The Victim Virus

A New Diagnosis

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The below is a speech that I delivered at a keynote session of the Battle of Ideas 2025. The session was entitled: ‘Will DEI ever DIE?’

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Over recent months, the prevailing narrative has been that ‘woke is withering’ and ‘DEI is dying’. That we are through the worst of it and that all we need to do is wait for society to return to a state of equilibrium.

I disagree. I wish it were true that woke and DEI are on the cusp of extinction, but they aren’t.

This misguided notion is based on the narrative that these are simply political or social justice movements, or, alternatively, a set of ideological beliefs. Such movements and trends come and go, it is argued.

However, in my opinion, they embody something far more pervasive, contagious and intangible. They embody a new form of mental illness, and, as part of a book project I have in development, I have labelled this ‘The Victim Virus’.

A diagnosis of the Victim Virus is made up of a number of cognitive distortions and defence mechanisms. Here are just a few examples:

Projection: Attributing characteristics one finds unacceptable in themselves to other people. Here, we find the anti-racist racists, who claim to be firmly against racism but in fact show themselves more than willing to discriminate against those with the ‘wrong’ skin colour. We can observe this through the increased vilification of ‘whiteness’.

Splitting: The segregating of experiences into all-good and all-bad categories, with no room for ambiguity and ambivalence. We witness this through the creation of a world of oppressor vs oppressed. Demands being made of UK taxpayers to fund colonial reparations. Organisations encouraging their staff members to take part in ‘privilege walks’, in which their privileges can be compared to one another.

Mind Reading: A cognitive distortion in which people believe they can read the minds of others and impute intent. We see this through the increasing tendency towards policing speech and behaviour. For example, corporate training suggesting to ‘able-bodied’ people that holding the door open for someone in a wheelchair may be a ‘microaggression’. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, you’ve heard it here today…it’s actually ‘inclusive’ to let the door slam in their face!

Regression: A defence mechanism which involves reverting to an earlier developmental stage and becoming child-like in nature and thought-processing. A state of learned helplessness, in which people convince themselves that they are perpetual victims and constantly vulnerable to attack. This can be observed through the creation of ‘safe spaces’ and other forms of infantilisation, such as the employers who offered free counselling to staff members to help them cope with the ‘trauma’ of the election of Donald Trump.

The Victim Virus spreads silently and invisibly, by social contagion. Throughout history, we have witnessed the phenomenon of mental ill-health being transmitted from person to person. From eating disorders to Tourette’s syndrome, humans have demonstrated that they can be vulnerable and impressionable to the spread of thoughts, feelings and behaviours, often subconsciously. Usually, thankfully, the spread is localised.

However, unfortunately, The Victim Virus is anything but. Rather than person-to-person, it has been spreading from organisation-to-organisation and even jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction. The proliferation of technology and social media has brought about increased opportunities for misinformation and ideological grooming. The cognitive distortions making up The Victim Virus have been role modelled by our celebrities, business leaders and politicians, allowing for a more rapid spread. Our entire lexicon has shifted beyond recognition, enabling The Victim Virus to easily seep into the collective unconscious.

Unfortunately, large swathes, across the Western World, have been infected. Being a mental health condition, it cannot simply be wished away. It doesn’t just disappear. It doesn’t respond to logic. It doesn’t follow organisational policies. It doesn’t obey Executive Orders.

We witnessed this in the response to pivotal moments that supposedly rang the death knell of DEI.

The clearest example is what has taken place following the UK Supreme Court judgment from April 2025, which made it clear that ‘sex’ means ‘biological sex’. It was assumed that society would fall nicely in line and gender ideology would fizzle out. Just 5 months later, I can confirm that nothing is further from the truth.

NHS Trusts continue to fly the trans pride flag and instruct colleagues to use preferred pronouns. Children’s charities continue to parrot the line ‘transwomen are women’. Celebrities continue to come out as ‘non-binary’. Organisations, such as Girlguides, continue to allow boys to share female toilets and even bedrooms. Academics continue to label those they disagree with as ‘transphobic’. Schools continue to indoctrinate pupils. Museums continue to glamourise bodily mutilation. Members of the public continue to be cancelled for having a different opinion.

This has been further exemplified over recent weeks by the tragic and chilling murder of Charlie Kirk, a man whose life mission was to try and use common sense and logic to defeat nonsensical ideology. After years of being called a ‘fascist’ and told that his ‘words are violence’, someone decided to use actual violence to silence his words, forever. The depressingly high numbers of people who took to social media to celebrate his demise (in the name of DEI) was, in some ways, even more chilling. The narrative being that, if you disagree with someone’s opinions, you are justified in extinguishing them altogether. This is mental illness.

The sad truth is that the way many of us think and act has changed beyond recognition, perhaps irreversibly. Left untreated, the consequences of being infected with The Victim Virus are dire - hostility, division, narcissism, the death of meritocracy, cancel culture, the erasure of biological reality, eternal victimhood, and societal scaremongering.

If you want to know what my proposed treatment involves, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the book to come out. However, if anyone here today is convinced that their child, their spouse, or even their boss, has been infected by the Victim Virus, please do come and speak to me after the session ends and I will be more than happy to diagnose them free of charge!