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. Some pieces take an afternoon. This one took a month. If you’d like to support the work, subscribe or upgrade.

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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.

The cowards who use it

The Batley teacher did nothing other than follow his vocation: to educate young minds and get them thinking critically about the issues of the day. An independent investigation cleared him, but a robust defence of his actions was asking too much, and the school all but abandoned him, because it understood that a disturbed conscience is more bearable than a damaged reputation.

The Batley teacher is just the most famous example. Consider Steven Greer, the Bristol University professor who was fully exonerated after teaching about religious violence. The university dropped his course, leaving him to the wolves. He wore a disguise in his own city.

It’s a calculation made again and again to avoid accusations of racism. It works because a demoralised public will eventually let the matter slide. They’ve seen it all before, and deep down, most know they’d do the same.

The problem is not that we don’t understand what’s happening. Free speech is the only tool that can dismantle a bad idea, and “Islamophobia” is designed to take it out of our hands. We see it clearly. The problem is that we hesitate to say it out loud, because speaking plainly now carries a higher price than staying quiet.

The state has now given this cowardice written form. Although it’s woven in a few caveats which may “evolve”, censorship won’t come primarily from government prosecutions but from every institution pre-emptively protecting itself. Universities will sanitise curricula still more, and publishers will reject “problematic” manuscripts. The state won’t need to silence anyone because everyone will silence themselves.

The UK government has shown no comparable urgency on antisemitism, the one form of hatred visibly intensifying on British streets. It’s driven in large part by the ideology that the new definition of Islamophobia shields from scrutiny. The irony is lost on politicians, who mutter a few words of condemnation, perhaps even sounding like they mean it – although it depends on who's listening.

The morons who are manipulated

We’re not talking about stupid people, not in the ordinary sense. These are educated, influential, and sometimes genuinely compassionate people who have walked headfirst into a linguistic trap. They think defending Muslims against hatred requires defending Islam from criticism, a move they would consider condescending if the same logic were applied to their own beliefs.

Muslims, like every other minority, face their share of discrimination in the West. This is true. Therefore, any criticism of Islamic doctrine must stem from prejudice. This is false. Yet it’s false in a way that allows some people to build a career. A whole industry runs on this category error. The human rights lawyers, NGO officials, activists and journalists all see it and pretend it isn’t there because their careers and status depend on ignoring it. The ayatollah has no clothes.

Consider how odd it would be if Italians complained that criticism of the Mafia was anti-Italian. Why don’t Muslims march through the streets after every new atrocity, declaring “not in our name”, unless they feel cowed by the extreme, ideological wing of their own religion? Or agree with it.

Instead, the activism runs the other way. While women in Tehran burn their hijabs knowing they may be killed for it, a gruesome alliance of wannabe jihadists and weekend revolutionaries parade through Western capitals, openly supporting clerical fascism while their children hold placards of Khamenei, the man whose guards beat Iranian women to death for showing their hair.

Who pays for this moral and intellectual bankruptcy? It’s people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has spent decades advocating for the rights of women and girls, having been denied the same in her native Somalia. She fled the country after surviving genital mutilation and later renounced Islam. In 2004, she collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on a film that criticised the treatment of women in Islamic societies. Following the film’s release, Van Gogh was murdered by an extremist, who pinned a death threat to his body. The threat was against Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom Western progressives have since labelled an “Islamophobe”.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is just the most famous example. There are countless others whose names we’ll never hear but who bear the same cost of saying obvious things out loud, while their critics win applause for dealing in nothing but moral fraud.

A definition that claims to protect Muslims silences the Muslims who need protecting most – the women fighting for equality and ex-Muslims fleeing religious violence. Watch as they tear off their hijabs while we legislate against hijabophobia.

Britain abolished blasphemy laws in 2008, recognising that protecting ideas from criticism was incompatible with free inquiry. Now, under the auspices of people desperate to display their progressive credentials, blasphemy has returned under new management.

This is Britain in 2026. When the next atrocity arrives – and it’s just a matter of time – the institutions will respond with messages pre-checked against the latest definition of “Islamophobia”. The police will furrow their brows; the politicians will reach for “community tensions” and tell us that diversity is strength while the bodies are still warm. And the rest of us will be expected to shrug our shoulders, say nothing, and pretend this is normal.

The Batley teacher will likely spend the rest of his life in hiding.

This is a revised and updated version of a piece published in October 2025.

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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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Roger Scruton spent his career as a conservative philosopher in the overwhelmingly left-wing world of British academia. His colleagues reviled him, many grudgingly conceding he was a brilliant and original thinker. In what looks like a throwaway line, Scruton observed that:

“Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”

It’s a devastating diagnosis. What Scruton identified is something deeper and stranger than a political position: that what matters when evaluating a claim about reality is the moral worth of the person making it. In this view, to be right-wing is to be evil, and any claim made from that position is merely an expression of the same.

Of course, conservatives also recognise moral distinctions between good and evil. The difference is that, like Scruton, they are less likely to treat them as a method for determining what is true.

This would be academic but for the fact that most Western institutions have become hostile environments for those on the “wrong side” of that equation. Millions of good and decent people today will habitually self-monitor for ambiguous utterances that might be misread or used against them. In the background, just out of sight, someone is passing their comment – or more likely their vibe – under a moral Geiger counter, checking for the crackle of wrongthink.

The cost is real. A mature civilisation ought to be able to have differences of opinion without one side reducing the other to evil. That we can’t is a symptom of a society no longer at ease with itself.

The left’s division of the world into good and evil rests on a powerful myth, woven so deeply into left-wing identity that it’s become invisible: that the left is more humane, more compassionate, and more morally serious than its opponents. Not more correct – more good.

The utopian impulse, the uncompromising pursuit of the ideal society over the flawed but principled one, reveals a dark paradox: the willingness to license suffering and oppression today, so long as they are in service of a vision purged of both tomorrow. And purged in particular of those who stand in the way. The gulag is permissible – essential, even – to realise such an ambition, a necessary evil toward a virtuous end. Sacrifices must be made, hard decisions taken with unsentimental resolve. Today’s body count is irrelevant. Everything is subordinate to chasing the new dawn.

The journalist Peter Hitchens spent his youth actively seeking a British Bolshevik revolution. He has described this from the inside with brute honesty. He would have done terrible things to his opponents, he says, if he’d ever achieved the power he sought, not out of cruelty but out of certainty. It was the certainty that was dangerous, and upon finally seeing it, he got out. Most don’t, because getting out requires surrendering the thing the myth most reliably provides: the clean division of the world into good and evil, and the knowledge of which side you’re on.

In 1994, Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most eminent historians in the English-speaking world, was asked a simple question: if he had known that millions were dying in the Soviet experiment, would it have changed his commitment to Communism? Hobsbawm said probably not. The journalist Michael Ignatieff pressed the point. Might the loss of fifteen or twenty million lives have been justified if the revolution had succeeded?

Hobsbawm’s answer was a single word.

Yes.

There it is. A lifetime’s scholarship and ideological conviction compressed into a syllable, a black hole of moral reasoning with the weight of twenty million dead. Hobsbawm doesn’t flinch because the matter is settled, the reasoning sound. He can pass off unimaginable cruelty as the cost of a more radiant tomorrow. What’s a million dead next to the grander project, the millions more who will inherit the earth when the destination is finally reached?

What sustains it is the claim that this is all about intentions rather than outcomes (which, rather conveniently, is what makes it impervious to evidence). When left-wing policies fail – and they fail spectacularly in ways that damage the people they claimed to protect – the governing framework is never brought under scrutiny. The failures are written off as sabotage or as evidence of insufficient zeal. It’s the unmanageable complexity of the problem, the unwillingness to make the necessary sacrifices. And always, above the wreckage float the good intentions held by people incredulous as to the outcomes. Their own kindness is never called into doubt. The myth is preserved, and the mission recharged for another day.

The myth of kindness is ready-made for the young person arriving at university with the desire for meaning we all have at that age. The myth doesn’t have a required reading list or entrance test. One simply has to be open to it. What follows is the warm embrace from the professorial class that says: you’ll fit right in here; just be on the side of the right. And by right, they mean left – the side that cares; the side of the good.

The social rewards are immediate and obvious to the status-minded and cynical, but the myth of kindness seduces well-intentioned young people above all, whose primary need is to mean something and who are naturally drawn to activism and the camaraderie that comes with it. Many grow out of this mindset, of course, and even go on to become its harshest critics. But others will swap the placard for a lanyard and carry the same ideas into institutions, producing the ugly political and moral confusions we’re all battling with today.

However, it’s a serious mistake to dismiss all left-wing compassion as fraudulent. It’s often real. The mother who lies awake worrying about refugee children isn’t playing to an audience at that moment. Teachers who fight for struggling pupils aren’t faking it to win Teacher of the Year. When the right dismisses all of this as virtue signalling, it reveals its own form of cowardice, a refusal to acknowledge that some on the left are motivated by genuine compassion. Much easier to mock them.

But the crucial point is that these virtues are incidental to political beliefs, not framed by them. Right-wing people can also lose sleep over struggling pupils and the plight of genuine refugees because the human conscience isn’t tribal but moral. Turning the moral into the political is the point at which the left turns compassion into ideology, and ideology, as Chesterton warned, is where the trouble starts. As he put it:

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone”.

A virtue wandering alone doesn't ask where the money went. Compassion detached from prudence doesn't notice when the policy harms the people it was designed to help. It can't tolerate the possibility that it has become cruel, and so it stops looking.

When we think of the horrors of the grooming gangs and the depravity of fast-tracking children into irreversible treatments, we see people motivated by status or cowed by threats to their reputation. Sociopaths and cowards dominate, but they’re given cover by the clinician who genuinely believes they're being compassionate; the well-intentioned official who thinks naming the patterns around grooming gangs feels wrong. Morally confused, certainly, but the impulse to do right is real. Unmoored from every other virtue that once kept it in check, the results are devastating.

The right sees the damage everywhere it looks – the education system in tatters, the breakdown in social cohesion – and decides the compassion was always self-flattering and indifferent to consequences. The left looks at its own compassion and refuses to connect it to the damage it’s created. Only one of them runs the institutions.

It’s no use looking for the empirical foundations to the myth of kindness; they don’t exist. What we’re really talking about is what Nietzsche called God’s shadow: the ghost of Christian morality, but with God removed and politics installed in his place. The modern left doesn’t experience itself as one political tradition among others, liable to be wrong, capable of causing harm. It experiences itself as the force opposing evil. This is a theological claim, and once understood as such, it becomes obvious why competing evidence is useless, because the left didn’t arrive at its views through evidence but through a belief system with villains and saints, true believers and heretics.

This is not simply a universal feature of political tribalism, though tribalism is part of it. What makes the left specifically susceptible is that its entire project is fundamentally moral. Conservatism can fall back on tradition, order and stability. Goodness emerges through these things. For the left, goodness is foundational. When the outcomes are bad, the goodness must be protected at any cost, because to admit that the compassion caused the harm is to admit that the foundation is an illusion.

The myth survives everything, not just because it flatters people into believing they are good and kind, nor simply because it rewards enormous status for speaking the approved idiom on sanctioned topics. But because the conviction that the other side is evil hovers over everything. The existence of genuine monsters vindicates all that follows.

Nothing in recent history has tested this like October 7. The kindness myth was handed the most extreme possible counter-evidence: the people designated as victims committing acts of savage, premeditated violence against civilians, babies, children, and the elderly, while the people designated as oppressors became the victims. The narrative couldn’t absorb it. So it didn’t. Instead, the response was to turn everything on its head. Within days of the massacre, the sadists were the real victims, while their actual victims had what was coming to them. It was merely the response of the oppressed to their oppression. The kindness myth remained intact.

The most revealing image was not the marches that followed October 7 but the ripping down of hostage posters. Here were photographs of kidnapped children and grandmothers torn from walls by people whose faces were contorted with rage and hatred. This is what happens when you’re presented with the mirror of your own side’s evil. They were torn down because they were evidence. The faces of Jewish victims had to be removed from sight because their existence as victims contradicted the story on which an entire moral identity depended.

The myth of kindness produces moral blindness, but it also cultivates the enemies that sustain it. Today’s hard right is largely a consequence of one side declaring its monopoly on virtue while denigrating its opponents as morally decrepit and intellectually stunted; in a word, evil. When institutions are captured by people whose primary commitment is to their own moral self-image, and when a democratic backlash – Brexit, Trump – gets treated as moral deformity rather than legitimate dissent, the result is to radicalise dissidents rather than persuade them. The emergence of genuine fascists is the vindication that the myth was waiting for.

People do escape the myth’s hold. It can be examined and rejected; Hitchens is the proof. But it requires surrendering certainty, community, and knowledge of which side you’re on. Most find the price too high because the myth is comfortable.

Scruton was too generous. It’s not that the left finds it hard to get on with right-wing people because it thinks them evil. It’s that the myth demands them to be evil. Conservatism, whatever its failures, is a position. The left, in its current form, is an identity – one that requires an enemy to remain coherent. Scruton could afford to think his opponents were merely mistaken. The kindness myth cannot afford the same generosity, because a mistaken opponent might be reasoned with, might even be right. Better, then, that the opponent is evil. Without the devil, there’s nothing to fight for.

I try to do two things with The Gadfly: skewer the absurdities of our age, and make sense of the ideas behind them. Some pieces take an afternoon. This one took a month. If you’d like to support the work, subscribe or upgrade.

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There is a caricature of the conservative that’s become so familiar it barely needs describing: reactionary, nostalgic and allergic to progress. It conjures the image of someone who thinks nothing should ever change because nothing was ever wrong.

The thinkers below had no patience for that caricature, and neither should you. What unites them is an understanding that good things are fragile and traditions useful; that the work of building them is slow, while tearing them down is easy and likely irreversible.

The selection of quotes features Roger Scruton above all because he distils, better than anyone since Chesterton (also included), the qualities of the conservative disposition and why it’s worth embracing rather than rejecting. You’ll also find Burke (a great inspiration to Scruton) and Nick Cave – an outlier in a popular culture that rewards progressive slogans and disdains anything that sounds a bit to the right.

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“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created... In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.”

— Roger Scruton

“Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

— Edmund Burke

“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

— Thomas Sowell

“To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

— Michael Oakeshott

“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Conservatism is more an instinct than an idea. But it’s the instinct that I think we all ultimately share, at least if we are happy in this world. It’s the instinct to hold on to what we love, to protect it from degradation and violence and to build our lives around it.”

— Roger Scruton

“A conservative temperament has something to do with a deep understanding of the inherent value of the world, and its vulnerable and precarious nature. It is suspicious of the impulse to tear things down, dismantle things, cancel things, burn things to the ground... The conservative understands about loss and about grief.”

— Nick Cave

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”

―Gustav Mahler

“For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is as likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.”

— Roger Scruton

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected... Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”

— Roger Scruton

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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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Dear America,

I write today on behalf of a small and bewildered country in the North Atlantic which, until recently, answered to the name Great Britain. You might recall that the people of these islands invented parliamentary democracy and gave the world the Industrial Revolution. We were long famed for standing agreeably in queues and talking politely about the weather. Many of us still consider these achievements evidence of civilisation.

It is, then, with a heavy heart that we require your immediate assistance in a very grave matter. Our country is in peril, governed as we are by technocrats determined to ruin the nation they inherited.

Accordingly, I ask you to invade.

Before you object that such things are normally reserved for oil states and clerical fascists, allow me to outline the present situation. Britain today is run by a strange cohort of people who have been educated to think that their own country is uniquely awful, its history unforgivable, and its traditions contemptible. They consider free speech dangerous and observable reality a matter of interpretation. They treat ordinary common sense like a biohazard.

The country of Shakespeare and the Magna Carta has lost its way. We’re not the same people who sent you taxes, then soldiers, then apologies, and eventually a steady stream of television actors. We are not quite unrecognisable yet, but the people who lead us are. The country that stood alone against fascism is run by people who think the man who led that effort was the real problem.

It started with Tony Blair – promising to carry us from a more-than-tolerable postwar settlement into a new century of “progress” and a plan to make that transition permanent. First under his watch and then under his apprentices, our institutions deformed from the inside, supervised by PR people first, politicians second, patriots never. A new order emerged, characterised by utter contempt for the nation that gave them birth, and a positive genius for the administrative management of decline.

They ran as different parties, naturally. Labour first, then Conservative, now Labour again. Not a liberal or a conservative or a democrat among them. Not working-class Labour either – a respectable tradition in its way.

We threw out one party and elected another. For a brief moment – Brexit, you might recall – it felt like the public will meant something. It didn’t. We had merely swapped one dinner party cohort for another. The guests became the hosts, then the guests again. The same dinner party continued. We were not invited.

Just this week, we learn that our banknotes will be redesigned on the grounds that historical figures are “polarising”. Churchill out, badgers in. Or is it beavers? We can be sure it won’t be dogs.

Labour councils have advised teachers that children’s drawings may constitute blasphemy under Islamic law. Female genital mutilation, we are told by our esteemed academics, is “culturally complex”; stigmatising it is the problem. Just recent examples. We have been wallowing in this humiliating cultural pigsty for twenty-five years.

For two decades, gangs of men raped thousands of girls in the towns of northern England. The authorities declined to intervene on the grounds that intervening might appear culturally insensitive. They put tact before the rape of children.

Last weekend, on the south bank of the Thames, crowds gathered to mourn Ayatollah Khamenei – a man whose militias were still killing their own people two months ago – with children waving placards bearing his face. A journalist who objected was surrounded by a mob and escorted away by police.

In London, this scarcely counts as unusual. You may think the mayor of New York is an eccentric choice for a city twenty-five years after 9/11. But we have Sadiq Khan – someone who’s spent a decade turning London into a city where you can be stabbed on the way to a vigil for the people who want to stab you, and still win re-election.

So, dear America, invade. Bring your boats and your helicopters, rain down missiles if you must. Smash through the diversity barriers with tanks, level the BBC and salt the earth.

At this rate, Britain will become the first country to erase itself in the name of progress. A country that gave the world Jane Austen will likely replace her on the ten-pound note with a fucking otter.

Invade, dear America. Rid us of the progressive aristocracy and return this country to its people. Do it for old times’ sake.

And when it’s all done, we’ll send you some tea – no taxes this time.

Yours faithfully,

The proud but exhausted people of Great Britain

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In 1798, a mild-mannered English clergyman named Thomas Robert Malthus discovered something terrifying. Poor people were having sex. Not only that, but they were producing babies. Worse still, these babies were demanding food.

Naturally appalled by these observations, Malthus set himself to the task of forming an economic theory. In his Essay on the Principle of Population, he argued that human populations grow geometrically – 2, 4, 8, 16. Land, however, is finite. Agriculture improves only slowly. Food production grows arithmetically – 1, 2, 3, 4. Any fool could surmise from these calculations that population growth would soon outstrip the food supply, leading inevitably to starvation and misery.

Fortunately, the solution disclosed itself through the same logic. Charity towards the poor would only lead to them having more children, in turn exacerbating the demand for food and the need for further charity. It was unsustainable. The only forces preventing immediate catastrophe were what Malthus cheerfully called “positive checks”: war, disease, and famine. There were also “preventive checks”, such as late marriage and moral restraint. The poor, lacking the moral fibre for the latter, would breed to the point of starvation.

The solution was to let the natural order of things run its course: famine as the cure for starvation.

Within a generation, Malthusianism had become the respectable excuse – indeed, the “compassionate” excuse – for the well-off to do nothing about poverty. The mathematics were irrefutable. The matter was settled.

There was just one problem with this elegant bit of reasoning.

It was nonsense.

What Malthus got wrong

Human populations don’t grow exponentially without limit. Birth rates fall with prosperity, education, and urbanisation. The poorest have the most children while the rich have the fewest. This is completely obvious to anyone looking at current global trends, with rich countries like South Korea now experiencing a demographic emergency.

Agricultural productivity has refused to plod on arithmetically either. Global cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. The world already produces enough calories for ten billion people, and when famines occur today, they’re usually the result of political failures, not agricultural ones. More adults are now overweight than underweight.

Most fatally, Malthus assumed humans were mindless rabbits – driven by nothing but appetite, incapable of adaptation. Yet we have culture and technology and the awkward habit of solving problems that the gleefully pessimistic insist are insoluble. Take the Haber-Bosch process, for example. It practically conjures food from the air.

In short, the problem with his theory is that it treats people as passive objects of mathematical fate. The British Parliament embraced it anyway with a fervour bordering on the sadistic. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 introduced the workhouse, deliberately brutal and hellish places where cruelty was reasoned away as somehow necessary. This is Oliver Twist territory without the musical. Charles Dickens, in “A Walk in a Workhouse” (1850):

“In one place, the Newgate of the Workhouse, a company of boys and youths were locked up in a yard alone; their day-room being a kind of kennel where the casual poor used formerly to be littered down at night…They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or hyaenas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out, much as those animals do”.

Perhaps there was nobody more “compassionate” by Malthusian logic than Charles Trevelyan, administrator of Irish famine relief. In 1847, Trevelyan wound down public works and closed the soup kitchens while ensuring exports continued even as the poor starved. In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan described the famine as “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.” One million died.

Today’s Malthusians

The most frustrating thing about Malthusianism isn’t that it was wrong. Lots of ideas are wrong – most are, in fact, which is why the good ones tend to survive, and the bad ones disappear. But Malthusianism doesn’t disappear, and it refuses to die. Worse, it has stalked public policy ever since because the logic on the surface is just too compelling, too convenient for those in charge.

Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) predicted hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

None of it happened. Ehrlich is still invited to give talks, naturally. The career penalty for being wrong turns out to be zero, as long as the error is made in the right direction, flattering the preconceptions of people who want it to be true. But at least his heart was in the right place. His apocalypse has simply been rescheduled, with new prophets and updated catastrophes taking its place.

China’s One-Child Policy was explicitly Malthusian. It produced an unprecedented demographic catastrophe – a missing generation, a collapsing workforce, an ageing population – while solving what turned out to be a non-problem.

Today’s Malthusians worry about emissions rather than calories, but the structure of the argument is identical: too many people consuming too much. It’s why “degrowth” has become fashionable among policymakers and academics who think shrinking the economy and lowering expectations are the right thing to do. Curiously, it is always other people’s expectations that need to be lowered. The professor advocating degrowth is not, in the main, proposing to degrade his own circumstances. He means yours.

As Yuval Noah Harari has made a career of insisting, human beings are little more than biochemical algorithms produced by blind evolutionary forces. Once you've accepted that, the distance between "humans are the problem" and "fewer humans would be better" is surprisingly short.

Environmental activists produce carbon footprint calculators to make poverty look virtuous. Anti-natalist movements frame having children as a moral failing. We shouldn’t be surprised that both attract so many misanthropes.

The point of it

The appeal of Malthusianism, and why it endures, is that it offers something more valuable than truth. It offers moral licence to see other humans as surplus to requirements, while framing that view as ethical and aligned with the greater good. It’s an inhumane, deeply misanthropic way of seeing the world made respectable by mathematics, which turns selfishness into science and cruelty into compassion.

So the next time someone instructs you that there are too many people or that growth cannot continue forever, remember: Malthus said it first at a time when the world had one billion people and the horse-and-carriage was considered bleeding-edge technology.

We are now at eight billion and better fed than at any point in human history. Despite this, the apocalypse keeps getting rescheduled by the intellectual descendants of Malthus.

Malthusianism is never really about population, or resources, or maths. It’s seized upon by people keen to advertise their compassion and empathy while explaining why other people deserve less.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed the emperor has no clothes. Yet everyone around you is still complimenting his trousers.

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John Cleese is one of the very few celebrity activists I can get behind. Actually not “activist” – a word that now calls to mind trustafarians and murder junkies marching side by side through the world’s capitals for a recently deceased ayatollah.

Cleese is not an activist, then, but he is delightfully vocal and unfiltered on the absurdities of the moment. He’s become that rare thing in a stupid age – an influential voice of common sense in a world that treats such things as “problematic” and inflammatory.

Evidence of this comes from his recent posts on X, which point to the UK's unutterably stupid descent into an intellectual suburb of Islamabad.

Here’s a taste of what he’s been saying:

Cleese has probably retweeted things he shouldn’t. He’s 86 and posting in hurried disbelief at what’s happening to his country. The occasional loose cannonball is inevitable – and forgivable. I’d rather that than the bland, inoffensive slop that passes for conviction among people with more to lose and less to say.

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If Cleese were just another retired octogenarian, I suspect someone from the Starmer Stasi would have knocked on his door by now. They haven’t and probably won’t because he has an enormous online presence, or “reach” as marketers say – and reach, in this climate, is the only reliable protection.

Protection from what? Protection from saying what so many people think but have learned not to say: that Great Britain has been shat upon by a spiteful, technocratic, ideologically bamboozled collection of characters who belong in a Monty Python sketch, not the UK Parliament. That sort of thing.

Cleese has nothing left to prove. This is the man who co-wrote The Life of Brian and gave us Basil Fawlty. A man who has gifted the world more laughter than all humourless ideologues could ever bury under an avalanche of sanctimony.

More importantly for this discussion, he’s at an age where he has nothing to lose. Freed from the social calculus that keeps younger celebrities rigidly aligned to progressive orthodoxies, he’s able to post freely about extremism and the institutional cowardice that refuses to name it.

The response from the cultural establishment has been predictable: he’s gone mad; best not to engage; old white man howls into the wind. The instinct, as always, is to pathologise common sense as some kind of cognitive defect. “Is John Cleese OK?” – that patronising little question that implies mental illness while pretending concern.

He’s more than OK. He’s enjoying a second burst of the same irreverence that made him famous – which makes sense, because the target is essentially the same. When The Life of Brian was released in 1979, it was widely banned and picketed by people who apparently couldn’t tell the difference between Jesus and Brian. Cleese and the other Pythons, then in their thirties, skewered precisely the sort of people who most needed skewering – the pious and the pompous. The sort of people who today tell you to “educate yourself” and call you a racist for noticing things, in the belief that this wins the argument rather than advertises the absence of one.

Cleese has been thinking about this problem for a long time. Years ago, he gave a wonderfully clear explanation of the mentality of fanaticism – the habit of dividing the world into the pure and the impure, the enlightened and the damned.

The fanatics have only multiplied since. Like a lot of truly great comedy, the clip hits the target long after the first shot is fired. This was from a time when comedy and satire had a job to do and did it well.

What a pity, then, that modern comedians are so tiresomely quick to share their moral positioning on climate, trans rights, and every other urgent “moral emergency”, yet remain silent on the actual evils in our society. Today, satire is almost dead, not because so much of what surrounds us is beyond parody, but because the reputational costs are too high and the rewards for toeing the line too compelling.

What are the odds that at next week’s Oscars anyone will show solidarity with the massacred dissidents of Iran or call out the grotesque apologists for theocratic fascism? We won’t hear a word. Instead, we can expect the usual ejaculations about Gaza, Trump’s threat to democracy, and the existential horror of border enforcement. The causes that cost nothing, aimed at the enemies that are safe to have.

Not Cleese, though. He hasn’t been stupefied by fame and in his later years is using it for something useful – stirring things up and being a nuisance, or a gadfly, as I like to think of it.

Not that I agree with him on everything – of course I don’t. Agreement is not the point. Intellectual honesty and the courage to speak plainly are.

There’s something both funny and faintly melancholy about all this. The satirical tradition he helped build was supposed to be self-renewing – each generation finding the next sacred cows and roasting them like before. Instead, we’re watching an octogenarian do the job that a younger generation has decided is too risky to pursue, preferring instead to bore us with sermons about diversity and inclusion. Who the hell watches a comedian for that?

Cleese has remained true to his vocation. By the standards of the current moment, that makes him a dissident. Which probably says rather more about the moment than it does about him.

If you want to take the pulse of a culture, start with its comedy. Ours, with a few exceptions, is very unwell

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Gadfly Quotes

I’ve added a new section to The Gadfly – a place for some of my favourite quotations, aphorisms, quips and epigrams. These are the sort of lines you can dip into when you’d rather hear from people who have thought more deeply about the big questions than most of us.

If you have a favourite of your own, add it in the comments of the post below. I’ll update these posts with the best ones as the collection grows. Over time, I hope to build up a small library worth dipping into.

Here’s the first one.

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Imagine losing all your political freedoms. What would it look like? Perhaps you picture the blaze of revolution – a political earthquake, jackboots marching through the streets. That happens, of course. History is full of it.

But the more likely scenario is freedom withering away bit by bit, surrendered on promises of greater security and personal safety. The truth is that many of us are willing to give up our freedoms and quick to trust administrators and experts to act in the greater good. Those less inclined shouldn’t be surprised when a police squad eventually turns up to ask about something you posted online.

The thinkers below understood this: that political freedom is easy to give away and almost impossible to reclaim, especially when it is taken under the auspices of good intentions.

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“Of all tyrannies, that exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

– C. S. Lewis

“Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”

– Friedrich Hayek

“What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it.”

– Thomas Sowel

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.”

– Thomas Paine

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

– Søren Kierkegaard.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

– George Orwell

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

– Voltaire

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

– Milton Friedman

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

– John Stuart Mill

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

– James Madison

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

– Ronald Reagan

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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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There’s a parasitic wasp called Glyptapanteles that lays its eggs inside a living caterpillar. The larvae grow slowly, feeding off the flesh and keeping the host alive, rewiring its behaviour and steering it about its business until the larvae are ready to emerge. The caterpillar doesn’t know what’s going on but probably thinks something weird is happening, something a bit off. It has no idea of the seriousness of the situation because it’s now essentially a zombie. It walks, but it isn’t going anywhere of its own choosing – kept alive only insofar as it provides a useful residence and resource centre for a grand project that hasn’t yet declared itself in full.

This is a metaphor for something that’s happening in the West: an ideology inserting itself into progressive institutions that scarcely understand what they’ve got themselves into. But what is this ideology, you ask? Militant Jainism? Radical Quakerism? The horse-and-…

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The Ayatollah’s obituary

It’s a good time to be in the hate business. You probably feel it too. If someone bothered to plot it on a graph, the line would look like one of those stock charts from a bubble economy: steady climb, minor dips, then a vertical. Ever since the internet became our second brain and social media the public vomitorium, the opportunity to despise people at scale has never been greater.

Let’s not pretend this is new, though. There have been far more dramatic surges of hatred in history. The 1930s were pretty full-on, albeit the media was less in-your-face. Back then, people had to go to a cinema to see a lunatic with a funny tache get very cross about things – and I don’t mean Charlie Chaplin but the other guy he was mocking.

Mocking tyrants is a good thing, by the way. Celebrating their downfall even better. Which is why the media obituaries for Ayatoll…

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They’re going to be more insufferable than usual, aren’t they? Greta will come out of hiding, and Jeremy Corbyn – who increasingly resembles the late Ayatollah Khomeini but with less charm – will pop up in TV interviews. He’ll declaim on the evils of regime change, waffle something about international law, and become indignant and evasive the moment anyone points out the nauseating hypocrisy – which they won’t because it’ll be on the BBC.

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Many years ago, when Britain was still a vaguely serious country and “soft power” didn’t sound like a punchline, I spent time working in China doing my bit for Sino-UK relations. I occasionally visited Xinjiang – a vast western province home to the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority now subject to mass internment, forced labour and what several governments have formally recognised as genocide.

The Uyghurs I met were friendly and curious, getting on with the business of living like everyone else in that watchful country. I’ve thought about them occasionally over the years. I wonder how many are suffering under the CCP’s brutality today.

I don’t expect to see mass marches through London or New York for the Uyghurs any time soon. No trending hashtags, no flags in bios or TikTok sermons. True, a handful of activists keep vigil outside embassies, but they go largely unnoticed. Meanwhile, the big NGOs barely mention them, and celebrity activists – usually so keen to …

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Maybe it’s because I spent years working in PR for a British institution that I can detect progressive orthodoxy in parts per million. I can pick it up in the throat-clear before a politician says “people who menstruate”. I know within seconds of meeting someone if they will use a word like “intersectional” unironically.

I can even tell which of five distinct types of progressive I’m dealing with. I’ll come to those in a moment.

If you’re still reading this, I suspect you have similar radar systems and defence capabilities – perhaps even a natural-born immunity to progressive groupthink. In any case, you’re likely equipped with that most dangerous of intellectual habits: thinking for yourself.

But while immunity to progressive orthodoxy is one thing, it also comes with side effects. In my case, a severe allergic reaction to gaslighting. Left-wing moralising brings me out in a rash. Institutional moralising is even worse, at one point making me so agitated I started The Gadfly. This is personal therapy, you understand.

I put these reactions down to a simple intolerance of sanctimony and instinctive hostility to the corruption of language. Like you, I didn’t sign up to be lectured by people who insist biological reality is a social construct or who spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about race.

Still, it’s comforting that so many of us can see the charade for what it is. The question, then, is why progressive ideology persists despite its obvious contradictions and distortions. Who benefits?

Here’s who.

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The five types of progressive

The True Believers are the rarest and most dangerous type. Usually found in university admin or HR, they genuinely think that questioning any aspect of progressive orthodoxy constitutes harm. The moment they make eye contact with reality, their pupils dilate, and they assume a glazed, faraway look like someone’s talking to them through an earpiece only they can hear.

It’s the Tavistock clinician who dismissed parents’ concerns about rushing children into transition as “transphobia”. It’s the university administrator who considers “women” a radioactive word and the niqab an expression of female empowerment. It’s the civil servant who enforces unisex toilets because questions of “dignity” matter more than safeguarding.

The Careerists know it’s all nonsense but have mortgages. They privately roll their eyes at the latest pronoun updates but champion them in the board meeting with the enthusiasm of a North Korean newsreader.

Examples include the BBC editor who knows “pregnant people” is absurd but issues the apology on behalf of the female presenter who corrected the autocue to “women”. It’s the museum curator who rewrites exhibition labels to acknowledge “problematic legacies” to satisfy the demands of the True Believer, who controls the money.

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OnlyFans is a platform where strangers pay a monthly subscription to simulate sexual intimacy with people they will never meet – a technological innovation that would have baffled every previous civilisation.

On the other side of this transaction are millions of young women (and a few men) who treat this as they might a career in teaching or an entrepreneurial pursuit – weighing the hours, calculating the income, and optimising the marketing strategy.

Imagine explaining that to someone 50 years ago. Better yet, imagine you’ve time-travelled back to a classroom of teenage girls in the mid-1970s and you’re telling them what’s coming. That within a generation, thousands of girls their age will aspire to sell access to nude photographs and videos of themselves, and that newspapers will profile them as entrepreneurs. That a woman called Bonnie Blue will offer her body as a venue for an extreme endurance sport and that this will be treated as a newsworthy ac…

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Here’s a little experiment you can try if you want to add a bit of drama to your day. Walk into your next diversity training session and declare that men cannot be women. You’ll be sitting across from HR by lunchtime and given a pamphlet about unconscious bias. Persist in your line of thinking, and you’ll be shown the door.

Now try running the experiment the other way. If you’re a man, show up in a floral sundress and announce you identify as a woman (whatever that is) and mention you’ve always felt like “one of the girls”. You’ll be asked your pronouns, told how brave you are, and someone will cry. You’ll get a promotion by Friday.

Something has gone badly wrong with our culture’s understanding of what is true. We all know it. Modern institutions insist on claims about reality that are obviously false – and they’ll happily destroy your career for noticing. Saying nothing increasingly feels safer than pointing out what everyone can see.

None of this is new…

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I’m generally against criminalising stupidity. Nobody can be blamed for being born with a low IQ, or for having the misfortune to miss out on an education – although the latter isn’t strictly stupidity, and avoiding a Western university education is increasingly the smart move.

But some utterances are so stupid, so utterly devoid of logic and sense, so obviously designed to win applause rather than connect with intelligent life, that I find myself believing there must be a cost. A price must be paid. I’ll return to this.

Billie Eilish, I’m assured, is a talented singer. She’s the sort of person who can fill a stadium and make teenagers cry with a chord change. She’s also the sort of person who stands at the Grammys and tells the world that “nobody is illegal on stolen land” – and gets a standing ovation for it.

Let’s take a moment to unpack this. If all land is stolen – and it is repeatedly, by different groups throughout history – then the logical conclusion is either that everyone is illegal everywhere, or nobody is illegal anywhere. If the latter, then every country on earth should open its borders to every person who wants to come in.

Even a child can work out that this wouldn’t be practical. But Billie Eilish isn’t a child, she’s a celebrity – completely insulated from the real world and surrounded by sycophants and other moneyed morons who all think alike.

She doesn’t need to understand what the scripted line means. The only calculation she has to make is whether the phrase sounds compassionate. In her world, that’s the same thing as being compassionate – which is top-tier positioning for the status-hungry. The standing ovation confirms it.

Why does this matter? Who cares what singers and actors think?

Well, imagine someone tells Eilish that the Earth itself is stolen land. Stolen from whom, exactly? Doesn’t matter. Maybe the dinosaurs. The point is that by Friday, there’d be a #FreeEarth march in Los Angeles. A pin would be designed in the shape of a T. rex. Celebrities would wear it, and fans would follow suit. Within a month, Greta Thunberg would ditch the keffiyeh for a lizard-patterned onesie and release a spoken-word manifesto called Asteroid about the ancestral trauma of the Mesozoic Era. And anyone pointing out that the Earth belongs to nobody – or, more likely, to everyone – would be accused of being a planet supremacist.

And then someone would blame it on “Israel”. Then they all would.

Hollywood celebrities aren’t ideologues. They haven’t worked out a political philosophy or economic framework. They’re not wrestling with Marxist dialectics or decolonial theory. They’re airheads and useful idiots who’ve spotted a status opportunity and grabbed it. The oppressor/oppressed framework is the most efficient virtue-signalling machine ever invented. You don’t need to understand anything. You just need to know who’s the victim and who’s the villain – and then declare that you’re on the right side of history.

Hollywood is the perfect fit because these are people who tell stories about goodies and baddies for a living. This is what makes them so dangerous. They genuinely believe life is this simple and that they are at the centre of it. Moral narcissists are everywhere, but Hollywood moral narcissists really are everywhere – on every screen, in every feed, telling young people that Israel is evil and brown people are oppressed. There’s no further context or nuance. No complexity. Just a story that gets told and retold, deformed and eventually borrowed by sadists and fanatics for moral cover.

At the Golden Globes, a reporter asked Bill Maher why he wasn’t wearing a “Be Good” pin – a tribute to Renee Good. Half the celebrities in the room were already adorned. Maher’s answer:

“It was a terrible thing that happened. And if they didn’t act like such thugs, it wouldn’t have had to happen. But I don’t need to wear a pin about it.”

Later on his show, he reiterated the point:

“I hope I didn’t spoil the perfect record of pins and ribbons solving the world’s problems. You can’t name a problem – from guns to AIDS to bullying to breast cancer – that still exists after people wore a ribbon for it. Except all of them. You fucking posers.”

Few celebrities puncture the hypocrisy of their own tribe as effectively as Maher. He understands that pins and ribbons aren’t political statements but accessories. They signal membership of a very exclusive club – the club of People Who Care™. Or, more accurately, the club of people who need everyone to know they care.

Which is why the silence on Iran is so damning. The system reveals itself as one that isn’t designed to pick up every genuine cause, only the safe ones. While Billie Eilish rehearses lines about stolen land, the Islamic Republic is massacring its own people by the tens of thousands – the majority of them killed on two days, shot by the Revolutionary Guard on direct orders from Khamenei. Most of the dead were under 30. The government cut the internet to hide it while doctors smuggled footage out via Starlink.

Where’s the pin for this? The hashtag? Where’s Mark Ruffalo?

Nobody’s surprised at any of this because Iran doesn’t fit the template. The oppressor is an Islamic theocracy, not a Western democracy. Criticising Islam is career suicide in Hollywood. So they simply don’t see it. Their radar only picks up signals that come pre-packaged for virtue signalling, and Iran isn’t one of them.

“Our voices really do matter”, said Eilish at the end of her speech. This is true but not in the way she thinks. Celebrities are so convinced that good intentions are the same thing as good outcomes that thinking becomes optional. Their young and unworldly audiences lap it up all the same.

Which brings me back to the cost. The price that must be paid.

It’s tempting to indulge the fantasy of chartering an A380 and flying Hollywood royalty immediately to Tehran to discover the true cost of speaking out for freedom.

But the real cost of moral narcissism ought to be much simpler than that. Holding luxury beliefs should become hugely embarrassing – stigmatised, even. Delivering scripted opinions about Gaza while ignoring Iranian clerical fascism should be career-terminating. Not because some authority decrees it, but because enough people have enough moral clarity to see the hypocrisy for what it is – a game for status junkies. They’ll stop watching the films and streaming the music because it’s all just a bit gross.

And only then, when the status calculation flips, when performance stops paying, will Hollywood’s moral narcissists pause and wonder whether any of it was ever real.

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At twenty minutes to five on the morning of 24 June 2016, the BBC’s David Dimbleby announced the result of Britain’s referendum on Europe.

“The British people have spoken,” he said. “The answer is: we’re out.”

Sterling went into freefall. Remain-voting politicians reacted with open incredulity – some with something close to grief. “God help this country,” tweeted one of them – a sentiment shared by practically everyone in the establishment.

Brexit marked the start of something that remains unresolved, and that has arguably done lasting damage to trust in democratic politics ever since – not just in the UK but across the West. The election of Trump did the same in the US. What helped produce both – and intensified in the aftermath – was a collapse of trust in technocratic governance.

In the years that followed, two different but related grievances solidified into rival expressions of resentment. One side raged at how the public could have got it so wrong. The other at why the political cla…

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