How We Moved the Overton Window

A list of our political victories in the last year.

What passes for the “Marketplace of ideas” can feel more like an infernal, eternal conversation: paralysing political action with consternation and indecision. As Carl Schmitt infamously quipped in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy:

Just as the romantic avoids taking decisions, so too the liberal; faced with the question, “Christ or Barabbas, the liberal answers with a motion to adjourn the meeting or set up an investigative committee.”

But, battles were hard-fought and won in 2024. To stave off feeling dispirited about the glacial pace of change in politics, it’s worth counting the victories we contributed to.

The Overton Window

To frame this discussion, I provided a succinct crash course on the concept of the “Overton Window” this week on Tomlinson Talks.

As long as we are in apolitcs which is governed (more or less to an extent) by public perception and democratic assent, the Overton Window exists as the parameters in which speech and policy in the political and public sphere are possible …

What the Overton Window describess is not someting objective or metric. It’s kind of like a political apocalypse, in a traditional sense of the term: a lifting of the veil to reveal just how far things have moved, and how fast things have changed, before it is officially declared. It’s a vibe barometer …

The term originated from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and was named posthumously after its former senior vice president, Joseph Overton. After Overton’s death in a plane crash in 2003, his colleague Joseph Lehman used the concept in a presentation to educate fellow think tank employees on how public policy advocacy works.

Their summary reads:

The Overton Window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support — they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. Other policy ideas exist, but politicians risk losing popular support if they champion these ideas. These policies lie outside the Overton Window. …

All of this suggests that politicians are more followers than they are leaders — it’s the rest of us who ultimately determine the types of policies they’ll get behind. It also implies that our social institutions — families, workplaces, friends, media, churches, voluntary associations, think tanks, schools, charities, and many other phenomena that establish and reinforce societal norms — are more important to shaping our politics than we typically credit them for.

The Mackinac Center places undue emphasis on the role of think-tanks (like themselves) in shaping public debate.

While politicians do outsource their thinking to staffers, think-tanks, and activist groups, a larger unelected, managerial bureaucracy applies behavioural science insights to “nudge” the population toward holding specific beliefs. This network of propaganda outfits — such as the Home Office’s RICU, and the for-profit Nudge Unit — specialise in manufacturing consent for policies desired a priori by the government.

As Laura Dodsworth details in A State of Fear:

Nudge theory is the concept in behavioural science which uses insights about our behaviour to ‘nudge’ our decision-making. Nudges are not mandates: they are subtle suggestions, and they happen without you even being aware.

We don’t always make decisions rationally; we simply don’t have time to evaluate each decision we make carefully. If you understand the psychological drivers beneath the surface thinking, you can positively influence people’s decisions and behaviour.

The person who coined the term ‘nudge’, Cass Sunstein, said, ‘By knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best for them, their families and society.’ Isn’t it great that there are people who know what is best for you? And who can change your thinking and behaviour without you even being aware of it? Rest assured, there are many behavioural scientists and their advocates embedded and advising within the UK government, nudging you towards what is best for you.

Britain is one of the pioneers in nudge theory. The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), unofficially known as ‘the Nudge Unit’ was set up in 2010 under David Cameron’s government. Britain is so good at behavioural insights that we export it all over the world. The Nudge Unit is now a profit-making ‘social purpose limited company’ with offices in London, Manchester, Paris, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Wellington and Toronto. It has run more than 750 projects and in 2019 alone worked in 31 countries. It has conducted over 1,000 workshops for governments around the world, training 20,000 civil servants in behavioural insights.

However, as human rhetorical mine-sweeper, Douglas Murray said, there are times when even the most arrogant clotheless-Emperors in the political elite capitulate to the demands of their rabid base.

Douglas cited Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democrats being winched up from their locking octogenarian joints after kneeling for almost nine minutes, to honour George Floyd, while wearing the kente cloth of a slave-owning tribe, during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.

I explained how the Democrats have sabotaged their future electoral prospects by occupying a narrow sliver of the Overton Window in a recent essay for Courage Media.

In 2004, most Democrats saw themselves as socially conservative (20%) or socially moderate (40%). Now those factions are down to 6% and 24%, respectively.

The Republican party became marginally more socially conservative, accommodating some of those Left-left-me Democrats. But that roughly 10% shift to the right is dwarfed by the 30% shift among Democrats. Commensurately, Americans as a whole have gotten more socially liberal.

A preponderance of Americans self-identifies as social liberals nowadays, which should make fertile recruiting ground for progressives. Liberals have a large, motivated, ideological consistent base that can attain almost half the seats in congress, even in a bad year like 2024. Remember that, for all her faults, Harris still secured more than 74 million votes. Perhaps this group will continue to grow, and come to dominate American politics one day (though the ratio of children-per-parent of liberals versus conservatives means this is unlikely).

In the meantime, progressives have become victims of their own success. Ross Douthat explained their conundrum in 2017. His analysis centered around a survey of 2016 voters that polled views on a variety of social and economic issues. Here is the resultant matrix:

Going clockwise: In the top right, we have rock-ribbed Republicans (conservative socially, and fiscally restrained). In the bottom right are libertarians (social progressives, but fiscal conservatives). In the bottom left are dyed-in-the-wool progressives (left-wing on everything). Finally, in the top left are a large, varied group of voters we might call “populist” (fiscally relaxed, but socially conservative). This top left quadrant constitute the most common voters in the UK: left on economics, right on social issues. Populists support a welfare state and socialized healthcare for native citizens, but oppose mass immigration and Woke identity politics. They are traditional Labour voters, who largely voted for Brexit in 2016, Boris Johnson in 2019, and in significant numbers for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in July this year. They also vote in large numbers for Donald Trump; hence his unwillingness to touch entitlements such as social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. This puts Democrats in a difficult position: unable to run as economic populists, while also wedded to radioactively unpopular Woke social policies.

In Douthat’s diagram, one notices that the most densely populated quadrant is the most politically progressive. Many Americans cluster in that corner — more than any other — but, crucially, not a majority. A small majority of Americans exist in a miasma centered in the middle of the socially-conservative top-half of the graph. This consolidation of their activist base, at the expense of gains elsewhere, could explain why Harris failed to outperform Biden by >3% in every single county nationally. Thanks to Democrats’ failure to read the room, Republicans stood to gain.’

Through years of social shunning, public policy advocacy, manipulation of primaries, and social media activity, the Democrats have ended up in an unpopular Leftist cul-de-sac, with little room to manoeuvre come 2028.

Look at what Democrats have done in every part of the country they control. The number of pro-life Democrat senators is zero. The number of pro-life Democrat governors is zero. Representatives? Either zero or one, depending on whether you take Henry Cuellar at his word or Marjorie Dannenfelser at hers. …

LGBTQ+ activist group, the Human Rights Campaign scores members of congress (out of 100 points) across a variety of causes célèbres dear to sexual revolutionaries. [...] A grand total of six Democrats in the 118th Congress earned middling scores from them. …

The “blue dog Democrat” seems to have been put down. In 2006, its eponymous caucus of open moderates boasted 56 members in the US House. By 2010, it had diminished to just 28. The incoming class this year will have just nine — four of whom are avowed lefties on social issues. …

So yes, perhaps Democrats could win again, were they to moderate on social issues and meet Republicans in the center. But their own voters have purged all the moderates Democrat politicians in primaries. Many of their moderate voters are following Tulsi Gabbard into the welcoming arms of the GOP. In fact, many of Trump’s A-list allies are former Democrats. While smart political operators cannot wait for a congenial centrist to emerge from the South or Midwest to lead Democrats back to victory, the drawbridges are up. There are literally zero socially moderate Democrat governors or senators left.

You can read the rest of my assessment of the likelihood that electoral expediency will prompt the Democrats to ditch their radioactively unpopular woke social policies on Courage Media.

So, while the organised minority and the state apparatuses they control can shape and set public opinion, their liberal progressive values do leave them susceptible to allowing the most demented, febrile, elements of their diverse client coalition to drive the revolution.

However, while the state and conventional uniparty remains impenetrable to entryism by those of us who think having borders and babies is a good idea, insurgent political movements remain amenable to dissident voices.

Reform UK and Mass Deportations

July’s general election saw five MPs enter Parliament from Reform UK. I was vocal about my support for the party — so much so, that abstaining from voting Conservative this election cost me my membership.

I detailed the ordeal in the following essay for The European Conservative:

It took two weeks for CCHQ’s (Conservative Campaign Headquarters) crack team of investigators to provide me with a list of offences. From over 4,000 X posts, and thousands of hours of broadcast footage, they produced four tweets and a ten second clip. I was disappointed that they were incapable of compiling my greatest hits—all of which I would have stood by. What were my crimes? Tweets suggesting conditional support for Reform UK’s policies; tweets criticising the hostility of LGBT activists towards the family unit; tweets condemning the chemical castration of children by transgender ideology; and a joke about the undesirable cultural practices of unassimilated immigrants.

Yes, you read that right. I was removed from the Conservative Party for stating that we should not chemically castrate children. …

I condemned the exile of Lee Anderson for suggesting Sadiq Khan’s career history of defending Islamic terrorists may go some way to explaining why the Palestine marches have been given carte blanche to chant genocidal slogans every week in Westminster since October 7th. I commended Reform UK for making Anderson their first MP, and stated that I might be willing to vote for them in a general election.

I also said that I voted for Richard Tice in my local Bexley by-election in December 2021—before I had reinstated my Conservative party membership, following Boris Johnson’s resignation. I had cancelled my membership renewal in 2020, after the government saw fit to place healthy people under house arrest for almost two years while simultaneously importing 942,000 people in 2021. Johnson then had the temerity to float the notion of ending the lockdowns only after the entire population was compulsorily vaccinated.

I reinstated my membership when Jonhson resigned, in anticipation of the leadership election. After Liz Truss emerged victorious, I hoped for a course-correction on economic and social policies. Forty-nine days later, Truss was coup’d out, and Rishi Sunak installed to continue the status quo. This hubris produced the historic defeat on July 4th. It seems the Conservative Party is filled with suckers for punishment, intent on suffering yet another repudiation by the voting public the next time their brand is put to a vote.

Lest I be accused of hyperbole, here are the screenshots from my expulsion email:

I have since continued to comment on the conduct of both parties, using (what I hope is) my record of credibility on issues like energy, immigration, demographics, and transgenderism to give public and private policy advice to pundits and politicians.

I provided running commentary on the Conservative leadership election — culminating in the disastrous election of Kemi Badenoch by a clod-eared, cleaned-out Tory membership.

Party members now get to choose between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. Both candidates have made more and less sincere bids for the same social conservative faction which have been ostracised by the party’s central office. This same CCHQ establishment has been aligned with Badenoch for some time. Former permanent Cabinet fixture Michael Gove supported Badenoch’s leadership bid in 2022. When Suella Braverman was sacked as Home Secretary over criticism of how pro-Palestine protests were inadequately policed, Gove insisted allies “isolate Braverman, who, as the more “extreme” voice, with her heated rhetoric aimed at Gaza protesters, left Badenoch positioned for broader appeal”. This could explain why details of the first Shadow Cabinet meeting following the election were “leaked”, with Badenoch saying Braverman’s comments at NatCon DC constituted a “very public nervous breakdown”. Despite Badenoch denying the partnership, rumours persist that the former minister has been in her corner for years. …

This general stench of association with an establishment which led the party to their worst election defeat for a century is part of why Badenoch has slipped behind Jenrick in the polls. Other reasons include Badenoch weaponizing anti-White identity politics when it suits, and claiming to have “become working class” when she took a job in McDonalds as a student. Despite a recent endorsement from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Badenoch cannot claim to be a more right-wing candidate than Jenrick. In 2018, Badenoch boasted in the Commons that she successfully lobbied to removing annual limits on work visas and also on international students to benefit her home country, Nigeria. In 2010, Badenoch wrote a blog post while running as a Parliamentary candidate for Dulwich & West Norwood, promising to “Use whatever influence I have to speak out against those who are cheating and robbing Nigeria and who seek refuge for themselves or their money in the UK”. Pandering toward the interests of an unassimilated ethnic subgroup in Britain is hardly socially conservative toward the native host population.

Would the Last Person Please Turn the Lights Off?

This has produced a predictable predicament, in which globalist socialist Keir Starmer can be seen as more credible than Kemi Badenoch on immigration, by dint of not being a Conservative minister who personally lobbied to lift the caps on visas:

Starmer’s perceived rightward shift on immigration leaves the Conservative party in a double-bind. While the only path to victory is to abandon the radioactively unpopular immigration policies of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, they have elected a new leader, Kemi Badenoch, who is personally responsible for making the problem worse. In a speech in Parliament in 2018, Badenoch boasted:

“As a first-generation immigrant, can I welcome the home secretary’s statement?

“I feel this immigration white paper is a move from the 20th century to a much better future immigration system.

“In particular I’d like to thank the Home Secretary for removing annual limits on work visas and also on international students, both of which I lobbied for on behalf of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Anglia Ruskin University, which serve my constituency.”

Badenoch not only campaigned to liberalise immigration restrictions since becoming an MP in 2017, but also signals solidarity to “immigrants” as an identity category. This concerning use of identity politics is compounded by her use of “white” as a pejorative: referring to fellow university students as “stupid, lefty white kids,” and calling trans–obsessed actor David Tennant a “rich, lefty, white male celebrity”. Conversely, she has invoked her race as a virtue: saying she achieved despite the bigotry of white teachers, who “thought that black kids were not very academic”, and that her skin colour allows her to make criticisms of multiculturalism that would land the native population in prison. This week, she insisted on identifying as Yoruba, not Nigerian, and has called Boko Haram her “ethnic enemies”. Were the word “white” substituted for “Jewish”, we can be sure Badenoch would have the party whip suspended. Were a white male (like myself) to suggest that British identity is rooted in ethnicity rather than values, they would be condemned by every party in Parliament. Instead, Badenoch is applauded by leadership rival and former Home Secretary, James Cleverly, for showing how “Male, pale, and stale” Labour are by comparison.

I have also tried to act as a third rail for Reform UK, notifying them when any perceived softening, in the hopes of attracting new voters, is estranging their core base. This is possible, because there are good people within the party who are, as Matt Goodwin put it to me, ‘trying to build the plane as it’s flying’.

As I wrote in my review of the Conference for Courage Media:

When asked if the demographic decline of the native white British population, from 87% to 74% in the last twenty years, was concerning, Farage said, “No, no that’s not a concern of mine”. When Edginton asked if Farage supports mass deportations, Farage replied, “It’s impossible to do. Literally impossible to do”. When pressed on if, despite logistical challenges, it was Farage’s “ambition” to remove the over-a-million illegal immigrants currently residing in Britain, he said:

No. No, I’m not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations, or anything like that. […]

If I say I support mass deportations, that’s all anybody will talk about for the next twenty years, so it’s pointless even going there. It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds-of-thousands of people. We simply can’t do it.

This alarmed Reform voters. In Reform’s “Contract with the people” released before the election (which, I have on good authority, was rewritten by Nigel personally), it says, in no uncertain terms, that “Illegal migrants who come to the UK will be detained and deported”. Their policy on foreign criminals reads:

Deport foreign nationals immediately after their prison sentence ends. Withdraw citizenship from immigrants who commit crime with the exception of some misdemeanour offences.

Farage’s latest statements seem to be an unannounced departure from their election pledges.

Rhetorical Softening on the Precarious Path to Power

Farage had also posted on X on election day:

This led to a few weeks of discourse on X about whether Reform was already retreating from the policies that won them four million votes in July’s election.

I wrote a notorious piece in the Critic, on the consternation caused by recent interviews by Richard Tice and Nigel Farage, which divided opinion within the party:

those fearing Reform will be a refugee camp for Tory MPs might dread Farage’s pronouncement that “half of the Conservative party in Parliament should join Reform, and the other half should join the Lib Dems.” Given Nigel’s close friendship with Priti Patel, despite her doubling-down on her unapologetic importing of the Boris-wave — millions of third-world migrants — into Britain, one grows concerned as to exactly which members he has in mind for his half. …

Ben Habib announced his departure from the party, following his unceremonious ousting as deputy leader in July. In an interview, Ben told me he has still never met Zia Yusuf, who was appointed chairman the same day of Ben’s sacking. Alongside his concerns that the promise to democratise the party were not being kept, Ben cited his opposition to Nigel’s apathy to demographic change, and categoric refusal to support mass deportations, as reasons for leaving. …

Habib also expressed discontent with Reform’s policy of distancing themselves from the crowds at the Unite the Kingdom rallies. A strawpoll of the attendees found that every one, to a man, voted Reform at the last general election. Despite this, Richard Tice denounced them on GB News, saying “we have nothing to do with [Tommy Robinson]” or “all of that lot.” Now, I don’t attend those marches, but I am concerned about this kneejerk need to disavow thousands of Reform voters through guilt-by-association.

This then sparked an exchange on X with Deputy Leader Richard Tice MP, which I detailed in a previous Substack post:

And the following clip from Tomlinson Talks:

My core complaints with the party’s brief wobble were their reluctance to commit to upholding the law by deporting all of the illegal immigrants currently residing in Britain, and Nigel Farage’s suggestion that political Islam should not be “alienated” but appeased.

Despite Tice’s public objection to my article, I have since spoken to senior people with Reform UK, who were keen to assuage my concerns. I made my objections to their strategy known, and they were taken on board.

At the same time, Rupert Lowe has risen to prominence, promising to deport all illegal immigrants in Britain, and offer remigration for any foreign national who remains unwilling to assimilate into Britain outside their ethnic and sectarian silos.

Lowe has excellent instincts and an unmatched work ethic. He has procured so much data that those of us outside the Commons would never be able to access. For this, he has our thanks.

But without vocal members of Reform’s base pushing for the mass deportation of foreign criminals, the party may not have felt encouraged enough to run a little faster while conducting its ming-vase strategy ahead of the next election.

The trick to moving the Overton Window isn’t making beyond-the-pale ideas palatable; rather, it’s making sensible, necessary policies possible by proving to politicians that there is existing public demand for them, which it behoves them not to capitalise on.

For example: when asked on the fringe event stage at the Reform UK Conference what one policy the party should pursue to win a mandate to govern at the next election, I said, “Mass deportations.”

This was a few days after Nigel Farage told Steven Edginton on GB News that mass deportations of foreign criminals were “impossible.” The room erupted into applause — meaning it was undeniable that Reform’s core supporters wanted the policy.

After months of critical friends making the public appetite for deporting foreign criminals known, Rupert Lowe, and now Reform more broadly, have gotten behind the policy.

Although some expressed frustration with my perceived breaking-rank from Reform by criticising them, one’s best and most trustworthy friends are those who warn you when you’re going astray, before you make a fatal mistake. The short argument with some of Reform’s senior figures was well worth having them listen to the concerns of their loyal supporters, before they decided to wander off down other political cul-de-sacs, like smaller parties or street movements which have no hope of governing.

But one thing Reform must still address in the coming year is…

British Values vs. Ethnicity and Identity

On Christmas Day, I released an episode of Tomlinson Talks on the necessity of national tribalism, to break the false binary of civic/racial nationalism.

By coincidence (as this episode was pre-recorded), a hit-piece was released on me on Spiked.com only a few days prior.

You may be confused, dear reader, as I am not a ‘white identitarian’. Nor am I a ‘racial identitarian’, or do I feel any ‘nihilistic resentment’.

And yet, my Critic piece was hyperlinked in the following paragraph by Inaya Folarin Iman, insinuating that I am all of the above:

Some are willing to take a stand, however. Reform leader Nigel Farage has been keen to draw a line between his party’s populist politics and those of the identitarian right. His recent efforts to rebuff the racial identitarians have been criticised, unsurprisingly, by those who think the party should obsess over ‘demographic change’ and stop saying mean things about Tommy Robinson. Apparently, Farage is betraying his anti-establishment credentials. The polls would suggest Farage was right to ignore these critics. Reform is polling at record highs. Ordinary people clearly don’t spend their days worrying about the ‘great replacement’.

Under the Public Order Act 1986, "stirring up racial hatred" is a crime in the UK — making Inaya's mendacious mischaracterisation of my beliefs a very serious accusation.

I did contact Iman, Spiked, and request a retraction publicly on X. I never received a reply — meaning Spiked is content to post lies about people, even when they cannot produce a modicum of evidence that I hold the above beliefs (because I don’t).

Had Iman done her journalistic due diligence, she could have reached out to me ahead of time and asked what my beliefs were, and I could have allayed her concerns. I could have also explained to her that I am not persona non grata at Reform UK, as this piece alleged (and is attempting to ensure).

She knows she could have done so because Inaya has spoken to me in person before: when we appeared on Mark Dolan Tonight together on 21st August 2021, and at my friend Eric Kaufmann's book launch last year. I would hope that the opinion of me in this space is that I'm honest and relatively approachable, and I don't think, at the times we have met, I did anything to give Inaya an impression to the contrary.

Though I don’t think Iman is all that keen on conversations these days, because:

Such reputation hit-and-run attack tactics are despicable.

Anyway, what I actually believe is laid out in the episode of Tomlinson Talks: that historically, states have been collections of families who intermarried to form tribes, and who worshipped shared ancestors, who were buried in the earth and built their home. The city-state was inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors, to whom they owed gratitude, and gods emblematic of the ideals of the people, to whom the culture belonged. The ruling authority owed its allegiance to the tribes, faith, and families of its state. The structure of public and private life was interconnected, and based on bonds of loyalty between people, as a people.

The moment you go a layer of abstraction beyond families — to either race or values — you base the state on unstable foundations.

One oxymoronic term produced by this false binary cropped up in both my Tomlinson Talks episode and the appalling Spiked piece: “Woke Right”.

Here is a prime example of how not to move the Overton Window. A handful of liberal commentators astroturfed this ill-defined, self-contradictory term — some in good faith, others, not. But they couldn’t agree on whom the label applied to: lumping in Tucker Carlson with anonymous neo-Nazis on X, and setting the parameters as broad as “historical revisionism” and hatred of Israel.

As I wrote in a widely-read piece in The Critic:

My friend, Triggernometry host Konstantin Kisin, was a prominent early adopter of the term “Woke Right”. In February, Kisin accused Tucker Carlson of right-wing wokeness, after Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kisin suggested that Carlson’s career, covering the corruption in the American government, led him to reactively romanticise Putin’s Russia. …

Calling Carlson a “Useful Idiot” is also inaccurate. As Larry Siedentop explained, the etymology of idiot is derived from the ancient Greek for “private person”. City states formed from households, which worshipped ancestors at the hearth, coming together to form tribes and worship the same gods. There was no distinction between private and public. One’s identity was as a member of a family, a faith, a tribe, and a city state. To be stateless was unthinkable — idiotic. Carlson isn’t casting off his identity as an American; nor seeking to import an ideology to reconstitute his society by revolutionary means. …

Telegraph journalist Michael Murphy has suggested the following: an interest in revising historical facts to depict one’s identity as an aggrieved constituency; and subsequently acting as if in possession of hidden knowledge. This shares elements with Kisin’s definition: “an ideology obsessed with victimhood identity and the falsification of history to suit today’s political agenda” — but in a right-wing way.

Both definitions were inspired by another controversy featuring Carlson: when history podcaster Darryl Cooper claimed Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War”. While Cooper’s historical errors have been catalogued, both men made fair critiques of the post-War liberal consensus. While Churchill was right to vanquish the Nazis, the institutions he established with the aim of upholding peace in Europe have resulted in, for example, an inability to deport millions of foreign criminals. Is it Woke to reevaluate the merits of the post-War consensus, and urge elements of it be revised? Are we meant to believe that Churchill, if he was somehow resurrected, would welcome the effects of the ECHR? …

Lindsay is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, who values the Constitution’s checks and balances on executive power above all else. However, despite decrying “Carl Schmittians” (including me), Lindsay is happy to exercise sovereignty against his political enemies. He supported Trump when he promised to “remove the Jew haters who do nothing to help our country.” (As do I, by the way.) Lindsay has listed among “telltale signs” of Woke Rightism “blaming things on the Jews or doing edgy Nazi memes”. Tucker Carlson is guilty of neither offence; nor is Auron MacIntrye, an author and podcaster that Lindsay has dubbed “Woke Right Inner School Adept”.

According to Lindsay, the Woke Right also entails a plot by Theosophists who run the UN via the Fetzer Institute, who have embedded occult practices in schools through Social-Emotional Learning, and have convinced Donald Trump to praise the Archangel Michael in order to summon a Zoroastrian demon named Ahriman to usher us into the Age of Aquarius. If you’re confused, do not be alarmed: it only means that you are still sane. One wonders if Lindsay’s long-standing contempt for organised religion motivates this policing of boundaries of what is acceptable on the Right, rather than studious research and deep thought. …

Without a clear definition, Woke Right begins to look like an attempt by yesterday’s Left to tone police, gatekeep, and redefine the Right. That way, heterodox liberals position themselves as the sensible centre between two extremes, and maintain their positions of intellectual credibility no matter how far the Overton Window shifts. Antagonism will arise from left-behind-liberals seeking to rearrange the furniture on their new political side, without examining how their first principles rendered them vulnerable to Woke subversion in the first place.

One discourse we could do without in 2025 is gatekeeping of the insurgent conservative side by left-behind liberals, just as policies of national preference, cultural particularism, and retributive justice begin to gain momentum. (Because they are obviously sane and sensible.)

Stop trying to make “Woke Right” happen. It’s not going to happen.

Gen Z, MAGA and Trump’s Second Term

In March 2024, I appeared on Triggernometry, for an unexpectedly popular episode on Gen Z’s discontentment with democracy.

You're going to get the revolutionary Gen Z. It's just a question of which flavor do you get: do you get Woke Communists or do you get the reactionaries?

I predicted young white men would break away from the post-War liberal consensus, as public enemy number #1 of the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda that its anti-racism obsession had produced. When the prevailing order forbids you pursue natural, healthy ambitions — like employment, a home, and a family of your own — why should you be obsequious to that order?

In December, I spoke to former Triggernometry producer Elliot Bewick on his new podcast, Next Gen, about whether my prediction had been proven right.

I forecasted an exacerbation of the electoral gender divide, driven by the algorithmic promotion of resentful ideologies about male and female nature. Fortunately, this was less the case in the United States, where young women’s partisan split for Democrats decreased from the 2022 midterms. But the gender divide remains chasmic between Gen Z’s men and women.

The electoral pattern I predicted happened in Europe three months after my Triggernometry interview: when 16 - 30s voted en masse for National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany, the Freedom Party in Austria, and other rightwing populist movements in the EU elections.

I wrote about the phenomenon for The European Conservative:

Born in or after 1997, Gen Z—Zoomers—have a different frame of reference for world events than their predecessors. The Second World War was more than 50 years ago. To them, the Berlin Wall never existed. Most won’t remember 9/11 on television. In Britain, Tony Blair’s promise that “things will only get better” turned out to be a lie. They only know their nation post-2008 crash, rendered unrecognisable by more immigration in under 30 years than between 1066 and 1945. The political paradigm of their lifetime has been managed decline. They have been indebted from conception, bereaved of a cultural inheritance and sense of historical belonging, and deprived of the chance to own a home to have children of their own in. …

National Rally president, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, has given voice to the grievances of native French peoples with his slogan “France is disappearing.” Like Farage, Bardella has amassed over a million followers on TikTok, and appears popular with women who stop him for selfies. Bardella used to record footage of himself playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2—infamous for how young men our age bonded through ruthless trash-talk in lobbies. He has also denied allegations that he once ran an anon account on Twitter, with such accounts influencing elections by generating infectious memes. As the second-youngest MEP in EU history, Bardella is an avatar of how Europe’s youth are shifting to the right—both because online politics is second nature to them, and because the liberal EU consensus is making their countries manifestly worse. As a result, 32% of them voted for National Rally.

This swing is most evident in Germany. Despite Alternative für Deutschland challenging the decision to lower the voting age to sixteen, they increased their vote share by eleven percent among 16-24s, securing 16.5% of the overall vote. TikToks by Maximilian Krah, advising young Germans “Don’t watch porn, don’t vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don’t believe you need to be nice and soft,” seem to have struck a chord.

But another organic viral trend brought Gen Z out in force for the AfD: across Europe, Zoomers have repurposed the 1999 pop song “L’Amour Toujours” as an anti-immigration anthem. German youths don’t have the handful of Japanese businessmen celebrating Oktoberfest in mind when calling for mass deportations. Rather, ‘Ausländer raus’ is directed at the millions of MENAPTS (migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey) who have milled about in Germany’s metropoles since Mutti Merkel said “Wir schaffen das.” As studies from Denmark, the UK, and the Netherlands have consistently shown, this cohort—which comprises the majority of asylum claims—never become net tax contributors. In Germany, 45% of benefits claimants are immigrants; in Austria, 60%. No wonder aspirational youngsters, squeezed between paying healthcare and pensions for boomer retirees and housing the Third World and his three wives, want to deport foreign dependents.

Until immigration becomes the paramount women’s safety issue, this spell of suicidal compassion will remain in place over many young women.

For some Zoomers, that means being wedded to what Mary Harrington has dubbed the “Omnicause”: a set of seemingly incoherent positions on political topics, connected by their advancing the intersecting interests of aggrieved minorities. Their priorities change quickly—from climate change, to trans rights, to Palestine. These political flights of fancy have been pejoratively called the Current Thing™️. This churn is driven by the mysterious force at work in social media algorithms setting social trends. Conforming to these trends becomes the gatekeeping mechanism for friendship circles, job opportunities, and networking soirées. As such, some young people have a perverse incentive to derive all of their beliefs from what Instagram and TikTok present to them. They are children of the algorithm.

One thing which may wake them from their slumber is…

Islam and Grooming Gangs

As the New Year was ushered in, X was alive with debate about the industrial-scale rape and torture of white English and Sikh girls in Britain by Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs. We had foreshadowed this with a pre-recorded Deprogrammed with Rafe Heydel-Mankoo of the New Culture Forum, released yesterday (2nd January).

But the conversation on X started because former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson published the following odious final column in The Telegraph:

I covered the implications of the ensuing exchange with Sam Bidwell, Sam Ashworth-Haynes, Charlie Peters, Tom Jones, myself, and others on X in my newest essay for Courage Media:

For the past few days, Musk’s attention has been drawn to amplifying awareness of the grooming gang scandal. The conversation began when former editor of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson, dedicated his final Telegraph column to saying, “Britain’s integration miracle is a beacon of hope amid instability”. Such staggering ignorance to the costs and crimes of multiculturalism makes one wonder if Nelson has ever left his house. Nelson complains about rates of welfare state dependency in Britain, but says nothing about how 95% of annual post-Brexit immigration is a net-tax drain. This record influx of foreign dependents is something Nelson previously dismissed as “an accident, not a conspiracy”. We now know, thanks to admissions by Boris Johnson, that this was a deliberate policy to soak up inflation caused by the COVID pandemic. So what else is Nelson wrong about?

Despite a rape reported every hour in London, and stabbings rising by 20% last year, Nelson wrote, “Our streets are now safer than they have perhaps ever been.” Nelson also omits that reports for crimes like theft have decreased, because most go unsolved. Police forces in England and Wales have failed to solve 90% of all crimes, including not one single burglary across half of all neighborhoods. Of the more than 1000 break-ins every day in Britain, less than 4% of instances result in a charge. Nelson would know this, given he spent a decade editing Douglas Murray’s column on this very topic.

Nelson also saw fit to reduce the history, heritage, and identity of the peoples of Britain to “our concept of Britishness, which is not about ethnicity or religion but a way of life with global appeal. It’s a set of values that anyone can adopt.” This absurd rendition of national identity leads one to propose that the entire world need only revere the rule of law and cricket to be Britons-in-waiting, whereas the likes of King John and Lord Bolingbroke are no longer British because they fail to abide by Nelson’s contemporary liberal credal version of “British values”. Wanting to avoid any accusation of racism leads one to the absurd place of denying that Britain has any distinct ethnicities native to its isles. Someone born abroad, who has never set foot in Britain, is not “more British” than an Englishman who can retrace his heritage to the Battle of Hastings — even if said foreign national is a better neighbour than that Anglo-Saxon. This statement of fact is not a moral judgement on any nationality.

Much like the FBI in New Orleans, Nelson intends to obfuscate the problems of mass immigration and multiculturalism, for fear that “The far Right is on the march”. (As always, the response is treated as worse than the problem.) He finished with, “in this, my last column, I’d like to sign off by saying that the problems are vastly outweighed by what’s going right.” This prompted the Adam Smith Institute’s Sam Bidwell to criticize Nelson in The Critic, comparing him to Hiroo Onoda: the last Japanese soldier, stationed in the jungles of the Philippines, to surrender 29 years after the Second World War had already ended. Nelson is fighting a losing cause, trying to paper over the deleterious effects of imported “diversity” with a sanitized depiction of modern Britain. Nelson retorted, saying that:

“My argument is that Britain, overall, has handled demographic change well – not that there are zero problems. We have huge problems: but outnumbered by even bigger successes.

Managing this change *is* a British value. It *is* our national norm.”

Given the British government has seen fit to construct a surveillance state, which regularly subjects British citizens to propaganda campaigns to convince them of the benefits of multiculturalism in the aftermath of terror attacks, one might suggest that the management required to make diversity work is neither “our national norm”, nor worth it.

The grooming gangs were mentioned as one among many undesirable imported consequences of mass immigration and multiculturalism.

This scandal continues to cast a dark and indicting shadow over the police and local authorities in over 50 British towns and cities. At least five girls were killed by the gangs, including Laura Wilson, 17, stabbed and thrown into a canal; Lucy Lowe, 16, burned to death by her rapist, along with his child, Lowe’s sister, and her mother; Victoria Agoglia, 15, who was hooked on drugs by her abusers, and overdosed on heroin; Becky Watson, 13, killed by Ahmed Nawaz; and Charlene Downes, whose body was never found after allegedly being minced and sold as kebab meat — with her suspected killers walking free, due to malpractice by Lancashire Police.

X account Max Tempers then posted a passage from the Oxford grooming gang trial transcript to the discussion, detailing the gang-rape and torture to which Pakistani pedophiles subjected children. This resurfaced transcript, thanks to Musk’s purchase of X, has alerted Americans to these horrific crimes for the first time. The perpetrator, Mohammed Karrar, was convicted of drugging and raping a 12-year-old girl — before trafficking and impregnating her, and forcing her to undergo an illegal abortion. ….

Mohammed Karrar was given a life sentence, but may only serve 18 years in prison. Others have already been released: encountering their victims in supermarkets, nightclubs, and by delivering food to their doorsteps. Not only are victims not notified when their abusers are freed: they are censored when lawfully requesting the perpetrators be deported to their nations of origin. Not a single grooming gang perpetrator has been deported. The prospect that these predators can ever be rehabilitated is delusional. The remorseless rapists in Rotherham have chanted “Allahu Akbar” as they were led out of court; and their families have started fights with victims at the sentencing hearings. Neither they, nor the community who conspired to cover up the abuse they knew was going on, cared about these girls, who they saw as “the white enemy”. (Hence why Reform MP Rupert Lowe has supported deporting “the whole community” in cities like Rotherham, for their part in hiding the abuse.)

Labour MP Sarah Champion estimated as many as a million girls had been abused by these gangs by 2015. (After writing in the Sun in 2017 that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”, Jeremy Corbyn forced her to resign from the Labour front bench.) Champion is one of few public figures who spoke up about the scandal. As GB News reporter Charlie Peters detailed in his documentary, and new viral X thread, in Rotherham alone there were 265 allegations of misconduct, with 91 investigations involving 47 officers. Only five were penalized, with none fired. Last month, two more former Rotherham police officers were arrested over child sexual offences committed while on duty between 1995 and 1999. But nobody in social services, the local council, the police, or the government have been arrested and charged with their complicity in covering up the grooming gangs. This is the even greater scandal: that nobody in a position of authority who sought to preserve their own careers and reputations over the girls’ safety has faced consequences.

Since it was revealed that Home Office safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, rejected a government inquiry into grooming gangs in Oldham in October. Musk called for Phillips to be arrested for her negligence

Because Musk decided to amplify these horrors to an American audience, the UK news cycle has been filled with calls to finally have a national inquiry into the rape gangs. This would mean those implicated in the cover-up would also face consequences. So we must be thankful for Musk’s decision to purchase X, without which the cover-up would continue indefinitely.

The dam appears to have broken on this most shameful chapter in Britain’s history: where children were sacrificed by politicians to “avoid inflaming racial tension”. A truth-and-reconciliation-style commission must follow, with social workers, police officers, local councilors, and politicians investigated, arrested, and charged accordingly, for their part to play in the cover-up. As Shadow Justice Minister Robert Jenrick and the Reform party have proposed, grooming gang perpetrators should receive mandatory whole-life sentences, and immediate deportations where possible. Cousin marriage, Sharia courts, and other clannish practices must be criminalized, to break the conspiracy of silence in the Pakistani community about this industrial scale child abuse.

I wrote about these clanish practices in a previous essay for Courage Media, on the grooming gangs:

There has been a culture of cover up within Muslim enclaves in Britain concerning child sexual exploitation. Some knew their brothers, fathers, friends, and cousins participated in grooming gangs, and said nothing, for fear of bringing collective shame upon the Muslim community. The Muslim Women’s Network complained that too little attention was paid to Muslim girls also being abused by Pakistani gangs — but failed to point the finger at the shame culture which pervades Muslim communities. A culture of shame encourages silence, because the family and clan are punished collectively for the actions of one or many members. Mohammed Shafiq, whose three cousins were jailed as part of the Rotherham grooming gang trials, explained that “the crimes of the Hussain brothers represent a stain on the Pakistani community that can never truly be scrubbed away” — and that, for this reason, “some British Pakistanis have deliberately buried their heads in the sand [and] see any of us who try to tackle this problem as siding with the white ‘enemy’”.

Some Muslims, such as Mohammed Shafiq, spoke out. In 2016, Shafiq said:

“The sad reality is that in the case of on-street gang grooming, there is an over-representation of Pakistani men.

“Until British Pakistanis accept that this is a problem for our community we will not be able to eradicate this evil. Burying our head in the sand as the usual response is not good enough.”

Others abetted, or were merely indifferent, to white English girls being victimised because they are Kafir — non-believers. Equal moral consideration is not applied to those outside the Ummah. Worse still, some looked to Islamic scripture to justify their crimes. Dr. Taj Hargey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation, confirmed in 2013 that the grooming gangs “deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases”. To pretend Islam did not contribute to the grooming gangs is “ideological denial”, according to Dr. Hargey. There is a tribal, misogynistic morality in Islamic scripture. The Quran teaches that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; and Hadiths prescribe punishing women with stoning for adultery, or a hundred lashes for fornication. There are ample verses from which grooming gang members may derive a justification for their crimes; hence why remorseless members of a Rotherham grooming gang, jailed in 2017, shouted “Allahu akbar” as they were led out of court.

Recognising the ethnic and religious nature of this pedophilic predation is not “Woke Right”. As I said on X:

One of those who agreed was Musk himself:

It was not “Woke Right” for Israel to respond to a racially and religiously-motivated attack on their people — their tribe — as a people.

Nor is it “Woke Right” for Britain to finally seek accountability for the girls brutalised ‘for the good of Diversity’ in the same way.

A consciousness of the indigenous peoples of the British Isles as peoples is a prerequisite to forming a theory-of-mind as to why these Pakistani Muslim paedophiles preyed on our girls. This requires a recognition that the English are an ethnic group; and that other less-individualistic, clanish cultures treat them as enemies by the dint of their ethnicity. This does not mean racial purity tests, or other such undesirable, immoral things. Only that we must recognise how other civilisations do not think like us, do not want to think like us, and how their thinking poses an existential threat to our way of life.

The Overton Window has been blown wide open on deportations for foreign criminals; the denial that British and European peoples are distinct ethnicities with a claim to their ancestral homelands (as Jews do in Israel); and that values like tolerance, individualism, and childhood innocence are culturally particular to those peoples.

This is why Rupert Lowe began the year by setting the sombre tone for policy:

Incompatible civilisations and their constituents must be returned home, after the heinous crimes inflicted on Britain’s children.

Our way of life is noncommunicable to them, and they have already demonstrated their contempt for it. I should not be forced to subsidise their stay in my home one second longer. They, for their complicity in these crimes, must be made to leave.

And if Douglas Murray is saying it to millions of people too, how could it not be sensible?