The Social World

Author: JP4

  • Retribution looms for the NeverTrumpers

    Retribution looms for the NeverTrumpers

    “My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” says James Comey, the former FBI director, in a video statement on – naturally – Bluesky. “We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.”

    The Resistance is strong in that one. To a dwindling number of hardcore NeverTrumpers, Comey is a sort of godfather figure. He seems to love the attention, too. He wrote a self-aggrandizing memoir called A Higher Loyalty, about his fall-out with Donald Trump and the start of the Trump-Russia, Russia, Russia business. Earlier this year, moreover, he was even accused of elliptically threatening Trump’s life, when he posted and then deleted on Instagram an image showing the numbers “86 47” written in seashells on a beach. (The number 86 is code for “get rid of,” or “kill” in gangster-speak, and Donald Trump is currently serving as the 47th President of the United States.)

    Now it’s Team Trump that’s threatening Comey – with imprisonment. Yesterday, Trump’s DoJ indicted him on two counts: for making a false statement and for obstructing a congressional proceeding. Reports of the indictment are full of sources suggesting it is wafer-weak, in terms of legal power. Yet the Trump administration seems to be relishing its opportunity to use the legal system to exact revenge on the legal system and the various “resistance” heroes such as Comey who spent years trying to condemn Donald Trump on any number of fronts.

    Kash Patel, the new FBI director, insists his Bureau is merely calling “balls and strikes,” focusing on the mission rather than revenge. But nobody believes that. This is what the “retribution” Trump promised looks like. This is what many Trump supporters voted for.

    Other NeverTrumpers will be next. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, who also wrote a pompous memoir about the awfulness of the Donald, is next in the DoJ’s sights. The FBI searched his downtown office in DC last month and reportedly seized various classified documents.

    On another front, too, Attorney General Pam Bondi is pursuing the George Soros Foundation, for allegedly supporting terrorism, in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

    Critics will continue to moan about the erosion of civilized politics and a slide toward authoritarianism. This can’t be happening in America! Over and again, however, the Trump administration’s response is: “Let’s see about that.” Or, to borrow from the vulgar pro-Trump meme, “WAGTFKY” (“We Are Going To Fucking Kill You.”)

    Trumpists in Washington hope that the American public will spot the way in which the Democratic media machine, which cheered on every act of lawfare against Donald Trump, now pours scorn on Bondi, Kash Patel, and Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, for pursuing Trump’s enemies. Trump insiders also think that figures such as Comey, Bolton and others are so contemptibly self-important that people can’t help but oppose them.

    And there’s no doubt that the double-standards and sanctimonious hypocrisy of NeverTrumpers are deeply galling to the President’s supporters.

    It’s notable, however, that, as his administration’s lawfare operation has ramped up in recent weeks, Trump’s approval rating has dipped. That might have more to do with broader concerns about the economy. But most American voters don’t seem to like the weaponization of justice, no matter who is doing it.

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  • Is the cult of Obama finally over?

    Is the cult of Obama finally over?

    Everyone wanted to get close to the president. For three hours outside the O2 Arena in London, a line of admirers pawed at and posed with a fifteen-foot-tall billboard of Obama’s face. All of the marketing for yesterday’s event, titled “An Evening with President Barack Obama,” had used his official presidential portrait from 2012 in the Oval Office. It was a reminder of the good old days – before Trump ever happened. “I’m just looking forward to being in the same room as him,” said a woman called Fran who had taken a photo with the billboard, leaning on it for support. She started crying. “I’m looking for a little bit of hope.”

    All Obama’s life people have staked their hopes on him. His white mother was the first. When he was a child she played him recordings of Mahalia Jackson and the speeches of Martin Luther King, and told him that his destiny was to carry their glorious burdens. Then his grandparents. In 1971 when Obama moved to Hawaii to live with them, he realized that they had given up on their own ambitions and put their dreams onto him. “So long as you kids do well, Bar”, his grandmother told him, “that’s all that really matters.” In time, the whole liberal world would lean on Obama. Ten months into his first term, he was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize. In his memoir A Promised Land, he records his reaction: “For what?”

    Now in London he came on stage as a reluctant messiah. The crowd had been made hyper by a montage of powerful snippets of his speeches, set to cinematic music, but when he arrived in the flesh he was diminutive and physically far away. He said “Hello, London!” and sat in a too-big chair opposite the British historian David Olusoga, who was hosting the evening. Obama kept talking over the applause until it stopped. He drank from a takeaway coffee cup.

    Olusoga began by asking Obama what he now spends his time doing, squinting and quietly straining his voice when he spoke, feigning poignancy as he tried to meet the promised specialness of the evening. Obama replied that he has been trying to “dig myself out of a hole with Michelle,” using almost identical wording to the answer he gave when he was asked the same question at the Jefferson Educational Society in Pennsylvania a fortnight ago. Even the garbled punchline – “I’m almost level” – was copied. (Michelle never wanted Barack to run for president, but he did so anyway, he’s said before, not for his own reasons, but because he wanted black kids and Hispanic kids and “kids who don’t fit in” to “see themselves differently.”)

    Obama can turn it on when he wants, but at the O2 he did not. Olusoga asked for his analysis of current affairs and his response was boring and wrong. After World War Two, he said, it was clear that “blood and soil nationalism” and “castes and hierarchies” did not work, and so new ways of politics emerged. “Things kept getting better,” he said, aside from a war in Vietnam, a genocide in Rwanda, millions of deaths from conflicts in the Middle East, and “terrorism.” Then “we got complacent, we got smug,” he said, and liberalism failed to create “a language that made everybody feel like they had a stake.” In Obama’s telling of the 21st century, America pre-Trump was consistently going the right way. The country’s good course was not altered by 9/11 or the financial crisis of 2008. No, things only went bad after 2016. 

    For people like Fran who wanted answers, Obama gave none. He just seemed depressed. He said that Britain, like America, is at a “fork in the road.” He said that we’re too materialistic, and have lost two historic defenses against consumerism: religion and counterculture. (Hip-hop used to have a purpose, now rappers just talk about money.) He said there was a “significant risk” that AI becomes a tool of oppression and censorship, and said that Donald Trump has committed “violence against the truth.” “Old men hanging on who are afraid of death” cause 80 percent of the world’s problems, he told the audience, with exasperated frankness. His world view had lost.

    After an hour-and-a-bit he was done. Olusoga said “Mr President, thank you for your leadership,” and Obama smiled, waved and left. People ran for the doors. To get the train home, to rush to their friends and loved ones, to proclaim that their king was dead.

  • Why tech leaders are obsessing over Heaven and Hell

    Why tech leaders are obsessing over Heaven and Hell

    Are these the End Times? It certainly feels that way. Algorithmic demons are rewiring our brains. A young father is shot and killed, and people cheer. A woman is stabbed on a train, and no one tries to help her. The horrifying videos of these incidents are then watched millions of times over, often by children. The God in whom America trusts seems nowhere to be found.

    Can’t you hear the Antichrist knocking? Peter Thiel can. Not so long ago, no public figure outside of the kookier Evangelical universe would have dared admit such a thing, but times have changed.

    Tech mavens argue that Silicon Valley’s engineers should see their work as part of a greater divine plan

    Tucker Carlson, one of America’s best-known conservative pundits, speaks openly about having been attacked by a demon. Mainstream commentators discuss the rise of “Moloch” – a Canaanite god they associate with rogue AI employees of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, who have been reported to burn effigies and chant in a ritualistic way as they work on creating artificial general intelligence. “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!”

    It’s not just in the US that this notion has taken hold. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia Today, recently suggested Elon Musk was bringing about the arrival of the Antichrist: “Everything is moving in this direction… We are moving towards losing ourselves as a species.”

    And Thiel, mentor to Vice-President J.D. Vance and titan of Silicon Valley, has become obsessed with Christian prophecies of the apocalypse. “We are sleepwalking into Armageddon,” he said on a recent podcast, but added ominously: “You should be way more worried about the Antichrist.”

    It’s easy to be cynical about this. Thiel’s company Palantir – the darling of the US Department of War – makes defense and intelligence software. Someone will need to make a scythe for Death when he comes riding in on his pale horse. Any cataclysmic final battle between good and evil before Christ’s return would probably be a great boon for the shareholders and add to Thiel’s $25 billion fortune.

    But Thiel seems genuinely anxious. The nightmare he foresees is a global, totalitarian, homogenous state and a leader who brings it about and then rules that state. Thiel’s Antichrist is a gray bureaucratic figure with tentacles flopping across the planet. He’s worried enough that he’s dedicated four evenings this month and next to hosting a sold-out, off-the-record lecture series in San Francisco, titled “The Antichrist.”

    If there’s one thing Thiel resents above all else, it’s stagnation – technological, moral, civil. In the world overseen by his Antichrist, people would no longer need to ask serious political and moral questions because everything significant would be decided by the regulatory, global state. It would be something like institutionalized Marxism; in other words, a force determined to end the pursuit of wisdom and, with it, wisdom itself.

    In order to ensure no rogue enemies arise, the one-world state would need to exercise total control over all technology and maintain a vast surveillance network. Any new technology that could potentially be used to threaten the state’s power would need to be regulated, and revolutionary developments would be squashed. The world’s population would be cowed into accepting this state based on fear of some existential catastrophe: nuclear war, climate change, artificial-intelligence rebellion. Pick your poison.

    We’re already drifting toward this satanic stagnation, says Thiel. Who’s to blame? The hippies, at least in part. Progressivism has scuppered progress. Thiel told the New York Times in a recent interview: “We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.”

    Scientific progress stalled around then, apparently, because, as Americans mulled over the horrors of nukes and the Vietnam War, they grew distrustful of technology. Pessimism replaced optimism and the innovators who once pushed the boundaries of human achievement turned instead to entertainment. Video-game developers replaced rocket scientists. App developers replaced nuclear physicists.

    Other Valley types are embracing Biblical reality, too. A new nonprofit “collective” called ACTS17 – short for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society” – has been selling out events. Tech mavens appear on stage, arguing that the Valley’s engineers should see their work as one part of a greater divine plan.

    One media clip shows Trae Stephens, the co-founder of defense company Anduril, telling a room of (mostly) young men: “I’m, like, literally an arms dealer” – pauses for laughter – “that’s a pretty unique calling.” He continues, with a smile, “I think you have to lean into your gifts and figure out what that quest is you’re supposed to be on.”

    And then there is Silicon Valley heavweight Garry Tan, chief executive of Y Combinator, whose venture-capital firm has launched tech companies with a combined value of $600 billion. Last year, he hosted an event in his house to discuss how the teachings of the Bible could intersect with technology. “LSD and shrooms won’t fill the God-shaped hole in your heart. Guess what might?” he posted. Silicon Valley is going back to Church.

    You do rather get the sense that a lot of these techies think they are the first to discover that faith provides purpose. But their newly discovered Christianity comes with a self-serving twist: they, the tech titans, see themselves as the new apostles. In this brave new world, Christianity will save tech and tech will save Christianity.

    In this new world, Christianity will save tech, and tech will save Christianity

    But if that makes your skin crawl, there are other 21st-century prophets of a very different type, pushing quite the opposite message. Paul Kingsnorth, an English author and thinker, is in many ways the anti-Thiel. He’s a mix between Frodo Baggins and Ted Kaczynski and politically unclassifiable. He’s part red-blooded conservative, part radical tree-hugger. He hates communism as much as he hates capitalism and he thinks cities inevitably corrupt humanity. He believes there’s something immoral about Alexa, cars and phones. Most of all, he hates “the Machine.” This is the subject of his recent book Against the Machine, which is forceful and gracefully argued.

    According to Kingsnorth, the “Machine” is “progress” and the never-ending pursuit of growth – technological, societal, governmental. It is nearly everything we Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment people take pride in.

    The first time I heard Kingsnorth speak was at a gathering of very conservative, very Christian New Yorkers last fall where he delivered a lecture, “Against Christian Civilization,” which much of the audience refused to applaud. Some jeered. The upshot of this lecture and Against the Machine is that the West is dying or dead. This is a common topic of conversation in these circles; what is not common is Kingsnorth’s conclusion: “I want to say that this ‘West’ is not a thing to be ‘conserved’: not now. It is a thing to be superseded. It is an albatross around our necks.”

    The West, he believes, is actively giving birth to the Antichrist. Unlike Thiel, however, Kingsnorth believes technology is triggering the Beast’s arrival. As Kingsnorth sees it, modern technology is something we only tell ourselves we have control over, when in fact it is incubating Satan’s spawn – and our brightest scientists are acting as its midwives. The deceiver will manifest himself via artificial intelligence: “‘AI’ on the right lips can sound just like another way of saying ‘Antichrist,’” says Kingsnorth. “Humor me,” he says, adding:

    Imagine for a moment that some force is active in the world which is beyond us… Perhaps it is independent of us. Perhaps it created itself and uses us for its ends. Either way, in recent years that force seems to have become manifest in some way we can’t quite put our finger on, and has stimulated the craziness of the times… This force seems to be, in some inexplicable way, independent of us, and yet acting within us too. Let’s give this force a name: a less provocative name, for now, than Moloch or Antichrist. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s just call this force “Progress.”

    Progress or the Antichrist, a rose by any other name. Something in our technology and way of seeing the world is detaching us from reality, both natural and supernatural, uprooting us from the earth. Kingsnorth’s recommendation is to smash the screens, leave the cities, come to the hills, light fires and dance.

    Thiel believes that to behave like this – though perhaps beneficial for personal sanctification – would be to hurry our own downfall; a move guaranteed to empower the most power-crazed, destructive individuals. Kingsnorth might not disagree – but he’s not interested in saving this world. He wants a new world to be born. And that requires this one to die.

    Thiel and Kingsnorth, our magician and our hermit, appear diametrically opposed – and in some ways, they are. But listen more closely to both of them and you’ll begin to hear echoes of the same tune. These two prophets agree that the Enlightenment and the liberal order will kill us all and that only a re-spiritualization can save us.

    But whose path should we take? There’s a lot on the line. Namely, our souls.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • A meeting with the Tate brothers

    A meeting with the Tate brothers

    “I detest lateness,” texts Tristan Tate, who’s offered to pick me up from a hotel in Bucharest. “So I’ll either be 15 minutes early or right on time.” Minutes later, he messages again: “All my talk on being late and cops pull me over haha.”

    Tristan and his older brother Andrew seem to have a knack for getting into trouble. They’ve been accused of all sorts: rape, actual bodily harm, sex trafficking, controlling prostitution for gain, organized crime, money-laundering, witness-tampering. To the media and bourgeois parents everywhere, they are infamous: the vilest beasts of the manosphere, monetizers of misogyny and leading purveyors of far-right hate.

    ‘I saw the video of Charlie Kirk getting shot and I thought, that could be my brother’

    Are the Tates really that bad, though? They still face a number of criminal charges, their homes have been repeatedly raided and they’ve spent time in jail, but they deny all wrongdoing and have not yet been found guilty of anything. The big Romanian case against them appears to have stalled, after a judge ruled that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to go to trial, and the brothers have launched a suit in America against a woman they claim conspired to defame them through a fraudulent conspiracy. The Tates are confident that their complaint will be upheld and then all other charges will melt away. Perhaps I am gullible, or toxically male, but I can’t help believing them.

    Tristan pulls up – only ten minutes late – in an Aston Martin. The police stopped him, he explains, because they couldn’t see his license plate. “But they were friendly. They know me.” He drives us to one of his favorite restaurants. “If you don’t mind, I’ll sit here,” he says, plonking himself down at the table. “I don’t like having my back to the room. A crazy Ukrainian guy came and tried to stab an employee of my house a few days ago.”

    Tristan is the gentler Tate. He cultivates a more civilized air. He smokes gold-tipped Sobranies and wears a brown three-piece suit with a Union Jack pin on the lapel. He has good manners, speaks to the locals in Romanian and doles out generous tips. “To you I sound fluent, to them I sound like Borat… but everyone here knows that we were set up because this happens to wealthy Romanians all the time: a fake case, they take all your money, later they find out it’s not real.”

    He orders us sushi with foie gras and a vast amount of steak. As we start to eat, two young men approach. “I’m like a crazy fan of you,” says one, a Brazilian, before asking for a selfie. Later, as Tristan asks for the bill, another male superfan approaches wanting a photograph. “I promise I didn’t pay these people,” he says. “I have a prolific number of female stalkers as well.”

    Dinner is meant to be a prelude to a longer interview with Andrew tomorrow. Tristan drops me off and says he’ll send a car in the morning. Overnight, we learn that Charlie Kirk, the MAGA star, has been killed at a university in Utah.

    ‘I’m seen as a national security issue because of how many young men obey me’

    The Tates didn’t know Charlie, but they had friends in common – the commentator Candace Owens, for one – and shared some views about the plight of young men in this hyper-liberal age. Kirk’s death seems to disturb them profoundly. When I turn up the following morning, Tristan tells me he hasn’t slept. “The media’s responsible for this,” he says. “Charlie was a good guy who loved his family and his nation. I saw the video of him getting shot and I thought, that could be my brother.”

    He gives me a quick tour of their famous residence. It’s like being in a 15-year-old’s Ferris Bueller-esque fantasy. Tristan shows me the expensive cars and gadget-stuffed rooms. There’s a personal trainer and a couple of chirpy tech guys with laptops pumping out content. Then I’m ushered into a smoking room. It has high-backed leather chairs. A young mixed-race woman, introduced as Andrew’s girlfriend, brings coffee and then disappears. “She’s another of our alleged victims,” says Tristan.

    Suddenly Andrew, the so-called “Top G,” appears as if from nowhere. In one motion, he slips a gold watch on to his wrist and shakes my hand. Kirk’s assassination looks like a professional job, he tells me, skipping the small talk. “We live in a battle for influence,” he says. “So if you’re someone like Charlie Kirk or myself with massive influence, you’re a problem. And the people who disagree with you want you to go away.”

    The Tate brothers were born in 1986 and 1988, 19 months apart, in Washington, DC. Their father, Emory, was an African-American Air Force sergeant and an international chess master. He met their mother, a British lunch lady called Eileen, while stationed at an RAF base in Bedfordshire.

    Andrew and Tristan moved to England with Eileen after their parents divorced in 1997. They lived in public housing in Luton, just outside London, near British right-wing influencer Tommy Robinson, and the brothers dropped out of school at 16 in order to make money. Andrew worked for a fishmonger; Tristan at a Pret a Manger in Luton airport. They discovered kickboxing. Andrew won a world championship belt; Tristan a European one.

    Their early adulthood coincided with the rise of the internet. Andrew spent large amounts of time on MSN Messenger and discovered his unique talent for saying truly shocking things on camera. He posted videos under the title “Offending what’s Trending,” which later came to be called “Tate speech.” The young brothers were drawn into terrestrial television, too: they set up a TV advertising agency. In 2011, Tristan appeared as a guest on the reality show Shipwrecked; five years later, Andrew made it on to Big Brother.

    The Tates live in their own world, which may or may not be real. Andrew is obsessed with ‘the Matrix’

    Around that time, a video was posted online of him beating a woman with a belt. Andrew and the woman on the receiving end have long insisted that the lashing was consensual. Soon after, the two brothers moved to Bucharest. Reports suggest Andrew was running away from allegations of sexual assault; Tristan says they found work commentating in English on Romanian extreme fighting events. Bucharest at the time was host to a budding online sex industry and the boys soon set up a small “camgirl” studio. “I thought: I’m in Romania,” recalls Tristan. “Do as the Romanians do.” But the seediness of that enterprise has dogged them ever since.

    Their real business bonanza came not from sex but from online education – or rather Hustlers University, which then became The Real World, an online platform for young men looking for purpose and ways to make money outside traditional employment. In 2022, for several million dollars, the brothers bought the domain name university.com, “to make a statement,” they say. They could afford it: The Real World was generating somewhere between $60 and $120 million a year by charging monthly fees, starting at $49, to teach students how to make fast money from e-commerce, cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.

    That’s what Andrew wants to talk to me about. Sitting across a mahogany table, puffing on his large shisha, he explains how his students learn how to build AI customer-service tools and rent them out to small businesses or build chatbots for lonely people to talk to online.

    But he keeps digressing into dark ruminations about the nature of the world and how he might end up like Charlie Kirk. “I’m seen as a national security issue because of how many young men obey me and I’m seen as a problem, which is why they weaponize their entire mainstream media into convincing [people] I’m a bad person.” He rails against the elites, the decline in living standards in the West, the pitfalls of sexual equality and “financialized capitalism, which is leading into monopolized capitalism, because everyone’s just putting their money into the last few producers of product.” There’s a money counter in the corner of the room.

    Who are the elite? “It’s very rich people who want to stay rich,” he says. “They don’t live among the mess they create.” A secret cabal, then? “That’s actually quite a cartoonish thought,” he replies. “I’m sure there’s lots of different cabals and I’m sure there’s lots of crossover between them.” The Tate brothers are convinced that they and their businesses are targets of a concerted government campaign. “I’ve gone from a Luton council estate to the upper echelons of fame and power and money,” says Andrew. “And I am telling you that I am the target of a military intelligence operation to dampen my influence and destroy my school.”

    He and his brother offer overlapping theories as to why the deep state wants them stopped. It’s because of their views on immigration, their criticisms of Ukraine, their opposition to Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates. It’s because the system wants to crush young men – and he inspires them. Andrew says his online academies represent a threat to the scam that is higher education. “Big Education is as powerful as Big Pharma,” he says. His online school has been the subject of relentless cyber attacks, he says, “but like a cockroach, I refuse to die.”

    Andrew and Tristan also suggest, darkly, that their real legal problems began in 2023, soon after they turned down $50 million from a large PR group whose lawyers wanted them to agree to stop spouting certain opinions and they refused. But they also now refuse to name the organization. “Call me paranoid if you like,” says Andrew.

    Trying to make Andrew reveal himself is like banging your head against a wall. You hope something cracks but you end up dizzy. He calls me “sir,” over and over, and refuses to show weakness. “Absolutely not,” he says when asked if his parents’ divorce made him sad. “Zero percent,” he says when I ask if he’s ever lonely. “Psychology is pretty shit, by the way.”

    He admits that he doesn’t sleep and that he has “to a degree, if it is real, which I don’t believe it is, some kind of anxiety disorder, I can’t sit still, I can’t relax… but all these demons, anxiety, panic attacks, all these things, I’ve grabbed them by the neck and I’ve forced them to join my legion.”

    The Tates live in their own world, which may or may not be real. Andrew is obsessed with “the Matrix,” a concept invented in the 1999 sci-fi film about machines enslaving man. It’s also the metaphor he uses to persuade young men to join his school in order to free themselves from the clutches of the system. Yet he also seems really to believe that we exist in some cruel virtual game.

    “I’ve always had a splinter in my mind that is permanently bothering me,” he says. “Do you ever feel like you’re living in a simulation?” In that moment, I do.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Charlie Kirk and the fifth great awakening

    Charlie Kirk and the fifth great awakening

    Political Islam is a powerful global force. Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood and Shia theocracy are different yet successful strands of the same impulse to govern according to the will of Allah. 

    Political Christianity, by contrast, has in recent decades, even centuries, taken a back seat when it comes to public affairs. With some exceptions, Christians have broadly interpreted Jesus’s message to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” as an injunction not to muddy the holy pursuit of justice with the worldly pursuit of power. 

    At Charlie Kirk’s memorial yesterday, the world witnessed something different: not just a Christian politics but a political Christianity. Republican party campaigns have long had a strong evangelical dimension. But the Make America Great Again movement is producing something new: a spiritualized politics that is far less apologetic, much more strident and nationalist, and as syncretic as it is militant. 

    It’s a multi-faith army for Jesus, unashamed of its contradictions and adamant in its defense of hybridized conservative values. (For more on this see our latest “Angels & Demons” edition of The Spectator World.) 

    Kirk’s memorial, held in a vast and packed football stadium in Arizona, was a profoundly religious event, and an explicit attempt to proselytize. We saw the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence all lionize Charlie as a warrior for God. J.D. Vance, a Catholic, called him “a martyr” for the faith. Pete Hegseth, a Protestant veteran, quoted his own pastor saying “the devil overplayed his hand” in killing Kirk. He urged the audience: “arm yourself with truth, with prayer, with unapologetic boldness.” DNI director Tulsi Gabbard, a Hindu, added that the Trump movement should “take shelter in God, to draw strength and fearlessness from the Lord.” Stephen Miller, the Jewish White House Deputy Chief of Staff, talked in faintly pagan terms about how Kirk had been “immortalized” and said “we will prevail over the forces of wickedness.” 

    Tucker Carlson, the Episcopalian media star, compared Kirk’s killing to the crucifixion of Christ. He said he could feel “the Holy Spirit humming like a tuning fork” throughout the stadium. Rob McCoy, Charlie’s co-chair at Turning Point USA, said that Kirk saw “politics as an on-ramp for Jesus’.” Andrew Kolvet, the producer of Charlie Kirk’s show and TPUSA’s comms director, said: “Charlie was a prophet… not the fortune-telling kind but the Biblical kind. He confronted evil and proclaimed the truth.”

    Erika Kirk, the grieving window, delivered the most powerful Christian message of all. She forgave her husband’s murderer. “Charlie wanted to save young men just like him,” she said. “Lost, angry, deceived by the world. Pray for him. Pray for his soul. And pray that God breaks his shackles.”

    The theme which the speakers had clearly agreed upon was “revival” – not revenge. President Trump called it “a great spiritual awakening.”

    Since its founding, America has been convulsed by at least four “great awakenings,” which have bound American faith in God to the nation’s sense of manifest destiny. What we could be seeing now is a Fifth Great Awakening, but one that is more nakedly political, coming as it does from the White House down, and less explicitly Protestant, mixing as it does Catholic messages with the passionate convictions of other faiths. 

    At the very end of the 19th century Pope Leo XIII warned against the “heresy of Americanism,” with its emphasis on individual liberty and embrace of the spirit of the age.  As chance would have it, there is now a new American Pope, also called Leo. How might he respond to this MAGA-spiritual revival? 

    Pope Leo might note that a new religious fervor is beginning to envelop the right in Europe, too. In Britain, a Christian warrior ethos is taking hold on certain parts of the right. It is in some ways in reaction to political Islam in the United Kingdom. In others, it is inspired by the overt Christianity of the Trump movement. We saw crosses and crusader costumes at the “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London the weekend before last. The political Christian revival may have a strong American influence. But it could also be much bigger than just American politics.

  • America’s ‘fringe’ has taken over the country

    America’s ‘fringe’ has taken over the country

    Another day, another public execution. The talking heads on television and Twitter tell us not to worry too much: America is still strong. They repeat this sentiment after every waking nightmare. These horrific events are not the norm, they say. They’re just the actions of a few people on the “fringe.” 

    But what is the American “fringe”?

    The “fringe” tried to incinerate the country in 2020. The “fringe” tore down statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The “fringe” control the universities and has spent years indoctrinating kids with discriminatory dogmas. The “fringe” created the policies that let violent, mentally ill men prowl the streets and kill refugees. The “fringe” killed a healthcare CEO at sunrise in December. The “fringe” tried to kill Donald Trump last summer. The “fringe” killed Charlie Kirk on Wednesday. 

    The “fringe” celebrated everything that was destroyed and every life that was taken.

    The “fringe” is a bunch of very normal people I went to high school and college with, who have spent the last three days cavorting and reveling over the death of a man they never met and whose actual beliefs they likely cannot articulate, let alone rebut. These are not incels or idiots; they’re ostensibly educated people with jobs and families and degrees. And yet they’re possessed by an ideology that apparently prohibits them from accepting the sanctity of every human life. 

    The “fringe” is not on the fringes. It’s everywhere. It’s taking over the country. 

    And yet for years, well-intentioned voices have told us that the madness we see online is somehow unreal – that the internet is not real life. It may be true that the internet cannot replace real life, but it can certainly destroy very real, meaningful parts of life. 

    And it’s succeeding, especially in its pursuits to rot the brains of young people. To say that the radicalization we’re seeing is a “fringe” issue is to simply admit you have no idea the scale of the problem; it reveals you do not know what’s happening to young people online.

    If you’re a Boomer, or a “not very online” person, you won’t understand the extent of the problem. That’s not a criticism. It means you’re probably doing something right – you’ve not witnessed the effects of online addiction. You’re not seeing the kinds of vile images and videos and calls to arms that create the world’s Luigi Mangiones and their disciples. But just because you’re not seeing radical, politically insane, very subversive, and dangerously attractive content online all day doesn’t mean others aren’t. 

    More and more of my friends are becoming openly Bolshevist or sympathetic to nihilistic authoritarianism, every month. This isn’t because they’re reading Lenin or Marx or Marcuse. No, they don’t read at all. No one does. Their minds have been captured by algorithms that exist solely to weld their eyes to their screens. Those algorithms feed them craziness to intrigue the scroller, and, with enough time, that craziness starts to feel normal to the addict, who then goes seeking crazier content, which the algorithm gladly supplies. This cycle replays millions of times across the country, every day. And then, before you know it, you have millions of people rejoicing over the death of a civilian who’d broken no laws. 

    Refusing to acknowledge that these screechers are destroying the nation’s harmony is a refusal of duty. The very insistence that these people are fringe has allowed this scourge to grow to the size it has now, where it can take lives and endanger the democratic process. 

    It’s also made social media a more miserable place (which it was always destined to be). That has in turn made social life in America more miserable. Anyone still insisting that these forces are marginal is naïve or complacent, or speaking with their hands over their eyes. Perhaps they’re afraid of what they’d see if they peeked through their fingers.

    Because the “fringe” has already infiltrated real life, real America. They were educated in our schools, and they now teach our children. They tyrannize the public square. They swing clubs when they cannot win debates. They disrespect our gods. They ransack our churches, and, like the barbarians of old, they do not speak our language. They speak only the language of violence and convulsion. And they are not “fringe.”

  • America’s mask of civility slips again

    America’s mask of civility slips again

    The FBI has just released an image of a “person of interest” in the case of Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that investigators have found ammunition at the crime scene with pro-trans and “antifa” engravings. 

    But we still don’t know much, if anything, about the killer. Speculation as to motives, or snap judgments as to the historical significance of yesterday’s crime, are therefore futile.

    On the moronic inferno of X, however, the would-be Nostradamuses of the 21st-century right are weighing in with grave predictions about civil war or revolution or an imminent tide of vengeful justice against “the left.”

    Others are suggesting that Kirk, a Christian Zionist, may have been slain for having raised doubts about Israel’s war on Hamas recently. There are also people making gnomic connections between his death and Ukraine and the release of the Epstein files this week.

    From another side, a barrage of amateur historians has taken to issuing warnings that Trump’s wannabe Nazi administration will now use Kirk’s death as a sort of Reichstag Fire moment to silence dissent.

    And of course we see the usual gun experts insisting – as if only they could know – that whoever “made that shot” must have been a highly-trained sniper. A state-sanctioned hit job, then? The plot thickens – in the sense that the discourse only becomes more asinine.

    The truth is that nobody knows very much, and we should probably all keep away from our smartphones in the wake of such horrible news. (Not that I can lecture anyone: I’ve ghoulishly watched videos of the killing. I wish I hadn’t.)

    For now there seem three good points to make about this crime. First, all civilized people are appalled that Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, was killed for his opinions. The second is that America appears to be going through another of its periodic fits of political violence. The mask of civility in American life is slipping too often and too quickly (again, the internet doesn’t help).

    The third and perhaps more salient point is that Charlie died as a passionate believer in free speech. His murder ought never to intimidate others from speaking their mind.

    You can read some excellent – and, we hope, sensitive and non-hysterical – reaction pieces to Kirk’s murder on The Spectator’s website. I’d also encourage everyone to read Charlie’s diary for us about his visit to Britain earlier this year. He was a brave man. Rest in peace.

    In other news, Lord Mandelson has stood down as British ambassador in Washington, as more and more evidence spilled out about the extent of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein – which continued even after Epstein was jailed for sex crimes in 2008.

    In an interview with the journalist Harry Cole on Tuesday night, the “Prince of Darkness” called his Epstein association “an albatross around my neck.”

    Certainly, Westminster journalists have spent years whispering about Mandelson-Epstein stories being mysteriously blocked from publication. But the damn finally burst this week and now he joins Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, as the second British grandee to have wrecked his reputation by palling around with you-know-who.

    Earlier this week, I wrote a magazine piece about how Epstein’s ghost will haunt Donald Trump’s visit to the United Kingdom next week. It’s now possible that Kirk’s murder will, in fact, overshadow the whole trip.

    Yet many liberty-loving Atlanticists have been hoping that Trump might berate Keir Starmer for clamping down on free speech in the United Kingdom. And that was an issue Kirk, who is already being hailed as a “free speech martyr,” cared about deeply.

    Might Trump now invoke Kirk’s name next week to challenge the British government for locking people up for their views? Let’s wait and see.

  • The ghost of Epstein will haunt Trump’s UK visit

    The ghost of Epstein will haunt Trump’s UK visit

    When King Charles hosts Donald Trump for the state banquet at Windsor Castle next week, the dignitaries should know better than to mention Jeffrey Epstein. Inevitably, however, Epstein’s ghost will hang over proceedings, the pedo-Banquo at the feast.

    The royal family will entertain the President, though the Duke of York will (surely?) stay away. He no longer works for the crown and everyone knows why. Trump, meanwhile, will still be batting away suggestions that in 2003 he contributed a puerile drawing to Epstein’s 50th “birthday book” – a strange compilation of messages for the sex criminal, lovingly assembled by Ghislaine Maxwell.

    Then there’s Lord Mandelson, His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States, who is supposed to accompany Trump for some of the trip. The Prince of Darkness apparently features prominently in the soppy-yet-pervy birthday book, which Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have cunningly released online. “Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!” Mandelson allegedly scribbled, alongside an image of himself in a bathrobe sitting opposite the fully dressed rapist.

    “Petie,” as Epstein called him, has long said he regrets ever having met the financier. “It’s an albatross around my neck,” he said this week, referring to the fact that he apparently continued the friendship after Epstein was imprisoned for a child-sex offense in 2008. But expressions of regret won’t stop the attacks coming.

    On Tuesday night, in the wake of the birthday book bombshell, the Telegraph reported that, in 2010, Epstein helped Mandelson broker a £1 billion ($1.35 billion) deal for the sale of a UK-taxpayer owned business, Sempra Commodities, to JP Morgan. “Something is really wrong here,” says Sarah Ransome, one of Epstein’s British accusers. “Peter Mandelson should not be ambassador. He needs to be fired.” Sensing opportunity, the Tory leader Kemi Badendoch used Prime Minister’s Questions to attack Keir Starmer for Mandelson’s Epstein association. “That is a disgrace,” she said.

    How long can Britain’s ambassador last? In the coming days, the details of Mandelson’s bond with Epstein may end up overshadowing all talk of the special relationship between Britain and America, as the wars rage on in the Middle East and Ukraine.

    Trump has turned on a British ambassador before. In 2019, Sir Kim Darroch was pushed out of his Washington post after diplomatic cables – in which he called Trump “inept” and “insecure” – were leaked. What might save Mandelson is that he has done nothing but praise the US commander-in-chief. Sure enough, whereas Trump loathed Darroch, he seems to have warmed to Mandy. Now both men would rather the world move on from Epstein.

    It’s all so awkward. There’s another photograph of Epstein with Joel Pashcow, a longtime member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and an anonymous young woman holding up a large fake cheque from “DJ Trump” for $22,500. Clearly, in the time before 21st-century populism and the #MeToo movement, the global elite used to enjoy their risqué japes. But what does it all mean now?

    Trump is adamant that Epstein, Epstein, Epstein is the new Russia, Russia, Russia: a hoax designed to distract the world from his revolutionary achievements. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, claims: “It’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign [the birthday book].” But it isn’t clear at all, unless Team Trump can prove that some of those other epistles have been faked.

    It’s also baffling to ponder why, when Joe Biden was in the White House, the now-viral Epstein files did not find their way into the public eye. The Democrat-led Department of Justice and the FBI, along with their allies in the media, spent years hounding Trump as a Russian patsy, a fraudster, an insurrectionist and an abuser of women. Yet somehow, it seems, the anti-Trump deep state sat on eye-popping evidence appearing to tie Trump to Epstein. Was it simply because Bill Clinton, that philanderer par excellence, also appeared in the birthday bundle? A note purporting to be from the ex-president praises Epstein’s “childlike curiosity.”

    The Epstein story now appears to involve the Democratic elite, the British establishment and Trump. It thus becomes an ever more mysterious meta-conspiracy – a kaleidoscopic scandal that takes on a different complexion depending on who looks into it. Republican figures, including Vice-President J.D. Vance, enjoyed fanning anti-elitist paranoia when the Epstein muck was on the opposition. They are strangely mute now.

    For Vance and MAGA-supporting Atlanticists such as Nigel Farage, the hope for next week’s visit is that Trump, accompanied by various tech tycoons, will launch a broadside against Keir Starmer’s government for suppressing free speech online. Now, however, the whole world is gossiping about who did what with Epstein. Behind closed doors, Trump, the royal family and the Labour leadership will perhaps agree that sometimes it’s better for the people just to shut up.

  • I made the Epstein cookies

    Is it wrong to bake cookies from a recipe addressed to a pedophile and sex trafficker? When I found the recipe for chocolate chip cookies on page 169 of Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book, I read and re-read it expecting there to be some sinister inside joke, perhaps a hidden dash of adrenochrome or instructions to “massage” the dough. The surrounding page contains a woman’s redacted photograph and references Epstein’s “mentorship,” while the other 237 feel like a cross between various expressions of human depravity: part ransom letter, part porn magazine and part teenage girl’s diary. Where does an innocent cookie recipe fit in among this?

    It is a prodigious recipe which makes about four times the amount of dough a sensible home baker should attempt, unless you happen to have a commercial grade stand mixer – the writer estimates between 60 and 80 cookies, depending on size. I managed somewhere around 100, enough to feed a small private island or all your “best pals.”

    They’re actually quite good. The addition of five cups of ground oatmeal tempers the sweetness of the cookies and gives them a more substantial chewiness than your standard flour base. A half-cup of cocoa powder is a bit cosmetic, turning the cookies dark instead of their usual light brown, but adds a very slight bitter edge enhance the semi-sweet chocolate (I recommend a mix of chips and chunks). The recipe also instructs the baker to “mix all ingredients together in a large bowl,” but you should really cream your sugars and butter first to aerate and lift the dough. 

    The recipe appears to be taken from an urban legend passed around via chain mail in the 90s. “This is not a joke – this is a true story,” insists the tale of the Neiman Marcus Cookie recipe. It is a revenge story at its heart, about a customer wanting to get back at a waitress who sells him the recipe for “two-fifty” and adds a $250 charge to the tab. When the department store refuses to refund him, he sends the recipe to everyone he knows: “I’m sorry but this is the only way I feel I could get even, and I will.” It reads unnervingly like something out of the birthday book.

    Perhaps all it means is that Epstein had a sweet tooth. His receipts from the jail commissary during his sentence in 2008 to 2009 seem to indicate he did. He purchased all sorts of sickening things, Business Insider reported: “Baby Ruths, Hershey’s bars with almonds, peanut M&M’s, Kit Kats, Almond Joys, Jolly Ranchers, PayDays, Milky Ways, Root Beer Barrels, and a Reese’s Crispy Crunchy Bar… chocolate cupcakes, chocolate cream cookies, fudge brownies, Oreos, Pop-Tarts, butterscotch drops, lemon drops, cinnamon graham crackers, bear-claw pastries, honey buns, apple-cider mix, and peanut-butter squeezers.” A grown man with a grocery list like this must be shamelessly perverse.

    Despite knowing the recipe’s annoying but harmless origins, I feel the need to issue a disclaimer about the Epstein ties to everyone I offer them to. I told my roommates as they were mid-bite, as if I’d poisoned them and suddenly lost the courage to follow through with it. I wonder if I should leave it in a note by the plate for the workmen at my house: “Jeffrey Epstein cookies, take some.”

    Still, it wouldn’t feel quite fair to say these cookies are spoiled by association. Hang on… isn’t this all just a horribly glib metaphor for the innocuousness of certain entries in the birthday book? Not exactly. Many of the innuendo-loaded letters from friends, girlfriends and “assistants” – who were instrumental in recruiting underage girls for sex work – do complicate things. The book raises questions about how much, exactly, the contributors knew about Epstein’s life, and whether they were aware of his crimes. Leave the cookies out of it.

    The birthday book “Chocolate Chip Cookies”:

    Ingredients:

    • 2 cups butter
    • 2 ½ cups sugar
    • 2 cups brown sugar
    • 4 eggs
    • 2 tbl vanilla
    • 4 cups flour
    • 5 cups oatmeal (before grinding)
    • 1 tsp salt
    • 2 tsp baking powder
    • 2 tsp baking soda
    • ½ cup unsweetened cocoa
    • 1 24oz bag chocolate chips (semi-sweet)

    Directions:

    Preheat oven to 350°. Grind 5 cups oatmeal in blender (will reduce to approximately 4 cups ground). Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. Drop dough in rounded spoonfuls onto non-stick cookie sheet. Bake 8-10 minutes. (Makes approx 60-80 cookies depending on size.)

  • Is it really ‘clear’ the Trump-Epstein birthday letter is fake?

    Is it really ‘clear’ the Trump-Epstein birthday letter is fake?

    The “bawdy” birthday letter from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, which the Wall Street Journal reported the existence of in July, has been released for all to see. The bawdiness is somewhat wanting – the “small arcs” of the naked woman’s breasts which the Journal described are indeed very small. There’s nothing explicit in its imaginary dialogue between the two men, which begins with a pensive “voice over” saying “There must be more to life than having everything.” It’s creepily cryptic, at worst. 

    Trump said in July that the letter was a “fake thing’ and a “fake Wall Street Journal story.” He filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Journal after the initial story, which did not feature a picture of the letter, calling it “fake and defamatory.” 

    J.D. Vance tweeted, “Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it? Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?” And last night, Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeted, “The latest piece published by the Wall Street Journal PROVES this entire ‘Birthday Card’ story is false. As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it.”

    Is it so clear? The letter has not been authenticated, though the “Donald” signature resembles Trump’s signature on other documents from around the same time and the sketch resembles Trump’s thick, Sharpie style. Even if the letter is real, it wouldn’t alone be an indictment of Trump, whose friendship with Epstein in the early 2000s is already well known. Like the overconfident and unfulfilled promise to release the Epstein client list, a similarly proud approach of “deny, deny, deny” has left the President in a difficult position now that the letter has been released.

    The “birthday book” containing the letter, which the Journal said was seen by the Justice Department during its investigation of Epstein years ago, also features letters from Epstein’s family members and public figures including Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz. It’s one among several documents subpoenaed by Representative James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee. These include Epstein’s last will and testament, contacts from his address book and a non-prosecution agreement between Epstein and the State Attorney’s Office for Florida’s Southern District.

    “It’s appalling Democrats on the Oversight Committee are cherry-picking documents and politicizing information received from the Epstein Estate today,” Comer said of the bipartisan committee. “President Trump is not accused of any wrongdoing and Democrats are ignoring the new information the Committee received today.” Despite the eagerness on the left to draw easy interpretations from a very cryptic letter, it alone doesn’t tell us very much beyond offering an insight into the President’s mind, which was as perplexing in 2003 as it is today: as Trump writes in the letter, “Enigmas never age – have you noticed that?”