We have been sold a lie, an insidious and pervasive one, which suggests that freedom of speech is merely one right among many, a polite accessory to be balanced against other, more "urgent" concerns like emotional safety, social harmony, and the avoidance of offense. This is the foundational error of our time. Freedom of speech is not a luxury, nor...

We Are Sleepwalking into World War III The rhetoric emanating from Western leaders has crossed a threshold from political posturing to an open declaration of war against Russia. We are not on the brink of a conflict; we are being marched into one by leaders who have abandoned diplomacy for a suicidal path of confrontation. The American public, fed ...

 For a moment, it sounded as though Sam Altman had finally said the quiet part out loud. "We opened Pandora's Box together," he supposedly declares. "The future's inevitable. Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse and we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world." If that were really the chief executive of OpenAI sp...

Researchers associated with Anthropic, one of the world's leading artificial-intelligence companies, have gone public with fears that sufficiently advanced AI could present an existential danger to humanity within the next decade. Most strikingly, Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger has estimated that there is at least a 10 per cent chance of AI kil...

There is nothing inherently fraudulent about a home battery. For households with rooftop solar, the ability to store electricity generated during the day and use it at night can make perfectly good economic sense. Batteries may also have a useful role in a more decentralised electricity system. The problem begins when governments decide that a usef...

Socialism is returning as a mood before it returns as a programme. Young voters hear "healthcare," "housing," "the billionaires," and reach for a word their grandparents treated as a warning label. The establishment treats this as a sudden fever. It is closer to an allergic reaction. For forty years the people who ran the West called a rigged, infl...

A recent Spectator Australia article jokingly suggested that Canberra might one day have to be renamed Buenos Aires. The comparison is deliberately provocative, but behind the joke lies a serious economic question. Could Australia, through a combination of persistent government spending, weak productivity growth, excessive dependence on property an...

The West does not throw Christians to lions. It files them, schools them, and occasionally burns the building of worship. Michael Snyder's latest list is the usual American mix: a Maine custody order that lets a father veto church and Bible reading; churches going up in flames with thin national coverage; a coffee shop in Idaho ejecting a pro-life ...

The article by Tim Sargent (see below), argues that the transatlantic slave trade was not a European invention imposed on Africa, but an expansion of practices already widespread there. Tim Sargent uses that history to question Church of England guilt-trips and reparations talk that treat the Atlantic trade as uniquely originating in Europe and ign...

Predictions of financial apocalypse are cheap. At almost any moment during the past half-century, somebody somewhere has been announcing that shares are about to collapse, banks are about to fail, the dollar is about to die, gold is about to explode and civilisation will shortly discover that compound interest was a terrible idea. Most of these pre...

Childcare policy in the rich world has a quiet prejudice. It will spend public money to put a toddler in an institution so that both adults can clock in. It will not spend the same money, or anything like it, if one parent stays home and does the work herself. The arrangement is sold as help for families. It is help for a particular family shape: t...

A country does not slide into civil disturbance because a politician invents a mood. It slides because the public has been telling the same story for years and the state has answered with process. Nigel Farage's warning after Portsmouth, that Britain is on the edge of "serious civil disturbance" if the boats are not stopped, is not a novelty act. I...

"What we call "globalism" has been on the march for eighty years. A system that embraces centralized markets, bureaucratic regulation, international institutions, and so-called non-governmental organizations (predominantly funded by governments), globalism places significant power in the hands of a small collection of wealthy and powerful stakehold...

A civilisation that wants women to be adults cannot keep treating them as weather. Weather happens to you. An adult acts, and then answers for the act. The Lindsay Clancy case has become a public argument because a large part of the culture no longer accepts that sequence when the actor is female and the wreckage is intimate. Three children are dea...

A map is a lie that tells the truth. That is not a slogan. It is the first fact of cartography. The Earth is a sphere, slightly flattened, spinning, and continuously changing at the edges of ice and coast. Paper is flat. A screen is flat. Any attempt to put one onto the other must choose what to preserve and what to sacrifice. Distances, areas, ang...

"The British people are rising up. What choice do they have? The Labour party has betrayed them, destroyed the country. Hundreds of protesters (some masked) clashed with police overnight Sept 6–7 in Portsmouth after a single dinghy carrying ~140 migrants made an unusually long crossing from Normandy and was brought ashore near Eastney. Demonstrator...

"As the 25th anniversary of September 11 approaches, Canadian public television has asked newsrooms not to speak of "terrorist attacks." In the camp of the Good, the day has now arrived when they criminalize patriotism, an obstacle to building the multicultural dream with eyes wide open. Welcome to Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, for a f...

If diversity were strength, Spain would not have needed a national evening to say the word enough. Hundreds of thousands came out on Ceuta's day; Madrid's Cibeles packed on one count to 150,000, tens of thousands in Seville, Málaga, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Valencia, the islands, and more than 30,000 again in Ceuta itself, because an exclave had been u...

Andrew Garfield is back on his crusade, 13 years after first floating it, to make Peter Parker "into boys." And the pitch is pure Hollywood woke: Why can't we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It's hardly even ground-breaking. Hardly ground-breaking. That's the tell. It's not a creative idea, it's a rebranding exercise wearing a cape....

Apocalypse has a preferred unit, and it is not the centimetre. When Al Gore stood in front of a drowning Florida and talked about twenty feet, he was not offering a tide gauge. He was offering a sermon. West Antarctica "goes," Greenland "goes," the map of the low countries becomes an aquarium, a hundred million people walk. Two decades later the So...