Curtis Yarvin in a Curry House

Military disability scams, Catholic covens, Yarvin's garden party and more in this week's digest.

Welcome to my weekly news digest for October 10, 2025.

The Washington Post ran a lengthy investigative piece on the pervasive disability scams (gift link) that have arisen in the military. Here are some short snippets. (To compress the text I did not include ellipses, but each of these paragraphs is a separate quote. It’s not one continuous flow passage).

About 556,000 veterans receive disability benefits for eczema, 332,000 for hemorrhoids, 110,000 for benign skin growths, 81,000 for acne and 74,000 for varicose veins

The Post found that millions of the claims are for minor or treatable afflictions that rarely hinder employment, such as hair loss, jock itch and toenail fungus

A Marine Corps veteran won a decision from the board last year that granted him a 30 percent disability rating for a case of genital and oral herpes he contracted when he was in the service more than a decade earlier

Sleep apnea is now one of VA’s most frequently claimed disabilities. Last year, 659,335 vets received compensation for it. That’s about 11 times the number who did in 2009

The investigation exposed an increasingly costly disability program prone to rampant exaggeration and fraud, which make it harder for veterans with legitimate claims to get their benefits processed

Veterans’ advocates, for-profit companies and VA itself encourage vets to file as many claims as possible to milk the system

For instance, VA typically pays veterans diagnosed with sleep apnea, a common breathing disorder, more than a combat vet with a leg amputated below the knee.

A Post review of 70 fraud prosecutions since 2017 shows VA regularly falls victim to half-baked schemes. In three cases, men who never served a day in uniform fooled the department into thinking they were disabled war heroes

Disability payments to veterans are tax-free and typically last for life. Last year, disabled vets received $25,046 on average, VA figures show. The money comes on top of free or subsidized medical care provided by VA.

Last year, each disabled veteran received, on average, benefits for a combination of about seven injuries and illnesses, up from 2.5 per person in 2001. The Post found that it has become common for veterans to submit claims for 20 or more disabilities each

In 2001, veterans received benefits for a total of nearly 6 million disabilities. By last year, that figure had risen to 41.7 million, a sevenfold increase.

The $193 billion that VA will spend this year on disability compensation is about $8 billion more than what it costs to run the entire Army.

This is one where it appears social media is now bleeding over into the mainstream media. Disability abuse is a growing theme in right wing online discourse. I highlighted this back in June, and noted that this is starting to drive a wedge between right wing civilians and the military. Where once this group was reflexively 100% support-the-troops, today it is starting to see at least some people in the service as scammers. Caleb Hammer’s Financial Audit podcast seems to be playing a particularly significant role in highlighting questionable disability claims.

As I said back in June, this is an example of why when you read me you get insights into the trends that are going to be making the news in the future. Please help me continue providing cutting edge cultural insights by becoming a paid subscriber.

The Negative World

My “three worlds” model continues to resonate. Former Southern Baptist Convention President J. D. Greear mentioned the Negative World in the trailer for a new video series he put out in association with his new book.

These kinds of mentions are particularly gratifying since Greear and I exist in very different worlds and there are probably many areas where we don’t agree on things. So if someone like this finds my work useful, it’s particularly notable.

I feel compelled to mention that I’m not actually a sociologist, though I do sometimes get referred to that way.

If you haven’t read my book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, be sure to pick it up today.

Catholic Covens

Financial Times columnist Jemima Kelly visited a gathering of “witches” in the UK. As people are noticing, there’s been a lot of growth in interest in the occult and alternative spiritualities. This paragraph really caught my eye:

My Catholic upbringing is one shared by the festival’s founder, Julie Aspinall, a slightly intimidating 60-year-old witch, granny and security-dog trainer with poker-straight blonde hair, turquoise eyeliner and silver shimmer smudged under heavily lined brows. She tells me it’s a common background for witches. “You ask any witch here, and 90 per cent of them will have had a Catholic upbringing. Why? Because spirituality was forced on us,” she says in a strong Coventry accent. “But our deity is Mother Earth, so we do rituals to work with her or with gods and goddesses we call in to work with our spells.”

I find it interesting that it is disproportionately women raised Catholic who are interested in this kind of thing.

Unfortunately, the FT has a very hard paywall and lacks an NYT style gift link system. You can try to read it, but there’s no guarantee.

Back in August, Kelly also wrote a similar piece, but this one was her embedding with a UK garden party thrown for the dissident right writer Curtis Yarvin.

When we first matched, I hadn’t grokked his politics. They only became clear as we began exchanging messages, and he told me about his expectation that his future wife shouldn’t work but do Pilates instead. When he discovered that I write a weekly column and that I had recently noted the rightward vibe shift he said he thought that was rather “cosmic” given the kind of circles he mixed in and that, maybe, the universe wasn’t bringing us together for romantic reasons. (I didn’t disagree.)

…

Then Yarvin starts telling a story about what happened this January, as he was leaving an inauguration party in Washington DC: “So I’m coming out and some Groypers — you know, internet Nazis — started to do that traditional antisemitic thing of throwing coins at me.”

“Wow,” I reply, genuinely shocked.

“Wow, right? What was really unfortunate though was that, you know, I got delayed by talking to someone on the way out, so I was actually late for the Uber, and the thing is, um . . . ”

I get the feeling he’s building up to a punchline.

“ . . . I didn’t have time to pick up the coins. Hyah-hyah-hyah!”

It’s not the last antisemitic or racist joke that Yarvin, who has seriously argued for the existence of racial hierarchies, tells. I can’t quite decide if he finds these jokes genuinely funny, but he seems compelled to make them. I point out the “Kabul Supermarket” we’re passing to our left. “Oh yeah, so much for nation-building,” he offers, a bit halfheartedly.

…

Glamorre met Yarvin three years ago at Scyldings, a UK-based far-right conference modelled on the early medieval Anglo-Saxon “witan”, or king’s council. The two struck up a friendship that inspired Glamorre to launch The Cathedral, the name under which he hosts all his parties. A year later, he officiated Yarvin’s second wedding, in Berkeley, California.

I’m beginning to realise that, in some ways, this is a coming together of the formerly cancelled. I meet people here who have lost jobs, lost appearances on GB News, who have been kicked out of the Tory party and even from the British National party. The dissident right seems to provide a haven where nothing you say can get you kicked out of the gang, as long as you’re loyal to the gang.

…

Inside the Halwa Poori House, the wall behind our table is decorated with fairy lights, various neon signs, a Pakistani flag and a Union Jack with the word “London” across it. On the opposite wall are laminated photos of various mosques in Pakistan, as well as some letters from the Koran. “You don’t understand how perfect this is,” my Bumble match continues. “This, right now, is the best argument that we live in a simulation.”

Yarvin wants a beer but, as alcohol isn’t served, he goes for a mango lassi instead. He asks for a lamb korma but there’s only chicken korma, so he goes for that and asks for some parathas too. He seems to know his way around a curry house.

Again, you can click over to try to read it. It’s an entertaining piece.

The thing I found most interesting is that while everyone at the party wants a 95% white Britain, Yarvin “seems to know his way around a curry house,” suggesting a high level of personal comfort with diversity.

Best of the Web

Commenting on the NYT piece about Disney’s shift towards wealthy patrons and away from the middle class, as well as the Jimmy Kimmel affair, Dylan Riley at the New Left Review writes about post-mass culture. This part caught my eye:

Symptomatically, the tech executive does not renounce Disneyland in favour of some more rarefied leisure destination; he instead demands a version of the same experience but tailored to his class position. This is a general phenomenon in the contemporary US. It is common at upscale restaurants, for example, to find menu items that ‘elevate’ a mass-cultural product: an Oreo cookie re-interpreted as a fancy ice-cream sandwich, a Twinkie presented in the form of a bundt cake, or the innumerable plagiarisms of Big Macs in more or less gourmet forms. The high-income consumer still covets the mass-culture original, but wants it in an appropriately upmarket form. All kinds of other phenomena follow this logic: sporting events, bowling alleys, movie theatres are increasingly sold as upscale experiences, offering fine dining, reserved deluxe seating and so on.

This resonates with what I see out there. It’s a literal version of Venkatesh Rao’s “premium mediocre.”

NYT: What Does Gen Z Divorce Look Like? (gift link) - This is wild

In 2021, Kira Benson, a violinist living in Seattle, knew it was time to get a divorce. Ending their two-year “lavender marriage” wasn’t an easy decision, but the musician had a supportive ally. “If you have to dump your ex-husband,” Mx. Benson said, “co-dump him with his mistress.”

Before the breakup, Mx. Benson, 27, who uses the pronoun they, checked in with their therapist, who said a divorce would be a “good choice.” Out of queer solidarity, they informed their husband’s “mistress” — this was kosher in Mx. Benson’s arrangement, which was not a legal marriage, but a domestic partnership — about their shared partner’s troubling behavior. The night of the breakup, Mx. Benson and the mistress spent a cozy evening together: “We were eating a lot of comfort food, playing a lot of Animal Crossing.”

Stiven Peter/First Things: Charlie Kirk, Christian Vitalist

Matthew Capone: Watch your language - This piece arguing against the use of profanity is very in line with my call to reject vice.

Reject Vice

Axios: 15,000 churches could close this year amid religious shift in U.S. - These will be mostly mainline churches.

Musa al-Gharbi: Inserting “Culture” Into the Culture Wars

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a nice reference from Ross Douthat on X. I also got a mention in Christianity Today. And I was a guest on the Truth Changes Everything podcast.

New this week:

• The Quest for Christian Symbolic Dominance - The battle for symbolic recognition in a diverse, post-religious America

• And my podcast this week was with Chris Arnade on why America can’t have nice things.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.