America has a remarkable way of treating the impossible like a logistics problem. In 1961, after the country had put a man in space for all of fifteen minutes, President Kennedy promised to go one step further. A giant leap further, in fact. America spent the GDP of a mid-sized country, employed 400,000 of the finest minds of a generation, built things, broke them, built them again, and finally strapped three men to a rocket with less computing power than a washing machine. Somehow, within eight years of setting the target, and only 66 years after inventing powered flight, it landed a man on the moon.

What other power could have achieved such a thing, let alone dreamed it? The USSR had ambitions, certainly, but ultimately didn’t have the right stuff. Today, the European Union – which resembles the USSR in some ways, although not in industrial output – looks at Elon Musk’s rocket catcher and shakes its head. Not out of awed disbelief, but because it knows, on some fundamental level, that it simply doesn’t have what it takes to realise such an implausible ambition. It won’t admit as much, of course, instead muttering to itself something about the rocket’s carbon emissions or a lost opportunity for regulatory paperwork.

There’s a meme for this, and every European technocrat knows it as an unanswerable humiliation.

The contrast could hardly be more absurd. While SpaceX catches a 275-tonne rocket booster mid-air, the European Union puts its best minds to a bottle cap tethered to the body by a plastic strap. In their way, these achievements represent the limit of what each civilisation believes itself capable of. On one side, an engineering miracle signalling hope and the spirit of adventure. On the other, a consumer irritation mandated into existence by environmental regulations.1

America wasn’t the first nation to think impossible things and bring them into being through sheer swagger. Britain, which today leads the world in decline, once had an empire on which the sun never set. That’s quite an achievement for a damp little archipelago off the coast of mainland Europe.

There are genuine sins of empire, and no serious person should deny them. But the narrative pushed in schools and universities that British colonialism was an uninterrupted campaign of evil and exploitation is simply nonsense2. Consider all the extraordinary innovations and developments Britain achieved and shared with the world when confidence ran high. Parliamentary democracy, common law, liberalism, capitalism, the novel, penicillin – the list goes on. Britain practically invented the modern world. It also helped end the slave trade at considerable cost to itself. No nation is perfect, but few have so disproportionately influenced the world for good.

Britain built the first railways, too. How extraordinary, then, that two centuries later it struggles to build a new line between its two biggest cities, barely a hundred miles apart. HS2 was meant to connect London to the North, but after years of mismanagement and escalating costs, it will now connect London to Birmingham and not much else. The leg to Manchester was cancelled outright, while a £100 million structure to protect bats from the trains somehow survived the axe – and it might not even work. Kennedy got a man to the moon in eight years. Britain has spent longer than that failing to deliver a single high-speed rail line. The total estimated cost is around £100 billion, but the real cost is national humiliation. The Chinese must look at this with amused disdain. They’ve built dozens of HS2s in the last decade alone, which is why their model now tempts weak Western elites.

Britain is the cautionary tale, proof that a people can talk itself out of optimism within a couple of generations. A can-do attitude is a resource that depletes fast, and all the hand-wringing and virtue-signalling in the world won’t bring it back.

Why does any of this matter, you might ask? So what if Britain is in self-imposed decline? Who cares if the EU can’t tie its own shoelaces without first running them through a regulatory framework? None of that is America’s problem.

It matters because, for all the irritations of the Old World, we share the same values in the end. I want America to win because I want the West to win – the best version of it, anyway. This is our inheritance, paid for by the generations who died in their millions to defend it. Now it’s being squandered by an elite class embarrassed by the West’s success and convinced that every problem requires more state intervention. Not surprisingly, those elites look less to America for clues about how to build things and more to China for clues about how to manage them.

I lived in China for years. Chinese people are the same as you and me in the way all people are the same: the same dreams and worries, the same love of family, the same preoccupation with status, exams, property prices and whether their children are doing well enough.

But there is a different software running underneath, part of its Confucian inheritance. It prizes order, harmony, hierarchy and competent management above almost everything else. The Chinese Communist Party doubtless exploits some of these instincts, although it also imported the West’s worst-ever idea, Marxism, and made it its own – because it’s ultimately interested in power. It despises our democratic norms, not least because its survival depends on rejecting them.

As for the Chinese people, most understand perfectly well what democracy means and why Westerners want it. But they also see the same thing we see: the unending quarrel we have with ourselves. The marches and lawsuits, the deranged students, the collapsing institutions, the elections that leave everyone furious and nothing settled.

As long as the CCP delivers prosperity, raises living standards, keeps violent criminals off the streets and lets everyone else live in peace – albeit inside a surveillance state – many will accept the trade-off. Tiananmen Square showed what happens when the allure of freedom threatens the Party’s monopoly on power. It has no intention of letting things get out of hand like that again. Its response to COVID showed the world what that promise looks like in practice. The police didn’t think twice about welding people into their own homes. The white-suited officials moving through the streets looked like a low-budget dystopia, and that’s just the stuff that was caught on camera. The message was clear: we are in charge here. Play nice or else.

The point is not that the CCP is uniquely cruel, though it’s certainly that. The managed society doesn’t need to be cruel to be a trap, and we can see that even in its most attractive versions.3 The trouble is that top-down management has no off switch, because there is no situation in which more order doesn’t appear to benefit the “good” society, and every risk that personal freedom might subtract from it. The managed society always has a reason to manage more.

That is the bargain increasingly tempting Britain, Europe and, no doubt, America’s progressive aristocracy. We’ve been here before, of course: the state having more control of your life for your own good has the unmistakable smell of socialism. The educated and intellectual class are drawn to the idea because they assume they’ll be the ones running things. They’ll call it “democratic socialism”, but what they really want is China’s Lenovo-Leninism with rainbow flags. This is the socialism of compliance frameworks, managed speech and approved opinion. They want the machinery of order in the service of fashionable projects that undermine the social trust on which freedom depends.

Worryingly, an alarming number of voters want the same thing, if the pandemic is anything to go by. The curtain-twitching, the snitching, the strange moral thrill of telling other people what they were allowed to do – COVID revealed a faultline between two types of people in our societies, between those who want safety first and the rest who value freedom above all. Americans tend to be on the freedom-loving side, which is why even the parts of their political culture Europeans find baffling often make more sense when seen as expressions of an older suspicion of state power.

This is not to say America is anything like perfect. US politics is as ugly as any nation’s, all the more so because it’s put under a media microscope and served up into everybody’s newsfeed every day. Its healthcare system is hardly the envy of the world, and its ideas about maternity leave and gun ownership and a host of other things can be gasp-inducing4. It has conspiracy loons on the right who think the moon landing was faked and hobbyist revolutionaries on the left who think the freedoms that make their protests possible are also, somehow, the problem. It has all the same useful idiots as the rest of us, but with bigger megaphones and an unhappy way of exporting their terrible ideas around the globe.

But, my American friends, none of that is the point – at least not today. As the world looks at your great nation now 250 years young, we see a country that still believes the future is something you make, not something that happens to you. You’re a people who look at a desert and imagine Las Vegas, or at a falling rocket and wonder whether it might be caught.

Your politics might look like reality TV without the meds, but you’ve been here before and come out the stronger for it. In another fifty years, today’s dramas will look like a blip, and you’ll be wrestling with a fresh set of problems, some of them insane, some of them magnificent.

Whatever the future holds, may you remain loud, infuriating, inventive, and free.

Happy 250th birthday, America.

Britain’s Keir Starmer, the latest prime minister to come and go, has one of the worst voices any leader could hope for. An adenoidal robot, Starmer is what an AI would think a technocratic prime minister should sound like. This is not exactly why he failed, of course, but it’s not irrelevant either. Successful politicians are not merely in the business of making arguments. They capture a mood, find the cadence, and give voice to the concerns of the people they’re elected to represent. A leader has to make a country feel that someone is speaking from a real place. Starmer failed on every count, as did his recent predecessors, making 10 Downing Street seem like an Airbnb for political office.

We’re used to despising politicians, but something feels different now. The political leaders of the late 20th century might have been ruthless or morally compromised, but they also possessed qualities that made them impossible to ignore. Their voices carried conviction, competence, or simple courage in a way that seems a little incongruous to us now. The current batch of Western leaders (Trump aside) often seems depressingly forgettable and mediocre by comparison, as if politics has become a recruitment process for people who respond well to media training and tick the right demographic boxes.

The first political leader I remember was the one who appeared on television in the corner of the living room. Children’s TV had a dedicated hour each day – we had three channels back then – and on each side of that were soaps and sports and, most vividly, the news showing the occasional mushroom cloud, a preoccupation with something called the USSR and, at the centre of things, someone I assumed was the President of the Earth and all-round figure of benevolence: Ronald Reagan. This was not entirely inaccurate.

Though my mature understanding of Reagan is retrospective, built from history books and YouTube clips, even as a child watching that screen, I could sense the humour and affability, as well as the solemnity of his historical declarations. “Tear down this wall”, he said, in a way that was impossible to refuse. Few leaders today would dream of uttering such commands to an enemy. Trump might give it the volume but has none of the gravity.

America in the late 1970s was starting to look like a nation in decline – inflation, humiliation abroad – so when Reagan promised a new morning in America, he was already engaging a receptive audience and few, I imagine, were inclined to doubt him. The genial certainty that his critics read as dangerous simplicity looks to me now like someone who understood that leadership is not only administration. It’s the ability to tell a nation what story it’s living inside.

On foreign affairs, Reagan seemed to grasp the Manichean drama of the Cold War in a way that technocrats, then and now, would have found embarrassing, which is probably why they underestimated him. Sometimes the world is not crying out for nuance, but for someone to call the thing in front of them what it is. The evil empire really was evil, and saying so plainly played a significant part in ending it.

Thatcher was the other political figure who loomed from the television, though with little of Reagan’s glamour and absolutely none of the humour. Thatcher was the unfunniest person alive in the 1980s, although she made great comic material for satirists. Where Reagan was sunny confidence, she was weather of a much harsher kind, like a tornado swinging a handbag while telling you to clear up the mess.

It took me many years to appreciate Thatcher because, right up to and including my university years, she was synonymous with all the worst things we were taught to associate with the right: selfishness, greed and a lack of compassion. Much later, I understood that she was an anomaly: Britain’s first female prime minister conquering an aggressively male-dominated arena through sheer conviction and total self-confidence, imposing direction on a country that had grown used to managed decay. By rights, she should be a feminist icon, but she had the wrong politics for that. In any case, she would have rejected any such accolade. For Thatcher, individuals succeed through discipline and hard work. She didn’t want to be treated as “a woman in politics” so much as a politician who happened to be a woman. Identity politics was an indulgence of the other side. She had work to do.

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One of the great stupidities of the British state today, though we see the same across much of the West, is that it has conflated race with culture. This would ordinarily be called a category error, although that makes it sound like a miscalculation rather than what it is: a useful dogma that the managerial class can hide its failures behind. We call it multiculturalism.

Many hear that word and conjure up a society where cultures intermingle happily and enrich the whole. “Look at the wonderful festivals and cuisines”, they say. “Chicken tikka masala is your national dish now. Isn’t it brilliant how multiculturalism has saved the native British from the distress of eating their own food?”

Sure, okay. I mean, I love Indian food. I would take it over fish and chips any day of the week except Sundays, when I opt for Chinese. I’m fine with festivals, too. I’ll pass on Notting Hill Carnival because it’s a little “vibrant” for my taste, but I’m happy for others to parade through London and celebrate their cultures.

None of those things is multiculturalism in the sense I’m talking about in this essay. The cuisine and mixed marriages, the freedom to practise your religion within the law, everybody rubbing along – that’s the soft version of multiculturalism, and almost nobody objects to that. I certainly don’t.

I’m talking about the hard version of multiculturalism, the one written into state policy. It’s the doctrine that says the state should treat some groups differently rather than expect them to assimilate into a shared civic culture. It says, in effect, that the liberal principles which are the bedrock of the free and open societies we enjoy in the West must adapt to imported customs, even when those customs conflict with those same principles. It’s the multiculturalism that defers to “community leaders” and treads on eggshells every time it asks a group to adapt a bit to British norms, maybe rein in the cousin marriage stuff, that sort of thing. It’s the sort of multiculturalism that has critics talking about “failures to assimilate” and “integration problems”. That’s the version I’m talking about in this essay.

And let’s be honest about what “integration problems” really mean. We’re not usually referring to Poles or Nigerian Christians. Nobody seriously worries that the Hong Kong diaspora will refuse to adapt to liberal norms or demand that the local supermarkets stock dim sum.

We’re talking about Islam, and specifically the cultures around some of its more conservative interpretations. Many Muslims integrate perfectly well, of course, and that matters. Where things go wrong is in the immovable religious injunctions that treat secular law, female equality and free expression as problems to be managed rather than rights to be upheld. Conservative Muslim men are not taking their cues from On Liberty but the Koran, and the two sets of ideas, liberalism and literalist Islam, are (shall we say) pulling in opposite directions – the latter producing men who regard women as property and, as we are all too aware today, view girls outside the group as fair game.

This week saw the release of the Rape Gang Inquiry report1. You already know about this unless you’ve landed on this post by accident and have paid no attention to one of the darkest episodes in modern British life.

The report describes how, for decades, organised networks of overwhelmingly Pakistani-heritage men abused and exploited working-class girls, many of them children, across towns and cities in the UK. We already know the rest: that the police, social workers and media looked away for years, and that even when Elon Musk dragged the scandal into the global spotlight, the government's first instinct was to resist – voting down a national inquiry before grudgingly conceding one much later. The sentient filing cabinet that is Keir Starmer previously accused critics of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-right is saying” – because that’s simply the script he pulled from the shelf, one written down long before he came into power.

We also know that the children who reported what had happened to them were treated as the problem; that those whose first duty should have been to listen to these children and care for them instead treated them with suspicion and even contempt. Why? Because they were terrified, above all, of looking racist.

Just think about what that means for a moment. The organised abuse of white English working-class girls mattered less in their moral calculations than the perception of racism. Not actual racism, which is stupid and wicked, but “racism” in the sense a bureaucrat uses it, which amounts to: please stop noticing patterns because your noticing is creating paperwork and I might lose my job if we make a fuss about it.

The governing class understands all this well enough, which is why it puts so much emphasis on crisis management and on holding a tight rein on the mainstream media – not that the latter need much restraining. This is just another institution staffed by the same university cohort that was taught Britishness is somehow morally defective, that it must pay for colonial sins and the rest. Even Britain's feminists, who can detect patriarchy in a manspread, fell silent.

All of them understand the difference between attacking people for their skin colour and criticising ideas, customs and practices. They simply discovered that conflating the two categories was useful, because it made awkward questions easier to dismiss and dissent easier to pathologise. It also preserved their self-image as moral sophisticates, which is why they return to the slogans again and again, like a dog proudly returning to its vomit. The rest of us, meanwhile, see a poisonous mess in urgent need of clearing up, although few have wanted to say so out loud.

Decades of nudge tactics and propaganda have trained the public to respond in very particular ways to questions of race. People learned to self-censor because the charge of racism became the second-worst thing you could be called after paedophile – unless, of course, the paedophiles belong to a protected group, in which case mentioning it is “divisive”. We learned that noticing patterns was the sort of thing the “far-right” do, so we pretended not to see them, or at least not to mention them in polite company.

Who can blame anyone for avoiding these discussions when speaking up costs them their reputation or even their job? And what if going along with it has the opposite effect: a promotion, a status bump, the applause of a handpicked BBC audience? This is the kind of social engineering that has been operating on the general public for two decades or more.

It was Times reporter Andrew Norfolk who, in 2011, broke the "conspiracy of silence" over the abuse of vulnerable girls by organised groups of men. The man who exposed it was promptly accused of racism and received death threats, which tells you everything about what he was up against2. His investigations eventually forced an inquiry, but only after the state had switched on the fog machine at full blast. It’s why we kept hearing about “Asian men”, a group so broad it could mean anyone from Istanbul to Tokyo. The people who could distinguish between 72 genders suddenly couldn't identify a relevant subculture, for the same reason others looked away from the girls who needed protecting: the fear of seeming racist.

But culture is not race. This is not a difficult concept, and a child can understand it. Indeed, it takes a certain kind of education to make people stupid on this point, and perhaps it should not surprise us that the most educated societies on earth have produced managerial classes so obsessed with race and gender that they seem to need to renegotiate terms with reality itself.

For everyone else not bamboozled by tertiary-level groupthink, the difference between race and culture is clear enough: one is inherited, the other is learned. Skin colour by itself tells us nothing about what someone believes, any more than eye colour does. Culture, on the other hand, can tell you quite a lot, especially on questions related to the treatment of women, whether daughters are protected or policed, attitudes to religious dissent, and the moral status granted to girls outside the group.

White girls, for instance.

That is the category error that has now become a rape statistic. The girls who should have been protected by the state – and what other duty could come before protecting its own children? – were treated as an inconvenience instead. Their suffering pointed to a pattern the state had decided not to see, because scrutinising cultural practices had been ruled a form of bigotry. The liberal state, having substituted multicultural values for liberal ones, decided that clarity was more dangerous than abuse.

There is another layer to all this that rarely gets mentioned, and which complicates the simple narrative around Islam. As the commentator Richard North argued recently3, many of the grooming gangs appear to have operated within criminal networks underpinned by the biradari (meaning brotherhood), a clan-based kinship system from Pakistani Kashmir that predates the arrival of Islam in the region by centuries. There is very little online about British biradari culture, except, ironically, a BBC article from 2015 that describes how clan politics emerged in Bradford, home to one of Britain’s largest Muslim communities4. Arrivals to Britain from Pakistan in the 1950s sought out those among them who had a basic understanding of the political system. These men then acted on their behalf, becoming their representatives – what we now call “community leaders”.

“Once the biradaris realised they held a degree of power,” the article noted, “they decided it would be ideal for them to put up their own man, who could relate to them and effectively become a puppet. Deals and bargains were struck between rival clans to secure positions of power.”

If that sounds a bit like the mafia, North has the same thought. Many of these biradari networks, he suggests, have morphed into crime syndicates, not dissimilar to the Mafia crime families in the United States. Law enforcement cannot begin to deal with the rape gang phenomenon until it understands that what confronts it is not merely individual criminality, but organised crime bound by a complex social architecture.

The larger point, and the one that matters for our purposes here, is that none of this is about race. Skin colour explains nothing. If North is right, the rape gangs are woven from several strands – theology, clan loyalty, organised crime – not reducible to any one of them. A competent state would have studied and recognised these variables. Instead, it switched on the obfuscation machine and hoped the whole thing would disappear into the fog, while declaring that any criticism of ideas and customs was motivated by racism. All any of them had to do – the clerical bully, the clan operator with a cousin on the council – was shout “racism”, and half the British establishment would step back in a panic.

The tragedy of all this is that the British state, in its effort to make multiculturalism work, failed in its first duty, which is to protect the citizens, the children, who paid the price for that doctrine. It failed those British Muslims who did assimilate, and especially those reformers inside those communities who challenge regressive practices and should be the state’s best asset in making integration work, but who are instead sidelined at the behest of “community leaders”. And it failed the rest of us by treating the public as a problem to be managed through propaganda, and where that didn’t work, smeared as bigots and racists by the BBC and every other cultural arm of the establishment tied to the same agenda.

The backlash we are seeing today is inevitable, the anger palpable and growing. And the more that anger is met with name-calling, institutional contempt, and eventually jail sentences, the more it seeds darker elements.

Enter the far right, the stupidest possible answer to a real problem. If you make the truth unsayable for decent people, then fascists will gladly pick up the baton. A walk through Twitter/X reveals elements at the margins becoming increasingly fanatical and insane, as I mentioned a few days ago. I’m not talking about angry posts saying “deport them now”. I mean talk of “race traitors” and “lynchings” and the inevitable cretins who have decided “the Jews” must somehow be behind the Pakistani grooming gangs – and these are the posts that make it through whatever filters are meant to catch death threats and calls for mass murder.

The governing class has not even begun to understand the monster it’s creating through its refusal to deal properly with rape gangs and related issues. It has spent decades making the term “far right” close to meaningless. Now that something genuinely ugly is stirring, it has no word left for it.

And that, in turn, has allowed the establishment to point at the monsters it helped produce and say: “See, this is why we couldn’t let ordinary people talk about it”. The whole system has become conveniently self-vindicating. First, lie to the public. Then manage dissent by labelling it “far right”. When this radicalises the margins, use that as evidence that the public cannot be trusted with the truth.

We will learn the cost of this dishonesty in ways that demoralise us further. You can almost sense the ruling class and their apologists in the media praying for some far-right atrocity to take the public’s eyes off their own incompetence and justify their assertion that the problem is something other than themselves. That is how low we have got in Britain. Or we might see another Islamist atrocity that flips the switch on the rage already simmering. From one direction or another, Britain – I’m sorry to say – feels on the edge of violence.

There’s no obvious solution to any of it, though it looks simple enough on paper: a return to old-fashioned liberal principles. Defend individuals, judge practices. Protect minorities from hatred, but do not protect bad ideas from scrutiny. Punish actual criminals – rapists, not wrongthinkers – and do it swiftly and without apology.

Britain has spent decades wrestling with the questions of race and multiculturalism. On one side are the state and its enforcers, desperately trying to manage perceptions and police speech. On the other side, a population that feels managed, insulted and ignored. At the centre of all this is a lie that has betrayed children, protected cowards, abandoned reformers and poisoned public trust.

Today, we’re seeing what that looks like when the heat is turned up, and the lid comes off – a racial politics edging towards violence because one side found it easier to smear good people than to take their concerns seriously. Keir Starmer will call them racists, but their complaint isn't about race. It's the culture, stupid.

As I read back through this piece, fixing the typos and moving things around, I can hear my youngest playing in his room. In a moment, he’ll wander in and ask what I’m doing, and whether I want to come and kick a ball about. He’s ten. He looks a little different from me. I’m as white as a polar bear that’s been kept indoors. His skin is soft brown. My eyes are blue, his are almost black. It barely ever occurs to me that he’s mixed race. It’s the least interesting thing about him, and I suspect that’s true of anyone.

I thought that was supposed to be the point. What happened to judging people by how they think and act towards others, rather than the colour of their skin? We used to call the other thing racism. How tragic that so many people chose to prise this open again – some profiting from it, others swept up in grievances they never knew they had until someone went to the trouble of teaching them.

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This piece is an extended version of a Substack Note I posted yesterday. If you’re new here, please consider subscribing.

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Unless you’ve been living on Mars, in which case Elon Musk might like a word, you’ve probably heard that the man who gave the world PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX is now a trillionaire. This has predictably annoyed a lot of people, among them the kind who still think his gain must be everybody else’s loss.

Yesterday, the writer pointed to a typical example:

Now, economics is not my strong point, but even I know that Nathalie is talking nonsense in a way that will nevertheless get her audience cheering. Musk, she says, has hoarded all the bananas, and the rest of us won’t get our share – and yet he’s celebrated for it. In other words, he’s an evil man born of an evil system.

Only the economically illiterate could make this claim, resting as it does on the assumption that wealth creation is a zero-sum game – that one person’s wealth is another’s poverty (also known as the fixed pie fallacy). But wealth isn’t a fixed quantity to be divided and distributed. It’s something created. Musk’s billions came from companies he built, not from money he took from other people’s pockets.

It's the trillion figure that has people on the left fainting into their chaise longues. Left-wing commentators are pumping out dozens of articles on Substack alone today, frothing at the news that someone who’s built useful things will also profit by them. The writer Nick Cohen has just published a piece titled “Elon Musk: The trillion-dollar psycho — He has hastened the deaths of millions.” That’s the tone we can expect in the coming days, and Cohen is one of the less crazy ones.

There’s a dreary envy in much of this, of course. It’s not just the money – which, by the way, Nathalie, isn’t sitting in a Bank of America current account nudging him over the threshold for a free toaster. It’s equity, tied up in the companies he’s built. And underneath the envy is resentment that Musk has achieved things that most of his loudest critics couldn’t dream of. None of us can, really. The one thing these “creators” have built, and the least admirable, is audiences around a grudge against people who build actual, useful things. Building audiences isn’t something to be disdained in itself (I hope), since it’s what I’m doing here. But there’s a difference between criticising power and pretending financial gain from those efforts is theft.

There’s a better objection that gets drowned out by all this. It’s that wealth on this scale buys power and influence that’s hard to square with democracy – a project we all supposedly consent to on the understanding that we have a roughly equal say in how things turn out. Zuckerberg is another example of this problem. Here’s a private citizen whose decisions about speech and political content shape public perceptions and, by extension, public life for billions. That’s the thing worth discussing, not the bananas.

For the record, I find Musk insufferable and admirable in roughly equal measure.

The admirable part first. He’s obviously a business genius who has somehow created several multi-billion-dollar companies. I don’t doubt that much of it is driven by a genuine desire for human progress. It takes enormous optimism in humanity to do what Musk does, and optimism is in drastically low supply today. We’re teaching our children that the environment is a ticking time bomb and that another extinction-level event is always around the corner (pandemics, AI, and so on). We could instead teach them that humankind has an extraordinary record of solving problems. “Look at Elon Musk”, teachers might say. “He’s building the rockets that could one day take you to Mars”. But teachers don’t say this because, for most of them, Musk is Dr Evil, the quintessential villain, Trump but with maths skills. Sadly, Musk makes this all too easy to believe, for reasons I’ll get back to.

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The title of this essay will have already divided some readers before I get to the first argument. For many, the words “Sam Harris” and “moral clarity” in the same line are uncontroversial, even obvious. Harris, they tell you, has spent more than two decades saying unfashionable things plainly, and often more lucidly than any other public intellectual alive, especially on religion and the moral idiocies of our age. But to some on the left, he is the “Islamophobe” who wants to profile brown people at airports. To some on the right, he is the man who can dissect jihadism from outer space but has a meltdown the moment populism enters the room. Even his own large and devoted audience cannot quite fit him into an ideological box, and often finds him maddening for reasons of its own. This is someone who’s clearer than most of his critics, more exasperating than many of his admirers care to admit, and somehow charges an incredible $25 a month on Substack for the privilege, which many thousands are apparently willing to pay.

I stumbled on Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, the month after it was published in 2004. I read it once, in one sitting, then immediately read it again. I was so impressed that I handed copies to friends, one of whom skimmed the first chapter before throwing it disdainfully on the floor and declaring it racist. That category error – mistaking criticism of Islam for hatred of Muslims – would alternately bore and infuriate the rest of us for the next two decades, right up to the present day, when the British state still worries more about “Islamophobia” than protecting its own children. Harris has been as useful a guide to that moral confusion as anyone, and he brings the same clarity to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which, in hindsight, is where all this was always heading. I’ll come back to that.

First, let’s briefly map the path by which he became one of the leading public intellectuals of our time.

Harris emerged as one of the “Four Horsemen” of the new atheist movement that followed 9/11, alongside Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. That chapter feels like something from another age – it was another age – when rationalism was in vogue and social media was in its infancy. Nobody talks about atheism any more, partly because a new religion stepped into the arena and got everyone arguing about gender and race instead.

Later, Harris became associated with the “intellectual dark web”, a loose collection of heterodox thinkers and academics arguing against the new orthodoxy, including Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Eric Weinstein (who coined the phrase as a joke) and others. That lasted about five minutes, and by the time Covid came along, nobody could agree what they were for or against.

His primary concern throughout these years has been the moral significance of belief – that ideas matter, and that bad ones matter in ways the West would rather not think about. That was essentially the argument in his first book, and it runs through everything he’s written and talked about since, including Islam, Trump, Covid and Israel. Islam most of all, though.

Long before progressive ideology had trained polite society to treat moral clarity as indecent, Harris understood that liberalism cannot survive without the ability to criticise dogma. The left had been explaining away extremism since Salman Rushdie went into hiding for writing a novel, but 9/11 ushered in a remarkable new settlement on the part of the cultural and political establishment. Islam, we were told, was somehow deserving of special exemptions from scrutiny. We learned that criticism of Islam as a set of ideas was equivalent to hatred of Muslims.

To see that moral confusion play out, we can turn to a fascinating cultural artefact: the exchange between Ben Affleck and Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Affleck, standing in for polite society everywhere, simply cannot compute the moral logic Harris is offering. All he’s got is indignation. All he hears is bigotry because he’s soaked up the relentless messaging that honest discussion of political Islam is somehow a form of racism, even though Islam is obviously not a race but a set of ideas. “It’s gross, it’s racist”, says Affleck, echoing a sentiment an entire class has marinated in for a quarter of a century. Affleck isn’t stupid, by the way, nor do I think he’s dishonest. He’s just confused somewhere between becoming Batman and performing the duties of a conscientious Hollywood liberal. Like so many well-intentioned and busy people, he’s absorbed something from the surrounding noise, the way some people pick up an accent. The real dishonesty belongs to the people who feed it to him – the ones who know it’s a category error and reach for it anyway, because admitting it would lose them the argument. Such has been the political culture of our time, with truth a secondary consideration to the demands of the tribe.

Which brings us to Trump, that perfect distillation of everything Harris loathes. Trump, I would agree, is a grotesque figure in many ways: mendacious, egotistical, and vulgar. In 2016, Harris painted a typically vivid image of the man:

“Blow up a balloon without tying off the end, and hold it up high, and then release and watch it fly chaotically around the room. That’s Trump’s mind. In my view that’s what we’d be doing with the country if we put him in charge. Just hitching our future to a totally chaotic system.”

The image was funny because it was true, and the first presidential term bore it out, helped by a media class that went off the rails and still doesn't understand the strange lifeform that is Donald Trump. But Harris did get somewhat obsessive on the subject – enough that even sympathetic listeners started tuning out whenever Trump came up, and his critics claimed he had full-on "Trump Derangement Syndrome". Yet to me, it's always been obvious that Trump is simply a bullshitter in the sense Frankfurt discussed in his famous essay. Unlike a liar who knows the truth and intentionally hides it, a bullshitter is largely indifferent to whether what he says is true or false. Trump doesn't care about the facts; he cares about making the deal. Next to that, you have institutional lying that looks respectable on the surface, speaks in whole sentences and talks about empathy and "saving our democracy". This is lying in the proper sense – deliberate, fluent and ultimately more deceptive.

The Clintons and Obamas of the world seem more “presidential” on the surface, but decorum is not the same as honesty. The people who lied about borders, sex, grooming gangs and political Islam do not become less dishonest because they wear appropriate expressions of concern and speak in managerial clichés. Trump may deal in obvious lies and pointless insults, but on certain basic realities, he grasps the truth that matters: that countries need borders, that men are not women, and that radical Islam is a serious threat. One doesn’t have to wear a MAGA hat or drink “liberal tears” from a mug with his face on it to see that these are statements of common sense that only the hypereducated class could fail to recognise.

Then came Covid.

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The Soviet Gulag was one of the cruellest inventions in human history. Like the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, it attracted its share of sadists. One notorious punishment was to tie naked prisoners to a tree and leave them to the mosquitoes, which swarmed the camps in the summer months.1 At best, prisoners were treated as disposable economic units for the Soviet state. At worst, they were playthings of guards who killed them for their sport.2 In every case, the Gulag was designed to strip human beings of their dignity. Into that hell were thrown dissidents and ordinary citizens, poets and peasants. Among those who came out the other side was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The astonishing thing about Solzhenitsyn is that he refused to define himself by the horrors of the camps. “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life,” he wrote in the book that made the Gulag famous worldwide.3 It’s a sentiment almost impossible to comprehend except, perhaps, as a way of mak…

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“I don’t think you have, mate”.

But he had been stabbed. Henry Nowak, 18, lay handcuffed on a Southampton pavement last December, telling the police what had happened, saying nine times that he couldn’t breathe. Meanwhile, the man who’d knifed him, Vickrum Digwa, stood by, uttering the magic words that would make him the victim, not the dying man with four stab wounds. The spell worked. Nowak died at the scene; the last words he heard were the police reading him his rights. Hampshire Police released the footage months later, in the early hours of a Tuesday morning, the sort of time an institution chooses when it would rather the country was asleep. But the country is not asleep. Indeed, it is more awake than ever to something it has long suspected: that Britain is a failing state now failing in its most essential duty – to protect those it claims to represent. Henry Nowak’s terrible end is what that failure looks like on a police bodycam.

A young man is bleeding in front of you, lying …

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In the first year of this century, I was down and out in Prague, doing a bad impression of Orwell but without a book to show for it at the end. Skint and dislocated, I slept on a lilo in somebody’s hallway at night, and my shoes were so tattered that the laces had to be tied around the middle to keep the soles from coming off. I earned a few beer tokens teaching English, but nearly every other waking moment was spent drinking, reading and playing Scrabble like an obsessive with a fellow traveller. But reading most of all, and in dusty cafés – the sort that resembled a bohemian jumble sale of wonky armchairs and wobbly tables. This was a time before smartphones and American coffee chains. The internet was mainly for email at this point, and the devil was still workshopping social media. I didn’t realise at the time – nobody did – that these were the last days of a particular way of reading.

It was in Prague that I discovered the novel, or rather, …

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Now imagine an intellectual class rushing to the airwaves to insist that motives remained unclear. Meanwhile, a gigantic voluntary PR machine of global reach kicks into motion on behalf of the clergy, who remain mysteriously quiet about the whole thing. While all this is going on, ordinary Catholics go about their business and the rest of us are encouraged to worry on their behalf about a possible backlash.

If any of this is hard to imagine, it’s because our expectations would run in the other direction entirely. So much so that few in the Church would dare respond in any way other than perpetual contrition – the media and intellectual class nagging them into near madness, implicating them in the terrible actions they neither committed nor condoned.

We would hear other Catholics condemning the fanatics in their midst morning, noon and night. The public disavowal from Catholic priests, politicians, and celebrities would be deafening and unanimous. Every parish newsletter in the country would become a counter-terrorism pamphlet. The Pope would barely get through breakfast before issuing another statement. Nobody would need to ask where the moderate Catholics were, because we would be unable to hear ourselves think over the sound of them. We’d be bored with it, frankly. Here they go again, we’d say. Yes, we get the message: you don’t want any association with it, you condemn it utterly. Duh.

Would anyone say it was bigotry to ask why men invoking Catholic doctrine kept murdering children? Would people on discussion panels and newspaper op-eds insist that the real problem was “Catholicophobia”, a word so obviously absurd you’d have to be drunk on communion wine to say it with a straight face?

Do you really doubt any of this? Westerners are pretty good at apologising and worrying out loud for the sins of the past, after all. We’ve heard practically nothing else for decades. Why would this be any different? And what if we swapped out Catholic for Protestant or Quaker? Nothing changes.

How about Muslims?

Just asking that last question makes this piece controversial in a way every preceding line wasn’t. That should tell us something.

But wait a moment, you say. The comparison is unfair. The Catholic Church has a Pope, while Islam has no comparable figure who can issue a statement. This is true, but it’s not the point I’m making. The disavowal that counts springs from the op-eds and discussion panels, from the ordinary believers and those in the community who speak for them, who simply don’t want these things done in their name.

That’s not to say condemnations don’t exist. Of course they do. The Muslim Council of Britain issues its statement, and the press release goes out. Every serious survey finds the same thing: British Muslims condemn terrorism at least as readily as everyone else. Anyone claiming ordinary Muslims secretly approve of atrocities is not paying attention. But a press release read by no one is different from an organic expression of remorse for acts carried out in your name. You might not share that intuition, and if you don't, the rest of this won't move you. But many people, asked honestly, will recognise it.

The disavowal we’re talking about is the deafening, spontaneous, unanimous reflex we imagined for the Catholics, the kind nobody has to ask for because staying quiet would seem so at odds with the claims of the religion of peace. Nobody polls for that, and I cannot hand you a figure. But you do not need one. You know the difference between a reflex and a press release, and that’s what’s missing from the scene following every terrorist atrocity, the unmistakable sense that ordinary Muslims are impatient to condemn the evils carried out in their name.

This is a very different claim from one that says Muslims should perform some sort of disavowal ritual after every atrocity. Of course not – guilt by religion is grotesque, and we’d never impose it on anyone else. The question is why institutions, media and public culture appear to have no comparable expectation of visible, sustained disavowal from Islamic authority and civil society, a public expression of condemnation from ordinary Muslims through their community leaders and public figures.

John Cleese asked a version of that question recently, to which the broadcaster and author of Win Every Argument, Mehdi Hasan, answered: “Oh STFU you racist unhinged ignoramus.”

This is at least a step up from the accusation of “Islamophobia”, more honest in what it’s trying to do, which is to make the man asking the question sound morally suspect and intellectually defective. Anything but answer the question. One can almost admire the efficiency. Why answer the question when “racist” does the job, and the crowd does the rest? (I covered Hasan's record at more length in a note here.)

The question is never answered because answering it would be to admit that the question is reasonable. And it is reasonable, because we would ask the same of Catholics and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists if the most extreme elements were strapping bombs to their bodies.

What explains the anomaly? The radical of any other religion would be disavowed by moderates at no cost, because nothing exists to punish the person doing the disavowing. Not so with Islam.

Consider how much propaganda it takes to make criticism of child marriage feel gauche. Young girls were raped in England, and still are, by groups of men predominantly of Pakistani-Muslim heritage – but saying so makes people wince, because decades of top-down institutional pressure have made plain speaking about obvious evils sound like the real problem.

The concept of “Islamophobia” is just a few decades old, but it has completely changed how we think about a set of beliefs alongside the people who hold them. It has merged these two things in a way that makes the latter a protected entity, so that criticising Islamic ideas now reads as hatred of Muslims themselves. To say that it’s been wildly successful as a way to deflect criticism of Islam is to state the obvious.

Muslims, like everyone else, deserve equal dignity and legal protection. Islam is a collection of beliefs and traditions that should be open to critique like any other. Nobody is arguing that criticism of Marxism is bigotry against Marxists, and we can run the analogy with any other ideology. Only Islam gets a pass.

Which is why today, everyone in public life has reached the conclusion that thinking clearly about Islamist atrocities is bad for community cohesion. It’s a form of moral confusion, of course, but it’s also strangely condescending – as if Muslims need to be held to a different standard. And it’s ordinary Muslims who count the cost of that confusion, since it’s their own dissidents who pay the highest price for speaking in ways we would expect of any other religion. And the more dangerous the question becomes – for Muslims and any of us who dare raise it – the more its absence is presented as proof of good manners.

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The last James Bond movie was five years ago. I remember nothing about it except that, in a first for 007, he dies at the end. This was the best part of the film because it signalled that it was over and I could drag my CGI-battered senses to the exit sign, which had been the most interesting visual in the cinema up to that point.

There was a lot of messaging in the film, of course (masculinity is bad, etc), but as I say, I don’t recall the details; nobody does. The next instalment, when it arrives, will likely ignite the usual media buzz, the sort that accompanies the England football team going into the World Cup before getting knocked out by Uzbekistan on penalties in the quarters. These two events, coming every few years, have tested the patience of an exhausted people who just want a few wins to punctuate the decades-long managed decline of their country – something that says “we can still pull our weight, make a splash, hit the target”.

I doubt the next Bond will deliver on that promise. There’s been speculation about a woman in the lead role, but the more likely move will be to make the next Bond black. Idris Elba’s name has popped up a few times. He would be a fine choice because he would fit the expectation that actually counts. He could inhabit that masculine, brutal, slightly cruel character of the Fleming novels if they let him. Because Bond is resolutely not a feminist. He’s not checking in with Moneypenny about her boundaries or filling out MI6’s inclusivity survey. He’s an assassin. True, Fleming imagined him as a Scots-Swiss product of the British establishment, but the franchise stopped treating that as binding decades ago. This is an action movie, first and foremost, with a recognisable character at its centre. The colour of his skin (it seems to me) is irrelevant.

I’m not sure I would say the same about the casting of Helen of Troy. We recently learned that Lupita Nyong’o will take the role in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The film, which opens in July, is Nolan’s most expensive and ambitious to date. Like Bond, Helen is a character in a work of fiction. But unlike Bond (a franchise character invented in 1953), she’s foundational in a 3,000-year-old text of Western civilisation. Hers is the face that launched a thousand ships. Homer’s stories are what the Ancient Greeks told themselves about who they were, and Helen of Troy is a pivotal figure in that account. Homer describes her as “leukōlenos” – white-armed.

To cast a black actress in the role is to make a statement, and Nolan knows it. The issue isn’t whether Nyong’o is beautiful (I’ve no argument there), nor that she’s black per se. It's that we're being spoonfed an anachronism that shoehorns modern sensibilities into the ancient world. Bond is a character in a franchise. Helen belongs to the Western canon. Casting them isn't the same kind of choice.

If you think it’s irrelevant who plays Helen, then imagine a film adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita – the most sacred text of Hinduism – starring Ben Affleck as Lord Krishna. Or a biopic of Confucius with Tom Cruise in the title role. Or Lady Gaga in the musical version. No Hollywood studio would dream of making these casting decisions today, so why does the same logic operate in reverse for the Odyssey?

Nolan might yet surprise us. He’s made a dozen films, and none that I remember were interested in identity politics, so maybe he’ll leave ideology at the door for his latest as well. But the early signs are not encouraging. There’s already a rumour that Elliot Page will take the role of Achilles, armoured with pronouns and a six-pack. Then there’s rapper Travis Scott. Nolan recently told Time magazine that Scott was cast because the Odyssey was “oral poetry, which is analogous to rap” – the reasoning of a man who has just discovered both.

Even if all these speculations are just to create noise (as I’m doing here), there’s no escaping the broader trend. Hollywood, the BBC, and every other production company keep casting people in roles in ways that run counter to audience expectations. It’s designed to elicit a reaction that can then be filed as evidence of the racism or transphobia it sets itself up to combat. This is a feedback loop that has played on auto for years and shows no signs of wearing itself out. But what the cultural establishment fails to understand is that the pushback is not, for the most part, a protest about historical accuracy and rarely, if ever, actually racist in any literal sense. The actual complaint is more mundane.

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J.K. Rowling has done more for children’s reading than any other living author, but the work that matters now is her campaigning for women and girls. Such is her fame that a simple message on a social platform reaches millions, and she uses that opportunity to do one thing above all: tell the truth. It’s the sort of work that has earned her vilification from the cultural establishment, and at the margins, death threats from people lecturing others in empathy while extending none themselves.

If anyone has empathy, the capacity to inhabit minds other than your own, it’s the author of multiple children’s books and novels. Rowling can imagine monsters better than most, but she’s also seen up close the ones that appear when others abandon that imaginative faculty.

In her commencement speech at Harvard, Rowling spoke about her time at Amnesty:

“I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child.”

If she never forgets it, it’s because she can see not just what suffering looks like from the outside, but how it feels from within. Novels probably cultivate this habit of mind more than any other medium, which is why the decline of reading is starting to look like an emergency.

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The modern world doesn’t make much time for people to sit alone with a thought, let alone a book. An entire industry is devoted to making each of us think we’re the main character on the stage. Everyone else is playing supporting roles. Followers provide the applause, and enemies supply the outrage. Behind every exchange, the algorithm is taking careful notes, then prodding us one way or the other, although the destination is ultimately the same. Social media is in the business of narcissism after all. It leaves no room for the moral instinct that says the “I” is not the centre of the universe.

The totalitarian mindset has always depended on the collapse of this instinct. Mill, writing in 1859, understood this:

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”

Enlightenment liberalism depends on this ability to put ourselves inside the head of the person on the other side of an argument, to understand why certain views of the world feel compelling to them. It takes a leap of the imagination, and it’s hard to do. We get attached to our own reasoning. We accept the thoughts of others when they confirm our own biases and reject the ones that don’t. We sort people and things into categories because reality is messy, and humans can tolerate only so much ambiguity. Certainty is comforting and comfort is everything.

It’s a lesson I’ve learned multiple times, which might tell you something about how hard it is to make the habit stick. Twenty years ago, I decided, for reasons I can’t quite remember, that I’d like to spend time in China. I hadn't given the people much thought before arriving, except, quite honestly, to assume most of them would be brainwashed in some way – a billion brains plugged into whatever the Party was broadcasting that week. The theory fell apart as soon as I visited the home of a Chinese colleague. I didn’t know what to expect – maybe a game of Mahjong or something. Instead, she casually put on Friends, a show I’d made a point of avoiding back home on the grounds that it was beneath me. There I was, the Westerner who’d flown in armed with On Liberty and a second-hand phrasebook, being introduced to an American sitcom (which I loved) by someone I’d assumed was incapable of independent thought. The brainwashed person was me.

The novel is the best defence against this sort of insular thinking because it cultivates the discipline of seeing through another person’s eyes. The categories and compartments get dislodged and rearranged. We see things we couldn’t before. The author grants the villain a soul as much as the hero, and shows us, as Solzhenitsyn did, that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”.

The ideologies gaining traction today run in the other direction. They offer prefabricated responses to complex situations, sparing their adherents the work of imagining the people they’re judging. A fundamentalist doesn’t need to inhabit the inner life of his opponent. Much easier to confer labels: “bigot” and “traitor”, “commie” and “fascist”. The person vanishes with the epithet, leaving a problem to be got rid of rather than another self to contend with.

But this is too neat. Most of the people running on borrowed convictions don’t see themselves as failing the test of imagination. Quite the opposite – they believe they’re exercising it on behalf of someone else, the child in Gaza or the trans teenager who thinks they need to be affirmed. And sometimes this response is more than justified. Of course the children caught up in a terrible war deserve our compassion. Who doesn’t feel angry when the innocent are collateral in the wars of people who care nothing for those they claim to protect? Some children genuinely do suffer gender dysphoria and deserve careful treatment. The complexity is real and asks for a real capacity of mind. The trouble is what happens next. The activist sees herself as one of the good ones, and the cognitive dissonance – between her self-image and the cruelty her position licenses – gets anaesthetised by certainty.

But others are not confused. They have no conscience to wake, no imagination to activate. In these cases, terms like “sociopath” and “monster” aren’t a failure of imagination on our part but a recognition of moral reality. The Hamas rapist really is a sadist. The doctor pushing irreversible treatments on confused teenagers for profit really is displaying sociopathic tendencies. Compassion extended to the cruel is one of the ways cruelty wins.

Totalitarianism, or at least the totalitarian mindset, is where the failure of imagination ends. It’s easier to dismiss a whole people because of what their government is doing. Easier to rip down a poster of a hostage when you’ve trained yourself to see a “Zionist entity” rather than a child. Easier still to hurl death threats at a writer when what you see is a “transphobe” rather than the author of the children’s stories that taught a generation to read. In each case, imagination has been switched off, making cruelty not just possible but desirable.

Rowling has spent a lifetime developing the faculty her critics have shut off, distilling in four sentences what too many of us have spent decades undermining:

“If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you’re illiberal.

If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you’re a fundamentalist.

If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you’re a totalitarian.

If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you’re a terrorist.”

Failing any one of these tests is to fail the imaginative work that liberalism depends on – the willingness to see that others hold their convictions as strongly as you hold yours, that their interior lives are as richly formed, that they are subjects to contend with, not objects to be swept away.

Mill’s argument is wasted on people who have stopped seeing the person on the other side – the African torture victim, the hostage on the poster, the novelist whose books taught a generation to read. It’s a faculty of mind powerfully at work in a novelist like Rowling, which is why she remains so unbearable to those who have traded the person for the label.

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Antisemitic malware works in a similar way. It first presents itself as something noble: justice, compassion, solidarity with the oppressed. In some cases, it comes preinstalled with the ideology you were born into, but for others, it’s a program they voluntarily install. Before long, they’re giving Heil Hitler salutes and screaming genocidal slogans.

Nothing in the compilation video above will surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to the Free Palestine movement up close, but it should make uncomfortable viewing for politicians and media types who think criticism of the movement is just a misunderstanding. If pressed, they might call these people a few bad apples rather than the less inhibited elements of a sinister movement.

Of course, most people on a Free Palestine march are not giving Hitler salutes. The people in a curated video are at the extreme end, but we might fairly ask why this movement attracts so many antisemites. It isn't just the people in the video; it's also the “polite” ones who claim the label of anti-Zionism while focusing so obsessively on Israel that you can almost hear the same software whirring in the background.

As I wrote about recently, it’s not just thugs and morons who get caught up in the hate, but people who wear suits and wouldn’t dream of doing a Nazi salute (at least not in public) but who nevertheless feel the same vengeful hatred toward Jews. The malware infects people of all demographics and classes, but especially those who are already envious and vindictive.

The writer Dara Horn, in her article “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies”, observed that:

“Free Palestine” had, even before October 7, become a kind of verbal swastika—not because of its meaning, but because of how it is deployed. Apart from its use in political or protest contexts, it has also been used as an online-harassment technique: Trolls tag any post with Jewish content—including material unrelated to Israel—with #FreePalestine, summoning more freedom fighters to the noble cause of verbally abusing Jewish teenagers who dare to post pictures of challah. This verbal vandalism made the jump to real life…and harassers now routinely scrawl it on Jewish communal buildings, shout it at their Jewish schoolmates, and scream it out of car windows at anyone wearing a kippah.

The irony is that they think they’re the anti-fascists, the morally sane ones correcting a terrible evil, when the opposite is the case.

It’s not just on the Left, although the left frames it as “compassion” because that’s their identity marker – the signature move in the status game. On the Right, we have the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who seem to treat Hamas as a resistance group and blame the Jews for the world’s ills – and their own grievances, which are many.

There’s effective antiviral software for all this, and it’s called critical thinking. But that’s also the first thing a certain kind of university education drags to the trash can, if it was there to begin with. Too many universities, which once at least pretended to be about the pursuit of truth, now function like churches with a new theology formed of social justice slogans and critical theory. How easily antisemitism slots into that oppressor/oppressed framework, the easiest virtue-signal machine ever invented, overwriting critical thinking and corrupting the operating system it runs on.

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A guide to five common deflections

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Imagine you’re a tourist in Vietnam, enjoying a bowl of noodles in the hostel’s little restaurant. A couple of tables across from you is a Chinese couple, travellers like you. You realise they’re Chinese only when two women nearby, having spotted a tattoo on the woman’s arm, demand to know where they’re from. The tone of the women is sharp, then hostile, then hectoring. From the accent, you guess they’re British. As the embarrassed Chinese couple get up to leave mid-meal, the women throw taunts and accusations of depravity and murder at them, making the couple complicit in China’s “genocide” of Uyghur Muslims. The other travellers sit rooted to their chairs, hoping the scene will quickly pass.

It’s hard to imagine this happening anywhere, let alone in a little corner of Southeast Asia – two British women haranguing a Chinese couple for their apparent crimes against the Uyghur Muslims. What a strange and unlikely scene this would be.

But of course, the couple weren’t Chinese, they were Israeli – identified by an Israel-shaped tattoo – and the cause wasn’t the Uyghur Muslims but Palestine. Suddenly, even a thousand miles away in an unlikely locale, none of this seems far-fetched but all too familiar, so inured have we become to the eruptions of Jew hatred.

“We’re just the goyim, aren’t we?” says one of the women. There it is. She knows the vocabulary well; she’s rehearsed these lines for just such an occasion. “Say you’re against Netanyahu!” insists one of the women. “What about Ben Gvir?” says the other. They can’t believe their luck, and on holiday no less – an Israeli couple on whom they can perform all the antisemitic tropes: “You’re monsters. You’re savages… A hundred and ten countries you’ve been thrown out”. Nobody steps in, nobody urges restraint. The Israeli couple make their way out of the restaurant at last. “Look at them…rats running away… Go on rats. Murderers. Murderers. Savages. Monsters. Genocidal”.

We know this is how it happened because one of the women recorded it on her mobile phone and later uploaded it to social media.1 That says something in itself. Because you can’t imagine this happening following any other kind of racism. Not towards a Chinese couple or an Indian one. If it had been a black couple, the incident would likely never have taken place – even a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist would pause, and if he uploaded any incident of the sort, it would be in private to a group of fellow racists. The costs are too high.

Antisemitism is different. One of these women uploaded the video to social media for all to see. I’m quite sure she did so with pride. Because far from being racist, they likely viewed this as a moral achievement – one that took courage and conviction. If they had any regrets, it was probably that they didn’t get around to chanting “from the river to the sea,” although I doubt they could have put a name to either. Geography is an irrelevant detail when the borders that matter are the ones that divide good from evil, the oppressor from the oppressed. This is what hatred feels like when it feels like virtue.

“This is what hatred feels like when it feels like virtue.”

They didn’t arrive at these beliefs independently, of course. The world’s oldest hatred filtered through numberless versions over countless centuries in which societies have formed certain ideals and defined them in opposition to what they consider “Jewish”. As Dara Horn puts it, referencing David Nirenberg’s research:2

The trope is infinitely adaptable; only the hatred stays constant. And in that consciousness, like malware passed from one age to another, lies the permission to hate: antisemitism recast as a righteous act of resistance against evil.

The Soviets – who could master propaganda in a way they could never muster a successful society – did more than anyone in recent history to rebrand Zionism as “racism” and “colonialism”, exporting this messaging to the developing world and ultimately to the DEI industry in the United States and from there into nearly every university department in the West.3 Qatar and Al Jazeera have since done more than anyone to propagate and finance the operation.4

The scene in the restaurant is the end product of all this. Here are two women who have downloaded the full ideological toolkit from a progressive class whose "polite" dinner-party antisemitism repackages the world's oldest hatred in the oppressor/oppressed framework, making righteous hatred feel legitimate in the 21st century. But it's the Islamists that provide the raw power and endless newsfeed of suffering, some of it real, some of it fabricated. And it's the Islamists who take it to the streets, calling violence "resistance" and murder "justice".

Glastonbury Festival put it to music in 2025 while the BBC filmed it for the nation. “Death, death to the IDF” chanted punk-rap duo Bob Vylan while a thousand middle-class festivalgoers joined in like a gruesome karaoke in the fields of Somerset – a ritual of moral self-congratulation with Palestinian suffering providing the emotional kick. The BBC saw no reason to edit it out because they didn’t hear a racist chant but urgent clarity expressed by like-minded people, high on a feeling of righteousness.

Bob Vylan issued a statement shortly after. “We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people,” they wrote on Instagram, now carefully substituting “dismantling” for “death” – a word that presumably tested better with the lawyers. “We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine.”5 Perhaps those women in the restaurant, who called the Israeli couple rats, were also just dismantling a violent military machine. Or maybe they no longer know the difference because the issues are already complex enough, and sometimes “monsters” does the job.

The Glastonbury death chants were sinister, evoking something dystopian, something alien to the society we thought we knew. In Orwell’s 1984, the state organises a daily ritual called the Two Minutes Hate. Party members come together before a screen, faces contorted with rage, screaming at a singular enemy in an ecstasy of denunciation. Winston Smith, who privately resists everything the Party stands for, joins in at first out of pretence – but then finds himself overtaken by the same urge, which is contagious, delirious, and purifying.

What must it be like to be a Jew in the West today? To have been told from the earliest age that your history is the darkest of all histories, that the evils of the past are stepping boldly once more into the present. To see politicians adopt their practised solemnity at the latest atrocity and the media rolling out exhausted clichés. “An attack on one is an attack on all of us,” they say. “Hate has no place in Britain”. “This is not who we are as a country”.

But hate evidently does have a place in Britain, and this is who we are as a country, at least in parts of it. The clichés and platitudes can no longer hide the fact.

On a pro-Palestinian march through London not too long ago, a kippah-wearing man came face to face with a British police officer. “You are quite openly Jewish,” scolded the latter, as if to preempt any blame for the antisemitic violence that might follow.6

At some point in his life, that man in the kippah would have read Anne Frank’s diary, probably as a child at school, as so many of us did. He might have wondered as a boy what it takes for a civilised society to force its Jewish population into hiding, then hunt them down and finally kill them. Perhaps he closed the book, saddened but convinced that those evils, decades in the past, were safely locked away and unrepeatable. After all, civilised society had agreed: never again.

Today, walking through Golders Green in London or any neighbourhood in the West, he will ponder whether to wear his kippah. Others might hide their tattoos. All of them will wonder at the cost of being “openly Jewish”, for themselves and for their children.

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I’m against violence, on the whole. It’s ugly and nearly always unnecessary. It’s ubiquitous because humans are ubiquitous, but it’s the worst of us. I don’t wish to see violence visited on anyone except people I vehemently dislike – rapists, for example – in whose case I welcome violence as long as it’s delivered solemnly, after a fair trial and preferably by firing squad.

But then again, even capital punishment makes me uneasy. What if they have the wrong person? What about forgiveness and redemption? But this is a different matter from violence outside the state’s monopoly: the lone shooters and wannabe assassins who emerge when certain elements in our society have become so radicalised that they are willing to act on their feelings of hatred, although it's just as likely to be feelings of self-righteousness, even justice and heroism. Their self-aggrandising manifestos usually tell us their act of violence is for the greater good, that they’re ridding the world of an evil only they see clearly, and only they have the courage to eliminate.

It’s the same rationalisation, by the way, that any decent person would likely make if transported back to Weimar Germany. You find yourself with a gun in a deserted alleyway, a young Hitler approaching from the other end. Who wouldn’t shoot him for the greater good? Who would dare not to assassinate the man who caused so much human misery on such a scale, given the chance?

And here lies the problem, because Hitler belongs in a category all by himself. My political adversary isn’t Hitler. Shooting the British Prime Minister (say) would be unthinkable. I would never endorse violence against him, let alone have a direct hand in it. Keir Starmer may be a useless political android – and if he had an off-switch, I might consider flipping it for a bit – but even I concede he’s a human being in the final analysis. And I don’t think he’s motivated by evil intent but simply mistaken and deluded on matters of huge significance. It’s become common for some on the right to complain that Britain can’t vote its way out of its current mess, but at the edge of that lament are some who would act on that impulse if they could with violence. I want nothing to do with them.

But I know what it feels like to loathe people in politics. I’d be willing to bet you do too. Take podcaster and former Conservative MP Rory Stewart. He’s everything I dislike about the modern-day UK politician, a ghastly homunculus in the body of centrism, the Golem of Eton as I think of him. And then there’s his cohost, Alastair Campbell, a creature so unaware of his flaws that it’s become his primary flaw, his unawareness compounding all other flaws in an infinite loop. I’m not alone on this. JK Rowling recently described the pair as “exceptionally arrogant” and “dripping with classism and misogyny”.

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Many years ago, I worked as an editor (but really a ghostwriter) for a publication that ran articles by academics and scientists, and the sort of people with important-sounding positions in the NGO sector. There was a part of the job I dreaded: editing the copy of somebody who put a “Dr.” in front of their name.

Many academics are brilliant, some devoting their lives to exploring a tiny sliver of reality to the exclusion of all else. It’s the quantum physicist, the computational neuroscientist, the zoologist who spent two decades studying the nocturnal habits of the giant African land snail. I was always glad to work with people like this, who happily gave up their time to talk about their work in a way the rest of us could understand.

Oh, but the other ones, the sociologists and literary theorists, the “critical” people. The sort who replied to my brief for a 1500-word article with a 14-page Word doc of cut-and-paste bits from their PhD dissertation on why gardening is racist.

“Thanks”, I lied in my reply email before explaining that this would “need some work”.

A lot of work, as it turned out. The first draft looked fine at a glance. No major grammar errors, maybe a dangling modifier here and there, but the sentences had subjects and verbs; the paragraphing made sense.

The problem was something else, something not getting through to me as though the meaning couldn’t quite travel from the page to my mind. So I’d print it out in the hope that a tangible document would help me grasp what the writer was trying to say. It didn’t work. I squinted at it like a baffled simpleton, mouthing the words, trying to make them mean something. Perhaps I traced my finger along the lines like a child learning to read, I can’t remember.

What is the writer trying to say?

The words were doing something, but the something wasn’t communicating anything other than its own unintelligibility. There was a lot of “problematizing” and “interrogating” going on. The prose was peppered with “praxis” and loaded with “liminality”. Everything was a “discourse” or a “narrative” trailing “problematic signifiers”. But these were mere baubles decorating what was underneath – or rather, what was not underneath. Because this was writing that had spent years marinating in institutional cadence, now served up like the university’s own canteen slop, nutrients processed out, artificial flavouring folded in.

Worse, though, was the flash of recognition. I had studied continental philosophy at university – Heidegger, Derrida and others. Their texts are impenetrable to anyone who hasn’t put in the work, but once you have, you’re through the looking glass. It’s beguiling. Heidegger, especially, is a philosopher doing something novel, pushing at the limits of rational thinking in trying to get at the meaning of being itself. Derrida is another matter. He takes the idea that language is slippery and unreliable, that meaning can never quite be pinned down – then tries to pin this down in a language that’s slippery and unreliable. The effect is to make nonsense sound profound. This might explain why it seeped out of the philosophy seminar into every other department, picking up a bit of Marx along the way – critical theory supplying the moral mission, postmodernism the affectations.

It’s attractive because it makes abstraction feel like intelligence. Moreover, nobody is quite immune to it. I left the academy speaking and writing in ways undoubtedly influenced by this vernacular. It took a couple of years and George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language to relearn how to write clearly – an essay, by the way, that did more for my prose than a university education could hope to achieve in half a decade.

What Orwell understood, and what the academy has spent decades trying to forget, is that unclear writing is almost never an accident. It’s a technique. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

His six rules of writing are justly famous and pop up in every other essay about writing, but let’s briefly revisit them here:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Flip these on their head, and you get what we have now: needless complexity, sprawling sentences, passive verbs, and jargon. And in the margins, the creep of barbarism.

That said, not all “difficult” prose is difficult in the same way. I’ve already mentioned Heidegger, but I could add Kant and Wittgenstein. These are unusual and highly original thinkers (geniuses, in short) trying to stretch language to its limits to express ideas nobody had thought before. Reading them is agony, but I never had the slightest doubt that every sentence was in search of the truth. It’s highly technical language, but not in an effort to sound sophisticated. Likewise, a quantum physicist’s paper means nothing to me, but I know it uses jargon in the service of precision. The terms point to something real.

Literary writing is another matter as well. James Joyce is difficult, but nobody reads Finnegans Wake for clarity on political matters. The writer Will Self sounds like a thesaurus left out in the rain, but nobody reads that sort of fiction to illuminate real-world concerns, if they read it at all.

But the other difficult stuff, the prose I was grappling with at the start of an edit – this is the kind that borrows the appearance of technical density without referring to anything tangible. It’s hard to understand, not because the ideas are hard, but because you’re trying to extract meaning where there is none, or not enough to fill an article. That’s why, if a draft didn’t survive an edit, it was because there was nothing there to begin with.

Still, other drafts, after various rewrites and additional research, did yield something valuable. Only years later did I understand why my efforts didn’t get much in the way of a thank-you from the “author”. It’s obvious now. The person whose work I’d made readable couldn’t forgive me for proving it was unreadable to begin with.

I mention all this because the language of the academy, specifically its register, long ago spread into the public realm. If you want to see the infection in its purest form, look at the mission statement of any university in the Western world. Here’s the opening of SOAS – the School of Oriental and African Studies:

“To be an excellent research-intensive university that responds to the learning needs of our diverse students. We will enable an equitably grounded global academy as a means to challenge hierarchies of knowledge and assist in the building of a socially just future.”

“Enable an equitably grounded global academy.” What does that mean, really? “Challenge hierarchies of knowledge.” Which hierarchies? What knowledge? A sentence or two later: “Inherently inter-disciplinary, we value deep partnerships with scholars from the regions and diasporas of SOAS’ focus.” That’s the cuttlefish reaching a climax.

It’s everywhere; you’ve probably read something like it this week. It’s the kind of writing that makes very particular noises like a mating call in pursuit of suitable candidates and like-minded sponsors. It’s the language of the NGO fundraising deck and corporate DEI policy, both of which have their origins in the same university departments. It persists because the incentive structures of academic life reward it. Grant applications and hiring committees expect the song and dance of theoretical sophistication. Language that cleanly maps to reality doesn’t get you the job because the job requirement is talking in riddles, which will eventually earn you tenure if you do it for long enough.

The real cost is that the same dialect gets used by those arguing against the terrible ideas it produced. I keep stumbling on intelligent young writers I broadly agree with who reject trans ideology (for example), yet bring the same linguistic tools to the fight. They’ll make a perfectly sound argument about the failures of gender medicine, but in a sentence like:

“The framework underpinning affirmative care models has not sufficiently accounted for the role of social contagion in identity formation among adolescent cohorts.”1

What they mean is:

“Teenagers copy each other. The doctors ignored it.”

Somewhere along the way, the writer picked up the idea that complexity is what makes an argument sound serious; that convoluted sentences and tortured syntax reveal the truth of something rather than hide it. But you cannot argue against postmodernist drivel in the language of postmodernist drivel. If your critique of institutional capture reads like Judith Butler, you’ve already lost the argument because the language is the ideology.

It’s understandable in a way. Using clear, concise language feels like showing up to a debate with a haiku while your opponent readies a 50-slide PowerPoint. It’s that scene where Indiana Jones meets the Cairo swordsman, slicing the air with his scimitar in the warm-up to a fight. The dissident thinker feels compelled to use the same elaborate moves, conscious that words that mean things sound dumb to a room full of critical theorists. They end up arguing in the vernacular of the ideology they’re trying to overcome, whether it’s trans ideology, critical social justice or antisemitism disguised as postcolonial theory.

There’s another way, and we can learn from the trans debate. The women who turned the tide on gender ideology didn’t show up to the fight flourishing abstractions like scimitars. They won it with the simple question: “What is a woman?” That’s Indiana Jones pulling out his pistol and shooting the other guy dead.

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I cannot drop litter. It’s impossible. I will walk 10 miles with an empty plastic bottle in search of a bin if I have to, because chucking it in the bushes where it will go unnoticed alongside similar rubbish strewn over weeks and months, is simply unthinkable. My whole being recoils at the notion. It’s not because I’m worried that the bottle isn’t biodegradable. I’m not anxious that a badger will choke on it (although I wouldn’t be pleased at the idea either). It’s that my father instilled in me, from an early age, the idea that dropping litter was egregiously antisocial, contemptuous of the social contract, a moral failure. He didn’t put it like that (I think he mentioned hanging people), but it was clear what he meant. He never knew his father and grew up practically an orphan, and I’m not sure what instilled the belief in him, except perhaps that the age he grew up in was one where certain behaviours were simply unacceptable. Littering, among other things, carried a stigma. My own son doesn’t live in anything like that age, but I’ve presumably shaped the same disposition in him as my father did in me.

I can form a whole morality from this. I know something important about a person who throws a coffee cup from their car window. I know with close to moral precision that they’re the same person who abandons a shopping trolley in a parking space or who plays music on a speakerphone on a train. The probability that they’re a fraudster, a thief or worse increases, too.

Littering is not a crime worthy of the name except in places like Singapore, where the consequences are severe enough to ensure its streets are immaculate. Drop a cigarette butt there, and the authorities will fine you $10,000, hand you a broom and make you sweep public areas while wearing a bright vest that identifies you as a litterer. Good. This is my kind of police state, although I’d make them use a toothbrush.

It shouldn’t need the threat of punishment, though. Antisocial behaviour ought to be rare because a happy society is one where its citizens value the shared space, each of us signed up to an unwritten social contract that says mutual respect will be rewarded; that my cleaning up after a picnic is the right thing because I know you will do the same, thus preserving the beauty of this spot that drew us here in the first place.

The disgust we feel toward those who transgress certain norms stems from something deeper than mere lawbreaking. It turns out that the same part of the brain that lights up when we face something revolting, like rotten food, responds in the same way to certain transgressions like jumping the queue or shoplifting. I could have saved scientists the trouble. When I see the remains of a McDonald’s Happy Meal on my country walk, I know that my visceral reaction is hardcoded in my brain. The same circuitry that has evolved to warn me off bad eggs activates in the same way when certain people (bad eggs of a different kind) violate the social contract.

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The word stigma comes from Ancient Greece, specifically the practice of burning a mark in the skin of slaves and criminals, branding them as tainted or corrupted, a way for the community to know who to avoid and why. The mark became metaphorical over time, but its function remains the same: an expression of the collective agreement that certain behaviours are off-limits and disreputable. Not illegal, necessarily; just not done. Stigma became a means by which human communities delineated and enforced moral boundaries without laws through exclusion, defamation, and loss of status.

Stigma is closely associated with shame, that feeling of distress or humiliation when others judge us, measure our worth and find it wanting. Nietzsche, ever the psychologist before the profession existed, understood that we fear the loss of reputation far more intensely than the troubles of conscience. This is supported by evolutionary psychology today, and it makes perfect sense. For most of human history, social exclusion was a death sentence. If you were rejected by the tribe, you lost the community that helped keep you alive. We are hard-wired to care what the tribe thinks because that’s how our ancestors survived.

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I suppose it must have been at the Tate Modern in London, at the start of this century. All I remember was looking at a urinal and thinking, “This is just a urinal”. But for my friend at the time, it was a “brilliant work of art”. We were very young, of course, both recent philosophy graduates keen to avoid anything like a serious job, preferring to booze at any opportunity, read difficult books and debate everything under the sun.

A couple of decades later, after years of robust but friendly sparring, we finally fell out when I asked him at the strained end of a WhatsApp chat what a woman was, and he pretended not to know. It was always going to come to this; the discussions had become fewer and more fraught, the culture wars always at the edge of conversation. But this was the final straw, and neither of us picked up the conversation again, or any conversation, since. I don’t know where he is today, except that he holds a senior position in the British Civil Service, which is exactly what I would expect.

Duchamp’s Fountain1, the artwork we were looking at, was a genuine provocation when it was first exhibited – a clever joke, really. By placing a mundane object in a gallery and calling it art, he was raising real questions about the nature of the medium, about perception and reality itself. These are interesting questions, and we’re still asking them today.

But it’s a joke that only really works the first time. Taping a banana to a wall is amusing, perhaps, but it recycles the same gag, the same provocation, except now the purpose is to elicit “low-status” opinions from “high-status” ones. A snobbery device, in other words.

This would be a minor cultural oddity if it stopped there, but instead it infiltrated our language, then our institutions, and eventually our way of life. Duchamp’s Fountain is the story of postmodernism before postmodernism had a name.

Like many terrible ideas, postmodernism started with a question. The wreckage left over from the Second World War, the incomprehensible scale of the slaughter, the industrialised genocide, the atom bombs – all this brought about by the most advanced nations on earth, the ones that considered themselves civilised. How could the same cultures that brought us the Enlightenment, human rights, individual liberty and the scientific revolution also give us Auschwitz, slavery and the brutal repression of colonised people? As the second half of the century got underway, intellectuals were naturally inclined to question the West’s founding principles and what they saw as the illusion of progress. It was time to interrogate its assumptions, take apart its certainties, and puncture its claim to hold universal values.

Leading the way were the French intellectuals, who in the 1960s and 70s questioned the deepest of those assumptions, beginning with truth itself. Was there really such a thing as “objective truth”, or was it simply an invention of the powerful, something declared rather than discovered? Was "progress" a description of reality or just the story told by whoever won? These are serious questions from which they could make fair observations. They were right to point out that institutions serve their own interests, and grand narratives play a defining role in our understanding and interpretation of the world. The trouble is that the same intellectuals didn’t try to place the answers intelligibly within the larger story of our lives. Postmodernism made interrogating power the overriding intellectual move and the answer to its own question.

Postmodernism doesn’t lend itself to a simple explanation, which is appropriate, as we shall see. However, dig beneath the deliberately impenetrable jargon, and the core claims are as follows. There is no objective truth, only competing narratives. What we think of as “knowledge” is just something the powerful tell us is the case. Language doesn’t describe reality but constructs it. Science, reason, and universal liberalism are inventions of Western minds, specifically male ones, while the Enlightenment idea of the individual with supposed natural rights is just another concept made up by those most likely to benefit from it.

There’s an obvious paradox at the outset. In what sense is it true to say there’s no such thing as objective truth? The question is meaningless because the premise is nonsensical. As Roger Scruton put it, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”

Despite the obvious contradiction, it’s an idea that has been pushed aggressively by campus authoritarians for decades. No narrative deserves authority, they say, while demanding intellectual obedience to a narrative of their own.

If postmodernism has a main character, it’s Michel Foucault. A brilliant, sexually transgressive2 provocateur who wrote with genuine originality about power, punishment, and the structures that govern how we think, he was also catastrophically wrong.

Scruton registered postmodernism as intellectual fraud early on and pointed to Foucault in particular, whose ideas he regarded as the most dangerous of the lot because they were the most easily weaponised. Foucault’s central insight, that power and knowledge are inseparable, was a half-truth that has cast a spell on the academy, whose graduates see in it a compelling reason to stop making judgments. They know some cultures are better than others, but now they have a reason to pretend otherwise.

Today, Foucault’s influence pervades our institutions at the deepest levels, his designs shaping outcomes even while those who operate the machinery have never heard his name. Every time a claim to objectivity gets treated as an expression of privilege, that’s Foucault. When “lived experience” trumps clinical evidence, Foucault’s fingerprints are all over it. The same when someone argues that standards are tools of exclusion – this is the ghost of Foucault passing through on its way to a bathhouse.

Foucault, above all, was interested in power. His contention was that knowledge is always a product of the dominant structures that produce it. Knowledge is never neutral – it is always formed by someone with an interest in what gets known, enforced in the name of the public good. Hospitals define what illnesses are before treating them as such; psychiatry invents mental disorders so as to make sense of the institutions that bear the name. The prison comes before the prisoner, inventing the category to make sense of its own existence.

What makes Foucault so compelling is that these ideas feel thrillingly subversive, an intellectual exercise in setting fire to the library and analysing the remains. The problem is that if all knowledge is contaminated by power, what do you replace it with? If science is just one more Western narrative, what’s the alternative? If standards are oppression, what do you measure oppression against once you’ve thrown them out?

This is what Scruton was getting at when he observed that some ideas are true but boring, while others are exciting but false. Foucault exemplifies the latter, and what’s more, he never had to answer for these intellectual contortions because he was a philosopher whose job (as he saw it) was to ask questions and bend things out of shape. It’s a different story for policymakers. The people who inherited his ideas, or rather were handed them in a job description, have to run hospitals, child protection agencies, and the civil service.

Inevitably, perhaps, Foucault became an enthusiastic supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978, praising him as “the old saint in exile”. He championed the Islamic Revolution for casting off what he saw as Western pretensions. Here was a powerful spiritual alternative to the rational, corrupt Western model with all its empty rationalism.

Foucault retreated soon after Khomeini started silencing dissidents and ordering women to wear a veil. But by then the pattern was set, a template for what has followed: Western intellectuals so committed to the critique of their own civilisation that they cannot recognise barbarism when it’s standing in front of them.

Fifty years later, the counter-revolution led by young Iranians desperate for freedom is all but ignored by news outlets like the BBC and the New York Times. The Guardian, which is practically a Foucault newsletter with a sports section, overlooks a genuinely oppressed people living under a theocracy because it long ago decided that the Western project itself is the real oppression.

Jacques Derrida, another towering figure of postmodernism, attacked the stability of language itself. According to him, meaning was never fixed, words never referred to anything straightforwardly, and the author’s intention was irrelevant. What mattered was the reader’s interpretation. From here, it’s a short walk to the idea that intent doesn’t matter, only impact. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the logic behind every cancellation and every social media pile-on.

Foucault and Derrida are just the most well-known figures – we can add Lyotard, Baudrillard, and many others to the roster. Taken together, they built an intellectual framework so total in its scepticism that it left no ground to stand on and no tools to build with.

But before we examine the consequences in more depth, it’s worth briefly examining the case for the defence. Many of these thinkers would have despised what became of their ideas. Foucault was arguably a libertarian above all, instinctively hostile to orthodoxy. Derrida’s whole modus operandi was to question everything, including, presumably, the sorts of people who quote him as scripture. Nietzsche, a sort of father figure of postmodernism, would have recognised the woke movement immediately and cast it into the abyss along with all the other herd thinking he so despised. If there’s one thing that unites a postmodern disposition, it’s an attitude of radical scepticism. Their inheritors, by contrast, are zealots.

But this defence only goes so far. You don’t get to build a monument to the idea that all knowledge is bound up in power structures, that claims to truth and objectivity are instruments of domination, that language is unreliable and meaning subjective – and then disown the activists who took you at your word and installed it at the entrance of every institution they could reach.

The woke movement, and progressivism more broadly, simply embraced the logic, found it useful, and upended established norms in its name. What made the upending possible wasn’t the strength of the ideas themselves but a civilisation already weakened enough to accept them.

An autoimmune disorder doesn’t strike a healthy body at random. There must already be a weakness, a system under stress. Postmodernism simply turned the body’s defences against itself. The capacity for self-criticism – essential for progress and error correction in a free and open society – became the disease, attacking the host organism rather than identifying and eliminating external pathogens.

The irony is that the threat didn’t come from outside. It was produced by Western intellectuals at wealthy Western universities, enjoying Western freedoms of speech. It couldn’t have emerged anywhere else. Only a civilisation confident enough in its own ideals of personal liberty and intellectual freedom would allow for such a radical critique of those same values. Postmodernism could never have emerged in an authoritarian state because it required the very Enlightenment values that it set out to destroy.

The question, then, is why the West made itself vulnerable. What convinced its political class and cultural establishment to spread the contagion rather than lock it down?

Three things, in my view, made it possible: guilt, boredom, and an empty church.

Guilt, because intellectuals looked at their recent history and saw gas chambers and gulags, slavery and all the other horrors made possible by an industrially advanced, scientifically minded culture. The healthy response would have been to engrave these crimes upon the Western conscience, commit to never repeating them, and set about reforming what was bad and advancing what was good. And this is largely what happened at first: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the civil rights movement. These were signs of a mature civilisation coming to terms with its failures and correcting them. The unhealthy response would have been to conclude that the entire project from the Enlightenment onward was rotten, an edifice built on oppression; that the only meaningful response was permanent self-flagellation and dismantling the whole structure that made these crimes possible in the first place. Postmodernism offered a philosophical framework for the second response, and the guilty grabbed it.

Boredom, because Enlightenment liberalism had succeeded beyond anyone’s imagining. Here was a system that solved many of the problems it set out to solve – so many, in fact, that its inheritors had little left to build. It had written equality into law, banished slavery, and pushed racism to the margins of respectable opinion, all while establishing relatively stable and open societies of unprecedented wealth. The only remaining move for a certain kind of intellectual was to question whether the structures themselves were legitimate. Fukuyama saw this coming. The author of The End of History predicted what would happen when people could no longer struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause had been victorious in an earlier generation. “They will struggle against the just cause,” he wrote. “They will struggle for the sake of struggle... out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle”3.

Postmodernism gave boredom a curriculum and degrees ending in “studies”. It’s a philosophy for people whose material comfort is so total that they can make a hobby of interrogating the epistemology that produced it. This is the hyperprivileged, pronoun-declaring busybody who stalks every utterance for wrongthink. Nobody in a society fighting for clean water has time to wonder whether objectivity is a patriarchal construct.

And finally, postmodernism was made possible by the retreat of Christianity. That may sound strange to those of us who get on with our lives perfectly well without a church to attend or a Bible verse at hand. But drive through any European town, and you’ll find a church soon enough – likely empty, perhaps attracting a handful of pensioners on a Sunday morning.

A visitor from 100 years ago would be astonished by how Christianity has receded into the background of most people’s lives. And yet, despite the retreat, it remains deeply woven into Western psychology. It’s there in our need for dogma, confession and redemption, our moral certainties and the clear lines we draw between good and evil. Postmodernism didn’t fill the space it left – it’s too esoteric for mass adoption as a faith. But it told people they didn’t need to believe in anything universal, that universalism was a contrivance of power, just another narrative to be discarded. It emptied the pews in a way that felt like liberation, but into that space marched every substitute religion of the last thirty years, from critical race theory to crypto cults.

Postmodernism would have been a lively if abstruse intellectual endeavour if it had remained in textbooks and seminars, but its abstractions entered the public domain.

Where postmodernism really announces itself today is in its dismantling of sex-based reality. We are to imagine that human societies, over millennia, were caught in a delusion about the meaning of “woman”. The person most responsible for making this confusion mainstream is Judith Butler, who took Foucault’s idea that power shapes knowledge and applied it to sex itself. Not just gender roles, which are clearly shaped by culture, but the biological categories of male and female. This is how we arrive at pregnant men and women with penises – the human body just another text to be interpreted.

It’s worth quoting Butler at length because the prose style is Exhibit A in a fraudulent intellectual system. This single sentence won the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest4 in 1998 and will likely never be bettered.

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Read it again if you like. It won’t help. If you read it backwards, it won’t make any less sense. But don’t for a moment think that’s a flaw in communication – at least, not for Butler and her supporters. The incomprehensibility is the whole point. If you cannot understand the argument, you cannot challenge it. It’s impenetrable by design, immediately creating an in-group privy to the codes who nod along and delight in excluding and intimidating the out-group.

It would be irritating and pretentious by itself, but the meaning supposedly conferred by such gibberish finds its way into the clinician's office, where a counsellor can't ask a distressed teenager basic questions because questioning a child's self-diagnosis would be "invalidating their lived experience". It shows up in the best practices document telling midwives to say "birthing people" while women – actual women, with uteruses and birth canals – push and scream on the ward. Everyone playing this game of pretend knows it's nonsense. They play it anyway, because describing reality in terms agreed on by civilisations for all of recorded history became “oppressive” ten minutes ago.

It's not confined to the left. Postmodernism's offspring include the trans theologian but also the podcaster who says the US government is run by a cabal of satanic paedophiles. The disdain for the notion of truth, one thinking it's a power construct, the other calling it a psyop, is a symptom of the same epistemic rot. Neither has much use for objective reality.

I think about Duchamp’s Fountain sometimes. My friend saw a thrilling provocation – a mocking of the establishment of its day and ours. How he enjoyed dismissing those old-fashioned preoccupations with beauty and truth. Here was a urinal calling itself art, a fuck-you to the suits and stiffs and their reactionary ways.

But that provocation now just is the establishment, absorbed into orthodoxy, written into the curriculum, and demanded of every new recruit – the sort whose job application requires a personal statement demonstrating their commitment to diversity and equity. My erstwhile friend, the civil servant, perhaps reads the statement, perhaps he sits on the interview panel for the next Head of Inclusion and Belonging.

Mockery, we both agreed then, is good. We should mock the powerful, question their assumptions and ridicule their dogmatic certainties. A free and vibrant society depends on it. But postmodernism took that instinct and deadened it into new assumptions. It became a joke nobody laughed at because laughing at it would cost you your job.

The result is a civilisation that, far from defending its own values, is preoccupied with undermining them, installing status-hungry people in its institutions who have convinced themselves that Western values are oppressive by definition and that gutting them signals virtue and sophistication.

Postmodernism could only happen in a civilisation like ours, making a fatal weakness of its greatest strengths. These are ideas that consumed the intellectual foundations that gave birth to them. Along the way, they ended friendships and ways of talking about reality that allowed for scepticism and questioning without pretending not to know what’s true, what words mean, what a woman is.

I try to do two things with The Gadfly: skewer the absurdities of our age, and make sense of the ideas behind them. If you’d like to support the work, please subscribe or consider upgrading.

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Somewhere in Britain at this moment, a man and his young family are living a life in secret. They go about their lives under false identities in an unfamiliar town or city, making new acquaintances, but never revealing who they are or what brought them there.

The Batley Grammar School teacher, as we know him today, remains in hiding. No one has been arrested for threatening him, his career is over, and he will spend the rest of his life knowing that he’s the target of Islamist rage.

I don’t know what was in his lesson plan, except that it was about blasphemy and free expression. It wasn’t the first lesson he’d given on the topic, and it followed the approved national curriculum. Charlie Hebdo was in there somewhere. If I’d been teaching the lesson, I might have asked the students what motivates some among us to murder twelve people for publishing a cartoon. Perhaps he did the same.

What we know for certain is that the lesson led to protests outside the school gates, along with denunciations from “community leaders” and the sort of threats that would make anyone want to stay out of sight.

This all happened exactly five years ago and made two messages clear to anyone paying attention. First, intimidation works. Second, those with the power to do something about it will not merely look away; they’ll recast the intimidation as a legitimate grievance.

The career-ending accusation of “Islamophobia” has hung over every discussion of Islam in the West for decades. In Britain, which leads the world in self-sabotage, a formal definition has now arrived, rebranded as “anti-Muslim hostility”. It’s carefully worded and accompanied by caveats that claim to protect criticism, ridicule, and academic debate.

Near the end, it drops in a line like an afterthought:

“This is a working definition and, as with all working definitions, it may need to evolve over time as understanding of the issues develops.”

Evolve how? Upon whose “understanding”? It’s not cynical to wonder what this means and where this leads. It’s not an exaggeration to call this a blasphemy law in all but name.

A few days after the definition was formalised, London Mayor Sadiq Khan led a sex-segregated public Islamic prayer session in Trafalgar Square.

Nick Timothy, a member of parliament, remarked:

”Too many are too polite to say this. But mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination…I am not suggesting everybody at Trafalgar Square last night is an Islamist. But the domination of public places is straight from the Islamist playbook…”

Timothy’s X post was exactly the kind of thing protected by the definition’s own terms. Still, the Prime Minister responded with synthetic indignation, demanding he be sacked for his "utterly appalling" remarks. The Attorney General, Lord Hermer, opted for whataboutery: “Would they have a problem if I, as a Jewish man, were praying in public?”, he asked – as though the concern were about prayer rather than ideology; as if it wasn't Islamists who were forcing teachers into hiding, threatening autistic children for accidentally scuffing a book, and detonating themselves at pop concerts. As if religion were an irrelevant detail when men were gangraping children on an industrial scale in the forgotten towns and cities of the UK.

“Islamophobia”, in a line often credited to Christopher Hitchens, is “a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons”.

It's an elegant compression of something we all know to be true – including, and perhaps especially, those who are first to deny it.

The fascists who created it

Theocratic regimes popularised the term “Islamophobia” in the late 1970s after facing criticism of Islamic governance, particularly from dissidents within Muslim-majority countries.

Aided by the burgeoning left-wing NGO industry, they borrowed the moral force of anti-racism by making criticism of Islamic doctrine equivalent to attacking Muslims as people. It’s a move that hides its flagrant dishonesty by tapping into Western sensibilities – the preference for tact and good manners over cultural ineptness. Conflating criticism of Islam with bigotry toward Muslims shields the theology behind the person. What better way to make that scrutiny feel gauche among people who pride themselves on their progressive credentials?

It makes no sense, obviously. As soon as you apply the same logic to other belief systems, it falls apart. Can you critique Christianity without accusations of Christophobia? Can you question Marxism, capitalism, Zionism – any ideology – without being labelled bigoted against its adherents? You know the answer. Secular democratic societies defend these rights scrupulously. Only with Islam have we accepted that scrutinising ideas equals hatred of people.

We first saw this pattern emerge in 1989, when Salman Rushdie went into hiding after publishing a book. Perhaps nothing captured the strangeness of that moment better than Cat Stevens, the singer-songwriter who had converted to Islam and become Yusuf Islam. Here he is, endorsing the murder of a fellow artist in a panel discussion shortly after the fatwa.

Years later, in an astonishing display of victim-blaming, Baroness Shirley Williams, a prominent Liberal Democrat politician, said of Salman Rushdie:

“This is a man who has deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way, who’s been protected by the British police against threats of suicide [sic] for years and years at great expense to the taxpayer…”

Christopher Hitchens responded by calling the remark “contemptible”, which, of course, it is.

The script has been the same for all Islamist violence ever since. Charlie Hebdo: “They provoked Muslims”. Samuel Paty beheaded: “French secularism is inflexible”. The Batley teacher forced into hiding: “The lesson wasn’t necessary”.

Always, the reflex is to blame the victim rather than the people who follow through on their death threats. Always, the preoccupation is with the supposed offence that was caused, not the murderous response to it.

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Nearly everyone who thinks seriously about anything will tell you they think for themselves. The opposite – parroting other people’s ideas and opinions – is widely derided on both the left and right, and one side will frequently accuse the other of repeating things they read in The New York Times or saw on a Tucker Carlson podcast.

The problem is that, to one degree or another, we all outsource our thinking and are influenced by ideas that are not our own. How could it be otherwise? The real measure of thinking for yourself, then, is perhaps the ability to change your mind, take the view that runs contrary to your group, not out of contrariness but because you’ve followed a thought a little further than is comfortable.

The writers and thinkers below understood this better than most.

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

— Bertrand Russell

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Even the lively debate within this spectrum gives the impression of free thinking, but all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate."

— Noam Chomsky

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

— Oscar Wilde

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

— Upton Sinclair

“The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

— John Stuart Mill

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”

— Galileo

“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell (attributed)

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

— Mark Twain

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”

— Albert Einstein

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By Frederick Alexander

The Gadfly looks at the ideas, institutions, and incentives behind our cultural confusion – who benefits, why it persists, and what it costs.

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