Challenging the herd with bold thinking in philosophy, politics and culture. Subscribe to UnHerd here: https://xitter.cf/t.co/zUxzdsSoTQ
London, United Kingdom
Joined March 2017
- Tweets96.1K
- Following210
- Followers149K
- Likes2.6K
Once you recognise the phenomenon of “virtue hoarding”, countless political stories make sense. In the aftermath of the recent Green Party conference, for instance, some wondered whether passing a motion that “Zionism is racism” (which won by only a few hundred votes) was a smart strategy: not least because the Greens are struggling to deal with a Labour government now led by Andy Burnham. Just when the Greens needed to address the country with bold, broadly popular policies, critics argued, they had turned inward to debate the meaning of words.
And yet, once again, it was these same people — who are on the whole entirely sympathetic to the claim that Zionism is premised on ideas of racial superiority — who stood accused of being Zionists themselves.
I myself was called a Zionist! I had said I understood why some European Jews, in 1945, were attracted to the Israeli cause in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But for the virtue hoarders, of course, that signalled little more than my own moral depravity.
Read more from @AaronBastani
buff.ly/xxU6K2k
Chocolate rewards patience, while sour sweets demand an instant reaction.
Our increasingly online culture seems to favour the latter, writes @TheGreedyDick 👇
buff.ly/XOfCKva
As chocolate prices soar, Gen Z is turning to sour candy.
The more violently a flavour attacks the senses, the better, writes @TheGreedyDick 👇
buff.ly/XOfCKva
All the famous Hemingway rough-and-tumble is explicable in basically compensatory, Freudian terms. And yet for anyone familiar with Hemingway’s later trajectory, these affinities might seem rather surprising.
By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he was regularly exploding in print at any journalist or biographer who dared mention the word “psychology” and “Hemingway” in the same sentence: “How would you like it if someone said that everything you’ve done in your life was done because of some trauma?”, he complained in Time Magazine.
In the academy, he became a kind of anti-Freudian bogeyman, a monster of male repression, and that task of critics was to do what he, in his own life, never could: understand himself.
Read more from @peermohambert
buff.ly/7YdX8uw
New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.
As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanisation, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarised, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness.
Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.
Read more from @lilyslynch
buff.ly/MKCq8Nm
Why is the Met responsible for protecting royals across the UK?
The Markle affair raises questions about whether this costly arrangement makes sense, writes @DomAdlerUK 👇
buff.ly/AnnNmw0
The Met failed to pass on allegations against Meghan Markle’s father to US authorities.
How did such a sensitive case slip through the cracks? @DomAdlerUK 👇
buff.ly/AnnNmw0
UnHerd retweeted
JD Vance fears, above all, the Blade Runner scenario: demographic churn so high that majority-minority distinctions completely break down and society becomes an agglomeration of hostile strangers.
Me, on what the VP sees in Europe. unherd.com/2026/10/france-an…
Labour says it wants businesses to make a profit.
So why is it still so expensive to do business in Britain? @ADOBrien88 👇
buff.ly/GTRnpUW
The migration anxieties that twice catapulted Trump to the White House will long outlast his messy reign. A majority of Americans might disapprove of his handling of immigration, recoiling from the performative cruelty of ICE. But those same majorities still tell pollsters that they prefer the same or lower levels of migration as today (when Trump has already sealed the southern border and drastically cut legal migration and naturalisation).
The upshot is that immigration restrictionism will remain the American Right’s top concern for the foreseeable future. It is the one cause upon which an otherwise notoriously fractious movement can converge even after Trump leaves the historical stage. Today, the movement is divided between five main factions. We might call them the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists. All demand less migration, albeit for different reasons and in a different tone.
Read more from @SohrabAhmari:
buff.ly/naXHCN3
Britain is becoming a hostile environment for entrepreneurs.
Next week's Budget must change that, writes @ADOBrien88 👇
buff.ly/GTRnpUW
I don’t denigrate or dismiss so-called “high culture”, or pretend that we’ve achieved nothing since the Neolithic. Hunter-gatherers didn’t build Chartres Cathedral or write the Bach Cello suites. And I am no anarchist. I’m a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, who realises that we’ll all get on a lot better if we drive on the left-hand side of the road and proscribe gross violations of the social contract. Institutions have their place, and their place is often, and rightly, geographically and figuratively central. But that place must always be subservient to, and exist expressly for the edge people, not the edge people for the institutions. This should be trite. Sadly it’s radically countercultural, and the centre will fight tooth and nail to preserve its hegemony.
Read more from @tweedpipe:
buff.ly/hvIzdKD
“Nations as servants, fine. Nations as masters, not fine."
Charles Foster tells @freddiesayers that nations and corporations should serve individuals rather than rule them, noting that every single human life is infinitely more morally weighty than any institution.
Neither the single market nor the customs union have been panaceas for Europe’s long-term trend of relative decline. Indeed, Britain has outgrown both France and Germany since leaving the EU’s free-trade and regulatory regimes. If AI really is the sector of the future, then Europe’s data regulations exclude the continent from its windfalls.
Besides, the bloc Britain would now rejoin is not that of Mitterrand or Kohl: it would be the Europe of Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel. The dissonance between the Europe of the Remainiac imagination and the actually-existing EU grows wider by the day — not least given the recent disorder in France. Besides, Britain would enter this unhappy arrangement without exemptions from the Euro and Schengen, nor the significant budget rebate, all available before we left.
Read @DespoticInroad on why Britain shouldn’t rejoin the EU:
buff.ly/cuQIxcH
“We need to keep moving… stasis is deadly”
Charles Foster tells @freddiesayers that humans remain hunter-gatherers at heart, built to wander and pay constant attention, reminding us that stasis is deadly and true thriving requires continuous movement.
The Pentagon’s latest UFO files reveal a wartime mystery.
Allied aircrews were seeing things they could not explain, writes @TomRtweets 👇
buff.ly/bPGxyRo
It should not surprise men that women are superficial. It is true that as a sex we have become pickier; changing mores have made partnership optional, and so women are now motivated by desire rather than duty.
Women’s metrics have become, in other words, closer to those of men. If men baulk at this, it is because they see an unflattering reflection of themselves. Increasingly today, women are the more educated, higher-earning party, and so implement stricter selection methods so as to conserve their self-made status.
Yes, that can hurt. But judging women for exercising preferences — the realistic ones, at least — is pure hypocrisy. Modern male sexual culture is aggressively “lookist”, with men constantly ranking women out of 10. Yet hints of the same attitudes among the fairer sex are framed as evidence of a civilisation in decline.
Read more from @poppy_sowerby:
buff.ly/lV2CAkQ
“What is ecstasy? … It's literally becoming more edgy"
Charles Foster tells @freddiesayers that true human flourishing requires escaping self-centeredness and embracing ecstasy - literally "standing outside yourself" at the transformative edges of existence.
UnHerd retweeted
"France functions for America’s various conservative factions as a kind of crystal ball." @SohrabAhmari @unherd.
unherd.com/2026/10/france-an…
