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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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.

Thanks for reading. The Gadfly recently became a Substack bestseller. My sincere thanks to everyone who supports this work, to those who make the comments section worth reading, and to everyone who argues with it in good faith. If you’re thinking of subscribing or upgrading, you can do so here.

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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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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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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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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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