'New Year's Eve Rewind 2024'

Highlights from my published essays this year

January

In January, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced after their annual summit that the Doomsday Clock — “a global alarm clock” — rests at ninety-seconds to midnight.

I reflected upon our need for catastrophe in The Critic Magazine, and concluded that, sometimes, we dwell upon the frailty of tomorrow at the expense of establishing eternity.

Photo by Westend61/Getty

“For some time, humanity has been trying to reckon with their mortality without the assistance of God — without a loving and steadfast father to promise them tomorrow. The Boomer generation were perhaps the first group of children to do this in some serious manner. Their collective existential distress — at having discovered themselves to be fatherless — is our own collective and existential distress. And in the attempt to guarantee tomorrow for ourselves, to parent ourselves —for the role of the parent is to secure tomorrow — humankind has forgotten the cultivation of eternity.

When tomorrow is promised, one need only focus on today. Doomsday is not a day of the week. Doomsday is every day that is lived for the expediency of tomorrow and not for the glorification of forever.”

February

Apparently, the lofty thoughts of January knocked me out I went at the opera instead… 🎭

March

Compensating for a lack of published essays in February, I gave a sneak peek into the lives of Cambridge students and professors who are forced to gather in underground societies in order to study and discuss the literature of dead white men. The essay feature in print in The Critic Magazine.

“I had heard rumours of Cambridge’s secret societies — of Sunday morning symposiums devoted to sex and scrambled eggs — each tale too outrageous to be true. But it is not the promise of illicit affairs driving students and academics underground. It is a love of C.S. Lewis.”

I was also privileged to give a speech at Christ’s College, Cambridge where I testified to the unrecognised significance of free speech to the working class students studying at august institutions.

“…for someone who had no prospects and thought they had one in Cambridge or Oxford, only to find out that it is not quite the place they thought it was – a castle built in testament to free speech and bold exploration – matters, not just to me, but to any person who does not have much upward mobility.”

The full transcript of my speech can be read on this Substack.

April

In April, my writing made a debut in The European Conservative. I challenged the statement that being transgender is a ‘hardware’ issue in an essay entitled, ‘The problem of detransitioners’. Is one “born this way” or has the wrong sexed brain been put in the wrong sexed body? Perhaps, it is neither.

”If being trans is a software issue, there are fewer grounds for society adapting its language, changing its rules of sport and social interaction, and demolishing all its public toilets in order to build “gender neutral” ones. Some may experience being trans in the mind, but this does not have any bearing upon the body besides it feeling icky to the wearer […] If being trans is a software issue, it would not carry much more social significance than dying your hair blue or having a tricky liver. But, of course, that is not equity. That is mere filthy equality. And, as we all know, some people know themselves to be more equal than others.”

May

Following Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a snap General Election, I ask why would any ambitious politician want to be Prime Minister of a country when he can be CEO of the world.

With the emergence of world-governing bodies like the World Health Organisation, supranational banks like Goldman Sachs, and trillion-dollar businesses like Meta, the nation state is being commodified in order to remain competitive in the global market.

But at what cost?

“For a Sunak or Starmer, his country is his portfolio, and his tenure over a nation offers a sneak peek into the policies of the man that would be not just “regional manager” of the global corporation but CEO.

Such an individual risks instrumentalising his country to his own careerist ambition. With his country, he alludes to what advantages — what resources, information, manual labour, infantry — he would be willing to leverage towards the prosperity of the conglomerate brand. He stakes what “investments” he is willing to make towards the global agenda of each world governing body, bank, business, council, or forum upon which he has set his sights. In short, he indicates which parts of his nation state he would be willing to sacrifice to the superstate for his own advancement.”

June

‘Save yourselves’

“It seems to me that our assertion that sex can ever be inconsequential is the cradle of our problem, one we have attempted to surmount by deconsecrating childhood, rather than the re-sanctifying adulthood. Rather than admit to our personal sense of violation and loss, of being spoiled or unfaithful, our ambition has been turned towards deconstructing the virtues of abstinence, innocence, loyalty and chastity, and turning them into vices.”

Photo by Iuliia Bondar

But who does it suit — to underplay the significance of sex? My argument is everyone. It suits the girl who made a drunken error and it suits the boy denying his heartbreak. It suits the man who does not wish to raise the children he has fathered. It suits the wife who no longer feels attracted to her husband. Whether perpetrator or victim, it suits each and every one of us to divest sex of its intimacy and emotional significance.

July

July played host to perhaps the most lacklustre General Election the United Kingdom has ever seen. The Labour Party’s ‘landslide majority’ turned out to be the lowest vote share of any victorious party in British parliamentary history, but the newly emerged Reform party surpassed the expectations even its supporters as they took five seats in the house and hoovered up the third largest vote share in the country, beating the mainstream runners-up, the Liberal Democrats.

I took to the national stage to explain why I had been among the millions who voted for Reform.

“Reform is a vote for not surrendering sovereignty to global bureaucratic superstructures. I do not dream of a cashless society. I want no part of an economic forum or a European union; I am disinterested in seeing my marriage prospects being sent to die in foreign wars. I vote Reform not to see them in charge today but tomorrow.

August

In August came the aftermath of the Southport Massacre. The British people were told that a “Welsh, Christian, choir boy” had stabbed three young girls to death and mutilated eight more during a knife rampage at a Taylor Swift summer dance class.

This proved to be a lie.

Peter Powell / AFP

Whilst the government and the mainstream media turned against these protests, with Britain’s own prime minster branding them ‘far-right’, I attempted to give voice to the frustration of father and mothers up and down the nation.

The litany of “thoughts and prayers” trickling down from those in authority is beginning to feel tired: the growing public feeling is that the phrase has become miserably insufficient in the face of our problems.

The outrage following the murder of these three girls — and the attempted murder of eight more — has been seen most amongst the working classes. This has proven to obvious to some and a complete, racist mystery to others.

September

'Femina Simulacra'

When did vulgar simulations of the female come to be valued above the female herself?

“We are told over and over again that ‘transwomen are women.’ They are the sex they say they are because the body is immaterial to a person’s ‘felt sense’ of gender. He thinks, therefore she is. Thus, access to gender transition hormones and surgery is a human right and life-saving medical treatment … but also immaterial to a person’s legal status as ‘trans.’ Girls need their breasts amputated by the tax-payer (so that they might live their authentic lives), but should a man be required to become eunuch—or at least shave—before he strips naked in front of seven-year-old girls? That is transphobia!

Photo by Rach Teo on Unsplash

We are also told implicitly not to notice that the majority of females identifying as trans are distressed teenage girls, while the majority of males identifying as trans are middle-aged men with sexual fantasies. And we are certainly not meant to ask whether the former has anything whatsoever to do the latter.”

But what is a phrase one never hears?
Transmen are real men.

October

A halloween special for The Critic Magazine I posit The Rocky Horror Picture Show has always against the sexual revolution but we were enjoying ourselves too much to notice.

“The catchy tunes and spectacle provide an excellent cloak for the sinister goings-on. The singing and dancing encourage complicity in disturbing behaviour and the air of frivolity sweetens actions that would otherwise be repulsive by the witness. Which is to say, in the glow of an “orgasmic rush” all manner of sins can be forgotten, if not forgiven.”

Whilst The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains a public lament for those who find themselves embedded in a web of attraction that exceeds the bounds of heterosexual marriage – including for those trapped in a loveless marriage – it does not advocate for sexual liberation. Rather, it warns against it…

November

As the Israel-Gaza conflict continues to intensify, what is the impact on Europe?

The general air of complacency seen from the attacks against Jews is our clearest indication that Europe is breaking with its Enlightenment roots, and its philosophical tradition of individualism…

“Europe has become unique in the world in its ability to look upon a person and see them as an individual distinct from their social and ethnic group. Whilst their skin colour, accent, facial features, dress, or religion might have been remarked upon as an interesting feature, the emphasis was on the soul of the human being who performed these cultural rituals rather than the culture from which they originated.”

In understanding the West’s failing relationship with individualism, one must look to the West itself — not only in terms of its suicidal immigration policy, but the reasons behind its immigration policy. One must examine the elites love affair with Critic Theory and identity politics.

December

I hit a personal milestone this year when I made my debut appearance on my favour podcast, The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters.

In episode #1052, Carl Benjamin, Josh Ferme, and I delve into some of the most pressing topics of our time, including mass immigration, the political persecution of the right-wing working class, and the widening gulf between men and women.

What is in store for 2025?

Throughout January and into the spring I will be continue to report on Southport, the cover-up, and the trial of Axel Rudakubana.

Come the summer I hope to have started work on my first book documenting my time at the University of Cambridge and my transition from woke activist to conservative reactionary.

For the rest of the year, WHO KNOWS! But I am excited to have you with me along for the ride.

I have been overwhelmed by the support my work have received this year — if it were not for the support and encouragement of my friends, colleagues, followers and subscribers, I’d be working a lot more hours in my ordinary job than I presently do. Instead, I get to do what I love — write and write. And what a gift that is…

I wish each and every one of you the very best for the year ahead.

To health, wealth, and the sublime 🍾🥂

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