Gad Saad on Cancel Culture, Idea Pathogens and the Future of Discourse

Gad Saad on Cancel Culture, Idea Pathogens and the Future of Discourse - Newsweek

Gad Saad's escape from Lebanon as an 11-year-old set the stage for a life that would eventually combine psychology, politics and scathing Twitter takedowns of his critics. A Canadian Lebanese evolutionary psychologist, professor, host of the YouTube show The Saad Truth and the author of a new book called The Parasitic Mind, Saad's main mission is to combat what he calls "idea pathogens," or omnipresent wokeness, by another name. Known to his fans affectionately as "the Gadfather," and often battling his critics on Twitter with a blend of satire and data, Saad first became interested in the work he's doing when he saw topics becoming taboo in his professional home in science...

Newsweek: Your background is really interesting. How does it influence your work?

Gad Saad: I was born in Beirut, Lebanon. We were part of the last group of Lebanese Jews who had steadfastly refused to leave Lebanon. But when the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975—the Lebanese civil war is the standard by which all butchery is measured against—it became impossible to remain in Lebanon. So we were there for the first year of the civil war, and then luckily we were able to escape to Canada.

The most direct way it [shapes my work] is that it allowed me to see what happens to a society that is instantiating a perfect ethos of identity politics. In Lebanon, everything is defined by identity politics. In this case, it was your religious heritage. There's an internal card in Lebanon, which basically is like an internal passport that states, very prominently, your religion. And if you were Jewish, they didn't even write "Jewish," they wrote "Israelite." So it even creates greater animus against you, even though you've got nothing to do with Israel and you're Lebanese. So I saw what identity politics does to a society, and to now see it lauded as a wonderful way to organize society 45 years after I left Lebanon is quite disheartening.

There's a debate now about who is allowed to speak about what. Your background allows you, in a way, to speak to our current moment. But do you agree with the idea that you need to have experienced something in order to have an opinion on it?

No. People can analyze the Holocaust, even though they didn't go through it. Oncologists study cancer even though they've never suffered from it. On some matters, of course, your lived experience adds one data point to the total narrative. I think in my case, the fact that I do hold the highest hand in victimology poker, or the gold medal in oppression Olympics, makes it more difficult for the enemies of reason to use the woke calculus against me. And so I use that against them, in a somewhat sardonic way, but in a very effective way, because they don't actually listen to the veracity of your arguments. Instead, whoever has the greater victimhood wins, and the reality is it's going to be very tough for most people to defeat me. And so they end up losing using their grotesque calculus. And so in that sense, I am pleased to have had my lived experience because it allows me to defeat the idiots.

On the whole, what are you trying to accomplish?

I'm trying to avoid that which has been tried in previous societies and failed. I'm trying to make people understand the anomalous reality that the West was able to create. I say "anomalous" because, in the history of human civilization, it's a complete outlier that we've had the types of societies that we're able to create in the West. This is not the default value. So to have found the magic recipe where freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and the scientific method and all the other wonderful things that the West has offered us, are allowed to flourish, and to now see it being thrown away under the cloak of the progressive robe is very galling to me. It upsets me, it angers me. I become righteously, I think, indignant. So I'm trying to offer people, if I may use the terms, a vaccine against the brain parasites that have absolutely infected the minds of Westerners.

Was there a specific moment that you decided to get into this? What was the thing that pushed you over the edge?

I guess it started in my scientific work. In my scientific work, I apply evolutionary psychology and the behavioral sciences in general, and in consumer behavior in particular. And for most social scientists, the idea that we would use biology to explain human behavior is really heretical. "Surely, Doctor Saad, you're not saying that the same mechanisms that explain the behavior of my dog and the zebra and the mosquito explain consumer behavior. That's grotesque, Doctor Saad." Of course that's silly, because we don't somehow exist outside of our biology. We don't exist in a supra plane, where our biological heritage ceased to matter or exist. And so I started seeing these tensions to view some ideas as heretical in my scientific world. "Don't discuss sex differences—that's sexist." "The fact that Arianna Grande bench presses less than the center for the Dallas Cowboys is only because her parents taught her to play gently with dolls and taught Bubba to really play aggressively with his blue truck." Surely you don't think there might be any hormonal physiological, anatomical, behavioral, differences across the two sexes. And so at first, I was bewildered by this. So it started by being something that was being fought only within the hallways of academia and the fancy peer-reviewed journals. But then the idea pathogens escaped and started infecting every nook and cranny of society. And so then I took my fight from the typical environment, which I fought in academia, and I started going public. And as my platform grew, my voice grew, and I took on more and more sacred cows.

Do you think that, in the West, America's rightful embrace of civil rights, and anything that looks like civil rights, has led people to take on a lot of these ideologies?

In The Parasitic Mind, I have an entire chapter on thinking vs. feeling. It's a false dichotomy, which is why I refer to it as a form of epistemological dichotomania. To always try to create two mutually exclusive realities. We are either thinking animals or feeling animals. Well that's perfectly incorrect: We are both. What matters, as I explain, is when do you activate the right system? For example, when I'm walking down a dark alley and I see four young men who look suspicious and are loitering around, I'm going to get an affective-based response: My heart will start racing; my blood pressure will go up; I might start perspiring. That affective response makes perfect evolutionary sense. On the other hand, if I'm trying to solve a calculus problem, all of the affective response in the world is not going to help me solve that calculus problem. I need to trigger my cognitive system, my thinking system. A fully grown mature adult recognizes that the world is made up of cost benefits, it's made up of trade-offs, opportunity costs, competing interests. That's what happens when you grow into adulthood. People have this very kind of infantile view.… The maladaptive empathetically progressive, really view the world through only a feelings lens.

The term cancel culture gets thrown around all the time. What do you think of the criticism that cancel culture is overblown and it's not real, and there's nothing to fight against?

It's insane to argue that. I have a chapter called Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome.The metaphor is now well understood as, there's no way you're going to accept reality. When there have been 36,000-plus terror attacks in nearly 70 countries since 9/11, and nearly every single one of those terrorists will state exactly why they are committing the act, and they will quote the exact passage from their religion about why they're committing the act. The super progressive and smart Westerners who analyze the situation say, "No no no, it's not because of what they said. It's because of beard bullying. It's because of climate change, it's because of lack of solar panels. It's because they weren't exposed sufficiently to art; if they'd only been enriched by art, they would've known better. It's because of lone-wolfism. They're alienated. So that's what ostrich parasitic syndrome is. Don't believe your lying eyes. How many more examples does one need of cancel culture before you think it's real? I recently spoke at the Jewish Public Library—so if you want to appreciate the singularity point of wokeness, here it is: The Lebanese Jew who escaped execution in the Middle East is trying to be deplatformed by progressive Jews from speaking at the Jewish Public Library. I mean, we've hit the singularity point. It's impenetrable to reach such people. There is no amount of evidence I can offer you that can convince you that this is serious. I receive innumerable emails where people testify to me—because I've become sort of the grand confessor—where people write to me from all over the world, saying well here's my situation, professor Saad.

Here's a typical one: "My adviser just found out that I said something complimentary about Donald Trump. Now he's removed my name from a paper I've been working on for a very long time and it looks like I'm going to be kicked out of the lab." That wasn't from Yemen, that wasn't from North Korea, that wasn't from Communist China. So how many people need to be deplatformed before you actually take it seriously?. I think it's a very serious problem, because it has normalized the reflex of people saying, "I don't like what you might say, cancel him." Even if not a single person were actually canceled, the fact that people are emboldened to view this as a viable strategy, therein lies the problem. Twenty years ago, you didn't have that reflex, because the zeitgeist was: We live in a free society. Today we don't have that zeitgeist. so it's a profoundly serious problem, it's a terminal illness.

In your book you say, "The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible." So when you point to someone as a racist or a homophobe, you shut down the conversation because it's impossible to prove you are not one of those things. What is your advice for people who are looking to engage in tough subjects but are continuously getting shut down by those accusations?

Using satire effectively is a very very powerful way to stay ahead of those possible accusations, because what you're basically doing is using satire in a very trenchant way. In the way a surgeon's scalpel cuts through warm butter, it cuts through the nonsense. For example, sometimes when I receive a compliment on my book, I'll look at the person on Twitter and if they are white, I'll retweet it and say, "It looks like you are a white person, I'm trying to decolonize my Twitter feed for the purposes of equity and systemic racism. Only accepting compliments from noble people of color." How come I can't be canceled? Because I have literally replicated the exact structure of the argument. By the way, that's why satirists are the first to be executed in regimes. We don't go after the guys with the big muscles when we are dictators, because the guys with the big muscles are easy to control. But the guys with the sharp tongue and the big brain—those are the ones you have to get rid of.

It's hard to offer complete advice that is applicable to every person. But the general advice is you need to activate your inner honey badger. The honey badger is a a very small animal, and yet it can withstand an approach by six adult lions. It means be fierce in the commitment to defend your first principles. I will stand in a ring with anybody to defend an idea that I know I can defend. When I don't know enough about a subject, I will tell you frankly I don't know enough so i'm uncomfortable making a pronouncement. What people have to do is develop the intestinal fortitude and the cerebral fortitude to have the ability to defend the principle of presumption of innocence. I don't emote louder than you, I don't get hysterical, I don't cancel you. I say, "Let me convince you with a preponderance of data."

Do you believe that there is a silent majority against cancel culture that thinks these ideas are absurd. And if you do, do you think they'll be a backlash soon that's larger than anything we've seen so far?

It depends what the population is that you're looking at. In academia, the majority are the proliferators of the idea pathogens. The rate of Democrat professors to Republican professors in American universities is astoundingly lopsided. But if we say that the population is the entire U.S., not the intelligentsia, then it is absolutely the case that the silent majority is not made up of the blue-haired people.

But I analogize it in this way: When you look at the 9/11 terror attacks, it didn't take 19 million people to bring down the twin towers, it didn't take 190 million people to bring down the twin towers, it took 19 terrorists. But then there were a whole bunch of other people who supported their cause. It's a similar dynamic in academia. There are very very few ultra-rabid blue-haired people on campus, but there are enough of them to keep the rest of us in check. In a sense, that's why Donald Trump was so problematic to the blue-haired people, because he really did represent a possibility for a catalyst for this cataclysmic change. The silent majority, if we mean the entire U.S. population despises this stuff—but I also think that most of them don't do anything for all of the reasons I enunciate in Chapter 8. They diffuse the responsibility onto others: "I don't want to lose my job, I don't want to lose friends on Facebook, I wanna still be invited to the cool kids party in Malibu."

Oftentimes people ask me what is it that fundamentally drives me. I think it comes from a very exacting code of personal conduct. At the end of the night when I put my head on my pillow and I'm about to go to sleep, the only way for me to avoid insomnia is to know that I've done all that I could, however big or however small, to contribute to the battle of ideas, to the defense of truth and liberty and freedom and true classical liberal values. My two fundamental life ideas are truth and freedom, and that's what drives all of my actions. If the silent majority were able to somehow access that courage, to speak out, I genuinely think that it could solve this problem in a couple of years. It won't take generations. If we don't, it will be a very very slow, laborious, train ride to hell.

You propose in your book, as part of the solution to the battle of ideas, that social media companies be regulated as utilities. Do you think we'll see that happen?

Not as long as the media companies are able to play both sides of the political aisle with unbelievable political donations. The diabolical brilliance of all the social media companies is that they understand human nature and so they go to the Republicans, who might be the source from where some of these bills might be coming from, and they say, "Here's $5 million for your next campaign. Are you still against us?" I worry that because of that, because of people's myopic selfishness and instrumentality the social media companies will always win. But I suspect that if it gets bad enough, people will wake up out of their stupors, although you would think that shutting out the sitting president of the U.S. might have been a moment by which people take notice but apparently not, so we have to wait and see.

In the months since you wrote your book, the idea of "intent vs. impact" has gained more attention in the public discussion—that it doesn't matter what you were intending it just matters how people took it. What do you think of this idea of intent vs. impact and what the impact of that will be on society?

Let's take, for example, forbidden knowledge in academia. The idea of forbidden knowledge is that there might be downstream ill consequences to you doing research in this topic, therefore stay away from it. That's a grotesquely bad idea. If we follow that principle, then there's this little field called physics that we should have never pursued because of atomic bombs. We have the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. It didn't come because we understood feminist dance therapy, it happened because physicists did that. Those physicists could or could not have known the consequences of having studied physics. But we did not tell them that there could be a future whereby you'd use the production of weapons as a consequence of you being physicists. That's not my problem as a scientist. I follow truth wherever it takes me, and it's someone else's job to worry about the consequences. For most things, we need to be careful about the dichotomy you're talking about. In the criminal justice system, we do recognize that depending upon what your intent was, what we charge you with. the dichotomy you mentioned has become fuzzy and confused, and that's what causes a lot of the problems I discuss in the book.

What are you most concerned about in the near future and what are you most hopeful about?

I am most concerned that the pandemic of these ideas pathogens is going to continue unchallenged. I often end my video clips with: "Slowly, we inch." I updated this to "Quickly, we gallop." What I refer to here with that imagery is that we are either slowly inching or quickly galloping toward the abyss of lunacy. Once you fall off the abyss, that's it, gravity is taking over. What worries me is that our response will not come quickly enough for us to defeat the new idea pathogens that are afoot, so that in the future to defeat those ideas it won't come peacefully to defeat those ideas, it will come violently.

On the flip side of that, I think it can quickly be overturned—if the silent majority truly wake up in unity and say, "I've had enough. I don't want to be talked down to in this way, I don't want to not recognize what biology means. I don't want my children to be taught that they are bad because they are white or they are any color. I've had enough." It's going to be difficult, but if the zeitgeist changes so that people are emboldened to speak out, that's what gives me hope.

 

 

 

The East Asian Package

The East Asian Package

"If you look at almost any kind of cross-national data, you notice that East Asians are fundamentally different from other peoples. So much so that we might talk about an “East Asian package,” a series of traits shared by South Korea, Japan, China, and the Chinese-descended nations and territories of Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan. There are indications that even North Korea shares many of its important components, despite it being the most isolated country in the world. This package includes:

• Low levels of crime... American liberals often respond to complaints about crime by saying that it is a natural part of living in a big city. But the largest and most crowded East Asian cities have less crime than rural and suburban areas in the West!

• Extremely low rates of illegitimacy...
   
• High levels of academic achievement, particularly in math and science. You can see the 2018 PISA results below. Some people think the Chinese numbers here can’t be trusted because they only tested urban centers, but we’re still talking about kids who are coming from families that are poor by Western standards. North Korea doesn’t show up in international comparisons, but it actually fields a formidable Math Olympiad team, and has constantly shocked Western analysts by how quickly it’s been able to develop advanced military technology. The East Asian aptitude for math and science is reflected in it being the only non-Western part of the world to produce multiple major tech giants, including familiar names such as Samsung, Mitsubishi, Sony, TSMC, and Alibaba.  
  
  
• High levels of economic growth in recent decades... There’s a book called How Asia Works that tries to attribute this to East Asian nations adopting the correct developmental policies, but as Scott Alexander points out, “It seems weird that all the countries with good policies would be right next to each other.” Indeed, many of the policies the author suggests, like land reform, have been tried outside the region with limited success. Even if the book could explain economic development, it doesn’t explain East Asian success in other countries, nor the rest of the East Asian package.
  
  
• Extremely low fertility... While East Asians weren’t always infertile, indicating that this isn’t an immutable trait that exists independent of cultural and historical circumstances — we did somehow end up with 1.4 billion Chinese, after all — the nations of the region have without exception responded to economic growth and modernity by being much less likely to start families, and the extent of the collapse isn’t like anything we’ve seen anywhere else in the world. 
  
  
• High life expectancy... 

What’s really amazing about all of this is that these countries are extremely different by most conventional measures of how we understand and classify nations. China is an authoritarian state and about at the middle of the pack when it comes to income and its urbanization rate, while South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are all developed and urbanized democracies in good standing. As mentioned before, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau are basically just cities, though we have numbers for them and can study those places in the cross-national context.

Moreover, you find the East Asian package outside of East Asia, among people of East Asian descent. In the US, Asians famously get higher test scores than whites, and are so successful that the affirmative action debate centers around whether schools can keep trying to stop them from becoming too large a portion of the student body. This is similar to the politics of many Southeast Asian countries, where Chinese success is a constant source of tension with lower-performing natives. In the UK, Chinese students have the highest test scores of any ethnic group. The Japanese are considered a “model minority” in Brazil. One could go on.

You’d think social scientists, if they were serious people, would treat this as one of the most important things they could be studying. We all want a longer life expectancy and less crime, and reducing illegitimacy and getting test scores up are forever goals of public policy. We have a major region of the world that is filled with extreme outliers on all of these measures. If there was a country with nearly no cancer, wouldn’t medical researchers want to know why that was? Why is it so uninteresting that an entire region of the globe seems almost completely free of the social pathologies that afflict much of the rest of the world? 

I never see liberals talk about the East Asian package, except when they’re arguing with their fellow leftists and trying to debunk some misconceptions they hold, in effect making a conservative argument. Conservatives and moderate anti-wokes, in contrast, like to talk about Asians, since their success seems to refute the liberal worldview. Amy Chua, for example, has famously argued that cultural differences explain which ethnic groups in the US succeed.

But do Japan, China, and Korea in fact share a common culture? People sometimes make this point in a circular way. The fact that East Asians behave similarly across various countries and social contexts supposedly indicates that they belong to the same culture. A group that does well on tests “values education,” while one that doesn’t have children out-of-wedlock has “conservative social values.” We might as well say differences in crime rates reflect how much various communities “value crime.” Such explanations are useless. 

But is there a non-circular way to approach the topic? I think there is, and once you do, you struggle to find evidence that China, Korea, and Japan have all that much in common culturally. Without falling into the trap of circular reasoning, we can measure cultural distance or similarity by the following criteria. 

• Religion. We often say that peoples that share a religious faith belong to the same culture. About 70% of Japanese practice Shintoism, a religion that exists in no other country in the world. A similar number of Chinese either have no religion or practice “Chinese folk religion.” Meanwhile, in South Korea, a quarter to a third of the population is Christian, a faith that barely exists in Japan or China. All three countries have sizable Buddhist populations, but they each practice the religion in ways that reflect their own independent cultural histories. There has certainly never been anything equivalent to the Catholic Church in Europe, that is, a centralized spiritual authority for the region.
  
  
• Language. Linguistic similarity and relatedness tend to correlate with closer cultural affinity, both because close languages allow for communication across political boundaries, and indicate that people belonged to the same community not that long ago. Linguists put languages into family trees, based on the theory that the major families of the world each represent an ancient proto-community. All forms of Mandarin are part of the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Meanwhile, when I studied linguistics as an undergrad, Japanese and Korean were said to be “language isolates,” meaning they had no known relatives, although Wikipedia tells me that they are now considered part of the “Japonic” and “Koreanic” families. Some scholars have proposed something called the Altaic family, which would encompass Japonic, Koreanic, Turkic, and Mongolic languages, but this appears to be a minority view. In other words, although East Asian languages have shared loan words over the centuries, Mandarin is at its core as distant from Japanese or Korean as English is from the indigenous languages of Australia. Korean and Japanese are either just as distantly related, or share a common origin so deep in the past that most linguists doubt that they should even be grouped together. 
  
  
• Political history. As mentioned above, China is a dictatorship, while Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are democracies. Singapore is somewhere in between. Japan has been an independent unified nation for over 400 years, and has had a parliament or some form of representative government since 1889. It generally has been extremely xenophobic and closed off to outsiders. The Joseon dynasty of Korea (1392-1897) was so isolated from the rest of the world that Western scholars named it the “Hermit Kingdom.” China under Mao underwent one of the greatest social upheavals the world has ever seen, and it now has a very unique political system. It’s true that Japan briefly colonized Korea and Taiwan, but this was an exception to a long history in which the three major peoples of East Asia had relatively little contact with one another and lived under different kinds of governments. Even if East Asians did start out sharing the same culture, it’s hard to see how the events of the last 150 years, from the Meiji Restoration to World War II and Maoism to democratization across much of the region, wouldn’t have caused divergence given the different experiences of these nations. 
  
  
• Moral psychology. According to Joe Henrich, writing in The WEIRDest People in the World, Japan has “a unique social psychology, distinct not only from WEIRD societies but also from populations in South Korea and China, with which it’s often mistakenly lumped together with psychologically.” Even placing South Korea and Chinese-derived countries and territories together strikes me as a stretch based on the data. Check out this famous chart based on the World Values Survey. It’s gerrymandered in a way that would make a Republican state legislator blush. All East Asians get grouped into the “Confucian” category, despite China being closer to Belarus than it is to South Korea, and Japan being as close to Protestant Europe as it is to its neighbors. Given how distant China is even from Taiwan and Hong Kong, one could argue that it would be too much to grant that all Chinese-derived nations and territories have a similar culture.   

• Pop culture. Japan and South Korea have produced pop cultural products that have large fan bases abroad. China has not, remaining unattractive to outsiders, or as Peter Thiel calls it, “weirdly autistic.” And although I’m no expert in either, from my limited experience K-Pop and Japanese anime strike me as fundamentally reflecting different values and cultures.

• Attitudes towards sex. South Korea is by almost any measure a socially conservative country. It bans pornography, while Japan is known for being extremely creative in this area. Until very recently, South Korea prohibited most abortions and even adultery, with change only coming through court decisions. China is of course even more socially conservative, and has zigzagged from an emphasis on gender equality during the Mao era to the Xi government declaring a war on sissies and telling women that it’s gross for them to remain single over 30.  

If having a similar culture doesn’t mean being similar in terms of language, religion, moral psychology, political institutions and history, pop culture, or sexual attitudes, what could it mean? Again, one can’t define “cultural similarity” in terms of things like high test scores and low levels of crime and illegitimacy, as that’s what we’re trying to explain in the first place. 

We can see how culturally separate East Asian nations are from one another by imagining what a similar exercise would look like for Europe. Here, using the same methods, we can find strong evidence for cultural connections. With a handful of exceptions like Hungarian and Basque, all languages of the continent belong to the Indo-European family, broken down into categories and subcategories like Germanic and Slavic. All countries have historically been overwhelmingly Christian and except for Belarus and Russia all are democracies. Finally, European history can be understood as a series of consolidations and fragmentations of various empires, from Rome to the Soviet Union. The idea of united Europe, or Christendom, has been strong enough to inspire major political projects, as varied as the Crusades and the EU. For centuries, Europeans have seen themselves as part of one community, with political, social, and scientific ideas easily permeating across ever shifting state boundaries. In contrast, in East Asia there has never been a strong idea of an identity that encompasses Japan, China, and Korea and separates their civilization from those of other peoples, or at least nowhere near to the same extent. Thus, while it makes sense to speak of a European culture, the idea of an “East Asian culture” seems like a convenient shorthand used to arrive at a quasi-explanation of why countries that happen to be next to each other have similar outcomes. Europe is even more of a coherent concept in the World Values Survey cited above, unlike the gerrymandered East Asian category. 

None of this is to say that some ideas like Confucianism and Buddhism haven’t crossed the borders between China, Korea, and Japan. Only that political, social, religious, linguistic, and other kinds of links between the nations of the region have been extremely tenuous and weak compared to Europe, and also other parts of the globe we consider broad civilizations like the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. 

Liberals believe in “stereotype threat,” in which our expectations and perceptions regarding how groups behave become self-fulfilling prophecies. We’ve seen that cultural explanations for the East Asian package favored by conservatives don’t make much sense, so maybe liberals are on to something...

Granted, stereotype threat as a way to understand the East Asian package has certain difficulties. It would need to explain how stereotypes operate globally, across cultural, linguistic, and political barriers. Somehow, a Korean in Los Angeles and a descendent of Japanese immigrants in Brazil must both know that Westerners expect them to have a certain collection of traits. This influence of stereotypes even penetrates foreign countries, including China, despite the best efforts of the government to keep its population culturally isolated from the outside world. Of course, Xi Jinping is no match for the power of global stereotype threat, given that it even made North Koreans good at math. Kendism may also need stereotypes to travel back in time to work since East Asians somehow were already wealthy in the US decades ago, despite China being associated with crushing poverty throughout most of American history. But these are small details for Kendism, an ideology so convincing and scientifically well-established that universities produce glossaries to teach its core tenets. 

Say what you will about Kendi, but he’s given us a framework that can possibly explain the East Asian package. Can it be a coincidence that we see the highest levels of economic growth and mathematical success, and lowest levels of illegitimacy and other forms of anti-social behavior, in countries that are geographically adjacent, despite the limited cultural links between them? And that people from these countries show similar traits when they move abroad? Journalists and academics write papers about low South Korean fertility or remarkable Chinese growth over the years, or about Asian success in American schools, and look for local factors at work, without seeming to understand that they’re observing any kind of broader phenomenon. It’s like if scientists were trying to figure out the association between elevation and weather, and were coming up with an independent hypothesis about the relationship on each continent without ever attempting to synthesize various kinds of data into a more general theory. 

Given that conservatives and anti-wokes more generally have done such a poor job of presenting a theory that fits what we see in the world, it is no wonder that Kendism has unrivaled influence. With our advanced modern state of understanding of social phenomena, it remains the only school of thought that has broad explanatory power."

Links - 11th September 2026 (Migrants: UK)

Reform will stop the boats - "When the Australians faced a wave of illegal boat migration, they deployed their military in response. Illegal crossings fell to zero within weeks. It ended the crisis. It also saved lives. Between 2007 and 2013, 1200 migrants had died making the journey. The Australian military operation reduced that to zero. Over 170 migrants have already died trying to come to Britain via the Channel – this policy would have saved their lives too. The Tory Labour establishment will say it can’t be done. They must, or face the reality of their own failure. But the former Navy commanders who engineered this plan leave no room for doubt: it can be done, and it must be done."

Michael Howard: Reform won’t stop the migrant boats, but I have a solution that will - "When I was home secretary, in 1995, I reached an agreement with my French opposite numbers, under which any migrant who was refused admission to one country would be returned to the other... Under the provisions of the European Union, of which we were, of course, still a member, the Dublin Convention was due to come into force in 1997. Under the terms of the Convention, asylum seekers in the European Union were required to make their application in the first safe country they reached and, if they didn’t, they would be returned to that country. Had it worked it would obviously have led to a sharp reduction in the numbers seeking asylum in the UK. So I accepted a clause in the 1995 agreement I made with France which provided that, in relation to asylum seekers, it would be superseded by the provisions of the Dublin Convention.  I thought the Convention would work. How naïve I was. It became entangled in the bureaucracy and red tape which were so characteristic of the EU.  Astonishingly, for most of the time when it applied to the UK, as members of the EU, the numbers returned to us from other countries exceeded the numbers returned by us. So much for the claims sometimes made that Brexit is to blame for the channel migrants crisis, as the Dublin Convention would have ensured their return. I, at least, did not have the benefit of hindsight. Those who make those claims do. So to claim that the Dublin Convention would be the answer means that they are either deceiving themselves or wilfully deceiving the public."

Basil the Great on X - "🚨BREAKING: RED CROSS DELETES VIDEO AFTER MIGRANT MURDERS BRITISH WOMAN
The Red Cross made a sympathetic cartoon video showing the journey of Sharif, an Afghan travelling to Europe  When Sharif got there he MURDERED a British Woman and stuffed her body into a suitcase  They wanted you to feel sorry for him but he killed a young woman like the savage that he is  The Red Cross must be held to account for the blood they have on their hands"

Reformer on X - "Former Conservative minister Edwina Currie suggests a policy of brothels in villages near asylum seekers as a way to reduce sexual violence"
James' dog. on X - "Interesting the discourse has moved from ‘future doctors’ to ‘we need to feed asylum seekers with naked women or they’ll commit heinous crimes.’"
Luckily, the human rights of the asylum seekers are well-protected

Zara Hussain on X - "A street in Bristol still has the England flag up. Strange, because the World Cup ended weeks ago. When will Bristol Council remove them?"
Railfan Reborn on X - "> Foreigner immigrates to England
> UK government spoils her with unlimited welfare
> Demands the flag of her new country be torn down anyways
Remigration is the moderate solution."
Migrants need to be protected from seeing such hate symbols, so they should be sent to a place where they will probably never see them again, e.g. their countries of origin

There’s only one ‘fair’ place to place illegals, and that’s Bristol - "At last, an admission from the Government that illegal immigrants are a pain in the neck. After years of wagging their fingers at uppity plebs who dared to say it’s not nice to have 800 men from God-knows-where imported into your community, now officialdom admits that’s true.  How else are we to interpret Andy Burnham’s harebrained proposal to house more of these un-vetted blokes in middle-class parts of Britain? It’s not right, he says, that it has fallen to our “poorest communities” to host these border-busting men. So in the name of “fairness”, he’ll be calling on leafier towns to “play their part”.  This is the closest we’ve had to an acknowledgement that these intruders are a burden. That all that blather about them being “vulnerable” souls from war-torn lands who might just “enrich” our lame nation was just that – blather, lies, the faux-virtuous bleating of a clueless political class.  What Burnham is essentially saying is that we must share out the pain of illegal immigration. So can we all say it now? Are we finally free to say it is deeply undesirable to wake up one morning to find hundreds of men from distant, regressive lands wandering through your town? It is precisely the accidental truthfulness of Burnham’s proposal that makes it so insane. It is unforgivably reckless to wilfully inflict social pain on proud, tidy towns. It is an assault on the soul of England itself to subject the most pleasant parts of this green and pleasant land to the menace of un-vetted foreign men.  Not content with sowing rage and tension in working-class towns by stuffing the local hotel with men from afar, now the Government wants to serve up the same madness in the manicured enclaves of middle-class Britain... The impact has been dire. Women and girls feel unsafe. Some have suffered horrific assaults, including those seven Doncaster girls aged between 12 and 16 who were trafficked for sexual abuse by an Iraqi asylum seeker.  Social media is awash with video evidence of the civic discord caused by our deranged experiments in mass immigration. But the solution is not to “share out” such social misery. A responsible government would see such problems and think: “How might we put a stop to this?” And not: “What other towns can we bring this lunacy to?”  If we must house these men who have no right to be here, I say send them to Bristol. That Green-run city puffs itself up as a “City of Sanctuary”. Its preening activist class claims to love migrants. Green Party leader Zack Polanski reckons mass immigration is “Britain’s superpower”. Okay, here you go. Both middle-class towns and working-class suburbs have made it crystal clear they don’t want these armadas of men, so you can have them instead... Home Office minister Anna Turley says this is about calling on middle-class communities to do their “fair share” in the great migrant crisis.  This cuts to the blackened heart of the immigration issue. What in God’s name is “fair” about asking hard-working communities to take up the slack of the state’s dereliction of duty? What is “fair” about demanding that even towns of 300 or 400 people open their arms to 1,000 men who barged illegally into our nation?  These are staggeringly unreasonable requests. The Government is treating historic communities as if they were board games, which it might manoeuvre and fiddle with as it pleases... What an extraordinary abdication of the very first duty of a state, which is to defend its territory, and its people. Forget messing with middle-class communities – just police the borders and swiftly deport intruders. And, for the meantime, let’s make Bristol take more than their “fair share”."

Burnham’s migrant plan is going to blow up in his face - "Such an admission only makes sense politically if the Government appeared actively to be trying to stop the flow of boats, and then negatively processing and returning those young men who arrived in this manner. This isn’t what people see. All they hear are excuses about how hard it all is.  Secondly, the timing was a disaster: straight after the massive incursion of illegal immigrants into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, and the sighting of huge new boats in the English Channel capable of carrying more than 250 men. In effect, it looks like the scale of the problem is so enormous, asylum seekers are essentially “spilling out” into rural England. Thirdly, and this is yet to be felt in earnest, the pictures are going to be terrible. By housing asylum seekers in parts of England that could be used as a backdrop to an episode of Poirot, Reform and others will be able to portray the starkest, most extraordinary contrast, that voters across the country will find shocking.  At present, to an extent, asylum seekers have often been hidden in plain sight. In hotels in less affluent, often-multicultural areas, you wouldn’t necessarily know who was an asylum seeker or not. Now, villages with small and settled populations will find themselves dwarfed by large-scale accommodation facilities next door. This takes us to the issue of class. In justifying the move, a Downing Street source said: “Andy feels the current system is unfair, and as a point of principle, he wants to see a redress of the distribution.” Extraordinarily, this source confirmed the move would cost more money, apparently because of the difficulty of finding cheap accommodation in leafy areas: “He acknowledges that it would cost more money to do it fairly, but that is what we need to do.”  This sounds like Labour’s justification for a wealth tax – as well as their earlier taxes on private education – and it reflects how the modern Left sees class. They seem to think there’s a negative working-class identity which is formed primarily through hostility and struggle. It’s as if there’s a zero-sum game, where working-class people suffer because of middle-class privilege. The problem is, the English working class don’t think like this. While they tend to favour wealth taxes and a progressive tax system more generally, this is entirely because they want more money to pay for the NHS and other public services. They don’t want a punishment beating meted out to middle-class people out of hostility or envy. Most working-class people want to “get on” themselves – and certainly they want their kids to have opportunities for a better life – and don’t view the affluent as the enemy. More to the point, their identity isn’t formed by negative perceptions of struggle, but mostly by positive perceptions of their local area and their country. They tend to love their towns and their local heritage and they tend to love England too. This is why they love their (fading) high streets, their heritage sites and local football clubs – but also usually the British Armed Forces and the Royal family too.  It’s this mix of local and national patriotism which explains their hostility to the housing of so many asylum seekers in their towns. Most feel their local area can’t physically cope with so many new arrivals; and most dislike the idea of a country with no border control. The English working-class will not come to think Burnham’s policy is a fair and good one; on the contrary, they’ll sympathise with those now affected and think it underlines the incompetence of the political class. If Burnham is hoping for working-class people to think “now the posh people can have some”, he’ll be sorely disappointed.  There’s another important aspect of the English working-class the left forgets, which is directly applicable here. Where class hostility emerges, it’s because of perceptions of unearned, unfair wealth or benefits... this is why working-class people tend to be the toughest on welfare cheats. And this is why so many are so angry with the current asylum system, which appears to be set up to attract and then reward those who come here illegally."

Burnham’s asylum housing plea is a costly political misjudgment - "When Mr Burnham learnt that two of the killers of Pc Andrew Harper were set to be released from prison early, he decided nothing could be done, went on holiday, and apparently hoped the problem would fix itself. He seems to think the same way about Britain’s broken asylum system. In neither case is he correct."

Middle-class Britons understand what a genuine refugee is – Andy Burnham doesn’t - "The Prime Minister apparently has much less common sense than ordinary people. They know the difference between today’s bogus “boat people” and genuine refugees, such as Jews fleeing the Nazis, Hungarians in 1956, Ugandan Asians in 1972, or Hong Kongers and Ukrainians more recently.  Middle-class Britons are the most generous and hospitable people on earth: look at their unique munificence to charity and readiness to volunteer. But they don’t see why they should pay the price for the Government’s failure to secure our borders. Many readers will know British families who have made real sacrifices to help Ukrainians over the past few years. It is an insult to hundreds of thousands like them for Andy Burnham to suggest that only the poorest are “playing their part” towards refugees.  Blaming middle-class Britain for Labour’s failure to control migration suggests that the new PM, like his predecessor, has no answers to the problems of migration and integration."

The Left is finally paying the price for its idiotic belief in open borders - "Burnham’s plan should have at least one tremendous benefit. Smug, middle-class progressives will finally receive their comeuppance because, for the very first time, they’ll be forced to face the consequences of their own idiotic beliefs.  No longer will they be able to proclaim that refugees are welcome here, safe in the knowledge that the “refugees” will in reality be deposited in the type of frightful, gammony dumps that vote Reform, far from their own charming locales. And, just as importantly, no longer will they be able to delude themselves about the type of men that the  boats tend to contain. These delusions were exquisitely exemplified by the BBC comedian, Zoe Lyons, during an edition of Question Time in November last year. Britain, she declared, was “missing a trick” by failing to take advantage of all the “talent” that the small boats’ occupants have to offer. “Many” of them, she explained, are “doctors”, “scientists” and “engineers”.  Seemingly, it had not occurred to her that, if these men were doctors, scientists and engineers, they wouldn’t be coming to Britain by dinghy. They’d be coming by plane because they would have easily secured a visa. Also, if the boats are filled with doctors, scientists and engineers, why do the French do so little to prevent them from setting sail?...  such imbecilic fantasies will not survive Burnham’s new plan. As a result, middle-class Left-wingers should belatedly grasp why it is that the rest of the country is so unhappy about illegal immigration, and realise that it’s not merely because everyone is a massive racist.  Of course, I suppose it’s possible that these people will stay true to their principles by joyfully welcoming the new arrivals into their neighbourhoods, and eagerly inviting them to their dinner parties. (“And will you be bringing your wife and children, Mr...? Oh, I see. It’s a funny thing, but just about all you refugees seem to be single men. Don’t women and children flee war and persecution, too?”) Equally, though, they might respond like Rachel Millward, the Green Party deputy leader, who indignantly fought Home Office plans to house 600 male asylum seekers in a former Army training camp in her part of East Sussex. Or like Calum Miller, the Lib Dem MP, who’s been fighting plans to house 1,250 male asylum seekers in a former MoD site in his part of Oxfordshire.  Given a choice between these two approaches, I would guess that most middle-class progressives will opt for the latter. If so, it will do our immigration debate the world of good. Because there’s only one way to cure the woke Left of their support for open borders. And that’s to give them exactly what they claim to want."

Brendan Clarke-Smith on X - "Doctors, nurses and engineers don’t generally throw their documentation away and pay gangs to smuggle them in on small boats."
In 2025, we still had left wingers claiming many "refugees" are doctors, engineers and scientists. The exact quote (~11:45): "As a country, we're missing a trick as well. If we have all of these people who have coming over seeking asylum, many of them coming from countries where they'll have been doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists, and we're sticking them away"

The middle classes didn’t work so hard to see their areas ruined by illegal migrants - "The most infuriating aspect of Britain’s experiment with mass migration has been the way in which it was foisted upon the electorate with a contemptuous disregard for the very concept of a democratic mandate.  Which party included in its manifesto a pledge to increase migration incrementally until it reached an all-time high of a million newcomers a year? Not New Labour. Not the Conservatives under any of their leaders. Not the Labour party of Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham. Nobody asked us about it. Yet that is what we got.  Which brings me to Burnham. Yesterday, our brave new leader announced that middle-class families should “play their part” by keeping schtum while small boat arrivals are given accommodation nearby... New YouGov polling has revealed that just one in five people now think that migration has been “mostly good” for the country. In January, 79 per cent of voters wanted the Government to concentrate on stopping small-boat crossings... how many of the illegal migrants streaming across the Channel are genuine asylum seekers? It’s absurd to expect people who have worked extremely hard to build a good life for their family to potentially jeopardise all that in order to accommodate migrants who shouldn’t be here in the first place.  If our political masters really cared, they’d do something about that. Both legal and illegal immigration may be thorny problems to solve, but they are the product of Britain’s own policies and political culture, and our leaders are squarely to blame. Take the small boats: forget “smashing the gangs”, for heaven’s sake. If every man landing on our shores was incarcerated pending deportation, possibly in some nightingale-hospital-style pop-up prison on a remote Scottish island, with no mobile phone, no access to black-market work, no cash handouts and no hotel accommodation, the problem would soon dry up.  This vandalism is, in other words, the result of political choices. It is not some natural disaster afflicting our country that requires us all to pull together and share the burden. It was brought upon our heads without our consent by a political class that is a) incompetent and b) steeped in the twin dogmas of centrist fundamentalism and niceism, both of which have been resoundingly discredited. Yet now Burnham expects the beleaguered middle classes, who are already groaning under historically vast levels of taxation, to put up with a load of foreign criminals – for they arrived, let’s not forget, illegally, and from the safe jurisdiction of France – on our doorsteps. I don’t want to live next door to a Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian small boatman who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl within days of arriving, or a Mohammed Sharwarq, the Syrian who assaulted a cleaner, a head chef and other residents, or any of the numerous other violent migrants who have been welcomed with such generosity by our governments.  Why should we? I repeat: we never wanted it, we never consented to it, and we have frankly had enough of it. For this reason, let me float a counter-proposal.  Every prime minister since 1997, and every home secretary, should take four illegal migrants into their homes, and pledge to care for them with great compassion until such time as the migration crisis is over. Starting with Burnham himself. That should focus their minds."
One cope is to claim that net migration estimates are wrong because the methodology sucks
Human rights means you can't detain asylum seekers, so too bad

Andy Burnham still isn’t listening on illegal migration - spiked - "The post-Southport riots were like a heatmap of Home Office-imposed asylum accommodation. According to a private cabinet briefing, ‘15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots’ during those grim days in summer 2024 ‘are in the top 20 per cent of local authorities with the highest numbers of supported asylum seekers’. But the answer is not bussing more Sudanese to Sevenoaks, or more Afghans to Alderley Edge. If anything, the chances of ending up in one of Britain’s more premier postcodes could become yet another one of those ‘pull factors’, making a £2,000 ‘mega-dinghy’ ticket look like even more of a sound investment. The primary issue with illegal migration is clearly not the uneven distribution of illegal migrants. But rather than leave the ECHR, rip up the Refugee Convention and finally detain and deport those who violate our borders, Labour appears resigned to shifting the problem around. There is a curious literal-mindedness to how the government is responding to public outrage over asylum. Protests outside of migrant hotels? Let’s move the migrants into HMOs, then! Oh, you don’t like the HMOs, either? Let’s stick them on some old military bases instead! It’s almost like they think we’re mugs. If Burnham reckons any of this is going to placate the populace, he’s in for a shock. Indeed, the latest place to erupt over the asylum issue is well-to-do Piddington, a village in Oxfordshire, which is threatening to declare independence over plans to stick 1,250 male migrants in the nearby Bicester Garrison – a number almost four times larger than Piddington’s tiny population. The British people are not heartless, migrant-bashing bastards. They can be incredibly generous to refugees when there is a pressing need, a sense of historical or moral obligation, and precious few concerns around crime or cultural compatibility. Which is why hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Hongkongers have settled here in recent years without anyone raising an eyebrow. But they’re also not idiots. They know that allowing anyone to claim asylum, provided they can pay a people smuggler enough to ferry them across the Channel, is illegal migration by another name – not least given these people aren’t actually fleeing war, they’re fleeing France. They also know that opening the door to men, and they are almost all men, about whom we know nothing, often from cultures with frankly medieval attitudes towards women, is unlikely to end well. The now daily stories about horrific sex attacks committed by illegal migrants, have revealed, once again, the wisdom of the masses and the wilful blindness of our virtue-signalling elites. No one voted for mass and illegal migration. Voters don’t want the effects of it shared out more equitably across the income scale. They just want it to stop. One day they might get a government that is actually willing to listen."

Donna Louise on X - "Just when you think the UK couldnt get more ridiculous.  Asylum seeker Amgad Abouelazm has 67 offences (51 of them theft). Homeless. On drugs. Stealing from shops and cars.  Now the Home Office is housing him and paying him benefits.  Magistrates give him a conditional discharge and order zero compensation because his means are “limited.”  This is what “asylum” looks like in Britain in 2026.  67 crimes. Zero real consequences. Taxpayers still paying.  We are being taken for fools!"

Tony Smith CBE on X - "It’s probably worth saying at this point something I’ve said before, lest it gets lost in the sands of time and political rhetoric about immigration and illegal entry, and how we got to this point.  I was an immigration officer in the 1970s and 1980s. The power to grant or refuse leave to enter was vested to me in law under the authority of a Chief Immigration Officer. Anyone arriving without a valid passport (and a visa if required) was refused entry at the border, detained, and removed on the next available ship or aircraft whence they came. This was under the Immigration Act 1971 (still In force although amended massively by successive governments ever since). It was some 20 - 30 years after the 1951 ECHR and the 1951 Refugee Convention was signed.  Nobody claimed asylum. Nobody claimed human rights. No country refused to take people back. Those who had destroyed their passports were removed on a letter, signed by me.  Fast forward 50 years and now anyone who arrives at the border without a passport or a visa automatically claims asylum or human rights. Immigration Officers of today (or Border Force Officers) are thereby disempowered to send them back before their asylum claims or human rights claims are considered. And their appeals are dismissed. They cannot be detained in the meantime because under the Hardial Singh principles immigration detention is only lawful if there is a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable period of time. Which there isn’t of course. So the only option available to the officer is to grant temporary permission whilst these applications are considered. And if the applicant claims to be destitute they must be given support and accommodation at public expense. Because failure to do so would put the government in breach of A3 of the ECHR (inhuman and degrading treatment). And even if the applicant is eventually refused protection - and loses their appeal - we need to get a passport to remove them on. And they often refuse to comply with the documentation process. Even if they do many countries still refuse to issue them with a passport and refuse to take them back. And even after all this they can abscond and if ever caught start the whole process again.  This is where we are and so far no government has been able to break the Gordian knot that ties the hands of our officers. In order to do that they would have to reverse decades of laws and judgements - and demur from long held well intentioned international conventions. And probably look at the British Constitution itself to curtail the opportunity of political opponents to use the courts to thwart the will of Parliament.   This is not to criticise or favour any political party or policy. It is simply a matter of record to inform the next generation of politicians and the civil servants charged with the duty of implementing any new laws or policies they may introduce.  And to ask why - if we did it back in my day - why can’t we do it now?  I even wrote a book about it. I hope someone keeps a copy for posterity - or even history - when thinking about how to fix this seemingly intractable problem."

Rupert Lowe MP on X - "The British Dental Association has accused me of 'potentially dangerous rhetoric' because I oppose illegal migrants getting priority dental care - as evidenced by Restore Britain's investigation. I suspect the British people agree with us..."

Daily Mail on X - "TV presenter who exposed people smugglers forced to flee home after police warned of death threats"
Mary Harrington on X - "This is also why rape gang investigations keep finding asylum seekers among the suspects Because it’s all the same network of criminal gangs Britain has an ethnic mafia problem"

The New Truth

From 2020. Another article on the religious aspects of wokeness.

The New Truth

"Perhaps that’s a uniquely New York thing, to place so much faith in talking. But it once felt very American, too... American because, if you could think it and you could argue it, then maybe you could be it, too. It was at least possible. And it was democratic in the best sense. You could talk to anyone, butt into any stranger’s conversation, as long as you had something interesting to say.

I don’t know how to argue in America anymore, or whether it’s even worth it. For someone like me, that is a real tragedy and so I would like to understand how this new reality came about.

There are distinct and deep-rooted traditions of rational empiricism and religious sermonizing in American history. But these two modes seem to have become fused together in a new form of argumentation that is validated by elite institutions like the universities, The New York Times, Gracie Mansion, and especially on the new technology platforms where battles over the discourse are now waged. The new mode is argument by commandment: It borrows the form to game the discourse of rational argumentation in order to issue moral commandments. No official doctrine yet exists for this syncretic belief system but its features have been on display in all of the major debates over political morality of the past decade. Marrying the technical nomenclature of rational proof to the soaring eschatology of the sermon, it releases adherents from the normal bounds of reason. The arguer-commander is animated by a vision of secular hell—unremitting racial oppression that never improves despite myths about progress; society as a ceaseless subjection to rape and sexual assault; Trump himself, arriving to inaugurate a Luciferean reign of torture. Those in possession of this vision do not offer the possibility of redemption or transcendence, they come to deliver justice. In possession of justice, the arguer-commander is free at any moment to throw off the cloak of reason and proclaim you a bigot—racist, sexist, transphobe—who must be fired from your job and socially shunned.

Practitioners of the new argument bolster their rationalist veneer with constant appeals to forms of authority that come in equal parts from biology and elite credentialing. Have you noticed how many people, especially online, start their statements by telling you their profession or their identity group: As a privileged white woman; as a doctoral student in applied linguistics; as a progressive Jewish BIPOC paleontologist—and so on? These are military salutes, which are used to establish rank between fellow “az-uhs” while distinguishing them as a class from the civilian population. You must always listen to the experts, the new form of argument insists, and to the science. Anything else would be invalid; science denialism; not rational; immoral.

Because of the way it toggles back and forth between rationalism and religiosity, switching categories by taking recourse to one when the other is questioned, the new form of argument-commandment, rather than invalidating itself or foundering on its own contradictions, becomes, somehow, rhetorically invincible—through the demonstration of power relations that the arguer denies exist, but are plainly manifest in the progress of the argument. 

The group of historians who submitted their letter of dissent to The New York Times, objecting to the historical claims in the paper’s flagship 1619 project provided a nice demonstration of this point. They questioned the project’s scholarship and in response, were accused of being old white men, as indeed most of them were, and antique reactionaries. When they pleaded that they were not abettors of white supremacy but objected to the project’s historical claims, they were told their history was in error. In the end the historians, however distinguished their careers were beforehand, appeared confused and defeated, complaining solicitously in their allotted column inches in the paper’s letters section.

The 1619 project, meanwhile, having essentially conceded the historians’ central point, lost nothing at all. It marches on unscathed toward becoming the official curriculum in the nation’s public school system, replacing the products of the American historical profession as a whole, which must either adapt or suffer a similar humiliation. The outcome proved that whether or not the historians were right about the facts of history, they had made a fundamental error in judging where power lies. At best, they are dopes who thought they were smarter, which is to say more powerful, than they are. At worst, they are professionally self-destructive, and—who knows—maybe even racists.

Argument itself requires that certain fundamental questions are settled and beyond dispute. In order to argue over whether the sky is blue, we’ll have to agree on what the sky is. The new argumentation has not only vastly expanded the number of subjects that are supposed to be beyond argumentation, it has, by a sleight of hand, reversed the nature of the matters that cannot be questioned. Now, it is precisely the most contentious issues—is biological sex a valid concept? Is racism and abuse so widespread in American law enforcement that we should immediately defund the police?—that must be accepted a priori.

To insist that the conclusion that the arguer wishes to reach, with its implied corollary commandment, must be accepted by his or her opponent as a premise before the argument begins is not the move of a person who has confidence in their truth. It is the opposite of any form of reasoned argument. It is coercive. Except the people who argue this way claim that they cannot possibly be coercive, because you must accept the premise that they don’t have power—even if they are editing The New York Times Magazine, or threatening to get you fired from your job. You say they can’t have it both ways? They say, why not—and then accuse you of opposing the powerless, which, it turns out, is a form of authority that cannot be trumped. 

The reason we cannot argue about certain things is because they have already been proven true and the truth they have established is such a significant moral advance—like ending child sacrifice—that to question the rational basis on which the truth rests is to risk eroding a foundation of the moral progress that separates us from encroaching barbarism. If you want to argue about those things, then you are a barbarian—which means that argument with you is impossible, because the only argument that barbarians understand is being put to the sword or sent off to a labor camp. 

Do you need me to give you an example of this kind of argument? Not really, because such arguments have become the norm. But here are a few recent examples:

The moral injunction is: “Believe women”—and you believe women, don’t you? The argument underlying the slogan is that sexual violence is rampant in America and goes unaddressed and unpunished because of the endemic misogyny in our society. There are rational assertions contained within this argument: The claim that American women are the victims of rampant sexual violence enabled by ingrained cultural and legal biases was advanced initially as matter of social science—that is, as a matter of science—based on empirical evidence such as a famous study that found 1 in 5 women on American college campuses had been sexually assaulted.

If women were being victimized at such appalling rates and their assailants routinely going unpunished, it followed that they required protections greater than those which our current notions of legal and judicial fairness provided. In fact, one could see how it was precisely our prevailing notions of fairness, like due process or the rights of the accused to face their accuser, that were integral to an institutionalized “rape culture” responsible for the heinous epidemic of sexual assault against women.

Here are the two parts of the argument by commandment. There is the empirical assertion—let’s call it X. And there is the moral claim suggested by, or perhaps even mandated by the evidence of X—let’s call that Y. Empirical evidence shows that there is an epidemic of sexual assault against women, that epidemic requires a drastic corrective, and that corrective enshrines a moral claim and a commandment—American women are sexually victimized, egregiously and without the protections of a justice system that systemically discriminates against them. Therefore it is virtuous to “believe women” and to encode that belief formally in new procedures of law and justice. 

Only it turns out the rational argument was wrong. The evidence did not actually show that 1 in 5 women would be sexually assaulted on a college campus, a statistic repeated by President Barack Obama himself to justify “sweeping changes in national policy.”

It turns out that the author of the study himself acknowledged that it was based on surveying only two campuses and the numbers could not be extrapolated to a national trend as the White House itself had done. Other studies widely cited at the time to justify the construction of a punitive new Title IX sex bureaucracy were also marred by significant methodological shortcomings.

But if you were clueless enough to point out the flaws in rational claim X, even if just to wonder over matters of degree, then wham!—you were whacked in the face with moral claim Y. Evidence X isn’t evidence; it’s window dressing. And if you’re too stupid to understand that, then you’re probably an even worse person than the arguer supposed.

Because—think about it—who else but a fervent, drooling misogynist, or a rape apologist, or a real live rapist, namely someone both ideologically and emotionally invested in actively disbelieving women, would be so interested in picking apart the evidence that supported such an obviously virtuous and necessary claim—especially now, at a moment when people are literally dying? What basis would anyone have to question X aside from the desire to violate the moral value of Y?

It’s no surprise that the entire #MeToo movement grew out of the revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein—a loathsome man who was, by all accounts, a bullying asshole, a lecher, a tyrant, a sweaty groping pig. But in the end, justice finally caught up to him and Weinstein became the evil pig who launched a whole movement. And that was where most of us stopped thinking about it.

But there were a few more twists in the story. First, there was Asia Argento, one of the first actresses to come forward with her story of sexual abuse at the hands of Weinstein and one of the leaders and public faces of the #MeToo movement—who turned out to be an accused sexual predator herself. No one should have to be a “perfect victim” or a moral exemplar to be given sympathy and believed, but Argento was pushing it.

Then there was the evidence that came out in Weinstein’s trial. One of his key accusers was a young aspiring actress with whom he had a yearslong relationship—just the kind of vulnerable victim that Weinstein was said to have sought out. But the private correspondence kept by this woman, which included both letters to Weinstein and letters to her boyfriend about the Hollywood producer, suggested something far more complicated than a predator-victim relationship of the kind that is criminally prosecutable. Especially revealing was the woman’s claim that Weinstein’s sexual organ was defunct, a detail that, if true, would present all sorts of complications for an alleged serial predator like Weinstein. Or should have.

Do we believe in the rightness of #MeToo because of what the Weinstein case revealed or in spite of it? It seems perfectly clear that Weinstein is guilty of some of the crimes against women of which he has been accused, but equally obvious that it is not supposed to matter on which specific charges he is guilty and on which he is innocent by the standards of the law. Weinstein’s guilt must be totalizing so that it can serve as a stand-in for an empirical case justifying a set of new rules and commandments. The entire discourse has been warped to fit a Hollywood narrative—wherein drama and action (and whatever good they might accomplish) are never mustered for regular people but only for the wealthiest members of the American cultural elite. It is rather difficult to point this out without appearing to excuse the actions of someone like Weinstein, but perhaps a movement truly concerned with ending gender discrimination in the workplace and protecting the victims of sexual assault would have focused on the retail industry or the healthcare field, rather than on Hollywood.

Black Lives Matter is a movement that makes its core doctrinal claim a value that no decent person can object to. It asserts that, not merely formal legal acknowledgement, but full human dignity and consideration has been uniquely robbed from black Americans throughout the country’s history. No one with a basic knowledge of American history can deny that this claim is true. But the statement Black Lives Matter makes also has a more pointed political meaning, which is that black lives are systematically devalued in the present, and under assault from racist police violence and an overarching regime of white supremacy that animates every aspect of modern American life. That life, therefore, is in urgent need of reparative justice—like defunding the police, and establishing formal and informal systems of preferences that this time prefer blacks over whites, that statues of white men must be pulled down, that corporations must fire their current employees and hire new employees based on their skin color, and that a massive program of public reeducation must be set in motion across American society, and especially in public schools. 

There may be no more totemically powerful moral claim in all of American life than those three words: “black lives matter.” As a meme it is invincible. But the moral claim, with its demand for immediate radical changes to policing and other institutions of American life, is not just a moral claim, it is also supposedly a reflection of observed and analyzed material conditions. For instance, that there is an epidemic of racist, or, more correctly anti-black, police violence in America.

It seems appallingly obvious that systematic police violence targeting black Americans is real. The evidence is everywhere: in the state-sanctioned snuff films that circulate on YouTube and throughout social media maintaining a sense of terror and siege. It does little good to point out that the majority of police violence in 2020 America is directed toward white people, or that a total of 14 unarmed black men were in fact shot in America last year, while a greater number of unarmed light-skinned men were shot by the police, or that a majority of police officers protect their communities in a lawful manner under often difficult conditions. And since it doesn’t matter if you concede that there is evidence of racial bias in policing, just not at anything like the catastrophic level that justifies calls to defund the police, and it doesn’t matter whether you acknowledge a significant need for police reform to make it less prone to escalating violence and more accountable—since that hardly seems to matter in the context of a discussion that now centers on police abolition, why would anyone go to the trouble.

The paradigmatic case of police violence in the modern era was the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It was Brown’s death, shortly after Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida, that consolidated the movement’s power in national politics. The motto born of the killing that gave birth to the modern era of race relations was “hands up, don’t shoot.” Only we know now that this phrase, a shorthand for the evidence that indicts the society and justifies its rejection and refounding, did not describe the reality of Brown’s death. A lengthy investigation of the killing by the Obama Justice Department found that Brown did not have his hands up and may have been charging at Wilson when he was killed. Of course, the Obama Justice Department report also found evidence of racial bias in the Ferguson police force but it did not support the central claim about the killing of Michael Brown. And so while the DOJ findings were dutifully reported in the press, it was, at the same time, often kept at safe distance from discussion of Black Lives Matter, the movement, the moral claim, the commandment.

The police execution of Michael Brown, who was shot with his hands up, proved the rational basis for the moral claim that “black lives matter” with its implied set of commandments. The moral position further legitimated the idea that progress is illusory and reform is not possible because American society is currently organized, as the Brown case proved, to devalue black lives and thus requires radical overhaul. And so the new argument proceeds, burying contrary evidence in unmarked graves while erecting new religious monuments and shrines at which the growing number of the faithful pay obeisance.

The organs of reason and expertise have one by one, pledged their cultish loyalty to this new faith. A group of doctors wrote an article in Scientific American explaining why the mentioning or reading of the results of George Floyd’s autopsy was a racist act. Public health officials across the country, who had in May condemned public demonstrations in the strongest terms, now fully endorse the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. In a petition signed by some 1,200 health officials, they declare that it is incumbent on others in the profession to offer “unwavering support” to the current protesters as a matter of both moral and medical hygiene. They all together elide the difference between empirical claim and moral commandment by declaring that, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.” And so, the merger of pseudorationalist discourse with the new American religion of anti-racism is completed.

America’s elite institutions now routinely make statements and use language that empirically is false. Indeed, they have taken the making, propagation, and enforcement of such language as their central mission. Because these statements are false, they make solutions to the real problems that are being gestured at impossible—while turning people who may want to actually address those problems into evil rape apologists and racists.

What we are witnessing, in the rapidly transforming norms around race, sex, and gender, is not an argument at all but a revolution in moral sentiment. In all revolutions, the new thing struggling to be born makes use of the old system in order to overthrow it. At present, institutions like the university, the press, and the medical profession preserve the appearance of reason, empiricism, and argument while altering, through edict and coercion, the meaning of essential terms in the moral lexicon, like fairness, equality, friendship, and love. That the effort wins so much support speaks to the deep contradictions and corruption of American meritocratic institutions, and of the liberal individualist moral regime it seeks to replace.

Moral revolutions cannot tolerate ambiguity, but there is so much that I’m not sure of. How does one argue with this new form of truth? Not in the old way. Not by taking the bait."

 

 

The Clash of Sexual Civilisations

The Clash of Sexual Civilisations

It’s a pretty sick joke. A young man from Syria or Morocco or Afghanistan risks everything to reach Europe. He survives the crossing, the camps, the bureaucracy. He arrives in a civilisation that surrounds him with female flesh on a scale his culture considers obscene — on billboards, on public transport, in the gym, on his phone. And every centimetre of it is legally mined — one wrong look, one misread signal, one drunken encounter, and he becomes not a man who made a mistake but a criminal. 

The man is broke, he is foreign, and to the women surrounding him in their skimpy gym wear, he is either invisible or a threat — rarely anything in between. If, by some miracle, he stumbles into a relationship he may end up in a marriage where his wife holds every legal and cultural card — including the power to withdraw sex, his children, his assets and freedom. He traded a society where men rule to arrive at the bottom of one where women rule. A better life? In some ways, perhaps. But when it comes to the thing that matters most to young men, he may have made the worst trade of his life.

Australia’s version of this story arrives by plane rather than rubber dinghy, and the young man in question is more likely to be clutching student enrolment forms than a life jacket. He comes from China, from India, from the Middle East or Southeast Asia. He is ambitious, his family’s great hope, carrying assumptions about women and sex formed in societies where the rules are utterly different. And his encounters with female flesh involve similar cultural and legal minefields – but the courtroom awaiting him may not be a criminal court but rather a campus kangaroo court. A court in name only, where the standard of proof is lower, the rights of the accused are minimal, and the penalty for losing is expulsion and a destroyed future. He came to Australia for an education. He got one — just not the one he paid for.

What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilisations in the grand geopolitical sense, but something more intimate and more combustible — a clash of sexual civilisations. Two utterly incompatible systems of rules about men, women, power, and desire — colliding on buses and street corners, in bars and bedrooms, and the consequences playing out in courtrooms and campus tribunals across the Western world. One system gives women all the power and calls it progress. The other gives men all the power and calls it God’s will. No one is talking honestly about what happens when they clash.

The consequences should be front page news but are usually buried. Writing just last month on his Substack Uncharted Territories, data analyst Tomas Pueyo compiled Eurostat figures showing that between 2014 and 2024, while the EU population grew by less than 2%, sexual assaults across Europe increased by 72% and rapes by 150%. A doubling of rape in a decade, in some of the most prosperous and supposedly civilised societies on earth!

Pueyo then breaks down the data by nationality of offender across five European countries — Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Italy. The pattern is consistent and unambiguous: immigrants from Muslim-majority countries are overrepresented in sexual and violent crime across all five nations. Germany’s 2025 police statistics show that Algerians in Germany are 26 times more likely to commit crime than the average German. Thirteen other Muslim-majority nationalities are at least five times more likely. When broken down specifically by sex crimes the overrepresentation is even more stark.

The UK tells a similar story — foreign nationals account for between a quarter and a third of sexual assault convictions despite being roughly 10% of the population, with conviction rates rising 62% in just four years. But it is Britain’s grooming gang scandal that most nakedly reveals what Islamic contempt for Western women actually looks like in practice. In Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and scores of other towns, organised networks of predominantly Pakistani men systematically abused thousands of vulnerable white girls for decades — while police, social workers and politicians looked away, terrified of being called racist. The perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing. As Muslim community leader Mohammed Shafiq stated on the record, they believed “white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.”

“If you leave meat uncovered on the street and a cat eats it, whose fault is it?” In her book, Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, the brilliant Ayaan Hirsi Ali quotes her Somalian grandmother in warning of the consequences of mass immigration to Europe from Muslim-majority countries. She cites a UN survey of more than four thousand men in Morocco, Egypt, Palestinian areas and Lebanon, which found between one-third and two-thirds of men admitted to sexually harassing women in public.

Hirsi Ali’s anger is directed squarely at Islam — and rightly so. Her life’s work has been documenting the systematic subordination of women in Muslim societies, and the evidence she marshals is devastating. But her argument carries an implicit assumption worth examining, namely that the Western alternative represents unambiguous progress. From where she stands, having escaped one of the world’s most oppressive systems, that is entirely understandable. It is also not quite the whole story. 

Western sexual culture has its own pathologies. A culture which encourages women to display their half-naked bodies in public — and then criminalises every male response, including the involuntary glance. A legal framework so aggressively expanded that the line between predatory behaviour and a misread signal has become genuinely unclear — not just to bewildered immigrants, but to men who grew up here. For a Western man who at least knows the rules, that is dangerous enough. For a man formed in a world where very different rules exist — it is a trap waiting to be sprung.

Here’s the thing about Pueyo’s soaring statistics: they are not measuring the same offences they were measuring ten years ago. Sexual harassment — “inappropriate staring or leering,” “indecent sexual jokes,” “inappropriate invitations to go out on a date” — is now formally classified as sexual violence under EU law, with individual countries steadily feeding ever-broader national definitions into the Eurostat data. Finland, for instance, redefined rape in 2023, instantly inflating its statistics to record a 23% jump in sexual offences in the first nine months alone. What counts as a sexual crime has been steadily, quietly, and deliberately expanded — and a man arriving from Syria or Morocco or Afghanistan is about to get a very expensive education in what Western feminism has done to a statute book.

None of this is to minimise what some of these men have done. Within these statistics are genuine predators — angry, entitled men who brought their contempt for women with them across the Mediterranean and acted on it with devastating consequences for their victims. That story is real and it matters. But within these same statistics are also confused, isolated young men who touched a knee on a bus, stared too long on the tube, made a clumsy pass at a work colleague, sent an unwanted text — and found themselves processed through a criminal justice system they had no framework to understand, for behaviour that in their world carried no moral culpability whatsoever, let alone criminal liability.

The irony — and it is almost too perfect — is that the refugee-welcoming, Greens-voting feminist left are likely the same women who spent decades building the legal machinery now crushing these men. It was built to catch Western men — and has been doing so for decades. The immigrants are just the latest, and least prepared, to stumble into it.

Some years ago, Australia activist Nina Funnell was one of nine finalists in an annual Women of Influence award sponsored by Qantas who wrote a letter of protest to the airline asking it to stop deporting failed asylum seekers. This is the woman who was one of the founders of End Rape on Campus, the organisation responsible for establishing kangaroo courts on our campuses. Quelle surprise!

Looking back on the steady stream of young men I have supported through this horrendous process, I am struck by how many are foreigners, newcomers who are easily targeted when they fail to navigate the confusing sexual climate they encounter on campuses. What haunts me is how rarely we have managed to save them.

Men like Chris, the Malay/Chinese tutor student dismissed by Melbourne university for various trivial accusations like placing a hand on a female student’s shoulder whilst herding students across a busy road. He’s now left the country.

Or Marcus, the Mexican doctor doing post-graduate research at a Sydney university who was suspended after a malicious and false sexual assault accusation. Two years later, a jury took 20 minutes to dismiss the case following a two-week trial. Marcus has given up his medical career.

There are many others — from India, Indonesia, China, across Asia and beyond — too frightened to have their stories told. I have talked to enough of them to know that what destroys these young men is not just the outcome but the process — the speed with which they are presumed guilty, the contempt with which their evidence is dismissed, the ease with which a university can erase years of work and a lifetime of family sacrifice on the basis of one woman’s word.

Kangaroo court is too polite a term. These are conviction machines, built by ideologues and staffed by true believers, where the verdict is decided before the hearing begins. And the cruellest irony of all is that the foreign students caught in them came here trusting that Australia was a country where justice meant something.

Yet in Australia we also see the real risk of importing men with extreme views about women. My good friend Paul Sheehan documented this in Girls Like You (2006) — about Pakistani brothers freshly arrived in Australia, gang-raping schoolgirls. But it was Bilal Skaf, the ringleader of a Lebanese gang whose 2000 attacks on teenage girls shocked the nation, who most nakedly revealed what Islamic contempt for Western women looks like on Australian soil. Bilal remains behind bars. His brother Mohammed was released in 2021 after twenty-one years — still blaming his victims, with not a shred of remorse. He was arrested just the other week for allegedly directing a large-scale cocaine syndicate. Some men don’t change. And our authorities remain determined to look the other way.

Importing large numbers of men raised to regard uncovered women as fair game is not compassionate — it is reckless. Dangerously reckless to the women they encounter — including the indulged Western women who have been taught they can dress and behave as they please, with no consequences. But mass immigration also delivers a very different kind of man — the gentle, disoriented foreign student who stumbles blindly into legal minefields.

A culture that maximises sexual provocation and then criminalises sexual response has no business congratulating itself on its enlightenment. We have lit the fuse, thrown open the borders, and then expressed shock at the body count. The least we can do is stop pretending we don’t know what we’ve done.