I’m wary of calling people I disagree with stupid because, first, I am stupid in any number of ways and, second, “you’re stupid” is not, by itself, an argument. A decade ago, we saw the managerial class use the “you’re stupid” tactic to demean Brexit voters and Trump supporters as low-IQ blockheads – plumbers and the like. The big, important decisions, they were careful to point out, should be left to people who’ve been to university and understand how things are. They’ve been patiently explaining the world to the rest of us ever since.

But it turns out the progressive managerial class doesn’t understand things. It knows things, certainly – how to pass exams, work the system and recite the correct talking points and shibboleths. Meanwhile, the wider public has been slow to notice what’s going on because most people have better things to do than watch the circus unfold on Twitter. Many still take the BBC and other mainstream media for more or less trustworthy voices of reason rather than ideological partisans selecting facts to fit the approved narrative. That is now changing, and a rather different conclusion is taking hold: there is no more confidently stupid group of people in the world than the reality-illiterate, badge-wearing progressives who occupy our institutions today.

Consider what you have to believe, or at least nod along to, inside one of our institutions if you want to avoid getting hammered. The obvious ones first: men can become women by putting a dress on; race is a meaningless social construct but also the most important thing about you; unequal outcomes are incontrovertible evidence of prejudice, except where the outcomes favour the groups we like, in which case it’s social justice. Then we have inclusion, which is an ultimate good – except where it includes the people we’ve just decided were the cause of the unequal outcomes, in which case we must ruthlessly exclude them. Then there’s the thorny issue of censorship, which is vital for that most sacred of things: democracy. But democracy is under constant threat from people who vote the wrong way (those plumbers again), hence the censorship. And hovering above all this, the broad agreement that the West is uniquely wicked despite millions of people desperate to move here, whom we are, by the way, morally obliged to accommodate. Well, not “us” – we like our little corner as it is – but everyone else, who never got a say but must do the accommodating in any case.

There are more sophisticated ways of stating each of these propositions, of course. Put to music with carefully selected imagery, the media can convince polite society of any of them. The sophistication is part of the trick. Orwell called it doublethink: the ability to know and not know at once, to “use logic against logic” until the contradiction no longer feels like a contradiction but evidence of one’s intelligence. That is the stupidity I’m talking about: not the absence of knowledge, but a cultivated myopia – the ability not to see what is directly in front of you.

And then there’s the hypocrisy. In Britain, the same people gather in a field in Somerset once a year at the festival of groupthink we call Glastonbury. They will enthusiastically promote open borders inside an event whose security perimeter makes the Berlin Wall look like a bead curtain. They will chant “Death, death to the IDF” in an act of deranged karaoke and come away from it surfing a high of moral adrenaline. Between the sets and sing-alongs, there will be lots of worthy little events about protecting the environment, including “awareness-raising” talks on climate catastrophe and plastic pollution. Then the crowd will leave behind something resembling a landfill, its abandoned tents and plastic rubbish to be cleared by low-paid manual labourers.

Beyond the doublethink and the hypocrisy, there’s the credentialled moral vanity – the kind advertised in a LinkedIn bio: the Certified Scrum Master and Innovation Evangelist who’s also “amplifying marginalised voices” and a “proud ally” of whichever group is trending this week. These people run the country.

Perhaps no recent episode better illustrates the folly of the educated than Cambridge’s appointment of Jason Arday and everything that followed. There’s more than one tragedy at the centre of this story, and the one that concerns me here belongs to Cambridge itself – or rather to the academy as a whole, which I can’t help feeling died some time ago. A version of it, anyway. In its place is something that looks the same on the surface but is pulled towards commerce on one side and activism on the other, with ideology filling the vacuum where the pursuit of truth used to be.

If Cambridge had been serious about its own standards, it would have checked Arday’s work at the outset. It didn’t because it saw a symbol and an opportunity to bolster its reputation among its own congregation (and, as it turned out, ruin it in the process). The university as an institution grew from the cathedral and monastic schools of medieval Christianity and today resembles a seminary for the new religion of social justice. Humanities departments especially have become schools of orthodoxy once again, with their new priests and doctrines, magic words and miracle stories.

The academy got away with it for years. Arday is simply where the public has finally caught up with a transformation long since complete.

None of it would have been possible if the progressive class had not pulled off a rather brilliant trick. First, turn common sense on its head by denying something everyone has understood for millennia – what a woman is, for example, or why borders matter – and then characterise anyone who raises an objection as reactionary and unreasonable. Take the WNBA, which has spent the summer unable to say what a woman is, insisting with straight faces that there’s nothing especially interesting or important about the question.

But there is something interesting about it – in the way it would be interesting if dolphins were admitted to Olympic swimming events.

“How fascinating,” you might say, watching the bottlenose finish a race the bipeds have barely started. “Probably not a fair contest, though?”

“Nah, it’s fine,” comes the response, a very slight impatience creeping into the exchange.

“But it’s a dolphin,” you say.

“Why do you care so much? Why are you obsessed with dolphins?!”

This is essentially the conversation we’ve been having for a decade, and not just about gender but about reality itself. And it’s always that tone, the pretence of not understanding what the objection is. You’re up against someone in a lanyard who presents himself as neutral while casting you as somehow abnormal. If you push the point, you’re then charged with intellectual or moral failure – worse, a mental disorder in the form of a phobia.

“Perhaps we should look at the prevalence of cousin marriage and its consequences for children…”

“That’s Islamophobic.”

“Maybe we should let children reach eighteen before removing healthy body parts…”

“That’s transphobic.”

“I’m not sure a man whose PhD reads like a thesaurus in a blender was the right choice for a Cambridge professorship…”

“That’s racist.”

The question doesn’t need to be answered because the person asking it has been diagnosed as unfit for further comment.

It works because most people would rather not spend their days being called a bigot and a racist by somebody who does this for a living. The policymakers and the professionally offended, the opportunists and the self-declared victims – in short, the progressive class – don’t have to explain why the policy makes sense if they can persuade everyone else that only a bigot would question it. This is how polite society has been captured and coerced into repeating things they do not believe or keeping quiet about things they know are absurd.

Meanwhile, the powerfully stupid and the stupidly powerful have their mitts on the wheel, steering an alternately baffled and furious population around in a rainbow-coloured, ethically sourced funbus while China, Qatar and other hostile regimes with no intention of importing any of this watch from the roadside, stifle their giggles and provide the fuel.

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Suppose you were a black professor at a prestigious university, someone of genuine intellectual distinction who earned every inch of your career through talent and relentless work. Yet you can’t quite shake the feeling – is it paranoia? – that some students, peers and members of the public think you obtained your position, at least in part, because of the colour of your skin rather than the breadth of your knowledge and the power of your intellect.

That is the price serious scholars now pay for the idiocy of identity politics. Universities that put symbolism before substance in an act of self-congratulation cast suspicion on the achievements of those who earned their positions entirely on merit, regardless of colour or background.

Newton, Hawking, Wittgenstein, Arday. One of these names does not belong. All four became professors at Cambridge; three of them expanded the boundaries of human knowledge, while the fourth expanded mainly the boundaries of his own biography.

Arday, after all, is an alleged plagiarist1, elite marathon runner and – for all we know – astronaut and time traveller. We are still discovering the full extent of the Cambridge professor’s fantastical claims, and each discovery adds another element to a catalogue of mendacity, fabrication and vanity. The latest is perhaps the most disturbing: using law enforcement to protect his reputation.

We learned this week that the UK’s Metropolitan Police investigated a journalist for doing his job, which in this instance was finding out whether Arday was the man he claimed to be. Jack Grove of Times Higher Education assembled the case that Arday plagiarised his PhD, finding numerous passages lifted from another student’s thesis, including the typos.

When Grove offered him the customary right of reply, Arday did what anyone would do under such circumstances: employ an expensive defamation firm to insinuate that the investigation might be “racially motivated”. The story was buried for the best part of a year. Later, Grove learned he’d been investigated by the police for “harassing” a man he’d never phoned or gone anywhere near. This is Britain, after all. That’s how we do things now.

This is the same Arday who told journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy he wanted the world to “spin on an axis of love”, who dreamed of taking “a thread and a needle” to “interweave love into our society”. The needle, it turns out, was the Metropolitan Police.

Arday, we now know, is a man of many talents. He ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last 15 on a fractured leg. He ran 600 miles in six days, a feat that would place him among the greatest endurance athletes alive. He was part of Seven Up, the documentary that has followed the same Britons since 1964 – an impressive feat considering the programme began two decades before he was born. And while all this was going on, he single-handedly raised five and a half million pounds for charity2.

We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.

Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.

Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining… well, you figure it out.

“As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.”

You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person's sentences at least making the effort to mean something.

The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?

They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.

Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.

The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.

Meanwhile, the ones who pay most are serious black and brown academics, who must clear a new hurdle placed in their path by those claiming to help them: the suspicion that their achievements owe something to their immutable characteristics rather than their intellectual merits.

The rest of us pay too – exhausted after decades of this nonsense, worn not quite into submission but into cynicism, and sickened by an intellectual class that in a better society would illuminate reality rather than mock it.

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A few weeks ago, a Russian couple climbed to the top of the Empire State Building in New York, a feat of genuine bravery and skill. I’m not sure which laws they broke in the process, or whether they paid any price for such reckless behaviour, but the real crime occurred when they reached the top. They unfurled a banner that said:

“When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace.”

Perhaps they thought elevating the phrase to 1,500 feet would elevate the message as well. It did not. All that preparation and sheer physical courage just to haul a fortune cookie up a spire. What next? The Eiffel Tower, presumably, to remind us that “everything happens for a reason”. Maybe then the Burj Khalifa, from whose tip we are enjoined to “live your best life” – the world’s stupidest sentence becoming, at last, the tallest.

Am I being mean? Perhaps, but I can’t help it. I’m simply the sort of person for whom clichés and platitudes have a distressing effect. An utterance like “at the end of the day, it is what it is” triggers an ancient, reptilian response in my brainstem, which identifies the phrase – correctly – as something rancid and harmful.

The novelist and critic Martin Amis took cliché with the seriousness of a general who treats the language itself as a battlefield. In his collected essays, Amis writes that all writing is a war against cliché.

“Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice”.

Amis identifies three kinds, then. The first, clichés of the pen, is familiar enough. Any half-decent writer consciously avoids dead phrases and platitudes. When someone tells me that I must “think outside the box”, I know immediately that he is inside one, that he was in fact born in the box, and that he intends to die there, comfortably, surrounded by others muttering about “synergies” and “paradigm shifts”. Clichés are sins of writing, or symptoms at least of something noxious, like little patches of verbal mould sprouting across the sentence.

But a cliché is not merely a borrowed phrase but a borrowed perception. When a phrase goes slack it’s because the thought behind it has slackened first. The words arrive pre-packaged, like a microwave dinner. Their blandness is a given but also a convenience. It saves anyone the trouble of seeing things directly. Indeed, in the mouth of a politician or bureaucrat, the cliché serves that precise purpose, which is why, somewhere at this very moment, a politician is repeating the lie that “diversity is strength” to an audience too bored to ask what the phrase actually means. That’s the point of it.

This is where Orwell still matters (and invoking Orwell in an essay like this is admittedly a cliche or sorts). His famous essay on the subject should be read by anyone who cares about the truth – which is perhaps why those indicted by it don’t. His complaint is our complaint: that ugly sentences make certain kinds of dishonesty easier to impart, because euphemism puts intellectual distance between the words and the things they’re describing. This is how the bombing of civilians becomes “pacification”, and murder becomes “liquidation”. These are phrases designed not just for politicians but for us, so that our own consciences might be soothed about the crimes committed in our name.

A cliché of the mind is more serious still. The tired phrase is the Trojan horse of the tired idea – waved through the gates because it looks like a gift, the ideology already inside the walls before anyone thought to inspect it. This is the line you thought you arrived at through your own thinking but which is simply prepackaged ideology, handed to students like freebies at the freshers’ fair. “Lived experience”, “my truth”, and “the wrong side of history” are statements with ideology already baked in. Uttering them simply advertises an ideological viewpoint and signals allegiance to progressive orthodoxy.

Mental clichés are attractive because they're both shortcuts to an agreed-upon worldview and, to the speaker's ears, morally insightful. Language is the instrument through which we discover what we actually think. The cliché exists precisely so that we may forgo that discovery. That is why hyper-educated people are so vulnerable to them. A stupid slogan, repeated often enough by “serious and clever” people in seminar rooms, lends moral standing. Nobody wants to be the person who asks what “my truth” actually means, because doing so not only ruins the mood but also commits self-sabotage at a cost of fifty grand a year.

Let’s not pretend this is a vice of the left alone, though. The right has its “woke mind virus”, its “luxury beliefs”, and (a recent entry) “suicidal empathy”. These were genuinely useful conceptual metaphors, but they’ve become exhausted by repetition – which is to say, they’ve become clichés. The people who most need to understand them have stopped listening, if they were even listening to begin with. Then there’s “red-pilled” and its variants. Once a vivid image lifted from The Matrix, it now arrives pre-dead to my ears, telling me nothing except the tribe of the person who speaks it. What does “black-pilled” mean? I’m not sure. Is there a purple-pill? A black-and-white-pill? I neither know nor care.

But the most dangerous category of cliché is the last one: clichés of the heart. Progressives have no real rivals in this category. True, the right has “family values” and the rest, but the progressive versions carry all the institutional weight today.

A cliché of the heart is what happens when feeling itself is borrowed, like an item in someone else’s wardrobe. Compassion especially arrives with a set of instructions about how to wear it and on what occasion. Outrage, empathy and tolerance all follow the same directions. This is how you know what to feel about environmental policy, immigration and gender surgery. The progressive reaches for the feeling that decent people are expected to have and wears it proudly.

It’s tedious for everyone else, as clichés are. Yet they persist, as clichés do, because we learn to ignore them – or worse, start imitating them, in a way we hardly notice at first. This is how progressivism has convinced polite society that plain speaking about obvious reality is indecent.

I’m as guilty as anyone. When someone is made a professor at Cambridge because it flatters the people who put him there, I know the lay of the land before I’ve formed a thought, because certain subjects sit in a terrain already wired for trespassing. Every misstep is an emotional landmine, every joke has to be risk-assessed in advance (something I do automatically now, and I suspect you do too).

Nor does the disease spare the phrases I’d defend, such as “protect women”, “tell the truth”, and “common sense”. A cliché doesn’t stop being a cliché because it’s true, and it’s all too easy to let a phrase stand in for the argument instead of going to the trouble of making it.

The point is that slogans and other prepackaged thinking arrive already knowing what you think, and too often do the job of thinking for you – which is to say, stop you from thinking at all. “No human being is illegal”, to take one further example, is not an argument and answers a claim almost nobody made.

Does this sound like cynicism? Perhaps. It’s hard not to be cynical in this environment. But the point is not that kindness, solidarity, or concern for the vulnerable are wasted emotions. Quite the opposite. It’s that some will treat these things with an emotional vocabulary that serves as a substitute for judgment. Once compassion is treated as a fashion accessory, any argument against your position is just “bad vibes”.

If your first response when you see 50,000 men break into another country is to say “they’re refugees fleeing the climate crisis” – as a famous English radio talk show host did this week – then you’re claiming to be morally serious while illustrating the precise opposite. Absurd as that statement is, it’s taken seriously by an incurably sanctimonious class of people for whom mass immigration is a talking point in a culture war they wage for a living. The difficult questions – What happens next? Who will pay for it? Who lives with the consequences? – never get asked because the answers embarrass the beliefs that hold their world together. This is why clichés of the heart are moral failures rather than merely literary or intellectual ones.

Progressive politics is especially vulnerable to them because compassion and tolerance are trivially easy to claim in theory while demanding little evidence in practice. Take women’s spaces. There is nothing so facile as calling a woman “hateful” for objecting to a male body in a changing room. Men, especially, find this easy because the empathy they demand of others is the very thing they lack when it matters. They cannot imagine what it is to be a girl in a changing room with a man in a dress – or out of one.

Or take the girls in Britain’s forgotten towns and cities, lost to the vocabulary of “cohesion” and “community relations”. Rape gangs are hard for bureaucrats and politicians to process in a way that doesn’t indict the beliefs they cherish, so they reach for the handbook of approved phrases put together by a comms team of failed marketers and activist journalists.

Meanwhile, the hijab becomes “empowerment”. The NGO sector applauds a woman in London for “choosing to wear it” while women in Iran are beaten for taking it off. This is cheap virtue, straight off the rack. Does my compassion look big in this?

Real compassion asks what is true even when the answers are awkward. It knows the difference between people and ideas. It can distinguish between intentions and outcomes. True compassion, above all, insists on hard reality over the comfort of a fantasy, and that takes a kind of courage the sentimentalist never has to find. J.K. Rowling has it. So does Graham Linehan, whose life was taken apart by an industry that runs on borrowed feelings – including that men can be women simply by declaring as much, and that dissenting views are evidence of bigotry. One day the entertainment industry will take a different view, but the apology won’t arrive, because it will edit the whole episode out and recast itself as the hero.

The climbers put their cliché where everyone could see it, flapping 1,500 feet above Manhattan. On the way down, the man stopped on a ledge, set up the camera and proposed. They took selfies with the ring, but they had backup in the form of the helicopter dispatched from the newsroom to circle the event and broadcast it to the rest of us – a microwave dinner served at 1,500 feet and devoured by an audience that’s lost all taste for the things that matter.

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Becker was sceptical. She had seen enough of Democratic Kampuchea in the preceding days to recognise a country brutalised and silenced by a murderous regime. Caldwell had been guided through the same eerie, tightly controlled tour, and both saw the same things. But where Becker saw evidence of concealment, Caldwell saw a revolution maligned by its enemies. Reports of atrocities were the usual imperialist propaganda, he insisted. Neither persuaded the other, and they retired for the night.

Not long afterwards, Becker was woken by gunfire. When she opened her bedroom door, she faced a young man pointing a pistol at her. After begging him not to shoot, she locked herself in the bathroom. Caldwell, she soon learned, had been shot dead in his room.

What motivated the killing? Was it a direct order from Pol Pot? An internal purge? A Vietnamese operation ahead of the imminent invasion? Nobody knows for sure, but Becker’s verdict, later recorded in her book,2 holds for every possibility: “His death was caused by the madness of the regime he openly admired”. Whoever pulled the trigger or gave the command, Caldwell was a true believer destroyed by the thing he believed in – still defending it only hours before he died.

Caldwell was unusual in that he was both a true believer and a useful idiot – indeed, the quintessential example of each. But it’s crucial to note that these descriptions come from different directions. Useful idiot tells us whom his convictions served. It tells us far less about what those convictions did for him and why he held them in the face of evidence pointing the other way. The label is well-earned, and there's a grim satisfaction in the story: we congratulate ourselves on being less foolish. But Caldwell was an intelligent man, a family man and by Becker’s own account, “a lovely man, very funny, very charming”. Yet he still needed the murderous regime to be innocent. Why?

There are obvious answers. Caldwell had invested years in his political beliefs and staked his academic reputation on them. He was ideologically committed. One of his students, Walter Easey, says of Caldwell that he converted to “a fierce and angry communism”3 (I’m not sure there’s another kind). Admitting that the Khmer Rouge was monstrous would have meant admitting that its supposedly reactionary critics had been right. There was status in seeing through “imperialist propaganda”, just as there is status now in holding the correct opinions and advertising them to the correct people – peer approval in Caldwell’s day, clicks and likes in ours. We’re all reluctant to discover that our enemies were right about something important, especially when our friends are watching.

I’ve known Caldwell types in my time, and you probably have too. As a student, I worked with one in a bar on my weekends and was frankly a little in thrall to him. I had no idea what I was for. He knew exactly. He was going to be an intellectual, and he would solve the problem of the world, which (it became clear) was other people. He was vain and knew everything as all twenty-somethings do, but he carried it with genuine conviction. I envied the certainty more than I like to admit. He had the whole thing settled at twenty-two, whereas I couldn’t have told you what my following week was for.

But status and vanity don’t do enough to explain what we’re looking at here. Plenty of people cling to mistaken opinions without travelling across the world to flatter a mass murderer. The question that interests me is what a totalising belief does on behalf of the person who holds it. What uncertainty does ideological conviction remove? What psychological needs are met by holding to beliefs that fall apart under honest inspection? It interests me because the pathology is one we all recognise. The hashtags, slogans and ritual denunciations filling every newsfeed show us what that looks like today.

One possible answer begins with freedom, or rather with the fact that freedom is heavier than its admirers usually admit. This might seem paradoxical. Surely someone who prizes freedom would be the first to condemn those who take it away. But I’m talking about a different kind of freedom, the existential one.4

For most of human history, the largest decisions in a person’s life had already been made by the time he was born. He inherited a faith, a place, a social station and a set of duties. This did not necessarily make life good, and often it made life wretched. But it made life simple, much like a script is written for any actor on the stage. One need not improvise but simply follow the directions, oppressive as they may be.

The modern world offers a very different stage. In the democratic West, we are endowed with freedoms unimaginable to most of our ancestors. We can switch jobs, move countries, change gods, leave husbands, and start over halfway through. These are gains our forebears died for, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything – and (I’m quite sure) neither would you.

Yet for every hard-won freedom, there’s a question. What is the day for? What does a good life look like? Who should I love, which god should I worship, and how do I know I’m doing it right? There’s no script for this, and we must work it out as we go. Every word and action opens up new possibilities while closing off a thousand others. When things go wrong, the consequences are ours to bear alone.

But what does a person actually do with the freedom to author his own life?

Picture a man lying in bed at one in the morning, scrolling through political reels he no longer even enjoys. TikTok has learned which content keeps him engaged – that is, bristling with fury at a world going to hell. Depending on his tribe, the villains are globalists and woke activists, or billionaires and fascists. Nobody is forcing him to watch this, and he knows, on some level, that this is doing him no good, just as he knows junk food does him no good. He can close the app whenever he likes, and he will, as soon as this Piers Morgan segment is over. By any conventional measure, he’s a free man doing as he pleases. And yet his thumb still flicks through an infinite scroll, stopping at the next piece of outrage.

Whatever this is, it isn’t self-authorship. We’re watching a sovereign individual, with every freedom in the world available to him, hoping something or somebody will switch off his phone and tell him what to do.

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This was the predicament Erich Fromm explored in a book suitably titled The Fear of Freedom,5 in which he identified two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. The first kind is what modernity delivers in the way of liberation from external authorities and social hierarchies – the serf untied from the lord, the slave free from his master. The second kind is freedom as personal autonomy. This is about the freedom to direct one’s own life, create meaningful relationships and do productive work via choices made by the individual, rather than through coercion.6

The trouble is that the first kind of freedom doesn’t automatically produce the second kind. Modernity may have freed the individual from traditional authorities, but that same freedom “though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless”. Faced with that isolation, the individual seeks some escape. The very chains he has cast off now look like the ones that offered security. The failure to create becomes the urge to destroy; the freed self is now a burden, and surrendering it to an authority looks like its own reward. A mass movement can offer the perfect solution: an authority to obey, an enemy to destroy and a crowd in which the troublesome self can disappear.

Fromm was trying to understand what had happened to Germany. How did one of the most civilised and advanced nations on earth give way to torchlight parades and the dictates of a malignant narcissist?7 His conclusion was that fascism, far from being a bewildering aberration, was a monstrous answer to a real question. Freedom had left people exposed, and the movement promised to cover them again. They had only to obey. How else to explain why “millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it”?

Fromm’s analysis doesn’t fit neatly onto Caldwell, however. The Scottish academic was not trapped inside Democratic Kampuchea. He was not coerced by the Khmer Rouge. He was making his name at SOAS, enjoying all the freedoms of one of the most liberal countries on earth – the sort of liberty the regime had abolished. Indeed, only a liberal society like Britain could produce someone like Caldwell, making a career of blaming the West for the sort of oppression he admired in its enemies. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s practically the job description of the Western academic today. If Caldwell were alive now, we know what his Bluesky would look like.

Perhaps the burden from which Caldwell sought relief was closer to uncertainty. A doctrine that explains everything spares its adherents the anguish of an ambiguous universe. It hands them predetermined principles, a framework, and a system through which to make sense of the world and one’s place in it. It offers more as well: a cosmic narrative, a destination that can absorb the cost of revolution – the corpses pointing towards the better world to come.

Eric Hoffer took the argument somewhere darker in The True Believer.8 Hoffer was entirely self-educated and spent his working life as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks. Without even a degree to his name – or perhaps for that reason – he produced a clearer account of the fanatic than anything to come out of the academy. Where Fromm begins with the burden of freedom, Hoffer turns to the person who finds his own life unbearable.

The fanatic, seeing his individual existence as “spoiled or wasted”, yearns for a cause to dedicate himself to, nursing his grievances all the while. What he wants from that cause is not freedom from restraint but freedom from responsibility – and, beneath it, anonymity: to be absorbed into the whole, one thread among many, the personal inferiority that felt so exposed now obscured. A mass movement offers precisely this, neatly packaged with a new identity, an enemy, and the thrilling possibility of starting over as someone else, someone with renewed purpose. No wonder the fanatic, as Churchill observed, cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.9 He’s found his calling.

But Hoffer makes an even more unsettling claim: that the content of the belief may be far less important than we like to imagine. Communism and fascism might present themselves as opposite ends of a spectrum, yet both draw on the same fervour, the same promise of self-transcendence. This horseshoe fits the fanatic regardless of the doctrine: the communist of one decade could just as easily be the fascist in another. The doctrines change, but the needs being met look ominously similar.

The most important thing they offer is an enemy. As Hoffer put it: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”

For Caldwell, the devil was (naturally) Western imperialism, which provided more than just an object of hatred. Inconvenient facts could be dismissed as propaganda from a West all too adept at managing the narrative. Reports of atrocities were tainted by their source. Refugees could be discredited, and journalists were the dupes of governments manufacturing lies. Evidence against the revolution became evidence of the lengths to which the West would go to destroy it. This is how Caldwell and others who shared his convictions neutralised anything that threatened their worldview.

Consider François Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, the first catalogue of the genocide. Caldwell had already dismissed its author without reading it – relying instead on Chomsky, who had questioned the refugee testimony the book drew upon. Becker couldn't get over it: "The fact that Malcolm, a professor, had not read it before he went, that I couldn't believe. I think it was almost ideological that he didn't read it”.

Shared hatred is powerful and intoxicating. It binds the believer to his fellows in the movement, but more than that, it relieves him of the need to consider what his opponents are actually saying. If the enemy is sufficiently wicked – and the West undoubtedly was in Caldwell’s mind – then debate itself becomes suspect. To engage is to lend the devil credibility, as though he might have an argument rather than another trick. There is nothing to learn from the enemy and everything to lose, including the certainty of one’s own convictions. Doubt itself begins to look like betrayal.

By the time Caldwell arrived in Phnom Penh, his beliefs – already applauded by colleagues and students at SOAS – were operating as a sorting system for reality. Months earlier he had written in the Guardian rubbishing reports of a Khmer Rouge genocide, citing the Kampuchean Information Minister, Hu Nim, who blamed the deaths on America. Hu Nim had by then been tortured to death at S-21, the regime’s interrogation centre a few streets from where Caldwell would sleep. Any suffering he witnessed on his guided tour had a purpose. The deserted capital looked like a triumph of political will rather than mass coercion. Here he was, a representative of the enlightened few who had seen through the lies believed by ordinary people. And now, an invitation to meet Pol Pot in private. Here was recognition from history itself.

“Nobody announces that they are handing back the burden of being a person.”

Perhaps this explains the euphoria Becker described on his return. Caldwell had not merely found a revolution to support. He was now its leading intellectual champion in the West. The true believer finds vindication, his surrender both freeing and binding, the self unburdened yet magnified.

This act of surrender never travels under that name, of course. Nobody announces that they are handing back the burden of being a person. It goes by words like “solidarity”, “liberation” and the “cause”. The true believer doesn’t experience himself as fleeing anything. Quite the opposite. He is finally arriving.

No one described the burden of freedom better than Sartre. “Condemned to be free” is his phrase, and the verb is deliberate – not blessed or relieved but condemned. (Of course, this is the man whose other most famous phrase is “Hell is other people”, from his play No Exit. He wasn’t describing the French, or not only.) But it was in his masterwork, Being and Nothingness, that he built an entire philosophy around the existential freedom that precedes our essence. There’s no human nature to fall back on, no script to read from, no God to guide you. Circumstances may limit what’s possible, but your choices within them are still yours to make. Even obeying a direct order is a choice to obey. The anguish you feel in the face of such freedom is not a passing psychological malady but the very truth of your condition making itself known to you in no uncertain terms.

Naturally, since anguish is an unpleasant feeling, the instinct is to evade it, deny it, or pretend it’s something it’s not. Sartre gave a name to this evasion: “bad faith”. He took the example of a waiter, who disappears into his role, behaving as though he were merely a waiter rather than a man choosing to serve. And yet there is something optimistic in this terrifying lack of excuses. Whatever our circumstances, we remain responsible for what we make of them. Existence, says Sartre, precedes essence. “At first he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be”.

Sartre’s early work had a considerable influence on me as a young man, and I came perilously close to describing myself as an existentialist at one point. I still think there’s a great deal of truth in it. Which makes what came next harder to explain.

It may not astonish you to learn that Sartre’s philosophy took a turn for the worse with the arrival of Marx. His Critique of Dialectical Reason might be seen as a response to Marx’s injunction to change the world, not merely describe it. As he became more political with age, he saw that his philosophy of freedom was no use to the starving, overworked factory hand. Telling a labourer he was “radically free” in any language, let alone French, would merely antagonise someone born into brutal systemic constraints. He needed a philosophy that could explain how human beings are fundamentally free, yet constantly find themselves trapped in dehumanising systems. Sartre saw that we use our freedom to create these systems – economies, cities, tools – but over time they crystallise into rigid structures that turn around and dominate us, acting like an oppressive force of nature.

Sartre’s exit was what he saw as the moment of collective awakening, the “group-in-fusion” – isolated individuals suddenly acting as one against a common threat. It’s the crowd storming the Bastille, a scattered people joined in a single purpose. But this fusion cannot last, and once the danger has passed, the group starts to dissolve. Its members try to preserve it through a pledge of mutual loyalty, and from that pledge arises what Sartre called “fraternity-terror”. Betrayal is met with punishment in the name of the group. A brotherhood, then, in the way a firing squad is a brotherhood.

This was a necessary evil, you understand. In certain historical moments of extreme oppression – anti-colonial struggles, say – a group might find violence unavoidable to overthrow an even greater, institutionalised terror. Somehow, Sartre managed to rationalise the brutality of Stalinism, Maoism and Castro’s Cuba under these terms. Later, he would defend the Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics as a terrible but necessary weapon of the oppressed.10 It is not a stretch to imagine what view he would take of Hamas.

Read Fromm next to this later Sartre, and the irony is difficult to miss. Fromm would have recognised an escape from freedom in what Sartre presented as freedom recovered through the group. And it was with the theory in hand that Sartre could stand on the streets of Paris in 1970, hawking the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple, lending his immense prestige to a doctrine that was at that moment showing China what fraternity-terror meant in practice: students denouncing their professors in struggle sessions before clubbing them to death.

These were not stupid men. Caldwell had a doctorate. Chomsky revolutionised linguistics, yet spent years casting doubt on early reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities, arguing that Western coverage was politically motivated and frequently unreliable.11 Sartre was one of the finest minds Europe produced in the twentieth century, his early work dazzling in its scope and originality. But that same intelligence is what wrote the get-out clause of his later work.

Intelligence offers no natural immunity from terrible ideas, and may even make you more vulnerable to them. Education is a different thing but not an unrelated one: it furnishes you with better arguments, which is not the same as better judgment.

The true believer is not a historical curiosity. You know this already, and any scan of political Twitter shows that our society produces them in abundance, all of them wanting the same things Caldwell wanted: recognition, vindication, the overriding need to belong to something bigger than themselves.

You can see him in the activist for whom gender theology has all the paraphernalia we associate with other cults and religions: doctrines, heresies, excommunications, conversion testimonies. Notice how factual questions are always received as attacks on the self the belief is holding up. She’s there draped in a Palestine flag, waving a genocidal slogan on a police-escorted march through London. For this true believer, Palestine is not merely a bit of geography with a people but an absolute – a totem of everything she believes is righteous, its enemies representing everything that is evil, with the imperialist West once again featuring in that fevered imagination. She’s the direct descendant of Caldwell, but now with a wifi connection. She needs this cause, just like the rest of us need an income.

And remember Hoffer’s interchangeability thesis, because the true believer isn’t confined to the Left. He’s there in the glow of his screen, flitting between Rumble and X, a case study in confirmation bias, seeking out every video clip that confirms every conspiracy theory, every post-truth hot take. He has surrendered his intellect to someone else’s doctrine, with its leader, its vocabulary and its hierarchy of the insufficiently pure – all while feeling cleverer than everyone else for seeing through the lies. There are as many of them as there are marchers for Palestine. They just haven’t yet organised as effectively. And, like his leftist counterpart, he somehow always lands on the Jew in the final analysis. Such is the unique role of the Jew through history, the scapegoat of scapegoats, the enemy to unite enemies. Hating them feels like liberation.

To be clear: the comparison I’m making runs through the believer, not the Pol Pot regime. The point is not that the Free Palestine marcher or the MAGA enthusiast would staff an interrogation centre – but then nobody thought Caldwell would defend one, least of all Caldwell, who was by all accounts a "lovely man". What separates the true believers among them from Caldwell is circumstance, not conviction. Nobody has yet handed them a Year Zero.

But wait a moment, you might be saying. Are these true believers not the most liberated people in history? If the burden of freedom drives people into the arms of movements, the West should be recovering, not relapsing. We have never been richer or safer. We live longer, healthier lives. We have choices that would astonish and bewilder our great-grandparents. Nobody making memes from an air-conditioned Pret is dodging conscription. The man glueing himself to a train will not go hungry, and neither will his audience who lap it all up. If the weight of freedom was the problem, the most coddled generation in history should feel it least.

Instead, fanaticism is a growth industry. Why?

Start with what’s gone missing. Freedom, as Fromm showed us, brings anxiety but also the chance to direct our own lives and make meaning through relationships and productive work. But the structures that once shouldered some of the burden – religion, nation, family, trade, and place – have given way. At one time, you were an individual, but you were also part of a community – an organic one rather than the social media variety. The parish told you what Sunday was for. Your trade told you what you were, and if you were good at it, gave you something to be proud of. You didn’t have to be a believer or a patriot, a tradesman or a dutiful son to benefit. These institutions carried the weight whether you subscribed to them or not, and for those who rejected them, they were still there to define themselves against.

What does that look like now?

Over two or three generations – faster for the young than for anyone else – these institutions have weakened all at once. No tyrant abolished them, no jackboots kicked them to the ground, although an army of sorts marched through them in the name of progress – often in the name of freedom itself. Freedom from oppression. Thus many of the things that once helped people carry the burden of their own liberation disappeared. But the need they served did not disappear with them. People traded the tangible obligations of a real community for an online one, which comes with an entry requirement: the demanding obligations of ideology. Fromm’s atomised self now stands among the remains, and standing there alongside it is someone hawking a newspaper or, more likely, a hashtag and a slogan telling you who you are, what history means and who is to blame.

Comfort creates a different problem. Fukuyama saw it coming at the moment of liberalism’s triumph.12 He warned that people who can no longer struggle for a just cause may struggle against the just cause, that is, struggle for the sake of struggle, “out of a certain boredom”, because they cannot imagine a life without it. We are creatures not long off the plain built for scarcity and danger, thrown quite suddenly into modernity, manufacturing emergencies in order to feel real.

This might explain why so much online disagreement is conducted as apocalyptic melodrama: why misgendering someone is “genocide”, why the Hollywood adaptation of the Odyssey points to “the collapse of Western civilisation”. The stakes must be inflated because nothing in the true believer’s ordinary life supplies them.

The smartphone amplifies all this. We left a man lying in bed at one in the morning, and we can now say more precisely what is happening to him. The TikTok feed is Fromm’s “new dependency and submission” in a portable universe. It does much of his choosing for him, introduces him to his tribe and its attendant enemies. And it supplies that fresh torment unknown to previous generations – an infinite comparison machine that measures his atomised life against the curated triumphs of a billion strangers. Face lit by the screen at one in the morning, he looks for an exit from the terrible burden of his own autonomy.

The effect may be especially powerful among a generation that has been given fewer opportunities to practise bearing uncertainty for themselves. Children whose lives were scheduled to the quarter-hour and supervised to the horizon are bound to find the world more daunting when they face it unsupported. We should not be surprised that people who demand safe spaces on a university campus will demand ideological safe spaces when they go out into the real world.

If you doubt this instinct to surrender, then look at a recent test. In 2020, the question of how to live our lives was abruptly answered for us, and a great many people accepted it without resentment. I’m not talking about epidemiology, which is a different argument. What interests me is what the surrender felt like from the inside. The days took on a radically new shape which quickly became second nature. The rules were set and the same for everyone. Suddenly there was a purpose larger than oneself, and an enemy of sorts in the form of the sceptic, the refusenik, the man in the park without a mask – against whom one’s own compliance could be measured and found virtuous. Here was a domesticated, suburban echo of Sartre's “fraternity-terror” making a brief appearance in the suburbs – a sort of brotherhood of the compliant enforced by the threat of excommunication of anyone who broke ranks.

People banged saucepans in the street at an appointed hour and applauded the dancing nurses and their TikTok routines. But beneath the genuine civic spirit, there was more than a faint obligation to join in. Whole industries of ordinary decision-making were suspended. Millions felt the burden of freedom lift as they joined in the calls to flatten the curve and practise social distancing. Many later described the pandemic lockdowns as the most meaningful period of their lives. That should be the most unsettling sentence in this essay, because it wasn’t just laptop liberals and the work-shy enjoying the confines and dialling Uber Eats between Netflix. It was many of us, perhaps even most of us. The conditions Fromm described were embraced with the fervour of a true believer.

For now, much of the fanaticism we see today remains theatrical, because things are still economically more or less all right – well enough, at any rate, that political violence is mostly the work of the fringe. There are no brownshirts or Mao suits yet13, but the markers are already there, and nobody knows what they will look like in another ten years.

But let the question change from the existential to the practical. Not what is my life for, but where will I live? What will I do for a living if the work I trained for disappears? Add a serious downturn, mass unemployment and some new global crisis, and Fromm’s conditions begin to rhyme with something we’ve seen before: atomised selves, unbearable aloneness, and the movements at the door offering to carry the weight, name the enemy and supply a purpose.

Which is why I keep returning to Caldwell – and to something I saw in Phnom Penh a decade or so ago.

Tuol Sleng, known to the Khmer Rouge as S-21,14 stands in the middle of the city. It had been a high school before the regime converted it into a place for cataloguing, torturing and killing the enemies the revolution required. You see the cabinets of human skulls, the classrooms turned into torture chambers. What sickens you most is the ordinariness that remains: the school still looks like a school. You can picture children sitting beneath the palm trees in the courtyard, doing what teenagers do anywhere, wondering what the future holds, who will love them, who will break their hearts.

The Khmer Rouge photographed everyone who came through, which is why there are walls of faces everywhere. Many were members of the movement itself – cadres, officers and even interrogators from the prison, fed to the revolution as it turned upon itself and photographed on the way in like everyone else. Children among them.

I keep thinking about the look on one of their faces: a young man – a boy really – a number board around his neck, looking into the lens as though he is still waiting for someone to come and explain that he is not meant to be there.

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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 con…

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America has a remarkable way of treating the impossible like a logistics problem. In 1961, after the country had put a man in space for all of fifteen minutes, President Kennedy promised to go one step further. A giant leap further, in fact. America spent the GDP of a mid-sized country, employed 400,000 of the finest minds of a generation, built things, broke them, built them again, and finally strapped three men to a rocket with less computing power than a washing machine. Somehow, within eight years of setting the target, and only 66 years after inventing powered flight, it landed a man on the moon.

What other power could have achieved such a thing, let alone dreamed it? The USSR had ambitions, certainly, but ultimately didn’t have the right stuff. Today, the European Union – which resembles the USSR in some ways, although not in industrial output – looks at Elon Musk’s rocket catcher and shakes its head. Not out of awed disbelief, but because it knows, on…

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Britain’s Keir Starmer, the latest prime minister to come and go, has one of the worst voices any leader could hope for. An adenoidal robot, Starmer is what an AI would think a technocratic prime minister should sound like. This is not exactly why he failed, of course, but it’s not irrelevant either. Successful politicians are not merely in the business of making arguments. They capture a mood, find the cadence, and give voice to the concerns of the people they’re elected to represent. A leader has to make a country feel that someone is speaking from a real place. Starmer failed on every count, as did his recent predecessors, making 10 Downing Street seem like an Airbnb for political office.

We’re used to despising politicians, but something feels different now. The political leaders of the late 20th century might have been ruthless or morally compromised, but they also possessed qualities that made them impossible to ignore. Their voices carried conviction, competence, or simple courage in a way that seems a little incongruous to us now. The current batch of Western leaders (Trump aside) often seems depressingly forgettable and mediocre by comparison, as if politics has become a recruitment process for people who respond well to media training and tick the right demographic boxes.

The first political leader I remember was the one who appeared on television in the corner of the living room. Children’s TV had a dedicated hour each day – we had three channels back then – and on each side of that were soaps and sports and, most vividly, the news showing the occasional mushroom cloud, a preoccupation with something called the USSR and, at the centre of things, someone I assumed was the President of the Earth and all-round figure of benevolence: Ronald Reagan. This was not entirely inaccurate.

Though my mature understanding of Reagan is retrospective, built from history books and YouTube clips, even as a child watching that screen, I could sense the humour and affability, as well as the solemnity of his historical declarations. “Tear down this wall”, he said, in a way that was impossible to refuse. Few leaders today would dream of uttering such commands to an enemy. Trump might give it the volume but has none of the gravity.

America in the late 1970s was starting to look like a nation in decline – inflation, humiliation abroad – so when Reagan promised a new morning in America, he was already engaging a receptive audience and few, I imagine, were inclined to doubt him. The genial certainty that his critics read as dangerous simplicity looks to me now like someone who understood that leadership is not only administration. It’s the ability to tell a nation what story it’s living inside.

On foreign affairs, Reagan seemed to grasp the Manichean drama of the Cold War in a way that technocrats, then and now, would have found embarrassing, which is probably why they underestimated him. Sometimes the world is not crying out for nuance, but for someone to call the thing in front of them what it is. The evil empire really was evil, and saying so plainly played a significant part in ending it.

Thatcher was the other political figure who loomed from the television, though with little of Reagan’s glamour and absolutely none of the humour. Thatcher was the unfunniest person alive in the 1980s, although she made great comic material for satirists. Where Reagan was sunny confidence, she was weather of a much harsher kind, like a tornado swinging a handbag while telling you to clear up the mess.

It took me many years to appreciate Thatcher because, right up to and including my university years, she was synonymous with all the worst things we were taught to associate with the right: selfishness, greed and a lack of compassion. Much later, I understood that she was an anomaly: Britain’s first female prime minister conquering an aggressively male-dominated arena through sheer conviction and total self-confidence, imposing direction on a country that had grown used to managed decay. By rights, she should be a feminist icon, but she had the wrong politics for that. In any case, she would have rejected any such accolade. For Thatcher, individuals succeed through discipline and hard work. She didn’t want to be treated as “a woman in politics” so much as a politician who happened to be a woman. Identity politics was an indulgence of the other side. She had work to do.

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One of the great stupidities of the British state today, though we see the same across much of the West, is that it has conflated race with culture. This would ordinarily be called a category error, although that makes it sound like a miscalculation rather than what it is: a useful dogma that the managerial class can hide its failures behind. We call it multiculturalism.

Many hear that word and conjure up a society where cultures intermingle happily and enrich the whole. “Look at the wonderful festivals and cuisines”, they say. “Chicken tikka masala is your national dish now. Isn’t it brilliant how multiculturalism has saved the native British from the distress of eating their own food?”

Sure, okay. I mean, I love Indian food. I would take it over fish and chips any day of the week except Sundays, when I opt for Chinese. I’m fine with festivals, too. I’ll pass on Notting Hill Carnival because it’s a little “vibrant” for my taste, but I’m happy for others to parade through London and celebrate their cultures.

None of those things is multiculturalism in the sense I’m talking about in this essay. The cuisine and mixed marriages, the freedom to practise your religion within the law, everybody rubbing along – that’s the soft version of multiculturalism, and almost nobody objects to that. I certainly don’t.

I’m talking about the hard version of multiculturalism, the one written into state policy. It’s the doctrine that says the state should treat some groups differently rather than expect them to assimilate into a shared civic culture. It says, in effect, that the liberal principles which are the bedrock of the free and open societies we enjoy in the West must adapt to imported customs, even when those customs conflict with those same principles. It’s the multiculturalism that defers to “community leaders” and treads on eggshells every time it asks a group to adapt a bit to British norms, maybe rein in the cousin marriage stuff, that sort of thing. It’s the sort of multiculturalism that has critics talking about “failures to assimilate” and “integration problems”. That’s the version I’m talking about in this essay.

And let’s be honest about what “integration problems” really mean. We’re not usually referring to Poles or Nigerian Christians. Nobody seriously worries that the Hong Kong diaspora will refuse to adapt to liberal norms or demand that the local supermarkets stock dim sum.

We’re talking about Islam, and specifically the cultures around some of its more conservative interpretations. Many Muslims integrate perfectly well, of course, and that matters. Where things go wrong is in the immovable religious injunctions that treat secular law, female equality and free expression as problems to be managed rather than rights to be upheld. Conservative Muslim men are not taking their cues from On Liberty but the Koran, and the two sets of ideas, liberalism and literalist Islam, are (shall we say) pulling in opposite directions – the latter producing men who regard women as property and, as we are all too aware today, view girls outside the group as fair game.

This week saw the release of the Rape Gang Inquiry report1. You already know about this unless you’ve landed on this post by accident and have paid no attention to one of the darkest episodes in modern British life.

The report describes how, for decades, organised networks of overwhelmingly Pakistani-heritage men abused and exploited working-class girls, many of them children, across towns and cities in the UK. We already know the rest: that the police, social workers and media looked away for years, and that even when Elon Musk dragged the scandal into the global spotlight, the government's first instinct was to resist – voting down a national inquiry before grudgingly conceding one much later. The sentient filing cabinet that is Keir Starmer previously accused critics of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-right is saying” – because that’s simply the script he pulled from the shelf, one written down long before he came into power.

We also know that the children who reported what had happened to them were treated as the problem; that those whose first duty should have been to listen to these children and care for them instead treated them with suspicion and even contempt. Why? Because they were terrified, above all, of looking racist.

Just think about what that means for a moment. The organised abuse of white English working-class girls mattered less in their moral calculations than the perception of racism. Not actual racism, which is stupid and wicked, but “racism” in the sense a bureaucrat uses it, which amounts to: please stop noticing patterns because your noticing is creating paperwork and I might lose my job if we make a fuss about it.

The governing class understands all this well enough, which is why it puts so much emphasis on crisis management and on holding a tight rein on the mainstream media – not that the latter need much restraining. This is just another institution staffed by the same university cohort that was taught Britishness is somehow morally defective, that it must pay for colonial sins and the rest. Even Britain's feminists, who can detect patriarchy in a manspread, fell silent.

All of them understand the difference between attacking people for their skin colour and criticising ideas, customs and practices. They simply discovered that conflating the two categories was useful, because it made awkward questions easier to dismiss and dissent easier to pathologise. It also preserved their self-image as moral sophisticates, which is why they return to the slogans again and again, like a dog proudly returning to its vomit. The rest of us, meanwhile, see a poisonous mess in urgent need of clearing up, although few have wanted to say so out loud.

Decades of nudge tactics and propaganda have trained the public to respond in very particular ways to questions of race. People learned to self-censor because the charge of racism became the second-worst thing you could be called after paedophile – unless, of course, the paedophiles belong to a protected group, in which case mentioning it is “divisive”. We learned that noticing patterns was the sort of thing the “far-right” do, so we pretended not to see them, or at least not to mention them in polite company.

Who can blame anyone for avoiding these discussions when speaking up costs them their reputation or even their job? And what if going along with it has the opposite effect: a promotion, a status bump, the applause of a handpicked BBC audience? This is the kind of social engineering that has been operating on the general public for two decades or more.

It was Times reporter Andrew Norfolk who, in 2011, broke the "conspiracy of silence" over the abuse of vulnerable girls by organised groups of men. The man who exposed it was promptly accused of racism and received death threats, which tells you everything about what he was up against2. His investigations eventually forced an inquiry, but only after the state had switched on the fog machine at full blast. It’s why we kept hearing about “Asian men”, a group so broad it could mean anyone from Istanbul to Tokyo. The people who could distinguish between 72 genders suddenly couldn't identify a relevant subculture, for the same reason others looked away from the girls who needed protecting: the fear of seeming racist.

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This piece is an extended version of a Substack Note I posted yesterday. If you’re new here, please consider subscribing.

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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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The title of this essay will have already divided some readers before I get to the first argument. For many, the words “Sam Harris” and “moral clarity” in the same line are uncontroversial, even obvious. Harris, they tell you, has spent more than two decades saying unfashionable things plainly, and often more lucidly than any other public intellectual alive, especially on religion and the moral idiocies of our age. But to some on the left, he is the “Islamophobe” who wants to profile brown people at airports. To some on the right, he is the man who can dissect jihadism from outer space but has a meltdown the moment populism enters the room. Even his own large and devoted audience cannot quite fit him into an ideological box, and often finds him maddening for reasons of its own. This is someone who’s clearer than most of his critics, more exasperating than many of his admirers care to admit, and somehow charges an incredible $25 a month on Substack for the privilege, which many thousands are apparently willing to pay.

I stumbled on Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, the month after it was published in 2004. I read it once, in one sitting, then immediately read it again. I was so impressed that I handed copies to friends, one of whom skimmed the first chapter before throwing it disdainfully on the floor and declaring it racist. That category error – mistaking criticism of Islam for hatred of Muslims – would alternately bore and infuriate the rest of us for the next two decades, right up to the present day, when the British state still worries more about “Islamophobia” than protecting its own children. Harris has been as useful a guide to that moral confusion as anyone, and he brings the same clarity to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which, in hindsight, is where all this was always heading. I’ll come back to that.

First, let’s briefly map the path by which he became one of the leading public intellectuals of our time.

Harris emerged as one of the “Four Horsemen” of the new atheist movement that followed 9/11, alongside Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. That chapter feels like something from another age – it was another age – when rationalism was in vogue and social media was in its infancy. Nobody talks about atheism any more, partly because a new religion stepped into the arena and got everyone arguing about gender and race instead.

Later, Harris became associated with the “intellectual dark web”, a loose collection of heterodox thinkers and academics arguing against the new orthodoxy, including Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Eric Weinstein (who coined the phrase as a joke) and others. That lasted about five minutes, and by the time Covid came along, nobody could agree what they were for or against.

His primary concern throughout these years has been the moral significance of belief – that ideas matter, and that bad ones matter in ways the West would rather not think about. That was essentially the argument in his first book, and it runs through everything he’s written and talked about since, including Islam, Trump, Covid and Israel. Islam most of all, though.

Long before progressive ideology had trained polite society to treat moral clarity as indecent, Harris understood that liberalism cannot survive without the ability to criticise dogma. The left had been explaining away extremism since Salman Rushdie went into hiding for writing a novel, but 9/11 ushered in a remarkable new settlement on the part of the cultural and political establishment. Islam, we were told, was somehow deserving of special exemptions from scrutiny. We learned that criticism of Islam as a set of ideas was equivalent to hatred of Muslims.

To see that moral confusion play out, we can turn to a fascinating cultural artefact: the exchange between Ben Affleck and Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Affleck, standing in for polite society everywhere, simply cannot compute the moral logic Harris is offering. All he’s got is indignation. All he hears is bigotry because he’s soaked up the relentless messaging that honest discussion of political Islam is somehow a form of racism, even though Islam is obviously not a race but a set of ideas. “It’s gross, it’s racist”, says Affleck, echoing a sentiment an entire class has marinated in for a quarter of a century. Affleck isn’t stupid, by the way, nor do I think he’s dishonest. He’s just confused somewhere between becoming Batman and performing the duties of a conscientious Hollywood liberal. Like so many well-intentioned and busy people, he’s absorbed something from the surrounding noise, the way some people pick up an accent. The real dishonesty belongs to the people who feed it to him – the ones who know it’s a category error and reach for it anyway, because admitting it would lose them the argument. Such has been the political culture of our time, with truth a secondary consideration to the demands of the tribe.

Which brings us to Trump, that perfect distillation of everything Harris loathes. Trump, I would agree, is a grotesque figure in many ways: mendacious, egotistical, and vulgar. In 2016, Harris painted a typically vivid image of the man:

“Blow up a balloon without tying off the end, and hold it up high, and then release and watch it fly chaotically around the room. That’s Trump’s mind. In my view that’s what we’d be doing with the country if we put him in charge. Just hitching our future to a totally chaotic system.”

The image was funny because it was true, and the first presidential term bore it out, helped by a media class that went off the rails and still doesn't understand the strange lifeform that is Donald Trump. But Harris did get somewhat obsessive on the subject – enough that even sympathetic listeners started tuning out whenever Trump came up, and his critics claimed he had full-on "Trump Derangement Syndrome". Yet to me, it's always been obvious that Trump is simply a bullshitter in the sense Frankfurt discussed in his famous essay. Unlike a liar who knows the truth and intentionally hides it, a bullshitter is largely indifferent to whether what he says is true or false. Trump doesn't care about the facts; he cares about making the deal. Next to that, you have institutional lying that looks respectable on the surface, speaks in whole sentences and talks about empathy and "saving our democracy". This is lying in the proper sense – deliberate, fluent and ultimately more deceptive.

The Clintons and Obamas of the world seem more “presidential” on the surface, but decorum is not the same as honesty. The people who lied about borders, sex, grooming gangs and political Islam do not become less dishonest because they wear appropriate expressions of concern and speak in managerial clichés. Trump may deal in obvious lies and pointless insults, but on certain basic realities, he grasps the truth that matters: that countries need borders, that men are not women, and that radical Islam is a serious threat. One doesn’t have to wear a MAGA hat or drink “liberal tears” from a mug with his face on it to see that these are statements of common sense that only the hypereducated class could fail to recognise.

Then came Covid.

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The Soviet Gulag was one of the cruellest inventions in human history. Like the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, it attracted its share of sadists. One notorious punishment was to tie naked prisoners to a tree and leave them to the mosquitoes, which swarmed the camps in the summer months.1 At best, prisoners were treated as disposable economic units for the Soviet state. At worst, they were playthings of guards who killed them for their sport.2 In every case, the Gulag was designed to strip human beings of their dignity. Into that hell were thrown dissidents and ordinary citizens, poets and peasants. Among those who came out the other side was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The astonishing thing about Solzhenitsyn is that he refused to define himself by the horrors of the camps. “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life,” he wrote in the book that made the Gulag famous worldwide.3 It’s a sentiment almost impossible to comprehend except, perhaps, as a way of making peace with injustice rather than being destroyed by it. Solzhenitsyn turned his experience into testimony. He never traded on his suffering, nor asked to be excused from ordinary judgment because of it. He simply bore witness to staggering human cruelty, showing us the worst of humanity, but also, through those who endured it, the best.

There are millions today suffering at the hands of others. From Christians in Nigeria to the women and girls of Afghanistan, these are people who know the real meaning of victimhood in a way few of us do. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban for insisting that all girls have a right to education. She went on to campaign publicly, and at continued risk – a response so alien to our own moment that it almost sounds eccentric. Partly this is because we can’t imagine living under those conditions, but it’s also that we’ve grown used to a different response to suffering. Ours is a culture that incentivises taking a wound – sometimes real, often inflated – and placing it at the centre of our identities. If you’ve opened a newspaper today or scrolled social media, you’ve already seen countless examples: personal injuries displayed like medals, worn with defiant pride, and daring you to contradict the claim.

Philosopher Pascal Bruckner calls this victimisme (victimism): suffering converted from something to be overcome into a source of status, moral authority and power.4 We’re all victims of something because to live in this world is to suffer indignity and face injuries, real and imagined. Think back to the school bully, the neglectful teacher, or the boss who humiliated you in front of your peers. What if you could make these injuries into instruments within a moral system of blame? What if, rather than overcoming these injuries, you turned them into symbols of virtue and moral authority? Those who play this game and profit by it, Bruckner calls “victim entrepreneurs”.

None of which is to say that compassion is the problem per se, nor that victimhood is imaginary. One doesn’t have to endure the Gulag to be a victim. People are bullied, neglected, humiliated and destroyed in all sorts of ways that decent societies are morally obliged to notice – and decent people do notice. When someone in obvious distress tells you he’s been badly hurt, most of us are inclined to believe him and act on it, unless we have very good reason not to, or we’ve been conditioned out of it. The question is not whether suffering exists. It plainly does. The question is what happens when victimhood becomes the most reliable route to authority.

Here’s where liberalism comes in. Compassion wasn’t something added to liberal ideology by sixties hippies doing peace signs. It was there at its roots. Montaigne, writing in 1580, well before liberalism had a name, wrote that among all other vices “there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices”. Or take Adam Smith, the supposed paragon of self-interest, who established himself first as a moral philosopher, arguing that our moral ideas and actions are rooted in sympathy for others. Centuries later, philosopher Judith Shklar built an entire liberalism on that instinct, one that begins not with a vision of the highest good, but with the rejection of the worst evil.5 Do not start by deciding what the perfect society looks like, she argued. People who do that tend to build camps. Start instead by naming what no decent society may do. And the first thing it may not do is be cruel.

This is very much the liberal inheritance we recognise today, one that exists, before anything else, to shield the vulnerable from cruelty and arbitrary power. None of it will be news to the modern “liberal” in the American sense, who makes this the foundation of their politics. But hold the classical version in mind, because it goes far beyond shielding the sensitive from microaggressions. The classical liberalism of Locke and Mill is about protecting individual freedom from state tyranny – something the right would sign up to as hurriedly as the left signed up to compassion, but they are hardly unrelated. And it is these liberal virtues – compassion above all, and the regard for human dignity – that let victimism in through the back door.

Nietzsche put this down to a master-slave morality, in which the masters embodied all that was good: vitality, pride, and the capacity for action. Or, more precisely, the good was everything they embodied. What was bad was simply everything they were not. But because the weak couldn’t compete on these terms, they inverted the whole structure. Slave morality begins not with affirmation but with ressentiment, and takes its revenge where the weak can actually win: in the realm of values. Now the master’s qualities are reimagined as evil, while the qualities exalted are precisely those the powerless happen to possess: meekness, humility, pity, the turning of the other cheek. Powerlessness gets relabelled as virtue, and suffering becomes meaningful. It’s significant that slave morality cannot affirm itself directly; it needs monsters against which to define itself.

Nietzsche saw Christianity as the great historical triumph of this inversion, but there’s a modern version he couldn’t have imagined: slave morality running most freely among the safest, richest, and most insulated people who have ever lived. Their resentments are turned into policy by a diversity consultant drafting corporate speech codes from a corner office overlooking Central Park. Codes that begin in universities now filter out into every public institution in the land. There’s a multi-billion-dollar industry built on it.6

Liberalism has inherited and universalised something from the slave-morality lineage: concern for the weak and the dignity of the individual. But liberalism organised around the prevention of cruelty has to take all suffering seriously, from claims of systemic injustice to the colleague who “felt unsafe” after someone complimented her haircut. Once a society agrees that injury confers moral authority, it has created a currency. And currency invites counterfeiters.

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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.

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In the first year of this century, I was down and out in Prague, doing a bad impression of Orwell but without a book to show for it at the end. Skint and dislocated, I slept on a lilo in somebody’s hallway at night, and my shoes were so tattered that the laces had to be tied around the middle to keep the soles from coming off. I earned a few beer tokens teaching English, but nearly every other waking moment was spent drinking, reading and playing Scrabble like an obsessive with a fellow traveller. But reading most of all, and in dusty cafés – the sort that resembled a bohemian jumble sale of wonky armchairs and wobbly tables. This was a time before smartphones and American coffee chains. The internet was mainly for email at this point, and the devil was still workshopping social media. I didn’t realise at the time – nobody did – that these were the last days of a particular way of reading.

It was in Prague that I discovered the novel, or rather, …

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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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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.

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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 have spent decades undermining:

“If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you’re illiberal.

If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you’re a fundamentalist.

If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you’re a totalitarian.

If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you’re a terrorist.”

Failing any one of these tests is to fail the imaginative work that liberalism depends on – the willingness to see that others hold their convictions as strongly as you hold yours, that their interior lives are as richly formed, that they are subjects to contend with, not objects to be swept away.

Mill’s argument is wasted on people who have stopped seeing the person on the other side – the African torture victim, the hostage on the poster, the novelist whose books taught a generation to read. It’s a faculty of mind powerfully at work in a novelist like Rowling, which is why she remains so unbearable to those who have traded the person for the label.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Imagine you’re a tourist in Vietnam, enjoying a bowl of noodles in the hostel’s little restaurant. A couple of tables across from you is a Chinese couple, travellers like you. You realise they’re Chinese only when two women nearby, having spotted a tattoo on the woman’s arm, demand to know where they’re from. The tone of the women is sharp, then hostile, then hectoring. From the accent, you guess they’re British. As the embarrassed Chinese couple get up to leave mid-meal, the women throw taunts and accusations of depravity and murder at them, making the couple complicit in China’s “genocide” of Uyghur Muslims. The other travellers sit rooted to their chairs, hoping the scene will quickly pass.

It’s hard to imagine this happening anywhere, let alone in a little corner of Southeast Asia – two British women haranguing a Chinese couple for their apparent crimes against the Uyghur Muslims. What a strange and unlikely scene this would be.

But of course, the couple weren’t Chinese, they were Israeli – identified by an Israel-shaped tattoo – and the cause wasn’t the Uyghur Muslims but Palestine. Suddenly, even a thousand miles away in an unlikely locale, none of this seems far-fetched but all too familiar, so inured have we become to the eruptions of Jew hatred.

“We’re just the goyim, aren’t we?” says one of the women. There it is. She knows the vocabulary well; she’s rehearsed these lines for just such an occasion. “Say you’re against Netanyahu!” insists one of the women. “What about Ben Gvir?” says the other. They can’t believe their luck, and on holiday no less – an Israeli couple on whom they can perform all the antisemitic tropes: “You’re monsters. You’re savages… A hundred and ten countries you’ve been thrown out”. Nobody steps in, nobody urges restraint. The Israeli couple make their way out of the restaurant at last. “Look at them…rats running away… Go on rats. Murderers. Murderers. Savages. Monsters. Genocidal”.

We know this is how it happened because one of the women recorded it on her mobile phone and later uploaded it to social media.1 That says something in itself. Because you can’t imagine this happening following any other kind of racism. Not towards a Chinese couple or an Indian one. If it had been a black couple, the incident would likely never have taken place – even a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist would pause, and if he uploaded any incident of the sort, it would be in private to a group of fellow racists. The costs are too high.

Antisemitism is different. One of these women uploaded the video to social media for all to see. I’m quite sure she did so with pride. Because far from being racist, they likely viewed this as a moral achievement – one that took courage and conviction. If they had any regrets, it was probably that they didn’t get around to chanting “from the river to the sea,” although I doubt they could have put a name to either. Geography is an irrelevant detail when the borders that matter are the ones that divide good from evil, the oppressor from the oppressed. This is what hatred feels like when it feels like virtue.

“This is what hatred feels like when it feels like virtue.”

They didn’t arrive at these beliefs independently, of course. The world’s oldest hatred filtered through numberless versions over countless centuries in which societies have formed certain ideals and defined them in opposition to what they consider “Jewish”. As Dara Horn puts it, referencing David Nirenberg’s research:2

The trope is infinitely adaptable; only the hatred stays constant. And in that consciousness, like malware passed from one age to another, lies the permission to hate: antisemitism recast as a righteous act of resistance against evil.

The Soviets – who could master propaganda in a way they could never muster a successful society – did more than anyone in recent history to rebrand Zionism as “racism” and “colonialism”, exporting this messaging to the developing world and ultimately to the DEI industry in the United States and from there into nearly every university department in the West.3 Qatar and Al Jazeera have since done more than anyone to propagate and finance the operation.4

The scene in the restaurant is the end product of all this. Here are two women who have downloaded the full ideological toolkit from a progressive class whose "polite" dinner-party antisemitism repackages the world's oldest hatred in the oppressor/oppressed framework, making righteous hatred feel legitimate in the 21st century. But it's the Islamists that provide the raw power and endless newsfeed of suffering, some of it real, some of it fabricated. And it's the Islamists who take it to the streets, calling violence "resistance" and murder "justice".

Glastonbury Festival put it to music in 2025 while the BBC filmed it for the nation. “Death, death to the IDF” chanted punk-rap duo Bob Vylan while a thousand middle-class festivalgoers joined in like a gruesome karaoke in the fields of Somerset – a ritual of moral self-congratulation with Palestinian suffering providing the emotional kick. The BBC saw no reason to edit it out because they didn’t hear a racist chant but urgent clarity expressed by like-minded people, high on a feeling of righteousness.

Bob Vylan issued a statement shortly after. “We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people,” they wrote on Instagram, now carefully substituting “dismantling” for “death” – a word that presumably tested better with the lawyers. “We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine.”5 Perhaps those women in the restaurant, who called the Israeli couple rats, were also just dismantling a violent military machine. Or maybe they no longer know the difference because the issues are already complex enough, and sometimes “monsters” does the job.

The Glastonbury death chants were sinister, evoking something dystopian, something alien to the society we thought we knew. In Orwell’s 1984, the state organises a daily ritual called the Two Minutes Hate. Party members come together before a screen, faces contorted with rage, screaming at a singular enemy in an ecstasy of denunciation. Winston Smith, who privately resists everything the Party stands for, joins in at first out of pretence – but then finds himself overtaken by the same urge, which is contagious, delirious, and purifying.

What must it be like to be a Jew in the West today? To have been told from the earliest age that your history is the darkest of all histories, that the evils of the past are stepping boldly once more into the present. To see politicians adopt their practised solemnity at the latest atrocity and the media rolling out exhausted clichés. “An attack on one is an attack on all of us,” they say. “Hate has no place in Britain”. “This is not who we are as a country”.

But hate evidently does have a place in Britain, and this is who we are as a country, at least in parts of it. The clichés and platitudes can no longer hide the fact.

On a pro-Palestinian march through London not too long ago, a kippah-wearing man came face to face with a British police officer. “You are quite openly Jewish,” scolded the latter, as if to preempt any blame for the antisemitic violence that might follow.6

At some point in his life, that man in the kippah would have read Anne Frank’s diary, probably as a child at school, as so many of us did. He might have wondered as a boy what it takes for a civilised society to force its Jewish population into hiding, then hunt them down and finally kill them. Perhaps he closed the book, saddened but convinced that those evils, decades in the past, were safely locked away and unrepeatable. After all, civilised society had agreed: never again.

Today, walking through Golders Green in London or any neighbourhood in the West, he will ponder whether to wear his kippah. Others might hide their tattoos. All of them will wonder at the cost of being “openly Jewish”, for themselves and for their children.

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’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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