Politics: the woke mind virus
By Richard North - June 8, 2026
Things are hotting up again in the Middle East, with Israel under attack from Iranian missiles once again and the region poised on the brink of war, despite Trump urging Netanyahu not to respond.
Back in the UK, the media seem to be welcoming the opportunity to focus on something other than Henry Nowak, this issue having been stripped from the front pages for the first time in nearly a week.
Nevertheless, there’s been plenty of inside page coverage of this and related issues, Henry’s death having launched public race policy into the limelight in a way we haven’t seen since the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the publication of the Macpherson report.
What is different this time round is that the concept of anti-white racism has been firmly lodged in the public domain, despite strenuous official attempts to deny that it exists, with even (or especially) Badenough preferring to blame “institutional incompetence” in Hampshire police, rather than the self-evident institutional racism that can be seen in the officer’s bodycam footage.
We also have Lammy taking a pop at JD Vance, telling him that his comments were wrong and that the killing of Nowak “has got nothing to do with mass migration”.
However, being told that you are wrong by a man who once declared that Marie Antoinette was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist perhaps doesn’t quite have the impact that Lammy might expect, especially when it is he that is wrong.
A clue to this can be found in the judge’s sentencing remarks where he quotes Gurnam Singh, professor of sociology, saying: “Over the last 30 years, there has been a trend towards younger people wearing a kirpan with pride, in a desire to express their cultural identity. They see it as an act of resistance to being denied the ability otherwise to display their identity”.
We have seen something akin to this in multiple immigrant communities where, after a period of progress, the processes of integration and assimilation seem to have gone into reverse. Second, third and even fourth-generation immigrants are reverting to assumed national cultures (which are often different from their homeland cultures), in expressions of exceptionalism that are destroying the cultural stability of the United Kingdom.
The proximate cause of this is mass migration – where the numbers of incomers from culturally dissimilar backgrounds have vastly exceeded the absorptive capacity of the host nation. Supposedly tolerant Britain is said to have been relatively successful in its handling of the flow of immigrant, but the numbers have become overwhelming.
That neither Badenough nor Lammy, both blacks – one of Nigerian and the other of Ghanaian heritage – can get to grips with this issue suggests that, when the chips are down, we can never expect such politicians to understand or root for the White British perspective. They will always be compromised, and therefore unreliable.
When immigrant politics combine with corporate culture, though, we have a formidable and dangerous mix. While the legacy media are churning out comment, as so often the more perceptive writing is coming from social media writers.
And on this subject we have one commentator arguing that the Nowak scandal exposes a deeper culture that runs through policing and politics alike: the instinct to pathologise public anger rather than confront institutional wrongdoing.
He writes of the home secretary talking about a “dangerous undercurrent” of commentary, as though the real threat is people being furious that a dying teenager was treated as a perpetrator, not a victim; the PCC fretting about “police morale” and “online abuse”, as if the reputational harm from criticism is worse than the moral harm of leaving Hampshire chief constable Boon in charge.
And Hampshire’s leadership, instead of accepting the obvious – that handcuffing a mortally wounded boy and then trying to control the narrative is indefensible – doubles down on PR. This isn’t policing in the public interest, our commentator says. It’s a political class circling the wagons around its own.
Just how badly the corporate “woke virus” has affected police behaviour is put together by another commentator who asserts that the behaviour was far worse than incompetence.
Hampshire police, he writes, knew the truth and buried it anyway. Two days after Henry Nowak had died, Hampshire Police secretly recorded Digwa in a police van speaking Punjabi to his brother. Digwa admitted stabbing Henry, the discussion focussing on “self defence”. There was no mention of racial abuse.
Hampshire Police recorded the conversation. Thus, they knew Digwa and his brother were lying about the racist attack. They had the evidence. They had Digwa’s words, yet still tried to smear Henry as the aggressor.
Three days after his death their statement read “it was reported two men had been assaulted by an unknown man”. Henry was the unknown man. The boy bleeding out on the street. They had “flipped” reality.
Only when the family complained was the statement changed. Then police told the family their next update would again imply Henry was the initial aggressor. His family had to fight them a second time, while grieving their murdered son.
Then, during the trial, Hampshire police tried to issue a statement telling the public to stop talking about it online, calling the public discourse “disinformation”. The CPS had to step in, to tell the police that they were about to collapse their own murder case.
This was the force that had handcuffed a dying boy, had missed the murder weapon twice and had a secret tape proving the killer had lied. Still they had tried to bury Henry’s name.
That was not incompetence. That was the corporate machine protecting itself, at the expense of a dead boy’s reputation. Three officers involved are still on active duty. Rather than being suspended, they are being treated as witnesses to their own actions. Concludes our commentator, Hampshire Police didn’t just fail Henry on that street. They kept failing him for six months after he died.
And yet, the Telegraph conveys the comments of Abimbola Johnson – another black Nigerian – who chairs the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board (ISOB), overseeing police race action plans.
She says her “watchdog” has consistently found that progress in tackling racism had been “too slow, too inconsistent and too poorly embedded” and is now warning about the backlash over the police treatment of Henry Nowak. She says it risks “throwing away” improvements in anti-racist policing if it was caricatured as involving “preferential treatment” over white people.
This is the sort of tone-deaf corporate-speak which utterly infuriates normal people, representing as it does the inflexibility of the corporate mind. Sadly, though, there is no remedy. The description “woke mind virus” is a good one, one that is said to have captured Scotland Yard – as well as many other police forces – and is evidently alive and kicking in the portals of the ISOB.
Once infected, the corporate body is unable to resist. The virus is akin to the wasp cordyceps fungus which infiltrates wasps’ exoskeletons and slowly eats their internal tissues while spreading through their nervous systems.
The fungus alters the wasps’ behaviour, forcing them to leave their nests, climb to elevated locations (like twigs or high leaves), and clamp on tightly with their mandibles. The wasps die in this position. Long, slender cream or yellow stalks then erupt from the wasps’ bodies (pictured), bursting out to rain infectious spores down onto more unsuspecting wasps below.
The result of the corporate mind virus is ordinary people, from teenage boys and young women to people of all ages, bleeding out on the streets of England, while the infected minds seek to justify their actions and inactions and blame the victims for being white.
In the end, we will have to knock down these structures and start again, but that will be a long time coming. Much more blood will be spilt before we get there.
