The Social World

Category: Politics

A meeting with the Tate brothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 23, 2025
We should treat veterans with psychedelics

“Shit starts to get real, real quick,” recalled former US Marine Tyler Flanigan. An Iraqi sniper had just shot out the tires of his truck, and a key member of his team had been killed. “We were like sitting ducks,” he remembers. “There wasn’t a single day in Iraq when I wasn’t shot at or didn’t have something explode next to me,” says his fellow Marine veteran, Nigel McCourry. Combat experience is hard to forget.

Like a Proustian madeleine, life offers daily triggers that throw them back to a world of nerve-jangling journeys down “IED alley,” the flailing feeling of in a conflict and then the horror of having to gather the body parts of your friends and put them into bags. These former US Marines very bravely discussed their difficulties with processing their trauma in the moving documentary short Dead Dog on the Left. It chronicles their journey through the no-man’s-land of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD, which in turn triggered alcoholism and suicidal thoughts, to recovery aided by MDMA-led psychotherapy.

Psychedelic therapy doesn’t simply suppress symptoms. It may help reshape the system generating them

Their stories are not unusual. For the past eight years I have been the patron of a small charity called Supporting Wounded Veterans, which helps veterans who have suffered life-changing injuries. Increasingly though, our work is less to do with physical injury and more to do with mental injury, C-PTSD does not necessarily arise until sometime after the trauma. We are the only UK charity conducting medical research with trials using MDMA-led therapy, first at King’s College London and now in Cambridge.

When I was chief of the general staff, the professional head of the British Army, eight years ago, we recognized that while we had an excellent focus on physical health, we were not doing enough for mental health. So we introduced training for commanders at all levels and developed a mental-first-aid assessment. But most importantly we worked to change the culture. We wanted to make it acceptable for soldiers to talk about mental health and to have the confidence to ask for help, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be seen as a weakness. Recently, I took three weeks off and traveled to a retreat to try to understand the effect that multiple year-long combat tours in Afghanistan have had on my own mental well-being. It was an extraordinary experience to bring my feelings out of their sealed box and to begin to understand the impact of the conflicts. I am fortunate. My issues are entirely manageable – but imagine what it is like for those who suffer with complex PTSD.

The guilt of surviving when others have died. Living in a society that does not want to know what you saw, and seems not to care, leaving you feeling betrayed. Losing your sense of purpose and belonging. And the desperation that comes from not being able to find a treatment that works. It should be alarming for all of us that suicide rates in young veterans are two to four times higher than for the rest of the population. Hence my purpose in writing this article – for there is a treatment that potentially works if only our government would get behind it.

At the risk of sounding “woo-woo,” I am talking about psychedelic therapy. It is not new. Between the 1950s and 1970s, LSD, MDMA and psilocybin were used in psychiatric clinics across Europe and North America to treat alcoholism, trauma and end-of-life anxiety. Tens of thousands of patients received care before prohibition abruptly ended the work. The methods were sub-par by modern standards, but one insight endured: these compounds seemed to activate the mind, not just medicate it. Patients described experiences that were vivid, challenging and often profound, and outcomes improved when those experiences were supported before and after with specialized care.

We now have MDMA-led therapy, currently the most rigorously studied psychedelic intervention for C-PTSD. MDMA doesn’t produce hallucinations. Instead, it reduces activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain where fear-based emotions are processed, allowing patients to revisit trauma without being overwhelmed. Psychedelic therapy doesn’t simply suppress symptoms. It may help reshape the system generating them. Neuroscientists now speak of a “window of plasticity” – a brief period in which the brain becomes more responsive, flexible and open to learning. It’s not alchemy. It’s structured, supervised psychological work.

Phase three trials in the US and earlier studies in Australia, Canada and Israel have shown sustained reductions in symptoms. But sadly, despite the FDA designating MDMA-assisted treatment as a “breakthrough therapy,” there is still no formal approval. Even so, momentum continues. In March, the US Department of Defense awarded $9.8 million in grants for MDMA research, including studies with active-duty troops. Regrettably, the UK is not keeping up. Though MDMA and psilocybin show promise in trials, both remain Schedule 1 substances in Britain, labeled as having “no medical use.” That legal status triggers licensing hurdles, a regulatory burden and huge additional costs.

America is investing in healing her warriors while the UK hesitates. Ministers cite regulation, but the deeper issue is a lack of commitment to collaborative research, to therapeutic innovation and to serious investment in mental health care.

I believe Britain doesn’t need to wait for the US to license this treatment. It should recategorize MDMA for research purposes to enable trials to happen more quickly and at a vastly reduced cost. If these trials are as successful as the ones we have seen so far, then the government and the Medicine and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency need to allow full licensing – and at pace. This is a moral obligation to those who serve our country.

The Byzantine emperor Maurice had it right when he said: “The nation which forgets its defenders will itself be forgotten.” All these years later, his warning still feels painfully relevant.

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

September 23, 2025
The blurred lines between politics and common morality

Some 238 years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Charlie Kirk was a patriot and his blood, shed by an assassin’s bullet, is making Americans take their free-speech liberties seriously once again.

Jefferson wrote his famous line in response to an insurrection – a real, armed one quite unlike the ugly out-of-control protest at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The author of the Declaration of Independence wasn’t defending the rebels who had risen up under the command of Daniel Shays. His letter was instead a warning against overreaction to the rebellion on the part of the national government. Kirk’s assassination also calls for a response that respects the principles for which he risked, and ultimately gave, his life.

Kirk was a target because of his conservative views. Leftists demonized him as a racist, a Nazi and a living, breathing threat to the lives of transgender persons. For years, radical leftists and Trump-loathing liberals have casually labeled their political opponents as fascists or Nazis who threaten “democracy,” without owning up to the implications of such talk. If Hitler really were on the verge of taking power in America, wouldn’t using violence to stop him be not only moral but mandatory? Political rhetoric can be cheap to the point of meaninglessness, but it’s clear many commentators in the mainstream media, to say nothing of radical left activists, intended these characterizations to be taken seriously. Yet they dared not complete their own thoughts, let alone translate them into the logical action.

Kirk’s murderer, who reportedly had a trans lover and carved anti-fascist slogans into his bullets, followed through on the left’s premises. And on the anti-Trump social network Bluesky, his crime was celebrated – or at least Kirk’s wickedness, not the gunman’s, was the major topic of conversation. “It is a tragedy both that charlie kirk lived and that he died,” one even-handed Blueskyer opined. Another, uniting the sexual and pharmaceutical obsessions typical of the crowd, wrote, “In honor of Charlie Kirk who believed God wanted gays to be stoned I think I will have an edible.” Droll, even if it depends on the lie, widespread on Bluesky, that Kirk believed such a thing. A German account with the handle TRG Movies & Entertainment wrote, “Charlie Kirk, the white nationalist, has been killed? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Fuuckin’ hell. Wow. Who, how, and are you ‘sad’ about it? As a German, knowing where this fascist nazi shit is leading: I ain’t.”

Disagreeing with the left, or the right, doesn’t make you a bad person – celebrating naked evil does

Examples can be multiplied endlessly. “Kirk’s death was good. if you can’t agree with that then frankly you’re either a fascist yourself or a fucking dumbass,” wrote an account called “Harlot,” evincing a pathological hatred of capital letters as well as Kirk: “there is no wiggle room here, that man deserved to die.” “Remember this before you condemn ‘political violence,’ he advocated political violence against trans people,” wrote one “Natacha.”

I didn’t have to hunt for those quotes – they were from posts trending under “Charlie Kirk” the day he was murdered.

There were many more restrained comments as well, including from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, who wrote a post beginning, “Violence only begets violence.” Yet the replies from his site’s users included one quoting without comment a message saying, “When you argue that fascists should be defeated through debate what you’re actually suggesting is that vulnerable minorities should have to endlessly argue for their right to exist and that at no point should the debate be considered over and won.”

God forbid a “vulnerable” minority should have to make an argument instead of having someone shot. If you can’t forever end a discussion with bullets, doesn’t that mean the fascists win? Some comments applauding Kirk’s murder or saying he got what he deserved – as if “what goes around comes around” applies to answering words with sniper fire – came from identifiable members of the public, including alarming numbers of teachers, medical professionals and caregivers. And some of those gloating enthusiasts for murder have since been fired. Is that an injustice – an insult to free speech?

Not in the least. What they’re being fired for is not political speech but profoundly bad character. Someone who tells a rape victim he hopes she enjoyed it or who boasts about torturing animals shouldn’t be trusted to teach children or care for the sick. People who exhibit their wicked character by cheering for straightforward murder are declared enemies of the most basic moral standard.

Yet there are overreactions of the kind Jefferson might have feared, including from the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, who unbosomed herself of the belief, incompatible with the First Amendment, that “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” threatening, “we will absolutely target you… if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

Kirk himself would have been a target of the federal government under that standard, not because he was a purveyor of hate but because his enemies, themselves as hateful as their Bluesky testimonies indicate, would have been just as happy to silence him with federal goons under their control as they were to see him killed by a freelancer.

The left, and anti-Trump liberals driven insane by the collapse of their own prestige and norms, have worked assiduously to blur the lines between politics and common morality. Disagreeing with the left, or the right, doesn’t make you a bad person – celebrating naked evil does. The First Amendment protects even that. But employers should not.

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

September 23, 2025
I’m done with default illiberalism

It took me far too long to reach the point where I could vote for Donald Trump confidently. I’d been redpilled multiple times. First in 2015, during Trump’s first campaign and the unhinged reaction to it; then again during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings; and most intensely in 2020 while living in Los Angeles. That city under lockdown was chaos. Churches and AA meetings were shuttered. Protests, looting and arson were tacitly permitted. I watched the collapse of society, a grim spectacle of selective enforcement and eroded trust. The grown-ups, I realized, weren’t in charge. Someone had to clean up the mess.

I could explain away my reluctance to vote for Trump with January 6 or his contesting the 2020 election results. Those events provided convenient excuses. But if I’m honest, the real barrier was deeper – a reflexive, almost primal reaction to shout “but the right…” This knee-jerk impulse to respond to any critique of “the left” with a list of crimes committed by “the right” kept me tethered to an ideology I didn’t really believe in. It was a factory setting, a default liberalism that took years to unravel.

Hollywood doesn’t help. It relentlessly reinforces the idea that conservatives are villains

I wasn’t redpilled in a single moment. It was a slow, humbling process of admitting I wasn’t the “good guy,” that I wasn’t inherently on the moral side of history. Only through conversations with people I respected did I see it clearly: I had a compulsive need to qualify any critique of the left with a jab at the right. It was a cultural tic, a way to signal virtue.

And what’s virtuous about signaling left these days? Their excesses are glaring. Russiagate theories were peddled as fact for years. Race-baiting became a default response to electoral losses, with “white women” scapegoated as the problem.

Commentators such as John McWhorter mused about wishing Trump had been assassinated, with no repercussions. The media didn’t wring their hands over “dangerous rhetoric” when it came from the left. There was no accountability, no boundary they couldn’t cross. For me, the tipping point came at a dinner party shortly after Trump narrowly survived his assassination attempt. A friend, emboldened by too much wine, lamented that the bullet had missed. “It was so close,” she slurred, as if rooting for a sports team. I was stunned – not just by her words, but by her confidence that she could say them in polite company. She spoke as if she were on the right side of history, untouchable in her moral clarity.

After that, the left’s moral asymmetry became impossible for me to ignore. When George Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests, it legitimized any response – no matter how extreme.

Yet when Charlie Kirk was assassinated a few weeks ago, we were told that attempts to call out those celebrating his death were excessive. The left can cheer political violence, but the right can’t even push back without being accused of overreach. This double standard is rooted in a myth: that the left is the “kinder, gentler” side of politics.

But it’s not kindness. It’s weaponized empathy. Within hours of Kirk’s death, social media was flooded with teachers, doctors, pundits, musicians – pillars of civilized society in positions of authority – rejoicing in a man’s murder simply because they disagreed with him.

In truth, the left abandoned its kind streak for good old-fashioned authoritarianism long ago. Under their latest attempt at governing, kids faced sterilization under the banner of “gender-affirming care.” Men exposed themselves in women’s spaces and women were assaulted in prisons by male inmates. Businesses and federal buildings burned during riots enabled by a “defund the police” ethos. Millions of children fell behind during Covid school closures (some never logged back on).

For the left, being misgendered or told “no” are considered “existential threats.” For the right, the threat is literal: political violence and the possibility of being killed for your beliefs.

Hollywood doesn’t help. It relentlessly reinforces the idea that conservatives are villains. Even actors such as Chris Pratt, who seem “red-coded,” face scrutiny for their beliefs. But Kirk’s murder changed the rules. The right is done with the “let it slide” approach. It is no longer willing to absorb aggressive tirades about its supposed evils or to take the high road against a culture that celebrates right-wing deaths. The left calls this shift “cancel culture,” but it’s a false equivalency. Its version of cancellation punishes ordinary people for believing in biological reality, or questioning progressive dogma. It’s about humiliation, de-banking and ruining people’s lives for their thought crimes. The right is simply demanding accountability for political violence.

When Senator Chris Murphy warns that “something might be coming” in response to Kirk’s murder, he does not appear to be condemning the killers; rather, he seems to be scolding the victims for their outrage.

It’s the final evolution of “BUT THE RIGHT…” – a refusal to confront one’s own side, and its radicalization, while chastising the right for daring to fight back.

Most Americans have more in common with Charlie Kirk than with the alleged shooter or the elites making excuses. The everyday American “normie” sees this clearly. One side cheers murder; the other says it’s wrong. The choice isn’t hard.

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

September 23, 2025
A lack of national identity has killed off the Great American Novel

Is there hope for literature in America this century? The forecast looks grim. One walk through the literary fiction section at a bookstore is a testament to the art form’s cultural bankruptcy. Just about every other book on the new release table is a treatise on your racism masquerading as a tale of collective uplift. Fine, if you want to expiate your sins of privilege – but all in all, a snoozefest.

Novels held a central place in America as a vital cultural force; novelists were worshipped as electrifying sages

Same goes for most of the books on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the century so far. The subjects of race, gender and oppression generally dominate. Soap-opera conflicts about victimhood crowd the rankings, each one a reproach against your unspoken crimes: your whiteness, your maleness, your very existence. Narrow and righteous, this is a fiction that cannot be pulled apart from politics. Like the top-ranked sermons of Protestant ministers from the 1800s, the whole lot will slide into irrelevance, unread and forgotten.

The poet Joseph Bottum once described to me what he calls a “cocktail party test” to gauge the cultural significance of a novel. The test is to ask whether you would feel any embarrassment if the smart set at a party brought up a new book and you had to admit you hadn’t read it yet.

With TV shows, this still happens. The hit HBO series The White Lotus even satirizes such conversations, itself being a show everyone wants to share and talk about after an episode airs. Bottum suggested that the last novel to pass this test was Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, published nearly 40 years ago in 1987, a hard-to-believe time when novels still held a central place in America as a vital cultural force and novelists themselves were worshipped as electrifying sages by obsessive fans. The whole country talked about Bonfire. Not just an insular claque of corpses at New York publishing houses and magazines.

Americans simply don’t read so-called serious fiction very much anymore. Particularly men. It is worth asking why.

In a column this summer in the New York Times, David Brooks picked up the question, lamenting the fading glory of the literary novel. He too brings up Wolfe as one of the last great American novelists, along with a host of other big names in a Macy’s Parade of boomer nostalgia. Look there’s Saul Bellow! And Philip Roth and Toni Morrison! See how they elevated our souls! Such passionate and prophetic voices, but now, alas, the parade has been canceled, the crowds dispersed and the children told Santa was never real. They might as well look at their phones.

It is true, Brooks concedes, there are fine novelists out there toiling in the fields of obscurity, but he says they have all failed to capture the whole public’s imagination because they play it too safe and too small. He calls for – begs for – novelists with a grand enough ambition to capture the zeitgeist, to show us who we are – all of us, not just some – and what we could become. Only then might America start reading again.

It’s a rousing thought, for sure, a heady enough cocktail to quicken the pulse of the most indebted English major’s heart. At least for ten minutes before the next student loan payment comes due. But I’m not convinced that the future of literature in America is dim for lack of courage. The rot is much deeper than that. The poor, sad death of the Great American Novel has less to do with the lost virtue of aspiring writers and more to do with the erosion of a unified national identity and the country’s consequent trajectory toward a more fragmented society of different competing cultural tribes.

These divisions in the US are deepening: boomers versus Generations X, Y and Z; urban versus rural; race communists versus conservatives; even regional differences are intensifying, with states such as California and Texas growing further apart in policy and culture. It’s hard to believe even a novelist of the first rank could appeal to all members of these warring factions.

But while it’s true the mainstream literary beast lies belly-up, gasping for its last breath, something fervent is stirring in the cultural underbrush. There may never be a single novel that dominates conversation at cocktail parties across the nation again, but there are little polities of the mind emerging, building their own canons like medieval monks illuminating manuscripts in hidden scriptoria.

Take the TradCaths. This small but spirited tribe is resurrecting G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh – not American authors, sure, but they will form the foundation of a counter-canon that’s booming in sales of reprints and in homeschool curricula, while the secular slop of literary fiction wheezes on life support. In short, the center cannot hold, but the fringes will flourish. And there is one niche with a strong counter current that interests me most.

One of the oldest themes in the western canon is the conflict between greatness and prestige. What might roughly be called the hero versus the king. The very first word of The Iliad is an ancient Greek word for anger, but not just any anger. It is intense and divine and it is the fury of Achilles, the best among all the heroes in the field.

One of the oldest themes in the western canon is the conflict between greatness and prestige; the hero versus the king

And even though the Greeks are at war with the Trojans and have been for years, Achilles isn’t angry about that. He’s angry because an incompetent, corrupt, but legitimate king, his ruler and commander, has taken what doesn’t belong to him. So Achilles shrugs. In a huff he retires from the battle. The central conflict of The Iliad isn’t between the Trojans and the Greeks. It’s between Achilles and Agamemnon: the hero versus the king.

There are two types of hierarchies battling it out in America today: the hierarchies of prestige and the hierarchies of greatness. They have very different cultures. Prestige hierarchies are those institutions that have a long history, that are large, bureaucratic and powerful and that form the establishment – the departments of the Federal government, Wall Street banks, the media, the professions and elite universities.

Hierarchies of greatness, on the other hand, emerge when something is the best at what it does in a competitive landscape. They have a short history, they are small and they are extremely competent. A clear example is SpaceX compared to NASA. One soars; the other is buried in committee meetings and memoranda.

In the hierarchy of prestige, advancement and promotion depend on pleasing superiors. To ascend this pyramid, you must have the right opinions and know the right people. In the hierarchy of greatness, to ascend you must win and solve problems. It’s not about who you know or impress, it’s about what you can do.

The literature of prestige is the literary canon of the pyramid-climbing tournament that has gripped the nation for 50-plus years – that is, the elite college admissions tournament and beyond that, the tournament to enter the professions and civil service.

The character-stripping rules for advancement in this pyramid anesthetize genius. Genuine artistic geniuses do not go to grad school, where conformism, collusion and incrementally becoming a toady are all rewarded. This pyramid molds a nation of diligent functionaries, time servers and careerists who don’t want to rock the boat. The table of new novels at the bookstore, the New York Times list of the 100 best books this century, contain the books you must read to advance within this world.

For the hierarchies of greatness, it isn’t the professor or the critic or the journalist who makes a literary canon, but the builder or artist. Membership is determined by those who create.

Among this crowd, there are books discussed as passionately at Silicon Valley house parties as French poets brawling over aesthetics in a Parisian café: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

Meanwhile, the established, respected, highbrow world of literature, the gatekeepers to the professions and the petty tyrants of the administrative state read their canon on a sinking Titanic.

The future of American fiction is not in New York’s publishing houses, nor in the pages of the New York Times. It’s tribal and alive in the shadows, where stories are written not for prestige but for truth. It will belong to those who win.

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

September 23, 2025
The cultification of math and science

My, how we laughed, nearly 30 years ago, when the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper “liberally salted with non- sense” (in his own words) but that “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” Its title gave away the joke: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise known as science realize verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a landmark new book, called The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 20 scientific scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense. Whereas once a book with this title would have raged at the conservative right pushing creationism and sexism in the teeth of truth, now they are raging at the woke left pushing identity ideology and intersectionality at the expense of reason.

In 2022, Nature magazine, at the pinnacle of the scientific establishment, published an editorial stating that from now on it would refuse or retract papers that “could reasonably be perceived to undermine the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.” The editors went on to reassure readers that they would consult “advocacy groups” before doing this, just as they once had to consult popes before denying that the earth circles the sun. This was an open invitation to activists to censor science they did not like.

Sure, scientists always had their prejudices, ideological biases and blind spots, but almost by definition they regarded those as bad things to be minimized, not good things to be magnified. Here was a manifesto for deliberately injecting bias into science.

As I said, back in the 1990s we laughed off this threat. The structure of DNA, the charge of an electron, the distance to Andromeda – these were neutral facts, not social constructs and always would be. Foucauldian gobbledygook could be ignored as a disorder of the humanities and sociology. Then the ramparts of anthropology were overrun by those who insisted science must come second to cultural hypersensitivity when discussing indigenous peoples. Then much of psychology went the same way: the sensible compromises between nature and nurture that every sane person had accepted were thrown out in favor of the outdated fable of blank-slate social construction.

But surely biology was safe, let alone chemistry and physics? How naive we were! Gender became the new front line. Journals were falling over themselves to declare sex a spectrum and any other view a heresy, despite the fact that all animals divide neatly into a sex with large, immobile gametes and a sex with small, mobile gametes – and there are no other sexes, just some rare develop- mental anomalies. Deviate from this new Lysenkoism by saying there are two sexes and you will be excommunicated.

Richard Dawkins once pointed out innocently in a tweet that a mostly white woman had been pilloried for “identifying as black,” which seemed puzzling given that race is a spectrum in a way that sex is not. Why is it all right for a man to identify as a woman but not for a white person to identify as black? Just for raising the issue, he was retrospectively stripped of his Humanist of the Year award by the American Humanist Association. They accused him of implying “that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity.”

So biology fell, but physics and math? Incredibly, yes, they too are battlefields for this nonsense. In 2023, a physics journal published an article on “observing whiteness in introductory physics, a case study” and a math conference heard a talk on “undergraduate mathematics education as a white cisheteropatriarchal space and opportunities for structural disruptions to advance queer of color justice.” Hilariously, the ideologues have painted themselves into an awkward corner in their attempts to decolonize mathematics. They demand non-western slants on algebra and algorithms, which are words of Arabic origin, while rewriting exam problems to replace adding up grocery bills (which “carry the ideological message that paying for food is natural”) with calculating how many aboriginal people can fit in a tipi, which is patronizing to the point of racism. One right-on mathematician admitted this change was insulting, but only “because indigenous people would not divide themselves in the way stated… relational and spiritual factors would dominate.” Meanwhile, New Zealand now requires schools to teach indigenous Maori “ways of knowing” as equivalent to scientific ones. So creationism is fine if brown people do it?

Many scientists continue to do good work unperturbed by this revolt against critical thinking. But the sheer volume of funding, publishing and attention that is being siphoned off into this pathology represents a massive opportunity cost. Grants are being spent, papers retracted, scientists sanctioned, hiring practices altered and peer-reviews corrupted, while scientists are self-censoring to prevent their cancellation. Four-fifths of students say they self-censor, many more than at the height of McCarthyism.

It is clear that embracing ideology over truth directly led to scientists misleading us during the pandemic. In an open letter published in 2020, more than 1,200 academics argued with a straight face that the mass protests about George Floyd’s death during lockdown were safe, while visiting a dying relative in hospital was not. This helped torpedo the reputation of science. Science has always behaved like a cult to some extent, enforcing dogma and persecuting heretics, but it has grown far worse with wokery. Science as a philosophy is still great, but science as an institution is about as true to its philosophy as the church was under the Borgias, and as ripe for reformation.

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

September 23, 2025
Is Trump right to link autism with Tylenol?

Donald Trump’s apparent suggestion that people could protect themselves against Covid by injecting themselves with bleach marked a low point in his first administration. It provided his critics with evidence that he was an erratic president trying to ride roughshod over scientific evidence as well as common sense. It is easy, therefore, to dismiss the American president’s announcement that government health warnings will henceforth be printed on packets of Tylenol – the brand name for acetaminophen – telling pregnant women to avoid the painkiller for fear it will cause autism in their unborn children as yet another anti-scientific diatribe.

The involvement of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – a long-term vaccine skeptic – adds to the impression that the association between autism and acetaminophen might be a little cooked-up. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lost no time in branding the presidential announcement as “irresponsible.”

But is there any genuine link between autism and the consumption of Tylenol? There is quite a lot of evidence on this and interestingly, it doesn’t entirely dismiss a link, although if there is one, it does not appear to be very strong.

A review of the evidence was published in the journal Environmental Health in August – carried out by a team of scientists from several universities, including Harvard and the University of California. It looked at 46 studies, 27 of which found a link between acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders in children (not just autism but also attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, ADHD). Of the others, nine found a null link and four found a negative association – i.e., suggesting that acetaminophen could actually lower the risk of neurodevelopment disorders. It didn’t classify the remainder of the studies into either of those groups. Pointedly, however, the review suggested that the higher-quality studies were more likely to show a positive association between acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders.

But how big is the link? One of the most comprehensive studies on this subject uses data on 2.5 million Swedish children born between 1995 and 2019. It found that 1.42 percent of children whose mothers had taken acetaminophen during pregnancy went on to develop autism, compared with 1.33 percent of children whose mothers didn’t take the painkiller. There are other things to consider behind this rather weak association – mothers who took acetaminophen were quite likely to have been in worse general health than those who did not, so their acetaminophen use is surely not the only thing going on here.

Yesterday’s announcement is not purely some off-the-cuff move by Trump – it is backed by Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health (whose background is nevertheless in economics rather than medicine). He was one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which called for young people less at risk of Covid to be allowed to get on with their lives during the pandemic.

While evidence for any link between Tylenol and autism is certainly not strong, it is not unreasonable to ask whether pregnant women – and many other people, for that matter – should try to avoid taking Tylenol if they can. Taking medical drugs is often a trade-off between risk and reward, and while the risks in this case might not be great, nor, in many cases, will be the rewards.

A lot of people are taking painkillers far too routinely without considering that pain is there for a reason: it is telling you not to put too much weight on that injured ankle or warning you that there might be some serious problem in your stomach. Kill the pain and you kill the warning with it.

The presentation of the Trump administration’s policy, however, is dreadful. Trump’s assertion that the Amish community don’t have autism because they don’t take painkillers does seem a little dubious, as does RFK Jr.’s claim that there aren’t many 70-year-olds with full-blown autism. The diagnosis of autism has certainly increased dramatically in recent decades but it seems to me to be strongly related to it being a fashionable diagnosis. There are plenty of 70-year-olds living in institutions who were never diagnosed with autism when they were young but who would be now.

September 23, 2025
Jimmy Kimmel is back

Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast has made a lot more news off the air than on it. The latest is that ABC will resume the show Tuesday night and that some 400 Hollywood celebrities have signed a petition supporting their friend. Stop the presses! Today’s celebrities support leftist politics! So does ABC’s corporate parent, Disney, the folks who lost a fortune by remaking Snow White as a progressive wet dream.

It would be a cruel joke to add, “If another 53 celebrity’s sign up to support Kimmel, his audience will double.” Actually, he will get a lot of viewers on his first night back. After that, viewers will remember why they didn’t watch.

The joke about Kimmel’s small audience may be cruel, but it captures two points. One is that Kimmel’s audience, like that of his mainstream peers, is a shriveled replica of Johnny Carson’s huge numbers. The second is that celebrity culture, represented by those 400 signatures, is badly out-of-touch with a broad swath of the American public and clueless about the most important lesson in marketing: don’t insult your audience. When you do that, the audience walks away, as they have from Bud Light beer, Jaguar cars, and Cracker Barrel restaurants.

It’s even dumber to alienate your viewing audience when the media environment is as tough as it is today. With the internet and stream content, the market has grown more and more fragmented. As it has, the profitability of late-night shows has shrunk. Their traditional format has also grown stale. After the host finishes a short monologue, he sits behind a desk and talks with one guest at a time. The guests are familiar faces, fresh from Botox, promoting their latest ventures.

With this reduced viewership and dull format comes reduced profitability. The only winner has been a show with a different format and a different political angle. Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld is funny and snarky, but he never takes himself too seriously. He sits in a circle of chairs, talking with a group of guests, some of them regulars, some new for that episode. The goal, which has been wildly successful, is to draw in younger, more conservative viewers, who already like Fox News, and, according to polling, are shifting from Democrat to Republican.

Gutfeld, unlike Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, is performing on a conservative cable channel, not a mainstream network meant to appeal to all viewpoints across a wide demographic. Kimmel and Colbert seem to have missed the point, turning their mainstream broadcast slots into tendentious political platforms, mimicking MSNBC and CNN just as those cable networks were imploding.

Kimmel and Colbert’s decision to alienate half their potential audience is far different from the older, blander days of late-night talk shows, when the hosts poked gentle fun at both sides. Their goal was to appeal to the Upper Midwest as well as the Upper East Side and to provide calming entertainment to a broad national audience as they eased into bedtime. It’s not rocket science, and they knew it.

No one understood this logic better than Johnny Carson, by-far the most successful late-night host of all time. “Tell me the last time that Jack Benny, Red Skelton, any comedian, used his show to do serious issues. That’s not what I’m there for. Can’t they see that?” he told CBS’ Mike Wallace in 1979. “It’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling.”

Gee, I hope Kimmel and Colbert don’t get that feeling. But, of course, they got it long ago. They chose to become political tribunes, a posture that appeals to some, alienates others, and fits better into a Hollywood party than a bed-time TV slot.

If Hollywood’s reaction to Kimmel’s troubles has been predictable, the reaction from Republican politicians has been more interesting – and surprisingly varied.

They were unified, naturally, in lambasting Kimmel for his malicious and factually incorrect statement that Charlie Kirk was killed by a MAGA supporter. He wasn’t. Kimmel should have known that – or shut up. The assassin was a crazed, left-wing ideologue, living with his transgender lover, and outraged at Kirk’s traditional Christian morality and willingness to debate issues that the assassin deemed beyond debate.

Now that Kimmel understands his misstatement, you might expect an apology. If so, you must be waiting for the Easter Bunny to arrive with your breakfast omelet. (When Kimmel goes back on the air, ABC will almost certainly force him to apologize. Kimmel and his team will negotiate to water it down as much as possible. The network will surely want pre-approval on anything he intends to say. They know Kimmel’s own judgment could land them in even more trouble.)

What’s new and unexpected is not the conservative revulsion at Kimmel’s comments but the pushback against the Trump administration for pressuring ABC and Disney. The leader of that pushback is Sen. Ted Cruz, aided by Rand Paul, and their target is Brendan Carr, the outspoken head of the Federal Communications Commission. Since the FCC controls broadcast licenses for TV and radio stations (not for cable or social media), his threats to reconsider ABC’s licenses pose a serious financial risk for that network and its corporate owner. Ted Cruz likened Carr’s threat to that of a Mafioso boss. He’s right.

The crucial distinction here is between pressure from a government agency and pressure from private citizens, station owners and advertisers. It is perfectly fine for a conservative media company, like Sinclair, to say they will not resume broadcasts of Kimmel’s show. They own the stations, and they can choose what to broadcast, within broad limits. Likewise, it’s perfectly fine for left-wing owners, or those in progressive markets, to say, “Let’s bring Kimmel back now! Our audience wants it.” It’s fine for the Acme Manufacturing Company to announce it will no longer advertise its Wile E. Coyote products on the Kimmel show. Or that they’d love to buy more advertising there.

Why is pressure from the government unacceptable? Because it carries the implicit threat to use the full force of the Executive Branch to harm the target. That’s why it was wrong for the public health agencies under Trump 45 and Biden to pressure social media companies to block alternative views about Covid, hoping to quash dissent.

We now know that the dissenting voices were often more accurate than the government “experts.” But even if the dissents had been mistaken and the CDC experts correct, the pressure from official sources would have been wrong. We are much more likely to find the right answers when we allow a vigorous public debate. We are much less likely to find it when the mailed fist of government suppresses our First Amendment freedoms.

The point here is not that “both sides do it” when they are in power. Sadly, they do. The point is our country and our citizens are best served by free and open debate, not the hidden, suppressive hand of the state. It is best served by letting viewers, advertisers, and media owners make their own decisions, after they’ve heard various voices.

Yes, publicly-licensed airways are subject to a few reasonable restraints. But those restraints shouldn’t be stretched to bind and gag alternative views. We also need a lot more self-restraint from powerful bureaucrats, who are all-too-ready to silence and punish anyone they oppose. When their self-restraint fails, we need the freedom to call out the miscreants in government, just as we need it to call out failed comedians for their malign and ignorant comments.

September 22, 2025
Tyl and error

“DON’T TAKE TYLENOL,” the President advised pregnant women, forcefully, in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon, because his Administration now says that acetaminophen causes childhood autism. Trump said it at least a dozen times. Also, he said, don’t give Tylenol to your children after they get a shot. Speaking of shots, President Trump said, kids shouldn’t get their Hepatitis B vaccine until they’re 12, because Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. In addition, he recommends breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, because that’s a lot of liquid. “It’s a fragile little child and it looks like they’re pumping it into a horse,” he said.

It was a typically eccentric Trump event. The main three speakers were Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz. Trump said that pregnant women should only take Tylenol in an emergency. “If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re gonna have to do,” Trump said. But any attempts to spin this as quackery unfounded in science are going to fall flat.

In fact, the acetaminophen warnings come from a study that the Harvard School of Public Health, hardly a Trump-driven institution, published a month ago. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary also announced a push to give a drug called leucovorin to children with autism. Leucovorin is essentially a vitamin supplement used to address folate deficiency in cancer patients, and studies have found it’s effective in treating autism symptoms, which now affect approximately one in 31 of American children, and one in a dozen boys. That was the essential substance of the press conference, during which Trump showed a lot of sympathy for children with autism and their families. He also said that he has a lot of “fat friends” who take Ozempic. “Let me tell you,” he said. “They don’t look so good.”

But beyond the President’s War On Tylenol, which will clearly grab all the headlines, this press conference signified something much more important. Appearing with Trump were RFK Jr. from HHS, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health, Makary from the FDA, and Dr. Oz, who these days only appears on TV to talk about his work in running the Medicaid program. They spoke in a unified voice about this issue.

RFK said, “we have broken down barriers between agencies, and fast-tracked solutions.” This will be the first in a series of autism announcements that “will be a model to deliver the framework for similar results for other chronic conditions that plague Americans.” Makary said “this is The start of a historic shift in medical culture. A charge to identify root causes. We’re not going to stop until we address the root causes of this suffering. It may be entirely preventable.”

This marks an extraordinary cultural shift. Typically, the FDA, HHS, NIH, and Centers for Disease Control have operated within silos of research and information. Their lack of coordination and communication have led to a massive public-health crisis that formed the basis for the MAHA movement. This is significant way beyond the President issuing the same warning about Tylenol for pregnant women a dozen times in an hour. He’s just the very loud messenger. But the health and medicine branch of his Administration is united with common purpose, and it’s going to yield extremely interesting and highly controversial results.

Quite telling is the fact that the major voice speaking out against the Administration’s Tylenol warnings is Kenvue, the drug’s manufacturer. Oh, and also The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which issued a statement saying that Tylenol is safe for pregnant women. At the event, a reporter brought this up. After Trump was doing calling it a “nasty question,” he said, dismissively, “That’s the establishment. They’re funded by lots of different groups. Maybe they’re right.”
“But I don’t think they are.”

September 22, 2025
Did the Jews kill Charlie Kirk?

Yes, things can always get worse. Within less than a week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a new conspiracy was in town. Despite mounting evidence of the homegrown nature of Tyler Robinson’s radicalism, social media was ablaze with an explanation so perfect, so fitting, so dazzling that only a stooge could possibly deny it. This was no story about terrorism, they say, let alone the online incubation of extremism. This was a story about – who else? – the Jews.

The idea that Israel is responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk continues to clock up millions of views every single day on X, so it’s worthwhile explaining what happened to readers sane enough to avoid social media entirely. By far the most common accusation was that Benjamin Netanyahu himself gave the order to kill Charlie Kirk because he was starting to “turn against Israel,” The evidence provided for this view is predictably slim, and rests mostly on a few short clips in which Charlie Kirk talks to Ben Shapiro and raises some sporadic, though hardly uncommon, questions about the conduct of the Gaza war. It didn’t make things any better when Netanyahu himself went on camera to deny the accusations soon after, doubly strange given the old adage that you should never believe anything until it is officially denied.

The second (and only slightly less ludicrous) theory is that Charlie Kirk was killed so that Ben Shapiro could take the reins of his organization, Turning Point USA. This would allow full consolidation of the organization in the hands of someone who wanted to protect Israel from criticism within the MAGA movement.

Then, another conspiracy theory appeared claiming that Jewish donors were upset with Charlie for his broad stance against US involvement in the Israel-Iran war last June.

Lastly, and least surprisingly, a conspiracy interpreted all of this in light of the Jeffrey Epstein/Mossad cover-up saga which continues to engulf the imagination of a considerable number of Americans today.

Whichever angle you take, it appears that a degree of anti-Semitic conspiratorialism has gone mainstream among large swathes of the American electorate. Why?

Some have said that anti-Semitism, like all forms of racism, simply always exists. Analogously, it is like a “virus” that is liable to suddenly catch and take over people at any random point in history. But this way of viewing things doesn’t quite explain why anti-Semitism happens to catch particular people at particular times, other than by invoking a kind of weakened “social immune system” kind of explanation. Plausible? Somewhat. But completely satisfying? I don’t think so. Even if we carry this idea to its logical conclusion, we’d still need to explain why anti-Semitism has gone mainstream right now – as opposed to, say, ten or twenty years ago.

Another popular alternative explanation would be to blame social media, and Lord knows I have done it. In this telling, some weird mixture of bot activity and engagement farming – particularly from the blatant use of highly emotive and conspiratorial ideas – drive revenue for social-media influencers, particularly on the far ends of the political spectrum. By peddling these wild and extreme theories to millions through the monetization algorithm of X/Twitter, they can (and do) make a lot of money. And even if they do get sued for defamation, these fines can be absorbed and written off as the cost of doing business – much as the marketing departments always have the biggest budget in tech companies. Early reports suggest that this disinformation about Kirk is indeed being pumped into social media by bots, but whether it’s for making money or foreign influence still remains unclear.

Maybe, others have told me, the people that push these “Israel killed Charlie Kirk” conspiracies are just crazy. And it’s a nice idea, and probably not altogether completely incorrect, but crazy is as crazy does – and crazy people are doing extremely well in global politics these days. Without realizing it, we’ve entered a cultural universe so totally fused with the internet and a memeified social media today that bombastic and wild trickster anti-heroes continue to reach the summits of global power. You can never quite write off the sense that crazy performative politics is just a cynical, tongue-in-cheek technique for gaining attention. But attention, when skillfully manipulated, easily turns into political power.

But there’s the last perspective, too, and it’s one which I personally believe to be the most compelling of all. People greatly misunderstand conspiracy theories. Most of us believe that they are, in the words of the critic Frederic Jameson, simply the “poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age.” In other words, conspiracy theories help us make sense of a world which is increasingly fragmented and destabilized by social media, fake news, conflicting narratives and straightforward lies. Rather than try and organize and shift through this incredible complexity of information, most people prefer to just take a black-and-white view of things. They ignore everything else, and are easily prey to simplistic conspiracy theories.

It’s a seductive theory, but it’s not quite the full story. Conspiracy theories, much like the outgrowth of strange cults and mystical religions, do more than just offer us a digestible explanation of the world. They’re not just intellectual. They do something for us socially, too. When new movements break off and found new Churches, secret societies, or even tech startups – they’ll often do so with the rationalization that the older guys were doing it wrongly or immorally. Think of the many Protestant sects that exploded in the 16th century, all of whom disagreed with one another but basically agreed that the Catholics were absolutely and unequivocally wrong. They didn’t split in the name of some new variety of prayer, or view on transubstantiation, or resurrection, or whatever. They broke off and then they came up with the reasons for doing so. New ideologies are always downstream of the desire to break away from the original group. Ideologies are rationalizations, not explanations.

And the same basic process is now happening within the American right. Donald Trump upended a system of neoconservative Republicanism that had been relatively stable for decades. He rode to power renouncing many of the old shibboleths, particularly around foreign intervention, that had once animated serious players on the Washington scene. Now, however, deep and possibly unresolvable cracks are starting to appear in the MAGA movement, particularly (although not by any means entirely) around America’s relationship to Israel. Now is the time of conspiracies not because the loonies have temporarily taken over, as many people earnestly wish to be true, but rather because we’re in the middle of a white-hot battle for ideological control over the Republican party and the essence of American conservatism itself.

Public anti-Semitism is often simply a tool – and a particularly shrewd one, as is often the case in the history of conspiracies about Jews – to hive off support away from previously mainstream leaders and institutions to build rivals that can compete with them. Even some of the most pro-MAGA social media commentators said the conspiracy was dumb. But it’s only dumb if you misunderstand what it is. Tucker Carlson’s final speech at Charlie Kirk’s funeral comparing his death to Christ’s crucifixion by the Jews seems outrageous, which it obviously is. It seems stupid, too, but it’s not. It’s the opening gambit in an ideological battle which will only continue to accelerate the widening gulf between factions within the MAGA movement. It reflects an assertiveness and a growing dominance which, whilst still marginal, is rapidly gaining in strength.

Soon, Donald Trump will finish his second presidency and his successor, almost certainly J.D. Vance, will fight the next election. The fight is on to see whether the MAGA movement will fully institutionalize as mainstream, or fade as a little more than a charismatic ejaculation tied to the personal fortune and celebrity affection for the current president. Anti-Semitism has been loaded in the deck, and the cards are being shuffled. What comes next will almost certainly direct the future of American Jewry, and perhaps even the United States itself.

September 22, 2025