First, though, I should probably declare an interest. At least twice in the past I have traveled to London, been put up in a hotel, got out of bed at some ungodly hour, and then been plonked on the breakfast TV sofa in front of Piers Morgan. Each time he shouted over me and the other hapless guest for approximately three minutes, before we were both dismissed. Suffice to say, then, that on hearing about this interview I was not entirely convinced of the man’s suitability to handle as tricky and multi-faceted a guest as Fuentes: a character both apparently vulnerable and intensely steely, as if the Diary of a Wimpy Kid character had got his hands on Mein Kampf.

Still, Morgan has his own channel now, I reasoned, and a one-to-one conversation rather than a chaotic multiplayer shouting match might be worth a watch. Though politically very different, in other ways Fuentes resembles a mini-Morgan, and for that reason alone, the meeting held interest. Each has a huge internet audience; each exerts tight control over his own channel; each trades on outrage to get clicks. They both seem misanthropic and easily wounded. I’ve already listened to the Red Scare ladies adopt a big sisterly tone towards Fuentes in order to coax out confidences, and watched Tucker Carlson do his kindly father impression. Might Morgan’s sterner parental stance uncover further aspects?

No, of course it didn’t — although it did underline the futility of the hairdryer format with someone who won’t play the game. The entire interview was an extended struggle session, apparently aimed at making Fuentes recant his past statements, or else break down in remorse. Accusations were repeated more and more vociferously by Morgan, until they had nowhere left to go; at which point the host would simply move robotically to the next charge on the autocue. By the middle of the proceedings, Fuentes looked incredulous. By the end, he looked totally bored.

Suggested reading

Jessica Mitford: faux-progressive troublemaker

By Kathleen Stock

Morgan’s clunking setups could be detected from space. “At some stage in your family, there were immigrants who came to the US, is that correct?” was an early example, and you’re never going to guess where he was going with that one. When he eventually got to the point, Fuentes batted the move off easily enough: these days there is a different kind of immigrant arriving, and the US is a different kind of country. As usual, his interrogator had no real follow up.

At other times, Morgan managed to swerve open goalmouths in favor of pointlessly elaborate back-and-forths. “Just to be clear, you don’t like black people who play the victim and are rude. Is that your position?” he accurately summarized at one point. Clearly anticipating that his interviewer was about to make a “physician, heal thyself” kind of move, the notoriously rude white-victimhood-enjoyer laughed it off in advance: “I see where you are going with this.” But no; the actual bear trap being laboriously constructed for Fuentes was that he had been insufficiently rigorous in applying this principle to his friend Kanye West. “Your choice of friend is Ye, who is probably the number one black victimhood narcissist in America … do you understand the problem?” Morgan thundered. There then followed a bafflingly tangential discussion of whether West, in particular, was a nice person or not.

Morgan’s main weapon, though, was shame. It failed utterly. The tape would roll, and Fuentes would be shown footage of himself in the past saying some outrageous taboo-busting thing or other. Cut back to the present, and his English daddy would sternly ask him if he stood by it. Every single time, Fuentes simply asserted with a grin that he did. Did he really have an “opposition to world Jewry”? He did. Did he still think, as he once said, that “Hitler was kind of fucking cool?” “Yes, I do,” Fuentes replied. “And I’m tired of pretending he’s not, to be honest.”

The nadir of this approach came during a bonkers segment where Lord Finkelstein unexpectedly made an appearance on screen, introduced as Morgan’s friend. He was there to describe how his mother and numerous other close relatives had suffered terrible fates under Hitler and Stalin, and to ask Fuentes whether he would “rather be on team Mum than team Hitler”. Completely unsurprisingly, Fuentes openly mocked this appeal to his finer sensibilities from an unknown old British gent sitting in his large kitchen in a quarter-zip, lecturing a younger American generation about events they had been told about thousands of times already. “My generation is done with the pearl-clutching… I don’t even know who this person is, why is this person talking to me,” Fuentes said. He went on: “We’re tired of hearing about slavery, and the Holocaust, and Jim Crow, we are done hearing about that.”

That, then, is the nub of the matter. Fuentes and his feral supporters online simply don’t care. They weren’t there, they aren’t responsible for any of it anyway, and they are more concerned about other things. The more that their elders amp up their incredulity and disgust at this lack of compassion and decency, etc. etc., the more disassociated they get, and the more funny they think it all is. They have already seen the documentaries, been to the memorial sites, listened to the lectures, had their heartstrings plucked to breaking point.

Any parent has surely been in this position at least once: adopting a stern face, insisting this is extremely serious, why are you laughing, stop it at once! But the kids are not going to stop; they revel in their herd immunity to the socially prescribed response. Every trick you pull to pile on the emotional pressure will only be met with derision and increased resolve.

Since the interview aired, there have been various responses, and many of them seem to me to be wishful thinking. Aaron Bastani has said that, faced with Morgan’s ham-fisted probing, Fuentes “falls to pieces … He looks incredibly vulnerable.” I saw no such thing. Writing in the Times, Rob Henderson has argued that Fuentes’ appeal rests on constantly cycling through personas: sometimes ironic and jokey, sometimes serious, without people being able to pin him down. But in longer inquisitorial formats such as Morgan’s, he writes, “the contradictions pile up — and the audience he has cultivated will finally see what has been in plain sight all along”.

Yet the idea that Fuentes’ groyper following is going to be put off by some inconsistency in his various statements seems to me totally naïve. On the contrary, I think they will applaud him for his trickster slipperiness. I assume they are very much over playing the game according to the conventions of rational inquiry. Why should they follow them, when their opponents do not? With their recent race-based crusades, many supposed liberals threw the principles of truth, fairness, and interpretative charity out of the window. In that respect, Fuentes is just following their lead.

Ultimately, the most that Morgan’s encounter with Fuentes shows us is that the comforting ideal of a Big Television Interview, definitively sorting the good guys from the bad guys, is now impotent in a time of streaming. We can no longer console ourselves with the idea of an implacable inquisitor in a suit, calling some public figure to account on behalf of the imaginary Reasonable Viewer. The whole idea of an implicit Reasonable Viewer was based on an underlying consensus about basic values, which no longer exists. Instead, we have lots of groups of loyal partisans, and their pet figures getting rich off their clicks.

Equally, no interviewer has sufficient control over the means of visual production, and many guests have bigger reaches than their hosts. The discussion can never definitively end, because there is always the chance of another spicy comeback. Last time I looked, Morgan and Fuentes were trading post-interview blows on X. Fuentes was proclaiming “TOTAL GROYPER VICTORY” and Morgan was telling Fuentes that he really should get laid. David Frost must be turning in his grave.

So yes, everything is debatable, as Fuentes says; but nobody is actually debating. There can’t be debates where neither side is willing to play by the rules. I am afraid I have no quick answer as to how to make Fuentes’ white nationalism less appealing to masses of young men, but Morgan has shown us that old-school tactics have absolutely had their day.

I was genuinely exhausted after a long day, but remember feeling slightly ashamed at the possibility that I’d weaponised the guards’ machismo in the interests of my own convenience. I suppose, though, that it was a textbook example of the now oft-condemned “white women’s tears”.

This supposedly potent weapon is, we’re told, usually directed at less privileged classes of women, typically to avoid being “called out” for some moral infraction or other. This debate-ending power to weep on demand is supposedly predicated on the special, celestial status of white middle-class women as fragile entities whose emotional well-being must not be disturbed — even if that means warping all of politics and culture to accommodate their emotional comfort.

“Our sanctioned victim status shields privileged white women from accountability in interpersonal interactions and in the political sphere”, argues feminist Alison Phipps. But is it really just white women, like my younger self on the Guatemalan border, who get listened to when we weep? The debate reignited yesterday, after Keir Starmer’s tearful appearance on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on Tuesday evening.

The Labour leader recounted a number of painful personal events, including the loss of his mother, the devastating effect this had on his father and a house fire that killed the family dog. Morgan is the master of extracting a visceral confession, and it was affecting to see the usually very controlled Starmer in the grip of deep emotion.

Morgan described the interview as “searingly honest and intensely emotional”; it was an exchange that “shows the real him”. From this perspective, there’s something more real about tears than self-restraint: a stripping-away of artifice to reveal the person that’s really inside.

Britain, long notorious for emotional restraint, started to embrace this emotional openness more than two decades ago with the 1997 death of Princess Diana. Crowds piled bouquets in front of the Palace; people who’d never met Diana wept openly. The Royal Family initially remained in Scotland, only returning to London after public outrage at their reticence. Almost overnight, it didn’t just become acceptable to emote in public; failing to do so demonstrated crippling emotional inadequacy.

Tony Blair, a natural for the emerging aesthetic of public emotional display, declared that Diana had been the “People’s Princess”. She had been, as she hoped (and in a phrase reportedly borrowed from a novel by her step-grandmother, the romance writer Barbara Cartland) a “queen of people’s hearts”.

More from this author

It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

How times change. Diana was pursued by humans with cameras; but today the intrusive reach of the cameras is something we do to ourselves, via social media. As in the age of Diana, intense emotion remains a currency: weeping selfies garner a powerful reaction. But with so much more coin in circulation, the market is growing jaded.

The generation that came of age when Diana was still alive may treat tears as an “authentic” manifestation of the “real you”. But now we are all encouraged to be both a tearful Instagram Diana and also the paparazzi swarm. And the question of whose tears garner sympathy, and whose trigger cynicism, is itself becoming a battleground.

One individual regularly lionised as authentic for her weeping (despite being a white woman) is New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Widely celebrated for her emotionally engaged political style and willingness to talk about wellness, compassion and empathy, Ardern herself argues: “you can be strong, and you can be kind”.

Perhaps that’s why Ardern regularly weeps in public: in 2017, for example, she wept while apologising to the family of murdered backpacker Grace Millane; she did the same two years later while commemorating the Christchurch mosque massacre. Again, last year, she openly cried at a service remembering the White Island volcano eruption. Crucially, her tears invariably make the headlines: evidence of her compassion and authenticity.

More from this author

The virtues of masculinity

By Mary Harrington

Elsewhere, the press luxuriates in stories about whether Kate Middleton made Meghan Markle cry before the royal wedding, or of Markle weeping into her pillow the night before the couple’s notorious Oprah interview. But even our royal emoter-in-chief, Prince Harry, has spoken of how surreal it was to follow his mother’s coffin as thousands who’d never met her lined the streets, sobbing.

Harry may be keen to make a career rejecting his repressed upbringing in favour of emotional authenticity as a route to mental health. But even he has, it seems, some concerns about that era-defining moment of emotion. No surprise, then, to find that our culture more generally is by no means unambiguously in favour of tears.

If the tears are low-status and male, for example, you can buy a t-shirt that celebrates bathing in them, as modelled by feminist Jessica Valenti. Even those tears emitted by Britain’s (male) Secretary of State for Health, on hearing of the first Covid jabs, were mocked as “pretending to cry”.

And despite what Phipps asserts, being a white woman is no guarantee that your tears will reach a sympathetic audience. Theresa May, long panned as the “Maybot” for her lack of warmth, was panned for breaking with her usual buttoned-up form as she announced her resignation. And when the classicist Mary Beard was rounded on for defending the sexually predatory behaviour of Oxfam workers in Haiti, the weeping face she posted in response triggered not sympathy but further condemnation.

It’s sometimes claimed that greater political participation by women will result in moral improvements to politics in general, thanks to women’s superior capacity for empathy and aversion to conflict. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that as more women have entered public life — Parliament is now 35% female, an all-time high — so too our embrace of emotional display in public life has grown alongside it. But while it’s true that women are statistically less violent than men, it’s less certain that this means we’re nicer human beings.

More from this author

So you want to be a mermaid?

By Mary Harrington

When I was at school in the Nineties, I often watched the Popular Girls amuse themselves by baiting less popular classmates with carefully calibrated and plausibly deniable barbs. When the victim retaliated, usually with less subtlety, the Popular Girl would respond by ostentatiously crying — a move that usually resulted in an outpouring of sympathy for the girl who had in fact been the aggressor.

Since then, along with the rest of social life, much of our political discourse has transferred to social media. And here, actual violence is off the table — it’s all words on a screen — but verbal cruelty and social ostracism are easy to mobilise if you’re popular. It’s the perfect hunting ground, in other words, for Popular Girl-style covert aggression.

I was reminded of this recently by one of the most noted weepers in American public life: the politician Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. After the Capitol riots, Ocasio-Cortez was mocked by conservatives for over-dramatising her own experience, after convincing herself that an officer who’d come to find and protect her was actually about to kill her. In response to her critics, she grew tearful and talked about being a sexual assault survivor.

The Hispanic Ocasio-Cortez, at least, challenges the idea that it’s the tears only of white women that reign supreme — at least contrasted with Mary Beard and Theresa May. The politics of the breaking voice and artfully dabbed eye are indisputably more female than male; its power-users are always women. But these examples suggest the effectiveness of this method is less about race, than something more like Popular Girls schoolyard ranking.

If you’re ugly, old or badly-dressed, don’t expect crying to work; if you’re male, it’s a gamble; and if you’re not in the in-group, you can forget it. But if your face fits (and you don’t ugly-cry) then you can do what you like. And as long as you sob in public now and then, you’ll be considered a paragon of compassion.

More from this author

What does Laurence Fox stand for?

By Tanya Gold

The policies Jacinda Ardern actually implements are, after all, often considerably less cuddly than her sometimes-weepy public persona. She may shed a tear to mark a terrorist attack or natural disaster, but she also intervened to water down public condemnation of the use of enslaved or forcibly sterilised workers in China’s Xinjiang region. Evidently, New Zealand’s compassionate Prime Minister prefers the pragmatic realpolitik of balancing export priorities to compassion for the plight of China’s Muslim minorities.

Yet watching Sir Keir, I had no sense that he was playing a game of tactical tears. A politician who came of age before the sobbing selfie, his emotion — rarely seen in political life — seemed unforced. But I also wondered how much longer we’ll see that kind of authenticity, as pre-internet politicians grow fewer, replaced by millennials steeped in the Mean Girls politics of social media.

There’s much to be said for a more emotionally open, less aggressive and more empathic style of politics — more feminine, in a word. But we should be under no illusions: embracing this will also bring a rise in the public use of emotion, Popular Girl style, as a weapon. And that, in turn, will breed cynicism — even of those tears, like Keir’s, that seem to come from the heart.

The first belonged, to Piers Morgan, who was forced to quit Good Morning Britain after six successful if noisy years for daring to express disbelief at a number of the Duchess’s claims. The claiming of the second scalp, however, has attracted far less attention — even though it serves as an equally, if not more, damning parable for our times…

Do facts still matter? On the face of it, that question appears to have a straightforward answer: of course facts matter; fact-checking is a divine skill and the best defence we have against so-called “fake news”. But in today’s troubled climate, you’re increasingly likely to be given an altogether different response: “Facts? Why are you demanding facts. Don’t be racist.”

Just ask Ian Murray, who until this week was the executive director of the Society of Editors, but now finds himself jobless. The Society attempts, in its own words, to “fight for media freedom”. But as Mr Murray (no relation) has discovered, media freedom is just as elastic as almost every other freedom in this freedom-less age.

In this regard, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was something of a litmus test. In a free society, people would be able to watch it and draw a number different, but acceptable, conclusions. In an unfree society, however, only one permissible opinion would be allowed. If the past days have taught us anything, then surely it is clear that we have failed this test. The second reality has been borne out, and, as a result, Mr Murray has been forced to end his career.

One of the most disturbing accusations levelled by both Harry and Meghan during their interview concerned the toxicity of the British press, in particular the British tabloids. But a claim does not become true simply because a Duke or Duchess says it. Indeed, it is striking that while the comments made by the Sussexes on the Royal Family have been heavily scrutinised in recent days, their accusations against the British press have managed to slide by, accepted as though they were simply fact.

It didn’t matter that their claims — presented, it should be noted, more as assertions — were particularly egregious: that the reason why Meghan and Harry had come in for criticism from the British press was because Meghan identifies as black, thus implying that the British media is racist.

More from this author

How Meghan won

By Douglas Murray

In the face of such damning charges, it is striking that much of the media has chosen to keep its head down; the Guardian proved a notable exception, predictably endorsing the Sussexes’s worldview. As for the others, I suspect their silence come from a simple and understandable desire not to get in the line of fire.

In the end, the only person brave enough to stand up for Britain’s newspapers turned out to be the since-departed executive director of the Society of Editors. In a statement issued after the Sussexes’s interview, he rightly pointed out that the British press “is not bigoted and will not be swayed from its vital role holding the rich and powerful to account”. It continued: “It is not acceptable for the Duke and Duchess to make such claims without providing any supporting evidence.”

In itself, such a statement should have been unremarkable. But as the fall-out from the past few days has shown, demanding “supporting evidence” can you turn you into a pariah.

In this instance, I suspect that’s probably because when the Sussexes and their supporters talk about racism towards Meghan, genuine examples are never forthcoming. For example, at one point during the interview, Oprah launched into a monologue detailing how Meghan “became the target of unrelenting, pervasive attacks” when she joined the royal family.

To illustrate her point, a selection of allegedly racist headlines from British newspapers appeared on screen. Pretty damning stuff, you might think. Except for the fact that a significant proportion of the headlines were taken completely out of context. More than a third of the articles shown during the interview were from American and Australian publications. And in the case one of the most egregious headlines — “Meghan’s seed will taint our Royal Family” — Oprah failed to mention that the purpose of the news story was actually to expose racist comments made by a model.

More from this author

Why is the woke mob so scared?

By Douglas Murray

Point this out to the Sussexes, though, and no doubt they’ll respond that their treatment has still been particularly unpleasant. But such a claim wrongly assumes that other members of the Royal Family have managed to avoid intrusive or negative coverage from the media; or that, when they have, it hasn’t amounted to much. When Meghan, in her Oprah interview, acknowledged that the Duchess of Cambridge had been branded “Waity Katie” by the media for waiting so long for Prince William to propose to her, it was telling that she went on to conclude, with Oprah’s encouragement, that Kate’s unpleasant experience didn’t compare to her own.

As it happens, I find it rather telling that Meghan chose this particular example to illustrate media intrusion into Kate’s life. For when it comes to intrusion, is there anything more intrusive than the publication of photos, in the French press, of the Duchess of Cambridge topless? Unpleasant as it may be, it’s the simple truth that the world’s press is intensely interested in every aspect of the Royal family, and that they are interested in it because their readers — the public — want them to be.

That’s why Ian Murray was entirely right, as the head of a body representing editors, to push back against the unsubstantiated claims made by the Sussexes; to say that if high-profile figures such as Harry and Meghan are going to accuse the press of singling them out, let alone being racist in the process, then they should show proof.

Suggested reading

Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

In a reasonable age that would be a reasonable demand. And that was the only mistake Murray made: forgetting that this age is far from reasonable. The Society of Editors was soon targeted by the usual online activists and Murray was forced to resign, announcing that he had to “take the blame” for his initial statement. “While I do not agree the society’s statement was in any way intended to defend racism, I accept it could have been much clearer in its condemnation of bigotry and has clearly caused upset,” he said.

A new statement from the Murray-less board made the necessary confession, acknowledging that there is “a lot of work to be done in the media to improve diversity and inclusion”. The society went on to promise that it “will reflect on the reaction our statement prompted and work towards being part of the solution.”

So another person finds themselves without a job and another institution bends towards the dogmatic orthodoxies of the time. There are ugly winds in the air. And with evidence and facts unable to save us, I fear Mr Murray’s scalp will not be the last.

Young himself has had to resign from a plethora of positions in the face of a huge social media backlash for some of his previous puerile comments. He is now fighting back against the ‘tyranny of opinion’ warned against by John Stuart Mill.

Anyone can defend opinions they agree with. It takes a true liberal to stick up for those with whose opinions we find incredibly irritating or fundamentally disagree with. As a liberal, I shudder at the way today’s liberalism has mutated into the epitome of illiberal.

I joined the Liberals when I was 16; not as a cunning career move, but because I believe in the equal worth and value of every person. I believe that every person should be free to live as they see fit, to hold their beliefs and to express them as they wish. I reject forced conformity, whether from the law or from social pressure.

Today’s liberalism does not uphold these liberal values.

Eyebrows were first raised when thinkers such as Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell were no-platformed for their views in the name of liberalism. Then, last year, when the police turned up at the workplace of Harry Miller to ‘check [his] thinking’ because of some of his tweets, it began to look like we were heading full tilt into Orwellian territory.  These days, it is perfectly normal for so-called liberals to condemn the views — and even the thoughts — of those who do not sign up to all their beliefs; even those who once would have been part of the same ‘tribe’. Liberalism has lost itself.

Suggested reading

Hate crime is the new blasphemy

By Mary Harrington

So I applaud the intent of the Free Speech Union in pushing back against some of these expressions of ‘liberalism’. But I think it should work both ways.

Today, it is almost impossible to avoid the eggshells littering the terrain of public debate, as we try to remain ‘politically correct’, fearful of saying the wrong thing. But lest you find yourself nodding along, it’s important to take a step back and realise that the liberal Left are not the only PC police. I do hope this new Union, many of whose members come from the Right of the political spectrum, will also be taking issue with the ‘PC brigade’ of their own tribe.

Five minutes on social media will give you a window into a world where all sides seek to judge and condemn. And the language of the Right is just as explosively politically correct as that on the Left. While they may not seek physically to no-platform those whose views they don’t like, there is an aggressive hostility about their tone which seeks to shut down the other side just as effectively.

More from this author

Test article

By Tim Farron

Right-wing PC views condemn any publicly-declared statement of compassion from the Left as simply ‘virtue-signalling’ which therefore must be vilified. For example, Barack Obama was dubbed a ‘virtue-signalling doormat’ by Piers Morgan for claiming that having more women in authority would improve living standards.

Those who express certain concerns around social and racial justice are dismissed as ‘woke’, which is now a kind of shorthand for not worth listening to.

The Right-wing PCers are concerned about belligerently policing the trappings of nationhood and national heritage. There is outrage when Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t sing the National Anthem and contempt for anyone not wearing the right kind of poppy 24/7 during the Remembrance period. Meghan and Harry are lambasted for not being royal in the right way: an Express columnist recently called the pair “freeloaders” and a “joke woke couple”.

This synthetic anger springs from the conviction that previously mainstream views are now being marginalised. They think, therefore, that they can hit back with as much offence as they believe they are receiving. But this simply intensifies the downward spiral of public debate.

We have arrived at the point where the self-righteous are judging the self-righteous for being self-righteous…self-righteously. My point is we’re all guilty.

I do believe that political correctness can actually be a good thing. When applied properly it speaks of treating people with dignity and respect, and not dismissing or denigrating them because they are different from me. But the negative side of this is that it is often zealously policed by disapproving Twitter warriors, ready to orchestrate a pile-on.

Suggested reading

The truth about free speech in Britain

By Peter Hitchens

It is inevitable that in a polarised social-media-driven society, some of what we say will trigger offence. But this does not mean that we should deliberately set out to cause it. Perhaps we might feel that, given that people are going to be offended anyway, we don’t need to bother trying to be respectful or restrained in our language. But I want to call out both approaches — while being aware that this warning also applies to my own interactions on Twitter.

Those behind the Free Speech Union and those who are fighting back against the rise of liberal illiberalism will say that they want to restore traditional British values; freedom of speech being among them. That is all well and good. But I would add civility to this list. And I would also add the often-overlooked Christian value of grace.

Grace is the gift of something wonderful and undeserved. It is epitomised in Christ’s offer of forgiveness, and to release us from our anger and hurt. In return, we are asked to offer forgiveness to others, even when it is not sought. Our culture finds this concept almost impossible to grasp. Yet such an understanding would surely allow a healthy national debate, in which different opinions can be permitted and debated without the other side feeling threatened.

The Christian apologist Michael Ramsden makes the point that we live in a time of competitive victimhood. Everyone defines themselves by how they have been ill treated by others. And this increasingly goes for the Right, as they push back, ever more vigorously, against the liberal thought police.

It is appropriate to seek justice for our grievances, but if our pursuit is motivated by bitterness, we will be left with resentment, even when justice is achieved. As long as we take this approach, there will be no forgiveness in our public debates. So while we may protect free speech, public discourse will always be tainted with a tone of calculated offence.

So my challenge to us all is that we are willing to give up our anger and replace it with an attitude of grace. This applies to both Left and Right; Remainers and Leavers. Otherwise our current tribes and divisions will continue to define us for years to come.