The Tattooed Infidel at the Pentagon
Pete Hegseth’s rise to Defence Secretary marks the moment Christian nationalism stopped playing insurgent and started running the world’s most powerful war machine.
The rest of the blog
Pete Hegseth’s rise to Defence Secretary marks the moment Christian nationalism stopped playing insurgent and started running the world’s most powerful war machine.
Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement confirms what many suspected: Labour has embraced austerity not as necessity, but as ideology.
Resistance is a stark, tender, and unflinching record of a century of British protest, where the power of black-and-white photography turns acts of defiance into collective memory.
A shimmering portrait of an age when the rational order cracked, and something strange and holy slipped through.
Trump doesn’t defeat his opponents; he casts them, turning liberal conscience into spectacle, and transforming critique into the very script that keeps him centre stage.
A Minister for Men cannot rebuild the infrastructures of solidarity that were torn apart by decades of neoliberal consensus.
The presidency was already a sideshow in Trump’s first term, but his second has stripped it of any remaining dignity, turning the White House into just another stage for his brand of gaudy, transactional spectacle.
A masterful dissection of power, corruption, and the making of modern America, The Apprentice deserved to sweep the Oscars, but the Academy, as always, chose safety over truth.
The age of algorithmic authoritarianism is here: governance has been outsourced to billionaire-controlled social media and AI systems that manipulate reality, suppress dissent, and enforce ideological obedience through predictive algorithms and digital surveillance.
There’s no mystery here. The American empire, bloated and decayed, has finally started eating itself, and Musk is just the latest tech-cult billionaire to turn state side destruction into spectacle.
The transition is complete. The bureaucracy is being purged, executive orders rain down like decrees from a throne, and opposition is branded treasonous. The state is no longer a neutral machine for capitalist management—it is becoming an instrument of direct class war. Trump’s second term is not simply a rerun of his first; it is something darker, more disciplined, more openly repressive. The threats against political enemies are no longer bluster—they are policy. The FBI and CIA are being reshaped in his image, turned from institutions of surveillance into enforcers of ideological loyalty. Official diktats appear not just in government memos but on X, where Musk, the regime’s favoured oligarch, polls his Twitler Youth on whom to exile next. The question is no longer whether American democracy is eroding but whether we are watching its final transformation into something else entirely. Neoliberalism is collapsing, and in its ruins, a new order is emerging. The only question is: what kind?
Picture a once-mighty empire, stripped to its underwear. Once hailed for its democratic values and global reach, the United States now staggers beneath the weight of its own contradictions—its institutions hollowed out, its alliances squandered, its climate left to burn. In the aftermath of a second Trump presidency, what was once dismissed as political theatre has morphed into a crisis so profound that even the most reluctant observers must confront the truth: the old order cannot endure.
The growing concentration of power in the digital realm, exemplified by Elon Musk’s control over X, poses unprecedented risks to both online discourse and real-world stability.
From the cult-like following of visionaries like Elon Musk to the polarising influence of figures such as Donald Trump, we explore how the digital age’s most prominent personalities contribute to and thrive within the ever-evolving spectacle that captivates and divides our global society.