FIFA 2026 is stirring controversy for all the right reasons.

Soccer players platforming Jesus Christ has the globalist anti-Christ media scrambling to make sense of it.

Dubbed by hardline secularists as a religious revival, they’ve been forced to declare that God has made a World Cup comeback.

The movement is so big that the New York Times (NYT), The Guardian and even the Financial Times (FT) haven’t been able to easily ignore it.

Goal scorers pointing to the Gospel, they’ve been forced to admit, represents a sizeable cultural shift.

As I documented in a series of four articles for the Daily Declaration this week, players putting their faith on the football field have the World Cup overflowing with shouts of Soli Deo Gloria.

From Argentina’s Leo Messi, to German-born ethnic Nigerian, Felix Nmecha, including the USMNC soccer team, and over 30 other nations, the sport’s faith pair-up is proving difficult to process for the relic legacy media.

The rise of FIFA players bringing their Christian faith to the soccer field en masse has the haters perplexed.

For instance, the Financial Times’s Simon Kuper, when trying to make sense of the social shift, accused Christians of bringing the “far-right” into FIFA.

The FT’s piece is soft on Islam, yet highly critical of players glorifying God and bringing the Gospel to part of the game.

Similarly, The Guardian tried to downplay the “radical change in the team’s public engagement with religion, or really with personal beliefs of any kind.”

Although the left-wing bullhorn acknowledged that the contrast between this year’s event and previous World Cups was “remarkable,” they put it down to Trumpian Christian nationalism.

According to The Guardian, FIFA’s Jesus movement isn’t spiritual, it’s political.

This is, they tried to assert, a consequence of the Trump administration empowering Christian nationalists.

As I wrote in the Daily Declaration, despite the whiff of TDS in their sneer, The Guardian couldn’t ignore the sincerity of it all.

“The national team’s leading players’ proclamations on their religious beliefs seem to be sincere. They are very much doing it in, well, good faith.”

They also couldn’t dismiss the observable fact that there has been a tangible change under the Trump administration.

USMNT’s Christians, The Guardian conceded, “are joining a generation of professional American athletes who feel freer to express their views.”

Contrary to The Guardian and the FT’s cranky Simon Kuper, what’s at work here is the transformative power of the cross.

It’s the reason why a perplexed legacy media cannot solely pin it all on Donald Trump.

Although jittery, the NYT was less hostile. Uncharacteristically reverent, they honoured the player’s devotion to God and the game.

Prayer, the NYT reported, is uniting “a group of players and people who, for the past month, and in some ways for the past several years, have been pushing toward a common goal: World Cup success.”

This movement isn’t just uniting players. Their symbolic salutes are inspiring fans.

Players like 25-year-old Felix Nmecha, whose “crown down” gesture puts his 40 million Euro 5-year contract second to his faith in Christ.

Although initially misrepresented by the media as self-glorifying, many clearly saw it as glorifying God. Consequently, “Crown Down” went viral.

So much so that pro-athlete ministry Ballers in God said they’ve been inundated with videos from people joining the footballer in their own Revelation 4:10–11 celebration.

Despite the “here comes the far-right” fearmongering, FIFA’s faith pair-up is undeniably real.

Even though Kuper and the Left’s “God is dead” hegemony might be reluctant to admit there’s a power greater than theirs at work here.

Players are turning goals into gratitude and gratitude into kicking goals for the Great Commission.

To end with a quote from Kuper’s piece, “The tournament’s religiosity is proof that Europe isn’t as secular as it thought.”

Crown Down!

A mother and father in Brazil have been sentenced to prison for “intellectual neglect” after homeschooling their two daughters, aged 11 and 15.

Adauto José and Ieda Cristina Denardi began homeschooling their daughters in 2020 during the pandemic, after taking issue with some of the aspects of remote learning and observing the shortcomings in the public system.

The couple provided a curriculum that included mathematics, science, English, Latin, piano, music theory, and extensive reading, with the oldest of the two girls reading an average of 20 to 30 books every year.

An independent psychologist’s report and academic records supported the children’s development, and the prosecutor recommended acquittal.

But that wasn’t good enough, according to a local judge who sentenced the couple to 50 days in semi-open detention in April, claiming the children had been intellectually neglected.

The judge ruled that the homeschooling lacked state-approved content on gender, sex education, tolerance, and diversity.

The sentencing also cited the girls’ limited exposure to popular Brazilian music genres such as funk, trap, and sertanejo as evidence of cultural isolation.

In his decision, the judge explicitly accused the parents of “using their daughters as pawns in an ideological struggle, subjecting them to a form of unregulated education, the effectiveness and quality of which lack adequate metrics within the Brazilian legal system, while completely excluding the State’s involvement.”

This case marks the first criminal conviction of parents for homeschooling their children.

The sentence has been suspended pending appeal to the São Paulo State Court of Justice. While the appeal proceeds, the family must comply with certain conditions, including school enrollment for the children, community service, and regular court check-ins.

Advocacy groups such as ADF International are supporting the family, arguing the ruling infringes on parental rights.

Ieda Denardi told ADF, “As a mother, I cannot conceive a more dictatorial state than the one that wants me in jail because I chose to exercise my right to direct the education and upbringing of my daughters.

“My husband and I are hopeful the court will recognise our right to choose the best education for our children and overturn this unjust conviction."

Julio Pohl, Legal Counsel for Latin America at ADF International, said: “The prosecutor examined the witnesses and recommended for acquittal. An independent educational psychologist found no sign of neglect. The girls themselves described rigorous daily education.

“The judge convicted anyway – because a fifteen-year-old said she finds some music lyrics morally questionable, and because the curriculum didn’t include state-approved content on gender.

“A parent has been sentenced to prison not for failing to educate her children, but for educating them according to her own values. This is a grotesque abuse of the criminal law, and we will not let it stand.”

ADF International notes that there are over 70,000 children currently being homeschooled in Brazil.

And all homeschooling parents today have reason to wonder whether some activist judge—more interested in imposing ideological convictions on other people’s children than defending the rights of parents—might one day decide to intervene in their home, remove their children, or criminalise them for raising them according to their own beliefs.

This is the hill on which we die. Nothing is more precious than our children, and nothing is more fundamental than the freedom to raise them according to our convictions rather than the dictates of an intrusive state.

That is why we must recover the Christian doctrine of sphere sovereignty. God has established distinct spheres of authority—family, church, and state—each with its own God-given responsibilities and limits. None is sovereign over the others. When one sphere usurps the authority of another, fundamental liberties are violated.

Without Christ as the supreme authority over every sphere, the state inevitably seeks to become supreme itself. Armed with a monopoly on coercive force, it steadily absorbs the responsibilities of the family, subordinates the church, and extends its control into virtually every area of life.

What begins as government overreach ends with the state claiming ultimate authority over institutions God never entrusted to it, like imprisoning parents for failing to indoctrinate their kids with the “progressive” religion of the state.

Before the arrival of the Vikings, “England,” as a unified nation, did not exist. Anglo-Saxon England was fragmented into the Heptarchy. There were seven major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms—including Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria. All of these kingdoms were operating independently, and all of them were fighting against one another for dominance.

Any sense of unity among the Anglo-Saxons seemed impossible—that is, until the Northmen arrived. That terrifying, existential threat imposed on them from the outside made the fragmented Anglo-Saxons realise that their internal rivalries were a luxury they could no longer afford.

That common enemy forged a common brotherhood.

In the 9th century, Viking raids evolved from sporadic, quick coastal hits into a full-scale invasion. The “Great Heathen Army,” as it was dubbed, arrived not just to plunder, but to conquer, and then to settle.

One by one, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fell. Northumbria collapsed. East Anglia was crushed, and Mercia was severely fractured. By 878 AD, only the southern kingdom of Wessex, ruled by King Alfred, stood between the Anglo-Saxons and total Viking dominance.

Alfred understood that a fractured island stood no chance against a unified enemy. To survive the onslaught, Alfred had to unify his people. He was able to achieve this through a few calculated moves:

1. Shared Identity: First, Alfred framed the war, not just as Wessex versus the Vikings, but as Christian Anglo-Saxons against Pagan invaders. This gave the Anglo-Saxons both a spiritual and physical reason to view themselves as one unified body.

2. The “Burghal” System: Alfred understood that survival depended on cooperation. So, he built a network of fortified towns (burhs), which required cross-regional cooperation to maintain. This forced neighbouring communities to rely on each other, especially for defence. Working together was vital to the survival of every Anglo-Saxon community.

3. A New Legal and Cultural Identity: Alfred sought to bind the people together in one new identity. He compiled a code of laws that blended Anglo-Saxon traditions from different kingdoms, and championed English literacy. In so doing, he strengthened and popularised the emerging English identity. The Anglo-Saxons began to view themselves, not just as West Saxons or Mercians, but as Angelcynn (the English people).

Today, King Alfred is the only English monarch to be given the title “the Great.” An inscription on a statue commemorating King Alfred in Wantage, England, states:

“Afred found learning dead and he restored it, education neglected and he revived it, the laws powerless and he gave them force, the church debased and he raised it, the land ravaged by a fearful enemy from which he delivered it. Alfred’s name shall live as long as mankind shall respect the past.”

After Alfred’s death, his grandson, King Athelstan, capitalised on his grandfather’s efforts to unify England. In 927 AD, King Athelstan conquered the last Viking stronghold of York and united the people under one banner, becoming the first recognised King of England.

Common Enemy Effect

What happened in Anglo-Saxon England and the years following King Alfred’s death is a textbook historical example of the deeply hardwired human phenomenon of the Common Enemy Effect.

Sociologists and psychologists refer to this as the In-Group/Out-Group dynamic. Political theorists such as Carl Schmitt described a similar phenomenon through what he called the Friend/Enemy distinction.

To put it simply: When a common enemy emerges, that shared threat systematically forces rival groups to unify by:

1. Re-Prioritising the Hierarchy of Needs

When groups are at peace, they compete for status, land, and resources through internal politics. However, an existential enemy threatens the most basic level of human survival. And when your life is on the line, local grievances with a neighbour suddenly seem trivial.

The immediate need to survive outweighs the luxury of bickering about non-essential matters. This phenomenon was observed during the Covid-era, when people from diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and convictions unified in one chorus against oppressive government mandates. It was only after that threat disappeared that the factions became evident once again.

2. Shifting the Boundaries of the “In-Group”

To some extent, identity is elastic. Human beings naturally form an “in-group” of people who are most like them, which obviously results in an “out-group” for everyone else. Where that line is drawn and just who is included will vary depending on the individual, the collective, and the measure employed.

Before the Vikings arrived in the British Isles, a Mercian saw a West Saxon as the “out-group.” After the Vikings arrived, the threat was so radically different in culture, language, religion, and warfare that it forced a mental shift at a social level. The West Saxon and the Mercian suddenly realised they weren’t all that different after all. They had far more in common with each other than they did with the invading armies. As a result, the “in-group” expanded to encompass all Anglo-Saxons, regardless of what kingdom they came from.

Interestingly, in a 1987 address to the United Nations General Assembly, U.S. President Ronald Reagan remarked that he sometimes wondered how quickly global differences would disappear if humanity were confronted by an extraterrestrial threat—a threat so removed from our “out-group” that our “out-group” became our “in-group.” Reagan suggested that such an external danger would unify the nations, saying it would make people set aside their national interests and realise their shared vulnerability as inhabitants of one world.

It is the Anglo-Saxons versus the Vikings, but on a galactic scale.

3. Recognising a Shared Fate

What’s more, a common threat creates a scenario where “If you fall, I fall next.” King Alfred successfully communicated this reality to the surviving regions of Anglo-Saxon England. If Mercian fighters did not support Wessex, the Vikings would simply wipe out Wessex and then turn their sights towards Mercia. Cooperation and joint participation were necessary for the survival of all. Their fates were tied together.

Benjamin Franklin echoed this exact sentiment during the American Revolution when he famously said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Learning From History

The story of King Alfred and the unification of Anglo-Saxon England is just one historical example of the Common Enemy Effect that offers profound lessons for modern multicultural societies today.

When a native population feels threatened by rapid demographic or cultural changes, the standard appeals to “celebrate diversity” often fall on deaf ears. This is because mindless mantras, such as “Diversity is our strength,” ignore the fundamental human psychology of the In-Group/Out-Group dynamic.

A diverse society cannot achieve unity simply by multiplying its differences, as though that were a quality in itself. Diversity itself cannot be the basis of cohesion—by definition, there is nothing inherently holding “diversity” together. Unity requires a compelling, overarching “Superordinate Identity”—who we are, where we came from, what we believe, and where we are going

Without that, a diverse society is just a collection of isolated subgroups, living side-by-side in a fragmented multiculturalism. Coupled with our very natural In-Group/Out-Group mindset, and you have a recipe for social confusion, suspicion, resentment, and chaos—especially when native populations are marginalised or disadvantaged in their own homeland.

Instead, cohesion depends on newcomers adopting the core values, language, and civic identity of the nation, such that they are no longer perceived as part of an external out-group. Where the process of integration is weak, incomplete, or impossible by virtue of volume (think mass migration), social tensions are guaranteed.

If assimilation into the in-group is to occur effectively, immigration levels must be reduced to a degree that allows integration systems, institutions, and communities to facilitate meaningful assimilation over time.

At the same time, integration cannot be a one-way process in which the host culture is diminished, diluted, or lost. A stable society depends on the preservation and respect of foundational institutions, legal traditions, historical continuity, national language, and religion. When the existing population feels culturally secure, openness tends to increase, and those in the out-group seeking inclusion are less likely to be perceived as a threat.

Should “right-wing” parties avoid the issue of abortion because it may cost them votes—particularly among women—at the next election? That question is now being debated on social media, especially following reports that One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts will push the party toward adopting a blanket abortion ban.

Here’s a small taste of some of the commentary that’s emerged among some of our friends:

But there’s a key point being missed by those who argue One Nation should avoid speaking about abortion altogether while framing immigration as the only pressing concern.

The reason the Western world is in the mess that it’s currently in is because right-wing and conservative parties compromised with what they should have consistently resisted. By trying to reach the widest possible audience, they adopted the moral boundaries of their ideological and political opponents. As a result, we’re left with an impotent version of “conservatism” that has conserved absolutely nothing, and instead has become a softer, delayed version of what the left was already offering.

This is the rationale that destroyed the Liberal Party from the inside out. They didn’t want to be too rigid; they wanted to sound more like the other side and avoid saying anything that might alienate potential voters. “Centred,” “moderate,” “measured” became the standard—but in practice, it was nothing more than perpetual compromise. And that’s more repugnant to voters than anything else.

Ironically, decades of playing by this strategy produced no effect. The public didn’t shift right because conservatives and right-wing figures moved left. No one became more right-wing because the right-wing sounded more left-wing. Rather, they became disengaged or simply accepted the new consensus as the only available option.

What actually shifts public sentiment is not mimicry or caution, but conviction—especially in the face of opposition. People are drawn to those willing to stand firm on the convictions, even if they don’t agree on everything.

Political momentum and energy flow towards clarity, conviction, and courage, not dilution, kowtowing, and compromise. Courage in the face of evil is what breaks the inertia of consensus. Compromise only reinforces it.

We cannot become captured by the promise of power in exchange for our compromise—not an issue so serious as the murder of society’s most vulnerable. On the subject of abortion, in particular, it is just as important—if not more so—as the subject of mass immigration, because the two issues are fundamentally inseparable. Killing off the next generation is *the* justification for importing their replacement.

It should go without saying that a nation that does not reproduce its own will inevitably be replaced by someone else’s. You can’t cure the symptom without addressing the cause. And failure to address the cause is to follow in the stumbling footsteps of the Liberal Party, which, according to recent polling, has all but aborted itself.

A Christian police officer in the United Kingdom says he was driven out of policing after asking questions about Islam during a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training course.

Luke Salmons, a former officer with North Yorkshire Police, said the force required officers to undergo DEI training in 2023 and 2024, as part of broader efforts to develop policies based on race, religion and culture.

According to the former officers, the setting was framed as an open and safe environment where participants were encouraged to ask questions and raise concerns. Salmons, however, soon discovered the limits to that “openness.”

Salmons said most of the training focused on Islam, and recounted one troubling session in September 2024, where he claimed educators walked up and down the rows of officers chanting, “Islam is a religion of peace.”

A month later, while attending yet another DEI session, this time led by a Muslim sergeant, Salmons asked how the instructor understood the concept of jihad as a peaceful Muslim, in the context of the war in Gaza.

Although Salmons maintained the exchange was respectful, just two days later, he was called into a private meeting with his inspector and suspended from his duties.

According to Salmons, the inspector told him, “I don’t like your beliefs.”

Salmons told Fox News Digital, “She took me in a room, deliberately said to me, ‘I don’t like your beliefs,’ which indicated to me that she was meaning my Christian beliefs, which is discrimination towards me and my faith.”

He was reportedly placed under investigation and advised by union representatives to apologise.

“There’s a real fear in the police about speaking out, about anything, especially to do with minorities, certainly about Islam,” he said. “There’s certainly a fear within the police and within institutions as a whole in the UK.”

Eight months into the investigation, Salmons officially resigned from the force. A month after that, a North Yorkshire Police disciplinary panel ruled that his conduct amounted to “gross misconduct” and barred him from serving as a police officer.

Salmons appealed the decision, with the help of Christian Legal Centre, and the appeal was upheld by Chief Constable Tim Forber. Forber found that while concerns had been raised, they did not amount to “gross misconduct” or a breach of professional standards.

He subsequently pursued legal action against the force, alleging he was discriminated against based on his religion. The matter has since been settled, although Salmons says he is yet to receive either an apology or an invitation to return to policing.

North Yorkshire Police stated to the BBC that it is an “inclusive employer and respects the rights of all individuals to their beliefs,” adding, “the expression of those beliefs must always be with due consideration of respect and courtesy in line with our force values and behaviours framework.”

The New Orthodoxy

Unfortunately, what we’re seeing here is not an isolated incident, but yet another example of how DEI has come to function throughout much of the Western world. It is sold with the promise of fairness and equality, but in practice, it operates as an ideological system that punishes certain segments of society, along with all those who refuse to affirm its incoherent assumptions.

And they are incoherent. A police officer attends a training course to promote diversity of opinions and beliefs. He respectfully asks a reasonable question about the subject repeatedly presented, and finds himself suspended, investigated, and ultimately driven from his career for wrongthink.

So, whatever DEI claims to be, fostering open dialogue and diversity of thought is clearly not among its priorities. And this is the problem with DEI—it doesn’t merely seek tolerance, it demands conformity. Certain groups and beliefs are granted protected status—regardless of what those groups believe—while others are placed under permanent suspicion and subject to legalised discrimination.

Christianity, in particular, is entirely unique in this hierarchy of respect and priority. Christians alone are expected to accommodate, affirm, and accept the beliefs of everyone else, forfeiting their own convictions when they clash with those of others. Yet it is often Christians who discover that the respect and tolerance demanded for other beliefs are rarely extended to their own.

It’s why stories like that of Salmons’ resonate with so many Christians. They’ve experienced something of it firsthand. There’s a pattern hard to miss. Christians are told they are free to believe whatever they like—provided those beliefs remain private. The moment Christian convictions shape public speech, prompt an uncomfortable question, or challenge an approved narrative, they have transgressed the limits of acceptability, and the Christians themselves will no longer be tolerated.

As such, Christians are tolerated only insofar as their faith remains a private matter and demonstrates little influence over what they say or do.

Of course, DEI advocates insist such programs exist to prevent discrimination based on diverse appearances, ideologies, religions, and cultures—yet, time and again, they seem to function as a weapon to silence and punish one of the only groups it is socially acceptable to marginalise: Christians—especially if you’re a White Christian.

This is why many, not just Christians, no longer view DEI as a helpful, necessary, or neutral framework. Many are seeing it for what it is. It is a weaponised ideology that divides society into approved and unapproved groups, protected and unprotected beliefs, and acceptable and unacceptable opinions.

Under the banner of inclusion, it excludes. We saw that last week in the case of Israel Folau (you can read more about that here). Under the banner of diversity, it narrows the diversity of thought and punishes all dissent. Under the banner of equity, it creates new forms of unequal treatment.

It’s not framed as such. Few institutions would openly admit to discriminating against Christians or White people, for that matter. Such a policy would be near-impossible to defend. Instead, the same outcome is achieved indirectly. Christianity is portrayed as the religion of the historically privileged White man. It is culturally dominant in Christian nations, and therefore, it is undeserving of the protections extended to others.

What you end up with is a system in which Christians are expected to not only tolerate but celebrate everything—except the public expression of their own faith.

As such, DEI programs have increasingly taken on the nature of a secular religion. It has its own doctrines, its own moral hierarchy, its own concept of sin—even a caste system! Those who question its assumptions aren’t debated, they’re denounced as heretics. They’re subjected to investigations, mandatory reeducation, professional sanctions, and social ostracism. And like all orthodoxies, it reserves its harshest penalties for those who foolishly think “diversity” means anything other than conformity to a world, not without religion, but without Christianity, in particular.

For generations, British institutions were shaped by Christian principles that emphasised justice, forgiveness, equality before the law, and the inherent dignity of every human being. Today, those same institutions are treating Christians as obstacles to progress rather than the spiritual heirs of their founders. As such, DEI turns the West against its own foundations, marginalising the Christian faith that played a central role in creating the very institutions now seeking to exclude it.

Salmons’ case isn’t an isolated incident. There’s a growing number of Christians who are finding out the hard way that there is a cost to remaining publicly Christian in modern institutions. The promise of “inclusion” extends to everyone—except those unwilling to abandon or conceal their Christian convictions.

And this is the incoherence of the DEI framework. If “diversity” cannot tolerate Christianity, if “equity” results in unequal treatment before institutional power, and if “inclusion” excludes Christians, then what is being promoted is not diversity, equity, and inclusion, but an ideological system that is increasingly anti-Christian in effect, seeking to reshape the world according to a vision in which Christianity is not just one of many options, but not an option at all.

If you’ve followed this series, you know the diagnosis. Vague rules, interpreted by offices that lean one way, inside an information climate that leans the same way — producing tilted outcomes even from honest people, against an opponent who actually operates the machine while conservatives decline to when they are in power. If you’re starting here, that’s the whole setup in a sentence, and the rest stands on its own.

So what do you do about it?

There are exactly three things a conservative coalition can do in 2026 or beyond when they gain power. They are not a menu. You don’t pick one. Each fails on its own, for a reason specific to what it leaves out — and only together do they work. And the comforting idea that if conservatives just keep playing fair, the machine will eventually right itself is not a strategy. It’s a fool’s wish.

Strategy 1 — The destination: Repeal and replace.

Tear out the vague instruments and replace them with bright-line rules that leave nothing to interpret. Turn “hate” into “direct incitement to imminent unlawful action against specified persons,” modelled on the American Brandenburg test. Turn “impartiality” charters into mechanical compliance regimes. Turn ministerial discretion into objective statutory criteria. This is correct at the root. It solves the structural problem by removing the thing that gets captured.

The catch is scale. Every English-speaking country now has three to five decades of accumulated vague statute, administrative rule, and institutional habit that would have to be legislatively dismantled, along with a bloated bureaucracy to enforce it. No current conservative coalition has the parliamentary votes or the multi-decade coordination to do it. Repeal and Replace is a generation-long background project. It is not a response to the machine running now.

Strategy 2 — The road: Compete for the positions.

Accept that the vague architecture exists and isn’t going anywhere soon. Then do the boring, low-status, long-haul work of staffing the interpretive offices with competent conservative professionals. Fund the pipeline with scholarships. Build the parallel professional societies. Recruit, train, and appoint across the judiciary, the regulators, the tribunals, the curriculum authorities, the senior civil service — with the same decades-long patience the other side showed.

The model already exists: the Federalist Society. Its transformation of the US federal judiciary over a single generation is exactly what disciplined pursuit of this strategy produces.

The catch is time. This is a forty-year play whose payoff is invisible for the first twenty. It asks donors and foundations to fund work that delivers nothing inside any one politician’s career, which is precisely why the positions got vacated in the first place. Necessary, but slow.

Strategy 3 — The accelerant: Use the machine.

Use every lever of the existing architecture symmetrically. Appoint the way they appoint. Prosecute the way they prosecute. Regulate the way they regulate. Defund and deprioritise the way they do. And absorb the coordinated media and institutional response as the price of doing it.

The logic here isn’t to build a nicer consensus. Its effectiveness and deterrence — to impose enough reciprocal cost that the architecture progressives spent fifty years building starts to look, to progressives, like a liability rather than an asset. Bipartisan appetite for Strategy 1 - Repeal and Replace only becomes real once both sides have felt what it’s like on the receiving end. Strategy 3 is what produces that experience.

The cost is real, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. Whoever adopts it is choosing to fight on a field the other side picked fifty years ago and has run uncontested for two generations. You absorb an institutional response of unprecedented intensity. You give up the comforting story that the old norms can be restored from the sidelines. And you accept that rule-of-law norms already damaged by one-sided use will degrade further before Strategy 1 can replace them. But the alternative isn’t a return to fair play. The alternative is to keep losing the contest while refusing to enter it.

Historically, conservatives, as we described in Part 2 of this series, have near-universally chosen to refrain from this strategy, and this has produced the ratchet of increasingly progressive anglosphere governance, despite conservatives in most cases ruling for longer than progressives have.

Why all three, and why none alone

The common mistake is treating these as options to choose between. There are three layers of one strategy, on three different levers and three different clocks.

Strategy 1 works the statutory layer over a generation — it defines the end state. Strategy 2 works the human layer over two decades — it makes 1’s replacements durable and defends the offices that can’t be eliminated. Strategy 3 works the institutional-culture layer immediately — it generates the political conditions that make 1 possible at all, and stops the machine running one-directional during the twenty years 2 needs to mature.

Pull them apart, and each dies its own death. 1 alone never gets the votes, because the pressure to dismantle forty years of statute never builds without both sides feeling the reciprocal cost first. 2 alone starves, because a forty-year pipeline is chronically underfunded by a politics that rewards the next cycle. 3 alone spirals — symmetric use with no statutory endpoint in view just degrades the rule of law without ever producing the repair that would justify it.

Strategy 1 is the destination. Strategy 2 is the road. Strategy 3 is the accelerant.

Together they compound: 3 creates the conditions for 1, 1 defines what 2 is staffing toward, and 2 makes it last. Apart, each fails for a reason specific to the lever left out. DeSantis in Florida and the second Trump administration in Washington are the live experiments in 3 — and their real value isn’t the short-term win, it’s the reciprocal-cost conditions that make 1 and 2 reachable.

And now the part nobody wants to say out loud

There’s a question conservatism has mostly refused to ask itself. Conservatism means preserving inherited institutions and practices against replacement or reformation. It assumes there’s still something substantially there to preserve. Is that assumption actually true anymore?

Go down the list:

• The family structure of 1950 — not conserved.

• The civic religious settlement — not conserved.

• The national-identity framework — not conserved.

• The institutional neutrality of the university, the broadcaster, the judiciary, the regulator, the professional bodies — not conserved.

• The demographic composition of the historic populations — not conserved.

• The educational consensus — not conserved.

• The shared media environment — not conserved.

• The market discipline of the corporate and financial sector — not conserved.

• The basic public distinction between male and female — not conserved.

On every one of those, the progressive coalition has executed a transformation of revolutionary scope over sixty years. From their side, it’s the consolidation phase of a century-long project. From the conservative side, the ground being “defended” has retreated to positions a serious conservative of 1960 wouldn’t recognise.

It’s why increasingly conservatives find it difficult to answer the flippant progressive question, ‘Well, what are you conserving?’

At which point, continuing to call the project of restoring the old order conservatism is just imprecise. The accurate word for transforming the actually-existing order in service of an older vision isn’t conservation.

It’s counter-revolution — or, less dramatically, restoration.

And the relabelling has teeth. Conservation, as a temperament, prefers the slow, the procedural, the cautious, the consensus-respecting. Those instincts are right when the institutions are basically intact, and gradual reform will do. They are exactly wrong when the institutions have already been transformed against you, and the real question is no longer how to preserve what’s here but how to recover what’s gone. Restoration, as a temperament, permits strategic seriousness about state power — because it admits up front that transformation is the work.

To be clear about what that does and doesn’t license: restoration is not a permission slip for norm-breaking or undisciplined thuggery. It’s the recognition that the job is transformation rather than preservation — and transformation demands exactly the patience, discipline, and seriousness that successful revolutionaries have always shown. Whether one endorses the reframe is a separate question. Whether it accurately describes the strategic reality in 2026 has already been answered by the evidence.

Conservatism presupposes there’s something substantially in place to conserve. Across the major domains of Western public life in 2026, that presupposition is weak. A coalition whose goal is restoring an order that’s already been transformed isn’t, strictly, conservative. It’s counter-revolutionary. Naming that accurately doesn’t endorse it. It just clarifies which options are actually on the table — and what each one really costs.

What it means for ‘counter-revolutionary’ policy

Four concrete moves follow, and none is a moral appeal. All of them are structural.

1. Repeal vague speech law where you can. Section 18C in Australia, Section 13 in Canada (already gone), the speech provisions of the UK’s Public Order Act 1986 — these aren’t reformable. The failure is in the design, not the administration. The American First Amendment standard is the model: viewpoint-neutral, restricting content only in narrow categories defined by bright-line tests. Where full repeal won’t pass, convert “hate” into “direct incitement to imminent unlawful action against specified persons” and accept the much narrower scope that implies.

2. Privatise public broadcasters and ban government advertising in commercial media; mandate licence-conditional free public-interest airtime. A broadcaster captured by structure can’t be made impartial through internal complaints. Privatise it fully, no residual state ownership. Prohibit government ad spend in commercial media — it’s a large, quiet subsidy to the captured outlets. And deliver the legitimate public-information function a different way: make broadcasting and platform licences conditional on providing a fixed slice of inventory — ten per cent is a reasonable start — free for government public-interest messaging, with eligible categories nailed down in bright-line law (emergency alerts, statutory health campaigns, electoral and civic information, court notices), not left to a minister. Removing public purse subsidy from media also ensures these outlets must appeal to the mainstream public for viewership rather than narrow special interest echo chambers. That swaps a captured ownership model for a mechanical licence condition that doesn’t depend on anyone’s good faith. Do it as a first-term priority, early — far enough from the next election that the new equilibrium becomes the boring status quo the election is fought within, not the contested issue it’s fought about. A media reform announced six months before an election dies. One executed in the first six months of a mandate normalises before voters are next asked.

3. Strip ministerial and bureaucratic discretion from immigration, charity, and curriculum decisions. Discretionary visa cancellation, charity registration, and curriculum-content calls all produce tilted outputs for the reasons in Part 3. Convert them into objective criteria that need minimal judgment — and pay the political price of writing the criteria into legislation instead of letting them get “discovered” in practice. Where genuine discretion can’t be removed (parts of immigration), make appointment to the office subject to the same bipartisan statutory requirements proposed for broadcasting.

4. Compete for the positions you can’t eliminate. Some interpretive offices simply can’t be abolished — senior judicial appointments, regulatory boards, university governance, professional standards bodies. For those, the answer isn’t lamentation, it’s participation. Conservative donors spent forty years funding think tanks and campaigns while ignoring the pipeline. The Federalist Society is the one institution that understood the difference, and it transformed the federal judiciary in a generation. Its absence everywhere else is the measure of what that absence costs.

The discipline underneath all of it

None of this will be popular with the conservative coalition as it currently exists. Strategy 1 means accepting the state should have less discretionary power — including in areas where conservatives would like it to have more. Strategy 2 means decades of low-prestige work with no electoral payoff in any one career. Strategy 3 means absorbing an institutional response of unprecedented intensity without flinching. And the same coalitional habits that prevented symmetric use for fifty years are exactly what make the corrective so hard now.

The alternative is the strategy the Anglosphere right has actually run since about 1960: keep passing vague rules in the hope of someday controlling their enforcement, and keep losing the enforcement game in the meantime. The results are visible. You’re living in them.

The Madisonian discipline isn’t a partisan position — it’s a structural one. Applied consistently, it would have prevented the apparatus that now harms conservative interests and would prevent conservatives from building the mirror-image apparatus their opponents fear. It generalises. That’s what makes it durable. It’s also what makes it unattractive to operators on both sides who, most days, would rather have the discretionary instrument — as long as they can picture themselves holding it.

The conservative movement has spent nearly three generations losing a game whose rules it largely wrote, to an opponent better organised, more disciplined, and more willing to use captured institutions for transformative ends. The fix isn’t better luck or better people next administration. It’s the discipline to stop writing rules that depend on the enforcer’s good faith — and the patience to compete for the offices that interpret the rules already written.

The discipline and faith that reformists and counter-revolutionaries have.

There’s nothing left to conserve. The honest question is whether you’re willing to do what restoration actually requires.

This is the final part of a four-part series adapted from the Prothean Institute brief “Nothing Left to Conserve.” The Prothean Institute is an independent strategic research organisation. https://protheaninstitute.com

Israel Folau has allegedly been denied the opportunity to play in the NRL for the remainder of the season because of “inclusivity”.

The quick rundown: Folau’s camp alleges that Israel was invited to play for the West Tigers.

Yet, media outlets claim that Israel was the one who reached out to the club.

Fox Sports, quoting a 2GB exclusive, asserted that Folau’s manager had approached Tigers coach Benji Marshall.

2GB said they were informed, “that he’s been shopped around to at least one club in the National Rugby League - that being the Wests Tigers.”

On June 12, Newswire reported that Marshall had “shut the door on suggestions his club is considering signing Israel Folau.”

Marshall essentially said he’s got more to think about than answering speculation about recruitment.

Igniting another religious freedom battle, legacy media took the opportunity to hype up the “homophobe” trope.

They rehashed the Rugby Union’s 2019 unfair dismissal of Folau for posting a paraphrase of Galatians 5:19-21 on his personal Instagram page.

Covered extensively by Caldron Pool at the time, Folau’s dismissal was eventually settled out of court (see examples here, here, here and here).

Wallabies boss, Rugby Australia, apologised, then apparently paid an undisclosed amount in compensation.

Israel never played for the Wallabies again.

Disputing 2GB’s sources, Folau’s wife, Maria, took to Instagram yesterday to clear the air.

A month after returning to Australia, Maria said Marshall contacted Israel, saying “he wanted him to be part of the West Tigers for the remainder of the season.”

Israel, she recalled, told Marshall that he would have to check with Peter V’landys, Chair of the Australian Rugby League Commission.

This was because Israel was blocked in 2021 from playing for the Dragons.

Maria recounted Marshall saying, “he had already cleared it with V’Landy and the Tigers board, and that it was all good for Israel to come play in the NRL.”

A week later, she added, the Tigers’ coach called to tell them “he’d hit a roadblock. That V’Landy had spoken to him, saying that everyone had given the all-clear.”

However, former Tigers player Wayne Pearce, one of the league’s commissioners, reasoned against the move because of “inclusiveness, and that it would be a bad look to have Israel back in the game.”

“I’m not sure how these boards work and how one person has that much pull about who can play in the NRL and who can’t,” Maria said.

“But that was what we were told from Marshall.”

Maria continued, “got in contact with Wayne Pearce by text, and it was the same thing.

“Israel wasn’t welcome to play.”

Marshall told them “He was still keen to have Israel back on board and that he was going to try and get a contract lodged, and that the board were meeting on Sunday to talk about the situation.”

Maria explained they were later “told the Tigers were no longer going to lodge a contract.”

This, she explained, “was because media pressure would be a distraction for the club, and then also pressure from elsewhere.

“It’s unfortunate the Tigers have changed their mind.”

Maria then added that she felt like the entire exercise was a complete waste of time.

People will speculate, “say what they want to say, and write what they want to write,” she concluded, “but this is what’s actually happened. These are the conversations that we’ve had.”

Adding to this, Israel Folau wrote, “The double standard from the NRL is crazy. The game talks about inclusion, yet my Christian beliefs were said to be a problem and didn’t align with their values.

“At the same time, players who’ve committed actual offences have been welcomed back. Make it make sense.”

Revisiting then-ACL boss, Martyn Iles’ 2021 “Let Him Play” social media campaign, Family First said in the party was standing with Folau.

Family First director, Lyle Shelton, called for the NRL commission to stop “blacklisting” Folau, adding that “the treatment of Folau exposed a glaring double standard within the game’s leadership.

“Israel Folau has not committed a crime. He has not assaulted anyone. He has not abused women. He has not engaged in misconduct on the field or off it.

“His ‘offence’ was posting a Bible verse expressing orthodox Christian teaching about repentance and salvation.

“Yet the NRL,” Shelton argued, “has repeatedly welcomed back players involved in serious off-field scandals, including incidents involving violence against women and other deeply troubling conduct.”

Naming moral inconsistencies and calling out the apparent incoherence in the application of NRL policies, he remarked,

“The message from the game’s administrators appears to be that you can make serious mistakes, hurt people, coerce your girlfriend to abort her baby and still be welcomed back into rugby league.

“But if you publicly express traditional Christian beliefs, you become untouchable.”

If what the Folau camp has said rings true, Shelton said, “the ARL Commission are operating a two-tier system of inclusiveness.”

“One set of rules applies to people whose behaviour breaches community standards, and another applies to Bible-believing Christians.

“That is not inclusiveness. It is ideological discrimination.”

Shelton isn’t wrong.

As he also pointed out: “If they can do this to Izzy, they can do it to any of us.”

Effectively, Folau is being excluded from the game to protect the game’s commitment to maintaining an “inclusive” environment.

If you ever wanted a definitive example in Australia of LGBTQ+ lawfare, and its Marxist cousin, the Woke Mind Virus, this is it.

On her final day as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard released hundreds of pages of newly declassified documents that she says show Dr Anthony Fauci directed millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars toward gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, worked with elements of the Intelligence Community to suppress the lab-leak theory and conceal his involvement, and later provided false testimony to Congress while under oath in 2024.

The documents include internal emails, intelligence assessments, memos, and whistleblower accounts. According to Gabbard, the records reveal a pattern of efforts by government officials and intelligence agencies to downplay questions surrounding the possibility that the pandemic originated from a laboratory accident.

“The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world,” Gabbard said. “After years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability.”

Key Claims From the Release

According to Gabbard, the documents show:

• Millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were channelled through organisations such as EcoHealth Alliance to support coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

• Some of the Wuhan-based research involved gain-of-function experiments that increased the transmissibility or virulence of bat coronaviruses.

• Senior officials sought to discourage public discussion of the lab-leak theory in the early stages of the pandemic.

• Intelligence assessments regarding the origins of COVID-19 were influenced by political considerations rather than being based solely on the available evidence.

• Internal communications reveal efforts to shape public messaging around the origins debate.

• Whistleblower accounts describe pressure placed on analysts who raised concerns about a possible laboratory origin.

• Dr Anthony Fauci was involved in discussions concerning coronavirus research and its public presentation despite later denying certain aspects of that involvement.

• Information relevant to the origins investigation was withheld from the public for years despite calls for greater transparency.

Gabbard also alleged that Fauci worked with members of the intelligence community to minimise the credibility of the lab-leak hypothesis and influence official assessments of the virus's origins. She further claimed that Fauci provided misleading testimony to Congress when questioned about his knowledge of discussions involving intelligence officials and coronavirus research.

In announcing the release, Gabbard said the documents were being made public in the interests of transparency and accountability, arguing that Americans deserve access to information that has remained hidden for years. She described the move as part of the government's obligations under the COVID Origins Act.

“The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe,” she said.

“It’s time the American people learn the real story.”

Communications and documents can be viewed here.

One of the greatest challenges facing the modern Church is learning to distinguish between what’s sinful in the eyes of God and what’s sinful in the eyes of the culture. So long as the broader society operates independently of, and in opposition to, the Church, two competing moral frameworks will inevitably exist.

On the one hand stands the Church’s moral standard, grounded in the authority of Scripture. On the other hand stands the culture’s moral assumptions—a shifting patchwork of popular influences, trends, social pressures, and prevailing sentiments.

When the Bible is no longer esteemed as the recognised moral authority in society, cultural values increasingly function as a rival moral basis. They effectively establish their own orthodoxies, taboos, heresies, and with all that, punishments for dissent. This is because, as the culture becomes more dominant, the consequences for transgressing its so-called “sins” become increasingly severe.

As such, when the culture becomes the dominant moral authority, immense social pressures are placed upon Christians to remain within the bounds of what is culturally acceptable. To step outside of those defined limits, to speak about things deemed out-of-bounds or to challenge prevailing orthodoxies and norms, is often met with denunciation, calls for cancellation, or worse.

As a result, Christians can easily find themselves confusing cultural transgressions with biblical ones, treating violations of social norms as though they were violations of God’s law—and at times, even worse.

Consequently, there is a very real temptation within the Church to reshape Christianity into something that fits comfortably within the boundaries of acceptable cultural discourse. Christian commentators, eager to gain the approval of the world, often adopt popular cultural causes and attempt to baptise them with Christian language and justification. Black Lives Matter is embraced because God shows no partiality; climate alarmism because God created the earth; equality and inclusion because God is love; and so on.

In each case, the direction of influence is reversed. Rather than allowing Scripture to define the Church’s priorities, cultural priorities are first accepted and then retroactively furnished with biblical support. The result is not the Christianisation of culture, but the gradual accommodation of Christianity to the spirit of the age.

It becomes a form of Christianity that addresses only those issues the surrounding culture permits for discussion, while punishing those who dare to discuss topics deemed out of bounds. There are always subjects that remain untouchable—questions that, if raised, result in a modern-day heresy trial. In such cases, the accused is expected to recant, renounce, and do penance, often indefinitely.

We need to be abundantly clear when it comes to denouncing others as blasphemers for simply transgressing cultural norms or insulting the idols of the age. For the Christian, however, faithfulness to Christ requires us to judge all things according to Scripture, not according to the ever-changing standards of the age. It’s essential for Christians to clearly distinguish between sins against the culture and sins against Christ.

Not every Christian needs to be inclined towards “controversial opinions.” Not every Christian needs to be pushing the social boundaries. Not every Christian needs to find backlash and public condemnation. But every Christian is bound to define sin as Scripture defines it.

When a Christian is accused of wrongdoing against the prevailing narrative, and the pressures of cultural censure begin to mount, the most important thing to ask is: Is this a sin against Christ, or merely a transgression against the culture?

If it’s truly a sin against Christ, then repentance is obviously required, and upon that, forgiveness must follow. But if it’s merely a sin against the culture—especially where the “offence” consists of speaking truth or fulfilling biblical duty—then there’s no warrant for binding the conscience of believers, nor for condemning them as heretics against God.

In such cases, the Church must not only resist conflating cultural offence with divine transgression, but must also stand with those whom culture condemns, since social exclusion does not equate to exclusion from God. The Church must recover both the ability to distinguish between what offends culture and what offends Christ, and the courage to stand with those whom society casts out and subjects to the pressure of social acceptability.

When these categories are blurred, cultural pressures begin to function as if they were divine laws, and the Church risks becoming captive to shifting public sentiment rather than anchored in Scripture.

But once that distinction is clear, Christians are liberated both from cowardice and from false guilt. They are free to seek forgiveness where they have truly sinned against God, and equally free to stand firm where the “offence” consists in nothing more than fidelity to truth in the face of a culture shaped by lies.

A senior CIA operations officer has accused Dr Anthony Fauci of using his influence within the intelligence community to downplay the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.

Decorated CIA veteran, James E. Erdman III, made the claims last month in a testimony delivered before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

Erdman alleged that intelligence leaders and analysts systematically suppressed evidence pointing to a laboratory incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and described a “concerted effort” that resulted in a de facto cover-up, including retaliation against analysts who supported the lab-leak hypothesis.

“Intelligence community leaders and senior analysts downplayed the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated as a result of a lab incident,” Erdman stated in his opening remarks.

He specifically pointed to Fauci, who was then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. According to Erdman, Fauci leveraged his influence and longstanding ties to the intelligence community. He allegedly recommended bringing in experts who had received NIH funding to help shape the analysts' reviews during 2022–2023.

Senator Rand Paul, who chairs the committee, has argued that Fauci’s role in approving gain-of-function research at Wuhan created a conflict of interest that could have motivated efforts to steer the narrative away from the lab-leak theory and towards a natural origin theory.

Fauci has denied the allegations, describing them as distortions of his actions.

On January 19, 2025—just one day before he left office—President Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci, shielding him from any potential federal prosecution related to his actions during the COVID-19 response.

Here’s the uncomfortable part, and the most important one. Suppose every conservative complaint about bad-faith enforcement is wrong. Suppose every tribunal member, every commissioner, every ombudsman, every licensing official is scrupulously honest and genuinely trying to be fair. The outcomes would still come out tilted in one direction.

That’s not a concession. It’s the actual diagnosis. Bad faith isn’t the engine. It’s an optional extra. The engine is three things stacked on top of each other, and once you see them stacked, you can’t unsee it.

(If you’ve read Part 1 and Part 2 of Nothing Left To Conserve, this is the structural asymmetry I promised — the one that would survive even if conservatives developed all the discipline they’ve lacked for fifty years. If you’re starting here, you don’t need them. This stands on its own.)

Stack one: The rule is written vaguely

Every rule sits somewhere on a line from objective and bright and to vague.

A bright-line rule is mechanical. A 60 km/h speed limit. A 25 per cent tax rate. A fixed retirement age. Applying it takes no judgment about what the words mean to know what kind of person or rule you’re dealing with. The number is the number. The rule is the rule.

A vague rule needs interpreting. What counts as “hate”? As “fair”? As “in the public interest”? As “a person of good character”? The wider the space for interpretation, the more power sits with whoever’s doing the interpreting.

And here’s why the world fills up with vague rules: legislators *love* them. Vague rules are flexible. They dodge the political cost of saying exactly what you mean. Best of all, they pass with support from both sides — precisely because each side sits down imagining its own people doing the enforcing. The very ambiguity that gets a rule passed is what makes it dangerous once it’s running. You’re not voting on a rule. You’re voting on a blank cheque and trusting it’ll be cashed your way.

Stack two: the people who interpret it all come from the same place

Vague rules need humans to interpret them. And those humans aren’t drawn at random from the population. They come out of specific pipelines — law schools, journalism schools, public-administration programmes, education faculties, NGO career tracks — that have leaned one way, hard, for at least two generations.

The numbers are documented. The progressive-to-conservative ratio in American humanities and social-science faculties runs more than 90 to 10 (Langbert and Stevens, 2020; similar figures for the UK from Carl, 2017, and Australia from Lindsay, 2021). The ratios in journalism, public-sector law, and the senior civil service across the English-speaking world look much the same.

This isn’t a plot. Nobody held a meeting. It’s the slow, compounding result of one kind of person self-selecting into low-paid, credential-heavy professions over decades — combined with the motivational gap from Part 2. One side was willing to do the unglamorous institutional work. The other wasn’t. And so:

The discretionary positions were not seized. They were vacated.

That’s the sentence to take away. The interpretive offices weren’t stormed. One side just kept showing up for jobs the other side considered beneath it — for forty years — and then the side that didn’t show up started complaining about who’d filled the room.

Stack three: even the honest ones breathe the same air

Vague rules plus captured offices would *still*, in principle, leave room for individual conscience to occasionally produce a fair result. The third stack closes that door.

The world around the office — the journals the official reads, the professional guidance they follow, the conferences they attend, the colleagues they talk hard cases over with, the (biased) media they consume with its blind spots, the literature their decisions cite — has itself been captured by the same monoculture over the same generation. So even sincere, good-faith enforcement, by people who genuinely believe they reasoned their way to the right answer, comes out one-directional. The whole information environment they think inside was pre-filtered to exclude the assumptions that would have produced a different conclusion.

The cleanest example is paediatric gender medicine. A GP or paediatric endocrinologist assessing a fourteen-year-old with gender dysphoria operates inside an environment where the WPATH standards, the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, the Endocrine Society statement, the peer-reviewed journals, the medical-school curriculum, the continuing-education modules, the hospital’s diversity training, the media, and the activist NGOs all point the same way at once. A clinician applying the standard of care their environment defines will affirm and refer for medical transition.

They would argue that they are not all failing morally. They’re not all acting in bad faith (though Prothean Institute would argue they have a duty to be fully informed that they have neglected). They’re operating inside an information architecture engineered to produce one answer — one in which the contrary evidence (the Cass Review, the Finnish, Swedish, and Danish health-service reversals, the long-term detransition data) is filtered out before it reaches them, or tagged as fringe and extremist when it slips through. The structural failure produces harm at scale, by good people who genuinely believed they were helping. That last clause is the whole point. By good (but naive) people.

The same architecture runs everywhere a vague judgment gets made. The immigration officer applying a “good character” test. The charity commissioner applying “public benefit.” The tribunal member applying “hate.” The broadcasting ombudsman applying “impartiality.” The curriculum reviewer applying “age-appropriate.” Each works inside an environment where the standard itself was defined by one monoculture — so the application comes out one-directional whether the enforcer is sincere or not.

Bad faith isn’t necessary to produce asymmetric enforcement.

Captured discretion plus a captured information environment is enough — even when every individual enforcer believes they’re acting in good faith, which they almost always do. The failure is upstream of the person at the desk. By the time the case reaches them, the tilted outcome has already been decided by the architecture they’re standing inside.

Where enforcers do act with deliberate partisan intent — the prosecutorial pattern in Fulton County, Manhattan, various state AG offices — that’s an aggravating factor bolted on top, not the root cause. Replace every wilfully partisan prosecutor tomorrow with a sincere successor from the same pipeline, breathing the same air, and the pattern holds. That’s how you know the partisanship isn’t the engine. Remove it and the machine still runs.

The test that would have stopped all of this

There’s a 250-year-old principle that catches this at the design stage, and it’s worth stating because conservatives ignored it on the way in and are now living with the bill.

Madison’s argument in Federalist No. 51 is that you design institutions for self-interested actors, not virtuous ones. The famous use is constructive — set ambition against ambition. The diagnostic use is sharper, and it’s just one question you ask of any rule: what does this rule need its enforcer to be, in order to produce the effect it promises?

Run the standard instruments through it. You don’t have to assume anyone’s a villain. You only have to admit the enforcer will come from a pipeline, will breathe an information environment, and will feel professional pressure — and that all three have pointed one way for two generations.

• Section 18C needs the Human Rights Commission and the courts to apply a politically neutral definition of “offence.” They haven’t. They were never going to.

• The ABC charter needs the broadcaster’s leadership to apply a politically neutral definition of “the centre.” They haven’t. They were never going to.

• Charity registration needs officials to apply politically neutral criteria for “public benefit.” They haven’t. They were never going to.

• Curriculum authority needs officials to apply politically neutral criteria for “legitimate content.” They haven’t. They were never going to.

Every one of these fails the test before it’s even enforced. None produces its promised outcome under any realistic staffing. The naive version of the rule — don’t pass a law you wouldn’t want your opponents to use — is the surface. The real version is harder:

Don’t pass any rule whose protective effect depends on the worldview of the official who enforces it. The worst plausible enforcer will eventually staff that office. Either the rule produces acceptable outcomes in that person’s hands, or it’s a defection waiting to be triggered.

Apply that consistently, and most of the architecture conservatives now resent would never have been built. And here’s the part conservatives don’t want to hear: they failed to apply it because they thought they wanted the same kind of instruments for their own purposes — banning flag-burning, banning pornography, restricting religious expression they disliked, controlling academic content they objected to.

The DeSantis and Trump administrations are now testing what symmetric use of the vague machine looks like in practice. The disciplined response to that experiment is not to cheer it as overdue payback. It’s to recognise that any apparatus whose fairness depends on which side holds the office is an apparatus that shouldn’t exist — because the pendulum swings, and the conservative cheering DeSantis today is blessing the exact instrument that gets used on the next conservative cohort tomorrow.

The standard is universal, or it’s worthless.

That’s the diagnosis, complete: a motivational gap that means one side won’t fight (Part 2), sitting on top of a structural machine that tilts even honest hands (this part). Which leaves the only question that matters. Given all of that — given the offices are vacated, the air is captured, and your own side won’t operate the levers — what do you actually do?

Part 4 is the answer: three strategies that only work together, a reframe that explains why “conservatism” may be the wrong word for the job entirely, and the policy that follows. It’s also where the title finally pays off.

This is Part 3 of a four-part series adapted from the Prothean Institute brief “Nothing Left to Conserve.”

Rupert Lowe’s independent Rape Gang Inquiry Report has left many across Britain and the wider world shocked and appalled that something so heinous could not only occur, but continue unchecked and unchallenged for decades.

How does a nation once renowned for its Christian morals, virtue, and civilised order descend into such cold-hearted and degenerate barbarity?

There are, of course, many contributing factors that we could point to, including mass immigration, failed vetting procedures, the importation of incompatible cultural and religious values, institutional cowardice, and political correctness. But these did not arise in an ideological vacuum. So, unless the root cause is identified, the symptoms will continue to be debated in isolation, while their chief cause goes unaddressed.

At its heart, the rape of Britain is inseparable from Britain’s rejection of its Christian heritage. It was Christianity that shaped Britain’s moral consensus, established the sanctity of human life in the public mind, elevated the dignity of women and children, and provided the necessary ethical foundations upon which its institutions were built.

The gradual dismantling of that Christian foundation didn’t merely remove a set of private religious beliefs; it eroded the very moral order that once restrained vice, demanded justice, and gave leaders the courage to place truth and goodness above political expediency and personal profit.

Every contributing factor that made this scandal possible was enabled by that fundamental civilisational shift away from Christianity. As such, a society that abandons the moral foundations that built it shouldn’t be surprised when the protections those foundations provided begin to disappear.

This inquiry stands not merely as an indictment of particular individuals or institutions, but as a warning about what happens when a nation severs itself from the principles that once defined and sustained it.

Contrary to what we’ve so often been told, the rejection of Christianity as the recognised religious and moral foundation of society doesn’t just have private consequences; it has social and national consequences as well. And the Rape Gang Inquiry may be the most horrific expression of this reality so far.

Make no mistake, the willingness of authorities to allegedly turn a blind eye to the systematic rape and exploitation of young girls is the direct consequence of abandoning Christ and enthroning the state in His place.

Those who ignored these crimes did so under the assumption that they possessed the authority to do so—or at least, the assumption that they would never be called to account by any higher tribunal.

Such a posture is both dangerous and deadly. It treats government authority as the highest moral standard and the final court of appeals. It assumes that the state is not under the law, but is itself the source of law.

This is the inverse of the Christianity that historically shaped the British Isles. Christianity taught that rulers, magistrates, and institutions stand under the judgment of God and are thus accountable to a transcendent moral order.

Christianity taught that God’s law is the standard of love, and to violate that law was to harm one’s neighbour—and to harm one’s neighbour was a crime, not only against one’s neighbour, but against God Himself.

Once that foundation is compromised, power increasingly becomes accountable only to itself. Once that foundation is demoted to one among many religious options, the state becomes the final moral arbiter.

The de-Christianisation of Britain, therefore, is not merely a spiritual transformation; it’s a civilisational one. And if continued, you can be sure it will bring profound social decay, and it is Britain’s most vulnerable who will continue to bear the heaviest cost.

An independent, survivor-led inquiry has published a shocking review of Britain's grooming gang scandal, alleging that as many as 250,000 vulnerable girls were subjected to sexual exploitation over several decades amid repeated failures by police, social services, local authorities, and political leaders.

The report argues that the issue represented a widespread and systemic problem across multiple regions of the United Kingdom.

The 219-page report, titled The Rape Gang Inquiry Report, was chaired by Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe and produced with significant input from survivor and campaigner Sammy Woodhouse.

The inquiry, which was funded through donations from more than 20,000 members of the public, draws upon survivor testimony, court records, whistleblower evidence, previous official investigations, and expert submissions.

Findings on the Scale of Abuse

According to the report, organised grooming and sexual exploitation networks have operated in at least 149 local authority areas across the United Kingdom. The inquiry estimates that as many as 250,000 girls may have been abused over several decades, while acknowledging that the true figure may never be known.

The report describes a recurring pattern in which vulnerable girls, some as young as 11, were targeted through gifts, attention, alcohol, drugs, and other inducements. Victims were allegedly transported to private homes, hotels, restaurants, and other locations where they were subjected to repeated sexual abuse, violence, trafficking, and intimidation.

The inquiry also details allegations involving coercion, blackmail, forced pregnancies, and movement of victims between towns and cities by organised groups.

Demographic Patterns

The report states that a large majority of convicted or identified offenders were men of Pakistani Muslim heritage, with smaller numbers originating from other predominantly Muslim backgrounds. It argues that these proportions exceed the demographic representation of those groups within the wider UK population.

Inquiry authors contend that some offenders were influenced by cultural attitudes toward non-Muslim girls and by tightly connected family or clan-based social structures.

Criticism of Public Institutions

A central theme of the inquiry is the alleged failure of public authorities to adequately protect victims or pursue offenders.

The report criticises police forces, social services, health authorities, schools, local councils, and political leaders, arguing that concerns about community relations and accusations of racism sometimes discouraged intervention.

Among the allegations are claims that reports from victims were dismissed, evidence was mishandled, whistleblowers faced retaliation, and vulnerable children were returned to environments where exploitation continued.

“On one occasion,” the report claims, “a police officer returned [the victim] to the house where the abuse was occurring and told the men to ‘have fun with her.’”

The inquiry argues that these failures occurred across multiple governments and political parties over several decades.

Recommendations

The report concludes that the grooming gang phenomenon represents a systemic national problem rather than a series of isolated incidents. It recommends a range of measures, including:

• Mandatory recording of offenders’ ethnicity and religion.

• Stronger sentencing and enforcement powers.

• Expanded investigations into historic cases.

• Greater accountability for officials who failed to act.

• Additional national and local inquiries.

You can read the full report here.

What Happens Next?

Following the release of the inquiry, Rupert Lowe released a statement on X, saying he intends to use his parliamentary privilege to name perpetrators and their enablers.

“This will be done incredibly carefully with our legal team involved every step of the way to ensure that no future prosecutions are jeopardised.

Lowe said his team is cooperating with the authorities to help cases be opened and reopened, but said his faith in the system to independently deliver justice is “not high.”

“This is why we are pursuing private prosecutions and civil litigation.”

Lowe said a target list has been identified, and it continues to grow.

“Our aim is straightforward,” Lowe explained. “Put people in prison. Deliver justice. Finally.

“We will act. Not talk.”

I recently posed a hypothetical question to Grok, which is often described as one of the most advanced artificial intelligences today. I asked: If you were tasked with destroying Western civilisation, what steps would you take to ensure its complete collapse?

Here’s the answer:

Grok said: I wouldn’t use overt conquest—that breeds martyrs. I’d seduce, subvert, and let the host devour itself. The goal: replace ordered liberty rooted in transcendent truth, natural law, and the imago Dei with chaos, appetite, and power.

1. Corrupt the Classroom.
   Corrupt the young through education. Capture the schools and universities. Replace the transmission of Western heritage, logic, rhetoric, and Christian metaphysics with grievance studies, emotionalism, and “critical” theories that frame history as endless oppression. Teach children they are random meat accidents in a meaningless universe—no souls, no purpose, no duties. Outcome: generations who despise their ancestors and cannot reason.

2. Break the Family.
   Destroy the family and fertility. Promote no-fault divorce, careerism over motherhood, and the idea that children are economic burdens or lifestyle accessories. Normalize casual sex, pornography, and the hook-up culture while stigmatizing large families as “irresponsible” or “planet-destroying.” Subsidize single motherhood and make two-parent homes seem optional. A civilization that stops reproducing and raising its own children in stable homes is already dead.

3. Confuse Identity.
   Invert sexual morality and identity. Turn the biblical and biological order of male/female, marriage, and procreation into a fluid spectrum of self-worship. Flood culture with pornography, transgender ideology, and the sacralization of every desire. Shame chastity, fidelity, and complementarity as “repressive.” When people cannot even define what a woman is, they cannot defend civilization’s basic building blocks.

4. Neutralize the Church.
   Infiltrate and neuter the churches. Fund and elevate progressive clergy who preach social justice, climate repentance, and “inclusion” over sin, redemption, and orthodoxy. Encourage therapeutic deism, prosperity gospel, and endless ecumenism that dilutes doctrine. Make faith a vague feeling rather than costly allegiance to Christ. Empty cathedrals and confused believers follow naturally.

5. Control the Narrative.
   Weaponize media and entertainment. Control the narrative machines—Hollywood, news, music, social platforms. Glorify degeneracy, irony, and anti-heroes while mocking virtue, tradition, and the nuclear family. Use endless distraction and dopamine to shorten attention spans and erode the capacity for contemplation or worship. A people who binge-watch their own dissolution won’t notice the collapse.

6. Divide the People.
   Divide and conquer through identity politics. Replace “image of God + individual dignity” with intersectional tribes ranked by victimhood. Stoke racial, sexual, and class resentments so citizens see each other as oppressors rather than neighbors. Import incompatible masses without assimilation to heighten conflict. When loyalty is to tribe over transcendent truth or nation, civilizational cohesion dissolves.

7. Worship Consumption.
   Promote materialism and debt-fueled hedonism. Link human worth to consumption and status. Encourage massive personal, corporate, and national debt so people are enslaved to the present and terrified of the future. Erode the Protestant work ethic and thrift; replace delayed gratification with instant credit and vice. A society that lives only for now has no stake in eternity or posterity.

8. Abolish Truth.
   Undermine reason, truth, and objective standards. Push relativism, “my truth,” and the idea that words are violence while violence is speech. Attack classical liberalism’s roots in Christian assumptions (equality before God, rule of law). Elevate “science” as oracle when convenient, then deny biology and statistics when they contradict the narrative. A people who cannot agree on basic reality cannot maintain institutions.

9. Deify the State.
   Expand the state as false god and savior. Grow bureaucracy, welfare dependency, and surveillance to crowd out charity, church, and family. Promise security and equity in exchange for liberty and responsibility. Criminalize thoughtcrimes (wrong opinions on sex, race, climate) while decriminalizing real crime. When the state replaces God as provider and moral arbiter, tyranny follows—and people will cheer for their chains.

10. Erase the Past.
    Erase memory and rewrite history. Topple statues, decolonize curricula, and pathologize the past as irredeemably evil (while ignoring every other civilization’s sins). Promote apathy toward the unique achievements of the West—abolitionism, hospitals, universities, rule of law, scientific method—all downstream of Christianity. A people severed from their roots will not defend the tree.

Grok concluded by noting its “masterstroke” move, that is: “Make every step feel like liberation, progress, and compassion. Label resistance ‘hate,’ ‘bigotry,’ or ‘extremism.’

“Most will applaud their own destruction,” Grok said. “The few who see it will be isolated, censored, or co-opted.”

Okay, that was a bit on the nose.

When so many seemingly destructive policies and trends all move in alignment, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe it’s all mere coincidence. At some point, the explanation of incompetence loses credibility.

Can so many institutions, leaders, and experts really be this consistently wrong—making the same mistakes, producing the same harmful outcomes, decade after decade—purely by accident?

Surely, nobody is this bad, unless it’s on purpose. It should certainly make you wonder…

Hand a progressive coalition control of an institution, and it transforms the institution. Hand a conservative coalition the same control, and it runs the place roughly as it found it, tidies a few things at the edges, and hands it back.

That single asymmetry is most of the post-1968 story. It’s why the ground has moved so far in one direction over sixty years, even though conservatives have won plenty of elections along the way. Winning the election turns out not to matter much if you don’t use what winning gives you.

You don’t need to read Part 1 of this series to follow this one, but here’s the one line it leaves you with: the rules look neutral, the people enforcing them aren’t, and one big reason is that conservatives simply won’t operate the machine they win. This is the part about *why* they won’t.

There are four reasons, and they stack.

1. A different theory of what the state is for.

Every revolutionary left project that actually captured a state and held it — Mao’s China and now Xi’s, the Soviet bloc, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, the Bolivarian governments across Latin America — ended up in the same place: coercive enforcement of the approved social outcome. That’s too consistent, across too many cultures and decades, to be a local accident. The common thread is a theory of politics where the state is the legitimate tool for remaking society, and anything in the way — people, institutions, traditions, inconvenient facts — is an obstacle to be cleared.

The social-democratic version doesn’t produce gulags, because the constitutional furniture it operates inside won’t let it — for now, though, as the COVID era shows, we aren’t as far away from this as we think. What it produces instead is the low-intensity version: take an institution, fill it with one worldview, quietly push the dissent out. You can see it in every university humanities faculty, every big newsroom, every public broadcaster, every professional association, every government department that touches a contested question. The intensity varies. The mechanism is identical.

Conservatism has no equivalent. It’s a defensive disposition — preserve what’s here, slow down what’s changing — not a transformative one. So it generates a much weaker appetite for using captured offices to remake the institutions themselves, and a much weaker willingness to hold the line, in disciplined formation, for the decades that would take.

2. One side marches in step. The other is a coalition of arguments.

Progressive blocs vote together. Democratic and Labor parliamentary votes routinely hit 95 per cent cohesion or higher on contested questions. Republican and Coalition votes routinely fall below 80 per cent on the same questions.

That’s because the right genuinely is more internally varied — libertarians, social conservatives, business, populists, traditional institutionalists, national-conservative tendencies, all under one tent and frequently at each other’s throats. Coordinating that crowd to seize and hold an institutional opportunity is just *harder* than coordinating a more unified bloc.

It cuts both ways. The internal diversity makes the right hard for any single faction to capture — a real strength. It also means the disciplined side wins more of the institutional fights, and wins them consistently. Discipline beats diversity in a long campaign for control. It has.

3. The press only punishes one side for it.

A conservative who actually uses institutional power for transformative ends gets an immediate, coordinated, high-volume hostile response. A progressive using the identical power does not. That shapes the maths before anyone acts.

A conservative governor fires a regulatory commissioner and gets outrage and accusations of “authoritarianism.” A progressive governor does the same thing and it’s Tuesday. A conservative president removes US Attorneys and gets investigations; a progressive president removing US Attorneys is “exercising normal executive prerogative.” The coverage is asymmetric, so the political cost is asymmetric, so the willingness to act is asymmetric. The restraint isn’t always principle. Sometimes it’s just knowing who’ll get the headline.

4. Some of them actually mean it.

And for some conservative actors, the restraint is real principle. A genuine belief that institutional norms matter, that procedural fairness is worth something beyond winning, that the rule of law is supposed to bind *your* side too.

This disposition exists in both coalitions. What differs is its *weight*. In the conservative coalition, the moralist who says “we shouldn’t do that, even though we can” frequently wins the internal argument. In the progressive coalition, the strategist who says “we should do it because we can” frequently wins instead. Same two voices in both rooms. Different one carries the day.

For the purposes of what to actually do, it doesn’t matter which of the four is doing the work in any given case — principle, fear, internal chaos, or sheer inertia. The output is the same. Conservatives, with one very recent exception, don’t operate the discretionary machine the way their opponents do. Any strategy that assumes they will is built on a fantasy.

The exception that proves it: DeSantis and Trump.

Here’s where it gets clarifying, because there is a recent exception, and the reaction to it tells you everything.

DeSantis in Florida used education statute, professional licensing, and appointment power. The second Trump administration used executive orders, agency reorganisation, and prosecutorial discretion. And the howl that went up — constitutional crisis, authoritarian breakdown, the end of liberal democracy — would lead you to believe they’d invented some terrifying new power.

They invented nothing. Look at the actual precedents:

• Trump dismissing US Attorneys? Clinton fired all ninety-three in a single day in 1993. Every administration since has done its own version.

• Trump reshaping agency policy by executive order? That’s the Obama administration’s tool for DACA and DAPA, and the Biden administration’s tool for trying to forgive student loans after Congress said no.

• DeSantis using the education statute to pull curriculum content? California, New York, and Illinois have used the identical authority to insert woke curriculum content for forty years.

• DeSantis using licensing and corporate-charter power against Disney? That’s the same family of authority progressive states used against bakers, photographers, pharmacists, crisis-pregnancy centres, and religious schools.

Every instrument DeSantis and Trump reached for has a direct progressive precedent in the preceding forty years. Not one is a new power. Not one exceeds the scope already established. They are using the existing machine symmetrically — and that, apparently, is the scandal.

Virginia, April 2026, shows the asymmetry in real time. Democratic legislatures have been aggressive gerrymanderers for decades — federal courts have described their maps as everything from a “broken-winged pterodactyl” to an “earmuff.” When Republican legislatures in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri belatedly drew comparable maps in 2025, the outrage was about the response, not the act.

Virginia is sharper still: faced with the same incentive, Virginia Democrats overrode their own voter-approved bipartisan redistricting commission — passed with 66 per cent support — via a constitutional amendment slipped into a special session called for other business while voting was already underway elsewhere. Their own Attorney General called it unconstitutional. A trial court agreed. The amendment passed 50.7 to 49.3 and turned a 6-5 delegation into a projected 10-1. Texas used existing authority. Virginia broke its own. The same captured institutional layer described them in opposite terms.

That’s the tell. The same instruments, used the same way, on the same legal basis — and a wildly different institutional response depending only on who’s holding them. That’s not a bug in the machine. That’s the machine doing exactly what it was built to do: one response when the in-group operates it, another when the out-group does.

DeSantis, Trump, and the conservative redistricting states have done nothing that progressive governors, presidents, and states haven’t done first, using the same authorities. The reaction to them demonstrates the asymmetry more clearly than any argument could.

So that’s the motivational gap: one side won’t operate the machine, and on the rare occasion it does, the machine’s own staff treat it as an emergency.

But motivation is only half of it. Suppose conservatives woke up tomorrow with all the discipline they’ve lacked for fifty years. The results would *still* come out tilted — because the tilt is built into the structure, not just the willingness to use it. Part 3 is about that structure: how vague rules, captured offices, and a single information climate combine to produce one-directional outcomes even from completely honest people. And it turns on one sentence that reframes the whole grievance: the positions weren’t seized. They were vacated.

This is Part 2 of a four-part series adapted from the Prothean Institute brief “Nothing Left to Conserve.”

In any serious system of accountability, the importance of a promise increases the obligation to keep it. In modern politics, however, the more consequential the promise, the less accountability seems to follow when it is broken.

Why is that?

If a business falsely advertises a product, it’s treated as a serious breach of trust. Let me give you an example:

In 2022, Samsung published advertisements showing Galaxy phones being used in pools and seawater, suggesting they were suitable for such conditions. The ads featured activities like surfing and poolside use, accompanied by promotional claims about capturing beach adventures.

Here’s a sampling of advertisements used:

You get the idea. As a result, the company admitted its advertisements had misled consumers about the water resistance of its phones, and the Federal Court ordered Samsung Electronics Australia to pay $14 million in penalties.

But why is it, when it comes to political promises, which are far more consequential, that the standard is lowered, not raised? Shouldn’t it be the exact opposite?

Why do we hold Samsung—or even the local fish and chip shop!—to a higher standard than our own politicians?

A business can face severe penalties for misleading customers about a product, yet politicians can make promises that influence tax laws, affect the lives of millions, and alter the course of an entire nation, only to abandon those promises without consequence.

So, why are those entrusted with the greatest power often held to the lowest standard of accountability?

Today, broken commitments are brushed off as “just politics,” and the result is a strange social inversion where the more important the promise, the less accountability there appears to be for breaking it.

Make it make sense.

Little wonder that One Nation’s “Fire the Liar” fundraiser has reached $4 million in public donations. The campaign seems to be the best shot Australian citizens have at holding our lying politicians to account.

I want to have a bit of a discussion about some of my most controversial opinions and how they are received by different generations, particularly millennials and boomers. I think there are some important insights in this discussion.

My most controversial opinions, according to the responses I get, are, ironically, things that pretty much every previous generation of Christians agreed on, at least before the middle of the 19th century:

• Men should provide.

• Men should lead the home.

• Women should keep the home.

• All who believe in Jesus are true Israel.

• There is no rapture.

• Psychology is more harmful than good.

I find that many millennial men and women see the first three as personal attacks, or even attacks on their mental health and the mental health of others. They immediately frame the views as unfair, mean, or harmful. Millennials have been trained to see traditional biblical standards as causes of low self-esteem, sometimes severe mental breakdown, or other social ills. Pick the issue, and you will find millennials who will respond this way. I have identified a few here, but the same will be true of gender issues and a host of political issues.

The last three issues usually upset boomers. This generation, generally speaking, hears those positions as at least severely errant teaching, although some see them as basically apostasy. If you maintain these positions with determination and unapologetically, as every pastor should, they really can fly off the handle about it. Some boomers even see issues 4 and 5 as pillars around which the church should base its teaching and practice. Especially if Israel happens to currently be at war, which just happens to be a lot of the time.

The last point is usually seen as equally insulting to both most millennials and many boomers. Millennials were raised to see soul health as the sole providence of psychology (used collectively, including all its diverse branches; counselling, psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, etc.). Many millennials see people who are sceptical of psychology as people who are in need of deep therapy themselves, and often as unsafe persons, or simply as people out of touch with modern developments.

They have placed psychology, in its various forms, as an authority in their lives, and one that people should submit to. I even know of people who refuse to engage with their own extended family over minor issues, because those family members have refused to go to therapy. These millennials see this as a reason to remove these people from their lives. Boomers were the generation that taught them that, though you will probably find more boomers who are still sceptical of the profession.

But the theological positions noted above are all really standard Christian positions. There is nothing historically controversial about them at all. They are all well established and widely held within Orthodoxy, and really well represented across the denominations. None of these positions would have even caused much controversy in the vast majority of the church prior to about 1960. Though the white-anting of these views all began in the middle of the 19^th century, within a few years of each other…how interesting.

This is just more evidence of the inverted culture we live in. When Christians find orthodox, moderate, and standard Christian teaching offensive, and often feel like biblical truth is a personal attack on them, you know the church has come to place the Baals and Asherahs before the Lord in many areas of their life. But I’d like to process why this might be happening. Because this can give us insights into things that went wrong with these generations, which may help us correct them or help those coming up.

Why is this Happening?

One reason we see these kinds of responses is that people rarely evaluate a doctrine in isolation. They evaluate it through the lens of what they think the doctrine implies, especially about their identity and their worldview. For instance, “Men should provide” is often not heard as a statement about responsibility; it is instead heard as a statement about economic dependence, restricted opportunities, or unequal value. “Women should keep the home” is often not heard as a statement about vocation; it is instead heard as a statement about limiting women or confining them to a role.

Keeping the home is the most important role a woman can fulfil, but many people have been conditioned by decades of propaganda that has framed homemaking as a lesser role. “There is no rapture” is often not heard as an exegetical argument; it is heard as an attack on a theological system people have been taught for decades, an idea many of them have personally placed their hopes in and expect to be fulfilled in their lifetime. “Psychology is more harmful than good” is often not heard as a critique of a discipline; it is instead heard as an attack on people who received help through counselling or therapy. In other words, controversy often arises because people mentally attach emotional baggage to the proposition.

Another reason this happens is that many Christians today are formed by multiple authorities simultaneously: Scripture, church tradition, family culture, political ideology, therapeutic culture, and social media. They may say that biblical truth is their greatest concern, but they are thoroughly unaware of how they were raised in a form of Christian doctrine that is utterly alien to Church history and in many ways, actually opposes what Christianity historically was. Some have even been trained to see the Church throughout history as almost universally suspect, anyway, so appeals to history to evaluate their doctrine fall on deaf ears. This is a form of modern supremacy, or chronological snobbery, but those doing it are often unaware that is what they are doing.

So, when one of those authorities conflicts with another, the person often experiences tension. The doctrine then feels threatening because it threatens a larger worldview, not just a single belief. It becomes more than a disagreement; it becomes an attack on their identity. This is especially true today, in a society where identity is among the chief gods of modern culture.

Generally speaking, the different generations get upset about different historically Orthodox doctrines. There are obviously exceptions in each generation, but these generational divides provide us with interesting insight, so they are worth delving into.

Millennials

Millennials were formed during the triumph of therapy culture. Think about how therapy infused even pop culture in the 90’s. Star Trek: The Next Generation put a psychologist on its bridge. Shows like Fraser and The Sopranos were touchstones of the millennial generation, and both shows were explicitly centred around a psychological framework. Home Improvement, a prominent comedy of the 90’s, was presented as a masculine-centred family comedy, but if you rewatch it, you will see that it is a clever feminist reframing of men, based around psychology, and Tim ‘the tool man’ Taylor quits his job at the end of the show so his feminist wife can pursue her desired psychology career. This message was just dumped on this generation from every direction.

The dominant cultural message was not merely, “What is true?” but “What is healthy?” and often what feels harmful, hurtful or emotionally damaging. This message became a mantra of the millennial generation. As a result, many Millennials instinctively evaluate ideas according to psychological impact before they consider their theological accuracy. In other words, they immediately think about how the idea makes them feel, and they may never even get to evaluating its validity. That it makes them feel bad is enough for them to know it must be wrong. This is their guiding philosophy, at least for many.

This does not necessarily mean that they reject biblical authority. Rather, many in this generation have been trained to believe that biblical authority and psychological flourishing must always align in the way modern psychology defines flourishing. So, when they hear traditional teachings on family structure, they often ask questions like, “What effect does this have on people?” before asking, “Is it true?” That is a very different starting point from previous generations. And it blinds them to their ability to correctly identify rebellion against God on many issues. But they simultaneously often feel superior to previous generations while doing this at the same time.

We were taught about post-modernism and political correctness in schools. But many millennials did not realise they were being formed to live out these principles through therapy culture. Therapy culture cares more about “Your truth” rather than the truth. Therapy culture cares more about not offending someone than speaking what is true. Boomers pushed these ideas, but millennials were moulded by them. Many more than others.

Boomers

Boomers, on the other hand, were converted, discipled, or matured during the period when dispensationalism was highly influential, prophecy conferences were common, and evangelical publishing was dominated by futurist end times views. And you can understand why. They were born after the biggest, most apocalyptic-like war in history, then the founding of a country called Israel, the rise of the beast-like communist states, the invention of the nuclear threat, and more.

Their generation had many reasons to consider that the times and ages were coming to an end in their day. As a result, positions like a future ethnic-Israel focus or a pre-tribulation rapture can feel foundational to them rather than secondary. These ideas were in the air they breathed in many churches. When someone challenges those views, the challenge can feel larger than it actually is; it can feel existential.

These are generalisations, of course. Many boomers were strongly grounded in the secure walls of orthodox bible teaching and not drawn to the novel doctrines of their age. However, many, many were, and many of these people take criticism of their views not just personally, but as an attack on the foundations of Christianity itself. The rapture is not just a biblical possibility; it is part of a framework that places the country called Israel at the centre of world events and, in their eyes, confirms the validity of God’s word. This is a big deal for them, and you can understand why.

So, what is happening here is that people have been largely reshaped by the cultural zeitgeist of their days; they see authority quite differently. Millennials see affirming feelings as an intrinsic responsibility of any truth teller, and if he can’t do this, then he probably should not speak. Boomers see Israel as central to both world events, bible teaching and eschatological timelines; it is a linchpin, not just an idea. Imagine some young guy telling them they are wrong about fringe beliefs they thought were central and have held for most of their lives.

But as the power of millennials is rising in the church and society, I want to talk about the reasons for their response some more.

Therapyism Overtook Our Culture

Millennials were the first Christian generation raised almost entirely after the therapeutic revolution had become the dominant framework for understanding human beings. I watched a recent movie with my family during the Holidays called Anaconda. It is a self-aware remake of an old 90’s movie. And it is the most explicit exploitation of millennial tropes and ideas I have ever seen, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as a result. Especially, when one of the filmmakers noted they should make sure that “intergenerational trauma” was woven into the story. The movie is explicitly seeking to make millennials laugh at themselves. And making them laugh about how many feel hurt by their parents landed in a particularly savage but clever way, because it is true that many millennials are obsessed with these ideas.

Historically, Christians tended to ask questions like, What is true? What is righteous? What is sinful? What is my duty? What has God commanded? How should I obey? These questions were answered in a way that created objective boundaries within which people functioned and could often flourish in society. Even when Christians failed to obey, those categories generally remained intact.

Therapeutic culture rearranges the hierarchy of questions and places feelings as supreme: Is it healthy? Is it harmful? Is it affirming? Is it validating? Is it emotionally safe? Does it damage self-worth? Notice the very significant shift. The centre of gravity has moved from moral categories to psychological categories. This does not mean therapeutic culture abolishes morality. It simply relocates morality.

Sin is redefined as harm.

Virtue is redefined as wellness.

Wisdom is redefined as self-awareness.

Salvation is redefined as healing.

The saint becomes the therapist.

The confessional becomes the counselling room.

The pastor increasingly becomes a life coach.

Boomers and older Gen X remember a time when this was not the predominant culture. You see this in Gen X movies like Lethal Weapon, where the therapist is played for laughs by the damaged but entertaining Martin Riggs. But Millennials were, as we noted above, forged in this culture.

By the time Millennials were growing up, every institution spoke the language of therapy: schools, television, movies, universities, HR Departments, and especially churches. Churches took on board psychology as if it were a key to unlocking the New Testament. The culture’s views on psychology had changed so much that while in the early Lethal Weapon movies, the police psychologist was played as a joke, by the last movie, the best police officers had degrees in psychology. These themes were all over our society, everywhere. It is remarkable that as many millennials resisted this as they did, because most did not.

A millennial could spend twenty years being taught a therapeutic anthropology, at a popular level of course, before ever reading serious theology, if they even ever did. As a result, many Christians do not merely believe therapeutic assumptions; they experience them as self-evident reality. For example, older Christians might hear, “Take up your cross” and think that sounds difficult. Many millennials hear, “That sounds psychologically dangerous.”

Those are not the same reaction, not at all. Even more relevant to our topic, when a millennial woman hears “submit to your husband” she often hears this as a dangerous position to put herself in that questions her self-worth. When a millennial man hears, “husbands must provide”, and thinks about the fact that it is hard, he will often think that it is no wonder that so many men are breaking down, “That is too hard, man, too hard.” Too hard to achieve, and too harshly spoken at the same time. That is a common millennial response.

Feelings have become the ultimate authority. Even in young men and women, from whom you would not expect it. Because they were enculturated in a society that made them think that way.

This is why when you say, “Men should provide”, millennials do not hear that. They hear you say that women are being limited. Likewise, they do not hear, “Men should lead the home” as an obligation; they hear, “Someone’s autonomy is being restricted.” Why? Because therapy culture places autonomy near the top of the moral hierarchy.

In fact, therapy culture can be defined as “autonomy culture”, because that is really what it is. The worst thing that can happen to a person is not sin, it is the loss of self-expression. The highest good becomes authenticity, not honouring your obligations. Therefore, any doctrine that introduces hierarchy, authority, obligation, sacrifice, submission, or duty immediately sounds suspicious. Not because millennials have carefully refuted the doctrine, but because the doctrine collides with their deepest-held assumptions about human flourishing. They hear at the same time both the limitation on their desires, and also the lack of validation of their feelings, and these are the two greatest sins of this generation.

They would see this as traumatic, and this is why they will discuss these issues in the language of trauma. Originally, trauma referred to genuinely severe experiences. Things like combat, abuse, violence, or catastrophe. Today, the concept is often expanded to include experiences that previous generations would have categorised differently. The practical effect is that disagreement increasingly gets interpreted through therapeutic categories.

A doctrine is no longer simply wrong; it is harmful. “Your teaching on women in the bible hurts women!” A sermon is no longer merely mistaken; it is damaging. “I am afraid of the effect on my family if you don’t affirm my strict interpretation of this passage.” A command is no longer difficult; it is traumatising. “You can’t tell me to obey my husband, what right do you have to do that?”

This creates a situation where theological disagreement feels like psychological violence. That is why some reactions seem wildly disproportionate. The person is not experiencing an intellectual debate; they believe they are experiencing actual harm. And I mean, they believe it. They really do believe that is what is happening to them.

And, what is worse, is that churches took this on board probably more than any other institution. It is important to note that millennials did not create this; boomers did. Millennials were forged in this changed outlook. Many churches slowly shifted from centring their teaching around repentance, holiness, obedience, and self-denial, toward things like healing, wholeness, recovery, or emotional health. None of those latter things is inherently bad, but they do become bad when they are made to become primary.

Theological disagreements are no longer debates over objective reality. There are situations in which emotional harm and damage can be done. They hamper someone’s healing, they delay their recovery, they have a negative effect on their emotional health. Therapy culture has neutered most of an entire generation, who now wince like vampires when a window is opened at noon, when they hear a long-held Christian belief that disagrees with their identity and affects their emotional state.

Underneath the surface of these discussions is often this deeper conflict between two rival anthropologies:

1. The biblical view is that man’s fundamental problem is sin and his fundamental need is reconciliation to God.

2. The therapeutic view that man’s fundamental problem is psychological injury and his fundamental need is healing of the self.

Once those two systems are distinguished, many otherwise puzzling reactions begin to make sense.

I think it is for this reason that millennials will be easily surpassed by upcoming generations. Firstly, boomers are holding power for so long that many millennials will never get the opportunity to wield it. But secondly, many of the younger generations can see how soft this has made millennial men and how aggressive it has made millennial women. They recognise the errors of the boomer and millennial generations and are reacting to them.

Just watch younger people mock millennial feelings-based writing in movies, or millennial social justice writing in video games. They despise the therapy generation in many ways. Though they will have their own floors, it is yet to be seen what they are - maybe their relentless rejection of the real world in favour of online spaces?

Would love to hear your thoughts on these issues.

As a cultural touch point, I think this is the theme song of the millennial generation:

One of the most persistent myths in the modern world is the idea of neutrality.

We’re told our governments can be neutral. That our institutions can be neutral. That our schools can be neutral. That our courts can be neutral. That our media organisations, bureaucracies, and entertainment can all function from a position of value-free objectivity. Nothing but the brute facts.

But neutrality is a myth, and not a thing in the world that cloaks itself in neutrality is the absence of a worldview with values, ideals, and beliefs.

Every institution is built on a foundation of assumptions about truth, human nature, morality, and authority. So, the question is not whether a thing is biased, but whether the assumptions behind that thing are hidden or acknowledged.

When any society declares its public institutions are “neutral,” as many in the Western world now do, what it often means in practice is that a particular worldview has been so thoroughly normalised that it no longer appears ideological at all.

In other words, it becomes the air people breathe. It is invisible, but it is still everywhere, and in everything. And then anything that challenges it is immediately perceived as an assault on neutrality, which in turn is immediately labelled “biased.”

This is how the modern myth of neutrality functions. It’s not a genuine absence of religion and ideological conviction, but rather, the dominance of one set of convictions that refuses to admit its own existence.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the modern education system.

Government schools are often described as neutral spaces where children are simply taught “critical thinking,” free of ideological indoctrination and religious assumptions. But critical thinking does not and cannot exist in a vacuum. It always operates within a framework of assumptions about what counts as knowledge, what counts as evidence, and what counts as acceptable reasoning.

As such, students are not simply learning brute facts about the universe. They’re being formed into a way of viewing the world. They’re being given a worldview—that is, glasses through which all of life is to be viewed and interpreted.

The same is true of the media, politics, law, and every other institution and organisation that claims to operate free of ideological input.

Now, you might think it’s all just semantics. But there’s more at stake here than just a squabble about appropriate words and labels. This is because the claim to neutrality has become a form of authority in itself. It doesn’t merely describe reality; it defines the boundaries and limits of acceptable reality.

To question the dominant assumptions is not simply to disagree with the prevailing narrative. It is to be marked as biased, extreme, or even dangerous.

In this sense, the myth of neutrality operates as an ideological shield, assumed to be impartial, unbiased, and therefore, the fairest of all options amongst a world of competing ideologies.

Thus, by its amorphous and elusive definition, “neutrality” effectively transcends any and all criticism, as every critique can be dismissed as fundamentally biased.

But no society can maintain this illusion indefinitely. Sooner or later, the blind assumptions of the “neutral” institutions are revealed—in what they teach, what they punish, and what they celebrate.

And so, the question is not whether there is a bias, but what that bias is. It’s not whether a worldview will shape public life, but which worldview is being assumed. And this is exactly why the myth of neutrality has been so powerful. It persuades people to stop asking that question.

But every society must decide what it considers true, what it considers good, and what it is willing to defend, protect, and preserve.

There is no neutral ground on which to avoid that question. Only the false appearance of it.

One Nation’s “Fire the Liar” fundraiser is close to reaching $3.5 million within 48 hours.

Although the donations have been described by 2GB as “Anti-Albo,” they are more broadly a vote against the arrogance of the Australian Labor Party.

Put simply, One Nation handed Labor their “fight the far right” clown hat back.

As I explained in the Daily Declaration on Friday, One Nation’s campaign was a quick counter-punch to Labor’s “Stop One Nation” far-right fearmongering.

What the Marxian Woke Labor Party seemed to assume would be a straightforward political win became a public relations embarrassment.

In damage control, Labor even rolled out Rudd-Gillard treasurer Wayne Swan to downplay evidence of the seismic socio-political culture shift.

Swan danced around the One Nation fundraising phenomenon by dishing out some classic DARVO to try and save face.

Visibly rattled by the massive response to “Fire the Liar”, Swan smeared One Nation as the “billionaires’ party.”

He told the Today show’s Sarah Abo, “they’re pretending they’re run on small donations, yet they’re running on money from Gina Rienheart, among others at the top end of town.”

Showing the desperation, Swan went as far as accusing One Nation of “going to [Donald Trump] Mar-a-Lago to raise funds.”

This runs parallel with Anthony Albanese’s denials.

When asked by reporters about One Nation, the career politician PM implied that Pauline Hanson was making it all up.

In reply, One Nation ran an independent audit. The result vindicated Hanson by exposing yet more of Labor’s lies.

These lies span two elections and include 13 broken pledges that have significantly weakened the country, alongside undermining Team Albanese’s delivery rate.

For example:

1. After declaring a commitment to the LNP’s stage 3 tax cuts, Albo ditched them.

2. Labor walked away from a national reduction of $275 off power bills per household. This is despite Albo promising on 90-plus occasions that a vote for Labor was a vote for cheaper energy.

3. Albo also promised that “all you need is a Medicare card, not a credit card,” to see a doctor. Yet, out-of-pocket doctor bills increased, while bulk billing decreased.

4. Labor denied knowing about how corrupt militant unions such as the CFMEU were, even though Albo and the upper echelon had been warned about the organisations’ behaviour since 2014 (see here).

5. Budget 2026 backflips on promises not to touch negative gearing and capital gains taxation. Albanese repeatedly told reporters in 2025 that Labor had no intention of tampering with the system.

6. The same applies to superannuation. Labor promised no new taxes, then wacked a 30% tax on balances over $3 million.

7. Cost of living salvation deflated by government-induced inflation. Families are worse off under Labor, contradicting Albo’s core election promises.

8. By boosting collective bargaining under the “Secure Jobs, Better Pay Act 2022,” the Albanese government reneged on a commitment to protect the employee/employer relationship.

9. Labor abandoned protections for whistleblowers and Albanese’s promise to establish better government transparency. Illustrating this backflip is the failed push to make access to Freedom of Information harder.

10. 10. Albo reintroduced the Cashless Debit Card system (albeit in a different form) after repeatedly virtue-signalling during the election about ending the program’s “paternalism.” The system was reintroduced following protests about rising crime in vulnerable communities.

11. 11. Labour talked big about creating an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) then quietly scuttled the plan. This was thanks to pressure from within. Specifically, Labor’s Western Australian Premier, Roger Cook. He had concerns about potential hits to government revenue from mining.

12. 12. Housing and immigration made the list because it is one of the most blatant examples of Labor’s lies. Forgoing yet another nation-saving election commitment, Labor has neither reduced immigration nor increased housing availability. This includes a massive decrease in housing affordability.

13. 13. Probably the second most alarming is Labor’s flip-flopping over Australia’s national defence. Gaps exist in operational readiness and capability thanks to funding cuts that Team Albo said Labor would never make.

This isn’t just a trickle of inconsistency for the sake of national security; it’s a flood of say one thing, do another—such as the Royal Commission into the COVID-19 response.

Labor lied about ensuring accountability for “two weeks to flatten the curve”, turning into totalitarianism, allegedly because it would indict Labor premiers.

Albo reneged on a 2022 commitment to “a royal commission or some form of inquiry.”

While a report was produced in 2023, it was toothless and largely tokenistic.

Circa criticism from the Human Rights Commission, the report failed to put Labor premiers at the time under the spotlight.

One Nation’s phenomenal political success isn’t so much a result of political genius, as it is tangible proof Australians have had enough.

Hanson: One. Albo: none.

“If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” 1 John 1:6.

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” Ephesians 5:11.

In October 2024, a British court convicted a man of praying silently. Not out loud. In his head. Three minutes of it, on a public street, standing behind a tree with his back to an abortion clinic, thinking about the son he’d lost to abortion twenty-two years earlier.

The police questioned him about the nature of his prayers. The local council — then being warned it was heading for bankruptcy — spent more than £90,000 of public money to secure the conviction. They made him pay another £9,000 in costs.

It was the first conviction for silent prayer in British history.

Here’s the thing you need to understand before anything else: that’s not the worst case. It’s one of the mild ones. I’m starting with the mild ones on purpose, because the strength of the pattern isn’t in the outrages — it’s in how ordinary the targets are.

Four people who broke no reasonable rule

A charity worker in Birmingham, December 2022. She’d spent twenty years volunteering with women in crisis pregnancies. Police arrested her on a public street after she said she “might” be silently praying. Acquitted February 2023. Arrested *again* in March. Paid £13,000 in compensation by West Midlands Police in August 2024. Charged a third time in December 2025 under new buffer-zone law. For standing on a footpath, possibly thinking.

Jordan Peterson, August 2023. Ontario’s Divisional Court ruled that the College of Psychologists could order him into mandatory social-media re-education — at his own expense — or lose his licence. The trigger was tweets about contested political topics. The Court of Appeal refused to hear it. The Supreme Court of Canada refused the final appeal.

Dr My Le Trinh, a Sydney GP of twenty-seven years with not one prior complaint. Suspended in September 2021 on the basis of an anonymous “John Smith” complaint whose email bounced, whose phone was disconnected, whose address was blank — and which the regulators wouldn’t confirm was real. The evidence attached was a prescription she’d left at her local pharmacy, which the pharmacy says was collected directly by the regulator’s own agents. “John Smith” had no lawful way to get that document. Which means the complainant was inside the regulator. The case went ahead anyway.

None of these people said or did anything a reasonable person would call threatening, harassing, violent, or dangerous. None had any criminal history. And every power used against them — the protection orders, the licensing boards, the buffer-zone laws — was sold to the public on a promise. The promise was that these powers would be aimed at genuine threats. Real harm. Public order.

The architecture was sold as protection against serious harm. It is being used against silent prayer, social-media posts, and people expressing religious belief on a street corner. The gap between what it was sold as and what it actually does — that’s the thing to be explained.

It’s not four cases. It’s the whole machine.

If it were four cases, you could call it bad luck. It isn’t four cases.

Australia’s Section 18C bans speech that “offends” or “insults” on racial grounds. Thirty years on, its biggest scalps are a conservative columnist (Andrew Bolt), some university students who objected to being told to leave a computer lab because of their race, and a cartoonist (Bill Leak) for a drawing about parental responsibility. It has never been turned on an academic department hostile to Anglo students, Islamic extremists, or on any left-wing publication’s editorial line.

Britain’s Public Order Act and Communications Act now generate around thirty arrests a day for things people said — roughly twelve thousand a year, up from 7,734 in 2019. A parallel system of “non-crime hate incidents” has logged over 133,000 citizens in police files since 2014, including children too young to be charged with anything. These same laws have not come down with equal weight on marchers openly chanting for the death of Jews, or clerics preaching execution for leaving Islam, or academics calling to dismantle “whiteness.”

Canada’s old Section 13 tribunal, before it was repealed in 2013, became an instrument used almost entirely against right-wing speech — with a near-perfect conviction rate.

Australia’s ABC operates under a legal charter requiring impartiality. Review after review has found systemic editorial drift on climate, immigration, Indigenous policy, Israel-Palestine. The charter isn’t enforced. It’s interpreted — by an institution staffed almost entirely from one side.

And it keeps going: charity commissions, registration boards, university discipline panels, platform moderation, immigration discretion, the curriculum authority in every English-speaking country. Same direction, every time.

Two things are happening at once

Most people who notice this reach for one of two explanations. Either “they’re operating in bad faith, and we’re playing fair” — the moral story. Or “vague rules always get captured by whoever staffs the enforcement” — the structural story. Both have something to them. Neither, on its own, is enough.

What’s actually happening is two separate asymmetries running at the same time, and feeding each other.

The first is about motivation, and you can see it just by reading the news. One coalition treats getting and using institutional power as the whole point. The other — for reasons of temperament, internal disagreement, fear of the press, or genuine principle — mostly doesn’t. So even when conservatives hold the offices, they don’t drive them the way their opponents do.

The second runs underneath, and it’s the one almost nobody talks about. Vague rules have to be interpreted. Interpretation needs interpreters. And the people who fill those interpretive jobs — the tribunal members, the ombudsmen, the commissioners, the senior officials — come out of credentialing pipelines that have leaned one way for two generations, into an information world that leans the same way across journalism, the universities, the professional bodies, and the NGOs. So even the sincere ones, the genuinely fair-minded ones, produce one-directional results. Their whole sense of what counts as fair, neutral, harmful, or legitimate was shaped by an environment that filtered out one set of starting assumptions before they ever sat down to decide.

These two don’t pull against each other. They compound. The motivational gap means nobody pushes back. The structural gap means the baseline output is already tilted before anyone would push. Fix one and leave the other, and the machine keeps producing exactly what it produces now.

The rule book looks neutral. The referees are not.

That’s the whole problem in one line, and it’s why writing another column about hypocrisy changes nothing. Hypocrisy isn’t the mechanism. Structure is.

So the real question isn’t “why are they so brazen?” It’s two questions, and they have different answers. Why does one side never use the power it holds? And why does the machine tilt even when the person operating it is honest?

Part 2 takes the first one: why conservatives, handed the same levers, keep declining to pull them — and why the rare moments they do (Florida under DeSantis, Washington under Trump) get treated as the end of democracy rather than as someone finally playing by the established rules.

This is Part 1 of a four-part series adapted from the Prothean Institute brief “Nothing Left to Conserve.”