I know there are more than enough news events stateside to cover the board for this week’s installment of the 5QT, but forgive me — ever since I wrote From Hellmarsh With Love (which you can read a serialized version of here at TAS, or purchase the whole thing at Amazon) last year, I’ve been fascinated to watch British politics to see if some of the things appearing in the novel would show up in real life.

And all of them have, of course.

Well, maybe not all. But it certainly feels like it.

So, in the interest of documenting history, and maybe a little bit of drumming up book sales, we’re going to talk about the Brits to lead things off.

1. It’s All Falling Apart in Great Britain

There continue to be seminal events in “Two Tier” Keir Starmer’s Great Britain; the latest involved a young girl in Dundee, Scotland, who was arrested for brandishing a long knife and a hatchet at a foreign migrant who was lecherously menacing her even younger sister.

The migrant was let off unmolested by local law enforcement.

Images of the girl have gone viral, and she’s now a symbol of popular resistance to Starmer’s government.

That’s not quite accurate, is it?

It isn’t Starmer they’re resisting, though he sits atop Britain’s government infrastructure. It seems like it’s the entire infrastructure itself that the public in Britain is fed up with.

The cops. The media. The politicians. The corporations. Every iteration and manifestation of the elite in British society seems like it’s in the crosshairs.

Of what, naturally, is the question, because as those images of the girl hoping to ward off a would-be rapist with, essentially, garden tools indicate, the British people are not armed.

Which adds an interesting dynamic to a great piece John Daniel Davidson wrote earlier this week at The Federalist…

The entire sordid history of Britain’s civic collapse — stretching back decades to the Rotherham rape gangs scandal and forward to today — is in some ways contained in the striking image of this wisp of a girl with knife and hatchet in hand, facing down a predatory migrant. She is clearly desperate, abandoned by the adults who were supposed to protect her, sold out by the political leaders who were supposed to maintain the cohesion and safety of her city, reduced at last to brandishing crude weapons to defend herself from foreign men brought to her native land against her will.

It’s a scene that encapsulates the total loss of legitimacy of the British government and a portent of what comes next: civil war.

This isn’t hyperbole. Britain right now shows all the signs of descending into sustained civil conflict and eventually open civil war. The ruling elites have broken the social compact by importing mass numbers of foreigners who are hostile to the native population. The government has repeatedly and consistently signaled to the ethnic white majority that there is indeed a two-tiered system of justice — and that they are on the lower tier. Political leaders and public officials have criminalized dissent from their agenda and sent police to harass and arrest people in their homes for criticizing the government.

Worst and most stomach-turning of all, the British ruling class has failed to adequately acknowledge or take appropriate action in response to the Pakistani rape gangs scandal — a scandal which is ongoing, a festering wound in the British body politic. Just this week, Rupert Lowe, a member of Parliament and the chair of the Rape Gang Inquiry, released a statement saying the inquiry had identified 85 local authorities “in which the gang-based sexual exploitation of children is taking place, or has historically done so.” The inquiry, says Lowe, has identified “patterns of targeted exploitation by predominantly Pakistani males, combined with gross negligence from public bodies.”

The title of Davidson’s must-read missive is “Civil War Is Coming To Britain.” I’m not sure that’s quite correct, because for a civil war, you really need some semblance of balance where weapons are concerned. And the people of Britain don’t have them.

But you can have a revolution without a civil war, and, optimistically, I expect that’s what you’ll get in Britain soon.

More Brits favor protests in front of migrant hotels, which the media elite and others of the British upper class think are utterly deplorable, than oppose them. There’s a reason for this, which is that those hotels are the harbors for migrant rapists and criminals, and in fact, many of them are well-known to house the ubiquitous rape gangs preying on British girls. The idea that somehow it’s inappropriate for the villagers to come at the monster with pitchforks and torches isn’t exactly a well-grounded one, but that’s where the elite — in whose neighborhoods there are no rape gangs, magically enough — have placed themselves. (RELATED: The Outbreak of Migrant-Related Crime and Rape in the EU)

Starmer’s government can’t get past this problem because the people in it are the ones who have been covering up the rot at the heart of British society for decades. And it isn’t like the Conservatives are the answer; they had 14 years to cut out the cancer and earnestly failed to do so.

Nigel Farage, who is the most likely Brit politician to succeed Starmer, had an interesting quote last month. “Remember,” he said, “I am the moderate…reasonable…democratic…experienced…grown-up face of the fightback. If I lose, just you wait.” (RELATED: UK’s Labour Party Is Gerrymandering the Vote)

I suspect that’s probably right. The question is whether Farage is the true face of the revolution brewing in Britain or something more akin to an Alexander Kerensky — with Lenins and Stalins as yet unidentified.

That isn’t a complete metaphor, of course, because Britain isn’t on the verge of going communist. In fact, they’re already there and trying to get out.

But then again, there’s the old line which says you can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.

With arrows and slingshots, apparently. Otherwise, there’s nothing to shoot in the U.K., which is why they’re where they are.

Best of luck, you lot.

Before we move on, an aside: how much of this ought to be laid at the feet of the nominal ruler of Great Britain, its jug-eared idiot of a king? Charles has the power to dissolve Parliament and form a new government, but not only is he too personally weak to do so, he’s on board with all of the stupid, destructive policies of the Starmer regime. (RELATED: King Charles’ Easter Message Accelerates Britain’s Fall)

They need change top and bottom across the pond. Here’s hoping they get it.

2. Well, Here’s Some Pretty Good Economic News, Especially for the “Marxist” Trump Administration…

GDP is up and inflation is down, and, well…

CNBC: Second quarter GDP has been revised up to 3.3% — while inflation has been revised down to 2%, right on track with the Fed’s target rate.

???????????? pic.twitter.com/dYdMcbvGRQ

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 28, 2025

Your old-school Republicans don’t seem to be impressed with this, thanks to news out of the administration that it’s taking equity positions in various companies with strategic value like Intel and Lockheed Martin.

This is being described as socialism and Marxism. That’s a bit fraught, I’d say.

I’d also say that ideally, you’d have a bigger wall of separation between the state and the means of production than between church and state. But we’re a long way from ideal at this point.

And to be fair, after Barack Obama turned GM into Government Motors, we really can’t impose much of a purity test on Donald Trump. Especially when it’s the Bush Republicans and the libertarian “free trade” crowd who let Obama all but fatally wound the capitalist system in the first place.

Do I like the idea of the federal government owning stock in private sector companies? No. But this has been going on forever, in some form or fashion.

And the direction we’re moving in is that we will have a sovereign wealth fund up and running soon. It’s inevitable. We have to have it because we’re going to need a vehicle for paying down the national debt, other than trying to rely on Congress to balance the budget. Clearly, that isn’t going to happen.

And a sovereign wealth fund isn’t socialism. Unless you think public-employee pension funds are socialism. Which, if you do, hey… I don’t really disagree, but let’s just remember we didn’t get here overnight, and it shouldn’t be a surprise if the way out is a little messy.

3. And Now We’re Done With Trey Gowdy

At some point, we’re just going to have to flush out all of the Bush-era and Obama-era Republicans, aren’t we? Take this all-hat, no-cattle dude-ranch wannabe with the weird hair…

WOW! @FoxNews‘ @TGowdySC just called for gun control on prime time tv!

Arguing “security over freedom” is NOT the way to save lives.

✔️Schools must be protected.
✔️Gun free zones must end.
✔️Law-abiding citizens must be allowed to carry. pic.twitter.com/yL8U0xWFP1

— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) August 27, 2025

Gowdy got himself taken to school by Hillary Clinton when he had her dead to rights on her email scandal, for crying out loud. At the end of the day, we just don’t have to make excuses for his brand of failure theater.

Go away, Strange-Hair Trey.

4. Split California in Two? Why Stop There?

I’m sure you’ve seen this…

????BREAKING: The Republican leader of the California Assembly is introducing a resolution to split California into two states.

“The people of inland California have been overlooked for too long. It’s time for a two state solution.”

Republican Assembly Leader James Gallagher… pic.twitter.com/s3yNS6JiJe

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 27, 2025

What I don’t like about it is that there’s only one coastal county in Red California.

Honestly, I think California ought to be split into four or five states, and the fun part is that most of them would be red.

The thing is, if you check out the county map in pretty much all of these blue states, what you realize is how red a lot of them are. There are large islands of blue tyranny in those red seas that control and immiserate the folks out in the country.

Maybe this is a fun column all to itself. Maybe we’ll do Scott’s 60-State U.S. Map at some point.

5. Alien Earth Brings Back Lots of Old Feelings…

When I was a kid, I saw all of the horror movies. And by all, I mean all of them. We’re talking about the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the genre absolutely blew up and there were all kinds of crazy film properties to keep you from sleeping for days.

But the best of them, for me, the one which made me feel almost sick with terror, was Alien.

It was an absolutely brilliant horror movie wrapped in a sci-fi package. It had all the gross-out special effects, and they were amazingly well done; the characters were realistic even though one of them was an android, and the suspense that movie put its audience in is, to this day, a gold standard for horror.

You sit there and you watch Alien, and you get immersed in the scene of that spaceship with that horrific predatory xenomorph from some outer space hellhole that damn sure does not belong in the same universe with human beings, and you simply can’t help but be sucked into that story. It does to you what it did to poor John Hurt’s character Kane — it gets inside you and then it busts out of you at inconvenient times. And when Sigourney Weaver manages to survive a fight with that thing, it’s such a relief that you feel like you’re the one who made it out alive.

There were good sequels in the Alien franchise. My favorite of the series wasn’t even the first one. I liked Aliens best, mostly because Bill Paxton’s Private Hudson character is one of the most relatable movie characters of all time. That said, none of them captured that sense of ugly foreboding, that sheer horror bordering on disgust at the terrible situation the presence of those xenomorphs represent like the first Alien movie did.

That said, FX recently debuted Alien Earth, with Timothy Olyphant heading up a mostly unknown cast, and that queasy feeling of horror came right back.

I’m current with all four episodes, and I’ll give showrunner Noah Hawley credit — he’s got the ugly foreboding nailed down perfectly.

Without doing too much in the way of spoilers, the premise is that one of the five hideously corrupt corporations that run the world decides it’s an awesome idea to bring back specimens of various alien creatures to study on Earth, and the spaceship carrying them proceeds to crash-land into a large downtown area owned by another hideously corrupt corporation. Said Corporation B then dispatches a team of androids to capture those specimens and bring them to its secluded research island, and…

It’s four shows in so far. The truly awful things have not happened yet. But they’re certainly coming. And the dread has absolutely set in.

I don’t know how fun this is, but I’m hooked. Just like I was when I was nine and that first Alien movie came out.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

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