Thomas: There was a big rape gangs report in the UK. It’s going mega viral, and certain media outlets are completely ignoring it. If you don’t know about it, it’s because you’ve been isolated in an information-dampening channel. Look it up and read the report.
This is an independent report instigated by a member of parliament, and it’s gotten a lot of attention.
A victim of rape complained online about being raped by migrants. The police came to her house and arrested her for saying racist things about the men who raped her. They did not arrest the rapists. When people in the UK see instances like this, where even rape victims get arrested for complaining about their attackers, it has a chilling effect.
Almost no one in the UK is talking about this report publicly because they are terrified of their own government sending police to their door to put them in prison.
Jonathan: The independent crowdfunded inquiry compiled court records, prior inquiries, and over 20 survivor accounts across 149 local authority districts. It’s a 219-page document that estimates at least 250,000 young white British girls suffered repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, forced pregnancy, and Islamic conversion at the hands of organized grooming gangs.
It concludes that 87% of convicted perpetrators in group-based child sexual exploitation cases bore distinctly Muslim names, predominantly from Pakistani heritage, operating under clan codes and cultural attitudes that treated non-Muslim girls as inferior and available for exploitation.
Grooming typically began with gifts of alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes, followed by collection from school gates and care homes, then repeated group assaults, transport between locations, blackmail via recordings, and forced conversions.
Police, social services, schools, the NHS, and successive governments allegedly returned victims to abusers and suppressed ethnicity data out of fear of racism accusations.
Thomas: In one account in the report, a girl who was being raped went to a police station. The police put her in a car, drove her back to the house where she was being raped, handed her back to her abusers, said, “Have fun with her,” and drove off.
Jonathan: Recommendations include automatic deportation for every foreign national convicted, loss of citizenship and deportation for dual nationals, and deportation proceedings for family members who supported or failed to report the crimes.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK Party, the one that crushed everyone in the last election in Britain, framed the findings as evidence of colonization and institutional cowardice driven by political correctness. A separate statutory government inquiry into grooming gangs continues its work, while the National Crime Agency has already ordered police to reopen hundreds of cold cases dating back to 2010.
How does the scale of this compare to other atrocities?
Thomas: For people who’ve had access to non-UK news sources, grooming gangs shouldn’t be a surprise. I wasn’t surprised by the material in the report. I was surprised by the scope: a quarter million girls, children in many cases, were the victims.
The mind breaks with big numbers, so here’s some scale for comparison. The Rape of Nanking, the worst rape event of World War II, involved an estimated 20,000 women. This report covers 250,000 victims. That’s as much as 10 times worse than the Rape of Nanking. And the Epstein files, which everyone is rightly outraged about, involved roughly 1,200 victims. This is 200 times more victims than the Epstein files.
The response in the UK has been muted online because people are genuinely afraid. Peaceful protesters are being arrested. I saw footage of a man arrested with his five-year-old son present. Police dragged the crying child away from his mother into a police car. Another peaceful, unmasked protester had his head rammed into a metal post by police. There were disputed reports about whether he survived or just suffered a brain injury.
Meanwhile, the protesters in Belfast who dress in black, put on masks, and leave their phones at home face no consequences because they’re engaged in direct violence. In the UK, people have stopped talking and started acting.
Why did the British government let this go on for so long?
Thomas: There was a phrase we discussed in our members-only Belfast episode: “I don’t think you are, mate.” It effectively shut down all debate. It comes from what British police said to a young man who’d been stabbed by a migrant. The man said, “I’m bleeding, I can’t breathe.” The police said, “I don’t think you are, mate,” handcuffed him, and let him bleed to death on the ground because he was accused of saying something racist.
The UK zeitgeist has held that racism was worse than rape. It was the worst sin a person could commit, and the whole apparatus of government was structured around punishing racists more severely than any other kind of criminal.
Jonathan: A lot of this comes from the British feeling the need to apologize for colonizing the world. After 50 or 60 years of being told they’re colonizers, institutions decided they could never be racist, whatever that required. As a result, they threw aside the objective standard of justice, which is, “Don’t rape kids.” The police had no institutional backing to do anything to save these girls.
Why is it important for Americans to speak up about this?
Thomas: There is a growing longing among a certain element of young American men to invade Britain. Americans have never wanted to invade Britain before. A surprising number of the restless young men who cause problems if left without purpose are now expressing this.
I don’t think Donald Trump is aware of this yet. Trump has a high respect for the British Crown, and there’s no way he would invade the UK. But there’s a risk he’ll bring up what’s happening at a rally, hear the crowd’s reaction, and understand the depth of the feeling.
Each week, something happens that’s worse than the week before. We thought the man stabbed to death in Belfast was the worst thing, and then this report came out. It’s important for Americans to speak about this because we are not afraid of the British government, especially on the 250th anniversary of our ceasing to be British.
The British will get arrested for complaining about their government and using naughty words while doing it. Americans won’t.
What does the law of hospitality have to do with any of this?
Thomas: The first zeitgeist angle is the ancient law of hospitality, what the Romans called the law of gods and men. You see the concept in the Bible, in ancient China, and in modern Japan. It’s a universal concept about the duties of guests and hosts.
I just finished reading The Odyssey, and the whole book is actually about hospitality. Almost every scene takes place in a home. All the parts that get made into movies are stories Odysseus tells while experiencing hospitality, and the whole interplay in those stories turns on the rules of hospitality. The Cyclops was godless because he didn’t show Odysseus hospitality, not because of who his father was. The book shows the duties of hosts, the duties of guests, and what happens to those who abuse hospitality.
Odysseus, at one point ,declines to compete in games hosted in his honor because he doesn’t want to shame his host. Then you see the suitors abusing hospitality, and what ultimately happens to people who do that.
This concept of hospitality, when you offer it, when you don’t, how you handle someone abusing it, is a civilizational question we need authors to help us navigate. The fact that we’re looking back 2,500 years to the Odyssey for content means there’s a lot of modern territory for you to write about.
What can storytellers and novelists do to help?
Thomas: There’s a growing curiosity about the Crusades, particularly among American Protestants who are realizing they know almost nothing about them, and the few things they think they know are wrong.
There’s a growing view that the Crusades were justified, once people learn that virtually all the places where the Crusades happened were Christian lands that had been conquered by Muslims through rape, pillage, and conquest, with pilgrimages blocked for centuries. After hundreds of years of suffering, the Christians finally said, “We need to get our ancestral lands back.” That triggered the First Crusade.
There’s also growing curiosity about Islam itself, as people realize they don’t know its history. When they hear that Muslims bought more African slaves than Europeans did, they have no idea. They have no idea about the millions of Europeans captured and sold into slavery in the Middle East.
So here is a specific book pitch:
Logline: It’s a medieval Taken.
Pitch: A French knight returns from the Crusade in the Holy Land to find that his teenage daughter has been stolen by Muslim slave traders. Years of warfare have given him a particular set of skills and a determination that nothing will stop him from getting her back.
The plot basically writes itself, and you’ll want to research slave markets and the southern French coast. Getting tagged in certain lists will get you sales. People without courage avoid this kind of controversy. They don’t want to make Muslims the villains even though there’s demand among readers for exactly that, because they’re seeing these migrants raping and pillaging.
The rape report itself connects the acts of these Muslim grooming gangs to specific commands in the Quran. It frames their behavior as an extension of the religion. If you look back over the history of Islam, nothing has changed.
Jonathan: The United States Navy was founded to fight Muslim slave traders. The Navy’s funding was authorized by an act of Congress specifically to fight the Barbary corsairs. That was the first time the Marines met Muslims in combat.
Thomas: The Barbary corsairs had been raiding France and stealing French women, children, and men for generations, and everyone was just paying them protection money. Then Thomas Jefferson came along. His position was “A million dollars for defense before a penny in tribute.” Americans don’t pay tribute to Muslim slave traders. So we sent the Marines to the shores of Tripoli. That’s why it’s in the Marines’ Hymn in the opening stanza, “From the Halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli.”
Jonathan: Decatur was the captain, and he went with an officer and 10 enlisted Marines plus some Greek mercenaries. They decided to just take Tripoli. They loaded a cannon, fired it, and realized they had fired the ramrod because they forgot to take it out. The Marines looked at each other and said, “Cannon fire’s stopped. Bayonets, I guess.” They fought so violently that they were given the name Leathernecks, for the leather collars they wore to protect against Saracen scimitars. They smoked them.
Thomas: Then they did regime change. In gratitude, the son of the deposed leader gave the Marines a scimitar, which is why the Marine dress sword is a Middle Eastern-style blade. So, we have a history of not negotiating with terrorists. It’s a core American value. The Europeans do not share it. They all paid tribute or the blood tax.
The blood tax is another thing most Americans don’t know about. The Ottoman Empire would conquer Christian lands and require Christians to surrender five- and six-year-old boys from their families. They’d load these boys with drugs and alcohol, brainwash them, forcibly convert them to Islam, and forge them into a military unit known as Janissaries. When the Ottomans invaded Christian lands, the Christian defenders would find themselves fighting and killing their own sons, brothers, and cousins, whom the Ottomans had taken and turned into a radical fighting force.
Jonathan: There’s a great movie on this, Dracula Untold. It’s the story of Vlad the Impaler, and it covers this exact situation. The Ottomans tried to take his son for the blood tax, and he said no.
Has England lost the Mandate of Heaven?
Thomas: There’s been discussion online, particularly on X, about whether England has lost the Mandate of Heaven. This is a cultural sea change you can miss if you’re not paying attention.
As a Christian, I don’t put a lot of stock in omens, but I do acknowledge signs. As Jesus said, it’s a wicked generation that asks for signs, but signs can exist. Supernatural events sometimes manifest in the natural world and signal whether a nation has the favor of God, or what the ancient Chinese would have called the Mandate of Heaven. It’s a universal concept throughout time and cultures: “Does Heaven favor this government?
A lot of people were sharing the photo of the Washington Monument with a rainbow over it and lightning striking nearby, saying America has the Mandate of Heaven. The divine right of kings in English history is essentially the same concept, going back to Emperor Diocletian.
Several events are causing people to question whether England has lost it. First, in 2021, British police killed a rare white stag in the city of Bootle. The white stag is a creature of the other world in Arthurian and Welsh tradition, a symbol of purity and a herald of spiritual quests. It’s the white stag that led the Pevensie children back to England from Narnia. The British police killed it.
Second, the Sycamore Gap tree, the famous tree on Hadrian’s Wall, iconically featured in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was cut down by vandals.
Third, just days ago, it was officially announced that the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, a thousand-year-old tree, has died.
Jonathan: That’s like the White Tree of Gondor dying. That’s bad.
Thomas: It’s a thousand-year-old tree that just died. The first omen was police action, the second was vandalism, and the third was supposedly natural causes. A drought, they say. Do you know how many droughts this tree has lived through? It goes back to Robin Hood’s time. It’s older than or contemporary with Magna Carta. Prince John, whom Robin Hood opposed, was eventually forced by the nobles to sign Magna Carta, which is the founding document of the English Constitution. Now that tree, representing a thousand years of English history, has died in Sherwood Forest.
I’m not English, and I’m surprisingly sad about it.
Jonathan: Sometimes God is trying to talk to you. He hears the cries of the innocent and those who cannot defend themselves. When they are crushed by their leaders, by their priests, prophets, kings, and princes, when they are crushed by the mighty and left to foreign invaders, someone is going to come and get their justice.
What can authors do for people who are furious and have no outlet?
Jonathan: When you write your stories, this is something you can incorporate, especially in this fourth-turning moment.
People need an answer to their anger. You heard 250,000 girls were raped and nothing was done. Now you’re angry, but the anger is unanswered. There’s no satisfactory conclusion, which means it festers, and that produces terrible results. That’s why justice matters. It must resolve the feeling of anger.
In our stories, we can create events that generate this kind of anger. We can write those events. And because readers are already feeling that anger, when they encounter it on the page and then get the satisfaction of seeing justice prevail, it works.
Think about John Wick. You remember how furious you were when they killed his puppy? My wife still gets mad. She doesn’t even like those movies, but she asks, “Can he kill them again?” In The Patriot, the villain kept killing his sons, and my mom was saying, “Stab him again!” She was upset by the way the villain died because she wanted more.
Thomas: It’s catharsis. When you see justice done in a story, you feel satisfied, which is what people cannot get in the real UK right now. As an author, you can give them that feeling narratively. As an American author, there’s very little you can do in the streets of Britain, but you can guide people narratively, and there’s real power in that.
There’s a movie going viral on X right now, called Reign of Fire. People are realizing it’s a near-perfect metaphor for the situation the UK is in. In the film, the UK becomes infested with dragons that spread across the whole Earth and create a dragon apocalypse. Eventually, the United States sends armed military to Britain, where the survivors are hiding in holes and mountains and castles, and the Americans say, “You don’t have to live tormented by the dragons. You don’t have to hide from them. We have this thing in America called killing dragons, and we are going to kill dragons here.”
Jonathan: The initial reaction of all the British was to get into the castle and hide. Then the Americans showed up, flew above the dragon, and jumped out of the aircraft with net guns to bring it down so they could shoot it. It’s tactically insane, and totally cool.
Thomas: You have to suspend disbelief about how helicopters magically flew across the Atlantic. But “Gondor calls for aid” is the energy. Watch Reign of Fire, because that movie is narratively resonating right now, and you can write books along those lines. You can give people hope and guide them, because in turbulent times, it’s easy for people to overreact and do things they regret.
Telling angry people they shouldn’t be angry when they have cause to be angry doesn’t work.
Jonathan: Don’t tell people to calm down. Have you ever told a woman to calm down? Learn from your pain. You have to satisfy the grievance. You have to treat the wound.
Thomas: In times like this, we need authors who can step back from the news, think about core issues, core philosophies, core identities and strategies, and work them into a narrative that helps people make sense of the pain they feel.
Jonathan: If you have the gift of words and you know what’s going on, you are duty-bound to use it. “To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”
If you are not doing this, you have a problem. That’s my extremist view on this.
Thomas: Use your power for good as a writer. The pen is mightier than the sword. You don’t have a sword, but you have a pen. Use it.
