Have you, like me, started to suspect that British politicians ignore the people? Does it feel like politicians pursue their own agenda irrespective of the stated requirements of the majority of the electorate?
Are we being gaslighted? Are we represented? Are we a democracy?
The time had come to discover out if anyone had conducted any research into this area. I typed ‘political respresentation by demographic studies’ into a search engine and, it transpires, my suspicions were correct: politicians go where the money is. ‘No!’, I hear you cry. Yes, it’s true.
The studies I found collectively point to a positive income gradient in political responsiveness. Which means that if you’re rich, politicians will give you what you want and if you’re poor, they’ll ignore you.
The first two papers I came across were:
‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’ by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page (pub. 2014)
And
‘Responsiveness in an Era of Inequality: The Case of the U.S. Senate’ by Thomas J. Hayes (pub. 2011).
Gilens concluded the following:
‘Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.’
Furthermore, Gilens finds just a slight income gradient in political responsiveness, but when preferences differ by more than a few percentage points, changes in policies reflect only the preferences of the affluent. Which means that the poor only receive political representation when their political requirements overlap with those of the rich. When requirements diverge, the poor lose their representation.
Hayes reported the following:
‘To what extent do members of Congress respond unequally to people in different economic situations? How does partisan control of the agenda change the way in which Senators respond to the poor? Using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES), and multiple roll call votes, I examine Senate responsiveness across a range of issues for the 107th through 111th Congresses. Additionally, I use the 107th Congress as a case study to test responsiveness under changes in agenda control. This paper has three important findings. First, I find extreme biases in responsiveness to constituents in different economic groups, with more wealthy individuals economic groups receiving the highest level of representation, while poorer groups seem to be either ignored, or have legislators act in opposition to their preferences. Second, the major political parties seemed to have recently switched roles as the Democratic Party has become responsive to the wealthy, while Republicans are responsive to the middle-class. Third, partisan control of the agenda does impact the way in which different groups receive representation as Democratic control of the Senate tends to lead to increased responsiveness toward the middle class. The findings in this paper are suggestive of broader factors at play in terms of the representation of different income groups, subconstituency politics, and the policies aimed at reducing economic inequality in the United States.’
So, the left leaning Democrats are even more responsive to the needs of the rich than the Republicans. This mirrors the situation in the UK where the Labour party, that was expressly set up to represent the working class, now represents the monied interests and groups with ‘protected characteristics’, i.e. women and foreigners.
Gilens’ and Hayes’ findings have been corroborated by other research.
In the US Senate, Bartels (‘Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age’. Pub. 2008) finds patterns partly consistent with both the partisan and distorted view of democracy: partisanship does matter, because Democrats attach relatively more weight to middle-class preferences than do Republicans, but both parties respond most strongly to the preferences of the affluent and completely ignore those of the poor.
Maks-Solomon and Rigby (‘Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor? Partisanship, Class, and Representation in the U.S. Senate’. Pub. 2020), however, find that both parties respond more strongly to their rich co-partisans, suggesting that although partisanship matters more than income, US senators may have incentives to cater to the preferences of their more affluent voters.
Across US states, Rigby and Wright (2013) find that whereas Republican state party platforms respond roughly equally to middle and high income preferences, Democratic platforms respond most strongly to the preferences of high income groups, especially in states with high levels of inequality. Within state parties, Republicans appear most responsive to their rich co-partisans on economic issues and their middle-class voters on social issues. Democrats, by contrast, appear more responsive to their rich co-partisans on both economic and (especially) social issues.
The general conclusion is that the preferences of the rich receive more consideration in the policy-making process than those of the lower and middle classes—and often a lot more.
There are also European studies into political representation which report the same findings.
Peters and Ensink (‘Differential Responsiveness in Europe: The Effects of Preference Difference and Electoral Participation’. Pub. 2015) and Bartels (‘Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government’. Pub. 2017) find in broad sets of affluent, mainly European, democracies that the rich exert an outsized influence on social spending to the extent that spending often moves against the preferences of the poor.
Schakel, Burgoon, and Hakhverdian (‘Real but Unequal Representation in Welfare State Reform’. Pub. 2020) corroborate these results, arguing that rich people decide the generosity of welfare policies in advanced democracies.
Empirically, Elkjær and Iversen (‘The Political Representation of Economic Interests: Subversion of Democracy or Middle-Class Supremacy?’ Pub. 2020) test their argument using data on preferences for redistribution and social spending from 21 advanced democracies. The results are corroborative, showing that short-term changes in spending, during a period in which spending increased significantly, appear to have been driven by the preferences of the rich, but the preferences of the middle class seem to have decided the long-run levels.
Having established that politicians focus their attention on the small number of people with money and ignore the filthy masses, I wanted to find out why. I expected to see ‘corruption’ and ‘sexual blackmail’ among the reasons given. Unfortunately, not. The reasons provided are more calculated than that:
1) The rich participate more — and more effectively. Wealthier citizens vote more, donate more, lobby more, contact representatives more, and do so in more organised ways.
2) Money shapes the political agenda before votes happen. Most political influence occurs upstream, before issues reach public debate. Gilens & Page (2014) show that when elites oppose a policy, mass support rarely matters. Basically, the rich don’t just win votes — they decide what is votable.
3) Legislators are disproportionately wealthy, highly educated, and socially connected to business and professional elites. This means they over-estimate how typical elite preferences are.
4) These politicians genuinely see affluent interests as “reasonable,” “moderate,” or “economically responsible” Poorer voters’ demands are more often framed as “unrealistic” or “populist”
5) Ignoring the poor carries low political risk.
6) Governments are very conscious of business requirements which shapes their bias.
So in summary, poor people are not in the club so we can be ignored. After all, who else are we can gonna vote for? They don’t care whether we vote or not. They’re gonna do what their buddies want.
The only fly in the ointment is the rise of populist parties. Hence, why the Establishment is busy trying to de-legitimise such parties such as Reform UK in the UK and the AfD in Germany.
We are not a democracy. We are an oligarchy.
Oligarchy definition:
Government by a few, especially by a small faction of persons or families. Those making up such a government. A state governed by a few persons.
I’d say ‘Oligarchy’ reasonably describes the situation in all Western countries.
Let’s document the egregious acts imposed by the UK labour govt since their election win in July 2024:
Pre-election pledge to abolish student fees – abandoned.
Pre-election pledge freeze council tax for 1 year. Broken.
Pre-election pledge to reduce energy prices – the opposite has happened.
Made Winter fuel allowance for pensioners means tested despite pledging before the election not to do so.
Closed the migrant barge.
Stopped Rwanda programme.
Promised before election that ‘pensioners would be better off under labour’.
Starmer gave his donor, Lord Ali, a Free Pass for Downing Street.
Undeclared freebies.
Made family farms eligible for inheritance tax despite pledges from Starmer to protect farmers.
£500 million given to foreign farmers.
22.3% pay rise for doctors.
15% pay rise for train drivers
Bridget Phillipson (Education Secretary) will face legal action over her decision to pause new free speech laws designed to protect academics from cancel culture…Legislation designed to protect academics from cancel culture paused just days before it was due to come into force in August.
Southport protests: Starmer branded all those who were angry about the murder of 3 little girls ‘far right’.
Thousands of prisoners had their sentences reduced so they could be released to free up spaces in prisons. On October 22nd, 1,100 prisoners were released after completing only 40% of their sentence to “ease overcrowding”. These include those convicted of kidnapping, grievous bodily harm, and torturing a child on Snapchat. This followed September 10, when 1,700 inmates were also released — including 37 freed by mistake, who have since been returned behind bars.
Gave Ukraine permission to fire UK supplied missiles into Russian territory. (This meant UK soldiers would be firing these missiles).
Starmer’s Chief of Staff is at the helm of Britain’s interference in US elections.
Gave £millions more to Ukraine.
Gave £50 million to Syrian militants.
Labour Party broke US electoral law by advising Kamala Harris’s campaign.
Lied about a financial black hole in order to raise taxes.
Promised to ‘smash the gangs’ driving illegal immigration. Instead numbers have risen.
Promised to build 1.5 million new homes during their term. Instead, housebuilding has fallen.
Refused to commission a national inquiry into grooming gangs before yielding to public pressure. Since then, the government has done everything it could do to undermine the scope of the inquiry, leading to all victims disassociating themselves. A chairperson still has not been appointed despite 6 months having passed.
Signed the UK up to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme where carbon costs were much higher than the UK. Carbon costs have risen 37.7% from £19.84/MWh in January of this year.
Rolling out facial recognition software throughout the UK.
Attempting to bring anti-semitism laws
Attempting to bring in islamophobia laws
Introducing Digital ID
Stuffing the Lords with his cronies and ex-advisers.
Aligned the UK with the EU Emissions Trading Scheme thereby driving up energy prices.
Planning to perform medical experiments using puberty blockers on 13 year olds.
Paid £570m to the EU to re-join the Erasmus scheme which allows free movement of students with the EU.
Spends £72m refurbishing HMS Bulwark then sells it to Brazil for £20m
Introduced ‘banter ban’ whereby employers are held responsible if their employees oveehear anything at work that offends them.
Labour Together paid a PR firm £36,000 to compile a dossier on two Sunday Times journalists who had found LT had failed to properly declare £730,000 of donations. https://mrf.lu/zLgk
Brought in ‘cumulative disruption’ law to further suppress the right to protest.
About 50,000 people are stabbed in UK every year. However, when 2 Jews were non-fatally stabbed in London, Starmer convened a COBRA meeting and promised additional funds to protect Jewish communities https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sjxrsae011x
This government is quite remarkable in its hostility to the native population and its determination to enact unpopular legislation. We wake up each morning wondering what the government is going to do that day to make our lives poorer and more miserable.
I will continue to add to this list.
Here’s a little piece of Starmer analysis I copied from the internet:
‘Keir Starmer isn’t dishonest in the traditional sense. That would imply intent, memory, and a fixed relationship with reality.
What he practises instead is something far more modern narrative laundering.
Statements go in firm, clear and solemn, and come out later unrecognisable, cleansed of meaning, date stamped “misinterpreted” and quietly reissued as if nothing ever happened.
The Telegraph’s catalogue of his untruths doesn’t read like scandal. It reads like a job description. This is a Prime Minister who treats promises as provisional drafts, manifestos as mood boards, and voters as an inconvenient audience who keep quoting the script back to him.
Starmer didn’t break pledges, you see. He merely outgrew them. He didn’t raise taxes. He simply discovered new definitions of “raise” and “tax” after the election.
He didn’t mislead the public about the state of the economy. He just waited until he had the keys to Number 10 before admitting the house was already on fire, then blamed the smoke on those who noticed earlier.
The most impressive thing about Starmer is not the scale of the contradictions, but the calm with which he delivers them.
No bluster. No drama. Just the serene confidence of a man who knows that if he says something slowly enough, with enough lawyerly precision, most people will assume it must be true or at least too exhausting to challenge.
This is governance by semantic exhaustion. Every claim is wrapped in so many caveats, footnotes and retrospective clarifications that accountability simply gives up and goes home.
Ask him what he promised, and he’ll tell you what he meant. Ask him what he meant, and he’ll tell you what you should have understood.
Even the famous fiscal “black hole” follows the same pattern. It didn’t exist before the election because acknowledging it would have been politically inconvenient.
It existed immediately afterwards because it became fiscally essential.
This wasn’t deception, apparently. It was statesmanship. Schrödinger’s budget both balanced and broken, depending entirely on whether votes were still required.
He doesn’t inspire confidence because confidence requires belief. He inspires compliance.
Don’t question too closely. Don’t remember too clearly. Don’t compare the before and after too directly. Just accept that whatever was said then has been superseded by what must be said now
In the end, Keir Starmer will never steady the ship insisting he never promised calm seas, never denied the storm, and never said the compass was pointing north in the first place.
And if you remember it differently, that’s not his problem. That’s yours.
I read Helen Andrews’ article in Compact Magazine shortly after it was published. I found it to be very insightful. I’d had a feeling for a few years that all the Cultural Marxism stuff that had erupted all around was most strongly endorsed by women but Helen’s article was the first time I’d read someone make the case that what was going on in society wasn’t simply a case of women supporting fringe academic theories but was actually a manifestation of women’s collective characteristics. This wasn’t just something that women supported, it was who they were. Lots of things clicked into place for me at that point.
I soon discovered there were a number of writers making similar points.
The purpose of this blog post is to present a summary of the whole concept of ‘The Great Feminisation’ by linking to a bunch of articles on this subject and presenting the most germaine extracts from those articles
I’ll start with Helen’s original article that started me off:
‘Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.’
‘Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.’
‘Wokeness is not a new ideology… It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.’
‘The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018
Medical schools became majority female in 2019.
Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019.’
‘Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.’
‘Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition ‘
‘Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation…The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.’
‘Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza.’
‘If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect to see the ethos of Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent’
‘The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?’
‘The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten simply in order to keep their numbers up.’
‘Many people think wokeness is over, slain by the vibe shift, but if wokeness is the result of demographic feminization, then it will never be over as long as the demographics remain unchanged.’
2) ‘What Helen Andrews’ Critics Get Wrong’ by Bo Winegard
‘Women have excelled in domains of care and cohesion, tempering the male proclivity for violence and conflict. But they have not created autonomous truth-seeking institutions.’
‘Their social predispositions, inclined toward equity and emotional harmony, tend to discourage the competition, the audacity, the autonomy and the impartiality that such institutions require. Thus, as women’s presence in the academy, politics and cultural organizations more broadly has grown, those institutions have changed — becoming more solicitous of equity, inclusion and affirmation, and less protective of merit, competition and conflict. This is most evident in the academy.’
‘…women were not selected to form large, goal-oriented coalitions.’
‘The evolutionary pressures they faced selected instead for the maintenance of harmony within families and small networks, not the pursuit of large, coordinated projects. Men’s social groups and institutions, by contrast, can vary from intolerant and fanatical to liberal and truth-seeking. This capacity for variation arises because men, unlike women, were selected for cooperation in hierarchical pursuits, e.g., for building, hunting, warring. Male groups evolved to tolerate conflict and inequality in service to a shared goal, whereas female groups evolved to promote cohesion by minimizing both.’
‘Success for men in forming large coalitions required mechanisms for ranking, enforcing impartial rules, and harnessing the power of individual talent for group benefit… A skilled hunter or fighter earned status from his group, and his group benefited from his skills. The mind shaped by these selective pressures valued hierarchy, fairness understood as merit, a disciplined emotional stoicism and impartiality, the moral foundations of what would later become meritocracy, law, and science.’
‘Women, in contrast, were primarily selected for kin and reciprocal levels of cooperation, the care of children, maintenance of family, and management of reputation in smaller social networks. Unlike men, they rarely engaged in coalitional combat. Thus their moral mind was oriented not toward impartiality of rule but to empathy and concern for the vulnerable. Whereas men developed a coalitional morality that emphasized duty, loyalty to the group, and the subordination of emotion to function, women developed a relational morality emphasizing care, equity, and emotional cohesion.’
3) Cultural Feminisation: An Introduction by J. Stone
‘On average, men are more systemizing, inclined to reason about objects, abstractions and formal rules. Women are more empathizing, inclined to contemplate and ruminate about persons and feelings. Men are more tolerant of risk, pursue status more openly and aggressively, and tolerate competition more easily, often exhilarating in the clash of arms or ideas. Women exhibit stronger preferences for security, stability and social harmony, often discouraging dissent and debate ‘
‘The upshot of this is that men are better than women at creating and maintaining hierarchical organizations and impartial norms and rules, and thus better at creating and maintaining many of the institutions vital to modern civilization: the academy, the army, the legal system.’
‘In a 2020 paper by Geher and colleagues, US academics were asked to allocate points across different academic priorities. Men allocated more to advancing knowledge, academic rigor and academic freedom. Women allocated more to social justice and emotional wellbeing.’
‘In a 2021 CSPI survey of academics and PhD students at universities in the US, Britain and Canada, men were more likely to support intellectually foundational texts over diversity quotas than women. Only 24–34% of men supported diversity quotas, compared to 44-66% of women.’
‘Men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable.’
‘But I do believe that men, on average, are better suited to creating and sustaining certain types of institutions, namely those that prize hierarchy, competition and truth. And as those institutions continue to feminize, their traditional virtues will continue to erode. We should value the unique role women play in civilization, but we should not pretend that their increasing prominence in traditionally male institutions is an unalloyed good.’
‘The historical longhouse was a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian. In online discourse, this historical function gets generalized to contemporary patterns of social organization, in particular the exchange of privacy—and its attendant autonomy—for the modest comforts and security of collective living.
The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.’
‘As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.’
‘Thomas Edsall makes a similar case in the New York Times, emphasizing how female approaches to conflict and competition have become normative among the professional class. Edsall quotes evolutionary biologist Joyce Benenson’s summary of those approaches:
‘From early childhood onwards, girls compete using strategies that minimize the risk of retaliation and reduce the strength of other girls. Girls’ competitive strategies include avoiding direct interference with another girl’s goals, disguising competition, competing overtly only from a position of high status in the community, enforcing equality within the female community and socially excluding other girls.’
Jonathan Haidt explains that privileging female strategies does not eliminate conflict. Rather it yields “a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offense by mobilizing social resources to ostracize the alleged offender.”
‘Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of free speech and the tenor of our public discourse where consensus and the prohibition on “offense” and “harm” take precedence over truth. To claim that a biological man is a man, even in the context of a joke, cannot be tolerated. Instead, our speech norms demand “affirmation.” We are expected to indulge with theatrical zealotry the preferences, however bizarre, of the never-ending scroll of victim groups whose pathologies are above criticism.’
‘Further, these speech norms are enforced through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups––social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force. To be “canceled” is to feel the whip of the Longhouse masters.’
‘The emphasis on “feelings” is rooted in a deeper ideology of Safetyism. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, define Safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.’
‘…the cult of Safetyism is best exemplified in our response to the pandemic. Think of the litany of violations of our basic rights to personal freedom and choice over the last two years that were justified on the basis of harm reduction. The economy, our dying loved ones, our faith practices, our children’s education, all of it served up on the altar of Safetyism. Think of the Covid Karen: Triple-masked. Quad-boosted. Self-confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state. This person—who is as often male as female—is the avatar of the Longhouse.’
5) ‘Did Women In Academia Cause Wokeness?’ by Noah Carl
‘As I’ve argued before, the two key events giving rise to the Great Awokening … were the launch of social media and the Occupy Wall Street protests.’
‘…However, those two events didn’t occur in a vacuum. While they may explain the timing of the Great Awokening — why it got going in around 2012 — they aren’t sufficient to explain its origins. Indeed, there are several contextual factors without which the Great Awokening might never have happened. One is the legal regime instigated by the Civil Rights Act… Another is the massive leftward shift of academia: the increase in the proportion of academics with left-wing views, and the corresponding rise of Grievance Studies.’
‘…However, one other possible cause of academia’s leftward shift, and of the rise of woke activism in particular, is the influx of women into that institution.’
‘…So, why would the influx of women into academia have contributed to its leftward shift, and to the rise of woke activism in particular? As the psychologist Cory Clark notes, women are consistently less supportive of free speech than men, and consistently more supportive of censorship. Compared to men, they’re more likely to say: that hate speech is violence; that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker; that controversial scientific findings should be censored; that people need to be more careful about the language they use; and that it should be illegal to say offensive things about minorities.’
‘Clark argues, convincingly in my view, that this stems from women’s greater aversion to harm and conflict. They interpret various forms of speech as harmful to vulnerable groups, and wish to censor them for that reason.’
‘…Clark isn’t the only scholar to have noticed that women’s aversion to harm and conflict has profound implications for academia. Drawing on the work of psychologist Joyce Benenson, Arnold Kling notes: “Women have a social strategy that works well for protecting their individual health and the health of their children: emphasize safety, covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them.” This leads him to speculate that adding a lot of women to formerly male domains has made the culture of those domains more consistent with female tendencies. “The older culture valued open debate,” Kling notes. “The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.”
‘…First, women are disproportionately represented in Grievance Studies (i.e., disciplines like Gender Studies and Critical Race Theory), which are often little more than a vehicle for left-wing activism…almost 80 per cent of bachelor’s degrees in “Ethnic, Gender, and Cultural Studies” are awarded to women, about 65 per cent of doctoral degrees in “Cultural, Ethnic, & Gender Studies” are awarded to women — a higher percentage than in any other subject…about 65 per cent of doctoral degrees in “Cultural, Ethnic, & Gender Studies” are awarded to women — a higher percentage than in any other subject…’
‘…In a 2016 paper, Mitchell Langbert and colleagues analysed voter registration data on approximately 4,000 US academics. As the table below indicates, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans was “only” 9:1 among men, but it was almost 25:1 among women.’
‘…We also have detailed surveys from two of the most left-leaning disciplines: sociology and anthropology…Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Sociology should be both a scientific and moral enterprise”, and that “Sociology should analyze and transcend oppression”. They were less likely to say that “More political conservatives would benefit the discipline”, and that “Advocacy and research should be separate for objectivity”.’
‘What about anthropology? The next table shows the proportion of male versus female anthropologists (from a sample of 301) who agreed and disagreed with various items. Compared to men [anthropologists], women [anthropologists] were more likely to say that “Science is just one way of knowing”, and that “Postmodern theories have made important contribution”. They were less likely to say that “Field is undermined by antiscientific attitudes”, or agree with “Advocacy and fieldwork kept separate for objectivity”.’
‘Finally, there is the evidence supplied by Eric Kaufmann in his mammoth report for the CSPI. Kaufmann compiled data from several different surveys of graduate students and academics. He found that women were more likely to support dismissal campaigns, more likely to discriminate against conservatives, and more likely to support diversity quotas for reading lists. Overall, they had significantly more left-wing views. To quote Kaufmann: “if the share of women rises, we should expect the balance of internal opinion to move in the direction of emotional safety over academic freedom.”
6) ‘Sex And The Academy’ by Cory Clark & Bo Winegard
‘In 1970, women received less than 10 percent of doctoral degrees awarded in the United States. This percentage has steadily increased, reaching parity with men around 2005. Today, the majority of new doctorates are earned by women. Similar patterns pertain elsewhere, including in Australia and many European countries.’
‘When presented with a variety of controversial claims made by speakers (e.g., men are better at math, all white people are racist, police are justified at stopping African Americans at higher rates), a majority of men supported nine of the 11 speakers’ right to speak on campus, and a majority of women opposed all 11 speakers’ right to do so.’
‘A 2021 survey of 3,772 academics and PhD students at universities in the United States, Britain, and Canada conducted by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that:
66–76 percent of men support intellectually foundational texts above diversity quotas on reading lists; 44–66 percent of women support diversity quotas above foundational texts. Female academics report a greater willingness than their male counterparts to support dismissal campaigns against a colleague who has conducted research that reached a controversial conclusion.’
‘A 2022 paper by Rausch and colleagues (in press at the Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science, some details of which can be found here) in which 574 undergraduates, graduates, and PhD students were asked to allocate 100 points toward five different academic priorities, found that:
Men allocated more points toward academic freedom and advancing knowledge than women, and women allocated more points toward social justice and emotional wellbeing than men.’
‘A 2021 paper by Zhang and colleagues that coded 1,193 abstracts and surveyed 2,587 European researchers across three disciplines found that:
Male researchers were more likely to specify scientific progress/the advancement of knowledge as the aim of their research; female researchers were more likely to specify societal progress/external usefulness as the aim of their research. Female scholars were more likely than their male counterparts to report that “creating a better society” inspires their work and to place higher value on research that has benefited society.’
‘A 2021 survey one of us conducted with 468 psychology professors from over 100 top universities in the US (preprint in progress) found that:
When asked whether scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment for their research conclusions, among men, the majority (60.5 percent) said “yes,” 37.0 percent said “it’s complicated,” and 2.5 percent said “no.” Among women, the majority (59.6 percent) said “it’s complicated,” 39.8 percent said “yes,” and 0.6 percent said “no.”
‘The overall theme of these differences is that men are more committed than women to the pursuit of truth as the raison d’être of science, while women are more committed to various moral goals, such as equity, inclusion, and the protection of vulnerable groups. Consequently, men are more tolerant of controversial and potentially offensive scientific findings being pursued, disseminated, and discussed, and women are more willing to obstruct or suppress science perceived to be potentially harmful or offensive. Put more simply, men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable.’
‘…Thus, women are more likely to experience self-protective emotions such as anxiety and fear, to be more harm- and risk-averse, and to have more empathy and desire to protect the vulnerable. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to take risks and to endorse hierarchy and support for conflict.’
‘Academia has changed in various ways over the past few decades.. Nevertheless, some of the most drastic developments over the past 25 years share a common theme: They reflect the priorities of women. These include:
• The introduction of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) committees and offices on university campuses…
• The introduction of DEI Commitment Statements as a required part of job application materials for faculty members, which are more common in (more female-dominated) social science jobs than in (more male-dominated) STEM jobs.
• An increase over the past seven years in the number of academics targeted for sanction for their scholarship and teaching (and often, due to harm concerns about the content of their teaching or scholarship).
• The addition of extra-scientific moral concerns to the evaluation criteria for publications and retractions by journals such as Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Communications.
• The introduction of safe spaces and trigger warnings on college campuses.
• The requirement now made by large professional societies, such as the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, that presenters explain how their work advances equity and anti-racism, and the evaluation of presentations based on their ability to achieve these goals. (Anecdotally, this policy was instituted under a 13-member board, 11 of whom appear to be women. And this policy received public pushback from at least two members, both of whom are men.)
• Growing concerns about “coddling,” the “free speech crisis,” and increasing censorship and self-censorship on college campuses.
7) ‘Woke Institutions Is Just Civil Rights’ by Richard Hanania
‘Like Scott Alexander, I think it’s clear that the proximate cause of the Great Awokening is the rise of the internet and social media. Yet the ground had been set by generations of government bureaucracy making sure that almost every major institution was subject to the rules of disparate impact, hostile work environment, and the HR revolution.’
‘The new Western culture, especially the American variety, offers the old-fashioned conservative male dissident many trends to bewail. Discrimination against white males! Promotion of LGBTQ lifestyles! The trans mania with its mutilation of children and destruction of women’s sports! Suppression of meritocracy, free speech, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law! Runaway entitlement spending! Open borders! Critical race theory! The ESG investing fad! No-prosecute policies in violent cities! Proliferation of social contagions and hysterical illnesses, from ROGD and PTSD to Tik-Tok Tourette’s! Cascades of cancellations of perfectly competent white males, e.g., for “grading too hard in organic chemistry,” or for cracking an off-color joke! Widespread exclusion (in effect) of males from important professions, including public relations, publishing, and clinical psychology/psychotherapy. “Math is White Supremacy!” “Showing up for work is White Supremacy!!” “Not being a pea-brained slob is White Supremacy!!!”
My argument here is that everybody should stop bewailing these trends as separate phenomena—should stop fighting “wokeness” or “ESG” or the trans mania. They should, instead, focus on the one factor that underlies and causes all of these social developments.
Of course, I mean women—or more precisely, women’s newfound power in organizations and institutions, and in the culture generally.’
‘Lastly, somewhat hair-splittingly, I don’t think that women when left to themselves running male-built institutions necessarily become woke in the way that we see now. I see wokeness as a contemporary, contagious mindset (not quite an ideology) that corresponds very well to, and thus easily infects, the average female mind, still moreso the younger, more neurotic, more activist female mind. But in principle, under different circumstances, one could gin up something substantially different that would also spread well among women, provided that it pressed their main buttons. Certainly in the centuries before women took such a large part in public life, thought contagions among them were common and varied, though usually localized and rarely very consequential (rarely but not never—see, for example, the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria).’
9) ‘The Great Feminisation’ by Lies Are Unbekoming
‘The productivity costs of feminization are measurable but undiscussed. Meetings expand to ensure everyone feels heard. Decisions are delayed to achieve consensus. Innovation is stifled to avoid risk. The most creative, driven employees—disproportionately male—are frustrated into departure or submission. Companies wonder why innovation has stalled, why breakthrough products are rarer, why bureaucracy metastasizes regardless of management initiatives. They implement “lean” methodologies and “agile” frameworks without recognizing that their HR-enforced culture makes masculine virtues of speed, risk-taking, and decisive action impossible.’
The most damning evidence against feminization comes from its supposed beneficiaries. Female happiness has declined steadily since the 1970s, even as women achieved unprecedented educational, professional, and political success. This “paradox of declining female happiness,” documented by Wharton economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, confounds feminist narratives. If feminization liberates women, why are they increasingly miserable?
Liberal women report the highest rates of mental illness, anxiety, and depression. A 2022 American Family Survey found conservative women significantly happier than liberal ones. This isn’t because feminism attracts unhappy women—longitudinal studies show women become unhappier as they adopt feminist beliefs. The ideology that promises liberation delivers misery by teaching women to see oppression everywhere, victimization in every interaction, patriarchy behind every disappointment.
Universities became feminization laboratories where theories could be tested on captive populations before release into broader society. Women now earn 60% of bachelor’s degrees and 53% of doctorates. Female professors dominate humanities and social sciences. Female administrators control student life. The results validate every warning about feminization’s impact on truth-seeking institutions.
The very concept of objective truth is dismissed as patriarchal oppression. Andrews correctly identifies this as feminine epistemology replacing masculine rationalism—ways of knowing based on feeling and relationship rather than logic and evidence.
Corporate enthusiasm for feminization becomes comprehensible through this lens. Feminized workers don’t form unions—they’re too busy policing microaggressions to develop class consciousness. They don’t demand higher wages—they’re satisfied with diversity initiatives and pronoun recognition. They don’t resist surveillance—they welcome HR oversight as protection. They don’t leave for competitors—they’re emotionally invested in corporate “families” and “cultures.” They perfect what management theorists call “emotional labor”—the commercialization of feeling itself.
The most predictable yet ignored consequence of feminization is male withdrawal from institutions that are actively hostile to them. Young men are abandoning higher education—enrollment has declined from 58% in 1970 to 40% today. They’re leaving traditional careers for entrepreneurship, trades, or geographic arbitrage. They’re rejecting marriage—the marriage rate has halved since 1970. They’re avoiding women altogether
Janice Fiamengo’s research reveals the depth of institutional hostility driving this withdrawal. As she documents, father absence—often enforced by feminist-influenced family courts—has discernibly negative impacts on children, especially boys, leading to behavioral problems, aggression, delinquency, poor academic achievement, substance addiction, and poverty. Yet no one discusses this crisis
The “Men Going Their Own Way” movement represents just the visible tip of a massive iceberg. For every man who explicitly renounces relationships, hundreds quietly withdraw without announcement. They work minimally necessary hours, consume entertainment instead of building, find meaning in video games rather than reality. They’re not failed men—they’re men who’ve concluded that success as defined by feminized society isn’t worth pursuing.
The consequences are civilizationally catastrophic. Men build and maintain physical infrastructure—roads, power grids, water systems. Male withdrawal means deferred maintenance, infrastructure collapse. Men drive innovation—patents remain overwhelmingly male despite decades of female STEM promotion. Male withdrawal means technological stagnation. As Fiamengo observes, construction workers, miners, fishermen—men in dangerous jobs keeping society running—die at work while feminists complain about air-conditioned offices being too cold. When these men withdraw, society literally stops functioning.
‘Why is the greater presence of women in culture-making professions important? Because women, on average, think differently than men on a wide range of subjects. That psychological differentness is well established from experiments, and is reflected in the well-known “gender gap” in voting and policy choices—a gap that is even larger when considering women who are maritally independent of men, i.e., single women, one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country.’
10) ‘Women, Inclusivity And The Paleolithic’ by J. Stone
‘In any case, to sum up the main idea here: Key feminine psychological traits favoring inclusivity and equity and opposing hierarchy—traits that seem especially influential now as drivers of social change in the era of female empowerment—may have had their origins in the band-level social organization that dominated the Paleolithic period, not just in maternity per se.’
This article goes into much more detail about Larry Summers’ female-led sacking as Harvard President that forms the introduction to the Helen Andrews’ article that started this blog piece:
‘…Moreover, it may be that men such as Larry Summers who encounter this primordial feminine power, and retreat before it, are not just behaving “rationally” but are also unconsciously acting out an ancient appeasement reflex. If so, I suspect this appeasement reflex no longer works for men, collectively and in the long run, because in modern societies the traditional limits on female power no longer exist: Now every surrender to that power increases it.’
These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.
“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”
In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.’
‘In 2022, there were 728 applicants to tenure-track jobs in the humanities at Brown, 55 percent of whom were men. At every stage of the process the male share was whittled down. The long list was 48 percent male, the short list 42 percent. Only 34 percent of candidates who made it to the interview round were male—and only 29 percent of the jobs were ultimately offered to men.’
13) ‘Women’s Tears Win In The Marketplace’ by Richard Hanania
‘…a world that valued truth and objectivity over feelings would have fewer female executives, senators, and journalists, but be better for everyone because it would have more economic and technological growth, while not encouraging women’s worst instincts (more female representation in high status careers does not appear to have done much good for women’s mental health). It might have more war too, but, as mentioned already, society has been pretty good at recognizing the harms that come from the excesses of masculinity. We haven’t even begun to think carefully about equivalent pathologies stemming from traits of the other sex.’
14) Finally some words that i copied from somewhere but cannot find the articke from which these words are extracted
‘The elevation of “lived experience” over data, the obsession with linguistic harm, the pursuit of consensus through exclusion rather than confrontation: these are not random ideological developments but predictable outcomes of demographic transformation.’
‘We debate whether wokeness represents a new religion or a marxist revolution without seeing that it’s something more fundamental: the replacement of masculine institutional norms that prioritized objectives, hierarchies, and systematic reasoning with feminine norms that prioritize relationships, equality, and emotional intelligence…’
‘Male groups, shaped by millennia of coordinating for hunting and warfare, developed hierarchical structures where leadership could be established, challenged, and replaced through direct competition. Disagreements were resolved through confrontation, after which the matter was settled. The defeated could maintain honor in loss; the victor could show magnanimity in victory. This created resilient systems capable of incorporating conflict without fragmenting…’
‘Female groups, organized around child-rearing and resource-sharing within tribes, evolved different dynamics. Conflict threatened the intimate bonds necessary for collective child care. Direct confrontation risked permanent rupture of essential relationships. Thus emerged what Benenson calls the “worrier” strategy: maintaining group harmony through exclusion of troublemakers, indirect communication to avoid confrontation, and elaborate efforts to preserve unanimous consensus. Dissent wasn’t defeated—it was expelled…’
‘When James Damore wrote his Google memo suggesting biological factors might contribute to gender disparities in tech, the response wasn’t to debate his claims—many of which cited peer-reviewed research. Instead, he was immediately ostracized and terminated. When academics like Jordan Peterson questioned pronoun mandates, they weren’t engaged in scholarly debate but subjected to campaigns of social destruction. The goal wasn’t to prove them wrong but to make them disappear…’
‘The shift from masculine to feminine conflict resolution has profound implications for institutional function. Science advances through adversarial challenge of hypotheses. Law depends on adversarial presentation of evidence. Democratic politics requires adversarial competition between ideas. When institutions adopt feminine conflict-avoidance, they lose the very mechanisms that made them effective…’
About 10 years ago I went to a local music festival that was taking place in a local park. It was one of those 80s nostalgia things with lots of ‘B level’ music acts wheeled out for the sentimental carousel of a bunch of Gen X’ers.
As we entered the event, we were handed a thickly padded plastic pocket together with a coloured flyer.
The flyer explained that the post-it note sized pocket was to be used for the disposal of cigarette butts. This item was branded with the logo of the local council – who managed the park – and it was the council who had supplied these environmental butt pockets.
The flyer also explained all the harmful effects of leaving cigarette butts on the (grassy) ground. I remember something about nitrates and harm to animals.
Some further context: the pouches were handed to each and every attendee, not just to smokers. Furthermore, the park was not used to graze animals so I was unable to determine how the harmful effects of cigarette butts were going to become manifest to animals.
Thus, the benefits of these pouches were not very clear.
What staggered me at the time was that these items were presented as vital components of responsible environmentalism. The council was clearly very proud of its role in pointing out and reducing the harmful effects of ciggie butts.
Yet the pouches also had a not-insignificant negative environmental impact. Not only had the manufacture of these items used resources – and released CO2 – but they were going to end up in landfill – or hedgerows – in the very near future.
I dreaded to think how long these thickly padded items of tough plastic would take to breakdown. Decades, at least, all the while releasing micro-plastic particles into whatever vicinity they ended up in.
I wondered how the scales of Green environmentalism would balance out. Would the environmental benefits of these pockets exceed the environmental harms? How many captured cigarette butts would it take to make the whole enterprise a net boon to the planet?
Whilst mulling over these questions, it dawned on me that the Council was very unlikely to have asked, let alone assessed, these questions itself. The council would only have noted the benefits and ignored the costs. Even the benefits would not have been quantified. And that’s often the issue with environmentalists. If it’s something they want to do, they measure the benefits and ignore the costs. EVs and Renewable energy are examples of this phenomenon. On the other hand, however, if they are ideologically against something, then they only weigh up the costs (and ignore the benefits).
In summary, someone at the council had the idea for ciggie butt envelopes and everyone at the meeting thought it would be a superb idea because not only would it be good for the land and the animals but it would show everyone how responsible the council is with regard to the environment. Everyone gave themselves a pat on the back for being so caring. End of meeting.
‘There is only one question you need to ask to find out if someone is Left or Right Wing: do you think all people are the same? If the person answers ‘No’, they’re Right Wing. If they answer with a speech, they’re Left Wing’ – Michael Malice
In around 2021, I first started hearing – or reading – that categorising people as either ‘Left wing’ or ‘Right wing’ was no longer relevant. In the wake of the horrors of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, I learned that the new categories were now ‘Globalist’ and ‘Anti-Globalist’. Or ‘Awake’ vs ‘Sheep’. Or the ‘Anywheres’ vs ‘Somewheres’. Or ‘Open societies’ vs ‘Closed societies’. There were probably others.
Whilst I acknowledged that the positions of the Left and Right had shifted considerably over the last 50 years, I still felt that ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were useful categories that predicated positions across a wide range of political issues.
Today’s Left wing is about supporting the expansion of the State as the provider of funds and services in the pursuit of a utopian future whereas Right Wing is increasingly hostile to the State as an inefficient, inflexible bureaucracy that continually infringes on our freedoms. Based on these metrics, isn’t ‘Globalist’ just a new term for Left Wing and Anti-Globalist just a re-branding of Right Wing?
It seemed to me that the people largely in support of the Globalist agenda are those who would previously have been called Left Wing. While those who don’t want unelected oligarchs telling us what we could and couldn’t do, would previously have been known as Right Wing.
The categories haven’t changed, just the labels. Instead of thinking of politics at a National level, we are now expected to think politically at an International level and that means, for some reason, that the old terms of Left and Right wing are no longer applicable. But they are, don’t let the Globalists tell you they are not. After all, isn’t Globalism just another layer of Government wrapped around the local and national layers we already have? Fundamentally, Leftists want ever more Government and Rightists want ever less. The Right wing is now the anti-establishment position. The Left, having wanted to replace the system with socialism have now seen that Globalism IS socialism so they support it.
So, now, I have cleared up any confusion relating to Left and Right wing, I will present a new insight that has occurred to me: The Left Wing is a political ideology that broadly aligns with female pre-occupations while the Right Wing is a political ideology that broadly aligns with male pre-occupations.
Let’s look at the evidence: the modern Left supports immigration, restrictions on speech, hyper feminism, cultural marxism (including critical race and gender theories), safety at the expense of freedom, two tier justice (where protected groups receive lenient sentences to reflect the prejudice and oppression they face), and DEI policies.
There is a very high correletion between such policies and female group characteristics.
Right wingers, on the other hand, follow traditional male proclivities: homogeneous societies, meritocracy, cultural traditions, one law for all, freedom over safety, free speech, family and self- sufficiency with minimal state intervention.
I’m not saying that all Leftists are women. I’m pointing out that the modern Leftist policies are highly correlated with female average priorities. Sure, men are part of the Leftist movement but we notice that such men are the sort that wear ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirts. It’s like they sense that Leftism is a female agenda and, as such, they feel a need to simp themselves to carry favour. Many such men probably believe being Left wing is their best chance for getting a shag.
We’re not talking ‘Alpha males’ here
And women that want men to be strong providers and protectors in order to perpetuate a system of society that has been successful for all of human history will be drawn to a political outlook that doesn’t condition them into believing that abortion is healthcare.
What does all of this mean?
Well, it explains why women are increasingly drawn to the modern Left. The Left has become a mirror of female values. It hasn’t always been so, of course. Once upon a time, the 2 main interests of Leftist political parties were nationalism and improving the living and working conditions of the working class.
Over time, however, the Left has slowly migrated towards the adoption of an internationalist, academic outlook. This has appealed to women. As more women have become Left wing, so the Leftist parties have taken on ever more female concerns which has appealed to more women and so on and so forth.
Single women, particularly, favour Left wing parties whilst married women are more supportive of the Right. This has led to the observation that married women look to their husbands for protection whilst single women look to the State for protection.
Similarly, the agenda of the Right is increasingly dictated by the needs of men as men seek shelter on the Right from the anti-male rhetoric coming from the Left.
Thus, while political ideology was once based upon class, it is now increasingly based upon gender.
I came across this video on Substack. I have no idea who this guy is but he summed up the ‘Trust the experts’ mantra so well that I transcribed his words into this Blog:
‘We’re all playing the adult version of ‘Simon Says’ but it’s called ‘Science Says’ which is one of the biggest sleight of hand tricks of modern civilisation.
Science is just a method but it’s being pushed as authority and most people don’t even realise the difference. People hear ‘Science Says’ and then immediately surrender their own thinking. That’s because science is being framed as an institution instead of just being a process and institutions eat sovereignty for breakfast.
The problem here isn’t science which is just expressed curiosity through disciplined observation. Real science is a relationship with reality that’s pretty humble. It’s testable, falsifiable and is always asking questions to disprove itself. However, what we’re all witnessing isn’t actually ‘science’, it’s ‘scientism’ which is a religion built around the appearance of science. And what happens when we all defer to ‘Science Says’ is that science becomes a form of priesthood whereby most people don’t read the studies, they just read the headline ‘this study shows…’ and blindly trust a journalist summarising a press release that was written by a PR team funded by a corporation.
And the entire chain is hearsay dressed up as truth and in that way authority replaces intelligence. And instead of thinking, people reference something that’s been said instead of something that’s been observed. ‘Trust the experts’ then becomes code for ‘Outsource your perception’.
Now funding becomes truth because if you can control the funding you can control the research and if you control the research you can control messaging and if you can control messaging you can engineer belief and belief drives behaviour and behaviour drives markets and in that living knowledge is erased, knowledge that was accumulated through ancestral lineage, passed through word of mouth for tens of thousands of years, something I care a lot about, which is dismissed as ‘unscientific’ because there’s not institutions controlling it.
And then the language becomes a trap because now people are defending things they don’t understand. Words like ‘misinformation’, ‘peer reviewed’ and ‘consensus’ are used like shields which is always a red flag for me because I’m not actually hearing an argunent here, I’m hearing obedience signals.
It’s very easy to cling to Scientism because it gives us a way out of responsibility: that lab coat said it so I don’t have to think. If that study says so then I don’t have to trust my own lived experience. If the consensus exists, I don’t have to take a stand. It’s all just permission to feel comfortable in someone else’s narrative.’
Did you know that new childhood vaccines are NEVER tested during formal approval processes against an inert neutral solution (placebo)?
Each and every one of the vaccines on the US CDC-recommended childhood schedule has been tested in clinical trials against another vaccine (or vaccine-like compound) that has a similar scope of side effects. Not a single one was tested against a true placebo.
As David L Streiner confirmed in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences: ‘There are serious ethical concerns about placing patients on a placebo when effective treatments exist. Further, if a new agent is tested only against a placebo, there is no guarantee that it is more effective, or even as effective, as an existing agent. For these and other reasons, ethicists and regulatory bodies have said that, under these circumstances, new drugs should be tested against an active agent.’
The clinical trials’ designers use this technique to cover up the high rate of adverse events expected with each new vaccine. Thus, the new vaccine can be declared “safe” and its side effects proclaimed “normal”, as the recorded side effects do not substantially exceed those of the ‘control’ vaccine.
For example, in one of the DTaP [diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis] vaccine trials, the rate of hospital admissions in the Trial Group was almost 1 in every 22 subjects. The researchers did not consider this alarming, however, because in the Control Groups that received different DTP vaccines, the hospitalisation rate was similar.
In the case of Rotarix, there was no existing vaccine for Rotavirus. Instead, the new vaccine without its antigenic component was used on the Control Group. (The antigen is the active ingredient that provokes an Antibody reaction in the body).
However…the vaccine-sans-antigen is still a potentially potent compound whose side effects are likely to be quite similar to those of the vaccine being tested.
In the Rotarix trial, about 1 in 30 control group subjects experienced a ‘severe’ medical event (a rate which was even slightly higher than the trial group), and a similar proportion of patients were hospitalised. In addition, 16 infants suffered intussusception and 43 died.
However, Rotarix was approved. The Rotarix package insert states: ‘No increased risk of intussusception was observed in this clinical trial following administration of Rotarix when compared with placebo’.
Big Pharma uses the word ‘placebo, in a knowingly deceptive way: they rely on the fact that lay-people interpret ‘placebo’ to be a medically inert substance.
In future trials of next-generation Rotavirus vaccines, GSK will be able to give their Control Groups the standard ‘placebo’ – the current-generation vaccine – whose safety ‘was already proven’
The use of this intentionally flawed trial methodology means that every vaccine on the US childhood schedule received FDA approval without a true measurement of the actual magnitude of its adverse events against the background rate.
In 2022, the Rockefeller Foundation put out one of those Food reports that read like ‘How can we save the planet by taking away all pleasure in food and stripping all food consumption down to fundamental metrics relating to health and sustainability’.
I’m drawn to these ‘Future of Food’ type reports. Firstly, there are a lot of them which reminds me how important control of the food supply is and, secondly, the reports are always surprisingly candid about the dystopian future that the Global Stakeholders have in store for us.
I’m going to include the summary at the start of this piece for those that just want the quick take. Those with more time or interest can choose to read the rest of my takes on the report’s proposals.
Summary of Rockefeller’s ‘True Cost of Food report: The report says that we need to take account of all of the associated costs of the US Food System (such as health issues and environmental impact) as knowing the ‘True Cost of Food’ (TCOF) will enable better policies to be devised. The report then qualifies and quantifies all of the hidden costs which it concludes equal double what is currently spent on food. The report is quite vague about what policies are required to reduce the hidden costs but it comes down to more govt interference and private investment. There are repeated references to covid, climate change and the burdens borne by people of color. We are told that we must remake the incentive structures of the food system away from volume, safety and affordability and instead create incentives based around health and the environment. The report wants everyone to eat better but is quite vague about how to achieve that, other than through govt food programs, policies to limit portion sizes, taxes on sugary drinks and more education (as if people don’t know what food is unhealthy). There are references to involving private investment and how such investment can improve returns but only if we know the TCOF. Towards the end of the document, the report makes an oblique reference to tokenisation of natural assets to solve climate change caused by food production. The report also refers to how corporate behaviours can be adjusted by the finance world which is obviously a reference to ‘ESG’ by penalising those actors that aren’t reducing their carbon footprint. Food security is not mentioned once but reducing the resources dedicated to food are heavily inferred.
Now let’s get into the detail:
The Detail:
This report from the Rockefeller Foundation is less precise, more vague than related documents I have reported on – here and here – nevertheless, the desire for centralised control still comes shining through.
After all, as the saying goes…’Whosoever controls the food supply, controls the people.’
The name of the Rockefeller report is ‘True Cost of Food: Measuring What Matters to Transform the US Food System’. Spoiler Alert: what matters is not ‘taste’ as this word appears only once in the entire report.
No, the entire theme of the report is that the US food system has ‘hidden costs’ which fall on everyone and, thereby, make it ‘unsustainable’. Also, the report states that our ‘food system is failing us’. We are not told how it is failing. However, the answer, we are told, is to account for the True Cost of Food (TCOF):
Page 1: ‘That’s why accounting for the true cost of the food we eat is the first necessary step towards remaking the incentive structure that drives our food system today.’
Remaking the incentive structure? That should send shivers through you. Such an objective suggests an entirely new system is being designed to replace a system that has evolved over hundreds of years to be fit-for-purpose. The probability is extremely high that a designed system will be much worse, in many ways, than the system it replaces. As explained on page 5, the current incentives in the US Food System are volume, safety from disease (ie quality) and affordability. Those seem like the correct incentives for a food system: providing enough quality food for everyone.
So let’s see if we can work out why knowing the TCOF will make the food system more resilient during the next pandemic and how the incentive structure will be remade. The foreword starts as follows:
Page 1: ‘Covid-19 exposed longstanding fault lines in our foodsystem. As lockdowns took hold, hunger and insecurityskyrocketed, and cars stretched for miles outside foodpantries across the country. Producers faced surplusgoods, while grocery store shelves sat empty, revealinga supply chain vulnerable to crisis and disruption…’
So the government disrupted the supply chains in the most extreme way (by making everyone stay at home) and were surprised when the supply chains struggled. Right. So now the Rockefeller Foundation have rocked up to tell us how to ensure supply chains continue to function the next time the govt places everyone under house-arrest. Except, oddly, at no point in this dull, wordy report do the authors explain how their recommendations will provide supply chain stability. We never see the term ‘supply chains’ again.
We are told that Americans spent $1.1 trillion on food in 2019 but that cost did not include:
i) healthcare costs for those suffering from diet-related diseases ($1.145 trillion)
ii) costs of the food system’s harms to the environment ($350billion)
iii) costs of reduced biodiversity ($455billion)
iv) costs of livlihood effects ($134billion)
v) costs to economy ($21 billion)
Thus, the true cost of food is actually $3.2trillion.
Also, the true cost of food ‘disproportionately burdens people of color, who are more likely to suffer from diet- related diseases, have less access to water and sanitation, and often work in food production jobs for less than a living wage.‘
So, the TCOF report will show us how to reduce these hidden costs.
Page 2: ‘We must accurately calculate the full cost we pay for food today to successfully shape economic and regulatory incentives tomorrow.’
Another reference to changing the incentives of the food system. I suspect the long arm of the State will make an appearance within the solutions.
Page 5: ‘Poor nutrition is now the leading cause of poor health.’ This is because… ‘For too long the food system has optimized for production volume, safety from food-borne infectious illnesses, and inexpensive calories’.
Volume; safety and inexpensive food – these are the incentives that page 1 warned us are in need of ‘remaking’.
Page 5: ‘We need holistic and transformational change to build a food system that provides healthy and affordable food for all consumers; fair, livable wages, and safe working conditions for workers; viable farming options for rural communities; and efficient and sustainable use of our natural resources, to name a few. We need a system that protects the environment and human health, while delivering fair returns to a broad set of stakeholders— from workers to consumers to producers.’
What are viable farming options? This is never explained. Safe working conditions are covered by existing legislation. Clearly it is not possible to hit all of those objectives as many will come with large costs of their own which will break the ‘affordable’ objective. But look at the terminology – references to fairness, safety and health. Politicians want to be associated with these terms. And that is the point: the report is a tool with which to lobby politicians.
Page 6: ‘We believe there is significant opportunity to both address overall costs of the food system and increase the benefits or “total return” from the food system if innovations, products, and policies are designed with a more comprehensive view of system costs and benefits’.
Ok, so we are going to see increased benefits. I wonder what those benefits will be. Saving the planet would be my guess. Let’s keep an eye out for the ‘innovations, products and policies’.
Page 6: ‘while it is critical to quantify the “true cost” of food to effectively address the impacts of the current food system, the sole solution for change cannot and should not be increasing consumer prices.’
Ok, so consumer prices need to go up but this won’t be the only solution. Let me guess, we also need more regulation? More centralisation?
Page 6: ‘…there is neither a clear line of sight into such costs, nor incentives to reduce these true costs and optimize for the true benefit of food through public spending and private investments.’
There’s that word ‘incentives’ again.
Note also the references to public spending and private investments. Public-Private Partnerships are all the rage these days as the govt and corporations conspire to transfer tax money into private hands as the costs of the changes will be borne by the public purse and the benefits – ie profits – will accrue to the private firms.
Page 6: ‘We believe that there is a myriad of options to reduce true cost: from redesigning public nutrition programs, to dietary shifts, to adopting more resource-efficient business practices, to technological innovations to improve the nutritional value of products, to policy changes.’
The report reads like the Rockefeller Foundation are the first people to realise that unhealthy diets impose a costly toll on the nation’s health. Yet there has been a constant campaign to instill the importance of healthy eating for 40 years. That campaign has failed because unhealthy food tastes nice so people like eating it. It will be interesting to see how the Rockefeller Foundation thinks it can do better.
Also, I’m surprised that nutrition programs don’t already reflect what we know about healthy eating. Let’s keep an eye out for those ‘technological innovations’ and ‘dietary shifts’, ‘resource-efficient business practices’ and ‘policy changes’.
Page 6: Because the TCOF unfairly burdens marginalised communities…‘we should look for ways to meaningfully address the “true cost of food” without necessarily raising consumer prices or adopting changes that exacerbate existing inequities in the food system.’. The logic for how TCOF unfairly burdens the marginalised is looked at on page 24.
I have no idea how they’re gonna walk this tightrope. One moment we are told to expect higher prices then we are told that prices shouldn’t ‘necessarily’ be raised.
Page 7 is shown below. The diagram shows the 5 shifts that are required to transform the US food system. We can see that ‘True Cost Accounting’ is only 1 of the 5 shifts. Presumably, each shift will come with a report of its own.
The next few pages was filler about the methodology for calculating TCOF.
Page 17: ‘While nutrition programs and benefits—both public and private—have often been viewed as expensive, looking at them through a true cost lens reveals that they are in fact wise investments for strengthening our country’s economy ‘
More public spending is needed to reduce costs. The eternal cry of indebted governments everywhere: ‘No, we’re not spending too much. In fact, we’re not spending enough’. Of course, govts never use the term ‘spending’, only ever ‘investing’.
Page 20 explains the breakdown of environmental and biodiversity costs associated with the US food system. In short, it’s the packaging and use of land, water use, soil erosion and nitrogen pollution (from fertilisers, I assume, but the report does not confirm this).
I’d be happy to have less packaging but food production requires land and water. That is kind of how it works. Soil erosion? I thought that was understood 100 years ago and it no longer occurs (or is there a new definition of ‘soil erosion’?). As for fertiliser, these were designed to boost yields so that there would be enough food for everyone. The report seems to imply that having enough food is now negotiable.
Page 22 breaks down the livlihood and economy costs under TCOF. Livelihood refers to poor employment regulation. Economy refers to agricultural subsidies.
Page 24 explains – again – that people of color carry the heaviest burden of TCOF. This is because they are more likely to be obese and suffer from diabetes. The report also lists other metrics relating to people of melanin that seem to be more about general poverty levels than about food. For example: ‘Air pollution exposure is 25% higher for Black Americans compared to the national average.’ But isn’t that to be expected considering that blacks are more likely to live in cities which is where the air is polluted? The report is inferring that the food system is causing the air pollution.
Page 25 informs us that of TCOF livlihood costs…
‘a disproportionate amount is borne by the ~11 million producers and workers in the food system, the majority of whom are Black and Indigenous people of color’. Further down the page the report states:
‘Median hourly wage for persons of color is 22% lower than for White Americans.’
However, this statistic is nothing to do with the food industry. This relates to all salaries across the whole of the US. Therefore, it is somewhat misleading in this document.
Page 26: ‘[Meat] processing plants that continued to operate became transmission sites for the disease. Reports show approximately 300,000 excess cases of Covid-19 due to proximity to a livestock plant and approximately 5,000 deaths happened among workers in meat processing facilities – primarily immigrants, refugees, people of color, and those who lack other employment opportunities.’
Such stats are completely bogus. This is a continuation of the narrative that aims to create a negative association with meat. These food reports always demonise meat-eating. Plus, this information does not explicitly feed into any of the report’s recommendations so what is the point of including it?
Page 28: ‘By approaching food and the food system as an investment, and understanding its downstream returns, we have the potential to not only lower our true cost of food bill, but also transform the food system in a way that reduces costs and increases returns across the different systems and domains with which it intersects.’
The report mentions how investment can reduce our TCOF bill like it is now self-evident to the reader. But, of course, the report has not shown this connection in any way as no policies have yet to be presented. As for reducing costs, lots of costs have been presented but no case has been presented as to what costs should be reduced and by how much. And what would be the benefit? And to whom would that benefit accrue? The consumer or the investor?
Page 28: For example, by expanding access to healthy food for all Americans, through infrastructure investment‘food is medicine’ interventions integrated into healthcare delivery, business incentives, greater consumereducation, strengthened federal nutrition assistanceprograms, and more active regulatory and labeling policy,we could reduce diet-related disease relatively quickly,improve individual and population health, and eliminate many of the health-related costs‘.
Surely Americans have access to healthy food? Perhaps they just don’t want it. Is more consumer education really required? Will more labelling stop people buying Doritos? I think we can assume that everyone knows that unhealthy food is bad for you. This messaging smacks of liberals thinking that the only reason people aren’t doing what liberals want them to do is that liberals haven’t told them enough times what they want them to do. I suspect that ‘food is medicine’ refers to food additives such as vitamins, folic acid etc.
Page 28: ‘If diet-related disease prevalence rates were reduced to be comparable to countries such as Canada, health care costs could be reduced by close to $250 billion per year…’
If, if, if! How are you going to make such changes? By handing out leaflets? Recipe cards for healthy meals? It’s just a wishlist. Governments have been publishing healthy eating advice for years yet people keep getting fatter.
‘… Similarly, if the U.S. can reduce agriculture-specific emissions to comply with the 1.5°C pathway, then close to $100 billion could be reduced in additional environmental costs…’
Doesn’t hitting the 1.5°C target require the whole world to comply with emissions targets? That’s not going to happen so this is a pipe-dream. Plus, the idea that a slight increase in temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age is going to cost the US $100 billion in costs is laughable. Has anyone stopped to think that there might be benefits from a warmer climate?
Pages 29 and 30 describe 7 shifts that are required across the food system. These shifts are about ‘rewiring the food system in fundamental ways’.
Here are the 7 shifts:
• ‘Significant appetite to expand and modernize nutrition safety nets and better align government food procurement with a true cost approach.’
Ok, so the government will only procure healthy and sustainable food and that will reduce the costs associated with health and the environment. There is no mention of what proportion of all food provision is provided by the government. There is no mention of the private sector. There is no mention of the ultra-processed food that is made by the private sector.
• ‘Movement by governments to support marginalized communities, especially Blackand Indigenous peopleof color and small producers. This includes work toreverse the costs of years of discrimination through newlocal purchasing incentives and producer debt relief,and increased worker wages, and expanded health benefits.’
More affirmative action for black people. The Liberal mindset exposed. Also, more government intervention which will be paid for by the taxpayer. This doesn’t appear to reduce ‘hidden costs of food production’, merely re-allocate those costs.
• ‘Greater interest by governments to create incentives to address the human health impacts of the food system. Efforts include policies to limit portion sizes of unhealthy foods and beverages; adding nutrition labels; and considering additional taxes on sugary drinks or other foods.’
Ok, more regulation and more taxes to force us to eat healthily thereby raising prices. Whatever the problem, more government is the answer!
• ‘The private sector, including health care companies, are working to address the root causes of healthcare expenditures. This includes investments in medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, and ‘food farmacies’ that leverage healthcare dollars to support positive diet-related outcomes.’
Health care companies do not care about the root causes of healthcare expenditure. These companies certainly have no incentive to make people healthier because that would reduce their profits. The fact that the report identifies healthcare companies as being part of the solution for better health is interesting.
• ‘Acceleration in the development of new tools to reduce GHGs. This includes new financial markets related to natural capital including carbon, water, soil nitrogen and biodiversity. Policy makers are introducing new subsidies or incentives for farmers and agriculture producers to encourage the adoption of regenerative practices including conservation tillage methods and planting cover crops to build carbon in the soil and prevent runoffs.’
Financial markets can save us from greenhouse gases! I suppose this refers to tokenising all natural assets which will mean introducing carbon credits to manage usage of carbon. If you’ve used all your credits for the month, no more meat for you (unless you’re rich, in which you can buy more credits). Also, policy makers interfering in farming matters by setting (new) incentives, ie not the incentives of sufficient, affordable, disease-free food that we read about on page 5. These incentives will be about using less farmland and less fertilisers and having less cows (methane) so that we eat less meat.
This reminds me of Stalin’s 5 year plans. Also, there is a reference to more subsidies but on page 22 we were told that agricultural subsidies were part of the ‘hidden costs of food’ that need to be reduced?!
• ‘Financial investors are rewarding and incentivizing environmental stewardship of corporations. Driven by their fiduciary responsibility and armed with a greater understanding of climate-related investmentrisks, they are also penalizing actors that are not makingmeaningful progress on reducing their environmentalfootprint.’
Ah, yes, ESG in other words: the social credit score for companies. To ensure that companies toe the line of the Global Stakeholders. Financial investors are directing how farming will be conducted in the future. What could possibly go wrong?! Less GHG in farming will mean less food. The report has not presented any technical innovations that will avoid this.
• ‘Consumers are making different food choices, based on new information. Today, consumer purchase decisions are not just influenced by taste, price and convenience but also by factors such as health and welliness technologies, environmental sustainability, and personal values.’
More behavioural nudging from the Liberals: Enlightened people like us are doing the right thing and now we are going to force everyone else to do the right thing.
Liberals have the deluded mindset that if they point out to people the error of their ways – i.e. eating unhealthily – those people will thank the Liberals kindly and immediately adjust their behaviour.
Page 33: ‘If left unaddressed, the true cost of food will continue to rise and negatively contribute to climate change, the prevalence of diet-related diseases, and growing inequity…’
Growing food is contributing to climate change therefore, we need to grow less food. I don’t think that will end well. Also, ‘growing inequity’? It’s policies implemented by Global Stakeholders that are responsible for growing inequity between the super-rich and everyone else.
We are now at the end of the report and it’s still not clear how true cost accounting of food will make America a better place. However, they don’t want to make it too clear because people won’t like the medicine they are prescribing. As usual with documents like this, this report is just a sales brochure for the benefit of the government. Its entire purpose is to sell the product – the centralisation of food production or the tokenisation of assets or the carbon credit system, whatever are the hidden solutions in this report – in a way that will appeal to Liberal sensibilities about social justice, health and the environnent. All the while, the real benefits of the policies will accrue to the Rockefellers and their peers.
As for making the food system more resilient to future lockdowns, nothing in the document solved that conundrum.
If you genuinely believe that humans are responsible for destroying the planet via Climate Change then Game Theory would propose that the only rational solution would be to drastically reduce the human population. Such an outcome is what AI would determine.
Unsurprisingly, many Global Stakeholders who push the Climate Change and Environmentalist narratives have expressed their Malthusian desires to reduce the human population
Eugenics has been a popular philosophy of the upper classes since at least the Victorian era before becoming an unacceptable topic after WW2. However, as the quotes below prove, the idea of eugenics remains central to the ideology of what are now called the ‘Global Stakeholders’.
‘The population problem must be recognised by government as a principal element in long-range planning.’
Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood):
‘All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class.’ And… ‘The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.’
Ted Turner:
‘A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.’
Boris Johnson (Baby-maker extraordinaire):
‘The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself … It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet’
Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder:
‘My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with its full complement of species, returning throughout the world.’
Paul Ehrlich, member of ‘Club of Rome’, a former science adviser to President George W. Bush and the author of ‘The Population Bomb’:
‘Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism … of sexism … of religious intolerance … of war … of gross economic inequality. But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem.’
Maurice Strong (First executive director of the UN Environment Programme; Foundation director of WEF; member of World Business Council for Sustainable Development):
‘Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?’
Professor Philip Cafaro (Colorado State University) in a paper entitled ‘Climate Ethics and Population Policy’:
‘Ending human population growth is almost certainly a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for preventing catastrophic global climate change. Indeed, significantly reducing current human numbers may be necessary in order to do so.’
Jacques Costeau:
‘In order to stabilise world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.’
Finnish environmentalist Pentti Linkola:
‘If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die.’
Prince Philip (Co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund):
‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.’
Bill Gates (doctor and farmer): ‘The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. (…) And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later’
And let’s not forget Guide #1 on the Georgia Guidestones, organised under conditions of high secrecy but since destroyed, which stated ‘maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.’
Eugenics and population control has been a constant pre-occupation of the intelligentsia since the Victorian era.
When humanity is a variable and the environment is a constraint, the optimization function can solve for fewer humans.
