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So long, and thanks for all the clicks

This is the last article published on Mercator. Sadly, after 20 years, we are closing our doors. I used to say that Mercator (which was born as MercatorNet) was the world’s only dignitarian magazine. We explained: “It’s not about left or right, liberal or conservative; it’s about firm, unchanging moral principles, common sense, and evidence.” For the most part, I’d say we have been faithful to those ideals. Our readers responded enthusiastically as we journeyed together across the ever-changing internet. There has been a lot to write about. Politics around the world has been volatile, and social trends have been manic. Here’s an example of how much I had to learn. Our About Us page once stated: “How do we define human persons?They are men and women (that’s right, nothing in between) who have an intellect to know the truth and a free will."  This might have been a bit pompous but it was otherwise unobjectionable. So I was astonished to receive an email in 2012 claiming that these words were a concession to “rightist ideologues.” I honestly didn’t know what he/she/it/they/zie was talking about. I have since been educated about this incendiary issue. Technology changed, as readers deserted desktops for mobile phones. Video surged in popularity—then, unexpectedly, podcasting did too. In 2005, our monochrome website was appalling. But somehow, its dignitarian stance attracted readers and donations, and gradually, we evolved into an attractive, smoothly functioning website. We have certainly given Mercator our best shot. We made an impact on hearts and minds—our ultimate aim from the beginning. It was never going to be a profit-making venture. However, we have been facing headwinds. In 2005, there were very few magazines on the internet that appealed to the socially conservative segment of the market. By 2025 that number had exploded, especially after Covid. As the technical quality of websites has improved, more and more money is needed to keep up with the competition. Our team studied our predicament carefully and concluded that we couldn’t afford to continue.  

Michael Cook

Michael Cook

March 11, 2025

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Vale, Mercator

It must have been 2004 when the invitation came from Michael Cook and his team in Sydney to become the editor of a new email newsletter called FamilyEdge. I had been free-lancing for a couple of years writing institutional histories and opinion pieces for New Zealand newspapers, and a regular gig sounded good. It was the beginning of a steep learning curve and a great adventure. I had only a vague idea of what “email newsletter” meant, but if it would do something for the family, I was in. Michael was already sending out BioEdge so I had a model and plenty of help. As an IT ignoramus I needed it all. When we launched out into the deep a year later with MercatorNet to address human dignity issues on a broader front, it was challenging, to say the least. We were attempting to give people good arguments to bring to public debates about human life, the family, the role of the state, identity…. Such fundamental realities can only be fully understood in the light of faith, of course, but there are a lot of reasonable things that can be said before invoking Christian beliefs and ethics. That is what we tried to do, and largely succeeded I believe. For myself, writing articles quickly enough and finding other writers who could contribute was difficult, however, and most of the burden fell on Michael, whose vision and commitment has always kept the good ship Mercator afloat and sailing.  

Carolyn Moynihan

Carolyn Moynihan

March 10, 2025

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Mercator’s final voyage after a job well done

Almost exactly five years ago, I began writing for Mercator. Western civilisation has undergone breathtaking changes in that time — whether pandemic panics, racial reckonings, the arrival of AI, or a comeback of commonsense. Through all this and more, it has been my utmost privilege to be part of — as Mercator’s charter puts it — “reframing [these] ethical and policy debates in terms of human dignity”. Mercator will now sail into the sunset. But like the final scene in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, this is not a voyage into exile but a hard-earned rest after the completion of an extraordinary endeavour. At times, the news headlines we’ve interrogated might have felt trivial. But underneath the breaking stories and our response to them a mighty war has raged — a hearts-and-minds battle for the soul of the West. At stake was whether the fairest and freest civilisation ever to grace the planet should be allowed to endure, or whether the imperfect must be torn asunder in pursuit of some illusory utopia. Such battles have not always ended well, as the 20th century attests. In this case, however, goodness and sanity are emerging victorious — and it is largely thanks to publications like Mercator that our culture is mercifully turning the corner. Consider just some of the progress we’ve seen in the last year or so. The chemical and surgical castration of children in the name of “gender-affirming care” is effectively over, thanks in large part to independent reporting on the WPATH scandal, the Cass Review, and the growing army of detransitioners. Big Abortion is on notice, as scandals at Planned Parenthood continue to make headlines, and the most pro-abortion administration in US history suffered an electoral wipe-out. Meanwhile, abortion is being talked about more than ever before and its euphemisms are wearing painfully thin. Wokeness in all its forms is sounding the retreat — seen in monumental voting pattern shifts, the course corrections of major newspapers like The Washington Post and the LA Times, the disappearance of pronouns on social media, the shelving of the woke lexicon in academic literature, and much more besides. DEI is D-E-A-D. The Trump administration might have sped up its demise — in the military and federal bureaucracy especially — but truth be told, colleges and corporations have been walking away from Racism 2.0 ever since the toxic Harvard scandal. Watch this space as other nations follow suit. Gender-confused men are finally being exiled from women’s sporting codes, locker rooms and bathrooms, with public sentiment on this issue clearly galvanising in favour of sanity. Persecuted pro-lifers have been released from prison after suffering injustice at the hands of Biden’s weaponised Justice Department. Social media is unchaining its users — and itself — from the worst excesses of the censorship era. Mark Zuckerberg is the latest Big Tech titan to express regret over the Orwellian overreach. By far, the biggest win on this front is Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X, which has not turned into a haven of far-right hate as the screeching media banshees like to imagine, but is instead now the most balanced social media platformamong the big players. Trust in the lying legacy media is lower than ever. Critical Race Theory hustler Ibram X. Kendi is out of a job. The world is waking up to the birth dearth. Disney is replacing trans characters with Christian ones. Both Christianity and social conservatism are staging major cultural comebacks — which is fantastic news indeed when you consider where the West’s emphasis on human dignity arose in the first place.  

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg

March 10, 2025

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Mercator: a prophetic voice on demographic winter

Nearly 15 years ago now, in a dingy Turkish cafe, a friend asked me if I was interested in editing a blog about demography.  I agreed, perhaps because I was still at the stage of life when I said “yes” to things and also because I thought he’d said “democracy”. I knew something about democracy, I lived in one after all, but demography? What intrigued me about the brief given to me by Mercator’s editor, Michael, was that he wanted to focus on a story that he thought was not getting enough attention: looming demographic winter. Many countries were facing sustained population decline due to below-replacement birth rates. In peacetime, this is historically rare (if not unprecedented), especially on the scale the world is now experiencing. Lone voice Oddly, despite the far-reaching consequences of such statistics, no one in the media was talking about it. The man on the street didn’t seem to know anything about it. Instead, the dominant narrative was still largely influenced by The Population Bomb concerns of the 1960s and '70s.  Malthus and Ehrlich’s overpopulation scaremongering still loomed large. At that time, we would scour the web for current demographic stories and find almost none but our own. Thus, for ten years, my wife Shannon and I wrote about 1,000 pieces for Mercator, trying to highlight the new demographic world that was unfolding. Our pieces largely focused on deeply important and concerning topics such as demographic collapse in South Korea, Japan and Spain, the global trends emerging in the 21st century and the economic effects of an ageing population.

Marcus Roberts

March 09, 2025

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Mercator: taking the permanent things seriously

The world will miss Mercator. More, evidently, than it realises. But we all know the thing about prophets and honour. And the crucial thing about Mercator, the one we all need to keep looking for and paying for going forward, is publications that take the permanent things seriously instead of chasing ephemera. As a freelance writer, I am, of course, grateful for the opportunity to write for this fine publication. (And get paid, a bit.) But whatever the sin of pride may say, it’s not really about me, is it? It’s about the crying need for journalism, in the broad sense, that tackles principalities and powers. Because when I say “ephemera”, I don’t just mean celebrities. In fact the lifestyles of the rich and famous tell us much about our society and about how to live, and I don’t mean it in a good way. But an astounding amount of reporting and commentary is about politics, and very little of it is worth the paper it’s no longer printed on a week later, because the posturing and polemics themselves were worthless. I don’t just mean badly done. Mostly, they are; if electricians were as incompetent in their chosen field, there’d be house fires and singed bodies from coast to coast to coast. But mostly, I mean that most of what politicians talk about, and journalists write about, is as superficial as it is fleeting. Good for kindling Back in the day, we used to close up the family cottage in late October and not return until May. And when we then started a fire with newspapers six months old or more, it was comically bizarre to look at the stories and remember that anyone ever cared. Before turning to today’s paper, no wiser for the lesson. To quote an email from a friend some months back, you often hear the phrase, “Life is short. Enjoy it.” But how about “Eternity is long. Prepare for it.” And how much journalism takes eternity seriously? I have now spent a surprising length of time in the field, which, among other things, has brought eternity inexorably closer. And again, it’s not about me, but the point here is that most of the publications I write for give very little attention to metaphysics. Which might seem to be simple business common sense, since readers don’t want to hear about sin, least of all their own. But I submit that it’s not. The job of journalists is to make sense of the world for busy people. Or, in the words of my former colleague David Warren, who did and does take metaphysics very seriously, to ensure that the mud pie is thrown in the right face. And whose better than that of the Father of Lies himself? And what matters more, not just in some airy and far-off sense but immediately and every day, than what is morally right and morally wrong? Including, I might add, in a lot of “breaking news”. It would be a very unusual newspaper or evening broadcast, if they even still have those, that warned people that Baal is back. Or whose staff, or audience, would grasp the warning if they did. Yet the other day, someone in loosely similar journalistic circles to me referred to Hamas’s conduct over the mortal remains of Ariel, Kfir and Shiri Bibas as “satanic”. I responded, “When you use the word 'Satanic', mean it. Because it does apply here. Baal is back.” And I meant it. But most media outlets do not take the language of “evil” seriously even when, desperate to come to grips with real, raw, terrifying wickedness, they are forced to use it. Let alone the personification of evil. Their use of such terms beats their common resort to “medieval” as the worst insult imaginable, from journalists who would struggle to say when they think the Middle Ages began or ended and what they were about. I have an immense file of such quotations that I perceive you would be fascinated to hear all about, just not now. But I will say that the main reason their use of “medieval” is even less on point than their use of “evil”, the reason modern journalists and politicians call anything from concentration camps to Islamism “medieval” in the sense of “really really bad thing”, is that they think the Middle Ages took religion seriously and nothing is worse than religion. At least one religion. Even that perception is strangely ahistorical. The supposed blessed return of light, aka secularism, aka the “Enlightenment”, after around 1350 strangely coincided with things like the Thirty Years War, fought over Protestantism versus Catholicism, and the English Civil War, which killed more English people per capita than World War I and was fought over Puritanism versus crypto-Catholicism. Not to mention the St Bartholemew’s Day massacre. Or the vast Renaissance surge in witch-burning, a practice almost unknown in the Middle Ages. But I digress.

John Robson

John Robson

March 09, 2025

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China’s bureaucrats are thinking of forcing couples to have 3 kids, as population decline accelerates

University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde is a rare bird in academia. He is street-smart, so his thinking is not wholly derived from scholarship in the abstract. He recently told up-and-comers at Harvard that global population will peak about 2055. That’s a decade or more ahead of most projections. While the UN pegs the world’s total fertility rate (TFR) at 2.25, Fernández-Villaverde says it is 2.18, slightly above replacement-level 2.1. He says that UN population projections are “overly optimistic” and do not fully consider the acceleration of decline: The world population will peak and then start declining and it’s likely to happen at a rapid rate. You’re going to be the first generation in human history that is going to see the population of the planet fall in a systematic way. We’re going to start losing a lot of population, and it’s going to be very fast, much faster than anyone can think. I believe him. Nowhere is the professor’s prognostication more disquieting than in Beijing. China’s population began falling in 2021; there were 9.7 million abortions that year. The National Health Commission has since placed restrictions on abortion. Also in 2021 the government allowed couples to have three children. There is even chatter about making it mandatory. Good luck with that. In 2024 there were 9.54 million births and 10.93 million deaths. In 2023 kindergarten enrolment declined by over 5 million. Meanwhile Beijing bureaucrats, technocrats and all manner of egghead “experts” are feverishly trying to figure out how to turn things around and avert full throttle population collapse. It is an unprecedented challenge; they’re in uncharted territory. The hour is late. Marriage The Gray Lady just ran a pithy clickbait headline: “Chinese Company to Single Workers: Get Married or Get Out.” The Shandong Shuntian Chemical Group had sent a terse notice to unmarried employees: If you cannot get married and start a family within three quarters, the company will terminate your labor contract. Not responding to the call of the country and not getting married and having children is disloyalty; not listening to the words of parents and making the elderly worry is unfilial; not being able to get along with a partner after several attempts is unkindness; not listening to the advice of comrades and making workers worry is unrighteousness. Sounds like corporate sector Confucianism: family formation as civic virtue. After a social media storm, the directive was withdrawn. Despite what most Westerners may think they know about China, popular input is important. What we call “focus groups” are often used to gauge public opinion. Then Yu Donglai announced that his Pangdonglai supermarket chain would forbid employees planning to get married from paying or receiving “bride prices,” amounts (dowry) customarily paid to the bride’s family. Yu also limited the number of guest tables at employee weddings. Nuptials are not cheap in China; Mr Yu was thinking that if it costs less to get married, more people will do so. His heart is in the right place. Marriage is critically important: Less than 9 percent of Chinese births are out of wedlock. In the US it is over 40 percent. To Westerners (and quite a few Chinese) such employer meddling in personal affairs is outrageous. But a Chinese government official trying to somehow mandate a three-child policy would contend that because marriage and children are essential for China’s future, family formation is not a private matter but rather a public concern warranting state intervention. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) People’s Daily said Mr Yu’s edicts were “intended to promote a new trend of civilized marriage… Its guiding significance is worth paying attention to.” In other words, the state is OK with it. So Mr Yu’s initiative stands. Noncompliant employees can continue in their jobs with existing benefits, though they will not be eligible for expanded ones. Last year the city of Quanzhou directed government employees to “take the lead in implementing the three-child policy.” While there is no three-child policy, the directive is eerily reminiscent of the government’s infamous “one-child” policy that began by urging citizens to “take the lead.” It didn’t work out that way. Mr Yu’s initiative was undoubtedly a reaction to the shocking news that Chinese marriages fell 20 percent from 2023 (the auspicious Year of the Dragon) to 2024. While the CCP is alarmed, a coherent strategy to reverse this has not emerged.  

Louis T. March

Louis T. March

March 09, 2025

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How a rich corporate elite helped fund transgenderism as a hidden front for transhumanism

Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman: Dispatches from the 11th HourJennifer Bilek| Spinifex Press, 2024 | 207 pages  Machaela Cavanaugh is an obscure female politician from Nebraska about whom I know absolutely nothing, bar the simple fact that she appears to love trans people. I only know this factoid because she happened to stand up in the Nebraska Legislature building a week or two ago and tell us all that she did. Repeatedly. And I really do mean repeatedly. Please go and view this footage of the deranged tirade, where Cavanaugh chants nothing but the words “Trans people belong here. We need trans people. We love trans people. Trans people belong here. We need trans people. We love trans people,” over and over again until eventually, towards the end of the footage, Hell actually freezes over. To many observers’ eyes, this woman would surely come across not as being caring, compassionate or tolerant, as she presumably desired, but as being profoundly mentally disturbed. Either that, or as a badly malfunctioning robot, whose in-built voice-box components have got themselves stuck upon an endless loop.  Of the two potential options, my money would actually be on the latter, at least after reading the investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek’s book Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman, which claims to unveil the sensational fact that, over the past few decades, a sinister cabal of ultra-rich Silicon Valley types, medical tycoons, and moguls of high-finance, have been systematically funding the whole transgender agenda as a disguised entry-point front for a much wider form of transhumanism. Their ultimate goal? Facilitating the transformation of our species into a breed of genetically and prosthetically augmented post-human quasi-robots like the brainchip-implanted Machaela Cavanaugh so very obviously now is.     Broadcasting trans-missions To some readers, this may appear like a lunatic Far-Right conspiracy theory. To which I would say, not half as lunatic as the competing Far-Left conspiracy theory that magical beings called “transgenderists” (a word Bilek herself objects to as being an empty symbol without any genuine concrete referent) exist out there who can shift impossibly between the human sexes at will, but that this all-time wonder of advanced primate biology has been methodically covered up by the evil fascist cishetero-male Establishment for several millennia now. We are always being told these days that transsexuals are amongst the most marginalised, oppressed, voiceless and maligned groups on the entire planet – curious, then, that many of the people endlessly telling us so over the past 15 years were themselves amongst the most powerful, well-connected, influential and richest people on Earth, like the Presidents of the EU, US, WHO, UN, etc, etc, not to mention all those uncritically transphilic propagandists running Hollywood and most television, publishing and social media companies in the pre-Trump 2/Elon Musk Twitter era were. Truly marginalised individuals tend not to have many allies like that, do they? Mercator never got any disguised compulsory taxpayer funding direct from USAID, for example, otherwise it wouldn’t be closing down this week, would it? In the few days of my reading Bilek’s book alone, I noted down stories like the following from my own home-country (now spelled “homo-country”) of the UK which demonstrated how complete such “marginalised” folx’s institutional capture has become in many Western lands: Doctors in the National Health Service (NHS) who decide to change gender will be issued with a whole new General Medical Council ID number, which will wipe their past record as a male clean and award them a brand-new, spotless female one (or vice-versa) – even up to the point of erasing all their prior public disciplinary records of professional misconduct, because, you see, once they officially alter their pronouns on little bits of paper, they quite literally become whole new people! What could possibly ever go wrong there? To celebrate International Women’s Day later this March, the BBC’s programming for toddlers wing, CBeebies, ran a list of “Inspirational Mums” on their website – two of whom were a pair of mafia-linked male transgender prostitutes and squat-dwelling druggies named Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson, founders of the radical Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) group. To any rational human mind, this pair would have made just about the worst figures of aspirational motherhood since Medea and Mrs Herod, but not to those managing Britain’s biggest and best-funded national broadcaster.   Also on the BBC, an episode of the dire school-based soap opera Waterloo Road featured a typically unwatchable storyline in which a dementia-ridden old woman lay dying in her hospital bed before being visited by her trans grandson, dressed as a girl. As she was high on morphine and afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and therefore highly confused, the elderly lady continued to refer to him as male by using the lad’s (correct) male “deadname”, not his (incorrect) made-up chosen girly one. Faced with this all-time obscenity, the schoolboy/girl became inconsolably distressed and angry, and the BBC scriptwriters and producers honestly expected the audience’s sympathies to lie with the self-obsessed transboi, not the dying pensioner! As one disgusted viewer accurately wrote online: “It perfectly encapsulates the trans mindset. Even when the person next to them is dying, it's all about them. No one else's feelings are important.” So thought the BBC viewers, anyway. But the views of mere bigoted plebs like that don’t matter, just the opinions of those who actually control the schedules. Clearly, in rainbow nations like Great Britain, the slavish, trans-worshipping institutional capture is near-complete: both Britain’s national broadcaster and its National Health Service, arguably the two most influential organisations in the country, now worship at the pink altar of the gender-benders. If it was only tiny obscure outlets like the Retired Gay Ex-Servicemen’s Ferret Fanciers’ Club, or the East Grinstead Lesbian Cactus Appreciation Society, who had pro-trans policies, I could understand how you could argue such people stood as being marginalised. But the multi-billion, government-administered BBC and NHS? Transgenderism isn’t marginalised in the West any more, it’s been pushed forcibly right into the very centre of things, obsessively and ruthlessly so, in fact. But why? How the hell did we get here? For over a decade now, Jennifer Bilek has been asking herself the very same question on her popular blog, The 11th Hour, selected entries from which make up her new book. Her basic answer is: FOLLOW THE MONEY!! So, that’s precisely what she has done. It leaves a trail leading straight towards Sodom.  

Steven Tucker

Steven Tucker

March 09, 2025

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So long, and thanks for all the clicks

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Vale, Mercator

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