Welcome to My Substack

I’ve been holding off on this announcement for some time but with my book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, now out of the way, I am incredibly excited to launch this Substack.

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you will know that I used to frequently write about social, cultural and political events and trends for major publications in the UK and the US. Despite the great pleasure of writing for the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, Quillette, Standpoint, Tablet Magazine and others, the media environment is such that everything you write must be topical. You can only write about the thing that is happening right now. And only after it has happened.

Only a few weeks ago, I was metaphorically jumping up and down on Twitter to warn that Russia was about to invade Ukraine but no publication was interested in my take. I don’t blame them – I have no particular authority to speak on the subject and, most importantly, it wasn’t “topical”. Instead, we busied ourselves with the furore about Jimmy Carr’s offensive joke.

The same is true of other issues. No publication or TV channel will address the deliberate stirring of racial tensions in our society until they spill out into riots on our streets. Few will talk about the unintended consequences of the green agenda until we “suddenly” discover that Europe buying oil & gas from Uncle Vlad to keep Greta happy might not be a good idea. Fewer still will explain to their readers, viewers and listeners that not everyone in the world thinks as we do or why that matters.

The never-ending cycle of news is a direct obstacle to understanding the world and preparing for the future. In the modern West, anyone who attempts to distract your attention from the cacophony of soundbites and the endless array of decontextualised, emotionally-driven news items will be drowned out by clickbait and trivia.

But the truth is that the declining power of corporate media, radio and television is a product of the fact that we are not buying what they’re selling. There are enough of us who want to understand the tectonic shifts at work beneath the headlines and together we are powerful.

As we increasingly question the mainstream narrative, there is a danger of becoming so untethered from reality that nothing makes sense and everything is suspicious. Whether it’s the woke warriors who think every problem in society is caused by an “ism” or the QAnon nutjobs who see paedolizards around every corner, a new kind of pseudo-religious superstitionism is making a comeback.

Charting a sensible path through these murky waters will be a challenge for all of us. The future we live in and bring our children into will be shaped by how we respond to this challenge.

With this newsletter, I will do my part to feel out that path and warn us when we’re drifting astray. By supporting my work here, you are making rational conversations possible again. And if we can do that, everything else follows.