Inside the Plymouth courtroom, there’s agreement: Lindsay Clancy killed her three children. What’s at issue isn’t the basic facts, what Clancy did and didn’t do. She’s freely admitted to killing Cora (5), Dawson (3) and Callan (8 months) Clancy.The M

Lindsay Clancy doesn’t dispute that on the evening of January 24th 2023, after she asked her husband, Patrick, to fetch takeout food and some medication from the local pharmacy, she strangled the children in the basement of the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, using a set of exercise bands, then attempted to commit suicide by slitting her wrists and jumping from a second-story window. When her husband returned, he found her outside, still alive, called 911 and then discovered the children downstairs.

The call is so harrowing the judge refused to release the audio to the general public.

What’s at issue, rather, is a second-order moral question: Was Lindsay Clancy responsible for the killings? Was it murder—deliberate, premeditated—as the prosecution alleges; or did Lindsay suffer from severe postpartum psychosis, auditory command hallucinations—voices in her head telling her to kill—and massive overmedication of prescription drugs, as the defence claims in mitigation?

There’s compelling evidence on both sides. This is a genuine moral conundrum, one that admits no easy answers. There’s clear evidence of malice aforethought. Before the killings, Clancy made repeated internet searches asking questions like “how to slit throat to die,” “Where is the carotid artery?” “How to turn airbags off on Kia Sorrento?” and “Can you treat a sociopath?” Other digital evidence, including Apple Watch and phone data, suggest she acted in a rational manner: She created an opportunity to have her husband out of the house so she could kill the children. But it’s also hard if not impossible to dispute that Clancy was of anything but sound mind in the months, weeks and days leading up to the tragedy. She also Googled “hallucinations,” “intrusive”—meaning “intrusive thoughts”—“psychosis,” and “postpartum depression,” and she tried to find out information about the various drugs she had been prescribed, which included anti-anxiety drugs, SSRI anti-depressants and a powerful antipsychotic called Seroquel with a worrying array of side effects. Clancy’s personal journals describe deepening anxiety, panic attacks, emotional numbness, murderous thoughts and suicidal ideation after starting Seroquel. She had repeatedly sought psychiatric help and even been hospitalised weeks before the killings. She and her husband—now ex-husband—have both filed malpractice and wrongful-death lawsuits against her medical providers, alleging she was improperly diagnosed and prescribed drugs that made her condition worse.

Here isn’t the place to go over all the evidence for Lindsay Clancy’s guilt, or to consider the complex issues involved in attributing blame, especially to those under the influence of powerful drugs and with a history of serious mental illness. I have my opinions, of course, about a woman who would strangle her own children to death and whether such a crime could ever be mitigated by circumstance. My interest here is in the public reaction to events, and what it says about the American public today, and American women in particular.

The trial has generated a media circus, and by that I mean a social-media circus. While the basic facts of the Clancy case are agreed by both prosecution and defence inside the courtroom, outside everything is up for grabs. Wild theories are circulating, calling the trial a sham and a coverup. Despite admitting her guilt, Lindsay Clancy did not in actual fact kill her children. She was framed. Her husband pushed her out of the window after strangling the children himself. He was the voice she heard in her head, telling her to kill, only he was whispering in her ear. He did it so he could start over with his new wife, a fertility doctor in New York. I know a narcissist when I see one.

These claims aren’t fringe claims. They’re each garnering tens and hundreds of thousands of views, likes and shares—millions, cumulatively. Patrick Clancy and his new wife have been attacked directly, with leaks of personal information and death threats. For the most part, though, the theories have simply done the rounds online, as such theories do, and they’ve created a thick fug of suspicion over a man who has never been suspected of wrongdoing, at least not from prosecutors anyway.

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Over Easter, Matt Ford suggested Donald Trump might one day soon be hunted down by the International Criminal Court and put on trial like a mass-murdering warlord from the Balkans or the Congo.

“There will be no post-presidential peace for Donald Trump,” Ford thundered in the pages of The New Republic, before providing a litany of high crimes and misdemeanours that would justify a meeting with fate at the Hague.

“The shuttering of the Kennedy Center may be the least of Trump’s second-term sins,” Ford opined.

“In the first year since returning to power, Trump and his subordinates have pushed the country toward fascism and oligarchy. He has turned Washington into an orgy of corruption and self-dealing beyond even the most cynical observer’s imagination. He has transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol into a lawless paramilitary force that has besieged American cities and killed at least five U.S. citizens and 22 foreign nationals. He has abused Americans and their immigrant neighbors alike simply because he can.”

Given everything that happened to Donald Trump during his first term and then the four long years of the Biden presidency, it should come as no shock that his enemies are already thinking of ways they can punish him, his family and his supporters as soon as they have the power to do so.

The plan for retribution—and there is a plan, rather than just a diffuse sense that Trump must be punished—is now taking shape under the rubric of “Project 2029.” The name is a knowing wink towards the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, which set the agenda for the second Trump administration in so many different ways. Although the main focus is on 2029—there’s still no clear frontrunner to lead the party at the moment, with recent polls suggesting Gavin Newsom might not be the favourite—a win at the midterms will allow the process of retribution to begin in earnest.

Back at Easter, there were some intimations of exactly what might happen if November goes the Democrats’ way, but now Reuters has added some real meat to the bone.

According to Reuters, “Senior Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and committee aides have discussed using hearings, subpoenas and document requests to obtain records from entities tied to Trump’s political and business orbit... It is a bet that investigating private companies and outside financial players will prove more fruitful than directly confronting a White House they expect to resist oversight.”

Impeachment, that bluntest of weapons, is out. Democrats have finally learned their lesson, it seems. They know impeachment is unlikely to succeed and that President Trump will be able to turn proceedings to his advantage, portraying himself as the victim of a merciless witch-hunt (imagine that!).

“No one wants a failed vote on day one,” a senior Democrat aide said.

“The focus is on building a body of evidence through investigations that can hold Trump accountable.”

A number of major companies have already been singled out. Among them are Apple, Alphabet, Blackstone, BlackRock and Palantir. No surprise, companies owned by Elon Musk—whose support was instrumental in returning Trump to the White House and who oversaw the Department of Government Efficiency—are also targets.

Reuters continues, “Democrats are expected to examine Department of Homeland Security contracts, financing for Trump’s planned White House ballroom, corporate donors and alleged pay-to-play arrangements, two sources said. They also plan a probe of Trump-linked financial vehicles including 1789 Capital—a venture capital firm where his son Donald Trump Jr. is a partner—and foreign sovereign wealth funds whose investments in Trump family-linked entities could raise questions about administration influence, the sources said.”

Party leaders have now begun sending out letters in advance of subpoenas after the midterms. These include requests for information from Paramount Skydance about its dealings with the Trump administration and the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery deal. They want information about Alphabet’s $24.5 million settlement with President Trump, and they also want answers from private prison operator GEO Group and security company Salus Worldwide Solutions about their contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Commodity traders have been asked about sales of Venezuelan oil since Nicolas Maduro was deposed in January.

At this stage, of course, the letters have no power, and the recipients are in no way compelled to respond. But they serve as signals of intent, warnings that the price of cooperation with the Trump administration could be about to increase steeply. As a strategy, it’s likely to have some effect, and given Trump’s current low favourability rating, largely thanks to the Iran war, the warning will be felt. The Democrats have reason to be confident.

Republicans will be campaigning on accountability too, albeit of a different sort. In the last couple of days, we’ve also learned the GOP will focus on the Democrat party’s violent lurch towards the left or “communism” as President Trump has described it, and on the inability or unwillingness of the party’s leaders to stop it.

According to Axios, via Republican sources, the party is going to tell America, “but they’re worse.”

“Yeah, you’ve got your gripes with us—maybe you’re still pissed about the price of gas, maybe you think things went too far in Minneapolis, maybe you’re just tired of Donald Trump—but trust us, they’re worse. Much worse.”

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“After years of enduring severe pain from a broken back, navigating the obstacles of the health insurance system and witnessing similar experiences of countless others, I learned that United Healthcare would be holding its annual investor conference in New York City on December 4, 2024; although the specific location was not publicly disclosed.”

The defendant spoke with little emotion as he read a prepared statement.

He described how he researched the conference online and discovered it would be attended by executives of the firm, its board and prominent investors.

He described how he emailed the firm, “posing as an investor at a firm managing over $50 billion in assets and requesting information about the conference. Unlike my previous interactions with insurers, I received an immediate response within an hour.”

“Before traveling to New York, I used a 3D printer to make part of a gun, and I equipped the gun with the silencer and magazine,” he continued.

“My travel to New York and email to United Healthcare was with the intent to shoot Brian Thompson.”

“On the morning of 4 December 2024, I shot Mr Thompson in Manhattan and he died. When I did so, I understood that my actions would place him in fear of death or serious bodily injury. I knew what I was doing was illegal.”

On Friday morning, as you may know, Luigi Mangione pled guilty in Manhattan federal courthouse to two stalking charges related to the murder of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of United Healthcare.

Interstate stalking resulting in death and stalking through the use of interstate facilities resulting in death—Mangione hadn’t made any kind of deal with the feds. Those were the only charges that remained after prosecutors lost their bid to hit him with a murder charge and the death penalty, which would have been richly deserved. A weapons charge was tossed by the judge too. That left two lesser charges of stalking.

The good news: Mangione still faces a second-degree murder charge in the pending state case; no death penalty, though.

But that trial, and a “marquee conviction” for local DA Alvin Bragg, may also be at serious risk.

Says The New York Post, “Just hours after the healthcare-hating pretty boy copped to charges in Manhattan federal court, which could land him life behind bars, his bulldog legal team filed papers asking to have his separate state murder case tossed out over double jeopardy.”

Mangione’s lawyers entered a motion to dismiss the state charges against him, claiming he was a “pawn” for federal and state prosecutors who have “have sensationalized this case and misapplied statutes in an effort to overcharge him.”

“By explicitly coordinating and planning the order of prosecutions against Mr. Mangione so as to maximize his punishment and increase each government’s chances to convict him, the facts here do not allow the District Attorney’s Office to continue to prosecute Mr. Mangione under the Fifth Amendment.”

Double jeopardy laws stop a person from being prosecuted more than once for the same crime. New York has a specific statute that prevents “a second or subsequent prosecution in New York State Court arising from the same transaction or occurrence as a previous case.”

Could this plan work?

I’m no legal expert, but two lawyers who spoke to The Post think so. They reckon the words of the New York double-jeopardy statute can be twisted in such a way prosecutors will have a very difficult time pursuing the case. Bragg’s office will be forced to “argue that the [stalking and murder] statutes are designed to protect against different evils, [that] there’s different facts that weren’t covered in the federal plea and charges.”

Who’s to blame for this unfortunate situation? Someone must be. The Post’s legal eagles both lay the blame squarely at the feet of the feds, who “sabotaged and torpedoed” the state case by pursuing their own after the judge had “gutted” the charges against Mangione.

“They should have dismissed the case and let the state [case] proceed,” one of the lawyers said.

On X, people are suggesting the feds might even have done this on purpose, since Bragg is a Soros DA and the man who got Donald Trump convicted of 34 felonies in his “hush money” case. But what’s that rule of thumb—never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity? Godwin’s Law? No, that’s the one about Hitler…

The great risk, of course, is that if he manages to dodge a murder charge altogether, Mangione’s star will only rise further. Mangione will farm even more aura and become even more of a hero to the worryingly large number of people who believe he is exactly that—a hero.

On Wednesday, two days before Mangione entered his plea, voice-of-a-generation Hasan Piker appeared on the New York Times podcast and yet again sought to justify the killer’s actions.

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This is a direct follow-on from my piece about Rod Dreher, which began a series of exploratory essays about the conservative character. I’m trying to understand some of the more destructive quirks of conservatives and the movements they find themselves a part of, not because I want to poke fun at them, but because right-wingers need to do something about them if they actually want to win.

In four separate experiments, researchers from the University of Queensland, Australia showed nearly 5,000 adults in the US and UK a series of hypothetical scenarios designed to gauge their empathy for political allies and enemies.

The researchers were shocked to discover that conservatives, not liberals, turned out to be the nice guys.

“Conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives,” the researchers noted.

“This pattern—neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical in the expected direction—remains surprising.”

Surprising, maybe, but the results were unequivocal: Liberals made harsher moral judgments about “outgroup members” and also saw conservatives as “more harmful than conservatives saw liberals.”

In fact, I don’t think these results are surprising at all. They’re only surprising if you are yourself a liberal, and a naïve one at that, meaning you take yourself and other liberals at their own self-estimation: as the nicest, most moral people of all, the historical agents of equality, human rights, emancipation and Progress, who would never do anything nasty or low or that wasn’t in the interest of the Greater Good and all that. But if you actually look at the way conservatives behave—and again, as I did last time, I’m using “conservatives” as a broad term to include right-wingers more generally—you’ll see that conservatives are almost always, without exception, the ones who defer to morality and principle, expecting their opponents to do the same. Of course, their opponents do no such thing.

Conservatives almost always, fail, to pull the trigger on their enemies—metaphorically and literally. Leftists have no such qualms. Just ask Tyler Robinson.

But it’s even worse than that, I think. Because not only do conservatives fail to pull the trigger, they fail to identify their enemies in the first place. Rather than keeping their friends close and their enemies closer, so they can watch the latter and dispatch them when the time is ripe, conservatives mistake enemies for friends and completely let their guard down, inviting a knife through the ribs. Or they believe, no less disastrously, that every enemy is really a friend-in-the-making, and if they could only sit down and have an open and honest “dialogue,” all differences would disappear and everything would be hunky-dory. Fat chance.

Wasn’t that the signal failure of the first Trump presidency? That the outsider president simply didn’t recognise who within his administration was actually working against him and against the goals of America First—Pence, Pompeo, Barr, Bolton, Kushner, Fauci...—before it was too late? By the time Trump figured out what was really going on, his first term was over and he was being labelled a “threat to democracy” by some of the very people he had appointed. Mercifully, the notoriously stubborn Trump does appear to have learned a lesson or two from the 2017-2021; pre-election talk of a “retribution presidency” was not entirely misplaced.

Overall, then, you could say conservatives have a problem with the “friend-enemy distinction.” I’ve said this before, multiple times in fact, but I increasingly think an unsophisticated reliance on this concept, originally derived from German jurist Carl Schmitt, is a problem in its own right, and perhaps yet another example of how so many conservatives are raped—which is to say, programmed to repeat the same traumatic mistakes over and over and over again.

The “friend-enemy distinction” comes from Schmitt’s 1932 book The Concept of the Political (Der Begriff des Politischen). The bit that always gets quoted is this single sentence, as if it can stand totally alone, without any further contextualisation or interpretation.

“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”

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The second Trump administration is the first pro-androgen administration in American history, and probably the world.

Granted, there have been some pretty masculine societies in the past—ancient Sparta, anyone? The Vikings?—but there isn’t a single government that has concerned itself with androgens (male hormones), and testosterone in particular, the way Trump has since returning to power last year.

For most of history, it wouldn’t have been possible for a ruler or government to do this, at least not directly. Yes, rulers and governments could do all sorts of things to enhance the vigour and vitality of their male subjects, but they couldn’t get at the biological substrate responsible for making them men: for sexual differentiation in the womb, then through childhood and puberty; for muscle mass, libido, motivation, striving, courage and aggression, for patriotism and the ability to function as part of a hierarchy. Testosterone wasn’t properly discovered until the early 1930s, when it was isolated from vast quantities of male urine; although nearly a hundred years earlier, experiments involving transplanted rooster testicles had identified a mysterious substance that was responsible for male characteristics and behaviour.

But now governments can get straight to the source—and not a moment too soon. The simple fact is, testosterone levels are declining and have been for some time, and if we’re not worried about that, we should be. All the best research, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, points to a decline of about 1% year on year, taking place over decades, across the Western world. This is part and parcel of a broader decline in male reproductive parameters, including sperm quality and sperm counts. According to Professor Shanna Swan, a reproductive-health expert at Mount Sinai University, New York, on current trends the median man will have a sperm count of zero by the middle of this century. That means in less than a generation one half of all men will produce no sperm, and the other half will produce so few—well, what’s the point? They won’t be able to get a woman pregnant with such a jejune cocktail.

There are many likely causes for the decline in testosterone and male reproductive health: obesity, sedentary lifestyles, chronic stress, lack of sleep, exposure to a class of chemicals called endocrine-disruptors, which interfere with the body’s natural balance of hormones. By a kink of industrial chemistry, it turns out pretty much all the new chemicals we’ve created over the last century or so mimic the female hormone estrogen in one way or another. Estrogen-mimicking chemicals are everywhere: they’re in the food, the water, the air; they’re in the coating of your non-stick frying pan, your deodorant, the receipt in your pocket and the polyester underpants you’re wearing. We can’t avoid them. We can only mitigate our exposure, and we should.

Over the last month, we’ve seen two headline-grabbing policies from the Trump administration regarding testosterone.

The first, announced by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., aims to widen access to testosterone-replacement therapy (TRT), so more men with low testosterone will be able to get it. This involves removing a use-limitation on the therapy—a statement that the safety and efficacy of TRT had not been established—and also updating warnings associating testosterone with prostate cancer.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the second policy a few weeks ago, as a way to ensure America’s soldiers, sailors and airmen “operate at their absolute best.” There will now be mandatory annual screenings for testosterone deficiency for all service members over the age of 30, which is when scientists generally reckon testosterone begins a natural decline. Those with low testosterone will be offered the choice of TRT. Hegseth said the new programme is “not about artificial enhancement,” but “restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”

The irony of this policy is that it’s the inverse of the Department of War’s new transgender rules, expanding access to testosterone for health-optimisation at the same time as it’s withdrawn for the purposes of gender-transition. Critics have noticed this, of course.

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Many a true word was spoken in jest. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Real chestnut.

Anyway, that’s exactly what I thought when I saw the latest clip of pudgy leftist idol Hasan Piker doing the rounds yesterday.

I’m not sure exactly when the clip is from or the wider context, but what’s clear enough is that he’s “joking” about exterminating white people—and having some fun raping white women and girls on the way to that end.

Grok tells me, from the doughiness of his ever-so-punchable face and the retarded man-child outfit he’s wearing, that the clip is probably from somewhere around 2018-2020.

Piker first began streaming in the spring of 2018, while he was still working at the Young Turks, a gig kindly given to him by his uncle, bestiality advocate Cenk Uyghur. Before that Piker had failed miserably as a “redpill” guru dispensing crass dating advice to spoiled chonky dorks just like himself.

Here’s what he said in the clip, in full.

“We’re gonna bring in immigrants to this country just so they can fuck your sister and then maybe your daughter… We’re gonna destroy the white race, bitch.”

Charming.

“Joke” or not, this is what leftists today actually want to do, even if they’re plausibly white-passing like Piker. Perhaps more so, in fact, if they’re plausibly white-passing like Piker. They want to cleanse the entire planet of the stain of “whiteness,” which is seen as something like a new kind of Original Sin, and they think no means should be off the table: murder, rape, nuclear weapons, biological warfare (mass immigration). If that makes it sound like some kind of apocalyptic religion, well it is. And given the chance, its devotees wouldn’t think twice. Their numbers are growing every day in the US, and around the world.

I said as much on X yesterday, quoting the clip, and others, like Congressman Brandon Gill, said the same thing too. Gill has been consistently great at denouncing this kind of disgusting murderous crap.

We can debate whether the leftist project has, from the very beginning, been an anti-white one—I’d say yes, and point to, for example, Lenin’s plan to “set the East ablaze” and destroy Europe with Asia and its sheer weight of numbers—but really that’s an academic debate at this point, to be had at some other time, when these people aren’t breathing right down our necks. If anti-whiteness has for decades been the unofficial ideology of American government, with institutions like the Community Relations Service and policies like Affirmative Action, it’s now fast-becoming the official ideology of the Democrat party. The Democrats, if you hadn’t noticed, have taken quite the lurch left since the disaster that was the 2024 election.

Aside from Piker himself, endlessly touted as the voice of a new, more radical generation, the most prominent example is, of course, New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is a Third World race communist through and through, even if he’s trying to appear at least a little more reasonable from the comfort of Gracie Mansion. Just a quick search will yield videos of him talking about “seizing the means of production” and taxing white neighborhoods more heavily than non-white neighborhoods. You can also find embarrassing college-era scribblings about how bad it made him feel to be rejected by all the attractive blonde girls. There’s nothing like sexual resentment to generate murderous hatred of white people—don’t underestimate that. Then there’s his dad, Mahmood Mamdani, an academic who blames all the world’s ills on the White Man, including the Rwandan Genocide, in shitty books with shitty titles like, When Victims Become Killers.

Piker and Mamdani are both affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, a radical group that’s leading the “hostile takeover” of the Democrat Party, as some are calling it.

DSA candidates are now routinely trouncing establishment picks in key contests. Mamdani endorsed three such candidates in a recent series of Congressional primaries in New York. All three won. Here’s a description from The Spectator of one of them, Darializa Avila Chevalier

But the eyepopper is the victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old DA member and PhD graduate student, in East Harlem and the Bronx. She defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and will easily become the most radical House member since Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party represented the same area in the 1940s.

The night before his election in November, Zohran Mamdani filmed a video honoring his “radical” hero, Marcantonio.

Chevalier’s views would send even Marcantonio into orbit. DAC—as she will inevitably be dubbed—is so ideologically extreme that Jeff Maurer, a former writer for unrelentingly left-wing comic John Oliver’s HBO show, is gobsmacked by her. Maurer began his latest Substack post by announcing “My challenge is to find words to describe just how bonkers this Cirque du Soleil-level s-show truly is!”

DAC has called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders. As recently as last week, she refused to back down on those views when given an opportunity: “All deportations are wrong,” she says, even for those convicted of a crime.

She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the militant student group behind the violent 2024 occupation of Columbia after the Hamas attacks in Gaza the year before. CUAD is explicitly anti-Enlightenment: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one...”

Chevalier called the United States “a f—— disgrace,” and referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land. She’s written favorably about communism and seizing “all properties from landlords.”

She has criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel, and is known as a key leader in the “left of AOC” faction of Democratic Socialists of America.

DAC isn’t even the worst. There’s Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez, James Talarico, and Francesca Hong, a woman who should, by her own admission, be strapped to a bed in a lunatic asylum.

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I often get asked, “Charles, if you had to give people one piece of advice to transform their lives, what would you say?”

The obvious answer everyone expects, what with my being a “right-wing bodybuilder” and all, is “EXERCISE AND LIFT WEIGHTS!” And while I do think we ought at the very least to be moving a lot more than we do, and that men really should start hitting the iron to boost their testosterone, I actually don’t think it’s the single best thing you can do to transform your health.

I think the real answer is something distinctly less heart-pumping.

Learn to cook.

You don’t have to go to cookery school and don one of those silly French hats. Just learn how to cook basic meals made from good-quality fresh ingredients. The kind of things you like to eat and maybe also some of the things you should like to eat but don’t. Learn how to fry, boil and scramble eggs. Learn how to cook a steak the way you like it. Learn how to cook a chicken breast all the way through but not so much it’s as dry as Ben Shapiro’s wi—you get my drift. Make a stew and then make a lasagne and once you’ve done that make a breaded pork cutlet with some nice brown butter and a slice of lemon, maybe some capers in the butter too. Delicious.

If you learn to cook, you can control what goes in to your own body. And that means you don’t have to rely on other people to make food for you, and what I really mean by that, of course, is that you don’t have to rely big corporations to make your food in a factory. Because the truth is, the vast majority of us aren’t relying on skilled local artisans—the baker, the butcher—to make our food for us if we don’t make it ourselves. Many communities don’t even have bakers or butchers any more. It’s companies like Kraft-Heinz and General Mills, and what they really care about isn’t your health and wellbeing, it’s their bottom line and making sure you keep eating as much of their products as possible.

These companies have legions of so-called food scientists working for them whose sole aim is to make the food as addictive as possible. They call it “hyperpalatability” in their jargon, the perfect combination of sweetness, saltiness, crunch and other food sensations; a combination that makes you reach the “bliss point” where stopping eating becomes an act of conscious willpower beyond the capabilities of most people.

The essence of ultraprocessed food, the novel food type that makes up the majority of Americans’ daily calories today, is that it’s calorie-dense and addictive. It’s also packed with a myriad of weird and wonderful ingredients whose effects are largely unknown thanks to the laxness of food regulation in the US. After the Food and Drug Administration introduced a special loophole called Generally Recognized as Safe in the late 1950s (“GRAS” for short), food manufacturers have spent the last sixty years creating new ingredients, saying they’re safe and then just adding them to the food supply without any independent testing whatsoever.

Nobody even knows how many ingredients there are in America’s food. Some estimate 10,000. It could be more. In the EU, by contrast, where food quality is taken much more seriously, there are about 2,000. This is before we get on to the herbicides, pesticides, food-contact chemicals, microplastics, heavy metals, antibiotics and pharmaceuticals, and other contaminants that are also found in great abundance in cheap, factory-made food.

The transition from locally produced, fresh, home-cooked diets to diets consisting largely or entirely of foods made in factories is one of the main reasons chronic disease rates have exploded over the last century and Americans are the sickest people on earth. A full 70% of Americans are now overweight or obese. One in 31 children has an autism diagnosis. Rates of diabetes, digestive conditions, neurodegenerative diseases and various cancers are all rising fast, especially among the younger generations. It’s a dietary change as profound as any in human history, and built in large part on the promise of convenience for people who have come to see time as money and little else.

The quietly radical power of learning to cook is the reason why my very first book was a cookbook, Raw Egg Nationalism in Theory and Practice: Cook Good with the Raw Egg Nationalist. I was lucky enough to grow up in a home with a mother who knew how to cook, and one of her many loving gifts to me was an appreciation for real food and also the ability to make it myself.

It was always clear to me, then, that if America was to be made healthy again, as Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed, it wouldn’t be enough just to tackle the corporations perverting and polluting the food, air and water supply. Americans would need to be shown what real food is and, just as importantly, how to make it.

Thankfully, Secretary Kennedy gets that too. At a USDA event back in March, he said home-cooking was an urgent priority that was going to be addressed in a number of different ways.

“One of the challenges we’re facing and that we’re working on­—all kinds of innovative devices to solve—is that Americans have forgotten how to cook,” Kennedy said.

Americans could feed themselves better food for less, he continued. They just lack the know-how and often the equipment too.

“The convenience of fast food is one of the things that attracts them. And many of them don’t have cutlery, they don’t have pots and pans, they don’t have cutting boards, and they don’t know how to shop.

“And one of the things that we’re talking about now to HHS is to use the Commissioned Corps or other groups within our agency to go out and actually teach people to cook.”

We haven’t got the Commissioned Corps going out into American communities to teach ordinary people to cook—not yet—but what we have got is a new cooking show on YouTube called “The Real Food Show.” The first 20-minute episode debuted at the end of last week and featured Secretary Kennedy and chef Andrew Gruel showing Americans how to cook a simple but delicious meal of salmon fishcakes with a green-apple salad.

The premise of the show is simple. Each meal illustrates the core principles of Secretary Kennedy’s new nutritional guidelines and his updated, inverted, food pyramid. The emphasis is on high quality protein and fat, with minimally processed ingredients. And, just as importantly, each serving should cost less than $5. Nutritious and affordable.

Affordability is key, because one of the weapons being wielded against Make America Healthy Again, with the support of ultraprocessed-food makers, is the claim that eating well is elitist: something only a privileged few can afford. This new show cooks that canard perfectly.

I have high hopes for this series and its simple but radical message. And who knows? Maybe Secretary Kennedy and I will reprise our double-routine from the 2022 Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men?

In fact, I know just the perfect recipe.

“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.” (Industrial Society and Its Future)

The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski didn’t have much to say about conservatives, and what he did have to say wasn’t flattering—but it was totally right.

Kaczynski believed the conservative, unlike the leftist, was not a primary manifestation of the “craziness of our world”—i.e. the modern industrial society that must be destroyed for the good of humanity and world. As a result, he didn’t feel the need to examine the psychological basis of conservatism in any detail. Leftism, according to Kaczynski, is driven by two main character traits: “oversocialisation”—overidentification with social norms—and “feelings of inferiority,” which is pretty self-explanatory.

Even so, what Kaczynski does say about conservatives is penetrating and useful. That conservatism in the modern world is, in some fundamental sense, a loser doctrine built on a series of mismatches between conservatives’ professed aims—“conserving”—and the things they actually do and advocate for. Their staunch support for capitalism and the free market, in particular, the most transformative productive forces in the history of mankind, means the only things they end up conserving are… capitalism and the free market.

“Fools,” Kaczynski says. Or, to use a language I’m beginning to develop myself, raped.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the conservative character, mainly because I want to understand why conservatives behave in such a self-destructive, self-sabotaging manner and have done so for basically as far back in time as you care to look. We see this in the US right now and we also see it on this side of the Pond, in the UK. It’s unmistakeable. Power has been won or the road to power seems open—but then the raped retraumatise themselves, as raped people do, and the whole thing starts to fall apart. They can’t help themselves. They do everything they can to thwart themselves and to drag as many people down with them. They’re not content with suicide. It has to be a murder-suicide and—guess what?—you’re going with them.

A few notes before we continue. First, on terms. By “conservative,” I also mean “right wing” more generally.

Yes, the two labels aren’t co-extensive. More often than not there’s antagonism between conservatives and those who consider themselves right-wing and not primarily conservative. What usually happens is the conservatives “punch right,” sacrificing anybody to the right of them whose views they believe are discrediting in the eyes of their opponents; and in return the right-wingers engage in absurd purity-spiralling and accuse the conservatives of cucking, being bought and so on. But both groups are seen as a single team by their enemies, even if they don’t behave like one, and they do share plenty in common, not only in terms of beliefs and goals, but also psychological makeup.

Being on the outside, in opposition to the left, has shaped conservatives and right-wingers in the same important ways. Even when they’ve been in power, the general trend of democratic society has been leftward, frustrating their efforts and shaping their thought and behaviour in ways that reinforce and exacerbate the weakness of their position. They anticipate their efforts will fail, which tricks them pre-emptively into seeking out ways of failing for which they themselves are completely guilty. They fool themselves into thinking that they somehow “own” their own defeats just because they’ve chosen them of their own free will, and strangled their friends and allies with their own hands instead of waiting for their enemies to do it. Rather than victory, they choose failure and death: a “principled last stand”. From now on, unless I say otherwise, I’ll be referring to conservatives and right-wingers interchangeably.

Second note: I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the basic human instinct to conserve things, and it is a basic human instinct that you’ll find in every single human society that has ever existed. In fact, I think it’s good, and I can think of plenty of things that we should fight to conserve. But conservatism and the right wing are about much more than just expressing or satisfying this instinct. The instinct to conserve is not pathological, but “conservatism” as a political philosophy might be.

Third, I don’t think everything that’s wrong with conservatives is the result of some kind of archetype. Not everybody who is conservative or right-wing fits the type. Very many don’t—but very many do. That character, regardless of whether or not I describe it fully or correctly, isn’t an explanation for why conservatism exists either. Kaczynski didn’t believe “oversocialisation” or “feelings of inferiority” are the reason why leftism exists: He believed they explain why certain kinds of people are attracted to or become leftists, and why they persist in being leftists. That’s what I’m trying to do too, to explain that attraction and persistence, or at least to begin to. Personal history and inheritance, by which I mean genetics, are obviously important to a significant extent. Social psychological research suggests political attitudes might be as much as 40% heritable from our parents. This is a subject that can be attacked from multiple angles, and almost certainly has to be.

So, my basic position is this—and humour me, because I’m still ironing it out. Conservatism, as expressed through the conservative character, is a kind of trauma-response. By that I mean it’s something like a state of learned helplessness, whereby an animal or individual is conditioned to believe it has no agency, for example by being restrained. When the restraints are removed, the animal still believes it’s powerless. Or it might be the result of something like Pavlovian conditioning, wherein a repeated trauma, say an electric shock, gradually conditions an involuntary response in an animal, such as flinching, even when the shock ceases to be delivered. The expectation is enough to elicit the response. And in particular, the conservative character is a trauma-response to decade upon decade of social and political failure.

Without putting too fine a point on it, we should remind ourselves that conservatives have lost every single battle they have fought over the last century, on every single terrain. Any notable victories they’ve won—like Spain, for example—were short-lived and quickly overturned. At best, conservatism is simply a rearguard action that is doomed, in the end, to fail. “What have conservatives ever conserved?” is one quip, and of course it’s true. Try to think of something. Another quip: “In ten years’ time, conservatives will be defending what liberals are promoting today.” Is it unfair though? I don’t think so.

A rearguard action—which leads us nicely on to William F. Buckley. We have many things to thank William F. Buckley for, or so I’m told, but I’d like to thank him for providing the most obviously raped definition of conservatism that’s ever been given: “Standing athwart history yelling STOP!” The image of course suggests a man attempting to straddle a speeding train, but it could just as easily be a small woman screaming “STOP!” as a huge hairy man—perhaps a newly arrived doctor or engineer from Iraq—forces himself upon her and invades her body. No man can stop the progress of history, just as no women, really, can fight off the unwanted advances of a man who’s crossed the whole of Europe and the English Channel in a dinghy with one single purpose in mind.

Rape is, of course, an unpleasant thing, and I don’t mean to trivialise it by comparison. I wanted a harsh metaphor but one that also rings true and actually works as an analogy. I think this does.

I’ve been thinking this way for the better part of a year, but I only started committing my thoughts to screen last week because of Rod Dreher. I consider him to be an archetype of the raped conservative. He’s now calling his friend—now definitely former friend—JD Vance a “von Papen conservative,” because of his supposed embrace of “anti-semitism” and the groyper movement led by Nick Fuentes. Franz von Papen, if you didn’t know, is the German politician who entered a coalition with Hitler and the NSDAP, thinking he could control the soon-to-be dictator. This wasn’t the first time Rod had criticised Vance in a way that looked very much like a public betrayal, but it was certainly the worst—for now.

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I wrote this one for American Greatness, in the immediate aftermath of the murder of British politician Ann Widdecombe two weeks ago.

When I saw the first picture of Joshua Kerry, the man accused of murdering former British MP Anne Widdecombe, I knew without a moment’s hesitation.

“This man is a leftist. The worst kind.”

I said so on X, too.

I’ve got in trouble before for suggesting there’s such a thing as “leftist physiognomy”—a distinctive set of physical features that instantly identify a person as a leftist, especially a radical one—but I’ll happily defend that position, no matter how loud my critics scream and stamp their feet.

The very first hitpiece that was ever written about me, four years ago now, largely focused on comments I had made on a podcast, about leftism as a biological phenomenon. I noted that the Antifa rioters arrested in Portland during the Summer of Floyd were all, to a man, woman and whatever the third thing is they think they are—“hideously ugly, malformed people.” My exact words. Google “Portland Antifa Mugshots” yourself if you don’t believe me. Tell me I’m wrong.

Granted, there are some pretty weird people on the right too, especially on the fringes, but as a rule of thumb I think leftists are an ugly bunch, and it has something to do with the ugliness of their motivations, which include “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialisation,” as the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski described, as well as a “titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful” (Bronze Age Pervert). There’s also some scientific research to back me up. One study showed people rated as better looking were more likely to identify as conservative and Republican, and to feel their actions could influence politics. Another study found that participants consistently rated conservative politicians as more attractive than leftist politicians, and that this translated into more votes, especially in “low-information” elections where voters don’t really know much about the candidate beyond how they look.

Anyway—there had already been some clear indications that the murder of Anne Widdecombe was a political killing before we knew what the man arrested for her killing looked like, or anything much about him. We still don’t know much about him, but I think we know enough to draw some meaningful conclusions.

Widdecombe was about as well known as a right-wing politician could be in the UK. She served for 23 years, from 1987 to 2010, as Conservative MP for Maidstone, occupying cabinet roles in the John Major government, and then shadow cabinet roles under William Hague, in opposition. Always a strong Eurosceptic, she left the Conservatives and joined the Brexit Party, which later became Reform, and was Member of the European Parliament for South West England until 2020. She then served as Reform’s immigration and justice spokeswoman. She was a staunch traditionalist and famously didn’t mince her words or back down from a challenge. She was not ashamed to be anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-law and order, and patriotic. She famously converted to Catholicism in 1993 when the Church of England decided to ordain women.

After retiring from Parliament in 2010, she became a celebrity in her own right, taking her pugnacious character onto the nation’s screens at prime time. She starred in Strictly Come Dancing—our version of Dancing with the Stars—and demonstrated remarkable staying power despite her two left feet, becoming an underdog fan-favourite and surviving for nine weeks on the strength of popular support alone. She was runner-up in Celebrity Big Brother, and featured regularly in a variety of panel shows like Have I Got News for You, Question Time and Loose Women (think The View), as well as documentaries. She even made a cameo in Doctor Who. She toured theatres and wrote books.

It was only natural, given who she was, what she was known for, and the current political climate, that people would immediately suspect a political motive when news broke that she had been violently killed in her own home. The police and the left-wing British government, however, chose to run with a different angle, the “burglary gone wrong.” It wasn’t a totally implausible alternative. Elderly people are killed during burglaries, intentionally or otherwise. Widdecombe was 78. It quickly became clear, however, how self-serving this interpretation was.

A local man was arrested. The police enthusiastically, lingeringly described him as “white” at a press conference: an obvious attempt to dispel rumours Widdecombe was yet another victim of a recent arrival to the country. The Police are increasingly tight-lipped about the ethnicity of crime suspects, for reasons that aren’t hard to guess. Shortly after, the man was released and police said he was no longer a suspect.

The “burglary gone wrong” narrative collapsed when Joshua Kerry was arrested and it was revealed he had probably travelled nearly 300 miles, from Rotherham, in the North of England, to attack her.

Nobody drives 300 miles to “randomly” murder someone. This must have been a targeted attack.

Reform leader Nigel Farage felt confident enough to say last week that Kerry was a “hard-left activist” who “hated anyone with an opposing view” and was “an intolerant individual obsessed with Soviet communism.” There had been rumours communist materials had been found at his home, and internet sleuths dug up evidence Kerry was involved with a political party called “Your Party,” founded by former Labour leader and doctrinaire old-school socialist Jeremy Corbyn. A female member of Kerry’s family, on the very day Widdecombe was killed, had made comments on social media about Farage’s security arrangements and whether they were justified. (Farage has been embroiled in a scandal over a £5 million private gift he has used to pay for increased personal security, among other things. He chose to step down and trigger a by-election in his constituency as a vote of confidence in his fitness as an MP.)

Those comments from Farage were made before it became public knowledge at the weekend, thanks to Britain’s Sun newspaper, that the suspect’s bedroom walls were found covered with news clippings about him. A source from the police told the paper, “The articles on the walls were all about Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, his party and their immigration policies… It would appear he had a profound dislike of the party, its leader and its policies.”

The British government has been largely silent about the case. Farage was right when he also said that if a left-wing politician had been murdered and there was even the suggestion of a political link to the right, it would be 24/7 news and the government wouldn’t stop talking about it. The blame would be pinned directly on him.

That silence, a refusal even to countenance the idea of there being targeted left-wing violence, is bad enough. There are more sinister possibilities. Two days after Kerry’s arrest, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that police had foiled a terror plot against a large Muslim gathering. Twelve men—presumably “right-wing extremists,” because who else would target a large gathering of Muslims?—had been arrested. Mahmood told Parliament the arrests had “undoubtedly saved lives.” But days later the suspects were released and police said they “found no evidence to support anyone being charged with any offences linked to the alleged threat.” Reform’s Shadow Home Secretary, Zia Yusuf, called for Mahmood to resign over the affair, saying she had “misled Parliament” and was a “disgrace.” He stopped short of saying what many others were saying: That the government had cooked up the plot to distract from the Widdecombe case.

Far-fetched? Maybe not. In recent years the British government and intelligence services have taken to stage-managing the public response to traumatic and embarrassing events in an increasingly obvious way. It’s called “controlled spontaneity,” and it’s not unlike what the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service was doing to cover up anti-white murders; for example, the murder of Donald Giusti, who was kicked and stoned to death by a group of Somalis in a park in Maine. The response to the Manchester Arena suicide-bombing is one instance where controlled spontaneity was used to divert attention away from justified outrage at government policies and the presence of Muslim extremists in Britain, towards vapid public expressions of “unity” and forgiveness. Crowds were encouraged to sing the Oasis song, “Don’t look back in anger”—as if anger is an illegitimate response to dozens of children being killed and maimed at a pop concert by a man who should have been left tending goats in a fly-swept village in North Africa.

Police could easily have been told to nab a group of idiots saying edgy things on the internet or WhatsApp. Such people are not in short supply.

The internet was also apparently purged of all references to Joshua Kerry. The left-wing activist group Hope Not Hate—the group that doxxed me in 2024, possibly with the help of the intelligence services—deleted its web page about Anne Widdecombe. The page had described her as “homophobic and sexist,” accusing her of “embracing… dangerous and divisive politics” by joining Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. Thankfully, there’s Internet Archive to preserve exactly what was said. Still: evidence was deliberately being scrubbed.

We need not only speculate. Violence is now, without doubt, a part of British politics, just as it is now, without doubt, a part of American politics. In both cases, the targets are far more likely to be right-wing than left-. Farage, as Britain’s most prominent right-wing politician, has borne the brunt so far, not only of the standard rhetoric—Nazi, fascist, racist, etc.—but also of physical attacks in public. He’s been “milkshaked”—had a milkshake thrown over him—multiple times. In 2019, obese comedienne Jo Brand said, on the BBC, that she would have preferred if someone had thrown acid over Farage instead. “Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?” she said.

The BBC decided, somehow, that her comments were not incitement to violence.

It’s not hard to see where this is going—where it has already led, if the murder of Ann Widdecombe is indeed a political killing. It’s exactly the same process that led to three attempts on the life of President Trump, the murder of Charlie Kirk, an attempt by a transgender man to kill Scott Bessent and burn down the Heritage Foundation, an attempt to kill a Supreme Court justice at his home, vehicle attacks on ICE agents and ambushes outside detention centres…

In the US, at least, you have a right-wing government that’s in a position to confront the problem of left-wing violence and actually do something about it. The Department of Justice and the State Department are finally coming to life to tackle the radical left at home and abroad. The conviction of an Antifa terror cell in Texas that attacked an immigration facility has provided a strong precedent for pursuing other cells and putting their members in prison for hundreds of years. Last week, Marco Rubio held a meeting with foreign representatives of around 70 countries to discuss the threat of transnational left-wing terrorism. In a remarkable speech at the conference, Rubio called leftism a “revolt of the worst against the best; of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”

“It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, cannot create, cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can,” Rubio said.

“It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, liberation; an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and right, on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness, and have nothing else to offer the world.”

The speech could have been written by me—or by someone who reads my Tweets.

In the UK, by contrast, the left remains in power and probably will remain in power until 2029, which is the earliest a general election has to be called. A new Labour Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, was installed this week, without contest, and he’s brought radical leftists, including former members of Hope Not Hate, into Downing Street with him. A member of the Muslim Council of Great Britain too. The right is still on the outside, looking in. Nigel Farage could lose his seat, and even if he regains it, he will be subject to further measures from the “Donald Trump playbook.” Reputation destruction, spurious investigations, lawfare, harassment by the media and activists. And always the possibility of that other thing too, stalking his every move.

It’s going to be a long three years.

There are only two things that scare me, dear reader, and one of them is nuclear war.

The other? Carnies. Circus folk. Nomads, you know. Smell like cabbage. Small hands.

Truth be told, I’m actually not scared of nuclear war—I was born in 1987, barely two years before the Wall fell—and it’s a long time since I’ve been anywhere near a circus.

Here are some things that do scare me. I’m not one for enclosed spaces, and I have a recurring nightmare about being forced to watch people eat with their mouths open, smacking their lips and sending half-chewed fragments of food spinning through the air and into my face. I wake up in a cold sweat every time. Worst of all, though, by far, is the fear that I myself might never be able to eat meat again. I shudder just to think of it.

I first came across the terrifying prospect of a “meat allergy”—an allergic inability to consume red meat—when I was researching my 2022 book, The Eggs Benedict Option. The book was about the plan for a global plant-based diet, and naturally I discovered some rather daft suggestions about how we’d get there: how millions upon millions of meat-eaters would be persuaded to give up their beloved steak, pork chops and bacon for the good of the planet. Or not. After all, why go to all the effort of persuading people if you can just take the decision out of their hands entirely?

I found a video of a Princeton bioethicist called S. Matthew Liao speaking at some globalist shindig in 2016. He suggested we could all be given gene therapy to make us allergic to meat, just like a natural allergy transmitted by tick bites. Problem solved. Liao also suggested gene therapy might be used to shrink us by about 25%, to reduce our carbon footprint, quite literally.

The condition Liao referred to, I soon learned, is “alpha-gal syndrome,” named after a sugar molecule that’s found only in red meat—beef, pork, lamb. A bite from a lone-star tick introduces a compound into the blood that resembles alpha-gal enough to sensitize the immune system to it. The tick gets a tasty little feast of blood, and you end up being unable to eat meat ever again. When you eat meat, your body suffers an allergic reaction. It can be so severe you die.

In fact, in 2024 there was the first recorded case of a death from alpha-gal syndrome. A 47-year-old man from New Jersey collapsed and died within hours of eating a hamburger. After an autopsy proved inconclusive, his wife went to experts at the University of Virginia’s medical school, who tested blood samples. They found the victim had been sensitized to alpha-gal, and that he had died from an extreme allergic reaction. The wife then revealed her husband had suffered a dozen or so bites on his ankles from ticks that summer. Case closed.

There’s since been a second confirmed death, in Australia.

We’ve only known about alpha-gal syndrome since the early 2000s, thanks to the testing of a cancer-drug called cetuximab. Researchers were able to show a link with the lone-star tick, and also to identify cases that stretched back into the 1990s in the southeastern US, where the tick flourishes. They identified anecdotal reports dating back even earlier, to the 1980s, including in Australia.

The CDC estimates as many as 500,000 Americans could have alpha-gal syndrome. The vast majority, of course, won’t have a diagnosis. In truth, the number is likely to be much larger.

New research suggests as many as 1 in 4 adults in some states carry antibodies for alpha-gal.

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It’s become a commonplace of social-media health talk: “I went on holiday to Europe [from America] and all I did was eat croissants / gelato / pasta / bread etc. for a fortnight and still I lost 10 pounds! What’s wrong with the food in America!?”

There is something wrong with the food in America. The food is better in Europe. It’s not just that Europe has deeper food traditions and the use of fresh local ingredients still remains the norm, but also that food is regulated in a different way. Americans do things with food and to food that can’t be done in Europe. Take additives, for example. In the EU, there are around 2,000 additives licensed for use in food. In the US—nobody knows. The FDA’s “Generally Recognised As Safe” (“GRAS”) pathway has allowed food-makers to create new additives, declare that they’re safe and introduce them to the food supply without even telling the FDA. This has been happening since 1958. Insane—there’s no other word for it.

Even so, things aren’t perfect over here. Far from it. Just like in America, agriculture and the food system in Europe are subject to power, money and the influence of corporate interests. That influence is only growing. A recent exposé in The Guardian provided a valuable window onto exactly how these corporate groups get what they want, which in this case was blocking “some of the most sweeping farming reforms in EU history, including a plan to cut pesticide use in half.”

You’ve probably never heard of Copa Cogeca. I hadn’t, and I’m supposed to be a health expert (forgive me). According to The Guardian, “Copa Cogeca describes itself as the voice of 22 million farmers across the continent, and enjoys unrivalled access to EU lawmakers. It has even been described as a ‘partner in policymaking.’

Copa “swung into action…when the EU launched plans for radical farming reforms in 2020 in response to concerns about climate breakdown and the nature crisis.”

By February 2021, the group had “set out its lobbying strategy.”

“Dozens of documents recording internal Copa Cogeca meetings, obtained by Grilled—an investigative journalism project focused on food systems—and the Guardian give a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the lobbying firm.”

The exposé is something of a mixed bag. It shows the lobbying group fighting against what I would consider to be harmful climate-change-focused policies like cutting red-meat consumption—policies I want farmers to fight against, for their sake and for the sake of our health—while also attempting to stifle new regulations on pesticide use, which I’m very much in favour of. Lobbying like this is, at best, a mixed blessing, and at worst a nightmare.

Copa were particularly worried about the EU’s goal of cutting pesticide use by half, to protect biodiversity, especially bees and insects. The group’s main strategy was to delay.

“The European parliament elections are in 2024,” a note from September 2022 states.

“Perhaps it is worth delaying until then. We must force the [European] Commission to abandon its objectives.”

In order to bog the EU down, Copa demanded a fresh impact assessment for the policy, which took six months to complete. When the EU then released an official report on the policy, Copa described it as “offensive” and presented EU ambassadors with its own privately commissioned research into the economic impacts of the policy. The ambassadors “showed understanding,” the group recorded in a set of minutes.

The safety licence for the pesticide glyphosate was also due to elapse, and the group was worried it might not be renewed. Glyphosate is the most widely used pesticide in the US and has been linked to a range of harms from reproductive issues to cancer. Bayer, one of the main manufacturers of glyphosate-based herbicides, has already settled billions of dollars of claims for illness caused by its Roundup products, and faces thousands more claims and billions more dollars in payouts. Copa told its members to pressurise their local representatives to ensure the licence was renewed.

It was.

Eventually, the pesticide regulation was withdrawn altogether, a few months short of the 2024 elections. The EU is now also considering removing periodic safety reassessments for pesticides that are already licensed for use.

Thomas Waitz, a Green MEP from Austria who sits on the agriculture committee, told The Guardian, “Copa Cogeca focused on sabotaging, delaying and ultimately killing the sustainable use of pesticides regulation. They are acting in the interest of large agrichemical multinationals and against the wellbeing of small and medium farmers.”

Otherwise, the report shows Copa fighting against policies aimed at reducing red-meat consumption (good), and also pushing to redefine what a factory farm is (not good).

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An unjammable fibre-optic kamikaze drone—a drone you fly directly into a target to kill it—was recently discovered in a cartel compound, 500 miles from the US border. You probably won’t have heard about this, but it’s big news. Or it should be.

It’s yet another indication of how closely drug gangs are coming to resemble state or quasi-state actors, not just in the territories they control and administer, but in the threat they pose to real states, including the US. The classic definition of the state, derived from sociologist Max Weber, is an entity that monopolizes violence within a set of given borders. And while the cartels have been using military-grade equipment like .50 calibre machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades for some time, their determined attempts to acquire the latest drone capabilities reveal a greater ambition: to achieve technological and tactical parity with second- and maybe even first-tier nations.

The kamikaze drone in question was discovered by accident, when the Mexican military searched a property in Dolores del Rio. The authorities had been alerted to possible criminal activity at the address, and when they arrived, they discovered the usual paraphernalia—bombs, guns, ammunition—associated with cartel violence. But they also discovered a weapon that, until now, has been entirely confined to warzones and to one warzone in particular.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that South American drug cartels and paramilitaries have been paying close attention to Ukraine, where drones are revolutionising warfare in a way that even a hobbyist with a 3D printer and a chip on his shoulder can replicate. Cheap, mass-produceable weapons can be used to destroy tanks and other equipment worth tens of millions of dollars; to eliminate entire squads of soldiers single-handedly, on the battlefield or before they even arrive on it, as they sit huddled in the back of an armoured-personnel carrier; to assassinate important military and civilian leaders; or to strike deep behind enemy lines, crippling vital military, energy and communications infrastructure.

We see evidence of the brutal effectiveness of drones, often from their direct perspective (“FPV” or “first-person view”), in videos on social media, every day. As much as anything else, these videos serve as propaganda and statements of intent: to show Ukraine is still very much in the fight, and that nobody and nowhere is safe from a technology that continues to evolve at a frightening pace.

In the early stages of the war, which began in the spring of 2022, drones weren’t that important, but as the war has progressed—it’s now been going on for longer than World War I—the drone has become its signature weapon, and especially that of the battered but unbowed underdog.

Ukraine is producing millions of drones annually. The target for 2026 is between five and seven million. It’s estimated around 9,000 are deployed a day, for short-range missions over the battlefield zone, but also, increasingly, for long-range strikes far beyond Russia’s western borders. New one-way drones—drones that aren’t intended to return to sender—can travel up to 2,000 km, which puts targets in Siberia, including air bases that house Russia’s nuclear bombers, well within their range. In June of 2026, drones conducted close to 2,400 deep-strike missions in Russia.

President Zelensky’s latest “influence operation” to bring Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table within 40 days is built on targeted drone strikes against critical infrastructure that previously were off-limits, either for fear of escalation or because Ukraine lacked the ability to hit them.

The strategy appears to be working. There are fuel shortages in Russia and widespread popular anger as Russians discover that their strongman leader can no longer do what every strongman leader must: keep his own people safe.

In the crucible of war—perhaps the ultimate testing-ground and incubator of rapid innovation—the drone continues to adapt. Wireless technology, for example, has given way to wiring—miles and miles of fibre-optic cable in a spool on the back of the drone—so that it can’t be jammed by electronic countermeasures. The Ukrainians are also integrating AI targeting, allowing drones greater autonomy on the battlefield and deploying them in massed “swarms” that are almost impossible to eliminate before they hit their target.

The cartels haven’t just been watching from afar, mouths agape, like you or I. In July 2025, it was reported that cartel soldiers were being sent to Ukraine to join the “international brigades” of foreign volunteers specifically so they could learn the very latest techniques in drone-warfare. Ukraine may very well be the only country whose military offers a comprehensive training curriculum in every aspect of drone-warfare, from their and deployment, to piloting and “real-time battlefield coordination.”

Website Defense News reported, “The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) launched a joint investigation with military intelligence after Mexico’s National Intelligence Center warned in early summer that Mexican volunteers had joined Ukraine’s foreign fighter units specifically to acquire first-person view drone capabilities. The probe has since expanded to include Colombian nationals, raising concerns about Ukraine’s inadvertent role as a training ground for transnational criminal organizations…

“The investigation centers on several Spanish-speaking units within the International Legion, particularly the tactical group ‘Ethos,’ operating in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions. Ukrainian investigators reportedly suspect that some Mexican and Colombian volunteers intentionally sought placement in drone operator units to later use this training in the service of foreign criminal organizations.

“One noteworthy case is that of a Mexican national operating under the alias ‘Águila-7,’ who registered in March 2024 using fraudulent Salvadoran documentation. Posing as a humanitarian volunteer, he completed comprehensive drone training in Lviv while demonstrating exceptional technical expertise that eventually had instructors suspicious.”

Águila-7 demonstrated “extensive technical knowledge,” including familiarity with “electronic warfare countermeasures and thermal detection avoidance.” Background checks suggested he had been a member of Mexico’s GAFE special forces, many of whom end up working for the cartels, which offer much better pay and regular bloody work.

Members of Colombia’s FARC guerrillas were also discovered among the international brigades. They had apparently travelled to Ukraine with forged Panamanian and Venezuelan papers. Further investigation revealed a sophisticated pan-Latin-American operation, where private-security firms obtained fake papers and coordinated the “placement,” via front companies, of cartel and guerrilla operatives in Ukraine.

An SBU official is quoted as saying, “We welcome volunteers in good faith. But we must now recognize that Ukraine has become a platform for the global dissemination of FPV tactics. Some come here to learn how to kill with a $400 drone, then sell this knowledge elsewhere to the highest bidder.”

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I promised myself I would not write about The Odyssey.

“Charles,” that little voice in my head began to say, “there is absolutely nothing of value to be written about that cursed film, certainly not in an opinion piece. Enough ink has already been spilled, enough Tweets have already been Tweeted, including paid sponsorships dispensed from a hasbara fund so deep it would make even our man in Tel Aviv swoon from vertigo. Just leave it be.”

After a brief pause, the homunculus piloting my meat-suit continued: “Remember: You’ve posted the hilarious memes and called her Helen of Detroit—for which you received furious copyright strikes from the film studio—and you’ve also offered compelling analysis of why the film is not a ‘Trojan Horse” expertly crafted to smuggle an anti-woke message into the very heart of Hollywood’s wokest of wokes. People can figure out for themselves that a guy like Jonathan Pageau—the sort of theory-obsessed blowhard who can’t read a menu without pontificating about the symbolism of the entrees in Leviticus—is just talking out of his French-Canadian trou du cul. (Yes, you could make a Troy joke there, but don’t.)

“Leave it be. The idiots will see the film in IMAX and order the special Elliott Page popcorn bucket, then post their glowing reviews on Reddit for updoots. The sensible ones with an ounce of self-respect will stay at home and watch the superlative Armand Assante made-for-TV adaptation instead. Do something better with your time, Charles. You are better than that.”

And, you know what? The tiny dude what lives in my head was right. I am better than that. I’m not going to waste any time writing about the latest big-budget attempt to subvert Western civilization and justify infinity mass immigration. I’m going to write about something that really does matter. And what’s more, it’s going to be something that otherwise wouldn’t get the attention it deserves.

So here goes.

This week we were told the State Department is going to start charging green-card applicants a $100,000 bond for their applications. This is a good thing. Very smart. The Trump admin is doing lots of smart things at the moment—if we can agree to put Iran to one side, and I hope we will.

Spokesman Tommy Pigott said the Trump admin is considering the move to ensure immigrants are “financially self-sufficient” and “contribute to our society more than they take from it.”

“We are working closely with the Department of Homeland Security to introduce commonsense and effective procedures to enforce U.S. laws, restore the integrity of our immigration system, and protect American public benefits programs from the financial burden of foreigners who arrive with major expensive medical or other needs,” Pigott said in a statement to The Hill.

“As part of this comprehensive initiative, the Department is exploring the use of a long-standing legal authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to require certain visa applicants—those who are otherwise ineligible for a visa because they are likely become a public charge—to post a bond as a way to demonstrate they have access to the funds needed to support themselves,” he added.

The $100,000 fee for green-card applicants will be a steep increase on current charges. The money will be collected from individuals or family members in the US and then returned at a later date.

According to The Hill, “The traditional green-card application fee depends on the specific category and whether the applicant is applying from inside or outside the U.S.

“The standard filing fee for Form I-485 is $1,440 for those applying within the country, but those who need to apply for a work permit and travel documents incur additional fees unless filed concurrently under specific conditions.

“A $325 DS-260 visa application fee is traditionally paid by those applying from outside of the U.S. through the Department of State’s online Consular Electronic Application Center portal.

“The payment is followed by a $235 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services immigrant fee to process their packet and produce their card after the visa is approved.”

A similar bond system has been introduced for visa applicants from over 50 African countries, who now have to put up a minimum of $15,000 to come to the US. If they don’t leave, the money is forfeit. Needless to say, applications for visas from Malawi and Zambia and 48 other nowhere countries are down considerably.

This new green-card fee will have an even greater deterrent effect, and applications for permanent residency will tumble.

The Trump admin’s pivot to a quietly-quietly approach when it comes to immigration, of which these new visas rules are just the latest example, is already working nicely. Not long ago, I wrote about the closing of a major immigration loophole by the Citizenship and Immigration Service, a loophole that has been used to grant citizenship to millions of immigrants. The “Adjustment of Status” pathway allows permanent citizenship to be granted to immigrants without leaving the country to apply. Although this was authorized by Congress in the 1950s, it was intended only as an “administrative grace” in very special cases. Closing that loophole now means millions more immigrants could effectively be barred from obtaining permanent citizenship.

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In my latest book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, I equate the Ancient Greek notion of thymos, often translated as “spiritedness,” with testosterone, the master male hormone. This equation is central to my argument about liberalism as a distinctive hormonal environment; indeed, I think all societies and political systems have uni…

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“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”

That’s a rather more concise way of expressing “Chesterton’s Fence”: a principle that urges us to exercise caution before we sweep away institutions, practices, buildings and structures without fully understanding why they came to exist in the first place.

The fence is a homely example, befitting the great fat man himself, but real-world instances have been devastating and tragic and anything but quaint.

Take China’s “Four Pests” campaign, begun under Chairman Mao in the late 1950s. In the name of maximising agricultural output, farmers were encouraged to massacre sparrows wherever they were found, since they eat grain. Less grain, lower yields—no Great Leap Forward. But when the sparrow population collapsed as intended, insects like locusts ravaged the crops. Famine ensued. Millions died.

The humble sparrow, it turned out, played an important role in keeping insects and other pests in check, a role that more than balanced the annoyance of a bit of lost grain.

These days, if I reach for an example to illustrate Chesterton’s fence, I might reach not for Chairman Mao and his little birds but for breastfeeding. Breastmilk is the natural food for babies and infants, a food perfectly suited to a young child’s nutritional needs, and what’s more, it’s free. Mothers produce as much as is needed, for as long as needed. Yes, a very small minority of women have trouble producing breastmilk, and some children, including the author, have trouble latching on, for one reason or another; but these are problems that can easily be remedied with breast-milk exchanges and bottlefeeding. In short, there’s no good reason why every child shouldn’t be fed with breastmilk.

That didn’t stop corporate food makers from selling mothers a product—baby formula—that they didn’t and don’t need. For decades, formula has been sold as a safe, healthy alternative to breastmIlk right from the get-go, as soon as baby is born. In fact, it’s often been marketed as a superior choice to breastfeeding, not just for baby’s health, but also for mum too—especially if she’s a busy professional who’s short on patience and time.

Today, about 15% of American babies are never breastfed, and the majority—around 70%—have their feed supplemented with formula during the first six months. Generally, rates of formula use are highest in the Developed World, but the Developing World is catching up fast. Global formula sales have more than doubled since the year 2000.

Over the same period, more and more research has revealed exactly what formula-fed children miss out on. We know that breastfed children tend to have higher IQs and significantly lower incidence of allergic conditions than children who go without. Breastmilk supplies nutritional compounds, including vital immune factors and sugars that encourage the growth of healthy bacterial strains in the gut, that no shop-bought formula can replicate; although smart-Alecs are now trying to create “lab-grown breastmilk” in bioreactors, an endeavour that will also fail.

In truth though, there are still plenty of things we don’t understand—or are only beginning to understand—about breastfeeding and its importance to children’s development.

A new study shows that breastfeeding may have help infants develop self-control, by giving them regular training in recognising when they’re full. This training translates to other impulses and behaviour—to what researchers call “executive function”—and may have long-term ramifications, including reduced likelihood of overeating and obesity.

Researchers have known for some time that early childhood is a key period in habit-formation and the development of self-regulation. Until now, the role of breastfeeding in those processes had been unclear.

It was hypothesised that breastfeeding might play a role in the emergence of self-control, because babies take the lead. When bottlefeeding, mothers have a visual guide to how much has been consumed—the amount of liquid in the bottle—and may encourage their babies to finish the contents even when they’re full. Bottlefed babies may consistently be trained to overeat. By contrast, when mothers breastfeed, there is no visual guide. They must wait until their babies choose to stop.

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In my book, The Eggs Benedict Option (2022), I argued that our “plant-based future” would not arrive on the back of government meat bans, as many people fear.

For one thing, meat bans—and bans on animal products more generally—would be just too unpopular, and governments do have to pay attention to what people think, even as they try to manipulate it and “manufacture consent,” to borrow a phrase from Noam Chomsky, Satan torment his soul.

Among other evidence, I cited a poll from Australia that showed something like 75% of all men would rather lose five years off their life—it might have been ten actually—rather than give up their beloved steaks and ribs and pork chops. Quite right too. I’d probably go further and say I’d rather not live at all.

Market research shows people don’t want to give up red meat and eggs and dairy products, at least not given a free choice. This has been reflected in the dismal failure of “alternative protein” brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger, which have had billions of dollars pumped into their hype campaigns, replete with celebrity endorsements and warm pats on the back for consumers—but still nobody wants to eat them. This lack of interest was on show hilariously during the pandemic, when meat products were cleared from supermarket shelves, leaving full rows of untouched “plant-based” burgers, shrivelled soy sausages and vegan “cheese.” In 2019, Beyond Meat shares were trading at more than $200. Now they’re about $0.66, which is about 66 cents more than they’re worth.

Companies that sell these products have been forced to pivot. Hard. Many have completely changed their marketing. If you saw Oatly’s appalling “Help Dad” campaign from a few years back, you’ll know exactly what I mean. A tragically unhip father enters a darkened kitchen late at night and heads for the fridge to grab an ice-cold glass of cow’s milk. A light turns on, illuminating a face in the corner of the room. “Well, well, well. What do we have here?” Broccoli hair and an unheimlich visage—it’s the poor father’s Zoomer son…

Consumer research says this is a better strategy. Instead of trying to convince people your ungodly slurry of oat-protein, vegetable oil, texturisers, flavorings and preservatives is a kind of milk that’s every bit as nutritious and tasty as the real thing, you make them feel ashamed to want the real thing in the first place. You tell them it’s destroying the planet and they have the full disapproval of all right-thinking people, especially the younger members of their family—and Bob’s your uncle, people are more inclined to plump for the plant-based option. Manipulation, pure and simple. The choice still remains, at least formally, but the guilty conscience and our wormish desire to be good and liked does the rest.

There are other means of manipulation, too. During the pandemic, our betters praised the supply-chain disruptions and price inflation as a spur to necessary “behavioural change.” An op-ed from The New York Times sticks out in my mind for the brazenness with which it pursued this angle. “You want to buy meat? In this economy?” was the headline.

“Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat,” the author, Annaliese Griffin, wrote, as millions of Americans were struggling to put food on the table.

“While hunger and food insecurity are a very real problem in the United States and globally, middle- and upper-class Americans still have more choices at the grocery store than perhaps any food shoppers in history. Climate change has motivated some to eat less resource-intensive meat and more vegetables, grains and legumes, but this movement has not reached the scale necessary to bring needed change—yet.”

Griffin even praised the 1917 Lever Act, which gave the wartime government the power to requisition food to prevent hoarding…

As I said, though, I don’t think it will come to that. Governments, including the British government, which is committed to reducing meat consumption, do float the idea of things like carbon taxes to “offset” carbon emissions for “polluting” products, but again, I think these are more likely to be last-resort measures than first choice. There are plenty of other ways that people can be dissuaded or prevented from eating animal products, and what’s more the general public doesn’t even have to know what’s going on. One day they just wake up and meat is too expensive to have for supper, so they eat something else.

One way involves allowing the infrastructure that supports animal farming to decay.

Just last week, I saw an article in Farmers Guide, “the UK’s leading monthly farming magazine,” about the state of abattoirs in the country. Abattoirs—slaughterhouses­—are closing here at a rate of 10% a year. Back in the 1970s, there were 2,500 abattoirs in the UK. Now there are fewer than 200, and numbers are still falling.

It’s not hard to imagine what the effects of continuing closures might be. Certainly it will affect the price of meat—livestock will have to be transported further for slaughter—but it’s also likely to reduce the availability of meat full stop. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has warned that 43% of farmers would stop selling their meat locally if their abattoir closed.

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Is the looksmaxxer a morality tale for our time—a sort of Hogarthian parable about everything, or at least some of the main things, that ail us as a society in 2026?

After all, could there be a greater indictment of the vanity of the vainest society in history than a young man who devotes his entire waking life to improving his appearance, and not only that, documents every second on camera for a legion of adoring fans and imitators? An otherwise perfectly handsome, fortunate young man obsessing so much over his looks that he spends a portion of each day hitting his face with a small rock hammer, including when he’s out at nightclubs? (That’s “bonesmashing,” by the way, a practice that’s supposed to encourage the growth of bone tissue in the cheeks and jaw, providing further shape and contour to the face, for a more masculine hunter-gatherer-type look.)

There are other, darker, interpretations of looksmaxxing. There’s one, for example, that situates it at a biological level, as a kind of morbid symptom of prosperity and the aimlessness that comes with it. I’m not the only one who’s seen clear parallels between the rise of looksmaxxers and the so-called “mouse utopia” experiment conducted by John Calhoun. Mice were allowed to reproduce for generations in a controlled setting absent the threat of predation and in which all their basic needs—food, water—were catered for lavishly. After a certain number of generations of normal reproduction, things took a very strange turn. Among the wealth of sudden bizarre manifestations was a class of mice Calhoun dubbed “the Beautiful Ones.” These mice would obsessively clean and spruce themselves all day long. They did nothing else. They had no interest even in reproduction: only in themselves and the perfection of their image.

The implication: Freed from the struggle for life that has defined all living creatures since they crawled from the primordial soup, mice stop functioning properly. The mechanisms that allowed them to adapt, survive and reproduce no longer prove adaptive or tend to reproduction. In fact, they prove fatal.

And maybe humans too. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, wrote similar things about modern man and his “surrogate activities,” pastimes that offer no real compelling substitute for the genuine struggles of life but are the only avenue for fulfilment left today. Man essentially drives himself to distraction, in whatever way he can, because that’s all there is left to do.

Certainly, looking at looksmaxxing’s current poster-boy Clavicular—real name: Braden Eric Peters, age: 20—it’s hard not to ask: How is this going to end? “Badly” seems to be the near-universal answer. After achieving exit velocity in mere weeks and months, he now appears to be coming back down to earth equally fast.

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This is a long essay I wrote back in 2024 for American Mind, before Donald Trump won the presidency.

“Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online,” ran a headline at the Associated Press a week ago. “They al…

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“This is one of the mo…

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