Wes Streeting, the former Health Secretary who is looking to challenge British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer for the premiership, has declared that “Social Media is the New Smoking.” Apparently, it is highly addictive (who’d have guessed that a highly pro-social and inquisitive species would become addicted to the dopamine hit of constant interaction and information?), it is particularly addictive for children, it has driven some children to suicide,and doctors regard banning it for under-16s as being as obvious for safety as using seat belts in cars.

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Now imagine a small bar at the bottom of your screen. As the chap speaks, it lights up. Loaded language: 3.2 times the rate of his opponent. Cherry-picked statistics: four. Strawmen: two. Pattern over the last six months: consistent. You glance at it. You don’t have to read a thinkpiece. You don’t have to consult a fact-checker the next morning. The number is just there, the way the score is there at a football match.

This is, I am reliably informed, more or less imminent.

Why this works when fact-checking doesn’t

Here is the thing that the political-science chaps have established beyond serious doubt over the last two decades: telling people that the politician they like has said something untrue does almost nothing. You can publish all the Snopes articles you wish. The voter shrugs, mutters something about the lying media, and proceeds. Humans are not Bayesian reasoners updating gracefully on evidence. Humans are tribal primates running on coalitional software, and the software treats inconvenient facts the way the immune system treats a transplant.

So you might think: well, if fact-checking doesn’t work, this rhetoric-scoring business won’t work either. People will simply ignore it.

But it’s not the same mechanism. And this is the bit worth dwelling on.

Fact-checking attacks individual claims. Did he say the thing? Was the thing true? The voter’s tribal software has excellent defences against this — denial, whataboutery, source-impeachment. But what the new tools attack is pattern. Not “this statistic is wrong” but “this fellow uses three times more manipulative language than the other fellow, every time, over six months, across every venue.” That’s a different sort of signal. It bypasses the truth/falsity argument entirely and goes straight to character. And character — the perceived sort of person somebody is — is precisely the variable that the tribal primate brain does update on. It is, in fact, the variable it was built to update on. Our ancestors weren’t checking each other’s sources. They were watching, over years, who was reliable and who was a slippery sod.

So this is, if I may, the cable-news mechanism in reverse. Cable news weaponised pattern recognition for tribal loyalty: here are all the times the other side did something bad, repeatedly, across years. It worked beautifully. It also corroded everything it touched. The new tools take the same mechanism and point it at rhetorical conduct itself, irrespective of which tribe is performing it. It’s the same psychological lever but a different target.

What I’d expect to follow

A few predictions, dear reader, for which you may hold me to account in the fullness of time.

The score becomes the story. At the moment, the morning after a debate is decided by pundits — that grim parade of former staffers and PR people telling you who “won.” Within a few election cycles, post-debate coverage will lead with the asymmetry numbers. “Senator Plonker used 3.2 times the loaded language of his opponent — here is the breakdown by technique.” Pundits will hate this, naturally, because it commoditises pundits, who are extraordinarily expensive replacements for what is essentially a confidence trick. But networks will license the rhetoric-scoring rails anyway, because the numbers will rate. Spectacle finds spectacle.

Speechwriters adapt — and here we have a fork in the road. Two possible futures, both plausible, neither yet decided.

The cheerful one: speeches actually clean up. The speechwriter, knowing that obvious manipulation will be flagged in real time on screens around the country, edits it out. Baseline rhetoric improves. We get something a touch closer to grown-up political discourse.

The grim one: speechwriters learn precisely where the classifier is blind, and write around it. We get AI-clean rhetoric — still misleading, still manipulative, but on dimensions the model isn’t yet measuring. This is what the engineers call adversarial co-evolution, and historically the optimisers win, because there are thousands of them and only a few classifiers. The honest answer is that we’ll get some of both, with the second probably outpacing the first unless the rubrics keep evolving — which means the people building these tools have to treat them as a permanently moving target, not a finished product.

The town hall dies. The AI grilling replaces it. A clip went around recently of Bernie Sanders being interviewed by Claude. It was striking because it bypassed two layers that politicians ordinarily rely on. Friendly interviewer, friendly audience: gone. Replaced with an interlocutor that doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get charmed, doesn’t get intimidated, and doesn’t have a producer in its ear telling it to wrap up because the next segment is on weather. If even two or three serious candidates do well in that format, and one or two visibly duck it, then refusing the AI grilling becomes a political signal — the way refusing presidential debates was a damaging signal between roughly 1960 and 1976. By 2028 I’d expect a “live AI Q&A” to be a major campaign format. The candidate who runs as the AI-tested candidate will probably be a fellow with a strong substantive record and feeble charisma. The format will favour him for the same reason a written exam favours the swot over the chap who can charm the examiner in viva.

Charisma is decomposed for parts. And here, dear reader, we approach a topic dear to my evolutionary heart. Charisma at present is a black box — “she’s just somehow likeable,” “he has presence,” “there’s something about him.” Once the machines start telling you that the something is, in fact, 73% vocal cadence, 8% argument structure, and 19% well-deployed tribal cues, the mystique evaporates. Charisma has historically been an enormous political asset — it is, after all, how primates have selected leaders since long before language. Strip it down into measurable components on a screen, and it loses much of its black-box premium. Reagan, in this environment, is a slightly diminished Reagan. Some painfully wonkish fellow nobody can presently bear to listen to becomes, relatively speaking, more powerful. Whether that’s good for civilisation is genuinely unclear. Charisma is, among other things, how democracies have built coalitions across difference. Take it away and you may find yourself with more honest politicians and less functional politics.

The fifteen-second gotcha clip dies. At present, a great deal of journalism consists of catching a politician contradicting himself in a single clip and circulating it for a day. Once we have proper longitudinal profiles of how every politician speaks and writes over years, the single contradiction matters less — because it’s no longer a slip, it’s a data point in a pattern. Patterns matter more. Journalism shifts from clip-hunting to pattern-narrating. The politicians who survive are the ones whose patterns hold up under that scrutiny. Most won’t.

The earpiece scandal is coming. Once the tools exist to grade rhetoric in real time, they also exist to coach it in real time. Some candidate, somewhere — probably first in a city council race or a congressional primary, where standards are slacker — will be caught wearing a concealed device fed real-time rebuttals from a staff-run AI. Once it’s caught, it will be a scandal. Once it’s normalised, it will be the norm. I should rather like to know when the first big detection lands. I’d guess within five years.

And the deepest worry

Now the awkward bit.

Once politicians start optimising for the classifier, the classifier stops measuring what it was supposed to measure. Goodhart’s Law — the moment a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The honest version of any such tool keeps reminding the user: this is one frame on framing; there are others; reasonable people disagree. The successful version, the one that gets a million users, probably can’t afford to keep saying that, because users want a verdict. They want to be told who’s lying and who isn’t. They want the green light or the red light, not the nuanced essay.

That tension — between honesty and influence — gets harder to hold the more influential the tool becomes. The serious response is something like: publish your rubric, publish your disagreements, surface dissents prominently, refuse to give a single number where multiple are honest. Whether the market rewards that level of restraint is an open question. I’d not bet the family farm on it.

The moment to watch most carefully is the first major debate where some superPAC takes the asymmetry numbers and runs them as the entire content of an attack ad. “Here is the score. Vote accordingly.” That is the moment this technology stops being a literacy tool and becomes campaign infrastructure. And the politics of building it — funding it, governing it, contesting it — change overnight.

We are, dear readers, perhaps two election cycles from finding out which version we get.

That’s why I’ve partnered with Parallax — a company that wants to create the most ethical and useful version of this technology. You can download the Parallax extension for your Google Chrome browser and see the techniques YouTubers and writers use to persuade you. And in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I scanned the article you just read — you can view Parallax’s analysis of it here.

I know I wrote last week about Angela Rayner and perhaps you might think I am obsessed with this ginger school drop-out, but events are moving fast in the UK and, at the time of writing, there genuinely is the insane prospect of Angela Rayner – born into the underclass and a mother at 16 - becoming Prime Minister. Her ascent seems to reflect the lunacy that you should simply “believe what women say.” But since autumn I have been working on a book on a sub-section of women, around 3% of them, whom you probably should not believe, and that is women who have Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). As far as I can see, Big Ange, like a fair few women who reach positions of power, is among their number.

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In the mid-1990s, before mass-immigration dominated everything, there was a moral panic in the English-speaking world about teenage mums. Usually from families who were long-term unemployed, these young girls would get pregnant, often below the age of sexual consent, allowing them to drop out of school, jump the social housing list and likely live off benefits for the foreseeable future. I knew a girl at primary school, whose parents actually seemed quite middle class, who had her first child at 14, and had three kids when I ran into her on a bus aged 19.

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The German Democratic Republic, East Germany; the GDR . . . those words conjure up images of the most repressive of all of the Communist states: files kept on most of the citizens, being subjected to constant Marxist propaganda; people avoiding striking up conversations with strangers, let alone expressing their opinions to them, lest the stranger be one of the nation’s army of volunteer snitches: a country governed be fear. Yet as I made my way to the Medieval town of Gotha to speak at a conference of fellow “based” people, I began to think about how, in many ways, this former Eastern Bloc country is less like a Communist state than Britain, which still sings of being the “mother of the free.”

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Are you consuming “Nostalgia Porn”? Do you watch videos from the 1980s or 1990s – when Britain was a safe, relatively united and an overwhelming British country where the idea of foreign government ministers, let alone a Prime Minister, was insane and repellent – and think, “Hmm, life looks like it was rather better back then.” According to a very turgid and meandering piece in The Guardian (where else?) entitled “‘I feel like I’m losing her’: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right,” this is a growing and very dangerous problem.

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I was making my way to my local branch of Lidl when I saw it in the distance; a pitch black ghost pushing an equally black pram. She wasn’t merely wearing a burka. Even her eyes were completely covered; she was presumably able to just about see through the thin fabric.

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I was recently watching an episode of a Netflix series about the Cold War in the 1980s and it got me thinking. A huge part of what distinguished Britain from the Eastern Bloc was that those societies were police states. One of the markers of a police state is that laws are arbitrarily enforced; what one person can get away with another person, in particular a critic of the regime who is known for his wrong-think, cannot. Also, police states – and East Germany was notorious for this – often operate networks of undercover informants such that any random person you might talk to might be a state operative. As such, you have to be extremely careful what you say and to whom. In the world of social media, anonymous operatives gleefully scour the posts of prominent people whom they dislike in search of anything that might be worth reporting to Britain’s politicised police.

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You have to be quite fearless to write an excoriating review of the book of a prominent and influential man, at least if you move in his sphere of influence, but this is what Ben Sixsmithhas recently done in relation to the Reform UK spokesman Matt Goodwin. His review of Goodwin’s self-published book Suicide of a Nation (what a cliché!) is entitled “Suicide of an author’s credibility” and it calls Goodwin’s tome “a very bad book.” It reads, Sixsmithargues, like someone trying to extend his CV, it contains factual mistakes, AI hallucinated quotes, and even source information from Chat GPT in the few footnotes. It is “slop” written in a patronising style, it is derivative: “I just don’t think a book that claims to defend British culture should be so short on eloquence, wit, scholarship . . .” writes Sixsmith.

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“Land of hope and glory . . . Something, something else . . . Land of hope and glory, That is where I live.” So began an episode of the sitcom “Bottom” broadcast on 14^th October 1991. The character, the ever-pompous Richie, could not remember the line “Mother of the free.” In the intervening years, it is a line that has not so much been forgotten in Britain as ruthlessly ignored to the extent that it is now plain wrong.

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There is an outbreak of meningococcal meningitis in Canterbury and the UK authorities are desperate for it not to reach London, which it may already have done. The outbreak seemingly began on about 7^th March in a nightclub in Canterbury called Chemistry. Eleven people who attended are seriously ill in hospital and two people have died; an 18 year-old sixth former called Juliette and an un-named 21 year-old student at the University of Kent. It has been speculated that the outbreak may have been caused by people sharing vapes.

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Enoch Powell was wrong. You might not expect me to say this, as his “Rivers of Blood Speech” was frighteningly prophetic and he was clearly correct that black and South Asian immigration would lead Britain to the brink of civil war. However, on another issue, as I pointed out on a live stream on 3^rd November 2025, Powell was very wrong and that was his insistence that asylums be shut down, a process which finally began in the 1980s and which became formal government policy in 1993.

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I groaned with disbelief as I clicked on to the Mail Online on 17^th February and saw the lead article: “Chilling warning signs before ‘narcissistic’ trans dad ‘shot ex-wife and kids’ in hockey game bloodbath.”

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I put out a tweet on 11th February which I thought was really rather reasonable: “No man, other than a nonce, would want to spend his working life with other people’s defenceless kids.”

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Should we all be apologising to our permanently online, far-right, schizophrenic friend today? Has he been right all along, albeit due to his paranoia rather than due to hard evidence?. The world appears to be run, or very heavily influenced, by a super-elite network of sexual degenerates who are centred around an extremely wealthy Jew who has a penchant for under-age white girls. And not only was Jeffrey Epstein Jewish but he regarded non-Jews, compared to Jews, as low-IQ cattle, dismissing them as “goyim.” This elite, according to the published emails, merrily discussed topics that we are not supposed to touch such as race differences in IQ and even eugenics, with Epstein openly wondering how to cull the supposedly less worthy segment of humanity. He even secretly fathered numerous children with the aim of creating a superior gene pool.

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The English comedian Andrew Doyle has recently published a book entitled The End of Woke. In my view, the title alone is extremely dangerous, because the kind of unhappy and unstable people epitomised in the “legal observers” of Minneapolis never, ever give up. They are fuelled by resentment, by a feeling that they don’t have enough power, by fear of openly playing for status, and by a hatred of those who implicitly question their “cope” of moral perfection. Their loathing of us makes our feelings towards them seem conciliatory. There may be a reaction against Woke; Woke may be on the defensive, but it certainly hasn’t ended yet, and this is best evidenced in the ability of the Woke Deep State—and especially the mainstream media—to lie, in the most Soviet manner possible, about Alex Pretti and think they can get away with it.

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I know that I have already produced a video on the allure of Amelia from an evolutionary psychology perspective but, as the cult around her grows every day, I cannot resist exploring it in even more depth. Clearly, she was presented by the makers of Prevent’s hilariously backfiring teen game Pathways as a projection onto the right of a left-wing woman; perhaps with the assumption that this would repel young males who might be slightly conservative. With her purple hair, she is essentially signalling Borderline Personality Disorder: I am depressed and have a weak sense of identity, so I need a strong one by being unusual. I find the world frightening, so I am employing the aposematism of purple hair to signal to others that I am dangerous and to induce certain negative feelings in them, such as confusion. I feel that I am a weird outsider, so I am taking control of these feelings by making myself look odd.

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There is a comedian in the UK who literally embodies Woke over-reach, and why the backlash against Woke began. Her name is Rosie Jones, and she has severe ataxic cerebral palsy. Despite speaking very slowly and with a pronounced slur, meaning that she has no comic timing and is objectively not funny in a performance context, Woke audiences, as well as regime comedians on panel shows, pretend that she is funny, like two parents laughing at their 4-year-old’s joke and feeling good about themselves accordingly. Jones has even started lecturing genuine stand-up comedians on what they should and shouldn’t tell jokes about. It is being forced to lie in this way – participating in the fantasy of Narcissistic men with a sexual fetish that they are women is another example – that began to push people too far. Many people can cope with watching historical dramas that lie about historical ethnic diversity but being persecuted for not affirming lies was too much.

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Indirectly, Nick Lowles is the reason why the grooming gangs went unchecked for so long; the reason why the Southport Massacre took place; the reason why much of England has collapsed into chaos. Whether as the editor of Searchlight or head of the manipulatively named “anti-racism” group Hope Not Hate, he has spent his career bullying and destroying those who speak out against his Woke ideology; spying on them and getting them fired by weak-willed, frightened employers. It is due to him that most people feared, and many still fear, that emotive word “racism,” so much so that they dare not speak out. Lowles caused the repression to go too far, such that people weren’t prepared to accept the lunacy anymore, and now the atmosphere is changing, and he knows it.

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In England, if someone was sitting on a park bench and there was a space next to them, traditionally, before occupying it, and to be polite, you would ask if you could sit there. Frequently, this would evoke the light-hearted response, “It’s a free country.” Such a reply broke the ice with a stranger and fellow Englishman and indicated that you were friendly and up for a chat. It was a reflection of positive ethnocentrism; you were both Englishmen together whiling away your three-score and ten, so why not inject a bit of levity into life? It also alluded to a core element of English identity; that we are a free country, while European nations have a tendency to descend into various forms of totalitarianism.

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