When an elderly woman is murdered in her own home, you might expect the people who never tire of telling everyone how good they are to respond as any decent person would: with shock and revulsion, with despair at the state of things, with horror that someone who had lived a long life should end it violently at the hands of a monster.

Your expectations would be wrong, of course. Because the people who endlessly advertise their moral superiority are also the ones gleeful at the news that one of their enemies – a certified bad person – has met her deserved end.

Ann Widdecombe was 78, a former Conservative MP who had defected to Reform. She was from another era, one that produced politicians of a different character from the technocrats and identity merchants who sully the offices of power today. She was what we used to call a conviction politician. When she said something, we believed her, because she was obviously sincere. To the modern eye, accustomed to the human chatbot that is the contemporary politician – smooth, media-trained, platitudinous – she seemed a little bonkers. She was a little bonkers, frankly, and I didn’t warm to her. Her strange, flutey voice was nails on a blackboard, and the direct, abrasive delivery made Thatcher sound like Enya.

Yes, she thought homosexuality was a sin. She also said: “I do not care tuppence what consenting adults do. It’s not my business”. She backed Brexit and held every other unfashionable opinion that made her a villain in the minds of progressives. Yet she was admired by many who were surprised to discover a disarming, genial person and excellent company – an eccentric and an original, someone worth engaging with even in stark disagreement.

A few years ago I watched Christopher Hitchens and Widdecombe debate Catholicism, and they carried on afterwards, each obviously finding the other’s beliefs reprehensible. Neither would have celebrated the other’s death, because neither was wicked, but both agreed on the importance of talking it out. Of course they did; it was why they were in a debate to begin with. This is how grown-ups used to behave in a grown-up society.

Not the #BeKind people.

LGBTQ activist Peter Tatchell marked the occasion with a post that opened “Tory ex-MP Ann Widdecombe is dead!”. He then listed her sins before signing off: “BIGOT!” He deleted it when the signal to his base was outweighed by condemnation from everyone else. He said he was sorry – meaning he was sorry the post hadn’t scored the points he hoped for in this sordid little status game.

The Socialist Worker chimed in with “Hurrah! Ann Widdecombe is strictly dead”, a play on her stint on Strictly Come Dancing – a show that, incidentally, revealed a playful side of her that few had seen. This was someone who didn’t take herself seriously while nevertheless holding political convictions with the seriousness all too absent in our frivolous culture. They deleted the post too, naturally, having made the same miscalculation as Tatchell about the revulsion most people feel at gloating over a death. It won’t surprise you that they greeted the murder of Charlie Kirk in a similar style, with a piece titled “Charlie KKKirk’s chickens come home to roost”. Note the triple K. Consider how moronic that is as satire, then apply the same measure to their moral faculties. That is the sort of socialist we’re talking about – which is to say, all of them.

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Then came the Sky News veteran Adam Boulton, who thought a woman’s violent death an opportune moment to appraise her sex life. She was “very much a spinster”, he mused – “an old maid” and, he added, “reportedly” a virgin – before moving on to a “chaste but doomed” university romance with a man “now a banker”. A day after she was found dead in her home, this was the register: the leisured, faintly amused tone of a man enjoying his own worldliness.

What sort of person offers this over a fresh grave, let alone that of a devoted Catholic for whom her private life was nobody’s business? It’s the sort who wouldn’t dream of it if the politician were on the Left – in which case we’d see him moved to tears by his own eulogy. That is the defining trait of the progressive media establishment: everything passes through the sorting filter before reaching a response, which switches between contempt on one side and approval on the other. We already know Boulton’s entire worldview, from trans theology to climate change, because version one of the firmware was uploaded around 1997 and has received regular updates ever since. This is the operating system an entire class runs on, from the education sector to the media and right into Number 10.

Boulton, though, is merely revolting – an opportunist who, in any other era, would be spouting whatever pieties and orthodoxies elevated his position in the hierarchy. He’ll be replaced soon enough by another of the same, drawn from a cohort produced en masse by our worthless universities.

The truly sinister types in this cast of ghouls are the pronoun sociopaths and rainbow bureaucrats who scream about your lack of empathy while fantasising about other people’s gruesome deaths. Admittedly, that requires a kind of empathy the rest of us lack – the most deranged kind, which imagines another’s suffering and revels in it. This is empathy as a sickness of the mind. But it’s a mistake to think it only reveals itself in the anonymous Bluesky account with the anime avatar. A great many of these same people, come Monday morning, put on a lanyard and walk straight into a primary classroom, an NHS ward, or another corridor in the public sector.

These are the worst people in the world, simultaneously sanctimonious and malevolent. What makes them so dangerous is not merely the cruelty, which has always existed and takes many forms – our prisons are full of the evil and wicked. It’s the way it takes the guise of righteousness. Widdecombe was a “bigot”, so her death is a deliverance. Showing sympathy, let alone decency, would signal a lack of resolve. Similarly, Charlie Kirk was a “fascist”, so murder is reimagined as poetic justice. In each instance, the victim is declared a moral outcast and therefore deserving of their fate, which should preferably be grisly and terminal. And while making these calculations, our moral superiors congratulate themselves on their compassion.

Call them socialists or progressives or the woke – the label doesn’t matter. What unites them is the belief that they are morally qualified to redesign society, which is exactly why they are the last people on earth who should be charged with the task. Given unlimited power, they would cheerfully have the rest of us rot in a gulag. It sounds like hyperbole, and I almost wish it were. But the horrors of the twentieth century depended on millions of willing executioners, a good many of them ordinary men and women who put on a uniform and went to work. They didn’t consider themselves monsters. They had simply learned to see their victims as morally defective, or as obstacles to the utopian bliss that was available if only everyone got on board and did what had to be done.

I despise these people – surely anyone with a shred of decency does. But we’re not like them, and neither was Widdecombe. If a socialist demagogue or diversity commissar were found murdered on the floor of their home, she would not have tweeted about it with glee. She would have turned her attention to the crime, to the failures of the police and to the broken society that produced it. She might have detested everything the victim stood for, but she’d have extended to them the humanity they so readily denied her.

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

Yesterday, the writer pointed to a typical example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“I don’t think you have, mate”.

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

A young man is bleeding in front of you, lying on the ground, all but motionless, saying with what little life he has left that he can’t breathe. It’s an unambiguous distress signal; a dog would understand it. Consider what it takes, then, to respond first with mockery, then with handcuffs. Short of being sociopaths, the police officers must have been subject to some form of psychological engineering to override the simple human reflex to help a person telling them repeatedly he had been stabbed. We may never know just how many training days they attended over the years, but it’s clear what the overriding mission was: to teach recruits that the evidence of their own eyes is a trap and that the colour of a man’s skin is what counts in the moment.

The police officers on that pavement were not sociopaths, but simply the finished product of a system years in the making, accelerated and intensified following the death of a man 5,000 miles away whose killing was swiftly converted into a parable of racial guilt in a state religion we know today as progressivism. It’s that apparatus I’m interested in here, rather than the officers at the scene. And it’s the state, or more specifically, those who govern it, that is the real cause of my rage and perhaps yours. Rather than dwell on the awful details of that day, allow me to put the governing class in the dock.

I’m not the first to notice that a particular kind of person runs Britain today (although there are similarities across the Anglosphere), as if it were a colony whose natives he’s been put in charge of. The English used to ship him to colonial India (it would have been a man in those days), and I picture him sitting on a verandah in Simla, the former summer capital of British India. Twiddling his finely manicured moustache, he’s high enough above the plain to keep the “smell of the natives” at bay. Not especially bright, he wears a linen suit and drinks gin at the club. He doesn’t hate the people he rules over; hatred implies some notion of equality, some claim to a similar status. He manages them, or rather, he waves a languid hand at the local police to deal with them because they’re being a nuisance about the famine again.

It’s an anachronism now, embarrassing – the stuff that used to get dramatisations by Merchant Ivory but is now fodder for a good two-minute hate session at the university seminar. And yet there’s something familiar about it because that governor, the one we now condemn as racist and appalling (and he often was those things), is the same person leading that same condemnation today. He never left. Ever the opportunist (his only real talent), he simply changed postings and ideological positioning. The only real difference now is that he was actually born in the country he administers from above. His old power is gone – he can’t flog a man or fire on a crowd – but the posture remains intact. It’s the same contempt and superiority, but now supported by the state religion to which he is a devoted believer. He’s swapped the whip for the compliance objective, but he still sees groups or factions that need managing. There are the minorities – the “exotic” castes treated like children and punished the same way (leniently) for misdemeanours. And there are the other natives, the majority – thick and menacing, to be watched carefully rather than served. He holds both in contempt, but only the former earns him status points in the religious hierarchy.

Five years ago, Keir Starmer, now Prime Minister, took the knee like a suitor. The creed he was pledging himself to had been imported wholesale from across the Atlantic and written, in due course, into Hampshire Police's own Race Action Plan. The plan called Floyd’s death “a pivotal moment for policing in the UK”, as if Minneapolis were a district in Greater London. Then Starmer stood up again, brushed off his linen suit, and went back to managing the natives. When the next man couldn’t breathe – this time closer to home but the wrong sort – he counselled restraint and patience, implicitly suggesting that anyone upset about the whole thing was somehow lacking in decorum. The best the Prime Minister could manage on seeing the footage was “harrowing”. There hasn’t been any kneeling yet.

Digwa understood the operating system better than the people running it. He reached for race because he knew the system would credit his accusation and distrust Nowak. The race card was being played down the phone before help arrived. It was Digwa’s brother who called the police rather than an ambulance, telling them, “We’ve just got attacked racially by some white person... we’re Sikhs, we wear a turban, and he’s just attacked my brother... took my brother’s turban off.” None of it was true, but all of it was believed. Of course it was – the police were primed to see the white native as latently guilty.

For the governor’s staff – in this instance, the police, but it could just as easily be a social worker or civil servant – a scene like this is frightening for all the wrong reasons. It’s a “community-relations” disaster waiting to happen. We know this because they tell us as much. Rick Prior, who chaired the Metropolitan Police Federation until he was sacked for going off script, said: “The worst thing in the world that can happen to a police officer now is to have an allegation of racism against you... So if they are turning up to an incident where there is an allegation of racism, that will be their primary focus. Rather than being objective they will be thinking ‘for God’s sake don’t mess this up.’”

The governing class is always asking which version of events would be most professionally dangerous to get wrong. They have an offence code that needs to be interpreted correctly: a stab wound counts for less than a slur, for example. So the man saying “I have been stabbed” is weighed against the man saying “I have been offended”, and loses. The stabbing was real, and the accusation was not; yet one of these things mattered more than the other. And it was not the boy lying motionless on the ground beside a man crying racism.

Britain, in truth, is today one island of two peoples. The governors watch that harrowing footage and see a procedural lapse, a failure of compliance objectives rather than a failure of conscience. Everyone else sees a young man who bled to death in handcuffs for being the wrong sort of native in his own country.

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

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

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

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

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

How about Muslims?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A guide to five common deflections

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

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

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

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

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

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Dear America,

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

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

Accordingly, I ask you to invade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours faithfully,

The proud but exhausted people of Great Britain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gadfly Quotes

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

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

Here’s the first one.

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The Ayatollah’s obituary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later on his show, he reiterated the point:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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