The world does not usually pay much attention to Ottawa, Canada’s sleepy capital city. But over the weekend it generated international headlines. A “Freedom Convoy” consisting of anti-vaccine mandate truckers descended on the Canadian parliament to protest cross-border vaccine mandates …
Vasectomies won’t save the planet
When H. G. Wells imagined the end of the world, he thought of a salt dead sea under a dying sun. His time traveller, having navigated his machine 30 million years into the future, saw this: algal slime, lichenous rocks, …
Why the experts are losing
We tend to characterise totalitarianism as a top-down affair, where the state controls the thoughts and actions of its citizenry according to the whims of some politburo. But in the West today, the project of information control and narrative management …
The rise of Europe’s fake populists
After seven inconclusive rounds of voting, on Saturday the Italian parliament re-elected Sergio Mattarella as the country’s president and official head of state. It didn’t come entirely as a surprise. As I noted on UnHerd, the two most likely winners …
Raquel Rosario Sánchez won’t be silenced
Raquel Rosario Sánchez should be graduating this month with a PhD from one of the UK’s most prestigious universities. Instead, she will be in court, suing the University of Bristol for allegedly failing to protect her from bullying and harassment.…
René Girard’s apocalypse is now
“The apocalypse,” declared René Girard, “has already begun.” The most influential philosopher in the world today was on a messianic mission before his death seven years ago.
Since then, his work has found acclaim far beyond the academy: business gurus, …
What Ukraine can learn from Israel
Almost eight years ago I watched a Ukrainian teenager lob a can of Mojito Royce Ice into a ditch and had the first stirrings of what the future might hold. It was May 2014, and I had travelled to the …
Scientific tyranny has captured America
Plato’s dialogues are full of strikingly individual characters who have been stamped by the accidents of their time and place but are nevertheless familiar to us from our own. A particularly fine example is the teacher of rhetoric Thrasymachus, who …
How Covid stole our privacy
As soon as I turn on my phone, it becomes a node in a network, giving me access to the entire world. But it also gives Apple access to information about me and my behaviour; I become another source in …
Putin’s next move
A couple of weeks ago, in a biting sleet wind, I visited the graveyard of the tiny village of Bohoniki in Poland’s far north east, home to Poland’s minuscule Tatar Muslim minority, descendents of the Mongol Golden Horde. On the …
Putin has history on his side
If you set off from Kiev and drive east, heading across the flat fields of central Ukraine, after about four hours you’ll come to a city called Poltava. By post-Soviet standards it’s not such a bad place, with a sleepy, …
The Left-wing case against vaccine mandates
The Covid vaccine rollout is seen as one of the success stories of the pandemic. Over 60% of the world’s population has now received one dose of the vaccine. This has coincided with a fall in Covid mortality among the …
Ireland’s elites are rewriting the past
When the Irish government published a video to commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016, there were a number of glaring absences. The 90-second clip made no mention of its combatants or the bloody crushing of the rebellion …
Inside Germany’s paedophile experiment
Hidden away in a village in northern Germany, Ruby has lived a lonely and tormented existence. Just 25 years old, she has a horrifying secret that, if exposed, could see her ostracised, even killed.
Ruby is a paedophile.
Ruby is …
The cost of sexual liberation
“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970). Last week, a tall, moustachio’d 25-year-old serial shagger in New York City became Exhibit A for this claim – and also …