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.

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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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 …

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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. Li…

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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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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.

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For many people, when they think of a conservative, they conjure the image of a reactionary: someone who’s nostalgic, suspicious of the future, and allergic to progress. It’s the one-percenter lobbying to preserve the status quo because change might diminish their wealth and power. It’s the boomer in a tweed jacket who throws a scolding glance at “today’s youth” and refuses to understand their concerns.

The thinkers below had no patience for these caricatures, and neither should you. What unites them is an understanding that good things are fragile and that traditions are often inherited forms of knowledge and wisdom. For the conservative, the work of building civilised institutions is slow, difficult, even a little dull. But they understand that tearing them down, while often thrilling and self-flattering, is also often irreversible.

None of which is to say that reform is bad. The conservative disposition, rightly understood, is about the insistence on knowing what you are moving away from. Before you tear down the fence in the field, find out why someone built it (we sometimes call this “Chesterton’s fence”). We should ask the same of the reformer who busily uproots the fence, and if they are incurious about that question or hold it in disdain, we might fairly wonder who gave them permission to act on our behalf and what the consequences might be. History has shown us repeatedly that when those things don’t happen, or can’t happen in an unfree society, catastrophe awaits.

This selection of quotes below features Roger Scruton above all because he distilled, better than almost anyone since Chesterton, the qualities of the conservative disposition. Things like gratitude, restraint, and piety toward the past, as well as the tragic sense of human nature and the suspicion of schemes that promise liberation while dissolving the conditions that make freedom possible.

You will also find Burke, Scruton’s great inspiration, who looked on as a revolution promised heaven and delivered the guillotine. His conclusions about the paroxysms of the French Revolution form the foundational text of conservatism today, and the kind of events he responded to lurk at the edge of every society not constrained by temperance. Chesterton is here too, because he understood as well as anyone the confidence of a fluent managerial class busily dismantling things they have not first taken the trouble to understand. This, of course, is the class of people that incur so much of the public wrath today, and for precisely these reasons.

Taken together, these quotes offer a brief introduction to the conservative disposition: the inclination to defend our inheritance against those who despise it or merely don’t understand it; to emphasise gratitude over vanity; and to favour careful, thoughtful reform in place of the peculiar modern belief that sweeping things away is a form of cultural intelligence rather than reckless naivety.

“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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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 unique…

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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.

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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

If you’ve noticed the emperor has no clothes, but everyone around you keeps complimenting his trousers, subscribe. There are more of us than you think.

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.

If you’ve noticed the emperor has no clothes, but everyone around you keeps complimenting his trousers, subscribe. There are more of us than you think

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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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