American speech is protected by the first amendment and backstopped by the second, yet nevertheless you will not find many Americans daring to even so much as mutter the forbidden word of power. This is not because white Americans don’t understand the problems. They have developed an elaborate vocabulary of ‘bad neighbourhoods’ and ‘good schools’ and ‘urban crime’ and ‘troubled youth’ and so on and so forth with which to discuss, in whispers, after glancing twice over their shoulders, the realities of life in the USSA. There is no law against parrhesia, technically an American citizen may say whatever he pleases without consequence, but of course frank speech in this Greek sense requires courage by definition, and there has been a great shortage of that. You can say whatever you please, yes, of course, fill your boots, but you will find yourself ostracized, divorced, unemployed, and homeless if you speak too directly, so you know, shut up. The unspoken strictures of the longhouse are a more effective prison than iron bars for those whose spirits have been cowed.

Meanwhile, last week there was a minor uprising in Belfast. Hadi Alodid, a gentlemen of Sudanese extraction, enriched the face of Stephen Ogilvie, a local bloke with special needs, providing him with extensive tribal scarring in a generous act of cross-cultural exchange, and only claiming two of his eyes in payment. The entire incident was caught on video. Ogilvie’s life, though not his sight (and he was already hard of hearing) was saved by three Irish men who rushed in to beat the innocent Sudanese rocket surgeon off with their hurling sticks. In the aftermath, it emerged that Ogilvie had helped Alodid move in to his new accommodations just a few days before. No good deed, etc.

Belfast exploded the next day. Yes, I was surprised too. Not a city noted for its hard lads, Belfast.

The uprising was variously described as a protest and as a riot, but it was neither of these. A protest is when an angry crowd gathers to chant some slogans and wave around some signs, pretending that their numbers are a display of power, and deluding themselves that Power will redress their grievances because a noisy lump of quivering biomass is somehow intimidating to Power. A riot is an explosive release of emotional energy that results in some property destruction and futile confrontations with armoured riot police, typically ending with the rioters being rounded up and jailed. In some cases, it’s true, protests and riots appear to produce political change, but this is almost invariably because Power has orchestrated these little carnivals in order to sanctify the policies it’s already decided upon under the guise of ‘bowing’ to ‘pressure’ from the ‘public’. The Canadian government, by the way, has long since mastered a non-violent variant of this dark art: practically every ‘public policy research group’ in the country is funded by the government to pressure the government to do what the government already wants to do. Show me what Our Democracy looks like; this is what Our Democracy looks like.

There were no signs being waved around in Belfast, no chanting of slogans. While there was a great deal of violence, it was not random and senseless, but methodical and carefully targeted. It unfolded with the tight discipline of a coordinated military operation.

The day before the uprising started, a communique was sent out to local businesses, instructing them to close before the fun started. At the appointed hour loose formations of young men, indistinguishable in black hoodies, fanned out across the city.

Barricades were set up all over Belfast; these were lightly manned, reportedly often with minors, and seem to have been intended mainly to slow down the police. In a few places men in balaclavas established checkpoints, pulling out migrants when they found them and roughing them up.

Meanwhile, highly mobile groups of young men targeted houses, cars, and businesses known to belong to migrants, breaking their windows and firebombing them. When there were civilians inside, they evicted them first: as far as I’ve heard, no one was killed, or even hospitalized. By the time emergency services arrived on the scene they’d already moved on to the next targets.

There do not seem to have been many direct confrontations with riot squads. There were a few videos of small numbers of skirmishers lobbing bricks or petrol bombs at police vehicles while using wheelie bins to shield themselves from a water cannon. It looked like they were mainly trying to keep the police occupied, so that the real work could proceed unimpeded elsewhere.

These young men had no interest in providing fodder for the media cycle. They left their phones at home in order to avoid being tracked. They kept themselves masked, and were at pains to politely discourage bystanders from recording them.

This combination of identical black clothing, identity concealment, mobility, and property destruction are classic black bloc tactics. In North America black bloc is generally associated with Antifa, and as far I know, the tactical doctrine was first developed by anti-globalization activists at WTO meetings (remember when anti-globalization was a leftist position?), but tactics have no ideology: several years ago a Polish nationalist friend informed me that he’d participated in several black bloc actions against the police in Warsaw, back during the naughty oughties when Poland wasn’t as nationalistic as it has since become.

The violence was largely contained to Belfast’s Protestant neighbourhoods, strongholds of loyalist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association. These were formed in response to the Irish Republican Army’s terrorism, as community defence organizations meant to deter incursions from Catholics, although they weren’t above reprisal attacks. The back and forth between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland is why Belfast is divided up by peace walls. Some of the paramilitaries’ leadership were seen on the streets, although they did not participate directly, and seemed to be just observing. Officially the paramilitaries played no part in orchestrating the violence, which is a line that both the paramilitaries and the police are sticking to, but then of course they would: the leadership isn’t about to confess to criminal activity, and the authorities much prefer a narrative of a spontaneous eruption of disorganized racist thuggery because that doesn’t imply that they don’t actually have a monopoly on violence in Belfast. My working assumption is that this is nonsense, and that the uprising was in fact organized by the loyalist paramilitaries.

A lot of people assumed that it was the Irish Republican Army reactivating, I think mainly because the only thing most Americans know about Northern Ireland is that it’s where the IRA was from, and they think the IRA is romantic. To the contrary, the IRA does not seem to have played any part in this, and indeed the IRA’s communist boomer leadership actively discouraged Belfast’s Catholics from taking part. They could not, however, motivate their people to actively interfere with the loyalists: the Catholics seem to have mostly watched (there were reports that some of their young men joined in the fun, but who knows).

The IRA was always a left-nationalist organization, and as such aligned itself with Marxist national liberation struggles, meaning that it consciously situated the struggle of the Northern Irish Catholics to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic of Ireland with decolonization efforts in the third world. You can read about the factors driving Sinn Fein’s fall from grace in this very good article by Keith Woods. The ideological inertia of this stance has meant that, since the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA’s public-facing political wing, Sinn Fein, has steadily drifted into third worldism. As a result, Sinn Fein are now amongst the loudest cheerleaders of third world invasion. The corrupt old men at the IRA’s head were more incensed by ‘racism’ than they were by an Irish man having his face cut off, which, you know, part and parcel.

The loyalist paramilitaries, by contrast, were always implicitly reactionary and traditionalist. Where the IRA obtained its weaponry from the United States, the Soviet Union, and Libya, the UVF and UDA traded with South Africa, Rhodesia, and Israel. Now that nativism is associated with the far right, it is a much easier fit for the loyalists.

The uprising in Belfast was not nihilistic violence for the sake of violence, though I’ve no doubt the lads were enjoying the opportunity for mayhem. It was violence towards a specific political objective: driving the foreigners out. Migrants whose domiciles were destroyed were directly deprived of housing. Migrants who managed to avoid this were made to worry that they will be next. Landlords taking government money to house migrants, or even thinking about doing so, now need to worry about the immediate cost of repairs and the ongoing expense of higher insurance premiums, making the Home Office’s lucre a lot less attractive. Landlords also need to worry about escalation: reportedly, letters were circulated which heavily implied that bricks and petrol bombs were just the first step on the violence ladder, and that the paramilitaries would be quite happy to take more decisive measures against the landlords themselves should the message not be received.

All of this is very sad, and I don’t want to seem heartless. The immigrants whose houses were destroyed were probably innocent; there was one particularly touching video of a nurse from Ghana or somewhere. Unfortunately, that is the nature of these things. They were brought in by the government en masse as a form of biological warfare against the native population. The government wants them there, the people want them gone, and the government refuses to listen, so, this is what happens.

Only 27 migrants were actually made homeless by the arson, but reportedly, quite a few are already clearing out on their own. The British government quite naturally condemned the violence, organizing a rally against racism in the aftermath, but it also responded by instructing the media to emphasize that it would be cracking down on illegal immigration into Northern Ireland. Underneath the condemnation, there is a clear message to all of this: in this case, violence worked.

That message has been sent before in Northern Ireland. Exactly one year to the day before the uprising in Belfast, there were riots in the small town of Ballymena after the courts let two gypsy boys off with delicate wrist taps for raping an Irish girl. The rioting went on for two weeks, and resulted in two thirds of the gypsy population clearing out. Again: violence worked.

Contrast Ballymena with the other major British protest movement last summer: the anti-migrant hotel protest in Epping, a London exurb populated largely by Londoners driven out of their city by diversity, which started when one of the migrants diversified a teenage girl. In contrast to the eruption in Ballymena, the protest in Epping was explicitly non-violent: the only violence came at the hands of the cops arresting people for flying Union Jacks. The mothers of Epping spent months gathering outside the migrant hotel, holding signs and raising awareness. The council also fought the migrant hotel in the courts, and enjoyed early success when a judge found that the location was zoned as a hotel but not as a migrant dormitory, essentially telling the Home Office that they didn’t have a loicense for that. This legal victory was short-lived. The decision was overturned almost immediately by a higher court judge, who explicitly found that whatever the concerns of the people of Epping as to their children’s safety, these were outweighed by the human rights of the mystery meat that had washed up on Britain’s shores, and by the government’s interest in housing them. As a result, parallel lawsuits that had been launched by councils across the country were dropped. The migrant hotel in Epping was eventually shut down, but this likely had more to do with the government’s switch to ‘Operation Scatter’ in which migrants were garrisoned in smaller houses all over the country, rather than concentrated in a few large centres, than it did with the government responding to the concerns of British subjects.

In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not.

The British establishment has spent the last thirty years driving this message home to its captive population.

The British people have voted for lower immigration in essentially every election since the British establishment destroyed Enoch Powell, and every government they’ve voted into power, whether Labour or Tory, has increased immigration. The British people have used social media to raise awareness of the problems caused by immigration, and the British establishment, whether Labour or Tory, responded by imprisoning more Britons for mean tweets in one year than the Soviet Politburo sent to gulags for political crimes throughout Brezhnev’s entire term. They’ve used the courts to try and defend their rights, and the British establishment responded, lol, you don’t have rights, immigrants do.

The British people have patiently pursued every avenue for peaceful redress of their grievances, and have been shut down at every turn by an establishment that doesn’t want to hear it.

As the Americans say, there are four boxes: soap box, jury box, ballot box, and ammo box. Whether the Brits as a whole can crack open the fourth box remains to be seen, though it seems some are trying. A lone arsonist firebombed the house of an imam in the English town of Bolton, using tactics very similar to those seen in Belfast.

The Ulster loyalists may well be a special case, and not only because they’re one of the only groups in the UK who almost certainly did not hand in their firearms. Decades of sectarian carnage honed their society into something uniquely suited to insurgency. They don’t seem to care very much what outsiders think of them or their methods. Their paramilitaries manage to balance clear chains of command alongside superb operational security: to this day MI5 has difficulty penetrating their ranks with informants. This requires close community bonds, high levels of interpersonal trust, extreme suspicion of outsiders, and a relaxed attitude towards extralegal violence in furtherance of community protection.

Such conditions are rare in the rest of the British peoples, who are comparatively atomized, making trust difficult, and who have been conditioned to abhor any expression of collective violence. Since violence is deplored, attempts to build paramilitary organizations tend to attract antisocial personality types, for whom the violence is the point, rather than concrete political objectives. These actually make quite poor foot soldiers.

Hey there. Are you enjoying this? I hope so, as I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last several days composing it. Actually I started last week with an essay that was basically just about Belfast, but then by the time it was almost done decided that the news cycle had already moved on, so I scrapped it, but then I decided that maybe I could use the incident as a frame with which to examine the broader question of why European men have placidly allowed their countries to be taken from them, so I started from scratch and wrote this instead. I’ll get into that below, and really, I could be an absolute grifting asshole and put a paywall here, but I want people to actually read it because I am a VAIN asshole, and also I just feel weird charging people for my musings. Even if I have spent a ridiculous amount of time writing them up. Anyhow. In the end, I do actually need to eat, and I rely entirely on your generosity to do so.

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The lads roaming about Belfast last week didn’t strike me as street thugs. Their numbers, coordination, and discipline rather suggested that they were by and large just ordinary young men engaged in what they saw as the legitimate defence of their community, rather than criminals out for a thrill. The violence was very carefully targeted at specific residential and commercial properties, with direct violence against people generally avoided (although there was at least one rather amusing exception in which a black streamer discovered that the racism he was in the process of farming attention for was actually quite real). The boys all obeyed the tactical rules, e.g. by keeping their faces covered. There was no looting. Perhaps most importantly, the violence ended quite abruptly after three days, exactly as if someone up the chain of command gave the order to stand down, and they all obeyed. Perhaps it was felt that the necessary message had been sent; perhaps there were quiet back-channel negotiations, which resulted in the leadership getting what they wanted, such as money, or a promise to redirect migrants away from Belfast.

Legitimacy is a key aspect to all of this. Non-criminal men do not tend to engage in organized violence unless they feel that they are justified in doing so, and not only personally: they must feel that the people whose opinions matter to them agree that they are justified. A great many men may understand that violence is the best or even the only solution, but unless they also sense that others feel the same way, they will not act. Men generally understand that lone wolf violence is politically pointless, and usually counterproductive, and so, unless they are paranoid schizophrenics, sociopaths, or simply very stupid, they do not engage in it. Men who have been organized for the purpose of collective violence will often refuse if they come to feel that their leadership is illegitimate. At the same time, men who harbour private doubts about the justification for organized violence will often carry it out if they believe that the authorities directing them are legitimately empowered to do so.

In the case of the Ulster paramilitaries, all three conditions seem to be fulfilled. The young men who conducted the pogrom were confident in the justice of their cause; they were confident that their community broadly shares their assessment; they perceived the paramilitary leadership as a legitimate authority. As a result, mobilizing them for action is possible, even easy, and as a result of that the British state finds that it must tread very lightly in Belfast.

In the broader United Kingdom, in the Republic of Ireland, and in Europe as a whole, these conditions do not exist. There are angry young men in abundance, and a great many of them would privately agree that violence has long since become the best solution to the problems inflicted by the treacherous political class. However, the broader society is split down the middle: many of the elderly, and many of the young women, are vocal enemies of their own civilization, and therefore of the young men who would defend it. Men correctly understand that if they act, they will be condemned both by authorities, and by the wider society; therefore they do not act.

None of this is to say that the established authorities themselves retain any legitimacy. Decades of betrayal have eroded this completely. Keir Starmer is the most despised prime minister in the history of constitutional monarchy, and the political mechanism he presides over is discredited. During the postwar era a social control infrastructure based largely on emotional manipulation was put into place, but lately this has broken down. The old scare words, ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘Nazi’, and so on have lost their power, and it does not matter how loudly regimoids scream them. The legacy press is regarded as the lugenpresse, and outside of senior citizens is mostly ignored, except as fodder for outrage and mockery.

The regime’s more elaborate psychological operations are also failing to find purchase. In my discussion of the Henry Nowak affair, I speculated that there was almost certainly a British equivalent to America’s Community Relations Service, the ‘X-Files for Black Crime’ whose agents pressure the families of victims of interracial crimes to make conciliatory public statements in order to defuse community tensions. As it turns out I was correct: Britain’s CRS is the Research, Information, and Communications Unit.

As the Lotus Eaters’ describes, RICU is the ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ unit, set up by a former MI6 agent to run interference for multicultural excesses. Their signature is ‘controlled spontaneity’, which really means ‘false spontaneity’: astroturfed events which provide the appearance of an organic movement in support of regime narratives. According to a whistleblower, RICU stage-managed the response to the Manchester arena bombing, in which the crowd at a candlelight vigil ‘spontaneously’ began singing the Oasis song ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. More recently they played a role in the public statement made by Henry Nowak’s father after his murderer was sentenced, and wrote the statement released by the family of Stephen Ogilvie, an especially hamfisted composition that took pains to praise migrants for their role in the hospitality industry, exactly matching the register of a memo from corporate in which you’d expect a family to speak after a savage cut their son’s face cut off.

Just as with Nowak, the British establishment attempted to use the statement from Ogilvie’s family to shame the outraged public into silence, and just as with Nowak, the result was to outrage the public further. Using a family’s grief over an atrocity as moral cover to damp down the natural anger at the atrocity, thereby making further atrocities more likely, is macabre, and once this ruse is understood, it can only backfire.

Another psyop tactic is to hold rallies in an effort to generate the appearance that the public is more horrified by the response to an atrocity than they are by the atrocity itself. They tried this in Belfast, gathering a few thousand paid protesters and grey-haired boomers together to stand up against racism. They tried it with Henry Nowak, sending Stand Up To Racism to yell at his memorial. They tried it in Epping. It always seems to fall flat now. People notice all the buses bringing the paid protesters in, the identical professionally printed signs, and the generally unsavouriness of the spiteful mutants and geriatrics who can still be rallied to the rainbow banner, and conclude that it is neither organic, nor something anyone respectable wants to be associated with. Rather than generating the illusion of popular support for the regime, these fake rallies tend to underline the very absence of organic support.

The regime’s narrative control system is observably failing in real time, but all this really means is that they lack the ability to move the hearts of the people.

So, a couple days ago Rupert Lowe’s insurgent nationalist party Restore Britain released its Rape Gang Inquiry Report. It has now been downloaded over a million times. The content is sickening, and the general sentiment is that it authorizes retribution of the sort typically described with adjectives such as ‘biblical’ and ‘medieval’, not only against the rapists themselves, but most especially against the officials who facilitated these war crimes. There is great appetite for heads on pikes. But of course, we have known of the Pakistani rape gangs for over twenty years, now, and so far nothing of the sort has happened. This indeed is one of the primary reasons that Americans mock their British counterparts as chestless cucks. “Why haven’t British men done anything?”

The truth, as the report makes clear, is that British men did try to do something, repeatedly, and were shut down hard at every turn by a state that treated their attempts at self-defence and justice as a worse threat than the rape of their daughters by foreign invaders. Individual fathers attempting to rescue their daughters from sexual bondage were given the runaround by the authorities, and were arrested when they got frustrated with official inaction and intervened directly, while the rapists themselves were left untouched. The rape gangs were of course completely unworried by the police, who they knew would treat them with kid gloves, but they were extremely worried about the English Defence League, who they knew quite well would not hesitate to kick the crap out of them. For a few years, at least. Until the full weight of the British security state crushed the EDL ... in rather sharp contrast to the community defence leagues organized by Sikhs, which the authorities turned a blind eye to, and which successfully used street violence to deter the Pakistanis from preying upon the daughters of the Punjab.

The point I’m making here is that the spirit of British men hasn’t been crushed to the point where they can’t resist. They can and do resist, as we just saw in Belfast, and as we saw last year in Ballymena, and as we saw the year before in Southport…

… and as we saw the year before that when things cooked off in Dublin …

… and as we saw with the EDL, and as we’ve seen with innumerable isolated acts of individual resistance when British men take matters into their own hands to clock a dangerous migrant on the street or on the train.

The problem is not that Britain’s manly courage bled out in the trenches of the Great War, leaving behind a residue of flat feet, asthma, and cowardice in the gene pool. Nor is the availability of weaponry the primary problem: as we just saw in Belfast, you can ban guns, but glass bottles and gasoline are harder to get out of people’s hands. Hardware stores are full of improvised weaponry of every kind. Just ask your great-granddad about the common soldier’s ingenuity in the Great War.

The problem is fundamentally one of legitimacy. The duly appointed authorities are on the side of the invaders, and as of yet there is no widely recognized alternative authority to step into the moral vacuum left by the subversion of the state apparatus.

Absent such a recognized authority, resistance to the state’s depredations amounts to an atomic dust of angry individuals, who may be numerous and might take lots of individual actions but are utterly powerless to really change anything.

The state understands this quite well, which is why it acts to interrupt the formation of alternative centres of authority around which any kind of effective resistance can cohere.

I would not recommend trying to start such an organization. The loyalist paramilitaries got away with it because they were useful against the IRA, and therefore tolerated and even cultivated at arm’s length by the state. That is a very special case that will certainly not be replicated elsewhere in the modern Yookay. Any organization that tries to set itself up along these lines will immediately be subject to infiltration and its members arrested for participation in a terrorist hate group.

For now, conventional politics really is the best avenue to pursue, and not only because it’s the safest. The collapse of the regime’s sense-making apparatus has left it wide-open. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has been cleaning up in the local council elections, and is widely expected to form the next government. Lowe’s Restore Britain has galloped to the right of Reform, promising millions of mass deportations, the death penalty for rape gangs, the repeal of the managerial tyranny inflicted by New Labour, and all sorts of other great stuff; this is all very popular, and has forced Reform to move to the right itself. Restore has only been around for a few months, and has grown explosively, already reaching 100,000 members to become one of the largest parties in Britain. The moribund Conservative Party is shifting to the right in a desperate attempt to remain relevant. Even Labour has been forced to make overtures towards limiting immigration. There’s a critical mass of people now who simply do not care what names the regime gremlins call them, and this has the gremlins worried.

The trajectory on the Continent is similar. Germany’s AfD continues to grow in popularity. Social democrat parties in Scandinavia are restricting immigration. The European Parliament just voted to deport illegal immigrants to detention centres in third countries to chants of “Send them back!” from enthusiastic rightists, which occasioned great wailing and gnashing of teeth from the females and catamites on the other side of the issue, who felt very unsafe.

Electoral politics may fail in the end. There is a narrow window, perhaps ten to fifteen years, in which it is still possible for rightist, nativist, and populist parties to take power in Britain and other European countries, and commence the policies of peaceful, orderly, and thorough remigration necessary to avoid rivers of blood. After that, if present immigration and fertility trends continue, whites will be outnumbered. It’s entirely possible that the establishment will successfully avert defenestration via a combination of procedural manipulation and outright repression, holding back the tide of popular discontent just long enough for the invaders to become electorally dominant.

In that event, however, there will by that point be well-established political infrastructure which is avowedly and unashamedly pro-European. This would serve as the basis for precisely the kind of legitimacy-generating mechanism that could allow Europeans to ask one another whether the votes of foreigners in ‘national’ elections should count at all. If consensus is reached that the votes of invaders don’t count, organizing towards reconquista via other means would be a real possibility. The best means of turning this around is to take control of the state via conventional means; but if that fails, the very effort to do that will have built the foundation necessary to erect a parallel state that can supplant the occupation from within.

Thank you very much for investing your time and attention in my rambling speculations, which if nothing else I hope you found amusing. As always, I would especially like to thank those of you who invest in my writing in more direct turns, as without your treasured patronage I should have to wagecuck somewhere, which would mean submitting myself to the humiliations of human resources, which I am quite eager to avoid. Your support means a lot to me. It honestly never ceases to amaze me that you’ve made this possible.

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I’ve already written on Henry Nowak affair, but my treatment of the case itself was somewhat overshadowed by my suggestion that Saxons retake their birthright and begin wearing the seax again. Moreover, there have been developments in the matter since then, which look like they are becoming highly politically salient to the disintegrating kingdom.

The facts of the murder of Henry Nowak have been covered with admirable thoroughness and attention to veracity by , so I won’t reiterate them in detail here. Suffice to say that Nowak was stabbed in the chest by the young Sikh Vikram Digwa, who then claimed to the police that he’d been the victim of a racist attack by Nowak; the police, thoroughly trained in the finer points of anti-white hatred, handcuffed the vicious racist Nowak the moment they arrived on the scene, and Nowak died from massive internal hemorrhaging shortly thereafter. has already weighed in on the unforeseen outcomes of the British constabulary’s enthusiasm for racial injustice, and the nauseating spectacle of bien pensant liberals attempting to squirm out of their culpability for reducing the indigenous British peoples to defenceless second-class citizen status in their own ancestral land.

Digwa was sentenced to life in prison, with a supposed minimum of 21 years before he can be paroled. His mother, father, and brother have also been charged, since all of them assisted Digwa in his attempt to hide the evidence of his crime and misdirect the police. At the sentencing Digwa’s family apparently caterwauled about racism, presumably in a last-ditch attempt to play on the heartstrings of a judge who, to his credit, was having none of it (though given the proclivities of the British judiciary, it’s quite possible he was instructed to bring down the hammer so that the justice could be seen to be done; the Yookish occupation government is painfully aware of the racial tension throbbing through the Yookay). During the trial there was some fake news making the rounds to the effect that the judge had reduced Digwa’s charge from murder to manslaughter; in fact, the judge merely informed the jury that, in the event that they decided they could not find Digwa guilty of murder, they could still consider a manslaughter charge, which has a much lower evidentiary burden. The jury convicted Digwa of murder in any case.

After the trial Nowak’s father gave a press conference. He acknowledged the dichotomy between his son’s rough handling by the police, and the kid gloves with which Digwa was treated: not only did the police default to believing the brown man’s complaint of racism over the white kid’s insistence that he’d been stabbed, but when they finally arrested Digwa, they didn’t even cuff him. After this, however, Mr. Nowak emphasized that his son was a kind, tolerant man who would never want his death to be used to stoke hatred and division, and that the public’s focus should be on the government’s efforts to combat “knife crime”, which is a nice vague racially ambiguous term from which any indication of agency has been safely removed. Sure enough, regimoids from Prime Minister Starmer on down immediately picked up on the motif of knife crime, while throwing Mr. Nowak’s admonitions against divisive rhetoric in the faces of “far-right agitators” such as Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, or Rupert Lowe in an attempt to shame their opponents into silence.

The statement prepared by Nowak’s father didn’t sound like the words of a man whose heart had been split asunder with grief by the murder of his boy, but then, such statements never do. You would expect such fathers to get in front of the cameras with righteous fury burning in their eyes, calling for bloody retribution. Yet they are always calm and collected, at most a bit morose, perhaps they wipe away a tear, and they always, always take care to stress that their child’s death should not be the occasion for revenge. Don’t look back in anger, we must come together to heal, thoughts and prayers, please respect the wishes of our family in this time of grief, and so on.

The script is familiar because it is, in fact, a script. The first tell is that it sounds like something written by ChatGPT, which is to say like a bland communique from the androids at head office. In this case, the other tell is that Mr. Nowak even took the time to thank the police force’s Family Liaison Officer for her support.

In the US, a shadowy organization known as the Community Relations Service has operated since the Civil Rights Act was signed into law1. This organization is essentially an X-Files for black crime, with secrecy privileges rivalling those of the FBI. Its agents, known as facilitators, show up on the doorsteps of white families whose children were murdered by Protected Americans, and works to ensure that their grief does not inflame ‘community tensions’. Exactly how they do this is unknown. My suspicion is that they start by appealing to the high-minded civic feeling of the family, under the assumption that they are good liberals who want to do ‘the right thing’. If they need some more cajoling, doubtless there are implied threats of prosecution for jury tampering, hate speech, disturbing the public order, and so on. Whatever it is that they do, they seem to be very good at their jobs. It would be shocking if the the United Kingdom did not have a functional equivalent: probably the Family Liaison Officers embedded within local police forces, probably backed up by nudge units at the national level2.

The police came under heavy public pressure to release the bodycam footage, and they caved shortly after the trial concluded. No doubt there were intense internal discussions over whether it would be more inflammatory to release the footage or to continue to sit on it. In the end they seem to have decided that releasing it was less damaging than continuing to allow speculation to run rampant.

The video is only a couple of minutes long. It’s harrowing. You should watch it.

When the officers arrive at the scene, Nowak is lying motionless behind a car. The cops start by diffidently asking Digwa if he’s been injured in the fight, to which Digwa responds that he was, pointing to an invisible black eye; he then reiterates that he was the victim of a racist attack, pointing to his tousled hair and missing turban. Nowak moans that he’s been stabbed. The male officer3 then drags Nowak out from behind the car, gives him a cursory once-over, and speaks what were very nearly the last words Nowak heard: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

The female officer protests that they’re supposed to actually check to see if he’s been stabbed (one must check all the boxes, you see), which the male officer seems to ignore. Nowak repeats multiple times that he can’t breathe; the officer ignores this entirely, informs him that he’s under arrest, cuffs him, and reads him his rights. The female officer then observes that Nowak’s pupils aren’t responding; at this point, Nowak is dead.

It is here that the footage produced the haunting image that’s all over the Internet.

Fooled you. This is the actual still:

Here, I must digress to remonstrate with all of you.

The first image is an AI edit, which has been altered in several ways from the original. First, it has been sharpened. No bodycam footage is that crisp. If the changes stopped there, that would be fine: upscaling the image a bit doesn’t change anything important about it. But the changes don’t stop there. The next thing you’ll notice is the position of the hand of the female officer in the upper right, which in the AI version looks like she’s wearing false nails underneath her latex gloves, giving her hand the appearance of grasping, demonic talons; obviously, an on-duty police officer is unlikely to be wearing false nails. The second thing you’ll notice is the cinematic ray of illumination crossing Nowak’s hand. The third thing you’ll notice is that Nowak’s wristwatch has been turned into a steel manacle; this is probably just an artifact. Finally, in the original still the skin of all three people, Nowak as well as the officers, is clearly visible; the altered image highlights the corpse-like pallor of Nowak’s bare hand, while hiding the skin tone of the two officers. This final detail matters, because it gives the impression that Nowak’s skin tone is due to blood loss, whereas in the original still it’s pretty obvious from the common skin tone of all three people that the desaturated colours are mainly a consequence of the lighting, presumably from the LED flashlights carried by the police.

I’ve seen a lot of credulous people reacting to the AI image as though it is real, specifically pointing out details like the false nails or the grave-like pastiness of Nowak’s skin as speaking to woke dress codes or the callousness of the officers who should have been able to tell that Nowak was suffering from severe blood loss just from glancing at him. And, look, okay, perhaps the image is ‘spiritually true’, as many have insisted, but the Xitter hordes are not treating it as an artistically enhanced representation, they are reacting as if it is the real image, because they think that it is, and they think that it is because it is very convincing.

That is a problem.

Our enemies control the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government in basically every single one of our countries, with the US currently being a very partial exception. They control the universities. They control the legacy media. They control the police. They control the military. They control the financial system. They control the corporations. They control the non-governmental organizations. They have essentially all of the formal power.

Against this we have precisely two weapons: truth, and humour; and humour is really a subset of truth.

That’s it.

That’s what we’re fighting with.

Truth is a very powerful weapon against enemies who are wholly submerged in lies, which is why we have gotten as far as we have.

But truth is also a very fragile implement. Its efficacy relies entirely on credibility. The enemy has steadily eroded the reputations of its own institutions by requiring them to bend the truth, ignore the truth, hide the truth, or outright fabricate ideological ‘truth’ for political ends. The first few times you do this, it can be very effective. You find that you can arouse passions a bit more strongly, aim the herd in the direction you want it to go a bit more easily. And what’s the harm, if it’s all for a good cause? What you’re portraying might be technically false, but it’s directionally true, and that’s what matters, right?

The problem is that every time you do this, some people eventually notice. They’ll be a bit more skeptical of what you say the next time. Do it too much, and they start defaulting towards disbelief of everything you say. Even if you are telling the truth about something, they’ll assume that you’re lying.

This is, by and large, what has happened to the legacy institutions. It’s why their propaganda is so much less effective than it used to be. People don’t even bother to argue with it much, anymore; they simply tune it out. Why pay attention to known liars?

But the regime can get away with that because, again, they have total control of every large formal institution in society. It doesn’t really matter if people believe them or not, because they can force obedience.

Of course such institutional control is also brittle. Discredit yourself enough and people start to defect. We’re in the early stages of that happening, now. But we don’t actually control any of the institutions yet. We don’t have parallel institutions, either, not to any really meaningful degree. We can’t compel: all we can do is win trust.

I am not making a pRiNcIpLeD cOnSeRvAtIsM argument, here. I’m no more interested in being a beautiful loser than you are. I’m not saying ‘we’re supposed to be better than that’. This has nothing to do with morality; it is a question of cultural efficacy, a matter of not damaging long-term strategic advantage for short-term tactical gain.

Social media has already become a cesspool of slop, thanks to the simultaneous advent of generative AI and the incursion of billions of third-world slumdwellers onto the Internet, who are absolutely not above just straight-up lying if it means they get a couple hundred bucks a month of what is for them life-changing engagement payouts. These people don’t care about ‘the cause’ or ‘the movement’ or whatever, they’ll say whatever they have to say, from whichever ideological position, if they get paid for it. I now find myself reflexively hitting the Grok button to check if there are corroborating sources for incendiary claims, because there is just too much slop out there, and too many sloptards who are too lazy to share things without checking to see if they’re true first, or who just don’t care because they think knowingly spamming the networks with misinformation is somehow helping to fight the InfoWar™.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using AI to generate propaganda, so long as it’s clear to everyone that they’re seeing a manufactured image. It’s exactly the same principle as drawing a caricature or making a meme. An artistic representation can encode a deeper truth while being obviously artificial: that’s the purpose of art. Passing off an artistic representation as a real image crosses the line into falsification, however, and in the long run it is always damaging to credibility. There are no exceptions to this. How many times has the media artificially lightened someone’s skin tone in order to make them look whiter than they are, and thereby accentuate the racial angle of a crime story? Another example came during the ICE raids in Minneapolis, when a widely circulated image showed an ICE officer executing a protester; the left was absolutely roasted when it turned out that the image was an AI fabrication. But again, the regime can get away with this, because the regime controls the institutions. We don’t, so we can’t. And we shouldn’t want to, either.

OK, enough preaching. I’ll get off my high horse now. Back to the matter at hand.

Before the verdict came in, there was a vigil for Henry Nowak. Supporters came to lay wreathes, say a few words, and hold a minute of silence. Counter-protesters from “Stand Up To Racism” showed up to screech at them, ‘drowning out’ the minute of silence with the kind of gracious civility that only spiteful mutants can demonstrate. Their mass-produced signage is a good indication that their presence was anything but organic. Someone paid for them. Probably someone in Whitehall.

Nigel Farage made a statement to the effect that, regardless of the admonitions towards meekness preached by Nowak’s father, the public should respond to Nowak’s murder with “pure, cold rage”. By this he meant not that there should be an anti-Sikh pogrom, but that systemic anti-white policies need to end. The parliamentary toads shouted him down for inflaming the situation, with Starmer tut-tutting that while of course it was all a terrible tragedy and there were lessons to be learned, there was no such thing as two-tier policing and it was grossly irresponsible of Farage to suggest otherwise, which is a rather different reaction from the one he gave to George Floyd.

The inverted parallels with Fentanyl Floyd are obvious, and have been made by many, but I’m going to harp on them anyhow. Floyd was a career felon and drug addict who died because he swallowed a fistful of street drugs to avoid getting caught with them after police arrived to arrest him for trying to buy a banana with a counterfeit bill; he resisted arrest, and was put in a standard restraint, which involved the officer kneeling on his neck, a perfectly safe manoeuvre that could not actually have cut off his blood supply. His last words were “I can’t breathe”, because he was OD’ing on fentanyl. This led to the largest hysterical outburst of deranged paramoralistic virtue-signalling in history, as a result of which officer Derek Chauvin was subjected to a kangaroo court as the international scapegoat for the sins of the white race, and imprisoned for life, because he’d had the bad luck to be in the vicinity of the violent pavement ape’s drug OD. Henry Nowak was a sweet-natured young white kid who died because he was stabbed in the chest by a brown-skinned psycho, and because the literal systemic racism written into explicit police policy resulted in delayed medical treatment along with degrading treatment in his final moments of life. The establishment’s response to this outrage was to ignore it.

On the streets of Southampton, people gathered to make some noise. The riot police were naturally on hand to inflame the situation. During the initial showdown, the protesters began demanding that the cops take a knee.

Protesters demanding cops take a knee

While the police were absolutely unwilling to bend a knee in recognition of their shameful treatment of Henry Nowak, they were absolutely determined to protect the Digwa family home. No one likes a lynch mob, to be sure, but the extraordinary consideration the police showed for the Digwas, in contrast to their contemptuous treatment of Nowak, did not go unnoticed, and did not help to calm things down.

The cops seem to have underestimated the scale of public outrage. That, or their recruiting problems have become so acute that they simply lack the manpower to enforce order, which, hmm. In any case, rather than kettling the protesters, beating them down, and arresting the lot of them, they ended up getting hunted through the streets themselves.

At one point protesters started throwing garbage bins at the police officers.

This led to some amusing memes.

The government can ban firearms and take away people’s knives, but the modern urban environment is full of improvised weapons if you know where to look. Never forget that the first weapon was a simple rock, which was quite effective at smashing through bones and skulls. Your opponent might be armed with a nuclear weapon, but he can’t use it if you put a knife through his hand.

Later in the evening the protesters seem to have successfully evaded the riot police, with an African bloke telling them to take shelter behind him since, being black, the enforcement arm of HR wouldn’t dare harm a hair on his nappy little head. Everyone knows how this game works, and the only people who won’t admit it are the ones who run it.

One couldn’t help but notice that the protesters were not exclusively limited to middle-aged yobs, but included a fair number of fair young ladies.

There is a painfully stark contrast between the lovely young British women siding with their own people, and the loveless hags enforcing their own people’s subjugation. Here, for instance, are the two ladycops who designed and implemented the Hampshire Police race action plan that led directly to Nowak’s death by creating an atmosphere of ideological terror within the department:

I’d argue that if anyone should be thrown to the wolves it’s those two swamp hags, but the attending officers clearly share a large degree of culpability. So far the identities of the specific officers who arrested Nowak haven’t been officially released. There have been rumours kicking around online as to who one or two of them are. The police insist that these individuals have been misidentified, and have asked for people to stop spreading their names around as this has resulted in death threats, which is why I’m not sharing their identities here. That’s considerably more sympathy than most of the British public are showing towards them:

Hampshire police statement on officer identity/don’t think you have mate

Screenshots/Screenshot from 2026-06-03 15-25-47.png

The Independent Office for Police Conduct’s investigation into Nowak’s murder has been ongoing for six months now, and while the IOPC has yet to come to a conclusion, it has issued a statement that it has found no evidence that any of the five officers involved at the scene did anything wrong, a headline that seems like an attempt at throwing a bit more gas on the fire.

The Sikh community in Britain seems to be divided between disavowing Digwa as a loose cannon who isn’t representative of their beliefs, and complaining about an increase in anti-Sikh bigotry. I haven’t seen much of the latter: the worst I’m aware of is people complaining about Sikh knife privilege, with the commentariat about evenly split between those who insist that Sikhs shouldn’t get a unique carve-out on account of their special brown people religion and should have to turn in their weapons like everyone else, and others who would prefer that they get to be armed just like the Sikhs are. Neither side is really dumping on Sikhs per se, they’re simply demanding that everyone be treated according to the same standard. Beyond this, there have been a few mentions of other incidents in which a Sikh stabbed an innocent white man, such as the father in British Columbia who was butchered a few years ago for asking a Sikh to stop puffing on his weed vape in front his kid, but again, this hardly rises to the level of hate crimes against elderly Sikh men minding their own business.

One of the striking aspects of the footage out of Southampton is that almost all of the people involved – the Digwas aside – are white. The protesters: white! The police: white! The politicians: white!

Racial minorities are present in this discourse more as a theoretical concept than as an active agent. Wikipedia tells me that Southampton is about 80% white and 10% Indian and Pakistani (“Asian” in British parlance), with the remainder being odds and ends of this and that. Racial strife in Southampton, as almost everywhere else in the Western world, is not really a matter of discord between racial others and white people, although of course this is always a factor to a certain degree. The more fundamental conflict is intrawhite: between traitor whites of the parasitic shitlib professional-managerial class, and the patriot whites of the productive and more conservative working and entrepreneurial classes.

Traitor whites use foreign imports as a means of tyrannizing, oppressing, and stealing from their opponents. This works in a number of ways. Immigrants from certain demographics are much more prone to violent street crime, which keeps the white underclass usefully terrorized. Immigrants tend to use social welfare systems at higher rates, which provides the traitor whites with the opportunity to profit from administering resource redistribution from the productive whites towards their imported clients. The same socioeconomic underperformance guaranteed by human biodiversity that leads to higher rates of crime and welfare usage also justifies interventions in the name of fixing racial discrimination, which is the only acceptable explanation for socioeconomic underperformance as traitor white ideology consigns human biodiversity to unforgivable thoughtcrime. These anti-discrimination interventions are a rich source of traitor white employment all on their own, while also providing them with the opportunity to deny education and employment to patriot whites, who are simultaneously ground down by the high taxes necessary to support social welfare programs, the low wages that result from the labour surplus provided by high immigration, and the high cost of housing that results from immigration boosting demand for real estate; while the asset-owning rentier class might not like the high taxes, they love the cheap labour and expensive real estate, which keeps them onside within the parasite coalition.

Best of all, because the civic religion propagated and upheld by traitor whites elevates “racism” to the sin of sins, all they have to do to silence their political opposition is to call them “racists”. They avoid criticism by hiding behind their client groups, insisting that any criticism of the regime’s policies is motivated by the small-minded bigotry of hearts full of hatred for the colour of the skin. That tactic worked very well for a very long time.

Unfortunately for the traitor whites, they’ve yanked on the racism lever so long, so often, and so hard that they have now broken it clean off. The old wordspells stopped working sometime over the last few years.

That doesn’t stop them from trying, however. Thus, in the Nowak case, regimoids are united in deploring the “racism” of the other side, when the actual truth of the matter is that the other side is not chiefly angry with the Sikhs in this case. The fury is quite specifically directed at the overwhelmingly white regimoids who built out an ‘anti-racist’ system of two-tier policing that consigns native white Britons to second-class citizen status. The Digwas are disgusting animals whose carcasses should be fed to pigs, no doubt, but it was specifically because of the ‘anti-racist’ policies of the police that the Digwas knew that all they had to do was simper the r-word to the nice officers to have them eating out of the palms of their hands. The official line from the police is that Nowak’s wound would have proved fatal no matter what happened, but one wonders about this. Something like an hour elapsed between Nowak getting stabbed and the police desultorily applying CPR, and much of this delay is attributable to their prioritization of fighting ‘hate’ over responding to 999 calls reporting a stabbing: among the many ugly details of the case, the police had apparently ignored a call from a local resident reporting the stabbing, but responded with alacrity when their brown clients reported a racism.

The British establishment is up to their eyeballs in this. They’ve spent decades building their careers on the the implementation and enforcement of increasingly insane and draconian race policies. Many of them have absolutely nothing else to fall back on. Race politics are all they know. Race politics are why they have jobs in the first place. Without race politics, the traitor whites have no purpose. Race politics are the feeding tube they use to suck their blood-meals out of the body politic. Quite apart from that, there is simply no way for them to extricate themselves from their moral culpability: they’re all on record, in emails, in memos, in policy documents, in public statements, on their social media accounts, advocating for all of this, insisting on it, demanding it, cheering for it. There’s no way out for them. Keeping this system going is existential.

That’s why their tone is increasingly panicked, desperate, pleading. The choir they preach to is shrinking. The part of the population with acquired immunity is growing, and so is that population’s righteous fury. The political centre is collapsing, and their institutional power continues largely by inertia, even as the institutions themselves crumble. Their supporters consist almost exclusively of the old, of women, and of various grades of low-quality human capital dredged up from the worst parts of the white gene pool and the dregs of the third world. Their opponents are increasingly fearless. The rioters in Southampton didn’t bother wearing masks: no doubt they understand quite well that regime intelligence officers will be poring over video recordings to identify rioters, who will doubtless be charged with public order offences, just as happened during the Southport riots two summers ago, but they don’t seem to care.

When this ends, most of the invaders will be remigrated back where they came from, and for the migrants that will be the end of the matter. Not all we leave. Some of them will be executed for heinous crimes they committed during their stay in our countries. The traitors who facilitated the multicultural experiment, however ... who threw open the gates to the invasion ... who held the native population’s hands behind their backs so the invaders could prey upon them ... who reduced their own people to humiliating servitude ... well they can’t be deported, can they?

So they’ll need to be dealt with in other ways.

And when they protest at being dealt with, the people will respond, “I don’t think you have been, mate.”

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Fast and unpolished as it was, and it really is not my best work, I hope you found it informative and interesting. That’s always the problem with news cycle pieces, you need to bang them out fast and quality always takes a hit. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t still a lot of work ... this piece is around 5000 words, and I put it together in a day. A long day. I’ve been writing since noon, and it’s around 10 pm now as I prepare to send this to press. And I do all of this for you, for free! But of course, I do need to eat, which is why my deepest and most sincere gratitude is always reserved for my wonderful supporters, whose unsung generosity keeps a roof over my head and food on my plate. If you’d like to be one of them, even if only for a while, you can do so for the cost of just one beer a month. No pressure.

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Initially people thought it was aliens, and to be fair, they weren’t far off. The glow belonged to the closest thing humanity has yet invented to a Tyranid hive fleet: a Chinese fishing fleet raping the seas in search of seafood. The glow is from huge banks of LEDs, which the ships use to draw marine life to the surface, where they trawl it up with nets. Much, maybe even most of the indiscriminate catch is discarded.

China has over half a million fishing vessels. Their vast fleets comprise thousands of ships, and can often be seen from orbit.

China has long since eaten its way through its own territorial waters, and therefore sends its fleets out into the rest of the world’s oceans. As a rule marine life is much more abundant close to the shore, since this is where most of the nutrients are. Fishing in another country’s territorial waters is illegal under international law. The Chinese do not care. Their fleets park just on the edge of a country’s Economic Exclusion Zone, and then turn off their Automatic Identification System transponders so that they can sneak inside and poach. Turning off an AIS transponder is also illegal: maritime law requires these to be activated at all times, for collision avoidance and search and rescue. Organizations which track this regularly observe Chinese ships on EEZ borders disappearing from the AIS network, and reappearing a few hours later on the right side of the border.

The consequences for local fishermen are disastrous: the Chinese scoop up all the fish, and lead the local fisheries towards ecosystem collapse. When they’re done pillaging they just move on, leaving an oceanic wasteland in their wake.

Environmental groups generally don’t seem very bothered about this, perhaps because the ocean is a CO2 sink whether or not there are fish in it, and the only thing that matters about the environment is how much carbon is in the air. National governments are reluctant to take action, because they are often dependent upon Chinese investment for their economic growth. The only people who really seem to care are fishermen and Internet racists.

This is the set-up for ’s immensely satisfying debut mercenary novel, Once Upon A Time In Argentina.

The novel’s basic concept is that the Argentinian government is caught between the economic necessity of appeasing Beijing, and the growing domestic political problem of its own outraged fishing industry. The obvious thing to do would be to send out the Argentinian Navy – the Royal Canadian Navy did just that to Spanish fishermen back in the 90s, even going so far as to fire a shot across their bow – but with Argentina’s economy in a permanent state of near-collapse, the government can’t afford to alienate Chinese investment capital. Instead, the Argentinian president decide to hire a small team of mercenaries to run a fully deniable, off the books black op in Tierra Del Fuego, terrorizing Chinese fishing vessels in order to spook them into avoiding Argentinian waters.

The novel opens with a quote by Nietzsche: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night,” which is something that’s resonated with me since I first read it as an angsty teenager. This sets the stage for our introduction to the protagonist, Ryan “Cowboy” McGowan, as he is actively contemplating pulling the plug on a life that has become intolerable.

McGowan hasn’t hit rock bottom materially. Most people would consider him reasonably successful. He’s got a good job with benefits and a decent salary at a tech company in LA, a live-in girlfriend, an apartment he doesn’t struggle to pay rent on, and a Ford F-150. Of course, the job requires him to sit through DEI workshops, his boss is a literal cuck, and his girlfriend is a cheating whore, but, again, this is more or less the American dream at its best in the twenty-first century. There are many despairing zoomers who would kill to have it this good.

McGowan’s problem isn’t that he isn’t successful, it’s that he feels dead inside. Before becoming an office drone, he was a special forces operator, and he’d still be in the game if he hadn’t been drummed out of the service (for reasons that, it turns out later, reflect rather well on him). When we meet McGowan he’s hitting his late thirties, getting flabby, worried about his testosterone levels, paranoid about touching receipts due to the xenoestrogen cooties they’re coated with, and wondering if this is all there is to life, and if so whether it might not be better to leave the show early.

Instead of checking out, McGowan drops out. He quits his job, cancels the lease on his apartment, picks up a part-time bartending shift at the dive bar he frequents, moves into the bartender’s houseboat, and starts banging the waitress. He wakes up with the Sun, bathes in the ocean, lives on burgers and fish, and spends his evenings at a rat-trap boxing gym run by a sketchy Arab who will occasionally take payment in blood and sweat when his clients can’t make their monthly membership dues. It’s a nihilistic existence that leads nowhere, but it’s a step up from the drab nihilism of the office, because at least McGowan isn’t rotting away under fluorescent lights as he watches his life ending one minute at a time.

All of this is just the setup in the first couple chapters, allowing us to settle into the narrator’s interior life. The story gets moving six months after McGowan abandons normieworld, when a sketchy private military contractor, Mike Hudson, approaches him at the gym. Hudson offers McGowan a lot of money if he’ll come along for a job whose details he refuses to discuss, but more importantly, he offers McGowan adventure. He knows McGowan wants back in the game, whether McGowan understands this or not.

A few days later, McGowan finds himself living in a camp built of Quonset huts and lawn chairs on a beach in Tierra Del Fuego, alongside several dodgy characters he’s only just met, but who he now has to trust with his life. All of them are former operators – Marine Recon, Navy SEALs, Green Berets – who were released from the service due to minor disciplinary infractions such as pissing hot for weed. The only exception is a shifty Pashtun known only as Psycho that Hudson brought back from Afghanistan, who doesn’t speak English, and who is there to spy on them.

The rest of the novel is a mixture of military adventure story, Western, techno-thriller, wilderness survival, and bro hangout. The team takes their Barracudas out in the middle of the night to terrorize Chinese fishing vessels that have slipped into Argentina’s territorial waters; they get drunk on the beach; they brawl when they have arguments over ethical dilemmas; they shoot the shit while fishing; they lift weights; they slip away to play hookie in a nearby town when Hudson disappears for a few days for a briefing in Buenos Aires.

The team spends more time hanging out on the beach than they do on mission, but this doesn’t make the story drag. To the contrary, Kidd deftly uses these scenes to develop the characters, who behave exactly as you’d expect bored soldiers at the edge of the world to behave when the devil holds their idle hands. These scenes aren’t side quests, either: the decisions the characters make in them, the specific shenanigans they get up to, have important consequences for the later parts of the story. Kidd skilfully weaves everything together in the end, often in unexpected ways. Several times he uses the ‘rule of three’ to casually introduce a story element, seemingly as an aside; revisit it to develop the theme from another angle; and then finally return to it in the story’s resolution, often to excellent effect. My favourite example of this was his use of the Burroughs novel, A Princess of Mars.

The quiet moments give McGowan time to pay attention to his surroundings, and at times Kidd’s descriptions are downright lyrical. McGowan isn’t just some soulless killer: while he thrives on the hunt, feels himself come alive during the electric thrill of combat when the life and death stakes illuminate life with its sharpest possible meaning, he is equally capable of seeing the world through what the Navajo call ‘soft eyes’, simply relaxing and letting everything wash over him in all its animate beauty. This gives occasion for the novel’s more philosophical passages. Once Upon A Time In Argentina is not a didactic political tract, Kidd is not preaching, but he lets his characters voice just the kind of sentiments that you’d expect from a group of hard-bitten, hard-used men, who have strong opinions on everything from the best way to handle women to who was really responsible for 9/11.

The result of this psychologically observant, somewhat indirect approach is that Once Upon A Time In Argentina feels more like Sicario than a Tom Clancy novel. It manages to hit a wide variety of emotional notes: sometimes fast and brutal, sometimes funny, sometimes haunting, sometimes poignant. Kidd’s characters are not one-dimensional murder machines, but living men with their own pasts, wounds, regrets, and obsessions. It’s an action-adventure which asks whether adventure is even possible in a world where everything is fenced off, tamed, and surveilled. Or, perhaps more accurately, whether heroism is possible in a world that has wholly lost touch with any sense of the sacred, and in which every moving part is a component of the impersonal mechanics of capital and power. God is dead, the frontier is closed, and the only escape from the dreary saftetyism of the longhouse is the criminal nihilism of the underworld. The spirit of a man who remains in the longhouse is slowly smothered, but the soul of the man who escapes is easily broken.

Once Upon A Time In Argentina is not without its flaws, chief among which is Kidd’s spotty editing1. While at its best his prose is quite simply beautiful, there are also passages in which his phrasing comes off as a bit clunky. The punctuation is occasionally misplaced, words are sometimes randomly capitalized, and he has a tendency to throw around acronyms without defining them; for instance, I had to look up RIB, which is used repeatedly throughout the novel (Rigid Inflatable Boat, for the record). When the protagonist’s equipment is first described, Kidd just lists a series of model numbers for the weapons and their accessories. The author’s a vet and, but for the rest of us who don’t live and breathe the finer points of American gun culture a bit more detail would have been nice. We don’t all know what American military kit looks like, or even what it’s used for. It’s worth noting that Kidd doesn’t always do this: when I looked up the Barracuda, it matched the picture he’d painted in my mind’s eye quite precisely.

All of these flaws are rough edges that a competent editor – or even a decent proof-reader – could easily have polished off, but their services don’t come cheap and as a self-published author I doubt Kidd had the money to retain one. This is one of the ongoing problems with the indie scene, in which writers are expected to be their own editors, proof-readers, typesetters, and publicists. Hopefully Kidd picks up a book deal, maybe with Passage’s new Ark imprint, which would give him access to precisely those professional services2.

The editorial flaws were minor annoyances that occasionally took me out of the story, which was unfortunate because it’s a great story. Once Upon A Time In Argentina is a genuinely fun book, which I devoured very easily over a couple of days. It’s wonderful escapist literature, particularly as it isn’t set on some distant planet in the far future or in a lost historical era, but in the here and now, and thereby suggests to the reader that, yes, adventure is still possible, if you know where to look.

The novel’s ending strongly implies that Once Upon A Time In Argentina will be the first of several novels in a coming series, and if so I’m looking forward to them. I think Kidd has really hit on something here. The mercenary novel has the potential to be the Western of the early twenty-first century: violent adventure stories set in all the worst parts of the planet, exploring the ugly interstices of organized crime, state intelligence, black ops, and corporate power. The possibilities of narrative and setting are almost unlimited. Moreover, private military contractors have already emerged as one of the only contemporary professions to which a certain romance still attaches, at least on our side of the great divide; PMCs fill the same morally ambiguous, antiheroic niche that gunslingers, spies, and mafias filled in earlier times.

Once Upon A Time In Argentina is, of course, available on Amazon, in both Kindle and paperback. You might also consider heading over to Pulp West to subscribe to Frank’s chudstack.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoyed the review, and if it motivated you to pick up the book, I hope you enjoy that, too. As always, I’d like to express my gratitude to my supporters, without whom I’d have to get a real job instead of spending my afternoons reading mercenary pulp novels and pecking away at a keyboard about them. By the way, I’m not getting any kickbacks from the author: if you buy the book, the only people getting paid are him and Amazog (sadly, mostly Amazog). If you’d like to support Postcards From Barsoom so that they keep coming, there’s only one way to do it:

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I’m going to have a little rant, here, so I’ll start by emphasizing: Not All Boomers. Look, my mother is a boomer, and I love her dearly, in large part because she represents the opposite of so many boomer stereotypes. Many of you reading this are boomers; I know this because you’re in the comments, writing some of the best comments, you can ask anyone, the very best comments, everyone says it, it’s true. I know full well that much of what follows doesn’t apply to you, because you’re the good ones, the exceptional ones, the few, the proud So, please, do not take any of this personally.

With that said.

The shouting match broke down along the expected lines. Boomers – including spiritual boomers – loudly agreed with O’Leary’s remarks. If you only spend $2 a day on lunch, they insisted, the resulting $26 a day that you save adds up to $9490 a year; after 5 years, you’ve got the down payment for a $250,000 house. Checkmate, you financially illiterate layabouts!

Zoomers, millennials, and Gen-X replied that $250,000 will get you a leaky shack in rural Arkansas with black mold in the unfinished basement; that by the time you save up the money for the down-payment, that shack will be going for $500,000; that recent immigrants receive government assistance to get onto the property ladder (along with preferential employment) and so do not have to spend years of their lives saving up at all. Disaffected youth (and these days, that is just ‘the youth’) generally heaped scorn on the idea that it’s even possible to save in this economy, or that there’s anything worth saving. “If you live on instant noodles and margarine sandwiches for twenty years, you too, my son, can one day afford a van down by the river.”

I can see both sides of this. I tend to live frugally myself, not so much because I consider it virtuous but out of simple necessity. Throughout my 20s and 30s I was a career student living paycheck-to-paycheck, as a result of which I became very accustomed to cooking my meals and buying only what’s necessary. I’ve never once used DoorDash or Uber Eats. I buy my clothing at thrift stores, only purchase a new laptop once every decade or so, and have somehow managed to avoid racking up much in the way of debt ... and by ‘somehow’ I mean that I’ve never owned a house or a car, partly because I changed continents too regularly to make such big-ticket purchases practical or necessary, but mostly because I couldn’t afford them. Even finishing my doctorate did not really bring anything you could call prosperity in its wake: my first position was for the princely some of just over USD30,000 per year. By the time I reached the median national income in my late 30s, I’d gotten so accustomed to frugal living that money started piling up in my account just because I had no idea what to do with it, and little inclination to spend it because I was honestly just happy to not have to worry about budgeting to make rent. That turned out to be very helpful when DEI came for my career track; I lived on those savings for a couple of years after.

A rainy day fund which has long since been spent down, of course. These days, my sole source of income is derived from the words that I share with you here, which I provide for all, free of charge. Ahem. Shakes cup.

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So, yes, it is obviously possible to save some money up by living under one’s means.

Assuming that one is actually making money that is.

Which zoomers mostly aren’t.

Zoomers fly into a rage when they’re told to tighten their belts so that they can save for the future., because zoomers do not think that they have a future.

They are not wrong to think this way.

Planning for the future relies on the ability to defer gratification, to prioritize the greater potential reward over the smaller present reward. To a very large degree this is the basis of civilization, which as the old saying goes thrives when old men plants trees whose shade they will never enjoy. Old men do not plant metaphorical trees anymore; they cut them down for quick cash to pay for casino cruises. The baby boom generation took out tens of trillions of dollars in debt in their descendants’ names to pay for social welfare programs that only baby boomers will enjoy.

Boomers will often point out that the younger generations today are lazy spendthrifts, and there is actually a lot of truth to that. Zoomers think nothing of calling in sick to work for the third time in one week so they can bedrot in front of Netflix with their pad thai takeout and mango-cherry vape juice. This moral failing, boomers despair, is why their grandchildren are destined for downward mobility, and why they don’t dare hand over the reins of society to them.

There was a famous Stanford experiment called the Marshmallow Test which measured time preference in young children. A child would be left in a room with a single marshmallow on the table. They were of course free to eat the marshmallow, the experimenter would tell them, but if they didn’t, then later on they would get a second marshmallow. Children with high time preference – meaning that they strongly prefer the immediate reward to the hypothetical future reward – would cram the marshmallow into their candy-holes without a second thought. Children with low time preference – meaning that they value the future at a similar or even higher level to the present – would patiently wait, and be rewarded with a second marshmallow. These children were then followed, and it was demonstrated that the children with low time preference demonstrated better life outcomes: they maintained higher grades, were less likely to fall into debt, were less likely to develop drug addictions, were less likely to get pregnant before marriage, were less likely to get fat, and so on. All of which makes sense. The capacity to endure present pain – by studying, dieting, working out, what have you – in order to obtain a better future outcome is obviously going to be linked to better outcomes.

How would a smart kid react if the experimenter failed the marshmallow test?

For instance, say the experimenter simply lied. There was no second marshmallow; the child waited for nothing. Or, even worse, the first marshmallow was snatched away, and replaced with two marshmallows, each one half the size of the original? Or a third the size? Here are your two marshmallows, sucker, joke’s on you. What would the results be if, after this experience, the children were tested a second time? I don’t know if such an experiment has ever been conducted, but the outcome is not hard to guess. Every single one of the children, whether they’d passed the marshmallow test the first time or not, would scarf down the marshmallow the moment it was in front of them.

The capacity for low time preference may be largely innate, but whether it expresses or not is entirely a function of social trust. In order to defer gratification for a greater future reward, one must believe that there is a reasonably high chance of that reward manifesting. The less likely the future reward becomes, the more steeply a rational actor will discount the future.

I don’t want to minimize the hardships that boomers endured when they were young. Boomers worked hard, and they didn’t enjoy the same conveniences that we enjoy now. They fought in the Vietnam War (well, about 3% of them), they spent most of their lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, they suffered through the oil shock and stagflation in the 70s, they were punished by double-digit interest rates in the early 80s, and they spent their working lives trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the skyrocketing inflation that was unleashed when Bretton-Woods fell apart and the last vestigial support of the gold standard was kicked out from under the brrrring money printer.

But, despite all of that drama, the one thing boomers could generally rely upon was that – so long as thermonuclear annihilation was averted – things would generally get better. Technology would advance. Working conditions would get safer. The special effects in movies would become more convincing. Houses would get larger. Cars would get nicer. Air conditioning would get quieter. The environment would get cleaner. Society would become more just. The world would become freer and safer for democracy. And so on and so forth. Baby boomers have enjoyed a charmed life such as no other generation has known: free of major wars, full of technical wonders, in which whatever difficulties you might endure now, you could generally count on the future being a better place. For the boomer, deferred gratification always had a payoff.

For the zoomer – and the millennial, and generation X – this has simply not been the case. After 9/11 a police state panopticon settled over society. The 2008 real estate crash pulled the rug out from under the millennials, after which real-estate got ZIRPed to the Moon. Mass immigration pumped real estate demand further, while undercutting wages and rendering public spaces steadily more alienating, unpleasant, and dangerous. Black Lives Matter immolated quaint notions of racial harmony. DEI threw young white men, their careers, their futures, and their unborn children to the wolves. COVID stole two years from young people’s lives so that old people could feel safe from the coof. Now, AI^2 (Artificial Intelligence + Actual Indians) means that the only thing the young expect in their future is gig work in the sex trade industry (until robots take that, too).

If you’re a young person, the only thing you’ve ever known is decline. You’ve seen society get digested by the attention economy, human interactions digitized into shares, views, and likes. You’ve seen the war of Discourse poison relations between the sexes to a degree never known before in history. You’ve seen dating apps replace romance with swipes and monogamy with Tindergamy. You’ve seen third spaces disappear. You’ve seen culture stagnate. You’ve seen music, movies, television shows, video games, and books be converted into hamfisted, poorly written, badly composed, terribly edited agitslop. You’ve seen the Internet get enshittified by adware, malware, spyware, engagement bait, and the subscription-model SaaS scam economy. You’ve seen food get more expensive, even as the quality of the ingredients declines, and the portion sizes decrease. You’ve seen a third of your income get stolen by inflation in a few year’s time. You’ve seen the basic elements of a human life – a house, a spouse, children – recede before you like a mirage in the desert.

I’d like to believe that this is all temporary, that things can be turned around, but if you tell me this hope is nothing more than cope it is very difficult for me to argue otherwise. Maybe things will finally improve and maybe they won’t; the point is that, for the young who have only ever known civilizational rot, it is entirely rational for them to lay down and let it rot.

Generation X and the millennials both tried to do everything right, according to what the boomers told them was the path forward: save money, study hard, get a ‘job’. At every stage we got rugpulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that.

Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen-X and the millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that.

That is why zoomers don’t care about ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ or ‘education’ or ‘savings’. They know there’s no such thing as institutional loyalty, that they’ll be cut loose the moment their job can be automated or outsourced to cheap Indian labour, and so why would they be loyal to their employers? Why would they do any more than the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting fired? Especially under the identitarian spoils system of DEI that makes a point of rewarding someone else for your hard work.

Zoomers have no faith that the future will be better and every reason to believe that it will be much worse, and so they have every reason to prize the small, present pleasure over some future prize that experience has taught them lives only in their broken dreams. What’s the point in saving for a house if you’ll never even be able to afford a hovel in an abandoned toxic-waste dump small town where the major local industries revolve around the fentanyl trade? You might as well just splurge on that $28 lunch, which you can enjoy now, and which you won’t be able to enjoy in a few years, when you’re making the same amount of money, but that lunch costs $48, is prepared with worse ingredients, is provided in smaller portions, and is served in grottier surroundings by less attractive waitresses who now expect a 40% tip.

To be clear, I’m not saying this is a good thing. This generational demoralization is a great tragedy. Zoomers have been spiritually sabotaged, and many of them will never recover. Once social trust is broken it is incredibly hard to rebuild.

This is not entirely the boomers’ fault. They’ve been the primary beneficiaries of the vampire economy, and they are by far its strongest defenders, but they weren’t the ones who set the system up. That would be the ‘greatest generation’, who were the ones that built out the welfare state, passed the Civil Rights Act, dismantled long-standing protections against third-world immigration, and first started letting the money printer rip. Boomers have profited from a kind of generational Cantillon effect: they were born close to the time when inflation first began in earnest, meaning that the money they were lavished with would always be worth more than whatever spare change their children could scrape together.

Blame is beside the point. On its own it isn’t going to solve anything. The only way to fix this is for things to start improving for young people again, and not in the sense of getting cheaper smartphones or whatever. We are talking about very basic, mammalian necessities: food, shelter, mating. It doesn’t matter if technological trinkets are slightly more affordable than they were last year when the foundational elements of Maslow’s Hierarchy are either chewing giant holes through shrinking budgets or simply priced out of any practical reach. Sneers about $28 lunches come off as particularly tone-deaf when groceries have exploded in price to such a degree that it’s barely cheaper to eat in than it is to eat out1. Not to mention that restaurants everywhere are struggling because people don’t have the money to eat out.

I don’t know how to solve this. Unless there’s a world-historical economic boom thanks to AI – which there’s no sign of yet, and furthermore it would need to be one whose benefits are not concentrated in the hands of a small number of oligarchs – there’s probably no way to solve it without pain. The only question is how that pain will be distributed. Experience suggests that boomers are unlikely to volunteer to take the hit. If we were sane we’d dismantle the social security system immediately, and start putting in place systems to transfer opportunity, wealth, and power to native-born child-bearing demographics immediately. This is improbable. The most likely outcome is that, over the next decade or two, the boomers will spend down the last of the West’s national wealth on heroic end-of-life health care, and leave behind a broken mess of insolvency, shattered institutions, lost cultural knowledge, and tribal warfare. None of which will be a problem for the boomers. Après moi, le déluge. It will be up to everyone else to piece together something resembling a functioning society amidst the ashes and ruins. By that point, millennials will be in their 50s and 60s; most of their lives will be behind them. Zoomers will be hitting middle age. Perhaps you can see why everyone under 50 is so dejected, and prefers treating themselves with the small pleasures they can still afford rather than dwelling upon the long decline that awaits?

Or, instead of berating the youth for their moral failings while society crumbles, you might try throwing them that marshmallow and seeing what happens.

Thanks for taking the time to read my little diatribe. A few years ago I got into it with a family member – well, an aunt’s boyfriend, but we like him, he’s a good guy, so he’s family now – who’d started complaining to me about how he couldn’t find good help these days because the kids were all lazy. When I framed it like this it took him aback, and when I saw him a couple of years later he made a point of telling me that he’d never looked at it that way, and it had really made him see things differently. Which was surprising to me, because I thought it was rather obvious. Fish, water, I suppose. Anyhow, at the very least I hope you found this entertaining.

As always, many thanks to my supporters. It’s rough out there and money’s tight, believe me I get it, and that makes your support all the more meaningful.

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Let a man never stir on his road a step

without his weapons of war;

for unsure is the knowing when need shall arise

of a spear on the way without.

- Hávamál, Stanza 38

On December 3^rd, 2025 the 18-year-old accountancy student Henry Nowak was walking home from a night at the pub with his friends from the University of Southampton football team. Nowak had a few pints in him, yes, but he was far from blind drunk. He was singing to himself and SnapChatting with his friends. From the sounds of it he was in high spirits.

Around half past midnight he encountered Vickrum Singh Digwa, 23, who was openly carrying a shastar or Punjabi short-sword. This struck Nowak as notable, and he teased Digwa, “Innit bad man, what bad man. You’re a bad man, say you’re a bad man, go on.”

“I am a bad man,” Digwa replied.

At that point the video cut off.

When the police arrived they found Nowak bleeding from four stab wounds: one on the jaw, two on the backs of his legs, and one deep puncture through his lung. He had tried to escape Digwa by climbing over a bin, a fence, and a car. Digwa informed the police that Nowak had done a racism.

The 999 call was apparently made, not by a concerned onlooker, but by Digwa’s brother, who called in to report that Nowak had racially assaulted Digwa. Video from the encounter records Digwa mocking Nowak, telling him that he hadn’t been stabbed, he was just drunk.

The police responded by handcuffing the wounded Nowak.

Nowak drowned in his own blood shortly thereafter.

Digwa was later arrested and charged with murder. His mother, Kiran Kaur, was also charged with assisting an offender, as it is alleged that she arrived on the murder scene before the police and hid Digwa’s shastar. When the weapon was recovered, Nowak’s blood and fatty tissue, Digwa’s hair, and Kaur’s DNA were found on the sheath. Nowak’s phone was also found in Digwa’s possession, suggesting either that Digwa was just trying to rob Nowak, or – more likely – that he was trying to hide damning evidence that was contained on it.

The trial commenced a few days ago, following Digwa’s plea of not guilty which he entered because, you see, he was defending himself from a racially motivated assault launched by the viciously unarmed white kid, and there can be no guilt when a racist is involved. Perhaps Nowak disliked Sikhs; perhaps he liked them; perhaps he was serenely indifferent. Whatever his private opinions, does it strike anyone as plausible that an unarmed young man would physically attack a man he’d taken note of specifically because he was armed? Not that this will necessarily matter to a British court, for which all other facts are routinely overruled by the observable facts of skin colour.

Regardless of the trial’s outcome, there are a couple of notable things about this case. The first and most obvious is that the police reacted by handcuffing a young white man who – given the multiple stab wounds that Digwa had inflicted upon him – was quite clearly the victim in the situation, rather than the brown man who was equally clearly the aggressor. Nowak apparently would have died regardless, but this is neither here nor there to their demonstrably hostile disposition. The law enforcement officers of the Yookay have been so deeply indoctrinated with oikophobic mindrot that their first instinct is to restrain a white man as he’s bleeding out, solely on the say-so of a brown man claiming an intolerable intolerance had been done unto his blameless self. By now the Yookish authorities are well-known for this kind of two-tiered response. These are the same monsters who have aided, abetted, and covered up the systematic mass rape of hundreds of thousands of white girls – as in, twelve-year-old white girls – by Pakistani rape gangs, for decades. The cheerful euphemism ‘grooming gangs’ does not do justice to the abuse these girls suffered, which included being burned with cigarettes, tied up, gang-raped over periods of months, forcibly injected with heroin, having baseball bats and broken liquor bottles rammed into their vaginas, and being held captive and starved. Throughout all of this their Pakistani abusers were quite open about the ethnoreligious dimension of their predation, referring to their captives as white slags and white cunts, and holding special gang rape parties to celebrate Eid.

The Yookay’s lawlessness enforcement agencies have long since been purged of that type of good man who can’t bring himself to treat his own people as helots. Instead their ranks have been packed with antiracist lesbian girlbosses, Islamic mercenaries, and that particularly contemptible species of squishy little nematode that’s willing to crawl through any sort of filth as long as it comes with a small paycheck and a modest pension.

This is from a year ago, during the nationwide protests against the migrant hotels.

Nowak’s case is simply one more entry in a ledger of outrageous grievances that has by now consigned the suffocating autoethnocidal bureaucracy managing Great Britain’s decline to the short list of the most evil regimes in recorded history. In the context of the litany of horror inflicted by Tony Blair’s troglodytic spawn, Nowak’s treatment is really a small thing, which merely underlines once again that the Yookish police are the enemy of the British people, and that there is no sane reason why policing the Yookay should not be among the world’s most dangerous occupations.

That’s the first thing to notice, and it’s already been noticed enough that talking about it only makes me feel nauseous.

The second thing to notice is that Digwa was armed in the first place.

Infamously, as one of its many assaults upon British tradition – the latest of which is the end of jury trials, a right Englishmen have enjoyed since the Magna Carta – the decline’s managers disarmed the British people. The right of (Protestant) Englishmen to keep and bear arms was enshrined in the Glorious Revolution’s 1689 Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment of the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights is essentially a reiteration of this ancient right of Englishmen; indeed, one of the complaints of the revolutionary colonists was that their rights as Englishmen were not being respected by the English crown. The right to bear arms was first expressed in the 1689 Bill of Rights, but its origin is much older, in the ancient Germanic understanding that a free man is an armed man, and that only slaves are prohibited the means of assuring their personal security. Britain’s managerial regime spent the twentieth century patiently gnawing away at the right to bear arms. It began its assault with licensing requirements in 1920, finally escalating to absolute bans following the 1988 Hungerford massacre1 and the 1996 Dunblane massacre2.

As with all of its petty oppressions, the excuse for banning firearms has always been public safety, which the Yookish regime claims to prize much more highly than public liberty, which it does not claim to prize at all, that being the only honest thing about it. The sincerity of these invocations of safety is rendered dubious by the simultaneous premium Westminster, Whitehall, Number 10 Downing, and Buckingham Palace place upon the uninterrupted mass importation of humanoid dross from the most violently dysfunctional countries on the planet, which (notably) started in earnest at almost exactly the same time that the British people were disarmed.

It was not enough to take away the tools of self-defence. The principle of self-defence was also effectively eliminated: if a private citizen injures or kills a criminal in the course of defending himself against criminal predation, he will be charged as a criminal himself. The British people are expected to outsource their personal defence to police who refuse to defend them, in a country to which their government deliberately imports as many dangerous men as it can. Notably, defence against dangerous men of diversity is particularly frowned upon, because this is racist; indeed, even to complain about diversity danger is treated as a worse crime than rape, robbery, assault, or murder. The Yookay arrests more people for speechcrime than any other country on the planet.

Since firearms are banned, Britain’s criminal element has turned to knives, leading to a long-standing hysteria over knife crime. ‘Zombie-style knives’ and ‘ninja swords’ were banned in 2024 and 2025, while online knife sales now require 2-step age verification. There have even been calls to ban knives with sharp points, which would present certain challenges to the culinary arts. Meanwhile the stop-and-search policies intended to control knife crime on the streets are routinely derided as racist, as it is (surprise!) overwhelmingly young black men who are caught with concealed knives, which of course they conceal because their intent is to use them in the commission of robbery, assault, and murder. Which the British people are not permitted to defend themselves from, and which the Yookish police refuse to do anything about.

All of this raises the question of why, precisely, Digwa was walking around with a big knife.

The answer to this is that Digwa is a Sikh, and Sikhs have a special carve-out for the kirpan, a ceremonial knife which their religion mandates they carry with them at all times, as (if I understand correctly) a symbol of resistance to oppression and their readiness to always be prepared to defend the weak from injustice. Symbolic or not, the kirpan is a very real knife, with a very real edge.

The special religious dispensation granted Britain’s Sikhs is merely the most visible double-standard when it comes to keeping weapons. We saw another example during the Southport riots, when large numbers of Muslims turned out on the streets with machetes. Rather than arresting the lot of them (which the Yookish authorities couldn’t do, as they were busy filling the prisons with British protesters), the lawl enforcement officers on the scene advised them to hide their weapons in their mosque, which out of respect for the delicate sensibilities of the vibrant Islamic community the police would certainly never even dream of searching. One wonders just how many mosques are hiding caches of weapons.

Unlike the benevolently blind eye the Yookish authorities cast upon their treasured Muslims, however, the Sikh exemption is actually written into law.

As the Nowak case broke across social media a few days ago, a lot of people called for an end to this double standard. If whites are disarmed, then everyone else should be as well. There should be no special treatment on account of their heathen gods.

This is an understandable position, but I think it’s the wrong one. It is the thought pattern of The Raped.

Rather than wanting to drag Sikhs down to the subbasement of slavish cuckery into which they’ve been pressed, Anglo-Saxons should instead demand that they, too, be allowed to arm themselves.

The Sikh argument is that their faith requires that they be armed at all time.

The Saxon argument is similar to the Sikh, but if anything it is even more fundamental.

The name Saxon derives from the seax, the characteristic short sword carried by the Germanic invaders who made England their home in the 5^th century. ‘Saxon’ literally means ‘the sons of the knife’, ‘the people of the blade’, or ‘the swordsmen’.

The very identity of our tribe is intertwined with privately held armaments. This is pre-political; it’s pre-religious; for the Saxon, armaments are an identitarian symbol that goes to the very core of what a Saxon is. To remove the seax from the Saxon is to strip him of his identity. Which, of course, is the avowed goal of the Fabian social engineers who have laboured for generations to reconstitute the definite form of the Anglo-Saxon into a pliable mush of generic, vaguely-defined, ahistorical, and universally extensible “values” that no Anglo-Saxon had even heard of until five minutes ago.

If Henry Nowak had carried a seax sheathed on his belt, he would almost certainly still be alive today. The open display of a knife is a powerful deterrent, following the same principle of mutually assured destruction that governs relations between nuclear states. At close range it’s impossible to dodge a knife attack, and any attempt to block a knife just means you get cut somewhere else. The most likely outcome of a fight between two men armed with knives is two dead men; most men understand this, and so will leave men with knives alone even if they carry one themselves. If Nowak had been armed in this fashion, Digwa’s response to him would probably have been a courteous “You’re a bad man, too,” and that would have been the end of the interaction.

The same principle obviously applies to knife crime. Criminals are opportunistic predators. They avoid hard prey. There’s profit in jacking up easy meat to get a free iPhone, but not so much in getting stabbed into fresh meat yourself. If every Saxon wore a seax, street crime would very rapidly become a non-issue.

Of course, from the perspective of the Yookish governing apparat, the powerlessness of its subjects against criminal predation is quite an insignificant price to pay in exchange for ensuring the powerlessness of the autochthonous helotry against the apparat itself. If anything it’s a bonus. The regular humiliation of being forced to endure low-level criminality encourages a feeling of helplessness. The rainbow communists will therefore never “allow” the Saxon to rearm himself.

But what if the Saxon wore the seax without permission?

Any individual Saxon who started walking around the streets of Britain with a seax would be immediately arrested. One way around this would be for so many people to wear one that the state ran out of jail cells. This has its own problems, however. If everyone is technically a felon, the police can arbitrarily arrest anyone, at any time. This would be particularly disastrous for political dissidents, who the state is always looking for any excuse to arrest. Imprisonment wouldn’t be the only potential consequence: heavy fines could be levied on offenders, and offenders could be debanked. The effeminate regime generally favours administrative tyranny over the iron fist, as soft measures can be taken remotely and bloodlessly, without exposing themselves or their agents to physical danger.

A sufficiently motivated Saxon could, however, use the inevitable court case as a cause celebre. The strategy would be two-fold. First, publicity would put the idea in the heads of other Saxons: you should rearm yourselves, because armaments are your right as Saxons. The seax is part of your national dress! Second, and more importantly, a properly constructed court case would draw the Yookish oppressor into a no-win situation. A finding in favour of the defendant would establish the precedent that it is the human right of Saxons to wear the seax, after which nothing would prevent the Saxons from rearming en masse. Obviously the authorities understand this, and so there would be intense political pressure to find against the defendant. That, however, would drive yet another big, fat spike of a nail into the coffin in which the Yookish traitors have been encasing themselves: if Sikhs are allowed to carry knives because their religion demands it, but Saxons are not despite an exactly comparable ethnoreligious argument, it would once again underline the preference shown by the regime toward its pet invaders.

An explicitly religious component may be helpful to the argument. The stanza from the Hávamál could provide the necessary scriptural justification: when Odin says “Let a man never stir on his road a step without his weapons of war”, this can be very easily interpreted as a directive to always be armed in public. It can of course also be argued that this is more in the way of advice than a strict commandment: the pagan deities don’t proclaim laws in the same way that the God of Abraham does. However, what matters for the purpose of a legal argument isn’t how someone else interprets a given religious doctrine. Courts are not supposed to adjudicate theological disputes, and therefore it’s what the faithful believe that counts. The faithful can believe whatever they want.

It’s worth pointing out that Odin doesn’t specify what kind of weapon one should carry. He simply says ‘weapons of war’, and gives the example of a spear. The specific weapon of war one should carry is up to the judgment of the individual man. The principle very obviously extends to firearms. However, it’s worth pointing out that the example of the spear suggests that Odin is not saying that one should carry concealed armaments, since it is quite impossible to hide a spear. Concealed weapons carry no deterrent effect, but they can signal criminal intent, since they confer the benefit of surprise over an unwary victim.

So far this discussion has focused primarily on Britain, but the same principle can be applied throughout the Anglosphere.

American citizens of course enjoy the protection of the Second Amendment, but as Americans know all too well this constitutional principle is very unevenly applied. Some red states enshrine both open and concealed carry. Some blue states tie down the 2A with so many rules and regulations that the right to keep and bear arms may as well not even exist. The core problem Americans have in this regard is that the Second Amendment is a merely political right, meaning that it can be chipped away at by politicians. If instead the right to keep and bear arms was approached as a fundamentally religious question, the communists would have a much more difficult time diluting it.

Americans are the most Christian nation of the Anglosphere, and Christians probably have a harder time making a religious argument for bearing arms than Odinists do. It’s not impossible, however. Christians can quote Matthew 10:34, in which Jesus says “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” There’s also Luke 22:36, “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment,” and Luke 11:21, “When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace.” All of these passages suggest that Jesus Christ thinks you should be strapped. While He disapproves of wanton violence, He is no pacifist.

It’s probably possible for Americans to bolster the Second Amendment using the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause, by expressing Constitutional Originalism as a religious philosophy that demands that every man be armed. Honestly, American Constitutionalists already think this way, it’s just a matter of making the de facto explicit.

In Canada, interestingly, it’s actually entirely legal to walk around with a sword. It isn’t normal, obviously, and it will certainly attract the gimlet eye of the constabulary. Intent is the key issue in Canadian law: if the weapon is being carried for some purpose contrary to the public peace, the police can arrest you, confiscate the weapon, and lay charges. If the reason you give the nice officer is ‘I’m wearing it to defend myself’ or ‘I just think it looks cool,’ this is considered contrary to the public peace, and legal difficulties are likely. However, it is explicitly legal in Canada to carry a sword if, for instance, one is going to historical martial arts practice, LARPing in a historical reenactment, or (and this is the crucial bit) if one has valid cultural or religious reasons ... as in the case, once again, of the Sikh kirpan.

The precedent established by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 2006 case Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys effectively made it legal for Sikhs to carry kirpans wherever they go, including (as per the complaint in Multani) in public schools, because banning them from carrying their holy knives is a violation of their religious liberty. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that Sikhs are allowed to use their kirpans to threaten or attack people, and indeed their religion explicitly prohibits them from using their kirpans for such purposes, a reassurance that contributed to their successful litigation of the issue. The point is that the precedent is there: cultural or religious grounds can be invoked to force the government to allow you to carry weapons. All that remains is for some determined Canadian Saxon to use it.

This would be an uphill battle, of course, and I would not recommend any individual or group to undertake it lightly. I would in fact strongly advise almost anyone reading this from trying this out, because you will almost certainly get into trouble. The courts are naturally biased against whites, and will be deeply suspicious of any new cults which claim that their doctrine demands that they be armed with a specific ceremonial weapon. The probability of success is very slim, and the probability of jail time is very high.

When Sikhs fought this battle in the Anglosphere’s courts, they went in with some crucial advantages: the question was decided by a sympathetic judiciary terrified of looking intolerant towards a religious minority; Sikhs could point to a long and well-established religious tradition; Sikhs had the moral and (I assume) financial support of a large and well-resourced faith community. A Saxon that goes into this half-cocked will have none of these things, and without them success is much less likely. A sympathetic judge is laughably improbable, which makes community support all the more important. The defendant would need to have the backing of a large and absolutely rabid cult, the sincerity of whose belief was beyond question, and which would be liable to chimp if they did not get their way. It would help enormously if this group could point to religious teachings and organizational practices that strongly discourage aggression. Perhaps a real-life Brotherhood of Saint Possenti, the unofficial patron saint of gunslingers, would have a good shot (heh).

Of course, we aren’t likely to get militant Catholic orders or politically astute pagan brotherhoods any time soon, and insofar as we are, adopting a policy of publicly bearing arms is a short path to organizational disaster. It would be just the excuse that the authorities would need to bring the hammer down, arrest the leadership, seize the organization’s assets, and declare it a terrorist group. Leaders would wisely be leery of having their people walk around on the streets with weapons.

Given that, another strategy is the social media influencer path, because while we don’t have much in the way of formal organizations, the ad hoc networks we’ve built on social media are a particular strength of ours. In this version, an ambitious young man with nothing to lose goes full kamikaze, and makes himself The Seax Guy. He’s got a TikTok, an Instagram, channels on YouTube and Rumble, a Substack, and an X account, and his thing is basically just walking around with a seax and seeing what happens, while advocating for the ancient right of Saxon freemen to wear their traditional national implement, as part of a broader focus on Saxon revivalism and national pride. Obviously he’ll get arrested, at least once and probably repeatedly, but this just provides fodder for the attention economy. His goal is to end up in court, specifically so that he can argue for the right to wear the seax while forcing the authorities to tie themselves in knots as they try to explain why it’s okay for Sikhs but not for Saxons. Meanwhile he monetizes with views, a Patreon, superchats, sponsorships, and a webstore selling authentic British and American-forged seaxes, hand-made artisanal leather sheathes, whetstones, and oil for polishing the blades. At some point he can write a book or something. Again, and this can’t be emphasized enough, this strategy is obviously extremely risky for anyone who wants to try it, but it has the great advantage that pretty much anyone could start doing it tomorrow, and the only life they’d risk screwing up is their own.

Winning back the right of Saxons to wear the seax is a tall mountain to climb, so what’s the point? Don’t we have more important things to do, like take back control of our governments so we can remigrate the invaders? Of course we do. But that isn’t going to happen overnight, and in the meantime some measure of personal defence on the mean streets of the post-West would not be unwelcome.

The real point isn’t self-defence, however. It’s psychology. Forcing men to outsource their defence infantilizes them. The modern Westoid is cucked. His soul has been gelded by his defencelessness. A man who is powerless to protect himself, his loved ones, and his property becomes cautious, servile, and deferential to authority, because the authorities are now the only protection he has left ... even if they generally won’t do anything to protect him, which actually renders him more servile, because all he can do is endure. He basically becomes Reek from Game of Thrones. As a direct result of this, he is less likely to speak candidly, because voicing opinions contrary to prevailing sentiment risks alienation from the collective, which would render him helpless.

Walking around with seaxes on their belts would not give men the physical ability to overthrow the government or anything, that would be silly. Knives are no good against rifles, and even rifles are of very limited use against the administrative state: as many have observed, for all their muttering about the immanent Electric Boogaloo (any day now!), red state Americans have not yet taken up arms against a government that is far more oppressive than the British Empire ever was. It’s not clear that taking up arms would actually do much. Fifth generation warfare problems require fifth generation warfare solutions, and we’re actually doing pretty well in that arena. That said, it also has to be acknowledged that the US government, for all its many faults, is far less tyrannical than the governments of the rest of the Anglosphere. This is certainly not because there is any shortage of enthusiasm for tyranny amongst America’s homegrown Khmer Rainbow. They would go much farther if they could. Part of the explanation for this relative liberty is probably that America’s large population of armed men do not feel themselves to be so easily cowed as their British counterparts; because they don’t feel easily cowed, they aren’t; because they aren’t, the state treads a bit more lightly. The effect is hormonal as much as anything else, and this has a subtle but real behavioural impact which affects the way American men carry themselves, speak, and think.

In addition to the salubrious psychological impact that carrying implements of violence has upon male psychology, there is also a desirable effect on the enemy’s psychology. Namely, it intimidates them. The modern white man is expected to be meek, soft-spoken, and unthreatening, because anything else makes his jailers feel unsafe. By and large, men have complied with this, which is a big part of the reason that the regime finds it so easy to abuse them. Carrying weapons would make them screech that they feel unsafe, and this is a good thing. They should feel unsafe, because they are vicious traitors who have perpetrated monstrous crimes upon our civilization. If leftoids feel unsafe, they will be far more hesitant to shriek like banshees when they don’t get their way, which will make our public spaces quieter and more enjoyable. The non-white criminal auxiliaries the left has lovingly nurtured will also be much more cautious. The mere presence of armed white men would serve to passively reinforce the public peace. What’s not to love?

A revival of the seax would also help the Saxon to remember who he is. The modern Anglo is not only defenceless, but deracinated. He has been severed from his roots by a long process of social engineering which has systematically eliminated his traditions, his faith, and his ancient rights from public life. He floats in an asynchronous, decontextualized moment, with no idea where he came from, where he is, or who he is. This state of semi-consciousness renders him malleable, which is precisely why he has been put into it. It enables the regime to marginalize the Saxon in his own countries. Reestablishing a connection with ancient symbols by wearing the weapon from which his ancestors took their tribal name would be a visible reminder of his origins and identity, not as some sanitized, defanged national cuisine or music or costume or whatever, but as something potentially dangerous and therefore very alive and undeniably real. That alone would be a very powerful thing.

I’d like to finish this by noting that I have nothing in particular against Sikhs myself, and certainly don’t resent their carrying the kirpan. What I resent is the double standard. Indeed, I got some input on this piece from a Sikh friend whose fond hope is that the Anglo uncucks himself and finds his warrior spirit again, and who was very happy to share his thoughts on how we might leverage the same legal processes used by Sikhs to win our own right to wear our tribal weapon again.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope it was worth the wait. Obviously, given the news cycle, this is something I threw together over the Victoria Day weekend, while the rest of you were out enjoying the weather, which is finally beautiful (which I’m enjoying myself, sitting here on the patio as I type this). Winter this year was especially long, cold, and dreary, and that affected my mood quite a bit, probably contributing to the creative funk I’ve been experiencing lately, which is part of my sorry excuse for the relative paucity of posting the last couple of months (the other reasons being things I can’t talk about yet). Now that the weather’s finally turning, I can feel my mood lifting already, and I’m hoping to polish up a few much longer pieces I’ve been plugging away at to the point where I can share them with you. I’ve got 23 open documents in LibreOffice Writer at the moment, some of which have grown to 20,000 words or so...

All of which is to say that my gratitude towards those of you who patronize my writing is particularly strong right now. Your patience is nothing short of saintly. From the very bottom of my heart, thank you.

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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…

Listen now

6 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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5 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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6 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.

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7 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.