Culture and the Sexual Marketplace: Harmful Cultural Trends and the Law of Supply and Demand in Sex and Romance

Many are incredulous of or resistant to this assertion, but it is readily demonstrated by imagining a microcosm of the sexual marketplace in a self-contained high school or—even better—a small college in a small, isolated college town. Suppose, for these purposes (although in fact there are typically many more women in college than men), that a self-contained, homogenous student body consists of an equal number of men and women of 2500 each, for a combined total of 5000 young men and women.  In a default scenario that better reflects conditions in a healthy society, the women are not subject to any number of vices, delusions, or pernicious social manias that ruin them as suitable dating or romantic prospects in this sexual marketplace. In that scenario, their male counterparts enjoy a dating and sexual marketplace that is one for one. Time and effort will be expended in any number of ways to find a sweetheart, but the supply and demand is balanced.

In the alternative scenario—a scenario that reflects the dystopic nightmare that is modern society as it currently exists—the female population is subject to any number of undesirable, destructive, or even insane manias, fads, and social contagions that contaminate and constrict the female dating pool in significant ways. These can range from radical feminism, to hyper-promiscuity that has not only given rise to the “slut generation,” a turn of phrase that had some currency briefly twenty years ago. In fact, the evisceration of sexual mores over the decades has created a succession of generations of such women, going back to the boomers fucking in the mud at Woodstock, smoking pot and dropping acid, before promptly selling out in the 80s before consuming everything and leaving nothing for successive generations.

Hardly limited to these destructive sociological and cultural trends associated with the so-called sexual revolution, the contamination and ruination of young womanhood similarly extends to other phenomena, most notably the transgender menace, which, as Abigail Shrier explicates in Irreversible Damage, has been particularly captivating to a certain subset of young women in the United States, particularly those coming from affluent, liberal White and “fellow White”—that is, Jewish—families predominantly found in urban centers in coastal states. When the female population succumbs to these and other nefarious influences, the hypothetical dating pool drops from 2500 to some number much lower than that. If one were to analogize a scenario where each woman holds a chair and each man must find a woman to allow him to sit down in a variation of sorts of musical chairs, such harmful influences reduce the pool of available chairs by substantial numbers, 2000, 1500, 1250 or lower—more than making up for the female majorities in college. A three-to-two or even two-to one ratio will require men to expend much greater time, effort, and resources in order to find his female counterpart.

This destructive phenomenon is exhibited in a number of harmful, disconcerting trends that pervade the modern world. Before those trends are examined, limitations on perceived notions about individual choice and autonomy, so prevalent in the Anglo-American world, must be established. As set forth in “Thrust Into It All; The Individual Defined by Culture and Circumstance,” what is perceived as individual choice is profoundly determined by a myriad of cultural externalities in ways that even those aware of what Martin Heidegger coined as Geworfenheit[1]can only have a rudimentary, imperfect grasp of. The mother tongue one is born into, any number customs or manners regarding dress and fashion, music taste, and a seemingly unending litany of things associated with both the individual and his contemporaries are predetermined by the time and place one is born into. Women are even more subject to these external influences of the cultural milieu that envelops everyone.

Contrary to the sort of “universally rational actor” imagined in platitudes celebrating the so-called Marketplace of Ideas, people often do not act in rational ways. This is evidenced most immediately by the transgender menace. The population at large is greatly impacted by advertising campaigns that often involve expenditures in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. Those who simplistically object that such matters ultimately come down to “individual choice” never discern that powerful but subversive interests wielding unimaginable wealth would never invest hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in advertising campaigns if those advertising campaigns were not incredibly effective in peddling harmful or undesirable products and vices, from junk food, to sports gambling, to so many other harmful products and services sold in the name of abject greed, irrespective of the harm to the social fabric and greater good. This is precisely why regulatory bodies and governments have banned or significantly curtailed advertising for cigarettes and other tobacco products: advertising peddling these carcinogenic products worked, and worked quite well.

This very bad life choice is only a choice to a very limited extent, as individuals are propelled to such choices by a confluence of external factors, most notably cultural milieu, as well as groupthink, social contagion, peer pressure, and so on.

Similarly, irrational and even destructive behaviors can rub off on people in truly shocking and irrational ways. This is the social contagion theory—or, rather social contagion fact—that Shrier and others correctly attribute to the transgender menace that has infected a sizeable contingent of young people and even older adults as well, as it has been documented in bulimia spreading among patients interned at a hospital or institution, requiring bulimic patients to be segregated. As set forth in “When So Many Do Jump Off a Bridge,” the phenomenon of social contagion is so powerful that it can even “override the most deep-seated survival instincts” against “suicide ideation let alone carrying out thoughts of suicide to completion. . ..” Indeed, media coverage of instances of suicide is directly correlated with higher rates of suicide. After Marylin Monroe committed suicide, suicides jumped twelve percent.” It is for this reason that media conglomerates have protocols in place to report on newsworthy incidents of suicide in ways that are less likely to induce others to follow suit, including “industry standards that seek to minimize the risk of increased suicide resulting from suicide coverage in the news and other media.” Such standards have even “been promulgated by government agencies like the Center for Disease Control and mass media institutions themselves.” These policy standards include:

· placing an emphasis on how the suicide harms relatives and the greater community;

· always placing suicide helplines and other resources conspicuously in the coverage, whether print or multi-media;

· deliberately refraining from romanticizing or otherwise condoning or explaining the suicide;

· refrain from repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide in the news.

These preambles showing how limited and chimeric individual choice really is are essential for understanding the full import of a number of destructive and harmful cultural trends—trends that are particularly applicable to young women in the sexual and dating marketplace. One such trend that is particularly timely concerns polling data among White men and women, single and married:

Liberal identity has increased by eight to nine points among White women as well as women of color between the Obama and Trump/Biden eras, while it has decreased slightly among both groups of young men.

White married women lean conservative, although that is by the slimmest of margins. Unmarried White men without a college education pull the most to the right, college educated White men somewhat less so. Single, college educated White women pull strongly to the left, however, as evidenced for example in new polling data showing White college educated women are the only remaining contingent of Whites that supports continuation of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives, as they are the one White demographic that strongly opposes the second Trump administration. This trend has been going on for some time, as seen in how visible White women were in the Black Lives Matter protests and riots in 2020. Indeed, a phenomenon known as “woke-fishing” has gained some notoriety in the past few years, in which single men pay lip service to leftist talking points and platitudes in order to seduce women beholden to leftist delusions. That White women are enamored with leftist claptrap in such large numbers is the most immediate illustration of how these appalling societal trends have a drastic impact on the sexual marketplace. At best such disagreements will hinder the establishment of romantic and sexual relationships, at worst these political and ideological differences will preclude any possibility of such relationships developing between White men inclined to more sensible political and policy positions (a majority of single White men) and women who have succumbed to left-wing groupthink.

An infamous case-study of this is one Chanty Binx, who gained world-wide infamy from her unhinged, misandrist outbursts as “Big Red.” Some readers will object that this woman is not (or was not) attractive. A reasonable position at the time of her infamous tirade, but she actually has nice facial features and was, once upon a time, fairly attractive.

In a lesser-known video in which she has an altercation with a Black preacher named David Lynn at a “pride” parade in Toronto, she is seen younger, trimmer, wearing more becoming and also more revealing clothes. One must of course object to the badge or sticker that reads “slut,” and the caption on her hot-pink tank top that reads “I Don’t Fuck Republicans.”

Several important observations are to be made. First, as far as anyone knows, she never married. But going beyond that, attire that reads “I Don’t Fuck Republicans” is hardly original or unique, as such attire is widely available across a wide array of ecommerce venues and brick and mortar novelty shops in so-called “blue” cities. This is just yet another demonstration of how what is perceived as individual choice is hardly that at all, but rather a set of sociological and cultural phenomena that can be observed on a macro, societal scale. Alas, there are millions of young women just like Chanty, or for that matter Leonie Plaar, better known as Frau Löwenherz.

A similar principal applies to popularity of bad music, something White women are so susceptible to, it has been the subject of various memes on the Internet. Some may scoff at this assertion as trivial or inconsequential, but having similar or disparate tastes in music is often a key factor in the success or failure of a relationship, or whether a relationship is formed at all. A young man who does not like Katy Perry or Taylor Swift or, as has been prevalent now for over 35 years, rap music is to be applauded, but particularly if he insists on finding a companion who does not have such terrible taste in music, he will likely experience greater difficulty in finding a suitable woman who shares more respectable taste in music. The vast majority of popular music favored by White women is awful just in terms of its musical qualities or lack thereof, but so much of this dreck conveys a degeneration of morals and decency as well, from Katy Perry’s T.G.I.F. which makes explicit reference to having a threesome (“We did a ménage à trois”), to an inexhaustible supply of other shit “musicians” hardly deserving of the moniker at all, such as “Cardi B” and “Megan Thee Stallion,” to the downright obscene rap lyrics that have enjoyed strong currency in youth culture for decades.

The transgender menace and the rise of LGBTQ-Yuck similarly apply to this supply and demand dynamic of the sexual marketplace. Some polling data indicates some 28 percent of generation “zoomer” women identify as some form of queer identity, usually lesbian or more likely bisexual because female sexuality, unlike its male counterpart, is far more malleable and prone to bisexuality and even switching from heterosexuality and bisexuality to lesbianism. Some data indicates as much as three percent of women in this generation succumbed to the mad delusion that is transgenderism. Three percent may not seem like a lot, but in the exercise described above of a pool of 2500 young women and 2500 young men, that would take some 75 women “off the market,” and ostensibly 75 young men missing female counterparts. This is compounded by female peers who have been inculcated with this insidious ideology and are trans allies, to say nothing of those who indulge the “gender non-binary” nonsense, so the deleterious effect of the transgender menace on the sexual marketplace is even higher. A far greater deduction from the dating pool is incurred by the increasing numbers of women who dabble in lesbianism and bisexuality as deviancy is defined ever further down.

A sordid collage of “before and after” comparisons posted by young women destroyed by the transgender menace. This is happening as a reproduceable, sociological phenomenon. Some might argue the two individuals on the right are unattractive, so who cares. Both individuals had nice facial features and would have been fairly attractive without the bad haircuts and other accoutrements. For every woman lost, there is a corresponding young man with one less potential prospect in the dating and romance game, i.e. the sexual marketplace. “But why do you care, how does it affect you, personally,” a legion of deranged lunatics and daft simpletons will invariably retort.

The last trend—a macro trend that has persisted with ever increasing strength since the end of World War II and really since the roaring 20s—relates to increasing prevalence and indeed ubiquity of promiscuity and even hyper promiscuity, attended by such pernicious phenomena as the normalization and mainstreaming of pornography, the rise of the cam girl menace, and more recent waves of feminism that attack any sexual standards at all as “slut-shaming.”

Hyper-promiscuity in women presents several problems. There is ample evidence linking high numbers of sexual partners (high body-count in Internet parlance) with chronic succession of dysfunctional and unsuccessful relationships, as promiscuity and especially promiscuity in women is also linked to unfaithfulness in marriage and divorce when they do get married. When large numbers of young women succumb to the “generation slut” ethos, their male counterparts can either compete with their peers for an ever-smaller pool of suitable, virtuous, but still attractive women not subject to such vices, decide that—in this age where love, beauty, and honor have all but died—the best recourse is to mitigate damages, sow wild oats of his own and seek sexual comfort where it avails him until he finds true love, if he ever does, or embrace celibacy for a prolonged, indefinite period of time while subject to intense sexual urges attendant by high testosterone experienced by healthy young men. Because of the ever-diminishing supply of suitable female companions, the least fortunate are nudged into involuntary celibacy.

Several considerations concerning the rising ubiquity of promiscuity and hyper promiscuity in young women warrant further elaboration. Two prior essays by this author concerning this matter have discussed at some length a disconcerting New York Times article entitled “The New Math on Campus” published in 2009, which describes and analyses the campus dating scene at the time. Of particular note is the account given by a sorority girl whose boyfriend fucked five or six or her sorority sister “friends” that “she knows of;” the term “friend” is somewhat loosely applied given that Greek life is a system whereby rich, affluent White kids pay others to be their friends and because of the “frenemy”[3] dynamic that has likely always characterized female friendship, but particularly so in regards to middle and upper middle class, largely suburban white women in the United States. This one anecdote, that can be replicated millions of times over, demonstrates a fundamental distinction between male and female sexual attraction, in that women are attracted to male promiscuity, partly because male promiscuity provides social proof, also known as preselection.[4] Women like this sorority girl do not view such caddish behavior as a red-flag portending future infidelity or any other number of problems; they see it as validation. “Other pretty girls had sex with him, so he is good enough for me” is the rationale of the estrogen-ridden mind of the sorority girl archetype.

With the rise of cuckoldry fetishism, polyamory, and other odious developments in culture and society that have eviscerated sexual norms and mores, there is some qualification or limitation to this distinction, but by and large most men would not find an otherwise highly desirable woman more desirable because she had sexual relations with five or six of a potential suitor’s friends. To be crude, right thinking men—right in more ways than one—would prefer not to kiss that mouth, or to “stick it or lick it,” sensibly eschewing any such offering of “sloppy seconds.” Men who have succumbed to a greater or even lesser extent to the erosion of sexual norms and mores at best regard a woman’s promiscuous behavior as neutral, not—in the absence of a cuckoldry or other harmful fetish or pathology—as a positive, except insofar as such indications of a woman’s loose morals may, depending on the circumstances, offer greater chances for an “easy lay.”

Another consideration that must be emphasized is the degree to which women are consensus driven. This means tolerating, normalizing, or, even worse, condoning various forms of undesirable and even pathological sexual behavior in both men and women fuels this consensus driven groupthink that women in particular are so very susceptible to. A survey of norms and mores in modern society shows a consensus has shifted dramatically in favor of rampant promiscuity and abject profligacy, particularly in young women. In American colleges and universities, fraternities have long ago leveraged an unfair advantage centered around female hypergamy that emphasizes social status, group socializing, and the like. This attribute of American fraternities has existed and indeed proliferated for over a century, as Willard Waller documented this phenomenon in an important and influential essay entitled “The Rating and Dating Complex.” Published in 1937, this essay describes a dating and sexual hierarchy Waller calls the “rating and dating complex,” with select fraternities at the top, “unaffiliated” men at the bottom. Participation in social activities, having a nice car and clothes and a “a copious supply of spending money” are all criteria for this higher status. Fraternities have gamed the system in large part by regularly hosting parties in which sorority women and select unaffiliated women are invited, but not unaffiliated men, with some very limited exceptions. This creates a lop-sided sexual marketplace with a favorable ratio of women to fraternity men, while creating an unfavorable ratio for “unaffiliated” men frozen out of the frat parties. These tactics have continued over the past century, as Jana Matthews has documented.

More cynical readers might wonder what the appeal of fraternity men might be, as that term is often paired with slang terms such as “frat boy asshole” and “frat douchebag.” The key to understanding such questionable sexual selection is social consensus among young women and how women, as a general rule, place an overriding emphasis on group socializing. Fraternities throw parties and indeed have an unnatural monopoly[5] on such parties. This monopoly capitalizes on how women are driven by consensus, socialization, and the like with remarkable efficacy; women, particularly young women, love parties. The sophisticated manipulation of female sensibilities by fraternities at an institutional level is attended by womanizing and the “hook-up culture” that some women complain about at a superficial level, but who by and large go along to get along. Actions and behavior always speak louder than words.

Another disconcerting trend relates to the rise of OnlyFans and other sex webcam services. Although anecdotal, young men using dating applications such as Tinder and the like report it is very common that potential dating and romantic prospects have resorted to performing sexual acts on these platforms, an experience that is reported anecdotally with increasing frequency. Women and particularly college-aged women are resorting to a number of so-called “sugar daddy” websites exchanging “companionship” (i.e., sex) for the generosity of wealthy, usually older men. One notorious article indicates that 56,000 women university students in the United Kingdom resort to some form of sex work. Furthermore, one of the more tiresome but shocking mantras of the left is “sex work is work,” normalizing and even championing the phenomenon whereby large contingents of desirable young women prostitute themselves in any number of ways, whether by “performing” in pornographic material, doing sex acts on OnlyFans or other webcam streaming sites, or acting as de facto escorts on the number of “sugar-daddy” websites.

The hook-up culture gamed at an institutional level by fraternities as well as the proliferation of young women resorting to offering a variety of different sexual services described above creates a terrible, unsustainable imbalance in the sexual marketplace in a multitude of ways. First, unless a young man comes from a wealthy family that affords him “copious amounts of spending money,” a new car, and so on, he will not be able to match desirable women who make thousands of dollars a week prostituting themselves on sex cam sites, being an escort to “sugar-daddies,” and the like. This afflicts the vast majority of young men with an insurmountable disadvantage given female hypergamy. A college-aged woman making a thousand dollars or more a week performing sex acts on webcams is unlikely to be interested in a male peer who more closely conforms to the poor student stereotype of yore. Nor does it matter that high earners on these sites are an exceptional outlier, because OnlyFans, Chaturbate, and the like have set forth a somewhat successful propaganda campaign convincing large numbers of the populace that making large amounts of money is typical, and not an exceptional outlier: perception so often counts much more than reality. In addition to this imbalance in the sexual marketplace where the most alluring White women can make exorbitant sums of money by prostituting themselves in a number of ways, the above-described dilemma facing would-be male suitors is intensified yet further: look among an increasingly fewer number of desirable women who remain virtuous, likely entailing a prolonged state of celibacy, compromise one’s morals and seek sexual comfort because that is all that is left in this degenerate, broken society, or resign one’s self to indefinite, perhaps permanent celibacy.

Unfortunately, the manner in which large contingents of American society condone and endorse this sort of moral dissolution is pervasive, as demonstrated by how most regard the wanton profligacy and womanizing that is rampant in various elite institutions, from Hollywood, to Wall Street, to, worst of all, professional sports. Mainstream American society not only fails to stigmatize or denounce the way elite men at the top, mostly by way of wealth, fame, power, and social status, procure large numbers of the most alluring women for their sexual gratification, this society encourages and celebrates it. Hugh Hefner was celebrated for keeping harems of the most desirable women on the planet—literal Playboy centerfold models—with no mind as to how this normalizes and condones this behavior, or how women, being consensus driven, take cues from the women they perceive, with good reason, to be the most desirable. This has gone on for decades, and is now exhibited in the lecherous behavior of Leonardo DiCaprio and other wealthy, powerful, and famous men who openly flaunt sexual conquest with untold numbers—certainly in the hundreds if not thousands—of the most alluring and desirable women on the planet: the well-known archetype of the beauty queen from rural Wisconsin or Idaho, as well as various countries abroad who comes to Hollywood to try and make it as a model or actress. Some derisively call such sexual fodder “mattresses,” an amalgamation of the two words “model” and “actress.” Far more disconcerting still are certain rightish or right elements on social media that correctly denounce feminism, but actually celebrate the sort of behavior DiCaprio and others have become famous for. Such persons are quick to deride women for “riding the cock carousel,” replete with quips about “empty egg cartons,” but fail to condemn or respond to how men like DiCaprio are part of the problem; such behavior worsens the imbalance of the lop-sided sexual marketplace not just by ruining those young woman he uses for sexual gratification (does anyone think such “damaged goods” are suitable as wives or even girlfriends?), but by setting a perverse social standard precisely because of how consensus driven women are. Such behavior gets even worse with instances such as Bill Belichick, former coach of the New England Patriots, who is 72 and is “dating” Jordan Hudson, some 24-year-old Tussi.

God Bless America? NO!

As has been stressed time and again by this author, the sorts of women who degrade themselves by being objectified by men like DiCaprio, Belichick, and others of similar ilk, including most especially Hugh Hefner back in the day, are not outliers, not exceptions, and indeed are hardly capable of individual choice as the term is properly understood, but are part of a larger cultural and sociological trend, a recurring theme in a sick and degenerate culture, to the extent one can call it culture at all. This trend is not resisted in any meaningful way, as most “normy-tier” conservatives simply quip “they are consenting adults, what business is of it anybody else?” Compare and contrast with more reactionary movements of the past that are not so beholden to such moral relativism, but instead act with unwavering conviction and merciless brutality.

These are not, it must be stressed, individual choices in an absolute or even true sense, as naïve assumptions in the Anglo-American tradition suppose, but cultural and sociological trends exhibited on a macro, societal scale and therefore require a remedy at a macro, cultural level. Indeed these destructive trends act in tandem with a certain compounding effect not unlike compound interest or the snowball effect. Reduce these and other harmful sociological and cultural phenomena to the hypothetical dating pool envisioned earlier. Three percent of women deducted for falling to the transgender madness, another unknown contingent for supporting such mad delusion as a “trans ally,” ten to fifteen percent, usually the most desirable white women, belonging to sororities and all the Bacchanalian debauchery that entails. Then another five, ten, fifteen percent who partake in so-called sex-work, again with the numbers weighted to those more attractive who could undertake such endeavors with at least some prospect of “success.” Then of course one must factor in that college educated white women are the only white demographic that leans strongly to the left. Finally, add young white women’s notorious taste in the worst music imaginable for good measure, and that pool of 2500 women is cut down by half or more, a consideration amplified by how less-desirable women are less susceptible to some of these pernicious social trends for obvious reasons.

It must also be stressed that women, at least the most desirable women, wield a disproportionate level of power on and influence of mate selection than do males, and do so in ways that in turn are powerful drivers of male behavior, even though women are largely consensus driven. Women select mates by and large, not so much men; men approach women, asking them out for a date or for number, women choose to accept or decline. Particularly in the context of young men brimming with testosterone, this means women’s terrible predilections do in turn influence male behavior in incredibly powerful ways. The desire, the drive, to attract the most alluring young women is central to the life force and biological imperative, and that is no truer than for young men during adolescence and young adulthood when testosterone flows. It is the primary motive for teenage boys to try out for and compete in football and other varsity sports. Those more artistically inclined will learn to play guitar or write poetry for many of the same motivations, but vying interest not from the cheerleader sort, but the artsy girls in drama club and the like. Since time immemorial, young men have engaged in all sorts of dangerous and even stupid behavior, often resulting in injury or death, for no other reason than to impress the most desirable women, as men have perpetrated horrific violence on another because of women since Helen of Troy and before. In modern times, men have regularly resorted to fisticuffs, engaged in fool-hardy, life endangering stunts like drag-racing and other such ventures, all to compete in the sexual marketplace. The implications of this cannot be overstated: social contagion and consensus driven maladies women succumb to in turn influence the behavior of young men doing whatever is necessary to compete in the sexual marketplace.

And there are even more dire implications. The failure to discern and remedy how these cultural and sociological trends disrupt and destabilize the sexual marketplace invoke what is known as the bare branch theory regarding the destabilization of society that occurs when excess numbers of men are disadvantaged or precluded altogether from competing in the sexual marketplace. As set forth in Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, this theory posits many destabilizing effects, including much higher competition between men in the sexual marketplace, and all the conflict and anti-social behavior that entails. These dysfunctional trends further exacerbate the demographic winter that presents an existential threat to European peoples everywhere.

There are of course other harmful social trends that are ruining sizeable contingents of young women, including most particularly the manner in which mainstream, controlled media propagate and promote race-mixing. One article by the Pew Research Center indicates 11 percent of whites, including ten percent of white women, are in interracial couples. That statistic obviously pertains to marriage, not dating or copulation, so the number of whites subject to the propagation of miscegenation is likely somewhat higher. Some on the dissident right regard this as a good sign, that whites are largely impervious to this propaganda. Ten percent however is quite a lot, particularly if that ten percent is extrapolated on a generational timeline, increasing as miscegenation is promoted with ever increasing intensity. It is also of note that a certain type of white woman who “pays the toll” is such a reproducible cultural phenomenon that right-wing and far right accounts on twitter and other platforms regularly disseminate thousands of images and memes featuring white women who all sort of look the same, and either complain about the hardships of being a poverty-stricken single mother with a (usually quite ugly) miscegenated child or have been subject to black on white violence in the way of battery at best, death at worst.

These and other trends not mentioned, acting in tandem, have largely removed sexual and romantic norms and mores away from any balance or equilibrium in the sexual marketplace, just as these trends have caused most people to marry later and others not to marry at all. In this way, the promulgation of these trends is revealed to be the nexus from which the demographic winter emanates, as that demographic implosion threatens Europe and the West with racial suicide and civilizational ruin. These trends have lured a critical mass of white women away from their male counterparts in a variety of ways, so much so that it is no longer standard for young people to enjoy serious courtship late in high school and early in college. In generations past, college men often married before graduating or very soon thereafter. This represents a matrimonial union in which young people invest in each other as they seek their fortunes. Women would invest in men before they achieved status and success, and men garnered strength and support from the love, intimacy, and companionship husband and wife enjoyed together. Now a sizeable portion of the most alluring white women are going for “sugar-daddies,” or slutting it out at frat parties, contributing to the cam girl menace, so on and so forth. Women have never been unhappier, as many regret not marrying, foregoing or hampering the opportunity to have children. Men, instead of gaining the strength that comes from matrimonial love and companionship, are thrust into an increasingly sordid sexual marketplace out of balance and characterized increasingly by intense competition between males, with all of the disorder, dysfunction, and chaos predicted in the book Bare Branches.

Before and after: on the left an insightful meme illustrating precisely how disconcerting cultural trends are disseminated by powerful interests. On the right, improvements made by this author.

These and of course many other considerations demonstrate once again how woefully inadequate and impotent mainstream conservatism is, ridden with the propensity to do nothing other than mouth tiresome yarns such as “if they are consenting adults…,” or even that culture does not matter, that family and religion alone can solve these and other problems, even though family and religion are, quite obviously, expressions of culture themselves. Dispelling such naïve notions about “individual choice” is essential—particularly in the female sex—as these phenomena and their effect on the sexual marketplace demonstrate yet again that no man is an island, that we are all affected by what others do, particularly as the “choices” individuals supposedly make are profoundly influenced if not outright determined by what others do, particularly in relation to the consensus driven nature of women. As argued at the end of “Culture as Programming” and as readily evinced in the meme image featured above, attacking, neutralizing, and even destroying those subversive elements in the culture that drive these nefarious, destructive trends in society is the hidden key to restoring balance to the sexual marketplace and instilling harmony between the sexes so that men and women can be together again on a near universal scale, as had existed for centuries before the advent of the modern world and its many peculiar, dysfunctional properties. Disrupt, debilitate, and destroy those institutions and interests that create and disseminate the programming that drives these cultural trends, and the mesmerizing chains of indoctrination that are ruining white women and driving Europe and the West to oblivion will be broken.

Other articles and essays by Richard Parker are available at his publication, The Raven’s Call: A Reactionary Perspective, found at theravenscall.substack.com. Please consider subscribing on a free or paid basis, and to like and share as warranted. Readers can also find him on twitter, under the handle @astheravencalls.

Heirs of the Displaced The effects of immigration on the East End before the Great War

In this essay I examine the effects of Jewish immigration on the native English in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing mainly on the East End of London and drawing entirely on the work of Jewish historians.

Areas of concentration

While wealthier Jews typically lived in the West End or in country houses, poorer Jewish immigrants before 1881 had tended to converge on the East End. Those who came from 1881 onwards joined them and, as their numbers grew, they took over whole streets, then larger areas. Susan Tananbaum cites estimates of the Jewish population of London that range from 150,000 to 180,000, of whom about 100,000 lived in the East End.1 Lloyd Gartner cites higher estimates. In 1901, in the Borough of Stepney alone, he says there were nearly 120,000 Jewish residents, about 40% of its population, making it the borough of most intense immigrant concentration.2 As Geoffrey Alderman describes,

“Stepney included the areas of Whitechapel, St George’s-in-the-East, and Mile End, in which Jews had traditionally lived adjacent to the City of London, and into which the immigrants now poured just as their more prosperous English-born or Anglicized co-religionists were migrating northwards. According to the census of 1881, over three-quarters of the Russians and Poles (most of whom can be assumed to have been Jews, of course) who lived in London were located in these areas; by 1901 the proportion was just under 80 per cent. By 1901 the alien population of Whitechapel had reached almost 32 per cent; in Mile End Old Town it was nearly 29 per cent.”3

In 1899, a map of “Jewish East London” was included in The Jew in London, a study “published under the auspices of Toynbee Hall”; the map showed that “some streets north and south of the Commercial and Whitechapel Roads were almost entirely Jewish by residence”. The study stated that

“The area covered by the Jewish quarter is extending its limits every year. Overflowing the boundaries of Whitechapel, they are spreading northward and eastward into Bethnal Green and Mile End, and southward into St. George’s-in-the-East; while further away in Hackney and Shoreditch to the north, and Stepney, Limehouse and Bow to the east, a rather more prosperous and less foreign element has established itself. . . . Dirt, overcrowding, industry and sobriety may be set down as the most conspicuous features of these foreign settlements. In many cases they have completely transformed the character of the neighbourhood.”4

As Gartner describes,

“There were two spines to eastward Jewish expansion in the East End. One was Whitechapel Road (Aldgate High Street and Mile End Road at its eastern and western ends), a street of Roman origin moving east and slightly north, and the second was Commercial Road, which was hacked through courts and alleys in the mid-nineteenth century to connect the City with the docks and stretching south-east. Both slowly filled with Jewish businesses and residences. The streets branching off them were slowly infiltrated in their turn, and presently the little side turnings were also annexed into the Jewish quarter. By about 1910 the Jewish area reached its furthest extent, with the fringe of the City symbolized by Aldgate Pump as western limit, and with Cable Street to the south, the Great Eastern tracks on the northern edge, and a flexible eastern limit around Jubilee Street, Jamaica Street, and Stepney Green as its informal boundaries.

These two square miles enclosed some of the most densely populated acres in England. This was caused not only by normal overcrowding of large families and the presence of many lodgers, but was aggravated by the razing of thousands of dwellings to make room for railway facilities, street improvements, business premises, and schools. Little or no provision was made for the displaced inhabitants, who usually remained in the vicinity where they earned their livelihoods and jammed the remaining houses still further. Although wholesale demolitions for commercial purposes subsided after 1880, they continued at quite a rapid pace for such public improvements as schools and slum clearance. In other words, Jewish immigration intensified the East End’s deep-rooted problem of house accommodation by preventing the population from declining as its houses were pulled down.”5

Immigrants arriving

My last essay mentioned the reception of new immigrant Jews among those longer-established in England. It became “an anxiously desired goal of native Jewish efforts among immigrants … to lure them out of the East End and to disperse them among the smaller cities in the provinces.”6 Yet,

“Up north in Grimsby, Joel Elijah Rabinowitz retorted that the Jewish immigrant would continue to choose the London slum in spite of every inducement, because employment and fellow-Jews were to be found there. The Russo-Jewish Committee, which tried earnestly to persuade immigrants to settle away from the East End, realistically explained why the immigrants persistently ignored these blandishments:

(1) Indisposition on the part of the individual refugee to migrate to quarters where he would be mainly among strangers.

(2) Local prejudices against foreigners, and especially against refugee Jews, who are regarded as interlopers.

(3) The persistent objection of some of the refugees to obtaining a knowledge of English.

(4) The objection to the schooling of the children outside Jewish influences.”7

As in most times and places, immigrants congregated for the sake of familiarity, security and mutual support. They were from all over Eastern Europe, but Judaism and the Jewish identity bound them to one another and separated them from the English, other than geographically. Their growth in the East End was rapid and contiguous, and they became dominant over ever more territory until the numbers arriving subsided. The immigrants also intensified demand for housing and, as also seems perennial, they benefited landlords at the expense of renters, as Alderman describes:

“Inevitably, the housing shortage resulted in the raising of rents; in London as a whole rents rose between 10 and 12 per cent in the period 1880-1900, but in the East London boroughs the rise was of the order of 25 per cent. Prospective tenants might also find themselves asked to pay ‘key money’ (often dubbed ‘blood money’) to the landlord or the outgoing tenant, merely for the privilege of moving in.”8

He continues:

“That Jewish landlords were more likely than native landlords to raise rents was a fact of life; that the rents they raised were usually those of their brethren from eastern Europe was merely a plea in mitigation. The Jewish influx caused rents to rise; had it not been for the Jews, rents would either not have risen or would not have risen so much. It is also true that the clearance of slums, and their replacement by model dwellings, ensured housing for Jews at the expense of non-Jews.”9

Gartner’s more critical description pierces the blandness of aggregated and averaged statistics. He says that Jews seemed willing to pay higher rents which accelerated “the displacement of English tenants”.

“By a process of mutual cause and effect, the high rents paid by Jews invited overcrowding, which in turn further stimulated rack-renting. Nothing hindered a landlord from raising rents as he pleased or from expelling any tenant to make way for anyone whom he pleased. Matters did not improve when, as sometimes happened, the landlord was himself a Jewish immigrant. (Real estate in Jewish districts was a favoured investment for immigrants who prospered.) … [R]ents probably rose fifty per cent or sixty per cent when a street turned Jewish, with the entire difference pocketed by speculating or rack-renting landlords and partially made back by tenants who took in lodgers.”

Taking in lodgers could only exacerbate the crowding. The growth of the Jewish dominion was inexorable. Gartner continues:

“The Jews’ alien status and the higher rents which accompanied them incited severe hostility when they settled in a new street as the Jewish quarter gradually spread out. Sensing that they would soon be submerged, some of the English and Irish inhabitants moved out at once. Others remained behind to give vent to cold or hot hostility, whether by calculated snubbing or, at times, by stones thrown or windows broken. But they too presently evacuated.”10

The standard of life was diminished in other ways. According to Gartner,

“To an East End which was water-starved sometimes, unsatisfactorily inspected by public authorities, and overcrowded in decrepit or poorly built houses, the Jews brought not only an extra measure of overcrowding but a seeming ignorance and indifference to sanitary requirements. Accumulated and uncollected refuse lay in rotting piles inside and outside houses, while the interiors were often dank and malodorous from foul water closets, leaking ceilings, untrapped sinks, and cracked, moist walls.”11

A writer in the Jewish Chronicle remarked in 1880 that “[o]f the Jewish poor in the Metropolis it is probable that ninety per cent are Russians. They have the Russian habit of living in dirt, and of not being offended at unsavoury smells and a general appearance of squalor.”12 The Lancet stated that

“the presence in our midst of this numerous colony of foreign Jews gives rise to a sanitary problem of a most complicated nature. Their uncleanly habits and ignorance of English ways of living render it difficult to maintain in a wholesome condition even those more modern dwellings where the system of drainage is well organised.”13

According to Tananbaum, the socialist activist Beatrice Potter (later Beatrice Webb), who investigated the conditions of life in the East End, found that

“the Jewish ‘race’ could withstand ‘an indefinitely low standard of life’. Their working lives were characterized by ‘long and irregular hours, periods of strain, and periods of idleness, scanty nourishment, dirt and overcrowding, casual charity — all conditions which ruin the Anglo-Saxon and Irish inhabitant of the East End [yet] seem to leave unhurt the moral and physical fibre of the Jew’.”14

Nathaniel Rothschild, the first Baron Rothschild, acknowledged in 1904 that “it is unfortunately true that a large number of them [Jewish immigrants] live in the Borough of Stepney… [and] that the rooms are insanitary, that more people live in a room than ought to be’.”15

Even the cleanest of people could not have entirely surmounted the challenges of the excessive density of people. As Tananbaum describes,

“Rose Henriques, of the Oxford and St George’s Jewish (later Bernhard Baron) Settlement, described the housing as ‘dreadful … [with] staircases that stank’. ‘The tragedy was that the smells didn’t necessarily mean that the tenants were dirty people, although often they were’. Even with ‘incessant cleaning’, buildings ‘stank of generations of overcrowded bodies and of outer clothing that become odorous from long use’.”

Stepney only gained a reliable water supply in 1902, and “[a]s late as 1939, 90 per cent of Stepney’s homes lacked baths.”16 Gartner remarks of Jewish migrants in general that their movement from towns and villages into metropolitan centres had the “immediately visible result” of “a rather foul slum zone and a knotty problem of health and housing. … The physical problems of the Jewish quarters did not vanish until the areas were torn down (or, as in London, bombed out) or the Jews abandoned them.”17

Working from home

Insanitary conditions were typically accompanied by noise from home life and home-based work. Immigrants were more inclined to adapt the environment to themselves than the reverse. According to Gartner, “England was a factory country, and very few immigrants had ever worked in a factory. They had worked in little workshops back in Russia and Poland, and that is where they continued to work in England.”18 In Stepney in 1901,

“Many living quarters doubled as workshops, with hundreds of contractors working out of their homes. By day, food, garments and refuse collected in the kitchen. At night, members of the household used the room to sleep. Lily Montagu, the famed warden of the West Central Settlement, contended that overcrowded homes ‘limited the outward realisation of the joys of family life. In tenement dwellings … every corner of the home is utilised for some domestic or industrial purpose … Excepting during the hours of sleeping and feeding, most scenes of family life are enacted in the streets’.”19

According to a London County Councillor speaking to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, a Jew in the East End “will use his yard for something. He will store rags there, perhaps—mountains of smelling rags, until the neighbours all round get into a most terrible state over it, or perhaps he will start a little factory in the yard, and carry on a hammering noise all night, and then he will throw out a lot of waste stuff, offal, or anything like that—it is all pitched out, and in the evening the women and girls sit out on the pavement and make a joyful noise . . . on the Sunday the place is very different to what the English are accustomed to.”20 In Todd Endelman’s words, “the aliens worked on Sundays, slept outside on hot summer nights, ate herring and black bread, and read Yiddish newspapers.”21 Jews working and trading on Sundays became a point of particularly fierce contention.

Jewish residents of the East End

Immigration alienated the native people. Areas that became Jewish-dominated acquired an “aura of exotic strangeness” which “provoked indignation and unease”.22 Gartner says that “[i]mmigrant Jewry formed a society apart, with standards derived from other sources than England.” Naturally this was so, as “immigrant life was an attempt to preserve with more or less adjustment the social standards and habits of home and communal life in Eastern Europe.”23 As Todd Endelman describes,

“Residents of the East End and middle class visitors alike viewed immigration as a foreign invasion, turning once-English districts into “little Jerusalems” and “little Palestines.” Native workers felt overrun and displaced as immigrants flooded in and occupied street after street. … [A] witness told the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1903 [that] “the feeling is that there is nothing but the English going out and the Jews coming in.” A local borough councilor complained that as he walked through Mile End or Cable Street he saw that “the good old names of tradesmen have gone, and in their places are foreign names of those who have ousted Englishmen out into the cold.” In Whitechapel, a Christian social worker noted, “the English visitor feels himself one of a subject race in the presence of dominant and overwhelming invaders.”24

Endelman also cites an account of life in East London which saw Jews as having “predatory noses and features”, described them as “alien” and remarked that “[o]ne seems to be in a hostile tribal encampment” which “makes one afraid, not of them personally, but of the obvious tenacity, the leech-like grip, of a people who, one feels in one’s English bones, flourish best on the decay of their hosts, like malignant bacilli in the blood.”25 Certainly there is abundant evidence that Jewish interests diverged from, or were directly opposed to, those of the English and that this was most vividly and punishingly experienced by the people of the East End.

Street life

The prolific, concentrated immigrant population exceeded the available buildings and lived partly on the streets. Gartner says that

“it is difficult to speak of home life in many houses, for with one or more lodgers, several children, and perhaps grandparents and other relatives, every Jewish immigrant household was a cramped place. Eight or nine individuals shared two small rooms, and the ratio was even higher in hundreds of dwellings. Hence a large part of home life was lived out of doors by older folk seated at their doorways, by adolescents in search of fascination and adventure, and by children at play in the courts and alleys.”26

The forms of fascination and adventure ranged from the sublime to the deplorable. Gangs of youths were free to prey on more peaceable folk. As we saw in the last essay, and as Robert Henriques describes, “the Anglo-Jewish community had acknowledged the immigrants as a charge which it had met with comprehensive generosity.” However, their children came to present “a new problem”. Though many “accepted the stringent demands of orthodox Judaism learnt from their parents”, they were formally observant but lacking “faith and piety”. They dispensed with any regard for “moral obligation or the law of the land”.

“Consequently the streets in the slum districts of the East End were filled with gangs of young Jewish boys, who identified Judaism with the empty shell of ultra-orthodox observance, and who spent their evenings lawlessly roaming the streets, creating disturbances, assaulting and robbing licensed stall-holders and becoming a source of great anxiety and trouble to the police.”27

The criminality that arose out of the post-1881 immigration owed something to the pre-existing patterns of Jewish occupations. Earlier in the 19th century, according to Endelman,

“Jewish poverty went hand in hand with crime, squalid surroundings, low-status trades, and coarse behavior. In the 1810s and 1820s, there was a marked increase in the incidence of Jewish criminal activity in London, if the skyrocketing rate of Jewish convictions at the Old Bailey is any guide.”

After 1830, “the number of Jewish street criminals fell … but Jews remained active in socially marginal occupations—as dealers in battered odds and ends, worn-out clothing, rags and rubbish; as keepers of brothels, wine rooms, saloons, gambling dens, billiard rooms, and sponging houses; as fences, crimps, sheriff’s officers, prizefighters, and prostitutes.”28

Of those families who abided by the law, some parents nevertheless raised their children to be competitive, acquisitive and even deceitful, at least in regard to the goyim. Gartner says that “[t]he foreign heritage continued not only in personal and cultural life but in economic activity as well”.29 Schooling offered opportunities to ascend socio-economically, and he mentions “the consuming eagerness with which Jewish children were sent to school in neighbourhoods where neglect of children and hostility to schooling were rampant”. He cites one schoolmaster who remarked on Jewish children’s “smartness, especially in commercial things”, which exceeded that of Christian children, and said that “‘they have a perfect want of moral sense’ in respect of truthfulness.”30 Moses Angel, long-standing headmaster of the Jews’ Free School, said in 1871 that the parents of his pupils were “the refuse population of the worst parts of Europe,” living “a quasi-dishonourable life”, by which, as Endelman says, “he meant that they were street traders and thus liars and cheats.”31

According to Alderman, “[t]he leaders of the Jewish communities in London had their own special reasons for hastening the demise of the Jewish pedlar. The peddling and criminal fraternities interacted in a manner that was both embarrassing and dangerous.”32 Endelman describes how, as the 19th century proceeded, “[t]he expanding native-born middle ranks of English Jewry were filled with the children and grandchildren of peddlers, old clothes men, and market traders who had become respectable, if modest, businessmen.”33

Commercial conflict

Just as the native people, though far more numerous, were displaced from housing in the East End, so were they from commerce too. Jews as customers tended to buy from Jewish retailers who tended to buy from Jewish wholesalers; evidence of equivalent efforts on the part of the English has gone unfound. Gartner says that

“Securing a foothold was not easy, for the English street-selling trades had long traditions and recognized mores. The Jew had to wedge his barrow into a pitth (place in the street) where an English costermonger might have stood for many years. Bitter were the ‘costers’ complaints that their Jewish competitors grabbed the pitches which they had occupied for many years, did business for unfairly long hours, undersold, and generally disrupted the accepted usages of the trade. The Jews and their defenders replied that the English ‘costers’ merely hated Jews and had always excluded them from their union. … These complaints resounded loudest in Petticoat Lane when that historic London street market situated in the Jewish quarter was taken over by Jewish traders in the 1880’s and 1890’s. … Undeniably, food sellers in Petticoat Lane and their Provincial counterparts lost considerably because the neighbouring Jews did prefer to buy from Jewish dealers.”34

Impression of Petticoat Lane in the 1870s

British laws and customs were adapted for the sake of the incomers. According to Gartner,

“The greatest friction was caused by the problem of Sabbath observance for, subject to certain limitations upon Sunday hours, the Jews were legally authorized to observe the Jewish instead of the English Sabbath. It was claimed, however, that some Jewish stores and street stalls observed neither day. With the undoubted existence of some such cases as their proof, the beleaguered English tradesmen were convinced that their Jewish rivals were too grasping to keep any day of rest, and thrice-told tales of the Jew supported their views. In the Borough Councils within London, where their influence was strong, the native shopkeepers did all they could to press for stringent Sunday trading ordinances, which would have harmed Jewish tradesmen by denying them enough hours on Sunday to compensate for the hours they were shut on Friday and Saturday.’”35

Yet however strong their influence might have been at the level of borough councils, the English were unable to match “the Jewish authorities” who had already lobbied successfully at the national level for legislation:

“firstly, in two enactments in 1867 permitting workshops which closed on the Jewish Sabbath (roughly sunset Friday to nightfall Saturday) to open late on Saturday evening; secondly, through legislation passed in 1871 allowing Jewish-owned workshops to operate on Sundays provided they had closed during the Sabbath.”36

Beside patronising one another’s businesses, Jews had other means of mutual support. Endelman says that “street traders and itinerant peddlers… routinely obtained goods on credit from Jewish shopkeepers and wholesale merchants” which “allowed penniless immigrants to begin trading on their own soon after their arrival.” Jews also formed friendly societies for mutual aid. These, too, served to benefit their own community and reinforce its separate group identity. “The United Israelites and the Guardians of Faith”, Endelman says, “barred men who cohabited with non-Jewish women or were not married according to Jewish law, while the latter also excluded men who kept their shops open on Saturday mornings and personally attended to business then.”37

Jewish shopkeepers

As one-sided ethnic solidarity did its work, “English tradesmen complained vehemently as their native customers moved away before the tide of foreign Jews, from whom they could expect much less patronage.”38 Jewish shopkeepers prospered and became “the heirs of displaced English shopkeepers in the Judaized streets of the East End, Strangeways and Red Bank, and the Leylands.” Later, between the two world wars, “the aggressive marketing techniques of Jewish shopkeepers—the subtle use of advertising, ‘cut‑price’ offers, and the inducement of ‘loss‑leaders’—caused much friction”.39 In Leeds, too, Jewish market stall vendors “were criticised for unfair practices” and were stereotyped as being “responsible for abuses in trades, of engaging in underhand business practices or of sacrificing principle in the pursuit of profit”.40 The universality of such stereotypes suggests that they were often true, and the English had to imitate such tactics or yield to their unscrupulous competitors; anyone today can see whose approach, and which group, prevailed in the East End and far beyond.

As workers, Jews tended to have the same inclination to benefit other Jews where possible. As employers, they intended from the start to employ their own kind. As replacement labour, they were a weapon against English workers’ pay and conditions, which smaller-scale immigration had already driven down before the major wave arrived. According to Tony Kushner, after 20,000 Jews settled in the East End in the 1830s amid a local economic depression,

“​[t]he only way the clothing trade, boot and ​shoe trade, and to a lesser degree, the furniture industry ​could survive was to cut their wage levels so as to compete ​with provincial and foreign producers. It was to these ​industries that the immigrants flocked, and the net result ​was an intensification of the sweating system, and a ​displacement of native labour by the new arrivals.”41

When the new arrivals found their conditions intolerable, some went on strike, including cigar makers. Their masters, though of the same tribe, “being unable to procure English workmen … to submit to the lowering of wages, resort[ed] to the practice of travelling to Holland and other parts of the continent, and, exaggerating the state of the cigar trade in England, fill[ed] the poor Dutchmen’s minds with buoyant hopes of high wages.”42

Then as now, any supposed need to import workers was really a pretext for employers to benefit themselves by doing so. Gartner says that “in England, still the world’s leading industrial nation, no great new industry or undeveloped region beckoned with opportunities for employment. Moreover, there was already an adequate supply of native and Irish labour for the hard, unskilled jobs.”43 According to Endelman, “[the] stream of new arrivals … guaranteed that wages remained low[.]”44 I have not seen evidence that employers lobbied for open borders in the 19th century, but they may have learned to do so after seeing the effects of Jewish immigration.

Any real demand for Jewish workers arose entirely from Jews who had already arrived. Ethnic solidarity dovetailed with ambitions to outcompete the goyim. As Gartner says,

“The Jewish immigrant workman forewent better hours, superior working conditions, and regularity of employment of an English factory, but also Sabbath work and hostility of the native workers. He preferred to work among his own people, frequently in the employ of an old townsman or a relative.”

An early immigrant from Russia recalled that

“I came to Leeds from Russia in 1852 and was a fugitive from Russian militia men. … We had a place of worship in Back Rockingham Street and I was married there. All of those I remember in my early days came here as single men … It was the usual thing for young fellows when they had settled here to send for Russia for their parents and brothers and sisters and that is how the Jewish people made a home in Leeds.”45

As James Appell recounts, “a Kovno master tailor, Moyshe (Morris) Goodman – recognised the opportunity for enrichment in the industry on his arrival in Leeds in 1866, and made numerous trips back to his home city to recruit landsmen for his workshops.”46

The employment of illegal immigrants served to undercut even the other Jews who already made use of foreign labour. It also helped to discredit the law and normalise defiance and evasion of the state. As Gartner says, “[t]he Factory Inspector’s right of inspection, tenuous as it was, was further weakened by the reluctance of many Jewish women and girls to admit that they were working illegally. … The inadequacy of the inspecting staff, the limitations of the law, the absence of even a list of workshops, the ruses to evade the Inspector’s visits and queries, all combined practically to nullify English factory legislation in the Jewish workshops.”47
Demographic change

As the immigrants were given British citizenship and their children grew up, they began to count as voters. Historians have debated the extent to which there was and is a ‘Jewish vote’, but surely all would agree that it is much more real than any ‘white vote’, ‘English vote’ or ‘East-Ender vote’. As the largest and best-organised minority, Jews began to have their way electorally. According to Alderman,

“…the undoubtedly socialist proclivities of the bulk of immigrant Jewry and their offspring… were reflected in and symbolized by such developments as the formation in June 1918 of the Stepney Central Labour Party, the founder and secretary of which was the formidable Romanian-Jewish political strategist, Oscar Tobin; the Labour victory in the Stepney Borough Council elections of November 1919; Labour’s capture of the combined Whitechapel and St George’s parliamentary constituency at the general election of 1922; and even the appearance in the House of Commons, as a result of that same election, of the first Jewish Labour MP, Emanuel Shinwell.”48

Jews did not seize power and territory so much as use the door opened for them by British politicians, who ignored the suffering of the English of the East End and in some cases made a perverse show of gratitude to those who came and exacerbated it. The future saviour of the country distinguished himself by his pro-immigrant sanctimony. According to Gartner, referring to the debates over what became the Aliens Act of 1905,

“[T]he early Labour Party minimized nationalist appeal and scorned racism. … The Liberal Party, especially its Gladstonian traditionalists, regarded free access to England as an unshakable aspect of Free Trade, and were not to be convinced that any harm was incurred by the unobstructed settlement of immigrants. Sir Charles Dilke, most leftward of Liberals, held the general opinion of social reformers that ‘the prohibition of alien immigration is a sham remedy for very grave evils in the labour market’. A younger man who shared the same conviction, C. P. Trevelyan, studied the relation between alien immigration and sweating, and felt ‘thankful to them [aliens] for turning the searchlight of public reprobation on a system which our own people suffer in common with them’. Young Winston Churchill, then M.P. for a considerably Jewish constituency in Manchester, concluded, in common with general sentiment in his Party, that there were not

…any urgent or sufficient reasons, racial or social, for departing from the old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum to which this country has so long adhered and from which it has so greatly gained.”49

A young open borders activist

The Tories came to adopt a vaguely immigration-sceptic stance after decades of unprecedented inflow, enough to siphon support from the nativist British Brothers’ League, and far short of even stopping immigration, let alone reversing it. We will elaborate on post-1881 Jews’ impact on politics in a later article.

Only infrequent comment is passed anywhere in the media or academia to lament the displacement of English East-Enders, whose descendants, typically living in Essex, our rulers despise. Of those who do comment, vagueness is still the norm, as while the area is now occupied by Bangladeshis, most people have some awareness that Jewish immigration set the precedent and that the English were habituated before the Great War to concede their land to foreign colonists.

Nearly everything alien and repulsive about the present foreign occupation of the East End was prefigured by the earlier one. We might ask, in light of the Jewish role in the arrival of the Empire Windrush, whether Bangladeshis first settled in the East End with Jewish encouragement. Perhaps so, or perhaps British governments saw the area as already ransacked and thus no loss if thrown open to barbarians again. Ministers didn’t live there, after all.

References

1

Jewish Immigrants in London, 1880-1939, Susan Tananbaum, 2014, p26

2

The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914, Lloyd Gartner, 1973, p171-2

3

Modern British Jewry, Geoffrey Alderman, 1992, p118-9. ‘Alien’ referred to those who had immigrated, not been born in Britain.

4

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p118-9. Toynbee Hall was a settlement house on Commercial Road that inspired similar ventures in the USA; it continues to operate today amid a primarily Bangladeshi population.

5

Gartner, p146-7

6

Gartner, p148

7

Gartner, p149

8

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p126

9

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p129-30. He adds that “Perhaps for this reason Samuel Montagu insisted, in making a gift of £10,000 to the LCC in 1902, that the special housing complex for Whitechapel residents which the money was used to build on the Council’s White Hart Lane estate, Tottenham, should be available ‘without distinction of race or creed’.” Montagu was of the older, wealthy Jewish ‘Cousinhood’ and worked for Jews to integrate into British society without losing their religion. Members of the Cohen, Rothschild and Henriques families took a similar view.]

10

Gartner, p157-8

11

Gartner, p152

12

Jewish Chronicle, 1st October 1880, in Tananbaum, p23-4

13

Tananbaum, p34

14

Tananbaum, p30. She continues: “Many descriptions of East End Jews emphasized racially unique characteristics, and connected it to Jews’ clannishness, commercial skills and disturbing competitive nature.”

15

Tananbaum, p30

16

Tananbaum, p34

17

Gartner, p180-1

18

Gartner, p57

19

Tananbaum, p31

20

Gartner, p157-8

21

The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, Todd Endelman, 2002, p158

22

Gartner, p180-1 and Endelman, p158. Gartner: “Street life in the East End and the other Jewish quarters, a sort of common denominator, displayed a vividness which fascinated many outsiders although it offended the more staid native Jewish and Gentile residents. Store signs, theatrical placards, bookshops, bearded types from the old country, immigrant women wrapped in vast kerchiefs, all conferred an aura of exotic strangeness upon the Jewish area.”

23

Gartner, p166. He continues: “To a greater extent than other migrants from rural or small town environments to the big city, the Jews maintained much of the outward appearance and even the flavour of their former way of life.” This is still true of Hasidic Jews, as in Stamford Hill.

24

Endelman, p157

25

Endelman, p200

26

Gartner, p172

27

Sir Robert Waley Cohen, 1877-1952: A Biography, Robert Henriques, 1966, p68-9

28

Endelman, p82

29

Gartner, p22

30

Gartner, p230

31

Endelman, p85

32

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p11

33

Endelman, p92. He continues: “A striking illustration of this can be seen in the aforementioned orange trade. As noted, by mid-century, Jews were no longer the dominant group hawking oranges in the streets of London, having been replaced by the Irish. However, they remained prominent at the wholesale end of the trade: the fruit market in Duke’s Place, where street traders purchased oranges and nuts, was entirely Jewish. A similar development occurred in the secondhand clothing trade. Jews increasingly moved out of the lower end of the trade and into its slightly more salubrious branches, becoming pawnbrokers, slopsellers, auctioneers, salesmen with fixed premises, or stallholders in the covered wholesale exchange erected in Houndsditch in 1843. The latter was a bustling international mart, regularly attracting wholesale dealers from France, Belgium, Holland, and Ireland, as well as every city in Britain. A few entrepreneurs then made the leap from slopselling (or slopselling and pawnbroking) into manufacturing inexpensive garments. (Tailoring and shoemaking also served as launching pads for entry into the field.) The two biggest firms in England in the 1830s and 1840s were those of the Moses and Hyam families, both of which grew out of slopselling. Despite the Enlightenment hope that, in the absence of legal barriers, agriculture and the crafts would save the Jews from poverty and make them productive citizens, it was commerce that became the vehicle for the economic transformation of Anglo-Jewry, as it was in all western countries.” Alderman describes areas of later Jewish economic advancement: “Within the metropolis Jewish businessmen expanded in three broad directions. The first was in the manufacture and sale of food products (bread, cakes, dairy products), epitomized in the teashops (of which there were 200 by 1914) of J. Lyons & Co. The second was in publishing partly to serve the needs of the Jewish community but soon catering for national and indeed world markets; notable in this category was the fine art and greetings-card firm of Raphael Tuck, the Levy Lawson family that owned the Daily Telegraph, and Rachel Beer (née Sassoon), proprietor of the Sunday Times between 1893 and 1904. The third was in the distributive trades, especially chemist shops, public houses, restaurants, jewellery, clothing, grocery and furniture stores, to which perhaps the ownership of cinemas and the development of mail‑order companies ought to be added—though these were by no means primarily London‑orientated activities.” Controversy and Crisis, Geoffrey Alderman, 2008, p242.

34

Gartner, p60-1

35

Gartner, p62

36

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p9

37

Endelman, p89-90

38

Gartner, p62

39

Controversy, Alderman, p242

40

Amanda Bergen in Leeds and its Jewish Community edited by Derek Fraser, 2019, chapter 9

41

British Antisemitism in the Second World War, volume 1, Antony Kushner, 1986, p22-3. “[T]hese industries generally saw a replacement of Gentile ​with Jewish labour[.]”

42

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p9. ‘English’ and ‘Dutch’ refer to the legal nationality, not the ethnic group, of the workmen.

43

Gartner, p57

44

Endelman, p135

45

Derek Fraser in Leeds edited by Fraser, 2019, ch2

46

James Appell in Leeds edited by Fraser, 2019, ch4

47

Gartner, p69-70. Jews continued to arrive illegally at least until the Second World War, with the encouragement of some community leaders.

48

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p252

49

Gartner, p276-7. Churchill was a Tory until 1904, then a Liberal until 1925, then a Tory again. He fought against the Aliens Bill with extreme fervour.

50

Endelman, p158

A Clown Called Chleo: Fetishism, Feminism and the Toxicity of TERFs

A puzzled patriarch. That was me in March 2025. To be specific, I was puzzled by a pervert. I read a headline and it didn’t compute: “Woman jailed for recording hundreds of men using the toilet in Aldi.” Huh? I thought. But women don’t do that kind of thing. When I clicked on the link and read the story, all became clear. As clear as Chleo, in fact:

A sex offender who secretly took nearly 800 pictures of men using the toilets in Aldi has been jailed. Chleo Sunter, 37, was caught with 790 pictures and 15 videos of men inside toilet cubicles and standing at urinals. She took the photos in the men’s loos at an Aldi supermarket, a shopping centre in Middlesbrough, and at Darlington Train Station between January and November 2023.

Sunter, previously known as John Leslie Graham, admitted to two counts of voyeurism at Teesside Crown Court. She also admitted six breaches of a sexual harm prevention order after she was found to be in possession of extreme pornographic images in 2014 when Sunter was named John Leslie Graham. Sunter was caught with the material when her sex offender manager turned up at her home in Thornaby, to check she was complying with the court order.

Photos and videos of victims using public conveniences near Middlesbrough’s Captain Cook Square shopping centre, at a Middlesbrough Aldi; and at Darlington station, were stored on her phone. Paul Newcombe, prosecuting, told the court: “Some of the males were stood at the urinals. Some were recorded under the cubicles.”

On a police visit in November 2023, Sunter wasn’t at home, but was found nearby. Police investigators found she had deleted 695 chats, 712 photos, and four videos from the gay dating app, Grindr, the court heard. Sunter has also been using her phone in incognito mode so that her internet history couldn’t be seen. She further breached the terms of the order by resetting her phone to factory settings.

Mitigating, John Nixon said Sunter has a history of alcohol abuse and “no longer has a phone or laptop with internet access.” Sunter’s barrister asked the judge to consider a court order instead of prison — as if imprisoned would mean she would lose her accommodation and face homelessness when released. Judge Geoffrey Marson said he was aware of Sunter’s mental health difficulties and “particular circumstances, but they have little, or no effect on the offences.” The judge jailed Sunter, of Avon Close, Thornaby, for 26 months, telling her that he accepted she is “emotionally vulnerable and custody will be difficult.” (“Woman jailed for recording hundreds of men using the toilet in Aldi,” Metro News, 22nd March 2025)

A clown called Chleo: the entirely and obviously male pervert “Chleo Sunter,” a.k.a. John Leslie Graham

The story wasn’t about a female fetishist, but about a male mini-clown, one of the multitude sprouting like mushrooms in the manure spread by the rulers of Clown World. The manure consists of lies like “Transwomen are women” and “Non-Whites enrich the West.” Both those lies are about breaking boundaries and enabling invasion. Clown World wants male perverts to invade female territory and non-White savages to invade White territory. Anyone who objects to the invasions is a hate-filled bigot, because although leftism preaches equality, it practises hierarchy. If you’re higher in the leftist hierarchy, like Blacks or “transwomen,” you can invade the territory of those who are lower in the leftist hierarchy, like Whites or real women. 

A cutie called Cleo: the attractive actress Amanda Barrie as Cleopatra is contrasted with Linda Bellos

As I pointed out in “Power to the Perverts!,” this leftist principle of “Preach Equality, Practise Hierarchy” has created an astonishing anomaly: some straight White men have risen far above a Black-Jewish lesbian in the eyes of Clown World. But it’s not an anomaly when you look at it right. Doing that, you’ll see that it’s in perfect accordance with the rules of Clown World and the principles of leftism. The Black-Jewish lesbian in question is called Linda Bellos (born 1950) and she’s a TERF or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In other words, she correctly denies that men can become women. That’s a very bad thing to do in the eyes of Clown World, which celebrates lies, not truth. As a Marxist feminist, Bellow has always promoted some leftist lies: that men and women are identical in their intellects and abilities; that women will benefit from having complete control over their own lives; that beautiful and useful words like “actress,” “poetess,” and “heroine” are best abandoned in favor of uniforming unisex words like “actor,” “poet,” and “hero.”

Context cancels clam-diver

But she has refused to accept the giant leftist lie of “transgenderism.” And so her hybrid heritage and committed clam-diving now count for nothing when she enters a dispute with perverted White men who claim to be women and who habitually threaten real women with rape, mutilation and murder. Suddenly, she’s the hater and they’re the heroes. How could this happen? Doesn’t leftism automatically grant power and privilege to Black women over White men? In fact, no, it doesn’t. Not automatically. Instead, leftism grants power and privilege according to context. The fixed principle of leftism is to champion the unnatural, abnormal and ugly. And that’s why Bellos did so well for most of her life. In the 1980s, she rose to power and fame as the leader of a radical left-wing council in London. In the early 2000s, she began to shovel in the shekels, telling the Guardian that “I get paid a lot of money giving advice” through “her own consultancy on equality and diversity.” The newspaper noted that “On matters such as rape, policing and diversity, opinion has come round to her way of thinking.”

Hero of Clown World #1: one of the perverted and narcissistic “transwomen” who threaten real women with rape, mutilation and murder

Hero of Clown World #2: a leftist male who wants to see “all Republican women” “gang-raped on national television” (see video)

The context in which Bellos did so well was that of opposition to the straight White majority and its interests. Her Blackness and lesbianism were suitably unnatural and abnormal in that context. But then the context shifted and Bellos came up against a group that was even more unnatural, abnormal and ugly than she was, namely, male perverts who claimed to be women. Naturally — or unnaturally — enough, leftism sided with the male perverts, not the Black lesbian. Indeed, Blackness is a perfectly natural category in the right context, that of Africa. It only becomes unnatural and abnormal outside Africa, which is precisely why Clown World wants Blacks to leave Africa and invade the West. That’s where their lower average intelligence and higher average criminality, which are natural to Blacks in Africa, can harm and subvert Whites and White society.

Lesbianism too is in some sense natural. It only becomes unnatural and abnormal when it’s celebrated and when lesbians are allowed power or leadership among other women. That’s when they can act on their resentment of men and harm the interests of straight women, whose psychology and tastes they don’t share. And something else about lesbians has contributed to leftism shifting its allegiance from muff-munchers to patriarchal perverts. As I pointed out in “Dykes Are Dull! Why Lesbians Lose to Translunacy,” real lesbians are boring. And particularly so by comparison with “transwomen,” who continually quench the adolescent leftist thirst for stimulation and sensation. When has a lesbian ever hit the headlines as abnormally and entertainingly as that clown called Chleo?

We’re all obscurantists now: how the media class copes with democratic loss

In the UK, legions of Labour supporters are realising that their party is hardly different in government to the previous Conservative administration. Guardian writers and below-the-line comments initially blamed the penny-pinching policies of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves on the ‘black hole’ left by the Tories (and Brexit, of course). But as the swingeing cuts continue, and Labour takes from the poor to give to the rich, discontent is rising.

Welcome, Labour followers, to the reality that Conservative voters have experienced since 2010. The dichotomy of Left and Right, which originated in the French national assembly of the late 18th century (nobility sitting on the right and revolutionaries on the left) seems irrelevant to the party in power. The only difference is in presentation: Labour pretends to serve one side while the Conservatives pretend to support the other. Did Cameron, May or Johnson stem the tides of immigration, Green and Woke? No – but they made the right noises to fool the electorate. The establishment wants us to keep the faith in a political pantomime.

The old divide is becoming unsustainable, despite mainstream media efforts. In the latest Atlantic monthly magazine, Anne Applebaum tries to explain what ‘far right’ means in context of Donald Trump’s return of to the White House. How could former Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr. serve a man that the likes of the Atlantic and Washington Post had deemed fascist?

Applebaum is starting to get it, but her prejudices prevent her from really understanding why the Left / Right paradigm is becoming meaningless. She focuses entirely on supposedly problematic ‘populism’, failing to consider how conventional political parties have abandoned the ordinary people to become like the nobility of revolutionary France.

Confusing for Applebaum is the phenomenon of politicians of the Right pursuing causes associated with the Left. She cannot believe that the likes of Trump and Viktor Orban really care about the common people; instead, she sees demagogues exploiting economic and cultural woes in a rapidly changing world. They are conmen, pretending to help the poor while building an oligarchy: –

This rising international elite is creating a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of a law in a world where emotion defeats reason — only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

She has a new word for the Right: ‘obscurantism’. The movement led by Trump and other figures manifests in a nebulous spiritualism, nativist narratives, and covid and climate change denial. The trajectory Applebaum describes is from Enlightenment values to darkness, through cultivation of fear. Ironically, she believes that humanity should be very afraid of viruses and a purported climate emergency, while most Trump voters simply want more freedom and less government, especially government that massively subsidises the left. It’s the establishment that has cultivated fear, from nuclear Armageddon to ‘global boiling’.

I first read Applebaum’s neocon missives two decades ago when I subscribed to the new magazine Standpoint, which I naively regarded as an antidote to subversive identity politics. Like neocons generally, Applebaum was obsessively concerned about Russia, which under Vladimir Putin was a counterweight to the Western-driven new world order emerging after the fall of communism.

Today, such rhetoric is normalised. But Applebaum knows that so-called populists in the West do not see Russia as our enemy or believe that Putin wants to invade Europe. Instead they see NATO and the EU as the warmongers, while the biggest threat to civilians in Western countries is not Putin but their own governments (as JD Vance remarked in his address to a security conference in Munich).

The Right, Applebaum asserts, has abandoned conservatism and caution for a wrecking ball. Democratic institutions are at risk. Again displaying lack of insight, she began her article with a scathing account of the Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu, who was arrested and barred from standing after his first-round election win was annulled. The reason given was supposed Russian influence on TikTok, but it was foreign interference by the EU and globalists that cancelled the election and its likely winner.  Some democracy there, Anne!  Meanwhile Orban has ‘impoverished his country’, she claims, ignoring the EU clamouring for punishment because of the Hungarian government’s legitimate policies.

Applebaum has a litany of slurs for anyone patriotic or traditionalist: law-breakers, thieves, misogynists. And, of course — conspiracy theorists. The latter should be worn as a badge of honour nowadays, because undoubtedly there is a global conspiracy to undermine sovereignty and install an oppressive technocracy. Wild conjecture may abound, but that does not invalidate the obvious truth, as blatantly stated by the World Economic Forum.

She gets something right, by stating that ‘techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology controls us in ways we can’t understand’. But who is controlling this technology? And why is the internet, initially liberating, now used for surveillance and censorship? Populists are not the powerful clinging to the status quo.

Applebaum scoffs at a mystical belief in the ‘deep state’ as a dark force taking humanity in a dystopian direction. Anyone remotely paying attention to politics in the West realises the deep state is a horrifying reality.

The problem with pro-establishment concepts of public opinion and politics is that the disfavoured side is labelled not with its own identification but by smears. ‘Far-right’ is not how most conservative patriots would describe themselves. But this term is used so excessively that libertarians and even socialists have been caught in the net, if they commit heresy against the climate cult or doubt the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

The Right / Left construct is a divide-and-rule strategy that we must overcome if we are to build a unified resistance to the globalist agenda. Applebaum, for all her verbosity, is a useful idiot for the predatory elite. Or more likely, she realises that as an entirely kosher, card-carrying member of the predatory elite, she is quite aware of where her ethnic, social, and economic interests lie: Definitely not with populism.

News from Nowhere: HOPE Not Hate’s 2025 Report

HOPE Not Hate (HNH) are a British organization monitoring and reporting on what is described in the UK as the “far Right”. They are the British equivalent of America’s Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and fulfil a similar function, that of unofficial government adviser. That may well change for the SPLC under President Trump, but HNH are quite safe with the Starmer government in Britain as they are on-message. For the left, since they have created a totally dysfunctional society, it can only be about hope — the ever-elusive goal of a multi-ethnic utopia that is just around the corner if we could only destroy and de-legitimize White people’s interests.

In fact, they could be said to produce a large part of the message. HNH produce an annual report entitled State of Hate (SoH), and the 2025 edition has just been published. With an 11-strong production team and solid funding, SoH is lavish and exhaustively researched. It can be downloaded, but is also available in glossy magazine form. It might make a nice coffee-table ornament, an office I’m sure it will perform in parts of north London.

As a serious journalistic source, should you happen to be writing about the British far Right, SoH is first-rate. But all it really is in essence is an almanac with a very disapproving tone. The allegations are largely petty indiscretions, the “problematic rhetoric” is very often just facts unpalatable to the Left, and simply appending the phrase “far-Right” to anyone of whom you disapprove is an ideological parlour-game Orwell exposed in 1946 in Politics and the English Language.

Also, when people whine about “rhetoric”, it’s likely that they have never read Aristotle’s ars rhetorica in their intellectually sheltered lives, this being too classical and therefore too White for them. But these midwits are more powerful than one might think, and are taken extremely seriously by those who fund them. Then again, so are many writers of fiction.

Like the SPLC in the US, HNH are not officially the government’s advisers, and Starmer would rather keep things as they are. That way, HNH are deniable should they do anything too crass, which they almost did last summer. At the height of the rioting following the attack in Southport in which three young girls were butchered, HNH CEO Nick Lowles posted on X that a Muslima had had acid thrown in her face. This was simply untrue and, viewed in context, with a number of volatile situations in progress and armed Muslims taking to the streets, incredibly irresponsible. HNH were fortunate that no charges were pressed. Fortunate, or something else.

Their status as a NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) notwithstanding, HNH seem to derive a fair portion of their funding directly from governmental sources—as DOGE is finding out in the U.S. The London Mayor’s Office, under the long reign of Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, gave money to HNH in 2019, and under the previous supposedly conservative government, HNH sent paid advisers to the Home Office to lecture its staff about extremism.

But SoH is its central pillar, and it is worth remembering that all of the various characters who appear in the 140 pages of the report have one thing in common, in the opinion of HNH; they hate. They are “haters”. Hatred is their natural habitat. Hating, of course, is what children do. “I hate you, Mummy!” It is also what ethnic adversaries do, and perhaps ethnicity is the greatest driver of genuine hatred, rather than that confected by HNH. In SoH, of course, the word “hatred” and its cognates are just stage props in a production as theatrical as it is ideological. The word “hate” itself is carefully manipulated by HNH, although hatred is an emotion understood by all. One thinks of the Messerschmitt busts which show hatred and other disagreeable emotions. This is how HOPE Not Hate wish us to be pictured in the mind’s eye of the great British public. So, let the hatred begin.

The report’s cover features two of HNH’s bêtes noires, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, the leader of the rapidly rising Reform UK, and effectively a political prisoner respectively. As always, they both have large sections of SoH dedicated to them.

Robinson having been in prison for some time, there is not much to report on him (absent the fact that the deep state is trying to kill him in jail, which HNH are unlikely to mention). Thus, being something of a veteran of these reports, I detect a fair bit of cut-and-paste in the production of SoH 2025. But, as noted, it is exhaustive, and the updates maintain the illusion of what I called the “Pepper’s Ghost” of the British far Right, here at The Occidental Observer three years ago. Not much has changed.

HNH’s mission statement accompanies a request for donations:

“We take on and defeat nazis.

Will you step up with a donation to ensure we can keep fighting the far right?”

This is an old advertising technique as well as more evidence of the little-league neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) which infects every ward of the Leftist sanitorium. Association, verbal or typographical, is a device the Left use consistently, and they like to link certain familiar images in the minds of their followers. Nazis, far-Right, fascists, radical Right; these smear-phrases must be kept in circulation, melding and conflating into one single meaning.

As the report progresses, certain phrases recur. Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer whose crime sparked last year’s riots in England, is mentioned three times in the first 12 pages of SoH, each time with a variation on this theme:

“We are also seeing rising numbers of young men who through ideologically fluid means — picking elements of different and even contradictory ideologies — are drawn together through a desire to commit extreme violence. The Southport killer fitted this mould…”  (p. 6)

Decoded, this means that Rudakubana’s being a Muslim was, if anything, a very minor and insignificant factor in his murdering three small girls. The way HNH work is by association, whether it exists or not.

Because of this methodological need to make links in a chain, HNH particularly like structure. This is from Lowles’ editorial introduction to SoH:

[The Southport riots] were primarily a product of the ‘post-organisational’ far right. Most of the disturbances were planned organically, often by local people unaligned to any formal organisation, but who were plugged into decentralised far-right networks online. (p. 12).

Unless cretinism is either a condition you actually suffer from, or the hobby it seems to be for many on the Left, this is nonsense on stilts. What does, what can, “post-organizational” actually mean? What are “decentralized far-Right networks”? If those of us on the political Right don’t know it yet, much of our battle takes place on the terrain of language, and the ex cathedra terminology of Critical Race Theory has allowed the Left to exercise their apparent right to use language as though it were malleable and has meaning only as subject to the requirements of the user.

HNH have their own lexicon, and it is every bit as semantically fluid as one would expect:

We use the term ‘trigger events’ to describe incidents that generate large-scale reactions. These reactions spread beyond the individuals involved in the event to those in the in-group attacking the out-group: what some social psychologists call ‘vicarious retribution’.  In the case of anti-migrant hatred, trigger events are most commonly crimes committed or alleged to have been committed by people of migrant backgrounds. (p. 84).

The Southport killings are thus reduced to the status of a simple causative formula rather than the massacre of White girls by a second-generation immigrant. Language is once again co-opted in order to smear perfectly understandable reactions to horrors which are becoming increasingly commonplace across Europe.

Language is also key to the self-damning of its “far-Right” users, although the bar is set low enough to challenge the doughtiest limbo-dancer, and is not confined to political pariahs:

But crucially, this [language] is not only confined to Reform or Conservative politicians. Although far less common and extreme, Labour have at times dipped their toes in this rhetoric. In 2007 Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a ‘British jobs for British workers’ policy, which many viewed as nativist and contrary to anti-discrimination laws. (p. 24).

As for the cast of this stage-play, hell is empty and all the devils are here. Farage and Reform UK, Elon Musk (despite not being British), Andrew Tate, GB News, Patriotic Alternative; the gang’s all here. But there are some new faces in this hall of shame.

One of the high-profile media arrivistes in this year’s SoH is Professor Matt Goodwin. He is a Jewish professional statistician with an academic background, articulate and forthright, and has found himself a target for HNH:

He [Matt Goodwin]… emphasised that the Cardiff-born murderer [Rudakubana] was ‘the son of immigrants from Rwanda’, in a clear attempt to frame the horrifying attack as a result of immigration. (p. 46).

The attacks were a result of immigration, literally and de facto, but HNH are not going to let facts stand in the way of a good story.

Goodwin merits four pages and has, it seems, been “radicalized”, another word which has been requisitioned and genetically modified by HNH. The word is immediately associated with Islamic terrorism, and HNH know this perfectly well. Thus, an equivalence is set up between a mild-mannered academic and a screaming jihadi with machete or backpack-bomb.

HNH are not entirely politically illiterate, and make the occasional astute observation. The endorsement made by Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon of Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rallies in London (successful, well attended, and entirely peaceful so far, and with another planned for September) has something of an internal problem:

While Bannon and Loomer’s presence will undoubtedly excite Lennon’s [Robinson’s real name] supporters, one person who will not be impressed is Elon Musk. Bannon and Loomer have nothing but contempt for the billionaire and have been leading the MAGA campaign against his influence. (p. 43).

Musk has previously helped fund Robinson’s legal team, and HNH have correctly pointed out a potential cause of future conflict.

In the quaintly named “Rogues Gallery” section of SoH, we see all 23 White human oddities convicted last year for terrorist offences. Many of these miscreants were jailed, at least partly, for offences concerning terrorist literature. This is another flexible category, despite being defined in the UK Terrorism Act 2006:

Section 2 makes it an offence to distribute a terrorist publication with the intention of encouraging acts of terrorism. A terrorist publication is one which could be useful to a person in the commission or preparation of acts of terror, and the maximum sentence in respect of this offence is 15 years’ imprisonment.

These “terrorist publications” could be The Anarchist’s Cookbook (and often is), or it could be The Turner Diaries.

It is a racing certainty that, should you be White and in possession of proscribed literature, you will go to jail. But UK Counter Terrorism Police arrested 248 people under terrorism laws last year, including those involved in three “late stage” attacks. Who were the other 225 not mentioned in HNH’s report? From SoH:

The offences of those who were arrested range from suspicion of possessing a firearm, to those who have allegedly shared terrorist material online, and to those who were thought to be preparing acts of terrorism. (p. 68).

The faces in the Rogues Gallery speak of snake-eye genes and sub-85 IQs, but HNH are determined that these dropouts be seen as representing the vanguard of a wave of terror which could break over the righteous at any moment.

Race science is also in HNH’s crosshairs, and Edward Dutton —  of this parish — makes an appearance, something which is becoming a badge of honor for those questioning the narrative, like a duelling scar at an old German public school. HNH only recognize state-endorsed science.

If HNH’s portrait of the British far Right is in any way accurate, then what a diverse bunch they are. Odinists rub shoulders with Conservative Woman magazine. Bubbly feminist Posie Parker mingles with the skinheads of Blood & Honour (who haven’t actually existed for some time, although no one seems to have told HNH). Affable, elderly YouTuber Simon Webb, of the channel History Debunked, shares the limelight with the UVF. That’s right. This extraordinary document actually finishes its inventory of far-Right organizations with the Ulster Volunteer Force. Strange times.

I can’t recommend SoH 2025 highly enough, and for two reasons. Firstly, and as noted, it is an exhaustive inventory of anyone in the UK even vaguely to the right of Mao Zedong. If you want new pen-pals on the British political Right, this is effectively one of those old-fashioned telephone directories. I shall certainly be contacting some of the groups who have merited inclusion since SoH 2024, with a view to interviews. Thank you for the contact list, HNH.

Secondly, this document is an extraordinary snapshot — like one of those MSI brain-scans — of the pathology of the British Left and, by extension, all Westerners of that persuasion. I hope that those readers who actually know a fair bit about psychology will forgive me, but I can’t resist a bit of a layman’s prognosis. I think Lowles and most of his crew (although I would bet not all) know perfectly well that SoH 2025 is a Potemkin Village. The frontage is impressively and meticulously decorated, but there is nothing behind it. Lowles is a snake-oil salesman, a used-car dealer who understands the importance to profit of counterfeit parts and the necessity of occasionally filing the number off an engine-block. HNH is a laboratory in which is produced controlled cognitive dissonance. It is also, to use a term taken up by those who understand the mechanics of the race industry, a grift.

The best grift I ever saw was 40 years ago on Guy Fawkes’ Night (aka Bonfire Night) at a crowded railway station in England. It was traditional when I was a boy to make a dummy of Guido Fawkes, the man who attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, and often wryly known as “the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions”. Boys would stuff old shirts and Dad’s work trousers with rags, make a papier maché head, and toddle off to the town centre to cry “Penny for the Guy!” in the hope that passers-by would throw them a few coppers for their artistic efforts. The boys at this bustling Brighton station full of commuters returning home from work in London were doing just that, but when they asked me for money, I asked them something which was troubling me:

“Where’s the Guy?”

They looked at me with feral distrust and sloped off to ply their trade elsewhere. There was, of course, no Guy, but people still gave them money without bothering to seek out the famous effigy. This is a perfect metaphor for HNH and SoH. It is also (to me) a nice irony that the website doing much to expose HNH’s troubles is the notorious Westminster insider Guido Fawkes.

As a source of juvenile revenue, a penny for the Guy has rather dried up now, as Bonfire Night is one of several celebrations smothered by the British version of the deep state (far too many White people enjoy, or used to enjoy, the fireworks and celebrations). But HNH are also seeing a bit of a dip in their revenue stream. Their last financial report shows that they took in £417,000 last year, compared with £715,000 the previous year, and over £1 million the year before that. It will be of interest to see the next figure in the wake of the forensic accounting President Trump’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) is carrying out, and we perhaps discover that some of USAID’s money was finding its way across the Atlantic. In terms of HNH’s status as an employer, in place of their previous long-term contracts for employees and interns, they are increasingly offering contractual terms as short as four months.

So, another year, another SoH report. But how long can HNH and Nick Lowles maintain the illusion? And, if the grift is done, who will save us from the imaginary monsters of the British far Right?

Decadence, the Corruption of Status Hierarchies, & Female Hypergamy: A Response to Rob Henderson’s Article “All the Single Ladies” – Part 2

Go to Part 1.

My Response Part Two: The Effect of Corrupt Status Hierarchies on Female Hypergamy

I could go on at much greater length denouncing the absurd, grotesque, surreal levels of corruption plaguing Western institutions of higher learning, but I bite my tongue to return to the point from which we set out, viz., Rob Henderson’s article “All the Single Ladies” and its touching portrayal of the loneliness of contemporary women who cannot find sufficiently educated men.

These sound like extraordinary ladies, and quite unlike any I ever knew or dated. Do they find men’s stock of knowledge and ideas insufficient to stimulate their own constantly buzzing intellects? Have male minds not been honed to enough razor sharpness to spot logical fallacies a mile off? Do the lady’s suitors have an insufficient appreciation of the fundamental principles upon which Western Civilization is based? Might an ability to parse Cicero help? How about solving differential equations, or explaining competing theories about why the industrial revolution occurred at the place and time it did? The poor fellows are certainly going to have to bone up before they can hope to become worthy of such exalted female minds!

Coming back down to earth, it is obvious Henderson is using the term “education” not in its proper sense—relating to the genuine practice of higher education—but with exclusive reference to contemporary institutions of “education.” And these are scandalously corrupt. The young women are “educated” only in the sense that they have demonstrated proficiency at negotiating a credentialing process that serves to protect a status hierarchy that has lost all mooring to the practice of higher education universities were originally meant to foster and promote. Those best able to rise within such a hierarchy turn out to be idle young women adept at chattering about olfactory oppression. (Competent women scholars obviously exist, but any survey of the contemporary academy would surely reveal that the remaining serious scholars are disproportionately male while the fakes are disproportionately female.)

Most of the noncollege young men these women despise—the 84 percent who are employed, in any case—do not engage in such chatter because they are too busy fixing leaks, delivering cargo on time, stringing electrical wire, repairing engines, hurrying to accident sites, putting out fires, preventing dusky barbarians from cutting our throats, bringing life-sustaining foods to market, and generally keeping the world around us running. They are operating competently toward the lower end of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as most men have had to do throughout history. And they are the only reason Western Civilization has not already collapsed entirely. The travesties of scholarship produced within the contemporary academy, by contrast, never benefit anyone apart from the mandarins who produce them. It is simply obvious that an electrician, carpenter, or auto mechanic is more valuable to the world than an olfactory racism “scholar.”

Why are women more successful than men at climbing today’s corrupt academic status ladder? In considerable part for the same reason they are better at knitting sweaters: they have a higher tolerance for monotonous, repetitive work of a sedentary kind. To spend his peak physical years culling examples of olfactory racism from the novels of Virginia Woolf and then—worse—to compose a long, formal dissertation on the subject would amount to positive torture for many young men, something I think does our sex credit. I myself had difficulty with restlessness in graduate school, which I dealt with through long walks and other physical exercise. I kept slogging away at the academic task because I was fascinated by big, serious, consequential philosophical ideas. But I could never have done the same for the sake of most of what gets “studied” in the contemporary academy.

Dutton mentions the probability that our newly minted olfactory racism scholarette has received public funding. Again, the particular case hardly matters—the point is that most young women in the academy benefit from such funding. This means working men have had a portion of their earnings confiscated to allow her to peruse Virgina Woolf novels and grind out empty verbiage about oppression. It is a crying injustice that should not be tolerated one minute longer. Yet in return for such support, the young lady looks down her snout at the men funding her! They are simply not “educated” enough to be worthy of her consideration.

What explains such women’s limitless faith in the objective validity of academic credentials? In part, their own mediocre intelligence and the limits precisely of their education in the authentic sense. Learning and acquired mental acuity are goods difficult to appreciate except by those who already have them in significant measure themselves. It is hard to judge uphill on education because people by definition cannot know what they do not know. Dull and untrained minds cannot have a proper sense of what they are lacking. All they can judge by is externalities—such as academic credentials. Any fool can see a degree hanging on someone’s wall in a way he cannot so easily see the benefit a gifted mind has derived from, for example, extended immersion in the Latin classics. Hence we find women in the tragicomic situation Henderson describes: lonely and miserable even as they reject legions of men on the basis of meaningless credentials. And we are asked to believe they do so because they value education. I feel myself crashing into the limits of the English language’s capacity for expressing contempt.

The relation of the genuine life of the mind to today’s corrupt academy might be illuminated by comparison with the ancient Christian doctrine of the church invisible. Christians believe the church derives from God himself, yet this presents an obvious problem. God is perfect, while the church is made up entirely of imperfect, sinful men (wise theologians admit that ecclesia semper reformanda – “the church is always in need of reform”). The explanation of this apparent paradox is found in the distinction between the church visible and the church invisible. Normally when men refer to the church, they have the everyday, visible church in mind. But this human institution is less important than the true, invisible church responsible for the work of salvation, and whose composition is known to God alone. The invisible church somehow exists within the visible, but is never identical to it. Obviously, the decay of genuine learning within a corrupt academy is analogous to a near-throttling of the invisible church by the visible.

If you give an uneducated (in the proper sense) person an educational credential, he—or more to the point, she—will accept it unquestioningly as a proof of her own real accomplishment. Dutton reports that the young olfactory racism expert weathered the storm of public scorn directed at her successfully. He even quotes her as saying, “I’m fine, I’m quite pleased that I’ve upset these basement-dwelling incels.” It does not occur to her that the incels may only be incels because thousands of academic spinsters like herself are ludicrously deluded as to the value of their own attainments.

In short, the corruption of our educational institutions has produced a status-mirage that women are unable to see through, one which condemns both themselves and men to childlessness—though not necessarily depriving the women of polygynous sex with men above them in the outward status hierarchy.

In addition to the mediocrity of their minds and the modesty of their attainments, women in the academy may have difficulty seeing through the corrupt status hierarchies in which they are enmeshed simply because they are women. As I wrote in a recent essay, the sex generally consists of “impressionable conformists with a powerful need for social approval.” Status hierarchies are produced by men, as Napoleon knew (“Les femmes n’ont pas de rang”). Women rarely consider them critically; they accept them as given, and all their instincts concerning the “attractiveness” of men operate downstream from there. If a society is healthy, its status hierarchy embodies sound values, and female hypergamy functions as a spur to worthwhile male achievement. If a society is sick—we get what we see in Henderson’s article.

A Valuable Historical and Literary Parallel

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a wonderful story reflecting how an impressionable female mind functions within a different sick society marked by an equally distorted educational status hierarchy: early Soviet Russia. It is called Nastenka, and can be found in English translation in the collection Apricot Jam (the relevant narrative begins on p. 91). The story presents numerous suggestive analogies with the decadence and corruption of the contemporary West as described in this essay. Let us have a look.

Just before the revolution, Nastenka enrolls in “a classical high school, one of the best in Moscow.” It survives unchanged well into the 1920s because at that period the Bolsheviks have more pressing matters than educational policy to worry about. The young heroine becomes fascinated with the imaginative literature of the nineteenth century. “It was an entire, enormous, organic world, more vivid than the reality that flowed around her.” At first, she simply enjoys the direct experience of reading, but gradually her teacher, a cultivated lady who received her education under the old regime, reveals to her the possibility of going deeper:

She learned to look at books in a new way—not just to live with the characters, but to live constantly with the author. How did he regard his characters? Was he the sole master of their lives, or where they independent of them? How did he organize this scene or that, and what words and phrases did he use in doing so?

Gradually Nastenka conceives the ambition of sharing her love of literature with the rising generation by becoming a teacher.

At age sixteen, one year before graduation, her family moves and she is thrust into an unfamiliar environment. At her new school “she couldn’t recognize the literature of the past in what was now being laid out before her in lectures.”

Though they did acknowledge, in passing, the musicality of Pushkin’s poetry (but never mentioned the transparent clarity of his perception of the world), they insistently pointed out that he expressed the mindset and ideology of the mid-level landowners during the incipient crisis of Russian feudalism. [The playwright] Ostrovsky reflected the decay of the feudal, serf-owning system and its displacement by developing industrial capitalism.

Nastenka pores over the new Soviet literature textbook produced by some communist ideologue named Kogan, where she learns how “all these Onegins and Bolkonskys” (characters in Pushkin and Tolstoy respectively) are our class enemies. She quietly thinks: “That may be so, yet they certainly knew how to love in those days!” But she cannot bring herself to question the overall validity of what she is being taught: “There was no way to maintain a sustained argument against Kogan. He couldn’t have constructed all these many things on utter nonsense. Surely there was a genuine historical and social basis for them? . . . Surely they weren’t built on thin air?” She begins to feel a mixture of confusion and boredom that contrasts sharply with the enthusiasm for literature that initially inspired her choice of career.

Her boredom vanishes temporarily when she meets a charismatic young man named Shurik, overflowing with ideas that he expresses with extreme confidence. As we all know, women love confident men: “How did Shurik know all these things? When had he found the time to soak it all up?” The reader quickly perceives—although Nastenka herself never does—the reason for Shurik’s self-assurance. He is a communist militant who follows the party line unswervingly. He knows exactly what he is supposed to say about everything under the sun. Nastenka drinks up his every word, and a romance begins. But soon he is pressing her to consummate the relationship, and something inside her tells her that, at the very least, it is not yet time. Concerning early Soviet manhood in general, she reflects: “None of them could understand the slow, gradual development of feelings.”

So Shurik breaks off with her and demonstratively ignores her for the rest of the time they are in class together. Soon he is called to Moscow and a no doubt successful rise within the official status hierarchy of the Soviet literary world. Nastenka is left broken-hearted. The reader understands—as she herself does not—that she has barely avoided a spiritual landmine.

Time passes and Nastenka, now addressed at Anastasia Dmitrievna, is put in charge of a class: “At long last, her dream had come true [and] she could pour into [her students’] heads all the things she had preserved from this great and good literature” (as well as “make sure these little boys become decent men, not like the ones today”).

One day she is handed a new literature textbook meant to guide her own teaching. In it a major Soviet author is quoted as stating: “It is entirely natural that workers’ and peasants’ power is crushing its enemies like lice.” She wonders, “How could you possibly present that to the children?” Yet this writer is “a Russian classic, and an authority respected across the globe, so how could your wretched little mind challenge him?”

By this time the Soviet curriculum is tightly controlled. She makes the best of things, teaching “all these production and Five-Year Plan works with the same dedication that she felt to her own sacred cause of literature.” On her own time, however, she organizes an after-school literary circle for a dozen or so of her best students where she “takes them through the best of the nineteenth century, things that weren’t included on the syllabus.” But word gets out and she is ordered to stop. “Enough harping on the classics! It distracts the students from life.”

Nastenka’s fate is the tragedy of a promising young female mind stunted due to an inability to trust its own healthy instincts and question what it receives from a corrupt authority. She senses the gulf separating the great literature she learned to love in her youth from the Marxist rubbish she is forced to impart, but never breaks through to clear insight about her situation. Perhaps most fascinatingly, she dimly perceives that this cultural decline bears some relation to the contrast between the men of her own time who insist on getting straight down to business with women and the Onegins and Bolkonskys who “certainly knew how to love in those days.”

So in general, as I said, women accept the authorities and status hierarchies that they find in place. This is probably because authority and status are essentially male concerns. Les femmes n’ont pas de rang—women are never going to tear down corrupt hierarchies for us, nor is it reasonable for men to blame them for being as nature made them. Their sexual instincts will function properly again once we have replaced rotten hierarchies with sound ones in better accord with the nature of things and a proper sense of values. When we do, we shall never again have female olfactory racism scholarettes turning up their noses at hardworking men.

What, Then, Must We Do?

Some years ago I came across an amusing article about a fire breaking out in an office building. What was amusing was the reaction of the female employees. Firemen, as everyone knows, do not enjoy the very highest status within our society, despite the dangerous and life-saving nature of their work. But every dog has its day, and even firemen come into their own when a fire breaks out. Under such circumstances, there is no time for discussion or persuasion. Everyone who knows what’s good for him must do exactly as the firemen direct, including the corporate CEO. You do not give firemen any backtalk while a fire is raging. For a brief moment, they are at the top of the status hierarchy.

Well, these corporate “career girls” were practically swooning. Once out of the building and in safety, they began marveling to one another how manly those guys were. This was virility the likes of which they had never known. It was the first time in their whole lonely, miserable lives that any man had put them in their place, and they were simply beside themselves. It was better than Love’s Sweet Fury.

It would be interesting to know whether any of these women went on the internet afterwards to seek dates with firemen. I doubt it. Most firemen are not terribly “educated,” and often earn less than the ass-sitting female paper-pushers they rescue. Perhaps if women had to spend several post-pubertal years being continually rescued from burning buildings, we could foster a baby-boom. Instead, of course, America’s fire departments are busy replacing firemen with firewomen. (When a large part of Los Angeles recently burned down, it emerged that the three persons in charge of the fire department were all lesbians.) So those rescued women probably went back to their sterile lives as soon as the building reopened. What a pity.

So what can we do? It is tempting to say we must raise the status of young men. But the solution to the problem described in Henderson’s article is surely not for policemen, farmers, and plumbers to get post-doctoral fellowships in feminist theory. If we cannot make female hypergamy function correctly once again by raising the status of men, all that remains is . . . to lower that of women. In effect, this is what briefly occurred in that burning office building. And the women just loved it.

Feminists, like broken clocks giving the right time twice a day, have described how women under “patriarchy” eroticize and derive pleasure from their own oppression, meaning their exclusion from the male status hierarchy. They are correct. The reader who wishes to observe how women might be made happier once men finally work up the gumption to deprive them of status is advised to watch my favorite Italian movie, Swept Away (1974; avoid Madonna’s 2002 remake). It was made by a woman—and could only have been made by a woman. Meanwhile, clueless male traditionalists offer nothing but laments that women are no longer being placed upon sufficiently high pedestals, unaware that their excessively elevated status is now the principal factor in their loneliness and sexual frustration. Watch the movie!

Sex is not simply something that happens in people’s bedrooms. It structures the whole of society. Societies that are badly out of order sexually, as ours is, can expect to experience sexual dysfunction and a potentially catastrophic decline in fertility. Women need men’s love, but to get it they need to respect men. (For men to respect women is also nice, but not as essential—although discussed ad nauseam.) Women have traded love for status, a properly male concern, and they are deeply unhappy. This is because they are not getting the love they need, neither from the men above them in the status hierarchy who can go from hookup to hookup nor, even more obviously, from the lower-status men their inborn instincts virtually compel them to reject. And it does not matter that these men are not actually unworthy of them. For women, all that matters is the outward status hierarchy.

Another point to consider: Henderson asks only how the ladies might find worthy men, not how men might find worthy wives. But what would the average academic spinster really have to offer a man who must go out every day and accomplish challenging tasks in the real world? She probably cannot cook, since grad students live on frozen entrees and takeout. Can she clean, decorate, grow a vegetable garden, or do anything else that might make his home a comforting and pleasant place? Assembling snippets from Virginia Woolf just doesn’t cut it.

So far I have spoken only of the 84 percent of non-college men who are employed. Henderson himself passes rapidly over this larger group to discuss the 16 percent who are stuck playing video games and watching pornography. Obviously, their long-term happiness and self-respect as well as the good of society demands that some useful work be found for them to perform. Fortunately, there is always valuable work to be done in this world; it is just a matter of suiting the tasks to the men. But this is a complex economic problem I have no special qualifications for addressing. One thing I would not recommend most of these young men do is enroll in college, where they can expect to be demeaned and resented. Leave the campuses to the purple-haired women’s studies majors who organize slut marches.

Proper employment will take care of most of the video game addiction from which these young men suffer. There remains the question of pornography. Being by temperament more analyst than moralist, I have been reluctant to address this question. Moreover, I long assumed that even a fairly mediocre woman could be counted upon to win out over lifeless images in the heart of any normal young man. I am no longer so sure.

Let us look at just a few of the advantages pornography enjoys from the point of view of Henderson’s unemployed and underemployed young men:

  • Pornography cannot divorce them and clean out their bank accounts with the armed backing of the state.
  • While porn cannot give them children, it also cannot take their children away from them. Pornography has never denounced any man to Child Protective Services as an abuser.
  • Pornography does not despise any man for having failed to earn an academic credential in oppression studies, does not call his masculinity “toxic,” does not condemn him for the natural sexual urges he cannot help: in sum, does not indulge in the endless litany of complaints about men heard from contemporary women.
  • Porn is cheap. Wives cost a lot of money, especially when they are carrying and nursing babies, whereas making porn requires only a camera and a slut. Not being a capital-intensive industry, the end user can find a nearly limitless ocean of it online for free.
  • Perhaps not least important, you do not actually have to pay attention to pornography. If forced to choose between keeping either porn or a pretentious female racism “scholar” under my roof, I would unhesitatingly choose the porn since I could always stuff it in a drawer and ignore it—something that cannot be done with a woman.

I can only conclude that these young men are behaving rationally in preferring pornography to the available women. If I were God or possessed a magic wand, I would (after finding them gainful employment) provide these men with sweet, loving, grateful young wives capable of creating homes for them and bearing and rearing decent children. But I am not hiding any stash of such women from anyone. I really do not know where they are to be found. If someone were able to solve this problem, I suspect the plague of pornography would largely take care of itself. Any eventual legislation to outlaw it would provide no more than the coup de grace.

End of Part 2 of 2.

Decadence, the Corruption of Status Hierarchies, & Female Hypergamy A Response to Rob Henderson’s Article “All the Single Ladies,” Part 1 of 2

In the comment section responding to my essay “Hooking Up,” I found a reference to an article called “All the Single Ladies” by journalist Rob Henderson. I am grateful—it is a fascinating piece for any observer of the contemporary sexual scene. The gist is that women in the world of higher education are having extreme difficulty finding suitable mates due to their numerical predominance on campuses. Just as my own writings have described, a situation has developed where too many women are chasing too few men. But Henderson’s article will find more favor with many readers since it expresses strong sympathy for the ladies’ predicament—and perhaps not so much for the men. A deflater of female pretentions must swim against a strong current originating in the male protective instinct. Skeptical as my observation of female behavior have made me, however, I do not actually enjoy seeing women lonely and miserable. The coeds described in Henderson’s article have never done me any harm, and I would like to help a few of them understand the situation in which they find themselves. That situation has been a long time in the making, however, and clarifying it will require a somewhat lengthy argument.

Henderson’s Article

Let us begin with a brief summary of the main points Henderson makes in “All the Single Ladies.” He begins by noting that “women, on average, prefer educated men.” Two of the strongest predictors of how many responses a man’s online dating profile receives are years of formal education and income. A controlled experiment holding all other factors constant found that women were 91 percent more likely to hit the “like” button for a man with a master’s degree than a bachelor’s. In that minority of marriages where the wife has enjoyed more formal education than her husband, the husband almost always (93 percent of the time) earns more money. If a man trails a woman in both education and income, his chances of finding acceptance from her approach zero. Men looking for a woman, on the other hand, care far less about either education or real or potential earnings.

From the point of view of economic rationality, a highly credentialed, high-earning woman should have less need of finding those same traits in a husband. But women’s sexual instinct does not obey the principle of economic rationality: the more a woman has achieved herself, the greater the stress she places on finding a mate of higher achievement still. This means, of course, that the dramatic expansion in academic and professional opportunities for women in recent decades has led to proportionately massive female loneliness and sexual frustration.

There are 5.5 million college-educated women between the ages of 22 and 29 in America today vs. only 4.1 million men. That translates into four women for every three men in this dating pool, or an excess of 1.4 million women. The resulting competition for scarce men leads to bad behavior among the men on campus, who find themselves able to pursue short-term relationships and sexual variety. Women at institutions of higher education will often engage in sex with such men simply for the chance to be in their company, but they do not necessarily enjoy it very much. Indeed, in what may sound like a paradox, women actually have more sex rather than less in environments where they outnumber men: it just tends to be lousy sex.

On STEM-heavy campuses like Caltech men still outnumber women and continue to court them by seeking to demonstrate commitment. But such campuses are getting rarer. A girl from heavily female-dominant Sarah Lawrence College is quoted as saying: “One of my friends was dumped by a guy after they’d been hooking up for less than a week. When he broke up with her, the guy actually used the word ‘market’—like the ‘market’ for him was just too good.”

This is, of course, the sort of thing that drives the editors at Chronicles into a frenzy. But women press their advantage in the battle of the sexes just as strongly as men wherever conditions permit. It is not a matter of these men being fiends: a whole system of perverse incentives has somehow arisen, and correcting it is going to require more than simply denouncing or punishing men. Indeed, traditional morality placed less emphasis on exhorting men not to accept sex in such situations than on commanding women not to provide it. That Sarah Lawrence coed simply learned the hard way why this used to be done.

Feminism is big on campuses where women outnumber men. The men cannot be relied on, so women respond by trying to become “strong and independent,” as the cliché runs: in Henderson’s words, they seek to “reduce their social, economic and political dependence on men.” In societies with an excess of men, on the other hand, the men are more interested in trying to adapt themselves to women. The men are dependable, so women depend on them. The author does note one supposed drawback, however: “women in such societies were more likely to be cast in stereotypical gender roles.”

Later in the article, the author broadens his scope from the campus to the wider society. Here there exists no shortage of men: as of 2022, there were 1.048 boys born for every girl in the United States. As parents used to assure their romantically forlorn offspring: “For every girl there is a boy.” Off campus we find plenty of unattached young men; the difficulty is that the frustrated coeds described above would never consider them as possible mates due to their lack of education or earning power. What are these young men doing with themselves?

Most are working, of course. But unfortunately, a growing number are unemployed or underemployed: “among never-married adults, for every 100 women, there are only 84 employed men. If all employed men were suddenly taken, every sixth woman would be partner-less.” And what do young men who are neither working nor in higher education do with their abundant free time? Mostly, they play video games. To a lesser but still worrisome extent, they view pornography. Average hours worked by men aged 21-30 declined by 12 percent between 2000 and 2015, and leisure increased proportionally. Around 75 percent of this leisure time is accounted for by gaming, which has become very big business. Young men are naturally interested in fighting and sex. Video games give them a risk-free virtual experience of combat, and can even provide a sense of accomplishment as players gradually improve their skills (although the skills are of little value outside the games themselves). And of course, porn offers fake sex. Both provide phony satisfaction of needs men have inherited from our evolutionary past, and so can be highly addictive for men with little else to do. Surveys of self-reported happiness indicate that at least when they are younger, these men are fairly content. As Henderson cautiously notes, however, such substitutes are unlikely to carry them through life.

So we have some college men gaining status and gathering harems while many noncollege men must console themselves with fake fighting and fake sex. “All the Single Ladies” closes by making a point I have been hammering away at for nearly twenty years now:

In a deregulated market, power laws dominate. At no point in history have all men in a given society been equally desirable. Today, though, the disparity between men is particularly pronounced. And the gap shows no sign of slowing or closing.

The reader of my recent essay “Hooking Up” will see that this description of contemporary sexual dysfunction partially overlaps with my own. The main differences are that I talk about what happens on campus, stressing the hierarchy of attractiveness (which for men includes status), whereas Henderson emphasizes campus sex ratios and the status and behavioral contrasts between men on and off campus.

My Response Part One: The Corruption of the Educational Status Hierarchy

As I see it, the major flaw in Henderson’s portrait of contemporary sexual mores is his disregard of a drastic equivocation contained in the term “education”—one with a strong bearing on its relation to status, and hence men’s sexual attractiveness. I understand education to refer primarily to three sorts of things: 1) the acquisition of knowledge and skills, 2) the training and sharpening of the mind both for its own sake and for the pursuit of external ends, and 3) the transmission of a cultural patrimony to the rising generation of a specific people.

You can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.

Education involves these goals at all levels, from the primary instruction offered to all normal children to the higher education traditionally provided only to the most promising young adults. The shift in the content of education from the primary to the tertiary level can be explained not only by the natural growth of the human mind as it approaches adulthood but also partly in terms of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Human beings’ most basic needs are physiological: food, warmth, sleep, and the like. When these have been satisfied, people go on to seek safety, then relations with their fellow human beings, then esteem and a sense of accomplishment. Once they have satisfied all these needs, they can concern themselves with higher yet more nebulous ambitions such as creativity, reaching one’s full potential, or self-actualization. Maslow’s hierarchy runs from needs that are urgent for all men yet concrete and well-defined, to immaterial and vague goals that are not particularly urgent for most of us most of the time. It is often represented as a pyramid, with a broad base gradually narrowing as one moves toward the upper levels. In healthy societies, the very peak of Maslow’s pyramid is so small that it is possible to name many of the men occupying it: names like Goethe, Pascal, Da Vinci, Leibniz, and Mozart.

Higher education is an elite enterprise concerned mainly with matters fairly high up Maslow’s pyramid, though the men occupied with it are not normally those at the very top. The character and quality of the higher education a nation provides for its young elites says much about it and is one of the best measures of its advancement.

We inhabitants of the West are living through a late phase of our culture, in a society gone flabby from prolonged prosperity. A leading characteristic of such phases is that Maslow’s pyramid becomes top-heavy: too many people are working on self-realization and not enough are growing turnips. Everyone forgets about the necessities of life to focus on luxuries. This results in an evolutionary mismatch. We are adapted to an environment where most people spend most of their time securing basic needs, and relatively little on creativity and trying to reach their full potential. When large numbers of people naturally suited to growing food and providing security are drafted into the world of higher education instead, strange things start to happen there, and the nature of education itself is inevitably and profoundly altered.

How does this process operate? The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre once drew a contrast between practices and institutions: practices are forms of human activity that provide social benefits, and institutions are human organizations created to foster, protect, and perpetuate such practices. For example, medicine is a practice which combats illness, thus extending and improving human lives. But medical practice would be unable to flourish for long without being embodied in institutions: primarily hospitals, but also including research laboratories, medical schools, etc.

The point at which MacIntyre was driving is that there exist ends or goods proper to practices themselves and ends proper to the institutions established to foster the practices—and these two sets of ends are not identical. They may even conflict. For example, the end pursued by the practice of medicine is the combatting of illness. Hospitals are set up to foster this practice. Yet those in charge of hospitals eventually and almost inevitably start making decisions with a view not so much to the quality of medicine being practiced there as to what is good for the hospital itself. Marble flooring might be installed, e.g., or a public relations campaign staged to increase institutional prestige and attract external funding—but without necessarily contributing anything to the curing of patients.

Many examples could be cited of how what is good for institutions may be given priority over the needs of the practices they were established to foster, but the principle aim of institutions considered as such is usually growth. The bigger the hospital becomes, the more people it can employ and the greater the rewards available to them. Examples of absurdly unjustified institutional growth are easy to find. Here is just one: in 1914, fewer than 4400 men administered the Royal British Navy, the largest in the world; by 1967, over 33,000 men were being paid to administer a Navy that had largely ceased to exist. This did nothing for British Naval power, obviously, but it benefited the administrators themselves.

Education is obviously an important human practice in the sense intended by MacIntyre. The goods or ends it pursues are mainly the three already stated: the acquisition of knowledge, the improvement of the mind, and the transmission of a cultural patrimony. The great European universities were established during the Middle Ages as places where a few men could cultivate rational debate, be trained in canon law, and study the works of Aristotle. The first scholars often literally did not have a roof to protect them from the rain. Gradually, universities acquired better physical endowments, but for centuries academic life remained the preserve of a small minority. In early America one had to demonstrate mastery of Greek and Latin before being admitted to a college. As late as 1910, only six percent of Americans graduated from secondary school, to say nothing of higher studies.

The first seven decades of the twentieth century witnessed reckless, headlong growth in educational institutions. This required drawing in students ever lower down the hierarchy of natural gifts. First attendance and then completion of secondary school became nearly universal. Then, following the Second World War and the GI Bill, tertiary institutions simply exploded. By 1975, 27 percent of men and 22.5 percent of women were earning bachelor’s degrees (up from 7.5 percent and 5 percent respectively on the eve of the war).

Enrollment plateaued soon after because a minimum IQ of about 115 was still considered necessary for a young person to derive much benefit from a college education. But even that weak standard has been eroding in recent years. A recent meta-analysis found that while the average American undergraduate in 1960 had an IQ of 120, the figure has now sunk to 102, equal to that of the average white American. There is no longer anything “higher” about higher education. Obviously, instruction has had to shift accordingly. As the late columnist Joe Sobran famously quipped: “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching Remedial English in college.”

Worthwhile learning has been replaced in part by frivolous classes in basket weaving, but often the new substitutes are worse than any frivolity: the students are indoctrinated in pernicious ideological fixations such as antiracism, feminism, post-colonial theory, etc. A powerful factor favoring this shift is precisely the lower intelligence of undergraduates. The ideological courses are far simpler in content that genuine academic study and almost impossible to do badly in unless a student is reckless enough to dispute the ideas presented. Why should a mediocre student risk his grade point average trying to master formal logic, particle physics, or the history of the Protestant Reformation when he can take oppression studies and get an easy “A”?

The scholarship produced by academics has gone through a similar change. This may have begun in schools of education, where young doctoral candidates have long occupied themselves with such weighty matters as the best way to arrange tables and chairs in an elementary school lunch cafeteria. But the nonsense has spread throughout the humanities and social sciences, and is now threatening STEM education.

Evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton recently did a short video on a completely unremarkable young female academic who just received a doctorate from Cambridge University with a dissertation entitled Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. According to Dutton, the

thesis shows how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse, the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates, in structuring our social world. The broad aim is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression.

Essentially, what the young lady did was read some feminist novels by Virginia Woolf, note all the passages referring to odors, and then fit them into a ready-made interpretive scheme built around the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

I have not read her dissertation, so it is just possible I am being unfair—although I doubt it. It hardly matters, however, for I only mention this young woman as a convenient example. Whatever the qualities of her work, most academic dissertations are now every bit as pointless and absurd as what I have just described. This particular thesis achieved notoriety only because the author bragged about her accomplishment online and was met with gales of scorn from the general public. Dutton claims that hers is far from the worst dissertation he has heard about. For comparison he mentions Dr. Desiree Odom’s A Multiple Marginalized Intersectional Black Lesbian Leader: A Critical Feminist Autoethnographic Narrative. In plain English, this woman wrote a doctoral thesis on herself.

Some legitimate and worthwhile learning and scholarship still goes on within universities, but it is under threat due to a kind of Gresham’s Law of the intellect whereby bad scholarship drives out good. In sum, the utopian attempt to extend the benefits of higher education to the general public has led to a catastrophic decline in the practice of education itself. And we must bear in mind that the very attempt was only made possible by the unexampled material prosperity of America and other Western nations, i.e., their success at securing the more urgent needs farther down Maslow’s pyramid.

Go to Part 2 of 2.

This article originally appeared at Counter-Currents and is posted here with permission of the author.