to their own history and identity, but it also serves to make newcomers feel “at home”. Presumably, under the Tombs/Birbalsingh scheme, the children of foreigners will be told that their ancestors are not represented in the Dickens and Shakespeare they’re being forced to learn by rote. In most cases, their connection to England does not even precede Tony Blair’s Millennium Dome or Coldplay’s Yellow being in the charts. None of this is anything more than a lazy attempt to peddle water and do nothing while Enoch’s funeral pyre grows ever larger.

It is complete nonsense.

It is not my purpose today to rehash all of the arguments against Civic Nationalism, but rather to engage in a rare bout of optimism. In a post last month, I wrote:

Race-thinking is thus an inevitability. The question then returns to the discourse surrounding the swiftly changing demographic situation in the UK, and the question must be addressed now, with all of its awkwardness and potential minefields, or it will take place later, when the situation and any remedies become even more draconian or unfeasible.

This, then, is what is beginning to take place - not on the streets with placards, not just in the pubs or online, but in person and straight to the faces of the right-wing establishment. What’s more, the editors and MPs, focus groups, and think-tanks are also aware that something has changed.

The gates, finally, are being breached, and the keepers are going to have to adopt new tactics.

Tombs finishes his piece with:

England has long balanced change and continuity. But several times it has changed suddenly and uncontrollably. The Norman Conquest destroyed its society and eclipsed its culture. The Reformation overturned its beliefs. The Industrial Revolution made it a different place. We may be facing comparable transformation today. A future government – led by people with “a sense of gratitude” towards their home country – will need unprecedented means to bring us together. Ancestry is not enough.

To which I would say, on the contrary, ancestry, or rather kinship and ethnicity as the basis for forming bonds and brotherhood, is precisely why his convoluted technocracy of indoctrination will fail, whether by the hand of the immigrants or ourselves.

The demise of his worldview was staring him in the face in that conference room. If he can’t convince them, then he can’t convince anyone else.

I’ve been trying to pin down and encapsulate what the feeling or atmosphere is in Britain in the summer of 2025. It isn’t a happy one, but then again, it never is these days.

A new Superman film hit the cinemas, which was colourful and vibrant, optimistic in its tone and attitude. I considered writing something about it, but nobody cares about “capeshit” and the accusation of dwelling on escapism would be apt. Still, the new Superman seemed intended to be post-woke, post-doom-and-gloom culture wars. Let’s relax and have fun, stop taking everything so seriously for a few hours.

Commentators, including myself, have speculated on what the new Trumpian age of populist victory would herald in terms of “vibe shift”. Would Hollywood return to Lethal Weapon buddy movies where the wounds of the last ten years had the balm of civic nationalism dabbed across them? Would the black cop say to the white cop “ya know, buddy, you crazy white folks ain’t so bad after all!” In the end, it doesn’t matter because social media has long since replaced the old media as wellsprings of cultural creation. The black mirror replaced the large screen, and the mirror prefers 30-second snippets to 2-hour slogs. We didn’t move on toward a new consensus; there is no consensus. Or rather, there is a multiplicity of narratives and hermetically sealed domes.

There was a brief few days this summer when Oasis started their comeback tour, and everyone felt a mixture of optimism and nostalgia. It doesn’t matter whether you like Oasis or not; they were a symbol of a collective past like some archaic runestone being thrust through the earth. People not born in 1997 had parents who were there, and if their parents disliked Oasis, perhaps they liked Blur, or maybe they loathed the entire Cool Britannia era. If so, they still had an opinion, still carried an imprint. The Oasis reunion was a signal of the before-times - not just the past, but a different country. The circuitry and synapses, or spirit if you prefer, of millions of Brits lit up with the hauntology of what was, and could have been, but wasn’t.

Oasis played out with Champagne Supernova, and more than a few people remarked on the lyrics:

How many special people change?

How many lives are livin’ strange?

Where were you while we were getting high?

Indeed, where were we? And more to the point, where are we now? The 2025 Desert of the Real reasserted itself ruthlessly as we scrolled past Roll With It and onto soundbites and headlines of civil war, mass sectarian violence, and routine allegations that the government was committing treason.

Are you okay, babe? You slept for a long time and were rambling about the Civil War, foreign rapists, and the Yookayification of England?

The Before-Times spectres evaporated before our eyes like a cloud of cheap vape as we braced ourselves for the squalor and depravity of 2025 once more. It’s been 14 years since I first noticed people saying “we can’t go on like this” during a grooming gang scandal reported on the Daily Telegraph website. But go on, we did.

In the summer of 2025, the Telegraph is sending out newsletters such as this:

It reads like the parody news segments in a Paul Verhoeven film, such as Robocop or Total Recall “Fifty Colonists on Mars were shot for going on strike yesterday…” There’s hyperreality and absurdity, a tinge of exaggeration mixed with the Telegraph’s usual Colonel Blimp bluntness. Yet the use of the word “febrile” to describe the mood of the country this year is not only accurate but also all-pervasive.

Britain is a “tinderbox” because the government seems hell-bent on stacking up dry wood that merely needs a mild spark, and then the country will explode because it’s reaching its boiling point. Everyone has their favourite metaphor for it, and it always seems to involve kindling or fires, combustible solids, and the odd pan left to boil over.

The final straw broke the camel’s back last year during the Southport massacre and riots; this year, we’re dousing the straw in petrol and stacking it up in preparation for that single atrocity committed by a foreigner. It’s easy to be glib, but the fact is that the country does indeed feel like something is about to erupt.

One gets the sense that the workshops and nudge units have been downsized, or that the material reality of the Yookay is beyond the sophisticated application of psychology to correct the thinking of the outliers. The exacerbating factor, from Ballymena to Essex, is the housing of unwanted migrants of one hue or another, who then proceed to fulfil every single negative stereotype the locals had of them, resulting in protests and unrest.

Again, it cannot be stressed enough that the government seems to have given up entirely on trying to anesthetise the public to the effects of their policies by way of propaganda or nudging. No grand visions or ends to justify the means, no counter-propaganda campaigns. When the treachery of the Afghan data breach was revealed to have resulted in billions of pounds and as many as hundreds of thousands of Afghans coming to live in the country, there was no attempt whatsoever on the part of the regime to promote it in any palatable way, to try and convince us it’d be fine.

No, we get the tooth pulled raw now.

Horribly out of touch talkshow hosts hector the public calling in and mock them as dinosaurs for their outmoded opinions that, say, Afghans are the highest ranking in the shitlist of foreign sex offenders. Yet it is simply true. Indeed, it is the media punditry that appears to be stuck in a bygone era, the era of Tony Blair’s first term, to be precise. The shorma is still a curiosity, the demographics are still 95% white, and the real threat of urban violence comes from chavs called Wayne. At least Coldplay also has a reunion tour going on, though, to the punditry class, they probably never disappeared from their playlists.

Recently, after an illegal immigrant from Ethiopia was alleged to have touched up a teenage girl, protests erupted in Epping. Many people noted that Essex and Epping were where the old East End Cockneys fled to after being ethnically cleansed from London. Epping is the northeastern terminus of the Central line on the London Underground, which is to say, they’re quite literally at the end of the line; there is nowhere left to flee to. You may think that local law enforcement might get a sense of the poetic tragedy of a tribe of natives being pushed to make a Last Stand in their leafy suburbia; instead, they escorted left-wing activists to counter-protest them.

There exists a class of people in the UK on stand-by, like firemen, who are on call to defend the pro-foreign sex-pest side of the argument. Suppose any uppity natives have the temerity to protest that the foreign men in hotels touch up their daughters. In that case, there’s an emergency goon squad of astroturfed leftists ready to be deployed with special protection from the police.

It’s a remarkable scene to behold. Foreign men who came into the country are given our tax money, they’re housed in comfortable hotels on our tax money, the police outside warding off the natives are paid for with our tax money, and there can be little doubt that the leftists they’re ferrying home are in some receipt of our taxes as well. The only people not on our dime are the poor bastards with the homemade placards saying “protect our kids!”

And the unending flow of foreign men continues regardless. The Government carries out its task with neither great enthusiasm nor great ideological zeal, but neither do they show any reluctance. The anger and frustration grow, but so does the confusion and bafflement at what is clearly a destructive path. As noted earlier, there is no explanation, no justification, just a dimwitted managerial doggedness. Is there a plan in motion? If so, what? We have passed beyond the malice or incompetence debate and entered a similarly framed “are the Government trying to foment unrest?”

Matthew Goodwin, also using the word “febrile”, questions why a “crisis” is being imposed on the British people, and warns that the social contract is falling apart, with the very glue of society dissolving. Some people have long held the belief that the government is importing a force to suppress the natives, like janissaries. Others claim that a problem is being created for Digital IDs to solve. Then, of course, there’s the Great Replacement line of reasoning, or, still more incendiary, the “White Genocide” argument.

This, then, is the nature of the kindling being heaped up on British society. Profoundly unpopular, often incomprehensible policies, and an establishment that ploughs on regardless of the unrest, the rapes, the cost, the political capital, and legitimacy of the Government.

Much as I’ve derided figures such as Nigel Farage, he’s correct to ask whether the Government is deliberately stoking up sectarian tensions in the country.

Neil O’Brien recently published an interesting piece that illustrates how the native population is voting with their feet and leaving the cities, despite the economic incentives. This deserves a post of its own, but suffice it to say that if families have taken a financial hit to escape the misery of the urban centres, there’s undoubtedly going to be a sense of despair setting in when foreigners are planted in their rural enclaves.

More dry sticks, more tinder, the matches and fire lighters moving ever closer. One senses an inevitability to it; we can run the numbers and view it simply as a game of roulette, and everyone knows that sooner or later we will land on the red slot designated “atrocity”.

In the summer of 2025, these are cultural tropes that inform our perception of the world around us; this is what inhabits the space once occupied by Britpop, cinematic blockbusters, and Breaking Bad. The establishment can rail against the excesses of social media and misinformation, but ultimately, they are responsible for the inputs.

For now, we look toward the autumn rains and gloom, like a finish line. If we can make it through riot season without too much violence and burning, it’ll be a win. This is delusional, of course, squinting and staring at each other as the tension reaches its pinnacle like a Sergio Leone film.

Yet this maelstrom-in-waiting, this abyss, is our collective cultural experience.

I had avoided watching The Devil Wears Prada for the best part of twenty years because I implicitly knew that a “chick-flick” set in New York that had something to do with fashion did not have me as its target audience. I had duly reciprocated that sentiment until now, when, due to factors beyond my control, I was forced to sit through it.

The Devil Wears Prada was directed by David Frankel, based on a novel by Lauren Weisberger, produced by Wendy Finerman, and scripted by Aline Brosh McKenna. Given that its main character is named Andrea Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway), it could be inferred that we’re witnessing a glimpse into the inner workings of the New York fashion industry and journalism, or perhaps just New York High Society in general.

The story begins when fresh-faced would-be journalist Sachs lands a job at the lucrative and extremely high-status fashion magazine Runway. Perhaps the most iconic element of The Devil Wears Prada is Meryl Streep's portrayal as the tyrannical editor-in-chief of the magazine, Miranda Priestly. Streep’s queen of the barbed put-down character was based on the real-life editor of Vogue, Anna Wintour. Hathaway’s somewhat frumpy Sachs character is cynical about the pretentiousness of the fashion industry. Yet, she swiftly finds out that holding the job will require her to submit entirely to the dictatorial and often unhinged demands of Priestly.

In one stand-out scene that could be used as a perfect primer of elite theory in practice, Priestly dispels Sachs’ cynicism that she is above and beyond the whims and pretensions of the fashion industry by explaining that the frumpy, bargain basement sweater she’s wearing has its colour (cerulean) because it’s a knock-off of a knock-off of what was fashionable in Milan a few years ago. We can delude ourselves that we have free will, but the choices placed before us are there because of people like Priestly herself, not idealistic notions about individuality (which we shall return to later).

Emily Blunt also appears in the film as Emily, Sachs’ co-worker and rival. Indeed, the name “Emily” is given to all the young women who join the office at Runway as a way to demean them and let them know they’re all replaceable. Anne Hathaway’s character is simply the “new Emily”.

The plot of The Devil Wears Prada involves Sachs having to overcome Priestly’s acerbic barbs and demands, and in the process, losing her individuality in the pursuit of success. She replaces her dour attire with Jimmy Choo shoes and Chanel, enjoys the champagne and prestige of New York’s socialite scene, and wins out against Emily Blunt. She even manages to secure a Harry Potter manuscript for Priestly’s children before the book is published. Despite living on nothing but a cube of cheese a day in preparation for the prestigious annual trip to Paris, Emily is sidelined, and Sachs is chosen over her.

However, success comes with a price, and the further Sachs’ career advances, the more she burns through her relationships, the rosier her career is. Thus, the title of the film could also be interpreted as a message that climbing the corporate ladder requires one to sell one's soul. Sachs alienates her friends, breaks up with her boyfriend, hurts her father, and becomes subsumed in the role of being the new, improved Emily, until Priestly eventually validates her by deigning to use her real name, Andrea.

Having slept with a publishing tycoon in an absurdly romanticised Paris, Sachs eventually finds her path back to her true self when she gets a glimpse of the nature of the cut-throat industry she’s involved in.

The Millennial Female’s Journey

Given that I’m neither a woman nor a millennial, nor have I been to New York or have any knowledge of fashion, I knew I’d be very much an outsider looking in on the world presented in The Devil Wears Prada. Still more confusing is that I have no idea what the film wants me to think about this world or the women in it. The high-pressure environment of Runway is damaging all three women in their personal lives and relationships.

Emily’s identity is entirely dependent on Miranda as if she’s a suckerfish loitering around the mouth of a shark. She appears to have no man in her life, no friends, and no family.

Miranda has outsourced the rearing of her twin girls to their grandmother and is on the cusp of another divorce. She laments that her children have had a succession of father figures come and go, and the latest is on his way out because her workload makes it impossible for a normal family to exist.

As the film’s protagonist, Andrea Sachs’ whole arc is one of steadily alienating her boyfriend, family, and friends as she pursues career opportunities and loses her identity, trading it in for a superficial one rooted in status.

All of which is to say, The Devil Wears Prada is a film that tells its audience of (then) young millennial women that having a career will destroy their hopes of having a fulfilling family life — a surprisingly reactionary sentiment, given the film’s setting and production team.

As I watched I began wondering how the writers were going to write themselves out of what could be seen as a trap of their own making, or perhaps the cathartic moment at the end would feature Hathaway’s Sachs character sitting on a porch reading to her infant child with another baby bump visible in her well-toned belly. Was I watching a searing anti-feminist diatribe? No. The writers had foreseen the hazard and allowed themselves the equivalent of a plot-device insurance policy.

A common rule in storytelling and narrative creation is known as “Chekhov’s Gun” and follows Chekhov’s line of reasoning that:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don’t put it there.

An example of Chekhov’s Gun is the pressurised scuba-diving canisters in Jaws. The writers signpost the canisters earlier in the movie, making sure the audience will remember them. The problem faced by the writers is that they know later in the film the shark will chew up the boat, and there has to be something aboard to allow the shark to be defeated while also incorporating a sense of catharsis.

In The Devil Wears Prada, Chekhov’s Gun is not an object but a mindset. It was signposted for the audience from the outset that our main character’s true ambition was to work as a writer or journalist, not a dog’s body in the fashion industry. Thus, the off-ramp for the production team that allowed them to steer away from critiques of feminism was “baked in” from the start.

The film concludes with Miranda endorsing Andrea for a job with a prominent New York newspaper. Yet, given everything we’ve seen so far about the soul-crushing drudgery of a corporate career, there’s no reason for us to suppose that Andrea Sachs’ family life will in any way be improved. Moreover, she returns to her boyfriend after cuckolding him in Paris with a tycoon, and he happily takes her back because she doesn’t tell him about it.

Female-centred fictional narratives often become weird inversions of the Hero’s Journey. Hathaway’s character did not reluctantly take up the call to adventure; she insisted upon joining Runway against the advice of her family and friends, and after crossing the threshold, she alienated these allies. However, the corporate fashion world does indeed make for a decent alien world, and she does face trials. Her version of the final confrontation was sleeping with a multimillionaire in a prestigious Parisian hotel, or saving Miranda’s (the antagonist’s) job, depending on how you look at it. Her return/resurrection was to become exactly who she was at the beginning of the film, except in a different workplace. All three women are exactly where they were at the start of the film.

The Devil Wears Prada is, then, a movie that catered to millennial women who would have been in their early 20s when it was released. Anne Hathaway was 24, and Emily Blunt was 23. The movie pretends to be their friend, acknowledging that the office is a humiliating slog, that a career can strain personal relationships, and, yes, you may have to adopt a fake persona to survive. Yet there are no escape hatches; the best young women can do is find a niche that they don’t despise.

In Strauss and Howe's generational theory, millennials are assigned the archetype of “Hero”, similar to the World War II generation. They are the stalwart defenders of a system during a great unravelling. They are stoic and unquestioning, facing one calamity after another. Despite some reservations about generational theory, I have some sympathy with that perspective.

However, one can’t help but return to Miranda’s famous monologue on the cerulean sweater.

The essence of Miranda’s monologue is that human agency is essentially a comforting fantasy; what really exists is people making decisions and engineering an array of choices that trickle down into public consumption. Human agency is, for most people, choosing between pre-selected options organised by an elite. Andrea believes that she is outside, and above, the superficial and materialistic fictions the fashion industry obsesses over, and Miranda explains why she is not.

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Yet, could the same argument not be made for Hollywood itself? The Devil Wears Prada was a product being sold to young women, and while it sympathised with them, it ultimately insisted that they all wear the cerulean blue sweater. The choices made available in the film are either soul-crushing, meaningless tedium, or the same with less intensity.

Yet one can’t help but wonder if the scriptwriters were aware of this meta-joke, and that perhaps, the devil was not just wearing Prada, but moulding the ambitions of a generation of women.

The Reform Party’s Richard Tice was recently asked by GB News journalist Steven Edginton whether or not he was concerned with the white British becoming a minority in a few decades. The question came off the back of Matt Goodwin’s work on demographics that projected the date to be 2063. Tice reacted to Edginton’s question with a mixture of awkwardness, evasiveness, and derision, finally quipping, “I’ll be long gone by then”. He also claimed that Edginton was “obsessed with this stuff” presumably thinking of a previous Edginton interview with Nigel Farage. Farage was similarly dismissive of Edginton’s questioning and, like Tice, earned the ire of the online right.

People tend to quibble too much about the minutiae of the white British tipping over into minority status. Perhaps it could be as early as 2030 in schools, 2045 for people under 30, and possibly 2050 for the general population.

The primary issue is not the date but the trajectory of demographic change, and recently, that trajectory has had an unusual degree of attention in the British press.

The problem for people like Richard Tice and Nigel Farage (they are by no means alone) is that they face a binary, and whatever answer they offer will offend or alienate many people. Moreover, the discourse on demographics and the prospect of the British natives being reduced to a minority in Britain is hurtling toward the mainstream, whether or not the correct framing and argumentation surrounding it is understood.

The question, fundamentally, is: Should the white British be prevented from being reduced to a minority?

I use the term “white British” because that, and not “indigenous” or “native”, is how it stands on the census, which, ultimately, is the source of the whole discourse. Nigel Farage is not entirely new to the discussion on demographics. In 2022, he posted a video to X in which he expressed alarm at white British people becoming a minority in various cities across the country.

As we can see, Conservative Party MP Savid Javid demanded to know why it matters. Oddly, this is essentially the position Farage himself has adopted since. Yet, Javid has posed an interesting question to Farage which, in my view, he can’t actually answer in full. My own answer would be that it was a result of the greatest betrayal in our history, and that the long-term effects of it will be catastrophic for our people. I would define the white British not as a statistic but as the native inhabitants, and I would define native inhabitants as being those people who are here organically and not as a result of bureaucratic processes — unlike Savid Javid, who is.

Both Farage and Javid hold to a civic definition of what constitutes a people, which is to say, one rooted entirely in bureaucratic procedures. Within the context of such thinking, Javid has a point. Why exactly was Farage concerned when, presumably, the vast majority of people in the cities he mentioned have their passports and paperwork in good standing with the Home Office?

I feel as if I should point out here that, for once, I’m not launching an attack on Farage but instead using him as an avatar of a mindset within the British right that, in my opinion, is redundant.

The civic, or procedural approach to demographics would be to argue that “integration” becomes untenable when the numbers are so massive. Yet, this merely begs the question of what integration means — what values and principles does one need, and who or what are they intrinsic to?

The political centre has for decades been able to use an endless and tedious discourse around integration and values as a comfort blanket to foot-drag and obfuscate in the face of changing demographics. People further right in the Nationalist scene have long used dates as doomsday deadlines that herald a disaster of unprecedented scale.

The problem posed by the question of the white British being reduced to a minority is that it is not rooted in values, but in ethnicity and tribalism. There is no Goldilocks zone of Quango-generated talking points about it being British; there are just two paths: either we become a minority or we do not.

If a political party such as Reform UK were to concede that the natives should not become a minority, then logically it follows that policies would have to be drafted to prevent that outcome. And this is the problem. People such as Richard Tice and Nigel Farage know that if they were to concede that it should be stopped, they would have to explain how that would be achieved. Preventing the white British from becoming a minority would spell the dissolution of their civic understanding of peoplehood and lead to ethnicisation, which is to say, race-based advocacy.

It goes without saying that a political party that is explicitly rooted in the racial interests of the white British would face harsher scrutiny and be less well-received by the mainstream, to the degree that it may very well be illegal. Or rather, policies of mass deportations or prioritising one group above others would be extraordinarily radical from the perspective of Hampstead dinner parties, and perhaps even the general population itself. Thus, it can be argued that a degree of Machiavellian pragmatism is needed to become effective. Yet such pragmatism, if it exists, would be publicly disowned the instant it was questioned, and the people opposed to becoming to a minority would once again find themselves without representation.

Professor David Betz has stated that, as the demographic noose begins to tighten, so too will resistance to further demographic change as a form of “fight or flight” kicks in among the population.

The other scenario, of course, is that the discourse surrounding demographic change remains “locked” in the sense that those opposed will be brushed aside, exactly as Farage and Tice brushed aside Steven Edginton. Notably, such a response was more easily digested by the public in, say, 2002, when the claim seemed outlandish and paranoid. In 2025, with the natives already minorities in many cities and towns, and more importantly, seeing and feeling the difference on their streets, waving away the doomsday date seems weak and perhaps even treacherous.

Again, either it is to be accepted that the white British, as they stand on the census, become a minority in their only homeland, or they do not. The political class as a whole will, in the coming years, have to confront this epochal change regardless of what they think about it. To enact policies now in order to prevent it would inevitably be regarded as racist, the gravest of sins. Yet, despite what we’ve been told our entire lives, the liberal mainstream assumes that race won’t matter when white people are in the minority — without a shred of evidence, of course.

When discussing the shifting demographics in the West, it is crucial to understand and emphasise that it is not how Europeans view others that matters; rather, it is how they themselves are viewed that matters. Let us take, for example, the Equality Act that legislates in favour of “protected characteristics” of “vulnerable groups”, essentially allotting special favours to the State’s client groups. The assumptions baked into the legislation are of a society constituted upon a white majority as the norm. Yet, as that majority becomes a minority, will the legislation be repealed or amended? If so, then what does that conversation look like, and who or what would be responsible for it?

The fact is, it won’t happen because it would be absurd to give every spectrum in society a protected identity classification. There will be no legalistic protections for the white British as a minority, and if there were, it would be entirely dependent on the empathy and ideals of other groups.

The Equality Act, as well as mountains of other legislation, laws and protocols, reveal an uncomfortable truth about the multicultural society: it isn’t actually race-blind as it stands now, and it never has been in the past. Neither will it be in the future.

Race-thinking is thus an inevitability. The question then returns to the discourse surrounding the swiftly changing demographic situation in the UK, and the question must be addressed now, with all of its awkwardness and potential minefields, or it will take place later, when the situation and any remedies become even more draconian or unfeasible.

We currently find ourselves in an unstable holding pen, or containment, if you will. The incentives of the system all point away from discussing the most seismic population change ever seen on these islands. Yet, despite the news cycle offering daily distractions and juicier intellectual morsels to mull over, ultimately, it is all that matters.

I am something of an absolutist on the issue in the sense that, without a secure place to call home, a people is just flotsam being tossed around on the tides of history. Having a home transcends economic systems, material needs, intellectual abstractions, and universalist ideals.

It is, in the end, all that matters.