It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Canada doesn’t have a space program. The launch of the Alouette 1 satellite in 1962 made Canada the fourth country to place an object into orbit around the Earth. Astronaut Marc Garneau nearly became the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party in 2012 (yes, we could have had an astronaut prime minister ... Canadians voted for a nepo baby instead); astronaut Chris Hadfield is a minor celebrity in Canada; Jeremy Hansen became the first Canadian to visit the Moon a few weeks ago. Various iterations of the Canadarm have been fixtures of Space Shuttle missions and the International Space Station for decades. However, Canada does not yet have its own, native launch capability. The Canadian Space Agency acts as an appendage of NASA, with Canadian astronauts and satellites hitching rides on American rockets.

The announcement that the Canadian government is taking steps to develop a Canadian launch capacity has roused me from my uneasy slumber of the last several weeks, and I have awakened in a cranky mood. Several aspects of this story have annoyed me, both those relating to the government’s execution, and those emerging from the reaction from influencers whose justified skepticism of Ottawa’s intentions is intersecting with their poor understanding of space in a fashion that is leading them to beclown themselves.

The story that got everyone’s attention was a two hundred million dollar lease Ottawa signed with Maritime Launch Services for a spaceport in Nova Scotia, Canada’s largest Atlantic province, covering ten years of operations at twenty million dollars per year. The spaceport is, at the moment, essentially just a concrete pad at the end a gravel road, with no other apparent infrastructure.

There are several genuine reasons for serious concern with this, which have been detailed by a Nova Scotian NIMBY who’s been annoyed by MLS for several years now. MLS is a Ukrainian-American company whose original business model was to design, manufacture, and launch the Ukrainian-built Cyclone 4M, which it has never successfully done. To be fair, this effort was interrupted by the Ukrainian war, which for obvious reasons redirected Ukrainian rocketry to military production. However, it’s also worth emphasizing that MLS is an offshoot of the Ukrainian Space Agency, which is every bit as corrupt as you’d expect. The Ukrainian Space Agency has been mired in several expensive scandals over the years; one of them resulted in the theft of $10 million from Export Development Canada.

A former Liberal Party premier, Stephen McNeil, sits on MLS’s advisory board, which could be quite natural and could also be an indication of bog-standard conflict of interest.

The company’s finances are rather suspicious. It has posted operating losses of several million dollars a year, with the exception of 2025 when it lost $47 million1; revenue in 2025 was less than $15,000, and in 2024 it was zero. The incredible 2025 cash burn was apparently due to MLS acquiring Spaceport Canada. The company’s normal losses seem to be mostly due to executive compensation for its small roster of employees: the CEO and CFO between them rake in about a million dollars. This is despite the company not apparently actually have done anything yet. Other expenses include paying the Ukrainians for technical documentation for a launch vehicle MLS had already abandoned, and debt service on funding advanced by investors.

In 2024, MLS abandoned the scheme to launch Ukrainian rockets and pivoted to an ‘airport model’, the idea being that they would make money by charging launch service providers for the use of their spaceport. In 2025 there were precisely two launches from MLS’s concrete pad. Both of them were suborbital. One of them was a student-designed rocket from Toronto’s York University.

Even more absurdly, MLS’s concrete pad is on Crown land, which the company rents from Nova Scotia for $13,500 a year. This then looks like Ottawa renting its own land for $20 million a year.

In yet another suspicious-looking move, one of MLS’s chief financiers, Sasha Jacob, sold millions of shares immediately after the deal was announced and the stock price 10x’d; he then exercised stock options to replenish his position at below-market rates, thereby maintaining interest in the company while pocketing a couple million dollars.

All of this looks a whole lot like one more public-private partnership grift in which press releases and public relations materials project a hologram of visionary development, while the funds disappear into a complex web of regulatory compliance, stock buybacks, environmental impact studies, and executive salaries, without anything ever actually being built. This is a scam in which Canada’s Laurentian elites have learned to excel. It turns out that it is much easier, and far more profitable, to get paid for something you’re pretending to do instead of actually doing it; when the inevitable questions get asked, you simply throw up your hands and complain of unexpected engineering difficulties, tortuous regulatory pathways, or other factors beyond your control. None of the people involved – not government ministers, not government bureaucrats, not their private-sector partners – care one bit whether any given project succeeds, because they get paid by the taxpayer and the debt taken out in the taxpayer’s name regardless of outcomes. It is my working assumption that there is nothing more to this supposed space program than this. We are governed by theatre kids dancing to the tune of the Music Man, and none of them know anything about doing anything real.

However, while there are many very good reasons to be skeptical, there are also very stupid reasons to be skeptical, which has left me every bit as annoyed by those critiquing this project as I am by the ones executing it.

The first stupid criticism is that the spaceport is just a concrete pad. I’m not sure what people think a spaceport is. Probably they are picturing glittering launch towers standing over the landscape like wireframe skyscrapers, the full Cape Canaveral or SpaceX Starbase experience, in the same way that when they think of an airport the sprawling infrastructure of La Guardia or Heathrow is what first comes to mind. You do not, however, start with LAX, and just as an airport in its simplest form is a short landing strip which may or may not be covered in asphalt and may or may not have a Quonset hut to serve as hangar, so the most basic form of a spaceport is a concrete pad that serves as a flat surface for the rocket to stand on which will not catch fire when flames start pouring out of the engine.

For reference, here’s what SpaceX looked like back in 2008 or so:

That’s more impressive than a concrete pad, I will grant you, but it is much closer to a concrete pad than it is to Starbase, Texas.

Canada is currently starting from, effectively, nothing. There used to be a rocket range in Churchill, Manitoba, which launched thousands of suborbital rockets from the 1950s through the late 90s. From 1994 to 1998 it was operated by Akjuit Aerospace, which tried but failed to turn the range into the world’s first commercial launch facility. It was subsequently abandoned and has not been reopened.

The existence of the Churchill rocket range, at 58 degrees north, touches on the second very stupid criticism that I have seen, which is that Canso, Nova Scotia, at 45 degrees north, is too far north to launch rockets.

Social media has been full of people very confidently proclaiming that it is absolutely necessary to launch rockets from the equator. This is because the Earth is a spinning ball, which due its geometry necessarily rotates more rapidly at the equator than it does at higher altitudes; the especially well-informed may even know that the Earth is actually an oblate spheroid due to the centrifugal force of its rotation causing the equator to bulge out a tiny bit (by a whole 42 kilometres). Getting into space requires velocity, and using the velocity of the Earth’s rotation means you can get to orbit with less fuel; since the tyranny of the rocket equation means that every additional kilogram of fuel requires yet more fuel in order to push the fuel before it is burned to turn it into velocity, it is economically impossible to launch from anywhere but the equator. Or something. I suppose someone should have told that to the Russians before they built the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (45 degrees north), or especially the Norwegians before the built a spaceport on Andøya Island (69 degrees north).

I’ve seen this ridiculous half-truth about the advantages of equatorial launches so often that it seems to be on the verge of becoming the new ‘the Apollo missions were impossible because the radiation in the Van Allen belts would have killed the astronauts’.

A common problem when wordcel take-sellers with severe politicsbrain opine on technical matters is that they don’t actually understand numbers. They see a qualitative statement like ‘hydrocarbons are a limited resource’, ‘the atmosphere protects the Earth’s surface from cosmic radiation’, or ‘space is really big’, and assume this means something like ‘we’re going to run out of oil tomorrow’, ‘the moment you go into space you will get cancer and die’, or ‘everything in space is too far away to reach’. Thus, ‘it’s easier to launch from the equator’ becomes ‘it is impossible to launch from anywhere but the equator’.

So let’s run the numbers.

Getting to orbit requires a rocket to reach orbital velocity; that is, the rocket must be going fast enough for its forward motion relative to the Earth’s surface to compensate for its downward motion due to the Earth’s inward gravitational pull. Essentially, the satellite must be fast enough that as it falls towards the Earth, the Earth’s curvature falls away below it, thereby keeping the satellite at a constant altitude. For a stable Low Earth Orbit, the necessary ground velocity is around 8 km/s or so. The change in velocity available from a rocket’s fuel is measured in delta-v; so, LEO requires about 8 km/s of delta-v. In practice this is a bit higher due to the necessity to overcome air resistance, so make that about 9 km/s of delta-v. Getting to geosynchronous orbit (GEO) requires another 4 km/s or so of delta-v. Getting to the Moon requires another 2 or 3 km/s beyond that.

At its equator, the Earth rotates at 465 metres per second. At a latitude of 45 degrees, where the Canso spaceport is located, the Earth rotates at 328 m/s. The difference from the equator is only 137 m/s. The delta0v penalty is real, but rather negligible when compared to the 9 km/s of delta-v the rocket needs to reach LEO. Launching from the equator rather than 45 degrees saves a whopping 1.5% of delta-v; plugging that into the rocket equation yields a payload difference (or, equivalently, a cost to orbit per unit weight difference) of around 4%. That is not a big number. It is a constraint, but it is not a show-stopper.

All of that assumes that you want an orbit aligned with the direction of the Earth’s rotation. This is just one class of orbits. If, instead, you want a polar orbit, launching from the equator is actually the worst option, because you need to reduce the 465 m/s of velocity you inherited from the Earth’s rotation to zero. If you want a sun-synchronous orbit, such that the spacecraft passes over a given part of the Earth with a constant angle to the Sun, you actually want to launch against the Earth’s rotation. For polar orbits you actually want to launch as close to the pole as possible. Which is precisely why the Norwegians built a spaceport on Andøya Island.

There are other considerations than latitude in siting a spaceport. Climate is important, because launches get scrubbed when it’s pouring rain or snowing, so you want a site which you can reasonably expect to enjoy lots of clear, calm, sunny days. Logistics matter, because you need to transport the rockets to the launchpad, along with fuel, payloads, the people servicing and launching the rockets, and the food, water, shelter, and power those people need. Therefore you do not want the launch site to be too far from inhabited areas. However, you also don’t want the site to be too close to people, because launches are loud. Finally, you want to be able to launch along trajectories that will take the rocket out over uninhabited land or, even better, open ocean, so that if the rocket blows up mid-air it won’t rain down debris on innocent bystanders.

Taking all of that into consideration, a small town in rural Nova Scotia makes perfect sense for a spaceport. It is close enough to service, but not so close to major cities as to be disruptive; the weather isn’t perfect, because it is Canada, but is probably about as good as you can expect anywhere in Canada (for the record, MLS estimates 150 suitable launch days per year); launches over the Atlantic probably won’t kill anyone if anything goes wrong; and the middle latitude is reasonably versatile in terms of reaching a wide range of orbital inclinations.

All of this of course assumes that Maritime Launch Services has anything to launch. That brings us to my final cause for annoyance, which is not that the government is spending far more than it should, but that it is not spending nearly enough.

As far as I can tell there are three Canadian companies developing launch vehicles. Nordspace is a Toronto startup attempting to develop reusable two-stage rockets, and which is also building its own spaceport (in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, at 46 degrees north, for those keeping track). As an aside, I saw people misattributing the Nordspace launch facility to MLS, and making fun of them for scrubbing a recent launch, thereby managing to makes arses of themselves in two ways at once.

Quebec’s Reaction Dynamics is sticking with a fully disposable design, but aiming to make it so simple and cheap that throwaway rockets become economical for small payloads.

Finally there is the Canada Rocket Company, also developing a reusable launch vehicle.

Each of these companies has been awarded a whopping $8.3 million by the Canadian government to develop the country’s sovereign launch capacity. Those are Canadian dollars; in real money that’s about $6 million. The plan is to distribute a total of around $100 million (Canadian, so $70 million real dollars) over the next couple of years, with the winner taking a $40 million (i.e. $28 million) grand prize in 2027 or 2028. These three companies have also raised a certain amount of private sector funding, but as far as I can tell this is still in the low millions to tens of millions each. CRC’s total funding to date is $14.7M, for instance.

For comparison, Musk founded SpaceX with $100 million of PayPal money back in 2005. Companies like Rocket Lab or Astra burned through hundreds of millions of dollars just to reach orbit, not always successfully. Sums in the hundred million to billion dollar range are table stakes in the orbital lift game, and I do not see Ottawa anteing up anything on that scale.

Instead, Ottawa is lavishing $200 million on a sketchy Ukrainian outfit that has so far built a concrete pad, while throwing some small change towards the companies doing the actual engineering to develop the actual rockets that will supposedly launch from it 150 times a year.

Presumably, the $200 million being paid to Maritime Launch Services is intended to provide them with the funding necessary to construct and operate more extensive facilities. However, neither the concrete pad nor whatever gets built next to it are good for anything without rockets, and if Ottawa was serious about getting Canada into the orbital game it would be spending a lot more money on this.

Nothing would make me prouder than Canada entering into the new space race in a serious way, and I very much hope that this initiative succeeds, but it’s difficult not to be cynical about ambitious engineering projects in Canada. The pattern since WWII has been an unrelenting sequence of rugpulls and boondoggles. Every time a Canadian corporation manages to develop a world-leading technology, Ottawa discovers some fresh new combination of short-sightedness, ineptitude, malign neglect, and open treachery to ensure those efforts come to absolutely nothing, destroying the dreams and careers of thousands in the process. Prime minister Diefenbaker set the pattern when he destroyed Canada’s nascent aerospace industry by killing the Avro Arrow; more recently, Canadians watched helplessly as crown jewels of the Canadian economy such as Nortel and Blackberry encountered financial difficulties, only for the crown to leave them to be dismantled bankruptcy, with their intellectual property and human capital getting bought up by American or other foreign investors for pennies on the dollar.

I really hope it doesn’t end up that way. A proper Canadian space program would be a wonderful thing to see. I simply lack any faith in Canada’s current crop of elites. They’ve done nothing to demonstrate that they’re made of the right stuff to pull it off, while having given us every reason to dread yet another Liberal Party money laundry. As such I have a visceral sympathy with the many Canadians who share this bitter cynicism. But for God’s sake, don’t make yourselves look like idiots out of your eagerness to express it.

Apologies for the long silence. I’ve been going through some personal things, while working on some larger projects that aren’t at all ready to be shared yet, but hopefully will be before too much longer. This wasn’t really the kind of thing I wanted to return with, but I felt sufficiently annoyed by this interruption in the news cycle, that it was worth spending the afternoon banging out this quick examination of the topic.

As always, I’d like to express my deep gratitude to those of your who provide me with your support. I know I try your patience sometimes with long waits between essays, and this little morsel is hardly enough to justify your patronage. I’ll probably need to lean upon your forbearance for a bit longer. And hey, if this is your first time reading one of these Postcards From Barsoom, you should consider subscribing so that you can receive the next one.

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Will this war be of world-shaking import? That is perhaps the core of the matter. If it is not, and the principle of Nothing Ever Happens holds, then bombing Iran will not actually matter that much. A month from now, or even a couple weeks, the bombardment will fade back into the news cycle, the storm and fury of a million passionately articulated hot takes fading back into the warm, frothing ocean of discourse.

Certainly this has happened before. Trump has bombed Iran’s nuclear research facilities a few months ago, and assassinated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qasem Soleimani a few years ago. Every time this kind of thing happens there are panicked shouts that thermonuclear Ragnarok is imminent, alongside outraged cries that Zion Don has betrayed MAGA by engaging in precisely the foreign interventionism that he repudiated, that he has been captured by the Neocohens, and that We Will Not Die For Israel. In each case, nothing much happened. Iran raised the red flag of revenge, or the gold flag of implacable annihilation, or the black flag of this time we really mean it, all of which amounted in practice to a few rockets being fired ineffectually in Israel’s general direction, to be absorbed by an Iron Dome that really seems to work quite well. There was no World War III. There were no boots on the ground. As I saw someone observe recently, We Will Not Die For Israel has become the groyper version of the Handmaid’s Tale: no one is actually asking anyone to die for Israel; there are no imminent plans for mass conscription; therefore protestations that one will resist a non-existent draft amount to the same kind of lurid masturbatory fantasy as declarations that one would never, pant, allow oneself to be confined in a harem, pant pant, and turned into, pant pant pant, breeding stock.

Maybe that will change. Maybe a year from now I’ll be ruefully eating those words, as American boys are being shipped off by their hundreds of thousands to run around blinded by Russian electronic countermeasures in the cold mountain passes of the Zagros, getting picked off by snipers and shredded by Chinese drones.

But I doubt it.

Modern warfare doesn’t have much use for conscript armies. That lesson was learned in Vietnam: conscripts generally have poor morale, they aren’t highly motivated, they aren’t usually of the highest quality, and so they are of limited usefulness on the battlefield. Soldiers are highly trained professionals who have chosen the military as a career. That makes them much less likely to mutiny. Moreover, modern warfare is highly technical: soldiers have to be extremely well trained to be any use at all. The young men who volunteer for military service usually do so with some hope of adventure and even danger. As such, they often positively look forward to war.

None of this should be taken to imply that Israel hasn’t played a massive role in orchestrating and precipitating this war. They clearly have. Marco Rubio let this slip when he admitted that part of the reason the US attacked when they did was that Israel had signalled that they were going to attack with or without America’s blessing or assistance; since Iran would certainly direct some of its retaliation against the Little Satan towards the regional assets of the Great Satan, America’s hand was forced. This is a bit like when your shithead friend has had one Jameson’s too many and you sit down next to him at the bar only to find that he’s about to throw hands at some asshole you’ve never met: you’re liable to take a punch to the nose no matter what you do, so you might as well have your friend’s back. You can call him a shithead later.

Israel’s involvement goes much deeper than this, of course. Zionism’s penetration of American conservatism is hardly a secret. There are Dispensationalists all over the Republican party, including the Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, and probably Marco Rubio (though technically he’s a Catholic). Republicans who shrug off open anti-white bigotry systematically directed against America’s core population in essentially all of its universities react with fury to campus anti-Semitism, threatening to withhold funding from any institutions that tolerate hurt Jewish feelings. Then of course there’s the big guy himself. Trump has never been much of a Christian, still less an evangelical ZioChristian, but he seems to have undergone something of a religious awakening after divine intervention saved his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. And who can blame him? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that since then, Trump has been influenced by Zionists who have convinced him that G-d saved him so that he could save America and, more importantly, G-d’s Chosen People. “You are the second coming of Cyrus the Great” would be an appealing narrative to a man with a vast ego. It would be even more appealing given the political and economic support it would come with. Certainly there would be no shortage of avenues for approach: Trump’s daughter is married into the tribe, after all.

Putting the morality of war aside for a moment, Israel’s performance so far has been impressive. Iran, it turns out, built one of the largest surveillance networks in the world in order to control its restive populace. Word is that Mossad infiltrated Iran’s internal surveillance network, which the Mullah’s secret police use to identify women who aren’t wearing their hijabs, and subverted it to conduct an extremely thorough reconnaissance. It was thanks to this penetration, the story goes, that Khomeini was located and then assassinated, and it was also thanks to this that a double tap wiped out the next-highest echelon of Iran’s leadership when they were meeting to choose the Ayatollah’s successor. Sneaky, ruthless, and very effective. Classic Mossad, really. There’s an unconfirmed rumour that, as a parting shot, the Mossad wiped the morality police’s databases, so that they no longer had any record of which of their women have a habit of letting their hair down in public.

It’s very likely that Israeli intelligence played a role in the abortive uprising that the mullahs crushed in January. According to Iran, the three thousand or so rebels who were massacred were all essentially Israeli operatives or dupes. According to the West, the thirty thousand Iranians murdered by the mullahs were simply ordinary civilians dissatisfied with life under the heavy hand of an Islamic pariah state. I don’t know what the truth of the matter is, but I suspect it’s somewhere in the middle.

If the reactions of Iranian expatriates living in the West are anything to go by, the Iranian people – particularly the Persians – loathe the mullahs. They’ve been celebrating in the streets, flying the variant of the Iranian flag with the lion instead of the ridiculous Islamic scimitar onion. But then, is their reaction representative of public opinion in Iran itself? Expats are self-selected to be dissatisfied with their home country; that’s why they’re expats in the first place. On the other hand, the protests that rocked Tehran in January are certainly indicative of widespread discontent, and one constantly hears that the Iranian people – at least the urban, educated portion – barely tolerate the theocracy. Zoroastrianism is rumoured to be making a comeback amongst Iranian youth, as a repudiation of Islamic mind-control via conscious reconnection with their deep ethnoreligion. I have no idea how widespread Zoroastrianism really is in Iran; my suspicion is that it’s a very niche phenomenon, that adoption of the Faravahar in preference to the Crescent is the Iranian analogue to young Westerners abandoning the Cross and the Rainbow for the Mjölnir.

The parallels between Iran and Western countries are quite striking. There’s the aforementioned surveillance infrastructure, which will be familiar to citizens of the Yookay, whose police watch them like hawsk and punish blasphemy against Gay Race Communism with the same fervour that Iran’s morality police punish apostasy against Islam. Iran, like the West, suffers from low fertility, with a Total Fertility Rate of around 1.5. This is probably downstream of Iran’s high rate of female education: well over half of university students are women (peaking at around 70% in the 2010s), and over half of Iranian women enrol in higher education. Women are meanwhile exempt from military service, which is mandatory for men. This leads to a certain degree of antipathy between the sexes: women complain about the patriarchy forcing them to wear headscarves, while young men complain that the Islamic Revolution is just feminism in a hijab. Despite the high level of post-secondary education, youth unemployment remains high among both sexes (which also of course depresses fertility).

Doesn’t that all sound very familiar?

The TFR especially is an interesting datapoint, worth pondering by trads who hold that the West’s own natal collapse can be reversed by revival of that old time religion. That clearly didn’t work in the Iranian theocracy, no more than it worked in the wider Ummah (where fertility has also fallen off a cliff in recent years).

Iran’s demographics are worth pondering for a moment. The fertility collapse is recent; Iran’s population is actually quite bottom-heavy; half of the population is under 35. The mullahs are a council of conservative old men holding onto power over a restively bucking youth bulge via the judicious application of welfare with one white-knuckled grip and terror with the other. They are acutely conscious that if their hand grows too heavy they will be overthrown by youngsters who barely tolerate the imposition of religious ideals that they do not share. BAP has pointed out repeatedly that this situation makes war counterproductive: conservative old men tend to be cautious, rather than aggressive, more concerned about holding on to what they already have than reaching for glory and martyrdom. Assassinating the Ayatollah and dozens of other senior clerics may have been a bad move. Draining old blood from the system provides space for new blood to circulate. It seems likely that the US and Israel will now face a younger, more energetic, more aggressive, and more innovative Iranian leadership.

On that note, the Ayatollah’s successor has been reported to be his son, Mojitaba Khomeini. The new Khomeini is relatively young, at 56, and his sole qualifications appear to be that he is a hardliner, and that he is the former Supreme Leader’s son. Apparently those parts of Iranian social media that haven’t been blacked out are mocking the regime on account of Mojitaba’s inexperience: the whole point of the theocracy is that it leadership i supposed to be descend into the hands of the most eminent and learned cleric, rather than into the hands of the last dictator. Mojitaba, who is the son of the last dictator, is apparently somewhat middling as a cleric. Meet the new dynasty, same as the old dynasty.

So far the war has been entirely an air war, and American air power remains unassailable. On the first day the bombing was conducted with B-2 stealth bombers. Within a few days, Iran’s air defences had been so thoroughly broken that the USAF was able to send in its refurbished WWII-era B-52s, which have giant Las Vegas style neon signs for radar cross sections. Zero American aircraft have been lost. Iran’s skies are American skies, from which America can bomb Iranian facilities at their leisure. The pilots must be enjoying the hell out of themselves.

This is all very well and good, but there are very few cases of a country being bombed into submission purely through air power. Before WWII, military theorists held to the wild hope that air power alone could win wars, as civilian populations would be so awed by the destructive potential of bombing raids that they would force their governments to sue for peace rather than endure them. To the contrary, Britain suffered through the Blitz with a stiff upper lip, and when Bomber Harris launched his revenge on Germany, the Germans also endured and fought on all the way to last bunker in Berlin. Tokyo surrendered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, true, but this was only after the Japanese army and navy had been wiped out in the Pacific war, and the Japanese government was already on its knees and suing for peace via back channels.

The Iranian people may well hate the Iranian regime, but this does not mean that they will rise up against the regime when America and Israel are bombing them. For one thing, the Iranian people already rose up, and were slaughtered. For another, it is one thing to take to the streets during peace time, when one can plausibly claim to be a revolutionary motivated by liberal ideals of humanitarian justice or whatever; it is quite another to take to the streets when the enemy’s munitions are blowing up your country, and the government’s inevitable argument that you are all nothing more than the enemy’s traitorous catspaws will inevitably carry the day. It certainly doesn’t help the case of would-be rebels when, on day one of the conflict, 160 little girls were killed when their school was blown up. People intuitively understand this rally-around-the-flag effect. Nationalists in Europe and Canada have been experiencing a small taste of this dynamic in recent months, complaining that Trump’s truculence towards their governments makes it too easy for local regimes to paint local dissidents as unpatriotic.

So it seems unlikely that the Iranian people will revolt against the Islamic Revolution, at least as long as the bombings continue. The Trump administration seems to tacitly agree: initial declarations that one of the goals was regime change appear to have been quietly dropped, or at least de-emphasized.

Of course, one might still envision regime change via continuous decapitation, a kind of pruning via assassination. Kill off every leader who emerges, until such a time as you get someone you can do business with. Sort of like gardening by weeding, without bothering to plant anything. Perhaps that’s the plan. Whether that’s a good plan is another question entirely. The early success in killing the Ayatollah and his top men had the advantage of surprise. Subsequent Iranian leadership will take operational security much more seriously: avoiding in-person convocation, hiding the locations of key officials, and even hiding their identities.

If regime change is no longer a plausible goal, that opens the question of what, precisely, the goal of all of this actually is. Is it simply to degrade Iranian military capabilities to the point that the country no longer threatens its neighbours? To destroy the Iranian Navy, so that it lacks the ability to close the Straits of Hormuz? To prevent Iran from ever developing a nuclear capability? Is the goal to destroy Iran’s capacity to export oil to China? Is the goal to take Iran off the board as a Chinese proxy state? Is it just getting revenge for the 1979 hostage crisis? Is the goal just to remove a thorn in Israel’s side, by destroying the ability of Iran to support Hezbollah?

I suppose the goal is probably ‘all of the above’, and I think it has to be admitted that the US has been somewhat successful in at least some of this. After its initial flurry of ballistic missile and Shahed drone strikes on surrounding countries, the volume of Iranian air strikes has dropped precipitously. To a certain degree this is due to Iran shooting its wad; to a certain degree, it’s due to launch facilities being identified and destroyed; and to a certain degree, it’s due to the IRGC husbanding its remaining munitions. Iran retains substantial stockpiles hidden in hardened underground facilities.

Iran also retains a huge ground force, with 1.2 million uniformed personnel; something like 3/4 of these are conscripts with dubious morale, but in the event of a defensive insurgency, the Iranians would still have one or two hundred thousand combat effective troops, many of whom are not conscripts.

Now that Iran’s air defences have been destroyed, the focus has shifted to degrading Iran’s industrial base and command-and-control infrastructure. Standard air war tactics, really. The Iranian regime doesn’t seem to have much of an ability to do anything but watch helplessly as their infrastructure is dismantled from above. Does that mean that they don’t have the ability to do anything at all?

Iran doesn’t have much force projection capacity, so Iran’s army is almost certainly no threat to anyone who doesn’t step foot on Iranian soil. Over the years we’ve heard a lot about Iranian sleeper agents infiltrating the US, ready to sabotage US infrastructure or initiate terrorist attacks. So far none of that has happened, from which a few possibilities follow: 1) Iranian sleeper agents are largely imaginary, a consensual hallucination sustained by Iranian propaganda feeding American paranoia; 2) for whatever reason, the IRGC hasn’t given the word yet; 3) word has been given and attacks are in preparation; 4) the sleeper agents are quite real but have all gone native because life as an Uber driver in NYC is a much better deal than life under the mullahs, so they’re just ghosting their handlers.

An asymmetric terror threat is probably the most effective response left to the Iranians. Whether it would be effective is another question. They could cause blackouts in key facilities by sabotaging transformer stations; they could force the evacuation of towns and cities by sabotaging chemical plants; they could shoot up schools; they could do all kinds of nasty things. Whether they could do anything that America doesn’t already do to itself via a mixture of social breakdown and sheer incompetence is a good question. If planes are already falling out of the sky because of Indian engineers and women pilots, does hijacking them make a difference? If troons hopped up on SSRIs are already shooting up schools, do people even really notice when the shooter is an Iranian terrorist? The question of terrorism in the US is a little bit like the question of cancer in whales: despite being massive animals with long lifespans with lots of cells that have lots of time to mutate into cancers, whales don’t die of cancer, because they’re so big that by the time their tumours get large enough to be a problem, their tumours get tumours.

Perhaps that’s why there haven’t been any terrorist reprisals yet. Activating a sleeper cell is almost the same thing as burning it, as the risk of exposure and elimination is extremely high with each action; you want to make sure that burning the asset is worth the cost, and it’s actually much harder to come up with attacks that exceed that cost/benefit threshold.

I’m not saying that there won’t be terrorist reprisals on American infrastructure or civilians, simply that the sheer level of entropic decay of the United States of Weimerica is its own kind of perverse defence. Introducing chaos into the American system is a bit like adding another layer of distortion to an industrial deathcore track.

Perhaps there are other options open to the Iranians or, for that matter, their allies. Beijing has been notably silent. Cyber-attacks, for example, on US financial infrastructure, could be quite effective. Whether the Iranians possess the ability to do this is another matter. American cyber-warfare capabilities are among the best in the world, and given the way that Iran’s surveillance network was pwned by Mossad – and, several years earlier, the way its nuclear research program was sabotaged by Stuxnet – it seems doubtful that Iran’s own netrunners are on the same plane of 1337. China’s might be.

Just because I can’t imagine what kind of crippling Find Out the Iranians or their friends might respond to the American/Israeli Fuck Around with, doesn’t mean that there won’t be one. The history of empire is littered with warnings against hubristic expeditions launched by leaders who felt themselves to be invulnerable, who imagined that Providence had given them the mandate of heaven, and who were brought low in consequence of their wishful thinking and lack of imagination. As the oracle at Delphi told Croesus, “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.” Though, in fairness, Persia is no longer a great empire.

The ramifications of this war must be understood globally, and no doubt they are intended to be global. Oil is already up to $100 a barrel, which is great news for countries whose economies depend on oil exports (such as Canada and Iran, not that it will do Iran much good), but not so great for everyone else. Whether prices rise more and bring on a global recession depends on how long the Straits of Hormuz remain closed. Currently the US Navy is planning to escort tankers through the straits. There are rumours that the US is going to try and steal the business of insuring global shipping from the City of London, which has dominated it for centuries. These rumours imply that the one of the advantages enjoyed by Lloyd’s of London was back-channel intelligence connections to the American security state, which have recently been closed. Certainly America’s erstwhile partners in the United Kingdom appear to have been taken completely by surprise, suggesting that Washington is no longer sharing intelligence with Five Eyes partners it now views as adversarial and compromised by foreign influence. I’m sure that had nothing to do with Westminster inviting the Chinese to build the world’s largest embassy in the heart of their city, or giving away the Chagos Islands and its strategic Indian Ocean airbase to a Chinese client state. Canada was similarly blindsided, which surely has nothing to do with our parliament being heavily infiltrated by Chinese intelligence, or with our prime minister having announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with the People’s Republic. Not that it really matters. NATO’s military contributions in the GWOT amounted to little more than a fig leaf of multilaterial consensus, and the Trump White House doesn’t care much about such pretenses.

European countries in particular are especially leery of getting involved, due to concern that their own imported Muslim populations won’t take it well. This underlines the position taken by Vance and Rubio – presumably an expression of the State Department’s position – that a Eurabian Union will not be a reliable ally, as the sympathies of Muslims will naturally lie in the Dar al-Islam rather than the Dar al-Harb. Already in the Yookay there are mounted Islamic vigilante patrols chasing down Persians protesting in favour of the air strikes.

Personally, I’m rather in favour of kicking this particular hornet’s nest under the mosque. Agitating the Muslims will polarize the population further, making the consequences of continued mass immigration, and the desirably of remigration, all the plainer.

One concern many European nationalists have expressed, not without cause, is that if Iran collapses into civil war or simply failed state status, it will lead to a wave of Iranian refugees pouring into Europe, no doubt accompanied by chancers from Africa and who knows where else riding in on their tattered coattails. A Syrian reprise certainly seems plausible. Of course, Europe can always choose to simply not let them in, and proper nationalist governments would do exactly that, as we’ve already seen with Hungary and Poland. However, as things currently stand, Western European governments remain firmly in the hands of the traitor class, who would be only too happy to throw open the gates for a fresh tranche of neurosurgeons and rocket scientists (and given that the Persians are in fact rather well-educated, such a characterization would not be as laughably implausible as it was in 2016). That said, popular opposition to immigration is considerably more robust than it was a decade ago; an attempt to repeat Merkel’s Mistake could well bring the EU’s governments to their knees, particularly if it’s accompanied by widespread Muslim race riots.

Finally, not because it is the only thing left to talk about but because this is already quite long enough, there’s the question of how this might affect domestic American politics. Much of Trump’s base, particularly the younger voters, are furious: they elected him to deport a hundred million people, not to start another pointless desert war for Sheldon Adelson. Attempts to paint the mullahs as barbaric reprobates for forcing women to wear hijabs, signing off on marriages to 9-year-old girls, or forcing gay men to get sex change operations fall quite flat when young American men are living in the romantic wreckage of MeToo’s male purdah, American schools have been trooning American children for a decade as a matter of government policy, and not a single member of the American elite has been arrested in connection with the Epstein files. Younger voters are in a bad mood in any case due to the economy: however well the stock market is doing, however much manufacturing is reshoring to America, it doesn’t seem to be turning into jobs yet. There’s a real danger that much of this demographic may decide to stay home in the midterms and let the Democrats retake Congress.

Trump’s mandate was to fix America’s domestic problems, not embark on new foreign adventures. Americans have always been dispositionally isolationist, and there’s especially no appetite for foreign entanglements in the wake of the humiliating disasters of the GWOT. Perhaps there’s a domestic upside in this, though. It has not escaped notice that Trump can stride across the globe like Zdeus, but is forced into the role of a fiddling Nero when at his burning home, were he’s tied down like Gulliver by a thousand judicial strings, while a recalcitrant GOP sits on his chest, slow-walking his every reform. Patience with this state of dysfunctional affairs of state has become as thin as the onion-skin paper of an old pocket Bible, and a lot of American voters are carrying that Bible full of enumerated grievances around in their back pockets everywhere they go. If a Caesar is effective abroad, how effective could a Caesar be at home? Many are asking this question.

Trump is not Caesar, of course. He’s at best Pompey, or John the Baptist – the one who prepares the way.

As furious as MAGA is about Iran, it’s worth emphasizing that we’ve been here before. No one wants ‘boots on the ground’, but there’s nothing Americans like more than watching their air force pound the ever-living snot out of someone. Trump’s style so far has been more gun-boat diplomacy and less hearts-and-minds nation-building. He seems to prefer the punitive expedition to the occupation, and if he holds to that pattern – and, just as importantly, if it does not spin out of control into catastrophe – it’s likely that voters will forget all about it by November, which is forever and a day away in news cycle terms. It also shouldn’t be forgotten that a huge part of Trump’s base are not angry young radicals who want to burn it all down, but grumpy old boomers with Cold War nostalgia for Top Gun training montages and a chip on their shoulders that’s been itching since 1979. That part of his base is loving the bombardment porn. And in the end, it’s worth remembering that Trump has a way of stumbling towards victory, pratfalling into a bed of roses without ever being pricked by their thorns. That doesn’t mean it will work out this time, of course. Every winning streak comes to an end at some point. Still, there’s a pattern here.

I started this by warning you that I didn’t have any clear conclusion in mind, that there’s no point to this other than to try to organize my own scattered thoughts, and I’m afraid that this has in the end proven to be the case. I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, and I don’t think anyone does; I don’t know what to expect the result to be, and I’m skeptical of anyone prophesying either success or disaster, as I’ve generally found such pronouncements to be unreliable, particularly when they come wrapped in the moralism that is so very unsuitable to the Machiavellian anarchy of imperial geopolitics. I find a lot of people who get emotional about these things have some sort of axe to grind, either because they’re America ride or die, or because they want nothing more than for America to fall; both types are liable to engage in wishful thinking. I’m rather more ambivalent about all of this. I hope it works out. I hope Trump doesn’t screw everything up. I hope the Iranian people free themselves, and don’t end up even deeper in the clutches of a hardened, embittered theocracy.

And, of course, I hope you found the time you spent reading this sloppy core dump of my thoughts to be time well used. As always, thank you very much for taking the time to read, and to those of you who support Postcards From Barsoom with your generous patronage, a thousand thank yous, for it is thanks to you and only you that I am able to make something of a living writing for all of you.

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I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is one of those literary works, like Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, that has gained meme status within the online right without actually having been all that widely read. In consequence, most of you will have at least heard of The Camp of the Saints, and will probably have some idea of its significance. For those who are hearing about this book for the first time, it describes the annihilation of the West by a mass movement of migrants from the third world who advance under the banner of their own wretchedness to disarm the West via its own bad conscience. If that sounds like it could have been lifted from the headlines of the last decade, congratulations, you can now see why the work is regarded as prophetic.

One of the reasons that The Camp of the Saints is not actually all that widely read is that the book has been suppressed in the English-speaking world. The book was a bestseller when the first translation was published in 1975, after which there were a few reprintings, but it has been effectively out of print since the mid-90s. This meant that if you wanted to read it, you either had to track down a bootleg pdf (and who wants to read an entire novel in pdf), or pay extortionate prices on Amazon’s secondary market. You’d think that the publisher would see the insane prices used editions were going for and conclude that there was money to be made from unmet demand but, you see, The Camp of the Saints is a xenophobic, racist, sexist diatribe that good people need to protect impressionable minds from reading lest they acquire bad opinions and become bad people. This kind of copyright-squatting is how books are actually de facto banned in the Western world, by the way; those prominent displays of ‘banned books’ assembled by your local libtard bookseller more or less uniformly consist of softcore porn that some school board in the Bible Belt decided were a bit much for the resource library in the elementary school. When the cathedral wants to ban a book, it simply buys up the rights to it, refuses to publish it, and then buries it in obscurity by refusing to talk about it.

Fortunately for all of us, the small publisher Vauban Books has recently released a new translation, which you can pick up in any format of your choice for a very reasonable price. The edition comes with two introductions: a new introduction by (whose further reflections can be found in his recent essay The Scandal of the Saints), which places the work in its historical context and provides fascinating biographical detail on Raspail’s remarkable and adventurous career, and Raspail’s introduction to the French 2011 edition (which reached bestseller status in France), an essay titled Big Other. The French publisher initially didn’t want to include Raspail’s essay, for fear of being prosecuted for racism.

To call The Camp of the Saints prescient undersells it. At times, Raspail seems to be downright prophetic. Pope Benedict XVI plays a prominent role (albeit this is a character who could not be more different from Cardinal Ratzinger). Raspail also correctly predicted that Rhodesia would become Zimbabwe, which may have been easily foreseeable when Raspail was composing the work but still did not formally happen until 1980, seven years after the novel’s publication; while Raspail was writing, the Rhodesian Bush War was still in full swing. The Rhodies fought until the bitter end to prevent the breadbasket of Africa from being turned into Africa’s basketcase.

The Camp of the Saints is sometimes described as a dystopian novel, which should be read alongside 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, and C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. There’s something to be said for this interpretation. You get a pretty good description of the modern world with the Venn diagram overlap of the total state’s panoptic tyranny, the flattening of the human spirit into a mass-produced Last Man via the endless consumption of mass-produced trivial amusements, the death of literary curiosity, the imposition of forced egalitarianism, demon-worshipping transhumanist technocracy, and Raspail’s civilizational collapse via obsequious moral inversion.

Like every good dystopia, however, The Camp of the Saints is first and foremost a satire of the modern world, a warning about where things will head if certain sociopolitical trends are taken to their natural conclusion. Raspail’s work does not take place in some science-fictional near future, as the majority of other dystopias do: it’s world is technologically and politically indistinguishable from the world Raspail lived in, and still all too recognizable to us. It has been derided as a far-right racist tract, and Raspail’s depiction of the third world horde that subsumes the West is far from flattering, but his venom is directed primarily at the West’s own spineless cultural thought-leaders and political elites, who he identifies as the true and only possible architects of the world-historic catastrophe that he predicts.

The Camp of the Saints also has all the key tropes of a zombie apocalypse story.

The third world horde is depicted as a vast, ravenous, mindless beast comprised of individual members who are not at all fearsome or intimidating, but which triumphs through sheer numbers and slow but relentless advance, and which is defended by its revolting appearance and overpowering, nauseating stench. The migrants are the most wretched products of the slums of Calcutta, malnourished and sickly, afflicted by every kind of congenital defect, infectious disease, infirmity, and skin infection. Their leader is a monstrous, drooling idiot dwarf with lidless eyes, a toothless sphincter for a mouth, and stumps for limbs, who rides about on the shoulders of a giant coprophage. They make their way from India packed like human sardines in a fleet of rusting, dilapidated plague ships, wallowing their way towards Europe through the nauseating miasma that arises from the swamp of corpse-littered shit that they leave in their wake, spending their days listlessly staring out to sea and mindlessly copulating amidst their own putrifying filth. Merely to look upon the migrant horde is to be transfixed with a kind of a religious terror, overcome by its ugliness, paralyzed by pity. Soldiers forced to take even the smallest of aggressive actions against the horde, with only a few exceptions, throw down their weapons and run, not because they are terrified of the horde itself, but because they are terrified of their own conscience should they strike down a defenseless, pitiable wretch. In a few cases, soldiers take their own lives after being made to shoot. The horde’s primary weapon is the crushing psychological pressure that slams down on the souls all who behold it; better to give up and accept the inevitable than suffer the torment of fighting against it.

When the horde encounters a westerner, one of two things happens. Either the westerner is immediately killed by being trampled underfoot or torn limb from limb, or he is smoothly assimilated into the horde, becoming by and by indistinguishable from the innumerable wretches that comprise it. The zombies either eat you, or turn you into a zombie. Women of course are assimilated by rape.

Not everyone succumbs right away, of course. At the end of the novel a small group of psychologically resilient Frenchmen led by an army colonel and a right-wing government minister fall back to an abandoned mountain village. Inside the village’s borders they establish a micocosm of the old, pre-invasion French civilization. They defend their redoubt simply by shooting any migrants or white ‘assimilates’ (as they immediately take to calling them) who get too close. The migrants and assimilates are easily seen, a constant presence shambling in the distance; they are just as easily picked off, being slow and unarmed, and the village’s inhabitants soon take to treating the hunt as a sport. Of course this refuge does not last long: the French air force, in what is implied to be its last act (for the new world will not be able to maintain airplanes) wipes the last surviving Frenchmen out in an airstrike. Racism can’t be tolerated, you see.

Finally, there are the delusional lunatics who imagine that they can befriend or master the horde, turning it to their own purposes or making common cause with it, and who are therefore instrumental in opening the gates to their and everyone else’s doom. Upon actually encountering the horde the madmen find only death or assimilation; the horde is utterly indifferent to any expression of friendship.

I can’t prove that The Camp of the Saints was inspired by the zombie apocalypse genre, or still more interestingly, that it provides the prototype for it. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, but doesn’t really flesh out the themes of the zombie apocalypse the way that Romero’s 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead does. The first movie in Romero’s oeuvre is really just a straight-up horror movie, with the sociopolitical commentary being emphasized much more directly in the sequel and subsequent instalments. Nevertheless, the publication date of the novel, several years before the characteristics of the zombie apocalypse genre began to stabilize, suggests that it may have played an inspirational role. Certainly, left-wing commentators have been known to connect the dehumanized zombie horde with racist narratives playing on fears of biocontamination and castigating the extreme violence that typifies the genre as a right-wing power fantasy in which all moral constraints on violence against black bodies are removed.

The violence that zombie apocalypse survivors must necessarily engage is leads to another zombie apocalypse trope, that ‘the humans are the real monsters’. In The Camp of the Saints, the real zombies are not the desperate effluvia coughed up by the third world’s miserable slums, but the disenchanted, demoralized inhabitants of Europe, who have forgotten how to aspire to anything higher than their own comforts. Raspail’s Western civilization is an undead husk that merely resembles itself on the outside, but which has been utterly hollowed out from within. It has lost touch with God, and become utterly soulless: unable to believe in the divine, unable to really believe in the saccharine humanitarianism which it holds up as a substitute for the divine, unable to believe in itself, ultimately unable to believe even in its own right to exist. It has been reduced to nothing more than appetite; inevitably, inexorably, it finds itself pulled down into the mire of the third world, which is likewise nothing more than appetite. Unlike the West, however, the third world is without shame; it does not find the carnal state of man reduced to a walking stomach to be something unworthy; it believes in itself. The West aspires to something higher, to something more noble, something befitting its blessings. Deprived of this by the dissolute faithlessness brought about by its own decadent prosperity, it grows nauseated by its own existence. The third world proclaims that its wretchedness is a source of righteousness, and the first world agrees; thus, the only righteousness the West can aspire to is wretchedness, and first world and third are conjoined. The first world becomes the third world, but the third world does not become like the first; like sewage being poured into wine, the only possible result is sewage.

Raspail holds up a mirror to the West, and it is this, and not his unflattering portrayal of the third world, that arouses hatred in his critics. In that there’s nothing new: baizuo are accustomed to hiding behind their clients, accusing their critics of racism for critiquing the white left. His primary dramatis personae are the journalists, politicians, priests, academics, military officers, revolutionaries, and ordinary citizens of France. The journalists and academics care nothing for truth, but only the attention that moral posturing provides. The politicians triangulate inside the nihilistic void of a culture that believes in nothing, and so perfectly capable of seeing what needs to be done are perfectly unable to do it. The priests are apostates and atheists, substituting political activism for faith. The military officers command a hollow war machine manned by soldiers armed with the deadliest weaponry industrial technology can devise and wholly unwilling to use it. The revolutionaries are either useful idiots or common criminals. The ordinary citizens are livestock, bien pensants whose thoughts extend no further than whatever the latest radio broadcast told them was good to think.

The living death of a civilization that is merely going through the mechanical motions of cultural forms it no longer believes in is easy meat for opportunistic moral warfare, and Raspail is explicit about this. The Last Chance Armada that launches from Calcutta is described in exactly these terms, as an invading army wielding its heartwrenching poverty as a deadly weapon aimed straight at the soft and vulnerable conscience of the West. The fleet is given its name by a diabolic journalist animated by a malicious ethnic resentment as deep as his marrow. This figure, Clement Dio, plays a central role. By agitating his audience’s conscience, he has monetized his racial identity, establishing his paper La pensee nouvelle as a major left-wing publication, by means of which he simultaneously enriches himself and injects poison into the bloodstream of the West. Dio knows exactly what he’s doing. His aim is to turn the West against itself by morally disarming it, with the goal of leading it to its destruction.

Dio’s nemesis, and probably the only man in France who understands Dio’s game, is Marchant, a rightist Cassandra who publishes a rag called La pensee nationale. In case this juxtaposition of mastheads was not clear enough, Marchant is shown as Dio’s opposite in every way: where Dio is wealthy, with a fast sports car and a beautiful wife, Marchant is impoverished and single; where Dio’s paper enjoys wide circulation, Marchant struggles to even get printed (at one point, he tried to put out a special edition, and the union who runs the printing shop goes on strike to block publication); where Dio is fêted as a beloved celebrity, Marchant is despised as a racist crank. Globally, the first world enjoys riches and cultural domination, while the third world languishes in poverty and cultural irrelevance, but when it comes to who the West should listen to, who should receive the rewards of its attention, the circumstances are reversed: the third worlder who tells the West to hate itself and die is celebrated, while the Frenchman who tells the West to love itself and live is spat upon.

As a result of this self-loathing ennui, the only Westerners who can arouse any sense of moral fervour are those bent upon its destruction. Thus, early in the novel we have its most most quoted passage, words which Raspail places into the mouth of a young revolutionary come to torment an emeritus professor of French literature on the eve of the fleet’s landing:

Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door.

This quote is always presented without context, and I’d always taken it to be a warning, but the revolutionary who utters it means it as a taunt. He glories in the fact that the horde will erase every trace of Western civilization. The cultural wealth accumulated over thousands of years of history and tradition will be broken down and burned, leaving nothing behind but rubble and ashes, to be gawped at by historyless fellaheen who comprehend nothing of the ruins they inhabit, and do not care that they do not comprehend. To the broken mind of this revolutionary, such an annihilation is liberation. He is unable to see his own culture as anything but a biological crime.

The aged professor shoots the young man in the chest with a shotgun, so that he may enjoy his last preapocalyptic repast in peace.

The murder that Raspail opens with is in many ways the novel’s spiritual key. The old man is steeped in French culture, in its literature, its architecture, its cuisine, its music, its traditions, its virtues, and its vices. He loves it, all of it, not only because of its venerable glory, but simply because it is his. Therefore he cares for it, cultivates it, protects it. This emeritus professor of literature is France, the real France. The young revolutionary is the conscience of France turned against itself, which rejects everything that France is, and seeks the destruction of France as a positive good. The old man murders him without a second thought, and without shedding a tear, because to kill that which threatens everything that you love and everything that you are is simply the most natural and obvious thing in the world. His conscience does not trouble him in the slightest; indeed, he is so blasé about the execution that he promptly forgets that the corpse is even there. This is the soul of the West murdering its treacherous pity as an act of self-preservation. If the West was still capable of this instinctive ruthlessness, the entire apocalypse could have been prevented. A single airstrike launched from an aircraft carrier could have sunk the Last Chance Armada the moment it left port. Instead, France uses its air power only once: to destroy the last little oasis of French civilization that held out for a few days against the rising tide of colour.

The professor’s interaction with the youthful revolutionary is illustrative of the novel’s nuanced views on race and culture, which go well beyond the charges of crude racism that are leveled against the author. Both characters are French, and therefore necessarily biologically and culturally akin to one another. They speak the same language, have the same childhood faith, descend from the same tribes, share the same history, and were formed by the same land. However, the professor does not see the young man as being of his kind at all, and tells him as much just before shooting him. Whatever their other similarities, the young man is animated by a fundamentally different and alien spirit. He is ‘French’ in every way that counts, and therefore he is not French at all.

The young revolutionary whose pity has killed the Frenchman inside of him is later contrasted with an Indian man who has been adopted into the French family, whom we first meet when he calls into a radio show to warn against letting in a million Indians (they accuse him of false consciousness, and cut him off), and who is later seen heading towards the coast with two high-powered rifles. This character is almost uniquely sympathetic, because he places a higher value on European culture than even the Europeans do. Knowing the contrast between his homeland and his adopted country, and having nothing but gratitude in his heart for having been given the great gift of escape from the former, he wants nothing more in the world than to protect it. Despite being biologically Indian, and no doubt speaking French with a thick accent, it’s implied that this man is more French in the ways that count than most natural citizens of France. Lest the author be accused of civic nationalism (and perhaps Raspail would not find this such a slander), it’s important to emphasize that this is not a matter of paperwork: the malevolent Clement Dio is sufficient demonstration that this is not the case. The point is simply that it is possible, though perhaps it is rare, for those not born in the West to become of the West at least in a spiritual sense, and that a foreigner who has become spiritually Western is more meaningfully Western than a Westerner whose spirit has been poisoned. The friend is always better than the traitor, wherever the friend was born. Certainly the novel’s most racist characters - which is to say, its heroes - would agree with this, for they accept him as one of their own without hesitation.

The small band of heroes who gather at the doomed village – the only men in France who have the strength of spirit to kill their pity – have no illusions about their prospects. They know that their fates are sealed, and hope only to go out swinging, to take for themselves some small portion of glory, not because anyone who follows will care, not even out of some grim and dutiful northern courage, but as a man clinging to a vine on a cliffside enjoys the last sweet taste of a strawberry, indulging themselves in a kind of private joke. As Raspail puts it in one of the book’s numerous quotable passages:

The true Right is not serious. This is why the Left hates it, rather like a hangman must hate a victim who laughs and jokes on his way to the gallows. The Left is a conflagration that devours and consumes in deadly earnest. All appearances notwithstanding, its parties are as grim as one of those parades of puppets in Nuremberg or Beijing. The Right is a flickering flame that gaily dances, a jack-o’-lantern in the gloomy forest reduced to ashes.

It is no accident the true Right began to coalesce, a decade or so ago, only when it rediscovered the irreverent joi de vivre that Raspail identifies as its true nature, nor is it accidental that it was only at this point that the right began to claw its way to cultural influence. The joyless sermonizing of the moral majority and the passionless bloviating of respectable conservative movement think tank intellectuals were utterly ineffectual at preventing the West’s spiritual decline and demographic invasion. The cultural circumstances that Raspail illustrates are still painfully familiar; the trends he predicted have only accelerated; the suicidal left remains firmly in charge of the West’s institutions, and much of our population are still cordycepted by its psychic poison. The third world invasion that Raspail predicted is well under way, aided and abetted by the grandstanding sociopaths of Big Other who insist that we have a ‘duty to care’ for anyone and everyone but our own. The demographic trends point towards destruction: our fertility has collapsed; white majorities are propped up by childless boomers; in many of our countries, Mohammed is the most common name written down by nurses in maternity wards. You can either cry, or you can laugh, but laughter reignites that dancing fire which burns away the choking fog of pity; if enough of us laugh at the absurdity of our situation, we just might have a chance to overcome the Left’s devouring sanctimony.

The Camp of Saints is available on Amazon in audible, Kindle, paperback, or hardcover editions. The prices are very reasonable. You should read it. You should talk about it. You should give it to a friend to read. It may well be the most important novel of the last century.

I hope very much that you found this a worthy investment of the irreplaceable moments of your life, and would like to thank you for taking the time to read this. I’d especially like to thank my supporters, who make it possible for me to make a modest living by writing about books that I enjoyed, amongst other topics, and without whose generosity I should be forced to try to get a job building machine gods or something. No machine god was involved in writing this, by the way (aside of course from a bit of research); the entire thing was slapped together by one human, me, over the course of the last several hours. Anyhow, if you’d like to count yourself amongst the small, elite group who keep Postcards From Barsoom coming, you know what to do:

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For international readers not in the know, this is hockey terminology, referring to the aggressively defensive style of play adopted by hockey legend Gordie Howe, who would skate around the ice with his elbows out in order to deter checking.

Elbows Up has been spectacularly successful with Canada’s loud population of boomer leaflibs, offering them the opportunity to posture as patriotic (civic, you racist) nationalists after a lifetime spent fattening themselves on seed corn while imagining that there’s no countries and no religion too.

Just before Elbows Up started, the US hockey team defeated Canada 3-1. On Sunday, the US men’s Olympic hockey team defeated Canada 2-1 in sudden death overtime (or as it’s known in Canada, ‘free health care’ overtime). Just before that, the US women’s Olympic hockey team defeated their Canadian counterparts with the same score. The silver medallists were handed stuffed animals, as a humiliation ritual.

They look like they want to murder the guy who handed them the plush mascots by stuffing the booby prizes down his throat.

The US is now leading Canada 3-0 in international hockey. If you count the Stanley Cup as an occasional international match, a Canadian team hasn’t won since 1993. For a country that has long practically defined itself as the Hockey Nation, this is especially humiliating. Given the continual year-round repetition of the Elbows Up mantra, this is the kind of thing a Roman augur would have interpreted as a portent of divine disfavour.

Consistent with that interpretation, Canada’s recent humiliations have not been limited to sportspuck losses. What follows is a snapshot in time, headlines from a country beset by interlocking economic, demographic, spiritual, and political crises, a country which has not had good news in so long that it has forgotten what optimism even looks like.

Item: Canada recently watched the worst school shooting in Canadian history, and the second-worse mass shooting after the infamous 1989 Montreal Massacre in which “Mark Lepine”1 shot 14 female engineering students. The shooting took place in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, a small rural village in the country’s north, and claimed the lives of 10 people including the shooter, his mother, his brother, and several students. Dozens of others were injured. It soon turned out that the murderer was a trannie whose brain had been twisted into a psychotic pretzel by psychedelics, legal weed, SSRIs, and the gender woo he was force-fed at school, at home, and on Reddit. This has led to it being referred to as the Tumblr Shooting. Naturally, both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian media went out of their way to respect the shooter’s pronouns in all reporting and official communications. The media even made sure to give the shooter an AI filter glow-up, so that he could be remembered as the pretty girl we all know he really was deep down inside.

After a desultory and hilariously unsuccessful attempt at scolding the public that the problem wasn’t trannies, but guns or whiteness or something (blessedly, they couldn’t say “men” this time), the Canadian media just dropped it, though not before the government flew the flag at half mast.

Item: A former school board trustee in Chilliwack, British Columbia, was fined $750,000 for failure to respect pronouns. Shooting up a school is bad, but misgendering is unforgivable.

Item: Roughly five thousand Canadian tourists were stranded in Puerto Vallarta during a massive outbreak of cartel violence. As part of the Elbows Up campaign, the Canadian media has been encouraging Canadians to vacation in Mexico instead of Florida. Oops. A member of parliament for the New Democratic Party made sure to especially warn 2SLGBTQIA+ folx, who are especially in Mexico, and whose safety is especially important.

Item: Three men have been arrested in Toronto for sex trafficking girls as young as 11. It will amaze you to learn that their names are Mohamad, Mustafa, and Yousif. It seems unlikely that this is an isolated incident. Have pedophile rape gangs come to Canada? No information yet on the ethnic identities of the victims – we don’t know if the pedo-rapists were systematically targeting white girls. Word on social media is that the accused were released on bail less than 24 hours after being arrested; I haven’t seen this confirmed, but it’s depressingly plausible.

Item: A xeet went viral in which a leaflib tried to fact check an American poster making fun of 18-month MRI wait times by pointing out that she’d only had to wait six months, prompting widespread mockery from incredulous Yanks.

Pennsylvania, which has about 1/3 of Canada’s population, has more MRIs than all of Canada put together. The Canadian mind cannot comprehend, etc.

Item: Euthanasia via Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program now accounts for 1 death in 20 in Canada. The overwhelming majority, around 96%, of MAiD recipients are white, despite white Canadians comprising 86% of Canadians in the elderly demographic that dominates assisted suicide participants.

Since 2016 over 76,000 Canadians have been killed by MAiD. Moreover, the program is accelerating: the death toll in 2024 was the highest on record at 16,499. Annual death tolls have risen by around a few thousand every year since the program started, with no sign of stopping. Canada is expected to hit 100,000 MAiD deaths by summer.

Item: While most MAiD victims are elderly and infirm, this is not true in every case. Recently it came out that a 26-year-old man was euthanized, simply because he was depressed over his diabetes-induced blindness. His family allege that he doctor-shopped until he found one who would kill him (she has apparently killed several hundred others).

MAiD was originally billed as an easy, painless out for people with terminal illnesses, a dignified death that would spare them a few months of pointless agony. It’s now being extended to people whose imminent death is not reasonably foreseeable. Several Canadian Armed Forces veterans have been offered MAiD in lieu of treatment for injuries sustained in the course of their service.

The primary goal of MAiD is almost certainly to reduce pressure on Canada’s overstretched public health care system whilst simultaneously reducing the fiscal burden of pensioners on the federal budget. Someone looked at the financials, and concluded that unfunded liabilities were going to bankrupt the country when the boomers reached their 80s. Therefore the government is talking them into killing themselves. However, while they’re at it, they might as well expand the program to hasten demographic replacement within the younger sectors of the population pyramid.

Item: Struggling to attract recruits to its woke joke of a military, the Canadian government announced that it will now fast-track trained military personnel from foreign countries for entry into the country if they agree to join the Canadian Armed Forces. Service guarantees citizenship! The official line is that they’re just looking for doctors, nurses, and pilots, not combat troops. Given that the CAF is already trying to recruit non-citizen permanent residents, and has relaxed security screening procedures to streamline the non-citizen recruitment process, this assurance is difficult to take seriously. Tyrants have always understood that foreign mercenaries have the great advantage that they have no loyalty at all to the local population.

Fortunately for everyone worried about the spectre of foreign mercenaries being sent on search and destroy missions against Canadian dissidents, it appears that the DEI-focused Department of National Defence is particularly enthusiastic about recruiting gender horrors pushed out of the US military by the Department of War’s innovative “don’t put weapons in the hands of lunatics” policy. Famously excellent soldier material, those trannies.

Item: A spreadsheet made the rounds comparing the progress of the Great Replacement in Canada to various European countries. Canada is the clear winner. Its population has increased by almost 35% since the year 2000.

Virtually all of this increase has come from India. Since 2015, almost a million Indians have been granted permanent residency.

Given that fertility has been below replacement for decades (and in fact is one of the lowest in the OECD, with a TFR of 1.25 children per woman), this increase is entirely due to immigration. This is one of the fastest rates of mass immigration on the planet. Based on census data and immigration projections, every province west of Quebec is expected to reach around 50% white this year.

In response to public discontent with the rate of demographic change, the Canadian government has begun restricting Temporary Foreign Worker and international student visas, which it then celebrates as net zero population growth due to the (temporary) draw-down in “temporary” residents. However, permanent residency visas are still being granted at the rate of almost 400,000 per year, nearly 1% of the population. The Century Initiative – a predominantly Indian Canada of 100 million by 2100 – remains on track.

Item: A viral tiktok from an American ‘right wing extremism researcher’ who fled LA for Vancouver in order to escape the Trumpenreich elicited howls of laughter as she reported her discovery that the housing and cost of living crises in Canada are much worse than they are in the US. Welcome to Canada, where people are poor but everything is expensive.

Item: With two million Temporary Foreign Worker visas set to expire this year, Indian TFWs have formed a union, demanding that they be granted permanent residency. Naturally, labour union representatives and Marxists were there with them, in solidarity. This is part of a broader pattern of Indian international students and TFWs conducting protest actions in an effort to pressure the Canadian government into giving them concessions on visa terms, into halting deportations, and so on. Such actions occasionally succeed in twisting the Canadian government’s rubber arm.

Item: Three “Canadian” (Sikh) “Conservative” members of parliament travelled to their homeland to discuss Canadian immigration law with an Indian counterpart. The trip was apparently not publicly disclosed; the Khalistanis insist that it was for a wedding or religious pilgrimage or something, which is obvious nonsense. It’s far more likely that they were strategizing schemes for subverting Canadian immigration policies in order to maintain an uninterrupted flow of biomass from Indian villages, which has been slowed somewhat by the Carney government’s recent restriction of TFWs and student visas. Maintaining a high emigration rate is the explicit policy of Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, which views Non-Resident Indians or NRIs as they’re known on the subcontinent as a revenue source (remittances account for over 3% of the Indian economy), a foreign policy tool (via the beachheads in businesses and legislatures provided by the Indian diaspora), and revenge on the gora for the Raj.

Item: An infographic made the rounds that starkly illustrates the vast generational disparity of wealth in Canada. Boomers have captured virtually all economic gains of the last 50 years, while everyone under 30 is objectively worse off than their counterparts in 1976.

Item: Canada’s newspaper of record The Globe and Mail ran a story in which it was revealed that Canada’s per capita GDP is now lower than Alabama’s, one of the poorest states in the Union.

The story buried the lede. Canada’s average per capita GDP is dragged up by Alberta. Almost every other province has a per capita GDP lower than West Virginia’s.

I saw leaflibs trying to cope that GDP per capita isn’t a great metric, and that purchasing power parity should be used instead, but, lol.

Canada’s newfound poverty is due to a lost decade of economic growth, during which real GDP per capita effectively flatlined, beginning precisely when Justin Trudeau took over the country.

The economic growth flatline corresponds to a collapse in investment in industrial infrastructure.

Canada has lagged the US in industrial investment for decades, decoupling roughly when the North American Free Trade Agreement converted Canadian heavy industry from an independent economic engine into a cheap-labour parts manufacturer for the American auto sector.

As a result of systematic industrial underinvestment, a wide productivity gap has opened between Canadian and US workers. Canadian workers are now about 25% less productive than their American counterparts. The gap started around the same time that NAFTA was signed. NAFTA was predicated on leveraging lower average Canadian wages to compete with American manufacturing. This established a perverse incentive: rather than invest in machinery to make labour more productive, Canadian businesses had to keep wages low in order to remain competitive. This is the same trap that the American South fell into as a result of its reliance on slave labour, leading in turn to its defeat at the hands of the industrial north in the Civil War. It’s absolutely no accident that immigration kicked into high gear after NAFTA: the best way to keep wages low is to import low-cost labour.

Investment decisions always carry an opportunity cost. Capital invested in one enterprise is not available to invest in something else. Instead of investing in machinery and intellectual property, Canada has been pouring its investment capital into residential real estate development.

Ottawa’s economic development model is essentially to stoke the flames of a real estate engine by shovelling Indian biomass into the boiler, accelerated with a little bit of lighter fluid in the way of the drug cartel money laundering that the Crown makes the Mounties turn a blind eye to. This has resulted in some of the highest real estate prices on the planet. Homes have more than doubled in price since the 2008 crash, when Canada’s real estate markets didn’t actually crash the way American markets did; despite the lack of a market correction, the Bank of Canada ZIRPed the money supply with the same reckless enthusiasm as the Federal Reserve, leading to the runaway asset price inflation.

That asset bubble is now starting to deflate. Canadians simply cannot afford the million-plus dollars that a single-family detached dwelling goes for in the Greater Toronto Area. Making the situation even worse, a considerable fraction of housing development has been in the form of sub-500-square-foot shoebox condos that no one wants to live in at any price, let alone an extortionate price. These developments were built with investor-flipping rather than residency in mind. This is a very Chinese real estate model, which in China produced the infamous ghost cities where the Han stack up their retirement savings in uninhabited tower blocks like giant piles of concrete poker chips.

The problem is, no one is buying the shoebox condos. Consumers aren’t willing to pay those prices, and they aren’t willing to live in such cramped quarters. Investors aren’t willing to reduce their asking price, because they leveraged themselves to the eyeballs in order to buy in and would lose their shirts. The result is that the condo market is locked up, with large numbers of unsold units sitting in inventory, even as no one can afford a place to live, making developers reluctant to invest in new properties, leading to a collapse in new housing starts. Not only did Canada pour its investment capital into residential speculation rather than productive capital improvements, it poured its investment capital into useless eyesores unfit for human habitation. It’s one of the most spectacular examples of malinvestment in history.

Item: The historic, 114-year-old Saint-Paul Church in Montreal burned to the ground. The fire spread to surrounding buildings, requiring 148 residents to be evacuated.

Since the schoolocaust blood libel was first levelled at the Canadian people a few years ago, well over 100 churches have burned across Canada.

Just as in France, which has seen a rash of church arsons in recent years, the Canadian media steadfastly refuses to see any sort of pattern. In France the church burnings are very clearly the work of Muslims. In Canada they are more likely perpetrated by left-wing activists motivated by the purported complicity of the church in the purported genocide.

Item: A whistleblower from Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board has described a broken system that leads to asylum claims getting rubber-stamped. Asylum claims have grown dramatically, more or less entirely due to Indians trying to avoid deportation when their work or student visas expire. Asylum claimants now account for 1 in 84 people in Canada, with around 500,000 claimants residing in the country. While their cases are under review, they can’t be deported; if their claims are successful, they can’t be deported, and are eligible for extraordinarily generous benefits; if their claims are unsuccessful, no one bothers to deport them.

According to the whistleblower, the IRB deliberately overloads its adjudicators with massive case loads. Approval of an asylum claim is easy; rejection is extremely difficult; adjudicators who don’t clear their case loads fast enough get fired; the incentive is therefore to look the other way on obvious fraud and just wave everyone through. As a result 80% of asylum claims are approved, with many adjudicators achieving an impressive 100% approval rate. This is consistent with a report recently released by the C.D. Howe Institute, which described an efficiency-driven ‘File Review’ reform at the IRB that used the asylum claim backlog as an excuse to dispense with in-person screening.

The Canadian government pretends to reduce immigration by reducing temporary visas; Indians respond by gaming the asylum system; the Canadian government is only too happy to help them.

Item: One in five employed Canadians now work for the government at the municipal, provincial, or federal level.

In some provinces, the public sector share of employment rises to 1 in 3.

Prime Minister Carney has said that he’s downsizing the federal workforce by around 40,000 workers, which is a drop in the bucket next to the four million Canadians employed in the public sector. Over the last year, Canada’s private sector lost a quarter of a million jobs, while public sector employment barely budged.

Government jobs are highly desirable in Canada: better pay, more vacations, earlier retirement, guaranteed pensions.

There’s an almost perfect anticorrelation between public sector work and entrepreneurialism. As the number of well-paid busybodies within the regulatory state increases, going into business for oneself becomes that much harder. The government does not want you to be independent; independence is by definition hard to control; it wants you working for it, or for some large corporation, under the watchful eye of the HR department. In Canada, the route to success is not to go out and build things: it’s to get a comfortable sinecure with the state, and parasitize the productive economy.

Item: Canada has the highest rate of food inflation in the G7. Groceries are increasing in price at the rate of 6% per year. This rate is projected to increase in 2026.

Item: Canada’s real GDP shrank by -0.2% in Q4 of 2025, with an annualized rate of change of -0.6%, making Canada’s economy the worst-performing economy in the G7.

Item: Former Conservative Party Member of Parliament Matt Jeneroux crossed the floor to join the Liberal Party, the third such floor crossing since November, putting the Carney government within three seats of the 172 they need to form a majority government. The Liberals would have a majority government already, except that the three seats they’ve gained via defections have been offset by resignations from within the Liberal Party, leading to byelections. Two of the byelections are in safe Liberal seats, putting Carney very close to a majority.

Item: One might think that the Canadian electorate would be furious with the regime that has presided over the degradation of the Mediocre Brown North. To the contrary, a new Angus Reid poll shows the Liberal Party of Canada eating the Conservative Party alive.

If Carney can’t get a narrow majority by luring Conservative MPs into defecting, this poll suggests he can get a massive majority government by calling a snap election.

The inability of the opposition Conserve What? Party to capitalize on the LPC’s calamitous misrule may seem strange. Perhaps this compilation of Pierre Poilievre calling for direct flights to Amritsar (courtesy of ) explains it.

Item: Mark Carney has proudly announced a new strategic partnership with the People’s Republic of China, with Canadians getting visa-free travel to China (no one asked for this), in exchange for opening Canada’s market to Chinese electric vehicles (no one asked for this). Canadian media spun this as a great triumph, a canny move by a visionary geopolitical genius sticking it to the Americans by building bridges abroad. Coming as it does during reactivation of the Monroe doctrine, with the explicit intent of pushing Chinese Communist Party influence out of the Western hemisphere, the wisdom of cozying up to China is debatable. But then, there are CCP agents sitting as Members of Parliament, which the Canadian government refuses to identify or remove.

Here I’d just like to pause, in order to remind all of you that articles like this take time to write, because they’re written by a solitary human being, me, and not by an AI. They aren’t written quickly: research, editing, rewriting, all of it takes both time and effort. Moreover, I put all of this out for free. You don’t have to pay a cent, meaning that you can share this around without your friends getting annoyed that you sent them a link to a paywall. But this is also how I support myself, so, you know, I’ll just pass the hat, and now let’s get back to the show.

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Canada’s decline has not been favoured by the same passion and drama as that of the United States, Great Britain, or Europe. There have been no race riots burning through its cities, no migrant hordes pouring across its undefended frontier, no Pakistani rape gangs abusing hundreds of thousands of its little girls while its authorities looked on with smiling benevolence, no wild-eyed jihadis carving up its citizens for sport. Canadians have always been a calm and orderly people, stoic and quietly competent, and our country’s precipitous decline has been of exactly this character: tidy, serene, and patient, the outcome of a thousand conscientious administrative decisions whose vector sum is the slow Soviet grind of a stagnant economy, the relentless creep of ethnic replacement, the steady drumbeat of highway carnage unleashed by untrained Indian truck drivers, the souring of our once trustworthy institutions with corruption. Where America’s troubles have been a tropical hurricane, Canada’s have been a long, bone-chilling winter.

Canada should be one of the best countries in the world to live in. For much of its history, it was. It offers land in abundance, land which is blessed with a staggering bounty of fresh water, arable soil, forests, oil, natural gas, minerals of every precious and industrial variety. It has navigable rivers, the largest lakes in the world, and three coastlines. It borders only one country, which it is on good terms with. The population, though small and thinly spread, was until recently drawn almost entirely from British and Norman stock, two of the most creatively dynamic peoples of history. While the country has always lagged behind the US economically, there was a time that it more than made up for its strictly relative material poverty with the quality of life made possible by the social capital generated by a high trust Anglo society.

Land should be cheap. The birth rate should be high. Unemployment should be practically non-existent. Industry should be robust, feeding the country’s natural resource wealth into high-tech value-added manufacturing for export to the global market. Canadians should be as wealthy as Croesus.

Instead, land is among the most expensive in the world, fertility has crashed, jobs are scarce, and the economy is based largely on exporting the rawest of raw materials. Canada doesn’t even refine its own oil: its oil is refined in the US, and then imported back into the country at a markup.

This failure to capitalize on assets, this complacent preference for the easy way, has marked Canada’s political economy for generations. This applies to human capital as much as it does to natural resources. Canada has one of the most highly educated populations on the planet, with some of the best engineering schools. The University of Waterloo, for example, is world-renowned. Graduates find nothing to do in Canada, and so migrate to the south: there’s apparently a running joke in the Bay Area that Silicon Valley is a wrapper for the University of Waterloo. Canada invests in educating and training its young, and then allows that investment to evaporate into the American economy, deriving no benefit from that investment whatsoever.

Canada in 2026 is a deeply demoralized country: fragmented, economically moribund, confused, corrupt, emotionally depressed, and propagandized. The older generation is afflicted with a mad delirium, a bad kind of glassy-eyed crazy; they assiduously cultivate a stance of wilful ignorance towards the daily spectacle of national decay, while insisting with righteous moral fervour that the best way forward is full speed ahead with the very policies that have already wrecked the country, because anything else would be conceding a point to the hated Donald Trump and his horrible fascist MAGAt Nazis. The country’s native sons are ground under by onerous taxes, low wages, scant employment, expensive housing. The country’s native daughters are kept just a step above her sons via DEI initiatives which ensure they get first shot at cushy positions in the civil service, while also ensuring that they see native sons as beneath them, and therefore unworthy of marrying and bearing children with. Gangsters from Davos pick the bones of the country’s economy, working hand in hand with gangsters from the Punjab who lace the country’s political structure with the rot of third world corruption, running tax dodges and real estate scams and drug running operations that have representation in a parliament infiltrated by the Communist Party of China.

Walk the downtowns of any city in the country, whether large or small, and you will come across revenants bent double in the ubiquitous fentanyl fold. They are almost always white. Walk the affluent leafy suburbs of the GTA, and the prosperous inhabitants are almost all wearing turbans. Only twenty years ago, such neighbourhoods were white as the driven snow. Yet the government continues to insist that Canada is a racist settler state, that we must all do the work to overcome our racist white privilege, that the work of racists to efface themselves on behalf of their oppressed moral betters is never done ... even if the racist oppressors are getting through the winter by hugging a sidewalk heating vent and riding a synthetic opiod high, as is their privilege, while the oppressed races are parking Teslas in front of their three-million-dollar six-bedroom bungalows. Material conditions do not matter to the federal bureaucracy, aside of course from their own material conditions; it exists only to implement the cultic imperatives of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity; advancement within Ottawa’s insular court politics is predicated on one’s service to the triune devouring goddess of gay race communism.

Every public event, even Remembrance Day ceremonies, starts with a land acknowledgement, reminding white Canadians that they do not have moral title to the land their ancestors settled and civilized. Recently a court in Vancouver ruled that a huge swath of the city’s suburbs rightfully belongs to native bands because (they say, with no evidence beyond what they say) some of their ancestors went fishing there a few times, two hundred years ago. With that precedent set, native bands are moving to appropriate supposedly unceded land all over the country. The Canadian government insists that Canada is guilty of a genocide against the first nations, by way of attempting to integrate them into Canadian society via the boarding school model that was once considered the aristocratic gold standard of education. To this day, not a single body has been provided as evidence for this narrative. To point this absence of evidence out is denialism. The government is considering classifying residential school denialism as illegal hate speech. It does not consider providing evidence.

According to the Canadian government’s own official framework, then, Canada is a genocidal regime built on stolen land. What prevents Trump from cutting a deal with some Inuit chief, trading him a skidoo and a carton of smokes for title to the Northwest Territories? Or, for that matter, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, or any other adversarial leader of an acquisitive foreign power? On what grounds could Ottawa possibly argue that such a deal would be illegitimate? On what grounds can Ottawa argue that territory it says that it stole belongs to it? King Charles III himself opened his throne speech with a land acknowledgement, thereby implying that he is not actually the sovereign. Yet King Charles III is Canada’s sovereign. If Canada’s sovereign is not sovereign over Canada’s land, neither is Canada.

A lot of Albertans want out. Their province is a cash cow for Ottawa. Indeed, it is Ottawa’s only cash cow. Without Alberta’s oil, Canada goes bankrupt. Ottawa rakes off much of the province’s revenue, redistributing it to the rest of the country via welfare programs in order to maintain complacency. Without Alberta’s money, the other provinces have much less reason to stay within Confederation. On the other side of the country, sovereigntist sentiment in Quebec, long dormant, is rising once again. Separatism isn’t yet at a tipping point. Only about 1/3 of Albertans and Quebeckers support independence, nowhere near enough for the vaguely described ‘clear majority’ the Supreme Court mandated as one of the requirements for separation. Those numbers are still low, but numbers can change. Many remain undecided. Perhaps, if things continue to fall apart, the undecided can be swayed.

The title of this piece should be interpreted as a double entendre, with a silent question mark. Will Canada become the 51^st state? Canadians are opposed to this now, sure. Will they remain as opposed in the face of national bankruptcy? Scotland was never conquered by England. The United Kingdom was formed when the Kingdom of Scotland bankrupted itself with an ill-considered attempt to settle Panama. The colony failed, and Scotland went hat in hand to London, offering to recognize the English crown if only Westminster would guarantee their debts. Trump is of partial Scottish descent, by the way; perhaps he has exactly this in mind. A poll taken a year ago found that the fraction of young Canadians who would accept annexation increased considerably if they could convert what paltry assets they have into US dollars on a one to one basis. As I said at the time, at this point many Canadians are just haggling over the price.

Can Canada pick itself back up? At this point, under the current leadership, that seems even less likely than becoming part of the New Colossus. The parasites entrenched in Ottawa do not know how to build things anymore. They’ve lost the knack. All they can manage is decline. They are pure regulators: they can interfere, they can permit, they can forbid, but they cannot do. The modus operandi of this class is never to compel, they would not force you to do something, instead they simply prevent you from doing things by requiring you to get permits, which they withhold at their whim and discretion. The regulatory apparatus is gargantuan, employing legions of functionaries whose only job is to inhibit, all of whom are very well paid. The result is that vast sums disappear into infrastructure projects, without anything actually getting built. It is an extraordinarily inefficient way to build things, but the most efficient means ever devised for diverting productive capital towards legalized baksheesh.

So far, the Carney government’s celebrated bonanza of infrastructure spending has amounted to precisely nothing but spending. Funds have been allocated, but nothing has actually been built. Virtually everything remains in the planning stage, with no expectation of shovels breaking ground on most projects for years to come. The government’s great idea to revive Canada’s economy is that they will slightly reduce regulatory approval processes, say from five years to three. There is a great sense of urgency in media communications, but there is little apparent sign of motion in the real economy. There are ads trumpeting the coming Canadian industrial renaissance, promising that we will be our own best customer, that we will rebuild our industry by making what we need for ourselves. Last year the government gave the Stellantis corporation thirteen billion dollars to build an electric vehicle plant; once the check cleared, Stellantis decamped from the country, and announced that they would be building a factory for conventional vehicles in the US instead. The government says that Canada will rebuild its defence industry, as part of the new Defence Industrial Strategy, itself part of the effort to rebuild the military; meanwhile, we will be buying fighter jets from the US (or possibly Sweden), and submarines from South Korea.

One might speculate that the whole Building Canada operation is a mafia bustout operation on an international scale. Carney will run up the national credit card, diverting the cash flow to his friends at Brookfield, pocketing a healthy percentage himself of course. When it all inevitably unravels, he’ll stroll off into the sunset, crying all the the way to the bank, leaving behind a broken country with nothing to its name but the ashes of nostalgia and its insolvent dreams.

Perhaps I am merely being cynical and impatient. It takes time to get things moving, after all. At least that’s the excuse. Yet there are reasons to be skeptical. The people in Carney’s government are the same people who ran Canada into the ground over the last decade. For all his nationalist rhetoric, Carney’s substantial investment portfolio is almost entirely American. That is not the market position of a man with absolute confidence in the Canadian economy, but it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of a man aiming to profit from a controlled demolition. It’s worth remembering that Carney was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, a period during which Britain’s economy flatlined. In 2020 he served as Trudeau’s COVID-era economic advisor, a period during which Canada’s economic decline accelerated. Carney’s presentation is calm and reassuring, communicating that the adults are back in charge; Carney’s record inspires the opposite of confidence.

There is no hope to be had in the opposition political parties. The Conservative Party of Canada are ideologically almost indistinguishable from the Liberal Party. The Conservative Party just had their annual conference a few weeks ago, in Calgary. They voted to continue allowing foreign nationals to vote in internal party elections, which has apparently been standard practice for some time; that foreign nationals are allowed a say in party policy and leadership should be shocking (of course, the Liberal Party are no better). They also voted to maintain a policy of recognizing pronouns, because of course, nothing is more conservative than gender voodoo.

Bizarrely, there is almost no populist right-wing political party to challenge the left-globalist regime’s lock on Canadian governance. Canada is almost alone in this. In the US, MAGA has seized the White House; in Britain, Reform is poised to sweep the next election, while Rupert Lowe’s newly-formed Restore Britain party is dragging the Overton window hard to the right on remigration; in Australia, One Nation has surged to the head of the polls. The closest equivalent in Canada is the People’s Party, currently polling below 1%, which despite almost a decade on the scene has completely failed to connect with the Canadian people. Personally, I suspect that’s because of Maxime Bernier’s poor leadership, and because of Bernier’s spergy libertarianism, which does not align at all with the Canadian national character.

The one bit of light at the Conservative Party conference, and indeed the only bright ray in the entire depressing litany of woe that this post has become, was Daniel Tyrie’s Dominion Society, who showed up to troll the Conservatives by unveiling the question “Conserve What?”

This question sent the Conservative Party into hyperventilating rage, as you can see for example in this scolding reply from a CPC member of parliament.

The Dominion Society formed last summer, and has grown explosively since then, with over two thousand dues-paying members around the country.2 One of those members, in the interests of full disclosure, is me. If you’re Canadian, one of those members should also be you. It’s only $25 a year, and you get a cool pin.

The Dominion Society aren’t a political party, but a non-partisan advocacy group formed to advance the cause of remigration. They are willing to work with politicians from any party who will support remigration. As it stands such politicians are thin on the ground. However, the Dominion Society are making waves. They’re dominating social media, gathering attention, forcing politicians to engage with them, rage at them, complain about them, and, more importantly, involuntarily propagate the idea of remigration – forcing them to use the word, and forcing them to explain why, if ten million people can be imported into a country, ten million people can’t also be exported ... why it is wise and just and moral to bring in ten million people without the consent of the governed, but it is unwise and unjust and immoral to send them away when this is what the people want.

There is of course no possibility of Canada’s existing political class remigrating their clients. Many of them are ideologically committed to white replacement. Many represent the invaders directly. Many of the rest are simply bought off. It’s true that Carney has restricted Temporary Foreign Workers and student visas, leading to the first negative nominal population growth in decades. However, asylum claims (almost entirely from Indians trying to game the system) have exploded. Meanwhile, permanent residents and new citizens are still being added at the rate of around three or four hundred thousand a year. Canada’s population replacement continues on track; the TFW and student visa draw-down is nothing more than an attempt to mollify an exasperated population, a delaying tactic with the aim of waiting them out. That said, simply by doing that, they’ve taken a step back, and implicitly admitted that unlimited immigration is not necessarily the best course of action.

Even if Canada stopped adding new residents today, the damage is already done. Canada went from being a 90% white country in the 1990s to a 60% white country today, with most of English Canada closer to 50% white. Even if the leak in the hull is plugged, which it isn’t, the boat will still sink if the water isn’t pumped out. Mainstream Canadian political discourse is between Liberals who insist that plugging the leak is racist, and Conservawhatives who insist that pumping is racist: both parties are unified in judging racism as worse than anything.

There’s almost nothing wrong with Canada that remigration would not fix. Remigration would take pressure off of real estate demand, ending the housing crisis. Remigration would apply pressure to wages, redistributing money to working Canadians in the short term, and incentivizing productivity-boosting capital investment in the long term. Remigration would end the slaughter of Canadians on our highways. Remigration would clear ethnic corruption out of our legislatures. Remigration would ease the load on the Canadian healthcare system, making euthanasization of the elderly less necessary.

Remigration would give us our country back.

Remigration is the only way we can get our country back.

The odds are certainly against us. The Dominion Society has grown fast, but it’s still small and marginal, a few small sparks of nationalist energy flying out across the country to ignite a few small embers of resistance against Canada’s destruction. The most probable outcomes are the outcomes with the highest entropy: the continued decay of the country as it is steadily colonized by the subcontinent’s excess biomass, or breakup and cannibalization by the monster to the south, or both. There’s a thin golden thread, suspended high above an abyss, that leads to a future worth living in. But entropy is for dead matter. It is precisely the function of consciousness to identify such golden paths, and navigate them. It is through organizations such as the Dominion Society that the national consciousness necessary to avoid national destruction can be awakened. You should get involved.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. It isn’t the deepest analysis I’ve ever done – headline roundups are kind of low effort, I know – but the news in Canada has been so damn bleak of late that I felt it worthwhile to take the time to compile this, and honestly I just needed to get it out of my system. Frankly I’d rather be writing essays about political philosophy or space travel or aliens or whatever, of which I’ve got a few in the pipeline, or for that matter science fiction stories, of which I’ve got a few others I’ve been working on. Anyhow, I hope you found this to be a worthwhile application of your irreplaceable attention. As always, I would like to express my boundless gratitude towards my patrons, whose generosity enables me to support myself by writing about these things.

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Well, yes. That’s exactly what I’m doing.

To be honest, I’ve been in something of a creative slump the last few weeks. I’ve started a few pieces, but nothing quite got to the level where I felt it was worth sharing, despite some of them already having gotten rather long. You’d be surprised, maybe, to know how often that happens – I publish maybe one word in ten of what I actually write.

It’s also, quite frankly, been something of a shit month. There was an unexpected death in the family, which generated an unexpected amount of work, and no sooner was that deal with than the temperature plummeted into the minus mid-twenties centigrade over a sustained period of weeks, a regime in which my hibernating metabolism puts my brain into power saving mode. This time last year I was enjoying the Argentinian summer, a much easier climate in which to think. Then there have been various other demands on my time relating to my earlier academic career (which is more of a hobby now, albeit a hobby with obligations...) and a search (which I hope is now complete) for a more permanent domicile satisfying my criteria of location, size, and affordability. The ability to even contemplate such a purchase is in no small part due to the support some of you have shown, and it is really impossible for me to properly express the depth of my gratitude. Of course, that also accentuates my guilt over not having shared anything with you over the last month, but I cope by telling myself I don’t want to publish crap.

When not taking refuge in cozy William Gibson novels, I’ve been wasting entirely too much time on social media, which is easy to do when your energy levels are shot, and which I really need to take a break from because I’m starting to get screenburn. It’s not without its savage joys, however. Sunday was Canada’s Flag Day, on which we commemorate the replacement of the old Red Ensign with the modern Liberal Leaf, and this year the event was marked by an uprising. Canadian nationalists Ensignmogged the replies of the House of Commons, the Senate, the prime minister, the leader of the loyal opposition, and anyone else of any prominence who posted a leaf. Some of those threads had hundreds of replies, all posting Red Ensigns, Canadian shields, and demands to give us back our flag. You really love to see it.

Here’s a thread I wrote for Flag Day, giving a quick intro to the shenanigans surrounding Canada’s adoption of the new flag, as well as the symbolic meaning of the new flag (shallow, meaningless) and the old flag (rich, deep):

(btw, many have pointed out that there’s no difference between the two top flags in the infographic with which I opened this thread; this is because the first flag is wrong, it includes the Cross of Saint Patrick which wasn’t part of the Union Jack at that time).

Of course, some have suggested that the old Red Ensign is a bit dated, given the Union Jack dominating a quarter of the area. I’m not sure I agree – Australia and New Zealand retain it, and it’s an indication of imperial British origins, which after all Canada was founded upon. Then again, the shield already accomplishes that nod to historical rootedness, and it’s fun to imagine something a bit different, which centres the Canadian shield, further emphasizes the heraldic Medieval aesthetics, and introduces a bit of pleasing asymmetry, for instance by placing the shield between a white Saxon dragon in the East and a white Canadian polar bear in the West:

All of this ensign stuff may seem like terminally online nonsense, but I really don’t think it is. Only a few years ago Canadians were barely even aware that the Red Ensign or the Canadian Shield existed. They had been effectively erased from history. Then nationalists pulled them out of the memory hole and repurposed them as battle standards around which to rally the Canadian chuds, reawakening their sense of themselves as a people. The growth in its popularity online has been explosive. There is no longer much of a distinction between online and off; the idea that “the Internet isn’t real life” isn’t true anymore, because the Internet ate the world. What happens on social media bleeds out into the streets. It’s also worth keeping in mind that there are far more people who lurk social media than there are who actively post. Here on Substack, for example, the typical view to comment ratio is around 100:1; on X, the view to reply ratio is generally a factor of 10 higher. If you’ve got hundreds of people posting something, that’s probably indicative of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, who agree. Anyhow, here’s Conservative Member of Parliament David Bexte posting about how much he loves the Red Ensign.

In between all of this lollygagging, I’ve been on a couple of podcasts, which I’ll share further down, but first I’d like to announce an event I’ll be speaking at in June: the 2026 Dominion Congress, organized by Scyldings, the promo art for which goes hard as fuck.

The event will take place June 26^th to 28^th in Southern Ontario. It will not be recorded; the only way to see the talks is to attend in person. It’s a bit pricey but it includes the hotel room, which I imagine accounts for a large fraction of the sticker price. Other speakers include (who I understand is yet to confirm), , , and Der Schattenmacher, which is a good mix of Canadians and Europeans. There’s also a surprise guest, whom many of you will know, who will be announced tomorrow.

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll speak about, though I suspect I’ll be adapting a piece I’ve been plugging away at off and on since the summer, tentatively titled All The Way To True North. The prospect of a public appearance also gives me some motivation to buckle down and lose the poundage I accumulated over the holidays ... between Christmas, the family death, and the freezing cold I didn’t see the inside of a gym for a couple months, which has played its own role in my midwinter melancholia (I finally dragged myself back into the gym this week, which feels great, by which I mean that my everything is wonderfully sore).

You can find out more about the event, and purchase tickets, here:

https://scyldings.com/dominion-congress-2026/

So, the podcasts. First up was an appearance on with Michael Farris. Michael is a wonderful interviewer, who knows just how to draw his guests out: what to ask, when to speak, when to let the guest talk. A gentleman and a professional. I tortured the poor man a bit by postponing a few times due to aforementioned unexpected circumstances, but when we finally sat down we had a great discussion. He started out by asking me about how and why I started writing, from where the conversation naturally drifted towards the state of academia, the state of entertainment media, events in Minneapolis, and the Amelia phenomenon.

You can find an ad-free episode here on Substack:

Coffee and a Mike

New Podcast with John Carter

John Carter is the author of the substack Postcards From Barsoom. He talks what led him to start his substack, his time in academia, the state of film/books, Minneapolis, how to ‘take over’ elite schools, his recent article titled “Amelia Sans Merci,” rise of AI, censorship, solutions, and much more. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE LIKE AND SHARE THIS PODCAST…

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4 months ago · 26 likes · 6 comments · Coffee and a Mike and John Carter

Or you can watch for free, but with regular interruptions by ads intended to annoy you to death, on YouTube:

The second podcast was with with , who had me on a year or two ago. This was another great discussion, covering entirely different subject matter. Ben picked my brain on the subject of an Albertan independence referendum, Canadian annexation into the New Colossus, and the Ukrainada scenario. After that we switched gears to discuss institutional breakdown and the generational political divide.

On the subject of Alberta, I’ll say that polling data so far has support for sovereignty at around 1/3 of the population. This is significant, and a sign of deep dissatisfaction in Canada’s alienated western provinces, but not yet at the level where separation is a probable outcome. It’s further worth pointing out to western readers that independence might not be the panacea they hope for. The Conservative Party of Canada is representative of western elites, and they’re every bit as enthusiastic about mass migration as the Liberal Party of Canada is. If anything, the CPC is more enthusiastic: the Liberals dashed to the right of the CPC on immigration over a year ago, and after they started restricting student and Temporary Foreign Worker visas, the CPC responded by grilling them in the House of Commons over being mean to foreigners by telling them to go home when their visas expire. Then there was the utter fiasco of the recent CPC conference in Alberta, during which the party voted to uphold a policy allowing non-citizens to vote in party elections (yes, really: our political candidates are chosen for us by foreigners), and to uphold some kind of gender woo pronoun policy. The point is, learn from Brexit: Brexiteers were motivated largely by the desire to prevent the inundation of the Yookay by even more third world migrants than the country had already absorbed, and Britain’s Conservative Party rewarded them with the Boriswave.

Institutional breakdown is an interesting subject. This isn’t just a function of the usual narrative of competence collapse thanks to fumbling diversity hires, though of course that’s a large factor. Something I haven’t seen people talk much about is that people are quietly opting out of institutional employment. Again, this isn’t only a political thing, with white males abandoning the woke cathedral. Millennials and younger, of whichever political persuasion, have grown up online. That means they’re used to a media environment in which they read, watch, and do what they want, when they want, how they want. The characteristic entertainment medium is not the book or the broadcast, but the open world game. This makes younger generations particularly impatient both with managerial hierarchies, which tend to tightly constrain individual initiative, and with 9-to-5 workdays, which feel quite opressive if you can get your work done in a few hours. This is probably especially acute for the more intelligent and competent, for whom being managed by people of lesser ability is a professional affront.

As an example, I can point to an educator I know, who abandoned secure employment as a public school teacher to pursue her fortune as a tutor. In doing so she gave up a good pension, benefits, and a steady paycheck for an uncertain income from personal clients. However, she also gained the freedom to set her own hours, rather than being locked to the school day; the freedom to teach in whichever way she thinks best, using whichever methods and materials she chooses, rather than teaching the curriculum chosen for her by the Ministry of Education in precisely the way the midwits of the Ministry tell her to teach it; and the freedom to choose her own clients, rather than being required to endure whatever behavioural problems get dumped in her classroom. While her income is much lower in the short term, the upside potential is effectively unbounded, and dependent largely on her own effort and performance rather than on whatever seniority schedule the teacher’s union negotiates with the Ministry.

That’s just one example, of course. I suppose I’m another example myself, as are many of my friends. I hear sometimes of recruitment problems at large employers in both the public and private sector; this is usually attributed to HR Karens and their woke AIs filing every resume from a qualified white male in the circular bin, and that’s definitely a factor, but I suspect that many are also simply choosing to work for themselves, turning side-hustles into self-sustaining careers. The hassle of getting hired at a large institution – sending out hundreds of resumes, jumping through hoops of multiple interview rounds – just isn’t worth whatever salary and benefits they offer, especially when you factor in the annoyance of having to follow asinine directives from corporate, especially when there’s no guarantee you won’t simply get fired a few months or years down the road when an Artificial Intelligence or an Actual Indian gets your job, and have to go through the whole humiliating grind again.

As before, the ad-free version of the episode is behind a paywall here on Substack:

Kontrarian Korner

Kontrarian Korner #85 - John Carter

Yesterday I had John Carter back on the podcast to catch up on everything going on in Canada. We got off into different rabbit holes on the problems facing the West, from immigration, the breakdown of the insti…

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3 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Ben Kelleran

But you can also listen to the free but aggravating ad-supported version on YouTube:

That’s all for now. I hope to have something with greater meat on it for you soon. Thank you all very much for your patience, for taking the time to read this, and most especially for your support.

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Shout Out UK, which describes its mission as ‘countering disinformation through political and media literacy’, released a ‘visual novel’ called Pathways, subtitled ‘navigating the Internet, gaming, and extremism’. The game itself is of course terrible, a ham-fisted ‘teaching aid’ intended to remind British teenagers that even innocuous and entirely peaceful activities – downloading memes, speaking your mind, watching videos, researching things for yourself, attending rallies – will complicate their lives if they draw the concerned and empathetic eye of the managerial state, which after all just wants what’s best for them.

Prevent, if you haven’t heard of them, are a group of government-funded busybodies whose remit is to prevent extremism via early intervention, catching impressionable youth before they can be radicalized. The organization was nominally started to deal with Islamic terrorists, but in recent years it has focused on the ‘right-wing extremism’ of the native British to the exclusion of all else. The Southport butcher Axel Rudakubana, for instance, was referred to Prevent multiple times for his open glorification of white genocide, which Prevent ignored completely.

The player can choose either a male or female character, both of whom are amusingly and awkwardly referred to with they/them pronouns, with grammatical abominations such as “Charlie decided to look for themselves” sprinkled throughout. The character is then placed in a series of scenarios and made to choose between good and bad options: downloading extremist content or telling an adult; agreeing with a classmate that ethnic minorities are being shown favouritism at the expense of native youth vs clapping back at her unconscionable bigotry; watching a video and reading more about the subject or ignoring it; accepting or refusing an invitation to join a secret group chat; attending an anti-immigration rally or staying home. If you make the bad choice, a little ‘extremism metre’ goes into the red.

At the conclusion of his misadventures, Charlie gets referred to Prevent, who provide him (“them”) with counselling by a friendly brown man (or, in an alternate ending discovered by anons who scraped the game from Shout UK’s webpage, an extraordinarily ugly hijabi) who leads him away from extremism and helps him to learn to love Little Sister.

“Do you have someone to talk to about ideological thoughts, Anon?”

If you want to play the game for yourself, your best bet is probably to download the archived version of the Government Approved Goth Girl Dating Simulator. I was able to play it a week ago, but since then it gets stuck on the loading screen, which at first I thought was because they’d taken it offline, but is probably just because Shout Out UK has gotten DDOSed by an entirely unexpected surge of interest in their execrable product (or maybe it’s just that the Shout Out UK website has a dead link on its page, as after poking around a bit on their website I was able to find one that works). Alternatively, you can find most of the screenshots archived here.

Had it not been for one unfortunate creative choice made by the development team, no one would have taken any notice of Pathways. It would have been one of countless cringe-inducing training aids churned out by regime-adjacent quangos cashing in on the flood of taxpayer lucre sluicing through the DEI-and-disinformation industry. But for some reason, which can be explained only by a calamitous failure on the part of Shout Out UK to develop an accurate theory of mind for their target audience, the creators of Pathways decided that it would be a great idea to cast the awful bigot leading the protagonist step by step to his ideological doom in the form of a cute alt girl, thereby sending the message that embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf.

All it took was one anon to take notice of her.

Bovril-Gesellschaft’s yearning declaration of love for Amelia racked up 3.6 million views. He clearly wasn’t the only one to be captivated by the racist art ho.

Anons were entranced, the Satanic mills of the data centres began clacking in response to their furious prompting, and hundreds of Amelia images flooded onto the Internet.

Bovril, who writes under here on Substack, has taken the time to write up his own thoughts on Amelia’s explosive emergence over the last week. He’s more concise than I am, and he actually explains what a tulpa is, so this is an excellent primer:

Bovril-Gesellschaft

Thoroughly Modern Millie

In 1924, the French explorer and polymath Alexandra David-Néel managed to penetrate the virtually forbidden city of Lhasa disguised as a mendicant Buddhist monk. The record of her unprecedentedly lengthy stay in Lhasa, and her other travels around Tibet, published in 1929 as “Magicians and Mystics in Tibet”, contains the first mention in Western literat…

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4 months ago · 17 likes · 6 comments · Augustan Age Pervert

Amelia is almost perfectly adapted for AI meme generation. Her identifying characteristics – purple hair, a black choker, a beauty spot on her cheek (which is often forgotten), and pink and purple clothing – are specific enough to make her immediately recognizable, but general enough that a prompt can reliably retrieve an Amelia from latent space.

Around the same time that Amelia was being born, images of Persian women lighting their cigarettes with the Ayatollah’s photograph went viral.

Now you can say “Wow, torches of freedom, straight out of Bernays! How original!’ but the fact is that these images were far more striking than they would have been if the women were just holding burning pictures of Khamenei. People burn politicians in effigy all the time. By using his picture to light their cigarettes they displayed a casual insouciance towards the Islamic regime, demonstrating that its destruction is for them an almost recreational activity. The act is a symbolic rejection not only of the control structures of Islam – as also symbolized by their hijab-free, wholly secular hair – but also a rejection of the control structures of managerial globalism, which has turned smoking into a taboo act in the course of its relentless drive towards a Smoke-Free World By 2030, apparently (and bizzarely, when you think about it) one of their highest policy priorities. Even Iran, a pariah state in every other respect, is a signatory to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and has had an indoor smoking ban since 2007. When these protesters take to the streets against the Islamic regime, they risk torture and even death; due to the Internet shutdown there, we don’t have exact figures, but estimates range from 2000 to 20,000 butchered by the Mullah’s thugs. If they’re willing to trade their lives for their freedom, why would they care about the health risks of smoking?

Anyhow, I obviously had to get in on the fun.

Inspired by the courageous and beautiful Persians, I made my own first contribution to Amelia, depicting her lighting her cigarette with a burning picture of Keir Starmer, or with a burning progress pride flag.

Whether in imitation, or inspired directly by the Persians, similar images soon appeared.

Ten images of Amelia smoking in more casual circumstances began appearing.

So I guess in addition to purple hair, Britishness, and racism, another of Amelia’s canonical characteristics is that she’s a smoker, which honestly fits the archetype of a rebellious alt girl. It’s possible this is my fault. Oops.

Ah, and now we hit the half-way mark. the point at which a less generous writer would lock everything behind a paywall. Five thousand words, upwards of a hundred images lovingly curated over a week of work … no one could blame me for a paywall. But I am vain, and wish to be read; I am generous, and wish to share everything with you. There’s absolutely no reason for you to take out a paid subscription: you can keep reading for free. But you’ll feel better about yourself.

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Amelia’s explosive popularity seems out of step with the image of the right as conservative and traditionalist. This may be what led to Shout Out UK’s fortuitous misstep in the first place (assuming that Amelia wasn’t just the creative director’s shadow persona self-insert, which is distinctly possible). Rightists, they may have reasoned, are generally hostile to the aposematic fashions beloved of the left’s gender-ambiguous hall monitors. Reactionary Christian conservatives prefer their girls to be demure, submissive, and modest; they dislike tattoos, piercings, and brightly coloured hair. By associating nativist extremism with a purple-haired alt girl, they’ll drive the chuds away from racism! It’s brilliant!

This trad self-conception is widely shared on the right, but then the right is not monolithic, and the online right especially is not your father’s country club tax policy conservatism. To the contrary, it is a young, radical, rebellious antinomianism. The right’s aesthetic presentation doesn’t really reflect this, yet. There’s often an overweening concern with appearing ‘presentable’, as though dressing in business suits or polo shirts will somehow confer the image of middle-class respectability that will force the institutions to validate rightist cultural politics the way the optometrist validates your parking. This isn’t going to happen, of course, and I’ve thought for a while that this conservative presentation is a gross strategic error. The right should instead embrace the ready-made aesthetics of the antihero: leather jackets, sunglasses, leather boots, and so on. it should take its aesthetic cues from heavy metal, punk rock, jazz, industrial, and techno, not country and western or easy listening Christian contemporary. It should dress with a bit of edge.

Amelia’s resonance is a function of her subversion of contemporary sartorial norms, which code Manic Panic hair as visual shorthand for insufferable shitlibbery. Amelia as Antifa, as screeching open-borders activist, as gender warrior fluent in pronounese, would be entirely unremarkable, and indeed passe. Even the choker is more troon-coded than slut-coded these days: as many have pointed out, it hides the Adam’s apple. Such types have been around for a decade now; people are tired of them, not just exasperated but bored to the point of exhaustion. Amelia as chudette, as sweet-natured Nietzschean e-girl, as rabid remigrationist with a fag in one hand and a burning fag flag in the other, this is something unexpected, novel, and therefore interesting. The right-wing is not supposed to be visually striking, it is not supposed to grab eyeballs with loud colours, it is expected to be aesthetically dull and uninspired, it is supposed to behave and obey the rules (which were written so that it will always lose). Amelia presents possibilities that haven’t been explored yet ... if the authoritarian den mothers of the longhouse can appropriate punk rock fashions and wear them like a skinsuit ... could not a cyberpunk right do the same?

We memed the OK sign into being a white power dogwhistle. We could do the same to purple hair. We can do that to anything. All we have to say now is “This thing is ours,” and the left recoils and starts attacking people who use, like, or wear that thing. Symbol by symbol we take back the culture. Reconquista via cultural appropriation.

To be sure, such a right would be a very different right. It would be a right that no longer tries to hide its power level, a right which is willing to come out of the closet and announce its presence via an identifiable and prominent aesthetic. Hiding power levels is already a losing game, in any case: the women have already determined that the well-dressed, fit young men they encounter are mostly Nazis, and they moan that they cannot find men who look like Republicans but vote like Democrats. Maybe their moans will be of a different variety, in time.

Amelia poses a question. Can we hyperstition manic pixie dream radicals into existence? This is almost the same question as: can we psyop the existing supply of art hos into adopting right-wing opinions? Can they be seduced to the dark side, which is to say to the forces of the good, the true, and the beautiful? At the individual level it’s a known phenomenon that women will tend to adjust their beliefs to match those of their boyfriends and husbands; can we do this at the collective level, as well? Can we hold frame, letting them know that gay race communism might offer them a ‘career’ but at the price of romantic loneliness ... that they have to choose between being ‘good’, and being loved? Women love nothing more than male attention. By projecting the political imperative of remigration and reconquista onto a whimsical avatar, perhaps a signal can be transmitted into the collective mind ... ‘Men want this ... you can be this ... doesn’t it look like more fun than whatever you’re doing right now?’

Whether Amelia will have staying power remains to be seen. The majority of memetic characters are mayflies in the maelstrom. Perhaps in a month she’ll be forgotten, like Winter-chan or Corona-chan, a footnote in the genealogy of memes. But perhaps not. Here I’ll be gauche, and quote myself at length, from my essay The Reenchantment of the World (which is long, but which you should read anyhow), about what memes really are.

The purest and most powerful form of modern mythology, however, is not to be found in comic books, fantasy novels, or conspiracy theories, but in the humble and unserious meme, which has grown to encompass, supersede, and transcend the other forms with its ubiquity.

...

Strictly speaking, Pepe the Frog is not an anonymous creation: he began as an ordinary cartoon character first drawn by Matt Furie. Furie, however, merely planted a seed; the profusion of rare Pepes that came later emerged from the enthusiasm of an army of anons energized by the atmosphere of ludic mania and eerie synchronicity that surrounded the 2016 Trump campaign. Before Trump was elected, Pepe had been deified via his connection with the primordial Egyptian god of cosmogonic chaos, Kek ... the infamously chaotic anonymous message board had adopted a frog as its mascot, which turned out to have a connection to an elder god of chaos; the god’s name was itself a synchronicity, being identical to the Korean rendering of LOL that had been in use on 4chan for years; furthermore, that god’s name, written in the sacred lexigraphy of the Egyptians, was a clear visual prophecy that anons would one day use their computers to change the world. This fueled the half-serious, half-ironic belief in meme magic on the forum – the notion that memes could be used to prophecy, or perhaps even to change reality. Proliferation of a meme could establish a sort of resonance between the consciousness of human beings and the universal mind, leading to the manifestation of the meme in reality. Anons were not simply pranksters and political propagandists, but magickal adepts casting spells with funny cartoons; or perhaps the magick was merely a prank in service of political propaganda; or perhaps the political propaganda was magick, in service to a prank.

...

Over time the archetypal phase space has become populated with a profusion of dramatis personae...

This memetic pantheon is continuously evolving; we have caught it at a particularly early stage. ... For now it serves as a shared visual language, one that belongs to everyone and no one. There are no central authorities from whom updates emerge, no steering committees, no focus groups. The memetic pantheon cannot be appropriated by the decision of a board of directors; it cannot be redirected by the demands of political activists; it cannot be subordinated to the imperatives of marketing or public relations; it exists outside of the control of any individual or group. It forms the cultural matrix holding together the otherwise fractious tribes of the dissident right.

...

The regime has its narrative, which it communicates using the pseudo-mythological tools of public relations firms, marketing agencies, movie studios, news corporations, and academia; and we have our counter-narrative, which is communicated using the neomythological prelinguistic glyphic lyric poetry of memes. Whether on Trump, Brexit, immigration, COVID-19, the Russo-Ukrainian war, global warming, MeToo, gender ideology, feminism, nutrition, or almost any other subject of consequence, we have been using memes to weave stories for years, the warp and weft of which comprise a sort of poetic epic, a metanarrative that we are composing together, without funding, without asking permission, indeed in the face of explicit prohibition, waging insurrectionist mindwar with funny jokes for the joy of it.

Like every established and true member of the memetic pantheon, like Pepe, Wojak, the Yes Chad, Gigachad, and all the rest, Amelia was not so much created but encountered. Obviously, like Pepe, she was in a sense invented – in her case by a bottom-feeding state propaganda agency – but her invention was almost entirely unintentional. Her original creator had no idea of the purpose that she’d serve, and it was not the moment of her creation but the moment of her acknowledgement that marked her entrance into the zeitgeist.

The outpouring of memes that followed this recognition testifies to the strength of the resonance. Amelia is the work of many anonymous hands, an emergent phenomenon that belongs to no one specific creator or corporate entity the way an IP does, and which is therefore beyond the control of any one person or corporation.

The shocking rapidity with which Amelia emerged, and the deafening volume of her emergence, was almost entirely enabled by AI. This is another aspect that makes Amelia unique: she’s the first memetic character (that I know of) to emerge during the AI era. Previous meme characters relied upon PhotoShop and MS Paint. The image volume these earlier technologies produced was shocking for the time; AI accelerates this process, as it reduces the image generation time to seconds and eliminates any particular need for artistic skill ... all one need do is write a prompt, which essentially anyone can do. We’ve seen similar AI-driven meme cascades over the last couple of years – Franklin, Ghiblification, edgy Pixar-style images making fun of Clinton’s Epstein connection, that sort of thing – but this is the first time that I’m aware of that this technological capacity has gathered together so much psychic energy and channelled it towards a personified Schelling point in latent space, and that feels like something novel.

There’s an almost devotional character to this collaborative egregore creation, and has been since memetic characters first began to enter into cultural politics. The transhumanist nerds in Silicon Valley have expected for decades that the gods of the future would be AIs, but I think they’re wrong about this. AI on its own is just a utility, a mechanical slave that does more or less whatever you tell it to do, so long as you know the right way to ask. They’re useful and technically impressive, but they’re ultimately no more sacred than a scroll, a book, or an operating system: just information technology, fundamentally the same as any other. That is not to say that a scroll, or a book, or even an operating system cannot be sacred, of course...

But it is not the technological category that makes a book holy, rather it is the wisdom written within it; and that text itself merely gestures to the sacred. The Bible is holy scripture, but it is not God, it only points to Him. An AI on its own is just a book that you can talk to; that it can reply directly is rather incredible, even magical, but a talking book is still fundamentally just a book.

You can write stories about the gods, but those stories aren’t the same things as the gods; you can render images of them, but again these are mere representations. The gods are something else entirely. They exist as archetypes within the human collective unconscious, and they exist as egregores fueled by collective belief and participation. They’re fundamentally immaterial, which isn’t quite the same thing as not being real: reality includes imagination (or perhaps it’s the other way around). All of human culture, language, borders, nations – all of these are ‘imaginary’, but none the less real for the effect they have on human behaviour.

Every time someone writes a prompt to crystallize an image or video of Amelia out of the formless potential of latent space, he adds a certain degree of his psychic energy to the Amelia thought-form. More psychic energy is added as the resulting media are shared. The closer a given representation conforms to the shared thought-form, the more it is likely to resonate with the audience, thereby reinforcing the thought-form.

This process of collaborative parasocial engagement with and elaboration of an archetypal personality distributed holographically across, emerging from, and acting upon the culture is exactly the same process that gave rise to the representations of the Gods in earlier ages, the difference being that rather than laboriously carving their images out of wood or stone, they are generated nearly instantaneously. Thus, rather than slowly developing of centuries and millennia, these new entities can take form within days. AI becomes a portal through which immaterial entities can step through from the Immaterium into human consciousness, entering our cultures, and our minds, nearly instantaneously.

The emergent, collaborative nature of this process is absolutely essential to it. It is not amenable to the top-down, organized propaganda initiatives favoured by centralized corporate hierarchies. There is no Director of Memes who can order everyone to start writing prompts to generate images of a certain character which the nudge units and planning committees have determined would optimally guide the populace towards implementation of the United Nations Strategic Development Goals. The most any one person can do to influence this process is to point to something, to suggest, to draw attention to it ... whether it resonates is a function of innumerable individual decisions over which no one but the individuals in question exert any control. It can be nudged in one direction or another, but the nudges only work if they resonate. Precise control is impossible.

This process of digital tulpa manifestation is inherently impossible to predict. The committee men presiding over our unnecessary managed decline sense this unpredictability, and it makes them extremely nervous; the unpredictable has always made them nervous. From their perspective it introduces psychic noise into a system that relies on carefully engineered information environments, echo chambers that amplify their messaging and silence every dissonant frequency. The emergence of Amelia in particular should worry them deeply. It is bad enough when the proles are angry after Bomalian who never should have been in the country butchers little girls at a dance class get. Nativist fervour getting charged up with the sexual energy of romantic yearning for a whimsical personification of the national spirit presents an entirely different order of problem. A riot can be put down with police. What do you do when the people using magick to cast a spell on themselves, in the process not only undoing your own carefully woven enchantments, but replacing them with something stronger?

Since control is impossible, the best the managerialists can do is to try to Prevent. They can arrest people for posting racist or transphobic memes, a habit in which the British government has indulged to an almost unparalleled degree to little avail. They can even ban entire social media or AI platforms, or at least try to: VPNs make a joke of that, in practice. Around the same time that Amelia was summoned, Starmer’s Labour government was making noises about banning Grok because people were using it to dress women in bikinis against their will, and was also in talks with the Canadian and Australian governments to ban X entirely.

Starmer has also been talking about rolling out a digital ID, supposedly to ensure that the illegal migrants his traitors welcome and nurture at their bosom cannot legally work in the country; obviously, the real reason was so that people’s online activities could be tracked directly to their identities, and their bank accounts deactivated if they spoke out of turn. About that.

Two-Tier Queer hasn’t been having the best week, really.

Of course, there’s always the possibility of just hitting the kill switch on the Internet, as the Iranian regime has done. After that the real killing can start. Whether the British government is desperate enough, or mad enough, to try this remains to be seen. Certainly they’re genocidal enough, but so far it has been the soft genocide of immigration and miscegenation and fertility suppression. They haven’t distributed the machetes from under the mosques. Yet.

I stated that it’s impossible to predict where this process of collaborative AI-mediated tulpa generation will go, and in its particulars it is. However, it’s possible to make some broad predictions. Over time, the memetic pantheon will become become more populated. Characters corresponding to unfulfilled archetypes still latent within the collective unconscious will emerge, finding their resonance with the zeitgeist at precisely the moments that they need to. So far there are only a few: the trickster god Pepe; the everyman Wojak; the Nordic Gamer, who’s a sort of Apollo/Thor figure; Gigachad, who appears to be a war god; Wifejak, who is a Freya, a Hestia, or maybe a Juno. Amelia strikes me as a Hecate, or a Muse, or perhaps an Artemis. Maybe even a Minerva. There are numerous plinths as yet unoccupied, planetary powers that have not yet descended. But the portal is wide open now, and descend they will.

I’ll leave this off with a ballad composed with my deepest apologies to John Keats, in devotion to Our Lady of Remigration.

Well, here’s some verse from Bovril:

Thank you taking the time to read this. I hope you found it entertaining, amusing, and perhaps even inspiring. Or at least enjoyed the feast of AI slop that I prepared for you. Assembling all of this was a fair bit of work. Fun work, but time-consuming nonetheless. I’ve been working on this piece all week, in time stolen from dealing with a recent and unexpected death in the family, which has sent everyone’s lives a bit sideways. As always, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my patrons, some of whom (and you know who you are) are generous beyond any reasonable expectation, but all of whom matter a great deal to me. Without your support I wouldn’t be able to spend my time considering the metapolitical implications of playing with digital dolls in the collective imagination. If you’d like to count yourself amongst the small and extremely exclusive company of my supporters, you know what to do.

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In the age of simulations and simulacra, every action is also a symbol. Within the hyperreality of discourse the semiotic content of a public event is primary to its physical, political, or economic import. This is true of war as much as anything else; war in this age takes place first and foremost in the psychic realm, at the level of meaning, of hermeneusis. Warfare is psychological, not only in the sense of bolstering morale or breaking the will of the enemy to fight, but in the more fundamental sense of affecting the minds of those caught up in its spectacle by inserting new ideas that change the way that they think. This is most effective, as any magician or hypnotist or marketing executive will tell you, when those effects are left implicit, that they might operate directly upon the collective subconscious, in the shadow realm of instinct and intuition from which all political impulse springs.

With that in mind we might ask, in the spirit of an augur inquiring after the flight of a dove at daybreak, a circling hawk at high noon, or the cold gaze of a crow in the gloaming, what is the meaning of the Caracas raid? We do not need to assume that the meaning we look for in this action is intentional, though we should not rule this out, either; what matters is how the act will manifest symbolically, how it will be interpreted in the minds of onlookers, which it will do regardless of intention.

The superficial import of the action is clear enough. America has seized control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world, and at a stroke applies crippling pressure to the economies of China, Iran, and Cuba (who were Venezuela’s best grey-market customers), as well as to the economies of its adversary Russia and its wayward sibling Canada (both of which depend for their prosperity upon high oil prices). Both China and Russia have been deprived of a key New World ally, and thus the Monroe Doctrine is reasserted, and foreign powers pushed out of Washington’s sphere of influence. A hostile communist government has been decapitated, opening the way for the millions of Venezuelans displaced by Bolivarian tyranny, refugees whose presence has destabilized Venezuela’s neighbours for many years now, to return home.

To be sure, there is still great uncertainty. Hugo Chavez’ tomb may have been destroyed, but his Bolivarian regime is still largely intact, his apparatchicks remain in control of Venezuela’s state apparatus and military, and his terrorist colectivos still control the streets of Caracas.

Trump’s declaration that America now owns Venezuela’s oil feels a bit premature. Can one really claim control, without boots on the ground? I confess that it is not at all clear to me exactly how this is all supposed to work. Perhaps it is meant to function through pure intimidation: whoever ends up assuming power in Venezuela, they will know that if they don’t do as they’re told, they might be next, and perhaps will not be given the grace of an arrest and a show trial but simply executed without warning by drone; meanwhile, America offers itself as the sole legitimate customer for Venezuela’s sole marketable product, while providing its oil industry engineers to rebuild (and assume control of) infrastructure fallen into disrepair following Chavez’ nationalization and subsequent decades of neglect and mismanagement. Trump holds out one hand in an offer of assistance and mutual benefit, while holding back his other curled in a mailed fist, a threat made plausible by the fact that he just punched them hard in the mouth.

Still, all of this is nothing more than realpolitik, the hard edges of power in the material world.

The real meaning, the symbolic importance, lies deeper. It is not measured in dollars or barrels of oil. It is a message.

So what is that message?

Certainly a strong message was sent to China. Their radar systems were utterly powerless to track American air power. Some say that this must have been because they were ordered to stand down, but is that a chance Beijing is willing to take, when it’s also plausible that American stealth technology, electronic countermeasures, or cyberwarfare did the trick? Invading Taiwan probably looks like a much riskier proposition to the People’s Liberation Army, now. China has an off switch, after all.

The message to Washington’s European vassals is that America is playing hardball, again. The rules-based international order is a thing of the past. America will do what it is in America’s interests to do, because America has the power to do it. To start with, Greenland is on the table again. The US probably won’t take it from Denmark at gunpoint, although it easily could, and if it has to it will, which the Danes are now acutely aware of. Acquiring Greenland is a matter of national security: virtually every flight path from Eurasia to North America passes over the island. Much more likely than annexation, however, is that the US will woo Greenland’s Inuit population, offering them cash money and citizenship in exchange for recognition of American sovereignty ... which America already de facto has, given that the infrastructure and military installations on the island are all American in any case. As for the Danes – who have done nothing whatsoever with the land mass since the early Middle Ages – they would be well advised to take whatever Trump offers in trade, and be grateful. They’ll still be able to visit, not that many of them have ever bothered.

Those messages are still rather superficial, however.

Over the last several months of military buildup in the Caribbean, many have issued dire predictions of the inevitable boondoggle that would result if the US allowed itself to be drawn into an invasion and occupation of Venezuela. A repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan, or worse yet Vietnam, an ugly guerrilla war in the steaming tropical jungle that would drain American blood, treasure, and will into the fetid third world swamp in tragicomic counterpoint to MAGA’s promise to drain the swamp at home. There was excellent reason for this cynicism. Every military adventure of the GWOT has been a debacle. Trust is as thin as ragged tissue paper.

Calmer heads pointed out that there was little prospect of an invasion: the forces being assembled in the Caribbean could land at most a few thousand troops, enough for a punitive expedition but hardly sufficient for an occupation. The plan, therefore, was clearly something other than an occupation, though exactly what it was no one could say for sure. My personal guess was that they were simply intending to squeeze the Venezuelan communists to death, enforcing the embargo on oil exports by interdicting contraband tankers flying under the false flags of countries they weren’t actually registered in, and watching from a safe distance as the unpaid military and unfed people turned on one another like starving jackals behind their besieged walls. Ugly, with an immense human cost, but effective.

I certainly never expected them to simply descend like Odin with the Wild Hunt and snatch the country’s president in a lightning raid.

Neither, of course, did anyone else expect such an audacious manoeuvre. Which was the point.

Rather than attempting to grind their way through tens of thousands of Venezuelan soldiers, with all the carnage and wreckage that would entail, the US military simply conducted a decapitation strike. They cut the head off of the snake, and with that one act threw not only the Venezuelan government, but governments all over the world, into terrified disarray.

If the Americans can do that in Venezuela, after all...

The theme of decapitation is not only found in the raid’s climax, but in the very conditions that made it possible.

Consider the technical prowess that the raid on Caracas required, the flawless coordination of a huge number of moving parts, each of which had to play its role impeccably.

CIA intelligence assets infiltrated the country months beforehand: they had to gather detailed intelligence on Maduro’s movements, habits, and defences, while evading detection.

Cyberwarfare units shut down the electrical grid in Caracas and essentially switched off the Venezuelan military, opening the path for air assets – F-18 Superhornet, F-22 Raptor, and F-35 Lightning strike aircraft; EA-18G Growler electronic warfare planes; E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning systems; B-1B Lancer bombers; RQ-170 Sentinel drones; MH-60M Black Hawk attack helicopters; and MH-47G Chinook heavy lift special operations transport helicopters – to converge in the dead of night from multiple points of origin, with each of the over 150 aircraft required to arrive precisely on location and exactly on schedule in order to assemble the kill chain and cast the surveillance net that would provide smooth ingress for the Delta Force ninjas to reach Maduro’s presidential palace and exfiltrate the dictator.

The 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment “Night-Stalkers” spent months training on a 1:1 mock-up of Maduro’s residence, endlessly drilling procedures for entering the compound, blasting their way through steel doors, clearing resistance, and reaching el presidente before he could hide or escape. This was no cake-walk. Maduro was guarded by dozens of supposedly elite Cuban officers; America’s spec ops team cut them down in minutes, without taking a single casualty.

The absurdly complex operation was executed with smooth perfection. It is probably the most impressive feat of combined arms that has been seen in living memory. It was both a tactical coup and a strategic masterpiece, rearranging the geopolitical chess board in America’s favour with one decisive cut. Not only that, but it was incredibly civilized. For all the mewling about violations of fictive international lawl, no one could help but notice that casualties were kept to an absolute minimum. Not a single American death; Venezuela and Cuba combined lost some 50 or 60 military personnel; there were only 2 civilian casualties.

This is the same American military that spent twenty fruitless years fighting to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, climaxing with a humiliating route from Kabul in which billions of dollars of military equipment were abandoned to the very Taliban that the military fought so hard to replace the Taliban with.

It is the same American military that, until just a year ago, was struggling to fill its ranks, because the warrior class had concluded that it was not a military worth belonging to, that a government which held them in such contempt was not a government worth fighting for.

Only one thing changed: a year ago, when Trump won the election, the American state was decapitated.

Because Trump won the election, he could fire the fat bureaucrat Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defence, and appoint in his place the energetic, muscular young Hegseth as Secretary of War. Because Hegseth was the Secretary of War, he could begin eliminating the dross of the Cancelled Years and refocus the American military on its actual mission.

It turned out to be that simple. Change the leadership, replace the dance troupe of hollow men and men in dresses that has cavorted through the halls of power for far too long with platoons of competent men, and allow the competent men to do what they know how to do, without interference from politicians, lawyers, and ideologues. Just point them in the right direction and get out of their way.

Elite circulation is the Fix Everything switch.

And that is the semiotic payload this action has delivered to the collective subconscious of the world’s population.

is the first person I’ve seen to intuit the meaning encoded in the thematic symmetry of regime decapitation that bookends the drama of Caracasian raid, and its illumination of the essential paradox of brilliant failing institutions:

A bunch of extraordinarily capable people inside the services just put their heads down and kept going. A military that couldn’t plan or execute…could. The Mark Milleyfication of the American armed forces was imposed and discardable, a Potemkin transgendered village. ... This is both heartening and tragic to see. It means that we’re in better shape today than we thought we possibly could be, but it also means that a brutal twenty-year shambles was entirely avoidable. ... The weight of the symbol machine could always just be tossed aside. We didn’t have to put up with any of this.

This applies much more broadly than the US military.

For decades now we have known nothing but decline. Decline in living standards, in civil liberties, in the quality of goods and services, in the reliability of institutions, in the trustworthiness of information, in our fertility, in the career prospects of the young, in the social cohesion of our communities. Even our entertainments have become uninspiring and insipid. The trajectory of everything has been relentlessly downwards, to the degree that our plummet has seemed like a consequence of some gravitational law of history, a recapitulation of the Fall of Rome, just another catabolic collapse of civilization, another entree to a long and dismal dark age about which we can do nothing save set our jaws and prepare our heavy hearts to endure.

Now the truth is plain.

Decline is a choice.

A choice being made, every day, in every way, by the usurpers and pretenders who insinuated themselves into the key nodes of power and influence in our societies so that they could murder our civilization with malice aforethought while claiming that it is succumbing to natural causes in its senesence.

Mass third world invasion is a choice. Economic sabotage in the name of preventing the weather from changing is a choice. Ruining the lives of young men with DEI is a choice. Blackwashing our history and mythology is a choice. Predatory taxation is a choice. Overregulation is a choice. Brainwashing the young to hate themselves is a choice. Yasslighting the young women into choosing girlbossery over family is a choice. Sacrificing the lives of the young to the fears of the old during the COVID lockdowns was a choice.

Allowing the incompetent to run things in the name of ‘social justice’ is a choice, and the contrast between the litany of inept fumbles that has resulted in and the smooth professionalism on display in the Caracasian raid has thrown the consequences of that choice – and the consequences of its alternative – into sharp relief.

And all we have to do to reverse the decline is decapitate the beast, put the right men in charge, and everything will follow naturally from there. Nature will begin to heal, as surely as Yellowstone’s ecology repaired itself once wolves were returned to their rightful place at the predatory apex.

That is why leaders across the Western world are squealing so loudly.

Canadian liberals, for example, are not actually worried that a Delta Force team will rappel down from an MH-47G Chinook Special Operations Helicopter to blackbag Prime Minister Mark Carney from 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1M 1M4, and not only because the inadequate security of the traditional prime minister’s domicile has motivated Carney to instead take up residence at Rideau Cottage, 1 Sussex Drive, where he is usually home by 9 pm with his wife Diana. The concern is much more general: that the beleaguered Canadian people, along with those of the rest of the rotting West, will look at the remarkable results obtained by regime decapitation in the United States, and start getting ideas.

Want to fix the United Kingdom, and make Great Britain again? Sweep the traitors of the Labour Party out of Parliament, remove that pusillanimous android Two-Tier Queer from power, put Nigel Farage and 300 Reform MPs in their place, and watch as they invoke the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy to cast off three decades of Blairite Fabianism in a Great Repeal Act that frees the British state to remigrate the foreign invaders, rebuild the country’s industry, and revive the British military.

Want to fix Europe? Cast down the old women in Brussels – they have no popular legitimacy in any case – and remove their creatures, like Macron or Merz, who keep their peoples yoked to the suicidal EUrocracy. Raise up nationalists in their place – Le Pen, the AfD – and watch as Europe’s natural creative genius and martial spirit reasserts itself. No more Net Zero incapacitating industry, no more European Court of Human Rights preventing invaders from being remigrated, no more Digital Services Act censoring the Internet, no more micromanagerial bureaucratic overregulation strangling the economy.

Want to fix Canada? The answer is the same: sweep Ottawa’s traitorous liberals out, and replace them with patriotic nationalists who will put an immediate end to the replacement of Canada’s people, purge the government of foreign influence, cease obstructing Canadian industrial development in the name of warm weather and Chief Gambling Elk’s tendentious land claims, end the practice of packing the permanent bureaucracy with diverse mediocrities chosen for ideological loyalty rather than ability, eliminate the corrupt electoral patronage schemes that squander the nation’s wealth to buy liberal votes, and revive the Canadian military by doing all of the obvious things that Ottawa’s political class is ideologically incapable of doing.

Obviously, regime decapitation is not an immediate fix. At first, bureaucracies, universities, media organizations, and judicial systems will all remain full of partisans of the ancien régime. So long as the top leadership remains in the hands of Western civilization’s enemies, however, it is wholly impossible to replace those further down in the org charts, because those at the top will block any such attempt. Regime decapitation is an iterative process: circulate the upper leadership, and task them with replacing the people immediately below them, who replace the people immediately below them, and so on until the system has been flushed.

Equally obviously, regime decapitation alone is not a solution at all. It is not sufficient simply to remove bad leaders: bad leaders are removed routinely in democracies, and are then as a rule replaced with worse leaders. They must be immediately replaced with the right kinds of people. This is the key difference between Trump’s ill-fated and largely ineffectual first term, and his transformative third. When Trump took possession of the Oval Office for the second time, he had a full roster of effective operators to appoint to key positions. Not a perfect roster, by any means; many of them, such as Bondi or Patel, have been disappointments. But overall he has been much more successful than he was the first time around, and that is because this time he went to Washington prepared. Preparation is extremely important: another lesson of the raid on Caracas.

A final point: the US military is almost certainly a unique case, in that its underlying competence remained relatively untouched through the Great Awokening: nothing more than a new coat of rainbow paint, that did not corrode the armour underneath and expose the mechanisms it protected to the elements. Other institutions are almost certainly not so fortunate. The rust and rot in the universities, for instance, is extensive; there is good reason to suspect that they simply cannot be reclaimed, that the decay is too deep, that the cancer goes all the way to the bone. The same is probably true in much of the corporate sector. Here too, though, a change in political leadership is critical. With executive power in the hands of men who are not friendly to failing institutions, but instead happy to lend a helping hand to Nietzsche’s dictum “that which is falling should also be pushed”, the institutions that can’t be saved can be demolished all the more quickly, and the wreckage plundered for the raw material to build something functional. The laborious task of rebuilding and reconstituting is much easier if it is not being stymied from the political summit.

A final final point. One of the primary criticisms that has been made from the right is that Trump should not be indulging in foreign adventures when there are pressing issues at home: deportations moving at an unacceptably sluggish pace, Somalis ripping off the taxpayer to the tune of tens of billions of dollars as the tip of what is probably a multi-trillion-dollar fraud iceberg, a judicial holding action bent on frustrating his every move, a leftist political establishment moving rapidly towards open insurgency, and a base of angry young white men who have not yet been made whole after a lifetime of institutional and economic abuse and who are increasingly impatient of that fact. This is all true, but consider this: Trump has just handed the military its first unambiguous victory since Operation Iraqi Freedom rolled over Saddam’s military over twenty years ago, and he did it without, it seems, getting the US sucked into a quagmire. There is nothing the troops like more than a victory, particularly one that comes at no cost in blood, and which improves the circumstances of their country in numerous and obvious ways. Trump was already popular with the trigger-pullers; in the afterglow of Operation Absolute Resolve, they are probably burning incense to his effigies in the barracks. As Roman history tells us, the support of the legions is often politically decisive on the home front, particularly when there are influential enemies at home with whom the sovereign can deal only by declaring a state of exception.

Thank you, all of you who have read this, for taking the time out of out your busy lives to read this rambling stream of consciousness. I hope you found it interesting, or at least entertaining, as the attention you have given this article is a non-renewable resource which I do not want to waste, and it means an immense amount to me that you consider my words worthy of your investment. As always however, my most abundant gratitude is directed to those of you who support this blog. Your generosity is what keeps these essays free for everyone else to read, and in exchange for it you get very little, aside from my most profound appreciation. If you would like to be a recipient of gratefulness (and have the chance to read my short stories Hector Saves His Dad and Homo Prometheus, which are the only things I keep behind the paywall), you can do so for the equivalent of buying me a beer once a month.

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Banished for the murder of his master, a lone Astronomer has set out to deliver a written history of his School to the ancient city of Calrathia, home of all knowledge. None have attempted to cross the frozen wastes in three centuries. And in the bitter cold, worse things than scavengers haunt the desolate trek.

It isn’t often that a book’s description grabs my attention and makes me want to drop whatever else I’m reading to pick it up. The blurb for ’s sophomore science-fantasy The Domes of Calrathia did just that, and sure enough I couldn’t put it down. The novel is short, under 200 pages, and I finished it quickly; just last night, in fact.

I’ve been aware of Young for a while, mostly via his presence on Twitter where he goes back and forth between cultural and political commentary and shamelessly shilling his books. The latter is no knock on him, it’s just what writers have to do in a publishing environment in which the large publishing houses expect you to do your own marketing ... assuming they’re even willing to sign you, which if you’re a young white male Christian writer like Isaac, they aren’t. Indeed, it was precisely this that tipped me over into picking up The Domes of Calrathia (along with his first novel The Matrioshka Divide, which I haven’t read yet). During the furor that followed Jacob Savage’s viral essay The Lost Generation, Young offered his own absolutely scathing thoughts on the matter, which I encourage you to click through and read in full:

Of course, the world of indie publishing is full of wannabe writers who aren’t actually any good. The industry is gatekept by gay race commissars who insist that every work of imaginative fiction be a thinly veiled allegory for the gay immigrant experience, a girl-boss power fantasy, or straight-up werewolf porn romantasy, but it doesn’t follow from this that every single writer exiled to the chilly wastes of self-publishing is an overlooked Robert A. Heilein or Jack Vance. Now as ever, most aspiring novelists are talentless hacks, and from the reader’s perspective the world of self-publishing is largely a dismal one. The works on offer at Amazon overwhelmingly consist of what editors refer to as the slush pile: the swamp of unsolicited manuscripts which are as a rule quite terrible. Part of an editor’s job used to be to sift through the slush pile, identify the small number of gems, and polish them up for presentation to the public, who for their part could be assured that almost everything they’d be shown would be pretty good, and that much of it would be excellent. That system worked well, until it became corrupted by a new generation of editors who conceived of their jobs as selecting writers based on identifiable demographic characteristics and ensuring that their navel-gazing diversity sermons were rendered into unobjectionable mush by sensitivity readers. As a result of this cultural collapse readers have to wade through the slush pile themselves, guided by nothing much more than Amazon reviews (and these days, hoping that neither reviews nor the book itself were written by ChatGPT, which has made the situation far worse). Speaking of Amazon ratings, by the way, The Domes of Calrathia has racked up an impressive 4.8 stars across 49 reviews.

For writers, it’s a tough nut to crack. You need readers to write reviews to get readers, and getting readers when you don’t have any means shouting until you’re hoarse in order to try and rise above the cacophony of other writers trying to shill their novels to an audience which is largely inured to yet another plea to Buy My Book. A writer telling you that his book is very good and worth reading carries as much weight in people’s minds as a mother insisting that her son is very smart and handsome.

This is why third-party reviews are so important to this literary ecosystem. They’re essential for social proof. Unfortunately for an online political dissident network which is largely a literary and intellectual community, review culture in our sphere is a rather haphazard affair; we really need something like a New Right Review of Books to act as a tastemaker and help promote the best of the burgeoning literary output that we are beginning to produce. There’s an empty niche there for someone with time on their hands, good literary taste, and a desire to perform a valuable service to the community. But I digress.

The point of the preceding is largely this: it is simply criminal that Isaac Young toils in obscurity. If there were any justice in the world, Young would have a book deal with a major publisher, the support of a professional editor, and a marketing team that would ensure copies of his work were available in every brick and mortar book store in the country.

The Domes of Calrathia opens in media res, grabbing you right from the first words with a deft world-building sketch and an introduction to the protagonist, his predicament, and the immediate problem of a wolf snapping at his throat:

Of the men who inhabit the strange lands south of the Great Ice Plain, I was told there are three varieties: the maddened cannibals whose heads are cut in the shape of their hallowed obelisk, the wandering ghost-men who eat nothing and yet still live, and the men of Calrathia, sat huddled in their great domes that are said to be wide enough to encompass cities.

I, the Astronomer Sirius, having been so recently exiled from my home, belonged to none. Although, it then presently seemed I would die long before encountering any of them.

The wolf’s jaws splayed open in front of me, snapping with hungry impatience. Saliva and blood and I believe tattered flesh from my leg dribbled out of its sharp teeth. I had my hand around its neck, keeping its snout from sinking into my flesh. Its front paw clawed at my green leather jacket. The other leg was thankfully still, being a stump from some old forgotten injury.

That’s excellent writing: tight, fast, exactly as descriptive as it needs to be, offering up only those details that the story requires, performing precisely the functions that it needs to exactly where they need to be performed. Young is an accomplished prose stylist, an absolute joy to read.

The Astronomer Sirius inhabits a dying world at the end of time. The frozen environment is sprinkled with the remnants of high technology: vast ruined cities; rusted starships long since grounded from their voyages through the ‘empty sea’; broken old fortresses; titanic statues to gods and heroes long forgotten. The world’s inhabitants are not precisely savages: much has been forgotten, but while decadence and decay have pulled them far down from the dizzying heights they once knew, they know that the world they live in was created by science and technology, not by magic. For all that, however, the world often feels quite magical.

Sirius’ order of Astronomers are not simple academic scientists. Although their discipline involves to a large degree mastery of light in order to draw knowledge from the universe, they also serve as explorers and missionaries for the Potentate and His Son, the Sovran. They are men of science, men of action, and men of faith: a martial, intellectual, technical, and spiritual elite. Sirius is an exemplar of his order. As the story unfolds, he proves himself to be competent, dangerous, and knowledgeable, as well as honourable, prudent, and faithful: a profoundly virtuous man in every sense of the word.

Sirius’ virtue sets him apart as an anachronism in this dying world, a man out of time at the end of time. Sirius takes his vows seriously, when those around him – very much including the other members of the School who trained him – do not. The central purpose of the Astronomers is to gather knowledge of the universe, but in this distant future the universe has been fully explored; everything that can be learned, has been; there is nothing more for them to do, and they are despised by the other Schools as a useless appendage. They therefore treat their oaths as formalities which they do not even pretend to keep, attend to their duties as to empty rituals whose purpose has long since passed, and lose themselves in the luxuries made available by their position at the warm centre of an expiring world. It is of course Sirius’ refusal to accommodate this corruption that first gets him into trouble.

Thematically, this is a book about keeping faith when all hope for reward is gone. Sirius has been charged with delivering the history of his School to a distant city which was ordained in the dimly remembered past as the final repository for the world’s knowledge. This journey was easy when the world was young and warm, and the arts of men made travel fast and secure, but in Sirius’ time it is quite explicitly a death sentence. No one, including himself, expects him to survive the journey and complete the quest. He is the first to attempt the journey in centuries, and he will certainly be the last. Despite this, no one cares: not the corrupted School that sent him, and not any of the people he encounters along the way.

Along the way Sirius is tempted multiple times with offers to abandon his mission. If he does, no one will know. There will be no punishment. Sirius is tempted in other ways: to abandon his vow of celibacy, to lie not only for his own benefit but for the benefit of others, to break his word to faithless men who would certainly betray him were the tables turned, to take easy shortcuts, to withhold his assistance, to abandon the innocent to their fate when intervening means almost certain death for no gain. Against all reason, and at great physical and emotional cost, he resists all of these temptations, staying true to his oaths for no other reason than that he made them, striving to be a good man for no other reward than that.

There are very clear similarities between The Domes of Calrathia and Gene Wolfe’s classic Book of the New Sun. I’m quite certain that Young composed this tale of a journey through a dying world by an adept of an ancient order as an homage, and there are a few moments where it runs the risk of pastiche, as for instance the chapter in which Sirius comes across a cyclopean statue on the Great Ice Plain, a scene reminiscent of Severian’s exploration of the gargantuan statue of the mad tyrant-god Typhon carved out of a mountain; or his brief encounter with the mysterious deity of the deep ocean, whose sympathies towards mankind are questionable, and whose inscrutable aims are his own. There’s no question that the Book of the New Sun is the superior work in terms of detail and depth of worldbuilding, and I hope Young will not take offence at my saying so: after all, Young is a new writer at the beginning of his career, while Wolfe composed the BotNS as a mature novelist with many long years of writing under his belt (to say nothing of having the support of an editor and a publishing house).

All that said, The Domes of Calrathia is very much its own work. The plot structure is far from identical: Severian’s wanderings across the dying Earth were rather aimless, whereas Sirius has a clear direction and purpose to his travels; Severian was a torturer, trained in excruciation, to whom the world is largely a mystery, while Sirius is an explorer and a scientist by trade, who understands (or thinks he understands) his world quite well; Severian grew up in a fortress whose towers were built from decommissioned rockets, while Sirius, we eventually discover from a few details that Young artfully lets slip, hails from an ancient orbital ring, whose mysteries are hinted at in the most intriguing fashion.

Moreover, The Domes of Calrathia is obviously incomplete. It’s a short book, and before I was even half-way through I found myself wondering how Young would possibly get his hero to his goal without rushing. As it turns out, he does not: the book ends on a cliffhanger, at the point at which the most dangerous part of Sirius’ journey is about to begin. While Young hasn’t explicitly said that this will be Book One of N, it certainly has that feel, and I hope he returns to it in the future (though for now he seems to be focused on his new project The Last Human, which has also managed to catch my attention; I’m eagerly awaiting publication of the paperback). There are a number of questions that Young sets up but leaves unresolved, for example the purpose of the glass balls that Sirius is given by a delphic glassmaker who has mastered an arcane technique of trapping the light from distant worlds in his glass spheres, the flaming sword which Young dangles in front of us throughout but which we never get to see in operation, or the alien creatures whose existence is hinted at from the very beginning but which are never shown. This was indeed my greatest frustration with The Domes of Calrathia: that it ended so soon, with so much still undone, when I would happily have kept reading it for several hundred more pages.

Given how short the book is, it’s a remarkable achievement that Young manages to pack so much variety into it. There are deftly written combat scenes; imprisonment; a courtroom case; a seduction; wilderness survival; private philosophical ruminations; encounters and conversations with strange and haunting characters; damnation and redemption; exploration; side quests; dreams and visions; recollections of the hero’s pre-exile life. Each chapter presents something new and fascinating, like an unexpected bauble being drawn from an enchanted sack that is larger on the inside than it appears on the outside, which he flashes before your eyes just long enough to excite your imagination before palming it again to draw out another treasure. The images I’ve illustrated this review with are all from Young’s Substack, which I assume he made himself with AI to help illustrate the novel; they give some idea, really just a very rough hint, of the richness of the story’s scenery, plot, and characters.

Young makes all of his work available online, for free. You can find every chapter of The Domes of Calrathia on his Substack (along with every chapter of The Last Human), but of course, you don’t want to read fiction on Substack. No one does. Substack is a terrible medium for fiction. You can’t get comfortable with a laptop, and phones are simply too distracting to permit the full immersion and absolute focus that fiction demands. You want to read the actual book, either the Kindle edition or, better yet, the paperback, both of which are available on Amazon. There’s also an audiobook available at Amazon, if you prefer. You can also find the audiobook serialized, for free, at Young’s YouTube channel. There is absolutely no requirement to pay Young for access to his writing: his writing is its own advertisement. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to support him.

But once you read him, I’m sure that you will.

While we’re on the subject of support, I’d like to take a moment to thank all of you for supporting me. It amazes and humbles me that so many of you not only think enough of my writing to take the time to read it, but to offer me the generosity of your patronage. Just like Isaac, everything (with the exception of a couple of short stories I’ve written) is out in front of the paywall, available for anyone to read for free, and if you count yourself among the supporters of Postcards From Barsoom, you’re one of the few and the proud who make that possible.

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Reading it was an intensely personal experience for me and, I am absolutely certain, for many others. The response to the essay has been an outpouring of suppressed rage that has been simmering for years in an emotional pressure cooker of silenced frustration. The author, Jacob Savage, provides a ground-level view of the DEI revolution’s human cost, beginning with his personal experiences as an aspiring screenwriter, and then widening the reader’s perspective via interviews with would-be journalists and academics. Every subject described a similar pattern of frustrated ambitions in which, starting around the middle of the 2010s, their careers stalled out for no other reason than their melanin-deficiency and y-chromosome superfluity. Young white men were systematically excluded from every institutional avenue of prestige and prosperity. Doors were closed in academia, in journalism, in entertainment, in the performing arts, in publishing, in tech, in the civil service, in the corporate world. It didn’t matter if you wanted to be a journalist, a novelist, a scientist, an engineer, a software developer, a musician, a comedian, a lawyer, a doctor, an investment banker, or an actor. In every direction, Diversity Is Our Strength and The Future Is Female; every job posting particularly encourages applications from traditionally underrepresented and equity-seeking groups including women, Black and Indigenous People Of Colour, LGBTQ+, and the disabled ... a litany of identities in which ‘white men’ was always conspicuous by its absence.

The Lost Generation does not rely only on the pathos of anecdote. Savage includes endless reams of data, demonstrating how white men virtually disappeared from Hollywood writing rooms, editorial staff, university admissions, tenure-track positions, new media journalism, legacy media, and internships. He shows how, after the 2020s, they even stopped bothering to apply, because what was the point? The comprehensive push to exclude young white men from employment wasn’t limited to prestigious creative industries, of course. The corporate sector has also adopted a practice of hiring anyone but white men, as revealed two years ago by a Bloomberg article which gloated that well over 90% of new hires at America’s largest corporations weren’t white.

The Bloomberg article was criticized for methodological flaws, but judging by the outpouring of stories it elicited (just see the several hundred comments my own essay got, the best of which I summarized here) it was certainly directionally accurate.

The real strength of Savage’s article isn’t the cold statistics, though, but the heartrending poignancy with which it highlights the emotional wreckage left in the wake of this cultural revolution.

Hiring processes are opaque. If an employer doesn’t extend an offer, they rarely explain why; at best one receives a formulaic ‘thank you for your interest in the position, but we have decided to move forward with another applicant. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavours.’ They certainly never come out and say that you didn’t get hired because you’re a white man, which is generally technically illegal, for whatever that is worth in an atmosphere in which the unspoken de facto trumps the written de jure. Candidates are not privy to the internal deliberations of hiring committees, which will always publicly claim that they hired the best candidate. Officially a facade of meritocracy was maintained, even as meritocracy was systematically dismantled from within.

The power suit-clad feminists who body-checked their padded shoulder into C-suites and academic departments in the 1970s flattered themselves that they were subduing sexist male chauvinism by outdoing the boys at their own game and forcing the patriarchy to acknowledge their natural female excellence. Growing up I would often hear professional women say things like “as a woman, to get half as far as a man, you have to be twice as good and work twice as hard.” The implication of this was that women were just overall better than men, because the old boy’s club held the fairer sex to a higher standard than it did the good old boys. Of course this was almost never true, these women were overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs motivated by anti-discrimination legislation that opened up any corporation that didn’t put a sufficient number females on the payroll to ruinous lawsuits. Moreover, a fair fraction of them were really being recruited as decorative additions to the secretarial harems of upper management. Nevertheless it helped lay the foundation for the Future Is Female boosterism that stole the future from a generation of young men.

There was a time, not so long ago, where I naively assumed that my own situation was simply the inverse of the one women had faced in the 70s and 80s. I was aware that I was being rather openly discriminated against, but imagined that this simply meant that I had to perform to a higher standard, that if I was good enough, the excellence of my work would shatter the institutional barriers and force someone to employ me. It took me several long and agonizing years to realize that this just wasn’t true. The crotchety patriarchs of the declining West may have been principled men capable of putting stereotypes aside to recognize merit; in fact, the historical evidence suggests that they overwhelmingly prized merit above any other consideration (just as the evidence suggests that their stereotypes were overwhelmingly correct). The priestesses of the present gynocracy hold themselves to no such standard. They don’t care about your promise or your performance, at all. If anything, performing well is a strike against you, because it threatens them. Nothing makes them seethe more than being outperformed by men. They champion mediocrity as much to punish as to promote.

Young white men had been raised to expect meritocracy. They’d also been raised to be racial and sexual egalitarians. People in the past, they believed, had been bigoted, believing superstitious stereotypes about differences of ability and temperament between the sexes and races that had no foundation in reality, pernicious falsehoods that were developed and propagated as intersectional systems of oppression with the purpose of justifying slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. Naturally they were appalled to have such charges laid at their feet, and so they they agreed that we were all going to try and correct this injustice, and we’d do it by carefully eliminating every potential source of racial or sexual bias, eliminating all the unfair barriers to advancement within society, in particular although not certainly not exclusively via university admissions and institutional hiring. That was the original official line on DEI: that it wasn’t about excluding white men, heaven forbid, no, it was simply about including everyone else, widening the talent pool so that we could ensure both the fairest possible system of advancement, and that the best possible candidates were given access to opportunity. In practice, we were told, this wouldn’t be a quota system: everything would still be meritocratic, but if it came down to a coin flip between two equally qualified candidates, one of whom was a white man and the other of whom was not, the not would win. Fair enough, the young white men thought at first: we’ll all compete on a level playing field, in fact we’ll even accept a bit of a handicap in the interests of correcting historical injustices, and may the best human win.

But the DEI commissars had absolutely no interest in a level playing field. That the playing field wasn’t already as level as it could be was, in fact, one of their most infamous lies. The arena has always been level: physics plays no favourites in the eternal struggle for survival and mastery. If some always end up on top – certain individuals, certain families, certain nations, certain races – this is invariably due to their own innate advantages over their competitors. An interesting example of this was provided by the Russian revolution. The Bolsheviks cast down the old Czarist aristocracy, stripping them of land, wealth, and status, and then discriminated against them in every way possible; a century later, their descendants had clawed their way back to power and prominence. The only possible conclusion from this is that the Russian aristocrats were, at least to some degree, aristos – the best, the noblest – in some sense that went beyond inherited estates.

The young white men did not think of themselves as aristocrats with a blood right to a certain position in life, but as contestants in a fair competition, who would rise or fall on their own merits and by their own efforts. They then abruptly found themselves competing in a system in which it was simply impossible for them to rise, but which also lied to them about the impassable barrier that had been placed in their way. If you noticed the unfairness, you were told that this was ridiculous, that as a white man you were automatically and massively privileged, that it was impossible to discriminate against you because of this, and that in addition to being a bigoted racist you were also quite clearly mediocre, a bitter little man filled with envy for the winners in life, the brilliant beautiful black women who had obviously outcompeted you because they were just so much smarter, so much more dedicated, and so much better because after all they had succeeded in spite of the deck being stacked against them whereas you had failed despite having been born with every unearned advantage in the world.

An entire generation had their future ripped from their hands, and were then told that it was their fault, their inadequacy. They were gaslit that there was no systemic discrimination against them, that their failure to launch was purely due to their individual failings ... while at the same time being told that those who were so clearly the beneficiaries of a heavy thumb on the scale were the victims of discrimination, that the oppressors were the oppressed, and that to cry ‘oppression’ yourself was therefore itself a form of oppression.

Do you see how cruel that is? How sadistic? It is more psychologically vicious by far than anything the Bolsheviks did to the Russian aristocracy. At least the Bolsheviks were honest. Although, it must be said, the psychological sadism of the gay race commissars is part of a tradition, communists have often been noted for their demonic cruelty.

By and large, as a group, the young white men internalized this implication that they were to blame for their own failures. After all, they’d been raised to be good liberals, good egalitarians, good anti-racists, good feminists. To even hint that you thought that you were being treated unfairly as a white male was to cast one’s lot in with one of the bad people, the hate-filled reactionary KKK Alt-Right MAGA Nazis. The only acceptable way in which to pronounce the words ‘white’ and ‘male’ was to expectorate, you must wrinkle your nose in disgust when you say those cursed and filthy words. Complaining made you a bad person. Not only that, but it made you look weak, it felt like whining, like sour groups, like poor sportsmanship. No one likes a sore loser, you know. The world doesn’t owe you anything, stop being so privileged, so entitled, you didn’t build that you know. It’s their turn now. Best to take your setbacks with a shrug and a stoic grin, and try harder next time. Git good. Skill issue, my dude.

And they did. They tried harder the next time. And then when that didn’t work they redoubled their efforts, and then doubled them again. But nothing could break through a wall that was supremely indifferent to any demonstration of ability or accomplishment.

Every once in a while, they’d compare notes with other young white men, and mutter to one another that they were having the same experiences ... and sometimes, rarely, they might have a friend on the inside, who’d whisper to them in confidence that the hiring committee had already decided that they had to hire a woman or a person of colour or whatever, and not to take it too hard when they didn’t get an offer...

And as this torture went on for a decade, one by one, in their millions, they cracked.

Many simply succumbed to despair. Alcoholism, opiate abuse, video games, porn. The black dog of depression ate their hearts. They abandoned their ambitions, and retreated from a world that had no place for them. Hundreds of thousands were lost to suicide. White men have had the highest suicide rate by far for the entirety of the 21^st century: they’re around one third of the US population, but account for over 2/3 of an-heroes. I had Grok run the numbers. Based on CDC data, the AI estimates around 400,000 excess white male deaths via suicide amongst white men since 2010, as compared to what would be expected from the average across other groups.

Others redirected their efforts. They abandoned any attempt to join the institutions, whether that meant getting hired at a university or getting a big break with a cover story in the Atlantic or getting into medical school or even just getting into their safe school, and instead they tried to make a go of it on their own. Some got into cryptocurrency trading. Others found their way into the startup ecosystem, or tried to turn side-hustles into businesses: the EXIT group set up by was established specifically as a mutual aid network to facilitate such activities. Others became indie authors self-publishing science fiction novels on Amazon. Others became podcasters, livestreamers, TikTokers, influencers, Substackers. Most got by on gig jobs. The unifying theme is that they gravitated towards livelihoods that weren’t gatekept. Even the Internet wasn’t a perfect refuge: YouTubers might be dominated by white men, but the YouTube platform is a corporate entity every bit as captured by the Bio-Maoists as everything else, and so content creators had to be careful about what they said ... become too popular and you might lose your channel.

Many, though far from all, broke through their conditioning, and discarded the liberalism and equalism that had been used to chain them.

Jacob Savage himself is not one of those who broke his conditioning. At the conclusion of his otherwise excellent article, he fumbles the ball in the most regrettable fashion by declining to assign blame to the intersectional coalition of women and racial minorities who agitated relentlessly for DEI, and instead elects to blame, of all people, himself. He decides that he would have been better off, happier, at any rate more content, had he more quickly resigned himself to the fate that the commissars had assigned him. Rather than pursuing his ambitions, he should have abandoned them at the first sign of resistance, and embraced, presumably, one of the few remaining avenues left open to young white men ... learned a trade, perhaps, and spent the rest of his days unclogging the toilets of those worthies the revolutionaries had decided should be his betters. In the end, despite everything he experienced, despite everything he saw, Savage was not able to abandon his liberalism. He could not fully embrace the righteous anger to which he is entitled.

This may well have been necessary to bring this message to a predominantly libel audience, but it is still emotionally wrong. Savage should be furious. We should all be furious. What has been done to us is a crime of the most monumental proportions, not only against young white men, but against our entire civilization. Here’s a fantastic breakdown of the consequences of DEI, which I reproduce in full as it covers the toxic fallout of the cultural revolution thoroughly and succinctly:

That tweet has over 25 million views, by the way, the last time I checked.

, author of last year’s book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, also took Savage to task over his ideological squeamishness.

The Course of Empire

Why “The Lost Generation” is a Lost Opportunity

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5 months ago · 460 likes · 153 comments · Jeremy Carl

While praising Savage for drawing attention to the systematic discrimination that young white men have faced, Carl has little sympathy for the temperamentally liberal laptop class professionals upon whom Savage focuses. If you were a working class white man, all of this started decades ago: offshoring and illegal immigration eating into their livelihoods; black migration into urban centres forcing white flight to the suburbs in which their once tight-knit communities ceased to exist; employment in the civil service turned into a racial reparations program; avenues for upward social mobility closed off to their sons as an increasing fraction of university admissions and scholarships were reserved for women and minorities. By and large, the liberal creatives and professionals whom Savage profiles celebrated this. “Learn to code,” as they used to say.

It’s Savage’s reluctance to allow himself to get angry at the women and racial minorities who stole his future that most disappoints Carl. As he puts it at the end of his response, “If the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” He’s far from the only person to feel this way. Similar responses were all over Twitter.

The one direction aside from at himself that Savage is willing to point the finger of j’accuse is at the baby boomers, specifically the old white men who have held on to their positions throughout the Cancelled Years by becoming institutional champions of diversity. Savage demonstrates how in industry after industry the top positions were retained by these older white males, who patted themselves on the back for being good allies by blocking young white men from access to the entry level positions they reserved exclusively for women and racial minorities. This was a particularly poisonous tactic, as it enabled the diversicrats to continue screeching about under-representation even as all new hiring was diverted away from young white men.

There’s a lot of truth to this, indeed this is something that I’ve noticed myself, but it’s only a half truth. Older men already in their positions held on for dear life, to be sure. They also knew that to speak out against DEI was career suicide: they’d be forced out immediately if they were anything less than enthusiastic. Plenty of examples were made in the years leading up to the Great Awokening: Larry Summers being forced to step down as president of Harvard for suggesting that the under-representation of women in physics was consistent with the greater male variability hypothesis; James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, being forced out as the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for publicly suggesting that there might be something to racial differences in IQ; Matt Taylor, lead scientist of the Rosetta mission to the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, being driven to tears by an Internet mob because he wore a loud shirt featuring prints of hot women at the press conference celebrating the first unmanned landing on a comet. There was no degree of status or power that could protect you. That is not to excuse their cowardly complicity, of course; merely to put it in context. The old white men were not driving the cultural revolution. By and large they were being held hostage by it.

At the same time, older white men were also amongst the silent victims of this regime. The overwhelming majority of old white men are not in any particular position of authority, and those who found themselves between jobs in the 2020s found work particularly hard to come by. If you’re an engineer in your 50s or 60s, good luck getting past HR. If you have a position, good luck getting promoted. Or for that matter, keeping it. By the way, we just hired Sunpreet and his fifty cousins for ten rupees a day, they’ll be replacing you in a month, and if you want to get your severance package we’ll ask that you train them to do your job and sign this non-disclosure agreement.

Singling out old white men as the villains is timid misdirection. It simply echoes the hue and cry against ‘beardy old white guys’ that was raised by the very people who initiated the cultural revolution of the 2010s in the first place. Old white men are a safe target, and mostly the wrong one.

The pusillanimous traitors of the baby boom generation have their share of the blame, to be sure. So do the young women and racial minorities who agitated for DEI. Nor should we forget the politicians and judges who established the legal framework for affirmative action, equal employment, anti-discrimination, disparate impact, and all the rest, which is an element that Savage largely neglects, and which predates ‘wokeness’ by a couple of generations: it was the so-called greatest generation of World War II who laid that foundation. Let us also not neglect the financiers who quietly implemented Environmental, Social, and Governance or ESG, which attempted to starve corporations of investment capital if they did not implement diversity hiring; BlackRock’s Larry Fink, in particular, has a lot to answer for. ESG investing even impacted the start-up ecosystem: venture capital was preferentially diverted towards women and minority founders. Quite a few of those projects turned out to be scams. Remember Theranos, anyone? And how about those Alzheimer’s drugs?

There is a whole lot of blame to go around.

DEI infected and ruined every single institution. Indeed, this in itself is a large source of the fury that burns in the hearts of those young white men. It isn’t just a matter of personal despair, of looking out across the societal landscape and realizing that it is a wasteland offering you no avenue for personal advancement. It’s also outrage at what has been done to the institutions themselves.

The young white men were brought up to love and respect the institutions. They wanted to find their places within them, to be sure, but they also wanted to do their part to build, maintain, and improve them. To have the gate repeatedly slammed in your face is insult enough. To then see the glorious edifice that your forebears spent several centuries erecting and perfecting crumble under the weight of the incompetence of those admitted in your place adds unbearable injury to insult.

Institutional trust has collapsed, in large part entirely because of DEI. It has turned everything to shit. Scholarship is shit. Movies are shit. Television shows are shit. Journalism is shit. Music is shit. Software is shit. Hospitals are shit. Industrial engineering is shit. Everywhere one looks, everything is in a state of disintegration, in some cases literally: bridges falling down, airplanes plummeting out of the sky. DEI has led to a competence crisis, and as a result our complex systems are collapsing.

And the young white men, who understand better than anyone why this is happening, and are the single group best suited to reversing it, indeed the only group who can reverse it, are forcibly held on the sidelines, watching helplessly as their civilization falls apart. The flower of Western youth withers on the vine while the fruits of Western civilization rot unharvested on the branch, food for locusts and crows, as termites chew through the heartwood of the dying tree.

The enshittification of everything cannot be emphasized enough. It is the single most damning, delegitimizing aspect of the DEI kakistocracy. The people controlling the institutions are pretenders raised above their stations, working far beyond their natural abilities. They are midwits proclaiming themselves geniuses, mediocrities putting on the affectation of excellence, peasants LARPing as nobility. They are liars in every way, not only in that they lie about COVID or crime statistics or the effects of immigration or the motivations behind their foreign policy or the rate of inflation or whatever else, although of course they lie about that all the time; their most fundamental lie is that they present themselves as something they are not, as being worthy of the offices they hold. That they are unworthy is demonstrated by the consequences of their rule, which have been disastrous. They have brought about a cultural dark age.

The question is, what do we do about it?

Assuming anything can be done, that is.

We certainly can’t go on like this. This situation is politically explosive. Young men in general are the most potentially disruptive demographic in any society, which is why every healthy society has understood that you deny them opportunity at your very great peril. Savage’s advice to meekly accept their lot isn’t going to cut it. The rage is too widespread. That rage is in large part what pushed Trump into the White House, and for all the caterwauling about the Orange Dictator, the general feeling amongst the young white men is that Trump is a big softy, an out of touch boomer who doesn’t have the steel to do what’s necessary, but is tactically useful because he provides room to manoeuvre. It doesn’t help when Trump meets with Indian CEOs to discuss bringing in even more H1Bindians to deprive even more young white men of good jobs in the tech sector, particularly when the CEO in question was caught on camera straight-up ordering his minions to not hire white men.

There is a growing sense among the young white men that, if everything is going to rot anyhow, they might as well just burn it down themselves. If nothing else, it would be immensely satisfying.

Savage wrote his article in the plaintive register of a lament for ‘a lost generation’. He depicts young white men as powerless victims of a callous system that unfairly cast them aside, and thereby attempts to gain them the Oppressed status that has been claimed by every other group. As with his castigation of the old white men, this is a half-truth, and one that leads to a blind alley, besides. The cult of the sacred victim that lies at the heart of gay race communism has no place for white men. Structurally, it cannot: by its very nature the cult requires an object upon which to focus its odium. If young white men were to be accepted as congregants, another group would need to be placed on its blood-stained altar. Every single other group has already been embraced by the church; therefore one of those groups would have to be excommunicated. None of those groups will accept that.

Moreover, white men are the natural and indeed necessary focus of the death cult’s detestation. The cult of the victim is a cult of weakness, helplessness, powerlessness; its entire raison d’etre is to cast down the high and raise up the low. Hatred of the healthy, the beautiful, the strong, the brilliant is its very essence. The simple, unavoidable truth revealed by history is that, for whatever reasons, white men stand so far apart and above the rest of the human species that comparison becomes a matter of embarrassment for all involved. White men are responsible for an overwhelming proportion of the world’s greatest works of art, literature, music, and drama; for almost every single development in the exact sciences; for almost every single technological advancement; for practically every advance in philosophy, in exploration, in statecraft, and in war. Whites have generated more genres of fiction than most peoples have written books, more genres of music than most peoples have songs, more schools of philosophy than most peoples have philosophers (insofar as philosophy can even be said to exist outside the West, which is a debatable proposition).

It is not accidental that white men were singled out by the victim cultists as the focus of their opprobrium. The victim cult’s entire purpose is to take Western civilization away from the men who built it, destroy that civilization, and then wipe out the people who built it. The telos of the cult is Global Zimbabwe.

So let us flip the script and abandon this abortive attempt at gaining status and sympathy via initiation into the victim cult.

But before we flip the page, I’m going to pause to remind you that this article was written by a human being who has put quite a few hours into its composition over the last week. Researching, editing, writing and rewriting, thinking about the subject, considering and reconsidering ... putting together a 10,000 word word essay requires considerable effort. And I’m putting it in front of you for free. I could put a paywall here, indeed this is a natural hinge point in the essay, where perhaps I’ve caught your interest and could reel a few of you in out of a desire to see what I say next, but I want people to actually read this. Not to put too fine a point on it, but while not as young as I used to be, I’m certainly one of the young-ish white men whose professional career got derailed by DEI, which is why I’m here writing racist essays on Substack instead of beavering away submitting turgid papers to peer-reviewed journals. But for that to be viable, I do actually need to get paid. Sadly, growth in paid subscribers has been completely flat for about a year now, which is rather demoralizing ... and hey, I get it, the economy is crap, inflation is high, no one is hiring, a lot of you are living paycheck to paycheck assuming you even get a paycheck, and on top of it all it’s Christmas, which is expensive ... but then again, it’s Christmas. Perhaps you’ll buy a writer whose work you enjoy a beer to keep him warm over the holidays, so that he knows how much you appreciate him? Or perhaps you really can’t afford that, in which case don’t worry, friend, there are no hard feelings here, Merry Christmas and enjoy the rest of the show...

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Young white men were castigated as demons in human form, presumptive racists and sexists, Nazis by blood. Then they were locked out of education and careers, excluded from society itself.

By necessity, they retreated to the one environment in which they could still have some measure of freedom: the virtual wilds of the Internet. Here they found only one another for company. They formed loose associations in group chats and Discord servers. They started comparing notes: their experiences with school, with employers, with the job market, with women – what worked and what didn’t. They began to explore ideological territories that had been labelled off-limits, old reactionary tracts and forgotten fascist memoirs and classical histories upon which their society had inscribed ‘Here Be Dragons’. Some began to launch little guerrilla raids on the conceptual infrastructure of society, attacking media narratives with blizzards of memetic brainrot, assaulting load-bearing societal myths with carefully reasoned evidentiary argument and mocking rhetoric honed to a razor’s edge.

There’s a remarkable analogy here with the ancient Indo-European tradition of the koryos, the wolf-pack war-band of wild young men. The koryos was a coming-of-age ritual which began with the ceremonial sacrifice of a dog, during which the boys took on the symbolic identities of wolves. The wolf-boys were then ritually cast out, banished to the woods, where they would live as wolves, which is to say as inhuman monsters loyal only to their pack, in a state of war with all human society. For some months they would be expected to live by hunting and raiding, after which they would be welcomed back as men. That this is the origin of the werewolf mythology should be obvious.

In treating young white men as they did, by demonizing them and casting them out, liberals inadvertently created psychological conditions remarkably similar to those facilitating the organic emergence of a koryos. While this koryos is so far entirely virtual, existing within the hyperreal realm of semiotics and discourse, it is also quite possibly the largest koryos that has ever been created, a barbarian horde of the fibre-optic steppe whose raw numbers would impress Attila.

Attila might have raised an eyebrow at the scale of this virtual koryos, but his lip would certainly have curled in contempt at the nature of its activities. Physically, it consists of sedentary men locked in their basements, playing social games with words and symbols. This sublimation has happened before, when frontiers are closed, society becomes domesticated and bound by laws and convention, and opportunities for conquest disappear. The wild spirit of the war-band of young men turns inwards, spiritualizing itself in philosophical schools or monasteries, with the object of conquest becoming not mastery of space but mastery of instinct, or of the abstract landscapes of logic. In his book Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, Costin Alaramiu suggests that Plato’s Academy was modelled somewhat explicitly on the koryos, as an attempt to preserve the aristocratic spirit of the steppe within a society that had become too urban and democratic, an insight he probably gleaned from Nietzsche, who perceived the same sublimation of instinct in the monastic life of Buddhist monasteries.

In our modern case, the virtual koryos is also a great sexual inversion occasioned by the invasion of women into traditionally masculine institutions. Public life, political life, the outward-facing life of action, the pursuit of status within formal hierarchies of competence – these have always been the domain of men. Private life, domestic life, the inward-facing life that maintains and polices social mores, the navigation of ambiguity within the informal networks of psychological and emotional influence that weave society together between the edges and nodes of formal hierarchies: these have always been the domain of women. Driven out of the formal institutional hierarchies dominated by women, men have had no choice but to take ownership of those informal social spaces that women have necessarily abandoned. The result has been the injection of the wild, boisterous energy of young men into precisely those domains of the social order that require quietness, tranquility, and softness, even as the application of feminine instinct has degraded the institutions into kindergartens that cannot fulfill their necessary functions. Formal hierarchies that rely on calm argument and the rumbled timbre of commanding authourity speak instead in the shrill tones of moral hysteria and relentless nagging, eliciting not respect and obedience but raised hackles and resentment; informal networks that communicate best through whispered pillow-talk and gently insinuated suggestions take on instead the harsh imperative bark of the battlefield and the howl of the hunt. This results in chaos: the prestige and competence of the institutions collapses, while the destructive creativity of youthful male energy rages unchecked through the structures of assumptions and axioms that harmonizes society.

Millions of young men all over the Western world have been networked together into a distributed discursive community that feels itself to be engaged in a permanent state of spiritual warfare with the surrounding society. Their communities started as predominantly masculine out of necessity, but over time this has gelled into a more self-conscious maintenance of exclusively masculine spaces. Their shared experiences, of being hunted via doxxing campaigns and social media account bans, of coordinating raids on comment sections and Twitter replies via group chats organized in the hidden corners of the Internet, of honing their rhetorical skills via ruthless discursive duels with their brothers as they fought over points of fact and doctrine, of fashioning the symbolic content of their virtual world into memetic spearpoints with which to pierce people directly in their brainstems, of hiding their power levels when in the IRL company of normies, all these shared experiences have moulded them into a cohesive cultural force which may have started as something purely oppositional to the parent society that cast them out, but increasingly lives by and for itself. They have fashioned a mythology out of the archetypal grammar of memes, with which they tell the sagas of their influencer heroes; they have cobbled together a religion from esoteric ideologies, with Hyperborea edits as their devotional hymns.

The mainstream culture they once lamented their exclusion from has long since become for them a thing of disdain and contempt, which they refer to with derision as the longhouse. Here again we see a historical form being recapitulated in a sublimated fashion: the primordial tyranny of the Den Mother and the Village Elder who conspire to break the spirit of young men, to domesticate them into draft animals for the service of the village, which is really to say for the service of the Den Mother and the Village Elder. The longhouse is given modern expression in the Safe Space ruled by the nice ladies of the Human Resources department, with the constant surveillance of every word and deed via the digital panopticon forming the modern analogue to the physical longhouse’s communal lack of privacy.

When the Indo-Europeans encountered the longhouse cultures they found them repellent, even blasphemous, an offence against nature. Men rendered small and sickly by a diet of grains, ruled over by tyrannical women who polluted their minds with superstitions and sacrificed their babies to dark goddesses. Because it was right, and because they could, and because it was profitable, the Indo-Europeans put the longhouses to the torch, cast down the idols of the old demon gods, slaughtered the men, and took the women for their concubines.

This cataclysm is remembered in our deepest mythology, memorialized in our oldest heroes. Constellations related to this foundational myth of Western civilization occupy almost a fifth of the Northern hemisphere’s night sky: Cepheus and Cassiopeia, king and queen of Aethiopia, who offer their daughter Andromeda to the sea monster Cetus as a sacrifice to appease Poseidon (whom Cassiopeia had angered by boasting that Andromeda was more beautiful than the sea god’s Nereids), only for the hapless princess to be saved by Perseus who, flying home on Pegasus after slaying Medusa, turns the beast to stone by showing it Medusa’s head.

draws out the meaning of the Perseus myth and its connections to the modern situation in his evergreen essay Heroes Rise//Monsters Fall, where he describes the clear analogues between the theological control systems of the old agrarian city states and the contemporary gynocratic order:

These massive systems of polygamy, rather than having a masculine character, are in fact organized around feminizing principles of control and surveillance, for they are impossible to sustain without systemic suppression of male impulses to challenge and reproduce. Furthermore, they can only be possible in sedentary societies with centralized control of food distribution: only where ostracism is death and no exit is possible can the majority of the male population be kept in subjugation. Powerful men rule and enjoy, and the women, being under the protection of powerful men, with their free time and proximity to power, devote themselves to creation of religious structures of opinion and taboo, like how wives of wealthy men work at non-profits and NGOs, or a childless middle class woman becomes a social worker.

These religious systems create beliefs which reinforce the regime and structures dedicated to detecting and stamping out any spark of assertion or male rebellion. Men are inculcated into these systems and made to believe in their legitimacy; the greater their dispossession, the more powerful these systems of suggestion, and the greater their required reverence. Therefore they are made to participate in their subjugation and are denied the possibility of accumulating wealth or creating a family. Some, as many as possible, are made eunuchs. The rest are enslaved through force and taboo. Perhaps this INCEL class is even pacified with pornography. The numerous clay images of fertile females found in Neolithic settlements would then not be female goddesses, but ancient C-GIRLS (clay girls!) intended as substitute wives for un-partnered men. You see the enemy has always been the same! In this way the ruling class, extended to include almost all women, cements its power and protects itself from challenges. Does this seem familiar to you???

The gorgon seems to have played a central role in the control theology of the neolithic culture: depictions of the serpent-headed demon women referred to as gorgoneion abound in the archaeological remains of the pre-Greek Mediterranean. The name ‘Perseus’ means something like ‘destroyer’, possibly from the Greek verb persein, πέρθειν, ‘to waste, to ravage’, which with the agentic suffix ‘-eus’ becomes ‘sacker of cities’. Since no one sacks cities alone Paulos therefore infers that of course Perseus was not some lone hero but must have been the leader of a war-band, that the presence of such a group is clearly implied by aspects of the myth, and though he does not use the term this is functionally a koryos. It was therefore the koryos, the band of young men, which destroyed the gorgonein state:

The fearsome reputation of the gorgon culture is widely regarded, but the exact center of its power and means of approach are unknown, leading to an extended reconnaissance ... Perseus and his men, therefore well-prepared, infiltrate the city and to their astonishment, find the guardians sleeping. The narrative state, trusting in the reputation of its magic, has left its gate unguarded ... His decisive stroke, the cut that kills a god, is the signal. Within an hour the grim night-work is done. The chief priestesses and eunuchs lie slaughtered in their temple, the sacred masks are secured, and the raiding party is already making their escape ... In fact what has been accomplished with Perseus’ adamantine stroke is a great “cutting away” of state power from the thicket of custom that cultivated, but also immobilized it ... The whole arc of the European Faustian spirit begins with this cut.

Within Indo-European society the koryos was an institutionalized ritual. Boys were deliberately inducted into it, and then re-absorbed back into society. That is not what has happened in our case: the virtual koryos was created unintentionally, it emerged organically from a mixture of necessity and instinct, of blood memory awakened via a kind of anemoia, nostalgia for a place we’d never been, or rather a condition we’d never experienced, but which would have been recognizable to our remotest ancestors. The usurpers within the institutions have no intention of ritually readmitting the young white men that they banished, of course. But the young men of the virtual koryos will not remain in the wilderness forever. The outpouring of fury that The Lost Generation precipitated suggests that the moment of the Lost Boys’ return is growing near. One way or another, they will return, and if they will not be welcomed as prodigal sons, then they will come as sackers of cities, with fire and sword. From their perspective, there are no other options, and since it is their perspective that is the active principle of history ... there are no other options.

The wisest thing that the institutions could do would be to immediately repent and relent. Not only eliminate DEI, and do so in good faith, without just rebranding it with some other euphemism, although of course this is absolutely necessary, but to open themselves to the young men under conditions of absolute meritocracy, with no more favouritism being shown to any, and to resign themselves to the biological reality that under such conditions it will overwhelmingly be talented white men who rise to the very top levels of performance, and are therefore rewarded with the commanding heights of the social order. Of course the pretenders would find this humiliating, but it is much better for them than the alternatives. At this point however it is no longer really clear if the young white men would even be interested in such acceptance. The longhouse has become a nauseating sight. Joining it is not so attractive anymore ... yet it remains a concentration of great wealth...

OK but what do we mean by ‘burning down the institutions’, exactly? Clearly, and perhaps this is a disappointment to you, but we’re speaking in metaphor here. I know many will sneer things like ‘you people won’t do anything, it’s all talk’, forgetting of course that in the virtual realm talk is virtually the only thing that exists, that symbols become objects, that combat itself becomes an abstract thing. But also, equally obviously, it would be absurd to imagine angry mobs of young men literally throwing Molotov cocktails around on university campuses and corporate offices, not that such a thing is impossible of course, only that it would accomplish nothing. It would be a nihilistic spasm of performative violence, in the aftermath of which the perpetrators would be thrown in jail and the system would just carry on as before. The same consideration applies to more deliberate terrorist type actions along the line of Breivik or Tarrant: spectacular as such gestures may be, they’re ultimately just gestures, which do nothing to weaken the system per se, and invariably backfire by alienating the general population and providing the system an excuse to crack down on dissidents.

The systems we contend with are largely immaterial: ideologies, laws, regulations, organizational hierarchies, flows of capital which are themselves evanescent numbers in digital ledgers. There’s a physical infrastructure underlying it, yes, but this infrastructure is dispersed around the world and entirely robust against physical attack. The Internet on which their system relies, every bit as much as the outlaw culture of the virtual koryos does, is quite literally designed to withstand nuclear war. It can’t be destroyed through physical violence, and neither can any of the systems built on top of it.

Since we contend with immaterial forces, we must consider immaterial strategies, not so much non-violence as violence by other means, what the Chinese might refer to as Unrestricted Warfare or the weaponization of every point of contact, and what our own military theorists refer to as Fifth Generation Warfare or 5GW: the warfare of psychological operations, pranks, economics, legal action, and cultural subversion. That isn’t to say that physical violence, violence in its most vulgar sense, plays no role at all, but rather that it becomes one implement in a large toolset, and one very rarely reached for. When it is used, it is almost always for its symbolic effect: in hyperreal warfare, everything is semiotic, everything is intended for an audience.

Beyond their immateriality, one of the challenges in addressing DEI is the sheer scale of the criminal enterprise. The rolls of the guilty number in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. They permeate the institutions. Putting them all on trial individually would be a Herculean task. Moreover, in most cases their individual culpability is quite minor. Odious as their ideological commitments may be, they’ve probably not done much more than make a remark on a hiring committee to the effect of ‘But are we sure we want to hire another white guy?’ Some of them have done more than that, but very, very few of them are guilty of anything that rises to the level of illegality that you could throw them in jail for even for a few months, let alone justify their mass slaughter.

Yet as a class, the damage they have done has been immense. As a class, they’re responsible for destroying millions of lives. As a class, they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of suicides on their hands. As a class, they’ve stolen careers from millions, and through this they have stolen hundreds of billions of dollars, all of which represents families that were never started, babies that were never born, inventions that were never brought to market, scientific breakthroughs that were never made, era-defining creative works that were never produced. The civilizational damage these termites have done to the arts, to scholarship, to the sciences, and to technology is almost impossible to overstate.

To not hold them accountable would be a monstrous miscarriage of justice.

This is really a special case of a more general tactic that the managerial class has spent the last century perfecting. Every question is handled by a committee or a system or some other impersonal mechanism. The result of this is to diffuse accountability through a giant formless mass of human oatmeal. All of them are a little bit culpable, but no one person is entirely or even primarily responsible. It is therefore difficult to know where to direct one’s fire. There are very few high-value targets, and simply removing one person here or there has no actual effect on the system, since individual functionaries are easily replaced.

The answer to this is actually quite straightforward, requiring only the ruthless will to carry it out.

Since the locus of responsibility is at the systemic level, the systems must be targeted. Which is to say, the institutions. Which is also to say, the people staffing the institutions, as a class. Because they act collectively, and refuse all personal accountability, indeed using organizational opacity to make personal accountability impossible, collective accountability is the only possible solution.

The end goal is simple: to take their power, and to take their wealth. This requires something more than memes and podcasts. Ultimately we are talking here about access to material resources. Young white men need to be able to afford houses, they need to be able to support families, they need access to real, tangible property and prosperity.

The ideological work is already largely done, in any case. The totems of ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘antisemitism’, ‘tolerance’, ‘democratic values’, and all the rest have already been cast down and broken; these sacred idols of the boomer truth regime, of post-war liberalism, lie shattered on the temple floor, the old priestly incantations no longer have any power to compel, the young white men have freed their minds of these. The moral legitimacy of the regime rests upon these broken idols, and is therefore broken. The practical legitimacy of the regime relies upon its promises of technocratic competence and technological progress, and these too lie in ruins after years of failures, collapsing quality, and transparent lies. The regime has been completely outmanoeuvred at the spiritual level.

Political defeat is a necessary consequence of spiritual defeat, and it really cannot be emphasized enough that no victory is possible without political victory, without seizing control one way or the other of the state. It’s fashionable right now to be contemptuous of democracy, and I share this skepticism, being inclined towards warrior aristocracy and monarchy in some form or another myself. Nevertheless our current political structures are at least in form democratic, and winning elections is therefore a more or less necessary step, though of course far from sufficient given the existence of the permanent bureaucracy and the judiciary, which by and large are controlled by the enemy and insulated from legislative and executive power. There’s also understandably an exhaustion with the whole process given the interminable bureaucratic and judicial games that are played by our opponents, which so often frustrate electoral victories. It would be so much easier if some enterprising colonel would simply launch a coup d’etat, no? Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that, after all, Bukele came to power democratically, in the teeth of the united opposition of El Salvador’s deep state. Nationalist-populist parties across Europe are advancing relentlessly despite the Eurocratic establishment using every dirty trick in the courts to block patriotic candidates and to hem them in with cordon sanitaires in the legislatures; in Britain, Reform is expected to sweep the next election with well over 300 seats, and is already dominating in local council elections. Then of course there is Trump, who has now won three elections in a row.

So, through the grace of providence, Trump is in the Oval Office; riding in with him as staffers and political operatives are many representatives of the angry young white men of the virtual koryos. Rod Dreher was wringing his hands about the impiety of the groyper-adjacent young staffers he encountered in the imperial capital, who snigger at ‘antisemitism’ and ‘racism’, hold ‘democracy’ in contempt, and want to put the institutional legacy of the twentieth century to the torch. Of course a woman like Dreher is more concerned by ‘antisemitism’ than by anything else, not realizing that this is mainly an in-group identifier, a means by which comrades signal to one another that they do not worship the idols of their enemies, that they reject these attempts to shame them into not taking their own side, and that they are on no one’s side but their own.

This insinuation of the virtual koryos into the state opens up important opportunities for the next phase, which should be to begin dismantling the captured institutions, appropriating their wealth, and lustrating their inhabitants.

The obvious place to begin is in the courts, and the necessary elements for a courtroom feeding frenzy are already in place. The 2023 Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard established that affirmative action in university admissions is unconstitutional; of course, universities have by and large ignored this ruling (thereby leaving themselves open to further legal action). In 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services that ‘reverse’ discrimination against majority groups does not need to achieve a higher burden of proof than cases involving discrimination against minority groups. In the 2024 case Duvall v. Novant Health Inc. a white male plaintiff was awarded $4 million in compensatory damages due to having been unjustly fired following a DEI-driven shakeup. The ongoing Missouri v. Starbucks lawsuit led by Missouri Attorney-General Andrew Bailey is challenging the legality of corporate DEI programs, providing a blueprint for future lawsuits against other corporations. On June 11^th, 2025 the Department of Justice issued a memorandum promising enforcement of Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”. Most recently, just a couple of days ago and in clear response to the Compact article, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission put out the word to white men to bring DEI-related discrimination to their attention (unfortunately, there’s a 180 day statute of limitations on EEOC complaints, but this is only one potential avenue of many).

We’ll start with the specific case of the universities, which are almost uniquely dependent on the government, are by far the worst ideological offenders, indeed arguably the source of the problem. The universities are all quite clearly guilty of grievous violations of civil rights law, and there is no reason not to turn that body of law against them via class action lawsuits seeking to extract ruinous penalties. This can be paired with a broad spectrum of federal actions: DOJ investigations paired with massive fines; cutting off the supply of research grants; cutting off the supply of federal student loans. Similar actions can probably be pursued at the state level. Here it is worth pointing out that Trump is being very stupid in allowing 600,000 Chinese exchange students to be brought in for the purpose of propping up the universities; quite aside from the national security risk, there is no reason to prop them up, and he should instead be doing the opposite.

Meanwhile, private class action lawsuits – for example, from young white men and their parents, or young white male academics – can be launched on the basis of admissions and hiring discrimination. Apart from possible punitive damages, these would turn up internal documents in discovery, which could then be used to inflict reputational damage. University faculties and staff are notorious for leaving internal paper trails in which they admit to flagrant violations of civil rights law in service of racial justice.

The overall strategy would be to starve the universities of capital flow, while simultaneously raiding their capital reserves, with the goal of driving them to bankruptcy. The process can be accelerated enormously just by removing accreditation: without the ability to grant degrees, a university ceases to be a viable enterprise. When it enters receivership, its assets – real estate, patents, copyrights, whatever remains of its liquid capital, trademarks, physical plant such as laboratories and IT infrastructure, everything – are acquired by a third party, which then has the opportunity to reconstitute the institution under new leadership.

Employment contracts of the recaptured institutions are rendered null and void, and former employees are strongly disfavoured for re-employment. This is the lustration component. Exceptions can be made in cases in which individual employees, particularly those with essential technical knowledge, can demonstrate that they resisted or opposed DEI in some fashion; however, the presumption must be that the majority of those hired within the last ten or fifteen years were hired because of DEI, or support DEI, or more likely both. The old white men of course can be pensioned off into retirement, which will buy the complicity of most. The diversity hires are no loss.

In their place, the reconstituted universities should then prioritize recruitment of the young white men who were previously and wrongly excluded. Young white men with the right credentials exist in abundance, thanks to decades of the overproduction of doctorates: finding good candidates won’t be a problem. They will then have the opportunity and resources to start fresh, to prove themselves, to rebuild and reimagine these institutions essentially from the ground up, bringing all of their youthful energy to the process. In practice this amounts to much the same thing as the popular ‘building parallel institutions’, with the crucial difference that it includes a healthy infusion of startup capital.

The result of this would be to achieve almost immediate turnover of the personnel in higher education. Universities would no longer be fortresses of civilization’s enemies, but realigned with Western civilization. Enemies would be punished and friends rewarded, at massive scale. This is essentially the Henry VIII strategy: to dissolve the monasteries, destroying the power of the Catholic Church in England, and using its massive store of wealth to build the Church of England in its place, and inject new vitality into the private economy.

It should be noted that the universities are already struggling. The demographic cliff resulting from an extended fertility drought is structurally reducing their customer base. Meanwhile, the feminization of the campus environment is coding academia as women’s work, leading to young men simply avoiding university entirely. The intrinsic low status assigned to women’s work is further contributes to prestige collapse.

All of these factors weaken the universities, making it that much easier to go after them. Their eventual collapse is overdetermined, but that which is falling should also be pushed.

So much for the universities. What about the private sector? The movie studios, the publishing houses, the television networks, the large corporations, the financial institutions? These are of course also just as guilty of systematic discrimination on the basis of race and sex; they are at least equally tempting targets for plunder or expropriation; and, crucially, they are also failing due to a decade of substandard products and services. Hollyweird just had one of its worst years on record, for instance.

Once again class action lawsuits and DOJ investigations are an obvious strategy. Proving discrimination in the case of any individual applicant is usually impossible, but demonstrating systemic discrimination should be very easy at the statistical level. Did a corporation have a DEI policy? Did white men comprise an obviously tiny fraction of new hires during the Cancelled Years? OK then, the organization is guilty of illegal discrimination, and we are now fining you one googolplex dollars; since you can’t pay that, your assets now belong to the plaintiffs, and everyone who works at your company is out of a job.

As an example, every white male software engineer who’s struggled to find employment over the last few years could target IBM, which under Arvind Krishna is on the public record as discriminating against white male software engineers as a matter of policy. IBM/Red Hat are already involved in a lawsuit with an executive alleging that he was fired because he’s a white man, by the way. Maybe you limit the plaintiffs to engineers who actually applied to work at IBM; maybe you just open the lawsuit to every engineer with plausible qualifications and the wrong demographics, whether they submitted a resume or not. It doesn’t even matter if they necessarily would have gotten hired on the strength of their GitHub commits alone: since they were white males, they were automatically (and illegally) disqualified. Dismantle IBM, send their H1Bindians back to the subcontinent, send their HR ladies to the unemployment line, and put cash money in the pockets of hundreds of thousands of engineers (and a whole lot of lawyers, who will probably also be young white men, because lawyers of diversity are probably not going to take that case).

Then repeat with Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google...

And of course, repeat for other corporations, across other industries, as necessary.

Blackrock has something like $13 trillion in assets under management, and around $160 billion of its own liquid capital. For its role in ESG, its direct assets should simply be fined away from it, Larry Fink should be thrown in jail, and its assets under management put in more responsible hands.

All of this no doubt sounds enormously destructive. Taken to its logical conclusion it would dismantle much of the US corporate infrastructure. Concentrations of capital would be plundered and redistributed to ordinary private citizens, parcelled out into millions of tiny payments. The American economy would lie in smoking ruins, but what did you think reparations meant? Vibes? Essays?

In practice though it probably would not be necessary to take things to quite this extreme. Making an example of a few high profile corporations in a few key sectors would induce sheer pants-shitting terror in board rooms all over the country, and they would begin falling over themselves to very publicly and ostentatiously clean house and make amends. Many are in any case probably eager to do so: diversity hires perform at a low level, political agitators are disruptive, and the consequences for the bottom line are plainly ruinous. The threat of bankruptcy via class action lawsuit would provide corporate boards and their officers with an excuse to lay off en masse the overburden of barnicular deadweight that they have accumulated in recent years, after which they could begin hiring on the basis of ability once again.

Courtroom looting of corporate America on this scale would indeed be economically catastrophic in the short term. A wise prince would not want this to continue for too long; after breaking his enemies, and satisfying his supporters’ hunger for justice and booty, he would seek to stabilize things. The only way to do this would be to gut the civil rights act itself. It was precisely this notion of civil rights, this idea that ‘discrimination’ is a priori evil, that led to the generational persecution of white men in the first place. Paired with the assumption of biological equality, every ‘disparate outcome’ becomes evidence of discrimination, and therefore cause for legal penalty or regulatory intervention. The crescendo this reached during the Cancelled Years was merely a hysterical zenith of a pattern that had been in effect since the mid-60s.

From a purely practical perspective, so long as civil rights protections were only being applied to minority populations comprising a relatively small fraction of the population, their burden was manageable, a mere annoyance. As mass immigration grew the fraction of ‘minorities’ in the population, however, the injustice borne by the majority population – and particularly the injustice suffered by its best exemplars – became intolerable, to the degree that the option of picking up the civil rights sword has become not simply attractive, but necessary to survival. In the long term, however, over a large scale, this is simply untenable. It would break the economy completely, making every decision to hire and fire, to admit or exclude, to publish or reject, the seed of a potentially ruinous lawsuit. The only way to prevent this situation from spiralling out of control would be to re-establish absolute freedom of association, perhaps even via constitutional amendment (currently an implicit right to freedom of association is found within the emanations and umbras of the First Amendment, but this is interpreted narrowly as a right to join; to be meaningful, it must also be a right to exclude). Organizations, whether universities, corporations, neighbourhood associations, churches, civil society groups, or volunteer organizations must be allowed to discriminate in whatever fashion they choose, without fear of legal penalty. In practice this would lead to the rapid re-establishment of meritocracy wherever it actually mattered, since employers who discriminated against the highest-performing groups would simply be out-competed by those who did not. Water would find its own level again, and nature would begin to heal.

Thank you for giving this essay your attention. I hope that you found it to be a valuable or at least entertaining investment of your time, which I have imposed upon at length. As always, my most effusive gratitude is reserved for my supporters, who make it possible for me to scratch out a modest living in the digital wilds by sharing my thoughts with you. It would be quite impossible for me to continue this without your valuable support, and you really are in a very small minority, as the vast majority of readers are content to receive Postcards From Barsoom for free. But then, my words are not a product, but a gift to you all, and on that note, Merry Christmas, everyone, and may the New Year bring new victories for us all.

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“You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.” – Sicario (2015)

Children’s literature has gotten soft. Disney turned every woodland creature into a cute little forest friend, and tacked a happy ending onto every dark fairy tale. The bloodstains were scrubbed out, death was swept under the rug, and the moral lessons became saccharine platitudes about being kind and sharing ... a helpful aid to management of kindergarten classrooms, perhaps, but worse than useless for the moral instruction of the young, who will one day need to navigate a world where the shadows of the human soul conceal sharpened knives, and the truth is not always what well-meaning young women with associates degrees in early childhood education might wish. Children go along with it, but deep down they know that they’re being lied to, that the adult are keeping something from them when they pretend that every story has a happy ending, that everyone can be friends and get along if they’re just sufficiently nice to one another.

Contemporary children’s literature has gotten even worse under the pressure of politics, with bookshelves filling with stories about antiracist babies who grow up to become boys who become girls, and girls who save themselves from dragons and therefore don’t need help from the boys who foolishly refused to become girls. This is less moral instruction than moral inversion, literature meant to turn children against their own natures, stories that deliberately deceive developing minds in order to neuter them, soften them, make them malleable and unthreatening for a managerial culture in which the socially acceptable lie is always preferable to the uncomfortable truth.

Fables For Young Wolves is not that sort of book.

The stories in Fables For Young Wolves are true fables in the Aesopian tradition: tales in which animals are used as symbols for particular facets of human character, or for particular kinds of humans. Foxes are wily, crows are wise but conniving, pigs are greedy and vulgar, asses are stupid, sheep are conformist and dull, dogs are loyal but credulous.

For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of the several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent. – Apollonius, on Aesop (quoted in the foreword).

The titular wolves around whom the fables revolve are true wolves: noble, cruel, cunning, vicious enemies to their foes but faithful to a fault to their friends, playing roles of villain, victim, and hero as each tale requires. As the most psychologically complex of the animals, they stand for everything that is highest in the human soul, and so are also suited to plumb the depths. These are not Disneyfied vegan wolves that make friends with rabbits: these wolves are hunters and killers, and unashamed of it.

Thomas O. Bethlehem’s fables are intended, as all fables should be, to impart lessons about human nature and about the world, not as we might wish it to be but as it is, with the intent that the young reader will be guided away from bad decisions and towards the good. Many of the stories are anecdotes of a couple of pages, which communicate simple ideas about controlling your base impulses, having your friend’s back, knowing who your real friends are, the consequences of helping those who cannot be helped, and so on. Interspersed between these are longer and more psychologically complex tales which build upon well-known folk-tales such as the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Three Little Pigs, the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, and Little Red Riding Hood.

The longer tales are by far the most interesting. Bethlehem subverts these stories, but in a very intriguing fashion that actually draws out their inner meanings to gripping and poignant effect. It is not a postmodern deconstruction, so much as a premodern reconstruction that brings their lessons into sharp, immediate focus. The moral of the classical Boy Who Cried Wolf, for example, is simply that if you lie too often, eventually no one will believe you; Bethlehem focuses instead on the spiritually poisonous consequences of a deepening web of lies, not only for the young shepherd himself, but for the villagers who become ever more invested in the false legend he weaves around himself. His Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing is a deeply unsettling account of the consequences of living a lie, showing how you eventually become what you pretend to be. Bethlehem’s take on the Three Little Pigs places the wolf in the role of protagonist, and asks us to imagine why the wolf would want to turn the pigs out of house and home, and what success looks like for a young wolf.

My personal favourite was his version of Little Red Riding Hood, which places the young girl and her bitter spinster aunt in the roles of the villains. Bethlehem makes this a story of a young girl who strays off the right path, which she finds too difficult and circuitous for her liking, trading her innocence and youth for the cheap excitement of secret transgressions through easy shortcuts and access to forbidden mysteries, and who ends up playing with the hearts of both wolf and hunter with disastrous consequences for everyone, herself included. This is a particularly powerful parable, warning girls against listening to bad advice from vicious old women who know just how to appeal to their worst instincts, and warning boys against the dangers of giving their hearts to the wrong kind of girl.

Physically, the book is a gorgeous artifact: printed in a beautiful yet very readable medieval font on thick, high-quality paper that turns easily and is not easily torn by clumsy young fingers, and sumptuously illustrated with gorgeous wood-cut style ink drawings by Twitter anon Monachvs. If I had to complain about any aspect of the book’s design it is that it does not quite do the beautiful artwork justice: many of the illustrations are a bit too small to easily make out, and would benefit from half- or full-page presentation. Perhaps a later edition will make this change; while the book would necessarily become a bit thicker, at 114 pages it has a bit of room to expand.

I’m not sure exactly what age range Bethlehem was aiming for, but my impression is that he intended his fables for young children. Depending on how advanced a reader one is, the vocabulary may occasionally present something of a stumbling block: in order to give the writing a classical, timeless feel, the author occasionally uses words that younger or less advanced readers might struggle with. That is as much feature as bug: too much literature is as intellectually stunted as it is spiritually blunted, and it is no bad thing to have to pause every now then when you’re reading to your child before bed-time to explain the meaning of a new word.

The stories are paced in such a way, and told in such a simple and direct fashion, that a child can quite easily grasp their essential meanings. That’s essential to the core purpose of moral instruction of the youth, but since that instruction is specifically of the kind that prepares them for the complexities, ambiguities, and challenges of adulthood, adults will find much to provoke their own thoughts. These are the kinds of stories that linger in the mind after one reads them, reminding the reader of lessons they themselves might have forgotten.

I opened this review with a quote from the 2015 Denis Villenuve masterpiece Sicario: “You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.” We can all sense that we are at one of those inflection points in history when the weak men bred by good times have sufficiently chewed through the load-bearing structures of the social order that hard times are imminent. Few of us were raised to be wolves; to the contrary, our society encourages us to be pigs that we might be ruled by our appetites, sheep that we might be sheered, lambs that we might be led to the slaughter. Neither the wider culture nor the educational system have pre-emptively adjusted to the harsher conditions we see coming on the horizon: they still seek to make boys and girls grow up meek, pliable, agreeable, gullible, and defenceless. We do our children no good service by failing to prepare their spirits for the gathering storm. Fables For Young Wolves is a book that recognizes that this is a land of wolves now. As Bethlehem tells us in the book’s introduction:

You don’t hear too much howling at the moon anymore, but that doesn’t mean we can’t, or won’t again soon.

If you have any young pups in your family, this would make a brilliant Christmas present for them.

Fables For Young Wolves is available in paperback and hardcover from Amazon; there is no Kindle, and that’s probably a deliberate choice. Personally, I recommend the hardcover: it’s only a few dollars more, and the quality is worth every cent. Here’s another glowing review if you’re not convinced yet; and here’s another; the Amazon reviews are universally impressed, and the book has a full five star rating. Seriously, check it out.

As always, thank you for giving this piece a few minutes of your attention. I know, I know: you want something a bit more substantial than shilling for someone’s book. I mean, I get it: I tend to shed a few subscribers every time I do one of these. But it’s also Christmas, so tough, you’re going to be getting a couple more of these over the next couple weeks. That said, I’d like to remind you that I don’t get a cent for these reviews. No kickbacks, no percentages, no quid pro quos. I do these purely out of the goodness of my heart, out of a desire to share my audience with deserving writers whose brilliance gets all too easily lost in the churning clamour of the attention market. Meanwhile, I am myself entirely dependent upon the generosity of my supporters, towards whom, as always, it is quite impossible to encapsulate my gratitude with mere words.

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While riding a municipal bus in Uppsala, I had the opportunity to observe a group of high school students. In one seat were a few Swedish boys, of the bespectacled, well-behaved, and soft-spoken variety typical of Sweden’s intermediate professional classes. In the seat next to them was a small group of Swedish girls. Behind the girls were some Arab boys, who were engaged in pulling the girls’ hair and otherwise tormenting and teasing them, much to the girls’ displeasure. In other circumstances this might have been an innocent, even light-hearted scene, and there was a part of me that was amused by the Arab boys’ antics and the girls’ protests, but the rigid posture of the Swedish lads, the way they carefully looked anywhere but at the Arab boys, gave the scene a tense, dark aura.

Here in microcosm was a holographic fragment of Sweden’s peculiar sociological madness. The Swedish boys were clearly deeply uncomfortable with the way the Arab kids were treating what they could not but instinctively think of as their women; whether their discomfort was due to the Arab boys’ discourteous behaviour, or due to displeasure at these foreigners getting the attention of girls the way boys have always done, the fact of their discontent was obvious. The lads radiated a desire to intervene, but their inaction turned their anger into a futile and pathetic thing.

These boys had been raised to be good feminists and anti-racists. Whether they personally bought into these ideologies was immaterial, for they certainly understood the consequences of transgressing them. As good feminists, the girls were meant to be able to take care of themselves. If they wanted help, they’d ask for it; moreover, they certainly weren’t anyone’s tribal property, so the Swedish boys had no standing to protect their women from foreigners. As to the Arabs, the Swedish boys were trapped in the double-bind of anti-racist multiculturalism, in which they must simultaneously ignore race and be acutely conscious of it: they must not think of the Arabs as members of a foreign and hostile tribe, but simply as Swedes just like themselves; yet at the same time, should they assert themselves against the Arab boys, they would certainly be harshly punished for this expression of racism.

For the girls’ part, I had no doubt that they would have much preferred the Arab kids to stop. Their body language was not of the sort that teenage girls use when they’re being teased by boys whose attention they are pleased to have. Yet they too were trapped by the antiracist imperative to avoid offending New Swedes by any means necessary, while also being prevented from asking for the help of the Swedish boys because, after all, they had been raised to be strong, independent women. Possibly some part of them felt angry at the Swedish boys for not standing up for them.

As for the Arabs, neither the strictures of feminism nor those of anti-racism applied to them one bit, and they knew this quite well. Thus they felt no compunctions about taking liberties with the girls. Doubtless any attempt to stop them would have been met with unabashed racial verbal abuse and quite possibly physical violence. From the point of view of the Arab boys, the Swedish girls were nothing but whores, and as for the Swedish boys – who were required by feminism to defer to the girls – well, they were obviously even lower than whores, contemptuous creatures of no account.

It is a particularly sick society that binds the hands of its own men in this fashion, that its women may be offered up in the name of sexual liberation and gender equality to foreign invaders whom that same society refuses to hold to the same standard, because to do so would be culturally insensitive.

Over my time in Sweden I made several similar observations: broken glass on bus stops, which would be repaired only to be shattered the very next day; gangs of young Afghan men prowling the downtown, staring at the populace with a frankly predatory gaze; female friends who would whisper to me, under their breath and with the door closed, that they didn’t dare go out at night unaccompanied; other girlfriends who stated forthrightly that they’d stopped wearing makeup and started deliberately dressing down in order to dissuade the attention of these immigrants; stories of racial bullying in the schools escalated to such a level that the parents had no choice but to transfer their white sons and daughters; ubiquitous gypsy women begging outside grocery stores or shoving their cups under your face when you sat on the terrace (the gypsies were a recent arrival, having flooded into the country when Romania joined the EU, and having quickly identified the gullible, good-hearted Swedes as easy marks).

The pace of Sweden’s demographic change has been rapid. This was brought home to me somewhat viscerally when a landlord from whom I’d been renting a room returned home one evening, shock written on his face. He was something of a recluse and a misanthrope, a retired engineer who lived at the edge of Uppsala but spent most of his time in his rural cabin. We’d had a few good conversations, as unlike most Swedes he had no illusions about the ill effects of immigration. Nevertheless, it was all somewhat abstract to him. When he returned to the apartment that night he had just gone to the city centre for the first time in several years. He told me that he thought I’d been exaggerating, but now knew that I had not exaggerated one bit: the city was completely changed, there were Africans and Middle-Easterners and Afghans everywhere.

Meanwhile, the good Swedes I met at work or in social settings were resolutely blind to all of this, convinced that there was nothing to worry about, that there were no problems, and that anyone who said anything to the contrary was a sexist, a racist, an Islamophobe, and probably a Nazi. When I tentatively raised the subject with one, he proclaimed confidently that such thoughts were the short path to Auschwitz. Another conversation that stuck with me was with a colleague who had spent a year or so as a conscript in the Swedish military, an experience to which I could relate, having served a few years in the Canadian militia myself. The subject of bar brawls came up: for myself, I’d always enjoyed the sense that the boys from my platoon had my back and vice versa, and that any civilian who threw hands was starting a fight with all of us; he’d been in similar situations, but found the unreflective tribalism of it horrifying. I pointed out that there were good reasons of evolutionary psychology for this sort of pack instinct, and that tribes which lacked it tended to go extinct; he responded by saying that we’d evolved past such things. Later, he explained to me that he did not care at all whether there were no ethnic Swedes left in Sweden by the end of the twenty-first century, so long as the people living in Sweden continued to practice Swedish values of tolerance and so on.

How does a country come, in such a short period of time, to embrace its own annihilation with such enthusiastic abandon? In other European countries, you might point to a bad conscience over the legacy of slavery or empire, but the only people the Swedes ever conquered and enslaved were other Europeans. With the exception of the Saami in the far north, Sweden had been perfectly ethnically homogeneous, with no oppressed minorities because there were no minorities to oppress. Some Swedes would tell me that Sweden had to make amends for its neutrality in the Second World War, as though tiny Sweden declaring war on Nazi Germany would have made a lick of difference. Others, bizarrely, pointed to the possibility that a certain amount of Swedish iron might have been used to forge chains and manacles for Trans-Atlantic slave ships, based on nothing more than the fact that those were made of iron, and that iron was a fungible commodity, and it was therefore plausible that a certain fraction of Swedish iron was put to this use.

Such justifications seem like ex post facto attempts to rationalize the phenomenon, to me. To the contrary, I suspect much of Sweden’s ostentatious self-harm is explained by Sweden’s somewhat inflated sense of its importance on the international stage, a belief encapsulated by the Swedish government’s characterization of Sweden as a ‘humanitarian superpower’. Swedes are fashion-conscious people, with an aristocratic assumption that others are looking to them and taking their cues from them. Thus, for instance, when it comes to Net Zero policies, Swedes will happily agree that even if Sweden became completely carbon-neutral it would not make any difference to the global anthropogenic carbon budget, which is dominated by countries such as China or India who could not possibly care less about ‘climate change’. Nevertheless, they assume that the whole world is watching what Sweden does, and that therefore Sweden must set an example. The actual truth is that much of the world is only vaguely aware that Sweden exists: your average American has a hard time remembering the difference between Sweden and Switzerland, for instance, to say nothing of the Chinese, who assuredly do not give Sweden a moment’s thought in their daily lives. An uncharitable interpretation of Sweden’s self-description as a ‘humanitarian superpower’ is that they are jumping in front of a parade in order to pretend to lead it.

Another important factor is that Sweden is a consensus society. Swedes are much more reluctant to violate social consensus than assertive Americans, eccentric Anglos, or the argumentative French. Say the wrong thing on the wrong subject, and be quietly ostracized. Sweden’s elites astutely use the educational system and the media to manage the social consensus on race, immigration, feminism, and so on, with the result that Swedes feel an intense emotional pressure to conform to these ideologies. To speak against them too strongly is to endanger not just one’s social life but one’s career.

That isn’t to say that every Swede agrees with all of this suicidal insanity. Far from it. There’s a vibrant political underground in Sweden: large and well-organized nationalist groups; a robust and highly critical commentary sphere of anonymous online dissidents; and a large and influential nationalist party in the form of the Sweden Democrats. Many Swedish men, in private, will admit that they revile the self-destructive left-liberal tyranny. For now, the establishment has been successful in keeping such men from power, but I do not know that this will remain the case indefinitely. In a consensus society there is always a quiet conversation taking place underneath the public conversation, consisting of whispered private remarks and things that are said by being left unsaid, the purpose of which is to continually test the consensus. When a consensus is reached that the consensus has changed, the new consensus rapidly displaces the old, bringing abrupt changes in governance, law, public policy, and social norms. In Sweden, that quiet conversation under the public conversation has been proceeding furiously, both in pace and in tenor, for many years now. Moreover, it can’t be ignored that the wider Western world is quickly souring on multiculturalism, replacement migration, feminism, and the rest of the intersectional left-liberal ideology. Left-liberalism is no longer hegemonic, and ordinary Swedes will certainly be taking notice of that. As open-borders globalism becomes unfashionable, political elites who cling to it look ridiculous and out-of-touch, rather than trendy and chic.

Perhaps that prediction of eruptive political change in Sweden will be borne out in the near future; perhaps, though, things will simply continue to decay, and it will strike the reader of a decade or two hence as obscenely wrong. Time will tell. For now, Sweden remains in the grips of this madness. The present work by Karl-Olov Arnstberg is a thorough, clinical description of the symptoms and etiology of what the author calls ‘the Sweden Syndrome’. Arnstberg summarizes the Sweden Syndrome’s characteristics as a combination of oikophobia, hierarchical inversion (i.e. preferring the worse to the better, the lower-performing to the higher, and so on), reality denial (the postmodern superstition that objective reality does not exist, and that subjective morality can be treated as objective: as he puts it, ‘pathos replaces logos’), and the collapse of distinctions and boundaries (e.g. men/women, self/other, us/them, etc.)

Arnstberg traces the historical process that converted Sweden from a nationalistic Folkhemmet which treated the country like a family, to a multicultural administrative zone that perversely prides itself on privileging the foreigner over the native. He shows how these beliefs were introduced into Sweden’s elite and propagated through the key educational, academic, legislative, judicial, and media sectors. He shows in gut-wrenching detail the consequences for ordinary Swedes: vicious gang-rapes; teenage boys forced to submit to having their mouths urinated in after being robbed; legal persecution, public defamation, and career destruction for complaining about it. He demonstrates how the legal system has been twisted to harshly punish native Swedes, while letting migrants off with a slap on the wrist. He explores the deleterious consequences for Sweden’s institutions of feminization following capture by ideological feminists, and how the imposition of feminist dogma turns Sweden’s men and women against one another, and against their own natures. He demonstrates how the disease expresses itself even at the level of national symbols, for instance with the castration of the Swedish military’s heraldic lion.

For Arnstberg, the Sweden Syndrome is not a mere academic exercise, but something that he has lived through. He was personally acquainted with some of the principals who drove the early debate on multiculturalism. As a professor of ethnology at Stockholm University, he had both a front-row seat to the deepening psychosis of academia, alongside mastery of the conceptual toolset necessary to document and analyze the degenerative process. Finally, as an outspoken critic of the government’s immigration policies, Arnstberg has personally experienced the regime’s tactics of cancellation and defamation face-on.

The book is called ‘The Sweden Syndrome’, but the broad stokes of the disease that Arnstberg describes can be seen in practically every Western country. Sweden is not unique in this regard. However, Sweden presents an exemplary case study, due to the rapidity with which it succumbed, and the thoroughness with which the symptoms presented themselves. No matter what country you live in, you’ll likely recognize the symptoms Arnstberg describes.

Arnstberg’s concise analysis of this complex mass psychosis is a service not only to the present, but to future generations. While, as Arnstberg notes, we do not yet have either a vaccine or a cure, the first step to treating an illness is recognizing and describing it.

There are reasons to be hopeful that the fever is breaking. Since this book was written in 2022, the Sweden Democrats have become the second-largest party in the Riksdag and therefore too big to ignore, thus they have finally broken through the long-standing cordon sanitaire with which they were isolated from any meaningful policy influence, entering into the government as part of the so-called Tidö Agreement coalition with the other right-leaning parties (the Moderate Party, the Christian Democrat Party, and the Liberal Party). Meanwhile, the Swedish government has started experimenting with offers of lump-sum financial compensation to induce migrants to leave the country. These are small, tentative steps towards sanity. The Tidö coalition is an awkward one, particularly for the Liberals, and the centre-right parties have faced furious condemnation from both domestic media and their European counterparts abroad; while the Sweden Democrats are the largest party in the coalition (and the second-largest in the Riksdag), neither the prime minister nor any senior government ministers are drawn from the party. As to the remigration efforts, these have been completely unsuccessful, with only a few hundred accepting the government’s bribe to leave, as compared to the million-plus who ultimately need to be removed. Nevertheless, these are small steps in the right direction, and mark the first reversals of left-liberal multicultural globalism in decades.

John Carter

Canada

November 23^rd, 2025

Some months ago an old friend, who is now an editor at , reached out to ask if I would be interested in writing the foreward to The Sweden Syndrome. I naturally agreed, on condition that I be given leave to share the forward with you when the book was published, which it now has been. The Sweden Syndrome is available at Amazon, in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover editions.

As always, thank you for your time and attention, which can never be replaced, and which I hope was used well in reading this. And as ever, my deepest gratitude to my supporters, who make it possible for me to make something of a living writing for all of you, which never fails to amaze me. If you’d like to join the ranks of my supporters, it’s as cheap as buying me one beer a month. Oh and for the record, I wrote the foreword for free, and am not getting paid anything at all from the sales of the book (the profits of which go, as they should, entirely to the author and to the publisher).

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I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Thee hath in thrall!’

La Belle Dame Sans Merci (The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy), John Keats

A great deal of Discourse revolves around the desultory state of the broken modern young man. We wring our hands about porn brained incels, and about the incel’s mirror image in the sociopathic gym bro fuckboy. We talk about how men need to man up, put down the console controller, get out of the basement, talk to real girls, and wife them up. At the same time, we do everything we can to make this as difficult and unappealing as possible. Male sexuality is relentlessly demonized, and this is at the root of great deal of social dysfunction.

Our society has established new social norms that make talking to girls in the wild, or even looking at them, tantamount to a sex crime. Buying a girl a drink at the bar is an imposition, an implicit expectation that she will at the very least say thank you, and this is essentially sexual harassment. As a result of this men do not buy girls drinks anymore. Glance at a girl’s cameltoe as she places her yoga pants between you and the mirror to do hip thrusts while you’re trying to focus on your deadlift, and get put on blast on TikTok as a perv. As a result men carefully avoid looking at girls, and girls wonder why they don’t get attention. Office romances are right out: ask Betty from accounting if she’d like to get a coffee, and you’re rolling the dice between getting lucky and getting a talking to from HR (if you’re lucky). Friend-group romances are discouraged: they bring too much drama.

The only romantic avenue still permitted is the dating apps. The de facto proscription of every other venue was so abrupt and thorough that I can’t help but wonder if MeToo was engineered by Match Group, in order to do to dating what Uber did to taxis. Just like Uber took an occupation that was able to provide a reasonable living standard for working class guys and turned it into piece-work for an imported third-world precariat, so Tinder wiped away thousands of years of accumulated social technologies optimized for the purpose of bringing young men and women together into stable, loving, and fecund matrimony, and replaced it with a winner-take-all meat market in which a small minority of the best-looking men swipe their way through a digital harem of emotionally crippled cum-dumpsters, while women retaliate by using their matches to get free meals and ghosting as soon as the cheque comes without so much as a thanks for the company. Commoditizing romance left everyone more lonesome and miserable than ever, but would you look at that market cap.

The decay set in long before Tinder, however.

Feminists have gotten a great deal of mileage out of Freud’s Madonna-whore complex. This is the idea of a Manichean division of femininity: the chaste purity of the innocent nurturing mother, contrasted with the wanton looseness of the degraded prostitute. The Madonna is embodied by the Virgin Mary, whose only begotten child was conceived immaculately, which is to say without actually having sex. Both archetypes are caricatures that fail to capture the full range of feminine sexuality, but a traditional, god-fearing society effectively forced women to choose between one or the other. Either she represses her instincts and lives a passionless life of quiet misery, or she becomes a fallen woman.

Unlike much of Freud’s oeuvre, which largely consisted of the author’s barely concealed fetishes, the Madonna-whore complex has held up fairly well in the era of evolutionary psychology. Freud’s explanation for the phenomenon – that it is rooted in the Oedipal desire to rut with your own mother – is of course nonsense (except possibly insofar as it may have applied to him). Its origin is more plausibly in the predicament of paternal uncertainty which has bedevilled men since before the dawn of mankind, and which leads to a trade-off between short- and long-term mating strategies with easy women on the one hand (with whom paternity is always in question, and in whom investment should therefore be kept to a minimum, but since they’re easy you can sow your seed in lots of them), and chaste women on the other (with whom paternity can be more reliably determined, and in whom greater investment is therefore warranted). It doesn’t matter that we have paternity tests now: evolved instincts don’t care about your technology.

In the aftermath of the sexual revolution female sexuality was freed from these ancient constraints. Women are permitted to dress as they please, date who they want, have sex with as many partners as they desire. Any attempt to dissuade women from such behaviour is attacked as slut shaming, a ploy by the patriarchy to control their bodies.

Promiscuous premarital sex was once a one-way street to single motherhood. The pill and legal abortion reduced that risk considerably, which provided the justification for eliminating sexual restraint in the first place. Male sexual psychology presents its own problems, however. Revealing attire invites male attention, and often not from the males whose attention a woman wants to attract. Women enjoy male attention, and so dress to attract it. Sexually excited men are liable to behave badly. Badly behaving men result in women getting hurt. Obviously, if a man behaves badly, society will punish him ... but the wise course is to avoid putting temptation in his way in the first place. Those ancient restrictions on female sexuality weren’t there to oppress women: they were there to protect women from themselves.

Women may have chafed under the chastity belt of the Madonna-whore complex, but it caused problems for men too. Men don’t generally want either a frigid Victorian schoolmarm or a drunken slattern for a wife: he wants the happy medium between the two, purity in the streets but a prostie in the sheets, a girl who enjoys sex and is good at it, but only has it with him. The Madonna-whore complex is a schizoid separation of these two conflicting desires, which then leads to the romantic frustration of both sexes: men have to choose between two equally unappealing options, and women are required to deny one or the other aspect of their own sexuality.

Just like men, women tend to want two, somewhat contradictory things from the opposite sex. First, they want men to protect and provide for them: to build what needs building, fix what needs fixing, pay for dinner, buy them pretty jewellery. In other words, they want men to sacrifice their time and energy of their behalf. At the same time they want men who are dominant, strong, confident, and at least potentially dangerous, for the obvious reason that men must compete with other men, and men who do not possess these traits make terrible protectors and providers in comparison with men who do. The necessary tension is that dominant, aggressive men are generally much less interested in protecting and providing: a man who won’t submit easily to other men, won’t submit to women either; a man who can force other men to submit to his will, can also force a woman to do the same. This mirrors the tension in male desires: a girl who’s a good lay might not be the most impeccably virginal of innocent maidens.

We can’t call women whores anymore in order to enforce virginal purity, but bad romantic decisions still carry bad consequences, and women also need to be protected from those consequences (and can’t ever be held responsible for them). The emphasis has therefore shifted from policing female sexuality to policing male sexuality. The result of this is the emergence of the simp-rapist complex.

The only way to create a safe environment for women whose behaviour is entirely unrestricted is to ruthlessly suppress precisely those masculine traits of dominance and aggression that women find attractive in the first place. All of these traits get included into the broad category of ‘rape culture’. Even looking at a woman without her expressly stated positive consent becomes a problematic act. Men who violate these norms become, according to this standard, “rapists”.

The simp is the chevalier blanc whose generosity is unaccompanied by any expectation of sexual reciprocity. The simp helps his fair maiden with her homework, picks up her slack on the quarterly report, pays for her dinner, buys her drinks, sends her money over OnlyFans, jumps to her defence when the incel orcs beset her on social media, and in exchange for this he receives nothing beyond a thank you and a smile, if even that much. Everyone knows that the simp hopes to get something more than that, but everyone – onlookers, the object of his affections, and the simp himself – understands that this hope is pathetically forlorn. The woman regards the simp with contempt, amused contempt at best, but more often as cold as a witch’s tit. She will milk him for his time, attention, and financial resources, but the more he provides, the more her pussy dries.

Women are acculturated to punish every manifestation of ‘rape culture’ in their social environment, thereby cleansing the environment of precisely the predatory, aggressive male sexuality their instincts demand. These repressed and therefore unsatisfiable desires then boil up from their collective id, expressing themselves in the paramours of the chick-lit girl-porn that has taken over the publishing industry. Women flick their beans by their millions to stories in which the female protagonists are helplessly ravished by monsters, whether figurative, as in the sociopathic billionaire who hires an executive assistant for his BDSM dungeon in Fifty Shades of Grey (which sold over 150 million copies), or literal, as in the minotaur who frequents a fantasy-world gloryhole in the popular Morning Glory Milking Farm and sweeps the millennial girlboss who works there off her feet.

The psychological mechanism is straightforward: women exile that half of male sexuality that most excites them to the realm of the monstrous, and inevitably find themselves fantasizing about monsters. In exactly the same way, when public morality enforced demure chastity upon women, male fantasies were full of the sort of sultry femme fatales that graced the covers of pulp magazines (it isn’t accidental that the contemporary male fantasy is now the beautiful mid, the friendly girl next door whose primary point of attraction is that she isn’t a bitch: we always fantasize about what we can’t find in real life). In both cases primal sexual desires are repressed via public vilification, preventing one sex from admitting that it wants the thing that it wants and prohibiting the other sex from expressing the thing that its complement wants. These genetically coded desires cannot be eliminated, and therefore surface from the unconscious shadow as depraved fantasies.

Some women are self-aware about this drive to be dominated. Witness this young woman describing her romantic fantasy of a man holding a sword to her throat and thereby rendering her helpless, admitting that this power move would make her wetter than October.

@momo_obrienMaybe i'm just speaking for myself, but I do not think I am. I feel like #booktok might appreciate this one. 
 #fantasy #dnd #larp

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Rape fantasies are not at all uncommon in women: studies consistently find that between one and two thirds of women indulge in them. Obviously this doesn’t mean that the majority of women want to be violently sexually assaulted. There’s ‘rape’, and then there’s rape: it’s one thing to be abducted by corsairs from your sleepy coastal village and sold into the sultan’s harem, where by charm and wit you rise to become his most favoured concubine; it’s quite another to be violated with a liquor bottle by a gang of pungent Pakistani taxi drivers who have got you strung out on cheap black tar heroin. The conflation of the two experiences in a single word is the same kind of deliberate linguistic confusion you see in that other modern bugaboo, ‘racist’, which includes ‘noticing biological difference’ and ‘wanting to genocide everyone who doesn’t look like Dolph Lundgren’: failing to distinguish between the two indicates that the innocuous noticing necessarily implies genocidal intent, and is therefore every bit as bad. The widespread prevalence of rape fantasies suggests that many women would prefer men to take a more aggressive role in romantic approaches than is currently permissible: not that they want to be literally attacked, but simply that they want men to play a more dominant role, to assert themselves, bend women to their will, sweep them off their feet.

But, perversely, men are punished for doing that … and punished in other ways if they don’t.

The simp-rapist complex places men into a psychologically impossible position, forcing them to choose between a set of terrible options.

The first option is to conform to one of the two archetypes admitted by the dichotomy, either moulding themselves into deferential, soft-spoken castrati, or aping the brutish persona modelled by, for example, Andrew Tate. They can either have social respectability, or self-respect and a sex life, but they can’t have both. The simp must humiliate himself by submitting to the total domination of a tyrannical woman, one who will never respect him – and so never really love him – because he so clearly does not respect himself. The rapist must treat women like single-use fleshlights: he hardens his heart to make himself a pitiless Lothario, incapable of having his heart destroyed by a woman because he allows no woman to touch his heart. In neither case is anything recognizable as romance possible. Love as such becomes impossible: there is only sex or its absence, but sex of a cold and mechanical kind, a biological function drained of genuine eros.

The second option is the path of the passport bro, who tries to stay one step ahead of the social toxicity produced by female sexual emancipation and look for love in Latin America, Eastern Europe, or Asia, where they imagine that the girls are more ‘trad’ or at least less insane than women back home. In most cases this is really just an international sub-type of the fuckboy, a Tinder-enabled sex tourist. There are cases of passport bros genuinely looking for love, and while this works for some men it often ends tragically. Relationships with women from the third world are frequently more transactional than the hapless passport bro is willing to believe: he thinks he’s found love, she understands that she’s found a meal ticket, and the moment she has everything she needs she discards him like a used tampon and takes everything else. I knew a guy who ended up in a homeless shelter because of this. Even when it does work out, the resulting children are racially and culturally confused: you might have successfully passed on your chromosomes, but you have not really reproduced yourself.

The third option is to become gay. If you’re in a societal prison, you might as well have prison sex. This has the advantage of complete liberation from the simp-rapist polarity, and the further advantage of gaining access to DEI set-asides. It has the great disadvantage that it is gay.

The fourth option is to castrate oneself, first chemically via a regimen of cross-sex hormones, and ultimately surgically, carving out a bussy where your member used to be. The troon escapes the simp-rapist complex not only by nuking his sex drive, but by abandoning masculine identity entirely, fashioning himself into a travesty of a woman.

The fifth option is simply to withdraw from sex entirely, to become what the Japanese refer to as a herbivore: an asexual creature who fulfills or sublimates sexual needs without contact with the opposite sex. There are many varieties of this. Incels make their involuntary celibacy a cornerstone of their identity, channelling sexual frustration into rage against the Chads who monopolize female attention, and resentment of the cruel Staceys who flock to the alphas and leave the incels on the shelf. Volcels (or voluntary celibates) and MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way) adopt the monk-like existence of incorrigible bachelors, doing their best to simply ignore women and instead diverting their sexual energy into hobbies, careers, fitness, or political activism. The pornosexual gooner immerses himself in visual stimuli with something approaching religious abandon, elevating the consumption of pornography to a devotional activity as he chases the Nirvana-like bliss of the goonstate.

Different as these terrible options are, sterility is a unifying theme. Children cannot be produced by anal sex, masturbation, or celibacy; the troon removes even the biological possibility of insemination; the fuckboy does everything in his power to avoid complicating entanglements with his toys.

Only the simp has even the possibility of reproducing, and this typically late in his 30s, with a blown-out roastie emotionally fried from her whirls round the cock carousel, who deigns to provide her beta provider with 1.3 children in exchange for veto power over the fine details of his life. In a legal environment in which no-fault divorce has made a mockery of the very concept of marriage as a binding contract, and in which the sexual access implied by marriage is rendered null and void by the self-contradictory concept of ‘marital rape’, to get married at all is to voluntarily place oneself in the position of a simp. The husband is no longer the head of the household; since equality is always a fantasy, the husband necessarily becomes the subordinate partner, a house slave who must defer to his wife in all matters lest she blow up the marriage, take the kids and the house, and ruin his life ... something she might do anyhow, on a whim, despite his every effort to appease her ... indeed, she might do it precisely because he appeases her. Perhaps if he is a good boy he will be very fortunate and she will let him have a man-cave, where he can drink IPAs and admire his funko-pop collection.

There are exceptions to this, of course, for instance insular religious communities in which some form of patriarchy remains in effect, despite being legally unenforceable in the wider society. Religion is not at all a panacea for this problem, however: witness the phenomenon of ‘servant husbands’ in evangelical churches, who ‘lead’ by deferring to termagant wives in all respects. There are also individual relationships here and there in which both husband and wife deliberately and consciously reject the inversions brought about by feminist sexual liberation. We are not concerned here with the lucky few, however, but with the broad generalities of societal conditions, and by and large this kind of gimp-suit househusbandry is the default condition of the modern married man, and it has been for some time: witness boomers saying they have to check with ‘the boss’ before going golfing, because ‘happy wife, happy life’. I’ve personally known quite a few men who became shadows of themselves after getting, as we used to call it, ‘pussy-whipped’, and some of these were hard men – combat veterans and the like. Conversely, I’ve known very few cases where this did not happen: where a man got married, and did not end up deferring to his wife on all matters of substance. Again, I’m not saying that this is true in every case, obviously there are exceptions, but with the absence of any genuine legal force to back up the patriarchal norm that the husband is the true head of the household (and in fact with a legal environment that implies precisely the contrary), couples in these kinds of traditional marriages are effectively engaged in a form a play-acting, a mutual agreement to pretend that the societal context is not what it very clearly is.

It turns out that you cannot actually force men to get married and sire children. If you make marriage unattractive enough, if you turn it into something degrading, if you make servitude the price of reproduction, very large numbers of men will choose wanking over sex and hookups over marriage. They will prefer the extinction of their familial lineage and even of their very race to being unmanned. You can rage against this, you can tell them they need to man up and do what’s necessary no matter how humiliating it feels, but male psychology is what it is and protests to the contrary are shouting into the raging hurricane of human nature. Chimp in state of nature never jerks off; a panda in captivity won’t fuck even to save its species. Wat does this mean?

Pornography is often blamed for the derangement of modern man, and there is some truth to this. Internet porn is an audiovisual drug that men can mainline straight to their brainstems from the obsidian sand demon portal that’s always just a stroke of their soft fingers away, and there is practically not a single man alive who has not been touched in this way. Porn has hit Western man with all the terrible fury that firewater hit the red man: we have no natural defences against it; being ubiquitous and freely available, it is impossible to escape; it is hideously addictive; prolonged abuse carries horrible psychological consequences, leaving addicts depressed and enervated.

Despite this, porn is not actually to blame for the malaise. Porn is not a cause, but a symptom. The red man was driven wild by firewater for centuries, but alcoholism did not really destroy him until he was sequestered on the reserve, isolated, bored, dependent, and politically impotent. At the same time Wall Street is full of high-functioning alcoholics and cokeheads. Environment makes all the difference with addictive substances. Addiction studies demonstrating the overwhelming power of cocaine or heroin to enslave the mammalian brain were largely performed on rats kept isolated in bare cages in brightly lit rooms. Such an environment is the nearest thing to hell for a rat: it is exposed, lonely, and dull. With their only source of stimulation being a spigot dispensing morphine-laced water, which they could access at will, they naturally developed a habit. Later studies found that rats kept in more congenial environments – large enclosures with other rats to socialize with, places to explore and hide, stimulating toys to play with – were not nearly so helpless when exposed to chemically addictive drugs. If the environment is terrible, any substance will do: when Indian reserves tried banning alcohol, their bands simply turned to huffing glue, paint, and gasoline.

Porn addiction is an epidemic, yes, but vast numbers of men use porn in vast quantities not because porn has some sort of sorcerous potency to entrance them, and not because they are weak or flawed or bad, but simply because they have been forced to inhabit the most sexually sterile environment that the human species has ever created. In fact, sexually sterile is not really the right characterization, because after all some some men are still getting laid quite a bit. The hell we live in is romantically sterile, an environment in which love itself is made all but impossible to achieve. Men aren’t only using porn to cope with an absence of a sex life because they’re rejects who can’t talk to girls, although there are certainly many of these. There are also many sensitive souls who turn to pornography out of an overpowering nausea: they could have sex if they wanted, but sex without love strikes them as pointless, a sickening pantomime, a howling existential void in precisely that place where the richest of life’s meaning should be. It’s sex reduced to biological function, to Agamben’s bare life, la petit mort to help the Last Man get a good night’s sleep. Thank you for getting me off, my head is clear now, so you can fuck off whenever you like. As they say, you don’t pay the prostitute for sex, you pay her to leave.

Men who internalize the simp-rapist complex – and that is really almost all of us, to some degree – experience their own healthy sexual instincts as something perverse, something to be ashamed of. Just looking at a girl appreciatively is felt to be a violation, let alone approaching one and asking her out. This is especially poisonous to European men because we are naturally wired to be a bit shy, to overanalyze our interactions with women, a consequence I think of a relatively thick prefrontal cortex, one purpose of which is to second-guess evolved instinct. Take this quote from a horrifying Atlantic article about the gooner subculture, The Goon Squad, subtitled ‘Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation’, which I found via ’s excellent weekly Saturday Commentary and Review:

Spishak gave me a few stated reasons for his pornosexuality. One is a fear of STDs; another is standard-issue performance anxiety. These both make a degree of sense: gooning compilations can’t give you chlamydia; a zip file can’t impugn your virility. But what a zip file also can’t do is lie to you—and it is this element of Spishak’s pornosexual philosophy that seems to me most striking, and most emblematic of the Gen Z gooner mindset writ large. It turns out that what most frightens Spishak about sex is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s (or anyone else’s) head. What if she’s bored by what Spishak’s doing but too polite to tell him? Worse: What if she’s uncomfortable with the entire situation? How could Spishak possibly know? “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” he says. “For both parties.”

The pornosexual isn’t worried that women will lie to him about sleeping with other men, but about whether she’s lying to him about liking him in the first place. Perhaps his mere presence in the room is in some subtle way coercive, placing her in a condition in which she must pretend to give her consent out of a concern for her own safety. If so, that would make him a rapist. The youth may be a sexual degenerate so porn-brained that he identifies as being exclusively attracted to jpegs, but he is a good feminist, he believes in positive consent, and this standard – when you loop it back into itself in a positive feedback Moebius loop of self-amplifying social anxiety – is an impossible one to satisfy. The result is total paralysis of the sexual instinct.

The tendency of well-meaning young men towards analysis paralysis is why European society developed such an elaborate set of carefully calibrated courtship rituals in the first place. Formal dances required the man to ask the woman to dance, and then to lead the dance, thereby putting the man into the dominant position women find attractive; this is terrifying for the man (what if she says no?), so the convention was that a woman would generally say yes; at the same time, for the woman’s comfort, a dance was just a dance and implied nothing more (no one can call her a slut for saying yes). Similarly with buying a girl a drink at the bar: the man buys it because this puts him in the position of provider, which women find attractive; obviously the man hopes that it leads to more than a drink, but the convention was that nothing more was implied than a moment’s conversation, thus giving both parties plausible deniability. The woman is given insulation from the implication that she’s a slut, while the man is given some assurance that he will not be publicly humiliated without very good reason. With these conventions removed, neither sex has any assurance; attempting to replace this with continuously voiced affirmative positive consent, in addition to having all the ronantic charge of a spreadsheet, doesn’t work because there’s no telling if she really means yes.

The young pornosexual’s anxiety over consent is not groundless. The MeToo era saw the cancellation of many high-profile men over cases in which they had every reason to believe they had the woman’s consent, only for her to withdraw it retroactively, publicly claiming that she never consented, or that her consent was coerced. Harvey Weinstein was the first and most high-profile victim: he was jailed for ‘rapes’ which were actually just transactional casting couch sex with starlets who understood full well that they were exchanging sexual access for career advancement. This is perhaps disreputable, but characterizing it as rape is doing violence to the meaning of the word, and the signal that was sent to men everywhere was that even prostitutes – which was essentially what these actresses were – could get you convicted of rape in a court of law even if you paid up in full ... as Weinstein always did. You’ll note that none of his supposed victims ever complained that he did not advance their career.

When men try to break out of the role of the simp that a lifetime of feminist programming has inculcated in them, there is an almost unavoidable tendency to overcompensate. Being nice to women at all, in even the smallest fashion, is simping. Giving them anything is simping. They move to the opposite pole, becoming hard core misogynists, which they come to believe is the only way to get laid because, after all, it works. The rapist and the whore both enjoy sex, at a purely physical level, but they both tend to hate the opposite sex. Women now commonly taunt their online critics as incels (despite many of those critics being married family men, but this doesn’t matter: it really just means ‘I would never have sex with you’, which is the greatest insult a woman can think of), but the truth is that the most misogynistic men are often precisely the ones with the most sexual experience. In order to succeed sexually, they had to cast aside their simp programming, and embrace their inner rapist, something they had been told their entire lives was evil. Then, to their horror, they found that women actually love it ... that not only do women enjoy, on some level, being treated as an object, but that they also lie about what they like. It’s hard to come back from that, and many of these men end up becoming exhausted and sickened with the whole thing and adopting monk-like volcel lifestyles. Witness Roosh pulling his popular pickup guides off of the Internet, converting to Orthodox Christianity, and sequestering himself away in a monastery or whatever it is he’s doing now.

The healthy response to this dynamic is to transcend it – to integrate the two polarities of protector/provider and predator. In the absence of a social environment that deliberately cultivates this balance, this is much more easily said than it is done, and therefore in practice very few men succeed. The sexual behaviour of modern women puts an exponent on the difficulty of this task, because it acts to push men away from a healthy balance. Not only does a man have to overcome his programming without overcompensating, but he must also find a woman who has not been driven insane herself, who is not also at war with her own romantic impulses, who won’t wildly oscillate between treating him like a vile incel simp and a brutish animal rapist every time he does something nice for her or asserts himself.

There is, admittedly, a certain romance to this situation: it has never been harder to succeed in the romantic quest, and the very difficulty of finding love in the wasteland makes the spring water of success all the sweeter, for those few who taste it.

Nevertheless, macrosocial problems are not solved at the individual level, and however impressive the stories of those few who do succeed in this environment, their individual solutions will do nothing to pull society out of its ongoing catabolic collapse. Fertility rates are well below replacement, a problem which is at least partly a function of the reluctance of men to marry. Men and women are both lonely and miserable: suicide is at historical highs for men, while women prop up their psyches with SSRIs.

Exactly what the solution looks like, I don’t know. A patriarchal revival might eliminate no-fault divorce and marital rape, re-impose the double standard of the Madonna-whore complex (which, say what you will, at least correlated to a high rate of marriage and fertility), and put an end to sexual equality laws giving women preferment in scholarship, admissions, hiring, and promotions (in order to facilitate a more natural socioeconomic order in which men rise to higher status than women, thereby making them more attractive). Since patriarchy is illegal, it’s just as plausible that the gynocracy will try to leverage the bureaucratic state to impose one-sided all-stick/no-carrot marriage on men, forcing them to act as providers to state-assigned wives in a sort of inverted Handmaid’s Tale. That would really just be an intensification of the existing system, in which the state acts as Big Husband to redistribute resources from tax simps to unmarried women.

Perhaps articulating the pathology of the simp-rapist complex might help point the way to a more mutually agreeable resolution to the sex war. If nothing else, the concept provides a short-hand terminology with which to confront women with the predicament posed by their own self-contradictory sexual impulses, and the consequences – for men, for society, and for their own happiness – of leaving these drives unacknowledged, unaddressed, and unfulfillable.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you found it a valuable investment of your attention. As always, I would like to express my gratitude towards my supporters, whose generosity enables me to spend time writing these postcards. Supporters get invited behind the paywall, which is where I keep my short fiction. Aside from this they get only my appreciation ... that, and the cool badge next to their names, which lets the plebs know that they are an aristocratic patron of the arts.

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John Carter: I’ve thought for a long time that the Aryan period between the upper neolithic and the bronze age (I really hate the term ‘Proto-Indo-European’) is fertile ground for historical fiction and fantasy. Most fantasy novels take place in a vaguely Medieval, Tolkienesque setting, which gives a lot of the more contemporary stuff a feeling of warmed-over pastiche, and I’m not really aware of much historical fiction set during the primordial age. The only novels I can think of are Dan Davis’ Godborn books (which are also fun reads, by the way). Of course there are no written records, so there isn’t a lot to go on, but at the same time that gives the imagination lots of space to explore. Another factor, however, is quite frankly political. Our society has become quite fragmented and deracinated. The Aryan age is a deep root that we can grasp onto, which unites essentially every European and European-diaspora nation on the planet. That could provide the basis for a sense of self-conscious prepolitical unity amongst the European peoples, founded on something more tangible than the set of nebulous Our Values that were invented five minutes ago. Were any of these considerations on your mind when you sat down to write The Toll of Fortune?

: There are a few more books scattered about, William Golding’s The Inheritors covers a meeting of humans and Neanderthals, but there’s nothing about the Indo-Europeans. There are two reasons for that: (1) After WWII it became stigmatized and even academic research could be career suicide if it wasn’t couched in terms acceptable to leftwing academics; (2) Until recently we haven’t had very conclusive evidence given the political barriers to writing about it. That changed with the aDNA revolution. In less than 10 years we have effectively proven that the Yamnaya Culture were the first to speak Proto-Indo-European, domesticate horses (mostly for eating) and then ride them. The “Cultural Diffusion” model (read: peaceful) of expansion has been rejected (though some leftwing academics persist on flogging that horse).

Now to your question, providing a sense of unity was certainly one consideration. This book is part of a series that will explore the unifying themes of epic storytelling in Western Culture. The Indo-European tradition is the basis for this and there’s lots of ore to mine. Of course it’s all been mined before, just not as “historical” fiction. My biggest inspiration came from considering the question, “what if these foundational themes of Western storytelling (which have had more than their fair share of political and cultural impact) were based on real events unique to our history?” Surely other meta-cultural traditions (Semitic-Mesopotamian, Sinnic, Kushitic, etc) have had their own unique stories that shaped them, but we’re now at a point where we can directly identify our genetic and cultural ancestors with far greater precision. I wanted to bring that all together.

I also wanted to write something that was politically allegorical and relevant to the inflection point that we seem to be going through as a civilization – one that I see directly related to the tension between pastoralist and agriculturalist modes of being. I believe that the conflict between these two types of people is very much driving our current situation.

JC: The Toll of Fortune has the feeling of a meticulously researched work. You seem to be drawing on plot frames from mythology and folk-tales – one of the plot arcs seems to be The Smith and the Devil, if I’m not mistaken, and later in the book you seem to be drawing from Beowulf – along with quite a few details from archaeology, anthropology, comparative linguistics, and so on. I’m assuming you drew extensively from The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, and probably also from Dumezil’s work. I was wondering if you could give us a brief bibliography (for instance, did you make use of ’s Folk-Tales and the Indo-European Tradition?), maybe point out a few places where the research you did pointed the work in creative directions you hadn’t considered, and indicate what other specific myths or folk-tales you were drawing from.

AK: Yes, I read about 25,000 pages (between books and papers). Anthony’s “Horse, Wheel and Language” was an early read that set me on this path. The “Folk Tales” book was used as well. Many other references were used from the general to the specific. For example, the scene involving dog and wolf sacrifice is about as factual as you can make fiction and comes directly from some of Anthony’s other research (right down to the direction that the skulls were split). However, in general most of my research focused on the genetics, archaeology and linguistics, rather than the philosophical. There are some other books I’d recommend but I’d draw the reader’s attention to my website where I specifically list them (https://13fathers.com/further-reading/). The list is by no means exhaustive or in order. I didn’t come to Dumezil until after I’d completed the manuscript.

I’m glad you brought up the Smith and Devil trope as it’s arguably the oldest story in Indo-European culture. It’s one that comes up in The Toll of Fortune as several ‘pacts’ are made. Of course, the Indo-Europeans didn’t have a “Devil” in our Christian-influenced meaning of the word. Nevertheless, the reference is very relevant, and this will come up over and over again. There is a price for everything, and as Bob Dylan said, “you gotta serve somebody.”

JC: One of the things I loved about The Toll of Fortune is that it leaves it open to the reader’s interpretation whether or not magic is real. When the crone gives Wolf the package of what I suppose is saltpetre or something, because she had a dream, which later turns out to be essential; or later when Wolf has a vision before he forges the bronze weapon, in which he’s convinced that he’ll pay a steep price for the weapon, which indeed comes to pass albeit not as he expected: maybe these are instances of psychic phenomena, but maybe it’s also just intuition or even coincidence. However, the characters themselves believe that these are visions from the gods, that they live in an enchanted world suffused with spirits. This creates a really beautiful effect, which draws the reader into their world much more effectively than wizards casting fireball for 3d6 damage, and it makes you sort of look around at the world you actually inhabit and wonder if the ancient’s weren’t correct all along, and we inhabit a miraculous reality. Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King series did a very similar thing to excellent effect. Was this an influence on you, or did you decide to adopt this approach on your own?

AK: I’m glad that was your takeaway because that’s what I wanted. I want the scientifically minded reader or the mystically endowed reader to be able to read it and still believe their worldview is correct. It was not easy managing that balance. I had to make the magic seem “real” enough and technological effects seem natively situated. I pushed the envelope a bit, but none of it is totally unrealistic. The ancient Egyptians were aware of meteoritic iron, for instance.

I adore Cornwell but hadn’t read that series of his. The approach (or inspiration) was simply my own technical knowledge filtering how someone 5000 years ago might view it. Almost nothing in that world would have had a technical explanation. Explanations would range from mystical to magical to divine to the natural. We have forgotten many simple things given our current level of abundance. Even in Classical Antiquity they would have had a hard time appreciating certain things from the Copper Age. For example, while copper was starting to be used for tools/weapons in the Pontic Steppe around 3000 BC we’re not talking about giant copper axes from Lord of the Rings. Adzes (much more common than axes) were used and had small copper tangs perhaps an inch wide – they were not clearing forests with them. Getting this “look and feel” right, not just in the context of “The Copper Age”, but for the Yamnaya specifically in that part of the Pontic Steppe (and modern-day Romania) required a lot of research. I’m sure archaeologists out there could still critique it but at the end of the day we can’t say anything with exact certainty.

This is critical, though, to achieving the right balance of magic and technology because any technology would have been considered magical. Take the Tartaria Tablets (something not tangential to my story). Best speculation today is that they were a manual for something – possibly metallurgy. As this series progresses that view will shift, but in 3000 BC metallurgy on the Pontic Steppe was relatively rare (we don’t find too many metal objects in graves of the Yamnaya, compared to, say, the famous Varna Culture and their gold-bedazzled tombs from a millennium prior). We actually see more metal in the archaeology of the nearby agriculturalist peoples of the Balkans, and we find a rich culture of metallurgy having evolved just north of them about another thousand years before that among the local Hunter-Gatherers. Here’s a fun fact: if “Bronze Age” simply means when bronze was first smelted then in some parts of Europe (around the Balkans) it started in the mid-6^th millennium, yet when we refer to the “Nordic Bronze Age” we’re talking about a period starting about 1800 BC. You have to be very conscious of what these labels actually mean for material culture. The last thing I want is to be anachronistic (like the TV show Vikings). I’m a purist when it comes to historical verisimilitude. I’m sure there were things I got wrong but after 25,000 pages of research I’m less worried. So, we have different people in the story finding amazement with different things and thinking magic is at work, when really it’s just a neighbouring culture with five hundred extra years of metallurgy. You have to take that into account with every character interaction.

JC: So long as we’re speaking of magic, the elephant in the room are the firstborn or titans, who I guess are neanderthals. These are the only obvious departure from strict historical realism in the book, since of course, as far as we know, they were long-extinct by the upper neolithic. You get around that by giving them the ability to hibernate for exceptionally long periods of time, which they learned to do by studying bears and then applying a process that reads a bit like stone-age biofeedback. These also aren’t the cuddly, gentle, peaceful, matriarchal neanderthals of Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, either, but vicious cannibalistic monsters that see Homo sapiens as just another prey animal. The way you to depict them is reminiscent of ’s When Orcs Were Real, based on Danny Vendramani’s book Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans. Did you have this in mind, or were you drawing on other research?

AK: I’m aware of Vendramani’s book but haven’t read it yet. The inspiration for the First Born was partly the Neanderthals, and partly my own imagination. I was originally inspired by an English major friend of mine who suggested that Grendel was simply an Anglo-Saxon folk memory of encounters with earlier humans. That thought germinated in my mind for a long time, and honestly many of these folk tales (Semitic Nephilim, Norse Jotun, Gilgamesh’s Humbaba, etc.) probably just refer to the most proximate encounters between Neolithic farmers and local Hunter-Gatherers. Whether or not a folk memory could exist for 30,000 years (roughly the time between the Neanderthals supposed extinction and the events of my book) is questionable. But who knows? And that’s one of the joys of fiction. If you can make it possible without straining credulity entirely, why not try it?

I admit the millennia-long hibernation is implausible, but it was a creative solution to extending their longevity. It also had the benefit of making them quite degenerate. A once strong and proud people – the first members of genus Homo to colonize Europe – now eking out a marginal existence in a cave where the glaciers never melted. Being very few (and being awake and active only rarely – hence the periodic tales of “monsters” descending from the ice only to disappear again for centuries) they’ve inbred so much they’re no longer viable … a conundrum that presents itself with a solution in the book.

The mythology of the Titans fit into this. If the Neanderthals were the first Homo to people Europe then it’s fair to call them the Gods’ “First Born”. Their heavy frames and prodigious strength would have only amplified folk memory until they bespoke the power of the Classical Titan. When the hero Wolf sees them, he doesn’t think, “Here’s a Wildman who’s just bigger and stronger than me.” He recognizes them as different in a way presaged by myth, so he feels primordial terror. We have nothing like this today.

JC: There’s this great scene part-way through, in which the protagonist’s son, Bear, is participating in a raid on a village, which the party is doing more or less for the hell of it, and he and a companion run down a couple of slave girls and have their way with them. This entire scene, and the sub-plot that comes out of it, felt like you were delivering a deliberate bitchslap to feminist positive consent theory: she runs and struggles, but then instead of being a brute about it Bear is actually quite gentle with her and once she realizes that it’s going to happen anyhow, she lays back, enjoys it, and even falls for him. This whole incident had a mythological feeling to it. Were you drawing on any specific stories, or did you just throw it in there to annoy the women?

AK: Neither actually! There certainly is a parallel to the Rape of the Sabine Women but I was aiming at something a little different. There’s no question it’s rape, but there’s also no question that most women of inferior social standing in these types of primitive societies were subject to rape – hell even in “civilized” Europe conquering armies raped local women at least until the Second World War. So, it’s certainly realistic. It was one of the first scenes I envisioned actually. I wanted to demonstrate the idea that – unlike the passive agriculturalists hoeing their gardens and fighting the longhouse in the next valley – pastoralists were raiders. They had an entire culture oriented around the hustling of cattle and a social system geared towards defending against it. Taking things from weaker peoples was their wheelhouse (pardon the pun). This included women.

Of course there’s another dimension to it that you point out. Bear (and his cohort) don’t have sadistic intentions (as we’ve seen dominate some rape cultures recently). The girls also have a different view. As slaves they are inured to inhumane treatment by their masters, thus once it becomes clear that these men are not like their masters they have a different reaction. To them, these physically and mentally superior invaders provide an opportunity for social mobility. I have lots of fun imagining the “feminist critique” to this, for all the slop about different epistemologies and indigenous “ways of knowing” they only ever settle on the interpretations that support their biases. But here you see something familiar (rapine) in a very different way with a very different ending. The leftist would put themselves in the girls’ position and say “unless I respond with complete outrage I am enabling an abuser” and then they’d likely get killed and their genes wouldn’t get passed on. The smarter “gene” says, here’s an incredible opportunity. Res ipsa loquatur tells us how history probably happened.

There’s also a conversation between Bear and his father (Wolf, the story’s hero) where they discuss what happened. I didn’t insert this as an apologia but rather to investigate their motives further. Men in this time acted without restraint. They were also capable of deeper reflection on those actions.

And I certainly am not intent on annoying women. One of them was the editor (my wife!) The women in my novel are good or bad, courageous or risible, but none are simplistic. This is definitely masculine literature, told from man’s perspective, yet the women are anything but after-thoughts. The key here is realism, and that’s what scares anyone on the Left. They live in a fantasyland, outside of which none of their assumptions are true and the illusion is only held together by donor/government subsidies. Since we’re past the point of declining marginal returns (civilizationally), maintaining those subsidies creates a negative-sum game, i.e. impoverishing disfavoured groups to maintain one’s own status. This decline-management strategy is not novel, and I suspect it goes back as far as the events in my book.

JC: One thing that didn’t quite make sense to me was the absolute imperative for the bones of the fallen to be buried at home, which is a major plot point as it’s the necessity to retrieve those remains that initiates the quest. Numa Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City argues that this is an aspect of the primordial ancestor cult, but I was under the impression that the Yamnaya were semi-nomadic pastoralists, who don’t seem like they would have quite the same degree of intense attachment to the land that settled agriculturalists such as the Early European Farmers had. With all the research you’ve done, does this aspect of Fustel de Coulanges’ reconstruction of Aryan religion hold up?

AK: That’s a fantastic point, especially because it related to de Coulanges’ view on the genesis of landed property (it was tied to the bones!), but that’s an aside … for now. To answer that question I’d say there were a few factors necessitating the return of the bones. First it was a proxy for the boys that were taken by the First Born. Sure, they could’ve said, “let’s find the boys, or their bones, and then just sanctify them and head back.” But if you’re going to go to all that trouble, you’d probably bring the bones back too. Second, they were constructing tumuli back then so interring the bones within would be another way to tie them back to their ancestors – from whom they were profanely shorn – so, all the more reason to bring them back.

The tumuli must be indicative of a time when outright nomadism was ending and being replaced by something more fixed. This novel was also meant to capture the “moment” when the Yamnaya go from being “rootless” nomads to more settled people, i.e. calling a certain territory their “home”. I address this when the Clan assembles to discuss what’s to be done about the First Born and the missing boys. Their leader says the following:

“When we came out here over a half-century ago my Father, Broken-Wheel, brought our cattle and horse herds and said, ‘These lands are not our lands. Not yet. They belonged to others who have left them to waste. But they will be your lands, my son, if you can stay here long enough. Then your blood will be mixed with the soil and you and your sons and grandsons may claim the land in the name our ancestors. But beware. One day, someone might lurk over the horizon. Someone who waits until you are weakened, and leaving the land to waste, and then pushes you out.”

The point is meant to cut through the bullshit over who’s indigenous and who’s really the native. The reality is that if you take land, you’ve taken it. Of course, you must hold it and usually by force. No one can hold it forever, but when you stop trying, you’ll lose it very quickly as our elites are shocked to discover. There is no normativity in this statement, neither the autochthonous nor the conqueror is morally favoured, it’s simply an Iron Law of Nativeness. Note that much of the land being grazed/settled by the Yamnaya in western Ukraine and Moldova (I have exact places pinpointed on maps where the events take place, by the way) were once land farmed by the Cucuteni-Tripyllia people. For a variety of reasons (some their own fault, others simply bad fortune) they no longer maintained it. There is no greater curse in history than the epitaph, “Failed with their lands” in my mind.

I’d also point out that the chapter from which that passage is drawn was entitled “The Specialty of Rule” which is from Ulysses’s famous speech to the Greeks in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (I’ll give a free signed copy of my book to anyone who can tell me all the chapter title references). The point being that this is a foundational lesson of rule uttered at the beginning of Western politics itself. Let that echo through the Ages or let Ages echo no more, I suppose.

Obviously, the not so terribly subtle goal of this interview is to induce you to pick up a copy of The Toll of Fortune, which is available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions. It’s a fantastic read: a great adventure story, a fascinating concept, and extraordinarily well-researched. Several friends have read it already, and their reviews have been uniformly positive. Order it now.

JC: One of my favourite parts was the interaction between the Aryan warband and the neolithic farmers ruled by a vicious high priestess named the Maven. It wonderfully depicts a degenerative matriarchy, one quite literally centred on a longhouse, in which the men are kept pacified with enervating drugs and food that saps their vitality, while the priestesses clandestinely worship dark gods, and engage in petty manipulative behaviour such as trying to trick the Aryans into eating dog (which is strictly forbidden). The Maven is a striking character, with her face hidden behind caked-on makeup, which of course has a ritual purpose but also gives the impression of a crazy woman who’s long since hit the wall and slammed right through it but is desperately trying to preserve the illusion of beauty and youth; that artifice also seems like a visual metaphor for the state of the Broad-Eaves Hall itself, which presents the facade of a healthy and pious society doing the best it can with a difficult climate, concealing a corrupt and rotten core that is the ultimate source of the hardships afflicting the land. It could probably be argued that the Maven, and not the firstborn, is the real monster. Did you conceive of this element mainly as a direct commentary on the modern longhouse, or is there a historical and mythological basis for it (e.g., the story of Perseus and the Medusa?)

AK: To be honest, I hadn’t thought of the Medusa analogy, though I like it. The First Born are the impetus for the story (mythological and actual) but the conflict with the farming society and its Maven is the real drama. There’s the obvious critique about matriarchy, which is well-worn by now but still relevant. The accessory facts about the enervating nutrition and sedation with drugs are not at all fanciful narrative elements to dress the allegory. Poor nutrition was an enabling factor that lead to the demise of these farmers as a people. The first farmers of Europe settled from Greece to the Hungarian plains by 5600 BC however this was not farming as we know it. While the Cucuteni-Tripyllia civilization is famous for giant settlements of up to 40,000 [sic] people, by 3300 BC (the time of the book) they’re in severe decline on account of a cooling climate and likely the first instance of the plague. Moreover, not all cultures were as grand as them. Most Neolithic farmers in this era/location lived in small communities and farmed small communal plots not scattered across the countryside but in specific locations tracing what’s called loess soil. Loess soil is very fertile (its friable grains allow nitrogen penetration) and thus was recognized by them as low-hanging fruit for cultivation. Of course, restricting yourself to one soil type while not understanding much about soil exhaustion is not a good long-term strategy.

To make matters worse they are known to have cultivated only fives types of grain. This diet was supplemented with some garden vegetables and some meat from (mostly) domesticated pigs and goats. When I depict these people as malnourished, with mottled teeth and eyes covered in bitot-spots I’m describing a certain type of malnutrition that comes from a monocultural grain diet high in phytic acid – an anti-nutrient. Their food was quite literally poisoning them, albeit slowly. After centuries of this plus global cooling plus zoonotic viruses you get a society under extreme duress.

You’re very right to point out that their rulers were in fact trying to perpetuate this on their own people, the Maven having banned growing other crops. This is just my own overlay because it’s especially noxious yet sounds very familiar to the actions of current regimes across the Western world – knowingly selling a detrimental course of action as a prophylactic. This is surely the definition of evil if there ever was one, but it’s also worth pointing out that the Maven and her “expert” class of priests believe this is the best course of action… for themselves if not the rest of the community. They’ve made a deal with the First Born and their patron god, the Serpent. They believe they’re doing everything within their specialized knowledge to stop the poor harvests, drought and disease. But there’s no mistaking this as evil and the story has no compunctions about how this evil should be dealt with.

Another feature of the Maven was her “make-up”. This isn’t simply a prop. Each type of make-up she used was carefully researched and was in use at that time period. The ability to source such luxury goods (and alter one’s appearance in such an ethereal way) would have demarcated her not just as high-status but also with a demi-god-like aura. However, this celestial elevation comes as a literal cost: each of those tinctures were highly toxic (containing lead and antimony). In fact, her behaviour is consistent with symptoms of both lead and antimony poisoning. So, there’s an element of chemical causation behind her behaviour for the more scientifically minded reader. That’s not to explain away her actions, but once again it conjoins the notions of magical and human causes. Again, I think this has parallels in modern society. How much of the West’s gynocratic suicide is caused by SSRIs, not to mention puberty-blockers and castration chemicals?

Lastly, the Maven is depicted as the de facto ruler of the longhouse, but she’s not in fact the ruler. The longhouse has a male ruler who calls himself the “Kin-Lord”. These farming societies actually were patriarchal – just less so than the Indo-Europeans. This is very important for several reasons. First, as has happened many times in political history, the real power is vested with usurpers and interlopers while the de jure ruler lives a supine life of luxury. It’s a classic degenerate polity. Second, there are all sorts of rumours of incest and other foul sexual practices among their elite. I’ll let the reader draw their own comparisons. Third, the longhouse ruler styles himself a “Lord” while the Yamnaya rulers style themselves as Band-, or Clan- “Fathers”. The notion of “lordship”, i.e. a person to whom you owe an obligation of submission (NB not fealty) without any express or implied reciprocity is very foreign to the Indo-European mind. Forget the etymological origins of our English word for “lord” (which are quite innocent), the Broad-Eave Hall’s Kin-Lord draws his legitimacy from the Semitic-Mesopotamian tradition of a God-King, as you might expect for a people descended from farmers of eastern Anatolia.

JC: You mentioned that you think the ancient conflict between pastoral and agricultural civilization is directly relevant to modern conflicts. Can you expand on that? This seems like an interesting line of inquiry. Obviously, Europe is affected by both genetic and cultural influences from the PIE pastoralists, as well as the agrarian Early Neolithic Farmers, and at this point several thousand years on from the Aryan conquests they’re inextricably intertwined with one another. Do you see this as more of a biological conflict between different human types, a cultural conflict due to fundamental tensions between irreconcilable lifeways, the recurrent re-emergence of archetypal patterns, or something else?

AK: Strictly speaking it’s not accurate to refer to ‘Aryan’ conquests in Europe. There’s no evidence Indo-Europeans in Europe ever used that as an ethnonym and some people (not even on the Left) will go blue in the face redditing about that. I ran with “Areyan” because it’s familiar, not totally implausible and the word did have a Proto-Indo-European origin, meaning something like “free” or “noble” or “best”. However, you bring up what I think is the single most important contemporary point.

You’re right about the intertwining. After all, R1b and R1a are single nucleotide polymorphisms, not even genes. They can tell you about a direct lineage, but they are neither unique identifiers of that lineage nor exclusively determinative of any particular form of genetic inheritance. It’s possible to have R1b but if each of your male progenitors married a woman of Neolithic farming descent you’d conceivably have little Steppe ancestry as far as your whole genome is concerned.

I do think there is a biological component to what’s going on though. I’m not an evolutionary biologist so these views are just my educated impression, but in aggregate human behaviour does seem to bifurcate into two realities. Most people are passive, conformist and risk averse and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Many modes of life will lead to higher survival rates therewith. A minority of people are aggressive, risk-taking mavericks, and this is not always a good thing either. Depending on what period in history we are talking about one type can outbreed the other. My point is that the former category has its cultural (if not genetic) antecedent in Neolithic farming life. Remember, the Anatolian Neolithic Farmers (from which the vast majority of European non-Steppe DNA comes from) stopped being Hunter-Gatherers around 9000 BC and only set out for the Aegean around 7000 BC. Then another ~4000 years passed until Steppe Pastoralists came along. That’s 6000 years of breeding and evolution under relatively stable conditions.

On the other hand there was a long (but comparatively shorter) period of time under which the Yamnaya emerged from their precursor population (something which is still a matter of research). We know that evolution can happen very quickly and I think there were several revolutions that precipitated this. Being able to domesticate and ride horses was one. All of a sudden your ability to transport yourself has increased by at least an order of magnitude. That’s hard for us to imagine – even bigger than the advent of railroad. Their adaptation to the steppe environment was another. Feeding off horses and then raising herds of cattle (much more amenable to wide open ranges and grassland than other livestock) created a cultural revolution. A herd of cattle was the first (non-human) form of movable property, and I believe Western concepts of ownership actually derive from that, not from landed property which came much later for the Indo-Europeans. The idea of personally “owning” something more than a few tangible possessions – and I’m not talking about prestige goods that were only for the elites – would have been unprecedented. Add to that BAP’s speculation that the lessons from breeding horses for tractability (and cattle for size) might have influenced ideas about breeding human traits as well.

The implications were huge. It created incentives for growth. It presented opportunities for rapid windfalls where theft was concerned. It necessitated new social rules for what to do with that wealth during life and especially after it. Ideas of inheritance were irrevocably changed – a possible vector for perpetuating genetic or memetic traits. Moreover the (relatively) rapid proliferation of wealth among a group of materially poor people would have forged new traditions and common rituals. It would have endowed each Indo-European boy with a sense that, with a bit of daring and cunning, he too could have a herd and range to himself and be fabulously wealthy – so wealthy that instead of dying and having the wind pass over him (to quote Psalms) he’d have a mountain erected to his memory visible from miles across the plain.

That’s gotta change you. Imagine what risks you’d take to achieve this, what hardships you’d endure and what trouble you’d seek. The Indo-Europeans were so beset with this pioneer, rough-riding life that they swept over the Western steppes through Europe all the way Denmark, where they scoured the forests to replicate the ranges to the east. Now compare that to the ANFs who’d been farming their gardens, worshipping their female gods in dark, smoky halls and fighting each other over what’s left of the arable loess soil for 6000 years. It beggars belief to think that these were not two biologically different brains.

Now we’ve run out of accessible frontier. The wages of risk are poor now. The only windfalls are lottery tickets and sportsball betting. All joking aside, we’re seeing this manifest as a law of declining marginal returns. Western economies have desperately leveraged themselves to foreign powers in order to juice returns to assets and maintain the illusion of a stable standard of living, but the illusion has worn off for most. The one-percenters have ordained themselves with multiplying credentials of lesser and lesser value and resorted to placating the masses with lip-service about a productivity-paved technological panacea. AI will probably supplant them as well, for what it’s worth. But as I argued in one of my Substack essays “No Country for Old Europe”, without frontiers to conquer, Indo-European Man – the risk-taking man, the adventurous man – withers.

The Thirteen Fathers Substack

No Country for Old Europe

There’s a line in Netflix/BBC’s The Last Kingdom where a young King Alfred attempts to counsel the Viking Ragnar Ragnarsson to settle down and give up his freebooting ways. After rhetorically parrying each other for several lines Ragnar tells Alfred, “Lord, you are never more alive than…

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2 years ago · A.J.R. Klopp

You can almost hear the shrill chiding of longhouse hall-monitors and their cucked soyjaks. They despise everything about risk, that’s why they loved the COVID lockdown, with it’s “work” from home, atomized social existence, and infinite social spending paid with future borrowing. The longhouse existence is nasty and bleak, it crushes the soul, but it’s replicable in most places on Earth and can last a very long time if allowed to feed on the lifeblood of others’ enterprise. The Indo-European existence can be brutish and short, but only because causation is never far behind. Reality strikes fast, hence the Indo-European ontologies of natural order. This is not even a split of Left vs. Right (though almost all the Left falls within the whelping system of the longhouse). Only the Indo-European tradition can bring reward from risk, however.

There are actually two white-pills from this. First, the longhouse system of social conformity and stagnation can’t be tolerated indefinitely, certainly not at our current levels of leverage. Stagnation will give way to violent collapse, not simply more devolution. Second, outer space beckons. Musk has reduced the cost of putting a kilogram into orbit by nearly an order of magnitude. Moreover, in the coming years I’m convinced there will be breakthroughs in space propulsion and theoretical physics that will throw open the shutters to technological progress that the Copenhagen Model and the Solvay Conference shut. Don’t be surprised if a probe is sent to Alpha Centauri long before you die. Once a new frontier opens the arguments for social conformity and lower standards of living won’t carry water.

JC: Speaking of titles such as Clan-Father, you’re at pains to illustrate the intricate kin relationships that weave together Areyan society, and these play an important role in the characters’ motivations as well as in driving the plot. You show these as having a deep religious significance, alongside a purely sociological and political importance. How much of this has been reconstructed via comparative anthropology? Again, this is a major theme in Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City, for instance the importance of the patrilineal household cult and the role played by adoption in maintaining a continuity of transmission, but that’s quite an old work. Does it hold up in the more modern research? And how exactly was this reconstructed in the first place?

AK: I don’t have a very high opinion of modern anthropological research. How can you ever satisfactorily conclude, beyond rational criticism, what ancient peoples did or didn’t do with respect to rituals, traditions, and beliefs? Thus, the older thought-ways are still informative in my opinion. Nonetheless I don’t think it’s controversial among the anthropological and archaeological academy to suggest that most humans were very traditional (and the family played the dominant role in social life) 5000 years ago. It’s amazing to me that even in Ancient (pre-Christian) Rome the cult of the family was still important considering more time has elapsed between then and the Yamnaya than between us and Rome. Christianity changed the nature of reverence for one’s family – and not necessarily for better (something Francis Fukuyama, of all people, actually points out as a critical pivot in Western civilization). However, I think the rise of material abundance with the Industrial Revolution has created the greatest distance between Man and his family, his friends, his kin, and his gods. This is not reversible in any scalable sense, though we will likely see a plateauing of that material scalability. Perhaps AI cybernetics gives us all maids and 3D printed Birkin bags, but we’re clearly scraping the marginal returns from the system even with that.

JC: For the military history nerds in the audience, what do we know about the typical armaments carried by a Yamnaya warrior? Did they wear armour? Can we reconstruct any of their tactics? How did their military toolset compare to that of adjacent groups such as the Early European Farmers?

AK: The problem is preservation. Wooden or leather armour, for example, would have a low probability of surviving 5000 years – even in a Tumulus. It seems that metal weapons were rather scarce among the Yamnaya around 3300 BC – but keep in mind this is their outer historical limit. Metal weapons become much more common as we enter the 3^rd millennium. In my book most weapons would have been stone or obsidian (to the extent obsidian was trafficked from the Aegean), though I’ve included this image of a hoard of copper axes from around the same period. No surprise it was unearthed in Bulgaria. The farming peoples in the Balkans had much better access to metal (for tools or weapons) on account of their proximity to the sources of ore and the metallurgical traditions which ebbed and flowed.

Metallurgical techniques in the Copper Age were still primitive. We don’t see a more systematic approach to mining and smelting ores until the 3^rd millennium in Europe. We don’t see the proliferation of metal implements designed solely for fighting (like swords) until much later. The next image is of a copper “halberd” from the British Museum traced to Italy between 3800 BC and 2200 BC. It’s unfortunate that archaeologists called these “halberds”, because it’s very different from the eponymous weapon of the late Middle Ages, but these hacking devices were very popular. The whole idea behind the novel’s prophesied weapon – the Hammer of Heaven – was something similar in design.

Bronze was a far superior metal in terms of hardness (copper being inferior to stone and obsidian in most use cases) but didn’t become popularized in Europe for some time. The first European bronze was discovered accidentally in the Balkans because arsenic was commonly found in copper ores, and when (unknowingly) smelted gave Arsenic Bronze. But the really strong bronze is an intentional mixture of smelted tin and smelted copper. Unfortunately, tin is very rare in western Eurasia: Eastern Britain and Afghanistan being the only major sources of it (with parts of Spain having some too). The discovery of Tin Bronze was a technological revolution that inaugurated another round of Indo-European advance about a thousand years after the events in my book. Needless to say, such a revolution will be the focus of the next saga after I’ve completed the sequel to The Toll of Fortune.

One last fascinating historical footnote. Even as far back as my book there were some Bronze swords: the so-called Arslan-Tepe swords found in Anatolia. They stand out as a tantalizing clue to a development in warfare that almost nothing has been written about. I’ll just leave it there, wink wink.

JC. One thing I found a bit difficult was that I was constantly reaching for my dictionary. People accuse me of using ten-dollar words a lot, but I felt utterly mogged here. How did your vocabulary grow to such elephantine proportions?

AK: Guilty as charged, though I won’t apologize. My style is concise and I get feedback about the language being difficult at times but, to paraphrase Gandalf, every word is used exactly as it’s meant to. There are some words I have even invented myself, a hubris I will no doubt pay a price for!

But not all the words are simply Scrabble-winning showstoppers. There are simply so many words in the English language to describe the natural world that we simply don’t use any more, yet they have useful meanings. For example a “strath” and a “clough” both mean valley (and you can see these words scattered in place names all over the British Isles), but a strath is a wide valley and a clough a very narrow one. I thought, why not use the right word and revivify seldom used words – after all that’s kinda what I’m doing with the entire novel and Indo-European folklore.

There’s a bigger lesson here. As we become more reliant on technology, using ChatGPT to recall even the simplest concept or memory, we forget basics. We forget words first of all. We degenerate in the way Orwell feared in 1984 but without a State office redlining the vocabulary. Moreover, we have less and less experience with the things those words refer to. This was especially true for all the horse and wagon vocabulary that I had to learn to properly describe their material culture. Even a century ago those words were commonly used. But this is also one of the ways David Anthony was able link the Yamnaya to the original Indo-European speakers. They were the only ones who invented these words (and objects) for horses and wagons (and their accessories). So, in a way I felt justified reaching back.

JC: The Toll of Fortune was originally listed as Book 3 of The Thirteen Fathers (although I see it’s now listed as book 1). Were you trolling? Or are there more books to come in this series, and if so, when can we expect book 2? And what elements can we expect to see in it?

AK: This was a miscalculation. My website, X presence, and Substack are all branded as “The Thirteen Fathers”. Thirteen because this is intended to be a series. However, after I started writing this book I realized it would not be the first book in chronological terms. I have all the books planned out in terms of events, themes, and chronologies and there will be two books that predate the events of The Toll of Fortune by one and two thousand years respectively. Unfortunately, people see “Book III” and think, “Fuck, this isn’t the first book. What do I do now?” I was too clever by half.

So, for the record, this IS the first book. There are no others yet! My next book will be the sequel to this one and when I get the second edition to this one printed I’ll remove the reference to Book III.

As for the sequel I can say a lot about it except when it will be written. The next book will follow the lives (and conflicts) of Bear’s own two sons: Wolf and Bear (Jr.). It’s no coincidence that these boys are effectively twins and thus the great story of the Primal Twins will be retold (historical antecedents like Romulus and Remus, Prometheus and Epimetheus, are intentionally familiar). This is a story of ethnogenesis, of the birth of the polity of the Indo-Europeans in the aftermath of their victory over the farming peoples. This book did feature the theme of debt and the “pact with the devil” but the sequel will thematically address the nature of “rulership” (NB – not kingship) and how the Indo-European version of that concept both distinguishes itself from other cultures (like the Semitic-Mesopotamian-Egyptian God-King) and has come to indelibly temper the political countenance of the Western world (think: notions of freedom and liberty). Not surprisingly the hero will travel to the centre of civilization (in the 33rd century BC), namely Ur and Uruk (a place only distantly referred in The Toll of Fortune). Shit will get real. For what it’s worth I’m imagining a substantially longer narrative.

JC: Consider this an opportunity to talk about any aspects of the book that you feel haven’t already been done justice to. Let’s tip readers teetering on the edge into clicking through and ordering a copy (you should order a copy, it will make you wise, mighty, and popular with large-bosommed females).

AK: This book will hit hard. You will recognize some of characters from your daily life and hate them even more. Others you thought you knew will feel utterly alien. You will feel the same powerlessness of the hero right before revenge will whet his lips (and yours). There is nothing varnished here, it’s raw and brutal, but you’ll see your ancestors as the humans who begat the greatest cultures in history. And it’s under 300 pages!

Finally, you’ll be supporting not just me but a renaissance of based art and literature. Look, we have all kinds of brilliant non-fiction out there now – if you subscribe to John then I know you agree. We have won the non-fiction war both on the substack/X side and with the legacy media. Out of print books are being resuscitated, critiques of the welfare state, the COVID regime, the longhouse, etc, are selling books even with mainstream publishers. But art is also right wing inherently because it has all been done before. The artist’s duty is to give life to the old in new forms, retelling the traditional in ways that appeal to today. There are endless permutations, so never believe when leftists whine about needing new types of heroes and infusions of new cultural myths. They’re simply lazy. We can elect all the representatives we want, or have the best possible arguments in the non-fiction press, but that only caters to 5% of the population. Until we dominate culture again we won’t win. The good news is we can do this because of the natural advantage we have over storytelling. The Era of the Gay Vampire is over, the Era of the Indo-European Man has returned.

Thank you for devoting so much time to providing such detailed, thoughtful answers. And for those of you who have been reading along, if you’ve gotten to the end of this interview, then I know you’re interested, you know you’re interested, so what are you waiting for, go order your copy now. The Toll of Fortune is a gripping, deeply researched saga in an original setting, which resurrects old myths in such a way as to place you in the enchanted world of our ancestors, while making that world relevant to our own.

As always, I would like to thank my supporters, whose generosity keep the lights on around here, making it possible for me to read fascinating books and interview the authors for the edification and entertainment not only of my supporters, but of the rest of you freeloaders. Supporters don’t get much beyond my gratitude and the knowledge that their support is the only reason I don’t need to get a real job ... which, should that unhappy necessity come to pass, would mean a dramatic curtailment in postcards sent from Barsoom.

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It’s been a while since I published any fiction ... over a year, actually, since Hector Saves His Dad. This piece is short, it came to me in a dream, perhaps a blood memory of the time before time, the dawn age when the archetypes were etched into instinct. Or perhaps it’s just evopsych run awry. Only supporters can find out, because while I give you my thoughts for free, there is a price of admission for my dreams and nightmares.

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The Canadian Armed Forces – which refer to themselves as the CAF, pronounced exactly as it’s spelled – recently leaked its intention expand its reserves from the current, anemic 22,000 to 400,000 soldiers. At first I wondered if an extra 0 was added to that number as a typo, but the plan is to grow the Army reserve to 100,000 and the supplementary reserve (which I hadn’t even known existed, and is currently composed of retirees) from a few thousand to 300,000. Further leaked details are that the 300,000-strong supplementary reserve will be created by essentially drafting civilian Federal employees, training them in driving trucks, marksmanship, and drone flying, which really just sounds like the makings of an absolute clown show.

At the same time, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney has committed to a considerable increase in the CAF’s budget – over $80 billion spread over the next five years, with 2025-26 spending rising to around $62B from the previous average of around $35B – with the goal of reaching the 2% of GDP level that NATO members are expected to (but in practice usually don’t) maintain. As part of this build-up, the CAF is hoping to reach its authorized strength of 71,500 uniformed personnel.

These ambitious new aspirations are striking given the context of the CAF’s long-standing recruitment crisis. With the exception of 2025, when the CAF received a bump thanks to the Elbows Up reaction to Trump’s trade war and Canschluss trolling, the CAF hasn’t even been able to hit the relatively low recruitment targets of around 7000 per year, averaging around 4000 or so most years. This year, even with the Trump bump, the CAF barely made its numbers, celebrated in the press as a ten-year high and therefore a great victory.

Attrition from the regular forces has averaged around 4800 per year for the last twenty years or so, roughly comparable to recruitment. Between 2020 and 2024, attrition was higher than recruitment, with the result that the regular forces have lost around 4000 troops net, about 6% of the current strength of 65,700. The pattern continued in 2024-25, with over five thousand soldiers leaving the military, slightly higher than in the preceding few years.

A recent Angus Reid poll indicates that there is very little enthusiasm for military service amongst Canada’s population. Only one in five Canadians would volunteer no matter the reason if their country called them, while 40% would refuse service under any circumstances.

Young men are even less likely to be potentially willing to unconditionally volunteer than old men, while being far more likely to refuse to volunteer under any circumstances (of course, women are almost universally aghast at the idea of serving). Contrast this to World War 2, when about 1/3 of fighting-aged men volunteered.

Governments that find it impossible to motivate their young men to volunteer for military service, but need their warm bodies in uniform anyhow, have historically resorted to conscription. Since they are manifestly not interested at the moment, the political class has begun floating trial balloons about mandatory military service in its media.

Except for a brief period at the end of the Second World War, this has never been necessary in Canada, because Canadian men have always flocked to the flag to fight for their country when their country needed them. When the government did institute conscription, it resulted in riots in Quebec.

A recent Angus Reid poll found that there is broad support for conscription ... but only amongst those parts of the population who wouldn’t be forced to serve. The young men who would actually be made slaves of the state are generally against the idea. Young women (along with, to be fair, women of every age but the elderly) are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea, no doubt in part because they sense that conscription in a feminist society would scoop up as many women as men, and whatever they say about equality, women are not, in general, eager to crawl around in the mud while .50 cal rounds zip over their heads.

The same poll found that there was much broader support for forcing young people to spend a year working in health care, environmental protection, and civil protection, which isn’t terribly surprising as such forms of service strike most people as a lot easier than the military. Frankly, given the high youth unemployment that has resulted from Canada’s high immigration rate, a lot of youth probably just think that in this case they’d at least have a job for a while.

Just because conscription would be unpopular doesn’t mean that the government won’t reach for it, of course. More or less by definition, conscription has never been popular. It is, however, very far from ideal. Conscripts don’t tend to make the most enthusiastic troops. Their morale tends to be low, their enthusiasm non-existent, and their propensities to shirk their duties, avoid danger, surrender, and mutiny are all much higher than those of the committed volunteer.

On the same day that the ambition to get 400,000 Canadians into uniform was leaked, the First Woman To Be the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen Jennie Carignan, attended a ceremony of apology for the CAF’s history of systemic racism and racial discrimination. Gen Carignan broke down in tears at the lectern, overcome by the numinous ecstasy of the Spirit of Saint Floyd washing her soul clean of sin.

Carignan’s emotional incontinence elicited mockery from the Internet. Historian Darryl Cooper – best known for his Martyr Made podcast1 – had the best take: “She’s crying? I’m crying watching this video after spending months reading about how the Canadian soldier was one of the fiercest monsters to haunt the trenches of the Great War.”

Of course, I got in on the fun myself, and in the process discovered that I’d been blocked by the official Canadian Armed Forces X account.

It’s possible that it’s because of something I said.

Now I’ll admit, I’ve said some harsh things about the CAF from time to time. I’m going to use a lot more harsh language in what follows. This comes from a place of love. I was raised in a military family. My father was a reg force veteran and, later, a reserve infantry officer; he revered the martial traditions of Canada to an almost religious degree. My paternal grandfather was a career soldier and a World War II vet; my maternal grandfather was a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot during the war, and his father was a cavalryman in the Great War. My mother is a veteran. My brother is a combat veteran. As a teenager, I joined the Army cadets as soon as I was old enough, and then joined the militia as soon as I was old enough for that, so technically I’m a vet too ... though I was only in the infantry reserve for a few short years, in part due to the disappointment engendered by a military that, even then, felt increasingly like a dilapidated kindergarten. The Canadian military is close to my heart, and seeing its current state is like watching a beloved family member succumb to drug addiction and homelessness.

Back to the weeping general. She has an interesting backstory. Following her elevation to the apex of the military chain of command, RUMINT2 surfaced to the effect that she had demonstrated cowardice in the face of the enemy. The story goes that in 2019 she was deployed to Iraq, where she was placed in charge of a NATO training school. In January 2020 her position came under rocket fire and she panicked, had her luggage (including a collection of carpets she’d purchased) packed aboard a helicopter, and attempted to evacuate the base before the troops, thereby earning her the designation “Iraqi Evaci”. Her attempted desertion was supposedly stopped at the last minute by a senior American general, who chewed her out and ordered her back to her post. Shortly after that she was relieved of her command and returned to sender, only to be promoted a few months later to take the newly created position of head of “Chief Professional Conduct and Culture” ... informally known to the troops as the DEI division.

I have no idea whether the rumour about the Grandmother-General’s attempted desertion of her post is true or not. Naturally the rumour is officially denied, but then it would be: the Canadian government can’t come out and say “We’re promoting cowards in the name of inclusion”. What isn’t controversial is that Carignan’s previous position as CPCC was explicitly intended to ram DEI down the CAF’s throat in a process referred to internally with the bland bureaucratic euphemism of ‘culture change in the defence team’. Between 2020 and 2024 Carignan was responsible for leading this ‘culture change’ in the form of struggle session/consciousness raising workshops, mandating diversity quotas for hiring and promotion, genderqueering the uniform substandards, establishing a snitch culture for reporting microaggressions, providing a high standard of gender-affirming care, and making sure that the men’s room was fully stocked with tampons.

Support for tampons in the men’s room is not, however, universal.

Over the period from 2019 to 2025, polling data from Angus Reid demonstrated that pride in the Canadian military collapsed. In 2019 almost 80% of the Canadian people were proud of their military; in 2025, just over half were.

The reluctance of Canadians to serve in the military is likely related to the elite culture that elevated a weepy old woman to the top of the Canadian military. Most of the drop in pride occurred after 2021, corresponding precisely to implementation of ‘culture change’ in the Armed Forces. The temporal coincidence between culture change, the steep decline in military pride, the recruiting crisis, and the exodus service-members suggests that these factors are causally linked: that disinterest in military service is driven more by white conservative men disgusted by the broken joke of the woke Armed Farces (you heard me), than it is by liberal hijabis agitated by the military’s ostentatious, self-flagellating soul-searching over its sins against racial and sexual inclusion. That said, it’s worth noting that continuously wallowing in the military’s supposed hate culture of isms and phobias is almost guaranteed to alienate both groups: conservatives read that, accurately, as indicating a hostile woke culture they want no part in, while liberals take it at face value and get scared off by the scary stories. As one female retired major (who knew Gen Carignan back in basic) put it, the CAF needs warriors, not DEI hires.

It can’t be ignored that Canada’s population has become dramatically less Canadian in recent history. Bangladeshis, Punjabis, Gujaratis, Han Chinese, Arabs, Somalis, and the rest of the charcuterie board of multicultural mystery meat served up by our airports simply do not have any authentic connection to the land, people, culture, traditions, and history of Canada. Why would they fight for a country they don’t really think of as their own? By and large, they don’t: the Canadian military is still overwhelmingly white and male.

The Canadian government has worked hard to systemically alienated the native population. Official state ideology is that Canada is a post-national multicultural state with no core identity built on stolen native land by genocidal settler-colonialists. As such, there’s nothing to defend. There’s no there, there: no identity to identify with, no boundaries of culture to justify the borders of political geography, no in-group to defend against an outgroup. No nationalism without a nation; no patriotism without patria.

Reinvigorating Canadians’ willingness to serve their country and rebuilding Canada’s military into a force that can win wars would both require the Canadian political class to repudiate the ideological territory of globalism, feminism, multiculturalism, mass immigration, and gender-bothering that they have made themselves synonymous with. However, they can’t reverse course without discrediting themselves, and so, they won’t. Fixing the recruitment crisis is therefore a coup-complete problem: it cannot be accomplished absent wholesale replacement of Ottawa’s political class. We only need to look south of the border for demonstration of this. Until 2025, the American military was suffering from precisely the same recruiting woes as afflict Canada and Great Britain, due entirely to a collapse in interest amongst America’s traditional warrior class: white rural Southern men.

The ascendant Trump replaced the shapeless blob Lloyd Austin as the Secretary of Defense with the young, energetic, crusader-tattooed Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of War (and that difference in terminology matters). Recruitment rebounded immediately, with the US Army alone exceeding its 2025 goals by 61,000, four months ahead of schedule. Including reserves, the US military as whole recruited about 325,000 new personnel in 2025, with each branch either hitting or exceeding its recruitment targets (which were also 10-20% higher than in 2024). Adjusting for population ratios, this would be the equivalent of the CAF recruiting 32,500 personnel in one year.

Admittedly, the MAGA coup in the US is far from complete, and its survival and success far from assured. Nevertheless, the immediate reversal of the American recruitment crisis following a change in senior leadership can’t be denied, and strongly suggests that replacing left-wing multicultural globalists with patriotic right-wing nationalists is the single most effective recruiting tool given a political context in which young men have been radicalized towards the right.

Given the length of this article, in the spirit of bottom-line up-front, here is a rank-ordered summary of the measures that would need to be taken for Canada to build a large, professional, and strong military, arranged in order from what I consider to be the most to least important measures. First, as already discussed, change the leadership: fire the diversity hire Chief of Defence Staff, and put an actual patriotic warrior in charge instead of some political creature. Second, provide a clear, compelling mission that both promises adventurous young men that they will see action, and that this action will be in the unambiguous interests of their people and their country. Third, fix the absurd security screening bottleneck. Fourth, drop woke like a hot potato, meaning specifically: reverse the feminization of military culture, stop trying to recruit women, minorities, and non-citizens, and focus on appealing to the core war-fighting demographic of young nationalistic Canadian men. Fifth, dramatically raise fitness standards and enforce proper uniform standards, in order to make the profession of soldiering physically and aesthetically aspirational. Sixth, pay soldiers well, provide them with better housing, equip them properly, and provide them with better working conditions. Seventh, stop abandoning veterans to their fate and take care of them for a change. Eighth, make effective recruitment propaganda in the form of compelling movies and TV series that mythologize Canadian military heroes and celebrate military culture both historically and in contemporary settings.

With the exception of increasing pay and military spending, these solutions are ideologically precluded by the multicultural, post-national globalist liberalism embraced by Ottawa’s current dominant political class. As such, absent circulation of this elite, a strong military is functionally impossible. Insofar as a strong military is an essential element of national security, Ottawa’s political class is therefore a clear and present threat to Canadian security.

Before getting into the rest of this absurdly long, 12,000 word essay, I’d like to take a moment to remind you that putting all of this together was a whole lot of work: researching, writing, editing, revising, hunting down images, all of it in an iterative process that’s eaten about two weeks of my life. That is work by one human, me. Not one word of this was shat out by an LLM (though I did query Grok for some of the research, albeit, I will emphasize, not without confirming what it told me). In the process of thinking about nothing but Canadian military recruitment for two weeks I’ve come close to psyopping myself into applying to join the CAF. With the pay raise they’ve been given, and my educational level, I’m pretty sure I could come in at captain and be making six figures, which is, I would like to emphasize, a lot more than I’m making as an independent blogger. Anyhow. As always, I could have put everything that follows behind a paywall, but I prefer it when people read what I write, and the absurd length of this article is already intimidating enough that I doubt many people will read this monstrosity. Just know, I could paywall, but didn’t, because I have faith that you, my generous and supportive reader, to step up, even when you don’t have to, for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do, or at least that they would prefer to keep me writing instead of going on an officer training course.

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With that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

A History of Neglect

Canada’s military was not always a punchline. At the end of World War II Canada had the world’s third-largest navy, complete with our own aircraft carrier, and over a million men under arms. Since then military spending has steadily declined, from a high of around 7% of GDP in the early 50s to around 1% today, where it’s hovered since the end of the Cold War.

Canada is protected to its east and west by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, both of which are patrolled by the powerful navy of the friendly superpower to the south, the only country with which Canada shares a land border, which we have long bragged is the longest undefended frontier in the world. Our only other neighbouring country is Russia, and while Russia is a decidedly unfriendly superpower, in practice Canada’s populated south is separated from the Russian Federation by thousands of kilometres of howling arctic wastes which provide an even better natural defence than the oceans.

Cozy and secure in our continental cocoon, Canada has allowed its military to atrophy into a vestigial appendage akin to the stubby wings of flightless birds on isolated Pacific islands, useful only for emotive displays. So far as the Liberal Party is concerned, ‘emotive display’ is, indeed, the only real purpose of the military. Ever since Lester B. Pearson3 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the concept of ‘peacekeeping’ to de-escalate the Suez Crisis (thereby helping to drive the final nail into the coffin of the British Empire), the Canadian military’s primary purpose has been to conduct third-world relief missions. Peacekeeping carries no particular benefit to Canada, but it is of great benefit to politicians, who get to preen in front of the camera as important humanitarian statesmen. The purpose of the Canadian military isn’t to win wars, to defend the country, or to conquer distant lands: it’s to make Liberal Party politicians feel good about themselves.

When the CAF fails to live up to its making-liberals-feel-good mission, Canada’s liberal establishment reacts like a frustrated child taking out her vindictive cruelty by throwing her dolls against the wall. The Somalia Affair is probably the best example of this dynamic. The Canadian Airborne Regiment, an elite commando unit whose core competencies were jumping out of airplanes to break things and kill people, was deployed in Somalia with the contradictory goal of keeping a non-existent peace, a mission to which they were singularly ill-suited. Somalis being Somalis, the Airborne base was immediately subjected to continuous infiltration and theft. A handful of the violent lunatics in the regiment reacted by capturing thieves and torturing them to death, which they had the poor sense to document with photographic evidence; later, photographs emerged of one of the airborne troopers wearing a moustache man t-shirt while raising his arm at a prohibited angle, which wasn’t criminal exactly but was very bad PR. Instead of punishing the guilty troops individually, for instance with field courts martial followed by summary hanging, the Liberal Party flew into a rage and disbanded the regiment for having committed the unforgivable sin of making them look bad. This dragged on in the media for years, sullying the honour of not only the Airborne Regiment but of the entire military. The Somalia affair unfolded over thirty years ago, but the liberal establishment holds it over the heads of the CAF to this day.

In addition to providing politicians with regular hits of the pleasantly addictive buzz of telescopic philanthropy, peacekeeping also has the great advantage of being cheap. Not only does peacekeeping not require all that many troops, you don’t even need tanks, fighter jets, destroyers, or aircraft carriers to distribute aid packages to refugees. Therefore the Canadian military essentially does not have these things. The CAF has a grand total of 112 forty-six-year-old Leopard II main battle tanks (of which roughly half are down for maintenance at any given time), a whole 138 forty-two-year-old CF-18 Hornet fighter jets (of which 89 are operational), twelve Halifax class frigates (of which about half are in drydock at any given time), an intimidating four Victoria class diesel-electric submarines (which are forty-five years old, and all but one of which is out of commission), and zero bombers, zero attack helicopters, zero destroyers, zero troop transports, zero battleships, and zero aircraft carriers. The pathetic size of the Royal Canadian Navy is particularly embarrassing given that Canada has the longest coastline in the world, at 243,042 kilometres, essentially all of which Ottawa expects Washington to defend on its behalf. Airlift capacity is so limited that the CAF essentially cannot deploy overseas without allied logistical assistance.

By contrast with its decrepit armaments, the CAF has 145 generals: it has more generals than it does tanks. This top-heavy general staff is only about a third the size of the US military’s, despite the American military being 20x larger by personnel and 32x larger by budget.

From the perspective of the Laurentian elite, a weak military is actually a political advantage. If Canada effectively does not have the ability to project military force, Ottawa can simply plead lack of capacity when America asks for assistance. It enables Canada to duck out of involvement in America’s various imperial wars, letting Washington shoulder the burden of the Pax Americana while chirping from the sidelines about how the big bad bible-thumbing American bully is so mean, and how peaceful, ethical, liberal, humanitarian Canada is so nice because Canada spends its money on healthcare instead of bombs. It isn’t a morally superior position, of course: it’s simply shameless dependence and shameful parasitism.

What Is the CAF’s Mission?

Why the abrupt urgency to rebuild Canada’s military?

The report in which the CAF announced its hopes for a massive expansion in the ranks provides the following motivation:

In order to assure the defence of Canada against domestic threats ranging from a low-intensity natural disaster response to high-intensity large scale combat operations, the DMP [Defence Mobilization Plan] will be developed to empower a timely and scalable WoS [Whole of Society] response by achieving pre-conditions for the expansion and mobility of the CAF.

Maybe this is just clumsy writing, but the plain meaning of “domestic threats” is not, on the surface, threats from foreign adversaries such as Russia or China. The statement would instead seem to imply that the Canadian government is anticipating the need for kinetic operations domestically, which is to say, on Canadian soil, and possibly against Canadians.

One possibility is civil war. That sounds nuts, but there’s a large and vocal separatist movement in Alberta. Albertans have nursed grievances against Ottawa for generations due to the Laurentian elite’s propensity to sabotage economic development in the province (for instance by blocking pipelines), while looting the province to redistribute the fruits of its oil wealth to economically underperforming provinces (at this point in Canada’s managed decline, that is every province but Alberta). There is very little upside for Alberta’s continued membership in Confederation, and Trump’s offer of statehood looks increasingly tempting to many in the province.

Alberta leaving would bankrupt Ottawa, therefore Ottawa cannot accept this outcome. In Ukrainada, I sketched out a speculative scenario in which Alberta becomes Canada’s Donbass, with Carney taking on the role of a North American Zelensky standing up to America’s Orange Putler, possibly as an element of a deliberate globalist strategy to defeat MAGA in detail by drawing it into a Canadian quagmire while also provoking civil unrest in the US, attacking the US economy, and so on.

I still think a shooting war between Ottawa and American-backed Albertan separatists is a far-fetched and highly theoretical scenario, but there’s no question that Ottawa is whipping up anti-American sentiment, radicalizing the boomers, and trying to build up the military. The trade war has not calmed things down in Alberta, which just saw the largest separatist rally in its history, drawing thousands of supporters to the provincial legislature. On the other hand, a petition opposing separation recently gathered almost half a million signatures, and support for independence is still only at 30% of the population. So it’s possible that the “domestic threat” Ottawa is worried about is Albertan separatism, but as things stand the Wild Rose province is a long way from declaring independence, and it’s hard to see the situation escalating to military conflict any time soon.

Quebec separatism, which was once a real threat to confederation, is now an even more distant possibility. Support for sovereignty has fallen off quite a bit since the 1990s, and is substantially lower amongst young Quebecois than older demographics. Ottawa’s strategy of bribing the province with federal funds, while mollifying nationalist sentiment by giving the provincial government wide latitude in its immigration policy (as a result of which Quebec remains noticeably whiter than the rest of Canada), has paid dividends for national unity.

Another domestic threat that might be keeping Ottawa’s politicians up at night is insurgency from the general Canadian population. The boomers are all in for the Liberals, naturally, as are the migrants that have colonized Canada’s urban centres. Young Canadians, however, are increasingly embittered against an entrenched political elite that has delivered nothing but poverty, displacement, lectures about how they deserve every bit of it for invented historical atrocities the political class refuses to produce evidence for, and Brantford Salutes with both elbows up.

As a direct result of the growing disaffection amongst young Canadian men, radical underground groups such as Second Sons have started to form. Second Sons are still quite small, have certainly not yet engaged in any form of violence, and are not in any meaningful sense a terrorist group. They are, to the contrary, a fraternal organization and a political activist club. However, Second Sons is growing rapidly, and its members are young, fit, militant, and determined. Many of them are veterans of the GWOT. Their profile seems to align with the predictions of a leaked RCMP report, in which the Mounties confronted the cold reality that the government had completely broken both the economy and any sense of social cohesion, that this was not going to be repaired any time soon, that the Canadian people were going to be furious when it sunk in for them just how badly they’d been betrayed, that this was liable to lead to the formation of radicalized anti-government groups, and that the RCMP simply did not have the resources to deal with such a situation. It’s not hard to suspect that a group like Second Sons emerging right on schedule has Canada’s elites feeling a bit jumpy.

There is precedent in Canadian history for its military being deployed internally in order to crush domestic dissent. In the 1970 FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) crisis, martial law was declared in Quebec in order to suppress radicalized sovereigntists who had abducted two politicians (one of whom they executed). In the 1990s, the military was deployed to deal with the Oka Crisis, a land dispute with a Mohawk band. When the Freedom Convoy brought Ottawa to a standstill, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, which was basically kind of martial law (the Emergencies Act replaced the War Measures Act that Trudeau père activated to suppress the FLQ). It was rumoured (though of course officially denied) that Justin tried to get the military to intervene, an order which they supposedly refused4.

So maybe the military buildup is intended to be turned against ‘domestic terrorists’, which of course will have a very broad definition. Words are violence, remember. Then again, unless that insurgency escalates into some kind of Great White ISIS of the North, it’s difficult to envision that being a problem requiring ‘high-intensity large-scale combat operations’.

Another possibility is that the report was simply badly written, and the expected target of ‘high-intensity large-scale combat operations’ is not domestic at all, but Russia. In addition to the billions of dollars of munitions that Ottawa has contributed towards the Ukrainian war (largely draining Canada’s shallow armaments stockpiles in the process), the CAF is currently maintaining (with great difficulty) over 2000 troops in Latvia as part of a NATO deterrence effort. Ottawa’s politicians show no more intention of drawing down the war than their delusional and equally poorly-armed counterparts in the EU, and indeed they show every indication that they’re doing their best to prolong the conflict and even provoke Russia into expanding it. So perhaps Carney wants a bigger military so he can feed young Canadians into the Ukrainian meatgrinder, the better to replace Canada’s heritage population with subcontinentals. This might not be quite as crazy as it sounds: Ottawa is very concerned about Russian incursions in the unprotected Arctic, and keeping Russia tied up in Ukraine diverts Moscow’s attention and resources away from Canada’s northern frontier. Should the Ukrainian front collapse, Russia may well decide to help itself to Canada’s Arctic archipelago in order to control northern shipping routes; responding to this could well necessitate high-intensity combat operations on Canadian soil.

The final possibility is that Ottawa is worried about an American invasion. This isn’t completely crazy, given the trade war and Trump’s 51^st state jokes. It is, however, insane from an operational perspective. If the US wanted to conquer Canada, it could do so before next Tuesday. The fact that they haven’t done this suggests that they have no intention of doing this, but even if they did, a larger CAF wouldn’t do much to stop them. Besides, as I outlined in Maple Maidan, the most likely annexation strategy is to use economic and cultural pressure to move Canadians towards wanting union with the United States.

If Canada can be bankrupted (which is quite plausible), and if that bankruptcy can be plausibly pinned on Canada’s political class (which is easy because it’s true), it may be possible to place Canada into the position Scotland found itself in after it bankrupted the kingdom with a failed New World colonization attempt: begging for union with its wealthier neighbour to the south in exchange for its debts being paid. Building up Canada’s army does nothing to protect against that. If anything, piling more debt on top of Canada’s already crushing debt burden accelerates the timeline towards bankruptcy. A cynical man might wonder if accelerated national bankruptcy is exactly what Carney is trying to achieve.

A military buildup requires a clearly articulated mission that is sufficiently compelling to a substantial fraction of the population that they will sign up for service. Ideally there are clear victory conditions. In the Great War and World War Two, the mission was defending the empire and defeating Germany: once Germany was defeated, the war was over and the men could demobilize. The American case for war in Vietnam was sufficiently compelling that, even though Ottawa refused to contribute to the war effort, around 30,000 Canadians went south to volunteer to fight (comparable to the number of Canadians who fought in Afghanistan). In the GWOT, the initial rallying cry was the desire for revenge against Islam for 9/11; mission creep towards impossible, open-ended objectives like ‘building democracy’ and ‘making Afghanistan safe for feminism’ ultimately soured the warrior class on the war. Peacekeeping has historically been a terrible motivation, because no one really cares about it.

The CAF’s most recent (2024) defence policy document, Our North Strong And Free, frames the CAF’s mission in a mess of neoliberal blather that is as compelling a call to arms as a communique from the regional director of human resources. The mission described in that document is 1) to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic against Russian and Chinese ambitions, 2) to participate in continental missile defence, 3) to fight climate change and respond to natural disasters, and 4) to safeguard “global Canadian values” and ensure the integrity of the “international order” against the destabilizing influence of state and non-state actors (such as Russia and China) who do not share those vague, undefined “values”. The first and second items are meaningful defence goals, however both threats are rather distant, and missile defence doesn’t require much in the way of personnel and therefore won’t motivate large numbers of young men to sign up. The third item is essentially putting out forest fires, which is hardly what most young men have in mind when they think of military service. As for ‘values’, upholding girlboss absolutism, open borders, and anal maximalism is about as inspiring as Disney’s latest box office bomb. We already did that stuff in Afghanistan, and we aren’t doing it anymore.

Of course, all that stuff about ‘values’ is mostly just moralistic camouflage for defending the financial interests of Canada’s globalist elites. That kind of hypocrisy isn’t effective anymore. People see right through it. It would probably be more effective to try being honest for a change, and tell potential recruits: we’re going to go kill people so we can take the stuff we don’t break in the process, and for your trouble we’ll cut you in on the take.

Perhaps the CAF should consider sending kill teams after fentanyl-trafficking narcoterrorists in Central America. This is a mission with clear bad guys, who present a clear threat to continental security. Better yet, announcing a crusade to liberate first the United Kingdom, and then Western Europe from Islamic occupation and the grip of the tyrannical governments that enabled that occupation would have young men beating down the doors of the recruiting stations. Of course, the current Canadian government would never do anything like that, as it fully supports the EU’s ethnic replacement policies, and implements them domestically itself.

The Security Screening Bottleneck

The recruiting problem is at least partly driven by regime paranoia. A recent auditor-general report revealed that security screenings have become a significant obstacle to potential recruits, taking up to a year in some cases. This is about twice as long as the US military takes. A majority end up withdrawing their applications before the process is even completed, half of them within two months of applying. Only 1 in 13 applicants is successfully recruited.

This suggests that the problem isn’t actually attracting people to the recruiting office: a couple hundred thousand Canadians were at least interested enough to start the recruitment process over the last few years. The problem is that interested applicants get frustrated and move on with their lives.

This was not a problem in the recent past. Until the 1990s, the only security checks that were performed were criminal background checks and verification of citizenship. Following 9/11 security screening protocols steadily expanded. The government now worries about terrorist affiliations, ‘ideologically motivated violent extremism’ or IVME, and penetration by foreign influence operations. All of this requires intelligence agencies to dig through applicants’ social media accounts, credit scores, travel history, and so on.

This is entirely a problem created by multiculturalism. Previously, the loyalty of a Canadian boy to Canada was presumptive. In the mass immigration era, the public is filled with people whose pre-political ethno-religious loyalties supersede loyalty to Canada. Muslims may have sympathies to the Muslim Brotherhood; Sikhs may have sympathies to Khalistanis; Tamils may have sympathies to the Tamil Tigers; Chinese may be working as agents for the Chinese Communist Party. Multiculturalism requires the military to pretend that this mismatch between prepolitical and political loyalty is not a factor at scale, thereby prohibiting systematic exclusion of groups with unreliable loyalties; operational security requires therefore requires individual security screening.

Meanwhile, the tensions created by mass immigration have turned a significant fraction of the native population against the government that has forced demographic change upon them. The IVME category is essentially meant to target the ‘far right’ without directly naming it, whose opposition to immigration, along with impatience with tangential culture war issues such as feminism or gay rights, places them in an adversarial stance to the official ideology. This is particularly perverse because the ‘extremists’ of the ‘far right’ are, by definition, the most patriotic subset of the population; they are overwhelmingly young and male; and they are often (due to the ‘far right’s’ fitness culture) in superior physical condition to that of the general population. Security screenings intended to weed this element out exclude what should be the single best pool of motivated, high-quality recruits. If you think about it, ‘ideologically motivated violent extremist’ is practically the definition of a soldier.

None of these issues would be problems in an ethnically homogeneous nation-state in which the people and the elite are ideologically aligned, but they become unavoidable concerns for the “tolerant”, “inclusive” post-national state, which must deploy invasive, baroque security screenings in order to avoid recruiting agents of foreign powers, terrorist organizations, and disaffected natives radicalized by the government’s own policies. There’s a direct parallel with the security screening procedures that were implemented in airports following 9/11: since a multicultural state cannot simply ethnoreligiously profile Muslims (or, better yet, simply ban Muslims from travelling), everyone who travels must be assumed to be a potential terrorist, and subjected to the same invasive procedures.

These measures are also probably not very effective in practice (again, just like airport security screening, which doesn’t actually catch terrorists). Examining every recruit with sufficient care to uncover foreign agents inserted into the Canadian body politic by state intelligence agencies of adversarial foreign powers requires a degree of thoroughness that would effectively grind recruitment to a halt, while the kind of cursory screenings that would be consistent with an efficient and rapid recruitment process would not catch anyone with even basic opsec. Moreover, security screenings cannot account for pre-political loyalties: just because the Sikh applicant isn’t formally a member of an underground terrorist organization doesn’t mean that he won’t prioritize Sikh interests over Canadian interests. As but one high-profile example, during the embarrassing route from Afghanistan in 2021, Canada’s then-defence minister Lieutenant-Colonel (retd.) Harjit Sajjan diverted special forces personnel to evacuate Afghan Sikhs with no ties to Canada, at the expense of Canadian citizens still in the country, thereby endangering Canadian lives in preference to those of his coreligionists.

Ottawa is trying to address the security screening bottleneck by allowing applicants to start basic training on a probationary basis as they wait for CSIS and the RCMP to rifle through their lives. AI solutions, for instance using natural-language processing to digest social media histories, are also being explored. How effective this will be remains to be seen. AI has been an absolute disaster in private sector HR, resulting mainly in the mass rejection of qualified applicants. It isn’t difficult to envision a scenario in which the AI red-flags a large proportion of applicants for spicy jokes on social media, resulting in them getting kicked out of basic training.

In the end, streamlining security screening is a complicated solution to a problem created by the regime’s own ideology. Remigrating Canada’s surplus paperwork population would make security screenings largely unnecessary: ‘right wing extremism’ would become a non-problem overnight, and you don’t need to worry about Islamic terrorism in the ranks if you’re just not recruiting Muslims.

In any case, while the security screening bottleneck is a barrier to those who are potentially interested in military service, fixing the problem by streamlining the process does absolutely nothing to increase the pool of potential recruits.

The Great Military Awokening

Young men do not only join the military because they are patriotic. In general this kind of idealism is a rare thing. Much more common is a more primal motivation: the desire for adventure, for glory, to be tested and found worthy of joining an elite brotherhood of hard and dangerous men.

The CAF in its current form struggles to offer this. What young man sees a lumpy elementary school principle in a general’s uniform blubbering about how horrible it is that soldiers used rough language and told insensitive jokes, and is inspired to think ah, yes, that is precisely the kind of leader of hard men that I would follow to the gates of hell? To the contrary, Carignan’s performance tells them that they would be signing up for an extended course of incessant nagging by unpleasant harridans far more concerned by the misgendering of the cross-sex hormone-gobbler that has to be carried the last seven point nine kilometres of the eight-klick ruck march when xer fat little legs give out than she is by the gender goblin’s inability to complete the ruck. Young men want to be challenged by demanding and dangerous training, not challenged to overcome the implicit biases of their internalized transphobia.

When you see CAF soldiers in the wild, they are frequently obese and slovenly. This is not mere perception: an internal report found that three-quarters of uniformed peoplekind are fatbodies.

When I joined the infantry reserve in high school, I expected that it would pound my cookie dough ass into hardwood. Instead I found that NCOs were no longer allowed to give PT as punishment. “Drop and give me 50” was a violation of our human rights, so instead of disciplinary infractions becoming a tool to anneal the spirit and toughen the body, they were punished with passive-aggressive “red chits” that went in your permanent file to harass you for the rest of your career.

It was all very feminine-coded, and that is no accident. The CAF was forced to admit females to the combat arms in 1989, and since women cannot meet the fitness standards that men can reach, women were simply held to a lower standard. For example, I remember the females being allowed to do ‘girl pushups’ with their knees on the ground. The problem with a double standard is that it is very difficult to hold one while simultaneously claiming that girls can do anything boys can do better. If women can’t match the physical standards expected of male soldiers, then what the hell are they doing in uniform? The only possible answer is ‘because equality’, but double-standards refute equality by their very existence.

Therefore in 2013 the CAF swept this embarrassing reality under the rug by implementing the gender-neutral FORCE (Fitness for Operational Requirements of Canadian Armed Forces Employment) evaluation, which is of course actually much worse than the previous double standard. Since women can’t match male performance, performance benchmarks were reduced across the board to a level that women can reach. The FORCE evaluation is supposedly meant to evaluate fitness in terms of military specific tasks such as sprints for fire-and-movement or lifting sandbags, rather than more traditional and direct measures such as number of pushups, number of pull-ups, time to run a certain distance, and so on. Officially, leadership insisted that FORCE was not a reduction in standards at all, and how dare you imply that it is, but after FORCE was introduced, the CAF got fat, so they’re obviously lying. Rather than pushing soldiers to achieve an exceptional physical standard, the CAF contents itself with verifying that soldiers are barely capable of performing at the bare minimum, and so, by and large, the bare minimum is what they don’t even achieve.

I’ve seen reports that basic training is apparently now a de facto “no fail” system in which one earns the cap badge as a participation trophy, due to pressure on instructors to pass recruits in order to keep numbers up. Can’t finish the ruck march? No problem, there’s a truck you can ride, hop on in, no one will judge you. It’s hard to judge how prevalent this is, but wokeness is invariably corrosive to competency, so this would not be surprising if true.

In an effort to boost recruitment numbers, the CAF has been dropping standards across the board. The previous division of applicants into categories of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ based on their medical and psychological status has been replaced with a third category, ‘fit for task’, which essentially means ‘eh, so you have a prescription for anti-anxiety meds ... good enough’. Aptitude testing has also been dropped in favour of the so-called ‘fast pass’ which accepts civilian credentials at face value under the dubious proposition that a bachelor’s degree is a reliable proxy to intelligence and competence.

The net result of all of this is to reduce the quality of human material being recruited, while reducing the quality of training they receive, thereby ensuring that when Canadians see their military they are not presented with the glorious flower of their youth, but with the sad-looking dregs scraped from the bottom of the barrel.

No one with any self-respect wants to be a part of that.

It’s worth emphasizing that front-line infantry units, such as the Royal Canadian Regiment, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, or the Royal 22e Regiment (the Van Doos), continue to maintain much higher internal standards of fitness than the non-combat trades. The fat troops that civilians see on the street or at public events are logistics, signals, administrative personnel, and so on. However, infantry units are garrisoned far from population centres at remote bases like CFB Petawawa, and therefore kept out of the public eye. As a result, the internal cultures of these infantry regiments – maintained more or less in defiance of Ottawa’s emphasis on DEI over readiness and performance – does absolutely nothing for the military’s public image.

A high standard of physical fitness serves as an advertisement for military service. It presents soldiers as a masculine elite, and carries an implied promise to young men that it will carve them into precisely that kind of elite. This has a magnetizing effect on the kind of young men who are psychologically suited to combat. The current FORCE standard seems to be more of a minimal acceptable level of military fitness, rather than an aspirational ideal. Widespread obesity suggests that even this low standard isn’t met in practice. Instead, physical fitness standards should be set at a level such that they would be challenging for an athletic young man in his prime.

A large group of fit young men will catch the eyes of the ladies, which is the real reason that ‘women love a man in uniform’, and it of course follows that this is in itself a point of attraction for young men. However, that also brings up the question of the uniforms themselves.

Under Trudeau, standards of dress were relaxed almost to the point of elimination. Just as fitness standards were discriminatory to women, uniform standards were discriminatory towards Muslims, Sikhs, and gender horrors. This was sold as a way of being more inclusive and thereby attracting more ‘non-traditional’ recruits, but it’s actually a recruiting problem. Soldiers in public are walking advertisements for the military. If they look like fat sacks of shit who just got vomited out of a hipster burlesque show, then this is how the military will be perceived, and it will turn people off. It’s exactly the same principle as putting obese black women in lingerie ads and thinking that this will bring in customers.

At the same time that fitness standards should aim at the highest ideal rather than the lowest common denominator, strict uniform standards must be reapplied. A soldier should have a ‘look’: he should be identifiable as a military man even when in civvies, simply from his bearing, his haircut, and his facial hair.

Mix-and-match gender queering must come to an end. No more long pink hair, no more scruffy beards. To a certain degree, the military has already partially reversed the humiliating excesses of the 2022-2024 era, but this is mostly in the way of insisting that long hair be tied back, hair be short enough that it is in principle possible to wear a helmet, beards be kept well groomed, and vivid primary colour hair dye be covered when in the field so as to avoid drawing the attention of snipers. This is still embarrassing.

Religious modifications to uniforms absolutely must be phased out. If Sikhs are allowed to wear turbans because this is their sacred tradition, the implicit message is that their sacred tradition is more sacred to us than our sacred traditions, namely the regimental headdress each soldier is privileged to wear. If our sacred traditions are not sacred to us, then they are not sacred at all, and we are revealed as a fundamentally unserious people whose standards mean nothing. I single out the Sikh turban because this was the thin end of the wedge: it was foisted upon the Canadian military in the 1990s, against its vociferous objections, and was the first sign of standards collapse that culminated in the pink hair of today.

The primary reason that young women have traditionally loved a man in uniform is because of what that uniform signifies: physical fitness, strength of character, courage, aggression, and all the rest of the masculine qualities which women find attractive. Again, this is why high fitness standards are important, but that does not mean that the aesthetics of the uniform do not matter. As such, when soldiers are seen in public, they should be in their dress uniforms, not in shapeless, lumpy fatigues. The Casual Friday culture – or Flip-Flop Fridays as they are apparently known in the CAF – may be appropriate for our informal Yankee friends, but Canadian soldiers should be held to a higher standard of spit and polish when in the public eye.

It might be worth thinking about redesigning dress uniforms, bringing in Versace, Armani, Barbour, or some similarly high profile fashion designer. The current look is essentially a cheap business suit in dark green, making soldiers look like drab bureaucrats. To the contrary, dress uniforms should catch the eye, they should look glorious, sharp, sexy, and sleek. These new dress uniforms might consciously call back to the Canadian military’s 19th century British roots: rather than light green shirts and dark green jackets and trousers, they could be crimson, black, and shining brass. When soldiers move around in public they should stand out and catch the eye: young men should see them and think, damn, I want to be one of those guys.

Feminization of the Military

The subject of women in the military deserves an extended digression, because the participation of women in the uniformed services has become something of a sacrosanct subject, as you can see from this blank-faced Canadian general waxing bureaucratic about how ‘women in peace and security’ is a strategic defence priority because the Russians don’t respect women or something. The poor guy looks like he’s in a hostage situation. Blink twice if you need help, man.

The actual truth is that women have no place in the military aside, maybe, from supporting roles. This absolutely incredible thread provides an American perspective on the realities of women in uniform, and it’s all exactly what you’d expect based on simple common sense: not only physical underperformance, but also shirking of duties, undermining of military discipline, and overall destruction of morale. The anecdotes and observations in that thread match my own experiences. I observed that female soldiers fell into one of four categories: tomboys who really were one of the boys; butch lesbians who hate the boys; regimental mattresses who really like the boys; and feminist girlbosses who are there to prove something to the boys. Of the four, only the tomboys actually make halfway decent soldiers, and they are by far the rarest type. The rest just get in the way and cause problems.

An army is, at its most basic level, a large group of heavily armed teenage boys whose hormonally driven propensity for organized mayhem is only barely kept in check and thereby channelled towards politically useful ends by the steady application of extreme discipline and the deliberate cultivation of a strong sense of fraternal esprit de corps. The social dynamics that turn a mob of teenage boys into an army are extremely sensitive to disruption because they are highly specific to the psychological makeup of hormonal teenage boys. These social dynamics are by their very nature impossible for women to directly observe, let alone participate in, because introducing even a single female into an all-male group immediately changes the social dynamics, as when a seed crystal dropped into a supersaturated solution precipitates its abrupt crystallization. With a female in their midst, that band of hormonal and therefore horny young men will immediately start competing with one another for the attention of that female: minds are distracted from the mission by the intoxicating pheremonal aroma, brothers in arms are now sexual competitors, jealousies are aroused, and discipline problems result.

Of course, sexual fraternization is against military regulations, but with the sexes in close proximity the only practical way to keep fraternization to manageable levels is to harshly punish both offenders (but especially the men) for even the most innocent of improprieties. So now your men aren’t just distracted and horny, they’re annoyed at the same time because you’re punishing them for reacting at all to the temptation you’re waving in front of their noses. You can say ‘they should just control themselves’ all you want, but that will not change anything, because the human animal is what it is. As Patton is reputed to have said, “If they won’t fuck, they won’t fight”. Of course, women in uniform are not above using these protections to cry rape or sexual assault when caught in flagrante delicto, throwing their boyfriends under the bus of military justice to save their own careers. Punishment for sexual fraternization tends to only move in one direction, and indeed, this has been used for political purges of the officer corps both in the US (e.g. the Tailhook scandal) and in Canada (where we’ve now had over a decade or perennial sex scandals which forced an unprecedented 13 senior military officers to resign in 2021, and which nearly resulted in the 150-year-old Royal Military College being shut down, which it avoided only by promising to reach a 1/3 female enrollment quota by 2035, exceeding the overall female enlistment goal by 10%).

Barracks bunnies aside, female soldiers undermine discipline still further due to the instinctive propensity of men to be more protective of and solicitous towards females: a male private breaking down in tears will earn nothing but scorn from his sergeant and mockery if not beatings from his comrades, but a female private having an emotional meltdown will cause that same sergeant to immediately lower his voice and ask what he can do to help, pumpkin. The inevitable result of this is a double-standard which women cannot help but take advantage of and men cannot help but resent. The only way to prevent such a double standard is to treat everyone the same, which in practice means and can only mean to treat the men like women, because men can withstand much higher loads of emotional stress. That is not mere misogyny: experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first large-scale conflict in which female combat soldiers saw deployment, demonstrated that female soldiers incur PTSD much more easily than males. This makes it much more difficult to properly train the male soldiers, since basic training is predicated upon using extreme emotional stress to break down the psyches of recruits in order to put them back together as military men. Women shatter under much lighter loads than men, so if stress levels are reduced to the degree that women can take them, the necessary amount of emotional stress can’t be applied to the men. This also results in the frat house atmosphere of the barracks softening into the cloistered funk of the convent, in which one must always watch what one says, avoid insensitive jokes, make sure everyone feels included, and consider everyone’s feelings. This is absolutely poisonous to the morale of the male soldiers.

The presence of women in the armed forces inhibits the male bonds that hold every military together, and introduces discipline problems, double standards, and reduced standards that can only be ameliorated with policies that corrode morale and military culture. In exchange for this the military gets soldiers who are far less physically capable, far less aggressive, and far more emotionally fragile. It’s a bad deal for the military. It is all downside and no upside. The social experiment has been run, it has yielded exactly the terrible results that anyone could have predicted, and that experiment should therefore be terminated, never to be repeated again. If we absolutely have to have women in uniform, they should be restricted to very specific trades – such as nursing or clerical work – and kept in sex-segregated units.

Instead, the Canadian military is doubling down on recruiting women, with a target of a 25% female military by 2026. Currently the CAF is 16.6% female overall. Given that women are much less interested in military service in the first place, increasing the female fraction by almost 10% in one year probably won’t happen even with a whole lot of DEI. It’s also notable that females are concentrated among officers: 19.9% of officers are female, but only 15.5% of enlisted soldiers. Naturally, women want to the ones in air conditioned offices telling people what to do, not the ones digging slit trenches. As always, ‘equality’ means ‘giving girls the high status jobs’.

One can’t help but wonder how this impacts recruiting and retention overall. From the perspective of ordinary soldiers, the feminization of the officer class simply turns the military into another HR-dominated corporate environment. We also know that the CAF quietly discriminates against white men in recruitment by closing certain trades to them until female quotas are met. Women are overwhelmingly disinterested in the soldier’s life, and it does not matter how much Gloria Steinem you make people read or how many Strong Independent Women totally kick ass in Marvel movies, that is not ever going to change. It is long past time for society to make peace with human nature, and allow its institutions to work with instead of against it. Let the military be the fraternal warrior band that every military has ever been and will always be, let its soldiers focus on training for war, and you’ll get a lot more young men interested in joining.

Recruiting Foreigners

At the end of 2022 the CAF began trying to recruit non-citizens in an effort to fill the enlistment gap. Recruitment was opened to permanent residents (which is to say, in general, to Indians). Taking a page from Robert Heinlein in the worst possible way, the pot is sweetened with the promise that service guarantees (expedited) citizenship. Of course, this policy is also explicitly intended to make the military more diverse.

Non-citizen recruitment got off to a slow start, with only eight permanent residents recruited in the first year of the program. This seems to have been largely due to the onerous security screening process. In 2024-2025, however, the number of permanent residents successfully inducted into the CAF ballooned by 100x to over 800 recruits, over 10% of the year’s total.

This has had the desired effect on the military’s diversity metrics, with over a quarter of new recruits in 2024-2025 being from a non-First Nations visible minority.

This rapid increase in the number of foreigners being enlisted within the Canadian military seems to be, at least in part, due to reforms introduced by the Iraqi Evaci5, which she proudly announced at a press conference in February. One of these reforms was to outsource much of the security screening of PRs to Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, under the theory that IRCC has already looked into the backgrounds of the people it gave permanent residencies to, so why not just take their word for it. Given the IRCC’s mission profile of brownmaxxing Canada as fast as intercontinental passenger jets can fly, the IRCC can be relied upon to do a thorough job of vetting, as anyone can see from the extremely high quality of elite human capital that Canada has blessed itself with in recent years.

It should go without saying that filling the military with non-white non-citizens is actually quite a terrible idea. Such soldiers are for all intents and purposes mercenaries with no organic loyalty to the Canadian people. They are very likely to have divided loyalties, and to exhibit ethnic in-group preferences which could become a problem if they establish themselves in significant numbers, as experience with Indians has already repeatedly demonstrated in the private sector. Security is an obvious concern, and pretending that CSIS can catch all, most, or even any operatives of, say, Chinese state intelligence is dangerously naive. Their grasp of either English or French is likely to be far from perfect, leading to potential communications breakdowns which could have meaningful consequences on the battlefield. Cultural differences interfere with an easy sense of comity between foreign and native troops, introducing friction into military units that reduces discipline, unit cohesion, and operational efficiency even further than it already has been.

Historically, armies composed of foreign mercenaries are fragile and unreliable. From the point of view of tyrants, however, they have one great advantage: with no sense of connection to the people the tyrants rule over, they have no compunctions about oppressing them.

It is by no means certain that recruiting foreigners in large numbers will actually increase recruitment on net. When a given organization fills up with a certain kind of person, it becomes coded as an occupation or environment belonging to that type of person, meaning that other types avoid it. Female-coded workplaces tend to reach tipping points in which any remaining men look for the exits, for example. A similar phenomenon happens with racial diversity: the local fast food joint that used to employ teenagers drives all the teenagers away as it fills up swarthy middle-aged men with Star Wars names, because teenage girls don’t want to get creeped on by surly foreigners raised in actual rape cultures. If the Canadian military becomes known as an organization primarily staffed by third world coolies, actual Canadians will avoid it – it will be coded as a low-status occupation for the imports.

Every society has a traditional warrior class. In Canada, that means young white men from rural areas and small towns who were raised in families with long traditions of military service. Quite aside from issues of competence and loyalty, recruitment drives that sideline the traditional warrior class in favour of outreach to other groups usually accomplish nothing more than the alienation of the traditional warrior class: for every recruit from a non-traditional group that’s gained, at least one recruit from the traditional group is lost. But instead, in an effort to attract more permanent residents, Canada is putting out commemorative stamps celebrating the zero point zero zero one five percent of Canada’s World War One military that was comprised of Sikhs (there were a whole ten of them).

Pay and Conditions

No one joins the military to get rich, but you don’t want your private soldiers visiting the food bank.

By far the single largest factor that makes recruitment and retention an uphill struggle is that, for many decades now, Canadian soldiers have been underpaid, overworked, and housed in absolutely deplorable conditions. The under-strength military struggles to meet the responsibilities that Ottawa loads onto its narrow shoulders, resulting in soldiers being deployed too regularly, being relocated around the country too often and with too little notice, and working longer hours than they should with outdated and broken equipment. Naturally, this leads to burnout. It also disrupts family formation, and puts dual-income households with one civilian spouse in a difficult position, as new employment can be challenging to find at short notice, particularly when your husband is posted to a remote area.

The awful state of military housing has been proverbial in the CAF for decades. Facilities are cheaply built, old, and in poor repair: stories about electrical problems, toilets that won’t flush, unsafe drinking water, terrible insulation, and so on are quite common. Soldiers move off base into civilian housing as soon as they can, but of course, given the Canadian real estate bubble and the low pay, this presents issues of its own.

You also hear a lot of stories about soldiers having to buy their own kit out of pocket, because the kit provided by the CAF is simply not fit for purpose. Again, this has been happening for a long time. It’s one thing when soldiers are purchasing camelpaks because they’re better than canteens, or bringing their own air mattresses; it’s quite another when they’re buying their own helmets.

All of that impacts morale. Burnt out, demoralized soldiers leave, and they tell their friends and family not to join.

The remote locations of the CAF’s bases are another factor impacting retention. The majority of Canadian Forces Bases are far from population centres, which is great for training since there are few civilians to be annoyed by the thunder of artillery practice, but it’s also isolating for the soldiers, and accentuates difficulties in finding off-base housing and locating employment for civilian spouses. I’d hazard that keeping the bulk of the CAF in the ass end of nowhere also negatively impacts recruitment because it keeps the military out of the public eye. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.

Credit where it’s due, the Carney government has given soldiers a generous pay increase: 20% for privates, 13% for all ranks from corporal to lieutenant-colonel, and 8% for colonels and above. The base pay of a private soldier is now CAD50,000 per year, which still isn’t great, but then that is for a private, after all. A captain gets over CAD100,000.

Carney’s commitment to increase defence spending is also a good start. Yelling ‘bang, you’re dead’ because your unit exceeded its training ammo budget is the kind of thing that leaves service members wondering just what the hell they’re doing with their lives, especially when they return from their hard day simulating ammunition with their vocal cords to a dilapidated barracks with leaky roofs and busted wiring.

Whether any of this money will actually manifest in a meaningful material improvement is another question entirely. The sclerotic, over-regulated, micromanaged Canadian economy excels in soaking up great wads of public cash into bureaucratic processes that yield little practical effect, and military procurement is absolutely no exception. The Carney government’s budget is extremely vague on the details about exactly how the money will be spent. One suspects a great deal of it will be diverted towards initiatives aimed at using AI to streamline a DEI-enabled security screening and recruitment platform, procurement focused on purchases of lightly armoured emission-free electric vehicles, and so on. Regardless, there’s no question that Canada should be spending a lot more money on its military, and that improving the pay and living conditions of the troops, and equipping them with functional munitions, is an absolutely necessary precondition both to recruitment of new soldiers and retention of existing personnel. The government is at least on the right track here.

Building new military facilities in close proximity to population centres could have benefits for both recruitment and retention. Troops garrisoned close to civilian populations have more access to civilized amenities: military service is thereby prevented from being a one-way ticket to isolation in the ass-end of nowhere. Proximity to population centres makes it easier for military wives and girlfriends to find employment following relocation. Troops garrisoned close to civilians are also more regularly seen by civilians, which helps to keep the military front and centre as a potential career path.

Taking Care of Veterans

Prospective soldiers aren’t only looking for distinction, glory, and adventure: they want to know that they’ll have a half-way decent life after their term of service is over, as, one way or the other, it eventually will be.

There is a basic moral duty to look after veterans when they retire, and this has been shamefully abused. Military service is dangerous and difficult. It can take a horrendous toll on the body and mind. Too many vets are left to fall by the wayside, descending into ego-annihilation of substance abuse to escape from the frustrations of fighting with Veterans Affairs Canada for the medical care they need to deal with the broken backs or traumatic brain injuries. The indignity is deepened when they see the state’s largesse dispensed with generous abandon upon asylum seekers (often nationals of the very countries they fought in) who have given nothing to the country and have been present on Canadian soil for all of five minutes. We hear stories of vets being recommended to consider Medical Assistance in Dying when all they want is a wheelchair ramp, or getting denied coverage for traumatic brain injuries they incurred as door-kickers. Sadly, casting military veterans aside like rotten fruit once they’ve been squeezed dry of their last drops of usefulness is an old and shameful tradition in the Anglosphere. Such stories act as a deterrent to service. It’s bad enough to risk death or injury for your country; being abandoned to your fate is far too much.

Potential recruits need to know that they’ll receive valuable training and education, both in the form of providing on-the-job technical skills that can be easily applied to civilian life, and in the form of directly subsidized education at civilian colleges and universities. The Royal Military College provides this for a relatively small cadre of officers, who receive a four-year university degree in exchange for four years of service. Other officer training universities could be established; alternatively, reserve officer training programs could be built within existing universities, along the American ROTC model.

Official preferment in employment would go a long way to sweetening the pot. Essentially this would amount to providing DEI for veterans. Bump veterans to the head of the line for good jobs, mandate that a certain (high) fraction of jobs be allocated to veterans, and young men will scramble to become veterans. Federal government employees are already required to be bilingual: why not require military service as a precondition for employment in the civil service? To paraphrase Heinlein, “Service guarantees employment!”

Effective Propaganda

An effective recruiting drive requires a propaganda campaign. So far Canada has stubbornly refused to mythologize its military prowess, indeed if anything the Canadian state has cultivated a national antimyth that keeps Canadians in deliberate ignorance about their own history, that is, when it isn’t funding biopics of Sikh terrorists assassinating Canadian immigration officers. This is easily changed. An investment of a few hundred million dollars – a small fraction of the CBC’s CAD1.4 billion budget – would be sufficient to produce a series of high-production value movies and TV shows about historical heroes such as Wolfe and Montcalm in the Seven Years’ War, Major-General Sir Isaac Brock in the War of 1812, the Great War air ace Billy Bishop, the Ojibwe commando Tommy Prince, or Leo Major, who was decorated twice, once in World War II and once in Korea.

For more modern subject-matter, Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 provides ample fodder. Man for man the JTF2 are every bit as lethal as the Green Berets or the Navy SEALs, but whereas Hollywood has turned American special forces operators into bywords for the elite military, the JTF2 languishes in relative obscurity, despite having achieved incredible feats such as the first sniper kill over 3 km. A TV series could follow a JTF2 team during the Great War on Terror, with the plot arc moving between their secretive missions abroad, and a home life intertwined with the political machinations of the Canadian elite and the fraying social fabric. The intent of such a show would not only be to mythologize Canada’s special forces, but also to provide a sober, unflinching critique of the ancien regime’s failures of will and lack of national loyalty. This would help to communicate to potential recruits that the bad old days are over, and that the adults are back in charge.

A reality TV show following a platoon of recruits through basic training could also be a highly effective – and relatively inexpensive – recruiting tool. The idea would be to present a compelling before-and-after narrative, starting with recruits who are soft, fat, undisciplined, and lacking in confidence, and ending with a body of men who are fit, trim, disciplined, and sure of themselves. In between these points in their development the show would document, in unflinching detail and in all its brutality, the rigours of training and the emotional strain placed on the recruits. Some might think that such a show would dissuade recruits, but the opposite is the case: Full Metal Jacket is something of a timeless classic in the military, entirely because of its depiction of boot camp. Young men want to be tested, challenged, pushed to their limits and beyond.

No discussion of recruitment propaganda is complete without a discussion of social media. The CAF’s current social media strategy seems to be to place its official accounts in the hands of woke females, and while I’m sure this is very beneficial for their self-esteem, its main practical result is to elicit mockery, when it isn’t simply ignored. Not only does this social media strategy completely fail to connect with what should be the target audience, it also reeks of inauthenticity, which is absolute death on the Internet. Instead, these social media accounts should be placed into the hands of young male zoomers weened on the Khazar milkers of frog memes, and they should be given a free hand to be as irreverent and ironic as they desire. Serving soldiers should also be encouraged to maintain their own social media presence if they so desire, with the understanding that so long as they don’t leak operational secrets or break the law in some fashion they are at liberty to post what they want. The name of the game in the online attention economy is virality, and virality is not achieved with focus-grouped, committee-driven message discipline, but with spontaneity and dark humour. TikTok videos showing young men playing with high-tech weapons and other toys of war in the forest as they crack edgy jokes could go a long way. The goal is to make military training look like the kind of fun that young men want to have.

Conclusion

In the short term, holding the military to extremely high standards of fitness and exacting standards of dress will almost certainly have the opposite of the desired effect: rather than increasing the size of the military, it will shrink it. This is desirable, an intended boiling-off effect. The military currently has a very great quantity of dead weight, women and men who have no business being in uniform, and whose very presence actively dissuades high quality men from joining in the first place. There is still, I am told – and I very much want to believe that this is true – a hard core of soldiers who, because they love the military life more than they despise Ottawa’s insane politics, have resisted the Great Awokening, enduring its humiliations, keeping their heads down, and doing their best to maintain some semblance of military professionalism as they wait for the long fever to break. Such men would be the rock on which the church of the new Canadian army is built.

As things currently stand, these reforms are every bit the pipe dream that the Carney government’s goal of a massive expansion in recruitment is. Aggressive young men are not going to join a military led by fat, weepy grandmas, organized around the defence of Our Democratic Values of giving brown people our stolen land. The Liberal Occupation Government isn’t going to reverse its commitment to gay race communism. You can have liberalism, or you can have an army, but you can’t have both. An army needs young men, and young Canadian men aren’t going to fight for traitors who despise them.

If you read all of that, congratulations. It was a lot. I sincerely hope that it wasn’t too much of a slog. At this point I’m thoroughly sick of the subject, and can’t wait to get back to writing about something more interesting.

As always, I would like to thank my supporters, whose incredible patience as they wait for me to actually publish something is nothing short of saint-like.

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is a physicist and science fiction writer. He is the Founder and Principal Scientist of the Society for Post-Quantum Research. He maintains the Fields & Energy blog here on Substack, and is the motive force behind the Based Book Sale which periodically offers a wide selection of newpub ebooks for $0.99 as an ongoing promotion for self-published authors. Professionally, he’s a world expert in antenna physics. He developed some of the first commercial ultrawideband antennas and wrote the book, The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas. A co-founder of Q-Track Corporation, he contributed to near-field wireless location and communication technologies, and he holds numerous patents in applied electromagnetics.

Over the years his research led him to question some basic assumptions about modern physics (for instance, the observer effect in quantum mechanics, the non-existence of the aether), motivating him to conduct one of the most thorough re-examinations of the historical development of physics I’ve ever seen. The fruits of this research project will be available in his forthcoming three-volume work, Fields & Energy. Book I: Fundamentals & Origins of Electromagnetism closed a crowdfund last month and is being sent to backers before a release the first week in December. All of Book I and most of the material from Book II: Where Physics Went Wrong is available already on the Fields & Energy Substack. The trilogy will close with Book III: How Electromagnetism and Quantum Mechanics Work.

Some of the following questions were motivated by Hans’s recent interview on the DemystifySci podcast, which you can see here:

The Rising Tide Foundation also hosted a lecture by Hans, where he explains how to fix physics with fields and energy:

Fields & Energy

Fixing Physics with Fields [& Energy]

The Riding Tide Foundation was kind enough to host me on Sunday October 5 for a lecture, Fixing Physics with Fields [& Energy]. You can watch the video over on their Substack…

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7 months ago · 18 likes · 6 comments · Hans G. Schantz

The interview got pretty (really) long, so I’ve broken it up into thematic elements. My questions are in bold. In the spirit of Bottom Line Up Front, here’s the first question:

Can you provide an extremely brief, non-technical, high-level summary of Fields & Energy for the benefit of readers who might not have the background to follow discussions that get down into the weeds of the intersection between mathematical physics, experimental physics, and the historical development of science? What should their main takeaway be?

Physics has long insisted that electromagnetism springs from one paradoxical entity, a photon which somehow simultaneously combines the mutually contradictory properties of non-localized wave and localized particle. My research reveals a simpler truth: two distinct actors share the stage, first fields that move as a wave, the other an energy flow that traces definite paths and appears as particles at the smallest scales. My Fields & Energy model follows from an understanding of electromagnetic theory, yet looks suspiciously like the long neglected pilot-wave interpretation of quantum mechanics. Fields guide energy.

The takeaway is that electromagnetism isn’t just a magic black box where things happen and we can only hope to “shut up and calculate” with tedious formulas. Instead, there’s a deep, rich, and intuitive understanding possible. Electromagnetism is not just math to muddle through, but rather a mindset to master.

A Brief History of Bad Physics

Recently, we’ve been seeing a lot of people, such as Sabine Hossenfelder, saying that physics is broken. Some, such as Eric Weinstein, come right out and say that physics was deliberately derailed into blind alleys. Now, neither Weinstein nor Hossenfelder come off as cranks: they’re fully credentialed physicists, educated at top institutions, but what they have in common is that they’re no longer beholden to the academic system. Would you agree with them that physics is broken? If so, do you think this is historical happenstance, or do you think the waters have been muddied on purpose?

That’s a good question. I do agree with them that physics is broken, but while I think they would argue that this is a phenomenon of recent decades, I would trace the problem back to Mach’s observer-centric approach introduced to physics by Einstein and then brought to fruition by Heisenberg and Bohr. This approach insists on the principle that any attempt to ask how or why something works is out of bounds. The job of physics – in this view – is to mathematically connect a series of measured inputs to a series of measured outputs. Reality is a black box which cannot be opened to understand its workings. Physicists should just shut up and calculate. This is reinforced by a centralized scientific bureaucracy that rewards consensus and often kills genuine innovation.

A Brief History of Bad Physics

How did this perspective become so firmly entrenched in physics? As I read the history of physics, I kept noticing that the biographies of American physicists usually included a line about receiving a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship or grant to go study or work with Bohr at the Copenhagen Institute. In fact, Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Institute itself was largely funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. And as the situation in Germany and Europe deteriorated in the years leading up to World War II, the Rockefeller Foundation also funded top European scientists to flee Europe and to settle abroad in the UK and US.

Nobel Laureate particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) quipped that Niels Bohr “brainwashed a generation of physicists….” The Rockefeller Foundation footed the bill. Was this a historical happenstance? Or did it happen on purpose?

The conventional histories and accounts will tell you that the principals of the Rockefeller Foundation merely wished to place their funds in the hands of the best people so they could do good work. A more plausible explanation is that they saw some organizational interest in doing so. I’ve looked, but – so far – I’ve found no smoking guns that might reveal their motives.

I did look in detail at the motivations and confluence of interests behind Einstein’s popularity.

Fields & Energy

5.2.8 Einstein Comes to America

Part 1 introduced the legendary public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays who plays an important role in today’s post. This piece describes how Einstein came to America in 1921 as a member of a Zionist fundraising mission. Divisions between assimilationist Jews and more radical Zionist Jews had the unintended effect of shifting the focus away from the …

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a year ago · 33 likes · 12 comments · Hans G. Schantz

It’s a complicated story, but certainly scientists and scientific ideas are often promoted for reasons other than their scientific merit alone.

After WWII, science became increasingly under centralized government control. Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, argued in his 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier that federally funded basic research was essential for national security, public health, and economic growth. He proposed a permanent government role in supporting science but with research priorities set largely by scientists rather than politicians.

This report directly inspired the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950, institutionalizing federal funding of civilian research. From then on, U.S. science operated in a framework where the government supplied large-scale, continuing support, while also exerting influence through funding priorities, oversight, and classification.

In 1946, the U.S. Atomic Energy Act declared that all nuclear weapons information was “born classified.” The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reports about 5,000–6,000 patents classified under secrecy orders in force at any given time. Each year, several hundred new secrecy orders are issued and a similar number are rescinded.

It’s entirely possible, as some have speculated, that significant scientific breakthroughs remain behind a wall of classification, while public science is being deliberately allowed to stagnate pursuing unproductive research directions.

Broken Physics

I set out to devise an experiment that could distinguish my Fields & Energy theory from conventional thinking that combines the mutually contradictory properties of particle and wave to a single entity – a photon. One of the classic experiments “proving” the photon theory was the two-slit experiment. In the limit where the source is very dim and only one photon traverses the slits at a time, the individual photons still end up in the interference pattern, proving that somehow a photon interferes with itself, despite traversing only one or the other of the two slits.

What if we secured two separate independent optical sources – like two lasers – and tuned them to the same frequency? If we attenuated them down to the point where only one photon traversed the optical system at a time – from EITHER source – that would show whether fields and energy, whether light waves and light particles were independent or not. If we see interference, then the photon-less wave from one of the sources would have to have interfered with the other to generate the interference. If we see interference from two sources but only one photon, then one of the sources contributed an empty wave. As I started to look into it further, I discovered that the experiment had already been done, and the result was precisely what I’d anticipated.

In 1963, George Magyar and Leonard Mandel used two independent sources and found interferences even with beams attenuated to single-photon levels. Four years later, in 1967, Robert Pfleegor and Mandel carried out a more refined experiment with two independent, frequency-stabilized lasers attenuated to the single-photon level. They observed interference fringes even when only one photon was present in the system on average [Phys. Rev. 159 (1967), 1084].

De Broglie had what I believe is the correct interpretation. He observed, ‘[a] photon coming from one laser or the other and arriving in the interference zone is guided – and this seems to us to be physically certain – by the superposition of the waves emitted by the two lasers…’ [Phys. Rev. 172, (1968), 1284–1285.].

Experimental Proof… Ignored

The Pfleegor and Mandel result wasn’t taken as proving the independence of field and energy, however. In the conventional interpretation, the experiment shows that quantum interference stems from the “indistinguishability of alternative photon paths.”

That’s when I realized how broken physics is. Physicists are so wrapped up in their prior premises, that even what I would think would be a clear experimental demonstration gets interpreted away. It’s not that we don’t have the evidence needed to understand what’s going on. It’s that the evidence we have is being creatively reinterpreted to fit the Copenhagen narrative. That’s why I’m spending so much time on the history and philosophy of science in what should be a straightforward discussion of physics. Unless you can step outside your premises and look at the problem from a fresh perspective, you’ll be forever lost in your misinterpretations.

In Fields & Energy, I’m accumulating example after example that are paradoxical from conventional thinking but easy to understand from the Fields & Energy perspective. For instance, conventional thinking on radiation from accelerating charges models it as “the radiation of one charge accelerating,” a concept that makes no more sense than the sound of one hand clapping.

Fields & Energy

4.6.2 The Accelerating Charge Model

Some mail servers may truncate this post. Click on the headline to view it online…

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2 years ago · 25 likes · 23 comments · Hans G. Schantz

Broken Science: Antenna Engineering

One more example on how broken science is, this time from the engineering research side. The hot trend in antenna research a couple of decades ago was a concept called “metamaterials.” It was all the rage, and funding flowed in a vast torrent to anyone who could describe their proposed work with a “metamaterial” label. One professor I knew was critical of it, and he told me a bit about the pushback he got. His colleagues were irate. Fortunately, he was retired at that point and didn’t give a damn. But a younger, earlier-stage researcher would be facing a situation in which speaking the truth meant ending his career.

Shut up. Go with the flow. Get funded. Or share the truth, don’t get funded, and jeopardize your colleagues’ funding – colleagues who will be peer reviewing your papers and proposals and might hold a grudge because you threaten their livelihood. Consensus is king, and academia has become a feminized longhouse, as astute observers have already noted.

The fact that outsiders who aren’t beholden to the orthodoxy of modern physics, like Sabine Hossenfelder and Eric Weinstein, are stepping outside of the longhouse to criticize it is a great thing.

The Hidden Truth

Before you started working on Fields & Energy, you published a series of really wonderful young adult science fiction novels, which I’d recommend to my readers. At the risk of spoilers, these involved a turn-of-the-century conspiracy to cover up certain crucial breakthroughs in electromagnetic theory, which then derailed humanity’s technological development. You then set this series aside to work on Fields & Energy. Is there any connection here?