China Shock 1.0 was clothes, toys, furniture and the quiet death of mill towns. Western politicians called it comparative advantage and pointed at cheap prices. The workers who lost the work were a regional problem. China Shock 2.0 is the same method aimed at the industries the West told itself it would keep: machine tools, industrial robots, elect...
John Leake's Mind Viruses (2026), names the thing Elon Musk keeps pointing at and that institutions keep calling compassion. An idea behaves like an infection when it spreads faster than evidence, punishes immunity, and treats the host's own senses as the disease. The woke regime is the current carrier. Its obsessions are not a list of causes. They...
The university as we inherited it is not reforming. It is running out of the institutional confidence, public trust and economic assumptions that sustained it for generations. Beneath all the language about transformation, access, resilience, inclusion and strategic renewal lies a simpler problem. The old university sold a formidable promise: spend...
Something important has changed in Western intellectual culture, and the change is deeper than political correctness, censorship or the familiar battles over woke language. It concerns the purpose of intellectual discussion itself. The older ideal, however imperfectly realised, held that argument existed primarily to discover what was true. Claims ...
This point of view has been argued in print at the blog, but for those who may prefer a video, which is something that can be given to the fence-sitters, here is a good one from Celina101, who is doing excellent work for the conservative movement in Australia: https://celina101.substack.com/p/why-we-need-free-speech-to-win
The numbers arrive without drama, simply as a line in the latest Department for Work and Pensions release: almost 1.3 million foreign nationals now claim Universal Credit in Britain. That figure, recorded in May 2026, sits roughly twenty thousand higher than the year before. Half of those claimants are EU citizens holding settled status; others hol...
More than six years after the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, the argument about Australia's pandemic response is no longer principally about what governments should have done in the frightening and uncertain opening weeks of 2020. The more important question is whether Australians will ever receive a genuinely independent accounting of what gove...
One of the most unsettling features of growing older is the gradual unreliability of memory. Names that once arrived instantly take several seconds to retrieve. A familiar word sits maddeningly beyond reach. We walk into a room and momentarily forget why we went there. At the more serious end of the spectrum lie mild cognitive impairment and ...
Frédéric Bastiat observed more than a century and a half ago that when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it. What once described the extraction of wealth by force or fraud has, in our time, expanded into some...
There is something irresistibly fascinating about the idea of a vast survival bunker beneath the White House. It belongs equally to the worlds of Cold War history, conspiracy literature and disaster movies: nuclear warning sirens sound, the President disappears through a concealed doorway, races down a staircase and emerges in an underground comman...
A recent Medium essay (linked below) nominates two candidates for the title of the stupidest ideas in philosophy: that there is no self and that there is no free will. There is certainly plenty to attack in both propositions, particularly when sophisticated qualifications disappear and the claims are presented in the startling form that ordinary pe...
The puzzle is not why governments grow. Bureaucracies expand because that is what they are built to do. The puzzle is why populations that still have the vote, the language of rights, and a living memory of freer decades sit still while the state thickens, the currency thins, and the official story gets more childish. Chris MacIntosh's answer (link...
Robin Fellow's point in the Daily Sceptic (link below), is blunt enough to survive translation. A statute can force an employer to pretend that a shop floor and a loading dock are the same job, or that a council clerk and a bin run are "equal value." It cannot repeal the labour market. Dirty, dangerous, nocturnal, remote, and physically punishing w...
The Lindsay Clancy trial has reached the point where the legal question and the cultural question are beginning to separate. The jury has struggled for days to reach unanimity, which is hardly surprising given what it has been asked to decide. Nobody seriously disputes that Lindsay Clancy killed her three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan. The disp...
Assuming the ridiculous gushing over a Cambridge conman was not a national Monty Python sketch arranged for tourists, the Jason Arday affair reminded me of one of the most peculiar things about Britain: They're more woke than the U.S. Which is weird, because the Mother Country still has a monarchy that rules over tens of millions of white subjects....
Donald Trump likes gold, and this is hardly breaking news. Anyone who has followed Trump for decades knows the aesthetic: gold lettering, gold interiors, gold fixtures, enormous rooms, chandeliers, marble, trophies and almost everything else associated with conspicuous wealth. Where Scandinavian minimalism whispers, Trumpian decoration enters the r...
One Nation is back on top of Newspoll: 30 per cent primary, Labor 29, the Coalition 19. The survey closed before Saturday's Secret Harbour by-election, which then handed Pauline Hanson her first lower-house seat in Western Australia, a safe Labor district, gone. Anthony Albanese's response was not a housing speech. It was a warning about "dishonest...
The Right has spent two years congratulating itself on a funeral. DEI offices renamed themselves. Fortune 500 pages got quieter. A few universities discovered the First Amendment after they lost in court. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even said the quiet part: "Woke 1 was crazy," meaning the 2020 carnival of defund-the-police and ritual self-accusation....
The latest Microsoft privacy controversy begins with what initially looks like a success story for modern digital policing. American authorities were pursuing an alleged member of the notorious Scattered Spider cybercrime group, and the suspect appears to have taken the sort of precautions that people are routinely told will conceal their identity ...
Professor Ian Brighthope has put forward an argument that deserves to be taken far more seriously than the scientific establishment is likely to take it. His proposition is deliberately radical: humanity should prohibit the deliberate genetic manipulation of viruses, bacteria and other self-replicating organisms because nobody has the moral authori...
