Beloved/loathed English “toff” politician Jacob Rees-Mogg comes across as a relic of a bygone age. Those of us who believe in standards and civilisation enjoy this. I like his charm, his verbal fluidity and his beautiful RP diction as much as the next lower-middle-class snob. However, we have to admit that all of this is merely ornamental if unaccompanied - as it always is in today’s conservatives - by an understanding of how Britain actually is today, as well as the resolve to gain such understanding even if it means relinquishing sacrosanct beliefs imposed on us by the Left and, indeed, by our recent ancestors.

On the 21st of September, Rees-Mogg put out a video announcing that there may be a war coming and if so, some us will have to die to defend Ukraine and Britain. He drew an equivalency with the First and Second World Wars, unfortunate because both of those wars, just like a hypothetical war against Russia, were pointless and unnecessary and led to massive wasted potential and a long-term degradation of the British gene pool.

He also said that if we are not prepared to fight such wars, our country will be taken over by another country “one way or another”. In saying this he overlooked the fact that Britain is already being taken over by other countries, both from within (mass immigration of Third World people) and from without (American hegemony and EU/UN/globalist dictats).

He then drew a comparison with the fate of ancient Rome, whose security was entrusted to foreign mercenaries who eventually decided to take over the Empire. Again, he failed to link this with the afore-mentioned internal threat of Third World immigrants - because he himself defends mass immigration and argues that there are no “native” Brits.

Furthermore, he called for a return of “the stiff upper lip” once associated with the British wherever they faced adversity or hardship. But you can’t expect the same behaviour of the British when, after the mass immigration he defends, they are no longer the same people.

He also spoke fondly of a society in which there is a shared (but not collective!) sense of purpose and cohesion - but failed to acknowledge that mass immigration pulverises these things, and already has done in Britain.

Finally, he advocated a revived sense of “duty” to country. Unfortunately, people exactly like Rees-Mogg have spent the last eighty years smugly telling the British that they don’t actually have a country, because anyone can become British and, by God, people like Rees-Mogg will make sure that vast numbers of Third Worlders do “become British”, and will calmly imprison and punish any insolent natives who complain about it.

This was demonstrated the very next day when he put out a video declaring that “the English are a mongrel people, not an Aryan master race”.

Notice that he holds an (ostensibly) right-wing position (patriotism and duty) while effortlessly integrating hard-left positions (race isn’t real, England is a nation of immigrants, anyone can become English, we’re all mixed). Rees-Mogg can do this effortlessly because he simply does not think. When it comes to issues of people, culture, race, etc. he lets the Left do his thinking for him and accepts whatever - whatever - they come up with.

Most ironic, then, that Rees-Mogg then put out a video claiming that “the Left is void of good ideas, whilst the Right is full of them”. The blindness to his own predicament, his intellectual paucity, is staggering, especially when he evinces a calm certainty that he is more cognisant than the Left, and that he is in control.

It is time to assert aggressively that conservatism is not just useless but actively detrimental. It was vaguely acceptable - if staid - in the early 20th Century. In the early 21st it is suicidal. The conservative is the retard on a sinking ship who continually tries to persuade the struggling crew that drowning is actually good for you, because he was once told so by his enemy.

Let us return to Rees-Mogg’s actual worldview, combining the first two videos: we are a mongrel people, we don’t really exist, but we have to defend this country even though it’s not ours, and also defend another country that definitely isn’t ours even while celebrating that both countries are flooded with non-natives.

This is what conservatism has become, and it is incoherent, unworkable and doomed - fatally self-contradicting. It’s like a chromosomal error at conception: the resulting creature can only be an abomination and won’t survive long, at least not without massive external help. Conservatism has the massive external help of dull people (there are many of them) and big funding. Without that, it would be laughed out of the room by any thinking people.

And that is exactly what does happen when conservatism enters a debate chamber today. It becomes clear that conservatives understand almost nothing. They understand neither their opponents on the Left nor their “rivals” further along the Right, and certainly not their replacements from the Third World.

The conservative’s famous boast is that he understands economics - “unlike those crazy socialists”. I’m not even convinced he understands economics. After all, it was a conservative government that implemented the covid lockdown which decimated the British economy for no good reason. It was a conservative government that brought us the Boriswave which will wreak untold damage on our economy. It was a conservative government that destroyed home-grown industries in pursuit of short-term profit.

It’s almost like economics is a toy that the Left have given to conservatives. “Okay, you’re going to lose everything else, but don’t worry, you can bore everyone to death talking about economics, you laughable rube.”

The insight into conservative impotence is actually worse for us nationalists than it is for the Left. The Left are under the impression, the fervent belief, that conservatives are committed to various things - sexism, racism, tradition, nation, Christianity, stringent standards, etc... But we nationalists, observing conservatives from the Right, know they are not committed to a damned thing. They have no principles, no enchantment, no balls, no curiosity, no imagination. All they have is a ruthless instinct for self-preservation, even at the expense of their country.

Is it any wonder the West has declined when the people tasked with protecting it were conservatives?

I despise them and consider them nothing but a tedious roadblock to progress.

And by “progress” I don’t mean tearing down Chesterton’s fence, but even admitting that there ever was a fence there in the first place.

This guide is a difficult one to write because there are simply so many stories to survey, and because the show has multiple eras which are very distinct - almost different TV shows altogether. (Broadly, I would say the eras are 1963-69, 1970-81, 1982-87, and 1988-89.)

The revival (2005 onwards) is a separate matter. Although I did learn a lot of factual details about it in the course of writing The Seeds of Gay Doom, I haven’t actually watched a great deal - maybe 40 stories out of the 150+. Some of them are objectively good but it is just not my kind of thing, so this guide will cover only the “classic” series.

I am much more familiar with that, from 1970 onwards. I will recommend those stories which are my personal favourites, those I think are “necessary”, “must-watch”, etc. and some I think are unusual enough to deserve attention for that alone.

Something you will notice is that I talk about the incidental music almost as much as the stories themselves. I find Doctor Who’s music, across the various eras, very stimulating and enjoyable in its own right. (This indicates how big a part it must play in the show itself.)

The First Doctor was played by William Hartnell. This was Doctor Who at its very beginnings, in 1963, so it is radically different not only from the modern 2005 show but even from the Pertwee era seven years later, by which time TV production had advanced in leaps and bounds.

I must confess to being barely acquainted with Hartnell’s era, having watched only four or five stories in total. It is too slow-moving for my tastes. However, I can certainly recommend one episode…

An Unearthly Child

This is the very first episode. Though it is technically the first of a four-part story, it is really a “standalone” episode to set up the programme. The introduction of now-iconic elements is beautifully done. Everything at this stage seems darker and more mysterious than it will later be. The Doctor is secretive, unfriendly and sinister. The TARDIS is scary and doesn’t seem reliable, its first “flight” being a genuinely unnerving experience.

The atmosphere is terrific throughout. The whole thing is in grainy black & white reminiscent of a 1930s horror film. It is excellent, in my opinion. Had the show continued in this vein it would probably have been much shorter-lived but less lightweight. I guess things are always better while they still have their mystery.

The Second Doctor was played by Patrick Troughton. He was perhaps the most talented - as an actor - of the men who played the role in the classic era. His turn on the character is much more playful and irreverent than Hartnell’s. I am again very unfamiliar with the era, so am somewhat at a loss for recommendations.

The Three Doctors

This is a cheat since this story is actually in the Third Doctor’s era, but I think the Second really dominates proceedings so it feels appropriate to cite this story as one of his. You get a strong sense of how different he is from the Third, whom Troughton effortlessly upstages. And it’s a good story.

The Third Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee, then known mostly for comedy work. During most of this era the Doctor is confined to Earth, working as “scientific advisor” to UNIT led by the Brigadier, and battling his Timelord nemesis the Master. A lot of the stories are 6 or 7-parters, formats that work very well; there is more world-building than in the 4-parters, which start to seem slightly lacking by comparison.

The third was perhaps the least “alien” incarnation of the Doctor. You can easily imagine him being a heroic leader in the Empire or a maverick figure in British government or business, up to about 1970 (after which such mavericks were tamed or filtered out by bureaucracy). Aristocratic but still practical and “a man of action”, he is constantly innovating and questioning, and being frustrated by the lack of imagination in the lesser men around him. But he is very much a man, not an alien. That choice was probably dictated by Pertwee’s own personality, and it would be reversed when his successor arrived.

Nevertheless, this era was a peak for Doctor Who. The storytelling is very competent, the production style has real charm and the acting (RP galore!) is consistent and endearing. All of this means the stories bear rewatching, remaining enjoyable time after time.

In terms of choice, you can hardly go wrong with this era. The only bad stories are Carnival of Monsters and The Mutants, with the rest being uniformly great fun. Nevertheless, here are some highlights:

Inferno

Great tension and fear in this intense 7-parter which manages to retain momentum throughout. It is genuinely terrifying because it is executed with total seriousness and earnestness, without any of the irony that so taints contemporary drama.

The Mind of Evil

An unnerving 6-parter about a sadistic machine. Good character moments and a plot complex enough to fill the duration. There is lovely location footage of early ‘70s London in the autumn, and radiophonic bliss with the creamy analogue sound effects. Dudley Simpson’s score is a classic one (though in Part 1 it is at times slightly incongruous with the action on-screen). His talent for giving each story a unique tone is unrivalled. Here the machine gets a leitmotif that perfectly evokes malice and driving, predacious cruelty. (Simpson reworked some of the cues from this score into a 7” B-side.)

The Silurians

Regarded as one of Pertwee’s best outings, this is a fast-moving 7-parter that never meanders. There are good characters, including an electric performance by Peter Miles and a warm showing by Fulton Mackay. The writer Malcolm Hulke handles the conflict between the two sides (human and Silurian) well, with believable dynamics and twists as the events unfold. The rural and the urban are both well-conveyed, from a Derbyshire farmyard to Marylebone Station in London (although even that, fifty years on, seems quaint). The score by Carey Blyton takes some getting used to but surprisingly you do get used to it, and it works well.

The Ambassadors of Death

Another 7-parter, this one could probably be shorter but it succeeds in building tension and mystery, with a few bits of action thrown in as well. There’s a nice set for General Carrington’s hideout/laboratory, and good turns by various actors. I like that, at the end of it all, the General isn’t really a villain, but a good man trying to do his duty. Also notable is the innovative score by Dudley Simpson, again showing his talent for creating distinct leitmotifs for particular story elements - for example, his unlikely theme for the “ambassadors” themselves which gives the story a strange dreamy feel. (This is a choice that would never be made today, but works beautifully.)

The Sea Devils

A sequel to The Silurians and written by the same man, this sees the Doctor once again trying to avert war between humans and an advanced prehistoric race, but this time thwarted by the Master. It is less “homely” than The Silurians but has a personality of its own, especially with all the nautical material. I love the sets for the abandoned sea fort and was hoping for a “base under siege” caper in there (which, to be fair, does happen briefly).

One can’t discuss this story without mentioning that it has undoubtedly the craziest incidental score in the show’s history, by Malcolm Clarke. Experimental and sometimes incongruous with the action on-screen, it is extremely unorthodox but oddly works, and definitely gives the story a memorable flavour. Here is a medley of its more musical sections.

The Time Warrior

Written by series stalwart Robert Holmes, this swashbuckling adventure set in the 13th Century is terrific storytelling, full of excitement, humour and atmosphere. As well as nice music by Dudley Simpson, I enjoy the sense of medieval England - the muscular phrases, the cosy castle sets, the meat on wooden tables, and the red wine sloshing around.

This probably should have been a 6-parter, the characters are just so engaging. I love the robber baron Irongron, played with absurd arrogance and bravado by David Daker. His interplay with the alien Linx is so much fun, I could imagine a spin-off series with the two of them. Even a series just about Irongron - maybe showing how he took the castle in the first place - would have been good, so enjoyable is Daker’s performance.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs

Because of the title, I wasn’t in a rush to watch this story. It ended up being the last Pertwee story I got around to. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be very good! This was another Malcolm Hulke 6-parter, and it never runs out of steam. Of course the dinosaur effects are bad - as bad as you would expect of a low-budget British TV production of 1974 - but the story is complex and full of surprises, the tone nicely maintained throughout, and it leaves you with some genuine moral questions. Also there are cute “London Underground” sets.

Death to the Daleks

This story gets a drubbing from fans but I like it - perhaps biased because I had it on VHS at the age of six. The early scenes with Sarah in the TARDIS are scary, as are the murderous “roots” and the tribal chanting of the Exxilons in their temple. The ancient yet highly-advanced city is an interesting concept nicely realised. Scottish actor Duncan Lamont is good as a disgruntled astronaut - it’s amusing to hear his Glaswegian tones berating the Exxilon workers for being “idle”. Carey Blyton’s incidental score, which again fans tend to hate, I think works well most of the time, and at certain points is very effective indeed.

Planet of the Spiders

This story shares the concern about cults that seems to have pervaded the early ‘70s. (A bunch of misfits sitting in a dark room doing some ritual… I’ve seen it in quite a few TV dramas from this era.) Great atmosphere and tension on Earth, though things are less successful on Metebelis 3. The critique of female power-seeking is interesting - definitely couldn’t be done nowadays. The villain Lupton is well-written and played by John Dearth - very dark and sinister. By contrast, the arc of the character Tommy is lovely to watch.

The Fourth Doctor was played by Tom Baker, a theatrical actor with a very eccentric presence, but capable of great gravitas. His version of the character seems like a bohemian, upper-middle-class explorer or inveterate traveller - a man eager to keep moving, but always intrigued by what he finds, yet always happy to say goodbye, yet always concerned for right and justice. He is generally regarded as “the best Doctor”.

The Ark in Space

Only Baker’s second story but his first “classic”. From the expert plotting, the iconic set design, Simpson’s haunting score and the array of well-chosen actors, this story deserves its status. It sees humanity at a bottleneck juncture in its history, its entire future hanging in the balance and depending on the heroism of a tiny number of people. The tension is very real: humanity, refined to a selected elite of survivors, lies helpless in cryostasis - completely vulnerable to fate, to accident, to sabotage, to predation. A legendary speech about homo sapiens by the Doctor lays out the stakes in Part 1.

Less remarked upon is that this story features one of the most incredible voices I have ever heard: that of the High Minister, played by Gladys Spencer. “Heightened RP” has rarely been so heightened! All actresses should be trained to speak this way. Just beautiful. The scenes where her majestic voice intones over grim tragedy are among the best in the show’s history.

Genesis of the Daleks

Often regarded as the very best story from the classic run, this sees the Doctor intervening in history to try to prevent the daleks being created. Given this, we see how and why they were created, a genesis that is very interesting and believable yet probably isn’t what you would have guessed.

It takes place on the planet Skaro, ravaged after centuries of nuclear war between two peoples (Kaleds and Thals). There is a gritty, somewhat brutal tone as we see what life in such conditions would be like.

Incidentally, this story is the one that confirmed the daleks “are Nazis”, not Communists. The Third Reich references can be very heavy-handed:

We are also introduced to the character of Davros. This original appearance (performed uniquely by Michael Wisher) cemented him as an iconic villain. Crippled and disfigured by some condition or accident that is not described, he is egomaniacal, ingenious and very ambitious. He is leading an elite of scientists in “the bunker” but must answer to the Kaled government. The dalek is his “solution” for that government, in both senses. Really, the story is as much the genesis of Davros (as we will later know him) since by the end of it he has completely shed the obstacles to his destiny and created the means by which he will eventually leave Skaro and terrorise the cosmos.

His machinations largely drive the plot in which the Doctor becomes a mere passenger reacting to events hopelessly. We see gradual descent to an inevitable conclusion. Along the way are multiple chances for the genesis to be averted… but fate gets in the way. It even seems likely that the Doctor’s intervention hastens the events.

A 6-parter, this story could have been shorter, but I’m glad it wasn’t. In fact, I’d have appreciated it being considerably longer and showing more of the two political worlds outside the bunker (especially the Kaled government). Though grim, it is enjoyable from start to finish and I think the scope could have sustained a full-season story. (That’s probably how it would be done now in the age of streaming.)

On the technical side, Davros’s voice modulation is the best it has ever been. There is good set design, especially for the bunker and the Thal rocket silo. And there is a memorable score by Dudley Simpson, too.

The Brain of Morbius

I personally think this story fails to live up to its potential but it is undeniably good and always gets cited among the show’s best. Epitomising the “sci-fi gothic” feel that this era’s producer was aiming for, the story riffs on Frankenstein, an allusion reinforced by the set design.

In the age of nanotechnology it is hard to imagine a scientist in the distant future needing to transplant a head or assemble a body from foreign pieces, but even in 1976 the handling of all this was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Philip Madoc plays the vain scientist Solon with relish, even while burdened with a hilarious hairstyle. His affected nonchalance when explaining why he abandoned the scientific mainstream always makes me smile: “Malice, academic jealousy… I just had to get away…”

There is also a female cult, the Sisterhood of Karn, a coven of irrational, obsessive young women - rampant sexual energy redirected as devotion to a cause. Meantime, their elder Maren is calm, careful - her youthful passions long spent - but remains just as devoted. It’s a memorable performance from Cynthia Grenville.

Horror of Fang Rock

You can’t really go wrong with a “base under siege” story in a lighthouse. The sets here are as cosy as one would expect. Unusually, the “outdoors” studio footage is on film (because done at Ealing) so it matches actual location footage, helping to sell the “outdoors” illusion. There are also beautiful model shots:

It’s an exciting and scary story with interesting characters. My one criticism is that the Doctor sometimes makes blatant mistakes which lead to characters needlessly dying. Other than that, this story (which was uniquely made at Pebble Mill in Birmingham rather than Television Centre) is great.

The Robots of Death

If you can get over the truly ridiculous make-up, this is an enjoyable “whodunnit” set on-board a large mining vehicle on some distant planet. The premise is interesting and the plot well-executed. My favourite element, though, is the model footage of the vehicle roving across the sandy landscape. It is beautifully done and could have featured more in the story. Directed by Michael E. Briant and written by Chris Boucher, this production prefigures the following year’s Blake’s 7, in which many of the actors seen here would crop up.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang

This Robert Holmes story richly deserves its hallowed status, being a classic in every way. The Fourth Doctor is at his best, sleuthing and quipping his way through Victorian streets, cellars and police stations in a perfectly-judged performance by Tom Baker. Also, Leela is both effective and adorable throughout.

Then there are the story’s own characters: Jago and Litefoot (who got their own audio spin-off), Chang (terrifically played by John Bennett) and Mr Sin (whose origins are so bizarre that when told they nearly tip the story into absurdity, except for the deadly seriousness of Tom Baker’s delivery). There is also a fun cameo from Patsy Smart as a deranged tramp. Then there is Holmes’ shameless use of stereotypes: Irish stagehand Casey, a weary Cockney slattern, and several Victorian policemen straight out of Punch magazine.

All of these characters bob in and out of a complex plot where, nonetheless, everything makes sense.

The production is intensely atmospheric, both on luminous 16mm film and grainy analogue video. 19th Century London has rarely seemed this charming or chilling. Shortcomings in special effects (such as the hilarious “giant rat”) can and must be forgiven.

Blending off-beat sci-fi with delightful Victoriana, this may be Holmes at his very best. Not content with providing a ripping yarn, he sprinkles it with little moments that don’t need to be there but are such fun. For example, the joyous supper scene between Litefoot and Leela:

This story is a guilty pleasure for liberal Whovians because of its racial element. Most painful for them is the “yellowing up” of John Bennett to play Chang. Incredibly, the Doctor makes a racist remark at one point. Throughout, the Chinese are “othered” by the English. Victorian London is clearly not “multicultural”: the Chinese are virtually all in Limehouse, and everywhere else they are outsiders, aliens, strangers. Moreover, there is blood and soil identity: Litefoot was born and grew up in China yet still he is an Englishman, who even considers the Chinese “a strange bunch”.

City of Death

I’m actually not terribly keen on this story, since it was shot in France and thus feels out-of-keeping. However, it is objectively a good story with a very intriguing central premise. Julian Glover, always reliable, gives a good turn as the villain.

Warriors’ Gate

A flawed story but undeniably reaching for “new territory” in both writing and execution, this has a very novel premise and some interesting bits along the way. It’s also an orgy of analogue video effects - of course they don’t really stand the test of time but no viewer of vintage TV should expect that. Peter Howell serves up a haunting and inventive score. (The producer had fired Dudley Simpson and was using the Radiophonic Workshop for all incidental music, so the show has a very different feel from hereon.)

The Fifth Doctor was played by Peter Davison. He was, by his own later admission, too young for the role. His was also the most human incarnation, second to Pertwee. Unfortunately during his tenure the show was losing direction so in addition to his being ill-suited for the role, a lot of the stories are sub-standard and the general production style really lacks the charm of the previous era.

The Five Doctors

This is a bit of an unfair choice because Davison has to share the stage with four other Doctors, but it is a good story - in spite of what many people say. Also, it’s worth it just for the early scenes at the Eye of Orion, which has a landscape (and incidental music) that I love. Another bit of lovely music appears when the Second Doctor and the Brigadier are in a cave. I also love the music for the cybermen, especially during their shoot-out against the Raston Warrior Robot. Peter Howell really did a great job with this story.

Earthshock

This is a cyberman story but starts off seeming like something completely different. Good tension throughout. The early material in the caves is nicely-done, and I like the daring switch to an entirely different setting later on.

The freighter, too, is nicely-done, with good atmosphere and interesting dynamics between the various characters. And again, a beautiful soundtrack (the first by Malcolm Clarke since his Sea Devils excursion).

The Caves of Androzani

This story is famous for several things - being oddly Shakespearean at times, being the Fifth Doctor’s final story, and having a regeneration sequence that features cameos from past companions and the Master. It is also a damned good yarn in and of itself, Robert Holmes delivering a cracker which, properly, would have been his swansong in the series. The “villain”, or really anti hero, of Sharaz Jek is a truly memorable character. Morgus is a repulsive villain, and Stotz is just psychopathic enough to seem a genuine threat as well. This is exceptionally dark territory for Holmes with really no comic relief to be found, but very engaging.

Generally regarded as the “worst” incarnation, the Sixth Doctor was played by Colin Baker. The show was really in the doldrums at this point so a decent and well-intentioned actor was under-served by bad scripts and bad guidance.

For his first season the show experimented with a 2x45-minute story format. I think it mostly works well and allows a more leisurely pace with lots of world-building. It foreshadows the 2005 revival (except better, because the entire story isn’t wrapped up in the first episode).

Vengeance on Varos

This is a fairly brutal story centring on the degrading effects that salacious mass entertainment has on the general public. As well as an ending that satisfies, it has the interesting device of a B-plot which is done on one set and is entirely separate from the main plot but serves to “make the point”. Also quite good set design and a nice mid ‘80s score.

Revelation of the Daleks

This isn’t a great story but it has good atmosphere and a vein of black humour. It is perfect for the 2x45 format - lots of world-building and well-sketched (if mostly grotesque) characters. Aristocratic assassin Orcini and his loyal squire are perhaps the saving grace in that department. The depiction of Davros is particularly unsettling. Prefiguring Gordon Gekko, he is at his control centre furiously making deals, receiving information, hatching schemes, and manipulating the greedy and the lost. Here he is in charge of humans for the first and only time, and he shows a keen grasp of psychology in getting his way, a unique call-back to how he operated in Genesis. A few too many characters die for my liking but the story is mostly successful and certainly memorable. There is some nice set design (really only let down by Davros’s lair) and also lovely winter filming on location, including at the distinctive IBM North Harbour site.

The Seventh Doctor was played by Sylvester McCoy, then mostly a comedy performer known for slapstick and surrealism. From Scotland, he “toned down” his accent but was nevertheless the first Doctor not to speak RP. Against his own form, McCoy brought a dark, brooding and mysterious air to the role which matched the direction the show evolved in during his three seasons. His first season is a hold-over from the previous era and not worth watching but his second and especially his third are much better.

In addition, from Colin Baker’s second season the producer had stopped using the Radiophonic Workshop and instead hired freelance composers to make the scores. Each of them - Dominic Glynn, Keff McCulloch and Mark Ayres - did everything himself, using analogue and digital synths as well as the new technology of samplers. Thus, the feel of the show changed again - for this and various other reasons as the 1990s approached.

Remembrance of the Daleks

This is the first Doctor Who story I ever saw and I was instantly hooked. It is generally regarded as McCoy’s best story and it is great. Atmospheric, fast-paced and well-plotted, with many thrilling special effects and a slew of interesting characters. Among them are two “fascists” but even they are portrayed quite sympathetically, not as cartoon villains. Cosy sets include Ratcliffe’s warehouse and the school cellar:

Keff McCulloch’s score is often mocked for being ridiculously “late ‘80s”, but it is effective and, among all the bombast, has three haunting sections. These sample-driven pieces accompany the scenes in the cemetery and help convey the idea of a London lost in the middle of the 20th Century - the old certainties all gone, the future blank and unnerving.

Ghost Light

This is probably my favourite Who story. Dark, stylish, theatrical and disturbing, it is like nothing else I have ever seen and demonstrates the kind of stories that this show, at this time, was uniquely capable of. Ostensibly a “haunted house” yarn, it quickly becomes something complicated and very new. It does struggle inside the three-episode frame and would have benefitted hugely from more room to breathe. The back-story is fascinating and original, unfolding slowly and requiring viewer concentration (key information is revealed casually and can easily be missed).

You also get a large ensemble of interesting and very unusual characters. While theatrical, the actors know when to dial things down, and the final scene between Gwendoline and Mrs Pritchard has moved me to tears.

It was shot on then-obsolete Link 125 cameras whose pick-up tubes argued with the low light resulting in a nice grainy image. With this and other factors, the production absolutely drips with atmosphere. Key to this is the lovely score by Mark Ayres, including the superlative track Loss of Control.

My only complaints about this story: it should have been four episodes and they should have kept its original title, “The Bestiary”.

The Curse of Fenric

While benefiting from the new “multi-layered” storytelling of its era, this also feels like quite a traditional Who story, which no doubt explains its popularity. As with Ghost Light, the back-story is as interesting as the actual story and has to be deciphered while the latter plays out. As well as an array of interesting characters, it has unnerving villains and some genuinely scary scenes. Also, in an example of the show’s new direction, there is a very moving arc about Ace’s relationship with her mother. It was by Ian Briggs who penned Dragonfire two seasons earlier, but here his writing is much matured.

Survival

Initially, this story is about coming back home and finding that everything has changed - an experience many of us have had. It evolves into a treatment of Thatcherite social policy which is perhaps a bit hackneyed but not overbearing. There is also a subtle lesbian subtext.

The alien planet is nicely conveyed - the standard Who quarry enhanced with newly-possible video effects. With dialogue, ideas and Glynn’s score, a very distinctive “tone” is achieved. Also, Anthony Ainley’s Master is uniquely vicious here, much more threatening than ever before.

This was the final story broadcast and is unlike any before it, with its scenes of working-class suburban London, shot entirely on location. To see the Master in a drab living room in a run-down council estate… is a radical departure. The show seems to be evolving in a much more gritty and “realist” direction. Even the score (by Dominic Glynn) innovates; his usual synth work is spiced up by various acoustic instruments, resulting in a more “organic” feel.

One can only guess at what might have followed had the show continued. I love the gentle studio-bound stories and hope more would have been made, but Survival really points to the future, a show that would have “responded” to the 1990s. (Interestingly, the revival 16 years later picked up somewhat on the grittiness of this story - but lacked any of the depth.)

Curiosities

An Unearthly Child (unbroadcast “pilot” version)

Despite being largely re-shot, this original mounting of the first episode miraculously survived in a mislabelled film canister. Of course, given the production standards of the time and then its subsequent treatment, it isn’t in great quality. I recall one person saying “it looks like it was filmed through a jam jar” - but that adds to its charm. This version is interesting for the changes that were later made. For example, the Doctor is even more sinister than in the broadcast version.

The Edge of Destruction

This very early 2-part story is notable for being a “bottle episode”.

Spearhead from Space

This Third Doctor outing is notable for being the only 1963-89 story shot entirely on film. The original materials still exist so a Blu-ray release in HD was possible. It’s a good story in itself, but is also interesting as a demonstration of how different single-camera film production was from multi-camera video production; the whole tone is affected, with the camera being more dynamic, the pacing more urgent, and the cosiness of video replaced with the rough realism of film.

The Sontaran Experiment

Conversely, this Fourth Doctor story is the only one to be shot entirely on video (until that became standard in 1986). It’s not a great story by any means but makes for interesting viewing. (For more of this style of production, see the list at the end of my Survivors guide.)

What I would have liked

Obviously, I wish they hadn’t junked the tapes from the first three eras. I love the evocative title of The Wheel in Space and it saddens me that I will never get to see that story (though in reality it would probably be a disappointment as I really don’t get along well with the 1960s stuff).

Also, all of McCoy’s stories should have been four-parters. Stories like Ghost Light, Survival and even The Happiness Patrol have such interesting worlds that they are crying out for more time to develop. (The latter actually has enough deleted footage to make a fourth episode.)

Most of all, I wish the show hadn’t been cancelled! It was really getting back on its feet. It’s a tragedy that the axe fell when it did, at the worst possible juncture. The show had evolved into something not only good but utterly unique. Sadly, the moment in time has long passed and cannot be recaptured. We will never have what we could have had.

See my other TV guides here.

So a gallstone had, having exited my gallbladder, traversed the biliary duct system and ended up in my pancreas. Apparently this is a well-known complication of gallstone attacks, but it had never happened to me before. Since even a small stone can do it, the stone responsible might not have caused any pain when leaving my gallbladder, hence it might not have had anything to do with the two attacks that immediately preceded. But of course, given the temporal proximity, it almost certainly did. As for whether those two attacks were themselves connected, again, given the proximity, they must have been. Maybe a glut of stones found their way out, all at once? Or maybe all three of these events - the two attacks and the pancreatitis - were down to one single stone? That is the most likely explanation, I think. But we will never know; it’s like a silent circus down there.

Friday 17th July

Still in A&E, a black nurse appeared and said she had to inject me with antibiotics, and offered me the choice of “the arm or the belly”. Dreamy with the morphine, I said “oh, whatever you think…” She rolled up my T-shirt. Presumably that location was better, since the drug would reach the pancreas faster. I remember being surprised at the total lack of pain, but of course I was strung out.

Later, I heard two East European doctors talking about me. I looked up. One of them was large and grizzled, in that East European way. He told the other that I shouldn’t be given any more antibiotics, then gestured towards my stomach with his pen, “but those stones need to come out [from the pancreas], and that gallbladder… that needs to come out, if not now then later.”

I was returned to the small room with the chair, where I had first disgusted that consultant by lying on the floor.

Here the giving of fluids began, immediately. They hooked them up to the cannula from earlier, which was now adapted to take two inputs - paracetamol and Hartmann’s Solution.

They told me I would be here until they found me a bed “in the wards”. I asked if there would be a shower there, and they said yes.

Sleepy, I pulled the curtain shut, got down on the floor again, took off my jacket and trainers and used them as a pillow. It was nice.

After about an hour I woke up and decided I should let “my network” know the situation, otherwise they would start wondering about my absence online. I messaged Martin Lichtmesz and a friend on my Telegram mod team. That was at 3:30pm.

I remembered it was Friday and there wasn’t an essay scheduled for Sunday. I tried to log into Substack from my phone but couldn’t, because in February I had wiped everything from it - including email - in anticipation of an airport interrogation.

Bugger.

I told a nurse I needed another dose of morphine, because the pain was returning. I think this was a bit of a lie, but luckily she believed me and got me a second dose. (According to ChatGPT a dose staggeringly only costs the NHS about 30p, so I don’t feel guilty.)

I fell back asleep.

Twelve hours later I had developed a rapport with a brown A&E porter who had come several times to take my blood pressure and replenish the IV drips. I thought it would be nice to go outside. I ventured the idea to him and he said yes but that I shouldn’t draw attention to myself. Of course. He told me the route to take and disconnected me from the IV drips.

I went, and on the way noticed how lovely it was to be free of pain. The morphine would have worn off by now, so clearly this meant the medical emergency was over.

On the way out of A&E I passed a room with two police officers watching over a guy with blood all over his head. I don’t think the blood was from his injury, but someone else’s.

I passed a vending machine and realised it would be great to have a drink of fizzy water with a hint of raspberry… it was right there… cool and clear… but the a notice said the machine’s card reader was faulty, and I didn’t have any coins on me. Who does, nowadays?

I soon found my way outside. I believe it was where the ambulance had brought me in:

If I had brought my vape this would have been a nice time to use it. Or back in the day, a cigarette. Alas, I had left home in too much of a hurry. So, after savouring the coolness and calm for a few minutes, I just went back indoors.

I ambled back into A&E, through the reception and the throng, back to my small room with a chair. The nice brown porter showed me that the chair could transform into a recliner, so I tried that.

I heard someone clicking a mouse through the wall, now revealing itself to be paper thin. That was baffling.

In the corridor, I heard a middle-aged White man arguing repetitiously with A&E staff, eventually telling them to “ffffffack off”.

Then a mad old Pakistani woman was going on and on and on about various complaints…

By now I’d had a lot of sleep, so I was unable to escape these things. The drama of a London A&E department on a Friday night… To be honest, it was more darkly fascinating than bloody annoying. I now wish I had seen more of it, maybe sat down somewhere for a while and just watched the pandemonium.

Saturday 18th

I remained in that little room until 4pm the next day, by which time I’d been in it for more than 24 hours, mostly on the floor. But now the nice brown porter found me “a proper bed”, so he took me there:

Reconnected to the IV drips, and I was asleep immediately. Very comfy. I had been happy enough in that little room, but it was nice to finally have a bed.

But it didn’t last long. I was awakened just three hours later to the news that they had found a place for me “in the wards”. While they waited for a porter to arrive to take me there, a nurse asked if I would like some toast with butter, and I said yes and she brought it.

There was no space in the hepatopancreaticobiliary (yes, seriously) ward but a bed had become available in the renal ward. A rather burnt-out looking porter wheeled me up there.

Arriving, I asked about a shower and was shown to the ward’s “bathroom”. The nurse warned me that the shower wasn’t hot. That was true, but it was warm enough. I was relieved to get cleaned up; three days of pain-induced sweat is not pleasant.

And then I settled into ward life. After the rush of those first hours in A&E, the next four days were calm and uneventful.

The bed was ideal for me because I was shielded from the sunlight by the adjacent bed (two sets of curtains), and also I was right next to the nurses’ station.

Two hours after I arrived, the other patients were served their dinner. I had arrived too late to order mine. But that was fine, because I wasn’t hungry. Everything was fine.

There were four beds in my room. Opposite me was an old, rather cultured (and I suspect Jewish) man who read the Times every day. He had delirium due to a kidney infection and would quite frequently call out for help he didn’t need, but was otherwise very good-natured. I developed a slight rapport with him, sometimes reassuring him about delusions he was having.

Next to me - through a curtain so I never saw him - was a black guy who constantly made noise of different sorts, including fiddling with his bed’s electronic tilting controls.

Wheeled in shortly after my arrival to the bed diagonally opposite was another black guy, who needed dialysis and I suspect had an IQ of about 80. Occasionally he would get up and wander around, and had a sort of smile all the time but I think was only vaguely cognisant. He could barely speak English so staff struggled to accommodate him. At one point he was visited by two black hospital helpers, one of whom eventually asked him in a thick African accent: “What is your language? Are you from Congo?” Even his fellow Africans couldn’t “connect” with him! Yet he seemed oblivious! What would be a torment for a thinking person was, for him, just another slightly amusing but meaningless fact.

In theory this would be an annoying situation, but in fact I had a lovely time during my stay, drifting in and out of sleep in a very leisurely way. Because I was shielded from the sunlight, night and day simply didn’t matter.

The only problem was the snoring of that black guy next to me. It was unbelievable. As I lay there trying to get some sleep, the ambient offence was so intrusive that my mind began producing abstract visual translations of each tangled, grotesque, evolving snore. Synaesthesia when you’d prefer anaesthesia.

At about midnight, I got up and saw that my phone was at 6% power. I had to do something about it because people on the outside were worried about me so staying in touch was essential. I went to the nurses’ station. There was a black nurse and a black porter. They might have been flirting. I asked if there was any way to charge my phone and the nurse unplugged her own charger and lent it to me.

Sunday 19th

I was awakened at 5:30am by the nurse taking her charger back. She was friendly about it, and by now my phone was fully charged anyway.

Aware that the consultants would soon begin pressuring me to let them remove my gallbladder, I did some googling in cooperation with a friend over Telegram. Removing gallstones from the pancreas (ERCP) is a separate procedure from removing the gallbladder (cholecystectomy). My friend found that the NHS’s official guidance is that a patient should be able to refuse both or either. Though the two procedures are typically done in the same operation, you can elect to have one but not the other. We even found the document which makes this official: NICE CG188.

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But, ill effects or no, it seems to me that removing a healthy internal organ must be a sub-optimal course of action.

And, as I understand it, the gallbladder is healthy and doing exactly what it is supposed to do: storing gall (bile) produced by the liver, then contracting to squeeze it out into the digestive system as and when needed. The problem arises if the liver produces “bad” gall, which tends to develop into stones while resting in the gallbladder. When it then attempts to squeeze out its contents through the narrow “cystic duct”, one of those stones can cause a blockage. This, which is called “biliary colic” or “a gallstone attack”, can be unbelievably painful.

So really the liver is at fault, not the gallbladder, yet the institutional solution is to remove the gallbladder. This leaves the patient with an incomplete digestive system. Whether that actually matters is apparently unique to every patient. Some don’t notice any difference at all, some do but are glad to be free of the attacks at whatever price, some bitterly regret having it done. (A porter at the ERI, wheeling me to the ultrasound in 2013, told me he regretted having it done.)

Yet the consultants will tell you there are no ill effects at all. If you challenge them, they are perplexed, then annoyed if you persist, then contemptuous when you say you read something online.

I think this attitude among consultants stems from the time the NHS was formed, in the much more hierarchical and patrician Britain of 1948, as well as a general history of medicine being an upper-middle-class profession. Doctors in Britain, especially surgeons, were traditionally posh, well-educated men dealing with a feckless and ignorant working-class, and a dutiful and obedient middle-class. Historically, neither of these classes would dream of questioning the pronouncements of an educated man, especially in his own field of expertise. They knew their place. If little Jimmy was told he had to lose some body part, his mother - whether working or middle-class - would think “who are we to disagree?” and “we should be grateful that better people care enough about us to give us this advice and treatment”.

But eighty years later, things have become more fuzzy. Ordinary people have much more agency, due to both the collapse of deference and the much wider availability of information. We still want to respect trained doctors, but we find ourselves on an increasingly equal footing with them. (This problem was actually the subject of the very first MW video I ever filmed, The Learned Physician.) But the consultants haven’t caught up with this new reality, and I suspect are still trained with a now-antiquated mentality that you have to simply tell the hoi polloi what is good for them, and browbeat away any objections they raise. Now, to be fair, in most cases this is probably still true; despite technology and social conditions, people remain people, and biology remains very complicated. But in this new age consultants should adapt their approach when speaking to someone as intelligent as them - which must happen quite frequently, after all - because that person may also be highly informed on the medical condition being discussed. But they don’t. Instead, all patients are treated the same. I think this is due to, not the socialistic origins of the NHS, but the elitist nature of doctoring. In a country with Britain’s heritage, that profession gets mapped onto the class system, finding in it the vocabulary with which it will operate.

As such, ironically enough, the NHS now stands as one of the last examples of institutional classism in Britain. The trouble is, as with any class system, that the intelligent get treated like the unintelligent simply because of the class categories they find themselves in. And in the NHS, the class categories are “trained” and “untrained”, with the untrained presumed to be basically cretinous.

The 2013 attacks were the worst, in both frequency and severity. The third, in May, was so excruciating that at one point I was frozen still, unable even to speak. Then in August there was a spate of attacks; for a two-week period I was nigh constantly on either morphine (in hospital) or codeine or tramadol (at home).

That year was when I learned about all of this - the various tribulations of an attack, the stupendous bliss of morphine, the alternative treatments (including chanca piedra, pectin, and the disgusting experience of drinking cider vinegar). And of course, I became familiar with the arrogance of British medical consultants. Every single time, they talked down to me and tried to get me scheduled for gallbladder removal.

Oddly enough, both socialised and private healthcare are motivated to remove it. The private providers can charge more for an operation than for palliative care. The socialised providers potentially save resources by pre-empting future attacks, and at any rate can claim to have definitively “cured” a patient only if the potential for future attacks has been eliminated. So both systems incentivise their staff to push for removal. Patients are told the attacks will worsen, become more frequent, and never stop. Having rejected this advice, my experience turned out be very different.

By the end of 2013, I had begun taking supplements that claim to dissolve gallstones. I would stay on these for years.

In 2014 there were far fewer attacks. 2015 was similar. I had started my channel and in several videos you can see I still have the hospital band around my wrist from an “incident”.

There was a surreal episode in 2015. Late one night, alone in the house, I had an attack and was ambulanced to St John’s Hospital in Livingston but only had my shoes, trousers and dressing gown on. Worse still, I forgot to take my mobile phone. Discharged at 4am, I had to get home somehow. I eventually got a bus, but the wrong one, and ended up outside Kirkliston, walking through open countryside in my dressing gown at 6am towards the village, where I then stood for an hour waiting for the first bus to Linlithgow. It was utterly bizarre.

At the end of that year I had an attack that was short and therefore didn’t require medical assistance, but it struck during Millenniyule (in its inaugural year), postponing the “female edition” hangout. When finally on air, I came up with an amusing word-play, apologising for “a rocky start” to the evening, then “well, a stony start”.

In 2016, even fewer attacks.

They were becoming less frequent and less severe, perhaps because of the stone-dissolving supplements. By 2019 I think there were only one or two, both mild. Then none in 2020. Early in that year I made some lifestyle changes. As well as stopping smoking, I made a point of regularly eating exactly the “heavy” meals which trigger attacks. My idea was that this would ensure the gall was kept moving and thus not get a chance to form into stones. I put on weight, of course, but this seemed a worthwhile price to avoid attacks. I even stopped taking the supplements.

Thereafter, I had no trouble at all for six years. I thought I had found a solution which had eluded the medical establishment! (All I needed was to start exercising, to counter-act the weight problem…)

But then, on the 15th of July, 2026, completely out of the blue… a gallstone attack.

I was asleep when it started. In fact, the pain intruded upon a dream, distorting the conversation I was watching between two men. They started slurring their speech, making crazed facial expressions. I noticed they were disturbed, and then that I myself was disturbed: I felt an old, familiar pain.

Waking up, I knew instantly what it was.

On the right-side of the lower abdomen. A burning pain. Coming in waves - searing, abate, calm, resurgence - about five minutes between each wave.

Eventually the pain achieves a baseline level so that, even between the waves, you are in pain. Finding the posture that is least painful becomes your sole, intense concern. You have to lie on your left-hand side. But then what to do with your arms? Your legs? Thoughts of mortality snicker from the sidelines but are mostly drowned out by the sheer drama of what is going on.

I moved to the floor, back to the bed, back to the floor… (Being in bed is risky if you don’t have a basin to throw up in.) I took two painkiller tablets, but solpadeine, despite being the most powerful non-prescription painkiller, is futile against this.

I can’t remember much of what happened over the next few hours, except that it ended with me throwing up. And then, quite suddenly, it was over.

The attack had been not too severe, akin to most of the 2016-2019 attacks, those which hadn’t required medical assistance.

Afterwards, I made sure to keep my phone on charge in case I did eventually need to go into hospital.

I did some googling. What causes gallstones to form? They’re not quite sure, but it hinges on the gall being cholesterol-heavy, and it seems that the liver will produce such gall if you consume a lot of processed carbohydrates and refined sugar.

As for what triggers the attacks, I already knew that: fatty, “heavy” meals - pizza, cheese, etc. But I had been eating these without incident for six years. Indeed, just a few days before this I had ordered online a large chunk of elite gourmet parmesan, the best in the world. It had been over a year since I last enjoyed this so I had decided to treat myself. Bad timing.

I also googled about the long-term effects of gallbladder removal. Since 2013 the horror stories have become somewhat substantiated by “official” research. As in everything nowadays, the Chinese seem to be ahead of the West on this. Some academic in Beijing has amassed scholarly evidence that implicates the absence of the gallbladder in heightened susceptibility to a wide range of disorders, not just gastrointestinal but even reaching to Alzheimer’s.

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The RTD2 era of Doctor Who is surely among the greatest fiascos in modern television. Russell T Davies had plenty of time, plenty of money, plenty of talent, and plenty of writers both accomplished and waiting in the wings ready to churn out good scripts. In theory it should have been a triumph. Instead it was a catastrophe on every level.

Exactly how this occurred is a question that vexes many. The scale of it is hard to believe. Right-wingers want to blame state funding (BBC), but Disney was involved. Left-wingers want to blame capitalism, but state funding was involved. Of course, both could be right simultaneously; everything the socialised BBC makes nowadays is awful, everything the capitalistic Disney makes nowadays is awful, so it’s hardly surprising when a co-production between them is awful.

However, given the nature of this particular production deal, it seems that neither state funding nor capitalism was responsible. The culprit wasn’t the BBC or Disney, but Russell T Davies himself. This makes sense given our earlier review of his career, and given that, on this project, he seems to have enjoyed total freedom. If this Times article is accurate (and it has never been refuted) then the BBC could not veto a single decision that Davies took; he had made sure of it. If the claimed insider account from America is accurate, he simply refused to listen to Disney’s feedback.

So how did it happen?

Three factors were involved: Davies’ total creative autonomy, his arrogance, and his paranoia.

His autonomy

He was able to get total autonomy because of his huge stature in the industry, because the BBC were desperate to rescue Doctor Who after the Chris Chibnall era, and because he was the only person they trusted to do it. Nobody else even volunteered except for J Michael Straczynski. Unlike him, Davies was a known quantity, and the BBC had become very risk-averse. Also he agreed with them - unsurprisingly, since he had persuaded them of it in the first place - that Doctor Who should go big budget. For all these reasons, the choice to put him in charge was a “no brainer”. From the BBC’s point of view, and Disney’s, it must have looked like a surefire success. One can imagine them thinking they should “just leave the genius alone to work his magic”.

His arrogance

This is simply explained by his continued success in a TV industry that, in tandem with his career, had become more and more lightweight, sensationalist and female-minded, exactly his style of writing. The industry grew towards his style, so that he became ever more the “flavour of the month”. No matter how silly or shallow his writing became, he kept getting rewarded for it. By 2022 he probably genuinely felt he could do no wrong; it had been decades since anybody had said “no” to him. This meant he no longer checked his work, in any way, and didn’t feel a need to take seriously any criticism of it from other people - even from those funding him.

His paranoia

He had always been paranoid, but I think the 2010s culminating with the Summer of Floyd and the “peak woke” of the Biden presidency probably gave him a brief taste of calm. It was ten years of non-stop progressive social revolution, so he probably thought the rainbow would reign forever. But then this assurance was destroyed by Musk buying Twitter in 2022, and in 2023 the rise of Reform UK, the 2024 re-electing of Trump, the Gaza genocide and the unravelling of the trans craze. This explains why RTD2’s societal norm is supreme wokery - happy-clappy, ultra-progressive, everyone race-mixing, almost nobody straight or cisgender - but it is peppered with foreboding and dire warnings about social media, bigotry, misogyny, pro-family influencers, and right-wing demagogues. Davies was too old, too arrogant and too well-connected to wonder whether he had been wrong about any of these things, so his inevitable choice was to pillory them in his writing.

So it was a perfect storm. The BBC were bound to give him carte blanche and he was bound to create a disaster with it.

Wokery is not something Davies does just because it is fashionable; it is an obsession that has dominated his life and defined his career. He was doing this kind of thing long before it became standard and will be doing it long after it becomes passé. He will be like the stranded Japanese soldier still fighting WW2 decades later because he never “got the memo”.

Fittingly for a trailblazer, Davies takes wokery farther than anyone else. With an “OG” like him, someone who has a genuine grievance against historical limits rather than just a fashionable disdain, it’s as if we are returning to “the source” and getting a purer attitude than can be mimicked forty years later by some teenager on a Gender Studies degree. This is Boomer original, not Zoomer emulation.

But that “pure attitude” is not only resentment. It does not spring merely from coming of age in 1970s Welsh schools where boorish boys beat up fledgling “poofs”. It is an outlook that is bolstered by academia and approved by the culture at large, which transmits it via Marc Bolan, Dennis Potter, Joe Orton, Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde… It is enabled by a century of deconstruction, material comfort, and individualism.

I could outline this “pure attitude”, but Davies does it for me. Here he is describing the Doctor, as he conceptualised him in the RTD2 era:

[He] just goes anywhere for no reason. It’s not his job, it’s not his mission, it’s not his task, it’s not a quest, he just pops off to the next place at random, and that is joyously freewheeling.

But before RTD2 it was the Doctor’s mission to explore the Universe and help people. It was his task to defeat injustice. In RTD2, Davies has him do exactly the same things as before, but without the prior sense of purpose or in-born mandate. In theory, then, the Doctor could just stop all of this one day and open a boutique or some other random thing. But that is a lie, because no creature is free from its own nature.

Davies had the Doctor describe himself similarly in Space Babies:

I don’t have a people. I don’t have a home. But I don’t have a job either. I don’t have a boss, or taxes, or rent, or bills to pay. I don’t have a purpose, or a cause or a mission. But I have freedom. That’s why I keep moving on - to see the next thing, and the next, and the next.

But it was his cause to put things right. He didn’t keep moving on simply to find the next meaningless novelty; it was his purpose, his raison d’etre, to help other beings and put things right. He was an explorer, yes, but not a tourist.

Davies’ new version represents the end point of liberalism: to be entirely without attachment, dependants, duties, obligations or limitations; to be without either a boss or a god, any higher order that might curtail one’s choices; to be infinitely free - free to experience countless novelties. It is the end point of consumerist materialism, but also the end point of woke transhumanism.

Davies thinks this is exciting and “joyous”. But ordinary people don’t want to be free to the point of aimlessness. They need duty and purpose. For the main character in a drama, no less, to be absolutely free is not inspiring at all; it is deadening, even depressing.

Since his (new) description of the Doctor was not even accurate, Davies was really crowbarring it in. He clearly had a reason that was outside the show. It’s how he would like the Doctor to be, just as he would like everyone to be gay, or trans, or bi, or at least be absolutely fine with it - the collapsing of all categories, the erasure of all limits. But this is antithetical to humanity, and his characterisation of the Doctor was antithetical to the show.

So, too, was the genre shift towards fantasy. The reason was the same (to escape the limits of science-fiction) and the effect was the same (to remove tension from the show since it no longer had to make sense or be consistent).

I think Davies’ stature in the TV industry has been diminished. Because of his lust for doing interviews, he is now publicly associated with a hugely expensive show that was widely hated. Who would have him overseeing any big project now? I think, as he threw Gatwa under the bus, his colleagues and rivals might do the same - or worse - to him, with him ending up as the fall guy for this disaster, while all the media executives who egged him on appear spotless.

And that, really, is the sick part. Davies has made a fool of himself, but who led him to do that? Who never urged caution or held him back? Who encouraged him every step of the way, and applauded every little piece of subversion he laid upon the British public?

Russell T Davies is a damaged man who, in a better age, would have been discouraged by his peers and bosses from indulging that chip on his shoulder, and instead encouraged to look inside himself and recycle his anguish into something good, healthy, positive and nourishing - something true, something worthy of his considerable talents. Instead, he was encouraged to make a fetish and a lifestyle and a crusade out of opposing the mainstream, hating heteronormativity, demonising fathers, twisting characters (including Shakespearean characters and even Shakespeare himself!) and assaulting the standards upon which society depends. For doing this, he was showered with awards, accolades, recognition, and money. It is all blowing up now, and I suspect he will be left alone in his house with his Baftas, wondering when the phone is going to ring.

But perhaps the most tragic thing is that Davies, an intelligent man, will be stultified by his prejudices and therefore won’t learn from this experience. Instead, he will interpret the ratings sink as proof that the British public are homophobic, despite their façades, and he was right all along! In actuality, if he had just kept his expectations as they were in 2005, the public would be less anti-gay now, and he would be the queen of the world again.

What the colossal failure of RTD2 means for Doctor Who itself is not encouraging.

Independent companies will make tenders for the contract to produce it, but it might well be that none can find a way to produce what the BBC now want (a globally-competitive sci-fi show) on the budget the BBC can raise on their own.

If this is so, then the BBC will have to go cap in hand to the US streamers again, and might end up having to dance to the tune of Amazon, Paramount or Netflix. These would inevitably demand more creative control than Disney had, which would further remove the show from its roots both in British sensibility and in low budget.

However, that might be the only way forward for a BBC that believes Doctor Who must never be a charming little cult TV show again.

And, since that belief - which has crippled and doomed Doctor Who - was established by Russell T Davies himself in 2005, it could be said that he has destroyed it in a more insidious way than the obvious. In 2024 he stated:

The BBC thought the show deserved to look as good as Stranger Things, as the Star Wars shows. Why should we be the humble little show being made in a shoe cupboard?

Because that is exactly what gave Doctor Who its charm. It was a British show, with a British budget, making a virtue of simplicity, not even trying to compete with American fare but instead just “doing its own thing”. This resulted in a quaint, cosy and unique show that people loved.

A more secure man than Davies, a more sensible man, might have understood this and told the BBC not to corrupt Doctor Who by forcing it to compete on the global stage. But, in 2005 and ever since, Davies advocated exactly that - even though it would surely kill the thing he loved.

In the meantime he has corrupted it in many other ways, catalogued in this series. Corrupting seems to be what he does best. He has done it since first getting any power in television in 1993, and since then, the more power he has gained, the more he has corrupted whatever was under his control. He is a man who, unrestrained by others, can only corrupt.

This is because he is consumed by loathing - of the healthy, the traditional, heterosexuality, hierarchy, reproduction, nationhood, rootedness, truth, honesty, and above all, himself. He is a man who never fitted into his society but never had the humility to make peace with it, so instead worked against it and attempted to weaken it so that it could no longer threaten him. As a result, he lives in constant fear of a reversal, of healthy order finding a way to reassert itself, and so again, he must do everything he can to prevent this from ever happening. It is a vicious spiral, propelled by his own lack of self-knowledge. As such, he is doomed to embody corruption - harming the society that created him and the things he loves.

One of the ways in which Davies had always wanted to differentiate modern Who from classic Who was by showing more of the characters’ emotions and relationships. Aside from romantic liaisons, this means familial relations - siblings, parents, children. Science-fiction opens the door for all sorts of things to affect such relationships. But, in RTD2, characters are hollow and family is almost always a disjointed, unconventional or bizarre affair. Unfortunately, when sci-fi elements hit characters and relationships that don’t “ring true”, the effect falls flat.

Davies, in planning RTD2, might have chosen his writers based on their unlikelihood to be parents:

The result is a dearth of normal White families in RTD2. Across the 21 episodes, only two are seen: one is barely glimpsed, the other is immediately wiped out.

The first is in Lux. They have no dialogue and appear so briefly (two seconds) that most viewers will not even notice them:

The second is in Wish World, a 19th Century Bavarian family with seven children. They are destroyed in the first scene (by a powerful Indian woman). Written by Davies, this seems almost like a calculated mockery of family, an attack on the idea of family as a source of protection, security and stability.

It’s also worth saying that the actor playing the father, Atilla Akinci, is not White as such, but Turkish. He certainly doesn’t look like a 19th Century Bavarian! Apparently the casting agent just couldn’t find a more suitable actor, in all of Germany.

This is ostensibly the one proper depiction of an intact White family in RTD2, but even here, they couldn’t bring themselves to actually depict a White family.

What this means is that, in the 21 episodes of RTD2 (1040 minutes), you see an intact White family for precisely two seconds.

All other families shown are non-intact or non-conventional:

• transgender mixed-race Rose with her widowed White mother

• White Ruby with her Black lesbian stepmother

• the titular characters in Space Babies, conceived artificially and reared by a Black pseudo-mother

• Wish World shows the Doctor and Belinda married with a daughter, but all three characters are non-white and in any case the situation is a fantasy delusion

We see an astonishing eight White single mothers:

• in Dot and Bubble we see a photo of Lindy’s mother. (Of course, there is no mention of her father.)

• a widowed mother in Empire of Dust. Bizarrely, even when the father has supposedly been resurrected and the family should be back together, he is still not shown, only the woman and child. Considering the fortunes spent on special effects in this episode and the tiny cost of hiring an actor for a momentary non-speaking part, the absence of the father here is simply inscrutable.

• in Empire of Dust, Ruby finds the mother who abandoned her as a baby

• Joy’s (apparently) single mother in Joy to the World

• a (apparently) single mother in Lux. She is worried about her son who has gone missing. Despite this, and despite living in hyper-conservative 1950s small-town America, she makes no mention of his father!

• Lux also shows another mother with child, both non-speaking

• Aliss in The Well, who is raising her daughter with her own (unseen) father

• Conrad’s abusive single mother in Lucky Day

The situation with fathers is even worse. Only four are seen in the entirety of RTD2:

• the barely-glimpsed White father in Lux

• the (Turkish) Bavarian farmer in Wish World

• the fantasy of the (Black) Doctor having a daughter

• Vater in Boom (see below)

Like the (Turkish) Bavarian farmer, Vater is killed before the opening titles begin. It is almost as if Davies wants the child viewer to have no faith whatsoever, not just in the nuclear family, but in fathers. He has long had a penchant for depicting fathers as cruel, selfish, irresponsible, homophobic, bullying, or else deceased. In fact, his story arc for Season 1 (about Ruby being a foundling) provided an ideal opportunity to look at the other side of things - the important and unique role of one’s father in one’s life - but Ruby oddly has no interest whatsoever in her father, only her mother. Bizarrely, her father is never even mentioned until the final episode, and then only briefly (and not depicted, unlike the mother).

Against a backdrop of unusual, broken, mixed-race or perverse parent-child relationships in RTD2, two episodes stand in stark contrast.

Boom prominently features a father and daughter. Vater and Splice are both White, Christian, straight and “cisgender”. What’s more, they are devoted to each other. We see attachment, tenderness, laughter and love between them, and the responsibility that each has towards the other. We can easily believe that these two characters are related, know each other very well, and love each other.

Vater and Splice are unique but they represent a form that we are familiar with. While watching them we can refer to that form, and see it perhaps countered by some of their quirks, but ultimately and beautifully affirmed - a social norm renewed, to the benefit of society and the vast majority of people.

As a viewer of RTD2, bombarded with a panoply of gays, transgenders, race-mixers, childless adults, parentless children, mechanically-gestated children, and other baffling edge-cases, it is so nice to finally see this healthy and life-affirming thing: a father loving his daughter, a daughter loving her daddy. The feeling is one of great relief - “Oh yes, normality…”

There is one other parent-child relationship that rings true. It is in the episode Joy to the World. Joy is an unhappy young woman, full of self-doubt, and not conventionally attractive. The closest person to her was her mother, who died four years ago. Joy carries guilt for not being with her mother in her final days, due to COVID restrictions. Joy is full of love, but she hates herself. She puts on a brave face for the world, trying to seem happy, but she is lost and hopeless, and thinks badly of herself. Yet her mother loved her dearly.

We never even see these two characters together, but the way their relationship is painted is incredibly persuasive and touching. It feels like the work of somebody who has been a parent and observed his friends being parents, somebody who has seen the dynamics involved and contemplated the facets of family - devotion, belonging, obligation, overwhelming gratitude.

While every other parent-child relationship in RTD2 feels “somehow wrong” - artificial, contrived, or just bizarre - and impossible to believe in, these two ring true. It warms the heart, and reminds us of what the vast majority of us should be doing: not seeking endless novelty, but creating heterosexual families and becoming parents.

The episodes Boom and Joy to the World were both written by Steven Moffat. They happen to be among only three episodes of the 21 written by a heterosexual and the only two written by a parent. Moffat is a White, sixty-something family man. How many men like that get TV scripts commissioned nowadays? I believe it only happened here because Moffat is a previous showrunner. Without his two episodes, RTD2 would have been entirely devoid of convincing parent-child relationships.

But it has to be said that, even in Moffat’s episodes, both of the families are single-parent. Worse still, when Splice’s only remaining parent dies, she is adopted - by an Indian woman. Why? Why couldn’t her mother be alive, and rescue her at the end? The storyline in no way requires that the mother be dead, it is already bad enough for the girl to lose her father, and it would be, after all, more likely and plausible for the mother to be alive… so why did she have to be dead, so that a little White girl could be adopted by an Indian and a White family be replaced by an inter-racial family?

The answer is that normal families and relationships simply aren’t welcome in RTD2. Moffat’s natural tendency was to include them. Davies’ natural tendency was to vastly drown them out with single parents, abandoned children, race-mixing and sexual deviance.

This is Russell T Davies’ world. This is the end stage of liberalism: freedom, but barrenness.

When he speaks of joy, I believe it is self-delusion.

It’s a lot of work, joy. It’s very hard to achieve on screen. Anyone can cry in the rain. Sadness is comparatively easy: thunder, it rains, cry, that’s all done. I believe in reaching and pushing for the greatest emotions that you can possibly get. Pushing towards joy.

The trouble is that, in drama, joy only matters if it is worked for. Otherwise, it feels meaningless - a smiling face pasted over a hollow interior. This is how “joy” feels in Davies’ second tenure: fake, shallow, unearned, cheap, sickly sweet. The Doctor is forever talking about joy and looking joyous, but never do we see him earning his joy with struggle. We do see him running away from responsibility quite a few times, though. We see him reduced to crying in almost every episode - a fragile emotional wreck. He is an indulgent, selfish, weak, decadent, vain, irresponsible and cowardly character without any backbone or sense of duty.

With that in mind, let us return to that quote from the Sisterhood of Karn’s founder:

Gay people are more in touch with their childhood than straight people - they don’t have to go through the processes of marriage, mortgages, kids. However old we are, we don’t feel the need to cast off our childhood. We don’t feel ashamed to have a Teddy bear. Except instead of a Teddy bear, we have a Dalek.

Here we have the explanation of it all: we are talking about people who have never grown up, and never will grow up. They are obsessed with and fascinated by their own childhood, or the idea of childhood. This fascination shields them from nature’s demand to grow up, but in the shielding it has become rotten. Such is the toll nature exacts on anything that defies it. So the fascination which started so well is soon morbidity with a smiling face, corruption with the look of innocence, misery with the look of joy, poison with the look of health.

Some things in life cannot be resisted safely. One of them is the call to grow up. Not even science-fiction can protect us from this duty or from the consequences of ignoring it. But it can distract us. It is the most lovely distraction.

As early as January 2025, it was claimed by people “in the know” that Disney would not be renewing the deal. Shortly after Season 2 aired, it was openly stated by a news website. Though FilmStories based this on nothing more than rumours, from this point it was considered an open secret: Disney were out of the picture and the BBC were seeking a new “global streaming [funding] partner”. But why would any get involved after seeing how badly it went for Disney? The other question was whether, and how, the BBC would get rid of Russell T Davies. Did they realise how much he was to blame for Disney backing out?

They had only to listen to their own employees, who by now were going off-script. Dead Ringers did a parody of RTD2, mocking it on multiple grounds: the obsessive wokery, overbearing gayness, annoying lead actor, mawkish sentimentality and incoherent plotting.

While the BBC might have been unsure how much to blame Davies, fans were unsure how much to blame Disney. After all, that corporation had destroyed many franchises by 2023, so why would they be any better with Doctor Who, especially when they held the purse strings? But according to Davies, Disney never complained about his choices. He told Men’s Health magazine in 2024:

I want to think about where we are in the world and what’s happening to the world. It’s very important to bring that to it. But I do that automatically, I don’t have to put much thought into it… and I feel very trusted by the BBC and Disney+ to let my voice be heard. They don’t stop me, nothing’s ever censored or challenged, it’s a very fruitful relationship.

However, on the 14th of June 2025, a post was made on Reddit purporting to be an insider’s account from someone connected to the Disney side. I find this account credible because it rings true, accords with what we know about Davies’ personality, makes sense given the documented facts, and also for the simple reason that it is well-written. It was very soon deleted from Reddit, which is a shame because, if true, it is the only insight we have into what went on.

early in the production process Disney executives were quick to stress that they did not seek to creatively interfere with the show. There was, from the outset, deep respect for the BBC and Doctor Who as a brand, and genuine admiration for Russell T Davies, whose return as showrunner was viewed as a major win. The intention was never to impose a Marvel-style formula or Americanize the property, but rather to support its global growth and long-term viability in a modern streaming environment.

So Disney did not pressure Davies to “Marvelise” or “Americanise” the show. That awful shallowness which marred and cheapened RTD2, presenting British culture as a gaudy, gay caricature… came from Davies himself!

Disney understood that Doctor Who thrived on its Britishness, and since they were American they felt they should leave it to the Brits to “do their thing”. Just like the BBC, they trusted Davies and were happy to give him the money and leave all the decisions to him.

But they did give some practical advice:

Disney also brought with it a clear understanding of what factually performs well in the streaming age for the audience that Doctor Who seems to be appealing most to: sharper and sophisticated narratives and dialogue, stronger serialized (not necessarily completely) storytelling, complex character [arcs], stronger hooks, tighter pacing, and concepts designed with subscriber behavior in mind.

Frankly, this is exactly what worked in classic Doctor Who, in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, but with a faster pace and a narrative sophistication, a depth, that was not expected back then and only emerged in the classic show in its final years (1988-89). Had Davies taken that as his model, he might have found himself very much aligned, even if coincidentally, with what Disney wanted. But instead, he favoured the format he had pioneered in 2005: self-contained fifty-minute stories, but with a new fluffiness and shallowness that even he hadn’t subjected viewers to in 2005. The show had always been made for children of all ages, whereas RTD2 seemed aimed at five year-olds. (Grotesquely, this iteration of Doctor Who was the most childish but, in terms of LGBT content, the most adult.)

[Disney’s] insights were grounded in extensive audience research and cross-platform analytics, all of which Disney simply provided in support rather than to enforce.

Again, Disney (like the BBC) were trusting Davies. What neither party knew was that Davies had lost all inhibition and sense of proportion. This became apparent once they began seeing footage:

While Disney+ teams regularly shared data-backed feedback (including from test screenings) and actionable insights into contemporary audience preferences, RTD reportedly remained confident in his creative instincts, favoring a traditional strong episodic structure that prioritized a fun tone and thematic continuity over edgier more sophisticated storytelling with more serialized cliffhangers or bingeable arcs.

Again, this is what classic Who used to provide, but Davies was stuck in the format of his 2000s heyday, and in his new, infantile “fun tone”. Unfortunately, Bad Wolf and the BBC backed him up:

Creative leadership within the BBC and Bad Wolf appeared at times resistant to these discussions, and internal Disney sources noted repeated instances where critical audience feedback was met with pushback or misunderstood entirely.

By 2024 Disney were backing away from overbearing wokery, but what really bothered them about RTD2 was the shallowness, the “fun tone”:

During test screenings, the show’s tone - while in keeping with Doctor Who’s family-friendly legacy - was described internally as “isolating” to viewers in the late teens to millennials age groups feeling that the show was meant for much younger audiences than they originally believed, something which wasn’t just picked up in the more light-hearted episodes, but also the somewhat darker episodes such as Boom and Dot and Bubble due to quality concerns, particularly in regards to dialogue, characterisation, and forced emotional beats

If this is all true (and I believe it is) then the summary is: once Disney began seeing footage, they tried to reason with Davies about his awful writing but found him implacable and, furthermore, insulated by two layers of devotees: his friends at Bad Wolf, and his bosses at the BBC. There was no way to get through to him. Disney could try “talking tough”, but they had already sent the money.

The “insider’s account” also sheds new light on Davies’ various claims that Disney never “challenged” him. They did. He just refused to listen. As a result:

Disney [became] aware early on that this was not going to be a show that aligned with what modern global audiences or Disney+ expect

In short, Davies was insisting on writing for morons, and there weren’t enough of them around - even in the age of Marvel.

Around the same time (11th June 2025) there was another purported leak. It concerned the BBC’s then-current struggles with the show, after Season 2. Again, it could be fake, but I find it credible.

the BBC is currently in advanced talks with a potential new partner following the collapse of the Disney+ deal.

I find it plausible that the BBC were seeking a new streamer (funder) to replace Disney because, as outlined before, that is the only way to get the huge budget they were convinced Doctor Who needs.

This new partner is said to be on a similar scale to Disney, but… is pushing for greater creative control than Disney had… believing that in order for success, the show needs to “take itself more seriously” and shift its focus toward an older teenage audience...

However, Russell T Davies is said to strongly believe that the show’s fun, campy, family friendly tone … is the key to its success.

His “strong belief” defied not just Disney’s advice but Doctor Who’s sixty-year history. Did these American streaming corporations understand the show better than he did? No! He was just intent on changing it to what he wanted it to be - light, fluffy and shallow.

The potential partner is reportedly already offering a mix of fresh and seasoned creatives… and are enthusiastic about the potential deal and eager to get involved in the show in any way they can, whilst ensuring that the show remains [retains] its British identity and core values. However, RTD remains extremely cautious and apprehensive, as he is known… for being HIGHLY selective and protective about who he collaborates with and allows to write for the show...

At this stage, both the BBC and Bad Wolf are reportedly backing RTD’s vision (who is looking to stay on for at least 3 more seasons), but they’re also aware of the financial challenges of continuing the show without a major partner.

Two things are astonishing here:

• that Davies still hadn’t realised the error of his ways

• that the BBC were still tolerating him

RTD2 had failed because he insisted on wokery and shallowness, an insistence he was allegedly maintaining even now, with an IP wrecked, a fanbase forlorn, a fortune squandered, his own reputation destroyed, Disney exited, and the BBC struggling to find a new partner to keep the show going.

As for the BBC not firing him… It should have been obvious to them that, even if he still had talent, he was a deeply arrogant man who refused to recognise the damage he had done, and was intent on maintaining that approach, destroying a valuable IP.

The BBC’s chance with a massive new streaming partner seems to have fallen through - from the sounds of things, because they were insisting on retaining Davies.

Everyone else could see that he was kryptonite. Perhaps the BBC could as well, but felt they had nobody to take his place so simply had to stick with him, even now.

If all of this is correct, then Davies, having brought the show to an unprecedented low and driven Disney away, was now sabotaging the BBC’s attempts to secure a future for Doctor Who. If he couldn’t be showrunner, and if he couldn’t control who would replace him, then he would be the last showrunner.

Signing off from the “producer’s column” in the official magazine in June 2025, Davies said:

No, not the end, don’t be mad. Doctor Who will never end! There are pathways leading to potential futures… But we don’t know what’s happening yet, and while everyone works that out, I’ll take a pause on this page… Hopefully, we’ll have some news soon

Just a few weeks later, pessimistic comments were posted on Reddit by yet another insider. From his discussions with industry people, he expected it would be “five or six years” before any new Who appeared, meaning the RTD2 era was decisively over.

Even now, Davies was unrepentant about the wokery, saying in interview:

It’s 2025. And you also have to look at what the others are doing. I find a lot of the other science-fiction franchises are very straight, very masculine, very testosterone-y. And so that’s our space, that’s where Doctor Who can fill a space.

He also said that, while funders always have “conditions” and “things to say”, he enjoyed total free rein on Doctor Who, “because I’m very responsible”.

By late summer 2025, Davies was overseeing production of his next TV series, Tip Toe, about a gay man being murdered by a White homophobic father. As ever, the existential threat to gays was on his mind. He said to Big Issue:

But now things are rapidly and urgently getting worse. What happens in America always happens here - and as we look down the barrel of a Reform government, we, the gay community, queer community, should be revolting in terror and anger and action.

Davies won a prestigious award for “outstanding achievement in family programming”. Not even a month later, another award: BAFTA Cymru’s “outstanding contribution to television”.

Yet, for all these accolades, Davies felt persecuted. Accepting his latest BAFTA, he ranted about censorship and oppression. He specifically mentioned people in America being fired and sued for mocking Charlie Kirk’s murder. How is it “oppression” to get fired for celebrating, simply because you dislike his politics, the murder of an innocent man? Has Davies ever cared about people getting fired for holding right-wing views? Of course not. He wrote the media, and continues to write the media, that “justifies” such firings.

In his rant, Davies also mocked the TV industry’s demand that writing should be “balanced”. Given rumours that he had just been fired as showrunner of Doctor Who, it is possible that his new-found frustration with industry “compliance” stemmed from this demotion. It is certainly a stark contrast to his attitude in recent years, saying that nobody had ever told him what he could and couldn’t write.

Former Who writer Robert Shearman broke consensus by saying that the show was “as dead as we’ve ever known it”. Confronted with these words, Bad Wolf boss Jane Tranter hit back deludedly. On the same day it was revealed that her company had commissioned a portrait of their darling Russell T Davies:

Finally, in late October, the BBC admitted that the Disney deal was over. However, they also announced that, while there wouldn’t be a Christmas special in 2025, there would be one in 2026. It would be written by none other than Russell T Davies. Plans for the show’s future beyond that would be announced in “due course”.

The announcement’s wording, that Davies had “agreed” to write the special, could only mean that he was no longer showrunner. Presumably, then, the special would be his final contribution to Doctor Who, and the BBC were letting him do it only to tidy up the mess created by his stunt cliffhanger ending to The Reality War. It would be unfair, after all, to leave that for some new showrunner to deal with.

In November, Davies said of the special:

I know exactly what happens in it, don't worry about that.

However, he added that he wasn’t writing it yet, because he was busy promoting the spin-off and making Tiptoe. Nonetheless, he did find time to take his young boyfriend, Oliver Cole, to the TARDIS set at Bad Wolf Studios and film him playing the Doctor.

Then, regarding the future, he teased fans:

He also assured BBC Newsbeat that his ideas for the special left BBC bosses “with jaws agape, loving it”.

A few weeks later, Christmas 2025 passed without a Doctor Who festive special, for the first time since 2004.

As 2026 began, everyone knew this would be the year RTD2 died. The assumption was it would happen on Christmas Day at the end titles of the special.

There wasn’t much news about it. On the 10th of February, Deadline interviewed BBC executive Zia Bennett, who said:

We’re… all motivated to make sure Doctor Who has a long and flourishing life… We’ve got the Christmas special coming.

In late February, composer Murray Gold revealed the script was being kept flexible:

I know that Russell’s written, I think, multiple versions depending on certain outcomes. So that’s all I really know, and I’m not sure [that] I’m even supposed to know that.

As for what those different “outcomes” might be, that was probably to do with uncertainties in casting. Given that this special might be the last Doctor Who episode for quite some time, would previous Doctors appear? How many? And what about the Billie Piper problem? Would she play the role throughout, with the regeneration completing at the end of the episode and an entirely new actor taking over for the long term?

Then the Sun newspaper claimed the BBC were struggling to find an actor who was prepared to take on the “poisoned chalice” role. It’s worth bearing in mind that, until 2018, this was one of the most coveted roles in British television.

By now (March) people were starting to wonder how long the filming could be delayed, given post-production and a deadline of December. Rumours abounded. They were waiting for Billie Piper to become available… They were waiting for David Tennant… They were negotiating to feature the Daleks… It would be a simple storyline, it would be complex… It would be low-key to end with dignity, it would be a blockbuster to end with a bang…

Davies took some time out to attend an industry event in France, where he declared the young today “have all been radicalised into bastards”. He railed against social media, especially Twitter which he called a “hate site” and not representative of fan opinion.

In April, Davies wrote in the official magazine:

Wouldn’t it be great if we got to this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special and nothing had been spoiled and everything was new?

In late May, echoing its claim from March, the Sun reported that production of the special was delayed because no actor was willing to take on the role “partly because it now feels like a role that comes with all the baggage of the most recent series”. Furthermore, they claimed the special might have to be entirely scrapped. These claims were repeated by the Radio Times, usually a loyal BBC mouthpiece.

On the 1st of June, Davies said a big announcement from the BBC was imminent. He sounded as happy and blasé as ever.

RTD2 was officially axed on the 10th of June, 2026.

The BBC published their big announcement. While very diplomatic in its wording, it made clear that Davies was no longer showrunner and Bad Wolf was gone as production company. With Disney and Gatwa having, of course, left long before, these departures completed the demolition of RTD2.

Also, the 2026 Christmas special was cancelled. Instead, Doctor Who would be put out to “competitive tender” to production companies to make full seasons. This means that, if the BBC had indeed spent the last twelve months seeking a new co-financing deal with US streamers, nothing had come of it. So now Doctor Who will be confined once more to a British budget.

On the cancellation of the special, a BBC insider was quoted:

The Christmas special was ordered in good faith but sometimes things change and new decisions need to be made

However, Davies claimed it had never been commissioned at all, and was only ever a ploy:

we only cooked that up to guarantee a future [for the show] when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it… there was no script, I never wrote it

I think this is a pack of lies. First, it contradicts many previous statements from him, one from Murray Gold, and several official ones from the BBC as well as the quoted BBC insider. Second, I don’t believe the BBC would be so unprofessional as to make a commitment they knew in advance they were going to renege upon; that would only reflect badly on them as a company. Third, the claim doesn’t even make sense; promising a Christmas special doesn’t “guarantee” a future for the show beyond that special, and in fact, now that the special has been cancelled, the situation is unchanged: the BBC are looking for a deal to produce the show long-term. It doesn’t make sense that the special was only ever a red herring to guarantee that outcome. Indeed, if it were, then it would make more sense for the BBC to go ahead with a special for 2026, and for subsequent years too if necessary, until a deal is struck for the show’s long-term future. So Davies’ explanation simply doesn’t hold water.

I think he was scrambling to save face. Most likely, he was writing a script but couldn’t reach agreement on it with the BBC. By now, given his disastrous performance, they would be closely monitoring things. Rumour has it BBC executive Lindsay Salt was frustrated with his drafts.

Alternatively, fans have theorised the special was cancelled because its production would delay the show being put out to tender. This has quickly become received wisdom among fans, but I don’t think it follows at all; there is no reason why a one-off special would stymy negotiations about what follows it.

Possible reasons for cancelling the special:

• Davies couldn’t find a way to resolve the absurd cliffhanger he had set up without devolving into “lore” that a general audience would find baffling and boring - not ideal for a light-hearted Christmas special

• having become accustomed to a Disney budget, he refused to scale things down for a BBC budget

• he pressed ahead with the fanatical wokery and the BBC couldn’t persuade him to tone it down

• it was just bad writing, like all of RTD2

• his continued presence meant he was able to interfere with long-term negotiations, so the BBC wanted him out of the way

Whatever the reason, the BBC eventually decided to cancel his final contribution and wash their hands of him.

In his statement, Davies also claimed that no actors had been approached to take on the role of the Doctor. This might be true, but either way it didn’t need to be said. I think he said it to, again, save face. He wanted to refute the claims that actors were staying away from the show after his vandalism of it.

It would be difficult to summarise that vandalism…

• unprecedented, nauseating wokery

• poor scripting

• incoherent plots

• tedious and out-of-place gayness

• shattering the show’s sixty year-old boundaries by introducing bigeneration, repeating the Tennant Doctor and switching genre from science-fiction to fantasy

• breaking the fourth wall

• wrecking classic villains

• wrecking the character of the Doctor himself

But for me the worst thing about RTD2 is not any of the above, but the extreme shallowness. It obnoxiously insists on having no depth or sincerity whatsoever, with all emotions seeming fake, all relationships unconvincing, every character empty, every moment pointless.

The axing of RTD2, with no other active plan for Doctor Who itself, meant that the 63 year-old show was, in all but name, cancelled, just like in 1989.

On Instagram and in a Gaydio interview, Davies did not apologise for anything. Refusing even to admit that the show was cancelled, he insisted that everyone else was wrong and just didn’t understand what “competitive tender” means. He refused to acknowledge that this was only happening because of what he had done to the show, which damage he also refused to acknowledge. Self-reflection, it seems, is for other people.

Asked on Gaydio what, with hindsight, he would do differently with RTD2, he replied:

Oh! Nothing! I love what I did.

He was given a fortune and he used it to destroy.

The fall of Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday began six weeks ago in mid July but I didn’t hear about it until early August, when suddenly it was everywhere - a national scandal.

In terms of his “expertise”, Arday was the standard Black “academic”. I will let someone else summarise:

he pushed the same anti-white ideology that led to Henry Nowak’s death.

He wrote about how higher education is institutionally racist, even though his own fraudulent career is a living contradiction to this pernicious claim.

He was the child of African immigrants who was given a better life in this country than he could ever have expected in his homeland. Yet he chose to attack the native population and the institutions that gave him every unearned opportunity

That would all have been fine - nay, terrific - in today’s academia… except that he did it with plagiarism. This was his (literally) fatal mistake which, once discovered and shown to the public, led to revelations of much wider, even compulsive, dishonesty. It turned out that, over the years, Arday had made countless fanciful claims. They covered his childhood, disabilities, misfortunes, as well as many incredible achievements in sport, charity and of course his academic career. (A comprehensive list is being maintained here.)

Then video clips surfaced of him, a Cambridge professor, voicing bland platitudes and trite slogans, apparently without an original thought in his head, very clearly “a DEI hire” - but one who, it turns out, even cheated at that most dishonest game.

At first, leftists denied his wrongdoing, made excuses, called his accusers racist and the evidence against him fake or flimsy or exaggerated. But, as it continued mounting, they began giving in, one by one.

The scandal had torn a great gash in the collective reputation of Britain’s academics. A great number of them were involved in stewarding Arday to Cambridge. And then:

In the two years after receiving his Cambridge position, Arday was awarded honorary doctorates from Anglia Ruskin University, Southampton Solent University, the University of Westminster, South Bank Colleges, and St Mary’s University, Twickenham. In 2023, he received the “Most Inspirational Person of the Year Award” at the MBCC (Multicultural Business and Community Champion) Awards, was placed fourth in the Shaw Trust’s list of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK, and was awarded an honorary fellowship by the British Science Association.

So a great number of academics had pretended, or even believed, that a midwit was a genius, a pathological liar was a beacon of integrity, and a serial fraudster was an angel.

While the scandal raged, the man himself received a lot of mockery and contempt - deservedly, in my opinion then and now. With each passing day, the elaborate (but farcical) world of lies that he had constructed was steadily dismantled by one new allegation after another. Someone opined that even his dreadlocks were fake. He was not a laughing stock, because no-one was laughing. This was too serious, too significant, so instead he was the focal point of anger, at his audacity and at the stupidity of others which had enabled it.

And then he committed suicide.

Suddenly the stream of allegations stopped, as did the many opinion pieces describing him as a fraudster and detailing the sheer extent of his deceit, as did the articles speculating on whether DEI has gone too far, and whether wokery should be dialled back, etc. Everyone just fell silent.

Arday was certainly a pathological liar. He found he could make an easy living (being a Black man) in progressive academia.

I am uncertain as to how ideologically anti-white he was. He certainly said and wrote anti-white things, but that might have been simply because he perceived (correctly) that that is what works in the water he had found himself swimming in.

I am also uncertain as to whether he was addicted to sympathy/pity. It might be that he simply found he could obtain material benefits by soliciting sympathy/pity from White people, so went ahead and did it, in pursuit not of the sympathy, but of the material benefits. Maybe the sympathy was really for the pleasure of those idiot White people who dispensed it. This was a mutually beneficial transaction: he got “stuff”, they got the pleasure of feeling good about themselves.

But he didn’t just seek sympathy. He also lied that he was a much more accomplished person than he was, by fabricating hardships he had suffered early in life, which had thwarted his progress until he heroically overcame them. You can’t be a hero unless you overcome adversity, after all. But did he do this because he wanted praise or pity? It is difficult to tell, and probably irrelevant at this stage.

Whatever the cause of his pathological lying and shamelessly dishonest self-promotion, it got him made the youngest-ever Black professor at Cambridge University.

That happened in 2023 so there has been speculation that some of the academics’ motivation for promoting him was a desire to bulletproof their department against crazed BLM guilt-mongering (by then at its zenith, three years after the Summer of Floyd). This is plausible but seems too prosaic an explanation, ignoring the psychology of the female academics concerned. And after all, you could employ a man without making a hero out of him. You could promote him without heaping diarrhoetic praise upon him. Also, academia was promoting men like this long before 2023. Years before any of us heard of Arday, Tony Hayers coined the term “skintellectual”. This refers to a non-white academic whose career is entirely predicated on their writing endless screeds bolstering the anti-white narrative, and serving, by default, as an avatar of non-white triumph over White oppression. All such an “academic” has in the way of thought is anti-white grievance-mongering and endless whining about inequalities (“structural” or otherwise) in how the races are treated (by White people). Such academics have existed for decades now, and if Cambridge University were seeking yet another one to keep BLM at bay, there were far more plausible candidates than Jason Arday, whose lies about his academic record could easily have been checked, and who seems to have been a complete airhead. His only original thoughts were lies about himself.

So why were these female academics taken in by him? I think John Carter has the answer:

In every photograph he’s wearing this open, angelic, sincere expression that presses every sainted magical negro button in the AWFL’s emotionally conditioned brainstem.

Carter elaborated elsewhere but so did Aureus, after seeing this photo:

This photo really demonstrates the trick he played over his career. He manufactured a “modern Star Trek alien” look, as we can see here with his “brain canopy” hair formation. Combined with the distracting gleaming of his vaselined forehead and the unblinking homo-gaze (suggesting “we mean you no harm”) there is a feeling of “I am not just a signalling token but a celestial eunuch here to forgive your sins”.

I find this a far more convincing explanation for his success than mere diversity pandering by silly menopausal women. No doubt that played a part, especially when those women had to persuade their male colleagues to promote Arday, but there were reasons specific to him why they were so inclined towards him in particular.

It is a phenomenon that I have perceived (perhaps incorrectly) elsewhere. I think the popularity of Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and even Andy Burnham can be explained by a boyish child-like quality which triggers in women the powerful maternal instinct: “The boy is innocent and vulnerable, like a baby, and other boys have it in for him, but I can protect him!”

It is notable, in the widely-shared BBC report from March 2023 about Arday’s promotion to Cambridge, that he “cannot” look a man in the eye, yet effortlessly holds a woman’s gaze for extended periods, and even caresses her hands when they meet. His shyness around men was clearly affected, part of a persona he fabricated.

His child-like innocence was also a mirage. In truth he was ruthless, cunning, shameless and paranoid. He reported various people to police for questioning his academic record, and told various students they were racist for questioning his judgement of their work. He advanced by lying, and by threatening anyone who doubted his lies.

But, as explained by Uubzu, one of his more obscure lies could easily have brought dire consequences upon innocent people. He claimed that a masked man had twice broken into his office, the second time threatening him with a knife. If, when scouring CCTV footage, the police had found a viable candidate for this “masked man”, Arday, in order to maintain his story and thereby his reputation, would have had to keep quiet as some innocent man was imprisoned. He surely would have done so. But what makes this even more egregious is that the lie was entirely unnecessary in the first place, dreamed up by him apparently at random one day. How did it benefit him? What was his motive? It would reinforce protective feelings in his female colleagues by showing them that their star negro really was in danger, and thus reinvigorate their concern for him so that, when he needed something from them in future, he could manipulate them more easily.

Jason Arday was despicable.

One Black chancer is a trivial thing to get worked up about. There are plenty of them, after all. There is a wider story here. The vitriolic press coverage was motivated not by racism against Black people, but by the fact that Arday’s case clearly shows there is deep corruption in British academia. The corruption happens to be premised on DEI, but even without that cause, it has implications for our entire society, now and in the future.

Cambridge professors hold positions of great responsibility, with influence over government policy, corporate ideology, national cultural orientation, and the life chances of promising young students. If those positions are being given to incompetent people, people who should never have been entrusted with such power and influence, who cannot handle but can certainly abuse it… that bodes badly for all of us. How can we trust them after this? Who would incur huge debt to get “educated” at Jesus College now?

The real issue is not Arday himself, but the people who promoted him and lavished praise upon him. In doing so, these academics have shown that they themselves are incompetent and shouldn’t be in those positions. The case has made a mockery of British academia in general, because we all know that the policies and attitudes which facilitated Arday’s rise are in place all over the country, and in fact, that institutions are rewarded the more they enact these policies and voice these attitudes. The flaw, therefore, is not incidental but systemic. Therefore, Arday’s case will not be unique and might even be typical.

We have to remark on the sheer gullibility of those middle-aged female academics to believe Arday’s lies and projected persona. Is this a micro example of “mass formation psychosis”? Then again, did they really believe him, or did they actually know he was average (at best) but conclude that facilitating him would look good for them, professionally and among their equally dream-headed friends? But then, why are dream-headed people, silly indulgent women, in academia in the first place?

And we can’t let the male academics off, either. They too are implicated, if only for appeasing their female colleagues. We know that two male academics did raise concerns, but these went unheeded and the two men dropped the matter. Thereafter, did no male academic, rigorous and intelligent and sensible, ever speak with Arday and realise he was an airhead? Or did that happen, and the male academic concluded it was best to keep quiet, for the sake of his own career? Just how toxic and dysfunctional has academia become?

We begin to discern a grim picture. It threatens the whole idea that academics are smarter (in any way) than ordinary people. After this, they seem like fools.

And also corrupt. The woman in charge of promoting Arday, Hilary Cremin, was told two months after his appointment that a 2018 paper by him contained plagiarism and data distortion. Cremin asked Arday about this. He knew exactly what to do: tell her “about his experiences with ‘direct and indirect racism’ and poor health conditions” while writing that 2018 paper. For Cremin, that was all she needed to hear. Indeed, I’m sure it was what she desperately wanted to hear, because it put her, once again, in a position to protect this huge Black child. She pledged to the plagiarist her “full support”.

In the BBC report, Cremin comes across as bright, but certainly nothing special. It is disappointing and very concerning that this is what passes for a senior Cambridge academic nowadays. Moreover she is dressed in an unserious way for a woman of her age and position, wearing a short skirt that makes her look frivolous (which I am certain she is).

We must think of the damage done to academia by having people like Arday there, especially in commanding positions. But we must also think of the damage done by having people like Hilary Cremin there, or indeed anywhere. If she had any sense or any shame, she would have resigned by now.

At first, it seemed that this scandal might be a “reality check” moment for “the regime”. Maybe they would now have to face up to the fallacy of their worldview, and finally “put the woke away”?

Arday’s suicide nixed that.

When the news broke, everyone fell silent… but only for a few hours.

Then the Left, who had been so meek over the previous ten days, found their direction, their momentum. They struck back with “righteous” anger at the Right and the mainstream media (which they claim kowtows to the Right) for attacking Arday, for conducting what they now called a “witch-hunt” against him. It was perfect for the Left, because they could now tell themselves they were indeed the underdog, not the hegemon corrupting all of British society, but the brave rebels fighting a hegemonic right-wing state and media apparatus.

Of course the centre-right buckled immediately. Numerous commentators found they now agreed that the media had gone too far, that Arday didn’t do anything seriously bad, and after all, don’t we all lie in order to get ahead?

With the ever-reliable cowardice of the centre-right, the Left has been able to effortlessly re-frame the scandal. No longer is it about a fraudulent import, his feckless enablers and the corrupted academic environment which fosters and promotes those enablers… now it is about a vicious (racist) media and a hateful (racist) Right. Once again, the miasma plaguing our society is that much-loved classic: racism.

So… after a Black man did a lifetime of wrongs, got found out and killed himself, White Brits are the villains. Arday gets to be a victim in perpetuity, the Left gets to be “on the right side of history”, and the regime gets to continue destroying Britain.

Before Arday’s death, some in our circles were speculating that the scandal was engineered by the regime itself, to cause public outrage and obtain the “justification” it needed to “put the woke away”. That speculation has of course been completely disproven, and I remain convinced that the regime has no intention whatsoever to “put the woke away”.

So useful was Arday’s death for the regime, I suspect that, had he not done it himself, they might have eventually done it for him.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

It is crucial to recognise that Season 2 was filmed before Season 1 aired, and written even before the 2023 specials aired. Therefore it was not, as many have assumed_, a vindictive response to negative feedback.

Conversely, there was no chance to improve it based on that feedback (assuming Davies would ever have done that). This explains the rabid wokery on display, since wokery hadn’t yet been decisively rejected when this was written. There could hardly be a better demonstration of the folly of writing a TV show two years in advance of broadcast: it cannot respond to cultural change and ends up obsolete on arrival. As a result, Season 2 is 2023 preaching to 2025, un-self-consciously.

At this point there was still officially a chance that Disney would renew, if Season 2 fared better than Season 1. But that was very unlikely.

Apart from anything else, the Doctor’s companion would no longer be a cute blonde girl, but an Indian girl. In Britain, having a TV show without any White leads is asking for commercial death.

Any sensible person would predict that fronting a sci-fi show (of all things) with only non-white actors would fail. However, back in 2016, as he was embarking on the wokery that scuttled his own tenure, Steven Moffat adventurously (and self-contradictorily) opined:

Two non-white leads would be amazing. In fact, a lot of people would barely notice.

Moffat might have been thinking, as per his infamous remark about blackwashing history, “by believing in it, we’ll summon it forth”. Well, now that notion would be put to the test.

More importantly, this casting completed the process of detaching Doctor Who from the White British boys who had, for sixty years, identified with it and been its lifeblood. I am sure many of them wanted to watch Season 2, but found themselves unengaged by it, perhaps without understanding why.

(Davies antagonised fans by saying he would like, in future, to cast Viola Davis, a Black American woman, as the Master. That would be a “hat trick” of three non-white leads.)

There would be increased diversity behind the camera, too. Davies had previously said:

I’m aware that we haven’t got enough women writing or writers of colour, which we’re fixing in the next series to come.

In January 2025, the four writers were revealed:

• Pete McTighe - a gay White man, a leftist who abandoned X for Bluesky. He is the only one of the four to have written for the show previously (two badly-received episodes during the Chibnall era, and co-writing a five-episode spin-off series with Davies)

• Inua Ellams - a leftist Black poet

• Sharma Angel-Walfall - a Black lesbian married to a White woman

• Juno Dawson - a White transgender gay man

25% female, 50% Black, 75% gay, 25% transgender. Davies was certainly delivering on his promise to diversify the show. As for those fans who, back in 2005, insisted he had no “gay agenda”, I hope they are now eating humble pie.

Juno Dawson came with particular baggage:

• a writer of books for children, he has included in them advice on anal sex, oral sex and sexting. For this reason, one of his books has been banned in various US states.

• on Twitter in 2020, he cyber-bullied a 14 year-old girl for opposing the Stonewall organisation

• some critics called him (a gay man) homophobic for saying that gay men want to be women. They also claimed he had reduced women to sex objects. I personally don’t consider these criticisms valid, certainly not when compared with his apparent preoccupation with reaching children.

Everything else aside, this man’s obsession with sexuality and gender orientation is a world away from the writers of, say, 1970s Doctor Who.

With less than two weeks to go before Season 2 aired, new companion actress Varada Sethu celebrated the show being woke:

There’s been a couple of Doctor Woke [references] or whatever, but I just think we’re doing the right thing if we’re getting comments like that.

After all that had happened, after the way Season 1 had been received, it is incredible that Sethu would say this. Clearly, among the media, nobody dares to speak against wokery and most people - ambitious young actors - are still in full support of it. This blinds them to how their self-righteous remarks will be received by the general public, dooming them to alienate themselves.

It got even worse. Laughing, Sethu recounted what Gatwa had said to her about being a non-white duo fronting Doctor Who:

Look at us. We get to be in the TARDIS. We’re going to piss off so many people.

It is bad enough that Gatwa said this, but it beggars belief that Sethu was gormless enough to quote it publicly. It proves that Gatwa knew he was ruining something that means a lot to many people, and that he enjoyed doing so, as did his new co-star. Why should any long-time fan of the show, any White person even, give these two people any respect?

At the start of April, with cancellation rumours running wild in the run-up to Season 2, Davies reiterated that there were “no meetings, nothing” going on with Disney at the time and said he was “dying to find out” whether the show had a future.

Then, two days before broadcast, he was interviewed on children’s programme Newsround and dodged a question about the future by saying Doctor Who is an immortal franchise, because “no good idea ever dies”. However:

Sometimes there might be a pause, and during that pause, the viewers of Newsround now will grow up a few years and start writing stories and they’ll bring it back.

For the first time, he was acknowledging that the show might go on “pause”.

With Season 2 imminent, the mainstream media and Rotten Tomatoes once again closed ranks to protect the show. They had a fight on their hands; as the season played out, reaction online was incendiary:

The Robot Revolution

In the opening episode, the Doctor is wearing a dress and meets his new companion. Indian thirty-something Belinda Chandra is an extremely feminist “girl boss” - obnoxious, rude, unfriendly and ungrateful. As well as insulting, berating and degrading the Doctor, she preaches at him. Naturally, Belinda is shown having had a White boyfriend, Alan, and of course he was simpish and obsessed with her.

But Alan was a misogynist. Belinda left him because he wanted to place limits on her behaviour so that she would be a better wife to him. He later becomes the story’s villain, killing many people in order to force Belinda to accept him. The entire episode is thus an attack on (White) “toxic masculinity”, belittling men who are afraid of female power. Belinda even uses the phrase “planet of the incels”.

When, at the end, Alan is reverted to a sperm and egg which are then sucked up by an unthinking automated vacuum machine, the Doctor and Belinda laugh in mockery. This flushes sixty years of characterisation down the drain. The show approves of the Doctor behaving in this way: Alan was not woke and therefore was undeserving of sympathy. With all the self-awareness of the self-righteous, Gatwa and Sethu spoke of this episode as a “compassionate” exploration of modern male loneliness and the incel phenomenon.

To make things much worse, Alan is a nerd, into gaming and sci-fi. In other words he could very easily be a Doctor Who fan. Davies could have made him any sort of young man, but specifically chose to make him a nerd. Many people have assumed this was Davies’ revenge on the fans for disliking the RTD2 era. However, that cannot be true. This episode began production in October 2023, so Davies wrote it long before any of RTD2 aired.

The story’s entire thrust is about misogyny, sexism and “toxic masculinity”. Indeed, according to Sethu, there were many discussions about these topics during production. At most, Davies added some nasty touches to the script at that time, which is when fans were first hearing about the transgender Rose character and beginning to complain, but he couldn’t possibly have made Alan into a nerd this late on. That decision, to attack the show’s fans, was made by Davies before the fans turned against him.

At the time he was writing this script, the nerdy White male fans were mostly excited about his return as showrunner, and pumping up the RTD2 era that was soon to begin.

Whatever dismissive attitude Davies had towards “the fans” in 2005 had now mutated into a contemptuous loathing.

How fitting that this was the least-viewed episode of all time, with a 23% audience drop compared to the previous season’s opener. This boded very badly for the show’s future, since renewal hinged on good ratings. (Yet, on the day it aired, Davies was talking wistfully about seasons 4 and 5.)

Four days later he answered criticisms that Gatwa’s incessant crying was grossly unlike the Doctor:

You don’t tell an actor whether to cry, not to cry, not an actor of that [Gatwa’s] stature. Absolutely not. It’s like, you wouldn’t tell anyone to laugh or not to laugh! It’s a beautiful thing he does, and it’s a completely new thing for the Doctor, that opens doorways into whole new experiences.

Diversity is many things, and sometimes it’s putting emotions on screen you haven’t seen before, or that the Doctor has withheld himself from.

But it does make me laugh…. I know sometimes fans get up in arms about it and they complain about it. They’re the same fans who say, ‘Why don’t you do something new with the programme?’ and you’re like, hello.

He doesn’t seem to give any consideration to the possibility that the fans are correct. This continued the next day when he appeared on BBC Radio 2 and denied that he had made the show too “woke”:

Someone always brings up matters of diversity. And there are online warriors accusing us of diversity and wokeness and of involving messages and issues. And I have no time for this. I don’t have a second to bear [it]. Because what you might call diversity, I just call an open door.

He was claiming that the show is dispassionately open to anyone and is simply reflecting the British population. That cannot be true. Britain today is 17% non-white, but non-white actors are all over RTD2. Non-heterosexuals are just 2.2% of the population, while in RTD2 it seems more like 75%. There is no way this could happen as the result of a merely “open door”. Davies deliberately made it happen. He was lying.

Lux

Season 2’s second episode, Lux, includes a virtual breaking of the fourth wall. The Doctor learns that he is a character in a TV show called “Doctor Who”, made by the BBC. The real-world logo, alongside the BBC’s logo, is shown on a TV. The characters even refer to a real episode, Blink, by name. All of this is eventually revealed to be a hallucination... but still, from the viewer’s point of view, the fourth wall has been broken, the show has gone “meta” and yet another limit has been dissolved.

Metro published (as far as I know) the very first MSM article condemning the RTD2 era.

It cited the record low ratings but also, crucially, the low writing quality.

The Well

The third episode was co-written by Davies and Sharma Angel-Walfall. It lacks the intelligent psychology, the creative wit and the production simplicity of the 2008 story to which it is a sequel, but nevertheless is well-written and involving, and is perhaps the only story in this season that is not offensive in some way. However, one notable thing is that it was originally going to be about African spirits (much like the other episode written by a Black person this season) and this was was only changed because Davies felt it was disrespectful to use figures from a real African religion as a Doctor Who villain. It seems his Black co-writer had no such qualms!

On the 30th of April, the Guardian published an article, “Is Doctor Who doomed?”, asking whether the BBC could justify renewing it given the low ratings.

Lucky Day

The fourth episode, written by Pete McTighe, further alienated the show from the general public while entrenching its progressive fans in their adulation of it.

Clearly written just after the covid period, this story demonises “anti-vaxxers”, “conspiracy theorists”, “hatemongers” and peddlers of “fake news” and “disinformation”, all of the bogeymen Hillary Clinton had named in her 2016 Reno speech. In the episode as in that speech, these various groups are linked (by the characters’ fixation on low taxes and by dialogue mentioning “Albion TV”, an obvious stand-in for GB News) with nationalism and the right-wing. For Clinton it was the Alt-Right, for McTighe and Davies it was Reform UK. The episode is also, like Clinton, paranoid about social media with its unscrupulous “influencers”. It feels very much like a mainstream media attack on alternative media.

However, its characterisation of right-wing influencers is not only crude and ignorant, it is inverted: they behave and get treated as, in real life, left-wing activists do (anti-social disruptive behaviour, smearing people, partial immunity from the law, sympathetic interviews on TV).

It is also very confused “in-story”. Given his own experiences, Conrad must know that UNIT are being honest about aliens so why does he dare them, on stream, to prove it and thus utterly discredit him? And why doesn’t his mole at UNIT, who must see every day that they are being honest, tell him that? Also, if he runs a pro UNIT podcast (“Lucky Day”), how don’t the followers of that know he also runs an anti UNIT podcast (“Think Tank”), and vice versa?

Of course, progressive Whovians didn’t care about these huge plot holes. They adored the episode. It “confirmed” their prejudices, made them feel wise and enlightened and sensible, and demonised their “out-group” as nasty, insecure, selfish, ignorant, dishonest, irresponsible idiots. It was essentially a wet dream for progressives, telling them they are good and their opponents are bad so they shouldn’t feel guilty about being full of hate towards them.

Unfortunately for progressives, the cultural hegemony they once enjoyed had expired. Outside their bubble, nobody shared their hatred for “right-wing” influencers.

Lucky Day’s thrust - total faith in the progressive neoliberal establishment and loathing for any who question it - could have “flown” in 2015 but by 2025 was completely “out of touch”. Once again, RTD2 showed itself incapable of acknowledging the modern world, and ensconced in obsolete presumptions from Davies’ heyday.

For the first time in Doctor Who’s history, ratings dipped below three million: 2.83m.

Even progressive journalists began acknowledging the situation. In Part 6 I mentioned a Metro article that smugly insulted “straight white men” who objected to the show’s new direction. Now, demonstrating how the winds had changed, Metro published a new article by the very same reporter:

What a contrast with a year earlier!

The Story & the Engine

The fifth episode was written by Black Muslim poet Inua Ellams. It sees the Doctor landing in Lagos and suddenly having a history of deep friendship with multiple Black people there, something that has never been mentioned before but is now said to be a huge part of the 15th Doctor’s life.

He says he feels “accepted” in Africa. Belinda doesn’t need him to explain; as an ethnic minority herself, she understands. “[They] treat you like one of their own?” He nods solemnly. She explains that her nan took her to India “whenever she could for the same reason”. Belinda felt accepted among her own ethnic group. The obvious question for this Black man and this Brown woman is “why don’t you leave Europe…?” Of course that question is never asked; instead White people are blamed for not treating either of these outsiders “like one of their own”. Likewise never asked is whether a White person would ever be treated by Africans or Indians “like one of their own”. Preferring one’s own kind is okay - even terrific - except when a White person does it. The messaging is entirely anti-White.

The rest of the episode avoids politics (except for a few inevitable comments about slavery) but is bad in other ways. Plot holes, absurd contrivances, unexplained things, very clumsy infodumping… The writing is simply dreadful. In addition it is a further drift away from sci-fi and towards fantasy.

On top of all that, the actors speak with thick African accents and, but for one small role in a flashback, there are no White actors in the episode whatsoever. British TV drama should not be like this.

Small wonder that it ventured even farther down in ratings than the previous episode, to 2.71m.

The Interstellar Song Contest

This is the most expensive episode ever made and is indeed an orgy of dazzling special effects. Trash 21st Century Western culture somehow survived the destruction of Earth and now, 900 years later, is enjoyed by many different alien species; the contest has three trillion viewers! Written by LGBT activist Juno Dawson, this episode is extremely gay throughout, full of men calling each other “babes” and “sweetheart”. Ordinary viewers are further alienated with cringe-inducing campery, an inter-racial gay couple and a mention of pronouns. There is even a cameo by Graham Norton (whom the Doctor says he met once at Brighton Pride). The whole episode also has a tedious moral message about racism. Ironically, it is actually very good in terms of plotting, characters, momentum and lack of plot holes (even if it does contradict earlier episodes in Season 2). If it hadn’t been for the needless wokery this could have been a very good episode. That said, in the final scene, female Timelord the Rani bigenerates into an Indian woman.

The Sun reported that, with Gatwa’s exit and no actor found to replace him, the show might have to be put on hiatus. The Standard also pointed to the low ratings and said the show might be cancelled altogether. All of this, including Gatwa’s exit, was denied by the BBC.

Then the Telegraph joined in, criticising the show and claiming that “only the BBC” didn’t know it was heading for failure.

Wish World

The penultimate episode is a barrage of woke storytelling. However, it does feature the RTD2 era’s second depiction of a normal nuclear family, and the first one where any of the members speak. The entire family is wiped out in the opening scene. Thereafter, the episode lampoons and demonises traditional social mores (the man goes out to work, the woman stays at home and her main role in life is child-rearing) even though these mores are exactly what make the opening scene (showing a family with many children) possible.

The fact that the Doctor’s companions leave him to “go and fall in love and marry and have babies” is mentioned, but by a villain - the misogynist obsessed with traditionalism who created the fictitious society shown in this episode. That this society is fictitious communicates to the young viewer that traditionalism and heteronormativity rest on delusion; that family formation is not for everyone so it shouldn’t be upheld as the social norm.

At one point, childlessness is celebrated by a female character (Mel). Yes, it’s a throwaway line, but these make an impression on young minds. Given the very low birth-rates in Britain today and how childlessness is known to psychologically harm women, a responsible writer would show Mel voicing regret about never having had children.

Furthermore, the episode characterises “non-conformists” as gay, trans, disabled, etc. This does work within the traditionalist society of the story, but is completely inconsistent with real 2020s Britain. (The Left can never accept that they have cultural authority and power; they must always see themselves as the underdog.)

Similarly, the episode champions the right to doubt social convention and received truth - yet Davies demonises anyone who doubts his favoured social conventions and his received truths. He does this multiple times in this season alone. He even includes a sly swipe at JK Rowling who disgraced herself by not being sufficiently pro-trans:

Especially with his sadistic treatment of Alan in the opening episode, Davies is exactly the cruel zealot that he caricatures.

On the 30th of May, the presenters of a show on BBC Radio criticised the preachy wokery of RTD2. This was significant because it was the BBC turning on itself - for the first time, a rupture in its resolve about the on-going debacle.

The Reality War

The finale of Season 2 is a sorry disjointed mess. To be fair to Davies, once Gatwa jumped ship he had to completely rewrite the second half to show the Doctor dying and regenerating. The result isn’t what Davies had intended. He was having to improvise.

However, even there, he made a reckless, selfish and catastrophic decision. Seeking a headline-grabbing cliffhanger, he had Gatwa’s Doctor regenerate into Billie Piper, a “fan favourite” companion from 2005:

This was bizarre. Nothing like it had ever happened before in the show’s history. Nobody understood how it was going to be resolved, or when, or indeed whether the new character actually is the Doctor. Even the show’s loyal ultra-progressive fans were disgusted at this naked “stunt”.

A leaker soon revealed that it was filmed very hastily just a couple of weeks before broadcast and was indeed a desperate ploy on Davies’ part to persuade Disney to renew their contract.

Unfortunately, all Disney cared about was ratings.

Ratings were even worse than for Season 1, down by about a million:

To grasp how bad this is, one must look at the entire revival, from 2005 onwards:

We can also compare Season 2 with the classic show’s final season, 1989. The latter is in purple and Season 2 (7-day consolidated) in bright pink:

The averages are 4.15m for 1989 and 3.17m for Season 2.

Bear in mind, again, the massive advantage that RTD2 had over 1989 in terms of budget, time, special effects capability, professional writing experience…

Davies’ triumphant return had failed utterly.

Now began the slow, agonising collapse.

Now imagine a product development team who go through iterations of a design. The first, Iteration 1, had serious flaws. Some of them were resolved in Iteration 2, but that introduced some new flaws. But the team are now on Iteration 7, and new people have come in, outside factors have changed the incentive structure around the project so that success becomes more likely, more desired, more facilitated. Now imagine someone looking at Iteration 7 and thinking: “Well, Iterations 1 and 2 let us down, so I’m not going to give this much later version the time of day. In fact, the more it looks like it doesn’t have serious flaws, the more the tricksters are clearly working to lull me into a false sense of security. The better it looks, the worse it actually is. Once bitten, twice shy. I’m not going to fall for it again. No matter what the evidence tells me, I will reject every iteration. This product is simply impossible and all attempts to develop it are either ill-fated or deceitful. There is no product developmental solution.”

Now, to be fair to the detractors of Restore Britain, their paranoia hasn’t been quite this mental. There are legitimate reasons for concern. As well as a history of British organisations being subverted or sabotaged or just imploding through self-destructive misfittery, there are visible flaws with Restore. There are important uncertainties about the structure, funding and future of the party. There have been some infamous gaffes by its Boomer leader. There are some shadowy figures at a high level about whom I know virtually nothing, and I will freely admit that this causes me some discomfort.

But…

My intuition has told me since February, since that video of Rupert Lowe on his farm, that this enterprise is radically unlike any other political party in Britain. Namely, it is sincere. It might be flawed, it might be disorganised or unprofessional (as of yet) or under-resourced. Its leader might not have the same grasp of things that you and I have. But I believe his heart is in the right place, and I believe he adapts quickly, learns from his mistakes, and has surrounded himself with young people who know “the lay of the land” in a way he knows he cannot, and I believe he is mentoring them to take over from him eventually.

Even if I am correct in all of these beliefs, that obviously doesn’t mean that success will come. But it does mean that we should be patient, give Restore the benefit of the doubt, and not rush to see every mistake made, or even every tactic used, as a sign of unfolding treachery.

On the 1st of August, Restore made an offer to Reform UK of “cooperation”. They made some prerequisite demands to preserve their own integrity, but nevertheless, people rushed to see this offer as a sign that Restore were “caving”, losing confidence and seeking “an off-ramp”. Even though Reform were almost certain to reject the offer because of the prerequisites, people thought this was Restore looking to merge with Reform. (Not merely cooperate, but actually merge; paranoia interprets things in the most extreme and calamitous way.)

There are others who have been saying for months that Restore is a con, a “grift”, or at least doomed, and once this offer was made, my colleague Academic Agent regrettably joined that set. In several livestreams then an essay, he wove a complex narrative. Paraphrased:

The regime is laying the groundwork for a merger between Restore and Reform, and then a merger between that amalgam and the Conservative Party. To grease the wheels, the regime is offering an off-ramp of mainstream acceptance to Connor Tomlinson (who isn’t in Restore and despises the mainstream media) and Carl Benjamin (who is in Restore but has a lucrative career of his own so certainly isn’t desperate for mainstream acceptance).

AA’s evidence for all of this was, as far as I can tell, merely the following:

1. Restore’s offer (which he took at face value)

2. Farage’s non-committal response (which he took as veiled acceptance of the offer, rather than the obvious interpretation: a man in an awkward position trying to save face)

3. the fact that Carl Benjamin has recently appeared on GB News and the Daily Express podcast

4. a belief of his that the right-wing parties will have to merge by the next general election in order to defeat Burnham’s revitalised Labour Party. This idea is creditable; it just isn’t matched by any facts “on the ground”. To insist on it is to be married more to theory than to reality.

AA also pointed out that, once Lowe made his offer,

the mainstream press immediately framed the exchange between Lowe and Farage as the start of talks, a possible pact, a coalition

Of course they did. They deliberately associate Reform with Restore so as to pressure Reform to perpetually dissociate itself from Restore. The regime did this for its own reasons, not because Reform and Restore actually are alike (they’re not) or a merger actually is on the cards (it isn’t).

Had AA spoken with me before publishing his essay, I would have advised him to hold back. Had he done so, for just a few days, he would have seen his theory demolished by events:

1. an avalanche of vicious hit-pieces against Restore in the Daily Telegraph, every one of them by avowed Zionists

2. some of those articles echoed by the Jewish Chronicle and Searchlight

3. a hit-piece in the Jewish Chronicle

4. a hit-piece by Searchlight

5. a (Jewish-written) hit-piece in the Independent

6. a (Jewish-written) hit-piece in the Times

7. TalkTV and (avowed Zionist) Brendan O’Neill likening Restore to the Nazis

8. (half Jewish) Nick Robinson interviewing Lowe on BBC radio and mocking him (reported by the Mirror)

9. Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewing Charlie Downes on TalkTV and mocking him

10. GB News having various guests on to talk shit about Restore

11. Alex Phillips’ rabid ranting about Restore on her show and on Twitter

One of the Telegraph hit-pieces (echoed by GBNews) targeted Charlie Downes, framing him as an anti-Semite for implying - six months ago! - that Reform had been “bought” by Zionist interests.

On the 9th of August we saw what all of this was really for. Nigel Farage finally gave a formal response to Restore’s offer: he would consider talks, but only if the party expelled Charlie Downes.

Now here is the interesting (and for AA’s thesis, devastating) thing about Farage’s demand. If it is genuine, that means the regime is attempting to kosherise Restore, which means that Restore is not currently kosher, which means AA is wrong. Conversely, if Farage’s demand is not genuine, namely he doesn’t expect Restore to acquiesce, then there is zero prospect of a merger, which means AA is wrong. Either way, if Lowe rejects the offer, AA is wrong.

Lowe rejected the offer.

In the meantime, by making this particular demand, Farage has laid bare where his true loyalty lies, undermined his own position and credibility and helped his supporters to see the folly of supporting him. He also demonstrated that Downes had been correct in the first place.

Restore won by making their demands, and then won again when Farage made his. And both stages pushed Restore farther away from the regime, not closer towards it.

I think, if Academic Agent had confabulated with various people, he would have had a much better grasp of the situation and wouldn’t have gone ahead and potentially done damage to morale and momentum in the movement. Thankfully, he hasn’t done much damage, for the simple reason that “the crowd” has had enough of fatalism, defeatism and pessimism. Something is obvious to the crowd but elusive to the theorycels: we are moving assuredly away from the post-war consensus, and, at least on the Right, a new apparatus is emerging to accommodate this change and navigate the new environment.

Does that mean the regime will just give up now? Of course not. But they do have a lot to worry about. For the first time in decades, a viable political party exists that vehemently rejects their order, their game structure, and their legitimacy.

The idea that Restore is seeking to merge with Reform was always a paranoid imagining. The idea that Restore is seeking to merge with the Tories is absurd fantasy.

It is very obvious at this point that Rupert Lowe is serious, Restore is in for the long haul, and the party is recovering from its “nadir” of late June. Lowe has explicitly spoken about the plight of White Britons, the party is openly and defiantly pushing the concept of “demographic security”, the membership is growing steadily (now at 150,000), Reform are cornered and discredited, the mainstream media are hysterical, and Lowe still doesn’t care.

In the meantime John Cleese has jumped aboard, and he has five million Twitter followers. Ah, but social media doesn’t matter, right? Wrong. Social media - whether Boomer Facebook or Zillen-X Twitter - is the life-blood of Restore, motivating, informing and recruiting the people who will do the vast amounts of donkey work that brings the party to the general public. What happens on Twitter does matter, and that is why momentum among Restore supporters on there is important and should not be damaged, certainly not on the basis of vague hunches or paranoid suspicions.

I will take issue with one other thing AA said in his essay:

there is little to separate Reform and Restore: on immigration rhetoric the two parties have largely converged

Here AA was making an assertion in order to bolster his desired belief that a merger was on the cards. I don’t think he really believes the assertion. He just wanted to.

But still, let us address the assertion. I would ask AA to think back to Restore’s birth as a party in February with that video from Lowe on his farm, and to compare it with Farage’s antics at the time: a gaudy Butlins-esque karaoke bonanza while Rome burned. This contrast demonstrates that the two parties are fundamentally different beasts, which means that even if their rhetoric converges, that is an event of no significance, because Reform is insincere and corrupt, merely aping Restore’s rhetoric in a futile attempt to regain credibility. Does anyone seriously believe that Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Richard Tice or Nigel Farage care about the demographics of Britain? After everything these people have said and done? Come on. Their rhetoric is irrelevant. A fundamental divide exists between Reform and Restore. There is not going to be a merger. I don’t think there is even going to be “cooperation”.

But I do think we are going to get our country back.

The journey is going to be long, and there will be more screw-ups along the way, some of them infuriating in how easily they could have been avoided. And perhaps Restore will transpire to not be the vehicle that wins elections, but even then, it will move us further towards that goal. There is no better vehicle lying around right now, none that can even remotely match it, so why reject this one just because it isn’t perfect?

We need to believe in ourselves and our cause in the way that the Left believe in themselves and their cause, despite reality. We are up against the Leviathan, but reality is on our side, and I believe the British people are just waiting to be given permission to agree with us.

We can be part of that effort or we can sit on the sidelines, critiquing and bitching and conspiracy-theorising like the tragic abused woman, incapable of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

But at least she has the excuse of being traumatised. For those determined to see Restore as ill-fated or insincere, the reason seems to be a burning desire to be “cleverer than thou”.

I hope I am not doing them a disservice, because I consider some of these people my friends. I invite them to reconsider. I think their talents would be useful and their contributions valued. But it requires seeing yourself as part of something, not as an “above it all” loner or a career malcontent. That adjustment might be difficult for content creator types, being, as we are, natural lone wolves. But it is an adjustment I think we all should make. There is, after all, much at stake here.

This is not a time for fatalism or for lofty detachment. It is a time for imagination, courage and audacity. This, as AA once said, is the shot.

Season 1 of RTD2 got the worst ratings in Doctor Who’s history and terrible fan feedback and was a laughing stock online, the height of “woke” storytelling. Having cost a fortune to make and with much fanfare about partnership with Disney, as a new lease of life for a sixty year-old programme it fell disastrously short. The question, of course, was what would happen next.

The immediate factor was that Season 2 had already been made. It wrapped filming just before Season 1 began airing. As a result, there was no time - and no money - to make any changes based on feedback about Season 1.

Bad Wolf Productions and their funders/broadcasters Disney and the BBC, as well as Davies himself, could only grit their teeth for a full year while Season 2 was post-produced and, eventually, broadcast.

We resume our coverage just after Season 1 ended, when everyone was shell-shocked from the disaster and Davies was smugly promising more drag and gay material in Season 2.

Davies was well aware, before and during and after the airing of Season 1, that there was a groundswell of complaint on social media. As shown in the images above, YouTube was very active, but when talking about the matter Davies always focussed on Twitter/X.

[When we lament a fandom’s alleged resistance to inclusion] are we actually talking about society now? Or are we talking about a single platform [Twitter] that is very noisy? None of us knows the answer to that.

The show’s low ratings surely confirm that Twitter was accurately representing general society and that the objections posted there were shared by most ordinary people, but Davies didn’t want to admit that. Nor did he want to admit that it wasn’t only on Twitter.

So it feels like we’re having a conversation into an echoing box. Unless you lift your head, and then the world is very different. Or you have to hope that the world is very different.

Yes, he was hoping. But in truth there is only so far you can push the public. Of course there is a limit. And that limit is where they feel that your demands and indulgences could harm their children, or even other people’s children.

But Davies didn’t think of that. So locked was he in his obsession with gay rights and individual freedom, he ignored all possible reasons against it and kept on fighting “bigots”:

So what do we do except keep on fighting? And I think it is a fight. I’m conscious of being part of it. It’s a tough old battle... but I simply will not back down.

This, I think, is how Davies ended up killing the thing he loved. In 2005, he used Doctor Who to ask for tolerance from the mainstream, and at first he received it. But he pushed too far. As the years passed, and the world grew ever more tolerant of sexual deviance, he became ever less grateful, ever more entitled, demanding, obnoxious, preachy and self-righteous. From 2023, he used his cherished TV show to reprimand the mainstream. In the process he made it unwatchable, alienating it (and himself) from the mainstream.

While Season 1 was playing out, various outlets attempted to hide the damage. Rotten Tomatoes froze public reviews throughout the majority of the broadcast period because they were so at odds with those of “professional critics” (regime apparatchiks):

As the low ratings gradually emerged, there was a scramble among devoted fans to explain them away. First, they laughably said that the warm weather was keeping people outdoors. By season’s end they had come up with a whole slew of excuses:

The first sign of doom came on the 11th of June 2024. With Season 2 filmed, Davies revealed he was writing ahead:

I’m working on the fourth script now for [Season 3]… Those scripts have to be ready by about August, for prep… It’s not actually commissioned, that’s still up in the air.

So Disney hadn’t renewed yet. By this time, Season 1 was three-quarters over. For renewal not to have happened by then was less than encouraging, to say the least.

But that’s the same for every TV programme. I shouldn’t say we’re confident, because that’s asking for a fall, but we’re very confident, to be honest.

Asking for a fall, indeed.

Davies did acknowledge the show’s low ratings:

You know, they might not be the ratings we’d love. We always want higher.

Then - and this is so desperate that I think it must signal that, deep down, he knew the truth - Davies mentioned 28-day cumulative ratings. I had never heard of this metric before, let alone seen it used as a barometer of success.

But they are building over the 28-day period. Episode 1, Space Babies, is already up to 5.6 million and counting. So it is getting there.

Every episode between 2005 and 2017 got 5.6m views on its first night. Taking 28 days to reach the same number is an astonishing decline.

Davies also claimed:

according to the people who juggle the numbers, all targets have been reached and exceeded. The BBC are running around like mad things.

This seems like an outright lie.

Asked whether, in retrospect, he would do anything differently with the RTD2 era, he replied:

I mean, no, to be honest – I’m very proud of it!

At this time, I think his colleagues were all afraid to tell the emperor the truth about his new clothes.

The mainstream media were also “toeing the line”. During Chris Chibnall’s tenure, they at first sang its praises - the female Doctor, the non-white casting, the increased wokery - but eventually had to admit it was a dismal failure. In 2024, there must have been even greater pressure to defend Davies. He is a much more prominent and influential figure in the British television industry than Chibnall, more recognisable to the general public, and more beloved by luvvies. All through Season 1, no mainstream journalist dared admit the problem.

Inevitably, though, cracks started to appear.

It began on the 17th of July, when Deadline suggested Disney might withdraw and Gatwa might leave, returning only to film a death scene for his Doctor to cap Season 2.

Comic-Con 2024

At Comic-Con in late July to promote the show, Davies was amongst friends. The audience there are not the sci-fi fans of the 1990s, but hardcore progressives who cheer on the subversion of franchises. These people are in disagreement not just with ordinary opinion but even with most male fans of sci-fi. United by progressive dogma against a mainstream they feel (or imagine themselves to be) excluded from, they constitute a new subculture.

It is a subculture that Davies himself helped to cultivate, with Doctor Who back in 2005, more with Torchwood and now even more with RTD2. It is a subculture of confused females and emasculated males who are obsessed with being different. Paradoxically, these people are fanatical about sci-fi franchises, but will celebrate those franchises being twisted out of recognition in the name of trans rights, gay rights, multiculturalism, feminism, etc. - this nexus of ideologies being their religion.

The more a franchise alienates itself from the general public, the more these people will cheer. But, while there is an unfortunately large number of these people, it is nowhere near enough to sustain a franchise.

Many of these people are politicised gays - far more politicised post-2005 than they would have been in, say, 1995. Many were Millennials not given sufficient lead by social convention, and left to drift into the various categories awaiting them on Tumblr. After this social group was brought together in the post-Buffy world of sci-fi/fantasy fandom, they became the “SJWs” of the mid 2010s and in some cases the violent antifa of the late 2010s and certainly the BLM rainbow drones of the early 2020s, and are now the childless forty-somethings of today, still clinging to the progressive activism which once gave them a sense of purpose and triumph.

For a flavour of how such people think about Doctor Who, here are some gay fans discussing Season 1:

UNWIN: It’s the first time that the Doctor talks like I do, as a gay man.

McCURDY: I feel exactly the same, he’s talking like how I talk.

BEVERIDGE: The Doctor has always appealed to gay men, because he’s a nonconventional male role model. So having the Doctor be more queer has allowed people to identify that bit more closely with him.

Fundamentally changing a sixty year-old character is perfectly fine, if it panders to your own feelings.

At Comic-Con, Davies spoke about trans rights, invoking his endless obsession with being persecuted:

I don’t go online much. Maybe I should, maybe that’s wrong. I’m talking about Twitter/X as “the portal” online. I don’t feel particularly safe [on Twitter] as a gay man. Increasingly, I think that it’s worse, worse, and worse in society. I see what’s said out there, but that’s a long discussion for another time. But I’m not sure I can even be part of that. So that’s tricky. So that stops me going online in many ways... So I get my agent telling me what’s going on...

There are several points to pick up on here.

First, he says he is fighting “battles” with gay/trans issues, but also that he doesn’t like to take part in debate online regarding those issues. He doesn’t feel “safe” on Twitter. Knowing what is said on there stops him going on. In other words, this is a man who cannot defend his ideas on a level playing field, and knows he can’t, so prefers to use his massive MSM soapbox to preach to people instead of debating with them on an equal footing. You could not get a clearer example of condescending, arrogant progressive elitism.

Second, it confirms his long-held loathing of Twitter, especially since Elon Musk took it over. This in turn confirms that the sly mention in Season 1 of an evil tech billionaire was indeed a reference to Musk. It is also another reflection of the change in the Left since Trump/Brexit: before, they were very pro freedom of speech, but afterwards they have turned against it, to such an extent that they demonise Musk for enabling it amidst a climate of near-universal and arbitrary leftist censorship.

Third, his focussing on Twitter seems tactical. Instagram, Facebook and especially YouTube were also ablaze with vituperation about RTD2, but those platforms don’t have “a reputation” that can be invoked in order to neutralise the criticism. By contrast, post Musk’s take-over, Twitter is “understood” by leftie liberals (Davies’ people) to be a den of right-wing fanaticism, hatred, conspiracy theory, bigotry and stupidity, therefore it actually plays in Davies’ favour to associate it with opposition to RTD2. This casts said opposition as a product of the right-wing bogeyman, not of ordinary people.

After saying this, Davies thought for a moment then changed tack:

I think Doctor Who’s fine… I think there are things happening in the culture wars, particularly with trans rights these days that are a million times more important than what’s happening with Doctor Who.

I think this should be interpreted carefully. He specifies “what’s happening with” the show, not the show itself. I think his actual meaning is that the controversy surrounding his revamp of Doctor Who is less important than trans rights, so please talk about that instead of his monumental screw-up.

He continued:

[There are] battles to be fought. And it’s getting worse. It’s… it’s terrifying.

Alex Kurtzman said:

You’re fighting some of those battles on the show just by [having] the [minority] representation.

Davies agreed:

I do that on purpose… Absolutely, that’s part of the battle.

Given these comments, there was no ambiguity: Davies no longer primarily saw Doctor Who as a thing in its own right that existed outside of him, but as his personal plaything and his vehicle for pushing his political views - onto children. He had turned from a dramatist into a demented propagandist. The results were celebrated by Comic-Con, but rejected by a nation.

Six weeks earlier, Davies had said:

Ncuti’s off to do a play, The Importance of Being Earnest. And so we’re coming back [to film] after that [in February 2025].

So filming would begin once Gatwa became available. But now, when asked at Comic-Con, Davies refused to confirm that Gatwa would be appearing in Season 3. It seemed he was preparing to throw Gatwa under the bus in an attempt to ensure that there would even be a Season 3.

Davies’ belief in an August 2024 deadline for delivering the Season 3 scripts seems to have evaporated by the end of that month, when he told SFX:

[Season 3 is] an industry decision, it’s like any business – these things take time. I think the decision will come after the transmission of season two.

Also in August came the astonishing news that Davies would be teaching people how to write TV drama. Given the incredible shoddiness of his writing on Season 1, the mind boggles as to how anyone could think him fit to teach the craft of writing. He had also taken to vastly over-estimating the quality of his own work. Such a man is the last who should be allowed to train novices. But who can be surprised? The job was given to him by his long-time friend, Jane Tranter, executive producer of RTD2.

Interviewed on a BBC show in October, Gatwa said he would be filming Season 3 in 2025. Ominously, the BBC removed this statement before broadcast.

Disney omitted Season 2 from a preview trailer of their 2025 content. This lack of enthusiasm made it seem increasingly doubtful that they would be funding any Season 3. It was probably around now (November 2024) that Gatwa made the decision to leave, prompted by Disney’s apparent impending departure and by his own skittish treatment by Davies.

2024 Christmas special

This was written by Steven Moffat. He is a talented writer, far more so than any of the new writers Davies brought on board. He delivered an intricately-plotted, engaging and heart-warming story. However, it has two serious flaws, which a responsible showrunner would have spotted.

The first is that it is too busy and “all over the place”, precluding the character development that would have been welcome with both Anita and Joy and thereby weakening the emotional punch that it tries to deliver.

The second is something endemic to RTD2: a callous disregard for things once deemed important. Namely, the Doctor encounters a hotel that enables its visitors to dip in and out of different points in history, doing untold damage to the timeline. This would have outraged any Doctor before now, yet Gatwa’s incarnation thinks nothing of it. This frivolous attitude is all over RTD2: nothing seems to matter. Well then, why should the viewer care?

For all that, it is probably the best script of the RTD2 era. Sadly, by now the damage had been done, and it got lower ratings than any previous Christmas special, 1.5m down from its predecessor:

The official rating is 5.91 million viewers, but the incremental data shows that during most of the broadcast it was actually below 4 million:

A story like this deserved better, both in finessing and in the episodes that preceded it and should have brought in more viewers, but instead drove them away.

2025

In January 2025, Bad Wolf advertised their studio space:

That the advert spoke in the past tense about Doctor Who being filmed there, not as an ongoing concern, was ominous. Of course, in the normal run of things, filming of Season 3 would have started by now.

More pressing still, given that Season 2 was “in the can”, was the question of whether a Christmas special would precede a future Season 3. Davies confirmed a 2025 Christmas special hadn’t been included in Disney’s “first order”, but nevertheless claimed to be confident about the show’s future. A month later, the Sun reported that, sans funding, there would be no 2025 special.

In early February, the crew was unexpectedly spotted doing location work. The Sun suspected this was hastily-arranged filming of Gatwa’s exit from the show, and turned out to be correct. It was exactly as Deadline had predicted in July 2024.

Soon, the Sun alleged that Gatwa had quit and the production crew had been told to find new work because the show was being axed.

Apparently Gatwa had had to turn down a very lucrative perfume advert because of his Doctor Who contract - one reason he might want to buy himself out of it. (Can anyone imagine Jon Pertwee doing a perfume advert?)

The Sun quoted an “insider”:

Ncuti doesn’t want to be tied to the series beyond this and plans to relocate to Los Angeles with several Hollywood projects standing by for him.

His team also see a lot of fan backlash from the series, and don’t want the perception of him still being The Doctor to get in the way of any future work.

The BBC denied everything. Nevertheless, it was obvious that Gatwa had left. He soon removed mention of the show from his Instagram bio.

In mid March, Davies won Gaydio’s “Pride Icon” award. In his acceptance speech, he fulminated about various right-wing bugbears and yet again repeated his lifelong refrain about gays being in more danger than ever:

I think times are darker beyond all measure, and beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.

He elaborated to the Guardian:

As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale… I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world… I’m not being alarmist. I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.

By now Davies had announced his next project, a gay drama for Channel 4. For this he was reuniting with Jewish producer Nicola Shindler (his enabler on Queer as Folk and It’s a Sin). It seemed significant that he would take on new projects while supposedly immersed in the huge task of steering Doctor Who. As he would later explain:

I was technically busy on Doctor Who, but I was driven to this [writing] desk. I had to write it in Manchester. And I would have written it for free. It just had to be written.

And the reason? Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Reform UK.

They’re out to get us. The president of the United States is literally out to get us, is discounting us. He would be happier with us invisible and gone, defunded, completely invisible if not biologically altered to become as straight as him.

This was typical Davies paranoia, but more deranged than ever.

In late March, a YouGov poll revealed the show’s dreadful standing with young and old viewers alike.

And now Season 2 was imminent. The long wait must have been agony for everyone involved in making it. They surely knew and dreaded the backlash it would elicit, but were powerless to avert it.

• dis-enchanting modern dialogue and accents

• black Helen of Troy heading a general mystery meat cast of “Ancient Greeks”

• transgender warriors

• bad writing

• subversion of concepts

Let us first confront the dumb notion that you need to have watched the film to judge it (a la Douglas Murray). No, I don’t need to watch the film to know that it is wrong, stupid, destructive and subversive to depict Helen of Troy as black. It is likewise common sense to know how a mystery meat cast will affect the telling of a classical European story. I can also predict - accurately - what effect modern dialogue will have on a mythic ancient story, because anyone could predict that. Transgender Greek warriors speaks for itself. As for the bad writing, that isn’t my concern here - although it is a widespread phenomenon nowadays and very much of concern to me - because others can analyse that. Ditto the subverting of the story’s concepts. But I can condemn all of these things, easily, without having personally endured them in this particular instance, for I have endured all of them elsewhere.

Indeed, if progressives tell us we can’t condemn the film before watching it, why were they celebrating it before watching it?

Let’s get to the point: this film is a White humiliation ritual. You know that by how much progressives celebrate it, rally to defend it, and want more of it.

The specific nation/people of Greece are especially degraded by this (eg. by accepting their budget contribution but not having a single Greek actor in the film or including Greece in its opening “world tour”). This abuse of the Greek people is even more grotesque because they are today a small and harmless nation.

But all European people, both in the Old World and the New, are degraded by this film. It perverts a key foundational text of our civilisation, it callously inserts non-Europeans into our heritage, it offends against the Faustian drive (much as Ridley Scott’s execrable Napoleon (2023) “biopic” did), in the manner of egalitarian poison it (by using modern American dialogue and accents) negates our very concepts of hierarchy and “the classical”, and, typical of Nolan’s spirit-shrivelling rationalism it dis-enchants our mythology, casting gods and magic as merely “apparent”.

Mainstream conservatives, of course, are as bovine as ever, seeking out ways to agree with the progressives and suppress their instinctual disgust and disappointment, so as to kid themselves that they have not been (yet again) defeated and humiliated. Mainstream conservatives are (due to their financial clout) an entity in political circles but (due to their nature) a non-entity in political discourse. They are the Renfield to the progressive’s Dracula. They are the shadow of the progressive, the forlorn echo of the jubilant vandal.

Is Christopher Nolan a mainstream conservative? Probably, but one with unusual amounts of agency and curiosity. He certainly had a reputation for being “a bit right-wing”. This is why I think, for the progressives, The Odyssey represents the cucking of Nolan, the successful corrupting of the only director right-wingers thought might just possibly be on their side. The progressives feel they have collected another scalp, in other words. This explains a lot of their joy about The Odyssey. But I am not sure they are really correct. It is more likely that Nolan willingly decided to join them. Having sailed quite close to the wind in his films thus far, I think he thought “okay, time to stop playing around now, and start being more socially responsible”.

It is natural, but also a sort of cope, for right-wingers to assume that Nolan didn’t want to do this. I disagree. I don’t believe he did this out of cowardice (he seems genuinely pleased with himself, not embarrassed or ashamed) or even in pursuit of Oscars (he goes far beyond what would be needed to clear that bar). For example, if he absolutely “had” to have a non-white Helen of Troy, he could have cast a mixed-race woman, or someone vaguely attractive, a Halle Berry type. Instead he chose a woman who looks like she is straight out of the jungle. It was as far from the Aryan ideal as he could possibly get without leaving planet Earth. So it was not desire for acceptance that drove him, nor the cowardice that would lead to such arrant compromising. I don’t think he was compromising. I think he did this willingly and even gleefully. As to the reason why, I don’t know. I am just certain that he was not acting under duress. I think right-wingers should give up on that notion. Christopher Nolan is not our friend.

Let us look at the fatuous defences progressives have made of the Helen casting. Almost all of them are tedious examples of pretending not to understand:

• she is a fictitious character (so it doesn’t matter…?)

• she is only on-screen for a few minutes (irrelevant)

• we don’t know that Homer intended her as White (of course we do)

• the character has already been played by non-white actresses - Eartha Kitt in a 1950 theatre play by Orson Welles and Galyn Görg in a 1996 episode of Xena: Warrior Princess! (Neither of these was an adaptation of The Odyssey, and neither was “serious”, the first being an experimental surrealist stage show and the second being a tongue-in-cheek 1990s pulp TV show.)

• the White actors in the film also aren’t Greek! (they can pass as Greek, are far more plausibly Greek than any non-white actor)

• why do you even care about the actress’s race…?! (then why do progressives care about it enough to feverishly celebrate it?)

Then there is the moronic and disingenuous argument that, if you can accept ghosts, giants, sea monsters, magic and a cyclops, then you can surely accept a black Helen of Troy:

As usual, Rotten Tomatoes is dutifully presenting the picture that everyone just loves this film. Now, it might be chicanery. I think it is, especially with the public reviews. But if it isn’t, that bodes very badly for public tastes. And either way, we know that mass numbers of them are paying to watch this film.

And that brings us to the matter I really want to discuss regarding this film. The people I want to reach are those who were hoping beforehand that it would fail, finally marking the end of “the woke era”.

To the contrary, The Odyssey stands as a “proof of concept” for Hollywood and all other media producers. If even Helen of Troy can be depicted as black, anyone can be (and therefore must be). If you think that, after this, some low-budget film is going to get away with having an all-White cast, you are kidding yourself. The precedent has been set: a $250m epic can thrive commercially with a diverse cast, even one that includes the hideous Zendaya and the hideous Lupita Nyong’o. That means all films will now be expected to do the same (or more) in terms of diversity casting.

Also, it is a proof of concept in terms of multiple new ways to distort European history and Western civilisational heritage. It has gone right back to the beginning of European history and globohomoed even that. If you think that, after this, any mainstream film is going to get away with faithfully depicting more recent periods in European history - say, Ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, Restoration France, Edwardian England - you are kidding yourself.

So I think we now have to definitively put away the notion that “woke is being put away”. Woke is dead and discredited, and we were correct to perceive that. Woke is also getting a bit slicker and more tactful, and we were correct to perceive that. But we were wrong to think that these factors meant it was being retired as “the official global state ideology”. In fact, the very “battering ram” / “shock and awe” effect (2015-2022) which exhausted people to wokery was also what established it as default, omnipresent and unanswerable - the norm. After the fact, people are tired of it, tired of fighting it, but it has become unfightable anyway.

At least, it has become unfightable in the sense that the institutions are clearly never going to “put it away” voluntarily. They have shown that with The Odyssey.

They have also shown that another canard is false: “go woke, go broke”. We desperately need to give up on that one as well. Whenever you hear someone say it, you should ask them how the weather is in 2015. Mock them, insult them, make them embarrassed about their gormlessness. While it is true that some woke films make a loss at the box office (Joker: Folie à Deux, Snow White, Supergirl) it doesn’t even matter then because the studios are massively wealthy and can withstand huge losses. You can’t “hurt” them by refusing to buy their poison. If you are hoping that the general public will unify to do that for you, again, you are kidding yourself. The masses will buy whatever they are told to buy. They have about as much agency as they have taste.

In Britain we have seen similar “elite narrative control” in recent weeks: Ann Widdecombe’s brutal murder was minimised and memory-holed (because she was right-wing), and Andy Burnham’s manufactured ascent to No.10 has reinvigorated the Labour Party in the face not only of its own hollowness and ineptitude, but also of Britain’s dire condition. You can distract the masses from almost anything and make them do almost anything.

In the case of The Odyssey, the advertising machine made sure that the masses did as required. In its opening weekend alone, the film made $264m, exceeding its $250m budget. It needed to make twice as much in order to fully recoup its costs, but that was achieved with its second weekend. And now, every ticket being sold is a bonus.

So it has worked out for them. This butchering of our civilisational heritage has been successful. Why? Because they have the tools and the hegemony to ensure that their projects are successful.

This brings us to the ultimate problem in countering wokery. The difficulty is not production - which is much easier than twenty years ago and is destined to become infinitely easier with AI - but distribution and, as an adjunct of that, “ascension” into mainstream culture, achieving of “legitimacy”.

These, not the production of our own media, are the dilemmas we need to confront now. People triumphantly say “we can make our own media now” and that is true, but it is irrelevant if nobody is going to see (or pay for) what we make.

I don’t have the answers. I just think The Odyssey has helped to show us what the correct questions are.

We have been told recently that a kirpan is a “small” Sikh ceremonial blade, usually about three inches long. But, looking through the newspaper archives (demonstrated by the photo above), British journalists and Sikhs themselves have historically used the word “kirpan” to refer to blades of many different sizes, so it is not surprising that, even today, nobody seems to be sure what the word actually means, or what exactly we have committed to tolerating on our streets. Is it a sword? Is it a dagger? Is it something even smaller than that? It seems to be all of these. Only this year (for reasons we will get to) has the media assured us that a kirpan is typically just three inches long.

Even before being officially legalised in 1988, the kirpan (in all sizes) was almost always tolerated in Britain. Various Sikhs were arrested for carrying one but charges were usually dropped, convictions only happened for long blades and even then not always, and in at least one instance the police actually apologised for the arrest. Interestingly, two of those arrested Sikhs were converts - one White in 1973 and one Black in 1982.

Where it was used in crime, it was only ever against other “Asians”. I found two examples. In Southall in 1983 a street fight occurred between two “Asian” gangs and involved the use of both short and long “kirpans”, among many other types of weapon. Dozens of men were injured. In Kent in 1987, a huge fight broke out inside a Sikh temple between “rival groups of Asians”, some with blades of 75cm in length. Four men were slashed.

But all of these victims were Asian, and the stories would only make local news. Most White British, the broad public, would be oblivious. Perhaps that is how the kirpan could be formally legalised, the very year after that fight in a temple. The Criminal Justice Act 1988 made it officially legal for Sikhs to carry a ceremonial blade in public. (This was later ratified by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019.)

Thereafter, there was the question of how much to tolerate it. In several cases in the 1990s and 2000s, it caused concern in schools and airports around the country. In every case, the answer found was to tolerate it more. It is remarkable how smooth the trajectory of acceptance has been. Then again, what school would forbid a pupil from carrying one around, when, given the legalisation, that would amount to the school breaking the law?

Though the law stipulates no size limit, the media assure us that most Sikhs only carry a small blade of about three inches in length. (Although it has to be said, even this could easily kill a man.)

But, as noted, even before this law, Sikhs carried much longer blades than that. Moreover, there is “mission creep”; if a law officially allows small blades, gradually longer blades will be tolerated, since nobody wants to take a non-white to task. I can’t find a single case after 1988 of a Sikh being arrested for carrying a kirpan of any length. Laws are used expansively against Whites, but diminishingly against non-whites. They have ever more leeway, we have ever less.

Thus, multiculturalism brings us scenes like this, even in Hazelbank Park in Northern Ireland:

If we read the actual text of both acts, we see that the legal exemption is not solely for Sikhs. In fact, Sikhs aren’t even mentioned. It applies to the adherents of any religion which requires the carrying of weapons. But of course, Sikhism is the only such religion. Some strands of modern Paganism and Wiccanism involve an athame, some strands of Buddhism a phurba, but there is no requirement to carry one around so neither qualifies for the legal exemption.

In theory, a bunch of White people could invent a religion which required them to carry swords around, and going by established law the British state would have to tolerate it. In practice, of course, this would never happen. Therefore, in practice what British law provides is a privilege for Sikhs that isn’t, and never would be, enjoyed by anyone else. Natives can only enjoy that privilege if they convert to the foreign religion of Sikhism.

This bizarre situation went on unchecked because very few people had any reason to be aware of it.

In the meantime, newspapers informed the British public that the kirpan is “a gold ceremonial sword symbolic of the struggle to maintain law and order and protect the innocent” and that it “represents freedom, protection, truth and justice”.

If they ever encountered a kirpan, it was probably in a formal setting of some kind. A Sikh brigadier gifted one to his former regiment in Penicuik. London police chief Sir Paul Condon was gifted one while visiting a Sikh temple. All very charming.

There just wasn’t much need for White British to know or care. I’d bet that 95% of them had never even heard the word “kirpan” before May 2026.

Then news broke of a criminal trial of a young Sikh, Vickrum Singh Digwa, who had killed a White teenager, Henry Nowak, using a ceremonial blade. Among other things about this case, White people were outraged to hear for the first time about the “religious exemption for Sikhs”, one law for us and another for them, British law giving them more freedoms than us - the natives! For many it was a perfect example of “two-tier Yookay”, even though the law goes back to 1988.

It was a bit ironic, because in fact Digwa was convicted not only of murder but of “possessing a bladed article in a public space”. The religious exemption didn’t help him. Why? Because he used an 8” pesh-kabz which the court ruled was surplus to his religious obligations, which were already fulfilled by the much smaller kirpan he wore around his neck and did not use in the murder.

So, technically, the public outrage about the religious exemption was unnecessary. But not really, because, if not for that exemption, Digwa would have got a longer prison sentence. Moreover, if not for the exemption, police would surely have taken an interest in a young man walking around with an 8” blade hanging from his waist, as Digwa was in the habit of doing every day. Sure, in combination with the small kirpan, the pesh-kabz was still technically illegal, but nobody knew this because nobody knows much about foreign cultures, especially about how they intersect with boring legal provisions. A non-Sikh walking around with the same weapon would be arrested immediately. Digwa wasn’t, because he is a Sikh.

Moreover, if anyone had claimed that his pesh-kabz was illegal, Digwa could have countered, saying it is required for his religious obligations because he is a member of the Nihang order. Even after Digwa’s conviction, any Nihang Sikh could still use that defence. And how could we Whites disagree? What do we know about their religious obligations? Had you even heard the word “Nihang” before now? I certainly hadn’t. We are tourists to their culture, and disinterested ones at that, while by contrast they can claim to be total citizens of our nation, every bit as integrated and invested in its ways as we are.

Despite these many nuances, the Digwa trial has prompted demands for the religious exemption to be abolished. The phrasing is typically “ban the kirpan”, even though abolishing the exemption would not “ban” it, only prohibit it being carried in public.

There are numerous reasons why people want this.

Some want ethnic revenge against Sikhs collectively for the Nowak murder.

Some are outraged that Sikhs have a freedom denied to the rest of us. They want equality under the law, one rule for all, etc. But if that argument is used, progressives will smugly explain that, in fact, Sikhs don’t have more freedoms than us, because the exemption applies to anyone whose religion has this requirement. In any case, if the goal is “one law for all”, I’d say the better way is to increase freedom for non-Sikhs rather than reduce it for Sikhs: let anyone carry such a knife, as used to be the case. We would still be protected by all the laws around assault, murder, etc. should a knife be used offensively (laws which, incidentally, apply to Sikhs today). I also think there is something petty, spiteful and feministic about removing weapons from people, defanging them. I think it would be more honourable for us to masculinise ourselves than to emasculate this other group. Having said that, I also don’t agree with “one rule for all”; this is our homeland, so if anything we should have more rights than minorities.

Some just want a safer Britain. They are outraged that the state allows the threat of kirpan-enabled Sikhs in their midst. But, if that argument is used, Sikhs will respond with statistics. And it genuinely is an extremely rare threat; Henry Nowak is, as far as I can tell, the first White Brit who has ever been killed with a Sikh ceremonial blade. But as for the idea that a ban would make us all safer… well, what about the argument, long-cherished on the Right, that “guns don’t kill people, people do”? And would it make us safer? Is it safer to live amongst kirpan-enabled Sikhs, or amongst Sikhs enraged at your emasculation of them and your obliteration of their culture? I honestly don’t know the answer. At any rate, I can understand why people think a ban would make us safer; it would certainly have made Henry Nowak safer. But then there is another question: do we really want safety at the expense of liberty, like the awful middle-aged harpies who want digital ID and censorship for the sake of “safety”?

For other people, the argument is that Sikhs should “become more British”, and an obvious obstacle to that is their ancestral habit of carrying a ceremonial blade. They want Sikhs to be forced to relinquish their weird foreign customs. This argument is virtually identical to that for banning the burka: it would force these foreigners to integrate into mainstream British culture. Civic nationalists see that as both possible and desirable.

I don’t.

I want these people - Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and non-white Christians and Atheists - to leave Britain. Whether they leave by choice or by law, I don’t care. I am tired of civic nationalists deluding themselves that any other course will preserve Britain. In that regard, banning the behaviours of our dusky friends is effectively just papering over the deep cracks in our multicultural crisis. It will not make them integrate to any great degree, but even if it did, that would be profoundly damaging to our people’s survival.

I also doubt that a ban on the kirpan (or the burka) would be enforceable. Would Sikhs abide by it? Would the modern British police have the guts to check?

All of those reasons are why I made this tweet.

Many replies said that I had missed the point. And indeed I had. In my rush to counter-signal the deluded civic nationalists who have thwarted proper nationalism in Britain for decades, I overlooked the fact that the policy they were advocating might actually have my desired effect, not theirs. In other words, banning the kirpan might cause Sikhs to leave Britain more than it would cause them to integrate.

It is very difficult to know because almost every Western country has more or less the same legal exemption as Britain. The only exception I can find is Italy, which forbids carrying kirpans in public, of any length. Italy has about 220,000 Sikhs (0.37% of its population) and that number is growing fast. That they remain in Italy suggests that they are willing to tolerate the ban, which also means it is not enough to make them self-deport.

In dealing with this problem we should not give in to our lower drives. We should try to be wise and to think of the long term. My positions:

• the civ-nat desire to “force” foreigners to integrate is crude, futile and, more importantly, genetically self-defeating for us

• the eth-nat desire to antagonise Sikhs is short-sighted, because if conflict ensues the regime is on their side, not ours

• the eth-nat desire to incentivise Sikhs to self-deport is sensible

With all of that in mind, should we “ban the kirpan”? Probably.

If nothing else, it would progress things, bringing us closer to the point where we can all openly admit that multiculturalism doesn’t work. Once that is admitted, we can begin deciding how we are going to separate.

One of the many depressing things about life in Britain today is being fond of various British cultural artefacts but knowing they are in the care of people who are bound, by their socio-political convictions, to destroy them. And this seems to affect literally all British cultural artefacts. Whichever you happen to be fond of, it is doomed.

In a dystopian novel, the people doing this would hate the things they were destroying. In our age, it is more perverse: they have genuine affection and love for the things they are destroying. After doing their destruction, they are happy for their warped version of the thing to sit alongside the original. (Did surgeons, having performed lobotomies, enjoy looking at “before and after” photos of the patients?)

The reason this happens at all is, of course, that right-wingers have ceded cultural authority to left-wingers. In many cases, feeling out of place or unwelcome, they have literally vacated the organisations where culture is generated, maintained, interpreted, etc. Where they remain, they are utterly dominated by the leftist atmosphere they are immersed in. If they are tolerated, it is because they are barely right-wing at all any more, or have learned to keep their heads down and pretend to agree with what is happening. There has been total castration of that contingent of “cultural people” who are politically right-wing.

This effectively leaves the spaces of culture entirely peopled by left-wingers. Some of those people are more strident and politically pro-active than others, but none of them can think of a reason why a Dickens character should not be played by a Black actor. So, when that suggestion is made by the more strident, it faces no pushback whatsoever from the less strident, and is in fact eagerly taken up and energised by all present.

It is the same when some activist working at a rural museum suggests an exhibition about the town’s role in perpetuating slavery. Perhaps nobody else present had ever made such a preposterous connection, but now that it has been proposed, well, it would be unthinkable to reject the proposal. The right-wing among them know that to object would be to risk a disciplinary hearing and possible sacking.

Once it happens in the places where culture is generated and maintained, right-wingers are either reprogrammed or repelled by what then emanates from those places. As a result, you find such people less and less in places where culture is discussed. Online forums have dumbasses of both political wings, and thoughtful left-wingers, but no thoughtful right-wingers. Those people just seem to have vacated the business of culture, especially high culture.

I have seen the phenomenon in various places, by both creators and fans of culture.

To deal with the latter group first… I have seen online portals where fans of vintage television drama gather to discuss the old productions they love - the techniques, the actors, the writers, the tropes, and of course the locations, the cultural settings that have long since evaporated. They discuss depictions (whether factual or fictitious) of bygone Britain - London in the 1950s, Liverpool in the 1960s, a rural village in the 1940s, Birmingham in the 1920s…

It is clear they feel deep affection for these settings, and they will admit this, yet deny vehemently any desire to “go back”. They speak of it like a forbidden pleasure - and forbidden for very good reason! - something we can sample but should never have, and should never want to have. We can look back on it fondly, but should balk at the idea of recreating it, even at the desire to recreate it, for that desire is dangerous and immoral. The rural train station, the village school, the dreaming spires of a university, the working-class canteen with the little old ladies, the grand metropolitan museum… these places of old might seem cute and heart-warming, but they were rife with racism, bigotry, homophobia and classism. Worst of all, they had no diversity at all, so these people existed in a purgatory of whiteness, ignorant of other cultures and possessed of a latent racism that waited to emerge when the first poor Pakistani family moved in and began their long suffering at the hands of these bigoted English.

This is how you are supposed to view pre-diversity Britain. Fanatical leftists will obsessively attack it (see above), creating a social pressure which ensures that fans of depictions of it - films, TV shows, novels, even music albums - will fall over themselves to assure everyone that they do not want that age back. The very qualities which make it appealing, they must deride as ugly and unpleasant, or even “disturbing”. This is virtue-signalling, of course - what we might call “performative revulsion”.

I can give several good examples of this.

Read more

First off, it is a bad film. Let’s get that out of the way. I am not claiming it is a worthy contribution to the Western artistic canon. It is cheap, badly-written “shlock” entertainment. My claim is only that it is good for the White nationalist cause.

Of course, the film is already massively successful and will become a cultural milestone whether you and I support it or not. Even if you are not interested in the film or not persuadable, this essay will hopefully be useful as an analysis of bad arguments and a demonstration of better ones.

I will go through all of the arguments against it that I have seen.

The lead actor is Jewish

First, Armie Hammer didn’t write the script, so his ethnic background is of limited relevance. However, people on our side often take this kind of thing as a sign that “shenanigans are afoot”; even if he didn’t write it, he took the lead role, which must mean he understands the film to be operating in Jewish interests (and therefore, the film must be operating in Jewish interests, even if we can’t see how it is).

That chain of reasoning falls apart, however, as soon as one realises that Hammer is really not a Jew anyway. Not only is he not halachically Jewish, he is three times over not halachically Jewish, coming from three generations of White Christian mothers:

Armand Hammer (J) + Olga Vadimovna von Root (C)
→ Julian Armand Hammer (1/2 J)

Julian Armand Hammer + Glenna Sue Ervin (C)
→ Michael Armand Hammer (1/4 J)

Michael Armand Hammer + Dru Ann Mobley (C)
→ Armie Hammer (1/8 J)

This would have been enough to satisfy some very hard-to-satisfy people. In another time and place, Michael Hammer might have been wearing a Hugo Boss uniform and Armie might have been in a certain youth organisation.

Ah, but he had his children by a Jewish woman! No, he didn’t.

Ah, but, despite being only 1/8th Jewish, he has described himself as “1/2 Jewish”! The paranoid explanation for this is that his Jewish ancestry must be very important to him. Occam’s Razor would say he thought it would help his career in Hollywood; exaggerating or even faking Jewishness has helped so many actors that even Caryn Elaine Johnson laughably tried it.

Ah, but he has a Hebrew tattoo! Most likely, he got it for some standard Millennial “it’s my ancestry” reasons.

Uwe Boll intends Sanders to be Jewish

This argument is that, even if Hammer isn’t really Jewish, his tattoo must mean that his character Sanders is Jewish, and this will condition the gentile public to see Jews as our saviours.

First, do you really think Uwe Boll was thinking at that level?

Second, even if he did hope for this effect, do you really think it will succeed? Do you think the normie general public, glimpsing that tattoo, will recognise it as a Hebrew symbol, then assume it means the character is Jewish, and from that take the lesson that Jews are our saviours? If you do, I think you need to be on medication.

In all likelihood, when ordinary viewers glimpse that tattoo, none of them will have a clue what it is. If this was a Boll manoeuvre to subtly condition the masses into accepting Jewish supremacism, it was even more far-fetched and ridiculous than his film’s storyline.

The vastly more likely explanation for the tattoo being there is that Boll, insisting on toplessness for the sex scene, didn’t have the budget to digitally erase the tattoo, or more likely didn’t care and didn’t know what it meant anyway. If he did know what it meant, he probably hoped it would help stave off allegations that he (Boll) is a White supremacist.

However, given that there is not a single other suggestion of Sanders being Jewish in the entire film, I think Boll didn’t even know what the tattoo meant.

The film was funded by Jews/Israel

As far as I can tell, this is completely untrue. My understanding is that it was funded by Uwe Boll himself (some sort of tax write-off scheme).

However, even if it were true, that wouldn’t change the content of the film, whose likely effect on the general public can be judged in isolation from its funding.

It is distributed by a Jewish-owned company

Of course, because every film distribution company is owned by Jews. I have read that Quiver - owned by two supposedly hardcore Zionist Jews - got the US distribution rights to the film because they were the only company that made an offer.

On the face of it, this is a good argument, except for two things:

First, Jewish film distributors tend to like money. Once the controversy started, it would have been obvious to Messrs. Sackman and Meyerowitz that there was big money to be made, which is enough of an explanation for them buying the distribution rights.

Second, none of this changes the effect the film is likely to have on the general public.

Hollywood is not our friend

Indeed, but this is not a Hollywood film.

But even if it were, that wouldn’t change the effect the film is likely to have on the general public.

Uwe Boll is a Zionist cuck who did a Holocaust film

True, but so what? Something can be true yet have no bearing on the matter at hand. The film is still the film it is, and will still have the same effect, regardless of his previous (and future) films and, indeed, regardless of his beliefs.

Uwe Boll doesn’t agree with us about race

Again, so what? Do you think the ordinary viewer will take the time to go and research the director’s political stances? That is an absolutely ridiculous notion. People in our sphere really need to understand that Joe Public thinks in very broad, simplistic and obvious terms. He is not nearly interested enough to do the research that would steer him away from the nationalist instincts that the film clearly pushes him towards.

Uwe Boll didn’t intend this to be a racial identitarian clarion call

Yet again, this is irrelevant. (There are so many irrelevant things that people persuade themselves “change the game”.) His intentions with the film are completely superseded by what the film actually achieves.

Having said that, I think Boll’s intentions are a big step in our direction: to embolden the general public to say that diversity doesn’t work and that most Third World people haven’t integrated into the West, won’t ever do so, and probably can’t do so. I think he believes this on cultural/religious grounds, not racial, but who cares? It works for us.

It’s exactly what the Establishment wants!

How…?

Because it might encourage “copycat” behaviour which can be prosecuted? That’s hardly worth the price of legitimising nativism.

Because it blames everything on Muslims? But it doesn’t. The killing in the opening scene is by a Black guy. He might be Muslim, or he might not be.

Because it neglects to “name the Jew”? True, but it still argues that diversity doesn’t work.

The banning is part of the trick!

This argument is that Boll and his (supposed) Jewish collaborators ensured the film got banned in Germany so as to achieve notoriety and “sell” the idea that the film is dangerous, when actually it is exactly what the establishment wants (see above).

First, the ban affects only one country (Germany).

Second, it’s not exactly “banned” in Germany. The ratings board has chosen not to give it a rating, which merely means that cinemas will not “want” to screen it.

Third, how could Boll “ensure” his film got banned? By including the crucial climactic scene which he had to include anyway? The film’s narrative would be severely hampered without that family execution.

Fourth, why would the German state do anything to help a film which explicitly rejects the open-borders mania of the German state? Much more likely is that, seeing the finished film, the ratings board shook their heads in despair and chose not to “dignify” it with a rating. What else could they do?

Fifth, to what extent has the film exploded because of the ban, really, rather than because of endorsements from Elon Musk? I’ll agree that the ban helped somewhat, but even then, that doesn’t mean the ban was intended to help. Not everything that happens is intended.

Nothing happens by accident

This is an example of the “everything is a psy-op” mentality. Paranoid nuttery, it holds that virtually everything that animates the public towards our ideas is actually a trick to ward them away from our ideas by misdirecting them - limited hangouts. So, if something looks too good to be true, that’s because it’s false! “Don’t be fooled, people!”

Okay, so how does the success of Citizen Vigilante harm our cause? It doesn’t. It helps our cause. Therefore, the obvious conclusion is it was indeed made (and then thrust into notoriety) by a series of accidents: a cucked Boomer pissed off enough by mass rape and murder to make a quasi-racist film, a German ratings board inevitably leftist enough to ban such a film, and two Jewish film distributors greedy enough for money to buy the rights to such a film.

It doesn’t point to the real perpetrators behind the Great Replacement

First, neither does Renaud Camus.

Second, of course it doesn’t. Uwe Boll is a Boomer German racked with Holocaust guilt!

Third, so what? Do you want everything to happen at once? If it did, do you think the general public would be receptive? Or would including that angle give them an excuse to reject the pro-White angle? (The answer is it would.)

Better reasons to condemn the film

All of the above reasons for condemning the film are retarded, but here is a good reason. It could be used to dismiss all right-wing/nativist art and drama as bad quality and undeserving of funding. But in most countries the institutions already believed that and would never give us funding anyway. I think the days of trying to persuade captured institutions to fund our projects are long, long over.

Reasons to celebrate it

What we on the Right need is new distribution systems and new institutions to fund our projects, and Citizen Vigilante might prompt some billionaires to realise the potential here, leading to films that surpass it artistically (which wouldn’t be difficult).

I have mentioned several times “the effect it is likely to have on the general public”. Let us spell out that effect.

Even if the film was funded, written or performed by Jews (which it wasn’t) you still need to look instead at the film itself, because everything else is actually irrelevant.

The ordinary viewer will take Citizen Vigilante at face value and see in it the vindication of his forbidden concerns. It tells him he is not alone and that he is not wrong.

Now, there are dangers consequent to this event (he gets led astray) but the event in itself is not a bad thing. And the alternative is that Joe Public never sees his concerns vindicated.

Many normies are watching Citizen Vigilante. We know this because it has shot to the top of several global streaming charts, including Amazon and Apple. Many, many people are being told for the first time that their feelings are valid, the problems are real, and the solutions to them are necessary.

Conclusion

People in our sphere need to learn to take a win when it’s handed to them. We are so accustomed to losing, we can’t believe it when something happens in our favour, so we invent reasons as to why it is actually a trick.

Instead of looking at the most likely explanation for something, we look for the most grotty explanation.

Instead of celebrating its most likely (even if unintended) effects, we forecast the most detrimental effects it could have, then persuade ourselves that the thing was only made in the first place so as to have those (unlikely) detrimental effects.

If this movement were a mental patient, the psychiatrist would be rubbing his hands.

They are very formulaic: an ordinary guy who abides by the law, pays his taxes and believes in the system, suddenly finds himself betrayed by it, and decides to get revenge and right a societal and moral wrong. Thus, built into the formula are both personal retribution (selfish, satisfying) and abstract justice (altruistic, duty). This is why, as predictable and silly as these films are, they are often highly enjoyable.

The genre is inherently masculine. We see a guy on a mission, working on his own, using tools, solving problems, improvising, bucking the system, striking out, acting in secret, and asserting himself brutally… but in the name of good. Implicit in the formula is the idea that social systems might be inadequate and it might be necessary to break the rules, to literally take the law into one’s own hands. Men find that exciting, women find it very troubling. Tellingly, so do liberals.

The genre is almost custom-designed for exploitation, and indeed every vigilante film turns out to be exactly that: trashy titillation of the audience’s base lust for revenge and a knee-jerk conception of “justice” which callously brushes aside all the post-war dictums about crime being an understandable result of social inequity, deprivation, marginalisation, etc. Women find that upsetting. Tellingly, so do liberals.

It’s no surprise that the genre has always met with lofty disapproval from liberal critics. They despair of the public’s base appetites, and wish film-makers had enough integrity not to make such obvious, reactionary, crowd-pandering slop.

The genre is inherently poised against liberals. It takes as a given that the civilised West is too weak on crime, that bad people do bad because they are bad and therefore the only solution is to meet violent wrong with violent right. When evil outwits lawful good, chaotic good must be allowed to intercede. For the liberal, this is a quadruple-whammy:

• we should be “cruel” to criminals (disadvantaged, misunderstood)

• people are not blank slates, and can be born evil

• our liberal system is unfit for purpose

• there are times when no organised social system can suffice. This throws into doubt the very possibility that we can ever fully transcend primitive animal existence.

Worst of all for the liberal is that he feels the same rush of joy that we all feel when the vigilante “takes out the trash”, putting a bullet through the brains of the beast who raped an innocent young woman. That bastard thought he’d got away with it, tricked the system, fooled that judge, and perhaps on his way out of the courthouse even mocked his victim… well, now he has paid the ultimate price for being a piece of shit. How can anyone resist feeling pleasure about that? The liberal can’t.

And so the vigilante genre shows the liberal that he is an animal, after all. Despite his pretensions and all those books he read about intersectional wiffle-waffle, deep down he is just like the reactionary right-wingers he despises.

Moreover, while it is true that vigilante films satiate a primitive instinct in the viewer, it seems likely that people will be most amenable to such satiation when their society really is too soft on crime. The spate of vigilante films in the 1970s, headed by Death Wish, were responding to a widespread feeling in America at the time that the courts were too often betraying the public by releasing violent scum back onto the streets. Whether it was a bloated bureaucracy, a lily-livered judge, a corrupt district attorney, the “expert” testimony of a Marxist professor, or the pleadings of a milksop female social worker, the system had become ineffectual, and the result was the dystopian squalor of inner city New York, Detroit, Chicago…

Though the vigilante genre fell out of fashion, it never went away. In fact there has been a steady stream of vigilante movies ever since 1965. As Hollywood declines and relies more and more on formula, there is one formula that is always reliable.

But the genre has never evolved. For fifty years it has ruminated on the same social ills. What is notable about the film we will discuss is that it drags the genre kicking and screaming from the 1970s to the 2020s.

The average liberal instinctively bristles at the tropes of classical vigilante cinema - “soft judges”, “nanny state”, “timid policing”, “moral decline”, “criminal parasites living off hard-working decent ordinary people” - but they long ago came to accept the genre as a necessary sop to right-wing idiots. I think the attitude was: “Let them have their trashy bread and circuses, if it keeps them docile while we remake their world around them.” After all, the tropes referred to realities that were incidental, not fundamental.

But today there are new realities, which today’s liberal cannot stand to see acknowledged because this strikes at the core of his worldview. These realities are fundamental, not incidental.

The first reality is that diversity has, far from improving White societies, degraded them in every way - economically, morally, culturally, socially, legally, educationally, physically, visually, aurally, olfactorily, and even medically.

The second reality is that the above degradation, far from a temporary side-effect of diversity, is inherent to it, unavoidable.

The third reality is that this permanent link between diversity and degradation is clearly known by the powers-that-be. Worse still, given that they continually advocate more diversity, they must actively desire the degradation that it brings.

The liberal cannot stand the idea that elite advocates of diversity advocate it, not because they agree with the liberal that diversity is good, but because they know that diversity is bad. This would mean that the liberal is a fool and has been played, and furthermore, that the elite do not love the liberal and see him as their equal, but despise him and see him as their useful idiot. This means he is not the thinking, discerning sophisticate he has always believed himself to be, but a gormless dupe who “thinks” whatever he has been told. (Which he is.)

Obvious lies can be tolerated easily, even happily, because they are obviously lies. Truths, even subtle ones, are painful.

And loud truths, truths spoken crudely and rudely, without any sense of decorum or nuance or good taste, truths that crash into your day like a fascist T-Rex, are unbearable.

Citizen Vigilante is a contemporary vigilante film written, produced and directed by the German am-auteur Uwe Boll. Aged 61, Boll has a long history of making films that are panned by critics and audiences alike.

Hollywood actor Armie Hammer had been “cancelled” in 2021 and was looking for a come-back vehicle. Boll persuaded him to play the lead in his new low-budget flick. What it will do for Hammer’s career is as yet unknown.

Objectively, Citizen Vigilante is a bad film. The production is competent enough. The real shortcomings stem from the script.

Sometimes I burst out laughing. Some scenes I couldn’t stop laughing throughout. It is bad, but it is enjoyable.

There isn’t really a storyline. What linear events occur are needlessly (perhaps to disguise the lack of a storyline) presented in a random order. One would say the film is more a character study, if it did any character studying. It is perhaps best described as simply a sketch of a situation.

American soldier Michael Sanders is visiting his ancestral country, an unnamed one in Europe. Apparently, he came to attend his father’s funeral and assume the running of his business empire, expecting it to be a fairly short visit, but ended up sticking around once he realised there was a need for brutal vigilante justice in the city, in the country, in the continent.

We don’t see any of that. The factors and process that led to his vigilantism are not important to Boll, who assumes that the audience already “get” the situation in Europe. His intent is to show that something can be done about it.

A narrative device throughout the film is a newsreader (with an oddly archaic English accent) giving updates on the situation. Except, she doesn’t really give updates. Most of the time, she just says what Boll clearly wants the audience to think. She speaks in a calm and precise way while being shamelessly partisan, couching rhetorical “questions” in an absurdly thin veneer of impartiality.

As well as the brazen one-sidedness, another thing we quickly notice about Citizen Vigilante is the generic-ness. This might be incompetence on Boll’s part or it might be deliberate, because the story is applicable all across Europe.

The filming location was Zagreb but absolutely nothing of Croatian culture is shown. Instead, we see a nondescript “modern European city” in which the architecture could be anywhere, the only culture is globalist consumerism, and all the people speak in American English with placeless “Eurotrash” accents. This extends even to lead actor Costas Mandylor, who is Australian but here adopts an amalgam of European accents (perhaps fittingly given that his character works for Interpol).

Depicting a generic “European city” feels lazy and offensive, but then I remember all those Hollywood films I grew up with, set in generic “American City”. Often they were not even shot in America - Toronto or Vancouver serving as generic stand-ins for a different country!

But we take it for granted that European countries are more distinctive, with deeper histories and more pronounced cultures, than the New World. Therefore it is depressing to see “Europe” presented as a blended puree, retarded by American entertainment, filleted by the 20th Century, de-souled by global capital, and now raped by kaleidoscopic immigration from every corner of the Third World, destroying the uniqueness of each European country. But this is exactly what has happened. Like other aspects of the film, what Boll did with the setting might be audacious or accidental, but is accurate.

Sanders does not quite fit the classical vigilante mould, an everyman victimised by the corrupt system. He is more like Bruce Wayne, being the orphan heir to a fortune and thus having plenty of time and resources to expend on “healing society’s sickness”. (Actually, back in 2007 Armie Hammer was cast as Bruce Wayne, for a film that was never made.) What he does have in common with the classical vigilante is military experience, having served in the US army. He is thus a highly-disciplined expert in weapons and killing. Convenient? No more so than his apparently limitless wealth.

Also convenient for the plot is his limitless resourcefulness. He can obtain heroin, a clean syringe, infinite guns and ammunition, the personal phone number for an Interpol officer, a shed-sized bulletproof iron safe, and cars that won’t be traced back to him.

But more convenient still is his limitless immunity from police detection. Sanders has no fear whatsoever of CCTV evidence, fingerprint evidence, DNA evidence, or witnesses. Where the classical vigilante must operate incognito, and Bruce Wayne must invent a complete alternative persona, Sanders simply marches in, kills the bad guys while delivering some political commentary, and marches out. He even does this in broad daylight, so unafraid is he of being seen, detected, filmed, tracked, recognised or accosted. At times it was like watching the T-800 mechanically going about its mission, until I remembered that, with its artificial skin, the T-800 actually does wear a disguise.

Sanders is constantly serious, unfriendly and humourless. In virtually every shot he has a hilarious expression, something between steely rage and steely disgust. He can be walking on a sunny day yet looking as if someone just keyed his car. Only once and very briefly in the entire film does he smile. He does it for no apparent reason while on a bus:

On one occasion, when a barmaid has to go away for a moment, he dreamily says “I’ll watch the bar”. His voice, in this single moment, has a note of irony. This might have been an oversight by the director, because every other line of dialogue is delivered by Hammer in robotic monotone. (I was impressed, actually, by his ability to memorise long screeds of political and social commentary.)

For the first half of the film Sanders is an enigma, with almost no character sketching whatsoever. The only thing we are shown is that he is bothered by dilapidation: he photographs the decay on one of his buildings, and is angered by human apathy causing wall plaster to rot. Presumably this reflects his irritation with the decline of society being allowed to progress.

We get some insights during the film’s sex scene (which is gratuitous as the information could have been conveyed without sex): Sanders owns lots of property, has a Hebrew tattoo, is not racist (the prostitute is non-white), and is “morally ambiguous” enough to frequent prostitutes. I applaud Boll for finding a way to sketch the character of Sanders that isn’t overt dialogue, but unfortunately, the revelations are all rather pointless since none is ever developed. Like the sex scene itself, they have no bearing on the story.

Then, 48 minutes in, we get two scenes that inform us about his background. He talks about his estrangement from his parents, which he has “come to terms with” meaning that he is not angry or resentful towards the father who neglected him. There might be a question mark over whether Sanders is being honest with himself about that, but if so, Boll never explores it.

Sanders’ moral ambiguity is developed slightly. He is needlessly rude to his employees (“Smells like a nursing home in here. Let’s get some fresh blood”). He uses mafia-style intimidation tactics to force rent out of tardy tenants. Finally, to pointlessly demonstrate an obvious truth to a man who is too drugged up to understand it anyway, he pointlessly causes the death of a passing motorist.

The trouble with this “moral ambiguity” is that Boll doesn’t do anything with it. We don’t see Sanders struggling with it, tormented by his dual desires to be good and to be horrible. He seems completely content being a man who is needlessly rude and even needlessly murderous but who also puts himself at huge risk for a moral cause. Good writing would have explored a conflict; Boll’s bad writing merely presents a contradiction.

Boll seems to have intended Sanders to have some depth, but didn’t know how to go about it. He never has any doubts, never changes his mind, never has a learning experience, never makes any mistakes.

But then again… would you really want him to? That brings us to the question of what this film is for, what this film is. And, whatever delusions Boll might have about his abilities as a film-maker, I think he knew what he intended this film to be, and I think he succeeded.

Sanders is a one-note character because that is what ordinary Europeans, tormented by mass immigration, want to see: a man just getting the job done. Citizen Vigilante is a film aimed squarely at those people. Boll has no interest in “showing both sides of the issue”. He knows, as we do, that the other side of the issue has been broadcast ad nauseum, for decades. We know the claims, we know the counter-claims, and we know the situation is intractable and that liberals are beyond persuading. There is a need only to take action against them and the dystopia they have built.

Billionaires Elon Musk and Duncan Bannatyne have endorsed Citizen Vigilante.

Liberals, of course, are apoplectic, about that endorsement and about the film itself. Their first go-to was to pretend to believe it is an elaborate joke, that Boll is merely trolling. He immediately clarified that he is not trolling; the film is meant seriously and straightforwardly.

Captured (like all institutions) review website Rotten Tomatoes did its usual thing, its “professional” critics vastly out of step with its public reviewers.

In theory the professionals are correct: this is a bad film. But in reality that doesn’t matter, both because the film shows the real situation in Europe and the real feelings of Europeans, and because the Left has lost the right to condemn anything on artistic grounds, having long ago degraded all of their art into crass propaganda.

But of course, when the Right do the same, that’s terrible. For the Left, it is always outrageous to see the Right having an opinion, and especially having a platform on which to voice it. They assume that, being right-wing, our perspective is inherently invalid, since validity comes as a quality of left-wing-ness, and therefore it is both unnecessary and unwise to allow us to speak.

After decades of that oppression in the media, academia and online, the Right have begun to seize the means of culture production, without giving any lip-service to impartiality. The result is a million memes that voice our worldview, cartoons like Murdoch Murdoch and The Will Stancil Show, online festivals like Millenniyule and Decameron, and films like Citizen Vigilante. These works come unapologetically from a right-wing perspective.

In the meantime, the same “hardening” has occurred on the Left, though for the opposite reason. The Right hardened because we were excluded from the institutions; the Left hardened because they had total control of the institutions.

The result is a film like One Battle After Another, a shameless leftist screed, completely one-sided, doctrinaire and supportive of leftist violence and terrorism. Other organs on the Left, having in their decadence lost all self-awareness, praised and celebrated the film. It was awarded no fewer than six Oscars, among a slew of accolades so extensive that there is a dedicated Wikipedia page.

With leftist propaganda as shrill as One Battle After Another, nobody should be surprised that the Right give up on “being reasonable” and “meeting them in the middle”, and simply produce a film like Citizen Vigilante.

So, is this how entertainment will be now? The Left and Right in a race to the bottom, competing to make the most crude, prejudice-affirming propaganda? Perhaps. But if so, our films will be the truthful ones, and this war of attrition will result in a Left exposing itself as utterly morally and intellectually bankrupt. Stripped to the bare bones, deprived of artistry and budget, our version of the world rings true, while theirs, bloated with expertise and prestige, discards all subtlety and reveals itself as insane, dishonest and suicidal.

Uwe Boll is clearly not a deep thinker. In an interview with Jared Taylor, he comes across as very much “an ordinary bloke”. This is why he is not an artist; he lacks the thoughtfulness and sensitivity that lead to art. But it is also why he would make something as crude as Citizen Vigilante, which can function as a battering ram and a rallying call, reducing the Left to “I can’t even” spluttering while emboldening more thoughtful right-wingers to make films that are better than it.

The danger is always the “limited hangout”, the release valve that seems to sympathise but actually misdirects. People have pointed out that Citizen Vigilante is distributed by a Jewish company, its lead actor is of Jewish descent (although he is only 1/8th Jewish!), its protagonist is apparently somewhat Jewish, and its narrative is more anti-Islam than pro-White.

The last is the most interesting for me. For all the fuss the Left have made about this film, it really isn’t racist. It repeatedly states that the problem is not race but integration, that what is at stake is not genetics but values. In the climactic scene, Sanders chides a Muslim family not for their religion or ethnicity but for their “commitment to religion over democracy and over anything else, including the rule of law”.

It is not even anti-Islam per se. Sanders condemns “archaic values” but also says that among Islamic populations there are “good ones” as well as “bad ones”.

As for a traditional White society, the film never yearns for that. No comment is made on the awful modern architecture or the dead culture. Everyone speaks English and consumes products, and it’s fine.

So what this film advocates is kosher, race-blind, civic globalism.

Boll doesn’t care about race. He just wants them to integrate. If they do, Sanders won’t blow their brains out.

The trouble - for Boll, for Sanders, and for civic nationalists everywhere - is that these people, en masse, cannot integrate.

And everyone who celebrates the film knows that. Even the film itself seems to know that, implicitly; if you are at the point of summarily executing entire families, that would seem to be well beyond any hope of their co-ethnics integrating. Killing the bad ones isn’t meant to “encourage the others” - it’s meant to scare them shitless so that they self-deport.

Thus, the lingering message is not “if we kill enough of the bad ones, we can make diversity work”. The message is: “diversity doesn’t work”.

As a result, I am not worried about the Jewish involvement in this film. I think their intentions rather fall by the wayside in the face of what the film achieves. It gives voice to a disenfranchised majority. Will the Left take heed, and begin making balanced films or even right-wing films? Of course not! But that isn’t the goal. The goal is to legitimate and articulate the nativist viewpoint. The Left cannot win here: admitting error is not an option for them, but the more they refuse to admit error, the more they show themselves to be irredeemable.

So in summary… is Citizen Vigilante a good film? No, but I am glad it exists.

We should think of Uwe Boll as a cinematic vigilante. He broke the rules and did a bad thing, a terrible thing, but he did it in the name of good.

Constituting 0.9% (535,517) of the British population, Sikhs are perhaps the minority we hear least about. Blacks and Muslims (especially Pakistanis) are for obvious reasons often in the news. Chinese run restaurants. Hindus do well in business and own lots of property. Japanese crop up in academia and tech. Sikhs just seem to keep to themselves.

Their reputation is difficult to pin down but they are certainly seen as more masculine than Hindus, who are generally seen as quite feminine and passive (and at worst, sneaky and treacherous). By contrast Sikhs are seen as the guys who are direct with you, old-fashioned, traditional and formidable coming from a martial creed, but also honourable, law-abiding and peaceful.

More recently, there is the archetype of “the cool Sikh”. Almost never encountered in real life, the cool Sikh is lively, confident, a bit quirky, warm-hearted, and of course completely at one with the hyper-modernity of today’s diverse, pro-LGBT Britain. And he knows some kick-ass recipes.

Among some people-of-flat-design there might be one with a turban, and that’s him. There he is, smiling along with the others, happy in our glorious new world in which difference is not a cause for concern, but a cause for delight, and yet at the same time completely inconsequential because (lest we forget!) we all bleed red and are exactly the same. He is the modern, westernised Sikh, who (we tell ourselves) is typical of his kind.

In fact the opposite trend is occurring. The more multi-racial Britain becomes, the less Sikhs see any reason or need to integrate. Like Pakistani Muslims, where they integrate it is in the sense of taking part in the degeneracy that the modern West makes possible - the drugs, the alcohol, the casual sex.

Moreover, there is increasing resentment among them towards Britain for, in the past and even now, supposedly oppressing their ancestral culture. Professor Gurnam Singh was quoted in the Digwa trial:

Over the last 30 years, there has been a trend towards younger people wearing a kirpan with pride, in a desire to express their cultural identity. They see it as an act of resistance to being denied the ability otherwise to display their identity.

I don’t believe they have ever been denied this ability, except perhaps, in the days before PC and inclusivity, in select environments such as offices and building sites, all of which will have long changed their ways and would today be terrified of imposing such restrictions on the young Sikhs who, nevertheless, are convinced of oppression.

This is simply entitlement, emerging as a direct result of the British state placating them and tiptoeing around their sensitivities. With some peoples, the more you accommodate them, the more they despise you and convince themselves you despise them.

This growing sense of entitlement also explains why Sikhs are, like all minority groups today, convinced that hate speech against them is rising. Sikhs were complaining about this even before the Digwa trial, as well as complaining that special provisions for Muslims will impact them. Diversity doesn’t seem to be their strength.

While leftists are happy with any and all minorities being in the country and replacing us, conservatives always have to rationalise their support for what is, after all, an existential threat to everything they hold dear. They tend to use the same rationale for every single minority group: “X-group are natural conservatives!” With Sikhs, the evidence available for this delusion is their traditional garb, religious piety, masculine presence, and apparent law-abiding nature. For civic nationalists obsessed with counter-jihad, Sikhs win additional points simply because they are NOT MUSLIMS. For all of these reasons, the centre-right will declare:

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Stephen Ogilvie is, and always was, what luckier people sometimes call “a poor soul”. Not bright, not talented, not impressive, not fortunate… but good. Unable to make much of a mark on the world, he wanted to at least do what he could: he helped the people around him.

Last week in Belfast, he helped two African men. Hadi Alodid and Younis Arabi were moving into the flat downstairs. He did “everything he could” for them. After a few days the Africans’ relationship with this local man who was trying to help them went downhill. One of them attacked, disfigured and maimed him. Maybe he had looked at them the wrong way.

Well, now he will never look at anyone again. Alodid gouged his eyes, blinding him forever. He also slashed his face and his neck, many times. Once “recovered”, Ogilvie will look like something from a horror film. If he is lucky, he will not understand how dire his situation is. But he will be traumatised and will probably spend the rest of his life in a state of vague terror that what happened to him could, now that he is much more vulnerable, happen to him again at any moment. The small amount of independence he had has been taken away. He will be helpless.

The ruination of this poor man’s life is entirely on you, the British establishment, comprising the government, civil service and mainstream media.

Civilisation requires that the low respects the high and the high protects the low. That is the bargain. This dynamic produces a functional, sustainable culture that handles truth with integrity and uses resources sensibly.

The price of status is that the high have a moral duty towards the low. Rich people look after the poor. Intelligent people organise the unintelligent. Educated people steward the ignorant. Able and well-connected people solve problems for the helpless. Above all, the establishment - ostensibly comprising the most intelligent, educated, able and well-connected people around - look after everything that is beyond ordinary people to look after, from the borders to the emergency services and the welfare state.

People like you - intelligent, connected, aware - have a moral duty to protect people like Stephen Ogilvie - simple, vulnerable, naive. You failed in that duty. He is the latest in a very long line of your failures. You failed to protect countless thousands of young English girls from being preyed upon by foreign men (yes, foreign men, because they are not British and never will be). You failed to protect Henry Nowak. You failed to protect Charlene Downes. You failed to protect Kriss Donald. You failed to protect this girl in Dundee. You failed to protect a million and more White Britons who, unfortunately for them, needed you to protect them.

They needed you to protect them, first and foremost, by not injecting into their communities people who are much more likely to commit violent crime.

People from the Third World are much more likely to commit violent crime.

Your predecessors knew this (it’s common sense) but let them into Britain anyway. Once they proved the stereotypes accurate, your predecessors let more of them in. This happened a hundred times since 1948, culminating with Boris Johnson’s extraordinary treachery (treason) in admitting over two million such people in 2021-23. In this crime against the British people he was aided by Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, two traitors who now hope to bedazzle the British people once again under the guise of Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage who proves his treachery by not ejecting them both immediately.

Farage declares that race doesn’t matter, anyone can become British, we mustn’t alienate Muslims, and it’s fine if we get replaced to extinction in our own homeland. Farage is already in your club, but he hopes to rise within it and knows he must therefore say these things. This is what you require of politicians: acquiescence, treachery, deceit.

Your requirements of the general public are equally outrageous. You do not merely demand that we accept Third Worlders. You do not merely demand that we tolerate them. You actually demand that we celebrate them. If delusion is impossible for us, you demand that we pretend to celebrate them. The least you will accept from us is silence. If we complain, you punish us.

To be clear… Your crime is not merely that you refuse to solve a problem. It is that you have caused and are maintaining and continually worsening the problem.

Some have likened it to “the emperor’s new clothes”, but it is worse than that, because the emperor’s nakedness did not bring barbarism and misery upon his citizens. Your fantasy does. You demand that we believe in and love something that is destroying us.

Anyone would think that you viscerally hate us and want us extinct. (Your bosses in global finance certainly do. Maybe you just want promotion.)

Usually you don’t punish us directly. The government and judiciary are only two of the weapons you use to oppress us. You have a whole infrastructure in place to punish us indirectly - the media, NGOs, antifa, Hope Not Hate, all backed up by corrupt, fraudulent academics. Destruction of reputation and livelihood are your favoured techniques, because they maintain your “plausible deniability”.

But you are also perfectly willing to use law. Indeed you make sure to use it disproportionately against us, giving more harsh sentences than to foreigners who commit the same crimes. This is your two-tier anarcho-tyranny.

It works well in the short term. In the long term, it destroys your legitimacy.

You arrest us, seize our devices (and needlessly retain them for years), keep us in legal limbo, imprison us for ridiculous so-called “crimes”… and when one of your Third World pets brutalises one of us, you pressure the victim’s family into issuing blatantly fake statements…

Know this: everything you do is being seen, logged and judged, and eventually you will be held accountable.

Likewise, every Third Worlder who commits some terrible crime against us, is a mark against you who let them in - and eventually you will be held accountable.

Of course, you are thinking “listen to this fool, thinking we have power over every little incident that goes on in the country!” but you do. You have the power at the border, where you choose to accept people you must know are highly likely to be violent, impulsive, low IQ savages. Hadi Alodid is just one of millions of examples.

He came from Sudan, where the average IQ is 79. He travelled to Paris then, in February 2023, flew to Dublin. He entered the United Kingdom by bussing across the border into Northern Ireland. Arriving in Belfast, he immediately claimed asylum. You (specifically Rishi Sunak, Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman) soon introduced a fast-track scheme to clear the asylum backlog.

This scheme - which you opened to Sudanese, Eritreans, Syrians, Afghans, Libyans and Yemenis - meant that Alodid merely had to fill out a 10-page questionnaire. He did this (no doubt with the help of a translator you provided at our expense, since he still needs one three years later) and you rewarded him with a visa allowing him to stay here until 2028. What you expected him to do here in those five years is mysterious; Sudanese (just like Eritreans, Syrians, Afghans, Libyans and Yemenis) are not known for improving European countries. Why did you think they should be fast-tracked into our lives, rather than immediately deported?

Then Alodid spent three years in Belfast. According to police:

There is no trace of this suspect on any of our national security databases and he was not known to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

So, three years in which he didn’t attempt to brutally murder anyone… until suddenly one day he did.

You might point to those three law-abiding years and claim they make Alodid’s case somewhat ambiguous, not clear cut. But, if you had asked the British public in February 2023 whether you should admit a man from Sudan, they would have told you “no”, emphatically. But you know that. You knew it then. You also knew that they would vehemently oppose placing a Sudanese man anywhere near a vulnerable man like Stephen Ogilvie.

When they voiced this sort of opinion, you ignored them, mocked them, demonised them, fined them, and in many cases imprisoned them. Then you went ahead and placed men like Alodid next to men like Ogilvie, and now a man has been maimed for life - a man who it is your job to protect, more than it is your job to accommodate the foreigner who maimed him.

“Ah,” you say, “but most men like Alodid don’t do things like this!” Indeed. They just ruin our towns, dilute our culture, lower our social trust, intimidate our girls, and either live off us on welfare or do jobs that our own people would otherwise be doing. So we don’t want them either. But we told you that already. We’ve been telling you for sixty years and more.

You laugh about “gammon” and “Muslamic rayguns”, pour scorn on the poor and uneducated while pretending to value them. You claim virtue while making life difficult for your own people. Then, when they cannot escape the consequences of what you have done, you mock, criticise and lecture them. This is not how a society is supposed to operate.

Look again at Stephen Ogilvie, the man you should have protected.

Even before being brutalised, he wasn’t pretty. He isn’t graceful or sophisticated. He doesn’t understand much. He doesn’t listen to Debussy. He doesn’t attend plays in the West End. He hasn’t read Jane Austen. He is unfamiliar with exotic cultures and knows only the most basic form of his own.

You loathe him. After all, he will never lead anything or create anything; his achievements will be unremarkable. What kind of avatar is he of a civilisation? He is not even the “salt of the earth” working-class who keep things going. He represents the most unfortunate of our people.

But he is ours. He is yours. And he was your responsibility.

All you had to do was not make his life worse than it already was. All you had to do was not place men like Hadi Alodid near to him.

But, like a child holding a boiling kettle over insects, you wondered how “the gammon” would react to the Third World. You already knew, of course, from decades of experience, but you had to find out just one more time.

Stephen Ogilvie is paying the price for your sadism. He will pay it for the rest of his life.

I believe that these decisions will soon be taken from you. You are going to be removed from power.

Right now you are feigning outrage at the rioting in Southampton and Belfast, but I don’t think you will ultimately be defenestrated through violence. I think it will happen quite calmly. A tap on the shoulder, a routine memo, a knock on your office door. But it will be decisive. Your whimpering will be futile.

What you should really be worried about is not the manner of your removal, but the punishment you will be handed afterwards by a court of (reformed) law. Treason is taken seriously. Of course, your treason is not against the state but against the native people of your country. That there is (astonishingly) no law for that will be your only hope for mitigation.

I realise that some of you will slip through the net. A few will even, in the manner of a snake, miraculously pop up in the new regime, proclaiming that you have always believed in all of the new ideas, voicing them more energetically than anyone else, and even judging people for not being sufficiently ethnocentric. It’s nauseating but, well, that’s just you.

Most of you, though, will never hold power again.

I expect that for some of you this will be a relief. Cowardly and conformist, you know you are part of a rotten regime and you don’t feel great about it. You push the doubts aside every night when you close your eyes, and every morning when you close them again.

But for others among you, the idea of this all being over will be terrifying. You were willing to proclaim anything in order to get ahead. You didn’t care whether it was true or not, and when reality proved it false, you denied reality, and vilified us for pointing at reality. Nothing was more important to you than your personal career success, even at the expense of your ethnic group.

It seems unlikely to me that, in all of human history, there have ever been people more treacherous than you in charge of a city, a country, a former empire. Perhaps there have, but history is too disgusted to remember them.

We will make sure that you are remembered.

Like many news stories these days in Britain, this one involves multiple institutions, because they all operate together in a concert of dysfunction and insanity. These institutions include academia, the media, the judiciary, the police force, the civil service, the government, the various political parties, the charity sector, the NGOs, etc. But obviously the one most crucially implicated here is the police force. My point in naming these others is to highlight that the police force is not an island. It is part of a general regime which is highly unified, self-reinforcing, adept at rejecting criticism from “outside the tent”, and completely averse to the bitter teachings of reality.

The story of Nowak’s death is causing great public anger. There have been riots and protests, and it might not be over yet. (After all, summer has only just begun.) The issue is DEI and British policing.

What are the regime’s options?

• insist that DEI training had nothing to do with Nowak’s death. The cause was incompetence in that particular officer / the lying of the Digwa family

• agree that DEI training might have “gone too far”

• agree that DEI training has been a disaster

The problem with “gone too far” is that it implies that DEI - ie. “being a good person” - is something one can do too much of. The activist Left will obviously have a huge problem with that idea, but so will the supposedly apolitical institutions we are discussing. If DEI means being good, well, there is no limit to how good one should be. In fact, one should be as good as it is humanly possible for one to be, at all times, in all circumstances, in all ways.

But then examine what DEI entails, in British police literature:

The allegation is that this leads to a two-tier system. The regime vociferously denies that. But, as Morgoth says:

So the question is, can the regime disavow this? That would be for it to disavow, not just one isolated program or policy or training course, but its entire ideology.

However, let’s hypothesise that public pressure became so intense that the British police felt they had to admit defeat and begin rolling back DEI training. I’m not sure they would be able to roll it back.

The Macpherson Report was in February 1999, but I’m confident this goes far before that. At a minimum, we are talking about three decades of implementation. In that time, sensible people have aged out or been pushed out of policing, and been replaced with, at first, pragmatic sociopath types who don’t really have any values but know to “play the game”, but latterly by true believers, people who have never known anything else and can’t imagine that anything else could ever be “okay”, let alone desirable or better. These are women and weak-minded men who went into policing in the first place because their natures matched the mentality of the force. They didn’t have to “adapt” to it; they’d grown up with it and were at one with it already. Indeed, if they were any other way, they wouldn’t have been accepted into the modern police force.

In 2005, a friend of mine who wanted to join the police was told by a seasoned officer that there was no point in applying since, being White and straight, he didn’t stand a chance. Now, the officer was surely exaggerating because I don’t believe that, twenty years on, every single police officer is either non-white or gay. However, in the news at exactly that time was talk of a redoubled effort to get more minorities into policing, which could only mean prioritising those candidates over men like my friend. In the twenty years since, the same talk has periodically been in the news, the unrelenting need to have fewer straight White males and more of everyone else, the apparent self-disgust of a force filled with “so many white people”.

But, while this shows the mentality, it does not demonstrate the problem. After all, all of the police who attended Henry Nowak’s murder were White, so it’s not as if his treatment was due to racial difference between him and the officers. Somehow, White has been set against White. To understand that, we have to understand the principle that unifies the diversity drive with the anti-white mentality of even the remaining White officers.

It doesn’t take much explaining. It is not complicated or subtle. It is childishly stark: “White bad, everyone else good.”

This notion is internalised perhaps especially in White officers, because they have something to prove and because White people, frankly, tend to be more concerned with moral rectitude than anyone else. If the dictum is “White bad”, then they will feel a moral need to demonstrate that, whenever they have a choice, they err against White people - their own kind.

Now, the principle is never actually expressed in the stark terms above. It is couched in a whole thesaurus of academic and sociological jargon as well as countless paragraphs and PowerPoint presentations of cutesy, feelgood, trite, feminine drivel. This is not just so as to “get away with it”; it is because, if the principle were ever stated explicitly, a lot of people would realise “we’re the baddies”. Instead they are invited to arrive at the principle themselves, through their own cogitation and absorption of sundry materials and exercises.

Ideally, they will never be consciously aware of what they have arrived at, for that would enable them to question it. Instead, it will simply be the new condition of their mind, which hasn’t the latitude to reflect on its own condition. The closer a candidate is to that condition naturally, or the more easily they can be moulded towards it, or the more willing to be moulded they demonstrate themselves to be, the more likely they will get accepted into the force. And certainly, the more likely they will get promoted thereafter.

In short: once established, the reigning mentality promotes in its own image, and this become a self-fulfilling and self-refining process that, while needing to be constantly pushed, doesn’t need to be (and mustn’t ever be) explicitly stated.

That paradox of deliberate action without conscious thought is what we struggle to comprehend.

It is also what would make it very difficult to “roll back” the anti-white mentality of an institution. If the staff aren’t even aware that they have a certain belief, how can you persuade them to relinquish it?

But the situation is even worse than that. While they are unaware they hold this belief, they are simultaneously bound to it in a hundred little ways. They are conscious of those ways, and believe each one to be crucial, necessary, decent, “just being a good person”, critical for delivering a just and equitable service, a key aspect of the job, an essential performance indicator, etc. More broad than just professional probity, they will feel that each of these little ways is how they, as police officers, can be moral people and contribute towards building a good society.

So the problem is that they are unaware of the cancer, but believe that a hundred things they do which perpetuate the cancer are essential.

It will be inconceivable to them to work in any other way. For them that would mean not only being unprofessional, but being a bad person.

To see how unconscious this anti-white bias is, compare how the chief of Hampshire Police, Alexis Boon, responded to the death of a violent Black career criminal in 2022 and then to the death of the innocent Henry Nowak in 2026:

I don’t believe for a second that Boon did this consciously, for the simple reason that it looks terrible. He did something that looks terrible because it was completely natural for him to do it. Decades of training brought him to this condition.

The death of Nowak is a matter of fact, not something that moves him. He almost looks uncomfortable voicing sympathy with a White family, as if he is doing something disgusting or low-grade. By contrast, the death of a Black gangster has him gushing, impassioned, deeply sympathetic, and making an effort to imagine the emotions the gangster’s family and community are feeling. It’s over-the-top and affected, but that isn’t the point. His natural reaction - even in footage that will be seen by the general public - is to be gushing, impassioned and over-the-top towards a bereaved Black family, while sympathising with a bereaved White family is a duty he performs with apparent reticence and distaste. Henry Nowak might have been a murder victim, but he was only a White murder victim. Chris Kaba might have been a violent thug, but he was a Black violent thug.

A fish rots from the head. If this is the mentality of the chief of Hampshire Police, imagine the thinking of his subordinates when they arrive at a crime scene involving four Sikhs and one White male.

I acknowledge that his fatal injury wasn’t immediately apparent, and if it had been, doubtless the police would have behaved differently. But because it wasn’t immediately apparent, they just assumed he was lying. After all, the Sikhs were saying so. And because his speech was slurred, they assumed he was drunk. After all, the Sikhs were saying so. He was clearly mildly injured, but they assumed that came from jumping over a fence. After all, the Sikhs were saying so.

As a direct result of these assumptions, which were made so as to dutifully honour the Sikhs’ word over his, they handcuffed him. In so doing, they might have accelerated his death.

Moreover, we have to bear in mind that there were two 999 calls regarding this incident. One characterised it as a stabbing, the other as a White-on-Brown racist assault. It is unknown which of these calls was made first, but it is clear that the police enroute to the scene were informed of only one of the calls. The racism claim was prioritised over the stabbing claim even before police got to the scene. This biased them in how they would interpret what they saw once they got there.

So the problem is not just with the front-line officers but with the dispatchers who inform them. But we can see that it is also with the chief who manages them, and of course all of the tiers of command in the middle.

We can only hope that it doesn’t also infect the IOPC that is now investigating their conduct. But if the IOPC should find against the officers, it will have a choice as to whether to blame incompetence or DEI training. If it asserts that DEI training is causing critical operating problems in policing, that means it will have to be modified or outright abolished.

But then we get to the problem I described earlier. Even modifying DEI would be anathema, would seem like heresy, like evil, to the people who now staff the British police force. And they in turn have to answer to the rest of the regime - the media, academia, the government, the civil service…

In a time of universal deceit, can one institution break away and tell the truth?

Henry Nowak was an 18 year-old from Essex, of Polish descent. He was intelligent and did well at A-levels. With those, he got onto an Accountancy & Finance degree at the University of Southampton. A well-adjusted, social and ambitious young man, he was also responsible, working part-time at a supermarket to help support himself. His family said:

Henry was loved by all those that knew him. He was an incredible son, brother, cousin, grandson, nephew, friend and teammate. He was an all-round top lad and everyone who was lucky enough to share his company thought the same.

He also enjoyed sport, joining two football teams within his first term at university. On the 3rd of December, that first term was nearing its end. To celebrate, one of his teams gathered at the Hobbit pub.

At 11:07pm, Nowak left the Hobbit and began making his way home to his halls of residence - most likely Portswood House which is at the top of Belmont Road, a quiet residential street lined with big houses on both sides. He was slightly drunk from his merry-making but within the legal limit for driving. Stumbling back to halls at night… it is something that virtually every male student in Britain has done, throughout the ages. But Nowak was in modern Britain.

Vickrum Singh Digwa, a 22 year-old Sikh, lived nearby in his family’s house on St Denys Road. Oddly enough, he also worked in accountancy, being accepted by a local firm. However, his own community were wary of him; they had barred him from a temple for bad behaviour. Fulfilling religious requirements, he wore a small “kirpan” dagger around his neck, under his clothing. But he is in a Sikh order called the Nihang, for whom carrying a second weapon is customary, so he also had an eight inch “pesh-kabz” sword hanging sheathed from his waist. Aside from any religious obligations, he was “obsessed” with bladed weapons and had trained with them since the age of twelve.

On the night, Digwa had just come home from a Deliveroo shift. One report says he parked his car on Belmont Road at 11:17pm. It seems he walked some way towards his family house then went back “to fetch some curried chips” from his car.

The two men encountered each other on the pavement at number 70.

Nowak was about three-quarters of the way home. He happened to be filming a video for Snapchat at the time. In this footage, he “can be heard saying ‘hello car’ and singing to himself before yawning”. This suggests to me he was slightly drunk and tired, in a placid and light-hearted mood.

He paused filming as soon as his interaction with Digwa began, so we don’t know exactly how that happened. Digwa claims that Nowak deliberately bumped into him, then told him he “could have moved a little more”, then said “Do you think you're a bad man? I'm from Essex. You don't know what people from Essex are on.”

(In modern British slang “badman” means a gangster, someone who is comfortable using violence.)

Nowak resumed filming. The footage shows Digwa walking away, and Nowak saying: “Innit bad man, what bad man. You’re a bad man, say you’re a bad man, go on.”

Digwa replied “I’m a bad man”, then walked back to Nowak and grabbed his phone, at which point the footage ends.

In court, Digwa said he grabbed Nowak’s phone in response to being filmed, and that Nowak now got very aggressive, punching him, knocking off his turban, and saying “I’m going to fuck you up, I’m going to kill you.”

Digwa testified that he “did not mean to stab Nowak in the chest when he pushed him away”.

This is where Digwa’s story, plausible enough until now, falls apart. How can you accidentally unsheath a sword and stab someone in the chest with it? It also seems unlikely that an intelligent and ambitious young man like Nowak - versed in the PC ways of modern Britain - would resume filming if he intended to racially abuse a non-white person.

What’s more, in both Snapchat segments, Nowak’s tone is described as placid and light-hearted, “not aggressive or threatening”. With that in mind a completely different interpretation, based on the same footage, is possible:

He was walking along Belmont Road, hazily filming a Snapchat video, and bumped into someone. He paused filming so as to apologise. Then, bemused by the sight of a turban-wearing man with a sheathed sword hanging from his waist, he thought his Snapchat friends might like to see so he resumed filming. Slightly drunk, he engaged the stranger in “banter”, thinking he would enjoy it and play along: “Innit bad man, what bad man. You’re a bad man, say you’re a bad man, go on.”

Either way, the footage shows that Digwa did not respond well to this. I believe that, while Nowak was being jovial, Digwa was being serious, and feeling increasingly malevolent, coiling like a spring, preparing to strike.

He replied to Nowak, “I’m a bad man” then approached him, snatched his phone and ended the filming. Perhaps while a confused Nowak was demanding his phone back, Digwa drew his sword.

He inflicted three wounds: a slash to Nowak’s jaw, a stab to his groin area, and a stab to his chest. This last was the fatal blow. The sword “passed upwards through soft tissue between the two uppermost ribs, catching a lung and cutting [the subclavian vein] an important vein behind the collarbone.” This slowly caused massive internal bleeding.

Bizarrely, Digwa now (11:22pm) began recording with his own phone. That footage shows Nowak attempting to escape, climbing on top of a bin to jump over a fence, leaving a trail of blood behind him, while Digwa taunts him, “you’re not going to get away with this, big man” and stabs him twice in the back of his legs.

Nowak managed to jump over the fence to number 68, landing on a car. I guess Digwa walked around to join him there. At this point Nowak seems to have been overcome by his injuries and stopped fleeing. Digwa, now assured of his quarry, stopped pursuing.

The two young men now began a sort of captor/prisoner conversation. I picture them seated - one calm, one in agony. Nowak pleaded with Digwa to help him, and Digwa mocked him.

Digwa’s brother arrived. Gurpreet was 26 at the time and himself had form for threatening people in public with a sword.

Footage shown in court has Gurpreet off-screen saying (presumably in a phonecall to his parents telling them to come): “Some little [expletive] just attacked Vic.” He then shouted to Nowak: “Step down now big man I will eat you up.”

Digwa himself told Nowak: “You’re [expletive] now bro. Come down now and apologise and we can have a conversation now.”

The brothers told Nowak repeatedly to “get down”. He must have been terrified. At some point, presumably succumbing to his injuries, he fell from the car onto the ground.

Footage from a home security camera has Nowak saying “I am dying” and Digwa replying “you’re not dying bro”, then ten minutes later, Nowak saying “you stabbed me” and Digwa replying: “No I didn’t.”

Digwa was lying to his victim. As will later become clear, he knew he had stabbed him, at least three times.

Having denied he had punished him, Digwa now explained why he had punished him: “You were recording me thinking you’re sick.”

(“Sick” in this context means tough, daring, etc. Like “badman” it derives from Jamaican slang - yet another gift of multiculturalism.)

A resident called 999 saying they thought someone had been stabbed. Incredibly, nothing came of this call.

Still now, Digwa did not call an ambulance for him. However, he did film him again, taking close-ups of his face. This second Digwa video, which I believe lasted a full five minutes, was withheld from the trial for being “too disturbing to be shown”.

The brothers concocted a story: Digwa was a victim of racist abuse and assault by Nowak. Given later comments made between them in a police van, it seems that at this point Gurpreet genuinely didn’t know what had happened and was simply taking his brother’s word for everything.

Whether or not Nowak knocked off Digwa’s turban, the brothers agreed he had. Digwa’s hair was in a tight bun in the footage he took after stabbing Nowak, highly unlikely if his turban had been knocked off. Either way, by the time the police arrived his hair was loose and hanging down over his face, which the prosecutor suggested he did so as to “corroborate” the story.

Gurpreet now called 999 and relayed the fake story to the police:

We’ve just got attacked racially by some White person. He’s physically attacked my brother, we’re Sikhs, we wear a turban and he’s just attacked my brother. We’re restraining him right now because he’s just attacked my brother and took my brother’s turban off. He also, he’s verbally, he’s verbally attacked my brother racially. I’m not having this as a regular occurrence, I live here, I’m not having this a regular occurrence. He ain’t fighting people, he’s racially attacking people, that’s what he’s doing. Nah, he sees some brown people, that’s what it was.

This article gives the time of the 999 call as “approximately 23:30”, but since it lasted nearly 12 minutes and the officers arrived at 23:37, it must have been made at 23:25 or earlier.

A large portion of the 999 call is the police operator trying to determine whether Nowak had said anything racist to Digwa. It is alarming how much time is spent on this.

Also, Gurpreet explicitly denied that any weapons had been used. As a result, the police were unaware of the nature of the incident. However, Gurpreet did say that Nowak was bleeding from his mouth, so the police operator did summon an ambulance but not urgently (it certainly hadn’t arrived by the time the police arrived).

Presumably before Gurpreet called 999, the brothers called their parents, father Moga and mother Kiran Kaur. When they arrived Digwa and his mother conspired in Punjabi and his mother took the sword and left the scene. Gurpreet filmed that interaction on his phone, which implies to me that it happened before he began the 999 call. The sword was later found at their family house, amongst a huge collection of bladed weaponry that Digwa had been amassing since childhood.

Now they waited for the police to arrive.

During this time, the Digwas actively prevented Nowak from seeking medical help. They were holding him down, restraining him. Gurpreet had told the police operator: “I can't let him go until this gets sorted.” The family seem to have been determined that this White racist wouldn’t get away with abusing young Vickrum. But if they hadn’t restrained him, Nowak could have rung on people’s doorbells for help, or got to the main road and been seen by passing motorists. In fact, if Digwa had simply given him back his phone, Nowak could have called an ambulance himself.

By now it must have been at least ten minutes since he had received the fatal blow. There was a trail of blood from his escape attempt, and given his various wounds there was almost certainly blood spilled elsewhere by now, and the slash to his jaw would be clearly visible, and given that he had been telling Digwa “I am dying” even before the family arrived, he would certainly be saying the same in front of them now… yet none of the four Sikhs thought to call an ambulance for him.

Instead, they spent this time accusing him of racism. Nowak denied that and insisted he had been stabbed. Digwa replied: “No one stabbed you bro… you’re drunk.” The truth: Nowak was below the drink driving limit, and Digwa himself was the person who had struck him with a sword, five times. Furthermore, father Moga joined in, accusing Nowak of “pretending” to be injured.

The police arrived at 11:37pm. By now Kiran had returned to the scene and Moga was propping Nowak up, perhaps because that would “look better” than his sons pinning the boy down on the ground.

Moga explained to the police: “He keeps dropping down, so I am just trying to keep him up.” (Why would he keep “dropping down” if he wasn’t injured? This question didn’t seem to occur to either Moga or the police.) Moga then quickly said that Nowak had “a mouthful of blood”, which aroused no interest from the police even though it clearly indicates a serious internal injury. Instead, they took the Digwas’ word for it that he hurt himself when jumping over the fence.

Digwa himself distracted them for a while by claiming to be injured: a trivial bruise under his eye. He can also be heard in the background telling another officer that this kind of thing has happened before to him:

“We’ve been walking in the park... and multiple times we’ve had people... racist and attack us... and nothing happens.”

Nowak told the police he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe. Digwa told them he was “pretending” to be injured, and reiterated that Nowak had assaulted and racially abused him.

Lying on his side, Nowak told the police repeatedly that he couldn’t breathe and that he had been stabbed. The police officer replied: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Unbelievably, the police now put him in handcuffs and said they were arresting him on suspicion of assault.

The male police officer said: “He’s saying he’s been stabbed.” His female colleague asked Nowak: “Where do you think you’ve been stabbed?” Digwa muttered “he hasn’t been stabbed” and the police woman replied to him: “I know but we have to check, don’t we?”

Nowak said “please, brother, I can’t breathe” (his final words) and lost consciousness. He was now motionless and unresponsive, yet they proceeded to read him his rights.

At this point a different female police officer noticed that his pupils weren’t reacting to light. This, exactly three minutes after they had arrived, was when the police realised he really was unwell and they had been lied to - persistently - by the Digwa family. The handcuffs, which had been on for nearly two minutes (not one minute, as was claimed by a police chief) were removed and the police began CPR and summoned an ambulance.

Digwa was arrested for attempted murder at 11:55pm. He was not handcuffed.

An emergency doctor was also flown in by helicopter. When these medical professionals arrived is unknown, but it was a lot later than had the Digwa family been honest.

Henry Nowak was pronounced dead at the scene at 00:37 on 4th December, about eighty minutes after he encountered Vickrum Singh Digwa.

Within four days, Hampshire Police had taken action against the entire Digwa family:

22-year-old Vickrum Digwa has been charged with murder and possession of a bladed article in a public place... Officers charged 52-year-old Kiran Kaur [mother] with assisting an offender.

Both Digwa and his mother have now been convicted of all the above charges.

Police also arrested a 51-year-old man [father, Moga] on suspicion of murder, who has now been released on bail. A 26-year-old [brother, Gurpreet] was initially arrested on suspicion of murder, assisting an offender and a public order defence [sic]. Officers released him with no further action in relation to murder, but he is on bail pending further enquiries for the other offences.

It is understandable why the murder charge was dropped against both men, but I am surprised that the “assisting an offender” charge against Gurpreet was dropped. I also think Moga could have faced the same charge; he must have seen his wife taking away the murder weapon yet stayed silent about this and told the police that Nowak was lying about being injured, even while he was having to prop him up. Are Moga and Gurpreet just incredibly stupid, unable to process incoming evidence if it contradicts what they have been told? Or is it simply that they were told by a relative? Is this the famous “clannishness” of Indians?

At the trial, Digwa maintained his innocence and insisted he had acted only in self-defence, terrified that Nowak might seize his sword from him and attack him with it. He also claimed he did not know he had stabbed Nowak in the chest until the police said it during his first interrogation.

Throughout the trial, Hampshire Police remained silent. This fuelled rage and speculation. After the conviction, they said their silence had been to avoid prejudicing the trial. However, this concern hadn’t stopped them tweeting about George Floyd nearly a year before Derek Chauvin’s trial.

After Digwa’s sentencing, a raft of new charges were levelled against the family for possession of weapons.

The wickedness of Vickrum Singh Digwa, like the wickedness or stupidity of his relatives, has been overshadowed by the behaviour of the police officers who attended. For many, it confirms long-held beliefs that the British police are hopelessly “woke”. How didn’t they immediately realise Nowak had been stabbed?

Three things can be said in their defence:

• it was night-time. Blood spatters wouldn’t be easily visible. The trail of blood he had left was on the other side of the fence.

• three minutes is a long time to a dying man, but not long at all in ordinary human perception

• four angry Sikhs were bombarding them with a false story that he had got “hurt” jumping over the fence, and that he was drunk. These two factors might seem to explain his condition.

But:

• the police also received a call from a resident of Belmont Road saying she thought someone had been stabbed. How on earth was this not combined with Gurpreet’s report to prepare the officers for a potentially more complex scene than Gurpreet had described? This failure, of police infrastructure, is surely critical.

• upon their arrival at the scene, Moga immediately told the police that Nowak couldn’t sit up on his own

• Moga also told them Nowak had “a mouthful of blood”

• he had been slashed around the jaw. A simple look at his face should have immediately told them a bladed weapon had been involved

• he told them four times that he had been stabbed and nine times that he couldn’t breathe

• they barely checked him for any stab wounds

• when they arrived, he was literally three minutes away from death. He must have looked dreadful.

All in all, I think the predominant explanation for the police’s conduct in those first three minutes is that they chose to prioritise racism over all else. They chose to believe a brown man had been racially abused rather than that he had stabbed a White man.

Within a day of the incident, Hampshire Police knew they had performed badly and referred the incident to the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Its investigation has been proceeding all this time (six months). Its findings must be published, because this story is dumbfounding the British public.

For unknown reasons, police bodycam footage was withheld. This also fuelled rage and speculation; the British people wanted to know how politicised, anti-White and therefore dangerous to them their own police “service” has become. A segment was finally released after Digwa had been sentenced.

What is truly astonishing is that the police handcuffed Nowak. Even if it wasn’t clear he had been stabbed, the bodycam footage shows he was obviously in no state to cause trouble or violence, still less to run away, so there can be no justification for that.

There was immediate public fury about this. However, according to the judge at Digwa’s trial, no matter how soon the police arrived and no matter what they did, Nowak was doomed:

The pathologist, Amanda Jeffrey… said that no emergency medical treatment would have permitted access to the bleeding vein. In simple terms, he would not have survived, however quickly he received first aid, CPR or expert medical treatment.

This was contested on Twitter by a Polish paediatrician who specified a set of medical actions by which this injury could have been treated and Nowak’s life saved. He furthermore said that the police pulling Nowak’s hands behind his back might well have stretched the subclavian vein, rupturing any blood clot that had developed and thus worsening the haemorrhage and expediting his death. Now, alongside the police conduct investigation, there is to be a full medical inquest into this.

Some bits of “fake news” have spread about the story:

• the police officers were all female

• they searched his phone and his father’s phone for evidence of racism

• the “kirpan” legal exemption has only existed since 2019. (I have written a separate essay about the legalities around the kirpan and about the calls to ban it.)

• in court, the judge reduced the charge from murder to manslaughter. (In fact, he gave the jury the option to find Digwa guilty of manslaughter if they couldn’t find him guilty of murder.)

Also, there was speculation that the officers were non-white. This always seemed unlikely to me given Southampton’s demographics and was disproven when the bodycam footage was released. However, the fact that their race was immediately a matter of concern for people indicates how febrile a situation is created by diversity. Whichever side we are on, we all know that race is a fault-line constantly waiting to rupture. The result is constant latent mistrust, a population constantly expecting betrayal and sabotage by “the Other”. We simply shouldn’t be living like this.

Another facet of living with diversity is the constant threat (for White people, solely) of being accused of not liking diversity, of being “racist”. Non-whites know that the R-word has a magical effect on White people: if you apply it to one of them, his fellows will abandon and condemn him. This is why the Digwa family threw the word around very liberally:

• Vickrum to his family

• Gurpreet to the police operator

• the three Digwa men to Nowak

• the three Digwa men to the attending police officers

• Vickrum to police interrogators

• Vickrum to the jury at his trial

• Vickrum’s (White) defence barrister to the jury

• the Digwa family to the court during sentencing

Even now, some brown people are trying to use it to make White people abandon and condemn Nowak.

In court, the judge and Nowak’s family felt they had to emphasise that he was definitely not racist, as if it would mitigate his being butchered if he were!

For White people’s sake, the R-word has to be stripped of its magical power. One could argue that it, like a curse, killed Henry Nowak.

In the aftermath, some Sikhs are closing ranks. How dare White people tar them all with the same brush? Yet any incidence of White violence against non-whites is used to tar all White people. In any situation, whichever option harms White people is the one chosen. When a non-white attacks one of us, our collective outrage is used to demonise us. When one of us attacks a non-white, their collective outrage is used to demonise us.

Narinder Kaur, a notoriously anti-White Sikh woman, has voiced solidarity with Muslims against “racist” Whites. For many years I have listened to White centrists squealing that “Islam isn’t a race!” Well, how insightful does that stupid remark seem now? For clarity, on the back of this incident I have seen Sikhs characterise animosity towards them as racist. Fairly soon I expect to hear White centrists squealing “Sikhism isn’t a race!” in the pathetic hope that this will shield them from the R-word. The truth is the whole world thinks in racial terms and we White people should never have stopped doing the same. We might have always been individualistic, but only recently did we become stupid.

Now, of course it is possible that a White family could conspire against an 18 year-old boy like the Digwa family did. I’m sure it has happened, here and there. But it is much less likely to happen. And where it does happen, race isn’t an issue, nobody can suspect it of being a motivating factor, and it can’t be used to mitigate or demonise the victim or the perpetrator, or the police, judiciary and media who handle the case thereafter.

Moreover, everyone knows that race was a factor here. It was a factor not just in the mutual alienation which undoubtedly prompted the attack in the first place, and not just in the actions of the police. Most of all, it was a factor in the behaviour of the Digwa family. At some level, they saw the dying Henry Nowak as “just a White guy”. They probably associated him with every resentment and suspicion they’ve ever had about all White people. In that hour he was a helpless avatar for them of the race they live amongst yet do not know, cannot know, and quietly despise.

Could a White family have treated him the same way? Yes, but their motivations would be different. Could the Digwas have had other, non-racial, motivations? Yes, but racial ones were there, making their contempt for him more likely, more real, more substantial, more deadly.

And everyone knows this. Everyone knows that, just as birds of a feather flock together, racial difference combined with Third World clannishness means that all White people are as vulnerable as Henry Nowak.

This could happen to any White guy in Britain.

Nowak was one of us. He might not have been “fully English” but it doesn’t matter. We identify with him, and we know that he suffered gravely by the nonsense that plagues us all in this multiracial dystopia. We care about him because race is real. It is so real, it probably caused his death.

If current trajectories proceed and diversity increases in Britain, how much more perilous does the situation become for us White people? What happens when the police are largely non-white, and instead of taking three minutes to wise up, they take ten minutes, or simply decide not to? What happens when the Independent Office for Police Conduct is largely non-white, and even when misconduct is clear, they simply decide not to see it? What happens when the government is largely non-white, and even though the regulatory bodies are clearly corrupt, it simply decides not to do anything about it? What happens when the political parties are largely non-white, so you can’t vote for a less Third World government? Without remigration, all of these things will happen - well within this century.

And even if all of the above paragraphs are false, even if race played no role in the motivations of anyone involved in this, and therefore we needn’t fear the Great Replacement further corrupting our societies… even then, it is certainly true that, had the Digwa family never been allowed into Britain, Henry Nowak would still be alive today.

Digwa was sentenced to “life with a minimum term of 21 years”. Nowak will never see any of those years. His family will have to spend those years wondering what the promising, happy young man would be doing by now, if he had just walked on the other side of the road that night, so long ago.

Henry Nowak’s final hour was spent listening to alien people conspiring against him in a foreign language while using English to accuse him of racism and deceit. His final minutes were spent with British police dismissing his pleas for help. His final waking moments were spent in handcuffs, on a cold December ground, while all of the above continued around him.

We should be angry and disgusted with the Digwa family.

We should be angry and disgusted with those Sikhs nationwide who are using this terrible incident to induce yet more White guilt in the native majority.

We should be angry and disgusted with the Hampshire Police who made a grotesque three-minute mistake.

But there were many more people who could have helped Henry Nowak. In all of the houses around him, there were people who must have heard his screams and pleas, people who could have rescued him from the foreigners, people who should have cared, people of his kind. For Belmont Road is 80% White.

Even though she knows the school is majority White (over 85%), she has designed her classroom, in her own words, “for non-white students”. To be fair, this could be simply because she is bringing materials from her previous school, which was much more diverse. But even then, you would think the sensible thing would be to buy materials more fitting for her new school. She does not.

So the woke attitude goes far beyond merely accommodating non-white people, and beyond even the absurdity of giving them equal prominence in our ancestral society, but actually to giving them precedence over us there.

What I found striking about this video, apart from the mindboggling fact that this is someone presumably vocated to help people yet doing something that will clearly harm her pupils, is how she delights in the fact that what she has done will annoy parents. To be precise, it will annoy parents who, whether conscious of it or not, are “racist”. After all, if they really “don’t see race”, then how can they possibly care about this? Thus, they cannot argue that their kids should see representations of their racial kin without outing themselves as “racist”, which in turn will make them very vulnerable. So this younger teacher feels not just morally sound, but bulletproof against reprisals, and very clever.

There is also a social class element to this. She specifies that these will be “posh White parents”. Despite appearing to be all of 23 and only having taught in very diverse schools, she alludes to experience in dealing with such upper-class White parents before. She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism.

She also clearly assumes that, if any parents do complain, she will be safe. The institution - not just her school but the entire education sector, including all of the academics and every university department that sustains them - will be on her side. If and when the parents complain (having navigated their way through the minefield of realising they are “racist” and painstakingly forming some lame argument to hopefully avoid that accusation) they will find that she is protected not just by her employer but by an entire segment of society. They, the parents, might get some small local newspaper to back them, or more likely to report the story impartially, but in all likelihood they will find themselves shamed by some much bigger newspaper. That is what she was clearly expecting when she made this video.

I think, if she had posted her video two years earlier, during the Summer of Floyd, that is probably how things would have played out. The school board would have been terrified to reprimand her, lest armies of BLM rioters and crazed antifa lay siege to their buildings and the national media destroy their little town’s reputation. By mid 2022, however, things had changed.

What actually happened was a small media furore followed by a statement from the school principal condemning her video. Then she was put on paid leave while the authorities “investigated”. After a month, they announced they had found no evidence of “any policy or legal violations” or “instances of discrimination [against White children] of any kind within the employee’s classroom”. She was reprimanded for her silly video but allowed back into the classroom. The school published an apology from her which clearly contradicted what she had said in her video. As it turned out, this smug SJW was startled by the blowback and said whatever was necessary to keep her job.

However, there was an assumption that she would soon be transferred to some other school, for her own safety since threats had been made against her. (Miraculously, nobody ever obtained her name and she remains anonymous to this day, four years on.)

What I find troubling about this story is that it illuminates both the viciousness and the vulnerability of the midwit. It wouldn’t be worth fretting over, except that there are many millions of these people about. Every one of them is bright enough to grasp the drivel at teacher training college, but not bright enough to realise that it is drivel. Every one of them is vicious enough to harm children and take pleasure in disturbing the parents and sadistically putting them in an impossible position… but every one of them is literally just doing what they have been told to do, and is spreading the ideas they have been trained to believe are good, healthy, and crucially needed.

It is almost pointless to be angry with that girl (a patronising word that I use deliberately) because, as smug as she is in her video, she isn’t very clever and she isn’t thinking for herself. She is “just following orders”. You’ve really got to be angry with the institutions that made her this way, that sent her out into the world with a head packed full of poison. She is their useful idiot, their canary which will sometimes flourish and sometimes suffocate. If she had been fired in disgrace, they would have some new drone fresh off the brainwashing line ready to take her place.

Indeed, why did she feel so safe putting out that video? Because she has heard countless senior figures advocating exactly the same things. She just didn’t realise that, being less senior than them, and being subject to the whims of parents in a small town, and with a media frantically rowing back from its 2020 excesses, she was much more vulnerable than those academics. They can spout their nonsense from an ivory tower, but when it gets to “ground level”, things are much more visceral, and parents will protect their children. That young teacher misjudged things, but I can see why she thought she was safe.

What should we do with people like her, the preachy sadists who think themselves above us and are quite happy to harm us in the name of “good”? I think the answer is the same as for all midwits. We must not give them the credence they so desperately want. We must circumvent them. Tackling them head on is pointless; they are not bright enough to recognise good arguments, nor humble enough to accept that they have been wrong. Always assert dominance. Talk down to them, brook none of their nonsense, never seek their approval, make them seek yours, reject their premises, put up obstacles to their proposals. Give them no more than the most basic respect. Talk to them as if you are addressing an errant child; to all intents and purposes (despite their paper medals), you are. But the best option is to avoid them entirely, if that is possible.

Of course, in another world, the very same person would be a fascist. Perhaps that is the ultimate irony. They are so smug, so sure of themselves, but the truth is they have no idea… of anything at all.