Here’s my take: Those who thought for themselves, read the available information and then stuck up the middle finger at the people attempting to convince them to take the vexxines not only will win they have already and will keep winning. Be smart now and into the future, build reserves, live frugally so you’re prepared and be patient; you’re not just winning now, today and here you’re going to continue winning and those who made the other decision are going to continue losing both now and well into the future. If you do that and keep your powder dry five years from now you’re odds-on to have a big fat grin on your face.

When all is said and done I expect mRNA to be consigned to the dustbin of history, the worst of a bad set of medical experiments run on entire populations without cause — and those firms involved in it are going to be severely damaged if not (as in the case of one-trick-ponies) utterly destroyed. Biotech firms blowing up is nothing new; they do it all the time and most of them fail. The only difference here is the size of the detonations as a result of the stupidity of attempting to use unproved medical technology on a mass basis.

Do not expect the economic and sociological impact will be over or “back to normal” in a year. If we’re lucky in five years we’ll be coming out of it; if not it might be a decade or even longer. But those who made smart decisions will be the winners on a statistical basis and already are winning.

Hold your head high if “screw you!” was your answer to this garbage.

You were right and it is rapidly becoming consensus whether the media and so-called “bigwigs” like it or not.

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=247865#discuss

• New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the city hit its 'breaking point' on Friday as he requested state aid to deal with 400 migrants arriving every day 
• Adams said that about 40,000 asylum seekers have reached the Big Apple since last spring, with 835 coming on Thursday alone
• Many have been bused into the city by governors and city officials from border states, who claim they are helping migrants reach their preferred destination
• Adams also called for federal aid and a immigration reform to stop the crisis 
  

Adam's office noted that the city has received more than 3,100 asylum seekers in the previous week, averaging about 400 each day, with 835 arriving on Thursday alone.

'All this is pushing New York City to the brink,' Adams said. 'Since last spring, the city has stepped up to welcome approximately 40,000 asylum seekers, providing them with shelter, food, and connections to a host of resources. 

'We have opened 74 emergency shelters and four humanitarian relief centers at breakneck speed, and done this almost entirely on our own.' 

The mayor also appeared to take a swipe at the Biden administration and federal lawmakers over the lack of solutions at the border, which saw a spike in illegal immigration in recent months.

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent of dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures?

What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?

When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan? Who planned it and why?

What happened to the once-trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie with impunity under oath?

Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?

How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew. (read more)

Ask Deborah Birx to ‘splain’ exactly what was going on in that White House C-19 task force. Why did the public health officers demonize early treatments with known, safe drugs and censor anyone who spoke out against their insane policies? What did the task force know about Pfizer and Moderna’s “vaccine” trials? Ask Rochelle Walensky how come she and the CDC kept pushing mRNA shots and boosters long after a broad array of injuries and deaths presented from their use. Put Bill Gates’s ass in the chair and have him ‘splain’ the labyrinth of funding mechanisms he set up to push “vaccines” all over the globe and how his tentacles happen to penetrate into the World Health Org (WHO). Ask him if he ever had conversations with the leadership of the WHO and the World Economic Forum (WEF) about population reduction and methods for achieving it.

Weaponization of Government. Time for FBI Director Christopher Wray to ‘splain’ how come he sat silently in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop — stuffed as it was with deal memoranda about payoffs from Ukraine and other foreign lands — through the first impeachment of Mr. Trump in late 2019 and early 2020, from the initial House hearings into the Senate trial… when said laptop was full of exculpatory evidence (“Brady material”)proving that Mr. Trump had a good reason to inquire about those matters in a phone call with V. Zelensky. Ask Mr. Wray what he knows about the roles of “whistleblower” (CIA agent) Eric Ciaramella and Intel Agency Inspector General Michael Atkinson and their relations with former House Intel Committee chair Adam Schiff. Ask Mr. Wray how many federal agents were involved in the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, both inside and outside. Ask him why one Ray Epps was never indicted for incitement captured on video. Ask him why the FBI never made a murder or manslaughter referral in the death of Ashli Babbitt. Don’t let him bullshit the committee about “ongoing investigations” blah blah. Ask Mr. Wray if he directly ordered his agents to monitor and censor social media companies, and, if not him, who did?

Summon the ghost of James Comey to ‘splain’ the finer points of RussiaGate: how he fell for Hillary Clinton’s Steele Dossier prank; how he used Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman to leak info about confidential meetings with Mr. Trump; whether he ordered Peter Strzok’s sandbagging operation on Gen. Mike Flynn, the FISA court shenanigans, the hiring of CrowdStrike instead of using FBI forensic experts to vet evidence; the run-up to “Crossfire Hurricane” the roles of international men of mystery Stefan Halper and Josef Mifsud in the operations to incriminate Trump appointees, Nellie Ohr’s role as a DOJ-FBI go-between with the Fusion GPS company.

Let’s hear from former CIA director John Brennan about the “17 Intel Agencies” who swore Russia was behind 2016 election interference and then about the 50-odd distinguished intel officers and other high officials who swore that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russia put-on job. Ask former Attorney General Bill Barr to ‘splain’ if he was informed about the Hunter Biden laptop when the FBI got it in 2019. Bring back former AG Jeff Sessions to ‘splain’ how the Mueller Special Counsel’s office was stuffed with Democratic Party activist Lawfare cadres, and how he determined that Mr. Mueller was mentally up to the job. Bring in Mr. Mueller to ‘splain’ how he testified that in the two-year course of his inquiry he never heard of the company Fusion GPS.

Find a special booster chair for Merrick Garland to ‘splain’ how come so many January 6 suspects are being held indefinitely pre-trial in the DC lockup on rinky-dink charges under the harshest conditions (solitary confinement, denial of medical care) in defiance of due process of law, in particular the constitutional right to a speedy trial. Ask Mr. Garland why he’s devoting vast resources of the DOJ to pursue ever more January 6 protesters on Mickey Mouse charges. Ask him to ‘splain’ how it came to pass that he went after parents protesting at school boards about indecent sex ed for little children and racist anti-white indoctrination. Ask him about sending SWAT teams on predawn raids to the homes of investigation targets whose lawyers volunteered to deliver them to the FBI offices. Ask him why he appointed a RussiaGate-involved lawyer, one Robert K Hur, as Special Counsel in the “Joe Biden” classified document matter.

That’s just my short list of areas to begin excavations. The Biden Family influence-peddling operation would be a fertile ground for a dedicated inquiry of a special committee. So would the adventures of Democratic Party Lawfare election engineer Marc Elias, along with the election funding activities ($400-million) of Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Civic Life in 2020. I’m sure readers can think of a thousand other matters worth airing in the public arena. Let’s see if The New York Times, The WashPo, and the cable news networks actually report any of this accurately…or if they just turn up the gaslight.

One somewhat disconnected thought, a sort-of postscript: The World Economic Forum’s annual jamboree at Davos, Switzerland, opens this coming Monday. Der Schwabenklaus, Bill Gates, and an international cast of global Big Machers will be in one room for the opening plenary session all at the same time. Think about it. Just sayin’. (read more)

• Start cross dressing with no feminizing hormones or surgery.
• Start cross dressing.  Take feminizing hormones. Develop big tits and a limp dick. Lose your body hair and constantly diet to avoid gaining weight.
• Start cross dressing.  Take feminizing hormones. Have sex reassignment surgery. You should know ahead of time that a surgically constructed vulva, labia and vagina will fool only virgins or sexually naïve partners. Your partners don’t have to be gifted amateur gynecologists to know your nether region is fake. You will not look like a real woman. You will not smell or taste like a real woman. You will not become naturally lubricated and receptive like an aroused real woman.

A new report from Sanjana Friedman at Pirate Wires documents a phenomenon that’s been a source of discussion among the extremely online for a little while, and has now made it into the open. “Transmaxxing” is a subculture of young men who embrace trans identities not because they believe they were ‘born in the wrong body’ but simply because they can, and because they think it’ll make their lives better. 

It’s a phenomenon that reveals more nakedly than ever before the true face of the cyborg era: a culture caught between increasingly powerful technology, and the collapse of any coherent narrative about how best to use it for the good into a general sense that all narratives are interchangeable.

As Friedman tells it, the transmaxxers are strikingly post-ideological about their self-remodelling, at least compared to the official trans narrative, which draws heavily from 20th-century civil rights discourse. In this view, ‘gender identity’ is immutable and trans people are just ‘born that way’. 

Many transmaxxers, though, modify themselves just because they want to (examples are shown on this 73-page ‘transmaxxing’ manifesto). Some report making up stories of gender dysphoria for medical professionals, while others then self-induce gender dysphoria by watching ‘sissy hypno’ — a type of video in which hypnotic (and sometimes also pornographic) stimuli are combined with messages encouraging the male viewer to embrace feminine looks or behaviour. The post-ideological feel of the phenomenon is underlined further by how often such individuals shift from embracing the ‘incel’ ideologies associated with the Right, to ‘trans’ identities associated with the Left. 

For the most part, the contest between trans activists and their feminist opponents has been conducted on the field of ‘gender’: what it is, whether it has discrete categories, how (or whether) it relates to physiology and so on. A smaller handful of writers have drawn attention to the transhumanist implications of claiming a right to remodel one’s physical body based on an unfalsifiable inner feeling. 

This vision sees medicine not as a restorative practice intended to return us to a shared understanding of ‘normal’, but as a potentially limitless method of upgrading ‘normal’ according to personal desire and preference. This has been openly advocated for some time as well by some trans activists, such as pharma entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt. But the debate has so far stayed largely within the pre-cyborg moral frame of equality, justice and rights. 

Yet as Friedman notes, what’s striking in the transmaxxers is the way they’re cheerfully abandoning the civil-rights narrative, in favour of an open, wholesale embrace of the transhumanist outlook. Many transmaxxers report that the interventions have significantly improved their lives; why, such individuals might ask, does anyone need a ‘born in the wrong body’ story to justify something that works on its own terms? 

And it’s here that we catch a glimpse of the real face of the cyborg era: an emerging cultural paradigm in which technology is the ideology. The opinions someone endorses while down an internet rabbit hole matter less than the cumulative psychological impact of spending all day every day in that rabbit hole: a condition of radical body dissociation and (increasingly measurably) real-world social isolation. 

(image source)

Once self is thus dissociated from body, there’s no obvious reason not to treat that ‘meat suit’ as an instrument to be optimised, whether via hormones, surgery or other interventions, in pursuit of greater happiness — and again the story matters less than the fact you’re simply doing it because you can. (read more)

But as someone who has spent years researching incels, such assuredness leaves me uncomfortable. Though the language changes from one news outlet to another, their reports are all essentially the same: “Plymouth shooter was a product of a violent, misogynistic ‘incel’ subculture.” The pieces tend to include quotations from former or current government officials, or experts in terrorism or gender-based violence who explain the danger facing our communities when thousands of young boys are radicalised online, just like Jake Davison.

The source of all this speculation is Davison’s digital footprint, the collage of his social media presence, including a now-deleted YouTube channel and a now-suspended Reddit account that chronicles a long history of isolation and self-doubt. He was a frequent poster in various Reddit communities, known as “subs”. Some were popular with incels; a few were “photo-rating subs”, where users are encouraged to rate each other’s appearances.

Interestingly, despite the certainty of many who have described him as an “incel”, Davison was also active on an anti-Incel “watchdog” sub, and two others dedicated to debunking the tenets of the incel ideology known as the “Black Pill”.

Of course, these things are never black and white. Davison certainly talked like an incel, using their terminology  and citing concepts from evolutionary psychology popular in “black pilled” circles. He uploaded a number of confessional-style video bogs lamenting his lost youth and his inability to lose weight, as well as the crippling insecurity that prevented him from talking to girls. In one video, he spoke emphatically about why women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance, to be “picky” for reproductive reasons. Just days before the attack, he claimed that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

But most of his videos just showed him lifting weights. In one, entitled “Older vid when I was a bit leaner”, he starts posing to the camera, with an Eminem track blaring in the background.

Still, according to the definition provided by incels themselves — a man unable to form a romantic or sexual relationship despite desiring one — Davison would have met the criteria. He was a virgin at the age of 22, and had never had any kind of a girlfriend.

But Davison himself did not self-identify that way. The one time he mentioned the word in a video, he paused to clarify that he did not include himself among their ranks, but considered them “people like [himself]”. This detail appears to have been lost on much of the media — as have Davison’s broader criticisms of the incel movement.

Three months ago, he described on a Reddit thread how much of the misogyny of the incel movement was “just toxic negative bullshit” and explained how he was excited for the end of lockdown, to begin driving lessons and start socialising more. Soon after, he responded to a post in the same subreddit by a depressed 17-year-old, encouraging him to overcome his insecurities, stand up to bullies, and not “let the blackpill or whatever shit you read online drag you down”.

Davison’s final post to the site, written just two days before the attack, was less optimistic. He explained that he was a loner by nature, something which he used to accept. But now he felt that he should have tried harder. “It’s vital you try your best to integrate with people, fit in and establish a solid social life and develop socially you can’t afford to be a loner as a young person it will only destroy your life,” he wrote. He sounded defeated but introspective, like someone taking accountability for his choices, not “echoing” an ideology.

None of this is to say that Davison wasn’t influenced by, or protective of, the incel community. But does that mean the media is right to ascribe his horrific attack to that relationship? I’m not convinced it’s as clear-cut as that.

Indeed, it’s striking just how inaccurate and irresponsible some of the commentary by self-appointed incel experts has been in recent days. Take the claim, made in the Guardian a day after the tragedy, that incels “actively recruit” young men, recalling the tactics used by extremist groups such as ISIS. I’ve spoken to dozens of incels for my research, and not one of them has suggested this happens. Overwhelmingly, these young men find the content on their own, which isn’t difficult to imagine for young people with internet access.

Most are “lurkers” who do not even interact with other members of the community. They also do not “actively incite” acts of violence, such as an “Incel Uprising” or the “Beta Rebellion,” as has been suggested. Unlike in other groups, who offer the promise of some kind of reward for such actions — the caliphate, the ethnostate, or eternal salvation — there is no common goal that binds incels together or mobilises them toward violence.

That is not to minimise the potentially toxic effect of a fatalistic, misogynistic echo chamber in which misery and failure are celebrated, or to deny the possibility that some very vulnerable individuals with a predisposition toward violence might come across their community and use it to ascribe their vengeance to some greater purpose. The murder of ten people by Elliot Roger in 2014 tragically demonstrated this is possible.

But the coverage thus far has focused on the “incel angle” to the exclusion of everything else, at times even cherry-picking details in a way that feels intellectually dishonest. For if we’re going to look at the case of Jake Davison honestly, we have to look at the whole picture.

We know that an assault allegation from September of 2020 led police to seize Davison’s firearm and revoke his licence the following December. It was returned just a week before the attack, for reasons that are unknown. The Independent Office of Police Conduct is investigating the decision to do so.

We also know that Davison’s mother, Maxine, and other relatives reportedly “begged police and NHS to help him with mental health problems — he had been diagnosed with autism and attention deficit disorder — though the timeline is unclear. Neighbours have commented that he was “a troubled soul”, who had always been very quiet and close to his mother, but had recently begun to clash with her.

For now, that is all we know about this devastating atrocity and the man who committed it. Yet somehow, armed only with (understandable) indignation and a few hot takes from social media, we seem to have lost sight of the perpetrator behind this awful attack, preferring instead to blame the atrocity on incel culture. In some ways, this is an understandable response to tragedy. It is more comforting, after all, to seize upon a simple explanation — in this case that incel culture is to blame — than accept that the situation is more complex.

But doing so makes it impossible for us to have the more important discussion about how we got here in the first place — and why certain men are drawn to incel culture. What is it about these communities that makes them appealing? Is it our increased isolation and lack of human contact? Or is it, as incels suggest, the fact that they feel marginalised in our current “woke” culture? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but if my research has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t help incels — and, in turn, protect our daughters — until we have that honest conversation. (read more)

Incels are very interested in e-girls too. So interested, in fact, that on incel forums, which I have spent a lot of time researching, discussion of them is essentially forbidden, restricted to a very specific context: references must be broad, and broadly negative. Anything else is considered “simping” — an offence punishable with a ban. Incels resent the attention lavished on these young women, and endlessly criticise their insatiable desire for attention, their licentiousness, their greed. OnlyFans creators, the ultimate e-girls, represent everything wrong with the world: narcissism, female privilege, sexual depravity, and financial abuse.

But Crooner sees it differently. “They play these roles, maybe a Rapunzel type, or the manic pixie, the chaotic e-girl, who compels the boy to save her. This forces him to shape up. It gives him the chance to become a hero.” He isn’t interested in judging anyone, or in identifying their dysfunction. I tell him that the story of Rapunzel is thought to represent Borderline Personality Disorder resulting from narcissistic parental abuse. He laughs, and then acknowledges that a staggering proportion of e-girls talk about having the disorder “compared to normie spaces”.

“I play this kind of ‘searching lover’ young man,” Crooner explains. “I do some philosophy too, but I’m showing people my quest for the holy grail.”  His videos and his timeline are filled with depictions of knights: young men in medieval armour. One of his most popular tweets bears the image of Leonardo DiCaprio from Romeo and Juliet, dressed in chainmail for the masquerade ball, alongside the Knight of Cups tarot. It says: “You’re not an incel. You’re an Arthurian Knight on the Quest for the Holy Grail.” His Twitter handle is @heropilled.

“This is what me and my friends, who I’m calling the e-Romantics, are onto right now: trying to flesh out the right mythos for the incel.” He believes that incels are in dire need of a different narrative about themselves and who they could be.

Flandalff the White is one of Crooner’s friends, and his aims are similar, though he is more private. “I think there’s a way to help lift men out of the ‘swamp of sadness’ so many are stuck in. I managed to crawl out of it myself, so I feel I may have a few insights that might help.” He is producing a series of YouTube videos based on an 800-tweet thread. Before he agreed to speak to me, he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to characterise him as “anti-incel”. “Incels are my brothers,” he said. “We all sink, or we all float, together.”

Another member of the collective is Tanner, who is edgier than both Flan and Crooner, with an ironic sensibility and a penchant for shitposting. He wouldn’t tell me anything about himself, but he snarks about US politicians of nominal significance, so he’s probably American. In addition to caustically funny satire about “mid-girls” and “coomers”, he writes on Twitter about how Romantic Love was a signature invention of the Middle Ages, a reaction against Christianity. He believes that the e-relationship is “one of the last bastions of romance in the modern age”, because it involves an obstacle to overcome: the distance. “There is a courtship and then a heroic process against the odds.”

After speaking to the e-Romantics, I decided to test-drive some of their content by retweeting it for my own followers, many of whom are incels. They have responded favourably so far to ideas of knights and grails and quests: “That seems wacky. Weird. But fun.” From this crowd, any response at all is noteworthy; one of curiosity rather than cringe is monumental. The e-Romantics seem to be doing something right.

What they’re doing right would be called, in the field of countering violent extremism, a “counter-narrative”. Several organisations have tried it. The Google-backed tech start-up Moonshot CVE offered the “Redirect Method”, for example, which involved a series of short videos designed to “undermine the extremist narrative” of white supremacism and Islamism. These ostensibly inspirational stories from ostensibly credible messengers were recommended for users who searched certain keywords online. I haven’t seen these videos myself — they’re not publicly available — but after the programme was deployed in 2019, abysmal results were reported.

The alternative narrative of the e-Romantics seems a better fit for incels — better than impersonal propaganda, and also better than the mantra they hear everywhere else: “Just focus on yourself!” We constantly prescribe self-improvement, self-realisation and self-care — elevating and encouraging selfishness as the noblest, healthiest pursuit, while pathologising intimacy and devotion as “codependency” and overearnest attempts at connection as “harassment”. Maybe the root of our relational difficulties is the 21st-century maxim that our most aspirational, “final form” is one of cold, navel-gazing contemplation.

There is clearly hunger for the “hero pill”. The Marvel Universe, and fantasy programming in general, is endlessly expanding. But romantic love is often minimised in these recent iterations — written off as too heteronormative, sexist, ableist. Chivalry is practically a hate crime. But the need to give one’s life meaning, the call to heroism and adventure, is still alive and well in all of us. And in young men, it seems, it can turn into something very dark. Today’s anti-heroes are very appealing. After all, being someone powerful and evil is better than being no one at all.

Crooner understands where this can lead. “The incel has will but he lacks power, so he manifests his power through ideology, through fascism,” one of his videos explains. But, he goes on, this isn’t the path to happiness. “Have you noticed that fascist statues never smile? They’re not live-laugh-loving.”

I asked Crooner about the dangers of encouraging incels to risk their hearts. Perhaps, for some, the romantic quest might actually be futile; perhaps it will just lead to rejection.

“That’s the quest,” he says. “You don’t lose if you get rejected. A hero has to suffer. You just go on to the next part of the quest. In the meantime, you create. That suffering makes you level up. You can create something beautiful. It’s all about the desire. Keep following that.”

He’s right. Love inspires human greatness. Unrequited love, especially, produces a lot of the best art. And for the e-Romantics, this isn’t about countering violent extremism. They’re not focused on crime prevention or tackling misogyny. They’re just “a ragtag bunch of internet weirdos” without any agenda, who want to change the online landscape so that they can enjoy it more. “It’s our space,” Crooner says. “We live here. Why not make it what we want?” (read more)

A couple years ago, World War 3 nearly started in Ladakh. A dry, high-altitude region of Indian Kashmir on the Himalayan border with China, it’s been the site of escalating tensions and military buildup for some time. On June 15, the first physical confrontation between the Indian and Chinese militaries for 45 years erupted, killing at least 20 Indian and 45 Chinese soldiers.

There are all sorts of geopolitical reasons cited for the escalating tension between the world’s two most populous countries, but there is one more central and timeless problem that is going to drive both countries towards violence and instability — women. Or a lack of them.

In his History of the Normans, written circa 1015, Dudo of St Quentin argued that the reason the Vikings went raiding was because they couldn’t find wives, an idea echoed by the Tudor antiquarian William Camden in his 1610 book Britannia. ‘Wikings’, Camden suggested, were what you got when there weren’t enough women to go round, resulting in an excess of young men hanging around full of machismo but without any prospect of finding a nice girl and settling down. (Viking literally means raider.)

So, whenever these spare males “multiply’d themselves to a burdensom community”, Camden reports that an area would draw lots. Those of the young troublemakers chosen in the lottery would be sent off on a ship to make a nuisance of themselves overseas. Which they did.

In evolutionary biology, the ‘operational sex ratio’ is a term used to count the proportion of males and females in a given species that are seeking a reproductive mate. As soon as the ratio tilts away from 50:50, the sex that’s over-represented will have to compete to secure a mate from among the less-plentiful potential partners of the opposite sex.

Though they wouldn’t have used that phrase, both Dudo of St Quentin and William Camden were both describing this phenomenon in human males. Where potential wives are scarce and the ‘burdensom community’ of spare men multiplies, the result is more violence and crime. One 2019 study showed that where polygyny — that is, multiple wives — is a social norm for higher-status men, attacks on neighbouring ethnic groups skyrocket. With a few men monopolising eligible women, the rest are forced to seek status and resources by attacking other tribes.

India and China both have an extremely ‘burdensom community’ of spare males. The normal ratio of newborn boys to girls is around 105:100. But as Mara Hvistendahl documents in Unnatural Selection, thanks to prenatal ultrasound and sex-selective abortion the ratio in China is around 118:100, and 108:100 in India. In some regions of India, the ratio rises as high as 150 males to 100 females. Though sex-selective technology is now banned in India, it’s still widespread, and the country now has some 37 million more men than women. Studies estimate that China has around 30 million excess men.

A naïve view of ‘mate competition’ might imagine this would play to women’s advantage. Females in sexually dimorphic species don’t choose mates at random but select for traits that will give their offspring an advantage of some kind. In bird terms, that might translate into choosing the male who can build the most splendid nest. Humans, being evolved creatures, do this too: ‘hypergamy’, or more colloquially ‘marrying up’, in practice means that the wealthier a man is, more women will consider him a desirable partner.

Certainly, some women benefit: hypergamy in China is brutal. Young Chinese men in some areas pay a deposit to a woman’s family even for the right to date her, non-refundable if the match doesn’t work out. Women refuse anyone who doesn’t have a car, a house and money for a ‘bride price’ running to tens of thousands of pounds.

But other women pay the cost. Human rights organisations have reported the ugly side-effects of the woman shortage, which include skyrocketing sexual harassment in India, and bride trafficking in China. There, women are tricked into migrating from countries such as Cambodia or Vietnam before being locked in a room and repeatedly raped until they are pregnant. Sometimes these women are allowed to escape but must leave their child behind.

Along with a hidden cost in abused and trafficked women, Chinese history suggests that bachelors with no prospect of marriage are associated with banditry, violence and even civil war. The Nien rebellion of 1863 was driven by ‘bare branches’, as men with no prospect of marriage are called in China. Meanwhile, in India, social scientist Prem Choudhry expects the woman shortage to make politics more extreme, as a man with no family is considered worthless and will need to prove himself somehow: “If they remain single, they will be declared not men at all.”

Historically a common solution to the problem of ‘bare branches’ has been to divert them from domestic trouble-making to foreign expansionist warfare. The Viking raids on Britain were one result of this; so was the conquest of Ceuta. Joao I of Portugal, the illegitimate son of King Peter I, came to power with the help of their own variety of ‘bare branches’ in 1385. But when he realised that their piracy and robbery posed risks to his own rule, he sent them off to seek status and resources by invading North Africa instead, kicking off a long and ugly history of European colonialism on that continent, the repercussions of which still echo today.

I’m not suggesting all the tensions between India and China can be attributed to spare men. Ladakh is close to the headwaters of the Ganges: not a location India wants to see under Chinese control. But unlike Dark Ages Scandinavia or medieval Portugal, modern nations can’t just send their spare men off on expansionist wars — although there are reports that China is using Uighur women like Viking men would have used captured Saxons.

And men who cannot demonstrate their masculine worth by forming and supporting a family will look for other opportunities to prove themselves. The prospect of two nuclear-armed superpowers squaring up within a political climate shaped by angry young men should worry us.

Angry incels closer to home should worry us too. Tempting though it may be to imagine that in the West progressive values have somehow abolished our evolved tendencies to intrasexual and inter-sexual competition for the best mates, evidence suggests otherwise.

Although the sex ratio in the liberated West is the normal 105:100, today this isn’t translating straightforwardly into family formation. As women have become more educated and economically independent, researchers hoped hypergamy would fade away, with women becoming more willing to ‘marry down’. It would make sense: after all, a woman doing well in a demanding career might in theory have an easier life if she married a self-employed plasterer whose flexible schedule would let him deal with school runs and appointments.

But after hundreds of thousands of years of evolving to prioritise mates with resources and status, it seems that many women still prefer to seek the ‘best’ potential partner. One recent US study showed that even where women are more educated than their partners, they’ll still show a preference for men who earn more than them. That is, high-flying women will disregard the plasterer and pursue an equally high-earning husband.

To compound the problem, social norms in favour of monogamous marriage have loosened over the decades since the 1960s — but this hasn’t made women less choosy about their partners. The number of American men under 30 who have never had sex tripled between 2008 and 2018 — but hasn’t risen nearly as rapidly for women. The only plausible explanation is that women are still having sex, but they’re competing for a smaller pool of desirable men and leaving the rest on the shelf.

You only have to look at online dating advice for American men to see this at work: “Show her you aren’t the average video game playing, cheap beer drinking, couch potato loser she wants to avoid,” advises one article on cultivating the ‘Alpha male persona’.

So even with normal sex ratios, our culture is creating a sort of flotsam of sexual no-hopers, composed of those males who simply aren’t impressive enough to attract anyone even for a fling, let alone a committed relationship. The grievances of this sexual underclass are creeping into our politics, as Angela Nagle argued in Kill All Normies: “Sexual patterns that have emerged because of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and a growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order. Their own anxiety and anger about their low-ranking status in this hierarchy is precisely what has produced their hardline rhetoric about asserting hierarchy in the world politically when it comes to women and non-whites.”

In case anyone is tempted to dismiss this as harmless losers posting misogynistic memes, remember incels go on actual killing sprees. And there’s considerable overlap between the ‘redpilled’ community of sexually frustrated anti-feminists and the far-right more generally. As in the Nien uprising, ‘bare branches’ make for ugly politics.

Bare branches also make for enthusiastic terrorists. ISIS used sexual slavery as a key plank in its recruiting pitch for foreign fighters. Like the ‘Wikings’, men who don’t have many prospects at home will take considerable risks if they think it’ll get them laid, and (again like the actual Vikings) never mind whether the girls are willing or not. Conversely, settling down de-radicalises: according to research by the Institute of Family Studies, people with children are less likely to express views consistent with white identity politics. Likewise the Saudi Arabian deradicalisation programme essentially involved getting extremists married, and has proved very effective.

It’s difficult to tackle this subject without yourself getting accused of being ‘redpilled’ or a men’s rights activist. But it’s surely possible to discuss the political and social problem of spare men without believing that the solution is to force unwilling women to have kids with them.

And addressing this problem should absolutely be seen as a feminist project. Being consigned to a life of hopeless, low-status singledom makes men more violent, sexually dangerous and politically disruptive. This is not an excuse, but it is a reality. It’s straightforwardly in women’s interests to improve the lot of our own burgeoning plague of Wikings. (read more)