The Social World

Category: Politics

Nihilism is destroying young minds

Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tipping point in our national conversation about mass shootings. This wasn’t a shopping mall or movie theater. It wasn’t a high school. We could imagine this happening at a high school. We had seen that before. But we could not imagine anyone shooting six-year-olds. It was so monstrous that it seemed beyond the realm of possibility.

Since that day, 13 years ago, the killings have continued and their settings have shifted. Earlier this month, a gunman opened fire at a Turning Point USA event, fatally shooting conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. In the past year or so, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow killed a teacher and a fellow student in Madison, Wisconsin, before taking her own life. Solomon Henderson opened fire in a Nashville school cafeteria. Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered healthcare executive Brian Thompson. Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.

These episodes are not identical. What unites them is an atmosphere: not tidy ideology but an appetite for meaning where meaning has been hollowed out.

Two specters haunt our culture, and both conclude that life should be extinguished. The first says life is meaningless. The second says life is suffering. They arrive at the same destination from different directions. The nihilists believe in the void. For them, all human values are illusions, all meaning is projection, all morality is “cope.” Violence becomes their demonstration: proof that nothing matters.

The Columbine killers left behind hours of video explaining this worldview. James Holmes, the Aurora theater shooter, documented his sense of meaninglessness. William Atchison posted for years about nihilism before killing two students in 2017. Their massacres were philosophical proof that caring about anything was absurd.

Before the internet, killing manifestos would have stayed in evidence lockers. Now they circulate endlessly online

The other philosophy comes from pain, not emptiness. Life is not meaningless but unbearable. Adam Lanza, who committed the Sandy Hook massacre argued that culture itself was a disease and schools were its transmission belt. Killing children, in his philosophy, was a mercy: putting an end to life before it could propagate suffering. He spent years developing an anti-natalist framework explaining why human consciousness itself was the error. This is not nihilism but something else entirely: the conviction that existence is fundamentally malignant. Today’s killers inherit one or both philosophies.

Mangione appears to have absorbed years of discourse about the moral emergency of medical bankruptcy and denial of coverage until the healthcare system seemed so cruel that killing an executive felt like justice. Bushnell consumed footage of the destruction in Gaza until self-immolation seemed the only proportionate response to unbearable reality. It now seems plausible that Tyler Robinson watched political polarization escalate until violence appeared to be a logical act of justice against a hateful world. To these young assassins, the system is torture and spectacular action is the only authentic response. Rupnow and Henderson found their way to “764,” a decentralized online network that grooms young people into self-harm and violence. Such networks are like pneumonia attacking someone who already has HIV. They don’t create nihilistic children; they find the ones who are already hollowed out by the media environment, already convinced they have no future – that the world has no future – already oscillating between numbness and panic. The groups are symptoms more than the disease. They could not recruit effectively in a culture that gave young people genuine hope.

Journalists and politicians still default to familiar explanations – guns, video games, mental illness – because those frames are simple and politically serviceable. The left calls for stricter gun control; the right leans on mental-health narratives. But both of those responses miss the crucial layer: the cultural conditions that make both philosophies persuasive.

Earlier mass killers had comprehensible motives: postal workers had grievances, political assassins had targets, even serial killers had pathologies and fixations. But Columbine, in 1999, introduced killing as philosophy. Before the internet, the manifestos that accompany such actions would have stayed in evidence lockers. Now they circulate endlessly online, providing vocabulary for those who already sense the void or the pain, but lack words for it. Each new shooter studies the last, refining the argument.

The internet doesn’t create these philosophies but accelerates their transmission. This is why policy responses that focus only on guns or only on therapy or only on “rooting out” political extremism will fall short; they are necessary but not sufficient. Shutting down grooming networks treats the pneumonia, not the HIV. We must address the underlying condition: the media environment that oscillates between numbness and panic, the economic system that tells the young they have no future, the culture that produces people primed for violence.

About a year ago, I interviewed a young man who had fallen into one of the darkest corners of the internet via the “furry community.” Furries are people who role-play as, draw fan art of and, famously, wear fursuits of anthropomorphic animals. They’re more important to the history of the internet than they’re often given credit for. They were experimenting with identity in online environments long before most people first logged on to social media. The culture of pseudonymous performance, fan-driven art economies and elaborate online communities – now standard features of the internet – were partially pioneered in furry spaces. Most furries are, at worst, eccentrics immersed in a fandom that doesn’t always feel accessible to normal people.

That being said, there is a fringe dark side to the furry subculture and this boy’s involvement led eventually to him watching violent, animal-torture pornography. There aren’t many practical case studies of what falling down an internet rabbit hole looks like, so his experience and the conversation we had matters. It shows how these online communities can potentially mutate and hurt people, and how some of those offshoots can draw people toward obsession, alienation and harm.

It should be a warning to all parents everywhere that this boy wasn’t a troubled or traumatized kid. His parents were inattentive, not criminally neglectful. “My home life was pretty calm,” he told me. “My parents worked a lot. They’d usually be home at maybe five or six. And from there they wouldn’t really, like, interact with me much. I would just be in my room and I would say I was doing homework when really I wouldn’t even start doing homework until ten.”

In seventh grade the boy got a smartphone and at that point, he says, his internet usage got out of control. He’d be online until two or three o’clock in the morning. His parents did notice his internet addiction but they were out of their depth. “They tried to push me to go to club meetings or they’d set up screen-time passwords,” the boy told me, but younger generations are at home online in a way their parents are not. He says he felt like he was always a step ahead of them. They never saw the extreme, violent pornography that the boy ended up addicted to. “If they did discover anything there, they never said anything, which frankly, if that was the case, I don’t think I could forgive them.”

The furry community can be and often is benign, but as the boy says, it can also be a portal to an actual hell. “It was very easy to find people who are into normal furry stuff, and then find people who are specifically into furry drawings of like realistic genitals, and then hyper realistic stuff. And from that point, it’s very easy to find just straight up zoophilia. I feel molested by the internet – that’s how I’d describe it,” he says. “I feel like it touched me someplace, very deeply, like part of my soul was trapped in cyberspace and I’ve been kind of clawing to get it back.”

Violence has become imaginable to people who before might have found solace in work, family or civic life

I do not want to blame the internet. But the internet is like a sort of fairyland – as full of danger as it is enchantment. What we face in such a moment is less a conventional political battle than a spiritual one. This boy’s experience is a perfect case in point. The choice is not between conservative or progressive policies but between frameworks that affirm life and those that render it either meaningless or unbearable. America’s epidemics of despair have combined with technological access to make violence imaginable to people who, in another era, might have found solace in work, family or steady civic life.

If we are to respond honestly, we must recover the vocabulary of meaning-making: institutions which offer identity beyond consumption and outrage; communities that restore durable ties; media that privileges context over immediacy; and education that teaches people how to live, not just how to perform. This will not be quick. It will not be purely legislative. But until we address what makes both “life is meaningless” and “life is unbearable” persuasive philosophies that demand violent manifestation, we will keep mistaking symptoms for causes.

Until we confront that – until we admit that even ordinary-seeming people can be recruited into these philosophies – we will continue to misdiagnose what happened in these classrooms, cafeterias and political spaces. The specters are everywhere now: in the manifesto and in the feed, in the philosophy seminar and in the TikTok video.

These are not anomalies. They are signals that America’s crisis is not only political or technical but spiritual: the routinization of despair, the auditioning for obliteration.

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

September 23, 2025
Is Kash Patel up to the job?

The morning after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, FBI Director Kash Patel stood in a Utah conference room, the state’s Governor Spencer Cox looking appropriately somber behind him, and uttered these words:

“To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you at Valhalla.”

A Hindu speaking to a dead Christian in front of a Mormon governor, none of them soldiers, invoking a mythical heaven for Norse warriors: ain’t that America? Yet beyond the absurd and harmless cognitive dissonance, there is a more serious question: does Kash Patel actually “have the watch?”

If the Kirk assassination really does demark a new Days of Rage, and if President Trump is serious about labeling antifa a terrorist organization, today’s FBI needs to be up to the job. In the Kirk case, they had their suspect within thirty-three hours. As Patel pointed out in testimony to Congress the following week, it took five days to find the Boston bomber and five days to catch Luigi Mangione.

But there were still mistakes leading up to Tyler Robinson’s arrest. On the evening of the assassination, Patel announced on X that “the subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.” The FBI had someone in custody to be certain, but it wasn’t the shooter. Two hours later Patel had to tweet that a 71-year-old man named George Zinn, who later said that he confessed to distract from the actual shooter but also revealed that he had child porn on his phone, had been “released after an interrogation by law enforcement.”

The situation deteriorated before improving. The morning after the shooting, Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino convened agents in Salt Lake City and chewed them out for taking nearly twelve hours to show him a photo of Tyler Robinson. He called their efforts “Mickey Mouse operations,” and, the New York Times said, “it was one of his few utterances without profanity.” By that evening, Patel was offering, profanity-free, a $100,000 reward for information leading to Kirk’s killer’s arrest. Appearing on Fox and Friends the Monday after the assassination, Patel said that the FBI had evidence, including the alleged killer’s messages.

“The suspect wrote a note saying, ‘I have the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it.’ That note was written before the shooting.” Robinson had destroyed the note but the FBI had reconstructed it, “because of our aggressive interview posture.” By Tuesday, we were all reading Robinson’s confession to his lover and roommate online. Patel had his man.

Patel was a controversial FBI pick from the jump. He joined the federal government as a Department of Justice staffer during the Obama administration but left the DOJ to work for Trump loyalist Congressman Devin Nunes. Patel was the primary author of the “Nunes Memo,” which argued, among other things, that the FBI had over-relied on the Steele Dossier in its attempt to prove that Russia had interfered on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election. This proved Patel’s MAGA bona fides and helped win him a seat on the National Security Council. Toward the end of his first term, Trump said that he intended to make Patel the deputy director of the CIA, an action that caused then-director Gina Haspel to threaten to resign.

If the Kirk assassination really does demark a new Days of Rage, and if President Trump is serious about labeling antifa a terrorist organization, today’s FBI needs to be up to the job.

After Trump lost in 2020, Patel wandered a bit in the wilderness, publishing three children’s books and joining the board of the Trump Media & Technology Group. He hosted a streaming show called Kash’s Corner on a Falun Gong-run streaming service and filled in for Steve Bannon on War Room when Bannon went to jail. He also worked as a consultant for a company, based in the Cayman Islands, that operates the e-commerce platform Shein.

Given his typically bizarre Trumpian résumé, a partisanly divided Congress narrowly confirmed Patel in February. Soon afterwards, he announced he would transfer 500 FBI agents to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, which didn’t happen. Then he said he would shift the bureau’s operations to his home in Nevada, which also didn’t happen, and that he would partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship to change the bureau’s fitness test. Trump briefly named Patel the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Patel rarely appeared at the ATF offices and by April someone else had the job.

But all of that was background chatter until the Kirk assassination placed Patel square in the klieg lights. His endlessly meme-able face wasn’t just a comic sideshow anymore.

Even as the investigation into Kirk’s murder continued, Patel headed to DC for congressional hearings into his dismissal of several prominent agents, including, controversially, the senior agent of the Utah field office. Patel played his partisan bulldog role at the hearing, calling California’s Adam Schiff “the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate” and “a political buffoon at best.” New Jersey’s Cory Booker was in full schoolmarm mode.

“Mr. Patel, I think you’re not going to be around long. I think this might be your last oversight hearing,” Booker said. “Donald Trump has shown us in his first term, and in this term, he is not loyal to people like you. He will cut you loose.”

That’s not likely. Trump is proving much more loyal to his appointees in his second regency. Patel may be the most eccentric person to hold his office since the first (and most powerful), J. Edgar Hoover. But with the swift, if somewhat chaotic, capture of Robinson – which was helped along by the suspect’s family – the ninth FBI director delivered a return on Trump’s investment. As long as he stops preemptively tweeting, he might stick around. Discretion is at least half the job.

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

September 23, 2025
Tyler Robinson is not an ambassador of the American left

The Charlie Kirk assassination has triggered a spate of dueling death counts. The usual media suspects on both sides of America’s epic left-right divide have trotted out set lists of the past decade’s politically motivated violence. For once, the faction that chocks up the most fatalities in this warped real-life video game loses – for the competition is over which end of the political spectrum can blame the other end for the frenzied ideological bloodlust we’ve been told for days now characterizes the contemporary United States.

For the left, the starring evidence that the right’s crazies pose the greater threat to the orderly conduct of civic life is January 6. It’s inconvenient, of course, that the only person who died during the 2021 storming of the Capitol was one of the rioters, ditto the only person whose subsequent death directly resulted from that mayhem. Progressive media have padded the law enforcement casualties after the fact with two not necessarily related suicides and a natural death from stroke. Nevertheless, a mob breaking into the legislature to interfere with the constitutional transfer of executive power was (understatement alert) not a good look. Score a major win for the-right-as-the-bigger-baddies.

Tyler Robinson is not representative of his generation, nor is he an ambassador of the American left

Astonishingly, the most convincing counterevidence – suggesting that instead American leftists have been far more berserk than their opponents – never seems to feature in progressive mea culpas. When itemizing recent political violence of both stripes, the PBS NewsHour and the New York Times, for example, conspicuously omitted the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Which went on for months! Which entailed arson, looting and massive destruction of property, the businesses vandalized often owned by minorities, with insurance losses of up to $2 billion – not including uninsured losses – whereas the events of January 6 caused only $1.5 million worth of damage to the Capitol.

Recollections may vary, but the 2020 race riots also killed between 25 and 34 people. You’d think professional journalists would remember a prolonged period during which US political unrest injured over 2,000 police officers, but noooo. Progressive journalists have highlighted the entire hysterical episode and pressed the delete key.

Both January 6 and the BLM riots displayed unique pathologies, and the violence in both involved thousands of people. Yet clear these two ructions away, and what remains as the ironclad proof that American politics have descended to barbarous gladiatorial combat is a mere handful of incidents by lone actors who often had a screw loose: right-wing attacks, such as the bludgeoning of Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the shooting of two Minnesota Democrats; left-wing attacks, such as a shooting at a congressional baseball practice and the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, and two attempts to assassinate Trump. To the left’s deplorables, we can add Tyler Robinson, who is, shall we say, strongly suspected of assassinating Charlie Kirk.

The aftermath of this murder has thrown up numerous matters of consequence. Kirk’s murder could have unpredictable downstream effects, possibly improving Republican prospects in the midterms. I do worry about copycat crimes. We’ve learned that a staggering third of university students endorse violence as a means of restricting bad-say on campus and that only 58 percent of Gen Z believe one should never use violence to suppress offensive speech.

We’re now depressingly up to speed on the callousness and bloodthirstiness of the many left-wingers who’ve relished Kirk’s murder. This same faction celebrated the October 7 attacks. These individuals are savages. That said, I fear we’re in danger of overinterpreting the decision of one psychically lost 22-year-old to shoot a popular activist whose opinions he didn’t share (and of whom it’s tempting to imagine this loser was envious). Out of more than 340 million Americans, the number of young men who inflict their personal problems on political adversaries – and who solve the challenge of what to do with their future by ensuring they don’t have one – is proportionally infinitesimal. Those lists of violent, politically motivated actors on the left and right: they’re not very long. I resist making broad pronouncements about an entire country and the viability of its democracy on the basis of a decade’s worth of disturbed misfits who couldn’t populate an average-sized birthday party.

I obviously know what it’s like to have a column due. To rack your brains over how you can conceivably add value. To have a deadline that coincides with national soul-searching in the wake of an occurrence your fellow journalists identify as a “hinge point,” inspiring the likes of the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan to write: “We are in big trouble.” I know what it’s like to want to get in on the action. It’s tempting, then, to not only chime in, but to up the ante – to extract ever more apocalyptic generalizations from the Big Story, because catastrophizing makes for edgier copy than “simmer down, folks, it’s no big deal.”

I wouldn’t downplay the sorrow this murder provokes in all morally grounded people or the gratuitous heartache it’s occasioned for Kirk’s family, friends, associates and fan base. But I would downplay Tyler Robinson. I may find his “romantic partner” being male-to-female trans worthy of passing note (we can infer, assuming we care, that Tyler is gay), as it’s yet more evidence that trans world and cloud-cuckoo-land heavily intersect. But I don’t believe this sorry son of a bitch necessarily signposts the direction the US is inexorably heading. He’s neither representative of his generation nor, much as I reject its agenda, an ambassador of the American left.

Drawing conclusions about America from this one spiteful sad ass accords the guy way too much power and importance. Don’t reward misguided murderousness by grandly designating a senseless assassination a historical watershed.

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

September 23, 2025
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.

September 23, 2025
The inadequate response of Christian leaders to Charlie Kirk’s death

It has been very heartening to see all the clips online of people saying they are going back to church for the first time in ages – or going for the first time ever – because of Charlie Kirk. They’re picking up Bibles, even leaving the left. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Charlie phenomenon is going global. You should also know that in some of the European media, he is being described as a right-wing extremist and freak (strong implication: who had it coming). Felix Nmecha, a Christian soccer player for a leading German team, got in trouble for posting mild, apolitical support for Charlie.

“Rest in peace with God. Such a sad day,” wrote Nmecha. He later changed that to: “May the Lord assist the Kirk family with special grace at this time. Jesus is the true way to peace and love.” And added: “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. Celebrating the murder of a father of two, a husband and a man who peacefully stood up for his beliefs and values is truly evil and shows how much we need Christ. May God have mercy and open our eyes and hearts, in the name of Jesus.”

This outraged some fans, and has prompted the team to say they are going to be having a talk with Nmecha. And you wonder why Europe is in so much trouble.

On the day of the assassination, the Pope tweeted not about Charlie, truth, or martyrdom, but about migrants

But Nmecha is right. Charlie showed young Christians and young Republicans they were not alone and that they could and should stand up for themselves. He was willing to suffer the scorn of campus haters for the sake of engaging them in public debate. Indeed, he said many times that the alternative to debate is violence. He paid for that conviction with his life. I don’t feel comfortable calling him a Christian martyr, because he was not murdered for his faith per se. But he was absolutely a martyr for free speech, and now we see very many people who were afraid no longer willing to be silent.

I have also heard a lot of people complaining that their churches were packed over the weekend, but their pastors said nothing at all about Charlie’s murder. To be fair, I don’t believe clergy are obligated to preach on current events. But this one? My God, it was news around the world, and had so much to do with faith and courage and the wages of sin. And so many pastors, it appears, blew it. How out of touch with your flock can you be? I am reminded of the Orthodox priest I once met who refused to talk about gender ideology to his congregation, even though parents in it were confused, because he didn’t want to be “political.”

Men of God, sack up! People need to know that church is a place they can go for wisdom and leadership on how to live godly lives in a world that has turned its back on Him. If all you can provide are canned sermons that have little or nothing to do with the lives people live, you are failing.

Gender ideology is a lie, and Tyler Robinson, Charlie’s alleged assassin, was living that lie. He was in a romantic partnership with a man who is thought to be transitioning to female and who is also, it seems, a “furry” (a weird subculture of people who dress up as animals and often sexualise their costumed selves). Robinson and his partner were ex-Mormons, raised in conservative families, who were radicalized by going deep online and living there as if it were reality. I believe that among the things the state should do is to ban all gender transition. Close the clinics. Forbid cross-sex hormones and prosecute doctors who persist. If that is politically untenable, then strictly forbid it to anyone under the age of 30. We must abnormalize this condition again.

We must also abnormalize giving children computers and smartphones. In 2013 Robinson’s mother posted an image that ought to be on the minds of every parent in America. It shows a young Tyler gaming on a computer, with the caption: “Almost forgot Tyler! He can totally avoid us now that he got all of the computer accessories he’s been wanting.”

The American pope had nothing to say about Robinson; no light in the dark for all the other disturbed young Americans living lies online. On the day of the assassination, Pope Leo tweeted not about Charlie, or truth, or martyrdom, but about migrants on the island of Lampedusa. His only mention of Charlie came two days later in a private conversation with the new US ambassador to the Vatican, in which he expressed his condolences and warned that “political differences must never be resolved with violence.” A diplomatic platitude, whispered in private, while the nation chanted in the streets.

Leo has also indicated that his first foreign trip – like his predecessor’s – will be to Lampedusa. If so, it’s a signal that nothing much is going to change in this pontificate.

Would that Leo go to Lyon to comfort the family of the wheelchair-bound Chaldean Catholic who fled his native Iraq to escape ISIS persecution and was slaughtered on a livestream by a machete-wielding Islamist for the crime of preaching the Gospel? Ashur Sarnaya, who was killed the same day as Charlie while live-streaming about Christianity, was martyred by the same sort of person Pope Leo is urging Europe to keep letting in, and whose violent presence is driving the continent to the brink of civil war. Such is the pastoral wisdom of so many Christian leaders. Europe, and all the West, ought to be a haven for Christians fleeing Islamist persecution.

Since Charlie’s assassination we are seeing who people are – and who they are not. We are seeing Good, and we are seeing Evil. We are seeing ourselves, too. The words, or lack of words, from religious leaders say nothing to us, or are even counsels of despair. But the blood of those who have died shouts to us: You must change your life!

Tertullian said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Strictly speaking, Sarnaya is the only true Christian martyr here. But there is not a Christian alive – not a person of conscience anywhere – who cannot read these signs, and choose to live in a different, braver way. Me too. Bob Dylan expressed it well two generations ago:

For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times, they are a-changin’

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

September 23, 2025
How does the American right move on?

At the time, it was audacious. Guy Benson, now a commentator for Fox News and Townhall, recalls being approached by an Illinois teenager who wanted Chicago high schoolers to listen to conservative ideas. He offered the same advice to the gangly 6ft 5in youngster that anyone would suggest to a man with a mind on politics: keep hustling, go to a good school, get a degree and an internship at a think tank. But the precocious Charlie Kirk had different ideas. “He was smart enough to completely reject my advice,” says Benson. Neither of them could have known how that decision, and the Turning Point USA organization Kirk then founded, would go on to change the country.

Instead of pursuing the traditional path, Kirk built something new based on a combination of a natural charisma, a skill for fund-raising and social media and a smiling face of good-natured Midwestern sincerity. He embarked on a relentless campaign of campus debates, parachuting himself behind enemy lines at universities across the country. For eager students long-starved of conservative thought on campus, it was a jolt of inspiration to stand up for their ideas and, if not to win every argument, at least to win over many in the crowd.

Kirk was calling on Americans to get married, to have kids and to return to the church

In environments where silence about beliefs was the key to success and sympathetic professors were few and far between, Kirk offered more than just entertainment value: he became a living symbol for all those who wanted to push back against the dominant ideas of the woke left. It was a crusade with small beginnings, but one that led to events packed with thousands of young people with Charlie at its center. He had that winning “aw-shucks” patriotism. He was ready to take on all comers – and that’s exactly what he was doing on a bright sunny day in Utah when an assassin’s bullet struck him down at the age of just 31.

It’s rare in a time of such constant news and disaggregated focus for an event to become the only story that matters. Kirk’s death became this instantly, on every network, dominating discussion not just in politics but in every corner of American life. Stadiums across the country filled with hundreds of thousands of fans saw moments of silence, prayers and player dedications for the young man. Heartfelt condolences were offered by everyone from Supreme Court justices to Marvel stars, from former presidents to members of Coldplay.

The success of Kirk’s effort was no forgone conclusion. He started out long before presidents were going on comedy podcasts and at the time, the left was riding high on a feeling of permanent social change. Coming out of the Tea Party era, and the cultural dominance of Barack Obama when so many in the Republican cohort wrote off young voters as unwinnable, Kirk’s aspirations for a turning point in American history seemed naive to his critics – even those on the right who hoped for success. A decade later, Kirk and his operation would help return Donald Trump to the White House with stunning levels of support among young men and historic gains among the under-30s. “College and non-college males shifted so significantly in the Republican direction, it can be argued it was by itself the deciding margin in multiple swing states,” pollster Wes Anderson told me. “And TPUSA and Charlie were a massive piece of that rightward movement.”

But Kirk wasn’t just offering arguments to use in class. He was calling on American citizens to get married, to have kids and to return to the church. “What Charlie tapped in to, on the front end, many of us didn’t think that stream existed,” Anderson says. “Yes, he was bringing conservatism to a lot of young people who had never heard of it, but more importantly, we’re talking about a generation that is the least churched ever, the least aware, with no exposure to religion – at a level unseen since modern polling began. But something very strange has happened: as Gen Zers enter the workforce, they are becoming exceedingly angry. In focus group after focus group, they tell us their frustrations, that everything they’ve been taught about how to order their lives by those indoctrinating leftist institutions is not working. Some of them radicalize even further to the left, but others are desperately searching for answers and not just politically, but about life. And to these people, Charlie was a man in the desert handing out cups of water.”

In the context of the American right, Kirk also took on a role that effectively dictated the Overton window of conversation around multiple topics. His support for including gay people in the conservative movement in opposition to some social conservatives was well known, as was the inclusion at TPUSA events of critics of Israel – a decision that became especially controversial as one of his former compatriots, podcaster Candace Owens, engaged in increasingly conspiratorial anti-Semitic rants.

Even as the success of this mission made Kirk an aspirational symbol for the right, he came to symbolize everything the American left hates – his Midwestern pleasantness transformed into a portrait of a smarmy jerk. How much the left hates him wasn’t fully evident until after his death, when social media posts celebrating his demise, users inventing false quotes and tweets mocking his mourning supporters led to hundreds of firings and suspensions, including among prominent media figures such as MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd and the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah.

The outpouring of sympathy for Kirk’s young wife Erika, who gave a passionate on-camera speech mourning her husband, was one side’s natural reaction. The other side spread shockingly callous remarks about Kirk, along with an aggressive attempt to spin the alleged assassin as having impossibly vague motivations, or being himself a right-wing extremist. There was a desperation in this false depiction, embraced en masse by CNN hosts and the largest leftist Substackers. When the alleged killer’s text messages were released, his motivations became hard to deny. He was a smart young student from a conservative religious family whose reported relationship with his transgender roommate seemingly pushed him toward regarding Kirk as a fascist, an advocate for hate, just as the left-wing media had told him over and over again. “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” Tyler Robinson texted his partner. Yet an ABC News reporter said his messages were “so fulsome, so robust… so touching,” praising him for “speaking so lovingly about his partner.”

Charlie was unafraid to go anywhere and make the case for what he believed

Author Walter Kirn weighed in with his prediction on X about the next steps in the left’s narrative: “How this all started is not how it will end. A story that began with a clear traditional moral shape, an innocent victim, a vile perpetrator, will be transformed using secondary characters, new revelations and other dramatic elements into its very opposite – a story of forbidden love, persecution by religious bigots, a poignantly rebellious heartfelt protest against a World that Doesn’t Understand.”

But for a generation which, as FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff has found, consistently supports more censorship and less free speech, including the banning of extreme views on campuses, Kirk’s death could instill the notion of the assassin’s veto. Conservatives are emphatic about the need to take up Kirk’s mission, but do college officials really want the possibility of copycat crimes on their quads?

From the 2017 attempt to kill a group of congressional Republicans at softball practice, the steady increase of politically motivated violence in America has largely emerged from the radical left. The underlying motivation to consider such violence is clear: a recent YouGov poll found that 77 percent of Republicans believe it is always unacceptable to feel joy at the death of someone they oppose politically, while just 38 percent of Democrats feel the same. If you’ve been told over and over again that your opponents are Nazis, fascists and white supremacists who are literally killing people and who represent an existential threat to the future of the nation, why would you allow them to speak anywhere, let alone to impressionable college kids? Such people should be hounded from polite society – and worse. And if the end of your political effort is a bullet with “hey fascist, CATCH” written on its casing? Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been a fascist.

As for many Christian conservatives such as Texas Congressman Chip Roy, the loss of Kirk is about more than a sad moment in American politics – it’s a time to reflect on what matters most. “The loss of Charlie is profound because it’s not just about the organization or who’s carrying it forward, but about an individual uniquely gifted by the Lord, who combined principle and courage with a level of goodness and kindness,” he told me.

“There’s a new generation that is growing out of TPUSA, new people not yet known to us, who can reignite the American spirit and carry it forward. If they can do that, there is hope for not just the nation, but for a real Christian revival when people are hungry for it. Charlie was unafraid to go anywhere and make the case for what he believed. Not being dissuaded by this moment is key – we have to encourage and be encouraged by the people who were encouraged by him,” Roy said. For the American right, that could be the difference between the revival they hope for and the revolution Charlie Kirk feared.

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

September 23, 2025
Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk have exposed the media’s depravity

“Clarifying.” It seems almost obscene to say that the murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk were “clarifying.” But the huge and still-exploding response to those savage events shows that the mournful synergy of murder can be an occasion for illumination as well as for grief.

To say that something is “illuminating” is not necessarily to say that it is pleasant.

The media yearned for a pro-Trump, heterosexual, white male killer of Kirk. One out of three was a disappointment

A picture is worth a thousand words. Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine, was murdered on a commuter train in North Carolina on August 22. The attack went mostly unreported until early September. Then video footage of the incident emerged. That changed everything. The suspect in Zarutska’s case is Decarlos Brown Jr., a deranged black man who had been arrested at least 14 times. He was free on cashless bail the night he stood up behind Zarutska and stabbed her to death with a pocketknife. “I got that white girl,” he appears to mutter as he moves through the train, his knife dripping blood. But that gruesome clip was superseded by the still of Zarutska looking up in terror at Brown from her seat.

We were not supposed to notice – or at least, we were not supposed to comment on – the fact that Zarutska’s suspected murderer was black. That was irrelevant, we were told. To suggest otherwise is racist. Is it?

A picture is worth a thousand words. A few days after images of Zarutska’s murder began circulating, the popular conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck and killed at a campus rally in Utah. He was 31. The image of Kirk knocked sideways, clutching his neck in pain made the world hold its breath. It took a little more than a day for the police to discover the identity of Kirk’s suspected assassin. He was a 22-year-white man called Tyler Robinson. The fact that he was white was not only relevant, we were told, it was cause for celebration. To suggest otherwise is racist. Is it?

The initial jubilation over Robinson’s race was at first compounded by the fact that his parents were Republican Trump supporters. The jubilation was short-lived. Despite his conventional upbringing, Robinson turns out to have been marinated in leftist ideology. He said Kirk was “spreading hate.” So, it appears, he decided to shoot him.

Robinson also appears to have had a complicated private life involving a transgender “roommate.” This was not what the media wanted to hear. They yearned for a pro-Trump, heterosexual, white male killer. One out of three was a serious disappointment.

Those pictures of Zarutska and Kirk represent a very large problem for the left. On the one hand, they are rallying points for a previously cowed current of normality. On the other, they are a revelation of a hitherto unnameable depravity.

The commentator Glenn Reynolds recently wrote an essay on his Substack about “preference cascades,” those “tipping points” in which people suddenly rise up and give voice to opinions they had previously suppressed. As Reynolds notes, usually preference cascades move in one direction. But the murder of Charlie Kirk – to which I would add the murder of Iryna Zarutska –revealed two opposing cascades.

The accepted media narrative was that Charlie Kirk was a “far-right” fringe figure. But his murder allowed millions of people to realize that Kirk’s ideas were also their ideas. They were mainstream ideas. Not only were those millions outraged by Kirk’s assassination, they were also free to celebrate his teaching. At the same time, many on the left greeted the murder of Kirk with a snarling ecstasy of hatred. They were glad Kirk was murdered. Some hoped his wife and children would be, too. Others provided lists of people who should share his fate. As Reynolds observed, “These aren’t just a few wackos. These are large numbers of people in professional and managerial jobs… who genuinely believe that holding ideas they don’t like should carry the death penalty.”

Which brings me to Plato. In Book II of The Republic, Socrates says that one thing no one can abide is “deception in the soul about realities.” Ordinary lies are one thing. People tell them all the time. But “everyone fears” the “true lie” that would disconnect one from the way things really are.

The commentator Scott Adams makes a related point when he talks about the people who are being fired or ostracized for saying hateful things about Kirk. The noteworthy thing, Adams says, is that they are surprised at the critical reaction to their vituperation against Kirk. They thought that the world at large would agree with them that Kirk, Donald Trump and their kith were fascists, Nazis, etc. They are shocked that this is not the case. They have been living in a media-nourished bubble in which Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler. They are, says Adams, “hypnotized Hitlerians.” They believe – because they have been assiduously instructed to believe – that America has been taken over by a Hitler-like figure. So in one sense, Adams notes, they are victims. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of Hitler? But the Hitlerians have been deceived in their souls about the truth. This does not mean they are not responsible for fomenting hate, only that their behavior can be explained.

The silver lining is that Kirk’s assassination, like Zarutska’s murder, has punctured that bubble. The disabused lineaments of common sense are everywhere taking shape again. Perhaps it is another instance of the somber economy, the paradoxical gift, of sacrifice.

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

September 23, 2025
Who’s running China?

Xi Jinping effectively vanished in July and the first half of August. Some China watchers speculated that his unexplained absence was a sign he was losing his grip on power. But he has since reappeared and been very visible again. At the end of the month, he visited Tibet, then indulged in a high-profile, backslapping meeting with Vladimir Putin and the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Tianjin. He capped off his busy two weeks with the September 3 military parade in Beijing and a second meeting with his star guest Putin, this time accompanied by Kim Jong-un.

So, a great triumph for the neo-Maoist leader and the new Axis of Evil? Not so fast. The lessons to draw from these three events are a sight more nuanced. Here are five take-aways from Xi’s last few weeks.

Perhaps US intelligence has an idea about who is increasingly the real power behind the throne in Beijing

First, Xi’s visit to Tibet was peculiar. It lasted just 24 hours. He inspected People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops in Lhasa on August 21, the 60th anniversary of Tibet’s founding as an autonomous state. He went home the next day. On his last visit in 2021 he stayed for four days. Even more curious was his absence from a visit to the biggest infrastructure project of his regime: the $165 billion Yarlung Tsangpo dam, now under construction, which will be the largest dam in the world. These kinds of projects are not only economically significant but provide plenty of opportunity for Xi’s political and military supporters to sing his praises.

Normally a visit to a project of this importance would be a must for a general secretary. Instead, the visit was made by Xi’s greatest political enemy, Hu Chunhua. Hu is the deposed reformist “crown prince” who was once seen as a potential next general secretary of the Chinese Communist party, until he was thrown off the politburo’s standing committee by Xi in 2022.

Yet three years after his humiliating demotion, Hu has made a surprise reappearance at the front line of Chinese politics. The PLA Daily even led with his name on its front page. After his time in the wilderness, is Hu back on the “crown prince” track? Maybe.

Second, the Shanghai meeting between Xi, Putin and Modi was not all it was cracked up to be. Western media seemed taken with the idea that India is now in alliance with China and Russia. Nothing could be further from the truth. Modi is an alpha-male ultranationalist (not unlike Donald Trump) and he is fixed on the idea that India is the emerging dominant world power. He could well be correct. Based on current projections, India, which will have double China’s population by the end of the century, will become a bigger economy than either China or the US.

For Modi, the meeting could be seen as a middle finger to Trump’s tariff threat if India does not stop buying oil from Russia. But it does not mean India is rolling over to China. As I wrote in The Spectator last year, whereas Russia needs “a big-brother China relationship, India sees itself as the equal of China. A subservient role would not work.”

When asked whether India sided with the West or with Russia, the external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has said: “I think we should choose a side, and that’s our side.”

Noticeably, Modi did not hang around for Xi’s military parade early this month. Instead, he flew to Japan, a country with which India conducts joint naval exercises aimed at the naval containment of China. In Tokyo, he signed a deal to use Japanese, not Chinese, high-speed trains.

Third, there was a long delay in announcing who was going to be the parade marshal on September 3. Usually, it is a job done by a full general and head of the Central Theater Command, whose job it is to defend (or control) Beijing. This time the role was given to a junior lieutenant general. The rumor is that Zhang Youxia, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and the general who is supposedly leading the move against Xi behind the scenes, has taken personal control of the Central Theater Command. In a demonstration of strength, Zhang moved the 82nd Group Army – the main PLA unit that put down the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 – into central Beijing before the parade.

Placements at the parade also seemed to hint at shifts in power. General Zhang was on the front row with the politburo standing committee members. Even more intriguingly, state television gave a long camera pan on the arrival of Wang Yang, a former standing committee member once discarded by Xi, who is now tipped as a possible next CCP general secretary or premier. Chinese TV is always up to date on who politically is in or out.

Fourth, although Chinese and western media bigged up the number of foreign dignitaries (26) who attended the military parade, the numbers were down from the 44 who attended in 2015. Ten years ago, attendees included Tony Blair and the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. No such grandees this time. Far from China being stronger, as many in the West have concluded, it is more convincingly arguable that China is more isolated now than at any time since the 1980s.

Fifth, the September 3 celebrations also renewed speculation about Xi’s health. In Tibet he looked ponderous and unsteady on his feet. Likewise at the parade. In addition, comments were made about his puffy and reddish complexion. Some have speculated that this is characteristic of liver disease. It is a diagnosis compatible with his reputation as a heavy drinker.

But the most revealing takeaway of all from the last month comes from America, not China. According to reports, Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, has in recent weeks been trying to set up a telephone call with General Zhang. Why would Hegseth call for a meeting with the vice chairman of the CMC rather than with his political counterpart, the defense minister Dong Jun? Perhaps US intelligence has an idea about who is increasingly the real power behind the throne in Beijing.

September 23, 2025
A dangerous era of nuclear weapons is upon us

The world is moving into a more dangerous age. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, last year set a grim record: the highest number of state-based armed conflicts in more than seven decades. At the same time, we are seeing a fundamental realignment of global geopolitics – made clear from the recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the “Victory Day” parade held in Beijing shortly afterwards. There, the leaders of what many in the West regard as an emerging new world order stood shoulder to shoulder as Chinese military hardware was put on display to mark 80 years since the end of World War Two.

That anniversary also meant the commemoration last month of the only two occasions where atomic bombs have been used. Their detonation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so horrific that they played an important role in the fragile balance that characterized the Cold War. Fear of nuclear war scarred generations, with a well-grounded anxiety that the use of a single warhead might result in a retaliation so severe that military strategists came to talk of the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction.”

What was unimaginable a decade ago is now seriously discussed in newspapers and research institutes

Now, thoughts are turning in many quarters to whether it’s time for a new chapter in the bleak history of nuclear weapons proliferation. Lessons from Ukraine and the Middle East have shown the use of force can pay handsome dividends. The sense that things have changed has become mainstream even in the US, which has played the role of guarantor of the rules-based system since 1945. As Marco Rubio put it earlier this year: “The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us.”

Not surprisingly, then, in some parts of the world the US is thought to be using coercion to reshape the world in its favor through the application of tariffs as economic punishments. But the threat of military force, too, has been a signature of Donald Trump’s year in office. Many take the President’s comments about the possible annexation of the Panama Canal to Canada with a grain of salt; but many do not. In March Vice-President Vance stated that “the President said we have to have Greenland… We cannot just ignore this place. We cannot just ignore the President’s desires.” The new world order, in other words, depends on the whims of a single individual, whose wishes apparently cannot be ignored.

All of this – made worse by worries about economic challenges and large-scale migration – has spurred a set of discussions in many countries about how to prepare for an age of fracture, competition and new rivalries. Some of these discussions have been fueled by technological leaps, including automation, drones, AI and robotics, which will radically lower the cost of war, making military confrontation more thinkable.

In a world of multiplied pressures and fragmented power, it is chilling – but perhaps not unexpected – to find voices calling for the development of nuclear-weapons programs to provide a new line of defense against possible state-on-state violence.

Such conversations have been fundamental to Iran for several decades – one reason for the dramatic events of the “Twelve-Day War” in June, when Israeli jets targeted nuclear facilities, as well as some of the most senior Iranian scientists working on enrichment and delivery systems.

It is discussions in other countries, however, that have been particularly striking. Take Turkey. The country has long been a key member of NATO, with B61 nuclear bombs held at the airbase at Incirlik a vital part of western defense capabilities in the time of the Soviet Union, as well as today. For decades, Ankara kept its own ambitions firmly in the realm of a civilian nuclear program. This summer, though, more commentators have been arguing that not only does Turkey possess both the scientific base and natural resources to pursue enrichment, but that only an indigenously designed and manufactured bomb would truly constitute “mutlak caydirıcilik” (absolute deterrence).

For one thing, nuclear self-sufficiency would be an alternative to having to rely on NATO. Much has also been made about the fact that Israel – Turkey’s primary rival in Syria and beyond – has an undeclared arsenal and acts unilaterally as a result. The recent strike on the Qatari capital of Doha, targeting the remains of Hamas’s leadership, was a stark display of Israel’s capabilities, which emboldened it to carry out what the Emir of Qatar called a “reckless criminal act” and “a flagrant violation of international law.” To many in the region, the support given to Israel by the US is significant, but its nuclear capabilities provide it with its ultimate layer of protection.

Even Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, noted that his country’s ability to restrain Israel is compromised by the fact that Spain does not have aircraft carriers, “large oil reserves,” or nuclear bombs. By this he meant that Spain has a limited capacity to influence global affairs. “That doesn’t mean we won’t stop trying,” he added.

The point has been made many times in the Turkish press over recent weeks that Iran was vulnerable to Israeli attacks because of the “cifte standart” (double standard) by which Israel is allowed nuclear arms while Iran is punished for enrichment. As one commentator put it, when small or medium-sized states are forced to ask what genuinely prevents attacks, the answer is increasingly obvious: nuclear deterrence.

Public opinion has started to move in the direction of support for Turkey acquiring nuclear weapons – just as it has elsewhere. In Poland, on another part of NATO’s eastern frontier, calls for the country to host nuclear weapons have grown, while in some quarters the question has begun to be asked whether the country needs its own deterrent. One catalyst for this has been the war in Ukraine; another was Moscow’s 2023 announcement that it would station nuclear warheads in Belarus.

The recent incursion of Russian drones into Polish airspace, in what Prime Minister Donald Tusk made clear was not a mistake, will only increase demands to boost Polish defense readiness – not least because some senior figures in Russia have proposed using a nuclear strike to deter western support for Ukraine. The risks, wrote the Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov last year, are low: if Russia used a device against Poznań, the US would not dare to retaliate. Doing so would risk sacrificing Boston for a Polish city and only a “madman,” Karaganov suggested, would consider doing that.

And then there’s Trump’s unpredictability and perceived hostility toward Europe. This month, Pentagon officials informed European diplomats that the US was no longer willing to fund programs to train and equip militaries in Eastern Europe, creating a hole in defense expenditure worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That is a problem, but just as important is the messaging that Europeans are on their own.

This has not been lost on the Poles. Former president Andrzej Duda has declared that Warsaw is indeed ready to join NATO’s nuclear-sharing program and to host US weapons – though some fear that Washington’s retreat might make that a pipe dream.

According to leaks earlier this month from the forthcoming National Defense Strategy, the new consensus in the Trump administration is to disentangle the US from foreign commitments and to prioritize places closer to home – such as Central America and the Caribbean – rather than focus on China, Russia, or other faraway places. Inevitably, that leaves Europeans feeling exposed, especially those on its eastern flank. It’s also a reason why even Germany, a country that has prided itself on a moral as well as military abstinence, has seen a growing debate about how best to counter the threat posed by Putin’s Russia.

Even before Trump’s re-election last year, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published essays debating whether Germany should consider an independent deterrent or support a Franco-British umbrella. Other newspapers have since followed suit, asking if Europe must not only learn to “love the bomb,” but must develop one itself in the face of current US foreign policy. Leading think tanks have started to turn out papers urging deeper nuclear dialogue inside Europe – including around developing weapons and delivery systems. What was unimaginable a decade ago is now seriously discussed in mainstream newspapers and research institutes.

Even in Japan, the only country to have atomic bombs used against it, public sentiment has been changing

Similar questions are also being asked across Asia, with debates driven by proximity to threats – perceived or otherwise. South Korea lives in a nuclear neighborhood that has become increasingly precarious. North Korea is thought to possess as many as 50 nuclear warheads, and enough fissile material to make dozens more. Its deepening partnership with Russia has seen its men and weapons reinforce the front lines in the Ukraine war, while advanced technologies, including missile systems, have flowed in the other direction. North Korea is not just a problem for Washington; it’s a permanent feature of Seoul’s security environment.

Against this backdrop, South Korean public opinion has swung heavily toward nuclear options. Polling by the Asan Institute – a Seoul-based think tank – shows more than three-quarters of citizens favoring either an independent bomb or the redeployment of US tactical weapons, which were removed at the end of the Cold War as part of the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Even in Japan, the only country in history to have atomic bombs used against its people, public sentiment has been changing. Tokyo has been careful to develop advanced fuel-cycle technology and large plutonium stocks. So far, calls for a domestic nuclear weapons program have been muted – at least in public. Behind closed doors, however, some senior figures admit that exposure to risk is rising in a rapidly changing world. Having allies in North America and Europe is all well and good, but with competition in the South China Sea more likely to increase than to diminish, anticipating problems has become increasingly important – one reason why Japan’s defense budget has risen for 13 years in a row, with spending up almost 10 per cent this year alone.

Another, closely connected, reason is the buildup of Chinese hardware. In 2024, for example, a single shipbuilder in China produced more tonnage than the US has done since 1945. The rate of expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal has been breathtaking as well, with around 100 warheads estimated to have been added since 2023. In ten years, some reckon that China’s arsenal could almost triple – putting it at parity with the US and Russia in terms of the number of its devices ready for use at short notice.

As in Europe, it has dawned on politicians in Asia that decades of over-dependence on US security – and US taxpayers – are coming to an end, leaving a set of existential questions on how to invest in defense and how to do so quickly. Japan remains committed to non-nuclear principles, but talk of nuclear options is no longer unthinkable. Taken together, these cases underscore the prospect of the erosion of the old nuclear order and prompt fears of a new era of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Iran has been on the edge of being nuclear ready and is thought to be more or less nuclear capable. In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been explicit, saying that while “we are concerned [about] any country getting a nuclear weapon,” if Iran did develop a weapon “we will have to get one.”

The world is heading into a decade of uncertainty. If more states do cross the nuclear threshold, they will have to develop not only the weapons themselves, but also the doctrines to guide their possible use. History shows that the process of drafting those doctrines can itself be destabilizing, as rivals attempt to divine intentions and try to work out how to respond, in theory and in practice. It remains uncertain, too, how the US or China, both of which have consistently voiced opposition to further proliferation, would react if partners or adversaries seek to join the nuclear club. What is certain is that every new entrant adds complexity to an already fragile system.

These risks are not abstract. Confrontation between nuclear-armed states carries the prospect of catastrophe on a global scale. The world has come close before, whether during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, or this year in South Asia, where tensions between India and Pakistan were on the brink of escalation.

Each of these near-misses underlines the same truth: nuclear weapons are not just the last line of defense but also the last line of existence. As more states contemplate acquiring them, the space for miscalculation grows ever wider – and the margin for survival ever thinner.

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

September 23, 2025
Beware the restless, shifty liars

I have only been to Alexandria once, some years ago, when Hosni Mubarak was still in power, but it struck me as a sad city. Of course the library was not the library. The lighthouse was not the lighthouse. The city was not the city. I looked around for the remnants of the Greeks who had made it their own, but there seemed little left of them.

Alexandria was on my mind again this week while reading a new biography of the city’s most famous modern poet, Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933). He was part of that world which migrated across the Mediterranean. Born in Alexandria, Cavafy and his family spent time in Liverpool before moving back to Egypt, fleeing to Constantinople, before returning to the already fading city. His social circles included the sort of Greek families that had fled Smyrna, Chios and other massacres committed by the Turks.

As the family trading business declined, Constantine, his siblings and finally their children lived within ever more slender means. But it was a letter from Cavafy to his most important non-Greek literary friend that struck me most. The poet and E.M. Forster became friends in the 1910s when the English writer was in Alexandria. Forster did more than anyone else to bring Cavafy’s work out to a non-Greek-speaking audience. One letter from Cavafy to Forster seems particularly notable. He wrote: “Never forget about the Greeks that we are bankrupt. That is the difference between us and the ancient Greeks and, my dear Forster, between us and yourselves. Pray, my dear Forster, that you – you English with your capacity for adventure – never lose your capital, otherwise you will resemble us, restless, shifty liars.”

American politicians have a certain boldness in their financial aspirations. Pelosi has made hundreds of millions

I suppose Cavafy’s warning brought to mind, among other things, the UK’s former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, specifically the issue over her unpaid £40,000 in property taxes on a second home. But it also brought wafts of those other great scandals of recent public life, such as the Scottish National party’s Nicola Sturgeon and her husband having to answer questions a couple of years back about the use of party funds to purchase a luxury camper van worth a six-figure sum. American politicians, at least, have a certain boldness in their financial aspirations. Nancy Pelosi, for instance, has managed to acquire a wealth running into hundreds of millions during her time in office. Her investments have consistently outperformed those of even the canniest hedge funds. But Pelosi has never faced any special censure over this. Whatever the rights or wrongs of her dealings, there is a grandiosity among US lawmakers in their search for wealth.

Britain’s politicians seem to fit into a different category, and I wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with what Cavafy was warning Forster about. According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK had to borrow £60 billion in the financial year to July – almost £7 billion more than the same time last year – and spent £41 billion to service its debt. Like most fiscal conservatives, I am slightly amazed at the financial and moral presumptions that lie behind this. Is there something we Britons are doing with our money as a nation that is so tremendous that it makes it worth running up this kind of debt? Is there a cause we are financing so considerable that it is decent to pass the bill on to the next generations?

It is no better in France. Their government may be less stable than our own, but they have all the same problems. France is also in a debt crisis. And the French parliament, like the British parliament, remains resolutely opposed to doing the things a responsible country would do to address it, such as cutting the astronomical spending on every arm of an increasingly corrupted and incompetent welfare state.

In France, the right, as much as the left, is given to promising an unending money-spigot to voters. In fact, right-wing parties are in some ways worse, cynically recognizing that one way to achieve success at the ballot box is to tack right on identity but left on economics. Yet it is not as though Europe’s politicians don’t realize the realities Britain faces. It is 13 years since Angela Merkel said something true to London’s Financial Times: “If Europe today accounts for just over 7 percent of the world’s population, produces around 25 percent of global GDP and has to finance 50 percent of global social spending, then it’s obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life.” Many people nodded sagely, but in the years that followed even Merkel made sure all those figures went in the wrong direction.

Since 2012 we have vastly increased the numbers who have come here to the UK, Europe’s share of global GDP has gone down some 10 percentage points and we have hiked our welfare spending to such a sum that we now even extend the state’s munificence to people who have broken into our countries and never contributed anything to them. Whether people in Britain or Europe have actually spent the past 13 years working hard to maintain our way of life is a matter of opinion.

I wanted to pull these threads together to say this: it is clear that we in Britain and Europe are indeed losing our capital. In part because we do seem to have lost our capacity for adventure – content instead to eke out what money we can in whatever time there is, with ever-lower aspirations for the future. It could be turned around, of course, but not without a Herculean desire to do so and a sincere recognition of the point we are other-wise heading toward.

What is that point? I would say it is a time when our cities will also not be our cities. And when we too have a preponderance – not least in our political life – of the type of people that the poet warned about: restless, shifty liars.

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

September 23, 2025