In 1944, during the closing years of the Second World War, C.S. Lewis wrote a column for the political and literary journal Time & Tide under the title Notes on the Way.

One essay, ‘Democratic Education,’ explored the growing demand for equality in his day and warned that not every appeal to equality arises from noble motives or good intentions.

Lewis observed, “The demand for equality has two sources — one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest of human emotions.”

The first source, he argued, is a genuine desire for justice and fair play. The second, however, is the hatred of superiority.

Lewis rightly found that fallen human nature often resents excellence. People can come to despise those who are stronger, wiser, more gifted, or more accomplished than themselves. And rather than aspiring to similar excellence, they seek to drag down the excellent.

In Australia, we have a term for it: Tall Poppy Syndrome. The concept derives its name from an ancient story recorded by Roman historian Livy. According to the account, Sextus Tarquinius sent a message to his father, the Roman king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, on how to maintain control over a captured city.

The king didn’t say a word. Instead, he silently cut the heads off the tallest poppies in his garden. Sextus understood that his father was advising him to cut down the most powerful and influential in the city to secure the top position.

For Lewis, the modern-day equivalent is rhetorical. It’s found in branding others with certain labels to discredit them and drag them down, not to the level of the discreditor, but beneath him. It is pure envy, he said, and it is insatiable.

“The more you concede to it, the more it will demand,” Lewis explained. “No attitude of humility which you can possibly adopt will propitiate a man with an inferiority complex.”

American theologian Jonathan Edwards defined envy as “A spirit of dissatisfaction or opposition to the prosperity or happiness of others.”

Similarly, English Minister Nathaniel Vincent said, “How much of hell is there in the temper of an envious man! The happiness of another is his misery; the good of another is his affliction. He looks upon the virtue of another with an evil eye and is as sorry at the praise of another as if that praise were taken away from himself. Envy makes a hater of his neighbour, and his own tormentor.”

Thus, forced equality is a dead-end pursuit. It will never satisfy those motivated by envy, because resentment often demands revenge.

As such, Lewis insisted that equality has proper limits. While equality is indispensable in law and politics, it becomes destructive when applied indiscriminately to every sphere of life.

“Equality (outside of mathematics) is a purely social conception,” he said. “It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind.

Lewis argued, “Beauty is not democratic—she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic—she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic—she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours.”

Political democracy is doomed, Lewis argued, if it tries to extend its demands for equality into these higher spheres.

“Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.”

Of course, a healthy society ought to pursue equality before the law, but it should also celebrate excellence. Justice requires that all people be treated equally as citizens, but justice is not so blind that it can’t recognise that truth, beauty, virtue, and talent are not distributed equally.

We may be equal in worth, but we are not all equal in nature. Some people can jump higher than others.

Whenever envy masquerades as equality, the outcome isn’t a fairer society but one that punishes excellence and rewards mediocrity. It is a weight fastened around the neck of society. Consequently, everyone is poorer for it. When excellence is hindered, the whole community suffers.

Okay, you’ll own the console. But purchasing and owning a physical copy of your game will soon be a thing of the past.

On 1 July, Sony confirmed via the official PlayStation Blog that production of physical game discs for new PlayStation titles will end in January 2028.

After that date, new games will only be available digitally. Purchased games will be added to a digital library tied to a specific account and downloaded to the console.

Sony said the reason for the move was that “consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital.”

Further, the move will have a significant impact on the pre-owned game market. In the past, players could trade in physical games after they had finished playing them. Those pre-owned games could then be resold at a discounted price, giving others a chance to play newer titles without paying full price.

For Sony, going fully digital means it can capture almost 100% of every sale without competing against a resale market.

For many others, however, it’s just another step towards owning nothing—or at least, nothing physical. The concern many have voiced is that people don’t truly own the products they purchase. Access can be revoked at any time, and users can lose access for a variety of reasons.

It’s already happened! PlayStation has announced it will remove access to over 500 films purchased by users on September 1, 2026, due to expired licensing agreements. It’s a move that further highlights that digital movie purchases on PlayStation are licenses rather than permanent ownership.

But users not actually owning the product they’re purchasing is something we’ve already come to normalise in other areas of life. When was the last time you bought a DVD? Almost every film we watch now comes through a subscription service or is added to a digital library. Gaming is simply the next inevitable step.

And while many people are outraged that PlayStation is making this move, we shouldn’t forget that it is also largely a response to consumer behaviour.

Would Sony abandon physical sales if the market were still there? Unlikely. But the market isn’t there anymore.

Digital sales have dominated the gaming industry for years, with many major titles generating 80–90% of their sales through digital downloads. Sony says physical software made up just 3% of PlayStation game sales in 2024.

So, while users may not like the decision, they also played a significant part in bringing it about. It serves as a reminder of just how much major companies are shaped by the behaviour of their consumers. We can't place all the blame on Sony. To a large extent, it's simply responding to the market.

Consumers have repeatedly chosen instant access over physical possession, and companies have taken notice. Sony's decision isn't creating a new reality so much as formalising one that gamers have been embracing for years.

If we want to own the things we buy, we'll have to start acting like ownership matters. Until then, expect to own nothing.

If you’re one of those families who keep your children in the church service instead of sending them to Sunday School, “Kids’ Church,” or creche, you’ve probably been questioned about it. Sometimes it’s polite. Other times, people will come at you as though you’ve admitted to feeding your child only once a day.

The assumption is often that keeping children in corporate worship is unnatural, unhelpful, distracting, or even irresponsible.

Yet today, a growing number of parents are deliberately choosing to worship together as a family each Lord’s Day. They’re not making this decision because they dislike supplementary children’s ministry. They have no problem with Sunday School and the like, provided it’s before or after church—not an alternative to church.

Rather, they believe that gathering with the whole church for Word and sacrament is one of the most important things children can experience.

Here are four of the most common objections to keeping kids in church, and a response to each.

“They won’t understand the sermon.”

This is probably the objection heard most often. The argument is that the sermons are too theologically complex for young children. Surely they’d get more out of a lesson designed specifically for their age.

At first, that sounds reasonable. But it assumes the primary purpose of bringing children to church is simply to maximise how much information they understand in that particular hour of the week.

Corporate worship is about much more than just Bible lessons.

Children spend far more time at home than they do at church. As such, parents have every day of the week to explain the Bible to their children at their level through family worship, Bible reading, conversation, catechism, and prayer.

They can read simplified stories, watch shows designed to teach kids about the Bible, answer questions, and—with the invention of the internet and the home printer—can colour in as many Bible-themed pictures as they wish.

What they can’t recreate at home is the gathered church.

Only in corporate worship do children experience the people of God assembled together across generations. They hear God’s Word publicly read and preached. They sing alongside grandparents, parents, singles, and other children. They sit under the shepherding of their elders. They witness baptisms, the Lord’s Supper, prayer, confession, and more.

Those experiences can’t be had in the living room.

The Bible consistently presents God’s people gathered together as one covenant community. Children were present when the Law was read publicly, not because they understood every word, but because they belonged among God’s people and were expected to grow into understanding over time.

After all, many adults don’t fully grasp every word and concept of every sermon either. Yet no one suggests they should leave for a simplified alternative.

“Church is boring—they’ll end up hating it.”

Many assume that asking children to sit through a worship service will only make them resent church when they’re old. In reality, however, the opposite is more likely to be the case.

When children are routinely removed the moment the “grown-up” part of the service begins, they learn an unintended lesson: church isn’t for them.

They begin to think, very early on, that this part of the service belongs to the boring old adults. Anyone who grew up attending Sunday School will probably remember the disappointment of church during school holidays, when children’s programs stopped, and they suddenly had to suffer the entire service they’d spent the rest of the year being told they couldn’t understand, wouldn’t like, and should participate in.

Keeping kids in worship communicates something very different. It tells them that they belong in church, with everyone, and regardless of their age, and importantly, whether or not they liked the sermon.

It’s not going to be easy on day one, but like every important habit, attention is cultivated through practice. No one expects a child to sit attentively for an hour overnight. They learn gradually. Week by week, year by year, they become familiar with the liturgy, the songs, the prayers, and the preaching.

In fact, if you’re doing family worship each day, your children will learn at home what it means to sit still while God’s Word is being read and talked about.

Long before they understand everything, church begins to feel natural, normal, and just a part of life.

Those memories often become deeply formative. The familiar sounds of congregational singing, the reading of Scripture from the pulpit, and the preaching of God’s Word create a rich spiritual foundation that many Christians later look back on with gratitude—and even nostalgia.

As Proverbs reminds parents: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Prov. 22:6)

“Children are a distraction.”

It’s true that young children make noise. Some more than others. They cry. They fidget. And they drop pencils, over and over again.

Removing them from the service may make it easier for adults to concentrate, but if that’s the reason for doing so, then the question is: What’s the purpose of corporate worship? Is it a Bible study lesson only for adults? What if a family with a handicapped child or adult attended? What if they made a lot of noise week after week? Would they be considered a distraction in need of removing too?

The New Testament presents the church as one body gathering before God. Children are not interruptions to that gathering—they are part of it.

Their presence calls for patience, grace, and respect. Just as churches gladly accommodate the elderly, the disabled, and others with particular needs, they can also make room for young families.

Supporting parents doesn’t require separating children from worship. Churches can provide nursing rooms, quiet spaces when needed, practical assistance, and especially a culture of encouragement without suggesting children are an interference and obstacle to be managed or removed.

Children are the future of the church. The sound of kids in the pews shouldn’t be a reason to get upset with their presence; it should be a reason to rejoice that the next generation of Christians is being formed and fashioned in the congregations they’re a part of.

Children are a blessing to parents and a blessing to the church. Take a child to a church with no children and see the joy and hope it brings everyone.

Of course, there will occasionally be crying or restlessness. But those brief distractions are a small price to pay for raising children who grow up knowing that they belong among the worshipping people of God.

“They don’t have the attention span.”

Of course, children don’t have the attention span. Neither do most adults, if we’re honest.

Like reading or prayer, attention develops through repeated practice and training. More importantly, the responsibility for helping children understand God’s Word belongs primarily to parents.

The sermon addresses the whole congregation. Afterwards, mothers and fathers can explain difficult concepts, answer questions, revisit the text during family worship, and apply its teaching in ways their children can grasp.

If there’s something important they’ve missed because they lacked the attention span, parents can help them out later.

That’s the biblical pattern of family discipleship.

Separating children from corporate worship can unintentionally shift that responsibility away from parents onto the church’s children’s ministry. Many have grown up with next to no biblical instruction at home because the parents outsourced that responsibility to the Sunday School teacher.

But the responsibility belongs to the parents. Parents are commanded to raise their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4), not outsource that responsibility to others.

Can you imagine a husband hiring someone else to love, lead, and sanctify his wife because he thinks they would do a better job at it? Absurd, right? The husband is the one responsible, and he has a duty to make it work, not pass it off to someone he considers more qualified. The same goes for parenting.

In corporate worship, children can hear the same Word proclaimed as the rest of the congregation, and then parents can help them grow into its meaning throughout the week. Assuming the adults have maintained attention throughout the service.

Children often understand more than adults think. Even when they can’t follow every point of the sermon, they are absorbing the language of Scripture, learning the patterns of worship, hearing the Gospel proclaimed repeatedly, and learning that gathering with God’s people is simply what Christians do.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the question isn’t whether children would enjoy a more age-tailored lesson, or whether parents want the hour-long break without having to worry about fidgeting children.

It’s whether corporate worship is something children should participate in as members of Christ’s covenant community.

More and more Christian parents are saying yes. Not because every Sunday is easy, or because every sermon is fully understood. But because week after week, year after year, children are being formed by something larger than themselves: The ordinary gathering of God’s people around His Word.

And that’s something that no Sunday School classroom can replace.

The Texas State Board of Education has voted to make selected passages from the Bible required reading in public schools.

Under the curriculum, students will study portions of Scripture alongside other foundational texts, including selections from the Book of Exodus and The Shepherd’s Psalm, in Psalm 23.

Supporters of the new reading list argue that the move is not merely about religious instruction, but rather, ensuring students understand the moral, historical, and philosophical foundations of Western civilisation.

Republican board member Julie Pickeren explained that the curriculum is designed to give students “important insight into the moral and philosophical traditions that have shaped Western civilisation.

“When students engage directly with original writings, speeches, sermons, and foundational texts, Pickeren told The Texas Tribune, “they can evaluate ideas and develop a deeper understanding of the principles that have shaped the USA and Texas.”

The decision reflects a long-standing American educational tradition famously championed by founding-era educator and lexicographer Noah Webster, who is often regarded as the father of American scholarship.

Webster argued that Christianity was indispensable to both education and civil liberty.

“In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed… No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people…”

Webster explained, “When I speak of the Christian religion as the basis of government… I mean the primitive Christianity in its simplicity as taught by Christ and His Apostles, consisting of a belief in the being, perfections, and government of God; in the revelation of His will to men, as their supreme rule of action; in man’s accountability to God for his conduct in this life; and in the indispensable obligations of all men to yield entire obedience to God’s commands in the moral law and the Gospel.”1

He maintained that the Bible wasn’t just a religious text, but the primary source of moral truth for society:

“The Bible must be considered as the great source of all the truth by which men are to be guided in government as well as in all social transactions.”2

Thus, Webster argued that the Bible is the “chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society."

For Webster, education and religion were inseparable. He rightly believed that every nation inevitably teaches a worldview through its schools and education system, and that America’s prosperity had been built upon a distinctly biblical foundation, not to be ignored or forgotten.

Similarly, Dr Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote extensively on this topic and argued that “The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion.

“Without this, there can be no virtue, and without virtue, there can be no liberty; and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. But the religion I mean to recommend in this place is that of the New Testament.

Rush continued: “In contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and those sober and frugal virtues, which constitute the soul of republicanism.”3

Not long after Rush penned these words, on September 17, 1796, during his Farewell Address, George Washington warned that the two indispensable supports holding up the nation were first, the Christian religion, and second, morality. To topple one is to topple the other, and to topple both is to topple the nation.

He said:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.

“In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.

“The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them.

“A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity…

“Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

For Washington, it was the “duty of all nations,” not just Americans, to “acknowledge the providence of Almighty God,” and to “obey his will” and “to be grateful for his benefits and humbly implore his protection and favor.”

Today, Texas is leading the way, not only for America but for the wider Western world, which has forgotten the foundations upon which its civilisation was built.

Conservatism is dead. It wore itself out for two simple reasons.

First, it chose compromise over conviction; second, it failed to diagnose the disease.

In the first instance, conservatism exhausted itself in a perpetual attempt to appease its opponents. In the naïve hope of winning over the other team, it largely abandoned its own base. It failed, of course—not only to win over the other side, but even to retain the support it once had.

In the second instance, conservatism wore itself out treating symptoms while ignoring the cause. Conservative leaders had no difficulty identifying and mocking the absurdities embraced by their opponents, but they failed to recognise that these absurdities did not arise in an ideological vacuum. Rather, they were the result of something deeper—something many conservatives were too timid to identify.

Hence, conservatives have conserved nothing.

In Australia, Liberal and Liberal–National governments—often seen as the centre-right or “conservative” option—have been responsible for passing major “progressive” reforms, including the introduction of one of the world’s strictest gun control regimes, same-sex marriage, expansions of anti-discrimination laws, the decriminalisation of abortion, and the introduction of voluntary assisted suicide, to name but a few.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, Conservative-led governments oversaw the legalisation of same-sex marriage, the consolidation of equality legislation, incremental developments in anti-discrimination protections, major restructuring of immigration policy following Brexit, and limited changes in abortion access through the expansion of telemedical provision during the COVID-19 period.

And what did they get for it? Today, these parties have never been so unpopular—not because the electorate has shifted to the Left, but because it has moved further to the so-called “Right.” Australians are now embracing One Nation in record numbers, while the Brits are backing Reform UK and Restore Britain.

The question now is whether the “Right” will repeat the same mistakes as the conservatives did. The success of the new Right will largely depend on its ability to resist cowardice and properly diagnose the problem it seeks to address.

The West is under assault on every front: the family, marriage, children, education, energy, economics, finance, immigration, national identity, borders, law, justice, military strength, and so on. But these are not isolated issues that have emerged independently of each other. They are fundamentally intertwined because they all indicate the same underlying issue. As such, each one must be understood as a symptom of a deeper disorder, not the disorder itself.

Not all symptoms are equal. Some are more destructive than others. But if we mistake any one symptom for the cause, we will ultimately fail to reverse the decline. We’ll merely manage the consequences while leaving the disease untouched. That’s precisely what conservatism did—and it conserved nothing.

History shows that great civilisations do not collapse overnight. Their decline is gradual, but it is driven by decisive cultural shifts that make every subsequent assault possible. In the Western world, no shift has been more significant, more consequential, than the decline of the Church’s authority in the public square. I’m not referring to any particular church, but to the role of the Church as a collective institution in society, including its broader leadership and public influence.

Many today assume that the decline of Christianity produced a secular, religiously neutral society. It did no such thing. Religion did not disappear; it simply changed institutions. The state became the new church. The civil government has today become the final arbiter of morality, justice, and truth. Rights that were once understood to come from God have been reduced to privileges dispensed by the state. The state now claims ultimate authority over your life, your children, your property, your speech, and your nation.

That is the root of the crisis, and the reason Christless conservatism was doomed to fail. It is also why a Christless “new Right” will fail in the same way. By virtue of its Christlessness, it is rendered incapable not only of properly diagnosing the problem, but of offering any meaningful solution.

Until we recognise that the state has usurped the place that once belonged to God, no meaningful political movement—whether conservative or otherwise—will reverse the West’s decline. At best, it will slow the rate of decay while leaving its cause intact.

The solution is not merely smaller government or better policies. It’s the restoration of the Christian foundation upon which Western civilisation was built: that God alone is the source of morality, justice, rights, and human dignity, and that the state is accountable to His law rather than sovereign over it.

We are, in the words of Jesus, to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God; and yet today, we are suffering the consequences of rendering to Caesar what belongs to God alone.

The greatness of the West did not arise from economics, military power, or democratic institutions alone. Those were fruits. The root was Christianity. As the root dies, so do the fruits.

Until that root is restored, every political victory will be temporary, every reform will be reversible, and every emerging “Right-wing” movement will ultimately fail for the same reason its predecessors did: it mistook fruit for root, and symptoms for cause.

FIFA 2026 is stirring controversy for all the right reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crown Down!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That common enemy forged a common brotherhood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common Enemy Effect

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

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

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

1. Re-Prioritising the Hierarchy of Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Recognising a Shared Fate

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

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

Learning From History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Orthodoxy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do you do about it?

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

Strategy 1 — The destination: Repeal and replace.

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

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

Strategy 2 — The road: Compete for the positions.

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

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

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

Strategy 3 — The accelerant: Use the machine.

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

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

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

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

Why all three, and why none alone

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

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

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

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

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

And now the part nobody wants to say out loud

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

Go down the list:

• The family structure of 1950 — not conserved.

• The civic religious settlement — not conserved.

• The national-identity framework — not conserved.

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

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

• The educational consensus — not conserved.

• The shared media environment — not conserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What it means for ‘counter-revolutionary’ policy

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

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

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

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

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

The discipline underneath all of it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel never played for the Wallabies again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Israel wasn’t welcome to play.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shelton isn’t wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Claims From the Release

According to Gabbard, the documents show:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communications and documents can be viewed here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stack one: The rule is written vaguely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discretionary positions were not seized. They were vacated.

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

Stack three: even the honest ones breathe the same air

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

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

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

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

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

Bad faith isn’t necessary to produce asymmetric enforcement.

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

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

The test that would have stopped all of this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The standard is universal, or it’s worthless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Findings on the Scale of Abuse

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

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

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

Demographic Patterns

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

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

Criticism of Public Institutions

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

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

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

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

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

Recommendations

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

• Mandatory recording of offenders’ ethnicity and religion.

• Stronger sentencing and enforcement powers.

• Expanded investigations into historic cases.

• Greater accountability for officials who failed to act.

• Additional national and local inquiries.

You can read the full report here.

What Happens Next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We will act. Not talk.”

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

Here’s the answer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, that was a bit on the nose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are four reasons, and they stack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The press only punishes one side for it.

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

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

4. Some of them actually mean it.

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

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

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

The exception that proves it: DeSantis and Trump.

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

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

They invented nothing. Look at the actual precedents:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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