And so, right on cue, here come the “accusations.”

What are these “accusations”? Good question. “Accusations” would seem to overstate the case, because it’s exceedingly unclear what Platner is even being accused of doing. But since the non-accusatory accusations have been dramatically unveiled by the The New York Times, all keen political watchers must now hold their breath and brace for the fallout. 

The Times’s Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer boast that they “spent months” doggedly reporting on the “complicated history of Platner’s relationships with women.” OK, then — after months of this intrepid investigative journalism, what did the journalists come up with? Reputedly that Platner’s relationship with various ex-girlfriends has at times been “emotionally wrenching.” The dynamic of these relationships, dating back to his 20s, is said to have been “volatile” and even “toxic.” And his behavior? “Unsettling.” 

These are the fruits of a New York Times enterprise project to canvass Platner’s ex-girlfriends, already a creepy enough initiative in its own right — and the worst they could uncover is that a handful of ex-girlfriends use vaguely unflattering adjectives to describe their subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner, stemming from consensual adult romantic activity a decade or more ago. 

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One ex, Lyndsey Fifield, alleges that Platner grabbed her roughly and, in one instance, “yanked her out of a cab” in the course of “altercations.” Fifield happens to be a long-time Republican operative, having served in multiple GOP political action committees and currently listed as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank. Her affiliations are alluded to by the Times, which notes that the paper “could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account.”

If this is what we’re really doing now, why doesn’t somebody go and canvass the ex-boyfriends of Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer? They evidently deem it newsworthy that former love interests of Platner claim to have endured “emotionally wrenching” relationship travails. Given the prominent perches Glueck and Lerer enjoy at the New York Times, certainly they rank high enough on the all-important “power dynamic” pyramid that the public would be similarly entitled to know if anything “emotionally wrenching” or “volatile” might have occurred in their own private lives when they were in their 20s. 

Robust reportorial resources should thus be devoted to explore this harrowing possibility, with any resulting material reframed and reinterpreted many years after the fact to comport with whatever news-cycle imperatives might arise on a given week. New York Times readers have every right to evaluate whether their own unreported romantic histories might be exerting undue influence on their 2026 midterm election coverage. 

God forbid either journalist be alleged by some disgruntled ex to have exhibited behavior that could be retroactively characterized as “toxic.” And if Glueck or Lerer wishes to dispute that characterization, perhaps for a lack of context or any other mitigating factors they may wish to cite, they’re plain out of luck, because everyone knows it’s a lose-lose situation to be rehashing dirty relationship laundry in the pages of The New York Times. The more you talk, the worse you look, regardless of what the truth happens to be.

If by any chance either female journalist has ever had an “off-and-on long-distance relationship” with old boyfriends who may have less than flattering memories of the experience, this is now to be considered straightforwardly reportable information, given the new Platner standard they’ve opted to set forth. Any relevant anecdotes would need to be fleshed out with ambiguously motivated remembrances of the journalists’ past emotional traits, since this is the kind of psychobabble that litters the Platner exposé. (For reference, Katie graduated from Northwestern University in 2012 and Lisa graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, so those are some decent leads to start with for any shoeleather reporters out there looking to better inform the public about contemporary power dynamics in America.)

Fifield, the flagship “accuser” in this Times story, doesn’t appear to be accusing Platner of anything in particular (though she has since taken to the X app, formerly Twitter, wielding the A word, “abuse”). Lacking anything more tangible to report, the Times is reduced to relaying Fifield’s assessment that Platner is “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions” — whatever the hell that means — which Fifield has extrapolated based on having sporadically dated Platner from 2013 to 2015. 

Seeing his recently discovered archive of Reddit posts, she claims, has “reminded me of just how much he hated women.” Left unexplained is why she apparently dated someone who “hated women” for two years. Or why, after the relationship apparently broke off by 2016, friends sent texts encouraging her to “move on,” implying that she was disinclined to “move on.” Nor do the Times sleuths probe whether her apparent knowledge that Platner was simultaneously seeing other women during their relationship might have been a key factor in generating her negative feelings toward him. Or what she precisely meant in a post-breakup diary entry, purportedly shown to the reporters, in which she wrote that Platner was “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” 

How did Platner destroy her life, exactly? What is the definition of “toxic” in this context? (That word can seem to be quite malleable.) What kind of alleged “abuse” is she talking about here — emotional, physical, or something else? And by any chance, are there additional sentences or paragraphs surrounding the curiously truncated excerpt that might shed additional light on her psychological state at the time, or further elucidate what Platner is even accused of doing wrong, which again remains exceedingly unclear, despite months of intensive investigation by a team of seasoned reporters? 

According to one of her friends in the DC-conservative-blackslapping network, the podcaster and opinion columnist Bethany Mandel, Fifield had already spent the past “many months” on a political mission to inflict maximum political damage against Platner — first by calling attention to his purported “Nazi Tattoo,” which had apparently never alarmed her enough to cease dating him. Then, when that proved insufficient to sink Platner, Fifield went in for the kill with a standard slate of “accusations” pertaining to nebulous intimate-partner improprieties. 

Though, again, to even call these “accusations” wouldn’t be exactly accurate; Platner is accused by no woman in the Times story of doing anything self-evidently illicit. Instead, the article assembles an impressionistic collage of what the Times theorizes is a pattern of “unsettling” behavior. Surely, a stronger adjective would’ve been used for the headline, should any reportorial finding have supported it. Perhaps most bizarre is that Glueck and Lerer, scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel at this point, deem it journalistically crucial to grant anonymity to yet another ex-girlfriend, whom they “asked to sum up how he treated her.” This source said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.” What does this mean? Sounds quite rueful and poetic, sure, but whatever “accusation” it’s supposed to correspond with is shrouded in mystery.

Speaking of the supposed “Nazi tattoo” that is now said to be a singularly defining mark of Platner’s allegedly foul character, it seems rather doubtful that a great many of his fellow Marines circa 2007 — when Platner says he got the tattoo while on leave in Croatia — would have been steeped enough in esoteric pagan iconography to identify the symbol as intrinsically linked with National Socialism. Because to the naked eye, it could easily just appear like a generic “skull and crossbones” symbol that a certain type of military guy in his early 20s would probably think looks cool. Perhaps going forward, all US service personnel should be required to consult the Anti-Defamation League’s “hate-symbols” database before they ink themselves with anything improper. Better yet, they can fax their proposed tat design to Susan Collins for pre-approval.

Earlier this week, a crew of doofuses affiliated with the National Republican Senatorial Committee thought it would be hilarious to gallivant shirtless around Washington, DC, wearing nothing but a white bath towel. This was done to heckle Platner for the supposedly incriminating mirror selfie of his that recently surfaced, in which, yes, the Democratic candidate is pictured shirtless and with a towel around his waist. If that was the extent of the GOP stooges’ stunt, it might’ve been loutish and lame, but forgettably harmless. In the current political climate, however, they of course had to ratchet things up to the most rabid extreme, and wave signage proclaiming Platner a “pedo” — based on absolutely nothing other than that he had apparently maintained a personal account on an app called Kik, which is thought to be inherently disreputable, given the purported connotations of what the app is typically used for. 

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It’s of course possible that Platner has done disreputable things on this app — his wife did report to his campaign operatives that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with at least six women earlier in their marriage — but that’s preposterously far removed from Platner doing anything that could be remotely labeled “pedophilic,” besides some vague supposition that the app is populated with minors who circumvent age-verification protocols. There is zero evidence of Platner engaging in any conduct that could conceivably make him a “pedophile.” If the only criteria for earning such a sick designation these days is using a social-media app on which minors might be present, there’s no necessary reason why that wouldn’t also apply to X, on which much of the recent hectoring of Platner has taken place. 

More broadly, it seems to have been collectively decided that in 2026, flippantly declaring one’s political foes to be pedos, or pedo-adjacent, or pedo-complicit, is just standard procedure, with any evidentiary requirement a relic of the past. In addition, certain Republicans have clearly been laboring with pent-up frustration at how Democrats gamely operationalized the Jeffrey Epstein saga against President Trump, who now also gets routinely taunted as a pedophile, despite a similar dearth of credible evidence. 

As such, vengeful has-beens like Ari Fleisher have proposed an inventive new angle of attack for their all-hands-on-deck offensive to preserve a slim Republican Senate majority: “Platner is Epstein without the island,” the former George W. Bush press secretary proclaimed. Why? Because, again, a selfie has emerged of Platner wearing a bath towel, and the selfie appeared on an app that Fleisher and others claim is “targeted to teens,” though they cite no empirical basis for this inference — much less any basis for assuming that Platner himself has “targeted” anything untoward at any teen. 

But it doesn’t matter anymore. American political conflict is now a rolling cacophony of everyone and their mother calling each other a pedophile. Republicans, cruising for a midterm bruising, should at least be thankful that Platner’s improbable ascent has enabled them to savor a moment of temporary catharsis, as they pretend to be enthusiastic about re-electing Susan Collins to a sixth dreary term.

For Matt Goodwin — the failed Reform candidate whose new book is widely judged to contain several machine-generated hallucinations and other inaccuracies, though he denies it — there was widespread mockery and condemnation. But for critic Alex Preston, dumped by the New York Times for using an AI tool to help write a book review, objections were more muted. There were even attempts at sympathy and understanding — including from gleefully vituperative Goodwin-bashers. One might reasonably wonder how much the British commentariat really loathe AI writing, as opposed to how much they loathe Goodwin in particular.

In fact, both cases are equally unforgivable. Each goes much further than simply using AI as a research tool among others, cross-referring and checking sources as you go. To use an LLM to write text for you effectively turns your computer into a ventriloquist. And it turns you into the ventriloquist’s dummy.

This is not a good look. Up until five minutes ago, Goodwin was an academic. In the eyes of some, this makes him part of a despised elite, a fact which must be somewhat inconvenient to a would-be populist. But equally, it’s also a crucial part of his origin story, giving a valuable impression of epistemic authority to those that care. Otherwise he’d be just another bloke in a gilet muttering darkly about cousin marriage. At a minimum, academics are supposed to do their own research, double check their own inferences, and then write it all down in their own words. What else could society possibly want them for? Certainly not for the innate charisma or the bantz.

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In his blustering Spectator rebuttal, Goodwin insists that he did not use chatbots to write any part of the book. The invented quotes and other misunderstandings were all his, he says, a claim which is apparently supposed to reassure us. He even cites the negative opinion of AI detection software on the matter “just for fun”. But either way, he seems to have been using AI tools for his Substack for some time. Or perhaps he sometimes writes exactly like a robot because he has unconsciously ingested the deadening format (“this is not x, it’s y”, compressed rhetorical questions, and all the rest of it). Crafting beautiful sentences is not your average academic’s strongest suit, after all.

Literary critics have no such excuse. Preston — book reviewer as well as gentleman novelist, amateur cricketer, birdwatcher, and BBC arts show stalwart — is said to have confessed immediately to his mistake when asked about it by the Spectator literary editor. The apology came as if delivered by Hugh Grant — you could practically hear the stammerings and goshes. “Oh god it’s awful and I’m so ashamed. Such a total car crash.”

Preston’s explanation was that he had been pressed for time, and asked a bot to help “expand and smooth” a draft book review, as well as adjust for in-house style requirements. The AI-enhanced result included phrases written by someone else, which he did not spot. “I looked at how it had tidied up the end of the review but didn’t realize that it had also dropped in language from Christobel Kent’s Guardian review. I was rushed and stupid and I’m so sorry.”

Despite the apparent willingness of fellow literary luminaries to accept this with “there but for the grace of God … ” style mumbling, I’m not buying it. A loose reading of Preston’s explanation implies he didn’t notice the alien phrases at all. He used the tool without understanding its capacity for invention, looked only at the second half of the AI-adjusted text but not the first, then immediately sent the result off to the New York Times. But surely no writer is ever that stupid, or indeed that rushed.

A more likely scenario is that he read the tarted-up review in its entirety, knew full well there were sentences in it that were not his, but didn’t know they belonged to Christobel Kent in particular. Preston says that this was a “case of someone naively and clumsily using a tool they didn’t understand”; but he obviously grasped that the tool would “expand” his piece, because that’s exactly what he said he wanted it to do. What he didn’t understand, perhaps, was that the machine might plagiarize from a single source rather than synthesize hundreds of texts undetectably.

But appropriating the words of no one in particular is just as bad as plagiarism; and it is no defense to say it was only a few phrases. Like the proverbial curate’s egg, a covert robot co-production cannot be good in parts. You might as well take out all the machine-inserted words and phrases and write lorem ipsum there, or just blah blah blah instead. These passages mark the point at which the author’s mind retreated and went off for a nap.

When I taught in universities, I used to find it absurd that the official policy for plagiarism cases required us to estimate what mark the offending piece would have got, were it not plagiarized; and then to subtract some fixed percentage from that. Effectively, this seemed to force the marker onto the horns of a ludicrous dilemma. On one hand you might remove all plagiarized sections from consideration, but then you would be left with surreally disjointed statements and huge gaps, and there would be not much of an identifiable argument left to penalize further.

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Alternatively you could treat the essay in its entirety as if it represented the original thoughts of the student, then subtract a bit; in which case your mark would seem to depend heavily on the quality of the author from whom sentences had been pilfered, and how extensively they were used. It seemed weirdly arbitrary to be giving more credit to students who thoroughly stripped down Ludwig Wittgenstein for parts, than to those who lightly borrowed from, say, Alain de Botton.

When you are assessing a student’s work, it is a basic presupposition that you are engaging with a single point of view, for which the stated author can rightly claim the credit. Any contradictions in the text reflect contradictions in the author’s own mind, as do any brilliant insights. Violate that contract and you might as well chuck the whole thing away. And the same goes all the more for professional writing, whether high or lowbrow. Relying on words that aren’t yours is not just lazy, it’s cowardly. If a writer lacks the courage to expose his mind to readers in all its naked imperfection, hiding behind the smooth extrusions of LLMS instead, then I don’t see why we should bother to read him.

And it is a poor defense to say that readers often cannot tell the difference. In the world of painting, skillful forgeries can look like astonishingly powerful originals until the ruse is revealed. Then suddenly there’s a gestalt switch, and the pictures look like what they always were: cheap fakes, free-riding on viewer credulity.

A different justification urges us to think of all human communication as a kind of ventriloquizing. Aren’t we always taking half-remembered words and phrases from other people and making them our own as we speak or write? Can’t we just see the use of an LLM as a simple extension of the creative process, with some externally-derived thoughts accepted, and others rejected — just as during a more internal process of reflection? This is part of the general project of redescribing human behavior to make it sound more like that of machines. That project is just as likely to undermine the impression of any meaning or value in human behavior than it is to reduce the distrust in robots. But in any case, we must not cede the point. Ordinary thinking and speaking as we know it is not “parroting” or “plagiarizing”. If it were, there would be no sense to these terms when applied critically, since the pejorative contrast with ordinary speech would be incomprehensible.

Even if it’s largely undetected by the intended readership, I can’t help feeling that AI will turn out to be a curse to many in the writing world, both established and aspiring. Clearly, as Goodwin and Preston show us, it is a temptation even to the already successful. A semantic glow-up is available at just the click of a mouse. Lots of bloggers I am aware of seem to use LLMs habitually. Preposterously, I’ve even seen the telltale signs in comments sections.

Wherever it is found, I imagine it’s quite stressful to gain a reputation for a writing style you have done little to deserve. The more admiration and followers you get for your punchy sentences, the less you will feel able to go back to your own deathless prose and reveal to the world what is really going on behind the curtain. In years to come, I expect we will see whole branches of therapy devoted to curing writers of LLM addiction. It seems that along with photographic filters and image generators, technology has discovered yet another way for people to hide their true selves from the gaze of others — and all this in a time where personal authenticity is supposedly uniquely prized. As the saying goes: you couldn’t make it up.

“Listen to the scientists, support masks,” Biden said at a campaign rally, four years ago, berating Trump for not wearing a mask after he had caught Covid. “Support a mask mandate nationwide,” Biden thundered to cheers and adulation. His campaign message captured a “follow the science” sentiment among Left-leaning American voters who derided anyone questioning mask effectiveness with the label “anti-mask”. This, despite a smattering of articles in Scientific American, Wired, New York Magazine and The Atlantic reporting that scientific studies found masks didn’t seem to stop viruses.

The debate over mask effectiveness took an odd turn last year when ardent mask advocate, Zeynep Tufekci, wrote a New York Times essay claiming “the science is clear that masks work”. Tufekci’s piece denigrated and belittled a scientific review by the prestigious medical nonprofit, Cochrane, for concluding that the evidence is “uncertain”.

Shortly after Tufekci published her essay, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, dashed out a statement, to assure mask advocates that Cochrane would update the review’s language. Cochrane reviews are widely considered as the “gold standard” for high‐quality information to inform medicine, and their process is laborious, with multiple rounds of internal checks and expert peer review. Having Cochrane’s head make a personal pronouncement about a published review is unprecedented — akin to having the executive editor of The New York Times write an essay expressing personal opinions about one of the paper’s own deep-dive investigations.

The incident also marked an odd point in the timeline of mask use. Before the pandemic, few, if any, prominent organisations promoted masks to stop influenza or other respiratory viruses. As the WHO concluded in their 2019 pandemic preparedness plan: “There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission.” So, it was not surprising that both Tufekci’s claims “masks work” and Karla Soares-Weiser’s allegations that something was wrong with the Cochrane mask review were later found themselves to have no real evidence.

Earlier this year, Soares-Weiser issued another statement, this time explaining the mask review was fine and no changes would be made. Despite the 180, damage to Cochrane’s mask review had already been done. Google sends you straight to Tufekci’s New York Times essay alleging problems in the Cochrane review.

But why did Soares-Weiser change her mind?

I have discovered, through hundreds of emails provided to me by freedom of information requests and a Cochrane whistleblower, that Tufekci bumped Soares-Weiser into making the statement against Cochrane’s own mask review — a move that landed like a grenade inside the organisation.

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While Soares-Weiser runs Cochrane, scientists with expertise in each specific subject matter write and edit the reviews. When she rushed out her statement complaining about the mask review, the review authors charged that Cochrane had thrown science under the bus by working with “controversial writer” Zeynep Tufekci; meanwhile, the editor of the mask review reminded Cochrane’s leadership that changes were only being considered because of “intense media coverage and criticism”, not because there were any problems in the review’s science. “I had a very challenging meeting with the [governing board] yesterday,” Soares-Weiser wrote a few days afterwards. “I am holding on, stressed, but OK.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Because the attack by Soares-Weiser and Cochrane’s leadership on their own mask review is illustrative of how media and political pressure undermined and suppressed inconvenient scientific conclusions during the pandemic — and are still attempting to do so. The incident also raises questions about media ethics and whether Cochrane’s leadership is still fit for purpose.

When Cochrane published their 2023 mask review, it was the seventh iteration of a process that began 18 years previously. Back in 2006, Cochrane researchers raked through the scientific literature to see if they could determine what interventions could halt the spread of viruses. They found no good evidence that masks work. The scientists then updated their review in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2020.

With all six updates, each time scouring any new peer-reviewed studies, Cochrane researchers concluded the same: there is no good scientific evidence that masks work to control viruses. And each time, the scientific community yawned. Because until the Covid pandemic, nobody had conceived of a political movement to advocate for masks. Not even Zeynep Tufekci.

“Don’t worry if you cannot find masks,” Tufekci wrote in a February 2020 article for Scientific American. “For non–health care people, washing your hands often, using alcohol-based hand-sanitiser liberally and learning not to touch your face are the most important clinically-proven interventions there are.” Promoting the article on X, Tufekci reiterated this point: “Clinical studies show hand-washing is the crucial step not masks.”

But the following month, a New York Times media reporter praised Tufekci for reversing her former opinion in a 1 March tweetstorm. This was followed by a 17 March essay for The New York Times that convinced the CDC to alter federal guidance and advise Americans to mask.

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What makes this all alarming is that Tufekci is an academic sociologist, with no training in medicine or public health. And yet, she managed to alter public health policy with a bunch of tweets and an essay followed, two months later, by a co-authored scientific preprint that promoted mask mandates. “We recommend that public officials and governments strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public, including the use of appropriate regulation,” it said.

The study’s lead author is Jeremy Howard, a mask advocate and Australian software entrepreneur, who, like Tufekci, has no training in public health or medicine. The review was later published in a medical journal and remains the only article I could find that Tufekci has published in the scientific literature on masks.

Despite such a thin publishing record in the scientific literature, the Raleigh News & Observer (an influential paper among academics) anointed Tufekci a Covid media hero who had challenged the medical and public health establishment and got the facts right — but with essays, not science. “Instead of conducting lab experiments related to Covid-19, she used her platform on Twitter and in the opinion sections of Scientific American, The Atlantic and The New York Times to inform the public with practical advice about what to do and why.”

In retrospect, it’s hard to read this article — celebrating an academic for doing science by essay — and not wonder if it’s a satirical piece for The Onion: “Monkey Solves Grand Unified Theory of Physics in a Single Tweet.” Nonetheless, Tufekci played along with the gag, amazed at her magical ability to solve complex scientific problems without doing any actual science — just writing essays.

“I never thought in a million years I’d be writing something that basically said the World Health Organization and CDC and medical establishment in the United States and Europe are wrong,” she told the paper. But one tiny obstacle stood between Tufekci and full acceptance of mask mandates: Cochrane.

When Cochrane released their mask update in January 2023, which again said the efficacy of masks was uncertain, critics of pandemic policies naturally used these scientific conclusions to cast doubt on the mask advocates. “Mask mandates were a bust,” wrote New York Times columnist Brett Stephens, citing an interview by Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane mask review. “Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.”

Tufekci’s rise to public prominence is tied closely to her mask advocacy. Reading this column in The New York Times, the most prominent paper in the country, and where she also worked, must have been irksome for her. Three days after the Stephens column, Tufekci emailed Cochrane for an interview. But rather than contacting Jefferson or any of the scientists who authored the review, Tufekci went straight to Michael Brown, one of Cochrane’s editors. She also asked if he would introduce her to Cochrane editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, to which Brown agreed.

Some days later, Karla Soares-Weiser emailed a Cochrane official that she had been “back and forth with NYT about the mask review”, asking for help responding to questions. “I’m navigating a difficult situation,” Soares-Weiser emailed. Tufekci meanwhile, had contacted Jefferson for comment, but he ignored her.

The very following day, the Times published Tufekci’s “masks work” essay. Given the way American journalism works, the piece had most likely been written and edited before she had contacted Jefferson the night before for comment. Although 12 different scientists had been involved in writing and researching the Cochrane mask review, Zeynep singled out Jefferson. She named him several times in her essay for making alleged false statements about the pandemic. Hours later, Cochrane rushed out Soares-Weiser’s statement, and then apologised to the review authors. “We hoped to inform you all before publication but have been blindsided by the NYT and have scrabbled to upload our statement,” Cochrane emailed the review authors.

This did not go down well with the authors. “I will not speak for the others but am deeply distressed by this course of events which have occurred without our knowledge,” replied Jon Conly, a professor and former head of the department of medicine at the University of Calgary. He insisted that Cochrane had thrown the review authors under the bus. “Very naive to think you and the [editor in chief Soares-Weiser] spoke to the media at NYTs (without informing us) and would trust them and that they would not immediately publish what you said, especially with this woman who is well known as a controversial writer.”

“There was no intention to ‘throw you or anyone under the bus’,” Brown responded, “since I would be throwing myself under the bus as the sign-off editor.” He added that he had told Tufekci that he stood by the review and had asked her to contact the review authors for their statements.

Conly confirmed to me later that Tufekci — who did not respond to repeated requests for comment — never contacted him, even though he is named as the review’s corresponding author, who Tufekci should have contacted for comment. “Not sure who Tufekci would have corresponded with to find any of the authors who would have agreed with her,” Conly said.

As I have seen from internal correspondence, Cochrane’s editors then began discussing how to manage blowback from Soares Weiser’s statement. Brown reminded them the update used the same language from 2020 and that revisions were now being suggested because Cochrane was flinching from media critics, not because the science was wrong. “Although I agree that the proposed changes to the [summary] add clarity, it was only under intense media coverage and criticism that these revisions were suggested,” Brown wrote.

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Seeking another angle to quell criticism of Soares-Weiser’s statement, Lisa Bero, a professor medicine at the University of Colorado who serves as Cochrane ethics advisor, suggested that Cochrane publish comments being submitted by outsiders that were also critical of the mask review. “That should be published as soon as possible (following screening for libel or profanity),” Bero emailed. “It is important for readers to know that criticism has not just come through the media, but through the formal channels that we have.”

But according to Conly, the review had already undergone extensive, detailed peer review. “If the editor-in-chief and ethics officer were colluding to find criticism afterwards,” he told me, “that would appear to be unethical.”

Meanwhile, Soares-Weiser’s statement and Tufekci’s article were having a significant effect outside the organisation, spurring several news articles as well as ridicule of the mask authors on social media. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of several books on pandemics, Laurie Garret, accused the mask authors of fraud. “[T]hese bozos have undermined public faith in [masks] & biz/govt willingness to promote use,” she posted on X. (It is notable that, prior to the pandemic, Garrett posted on X in 2018 that masks don’t work for influenza and other respiratory viruses. “We have also known for 100+ years that masks do no good.”)

The argument was even reverberating through politics. Testifying in her final appearance before Congress, CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, cited Soares-Weiser’s statement, falsely stating that Cochrane had “retracted” the mask review. Congressional staff were forced to correct her testimony: “The lack of trust in public health officials is becoming an enormous problem,” a congressional staffer later wrote.

Word of Soares-Weiser’s actions even reached the highest levels of the British government. That summer, while she was in London for a Cochrane event, an MP invited her to Parliament’s Portcullis House to explain her statement. However, according to a staffer in Parliament, Soares-Weiser dodged the invite and never appeared.

Although he was noted prominently in the “masks work” essay, Cochrane’s Michael Brown told me the Times had engaged in a lot of of “spinning” of his comments and he hadn’t been aware that Tufekci had campaigned for mask mandates, nor that she had published a review whose conclusions contradicted those of Cochrane. In her initial email to Brown, Tufekci had highlighted her ostensibly scientific background, introducing herself as both a New York Times columnist and an academic with a background in statistics and causal inference, and an interest in scientific reviews. “I use and participate in reviews myself (I’m writing one in my own field soon) and thus am familiar with many of the challenges and issues.”

This is something of an embellishment of Tufekci’s bona fides. According to Google Scholar, she has published no academic articles this year and the only one she published in all of 2023 was an opinion piece in Nature. As for the review article Tufekci had pointed to, it has never appeared.

“I’m a trusting person,” Brown told me, explaining that he had never looked up Tufekci’s history before speaking with her. “She’s definitely more of a journalist than a scientist. I didn’t agree with her, the way she then spun it: masks work.”

“The bottom line is that [our] review was well-done,” Brown said. As for the proposed changes to review’s language, Brown explained that the summary language had been written by Cochrane staff reporting to Karla Soares-Weiser, not Tom Jefferson and the other review authors.

“She sort of got caught in the crossfire,” Brown said of Soares-Weiser, adding that colleagues pressured her because they didn’t like the conclusions that there is no evidence masks work. “Which is really hard for her, for someone in her position as editor in chief.”

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Brown made his views on the science clear last September when he emailed the organiser of a talk he was giving that masks “do not make a major impact at the community level when promoted as a public health intervention”. He also told me that a recent scientific review in the Annals of Internal Medicine complemented the findings of Cochrane. “In the end, the conclusions were the same.”

But while Cochrane has ceased attacking its own mask review, The New York Times continues to promote the “masks work” narrative — despite evidence to the contrary. Last May, the paper ran an essay by Tulane University’s John M. Barry. In his piece, Barry wrote: “Masks present a much simpler question. They work. We’ve known they work since 1917, when they helped protect soldiers from a measles epidemic.”

And yet, we know this is not true. Even Barry does. As he wrote his bestselling tome, The Great Influenza: “The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could.”

But as has become clear, and as Brown confirmed in our conversation, masks are no longer about science: “Instead of just talking about the science, it became a political thing. And people fell on one side or the other,” he said. “And they said some things, and then they have to back up what they’ve said previously. And they’re just digging a hole deeper and deeper.”

What The New York Times did was to embrace a scientific opinion — masks work! — and then defend that notion like a divine ruling — ignoring contrary evidence and attacking researchers such as Tom Jefferson who have spent decades toiling away on a once-obscure topic. “This is what the future holds,” Jefferson told me. “It’s an upside-down world. It’s the death of science.”

Titled “How Yale Propelled J.D. Vance’s Career”, it reveals that “many students and professors remember Mr. Vance as warm, personable and even charismatic. But several also said they were perplexed by what they saw as Mr. Vance’s profound ideological shift.” That’s a real head-scratcher: since when does being warm and personable have anything to do with one’s ideology? Mussolini could be warm and personable. As for charisma, well.

The article recounts, with an air of true perplexity, the conundrum of Vance and his wife, who is of Indian descent and the daughter of immigrants, “deliver[ing]- home-baked treats” to a transgender student who had just undergone, as the Times put it in smug jargon, “top surgery” as if it were an everyday procedure, like a tonsillectomy. It then quotes the student, who said they abruptly ended the friendship after Vance, as senator from Ohio, supported legislation in Arkansas that prohibited transgender care for children.

Of course, they had every right to take offence. But there is no contradiction between treating trans people with kindness, protectiveness and respect and opposing transgender treatment for children. Except in the mind of the New York Times, whose grim, sanctimonious and lucrative prosecution of MeToo, the 1619 Project, the trans revolution, and its stigmatising of everything from a Confederate statue in the middle of nowhere to gas stoves and gas-powered cars had as much to do with Trump’s resurrection as anything else.

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After falling all over itself in 2016 to display its fair-mindedness and embracing Vance’s bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, as a “compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass”, the once prestigious liberal flagship now portrays Vance as a second-rate student at an Ivy enclave ingratiating himself with one powerful figure after another.

And this, then, according to the newspaper of record, is what really made Vance the success he is today. It is the truly revealing part of the article: one of his professors, Amy Chua, herself a bestselling author, arranged a meeting for him: “Then she introduced him to her literary agent, Tina Bennett. He was off.” In other words, for the NYT, it is not Vance’s resilience, literary talent, intelligence, political instincts or his book itself that made him a political success. It was his agent, the ultra-powerful and highly effective Tina Bennett.

For the success and status-obsessed Times, the success and high status of people who don’t share its moral framework can only be the result of obsession with status and success, not the consequence of any admirable human quality. Even Trump’s raised fist after the attempt on his life was, as one of its Times’ cultural interpreters pretentiously put it, a carefully calculated suck-up of world-historical proportions: “The force of the photographs, in other words, rests not in what they depict politically but what they convey about political depiction… Mr. Trump had the instinct, amid mortal danger, to consider how everything would look.”

There is another way to look at Trump’s raised fist. It was the reflexive motion of a man with failing mental faculties whose default response is the single obsession that is the glue keeping his mentality intact: the banal raised fist that is his ego’s doppelgänger.

Rest assured: what the liberal media commentators ruminating on Trump’s reaction were really thinking was: “I went to Andover and Harvard and followed all the rules. So why don’t I have Secret Service protection instead of this jerk from Queens?” As for their response to Vance, who dared attend Yale, it’s not: Here is a true Right-wing danger to the republic. It’s: “How can I meet Tina Bennett?”

But America is faced with a true slouching beast in Vance. He is smart, shrewd, intelligent, literary, young and not un-pretty to look at. And he plays with his cards exceedingly close to his chest. Vance is the most cunning politician in America. I cannot think of another recent politician with his national ambitions who published a bestseller with true literary qualities that then set him on a trajectory to the White House. Hillbilly Elegy was Vance’s Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy’s 1956 bestseller that also nearly made him the vice-presidential pick that year — he decided he didn’t want it in the end — and put him on the path to the presidency. And unlike Profiles in Courage, now generally agreed to have been mostly written by Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, Vance seems to have composed his book by himself.

For Vance is no blustering Trump, who perhaps is bumbling his way, yet again, to the most powerful position in the world. Trump is, unquestioningly, a master of self-presentation who at the same time undercuts his political skills with a seemingly uncontrollable temperament, only to right himself again. Vance, on the other hand, is the most masterful self-creation in modern politics, from his book to his beard. Especially The Beard, which did not appear until 2022, when he ran for the senate seat in Ohio. Its effect goes far beyond the immediate one of hiding a baby face.

No one has had a full beard in American politics since the late 19th century. The last time facial hair was an issue in that realm was in 1968, when allies of Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy urged his hippie supporters to “get clean for Gene” and trim their hirsute display of defiance, in order to try to appeal to the calls for law and order from the other side.

Vance’s beard is a whole other level of symbolic meaning. It makes him look, above all, like a Civil War general — from either side — right out of one of Matthew Brady’s famous photographs. Or it could be the beard of a pre-modern American president, presiding over America at a time when Christianity and traditional mores held sway. Or is it a hint of the countercultural type, a hippie for all seasons, after all?

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It has, simultaneously, a masculine working-class quality and a hint of insulated privilege affected by millennials devoted to a permanent dark stubble. Take a look beneath that. The Beard also could be the result of some sort of acedia, the medieval term for spiritual apathy, or depression as we would call it: that would put him in the ranks of so many working-class white Americans who turn to opioids for relief. But hold on. The Beard could well be the bohemian affectation of a literary man, meant to signify immersion in a world of mental work so thorough it leaves no time to shave.

From here, The Beard’s levels of expression move faster than the wildest cable-channel surfer Defiance of norms? Perhaps. Subtle defiance of Trump, beneath Vance’s fealty to him, who reportedly dislikes facial hair? Perhaps. Dangerous mountain man right out of Deliverance? Or valiant vanquisher of same? — remember that Jon Voight, the effete urban professional in that movie, had to grow a beard before extinguishing the Appalachian menace. And perhaps there are also meanings behind the Beard that Vance does not wish to project; perhaps it hints at a dark psychic wound. After all, growing up amid the savage dysfunction Vance sugarcoats in his book surely could have the same warping effect, or worse, as passing through the liberal mandarin pipeline of privilege and entitlement.

Or does The Beard say to increasingly hysterical liberals, who are already speculating about Vance refusing to certify the 2028 election, “Don’t worry. If I can change my appearance on a dime, I can change my politics on a dime, too.”

Whatever The Beard really means, beyond the guileful self-adjustment of a man who, for all his gifts, may well be a cipher, it represents what the liberals have long whined was absent in Trump: studied, calculated, reasoned, cosmopolitan, educated, disciplined self-presentation. Make no mistake about it. They hate Trump. They envy Vance.

Because a human epidermis only has so much square footage, Leonard has to be ruthless about retaining only the information that serves his purpose, resigning the rest to the abyss. But the twist of Memento, when it comes, reveals more than the limits of a life defined by a quest for vengeance that will be forgotten as soon as it is achieved; it reminds us that memory can be treacherous, that history is narrative, and that sometimes, in the single-minded pursuit of justice, we do things we’d rather forget.

I was reminded of the film while reading Morning After the Revolution, the new book by journalist Nellie Bowles. Described as “a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber”, it is a look back at the social justice movement which had been simmering under the surface of American society since roughly 2014, then exploded into a reckoning four years ago tomorrow, when George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. The book is, among other things, a historical record — one that the movement in question would definitely not choose to permanently inscribe on its skin. The fact that Bowles used to be a New York Times writer and card-carrying member of the woke crowd herself makes her account at once more credible to the reader and less convenient to its subjects.

If the summer of 2020 was a party that eventually devolved into a chaotic rager, Morning After the Revolution is the album of unflattering photos taken by a guest who left before the police showed up. Look: there’s the moment from the pandemic where Donald Trump said he wanted schools to reopen, so we shut them down until 2023. There’s the time a male spa-goer displayed an erect penis in front of a 14-year-old girl, and media commentators hurried to dismiss the entire thing as a Right-wing hoax. There’s the one where we started recreationally destroying the lives of random white women who looked a little too much like manager-callers; there’s the $3,000 anti-racist dinner party and the “Defund the Police” banner!

The revolutionaries are in this picture, and they don’t like it. Even as early as 2022, there were signs that people were happy to forget the movement once the marching-shouting-posting action was over; when reporters discovered that the $90 million raised by Black Lives Matter had been squandered on, among other things, a party house in Los Angeles, the response was a studied incuriosity. But even then, it’s hard to exaggerate how much this attempt to defund, dismantle and drastically remake every institution in service of social justice has been… well, not-that. Four years after his death became the spark that lit the flame of revolution, George Floyd’s lingering impact can mainly be seen in the hastily-installed DEI programmes in corporate offices nationwide, where hourly wage workers sit through interminable sensitivity trainings — and where the main beneficiaries are 28-year-old college-educated white women from HR, who now receive six-figure salaries to lecture their coworkers on the importance of daily pronoun exchanges and the scourge of microaggressions.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, the vacant gas station parking lot that was the site of Floyd’s death, and which used to be flooded with so many protestors that it had to be closed to traffic, is now deserted save for the occasional social justice tourist. They come to photograph the murals, the graffiti, the tattered plastic flowers around the perimeter of a former bus shelter, where a high-contrast portrait of Floyd’s now-familiar face has been painted on a piece of plastic sheeting — but there’s little to keep them there. The city has promised a plan to redevelop the memorial site, although it’s more like a plan to have a plan; the neighbourhood remains blighted by crime and vandalism, partially owing to lack of police presence. The third precinct police station in the neighbourhood remains permanently closed after being burned by rioters in 2020.

As for the anniversary of Floyd’s death, it has quickly faded from a national event to an afterthought; this year, the George Floyd Global Memorial will be hosting a “Self-Care Fair”, including “free wellness services including bodywork, meditation, arts and crafts”. The arc of the social justice universe is long, but it bends toward free massages and macaroni art.

Nobody who proudly and vocally fancied himself on the right side of history back in 2020 wants to admit that this combination of corporate bloat and urban blight is the primary legacy of that moment — or indeed, that this was entirely predictable. What did we expect from a movement in which “doing the work” became synonymous with guilty liberal white women paying thousands of dollars to engage in racial struggle sessions? In which the lives of ordinary black people were overlooked in favour of more photogenic diversity efforts centered on politics, corporate boardrooms, and prestige industries like the arts, the media, and Hollywood? In which the mark of an enlightened ally was to cheer for policies, like defunding the police, which were not just unpopular with marginalised communities but often actively harmed them?

In the cold light of day (and with black men now dying from homicide at rates not seen since the Sixties), of course the people who took to the streets en masse in 2020 would rather not think about how much momentum they squandered. They would, like Leonard in Memento, prefer to remember the story’s origins: a grotesque injustice and surge of revolutionary zeal. As for what happened next, ah, well, who knows? Who could have known? Better to push it under the rug; there is, after all, a new election to worry about. 

But, as Bowles pointed out in a recent interview, this refusal to remember doesn’t change what was: “It happened. I was there. People did argue to abolish the police, that toddlers know their true gender and that 15 years old is fine to begin cross-sex hormones, that accelerated math is racist.”

Bowles’s insistence on pursuing the truth — on being curious about what is true, and what is going on — is an animating feature of Morning After the Revolution, much as it was the animating feature of her journalism at the New York Times. This, as she writes, was a boon to her career until it wasn’t, as the questions she was asking became inconvenient to the increasingly partisan goals of the paper’s leadership. Among the dishier parts of the book is the revelation that Bowles’s proposed reporting trip to the anarchist “autonomous zone” that sprang up in Seattle, with the mayor’s blessing, was met with raised eyebrows; why on earth, an editor asked, did she want to go there?

“Antifa was nonsense, fake, a nothing-burger, a non-story, not interesting and not real, he said. The reason he doesn’t go to Seattle and cover things like this is because he knows right now is time for white people to sit certain things out. Some things that are not important things shouldn’t be covered. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and whatever was going on there wasn’t important. Antifa wasn’t important. Why do you care? No but seriously why do you care?”

Of course, Bowles would say this, particularly when stories like the one about a New York Times editor calling her then-girlfriend Bari Weiss “a fucking Nazi” were guaranteed to go wildly viral on social media, confirmation of every sordid rumour about how mainstream media had become nothing more than a middle-school lunch room ruled by adult mean girls. Perhaps it should all be taken with a grain of salt.

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And yet, for people who did go a little mad in 2020, and particularly those who engaged in some of the more vicious forms of social policing while in the thick of revolutionary fervour, it’s not hard to imagine that Bowles’s account of the moment is an unwelcome, embarrassing reminder, and the critical response to her book from most mainstream media outlets has a definite air of hit dogs hollering. The New York Times declared it “an attack on progressive activism”; the Washington Post called it “a deeply anti-democratic document”; a New Yorker headline scoffed at Bowles’s “failed provocations”. 

This, too, made me think of a moment in Memento, in which another character tries to tell Leonard things about his life; things that would contradict the narrative he has indelibly inked on his body. In an impulsive act, Leonard takes a photograph of this man and scrawls an aide-memoire on the back. One gets the sense of this same message, the same desperate desire to forget, lurking unspoken beneath much of the contemptuous snarling over Morning After the Revolution.

It says: DON’T BELIEVE HIS LIES.

Boba has a reputation for being a drink that’s all sugar and no substance. Likewise, a boba liberal is an Asian who uncritically subscribes to the Democrat party line that “diversity is our strength!”, while making shallow tributes to Asian-American identity, such as celebrating representation in Hollywood. While it is commonly used by conservatives, “boba liberalism” was actually named by the other sworn enemy of liberals: Leftists. It was coined by a socialist Twitter activist, who wrote that “Boba Liberalism is thinking t-shirts, products, and merchandise are the main way of affirming one’s racial identity”.

The term is also used to describe Asians who are deemed to have been “whitewashed” — to have abandoned their “authentic” Asian identity to assimilate into the middle class. But how do you decide what counts as “authentic”, when the whole concept of Asian-American identity is built on a shaky foundation? African Americans are mostly descended from individuals who crossed the Atlantic centuries ago as slaves, and are therefore disconnected from their ancestors: they had no choice but to create a new culture from scratch, which gives it a coherence. Asian Americans, by contrast, have only existed in significant numbers for the past few decades. They have stronger ties, as well as living relatives, with other hugely varying nations. Bureaucracy may still lump together East and South Asians, but the two groups are two distinct races in everyday life. Ironically, in an era when racial minorities are encouraged to think about themselves as categories on a census form, boba liberalism is pushing a pan-Asian identity that does not actually exist.

The recent New York Times article “What Does It Mean to Be an Asian American Brewer?” is a classic example of how that identity is pushed. The author emphasises how few Asians there are in the industry, and points how those breweries which have succeeded began using Asian motifs, such as Chinese Zodiac symbols, only once they became popular. The only real difference between an Asian and a non-Asian brewery, apparently, is that an Asian brewery engages in self-Orientalism so that the mostly non-Asian customers can get feel like they are getting an “exotic” experience, even though the beer tastes just like any classic American beer.

Over time, politically conservative Asian Americans have also come to enthusiastically adopt the term “boba liberal” — mainly because it gave them a chance to “own the libs”. Like Asian Leftists, conservative Asians view boba liberals as not possessing an authentic Asian-American identity, but for the Right, disparaging boba liberalism is not a way to critique capitalism. It is a way of taking aim at a small but influential group of progressive Asian-American activists who are supposedly selling out other Asians, especially working-class Asians, in order to win brownie points from elite, generally white liberals.

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After all, Boba liberalism is, essentially, an Asian version of white liberalism — or wokeness. The core of this identity is self-flagellation, the sacred mission to “do the work” of atoning for being born white, the original sin. As Tom Holland has suggested, wokeness is a direct by-product of European Christian morality. And modern-day white liberalism has largely abandoned Christianity, but persistent is the desire to make up for the offences of one’s ancestors, and to see that the last shall be first and that the first shall be last.

As the most educated in society have adopted the tenets of this new religion, people who want access to elite spaces feel immense pressure to convert. Asian Americans from middle- to upper-class families are typically from majority-white neighbourhoods, and the urge to join the club is immense. (This demographic has the highest rates of getting into elite colleges.) Since white guilt is in vogue among their white liberal peers, they have created their own version.

Boba liberals cleave to the idea that that “anti-blackness” is endemic in Asian-American communities. In Liquor Store Dreams, for example, the Korean American filmmaker So Yun Um turns her parents’ experience of running a shop in a majority-black neighbourhood into a critique of this supposed anti-black racism. Her parents were working-class immigrants who toiled for decades to give her a better life, but she has risen above them socially, becoming a filmmaker — and is now castigating them to gain acceptance in her new class.

In an interview to promote the film, she tells the story of a Korean American friend who was accosted and robbed on the street by a black person. Her friend felt conflicted because he didn’t want to bring race into how he viewed the incident. The rest of the interview focuses on the myriad ways Korean Americans are said to perpetuate anti-blackness. When discussing attacks on Asians, for instance, she says: “If you’re in a predominantly black and brown neighbourhood, if an accident were happening, who else would be the assailant? It wouldn’t be a white person because a white person doesn’t live there.” Note her use of the word “accident”, rather than, say, “attack”. By doing so she is unintentionally perpetuating the obviously racist idea that a black person can’t help being an “assailant”; it denies black Americans agency. There is no similar call for black Americans to “unlearn anti-Asianness”, because in a boba liberal’s mind, how can they possibly take responsibility for their actions?

While boba liberals may experience anti-Asian racism themselves, they know there is little social capital to be gained from discussing it. The common assumption is that Asians are mostly well-off and do not need liberal saviours, unlike black Americans. The latter are often portrayed in popular culture as living tough lives in “the hood”. But working-class Asians tend to cluster in ethnic enclaves that receive very little media attention. The dominant Asian stereotype is of the “crazy rich Asian”. Boba liberals will intentionally distance themselves from these working-class Asians. Anyone who doesn’t toe the progressive party line on every issue is actually an ally of white supremacists.

Unsurprisingly, then, boba liberals often support affirmative action over merit-based admissions policies. In other words, they support a process based not on a clear set of consistently applied rules, but on more nebulous, unspoken criteria set by elite ideology. This benefits them, because they understand the “right” things to do and say to gain access to institutions such as Harvard. Working-class Asian Americans have little-to-no social capital and have the “wrong ideas”, however, and thus prefer merit-based admissions policies that don’t require intricate knowledge of elite codes.

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But being against affirmative action is considered “wrong” by affluent progressives; for them, the policy is an accessory they can tout to signal that they believe in the value of having a superficially multiracial ruling class. And just as affluent white liberals feel ashamed about white MAGA voters or Brexiteers, boba liberals are embarrassed by working-class Asians and their “incorrect” views.

As Rob Henderson has pointed out, Asian Americans are adopting “luxury beliefs, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes” — which he sees as “an indicator of assimilation” into upper-middle class America. A similar phenomenon is happening among Latinos: the college-educated now use the term “Latinx” as a class signifier, a term that is deeply unpopular with the vast majority of Latinos. It seems, then, that racial solidarity is not as powerful as class solidarity. America’s liberal elite have all converged on one value system that sets them apart, while pretending to be “diverse” through shallow imitations of identity.

The interview went viral in 2012. And the final line, shortly after it was uttered, became culturally ubiquitous, particularly on social media where it proliferated as a reaction GIF — it was also, crucially, the subject of a fierce debate about whether its popularity was racist. Did we love Sweet Brown for her story and her screen presence, or was it because she was a walking, talking stereotype of the archetypal sassy black woman?

That debate has waxed, waned and evolved over the years, but the one thing it stubbornly refuses to do is die. Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

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But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

If anything, the concept of “digital blackface” reads like an attempt to meme more racism into existence by claiming that it’s already everywhere. Like the too-credulous coverage of outrageous hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes, stories about the hidden racism of reaction GIFs suggest the need for constant vigilance, which in turn fuels perpetual mistrust. The overarching narrative, as I wrote last year, is one of a deep and roiling river of racial conflict running beneath the surface of American society. The moral of the story is that we can only ever relate to each other through the lens of power, privilege, resentment, and loathing — that, as Robin DiAngelo instructs, there can be no question of racism’s presence in any given interaction, only of how the racism manifests.

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It’s a pessimistic and profoundly superstitious mode of thinking — racism, the devil lurking in every room — and one that has spawned a particularly fervent adherence among millennial white women, for whom self-help and self-hatred have always been inextricably intertwined. Blake’s essay quotes a young woman named Elizabeth Halford who narrates her use of reaction GIFs with the ecstasy of the confessing sinner: “I’ve appropriated Black trauma as punchlines and peeled their faces off to put on my own and say what I can’t say, to make you laugh, or just because it went viral.”

It’s hard to imagine who or what is served by this confession, apart from Halford’s masochism. It is also hard to imagine that any GIF could represent a greater affront to black people than the idea that selecting said GIF is akin to peeling their faces off.

But more discouraging than the pessimism (and bizarre Hannibal Lecter comparisons) inherent to this worldview is its racism — and not the insidious, subtle kind. The original Teen Vogue essay introducing the concept of digital blackface bemoaned that “black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs”, as if the ubiquitous presence of black people in American culture is a bad thing.

Blake’s CNN piece calls out specific, seminal memes: an outraged Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model shouting, “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”, or Michael Jordan crying at his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Maybe these are “black reaction GIFs”, in that they are reaction GIFs featuring black people. But surely what they capture is something bigger. These are American celebrities. This is American culture.

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But lately, an impulse has found a regrettable level of validation in American media, academia, and cultural institutions — an impulse to fracture and resegregate society along racial lines. American colleges hold exclusive, separate graduation ceremonies that segregate students by racial background. Lizzo, a multiple Grammy winner and one of the most famous musicians in the country, is forced to defend herself against allegations that her music is too popular among white people. An influencer goes viral for urging white moviegoers to stay away from the new Black Panther movie. Media institutions fret over race-matching the authors of book, theatre, and film reviews to the content they’re critiquing.

All of this is great, of course, if you have an economic stake in keeping Americans at each other’s throats. But for the rest of us, it only fuels polarisation and mistrust. The most incisive response to the latest “digital blackface” article came from Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, who tweeted: “This stupid article is important in only one way: it illustrates that, as actual racism continues to decline, new varieties will simply be invented/’promoted’ and used to make us fight one another.”

In a diverse, thriving, integrated society that includes people of multivariate backgrounds, of course non-black citizens are going to engage with, appreciate, and relate to cultural products created by their black countrymen — and vice versa. Not only could it not be otherwise — culture, in our highly mimetic species, has long proven itself impossible to contain — but isn’t it what we want? The popularity of these GIFs stems from the fact that they represent events, emotions, and cultural touch points that millions of people recognise and relate to; in many cases, they speak to something not just specifically American but deeply human. That something like the Crying Jordan meme has become a global visual shorthand for conveying our feelings — the fact that people of every age, shape, colour and creed feel represented by the raw emotion captured there — should be seen as a triumph of common humanity over identity category. It is, at the population level, exactly what an inclusive society should strive for.

In this context, it seems not just absurd but grotesque for our national news media to argue that we should wall off these memes from the American mainstream, or make it so fraught for non-black people to engage with them that it becomes effectively taboo. The idea that black culture, whether it’s memes or music or slang or style, needs to be kept separate for its own protection is indistinguishable in practice from the racist ghettoisation that once sidelined black artists and athletes from the mainstream, lest they pollute the spaces where white people gathered. At its root is the notion that black culture is not American culture, that black people are somehow other. And, well, you know, there’s a word (and a GIF) for that.

In the digital age, however, the fresh start is more elusive. The internet is everywhere, and the internet remembers; the person you used to be still lives there, preserved in the form of archived links and deleted-but-screenshotted posts, ready and waiting to dispel any notions you might have had of leaving him behind. And while maintaining a careful separation between the digital self and your actual one can mitigate some of the risk, even the most painstakingly constructed pseudonymous identity inevitably develops a crack or two, through which the real you can be glimpsed — especially if your pseudonymous self is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a flamethrower.

This brings us to a New York Times op-ed titled, “Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify As a Man?”, which was published in late December to widespread consternation. The content of the essay has already been thoroughly dealt with by critics, who alleged that its author, Peyton Thomas, indulged in both contextual misrepresentation of Louisa May Alcott’s writings and no small amount of crude gender stereotyping, to support the illegitimate, retroactive transing of the Little Women author. (Among these was noted feminist critic Katha Pollitt, who in a letter to the editor wrote: “What 19th-century woman with genius and gumption wouldn’t chafe at her restricted life and long for the broad freedoms of manhood?”)

But equally interesting, and largely unremarked-upon, was the reaction to the op-ed by a smaller group — one less outraged by the essay’s content and more profoundly amused that the author was given the chance to write it in the first place. Because while for the average New York Times reader, this essay would have been the first time they encountered Thomas’s work, these commentators — who skewed generally younger and far more online — had been watching Thomas make arguments just like the Alcott one for years on the microblogging site Tumblr, where he was a sometimes controversial figure.

For those not familiar with the early-2010s dynamics of Tumblr: Katherine Dee has described the site, accurately, as the “digital sideshow attraction” from whence much of today’s weirdest and most toxic identitarian political discourse originates. It is important to note, therefore, that most of the drama surrounding Thomas, like most Tumblr controversies generally, is so overwrought, convoluted, and terminally online that it’s both impossible to parse and not worth giving more oxygen to. (For this reason, I’m not linking to it.)

What is worth discussing, however, is how easily Tumblr’s cult-like fandom culture became the default mode of engagement for its adherents, a way to not only participate in fandom but to understand the world. The way discourse functioned on the site, it was a brief step from writing gay fan fiction about, say, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, to fantasising openly about a same-sex romance between the men who played them, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman — and then to lashing out publicly at actress Amanda Abbington when she had the audacity to not only be cast as Watson’s love interest, but to be Freeman’s paramour in real life.

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Peyton Thomas was a content creator within multiple Tumblr fandoms, and like many young writers, developed a professional career out of his early, more informal posting in a way that made it difficult to leave Tumblr entirely behind. “Lots of writers sort of put their fandom identity to the side when they become professional writers,” Thomas told me by phone. “For me, that’s never been possible, because so many of my first assignments came out of people who’d been reading my Tumblr.”

Curiously, Thomas’s best-known work of fan fiction was one with a real-life analogue that also blurred the lines between reality and fantasy: the same month that Thomas posted a full-length fan fiction screenplay for a Spider-Man movie featuring a bisexual Peter Parker, he also sparked a rumour that Andrew Garfield had been fired from the Spider-Man franchise after two films because he wouldn’t stop pushing for the hero to have a same-sex romance.

In hindsight, Thomas says, he got a bit ahead of himself.

“That was definitely an overstatement, that he was fired because of this. I don’t have any definitive proof, and I didn’t then, that he had been fired for making those comments, or that the entire franchise had collapsed because he made those comments,” he told me. (He did note, accurately, that Garfield felt both constrained by the canonical requirements of the Spider-Man franchise — a 2011 licensing agreement stipulated that the Peter Parker Spider-Man character could only ever be portrayed as a heterosexual white man — and disillusioned by the pressure from Sony to retract his comments about making the hero bisexual.)

But less interesting than the lack of truth in this rumour is the way in which it wasn’t true, how perfectly the story of Garfield’s alleged firing fit within the Tumblr paradigm of disregarding canon (or in some cases, reality itself) in favour of a narrative that is less true but more exciting. Viewed through this lens, the gay Spider-Man fanfic, the Andrew Garfield rumour, and the Louisa May Alcott essay all coalesce into a single category of thing: they are all fantasy, all projection, all the headcanon of a super-fan imagining an alternative reality into existence. The only difference is that the first two things could be more or less written off as internet nonsense, while the latter was deemed worthy of inclusion in the nation’s most prestigious newspaper.

To be as charitable as possible to Thomas, his Alcott essay — like his Spider-Man rumour — is not based on nothing. (Among those presently struggling with the question of how to understand Alcott’s identity through the lens of contemporary gender politics is Louisa May Alcott Society president Gregory Eiselein, who is quoted in Thomas’s essay as saying, “I am certain that Alcott never fit a binary sex-gender model.”) And none of this is to say that having been a Tumblr poster, or even a Tumblr shitposter, should disqualify a person from eventually making a living as a writer or cultural commentator. Many authors working today first began honing their craft as amateur fanfic writers.

Meanwhile, in 2023, there are few young adults who don’t have a discoverable digital footprint dating back to their teens, the content of which should not be held against them, no matter how embarrassing or unsophisticated it might be. Those of us who came of age before the social web may thank the stars that our most cringeworthy adolescent thoughts are confined to the pages of a physical (read: burnable) diary, rather than preserved for all eternity on the internet. Yet it behooves us to recognise that one individual’s trajectory from Tumblr conspiracy theorist to NYT columnist is not substantively different to going back for your 10-year high school reunion and discovering that your lab partner from freshman biology — the one who always seemed to like dissecting frogs a little too much — is now an accomplished neurosurgeon.

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Rather, I want to question the trajectory whereby an argument like this one — which ultimately hinges less on historical accuracy than the desire of its author that it be true — can make its way into the pages of the New York Times. Partly, this might be down to the existence of a commissioning editor on staff who likes to source their pitches from Twitter, where Thomas went viral last spring with a thread advancing the same thesis ultimately argued in the Alcott essay. But there is something here, too, about the ability of an ultimately half-baked idea to sneak past the gatekeepers of our most storied media institutions.

Much has been made of late over the threat of misinformation, as the public’s faith in American news media has fully split along partisan lines. Those on the Right no longer trust mainstream news, which in turn treats that lack of trust as a threat unto itself: even a casual news consumer has likely been warned about the dangers of QAnon, Russian bots, and the rise of an entire, Right-wing ecosystem dedicated to ensnaring gullible conservatives in an alternative reality made of fake news. But here we have a rare glimpse of how a similarly baseless story can spread beyond the cultish confines of the social justice Left and into the paper of record: as it turns out, even the New York Times will happily launder a narrative into news if it rings the proper, politically expedient bells on a hot-button topic.

In this case, of course, that topic was trans issues, which in addition to being a major front in America’s 2022 culture wars are also lately host to a smaller, internecine conflict between the New York Times news organisation — which has gone against the grain in recent months to report on, for instance, the medical controversy surrounding the use of puberty blockers on trans-identified kids — and its smaller, more ideologically homogenous opinion section. In this environment, something like the Alcott essay isn’t just clickbait; it signals to those readers who were inflamed by the aforementioned reporting that the NYT is still down with the cause. And of course, this willingness to bestow its imprimatur upon a story that is factually flimsy but politically correct is not exclusive to the Gray Lady: in past several years, institutions from The Guardian to Scientific American have allowed embarrassingly bad arguments to be printed in their pages because they promoted a narrative that progressives wish were true.

The truth is that bias-stroking sensationalism has a way of finding purchase in the media on Left and Right alike. Once you notice this, it’s hard to unsee it — as with last week’s explosion of news stories about the dangers (or, on the Right, the noble necessity) of gas stoves. It is just as much a problem with non-frivolous topics as it is with culture war fodder: while the Right-wing press engages in ghoulish, and foolish, speculation attributing this or that recent death to the mRNA vaccines, one recalls that the Left was no less gung-ho in amplifying nonsense stories about Covid denialists in red states gasping “It isn’t real!” as they coughed themselves to death.

If anything, perhaps we should be grateful to the New York Times for advertising that it is as susceptible to such audience capture as any other outlet. Then we might resolve, if we hadn’t already, not to simply believe everything we read.

Certainly, this norm was well-established by the following year. In October 2016, the Washington Post published an article mocking Donald Trump’s weight and asking a panel of “experts” to guess how fat he was. “Even more important than Donald Trump’s weight is how unhealthy he looks,” said cardiologist Dean Ornish. “Unhealthy complexion, puffy, pasty skin, sweating a lot.”

This type of coverage certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of medical ethics, which discourages doctors from performing armchair diagnoses of people they don’t treat. But the Left’s defence was that it was part of a vital truth-telling exercise. The press should have an adversarial relationship with those who seek the privilege of governing us! They should ask tough, even invasive, questions about a candidate’s fitness for office! The health of our aspiring leaders is a matter of public concern, after all, especially when it comes to retaining the necessary faculties to do the job. But especially, and more importantly, when the aspiring leader is that guy. And so, the resistance media was born, and went on to thrive during Trump’s presidency.

At the root of all this was a conviction that it was the job of the press to, as Arianna Huffington put it in 2015, “never [fail] to remind our audience who Trump is and what his campaign really represents” — but this was about more than Trump. He was only the catalyst for a long-overdue transformation of journalistic norms. Telling the public what is true, objectively, became somewhat less important than telling them what is right, morally. And what has since become clear is that this concept of rightness is not just morality-infused but highly partisan — which brings us to last week’s controversial interview between NBC journalist Dasha Burns and Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman.

Fetterman is nearly seven feet tall with prominent tattoos, a shaved head, and a penchant for wearing shorts and hoodies rather than three-piece suits. He has become something of a star for Democrats trying to combat their image as smug coastal elites in couture clothing who’ve fallen out of touch with the working class (even though, despite his grungy aesthetic, Fetterman actually holds a PhD). He was also, until recently, well-positioned to win in the upcoming midterm elections against his Republican opponent, Dr Mehmet Oz, a Trump-endorsed candidate who was previously best known for hawking pseudoscientific cures on Oprah.

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Unfortunately, Fetterman suffered a relatively serious stroke in May — and while he was back on the campaign trail two months later, he and his team remained somewhat tight-lipped about his health. Videos surfaced of Fetterman seemingly stumbling over his words during public speaking engagements, giving ammunition to Right-wing claims that he was no longer up to the challenges of holding office. Fetterman’s campaign said the videos were misleading; the truth, as usual, appears to be somewhere in the middle.

The NBC interview was his first on-camera since the stroke. Introducing it, Burns told NBC anchor Lester Holt that Fetterman continues to have auditory processing difficulties for which he uses technological assistance, which Fetterman himself explains in the interview: “I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear, so I use captioning, so I’m able to see what you’re saying.”

The trouble began when Burns told Holt that without the captioning, Fetterman had struggled to communicate: “In small talk before my interview, it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying,” she said. She clarified these remarks the next day on the Today show, noting that auditory processing issues are not the same as cognitive damage; Fetterman’s problems are specifically listening-related (the signal gets garbled somewhere between ear and brain), can be mitigated, and may also improve over time.

By the standards of 2016 — or indeed, of journalism in general — it was completely appropriate of Burns not to shy away from discussing this issue. Reporters have a solemn duty to tell the honest truth about a candidate’s limitations, whether or not they find that candidate repulsive.

In this case, the NBC appearance was arguably to the candidate’s benefit. The interview, along with the background provided by Burns, makes the extent of his current limitations clear in a way that voters might find reassuring. In contrast to the viral videos, which seemed like serious cause for concern, he came across here as being in relatively good shape.

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But rather than being lauded for her brave and honest reporting, Dasha Burns became the resistance media’s sworn enemy of the week. Podcaster Kara Swisher tweeted a scathing criticism of Burns to her million-plus followers, writing: “Sorry to say but I talked to @JohnFetterman for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.” The women of The View also jumped on the “Dasha Burns is bad at small talk” train, with Sunny Hostin also claiming that she “broke journalistic ethics”. Buzzfeed condemned Burns for ableism and included quotes from a disability activist who said the interview would “worsen attitudes and violence towards disabled people in a time when virtual accommodations are being removed left and right after they were implemented overnight in 2020”. And Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, said she couldn’t believe Burns had been allowed to describe the candidate’s communication difficulties without “consequences”; she demanded them a few days later: “I would love to see an apology towards the disability community from her and from her network for the damage they have caused,” she said.

The word “damage” is interesting, in that it seems like a rare, open acknowledgement of the deference politicians on the Left have come to expect from the press. (The Burns interview triggered nearly as much outrage as a far more scandalous remark from Oz’s communications adviser Rachel Tripp, who mocked Fetterman’s struggles, saying that if he “had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly”.) Fetterman was, of course, not personally harmed by the observation that he still struggles to interpret speech. His chances of election, on the other hand… well.

But this is what happens when journalists begin to see themselves not as mere reporters, but arbiters of moral truth, with a responsibility not just to inform the public but to guide them to the proper conclusions. And the new norms, and new normal, ushered in during the Trump presidency have lingered long after the conclusion of his time in the White House, to the detriment of basically every election since.

The problem isn’t a press that challenges power, which is of course what the press should always do. The problem is that it challenges inconsistently, and only in one direction. The same folks who spent all of 2016 chortling about how Trump was too fat and crazy and congenitally stupid to be elected president are now, in 2022, calling for sanctions on any journalist who raises salient questions about Fetterman’s fitness for office — and relatedly, studiously ignoring some fairly newsworthy senior moments on the part of President Biden.

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That call for moral clarity, which sounded so elevated in theory, becomes something far baser in practice: a facile narrative about heroes and villains that invariably breaks along party lines. We see this not just in the expectation that Fetterman be protected, but in the treatment of his opponent, who has been roundly mocked as an elite Trumpian carpetbagger who can’t even pronounce the name of the local grocery store. Oh, the irony of Oz being condemned for his “Wegners” stumble by the same people who consider it a cardinal sin to even mention the other candidate’s difficulties with verbal communication.

One need not be a Republican to understand why this stuff makes ordinary people feel like they’ve stepped through the looking glass. Or to observe that the media establishment that now frets over the scourge of “big lie” conspiracies is the same one that spent years salivating over the end (it was going to happen, any day now!) of Trump’s obviously stolen presidency. Or to wonder why Stacey Abrams’s refusal to concede the legitimacy of her election loss in 2018 is courageous and inspirational, while Trump’s represents an unprecedented fascist threat. And yet the expectation is that good liberals will not notice the lopsidedness of this narrative — or if they do, that they will never mention it — because to do so would be to express “a Right-wing talking point”. Everything, even the truth, is now filtered through the lens of tribal politics.

Obviously, this makes for especially high drama when a presidency is on the line; obviously, it is especially bad and shocking when the norm-flouter is also the most powerful man in the nation. But it’s the trickling-down of this phenomenon to state and local elections, a reshaping across the board of both politics and the way the press covers them, that genuinely imperils democracy. Elections, once understood as a race, are being increasingly treated like an endless war — one that goes beyond politics as spectator sport, into a world of divergent realities. A world where the loser might capitulate to a corrupt system but never concede defeat. A world where the polarised press no longer even pretends to care about truth, but instead acts like a sort of hype team for its respective party.

And on that front, the upcoming midterms seem poised to be a watershed moment — one in which we either collectively move on from Trump’s America, or decide to live in it, forever.

These competing forces — a resentment of punishing beauty standards on one hand, and on the other the yearning to be beautiful oneself, with all the privileges that entails — have long been a source of tension, one that the movement keeps trying to resolve by treating beauty not as an objective quality, but a resource to which all women are entitled. Hence the endless campaigns telling women that they’re beautiful no matter what they look like, that they deserve to feel beautiful, that beauty is something every woman possesses in her own way.

The latest iteration of this phenomenon is a howler of a trend piece, which was published at the weekend by the New York Times — and subsequently went off-the-charts viral. “A social media movement inspired by the rapper Megan Thee Stallion strikes back at the gatekeepers of beauty,” announces the subhead. This movement sees being “hot” not as the condition of being physically attractive or sexually desirable, but as a state of mind, a vibe. Gone are the days when being hot required that another person bestow the label upon you. If you identify as hot, then you are.

The NYT piece goes on to enumerate all the ways in which young women “are expanding the definition of hotness, taking it beyond its former association with old notions of attractiveness”. You can be hot by doing things like eating spaghetti, cleaning grout, graduating from law school, and taking walks. In fact, the hotness of a given endeavour seems defined less by the activity itself than by the fact that the woman doing it is a) conventionally attractive, and b) under the age of 30. (Meet the new hotness, same as the old one.)

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There is nothing original here. It is a truth universally acknowledged that young people like to mess around with language, walling themselves off with vernacular from the generations that came before them. Before the vibe shift there were trends, or the zeitgeist; before the hot girl there was the cool girl; the feminists of the Seventies trashed their sisters while their granddaughters cancel each other.

But the idea that hotness could have nothing whatsoever to do with beauty, or the male gaze, or even the most nebulous idea of being hot to another person… well, this is also not new. We — that is, women — have tried this before.

It’s 1945 in the fictional village of Bedford Falls, New York: a young woman named Violet Beck responds to a compliment on her dress with a scoff, “What? This old thing?”

It’s 2017: Karlie Kloss is just having a casual cup of tea in her bathrobe, not trying to look nice or anything.

It’s 2022: a TikTok influencer named Mia Lind is taking a “hot girl walk”, the tenets of which are self-affirmation, self-reflection, and goal-oriented thinking. (“You may not”, Lind says, “think of boys or boy drama”, a great new riff on that old gag where you tell someone not to think of an elephant. Of course I’m thinking about boy drama now.) The hot girl walk is a four-mile exercise in cultivating confidence. It has nothing to do with looking good, as you can tell by the photos Lind posts of herself on her walks, in which she looks absolutely hideous.

Here, oddly enough, both contemporary feminism and the patriarchy seem to be in agreement: the opposite of “hot” is trying too hard. A truly beautiful woman is not like other girls. She’s effortless, unassuming, even unaware of how alluring she is — because she’s either too modest to acknowledge it, or too liberated to care.

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That is not to say that the women professing to reclaim and reboot “hot” for the masses are lying, exactly. They’re in their twenties, perhaps the only time in one’s life when it is genuinely possible to be hot by accident, or at least without too much effort. But let’s be clear: when a woman posts a video of herself eating spaghetti and receives a lustful outpouring in return, it’s not because of her confidence. It’s because she’s a conventionally attractive 28-year-old putting something in her mouth.

Of course, it would be nice if it were otherwise. And periodically, we flirt with the idea that everyone can be beautiful: that we can change our lives, even change the world, by changing our words. That you can put hotness out into the universe, so to speak, and convince the world to desire you simply by calling yourself desirable. Granted, this change in mindset might prove transformative for some people, in the same sense that the makeover scene in your average teenage rom-com transforms the nerdy nobody into a beautiful prom queen: it only works if she was beautiful all along.

But wanting to be wanted is out of style, too: that’s why it’s so important to launder the basic, embarrassing desire to be considered desirable until it comes out on the other side, nice and clean and feminist. The litany of defences is so familiar that it not only approaches, but already is, parody. I’m wearing makeup and sexy lingerie, for myself. I’m losing weight and getting a boob job, for myself. No one is going to love me if I don’t love myself first, not that I want anyone to love me, I’m entirely above that, and I am definitely not thinking about boys or boy drama on my hot girl walk — for which I have donned a crop top and a pair of the smallest shorts that offer just a peek of my underbutt area, just for, who else, myself.

That the hot girl walking might want to think about boys instead of life goals, or envision herself romantically partnered as one of those life goals, is obviously not to be discussed. Wanting to be pretty or desirable, or worse, wanting to be these things to men, is something the truly empowered woman must deny, deny, deny. (Remember when Victoria’s Secret jumped on the rebranding bandwagon last year, with newly-minted spokesmodel Megan Rapinoe decrying the harm done to young women by heteronormative underwear advertisements?) As with every prior iteration of this attempt to simultaneously exploit and eschew the male gaze, reclaiming and expanding the idea of “hot” is a new twist on the retrograde idea that a woman’s value to society is dependent on gaining access to the “hot” category. A beauty pageant that takes all comers is still a beauty pageant.

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But alas, diluting the meaning of the word so that “hotness” comes to encompass anything a woman of a given age might do is not the same as actually making hotness accessible to the masses. People invariably notice that even in a world where everyone has been freshly christened as “hot” by definitional fiat, a much smaller group of people are still “hot” according to the original meaning of the word. No matter how we torture our language and ourselves, human beings still notice and appreciate the beautiful things, and people, among them. It will never be otherwise, and do we really want that? Wouldn’t it be better to just appreciate what is beautiful, while striving for what is fair?

But like so many grand goals in activism, that would take courage, and work, and extraordinary disruption — including, in this case, the courage to not just demand access to society on behalf of “ugly women”, but to identify as one of them. To admit that beauty, or hotness, or whatever you want to call it, is simply not within reach. Who wants to be the first to let that particular dream die? Of course we’d rather keep insisting that hot is a vibe. Of course we’d rather believe that beauty is accessible to all. It is not just easier, but nicer to imagine a world in which all it takes to be hot is to say you are, than one in which hotness has ceased to matter at all.

Hackett Fischer, a professor of History at Brandeis University, notes that “with many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early 21st century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021.” He complains of demands for political correctness on campus and laments a public discourse in which “we have seen a growing disregard for truth, and a cultivated carelessness of fact and evidence”. He argues that “ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.”

African Founders has been years in the making. “My substantive work on this project had its beginning in 1955,” writes Hackett Fischer, 86, in the book’s acknowledgments. But, with the history wars raging, it arrives in the nick of time.

To set the scene, briefly, the 1619 Project aims to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative.” Since it was launched, 1619 has been rebutted and debunked by American historians of comparable or even higher standing than Hackett Fischer (a very select group). Among those who have pointed out its many distortions, lies and inaccuracies is Gordon S. Wood, perhaps America’s greatest living historian, who has said he was surprised the project “could be so wrong in so many ways”. When another esteemed historian, Leslie M. Harris, expressed her reservations about one of 1619’s core claims — that the American Revolution was fought in large part to preserve slavery in North America — to a New York Times fact-checker, she was ignored.

Since publication, The New York Times has stealthily edited contentious passages while Hannah-Jones seems to spend most of her time arguing on Twitter, accusing her critics of being old white dudes who Just Don’t Get It. In one swiftly deleted tweet, she appeared to revel in the idea that the violent eruptions of the summer of 2020 be called “the 1619 riots”. None of these problems with the 1619 Project as a work have dampened its impact on American public life.

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This is the fraught landscape into which African Founders arrives. A few asides in the introduction notwithstanding, Hackett Fischer’s rebuttal to the vogue for deeply pessimistic history is quieter and less direct than that of many of his colleagues. But that makes it all the more persuasive. African Founders is a devastating counter-example: a thorough, compelling work free from the didacticism of both 1619 and conservative attempts to set the record straight, such as the 1776 commission launched by Donald Trump in 2020.

African Founders is a successor to Hackett Fischer’s most lauded work, Albion’s Seed. Published in 1989, it described how settlers from different parts of the British Isles imported a range of enduring “folkways” — culture, religion, language, ethics and so on — to different parts of what would become the United States: East Anglican puritans in New England, southern gentry in Virginia, Quakers from Wales and the Midlands in Pennsylvania, and Scots-Irish border folk in Appalachia. (The enthusiasm of the descendants of that final group for Donald Trump caused many pundits to dust off their copies of Albion’s Seed after 2016.)  Taking the same regional approach, African Founders charts the migrations, cultures and political and social contributions of slaves, freed slaves and their descendants throughout America.

It is hard to overstate the scope of this 900-page work. Open it at random and you will find subheadings such as “How African School Children In Philadelphia taught Benjamin Franklin A Lesson About Race” and “Diversity of African Traditions Among Afro-Texan Cowhands”. Breaking up the demographic, social and political big picture are stories of many African Americans whose tireless work didn’t just win freedom for themselves but helped to expand the very notion of American liberty.

Many of the most pre-eminent such heroes came from Chesapeake Virginia and Maryland, foremost among them Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Hackett Fischer argues that this was no coincidence. The prominence of men from the region in the founding of the United States — George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being the two most obvious examples — left a lasting impression on a later generation of slaves-turned-leaders: “These former Chesapeake built on a regional tradition of leadership, and reached beyond it in creative ways. They learned from its strengths, corrected its weaknesses, and invented other new ways of leading from their own heritage and experience.”

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Hackett Fischer spotlights less well-known figures too. Juan Rodriguez, for example, was an enterprising “black mulatto” who became the first documented non-native settler on Manhattan: he liked the look of the island and blagged his way off a Dutch merchant ship in 1613. Rodriguez fought for his freedom, fended off an attempted enslavement, married an Indian wife, became a successful trader and a translator and go-between for the Dutch and American Indians. Several scholars have called him “Manhattan’s first merchant”.

In New England, the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatly, named for the ship on which she was brought to Boston in 1761, confounded racist expectations and won praise for verse that Hackett Fischer calls “a large-spirited celebration of a common spirit in all people everywhere”. As well as the racism she encountered in her own time, Wheatly would later be criticised by black nationalists, who weren’t especially keen on her short poem “On being Brought from Africa to America”: “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land/Taught my benighted soul to understand”. Hackett Fischer notes the irony in the similarities between the black nationalist critiques and the contemporary racist criticism, including from Thomas Jefferson.

Hackett Fischer is clear that none of this should detract from the cruelty of slavery or the racist violence that followed. His book is full of terrifying detail of the lives of slaves across America, including detailed accounts of how those experiences varied over time and geography. But he understands that lingering on the horrors of slavery only get you so far in understanding America’s past.

The story told by Hackett Fischer stands in stark contrast to the demotivating, almost paralysing lesson of the 1619 Project: slavery not as America’s original sin but something hardwired into its DNA, a past that cannot be escaped. It is a dispiritingly static view of the country. Rather than displaying a curiosity at the paradox that has animated so much American history — “How is it,” asked Dr Johnson in 1775, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” — the 1619 approach dogmatically sweeps aside everything other than the existence of slavery as minor details in the story of the United States.

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African Founders, by contrast, demonstrates that there doesn’t need to be a trade-off between “centring” the experience and stories of black Americans and an appreciation of the gift of American liberty. Indeed, the takeaway from Hackett Fischer’s work is that the latter cannot be achieved without the former.

“What if we told a story that centred slavery and Black Americans and, well, no one read it,” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones in the introduction to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, remembering her fretting on the eve of The New York Times magazine special edition. She needn’t have worried. It was an overnight sensation. Indeed, measured by impact on the public conversation, rather than merit, the 1619 Project is a more successful contemporary work of opinion journalism or pop history than any other in recent history.

African Founders, by contrast, feels like a book out of time. Inconveniently heavy and equivocal in the age of skinny provocations. Moderate in an era of extremes. But closer to the truth than the divisive works that hog the limelight.

But this virus has now killed over 6,000,000 people across the planet, and if lab research caused it, imagine what it would do to the entire field of virology. Money would be withdrawn and careers shuttered; it would be devastating. Small wonder, perhaps, that at the beginning of the pandemic anyone discussing a possible lab accident was swiftly dismissed by the science community as a “conspiracy theorist”. Donald Trump’s own opinion was particularly helpful on this matter.

Two essays in particular had a particularly powerful effect on the narrative. Placed in The Lancet and Emerging Microbes & Infections, both of them debunked the lab-leak theory. Their publication initially shut down any debate about the pandemic origin; but both reports were subsequently exposed as being rather compromised. The essay in The Lancet had been orchestrated behind the scenes by Peter Daszak, who runs a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, that directly funds research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak’s obvious conflicts of interest forced The Lancet to shut down their own investigation of the pandemic’s origin. At Emerging Microbes & Infections, the essay authors were caught passing the draft for approval to a scientist who Daszak funds at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Since that strategy has been wearing thin, a new tactic is being deployed: drafts of useful studies are being published online and then rushed into public discussion with friendly science writers.

To push back against public perception that their Wuhan colleagues could have made a mistake, researchers have been allaying themselves with science writers, who often regurgitate whatever researchers say or publish. “Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives,” wrote science writer, Nicholas Wade, in an essay last year, that detailed how the pandemic could have started in a Wuhan lab. “Most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses.”

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This lack of cautious scepticism now extends to preprints — the drafts of studies that scientists post online before they have been vetted by journal editors and peer reviewers. Peer review can be laborious and time-consuming, sometimes lasting weeks or months, and is far from perfect. But when a scientist wants to plant an opinion in the public mindset, publishing a preprint can serve this purpose; it helps if science writers are willing to ignore the need for expert vetting of the paper, before rushing the draft study into headlines. Such is the thirst for new stories about Covid-19 that this is now proving the case. A perfect example has just been published.

A week ago, Chinese government scientists posted a preprint online that analysed swabs sampled early in the pandemic at a market in Wuhan to detect the Covid-19 virus. The following day, a coterie of Western scientists rushed to publish two preprints of their own, analysing much of the same evidence. The Chinese preprint concluded that the market was the focus of either the pandemic’s origin or a spreading event where someone outside the market brought it in. Western scientists, however, argued that the same evidence showed the pandemic began in the market from an infected animal.

The Western report and its emphasis on an infected animal passing the virus to someone in the market as being the origin of the pandemic became the dominant narrative for New York Times science writers. Their story ran soon after.

“BREAKING NEWS: Two major scientific studies point to a market in Wuhan, China — not a lab in the same city — as the birthplace of the coronavirus pandemic,” read an early version of a story filed by New York Times reporters Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller. The opening failed to note that the “major scientific studies” were only preprints that had not been vetted by experts.

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“When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” the Times quoted Michael Worobey, a co-author of both studies and a researcher at the University of Arizona. In an essay he published last November in Science Magazine, Worobey also argued that the pandemic began in the Wuhan market. However, this conclusion was later criticised as unscientific by Liang Wannian, a Beijing public health official who has led the country’s Covid-19 response.

The New York Times article does give brief mention to the Chinese preprint, which noted that no infected animals have been found, for example, and wrote that an infected human could have brought the virus into the market. “Thus, the market might have acted as an amplifier due to the high number of visitors every day,” the Chinese scientists report, “causing many initially identified infection clusters in the early stage of the outbreak as indicated in the Report of WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2.”

The Western scientists, in contrast concluded, “Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.” And this is what the New York Times reported, even though both sets of scientists drew polar opposite conclusions based on mostly similar data.

This did not escape the notice of Alina Chan, a Scientific Advisor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and co-author of VIRAL: the search for the origin of Covid-19. Interviewed by The Hill TV, Chan pointed out that the Western scientists did not find the “incontrovertible” proof that was claimed — and Chinese researchers concluded the opposite. “We are just repeating what happened in 2020, which is a bunch of scientists and reporters rushing to print headlines about the origins of COVID19.” Chan said.

Politically, as Matt Yglesias noted, this is important. The New York Times report shows that “once again, I think the press is getting way ahead of its skis,” he wrote. “But we should keep in mind that the virologists publishing papers downplaying the possibility of a lab leak are not disinterested parties in this. The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs, and it’s hardly shocking that a large segment of the virus lab community doesn’t like that idea.”

This wasn’t the only omission by the Times: it also failed to report on a note buried at the bottom of both Western studies, where several scientists — including Michael Worobey and Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute — disclosed that they have received consulting fees or have been compensated for expert testimony on the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither scientist responded to questions from me about the nature of this consulting or expert testimony, or who it is for.

“Journalists owe it to their readers to help them understand both the strengths and limitations of scientific research – especially when the paper is a pre-print and has not been through peer review,” says Alison Young, who spent many years as an investigative reporter uncovering problems at labs studying dangerous pathogens and is now the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “In covering this kind of research, especially on the polarized topic of Covid’s origin, it is critical for reporters to note where conclusions are based in part on speculation,” she added.

Worryingly, this isn’t the first instance of uncritical reporting on preprints at the New York Times science desk. Last October, the Times’s Carl Zimmer reported on a preprint that discovered viruses most closely related to Covid-19 in Laos, far, far away from Wuhan. Zimmer quoted Worobey saying that the preprint finding these viruses in Laos “puts to bed” the idea that the Covid-19 virus could have come from a Wuhan lab. However, months prior to this Times article, researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already reported in a scientific paper that they had been collecting viruses from Laos since at least 2006.

Before this unfortunate incident, Zimmer wrote an article for Time Magazine praising research by China’s controversial virologist Shi Zhengli, and described claims that the pandemic could have started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “not just baseless but dangerous”.

“It does look like the science desk at the New York Times has a position on the subject of the lab leak,” says Richard Ebright, professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a biosafety expert. And few answers explaining how the pandemic started will be found in science journals; Ebright thinks the world needs forensic investigators and congressional committees to get to the bottom of what caused so many deaths.

Getting to the bottom of this is important because as we’ve seen over the course of the pandemic, science can be used to present a contrived picture of reality. It can be co-opted by politics and even used as an instrument of state propaganda. “So long as this is kept within science, all other evidence is excluded,” says Ebright. “And that’s what some science journalists and scientists want to do.” As we now know, not all parties are disinterested ones.

Neither Carl Zimmer nor editor Virginia Hughes responded for comment.

On paper, his piece had all the hallmarks of an inspiring call to arms: it was illustrated with a photo gallery of smiling workers; it took a swipe at Amazon and Starbucks; it celebrated how the “movement retains pockets of strength”. It was inspiring, that is, until we remind ourselves that the NYT is one of the most aggressively anti-union newspapers in the media — an attitude that trickles all the way down from the dynasty that still controls the paper to this day.

Just this month, it emerged that senior NYT executives are heavily leaning on 600 tech staffers hoping to unionise. In response, Times management has implemented a full-court-press campaign to defeat the effort. “This is an unproven experiment with permanent consequences,” New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levin wrote to staff in a leaked memo. “We encourage you to vote no,” the NYT informed staff in leaflets it distributed. Indeed, the NYT has been so strident in its approach to the tech union that a group of investors wrote a letter to the company’s management, urging them to “cease and refrain from actions that may violate federal labor law”.

Yet such behaviour is nothing new. Only weeks before, the paper had extinguished the flames of another labour confrontation, this time with the union of the paper’s product review site, the Wirecutter, which culminated in a walk-out by Wirecutter staff. In response to the union’s demands for better pay and terms, the NYT slow-walked negotiations for two years in an apparent effort to derail the negotiations — despite retaining strong revenue and cash reserves. “Hey Gray Lady, time to pay me! What’s appalling? Bosses stalling!” members of the three Times unions chanted in a rally outside the NYT building.

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In his essay, Applebaum singled out Amazon, Walmart and Google as hotbeds for union strife — but the battle for workers’ rights at the NYT is of a very different magnitude: it has been raging for almost a century. Almost immediately after the country’s premier news union, American Newspaper Guild (now the NewsGuild), was founded in 1933, the NYT took a harsh anti-union stance, not only refusing to allow its employees to organise but going so far as to deploy a network of spies to track employees engaging in union activities. When a pro-union communist flier was found in the newsroom amid early efforts to unionise, NYT Managing Editor Edwin James wrote to publisher Arthurs Hays Sulzberger: “The spies report that some of the auditing people are back of this. Maybe it will amuse [NYT corporate auditor] Mr. Weinstock to try to find out who.”

The revelation about a spy network at the NYT followed an investigation into the paper by the National Labor Relations Board, brought by the American Newspaper Guild. The Guild had charged that the NYT violated the Wagner Act by intimidating and discriminating against pro-union employees. Though James retorted that the term “spies” was used jokingly and that “voluntary informant” was a more accurate term, the paper’s general manager, Julius Ochs Adler, testified that the paper indeed had run an “espionage system” (though Adler claimed it had been mothballed). Sulzberger, however, defended the paper’s espionage against its employees, testifying that it used the tactic “to avoid raising issues with the Guild”.

The National Labor Relations Board trial erupted after a group of NYT reporters agitating for unionisation were either transferred to different departments or summarily fired. One of the most important cases involved the paper’s informal spy-catcher, Harry Weinstock, who had repeatedly questioned a newly hired assistant named Grace Porter about her communist sympathies and affiliations (she denied being a communist) after Weinstock discovered she was involved in meetings to unionise. After Weinstock reassured her that the NYT, as a liberal paper, had no issue employing communists, Porter was transferred, put on half time (slashing her salary by 40%) and, shortly thereafter, fired. (Note that the NYT was using insinuations about communism to silence union-related dissent a decade before Joseph McCarthy began his communist witch hunts.)

At least two other similar cases were examined by the National Labor Relations Board, including that of Fred Jaegar, a reporter and one of the organisers of a smaller guild at the paper, who was accused by the NYT of not working hard enough and showing up late multiple times a month, despite his frequently staying late at the office. Jaegar was subject to extreme scrutiny before being transferred to “a job at which he could not possibly succeed”, according to the National Labor Relations Board investigation. He was then fired.

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While we might look to figures like Weinstock as lone crusaders, the reality is the most pernicious argument against unionising the newsroom came from Arthur Hays Sulzberger himself. On this question, Sulzberger took a position that made organised labour and good journalism completely incompatible, arguing that a Guild shop (one that would require all employees to be members of the union) covering editorial roles would cause bias in the NYT news reporting as, in Sulzberger’s view, allowing unions in news organisations risked “polluting the well-spring of editorial objectivity”. This was quite a claim: not merely that unionising was bad for business, but that it was antithetical to journalism itself.

Sulzberger would pass this sentiment onto his son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (grandfather to today’s publisher) whose attitude towards unions, the NYT noted in Sulzberger’s obituary, “ranged from annoyance to hostility”. This attitude would have significant consequences for the company, in particular on one occasion that inadvertently shifted the balance of power towards disempowered workers.

In 1972, Betsy Wade, the first female news editor at the NYT, began working with arts columnist Grace Glueck to force the NYT to change its practices towards female employees. Despite Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on sex, the NYT had no women on its masthead or among its ten business-side vice presidents. Women were also paid on average $59 a week (about $400 in today’s money) less than the paper’s male employees.

Glueck and Wade formed the Women’s Caucus at the NYT, seeking to use the influence of the Times Guild to drive change. Perhaps not to their surprise, the NYT refused to engage. After two years of NYT stalling, the Women’s Caucus filed a lawsuit, which the paper quickly settled, setting a major precedent for women’s rights at news organisations.

How does the NYT reconcile such chequered past — and present — on organised labour with its own editorial positions? The answer is simple. Although we refer to the New York Times as if it’s a single thing, in fact there are two entities that get conflated: the New York Times newsroom and the New York Times Company. As a Times software engineer elegantly put it in last year: “The newsroom is responsible for the primary product of the Times, but there’s an entirely separate business side to the organisation. That’s the side making these decisions. It’s not the newsroom calling the shots. When we think of the NYT’s leadership, it’s not a writer or editor making that decision — it’s the chief executive officer.”

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In the case of the NYT’s most recent labour flap, the current publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, along with the company’s CEO, decided that the NYT would not voluntarily recognise the Tech Guild and called for union elections to be conducted by the National Labor Relations Board — the same body Sulzberger’s ancestor testified before nearly a century ago. As the NewsGuild has pointed out, the Times had previously thrown its editorial weight behind laws designed to allow majority sign-up to a union as legally binding, writing in a 2007 editorial that employers who reject the majority’s signatures often leverage “the time before the vote to pressure employees to rethink their decision to unionise”.

Yet this is exactly what the NYT is accused of doing with the Tech Guild. In one of the more hardline tactics, the NYT has since pressed employees into captive audience meetings, where management representatives spend an hour or more explaining to staff why unionising will be bad for them.

But as efforts to unionise heat up, the question now is how long the NYT can play this double role. It’s been doing for almost a century. But at some point soon, the practice of preaching labour virtue while practising capitalist vice will no longer be tenable.

Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesn’t live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends”. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to “mobilise at every level”. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: “Jan. 6 is not in the past,” we’re warned. “It is every day”.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust — and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had been right all along: that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their lives meaning. There were now Right-wing insurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wanted the Capitol siege to happen.

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Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clinton’s marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was a blowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of “sexual relations”, as Clinton had sought to claim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amis’s expression, “the Age of Vanished Normalcy”: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, a clash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need to pre-emptively act to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, as Christopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: “I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated.” Hitchens, who confided that he felt “exhilarated” at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principle for the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was the prudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchens’s metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

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None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of the rioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest that far-Right terrorism in America has increased markedly over the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of a perpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophic to a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

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More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. “Such nostalgia,” he noted, “will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.”

So when The New York Times publishes an editorial on how “every day is Jan. 6 now”, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology”. Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In his memoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire “to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like”. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for an impending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isn’t their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue — even if it means engaging in irresponsible fear-mongering and flagrant exaggeration.

There’s something uniquely fascinating about the persona of the journalist who betrays his or her professional ethics. There is no medical malpractitioner of historic notoriety, no lawyer so inept or corrupt that their infamy elicits international derision a century later. In fact, it might be only in the field of espionage that we find a parallel. The reason is that, like a nation’s spies, a citizenry loans journalists its most precious asset: trust. This is even more true in secular societies where social institutions take on the characteristics of religious bodies, guiding belief and shaping public perception of reality.

In this context, no American journalist has endured the same level of historical contempt as Hannah-Jones’s most notorious New York Times predecessor, Walter Duranty. One of the reasons Duranty’s name still echoes in the halls of ignominy is because his betrayal was of such an epic nature. He was not only the Times’s top Russia correspondent during the most important period of Russian-American relations in a century (namely, the very early days of the Soviet regime) but a celebrity intellectual.

Duranty’s star had risen so high that when the United States government officially recognised the Soviet Union in 1934, he was chosen to accompany its soon-to-be ambassador to the US — and escorted the newly minted American ambassador from DC back to Moscow. Indeed, it was Duranty himself who had advised Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then at the end of his presidential campaign, that US recognition of the new Soviet regime was the correct course of action.

But that was no shock. Three years earlier, around the time that international headlines were beginning to report on a famine unfolding in the Ukraine, Duranty had reported the very opposite. It wasn’t simply that he downplayed the famine, which Robert Conquest estimated killed upward of five million people in two years; he actively denied it.

What’s often missed when discussing Duranty, however, is the intentional nature of his malfeasance. When the Times came under pressure from the Ukrainian-American community in the early Noughties to return the “Duranty Pulitzer”, the paper’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., went against the recommendation of a historian hired by the Times to assess the matter. The historian recommended (unsurprisingly) that the Times should return the prize. Sulzberger refused, chalking Duranty’s cover-up to nothing more than “slovenly” reporting.

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But Duranty, an Oxford-educated polyglot, was anything but slovenly. The truth of the matter could be far more disturbing, and can be found in a statement Duranty had made years earlier. In June 1931, while visiting the US embassy in Berlin to renew his passport, Duranty made a remark to a State Department official so significant that the official recorded it verbatim and entered it into the State Department record: “In agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,” Duranty told the American diplomat, “[Duranty’s] official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet government and not his own.”

We might be tempted to think that a correspondent of a previous century would have little to do with the most celebrated journalist of the present day. Certainly, it is inconceivable that anything can compare with Duranty’s attempts to deny the Ukraine famine — and the deaths that followed. But the parallels between Duranty and Nikole Hannah-Jones seem hard to ignore. Like Duranty, Hannah-Jones has become the New York Times’s marquee reporter, her public profile taking on celebrity proportions. Hannah-Jones, like Duranty, is as often the subject of headlines as the creator of them. And, of course, there’s the Pulitzer Prize both she and Duranty won relatively early in their respective careers. But perhaps more than any of these factors, the tone and tenor of the subject matter each reporter covered set the stage for a spectacular rise and, at least in Duranty’s case (for now), an equally precipitous fall.

In her first major piece for the New York Times Magazine, where she was a staff writer, Hannah-Jones focused on school segregation — and did so through the lens of her own experience as a mother of a school-aged child. The 2016 article, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City”, placed Hannah-Jones herself squarely at the centre of the all-encompassing topic of race relations in America.

The 10,000-word piece launched Hannah-Jones into that rare elite which consists of reporters who become the focus of a larger reportorial arc. Just a week after it was published, the Times covered Hannah-Jones in an article that was part of a “Times Insider” series. Called “‘Surreal’: A Reporter Is in the Center of a Story She Covered”, the piece was written in the first person by Hannah-Jones and offered a look into the sausage factory of producing a culturally resonant piece for the New York Times. By October 2017, the Times was trumpeting Hannah-Jones in rockstar-like terms, running pieces about her with headlines such as “The Best of Nikole Hannah-Jones”.

And then came 1619, which made her as close to a household name as a journalist can in America. From an Oprah-backed film and TV production deal to appearances on NPR’s Fresh Air and The Daily Show, a talk with Moonlight creator Barry Jenkins to a 1619 book and accompanying children’s book, Hannah-Jones experienced the dazzling embrace of America’s corporate culture machine.

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Crucially, like that of Walter Duranty, Hannah-Jones’s celebrity has had the effect of coating her journalism with a lacquer which shields it from the buffeting forces of criticism. What unites that criticism, from both sides of the political aisle, is something fundamental to any work of journalism: accuracy. While some conservative outlets have attacked the 1619 Project on ideological grounds, the dozens of academics and many journalists who joined the debate intoned with a simple and hard-to-dislodge idea: the 1619 Project was not simply factually flawed, but deliberately, as Phillip Magness, one of the Project’s most vocal critics, put it, it amounts to “the sacrifice of scholarly standards in the service of the ideological objective”.

In the New York Times Magazine issue dedicated to the 1619 Project, there are the subtle but significant problems, such as the mischaracterisation of America’s early economy, which the Project emphasises was built on slavery, when, according to scholars who participated in the debate, slavery played a relatively minor role compared to the Northern industrial and commercial economy. Then there are the arguments that, when taken at face value, are simply absurd, such as the causal connection the Project draws between slavery and modern-day traffic jams in Atlanta or America’s love of sugary treats.

It’s the deeper claims of the Project, however, and specifically those made by Hannah-Jones herself, which are the most problematic — and which most closely tie Hannah-Jones to Duranty. The publication of a piece by Politico by Leslie Harris, a professor of African American history at Northwestern University, months after the 1619 Project was launched, identified the rot at the heart of the Project: “On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

This claim, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, is the fulcrum on which Hannah-Jones’s argument swings. The reason is that the 1619 Project was not simply predicated on the idea that slavery was of consequence to American history; that is a claim most (if not all) of the Project’s most vociferous critics would not have objected to. Instead, the thesis of the 1619 Project is that America is rooted in slavery. In pursuing this mission, what Hannah-Jones attempted to do is not simply “reframe” American history (as one of the introductions to the 1619 Project claimed) but rework reality.

It’s this attempt to edit history that most closely unites Hannah-Jones’s project with that of Walter Duranty. In both cases, historical realities were tarred over in order to make way for a new narrative. But beyond the personal failings of Duranty and Hannah-Jones, there is a larger and more significant connection between the two journalists. And that, of course, is the New York Times.

It is no coincidence that two largely successful attempts to alter history and edit reality have been carried out under the aegis of the New York Times. While Duranty and Hannah-Jones took centre stage, the platform essential to each was provided by America’s self-described paper of record.

As with any corporate-backed endeavour, a costly investment such as 1619 is undertaken only when there is a likely outcome of commensurately rich rewards. This is what we so often miss about major corporate news organisations such as the Times, which is far less significantly a newsroom built on a system of editorial practices than it is a reputation, a social construct, that produces trust — as well as a business mechanism that monetises that trust and processes it into power.

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Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?

By Ashley Rindsberg

This model applies equally to the denial of the Ukraine Famine and the creation of the 1619 Project. The case of the former is explained by the drive to be positioned at the very centre of the swirl of power, influence and profit presented by the nascent, rapidly industrialising economic power of the Soviet Union that was quickly modernising the agrarian economy of tsarist Russia. The USSR was a massive market of 150 million people that for nearly two decades since the revolution had been restricted to US corporate interests.

With the 1619 Project, the New York Times’s business interests are just as decisive a factor. The Times’s management is well aware that it has to replace its audience of ageing liberals with young adherents of progressive ideologies impassioned enough to pay for the digital subscriptions that are at the heart of its business model. For the Times, this is a matter of existential significance. As a New York Times Company vice president has explained, one of the aims of 1619 is, according to NiemanLab, to “convince more of its 150 million monthly readers to pay for a subscription”.

This makes good sense considering that over a third of the Times‘s revenue now comes from digital subscriptions — and nearly two-thirds of the Times’s American audience is made up of millennial and Gen Z readers. Print subscriptions, meanwhile, are in “steady decline”; advertising is falling by close to (and sometimes more than) double digits each year.

Like all dynasties, the Sulzbergers, the billionaire family that controls the New York Times, are, in part, motivated by financial self-interest. But in the current cultural environment, where a movement of ideological upheaval is at work, it is power as much as money that lies behind what is the most significant journalistic endeavour of the past decade. The Times’s progressive turn (like that of so many American brands) is more top-down than bottom-up; it is a quest for influence rather than principle. The Times knows which way the wind is blowing and in a raging storm why not sail downwind?

The only problem with this approach — in business as much as in life — is that it doesn’t work. As Captain MacWhir in Joseph Conrad’s novella The Typhoon shouts through the raging storm to the story’s young protagonist: “They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind.” In its cynical embrace of progressive politics, the Times runs the risk of capsizing in storm waters it mistakenly believes it can control.

The same may well be true about Nikole Hannah-Jones. To her credit, unlike Walter Duranty, Nikole Hannah-Jones does not appear to be a passenger enjoying the cushy ride of celebrity. From all appearances, she is a true believer who is not just willing but eager to make the necessary sacrifices to bring about her vision of justice in the world. Whether that makes her more or less problematic than Duranty, only time will tell.

Living in the Gilded Age, there were plenty of poor people for journalists to sympathise with — the streets were teeming with working-class Americans who had been cast out of the comforts enjoyed by the obscenely wealthy industrialists. You might think modern-day America — a new Gilded Age in which the gap between the rich and the poor is wider than it has been in living memory — would provide another such opportunity for American journalists to sympathise with the lower classes. You would be wrong.

Back in 2016, journalists, Democratic politicians and Never Trumpers struggling to comprehend how they lost the election came up with two competing explanations. One camp argued that it was a protest vote stemming from the economic anxiety and despair birthed by globalisation, stagnant working-class wages, and downward mobility for the shrinking middle class. The other camp argued that Trump’s supporters were simply racists.

Hillary Clinton was the rare figure to hold both views, immortalised in her infamous comment that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”. One might have expected that after Clinton lost the election, liberals would question the efficacy, if not the morality, of calling a quarter of the country racist.

Instead, they doubled down: it wasn’t just a quarter; it was half the nation. Everyone who voted for Trump was racist. By 2017, the very term “economic anxiety” had been branded a dog whistle for racism by some of the highest profile journalists in the country. So definitive was the racism explanation that during the 2020 election, the New York Times appears not to have run a single op-ed from a Trump supporter explaining their vote; how could the paper of record publish people who everyone knew were avowed racists?

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Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?

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How did this happen? How did the journalists, thinkers, influencers and professional Tweeters who too often set the agenda for the nation — people who consider themselves on the liberal and progressive Left — manage to police out of existence the devastating effects of globalisation on the middle and working classes of all races? How did we allow the definition of racism to melt until it covered people — of all races — who found their lots slightly improved over the three years prior to the pandemic, a time when wages for the bottom 25% rose for the first time in a decade?

You have to be pretty far removed from the pinch of economic anxiety to confuse it with bigotry. And indeed, America’s media has undergone a status revolution over the past century.

Writing in the Nineties, Christopher Lasch observed that the Left had begun to portray the nation, the neighbourhood and even the commitment to a common standard as racist, as part of a larger attack on populism and abandonment of the working class. But in truth that shift was a long time coming; throughout the 20^th century, American journalism went from being a working-class trade to a highly educated caste.

As I chronicle in my new book, American journalism was born in the 19^th century of a populist revolution in the form of the penny press, which was explicitly produced by and for the labouring class. At the time, the newspapers in circulation existed solely for the political and business elites: they were prohibitively expensive, and contained shipping schedules, wholesale prices, speeches from Congress and other things that interested few except those whose livings were made in business or politics.

The cheap penny papers filled that gap in the market, and were soon impossible to ignore thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who purchased them every day (catering to the lower classes has the benefit of there being so many of them, after all). From that moment, through the middle of the last century, journalism became a blue-collar job, one in which a journalist was as likely to not have a college degree as to have one.

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This is no longer the case. If a 1937 study found that fewer than half of journalists were college-educated and many hadn’t even finished high school, by 2015, 92% of American journalists had a college degree, a number that’s certainly even higher today. And college itself is no longer enough; to become a journalist today in a rapidly constricting industry, you have to go to the best colleges and take multiple unpaid internships in the most expensive American cities — where the vast majority of journalists remain.

But journalists today are not just more educated and progressive than the country at large; like other highly educated liberals, they have become increasingly affluent. As the local newspaper industry collapsed in the face of the internet, it squeezed those who made it to the top 10%, while dropping everyone else out. The fact that the starting salary of a digital media job is so low is not proof of the industry’s egalitarianism but of its exclusivity; who but the scions of the wealthy can afford to live in New York City or Washington, D.C. on $35,000 a year?

With a few exceptions, journalists along with the rest of America’s highly educated liberals now, by and large, belong to what the French economist Thomas Picketty calls a Brahmin Left. And as journalists became more highly educated and more affluent, they stopped writing for or about the working class. In its place, a moral panic around race and an obsession with causes once confined to academia — open borders, intersectionality, anti-racism, anti-Zionism — provided a convenient alibi for an elite that still sees itself as on the side of the little guy.

It’s not all on individual journalists, though. Journalists have for decades been more liberal than their fellow countrymen. But in the past, this liberalism was checked by their publishers, who were often the owners of large corporations, or Republicans, or both. They wanted their newspapers and their news stations to appeal to the vast American middle, which meant that journalists were not at liberty to indulge their own political preferences.

Then came the internet and with it the collapse of the local newspaper industry and the birth of a business model that was diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. Success is now rated in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue. And the best way to achieve this is to build a niche audience — more often than not, a highly educated, highly affluent, highly liberal niche audience who use the politics of identity to mask their success.

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In other words, the media’s moral panic around race in America and the abandonment of the working class go hand in hand, like a photo of Angela Davis on the cover of the New York Times’s T Magazine and a Cartier ad on the back; like affluent liberals in New York’s most expensive neighbourhoods demanding we defund the police amid a historic rise in murder taking place in neighbourhoods just ten blocks away; like American Express hosting diversity, equity and inclusion training sessions in which the facilitator tells employees that capitalism is racist.

This perfect alignment of journalistic and corporate interests is one of the great ironies of the progressive culture war. It makes individual journalists feel like heroes while making their bosses and shareholders (and themselves) even richer.

Of course, the racism of state actors remains a problem in need of urgent repair; police brutality, for example, remains a scourge on communities of colour. But the racial moral panic obscures — and therefore perpetuates — the real divide separating America into two groups: an economic and cultural one, a giant and ever-growing chasm separating the college educated from those they disdain.

And therein lies the real tragedy: the liberal news media has abandoned the working class, allowing conservative outlets to swoop in and cater to them. The conservative media may not do much to help the economic fortunes of the downwardly mobile, but at least it doesn’t sneer at the working class while abandoning them economically.

That, ultimately, is the story of today’s national media landscape in a nutshell: with few exceptions, it is waging a moral panic around race to disguise the abandonment of the working class — and it’s getting rich off of it.

Meanwhile, column inches continue to be generated by whether or not the next 007 should be a woman, and Superman is now bisexual. Just as reliable as the output of these franchises is the grumbling about our apparent inability to come up with fresh new stories.

The usual explanation given for the domination of franchises over new material is that media industries like a known quantity. But what if the real problem lies deeper? What if, in truth, we’re no longer able to come up with new stories because we’ve turned storytelling itself into a branch of influencer culture?

This was the unsettling implication of last week’s water-cooler debate: “Kidneygate”. A long New York Times essay told the strange story of Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson, two aspiring writers now embroiled in a bitter dispute.

Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger, then created a Facebook group to talk about her “journey”, and shared it with her writing group. Larson, a member of the same writing group, then wrote a short story depicting an egotistical and implicitly borderline racist woman donating a kidney. When Dorland learned this, she began an increasingly monomaniacal campaign of lawfare against Larson.

Like the dress that was either black and blue or white and gold, the story prompted a lot of debate. When does taking material from the world around you stop being legitimate and become invasive? Do we “own” our own stories? Or as the NYT put it: “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”

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But perhaps the question should be: would you trade a kidney for a shot at immortality? For while on the face of it Kidneygate seems to be two women arguing about art, in truth it’s about the only form of immortality on offer since the internet killed literature: clout.

Once upon a time, the way to get famous as a writer was to publish a book. But the internet inverted that. The print publishing industry today is both bigger than ever and more beleaguered than ever by competition from other media, not to mention the ocean of free digital content. The result is diminishing returns: more than 188,000 books are published every year in the UK alone, but only 5% of authors sell enough to earn more than £30,000 a year.

Against that backdrop, not unreasonably, publishers are more likely to be interested in people with the sort of profile that will help market their work. There are countless talented writers out there; the decisive factor in who gets the book deal is often being an existing player in public conversation. In other words, the swiftest route to becoming a famous author today is already being famous for something else.

That means aspiring writers need that indispensable resource for an attention economy: “clout”, which translates roughly as “the number of eyeballs you can persuade to notice you online”. And chasing clout is indisputably a skill, albeit not a literary one.

Building up clout can be done several ways, but perhaps the two most common are emotional exhibitionism and identity-politics controversy. Expert wielders of clout attract fans and haters in equal measure, set people arguing among themselves and then leverage the resulting public profile for real-world power or earnings.

One such expert clout-engineer is Nikocado Avocado, real name Nick Perry, a YouTube celebrity famous for his “extreme eating” or “muckbang” videos. Nikocado Avocado’s content is voyeuristic in the extreme. Categories on his channel include “Fights”, “Emotional” and “Upset Feelings” among others. More importantly, he has 2.6 million subscribers — a store of clout that translates into serious earnings. In 2019, his net worth was estimated at $3m.

It’s almost impossible to go too far with this kind of content. The only unforgivable crime, as far as consumers are concerned, is being caught faking the emotion. “Mommy vlogger” Jordan Cheyenne was recently pilloried after she accidentally uploaded an unedited video of herself and her child, in which she could be heard encouraging her child to act like he was crying. She has since deleted her channel.

In the more traditional cultural spheres of academia, politics and literature, competition for eyeballs drives clout-chasing identity politics controversies. These can be guaranteed to spice up any otherwise dull policy debate with angry culture war clicks, while handily boosting the profile of the would-be activist. Perhaps the consummate operator in this mode is the US Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who attained meme status recently by appearing at the $30,000-a-ticket US Met Gala in a white dress with “TAX THE RICH” scrawled across the back, then blamed the criticism she received on racism and sexism.

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In every case, though, the core feature of clout-chasing is that it centres not on what you say, but on others’ perception of who (or what) you are. And here we see the heart of Kidneygate: a dispute over who gets to use the organ-donation story as a means of cultivating their public self.

If Nikocado Avocado figuratively spills his guts for those who follow his channel, Kidneygate saw someone spill them literally — and then post about it on social media. Dorland created a Facebook group to collect the applause she expected to receive. She walked in a local parade as ambassador for organ donation. She even created a hashtag: #domoreforeachother.

Larson, in contrast, wanted to use the kidney-donation story alongside her own Asian-American ethnic identity to boost her profile with a short story about “white saviour” politics. That is, she wanted to apply the clout-rich filter of American racial politics to this highly emotive content, in order to increase her own standing in the world of fiction-writing. And it should have worked: before Dorland’s legal action scuppered the offer, Larson’s work had been selected for “One City One Story”, a Boston literary award that would have seen her short story distributed free all over the city.

I’m just about old enough to remember the Before Times prior to mass social media. Back then, we still clung to the idea that writing was about immortality — an idea captured by Shakespeare: “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Now, though, writing a book is just part of the “media mix”. Where fame used to be a means of getting your message out, now messages are a means of getting your fame out. In September, CBS launched The Activist, a show that turns political activism into reality TV — and where successful activism is measured “via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input”. Never mind making a tangible real-world impact: like successful writing, successful activism is measured in clout.

And once you’ve attained enough of it, you can pivot effortlessly from reality TV to book-writing, perfume launches, politics or whatever. The only condition is that, like Harry and Meghan, you continue to feed gobbets of personal tragedy, emotional intensity, marginalised identity or some other kind of emotive content to the clout machine.

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Do this, and the whole media mix is yours. It’s not just the raft of celebrities flocking to write children’s books. The 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman made history earlier this year as Biden’s inauguration poet, as much for her look and ethnicity as her aggressively bland poetry. Shortly after the inauguration, she signed a modelling contract.

And this pipeline works just as well in reverse. Transgender model Munroe Bergdorf has a threadbare literary track record, having attained clout mostly for being photographed wearing clothes, or for public rows with corporations and gender-critical feminists over identity politics. And yet Bergdorf received a six-figure advance from Bloomsbury for the “memoir and manifesto” Transitional.

The true message of Kidneygate, then, is not about art but what art now serves. It signals that if we allow it, the world of letters will irrecoverably join cinema, music, politics and activism as mulch for an online economy of attention.

And the Faustian nature of the bargain is increasingly clear. A culture powered solely by the hunger for intensity will devour any form of culture that isn’t already literal pornography. For in a raw economy of attention, the aesthetic or moral value of your work is irrelevant: what matters is emotional intensity and the power to generate discussion. Whether it’s politics, art, literature, music or simply people’s personal lives, the clout economy will transmute it, by a kind of reverse alchemy, into pornography of the self.

Before pivoting to YouTube emotional exhibitionism. Nikocado Avocado dreamed of being a concert violinist. Before pivoting to organ donation for clicks, Dawn Dorland dreamed of being a celebrated author. But there’s little clout to be gained through working hard at creating beauty for a common cultural domain. No wonder one in five British children want to be social media influencers when they grow up. And when everyone’s so busy crafting their online selves, no wonder there’s no creative energy left to dream new shared stories, leaving us nothing but zombie franchises crudely gingered-up by the culture wars.

Will we rediscover an ability to resist donating everything — even our organs — to the clout machine? I hope so. If we don’t soon regain a measure of digital self-restraint, the endpoint of every aspiration will be emotional porn. Or perhaps we could call it Kidneygate culture: a never-ending livestream of lost and miserable souls self-defining, fighting, crying, binge-eating or quite literally eviscerating themselves, all for our voyeuristic pleasure.

When Antony Blinken was selected as Secretary of State, Foreign Policy magazine hailed it as a “return to normalcy for weary diplomats”. Finally, when President Biden was elected, the New York Times raved that it represented an end to “four tumultuous years under Trump”;  the Los Angeles Times’s editorial board welcomed his election as a victory “for the American people”.

Biden, Blinken and Sullivan — three men who, less than a year ago, were cheered on as the sensible, cool-headed triumvirate capable of saving the West. Today that promise has been sullied. Instead, they will be remembered as three of the key figures responsible for the tragedy now unfolding in Afghanistan.

Until the sudden and complete collapse of the Nato-backed government in Kabul, the Biden administration had enjoyed its very own “special relationship” with the American media. They were frequently thrown soft-ball questions. They were always allowed to point to the villainous Donald Trump whenever they needed a scapegoat. The media corps is always on their side — and who can blame them? You can’t ask tough questions while munching on cookies from the Press Secretary’s mother-in-law. That would be rude.

To listen to Biden’s media cheerleaders over the past seven months has been about as exciting as reading Pravda. “America is back. Trump was an aberration. We are going to bring Americans together and heal. We’re giving people hope and change. Build back better. Let’s get high on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).” And so on. God knows it was tedious. But Biden’s team was more than happy to stick to this hymn sheet. Nobody leaked.

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You would have thought that the new administration would have been able to exploit for just a bit longer the narrative of an experienced, selfless, prudent President Biden — the steady hand after the wrecking ball. Where Donald Trump was off-putting, rash and rude, Joe Biden could so easily be presented as cool — those Aviators, man! — thoughtful and cooperative. In short, Biden was poised to become to the United States what Queen Elizabeth is to the United Kingdom: a rock of reliability and continuity, an embodiment of national pride and humility all at once.

Instead, seven months into the administration’s tenure, the Biden administration hunkered down and made a decision that would erase years of progress. It’s all too easy to picture the various individuals, all at the height of their professional careers, huddled together in the Situation Room. Some old and wise. Some fresh-faced and gung-ho. All fooled by the conviction that they can do no wrong.

While Team Biden already resorted to its standard fallback of pointing the finger at Trump — who, admittedly, initiated negotiations with the Taliban and made the original deal to exit Afghanistan — it is the current President who accelerated the plan for full military withdrawal before even attempting to repatriate all American citizens, evacuate our Afghan allies or secure any guarantees on human rights (particularly for Afghan women and girls). It was Blinken who told Senator Lindsey Graham during his confirmation hearing that any US agreement with the Taliban should “absolutely” be “conditions-based”. Where are those conditions now?

Just weeks ago, Biden assured us there would be no images of Americans climbing on roofs to evacuate in helicopters like in Saigon. Now, with the August 31^st deadline looming, it seems increasingly likely that some Americans might not make it out at all. Those who have applied for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) feel hopelessly abandoned. Our Nato allies look on with horror.

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Speculation over what compelled Biden’s national security team to withdraw so suddenly without a proper contingency plan remains ongoing. Theories range from shrill claims about how “these men must be evil” to “experts” praising what they deem a calculated, realist approach to a never-ending war that was sapping attention and resources away from the bigger threats posed by China.

The more convincing argument, however, is more straightforward: The Biden administration screwed up because they had grown accustomed to uncritical support from the press. Instead of upholding their traditional role of checking and vetting individuals and decisions, for seven months the media has scarcely offered up a critical word of Biden. It was almost the exact opposite for Trump, who came in for relentless criticism — some of it fictitious.

Of course, nobody enjoys being hauled over the coals by the press corps. But it focuses the mind — unlike canine adulation. If enough people tell you that you’re going to be the most transformative president since Lyndon Johnson, it’s easy to forget how Johnson’s presidency ended.

That honeymoon period is over now. The situation in Kabul is now so dire that there is no option but to report on the failures of the administration. Even our new pedigree of activists journalists, for whom reporting is a form of proselytising, can no longer play defence for the President because the images coming out of Afghanistan are indefensible. When they learn that a toddler of one of our Afghan interpreters has been crushed to death in the vast and desperate scrum outside Kabul airport, Americans are rightly angry.

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And so Biden now cuts an altogether different figure. After his briefings, he scurries away, fearing an inquisition. Meanwhile, his press secretary is starting to look like all press secretaries: her jaw set, her eyes tired, her implausible talking points delivered almost defiantly.

For Afghanistan, the return of a critical press corps comes too late. But for Americans there is a lesson to be learned. Perhaps if the liberal media had done a better job during confirmation hearings and appointments, the situation in Afghanistan could have unfolded differently, with more effective leaders at the helm. Perhaps if earlier policy blunders had been subjected to closer scrutiny, this one might not have been so casually made.

“Democracy dies in darkness” was one of the many facile slogans adopted by the anti-Trump press in 2017, as if only their fearless reporting stood between America and a 1930s-style fascist dystopia. But as we are now witnessing, competent government instead dies when the lights are dimmed to flatter a new administration. When journalists and editors suspend their critical faculties, tragedy is bound to follow.

In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”. The question we have to ask now is how, and why, did this happen?

To a great extent, I believe the answer lies with the world’s most powerful news outlet, the New York Times. At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemic’s origins. And it celebrated China’s success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCP’s absurd mortality numbers at face value, reporting in August 2020 that 4,634 Chinese people died from the virus and, six months later, that there were 4,636 total deaths. That in a country of 1.4 billion people only two people died of Covid-19 in the half a year defies logic and common sense. Still, the Times legitimised the CCP numbers by printing them as hard fact.

Of course, over the past year newspapers across the world have fallen for the CCP’s distorted Covid-19 narrative. And there is no evidence to suggest that the CCP did put pressure on the Times. But when it came to the lab leak debate, the Times was relentless. Starting in early 2020, when little was known about the virus — and nothing about its origins — the Times adopted a stridently anti-lab leak stance. In its first report on the topic, a February 17, 2020 article covering comments made by Sen. Tom Cotton, the Times stigmatised lab leak as a “fringe theory”. Once the story was published, its reporter took to Twitter to describe it as “the kind of conspiracy once reserved for the tinfoil hatters”.

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Only one week prior, another outlet made strikingly similar claims. In an editorial, the CCP-owned China Daily thundered that Cotton’s decision to spread “malicious rumors” shows “how irresponsible some are in their haste to attack China”. The Times, echoing China Daily, also cast the lab leak hypothesis as a “rumor”.

Over the months, the Times’s coverage grew even more strident — and more in line with Chinese propaganda. In February 2020, it gave a platform to zoologist Peter Daszak, publishing an opinion piece by him which claimed that the pandemic was caused by “road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development”. Daszak argued that “discovering and sequencing” viruses like Covid-19 in labs like the one in Wuhan should be a priority.

The Times, which used Daszak as a key source in over a dozen articles, has never mentioned that Daszak’s organisation funded the Wuhan lab, in particular research into bats and coronaviruses, a flagrant conflict of interest. Crucially, there was no mention of this when a reporter interviewed Daszak this February, following his return from a heavily criticised WHO investigation into the virus’s origins. (Danszak later recused himself from the investigation because of the conflict of interest.)

But the Times also never revealed that Daszak was a favoured source for another outlet: China Daily. The state-owned media organisation, along with Xinhua and sister outlet Global Times, repeatedly quoted Daszak to assure readers of China’s full cooperation in the search for the virus’s origins — and to discredit the possibility of a lab leak.

In fact, the Times appears to have been so enthusiastic in its attempts to discredit the lab leak hypothesis that Chinese propaganda outlets promoted its reporting on social media. In April 2020, for instance, the Times published an article claiming the Trump Administration’s investigation into a lab leak “has echoes of the Bush administration’s 2002 push for assessments saying that Iraq had weapons of mass of destruction.” Within minutes, a China Daily columnist retweeted the story and parroted its central claim.

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But why would the Times stake its credibility on a position that had no evidence behind it, and one that, as we are now discovering, looks increasingly unlikely? Was it simply a knee-jerk response by a liberal outlet to President Trump’s endorsement of the lab leak hypothesis at the time? Perhaps — but I suspect the answer is more complicated than that. Researching and writing my new book, I discovered that the Times has a dark history of inadvertently helping authoritarian regimes with its reporting, including the Nazis, the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro.

In the case of China, this appears true to an alarming degree. For over a decade, the Times has nurtured a special relationship with the CCP — though we can only speculate as to whether this influenced its editorial output. Still, the Times certainly appeared unconcerned about the appearance of impropriety as it took millions of dollars from Chinese propaganda outlets, most prominently China Daily. In exchange for this badly needed revenue, the Times has published hundreds of “advertorials” written by Chinese propaganda outlets, including China Daily, which promote CCP messaging on the most serious topics, such as a double-page spread on the hotly contested Diaoyu Islands brazenly titled: “Diaoyu Islands Belong to China”.

But the paper’s advertising relationship with Chinese state outlets is only the visible part of the iceberg. In 2012, seeking to capitalise on China’s burgeoning middle and upper classes, the Times launched a Chinese edition of its daily paper followed by the launch of a luxury lifestyle magazine. “The appetite for New York Times journalism in Chinese has never been stronger,” a company press release stated at the time.

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In investing so heavily in China, the Times unintentionally handed the rapacious CCP an editorial lever to sway coverage. The Times learned this first-hand when, in 2012, the CCP blocked Chinese access to the Times online in retaliation for an unfavourable article on the family finances of China’s outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao. The Times set out on a year-long “lobbying” effort to restore coverage that included meetings with Xinhua, the parent of China Daily.

Today, however, just as the tide is turning on the lab leak debate, so too is the Times’s approach to the subject. Last summer, the Times abruptly ended its advertising relationship with Chinese state media outlets and scrubbed all trace of the advertorials from its archive. And in recent months, it has published a handful of articles quoting scientists who believe we should take seriously the prospect of a lab leak.

But does this excuse the paper’s behaviour at the start of the pandemic?

Of course, the New York Times, like so many industry-leading corporations, should be expected to make mistakes. But unlike other big businesses, this one is entrusted with shaping our reality — especially on murky issues as critical as the origins of a pandemic that claimed four million lives. Only time will tell whether the lab leak hypothesis is true or false. But whatever the result, what a tragedy it would be if the Times’s coverage delayed that verdict.

But are its findings really evidence of widespread racism in the US? Hardly. In fact, you need only look at the behaviour of Americans — at the number of interracial marriages or police shootings of minorities, for example — to see that racism has almost never been so absent.

Take interracial marriages. In 1958, 94% of whites opposed it — yet just 10% do today. Similarly, the long-running General Social Survey found that in the 1970s nearly 60% of white Americans agreed with the statement that blacks shouldn’t “push themselves where they’re not wanted”. In 2002, that figure fell to 20% — and the question was discontinued.

It’s much the same story with police shootings of African-Americans. Despite the charged rhetoric of the past year, which culminated in calls for entire police forces to be disbanded, such shootings are 60-80% lower than they were in the 1960s.

So why is there such a misunderstanding between the American public and the reality of US race relations? The answer, I suspect, reflects a media-driven moral panic — one that is rooted in the racialisation of identity-obsessed progressive politics.

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Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

Indeed, the “rise” of racism in America since 2014 is a social construct that reflects perception rather than daily life. This is largely a result of what Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described in 1973 as the “availability heuristic” — the idea that vivid images rather than statistical reality tends to shape people’s perceptions. For instance, people routinely overestimate vivid phenomena, from crime to the share of Muslims in their country, because these stories make the news. Crime in America may have fallen every year before 2019 — but when asked about it by Gallup, most people in all but two years said crime had risen over the past year.

So too with race. In some ways, this is to be expected. Whenever events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots or the killing of George Floyd make the news, people — shocked by what they are seeing — inevitably perceive race relations to be worse than they are. What is distinctive today, however, is the sustained determination of major progressive news outlets like the New York Times or CNN to centre racism as a dominant theme in American society.

As UnHerd has previously noted, citing ground-breaking research by Zach Goldberg of Georgia State University, the use of the term “racism” and similar terms in mainstream news outlets took off around 2015, (which can be seen here).

What caused this spike? Goldberg cites social media and the new partisan clickbait business model in online journalism as the catalysts. Then, during the campaign for the 2016 US election, Donald Trump energised the enterprise. As the New York Times‘ Ben Smith recounted last year: “Heated Twitter criticism helped to retire euphemisms like “racially charged. The big outlets have gradually, awkwardly, given ground, using “racist” and “lie” more freely, especially when describing Mr. Trump’s behaviour.” Certainly, many of these outlets swiftly retired all objectivity and standards in favour of this new partisan model.

One reason for this was the media’s desire to tap into a mythic script of a white officer killing a black suspect. Indeed, Goldberg’s study of the 2015-20 Washington Post police killings database reveals that black police shooting victims received nine times the media coverage of white victims. As Coleman Hughes has observed, when footage emerged in 2016 showing Tony Timpa, a white suspect, being suffocated as a Dallas officer placed his knee on his neck, the media looked the other way while the officers walked free.

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The battle between the two Americas

By Joel Kotkin

This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public’s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in the Washington Post’s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of “unarmed”, 27. Yet nearly half of “very liberal” Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000. There were over twice as many unarmed whites killed by police as blacks but, as John McWhorter, author of the new book Woke Racism notes, this never makes the news because it doesn’t fit the narrative of white racial violence against African-Americans.

The narrative of police racism is exacerbated by party politics. A young black man is around ten times as likely to die in a car accident than from a police bullet, but only 10% of African-American Democrats and 20% white liberals get this question right — while more than 70% white Trump voters do. While there are some who are undecided, Figure 2 (below) shows that 95% of blacks and 70% of whites who believe “all white Republicans are racist” agree with the statement.

The impact of such warped perceptions cannot be overstated. But rather than trying to correct untruths, the American Left has leaned into these corrosive myths. Witness Elizabeth Warren tweeting that Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, despite the fact that the officer had been cleared by a federal grand jury of wrongdoing. Or, in the wake of the Chauvin verdict, Joe Biden reinforcing the irresponsible fiction that black people in America live in fear of their lives from police bullets:

We must do more on police violence, so they don’t have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. They don’t have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.

No doubt Biden was well-meaning, but he was, in effect, propagating a conspiracy; it was similar to telling an anti-vaxxer that their fears are well-placed and it is up to pharmaceutical companies to eliminate every last side effect before we can expect them to trust a jab.

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The fightback against Critical Race Theory

By Douglas Murray

Of course, Black Americans have had a historically uneasy relationship with the police, but that is no excuse for the blend of romanticism and virtue-signalling that seems to have gripped today's progressives.

While Democratic politicians and the media rightly held Trump to account for violating liberal democratic norms, such as claiming the election was stolen or encouraging the Capitol rioters, they were strangely silent when Biden said he was "praying for the right verdict" in the Chauvin trial and Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters told a crowd in front of the courthouse to "get more confrontational" and let the judge "know that we mean business", Meanwhile, media interest in the record-setting $2 billion in damage caused by the riots following George Floyd's death — which struck a disproportionate number of minority-owned businesses — was minimal.

It was a disturbing reflection of the distorted, racialised reality they now inhabit. Just don't expect them to take responsibility for it.

Probably it is. But maybe it isn’t, and one thing I should have learnt by now is that, in this pandemic, the “maybe” is important. Maybe we can slow the spread of a new form of the variant; maybe that maybe is worth it. Last  March, we thought masks probably wouldn’t help – but we should have thought maybe they would. We need to think not in terms of certainties, but in terms of costs and benefits, gambles and payoffs. It’s an approach that’s all the more important as the vaccine starts to roll out. 

There was a piece in the New York Times about the British regime which illustrated this rather well. “Britain Opts for Mix-and-Match Vaccinations, Confounding Experts”, said the headline (later changed to “Britain Opens Door To…” etc). The British government, said the piece, was going to allow doctors to give patients a dose of one vaccine (for instance the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine), and then a booster shot of a different one (say the Oxford/AstraZeneca one). This was, according to experts quoted, not a method supported by science: they “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess”, said one.

British people, especially those with some understanding of how the British vaccination regime actually works, got understandably annoyed. “This is a complete misrepresentation,” said one fairly typical response; “fake news … false information spread by reputable media organisations”, was another.

That’s probably fair. As the NYT story did say, but didn’t make clear in its headline, the “mix and match” approach is a legitimate one of last resort: the guidelines tell vaccine administrators that “For individuals who started the schedule and who attend for vaccination at a site where the same vaccine is not available, or if the first product received is unknown, it is reasonable to offer one dose of the locally available product to complete the schedule.” 

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When will the Covid-19 vaccine arrive?

By Tom Chivers

It is not saying “Go to it lads, throw the vaccines around like you’re mixing drinks at a stag do”; it’s saying “If you can’t get hold of the vaccine you originally gave, it’s probably better to give a different one as a booster than none at all.” The BMJ has written to the NYT asking for a correction; the drug safety researcher Anthony Cox has written an excellent piece on why the story is unhelpful and dangerous.

So, bad NYT, do better, etc. But there’s a more interesting question: will the mix-and-match vaccinations actually work?

There’s a stock answer to this if you take a certain view of science and knowledge: they won’t. Or, at least, we don’t have any evidence to suggest that they will. It’s not “data driven”, says one expert quoted in the NYT piece. “There are no data on this idea whatsoever,” says another.

This is all true, of course. There have been no randomised controlled trials into whether a Pfizer prime and Ox/AZ boost works, or vice versa. And, traditionally, in medical science, if you haven’t got an RCT showing that your drug regimen works, then you haven’t got any evidence that it works.

But I want to argue that this sort of thinking doesn’t work in emergency situations like the one we’re in. More than that: it’s been a repeated problem throughout the pandemic that we have relied on this “we have the evidence/we don’t have the evidence” binary, meaning that we have moved slowly, waiting for rock-solid confirmation; but moving faster, making decisions on imperfect information, would have saved a lot of lives.

So what do we know? First, it’s worth noting that although the Pfizer and Oxford/AZ vaccines — and the Novavax, and the Moderna, and whatever else — all work through different mechanisms, at quite a fundamental level they all do the same thing. They all present the immune system with an antigen – a little thing that looks like a part of the virus, so that your body produces antibodies which will fight the real virus when it arrives. And in all cases, the antigen is the same thing: the spike protein, the little protrusions that come out from the surface of the virus.

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It pays to believe obviously untrue things

By Tom Chivers

In the case of the mRNA vaccines, such as Moderna’s, and Pfizer’s, the spike protein isn’t in the vaccine itself; the vaccine contains little lengths of RNA which get into your cells and tell them to produce it. The Oxford vaccine does something similar, but uses a genetically modified chimpanzee cold virus to get into your cells. Others, such as Novavax’s, use the spike protein itself. (You can read more about different kinds of vaccine here, should you wish.) But at base, they all work by making sure that your immune system will recognise the spike protein when it sees it for real.

So there are good theoretical reasons to think that a shot from one vaccine will work in combination with another. But there’s another reason as well: analogy from other vaccines. Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told me that “heterologous prime-boost vaccinations” — that is, mixing and matching the two doses — have quite a long history: they were first proposed in 1992.

“The idea has mainly been studied in diseases for which we do not have an effective vaccine,” he said. “In HIV or malaria, or in dengue, where there is a single vaccine but it’s not very good.” In many cases, heterologous vaccinations like this can be more efficacious than homologous ones, he says (and there are papers to back him up). Most of the time, you don’t really need to get your vaccine efficacy up, because most vaccines are amazingly effective, hence their use in situations where the vaccines don’t work very well.

Of course, all those other heterologous vaccinations are backed up with RCTs. “We clearly do not have randomised trial evidence confirming efficacy of this,” says Evans. 

But those other vaccinations aren’t being carried out against a backdrop of about 500 people dying every day in the UK alone from a disease for which we have a working vaccine. “This is not an ideal, to do it until we’ve done the trials,” says Evans. “But in a situation of crisis where we’re not able to get people vaccinated with the same dose of the vaccine, it seems a reasonable thing to do to go beyond where we have trial evidence.”

Dr Zania Stamataki, a viral immunologist at Birmingham University, told me much the same thing. “We wouldn’t do this if we weren’t in a dire situation,” she said. “If we didn’t need to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible to save lives, we’d stick to the on-label advice. But at the moment we don’t have the luxury.”

It’s worth emphasising that this will only happen in extremis: if, say, the Pfizer vaccine has run out locally, or someone’s records are lost. “We’re anticipating that we stick to the regimen, and only in situations where we’ve run out supplement it with other things,” says Stamataki. But both Stamataki and Evans say that it’s a reasonable thing to do in those extreme cases. “Because the [the spike protein antigen] is the same,” says Stamataki, “we anticipate seeing the same result.”

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How dangerous is the Covid mutation?

By Tom Chivers

Of course, it may not work. Babak Javid, an immunology lab director at the University of California San Francisco, says that the Moderna vaccine and possibly the Pfizer one introduced a small mutation to the spike protein to “stabilise” it, and that as far as he knows the Oxford vaccine didn’t; so the antigen may not be exactly the same. Will that affect it? Perhaps. It’s vital that we carry on monitoring; in an ideal world we might even do some randomisation, saying that certain GP practices should give the mix-and-match dose to patients where the original vaccine is unavailable, while other practices leave them on single doses.

But the point is that even though we don’t have 20 RCTs and a meta-analysis showing that heterologous vaccinations work for Covid-19, that’s not the same as saying that we don’t have any knowledge or evidence at all. There are reasons, from theory and from analogy from other vaccines, that it should work fine. As Robert Wiblin, the director of research at the evidence-based charity 80,000 Hours, says in this wise Twitter thread, there is a widespread attitude among certain decision-makers that “if a study hasn’t been done on a particular question we have ‘no data’, and therefore no basis on which to form beliefs or act”. But that is flat wrong, and dangerous.

It’s that form of thinking which led people — not just ordinary people, but the UK Chief Medical Advisor and the US Surgeon General, among many others; top, highly credentialled experts — to say early in the pandemic not just that we don’t know if masks work, but that masks don’t work, and to advise against them. They were right that there weren’t any good RCTs. (There still aren’t, really.) But there were theoretical reasons to think that masks might work, and reasons from analogy: we all accept that surgeons wear them to prevent infection during surgery, for instance. And as social interventions go, masks are relatively low-cost, compared with nationwide lockdowns or closed schools. If you multiply the good it might do by the chance that it works, and subtract the costs, the expected value looks pretty good.

You can understand the “no RCTs, no evidence” attitude. Over the last century or so, medicine has established a norm where the only evidence that really counts is lots of RCTs. There is an excellent reason for that: doctors’ intuition as to what worked and what didn’t was often extremely flawed, because doctors are people. So it is very important to show that your new drug or your surgical intervention does more good than harm before you introduce it.

But we simply can’t afford to wait for that level of certainty. Evidence, a wise man once said, is like money: “Obviously it’s useful to have as much evidence as possible, in the same way it’s useful to have as much money as possible. But equally obviously it’s useful to be able to use a limited amount of evidence wisely, in the same way it’s useful to be able to use a limited amount of money wisely.”

That means looking at the evidence you have, and making your best guess at the costs and benefits of one course of action versus another course of action. The costs of, say, closing schools are considerable. Meanwhile, the benefits are very hard to be sure about – how much do they influence transmission? How much are teachers at risk? But we can’t wait for more evidence to come in; we have to make decisions now, as best we can.

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The tragic cost of closing schools

By Jennie Bristol

Similarly, there’s been a bit of a hoo-hah about another British plan to delay the booster jab for up to 12 weeks, so that we can get as many people the first dose (and some level of protection) as possible. Again, there are no specific RCTs looking into that – Pfizer only tested its booster three weeks after the prime, although the Oxford study did look at various different regimens including up to 12-week gaps. But again, we don’t have the luxury of demanding certainty and perfect evidence. The question is: do we think that a longer gap will work reasonably well, and if so, do we think the benefits of giving many more people their first dose outweigh the possible costs in efficacy? The MHRA obviously thinks so, and my own suspicion is that it’s pretty clear-cut. “We haven’t got the data” is partially true, but, again, it doesn’t mean we know nothing.

And in the case of mix-and-matched vaccines, once again, it’s true that we don’t have an RCT that says they’ll work. But we have good reasons to think they’ll work; perhaps not as well as the on-label regimen, but well enough to save lives and prevent severe disease and hospitalisations. 

And we know that the likely costs are low — there’s no evidence of any safety issues with heterologous vaccinations, and if the alternative is simply not giving the patient a booster at all because you’ve run out of the original vaccine, then this seems a reasonable course. “I don’t know of any instance where the heterologous prime boost has led to particular harms or to lesser efficacy,” says Evans, “although it hasn’t always led to higher efficacy.” This seems an obvious bet, in the rare cases when the original vaccine is unavailable.

With a bit of luck, we’re near the end of this. I’m sceptical that the Government will meet its target of getting the first dose to the four most vulnerable groups by mid-February, but March should be doable (and Nilay Shah, a professor of chemical engineering at Imperial, told the Science Media Centre that it the February target is “ambitious” and “needs everything to click every day”, but that it is “achievable”). 

So we’re no longer talking about delaying Covid deaths; we are talking about actually preventing them, if we can keep people from getting the virus for a few more weeks. And that means making decisions quickly, making decisions that are good enough rather than perfect, making decisions with limited information rather than waiting for the perfect RCT that shows that giving the vaccine in a red room works just as well as giving it in a blue one.

The NYT’s concern about the vaccine dosing is understandable: it is simply applying the same standard that medical science applies all the time, under usual circumstances. But we aren’t under usual circumstances. In this case, it is inadvertently propping up a decision-making system which has meant that we didn’t introduce masks until too late and which meant that we didn’t lock down or close borders until the virus was already spreading.

I got it wrong by saying that border closures “probably” wouldn’t stop the new variant; I should have talked about how likely I thought it was, and what the costs and benefits would be if it did. The MHRA, by allowing mix-and-match vaccines and a 12-week gap, is thinking in those terms, and doing the right thing. You can’t “follow the data” when there is none: you have to use the information that you have.

All was well before Donald Trump came along and all shall be well again now he is gone. This is the product Biden has on offer, but it is shoddy goods on two counts: all was not well before Trump took the White House, and all will not be well if, as Biden’s appointments indicate rather clearly, our forty-sixth president insists on pretending our forty-fourth had it all right.

Diversity is de rigueur as Biden shapes his administration. He promises “the most diverse cabinet in history,” and his nominees so far are indeed dense with women and people of colour, just as former Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played the diversity card during her 2016 campaign, naming women, black people, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and others to high office.

But now as then, it is diversity of identity that is supposed to count, not diversity of thought, of which one finds none among Biden’s newly-named people. This is a sales job, just as Barack Obama was a salesman — window dressing for an un-pretty foreign policy regime.

And there shall be no diversity among nations, either, as Joe Biden fashions his post-Trump idea of America’s proper place in the world. On this side of the pond, there are headlines about Team Biden’s abiding intention to use foreign policy to reconnect with the global community. “Biden Picks Team Set on Fortifying World Alliances,” The New York Times announced atop page one last week while Democracy Now!, a Democratic Party-aligned radio programme, puts it this way: “Biden’s National Security Appointments Focus on Multilateralism, International Cooperation.”

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

We Americans love these multisyllabic words. And we love making them mean other than what one finds in our Merriam–Webster dictionary.

The lately prevailing theme — multipolarity, alliances, partnerships, shared responsibilities — is also to be traced back to the earliest days of the Obama administration. The most important of Biden’s newly-announced cabinet and advisory appointments — respectively Antony Blinken to State, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser — sound it routinely: We cannot solve the world’s problems alone, they say with solemn conviction.

It is an excellent thought, as it was first time round. But we had better look carefully at who these people are — both Obama administration holdovers — and listen carefully to what they say. The alliances-and-partnerships bit did not turn out well when Obama tried it, and there is nothing to suggest that, four years on, it will work this time round.

The first thing to note about the administration Biden is introducing to the world is never mentioned in the American press, and certainly not among the foreign policy cliques. Biden’s people are to a man and woman American exceptionalists — true believers in the country’s providentially-conferred destiny to light humanity’s way. There is nothing new or remarkable in this: our chosen-people consciousness goes back to Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon, delivered before the celebrated Puritan set out from Southampton for these parts in 1630.

But as long as this credenda goes unquestioned, nobody is going to change the direction of American foreign policy in a way that responds imaginatively to the realities of the 21^st century. Chief among these is parity among nations, notably those of the West and non–West.

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National Populism is here to stay

By Michael Lind

To put this question in a useful context, one of Donald Trump’s supposed original sins, committed during his presidential campaign in 2016, was his full-frontal disavowal of our exceptionalist ideology. “I don’t like the term, I’ll be honest with you,” he told a Texas audience. “I don’t think it’s a very nice term: ‘We’re exceptional, you’re not.’” Three years later, when the fight to defeat Trump’s re-election bid was fully joined, the man now named Biden’s national security adviser published a spirited argument “for rescuing the idea of American exceptionalism” in The Atlantic. Jake Sullivan’s was “a case for a new American exceptionalism… as the basis for American leadership in the twenty-first century”.

All that flows from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the national security apparatus over the next four years will reflect this belief. But how does one reconcile all the talk of partnerships and common cause with “global leadership,” another of the Biden people’s running themes? When the next president declares that “America is back,” you have to read into the statement to grasp the true meaning: “It’s a team that reflects the fact that America is back. Ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again, sit at the head of the table.”

America has long required enemies to maintain its spot at the “head of the table”, the Cold War being the case nearest to hand. So far as one can make out, China and Russia, America’s twin Beelzebubs, are to serve as the Biden administration’s primary organising principles. To be noted in this connection: Strategic rivalries with the Chinese and Russians were the primary topic at a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last before Blinken replaces him.

Blinken and Sullivan are now preparing to enlist the Europeans, India and numerous East Asian nations as the U.S. conjures a new and dangerous Cold War with China. This is, of course, a straight-out continuation of the ultra-hawkish Pompeo’s cause. But Pompeo hasn’t got very far and neither will Team Biden. None of the Asians, not even the ever-loyal Japanese and certainly not congenitally non-aligned India, wants anything to do with an animated anti–Chinese coalition. Even Taiwan does not want confrontation; it wants protection. None of these countries desire to turn the region into another decades-long flashpoint.

It is now confirmed that Biden will extend the new START accord with Russia, due to expire early next year. This is wise, and one hopes Biden will go further on nuclear-arms reductions. But to the president-elect’s people this is an arms-control question, not a matter of U.S–Russian relations. These will not improve because Biden’s national security team are packed with Russophobes (including Joe himself). Antony Blinken, whose father was a noted advocate of détente, is vigorously of the view that ties with Russia can be repaired only if Moscow accepts unequal relations in which Washington sets the terms. Bill Clinton tried the same thing to no avail. Ditto Barack Obama.

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Joe Biden is no radical

By Michael Tracey

Will the Europeans re-enlist in this front in the new Cold War? One seriously doubts it. If Trump’s four years made anything clear in trans–Atlantic relations, it is that the continent no longer wishes to be force-marched into another of Washington’s anti–Russian crusades. Emmanuel Macron has been consistently outspoken on this point over the past couple of years. It is true the French president nurses a de Gaulle complex, but he is simply more forthright than others in expressing what is on a lot of European minds.

It was commonly assumed until last week that, along with the Paris climate pact and the WHO, Biden would also bring America back into the many-sided accord governing Iran’s nuclear programs. The assassination last Friday of Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh complicates things, but it was highly questionable whether Biden and Blinken would have made the move even if Iran’s top nuclear researcher hadn’t been murdered (almost certainly by Mossad). Biden, like almost all other American pols, is simply too close to Israel, which has made its objections to the nuclear agreement abundantly, belligerently clear.

So we’ve now got Sullivan saying “yes, we’ll get back in with other signatories — providing Tehran meets ‘these follow-on agreements’” — which are understood to be an awful lot like Pompeo’s preconditions, please note. This is an intended-to-fail position — and an easy way out for Biden. Net outcome: hostile stalemate in the Persian Gulf, continuing alienation from the European signatories to the accord, more trans–Atlantic drift.

If only America’s leaders understood that, with the emergence of new powers such as China and India and a new generation of post–Cold War leaders in Europe, ours is an age that requires us to accept — no, embrace — a diversity of perspectives. But our policy cliques, lost in nostalgia, travelling on presumption, and with no decisions to make for the past 75 years, simply cannot read the hands on the clock.

Biden’s “global leadership” will be the same as all previous versions — a polite term for American hegemony. Sullivan, Blinken and Biden’s other national security nominees may put themselves forward as vigorous proponents of partnerships, but look closely: they expect America’s allies to fall in line behind America’s we-know-best dictates. Apostles of exceptionalism can think no other way.

A significant factor in the Democrats’ defeat, I argued, was a style of politics that prevented them from developing an ambitious vision of America’s future — one that was capable of inspiring people from all walks of life. Indeed, it seemed that ever since the 1980s, American liberals had gotten out of the vision business altogether. They redirected their energies from party politics to movement politics, focusing attention in particular on minority and gender identity movements.

While that shift was morally comprehensible, it made it harder for liberals to speak of the common good across group lines. It also ingrained the habit of forgetting large constituencies that did not fit into the liberal-Left identity narrative, such as working-class whites and evangelicals — the latter group making up about a quarter of the adult population. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. Otherwise you give your opponent the opportunity to, as Donald Trump did with great success.

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Test article

By Matthew Goodwin

This movement politics mindset proved to be electorally suicidal. From the 1980s on we witnessed a massive transfer of political power, in large sections of the country, from the Democrats to an increasingly radical Republican Party. The most perverse consequence was that as Democrats ceded ever more geographical ground to Republicans, particularly in state and local governments, they lost the ability to protect the very identity groups they professed to care about — in particular, their right to vote. More than half of all African Americans, for instance, live in the deep red South.

Yet Democrats resisted the obvious lessons to be drawn from these developments: that you cannot help anyone if you do not hold institutional power. And you cannot acquire that power without a vision that transcends group attachments, without denying them.

Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them. Now that hopes of a Democratic landslide have been dashed and defeat is within the realm of possibility, the question remains as to whether they have drawn the right lessons from their electoral performance. The signs are decidedly mixed.

The good news is that Democratic politicians, party functionaries, and most importantly donors focused their energies on addressing the common good and capturing the political centre. They had seen that in the 2018 midterm elections the seats the party gained were mainly won by centrist candidates who focused on building a suburban base, particularly among white women.

They also realised that while minority groups make up an important part of the base, many of their members are culturally conservative. African-Americans, particularly older ones, are more likely to have reservations about the LGBT movement. A significant portion of Latinos oppose abortion due to their Catholic faith and have more conventional views about marriage and gender roles.

That seems to have registered, because in the recent election Democratic candidates generally avoided cultural and identity themes (apart from police reform), despite the efforts of Republicans and Fox News to provoke them into it. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran a rather old-fashioned campaign based on policy, competence, and basic decency, and pointedly did not portray the Democratic Party as a “rainbow coalition” of distinct groups. This bodes well for the future.

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Test article

By Gavin Haynes

The bad news is that the cultural Left is even more focused on identity than it was in 2016. In part, this is due to the Trump experience. What we back then genteelly called “populism” has degenerated on the Right of the Right into a reactionary force of poorly-educated whites with their own identitarian agenda. It is tempting to want to fight fire with fire.

But over the last summer, other events revealed just how large the gap has grown between the ambition and tactics of political Democrats and those of the cultural Left. Here I am thinking of elites whose power base is in universities, the media, Hollywood, the publishing and advertising industries, the art world, and philanthropic institutions. It also includes young activists whose notion of political engagement is identity-based, confrontational, and social-media driven.

This cultural Left has been behind the so-called “Great Awokening” on race of the past five years or so. I speak here not of economic and social policies intended to improve the condition of African-Americans, which is a historical duty. Nor of legal protections for gay, lesbian, and trans people. I refer to the focus on symbols and gestures meant to display one’s conformity with enlightened opinion on such matters.

Consider the aftermath to the impressive early demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in May. There were massive, peaceful gatherings in cities and small towns across America (and the world). But very quickly the situation degenerated into conflicts over symbols. Countless cultural institutions felt compelled to make statements about racial justice, and some of their directors resigned after making acts of contrition.

Many businesses followed suit and announced requirements that employees attend “anti-racist” training sessions, run by highly-paid, self-declared “consultants”. Twitter mobs descended on people thought to hold impure views. Editors were fired for running controversial pieces, while a researcher was fired for circulating an academic study on racial attitudes. What began as a summer of civic solidarity ended with squabbles about “cancel culture” that contributed nothing to improving life for non-elite African Americans.

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What's the mood in Trumpland?

By Ian Birrell

A major force behind this wrong turn was the liberal media, which has fallen into bad habits during the Trump presidency. Feeling that they had not been hard enough on Trump in the 2016 election, reporters got used to calling out “lies,” of which there were plenty. But the distinction between demonstrable lies and differences of opinion has gotten lost in the process. The standard of journalistic impartiality is being jettisoned in the name of an undefined “moral clarity.”

Central to these efforts has been editorial pressure on reporters to emphasise the racial dimension to stories and to play an active role in rewriting the national narrative. For example, in 2019 the New York Times launched “The 1619 Project” to mark the date when African slaves first arrived in the United States. What began as a thought-provoking idea soon became a tendentious effort to make the crime of slavery the true founding of the republic. Historians complained about inaccuracies and the Times silently corrected them, while still standing behind the project’s editor, who won a Pulitzer Prize. Young reporters were left with the impression that such efforts will still help them to advance their careers.

While the Biden campaign was not overly distracted by these psychodramas, it would be a mistake for Democratic leaders to pretend any longer that they don’t exist. Right-wing media will keep the culture war over symbols before the public eye, which can only help the Republican Party. That means that the Democratic politicians must explicitly distance themselves from ideological “anti-racist” rhetoric and political theatre, such as efforts to tear down statues of American presidents. And they must resist efforts to distort American history in our schools.

Democratic voters care about racial justice but they are focused on the present and the future, not on litigating the past. They also believe in fair play, open debate, and legitimate differences of opinion. They want to build America, not indict America. Democratic leaders must make it crystal clear that they feel the same way. No matter what the final results of this year’s elections, they desperately need to do some housecleaning if they hope ever to build a durable Democratic majority in our lifetimes.

In recent weeks, the big tech platforms have been trying to clear the underbrush of fake news. This time, the theory goes, we just need to get our message out. After all, Hillary only spent a billion dollars on hers.

What happened — the deep story of an America coming apart — should have been the point of departure for wide-ranging introspection from the losing side, yet from the New York Times down, many have instead become convinced that they alone hold the reins of decency, and that they will be judged by history simply on how well they re-state their class shibboleths to each other.

It is from within this prison of valour that Andrew Marantz conducts his entertaining interviews with the new online Right in Anti-Social: How Online Extremists Broke America — just released in paperback.

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Marantz is a New Yorker staff writer. (It shows.) From 2011 on, he followed many of the social media outriders who seemed to clear the way for Trump. People like steroid-loving Twitter blowhard Mike Cernovich, who laundered conspiracies about ‘sick Hillary’ into the news cycle; needy semi-cranks like vlogger Laura Loomer; anti-PC-as-performance-art vulgarians like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes; ballsy bandwagoneers like alt-lite crumpet Lauren Southern; and occasionally real nasties like the anti-Semitic podcaster Mike Enoch, who, in one of history’s great acts of cognitive dissonance, was eventually expelled from his own movement for having a Jewish wife.

By Marantz’s mirror they’re a charmless bunch: vain and along for the ride. A Proud Boy deliberately farts in an elevator. McInnes spoils for a fight. Cernovich sponges off his wife while writing Pick-up Artist blogs. At the DeploraBall, the Trump inauguration party for the alt-ish Right, everyone seems more interested in comparing their Twitter follower counts than in talking politics.

These are the people hotwiring the attention economy, Marantz contends. As he lays out to billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, in a chance meeting in a corridor at the DeploraBall, the idea that the cream always rises is a fiction. Shit floats. And social media is ultimate proof of that.

The implied premise — that racism is a contagion that is taking over America  — is not one Marantz wastes any time questioning. To the New Yorker set, the problem’s obvious: a bunch of yahoos got ahold of Reddit and Twitter accounts. Thus, America’s out of control id can only be contained by pruning the worst elements off the internet, because otherwise ordinary dupes will be dragged ever-rightwards.

Lately, this trope has become its own micro-genre. Who could forget the New York Times’ celebrated Rabbit Hole podcast, in which a young man watches some anti-feminist YouTube videos, then gets into Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, gets a job, does nothing, harms no one, but is saved from his radicalisation by watching yet more YouTube videos — this time of hip young Marxists on ‘BreadTube’ (Communism never being responsible for any historical carnage)?

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Facebook is radicalising your parents

By Gavin Haynes

In this world view, Trump is portrayed as the ur-yahoo: in 2011, he hijacked the attention economy with the birther slurs, and thus set the verbal and moral template for the likes of Milo Yiannopolous to go for attention above all, to grab the mic and say into it all the dirtiest words they could think of.

But this is only a shallow why. These people also rode in on the currents of social frustration that had been submerged pre-social media. On the opposite side of the aisle, so too did the likes of Alyssa Milano, the often bizarrely hyperbolic Twitter-famous actress who popularised the #MeToo hashtag. Is she just a different kind of attention hijacker?

“Gradually,” Marantz writes, “reluctantly, I admitted to myself that institutions can also have significant upsides… it’s possible for a thing to be uncool and also necessary.” The reluctant censor always cuts such a comi-tragic figure — a bit like Michael Palin’s sympathetic crucifixion administrator in The Life Of Brian. Still, he heads to Reddit HQ, to argue that the platform should delete subreddits like r/TheDonald. But it’s already too late — Cernovich has triggered the libs once too often, and Trump wins.  

The day after the election, Marantz’s Facebook feed is full of people posting the same prescient section from the philosopher Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. Written in 1998, Rorty claimed that the gap between the masses and the elite was widening, and foresaw a US dictatorship by 2014:

“Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for. . . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.  All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.”

Rorty popularised the idea of ‘vocabularies’: that civilisations speak to themselves in a unique argot which structures their consciousness. “Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry,” Rorty wrote. “Or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others.”

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Here, society is portrayed as a system that self-hypnotises. Repetition and expansion of ideas bends the possibilities for thought, and so what we prune and what we nurture counts for a lot. The ‘arc of history’ is still a thing in Rorty’s view — but it must be consciously bent by us in a positive direction.

On the back of Rorty’s argument, Marantz would like to say that we shouldn’t be shy of discriminating: there are always better and worse takes. And on that he’s entirely right. But it’s in the words ‘us’ and ‘positive direction’ that the sleight-of-hand lies. Who’s us? What’s positive? Marantz’s DC lawyer friends — whom he finds sat round the living room making their banners to go on the Women’s March — already seem to have their answers.

The problem is that the tussle over elites is seldom about their intellectual horsepower — it’s about their vantage point. In truth, democracy proceeds from something akin to the argument for animal welfare: not ‘can they think?’, but ‘can they feel pain?’

In this regard, one story is particularly striking. The Gateway Pundit is a Trump-loving clickbait blog started by a Midwestern 20-something from his bedroom. But post-2016, they’re invited to send a correspondent to the White House: the barbarians are inside the gates.

Marantz records a confrontation in the briefing room between their correspondent, Lucian Wintrich, and a gang of old school White House hacks, furious at having their turf, and weltaunschung, invaded.

“OK,” she said. “Are you a racist?”
“No, of course not.”
“What are your views when it comes to integration?”
“I’m all for it.”
“Races mingling?”
Wintrich smirked.
“My boyfriend’s Colombian, so we tend to mingle,” he said.

The irony is delicious. Wintrich might be serially incompetent, intellectually inferior, doing little more than wiggling his bum at the ‘elite’, yet he ends up winning the encounter precisely because the old media have never taken the phenomenon of people like him seriously enough to do their homework, and can only react in their own sclerotic vocabulary: daubing everyone with the same Nazi brush.

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By Justin Webb

Four years on, it’s jarring how little has changed. Establishment political hacks are still regularly baffled to learn that intellectual and political lifeforms exist beyond reforms to Working Tax Credits and the pieties of inclusion. 

Here, the gatekeepers must take their share of the blame. Marantz complains about the Overton Window shifting, yet within a few lines, he’s convinced that Jordan Peterson holding individual rights as cardinal over any form of collectivism is a racist dog whistle: “This is the sort of false equivalence [between collectivisms of the left and right] that would have been staggering just a few years ago.”

Would it? Or is it more staggering that institutionalist journalists have redefined perhaps the core Enlightenment value as a racist dog whistle? Or even that the neologism of the ‘racist dog whistle’ now allows them to claim things without direct evidence? It certainly suggests that any movement of the Overton Window might not all be in one direction; perhaps even that we now have two separate windows. Overton French Doors.

The question of why Peterson has connected with so many remains as uninteresting as why Trump did, or Cernovich does. From start to end of Anti-Social, the answer’s obvious: because half the country is secretly racist and these people give them the cover to express that.  

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The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

You might ask which new vocabulary grew up first: the pronoun checks, -isms, phobias and ‘systemic’ iniquities of what is now the establishment Left, or the ‘MSM’-bashing, ‘virtue signal’-despising, ‘SJW’-allergic new online Right? The latter seems the more reactive, in that theirs is a language of negation, of opposing to something already there.

Either way, much as it might be easier to play whack-a-mole censorship, if America is to pull past its present funk, the world of the gatekeepers is first going to have to admit that at least part of the reason that such a gap in the market has opened for the yahoos is because the vocabulary of nice, well-educated New Englanders has accelerated away from the broader population in recent years. Even back at Charlottesvile, “white supremacy” still broadly connoted hoods and crosses. Today, it means Tom Cotton and ill-advised H&M kidswear. “To change how we talk is to change who we are,” Marantz concludes. Quite right.

Strangely enough, in his book taking on the New Left godheads like Rorty, Fools, Frauds & Firebrands, Roger Scruton ends on a similar thought. Scruton argues that a key task of the modern Right is simply to scythe through the often obscure postmodern linguistic trifles of its opponents — that nothing can be solved without first arriving at a common vocabulary.

It is only when we have found again the language that is natural to us that we can answer the great accusations that are constantly thrown at our world from the left.

 And it is only when we have found that language that we can move on from the one-dimensional left/ right, with us/ against us, progressive/ reactionary dichotomies that have so often made rational discussion impossible.

Rorty couldn’t have said it better himself. Or could he?

“This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning,” blared a five-alarm-fire warning in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank, who may want to consider a title change from “columnist” to “in-house hysteric”. Not to be outdone, establishment weather-vane Thomas Friedman joined the fray in the New York Times with an equally shocking exhortation: “I can’t say this any more clearly,” he hyperventilated. “Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since the Civil War, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis […]”.

If these fevered prognostications even bore the faintest resemblance to political conditions in the United States, it might seem a bit odd that the pundits in question have since moved on to other subjects. Or to put it this way: if they really believed their own fantastical rhetoric, shouldn’t they have spent the past few weeks taking action more tangible than rattling off a few throwaway columns and browsing Twitter? Not that any “resistance” brigade composed of pallid middle-aged journalists would be especially formidable on the battlefield, but the point is that their conduct doesn’t come anywhere close to matching the incredible alarmism of their words.

More destruction could be in store next month than was wrought in World War II, the most devastating global military conflict in human history? All of civilisation was nearly wiped out in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but we’re supposed to believe that whatever harm is brought about by the election aftermath will exceed that? If so, why aren’t these people stockpiling canned food and training for hand-to-hand combat?

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Joe Biden is no radical

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They’re not doing anything of the sort because this latest round of histrionics is just a continuation of a theme that has characterised the Trump era: political and cultural elites, whose psyches have been profoundly damaged, will churn out nonstop waves of hysteria rarely noting afterwards if their frenzied forecasts ever panned out. As a largely accountability-free profession, there is no penalty in the opinion-making world if the catastrophising ultimately proves to be just a bizarre projection of their own angst.

The logic of these latest prophecies, to the extent that any can be discerned amid the haze of paranoia, is that Trump will refuse to abide a “peaceful transition of power” after the election. Instead, he’ll throw the country into some sort of protracted armed insurgency by calling upon white supremacist militias to do his genocidal bidding in the streets. Hugely viral tweets, including one by a credentialed member of the White House press corps, helped foster this belief by alleging (without caveat) that Trump had explicitly incited a Civil War.

This is the most frightening answer I have ever received to any question I have ever asked. I’ve interviewed convicted killers with more empathy. @realDonaldTrump is advocating Civil War. https://t.co/8eMY9Csuhp

— Brian J. Karem (@BrianKarem) September 23, 2020

Of course, the basis for the allegation was a typically garbled comment by Trump at a press conference. But there had already been an atmosphere of unfounded dread in the air, thanks in part to long disquisitions in The Atlantic — the leading clearinghouse for the neurotic elite speculation — playing out with utmost seriousness various as-yet-fictitious scenarios whereby Trump refuses to concede the election and the American constitutional order summarily crumbles.

Once you accept that this doomsaying is less about Trump himself, and more about an elite media class that has overdosed on five years of Trump-related dopamine rush, a darkly comical aspect emerges. The foot soldiers of Trump’s supposed post-election coup were declared to be the “Proud Boys,” a group of glorified performance artists and trolls who’d barely even register as a political force were it not for all the manufactured coverage intended to elevate them as frightening foils. If it truly falls on them to wage Trump’s Civil War, then this will be the goofiest and least daunting Civil War on record.

And as for the “peaceful transition of power”, it’s possible that Trump will dispute the election results in some fashion. The lawyers are gearing up in both parties, given the country’s wide-scale transition to mail-in-voting.

Irony must be lost on these prophesiers, however, because while Trump did not encounter any overtly violent coup upon assuming office in January 2017, his own transition to power was anything but ordinary. The country’s security state apparatus had launched an unprecedented brazen intervention into electoral politics, and hobbled his administration in a morass of investigation and quasi-scandal before it even began. Trump’s erratic communications style might in some sense violate customary “norms” of American political comity, but the behaviour of the FBI and CIA in 2016-2017 will have a far more long-lasting impact on what’s regarded as “normal” power-transfers.

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By Douglas Murray

One wonders how these media organs could ever hope to adapt to post-Trump life, with all the painful withdrawals and lingering psychological damage that will undoubtedly entail. One option is to simply keep going back over and over again for a fix, even with Trump out of office. Chris Hayes of MSNBC recently suggested one potential option: “Some kind of truth and reconciliation commission.” Interesting thought, because if this theoretical “commission” is tasked with uncovering the reasons for Trump’s rise to power, it will find that perhaps the chief culprit is NBC Universal, which provided Trump with a 14-year perch as one of the country’s most well-known network TV personalities.

Either way, the elite-peddled angst about some forthcoming Civil War is made all the more absurd because it almost gives Trump more credit than it deserves. His re-election campaign is flailing, and it has nothing to do with white supremacist militias readying for armed conflict. Compared to his successful 2016 campaign messaging, the current iteration is a hopeless wreck. Much of Trump’s time is spent impotently fuming about the “radical Left”, and he repeatedly brought up the phrase during the depressing first “debate” with Joe Biden.

Review the transcripts from his debate encounters with Hillary Clinton four years ago, however, and you’ll see not one instance of Trump making reference to anything like the “radical Left,” or any of the other heavily-ideologised attack lines that his advisors and handlers this time around have so relentlessly imparted on him to emphasise. Trump’s downfall, should it arrive next month, will be explicable by a variety of factors, ineffectual and incoherent pandemic response paramount among them. But they’ll all be far more banal, and therefore less emotionally satisfying, than those currently engrossing the elite commentariat.

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How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

Of course, one can always easily find examples of comparably grandiose doomsaying among pro-Trump partisans scattered throughout the Right-wing media ecosystem. But when the “youth activist” Charlie Kirk pronounced in an address at the Republican convention that Trump is nothing less than the “the bodyguard of Western Civilisation,” this was understood to represent a foolish, deluded Right-wing sensibility. Yet when similarly ridiculous claims are made by respectable elite outlets, the expectation is that all right-minded, well-educated citizens will nod in solemn, knowing agreement.

All of these insane proclamations have to be understood as fulfilling some depraved psychological purpose. This purpose is to elevate combatants in America’s pantomimed Culture War to the status of world-historic combatants, on whose shoulders the fate of the country rests. Many of the purveyors are pure cynical charlatans, but others probably have come to believe their own preposterous rhetoric, which is an indication of how deep the delusion runs.

Among the prophesiers, there is clearly a kind of perverse psychic need for the Trump saga to end with a salaciously climatic conclusion. If you are so inclined — that is, if you are so blinkered by four years of mostly self-inflicted psychological turmoil — then Trump is always going to provide a daily deluge of material that could justify your angst. But a tempered and public-spirited media would have developed strategies by now, five years into the theatrical trolling, to avoid withering into a shrieking stupor every time Trump makes a purposefully-provocative offhand remark. If anything, this emotional fragility has only burnished Trump with an unearned mystique. Because by now, what he’s working with is mostly just schtick.

If Trump goes down to the defeat, it will be largely because of his own incompetence, and one manifestation of that incompetence is that his (admittedly unorthodox) communications style has been only that: a communications style. PR. And for the US intelligentsia to have been so addled and demented by a PR shtick couldn’t be a better demonstration of how vapid and untrustworthy they are.

Let’s say he doesn’t fight the whole way to the Supreme Court, doesn’t try to start a civil war, doesn’t throw two arms around a stout leg of the Resolute Desk and have to be dragged crying and blubbering in a most undignified way from the Oval Office. Let’s say that. What happens next? Who are the winners and the losers?

Well, there’s the big man himself, for a start. There’s no question that Trump wouldn’t much like losing office. Defeat in the election would hurt his ego in ways that many of us will find it exquisitely sweet to imagine. Also, a return to civilian life would pose him two big problems. One is that he would be liable for criminal prosecution and civil litigation in so many departments you wouldn’t quite know where to begin. No doubt he’ll have a go at issuing a blanket pardon to himself, on all counts, before he leaves office.

That may help with all the Mueller stuff, the emoluments clause and so on; but it wouldn’t be of much use with civil cases over his various sexual and financial shenanigans. Also, if the leaks of his tax returns are to be believed, he’s soon about to have to find half a billion dollars or so to pay back his various creditors — and he’s no longer going to have the griftable assets of the Presidency to help pay them off. I know: your heart pumps jelly-babies, right?

But spare a thought for the real victims in all this. It will be all the people on my side: all those handwringing liberals whose dearest wish is the removal of the kandy-koloured tangerine-flake lie-machine from the White House. An entire industry has been built on the Trump outrage machine, and it has been as profitable and exhilarating an enterprise for his opponents as it has been for his family members. No longer.

Where does The Resistance go if it doesn’t have anything to resist? As Sleepy Joe ambles into the White House in his Wee Willy Winky nightcap, promising an era of sensible things done quietly, of technocratic solutions to tricky problems, of bipartisan fence-mending and all that sort of boring stuff, all the energy will go out of politics. The great glorious mad balloon-economy of Politics Under Trump will sort of… deflate.

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By Sam Leith

The ideologues, conmen and chancers who rode Trump’s slipstream will slope back off to obscure internet talk radio stations, and it’s nice to have a giggle imagining Sebastian Gorka and Dinesh D’Souza resuming their academic careers. But so, too, will the characters whose public profiles were created, revived or energised on the back of Trump: Eric “Time for some Game Theory” Garland, Rick Wilson, David Frum, Louise Mensch, Claude Taylor, Sarah Kendzior and so on. No more inventive Never Trump button badges or amusing helium balloons. No more 98-tweet threads explaining why THIS. We will no longer be on the brink of a Philip Roth dystopia. Even Devin Nunes’s Cow, alas, will return to pasture.

And the comedians: people like Trevor Noah, Alec Baldwin, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Sarah Cooper and Piers Morgan. Like the alternative comics who flourished in the UK in Thatcher’s 1980s, these characters have drawn their energy from the aggression of the White House. They’ll have to find new ways to be funny – and if you ask me, it’s going to feel just a bit of a let-down sending up the Biden administration. John Major’s aertex underpants were never quite a substitute for the Iron Lady’s handbag.

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By Sam Leith

Twitter’s share price will likely halve in value the day after Trump leaves the White House. Of course Trump himself will continue to send out ever more forlorn and irrelevant all-caps tweets, but those tweets will just be the sort of tweets any bitter ex-president could send. Millions of people are not going to log on every morning, as they once did, asking: did he start a war yet? He said what about who? He cratered which industry in 140 characters? This will be sad for ex-president Trump, but sad too for all the people who made Twitter careers out of being rude about him.

And even Fox News will slump. Nobody in power will now need to pay it the blindest bit of attention. And if — as seems quite likely — Trump’s post-presidential moneyspinner is establishing Trump TV, he’ll end up splitting its audience. Poor old Fox will most likely be left with the intellectuals, while the fun, salt-of-the-earth people who bulked out its viewing figures — the white supremacists, the survivalists and the toothless gun-freaks — will defect to Trump TV.

All those liberal organs of “resistance” have boomed in the age of Trump. I remember the New York Times’s CEO Mark Thompson telling me what brilliant things Trump’s denunciations of the “failing New York Times” had done for its circulation. The New Yorker, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post… watch their audiences taper off, their paginations thin down, as they are forced into a grim and dreary return to the status quo ante in an age of declining advertising spend and a moribund industry. “Democracy Dies In Darkness” sounds pretty cool. “Liberal Newspapers Ail In The Gloaming” not so much so.

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By Freddie Sayers

Think, too, of the nice, liberal publishing industry. It has — especially in the US — become more or less a Trump publishing industry. A fresh blockbusting, zillion-selling Trump expose seems to come out every week. Woodward, Wolff, Mattis, Cohen, Michael Lewis, Mary Trump, Comey, Bolton, The Mooch etc; not to mention the smattering of supportive works from Fox News personalities, and administration stooges. Dear little Donald Trump Jr somehow persuaded the Republican National Convention to buy enough copies of his Triggered to make it a bestseller.

The critic Carlos Lozada claims to have read 150 such books by way of reasearch for his What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. At the beginning of next year, all that will change. Like the first green shoots of some tentative rewilding project, airport bookshops will start to grow over once again with John Grisham novels, leadership manuals, and books about how to give a successful Ted Talk.

Politics, publishing and the media, in other words, will start to return to normal. And though, God knows, nobody sensible will be sorry to see Trump go, don’t let’s pretend that even the most fervent of his opponents won’t, after they stop punching the air, feel just that tiny little bit let down. As Julian Barnes wrote in Flaubert’s Parrot: “Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure … the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?”

However, some outlets such as The Washington Post, CNN and Fox News have also decided, in an act of racial grammatical reciprocity, to capitalise ‘White’. The justification is that both ‘Black’ and ‘White’ denote distinct cultural identities. As the Post said of white European immigrants to the America, “these diverse ethnicities were eventually assimilated into the collective group that has had its own cultural and historical impact on the nation,” going to conclude that “as such, White should be represented with a capital W.”

Those who joyously celebrated the New York Times uppercasing ‘Black’ as an act of “liberation” (for instance, Nikole Hannah Jones, the founder of the 1619 project) were not as happy about the Washington Post’s decision. Some have referred to it as the “grammar equivalent of all lives matter”. Others argue it is outright legitimising white supremacy.

For me, it feels like the grammar equivalent of All Lives Matter.

— Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) July 29, 2020

But is capitalising (or not capitalising) a single letter really such a big deal? Well it may be a small symbolic action, but the fact that so much of the mainstream media is making it at the same time is not. It is taking place as part of what some have rather derisively called the “woke cultural revolution”. This also includes Robin DiAngelo’s terrible book, White Fragility, and similar tracts becoming bestsellers; white voiceover actors recusing themselves from voicing black characters; major corporations aligning themselves with radical political causes; city authorities voting to defund or even abolish police departments; and other significant developments.

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We are in new territory now — and not everyone is finding the right way forward. For instance, the decision by the Washington Post and others to capitalise ‘White’ is obviously foolish, because it reifies a phantasmic unitary ‘white’ racial identity and culture, as fetishised by creepy white nationalists. In what sense do an Armenian-American from Los Angeles, an Irish-American from Boston, a New York Jew, an Appalachian, a descendant of Southern slave owners and a Palestinian immigrant share a distinct cultural identity?

There is (or was) the idea of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture, which for so long held a hegemonic position — and was held up as what European immigrants had to assimilate into (if they were allowed) to be considered upstanding Americans. Of course, this ‘respectable’ idea of ‘whiteness’ was a basis for institutionalised racial oppression and violence, so no truck should be had with it.

But isn’t there an inconsistency from those who think capitalising black is an act of social justice, while capitalising white is wrong and inappropriate? By capitalising ‘Black’ aren’t you inevitably opening the door for legitimising ‘White’ identity and other forms of racialisation? After all, ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ can’t really exist without each other.

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The usual retort is that ‘Black’ recognises a shared culture and identity that has played an important role in the American context. Moreover, we capitalise terms like Jewish and Asian so why not Black? And then there’s this compelling argument: most black Americans can’t trace their heritage to a specific tribe or ethnic group in Africa because of the deracination of the Middle Passage and racial slavery; so they have had to create their own identity and culture, often times in opposition to the dominant Puritan inflected ‘official’ WASP culture (and its southern counterpart).

Finally, there’s the practical requirement for commonly understood words. Though black culture can speak for itself without needing special recognition from The New York Times, to enable conversations about these matters we still need the least imperfect terminology we can find.

That said, black identity must not be over simplified. The rise of ‘mixed race’ relationships and decades of immigration from the Caribbean and Africa in recent decades has further complicated what it means to be ‘black’ in America. In what sense can it be said that a black American from Chicago who could probably trace his ancestry in America all the way back to the seventeenth century (longer than many white Americans), a Haitian-American, or an immigrant from Ethiopia share a common identity let alone culture?

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Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

Furthermore, while cultural differences do certainly exist, they are not as distinct and solid as we might imagine. The truth is that ‘black’ and ‘white’ Americans are much more similar to one another than different. The entire shelf of modern American music would not exist without black Americans. What we call ‘black culture’ wouldn’t exist without the European influences it had to draw upon. The point is made by Albert Murray in his masterpiece The Omni-Americans, which he wrote as a “counter-statement” to the “race oriented propagandists” of his day:

“The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multi-coloured people. There are white Americans so to speak and black Americans. But any fool can see that the white people are not really white and that black Americans are not black. They are all interrelated in one way or another.”

“Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences”, Murray goes on, “the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.” Murray made his declaration of America as a “multicoloured nation”, not a multiracial one, in 1970. With decades of further immigration from all around the world, which has added new elements to America’s national culture, his argument is even more true now than it was in his time. Yet I suspect Murray’s words (notice how doesn’t capitalise either black or white) would now be received with suspicion in some circles. Indeed, his arguments would be criticised as denying the ‘reality of race’ and therefore ‘denying’ racism.

The real problem with uppercasing racial categories is that — like many of the symbolic actions that have followed this ‘racial awakening’, from toppling statues to woke rebranding by corporations — it creates the illusion that wide-ranging change is ‘finally’ happening. But real progress will only occur when the material conditions of black Americans has improved, and when laws and institutional practices that empower police to brutalise citizens have been overturned. In other words, the prize is not symbolic concession, but radical social transformation. The former is easy and superficial; the latter is hard and substantive.

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Abolishing the police is a cop out

By Mary Harrington

The growing influence of identity politics and racial essentialism in the media, academia and other mainstream institutions is all in the name of equality and diversity. Nevertheless, it is a way of thinking that permanently categorises human beings, putting them into rigid racial, ethnic and cultural boxes. Race isn’t regarded as a social construct that can be explained and analysed historically, but as an omnipresent state of being which we must ‘come to terms with’. Ironically this undermines the lived experience of belonging to a diverse society with all of its messy, complicated and very human dynamics.

Under the identitarian worldview, America is portrayed as a mosaic of different volks (or ‘races’) each existing in their own unique universe with particular histories, values and volkgeist, which must be ‘respected’ and not transgressed against. It leaves little room for overarching common identities like nationality that can go beyond racial and ethnic affiliations. Is it any surprise that numerous controversies over so-called ‘cultural appropriation’ have become mainstream political issues in the past few years? Once you enter into the cycle of essentialising human beings through race and identity, it, crackpot racialist ideas inevitably become legitimised.

One of the most banal and vulgar ways to think about humanity is to classify and categorise by ‘race’, and especially by skin pigmentation. Racial thinking, no matter how ‘progressively’ arrived at, can only be reactionary. It is irrational, anti-scientific and anti-humanist. It is a fetter on the social development of human beings and their flourishing. Racialism and racism are twin brothers. Solidifying racial categories in mainstream discourse is a grave mistake. Real progress should mean challenging racial thinking at its root and ultimately transcending it.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

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A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

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The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view.

There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.

But even from a raw political standpoint, it’s almost certainly not even true. Trump’s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address — which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of “American carnage”. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.

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Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor — which many contemporary journalists certainly are — any fatuous “would it help Trump?” calculation ought to be irrelevant.

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.” I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago’s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with “antifa” and blamed them for the riots.

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned, remarked to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.

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A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago’s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job — I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name — and so, far from seeing the “Defund the Police” slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn’t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn’t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in May, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period — the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk “what about black-on-black crime” point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn’t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don’t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this “movement”. And if you hadn’t seen it directly, would you ever know?

A few weeks ago, for instance, the headlines told us that an episode of Fawlty Towers was being removed from circulation for its use of racist language. It was. But briefly and from only one platform, UKTV, during which time it remained freely available from Britbox, Netflix and iTunes. After a few days, it returned to UKTV, uncut and affixed with a brief warning about the script’s use of racial slurs that would be unquotable on this page. Predictably, the noise around the story prevented the discussion of the much more urgent and subtle question upon which it turned — how should broadcasters manage the consequences of our new and perhaps perverse expectation that the popular culture of five decades ago should be instantly and eternally accessible?

In the 1920s, movies that were more than six years old were customarily dumped in a bath of hydrogen peroxide, melted down with other plastic trash — gap-toothed combs, discarded Xylonite dentures — and recycled as waterproof paint. Now we confer immortality on every moving image, and expect it to be preserved, archived and streaming on our phones. Our grandparents were never made uneasy by the culture of the past: they’d already forgotten it. We, however, have abolished cultural amnesia. Puzzling out that paradox, however, takes more journalistic effort than cutting and pasting one of John Cleese’s angry tweets.

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By Matthew Sweet

This week, though, British comedy provided the field for a much more interesting and enjoyable battle — one that might even suggest a way of resolving these skirmishes. On Monday, Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary with the Rank Charm School manners, provided a deus ex machina ending for a drama that had been rumbling since the moment, a fortnight previously, when a widely-anticipated rescue package for the arts sector failed to appear. The empty space was filled with energetic campaigning by playwrights, directors and actors, worried by the not-unreasonable suspicion that Boris Johnson was about to do to the theatres what Margaret Thatcher did to the mines.

But on Monday morning, Dowden waved his magic wand and promised the imminent arrival of £1.57 billion — some of it in actual money. Then the examination of the detail began. In his round of media interviews, Dowden was asked if the Christmas pantomime season might yet be saved. His answer was a rueful one. It looked difficult, thanks to the epidemiological challenge posed by a noisy inter-generational entertainment involving shouting, singing, and the violent agitation of soap bubbles and wallpaper paste.

It was a realistic answer and it made me sad. It also made the European arts correspondent of the New York Times sad. But not for the same reason. Matt Anderson was disgusted. He tweeted his disgust in block capitals, which made him seem even angrier than John Cleese. And when others pointed out to him that the financial stability of many British theatres was guaranteed by a successful pantomime season, he went the full Abanazar. “If that’s the most important art form for the health of the sector,” he declared, “there’s something wrong with the system.” He might as well have said it under a green light and then flounced off with a peal of diabolical laughter. Theatrical Twitter raised its handbag to its chest and told him that his snobbery was showing.

I may have hissed a little myself. Pantomime produces no disgust in me. It gives me a delicious form of historical vertigo. When I watch a pair of comics perform the wallpaper routine, or the plate-smashing sketch, or some business in a dark forest with a luminous ghost, I know I am in touch with the deep history of British culture; that I’m watching choreography and gags that were first worked out over a century ago. It also makes me part of an audience that is being sounded out on the length of its cultural memory. At the Manchester Opera House in 1992 I saw the celebrated dame Gordon Peters manoeuvre 2,000 people into hooting out the second line of You Made Me Love You — a song from 1913. (“I didn’t want to do it!” they chorused, as if Pavlov had conditioned them.) I’ve also seen those echoes fail: at the Catford Broadway in 2008, I was the only person in the stalls who knew that “Hi-de-Hi” should always be followed by “Ho-de-ho!”

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Pantomime emerged from the Harlequinade, an Anglicised 18th-century version of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Thanks to the 1737 Licensing Act, which permitted only the two Royal Theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, to feature plays with dialogue, the Harlequinade concentrated on song and wordless slapstick — executed most effectively by its Clown character, a figure of misrule who sat on babies, prodded people with red hot pokers, and sometimes abseiled up the set on a rope of sausages.

In 1843, the Theatre Regulation Act changed the rules on stage dialogue, triggering the mutation of the form. The silent clowns of the Harlequinade remained silent, but their show underwent a fusion with another popular theatrical genre — the “extravaganza”, in which myths and fairy tales were used as a frame for satirical, pun-filled comedy. Even if the story was set in Ancient Greece or medieval England, a steam train or an omnibus might move anachronistically over the stage — which explains why Widow Twankey’s laundry in Old Peking is always equipped with coin-operated washing machines. The airlock between these two styles was provided by an event that also remains a feature of modern pantomime — the transformation scene, in which, for instance, the pumpkin becomes a coach, or a magic lamp is spotted in a cave full of jewels.

These developments have produced a theatrical form of impressive sophistication and complexity. Pantomime smashes the fourth wall, bends time, space and gender, combines acrobatics, physical comedy and satire on local and national subjects. In 1993, the film director Lindsay Anderson went to the Bath Theatre Royal to see his old friend Robin Askwith, who had played one of those Maoist schoolboy revolutionaries in If…. (1968). The show was Dick Whittington. Askwith’s co-stars were June Brown from EastEnders, Ian Botham and a pair of magicians called Richard and Lara Jarmain. Anderson’s verdict: “Very Brechtian.”

And if you scoff at the idea of the British intellectual in the panto audience, this too is part of the tradition. In 1874, John Ruskin went five times to see Cinderella at Hengler’s Circus, and then to Drury Lane to catch Jack in a Box; or Harlequin Little Tom Tucker and the Three Men of Gotham who went to Sea in a Bowl. In this production, a princess disguised as Bo Peep led a flock of mechanical sheep across the stage and then caused a forest of magic mushrooms to rise up:

You see at present everywhere among us,
A mushroom, popularly called a fungus.
I do but strike my crutch and with this plunge, I
Reveal the funny figures of the Fungi.

Ruskin went straight from the theatre to write an essay contrasting the child actors who skipped through the fairyland of the Drury Lane stage and their hungry equivalents on the streets of Covent Garden. He imagined England itself subject to a transformation scene, in which its street children occupied their own Drury Lane pastoral, instead of “rolling on the heaps of black and slimy ground, mixed with brickbats and broken plates and bottles”.

The man from New York Times endured this week’s boos and hisses with grace. I hope, however, he paid no heed to the little knot of culture warriors who imagined that a political motive explained his lack of enthusiasm for watching veteran comics and X-Factor runners-up throw custard pies at each other. “People like him don’t want to be deeply connected to our history,” one insisted. “They prefer to rewrite it.”

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It’s an odd charge. Rewriting history is what historians do for a living. It’s also why pantomime is still here, using 16th-century Italian performance style and stories from the Brothers Grimm and the Arabian Nights to produce topical entertainment that has always enjoyed the freedom to jettison any elements that fall from favour. (Blackface and yellowface vanished along with gags about Mafeking and ration books; the dame and the ghosts remain.) Its history usually defies those who accuse it of abandoning its traditions. Critics who complained that Julian Clary was too rude for Snow White at the Palladium probably didn’t know about all the cock puns in the Drury Lane panto seen by Ruskin in 1873. Those who grumbled about Frank Bruno’s presence at the top of 1990s panto bills had, I suspect, never heard of Daniel Mendoza, the celebrity bare-knuckle boxer who appeared in Aladdin at Covent Garden in 1778.

But why would they? Unlike sit-coms set in the aspic of UKTV, pantomime is mutable, agile, and always renegotiating its relationship with the present day. At the 2019 panto at the Palladium, Nigel Havers got the biggest laugh of the night by climbing out of a bear suit and declaring: “If Prince Andrew is in tonight … THIS is sweat.” At the 2016 Sleeping Beauty at the Hackney Empire, Gavin Spokes’s Dame Nanny Nora trolled on stage in a frock divided between the EU flag and the Union Jack and declared: “I like a bit of both.” In the 2018 Aladdin at the Catford Broadway, as Theresa May suffered another Brexit deal defeat in Parliament, Wayne Rollins’ Abanazar declared: “I will rub this magic lamp and plunge the country into chaos!” Then he paused. “On second thoughts…”

Everyone got it. And the audience, in that moment, seemed a lot less divided than the country.

This week, one of the few places that still let you have those conversations has shut down. I think it is a disaster. Let me explain why.

About two years ago, someone accused me of preparing to do a journalistic hatchet job. I had a book coming out, about a group of people called the rationalists, and their concerns about AI destroying humanity, but also about their approach to the world. One of them suggested that the book was going to be an attack on the rationalists: “I expect that any published piece will be hugely negative towards [the] community. Will anyone take the other side of such a bet?”

The book, for the record, wasn’t a hatchet job. But it would have been incredibly easy to do one, had I wanted. That’s why they’re paranoid; because there are people out to get them, and because they’re easy to get.

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They’re easy to get because they’re weird. They’re weird in lots of ways, but the weirdest thing about them is that they are happy listening to, and debating, arguments they disagree with, and with criticising arguments that are “on their side” in whatever greater cultural battle is going on. That’s especially true of one key rationalist blog, Slate Star Codex, written by Scott Alexander, a pseudonymous psychiatrist who lives and works in the Bay Area of California. 

I should declare an interest at this point: I’m a huge fan of SSC. I think it’s an astonishing body of work; it ranges from in-depth discussions of studies into new antidepressants, to wide-ranging philosophical thinking about how we argue and why we disagree, to childish puns and short stories about hallucinatory cactus-people. Normally, I’d link to it — normally I’d have linked to it four or five times already — but today I can’t, for reasons that will become clear.

It’s part of the SSC ethos that “if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do”, then you should consider the possibility that that’s because you don’t understand, rather than because they’re stupid; the “principle of charity”. So that means taking ideas seriously — even ones you’re uncomfortable with. And the blog and its associated subreddit have rules of debate: that you’re not allowed to shout things down, or tell people they’re racist; you have to politely and honestly argue the facts of the issue at hand. It means that the sites are homes for lively debate, rare on the modern internet, between people who actually disagree; Left and Right, Republican and Democrat, pro-life and pro-choice, gender-critical feminists and trans-activist, MRA and feminist.

And that makes them vulnerable. Because if you’re someone who wants to do a hatchet job on them, you can easily go through the comments and find something that someone somewhere will find appalling. That’s partly a product of the disagreement and partly a function of how the internet works: there’s an old law of the internet, the “1% rule”, which says that the large majority of online comments will come from a hyperactive 1% of the community. That was true when I used to work at Telegraph Blogs — you’d get tens of thousands of readers, but you’d see the same 100 or so names cropping up every time in the comment sections.

(Those names were often things like Aelfric225 or TheUnBrainWashed, and they were usually really unhappy about immigration.)

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That’s why the rationalists are paranoid. They know that if someone from a mainstream media organisation wanted to, they could go through those comments, cherry-pick an unrepresentative few, and paint the entire community as racist and/or sexist, even though surveys of the rationalist community and SSC readership found they were much more left-wing and liberal on almost every issue than the median American or Briton. And they also knew that there were people on the internet who unambiguously want to destroy them because they think they’re white supremacists.

This has actually happened. For instance, Scott wrote a huge, long article explaining the views of the “Neoreactionaries”, a group of strange alt-right-affiliated thinkers who want to replace democracies with rule by hereditary kings. He also then wrote a huge, long “anti-Reactionary FAQ”, explaining why he thought they were wrong.

He has also written several things about how terrible Donald Trump is, but one of them suggested that he is not “openly racist”, as many people were suggesting, because Trump repeatedly said things about how much he loved Mexican people and wanted the Republican party to be “be the home in the future and forever more for African-Americans and the African-American vote”. He may or may not be racist, said Alexander, but he’s not being open about it.

And, of course, people read the explaining-the-Neoreactionaries post and decided he was a Neoreactionary; and they read the “Trump is awful but he’s not literally openly racist” post and decided he was pro-Trump.

That’s some of the background to an extraordinary row that’s broken out. A few weeks ago, a reporter at the New York Times started researching a piece about Slate Star Codex. The rationalist community became aware of it and became incredibly paranoid, for the reasons discussed above. 

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The reporter got in touch with me. He was totally reasonable and I was (and remain) convinced that he was not going to do a hit job; he had read SSC, he was impressed by the breadth and depth of the thinking on display, and he was going to write a broadly positive piece. So I spoke to him, on the record. I also encouraged other people to, if they felt comfortable doing so. Better, I thought, that the piece had some voices speaking up in favour.

But then I had an email from the reporter saying that the NYT editors wouldn’t let him write the piece without giving Scott Alexander’s real name. And, on Tuesday morning, SSC had been taken down, replaced with a single post saying: “NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog”.

(That’s why I’m not linking to any of it.)

I’m wary of “the internet makes me unsafe” arguments, because a lot of the time I think it’s overstated. Perhaps it is in this case. But Alexander has reasons to be scared. Recently, some people had taken the most extreme comments on the SSC subreddit as evidence that he was “a homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazi”. “I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat,” he wrote. “I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me.”

His pseudonym is not watertight; I once worked out his real name from clues on his blog, which I admit is a mildly creepy thing to do. Some other people did the same, but not out of passive interest: “Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up,” he wrote. “A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.

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“Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.

“One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.”

He ended up having a mild nervous breakdown. I totally understand his being paranoid about being publicly named.

(And, I learn today, one SSC commenter seems to have been SWATted, ie had the police called on them in an attempt to get them shot by trigger-happy American cops, although whether that’s true or connected to the blog is an open question.)

I think accusations that Alexander personally or the community at large are sexist or racist are not true, or at least are reliant on definitions of those words that 95% or more of the population would disagree with. 

As I mentioned, the NYT journalist told me that his editors wouldn’t let him write a piece about Alexander without naming him; I suspect that is a Times policy thing. A tech journalist friend agrees, saying: “The NYT is one of those organisations that thinks its internal rules have the status of constitutional law.” That may be true, but the NYT leaves sources unnamed if there’s a reason to be worried about their safety; they’ve certainly allowed other people anonymity in similar situations recently.

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What I find baffling is the idea that the public interest is served in publicly naming a blogger. If the NYT piece had been, as the rationalists feared, a hatchet job, then it would at least make sense to name him: “This psychiatrist is a RACIST, he should be fired”; I would disagree, but you could follow the reasoning. “This psychiatrist runs an excellent blog, but has many people online who want to destroy his career; here’s where they can find him, printed in the most famous newspaper in the world” is just crazy to me. (Alexander himself notes that psychiatrists in general “are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work”, for reasons given here.) Even the online groups who hate him most have refrained from publicly naming him in the past.

As I said, it’s hard to talk to people who disagree with you. These days, it feels even harder, and it feels as though people are even more willing to try to publicly shame people they disagree with rather than engage with them. Perhaps it was ever thus. But it felt like SSC was one of the few places that allowed this sort of serious conversation. I really, really hope the NYT sees fit to run the piece without naming Alexander, and that SSC is reinstated.

(Not least because, until that happens, about 20% of the links in all my UnHerd articles will be broken.)

By the way: the person who said my book was going to be a hatchet job offered to bet anyone who disagreed. Someone took him up on it; they agreed a $1,000 bet, proceeds going to a charity of the winner’s choice. It was Scott Alexander who bet against it, and won.