Open letters claim to restore moral clarity; but too often they spread confusion. Open letters purport to express obvious truths; but recent events have highlighted the worrying tendency of the genre to be hijacked for counter-productive ends: to express obvious non-truths, for example, or — and this can be worse — non-obvious non-truths.

Some of the foregoing dangers are, we believe, inherent in the collective epistolary form itself. The trick, in crafting the perfect open letter, is to give maximalist expression to a minimalist position. Authors of open letters need to be selective enough in relaying the background “facts” of their case so as not to alienate potential signatories: these are celebrities we’re dealing with, remember, and therefore natural free-thinkers. At the same time, one has to give the letter enough moral phlegm to make it worth clearing one’s throat to put one’s famous name to it. 

The result — you might call it Maier’s Canting Theorem — is that the assessable argumentative content of an open letter is inversely proportional to a weighted average of the fame and number of the celebrities whose names are appended to it. In the place of explicit reasoning, in the course of which a position’s flaws and vulnerabilities are all too liable to be exposed, the reader of an open letter is treated to broad moral pronouncement, rendered in a high-committee prose style, and which tends to veer towards melodrama and alarmism. 

Needless to say, we, the undersigned, feel this chilling trend poses an existential risk to democracy, harms the most vulnerable in our society, and is likely to eradicate life on Earth as we know it.

OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for… pic.twitter.com/QLQel0EC7N

— The New Statesman (@NewStatesman) October 21, 2026

Connoisseurs of the open letter have by now probably seen the above-described defects recently on display in the public tangle that The New Statesman has got itself into. In a letter whose length is robustly predicted by Maier’s theorem — being really more of a tersely-worded postcard with 158 signatures — the magazine denounces as unconscionable the recent “censorship” of the novelist Sally Rooney. 

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The facts of the case are well-known. Among the political causes close to Rooney’s heart is Palestine, and a group called Palestine Action. Rooney has pledged to use royalties to support the group — despite the fact that it was lately sanctioned as a terrorist group by the British government, making funding them an offense. We, the undersigned, cannot help but conjecture that Rooney might have got away with her wheeze — were it not for the fact that she announced her intention to break the law in advance, and in a manner almost designed to attract attention. Given the legal jeopardy, at any rate, Rooney’s publisher at Faber has decided, with the author’s consent, to suspend sales of her novels. 

Now, we do not wish to take a collective stand on the controversial question of whether Rooney’s silencing omens a sinister curtailment of the right to free speech. We only wish to note that, if a novelist’s right to free expression includes a guarantee that others must cooperate in activities which the author loudly declares will be used to raise funds for terrorists on British soil, Rooney may well have a complaint.

It is one of the rhetorical liberties taken by open letter writers that they sometimes pass off caustic jibes as concessive praise. We only wish to add, then, that the Statesman’s own letter exhibits, rather brilliantly, one further trick common of the form: that of smuggling in inflammatory speculations to the extra-epistolary text, which the signatories themselves might have preferred not to be implicated in. In this case, there is a somewhat daring analogy attempted between the fates of Sally Rooney and Salman Rushdie. Just consider, we are invited to reason: both write novels; both have had trouble selling them in Britain at one time or another; both… have the initials “SR”? (At some point, the brainstorming exercise takes a slightly feeble turn.) 

Still, we note that one further peculiarity of open letters is that, once they begin to attract enough ink below the line, they inevitably tend to be judged as much on the basis of those who notably fail to sign as on the basis of those who do. (That may be more a “feature” than a “bug” of the genre: the creation of an implicit cost to withholding assent being part of the form’s coercive effort to organize public thinking). Notably, though presumably he was invited to, Salman Rushdie did not sign.

These quagmires give only a merest hint of the varied trouble open letter writing can lead to. Though they pretend to give a voice to suppressed truths, too often they simply echo a preachy moral consensus. Though affecting nuance, their inevitably coarse-grained rhetorical style is a standing disinvitation to detailed engagement. Even well-intentioned interventions — the famous 2020 Harper’s letter championing free speech — can undermine their own cause in subtle ways. Having spent so much time throat-clearing about the threat of “right wing demagogues”, “Donald Trump”, and slavishly assenting to the need for more DEI, the Harper’s letter may have done more to underscore the inescapability of a woke consensus than it did to oppose it.

Or consider — if you can bear to — the glaringly avant-garde approach that Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project takes to his open letters. One recent exhibit, a letter in defense of Jason Arday’s right to evade media scrutiny, was a superficially well-reasoned account made about an utterly alternative reality. Arday, the 21,000 undersigned agreed, was facing “entirely false allegations of plagiarism”. There was “no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing” against him. The “baseless allegations” were therefore a “right wing” smear campaign. “Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the color of their skin,” the letter concluded, apparently without irony. If ever it is complacently assumed that the open letter lends itself to the service of clarification, then here is evidence that it is just as easily commandeered as a vehicle for the brazen propagation of falsehood.

The home stretch of an open letter is the time to get expansive; and even in denouncing them we, the undersigned, do not wish to buck the form. Why do people set so much store by open letters? What epistemic authority are these bewildering lists supposed to exert over us? Someone who thought moral opinions more reliable when dispensed by motley bands of intellectuals would seem, on reflection, as mad as someone who thought all songs sound better when performed by Live Aid. Yet the appeal of the genre seems to rest on the strange assumption that when a missive has been jointly audited and solemnly endorsed by a mongrel committee of bewilderingly disconnected names, it enjoys some strange, placeless authority. “If Kneecap, Zadie Smith, and the Chichele professor of social and political theory can all agree on this one”, such letters seem to ask, “why can’t you?”.

Needless to say, in a world without open letters floating about, some might justly worry about where we are to get our opinions from, and how we are to verify that they are in good standing with the moral majority. We acknowledge that this is a serious problem. However, having consulted each other, we believe it best that everyone should think for themselves. 

Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York agree, and they aren’t leaving the matter to state and local governance. They have introduced a bill to impose a moratorium everywhere in the United States. In a press release, Sanders gives four separate reasons — environmental (“a profound impact on land and water use”), economic (“will drive up electricity costs”), occupational (“eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs”), and apocalyptic: “this revolutionary technology could soon become smarter than humans and escape human control — with potentially cataclysmic outcomes.” You might think that the prospect of a Silicon God enslaving or annihilating humanity, if it were a genuine threat, would be the first item in the list of AI data center dangers, not the last.  

Some Republican supporters of data centers assert that China is responsible for the opposition in the US — a claim as ludicrous as the Democrats’ claim a decade ago that Russia swung the 2016 election from Clinton to Trump.

Today’s opposition to data centers is home-grown, but it is more “astroturf” than grass-roots. The anti-data center movement is merely the latest cause seized upon by a pre-existing coalition of anti-growth environmentalists, anti-corporate progressives, small-is-beautiful populists, and preservationists, who for various reasons want their local landscapes frozen forever as they are now.  

Of the parade of horribles listed as reasons to oppose new data centers, concerns about the environment and electricity prices are legitimate. Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for cooling and electricity for operation. It is both reasonable and necessary to prevent these facilities from exhausting local water supplies or shifting energy costs to local utility bill payers.  How this should be done, and at what level of government, deserve to be important subjects of public debate. The tech accelerationists who oppose all regulation of AI are as misguided as the technophobes.

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But most Americans who oppose data centers do so on the basis of practical concerns, not progressive ideology. According to a Gallup survey in May, 50% of those who opposed data centers in their local areas cited “effects on resources”: water usage (18%), energy consumption (18%), and unspecified environmental impact (14%), with only 13% citing other reasons for opposition, including loss of farmland, threats to wildlife, natural resource consumption, or the fear that the data center would be an “eyesore.” Other concerns included apprehension about higher costs to utility rate-payers and citizens (20%) and concern about pollution (16%).

What about the other concerns raised by progressives like Sanders? Only 12% of the opponents polled by Gallup worried that AI would replace jobs and only 4% agreed with “Scared of AI/Don’t trust it/AI will take over.”  

Most data-center construction is in low-population suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas that tend to prefer Republicans to Democrats in elections. If the anti-data-center movement were really about practical local concerns, we would expect opposition to be greater among small-town and rural Republicans than among big-city Democrats who are not affected by the construction.

Instead, we find the reverse. According to the same survey, Democrats are far more likely to “strongly oppose” data-center construction than Republicans, by a huge gap of 56% to 39%. What is more, there is a gender gap: women are more likely than men to strongly oppose data-center construction, 55% to 43%.

In other words, a Republican man who lives in a rural county where a data center is likely to be constructed is less likely to be worried about it than a Democratic woman who lives in a big city far from the nearest data center. The truth is that the urban female Democrat opposes data centers only because that is quickly becoming the progressive party line.  Her concern about the possible effects on the rural Republican families she otherwise dislikes for their religious and political views is just virtue-signaling and play-acting, like the performative outrage of urban liberals at the thought that the Keystone Pipeline might cross sacred indigenous lands they will never visit but heard about on NPR, or the theatrical alarm among progressive city-dwellers on reading in The New York Times about road-building in the Amazon rainforest.

The debate about data center construction, then, would be boring and technical if the questions most local citizens have about their role in water use, electricity consumption, and pollution were the only issues. In this case, to use the phrase of the 1960s Left, the issue is not the issue. The real objection of many progressive opponents of data centers is not to this particular kind of industrial development, but to industrial development as such. Apart from the dystopian prospect of superhuman computers running amok, every one of the objections listed by Sanders and other supporters of a data center moratorium could be raised — and have been raised in the recent past — against major manufacturing and infrastructure projects of different kinds, including new factories that are built as a result of initiatives to reshore industrial supply chains lost to China, Mexico, and other countries.

Many of the same progressive advocacy groups that are uniting to oppose data center construction have come together in the past to oppose nuclear power, fracking, and offshore oil and gas drilling, using multiple arguments calculated to appeal to “the groups” as the allied single-issue factions on the left are known. Consider the Keystone Pipeline, proposed in 2008 and canceled by President Biden in 2021. (An alternate version is being considered today.) The Christmas tree logic of the anti-development Left is illustrated by an article published in 2022, after the Biden administration canceled the Keystone Pipeline: “this article draws upon environmental, utilitarian, rights and justice ethics in order to explain why the Keystone XL Pipeline extension was unethical and why its permit was revoked by the Biden Administration in 2021. It debunks the common claims that the pipeline would increase jobs and encourage economic growth, as well as sheds light upon the negative environmental effects and risks to indigenous populations, offering ethical guidelines for the future, such as consulting with indigenous communities before embarking on construction projects.”

Much of the passionate opposition to data center construction today is merely displaced hostility toward tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Progressive opponents similarly demonized the Keystone Pipeline as a plot to enrich those important Republican donors, the Koch brothers. In 2011, when a Reuters article reported that the Kochs would profit from Keystone Pipeline construction, two Democratic Representatives, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), demanded that Congress subpoena documents from Koch Industries about their interests in the project, if any. Yet, if the Keystone Pipeline was bad, it was bad no matter who profited from it, and if it was in the public interest, the identity of its investors was irrelevant. Associating Keystone with the Kochs was pure demagogy, like attempts by contemporary progressives to smear all data centers by association with Elon Musk.

In the view of the anti-development Left, technological civilization is bad and nature is good.  From this Arcadian ideology follows the conclusion that not only should the existing human-built environment not be extended, but also some existing infrastructure, like electricity-generating dams, should be destroyed. 

While New Deal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson promoted hydropower dams for their ability to generate cheap electricity, for decades, one of the goals of radical environmentalists in the US has been dismantling these New Deal icons and “rewilding” the rivers they modified. As in the case of the anti-data center movement, today’s anti-dam advocates provide multiple alternate rationales for the policy, each rationale calculated to appeal to a different part of the progressive coalition. A recent headline on the website of nonprofit The Post Carbon Institute seeks to unite conservationists, global warming activists, and those whose virtue-signaling includes performative displays of guilt toward Native Americans: “Removing hydropower dams can restore ecosystems, build climate resilience, and restore tribal lands.”

From the point of view of progressive political coalition-building, that is a good “three-fer” but it it could have been converted into a better “four-fer” by linking dams to sinister Big Business, or by smearing dams by association with the benighted, provincial Republican voters with motorboats and lake houses — who, once re-wilding is complete, will be conveniently punished by the drainage of the dam-created reservoirs they use for recreation.

The same progressive nonprofit-industrial complex and allied politicians who define the ever-changing progressive party line have now decided that data centers are to be demonized as symbols of the evils of corporate capitalism and inequality, as personal automobiles, highways, suburbs, oil and gas drilling, hydropower dams, and nuclear power plants have been demonized by the anti-development Left since the 1970s. If zero-carbon nuclear fusion technology generating cheap electricity were invented tomorrow, this same half-century-old anti-development coalition would immediately mobilize against it. Stop Big Fusion Now!

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The good news is that the anti-development coalition in America is fragile and sometimes breaks down. For example, there is a split between neoliberal boosters of solar power and wind power who back the Green New Deal and more radical deep ecologists and degrowthers. The radical Greens at least are consistent. If Big Data Center is bad for the environment, then so are Big Wind, with its massive windmills spoiling views and killing birds; Big Solar, with its rows of rusting, potentially-toxic solar panels wiping out ground cover and wildlife; and, of course, Big Transmission, with its proposed massive new power lines that are supposed to bring “clean” energy from the bird-killing windmills and the wilderness-killing solar farms.

The progressive coalition against modern industrial and infrastructure development also frequently comes into conflict with organized labor. Construction unions in particular have clashed with environmentalists over their opposition to oil and gas facilities, as well as infrastructure and nuclear power. In the debate about the Keystone Pipeline, for example, the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters and the Laborers International Union of North America supported the pipeline’s construction, in the interest of more jobs for their members.  

The anti-development left is also fractured by divisions among Green supporters of industrial-scale renewable energy and the group that might be called “local preservationists” — residents of an area who are not particularly ideological, but oppose construction that would alter a beloved landscape or block a lovely view. In Martha’s Vineyard, a Democratic stronghold, a massive offshore industrial wind project favored by environmentalists has met opposition from citizen groups like Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, citing, in true progressive virtue-signaling fashion, alleged harm to marine life and local fishers. 

In the long run, the non-ideological preservationists may prove to be a greater threat to the future of the US economy than small but noisy minorities like degrowthers and anti-capitalist socialists.  The desire to retain an unobstructed view from your dream house is understandable, and so is the concern about an industrial facility or infrastructure corridor being constructed next door. But all of America’s land is in or adjacent to the “viewscape” or homes of some individuals and families. Giving a few people a veto on further development of the United States on aesthetic or sentimental grounds would be fatal for American prosperity and power.  

A country is not a museum. The occasional quaint historic district is a good idea. Turning an entire nation into a historic district, frozen forever at a particular moment in time and technological evolution, would be national suicide.

We should deal with the practical issues of energy use, water use, and pollution that are raised by data center construction. And we should also deal with the separate issues of excessive wealth concentration and insufficient regulation of numerous industries, of which AI is only one. But a crusade against plutocracy and inequality that takes the crude form of blocking all data center construction is as stupid as a crusade against Gilded Age robber barons would have been if it had taken the form of a moratorium on railroad construction. You don’t have to be a godlike, silicon-based, out-of-control artificial intelligence to understand that.

But then, Natasha Walter isn’t here to sugar coat things. According to her new book, Feminism for a World on Fire, fresh threats to women loom from every angle: authoritarian demagoguery, technology, capitalism, climate change. And the old threats haven’t been properly dealt with either: inequality, violence, pornography, racism. Meanwhile women are divided and distracted by arguments about immigration and trans people, as the world burns. Cumulatively, the outlook is bleak: “When women face up to the challenges around them, it is not irrational if they start to give voice to fear, and even despair.”

Most of the book is taken up with diagnosis but — as Walter reminds us — feminists don’t just want “to understand the world … the point is to change it”. Unfortunately the proposed remedies, when they come, are also depressing — clearly inadequate to the gargantuan problems just conjured up. Drawing upon familiar second wave platitudes, Walter exhorts readers to build communities, promote the value of care, engage in local green projects, make connections with other women across differences — all of which sounds nice; but also like a mere drop in the overheating ocean, assuming you take the apocalyptic predictions seriously.

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The author hasn’t always felt this gloomy. Her 1999 book, The New Feminism, contained a relatively upbeat liberal message aimed at second wavers and conservative fogeys alike: stop disapproving of female sexual and sartorial choices, and put more women on boards and ballot papers instead. Do less glowering, do more empowering. Now, though, she has buyer’s remorse, reproaching her earlier self for being too individualistic, too caught up with the concerns of white middle-class women like herself. And she also regrets the way that what looked like a promising feminist protest movement in the 2000s was quickly turned into an empty fashion mag aesthetic: “even as the new wave of women’s resistance was starting to gather, it was being smartly mimicked and sold back to us”.

Walter used to be a Vogue writer in the Nineties, so she should know. She was also an elegant, fizzy member of the Late Review cultural commentariat, but then ditched the glamour and founded a charity for female asylum seekers instead. “Over the years that I worked with refugee women I came to know what it feels like when every day is a crisis”, she writes. And it seems she is still living in a permacrisis mindset, somewhat to the detriment of light and shade in her exposition. If you are the type to consider the pros as well as cons of any challenging situation — both in order to understand it, and to change it — you might find Walter’s relentless adoption of the tragic mode a little difficult to stomach.

On the other hand, if you are an “angry young woman”, trying to deal with gnawing anxiety at the state of the world by engaging in radical politics, the grim emotional register of the book will probably resonate. According to a recent investigation by the New Statesman, this demographic is particularly disaffected and prone to pessimism about the future. Walter’s boomer politics are unlikely to be radical enough for anti-imperialist Gen Z they/thems, but the general miserabilist ambiance does at least look like a good fit.

Personally I find the approach offputting: but I can’t blame either Walter or the youngsters for amping up a handwringing idiom that has been present in feminism for a long time. Just as someone is always wrong on the internet, so too is there always something wrong with some woman’s life, somewhere; and no feminist should apparently rest until the matter is resolved. Should a scintilla of optimism emerge about some particular advance for women, the subject can quickly be changed to other women thousands of miles away, with a more satisfyingly medieval set up to fret over instead.

Walter herself does a lot of this, jumping from country to country on the least fun world tour ever. Think some things are getting better? Not so fast, lady: you should hear what life is like in Kenya, or Iran. It makes me wonder what the measure of success is. Is the only acceptable outcome really the raising of four billion female people’s legal rights, practical opportunities, available goods, etc. across the globe to exactly the same male-comparable standard; or else conclude that the endlessly shape-shifting patriarchy has won?

If so, then the project is obviously doomed; and the perpetual lure of the omnicause to Lefties makes things even worse. Feminists are somehow supposed to tackle sexual violence, get rid of pornography, induce the world to recognize the true value of care work, free Palestine, and achieve net zero? Potential recruits can be forgiven for finding they have to wash her hair that night instead. In truth, the hopeless unfeasibility of the modern feminist to-do list undermines the project from within, just as much as the sight of some fashion influencer cosplaying at revolutionary chic. The age-appropriate idealism/ cluelessness of angry young women might obscure this point for a while; but more experienced organizers should know better.

Shorter lists, aiming at making local changes not global ones, are more doable. This is partly why — to take an example which will send angry young women into further paroxysms of rage — British gender-critical women have had great success in fighting the incursions of transactivism into women’s spaces and resources in recent years. Walter finds herself unable to use that example, not least because she finds herself unable to pronounce definitively on what a woman is. But she is also apparently hampered by another stultifying feature of much Left-wing feminism: a horror of working with Right-wing women towards shared objectives.

She is critical of those women who “pick up on only one part of the fight for women’s rights, and dismiss other parts”; who “appropriate certain aspects of feminism, particularly the fight against street harassment, to argue against immigration, while also standing against other feminist arguments”. Of course, a more charitable interpretation is that these women are applying female-friendly principles more strictly than many leftists do themselves, determined as the latter are to put anti-racist causes higher up their actions list.

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For her part, Walter seems to think that a woman has to be pro-immigration to count as a feminist at all. It’s a familiar stance on the Left, but one that makes her exhortations to women to “find solidarity” with one another over “shared experiences under patriarchy” sound rather hollow. She briefly mentions the scandal of grooming gangs, noting the failures of relevant agencies, but is silent about the omertà imposed by intersectional feminist logic, determined not to draw attention to any aspect of cultural reality that might draw racist backlash. At one point she even indulges in bit of that sort of thing herself, praising one survivor for “refusing to let her story be exploited by those who would use it to drive hatred and division”, and so implicitly positively contrasting her story with others.

Yet no grooming gang victim  — a victim of a real live patriarchy, if ever there was one — has good reason to stay silent about the drawbacks of some kinds of immigration for her personally; and nor, indeed, does any inquiring female mind, concerned with scrutinizing the effects of multiculturalism, both bad and good. And of course, once all these people have been ejected from the feminist club, the result is a much smaller club; so even less chance of achieving the titanic objectives set for the movement as a whole. Meanwhile, new members who are not particularly radical or angry are unlikely to flock in droves. For the bargain demanded of them — be prepared to pipe down about your own female-related interests or those of close others, wherever more urgent Left-wing causes require it — is not an attractive one.

Though shallow, the liberal feminism Walter used to espouse at least had a plausible psychological story about why women might want to be involved: namely, it was a form of self-help. Higher wages, more job opportunities, fewer disapproving looks cast by the world at your miniskirt and heels, were all things many women wanted to have at the time, and still do. In contrast, feminism as so often outlined by the Left seems like an exercise in altruism and self-abnegation, often forcing you to put the interests of distant strangers over those of yourself and the people you know. That’s fine if you have the temperament of a secular missionary or a raging masochist, but most do not. Indeed, instead of intersectionality as a paralyzing ideal, there should probably be a feminist version of the Ordo Amaris: women encouraged to address issues of relevance to the self, the family, neighbors, and local communities, before mentally venturing much further afield. At least that way, they would have an incentive to participate.

Towards the end of her book, Walter writes of the importance of grassroots feminism: “as more precarious and uncertain times come closer, the work to ground our campaigns in the grassroots feels to me ever more important”. Here, I completely agree. Grassroots campaigns are often effective because the women have achievable goals in mind, of direct relevance to them or people they know. In strategizing, they take account of true local conditions rather than applying a lofty ideological lens to a problem, obscuring the terrain. And in fighting, they know how to pick their battles, and are comfortable with large political differences between fellow combatants. Presumably Walter knows this, having done admirable local pro-refugee work herself.

There is nothing to stop feminists caring about anti-racism or capitalism or climate change if that is their thing, and individuals are always free to work out where they wish to direct their own political efforts. But defining feminism itself in terms of such goals is a recipe for disaster. It may sound boring in comparison, but feminists interested in actually getting things done should try to get back into the frying pan and out of the fire.

In a post on X, Reichstadter explained: “I am calling on Anthropic’s management, directors and employees to immediately stop their reckless actions which are harming our society and to work to remediate the harm that has already been done.” Days later, filmmaker and former AI researcher Michaël Trazzi launched his own campaign, inspired by Reichstadter’s, outside Google DeepMind’s London headquarters.

The cross-continental demonstration took hold, earning press coverage in Business Insider, Futurism, and The Verge, among others, even if Anthropic and DeepMind themselves did not respond. After 30 days of consuming only vitamins and electrolytes, Reichstadter ended his participation in the protest. “We who have everything at stake,” he wrote, “cannot stand by while this malignant conspiracy against the safety and security of the human race flourishes under the aid and protection of the corrupt and inept governments of this world.”

***

In the months after the hunger strike, I connected with Reichstadter through some mutual acquaintances on X. I was told that he was part of a larger anti-AI social movement cropping up in San Francisco, and that he had helped found an organization called Stop AI. The city is at the center of the AI boom — and corresponding safety movement — but it’s also the beating heart of American counterculture. I wondered what this burgeoning social resistance might look like, so ask Reichstadter to meet.

He agrees, and we make plans to go hiking in the Berkeley Hills. Given Reichstadter’s past, the natural setting feels appropriate. With a background in climate and other issue-driven activism, in April 2022 he went on a two-week hunger strike outside the offices of Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava to bring attention to climate change. In June that same year, the father of two spent 28 hours atop the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C. to protest the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. “Civil resistance works,” he said in an Instagram video facing out over the Anacostia River. “Learn about it… That’s how we’re going to get the radical change we need in the shortest time necessary.”

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Out on the trail, Reichstadter walks me through his journey into anti-AI activism. He says he was still in college when it first occurred to him that super-powerful AI could cause serious human harm. With the launch of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT in 2022, his fears became more concrete. Now, as the technology continues to advance at breakneck speed, Reichstadter’s efforts have become increasingly urgent. “These systems,” he tells me, “have the potential to become powerful enough, even without consciousness, to control the world.”

Reichstadter first came to San Francisco in 2024, after meeting a guy named Sam Kirchner through a group called Pause AI. The pair apparently bonded over the idea of using civil resistance and direct action, which Pause AI does not allow, to bring attention to the risks surrounding the development of super-intelligent AI. That led to a new group: Stop AI. Reichstadter is no longer connected with it — he left last August amid internal disputes — but still maintains ties: including legal ones. He’s awaiting trial with another Stop AI member for charges related to non-violent protests last February at Open AI’s headquarters. Lately, Reichstadter has been acting independently and recruiting more people for the cause. “This is not necessarily about reaching everybody,” he says. “It’s about finding a viable coalition of individuals who are willing to push back.”

***

The idea that superintelligent AI might lead to catastrophic harm or human extinction, once the domain of theorists and philosophers, has gained momentum among some experts. The discourse surrounding the extinction threat — or “x-risk” as it’s known in some corners of the internet — became especially intense following the release of ChatGPT. More than 1,000 tech leaders and experts, including Elon Musk, signed a March 2023 letter calling for tech companies to pause further AI development. In May the same year, Nobel laureate and pioneering “AI godfather” Geoffrey Hinton dramatically left his job at Google to warn about the dangers associated with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Weeks later, CEOs from leading AI labs, including Anthropic, DeepMind, and OpenAI, acknowledged that the extinction risk from AI is on par with that of pandemics or nuclear war.

Experts disagree about what the actual risk might look like, and how likely any given scenario might be. One argument suggests that superintelligent AI systems pose a risk to human beings if their goals are not precisely aligned with human values. The idea is demonstrated by Nick Bostrom’s “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment, in which a powerful AGI is given the directive to maximize the number of paperclips in existence: even if that means eliminating human beings in the process. Others worry that bad actors could misuse AI to cause more conventional harms, from global war and disease to economic and ecological collapse.

Even so, big tech firms have continued full speed ahead toward increasingly powerful AI systems, with critics ever-more worried in turn. Stuart Russell, a professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence, has likened the situation to an “arms race”. “For governments to allow private entities to essentially play Russian roulette with every human being on earth is, in my view, a total dereliction of duty,” he told AFP during last week’s India AI Impact Summit. The warning comes as researchers at some of the world’s biggest AI firms have also tendered their resignations. As Mrinank Sharma, who led Anthropic’s safeguards research team, wrote in an open letter to his colleagues: “The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.”

***

In some ways, Stop AI is an effort to harness those anxieties into collective action. It’s an approach that’s been used by radical environmentalist groups in the UK, notably Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, to bring about systemic change. Traditionally, those within the AI safety movement have taken the insider approach, working with labs and research centers and think tanks to influence safety procedures and government policy. That, along with concerns about being taken seriously, have encouraged caution when it comes to practical campaigning. Stop AI, however, explicitly favors civil disobedience. “History has shown us that non-violent movements can meet their goals quickly when a large enough group of people cooperate towards a common goal,” reads the group’s website. “Non-violent resistance is the only answer.”

As its name would suggest, Stop AI’s end goal is a permanent and binding international ban on the development of both Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI): respectively AI as capable as human beings at most cognitive tasks, and AI that surpasses the abilities of human beings. In its pursuit, the group has never shied away from controversy, adopting tactics like blocking entrances to office buildings or chaining their doors shut.

Last November, they made national headlines when a public investigator hopped on stage to serve a subpoena on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during an event with Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr. On social media, Stop AI claimed responsibility for the stunt. “Our public defender successfully subpoenaed Sam Altman to appear at our trial where we will be tried for non-violently blocking the front door of OpenAI on multiple occasions,” the group said in an X post. “This trial will be the first time in human history where a jury of normal people are asked about the extinction threat that AI poses to humanity.”

In the past, the group’s messaging has been direct, if not apocalyptic. There was a banner, for instance, that read “AI Will Kill Us All.” Then there was the accompanying chant: “Stop AI or We’re All Gonna Die.” In recent months, though, as Stop AI’s organizers have wrestled with how to more effectively raise awareness and grow their ranks, that message has evolved. With the election last fall of new leader Matthew Hall, who goes by the name Yakko, Stop AI began moving from focusing solely on the risk of human extinction. “I feel a moral obligation to warn people,” Yakko told The Daily Californian. “I just think when people get too scared they just kind of shut down. They still have to go about their daily business.”

What happened next hints at the broader tensions within the anti-AI movement. Kirchner, apparently frustrated by what he saw as a departure from Stop AI’s more radical message, stormed out of a November planning meeting. Later, he came back and asked for access to the organization’s funds. Agitated that his request was denied, he struck Yakko several times in the head. According to Yakko, Kirchner told him that “the non-violence ship has sailed for me”. He later apologized, but the incident led to his expulsion from Stop AI. Since then, though, Kirchner has vanished, not turning up for a scheduled court date. His bike and camping gear have disappeared from his house too. Out of an abundance of caution, a member of Stop AI called the police to say that Kirchner could potentially pose a threat to people working at AI labs. That led to lockdowns at OpenAI, though members of Stop AI maintain they are not aware of any specific threats.

Either way, StopAI was quick to post a message on X detailing the situation, reaffirming its commitment to non-violence. Pause AI equally condemned Kirchner’s actions, explicitly stressing that it “has no affiliation with him or his organization”. For its part, Pause AI’s Code of Conduct explicitly prohibits violence, while also requiring compliance with any applicable laws. Pause AI CEO Maxime Fournes adds that the movement has always been “extremely peaceful”. That’s echoed by a broader debate about the perils of a certain kind of apocalyptic anti-AI messaging. “An early activist at Stop AI had a mental health crisis and went missing,” Remmelt Ellen, an advisor to Stop AI, warned in an X post. “Act with care. Find Sam. Stop with the ‘AGI may kill us all by 2027’ shit please.”

It’s impossible now to know what Kirchner might have been thinking, what pressures he may have been under. Yet three months after his initial disappearance, the 27-year-old activist is still missing. According to Kirchner’s friends and allies, he had been under a lot of stress, and the thought that AI might cause harm to his sister was consuming him. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” one of the group’s members told reporters.

Lately, Stop AI has been engaged in the delicate task of sorting out how to continue its work in spite of everything that’s happened — and despite the fact that Kirchner has still not been found. For its last public event of 2025, Stop AI hosted what it called “A Vigil for Humanity”. Tellingly, perhaps, it wasn’t held at OpenAI or Anthropic, but rather at San Francisco City Hall.

The tone was decidedly somber. A video posted online shows members holding lanterns in the waning daylight. Someone in the group explains who Stop AI is and what they’re doing there. There are warnings about the extinction risk. But then the conversation turns toward the broader value of human life. “We are going to take a moment to meditate and pray that every human life is protected, including the lives of the people who work at these companies… even though we deeply disagree with what they’re choosing to dedicate their lives to… even though they’re pursuing something that is dangerous. We think their lives are sacred and important too.”

***

While in San Francisco, I planned to go to a Stop AI protest at OpenAI’s headquarters, but then learned that the event had been canceled. I considered going by the offices anyway, just to get a sense of the place. Instead, I connect with Wynd Kaufmyn, who is one of the group’s organizers. We meet at a restaurant near the Fruitvale BART station; she’s planning to attend a nearby protest against the Trump’s administration’s immigration policy.

Now in her sixties, Kaufmyn came to the Bay Area as a Berkeley graduate student — drawn in by its radical politics and the lingering energy of the Free Speech Movement — and never left. She met Reichstadter and Kirchner at a protest in support of Palestine at Andrews Airforce Base. The pair shared some information about Stop AI, and Kaufmyn started going to meetings. Now, more than a year later, she’s a member of the group’s leadership council. “The reason that we’re having this AI problem right now is that we have corporations running the world,” she tells me. “And they don’t care what happens to people. So, for me, this is really about being anti-establishment, being anti-fascist.”

Stop AI, Kaufmyn explains, has been talking a lot more lately about AI skepticism as a big-tent issue, encompassing concerns about more immediate risks — like autonomous weaponry, surveillance, mass resource use, and job loss — alongside existential risk. “We want to be honest about what’s at stake here,” she says. “But we don’t want the message to be all doom.”

Certainly, Kaufmyn worries that anxiety about impending catastrophe is what led to Kirchner’s disappearance. “I could tell he was really depressed,” she says. “And I wanted to help him, but he was always very guarded.” She echoes the observation that he had become increasingly frantic that AI might hurt or kill his sister. “There was an article in the San Francisco Standard that I thought put it well,” Kaufmyn continues. “Is it possible to protest the end of the world without losing your mind?”

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In recent months, Stop AI has been in a regrouping phase — trying to understand what happened and how to keep it from ever happening again. Kaufmyn explains they’ve been working on strengthening the organization from the inside out, building a strong internal culture so that they can reach more people outside of the movement. They’re being mentored, she tells me, by some members of Extinction Rebellion. The group is known for practicing what it calls “regenerative culture”, which tries to create healthy relationships through mutual care. But Extinction Rebellion is also among those in the environmental space most willing to aggressively engage on the AI issue.

Last summer, two Extinction Rebellion activists protested Meta’s AI expansion by chalk-spraying the windows at its New York offices with messages like “Meta Makes Kings” and “Zuck Loves Trump”. Earlier this month, Reichstadter shared an X post from Extinction Rebellion Founder Roger Hallam, announcing the Zoom launch of a group called “Pull the Plug” in the UK. “Give ordinary people a say in how AI is used in our lives,” its website says. Later this month, the group is hosting what’s been billed as the UK’s “first-ever anti-AI march” at OpenAI’s London offices. It’s called the “March Against the Machines”.

Before I leave San Francisco, I tag along with Kaufmyn for part of the immigration policy protest. It’s crowded in Fruitvale Commons. Some of the activists shout over a megaphone. Others hold a huge white sign with red lettering that says: “People Over Billionaires.” Kaufmyn surveys the banner and reads the words out loud. “People over billionaires… I like that.” For a moment, we stand in silence. “I have one last question,” I tell her. “What do you think your goal is for Stop AI?” She shifts her weight a little. “I would like everybody from every walk of life to stand up to these billionaires — through civil disobedience, a hunger strike, however — and demand that they aren’t building harmful technologies that could destroy our lives when we are telling them not to.” A different battle in the same fight within the AI-skeptic movement, and one Kaufmyn and others have fought many times before.

If these are Mamdani’s biggest fans — he performed best among what New Yorkers grimly call “transplants” — then I have no doubt that his appeal to well-meaning, well-heeled Zoomers is bolstered by the presence of his very chic, very right-on wife. Rama Duwaji is a bobbed artist born in Houston (though her Instagram bio protests “from Damascus”) who ranges, according to the resident babe-raters of X, from a sulky, pouting narcissist to a Princess Diana-level national treasure. At 28, she is at the top end of Gen Z; she met her husband on Hinge and wore knee-high black boots on her wedding day. One Facebook post from a “digital creator” in the run-up to the election rhapsodized over her “high boots, bare shoulders … showing off her gorgeous legs with confidence”. This, it read, was the liberated modern Muslim couple “about to lead the most Zionist city on Earth” (ever heard of Tel Aviv?). It seemed Mamdani’s untested political talent was secondary to his wife’s decision to get her shoulders out.

This may seem like the logic of a deranged naïf, but aesthetics increasingly matter in politics. This is particularly true when the target voter is a social media native whose engagement with policy is restricted to what friends put on their Instagram stories. For young liberals, Duwaji’s look signals the promise of progressive politics: her haircut alone is shorthand for being on the right side of history. In the age of Maga mavens with long barrel curls, tangerine foundation and stiff faces, here is someone who looks like she belongs at a Ridgewood party, where she’d drink High Noons and discourse on prison abolition with other illustrator-activists and their software-engineer boyfriends.

To a certain kind of bright-eyed young professional, Duwaji is the model proletarian (aka just like me!): a veteran of dating apps with a cool but humble art job, where you churn out doodles of cats and hijabis, and a commitment to social justice sternly meted out on social media. A direct message on Instagram from weeks after the October 7 attacks shows that she was ticking people off for not advocating for Palestine online: “shift ur energy for speaking out about genocide!!!” Then, last month, she posted broken hearts on Instagram about the death of the Palestinian influencer Saleh al-Jafarawi (“beloved Jafawari”, she wrote), who had celebrated the October 7 attacks in a gleeful viral video. Duwaji embodies the ineffectual radicalism of young activist voters, sharing their frustration over “complicity” and “silence” which they presume is also held by the working masses. But Mamdani and his wife represent “the people” — those inconveniently conservative lumpens more interested in utility bills than the global intifada — about as much as King Donald Croesus represents the red states. That is, not at all.

Duwaji’s physical appearance has drawn ample attention since Mamdani’s victory. Luckily, she also seems to spend a lot of time obsessing over it — to the extent that her own face appears to be the principal subject of her art. X users have been uncharitable about her tendency to “self-insert” in her drawings, but the evidence is pretty damning: to my philistine eye, Duwaji’s style looks like the poorly drawn Wojak memes born on imageboards in the 2010s — except in the place of soyjacks, chuds and tradwives is… the artist herself. In one particularly egregious example, she draws a policeman kneeling on a brown woman’s neck; his handcuffs dangle over her keffiyeh. It’s difficult to escape the interpretation that, here, Duwaji was reimagining the murder of George Floyd except this time, she — or a woman who looked remarkably like her — was the star of the show.

Being a rubbish artist isn’t a problem in itself, but the spectacularly shallow social commentary this first lady’s illustrations provide is depressing indeed. What strikes me is how very 2020 the whole thing is: Instagram activism, fantasies of victimization, nebulous “advocacy” which relentlessly centers the advocate. And, crucially, it’s all so oppressively cringe.

But this may be key to Duwaji’s fascination for a certain kind of voter: the politics of New York do skew embarrassingly earnest. When they enter Gracie Mansion in January, Mamdani and Duwaji will be at the helm of a city where quirky indie rebellion has long amounted to self-aware posturing. Here, the streets are awash with “wholesome chungus”, as one recent tweet put it: memelords tape onto lampposts flyers which invite passers-by to scan QR codes if they’re “looking for a hot performative male” or to “smoke a cigarette with me” in the West Village — all for the incomprehensible cause of being offbeat and, ominously, “creating”. Businesses, too, plaster NYC with vigilante graphic design: one poster on my road, in a corner where the fentanyl addicts huddle overnight, advertises a local dispensary with the tagline “weed made me gay”, along with emetic phrases like “toasted twink” and “puffing pansexual”. Duwaji is a hit here because her gauche art resonates with the city’s softcore radicalism, something which would be laughed out of the room in most of London.

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The real problem, of course, is that what Mamdani and his coterie stand for makes no practical sense to the people they profess to be representing — the killer catch in many radical projects of recent years, including Corbynism and its grim sequel Your Party. Squiggly art about protests and soup kitchens may make Zoomer women feel good, but they might feel less aglow with solidarity when they can’t take the bus because their dreamboat mayor has made them free, turning them into mobile homeless encampments populated with dangerous and drug-addled men. Nor will fourth-wave feminists thank him when he makes social workers, rather than police, the first port of call for victims of domestic abuse — shunting battered women into a sluggish, bureaucratic nightmare instead of putting their partners in handcuffs. Nor will liberated “digital sex workers” selling nudes to supplement their income feel extra-empowered if Mamdani ultimately decriminalizes prostitution, putting trafficked women entirely at the mercy of their pimps. Actually, scrap that last one — privileged feet-pic sellers never gave a toss about actual prostitutes.

New York’s next first lady will preside over the center of the capitalist world, overseen by a husband whose objective is to diminish it. These are young globalists: Mamdani may have won on a campaign of local affordability (memorably including bringing down the cost of halal meals), but his politics revolve around other places, other battles, far from the five boroughs. Nobody better represents this unrootedness — from New York as a place and from the priorities of its residents — than Duwaji and her fan club. These are people stuck in perpetual protest, obsessively documenting their urge to “rage at the state of the world”, as she puts it. Because that protest is so tightly bound in their self-image as a little radical in an evil system, nuance doesn’t come easy; older or more moderate voters find this offputting. When you’re an angry young creative whose job is to draw pictures of other angry people for The New Yorker, you never face ideological compromise or challenges; when the messy reality of political office unfurls next year, we can expect to see this couple grow up fast. It will be fascinating to watch the Zoomer’s champion being, I suspect for the first time, around people with vast experience and complex views.

This is not the BBC of today. Pleading for its very existence, the Corporation now plies TikTok and Facebook with behind-the-scenes-style ads to industriously promote arms such as BBC Verify. In one example — a hot mess of jump cuts and zooms to prod drooling scrollers awake — a young reporter holds up the kind of mic used by two-bit beauty influencers and gets real with us: “I know there’s a lot of mistrust in the news.” She tells us how “we piece together clues and get to the truth… examining videos frame by frame and even zooming in from space with satellite images”. A real humdinger, then, that this crack team of digital detectives didn’t catch the 50-minute splice in a video of Trump which has, just weeks after these ads went online, tanked the organization’s credibility.

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By now we are familiar with the facts. The 19-page death note from adviser Michael Prescott had raised existential concerns about not only the Capitol calamity but hopelessly biased reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict by BBC Arabic: journalists who called for Israelis to have their “throats cut” or to shoot and burn Jews “as Hitler did” had appeared on the channel hundreds of times.

But nowhere has the public’s delicate contract with our state broadcaster been so relentlessly tested as in its coverage of gender identity. At the best of times, the BBC website is an obsessive compendium of drag queens. Take, for example, a round-up of top Wearside and County Durham stories from last month, which included “Family of murdered toddler plead for law change”. But heading the page is not the two-year-old Maya Chappell but the 27-year-old “Sally TM” from South Shields, who “slays” in a bodice and tutu in the colors of the Tyne and Wear Metro. This corker was not the result of a single push, but rather 1,000 nudges — misguided appointments, blinkered inclusivity training and, most of all, the privileging of what Prescott called a “small group of staff promoting the Stonewall view”.

It is these young ideologues who have fed the rot of the BBC’s queasy cultural revolution. These are politically intolerant grads who have somehow picked up the idea that the reporting of straight news by a state broadcaster must in itself work towards what they perceive to be “good”. One envisions them commanding standing desks at Broadcasting House in Lucy and Yak dungarees, spending many days and taxpayer pounds on the noble task of reporting Boomer colleagues to “People Services” for misgendering Sock at the front desk. Their laptops and lapels are festooned with stickers and pins which cry “Allyship is a verb”; “Nevertheless, she persisted”. And she does persist, in pestering bosses to pillory sex-realist colleagues like Martine Croxall for a roll of the eyes, in polluting work WhatsApp groups with tripe like “Shouldn’t trans women qualify for maternity leave though?”, and in being so aggressively “nice” about what she perceives as a marginalized cohort that she cocks up the fundamental accuracy of her own newsroom.

The deranged, flailing tail is wagging an old slumbering dog. This is how we ended up with seasoned reporters cowed into using the preferred pronouns of sex offenders so as not to upset non-binary striplings fresh out of Bristol Uni. Many managerial Boomers reared on Reithian principles are, in the words of one insider invective, “too cowardly to stand up to the DEI hires, woke warriors and sectarian antisemites on the staff”. And it can only result in repeated embarrassments.

Last month, before the latest debacle, the BBC falsely accused Euan Blair’s company Multiverse of nabbing a contract to roll out digital IDs (a policy long lobbied for by his father) in a script for Have I Got News for You. The production company’s founder Jimmy Mulville blamed “generations of younger producers who are coming into the business, and they are digital natives… they’re marinated in social media”. So marinated, it seems, that they take everything on there at face value. These bright-eyed dullards found the story on a freelancer’s X page and reported it — ventriloquized by the presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell — without any other verification. That this is the same cohort aggressively promoting a political agenda alien to the people the Corporation serves is no coincidence. Despite Monday’s spluttering protestations by the chairman Samir Shah on the Today programme, the problem does indeed seem to be cultural. Is it such a leap to imagine that the BBC’s hiring practices might be to blame, guidelines which see off wrongthink before staff even sign a contract? These guidelines oblige recruiters to quiz candidates on “what diversity and inclusion means to you” and explicitly bar those with “lack of interest in learning more where no evidence of education and understanding of [DEI] was given”. Diversity is our strength — except diversity of thought. Any sign of that and you’re sent packing off to GBeebies with the other cretins.

And so critics — cynically painted this week as the hostile Right-wing press — are left asking: who on earth is the BBC for? Despite constant advertisements reassuring us that the Corporation is “for everyone”, they cannot possibly mean the general public, whose skepticism about transgender rights, for instance, has ballooned since 2022. They cannot mean the dwindling segment of that public that still faithfully listens to its generally excellent radio output, or watches its terrestrial television — that is, the older generations rubbing their necks from the past decade of doctrinal whiplash. And they certainly can’t mean those who tune in to The Archers, baffled by a buffet of open relationships and Christian characters inexplicably fasting for Ramadan. There is still great love for the BBC, but an organization that sees itself as reaching down to re-educate those with low-status beliefs from some progressive pulpit, the gleaming God to the British public’s decrepit, smelly Adam, does not deserve to last long.

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Nor will it. Expecting a public whose views are so baldly despised by activist producers to cough up for a license fee is a tough sell: at its heart, the BBC scandal is fatal precisely because we all pay for it. There is much to salvage in this cherished institution, much to protect. But choppy waters are ahead, and continued poor stewardship might just see the unthinkable — that “Sailing By” will play for one last time, diminished to a lovely dirge for a BBC dashed on the rocks by its own mariners.

“We couldn’t represent everyone we wanted to,” Shukla admitted, citing “a culture war or two” and “an industry that assumed itself to be doing the work” as relevant explanations for the company’s failure. But even leaving aside the growing backlash against DEI practices, his analysis seemed incomplete. For there was also the folly of calling a business “The Good Literary Agency” (TGLA), a strategy surely so hubristic that they were bound to come a cropper eventually.

But then again in 2017, the year the TGLA launched, we were also blessed with the pompously named The Good Law Project — a company also now ailing — so perhaps there was something in the air. After all, it was the early days of the first Trump presidency: many histrionic Guardian op-eds were being written and pussy hats knitted. It was easy to feel good about yourself in contrast to the evil orange one: to sail into work, your lunchbox stuffed with Innocent smoothies, Kind protein bars, and JUST water cartons, feeling you had moved one step closer to canonisation simply by turning up. And every day offered opportunities for new acts of righteousness: writing bits and pieces of moral cant for the company website; putting pronouns at the bottom of emails; signing various petitions to get your colleagues sacked, and so on.

But still, in retrospect, announcing your company as “Good” in its title does seem particularly daft when you work in the literary world; a place that tends to demand that writers “show, don’t tell”, traditionally holding lazy topline descriptions in some contempt. Equally, novelists have wrestled for centuries over what makes a man good, kind, innocent, or just, but rarely have they concluded that his self-identifying as these things is a reliable sign. That original ‘umblebragger Uriah Heep keeps telling us about his defining virtue, but Dickens knows it is all fake news. “I am not fond of professions of humility,” says wise David Copperfield, “or professions of anything else.”

To be fair to Shukla and Kingsford, in naming their agency they presumably were inspired by the success of Shukla’s 2016 edited collection The Good Immigrant. But whereas that title wore its sardonic irony on its sleeve, the later business name came across as painfully straight-faced. Perhaps they told themselves that the branding would hover playfully between “we are good at our job” and “we are good people”, but the accompanying piety seems to have eliminated useful ambiguity from the start.

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Clearly, they were not just saying they were good, in the way a baker, estate agent, or an arms dealer might be — namely, by performing their stated commercial function well. Rather, they were Good with a luminous capital “G”, putting the gospel of diversity and inclusion into practice. In her own Bookseller exit interview, Kingsford made this explicit, describing people like them as “hopeful change-makers” and saying: “So much good has been done across the industry since 2016, but for those of us at the coalface it feels like we are at a high risk moment where the danger of complacency, of a feeling that enough has been done, that we don’t need to keep pushing for more change, is beginning to creep back in.”

This fluently sanctimonious style has become emblematic of progressive ventures over the last decade, barely even noticeable in a field so crowded with proselytising. How anyone ever got taken in by the posturing is still a headscratcher, but it seems many did. Ascertaining someone’s morals is traditionally supposed to be a complicated business, requiring close and prolonged attention to the interaction of character traits, intentions, behaviour, and outcomes. Yet somehow, about a decade ago, we got to a point where explicit boasts about personal ethical achievements acted more like subliminal messages in adverts, inserting a conviction in the hearer that he must be in the presence of spiritual purity, though he wasn’t exactly sure how the thought had got in there.

The flipside of being so mesmerised with superficial markers of virtue is that you are also shallow and credulous about what counts as vice. And so we find adults who genuinely think it plausible that a tech billionaire, well known for his enthusiastically awkward gestures, would deliberately perform a Nazi salute at a post-inauguration Presidential rally, as the latest stunt of those subtle intellects at Led By Donkeys suggests they do. Or we get the sort of people who interpret “Jewish” as identical to “Zionist”, and “Zionist” as identical to “genocidal maniac” without noticing any moral variations under those first two headings — as a former Save The Children staffer did in a TikTok video this week, to her cost. And on the other side, we also get those who automatically equate “Pro-Palestinian protestors” with “hate marchers”. Obviously, there can be deliberate political strategy behind a particular decision to lump certain categories rather than split them, but equally, it sometimes seems that the art of fine moral discernment is just generally dying out.

Maybe part of the underlying problem is a mania for thinking of yourself and those in your tribe as belonging to the good people, a childish mental construction which both requires a contrast class (the bad people, over there) and some vaguely plausible-looking fellow travellers. There is a hint of this in Shukla’s plaintive “we did the best we could”: and it’s there every time someone falls back on the excuse of having had good intentions, ignoring well-known observations about pavement arrangements on the road to hell. It’s also there when you extend similar excuses to those with whom you feel some kinship, as if you know that whatever bad-looking things they do could only be the result of well-intentioned misreadings of the situation; as if there were no really bad people on your side of the fence at all, but only unfortunately foolish ones. Needless to say, such a concession is rarely made to opponents.

But in fact, just as there is no particular reason to trust myself on how good a person I am, there is equally little reason to trust me about the goodness of my intentions, or about those of people I like and presume to understand. It is true that there is a limited sense in which most or all intentions are “good” — meaning only that whatever action you chose, that action seemed to you to have some attractive aspect at the time. Philosophers sometimes describe this as acting sub specie boni; alternatively, acting “under the guise of the good”. In the same fairly trivial sense, Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost said “Evil, be thou my Good” but it didn’t make him any less satanic.

For my intentions to be “good” in a more full-blooded sense, relevant to moral assessment, depends on whether they stem from attitudes like benevolence, love, courage, or kindness; or alternatively from self-interest, hate, cowardice, or cruelty. It’s hard to admit that it might be the latter, even to yourself. And such things are even harder to discern in others, based only on a superficial glance. In the case of the now defunct Good Literary Agency, the still active Good Law Project, and other Good enterprises, it should go without saying — but apparently doesn’t — that uninformed onlookers have no actual idea what sorts of intention motivate their founders, whatever the holier-than-thou branding. They might actually be good people, or they might not. Still, I’m with Davey Copperfield: the fact they keep saying so should make us highly suspicious.

Gradually, though, my feminist friends and collaborators came to embrace the word, finding it rather amusing. And responding with humour always diminishes something’s power. We would organise “Terf drinks”, and named a London restaurant we regularly meet in “Terf HQ”. On occasion, when we need to assemble over a particular issue, such as the recent Supreme Court case to decide “what is a woman’ in law, we hold Terf Nato.

For me, for my allies, Terf has come to mean something we should all take pride in: an appreciation for the truth, and for biological reality, and a concern for the safety of women and girls.

So when I spotted a four-week online course entitled: “Feminists Against Women: the Politics of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism”, taught by Sophie Lewis, I found myself tempted — compelled, even — to enrol. In the blurb it promised to tell me: What is a Terf? Even more tantalising would be to discover “What makes Terfs tick?” As a proud Terf of 20 years standing, I should know. For me it’s a Negroni, the Godfather trilogy, and a decent meal in Terf HQ.

Even more exciting, I discovered, was my inclusion in the course: “we will read a spread of excerpts from the past 45 years of transphobic feminism, including Material Girls by Kathleen Stock and Feminism for Women by Julie Bindel”.

It’s not the first time I’ve been the subject of a course. My work on the global sex trade, in particular my book from 2017 on the topic, is often cited by pro-prostitution academics as a “bad take” on what they refer to as “sex work”, and I have often amused myself by reading the inaccurate guff they spout about me. But this is the first time I’ve ever signed up to participate, choosing to attend incognito.

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Hosted by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, this is an organisation that runs such courses as “From Racial Capitalism to Prison Abolitionism” and “On the Actuarial Self, and the Crisis of Zionist Feminism”. And if that speaks to the institute’s ultra-radical leanings, Lewis herself is of a similar bent. A visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a freelance writer, her forthcoming book is (predictably) billed as “an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th-century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th-century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists”.

She brought a similar energy to the course which she had convened to help people involved in the trans liberation struggle to “know the enemy”. It’s typical rhetoric for the gender wars in the US where they are fought between rabid trans activists on one side and reactionary conservatives who “know what a woman is”. Unlike here in the UK, it is rare that Left-wing feminists are heard and as a result, few points have been scored against the trans cabal. The course, presumably, was an attempt to shore up her allegedly feminist argument against us.

She certainly has form in that respect. Back in 2019 I read her essay in The New York Times, “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans”, a hit-piece on Terfs, she has devoted plenty of time casting aspersions on me and Kathleen regarding our views on all kind of issues – but mainly gender. We had even featured her in an item on our podcast. Kathleen had discovered a piece Lewis had written about her wedding, held in a cemetery. “How do you square your advocacy for… abolition of the family,” she had written, “with your decision to marry and cohabit exclusively with a spouse?” Good question — and one the article comprehensively failed to answer.

And so I logged on to Terf school with low expectations. As for the poor dears who had to attend alongside me, they were warned they would have to contend with some tricky opinions — ones that run counter to their firmly held beliefs. Hence the obligatory trigger warning; mine and Kathleen’s work “should be considered to carry a giant content warning for transphobia — often misogynistic, specifically, transmisogynistic, generally queerphobic, and sometimes eliminationist tropes”.

Sounds exciting. But even I was unprepared for the 12 hours of turgid neo-Marxist hyperbole I was ultimately exposed to. I’d like to tell you what we were supposed to be learning about, but it was mostly incomprehensible nonsense about how Terfs are quasi-fascists, and how our ideas are based on antisemitism, colonialism, racism and every other -ism you can think of.

I was disappointed my work could be “skipped over”. Given that I feature quite prominently in both the course publicity and the reading materials, I did wonder whether she had cottoned on to the fact that I was in her virtual classroom. Nonetheless, Lewis was considerate enough to include a PDF of both mine and Kathleen’s books for students to read without having to buy them. Kath’s work was described as “crushingly evil”. Other feminists were similarly dismissed. Discussing The Transsexual Empire, a groundbreaking 1979 work by Janice Raymond — the original Terf — Lewis repeats old tropes about her supposed bigotry, even claiming Raymond hoped to annihilate the whole trans community.

Lewis also seemed unable to genuinely counter other of Raymond’s assertions, breezily suggesting she’d “never seen” trans communities use terms like “front” or “back” hole. That’s news to me: one cancer charity last year announced that “bonus hole” is an acceptable alternative to vagina, a word that can apparently “cause someone to feel hurt or distressed”. These terms have been in use as far back as 2018 in “safe sex” guides for trans identified people. It is a well-documented fact that trans activists have been bullying midwives in the UK into using “chest-feeding”, “human milk”, “strapless”, and “girl dick”. But why let a good fact get in the way of your preaching?

Just as tellingly, not everyone received such short shrift: Lewis approvingly quoted Jacob Breslow, even though he’d claimed children can be “the object of our attraction” during a 2011 pro-paedophile conference. Not to worry, though: Breslow, a former trustee of Mermaids, is still a credible Terf-busting source. In his journal article, “They Would Have Transitioned Me”, he suggests that any Terf saying that “all it takes today to get sent down the gender clinic is to be gender non-conforming” can only be secretly envious of those who did get to transition. He then uses this to target two women he is not keen on — namely Stella O’Malley and J.K. Rowling. Both women were inevitably also in Lewis’s sights over the course.

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More telling, perhaps, is what the course didn’t touch on. There was not one mention of the male Terfs, such as Graham Linehan, Matt Walsh, or Simon Fanshawe. How interesting Lewis was only interested in taking out the women, the same women who have been responsible for setting up women-only services for victims and survivors of men’s violence, the ones she refers to as fascist enemies. In short, transgender ideology, including when promoted by women, is nothing short of misogyny.

The irony here is that by completely ignoring the real, tangible and positive change for women and girls that we Terfs have affected in our struggle over the years, Lewis completely fails to recognise, let alone teach, what it is that makes Terfs tick.

Their initial emergence was much lower key. An earlier book from 2019, capitalising on their newfound fame as self-described “Remainer activists”, describes the period in which they first became known for pasting posters on billboards in Southeast England, gonzo style. It is written up as a kind of subpar Ealing comedy: four ordinary house husbands from Hackney accidentally get caught up in a daring and wildly popular social protest, eventually becoming national heroes feted by Tony Blair, Steve Coogan, and Saatchi & Saatchi.

In this early telling of their origin story, there are comic capers galore, involving mishaps with wallpaper paste, run-ins with security guards, and the strategic recurrence of Ben’s fear of heights. There are also quite a few barely latent daddy issues (“What is it about David Davis that makes him such a prick?”;“there’s something about Dominic Raab that is volcanically dislikeable”; “Olly is possessed by a visceral dislike for Michael Gove”; “Firstly and lastly, fuck Rod Liddle”). And despite braggadocio at times implying that the four are hardened activists (“We’ve scaled buildings and occupied headquarters, hung banners and even been arrested and prosecuted”), equally there is much hammed up nervousness about committing illegal acts: “This is criminal damage; it’s the A10 … We don’t want to get arrested, we both have to take the kids to school and nursery in the morning”.

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There is also enormous detail in the early book about how much things cost, giving rise to such fascinatingly banal sentences as: “We assume that ordering five 6x3m posters will set us back the best part of £1000 but in reality each poster is forty quid and delivery is free.” Gripping verbatim text exchanges from key moments in the project are included, such as “@Will, any chance of pdfs today? Or is kiddie craziness descending?” and “We should decide by tomorrow lunchtime so I can get the posters ordered to arrive his week”.

Things have got a lot slicker since the early days, and the virtual tomatoes are now heirloom variety (price available on request).  In the new book, our guys are no longer styled as plucky outsiders but as solemnly engaged in an “accountability project”. In the interim, crowdfunder targets have been smashed; mutually advantageous corporate relationships have blossomed; famous screenwriters and actors are now onboard; and the groups’ campaigns, both here and in the US, have become bloated with technical gimmickry, celebrity collabs, and self-importance. And now that being a Remainer is no longer fashionable, the mission has seamlessly drifted into vaguer ideological territory: towards fighting what the new book variously calls “populist politics and petty nationalism” and “ethnojingoism”.  Definitions are not supplied, but one suspects that however the authors mean “populist” and “petty”, it won’t turn out to include them.

In practice, their core business is still midwit vituperation by photoshop, mostly aimed at Right-wing politicians, plus some more positive interventions designed to tug at the heartstrings of the sort of person whose bicycle comes with a sidecar. So for instance: they enlisted a thousand volunteers to cover a wall of the Embankment with love hearts, thus creating “The National Covid Memorial Wall” ; covered the road outside the Russian Embassy with “non-toxic, chalk-based” blue and yellow paint; and projected “End Performative Cruelty” in giant letters onto the Bibby Stockholm barge, only months before releasing a remote-control banner in Liz Truss’s presence depicting her as a giant lettuce with eyes.

Also this year, they filmed six kilometres worth of second-hand kids’ outfits arranged on a Dorset beach and set it to the sound of Bach, in order to get people to “grasp … the number of children killed in Gaza”. (An earlier idea, thankfully rejected, involved “thousands of funeral shrouds”.)  In other words: if you like your morality tales childishly uncomplicated, prefer the literal over the symbolic, and don’t mind pedestrian visuals that rely heavily on scale for impact, then this is undoubtedly the art collective you deserve.

I am sure that all this feels cathartic and noble for participants, but does any of it actually work? Could such clankingly heavy-handed treatments ever initiate a real moral reckoning for a corrupt politician or institution? It seems scarcely credible. In both of the Led By Donkeys books, virality alone is frequently taken as meaningful proof of impact, but this is unconvincing: feral squirrels in train carriages also go viral, after all.

At other points, the authors do their best to suggest they are making a difference, but only by blurring the lines between contiguity and causation, giving us sentences such as: “A week after this intervention, Abramovich was finally subjected to UK sanctions”; “A week later, the Met opened an investigation into 12 Downing Street parties”; “and “Two weeks later, Sunak called the election”.  Coincidences? I think probably, yes; or else the real causal relation goes in the other direction, with the four cannily sensing which way the tide was already flowing before launching.

What does seem clear is that the group are absolutely terrible at changing political opponents’ minds, or even at persuading relatively intelligent neutrals. Confirmation bias is an exceptionally blunt instrument. In a recent Guardian interview, Ben Stewart talked approvingly about the “idea of the mind bomb”, as if he had stumbled upon a secret magic spell: the idea, apparently acquired during a stint at Greenpeace, of “an intervention that, when people saw it, their minds would immediately shift. The idea was the person putting themselves between the harpoon and the whale.”

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What this leaves out is that, unlike real bombs, so-called mind bombs work best in wide open spaces; upon psyches where there is very limited relevant information to compete with whatever crassly emotive image is being used as explosive. In contrast, where a person already has a lot of complex and relevant factual information and/or clashing background principles and theories, a would-be mind bomb is more likely to be a damp squib, cementing the impression that the person lobbing it is a naïve buffoon.

In reality, I imagine that the habitual villains of Led By Donkeys’ narratives — Johnson, Farage, Tufton Street think tank svengalis, and so on — are perturbed by their treatment for an average of about 10 seconds each. It’s not just that they know that the attention spans of onlookers will be short, and that the facile messaging is unlikely to trouble their support base anyway. Nor is it that they are (perhaps) already well used to trenchant critique and defensively hardened against it; nor even that they receive the negative attention as some kind of narcissistic tribute, though this is certainly possible. It’s also that, collectively, we have gone a long way to undermining the societal conditions for a genuine experience of shame, so that it’s a little late to start talking it up as a useful social tool now.

To name a few contributory factors: liberalism has eroded a firm sense of shared social or moral principles, which means a grip on what would count as genuinely shameful violations of principles has also been substantially reduced. The longtime popularity of confessional genres of writing and the availability of social media to record every passing thought have made candid self-disclosure completely acceptable, decreasing one’s fear that hidden parts of the self are bound to be badly received. In many workplaces, people have become more squeamish about overt hierarchies, so that responsibility for any problems becomes more diffuse and blame can be more easily shifted. And of course, for decades, hundreds of self-help books and magazines have encouraged us to think of personal feelings of shame as something to be fought and overcome, while complete self-acceptance is to be encouraged.

In short — though many of us still routinely feel it — shame as a functional tool is not what it used to be. Led By Donkeys apparently know this too, at least some of the time. In an early interview, Ben Stewart noted that “the concept of shame and political leaders paying a price for lying and dissembling is in retreat … if we begin to lose shame around lying to the public, then we’re in big trouble here”. The fact is, though, that we are losing it, probably definitively; and scandals which might formerly have caused public figures to quit on the spot in mortification are little more than minor irritants now. The closest we have to a Profumo-like figure — about to commence a lifetime of charitable work and prayer in order to propitiate his critics — is Russell Brand. And he is trying to monetise his own baptism.

But perhaps the ultimate proof of the uselessness of wielding shame as a weapon is the persistence of Led By Donkeys themselves. They have now been going for five years, tend to brush off criticism all too readily, and have vowed to plough profits from sales of the new book into future activism. Right-wing leaders in continual need of a hackneyed and unlikeable enemy in order to fire up the base will no doubt be delighted by this news. The rest of us, tired of forever wars between simple-minded fanatics, should probably consider indulging in some billboard defacement of our own.

The 21st-century battle began in 2019, as Scotland was on the verge of introducing a law that would allow men to self-identify as women. That same year, Katie Dolatowski, a six-foot-five transgender paedophile, was convicted of sexual offences against two girls aged 10 and 12 in a women’s toilets in Fife. Dolatowski, born male but identifying as female, was placed in a women-only hostel, putting vulnerable women at risk. Despite this, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the self-professed “feminist to my fingertips”, forged ahead with self-ID legislation that most of Scotland either didn’t understand or didn’t want. Dolatowski, meanwhile, praised her for being a “great first minister”.

Around the same time, a new hashtag was born: #WomenWontWheesht. It was coined by a mother worried that her disabled daughter, given the proposed legislation, might be given intimate care by a male carer. In response to her voicing such concerns, she was accused of being a pearl-clutching transphobe. Her worries for her daughter’s dignity and safety were effectively deemed not inclusive enough of the sensitivities of adult men. And she was told to “weesht”. As a result, the hashtag became a battle cry: the symbol of the feminist resistance to being silenced. And this week, their book was published. The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht tells the stories of the individual women who fought to protect women’s sex-based rights, with testimonies from an SNP MP, a prison governor and J.K. Rowling.

As the book details, Mumsnet was an unlikely forum in which women would organise. In response to Swim England’s new guidance, released in 2018, Mumsnetters organised “Man Friday” events, in which they self-identified as men and rocked up to men-only swimming sessions bare-breasted and sometimes even sporting fake moustaches. Within two weeks, the new guidance had been withdrawn. Such demonstrations were akin to the Reclaim the Night marches, Greenham Common and the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement, marking a return to grassroots feminism. This was an antidote to the horrors being visited on women under the cloak of transgender rights.

Yet such movements were often hindered by financial constraints. The pro-gender ideology organisations were often funded by the Scottish government, while the women resisting did so on a shoestring. Women had to resort to shaking tins asking for donations to pay the lawyers, and crowd-funders were plastered all over social media. In the time-honoured tradition of feminist activism, this work was unpaid.

Female campaigners during this period faced appalling abuse. In 2018, the then-newly appointed rector at the University of Edinburgh, Ann Henderson, was plagued by baseless and vexatious complaints supported by the University and College Union. In the new book, she reflects on her experience: “Lesbian staff members felt excluded from networks. Women-only events were increasingly difficult even impossible — to arrange, and women were concerned about losing their female private facilities.”

Then, in June 2019, I spoke at Edinburgh University about the feminist campaign to end men’s violence towards women. As I was leaving the venue, I was attacked by a six-foot male transactivist, who was shouting that I was a “cunt” and responsible for the suicide of several trans people. The next day, Scottish Green MSP Andy Wightman caved into pressure from his party and apologised for attending the event.

That same month, poet Jenny Lindsay took to Twitter to complain about an article published in an arts publication, the Skinny, which advocated for violence against lesbian activists at Pride. The backlash was abhorrent — one friend turned against her, writing an “Open Letter on Transphobia” that more than 250 people signed. Lindsay recalls: “Every name I recognised was an emotional stabbing.”

A major boost to the feminist campaign came at the end of 2019, when J.K. Rowling publicly expressed support for Maya Forstater, who had lost her job after tweeting gender-critical views. Rowling recalls: “I’d watched in silence as girls and women with everything to lose had stood up in the face of a modern-day witch hunt, braving threats and intimidation, not only from activists in black balaclavas holding placards promising to beat and murder them, but from institutions and employers telling them they must accept and espouse an ideology in which they don’t believe, and surrender their rights.”

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But even she couldn’t make the world see reason. Rowling was cancelled, as were all her supporters. After expressing her admiration for Rowling on Twitter, Young Adult author Gillian Philip was cast out of publishing circles and has since retrained as an HGV driver. She says: “I’m a great believer in fantasy fiction for children, but I draw the line at telling them it’s reality — especially when it threatens to do them actual physical harm.”

Together, these women who wouldn’t wheesht contributed to the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon. In early January 2023, the UK government prevented Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill from becoming law, arguing that it illegally impacted the Equality Act. Days later, Adam Graham (also known as Isla Bryson) was convicted of two counts of rape, both of which he committed before he decided he was a woman. Graham was sent to a women’s prison: a photograph emerged of him wearing a blonde wig and tight leggings — his male genitals clearly visible. In a car crash of an interview, Sturgeon was grilled about whether Graham was a man or a woman. Just over two weeks later, she resigned, giving no reason.

It is not my style to be precious, but I found reading this book exceptionally hard in parts. It reminded me of the dozens of hellish scenarios I have had to endure in the 20 years since I first spoke out against gender ideology. The memories of the physical attacks and threats, the humiliation of being de-platformed, the betrayals by women I had thought were committed feminists.

But the book also reminded me of the enduring strength of the feminist movement. Despite facing the worst men’s rights backlash in more than 40 years, feminists from all generations are uniting to fight back. This is a story of a war, written while the bombs are still exploding. But it’s also the story of the resistance — and it isn’t over yet.

It didn’t matter that the book was critical of the Border Patrol; as the protesters saw it, to treat that agency’s operations with literary nuance and moral complexity was as obscene as doing so with the Gestapo. They tried to shame attendees into leaving, then repeatedly shouted down the author, derailing the discussion until the store manager called the police. After loudly denouncing her, they left.

I don’t know whether any of these hecklers called themselves “Antifa”, but their disruption of a minor literary event was just one small indication of the extent to which the movement’s values and tactics went mainstream during the Trump era. For decades, Antifa activists had focused their attention on shutting down the activities of fringe far-Right groups with violence if necessary. But with Trump in the White House, many concluded the domain of the struggle needed to be extended. In their panicked state post-2016, many liberals and mainstream progressives who might have once eschewed Antifa’s rejection of free speech and advocacy of violence against ideological opponents came to regard them as a last line of defence against a surging Right.

In reaction, Antifa became a central element of conservative demonology in the Trump era, especially during the riots set off by George Floyd’s killing in 2020, in which masked “black bloc” agitators were often seen setting fires and causing mayhem. As Minneapolis burned, Trump claimed on Twitter that his administration would designate Antifa a terrorist organisation. This never happened — and since the United States lacks a domestic terrorism law, it is unlikely it will in the event of a second Trump term.

At the local level, however, conservatives are now testing out other ways of cracking down on the movement. This month, the District Attorney of San Diego, California, brought conspiracy charges against two Antifa activists who were involved in street brawls in early 2021, in effect trying to prosecute them using a legal toolkit created to fight organised crime.

Both the prosecution and the defence in the Antifa trial lay claim to free speech. In her opening statement, the Deputy District Attorney alleged that the defendants conspired “to shut down the speech and the assembly of a patriot group” (they were protesting a pro-Trump rally of the Proud Boys and other far-Right groups). In response, as well as arguing the prosecution is politically motivated — plausibly, given that the government opted not to prosecute any of the Right-wingers involved in the street fights in question — defence attorneys contend that the conspiracy charge threatens free political expression, because it will have a “chilling effect” on anyone protesting Right-wing gatherings.

The irony of the defence attorneys’ argument is that Antifa advocates are often explicit about doing what prosecutors allege — conspiring, or at least coordinating, to prevent those it defines as “fascist” from speaking and assembling. They are also open about the fact that they reject the liberal conception of free speech. In Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, the historian and activist Mark Bray writes: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase incorrectly ascribed to Voltaire that ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.” Bray, whose book is at once a history of Antifa, an apologia for its approach, and a how-to guide for aspiring militants, writes that the movement is “committed… to fighting to the death the ability of organized Nazis to say anything”. (“To the death” here is literal: Bray approvingly cites historical instances of murders committed by anti-fascists.)

Like many Antifa sympathisers, Bray directs much of his ire at liberal free-speech advocates, whom he believes are naïve devotees of the “marketplace of ideas”. The reality, though, is that after Trump’s election, many liberals and liberal institutions embraced Bray’s position. Indeed, the popularity of his book — which garnered many positive reviews in the mainstream press and scored Bray multiple NPR interviews — was an indication of this shift. The most dramatic about-face occurred at the ACLU, long notorious for defending the right of a Nazi group to hold a rally in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977. The organisation took the same consistent free-speech stance prior to the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, but after the deadly events of that day, it began to waver, with many of its employees publicly disavowing its prior position.

In another sign of the patina of respectability Antifa acquired in the Trump era, in early 2018 Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison — then the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee — promoted Bray’s book on Twitter, saying it would “strike fear in the heart of [Donald Trump]”. This was quite a reputational upgrade for a movement that, as Bray’s historical account details, existed for many decades mainly as a minor skinhead subculture devoted mainly to brawling with equally marginal groups of neo-Nazi skinheads.

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For much of its existence, however, Antifa had a more ambivalent relationship with the liberal mainstream than its frequent denunciations of liberal proceduralism would imply. The movement first emerged alongside and in response to the rise of fascism in interwar Europe; the first anti-fascist militants were communists, socialists and anarchists who took to the streets to confront fascist paramilitary groups such as the SA in Germany and the Blackshirts in Italy. At this time, their violent struggle was part of a broader revolutionary agenda. Defeating fascists, viewed as the shock troops of capital, was one piece of the larger radical social transformation they sought, often inspired by the recent Bolshevik triumph in Russia (the fascists, for their part, saw their violent activities as justified by the threat of Bolshevism). Yet in nearly every country, they failed not only to bring about a communist revolution but to block the rise of the far-Right.

It was only in the post-war era, with the West settled under liberal-democratic rule, that Antifa re-emerged in something like its current form. With the dream of universal communist revolution deferred, the movement focused largely on beating back the scattered far-Right groups that persisted. While still deploying the rhetoric of the revolutionary Left, these militants were for the most part resigned to policing the outer fringes of acceptable discourse, following terms set by the liberal mainstream they despised. To the extent their use of political violence was tolerated, it was in large part because their far-Right targets had already been pushed to the margins of society by other means, or because they unfolded in subcultural spaces of little broad political significance.

In making the case for the efficacy of Antifa tactics, Bray and other apologists often point to concrete successes at preventing some particular neo-Nazi group from gathering or speaker from speaking. But it was the subtler, more comprehensive methods of enforcing ideological consensus employed by the liberal mainstream that rendered these fringe groups vulnerable to the antics of a handful of activists in the first place. Conversely, Antifa has had less success lately at shutting down Right-populist leaders and parties it dubs fascist, from Trump to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni — for the simple reason that it is unable to muster sufficient numbers to physically confront their mass base of support. Even Bray concedes the movement’s tactics are inadequate to take on this new enemy.

Hence, Antifa faces the problem that its approach is more likely to rack up successes when the stakes are lowest; when those it dubs “fascist” manage to command a broad base of support, it seems unable to scale up its approach. An approach calibrated to shutting down a bar show by a neo-Nazi hardcore band is unlikely to have much effect on a Trump rally. The liberal establishment, it would seem, began to embrace Antifa just as its tactics were becoming irrelevant.

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And yet, the possibility of effective collaboration between the centre-left and Antifa activists was on view this week, in the briefly successful attempt to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Belgian anti-fascists had repeatedly demanded the conference be prevented from happening, and the local mayor used the pretext of potential violence from counter-protesters to justify asking the police to break up the gathering on public safety grounds. Ultimately, a court forced the city government to allow the conference to go forward, but the affair revealed something novel: that Antifa’s willingness to use violence can furnish sympathetic authorities with a useful rationale for limiting the freedom of speech and assembly of their enemies.

If Antifa has contributed anything to public discourse other than shrill slogans, it is having forced the consideration of what the limits of tolerance and freedom are in a society that claims to revere these values. But this question also applies to them too, as the San Diego prosecution’s case makes clear. Can a liberal society tolerate the activities of a group that openly seeks to deny the speech and assembly rights of whomever its members deem “fascist”? (In the final chapter of his book, Bray implies all Trump voters are “everyday fascists”, but doesn’t clarify whether he and his comrades therefore consider half the US electorate legitimate targets for violence.)

Lately, Antifa has lost much of the prominence it enjoyed in the Trump era but the questions raised by its activities persist. Amid the Gaza war, pro-Palestinian protesters have used Antifa-style tactics to prevent pro-Israel speakers and groups from holding events, but have also fallen victim to tactics long used by Antifa, such as doxxing. If the San Diego prosecution of Antifa succeeds, we can expect further crackdowns on Left-wing protest by conservative DAs along similar lines — but this, in turn, may only confirm fascism is imminent, prompting more aggressive action on the Left. The question, it seems, is less whether we are lurching into a new age of illiberalism than which side will go further, sooner.

Back in January 2004, the year I left academia to become a full-time journalist, I wrote a column for Guardian Weekend Magazine on the issue of transsexuality. It was entitled “Gender Benders, Beware”. It wasn’t the first time I had written about the issue. But this piece in particular lit the touchpaper for a fire that is still burning even today.

I wrote it on the suggestion of the magazine’s editor, Katharine Viner. She wanted, she said, something about the trans issue. At that point, I mainly wrote about male violence, and sometimes lesbian politics. I had no other direction from her, except the deadline. So I wrote about how a bastardised version of “human rights” was being used against women, with Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) as an example.

In August 1995, two of VRR’s employees had asked Kimberly Nixon, a trans-identified male, to leave its counsellor training as they thought it might not be appropriate for a man to be treating abused women. Nixon immediately filed a human rights complaint and began suing VRR. The legal battle was long and arduous. In 2002, Nixon won $7,500, the highest amount ever awarded by the tribunal, for injury to “her dignity”. But when I wrote my piece, that decision had just been overturned.

Here’s a taster: “…having not experienced life as a ‘woman’ until middle age, Nixon assumed ‘she’ would be suitable to counsel women who have chosen to access a service that offers support to women who have suffered similar experiences, not from a man in a dress! The Rape Relief sisters, who do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman, successfully challenged the ruling and, for now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.”

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It was like a bomb going off. The letters page exploded. Two-hundred-odd complaints landed and, in his weekly column, the readers’ editor felt bound to apologise on behalf of the newspaper, claiming my words had: “…abused an already abused minority that The Guardian might have been expected to protect”.

This was my Rubicon. The gay press, which had never been fond of me, pretty much declared war and I became a figure of hate for transactivists. The Guardian was and is the only newspaper that employed a dedicated “readers’ editor” to whom complaints can be made about anything that appears in the publication. The organised lobby of transactivists availed themselves of the opportunity to make a huge scene about my piece, claiming that it was an incitement to violence and warning that no LGBT person would read the paper again unless I was fired.

Viner defended me to the hilt and continued to commission me. But these were just the starting salvos in a war of attrition waged by the transactivists: I received death and rape threats, and would be met by a baying mob of protesters wherever I appeared to do a public presentation.

If I thought things were bad, I drew some comfort in being shortlisted for the 2008 Stonewall Journalist of the Year Award. Back then, I was still the only out lesbian journalist in mainstream media and I was writing about issues that were vitally important to lesbians and, indeed, women. Alas, what should have been a moment to actually celebrate my achievements for the under-represented became an opportunity for transactivists to target me. One Stonewall insider told me they were getting up to 20 calls a day demanding my removal from the shortlist. And as I arrived at the ceremony, I was greeted by a 200-strong picket made up of trans people and allies, all screaming “Bindel the bigot!”, “transphobe!” and other such terms of endearment. This, it later transpired, was the largest ever transactivist demo in the UK: effectively, the dawn of the modern trans rights movement.

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And no, even though I was the firm favourite, I didn’t take home the prize — it went to Miriam Stoppard, the Daily Mirror’s Agony Aunt who had offered decent advice to a reader whose son had come out as gay in one of her columns. A win by me, I was told by one insider, could have “ruined Stonewall”.

Instead, the mob tried to ruin me. Invitations to prestigious events were withdrawn. I was shortlisted for awards, only to be un-shortlisted when the organisers found themselves under pressure. And in 2009, I became the first individual, alongside six fascist organisations, to be no-platformed by the National Union of Students. And as my name became dirt, the influence of transactivists grew.

By 2011, the media had begun platforming transwomen. Juliet Jacques was charting their “transgender journey” in The Guardian, and Channel 4 screened the reality series, My Transsexual Summer. In 2012, Trans Media Watch (TMW) a tiny charity with massive power gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, claiming that coverage in the mainstream media was almost always prejudicial. TMW began flexing its muscles with the big news outlets, offering “training” and “advice”. And, suddenly, the trans issue was everywhere. Activists were pushing to do away with the requirement for a rubber stamp from medical professionals in order to be allowed to access cross sex hormones and surgery, and the murmurings of “self-identification” as a way forward were getting louder. At the same time, the T was increasingly attached to the LGB acronym.

So, it was a surprise when, in February 2014, the acting Stonewall CEO, Ruth Hunt, emailed asking if I’d like to meet her for a drink. I was by now a loud critic of the organisation, considering it assimilationist and conformist, as well as focused far too much on gay men. Almost immediately, the conversation turned to the trans issue. Hunt told me there was “no way” Stonewall was going to add the T to the LGB if she was offered the permanent post, and that she would go no further than help set up and support a separate organisation for trans people.

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Well, what happened next? When, that summer, Hunt was revealed as the new CEO of Stonewall, she met with transactivists to discuss how the organisation could become more trans inclusive and apologised for my nomination in 2008.

Then, in 2015, I was invited to debate the question: “Does modern feminism have a problem with free speech?” by the University of Manchester Free Speech and Secular Society. My opponent was Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-Right agitator and misogynist who opposed abortion rights and blamed women for rape. Following the predictable trans activist pile-on, the Women’s Officer decided I should be publicly disinvited because my presence could “incite hatred towards and exclusion of our trans students”, and my views were “dangerous for trans people and…for feminist and liberation movements in general”. A feminist activist was being silenced while a self-proclaimed misogynist was welcome. Yiannopoulos was eventually disinvited after feminists kicked up a fuss. People were beginning to finally twig that trans activism was a front for woman-hatred, otherwise, why treat the actual transphobic bigot as far less of a threat than the left-wing feminist campaigning to end male violence?

It was a lonely time, despite a handful of other feminists speaking out and organising against transgender ideology. But the growing grip of gender ideology was a force to be reckoned with. And they had made me a pariah. When, for instance, I was invited in 2016 to speak to the Salford Working Class Movement Library about growing up as a working-class lesbian in north-east England, hundreds of mainly middle-class students petitioned the library to de-platform me, claiming I was a bigot. They even went after the library’s funders, who were told I was “transphobic”, “biphobic”, “Islamophobic”, “hateful,” and “anti-sex work”. I was also a Terf (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) — a nasty term coined by self-described “trans ally” Viv Smythe, bemoaning what she considered to be “anti-trans” coverage in the British press.

Undaunted, the library volunteers stood their ground, and the event went ahead in February 2017. It was standing room only. I hadn’t intended to mention trans ideology (strangely enough, it wasn’t much of an issue on my run-down council estate in the Seventies). But, once I was in that room, having been escorted by security guards past yet another baying mob, I cracked and spent 15 minutes talking about the rising transactivist hatred towards women, especially lesbians. And then we moved on to my lesbian awakening.

It has been a torrid two decades. I have been physically threatened and attacked on several occasions. Obscenities and threats are hurled at me. The irony escapes these activists — generally trans-identifying males — that I am a feminist who campaigns to prevent violence against women.

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I’m lucky, though, that unlike some women, such as my friends Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix and Maya Forstater, I had no job to be hounded out of. I work as a freelancer. And despite being slowly frozen out of writing for The Guardian over the past decade, I have always had plenty of work. But these past 20 years have not been easy.

What hurts most is being labelled a bigot, homophobe and fascist. After all, I have chosen to spend all my life, since coming out as a lesbian at 15, campaigning to end bigotry. And I like to think I still do. Last September, I was back in Vancouver, meeting the brilliant women I wrote about all those years ago, many of whom are now close friends. They are still under attack by transactivists, and have had cuts to their funding, and even a rat nailed to the door of their centre by blue-fringed misogynists. But they, like me, persist.

If we use the stages of grief as a model for human reckoning with tragedy, we are currently desperately bargaining that we might simply flip a switch — be it policy or market-based — and continue to expect to live as we have in the relatively peaceful End of History period of the past few decades.

Climate change activists, for example, look to the state and potential mechanisms for world governance via climate conferences to solve the problem. If only we put in the right number of bike lanes or subsidise the transition to a world of electric vehicles, industrial society would lumber on. Free-marketeers, relatedly, look to the unfettered global market to innovate our way to unleashing energy abundance never before captured in human history — a fantasy of the world economy run on nuclear power with Silicon Valley-backed AI-run vertical farms underwriting fully automated luxury capitalism.

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These assumptions — that industrial society must continue indefinitely, or that we must develop solutions at grand scales — has us stuck in a political and technological gridlock, and limits our ability to imagine alternatives. Some of the most salient cultural traditions for this historical moment live outside the current oversized scale of market and state.

Writers such as John Michael Greer, who have compared ours to collapsed civilisations of the past, have been proclaiming that we are at the end of the industrial society. In response, forward-thinking individuals are cobbling together a worldview to get us through this period of crisis: something like the conservatism of Christopher Lasch combined with the environmentalism of Wendell Berry, a synthesis we might call Left Conservatism.

In practice, this nascent ideology looks to revive civil society, cares about ecology and culture of place, desires robust local and regional economies, is broadly anti-war, and rejects the ongoing bureaucratisation and commodification of all the most sacred aspects of life. This milieu of thinking doesn’t belong to a set political tradition — hence the contradiction in terms — but, above all, Left Conservatism centres the local, the particular and the human-scaled.

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Whether or not we are ready for it, we are entering a world in which the market and state are failing to meet basic needs. We will therefore need to embrace much more radical self-determination, at various scales for various problems. Those who take on the responsibility of de-scaling our economy and politics will be the most successful in the New Tragic Age, which may not be so tragic after all, depending on how we prepare.

There is an interesting history of something like Left Conservatism in the United States, especially owing to federalism and the ability to devolve power to states. Writers such as Berry, Lasch and Norman Mailer represent versions of this alternative to the typical Left-Right binary. In an interview with Martin Amis, Mailer describes the appeal of the term:

“The best thing that can be said for conservatism, and there are a great many terrible things to say about it, but the best thing to say about it is that they (conservatives) do tend to have a certain appreciation of the world as a whole. I become uneasy when I find people drawing up solutions, which is, of course, the great vice of the Left, to solve difficult problems, because I think they cut out too many of the nuances. So, Left Conservatism is my way of reminding myself that you have to deal with everything in context.”

In a globalised market and bureaucratic state, nearly every aspect of life is decontextualised — a line on a spreadsheet to be analysed by financiers or policy-makers. The principle of subsidiarity, or the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest possible scale, closest to where they will have an impact, is a helpful rule. Political questions answered on appropriate scales would allow for a patchwork of diverse cultures — working in concert when necessary and focusing on self-determination where appropriate.

Here, the environmentalism of Berry is scaled down. Instead of focusing primarily on the global and intangible, Berry’s environmentalism is about local ecologies, fundamentally inextricable from place and culture. What follows from this distinction is a radically different ontology: a concern for global concepts such as climate seems to drive activists toward acts of destruction, whereas a focus on the stewardship of a specific, knowable ecology encourages acts of creation.

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Lasch is best known for documenting the advancing narcissism of the modern era, but he also mourned the loss of the culture of pre-industrial times. He bemoaned “the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” and called for a reinvigoration of active participation in civic life. Primarily known as a Leftist, Lasch retained a respect for the positive potential of the state, as long as it remained in balance with strong families, neighbourhoods, and working “guilds”.

For both, whether dealing with the market or the state, it is the scaling down of focus that radically reorganises the field of action. The inhuman scales through which we currently engage in politics rightfully make us feel out of control. Our sense is that the only way to protect ourselves from such totalising forces is to either recoil from them or to destroy them in some way or another. You can see this most clearly in climate activism, where the sense of helplessness leads to a rage channeled toward acts of destruction. However, when the scale is more human — a neighbourhood, a family, a garden — suddenly the possibility for acts of creation or stewardship become much more real, and the responsibility for action more tangible.

Those hovering around these ideas — localism, civic orientation, care for local ecologies — are seeking to move beyond the gridlock of over-scaled politics as currently constituted. They see the future clear-eyed, and know that more partisan appeals to solutions of the global market or governance will just provide us more of the same. The “Left” part of Left Conservatism is recognition of the need to protect ourselves from the exploitative forces of the market — the desire to commodify and sell off every last sacred thing. The “conservative” part is the desire to protect the sacred from the flattening authority of bureaucracy. Despite superficial political differences of individuals, working at the local scale as neighbours can start to draw out the shared sense of the sacred: a clean environment, a safe community, a thriving home.

As a reporter, I am supposed to bear witness: to expose the truth relentlessly and seek justice. I thought I could cope with seeing such horrific things; I would reassure friends that I was fine and point out that I was not the victim in these scenarios. Over the years, I have avoided examining how being immersed in a world of rape, child abuse and femicide has affected me. I would always support those feminist activists who threw in the towel to retire to Spain, but I would feel a bit bemused by their actions. Why would you want to take up gardening, instead of being an agent of change?

Then something shifted. Investigating yet another atrocity, over the past few years, I have been overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, unable to sleep. I now understand why some activists retire.

It began with the murder of a seven-year-old girl. Nikki Allan lived with her mum and three sisters in a run-down block of flats in Sunderland. One day, in 1992, a man took her to the wasteland outside a derelict warehouse and sexually assaulted her. When Nikki screamed, he pushed her through a window into the building, chased her into a far corner, and shattered her little skull with a brick. He then stabbed her 37 times, before dragging her into the basement. There he left her, propped up against the wall like a rag doll.

Police focused their investigation on a man named George Heron, seen as the local oddball. They effectively coerced a confession out of him. The following year, he was acquitted of murder at trial, after the judge ruled the confession out, but was forced to go into hiding because people in the local community were convinced of his guilt. Nikki’s mum, Sharon Henderson, believed Heron had got away with her daughter’s murder, because the police repeatedly told her that there were no other suspects. The media reinforced this narrative.

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I picked up the story in 2006. Visiting my parents in Darlington, not far from where Nikki was murdered, I saw a photograph in the local paper of a woman standing by the grave of a child. The headline read: “Mum’s bid to dig up daughter”. Sharon was asking police to exhume Nikki’s body, in order to test it for DNA evidence, following a change in the law on double jeopardy, which prevents someone being tried again on charges of which they’ve been previously acquitted. More than a decade after her daughter’s murder, Sharon was still fighting for justice.

“I always said I would never, ever give up campaigning for Nikki until her murderer was locked up,” Sharon told me. “Not until the police answer for that first so-called investigation.”

I first interviewed Sharon shortly after reading that newspaper story. A single mum from a rough part of town, she felt that the police weren’t taking her seriously. Over the years, I’ve kept in contact with Sharon, admiring her tenacity, and her refusal to accept that the police had done right by her daughter.

And then, in May 2022, the unexpected happened. A man named David Boyd was charged, 30 years after Nikki was murdered. A child sex offender, with convictions dating back to 1986, Boyd lived three doors down from where Nikki disappeared, and had moved away from the estate shortly after the murder. When questioned, Boyd had lied, presenting a made-up alibi. So focused were the police on Heron, they didn’t even bother to check it.

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By this point, I had started working on a podcast series about Nikki’s murder, originally with the intention of marking the 30th anniversary, and to give Sharon’s campaign a boost. It felt like we were close to getting justice. I attended every day of the trial, renting an apartment close to Newcastle Crown Court. Sharon and her family would come there between sittings, for respite. I saw, as I had over the previous 17 years, how much pain Sharon was enduring. But here she was, struggling on. The evidence at trial was harrowing. Sharon did her best to listen. But most of the time she would leave the public gallery after only a few minutes, sobbing. “Imagine listening to what that bastard did to your bairn,” says Sharon. “The details of how he murdered her will never leave my mind.”

Day in, day out, the particulars of the murder were played out: the forensic pathologist who examined Nikki’s body in situ back in 1992 came to repeat her evidence, 31 years later. A blood splatter expert, she painted a vivid picture of what had happened to Nikki in life and in death. We saw video footage of the crime scene. Nikki’s body was pixelated out, but the brick that had killed was in plain sight.

“Vicarious trauma” is a term used by psychologists to describe the effect of witnessing or hearing horror stories. It is increasingly recognised as a potential consequence of working directly with seriously hurt and injured individuals — an occupational hazard among Accident and Emergency personnel, for instance, or social workers who witness child cruelty. With wider recognition of the condition, it is becoming more commonplace for employers to offer counselling to staff who encounter atrocity in their working lives.

I feel uncomfortable claiming to be experiencing “vicarious trauma”. I’m not the victim here. I have always felt it important to be resilient, when focusing on the women and girls directly affected by a crime. But something snapped in me, with this story.

During the trial, I would find myself crying at home for no apparent reason. I would be too tired to blank out the stories I’d heard, but then have trouble sleeping. I’d stay awake watching Netflix as a way of escaping my intrusive thoughts, my hypersensitivity, and a feeling of deep, deep despair. I suffered extreme neck and shoulder pain, attributed partly to five weeks of scribbling in a notebook every day in court, but also to the tension of hearing the evidence, and trying not to cry on the press bench. I started getting headaches. I would imagine all kinds of horrific things happening to my loved ones, anything from car crashes to brutal murder.

What was it about the Nikki Allan case that kept me awake night after night, driving me into a depression? It was not the first time I had reported on the case of a murdered child, or seen such terrible evidence in court. But in time, I have come to realise that so many aspects of the case resonated with my own childhood experience, and what I escaped. Growing up in the North East, I witnessed how the police dismiss working-class women, in particular single mothers; I saw how child sexual abuse was minimised. Boyd was free for 30 years to abuse girls a short drive from the rough housing estate I grew up on, where men targeted me and my friends.

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I was first flashed at when I was nine years old. Aged 12, a man violently grabbed my breast as he walked past me in the middle of the town centre. At 16, I was raped by an older man I considered a friend. My job cleaning in a pub ended abruptly when a campaign of horrific sexual harassment culminated in an attempted rape. By this time, I was 17, and had recently joined the ranks of feminists fighting against sexual and domestic violence.

I was drawn to the cause partly because of my own experiences, but also inspired by the widespread protests about the police investigation into the so-called Yorkshire Ripper. The misogyny and class prejudice that underpinned this investigation — the idea that the victims were “common prostitutes” and were therefore somehow complicit in their fate — felt familiar to me. Many of the women I was raised among would be seen as the kind who would be “asking for it” simply for going to the pub alone, when they should have stayed safely at home.

Returning to the North East, spending time so close to where I was raised, amid Nikki’s grieving, traumatised family, I sometimes caught myself wondering how my life would have turned out had I stayed put in Darlington. Had I never found feminism. Sharon’s life could have been mine.

But anyone doing this work, immersed in the harsh reality of it, is bound to struggle with the toll it takes on our mental health. I see rape and domestic abuse routinely dismissed and minimised. Victims are dismissed, disbelieved, or blamed for their own predicaments. I also see men excused. They are reassured that what they have done is “not so bad”. Meanwhile, women such as Sharon Henderson are fighting against a system that views them as irritants.

And if the crimes themselves aren’t taken seriously enough in the mainstream, why would those of us reporting on them be given any consideration? Instead, we see the trivialisation of both sexual violence and of the hellish side effects of campaigning for change. I will never understand how Sharon must feel, having lost her seven-year-old daughter to murder; I do know what it is like to be silenced and misrepresented when speaking out against atrocities committed by men, and police inaction.

So, I will always be inspired by women like Sharon (in May, Boyd was found guilty of Nikki’s murder and jailed for life, with a minimum term of 29 years). One positive I cling to, in this bleak state of affairs, is the sense of solidarity that often flourishes between women. Sharon may never have considered herself a feminist campaigner until the unimaginable happened. But the rest of us have so much to learn from her tenacity.

‘Three doors down‘, Julie Bindel’s podcast series on the case of Nikki Allan, is out now

But then my wife and I had kids in the expensive California city of Oakland, and we sent them to our local government school (“public” school, in the US). I saw that, rather than applying dubious theories from their training — “child-centred” teaching inspired by John Dewey, Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” — teachers were mainly using age-old methods to convey mandated curriculum to restless children. And I learned that many of them, especially younger teachers without spouses, or divorced teachers raising children of their own, were sharing bedrooms in group houses to cut down on living expenses, commuting huge distances from more affordable cities, or even working second jobs.

I was also seeing research showing that the skill of individual teachers was a key variable in both the subject learning and life outcomes of students. I decided to think of our local teachers’ unions as a sort of guild, securing a measure of agency and public dignity and better pay for members of a maligned profession, which might help schools attract talented people to their classrooms, and keep them there. In any case, we were part of the same community now, working together to see our kids through their school years. Some of us — the teachers — needed better pay to have decent lives. Their 2019 strike thus seemed pretty defensible. Despite the learning it interrupted and the inconvenience it caused us, no one in my world of school parents opposed it.

We parents aren’t feeling so communal about the Oakland teachers’ strike of 2023. The strike, which ran from 5 May to 15 May, wasn’t about the thing we were used to feeling invested in and guilty about — teachers’ pay. The parties (the teachers’ union and the Oakland school district) were close to agreement on a pay increase when the strike was called. What they continued to disagree on was a set of broad demands that, the union said, it was making on behalf of the “common good”.

These demands sounded like an odd fit within a contract negotiation. Our kids had been kept home from school not because teachers were being ill-paid or disrespectfully treated, but because the leaders of their union had some theories about homelessness, social welfare, climate change and, of course, racism, along with some conspicuously swollen ambitions about how much policymaking power they might wrest from elected officials.

The two most newsworthy of the union’s demands, and the most noteworthy to parents wondering how long their kids would be out of school, concerned racial reparations and environmental justice. From what we were hearing, the teachers wouldn’t return to work until our schools were remade into places where racial reparations are paid out and environmental justice is finally done.

The “reparations” demand is, at once, confusing and revealing. It’s confusing because, in its details, it doesn’t mean what Americans think of when they think of racial reparations. It’s revealing because it shows the teachers’ union going the way of other progressive organisations in recent years. Instead of protecting the material and professional interests of our beloved teachers, the activist leaders of their union have taken up a new mission — impressing each other with radical gestures.

What the term “reparations” signifies in the United States is a tough national reckoning with the moral, material, legal and political injustice of slavery, in the form of generous payouts to black Americans. As a political issue, it is profoundly unresolved. But what the teachers’ union calls racial reparations is, along with a proposal to let homeless students live in empty school buildings, the most palatable part of its common-good vision. What the union means by reparations — according to a detailed description of its common-good demands, which it published in December — is that the school district would turn schools with large black populations into “Black thriving community schools”, where food, healthcare and other social services are provided to needy families.

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Now, the idea of community schools is an old one in education circles. If it turned out that such schools were an effective way to educate poor children and deliver social services to their families, Oakland parents would probably support them, even given the racially specific framing of “Black thriving” (though we’d still object to using them as a reason to hold a teacher strike). We recognise that the overlap between black and poor populations in our city is large. And the fact that politics in Oakland — birthplace of the Black Panthers — is always also racial politics, is a shock to no one who lives here. Indeed, the vernacular rawness and bluntness of Oakland’s racial politics is one of the many things I found refreshing about the city when I moved here in 2004. Feeling all my arguments from “colour blindness” fall away was both a settling-in and a liberation. I lived in Oakland now.

In this context, casting the “Black thriving community schools” proposal as reparations is almost perversely divisive, especially for a teacher organisation ostensibly dependent on the support of parents, including non-black, politically moderate parents. In conversations about the strike I had with such parents, the word came up several times as a bemused question: “Reparations?”

To Americans, “reparations” conjures political scenarios of endless accusation and evasion, anger and resentment and guilt chasing each other in a circle, a titanic policy debate that will never end because it never really starts. This total impasse of national deliberation is not what parents want to imagine as a sticking point in the contract negotiation that’s keeping their kids home from school. And it really wasn’t. “Reparations” was just a word they chose.

But why would our embattled teachers’ union package its proposal for community schools — already ambitious, as both power-grab and policy, but not without its moral appeal — in the divisive and discouraging language of reparations? Why would it risk the support of parents by seeming to foist on them a sudden resolution of the great American racial reckoning, from the private setting of a contract negotiation, when what they were really proposing was feeding poor families and letting them see a nurse at their kids’ school?

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I wasn’t present when the union forged this document, so I can’t say for sure. But I have a theory. Activists within the teachers’ union chose the language of reparations not for its denotative accuracy, nor for the crucial support it might add to its negotiating position, both of which it subverts, but to impress each other and challenge – and, perhaps even, cow — their less fervent colleagues.

We’ve watched this pattern repeat itself, especially since the George Floyd protests of 2020: organisations dominated in their leadership by a core of activists, or highly sensitive to the sort of problematic publicity that activists can generate for them, having their historic missions erased and rewritten according to the internal dynamics of progressive cadres — pathological status contests in which no one wants to appear less extreme than the most extreme person.

In these settings, terms such as “reparations” work as memes, easily permeating a symbolic system that offers very little friction or resistance to their movement. This is surely why the union’s list of common-good demands includes other terms that are faddish in progressive circles, but entirely outside either the real classroom mission of school teachers or the proper negotiating brief of a teachers’ union, nor particularly accurate as names for what the teachers were actually seeking.

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Under the politically exciting term “environmental justice” — another red flag for parents worried their teachers were taking on messy fights that would keep their kids out of school — the union demanded that “all student learning areas […] be independently climate controlled, ventilated and weatherised using safe and green technologies”. So, what our striking teachers meant by the provocative and pragmatically fraught term “environmental justice” was… air conditioning

When we parents learnt that our teachers were in fact striking over massive and intractable societal problems, we were perhaps justified in wondering how such a strike could possibly end. The teachers weren’t willing to budge on their “equity” demands. Rumours circulated that the school year was over. Summer would be starting a month early. Few of us knew what was really at stake. We’d only heard the news stories, which dealt in generalities. We hadn’t read the online documents that said reparations for slavery meant meals and medical checkups at some schools, and environmental justice meant better insulation and stronger fans in classrooms.

Still, the teachers did stage a strike, and the strike was about a set of grievances so novel and abstract it’s hard to understand them as grievances. Now that the strike is over, the union’s ostensible grievances seem more like plans. They certainly have some big ideas about how the schools, indeed the city, ought to be run. And they seem willing to strike again if our actually elected officials don’t do as they wish, or hand them the power to do it themselves.

On their own, in their scale and reach, these novel and ambitious plans violate the implicit agreement that parents make with their unionised teachers, whose work-stoppages they support and even encourage, despite the expense and inconvenience and learning-loss they result in. We parents do this on the grounds that teachers are joined with us in an educational project that is no less urgent or dignified for being confined to the teaching of humble things like reading and maths, which requires good teachers who are paid well, and which the schools find hard enough already.

More alienating is the strong sense that these plans emerged from a hermetic and vaguely unhealthy process, an esoteric set of deliberative pressures peculiar to progressive “spaces”, as these spaces have been rewired in recent years. It will be an ominous feeling for Oakland parents, as the term for the new contract moves toward another crisis of negotiation, to know that the future design of their public schools, and their future ability to send their kids to them, could be determined by a further set of ideological gambits by progressive activists — and by the larger number of people who will go along with them, no matter how crazy they sound.

Generally, the public mood on armbands and bent knees seems to be split. There are those who assume every organised public gesture in the name of human rights must be altruistically intentioned and beneficial. And then there are those who dismiss all such gestures as self-interested attempts to gain social capital. The relation between the two looks symbiotic: the more enthusiastically the first group don flags, lanyards, and armbands, the more obstinately the second group insists there is nothing but self-promotion at the end of this particular rainbow.

Prospects of a more nuanced take aren’t helped by Left-wing lip service to universal human rights, combined in practice with squeamishness about saying anything robust in their favour which might exacerbate racial or non-Christian religious sensitivities. One only has to compare the relatively muted and qualified response of Stonewall to the stabbing-to-death of three gay men in Reading in 2021 (perpetrator: a militant Libyan asylum seeker with a history of violence) to last week’s impassioned response to a US shooting in a gay nightclub  (perpetrator: a white American with a history of threatening to blow up his mum’s house — although, in an inconvenient plot twist, he has since come out as non-binary).

Apart from leaving the stage clear for Right-wing commentators to claim the divisive spoils, the Left’s squeamishness about cultural insensitivity also entails that activist gestures are most plentiful in the contexts where they are least needed. The safest space for full-throated political activism is apparently one where you can rely on the audience’s proximity to your own values, not to mention their repressed politeness and fear of being judged as the bad people. Many tolerant people in the UK are by now very fed up with all the needless hectoring and guilt-tripping.

This hectoring reaches its apotheosis during the annual farce of Transgender Day of Remembrance in the UK. Nagged into it by Stonewall and other transactivist organisations, last week various institutions fell over themselves to mark the murders of precisely zero UK trans people during the previous year with various fulsome tributes. Perhaps imaginatively accompanied by visions of the Last Post bleakly ringing out over the Somme, the Welsh Parliament even dramatically tweeted out: “Today, we remember the trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen.”

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Yet for UK political institutions to address a major factor in the majority of trans murders worldwide — working in the sex trade — not only would they have to address male violence and sex-buying, they would also have to take a public stand in some extremely macho and homophobic cultures overseas. Much easier, then, to put all such deaths down to amorphous “transphobia” and then return to the main task of leveraging irrational guilt out of soft-touch Lefties for the purposes of cash extraction and power consolidation.

But those on the Right should not think themselves off the hook either. On the side of those fulminating on Twitter about Kane’s supposed virtue-signalling were various socially conservative and post-liberal types, disapproving of the arrogance involved in imposing Western values on the Qatari nation. This position was, perhaps inadvertently, well-summed up by French captain Hugo Lloris. “When we are in France, when we welcome foreigners, we often want them to follow our rules, to respect our culture, and I will do the same when I go to Qatar, quite simply,” he said last week. “I can agree or disagree with their ideas, but I have to show respect.”

It’s likely Lloris said this for the sake of an easy life. But a growing number these days seem relatively uncritical — even occasionally offering qualified approval — of authoritarian regimes, partly because they are distinctly disillusioned with Western liberalism. Specifically, they are tired with the way that the internal logic of liberalism apparently results in endless quests for new forms of “freedom” — religious, sexual, bodily, and so on — with the result that traditional social structures such as marriage, the family, and local community have been undermined. Whereas many liberals on both the Left and Right would present things such as the advent of the Pill, no-fault divorce, commercial surrogacy, and rampant bodily modification as having no downsides whatsoever, post-liberals tend to be much more focused on what has been lost in terms of social cohesion and stability, and also upon the apparent moral and spiritual emptiness of what replaces it.

I’m not saying that these critics of liberalism would admire a country partly run under Sharia law. I’m suggesting, rather, that keen awareness of the limits of the dominant Western political model tends to make one less likely to criticise more authoritarian alternatives. And yet, no one should kid himself that failing to object vociferously to the imprisonment of gay men, or to the forcing of women to be dependent on male guardians for all their major life decisions, is a simple mark of respect for a less fractured and narcissistic culture than our own. Unless an unabashed cultural relativist, even the most post of the post-libs should acknowledge that personal autonomy — in the basic sense of being able to choose what you do — is a universally important moral and political value, whatever else is also valuable.

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This seems to be well-recognised with respect to the past, with leading post-liberal writers such as Patrick Deneen rightly decrying slavery. Qatari women and sexual minorities, living in the here and now, deserve no less a defence. Radical feminists have long complained of the tendency of liberal feminists to go suspiciously quiet when it comes to the authoritarian repression of women in non-Western cultures or minority communities. Post-liberals must not make the same mistake. And nor should they tell themselves that Qatari women don’t know what they are missing. It might be true that women in medieval England couldn’t miss what they didn’t know they didn’t have — but unlike them, Qatari women have at least some access to the internet.

Another source of reluctance to intervene here might be a general scepticism about the notion of human rights. Certainly, there’s no need to be credulous about every audaciously solipsistic claim made in the name of the “rights” of an identity group. It’s also reasonable, in my view, to have a relatively pared down account of what human rights actually are: not quasi-religious edicts coming down to us from some mysterious ethical realm on high, but rather requirements derived from basic and universal human needs, articulated in terms of the minimum standard required for well-being and not the maximum. We can argue about whether free movement across the globe is a human right in this sense, but it would be difficult to argue that free movement around your own village is not.

So, though it’s a shame that Kane eventually bottled it, I think it’s great that he initially wanted to take a public stand in Qatar. Despite what Piers Morgan thinks, whether a gesture like armband-wearing counts as “virtue-signalling” surely depends on the context. Within relatively progressive enclaves in the UK, public gestures in favour of values most people already hold there are superfluous — and the primary motive for them does indeed start to look like a desire to show off your moral superiority rather than to tackle the political non-issue in question.

But in profoundly illiberal Qatar, things are very different. I see no reason not to take any armband-wearing over there as a sincere and admirable attempt to speak up for the rights of oppressed others, and it seems to me highly uncharitable to take it any other way. Hell, never mind Qatar — in UK football, things are also very different. As is well-known, there are almost certainly gay players in the Premier League but none who will dare come out publicly, so great is the stigma. In either of these contexts, then — despite the critics — a rainbow armband or two is surely a wonderful thing.

Eloise is a champion of neurodivergence, an omnibus term that’s recently ballooned in popularity, which can include autism, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or indeed any other psychiatric condition that’s hot right now. The term is designed for making sweeping pronouncements. Forget the fact that, say, autism and schizophrenia are so different that they have at times been described as opposite conditions. Forget the fact that saying you’re neurodivergent has as much medical meaning as saying you have a disorder of the body. The idea is that there’s a group of people whose brain chemistry differs, in some beautiful way, from some Platonic norm. And it’s an idea that’s taken on great symbolic power in contemporary liberal culture.

There is, for example, a thriving ADHD community on TikTok and Tumblr: people who view their attentional difficulties not as an annoyance to be managed with medical treatment but as an adorable character trait that makes them sharper and more interesting than others around them. (They still demand extra time to take tests, naturally.) It’s also easy to come across social media users who declare how proud they are to be autistic; I’m glad they’re proud, but their repetitive insistence makes me wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince, us or them.

Darker, there’s the world of “DID TikTok”. DID, dissociative identity disorder, is a profoundly controversial condition, once known as multiple personality disorder. Many serious experts question whether it exists at all; at the very least it’s incredibly rare. And yet thousands of adolescents have diagnosed themselves with the condition, and happily perform their various personalities for their social media followers, typically in ways that defy all established psychological understandings of the disorder.

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Against this backdrop, Eloise is a marketing department’s dream come true: hers is a story of the young, beautiful, dysfunctional — and successful. Eloise is the perfect 21st-century woman, from a certain internet-enabled philosophy of human affairs. She is an admirer of witchcraft and believes that women have a mythical connection to water. She does a lot of drugs and becomes bisexual. She uses Tumblr and travels the world, vacationing in Lisbon and the south of France, and moves to Los Angeles to be an actor, taking care to embed that period of her life in a self-defensive patina of irony. She lives an enviable life of obvious socioeconomic privilege, which she does not have time to recognise, as she’s too busy cataloging her psychiatric maladies.

She crams them into every last anecdote: apparently nothing happens to her that she does not ultimately attribute to those maladies. Eloise’s love of swimming as a child is, for instance, laboriously explained in terms of her neurodivergence. I’m talking thousands of words. It seems never to have occurred to her that a love of swimming is not exactly rare among children, or that she doesn’t have to justify her joy at being in the ocean by making it “deeper”. Again and again, she holds perfectly mundane attitudes and behaviours up to the reader and says “Isn’t this special?”

The label of neurodivergence is so vague and capacious, pretty much anything can be pulled into its orbit and made “diverse”. There’s a meme that crops upon Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter that starts with “the neurodivergent urge to…” and is immediately followed by, well, just about anything a person does. Common examples include the neurodivergent urge not to reply to an email or to order food in rather than cooking what’s in the fridge.

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Take Eloise’s nightmares. She has, at times in her life, suffered from debilitatingly bad dreams that made sleep a constant source of fear and pain. This sounds like an awful condition, and she deserves sympathy. But she gives the game away when she writes: “Maybe my relationship with dreaming wasn’t like everyone else’s.” Not like everyone else’s, no. But certainly like that of many people who suffer from recurring and terrifying nightmares. Eloise writes that, according to the Mayo Clinic, nightmare disorder “only affects around 4-5% of adults, which shocked me: did adults really not have nightmares?” It’s as if she genuinely does not know the difference between 4% and zero.

It is perhaps comforting to see every last detail of one’s life as the product of some uncontrollable force. “I am this way because I was born this way,” Eloise writes, in a remarkably bald denial of personal responsibility. As a pawn of the various interior forces that do combat in her brain, she is adamant that there is nothing wrong with her, that her suffering is all in service to some deeper way to live, and that she is proud of the very conditions she asks us to treat as a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card for her behaviour.

The implication is that the neurodivergent might just be better than other people. As with introverts, social media users have developed a discourse around neurodivergence that is nakedly self-celebratory, a bragger’s genre. Eloise has clearly endured a great deal of hardship, but like her culture she seems to feel that this hardship can only be given meaning by being woven into a journey of self-actualisation. Eloise writes that her life is “underpinned and ultimately made whole by obsession”. Can you imagine a sadder statement: an adult telling you that there is nothing to distinguish her or give her value but her psychiatric conditions, conditions she shares with millions of others?

Diagnosis is the Holy Grail of the neurodivergence narrative. Eloise fixates on hers and its quasi-mystical powers. No reader could doubt that her problems are real, but she seems to have treated getting diagnoses like a consumer on Amazon. She states flat out, on several occasions, that she went shopping for an autism diagnosis, went to doctors with the express intent of wringing one out of them. There was a time when self-diagnosis was understood to be unhealthy, and perhaps embarrassing, but this is a brave new world we’re living in now.

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Once enough people insist on mental illnesses as upbeat and fashionable lifestyle brands, then any of us who oppose it are guilty of the most grave sin of all, the sin of perpetuating stigma. It’s stigma to call autism a disorder, despite the fact that it renders some completely nonverbal and unable to care for themselves; it’s stigma to suggest that someone with ADHD bears any responsibility at all for problems at school or work; it’s stigma to speak the plain fact that people with psychotic disorders sometimes commit acts of violence under the influence of their conditions. It’s stigma, in other words, to treat those of us with mental illnesses as anything else than wayward children.

Stigma, that cartoon monster, has never been in the top 100 of my problems in 20 years of managing a psychotic disorder, but never mind; stigma is the ox to be gored in contemporary pop culture, and so we must fixate on it to the point that we sideline the health, safety and treatment of those with mental disorders.

What I find tragic about those who buy into the neurodivergence narrative is that they become their illnesses. And yes, there are alternatives. Eloise and people like her seem never to consider one of the possible ways that they could have dealt with their myriad disorders: to suffer. Only to suffer. To suffer, and to feel no pressure to make suffering an identity, to not feel compelled to wrap suffering up in an Instagram-friendly manner. To accept that there is no sense in which her pain makes her deeper or more real or more beautiful than others, that in fact the pain of mental illness reliably makes us more selfish, more self-pitying, more destructive, and more pathetic. To understand that and to accept it and to quietly go about life trying to maintain peace and dignity is, I think, the best possible path for those with mental illness to walk.

But in this culture, all must be monetised, all must be aspirational, anything can be marketed. Eloise lacks the self-awareness to ask whether there’s something exploitative and ugly about turning psychological illness into fodder for soap opera and motivational posters. Again and again in this book, Eloise gins up the kind of statement on mental health that you might find in an Instagram meme, wedges it awkwardly into some prosaic story about her youth, and then skips away. At one point she mocks “Airbnb-style Live Laugh Love signage”, and I could only think, you’re writing a book filled with it.

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The most real, most human, most honest, and most humane part of Eloise’s book is something she wrote in a journal in 2009, when she was a teenager:

I fear my mind, as one single assembly by one fireman on fire safety in primary school caused this deep-seated fear. That shows the true extent of my mind’s power over me. Although these things are unlikely to happen, just yet, I fear every one of them one day. I don’t need a doctor to tell me that is a problem. But I want, so badly, to get better.

This is what it’s actually like to have a mental illness: no desire to justify or celebrate or honor the disease, only the desire to be rid of it. But the modern conception of neurodivergence (and disability activism generally) wants to have it both ways. Sometimes, people would prefer for you to think of their conditions as debilitating hindrances for which they may demand special dispensation. And sometimes they would like them to be seen as positive personality quirks that make them unique.

It is hard to witness the damage that has been done to this young woman, by a culture that insists she views her suffering as part of a beautiful journey. Today’s activists never seem to consider that there is something between terrible stigma and witless celebration, that we are not in fact bound to either ignore mental illness or treat it as an identity.

Were we wiser and more serious, we might be able to see psychiatric disorders as both natural and lamentable, as beyond the control of the individual but still within their responsibility. We would have sympathy for those who suffer from them, but recognise that sympathy only accrues to those whose conditions are unfortunate, unhealthy. We might be honest and say that, yes, it’s bad to be afflicted with psychiatric disorders.

We might, then, have the courage to say that mental illness sucks, that there’s nothing good about it, that the efforts to bend it into some superpower of greater creativity or deeper living is sour grapes from those who can’t escape. We might help people like Eloise, rather than celebrating them as self-actualised girlbosses. We might have the wisdom to ease her suffering, while we patiently tell her that there’s nothing beautiful about it.

In Stage Three of this process as seen during the Black Lives Matter protests, you’ll remember, right-wing media were filled with hair-raising scare stories about what BLM really wanted. “Revealed:” burbled the Daily Mail. “The British arm of Black Lives Matter’s full agenda – abolish the police, smash capitalism and close all prisons”. No reference to this loose and decentralised racial justice movement went unaccompanied by mention that three of the prominent figures in it had described themselves as “trained Marxists”. You feel on stronger ground, I suppose, resisting a movement that you’ve decided wants to tear capitalist society and its institutions to bits than one that asks us to give people of colour an equitable stake in society and the hope of walking the streets without being harassed by the cops.

Yet, capitalism being miraculously forgiving, we have now entered Stage Four. Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility fame, makes her main living as a “diversity consultant”, and is reported to charge north of £10,000 for a speech. She lectured Coca-Cola last year on “Confronting Racism”. And a brace of new books in her tradition indicates that far from wanting to smash for-profit workplaces, the diversity-industrial complex now wants to make capitalism safe for diversity. We have reached the stage, in other words, that trained Marxists would call co-optation.

Two books — one by Y-Vonne Hutchinson, How To Talk To Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down, and the other, A Judgement-Free Guide To Diversity and Inclusion for Straight White Men by Felicity Hassan and Suki Sandhu — are similar in scope and approach, though Hutchinson’s primary focus is race, while Hassan and Sandhu cover racism, sexism, ageism and homo/bi/transphobia too. They’re both aiming squarely at the business how-to market, most shamelessly in the case of the latter, which again and again mentions the “business case” for diversity and inclusion and barely makes the moral case at all.

In genre terms, we’re seeing the collision of two well established discourses: the boilerplate of antiracist discourse folded into the numbing cliches of the business self-help manual. This has the unfortunate effect, at least stylistically and in publishing terms, of making the case for antiracism or workplace diversity read like another vogue in management style — the new “mindfulness”, say — rather than an urgent moral imperative.

The books adhere to the same, by now familiar, theoretical framework — with leading anti-racists DiAngelo, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ibram X Kendi liberally and respectfully cited, and microaggressions and privilege given the traditional working over. They both address the reader in a buttonholing, folksy way. “If you feel concerned that you may now be labeled ‘cisgender’ for the first time in your life, hold onto that thought”, say Hassan and Sandhu. “It’s all part of the learning curve”. Hutchinson opens with the words: “Let’s cut the bullshit”. If you resist any of this, in other words, it’s just another sign that you need to do “the work”.

That doesn’t mean, I should say, that the ideas they’re selling are in broad strokes wrong. We can agree that people from historically marginalised minorities continue to be disadvantaged even when they achieve de jure equality. To take one of the most obvious examples, racial disadvantage in the US is generationally baked in in all sorts of ways, and prejudice survives and adapts to legal remedies. This is why it makes sense to talk about “structural racism”.

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There is much evidence — cited generously in both these books — for the notion that not only are black and brown people disproportionately under-represented in agreeable and well-paid jobs, but that more black and brown people in those jobs would make everyone, not just the black and brown people, richer and happier. And that what goes for black and brown people goes, in the broadest sense possible, for other minorities. It’s also true to say, as both these books do, that privileged people – white, cis-male, straight, able-bodied etc – can get a bit defensive when confronted with their complicity in such a system. Hassan and Sandhu address themselves, primarily, to the notional white dude standing in the way of reform; Hutchinson, primarily, to the person of colour seeking to start a Difficult Conversation with that white dude.

They both offer, in styles apt to the genre (Hassan and Sandhu: Venn diagrams, bullet-points, away-day exercises and wince-making tint-panels in which the likes of Richard Branson puff themselves by spouting abstract bromides about how much they value diversity), explanations of the jargon of the territory for bewildered newcomers, and hand-holding step-by-steps on how to help to centre marginal voices, be a good ally, and be the change in the world that you want to see. Most of the practical advice is not unobvious. Hutchinson, that said, has useful points to make about the way in which the task of changing workplace culture can all too easily fall on the unpaid labour of minority employees, and warns all too plausibly of how corporate HR departments are generally more interested in shielding the company from legal and financial risk than treating individual employees fairly.

But there’s little sense in either book that the received ideas or the received vocabulary of antiracism or gender politics needs any interrogation. This is, perhaps in keeping with the turn in identity politics where an individual’s own sense of themselves (in the case of the argument over aspects of queer and trans identity) or of their experience of oppression (in the case of much race discourse) holds an almost theological authority: that unless you have “lived experience” you don’t just have an inferior standing to consider the issues, but no standing at all.

Both books proceed from a position of epistemic confidence. “Is your workplace racist?” asks Hutchinson. “The short and simple answer is nearly certainly yes. The more nuanced answer is still nearly certainly yes”. What can the reader do? They can start, say Hassan and Sandhu, by “learning the language of diversity and inclusion”. A set of terms, rather than a set of ideas. “Set up a debate to debunk the philosophy that women compete more with each-other than their male counterparts”, they advise chirpily at one point. Foregone conclusions, regardless of the subject, isn’t what debates are traditionally about.

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Yet the vocabulary is contested; and the remedies, when it comes down to fine detail, are contested too. Hassan and Sandhu make a distinction, for instance, between “diversity” and “inclusion” (though they seem to muddle the two at other points) and between “equity” and “equality”. They disagree with Hutchinson, a little, on “unconscious bias”. The Judgment-Free Guide finds the notion useful; How To Talk thinks we should stop pussyfooting around and call it racism, so as not to centre white people, their intentions and their feelings in a conversation about the harms done to people of colour. Do you capitalise “Ally”, as Hassan and Sandhu do, but leave “white” lower-case; or do you capitalise “White”, as Hutchinson does, and leave “ally” lower-case? At this point, I should say, my fragility is perhaps causing me to indulge in what Hutchinson identifies as the racist-in-denial tactic of “sealioning”: “focusing on details and small points of argumentation rather than the larger themes of the discussion”.

What I can say, which I don’t think is my fragility talking, is that however we may endorse those larger themes, or humbly submit to be educated by the emotional labour of their authors, this subject’s established orthodoxies can make for wearyingly abstract and repetitive writing. “Power is not binary”, Hutchinson writes, “It’s multifaceted and fluid”. I lost count of the number of times Hutchinson uses the word “leverage”, or Hassan and Sandhu — the front of whose book promises “everything you need to lead positive change” — talk about “journeys” and “driving change” (though, be it said, these are more the failings of bollocksy business books than identity politics books per se). As a side-note, isn’t it careless when writing about diversity and tolerance to quote, as Judgement-Free Guide does, Henry Ford and Chairman Mao — one antisemite, one mass-murderer — with approval? That’s a bit more judgement-free than many of us will be comfortable with.

Both these books default too often to a tissue of generalities and buzzphrases that tend to leave little or no impression on the mind. That isn’t sealioning. You can agree that the elimination of structural racism and all the other structural-isms is an urgent necessity, and still wish that writing on the subject were lively and original and precise; indeed, the more you recognise the urgency the more you’ll want some decent books on the subject. It’s a bit depressing to think that wine made from the vineyards of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin has found its way into bottles designed by Tom Peters.

The same move is made by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories. They argue that the adoption of French theory — particularly the work of Michel Foucault — has given rise to bizarre, grievance-filled academic specialties which threaten all claims to knowledge.

Peterson, Lindsay, and Pluckrose are wrong, and perhaps even guilty of Francophobia. Contrary to their claims, French theory is not the original sin from which our current woes sprang. What’s missed in their analysis are the distinctly American cultural influences driving a political culture of cancellations, violent protests and hypersensitivity.

Let’s focus on the ultimate fall guy for ‘wokeism’, the French philosopher Michel Foucault. If you were to read anti-woke commentary about Foucault, you would be under the impression that his main insights are: nothing is true, all truth is power and all claims to truth are oppressive. This is a deliberately misleading.

Despite what you’ve been told, Foucault was not a rabid ‘activist’ bent on tearing down scientific institutions, but a historian of ideas. His work documents how knowledge changes over time, how some ideas become valorised whilst others get pushed to the margins, and how expertise shifts as a result of cultural and historical change.

He was not denying truth, but helping to place it within a broader historical context. Truth could not help being “a thing of this world”, he wrote. Every society had a regime of truth, and a “general politics” of truth. These are simply types of discourse which society “accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”

Foucault focused on the history of the “self” noting the scientific quest to understand phenomena such as madness, criminality and sexual deviancy. He frequently refers to “power” in his explanations, but his definition of power is not what you think. It describes a “a mode of action upon the action of others”. There is no moral connotation to Foucault’s use of “power”; it can have both positive and negative effects. His most useful insight is that power can be “constructive” – generating subjectivities that hadn’t previously existed.

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In The History of Sexuality, Foucault challenged the “repressive hypothesis” that Western society, beginning in the 17^th century right up until the mid-20^th century, gradually became more prudish and repressed. Instead, Foucault’s work demonstrates that all societies have had elaborate taboos on sexuality and that they stem from differing understandings of the self. Moreover, the so-called “prudish Victorians” actually led to the proliferation of thought regarding sexual habits that created, rather than repressed, new ways of viewing ones desires. Because of those prudes, the modern “homosexual” was born.

These insights are useful, they show us that our understanding of what makes a human being is often subject to significant change. What Foucault is calling for isn’t activism. It’s humility in the face of history.

Attempts to connect Foucault to the excesses of woke politics have to take some significant conceptual leaps. In Cynical Theories, the authors do this by separating out postmodernism proper from the “applied postmodernism” of activist circles. But this involves turning the descriptive work of scholars like Foucault into a prescriptive model for political action. This isn’t just nit-picking about historical narratives, but crucial to understanding French theory itself.

Foucault was heavily influenced by the work of German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche. His approach to ideas is directly inspired by Nietzsche’s Of The Genealogy of Morality, a work charting the evolution of moral concepts over time. Foucault, like Nietzsche, was highly sceptical of claims of absolute morality, seeing life as a chaotic unfolding of a blind will to power. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes:

Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals … will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power.

The sheer moral certainty one sees in the American Left — that they are “on the right side of history” as Barack Obama often put it  — doesn’t reflect this more contemplative and historical perspective on the nature of morality. In fact, one valid criticism of many 20^th century French intellectuals from Foucault to Derrida to Baudrillard is that they weren’t moral enough. If anything, they frequently circled the drain of nihilism. They stared too deeply into the abyss.

It’s important, then, to note that the emergence of queer, post-colonial, broadly anti-Racist and fat activist movements within the United States have their own local histories. These movements (often labelled “identity politics”) have distinctly American scholarly influences: from Peggy McIntosh’s descriptions of white privilege in “Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack” to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional approach to anti-discrimination.

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Contrary to certain popular accounts, “standpoint theory” which seeks to prioritise personal knowledge and perspectives as a means to objectivity, is not a position advocated for by Foucault, but, instead, by American philosopher Sandra Harding. Foucault never had the view that marginalised individuals held a unique, more authoritative perspective, on the world.

And he always maintained the scholarly virtue of disinterestedness in his work: “I do in fact seek to place myself outside the culture to which we belong, to analyse its formal conditions in order to make a critique of it, not in the sense of reducing its values, but in order to see how it was actually constituted.”

What’s commonly called identity politics emerged out of broader counter-cultural trends of the 1960s. These movements were influenced by American ideas of freedom, and were heavily focused on individual liberation and smashing stuffy bourgeois sentiments. This led to the development of humanist psychologies that promised to maximise individual self-actualisation. The nexus of social justice activism and psychology is still seen today in discussions of “toxic masculinity” and  “implicit bias” as well as the heavy focus on “trauma” and “minority stress”.

Identity politics has never been well received by French thinkers, or even President Macron, either because it is seen as a divisive force — prioritising the personal over the Republic — or it treats historically contingent subjectivities as essentialist. Foucault, who was homosexual, always had an ambivalence to American attempts to categorise desire for the sake of political action. In an interview for the American LGBT magazine The Advocate, he noted his wariness over identity. If it became “the problem of sexual existence” then identity would “become the law, the principle” of people’s existence. Identity then becomes another way of controlling people.

Whilst it’s true American progressives will often cite Foucault and other French theorists as influences, they tend to fragment their work in ways that serve particular purposes. So, The History of Sexuality will be cited to praise a queer liberationist future of a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” — but fail to mention Foucault’s silence as to whether this will be better than the status quo or his critique of identity.

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This co-option also tends to downplay the old Left political sympathies of French scholars, many of whom were self-avowed communists (although Foucault’s political leanings were more obscure). There’s also a shift from the contemplative demeanour of French philosophy toward an individualistic emphasis on confrontation, shock and transgression.

François Cusset, in his excellent book “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida & Co Transformed The Intellectual Life Of The United States” succinctly describes the strange way that French theory was adopted by American universities in the 1980s. American scholars did not study French theory, nor advance it in a meaningful direction. Rather, they co-opted it, and removed so much of its context that it no longer made sense. For Cusset this co-option of French theory in pursuit of American cultural politics was a “structural misunderstanding”.

Rather than blame the French, and Foucault, for current trends in American activism — which are quickly spreading across the globe — it’s crucial to re-evaluate some of values and claims to truth which underpin this activism. I’ve got just the philosopher for the task.

In complexity theory, the term ‘emergence’ is used to describe a complex, higher order that arises out of the seemingly uncoordinated behaviour of individuals. The principal threat to liberalism today is an emergent authoritarianism, not a top-down form of the kind we find in China or Turkey.

Consider the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher and feminist who defends the right of women to restrict access to some women-only spaces to those who are biologically female. Stock was last week forced to resign her position at the University of Sussex after being subjected to a campaign of harassment from trans activists and their fellow travellers. Her decision to quit was not preceded by a demand by her bosses to step aside. Instead, a number of her colleagues at Sussex, as well as students and administrators at the university, created the toxic environment that forced her out.

Having experienced a milder form of the same treatment for criticising the excesses of ‘anti-racist’ activism, I completely understand why she left. Even though the university belatedly stood up for Stock’s right to free speech, pressure from her peers — especially when combined with an activist-led disciplinary process — creates a repressive climate for those who dare to dissent.

This is, of course, not confined to the UK. Across the Anglosphere, cancellation campaigns are soaring: the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)’s ‘Scholars under Fire’ database records a fivefold increase in attempts to terminate American academics between 2015 and 2020, with students often leading the charge. But what makes the news is just the tip of a vast iceberg when it comes to hostility and self-censorship.

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My own work shows that in North America and Britain, around three quarters of academics in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) are on the Left. Three-quarters of SSH faculty in Britain endorse political correctness because it protects minorities, while just a fifth oppose it for stifling free speech. In the struggle between what Teresa Bejan calls ‘equal speech’ and free speech, many come down in favour of the former.

Even though it’s likely that most academics have been horrified by Dr Stock’s treatment, they still have an instinctive sympathy for disadvantaged identity groups — including those she is alleged to have hurt. So when activists smear Dr Stock as a transphobe, they make her radioactive to an important share of colleagues and students, who pull away out of a combination of moral disapproval and fear of guilt-by-association. Even in anonymous surveys, I have found that barely 1 in 3 North American and British academics are comfortable sitting down to lunch with a female academic who supports banning trans women from women’s shelters.

Cass Sunstein writes that the more one’s workplace doubles as a social community, the stronger its ability to force dissenters to conform to sacred values. And it is this which partly explains why Dr Stock was so vulnerable in the first place. Collegiate interaction and collaboration are a staple of academia. ‘Being a good colleague’ is not just an informal norm; it is often part of an academic’s formal appraisal. Peers review our presentations and papers, as well as the applications for grants and promotion that can make or break our career. Fellow academics also populate most levels of university governance, from a departmental teaching coordinator to the faculty Senate.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that biases and taboos pervade the system. Since over 40% of American academics wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter and a third of their British counterparts wouldn’t hire someone who voted to leave the European Union, the unorthodox keep their views to themselves. 70% of American conservative SSH academics say they self-censor, as do a third of British academics overall. The situation is similar in other ideologically-slanted industries such as journalism or the arts  — if anything, academics, once you control for their ideology, are more pro-free speech than others.

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That, however, is not saying much. There can be little doubt the campuses remain ruled by what Sunstein terms ‘outrage entrepreneurs’, the secular preachers of today’s cultural socialism — an ideology which holds that cultural narratives and signifiers reproduce group inequality. These outrage entrepreneurs compete to spot signs of the devil (i.e. racism, transphobia, sexism) all around them. Often this takes the form of redefining innocuous words, such as ‘master bedroom’ or ‘spooky’, as racist, while competing to erase the memory of ‘problematic’ historical figures.

In this sense, it is far from a new phenomenon. Just like the fundamentalist preachers who drove the Great Awakenings of American Protestantism or the Azusa Street Revival in the early 20^th century, a new priesthood is powering cultural socialism’s Third Great Awokening.

And they are succeeding beyond the wildest imagination of illiberal leftists such as Herbert Marcuse or the censorious student radicals of the Sixties. FIRE’s huge survey of 37,000 American university students shows that 75% of those in Liberal Arts colleges believe that shouting down a speaker with whom they disagree is sometimes acceptable; 70% of all students think a professor who says something that offends them should be reported to the administration.

Given censorious attitudes like these are so pervasive, it seems unlikely that they will grow out of their illiberalism. Indeed, this seems almost certain given the findings of a recent academic paper on white liberal Americans and their approach to toleration. The General Social Survey has been asking the same questions since 1972 about who should have the right to publicly speak. While American ‘liberals’ remain more tolerant than conservatives overall, the trend toward rising toleration — in relation to platforming racist speakers — began to go into reverse around 2000. Since the turn of the millennium, toleration has been steadily dropping. As Sean Stevens notes, Smith College students in 2000 and 2016, filling out the same survey, became 20-30% less favourable to free speech.

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It is somewhat baffling, then, that classical liberals are optimistic about the future; they have taken to congratulating themselves lately because much of the mainstream media is largely onside, while new organisations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance or Free Speech Union are doing excellent work defending victims of cancel culture.

But these are more a palliative than a cure. The demographic momentum of decades of cultural socialist control over education shows no sign of waning. The treatment of Dr Stock surely demonstrates that things will get worse before they get better.

In order to turn the tide of emergent authoritarianism, the Government must step in when institutions violate the laws and values forged during the West’s period of expanding liberty. Legislation such as the UK’s Academic Freedom Bill is required to proactively uphold civil liberties and guard against political discrimination. Beyond this, governments must restructure school curricula to ensure that students learn as much about the struggle for liberty and the evils of utopianism as they do about the fight against prejudice.

But even this is not sufficient. Ultimately, emergent authoritarianism will continue to spawn new outgrowths until we recalibrate the taboos around race, sexuality and gender that have been widening for decades. Taboos activate our disgust reflex, leading to a black-and-white approach that is anti-intellectual, and must give way to a more nuanced and proportional form of social sanction of the kind we apply to those who mistreat people on the basis of other characteristics.

This means applying the principle of charity in interpreting people’s intentions, allowing for second chances before doling out the maximum penalty, and creating space for forgiveness. Until we achieve this, there will be plenty more Kathleen Stocks in the coming years.

Dressed head to toe in black, her hair swept into a glorious silver-grey chignon, she told me she was “in mourning” for her former lover David, who had not died but left Claudia many years ago. Describing David as “a cross between George Best and Jesus Christ”, Claudia told me her life story.

Born male, Claudia grew up on a run-down estate in Glasgow, where she was mercilessly bullied for being gay. Then, in the early Eighties, Claudia met David, who soon announced he was “not gay” and that therefore Claudia “must be a woman”. She had genital surgery in 1986.

“I changed for all the wrong reasons,” Claudia told me. David walked out a year after the operation. Claudia and I became firm friends and remain so to this day. I later wrote about her for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, but the editors decided not to put the article online, so it was not widely read.

Not so my now-infamous column in the Guardian, entitled “Gender Benders, Beware”, in which I railed against a trans woman who had tried to have a rape crisis centre in Vancouver shut down by tying its staff up in years of litigation. The fall-out was immediate; the Reader’s Editor received more than 200 letters of complaint, many as a result of lobbying by trans activists. (He would later distance himself from the article, claiming “it abused an already abused minority”.)

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I began to receive death and rape threats by email, as well as messages that I was “being watched”. I was used to my feminist views being unpopular: those of us who name and blame men for violence towards women are often warned to keep quiet. But nothing could prepare me for the misogyny of extreme transgender activists.

Despite the hostility, I contacted a number of trans people to see if they were willing to talk. Over the years I had debated countless prominent activists at public events. It was always respectful, warm and, in some cases, truly enlightening for both sides. I kept in touch with some of my opponents and friendships were formed.

In 2007, I was asked by the BBC to take part in Hecklers, a live radio programme with an aggressive format. I was asked to put forward my view — that sex-change operations constitute unnecessary mutilation — before an audience of doctors and transgender people at the Royal Society of Medicine. Two trans people, a gender clinician and Peter Tatchell were put up to argue against me.

I was convinced I would mess up, and was too scared to invite my feminist allies to watch. But I survived, and afterwards stayed for a drink with several of the audience. Two individual trans men came up to me, lifted their T-shirts and showed me their double mastectomy scars. A trans woman told me that before transition and hormones she was being “poisoned by testosterone”. There was no animosity, except for the fact that Claudia, who had insisted on coming along to support me, was cruelly snubbed by her own community. Solidarity never extends to those who speak out against the transgender doctrine.

The following year, I was nominated for the Journalist of the Year award by Stonewall for my work on anti-lesbian violence. I had no interest in the nomination, which had come from the public as opposed to an internal vote by the charity. But when the gay media decided to go absolutely berserk about my nomination, I changed my mind: I had to go, despite the fact that I had long made public my view that Stonewall prioritised rich gay men over lesbians.

Soon social media was awash with petitions, open letters and plans for a demonstration at the event. There was talk of how to storm the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the event was being held. But Stonewall held firm.

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The crowd greeting me on arrival was loud and aggressive. My name was plastered over dozens of placards, and “Bindel the bigot” was being screamed through loudhailers. Once I had managed to enter the building, I was told by one of the judges that I was the clear winner, but the panel had received strict instructions that I was not to be given the award. So it was given to a heterosexual agony aunt.

The impact of that decision would extend far beyond the handing-out of a mundane prize. It galvanised the modern day trans-rights movement: the old guard — such as Press for Change founders Christine Burns and Stephen Whittle — started to be dismissed as irrelevant and too conciliatory, with the younger blue-fringe crew declaring themselves the new overlords.

From 2008 onwards, whenever I was invited to speak alongside a transgender activist or ally, the event would face threats of being shut down or disrupted. In 2010 I was invited to speak at “Queer Question Time” at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. I turned up to face a massive demonstration of well over 100 trans activists, shouting my name through loudhailers, jostling me as I tried to enter the building. Many of the protesters came inside for the event, and every time I opened my mouth, screamed over me.

The atmosphere became so toxic that one of my co-panellists, former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, was forced to say: “I’m sure that you do have people that put you in danger, but I can’t imagine Julie Bindel is one.” From the floor, an object was thrown across the room and hit me just below the eye. I was terrified, even though it turned out to be a lanyard, thrown by a trans woman.

But at least the event had been able to take place. From 2008, the UK National Union of Students (NUS) has included me on its “no-platform” list, alongside fascist groups and individuals. This meant that even when I was invited to speak at universities on male violence towards women and girls, the NUS would threaten to withdraw any financial support it had given to the organiser. Inevitably I would be dropped, publicly, to protect the event.

For many that still wasn’t enough. In 2011, upset that I was still invited to speak at the occasional university event, the NUS Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) conference voted to no-platform me once and for all. The motion summed up their spiteful worldview: “This conference believes that Julie Bindle [sic] is vile.”

And on it went. In Denmark, at a conference on how to end the harms caused to women by the global sex trade, I had to be escorted out of the venue by police officers after an angry mob started to bang loudly on the windows and scream through loudhailers. At another event, in Spain, where I was asked to deliver a keynote speech on rape, I was stopped from going on stage with minutes to spare. I later discovered that a major funder of the organising group had raised concerns about “transphobia, as reflected by the invitation to Julie Bindel to speak.”

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I am, of course, not the only activist to be harassed. Over the years, I have made friends with a number of trans people who have also been harassed and de-platformed when attempting to have discussions with feminists such as myself. I’ve interviewed dozens of de-transitioners who have been cast asunder after expressing regret about transitioning. I also know many trans people who are perfectly happy with their decision — but none of them believe it is reasonable to demand that they encroach women-only spaces such as domestic violence refuges, rape crisis services, prisons or hospital wards.

The problem, after all, is not trans people. It is extreme trans activism — a men’s rights movement which has grown out of the backlash against feminism, in particular the type of feminism that seeks to eradicate male violence towards women and girls.

For me, the costs of being targeted in this way have been enormous — and not just in relation to my unpaid activism. The mob follows me around, preventing me from speaking on how to end male violence under the guise of “protecting trans-rights”. Whenever I speak about prostitution, an expertise of mine, I am told that I “clearly hate trans sex workers”, as though everything comes back to that.

Faced with such vitriol, my mental health took a hammering. I began to feel ashamed of the trouble I was causing for those who invited me to speak. I would find myself apologising to them, which they would graciously accept as though they had done something commendable by having me there, despite my decades of active feminism and public profile.

I started to wonder if perhaps I was a monster — and I was ridiculously grateful to those who did not hide or apologise for the fact that they had any public connection to me. My self-confidence fell to rock bottom, as I doubted my abilities, skills and knowledge. On hearing of the latest cancellation, I would end up highly distressed and in floods of tears, knowing that mud often sticks. I was offered a newspaper column only to have it withdrawn after several staff members announced they would publicly argue against my appointment.

I spent years trying to warn my fellow feminists that if they stood by and let them scapegoat me, eventually they would come after every dissenter. First on the list would be the lesbians, because we are a thorn in the side of misogynistic gay men. Yet when I appealed to academics to stand with me and not cancel an event I was speaking at, most turned the other cheek and decided a quiet life was better.

And so now, here we are. The witches are being drowned and the bitches burned at the stake. Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Selina Todd and many other women whose names you will never know are being put through hell.

But another, largely hidden cost of this war is the lost opportunity for solidarity. As a young lesbian, trans people were my friends and allies. That is how it should be. Those of us who live on the margins of society, and who are discriminated against, should have each other’s backs. We are all victims of this bloody battle.

What I did not expect is that I would have to start the event by reading out a statement from one of the speakers because she had been advised that it might not be safe for her to leave her home and appear in person.

The speaker, as you may have guessed, was Kathleen Stock — a Professor of Philosophy who has been subjected to a campaign of harassment by anonymous trolls claiming to be students at Sussex University, where she teaches Philosophy, demanding for her to be sacked for her alleged views on transgender rights.

I say “alleged” because I have read her recent book, Material Girls, and it’s hard to see how it could be described as transphobic. “Trans people are trans people. We should get over it,” she writes. “They deserve to be safe, to be visible throughout society without shame or stigma, and to have exactly the life opportunities non-trans people do.” Certainly the book hardly amounts to “transphobic shit”, the term written on stickers that were recently plastered across Stock’s university building.

At the Battle of Ideas event, we did achieve an exchange of reasonable views about free speech and hate speech. Some contributions were critical of Professor Stock, and some were critical of the idea that more freedom of speech is always a good thing. Those on the panel and in the room who asserted that untrammelled debate is generally positive were forced to justify their views.

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It would have been better, of course, if Professor Stock had been able to take part in the debate, rather than send a written statement. I think the people who attended in order to criticise her views felt somewhat cheated by her absence, as well as those who were more sympathetic to her position.

Since the campaign against her gathered momentum last week, University of Sussex has issued statements in support of academic freedom of speech and expression, and of challenging one’s own ideas by listening to others. Vice Chancellor Adam Tickell said the university would not tolerate harassment and intimidation, or be pressured by calls to sack Professor Stock.

But not everybody has been so quick to defend academic freedom, free expression or the right not to be fired for holding unpopular views. Sussex University Students’ Union has issued a statement saying it does not support the University’s stance, and expressing disappointment “that our Vice-Chancellor is lending support to views which have been causing severe distress to students, and that the University did not reach out to our trans and non-binary community.”

In today’s climate, perhaps we should not be surprised by the decision of yet another student union to disavow the importance of academic freedom. What was striking, however, was the decision of the Sussex branch of UCU — the trade union representing academics in the UK — to follow suit. Yesterday, it issued a “statement In Support of Trans And Nonbinary Communities at Sussex”, in which it called on the university to enshrine “the dignity and respect of trans and nonbinary staff and students”.

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“We urge our management to take a clear and strong stance against transphobia at Sussex,” it warned. It later clarifies its authors “oppose all forms of bullying, harassment and intimidation of staff and students” — and that they “do not endorse the call for any worker to be summarily sacked”. The statement then goes on to endorse the Students’ Union support for the protesting students, who by Stock’s account have been largely menacing.

It is, of course, important to defend the right to protest, though harassment and intimidation of individuals — as experienced by Stock — clearly goes beyond the free expression of dissent. Freedom of speech, after all, is important precisely because it underpins all other freedoms: without being able to say what you think, freedom of thought is impossible. In Professor Stock’s words, which I read out on her behalf: “Young people are frightened to say what they think. In a weird reversal of the suffragette motto “deeds not words”, on campus and in middle-class life more generally there is an intense corrective emphasis on words not deeds.”

But the union’s statement was not just a defeat for free speech — it was a stark sign of how far union politics has fallen in recent decades. Like freedom of expression, employment rights were won by centuries of collective action. Because most of us need to earn a living, there is generally a power imbalance between employer and employee, and joining together in a trade union is a way to counteract that imbalance. It’s easy to replace one unruly employee, but not so easy to replace an entire workforce who have walked out in support.

Solidarity, then, is a very simple idea. But it seems to have gone out of fashion — or, even worse, been forgotten. The point of defending a fellow employee’s right to keep their job is not that you agree with their ideas, or that you like them. The point is that you have more power by standing together than as individuals. You will, you should, differ from your workmates in all sorts of respects — sex, gender identity, race, age, political views, tastes and habits. What you have in common is a shared interest in protecting each other from abuses of power by those who have power over you.

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And so UCU’s behaviour, in refusing to side with Stock, is a tragedy in itself. What you lose by calling on employers to discipline or sack your workmates for their opinions is power. Suddenly, something that unions were created to deter can be used against those whose views are deemed intolerable. Once you have handed over the control to decide which opinions may be expressed, or even thought, not just in the workplace but on social media or perhaps in private, it will be near-impossible to reclaim.

It used to be a maxim of union politics that dignity and respect cannot depend on handing more power to those in power. At best, the prize will be a constrained respect from your peers, policed by fear of punishment from above. At worst, it will end in the indignity of powerlessness, and the shame of knowing that you willingly chose that dependency on the powerful, because you preferred it to solidarity with those such as Kathleen Stock whose ideas were different from yours.

The concept of intersectionality — a shorthand for the ways that multiple minority statuses can overlap to create unique forms of oppression — is relatively easy to understand, which explains its sudden ubiquity in the sphere of extremely online activism. Twitter, after all, doesn’t generally allow for much complexity. But 10 years after its feminist incursion, the motto could use an update. “My feminism will be intersectional,” the new version might read, “and it will be the most ineffective flailing spectacle the world has ever seen.”

Turns out intersectionality is a concept that’s basic in theory but wildly divisive in application, especially when — as with feminism — you’re trying to get a coalition of activists with diverse identities to rally around a single shared goal. Whether it was getting the vote, reforming discriminatory laws, or even just pushing the so-called radical notion that women are people, feminism’s aim has always been to advocate for women because they are women. Once it was declared “bullshit” to focus on that commonality, the feminist cause fragmented with alarming swiftness. Since then, it’s had one crisis after another.

There were the toxic Twitter wars documented by Michelle Goldberg in 2014, as feminists eagerly trashed each other online over perceived political incorrectness. There was the implosion of the anti-Trump Women’s March over racial tensions, starting with complaints that the movement was too focused on pink-pussy-hatted white feminism, and ending with the diverse new leadership melting down amid allegations of anti-Semitism. There was Planned Parenthood’s astonishing apology this spring for focusing “too narrowly on women’s health,” closely followed by the schadenfreude-ridden girlboss downfalls in which powerful women, once feminist icons, were suddenly ousted from their own companies in the name of social justice.

Amid this ongoing feminist mission creep, those who attempted to bring the conversation back on the rails were accused of intersectional failure, centring white feelings, and inadequate attention (or even aggression) toward this or that marginalised group. The resulting chaos, apathy, and infighting caused the movement to basically stop moving — unless you count the numerous think pieces and half-dozen books devoted to the newfound scourge of “white feminism.”

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Against this stagnant backdrop, Julie Bindel’s new book, Feminism for Women, promises to breathe life back into the movement. “As feminists,” the veteran activist writes in her introduction, “we are sick of the differences between women being rammed down our throats and used to divide us.” Her book aims to save the cause by reviving the sisterhood and giving feminists permission to re-commit themselves to fighting for the rights of women full stop. “Feminism,” she writes, “has to refocus so that women are the centre of the movement.”

In a feminist culture dominated by online flame wars, Feminism for Women says that what we need are “tangible solutions that will help women move forward to achieve our goal.” Bindel takes aim at the rifts within the movement over trans rights, racism, sex work, pornography — and the incursion of men into positions of feminist influence — with a radical call for unity. If you felt pushed out of the movement during its intersectional moment, this book’s evident goal is to coax you back in.

At its best, Feminism for Women is a righteous expression of solidarity with women, by women, for women. Bindel writes with compelling fury about issues like intimate partner violence, corrupt police who make it fraught and difficult for women to report rape, the systems set up to privilege abusers over victims.

At its worst, though, all this coaxing becomes overwhelming, and this is never truer than when Bindel turns her focus to men, and the women who love them. This is not to say that Bindel’s identity as a lesbian precludes her from talking to and about heterosexual women. Indeed, the notion of identity as a be-all-end-all litmus test for determining who does and doesn’t get to speak on a given topic is just the sort of nonsense that this book rightly pushes back against.

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But having established herself as a person who finds the desirability of men incomprehensible, Bindel could perhaps approach the topic with a bit more humility — and to avoid, say, doubling down on insisting that women who enjoy kinky sex are suffering from false consciousness, or that a substantial number of straight women are simply deluded by patriarchy into imagining that they desire men. Feminism for Women delves at length into the concept of “compulsory sexuality,” with Bindel roundly asserting that if patriarchy were to be defeated, “there would be a significantly higher number of women who choose to be lesbians.”

I suspect that Bindel is probably wrong about this. Heteropessimism is already trendy among millennial-and-younger women. In 2019, Buzzfeed even suggested that straight relationships might be “a doomed project,” hopelessly passé. The new wave of feminists earnestly and publicly insist that they would choose to be lesbians — if only they could escape the siren song of their pesky, innate heterosexual orientation. But the choice, they lament, is not theirs.

The accuracy of Bindel’s hypothesis, though, is less interesting than her choice to assert it within the pages of a book that claims, in all caps, to be FOR WOMAN. In the name of solidarity, why lean so immediately and heavily into rhetoric that a substantial portion of your readership are bound to find alienating? Especially when, as the book itself notes, women are already fatigued by just this sort of identity-based shaming from the woke Left?

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The answer may be that Bindel’s book, despite its best efforts, is still a product of its time. The intersectional feminist literature of the moment instructs women that they’ve been hoodwinked into false consciousness by “whiteness”; Feminism for Women similarly condescends to its readership by replacing “whiteness” with “porn” and “patriarchy.” In both cases, the point is not to find common cause. It’s to fight against a common enemy.

This need to rally against a villainous antagonist is endemic to much contemporary activism, which tends to define itself by what it’s against rather than what it’s for. (Notice how the struggle for civil rights has lately rebranded itself as “anti-racism”; notice how much activist rhetoric focuses on dismantling and tearing-down without any mention of what might be built.) Of course, so many of these movements turn into circular firing squads, as some people invariably become more interested in ejecting apostates from within than advocating for change in the wider world. Consider how many more feminists want to defenestrate J. K. Rowling for her perceived transphobia than to set aside their differences in the name of advocating for shared policy goals.

Early on in Feminism for Women, Bindel asks: are we nearly there yet? Is the work of feminism almost done? The answer, of course, is no: globally, the subjugation of women remains a problem. And even in the western world, one can point to things like the recent Texas abortion statute as evidence that the battle for women’s bodily autonomy is hardly a thing of the past.

And yet feminism may be over anyway — not because there’s no work left to do, but because the necessary coalition-building has become impossible. Of course, Bindel wants this not to be the case. She writes of getting offline, taking to the streets: “It is crucial that we demand to be heard when we speak of what bonds and unites women, not only that which fragments us”. But women, and particularly those who call themselves feminists, no longer agree about what unites us. And the fractures in the movement run so deep that not even Julie Bindel can avoid tumbling between the cracks.

Julie Bindel‘s Feminism for Women is published by Little, Brown

This question has animated much of my reading this year: from Clayborne Carson’s Martin Luther King Jr, to Roy Foster’s examination of Ireland’s revolutionary generation in Vivid Faces. But the book that today’s Twitter activists could perhaps learn the most from is John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s deeply researched and highly entertaining biography of Dorothy Day. This rambunctious American peace activist emerged in times that echo many of the crises we currently face, but her answer to them was, inspiringly, different.

Born to a relatively comfortable middle class family in 1897, Day enjoyed a misspent youth among the radicals of 1920s Greenwich village, falling in love with feckless journalists and drunk intellectuals, writing novels, experimenting with feminism and socialism, and trying to figure out how life should be lived. If a friend of Dorothy’s was going to be arrested — and they often were, for agitating for votes for women in the 1910s, or protesting against the arms race in the 1950s or Vietnam in the 1960s — you could safely bet that she would be right there alongside them. The Groucho Marx saying about how a good friend will try to bail you out of jail, while a best friend will be in the cell next to you, could have been written about Dorothy.

Dorothy did not have to agree with you to love you. Her worldview did not depend on ideological convergence between friends — unlike that of today’s activists, who often insist on absolute purity and cannot tolerate disagreement. While Day’s openness allowed for the hectic fun of her early life, it gathered depth and meaning when she converted to Catholicism in her early thirties and began the journey that would lead to the foundation of her influential movement and newspaper, the Catholic Worker.

Dorothy’s conversion was an enormous surprise to her friends — she ran with a bohemian set and had been inclined towards communism as a young person (who isn’t?). But she ultimately declined communism’s emphasis on material progress as the only thing mankind need bother itself over. She needed more, and she thought humanity in general did too. Dorothy saw each individual as a whole person — which helped her avoid the horrific dehumanisation of the great ideological catastrophes of the twentieth century: ones that many of today’s activists, in their determination to hate those who don’t agree with them, seem bent on replicating.

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Dorothy, on the other hand, practised the love she preached. In 1933, she and Peter Maurin — a penniless French intellectual drunk on the radical potential of the Gospel — founded a “House of Hospitality” in Dorothy’s stomping ground of lower Manhattan. The House was for anyone who needed shelter, food and care — no questions asked. Crucially, no standards of behaviour or personal hygiene had to be adhered to. Dorothy liked to tell newly arrived volunteers at the House: “there are three things you have to remember about very poor people who live on the street: they don’t smell good, they aren’t grateful and they are apt to steal”.  This is not the carefully sanitised language of the modern activist; it’s the no-bullshit lowdown from someone who lived her word. Dorothy was not interested in saving people: her religiosity was non-evangelical, her compassion was not charity. It was not about control.

The results of all this acceptance were predictably chaotic, and the Lower East Side House of Hospitality was always just about to fall apart: bedbugs, unsympathetic city officials, rats, fire. Dorothy was comfortable with chaos — former hedonists often are — and it was a principle of her new faith that it was no use to live in middle class comfort while helping the poor. You had to live among them.

Day’s commitment to writing about organised labour in the 1930s brought her all across the country and her concern for racism brought her to the south long before the typical white do-gooder from the north paid attention to conditions for black people there. She, like many anti-racist campaigners today, thought that America was rendered a hypocrite through its racist treatment of its own people — but she was prepared to write about it while it was still deeply unpopular and indeed dangerous to do so. It’s amusing to imagine what Day would think of today’s booming Diversity and Inclusion industry with its corporate activism; while an advocate of brotherly love, she also had a caustic wit and a deep, instinctive distrust for any kind of institutionally mandated morality. The Catholic Church of its day did not know what to make of her; at one point, she was asked to omit the word “Catholic” from her newspaper’s title. She declined.

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While Dorothy seems to have been on the “right side” of most of the big questions of the twentieth century — anti-Franco, anti-Jim Crow, anti-fascist, anti-war — she was no saint (even if the Catholic Church is currently engaged in the long process of beatifying her, it being much easier to celebrate her now that she’s dead and can no longer shame comfortable prelates with her radical poverty). She was a less than ideal mother to her daughter, but then people called to higher ideals so often fail their own families. Tamar Teresa was born when Dorothy was 29, the result of a doomed love affair (one of several). She was a wanted, cherished child, and her arrival seemed to propel Dorothy towards the spirituality that would shape the rest of her life. But Dorothy was influenced by Emmanuelle Mounier’s “personalist” Catholic philosophy, which was sceptical of the bourgeois family and its emphasis on security and comfort — and this made her an unreliable mother.

A life of voluntary poverty is all well and good when freely chosen; Tamar never had the luxury of that choice. Growing up in an eccentrically run housing shelter can’t have been easy, especially as Tamar got older, and her mother spent increasing amounts of time on the road. While Dorothy had an answer to most questions, her life doesn’t offer many solutions to women who have children and feel called to something more. To be fair to Dorothy though, that one’s a toughie.

Dorothy Day died in 1980. She lived a huge life in a humble way, dedicated to improving — however slightly — the lot of the very least of us. She was a true activist: “the original hippie,” as icon of the counter-culture Abbie Hoffman called her, disciplined in nothing apart from her love for her fellow man, no matter how drunk, disorderly or ideologically unsound those men (or women) were. She is pretty useless as an example, then, to activists whose work involves identifying and shaming those who have the incorrect opinions. And maybe she’s also not that useful to the rest of us either: who among us is going to embrace a life of voluntary poverty? In this era of relentless careerism, such a notion is laughably quaint.

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As a life-long anti-war activist, the last decade of Day’s life saw her engage with the enormous wave of opposition to the Vietnam War. While she was heartened by the size of the protests, she was dismayed by their tenor; she hated the “contempt and ridicule” of the counter-cultural approach to activism. What would she think of current activism, which often seems comprised of only that? For Dorothy, the project of creating a better life on this earth — the project, one might in good faith assume, of all activists — had to be centred in love. And while few of us can follow fully in her footsteps — self-abnegation is not for the faint-hearted — we can perhaps learn from this.

Perhaps her most important lesson, though, for these terrifying, paralysing times, is Day’s rejection of the notion that anything or anyone will ever be “fixed”. Maurin said of the movement he created with her: “we don’t measure our success, we don’t despair and we don’t judge.” Our shambolic life on this collapsing planet is forever in crisis; we are always, like Dorothy’s Manhattan House of Hospitality, about to fall apart. But still she pushes us to answer: how can we make it better for the very least of us in the meantime?

For a long time, anyone who’d written a business or self-help book based on their Ted Talk was described by their publicists as a “thought leader”. Briefly, “influencer” was the thing to be if you’d written a book of lifestyle tips: essentially a way of indicating to booksellers that this pustular teenager had a gazillion followers on Instagram so probably merited the front table treatment even if — being the wrong side of 25 — you’d never heard of them. 

Now, though, we live in a more caring and politically conscious age. Hashtags are no longer for selling #swag, but for organising progressive political movements; which can, in turn, be used to sell swag. The way this manifests is in what I am coming to think of as the activist tricolon. 

On Monday one publicist wanted to alert me to a “poet, writer and activist”. Last Thursday it was a “veteran, [comma sic] politician and activist“. The day before it was an “Olympic boxer, model and activist”. I’ve had, just in recent weeks, “award-winning actress, model and activist”, “activist, researcher and policy maker”, “bestselling author and women’s empowerment activist”, “former publisher, community advocate, and activist”.

But what is an “activist”? It’s a pretty broad term these days. So broad, I worry, that it is starting to verge on the meaningless. For instance, a recent Guardian headline quoted “Composer-pianist Max Richter” to the effect that “Creativity is activism”, which seems to set the bar pretty low. I was reminded a bit of the wacky social theorist Michel de Certeau, who maintained that having illegible handwriting or walking down the street in a wonky zig-zag path constituted resistance to the ineffable structures of power.

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Once, it was clear what “activist” meant. It meant: “smelly hippy” (or, if you preferred, “dedicated leafleter, marcher and supergluer of self to solid objects in inconvenient places”). You knew where you were with an activist. Depending on your temperament and geographical location, you either arrested them and dropped them out of a helicopter, or you bailed them out of prison, circulated their samizdat writings and cheered in support of their brave direct action. 

The one thing that you tended not to do, whichever side of the divide you were on, was buy their books in any great numbers. In the second half of the last century, stalwarts like Jonathon Porritt would issue earnest books about the politics of ecology, and they would slide out of print. Polemical texts on feminism, Marxism and race consciousness sold in specialist outlets and to politics departments, but with the odd exception — Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch being a notable one — did not trouble the bestseller lists.  

Now, they are a positive publishing trend. Movements came with reading lists, and civilians read them. Black Lives Matter was accompanied by a slew of hugely successful books from the likes of Ibrahim X Kendi, Reni Eddo-Lodge and Ta-Nehisi Coates (while a new generation rediscovered bell hooks and James Baldwin).

Similarly, #MeToo and an associated revival of interest in feminism helped propel any number of books to bestsellerdom — Caroline Criado-Perez, Roxane Gay, Ronan Farrow, Rebecca Solnit, Laura Bates… Not since turtlenecked café-dwellers in the 50s flaunted their Camus and Sartre have dead-tree books been such a conspicuous badge of a particular sort of identity.  

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But that does, it seems to me, two things; one good, one less good. The good thing is that books are being sold, and presumably read — which gives a sort of intellectual ballast to progressive movements.

The less good thing is that — capitalism being the brilliant monster that it is — resistance to capitalism has become just another way of selling things. This is what used to be called “co-optation”. Here is, perhaps, the publishing industry’s equivalent of (though I don’t like the phrase) what sometimes gets called “woke-washing” — where Nike or Coca-Cola surf the social justice movement of the week with a fusillade of glossy Instagram posts. An athlete’s memoir or a model’s cookbook looks just that bit more saleable if you can also call them an activist because they’ve been saying right-on things on social media.   

“Activist” is a label so freely applied that it has become a brand rather than an activity, a general-purpose kicker to any other two things you can boast of in your career. That’s why it always comes as the final term in a tricolon: it’s a side-gig as part of a portfolio of self-fashioning, a lapel-pin more than a protest flag. I am not suggesting that many of the individuals so described are not doers of good works. Perhaps alongside their busy careers as authors, pop stars, writers, athletes, actors and so on, they spend their leisure hours organising demonstrations and petitioning for judicial reviews. But these days, what it takes to qualify as an “activist” is a bit more hashtag than black flag. As Danny the drug dealer ruefully remarks in Withnail & I: “They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over.” 

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One old friend who works as a literary agent rightly reproached me for claiming that three in four authors are now billed as an activist. I copped to the hyperbole, but said I bet she had the odd “X, Y and activist” on her own list — and she conceded that, yes, there was the odd one. Which, I think, slightly bore out my point. She’s a jolly good literary agent and if she’s signing up activists you can bet that they sell books. 

Perhaps the distinctly pre-#metoo saying that if you need to say you’re a lady, you aren’t one applies here. After all, if you call yourself a “troublemaker”, “dissident”, “maverick”, “cynic”, “disruptor”, “rebel” or “speaker-of-truth-to-power” in your social media bio, almost everyone who reads it will think you are a colossal wally. “Activist” isn’t quite there yet — but it’s on the way. And the ones who really put in the hard yards — you couldn’t accuse Marcus Rashford of being a lifestyle clicktivist, for instance — aren’t done any favours by sharing the label with lifestyle clicktivists who glibly chirrup, as it were, “me too!”

But even if we seem to have collectively decided that The Donald was a political blip, best consigned to the dustbin of history, his utterances live on. In 2015, before he was even elected, Trump declared that the US needed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. His statement was met with horror at the time. Today, though, it’s not just become a meme, but also mutated into a form of political debate.

Last week, in response to Sarah Everard’s murder, Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulscoomb called for men to be subjected to a curfew after 6pm. Baroness Jones argued that this would “make women a lot safer” and reduce “discrimination of all kinds”. Effectively, then, she was proposing a total and complete lockdown of men until we can figure out what’s going on. The Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford then made noises about the “dramatic action” needed to mitigate a “crisis”, and how his government would be “prepared to consider all measures”.

The proposal itself excited much discussion in the usual places, despite (or perhaps due to) having so many self-evident shortcomings as a policy. Baroness Jones herself has since admitted that the idea was “not an entirely serious suggestion”, while Drakeford was forced to clarify that Wales was not in fact considering a curfew on men.

But even if the bien-pensant world has agreed to pretend that Trump never happened, there’s something startlingly Trumpian about seeing elected UK politicians floating obviously absurd policy proposals. As the former President’s enemies never tired of pointing out, his utterances often bore only a glancing relation to reality. His detractors were infuriated by this, as well as by the way his supporters didn’t seem to care. But it’s possible that they were missing the point, because communication is by no means always about reality.

Many everyday exchanges are what linguistics experts call “phatic communication”. This is better known as small talk: utterances that don’t convey factual information, such as “the milk is in the fridge”, but rather establish a mood. Utterances such as “Good morning” or “Lovely weather we’ve been having” are less about the morning or the weather than about conveying the message “I’m here and I’m friendly”.

Trump’s distinctive contribution to modern politics was his expert deployment of something like phatic communication in a political context. That is, statements that delivered a kind of mood music, with some relation to policy issues, but which usually did little to alter the facts on the ground.

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For example, consider his assertion on February 28, 2020 that “one day, it’s like a miracle – [Covid] will disappear.” More than a year (and a new President) later, this hasn’t happened; the assertion only makes sense if understood as a piece of wishful thinking, aimed at conjuring a feeling of positivity about reality reordering itself in accordance with Trump’s desires. I think of this as “phatic politics”: a kind of willingness, despite the reality, to say whatever will convey a mood that feels appropriate, or is likely to achieve the desired effect, in a given moment — regardless of the facts on the ground.

In January last year, just before Covid struck, Eitan Hirsh drew a distinction between politics and “political hobbyists”. Politics, in Hirsh’s formulation, is about making things happen, such as the Suffragettes’s campaign for the female franchise, or a local group fundraising for a new community centre. Hirsh characterises political hobbyists, on the other hand, as predominantly white male graduates, who consume politics as a form of entertainment without themselves being involved in any concrete effort to bring about substantive change.

The style of phatic politics I’ve just described was Trump’s signature presidential style, but it’s typical of all hobbyist consumers of politics — because it implies that there is no real connection between what you say about real life and life itself. In Trump’s case, the slippery relationship between utterance and reality was complicated by his actually being the US President; but for most political hobbyists, there really isn’t much connection between the policies they advocate and those which are adopted by governments. This frees hobbyists to treat policy as a vehicle for self-expression. It means you can call for paedo-hanging or male curfews with impunity, as a way of conveying how strongly you feel about a subject — for the simple reason that your ideas will never be implemented.

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Over the last year, this style of politics has become so widespread that we’re now witnessing its group manifestation: phatic protest. That is, public demonstrations that often convey deeply felt emotion, but without a specific policy aim in mind.

Both the death of George Floyd and that of Sarah Everard have triggered such inchoate responses. Both events were, of course, deplorable. They both implicated police officers — precisely the citizens charged with ensuring public order and safety — and prompted a sense that the very structures of social order are institutionally hostile to a particular identity group. And in both cases, horror at an unjust death has fed a groundswell of public anger at this perceived injustice.

But also, in both cases, the outcry has been as formless as it has been sincere. After all, it’s all too easy to agree that the world treats specific groups unjustly, and feel deep anger about this, while remaining unsure what specifically we should do about it. And in the absence of any consensus on what we should do, we’ve seen the rise of phatic protest; that is, political engagement oriented more toward expressing a feeling than demanding policy change.

In the vacuum left by this uncertainty over what exactly we can do about something as endemic as violence against women, or the seemingly intractable issue of racial injustice, we’ve seen huge sums of money raised seemingly overnight by crowdfunding websites. Black Lives Matter raised more than $90 million in 2020, while Reclaim These Streets raised over £500,000 in just a few days, despite providing little information about fundraisers’s identities or how the money will be spent.

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I have no reason to suspect that the motives of Reclaim These Streets are anything but decent. But it is still startling to see half a million pounds raised in a matter of days by people who don’t even put their names on the crowdfunding website. And this sense of powerful grassroots energy in search of an organisational focus points to the most troubling feature of phatic protest: how vulnerable it is to being hijacked.

The initial outrage at racialised police brutality last summer rapidly became a vector for activists seeking to abolish prisons, capitalism and the nuclear family. Similarly, while Reclaim These Streets seems to be organised by local councillors and other women local to the Clapham area, rumours are swirling about Antifa infiltrating at the Clapham Common vigil.

It’s hard to be sure, but it’s at least possible that someone who takes an “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) placard to a candlelit vigil for a recent murder victim didn’t have mourning a horrible death uppermost on their mind. The next day, a protest was organised by Sisters Uncut, an existing group affiliated with broadly the same political agenda as the one which has colonised BLM — that is, to abolish prisons, undermine capitalism and so on. (I call this the Dismantle Everything lobby.)

By its leaderless, heavily emotional and agenda-less nature, then, phatic protest attracts would-be revolutionary vanguards who do have specific policies they want to bring about — even if these are at odds with whatever has prompted the mass outbreak of public feeling. It is not obvious, for example, how defunding the police would improve women’s safety in public; but as night follows day, Dismantle Everything has already suggested that doing so would be a helpful response to the Sarah Everard vigil.

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Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our politics has come so adrift from any sense that we might actually effect political change through activism. After all, we’ve spent the last year cut off from social contact, on the receiving end of unprecedented and authoritarian public laws, wondering what our distant leaders will foist on us next. It’s no wonder, then, that so many of us have given up on political agency in favour of political hobbyism, and that political activism over the last year has focused more on emotion and symbolic action — taking a knee, clapping for carers, leaving flowers — rather than substantive change. For if there’s a unifying subtext to phatic policy, it’s a sense of powerlessness: wishful thinking as a substitute for action.

But if we’re to recover a sense of political agency and democratic participation, that’s going to mean weaning ourselves off political hobbyism. In other words, less clicktivism, less arguing over Westminster court politics and instead grounding ourselves in reality. If you’re horrified by women’s lack of safety, you would do better to join the council to push for better street lighting, or help out at a local women’s refuge, than to pretend that wildly authoritarian policy kite-flying by C-list politicians is an adequate response to profound systemic issues.

Until we make this adjustment, we’ll continue to only stir ourselves from our online torpor for diffuse, emotive public protests over intractable problems. And as long as this remains true, mass politics will achieve nothing more constructive than rolling out the red carpet for Dismantle Everything.

The North American Scrabble Players’ Association has called for 238 “slurs” to be banned from the game on the grounds of their offensiveness — including not only the obvious racial epithets but terms such as “wrinklies” (offensive to old people), “papist” (Catholics) and “Jesuit” (apparently offensive to followers of St Ignatius of Loyola, though this seems to me highly questionable). “When we play a slur,” says John Chew, the association’s Chief Executive Officer, “we are declaring that our desire to score points in a word game is of more value to us than the slur’s broader function as a way to oppress a group of people.”

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There’s no certainty yet that this daft idea is going to catch hold. The international standard of tournament play remains Collins’s Official Scrabble Words (which is what we used to call SOWPODS), and Collins haven’t indicated that they’ll start expunging words from that. (There already exists a bowdlerised version, the Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary, which up till now was reserved for children.)

But it’s not a sensible direction of travel. Ebi Sosseh, described in a news report I read as “a BAME player from Bournemouth”, was quoted as calling the move a “trivial gesture”. I’m with him. I’m not much for the N-word in Scrabble — not out of political correctness but because who ever has two Gs at once? And besides, it’s low-scoring and hard to play. But “wop” and “wog” are both pretty tasty in a tight corner (by which I mean the corner containing a triple-word tile) and Scrabble players would be the poorer without them.

More to the point, the meanings of the words used has never had the faintest bearing on a game of Scrabble. TI, KA, KI, TE, UT, MI, XU, NA, OE. Do you know what any of those words mean? I don’t — and I have played all of them many thousands of times in Scrabble games over the years. I have a dim sense that a GI is some bit of judo paraphernalia, but I may be quite wrong and it has never even crossed my mind to check.

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Indeed, it’s perhaps not so much the fact that I don’t know what those words mean that matters, as the fact that when I’m playing Scrabble the meanings of the words I do know barely impinge. Looking over the list of allowable two-letter words, it requires a conscious effort to recall that “EH” is an expression of surprised curiosity. When you’re playing, it’s just one of a handful of two-letter words that you know will often let you get an H on a triple-letter going in two directions at once — which is a creditable 24 points right out of the gate. Scrabble players are more familiar with QI than any new age mystic, and get through more ZA than a teenage mutant ninja turtle.

The serious Scrabble player does not take the slightest interest in the meaning of the words he or she plays. It’s closer to a mathematical exercise than it is to a lexicographical one. The English language and its morphology (all those plurals and comparatives and conjugations) just provides a convenient corpus on which to perform the game’s operations. The question of meaning — another admittedly more useful thing that language does — is neither here nor there. The insight by linguists that language is a “discrete combinatorial system” — an essentially mathematical insight — is what makes this possible.

But here, perhaps, I’m getting a bit too abstract. It’s worth remembering how little eliminating a word from acceptable vocabulary serves in any case to limit the availability of the thought or the sentiment it expresses. When the Spastics Society renamed itself Scope — in part in consideration that the word “spastic” had become a 1980s playground insult — children simply started calling each other “scopers”. During the Falklands War, British paratroopers were told to stop calling the Falkland Islanders “Bennies” (after the dimwitted, beanie-wearing character from the TV soap Crossroads). It’s said that a commanding officer later overheard one of the men calling a local a “still” and asked why. “It’s because they’re still Bennies,” came the answer.

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All words exist and have meaning in a context — and that applies to their offensiveness as well. Just as an image of a virus in a textbook, a virus on a microscope slide and a virus propagating in the human body are rather different propositions, so too are a word played in Scrabble, a word in a dictionary and a word hurled across the police lines at a protest march. The charge of offence does not inhere in the word itself, in an isolated phoneme or in a combination of letters. If we thought it did, among other things, we would have to rename Scunthorpe.

Take “jew”: quite inoffensive as a noun, but viciously derogatory as a verb. If a Scrabble player places it on the board, do they need to be cross-questioned as to what part of speech they had in mind and penalised accordingly? If they put down “scoper”, should it first be established whether the word as they played it meant “one who scopes” or “person with cerebral palsy (derog)”? Or “benny”, come to that: slang for a benzedrine tablet or slur against the genetic stock of the Falkland Islands? Is “slope” an incline or a racial insult? Is “faggot” a Lancashire lunch or a homophobic insult? Is “tranny” a radio? Making these issues the province of the Scrabble authorities is to make what philosophers call a category error.

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And there’s a wider point here, too, to do with the tendency of a certain strand in progressive thought to reach for the low-hanging fruit, for the showy symbolic victory rather than the systemic fix. I’m often reminded of Naomi Klein’s wise and rueful line of self-reproach in her first book No Logo — where she described how her generation (during the first wave of what was then called ”political correctness”) poured its political energies into arguments about language and signification.

They missed, she said, the way in which, while they were doing that, globalisation was marching on unopposed. The material basis of human thriving — workers’ rights, corporate accountability, the wages and safety of the poorest people on earth — was changing while well-meaning college kids argued over whether it was better to say “black person” or “person of colour”.

To think that words themselves have power extracted from their context — and to evince a superstitious fear of that power — is to return to a primitive form of magical thinking. It’s a form of magical thinking that is well represented everywhere from the Kabbalah to the works of Aleister Crowley and the 1,001 Nights — but it’s not really for grown-ups in the secular and rational world to which progressives are supposed to aspire.