This recent interview with one of the world’s most significant leaders represents the culmination of a remarkable transformation. The Nelk Boys, whose name combines the first initials of their four Canadian founders (Nick, Elliot, Lucas, and Kyle), began in 2010 as politically neutral YouTubers pulling harmless pranks such as their viral “Coke Prank on Cops”. They’ve since evolved into significant political actors in Trump’s America, relocating from Canada to Orange County, California, to build an empire on outlandish pranks and party documentation, generating 1.3 billion views in the process. At the beginning of their career, they were telling LAPD officers they had “coke” in their car, only to reveal Coca-Cola; now, they are interviewing a politician embroiled in a major regional war. The journey illustrates something profound about how young American masculinity found its political voice, however halting and stuttering, in the algorithmic age.

The transformation wasn’t immediate. For years, Forgeard, who is the sole remaining original member, worked to transform their “Full Send” brand from drinking slogan (“party hard”) to lifestyle empire (rebranded as giving “your absolute best”). YouTube demonetized the group in 2020 for “creating a widespread public health risk” after they threw massive parties violating Covid protocols, but the punishment proved meaningless when they reportedly sold $70 million in merchandise the following year. Their content was laser-targeted at males aged 16-25: fake employee pranks at Walmart, Spring Break documentation, university lecture disruptions. As one analysis noted, they “tend towards the apolitical”, with viewers seeking entertainment rather than ideology. Women appeared only as props; diversity came through their multiracial, multiethnic cast, with Americans, Canadians, and even a gay Brazilian immigrant making conservative messaging more palatable than if delivered by the stale, pale, and male Republican establishment.

The political awakening of the Nelk Boys came in October 2020, when Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship — truly an important point of connection for so much of the latest iteration of the American Right — introduced them to Donald Trump. Suddenly, these Canadian pranksters were aboard Air Force One, dancing to “YMCA” at rallies. “Back in 2020, it really wasn’t [cool to have public dealings with Trump],” Forgeard later reflected. “We were kind of the first podcasters to have him on when it wasn’t cool.” Their reward? Trump thanked them by name on election night 2024, recognising their role in his 15-point gain among young male voters.

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Between these bookends lies a fascinating case study in audience capture. In August 2022, the Nelk Boys posted a video of themselves being bullied by Andrew Tate. The footage, which has garnered 11 million views, showed the Tate brothers “demonstrating” how to manipulate women, later spraying the Nelk Boys with champagne after allegedly “stealing their girl”. This went beyond mere entertainment, introducing their young male audience to the manosphere’s toxic gospel of traditional masculinity and female subjugation.

The Netanyahu interview exposed the intellectual bankruptcy at the heart of this movement. When “Steiny” asked why Netanyahu was “so hated worldwide”, the Prime Minister deflected with propaganda about a rabbi’s brother in Europe. When asked about starving Gazans, Netanyahu blamed Hamas while the hosts nodded along. Their most substantive pushback came over fast food preferences. The YouTube comments were brutal: “38-year-old frat bros interview Adolf Hitler,” one user wrote, garnering 117,000 likes.

The backlash forced them into a nearly four-hour damage-control stream featuring an unlikely coalition: Hasan Piker (Leftist streamer and, some hope, the Left’s answer to Joe Rogan), Nick Fuentes (gadfly alt-Right, Holocaust denier who has seemingly feuded with everyone on the Right and argued it’s gay for men to have sex with women), and Sneako (banned from YouTube for alleged antisemitism).

Taken together, it all represents a complete inversion of comedy’s traditional political pipeline. The 2000s Judd Apatow generation of frat humorists, which consisted of slobs or nebbishes such as Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, followed a predictable trajectory: crude masculine comedy led to Hollywood success and eventual performative liberal politics. Rogen, Hill and Cera reunited in 2020 for a Democratic fundraiser, looking old and bloated in Zoom windows while earnestly discussing their enthusiasm for reproductive rights. These were the same comedians who’d built careers on jokes about semen and being gay, and they were now positioning themselves as enlightened male feminists. Their politics weren’t so much sophisticated as simply polished, a professional obligation in Hollywood where being a “good liberal” meant career survival.

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By David Masciotra

The phoniness of this generation’s politics was exposed in moments of crisis. When real working-class grievances emerged, these millionaire comedians retreated into vague platitudes about “doing better” and “having conversations”. They performed progressivism like another movie role, complete with the right Instagram posts and carefully crafted statements drafted by publicists. The “White Dudes for Harris” phenomenon, with wealthy entertainers awkwardly performing allyship, represented the endpoint of this hollow politics: privileged men congratulating themselves for having the correct opinions while changing nothing material about the systems that enriched them.

The Nelk Boys embody the newer, more generous, more small-d democratic pipeline: YouTube pranks lead to Trump adjacency and what might be called “confused conservatism“ (or simple/basic conservatism, if one is being more generous). The bro podcast king Joe Rogan offers intellectual curiosity (however performative); the ascendant, formerly cancelled comedian Sam Hyde offers articulate extremism; but the Nelk Boys offer pure vibes — a vague politics of male-coded cultural resentment that plays on justifiable audience concerns yet lacks ideological coherence. They’re less sophisticated than Hyde, who evolved from edgy comedy to shrewd policy criticism, yet seemingly more committed to the cause than Jake and Logan Paul, whose political engagement remains more transactional. For the Paul brothers, it is their various sports-related undertakings that constituted their real bread and butter.

The data reveals the Nelk Boys’ impact. With 73% male viewership aged 16-25, over 21 million followers across platforms, and videos regularly exceeding five million views, they’ve become what less sympathetic researchers call a “Trojan Horse” for Right-wing messaging. Their evolution from apolitical content to hosting extremists demonstrates what these scholars, who are undeniably political themselves, term the “gateway drug” effect — in which mainstream entertainment content serve as an entry point toward such excesses as “extreme anti-feminism, nativism and overt white nationalism”. Commentary of this kind sounds like the sort of rhetorical overreach that makes most people question the validity of Left-coded academic “research” and, in turn, fail to ask questions about what the long-term impact of the Nelks’ political influence actually is.

Too big to fail or to shut down their profitable operation, the Nelk Boys exemplify how young male content creators are pulled rightward by audience pressure and algorithmic incentives. UC Davis research found that YouTube’s recommendation system leads Right-leaning users toward ever edgier Right-coded content. The economic logic is simple: controversial political content generates higher engagement, conservative audiences provide better monetization, and platforms reward transgression. The result? A generation of creators profits from performing politics they barely understand for audiences seeking validation of their cultural grievances.

These grievances are real. The Nelk Boys’ young followers face legitimate economic challenges: housing unaffordability, wage stagnation, social atomization, looming AI sunsetting of many white-collar jobs, particularly those offering entry to the corporate world. The manosphere offers clear albeit simplistic answers: feminism destroyed traditional relationships, diversity hiring stole your job, liberal elites hate you for being male. Content creators package these resentments as entertainment, creating what Left-wing researcher Rebecca Lewis calls “reactionary ideologies” sold through influencer tactics.

The 2024 election validated this strategy. Trump systematically courted the manosphere by appearing on podcasts that reached 50 million views, a move that contributed to a 15-point Rightward shift among young men. As the UFC’s Dana White took the podium to praise Trump’s victory, he specifically noted the contributions of “the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, and the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan”. These weren’t mere entertainers, but political activists who’d successfully converted politically homeless young men into Trump voters.

The phoniness of the Apatow generation created a vacuum for the Nelk Boys to exploit. Millionaire comedians who’d built careers playing pot-smoking man-children tried reinventing themselves as progressive allies, but their working-class cosplay fooled nobody. The Nelk Boys offered something similarly hollow but superficially honest — they never pretended to be sophisticated, socially conscious, or even capable interviewers. Most crucially, YouTube democratized their content in ways Hollywood never could. Any teenager with WiFi could access the Nelk Boys’ world, while the Apatow crew remained products of an insular industry that preached inclusivity while practicing groupthink and nepotism.

As Forgeard stood onstage at Trump rallies declaring “We need Trump back and we need him back bad”, he embodied this transformation. The fake employee prankster had become a real political employee, selling Right-wing politics to young men seeking meaning in meaningless or absurd lives. The “Full Send” lifestyle, which was once about partying hard, now meant saving democracy from an addled Joe Biden (to which end, among other things, they sold loads of merchandise that proclaimed “Biden is a half sender”).

In the aftermath of the Netanyahu interview, we can see possible limits to the trajectory. Having platformed alleged war criminals (Netanyahu) and actual Holocaust deniers (Fuentes), where does the Full Send operation go from here? In the attention economy, the answer is always the same: further out there, more extreme, endlessly transgressive until the platform itself becomes the message — wayward masculine energy searching for lost, strayed, or stolen meaning in all the wrong places, finding only more content to consume.

I’m referring, of course, to three of the superstars of the so-called “intellectual dark web”: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro. It was in a hagiographic New York Times profile by Bari Weiss in 2018 that the creaky tricycle of Rogan-Shapiro-Peterson rode into the mainstream of American life. Weiss praised them, and their inner circle of guests and fellow podcast hosts as “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers” having conversations unlike anything else in the culture.

Agree with their politics or not — “Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing America apart” is one example Weiss seizes on — there was an obvious problem even back in 2018. From the claim that free speech was under the assault from the left to the accusation that transgender women were destroying women’s sports, all the IDW’s views were orthodoxy of the Republican Party, and all had the bullhorn amplification of Donald Trump, Republican congressional leadership, and the highest-rated cable news network in America.

Since then, the iconoclasts have huddled more tightly around the MAGA consensus while exaggerating their personalities to unintentionally comedic effect. Rogan, for his part, has become a billionaire sycophant, all but crediting Elon Musk with saving the world and seeming to take Marc Andreessen at his word when he claimed that Biden staffers told him they’d “kill AI”. Another high water mark includes boasting that “bringing back” the word “retard” is one of his “greatest achievements”. His friend, Jordan Peterson, has transformed from an insightful psychotheorist, who picked up the mantle of Joseph Campbell, into someone who says, with a straight face: “Up yours, woke moralists. We’ll see who cancels who.”

And if all that’s not embarrassing enough, the trio’s political trajectory is similarly uninspiring. With the exception of Sam Harris, an IDW-adjacent figure who has now become a Left-leaning outlier, all of 2018’s “new media” superstars now mostly parrot the same lines on issues from Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to anti-Trump hysteria, transgenderism and DEI. Shapiro has broken with Trump on tariffs, and offered surprisingly strong criticism on the US president’s brazen corruption in dealing with Qatar, namely accepting the $400 million jet as a “gift”. Similarly, Joe Rogan has shown signs of humanity by expressing doubt and outrage in response to the Trump administration deporting immigrants and refugees, without due process, to an El Salvadoran gulag. Despite their occasional rebuke of Trump, they still occupy a Right-wing world with a culture that they helped to create. As a consequence, the so-called “heterodoxy” will only go so far. Don’t expect Shapiro to interview guests about climate change and universal health care. And don’t hold your breath waiting on Rogan to consider the costs of structural racism and cultural misogyny.

Suffice to say that it is a little strange that a group of “iconoclasts” and “renegades” march like wooden soldiers to the same tune on nearly every issue in modern politics. Complaining about the phantasmic threat of the all-powerful “Left” — even as Donald Trump ignores a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, and implements a Maoist defunding purge of entire sectors — is straight out of surrealist theater. Yet the absurdity is successful: so successful that other media figures have muscled in on the act too. On their respective podcasts, Bill Maher and Stephen A. Smith routinely denounce the “woke Left” while downplaying Trump’s offenses. California Governor Gavin Newsom, proving his favorite hair product is snake oil, has started a podcast too, sitting down with Right-wing activists such as Charlie Kirk to, you guessed it, ridicule progressives.

Nor can you really blame them: beyond the continued popularity of the original IDW trinity — Rogan reached 20 million listeners a week in 2024 — they’ve also turned politics into a remarkable moneymaker. To emphasize they’re in business, Peterson, Shapiro and the rest will take occasional pauses from their identical rants to pitch nutrition supplements, sleeping pills, and life insurance. It leads to awkward moments. Shapiro’s robotic, mile-a-minute delivery of his latest take on the widespread slaughter in the Middle East, suddenly transitions into shilling for a phone company. This stuff is easy to mock, but then again Shapiro himself can chortle all the way to the bank. Estimates of his yearly earning range from $10 to $20 million.

And with an audience comes influence — not just of the straightforward political variety either. Thanks to Jordan Peterson, the IDW podcast world has suddenly found Jesus. For example, Rogan, who once famously identified as an atheist, now declares that it would be a good time for “Jesus to come back”. One is tempted to quote the late George Carlin — “Jesus is coming. Look busy” — but several of Rogan’s fellow podcast bros have adopted a similar line. In a new media chicken-and-egg paradox, it difficult to determine if the podcast world is influencing clerical authority or vice versa, but the Catholic Church has created, in the words of one report, a “Catholic right celebrity conversion complex”, relying on figures like Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and other hosts to “make faith-appeals” and fight the supposedly “feminized church”.

It isn’t enough to speak with uniformity about politics and culture; the new media rebels must also express agreement that atheism is destructive, and religion gives society purpose and meaning. New friend of the IDW, Russell Brand, currently facing sexual assault charges in the UK, now baptizes people in tighty-whities, even as he recites scripture and leads his audience in prayer. While praying at a rally over the summer, he caused Jordan Peterson to break the third wall and laugh at a plea for God to rescue the West from “Kafkaesque, Huxleyan, Orwellian” forces. Peterson himself provoked laughter during his recent appearance on the “Jubilee Debate” in which he squared off against 20 college atheists. He sputtered, refused to answer if he is an actual Christian rather than some kind of vague theist who finds inspiration in the Bible, and even played the part of the hall monitor when he abruptly ended an exchange with one young man over his sarcastic and contemptuous tone. The decline of Peterson is unfortunate, because he can produce genuine insight in his field of psychology, and he could have positioned himself as a Joseph Campbell-style psychotheorist for the new media age. Instead, he’s become yet another casualty of the increasingly imbecilic culture war. On the right side of the battlefield, his audience shows all the signs of loyalty, and his popularity will likely endure for many years.

Taken together, then, the brave, exciting new world of uncensored, authentic media — where “dangerous” ideas thrive — has collapsed into Fox News with infomercials. And for all of the familiar complaints about “liberal media bias,” the mainstream press continues to salivate over reactionary, manosphere “new media” stars, both oldies like Rogan and newcomers like Theo Von. A comedian turned political provocateur, Von peddles updated variations of antisemitic conspiracy theories. According to him, you apparently “have to be afraid to even say ‘Jew’” in Hollywood. Von has admitted to not knowing that Judaism precedes Christianity, and that there are practicing Jews of all races. Despite his ignorance, the New York Times profiled him as a “proxy for the average American citizen” having “vibey conversations” that “dismantle the interview show”.

In other words, then, the IDW continues to go from strength to strength. But that still leaves the question of why. As those bursting accounts imply, I think one answer is money, not just made but spent. As Eoin Higgins details in his new book, tech billionaires have coalesced with “anti-woke” activists in the podcast world to shift “alternative” media away from heterodoxy — and towards the kind of conservative conformity that dominated talk radio in the Nineties and 2000s.

There’s plenty of practical evidence here too. Marc Andreessen, a billionaire and Trump enthusiast, is a leading investor in Substack. For his part, Peter Thiel owns Rumble, the Right-wing version of YouTube, while David Sacks has a large share of Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently joined the digital MAGA commune, largely because Trump falsely promised the end of an antitrust case against Meta over its purchase of Instagram. The allegation that the Kremlin, through a false front company, paid podcast hosts hundreds of thousands of dollars to unknowingly sow discord among the American electorate, has also done nothing to soften the Right-wing cacophony that advertises itself as revelatory commentary.

There are other cases where the influence is more subtle: the result of networking, shared interests, and overlapping incentives. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky details how one of the most powerful filters of media influence is the “ownership filter”. When tech-billionaires own the most powerful platforms, and they all have the same low tax, monopolistic agenda, it is hardly surprising that those platforms most heavily promote (and compensate) hosts who excoriate progressives: who also just happen to back antitrust actions against Silicon Valley.   

Not that demolition of heterodoxy and variety is just about funding. There are cultural factors at play too. In 2005, the late David Foster Wallace shadowed Jon Ziegler, a Right-wing talk radio host in California. Ziegler has since become a “Never Trump” Republican. But when Wallace met him, he attracted attention by making racist jokes, objectifying women, and pushing the boundaries of conservative opinion on issues ranging from welfare to profiling of Muslims in airports.

 Though Wallace acknowledged the importance of financial interests — explaining that “my radio company has zero incentive to promote the public good” — he also argued that “anger” and “clarity” sell better than emotions like joy and satisfaction, and certainly better than things like nuance and complexity. It is easier to structure a worldview, and therefore an entertainment product, around a simple, enraged perspective. Wallace observed that the motive for simplicity creates a dangerous game for Right-wing hosts who pride themselves on violating standards of political correctness. To appear more authentic and daring, the talk radio (or podcast) host has to venture further and further beyond the limits of polite society.

Joe Rogan recently displayed this dynamic at work by hosting, in separate episodes, Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper, antisemitic conspiracy theorists who have made sympathetic remarks about Hitler while claiming that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. He’s also hosted Suzanne Humphries, a street corner crank who believes that tuberculosis is a side effect of the smallpox vaccine, and that the Covid vaccine contains snake poison. 

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The political consequences are not minor. As recently as 2012, it was common knowledge that Republican officials lived in fear of Rush Limbaugh’s denunciation. Now, second only to Donald Trump, they move like lemmings according to the orders of Right-wing talk show hosts and podcasters. Historian Nicole Hemmer has described how “conservative media became the institutional and organizational nexus of the conservative movement” — helping to solve the political mystery of why one of America’s two major political parties demonstrates more interest in mocking and irritating “the woke” than addressing the dysfunction of American health care, public education, and social services. 

Of course, the dumbing down of American life did not happen overnight. Richard Hofstadter wrote his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life back in 1966, and despite the mainstream nostalgia for so-called better days, Right-wing media doesn’t have a friendly history. As an example, William F. Buckley opposed the civil rights movement and suggested, in print, that the government force gay men with AIDS to get tattoos indicating their positive status above their buttocks.

In other words, then, the “new” media is merely the same old wine in a fresh bottle. What has changed, though, is that the attention span of the American public is increasingly fractured and shortened, and that legacy institutions from newspapers to political parties can no longer exercise any restraints over discourse. It is likely that the problem will get worse, and eventually, poison the Left too. Certainly, the New York Times and Slate offering glowing profiles of Hasan Piker is ominous. Piker is a podcast host who claims to hate capitalism while selling clothing apparel with his face on it, laughs at people who show sympathy for Israeli hostages, and declares that “America deserved 9/11”.

David Foster Wallace concluded his profile of Ziegler with what he called an “editorial note”. As he put it: “One can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in — believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I’ll take doubt.” Wallace might not have predicted the medium, but he certainly understood the message. The psychological algorithm has met the technological algorithm, leaving us in a bleak world indeed.

Donald Trump is no Napoleon, but he has captured the spirit of our age: America’s soul riding forth on X. It is hard to open any social media app today — pace Bluesky— and not be struck by the sense that something has shifted in the zeitgeist. The Right is winning and it’s becoming cool. A new epoch has begun. Where NFL players once took the knee, now they are doing the “Trump dance”, while UFC fighters bow to their great Caesar as he strides in the modern, fighting colosseums of today. Animal spirits have been released into the popular culture that are as powerful as they are unpredictable.

But what about those of us living outside America? There is no obvious British Joe Rogan or British Elon Musk today — the Horace and Crassus of our age. Perhaps that is because these men are just as powerful here as they are in the States. In fact, just as we have entered something of an economic depression these past 15 years, so too are we stuck in a cultural and ideological rut. To look at Britain today is to be struck by an overwhelming sense of quaint, platitudinous predictability: more poor Vienna than booming Austin. There is no British Musk because there is no British Silicon Valley; and there is no British Rogan, because there is almost no popular, home grown counter-cultural energy — not yet at least.

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But down at the farmers’ protest an intriguing presence strides into view: Jeremy Clarkson. “Why are you here Mr Clarkson?” the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire demanded as he joined those protesting the Government’s decision to impose inheritance tax on family farms worth over £1 million. “Well, I’m here to support farmers,” he replied, without obvious hostility. Derbyshire, though, persisted. “This is not about you and your farm and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?”

As Derbyshire pointed out, Clarkson had written as much in The Sunday Times. “Classic BBC,” Clarkson replied, with seemingly genuine exasperation. “You people.”

Clarkson then proceeded to deliver a message of clean popular fury more in tune with the spirit of the day than anything I have heard out of Westminster in years — not since Take Back Control anyway. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning,” Clarkson began. “I wanted to shoot… which came with the benefit of not paying inheritance tax. Now I do. But people like me will put it in a trust and as long as I live for seven years that’s fine. But why should all these people do that?”

It was hard not to hear the distant sounds of the great populist panjandrum across the water in those remarks. “A lot of you don’t understand why Trump was so popular,” Dave Chapelle explained on Saturday Night Live. “The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio had never seen someone like him. He’s what I call an honest liar. That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it, I’d never seen a white, male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs: This whole system is rigged.”

Chapelle is referring to the scene when Hillary Clinton accused Trump of using a loophole to avoid paying taxes. Asked by the moderator whether this was true, Trump replied that of course it was. “I absolutely used it and so did Warren Buffet and George Soros and many of the other people that Hillary is getting money from,” he went on before delivering the killer line: “She complains that Donald Trump is taking advantage of the tax code, so why didn’t you change it when you were senator? The reason is because all your friends take the same advantage that I do.” The fact that Clarkson was attracted to buying a farm because it came with the benefit of avoiding inheritance tax will also, I suspect, be of little interest to most people in Britain who do not like this government. The fact that he said he bought a farm to go shooting and avoid inheritance tax will, in fact, be seen as welcome honesty.

Just as Trump hit on a central truth with his admission of tax avoidance — an honest lie as Chapelle put it — Clarkson alighted on a number of burning questions in British politics today which do not neatly map onto our traditional political system. When he asked why farmers should pay inheritance tax, Derbyshire replied with the obvious counter that if not farmers, then how else will the government fund public services? “I tell you,” Clarkson answered, pointing up at the government offices surrounding him. “Walk into any of the offices around here and if you don’t understand their job, fire them.” In other words: don’t tax; cut.

And here, not only do we have a British expression of the Trump zeitgeist, but a British incantation of the Musk agenda. The power of Musk’s prospective Department of Government Efficiency is that even in defeat, it opens up the prospect of something new in Western politics, much as Thatcher changed the nature of British politics even as she abandoned some core tenets of her agenda.

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Clarkson, though, represents something more interesting — and more distinctly British — than mere government efficiency. To watch even a few episodes of his hit show Clarkson’s Farm is to immediately realise that while it contains much of the energy of Top Gear, at heart it carries a far more profound message than the populist caricature he usually does little to disavow. Essentially, Clarkson’s Farm tells us that farming must be protected in a collective national endeavour because it provides our life source: food. It is elemental: an expression of an old, almost forgotten Toryism — not free-trade but protectionist, national, territorial and utterly opposed to centralising notions of uniformity.

The programme overlaps with other expressions of Toryism too: inheritance, obviously, but also questions of conservation and an instinctive opposition to a distant, bureaucratic state. Occasionally, as a viewer, you are suddenly struck by the sensation that Clarkson is quietly delivering a sermon on rural life, smuggled into your living room under the guise of an entertaining countryside farce, a Tractor Top Gear.

Clarkson pulled the same trick on the podium at the march, complaining not just about Starmer’s “infernal government” and the BBC being its mouthpiece, but also about the ordinary consumer who will buy imported chickens to save money. “Yeah, you can, but it’s so full of chlorine, it tastes like a swimming pool with a beak.”

Farming, Clarkson reminds us, remains a great touchstone issue of Brexit, shaping its eventual form. Liz Truss, remember, is held in open disdain by farmers — not for the insanity of her “mini budget”, but for the content of her free trade deals with New Zealand and Australia.

In Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli, he captures the old Tory icon’s politics as that of “genuine hatred of centralisation, bureaucracy and every manifestation of the Benthamite state”. This, Disraeli believed, was what Gladstone represented. “[Disraeli] felt the sort of reverence that Burke had had for the many independent corporations and institutions which, however odd and anomalous, however contrary to the abstract symmetry, to what Burke called the ‘geometrical theories’, were the true bulwarks of English liberty,” Burke wrote. This, I think, remains the essence of the Tory instinct, still alive even as the party veers off towards libertarianism or social democracy.

“In a progressive country change is constant,” Disraeli once warned. “The great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles.” To Disraeli, the former was a “national system” and the latter a “philosophic system”.

Clarkson represents the national system; Starmer and Reeves the philosophical one. If I were Starmer, I would be worried that this is the wrong side to be on today, especially in this era of Trump. Clarkson’s politics, it seems to me, are like T.E. Utley’s self-professed brand of Toryism: “at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the Establishment”. Just because Clarkson’s politics do not map onto the prejudices of the two main parties today — being neither pro-European nor pro-global free trade — does not invalidate them, but rather, potentially, elevates them.

Clarkson, like Trump, is not a new phenomenon in any sense. He is old, rich, famous and good on TV. He has been expressing the same kind of thoughts for as long as I have been alive. And yet he has become new by remaining still. And that is why this Labour government shouldn’t mock his appearance at yesterday’s farmers’ protest. “I don’t think farmers will go on strike,” Clarkson said. “I think farmers can do better than that. And I’ve got some ideas.”

This should give Keir Starmer pause. Rather than ignoring this protest as another squeal of special interests from the old Britain he intends to put out of its misery, he should take seriously the prospect that it is actually a first expression of the new Britain coming into being: not riding on a horse, but a tractor.  Starmer needs to do everything he can to ensure Clarkson’s ideas do not involve the words: “Reform UK”, “Start Up Party” or worst of all “the Tories”.

Let’s be clear about why Harris lost. She was an incumbent vice president who did not have the spine to separate herself from America’s unpopular recumbent president. The Recumbent did not have the character to help his incumbent vice president stake her own space. Harris was a mediocrity flung by fate into water way over her head.

As it happens, about two months before Biden was finally pushed aside as the Democratic nominee, Vice President Harris’s motorcade passed by my family and me as we sat before a red light at an intersection in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. It was clear that Harris was set to take Biden’s place as nominee, and she was returning from a fundraiser in Provincetown, a few miles up the highway. As her black SUV, preceded by state police on roaring motorcycles, slowed down to be allowed through the red light we caught a glimpse of her. She was sitting motionless, like a stone, staring without expression, straight ahead. She looked like a stage prop in the process of being moved from a regional production to Broadway. And that is all she ever was. A prop.

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America's future isn't fascist

By Lee Siegel

At a time when America is gripped by fear, Harris was precisely the wrong person to aspire to the presidency. Americans do not fear civil war; they fear a country with, as Americans are fond of saying, “no guardrails”. They fear, simultaneously, constraints on their personal freedom, and they fear other people doing whatever they want. They fear science telling them what they don’t want to hear, and they fear science being unable protect them when what they hear frightens them. They fear school shootings, and they fear having their guns taken away from them. They fear censorship, and they fear speech they don’t like. They fear government telling them what to do and how to act, and they fear government unable or unwilling to act at their behest.

They fear American entanglement in wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that no politician has bothered to explain to them. They fear nuclear war, which no politician or public figure will ever even allude to, with the exception of the logorrheic Trump, who may or may not have a rational fear of it. Harris sure did nothing to allay fears of total annihilation when she declaimed in her stump speech on the trail that America had an obligation to defend the liberty of other countries. That was the mechanical groupthink of liberal idealists who send other people’s children off to die. Trump got five military deferments during the Vietnam War, liberals mock. So did Biden. Nobody wants to fight a war, except for those who don’t have to, or whose children don’t have to. Like all people, Americans want a peaceful existence. It is beyond pathetic that the best Harris could do in her concession speech was to call on Americans to “fight”. But “fight” was Trump’s motto! In either case, fight for what? This is not 1861, or 1941. Americans want to live comfortably, fulfillingly and safely. They don’t want to “fight”.

In the lead-up to the election, Democrats tried to use a clip, from 2021, of Vance calling Harris, among other Democratic figures, a “childless cat lady” to prove Vance’s misogyny. It was indeed a ludicrous, callous, foolish thing to say about any woman, especially a woman as driven and accomplished and intelligent as Harris. But it was diabolically shrewd. At a time when America is under threat internally and externally, a woman was always going to be a hard sell. Especially at a time when men are feeling disempowered. Especially a short woman. And an unpopular incumbent. And a woman of not one, but two colours. And a woman with no charm or passion or original presence. But a woman who had no children of her own? At a moment when America’s children fear being shot in school, when American parents fear their children will die from an opioid overdose, or fear their children will not be able to hold their own in American society because college is so expensive, because college is so competitive, because every job is so competitive, because children’s neurological development seems to be slowing, because the internet poses countless threats and terrors to children, because the country is in a dangerous proxy war in Ukraine… In this atmosphere, a woman candidate for president who has no biological children of her own is not, in the eyes of most Americans, sharing their daily and nightly terrors.

It was painful to watch Harris, so far out of her depth, manically readjusting, in full public view, her public persona. It recalled Samuel Butler’s remark that life is like learning to play the violin and having to give concerts at the same time. But a politician’s persona should not be like that. Harris tinkered with her accent, suddenly dropping the home-girl intonations. The “y’all” disappeared. That dislocated grin slid around her face, now here, now gone, now back again, like a house guest who refused to leave. By the end of her campaign, she had hit her stride by imitating the oratorical style of Obama, sometimes so closely that it made you wince. It made you long for Obama himself, until you remembered that it was Obama who had stoked the fires of racialism in national politics in the first place, thus giving birth to Trump. You still longed for Obama.

The liberal establishment’s disconnection from American reality is breathtaking. Liberal pundits were shocked that Latinos came out for Trump in great numbers after a comedian’s slur about Puerto Ricans at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But Latin culture is among the most traditional, the most macho, cultures in the world. They don’t do transgender. Nor do they like the Democratic Party’s fetishising of black people. Black people don’t like it either. That’s why so many black men voted for Trump. They don’t like being white fetish objects; see American Fiction. But you cannot talk in this way about the reality of American life with the high priests of liberal piety politics. For them, all Latinos, from every Spanish-speaking country, feel solidarity not just with every other Latino but with people of colour everywhere. And if you are black, well, you think and act black like every black person. But these priests of piety need to plunge into ordinary American life and allow human imperfection in the form of “prejudice” to be, and attend to changing the material conditions that allow prejudice to thrive and become toxic. Liberals like to say that after the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, conservatives have put themselves into Americans’ bedrooms, but liberals themselves have been policing the insides of American heads. Come on into the ocean of American life! The water is warm! And getting warmer every day, even unto boiling.

Lord Acton said that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, near-absolute freedom inevitably tips and shatters into a billion degradations of freedom.

Why Trump? Because people drive murderously large vehicles without regard to red lights, stop signs or speed limits, even as other people cross busy streets so engrossed in their phones they don’t look to see if a car is coming. Because people are allowed to smoke potent forms of marijuana. Because you cannot get a human on the phone when you call anywhere. Because, as a black public school principal told me: “They wave kids through with high grades for the sake of equity which makes everyone feel good and keeps the test scores high for the real-estate market. Then the kids get to college, flunk out, and come back home with no future.”

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Welcome back to Trumpland

By Tom McTague

Why Trump? Because literature, theatre, art, opera, film have been both flattened into the bottom line, and at the same time coerced into being mere tabulators of social justice issues. Because everyone is withdrawn into screens, into the emotionally numbing penumbra of psychiatric drugs, into their own customised reality. Because everyone is “kind” and “caring” to everyone else, all smiles the size of Manifest Destiny, until they feel they are not getting what they are super-entitled to. Because from the workplace to the highest echelons of politics, what people say means more than who they are and what they do. Because litigation, from the aggrieved citizen to the slippery Trump, has ritualised social disorder. Because there is a stronger sense of community and responsibility in the most remote Chinese village than in the entire US of A. Because instant gratification has become a right, and responsibility a repression.

Why Trump? Because the country is not, as liberals are saying now, turning authoritarian. In the falling debris of neoliberalism, each side yearns for an authority it can tolerate, even as it deplores the slightest exertion of authority on the other side. The Right wants government to enforce personal liberty at the expense of collective freedom. The Left wants to impose an idea of collective freedom at the expense of personal liberty. Both sides, and everyone in between, is God-bereft, meaning-starved, longing for connection and bedevilled by it.

After the dazing election, CNN put up a revelatory map showing, on a granular level, where Trump’s votes came from. They largely came from rural and semi-rural areas. I would think that was the same for my own state, New Jersey, which has voted for a Democratic president for 32 years but this year went for Harris by only five points. Pascal’s line sprang to mind: “The eternal silence of these infinite space frightens me.” He was speaking of the seeming implacable indifference of the universe. But that fear falls far more heavily in sparsely populated places.

The liberal strongholds are mostly in the densely populated urban centres and their environs. People can walk, bike or drive a short distance to grocery stores, schools, doctors, and other necessary places. In the rest of the country, people sometimes have to drive hours to buy food or clothes or to see a doctor. Liberals seem stunned that Trump’s three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan apparently had such a catalysing effect on the election. They shouldn’t be. Three-quarters of the people who listen to podcasts listen while driving. The long, changeless road and the long, intimate conversation depend upon intimate, unchanging patterns of living. The super-accelerating trends of contemporary America life, celebrated by liberals, who wish to shame everyone else into accepting cherished solidities melting into air, have a palpably alienating effect on people outside the liberal bastions.

Although the liberal media, having established woke culture, have now declared it played little or no role in Trump’s astounding victory, they are lying. Following the dissolution of American small towns in the Fifties, the disenfranchised young in those towns — like the disenfranchised blacks in the cities — were sent off to the charnel house in Vietnam. Now, in this second dissolution of small-town America, in which mind, not just body, is wrecked, young people are being sent off into virtual, psychological space, driven deep into their screens and themselves. Why not vote for Trump? He has captured the attention of the ones who ignore you. More important, he frustrates, enrages, and frightens the ones who frustrate and enrage you and do nothing to soothe your fears. Why Trump? Because he both fills the eternal silence of infinite spaces with the projection of indomitable power, and he drowns out all the condescending, proscriptive — woke — chatter that excludes you.

Americans believe in solutions. It is a blessing and a curse. Here is my suggestion, to my liberal friends, not for a solution, but for a workable modus operandi. Give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Do not, as you did four years ago, pounce on everything he says as evidence of impending political disaster. Do not impeach him. Drop the ridiculous, pointless alarmism. Do not get all middle school and retreat into the cool corner of the cafeteria and preen yourself, personally and professionally, on every instance of this monstrosity’s inevitable folly.

Save the attacks for the important moments, and then keep them dignified and rational and proportionate to the occasion. Be Trump’s friend. Stroke his ego. Oversized and fragile as his ego is, Trump will, as he did in his first term, fling away anyone who makes him feel small. Already, Trump’s son, Donald Jr., who says that he is “heavily involved” in his father’s transition into power, has declared that he does not want people in the new administration “who think that they know better than the duly elected president of the United States”. I give Musk six months. Robert F. Kennedy four months. Then, if Trump considers you his friend, he will come to you to have his faltering imperial ego re-stroked.

Above all, make no mistake about it. Trump arose from the deepest regions of American life. You want to rid the country of this Groundhog Day affliction? Start with self-control, self-denial, tolerance, and a workable idea of what is good for all. Then work your way up.

Cue the scorn. The Left-leaning press has derided the shift as merely the rise of “toxic masculinity” and the hatred of women’s rights. The New York Times described something even more sinister, calling it creeping “hegemonic masculinity”.

This reflexive contempt may unintentionally provide an explanation for the reversal. Many young men believe they live in a liberal-leaning society that actively despises them, treating them with disdain rather than empathy as their struggles have mounted.

Imagine an 18-year-old voter filling out his ballot for the first time. Looking back over his childhood and adolescence, this young man would feel his cohort are far from oppressors. Instead, they are drowning in problems.

He would have reached adolescence as the #MeToo movement took hold globally. The legitimate castigation of high-profile sexual abusers would rapidly devolve into widespread call-out culture, in which boys and young men were suspected of perpetuating the patriarchy and rape culture. The ordinary clumsiness of youthful love and teenage romantic inquiry was transformed, overnight, into behaviours that were liable for disciplinary action from school administrators.

The start of high school coincided with liberal bureaucrats locking schools down during the pandemic. Left with no other choices, the youth languished at home with online classes and virtual socialising that amounted to little more than doom scrolling. Last year, a study found that two-thirds of young men believed “no one really knows me” and one in three young men had spent no time with anyone outside their household in the prior week. Surveys show that the number of young men who say they lack a single close friend has soared fivefold since 1990.

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Who is behind Kamala Harris?

By Lee Fang

As college approached, the women touted as the victims of society did not seem to be doing so poorly. The gap between college enrolment, which had been building for decades, exploded — 3.1 million more American women entered higher education than men by 2021. It’s not even just a yawning education disparity gap. In many American cities, young women are galloping ahead of men in terms of income.

And new vices seem to prey particularly among this crowd. The recent legalisation of marijuana and online sports betting in many states has fuelled a skyrocketing rate of young men addicted to high potency pot and app-based gambling. Other more traditional compulsive habits, such as video games and pornography, similarly afflict young men far more than women.

Wasted time and lost savings, compounded by a profoundly lonely existence, can also give way to deaths of despair. The young male suicide rate has tripled since 2000, according to a new study published this week. In some communities, the magnetic pull of nihilistic violence and gang crime has a particular allure.

In previous generations, young men yearning for transgressive content and open expression had plenty of safe options. There were endless sources of edgy magazines like VICE, or raunchy late-night comics poking fun at the double-standards and absurdities around us. That changed in less than a decade. VICE transformed into a liberal clickbait farm and then bankrupted itself as internal accusations of bigotry tore it apart, while comedians were cancelled over “problematic” jokes.

The search for verboten ideas and thoughtcrime discussions has shifted almost entirely to places like Joe Rogan’s podcast. It is now among the most popular broadcasts of any type in the country. With over 11 million weekly listeners, the show is where young men go if they want to hear critical discussions with independent-minded thinkers.

Not long ago, Rogan’s show was embraced by outsiders of all types. Having previously hosted Bernie Sanders for a thoughtful discussion about political corruption, Rogan soon after endorsed the socialist’s 2020 bid for the presidency.

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But the popularity of Rogan’s show angered the Left-leaning cultural order, which pushed to have him removed from Spotify and YouTube. Democratic politicians were warned to not appear over false claims that Rogan harboured racist views.

In this light, Kamala Harris’s refusal to appear on the show in the waning weeks of the campaign was more than a mere tactical mistake. It was an implicit endorsement of the cancellation campaign waged against Rogan — a dogwhistle for young men primed in the cancel culture wars.

And Harris’s rise may have reminded young men that they now compete in a world which at times seems stacked against them. As a presidential candidate in 2020, she received zero delegates, yet became Joe Biden’s running mate. And this year, she faced no competition for the nomination. Democratic powerbrokers, backed by billionaires and much of the party elite, simply coronated her.

On the other hand, Trump, for all his swaggering bravado, humbled himself with intimate, highly emotional appearances on podcasts favoured by young men — for example speaking with the comedian Theo Von about his brother’s struggles with addiction and depression before his suicide.

The Trump campaign, for what’s it worth, carefully cultivated the resentment brewing in this generation, keenly aware of the culture wars and its impact. Its closing television advertisement depicted an America silenced by false accusations of hate speech and humiliated into labelling its values as shameful. “Our patriotism was called toxic,” the narrator intoned. “Men could beat up women and win medals but there was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job.”

In many respects, young men have faced down a liberal cultural order that has reduced them to objects of scorn. For a majority of young male voters, the choice to send a message back was clear. Trump is perfectly suited as an avatar of defiance on the campaign trail.

Yet a more positive, policy-based agenda to shore up the material interests of young men may be more elusive. There are suggestions to reform Title IX, the civil rights code that has been widely accused of expelling men accused of sexual misconduct from college campuses without any semblance of due process. Any broad improvement in the economy can lift the economic prospects of young men. J.D. Vance, in particular, has called for the continued deployment of Biden-era spending programmes on chip factories and electric vehicle plants, albeit with stripping gender and race-based mandates embedded into the funding.

That may not be enough to soothe the souls of young men victimised by a pervasive media culture and academic ideology primed to see them as the enemy. A more fundamental change may require reform instead from the liberal coalition groups that make up the Democratic Party. The same activist class and foundation-funded world that decided to scapegoat men in the first place, now reeling from their electoral loss, must reassess the excesses of gender and racial identity politics.

How to champion the interests of women without seeing identity as a zero sum game in which lifting one group up must come at the expense of the other? How to extend empathy to both young men and women? If the 2024 election results are to signal a permanent realignment, such questions can’t simply be swept away.

So the cognitive dissonance was palpable when the country’s first Rajars-style consumer survey of podcasts was published last week, offering the best snapshot yet of what Britain listens to. Much of the top 25 paints the UK as essentially and irredeemably twee. No Such Thing As A Fish — gadzooks trivia from high-end neckbeards. Off Menu: whimsical comfort-eating celeb fodder. The Therapy Crouch: Peter Crouch having a mind-numbingly pleasant chinwag with his missus. Shagged Married Annoyed: exactly what it says. The Rest Is Politics: a show built around the heartwarming premise that the last 20 years can be neatly scooped up and packed away.

But at the top of the charts were two shows that pointed towards something hiding in plain sight. A missing market: the market for men. Podcasts are a confessional booth medium, after all. Up and down the train carriage, no one knows what’s in anyone else’s earbuds. As economists would put it, they are an example of “revealed preference” as opposed to “stated preference”. What you actually want, rather than what you think you should want. And by their mass adoption of Rogan, it seems that what men want is the old tradition of the men’s magazine, continued by other means.

At the start of the 2010s, the last of that old world — the shining city on a hill of Arena, Select, Nuts, Jack, Loaded — finally fell away. We were told this was because there was a new lad in town. Softer, kinder, he could “do better”, if he avoided his inherent “toxicity”. He had the feeling of inevitability that all modern archetypes take on. Vice threw off its buccaneering spirit, and actively mocked its old ways. Even LadBible, once at the end of a scale that could genuinely be termed toxic, has reformed itself into the doughy shapes of the maaate cultural revolution.

The message of the new man was gynocentric: by 2013, the conversation among women had begun to guide what men’s interest media looked like. Men took note of this important new datapoint: they softened their image, nodded along. Then, as the podcast charts show, secretly went back to listening to bodybuilding tips, insane stories of shark attacks, reasons why the pyramids were built by aliens, how fugitive Nazis founded actual colonies in South America, what it’s like to kill a moose, and what Tim Dillon thinks of twerking children. In short, they went back to what men’s magazines had always been about. Not connecting with a sort of soft Jeremy Corbyn vibe. Not trying to figure out complex relationships.

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LadBible has dumped the lads

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If Rogan is the pure Gen-X vision of masculinity — basically every self-educated stoner at a 1999 house party, who has that old-school vision of hating both the military-industrial complex and political correctness — then the second-most listened to podcast in Britain is his Zoomer cognate. Steve Bartlett is a marketing entrepreneur who flipped his social-media agency into big money ($660 million at its apex valuation) by the age of 25. This earned him a chair on Dragon’s Den. Now, in his twilight years (30), Diary of a CEO is solidly wedged at the top of younger listeners’ (17-34) playlists, as the Edison Research survey confirms.

First listens don’t immediately reveal its appeal. Like many other podcasts — The Lex Fridman Show, Sam Harris’s Making Sense, Hidden Forces — it takes the format of “slightly naive guy interviews top experts about big picture stuff”. Bartlett is obviously likeable. He comes across as humble, genuinely curious. He’s marketed the show well, and curated his guest list better. They all come with their A-game. Information, certainty, high performance. It’s not a giggly show for kicking ideas about: it’s an earnest attempt to mine their life’s experience for info nuggets. How to get your brain off porn. When to double-down on a job and when to quit. How to build resilience. Being consistent.

In DOAC’s world, almost every insight is usable; no part of the buffalo is wasted. The past decade has seen an explosion in media-savvy self-help gurus, whose profusion has sparked a quantum leap in just how well-adapted and productive the average person can be. Bartlett is at the forefront of that codifying impulse — the urge to absorb all of it. He has that kind of mind: the stone-cold work ethic of someone never truly at rest. The very first episode describes his entrepreneurial origin myth: aged 20, living in the worst area of Manchester, working every hour, so poor that he resorted to pinching food from empty tables in pubs.

Bartlett is unique in many aspects of his back story (he was born in Botswana to an illiterate mother, for a start), yet he also sums up a particular Geriatric Zoomer/Young Millennial way of engaging with the world. He’s the avatar of what they call hustle culture: the obsession with putting in the hours in your own business or scheme. Here, the ultimate aim is to achieve a kind of earthly perfection that previous generations might’ve looked at as square. This is the New Man. He’s neurotic but well-adjusted. He works hard. He does not play all that hard.

Bartlett’s “internet entrepreneur” origins speak to the core of that hustle culture identity. He’s literally on the board of Huel, the makers of a wildly popular Soylent-style meal replacement. The “complete nutritional shake” is fast becoming a lifestyle in itself to a certain kind of 20-something man, and for boys whose bedroom furniture comprises a single pair of dumbbells. They are the ones filing life down to a smooth nubbin, until it doesn’t contain anything that doesn’t add to some personal P&L account.

This, young men often mistakenly believe, is how you get girls. Being industrious. Having your shit together. Making it. In reality, this sort of monoculture is an instant turn-off. But the task of living fully can seem so daunting that it’s easy to double down on an internet grab-bag of tips and tactics and sheer Nietzschean will. Cannily, Diary of a CEO also styles itself as the antidote to the problems of this way of life. In his origin myth, Bartlett “thought he would figure it out” when he made his first million but he “quickly realised he knew nothing”. So it’s a show as much about how to sustain relationships, how to re-examine your old ways, how to work around the dreaded Mental Elf.

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There are many overlaps between how Gen X men view the world, and how the younger generations do. Both Rogan and Bartlett believe religiously in self-improvement. Both think that life is a hackable system, and delight in finding the short-cuts. But Rogan’s top paradigm is still open-loop. It’s ultimately a shrug. Did the Mafia kill Kennedy? I dunno, but it’s fun to think about. Can the sulforaphane found in young Brussel sprouts reverse the aging process? Well that would be cool.

With Bartlett, there is a sense that he does still feel there is an ultimate answer out there. That you can clock life. It’s an almost spiritual impulse, a syncretic belief in something better. All this hustle, it’s just got to add up to something. And in the absence of greater meanings, many are working out at a gnostic temple of the perfectible self. Overall, it might be nice if the world knew what to do with its biggest audio show.

The idea that “we the people” condemned the “Nasty Noughties” and its toxic men to the trashcan of history is a top-down reading that doesn’t stack up. In truth, the bits of masculinity we’ve suppressed are just living in a thumb-necked mixed martial artist’s basement in Texas. And the bits of masculinity we can still tolerate are on Diary of a CEO. With the blizzard of entertainment options, “water cooler moments” in media are supposed to be over by now. But what the success of Rogan shows is that there is actually a giant water cooler out there, that is accessed by millions each week, who try not to talk to strangers about it. Somewhere, there is a fusion position.

Meanwhile, house prices are so high in San Francisco that even software engineers at mega companies struggle to afford accommodation, tech companies are downsizing, and homelessness is on the rise. Confronted with these problems, the city recently recommended a payment of $5 million each in “reparations” to eligible black residents. The figure was arrived at without actually doing any maths and, it is estimated, would cost everybody else $600,000 each.

As always, Silicon Valley is at the vanguard of a wider Californian trend. Here is a place where things were too good for too long; where the ruling class became unmoored from reality, hastening their state’s decline. Residents are voting with their feet: in 2020, California’s population declined for the first time in its history, a trend which continued through July 2022. Where, people are asking, are all those who came to California seeking success now going?

For many, the answer appears to be Texas. Austin in particular has received some high-profile defections. In 2020, Joe Rogan left LA for the city because, as he put it, “I want fucking freedom.” Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, the data mining firm  that helped locate Osama Bin Laden, declared that Texas beats California “in almost every method you can name, whether it’s education, pollution, homeless[ness].” Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison relocated the HQ of database giant Oracle from Redwood City to Austin following a bitter struggle with regulators. And, most famously, Elon Musk shifted Tesla’s headquarters to Austin in 2021, after claiming that California regulators had started behaving like a “monopoly that cannot go bankrupt”.

Musk’s announcement marked the moment when the rise of Austin as a tech hub reached critical mass in the public consciousness, but the process had been underway for over a decade. Long before Tesla arrived, Google, Amazon and Meta (as well as older firms such as Apple, IBM and Dell) had established significant presences in the city. They had been attracted by a concentration of engineering talent and Texas’s business-friendly government. The result is that the Austin metro’s population has exploded, while rents and house prices have soared. Since I moved here, during the second Bush administration, the downtown skyline has completely transformed. A second centre, “The Domain”, has sprouted in the city’s north, where many tech firms have offices.

The cultural changes have also been profound. The laid-back city of old prided itself on the slogan, “Keep Austin Weird”. But there is a sense among locals that, in the new Austin, idiosyncrasies are ironed out. Formerly hip neighbourhoods that might once have boasted the odd wax museum or vintage thrift store are now lined with luxury boutiques and frou-frou eateries, while quirky institutions have either fled to the remote reaches of the city to survive or closed for good.

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Although Austin was a second-tier provincial city until very recently, it always punched above its weight when it came to the counterculture. Cheap rents, low house prices and Left-wing politics made it attractive to creative people and misfits: “slackers” unafflicted by the ambition and status anxiety that bedevils all those chasing careers in NYC or LA. Psychedelic music was born here, in the shape of The 13th Floor Elevator’s debut LP — released a year before Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And in my almost two decades here, I have met many interesting characters without trying, including a Scottish BMX champion who was once name-dropped on an episode of Neighbours, Morrissey’s guitar technician, and a man who turned his PhD on crustaceans in Victorian literature into a career in AI. The poster boy for the Keep Austin Weird era was Leslie Cochran, a homeless man in a thong bikini who ran for mayor three times and had his own line of fridge magnets that allowed you to dress him in an array of outfits. Leslie’s death in 2012 (he was only 60) coincides almost too precisely with the last gasp of weird Austin.

As depressing as this metamorphosis might feel to many Austinites, it is simply the next logical stage in a process that began years ago, as middle-class hipsters displaced the black and Hispanic residents of the working-class neighbourhoods they moved into. What follows now is not gentrification but rather wholesale destruction, as entire blocks are razed to the ground and replaced with luxury apartment buildings, while the truly wealthy erect ostentatious ziggurats on lots where modest kit houses once stood.

Tech bros are often cast as the villains here, but they are too easy to scapegoat. A more interesting example of how social dynamics have shifted in the new Austin can be found in the furore that erupted when the residents of a brand new luxury development attempted to shut down a weekly car club that had been taking place since the Nineties. The sight of customised low riders and the roar of engines was too much for the exquisite sensibilities of the residents of “The Weaver”, one of whom denounced the club as “a display of toxic masculinity”.

The invocation of Left-wing pieties in the service of naked class war captured perfectly the way similar language would be used to justify policies during the pandemic that had a disproportionately harmful effect on the poor. Austin’s leadership embraced school closures and mask psychosis. After the murder of George Floyd, it also voted to defund the police — promptly experienced record murder rates. This was not the first time radically progressive policy had backfired in Austin. In 2019, the city had decriminalised public camping, allowing tent cities doubling as drug markets to spring up along freeways and in underpasses. San Francisco had already demonstrated how a policy that sounds compassionate can quickly become indistinguishable from the worst kind of laissez-faire cruelty, yet Austin seemed determined to pursue the policy to its destruction.

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But while Silicon Valley operates in uber-progressive California, Austin has an openly hostile Republican state legislature to contend with. Texas puts a limit on just how far the city can go with its more avant-garde policies, while occasional uprisings from the electorate thwart others. The ban on public camping was reinstated by popular vote. It is also misleading to assume that everybody moving to Austin is a doctrinaire progressive: when three-time Democrat failure Robert “Beto” O’Rourke was defeated for the first time, he had actually polled higher among native-born Texans than among those who have moved to the state from elsewhere. Indeed, Musk himself has argued that Austin should not slavishly copy San Francisco, while Lonsdale said that bad policies made the state “unlivable”. Indeed, so appalled is Lonsdale by the “far Left” thinking he saw in San Francisco that he co-founded the new University of Austin to challenge the “new ideologies of intolerance that order subservience and quash those who think differently.”

It would be preferable, of course, if we did not live in a world where entire cities could be so radically transformed by the desires of the super-rich. But in this, Austin is becoming not weirder, but more normal. All the great cities — Moscow, London, Paris, New York, LA, Istanbul — are full of buildings, monuments and institutions that exist only because rich and powerful people wanted them: indeed, there are entire cities, such as Saint Petersburg and Astana that exist because of this principle. If not exactly progress, it is a sign of Austin leaving childish things behind.

Meanwhile, even as the old “Keep Austin Weird” spirit teeters on the verge of extinction, the new city is weird in its own ways. Sometimes this is in the style of nouveau riche grotesque: $150 cups of coffee are weird. But I also recall my confusion the first time I drove past the shell of Musk’s immense Tesla Gigafactory just outside the city. At first, I assumed it was just another Amazon warehouse, but the scale was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was weirdly radical to see so ambitious a manufacturing plant in a Western country when we have spent decades getting the rest of the world to make our stuff for us.

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And people here still dream of creating their own worlds: I recently met a man who was considering building a commune south of the city, while Musk himself is rumoured to be contemplating the construction of a “utopia” in the Austin metro area, close to where facilities for The Boring Company and SpaceX are being assembled. On the one hand, Musk’s plans have a practical aim: he wants his employees to have access to affordable housing. But on the other, they are extremely secretive, although Kanye West was reportedly involved in discussions about what the town might look like.

But whether Musk builds his City of the Sun or not, there is a more certain sign of the old Austin’s extinction. The city has approved a 12-foot tall monument, to be erected downtown, that will read: “Keep Austin Weird.” In doing so, a cold, heavy slab has been dropped on the still warm corpse of the town that was once was, to guarantee it never escapes from its resting place.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 

I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.

You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.

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This is, by the way, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, this is the final stopping point for any legal dispute. There are nine justices serving there, the quality of an appointment is not a small matter. We’re not now admitting a marginal student to an elite college campus, we’re selecting the people who are going to govern the country. The President might have engaged in a kind of subtle and tacit preference, rather than crowing about it and making it overt and explicit. It sows a kind of contempt for the standards that we ought to be employing.

Is it right to aim for public bodies to be “representative” of the population? 

What do we mean by representativeness and who can represent whom? How many Catholics are there on the US Supreme Court? I’m pretty sure there are more Catholics on the court in proportion than there are Catholics in the population. Dare we ask the question: how many Jews, how about gays, how many openly gay people are on the Supreme Court? How dare we. That’s a rabbit hole that we don’t really want to go down.

And it’s kind of silly because it presupposes that something as superficial as racial identity or sexual orientation is of such fundamental significance that legal counsels must have members present who, when they act out in that context, are acting on behalf of, quote unquote, their group. Well, these individuals are not only women, or blacks, or gays, or Catholics. These are human beings whose humanity supersedes and reaches beyond the categories that we might impose on them.

You were the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Would you have felt differently about this achievement had the governors at Harvard pre-announced before selecting you that they were going to choose someone of African American heritage? 

My appointment as professor of economics at Harvard, which happened in 1982, was accompanied by an initiative at Harvard to enhance the quality of the Afro American Studies department there. I was jointly appointed: economics and Afro American Studies. I was 33 years old. It would have been entirely fair, for some outside observer looking at that to say: “Oh, well, fine. But if he hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have appointed him.” That’s probably true. So such is the condition that we find ourselves in.

How do you think someone like Whoopi Goldberg can get to the point where said that the Holocaust was not about race? 

I assume it’s because she thinks Jews are white. I would chalk that up to ignorance and naïveté — just not being immersed in the long history of modern Europe and anti Semitism and the ideology of Nazism, in which the notion of race had a very particular meaning. I think Whoopi just didn’t appreciate the actual meaning of the word race, in the context in which the Holocaust arose, revealing her ignorance. She ought not to have put it that way. It is a misstatement or mischaracterisation to say that the Holocaust was not about race — it just wasn’t about ‘race’ in the way in which we in the United States might be talking about race.

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One finds anti-Semitism not only on the far-Right, with ‘Jews will not replace us’ kind of sentiments, but also in ethnic minority communities. Especially among African Americans, there’s quite a bit of anti-Semitism; there are attacks on Jewish interests. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights leader, got his start in part by demagoguery over incidents in which there was conflict between blacks and Jews. He has a history in which I think anti-semitism would be a fair descriptor.

Why is there not more sympathy for the Asian community among progressive activists? 

The Asians are called a model minority — people say that sardonically. And of course, the subtle implication there is that you must be anti-black if you compare blacks to Asians, and you find the blacks wanting — or anti-Latino.

Some of the corruption and decadence of the legacy population here, black and white, in American society, is exposed by Asian success. They expose the lack of depth and seriousness of too many of our people by their assiduous self application, and their excellence in the mastery of the currency of the modern world. I’m talking about calculus, I’m talking about biochemistry.

Do you think this kind of thinking actually makes racial tensions worse? 

So George Floyd is killed — murdered, a jury has spoken — by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, in 2020. A policeman inappropriately applying force, he had his knee on the man’s neck, the man expires. Was that a racial incident? Now the police officer was white, the man was killed, George Floyd was black — it became a racial incident. A whole movement was launched or abetted by the racial characterisation of that incident. But why should we understand it as a racial incident?

There is very little evidence at all, if any, that Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he acted. And on the victim side, George Floyd, the fact that a policeman might over use his power and harm a citizen — that’s something that happens to white people, too. There are cases parallel to the George Floyd case in which the victim has been white, which have not occasioned national attention. So that’s one thing.

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But the other thing that I would say is that by cultivating a practice of looking at such incidents in racial terms, invites a parallel practice of looking at criminal victimisation of citizens in racial terms. You want to count the number of white cops who have killed unarmed black men, somebody is going to start counting the number of black murderers who have abused, black carjackers who have robbed and threatened, black assaulters who have bludgeoned and beaten white people. There are an endless number of such cases.

There is enough racial blame to go around, and I’d hate to live in a country in which when a white person was victimised by a black criminal, the first words out of their mouth were “a black criminal victimised me”. That’s not good for black people, because there are many black criminals. And that’s not good for our country because the issue is a criminal victimising a person; the criminal’s blackness doesn’t stand in for his race. He doesn’t represent his race when he acts badly. The victim’s whiteness doesn’t stand in for her race.

What would happen if Affirmative Action is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? 

The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, the majority of whom have publicly stated that they have serious doubts about affirmative action. There’s a very good chance that racial affirmative action will be stricken by the Supreme Court.

If it happens, I assure you, there will be mobs in the streets of this country. No progressive activist is going to take the Supreme Court’s ruling as an opportunity to turn within and consider: “if we want to be at Harvard or the University of North Carolina in larger numbers, why don’t we get busy preparing our youngsters from the cradle to be competitive in this great country that we live in where competition is the coin of the realm?” No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to interpret that as an anti-black move by a racist Supreme Court. I assure you that it is a disaster and I think we’re headed toward it.

In the past week there has been a big, powerful movement to get Joe Rogan removed from Spotify over historic cases of him using the N-word. What should we make of this?

I’m not going to say the N-word on your programme, but I should be able to say it, it’s just a word. I’m talking about a word — I’m not talking about a slur. And neither was Joe Rogan’s use of it a slur. He wasn’t pointing to a person and calling them one in a way of being a derogation, of an insult. He was speaking about speaking. That is to say he was saying that the word exists and then he was saying the word in the context of quoting someone else’s use of it or whatever.

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We have a genre here of music, it’s called hip hop or rap, in which the word is used regularly. And they are not using it as a slur either. It’s a part of the English language. Now, this thing that we’re doing here — where we’re making the utterance of certain sounds an indication of a person’s racism, and then seeking to cancel people for it being revealed that they uttered sounds, without any reference to their intent — is a bizarre phenomenon.

And I think that it’s actually not a sign of strength, by the people, black people, who insist that the sound of the word is so injurious to them. I think it’s a sign of their weakness. There’s something almost pathetic about requiring people to indulge you by not making certain sounds with their mouth because hearing it reminds you of lynching, of nightriders coming down on black people who are defenceless and are being set upon and whatnot.

It seems like a lot of the voices that were most upset about this were white. And it seems like more of an intra-elite power battle to do with the nature of the media, in which the race issue is used as a battering ram. What do you think?

Who are those people who listen to Joe Rogan? They are mostly not latte-sipping, National Public Radio-listening, coastal elites in New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or whatever. They are mostly, or more often than not, male, more often than not, white. There’s some truck drivers among them. There’s some Trump voters among them.

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So this culture war that’s well-advanced here in the United States in which we are in effect, mutually contemptuous of one another based upon what camp we belong in — Joe Rogan is right at the centre of it and his audience substantially is on the ‘wrong side’ from a progressive’s point of view. A lot of this enmity directed toward Rogan is really directed toward his audience.

How do we make it better? 

I’d like to tone down the emphasis on race and be more concerned about the humanity of people. If we want to talk about disadvantage, poverty and the lack of wealth in America, there are more poor white people than there are black people. And anything worth doing, whether it be reform of education, or changes in the tax laws or extension of the welfare state programmes, anything worth doing to help black people is worth doing to help people who are in need of of help. I would have our arguments, that is our African American arguments, couched in broad, humanistic terms. And I think that less attention to racial identity and more attention to human common need is healthy for the country.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

In the UK, Hicks was acclaimed as the stand-up who might define the Nineties but back in the US he felt stuck. “Today he would be a mad prophet of the airwaves,” comedy manager Jimmy Miller says in Cynthia True’s Hicks biography American Scream. “He’d be on HBO, interviewing people, saying whatever’s on his mind. But back then the comedy business just hadn’t matured. They didn’t know what to do with him.” Miller said that in 2002. Twenty years on, Hicks, who died of cancer in 1994, wouldn’t need an HBO deal; he would be hosting a podcast.

Stand-ups played a foundational role in the podcast industry. In 2009, just as the format was becoming mainstream, Marc Maron launched the interview show WTF and Joe Rogan recorded the first episode of what became The Joe Rogan Experience. Two early podcast networks, Earwolf and Nerdist, were established by comedians; Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick compared podcasting to the comedy LP boom of the Sixties.

The symbiosis of comedy and podcasting isn’t hard to understand. Stand-ups love to hear themselves talk and a rambling chat is a much more congenial vehicle than the intense, time-consuming labour of writing and honing a tight one hour of killer material. With a successful podcast, a comedian can circumvent the usual gatekeepers and build a cultishly loyal fanbase without even having to leave the house or — and this is crucial — worry about being funny. What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster. Ba dum tss.

While old-fashioned one-liners and wry observations are doing just fine, many of the innovations in comedy are in the realm I call post-funny. Some of the most acclaimed comedian-fronted projects of recent years — including Master of None, Feel Good and Bo Burnham: Inside — see laughter as a secondary concern. The Closer, Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix special, is a prickly monologue about cancel culture and why he’s not actually transphobic, with occasional jokes. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette was a Netflix sensation in 2018 precisely because Gadsby deconstructed her duty to make people laugh: “I must quit comedy. Because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger.”

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Comedians increasingly want to be philosophers. (No philosophers want to be comedians, except perhaps Slavoj Žižek.) This can make them rather pompous. Over the weekend, Whitney Cummings tweeted: “Comedians did not sign up to be your hero. It’s our job to be irreverent and dangerous, to question authority and take you through a spooky mental haunted house so you can arrive at your own conclusions.” To which Marc Maron replied: “Maybe add ‘to be funny’ to the list.”

The first great philosopher-comic was Lenny Bruce. In Comedy at the Edge, Richard Zoglin describes the evolution of stand-up comedy between the Forties and the Seventies as “a long march from joke-telling to truth-telling”, with Lenny Bruce as its gung-ho general. Starting in 1953, he was not alone in reinventing comedy but he established a new template for the stand-up: raw, authentic, discomfitingly honest, ferociously intolerant of hypocrisy and cant and sometimes messy. Comedians in that mould couldn’t just make people laugh; they had to offer a point of view. “With Bruce a smile is not an end in itself, it is invariably a means,” wrote the critic Kenneth Tynan.

As Kliph Nesteroff explains in The Comedians, some critics didn’t consider what Bruce was doing to be comedy at all. Time complained that he “merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the world”, while the Los Angeles Times deplored his “soaring, if uncertain, egotism rooted in the eroded soil of unlettered knowledge, snippets of cliché liberalism, borrowed erudition, and a conviction he has a Messianic message”. Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1966, claimed for comedians the radical freedom not to be funny all the time.

At that time, only three kinds of people enjoyed the privilege of speaking their minds to an audience for an hour: politicians, preachers and comedians. In fact, the priest delivering Bruce’s eulogy said “he was in a sense an evangelist, on a street corner”. After Bruce’s death, the baton of comedian as social critic passed to the likes of Richard Pryor (“the Picasso of our profession,” according to Jerry Seinfeld) and George Carlin, whose aphorisms now circulate, like Orwell’s or Gandhi’s, in the form of earnest Twitter memes.

These pioneers cast a long shadow. A 2017 Rolling Stone list of the best stand-ups of all time was topped by Pryor, Carlin and Bruce, with others in the same tradition — Louis CK, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle — close behind. At number 13 was Bill Hicks. “To me, the comic is the guy who says ‘Wait a minute’ as the consensus forms,” Hicks told the New Yorker in 1993. “He’s the antithesis of the mob mentality.”

The politics of this brand of comedy are, more often than not, libertarian. Comics want the freedom to say whatever they like as long as it’s funny so have often ended up on the frontlines of the battle for free speech. Bruce was twice tried on obscenity charges, while Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace when he performed his celebrated routine ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’ in 1972. When an English vicar complained of blasphemy in Bill Hicks’s 1992 show Revelations, he replied: “This is about freedom and freedom of speech and words can’t hurt you.”

The culture has changed somewhat since then. In comedy, at least, there are now more taboos on the Left than on the Right and the spectre of cancel culture is to someone like Chappelle what the NYPD was to Lenny Bruce, minus the court cases. In The Closer, Chappelle expresses the comedian’s licence to say anything in a less noble form than Hicks: “Comedians have a responsibility to speak recklessly. Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean. Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean: I’m saying it because it’s funny.”

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This licence is immensely powerful. Take Jimmy Carr’s Roma Holocaust joke, for example. In the context of his recent Netflix special, it’s still, I think, grotesquely misjudged — but Carr goes on to talk about the forgotten victims of the Nazis and why he made the joke. It clearly didn’t shock the audience in the room, nor the huge number of people who watched the special during its first six weeks. It only became scandalous when a 40-second clip went viral on TikTok and Twitter: the land of no context.

Even in a stand-up environment, though, Chappelle’s disclaimer isn’t enough. I don’t buy the popular binary division between comedy that “punches up” (good) and the kind that “punches down” (bad). Comedy doesn’t cleave so neatly, and nor does society. But I’m equally unconvinced by the “just jokes” defence.

For one thing, it’s not the case that anything goes. No major comedian currently delivers the kind of racist jokes that were commonplace in the Seventies, however deftly constructed they might be. (Carr celebrates Black Lives Matter in his Netflix show before getting laughs out of the Roma.) For another, it’s inconsistently applied. Ricky Gervais has arguably replaced Richard Dawkins as Britain’s most famous atheist and on that issue he wants to be taken seriously. Increasingly, comedians want to say whatever they like even when they’re not being funny.

You can see this double standard at work in Jon Stewart’s famous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004. I agreed with Stewart that Crossfire was a toxic travesty of debate but notice how he positioned himself. When Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson criticised him for asking politicians soft questions, Stewart replied that he’s on Comedy Central: “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” But when Carlson complained, “I thought you were going to be funny, come on, be funny,” Stewart said, “No, I’m not going to be your monkey.” Depending on the moment, he is Schrödinger’s comedian: just a funnyman but also not just a funnyman.

Rogan uses this trick, too. He would not be interviewing politicians, authors and epidemiologists if he were only about the laughs, but he keeps his comedian’s licence in his back pocket in case of emergency. Last April, Dr Anthony Fauci criticised him for advising young, healthy people not to get vaccinated. In his self-deprecating response, Rogan said: “I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron and I’m a cage fighting commentator who’s a dirty stand-up comedian who just told you I’m drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed. I’m not a respected source of information, even for me.”

This is very convenient. Rogan is half a conspiracy theorist: he has the curiosity but not the commitment. To his credit, he sometimes admits to being wrong. But he has that particular blend of scepticism (towards mainstream expertise) and credulity (towards anybody challenging it), so he becomes a conduit for false information, even when he’s not explicitly endorsing it. In the case of the present Spotify controversy, whether Rogan himself is an anti-vaxxer (he claims he isn’t) is a moot point if he is sympathetically conversing with vaccine sceptics to an audience of millions.

Russell Brand, too, has been described as “a powerful voice for anti-vaxxers”. He’s been on a journey. In 2013, Brand abruptly transformed himself from verbose dandy lothario into revolutionary seer in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman in which he urged people not to vote. His ensuing book, Revolution, was a peculiar mix of rehab memoir, New Age mysticism and solid policy proposals from Left-wing thinkers such as David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, liberally salted with self-deprecation: “I’m not Noam Chomsky, you’ve probably noticed; I’m happy to be Norman Wisdom.”

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During the pandemic, Brand’s obsession with political alienation and challenging official narratives has led him a long way from Piketty. The breathlessly clickbaity titles of his YouTube videos are often indistinguishable from those of the conservative guests he gently interviews on a regular basis: “Why The Left Can’t Handle Donald Trump”, “Vaccine Gold Rush: Do You Trust Gates?”, “They’re Eliminating FREE THOUGHT!! Billionaires’ Plan To CONTROL The Internet”, the latter bearing the hashtag #GeorgeSoros.

Brand claims that he is “breaking down the news, providing you with information you won’t get in mainstream media”. Is it true? It doesn’t matter. “What do I know?” he says in a recent video defending Rogan. “What could I claim to know? I’ve never been to university or higher education of any kind, except for showing-off school.” To his fans, of course, this makes him all the more reliable: one of them, not one of Them. That video is called “The Truth”.

Comedians should be free to switch lanes, but when Al Franken runs for the US Senate, or David Baddiel writes Jews Don’t Count, they aren’t doing so as comedians and they are making a choice. Comedians who express political opinions through the discipline of stand-up (a discipline which inevitably tests and sharpens those opinions) are also making a choice. Just as a musician has more freedom in a protest song than in an essay, or a film-maker more liberty in a drama based on a true story than in a documentary, the criteria are relatively clear. Rogan and Brand raise an interesting question: does the privilege of comedy apply even when you’re not doing comedy?

I do wonder if Hicks, with his nascent taste for conspiracy theories and spiritual self-discovery, would have wound up in a similar role. 70 years after Lenny Bruce’s comedy revolution, Rogan and Brand represent a very modern, very online mutation which is both post-funny and post-truth-telling. Rather than establishing a point of view and crafting it into a routine, they offer a muddy, non-committal version of “anything goes” in which misinformation is simply another interesting idea for the open-minded to consider and pushback is establishment intolerance of free speech.

By hedging their bets, they have achieved a freedom that Carlin and Hicks could only have dreamt of. If you say they should clarify their own positions, or take responsibility for the opinions they promote, well, they say, they’re comedians, not intellectuals. Why so serious?

Take the podcaster, Joe Rogan, whose viewership is an order of magnitude higher than primetime television and has repeatedly been the subject of controversy and attempts at censorship. If Joe Rogan had lived in North Korea or the Soviet Union, his problems would no doubt stem from the government and the lack of forbearance of people such as Kim Jong-un or Nikita Khrushchev.

In the democratic United States, however, Rogan’s problem is quite different: The Joe Rogan Show has been subject to open threats of strike action by the employees at Spotify, which distributes his podcast. Their principal demand is to be handed editorial oversight over the podcast, with the power to veto what Rogan says or does.

This campaign was bolstered by an open letter signed by 270 “experts” concerned by his “history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the Covid-19 pandemic”. Interestingly, the list of signatories was not populated by people actually working in virology or vaccine research. Many of those who signed were nurses or students, others were general practitioners, a few were dentists, and at least one was a licensed marriage and family therapist.

It’s a bizarre situation: a call to censorship justified by the incapability of non-experts to handle a subject like vaccine research is then inundated with people who by the same metric should themselves be disqualified from having an opinion. But, ultimately, that’s the point — this was not a list of 270 of experts in the field, but rather a list of 270 of people from the expert class.

These class dynamics are hardly very subtle. Take Greta Thunberg, whose claim to fame, to put it pithily, is the fact that she refuses to go to school. While many of us can probably empathise with this desire, there is something strange about a person who hasn’t even finished high school acting like she belongs to a group of people who justify their rule through technocratic language.

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But while Greta may not really have much of a formal education, she does have rich parents, and a slew of contacts in the international NGO world. It would be foolish to think that the mere act of having a PhD would allow you to countermand someone like Greta Thunberg, even though the echelon she occupies openly ridicules the vast hordes of “deplorables” for the high crime of only having a high school diploma.

Like medieval nobles claiming a right to rule based on being a superior breed, and then openly practising inbreeding, our current elites rarely live up to their own hype. Often, the experts are stupid and wrong, sometimes to an almost comical degree. And yet they persist in trying to convince us that they deserve to rule us, and get mightily upset whenever someone dares to challenge their power. Their fixation with Joe Rogan is not hard to understand through this lens.

The investor Warren Buffet famously said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Today we can describe the political sphere with a modified version of this: there’s class war, all right, but it’s the expert class making war, and it’s not at all clear that they’re actually winning. Of course, the state plays its role here, but it’s difficult to shake the impression that it lags behind the enthusiasm and radicalism of the expert class — the students, professors, journalists and people whose work consists of writing and answering emails.

Perhaps the recent news that Sweden is forming a ”Psychological Defence Agency” in order to “safeguard democratic society” and “the free formation of opinion” gives us a sense of where the West is heading. The Swedish situation is actually far more subtle — even contradictory — than it first appears. Myndigheten för Psykologiskt Försvar (MpF) didn’t really make much of a splash in Sweden when it was announced. It was, perhaps surprisingly to any foreign observers, not even lazily condemned as a step towards 1984 or a Brave New World.

By now, everyone in Sweden is quite used to new government agencies being launched left, right and centre. If it follows in the tracks of the new agency for gender equality, which quickly devolved into a dysfunctional mess boasting more employee turnover and workplace-related sickness than an infantry brigade in World War I, the MpF is likely to become a glorified jobs programme for academic graduates, with no clear mission and an utterly broken work environment, filled with backbiting and petty office politics. In Sweden, government agencies are where political movements go to die.

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We can see this in the cultural revolution experienced by the country in the mid 2010s around the issue of migration. From 2015 to 2018, the entire Swedish expert class closed ranks, mobilised every single institution they controlled, and joined with the state in an attempt to combat “misinformation” and prevent wrongthink on the topic of immigration.

For almost a decade, the topic of immigration was transformed from one of actual material politics to one of  “competing narratives”. The idea that immigration had costs and drawbacks was reduced to a mere story, a narrative being sold by the Sweden Democrats. If the experts came together, and simply enforced the spread of a different story, anti-immigration populism could be defeated in detail.

This never came to pass, because unlike how things work in the minds of the expert class, reality isn’t just a “story”. If criminality is on the rise in your neighbourhood, and everyone knows that the criminals are newly arrived migrants, plucky attempts to fabricate rosy narratives will probably fall flat. But, as the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail; for most members of our “expert class”, managing the “discourse” is exactly what they are trained to do.

These agonised contortions are on full display in the United States and elsewhere on a variety of topics, from the status of the 2020 election to Covid vaccines to trans issues. Just as in Sweden in 2015, our expert class is beleaguered, desperately looking for something to stem the tide of wrongthink and rebellion from the people below them. And just as Sweden saw an exploding “alternative media” scene as a response to attempts to control the media narrative, the American experts are battling the uncomfortable fact that Joe Rogan has far more viewers than any of the channels they control.

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To illustrate just how difficult the situation is, consider the fact that something uncomfortably close to half of America currently thinks the 2020 election was not legitimate. This is a “narrative” of events that has been fought ferociously by every prestige institution in America, not to mention the state itself. And yet, all of that has failed to move the needle. Even the most frenzied attempts to control the narrative — such as the Swedish crime prevention agency engaging in a decade-long struggle to prevent anyone from researching whether certain crimes such as gang-rape displayed a similar skew along ethnic lines as in countries such as Germany — seemed to do nothing.

So while the Swedish announcement of an official state agency designed to carry on these sorts of battles might seem fairly dystopian at first blush, this is only even happening because these battles kept being lost. Again, to borrow from Warren Buffet: there’s class warfare going on, all right. But are the experts currently winning?

From my Scandinavian vantage point, it doesn’t look like victory is forthcoming. In Sweden, the activist veterans of our mostly failed cultural revolution against the ignorant deplorables are now rapidly being retired — the lucky ones shuffled off to various bureaucratic cubbyholes; the unlucky ones forced to get (horror of horrors!) real jobs.

But as with most things today, the situation is quite different abroad. In the United States, there are no peace talks forthcoming anytime soon. The desperate struggle between the expert class and those they purport to rule is likely to become even more feverish in the years ahead. For unlike the opinions and advice offered by today’s experts, which tend to be as dishonest and contradictory as any old Soviet decree, open class conflicts have a tendency to stick around.

I am an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, as well as a practising physician, and I firmly believe that it would be a mistake to censor Rogan under the guise of combating “misinformation”.

Rogan is not a scientist, and, like everyone else, he has his biases. But he is open-minded, sceptical, and his podcast is an important forum for debate and dialogue. It is not enough, moreover, to simply dismiss Malone and McCullough as conspiracy theorists. They are controversial and polarising figures, but they do have real credentials. Malone is a physician who has worked in molecular biology and drug development for decades, while McCullough was, until recently, an academic cardiologist and researcher.

Both speakers made accurate and useful points on Rogan’s podcast — as well as unsupported, speculative, alarmist, and false ones. The correct way to deal with incorrect ideas in biomedicine, if they rise to a level of prominence that warrants rebuttal, is to rebut them.

In what follows, I attempt to assess their main claims, explaining what they get right and what they get wrong. I cannot address every point that the two of them made — both episodes are close to three hours long — but I hope that I can provide some clarity in a debate that often lacks it.

Claim: The risks of mRNA vaccination are underdiscussed and boosters should be debated

Early in his interview, Malone is critical of the scientific and media discussion of vaccine safety, noting that “no discussion of risk is allowed”. Later, he says that the pejorative label of “anti-vaxxer” is used to stifle legitimate debate over vaccines. Malone and McCullough both warn that mRNA vaccines, such as Pfizer and Moderna, can cause myocarditis, especially in young men who are at low risk from the virus. Given these and other alleged risks, they warn against recommending — or requiring — boosters for the general population.

I believe they are correct in these sentiments. In April 2021, the first reports of myocarditis were noted in Israel, with the majority of cases occurring in young men who had recently received an mRNA vaccine. Since then, the evidence for vaccine-related myocarditis has grown. We know now that boys are more likely to be affected than girls. We know that Moderna has higher rates than Pfizer. We know that dose two causes more myocarditis than dose one. The precise estimate of risk is now thought to be between 1 in 3,000 to 6,000 for males in the target range (roughly age 12 to 30), and researchers have shown that the CDC’s method to study this underestimates myocarditis risk.

Such concerns are not limited to the fringe. Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, the former director and deputy director, respectively, at the US Food and Drug Administration, resigned last autumn over White House pressure to green-light boosters. Paul Offit, a prominent vaccine advocate and the director of vaccine communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, recently told the Atlantic that he advised his own 20-something son not to get boosted. Other nations are taking the myocarditis concern seriously, too. Several have banned or discouraged the use of Moderna in young men. Others advise two doses spaced further apart, and some have held off on a second dose entirely for younger age groups.

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It is perfectly valid to question the wisdom of boosters, at least in young people, though I do think they are beneficial for older and more vulnerable people. Like Malone, I have seen researchers smeared as “anti-vaxxers” for simply suggesting that myocarditis is a real safety concern, or that we don’t know the optimal duration and dosing strategy of vaccination, particularly for young and healthy people and those who have recovered from infection. Malone and Rogan are correct that the media dismisses concerns over myocarditis by claiming that most cases are “mild”, when in fact it is too early for us to know the full effects.  And I agree that this is an area of live debate that has not been adequately covered by the media.

Claim: Vaccines have lots of other dangerous side effects

At other points in his interview, Malone alludes to many potential side effects of vaccination, claiming it can result in seizure and paralysis, and that the menstrual irregularities associated with the vaccine suggest it is a “major threat to reproductive health” for women. He suggests that vaccination can suppress T cells, raising the risk of unusual cancers.

To date, I have seen no evidence to support any of these claims, and I believe it is a mistake to raise them. First, they are irresponsible — Malone’s rhetoric verges on fear-mongering — and second, they distract from his legitimate points on myocarditis in young men.

McCullough suggests that vaccine-related deaths and injuries in the US are severely underreported by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). While I agree that there are problems with VAERS, I find it difficult to believe the numbers McCullough offers of 45,000 dead and 1 million injured. Here is why.

VAERS is a voluntary collection network that is prone to two types of biases. First, it may undercount vaccine-related events because providers did not recognise them or lacked motivation to report them. But it can also overcount them. Bad things can happen after vaccination, such as heart attack, that are entirely coincidental but that still might be reported.

Trying to find safety signals due to vaccination requires comparison against base rates, or how many events are expected to occur without vaccination. Even very unusual events, such as the blood clots that happened after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, stand out fast. Similarly, elevated myocarditis rates in young men, especially after dose two of Moderna, jump out of the data.

Death signals are trickier to parse, and require knowledge of the ages and medical problems of people getting vaccinated. Even then, they must be weighed against data that shows vaccines reduce a big cause of death — death from Covid-19. For these reasons, I think it is premature and misleading to talk suggest that the vaccine caused 45,000 deaths. If McCullough wishes to make this case, the best forum would a scholarly publication, where other researchers can examine and critique his methodology.

Claim: US vaccine policy ignores the science on natural immunity

Malone and McCullough both make valid points that vaccine policy has not accommodated scientific knowledge of natural immunity. Should vaccines be required for people who have already been infected with Covid? If a healthy young person had one dose of the vaccine and then got Omicron, do they need a second? What if a person had two doses and Omicron — should they need to receive a booster, as some workplaces now require? These are open and legitimate questions.

Proponents of vaccines and boosters for those with a prior Covid-19 infection often point to antibody titers — blood tests showing that a recently vaccinated or boosted person has higher levels of Covid-19 antibodies than someone with natural immunity. But this is not persuasive.

Antibodies are a means to a clinical end, which is preventing someone from getting re-infected, becoming very sick, becoming hospitalised, or dying. Antibodies, especially in the short term, are bound to be higher the more you dose an individual, but the scientific burden is to show that these doses further improve the clinical endpoint in randomised studies. This burden has not yet been met.

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Yet, here too, Malone goes over the top. He and Rogan refer to “multiple studies” showing that those who get vaccinated after being infected with Covid are at a two-to four-times greater risk of having an adverse reaction to the vaccine; later, Malone describes Rogan’s friends who are encouraging him to get vaccinated as asking Rogan to put himself “at higher risk” and “take more risk for your health in order to join their club”. There is a dialogue to be had about whether Rogan might benefit from zero, one, or two doses, but the overall risks of vaccination remain low, particularly for a 54-year-old man such as Rogan.

At times, Malone refers to accurate studies, but I worry the audience draws the wrong inference. Malone, for instance, claims that natural immunity is six to 13 times more effective than the vaccine at preventing hospitalisation and 27 times more effective against developing symptomatic disease. I assume he is referring to this August 2021 study from Israel. This study does indeed suggest that natural immunity is more protective than vaccines against the Delta variant, though it also suggests that natural immunity plus a single vaccine dose is more protective than natural immunity alone.

While this has implications for the number of doses a Covid-19 survivor might consider getting, it should not be misconstrued to mean that infection is preferable to vaccination for an adult who has yet to experience either. Vaccination is almost surely preferable for most un-immune adults.

At one point in his interview, Malone says: “Think twice about giving these jabs to your kids.” While I can understand how many will be angered by this statement, the truth is other nations, such as the United Kingdom, are thinking twice — at least for healthy 5 to 11-year-olds, the group with the lowest risk of bad outcomes from Covid. As of this moment, the UK’s advisory panel has said that only 5 to 11-year-olds with comorbidities should get vaccinated.

Claim: Effective early treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, are being suppressed

McCullough and Malone are proponents of early treatment for Covid-19, specifically with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Both allege that public health authorities have intentionally suppressed the use of these drugs. McCullough states that early in the pandemic, “there was no focus on sick patients”, while Malone speculates that hospitals don’t want early treatments because they profit when people are hospitalised and claims that “probably half a million excess deaths” have happened in the United States through the intentional blockade of early treatments.

These are entirely false and insulting allegations, and Malone’s in particular are flat-out conspiratorial. Academic hospitals attempted all sorts of disparate treatment protocols in the hopes of helping sick patients. Many physicians did not wait for randomised control trials — the gold standard of medicine — to act; they simply acted. In fact, a Harvard hospital recommended hydroxychloroquine prior to randomised data.

The problem was not that there was no appetite for early treatment. The problem was that when the randomised trial data came in, they suggested the drugs favored by Malone and McCullough were ineffective. A pooled analysis of all such studies by Axfors and colleagues suggests patients treated with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine had increased risk of death.

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And ivermectin has not shown persuasive evidence of benefit in randomised trials to date. Of course, a randomised trial cannot prove that a therapy can never work under any circumstances, just as you cannot prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. But the burden is on proponents to show when and how their therapy helps, and they have not met it.

Rogan, Malone and McCullough are wrong to claim that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are known to be secretly effective, but they are correct that these drugs have been unfairly demonised. The truth is that they are neither particularly dangerous nor effective. The media labelling ivermectin a “horse drug” or “horse dewormer” was particularly absurd. Ivermectin is a well-known drug taken by humans all over the world.

Claim: Public debate over Covid-19 is often unfairly censored

Malone, Rogan, and McCullough are all correct on one topic: there is an effort to suppress information and censor debate on social media. The clearest example is that for more than a year, Facebook banned all discussion of the lab-leak hypothesis, until articles by Nicholson Baker, Nicholas Wade, and Donald McNeil broke the dam. This was a remarkable suppression of free speech.

Previously, I investigated the mechanism by which Facebook polices pandemic “misinformation” through third-party investigators. I found, in several cases, that the expert designated to fact-check a claim had already stated their opinion on it prior to being selected. This is a deeply problematic mechanism, as the person who selects the fact-checkers can scour the Internet to an expert who agrees with them, and there is no external review, appeal or oversight.

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Malone discusses a controversial October 2020 email from National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci in response to the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, Collins called three of the declaration’s authors “fringe” epidemiologists and demanded a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises”. I completely agree this was problematic.

As I have argued elsewhere, 2020 was a time of deep uncertainty about the science surrounding Covid-19 and the appropriate policy response to the pandemic. Collins is not an epidemiologist, and he has no standing to decide what counts as a “fringe” view within that field. As NIH director, his job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, he attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.

***

The efforts to censor Malone and McCullough have massively backfired, with both men gaining prominence and publicity from the attempts to shut down their speech. More generally, I strongly disagree with efforts to censor scientists, even if they are incorrect, and no matter the implications of their words, as I believe the harms of censorship far exceed any short-term gains.

One problem, which has been on full display in this controversy, is that censorship may draw more attention to incorrect ideas. Another is that in the middle of any crisis, the answers to many scientific and policy questions will be uncertain. Disagreement on these questions is natural, and attempts to suffocate “harmful” speech run the risk of stifling critical debates, including by silencing third parties who may have important contributions but who fear the professional or reputational consequences of speaking up.

Perhaps the most serious objection to censorship is that the censors themselves are not fit for the task. Censors are unaccountable. They may be biased, misinformed or undereducated. They may lack perspective. In short, they are as fallible as the people they are trying censor. This is especially true in science, where, as history shows us, consensus views can turn out to be false, while controversial or heretical ideas can be vindicated.

Finally, in the modern world, where the censor is so often a giant technology company, there is tremendous potential for abuse. The same tools used to suppress scientific “misinformation” may someday be used to solidify political power and stifle dissent.

In the aftermath, Donald Trump was impeached by House of Representatives, but acquitted by the Senate. The social media companies were not so lenient. The 45th President of the United States was de-platformed by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

The chaotic end of Trump’s presidency provided a pretext, though, for a much wider purge of anything deemed to fall under the category of conspiracy theory or misinformation. This week the Republican congresswoman, Majorie Taylor Greene, had her Twitter account permanently suspended; and Joe Rogan who has had content removed by YouTube.  

The attack on conspiracy theory — and the power of the elites to define it as such — is a dangerous one. And not just because of the threat it poses to free speech and the growing influence of big tech that it points out. It’s also because conspiracy theories are an understandable — and sometimes useful — response to a confusing world. To repress this very human instinct risks doing more harm than good.

That’s not to say that this mode of thought is never pathological. But if the conspiracy theorist is obsessive or hateful, the problem is the obsession and the hate — vices which can apply to any belief system.

The trouble is, many conspiracies and cover-ups do exist. And they’d never be uncovered if no one theorised about them. 

So as well as de-pathologising conspiracy theories as a concept, we need to understand conspiracy theorists as a group of people. Most of them are quite ordinary. And, according to recent UK-based research from Ipsos, there are a lot of them. Asked about three conspiracy theories randomly assigned from a list of 11, half the people surveyed considered at least one theory to be “plausible”, with 20% endorsing two or three. 

Therefore, if you want to drive conspiratorial thinking out of society, you’re up against millions of your fellow citizens— not just a few fanatics. Of course, one could argue that’s all the more cause for a crackdown. How can we tolerate a situation in which whole swathes of the population believe in crazy stuff? Except that most of them don’t believe it. Not really. 

For a start, there’s a huge variation in the extent to which different conspiracy theories are accepted. The theory considered the most plausible — with 40% of those asked agreeing — was that “Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was not accidental”. In contrast, the notion that “the COVID-19 vaccine is a cover for implanting traceable microchips” got the thumbs up from just 4% of respondents and the allegation that “5G mobile phone towers are responsible for the spread of COVID-19” a mere 2%.

What do people mean when they say that they find a conspiracy theory plausible, though? What do the Diana conspiracy theorists truly believe? That she was literally assassinated? In some cases, yes. But for most of the 40% it’s probably something much less extreme — like blaming the media for hounding the princess at every turn. 

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The researchers found “a high overlap” between those who consider a conspiracy theory plausible and those who consider it “not strictly accurate but a reasonable challenge to the official explanation”, which is telling. It’s not so much that they believe the conspiracy, but that they’re using it to express their doubts about the institutions that tell us what we ought to believe.

Ipsos asked about trust in various kinds of institutional authority. While more than 40% of respondents considered media and political institutions to be “untrustworthy”, the corresponding figures for scientific and public health organisations were much lower — just 3% and 6%. It’s clearly no coincidence that the Covid conspiracy theories had the least public support.  

The lesson here is that those in authority would do better to make themselves more worthy of trust than to wage epistemic war on the public. For most people who indulge in them, conspiracy theories are not about dogmatism, but uncertainty.

As human beings, doubt comes naturally to us. Rational analysis may persuade us to think a certain way about a situation, but inevitably we’ll have irrational thoughts about it too — including secret fears and sneaking suspicions. And why not? Until a situation becomes clear it pays to have multiple, perhaps contradictory, ideas about it. Even if our gut reactions prove unfounded, we’re bound to have them anyway. This isn’t to say that we should allow the emotional, instinctual side of our nature to dominate, but to repress it completely would be just as unhealthy. 

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I’d argue that the equivalent applies at a collective level. Though a society doesn’t have a mind like a person does, it does have what Emile Durkheim called a “collective consciousness” composed of a shared set of understandings. Not everyone thinks the same thoughts about everything, of course — a non-totalitarian society makes room for multiple interpretations of reality. Nevertheless, through mechanisms such as democratic elections or the price setting function of the market place, decisions can be collectively arrived at. 

Conspiracies theories are part of this bubbling mix of interpretations. At the social level, they’re equivalent to the stray thoughts, nagging doubts, daydreams and nightmares that individuals experience. As such, they need to be talked about, not repressed — taken seriously, if not always literally.

They might, after all, turn out to be true. Consider the origin of the Covid pandemic. The idea that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory was once repudiated as delusional, not to say xenophobic. Fortunately, there were some investigators willing to question the established view. Though not yet proven, the lab leak hypothesis is now taken seriously. At the very least, it has focused much-needed attention on the perils posed by high-risk research.

Just because conspiracy theories aren’t true, that doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose. There’s no conspiracy theory — no matter how obscure — that doesn’t speak to some unmet need to make sense of the world. 

A deliberately silly example is the bizarre claim that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike. What possible psychological need might that satisfy? Well, how about the desire to comprehend the astonishing pace of cultural change over the course of the Sixties? Like the Beatles themselves, the world looked completely different at end of the decade from how it did at the beginning. I don’t think that McCartney’s supposed death and substitution provides any sort of useful explanation, but it does reduce a question of unfathomable complexity to a human scale. 

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The same psychological forces are at work in Covid conspiracy theories. Take the notion that vaccinations are being used to inject us with tracking technology. On one level it’s obvious nonsense, but on another it’s symbolic of the vastly expanded capacity of the state to monitor and control our movements. Even if we believe that these measures were justified, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also be horrified by what’s been done to us. A necessary evil is still an evil. 

Our collective sense of horror needs an outlet. Conventional politics has done a poor job of providing one — as has the mainstream media. So, instead, the trauma bubbles to the surface in the form of conspiracy theories. Which is why I worry about the actions of the social media companies. Who are they to edit the collective consciousness?

They may imagine that they’re shutting down opportunities for charlatans and demagogues. But what I fear they’re really doing is closing off a safety valve.

BBC bias stories drive many people wild because it is a taxpayer-funded organisation, and also because we have a long-held reverence towards what people used to call ‘Auntie’. But in the long run, the issue of fairness and freedom in news-reporting and opinion-forming is going to focus far more around information giants such as Google and Facebook than it is for the national broadcaster, its best days already behind it.

Viewing figures for Newsnight — to pluck an example at random — are currently at under 300,000. In contrast an endless number of podcasts and online-only content providers get far larger viewing figures; Joe Rogan gets 6 million downloads a day. So while Emily Maitlis’s monologues are of great concern to small clusters of people in Britain, the overall impact is limited; Google and Facebook, in contrast, have the sort of power media barons of the newspaper age could only dream of.

And just as the tech platforms have allowed a great flowering of online debate, discussion and information-sharing, so the power of these companies to shut off that debate, by de-platforming or muting content they do not approve of, is an issue which becomes more troubling by the month.

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The issue recently hit particularly close to home. Earlier this month, an UnHerd interview with respected oncologist Professor Karol Sikora was, bizarrely, taken down by YouTube. According to the tech giant’s website, the interview was found to have ‘violated guidelines’ because the high-profile immunity specialist was critical of the lockdown policy (which, he believes, may end up killing many people due to missed cancer screenings).

YouTube has said in the past that it would delete any videos critical of WHO coronavirus guidance, the same World Health Organisation that has been heavily criticised for its links to the People’s Republic of China, (and its lack of links to the Republic of China).

But this in itself is not a simple public safety issue, because there is still much expert disagreement about how to fight the coronavirus pandemic; WHO, for example, has advised against mask-wearing in public, while some governments and states encourage or even enforce it.

After a certain amount of press attention, YouTube allowed the interview to go back online — which is entirely normal YouTube policy.

For years, the company has been hiding or removing content it didn’t approve of, and whenever public attention was brought to the matter YouTube would simply blame error or oversight. What it looks like, more often than not, is that the site acts as censor up until the moment that it is caught, at which point it’s one of those unfortunate errors again. If the unexplained disappearance of bad thinkers on the platform is not noticed, the error mysteriously remains in place.

Similar censorship happens at an astonishingly micro level. Just this week YouTube was accused of automatically removing below-the-line comments critical of the Chinese Communist Party. According to The Verge, statements containing certain words critical of the Chinese government have been regularly deleted from YouTube since at least October last year; statements that include ‘communist bandit’, for instance, have been being automatically erased in around 15 seconds.

When this was brought to YouTube’s attention, with all the attendant publicity and embarrassment, the company once again claimed that this censorship had been happening in error and that they were working on fixing the issue. Those damn gremlins in the machine, once again.

The problem for YouTube and other platforms is that over the last decade the goodwill that users initially had for these dynamic young tech start-ups has perceptibly faded, for a number of reasons. Some of the most high-profile include the revelations about Facebook data-harvesting and Google’s extraordinary desire to be seen to stand up to all governments apart from the authoritarian ones. 

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But equally significant is simply the growing number of individuals with their own experience of the tech platforms instituting forms of censorship, censorship which the companies first deny and then implement.

Twitter is perhaps the most pernicious case in point. For years, users of the addictive social media site — myself included — have noticed strange patterns on the platform. Certain tweets, or tweets containing particular words or relating to certain themes, would land as though into a great silence. They would go out and be liked by tiny numbers of people or none at all; or there would be nothing and then a sudden surge, as though in acknowledgement that the zero figure was unsustainable. Or people would find that the ‘likes’ for a particular tweet did not only remain static but would suddenly go down, as though Twitter had decided that a particular tweet needed to look less popular than it was.

I have experienced a certain amount of this myself, with readers regularly having to ‘re-like’ tweets promoting certain of my books. They had liked it, and Twitter had mysteriously ‘unliked’ it for them and they had then had to come back again to say that, no, they really did like it. I don’t think it is paranoia to observe that these shenanigans have a particular political bent.

It is well known that Silicon Valley is perhaps the most liberal (in the American sense of the term) place in the world. The people who work at the tech companies are almost uniformly left-leaning progressives, if not something stronger, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has admitted in the past that the corporation’s few conservatives don’t feel safe to voice their opinion. Similarly a former Facebook employee has accused the site of ‘curating’ feeds to screen out conservative content.

At the higher end, these companies have strong links with progressive politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The flood of former officials from the Obama administration into Silicon Valley after he left office, and Hillary Clinton failed to reach the White House in 2016, is well recorded. In recent times there has been a certain British flavour added to this, with reports that since Nick Clegg joined the top ranks of Facebook, that company has seen a marked influx of otherwise unemployed, perhaps otherwise unemployable, Liberal Democrats, swelling the ranks.

All of this and much more means that the tech companies swim in a bubble within a bubble. Their awareness of where the political or moral centre skews consistently left. When they do manage to take down terrorist material from their platforms, for instance, they placate the criticism they expect by stressing that they are opposed to ‘extremism’ in general; or ‘hateful content’, to give just one of the fabulously flatulent terms currently in vogue.

It is the reason why Twitter and all the other platforms acted so swiftly against Milo Yiannopoulos even as Dorsey’s site continued to allow Lashkar-e-Taiba (which carried out the Mumbai massacre in 2008) to keep active Twitter accounts.

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It is the same with YouTube, which even before you get to the issue of banning has the subtle art of ‘demonetisation’, by which the media giant signals whom it favours and whom it does not. For years it has become clear that conservative-leaning content in particular is having its ability to monetise (that is, make money from advertising revenue raised by views) removed because the site disapproves of the politics.

Regrettably, again, I find myself to have been on the receiving end of a fair amount of this, as has almost everybody I know who has questioned not just regular political orthodoxies, but specific Silicon Valley orthodoxies, such as anything to do with trans issues.

The kicker in all of this is that as the various platforms are caught out in various forms of censorship, their final move is to confirm in their terms of service that they are allowed to do the things that, up till that point, they denied doing. So having spent years denying that they engaged in ‘shadow-banning’, in January the new terms of service agreement that all Twitter users were requested to agree to included having the right to refuse to distribute certain content and to “limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service”. Otherwise known as shadow-banning.

Now that much of this is out in the open, perhaps it is inevitable that there is a surge in people volunteering to make themselves the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable material to publish online. In recent weeks there have once again been calls to either ban Donald Trump from Twitter or insist that his tweets are in some way fact-checked into irrelevancy by the company. Well, good luck to anybody auditioning for that job.

The debate around this political curating, as with the scandal over these companies’ China policies, returns us to the simultaneous recognition of two deeply troubling facts: that the social media companies have an awesome responsibility, greater than perhaps any comparable information-wielding power in history; and that this is a power that the platforms in question are utterly unfit to wield.

BBC rows will come and go. But the inadequacies and malignancies of the social media platforms are here to stay.