Armageddon is trending. Jacob Coxon, an artificial intelligence researcher, has resigned from the AI company Anthropic in a spectacular blaze of whistleblowing. He has told the Wall Street Journal that the leading AI labs (including OpenAI, where Coxon also previously worked) are careering towards ASI: artificial superintelligence. In a post on X, he warned that ‘the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade’.

Amid the panic and the accusations of panic-mongering, perhaps the biggest surprise has been how few people were already aware of this increasingly grim situation. AI experts have been sounding the alarm for years. Geoffrey Hinton, known as one of the ‘godfathers of AI’, resigned from Google in 2023 and later said that he believed the odds of AI causing human extinction were roughly 10 to 20 per cent within the next thirty years.

He’s not alone. Jan Leike, OpenAI’s head of alignment, resigned in 2024 claiming that ‘safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products’. Mrinank Sharma, formerly in charge of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research Team, quit in February of this year; he declared that ‘the world is in peril’ and announced his intention to study for a degree in poetry.

It is all too easy to disregard such statements as ‘doom-mongering’, on a par with climate alarmists such as Guy McPherson, the ecology professor who predicted that ‘there will be no humans on Earth by 2026’. We are so jaded with the Greta Thunbergs of this world that there will be a natural instinct to dismiss these concerns about AI as hyperbole. But these are not crazed activists with an irrational fear of technology. Many of the warnings are coming from people with formidable credentials, including researchers who have actually built frontier AI systems.

Coxon, for instance, is no keyboard warrior with a conspiratorial mindset. He has been working at the coalface of AI development and has been directly involved in training models both at OpenAI and Anthropic. It is worth remembering that Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers who left amid disagreements about the company’s direction and concerns over safety. No doubt there will be many who will be comparing the likes of Coxon to the Luddites, those who smashed up the new machinery that they feared would undercut their wages during the industrial revolution. But the comparison is flawed.

For one thing, Coxon is almost certainly correct about the extent of the concerns within the industry. Responding to his post on X, Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, said that ‘we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!’ He estimates that the probability is over 10% in the next ten years, and that there is, as yet, no plan ‘to solve alignment for superintelligence’. (‘Alignment’ is the problem of ensuring that increasingly powerful AI systems continue to behave in ways that humans can control).

For most of us, the idea that all of these AI experts are fully aware that they are creating the conditions for Armageddon but are continuing anyway makes little sense. If AI achieves superintelligence, it will be far more capable than us in virtually every area that requires thought. It will be able to produce its own superior models, effectively entering into a loop of intelligence generation. It will be so sophisticated that no human being could come close to understanding its abilities or decisions. In intellectual terms, we are talking about the creation of gods.

What these gods choose to do with us mere mortals is the key question…

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‘O Jesus, send me a wound to-day,
And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,
And get my bloody old sins washed white!’

These are the closing lines of Siegfried Sassoon’s war poem Stand-To: Good Friday Morning (1916). The soldier despises life at the front, and makes a deal to accept Christianity so long as Jesus arranges an injury that will get him invalided out of the trenches. It’s cynical and transactional, but unlikely to offend modern readers.

This was not the case in New Zealand in 1922, when John Glover was prosecuted under the law of ‘blasphemous libel’ for publishing Sassoon’s poem in his socialist newspaper The Maoriland Worker. The combination of religion and profanity was apparently too much. To those who wished to impose a narrow reading of the poem, it seemed to be parodying the very notion of Christian repentance and redemption. Glover faced one year in prison but was eventually acquitted. He has the distinction of being the only person ever prosecuted under this law from its inception in 1893 to its repeal in 2019.

The New Zealand chapter of the Free Speech Union is currently warning that there are moves afoot to reintroduce blasphemy law by the back door. We have seen it happen in the UK. Former police officer Stephen Gray was recently found guilty of an offence under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 for reposting a joke about Islam on Facebook. The image was of a man in a turban and a rasher of bacon along with the caption: ‘Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a nine-year-old!’

Gray testified in court that he was one of thousands who had shared the post, and that it was a joke concerning the marriage of the Prophet Mohammed and Aisha. According to Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the most authoritative collections of hadith in Sunni Islam, Aisha was six when the marriage took place and nine when it was consummated. Remarkably, the judge ruled that Gray’s reposting of a meme on this subject was not within the bounds of acceptable free expression. So while Islamic blasphemy codes are not officially on the statute books in the UK, they may as well be.

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The Free Speech Union of New Zealand is concerned that its own country is following the sinister path that the UK has taken. It has created a petition against the ‘seven-year lobbying campaign’ that ‘wants religion written back into our speech laws before the election’. As the petition warns: ‘it is closer to winning than most New Zealanders realise’.

Much of this can be dated to the atrocity at two mosques in Christchurch in March 2019, in which a far-right terrorist murdered fifty-one people and injured another forty. It is understandable that in the collective shock and anger that followed, many people strove to find somebody to blame. Australian senator Fraser Anning blamed Muslim immigration. Trans activist Brianna Wu implicated Tucker Carlson. A student at a vigil in New York City harangued Chelsea Clinton, saying the attack had been ‘stoked by people like you’. A chain of bookstores in New Zealand stopped selling Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, thereby outrageously implying a connection between the massacre and this explicitly anti-authoritarian book.

The Royal Commission established after the Christchurch atrocity examined New Zealand’s laws concerning ‘hate speech’. It considered whether the existing law covering incitement against protected groups – section 131 of the Human Rights Act 1993 – should incorporate religious belief. It concluded not only that religion ought to be afforded the same protections as ethnicity, but that section 131 should be replaced with a more tightly drawn criminal offence in the Crimes Act. The new offence would cover racial and religious groups but would require an intention to ‘stir up, maintain or normalise hatred’.

What exactly does this mean? Once again, we find ourselves facing the fundamental problem of all hate speech laws. Specifically, no government has yet satisfactorily defined ‘hate’ or explained how such a subjective term can be protected from weaponisation by those who wish to silence their critics. Both the European Court of Human Rights and UNESCO have conceded that ‘hate speech’ is not a concept that can be meaningfully defined, and yet countries throughout the Western world have accepted the principle that they should be legislating against their citizens’ emotions.

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The Royal Commission was at least conscious of the danger. It acknowledged that extending hate speech laws to religion raised ‘distinct freedom of expression issues’, and noted New Zealand’s strong tradition of permitting robust criticism of religious belief. But it nevertheless rejected the kind of explicit safeguard found in British law – woefully inadequate though it has proved in practice – which protects ‘discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse’ of religions and religious practices. The Commission’s concern was that such a provision had made prosecutions for stirring up religious hatred too difficult in the UK.

This is as revealing as it is disturbing. The very protections designed to ensure that criticism and ridicule of religion remain lawful were treated not as an essential safeguard for free expression, but as an obstacle to successful prosecution. Of course, it should go without saying that religious faith is not an immutable characteristic. For all the efforts of activists to rebrand scepticism about Islam as a form of ‘racism’, the idea has never taken hold because, quite simply, Islam is no more a race than Christianity or Marxism. Any society that does not permit criticism and ridicule of beliefs cannot be said to be free.

The New Zealand government did not adopt the Royal Commission’s proposed new Crimes Act offence. Instead, it introduced the Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill in December 2022, which would have extended the existing Human Rights Act provisions to cover religion. In particular, section 131 already made it a criminal offence to use abusive or insulting language, with the requisite intent, that was likely to ‘excite hostility or ill-will against, or bring into contempt or ridicule’ a protected group. The bill would have added religious belief to those protections. The bill passed its first reading, but the government subsequently decided not to proceed.

It should have ended there. But this June, Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of ‘purging India of all Christians and burning church buildings down’. Tamaki said: ‘I think we should reciprocate in kind. Let’s purge New Zealand of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. And, while we’re at it, if they’re burning churches down, why don’t we burn mosques and their temples down? Tit for tat.’ These remarks are obviously indefensible but, as ever, the most reactionary and extreme sentiments are often fodder for those who wish to introduce censorship on a much broader scale.

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Inevitably, Tamaki’s remarks have prompted renewed calls for tougher hate speech legislation. Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand has written to the government arguing that the existing incitement provisions ‘need work’, calling for the implementation of the Royal Commission’s recommendations so that religion can be deemed a protected group. This comes off the back of years of campaigning by the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, which has pressurised political parties to return to the recommendations of the Royal Commission.

The Free Speech Union has unequivocally condemned Tamaki’s comments. Its CEO Jillaine Heather has described them as ‘divisive and inflammatory’ and said that they ‘run contrary to the principles of a free and pluralistic society’. She continues:

‘The true test of a commitment to free speech is not whether we defend speech we agree with, but whether we defend the right of people to express views we find offensive, disturbing, or even abhorrent. The primary response to bad speech should be criticism, rebuttal, and public condemnation, not an appeal to state power.’

This is the key point. Genuine threats and incitement to violence are already covered by existing criminal law in New Zealand. Condemnation and counter-criticism are always far more effective than censorship, because bad ideas are not destroyed when silenced; they are driven underground where they can fester unchallenged.

For those New Zealanders who still care about liberty, now is a challenging time. No doubt calls for censorship and tighter hate speech laws will become more intense. In such circumstances, the prosecution of John Glover in 1922 is worth remembering. Back then, the state sought to punish the publication of a poem because its treatment of Christianity was considered sufficiently offensive to warrant criminal sanction. Today, the same impulse is re-emerging, with the causing of offence recast as ‘hatred’. If New Zealand is to remain a free country, its leaders must accept that nobody is entitled to protection from ridicule or contempt.

I will be touring New Zealand from 12th to 16th September in a series of talks for the Free Speech Union. Details and tickets to these events at Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch are available here.

There are many good reasons why men should not breastfeed. First and foremost, it’s because they’re men. There are other reasons too, but let’s just say that this one takes priority.

This weekend, the Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland (ALCI) paused ticket sales for its annual conference. This decision followed complaints about one of the scheduled speakers, Jacob Engelsman, who was due to give a talk on ‘lactation support for gender-diverse families’. This title is marginally more palatable than his previous talks on ‘inducing lactation for kinksters’ at fetish conventions, but only just. It has since been reported that the venue – the Ardilaun Hotel in Galway – will no longer host the conference, although the ALCI has not yet confirmed whether it will be abandoned altogether.

The concept of ‘male breastfeeding’ is not only sinister on a conceptual level; it also raises serious and unresolved safety questions. In order for lactation to be induced in males, treatment has commonly involved oestrogen and progesterone to develop the breast tissue, together with breast pumping and sometimes domperidone (a drug that raises prolactin and can stimulate milk production). The official product information for domperidone – sold under the brand name Motilium – warns that the drug passes into breast milk and that possible cardiac effects in the baby cannot be ruled out. Even if the risk is slight, why would anyone prioritise the feelings of a trans-identified male over the safety of a child?

Of all the insane demands of the genderist movement, the insistence that men ought to be able to breastfeed babies with a chemically induced mammary secretion must be among the most egregious. Frankly, I regard it as a form of child abuse. An adult male’s desire to breastfeed should not override the rights of the baby. I find it astonishing that I am even typing these words, but the behaviour of activists in recent years has meant that many of us have grown accustomed to stating the obvious.

There can be little doubt that male breastfeeding is scarcely on the radar of the general public; indeed, many people would probably be astonished to learn that it is happening at all. Yet only last month controversy erupted over an organisation called Queer Milk, then advertised as a weekly peer-support group welcoming ‘all LGBTQ+ people’. While the Scottish Government says Queer Milk itself receives no dedicated public money, the group is operated by LGBT Health and Wellbeing, a charity in receipt of substantial public funding.

Following criticism, Queer Milk insisted that it does not provide clinical advice or support induced lactation, and its chief executive went further, saying that the group is not open to trans women seeking to breastfeed and is not intended to encourage such activity. That clarification sits rather awkwardly with the breadth of its earlier publicity, and indeed with the name itself. Why, one is tempted to ask, should breast milk need to be ‘queered’ at all?

I don’t believe that it is particularly old-fashioned or reactionary to insist on a firm boundary between the feeding of babies and the sexual interests of adults…

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One of life’s small pleasures is the uncanny sensation of exploring a place previously encountered only in fiction. Those who have read Howards End by E. M. Forster will remember the vivid descriptions of the old property that Mrs Wilcox so adored. But are they aware that it exists in the real world in the form of Rooks Nest House near Stevenage? Similarly, fans of James Joyce’s Ulysses can step into Buck Mulligan’s shoes by visiting the Martello tower where he lived, still standing today at Sandycove just south of Dublin.

Locations that have been immortalised in novels tend to inspire a chill of familiarity. On a recent trip back to England I took one of my favourite country walks to another literary landmark. My house is not too far from Wallington, the village where George Orwell lived and worked from 1936 to 1940. It was here that he conceived Animal Farm (1945), and it was only by walking there myself that I discovered there is an actual ‘Manor Farm’ – the apparent model for the farm in the novel – just a few hundred metres from where the great man lived.

The story opens with the farmer, Mr. Jones, locking up the hen houses for the night and making his way up to bed. Then the protagonists of our ‘fairy story’ are introduced…

‘As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed that they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr. Jones was safely out of the way.’

There follows Old Major’s famous speech to the animals in which he lays out his dream of revolution. The ‘big barn’ remains to this day and is the first structure of Manor Farm that one sees from the road. The farm is still working, so I was reluctant to risk trespassing to see whether it still contains the raised platform from which the mighty beast – a porcine Lenin – delivered his oration. Still, it’s definitely there. It’s big, it’s a barn, and to settle all ambiguity it bears the sign of ‘Manor Farm’.

It’s worth a visit. There’s not so much as a pub in the village itself and, with its population of one hundred and fifty, you’ll be noticed if you start taking photographs. But walking along those lanes to the faint trilling of birdsong, it’s easy to find oneself momentarily seeing the village through Orwell’s eyes.

Orwell’s cottage on the corner of Kits Lane has a small plaque to commemorate his time there. This late seventeenth-century property used to be called ‘The Stores’ because it was once a local shop. Orwell and his wife Eileen sold groceries here, as well as sweets and packets of aspirin. The income helped to offset the rent, and afforded him time to write in peace. If you do manage a visit, take note of the low front door. Orwell, being a tall man, would often bang his head against the ceiling.

The couple kept chickens and a goat and tended their garden. It was in this building that Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. His time in Wallington was interrupted when he left to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and took a bullet in the throat for his trouble. Unlike many political commentators today, Orwell knew what fascism really meant, and loathed those who bandied the term around and degraded it ‘to the level of a swearword’.

The farm is halfway between ‘The Stores’ and St Mary’s Church, where the couple married. The building itself dates back to the fourteenth century, although there was a church on this site at least as far back as the reign of King Richard the Lionheart. As with so many of these small village churches, the doors are usually open, so you can wander in and look at the small display to Orwell and a range of his books. You can also buy a guide to ‘Orwell’s Life In Wallington’ by leaving the money in the basket. It’s a small reminder of the high-trust society that was once taken for granted.

Already I see myself falling into the trap of sentimentality, a quality that Orwell despised, but in my defence it is very difficult for a visitor in 2026 not to be captivated by this sliver of a lost world. And why should we not be inspired? Orwell certainly was. Having returned to Wallington from Spain, a simple event took place that proved to be the germ of Animal Farm. He recalled the moment in the preface to the Ukrainian edition of 1947:

‘On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages. However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.’

That boy was not to know that he had inadvertently changed the course of English literary history. There may not be much to see in Wallington, but it remains one of those little portals where one can step from reality into the world of fiction.

We discussed the government sending alerts direct to your mobile phone, Reform UK’s new welfare policies, and generally had a lovely chat.

How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a ‘racist’ for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society. White supremacists have denounced me as a traitor for my opposition to racism.

It’s all noise, of course, and best filtered out. These aren’t serious people, and no serious person would believe their smears. However, last week an author called Simon Edge, well-known in gender-critical circles, published a blog post about me that I can only describe as defamatory. He’s very lucky that I’ve no appetite for litigation, but I think it’s worth discussing the nature of his smearing technique because it’s become so common among activists of the more mendacious ilk.

It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it.

Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.

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Here’s how he did it. Recently, it was announced on X that Oldspeak Books, which bills itself as ‘Britain’s only centre-right bookshop’, has closed its doors. The manager posted a message on social media to explain.

‘Over time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced. The uncertainty around which customers were genuine, made it hard for me to greet everyone warmly, and my customer service suffered.’

This looked like a clear case of cancel culture to me and, since Oldspeak had been kind enough to stock my books, I reposted her message with a comment to the effect that it was a shame that she had been pressurised into closing her shop. This was, according to Edge, my first foray into the murky world of fascist apologism. Who knew it could be so easy?

But it gets worse. There was another post: a screenshot of an email from someone demanding that the manager take down her flags. I had no idea who this was, or why he should object to flags that I presumed were either St George’s Crosses or Union Jacks. And so I posted the question: ‘What’s it got to do with him?’ The manager of Oldspeak Books replied: ‘It’s the estate agent that marketed the building, Andrew. Don’t you know anything!’ I didn’t know, as it happens. I hadn’t noticed the agent’s logo and details at the base of the email. And it was only later that I learned the flags were indeed Union Jacks but with the phrase ‘Remigration Now’ added to them.

This was enough for Edge to jump to the conclusion that I must support the messaging of flags I had never seen. For the record, I don’t remotely support forcibly removing legal migrants from the UK. But nor do I object to anyone displaying a lawful political slogan on their own property, whether I agree with it or not. Edge could easily have contacted me to learn my opinions on this subject, but my answer would have disrupted his precious narrative.

As a result of this one post, Edge decided to construct a spurious – and frankly deranged – argument that I was aligned with the far right. His article is fairly scattershot. It’s mostly guilt-by-association nonsense, an exercise in score-settling that drags in anyone against whom Edge holds a grudge. He takes a swipe at various feminists who write for ‘UnHerd, The Critic, Spiked and The Spectator’ and who know ‘they’ll get a sympathetic ear from Julia Hartley-Brewer of Talk TV or Josh Howie of GB News’. He cites genuinely far-right figures and tries to connect them to individuals and organisations who have nothing whatsoever to do with them.

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Gratuitously, he goes on to name and shame authors whose work has appeared on the shelves at Oldspeak Books. He concedes in the same breath that none of them has any say over who sells their books, which rather raises the question of why he named them at all. The disclaimer does not undo the association; it merely provides cover for making it. It’s a variation on the same trick.

That’s not all. He posts a tweet by Josh Howie – a list of political opinions, nothing more – as putative evidence of wrongthink. He complains about ‘Islamophobia’, by which he means concerns about the more reactionary aspects of Islamic culture, including the oppression of women and gay people. He sneers at those who have written tributes to the late Rod Liddle, approvingly quoting a trans activist who repeated the widespread but asinine claim that he was a ‘wife-beating paedophile’. With all the argumentative fallacies and smear tactics, Edge’s article is a masterclass in how not to structure an argument.

For his pièce de résistance, Edge closes with a direct attack on me. Having cited my question about the man complaining about the flags, this is what he says:

‘The owner of that account is the GC author and former GB News presenter Andrew Doyle (who doesn’t even have the excuse of May stocking his work). No doubt he, like other big-name GCs, will continue to laugh dismissively at the notion that he is part of the far right. But in this instance, he seems very clear which side he’s on.’

So far so fatuous. I am not, as it happens, ‘part of the far right’. Anyone who has cared to read anything I’ve ever written will know this already. But because it is in the nature of unthinking ideologues to go too far, Edge has not yet perfected the skill of plausible deniability. And so directly after his statement about the ‘side’ I’m on, he posts the following image.

Note the sequence. Edge does not explicitly call me a Nazi, presumably because he knows I’d have no choice but to sue. Instead he says that my allegiances are ‘very clear’, and then immediately shows the reader a post with swastikas and symbols of the British Union of Fascists. His screenshot is of a post I had never seen, let alone commented on, and yet it is placed directly beneath the reference to my ‘side’.

This is prestidefamation of the most obnoxious kind. The accusation is made, and it is made by arrangement rather than assertion. That is the trick: the reader supplies the word Edge was careful not to write, and Edge keeps his hands clean. And all because I had replied to a tweet to ask why some busybody was asking for flags to be removed from private property. That is the entire charge sheet.

It is astonishing to see the man who edited and published Graham Linehan’s excellent memoir reduced to this. Edge has become the archetypal online activist: a zealot who spends most of his time roaring away at monsters of his own imagination. He’s like the last drunk in the pub, swinging his arms and shouting ‘come on then, you slags’ while everyone else just shakes their heads in pity.

Still, if the rules of the game mean that we must now throw false accusations at people we happen to dislike, I feel obliged to point out that Edge enjoys nothing more than dressing up as Adolf Hitler and copulating with livestock whenever the moon is full. Oh, and he once appeared on my show on GB News, so by his own rules I’m afraid that makes him fascist-adjacent.

It would be far better for society if we were to execute the literal-minded. We could do it discreetly, under cover of night, so as not to upset their relatives. Instead of scouring social media for potentially offensive posts, the police could be enlisted to identify anyone who takes an obvious joke at face value. No trial. No appeal. Just toss them into a volcano and be done with it.

Might it be possible that anyone could read these words and assume that I meant it? You would be surprised. It was tremendously sad to hear of Rod Liddle’s untimely death last week, but it was some consolation to know that he would have relished all the unhinged reactions on Bluesky from its resident hobgoblins. Many of his old articles were dredged up as evidence of his wrongthink, and obviously satirical lines were quoted as though they were admissions of guilt.

How the ghouls celebrated and jeered, all the while exposing to the world the lie that they were ever on the side of compassion and progress. Titania McGrath even weighed in for the Spectator (you can read her thoughts here). Even many on the right were apparently delighted with Rod’s passing because of what they perceived to be his unpardonable sins. Literal-mindedness is a disease that transcends political boundaries.

The chief accusation – invariably posted underneath the many tributes from Rod’s friends, colleagues and admirers – was that he was a ‘nonce’ who had admitted that he ‘wanted to shag schoolkids’. And so, with due exhaustion and contempt, I feel obliged to explain that this is not even remotely true.

I suppose we had better take a look at the passage in question from Rod’s 2012 article about the story of a maths teacher who had run off to France with one of his charges.

‘…the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one. We’re talking secondary school level here, by the way – and even then I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called. I just thought we ought to clear that up early on.’

It would take amoeba-level stupidity to assume that this was in any way serious. Such people would require 24-hour care in order to accomplish the most basic of quotidian tasks: tying shoelaces, brushing teeth, remembering to eat. And yet a surprisingly large number of people apparently cannot distinguish between a provocative and satirical article and an authentic statement of belief. The congenitally literal-minded do indeed live among us, and they are legion.

Of course, many of those citing Rod’s article as a confession of noncehood were doing so wilfully. In a sense, these people are even more deserving of the volcano treatment. It should be straightforward enough to admit that one finds Rod’s writing to be crass, offensive, or just downright unfunny. If Rod’s detractors believe that it is improper to make jokes about child abuse, they ought to say so. But to pretend that there had been no attempt at humour in order to score points against a dead opponent is about as low as it gets…

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As ever, please let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times. As the youngest black person ever to be appointed a professor at the University of Cambridge, there are good reasons why those who have championed him are rushing to his defence. But with each passing day, new revelations of his slippery relationship with reality seem to be emerging.

As with many fabulists, it is difficult to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Some of Arday’s boasts are quite obviously false. For instance, nobody believes that he completed the last nine of thirty consecutive marathons with a fractured leg that had swollen ‘to twice its normal size’. Or that he appeared in the television series Seven Up! as a child, even though its participants were selected in 1963 and Arday was born two decades later.

Other claims might well be embellishments on kernels of reality. No doubt he has raised money for charity, but it seems highly unlikely that his vaunted sum of £5.5 million is accurate. We know that he played snooker, but his assertion that he did so professionally would carry more weight if someone on the circuit had heard of him. Few would dispute that Arday is a keen amateur athlete. But if his claim to have run six hundred miles in six days were true, that would place him among the world’s elite sportsmen.

Perhaps most serious of all are the accusations of plagiarism. Cambridge has been quick to dismiss the matter, stating that an investigation has already been conducted by Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD thesis, and no evidence of plagiarism was found. Many readers who have compared the relevant passages side by side have reached a different conclusion. Numerous examples have been collated by Nathan Cofnas and can be seen here.

The refusal of the authorities at Cambridge to investigate the allegations properly has naturally raised suspicions that Arday is being protected because he is the poster boy for DEI. If it is true that he was raised on a council estate, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, first spoke at the age of eleven, and learned to read and write at eighteen, then his success story is unparalleled. Yet plagiarism is an extremely grave matter for an academic, and the evidence is difficult to dismiss.

The failure to hold Arday to the same standards as anyone else is, of course, a soft form of racism…

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One of the defining characteristics of a tyrant is his or her unwillingness to be mocked. When the poet Osip Mandelstam poked fun at Stalin’s ‘cockroach whiskers’ and his fingers ‘fatty like worms’ he was exiled and eventually sentenced to five years in a corrective labour camp. Within a year of his imprisonment, he had died of malnutrition and was buried in an unmarked grave.

One might have expected that, given its history, Germany would be especially wary of laws that ringfence politicians from ridicule. Yet in 2021, its government expanded Section 188 of the Criminal Code – aimed at protecting politicians from defamation – so that even crude insults could result in prosecution. This draconian law is why the Free Speech Union is now hoping to launch a branch in Germany.

As with all ‘hate speech’ laws, Section 188 is wide open to exploitation by any politician seeking to suppress dissent. In November 2024, Bavarian police raided the house of retired soldier Stefan Niehoff for a social media post in which he had referred to Robert Habeck, then Germany’s vice-chancellor, as a ‘Schwachkopf’ (dummy). That mild insult was all it took to see his liberties violated by the state.

Such legislation is the equivalent of the lèse-majesté laws that still exist in certain parts of the world, designed to punish subjects who denigrate the king. Countries that retain these laws include Thailand, Cambodia, Jordan, Morocco, Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Bhutan. The maximum penalty for insulting the king in Jordan is eerily identical to that prescribed by Section 188 in Germany: a prison sentence of three years.

In Turkey, citizens face similar oppression. Since becoming president in 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has relied on Article 299 of Turkey’s Penal Code – a previously little-used offence criminalising insults to the president – to investigate and prosecute tens of thousands of his critics. Former beauty queen Merve Büyüksaraç was convicted and received a suspended sentence for reposting on Instagram a satirical poem about the president that she had found funny.

The case of German comic Jan Böhmermann is similarly revealing. In 2016, he had produced a music video which ridiculed Erdoğan. In response, the Turkish government summoned the German ambassador in Ankara to demand that the video be deleted from the internet. Böhmermann in turn responded with a poem that upped the offensiveness tenfold, including references to Erdoğan having sex with goats and sheep. Turkey then requested that Böhmermann be prosecuted under Section 103 of the German Criminal Code, which protected foreign heads of state from insults.

That law was repealed in 2018, but Section 188 remains on the German statute books in its expanded form and is arguably even more authoritarian. A little knowledge of the history of tyranny would not go amiss, and in particular how this kind of legislation has typically been so vaguely worded. Section 188 contains open-ended concepts such as whether a statement is ‘capable of significantly hindering’ a politician’s public work. In the UK, Section 127 of the Communications Act criminalises ‘grossly offensive’ speech, a categorisation that it makes no effort to define.

Such vagueness is not accidental. It enables the authorities to interpret the law expansively, applying it to whatever speech or behaviour they choose to regard as criminal…

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On the very first page of his seminal treatise On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill addresses the ‘struggle between Liberty and Authority’. This simple phrase encapsulates the essence of our present-day culture war, the ‘woke’ movement merely representing the latest manifestation of the authoritarian mindset.

I have been at pains to argue in my articles and books that authoritarianism is the default in human nature. How many societies globally and historically have ever really been free? Even in the rare examples where freedom of speech is enshrined in law, there have always been caveats or exceptions to the principle. The UK is ostensibly a free country, but we have hate speech laws that outlaw certain points of view. No society has ever consistently lived up to wholly liberal principles, and all western political parties are, at present, authoritarian to some degree.

I have always believed that we are better off acknowledging this authoritarian instinct that we share so that we might continually resist it. Creating the conditions for genuine liberty is exceptionally difficult. It requires the gradual development of a civilisation that can uphold it. It requires tradition and inherited knowledge and a sophisticated educational system that can guarantee effective socialisation. More than anything, it requires individual self-awareness and a desire to correct course once we succumb to that universal authoritarian impulse.

With that in mind, here’s my list of five ways to tell if you’re an authoritarian…

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Yesterday saw the anointment of Andy Burnham as our new Prime Minister. He had not worked in parliament for over a decade, has no serious mandate from the public to lead the country, and has been helicoptered in by his colleagues in the hope that he can recover what is left of the reputation of the Labour Party. Given that Keir Starmer has presided over the most authoritarian government in living memory, is it possible that Burnham will see the error of his predecessor’s ways?

The early signs are not good. Burnham has already appointed two staff members from Hope Not Hate, a militant leftist organisation that has a habit of smearing people with mainstream opinions as ‘far right’. And the Telegraph has now revealed that a new report commissioned by the Government Office for Science early this year and published in May could end up influencing the Burnham government’s future direction on online misinformation and issues relating to free speech. It offers a guide to what it calls ‘psychological inoculation’ of the public. In other words, how to play mind games and manipulate the great unwashed into behaving themselves.

If Burnham has any sense at all, he will denounce this report at the earliest opportunity. Its fundamental ethos is illiberal and anti-democratic. It is called False and Misleading Information: An Evidence Summary and Map for Policy and Practice, and it was produced by a consortium called Behavioural Research UK. It is without a doubt one of the most chilling and authoritarian documents that has ever been commissioned by a British government. It’s worth looking closely at its contents, because it might well become a roadmap for Burnham’s policies.

The report is Orwellian not simply in its recommendations, but in how it presents itself. The authors repeatedly describe it as an ‘evidence review’, but it actually contains numerous policy recommendations. Perhaps the most egregious is the suggestion that the public should be ‘inoculated’ against misinformation through a process of ‘prebunking’; a sinister euphemism for censorship. It describes prebunking as the ‘first line of defence’. Here is the relevant passage as it appears in the report:

‘Prebunking refers to a broad category of strategies aimed at stopping people from accepting false and misleading information before they encounter it. The most widely employed of these strategies is psychological inoculation, the core idea is that presenting someone with a weakened form of a misleading claim builds psychological resistance against future manipulation. Psychological inoculation typically consists of two elements: alerting someone in advance that their beliefs may come under attack (e.g., “warning: someone might try to influence you by claiming X”), and offering a preemptive counter-argument that undermines the false claim before it takes hold (e.g., “this is misleading, because Y”; van der Linden, 2025).’

The report offers vague guidance to the government on how to psychologically manipulate the public so that it is not susceptible to ‘misinformation’. It does not address the key problem: that ‘misinformation’ is often the term used by those in power to describe information that is accurate but inconvenient. The report does not consider the ethical aspects of treating the public like toddlers who can be tricked into certain modes of behaviour. Moreover, it refuses to specify how the manipulation might work in practice.

Let’s take one of the policy suggestions: ‘Game-based inoculation interventions’. One assumes that this is referring to computer games produced for schools and workplaces. We’ve seen this kind of nonsense from the Labour government before. Back in January, the Telegraph reported on the state-funded Pathways game, aimed at secondary school children and sixth form students, that warned them that questioning mass migration could result in a referral to the counter-terrorism unit.

It features a character called Charlie (pronouns they/them, naturally) who is lured onto the slippery slope of radicalisation by watching online videos. It’s difficult to decide which is more cringemaking: the game itself, or the government’s faith that such overt propaganda will have the desired effect.

We see the same paternalistic philosophy in this recent False and Misleading Information report, an attitude that evidently mirrors that of Burnham’s government…

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Few would deny that the internet both creates and amplifies bad behaviour. In the wake of the death of Ann Widdecombe, I made the mistake of browsing through comments on Facebook. Apparently, for some, the brutal murder of an elderly woman is cause for celebration. I had not realised that I was acquainted with so many sociopaths.

In truth, Facebook is a …

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Last week saw yet another victory for women’s rights in the US. The Supreme Court upheld state bans on males participating in girls’ sports. Predictably, the ruling was split along party lines, with the six Republican appointees supporting single-sex sports and the three Democrat appointees voting against.

Riley Gaines has been quick to note the perversity of so-called ‘progressives’ working against women. ‘Justice Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor ruled against women having equal protection under the law,’ she posted on X. ‘Liberal women, yet again, prove to be the biggest hurdle women face.’

It is a feature of today’s culture wars that so many individuals are gulled into working against their own interests. Time and again, polls reveal that the staunchest advocates for gender identity ideology are women, even though it is a fundamentally anti-woman movement. Likewise, many gay men are found to be supportive of genderism, in spite of the fact that it represents the most serious threat to gay rights in living memory.

So what is going on here? I am reminded of Alice Walker’s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). The book opens with an arresting epigraph: ‘When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us’. The novel concerns the barbarity of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as practised in certain African tribal societies, which is why Walker dedicated the book ‘with tenderness and respect to the blameless vulva’.

We often speak of FGM as though it were an example of the patriarchy destroying women’s sexuality, making it impossible for girls, as they grow up, to experience sexual pleasure so that they will remain faithful to their husbands. While there is some truth to this analysis, Walker forces us to confront a harsher reality. One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the depiction of the older women in the tribe as being mostly responsible for the perpetuation of the practice. Little girls are mutilated at the behest of their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters. Often the men know little at all.

The novel was the inspiration for Tori Amos’s Cornflake Girl, surely the only song about female genital mutilation ever to break the top ten. But Amos’s song is really about that broader principle of betrayal among women. Today, the song resonates for a different reason. The ‘cornflake girls’ – those who turn on other women – are now mostly to be found on the self-styled ‘progressive’ side of politics, upholding an ideology that has seen the erosion of women’s single-sex spaces and services.

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I had the pleasure of contributing a story to this wonderful new collection by Heresy Press, a publisher that was established to promote artistic freedom and to push back against the conformity and self-censorship of our times.

Axe: Stories That Cut Deep was inspired by Kafka’s injunction that ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us’. The ed…

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‘Citizen Vigilante Is One of the Most Disturbing Movies I’ve Seen Lately.’ So runs the headline of a review in Slate of the controversial new movie written and directed by Uwe Boll. It stars Armie Hammer as Sanders, an American businessman based in an unspecified country in Europe who targets violent migrant criminals and those who have enabled them in the spheres of politics, law enforcement and the judiciary.

The reviewer for Slate is not the only one to brand the movie racist. Unsurprisingly, it has been accused of inciting violence against ethnic minority groups, and was effectively banned in Germany after the FSK (the country’s film classification body) refused to give it an age classification. This meant that it could not be released theatrically, distributed or advertised. Yet after Elon Musk posted the full movie on X for a limited period of two days, it was viewed many millions of times. The Streisand effect strikes again.

Whatever one’s views on the merits of Citizen Vigilante, Musk was right to promote it. I tend towards the view that any creative work that is banned ought to be amplified by those with the means, irrespective of its quality. In such circumstances, the principle must take precedence. I am reminded of a speech delivered by Stephen King in the 1990s to a group of school pupils on how best to respond to the banning of books:

‘Don’t get mad, get even. Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighbourhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest non-school library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.’

Citizen Vigilante belongs to a familiar tradition of the vigilante thriller, a subgenre of exploitation cinema, in which a lone figure takes revenge on society’s scum. One thinks immediately of Death Wish or The Equalizer, movies that revel in the moral ambiguity of citizens taking the law into their own hands. The character of Sanders in Citizen Vigilante does not deviate one jot from the archetype. There is a gratuitous sex scene with a prostitute, and he kills an innocent driver on the road simply to make a rhetorical point. He’s not a nice guy.

The popularity of the movie is easy to understand. It taps into a direct – and some would say ignoble – pleasure of popular storytelling: the thirst for poetic justice. With the two-tier systems of justice currently prevailing in many European countries (the UK included) many people are frustrated and angry at the failure of the law to reckon with criminals if they are from minority backgrounds. The case of the rape gangs in the north of England is perhaps the most obvious example, but there are many more.

None of this rescues Citizen Vigilante from being a terrible film. Hammer gives a strong performance, but the plot holes are cavernous and the script is ham-fisted. That said, its critics would do well to try to understand why it has struck a chord. It is the same reason why the 2005 thriller Hard Candy – a much worse film, in my view – was so appealing to those who are rightly furious that sex offenders have so often escaped justice. In that movie, a victim tracks down her paedophile abuser and spends most of the time torturing him both psychologically and physically. Similarly, I Spit On Your Grave (1978) depicts in disturbing detail the gang-rape of the lead character, who then systematically pursues each of her attackers and exacts bloody revenge.

Such films offer fantasies of retribution. The experience is close to what the ancient Greeks called catharsis: the arousal of pity and fear in tragedy which leads to a purgation of violent emotions. So the wife whose husband has left her for a younger woman can watch a production of Euripides’s Medea, relish her brutal reprisals (Medea sends her husband’s new lover a poisoned dress which tears away her flesh when she tries to remove it) and leave the theatre without any desire to commit similar acts of violence in real life. It’s a neat system.

Uwe Boll has said that Citizen Vigilante was inspired by a notorious case in Hamburg in 2016, when a group of teenagers raped a 14-year-old girl, only for the perpetrators to walk free with suspended sentences. The movie dramatises a near-identical case, culminating in Sanders holding the migrant Muslim family of one of the perpetrators hostage before forcing him to summon the other rapists and shooting them one by one.

Yet where Boll’s movie departs from the typical vigilante thriller is that its aim is not primarily cathartic. Like all revenge fantasies, it offers the audience the vicarious satisfaction of poetic justice, but it departs from this formula by leaning heavily into didacticism. Sanders is presented not simply as an avenger but as an exemplar, repeatedly arguing that the ruling class has abandoned ordinary citizens, leaving them with no alternative but to take matters into their own hands.

The film is interspersed with pixellated video recordings that Sanders broadcasts on the internet. At one point, he leans towards the camera and speaks aloud the message of the film: ‘I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself’. There are many words one could use to describe Boll’s filmmaking, but ‘subtle’ is not among them.

It is at this point that one can already hear the cries of ‘incitement!’ and ‘hate speech!’ from the pro-censorship lobby…

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Gender identity ideology is not the first religious creed to have seized control over those in power, but it is certainly the most baffling. In our supposedly post-Enlightenment world, it is remarkable to think that so many members of the political and media class have kowtowed to a supernatural belief system which they cannot coherently defend. For the…

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It has been fourteen months since the UK Supreme Court ruled that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, not ‘gender identity’. And yet in all that time many companies and public bodies have been evading their responsibility to obey the law. The most egregious example came this week, when Linda Pollock, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), put out an internal memo that once again betrays a shocking disregard for legal responsibilities.

The context of the memo was a Court of Session ruling issued last week by Lady Ross. It followed a judicial review brought by For Women Scotland over the Scottish Prison Service’s 2024 guidance on the management of trans-identified inmates. The SPS has been permitting men who identify as women to be accommodated in the female estate if they satisfy a risk assessment. It has been its policy, in other words, to prioritise gender identity ideology over safeguarding. The risks of this approach are not hypothetical. In April, a male murderer called Alan Baker was charged for sexually assaulting a woman at HMP Greenock.

Lady Ross held that the SPS guidance was unlawful, finding that Scottish prison rules require separate accommodation for men and women. She cited the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act and pointed out that, as a matter of law, biological sex must be the determining factor. It is mind-boggling that we require judges to state the obvious, but that is the reality of the UK in 2026.

Pollock’s response was remarkable. While admitting that the SPS has been acting unlawfully, she nonetheless stated that the current admission policy ‘remains in place’ but that she ‘will carefully consider Lady Ross’s findings before responding’. Here is the memo in full.

This is an astonishing admission, and could very well constitute contempt of court. A public body does not get to set its own timetable for when it obeys the law. Pollock has a duty to update the unlawful aspects of SPS policy without delay. That this needs to be said at all demonstrates how those who are in hock to genderism consider their ideology to be above the law…

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The contortions of activists and commentators over the conviction of the ‘Filton 4’ are something to behold. Amnesty International – a charity that once campaigned for prisoners of conscience but now produces screeds against those upholding the rights of women and homosexuals – has claimed that the sentencing represents ‘another step in the ongoing crac…

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‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ These words are among the most frequently quoted from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We see them in memes, in online arguments, repeated endlessly in opinion columns in the national press. The passage has turned into the very thing that Orwell hated the most: a cliché.

Yet ideas become clichés for a reason. So many aspects of Orwell’s novel seem prescient today, not least this tendency among authoritarians to blur the lines between truth and fiction and demand that the population play along. There is no clearer example than what has become known as ‘two-tier policing’. The evidence for it is overwhelming, and yet commentators, journalists, politicians, podcasters, activists and online loudmouths continue to deny it. Once again, the narrative has taken precedence over reality.

The notion that members of the public must be treated differently according to their group identity is not simply a speculative explanation for egregious police conduct. It is explicitly encoded in guidance published by the College of Policing and the NPCC (National Police Chiefs’ Council). There are numerous recorded interviews with officers who tell us that their job is to investigate and arrest those who have caused offence to particular groups. Multiple whistleblowers have revealed details of training sessions they have been compelled to attend that have instructed them to take a two-tier approach.

But you wouldn’t know any of this had you only read a recent article by Andy Hughes, LBC’s Crime Correspondent. Hughes argues that it is ‘nonsense to say police are told to treat people differently based on their ethnicity’ and claims to have spoken to dozens of officers who have confirmed his view. It seems odd that Hughes does not realise that there is nothing particularly surprising about officers repeating the party line. Far more revealing are those who are speaking out about two-tier policing – none of whom Hughes appears to have spoken to – in spite of the risk to their career. They’re called ‘whistleblowers’ for a reason.

Then there is the police guidance itself. Hughes attempts to shrug off the Police Anti-Racism Commitment on the grounds that he doesn’t understand it:

‘The NPCC guidance says: “Producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences.”

I’ve read this section several times, and I still don’t know what it means.

The wording is “clumsy”, as the NPCC admits, and police chiefs say they will review the guidance.

But to suggest this means every police officer is now told to treat people differently based on race is inaccurate – and dangerous.’

A generous interpretation would be that Hughes simply hadn’t read the following sentences in the guidance, which could not be clearer even for those unfamiliar with the activist jargon.

And there you have it. The ‘Police Anti-Racism Commitment’ explicitly states that officers should treat people differently based on race and that they must reject the principle of equality before the law. Their commitment to racial equity, it says, ‘does not mean treating everyone “the same” or being “colour blind” (racial equality)’. Of course, it’s unlikely that Hughes stopped reading at that point. It’s more plausible that he realised that the document flatly contradicted his narrative and decided to omit the relevant line.

However, the ‘clumsy’ language that Hughes cites (but does not understand) is evidence enough. When the guidance calls for ‘equality of policing outcomes’, it is saying that suspects should be treated differently according to their race in order to reduce disparities. It draws on a principle of Critical Race Theory, that equality of outcome is evidence of unequal treatment. As Ibram X. Kendi puts it, ‘racial inequality is evidence of racist policy’.

It’s the same logic that prevented Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, from being sectioned by the NHS. Having perpetrated a violent crime, mental health staff did not detain him because they were concerned about ‘over-representation of black men’ among those committed. They were simply following the NHS guidelines, but Calocane went on to murder two teenagers and an older man in June 2023. When ‘racial equity’ is adopted as policy, it costs lives.

Let’s have a closer look at the evidence of institutional capture as reflected in the official police guidelines…

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