The business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations.” —The Singularity Hub on “X”
Which is to say, there is Reality, and then there is every other cockamamie aggregate of simulation pretending to represent Reality, i.e. garbage. How many millions among us already subscribe to the latter? Apparently, lots, and they are not evenly distributed these days. You surely know where to look for the un-Reality. The party of men can get pregnant, and all the rest. . . .
Enter A-I to make things worse. Probably a lot worse. We have failed to learn the chief lesson of the computer age, which is that the virtual is not an acceptable substitute for the authentic. So, we plunge deeper into realms of the un-real and the inauthentic. This turns into a quest to get something-for-nothing, and the unfortunate result of that old dodge is that you will end up with nothing, and that is exactly why we are at such a hazardous pass in the human project.
I apologize if the above seems too metaphysical. But that’s the scenery en route when a civilization flies up its own wazoo. Novelist Cory Doctorow has nicely labeled this the enshitification of daily life.
First of all, get this: A-I has already quit operating as-advertised. It has lost the “I” part. A-I does its thing by rapidly combing through the Internet to evaluate and seize information that you request. Increasingly, A-I colonizes the Internet with second-hand, third-hand, and so forth A-I-generated information. The more territory A-I seizes on the Web, and the more it trains itself on recursive feedbacks of its own garbage, the more distorted the output gets. As that occurs, A-I becomes increasingly abstracted from Reality, which is exactly what happens when a person goes insane. So, expect an exponential rise in incorrect content that would, in theory, become a pretty serious problem when you ask A-I to run things like systems we depend on, the electric grid, harvesting crops, warfare. . . .
Secondly, as that process runs, and probably before it gets very far, A-I looks like it will wreck the financial system, which, in turn, would crater the economy of everyday life — the ability of people to earn a living, buy stuff, support children, get food, and stay out of the rain. Zillions of dollars are being invested in A-I now and lately it is mainly what drives the capital markets. So far, alas, return on that investment is scant — actually, negative. The situation might never improve, and as the recognition hits, look out below. The only question is whether that happens before the central banks destroy the world’s currencies with money-printing.
One A-I application, robotaxi services such as Waymo, have never turned a profit. Will they ever? Doesn’t look good. Notice, too, that the elimination of cab-drivers means X-number fewer humans making a living to buy stuff (presumably made by other people in other jobs soon to be replaced by robots). Of course, that’s the self-replicating problem with all applied A-I in every field of employment. The more jobs eliminated, the fewer customers for anything. Please don’t tell me that guaranteed basic income fixes that problem.
In desperation — and due to certain weaknesses of human nature — another early attempt to monetize applied A-I turns out to be pornography: create your own personalized sex fantasy to-order. Companies are already producing the first rudimentary A-I sex robots, which, let’s face it, amounts to a masturbation industry. Why bother cultivating a real-live girlfriend when you can fall into the pre-heated silicone embrace of a Jennifer Lawrence simulation that will never talk back or ask for anything? You can easily see how that would result in a whole lot less human reproduction — of which there is already a signal shortage in Western Civ — meaning even fewer people to work at anything or buy anything or do anything, or simply be here in the pageant of Planet Earth.
The A-I pioneers managed to make the situation worse from the get-go. The Open A-I company’s Chat GPT, Google’s Gemini and Bard A-Is, and Facebook’s Meta A-I are all trained-up to be politically Woke-to-the-max, meaning on any given issue in the public arena their output is one patent absurdity or another. Note: last April, conservative activist Robby Starbuck sued Facebook when its chatbot reported out falsely that he had been on-the-scene for the Jan 6, 2021 US Capitol protest (he was in Tennessee that day). Facebook’s parent company, Meta, settled the case with Starbuck in August, 2025, for undisclosed terms and the company apologized publicly.
Two days ago, Mr. Starbuck sued Google for defamation (with malice and negligence) when it’s Bard A-I output alleged that he was a “child rapist,” a “serial sexual abuser,” that he abused and stalked his ex-wife (Starbuck states in his lawsuit that he has no ex-wife). It accused him further of fraud, embezzlement, drug charges, stalking business partners, and being a “shooter” or “person of interest” in a 1991 murder case (Starbuck was two years old at the time), of appearing in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs (untrue), working as a porn actor, and voicing support for the Ku Klux Klan.
The A-I cited non-existent news articles from outlets such as Newsweek, The New York Post, Rolling Stone, Mediaite, The Daily Beast, and Salon, along with fake URLs and headlines (e.g., “Robby Starbuck Responds to Murder Accusations”). Starbuck demonstrated this in a podcast episode on October 22–23, 2025, where he queried the A-I live.
Google spokesman José Castañeda attributed the issues to its A-I “hallucinating” — which tells you that the recursive feedback of garbage content in A-I is already well-advanced. Prepare for ever more interesting mischief, while you watch your portfolio of index stocks go up in a vapor.
Going back 250 years, the enemies of America thought long and hard about how to destroy the fledgling experiment of a democratic republic that our Founding Fathers had envisioned. It was and continues to be clear to them that America’s strength is a function of three phenomena:
A fervent belief in the God Who makes miracles happen, for just one example the crushing defeat of the thunderously powerful English Empire’s armies by blazing patriots like General George Washington and his ragtag army of American heroes.
An equally ardent belief in and passion for the concept of freedom. Men who knew they were going to die, and their wives who believed their deaths were for the noble cause of freedom, all sacrificed to bring about our victory over the monarchy that wanted to continue to rule us.
The most passionate was the embrace, belief in, and allegiance to family — its sanctity, its strength, its ability to weather all storms and overcome all obstacles.
If they could destroy all three, our enemies reasoned, the masses they considered essentially stupid would be forced to rely exclusively on Big Government. And so, to this day, the socialists-cum-communists among us are employing — as their predecessors did — every malevolent, criminal, and vicious tactic they can muster to actualize that goal.
Still, the family remains their most desired — yet maddeningly elusive — target.
Help along the way
That effort was generously helped — perhaps, at first, innocently — by the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the Austrian neurologist-cum-psychiatrist who was wildly successful in convincing the relatively new and free-thinking American public that the genesis of neuroses, phobias, anxieties, obsessions, depression, psychosis, and general psychological malfunction not only took place in the first few years of life, but were to be blamed on the mothers. Later therapists, like the sadistic psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, blamed “cold” mothers for their children’s autism.
Cancel
Mission #1 Accomplished: Mothers are not good for children.
These psychological theories prevailed throughout the 20th century and up to today, embraced by generations of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists until 1998, when they were thoroughly debunked by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption, where the Harvard-educated psychologist and editor of most of the psychology texts used in colleges and medical schools in America argued persuasively that a person’s peer group is the major influence of thought, feelings, and behavior throughout life.
In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the most world-changing medication in history, developed by Dr. John Rock, a Harvard professor and obstetrician-gynecologist with five children — along with Drs. Gregory Pincus, C.M. Phang, and Selzo Garcia. Their creation was the birth control pill, AKA The Pill. For the first time in world history, the narrative goes, women had control over their reproduction.
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For millions of women, it was their own Declaration of Independence, and a huge relief not to have to worry every month about getting pregnant.
Mission #2 Accomplished: Now we can be just like men, some women reasoned, and have as much sex as we want without worrying about getting pregnant. Thus was the Free Sex movement born, ushering in a complete redefinition of traditional morality.
Get out of the house!
Three years after The Pill, in 1963, a book by Betty Friedan, a housewife with three children from Queens, N.Y., shot to the top of every bestseller list. In essence, The Feminine Mystiquetold women that they were simply too smart, too creative, too intrinsically or at least potentially powerful to be spending their time, actually wasting their time, changing diapers, folding laundry, and — the most colossal waste of time of all — raising children.
Friedan’s book resonated!
Mission #3 Accomplished: Multimillions of young women abandoned the once desired goal of early marriage and motherhood and instead enrolled in colleges and universities, where they pursued professional careers ranging from medicine and law and architecture to jobs like telephone linewomen to military combatants to firefighters to hedge fund managers to business executives, et al.
Coincidentally, ahem, an economy that once allowed men to work outside the home and support a wife and put children through college magically became an economy that only two working parents could afford. It’s kind of like an economy that was completely energy-independent in 2020 under President Trump but quite magically became one in which President Biden had to beg foreign countries to sell him oil in 2021.
Reality sets in
The ’60s also ushered in the historically unprecedented rash of violent assassinations — live on TV — of
U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963 (age 46),
firebrand black activist Malcolm X in 1965 (age 39),
Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 (age 39), and
former attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 (age 42).
All of a sudden, the idealized world of the newly emancipated women was shattered. The world is out of control, they realized. Is it any wonder that so many of them enthusiastically embraced (or attended) the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, with not only free sex, but a geyser of drugs for the smoking and snorting and injecting?
Mission #4 Accomplished: Many of these college-educated women congratulated themselves on avoiding marriage and especially motherhood, asking themselves, “Who wants to bring a child into this world?”
Only a few years later
In 1971, Gloria Steinem — “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” — and editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin founded the first national feminist magazine, Ms.
Mission #5 Accomplished: The traditional nuclear family was being dismantled by a new generation of women who bought in to the notion that making money is infinitely more satisfying, meaningful, and important than raising children.
Marriage out — now babies out!
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in Roe v. Wade that all women have a “right” to an abortion. To this day, that decision is the Holy Grail of millions of women who believe that “my body, my choice” starts after they’ve had sex and gotten pregnant with a baby they don’t want.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the decision for abortion back to each individual state. Today, every woman in the United States who wants an abortion can get one, although some may have to endure the inconvenience of traveling to another state. Forget about the inconvenience their embryos face of a death sentence!
Mission #6 Accomplished: The once most cherished accomplishment of both men and women — to be the parent of a newborn baby — was effectively reduced to ending that baby’s life in utero. Today, in some states, abortion exists right up to the moment a full-term baby is delivered — and in California, believe it or not, even up to the time a healthy thriving baby is 28 days old! I believe that is called infanticide!
The ticking clock
Uh-oh. After graduating from college and laboring in the workforce for over a decade, millions of women realized that this money-making thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But looking for a good man — after stepping on their necks on the way up the ladder — was even more problematic.
Nevertheless, the new social phenomenon of women marrying in their mid-thirties and older took hold, and not coincidentally gave rise to a booming in vitro fertilization industry, as millions of these new brides learned that conceiving and carrying a child after the age of 35 is both a “high-risk” and extremely pricey enterprise.
Mission #7 Accomplished: Take the joy out of intimacy and sex, make it a mechanical act, and further erode both marriage and the family at the same time.
But what about my career?
Modern women have been told by the influencers of the day that they can “have it all” — marriage, children, and career. Since they wanted it all, they bought it!
Some women were lucky to have their mothers or mothers-in-law or even young grandmothers volunteer to raise their children, and a rare few could afford expensive nannies.
But most women had to rely on another industry that boomed like no other: the daycare business, where mothers dropped off their infants, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to paid workers who tended up to 20 or more children at a time, making sure those children were safe and fed, but not necessarily held, loved, comforted, taught, or nurtured.
This allowed the mothers to brag that the hour or so they spent with their child at the end of a day — in which both mother and child were exhausted — was, ahem, “quality time.”
Mission #8 Accomplished: Women out of the home, children being raised by strangers, the American family being dismantled piece by piece.
The genius Steve factor
There were two geniuses: Steve Case, the founding CEO of America Online (AOL) in 1983 (which really took off in the ’90s), and Steve Jobs, who invented, created, introduced the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.
No need to elaborate on the degree to which these geniuses eliminated face-to-face communication and succeeded in riveting both parents and children to all the tantalizing distractions on these electronic devices that separate people and depersonalize intimate relationships, especially meaningful communication between parents and children.
Mission #9 Accomplished: Family concerns take a backseat to beeping texts, sexy emojis, Facebook invitations, Instagram images, Hollywood gossip, and horrifically graphic porn sites, which even savvy eight-year-olds can access with ease.
Worse, this has given rise to an entire generation of sociopaths who, understandably, have little or no human empathy, given the largely robotic care they’ve received.
And now we have an ad — since removed and eliminated from every search engine — that shows a child laughing and sharing an experience with her clearly delighted mother. Both are on iPads communicating long distance. The ad ends with a voice telling the mother, “You don’t have to be there.”
Right. The mother doesn’t have to be there to raise and love and comfort and teach and tuck her child in at night, and the father doesn’t have to be there, either. Only Big Government should raise their child to be a good little obedient communist. That’s the message!
Mission #10 Accomplished: Father never mentioned, mother out of the picture, the actual premeditated murder of the American family.
And the crashing failure of the feminist movement.
Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong.
“What do you expect when you sue the president?” Hearing that comment, some people may guess the comment was made by someone addressing one of President Trump’s political opponents who has been targeted for federal prosecution. That quote, though, is much older. It is from an IRS agent addressing officials of a conservative organization that was being audited during Bill Clinton’s presidency. This illustrates that the use of federal agencies to punish presidents’ enemies did not start with President Trump.
The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used tax investigations against political opponents. Targeted individuals included publishers of newspapers that were highly critical of Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies.
President John F. Kennedy used the IRS and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to drive his conservative critics off the radio. President Lyndon Johnson also used the IRS and the FCC to silence conservative critics. One tool that was used to silence conservatives was to accuse broadcasters of violating the “fairness doctrine” by favoring conservative commentators.
President Richard Nixon used the IRS to target political enemies. The Nixon administration also threatened television and radio companies with revocation of their broadcast licenses unless they provided favorable coverage of the administration.
During the Clinton administration, the IRS not only targeted conservative and libertarian organizations it audited Paula Jones after she sued President Clinton for sexual harassment.
During the George W. Bush years, the IRS targeted organizations critical of the Iraq War. When Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the tax agency turned its attention back to conservative and libertarian groups, with a focus on organizations associated with the Tea Party. The Department of Homeland Security also issued a warning that those with pro-liberty bumper stickers — including supporting the Libertarian Party or my presidential campaign — might be violent extremists.
During the Biden administration, many Americans received harsh sentences for being present at the Capitol on January 6 even if they did not commit any violent acts.
Federal agencies can also target presidents’ political enemies without a presidential order to do so being issued. Some ambitious and unscrupulous individuals will target a president’s enemies believing that this is an effective way to curry favor with the president or high-level administration officials. Others will use the power of the government against the president’s political enemies or those involved with political movements seeking to change the direction of the government out of a belief that these people or groups constitute a threat to the federal government that justifies violating constitutional rights.
This history suggests that abuse of power is an inevitable feature of the modern welfare-warfare-regulatory state. Therefore, instead of focusing just on electing the “right” president, we should focus on shrinking the size and scope of the federal government to its constitutional limitations. This will ensure that Americans can exercise their right to criticize the government without fear of reprisal. As Thomas Jefferson said, “in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
As Bill Maher once laid bare, “For Millennials, the word socialism doesn’t conjure up images of Stalin and Castro, it conjures up images of naked Danish people on a month-long paid vacation…it’s not such a jarring proposition when socialism comes along and says you are entitled to free stuff.”
That casual humor hides a grave reality: a growing portion of Democrats embrace an ideology they do not truly understand, mistaking state control and economic tyranny for harmless perks. This misunderstanding has transformed socialism into a seductive fantasy rather than the system of central planning and bureaucratic dominance it actually is, and the implications for America are profound, multi-generational, and deeply worrisome.
The recent “No Kings” rallies underscore the danger of this ideological drift. The Communist Party USA openly co-sponsored the protest, aligning with other groups to oppose President Donald Trump. In New York, the CPUSA’s hammer-and-sickle insignia was featured on official “No Kings” literature. That’s a brazen signal of how far-leftism is being mainstreamed under the guise of righteous protest.
Prominent Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Democrat Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, and Senator Cory Booker marched. Indeed, “No Kings” was broadly supported by Democrats at all levels of government, activism, and media.
For many Americans, the rallies were more than a spectacle—they were a revelation. What the left presents as “resistance” is, in reality, a Trojan horse for subversive forces bent on undermining capitalism and personal liberty. This is not abstract theory. Polling confirms a seismic shift within the Democrat base: a Gallup survey shows 66% now view socialism positively, outstripping the 42% who support the capitalist principles that have generated American prosperity.
Another survey from Data for Progress indicates 53% of Democrat voters prefer far-left figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over moderates, signaling an ideological takeover that threatens the entrepreneurial spirit and economic growth that millions rely on daily.
The peril lies not only in enthusiasm but in ignorance. Only 34% of Democrats correctly identify socialism as state ownership and central planning, while nearly half equate it with free healthcare, education, and other government handouts. Gallup data further reveal that 60% of Democrats see socialism positively for its promise of “free” services, blind to the suffocating control it imposes over work, innovation, and wealth creation.
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The result is a populace eager for handouts, unaware that each perceived benefit comes at the cost of opportunity, productivity, and personal freedom.
History offers stark warnings. Nations that flirted with socialism as an experiment have endured catastrophic consequences. Venezuela’s GDP has contracted nearly 25% since 2013 under socialist rule, paired with hyperinflation and mass shortages. Greece, after embracing socialist economic policies post-2008, saw GDP plummet by over 25% and unemployment surge above 27%.
These are not abstract lessons. They are vivid illustrations of what happens when good intentions collide with the harsh realities of centralized economic control. Yet the Democrat embrace of socialism persists, driven by a base lulled into believing generosity equates to freedom.
“The point is if you add up all the free things that the under-40 crowd is used to getting from…being able to sit in Starbucks all day for the price of a scone, from music to wi-fi to birth control—it’s not such a jarring proposition when socialism comes along and says you are entitled to free stuff,” Bill Maher observed, concluding that what’s desired is “not really socialism” but “Santa-ism.”
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That was almost a decade ago. His words ring true today, and their echo amplifies with every passing election cycle. To many, socialism offers the illusion of manna falling from the sky, while the rivers flow with milk and honey. In reality, socialism spells the end of America’s first world economy. Dependence replaces initiative, government replaces community, and freedom is subordinated to bureaucracy.
The stakes are not partisan. They are generational. America’s prosperity, built on the principles of capitalism and the protection of private enterprise, faces a credible threat from policies designed to redistribute, control, and centralize wealth. Socialism is not merely a policy preference. It is a long-term strategy to crush standards of living so despots can rule over ruins.
If left unchecked, it shall leave future generations with diminished opportunity, stunted economic growth, and an entrenched government class controlling the levers of daily life.
For those who care about sustaining the American Dream, the warning is clear: the Democrat party’s embrace of socialism is more than a political quirk. It is a deliberate pivot toward an economic ideology that history shows inevitably fails, a fantasy of free services that hides the harsh reality of governmental oppression, and a gamble with the nation’s multi-generational prosperity.
Understanding socialism is not optional. It is essential to defending the freedoms, innovation, and opportunity that have made America extraordinary.
Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto is the creator, host, and producer of News Sight, delivering sharp insights on the news that shapes everyday life. He also provides affordable, results-driven consulting for business, management, media, politics, and the economy. During the 2024 presidential race, he developed the Five-Point Forecast, which accurately predicted Donald Trump’s national victory and correctly called every swing state. Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt.
Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong.
When the long march through the institutions gives destructive and ridiculous people control of the institutions, the institutions become destructive and ridiculous, and then they become destroyed and ridiculous.
The law professor Glenn Reynolds has talked for years about the premise, in public policy, that people can be brought into the middle class if you give them the markers of middle-class status. Having a college degree is middle class, so make it easier to get a college degree. Owning a house is middle class, so lower the barriers to homeownership. 1.) Make it all much easier. 2.) Give people way more free stuff. 3.) Larger middle class!
“But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class,” he writes. “Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
Mistaking the markers for the substance, for the things that cause the creation of the desired thing, gives us this: [X post at link]
The idea behind the “long march through the institutions” is that the capture of the symbols of cultural authority is the same thing as the capture of cultural authority. The markers are the substance. See, people listen to their ministers and their professors, so if we get jobs as ministers and professors, people will listen to us. The job title is the authority. “As your minister, I advise you to embrace socialism and get a lot of abortions, and I direct you to notice that I am wearing a clerical collar, so.”
This language is ubiquitous in 21st-century America. It’s status markers all the way down. Experts say. Officials say. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is dismantling the CDC, and that’s very dangerous, because our health authorities are the experts. A lot of very important professors are telling you to do [insert thing here]. You can’t advise your child against gender transition — you don’t even have the right credentials.
Antonio Gramsci, and the New Left activists who followed him, looked at institutions like churches and universities and concluded that they had authority because they were churches and universities. They looked like authority, they performed the symbols of authority, they made authority noises, and so people followed.
It Vladimir was just a couple of weeks ago — October 3 to be precise — that I reported that the long-running “net zero” political consensus in the UK was finally “crumbling.” In the intervening two-plus weeks, the slow crumbling has turned into a rapid collapse.
The biggest roadblock for opponents of a green energy transition in the UK has been that the Conservative Party, which should have been the natural home of opposition to net zero, has instead long (and foolishly) allied itself with the net zero cause. In June 2019, the Conservatives (under Prime Minister Theresa May) put through an ambitious amendment to enhance the net zero targets of the 2008 Climate Act, and then proceeded to a general election that December where they won a substantial majority of 365 seats (in a parliament of 650). In subsequent years, a parliamentary faction in the House of Commons called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group struggled to get to about 50 or so Conservative members, who were far outnumbered by the opposing faction of the same party called the Conservative Environment Network. The UK voters had surely demonstrated their climate virtue.
But unfortunately things did not work out quite as they had anticipated. Energy bills accelerated until, as reported in the Telegraph on September 30 and then here on October 3, UK electricity bills have become the highest in the world. De-industrialization has set in and worsened. Britain’s last primary blast furnace steel works at Port Talbot closed in September 2024. A final rolling mill at Scunthorpe, now under Chinese ownership, threatened to close earlier this year until the government intervened. Similar reports of factory closures come regularly from all energy-intensive industries.
On October 6, immediately after my prior post, the Conservatives held a party conference in Manchester. One of the speakers was Claire Coutinho, the Shadow Energy Secretary. Her speech was an incredible breath of fresh air, and marked a dramatic u-turn from prior Conservative energy policy. The title was “Energy Is Prosperity.” Some excerpts:
In the last few decades, we’ve lost sight of a simple truth. Energy is a good thing. Conservatives know that great eras of British growth and prosperity happen when we have an abundance of cheap, reliable energy. . . . [E]nergy is not just part of the economy. It is the economy. It feeds into the costs of every business, every journey, every loaf of bread. . . . That’s why right now, the cost of energy is one of the biggest problems we have. It’s a stealth tax that is making us all poorer. And it’s killing our industry.
The Conservatives have finally figured out that the net zero agenda is a program to make the people poorer in sacrifice to the climate religion. More from Coutinho’s speech:
[H]ere’s the problem with the Left – they’re infected with a poverty mindset. They believe that Britain has a duty to make itself poorer on the altar of Net Zero. And they think that ordinary people should be the servants of their climate targets. So, take air conditioning. In America, nearly every single home has air con. Here in Britain? Just 5%. But Sadiq Khan’s London Plan effectively bans air con in all new homes – why? Because it uses too much energy. Rather than people fitting into the Government’s policy on energy, I believe a Conservative energy policy should serve the needs of the people.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I suspect that opposition to a program of intentional impoverishment of the people ought to be an electoral winner. The Labour Party and its Energy Minister, Ed Miliband, continue even now to claim that building more wind turbines will make electricity cheaper. But that claim is based on pretending that huge costs of intermittency, backup, storage, and transmission don’t exist. It has taken a long time for the reality of those costs to become clear, but the truth is now out.
The change in direction from the Conservative Party has come none too soon. On October 10, Bretibart News reported that the UK’s grid manager, National Energy Systems Operator, was forecasting reduced safety margins for electricity generation this winter, at the same time as the Labour government proceeds with dynamiting coal plants that could still be used for backup. The headline is “‘Tight Days’ For Electricity This Winter Says Network Operator as UK Presses on With Dynamiting Potential Backup Power Stations.” Excerpt:
Most notable was the revelation that the gas supply margin this winter is the lowest in years and down by 34 per cent over last year, a change [National Gas] attributes to the dwindling supply of gas being extracted from the North Sea. . . . 1960s-vintage power plants were brought online on command to cover tight margins several times in recent winters. Yet they have now all powered down for good, cut off from the national grid and are being demolished. Indeed, just days before today’s announcement of potential “tight days”, fresh footage of some of the final coal-powered power stations in the UK being dramatically dynamited was published.
I’m not going to predict that Britain will definitely experience major blackouts this winter. But the risk is far higher than it was just a few years ago, and that risk will continue to increase in coming years, until Britain can get itself to build more dispatchable generation, which in anything less than 15 years means natural gas or coal.
And it is not just the Shadow Energy Minister who has caught on. In today’s New York Post there is an op-ed by Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative Party leader and prospective PM should the Conservatives win the next election. (It is not obvious that they will do so, since the next election could be years away, and another party called Reform UK — also net zero opponents — leads both Labour and the Conservatives in the polls.). Ms. Badenoch’s op-ed covers multiple topics, including immigration and the Middle East as well as energy. Here are some things she has to say on the topic of energy:
[A] place I agree with this White House is on energy. Cheap energy is the foundation of a growing economy. No serious politician can talk about putting money in people’s pockets if they’re also doing things that make energy bills more expensive. . . . [I]n Britain, Labour ministers are so obsessed with chasing net-zero targets that they’re making life harder for ordinary families. . . . We’re sitting on North Sea oil and gas, yet the government refuses to grant new licenses. We’re now in the crazy position of importing gas from our near-neighbors Norway, who are getting stuck into those same oil fields in the North Sea.
The Conservatives came close to destroying the party by joining the Left’s net zero crusade. The current u-turn may or may not be enough to save the party. However, adding the Conservatives’ position in the polls to that of Reform UK would indicate that opposition to net zero is now close to if not an absolute majority electoral position. That represents an enormous swing in a few short years.
For centuries, men built and defended Western civilization — from its farms and cities to its laws, its art, and its moral order. But in just a few generations, that foundation has been shaken. Masculinity, once honored as the engine of strength, protection, and leadership, is now treated as a social problem. The very qualities that sustained families, communities, and nations are being redefined as “toxic.” Today, masculinity itself is treated as something to be “reformed” or “re-educated.”
What happened? How did the very qualities that built the modern world become objects of suspicion and ridicule?
The truth is simpler: Western civilization depends on men and masculinity — and it cannot survive without them.
The Quiet War on Manhood
Since the mid-20th century, Western culture has undergone an ideological shift that redefined traditional masculinity as something outdated, even dangerous. The cultural shifts of the 1960s promised liberation but gradually replaced personal responsibility and family order with self-gratification and state dependence. Where strong families once formed the backbone of the West, an alliance of ideological radicalism and excessive consumerism has turned both men and women into disconnected individuals — easier to manipulate, easier to control.
This erosion of masculine identity didn’t happen by accident. It was shaped through decades of social conditioning that cast male authority as oppressive, fatherhood as optional, and discipline as cruelty. In recent years, even government agencies have launched programs to ‘redefine’ masculinity, echoing language once confined to activist circles. The result is a culture where men are encouraged to suppress their natural instincts — their drive to lead, protect, and provide — in favor of emotional conformity. The modern man is expected to apologize for being male.
That truth — the structural bias against authentic masculinity — became the foundation for my book, The War on Men: How the New Gender Politics Is Undermining Western Civilization. Written not in resentment, but in plain clarity, it exposes how systems once meant to protect families and society have been twisted by new gender politics.
The Vanishing Father
The collapse of fatherhood lies at the heart of this crisis. A century ago, the father served as the moral and practical anchor of the household. Today, millions of boys grow up without one. The results are measurable: higher rates of crime, depression, and academic failure.
Without fathers, young men struggle to define what strength, honor, and leadership even mean. The vacuum is filled by media caricatures — the bumbling sitcom dad, the toxic aggressor, or the passive nice guy who never offends anyone.
It’s no coincidence that as male leadership has declined, so has family stability. When men are removed from their natural roles, the entire social structure weakens. Feminist academics and bureaucrats claimed this would “liberate” women. Instead, it left both sexes adrift — men deprived of a clear sense of purpose, and women burdened with expectations that conflict with their natural strengths.
From Strength to Shame
Modern education and media condition young men to doubt traits that were once honored — assertiveness, risk-taking, competitiveness, and stoicism. The ideal of the strong, self-reliant man has been replaced with the sensitive conformist who fears giving offense more than failing his responsibilities.
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This inversion of values has consequences far beyond gender. A society that discourages strength and rewards compliance eventually loses its ability to defend itself — morally, culturally, and even militarily.
Civilizations rise when men are encouraged to lead; they fall when men are shamed for doing so.
The Spartan Mindset
What does authentic masculinity look like today? It’s not about wealth, dominance, or bravado. True manhood begins with integrity — the courage to face reality, take responsibility, and act according to principle, even when it’s unpopular.
The ancient Spartans understood this. They didn’t chase comfort or approval; they pursued mastery over themselves. That’s the essence of the “Spartan mindset”: realism over optimism, truth over illusion. Modern culture tells men to “stay positive,” to avoid confrontation, and to seek validation. But strength is not built in comfort. A man becomes strong by facing hardship honestly — by learning discipline, self-control, and purpose in the face of adversity. When it comes down to optimism or pessimism, I always choose realism.
A Feminized Culture
Western civilization has become, in many ways, a feminized culture. Emotional comfort is prioritized over truth; feelings take precedence over facts. Public debate is now policed by fear of offense. The phrase “my rights don’t end where your feelings begin” has never been more relevant. Even federally, in January 2025 the U.S. government declared it a matter of state policy that there are only two sexes and that gender ideology must be rejected — a formal backlash to decades of shifting norms around masculinity and gender.
This preference for sentiment over reason has spread through politics, media, and education. Policies are increasingly designed not for long-term stability but to appease emotion-driven constituencies and align with UN-style governance models that echo centralized planning. The result is widespread moral uncertainty and civic stagnation.
The Masculine Virtues We Lost
Courage, restraint, loyalty, and honor — these virtues once defined manhood. Today, they’re rarely taught in a school system dominated by new gender politics, let alone celebrated. Yet these are precisely the qualities that sustain a civilization. Masculinity, properly understood, is grounded not in domination but in responsibility — the duty to protect, provide, and uphold truth even when it’s costly. The decline of those virtues has produced generations of anxious, uncertain men — products of a system that rewards compliance over conviction.
In schools, boys are medicated for restlessness; in DEI workplaces, masculine ambition is branded as aggression; in media, masculinity is reduced to parody. It’s no wonder so many young men feel lost.
A culture that derides masculine virtue produces dependents, not leaders.
Reclaiming Balance
The solution isn’t a return to harshness or domination, as critics of ‘patriarchy’ often claim. What’s needed is balance — a renewed respect for the masculine and feminine as complementary forces, not rivals. Men and women are different by design, and that difference is the foundation of family and community life. Denying that truth has made both sexes less happy, less stable, and less fulfilled.
The West needs men who are strong without tyranny, disciplined without indifference, and honest without apology. The current generation of men have been denied what their ancestors took for granted — that freedom and civilization depend on masculinity, courage, responsibility, and the willingness to lead.
The Way Forward
It seems clear that the revival of authentic masculinity won’t come from a political culture dominated by new gender politics — so where should men look instead? The revival of masculinity begins in personal conduct. Every man can reclaim strength by mastering himself — by rejecting the passivity and self-pity our culture encourages. Masculinity isn’t harmful; it’s essential. The real harm lies in the ideology that teaches men to distrust their natural instincts.
When men rediscover purpose and principle, families heal, communities strengthen, and nations endure. The West was built by men unafraid to lead, to protect, and to speak the truth — and it will endure only if such men rise again. If Western civilization is to survive, it must once more honor, strengthen, and respect its men.
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Ben Domenech has a very interesting take on Vice President Vance in an essay on The Transom.
[T]he truth is: They hate him because they view him as a traitor to their class, after they welcomed him with open arms.
He recounts the rapturous response Hillbilly Elegy received upon publication and the instant celebrity conferred upon Vance, in so small part because it satisfied a need of “people on the center left trying to make some sense of (or offer some dismissive explanation for) the Trump phenomenon.”
Vance went all-in (something he has done as Trump’s number two as well):
He went on Charlie Rose to call himself as a “a Never Trump guy,” wrote a piece for the The New York Times calling Trump “unfit” for the presidency, and joined Terry Gross on NPR to call Trump “noxious” and warn that he “is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He even did the most humiliating thing you could do at that time in that position, which was cast a vote in 2016 for Evan McMullin. He’d proven which side he was on.
Domenech understands the potent social and economic lucre such a debut implies:
For someone without a sense of principle or political reality, all this would go to your head. You have the opportunity to be at the top echelon of elite voices, rake in the money on the speaking tours, and be a voice of constant Christian moralizing against the racist bigots from whence you came who just don’t know what’s good for them. Who would turn it down?
But as we all can see, Vance didn’t go for the immediate reward at hand. He saw Trump’s first term unfold and changed his mind about what works. Not just in public, but as someone drawn to politics.
The left hates this. They think insults matter more than policy, and that if you couldn’t stomach Trump’s tweets, it definitely makes you a hypocrite to say he’s doing good things, too. And deep down, they know Vance is really quite good at it. The vice president has an even better understanding of the elite world he had briefly navigated. Seeing its weak points fueled an even greater talent at making the case for the Trumpian policies he now supports. Today you’ll oftentimes find him arguing the case with those same media entities and figures who once welcomed him into the fold. His talent makes the shift all the more frustrating. So does his beard.
I have a longstanding belief that former lefties make for effective conservatives. They know the enemy, and they know why it is wrong. The late David Horowitz stands as a powerful example of someone who understood the evil the left does and effectively worked against it. The son of party member capital C Communists, he turned against the left when he experienced the ruthlessness of the Black Panthers, who murdered his friend because she knew too much. He got it: the Left is a racket.
I’ve known many other reformed leftist conservatives because I am one and we can usually spot each other.
I take it as a powerful sign that Vance went to Yale Law School, where he heard plenty of progressive political rhetoric, and when he got out into the real world, he saw that the theories didn’t work too well in practice. And he had the courage to admit he was wrong and and change his way of thinking, not to mention professional and social circles, and seek to help frustrate the aims of the world of the progressive intellectual, that he briefly inhabited.
Domenech concludes:
So when the left rails against Vance, understand that they do so from a position of deeply felt personal betrayal.
And the Left is now virtually feminized, as Helen Andrews reminds us, with consequent amplification of the impact of emotional betrayal.
Woke little Communists who don’t believe in private property or profits protested to express their loathing of a system based on private property and profits.
This is what happens when you teach children that gender confusion is virtuous and logic or rationality represent toxic whiteness and masculinity.
Communism is your future, young snowflake leftists–and just remember: you wanted it.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 
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