AI is the next big psyop after covid — building our digital jailer? By Edward Dowd.

Be very afraid, they are telling us:

On Tuesday … a young man by the name of Jacob Coxon put out a post on X…his first post ever and it went mega viral. He is a former employee of both Anthropic and OpenAI and he warned about the dangers of AI.

 

 

Within 24 hours Jacob‘s X post had received 123 million views 650,000 likes 190,000 followers. Even Elon weighed in and said “I don’t think this has ever happened for a post from a new account with almost no prior activity.“

Immediately mainstream media hopped on board to add to the virality of the post. The Wall Street Journal within a few hours had already interviewed Jacob and mainstream media piled on. Both sides of the house then piled on (mostly Democrats) with X post quotes calling immediately to ask for regulations and government interventions.

Ed calls bullshit:

I believe this is a well-orchestrated psyop to move the needle and change minds. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “psyop”:

“A military operation usually aimed at influencing the enemy’s state of mind through noncombative means… also: someone or something used by the government to influence the population’s opinions and attitudes.”

I am not saying Jacob Coxon is a government asset. I am saying the last 72 hours look less like a whistleblower and more like an inorganic panic narrative. …

Overnight the post printed nine figures in views. Hundreds of thousands of likes. The account went from nobody to a household handle before most of the country had coffee.

That is not how organic X speech works: organic speech stumbles, it posts a draft, it deletes a typo and it has a history. This account had a history of silence, then a professionally punchy script, then the entire mainstream media stack that ran with it with hours of post.

The Wall Street Journal published an exclusive interview with Coxon very shortly after the post went live. Business Insider, Newsweek, the New York Post, Mashable, and Deadline, all ran the same quotes within hours. Then the next day live interviews on Fox News and CNN. That is not one reporter getting lucky on a late night scroll. That is a package. In my humble opinion you do not get a WSJ exclusive and a 100 million view thread by accident unless the interview was already in the can.

Who benefits?

Let us start with who does not benefit:

• Not the open-source shops
• Not the startups that cannot afford a compliance department and a containment audit
• Not the Chinese labs, who will ignore the sermon and keep training regardless

The first beneficiaries are the two names in the original post: Anthropic and OpenAI.

They are burning cash at a rate that would make a 2000-2001 CLEC blush. Token prices keep falling. Enterprise demand is not doubling fast enough to offset it…. Capex is a black hole. Valuations only work if the story stays vertical and the competitive set stays small.

A federal moat with pre-certification, insurance mandates, criminal liability for unlicensed models does two things at once. It crushes the long tail of competitors who were eating their margins. And it gives the incumbents a political story to take to investors: “we are the responsible adults, the regulated utilities of intelligence, please keep funding the losses until the unit economics appear.”

The second beneficiary is the government itself (this push is mostly a Democrat project).

A cabinet-level AI agency means new appropriations, new buildings, new GS-15s, new contractors, new “advisory boards” stuffed with the same people who wrote the talking points. Hearings mean travel budgets and television time. Pre-certification means a permanent inspection class. Mandatory insurance means a regulated market the agencies get to supervise. …

Bottom line:

Could Coxon be sincere? Sure…people leave jobs and people get scared…sincerity and utility are not opposites. The most effective operations use a real person with real anxiety and then put a megaphone, a Journal reporter, and a legislative calendar underneath him. …

Watch the cash, watch the narrative, watch the fear porn, watch who benefits … this is elaborate Kabuki Theater. After the Covid psyop this is the next big push in my opinion. All the signs are present.

 

Also by Edward Dowd:

In May of 2024 Marc Andreessen had a meeting with the Biden White House where it was revealed that only 2-3 AI companies would exist due to government regulations and no startups would exist. He has been vocal about this meeting.

Then yesterday Politico suddenly writes an article disputing the meeting…love the timing. More evidence this is an op with the blessing of the deep state and three letter agencies. They want total control and a fusion of AI and the state.

The real fear shouldn’t we are all going to die but instead we are building our digital jailer.

The carpentry parable, by Eric Raymond (esr).

Imagine it’s the 1940s. You’re a carpenter. Power tools are beginning to replace hand tools for ordinary work. Furthermore, jobs that would have been impossible or ruinously expensive are suddenly within reach.

You show up at a worksite one fine morning and it’s being picketed. STOP POWER TOOLS! the signs say. WOODWORKING UNDER THREAT!

Puzzled, you accost one of the demonstrators and ask him why he has a signboard in his hand rather than tools.

“Power tools are a menace!” he says. “How are you going to train apprentices if they can’t feel the wood through their hands?”

“What happens when we can chew through aged quality timber faster than we can grow new trees?”

“Carpentry isn’t just a set of skills and habits, it’s a mindset. It won’t be any true carpenters left if we let this go on.”

You inquire further and discover that they have plans. Plans to exclude from any job they work on any craftsman who has ever used a power tool or even spoken approvingly about them.

Meanwhile, inside the picket line, a house is going up. Men are working. Cutting and joining the framing is going faster than you could have imagined 10 years ago.

You look at the workers. You look at the demonstrators. One group is talking. The other is getting stuff done. One group looks like the past, the other like the future. In this moment, you get to decide which group you’re going to join.

This [parable] was not about carpentry.

The Great Threshing Machine: Why We’ve All Lost Our Leftist Friends. By Edward Dutton at The Jolly Heretic.

Polarisation may have taken place for partly genetic reasons, as I’ve explored in my book Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism.

In effect, we [are] under harsh selection for the traits, all of them significantly genetic, that are associated with conservatism: group-orientation, mental stability, physical health, pro-social personality and traditional religiousness.

With the collapse of child mortality [and thus, selection pressure], there was a massive build-up of mutation which would, logically, be expressed as the opposite of this fitness factor. Eventually, “individualism” (in the sense of being concerned with yourself and, thus, with equality and harm-avoidance), took over the culture and acted as a selection event — “Woke Eugenics” — sucking the unhealthy into its death cult of childlessness and leaving behind what we might call the remnant normal population from pre-Industrial times.

As part of this process, it has introduced policies which destroy social trust, such as mass immigration, which we know leads to distrust even among the natives because they fear that their fellow countrymen will collaborate with the foreigners….

Social media, such as Twitter, makes this process of coming apart so much worse. You quickly divide into niches, into echo chambers, and, once you’ve done so, whether you’re right- or left-wing, you competitively socially signal in a given direction.

Also, free from the constraints of having to rub along with people from the other side, it strikes me, you feel safer and so you allow yourself to “go down the rabbit hole” to “think the (previously) unthinkable” and, before long, the difference between you and those on the other side becomes a chasm and the “other side” really do seem like evil people who have no interest in your group-oriented values of obedience to traditional authority, in-group loyalty and sanctity. Further, because you feel safer, you fight back against Woke dominance, allow yourself to challenge it, and you start to build a parallel society. …

No more left wing friends:

As a middle-aged man, I bitterly lament the left-wing friendships that I’ve lost via this process. However, were we to meet up, it would be impossible to get along. …

In some cases, we are still “Facebook friends” but we can’t realistically have anything to do with each other anymore. In every battle in this Culture War, from Covid to trans, they were on the other side. It is as though we are not part of the same society. …

To the extent that political viewpoint is genetic, they will be more likely to end up with partners who are genetically similar to themselves than was the case in previous times, because they are likely to only socialise with such people. This will cause the chasm between Right and Left to grow even wider and we would expect this to lead, all else being equal, to a kind of sectarian society along the lines of the formerly Pillarised Netherlands (where there were parallel Protestant and Catholic societies) or Northern Ireland. In the Netherlands and in Ireland, the newspapers and even the universities were sectarian.

Phil writes:

While I understood how modern health practices would tend to reduce average IQ I missed that it would also (obvious in retrospect) affect mental health in the pathological sense. The effects on society are now visible.

hat-tip Phil

Are you a non-practicing white?

The term came to prominence outside lefty echo chambers recently when a Lindsay Clancy fan found out the mind-bending news that the lone holdout juror in the Clancy case who forced a mistrial was… *gasp“… black.

(The holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy’s trial was the sole person of colour amongst them. This means eleven white liberals, almost all women, were intimidating a lone black man — to free a white child killer.)

Lindsay Clancy fan discovering that the lone juror is black might be the greatest video in history pic.twitter.com/jIAjIvMcU5

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 11, 2026

She said:

“I’m a non-practicing white… it changes the landscape of the conversation a little bit. A lot of us were assuming it was a white man.”

End wokeness:

I can’t get past the “non-practicing white” line. Here we have a person assuming that being white is like a social affliction, rather than the shorthand description for a person with sparse melanin content.

But yes, it’s a real term:

These people are crazy. Men can be women, and white people can be non-white? They keep changing the meaning of words to feel good about themselves, which renders communicating with them almost impossible and wastes our time.

Hands off Pauline. By Monica Smit.

One Nation is surging.

The political establishment’s old tactics aren’t working.

What will they try next?

The rhetoric against One Nation has escalated: the Prime Minister said One Nation was “dangerous” and “divisive”. The Attorney-General has publicly associated the party with extremists and neo-Nazis.

In February 2026, Australia introduced powerful new laws allowing organisations to be declared prohibited hate groups.

The mission of this campaign is for it to be a deterrent. The plan is there, ready to be activated, but we hope we never have to.

The plan activates if:

• One Nation is declared a prohibited hate group, or
• Pauline Hanson is detained

Regardless of the degree to which you support or dislike Pauline’s One Nation party, for the Albanese Government to ban it and criminalize its members would be an awful development for Australian democracy. (Duh.)

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Germans are so funny. By Bryan Breguet.

They can’t stop talking about the decline of democracy in the US under Trump but then they suggest to just ban the party that just won in Germany.

After Saxony-Anhalt, will Germany now consider banning the AfD?

The question that arose quickly after the AfD’s electoral victory was whether or not to ban the party. It is a question that comes up a lot in German society. But so far, [Chancellor] Merz and his CDU have remained largely silent on the subject.

Couldn’t happen In Australia, could it Mr Albanese?

The AI arms race is a life and death thing. By Joanne Nova.

The nation that gets “there” first may get access to their adversaries encryption codes, crack their firewalls, hack their software, design the better drones, anti-missile weaponry, cure diseases and own the patents the world wants, or create the bioweapons that sabotage crops, generate fuel, or kill or cripple millions of people. That’s assuming AI doesn’t conquer us first.

This is why data centres are appearing everywhere and the “clean energy” revolution got left by the wayside.

As [US Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent said today “There is no day after tomorrow if we lose.”

“Beating China — there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said on Sept. 9 at Breitbart News’s “State of the Economy” event in Washington. “If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters.”

— Arthur Zhang,  The Epoch Times …

Been hearing a lot of anti-AI “news” lately? Who paid for it?

There is one main beneficiary of anti AI sentiment in the West and that’s China. Given the existential battle, China would be crazy if they weren’t pumping money into grassroots protests about AI datacentres in the US. …

Virus doom:

Last month a team created 16 entirely new viruses with the help of AI.

These are not viruses you and I could catch, they only infect a bacterium called E. coli. But if they wanted to make a virus that could infect humans, it could soon be a lot easier and faster than it would have been back in the prehistoric era of say, 2019. This should make anyone sit up and pay attention.

A virus that infects bacteria is called a bacteriophage. It’s a tiny molecular-machine in the order of 200nm in length that replicates. Once inside a hapless E. coli, it commandeers the cells machinery to produce hundreds of clones of itself. This one pictured here is one of the 16 new types of virions.

 

Natural selection is so yesterday, way too slow. Now we have unnatural selection:

Before Large Language Models, a research team had to culture real viruses in the laboratory, and they had to do it again and again to generate random mutations. One experiment ran for 13,000 generations and took six months. That team found the virus had accumulated 11 new mutations every 20 days. Then they’d have to test each mutant to see if it behaved the way they hoped, but it was all so random.

Now they just ask the AI, which is trained on millions of genomes from all domains of life. It generated and evaluated thousands of different genomes, and narrowed the list to 300. The team synthesized these 300 different viruses in the lab and tested them to find 16 entirely new viable viruses. That’s never been done before.

AI doesn’t merely accelerate evolution. It proposed a genome on the other side of an evolutionary gap without nature having to walk through all the intervening generations.

Shhh:

In theory, if they dumped these new viruses into people, swamps or chicken pens which had the right E. coli, they might peter out in a day, infecting a few bacteria and vanishing. But it’s also possible it could eventually spread far and wide — a right nightmare for E. coli. These new viruses could live on and spread in perpetuity, killing a lot of E. coli along the way until the bacterium evolved some resistance, after which the virus would mutate to counter that.

I asked one AI if this was correct and it replied at length expanding on it, until seconds later it suddenly deleted its own answer and said “This content can’t be shown”. We’re especially careful with request6s involving biological research and applications that could pose safety risks.” Well that sure makes me feel safe…

Consider:

In the next world war, a bad global citizen country could acquire the capability to design viruses and maybe also the drugs or vaccines to save themselves, before unleashing them onto adversaries. …

The truth is we’ve always had deadly diseases to throw at any enemies — like Smallpox, Ebola, Marberg and Nipah. The thing that stopped us (apart from the morality bomb) is the blowback. Whatever virus is unleashed on the world will come back to hit the instigator too. This is where AI makes it all so much more dangerous. What if some overconfident General thinks his group has a vaccine that will save them? Suddenly the unthinkable becomes a strategy.

Everything bad is escalating. By Gerard Baker in The Australian.

The world is trapped in a vortex of steadily ratcheting tension. Events are whirling in a spinning cycle with powerful centrifugal force that threatens disorder: abroad, at home, in our lives and livelihoods.

Everywhere you look – international diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, technology – the risk of things getting worse significantly outweighs the chance they will get better. Each ratchet upwards brings the heightened prospect of calamity.

The planet’s two major wars are escalating. Russia and Ukraine are preparing for another dark winter. Vladimir Putin seems to be considering escalation, both vertical and horizontal, deepening and widening the conflict. Repeated hints that he may use nuclear weapons can probably be discounted but what he can now achieve through many more missiles and drones can be just as devastating. Russia increasingly threatens its neighbours with provocations and incursions designed to test Nato’s uncertain resolve.

The war in Iran, a misconceived act of hubris compounded by inept prosecution, sees Washington and Tehran locked in a race against time whose logic impels more war. Donald Trump needs to break the stranglehold the war has on energy prices and his approval ratings, preferably before the midterm elections in November. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps must lift the US blockade of its ports before its faltering economy collapses completely. Don’t expect Russia and China to stand by as that happens. Russia has been supplying weapons and intelligence to Tehran, and China remains its vital economic lifeline. The Houthis in Yemen are threatening again to escalate the shipping havoc in a region vital to world trade.

Etc., across several domains. Maybe the 1930s felt like this too, with the logic of escalation pushing the world to war, with poor leadership unable to steer us back to peaceable resolutions. China seems to be behind a concerted anti-western push, backing both Russia and Iran, so eventually this might spill into open conflict between China and the US.

NY Major Mamdani at Islamic Friday Prayer that calls for killing of infidels (non-Muslims). By Josh Howerton.

Watch 50 seconds:

Newsworthy, wouldn’t you say? On the anniversary of 911 no less.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Our Biggest Problems Have the Easiest Solutions. By Kurt Schlicter.

We still have problems the smart set insists are insoluble. They are not insoluble. They are easy. That is why you are not allowed to talk about them honestly.

Say the quiet part out loud, and you are racist, sexist, transphobic, xenophobic, and every other -ist and -phobe that turns you into an officially bad person. You are supposed to shut up and bear the burden of other people’s deviance.

Youngsters today: Boys are defective girls.

Raw Egg Nationalist:

It’s worth remembering also that blind and non-blind tests shows that female teachers deliberately tend to grade boys lower than girls. No other civilisation in history has ever handed over young males to resentful women for their formation, except ours. It’s a disaster.

Rob Henderson:

“by four years of age, girls tend to think that boys are academically inferior to them…teachers often see their female students as academically superior…they see things this way even when aptitude tests show the opposite pattern for their classes.”

Dale Stark:

A lot of guys my age and older don’t realize how much the world has changed over the past 20 years. Young, talented white guys have been shut out of every institution in America and told their only hope for a future is clearing toilets for their new female and Third World overlords. Of course they should work every angle and do the best they can, but just telling them to just try harder is extremely tone-deaf.

If you think I’m overstating it, put together a fake resume as a young white guy with your exact credentials at that age, then apply to top-tier schools and jobs, and see how far you get.

Collin Cleary:

I spent 30 years in academia. …

Toward the end, I was teaching “Gen Z.” These students combined ignorance with strident moral certainty. They seemed to have had no general education at all, and lacked the most basic knowledge of history, even recent history. They were immature and emotionally fragile.

Many could not handle criticism, no matter how sugar coated. It took very little to reduce them to tears — or to send them into a fit of narcissistic rage. They were shockingly bereft of intellectual curiosity, and many gave the impression of having no internal life at all.

TS Roosevelt:

I gave a lecture to medical students of this age cohort on diabetes treatment. In the course of it I said that the cachexia that patients exhibited made them look like concentration camp victims. I was reported to the Dean for triggering them and removed from the lecture pool.

Northern Barbarian:

I used to look around and think, how did we ever get here? To this incredible level of technology, prosperity, security that we enjoy. I mean, look at these people.

I knew it was the critical 1 percent or so of true innovators, inventors, another 5 percent or so of high-level leaders, entrepreneurs. 10 percent of diligent, competent managers, supervisors. And most of the rest doing their jobs. Most of the other 84 percent, minus 5 or 10 percent of layabouts, total shitbags, criminals. It worked.

Now I look around and think, how do we maintain this? Those percentages have shifted. Are the 10 percent who should be competent managers, supervisors, executing, making things happen, are they up to the task? In the 84 percent, what’s the layabout, criminal, parasitic, predatory percentage now? Even among that 5 percent of high-level leaders, entrepreneurs, how many have submitted to DEI nonsense … answer, about 95 percent … or have embraced assorted covid, gender, climate end-time bullshit?

The usual cautions with generalizations apply.

Why the Blob is falling to the AfD in Germany. By Srdja Trifovic.

The AfD’s biggest gains came not from the CDU [the Christian Democratic Union, the German Chancellor’s party], but from the ranks of disaffected voters who had sat out previous elections: a net total of around 170,000 votes.

People who had once stopped believing their vote made a difference, because politics was deliberately defined as something apolitical and the realm of experts, now voted for the party that promised a fundamentally different setup. This is the result of decades of frustration with a political class that answers every concrete question with a procedural description.

The CDU is the biggest culprit and the biggest loser, deservedly so. It garnered a mere 17.2 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt — a truly historic defeat.

To explain the disaster, however, its leading figures resorted to yet more painful platitudes. This phenomenon deserves to be presented in some detail since it revealed with remarkable clarity the party’s — and the establishment’s — intellectual and moral bankruptcy. …

Why did the blob do so badly? It’s born-to-rule politicians are so dishonest:

Wiebke Winter, a young CDU parliamentary group leader in the northern city of Bremen … the young rising star of the CDU, replied that “the results need to be examined closely.”…

Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery Philipp Amthor, recited almost didactically on the ARD network a slightly different set of platitudes. “Democracy means rule by the majority,” he declared. “I believe all one-dimensional explanations for this shift in the party system fall short, all one-dimensional descriptions are inadequate.” …

Winter and Amthor, both in their thirties, share a common biography: Junge Union (CDU youth wing), party scholarship, early mandate, and office. Amthor was in the Bundestag at the age of 24; Winter, who is also considered a prominent advocate of an expansive climate policy within the Union, already leads a parliamentary group at 30.

What the blob filters for:

Winter and Amthor represent political high-flyers who learned at a young age that, in German politics, those who say something substantial are not rewarded, but those who say nothing wrong certainly are:

A dying generation of politicians of the Christian Democratic persuasion have built their entire careers on avoiding to address any issues of substance. They got away with it brilliantly — until the day came when an answer is demanded. Then they stand there and say that one has to “look into it.” …

This type of politician, omnipresent in the CDU/CSU alliance, is a legacy of Angela Merkel’s (CDU) 16-year chancellorship.

Merkel perfected the art of using many words to say nothing and of not answering questions but rather evading them until interest fades. She staged her political maneuvers as the administration of the inevitable. For 16 years, hers was the most successful technique in the country, and an entire generation was socialized by it.

Such power tactics could be employed in a sedated, affluent Germany of a decade ago. They have long since become useless for Merkel’s successors, however. Today’s Germany is a different country.

The political shifts are deep and the political, economic, social, and cultural crises are either present or expected. With the AfD the strongest party in the polls month after month, Merkelesque platitudes are a de facto declaration of bankruptcy.

The language used by Winter, Amthor, and Hoppermann is symptomatic of a political style that for years has reliably produced disaffected citizens who don’t bother voting. …

So Germany now needs the AfD:

The Alternative for Germany is demonized as “neo-Nazi” for wanting to close the borders, deport (“remigrate”) unassimilable aliens, stop appeasing immigrant criminals, support the traditional family and German values, and actively work on normalizing relations with Russia.

All that is just common sense, practicing politics (domestic and foreign) as the art of the possible, and therefore by no means “extreme.” …

After last Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has fortified it image among a huge segment of Germany’s electorate as the only hope for the country’s salvation.

Give it another year or two.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Elon Musk radically reduced the price of space launches by omitting the Senators. By Handre.

US Government:

The Space Launch System [SLS, an American super heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle developed by NASA for its current lunar program] costs $4.1 billion per launch. One launch.

NASA’s own inspector general confirmed that number. Boeing builds the core stage. Northrop Grumman builds the solid rocket boosters. Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the engines. Every one of those contracts flows to congressional districts where senators sit on the appropriations committees that fund NASA. Coincidence?

Congress mandated the SLS in 2010 because the cancellation of the Constellation program threatened to idle the same workforce and facilities that had built the Space Shuttle. Senators Richard Shelby and Bill Nelson wrote the requirement directly into the authorization bill. They protected Alabama and Florida jobs. The politics drove the rocket, not engineering logic.

Elon Musk, America’s shadow government, doing what government can no longer do:

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lifts comparable payload for roughly $90 million.

 

The difference:

The SLS costs forty-five times more per flight. That gap destroys you as a taxpayer; you fund the difference without consent and without choice. No competitive bid. No market test. Boeing received cost-plus contracts, meaning every overrun simply became next year’s invoice to the Treasury.

Ludwig von Mises identified the central problem: when bureaucracies spend other people’s money on other people’s projects, waste is the predictable outcome, not the aberration. Congress spent $23 billion developing the SLS before its first launch in November 2022. It launched twice total by mid-2026, with the third mission schedule slipping repeatedly. The SLS is a constituency management program wearing a rocket as a costume.

Completely unrelated:

Masterclass 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/i7SmsQxJ6F

— Brivael Le Pogam (@brivael) September 9, 2026

Where the manosphere narrative is wrong. By Celina101.

The left’s position is supremely illogical:

If rape and coercive control are treated as cultural and learned — which is the idea left-wing activist push — then the culture of the source country is relevant.

So here is the question I want to put to the people running this campaign.

You have spent a decade arguing that culture determines how men treat women. Therefore, you can’t talk about how patriarchy shapes the way men treat women, then go on and insist that importing large numbers of people from high-patriarchy, high-cousin-marriage, low-female-autonomy societies is unrelated.

You cannot maintain that Australian boys are formed by their cultural environment and simultaneously that everyone who arrives in Australia is a blank slate. Either culture does the work or it does not.

The same coalition that talks about patriarchy, coercive control and rape culture is overwhelmingly the coalition that treats mass immigration as beyond debate and deportation of even serious offenders as a moral outrage. …

Women moving sharply left is ignored:

It is clear that men are only modestly drifting to the right, and the media class treating this as “radicalisation,” while treating a sharper female leftward movement as normal, healthy or invisible, is a political choice about whose attitudes count as a crisis.

Non-white men and Muslims are much more into Andrew Tate:

The second thing that is also often under appreciated or outright omitted from the conversation is that the actual consumers of this sort of content are not primarily White men. Yet, the media coverage on this topic will implicitly argue that it is young White boys who are being radicalised by using visual cues. Netflix’s recent hit show Adolescence, turned this image into the official parable: a White British schoolboy radicalised in his bedroom by the manosphere, watching videos of Andrew Tate.

Nevertheless, the British polling on Andrew Tate’s audience is unambiguous. A 2023 Savanta survey of 1,214 UK 16 to 25 year olds found 15% of White respondents had a positive view of Andrew Tate, against 31% of Asian and 41% of Black respondents. Ethnic-minority youth were about twice as likely as White young people to view him positively. … Among young Muslims the figure was 51%, and 72% among young Muslim men. …

Implications for immigration:

Australia has run a high-migration program that includes large inflows from regions where those attitudes are commonplace. That important fact is almost never allowed into the same article as “rape culture” and “the manosphere.”

Instead we get the “straight white male” as the archetype of the radicalised young man. …

The ruling class is hiding the facts:

Is that there is a “rape culture” sitting inside ordinary Australian society, and that the remedy is a re-education programme aimed at Australian boys?

Is that true? The honest answer is that Australia has made it basically impossible to know. We do not publish sexual offending statistics disaggregated by country of birth, parental country of birth, or migration pathway. The ABS and state crime statistics agencies simply do not produce the tables that would let anyone test the claim. This is a choice, and it is worth asking who it protects. …

Denmark shows that non-White immigrants are the most likely perpetrator of sex crimes per capita. …

 

 

Can’t imagine what might have caused this:

Michael Shellenberger:

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, you couldn’t notice that foreigners committed most of the group rapes in Germany, despite being just 15% of the population.

By lifting censorship .. Musk unleashed a “vibe shift” that led to
AfD’s historic victory.

Sport is a Western Value, the Last Meritocracy. By Krzysztof Szczawinski.

Sport Is a Western Value. That’s Why They’re Trying to Destroy It.

The Greeks are the origin:

The [ancient] Greeks invented sport – and in doing so invented something that had never existed before: the idea that physical excellence is a moral category. …

The Olympic athlete was celebrated alongside the philosopher and the soldier because the whole person mattered. The naked body competing in public without shame, in front of the whole civilization, judged purely on performance. No birth, no wealth, no connections. Only what you could do. The most radical meritocracy the ancient world produced. The West being born.

Rome is the warning:

Rome perverted it. The gladiatorial games replaced the athlete with the slave, competition with death, excellence with spectacle. The crowd got what it wanted and stopped wanting anything higher. This is what sport becomes when a civilization loses the values that created it — entertainment for a managed population, bread and circuses, the Colosseum as the original streaming platform.

The English codified team sports:

The English codified it — and this is the most underrated civilizational contribution in history. Football 1863. Rugby 1871. Cricket, tennis, golf, boxing with the Queensberry Rules. The English didn’t just invent games.

They invented the moral architecture of sport: written rules, the neutral referee, fair play, the handshake at the end, winning within the rules rather than by any means necessary. This is the rule of law applied to play. Specifically, profoundly, unmistakably Western.

The Olympics started at the peak of Western Civilization (and western average IQ):

Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympics in 1896 with an explicitly civilizational argument: nations competing on the field rather than the battlefield. The amateur ideal — you compete for glory, not money. Peace through excellence. …

America today:

In the most vigorous Western society — America — sport is not entertainment. It is formation. The scholar-athlete. The sports scholarship.

The playing field as the place where you learn what the classroom cannot teach: how to lose, how to lead, how to perform under pressure, how to be part of something larger than yourself. …

Western values:

Sport requires values that are specifically Western. Rules everyone agrees to follow. The referee as neutral authority. Meritocracy — you cannot fake your time, your score, your result. The gracious acceptance of defeat. Fair play — winning within the rules, not by any means necessary. These are not universal values. They are Western values. Which is why sport flourishes where those values flourish — and is corrupted where they are absent. …

Naturally, the last meritocracy is under attack:

The last meritocracy is under attack because meritocracy is always under attack — by those who cannot win on the field and therefore need to change the rules of the field.

• The politicized Olympics.
• The kneeling controversies.
• Biological men in women’s competitions — the one case where the system’s attack on meritocracy has a measurable, undeniable, physical consequence that cannot be narrated away.

The ball goes in or it doesn’t. The clock stops or it doesn’t. The result is the result. This is intolerable to a system built on managed reality. Sport is the last public space where the lie cannot hold. That is why they are trying to destroy it. And that is why we must not let them.

Football is the largest shared ritual left in Western civilization:

When God died and the Church emptied, what filled the void for the masses wasn’t philosophy – it was football. The stadium became the cathedral. The club colors the liturgy. The season the liturgical calendar. The derby the holy war. Millions of people who cannot name a single philosopher know exactly what they felt when their team won the championship. That feeling is not trivial. It is the survival of something ancient and necessary — tribal solidarity, collective identity, the experience of belonging to something larger than yourself.

The club is inherited like a religion. Father to son, grandfather to grandson, the colors worn like a flag across generations. … You support your club the way you love your country: not because it is the best, but because it is yours. That irrational loyalty is not a bug. It is the mechanism by which civilizations transmit identity across time.

Trust:

The pitch is the last space in Western civilization where results cannot be managed, narrated, or captured by ideology. The ball goes in or it doesn’t. No diversity statement wins a championship. No committee changes it. This is why people trust it with a depth they trust almost nothing else — it is the last remaining public meritocracy, operating in real time, with no possibility of spin. We would be well advised to apply such meritocracy to the more important areas of life.

Social control:

But bread and circuses is the oldest formula in politics, and it works as reliably now as it did in Rome. The crowd cheering in the arena is the crowd not asking questions in the Senate. Football is simultaneously the most authentic community left in Western civilization and the most efficient distraction machine ever built. A population that knows every transfer fee and no political philosophy is a population that has been given exactly enough meaning to stop looking for the rest.

The capture is now complete at the top. The clubs that once belonged to communities now belong to sovereign wealth funds, American hedge funds, and oligarchs using sporting prestige to launder geopolitical reputation. Players have no loyalty to the cities whose shirts they wear — they are assets, transferred between portfolios. …

Corruption:

The system cannot change the game – it is too visible, too meritocratic, too honest. So it buys the clubs instead. This is the Machiavellian move applied to sport: when you cannot win on the pitch, acquire the pitch. When the institution is too legitimate to attack, capture it from above and hollow it out from within while leaving the form intact. The stadiums are full. The game is real. The ownership structure is indistinguishable from the forces hollowing out every other institution in Western civilization.

The tension is this: football is both the last authentic mass community in Western civilization and a machine being used to pacify it.

Sounds crazy at first, but I think he makes some good points.

Team sports were nearly all invented in England, at the time and place that the industrial revolution started. Mere coincidence, or were both due to the flowering of western values?