• Groundhog Project: The author introduces an open-source agentic coding tool named “groundhog” designed to teach how Cursor and similar coding assistants function.
• Cursor Techniques: Combining the /specs method with stdlib rules and compiler-rich languages enables rapid, hands-free development by directing LLMs through detailed specifications.
• Specification Domains: The workflow segments the codebase into domains like src/core, src/ai/mcp_tools, and src/ui, letting multiple Cursor sessions work in parallel without overlap.
• Stdlib Automation: Cursor rules automate processes such as rule generation, git commits, and enforcing coding conventions for languages like Rust.
• Loopback Workflow: A core prompt loop instructs Cursor to study specifications and rules, implement missing functionality, add tests, and run builds and linting until completion.
• Multi-Boxing Strategy: Independent Cursor instances with separate git worktrees enable concurrent progress across different parts of the project.
• Recommendation of Languages and Tests: Rust or Haskell are preferred thanks to strong compiler guarantees and clear errors, paired with property-based tests or static analysis for quality feedback.
• Future Vision: The goal is to bootstrap Groundhog to self-build, with future posts covering MCP tools and links to the project repository plus social sharing options.

Ello everyone, in the "Yes, Claude Code can decompile itself. Here's the source code" blog post, I teased about a new meta when using Cursor. This post is a follow-up to the post below.

[

You are using Cursor AI incorrectly...

I’m hesitant to give this advice away for free, but I’m gonna push past it and share it anyway. You’re using Cursor incorrectly. Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing /zooms with software engineers - from entry level, to staff level and all the way up to principal level.

Geoffrey HuntleyGeoffrey Huntley

](https://ghuntley.com/stdlib/)

When you use "/specs" (this post) method with the "stdlib" (above) method in conjunction with a programming language that provides compiler soundness (driven by good types) and compiler errors, the results are incredible. You can drive hands-free output of N factor (entire weeks' worth) of co-workers in hours.

Today, alongside with teaching you the technique I'm announcing the start of a new open-source (yes, I'm doing this as pure OSS and not my usual proprietary licensing) AI headless agentic coding agent called "groundhog".

Groundhog's primary purpose is to teach people how Cursor and all these other coding agents work under the hood. If you understand how these coding assistants work from first principles, then you can drive these tools harder (or perhaps make your own!).

We'll be building it together, increment by increment, as a series of blog posts, so don't rush to GitHub and raise GitHub issues that XYZ does not work as I'm yet to decide on the community model around the project and doing customer support for free is not high up on my list.

[

GitHub - ghuntley/groundhog: Groundhog’s primary purpose is to teach people how Cursor and all these other coding agents work under the hood. If you understand how these coding assistants work from first principles, then you can drive these tools harder (or perhaps make your own!).

Groundhog's primary purpose is to teach people how Cursor and all these other coding agents work under the hood. If you understand how these coding assistants work from first principles, then y…

GitHubghuntley

](https://github.com/ghuntley/groundhog?ref=ghuntley.com)

Groundhog is a teaching tool first. If you want a full-blown thing right now, go check out "Goose", "Roo/Cline", "Aider" or "AllHands".

All the code you are about to see was generated using these two techniques in conjunction with multiple concurrent sessions of the Cursor IDE open working on their own separate specification domain.

what the heck is a specification domain?

Consider a standard application layout on a filesystem:

• src/core - this is where your core application lives.
• src/ai/mcp_tools - here is where your MCP tools live.
• src/ui - here is where your UI lives.

By driving the LLM to implement the core basics in a single implementation session before src/ai/mcp_tools and src/src/ui to build the "heart of the application", you can then fan out and launch multiple copies of Cursor to work on parts of the application that do not overlap.

[

Multi Boxing LLMs

Been doing heaps of thinking about how software is made after https://ghuntley.com/oh-fuck and the current design/UX approach by vendors of software assistants. IDEs since 1983 have been designed around an experience of a single plane of glass. Restricted by what an engineer can see on their

Geoffrey HuntleyGeoffrey Huntley

](https://ghuntley.com/multi-boxing)

Using https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree is a key ingredient to get it to work if you use a single machine, as you want each Cursor ("agent") to have its own working directory.

Start by authoring a "stdlib" rule to automatically do git commits as increments of the specification as it is also key. If you want to Rolls-Royce it, you can create a rule to auto-create a pull request when the agent is complete.

Now, you might be wondering about how to handle merge conflicts. Well, you can author a "stdlib" rule that drives Cursor to automatically reconcile the branches.

okay, what is a specification?

Specifications are the heart of your application; the internal implementation of an application matters less now. As long as your tests pass and the LLM implements the technical steering lessons defined in your "stdlib", then that's all that matters.

I'll be the first one to admit it's a little unsettling to see the API internals of your application wildly evolve at a rapid rate. Software engineers have been taught to control the computer; letting go and building trust in the process will take some time.

how I build applications now

I start with a long conversation with the LLM about my product requirements aka specifications. For Groundhog, these are the prompts that I used

We are going to create an AI coding assistant command line application in rust

The AI coding assistant is called "groundhog".

It uses the "tracing" crate for logging, metrics and telemetry.
All operations have appropriate tracing on them that can be used to troubleshoot the application.

Use the clap cargo create for command line parsing.

The first operation is

"$ groundhogexplain"

When groundhog explain is invoked it prints hello world.

IMPORTANT: Write up the specifications into the "specs/" folder with each domain topic (including technical topic) as a seperate markdown file. Create a "SPECS.md" in the root of the directory which is an overview document that contains a table that links to all the specs.

After a couple moments something like this will be generated.

It's at this stage you have a decision to make. You can either manually update each file or keep on prompting the LLM to update the specification library. Let's give it a go.

Keep doing that until you are comfortable with the minimum viable product or increment of the application. Don't over-complicate it at first. Once you have the specification nailed, it's time to bring the "stdlib" into play. Let's build it up from first principles...

Create a Cursor IDE AI MDC rule in ".cursor/rules" which instructs Cursor to always create new MDC rules in that folder. Each rule should be a seperate file.

nice

Nice. Okay, we have the first foundational rule. It's time to create some more, such as automating the git commits.

New Cursor IDE MDC rule.

After each change performed by Cursor automatically from Git commit.

Commit the changed files.

Use the "conventional git commit convention" for the title of the commit message
Explain what was changed and why the files were changed from exploring the prompts used to generate the commit.

Okay, cool, now we are cooking with gas. The next step is to create a cursor rule that defines your coding conventions. As Groundhog is authored in Rust, let's generate best practices and save that as a rule.

Create a new Cursor MDC rule for all *.rs files (in all subdirectories)

You are an expert expert software engineer who knows rust. Infact you are the software engineer who created rust. Your task is to come up with technical recommendations in this rule which document best practices when authoring rust.

Split each concern about rust into seperate MDC rules.

Prefix each rule with the filename of "rust-$rulename.mdc"

Write these rules to disk

It's at this point, after these rules are generated, that you want to push the LLM harder. Ask it to continue...

After a few more rounds of this, manually review your new Cursor rules that instruct the LLM what you expect as technical output. If you want to speed run this then loop the new rules back onto the LLM.

Look at the rust rules in @.cursor . What is missing? What does not follow best practice.

Notice how we looped the LLM back onto itself up there? It's the key LLM prompt you'll be using in conjunction with your newly formed spec and tech library going forward.

loopback is the key workflow

The secret to hands-free vibe coding is really just this prompt when used in conjunction with stdlib and specs library...

Study @SPECS.md for functional specifications.
Study @.cursor for technical requirements
Implement what is not implemented
Create tests
Run a "cargo build" and verify the application works

after a few moments, Groundhog will be generated. Cursor will time out or run out of tool calls during this operation

keep going until implemented

The next secret is really just continually issuing the same prompt

Study @SPECS.md for functional specifications.
Study @.cursor for technical requirements
Implement what is not implemented
Create tests
Run "cargo build" and verify the application works
Run "cargo clippy" and resolve linting errors

Did the LLM go on a bad path? Restart a new chat session to clear the LLM context window and use the above prompt. Keep doing it until everything is implemented.

scaling it up

Now that the src/core has been implemented. It's time to move on to the other specification domains, such as src/ai/mcp_tools and src/ui . Start a new Cursor compose window and repeat the defining specification workflow we did at the start of the blog post.

Look at specifications in

New requirement.

What should be implemented for MCP (model context protocol) registry? Include security best practices.
What should be implemented for a new MCP (model context protocol) tool that can be invoked to list directory contents ("ls"). Include security best practices
Provide a LLM system prompt for this MCP protocol tool.

Update with this guidance. Store them under "specs/mcp" with each technical topic as a seperate markdown file.

Now, do the same for the src/ui

Look at specifications in @specs.

New requirement.

Create a basic "hello world" TUI user interface using the the "ratatui" create

Update @specs with this guidance. Store them under "specs/ui" with each UI Widget as a separate markdown file.

keep going until implemented

It's at this point you have a decision. You can launch multiple sessions of Cursor concurrently and ask each copy to chew on src/ui and src/core concurrently.

Look at @specs
Study @groundhog
Implement what is not implemented
Run "cargo build"
Run "cargo clippy"

recommendations

These LLMs work as "silly string lookup services" and have no understanding of programming languages at all. To make this all work, you are going to need a good programming language that has soundness where if it compiles, it works (ie. Rust/Haskell) and a solid property-based test suite. Rust/Haskell are unique in that they provide exceptional compiler errors, which can be looped back into the LLM to auto-fix problems until it gets it right.

The application of the "stdlib" technique to steer the LLM to use your technical requirements and via the creation of a feedback loop (ie. tests and/or a static analysis tool such as sonarqube) you are in full control of product/output quality.

The sky's the limit really - one could even hook in a pre-existing security scanning tool into the feedback loop..

closing thoughts

The limiting factor for me now is really how much screen space I have. I'm fortunate enough to have a 59" monitor on my main workstation. I can see, feel and taste the horizon of being able to ditch Cursor forever...

[

Multi Boxing LLMs

Been doing heaps of thinking about how software is made after https://ghuntley.com/oh-fuck and the current design/UX approach by vendors of software assistants. IDEs since 1983 have been designed around an experience of a single plane of glass. Restricted by what an engineer can see on their

Geoffrey HuntleyGeoffrey Huntley

](https://ghuntley.com/multi-boxing)

There's an approach in CompSci with compilers of "bootstrapping"

[

Bootstrapping (compilers) - Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects

](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_\(compilers\)?ref=ghuntley.com)

and bootstrapping as fast as possible so Groundhog can build Groundhog is the destination we will be building towards. If you enjoyed reading, please consider subscribing to the newsletter. We are a little away from getting there, so the next part of the series will explain what the heck "MCPs" are.

The source code of Groundhog (and the stdlib + specs used to build it) can be found here. Give it a star.

[

GitHub - ghuntley/groundhog: Groundhog’s primary purpose is to teach people how Cursor and all these other coding agents work under the hood. If you understand how these coding assistants work from first principles, then you can drive these tools harder (or perhaps make your own!).

Groundhog's primary purpose is to teach people how Cursor and all these other coding agents work under the hood. If you understand how these coding assistants work from first principles, then y…

GitHubghuntley

](https://github.com/ghuntley/groundhog?ref=ghuntley.com)

ps. socials for this blog post are below

If you enjoyed reading, give 'em a share please:

• Twitter: https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1896530416020148714
• BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/ghuntley.com/post/3ljgqqydyns2b
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/geoffreyhuntley_from-design-doc-to-code-the-groundhog-ai-activity-7302295543706226689-zexL,

• History of Iraq Syndrome: Iraq syndrome followed Afghanistan and Iraq wars after initial objectives succeeded but were followed by expensive nation-building and paralysis.
• Vietnam Syndrome Roots: Post-Vietnam conclusion that American interventions were inherently wrong led to calls for restraint, described by critics as anti-Americanism.
• Reagan Counterstrategy: Reagan’s interventions in Grenada, Panama, and Desert Storm, guided by Weinberger’s six criteria, ended Vietnam syndrome by restoring assertive policy.
• Paralysis Revival Consequences: Obama and Biden-era retreat allegedly enabled ISIS rise, Iranian proxy expansion, and emboldened adversaries, including Russia and China.
• Trump Doctrine Principles: Doctrine prioritizes American interests, proportional investments, all tools available, and explicit threats to bolster deterrence.
• Recent Actions: B-2 strikes on Fordow nuclear facility and Maduro’s ouster are cited as applications of the doctrine that reassert American deterrence.
• Outcome Claim: These actions claim to avoid quagmires while sending clear messages that actions have consequences.
• Final Assessment: The article contends Iraq syndrome is dead thanks to Trump, restoring fear of American power globally.

Something crucial happened with President Donald Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela.

In fact, taken together with his earlier moves abroad, they mark the substantive death of what might be called the “Iraq syndrome“—a paralyzing mindset that has distorted American foreign policy for more than two decades.

The Iraq syndrome emerged after the failure of the Iraq War and the long, costly occupation that followed. In the American mind, it became shorthand for a broader fear: that any U.S. use of force overseas would inevitably spiral into a quagmire. But this was not the first time such a syndrome had taken hold.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

To understand Iraq syndrome, one has to go back to Vietnam.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, America’s foreign-policy establishment fell into disarray.

A new conventional wisdom took hold among elites: The war had not been lost because of bad strategy or domestic unrest but because it never should have been fought at all. From this conclusion flowed a much larger claim—that the United States needed to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.

This worldview, later known as the “Vietnam syndrome,” argued that America should abandon assertive foreign policy in favor of restraint or outright withdrawal, lest it stumble into further disasters.

Underlying this posture was a thinly veiled anti-Americanism: the belief that the United States was not a force for good but a malign presence on the world stage. As former Princeton professor Richard Falk put it at the time, “I love the Vietnam syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat.”

In other words, America was guilty—and the appropriate response was retreat.

That retreat carried real costs. A world without strong American leadership proved far worse than its critics anticipated. America’s self-imposed paralysis helped usher in the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

By the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan decided it was time to move past Vietnam syndrome.

In 1983, the United States intervened in Grenada, deposing a Marxist government in a swift operation that cost few American lives and restored democracy to the island. Shortly thereafter, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger articulated six criteria for military intervention: a vital interest at stake, a commitment to victory, clear political and military goals, continuous strategic reassessment, sustained public support, and the exhaustion of nonmilitary options.

Together, the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations applied these principles in Panama and during Operation Desert Storm. By 1989, Vietnam syndrome was effectively dead.

Then came Afghanistan and Iraq.

Both wars began with clear, limited objectives. The war in Afghanistan aimed to depose the Taliban and prevent al-Qaeda from regaining sanctuary. The war in Iraq sought to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Those goals were quickly achieved.

What followed, however, was years of large-scale nation-building—at enormous cost in blood and treasure. The result was a revival of the old paralysis, now rebranded as the “Iraq syndrome.”

This was not a reasonable skepticism about intelligence failures or a caution against nation-building. It was a full restoration of Vietnam-syndrome thinking: the assumption that every U.S. intervention would inevitably become another Iraq or Afghanistan. That belief took hold across the political spectrum, echoed endlessly by both the horseshoe Left and the horseshoe Right.

Predictably, the Iraq syndrome produced the same results as its predecessor. Under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, American retreat became policy. The withdrawal from Iraq enabled the rise of ISIS. Iranian proxies expanded across the Middle East, culminating in the catastrophe of Oct. 7, 2023. Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan left 13 U.S. servicemembers dead and signaled American weakness—encouraging Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and emboldening China’s global ambitions.

But now, at the end of an Iraq-syndrome presidency, something has changed.

Just as Reagan once did, Trump has put the prevailing paralysis to bed.

Trump has done so through what can fairly be called the “Trump Doctrine,” a framework I outlined in November 2024. Its principles are straightforward: America’s interests come first; those interests must be matched to proportional investment; all tools—-from diplomacy to military force—remain on the table; and threats should be explicit, not implied. Deterrence works best when it is public and unmistakable.

Over the past year, Trump has applied this doctrine twice. First, with the June 22, 2025, B-2 strikes on Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility, reestablishing American deterrence in the Middle East and reshaping regional geopolitics. Then, with the ouster of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

In both cases, critics warned—yet again—of World War III. Once more, Iraq syndrome spoke. And once more, it was wrong.

These actions have restored American deterrence without dragging the country into quagmires or endless nation-building. America’s enemies are now on notice. The message is simple: Actions have consequences.

The Iraq syndrome should be dead. If it truly is, it died at the hands of Trump.

America is once again feared on the global stage—an extraordinary turnaround given where the country stood just a year ago.

This is what many of us voted for.

At least those of us who actually want to make America great again in the world.

Related posts:

1. Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Jacksonian Foreign Policy (With a Twist)
2. What’s Next After Trump’s Maduro Arrest
3. Maduro Gets His Just Desert

• Anniversary: Marks 20 years since Life on Mars premiered, hitting screens with a blend of 1970s nostalgia, loud music, and coarse dialogue.
• Origin: Creators Ashley Pharoah, Matthew Graham, and Tony Jordan developed the concept after declaring contemporary police dramas lacked fun, initially pitching a knockabout comedy titled Ford Granada.
• Premise: Centers on clean-cut DI Sam Tyler waking in 1973 after a car accident, uncertain whether he is dead, comatose, or truly time-traveling, creating dual narratives of crime investigation and metaphysical mystery.
• Character Contrast: Highlights tensions between Tyler’s modern procedural approach and Gene Hunt’s macho, blunt, politically incorrect methods, with supporting characters like Annie Cartwright offering a more competent and sympathetic female perspective.
• Genre Fusion: Combines police procedural tropes with sci-fi elements, using cultural callbacks to signal future communication and layering dramatic irony around historical social issues such as racism, corruption, sexism, and policing failures.
• Production Journey: Faced repeated rejections from the BBC and Channel 4 before finally being greenlit, with reluctance around maintaining the series’ ambiguity about Tyler’s reality.
• Legacy: Ran two series with an open-ended finale, spawned the Ashes to Ashes sequel that revealed the metaphysical purpose of Hunt’s world, and inspired failed remakes and unmade projects such as Lazarus.
• Current Status: Remains a streaming favorite on BBC iPlayer and Amazon Prime, with creators now developing a stage adaptation while reflecting on changing cultural sensitivities.

Tom Fordy

09 January 2026 1:00pm GMT

It’s 20 years since the debut of time travel police drama Life on Mars, a show that hit TV screens like a Ford Cortina smashing through a stack of cardboard boxes and screeched into the metaphysical non-reality (or is it?) of 1973. All to the sound of belting 1970s tunes and couldn’t-say-that-now obscenities.

But it took eight years to arrive. At a time when high concepts were considered a radical departure for serious British drama, TV bosses couldn’t get their heads around the premise: clean-cut copper Sam Tyler (John Simm) is hit by a car in 2006 and wakes up in 1973, not knowing if he’s dead, in a coma or really back in time. “Now people say, ‘It was such a cool idea – they must have been biting your hands off,’” says Ashley Pharoah, who co-created and wrote Life on Mars with Matthew Graham and Tony Jordan. “It was the opposite! Everyone turned it down at least once.”

“I remember one guy at the BBC who kept looking at his watch like, ‘Get me the hell out of this meeting as quickly as possible!’” says Graham, laughing.

Amusingly, Sam Tyler would bellow similar words: “Get me out of here!” Stuck in 1973, he’s forced to work as a DI in the Manchester police with DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), a self-styled sheriff and a model of no-nonsense machismo. Or as Tyler describes him, an “overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding.”

“You make that sound like a bad thing,” replies Hunt.

The characters personify the show’s central conflict. With his knowledge of modern police procedures, protocols and PC sensitivities, Sam is by the book; Gene, however, is more likely to use the book to wallop a suspect, force a confession and have a heavy session at the Railway Arms.

Indeed, Life on Mars is a plane of existence where both existential angst and giving some toerag a good shoeing are all part of the job. The surface level pleasure is, of course, 1970s nostalgia. “The music was fantastic, the clothes were great,” says Pharoah. Not to mention Lucozade bottles in orange cellophane, Watneys Party Seven Bitter, and, well, white dog muck. “That takes me back,” says Sam as the brutish DS Ray Carling (Dean Andrews) prepares to mash a villain’s face into a chalky pile of the stuff.

Beneath that, Life on Mars is one of the smartest genre shows of the last 20 years. It’s not just about dropping a modern-day copper into the 1970s, but within the established boundaries of a bullish 1970s cop show.

“Starsky and Hutch have a lot to answer for,” says Sam as Gene races recklessly through the streets in his Cortina.

“Who?” barks Gene.

![John Simm (left) and Philip Glenister as Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt in Life on Mars ](/content/dam/briefs/2026/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000004415730_176779720955410_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqf7y1lzytB1DEvIVIXvqqK4IvKz9SWqtU-hbKzx4ciBo.jpeg?imwidth=350)

An ‘overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex’ – Sam Tyler’s first impression of Gene Hunt Credit: BBC/Kerry Brown

Named for the David Bowie song, playing on Sam’s now outdated mid-Noughties iPod, Life on Mars is built on two interlocking narratives that operate in different genres. While Tyler and Hunt investigate their crime of the week – a closed-book story resolved by the combo of Sam’s protocol and Gene’s instincts – there’s the open-ended question of what’s really going on, a science-fiction mystery that bleeds through the boundaries of the series. Warnings and messages come from the future via cultural staples of yesteryear: Morecambe and Wise, Open University and the BBC Test Card Girl. One of the most inspired ideas is a recreation of Camberwick Green with a puppet of Gene Hunt “kicking in a nonce”.

The Life on Mars concept came from a 1998 jaunt to Blackpool, where Pharoah, Graham and Jordan spent a few days coming up with ideas for production company Kudos. “We agreed that all the fun had gone out of police dramas,” says Graham. “We said, ‘Can we do something like The Sweeney?’”

But realising the dodgy copper antics of The Sweeney might be unpalatable for modern audiences (“Get your trousers on, you’re nicked!”), the trio came up with the time traveller-in-a-coma idea.

“What if you take a decent cop who does everything by the book and believes in red tape and thrust him into this world?” says Graham. “It was more of a comedy at first – it was called Ford Granada [after one of the cars driven by John Thaw in The Sweeney] and was written as a vehicle for someone like Neil Morrissey. It was designed to be knockabout fun – probably even pre-watershed.”

![John Simm (right) and Philip Glenister as Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt in Life on Mars ](/content/dam/briefs/2026/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000004407029_176779720955411_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqQ-VOsFC87zhVkouiKY9ohWUjtte885jLZ8jGwXseDsY.jpeg?imwidth=350)

‘Oh, shut up you noncey-a---d fairy’: The line that summed up Hunt’s political incorrectness Credit: BBC/Kerry Brown

The show was turned down by the BBC before Channel 4 picked it up, developed it, then suddenly backed out. “I remember Channel 4 saying, ‘This will end careers if we make it,’” says Pharoah. “The risk was that it was silly. No executive wants to be the person who greenlit a massive failure.”

Enough time had passed, however, that they could go back to the BBC. “All the people that didn’t get it had moved on or gone on to new things,” says Graham. Both he and Pharoah credit Jane Tranter and Julie Gardner – then the respective heads of BBC drama and BBC Wales – for their confidence in the script. There was, however, hesitation within the BBC about the ambiguity. As Sam says in the title sequence, “Am I mad? In a coma? Or back in time?” The BBC wanted to show Tyler in a coma at the start of each episode to make it clearer. The writers argued against it.

“That’s what makes the show,” says Pharoah. “Is he dead? Is he dreaming? That’s the entire dramatic hook.”

Graham recalls that even star John Simm was “completely baffled” by the script. “I remember him saying to me, ‘What the f--- is this?’” says Graham. Simm said that when Tyler woke in 1973, he wondered if some pages were missing.

In classic time travel fashion, Simm’s Sam Tyler sets about righting wrongs in the past – like a Mancunian Quantum Leap – while also bumping into his parents and inventing chicken in a basket. The intellectual meat of Life on Mars, though, is in its layers of dramatic irony – things that Sam and audience understand but the 1970s characters don’t. It deals with issues of the day, and the consequences of poor policing and social unrest in subsequent years: racism, the IRA, police corruption and transparency, drugs, strikes and the loss of industry, football hooliganism and – yes – political correctness.

Ironically, the show was also ahead of its time in its treatment of what we’d soon call everyday sexism – see the casual bum-pinching, derogatory treatment of WPC Annie Cartwright (Liz White), Sam’s only true confidant in 1973 and a much better copper than the prejudiced DS Ray Carling or the dippy DC Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster). And while Gene Hunt stands a totemic example of political incorrectness, the character emerged as a British cultural touchstone. In white slip-on loafers and a camel-hair coat, no less, asking to have “a word in your shell-like”.

![From left: Chris Skelton (played by Marshall Lancaster), Sam Tyler (played by John Simm), Gene Hunt (played by Philip Glenister), and Annie Cartwright (played by Liz White) in Life on Mars  ](/content/dam/briefs/2026/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000006212297_17677972095548_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwWJKHVq56c9sYypHqwk1f_A.jpeg?imwidth=350)

From left: Chris Skelton, played by Marshall Lancaster, Sam Tyler, played by Simm, Gene Hunt, played by Glenister, and Annie Cartwright, played by Liz White Credit: BBC/KUDOS

He was also an unexpected hit with women. “Liberal female fans loved him,” says Pharoah, who admits to having a strange relationship with Gene. “We thought we’d created a monster.” Pharoah laughs looking back at a newspaper headline about Gene Hunt that read, “We need this man to fix Britain.”

Philip Glenister, who took inspiration from 1970s football managers – the likes of Brian Clough and Tommy Docherty – is remarkable in the role, embodying a sense of outdated but oddly satisfying British masculinity.

With an arsenal of zingers worthy of The Sweeney – “Don’t move, you’re surrounded by armed b-------!” – Gene Hunt is the kind of a man who can have a punch-up without dropping the cigarette from his lips, and whose solution to every conflict is “pub” (a statement, not a question). That no-nonsense machismo is all part of the joy of Life on Mars, as suggested by Gene’s parting line to Sam: “Oh, shut up you noncey-a---d fairy.”

Gene was initially conceived as more racist, but the lines landed uncomfortably in a script readthrough and were dropped. “We were criticised by some people who said in the 1970s Gene Hunt would have been out-and-out racist,” says Pharoah. “But if people hated that character, it wouldn’t work.”

Life on Mars debuted on January 9, 2006 and ran for two series. The finale sees Sam awake from his coma in 2006 but it leaves bigger questions hanging in the cosmos when Sam throws himself from a building and returns to 1973.

The sequel series, Ashes to Ashes, with DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) joining Gene’s team in the 1980s, revealed the full story: Gene’s world is a sort-of purgatory for the souls of troubled coppers, and Gene is a foul-mouthed, scotch-soaked angel who guides them to the afterlife. (Which is actually the Railway Arms boozer. “A comforting thought to us all,” says Pharoah.)

![Keeley Kawes as Alex Drake and Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt in Ashes to Ashes](/content/dam/briefs/2026/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000003883651_17677972095545_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqjJeHvIwLm2xPr27m7LF8mUYMapKPjdhyLnv9ax6_too.jpeg?imwidth=350)

Keeley Hawes as Alex Drake and a returning Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt in Ashes to Ashes which was first broadcast in 2008 Credit: Angus Muir

Did the writers have that explanation in mind when making Life on Mars or was it thought up retrospectively? Graham recalls an inkling of the idea, which they would have dealt with in a planned third series of Life on Mars. “It was half in our heads,” he says. “This idea of a metaphysical sorting house for police with problems, and Gene as this fallen angel guide.” But it was shelved when Simm decided to hang up the flares after the second series.

After winning an international Emmy, Life on Mars was remade in America in 2008 with Harvey Keitel as Gene Hunt. Pharoah attended a table read at which Keitel took him aside and asked, “Are we f------ this up?” It was axed during the first series and delivered an abysmal twist ending with the characters on a spaceship to, ahem, Mars.

There were plans for a third iteration of the UK original called Lazarus, which would have teamed Sam and Gene with a Bergerac-like detective in Canterbury, but it never happened. Both Pharoah and Graham wonder if Life on Mars could be made now. Pharoah points to a scene in which Gene fires off homophobic slurs. “I don’t think I could write those words any more!” he says.

They are currently working on a stage adaptation of Life on Mars. “A version of the original story,” says Graham. “We have high hopes.”

It’s a testament to the enduring popularity of Life on Mars, which remains a perennial streaming favourite. But Pharoah remembers that even at its peak there was some industry snootiness. “We never won a Bafta,” he says. “I heard from someone in the judging room that they were resistant to something like Life on Mars because it was a little bit silly.” But Pharoah writes it off with Gene Hunt-like panache. “The audience couldn’t give a toss. They loved it.”

Life On Mars is available to watch on BBC iPlayer and Amazon Prime Video

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The 40 must-watch BBC iPlayer shows to stream right now

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• Socialist resurgence: Growing popularity among college students and progressive Democrats culminates in a socialist mayor of New York and coordinated defense of Nicolás Maduro.
• Censorship paradox: Socialist movements reportedly ban conservative speech and seek to silence critics, spurring the question of labeling socialism as a hate crime.
• Democide evidence: R. J. Rummel’s research ties socialism to 110–260 million politically motivated deaths, making socialism a major source of twentieth-century mass murder.
• Soviet atrocities: USSR under Lenin, Stalin, and successors caused up to 126 million deaths, including the Holodomor, forced famines, and the Great Terror.
• Nazi socialism: The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, despite ideological differences, is identified as a socialist regime responsible for approximately 21 million murders.
• Mao’s carnage: Communist China massacred 50–60 million people through landlord purges, the Great Leap Forward (36–45 million deaths), and the Cultural Revolution (5–10 million deaths).
• Other socialist regimes: Castro’s Cuba killed 73,000–140,000, Pol Pot’s Cambodia murdered nearly 2 million, North Korea produced 0.7–3.5 million democide victims, and Venezuela now endures economic collapse and rights erosion under Maduro.
• Systemic failure: Hayek’s analysis explains how socialist central planning breeds authoritarian thugs, economic collapse, repression, and societal decline, with New York’s socialist mayor expected to spark rising crime and dysfunction.

It is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, socialism is now more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party, at least judging by the cult status of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now an avowed socialist has been elected mayor of New York, the commercial capital of the United States and home to that great capitalist institution, the stock market. Even more recently, socialists here and around the world have spoken out in unison against the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela.

It is ironic that these socialists, along with their supporters and fellow travelers, like to censor conservatives for, allegedly, promoting “hate” and “division.” On that basis, they have banned conservative speakers from appearing on college campuses, and just a few years ago urged Twitter and Facebook to close the accounts of conservatives who spoke out against socialism.  

This raises the question: given the historical record, why don’t we label socialism as a hate crime?  

After all, the evidence for socialism’s malignant effects is obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to open a history book. Socialists are responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and torture of many millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of innocent people during the ideology’s heyday in the middle of the twentieth century. That history of murder and tyranny continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the misfortune of socialism—Cuba, North Korea, and (most recently) Venezuela.  

How do socialists escape the indictment that they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder? Some of them deny that Stalin, Mao, and others were true socialists or, equally absurdly, assert that true socialism has never really been tried. But socialism has been tried many times in many places and has always failed.

Senator Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mayor Mamdani claim that they are for something called “democratic socialism,” a more peaceful version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and Castro said until they seized power and immediately began to sing a different tune. “Democracy” and “diversity” are what they say when out of power; tyranny and raw power are what they practice once in power. That is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements. 

R. J. Rummel, a noted scholar of political violence and totalitarian movements, coined the term “democide” to describe large-scale government killings for political purposes—in other words, politically motivated murder. While communists and socialists have not had a monopoly on democide_,_ these movements have been responsible for far more political killing than any other political movement or form of government in the modern era.  

After looking at the facts, Rummel, writing in 1993, drew this conclusion: 

In sum the communists probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the total itself is shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders in the Soviet Union alone—just one communist country—well surpasses the human cost of wars.

Rummel suspected that the estimate of 110 million killed may be too low. In fact, he believed the death toll from socialist democide in the twentieth century may be as high as 260 million. Below is a breakdown of the bloody record of socialist murder and violence in the twentieth century.

The Soviet Union was the first large-scale experiment in socialism, commencing with the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. For those who like to think that there is a meaningful distinction between communism and socialism, it should be noted that USSR stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Whatever Lenin and Stalin thought they were doing, they agreed they were engaged in a socialist enterprise.  

Rummel wrote that “the Soviet Union appears the greatest mega-murderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people,” with Stalin being directly responsible for at least 43 million of these deaths, mostly via forced labor camps and government induced famines.  

In what has come to be known as the Holodomor, in the early 1930s Stalin’s government killed millions of peasants, most of them Ukrainians, who resisted collectivization or failed to meet mandated production quotas. Several distinguished historians have documented this catastrophe. Robert Conquest, in The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), estimated that 11 million people died of starvation or outright murder in European sections of the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1934. Anne Applebaum, in her book The Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017), agreed with Conquest’s estimate and showed that these deaths arose as a consequence of deliberate Soviet policy. 

A few years later, between 1936 and 1938, Stalin orchestrated a campaign of repression and terror that, according to Conquest’s The Great Terror (1990), led to the murder of some 700,000 people who were judged to be opponents of the socialist regime. Many of those killed were leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution whom Stalin came to regard as traitors or rivals for power. Some historians judge the toll of Stalin’s terror to have been greater than one million killed.

At the time, and for decades thereafter, Western apologists either denied that killings on this scale had occurred or justified them as necessary to maintain the regime. It was only in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev admitted to some of Stalin’s crimes, that Western fellow travelers reluctantly acknowledged their monstruous scale. 

Adding up all of these estimates, Rummel calculated that the total number of political killings in the Soviet Union under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors may reach as high as 126 million. 

Then there is the awkward example of Nazi Germany, a regime rivaled in horror and mass murder only by Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Rummel does not include the Nazis in his calculations of socialist democide, though this may be judged an oversight on his part, because Nazism was in fact a socialist movement. The term “Nazi” was shorthand for Hitler’s political party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP in German). Hitler and his henchmen were socialists, albeit of a somewhat different stripe than Lenin and Stalin.  

The scale of Nazi murder across nearly the whole of the European continent is difficult to quantify. Rummel, whose estimates mirror those of other scholars, concluded that the Nazis killed perhaps twenty-one million innocent people via outright murder, including six million Jews murdered in concentration camps and many other groups killed by Nazi institutional practices such as forced labor, “euthanasia,” forced suicides, and medical experimentation.

We now come to the deadliest socialist regime of them all: Communist China. Following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Mao Zedong launched a series of campaigns that put him in the same league as Stalin and Hitler in terms of the number of people murdered, tortured, and imprisoned.  

In the first phase of Mao’s rule, from 1948 to 1951, Mao sought to destroy the property-owning class by killing at least one landlord in every village via public execution. One of Mao’s deputies said in 1948 that as many as thirty million landlords would have to be eliminated. Hundreds of thousands were shot, buried alive, dismembered, and otherwise tortured to death in the early years of the regime. Mao and his comrades killed at least 4.5 million Chinese during this period, according to estimates compiled by Rummel and confirmed by other scholars. 

Mao, alas, was just getting started. During the 1950s the Chinese Communists carried out murder campaigns against Christians and other undesirables, causing the deaths of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people. 

In the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958–62), a misnomer if ever there was one, Mao accelerated his campaign for collectivization and industrialization, emulating Stalin’s policies of the 1930s, and with eerily similar results. Frank Dikotter’s carefully researched book Mao’s Great Famine (2010) concludes that a staggering 45 million Chinese were killed via murder, torture, starvation, and imprisonment over that four-year period. In Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–62 (2012), the journalist Yang Jisheng, using government sources, placed the number of “unnatural” deaths at 36 million, as Communist officials seized land and produce from peasants to redistribute elsewhere and systematically killed any and all who stood in the way of the regime’s collectivist policy. Some have described this episode as the single greatest mass murder in the recorded history of the world. 

In 1966 Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, designed to purify Communist Chinese ideology by purging remaining capitalist and traditional elements. This is the stock response among socialists when confronted with the failure of their schemes: counterrevolutionary elements are to blame. The brutal campaign of state-sponsored murder, torture, and persecution went on for a full decade through different phases of insanity, finally ending with Mao’s death in 1976.  

Merrill Goldman, a noted scholar of modern China, estimates that as many as a hundred million people were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and between five and ten million people were killed via executions, communal massacres, and starvation. Rummel placed the death toll from the Cultural Revolution at 7.7 million, with many millions more suffering persecutions of various kinds. The Chinese government today is understandably embarrassed by this barbaric episode in its recent history and has withheld records that would allow scholars to arrive at a more exact estimate of the numbers killed, injured, and persecuted. 

Thus, over a period of just three decades, Mao’s socialist government was responsible for the killing of some fifty to sixty million Chinese, most of those casualties being incurred in three brutal episodes of political cleansing and socialist “reform.”   

In total, the three “super socialists”—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—were thus responsible for the murders of well over a hundred million people between the years 1930 and 1976. In the Hall of Fame of socialism, these three occupy exalted platforms.  

Let us now move to the “minor leagues” of socialism. In Cuba, Rummel estimated that Castro’s government killed at least 73,000 people for political reasons, and perhaps as many as 140,000, in a country with a population of 11 million today but just six million when he seized power in 1958. Castro staged hundreds of public executions after he seized power, imprisoned thousands of opponents—real or suspected—and seized property from landowners and foreign corporations. Compared to his Communist brethren, Castro appears almost humane in terms of the “modest” scale of his killings. In reaching this conclusion, however, one must leave to one side Castro’s wish to launch a nuclear attack against the United States in 1962, in retaliation for the U.S. demand for the removal of offensive Soviet nuclear weapons from the island. Like other socialists, Castro was ever ready to consider extreme measures.

In Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, the socialist Khmer Rouge regime, under the leadership of Pol Pot, murdered some two million people in a country with a population of only seven million, according to estimates compiled by Rummel and verified by a war-crimes tribunal set up in 2001 by a successor government in Cambodia.

Below is Rummel’s summary of this catastrophe:

In proportion to its population, Cambodia underwent a human catastrophe unparalleled in this century. Out of a 1970 population of probably near 7,100,000, Cambodia probably lost slightly less than 4,000,000 people to war, rebellion, man-made famine, genocide, politicide, and mass murder. The vast majority, almost 3,300,000 men, women, and children (including 35,000 foreigners), were murdered within the years 1970 to 1980 by successive governments and guerrilla groups. Most of these, a likely near 2,400,000, were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot and his comrades sought to follow Mao’s lead and purge the socialist movement of impure elements. Doing so meant the massacre of religious and national minorities, intellectuals, and city dwellers. Hundreds of thousands of victims were murdered in the “killing fields,” various sites across the country where Khmer Rouge soldiers and officials carried out executions and buried victims in mass graves. This slaughter ranks near the top of the list of socialist atrocities in terms of the proportion of the population killed.

Some socialists and fellow travelers have blamed the U.S. war in Vietnam for the slaughter, apparently because socialists are liable to act like madmen if provoked. It was, of course, to prevent this kind of lunacy that the United States intervened in the first place in Southeast Asia.  

The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea must be judged as the most bizarre of all socialist states, which is saying something in light of the standard established by the regimes listed above. The fact that the whole country is an open-air prison camp with a regimented population does not make it much different from other socialist regimes. The country is unusual in having a dynastic government run by the Kim family (now in its third generation of rule), with the hereditary succession written into the fundamental law of the country.

Rummel estimated that, in a country of twenty-five million people, between 700,000 and 3.5 million people have been murdered in the North Korean democide, with a reasonable midpoint being around 1.6 million. It is difficult to quantify the victims, because North Korea is a closed society. Rummel judged that the great proportion of those killed by the regime died in prison camps from forced labor, starvation, and illness.

During the Korean War, Communist officials followed North Korean troops as they advanced into South Korea and systematically massacred South Korean civilians perceived to be anti-communists. They then repeated these massacres as North Korean troops retreated northwards. In addition, the regime impressed some 400,000 South Koreans into their army, a large proportion of whom died from being forced into the most dangerous or laborious assignments. North Korea also failed to account for many thousands of American prisoners of war. 

The contemporary case of Venezuela is different from other experiments in socialism because of the relative absence of democide, at least to the extent catalogued above. Venezuelan socialism has instead resulted in economic collapse and social chaos. In Venezuela, socialists did not seize power by violent revolution but were initially elected by the voters, similar to Hitler’s accession to power. In socialist regimes elsewhere, the kind of economic failure now taking place in Venezuela has provoked repression, extrajudicial decrees, the elimination of legal protections, and mass murder. Beginning under Hugo Chávez and continuing under Maduro, legal and constitutional protections have evaporated in Venezuela, but the regime did not resort to large-scale killings, perhaps because it is no longer a practical option. Now that is progress.

Venezuela was one of the more prosperous South American countries for most of twentieth century, owing to a diversified economy and, more recently, to abundant oil reserves that allowed the country to accumulate export surpluses. Oil profits promoted a higher standard of living in the country, though they also drew more labor and capital into the oil industry and put the country’s economy at the mercy of the ebb and flow of international prices. When Chávez won the presidency in 1998, he moved quickly to nationalize the oil industry, raise taxes on corporations, and redistribute land. He also supported a revised constitution for the country giving the president a longer term and more power and granting new social rights to the population.  

Rising oil prices in the early years of the regime allowed Chávez to increase social spending and distribute funds to constituent groups, even as foreign corporations withdrew capital from the country. Since socialists do not believe in the price system, Chávez did not fully understand that oil prices could go down as well as up. In the event, oil prices collapsed in the great recession of 2008, leading to inflation, collapse of the currency, capital flight, and general economic chaos—all inevitable consequences of socialist policies. 

In addition, Chávez and Maduro mismanaged the country’s oil industry, expelling foreign interests, failing to invest in new technology, and subjecting it to state ownership. In 1998, before socialists came to power, Venezuela produced 3.5 million barrels of oil per day; in 2025 that number is down to around one million barrels per day. This is yet more proof that, despite wanting to run everything, socialists are incapable of running anything except a prison camp.   

In response to protests and mounting opposition, the socialist government cracked down on critics. In 2013, Maduro, Chávez’s successor, requested an enabling law to permit him to rule by decree. The next year he created the “Ministry of Supreme Happiness” to coordinate government social programs. The measures did not “work,” if by that term we mean a return to prosperity and stability; of course, they are never going to “work,” since socialism is an ideological doctrine rather than one of workable economics. The ongoing crisis in Venezuela is a direct result of these failed policies.

To make matters worse, the regime has sought to export its troubles around the region and to the United States, by running drugs and encouraging gang members to enter the United States via an open southern border during the Biden years. This brought down a criminal indictment on Maduro from the United States, which he never thought would be enforced. In the event, the Trump administration arrested him last week and threatened to bring to an end that country’s unfortunate experiment in socialism.

Some say that Venezuelan voters chose this course when they elected Chávez and then Maduro, and so they deserve to reap the consequences of what they have sown. Given how flagrantly the regime rigged elections, it would be unfair to blame the poor people of Venezuela, many of whom are against the socialist government. Others may have voted for the socialists out of naiveté or misplaced hope, just as some Americans have done recently in New York’s mayoral election. 

The question has often been asked: why does the same thing happen over and over again wherever socialism has been tried? Socialist plans and policies—central planning, five-year plans, collectivization of agriculture, nationalization of industry, the concentration of power into the hands of a few—lead inevitably to economic collapse and repression, and often large-scale killing_._ Socialism always and everywhere begins with idealistic promises and ends in barbarism. 

F. A. Hayek answered this question as long ago as 1944 when he published The Road to Serfdom, his classic critique of socialism. At that time, the socialist experiment was still in its early stages with just two examples from which to draw lessons, the Communist regime in Russia and Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. The brutal history of socialism was yet to play out fully in the post-war era, but the lessons Hayek drew from Stalin and Hitler would turn out to apply perfectly to Mao, Castro, the Kim dynasty, and all of the socialist tyrants that came later. 

As Hayek pointed out, in socialist movements there is a tendency for the most brutal and unscrupulous people to rise to the top because they are the types who are willing to take the necessary steps to seize and relish exercising absolute power. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot were not the kinds of people one might have encountered in faculty lounges or middle-class town meetings. They were blackguards and thugs one and all, which is the key trait needed to rise to the top in a movement in which power goes to those willing to use extreme measures for the sake of “progress.”  

Socialist policies, moreover, are always going to fail because it is impossible for central planners to allocate capital, goods, and services efficiently across a large economy.  Capitalism has the price system to aggregate that information; socialism has planners who know little about how the economy actually works. When there arose shortages of food or housing or military equipment—when socialist policies failed—leaders were faced with a choice of admitting failure and abandoning the socialist path or doubling down on their policies and preserving their power. It was in their nature to choose the latter course and thus to press forward with more extreme measures, which typically involved the identification of “counterrevolutionary” scapegoats. From there it was but a few steps to the catastrophic outcomes described above: show trials, terror famines, mass starvation, cultural revolutions, killing fields, and democide_._

New York voters who elected a socialist mayor are unlikely to face the worst of these consequences, since they reside in just one city in a free country where mass arrests or mass killings of the kind cited above will not be permitted. But, if history is a guide, they are likely over the next few years to deal with rising crime, deteriorating city services, failed experiments, wasted public funds, people and corporations fleeing the city, and extremist rhetoric designed to cover for the accumulating failures. It is possible that the damage done will reach the point where New York’s decline becomes irreversible. 

To return to the question posed at the beginning: is socialism a hate crime? The record speaks for itself: socialism is a hate crime, a doctrine of tyranny, mass murder, and human suffering on a vast scale. What should be done about it is a different matter. The important thing for now is to identify the crime.

• New Structure: U.S. government replaces MyPlate with an inverted food pyramid prioritizing proteins, dairy, healthy fats, fruits, and vegetables above whole grains.
• Guideline Release: The Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services issued the 2026 dietary guidelines on Jan. 7, retiring MyPlate.
• Added Emphasis: Guidance urges avoiding highly processed foods, refined carbs, and added sugars while excluding unrefined sugars in fruit and milk from the “added” category.
• Healthy Fats Defined: Healthy fats now include meats, poultry, eggs, omega-3 seafood, nuts, seeds, full-fat dairy, olives, avocados, olive oil, butter, and beef tallow while saturated fats remain capped at 10% of daily calories.
• Protein Increase: Baseline protein intake rises to 1.2–1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, raising the 150-pound recommendation from 54.4 grams to 81.6–108.8 grams.
• Advisory Committee: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rejected the previous scientific advisory committee’s plant-forward recommendations after concerns about ultraprocessed food evidence.
• Processing Guidance: People should avoid packaged, salty, sweet, sugar-sweetened, artificially flavored, preservative- or non-nutritive sweetener-containing foods despite an unclear definition of “highly processed.”
• Program Impact: The guidelines will influence school, military, and SNAP meals over two years and provide tailored advice for infants, pregnant people, older adults, and alcohol reduction.

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The U.S. government has officially resurrected the food pyramid — and flipped it on its head.

The new food chart emphasizes meats, dairy and what it calls "healthy fats," as well as fruits and vegetables. It accompanies new nutrition guidance that upholds some well-established diet recommendations while breaking with others.

The Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services released the new dietary guidelines on Wednesday (Jan. 7), and in doing so, they retired MyPlate, a visual guide to healthy eating that replaced the food pyramid in 2011. The so-called New Pyramid is an inverted triangle with protein, dairy and "healthy fats" at the top, alongside vegetables and fruits. At the bottom of the flipped pyramid are whole grains.

The brief guidelines accompanying the New Pyramid place a heavy emphasis on avoiding highly processed foods, refined carbohydrates and added sugars, noting that the unrefined sugars found in foods like fruit and milk are not considered "added."

The guidelines also specify that healthy fats include those found in meats, poultry, eggs, omega-3–rich seafood, nuts, seeds, full-fat dairy, olives and avocados. Olive oil (mostly unsaturated fat) and butter and beef tallow (mostly saturated fat) are listed as good options for cooking oils. That said, the guidelines don't change the long-standing guidance about limiting one's consumption of saturated fats, stating that they should not exceed 10% of a person's total daily calories.

The guidelines significantly increase recommended protein intake, NBC reported. Established guidelines say that 0.8 grams of protein per 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) of body weight would meet the daily nutrition requirements of the average, sedentary adult. Higher amounts are recommended for physically active adults (about 1.1 to 1.5 grams per kg) and older adults (about 1 to 1.2 grams per kg).

The new guidelines recommend a baseline daily protein intake of 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. So for a 150-pound (68 kg) person, that's a jump from 54.4 grams of protein a day to about 81.6 to 108.8 grams.

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had delayed releasing new dietary guidelines for months after rejecting the work of a 20-person scientific advisory committee assembled under President Joe Biden, STAT reported. The committee was poised to recommend plant-forward diets, rather than meat-centric ones, and had concluded that the existing research on ultraprocessed foods was inadequate to develop clear recommendations.

(The definition of "ultraprocessed" can be difficult to pin down, and while many experts agree ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy to eat in excess, it's hard to know if every food under the ultraprocessed umbrella carries the same health risks.)

The new guidelines, meanwhile, put a notable emphasis on meat and dairy and say to avoid highly processed foods, without clearly defining what "highly processed" means. They do say to avoid packaged, prepared and ready-to-eat meals; foods that are salty or sweet; sugar-sweetened beverages; and foods containing artificial flavors, or preservatives, or low-calorie, non-nutritive sweeteners.

Some experts worry that the guidelines' emphasis on meat and dairy — including the notable inclusion of steak, ground beef and a carton of full-fat milk on the illustration of the inverted pyramid — may promote high intakes of red meat and dairy products. This "will not lead to optimally healthy diets or a healthy planet," Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told CNN in an email.

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"These guidelines recommend heavily meat-based diets — protein is a euphemism for meat," Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and professor emeritus at New York University, told STAT via email.

MyPlate previously sorted foods into five categories — fruits, vegetables, grains, protein, and dairy and fortified soy alternatives — and provided general recommendations for how much food a person should eat from each category based on their age and sex. As a rule of thumb, fruit and vegetables made up half the plate, and proteins and grains comprised the other half, with a small amount of dairy featured on the side. Healthy oils were defined as vegetable oils and those found in seafood and nuts.

MyPlate also emphasized that additional factors beyond age and sex — such as height, weight, physical activity levels, and whether you are pregnant or breastfeeding — may affect daily nutrition needs. About 150 pages of guidelines detailed those nuances, and also set specific intake limits on added sugars, saturated fats, sodium and alcohol.

The new guidelines also acknowledge that a person's nutrition needs may vary depending on various factors, and they provide some brief guidance for specific populations, such as infants, pregnant and lactating women, and older adults.

They don't note a specific limit for daily alcohol intake, instead saying that people should generally "consume less" for better overall health. They also specified groups, such as pregnant women, who should avoid it altogether.

They added that those with a "family history of alcoholism [should be] be mindful of alcohol consumption and associated addictive behaviors." (While genetics do play a role in who is vulnerable to alcohol use disorder, genes are not the only factor at play, and people without a family history can also develop the addiction.)

These national dietary guidelines influence what's included in school lunches and military meals, as well as federal food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), NBC reported. A White House spokesperson said the new guidance will be phased into schools and federal food programs over the next two years.

Disclaimer

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical or dietary advice.

• New Year note: Author busy with new house and plans to return to headline coverage soon while highlighting her POLITICO Black Swan prediction contribution.
• Core thesis: Organic label described as wellness-industry cash cow lacking scientific backing and often inferior to conventional farming metrics.
• Industry analogy: Organic ideology likened to anti-vaccine narratives, both built on chemophobia, naturalistic fallacies, and distrust of regulation.
• Pesticide reality: Organic agriculture uses numerous “natural” pesticides that can be more toxic and applied at higher rates than regulated synthetic alternatives.
• Regulatory gap: National Organic Program exempts natural pesticides from EPA safety assessments, unlike conventional pesticides that require toxicology data and residue limits.
• Residue misconception: Claims of fewer residues on organic produce stem from not testing organic-approved chemicals, while conventional produce is monitored and mostly below safety limits.
• Harmful consequences: Organic yield penalties drive estate loss, deforestation, higher food prices, and Sri Lanka’s failed 2021 organic mandate cited as evidence.
• Call to action: Reject organic ideology in favor of evidence-based agriculture to protect public health, sustainability, and scientific integrity.

Hello and happy New Year! While lots of chaos continues to roll out from RFK Jr.’s anti-science HHS, including throwing out vaccine recommendations that save lives and bastardizing nutrition recommendations, I have simultaneously been super busy with lots of things, including buying a house last week! More on that (maybe) in a future newsletter, but now that I am settling in, I will be back to tackling topics related to recent headlines very soon!

In the meantime, if you missed it, I wrote one of the 15 Black Swan predictions for 2026 for POLITICO here.

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I bring this up because it was published last week, but also, because this piece, from my January column for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, talks about the 35-year wellness industry con that is the USDA Organic label. Just like dietary supplements, unproven health interventions, and unregulated wellness tests, the Organic industry is a multi-billion dollar cash cow (get it—I love a good pun) that is based on zero science and all vibes. And in nearly every metric, it’s objectively inferior than conventional alternatives—including for the reasons you’re buying it (environment, health, etc).

So let’s get into it.

And if you want to help support a scientist who is trying to help fact-check falsehoods that are harming you and the planet, consider subscribing to ImmunoLogic:

Note: this piece was written originally for my column, Inside Immunity, for the January/February 2026 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

The organic farming and food industry is based on clean-food ideology, chemophobia, and the fantasy that “natural” is a scientific argument. It is born from the same wellness industry that sells detoxes, “clean” eating, supplements, and anti-chemical fearmongering, wrapped in conspiracy-lined distrust of scientific institutions and regulation. Organic is not a science-based food system; it’s a belief system. Just like the wellness industry, it undermines science, harms public health, deepens inequality, and drives policy that prioritizes vibes over evidence.

People believe organic is the opposite of anti-vaccine ideology. It isn’t; it’s cut from the same cloth. Anti-vaccine ideology praises “natural immunity”; organic advocates praise “natural farming.” Anti-vaccine ideology fearmongers about “toxins” in vaccines; organic activists do the same for “toxic pesticides.”

Anti-vaccine ideology demonizes “Big Pharma” while organic crusaders vilify “Big Ag.”

Same tactics, different targets.

Organic farming is [not safer](https://doi.org/10.1093/nutrit/ nuae104), not more nutritious, not better for the environment, and not pesticide-free. It is just marketed to make you feel that way.

The National Organic Program (NOP) was not created for safety, health, or sustainability; it was created in 1990 as a marketing standard. It is the agricultural counterpart to the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). DSHEA removed FDA safety oversight of dietary supplements; the NOP did the same for “natural” farming methods. Neither require proof of safety or benefit, but both fuel profitable industries; organic farming is [22–35 percent more lucrative](https://doi. org/10.1073/pnas.1423674112) than conventional.

NOP is ideology, not science. There are no standards for pesticide toxicity, nutritional impact, environmental footprint, or worker safety to get that organic label. It simply bans “synthetic” farming tools while rubber-stamping “natural” ones, even when those natural options are more dangerous. In contrast, conventional farming tools adhere to rigorous scientific safety standards and regulatory rules. Just like the supplement industry, organic farming is less regulated than its conventional counterpart yet pretends to be superior.

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Natural Does Not Equal Safer—Even for Chemicals Designed to Kill

The organic industry has convinced people for more than thirty-five years that organic means no pesticides. This is objectively false. Organic farming uses a lot of pesticides. A non-exhaustive list includes copper sulfate, sulfur, pyrethrins, 20% acetic acid, spinosad, copper hydroxide, copper oxide, peracetic acid, eugenol, hydrogen peroxide, boric acid, potassium silicate, and Beauveria bassiana.

The difference? They’re “naturally derived,” which in science means absolutely nothing about their effectiveness or safety. Many organic-approved pesticides are more toxic and less selective because they are prohibited from chemical alteration to improve safety or specificity.

Copper sulfate, one of the most widely used fungicides in organic farming, is toxic at 300 milligrams per kilogram body weight (LD₅₀ = 300 mg/kg). It accumulates in the soil and groundwater and can be toxic to fish, aquatic life, and even humans at high enough doses. On the flip side, mancozeb, a synthetic fungicide used in conventional farming, is twenty-six times less toxic with an LD₅₀ of 8,000 mg/kg, and it rapidly degrades in the environment. Yet mancozeb is demonized solely because it’s synthetic, even though it is objectively safer and more effective.

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Comparison of application rates and toxicity of fungicides used in conventional and organic farming.

Organic pesticides are typically less potent and less targeted, which means farmers must apply more per acre and more frequently than conventional pesticides to protect crops.

Eugenol (4-allyl-2-methoxyphenol), a clove-oil herbicide used in organic farming, is more than twice as toxic as glyphosate and requires ten times the amount per acre to control weeds. Farmers apply it up to six times per season, compared to one or two glyphosate treatments. The result is opposite to what organic marketing promises: more chemical load, more ecological disruption, more risk to farmworkers. And, ironically, because glyphosate has been targeted for nearly fifty years by anti-science activists, it is one of [the most studied and safest herbicides](https://skepticalinquirer.org/ exclusive/a-skeptical-guide-to-glyphosatetoolkit-for-ten-common-claims/) to exist.

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Comparison of application rates and toxicity of herbicides used in conventional and organic farming.

A chemical isn’t safer because it “came from a plant.” Toxicity has nothing to do with where a substance originated. It is based on chemical identity, route of exposure, dose, and mechanism of action. That’s true for every substance, pesticides included.

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Organic Pesticides Are Unregulated

The National Organic Program (NOP) exempts “natural” products from the safety and regulatory requirements conventional pesticides must meet. It’s the same wellness loophole we see in medicine: vaccines undergo extensive clinical testing, dose–response analysis, toxicology, and post-market surveillance, while supplements make health claims without proving safety or efficacy. If you wouldn’t swap a vaccine with a “natural immune booster,” why replace evidence-based crop protection with “natural” pesticides that don’t have equal scientific standards?

Every conventional pesticide must pass toxicology and risk assessment before it is approved for use. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets enforceable residue tolerances (maximum residue levels, MRL) after all these are assessed: acute and chronic toxicity, carcinogenicity, developmental and reproductive toxicology, endocrine disruption potential, dietary and applicator exposure, environmental fate, and ecological impact. USDA’s [Pesticide Data Program](https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/ media/2023PDPAnnualSummary.pdf) (PDP) then monitors residues on finished food products annually to confirm real-world levels remain below EPA’s safety thresholds, set 100–1,000 times lower than doses shown to cause harm.

On the converse, most pesticides approved for use in organic farming skirt all this evidence-based oversight. If a substance is “natural” or “nonsynthetic,” the NOP permits it even without EPA tolerance-setting, residue limits, dietary risk assessment, or residue monitoring. This is policy based on the appeal-to-nature fallacy.

The difference between conventional and organic farming isn’t “pesticides” versus “no pesticides.” It’s risk-based and regulated chemistry versus vibes-based and unregulated chemistry. It’s the same false dichotomy that separates FDA-approved medicine from supplements and “wellness” cures. Nature happens to make botulinum toxin, asbestos, cyanide, arsenic, ricin, and snake venom, all of which are highly poisonous.

Organic policy hides risk; it doesn’t reduce it. Less tested, less regulated, and often more toxic compounds get a pass because they’re “natural,” while safer, more targeted, more studied compounds are banned based on ideology. That isn’t protecting health or the environment. It’s legitimizing pseudoscience for profit.

Organic Foods Don’t Have ‘Fewer’ Pesticide Residues; We Just Don’t Test for Most of Them

Even well-intentioned people repeat the falsehood that organic produce has “fewer residues,” so much so that even the American Academy of Pediatrics has adopted this as an official position.

The problem? Most people don’t realize that organic pesticide residues aren’t monitored! People cite the USDA Pesticide Data Program (PDP), but the PDP monitors synthetic pesticides to ensure compliance with EPA tolerance limits. Because organic-approved pesticides are exempted from tolerance limits, the PDP does not test for them. When people claim organic food has “fewer residues,” they have identified a data gap. You can’t detect things you aren’t testing for!

“Not tested” is not the same as “not present,” yet the organic industry has been profiting off misleading people for decades. In reality, the PDP should reassure you that conventionally grown foods are very safe: over 99 percent of detected residues are well below safety limits.

'Not as Bad as Anti-Vax' is a Cop-Out: Organic Is Harmful

When I point out that organic ideology and anti-vaccine ideology share the same playbook, I’m often told, “But buying organic doesn’t hurt anyone.” Except it does. Organic ideology damages the environment, undermines food security, increases food costs, and harms public health.

Organic yields are 10–30 percent lower than conventional farming. Lower yields require more land to grow the same food—meaning more deforestation, more habitat loss, and more greenhouse gas emissions. Modeling shows that large-scale organic farming adoption would increase greenhouse gas emissions by [approximately 20 percent](https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41467-019-12622-7) from land use change alone. The [European Union’s 2020](https://www.ers.usda.gov/ webdocs/publications/99741/eb-30.pdf) Farm to Fork plan—which aims to cut (conventional) pesticide use in half and double organic acreage by 2030—is estimated to [cause 20–30 percent yield losses](https://doi. org/10.2760/98160), food price increases up to 30 percent, and greater land pressure.

We’ve seen these consequences already. In 2021, The Sri Lankan government banned all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to force a nationwide switch to “100% organic.”

The result? Agricultural collapse, economic instability, and a food crisis. Rice yields fell by 30 percent, tea by 18 percent, food prices skyrocketed, and the economy spiraled. The outcome was so catastrophic that the government reversed course within seven months, which was already too late (International Monetary Fund 2022).

The Sri Lankan government later admitted the policy had a “worse-than-anticipated impact on agricultural production.” Translation: every scientific and economic expert warned them, and they ignored data anyway. When governments make policy based on beliefs instead of evidence, the outcome is inevitably harmful.

Organic ideology erodes public health by fixating on imaginary risks while worsening real ones. The Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list manipulates the PDP report to scare people about more affordable, nutritious produce that don’t actually have harmful pesticide residues on them while conveniently ignoring that organic pesticide residues aren’t monitored.

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](https://news.immunologic.org/p/the-dirty-dozen-undermines-trust)

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The Dirty Dozen undermines trust in safe and nutritious fruits and vegetables

](https://news.immunologic.org/p/the-dirty-dozen-undermines-trust)

Dr. Andrea Love

·

June 19, 2025

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Read full story

](https://news.immunologic.org/p/the-dirty-dozen-undermines-trust)

Trace pesticides aren’t hurting people; scaring them from eating produce is. Ninety percent of Americans don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, and unfounded fear of pesticides exacerbates that, especially for low-income households. Telling people they are poisoning their families if they eat conventionally grown produce objectively worsens health. This tactic from the organic industry is the nutritional equivalent of anti-vaccine propaganda: create fear of a fake threat to drive people toward a real risk.

Organic ideology harms farm workers too. Rejecting conventional herbicides means increased tillage and hand-weeding, which leads to more injuries, more exploitation, more soil erosion, and more greenhouse gas emissions from farm machinery. Rejecting conventional insecticides and fungicides means less effective, more ecologically damaging, or more toxic alternatives must be handled and used. The anti-science principles of organic farming don’t improve health or sustainability; they just give wealthy consumers moral superiority.

Organic ideology is directly tied to medical conspiracism along with the anti-vaccine movement and wellness pseudoscience. They originate from the same anti-science narrative: fear of “toxins,” distrust of regulators, hostility toward biotechnology, and outsized faith in the “natural” label. People who believe falsehoods about pesticides, GMOs, “chemicals,” or “toxins” also reject vaccinations, seek unproven cancer treatments, and refuse evidence-based health behaviors.

This is not a coincidence, this is by design.

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You can’t be pro-science and pro-organic the same way you can’t be pro-science and anti-vaccine.

Both come from anti-science, chemophobic, anti-expertise, “nature knows best” ideology. Both replace risk assessment with moral panic. Both harm society. Organic is not the “healthy” choice; it’s the agricultural arm of the wellness-industrial-complex that undermines trust in science and profits from fear.

If you care about public health, sustainability, food security, or scientific integrity, the responsible position is to reject organic ideology outright. Not to excuse it. Not to “agree to disagree.” Reject it.

Wellness-based agriculture is no more acceptable than wellness-based oncology or wellness-based immunology. Science isn’t something you get to apply in healthcare and abandon in the grocery store.

If you support evidence-based medicine, then support evidence-based agriculture. Anything less is anti-science hypocrisy.

We all must join in the fight for science.

Thank you for supporting evidence-based science communication. With outbreaks of preventable diseases, refusal of evidence-based medical interventions, propagation of pseudoscience by prominent public “personalities”, it’s needed now more than ever.

Stay skeptical,

Andrea

“ImmunoLogic” is written by Dr. Andrea Love, PhD - immunologist and microbiologist. She works full-time in life sciences biotech and has had a lifelong passion for closing the science literacy gap and combating pseudoscience and health misinformation as far back as her childhood. This newsletter and her science communication on her social media pages are born from that passion. Follow on Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Facebook, or support the newsletter by subscribing below:

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