In the English speaking world, it has become common to “blackwash” movies and television shows. This is the process of removing white characters and replacing them with non-white characters. The stated claim is that popular entertainment needs to reflect the changing nature of the audience. Of course, the reason the audience is changing is that the same people blackwashing films and television shows are ethnically cleansing white societies with mass immigration.
For a long time now, Hollywood has been taking great care to make the good characters black and the bad ones white. For a short while, the bad guys could be Arab terrorists, but now bad guys are white again. If they need to be foreign baddies, then they are neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or Russian gangsters. Of course, the smartest characters are black or female. If we’re lucky, the brainiac is a black lesbian. Every computer hacker is now non-white or female.
On occasion the blackwashing gets ridiculous. Some figure from white history is played by a black actor. A black guy in a show about medieval Europe could be amusing, but that’s not how it is done. Instead, we get black cowboys saving a white town or a black playing King Lear. It will not be long before we have historical dramas in which well-known figures from white history are played by black actors as black people. Imagine Ben Franklin played by Morgan Freeman.
The Z Man, “Blackwashing”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-02.
May 25, 2026
QotD: Modern movie casting
May 24, 2026
Hollywood took the wrong lessons from Joss Whedon’s work
I was a huge fan of the TV show Firefly, which I think was Joss Whedon’s best work — perhaps more so because it was cancelled before any of his typical tics and quirks took the show in overtly progressive directions. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a comment on yesterday’s post about writers needing empathy to fully portray the characters they create:
Koko (literal gorilla) @Mark68002312
I think Joss Whedon did great at writing characters in the Joss Whedon universe. At least through Firefly.
I don’t understand how people — even people who don’t write for a living — think the character and the context/universe they live in are independent
Joss Whedon wrote the characters in Firefly the way he did because they were:
1. Rebels and iconoclasts, thus irreverent.
2. Broken people, thus inclined to hide deep pain behind shallow humor.
3. Familiar with each other already, thus more likely to banter.The style worked in Firefly because it created a sense of character and setting, which it was appropriate to.
Joss was no master of individualizing character voice, but he at least managed to get the group dynamics right.
However, Hollywood, sack of narcissistic overfunded retards that they are, managed to learn the wrong lesson from the show’s resonance with audiences.
“Oh, the people want light, quippy dialogue with a joke to interrupt every tense moment with a laugh. They are not interested in drama, pathos, gravitas, or emotional weight”, they concluded, and proceeded to pack every damn film with snark for the next twenty years, like Pacific islanders making landing strips and control towers out bamboo, enacting rituals to bring the “cargo” back.
The lesson they should have learned is that audience want, will always want, dialogue that illustrates and enhances character and setting.
Banter is a good tool, sometimes, but it is one good tool in a toolbox of many, and an author must select the right one to do character voice correctly.
“He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays …”
“Here.” Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. “Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It’s how men’s shoes are made.”
“Thus I am served,” Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, “for scorning the arts of mechanics.”
Don Simon Ysidro doesn’t say “Well excuuuuuse me for not knowing all about shoes”, because Don Simon Ysidro is a three hundred year old Spanish nobleman turned vampire, not a homosexual Las Vegas nightclub DJ.
And when he remarks upon his own deficiency in knowledge, he says “mechanics”, not “tradesmen”, or “blue-collar workers”, because to a nobleman of the renaissance, a “rude mechanical” is not an impolite robot, he is an uncultured man who works at physical labor or crafts, rather than social or intellectual pursuits.
May 18, 2026
QotD: Medical ads
Jonathan David Morris, “Thoughts On Health”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-18.
May 13, 2026
QotD: The advertising business
That’s what makes the ads a useful window into the black soul of our rulers. The ad makers are all from the ruling class. Look at the team photo of an ad agency and it looks like the faculty of an Ivy League college. There may be a little color in there for show, but otherwise it is all men with small hats and people who still write “Episcopalian” when asked about their religion. The advertising agencies that produce these ads are the special forces of the Judeo-Puritan ruling class.
The Z Man, “Turn Off, Tune Out and Drop Out”, The Z Blog, 2020-09-04.
April 29, 2026
Three views on the Iran conflict
In The Conservative Woman, Alex Story outlines the three distinct ways that western opinions differ on the ongoing struggle with Iran:
The BBC has a long history of … careful wording in describing events in Iran since 1979. I don’t think this cartoon is unfair in portraying that.
TRUTH is the first casualty of war.
Opinions on a conflict depend deeply on the prevailing culture, erasing nuance in the process. The less of it there is, the easier it is to convince yourself of your righteousness and your opponents’ wickedness.
For instance, the Iranian question divides the world in three main groups.
The first staunchly believes that the Israeli tail wags the American foreign policy dog, working around the clock to recreate Israel’s “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates” Old Testament borders as described in Genesis 15:18.
The second will accept the long-standing Islamic Republic of Iran’s evil nature and its core philosophy of perpetual warfare leading in due course to the unbeliever’s submission but are sceptical if it can be removed solely by this war. As David, an exiled Iranian, said: “I’m caught between wishing for the end of the regime and the very real prospect of its entrenchment through external violence”.
The third will argue that the Iranian leadership should be obliterated. Ending the regime’s five-decades long barbarism, exemplified by the slaughter of “40,000 Iranians” across the country in January 2026 in Prince Reza Pahlavi’s recent words, would make the world a better place. Having lived by the sword, the mullahs should die by the sword, they will say, adding that few will miss them.
Positions turn into intellectual fortresses at the speed of light, fed by a constant stream of “news” destined to further harden preconceived ideas. Little is provided that offers any hope of peaceful co-existence. Data is used, ignored and abused, thus ensuring escalation and lying becomes the accelerator for a world on its irrevocable path to war.
But while truth dies early in the antagonists’ deadly exchanges, war eventually reveals it, and its revelations tend towards the astounding.
In our case, for instance, it has become crystal clear that Britain is now effete, irrelevant and defanged. It is a flotsam on rough international seas, bullied by some, ridiculed by others and ignored by all who have not yet emasculated themselves.
The United Kingdom, the former global hegemon and only European country to come out of the Second World War justified, is not the same country it once was, dismantled stone by stone by an establishment haughtily bent on demise over decades and encouraging others, partially successfully, to follow them down to the Gates of Hades.
Our end, however, cannot all be pinned on Starmer, Hermer, Sands, the Fabians and purple-haired socialists.
He then goes on to make the case that only a counter-revolution will rescue Britain from its current path to misery and global irrelevance.
April 22, 2026
“Finally authorities gave up and decided to let Timmy the Whaletard die in peace”
The German media has been breathlessly covering the story of a wandering whale who seems to delight in getting stranded on sandbanks along the northern coast of Germany in the Baltic Sea:
Timmy
Photo from eugyppius
Timmy is the name the German press have given to a confused humpback whale who got himself caught in a fishing net off the coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in early March.
Authorities cut Timmy free in the hopes that he would swim back to the Atlantic like a good whale, but instead he continued to poop around off the German Baltic coast where he does not belong, finally stranding himself on a sandbar near Niendorf like a complete fucking retard.1 An intensive rescue ensued – breathlessly livestreamed by the German press and regrettably also live-tweeted by myself. Ultimately the effort succeeded and Timmy swam free, only to strand himself again, and again, and again, and still again.
Finally authorities gave up and decided to let Timmy the Whaletard die in peace, but soon a whole raft of philanthropists and “whale whisperers” (this is literally what the press called one of them) descended on the problem and the drama of Timmy continues to this moment. The latest subplot unfolded yesterday, as our whale saviours prepared a complex scheme to lift Timmy via air cushions onto a tarp, tie him to pontoons and tug him around Denmark back into the North Atlantic. Alas, a rising tide loosened the hapless Timmy from his sandbar and he swam free, escaping this indignity at least and leaving all the whale-whispering shitheads with nothing to do but give more pointless media interviews. For two hours children across the Federal Republic jubilated as Timmy lurked aimlessly in shallow coastal waters, until of course he beached himself again, provoking a whole new narrative epicycle.
The case of Timmy the Retard Whale is oddly captivating. Most obviously it illustrates the naiveté and neotenous emotional incontinence of Germans today, many of whom have countered the pervasive secularisation of society with an exaggerated and childish faith in the overarching sacrality of the natural world and its creatures. The media have constructed a perverse Disney plot out of the endless ups and downs of Timmy’s plight: Now the whale is free! Now he is dying! Now he must be rescued! Now he is free again! Now he is stranded! Now there is hope! Now he is dying! Not only children but plenty of adults have lost themselves in this transparently repetitive drama. At one point a gaggle of dumb women even protested to demand that authorities do more to save our unsaveable humpback – who is of course merely one of perhaps 100,000 humpbacks across the world, the vast majority of whom will die in complete obscurity with nary a news article.
In my more delirious moments I wonder if Timmy is not also an omen from on high, a metaphor from the heavens to illustrate for us the ridiculous, circular farce that Germany has become.
- He was named Timmy for Timmendorfer Strand, where he beached himself for the first time. My efforts to christen him Horst have not caught on. I know the good Timmy is probably disoriented due to illness or injury and not actually retarded but this is how I have chosen to maintain emotional distance from the fate of this particular incorrigible mammal, who is beyond all human capacity to rescue but unfortunately not beyond all of my sympathies.
April 20, 2026
“Hail, Caesar!” oops we meant “Hail, Carney!”
At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies discusses the unseemly media adulation1 for Caesar Prime Minister Mark Carney after more than a year in power:
Grok illustration of PM Carney as Caesar
Image from The Rewrite.
Thirteen months into his reign as prime minister, we still don’t know who Mark Carney is or how he engineered the removal of Justin Trudeau from office.
Nor do we know what really happened behind the scenes to convince five Members of Parliament to betray their constituents’ democratic decisions and, for the first time in the nation’s history, give Canadians a majority government they didn’t elect.
What we do know is that none of that seems of great interest to most of our media or, as they like to describe themselves when seeking federal subsidies, “defenders of democracy”.
As The Rewrite noted a year ago, the moves behind the scenes to effect the abrupt ouster of Trudeau remain a mystery. And, unlike with other PMs, there have been no Carney family magazine profiles. (Who can forget Justin and Sophie Trudeau‘s sexy Vogue cover?) Yes, there are the books, Values and The Hinge. We have learned he likes hockey, runs, won’t criticize China and is ruthless. But there is a tangible paucity of efforts within MSM to get beyond what is permitted to be known. We don’t even know if he watches Heated Rivalry or why the Brits called him “the unreliable boyfriend”. And yet, as Stephen Maher wrote for Time magazine last week, Canadians adore him.
As for how he has seized power in excess of that granted by the electorate 11 months ago, there wasn’t a hint of concern on the part of CTV News anchor Omar Sachedina when Carney’s majority was confirmed in a couple of “gimme” by-election victories.
The leading voice on Canada’s most-watched newscast, Sachedina appeared awestruck by the “historic” moment and “what the Liberals have been able to achieve in the past year”. When his sidekick, Vassy Kapelos, noted Carney was now out of excuses for not fulfilling the promises that won him a minority government in 2025, Sachedina suggested soothingly that Canadians remember “sometimes ambition does take time, sometimes several election cycles”.
Screencap of CTV News from The Rewrite
The message to Canadians? The Liberals have accomplished great things in the past year, the greatest of which was to do what no one in the nation’s history had ever done before — manufacture a majority without the public’s consent. Oh, and be patient. PMMC’s agenda could take a few more elections. Sit tight and trust.
The next morning, questions were not, as one might expect from defenders of democracy, about whether the PM felt a tad greasy for the way in which he had won unfettered power. Like, in some countries — many actually — that might be considered kind of scary. Here? If you watch the news, it’s dreamy.
The preferred line of inquiry was to ask Carney whether, if he was the Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre, he would quit. And so it went for the rest of the week. PMMC wasn’t asked if he worried that his majority would undermine the public’s faith in its institutions. Nor did the press corps pursue their sources to discover what inducements may have been offered to create his Judas Gang of Five.
- Yes, I know … the presstitutes will “love him long time” as long as the government subsidies keep rolling in.
April 14, 2026
QotD: Holden Caulfield
Anyway, the point is, you name your kid “Holden” and what can you expect? The Catcher in the Rye is the greatest dickhead-identification device known to man. Even pretentious little snots in desperate need of a beating — I speak from experience here — think Holden Caulfield was a pretentious little snot in desperate need of a beating. It’s a 100% true scientific fact that the only people who liked The Catcher in the Rye are so repulsive to ordinary humans that they have no choice but to become high school English teachers, or go to work for the Washington Post.
I even once got linked on a site called “Kiwi Farms”, that seems to consist of nothing but Internet People making fun of other Internet People, and they all agreed with me (also with my interpretation of MTV’s Daria as “the female Holden Caulfield”, although that show took the piss out of itself more than once, and had actual human affection for its characters, and thus was actually pretty good (although of course serving the Catcher-esque function of mate sorting — if you met a girl who identified with it, run far far far away). I know, I know … MTV. And late-90s MTV, too, the guys who gave us both The Real World and Road Rules. Yeah, I’m scared too).
Anyway, though I think The Catcher in the Rye is the worst book ever written, and anyone who liked it should be beaten with the entire Jack Reacher series until their serum testosterone raises at least 300 points or whatever, I’m willing to hear other opinions: Is there in fact a worse book? Not in terms of writing etc. — even I have to admit that it’s not technically bad — but in terms of influence?
Severian, “Alt Thread: Worst Books Ever”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-10.
April 8, 2026
“Queering the Past”
It sometimes seems as though modern historians are spending all their time postulating that pretty much every prominent figure in western history was gay or lesbian or trans*. The latest attempt to present someone from British history as being trans is Queen Elizabeth I (admittedly in a drama rather than a documentary):
The “Darnley Portrait” of Elizabeth I of England (circa 1575).
National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.
Appropriately, it was April Fool’s Day when I read that Queen Elizabeth I is to be portrayed as a cross-dressing man in a forthcoming television show. But we live in times when the more silly and outlandish a rumoured cultural or political plan, the more likely it is to be true. Majesty – an oddly “heritage” title for a project that clearly considers itself “transgressive” – is set to film this summer, and is seeking “trans actresses” (what we used to call cross-dressers, before they got really cross) to play the monarch.
The Sun, which first reported it, seemed drearily inclined to go along with the usual sexist claims of the trans lobby. “She is known for having traits associated with a male monarch”, it mouthed in a mealy manner in an article last week. What would those be – not getting her tits out for, if not the cameras, then the portrait painters of the era? “Some have speculated she had male pseudo-hermaphroditism, known as testicular feminisation”, the Sun continued, also noting that “others are obsessed with the Bisley Boy myth”. Yes, “obsessed” isn’t too extreme a word here – I often hear people at bus stops discussing the Bisley Boy myth. This is the claim that Princess Elizabeth died in her youth and was replaced by a local boy with red hair. It was popularised by Bram Stoker in his 1910 book, Famous Imposters – because Bram “Dracula” Stoker never made up far-fetched stories based extremely loosely on real people, did he?
The Sun quoted a “TV insider” who insists: “Most historians dismiss the claims as misogyny motivated by the idea no woman could be as strong or capable without actually being a man. But it’s a theory which captures the imagination and appears to answer a lot of other questions around the unique queen.”
What would these questions be? That Elizabeth never married and had no children? Must be a bloke, then – what real woman would forego such unqualified pleasures? It’s a sign that trans thought is so woefully conventional, so gender straitjacketed, that it just doesn’t seem able to grasp, in this case, why a woman would refuse to hand over her hard-won power to a man by marrying a stranger who didn’t even speak her language. Or that she said on the eve of the Spanish Armada invasion: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”? It’s called wordplay, I believe, and was extremely common until people with Tin Ear Syndrome – a disease affecting the “trans community” and their inordinate number of “allies” – became so prevalent among those in the arts and media.
This, of course, is our old mate “Queering the Past” (or “lying” as those not educated beyond all common sense and honesty know it) beloved of universities, museums and other beclowned institutions. There have been some truly rib-tickling examples of it, such as the claim that “trans Vikings” existed, which sounds like a Monty Python sketch; sometimes the whole circus gets too much even for the most proudly gay public figure. In 2023, the museum dedicated to conserving the Mary Rose hosted a blog, promising to understand the collection of everyday objects found on the 16th-century ship “through a queer lens”. This prompted the great Philip Hensher to post on X: “I am as keen as anyone on gay sex, but I have to say to these curators – you’re fucking mental”.
April 1, 2026
QotD: “Colour-blind” casting
As a regular reader of this column, I have no doubt that you want to remain on the right side of history, and I imagine your instincts are to applaud anything that is annoying for conservatives, like diverse casting in historical dramas. Sometimes being an anti-racist can be hard work, but we don’t tell people to “do the work” for nothing.
First, we need to dispense with the “historical accuracy” argument. There are two ways to do this and the first is to say accuracy should play second fiddle to representation. This is apparently the Hilary Mantel argument. The Times says the Wolf Hall author blessed colour-blind casting before she died, saying that although it was difficult: “you’re in the realm of representation. I think we have to take on board the new thinking.” Everything in 21st Century Britain should reflect 21st Century Britain. We’re in year zero, and hence not employing non-white actors in a production made today, even though there were very few non-white people in sixteenth century England, is simply racist.
The second option is to straightforwardly argue that there were lots of Black and Brown people pottering around the court of Henry VIII, so the production is historically accurate. This is the BBC Horrible History approach. Were you there? Can you prove that it wasn’t full of People of Colour? And is it worth losing your job to do so?
I prefer to hold both of these arguments in my head at the same time. Too much consistency seems a bit right-wing.
Next we need to look at specifically who is being played. Thankfully, the “colour-blind casting” didn’t select any PoGMSTs (People of Global Majority Skin Tones) to play bad guys. This was both on purpose, because oppressed people cannot be bad, and it was also not on purpose, because otherwise it wouldn’t be colour-blind casting. Whichever one it was — and it was both — without PoGMSTs actors playing historic fictionalised evil people, we can avoid the completely random casting process being labelled as racist.
David Scullion, “People of Colour television”, The Critic, 2024-11-12.
March 26, 2026
Canada’s “national broadcaster” has become an expensive irrelevance
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was set up to provide Canadians across the vast heartland of the country with quality news and entertainment options. Some would say it was able to achieve those goals well enough for decades, but with the rise of the internet, fewer and fewer people are watching, listening to, or reading CBC content. In some major cities, the CBC’s share of attention is a rounding error, despite the federal government subsidizing their effort on top of the annual budget they already receive from the taxpayers.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison makes the case for letting the CBC shut down:
CBC Isn’t Being Attacked. It’s Being Ignored. And That’s Worse.
There’s an old business rule most people learn the hard way: if your customers quietly leave, you’re already finished. No protest. No boycott. Just silence.
That’s where the CBC is right now.
You can spin it. You can defend it. You can fund it.
But you can’t fake attention.We’re looking at a public broadcaster that calls itself the “voice of Canada” while pulling audiences so small they’d embarrass a local radio host. In some cases, tens of thousands of viewers in major cities. That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse.
And here’s the uncomfortable part:
Canadians didn’t lose interest in news. They lost interest in that version of news.
Because when reporting turns into messaging, people notice. When coverage feels selective, people adjust. When tone replaces trust, people leave.
Quietly.
Now layer in Mark Carney.
Carney’s entire pitch rests on a simple belief: that complex societies should be guided by centralized expertise. Managed from the top. Coordinated. Directed. Calibrated.
Sounds efficient. Sounds smart. Sounds like it belongs in a white paper.
But we already have a working example of that model in action.
It’s called CBC.Centralized control
Institutional messaging
Weak accountability to audience demand
Heavy public funding
And the result?
A broadcaster Canadians are walking away from in real time.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a signal.
Here’s the reframe nobody wants to touch:
CBC isn’t failing because it lacks resources.
It’s failing because it lost the discipline of needing to be chosen.When your funding doesn’t depend on your audience, your audience eventually stops depending on you.
That’s not ideological. That’s behavioural economics.
Carney’s model doubles down on that exact structure. More planning. More coordination. More reliance on expert systems that assume compliance instead of earning trust.
But trust doesn’t scale through authority.
It scales through responsiveness.And that’s the part that’s missing.
This is where the conversation usually derails into tribal nonsense. “Defund”. “Protect”. “Save public media”.
Misses the point.
The real question is simpler and harsher:
What happens when institutions stop adapting because they don’t have to?
You don’t get stability.
You get drift.You don’t get unity.
You get quiet disengagement.And you don’t get better outcomes by expanding that model across the country.
You get more of the same, just bigger.
I’ve run businesses. You learn this fast or you go broke:
If people stop showing up, it’s not because they suddenly became irrational. It’s because you stopped giving them a reason.
CBC stopped giving people a reason.
Carney’s approach assumes the reason doesn’t matter.That’s the disconnect.
Hard line:
If an institution can’t earn attention, it shouldn’t demand trust.
Plur1bus: First Impressions
Feral Historian
Published 21 Nov 2025EDIT: The sound is bad. I should have known better than to edit it on a laptop in-transit, but here we are.
After a few recommendations I started watching Plur1bus, and a few things strike me two episodes in. Let’s see how off-base I end up looking when the season is done.
Also I bounce off a few points raised by Damien Walter in his recent video on the show, which you can find here: • So. What’s PLUR1BUS all about then?
00:00 Intro
00:45 Mind Virus
02:28 Mrs. Davis and the End of the World
04:18 Mandatory Happiness and Self-Delusion
07:08 Commodification
09:02 Stopping the Machine
(more…)
March 20, 2026
The BBC is cheerleading Britain’s “baby bust”
In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Tony Rucinski reports on a recent BBC programme that clearly takes a dim view of parenting:
ON March 13 – the Friday before Mother’s Day – the Centre for Social Justice published Baby Bust, a report projecting that 600,000 British women alive today may miss out on motherhood they actually wanted. Nine in ten young women still hope to become mothers. The ONS confirms the total fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.41 in 2024. The CSJ calculates a “birth gap” of 30 per cent, with 831,000 people turning 50 in 2024 but only 595,000 babies born.
You probably did not hear about it. No identifiable standalone BBC News website article or feature covering the report has appeared. Our national broadcaster had other priorities. Namely a 1,500-word feature headlined “Like a trap you can’t escape: The women who regret being mothers“. It promoted the piece on social media, where it drew hundreds of critical replies. Instead of covering a demographic crisis, the BBC gave prominent space to a piece whose own evidence undermines its thesis – and thus revealed something important about the role it plays in the very crisis it should be reporting.
Its maternal regret article relies on a 2023 study conducted in Poland which estimates some 5 to 14 per cent of parents regret their decision to have children, a review article which synthesises several methodologically incomparable surveys – different countries, different age groups, different question wordings.
The more important point is its arithmetic. If 5 to 14 per cent of parents experience some regret, then 86 to 95 per cent do not. But the BBC devoted a feature-length article to the minority experience and ignored the majority one entirely. The lead case study featured is of a pseudonymous woman, Carmen, who came from a background of violence and dysfunction. But further data unsurprisingly finds the regret rates to be higher among single parents than married ones: 27.3 per cent versus 9.8 per cent. And that adverse childhood experiences, depression, and anxiety were also strongly associated with parental regret.
The BBC’s article however did not mention marriage once. Even the therapists quoted made the case against the BBC’s framing without apparently realising it. They repeatedly stated that regret often reflects “isolation, exhaustion, or lost identity” – failures of support, not failures of motherhood as a vocation.
The far larger and more painful form of regret that the BBC also ignored is the regret of women who wanted children and never had them, the highest figures among those who experienced fertility treatment failure. Or the similar regret found among couples whose fertility treatment did not result in a child. Or that involuntarily childless women’s regret intensifies with age.
The CSJ’s huge figure of 600,000 “missing mothers” just did not fit the narrative the BBC wants to tell.
Nor is this an isolated editorial misjudgment. Between 2023 and 2026, the BBC published a series of prominent features sympathetic to negative experiences of motherhood or to child-free lifestyles, among them: “I felt like a freak because I didn’t want children” (April 2024). “The adults celebrating child-free lives” (February 2023). “True cost of becoming a mum highlighted in new data on pay” (October 2025).
In the same period, not a single piece of the BBC’s coverage of Miriam Cates – the most prominent parliamentary advocate for pro-natalist policy – featured conversion therapy, smartphones and the trans debate, or substantially addressed her work on demographics or declining birth rates.
March 19, 2026
QotD: From the fall of the Soviets to the rise of the Wokerati
That protection ended when the Berlin Wall fell. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung round their necks like a putrid albatross any more. They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment. Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcomed political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.
Antonio Gramsci’s rethinking of the revolution — seize the university, the school, the TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theatre, rather than the barracks, the railway station and the post office — could at last get under way. At that moment, the long march of 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective, as they moved into the important jobs for the first time. And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished, exactly when it was most needed.
The BBC’s simpering coverage of the Blair regime’s arrival in Downing Street, with its North-Korean-style fake crowd waving Union Jacks they despised, and new dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked. May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge, and the Cultural Revolution at last had political muscle.
Then came the new enemy, the shapeless ever-shifting menace of terrorism, against which almost any means were justified. To combat this, we willingly gave up Habeas Corpus and the real presumption of innocence, and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly-convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.
Those who think the era of the face-mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport “security” (almost wholly futile once the simple precaution of refusing to open the door to the flight deck has been introduced) have not only remained in place since September 2001: they have been intensified. Yet, by and large, they are almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow-citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.
Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual (and hard to defeat — how can you ever eliminate a virus?) than al-Qaeda or Isis, has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action it cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling of an already shaky economy for which those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades. Millions have greeted this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.
As a nation, we now produce more fear than we can consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates. We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital IDs. And those of us who cry out, until we are hoarse, to say that this is a catastrophe, are met with shrugs from the chattering classes, and snarls of “just put on the frigging mask” from the mob. If I hadn’t despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.
Peter Hitchens, “Democracy muzzled”, The Critic, 2020-09-25.
March 18, 2026
Viewing-with-alarm “the highly lucrative, hyper-masculine ecosystem of online ‘red pill’ influencers”
I first heard of Louis Theroux and his Inside the Manosphere documentary through it being mentioned a few times on a recent podcast, but I’m hardly the one to provide any insight into contemporary political culture, so this is probably not very surprising. To provide some context, I found Celina’s summary to be quite useful:
When the liberal establishment is suddenly forced to confront the grotesque downstream consequences of its own social engineering, its first and most reliable instinct is to pathologise the individual rather than to interrogate the civilisation that produced him. This predictable dynamic is perfectly encapsulated in the critical reaction to the March 2026 release of the Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.1 The feature-length film, which follows the veteran British broadcaster as he immerses himself in the highly lucrative, hyper-masculine ecosystem of online “red pill” influencers, has been received by the chattering classes as a horrifying, alien glimpse into a shadowy digital underworld of unbridled misogyny, toxic behaviour, and financial grift.2 Commentators, critics, and worried parents have wrung their hands over the crude language, the explicit hostility directed toward women, and the ruthless exploitation of vulnerable, disaffected young boys who flock to these figures for guidance.3 They will undoubtedly draw the conclusion that these internet personalities are a bizarre aberration, a reactionary glitch in the otherwise progressive march of modern Western society that must be heavily censored, de-platformed, or psychologically rehabilitated.
This conclusion is not only incomplete, it is entirely, fundamentally wrong. The true significance of Theroux’s latest documentary is not that it uncovers an isolated network of digital deviants operating on the fringes of acceptable discourse. Rather, the film unintentionally functions as a bleak, unrelenting autopsy of late-stage Western cultural decline. The figures profiled by Theroux, men who monetise male grievance, openly commodify female sexuality, and preach a gospel of ruthless, transactional dominance are in no way rebels against the modern liberal order. They are, in fact, its purest, most distilled, and most logical products.
Through its exploration of this digital underworld, from the sun-drenched hedonism of Miami to the expatriate enclaves of Marbella, the documentary inadvertently exposes a significant and terrifying civilisational breakdown. It reveals a society suffering from the total collapse of traditional gender norms, the complete disappearance of honour, duty, and social trust, and the total ascendancy of a vulgar materialism where attention and capital are the only remaining arbiters of human value. The manosphere is not an alternative to modern Western ideology, it is the inevitable, putrid consequence of a culture that has spent the last half-century systematically dismantling its own moral, religious, and social infrastructure. To understand the phenomenon captured by Theroux, one must look past the superficial liberal moral outrage and recognise the manosphere for what it truly is: a favela culture operating seamlessly inside a wealthy Western economy.
[…]
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is undeniably a compelling piece of television, featuring moments of sharp journalistic insight and necessary confrontation with deeply unsavoury characters. But as a piece of cultural criticism, it ultimately fails because it refuses to look beyond the immediate vulgarity of its subjects. Theroux, and the liberal audiences who will consume his documentary, will walk away from the film comforted by their own moral superiority, convinced that the problem lies entirely with a few toxic men in Marbella and Miami who simply need to be censored, de-platformed, or re-educated.
They will draw entirely the wrong lesson. The manosphere influencers are not an invading force corrupting a healthy society; they are the native flora of the wasteland we have purposefully created. They are the warlords of the digital favela, thriving in the ruins of a civilisation that has actively, joyfully destroyed its own moral and social foundations. The documentary unintentionally captures the catastrophic, unavoidable consequences of modern Western ideology: a low-trust, hyper-materialistic culture where honour is dead, transactional exploitation is the accepted norm, and the relations between men and women have devolved into a state of algorithmic trench warfare.
Until the West is willing to confront the structural causes of this decay, the destructive failures of modern feminism, the atomisation inherent in mass democracy, the fraying of social capital brought about by multiculturalism, and the vast spiritual void of secular materialism, it will continue to produce generations of lost, angry men. And the e-pimps will always be there, waiting in the digital shadows, ready to sell them a monthly subscription to the abyss.
Update: Rob Henderson’s Wall Street Journal article on Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere has also been posted on their free Substack – https://wsjfreeexpression.substack.com/p/louis-theroux-exposes-the-manosphere
A new Netflix documentary takes viewers into “the manosphere,” a loose network of YouTubers, podcasters, live-streamers and online pranksters. Those interviewed in Louis Theroux’s documentary, Inside the Manosphere, claim to teach young men how to become dominant, wealthy and irresistible to women. They pitch a specific idea about male worth. Women enter the world with innate value, they say, though they often contradict this by telling their followers to mistreat women. A man must earn his value, the logic goes, through money, sex and status. Otherwise, he is worthless.
This is a bleak message. It is also a brilliant sales strategy. First you convince young men that they are nothing. Then you charge them to become something. It’s one of the oldest cons in the world, updated for the age of the algorithm.
At first glance, the documentary seems to confirm what critics already suspect. The manosphere is toxic and extreme. But the film reveals the gap between persona and reality. The influencers selling this lifestyle often don’t live it themselves.
Early in the film, Mr. Theroux asks influencer Justin Waller a simple question: How many kids do you have? The man hesitates. Later, we learn he lives with his two children and their mother — he describes her as his “wife” though they are not legally married — who is pregnant with their third child. The man leads a fairly conventional family life, yet he spends much of his online career telling followers that men should dominate women, avoid commitment and establish a rotation of multiple partners.
One influencer known as Myron Gaines brags privately to Mr. Theroux that he plans to have multiple wives. But when Mr. Theroux raises this idea of “one-way monogamy” in front of Gaines’s girlfriend, his facial expression immediately changes. He then says, “Who knows? Maybe I’ll only wanna be with one girl after all.” The credits of the documentary reveal that the girlfriend eventually left him.
