The Social World

Category: Politics

Legal immigration is a nightmare

A personal note as October 15, 2025, marks an occasion of sorts: when my husband’s and my Portuguese residency permits expire. Isn’t that a bit sloppy, you might ask, allowing your permission to remain in a country where you live to lapse? On one party’s part, very sloppy, but not ours.

At least a dozen people must have exclaimed to me: “Oh, I’ve thought about moving to Portugal!” After emigrating from London in 2023, I’m not issuing a warning, exactly. We don’t regret the move. Landscape gorgeous, food great, people nice, wine cheap. But this country is notoriously bureaucratic, and the paperwork side of playing Mother, May I? with Portuguese immigration was and remains a nightmare. More generally, there seems to be a perversely inverse relationship between the ease with which foreigners can gatecrash western countries by breaking the law and the diabolical complexity, expense, effort and time required to immigrate to these same countries by following the rules.

Let’s revisit an era subject to very little nostalgia on my end. Our original visa application required: a Portuguese bank account with at least €18,000. A Número de Identificação Fiscal, or NIF. Travel health insurance and private in-country health insurance (along with Medicare, Britain’s National Health Service and emergency evacuation insurance for a lit fest at sea, that year I was covered by five health insurance entities simultaneously; my, didn’t I feel safe). A criminal records check from London’s Metropolitan Police (lo, a summons for running a light on my bicycle in the city at 3 a.m. – with no traffic in sight – is actually lodged in my UK criminal record. That’ll teach me). Formal permission for a Portuguese criminal records check. Certified copies of both the deed and the land registry certificate for our new house outside Lisbon (of that agonizing purchase another time). Copies of the last three months’ statements of all our bank accounts in the UK, US and Portugal. Notarized copies of our passports. Proof of our permanent leave to remain in the UK. Copies of our London council tax bills going back several years, and two passport photographs each.

The process required two in-person appointments, the first in London with an overwhelmed embassy; pouncing on an available slot online demanded the same vigilance and uncanny good luck currently required to get a GP appointment in Britain. Its date delivered from on high with no warning, the Portuguese appointment required a larcenous, jam-packed round trip from New York to Lisbon during tourist season. Residency finally approved, the attempted delivery of our permits failed because we were abroad, so we had to grant our immigration lawyer power of attorney, then pay her to retrieve and FedEx the cards. Naturally, the legal fees for dotting every I throughout this rigmarole were substantial.

Legal immigration is a colossal headache for the very people the West should be welcoming

But! Residency must be renewed after two years (which fly by) and again three years after that; only thereafter can one apply for permanent settlement. But Portugal has made itself too popular for its own good, and last I read it had either 400,000 or 900,000 unaddressed immigration cases – how many hundreds of thousands hardly matters, given that the country’s entire population is only 11 million.

Originally expiring in July, our residency was extended to mid-October by a sweep of Portugal’s bureaucratic wand. Yet the rest of the EU won’t necessarily recognize this edict, of which we’ve no documentary evidence. We’re US passport holders, who like Britons may not spend more than 90 days out of 180 as tourists in the EU. Without proof of valid residency, my traveling to countries such as France, where I’ve a hefty fiction readership and translations coming out, risks being banned for five years from a continent where we live and own a house. Afraid to leave Portugal for exactly this reason, an American musician friend of ours had to decline multiple continental gigs for five months while waiting for his renewed residency card to arrive in the post.

The state of play now? After getting NIFs, SNS numbers ( = NHS) and 12-digit tax portal passwords, we must still acquire “NISS” numbers, apparently for no other reason than to prevent the residency renewal process from snagging; getting social security numbers entails waiting in an office in Lisbon for hours and possibly all day.

Scuttlebutt has it that because Portuguese immigration has hired a batch of inexperienced employees to clear the case backlog, many newbies are turning down residency renewal applications even from well-off foreigners with local property due to niggling paperwork infractions.

That’s hardly in Portugal’s interest, after for years deliberately enticing foreigners with assets to invest here. Imagine, after all this blindingly tedious crap, we could be kicked out after two years.

Put off yet? And permanent residency will involve amassing the notarized passports, the three months’ worth of all our most recent bank statements, etc – oh, how much bother and boredom lurks in that tiny abbreviation – three more times. Portugal may be worse than some countries, but I bet it’s no worse than the United States, whose green card shenanigans are infamous. Legal immigration is a colossal headache for the very people the West should be welcoming – well-educated, law-abiding, unlikely to become dependent on the state and apt to be net cultural and economic contributors.

I’ve written repeatedly that we need to make immigration easier for qualified, credentialed and solvent applicants and vastly harder for less desirable immigrants hoping to sneak through the back door. Given the costly, byzantine horror show of the legit route to Portugal, we might have been better off spending £699: the price of an inflatable dinghy.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
How the drug cartels are ‘diversifying’ into baby-trafficking

Juárez, Mexico

On the morning of September 2, in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexican law enforcement raided a remote safehouse and uncovered one of the most grotesque cartel operations they had ever encountered. They found not just the usual drugs but rudimentary medical equipment and bloodstained tarps. The evidence confirmed what many investigators had suspected but couldn’t prove: that growing US demand has created a black market in human babies. Police arrested a brutal female gangster, Martha Alicia Mendez Aguilar, who was allegedly running an operation that procured these babies, luring in young mothers and performing illegal C-sections. On the streets they call her La Diabla: the She-Devil.

Many of these women were lured with promises of easy cash jobs during the final months of pregnancy

For months, the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) had tracked La Diabla’s movements. The dossier they compiled before the raid described a woman who was an expert at seeking out impoverished, pregnant girls and reeling them in with promises of work or money. For the girls in La Diabla’s grip, the promises proved empty. The babies were cut from the young mothers’ bodies and sold for as much as 250,000 pesos ($14,000) to American buyers in El Paso, Texas. It has been alleged that many of the girls did not survive the ordeal and their organs became another product to be sold.

This seems almost too macabre to be true, but an account I heard from the mother of one victim persuaded me that the worst can and does happen. I talked to her in a cramped car in Chihuahua state as she clutched a rosary. “My daughter was a good person, she never wronged anybody… she was so excited to have her baby, investigators asked me if my daughter wanted to sell her baby, but that wasn’t the case. She was already buying everything for her son, and telling her daughter how she was going to be a big sister.”

Her voice broke as she described searching police stations, hospitals, morgues – any place that might give her answers after her daughter went missing. It was only after La Diabla’s arrest that investigators confirmed that her daughter had been one of La Diabla’s alleged victims, lured with the promise of money for prenatal care. In the end she was butchered for profit.

It would be one thing if La Diabla were a horrific anomaly but such stories echo across Mexico’s northern states, where women vanish daily into the machinery of organized crime. For years, Juárez has been synonymous with femicide, the killings of women often dismissed as collateral damage in cartel wars. La Diabla’s alleged operation is only the latest twist in the awful story.

Many of the women who fell into her operation were offered promises of easy cash jobs during the final months of pregnancy, others with invitations to make new friends or meet a man interested in taking them on a date. One woman told me she narrowly escaped La Diabla’s network. She had been promised simple, legal work for quick pay in Juárez, nothing that seemed suspicious at first. “My friend had been working with people in Juárez and making money, so I guess she told them to contact me. Over messages the guy made it seem like a good deal and I wouldn’t have to stay long. They said they wanted to help me because I’m pregnant and they kept telling me how much money I would make with them.”

She described being contacted over Facebook by a persistent individual, urging her to meet. This Facebook profile was later identified as one of those linked to La Diabla. A relative became suspicious and advised her that the offer seemed odd and the young woman backed out of the meeting. Her testimony is now part of the prosecution’s case. Her survival offers a rare glimpse into the mechanics of the trade: recruitment, transport and coercion. How many others never made it out alive?

Investigations into this network, on both sides of the border, are only just beginning. A Mexican law-enforcement source who worked on the investigation spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. He told me: “There is a lot of talk that these babies were sold into illegal adoption but when we checked the phone contacts of the woman [La Diabla], the men transferring the money and crossing the babies were smugglers. We don’t know where the babies eventually ended up.”

These smugglers are experts in moving everything and anything across the border. One man was recently found to have a six-week-old Bengal tiger cub from Tijuana in his car. Dried hummingbirds – a necessary ingredient for a folk-magic love potion – have been seized. Smuggling babies is more complex. Sham paperwork is often procured, including Mexican birth certificates, while the babies are sometimes drugged to ensure they don’t start crying, bringing attention to the smugglers.

Why would the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), one of the world’s wealthiest cartels, move into baby-trafficking? The short answer is that there’s money in it, and because impunity allows experimentation. Trafficking older children has long been a shadow industry in Latin America and the US, for illegal adoptions, child labor, sex-trafficking. But the industrial-scale operation uncovered in Juárez points to something new: a cartel cutting babies straight out of mothers and then selling them to the highest bidder.

Since January, the southern border crackdown has hit cartel profits harder than most US policymakers probably realize. Stricter enforcement and expanded surveillance have disrupted some of CJNG’s most lucrative human-smuggling routes and slowed the flow of fentanyl shipments north.

To compensate, cartels have pivoted, inventing new economies of violence. Baby-trafficking, organ-harvesting, crypto-laundering – each is a response to lost revenue. Every shift in US policy changes the underworld of organized crime. Crackdowns don’t end the business, they mutate it.

Cartels adapt faster than the governments trying to contain them, turning political victories in Washington into new criminal blueprints in Sinaloa, Jalisco, and now Juárez. The arrest of La Diabla was made possible by unprecedented coordination between US and Mexican agencies.

NCTC Director Joe Kent later called it a “terrorist cartel” operation, a phrase once controversial, now codified by President Trump’s designation of CJNG and other cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. This meant that US counterterrorism infrastructure could be redirected against them. Intelligence once focused on al-Qaeda and ISIS now targets cartels such as CJNG that control swaths of Mexican territory with military precision.

After the border crackdown, cartels have pivoted – inventing new economies of violence

US officials insist this is the only way to treat them: as terrorists. And yet, for families in Juárez, Chihuahua, Guadalajara, and beyond, the designation doesn’t matter. What matters is that women are dying, babies are vanishing, and every cartel bust feels like just another head cut from a hydra.

“This is one example of what terrorist cartels will do to diversify their revenue streams and finance operations,” Kent said. Yet what I saw in Juárez was beyond policy language. It was the commodification of life at its most obscene. For American couples desperate for a baby, willing to look the other way about how it came into their arms, $14,000 is a fraction of the cost of legal adoption. For child-traffickers, it’s even better, and for CJNG, it’s a goldmine. But for the women left behind, it’s a death sentence.

As La Diabla sits in a Juárez prison awaiting trial, the questions are piling up. How many babies were sold? How many women were allegedly killed? Who on the US side is being held accountable for buying into this supply chain? Mexican authorities say they have identified several women connected to the network, though they will not disclose their identities.

US officials insist investigations into American buyers are ongoing. But in borderland cities like Juárez, the fear remains. Everyone wonders if another La Diabla is already taking her place.

For the families I spoke to, there’s no comfort in intelligence victories or policy designations. There is only the gnawing absence of their daughters and granddaughters and the knowledge that somewhere, their stolen babies might still be alive, raised in American suburbs with no memory of the women who carried them.

Before I left Chihuahua, the mother I interviewed cried with me for her daughter and the granddaughter she leaves behind. “I want justice, I want this woman to pay for what she did to my daughter. She was smirking in the courtroom, and I need her to pay.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
How Alex Jones won

One of my favorite Walt Whitman stanzas goes like this:

I’m a pioneer! I’m an explorer! I’m a human, and I’m comin’!

I’m animated! I’m alive! My heart’s big! It’s got hot blood goin’ through it fast!

I like to fight! I like to eat! I like to have children! I’m here! I got a life force!

This is a human! This is what we look like! This is what we act like!

This is what everyone was like before us! This is what I am!

Just kidding. That’s Alex Jones, the voice of our time. Nobody in media has won more in the past 20 years than Jones. He’s lost a lot along the way, of course, including the largest defamation suit in American history and access to every mainstream media platform. But those were only temporary slowdowns. They may even have been accelerants.

In 2018, a bunch of nervous Silicon Valleyites overestimated their control of the web and deplatformed Jones. Today, he’s back on Twitter with 4.4 million followers. Pressure is mounting to reinstate his YouTube channel. His app was recently allowed on the Apple Store again. It’s currently ranked 13th in the news section – higher than Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the AP, NPR, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and CNN. His shows pull in millions of streams every week. He’s not fringe. I’m watching InfoWars as I write this. His guest is Senator Tommy Tuberville.

All you really need, Jones has proven, is a mic and an internet connection. In fact, he’s proven that only having a mic and an internet connection might be better than having, say, a primetime slot on Fox. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens – hosts of the first and third most popular news podcasts in the country, respectively – certainly learned this lesson from Jones. So did Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon.

Jones also changed what these voices dare speak about. Owens is obsessed with proving that Brigitte Macron was born a man, Carlson with UFOs and 9/11 trutherism – such topics would fit right into a Jones segment, but would have been unthinkable subjects for the biggest names in media to cover a few years ago. Carlson just brought Jones onto his broadcast for an episode titled “Alex Jones Warns of the Globalist Death Cult Fueling the Next Civil War and Rise of the Antichrist.”

More important than that, however, is that Jones has shifted the way regular Americans think, even those who’ve never listened to him. It’s totally unsurprising to go to a party and hear someone say the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles – a theory that he’s been incubating for decades.

“Globalism” has become a dirty word; populism is in; no one likes Bill Gates; Christian nationalism is on the upswing. Jones has been screaming for all this for the past two decades. He was doing so when no one else with a major platform would. Everyone – on the left and the right – has a pet conspiracy these days, because the average American thinks a lot more like Alex Jones than most people are willing to admit.

Still, he’s nuts. For every one thing he gets right – for example, that George Soros is flooding the country with bad prosecutors – he gets 99 things wrong, such as his theory that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an inside job. Given his nuttiness, journalists have a hard time accounting for his popularity. This is because journalists, as a rule, tend to lack imagination.

A mixture of Martin Luther King Jr. and L. Ron Hubbard, Jones combines biblical diction with sci-fi bunkum

There’s a discomfiting but simple explanation for Jones’s popularity: he is America’s greatest living orator. (Sorry, Obama.) His Texas voice growls like a souped-up semitruck engine; his monologues burn with Christian fire and swinging fists; you can smell the whiskey on his breath and hear him fire Colt .45s skyward before raising his arms and proclaiming, “Praise Jesus, amen!”

This puts him in the same tradition as Whitman, Cotton Mather and William Jennings Bryan. A mixture of Martin Luther King Jr. and L. Ron Hubbard, Jones combines King James biblical diction with science-fiction bunkum. “Get behind me Satan!” he yells into the microphone during a sermonette on the New World Order before describing interdimensional systems beyond our imagination and declaring that “Humanity is going interstellar!”

Soothsaying and calls to repentance spill from him as if against his own will – the Large Hadron Collider opened a portal to hell; death-worshipping, third-world hordes will fall upon the American promised; the Devil is building a machine to impersonate God; men must stop watching football. It’s all very prophetic-sounding.

Sometimes he adopts the persona of Jeremiah weeping over his people. “People are ugly now,” he laments. “They’re stupid. Their IQs are dropping. They’re dying all around us. I feel like a failure. God, if I ruled the planet, I’d feel like I ruled a pile of cockroaches or something. I mean, who the hell would want to rule this?”

But most of the time, his prophesying is a rallying call against the forces of evil in his cosmology: Democrats, globalists, Justin Bieber. His monologues are often uploaded to Instagram and TikTok and backed by rousing music. One such speech sees him shouting, “I’m so full of life and so full of resistance to these murdering pedophiles who want to get in the way of God’s plan! And let me tell you, I’ve been taken up to the third heaven. I’ve been jacked into the big plan. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it and I can’t even compute all of it, it’s so fantastical.”

He goes on, “Anybody that tries to get in the way of the incredible plan the big guy’s got for us has got me pissed and I’m just begging to stay on the team man. Just put me in the game coach, whatever you say coach, I know I’m weak, I know I’m pathetic. Man, you’re amazing. I’m so lucky you made me. What do I need to do boss!?” Then he starts panting like a dog and growls, “I’m like a hunting dog man, just take me out of the house, just turn me on them!”

For a religion-starved population – which American zoomers and millennials certainly are – this is water in the desert. (Is the water safe to drink? That’s another question.) Jones’s audience skews young. It’s composed largely of people who grew up in a secular world. Most of these young people probably didn’t go to church growing up, and if they did, they were exposed to the milquetoast Protestantism so common across the country. But it’s human nature to want a prophet, and a few decades of secularization can’t change that. For these listeners, hearing Jones for the first time must be like hearing thunder for the first time. Pollsters insist that America’s young men are turning back to religion. That’s a hopeful idea. But what if Alex Jones is the nation’s highest prophet?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
Trump inherited a weaponized justice system

Has Donald Trump “weaponized” the justice system to go after his political enemies? The answer is no.

“What about former FBI director James Comey?” you ask. “What about New York Attorney General Letitia James?” Both went after Trump hammer and tongs. Now both have been indicted by the Trump Justice Department. Are those not textbook cases of “weaponization,” of “retribution,” of using the power of the system to punish people who have punished you?

Hold on. I write this in mid-October. By the time you read it, I suspect that the list of indictments will be much longer. Candidates for inclusion on this Ko-Ko-like “little list” include John Bolton, national security advisor during Trump’s first term; Jack Smith, the special counsel who managed to rack up 37 indictments against Trump in two criminal cases; and sundry other former intelligence officers and DoJ officials. The dragnet will be large; it will be relentless.

So haven’t I just admitted that Trump weaponized the justice system?

No. Trump didn’t weaponize the justice system. He inherited a weaponized justice system.

More on that shortly. First, here’s another little list. Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Jeffrey Clark and George Papadopoulos.

That’s a very incomplete roster of Trump aides and supporters who were indicted, prosecuted, disbarred and/or jailed. The list does not include the more than 1,200 people convicted over the January 6 protest at the Capitol. Nor does it capture a contrast that Navarro describes in a post on X: “I was dragged through Reagan Airport in leg irons, mug shot, handcuffs, jail cell, the full circus. Meanwhile, Comey faces felonies up to 10 years for the worst political conspiracy in modern history, and he slips quietly through a side door.”

Responding to demands that Comey be subjected to the humiliation of a “perp walk,” Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel said there would be “no drama.” But the FBI that Trump inherited specialized in such drama. Remember their guns-drawn, dawn raid to arrest his confidant Roger Stone? The tipped-off media were there in force to lap up and regurgitate the entertainment.

That’s one element of the system Trump inherited. Another has to do with the courts. Trump and his allies faced kangaroo courts, kangaroo juries and a kangaroo media. All are Democrat specialties. There are certainly places in the US where judges, or at least juries, favor Conservatives. But is there any analogue to Manhattan or Washington, DC, where the name “Trump” guarantees conviction and hectoring media obloquy?

There is not. The cases that Letitia James and Alvin Bragg brought against Trump in New York were patently ridiculous. But had the President not won re-election he would be facing a $500 million fine, the destruction of his business empire and decades in jail, all to a hallelujah chorus of media self-congratulation.

At the moment, that media has shifted into a minor key, not crowing but spewing threnodies about “selective prosecution,” “lawfare,” “retribution” and of course “weaponization.” Yet Trump could never deploy the sort of judicial and media vendetta that had been organized against him. Republicans lack the kangaroos.

In March, I wrote here about deterrence, not as a feature of military strategy but as a part of political wisdom more generally. The attack on Trump and his allies, I noted, was only incidentally directed at those individuals. Writ large, it was aimed at undermining the very things they claimed to be supporting: “our democracy” and the rule of law. From that perspective, I said:

The Trump administration’s efforts to restore fiscal sanity, accountability, and common sense to the workings of government will seem like retaliation or retribution only to those who have betrayed those values. For them, the closure of redundant or malevolent agencies, the exposure of financial wrongdoing and incompetence, the revocation of tolerance for illegal migrants who prey on US citizens will seem simply punitive. It is punitive, because it is in response to egregious wrongdoing. But in the long term, such masculine policies will function less as a punitive expedient than as a deterrent.

The press is full of caterwauling headlines about Trump’s “vindictive,” “weaponized” prosecutions. But if you step back, such imprecations ring hollow. For one thing, as the commentator “Cynical Publius” noted: “James charged Trump with nonsense; Trump charged James with a verifiable crime.” The same is true of Comey. The same will be true of the rogues’ gallery of anti-Trumpists destined for the courts.

After she got done running for office on a platform of suing Trump and calling him “illegitimate,” James dusted off her oratory. “When powerful people cheat to get better loans,” she intoned, “it comes at the expense of hardworking people. Everyday Americans cannot lie to a bank to get a mortgage, and if they did, our government would throw the book at them. There simply cannot be different rules for different people.”

That was before it was revealed that James lied to a bank to get a lower interest rate on a mortgage.

Here is the moral of the story. Deterrence works only because there lurks in the background a credible threat of retaliation. Before Trump, Republicans were too lily-livered to mount any such threat. Would it be better if an incoming administration did not set about indicting its predecessors? Yes. Which is why the President’s vigorous effort to call to account those who waged lawfare against him is a necessary purgative. If vigorously pursued, it may just reset the conventions and courtesies of our political life.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
How Germany is preparing for war

Hamburg

What would happen if Russia was planning an attack on Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia – and the threat was sufficiently great that NATO felt the need to send troops east across Europe to face off against Moscow?

This was the scenario the German Bundeswehr spent several days rehearsing last month, working out how the army would transport its soldiers towards NATO’s eastern flank in the event of conflict in the Baltics. For three days, the port city of Hamburg played host to the exercise Red Storm Bravo: 500 soldiers, along with roughly 300 members of the emergency services and other civilian organizations, took part – the largest military exercise in the city since the end of the Cold War.

In the event of conflict with Russia, Germany would, because of its geographical position, become a “hub” for NATO to coordinate the flow of soldiers and weaponry to the front line in the east. Troops from the US and across western and southern Europe – including Britain – would flow through the country toward Warsaw and on. The purpose would be deterrence in the hope that a show of international force would put Vladimir Putin off an attack that would test NATO’s commitment to Article 5, which considers an attack on one member to be an attack on all.

It would be a huge operation: the Bundeswehr’s Operation Plan Germany, details of which were leaked to the press last year, envisages 800,000 NATO troops and 200,000 vehicles traveling across the country toward the front line. According to one army source, even with Germany’s motorways and ports used to full capacity, this would take close to a week. Red Storm Bravo was a rehearsal of the section of Operation Plan Germany that runs through Hamburg.

The purpose of Red Storm Bravo was as much to familiarize German civilians as the army regarding what to do in the event of a coming war. Only a fraction of the Operation Plan Germany soldiers took part but the scenarios neatly reflected the possible challenges. Soldiers rehearsed setting up and manning checkpoints; the fire service practiced fishing a sinking barge out of Hamburg’s port; and the ambulance service simulated a mass casualty event with multiple victims.

The first day’s main event was moving a military convoy through the center of the city after dark. As the sun set over Hamburg’s port, I watched the heavily armed soldiers march toward a fleet of about 70 military vehicles, lined up three abreast. Some were small armored vehicles, others enormous Rheinmetall-branded trucks, several with machine-gun turrets that would later be manned as the convoy sped through the city. Many soldiers wore balaclavas to prevent them being identified, according to our Bundeswehr escort.

There is an art to traveling in a convoy. It moves as one, meaning that as long as the leading vehicle continues to move, the others follow in an unbroken line, regardless of red traffic lights or civilian traffic. This convoy of just 70-odd vehicles snaked back roughly 2.5 miles – a considerable logistical challenge.

At two points along the route, the convoy was stopped by pretend protests: at the first, army reservists in civvies waved banners and chanted at the convoy to “turn back”; at the second, “protesters” staged a sit-in, with signs saying “glue” around the necks of some to denote those who would have stuck themselves to the ground. The point was for the riot police to practice removing them. Groups of three took turns: a grab at the protester’s head from behind and a knee to the back, one arm twisted around, then the other, allowing the police to peel them off the ground and carry them away.

When the planning for Red Storm Bravo was initiated, few could have predicted the new significance it would take on in the weeks leading up to it. Last month, a series of suspected Russian drone incursions into NATO territory set alarm bells ringing. Alongside Germany, Romania, Denmark, Norway and Poland have all reported drone activity close to military bases and other critical infrastructure. Meanwhile, three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets entered Estonian airspace for a total of 12 minutes on September 19.

“We developed the scenario for Red Storm Bravo last December and now reality has actually caught up with us somewhat,” said Captain Kurt Leonards, the head of the Bundeswehr’s Hamburg command, who oversaw the exercise. “Whether that’s in Poland, in Estonian airspace, or even the whole discussion now taking place in Denmark, it shows how topical this issue is, and that’s why we have to react very quickly and expand our capabilities.”

Poland and Estonia triggered NATO’s Article 4 less than two weeks apart, requesting alliance members come together to discuss the incursions. While the mood in NATO’s Brussels HQ appears to be calm so far, the rhetoric coming from individual members is somewhat more bellicose.

In comments supported by NATO chief Mark Rutte, Donald Trump gave his endorsement to any NATO ally shooting down Russian aircraft entering its territory. Poland and Lithuania have declared they will do precisely this. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said: “We are not at war, but we are no longer living in peace either.” The German government intends to change the law this fall to allow the army to shoot down any drones deemed a threat. Last month, the EU agreed to move forward with building a technological “drone wall” along its eastern boundary.

The mood on the ground in Germany is clearly jumpy, too. At approximately 1 a.m. on a stretch of road just outside the center of Hamburg, as the Red Storm Bravo convoy paused to set up for the second of its two protest simulations, a whining buzz became audible overhead. Alarm bounced around the crowd of assembled press and official observers as a small black drone hovered above us. “Is it one of ours?” someone asked nervously. It was only after a press photographer was able to get a grainy shot of it that one of our military escorts confirmed it did indeed belong to the Bundeswehr.

Leonards agreed that Hamburg had seen an increase in drone activity. “Of course, you don’t always know where the drones are coming from,” he said. “Are these drones the work of a state actor that’s systematically operating here? Or do we have a teenager with a remote-controlled drone who wants to test how fast the police can arrive on the scene?”

Following years of underinvestment, the German army is restocking its arsenal thanks to reforms that will see defense spending exempt from the country’s rigid debt rules and a one-off €100 billion fund ringfenced by Merz’s predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Some of this will be invested in anti-drone technology.

Following years of underinvestment, the German army is restocking its arsenal

In an army barracks in the Hamburg suburbs, the Bundeswehr demonstrated some of the gadgets already available. First to be sent up was a type of “hunter drone” capable of ensnaring other drones mid-flight by shooting out a web, Spider-Man-style. Disabling drones this way avoids having to use expensive weaponry to shoot them down and lowers the risk of falling debris injuring civilians. Once the hunter drone had lowered its catch to the ground, a four-legged “drone dog” dubbed “Lassie,” equipped with a camera and other sensors, was sent out to inspect it.

Despite these recent undertakings, questions over the German army’s readiness for conflict remain. In June, defense chief General Carsten Breuer warned that Russia could be ready to launch an attack on a NATO state by 2029; according to one government source I spoke to, this could be even sooner. Meanwhile, according to official figures, just under 183,000 soldiers are actively serving in the Bundeswehr, and a damning report published in May revealed that, at the end of last year, more than 20 percent of military positions remained vacant. The reintroduction of conscription seems inevitable to meet its commitment to NATO troop numbers.

So, is Germany prepared for the defensive challenges ahead? When asked this, Leonards said: “Germany is in the process of significantly developing its armed forces and the Bundeswehr. And I believe we’re really on the right track.” Not a resounding yes, then. But any preparation against an increasingly provocative Russia is better than none.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
Why the Army needs the cavalry

A generation ago, I was an officer in the US Army National Guard and later in the Army Reserve. I did absolutely nothing important, and never saw any places more exotic than Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, and Camp Atterbury, Indiana. I then spent a dozen years working for the Army as a civilian employee.

I had already decided before these events to devote my academic career to the study of the Army. I loved (and still do love) it in an abstract and historical sense. However, only after my personal association with it did I realize how profoundly shortsighted it was. I observed this myopia daily and marveled at its immensity. Veterans may remember the adage that there is “the right way, the wrong way and the Army way.” The Army way is usually just plain dumb.

Veterans may remember ‘the right way, the wrong way and the Army way.’ The Army way is usually plain dumb

Where am I going with all this? You may have seen the Army’s recent decision to eliminate all its horse-mounted ceremonial units in a cost-saving measure. Many will immediately attribute this decision exclusively to President Trump and the Department of Government Deficiency (DoGE). I know better, and so does anybody who served in the Army but retained a healthy sense of skepticism. While there has certainly been an emphasis on cost-cutting and savings, this decision was made by someone much lower in the food chain. Some one- or two-star general or some Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of the Army for God Knows What decided that for a mere $2,000,000 of savings (the Department of the Army’s total annual budget for 2024 was $165.6 billion), the Army would eliminate one of its few historical vestiges and an example for relatively cheap positive public relations.

Every other branch of the armed forces has its quirks. The Air Force has been described as an organization staffed with businessmen in flight suits. The Navy is an organization that will sacrifice anyone to save face (do a Google search on how often ship commanders are relieved because of a “loss of confidence.”) The Marine Corps not only takes pride in being the physically toughest branch of service but also seems to enjoy suffering in an almost strangely masochistic way. The Army, however, owing to its status as the first American armed force and almost always the largest, doesn’t seem to have a true ethos of its own.

Its advertising campaign could almost be (paraphrasing the internet) “Not smart enough for the Air Force? Don’t want to be trapped on a ship with 1,000 other people? Not tough enough for the Marines? Well then, what about the Army, you don’t have any other choices…”

When it comes to history and public relations, the Army’s incompetence truly shines. There is scarcely a ground combat situation in our history where it was not present. Yet it seems unable to inform the American public about this storied history. Even among people who know scarcely any US history, I would be shocked to find those who do not know about the Marine Corps and its role in World War Two. Why? The Marine Corps treats history more like hagiography, and they have lovingly wrapped their history and public relations together.

The Air Force maintains the Thunderbirds ($35 million annual budget), and the Navy maintains the Blue Angels ($40 million), both of which go around the country providing examples of aerobatic excellence, which enthrall crowds and entice young people to join their services.

We have already mentioned the Marine Corps’s brilliance in merging history and public relations. Where does that leave the Army? Ironically, the mounted units, which it has now decided to get rid of, are one of the few examples of effective public relations without explicitly recruiting – generating goodwill and positive feelings among the public. Yes, the horses were a throwback to a bygone era, but isn’t the Army proud of its history?

So, here it stands, shooting itself in the proverbial foot for the savings of 0.00001 percent of its annual budget. Unlike the Navy and the Air Force, the Army is an institution whose backbone is people, not aircraft or ships. The Marine Corps is organized similarly to the Army, but it seems to understand what it is and how to relate that information to the public.

There was a memoir written back in the 1980s by a man who served in the cavalry during its final years. He told the story of how an Army officer and a sergeant violated regulations to allow an old cavalry horse to live out its final days in a pasture rather than be sold off for dog food. He then contrasted that behavior with what he saw when he later served in the Air Force in the 1950s.

For him, the distinction demonstrated the different service cultures and why he preferred the Army’s. Unfortunately, I think that culture no longer exists in the Army. Can it be revived? I certainly hope so, but this latest decision gives me very little hope.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
Should the Nord Stream saboteurs be extradited to Germany?

The identity of the saboteurs who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 was for years the western security establishment’s worst-kept secret. Just two weeks after a series of explosions within the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark crippled three of the four undersea natural-gas pipelines linking Russia to Germany, Scandinavian diplomats in Brussels were already being quietly briefed that the most likely culprits were Ukrainian. By January 2023, a forensic investigation by German police had discovered traces of the explosives on board the charter yacht Andromeda and found that the vessel’s movements aligned exactly with the location of the blasts. Crucially, the Germans also established both the cover identities and the real identities of the seven Ukrainian members of the sabotage commando.

Ukraine’s hand in the sabotage operation was common knowledge among western security agencies

By the time The Spectator published a detailed report in March 2023 pointing the finger at Kyiv, Ukraine’s hand in the sabotage operation was common knowledge among western security agencies. As one senior British intelligence official told me in January 2023, “The story will come out sooner or later… but we’re not going to be the ones to leak it.”

Details of the German, Danish and Swedish investigations were kept secret not only from the public but also from EU and US politicians, and from the United Nations, for a simple reason: the news that Ukrainians were involved in an attack on Germany’s critical infrastructure could have a devastating impact on Kyiv’s relations with its major European supporters – as well as on public support for Ukraine. Or as Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency put it in a response to a parliamentary question in October 2022: “Information regarding this question cannot be issued – even in classified form – due to considerations regarding the welfare of the state.”

Denmark and Sweden officially shut down their investigations in February 2024 without releasing any information to the public. But the official omertà was finally broken last summer by the office of Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General, which has shown itself to be more concerned with justice being done than with saving the blushes of politicians in Kyiv – and Berlin. At least two European Arrest Warrants were obtained in June 2024 for Ukrainian suspects. And in August of this year 49-year-old former military diver Serhii Kuznietsov was arrested while on holiday near Rimini and remanded in custody by Italian magistrates, while another military veteran Volodymyr Zhuravlyov was detained in Pruszków, Poland, on September 30. But judges in both Poland and Italy have refused to extradite the suspects to Germany – sparking a political battle over whether they should face justice at all.

“The problem with Nord Stream… is not that it was blown up, the problem is that it was built,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said recently, arguing against extraditing Volodymyr K to Berlin. The head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, Sławomir Cenckiewicz, told the Financial Times that “if Germany is prosecuting someone based in Poland who destroyed the source of income of the Russian war machine, then we see a clear contradiction in interests between Poland and Germany… From our point of view, this investigation doesn’t make sense, not only [for] Poland but also [for] the whole [NATO] alliance.”

In other words, while Berlin prosecutors see the Nord Stream operation as an attack on Germany, the Poles view it as an attack on Russia. And while the Ukrainian citizenship of the suspects is not in doubt, the exact role the Ukrainian government and military played – as well as who conceived of, planned and ordered the attack – remains a mystery. The Russians, for their part, continue to insist that the attack was organized on a “state level,” and Putin himself has dismissed as “sheer nonsense” any suggestion that the pipelines could have been destroyed by a handful of possibly freelance Ukrainian frogmen. Kremlin media regularly blame the US for the attacks.

The controversy over the extradition has become inextricably linked with Germany’s own political debates over the causes of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine – and the legacy of the policy of cooperation with the Kremlin by successive German chancellors Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel.

From the moment Russia’s state-controlled Gazprom corporation first proposed massive undersea Baltic gas pipelines that would bypass Belarus, Ukraine and Poland and link Germany directly to the Yamal gas fields of northern Siberia in 2006, Poles and other eastern Europeans consistently and adamantly opposed the project. They argued that an abundance of cheap gas would increase European dependence on Russia, while at the same time enriching the Kremlin. Schröder and Merkel countered that increasing Russia’s economic dependence on European money would encourage peace and cooperation.

Even when Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea fundamentally undermined this logic, Merkel nonetheless greenlit the €9.5 billion Nord Stream 2 project in 2015, despite strong opposition from Washington. In the event, the second set of pipelines were completed but never certified and never came online. One of the two Nord Stream 2 pipes survived the attacks intact and is still full of pressurized gas, ready in theory to be switched on at any moment.

In several important ways, history has proved the critics of Nord Stream right – not least about the danger that the Kremlin would use its control of more than a third of Germany’s energy supply as a political weapon. In June 2022 Gazprom reduced the pressure through Nord Stream 1 to 40 percent of its previous flow, claiming that recent European sanctions had prevented the delivery of Siemens-made turbine blades. The following month the company shut down supplies, citing annual maintenance work. Service was resumed ten days later, but at only 20 percent capacity, and on August 31, Gazprom closed Nord Stream 1 indefinitely, officially because of further technical issues. Indeed, it was precisely in order to stop the Kremlin from applying energy blackmail on Berlin that, reportedly, the Ukrainian plotters decided to put an end to Nord Stream – and Russian leverage over Europe – once and for all.

The critics were also right about the dangers of Germany and Europe’s economic dependency on cheap Russian gas. The Kremlin’s serial messing with supplies predictably sent gas markets into a panic, with spot prices for natural gas soaring to €70 per megawatt-hour in August 2022, up from €27 in January. In the aftermath of the destruction of Nord Stream in late September, Germany rapidly built floating harbors to offload supplies of expensive liquefied natural gas (LNG), and booked massive new shipments from the US, Canada, Qatar and – ironically – Russia (which as of last year was still Europe’s second largest LNG supplier, after America).

The problem for the German economy was that several major sectors – notably large, energy-intensive industries such as chemicals, refining and fertilizers – have faced much higher costs. An IMF report suggested that the negative impact on Germany’s GDP of the shutoff of cheap Russian piped gas would be 1.5 percent in the second half of 2022, 2.7 percent in 2023, and 0.4 percent in 2024. That same IMF study predicted that the destruction of Nord Stream and its associated gas price rise would add some 2 percentage points to German inflation in 2022 and 2023 because of higher energy costs rippling through food, manufacturing, transport and consumer goods. While it’s impossible to know exactly what German economic performance would have been without the Nord Stream hit, Germany’s economy contracted by -0.3 percent in 2023 and -0.2 percent in 2024 while inflation shot up to 7.9 percent in 2022 before falling to 2.4 percent by 2024.

In short, whoever carried out the Nord Stream operation cut off Russia’s most valuable tool of political blackmail and wrecked one of Gazprom and the Kremlin’s most lucrative income streams. But they also killed off German growth and pushed up inflation across the continent.

To some, Germany’s insistence on prosecuting the saboteurs smacks of hypocrisy. “Forgive me if I say that the sight of Germany now ‘investigating’ the sabotage of Nord Stream feels like a mockery of history – another manifestation of German arrogance and hubris,” says Sławomir Dębski of the College of Europe in Warsaw. “Perhaps they should start by investigating Schröder and Merkel – they were the ones who blew up Europe’s trust in Germany as a reliable ally.”

Berlin prosecutors see the Nord Stream operation as an attack on Germany – the Poles see it as an attack on Russia

Others are outraged that Ukraine should have carried out such a destructive attack on its own allies’ economies despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in international aid and, it is said, in defiance of strong opposition from Washington. In August 2024 the Wall Street Journal, citing senior but anonymous sources, reported that the operation was ultimately commanded by General Valerii Zaluzhnyi (then Ukraine’s top commander) – and had gone ahead despite President Zelensky allegedly trying to call it off after pressure by US intelligence.

From Ukraine’s point of view, the attack was a major success, qualifying as one of the most geopolitically effective covert operations in history. Ukraine’s main strategic weakness over the late summer of 2022 was that the promise of a resumption of cheap Russian gas would fatally weaken European resolve to back the war effort. But with Nord Stream physically gone, Europe’s return to its Gazprom addiction ceased to be a threat. For the Kyiv government to undertake such an attack would carry enormous political risks if the story ever came out. But specialist operatives acting independently would be legitimately deniable. Which has pretty much remained the case, until now.

With extradition blocked and the two arrested suspects now at liberty, there will be no trial and no chance that details of the operation will be produced in court. And the biggest secret of all – the full truth about who in Kyiv ordered the attack – will likely remain hidden for years to come.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
The rise of the mayors

In Britain, the leading political parties have just held their annual conventions. After a month of national political debates, lost in all the commentary about polling and positioning is a larger and more consequential story about the changing dynamics of power. And it’s simply this: in a world where parties, prime ministers and presidents have long dominated the global stage, the spotlight is increasingly turning to a new group of leaders: mayors. And they are shifting the plot from talk to action.

Mayors have emerged as entrepreneurial actors on national and even international issues

In recent years, mayors have emerged as increasingly entrepreneurial actors on national and even international issues. They’re not only collecting trash and fixing roads, but they’re also pioneering new ways to tackle job creation, healthcare, housing construction, climate change and more. They are bringing a spirit of innovation to city halls, as the best US mayors in both major political parties are doing, too.

This development is only natural, since mayors stand on the front lines of our biggest challenges. And as frustration with national leadership grows around the globe, cities stand out as laboratories of renewal. Mayors are showing how progress happens in practice, by embracing pragmatic problem-solving, rather than ideological combat.

In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan has capitalized on devolution to reduce air pollution, provide school lunches for children and improve social services. Mayoral combined authorities in Greater Manchester and Liverpool are developing new ways to provide better transportation for residents, more plans for affordable housing and more effective police and fire services. And earlier this year, the British government announced six new regions that will develop mayoral combined authorities, a move that will put 80 percent of the country under devolution.

Across the EU, local leaders are also raising their ambitions and asserting their power, even without new grants of authority. Helsinki, Finland, has gone without a traffic fatality for more than 365 days thanks to the mayor’s efforts to improve street design and public transport. And the city of Madrid is one step closer to reaching net zero emissions, in no small part because of the mayor’s effort to transition the city’s bus fleet to electric power.

As mayors rise to meet the moment, it’s critical that they have the skills and capabilities needed to pursue bold ideas – and succeed. When I was first elected mayor of New York in 2001, just weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, I had spent 20 years building and running a company. But most mayors arrive in office with little experience running complex organizations. They haven’t spent much time, if any, using data to manage performance; attracting and retaining talent; breaking down silos; improving customer service; solving complex problems by developing and implementing innovative solutions – and many other activities essential to success.

In the private sector, executive leadership and management training are the rule rather than the exception. But in the public sector, it essentially didn’t exist. And so in 2017 Bloomberg Philanthropies formed a partnership with Harvard University to bridge the gap. Since then, the program has trained mayors in eight of America’s ten biggest cities and more than 380 mayors worldwide, including in Liverpool and Greater Manchester.

Now, as Europe increasingly turns to its mayors, we are teaming up with the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Hertie School in Berlin to create the first-ever leadership program designed specifically for mayors and top city officials in the UK and across Europe. The inaugural class will include 30 mayors from 17 countries representing a diverse array of cities, from industrial centers and tourism magnets to university hubs and national capitals. The initiative will build their capacity to lead – aligning talent, tools and shared purpose to help them write Europe’s next chapter.

Over the course of the one-year program, which is backed through a $50 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, mayors and their staffs will take part in training inside and outside the classroom, including one-on-one mentoring and coaching sessions. The focus of the sessions will be on strengthening their capacity to empower their teams, build partnerships with communities and businesses, bring new ideas and creativity to challenging problems, share lessons across city and national boundaries and accelerate progress they are already making.

As the world increasingly turns to mayors to deliver results, the stakes are much too high to expect them to go it alone. With the very best in leadership and management training, mayors can redefine what is possible for cities – and their countries – to accomplish. As they do, voters will see the virtue of electing problem-solvers over flamethrowers, with the benefits spreading far and wide. In the theater of politics, as in life, Shakespeare’s words hold true: “Action is eloquence.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
The Clinton curse

Democrats have almost lost hope. Nearly a year after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, the party is rudderless. It opposes Trump, of course, but it can’t afford to oppose Trumpism. Denouncing the President for a short war against Iran’s nuclear program or for negotiating a Gaza ceasefire wouldn’t be smart. Criticizing his tariffs is safer – yet Democrats don’t want to be branded the party of free trade. Likewise, while they’re prepared to condemn the way the President is getting immigration under control, they know it would be suicidal for them to campaign for more immigration.

Even on cultural questions, Democrats are Trump’s prisoners. They remain devoted to the idea that men can be women, and vice versa, if only they want to be, but the public backlash against what that means for women’s sports and their safety in private places has forced Democrats into hypocritically insisting on transgenderism in principle while saying they’re prepared to curb its practical applications.

The party has no policies to sell and fears its own ideologues. What could possibly overcome these debilities?

The answer, say pragmatic Democrats and some Trump-averse Republicans, is simple: the party needs another Bill Clinton, a charismatic leader to move it back to the political middle. Clinton copied Republicans and rebuked progressives whenever he thought it expedient, and by doing so he delivered Democrats from the wilderness in which they had wandered during the 12-year tenure of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

The decoupling of the working class from the Democrats is one of Clinton’s enduring legacies

The 1980s saw Democrats in doldrums not unlike today’s. Then, they were captive of left-wing economic orthodoxies that compelled them to be the party of higher taxes. Even as Reagan revived American confidence in the final phase of the Cold War, his opponents, like Trump’s today, could only carp about his actions. And then, too, Democrats appeared unable to get their coalition’s left wing, epitomized by Jesse Jackson and radical feminists, under control. The trouble with this view of Clinton as his party’s centrist savior is that he was the opposite – Clinton inaugurated today’s Democratic woes by shunting the party to the left. By doing so, he brought an end to 40 years of Democratic control in the House of Representatives. Never in history had a party enjoyed such a long run in national power. Clinton destroyed the most successful political coalition America has ever known, and the Democrats have never recovered. The New Deal coalition that Clinton wrecked was even more successful than a glance at its hold on Congress suggests. Although Democrats had an interrupted run in control of the House from 1955 to 1995, their dominance actually began in 1931 and was only interrupted briefly for two discrete two-year intervals during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. What was fatal about the Clinton years wasn’t just that Democrats lost the House but that, for the first time in 64 years, they couldn’t win it back.

Clinton attacked the left in the 1992 Democratic primaries, but he was no centrist. In his first two years in the White House, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, he signed into law a flurry of progressive legislation expanding government, raising taxes, circumscribing the rights of abortion-clinic protesters, banning firearms deemed “assault weapons” for purely cosmetic reasons and much more. He pushed for homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces – the first major engagement of the culture war that would ultimately lead to same-sex marriage and, subsequently, the Democrats’ transgender quagmire. The result of all this was that Clinton alienated key parts of the New Deal coalition while polarizing many constituencies that had previously been content to be represented by pro-gun or culturally conservative Democrats. The decoupling of the working class from the Democrats is one of Clinton’s enduring legacies.

“A true revolution should be seeking a minimum of 12 years in power,” the New York Times’s Ross Douthat recently wrote. He’s wrong. The last “true revolution” in American politics was the creation of what was effectively a new regime in the 1930s. Democratic presidents – Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman – held power without interruption for 20 years, but again the actual magnitude of Democratic political success was much greater. There was only one Republican president between 1933 and 1968 and that single exception, president Eisenhower, was hardly a Republican at all.

What ended the Democrats’ lock on the White House was the rise of a radical young New Left, which would ultimately bring leaders like Clinton to the fore. The ideology of today’s Democratic party was already hatched, if not fully grown, in the late 1960s. Clinton brought that ideology to power and thereby cost the Democrats the second of the bastions of government they had controlled for decades: Congress. Nor did he succeed in getting another Democrat elected as his presidential successor.

Since the Clinton era, Democrats have typically needed the aid of a crisis to reclaim power from the Republicans: during the Iraq War in 2006, the financial meltdown in 2008, Covid in 2020. Voters have rejected such Clintonite Democrats as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris time and again. There simply is no national constituency for the party whose identity Clinton redefined in the 1990s – a party of ever more radically progressive cultural attitudes and an economic agenda keyed to urban professionals. Combine this disastrous record with the stagnation and depopulation of blue states relative to the booming demographics of red states such as Texas and Florida, and Democrats have cause for despair. Republicans can still lose elections, but Democrats don’t really win them.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
‘Gender-affirming care’ is never justified

Even now, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans just assume that there is a vast and vulnerable cohort of kids who are born “trans” and need so-called “gender-affirming care.” They look at the protests and listen to progressive politicians and assume that there must be at least some evidence that pediatric medical transition helps children in distress.

It would be unthinkable to have put children through all this for nothing, and for American medics to have gone along with it all. But the awful truth is that there is no evidence that allowing children to transition actually works in any meaningful sense. An analysis recently published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy has finally cut through the noise with a simple but devastating tool: a calculator.

And as you read the evidence and absorb its implications, consider also that the European Commission is about to propose new legislation that would allow any European citizen, of any age, to legally change gender without consulting a physician or getting their parents’ permission and support. And under the proposed legislation, any nation that objects would be subject to having all its EU funding cut off.

The paper, by my colleague, Lauren Schwartz, a senior fellow at the non-profit Do No Harm, and M. Lal, uses the medical establishment’s own numbers to check its work. The conclusion is disturbing, suggesting that a medical scandal is unfolding on a scale that has been dangerously underappreciated.

In short, the article shows that, even according to the standards of those who would help children to transition, there is simply no justification for the mass medicalization of healthy children under the guise of “gender-affirming care.”

The harms are significant, including diminished bone density, cardiovascular disease and infertility

The authors’ method is simple. First, they establish a clear baseline for the number of adolescents who meet gender activists’ own “clinical” criteria for gender dysphoria. They do this by synthesizing three major reviews co-authored by ten of the key figures behind the most recent World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards of care – the very guidelines cited by proponents of medical transition. These WPATH-aligned professionals estimate the prevalence of the clinical population to be around 4.6 to 7.5 per 100,000 individuals.

Next, the authors compare these numbers with recent data on how many adolescents are actually being diagnosed and treated. They cite a study from this year in the journal JAMA Pediatrics which found that approximately 100 out of every 100,000 American adolescents received puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones between 2018 and 2022.

The discrepancy between the clinical population and those receiving treatment is staggering – a gap greater than one order of magnitude. According to the field’s own standards, more than 92 percent of kids receiving these interventions fall outside the clinical threshold for severe gender-related distress. Yet these are also vulnerable, confused kids, often struggling with a multitude of behavioral health challenges.

Lisa Littman was among the first researchers to observe such a troubling trend beyond baseline prevalence: a surge of adolescent girls suddenly identifying as transgender despite no earlier signs of gender-related distress.

In 2018, she published a study based on parent reports, introducing the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Rather than sparking thoughtful inquiry within the field, her work was met with intense backlash.

But Littman was on to something. Her early observations pointed to a powerful influence: the role of social contagion and online communities. These platforms often amplify certain narratives, contributing to a surge in self-identification that far exceeds the true clinical population.

Moreover, this troubling trend isn’t just confined to the United States. Britain has seen a similar phenomenon with a rapid rise in diagnoses beyond any prior prediction. Another study from this year found a 50-fold increase in gender dysphoria diagnoses in UK primary care for children and young people between 2011 and 2021.

The Schwartz and Lal analysis provides the chilling answer to what this really means: a profound shift from treating a small, well-defined clinical group to medicalizing a much larger, overwhelmingly non-clinical population. It’s no longer a vague feeling that “too many kids are being medicalized.” It is a specific, quantifiable crisis.

Yet even among the minority of children who do fall within the clinical population, puberty blockers and hormones aren’t the answer. Multiple systematic reviews reveal no reliable evidence of benefit. The harms, however, are significant, including diminished bone density, cardiovascular disease and infertility – to name just a few.

What these struggling kids need is psychosocial support and psychotherapy. In that regard, countries such as England, Finland and Sweden are now leading the way in restricting medicalization and focusing on psychological and psychiatric care, while around them many in the EU double down.

Simply put, subjecting children to dangerous medical interventions in the name of “gender-affirming care” is never justified.

The scale of the problem is no longer a matter of opinion; it’s a number. We now have the data to demand accountability and we must do just that. We must use this new evidence to ensure that we protect vulnerable children by returning to a standard of care that is cautious, ethical and, above all, evidence-based.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025