Fiona Girkin, researcher and specialist in female dark personality traits, discusses her PhD findings on female psychopathy, covert manipulation, and the structural silencing of victims—particularly men—who suffer at the hands of toxic women. Girkin argues that female psychopaths differ fundamentally from their male counterparts in their methods: rather than overt physical aggression, they deploy relational aggression—rumour, social sabotage, gaslighting, and the cultivation of protective "posses"—making their behaviour extraordinarily difficult to prove or challenge. She introduces the concept of the "sleeper cell" psychopath: charming, likeable individuals who remain dormant until their power is threatened, then turn ruthless overnight. Her research focused on the community services sector—therapists, social workers, psychologists—where she found far more psychopathic individuals than anticipated, drawn by the covert power that caring roles confer over vulnerable people's lives. Girkin also addresses the professional backlash she faced after speaking publicly about comparable rates of male and female domestic violence, including losing her university position teaching police. She argues that feminist organisations have systematically suppressed recognition of female-perpetrated violence, leaving male victims without resources, disbelieved by courts, and vulnerable to legal weaponisation through divorce and parental alienation. Things are changing, Girkin contends, as female violence becomes less covert and harder to ignore.

Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-founder of Democracy at Work, argues that the United States is living through the terminal phase of imperial overreach. Drawing on the history of empires from Persia and Rome to Britain, Wolff contends that no empire has ever escaped the arc of birth, expansion, and decline—and the US is no exception. Having emerged from World War II as the world’s undisputed economic hegemon, the US has spent decades in self-deluding arrogance, mistaking a historically anomalous post-war moment for permanent, God-given supremacy. The rot is now unmistakable: $35 trillion in debt, a proposed $1.5 trillion war budget, and a string of military defeats from Vietnam to Afghanistan. China, growing at two to three times the US rate for thirty consecutive years, has quietly displaced American economic dominance. The war on Iran—a civilisation far older than the Judaeo-Christian tradition attacking it—may prove the final overreach. With the Strait of Hormuz closed and NATO allies refusing to help, Wolff sees Trump as a latter-day Nero, fiddling while the empire burns. The solution, he insists, is redirecting military spending toward the American people.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, 30-year Army veteran, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, discusses the deep structural rot he believes is consuming American democracy and its military empire. Drawing on his experience from Vietnam through the Iraq WMD debacle, Wilkerson argues that the United States has become a force as much for evil as for good, and that the current war against Iran represents the most reckless and dangerous expression of that trajectory yet. He traces the unravelling of legitimate statecraft from the post-Cold War squandering of peace dividends, through 9/11 and the institutionalisation of torture under George W. Bush, to what he describes as the Caligula-like presidency of Donald Trump—whom he regards as history’s most brazen grifter and the architect of an illegal war of choice. Wilkerson raises urgent alarm about Pete Hegseth’s injection of Christian Zionist ideology into the Pentagon’s ranks, the militarisation of domestic law enforcement, the looming threat of cancelled midterm elections, and the very real spectre of a second American civil war. A searing, unflinching conversation with one of Washington’s most candid and consequential insiders.