Those hoisting the flags for ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ said they were expressing national pride. Opponents called it racist. My heart still cheers when I see them flying. If nothing else, we have very pretty flags. What’s wrong with a bit of patriotism?

YouGov dipped its finger into the swirling pot of UK sentiment and discovered that 52% of ethnic minority adults now consider the St George’s flag a racist symbol. If that’s hard to wrap your head around — that people who chose to move here for everything this country offers find England’s own flag offensive — brace yourself for this: so do 36% of white adults.

Oh well. At least they’re honest, unlike Sir Sneer Starmer, who is particularly illiterate when it comes to reading the room. He tweeted:

“St George’s flag stands for unity over hatred and decency over division. Those are the values I will always fight for. Some try to hijack our flag to spread hate. I reject their plastic patriotism.”

I’m sorry — when exactly did our national flag come to stand for “unity” and “decency”?

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It is, first and foremost, a red cross: a Christian symbol, reflecting our Christian heritage. The red on white was the colour scheme of the Crusaders — funny how the Prime Minister neglected to mention that. And St George himself is bound up in the chivalric ideals of Christian faith, courage, honour, and the protection of the weak.

Back to school, Keir.

Rather than watering down — or, to put it plainly, lying about — the flag’s symbolism to make it more palatable to those who find it troubling, why not simply tell the truth? The values our flag actually represents are rather magnificent. They don’t need softening. They need championing.

But the richest irony of all is Starmer’s use of the word plastic. Sir Polystermer himself could not be more plastic if he tried — hollow, synthetic, and moulded into whatever shape the room requires.

We’ve been debating whether to fly the Union flag outside our house. We haven’t quite managed it yet — which is, I know, rather feeble. We live in an ethnically mixed area, and we have a nagging anxiety that some of YouGov’s 52% or 36% might take it the wrong way. That fear alone tells you something has gone badly wrong.

As it happens, I was rather relieved last week that we hadn’t hoisted the colours.

I arrived home to find a man kneeling on the pavement outside our house, shoes off beside him. “What are you doing?” I asked, in my best school-ma’am voice and took a photograph.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably not the sort of person who needs much persuading that honest, independent thinking is in short supply. The Free Mind exists for exactly that reason.

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On Orthodox Easter Sunday, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself to Truth Social. He wore white robes and a red sash, his hand rested upon a sick man lying in a hospital bed and supernatural light emanated from his outstretched palm. Behind him were the Stars and Stripes, bald eagles, fighter jets standing in for the Heavenly Host, the Statue of Liberty, and what appeared to be soldiers ascending heavenward through luminous mist. Surrounding him, people knelt in prayer.

It caused an outraged backlash and he deleted it within the hour.

When asked what the image meant, Trump said he thought it portrayed him as a doctor, or perhaps a Red Cross worker. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor,” he explained, “making people better.”

A doctor. Right. I’ll leave that one with you, see what you think.

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This may be the only post Trump has ever voluntarily deleted — I can’t think of another. Even his most ardent Christian supporters called it blasphemy. I’m smothering a smirk, but The Knights Templar International (“Largest Official Non-Masonic Templar organisation in the world & true to the spirit of our Christian forebears”) demanded a public apology.

And all this happened in the same week that he picked a fight with the Pope. He called Pope Leo XIV “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” declared that Pope wouldn’t be in the Vatican if Trump wasn’t in the White House and that he should be “thankful”. The Pope responded by saying he had “no fear” of the Trump administration and called Truth Social — with some understatement — “ironic”.

So what was actually going on with this image?

Unlike any other world leader alive, Trump has mastered the art of weaponising AI imagery and social media as propaganda. He is, without question, the President of Memes, producing a relentless stream of visual content that positions him as warrior, patriarch, genius, and saviour. (Read previous Substack article “The ‘Trump Gaza’ video is a masterclass in psychological warfare”.) He has even depicted himself as the Pope before.

The logic of his propaganda is consistent: he borrows the iconographic authority of a pre-existing symbol of power and transfers it onto himself. In the now-deleted post, he doesn’t merely lead America, he embodies, heals and transcends it.

But of all the posts he has ever shared, this one was different, as the Jesus image reaches into sacred and highly controversial territory.

The sick man in the hospital bed isn’t just a sick man — he is America. And whatever Trump is doing is unlike any doctor I have seen — this is divine salvific healing rather than anything medical. The nation is implicitly cast as wounded and he is the Healer-in-Chief, a supreme redeemer not merely an administrator.

From a Jungian perspective, this is a form of inflation — Trump’s ego appears to be identifying with something larger than himself, an archetype of King/Saviour/God. Jung believed that inflated states are unsustainable and inevitably lead to a fall or catastrophe of some kind, just as Icarus flying too close to the sun with wax wings and literally fell into the sea and died, or Rudyard Kipling’s Dravot fell from a bridge after pretending to be a god-king.

Deleting a post may constitute something of a catastrophe for Trump, but if there is to be a fall it is yet to come. In fact, since then he has followed up with another meme of himself with Jesus, a placatory gesture perhaps, but not exactly humble either.

Of course, some of Trump’s Q Anon supporters have inflated him for years, ascribing him quasi-mystical status through archetypal projection. The crowd creates its own messiah, and then the messiah reposts the image. It is a feedback loop of devotion, and it has been running for years.

The end result is apotheosis, from the Greek, to deify. In Ancient Rome, emperors were deified after death and in Ancient Egypt the pharaohs were considered living gods, and in China the emperor was thought to be the ‘Son of Heaven’. This way the leaders are placed above ordinary human status and ordinary human challenge.

Since the construction of the pyramids, has any world leader pursued apotheosis this hard?

Of course, the meme could simply have been a joke. That was JD Vance’s explanation.

What is clear is that Trump’s propaganda, or jokes, have found their glass ceiling. His supporters will accept a lot, but not that he is a living god, and definitely not the Son of God.

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There is a moment in every institution’s decline when the desperation becomes visible. York Minster has just had one of those moments. The Minster has partnered with local brewery Brew York to produce a beer called Poisoned Chalice, supposedly to mark the 800th anniversary of the canonisation of St William of York. The reaction has been, depending on your tolerance for institutional self-abasement, either rather funny or genuinely troubling. Probably both.

Let me first deal with the obvious deflection. Yes, monks have brewed beer for centuries — the tradition stretches back to medieval times, when monks brewed because water was dangerous and pilgrims needed sustenance. But monks made their beer. They didn’t lend their brand to a commercial brewery in exchange for exposure. The monastic brewing tradition is one of self-sufficiency, sacred labour and hospitality. York Minster’s PR partnership feels more tawdry.

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Dr Gavin Ashenden, once chaplain to Elizabeth II and now a Catholic, put it plainly in The Telegraph: “It happens to be York Minster and beer this time — but the pattern is familiar, in which an ailing organisation seeks to entertain and enter into a kind of usefully symbiotic partnership with someone else.” Ashenden called beer “a drug” and suggested the Church is being “insensitive, careless” in its judgment, given the sustained rise in alcohol-related deaths since Covid. This may not be a popular position, but it is not an unreasonable one.

In England in 2023, 8,274 people died from causes wholly attributable to alcohol — a rise of 42.2% since 2019. And it is worth noting that Yorkshire and The Humber is the region with the highest number of alcohol-related deaths in the country, having seen a 43.77% increase over the last five years, as well as the greatest increase in drug use. York Minster stands in Yorkshire.

The Church of England seems to be shutting its ears to this tragedy — which is a pattern, is it not? It also shut its doors during lockdown. Arguably, the Church failed its congregations then, and it is failing them now with this obtuse cheerfulness about beer.

One wonders where the logic ends. The Bible contains plenty of material that the Church of England has not yet monetised. The Song of Solomon is bracingly physical about breasts and desire — “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies.” — so perhaps the Minster could partner with a tabloid to bring back Page 3 under ecclesiastical branding? And there is plenty of casting of lots to make decisions in the Bible. A Church of England and Bet365 joint venture cannot be far off — Take a Gamble on the Resurrection!

Perhaps all this could be seen as clumsy, well-meaning outreach if it weren’t for one rather important detail — the beer is called Poisoned Chalice. St William of York — a twelfth-century archbishop who became the city’s patron saint — is thought to have died after drinking from a poisoned chalice while celebrating Mass at the Minster. He believed he was drinking from a blessed sacrament. His death was, by any measure, a martyrdom steeped in the symbolism of the Eucharist. And the Church of England’s response to his 800th anniversary is to name a beer after the murder weapon.

They could have called it Holy Grail Ale, or Heavenly Hops, or Saint’s Rest, or any number of names that honoured a holy man without making a punchline of his death and the Eucharist. The marketing department has not apparently considered that the chalice at Mass is supposed to contain the symbolic blood of Christ — or, for Catholics who believe in transubstantiation, literally does. (Perhaps part of the problem is that there is a marketing department.)

It also recalls something darker in contemporary culture. There is a recurring aesthetic — think Marina Abramović’s spirit cooking, the Lady Gaga tableau with fake blood and a human-shaped cake, or Neil Patrick Harris’s ghoulish Amy Winehouse corpse cake — that ties ritualised consumption to death. I am not suggesting the Dean of York is in league with performance artists who bathe in synthetic gore, but there is something disquieting about the Eucharist — the most sacred act of Christian worship — being turned into a joke about poisoned drinks on a can sold in a gift shop.

The Rev Marcus Walker, founder of the Save the Parish campaign, called the beer “a brilliant idea” that reminds people “the Church of England isn’t a religion for Puritans.” Too true, wine certainly features rather prominently in the New Testament. But there is a considerable distance between the Wedding at Cana and slapping your name on a bitter named after a martyr’s death in order to “reach beyond the usual audiences,” as the Dean put it. What does he think will happen? That a twenty-five-year-old, mid-pint of Poisoned Chalice, will set down his glass and begin meditating on his spiritual journey?

The Church of England is clearly struggling. Attendance is falling, and the temptation to do anything that might catch the attention of people who wouldn’t normally darken a church door is strong. But is desperation producing decisions that are beneath the dignity of the institution making them?

St William deserved better. So do the people of Yorkshire, 877 of whom died from alcohol-related causes in recent years — the highest toll of any English region. The Church might consider attending to that fact before it raises another glass.

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The parish office door was right on the pavement. A laminated sign with the address assured me I was in the right place.

The intercom had two options: Parish Office and Presbytery. I pressed both. No answer. I called the office. No answer. I tried the administrative assistant’s mobile. Still nothing. I began to wonder whether I was in the wrong place or simply at the wrong time.

I called my husband, whose appointment had been the week before. He explained there was a “funny situation” with the door. Following his directions, I discovered an alleyway a little further down the pavement, where a recessed glass door waited, unmarked, almost secret.

If this was your first visit, you would almost certainly not find it. Yet the intercom now offered a third option: Marriage Tribunal. I rang, and eventually someone let me in. For someone who prizes punctuality, being ten minutes late for an important appointment was a stressful start.

When I recounted this story to my RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) group, a fellow catechumen said he had been told he was one of the few ever to find the right door on the first try.

It struck me that if the door is so difficult to find, the Tribunal could at least provide directions or signage. But they don’t. Perhaps this is a test — of faith, patience, intelligence? I failed all. The difficult door felt like a metaphor for the existential questions this process has raised for me.

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At a recent Ben Gurion University Foundation event, Noa Argamani appeared in conversation with journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti. She is slight, composed and softly spoken. If you did not know who she wa…

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The most powerful challenges to ideological systems often come from the people who have lived inside them — and left.

In Britain, the government has recently adopted a non‑statutory definition of ‘ant…

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Fear is generally considered the steam that drives the human emotional engine. Thomas Hobbes argued that fear of violent death underpins social order. Niccolò Machiavelli observed that rulers often govern more reliably through fear than love. Charles Darwin framed fear as a vital, evolved response to danger — an essential survival mechanism.

Modern neuroscience, notably Joseph LeDoux’s work, shows how fear circuits rapidly prepare the body for action. This dynamic operates politically as well. In A State of Fear, I argued that behavioural scientists and government messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic deliberately amplified public fear to increase compliance. Fear thus becomes not only biological fuel necessary for survival, but a tool of governance.

There is another emotional experience that fogs our view and ruins our society: self-hatred.

This is a peculiar form of self-hatred. It has metastasised from a hatred of the West’s prosperity, democracy and Christian legacy. The sufferer seeks to differentiate themselves from the country and culture of their own birth — to signal that they are different, they are better, they stand with the ‘opposed’, whoever the opposed is. This hatred of the West is de facto hatred of the self, since they were born of the West, enjoy its relative safety, peace and wealth, and yet choose to undermine its solidity rather than acknowledge its foundations.

In a similar way, fear and self-hatred are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

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Fear was dressed up in social responsibility — if you can save just one elderly person’s life, it justifies closing schools, shutting down manufacture and retail, interfering with every aspect of life. People shamed others for not wearing face masks. This shame was actively encouraged by the state, turning citizens into monitors of each other, enforcing compliance with what was at best symbolic and at worst harmful.

Self-hatred wears equally pernicious clothing. Those who hate our way of life, our democracy, safety and prosperity pretend they care more for humanity, equality, justice. But their actions often signal alignment with regimes and ideologies that actively suppress these values. Virtue signalling replaces moral clarity. They put outrage above careful and honest discernment.

Consider an example overheard at the orthodontist, one of the epicentres of middle-class posturing. Sandwiched between a mother and a receptionist’s small talk about holiday destinations, the mother proffered her daughter not a sandwich, but a Lebanese takeaway “to support the people of Lebanon who are being bombed.”

A few things were happening.

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How should the Green Party maintain momentum after their historic win in Gorton and Denton? Easy. Legalise polygamous marriage.

Green Party candidate H…

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On 15 February, Barack Obama, former President of the United States, disclosed in a podcast that aliens are real.

Asked whether aliens were real, he replied:

‘They’re real but I haven’t seen them. They…

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It is now genuinely hard to remember when Life Celebration was optional. Harder still to recall that it was once known by the funereal phrase ‘assisted dying’ — a name so glo…

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On several of the most important questions of our time, Britain has lost its grip on reality. We are wrong about power, wrong about morals and wrong about religion, and the confidence with which this…

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I used to be one of those English people. The kind who innocently and proudly believed, without much reflection, that England did everything best. London was the greatest capital city in the world — …

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Last week I wrote about Seven Things to be Happy About This New Year. Thanks to President Trump, we now have an eighth: the new dietary guidelines for Americans.

It is no longer quite so socially unac…

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You might have noticed that in 2025 I found myself giving in to the typical railing at the state of the nation. I would have had to be blind or mad not to. Everything felt brittle. Politics felt unre…

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Dr Clare Craig is a medical doctor and pathologist who has been educating the public on Covid issues pro bono since 2020. She co-chairs HART and her work can be found on X and Substack.

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You can learn an awful lot about human psychology by walking your dog. It’s where human and canine instincts collide in a daily tangle of projection and foibles.

Take my oldest dog. She’s a mongrel wi…

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There comes a moment when you realise that something has gone seriously wrong. The list of constitutional changes under this Labour government can no longer be counted on one hand. Is democracy slipp…

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I lunched in London yesterday with a group of girlfriends. We met at one of those fancy private members’ clubs. The views were to die for and you could feed a family of four for the price of one main…

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Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does.

Each week brings another step into a culture that has stopped valuing human life. I have said before that we are living in a death cult, and the eviden…

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