I’d be lying if I claimed to dislike polemic, but I do try to avoid it. Yet in this moment, polemic is necessary. I write this not just as a writer for this publication, but specifically as one of this publication’s younger writers. I write to address the murder of Henry Nowak – a murder institutionally enabled by ‘antiracist’ ideology (the belief system of the Ibram X. Kendis and Robin DiAngelos of this world) adopted by the British state. In the aftermath of this, there can be no escaping a simple conclusion:

‘Antiracism’ is Moloch. It is a god demanding the sacrifice of the young – in particular young white men – to a ‘greater social cause’.

I am not the first to reach this conclusion, although I may be the first to use the specific term. A previous, earth-shaking article – Jacob Savage’s ‘The Lost Generation’, published in Compact magazine – pointed out that in many key employment markets, young white men were habitually frozen out from the hiring process in favour of candidates who were women, from an ethnic minority, or transgender. This caused permanent damage to the young white men’s life prospects, because a gap in one’s CV is a red flag to potential employers. Critically, Savage noted that the burden was only borne by young people seeking to enter the market – established ‘legacy’ elder white males retained their position, but the lower rungs of the ladder were removed for younger members of their demographic.

Parents sacrificing their children. Moloch. Australia’s treasurer may cite intergenerational equity as an important principle, but I doubt he’d pay much concern to this particular threat to said value.

It must be re-emphasised that ‘antiracism’ is not ‘opposing racism’. Rather, it is a comprehensive ideology that believes equal treatment, race-blind law, enlightenment individualism and free-market capitalism are all plots by white men to cement control over society and subjugate ethnic minorities (particularly black ones). Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist – the defining text of this movement – makes all this clear and explicitly states that discrimination against dominant groups is a necessary corrective to historical discrimination against minorities.

For at least a decade, we have seen what this looks like in employment markets, particularly within intellectual/cultural industries. With Henry Nowak’s antiracism-enabled murder, we see what this looks like in criminal justice.

Let us not make excuses. ‘The historical suffering of African-Americans’ is a serious matter, but this was an implementation of ‘antiracism’ by the British state, and the murderer whose false accusation of racism prevented Henry Nowak from receiving medical care was not an African-American. Indeed, the murderer was a Sikh – a minority that is both well integrated and hasn’t been subjected to anything like enslavement or Jim Crow by white Europeans. Nor is this a matter of ‘knife crime’ – whilst the murderer benefitted from a religious exemption from Britain’s knife laws, the decisive factor in Nowak’s death was the police treating the killer’s false accusation of racism as true and Nowak’s claim to have been stabbed as presumptively false. The nature of the weapon is irrelevant.

And this is not the first example of UK criminal justice sacrificing the young to the antiracist Moloch. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this occurring previously is that of the Midlands grooming gangs, where a mixture of antiracist ideology and the Labour party’s dependence on votes delivered through the Pakistani constituency’s clan network (the Biraderi) resulted in the systemic toleration and concealment of rape gangs composed almost entirely of Pakistani Muslim men who specifically targeted white girls for ethno-religious reasons. At this point, there is no evidence that Henry Nowak was targeted specifically for his ethnicity (unlike the victims of the grooming gangs). What we can be relatively certain about is that a mentally ill man (the murderer slept with his ritual knives as if they were teddy bears) opportunistically exploited antiracist ideology’s institutionalisation within the British state in an attempt to get away with an act of grievous violence, and in doing so, Henry Nowak ended up dead. There are meaningful distinctions between these crimes, granted, but in all cases, those who should’ve protected young victims sacrificed them instead, because antiracist ideology declares those young victims are ‘not real victims’ due to the colour of their skin. And just as Midlands local governments (and, according to some allegations, actors within the parliamentary Labour party) actively concealed the grooming gangs, the Hampshire Police attempted to intervene during the trial of Nowak’s killer to present Nowak as the aggressor, thus covering up their own contribution to Nowak’s death. Government actors covering up their failures is hardly new, but using ‘protecting minorities from harm’ as an ideological excuse for doing that is the true antiracist innovation.

The UK government is acting as the priest, and the young of today’s UK are the sacrifices, but this is a case of the state using them as a scapegoat. The historical misdeeds of the British Empire were real (although sometimes overstated, and there were also some good things done by this empire that habitually get overlooked), but most UK citizens at the time of the commission of these deeds had nothing to do with said crimes. The average Briton neither voluntarily participated in, endorsed, or had any influence over the policies of the British state at the time, and the average young white Briton today is even further removed from any such misdeeds. Yet they are being used as the scapegoat for the ruling class’s forebears’ own misdeeds.

Among the best critiques of antiracist ideology in print was that made by John McWhorter of Columbia University. McWhorter, in his book Woke Racism, argued that antiracism is a religion, that Kendi and DiAngelo are clergy, that their writings are liturgy, that privilege acknowledgments are confession, and that privilege itself is original sin. With the antiracism-enabled murder of Henry Nowak, it is undeniable that ancient practices such as scapegoating and blood sacrifice are also part of this new religion.