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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Timothy, a member of parliament, remarked:

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

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

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

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

The fascists who created it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cowards who use it

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

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

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

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

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

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

The morons who are manipulated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hobsbawm’s answer was a single word.

Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s who.

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The five types of progressive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of this is new…

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

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

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

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

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

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Christopher Hitchens once divided the world into the things he hated and the things he loved.

“In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation.

In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”

What stands out is the inclusion of irony, an appreciation of which is one of the most reliable indicators of intellectual flexibility – the capacity to hold multiple perspectives without surrendering to one.

People without irony tend to be humourless, of course, but it goes deeper than that. You cannot be a fanatic and possess it. The two are incompatible. Fanaticism requires absolute certainty, whereas irony sees the gap between what’s said and what’s meant, between the ideal and the actual. This is why fanatics are so literal-minded. They cannot grasp ambiguity or complexity.

We see it in the comment sections and replies. It’s all over social media, naturally.…

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Dear Friend of the Oppressed,

You’ve spent two years telling us who deserves your solidarity. Now thousands of Iranians are dying in the streets, and you’ve gone quiet.

In recent weeks, the people of Iran have risen up against a fascist theocracy, demanding the same freedoms you enjoy and take for granted. When I say fascist, I don’t mean in the sense you apply it to people worrying about uncontrolled immigration. I mean actual fascism, where dissent is crushed through the slaughter of unarmed civilians, most of them under 30.

Thousands have poured into the streets to face down a regime that has strangled the people of Iran for 47 years – the same regime, incidentally, that armed and funded the “resistance” you spent the last two years championing.

Despite internet shutdowns, footage has managed to escape. Look around online and you’ll eventually see clips of young women burning hijabs and crowds chanting “death to the dictator”.…

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Twenty years ago, Tucker Carlson wore a bow tie and argued with liberals on CNN. This was in a different age – a different dimension, almost – to the one we live in today. People on either side of the aisle could disagree vociferously while still operating within a shared reality. Nobody felt the need to establish first whether the Holocaust happened or if men could have babies.

Today Carlson nods along as a podcast guest describes Winston Churchill as the real villain of World War II – worse than Hitler. The man who stood against fascism is recast as the monster by the sort of person who thinks nose rings and pink hair spell the end of civilisation.

This would be fascinating if it were just one man’s strange descent into the murky waters of conspiracy theory and paranoia. But Carlson is far from alone. He’s merely the most famous example of a new orthodoxy on the right that’s turning conservatism on its head and employing many of the same tricks as …

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Here’s an observation that explains more about our exhausted political discourse than a dozen explainers on progressive moral confusion.

“It’s amazing how much leftist discourse consists of pretending not to understand what’s plainly being said — thus making discourse impossible.”

Clarifying, isn’t it?

This piece is about that habit – what I’ve come to think of as strategic incomprehension, especially on the left. It’s the deliberate act of pretending not to understand what’s being said, because understanding it would concede the argument.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the old left, the one your granddad supported via a trade union. This isn’t a piece about thoughtful left-of-centre liberals, either – the kind who still believe in reason, common sense and individual liberty. Most of these people are perfectly capable of good-faith arguments and moral seriousness.

I’m referring to that infuriating habit of discussing complex issues in a way that h…

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The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bomb finally detonated around 2020. It had been years, maybe even decades, in the making – assembled inside the academy and then refined in institutions already steeped in the language of political correctness. It just needed a perfectly calibrated trigger.

The trigger, as it turned out, was George Floyd, whose death amid the strange, highly charged atmosphere of COVID lockdowns turned us all into spectators of a moral panic. Millions sat at home glued to their smartphones as the madness of crowds played out on social media with endless footage of “largely peaceful protests”, statues tumbling and politicians taking the knee.

Then came the turn of corporations. In the months that followed, performative statements flooded LinkedIn, diversity officers were hired by the thousand, and hashtags begged for attention in every thread and feed.

It’s tempting to look back on those events as if they were a curious aberration, a moment of hysteria brought about by lockdown cabin fever. Today, it’s common to hear that “woke is dead” – and it's true that many DEI programmes have been shut down or rebranded. The finger-wagging sanctimony has been toned down a few notches, too.

But what remains is the language: a distinct and unmistakable lexicon with a long half-life. This is the fallout from a blast we thought was long behind us. DEI no longer marches through institutions with a fanfare, but it operates as background radiation. Wave the Geiger counter over policy small print or the latest HR initiative, and you’ll hear the familiar crackling of progressive orthodoxy.

The language has insinuated itself into corporations and public bodies across the Western world, becoming almost invisible through constant repetition. Phrases that sound benign on the surface mask a cold system of enforcement that continues to reward fluency in Newspeak while punishing dissent. Taken together, they form a closed moral system – one that begins with empathy and ends with coercion.

Here are a few phrases you’ve probably heard before.

1. “We’re on a journey”

The world’s most overused corporate metaphor is also a favourite of institutions haemorrhaging money on failed DEI initiatives. Bud Light went on a journey with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April 2023 and ended up in corporate hell. The brand lost its spot as America’s top-selling beer, two marketing executives were put on leave, and the whole debacle cost a billion dollars in lost sales.

The BBC has been on a journey since around 1997 at the expense of licence-fee payers. It doesn’t seem to know quite where it’s going, but it keeps taking a left turn, often detouring into fashionable gender politics. The journey has also led it to stories that align with Hamas narratives. Despite the costs to its reputation, the BBC remains convinced the destination is an important one (whatever that may be) and that the journey mustn’t stop until the end, which will come eventually and mercifully for all involved.

2. “Bringing your whole self to work”

Silicon Valley invented this one. The idea was that workers would bring their creativity and passion to the job. Instead, they brought their politics and personal grievances.

It turns out there’s only really a problem if your “whole self” doesn’t align with “correct thinking”. Don’t bring your whole Christian self to work – the one who opposes abortion or thinks polygamy is a bad idea. That won’t go down too well. Think national borders might be a good thing? That whole self had better stay away, too. A gender-critical whole self? Don’t be silly. Best put all those whole selves back in their box, or wave your career goodbye.

You might remember Google’s James Damore. He brought his whole self to work – specifically, the part interested in evolutionary psychology. He was fired within days for “perpetuating gender stereotypes” after writing a memo about biological differences in career preferences. The memo claimed Google operated as an ideological echo chamber intolerant of dissenting views. His firing proved him right.

3. “Brave conversations”

Have you had a brave conversation recently? Maybe following a cancer diagnosis or after explaining to your husband why you’re leaving him. We’re not talking about any of that. We’re talking about “courageous dialogue” with your line manager following an apparent “microaggression”. Turns out you need more training in how to think and when to declare your pronouns.

These conversations tend to begin with an admission of privilege, followed by an acknowledgement of harm, and conclude with a commitment to growth. Actual conversation – the kind where people disagree and minds change – never happens. That’s the wrong sort of bravery. The proper kind is where you confess to thought crimes you didn’t know existed.

4. “Educate yourself”

You’ve probably come across this rebuke in a comment section at some point. Perhaps it was directed at you after saying “all lives matter” in what you thought was a noble, unifying sentiment we can all agree upon. Educate yourself.

This is a phrase professional activists and scolds deploy when they can’t defend their position. It’s the go-to for transforming intellectual laziness into moral superiority.

What “educate yourself” really means is this: read the approved texts so as to arrive at the conclusions I agree with – what we used to call indoctrination. Any other outcome is seen as proof of moral and intellectual deficiency.

Real education, of course, involves weighing evidence, considering counter-arguments, and risking being wrong, which is why the progressive ideologues hate it.

5. “Psychological safety”

Google popularised this phrase, which made its way into every workplace in Silicon Valley and beyond. “Psychological safety” was meant to encourage an environment where people can take risks and make mistakes without fear. That was a nice idea while it lasted.

Today, it means an environment where nobody can disagree with progressive orthodoxy without being invited to an HR struggle session. The safest spaces, it turns out, are wherever difficult questions are never asked. Feeling “unsafe” is now what happens when we challenge someone’s views on immigration or question whether men can become pregnant. JK Rowling has spent years being told her defence of women’s spaces makes trans people “unsafe”.

6. “Lived experience”

This one refuses to die, which is a tragedy because few ideas on this list have wrought so much chaos and misery as the idea of “lived experience”.

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If a fundamentalist Christian or a radical Hindu massacred a group of innocent civilians, would the first instinct of politicians be to protect churches or temples? Of course not. The ideology would be named and condemned. Apologists for religiously inspired terror would be sidelined and treated as morally adjacent.

So why, when the violence is inspired by political Islam, is the reflex always to protect mosques, draft laws on “Islamophobia”, and resurrect the looming threat of the “far right”?

It’s because Western liberalism has been captured and deformed by a progressive ideology that treats plain speaking about political Islam as the cardinal sin. To judge is to imply hierarchy; to imply hierarchy is to admit that liberal values might be superior – something now utterly taboo and status-destroying among those with institutional and cultural power. This doctrine is so internalised among the progressive class that it functions like a substitute religion. Naturally, it’s ruthlessly exploited by our enemies.

In theory, liberalism is perfectly capable of moral discrimination. It emerged from the Enlightenment precisely to allow members of society to assess competing beliefs, criticise some, adopt others and, through arguments and persuasion, reject those beliefs that seek to undermine these same rights. It assumes that ideas matter, that some are better than others, and that individuals have the right – indeed the duty – to defend the conditions that make liberty possible.

Progressivism has gradually and almost imperceptibly rewritten that agreement. In its current form, it treats all cultures as morally equivalent, while moral judgement is almost exclusively reserved for the West. The result is a ruling class that no longer understands what liberal principles are for and has lost the language to say that certain belief systems are not merely inferior but incompatible with a liberal society.

Islamism isn’t morally complicated, any more than fascism is. What’s complicated is the West’s refusal to judge it.

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By the time the bodies had been counted at the Bondi Beach massacre, the familiar machinery of moral confusion had already started turning. As with every atrocity of the kind this century – and there have been too many to count since 9/11 – the language is the first sign that something has gone horribly wrong with our response to evil.

Through the media that speak on their behalf, institutions reach for a tried-and-tested lexicon of calculated evasion. These are words and phrases designed to create the appearance of a sober and humane response.

In reality, they are empty of meaning. They function as an anaesthetic, numbing public outrage and buying just enough time for things to restabilise without having to say anything of substance.

Here are eight examples you’ve heard dozens of times before – by no means exhaustive – that should have been retired years ago but persist out of habit, even as fewer people pretend to believe them.

1. “This has nothing to do with Islam”

Translation: Ignore everything you just saw and heard.

It doesn’t matter that the perpetrator has done everything short of handing out annotated copies of the Quran to justify his actions. It’s irrelevant that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” while stabbing people, or that he livestreamed a statement pledging allegiance to ISIS in the aftermath. Ignore that his social media is a catalogue of jihadist justifications for violence. He may even be called Jihad, but that’s a reference to “spiritual struggle” – just so we’re clear.

Remember: this has nothing to do with Islam.

The brazenness of the lie is obvious – any fool can see it. But worse is the demand that you participate in it. The authorities are effectively asking that you ignore reality and absorb the institutional message that none of this was religiously motivated.

It’s gaslighting on an industrial scale. As the line often attributed to Solzhenitsyn puts it:

“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

Many of the other phrases on this list are downstream of this one or its variations that talk about a “poisoned offshoot” or a “grotesque distortion” of Islam – supporting characters in a fiction we’ve heard too many times before.

2. Concerns about “Islamophobia / far-right rhetoric / divisive language”

Translation: The problem is you.

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Few ideas have been so thoroughly discredited by reality as Marxism. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it brought to an end a diabolical experiment in “progress” that devoured tens of millions of lives, trailing poverty, tyranny and human suffering in its wake. Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward killed an estimated 45 million people. Lenin and Stalin eliminated approximately 20 million through forced collectivisation, manufactured famines, and the Gulag system. Add Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and the pattern is always the same.

All morally sane people can agree: Marxism was not humanity’s greatest idea.

Yet far from dying by its own contradictions, Marxism is alive and well. Indeed, it’s enjoying a sort of renaissance in Western universities, where critical theory – a Marxist framework for analysing power and oppression – now dominates many humanities and social science departments.

How is this possible?

The substitution

The answer is surprisingly simple, though rarely grasped, even by its opponents. Marxism survived by abandoning the economic revolution at which it so spectacularly failed and instead colonised morality itself. What happened was a substitution, not an extinction. What died in 1989 was Marxism as an economic and political theory. What took its place was Marxism as a worldview – a moral framework that divides humanity into oppressors and the oppressed. This pivot changed everything.

Where economic Marxism made falsifiable predictions about harvests and material wellbeing, cultural Marxism makes none. The first kind could be tested and its failures measured; the second kind immunises itself against reality by making empiricism itself suspect. How do you falsify the claim that objectivity is a tool of oppression? Or that mathematics is an expression of white privilege? You can’t. These are theories that cannot be tested by empirical reality. They’re more akin to astrology, explaining everything and nothing while confirming what you already believe. Minorities succeeding despite oppression? That’s resilience in the face of systemic injustice. Minorities struggling? That’s the system working as designed. Heads I’m oppressed, tails you’re racist.

But why morality? Why the obsession with language and political correctness? Because these are moral claims, and morality offers what economics never could: unfalsifiability, certainty, and permanent employment for those who police it. So Marxist ideas have seeped into the language almost unnoticed, redefining speech as violence and locating injustice everywhere. Transgress this new orthodoxy and you can expect a wave of sanctimony and censure typical of a dogmatic belief system.

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Lenin is usually credited with coining the term “useful idiot”. There’s no evidence he did, but it seems entirely plausible because the term became a popular way to describe Western intellectuals who cheered on communism from the safety of their Paris salons while actual communists were liquidating millions.

If we’re being charitable, we might say these intellectuals meant well, that they genuinely believed they were supporting progress towards a better society. Perhaps they were simply naive, seeing what they wanted to see and disregarding evidence of blatant tyranny, show trials, the mass murder of kulaks, and so on.

Or maybe they were just idiots.

The term has become popular again because the useful idiots of our day are similarly blinded by their own sense of moral superiority, too invested in groupthink to notice that they keep providing cover for modern-day evils. How else to explain their solidarity with fanatics who would eliminate them given the chance?

Every political tribe breeds its own useful idiots. The left has its campus activists and NGO lifers; the right has its conspiracy junkies and Putin groupies. This piece focuses mainly on the progressive variety because they currently have the deepest roots in our institutions – but the patterns are often the same.

It’s crucial to understand that not all useful idiots are stupid – not in the ordinary sense. Often they’re educated and articulate. The most committed useful idiots tend to have PhDs and introduce themselves as doctors. Yet all that education can obscure truths and blur moral clarity while making terrible ideas look attractive. As Orwell remarked, “Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them”.

Nevertheless, some useful idiots really are just stupid, and we’ll cover those as well. What unites all of them is a lack of courage – the courage to trust their own eyes, ask uncomfortable questions, and pay social costs for being right rather than staying comfortable by being wrong.

As for what makes useful idiots useful and for whom, we’ll get to that. First, let’s identify some of the common traits.

1. They outsource thinking to slogans

Ideology is how useful idiots know what to think about things they don’t understand. Perhaps “From the river to the sea” sounds poetic to the “Free Palestine” activist, but ask them which river and which sea and you’ll likely get a blank stare or embarrassed laughter. It’s the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, of course, but the point is that chanting the slogan effectively calls for the elimination of Israel and its people. It’s a bit genocidal when you think about it, which they don’t.

“Trans women are women” works in the same way. It’s not a claim about biological reality but an unfalsifiable redefinition of the word woman. It also functions as a sort of loyalty oath. Ask for a definition of woman, and it quickly falls apart. That’s because slogans are engineered to short-circuit thought and leave reason at the door.

2. They mistake performance for principle

Pronouns in an email signature or LinkedIn bio are cringeworthy, of course, but also a handy marker of pre-packaged thinking. Cringe is not something that troubles useful idiots, though. It’s why they can unselfconsciously wear an Amazon-delivered keffiyeh to an anti-capitalist march. Pronouns and keffiyehs are tribal signifiers first and foremost: ideology as a fashion statement; borrowed convictions as accessories.

Hashtag activism is also comically easy, requiring no real sacrifice except the risk of faulty wifi at the local artisanal coffee bar. Actual principled activism is a very different thing. It’s Karoline Preisler standing alone at demonstrations in front of a baying mob. That’s what courage and moral clarity actually look like, not playing the bongos and screeching for intifada outside a Christmas market.

3. They champion causes that would destroy them

Queers for Palestine might be the purest distillation of useful idiocy ever achieved. Hamas would throw them off the nearest building. Many Gazans, if we’re being honest, would happily assist. They wave their flags anyway because the cause provides meaning and the consequences are someone else’s problem.

Then we have Western feminists defending the hijab as a symbol of “empowerment” while women in Iran are beaten to death for removing it. And let’s not forget the progressives who celebrate Islamist movements that would criminalise everything progressives claim to value.

The useful idiot never asks whether the people they champion would tolerate them. It’s a simple question with a simple answer, which is why they ignore it.

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Knock knock.

Who’s there?

The police. You posted something on social media nine months ago, and someone has taken offence. These five other officers are here to escort you to the station for an interview.

Not a terribly funny joke, I’ll admit. In fact, it isn’t a joke at all, but reality in Britain in 2025. The country that gave the world liberal democracy and the foundational texts on freedom of speech now dispatches a police squad to your nan’s bungalow because she commented “we’re full” on Facebook beneath an article about immigration.

I exaggerate but only slightly. The Times reports that Britain’s police are making 30 arrests a day for “offensive posts on social media and other platforms”. That’s 11,000 arrests per year. For writing words. The knife-crime epidemic will have to wait, presumably.

Britain’s descent into unreason takes many forms – immigration chaos, economic self-harm, the refusal to look reality in the eye on almost everything that matters – but it’s this strange and deeply uncharacteristic policing of speech that most clearly reveals a country no longer in its right mind.

I feel it keenly because I write articles on controversial topics ranging from trans ideology to the rise of Islamism. I say things like “men cannot get pregnant” and “some cultures are better than others”. This week, Substack informed me I need to scan my face to keep using its chat feature, in compliance with Britain’s new Online Safety Act. It’s a small pop-up box, but it brought that knock on the door a little closer.

Describing reality now carries the risk of serious reputational harm and even legal prosecution. The UK government put it explicitly in a chilling tweet, which simply read: “Think before you post”. This is what Orwell meant by thoughtcrime, except Big Brother is now someone called Darren who works in the Metropolitan Police’s non-crime hate incident (NCHI) department.

This creeping authoritarianism is working. We see it in the normalisation of self-censorship – that little alarm bell in the corner of the mind, poised to go off when we wander into controversial territory. It’s in the moment you hesitate over a phrase or delete a sentence because you’re not sure where the invisible lines are any more. Most of us will never see a police officer about a Facebook post, but many of us are becoming attuned to the idea of wrongthink in our own minds.

In Areopagitica (1644), Milton argued that truth didn’t need protection from error; it needed freedom to contend with falsehood:

“Though all winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple, who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter”.

This was the principle, later developed by John Stuart Mill, that Britain gave the world. Trust free people to hear arguments and judge for themselves. Let truth emerge from the free and open exchange of ideas.

That was a nice idea while it lasted.

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You’ve probably stumbled upon a comment like this before on social media or in the pages of the New York Times. It’s the kind of thinking that flows through the progressive bloodstream, bypassing the prefrontal cortex and heading straight for the emotional centre of the brain – especially the part responsible for virtue-signalling. It’s abject nonsense, of course, but we need to deal with the problem of moral and cultural relativism – that’s what we’re talking about here – because it pops up all the time.

Let’s begin with a simple test that takes five seconds. Would you rather raise your daughter in Norway or Afghanistan? You already know the answer – everyone does. Some cultures are simply better for human flourishing. We know instinctively that South Korea produces happier, healthier people than North Korea. We can measure it empirically, too.

Migration patterns illustrate the point beyond doubt. When people risk drowning in the Mediterranean to reach Europe, they are risking their lives on the promise of a better life in countries like Italy than in places like Somalia. Migration flows one way. Nobody at the North London dinner party is planning on moving to Mogadishu for a better life.

None of this should be controversial because all of this is observable reality. So why does saying as much seem gauche at that same dinner party? “But colonialism”, they’ll say. “Who are we to judge?” intones another. “That’s bigotry!” exclaims Tarquin as he tops up his organic natural wine.

But these are not counterarguments. They’re evasions designed to protect progressive orthodoxy and move the conversation along without further scrutiny. But scrutinise we must.

The Malala test

In 2012, Malala Yousafzai was on her way to school when she was shot in the head by the Taliban for the crime of wanting an education. The fifteen-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl survived, and we know her story today because she went on to advocate for girls’ schooling. Her courage earned her the Nobel Peace Prize two years later.

Her cause was simple: girls deserve to learn.

Cultural relativism has no coherent response to this because it claims that all cultures are equal. For the relativist, education means different things in different contexts; we can’t judge one form by the standards of another.

Here’s where that reasoning falls apart. Because if we can’t measure a traditional Afghan society by Western values, then what exactly was wrong with what the Taliban did? Weren’t they simply enforcing their cultural norms about women’s roles? Protecting their traditions? Who are we, sitting comfortably in Oxford or Boston, to judge?

The relativist has three moves, all of which are fatal to their own position.

First move: “That’s not real Afghan culture”.

But of course it is. A conservative interpretation of Islam has dominated parts of Afghanistan for centuries. To say “that’s not real Afghan culture” is to suggest there’s a better version of it. You’ve already abandoned neutrality. You’re doing exactly what you claim is impermissible: judging between different cultural visions and declaring one superior.

Second move: “We support Afghan women’s own choices”.

Good. Malala and millions like her want education. But now you’ve conceded everything because you agree that Afghan women’s desire for education should override conservative cultural norms. You accept that individual autonomy should take precedence over traditional authority. You’ve admitted that some values – women’s rights, education, choice, autonomy – are superior to others. You’ve abandoned relativism entirely.

Third move: “Violence is the line”.

On what grounds? If no external standard exists, then honour killings and religious violence must count as valid, a legitimate part of the culture. When the Taliban shot Malala, they were enforcing their cultural rules. If you condemn them, you’re appealing to some universal principle that transcends culture. Once you’ve sided with Malala against the Taliban, you’ve granted that some cultures are better than others.

What we’re really measuring

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. We’re not talking about race or ethnicity. No thoughtful and intelligent person is claiming one race is better than another. Let’s leave that idea to genuine fascists. We’re talking about observable, measurable outcomes produced by some cultures in comparison with others – women’s rights, literacy rates, life expectancy, the rule of law, and freedom of religion.

True, history, geography and economics are important variables, but outcomes are largely shaped by how norms and institutions respond to the hand they’re dealt. When we think of cultures as competing solutions to the universal human problems of hunger, disease, violence, and injustice, it’s clear that some cultures produce solutions that help humans flourish; others produce the Taliban.

Literacy rates in the Philippines for males and females are 98% and 97% respectively. In Afghanistan, it’s 52% and 27%. The statistics reflect how cultures think about half their population. It’s not about ethnicity but how societies respond to the challenges they face. We don’t need to compare different countries or ethnicities to see this; we can compare one people divided between two systems. North and South Korea offer a striking contrast – ethnically identical people with one half thriving and the other imprisoned by its own leaders.

Saudi Arabia denies women equal legal status with men. Women need male permission to marry, travel, or leave prison. They’re treated as permanent legal minors. Pakistan criminalises blasphemy; people sit in prison for years, sometimes lynched by mobs, for insulting religion. Iran hangs gay men from construction cranes. The Taliban bans women from public life altogether.

If you condemned what happened to Malala, you must condemn this too. The principle is identical: women’s autonomy matters more than traditional male authority. The only difference is that one involved a bullet and the other involves a legal code. Both are evil.

Relativism’s intellectual bankruptcy

Let’s deal with the central claim of moral and cultural relativism: no culture can judge another. More precisely, judgments about what is right and wrong are not universal but are determined by the norms, beliefs, and practices of each culture.

Read that again. It’s making a particular kind of claim, one that is itself universal, requiring acceptance across different cultures if it’s to make any sense. In other words, it’s self-refuting. If all moral claims are relative to culture then so is that very claim. Why should a non-relativist accept a relativist’s injunction not to judge? They won’t, because it’s nonsense. As Roger Scruton noted:

“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.”

Relativism, he argued, is a convenient way for people to avoid taking a moral stand – a kind of intellectual and moral cowardice and “the first refuge of the scoundrel.”

Daniel Dennett made a similar point about postmodernism:

“Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.”

“Ah...” says the relativist, switching gears. “But what about slavery and colonialism? The West did terrible things”.

Yes, of course colonial powers did terrible things. We know they did because we spend a great deal of energy documenting and condemning the sins of our past. It’s also why we introduced reforms. Britain abolished slavery in its empire in 1833 and then spent the next several decades using the Royal Navy to suppress the Atlantic slave trade – at considerable cost in lives and money. This doesn’t erase Britain’s earlier participation in that trade, but it does demonstrate what holding ourselves accountable to universal standards looks like: the defence of human rights, equality and the rule of law.

When the relativist says we must judge Western societies by strict moral principles but not extend the same to other cultures out of “respect for diversity”, they’re obviously invoking a double standard. Moreover, it’s not respectful, it’s deeply patronising. Why fail to apply the same standards to Pakistan as we apply to ourselves, unless you think the former is somehow incapable of meeting those standards? Female genital mutilation (FGM), honour killings, child marriage, death sentences for apostasy – if these things were prominent features of life in Toronto, we’d condemn them immediately. Why do we exempt those practices when they occur in Helmand Province?

The relativist has no answer except to switch the subject back to colonialism. But you can’t have it both ways: either some practices are objectively wrong, or none are. If relativism is true, then condemning anything is impossible because there’s no objective standard.

In any case, this simple moral logic is beside the point for relativists because they don’t actually believe their own doctrine. You wore a sombrero to a Halloween party? That’s cultural appropriation, says Jemima, draped in a keffiyeh on her way to a hate march. A white person in dreadlocks? The Oxford Union will treat it as a hate crime, yet when girls are forced into burqas, it’s a “cultural difference deserving respect”. The incoherence is spectacular; the bigotry of low expectations is contemptible.

Who pays the price

The tenured sociology professor will airily dismiss these arguments from the comfort of his office because relativism comes at no cost to him. But for ex-Muslims facing death threats for apostasy or women fighting for fundamental rights in patriarchal societies, the cost is life itself.

The people who pay for this cowardice are never the academics theorising about decolonisation. They’re the reformers trapped inside these systems.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali endured genital mutilation, forced marriage, and beatings before fleeing Somalia. She later became a Dutch MP and advocated for Muslim women’s rights. Her collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered in the street – his assailant pinning a letter to his chest with a knife, promising her the same fate. Western feminists should have rallied. Instead, many dismissed her as an Islamophobe.

When Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, Iranian women burned their hijabs in the streets. They were beaten, imprisoned, and some were killed. Did the Western progressives who’d spent years defending the hijab as empowerment march in solidarity? Did they don their pussy hats and start a movement supporting the oppressed girls and women of Iran? Of course not. Many went quiet or looked the other way as Iranian clerics beat women and girls whose only “crime” was to want the same freedoms their sisters enjoy in the West – and once enjoyed in Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

What moral seriousness requires

Let’s put it plainly. A culture that lets you leave your religion is better than one that kills you for it. A culture that allows women to choose their husbands is better than one that marries them off at twelve. A culture that protects gay people is better than one that hangs them from cranes. A culture that investigates its own failures – slavery, exploitation – is better than one that admits to no flaws because God said so.

None of this should be controversial to say. It merely requires making two distinctions that relativists dismiss.

First: people and practices are not the same thing. Muslims deserve equal protection under the law and freedom from bigotry. But no group gets to smuggle illiberal practices under that cover. You can wear a veil; you cannot beat your daughter for refusing. You can preach your religion; you cannot demand blasphemy laws in a secular democracy. Defending Muslims while criticising conservative Islamic practices isn’t “Islamophobia”. It’s a basic liberal principle.

Second: universalism is non-negotiable. Those who drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had just watched what happens when governments insist their “culture” permits treating humans as sub-human. States from every continent signed the declaration. So when Pakistan jails blasphemers or Saudi Arabia executes homosexuals, the correct response isn’t Who are we to judge? It’s You signed. Now keep your word.

A game of pretend

Why do intelligent people maintain this obvious fiction? Because admitting that some cultures produce higher levels of human flourishing means defending their own, and this has become strangely anathema to many in the Western cultural establishment. Saying that our culture is better than illiberal ones is seen as unsophisticated, unrefined, low status – the sort of thing a plumber might say.

Because ultimately this is really about snobbery, a display of moral and intellectual superiority that begins in the academy and percolates through our institutions until it becomes orthodoxy. The irony, of course, is that it claims the culture of progressivism is better than the liberalism it replaced.

It would all be academic except that the posturing and moral evasions have real consequences. The progressive class abandons the vulnerable, emboldens theocrats, and prevents honest discussions about integration and social cohesion. It’s how we end up with the absurd contortions around multiculturalism. It’s how we end up with grooming gangs.

The choice is simple

Either you believe women’s autonomy, freedom of conscience, and protection from violence are universal goods, or you believe they’re culturally relative. If universal, then some cultures are better than others. If relative, then you have no grounds to condemn what happened to Malala.

There’s no third option. The attempt to split the difference – condemning individual acts while refusing to judge the cultures that produce them – is intellectual cowardice. It lets you feel moral while abandoning the people who need moral clarity most.

Some ways of organising society create more human flourishing than others. It’s measurable, observable, and obvious. We know it from seeing the direction people flee when they can.

Some cultures are better than others. It’s not bigoted to say as much, and we’re allowed to notice.

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Over recent decades, liberalism has gradually given way to progressivism. The mechanics of this shift explain why institutions that believe they are defending liberal values now operate on illiberal ones – and why those inside often cannot tell the difference.

The BBC offered a compelling case study this week: an organisation so steeped in progressive assumptions that it mistakes moral certainty for objectivity. But the pattern extends far beyond one broadcaster. Universities that once protected controversial speech now treat it as harm. Civil services that defended individual rights now prioritise group identity. And professions built on evidence now defer to “lived experience”.

To see clearly where liberalism ends and progressivism begins – and how the latter has distorted the former – it helps to examine three basic principles.

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