He has “reposted” or approvingly quoted posts claiming that South Africa is our future; that the United States is at risk of turning into a “Global Favela”; that the Left is “import[ing] a new voting block from the Third World”; that “all other [racial] groups show extreme in-group preference and particular hatred for white people”; and that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to “eradicate white people”. 

The agents of collapse are unassimilated immigrants, aggrieved black Americans, and progressive elites who have inflamed resentment through years of identity-based moralizing. The implied endpoint is civil conflict, for which he wants whites to prepare themselves.

These claims would be alarming coming from anyone. From a man of Musk’s unparalleled resources and influence, they warrant loud and unambiguous rejection. The hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of impressions garnered by Musk’s posts suggest that his views are shared by more than a few others. Despite flashpoints over immigration and high crime in a handful of American cities, the conditions in the country are generally peaceful. The streets are generally safe. The crime spike we endured in 2020 has fallen off. So why has “the race war is coming” proven to be such an attractive rallying cry?

I thought I had an answer. In my inaugural essay for UnHerd, I offered a short genealogy of our present political moment. I argued that President Trump’s rise had been abetted by a backlash against progressive overreach, especially on matters of race, and I expressed concern that the reactionary energy unleashed in 2016 — and again more intensely in 2024 — would culminate in a repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

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But the “backlash” frame, while not inaccurate, isn’t what is most important about the present moment. It captures the direction of political motion but misstates its mechanism.

Backlash suggests something like a political analogue to Newton’s third law of motion: progressive excess produces an equal and opposite reaction; grievance is answered by grievance; and if the reaction takes on a racial coloration, that is only because the initial action was racially tinged. In this view, Trump’s return appears as a kind of inevitability — an elastic band released after being stretched too far. But this way of thinking drains politics of agency. Human beings are not rubber bands. They choose, within limits, how to respond to strain. Those limits are shaped by politicians, institutions, and the culture at large. These organize raw dissatisfaction into strains of discourse, thought, and belief, with varying degrees of coherence. 

The Right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. A focus on racial identity remains the coin of the political realm. What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.

For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the Left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race, gender, and sexuality, o as the proper grounds for justice. Classical liberals warned that once politics was organized around groups rather than persons, the state would become an arena of zero-sum contestation among identities, with predictable consequences for social cohesion. During the “racial reckoning” of the late 2010s and early 2020s, we saw enough of that dynamic to last a lifetime.

Yet in the months since Trump’s return to office, it has become clear that identity politics has not been defeated. It has just been rebranded. An insurgent movement on the Right has concluded,  quietly but unmistakably, that identity politics is not a moral error so much as it is a powerful political technology. As a democratic ideal, it is corrosive. As a tool of mobilization, it is extraordinarily effective. What I had previously described as backlash (against overly aggressive anti-racism) now looks more like a realization: the right has decided it can no longer afford to leave the weapon of race-identitarian politics unused. 

Enter Elon Musk. 

Before dismissing the Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vision of open racial conflict outright, it is worth steel-manning it — internet parlance for presenting the strongest version of an argument before proceeding to contest it. Musk’s framing resonates because it speaks to genuine disorder that many associate with race. Crime has risen in some cities. Immigration has strained administrative capacity. Progressive elites have often appeared more interested in moral signaling than in competent governance. Many citizens reasonably feel that institutions no longer enforce rules impartially or tell the truth about trade-offs. Against such a backdrop, warnings about social fragmentation do not sound like hysteria. They sound like realism.

But realism requires discrimination and discernment. Musk’s diagnosis leaps from institutional failure to demographic destiny, from policy breakdown to fighting in the streets. That leap is not evidence-based; it is interpretive. And it is here that thoughtful analysis must reassert itself.

As I see it, the imagery Musk deploys draws on two sources: conspiratorial narratives about demographic “replacement”, and his own reading of civilizational failures in post-apartheid South Africa. In one widely circulated episode, Musk endorsed a post claiming that if white men were to become a demographic minority, they would face slaughter, and that only white solidarity could ensure survival. The meaning was unmistakable. This was not a critique of identity politics; it was a remarkably disquieting embrace of it.

Not long ago, open calls for white solidarity from a figure of Musk’s stature would have been politically radioactive. Today, they are met with a mix of alarm, rationalization, and — in some quarters — approval. That shift itself is the real story. Musk did not invent white identity politics. But he legitimizes them. His importance lies less in the sincerity of his beliefs than in his role as a permission-granting figure. When ideas migrate from fringe spaces into elite discourse, they change character. Errors that might remain contained at the margins become dangerous when voiced by powerful actors. Such is the case here.

Musk’s central error is conceptual. He is importing a post-colonial model of race politics into Western multicultural societies where it does not apply. Post-apartheid South Africa was not renegotiating the status of racial groups within a stable constitutional order; it was adjudicating the inheritance of the state itself. Questions of sovereignty, land ownership, elite replacement, and historical authority were all in play at once, in a context of racial domination and dispossession and a setting in which institutions were weak and legitimacy was racially compromised. Under those conditions, identity became destiny — because in the end, there was no other dimension along which to mediate political conflict.

Today’s pluralistic Western societies are not in that position. However bitter, their race-related conflicts take place within settled, universalist constitutional frameworks with entrenched property regimes and comparatively high-capacity institutions. Their arguments are about distribution, recognition, and status, not the wholesale transfer of political power. To read these conflicts as incipient post-colonial struggles is simply a grave category mistake.

What makes this mistake so consequential is that it is structurally enabled by a political culture already organized around identity. Once politics is understood — on Left and Right alike — as a contest among morally freighted groups, the temptation to treat race as a civilizational variable becomes overwhelming. In that context, Musk’s rhetoric is weirdly logical. It mirrors the structure of progressive racialism while reversing its moral valence. History still marks groups, in this view. Power still reproduces itself through institutions. Racially disparate outcomes still function as moral evidence. Only the identities of the winners and the losers, the offenders and the victims, have changed.

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Whether Musk genuinely believes in white cultural superiority is beside the point. What matters is the effect on the discourse. Once race is treated as destiny, society reorganizes itself accordingly. Institutions, insofar as they operate according to the disavowed pluralist precepts, fade into irrelevance. Demography becomes fate. Politics become a struggle for survival among groups. Race war seems to be imminent.

Institutional realism provides the best alternative to this logic. A serious response to rising crime asks whether policing, prosecution, and punishment are functioning coherently. A serious response to immigration asks whether borders are enforced, asylum systems administered, and newcomers integrated through work and civic obligation. A serious response to inequality asks how education, housing, and labor markets actually operate, rather than how they are symbolically narrated. These are institutional questions. They admit of failure, reform, and learning. They do not require racial metaphysics or “civilization-or-barbarism” histrionics.

This is also, in part, a story about the evolution of the American Right. Identitarian, white racial paranoia on the Right has filled the vacuum created by an earlier ideological unraveling. After World War II, the so-called fusionism associated with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine attempted to unite three distinct, occasionally contradictory strands of American conservatism into a single governing philosophy: economic libertarianism, a hawkish foreign-policy , and moral traditionalism. The viability of that alliance depended on general conditions of peace and prosperity in the United States, and a kind of gentleman’s agreement that adherents of each strand would mostly overlook their disputes with the others. They were stronger together than apart. And it helped that they were together in the trenches against a common foe: Soviet Communism and those who sought to expand its influence in the West.

But then Communism collapsed; the shared enemy went away. The forever wars and financial crises of the millennium’s early decades broke the accord, with neoconservatism discredited abroad, libertarianism discredited at home, and religious traditionalists left to pursue their own ends. The rise of Trumpian populism marked the definitive end of the fusionist project. But Trump’s distaste for consistency created an ideological vacuum, and a need for a coherent program to organize the resentments he brought to the surface. 

It would now appear that identity politics rushed in to occupy the space, because it is emotionally energizing and cognitively cheap. It offers a mirage of moral clarity without institutional analysis, and solidarity without responsibility. Racial fatalism on the Right thus functions as a substitute for a serious account of institutional decay.

The deeper tragedy is not that identity politics has migrated from Left to Right, but that it has become the shared grammar of political conflict itself. We now argue loudly about which identities deserve protection or priority, but we no longer argue about whether identity is the proper battlefield. That tacit agreement is more troubling than any particular tweet. For once that terrain is fixed, escalation becomes inevitable.

Liberalism’s achievement was never the denial of any group’s level of historical suffering, but discipline in managing the present. It sought to thin out identity enough that a sense of shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences. That achievement is fragile, and it is now under open assault — from a Left that moralizes identity and a Right that weaponizes it.

If the most influential figures in our public life continue to teach citizens to read pluralistic democracies through the lens of post-colonial struggle, the consequences will not be confined to rhetoric. Today’s permission structures become tomorrow’s political programs. Ideas that begin as tweets harden into expectations. Right-wing advocates of identity politics promise a restoration of order. What they will more likely produce is the acceleration of distrust and a descent into chaos.

Regardless of whether Musk does secure his full payout, when someone finally becomes the world’s first trillionaire, odds are it’ll be him. When that happens, his wealth would rival or exceed the GDPs of Portugal, Greece, New Zealand, and Hungary combined. As he’s already shown, Musk has the means to influence any political campaign in his adoptive country. But his immense wealth also allows him to astroturf political movements on virtually any global issue. Witness, if nothing else, his apparent support of Tommy Robinson in Britain, echoed by similar enthusiasms from Paris to Berlin.

Should one man control this much wealth, and thus have the power to tilt the scales of global politics at will? Regardless of your answer, it’s striking how much access Musk’s staggeringly deep pockets secured him on Capitol Hill. Politics moves so fast now that the specifics are easy to forget. But the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wasn’t just about advice or tech contracts — though Musk received those as well — but deciding whether government agencies deserved to live or die. Within months of the election, key civil service departments were gutted under Musk’s watch, with hundreds of thousands of federal employees fired via the vagaries of a proprietary algorithm and Musk’s cadre of 20-something tech graduates.

If DOGE was a characteristically juvenile nod to Musk’s meme-lord sensibilities — and if the Musk-Trump pact has lately acquired the will-they-won’t-they trappings of a Nineties romcom — their relationship is nonetheless one of the great turning points in American history. After all, it ultimately represents the de facto takeover of the federal government by the world’s wealthiest man, not merely for moneymaking, but to ideologically reshape it in Musk’s preferred image.

What is this new Muskian ideology he’s imposing on America? Like many on the American Right, Musk puts on a good show of believing in the mythology of classical liberalism and small government, while also cloaking himself in the aesthetics of techno-libertarianism. In truth, though, the ideological roots of his worldview go deeper and darker. Beneath that meme-saturated branding lies a politics shaped as much by late 19th-century Social Darwinism as by any genuine commitment to “liberty” or open markets, all leavened by a healthy reliance on government backing.

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To put it differently, Musk adheres to a brand of Social Darwinism, imposed from the top down. Think small government for you — and the working-class slobs you struggle alongside — but big government for them, the rightful rulers of the universe. Shortly after ensconcing himself at the White House, wandering its hall like an awe-struck child, Musk landed a $5.9 billion US Space Force contract, as well as a $200 million deal to implement xAI in the Defense Department. That’s echoed by an expanded SpaceX contract, one valued at perhaps $4 billion. The optics, of course, are damning. But more than that, these arrangements speak to the billionaire’s fundamental reliance on state munificence.

Not that Musk is only concerned about economics. Notwithstanding his large and obscure number of children, he often acts online like an angry incel — paranoid and petulant to the core. Over the years, Musk has entertained more than a few white supremacist narratives on his X feed. Though he seems to have once attended an anti-Apartheid concert, his South African upbringing may also have encouraged him to worry about racially charged civil strife. Due to his omnipresence online, certainly, he has legitimized fringe white-supremacist rhetoric that was once relegated to the fringes of cyberspace: witness the growing popularity of Groypers and other “black-pilled” race-based groups among a subset of Gen Z.

The amplification of these far-Right ideologies could prove to be one of the most consequential global shifts of the coming decade. Yet in a horseshoe-like twist, Musk’s reactionary paranoia also coexists with an unshakeable belief in radical futurism — from intergalactic colonies to brain implants. Transhumanism and extreme technophile utopianism — not typically labeled “Right-wing” — pervade nearly everything Musk offers. Whether it’s boring massive underground tunnels, apparently meant to “solve” car traffic, to manufacturing humanoid robots to replace low-skill laborers, Musk’s projects would have horrified traditional British conservatives from Oakeshott to Burke.

Yet amid this rush of contradictory ideological currents, it’s perhaps Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars, purportedly as a failsafe for Earth’s presumed collapse, that arguably represents the man in full. That’s starkest when it comes to his futurism. In an age of Icarian sci-fi projects like Saudi Arabia’s ludicrous Neom scheme, Musk’s space venture is the most extravagant techno-utopian fantasy of them all, even as the man himself has apparently convinced large swathes of the public that Martian colonies are not just feasible but actually existentially necessary.

Aside from materializing childhood Star Trek fantasies, it’s hard to find a compelling reason for such a quixotic mission to the fourth planet from the sun. Even assuming it’s possible to land a single human — much less the number needed to “colonize” the planet — the cost of the project would likely be in the neighborhood of $1 billion per person, for a total of $1000 trillion. That kind of outlay, all in a country without universal healthcare or decent public transit, would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Nor is funding the only problem here. Mars is, on average, over 225 million kilometers from Earth. Traveling there would take a minimum of seven to nine months of space travel— trapped inside a claustrophobic spacecraft. Anyone lucky enough to survive the journey would have to bring with them all the air, water, and food they needed, not just for the space voyage itself but for the rest of their lives.

All the while, life on Mars would resemble camping on an active volcano: permanently toxic, obscenely dangerous, and deeply unnatural. Once Mars mission astronauts arrived, these aspiring settlers would be forced to live an Antarctic-like existence, completely isolated from all normal aspects of human geospatial, social, and emotional life. If nothing else, there’s a good reason why the real Antarctica has no permanent settlements — no one can stand living there without losing their ever-loving mind. Now imagine that kind of existence, except 90% of it is underground and there’s no coming back.

Musk obviously knows all these details, yet remains completely undaunted. And it’s here, I’d argue, that his inverted kind of Social Darwinism comes to the fore. Notwithstanding his obscene personal wealth, a thoroughgoing Martian colony would necessarily require epic amounts of government funding — miserable living conditions on the Red Planet or continued squalor on the Blue Planet be damned. And if Musk truly believes in the necessity of humanity becoming an “interplanetary species”, he ought to then offer himself up as one of Mars’ first human residents. Of course that’ll never happen. Instead he’ll sucker poor, naïve — and almost certainly desperate — souls into doing it for him.

That’s obvious enough from his behavior here on Earth. For one thing, Musk is virulently anti-labor, once saying he not only disagrees with the necessity of trade unions, but even the very idea. Among other things, he claims unions are a “lords-and-peasants sort of thing” that “create negativity in a company.” For another, he has got into ugly disputes with Tesla janitors trying to unionize, while also being found guilty by the US National Labor Relations Board — a notoriously weak agency compared to similar bodies elsewhere — for laying off hundreds of unionized workers in retaliation for their collective bargaining efforts.

Combined with his enthusiasm for red-blooded states like Texas, which has far laxer labor laws than spots like California, and it’s clear that a large part of his affinity for his adoptive nation is those aspects of American “exceptionalism” that align most with his Social Darwinist ideals.

Along these lines, it’s quite telling that unlike past industrial tycoons, Musk has also no major charitable operations. Even during the notoriously callous Gilded Age, figures like Andrew Carnegie preached that the ultra-wealthy had a duty to give away large portions of their money to the public. Many of that era believed their good fortune required social contribution. Musk, in contrast, sees such efforts as unnecessary — or worse, counterproductive. The few charities he does fund are either self-serving, like building schools and infrastructure near SpaceX facilities, or else engaged in other dubious practices. His eponymous foundation only donated $100,000 in 2024, and that to a libertarian think tank. Musk doesn’t even appear to grasp the basic function of most philanthropy: pretending to care.

Such results-focused brutality arguably hints at yet another current in Musk’s ideological bloodstream. In a funny way, technophile futurists like him and Peter Thiel arguably have more in common with Marxist-Leninists than they know. Both regard their political opponents as victims of “false consciousness” — unable to grasp the “scientifically” inevitable direction of history. Any dissent is seen not as disagreement, but as clear proof of ideological delusion. Their version of Progress is treated as inescapable and morally righteous. To question it is to endanger humanity itself. Thiel recently went so far as to liken critics of AI and technological acceleration to apocalyptic figures, and perhaps even Antichrists.

Musk is obviously no Stalin or Pol Pot. But like the undemocratic masters of the 20th century, he surrounds himself with sycophants, while believing that no one could possibly know more than him. When confronted with his failures, he also exhibits the same brand of epistemic totalitarianism — either denying or ignoring shortcomings and continuing to insist on his own revolutionary vision defining all legitimate knowledge. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Musk did not buy Twitter to “restore free speech”. He bought Twitter to shape the narrative in his preferred image, providing free speech to his preferred groups and their preferred narratives. Like a true Enlightenment ideologue, with no acceptance of the limits of the human experience, Musk, like Marx before him, believes in truth with a capital “T”.

One good example here is Musk’s efforts to develop xAI, with the company hunting for “political bias” experts to ensure its large-language model is stripped of all supposed bias from its training modules. Whatever he might claim, genuine “impartiality” is impossible. Just as with academic peer review, choosing what constitutes a “non-biased expert” is itself an ideological act. Postmodernists were completely correct in this sense: no one is capable of decoding human society without bias. But like the Marxists of old, Musk’s supreme faith in scientism and rationalist pseudo-objectivity is his greatest intellectual failing.

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Due to his South African birth, Musk cannot become US president. But, as he’s already shown, he can clearly buy unprecedented government sway. More to the point, there are signs he wants to formalize this influence by creating his very own political party. A few months ago, when the president he helped install grew tired of his presence, Musk threw a tantrum and announced the launch of his own political movement, the so-called “American Party”.

The debut of Musk’s party appears to be on hold, though, with its launch being used as a stick to prod the GOP towards anti-statist, low “entitlement” policies — the same Social Darwinist policies Musk believes must inevitably improve society. The American Party threat is rarely discussed, yet represents an important component in explaining why the GOP continues to hold the “small government” line in the ongoing shutdown of the US government, now a month old and counting. That American Party name is itself a highly telling moniker since it was last used by the extremely violent, ethno-nationalist Know Nothings of the mid-19th century.

The danger, then, isn’t just Musk’s erratic behavior or his unchecked ego. It’s the precedent he’s set. A centi-billionaire — well on his way to trillionaire status — with no democratic mandate and no governing experience now wields unprecedented influence over both the American state and civic discourse. He controls one of the largest social media platforms, and has been allowed to fire government employees at will, treating American society as a sandbox for his own fantastical experiments. For Musk, society isn’t a fragile ecosystem. It’s a plaything for his brilliance to break and rebuild at whim.

Musk hardly started the trend of the ultra-wealthy trying to hijack the US government, but he’s also taking it to dramatically new heights, setting a precedent that’s being followed by tycoons from Bill Ackman to Bernard Marcus. In the 2024 election cycle alone, 100 American billionaires together spent some $2.6 billion in “donations”. To put that into perspective, a minimum-wage worker would need to work for over 174,000 years — and start during the last Ice Age — simply to gross that same figure. It goes without saying, of course, that this trend could yet have disastrous consequences for the average American, with millions feeling their votes don’t count and that whatever gains they secured during the 20th century are already slipping away.

As for Musk himself, the nearer-term danger is less that he’s a hubristic technophile huckster or a deluded space-faring Don Quixote. It’s that, like Stalin, he can afford to keep being wrong — forever. With wealth at this unprecedented scale, he can act, fund, fire, and build without opposition. And, if liberal democracy relies on key shared understandings, his outsized influence might signal something worse than just the rise of authoritarian wealth. Rather, it could ultimately herald a breakdown in our attachment to our mother planet and thus, the conditions for human flourishing. What an ironic “scientific” legacy that would be.

Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire (“CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!”) and then his flurry of accusations of it being broken (“ISRAEL DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS”) suggest that he is using social media to operate outside of the invisible institutional state systems that have constrained presidential action since at least the days of President Truman. We can infer that Trump is posting as Trump, not as the Trump administration. Trump is posting as a sovereign. The contrast with Biden’s Twitter/X account couldn’t be clearer. This is a style of wielding power.

And it is one, I suspect, which is not limited to Trump, but enabled by both new tools and shifts in capital accumulation towards tech and crypto. State monopolies of money and information have been disrupted and only the monopoly on violence remains. Under the old forms of state sovereignty, new forms of sovereignty are emerging. Individuals leveraging different kinds of platforms — whether financial, technological or media-related — have started to wield state-like influence. Elected officials at odds with intelligence agencies, bureaucracy and legislators can step outside of the parameters of government to persuade, isolate and break up conglomerates of power.

When a populist with ties to capital and tech, such as Trump, gets elected, this kind of disruption reaches its heights. The President behaves in some ways like a non-state actor operating within the state, and in other ways, like an avatar of the state. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. Trump is clearly using his Truth Social posts to increase his own leverage and to change the direction of negotiations, not only with Israel and Iran, but potentially with his own military and administration officials. The negotiations, happening in real time, are complex and multidimensional.

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The ability to instantly disseminate global communiqués has increased the powers of the US President to shape events around the world. When Trump tweeted that the citizens of Tehran should evacuate, all the highways leading out of the city were jammed within minutes. In this century, neither Biden nor Obama nor George W. Bush used the powers of the presidency this way.

Critically, these new forms of sovereignty and power politics are not just emerging within the framework of states, but outside of them, suggesting new, covert forms of power. When a billionaire like Bill Ackman tweets his support of Israel, he is not just sharing an opinion, he’s hinting at where and how his capital will flow. Trump’s battles with Harvard, similarly, are not just about sticking it to the libs in a symbolic sense, but about cauterizing certain sources of soft counter-power. USAID was dismantled for similar reasons.

Perhaps the most significant indication that something has radically shifted in the way power works was the explosive social media war between President Trump and Elon Musk. For 24 hours, the spat absorbed the full attention of the discursive ecosystem. Rather than work through representatives or behind closed doors, the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man engaged in a public tit-for-tat. I don’t think they did this to entertain us, but to test the limits of their power.

The Trump-Musk feud felt like a clean break from the tone, style and dynamic of managerial liberalism, which has been the American norm for 100 years. Rather, Musk’s language (“without me, Trump would have lost the election”) was classically Shakespearean: a powerful vassal lashing out against the king he helped to enthrone. The dynamic reminded me of Henry Percy (Hotspur) and Henry Bolingbroke in Henry IV. Hotspur feels he helped win the throne but hasn’t been adequately rewarded. Worcester, Hotspur’s uncle, tells the King bluntly that he owes his throne to the Percy clan — without them, you couldn’t have deposed even weak Richard II. The implication is threatening: we can overthrow you just as we helped you overthrow your predecessor. After Trump hit back, Tesla’s $150 billion plunge in market value felt like a battlefield loss, like Hotspur’s armies fleeing. When Musk threatened to “begin decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft”, he resembled a grand duke refusing to send his retinue to join the king’s military campaign.

These are examples of feudalism, not of centralized or modern state power. Power increasingly seems shared, asymmetrically distributed; absolute only in small spheres, and those spheres overlap. These exchanges — whether between Trump and Musk or Trump and Khamenei — recall the depictions of Johan Huizinga, in his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, of a time when feuds and vendettas were “the cardinal point of policy” and populations gathered behind aristocratic figures clamoring for “vengeance”. The late-medieval period was one where personality underwrote political stability, personal instability predicted political chaos, and pride drove public affairs.

Techno-aristocrats like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg already possess state-like wealth and functional power. Trump 2.0 models itself after a tech company, and tech companies increasingly resemble governments. Now that Trump can negotiate a ceasefire, or crash Tehran traffic, with a tweet, and Musk can threaten to withdraw space infrastructure over personal grievances, we’ve returned to a world where individual character matters more than systemic process.

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Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Back then, the system was strong. Presidents were thought-leaders who helped steer the ship but weren’t solely responsible for it. Now the system seems weak, fragmented; showmanship and emotion are weirdly reassuring to us. Someone, not something, is in charge.

This return to Shakespearean feudalism suggests both promise and peril — certainly peril for Iran. In Shakespeare’s plays, genuine personal risk and nobility exist alongside terrifying unpredictability in court politics. And it won’t be long before charismatic personalities once again eclipse institutional constraints, and sovereign individuals come to rival sovereign states. This is our new Shakespearean politics — the personal and tragic, played out on a global scale.

She exists in a strange subcultural ecosystem: the reactionary feminine id, emerging like mold in the shadow cast by figures like the Tate brothers, Jordan Peterson, and President Trump. But she’s far from the palatable rebellion of Netflix’s Adolescence.

RFH emerged from the same digital petri dish of the manosphere, fluent in its grammar of outrage and irony. But she inverts its vernacular, posting incendiary feminist content in a voice that calls out the trolls she once aligned with. Her account has become a minor spectacle on X, where she draws both threats and disciples. She is documenting, in real time, what it looks like when a former anti-feminist tries to escape the ideology she once helped amplify; and how the internet doesn’t make it easy to leave.

By the time I called her a few weeks ago — early afternoon — she had already tweeted 14 times. There was one that said, “I am the female Donald Trump,” and another, a reposted meme from a fake WikiHow article: “How to get men to leave you alone.” The answer: “Show them your Twitter.”

She laughed when I brought that up. When men do indeed go running, it shows her who they really are. Or they do the opposite: rage-quote her into a thread with 10,000 likes, tagging friends and followers to come and see what a deranged woman looks like. Sometimes, they go darker: burner accounts, threats. But she insists she doesn’t really care, because she’s there mostly “to have fun.”

She called herself Rad Fem Hitler, twisting the insult “Feminazi” into a parody so grotesque it loops back into being seductive. It stuck, succeeding in pissing people off. She doesn’t want me to use her real name, which makes sense: the whole project is part performance, part exorcism.

Her tweets are lacerating, occasionally brilliant, and often disturbing. When Russell Brand — the former actor, revival-tent star, and accused serial predator — was filmed being baptized in the ocean, RFH captioned the clip, “Put some clothes on, wh*re.” A few weeks earlier, she tweeted, “If I were a gay guy, I would be r*ping so many straight men.” She claims it’s just jokes, and in one sense, it is. But even jokes have a location; and hers live somewhere between trauma and spectacle, sharpened by the language of the Right-wing enemies she had counted as allies.

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On the phone, she’s disarmingly gentle. “I’m kind of in the middle of a lot of things,” she said. “I don’t have this entire hate-boner for trans women…. I don’t really care about adults doing these things”. The internet rewards extremism — including the kind she traffics in — but reality rarely does.

There’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in her cruelty. Or maybe it’s righteous anger. She uses the language of the online Right because it’s the dialect in which she first learned to be political, and because it’s the only tongue that seems to stir a reaction. Her fluency with it is part echo, part strategy, part theater.

She grew up in a “normal Republican family” in a Chicago suburb, with a brief interlude in Bahrain for her mother’s work. She remembers her childhood happily, and her parents modeled an equal partnership she’d hoped to find for herself. But her politics came online at the University of Michigan, where she discovered the term “libertarian,” and suddenly, everything clicked. “I think I was kind of a libertarian as a child, I just didn’t know there was a word for it. I remember thinking, why are people not allowed to do drugs? That’s their own business.”

She found, among her fellow libertarians, a bunch of “nerdy spergy guys who probably have mommy issues and don’t like women that much.” (The word “spergy,” in her usage, oscillates between self-identification and diagnosis; it feels defensive, maybe self-hating, maybe affectionate. In a way that’s hard to parse, she includes herself in the insult.) “That was me,” she said. “I was them.” At the time, she called herself an “anti-feminist.”

She ran in the same circles as the Right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, who was then running Breitbart. When Trump announced his run, she became a die-hard MAGA fan, because all his talk about “The Wall” was exactly what she felt Republicans had been missing.

She and a friend who worked for Yiannopoulos thought it would be “funny” to go to a Bernie rally and ask for donations for Trump’s campaign. To top it off, the rally was in Columbus, Ohio, and they wore their Michigan clothes, poking at the fiercest rivalry in college football. The plan was to troll everyone: Bernie fans, Buckeyes, liberals, the internet. “A lot of people were swearing at us” but some engaged, and some “thought it was almost kind of funny.”

That friend has since left politics and got the video scrubbed, but when RFH was recently doxxed, people from “back then” remembered it and put it on the internet—a gotcha. Many relics of her Trumpian days have since re-emerged, used as fodder against her. “I’m not in contact with any of those people now,” she tells me, sternly.

Things began to fall apart in 2018. The edge-lord e-Right — which once felt like a self-aware, post-political LARP — began bleeding into real life. Meet-ups turned into romantic entanglements, and RFH witnessed “unconscionable misogyny. There was so much domestic violence and horrific emotional abuse.” One man was trying to starve his girlfriend down to nothing. Some were addicts, and some died. There was slut-shaming, deadbeat fathers, self-destruction. “And somehow,” she added, “it was always the woman’s fault.”

She felt this in her personal life, too. She had absorbed the belief that “marriage was my salvation as a woman … that I had no other real purpose.” So she married a man from her libertarian college circle. She was 25. She got pregnant “immediately.” He wanted nothing to do with the baby. “I felt like I was living a meme,” she said.

Trad-wife life had promised adoration; instead, she was treated like a leech. Her husband’s misogyny, once theoretical, turned violent. When she asked for help, he would scream, “I’m not here to serve you.” The spell broke.

Her slow burn toward feminism began to accelerate. “I would say motherhood is quite radicalizing.” Her former views curdled into suspicion. “They want women to be mothers to just sort of keep them almost lobotomized, away from society.”

She saw it in the way conservatives talked about divorce. “The minute there’s a divorce, it’s like, ‘You just took his money,’ and, ‘You didn’t do anything.’ I’m like, didn’t you just say motherhood is so important?”

She won’t talk about her divorce to protect her child’s privacy. But she’s made the stakes clear elsewhere: “I had to live out the consequences of these ideas,” she said recently in an interview with the UnHerd contributor (and repentant online Rightist) Richard Hanania. “It’s not just an abstract, funny thing. It has real-world implications, and they’re not good. Not for me, or for other women.”

That’s the thing about RFH; her whole schtick is a kind of black comedy about realizing, too late, that the joke was always on you. The thing she’s doing on Twitter isn’t quite politics, but a kind of shadowboxing against her former self: an attempt to climb out of the hole using only the dirt that buried her.

Still, she remains caught between poles. She’s not trying to win approval; she’s trying to balance fury with fluency. She still hates liberal sanctimony, rants about immigration, and tweets like someone who spent too much time on 4chan.

Online fame has presented a double bind for her privacy: since her doxxing, she must defend herself as a “beautiful woman” while also impressing how much a woman’s “beauty” is overvalued. And she is cruel about people’s (usually men’s) lives and appearances, only to reap the same treatment when it’s flung back at her. It didn’t take me long to find men on Twitter talking about killing her, raping her, the size of her bust.

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The three tribes of MAGA men

By Poppy Sowerby

But for RFH, the point isn’t clarity or persuasion — it’s chaos with a feminist flavor. And it works. She’s built a significant following, with many of her posts going viral, not because people agree with her, but because they can’t look away.

She reminds me of Valerie Solanas — the radical feminist most famous for shooting Andy Warhol. Before she pulled the trigger in 1968, Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto, a text that called for “thrill-seeking females” to overthrow society and eliminate the male sex. It was dismissed as lunacy, and eventually, she was locked up in a psychiatric hospital. “I love Valerie,” RFH told me. “She was onto something.” Like much Twitter-speak, they both fall somewhere between dark comedy and a call to arms.

RFH reaped the full Solanos treatment in December. When a teenage girl carried out a school shooting in Wisconsin, killing a teacher, a student and wounding six others, Twitter users alleged that RFH was cited in her “manifesto.” Months on, nothing from federal investigators suggests that RFH, or feminism, had anything to do with the shooting; but that hasn’t stopped her opponents going wild over it.

It made her “sour” on the internet. She says anyone who suggests her calls to violence are earnest is just being disingenuous: “They don’t even believe it. You can’t read my stuff and believe that. There’s nothing in there that hints at some sort of violent takeover of men.”

Still, it lingers, like all internet scandals do. And she keeps going, because, in her view, things are changing. “We’re entering a weird postwar America,” she said. “Young men aren’t dying off anymore. We’re going to see this slow, social collapse.”

“We’re just going to have this big kind of culling,” she clarified. “I don’t mean killing people, but there’s just gonna be a lot of people that don’t reproduce.” Her vision of the future is certainly not what Andrew Tate’s devotees want to hear. It’s not clear yet whether RFH is helping that process or just making it harder to ignore. But she doesn’t seem interested in guiding anyone to safety. She’s more like a lighthouse that flashes on and off, just enough to show you how rough the water is.

Inevitably, the squabble played out on social media, where both parties proceeded to denounce each other in increasingly rabid terms. Musk accused Trump of being a hypocrite, a man who pretended to care about the US budget deficit while conspiring to make it worse. He said that Trump ought to be impeached and replaced by his vice president, JD Vance. Trump, meanwhile, hit back saying that the real problem with federal deficits was all the unearned subsidies and corporate welfare that Musk was leeching from Uncle Sam. And Steve Bannon piled on calling for Musk to be deported back to South Africa and have his citizenship revoked. By now, the love-in on the White House lawn, with Trump advertising Tesla and Elon expressing devotion, is but a distant memory. Bridges have been burned; there will be no reconciliation.

Though the level of vitriol and undignified childishness of the bickering between the President and the world’s richest man has been shocking, nobody can say that they didn’t see it coming. For weeks, the media has been reporting on the growing discord between Musk and the administration, primarily over the trade war. And other parts of Trump’s coalition — including billionaire and megadonor Bill Ackman — have made their dissatisfaction with the economic policies increasingly clear.

But the “big, beautiful bill” was the final straw. After spending a hundred days talking about fiscal responsibility, the danger of the exploding deficit, and suffocating levels of debt, Trump and his Republican Party made one of history’s greatest political U-turns and endorsed a bill that made all of these problems spectacularly worse. Adding insult to injury where Musk is concerned, the budget bill terminates nearly all ongoing subsidies for EVs, while leaving the corporate welfare handouts for internal combustion engines in place. Clearly, no good deed in Washington ever goes unpunished: after sacrificing his own reputation on the Trump altar, Musk has been rewarded with a knife slipped between his precious Tesla’s ribs. Some Democrats, sensing opportunity, are already calling for Musk to return to the fold.

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DOGE has devoured Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

But the dramatic collapse of a part of Trump’s political coalition isn’t just the result of two narcissists’ clashing egos. It signifies a deeper shift. Washington, after all, is intensely transactional; if you donate large sums of money to a party, you naturally expect to get something in return. Given how incredibly spendthrift Elon Musk has been, it is extremely noteworthy that he would end up being denied access to the pork barrel. This is not, however, a sign that Congress has decided to reject corruption — the existence of the big, beautiful bill is proof enough that the swamp has only gotten worse. No, the messy divorce is a sign that the political process — even the process of ordinary political corruption — is starting to break down.

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are getting queasy because the bill essentially represents a capitulation in the face of looming fiscal disaster; a resolution to simply sail the Titanic straight into the iceberg. The Trump administration sold itself as the last chance to try to steer the ship to safety before America’s state finances collapsed. But instead of changing course, Trump and the GOP actually decided to throw more coal into the boiler and go full speed ahead.

This time around, their fiscal profligacy has not been without consequences. The bond market is already wobbling, as weakening demand for more dollar debt slams head first into a state that is poised to gorge on even more unsustainable borrowing. Combined with a capricious and almost arbitrary economic war against the rest of the world, weakening America’s internal economy while alienating allies and making them less willing to bail America out from its fiscal irresponsibility, and you see the makings of a perfect storm.

The parallels between this crisis and the one that triggered the French Revolution of 1789 grow ever stronger. Elon Musk has played out his role as America’s Jacques Necker to its conclusion; he has gone from rockstar technocrat enjoying widespread popular support to spurned sidekick whose attempts at reform were frustrated and blocked by the very people who brought him in in the first place. The French monarchy did actually try quite hard to escape its looming bankruptcy during its last years in power; but, just like with DOGE, those reforms became more and more chaotic and even tyrannical or illegal towards the end, as the political system slowly collapsed into acrimony and infighting.

Meanwhile, in America, as the “big, beautiful bill” kills off even the pretense that Trump is working to forestall financial disaster, and with Congress so gridlocked and the political system so polarized and dysfunctional, there’s only really one politics left that still works: the politics of executive fiat. With Trump taking the same path as Louis XVI, will he suffer the same fate?

Certainly, his administration is going to go down fighting; as it loses many of the battles it began this term by initiating (the trade war, peace in Ukraine and the Middle East), it is simply picking more. Trump kicked off this term declaring war on illegal immigrants and the federal bureaucracy, and even though neither has gone well, he’s also declared war on Harvard University. Perhaps, though, this impulse to constantly pick new fights is perhaps less irrational than it appears. America is going broke, Congress no longer works, laws can barely be passed, and the bureaucracy itself is slowly failing. The only way to cut spending in that environment is by resorting to semi-tyrannical executive action.

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The decline and fall of MAGA

By Ross Barkan

While the official rationale behind the war on institutions like Harvard, or research funding more generally, often cites issues such as antisemitism, or wokeness, or DEI, it’s increasingly clear that the money withheld will never be restored. While this stand-off between Trump and the institutions could be described as a culture war spun out of control, or a distraction from other failures, it is also, in truth, a sort of improvised bankruptcy proceeding. When the Soviet Union slowly went to pieces, the same thing happened: at first, the money simply stopped coming, and only later did people belatedly realize that this was the new normal, and the money would not be coming back. In truth, there is no other way to even attempt to cut spending in America right now; Congress is simply incapable of doing the job.

Perhaps, five months ago, it was possible and indeed reasonable to talk about Trump’s administration in terms of “will they fix it or won’t they?” There was momentum and DOGE held a threatening promise. But today, the man who embodied that reform is now openly denouncing his former political allies and the system has proved resistant.

The President, meanwhile, is openly threatening some of America’s most dynamic companies, because of personal animus. Tesla and SpaceX, whatever their flaws, still represent an area of genuine industrial innovation in America, at a time when deindustrialization has devastated it. Destroying Tesla out of pique or petty revenge won’t do America any good, but one gets the sense that “doing good for America” is not really on anyone’s agenda any more.

But now his time in the White House is drawing to a close, and Musk has announced that from now on, he will be spending more time with his businesses (including Tesla, SpaceX and the social network X). Not, you’ll notice, the traditional retiring politician’s promise to “spend more time with his family” — which in Musk’s case would be tricky, given that he doesn’t have anything like a traditional family.

In Fight Club, the narrator complains to Tyler Durden about having an absent father: “Every six years, he goes to a new city and starts a new family.” Durden responds: “Fucker’s setting up franchises.” And “setting up franchises” essentially describes Musk’s attitude to fatherhood. He’s known to have at least 14 children with four women, although according to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, it’s probable that the actual number is far higher.

Of course, Musk doesn’t use the word “franchise” — he prefers the military metaphor of having a “legion” of children. The mothers of his many children, meanwhile, use another word: “harem”. They talk about being dragged into “harem drama”, as Musk plays favorites and uses his financial power to punish or reward. After one of the babymamas pushed back against a gagging clause that would have prevented her from speaking negatively about him (but not the other way around), he cut her monthly stipend from $100,000 to $40,000.

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By Richard Hanania

Which all suggests that Musk has a pretty terrible attitude to women: they’re there to procreate and to take orders. With one exception: his mother Maye Musk enjoys a privileged role in the court of Musk. She has an apparently close and protective relationship with her son: after the WSJ article was published, she responded to the allegations about the treatment of her grandchildren by calling it “dishonest” and flagging the journalists who wrote it to an X account called “@Ifindretards”.

Musk reportedly uses privacy deals to stop the mothers of his children from publicly associating themselves (or their children) with him. Meanwhile, Maye socializes with the wives and daughters of the Republican elite: a seat next to Melania at a Mar-a-Lago dinner party, a luncheon with Ivanka, a ride on Air Force One. She’s the nearest thing Musk has to a first lady.

She’s also apparently free to capitalize on her family as much as she likes. Maye would, presumably, disagree with the idea that she owes her status to her son. She has her own profile as a model — now 77, she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue in 2022. She is, incongruously, especially popular in China, where she’s regarded as a “silver influencer” and is in demand for lucrative partnerships with local brands.

She has, inevitably, written a book, which promises “Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” And, equally inevitably, she also offers a self-help course where you can learn her “five rules for life”. It is silly to think that anyone would be fascinated by this if Maye wasn’t the mother of the richest man in the world, but it’s equally silly to assume the benefit only goes one way. Maye lends Musk something that he could never have without her: humanity. Without her, it would be impossible to think of Musk — with his collection of children, his nativist fixations and his obsession with the letter X — as anything other than alarmingly weird. Maye brings a softening lifestyle angle to the dynasty: think of her as “GoopX”.

She even has a backstory that recasts Musk, with all his (kindly) eccentricities, as an object of sympathy. According to her autobiography, she left Musk’s father Errol because he was abusive (Errol denies this). The backstory to the backstory, however, is less helpful: Maye’s father Joshua N Haldeman, who died when Musk was two, was a white supremacist and antisemite who opposed democracy and believed there was a “a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization”. 

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Racism is not a hereditary trait (even though it would be funny if it was), and the fact that Haldeman held those opinions tells you little about his descendants. But it’s a useful reminder that the Musk family tree has been political for several generations, and Maye is a political player in her own right. As Wired reported, she’s used her social media posts to support Musk’s lobbying efforts on behalf of his businesses in China, and her own visits to the country (she claims to go almost every month) have been celebrated by members of the Chinese government. 

Until her son’s embrace of Trump 2.0, Maye’s American presence was non-partisan — at her most firebrand, she was the kind of girlboss Democrat who went to Hilary Clinton fundraisers. But as her son’s ambitions converged on Trump, so did her posting. Increasingly, she used her accounts to boost Musk’s interests, which meant boosting Trump. (If she’s sore about Trump’s tariff war potentially affecting her relationship with China, it hasn’t affected her loyalty.)

Musk loves a classical reference, so here’s a new one for him to enjoy. If his children are his “legion”, then Maye is the Livia to his Tiberius, in the style of Siân Phillips in I, Claudius. She is the savvy operator who can make up for his deficiencies, the proxy who can act on his behalf while pretending all to be doing nothing more than “mothering”. She can be his attack dog, and call it maternal instinct — though it’s notable that she doesn’t post about her other two children nearly as often. 

A power mother is a great asset (just ask the Kardashians). That’s true both publicly and privately. Maye is the one who is allowed to speak truth to her son’s power: she told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that “the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father”, and grows absorbed with conspiracies and delusions of grandeur. Whether he listens to her is another thing, but at least he didn’t fall out with her — which is what happened to Sam Harris when he demurred from the Musk line on covid. Naughty boys listen to their mothers.

But for Musk, Maye is also a bit of a reputational liability. Musk believes intensely in masculinity: “Men are made for war. Real men, anyway,” he texted to one of the mothers of his children. He has used his enormous riches to create a private world where women are maximally disposable, to be purchased for their reproductive value and maintained at a safe distance.

Meanwhile, Maye is out there telling people to “stop being mean” to her son, as though he were a weedy kid being bullied in the playground and not a billionaire who until recently had the power to direct the US budget. Men might be made for war, but Maye Musk is perfectly capable of fighting her son’s corner. Musk seems to be long beyond relying on women, but really he’s the ultimate mama’s boy.

It already seemed back in November as if Musk’s independence and loud public image would keep his tenure short. And now he is set to leave, with the man himself stating he wants to focus on Tesla; yesterday, he said he plans to spend “a lot less” on political donations in the future. Trump himself has said that Musk won’t be around much longer. He has apparently alienated a great deal of Trump’s staff, in particular Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who keeps the trains running on time.

A key and overlooked moment in Musk’s decline occurred in February, with his full-throated endorsement of Trump quoting Napoleon to indicate the president is above the law and constitution. Trump’s statement is a typical-for-him power move, all bluster and stubbornness. Musk retweeted it with 14 American flags at 14:14 in the afternoon. The 14 can only refer to the white supremacist “14 words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

From praising Germany’s AfD to tweeting “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did,” Musk hasn’t done much to distance himself from the more vulgar, racist nativists. But this was the first instance of Musk knowingly invoking (albeit cryptically) white supremacist slogans, moving from fellow traveller to active ideologue. Anti-Trumpers have had a terrible habit of crying wolf, making it very difficult to separate truth from hysteria, so when something without plausible deniability like this came around, it got no momentum.

This particular tweet didn’t blow up, so perhaps Musk got away with it, but it nonetheless points to the crux of the issue: Musk is a foreigner. Not an immigrant (though he is), but a techie in a non-techie’s world. J.D. Vance may get into grammatically correct arguments with other big names on Twitter, but Musk traffics with the randos to the point that you could almost think he is one of them, and when he slips up and embraces the 14 words, he shows that he ultimately is of the people, not above them. If you haven’t spent time in political circles, it is hard to realize just how forbidden it is to publicly associate with the great unwashed, but there you have it. Donald Trump may do a photo-op working at a McDonald’s drive-through, but he would never associate with any of the customers.

The incident was even more significant because it showed that Musk didn’t know where the lines were. As one Trump ally said of Musk: “There’s a lack of an understanding about communications and why it’s important, that you massage things, that you talk about things, that you qualify things — they just don’t do it.”

In other words, Musk fell because he didn’t know how to play the political game. He was, to be blunt, too autistic for politics. He came from a world where there is far more tolerance for people saying whatever comes into their head, less respect for seniority and prestige, and a far heavier representation of autistic traits. He could not cross over into the political world without abandoning the very world he embodies and represents, neutering himself. His behavior since creating DOGE shows him treating the government just as he’d treat a company that he’s CEO of.

On Twitter, you see techies like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCun mixing it up in public. While few go as far as Musk in their vulgarity, it still shows that notions of aristocracy and privilege play out very differently there than they do in DC. The tech culture Musk comes from has much more porous social boundaries, where the idea of putting an inexperienced 20 year old in charge of mission-critical tasks is plausible, if not exactly a regular occurrence. Ideas of “paying one’s dues” and “staying in one’s lane” are quaint. Musk’s steroidal version of this ethic has tanked Twitter’s earnings and led him to spew unlikely and provably false tales of DOGE’s savings, but ignoring reality is nothing new in a world where Joe Biden was mentally competent and the Ukraine war was going to end on 20 January. Musk’s fatal error isn’t in the falsehoods, but his cultural style. He needed allies within the administration, not just a rabid anon cheering squad.

Compare Musk with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who convinced Trump (against much opposition) to sign on to a tariff policy that has no constituency outside of MAGA dead-enders and far-Left protectionists. Despite being loathed by most of the administration, Lutnick is not a public liability in the way Musk is. Lutnick gives soundbites like “[The EU] hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak,” which copy Trump’s style while also sticking to the programme. Meanwhile, Musk cluelessly asks Senator Ron Wyden, “Why does ur pp look like u just came?” And Lutnick’s tariffs will ultimately have far more impact than anything DOGE and Musk did, not because Lutnick is smarter than Musk or because Lutnick faced less opposition, but because Lutnick knows how to act and how to speak in Trump’s world, and Musk either doesn’t or can’t.

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DOGE has devoured Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

The response to Musk within the administration is always a combination of awe and bemusement. As one Trump adviser remarked, “They think he’s a genius, but he’s a one-man wrecking ball.” They’re half-right. Insomnia and bullying willpower do not a genius make, but they certainly can create the impression of one. Musk’s peculiar charisma and bulldozer-like approach bear some resemblance to Trump’s own blithely uninformed arrogance and entitlement, but the key difference lies precisely in their constituencies: personality cult MAGAists for Trump, personality cult techno-accelerationists for Musk. Any link between these two groups was purely hypothetical prior to Musk buying Twitter, and the MAGAists were destined to win out for three reasons. First, there are more of them. Second, they yell about immediate and popular issues instead of missions to Mars and freight tunnels. Third, and most significantly, they worship Trump instead of Musk, and Trump is ultimately in charge.

Musk will remain among the richest people in the world and likely serve for the Left in the coming years as a Soros-like bogeyman to replace the Koch Brothers, but as the “good billionaires” of the Democrats have shown, money cannot buy elections as easily as conventional wisdom had it. More money does not necessarily equate to better than. But Musk’s particular billionaire form is different from that of Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker. Pritzker is the old paternalistic oligarch we all know who sits back and tells the youth to get to work; Musk is, at best, a tweaked-out babysitter who occasionally shares his drugs with you. Over the last decades, the tech lords of our world have changed how all aspects of our lives are conducted (and with AI, continue to do so), yet there remains a cultural gap between the tech world and traditional civic culture that has not caught up. Indirect influence can only go so far. Peter Thiel, possibly the savviest of the lot, wisely stayed behind the scenes to boost Trump only to find that Trump and even Vance would ignore his own policy agenda at their whim.

The real question is whether that cultural gap between tech and politics will remain as large as it is now. For all their money, few people from the tech world have crossed visibly into politics, and figures like Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have tended to exert influence from behind the scenes rather than attempt elected office. In a recent interview, a t-shirted Mark Zuckerberg explained why: “I’m like the most awkward person. People have been calling me a robot online for 20 years. It’s really done wonders for my confidence.”

These will never be the words of a political leader, no matter how rich. Nor, for that matter, will “Why does ur pp look like u just came?” Whatever ambitions Mark Zuckerberg has, there seems to be no room for an “autistic style in American politics”, but with the old elite dying, we may just be waiting for the right tech oligarch. If some future tech lord should somehow also possess the genuine charisma of an Obama or a Trump, the frustrated dreams of Musk and Thiel could rapidly be fulfilled.

No one embodies this paradox better than the world’s richest man.

He who controls Twitter, now X, exercises a vast power over the culture, and the website is now the personal playground of Musk. As a prolific tweeter with some 219 million followers, Musk would have a powerful voice if he were just a regular user who could amplify certain accounts. As it is, he has also changed the tone and ideological tilt of the public square toward his preferred direction through measures like revenue sharing and the algorithmic derogation of links (meaning, if you share a link in an X post, far fewer people are likely to see it).

To say Musk is biased in his posts or that he shows a disregard for the truth doesn’t come close to capturing the constant stream of nonsense he blasts out to the world. This isn’t a matter of being biased or getting things wrong like CNN occasionally does. His feed is more in the neighborhood of InfoWars, where Alex Jones will typically point to a document that actually exists to make wild extrapolations about what Democrats or “globalists” are up to. Musk is somehow more reckless: the things he regularly promotes lack even that kind of nexus to something based in reality.

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By Sohrab Ahmari

He approvingly retweeted a tweet about a story pertaining to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants being on the voter rolls in California, yet the link in the original post he himself shared was to a Snopes article debunking the claim. Musk has also falsely asserted that federal disaster-relief funds meant to help Americans were redirected towards housing illegal immigrants, even though the two are completely different programs. When a pro-Russian account claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine — in contradiction to all reputable polling — he was fact-checked via a community note, which caused Musk to flip out and charge that the system was being gamed. These aren’t isolated instances. Things like this happen all the time.

It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.

Federal employees are a small part of the budget, and Musk’s assertions that huge savings might come from uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse is not taken seriously by anyone who has looked into the issue. He has spread false claims about dead people collecting Social Security that were based on a misunderstanding of a government database. All of this is even before getting to the question of how much of what he has been doing will hold up in court, with many of his moves already facing legal setbacks.

Musk is not alone. Other members of the tech oligarchy close to the administration have regularly spread false or misleading information, albeit on a much smaller scale. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen went on the Joe Rogan podcast a few months ago and made claims that were somewhere between vastly exaggerated and completely false about the Biden administration “debanking” its enemies. During election season, a prominent VC investor asserted that there was massive voter fraud going on in California based solely on a text message someone sent him.

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All of this means that even for those of us who are true believers in the capitalist system, it has become clear that the traits that make one successful in business do not necessarily transfer into governance. Nor do they equate to having sensible, or even reality-based, views on policy.

Sure, successful entrepreneurs must have a high level of intelligence and a decent work ethic. But if Musk and other tech titans who have come close to the Trump administration are any indication, they seem to have other traits that imply they should be kept as far away from political power as possible.

What is going on here?

In a well-functioning market economy — assuming we are not talking about an exceptional case like a firm that peddles a highly addictive or otherwise harmful product — profit tends to be straightforwardly related to improving social welfare. People pay because they want a good or service, given conditions of scarcity and their own subjective preferences. Markets also take into account how workers are treated, the well-being of suppliers a business deals with, and an endless number of factors and interests that influence how capital and resources are allocated.

Government, in contrast, doesn’t have a similarly crisp measure of success. Sure, there are some metrics that guide policy makers, such as GDP and the unemployment rate. Yet leaders are expected to consider the long-term health and well-being of a society. They are supposed to respect rights and uphold fundamental values, even if we often disagree about what those values are.

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Musk's two-tier vision of free speech

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As Musk goes on a firing spree and seeks programs he can kill, we see that, in the absence of a widely agreed upon metric for success, he has decided to choose ones that will serve his private purpose. The fewer government employees and the less money government is spending, the better he thinks he’s doing. Again, even if you are a libertarian, this is a dumb way to go about achieving libertarian goals. DOGE has the word “efficiency” in its name, but efficiency is hard to define and measure, so employees fired and money saved have served as lousy proxies. Note also his influence on the latest congressional budget process, which was focused on reducing the page count in the legislation.

Of course, even in terms of Musk’s chosen metrics, success has been limited, as a government official, even a high-placed one, lacks the freedom of a CEO. Congress won’t let Musk touch the true drivers of government spending — namely, entitlements and defense. Musk appears to know this, but doesn’t seem to care when he is making exaggerated claims about what DOGE can and has accomplished. Grasping for metrics that are as useful as profits and losses in business has clearly led him astray. Note also that even when he finally acknowledged recently how much of government spending goes to entitlements, he felt the need to lie about these programs and say that they are there so the Left can attract illegal immigrants to the country.

Compounding the problem is the information bubble in which Musk has imprisoned himself. On X, his engagement is overwhelmingly with con artists, conspiracy theorists, and grifters. He now follows Catturd, a man who believes in every conspiracy theory from anti-vax to chemtrails, and whose ignorance and sycophancy towards Trump are legendary among regular X users. When the Trump administration tried to stir up social-media influencers by giving them the “Epstein files”, the results were so ridiculous that even many MAGAs felt compelled to say so. Yet Musk was still spreading the narrative that the deep state was thwarting Trump’s attempts to get to the bottom of the issue. Understand that there is a hierarchy in terms of how insane MAGA influencers are, and even among them, Musk pushes narratives that only appeal to the worst.

There is no indication in his prodigious tweeting that he relies on any newspapers, serious books, or credible sources of information. When a data scientist at X once told Musk that he had fallen for a conspiracy theory that would only appeal to a person at the tenth percentile of gullibility, Musk cursed at him. The man seems to have a deep lack of intellectual curiosity not only about the arguments of his political opponents, but even those of informed observers who would be inclined to support his project.

Again, having a kind of tunnel vision actually works well in business. An entrepreneur can afford to ignore the business press and what is happening in other industries and simply go about pursuing his vision of change. Yet a political actor can’t completely discount the views and opinions of those he disagrees with, because they are going to be part of the landscape going forward. And wise leadership requires a broad perspective on legal, economic and political affairs that raw genius can’t compensate for. Having a policy idea, for example, requires not only knowing whether it will work in the narrow sense, but also whether it can get through the courts and the legislative branch. This doesn’t mean that it would be a good use of his time for Musk to be reading case law, as no one can be an expert in everything, but it is necessary to have a grasp of reliable sources of information.

This leads to perhaps a more important difference between business and political success, which comes down to the ability to negotiate with and placate one’s enemies. An entrepreneur or CEO can act like a conqueror, provided his product is innovative enough or his market power overwhelming enough. If he builds a better, cheaper, faster product, society benefits, and he conquers his sector — or even creates an entirely new market. He never has to even be in contact with his competitors, who are free to do something else if they are less talented or lucky.

In contrast, the fundamental question of democratic politics is how to peacefully settle disputes between individuals and parties that disagree with one another. Healthy democracies celebrate leaders who bring us together, or at least take actions that are conducive to long-term peace and stability. Musk regularly spreads completely fabricated conspiracy theories about his political opponents, has repeatedly implied that those he disagrees or has disputes with are sympathetic towards pedophilia, when not referring to them as pedophiles themselves, and recently called Sen. Mark Kelly a traitor after he posted his support for Ukraine. Mean words directed at a business rival hurt feelings but have little social significance. In politics, however, fortunes reverse quickly, and today’s defeated opposition could be tomorrow’s governing party primed for payback. Moreover, truly lasting change is usually a product of bipartisan efforts.

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Finally, successful capitalists often have superhuman levels of optimism. The upside of such an outlook can be huge, and there is nothing wrong with this. If they fail, they simply lose money and distress their investors, who knowingly took on the risk. But public responsibility requires an appreciation for life’s tragic dimension and for the possibility that careless action, combined with bad fortune, can wreck society and millions of lives.

Musk’s reliance on sycophants like Catturd seems related to his overwhelming optimism. There’s little in his past to indicate he has ever sought out people who challenge him intellectually. Again, this trait may not matter in business, where so much depends on taking innovations that exist and bringing them to market. Drive and the ability to inspire a team can be what make the difference between success and failure.

But again, public life is different. Foolish wars are often started because leaders think they’re going to be easy — think George W. Bush’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Say what you will about communist regimes, one thing they have never lacked is optimism about how their plans will turn out.

To be sure, this analysis doesn’t explain everything about Musk’s recent behavior. There may be other dimensions. I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022, whether it was from drug use, social-media addiction, a combination of both, or something else. It’s possible that all his business ventures begin to fail from now, which would indicate a more general decline in his cognition and ability to regulate his emotions. Much reporting has been done on Musk’s drug use, which has been serious enough to worry many around him.

Yet if Musk continues to succeed as a businessman while being this dumb about everything related to public policy, he will end up having given us what was by far history’s greatest demonstration of the non-transferability of insight and skill across domains where wise leadership is necessary for human flourishing.

Secrets, lies and half-truths, too, have always been part of government, and under discussion in the press. This was true even in the postwar years where there was a relatively greater culture of public deference towards politicians. It was, after all, the legendary 20th-century Times journalist Louis Heren who wrote: “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’” Yet the act of exposing a politician for lying had its own rules of engagement. The traditional avenue for an allegation was generally via the British press and broadcast media, which exposed it to editorial scrutiny, the attention of lawyers and a significant degree of financial and reputational risk for the accuser. It could even lead to a judicial or public inquiry.

The operations of the British “legacy media” have of course not been an unbroken chain of good behavior, but there has nonetheless been some framework of accountability. Regulatory bodies such as the Press Complaints Commission and, after 2014, the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) rein in press operations, along with libel laws and, when necessary, the police and criminal courts. A number of British tabloid journalists went to jail over the phone-hacking scandal. As a last resort, the public could boycott a publication, and inflict lasting commercial pain: Liverpudlians were so incensed by The Sun’s front-page coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy — a splash egregiously entitled “The Truth” which wrongly blamed fans for the disaster in which 97 people died — that sales in Merseyside remain very low even today.

Yet online, this system for restraining or punishing the most extreme false allegations has now been sharply eroded. The overheating, unchecked rhetoric of rumor and smear is a swelling presence in modern British politics, and there is every likelihood of it intensifying. In recent months, much of it has been directed personally at Keir Starmer, and already it has begun to warp and destabilize British democracy itself.

Some of the elements in this contemporary collapse were introduced decades ago. The rise of celebrity culture in the Nineties and Noughties, along with a plethora of magazines that detailed every supermarket trip and gym visit of a cast of briefly famous characters, attuned the public to a heightened churn of gossip. When newspapers entered the game, most notably with MailOnline’s “Sidebar of Shame”, the primary focus remained on figures from the entertainment industry — but the appetite for gorging on fast-moving trivia had been created.

The advent of social media in the early 2010s then further accelerated the circulation of both hearsay and personal vituperation. This time, self-righteous fury entered the equation. For a period, X became the chief conduit for the policing of acceptable speech, with perceived transgressors singled out as objects of outrage by a “progressive” online mob. The effect could be personally devastating: in one early Twitter storm, in 2015, hysteria was unleashed upon the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Tim Hunt for making some silly passing remarks — which he meant to be humorous — about women in science labs. During that same speech, he had also actively exhorted women to enter science as a career. He was nonetheless asked to resign from his role at University College London, as well as several other research positions. A growing nervousness spread throughout institutions, particularly academia and publishing, that any digression from a progressive-approved line on issues such as sexism, racism or trans rights could be career-threatening.

Then came the 2016 Brexit vote, which sparked a series of political crises that made normal, day-to-day governance extremely difficult. The survivor of Conservative Party dramas emerged as Boris Johnson, perhaps the first prime minister to envision politics — as he had journalism — primarily as a form of entertainment. He kept the British public supplied with an excess of narrative and a paucity of workable policy. Truth and public trust were casualties of his premiership: the “Partygate” revelations appeared to confirm that there was one rule for the political classes and quite another for ordinary citizens. Louis Heren’s maxim had rarely seemed so apposite.

This was the state of the nation when Elon Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in October 2022. The prospect of libel payments didn’t daunt him: by December 2024, he was the first person in the world to have attained an estimated net worth of over $400 billion. From a technical rather than a media background, he had long demonstrated no awareness of any responsibility to restrain his speech or accusations, either on the grounds of accuracy or civic responsibility. Confronted with anyone who offended his mercurial sensibility, his instinct was to trash-talk, escalate and inflame. He had already emerged unscathed after one defamation case in 2019, in which he dubbed Vernon Unsworth, a cave diver who bluntly dismissed Musk’s intervention in a cave rescue plan, “pedo guy”. Unsworth, not surprisingly, sued. But he lost: Musk had accepted that the slur was baseless, but managed to convince the US jury that in South Africa, where he grew up, “pedo guy” was just a regular insult without specific connotations. Unsworth’s lawyer said afterwards that the verdict had sent a signal “that you can make any accusation you want to, as vile as it may be and as untrue as it may be, and somebody can get away with it”. The observation was prophetic.

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Since securing his close alliance with Donald Trump — and the apparent license to do exactly what he wants — Musk has heightened his explicitly political interference in the governance of other countries. In Britain at least, he inherited a user base that was already receptive to gossip, accustomed to intemperate expressions of online rage, and with a post-Covid, post-Johnson collapse of trust in politicians. Musk took things further. By ceasing moderation on X, he has permitted a constant wash of unverified rumor to ebb and flow over Labour politicians, leaving a stain behind even as it recedes. In the aftermath of the horrific Southport killings, the rumor mill began working overtime among Right-wing accounts, grinding “I know something you don’t know” in numerous different styles. In response to some of the false accusations about the killer which helped to trigger riots in the streets and attacks on police officers and mosques, Musk posted: “Civil war is inevitable.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage went so far as to speculate in a video that “the truth is being withheld from us”.

In early January this year, Musk began vociferously tweeting about what he called “the Pakistani-ancestry grooming gangs” scandal in Rotherham, Rochdale and other towns, which stretched from the late Eighties until 2013. His tweets on the topic were mixed up with expressions of support for Reform UK and far-Right activist Tommy Robinson, who is currently in prison for contempt of court. On 3 January, Musk posted: “Starmer was responsible for the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.” This wild statement was not only wholly unfounded, but a brazen inversion of the actual truth. While many in authority do bear culpability, most notably the local police and councils, those most closely involved in the story say that Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, was instrumental in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Andrew Norfolk, the former Times reporter who spent years exposing the crimes, said: “I want to put the record straight on this. It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.”

At this point, one might reasonably have expected British politicians of all parties to unite in some kind of staunch defense of actual evidence and objective truth. Chillingly, that did not happen. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, in tandem with Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, has developed a habit of using Musk’s lines of argument as political ammunition. Not only did she taunt Starmer in the Commons with a petition — boosted by Musk — calling for the Prime Minister to resign, but she and Jenrick both fed the X-based rumor factory by publicly hinting that there were important facts the public was not being told concerning the Southport case.

Those British politicians who are tempted to hitch a ride on Musk’s bandwagon, rather than defend the honest ground of political opposition, might heed the warnings from history. In the early days of the French Revolution, for example, a sudden explosion in newspaper titles and a collapse in regulation created a febrile, sparring press that might almost be seen as an early prototype of X. Between July and December 1789 alone, a total of 250 newspapers sprang up for public consumption, each vigorously competing in the battle for attention. While many were vehicles for astute debate and analysis, they also became mouthpieces for various factions, promoting denunciations against political rivals. Sometimes, claims carried a measure of truth; often, they didn’t. The thickening atmosphere of violence and suspicion began to exert its own dynamic force upon society.

Smears were used as a way of hobbling troublesome rivals. The radical newspaper editor Jean-Paul Marat helped to finish off the career of firebrand activist priest Jacques Roux by falsely alleging that he was a “venal intriguer” whose real name was the Abbé Renaudi. The lawyer and journalist Camille Desmoulins destroyed the reputation of a former friend, Jacques Pierre Brissot, in a scathing pamphlet called “Brissot Unmasked”. When he saw Brissot later being sentenced to death, he reportedly cried in remorse: “My god, I’m sorry for this!” When Maximilien Robespierre backed the Law of 22 Prairial in June 1794, rumor and accusation became the only things needed to secure a conviction, since the suspect’s right to a defense had been discarded. Most of the newspapers which had fed debate had been shut down and silenced, one by one. Marat, Roux, Brissot and Desmoulins were all dead.

The separation of accusation from verifiable evidence, or from any potential restraints upon the accuser, is a dangerous game that rarely ends well. It is even more disturbing when regularly practiced by the US President’s right-hand man. To play along with it for temporary political advantage — helping to dissolve the very principles that have reliably underpinned the British parliamentary and justice system — is to play with fire. The rise of rumor is closely related to the collapse of objective truth, and the slide of political systems from rational persuasion of the electorate to a feverish struggle for domination. Musk’s revolution, one way or another, will devour its children.

To supporters and detractors alike, the Department of Government Efficiency promises to remake the republic. Already, the media is stuffed with lurid stories of teenagers accessing the US Treasury Department’s archaic payment systems, even as swathes of the bureaucracy have already been defunded. Given USAID alone boasted an annual budget of $40 billion, it’s clear change is coming, and that’s before Elon Musk’s outfit gets to the $500 billion of government spending supposedly “unauthorized” by Congress.

Yet if the Right heralds the demise of the pen-pushers, and their liberal opponents fear the rise of an American Caesar, the truth is far less impressive. Whatever the sluggishness of DC’s civil servants, DOGE barely scratches the surface of government spending. And besides, worrying about waste, let alone fantasy projects abroad, ignores the real problem — that US democracy is fundamentally broken, that Congress is incompetent, and that none of the country’s basic challenges, from immigration to jobs, can be solved by its exhausted class of ancien régime failures.

In basic terms, DOGE is Trump’s attempt to assert wider control over the way the government handles its finances. This flies in the face of well-established American norms. The US Constitution clearly states that the federal government is supposed to operate on a division of powers: appropriating money is meant to be the prerogative of the legislature in the form of Congress. It is Congress that decides what the government will spend money on, how much money to spend, and when to spend it. The role of the president is simply to handle implementation.

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Trump and Musk argue that the discretion the president has in implementing the decisions by Congress should include the right to defund government agencies — if, that is, the president deems they’re not doing their job properly. Certainly, that’s the argument Trump’s lawyers are busy making, even as their claims wobble between acceptable political maneuvering and an unconstitutional power grab. Just a few weeks in, Trump and DOGE are unsurprisingly drowning in court challenges, injunctions, and other legal headaches. An increasing number of Trump’s supporters are getting impatient, clamoring for the day when he simply tells the judges to take a hike. As Andrew Jackson once said of a Supreme Court justice: “Marshall has made his decision, now let’s see him enforce it.”

At the surface, this feels like a very serious drama. The world’s richest man, an erratic and unaccountable billionaire, has been set loose on the federal government — boasting undefined powers to wreck the republic. The reality, though, is rather more mundane. To understand this, you must appreciate the scale of DOGE’s sweep. Yes, it’s easy to mock USAID for schemes such as the $70,000 spent on a “DEI musical” in Ireland. Yet when placed next to the full size of the national budget, Musk is conducting the administrative equivalent of scrambling about for change behind the sofa.

After all, the government today runs a deficit close to $2 trillion a year. To fund this deficit, it borrows roughly $10 billion each and every day. It’s important to realize here that while most countries do have some kind of national debt, the size and trajectory of America’s deficit is different. In 2000, the national debt was some $5.7 trillion dollars. In 2017, when Trump first took office, it was $20 trillion. Now, it’s over $36 trillion, putting unsustainable pressure on defense and social welfare costs. Even the most generous accounting of what Musk and Trump have achieved so far boils down to a few hours of US debt. And that’s if they can defend it all in court, and make it stick — and there’s no guarantee of that.

DOGE, in short, is a gimmick. Any meaningful control of US government spending can’t be attained through bureaucratic jiu-jitsu or legal trickery. To really cut the deficit, Trump would either have to literally crown himself king and abolish the Constitution, or else go to Congress and get them to actually do the job the Founding Fathers gave them. But Trump can’t do either of these things. If he simply ruled by decree, a polarized nation would explode into civil war. Yet, as bleak as that sounds, it might actually be more realistic than having Congress appropriate the funds. The legislature can nowadays barely pass the stop-gap, temporary funding measures it uses in lieu of actual budgets to prevent government shutdowns. The last time Congress passed all its required bills on time was in 1996, and over the last 40 years it has only managed to complete the appropriations process a grand total of four times.

Where, then, does that leave the president? In a word, trapped: in a political system collapsing round his ears. To take one practical example, consider the so-called “mass deportations” Trump promised pre-election, with his supporters hoping that once he assumed office, decades of illegal immigration could be upended in an orgy of raids and detentions. To a lot of Trump’s followers, deportation almost seemed like a matter of willpower: as long as you simply wanted it hard enough, anything could be done.

Yet once Trump was finally sworn in, nothing much happened. The administration initially promised to publish the daily number of arrests and deportations. Soon enough, though, people realized that Trump wasn’t doing a much better job than Joe Biden, let alone Barack Obama. The administration’s deportations are hitting a “wall” as the limitations of funding, facility space, and personnel become ever more acute. But the hype must go on: The Guardian even discovered the White House was gaming Google search results to create the illusion of activity, with old press releases given 2025 timestamps.

Eventually, the administration simply stopped talking about mass deportations. The stories that now do come out are mostly bad, and Trumpworld is back to doing what the President himself attacked Biden for: letting arrested illegal immigrants go free because of a lack of detention capacity. That gets to the heart of the problem. Building a detention center is less an act of will, and more about planning and resourcing. But the US government simply does not have the capacity to fulfill these dreams of “mass deportations” in the medium term. That would require additional officers and cells and aircraft, none of which the country ultimately has.

There are other examples here, too, from the Mexico border wall to reshoring jobs. All these projects require the legislature to cooperate, to pass laws and appropriate funds. But, again, it’s an open secret that what the Trump administration most dreads is having to abandon executive orders — which give the appearance of strength — and wrangle enough votes in the House and the Senate. When that happens, Trump’s mirage of strength will vanish.

In theory, of course, he could get Congress to find the cash to build his camps and finish the wall and bring the factories home. That, certainly, is what the legislature is there for. But, at this point, everyone knows Congress has become too broken to do the job, and its failures since 1996 are merely the start. First, consider the question of polarization. With politicians ever more focused on painting their opponents as evil, actually working together has become near-impossible. Then there’s that ballooning deficit. At this point, the threat of Weimar-style hyperinflation, or else a government default, hangs over Congress like the Sword of Damocles, as an increasing share of the federal revenues are gobbled up by debt servicing. At the moment, over 25 cents on every dollar that the federal government makes goes towards paying interest on its debt, leaving precious little for other things.

Add to that a gaggle of special interests — healthcare, for one, uses lobbying and campaign financing to keep state spending high — and America’s ledger remains grimly in the red. Like cutting the deficit, of course, Trump could simply stage a coup, placing a crown on his head and declaring that the wall will be funded and the factories built. But, once more, that’s not actually possible: most of the state apparatus would refuse to go along, to say nothing of how ordinary citizens would react.

Combined with the hopelessness of Congress, Trump’s recent obsession with tariffs, like DOGE, must therefore be seen as a sign of weakness. At first blush, that seems counterintuitive: someone constantly threatening to destroy Canada’s economy seems like someone positively drunk with power. Well, given the Constitution, Trump can’t raise taxes or appropriate money directly — but what he can do is impose tariffs on Ottawa, as long as he fibs and pretends it’s for national security reasons. That is one of the few remaining ways to raise cash now left to the man who claims to be the most powerful on earth.

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The US allies trying to parse Trump’s muddled messaging — “Is he angry about fentanyl? Does he want to annex us?” — are anyway overthinking things. America is broke, politics has frozen, and the system can’t function as the Founders envisioned. No less striking, paralysis is spreading through the whole government apparatus. By all accounts, the Republicans are having an extremely tough time crafting even a temporary spending bill that the party can agree on. A deal with Democrats, it goes without saying, is increasingly unimaginable.

All the while, the deficit is only rising. Even if Congress weren’t such a mess, a massive fiscal crisis is approaching, and Trump seems destined to be president when it arrives. This isn’t exclusively his fault, though he did very little to turn the ship around during his first term in the Oval. Rather, these crises are the result of decades of systemic mismanagement, with bickering politicians and special interests burrowed deep.

Even more worryingly, we’ve been here before. In 1788, France was also drowning in debt, and also had an executive desperate trying to correct the tailspin. No less striking, the Ancien Régime also had a legislature too broken to find solutions — but not so broken it couldn’t spend its time blocking attempts at reform. As for today, future historians won’t remember the squabbles around USAID: that just isn’t the story of our age. What matters instead is a financial system in ruins, a political class out of ideas, and the inevitability of a 1789 moment sooner or later.

Other users have followed suit, with an exodus of accounts from X to Bluesky, a social media platform that resembles in style the pre-Musk Twitter. Taylor Swift fans are flocking in their thousands and former CNN anchor Don Lemon posted a lengthy statement outlining his own reasons for relocating. The official account of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Museum posted a similar statement, which has led to candlelit vigils and a mass outpouring of public grief.

After the Guardian’s announcement, many users were quick to point out that misinformation, far from being the publication’s chief concern, appears to be its speciality. Since Musk has introduced “community notes” to X, journalists who post falsehoods or misleading articles have quickly been corrected. Inevitably, the Guardian has been slapped with community notes on numerous occasions, which might help explain its decision to withdraw. On its website, the Guardian proudly boasts that it “delivers fearless, investigative journalism — giving a voice to the powerless and holding power to account”. But whether its executives admit it or not, the publication has developed a reputation for extreme ideological bias.

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The frequent “community-noting” on X suggests that this reputation is not unfounded. For instance, when the Guardian posted a piece entitled “England riots: how has ‘two-tier policing’ myth become widespread?”, notes were quickly added to provide links to the various articles in which the Guardian has asserted that “two-tier policing” based on race and sexuality is rife. When it published an article entitled “How many more children like Sara Sharif will be killed before smacking is banned?”, the community notes quickly explained that the victim had not merely been smacked, but had suffered extreme beatings and multiple forms of torture. All such hideous acts are, of course, already illegal.

The political theorist Patrick J. Deneen has argued that ideology always fails because once its inherent “falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain”. Those currently scurrying away from X are effectively retreating from the battlefield of ideas envisaged by John Milton in his Areopagitica (1644) in which Truth and Falsehood are seen as antagonists. “Let her and Falsehood grapple,” he wrote, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

I was the subject of the Guardian’s misinformation tactics only the other week. Reporting on a short course on the “woke” movement that I will soon be teaching at the New College of Florida, the Guardian described me as a “controversial British media personality and culture warrior”. It is of course entirely predictable that culture warriors would brand their critics as “culture warriors”, but quite how my consistent defence of liberal values is “controversial” is anyone’s guess.

The article’s author, Jason Wilson, went on to claim that I am guilty of “courting rightwing opinion” because I have been interviewed by Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. I have also appeared on shows hosted by Left-wing commentators such as Hugo Rifkind and George Galloway, but thus far I have not been accused of “courting leftwing opinion”. Perhaps Wilson is simply unfamiliar with the concept of engaging in dialogue with people of opposing views?

Wilson further claimed that the course at the New College of Florida had been “reinstated”, which is odd given that it had never been cancelled in the first place. But the most egregious factual inaccuracy came when Wilson, in pointing out that I have written for Spiked, described the magazine as “hard-right”. Spiked began its existence as Living Marxism, and has consistently supported free speech, the values of democracy and liberal immigration policies, while vehemently opposing all forms of racism and white nationalism. Mislabelling Spiked as “hard-right” is either outright dishonesty or staggering ignorance. It’s what happens when journalistic standards are subordinated to propaganda.

The crowning moment of Wilson’s inadvertent self-satire was when he admitted, in light of my forthcoming course on the “woke movement”, that he had been actively searching for non-profit organisations which might qualify as members. He writes — and I am not making this up — “The Guardian’s search of IRS non-profit records indicate that while there are some 20 nonprofits with the word ‘woke’ in their names, none have reported any income in their most recent filings, and most appear to be inactive.” Wilson genuinely seems to believe that one can only subscribe to an ideology if it is registered with the government and has applied for tax exemptions. This is a species of literal-mindedness so colossal that it must surely be eligible for some kind of award.

On reflection, I got off lightly. A far more egregious example of the Guardian’s mendacity was the controversy over the Wi Spa in Los Angeles in 2021. A video of a woman who calls herself “CubanaAngel” on Instagram was posted online, in which she could be seen complaining to the staff about a naked man in the women’s jacuzzi area. The man in question, Darren Agee Merager, was a registered sex offender with previous convictions for indecent exposure, and it was alleged that the complainant at the Wi Spa had seen him semi-erect. “So it’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section and show his penis around the other women, young little girls — underage — in your spa?” she had said to staff, who defended his right to be there on the grounds of self-identification.

Josephine Bartosch outlined the sequence of events in an article for The Critic. After the video went viral, protests outside the spa were organised by women’s rights campaigners. These were quickly smeared as “far right” and mobbed by so-called “anti-fascist” protesters. The Guardian, having spent years promoting the notion that womanhood is an identity category rather than a biological reality, and having faced allegations of driving female journalists from its staff for their gender-critical views, then produced two articles in quick succession that implied CubanaAngel’s complaints were a hoax. The writers claimed that the incident “provided clear evidence of the links between anti-trans and far-right movements”, while Guardian columnist Owen Jones called the entire incident a “campaign of lies”.

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Even when it emerged that Merager had been charged for indecent exposure at the Wi Spa, the Guardian continued to conflate the female protesters with the far-Right agitators who had turned up to exploit the situation. As Bartosch puts it, “For all the Guardian’s handwringing about #metoo, when it comes to believing the women who complained about Merager’s crime, rather than ‘giving a voice to the powerless’ they pretended his victims didn’t exist. Women like CubanaAngel are ideological inconveniences.”

The combination of Musk’s successful Twitter bid and a forthcoming second term for Donald Trump has curdled many once sensible minds. Those who were comfortable with the echo chamber that Twitter had formerly established, where users were routinely banned for pointing out that no human being has ever changed sex, are now looking for an alternative. It is the psychological equivalent of the “safe space” mentality, one which led Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy to establish a “Self-Care Suite” after Trump’s victory. Here students could isolate themselves and process their trauma by playing with Lego, drawing with crayons, and bingeing on milk and cookies.

And now we have the digital milk and cookies of Bluesky, where users can be shielded from the disorientation that occurs where plurality of opinion is permitted. Such online echo chambers are of course largely to blame for the escalation of political tribalism that we have seen in recent years, and also for the sense of shock that many experience when elections don’t go their way. While it is true that Musk has reinstated accounts on X that post some genuinely objectionable material, this is the price one pays for an open marketplace of ideas.

This desire to avoid any challenges to one’s ideological certainties is becoming more widespread, and there is a sense in which we are entering a new phase in the culture war. I am not celebrating the departure of activists to Bluesky, because I would rather hear their views and see them participate in these important debates. By insulating themselves from criticism, and seeking platforms where their misrepresentations will not be flagged, the Guardian and its ilk are doing themselves no favours. If they are serious about their goals, they should reconsider their resolution to speak only to those who will unquestioningly cheer them on. Those who withdraw from the debate stand no chance of winning it.

The Washington Post has called it the “bro-ification” of Zuckerberg, drawing attention to his new UFC fighter’s physique and curly Gen Z-like hairstyle. In keeping with his claim to be “done with politics”, most of his recent antics have been largely apolitical. But make no mistake: without openly declaring support for the Republican candidate, he has dropped hints as to which side of the party divide Meta is trending. He has praised Trump as a “badass” after his near-brush with martyrdom, expressed regret at toeing the Biden Administration’s line on content moderation, and, recently, started to ban accounts that track the private jets of billionaires like himself, the former president, and Musk. Gone is the soft-spoken computer nerd with close-cropped hair as depicted in 2010’s The Social Network, replaced with a noticeably more flamboyant incarnation.

This repositioning only makes sense for Meta, as it does for Silicon Valley as a whole. The last decade’s liberal orthodoxy saw social media as a benign tool to foster democracy and progressive values at home and abroad, in the context of events such as the 2008 “Facebook” election and popular uprisings across the Middle East. This was a time when Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey were routinely feted at receptions in Obama’s White House. Then came the epoch-shattering election of 2016 in which Facebook played a most conspicuous part. What followed was a scandal-tainted half-decade in which Zuckerberg’s firm was blamed for enabling misinformation, conspiracy theories, and foreign interference. After being hauled before Congress to answer for these, Meta’s founder saw the writing on the wall: his (and the tech world’s) alliance with the reigning establishment was effectively over.

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The bug in Sam Altman's industrial revolution

By Michael Cuenco

A 2020 email from Zuckerberg’s mentor and Facebook angel investor, Peter Thiel, counselled him to consider a deeper cultural break with the system: no longer should he be “a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act”. The advice made sense. After all, the current climate now favours alignment between the Right’s embrace of free speech and laissez-faire online — sharing a common enemy in the establishment’s drive to combat disinformation (seen by many as scarcely-veiled censorship).

But both instances of Zuckerberg’s political signalling — whether towards Hope-and-Change Democrats once upon a time or MAGA Republicans today — arguably had less to do with ideological principles and more to do with raw interests: or what would allow the company to realise its aim of gaining mastery over “the future of human communications”. So far, this narrative may allow Zuckerberg (and the other tech billionaires) to claim that it’s the other side that’s changed and that he, in fact, has remained true to the liberatory promise and idealism of Facebook’s early days. When he borrows from Caesar to say Aut Zuck Aut Nihil or “All Zuck or All Nothing”, he seems to be uttering a liberationist promise, telling aspiring founders: follow Zuck and you, too, can be a Caesar!

However, Meta’s recent policy decisions to use personal data to feed algorithms and train generative AI point to the real heart of the tech giant’s project. Meta’s advertising speaks of self-expression even as the resulting output ruthlessly invalidates those very things. Automating the production of creative work and instrumentalising users’ most intimate digital footprints, while causing untold damage on people’s mental health — that doesn’t seem to be all in the name of fostering genuine connections. Children who grew up on Facebook and Instagram now report having stunted personal development. A federal child safety case against Meta and Senate hearings earlier this year in which Zuckerberg apologised to parents (without having to change much of his corporate policy) are cases in point.

Unlike the partisan Russia-gate charges, Zuckerberg’s deleterious impact in this case cuts across political lines, alienating Americans from each other regardless of party — all while Meta turns in handsome profits.

If Silicon Valley does succeed in hijacking the Republican Party as it did the Democrats a decade ago, and if a future GOP administration manages to give the moguls their desired regulatory regime, will it really represent a moment of liberation for mankind? The tech discourse has tipped over from mere libertarianism toward something far more grandiose and sinister, namely accelerationism, predicting (and encouraging) the agglomeration of all intelligence into a post-human singularity.

The race to see who will bring about — and therefore wield the power of — such a singularity is what motivates the moguls. And Zuckerberg, though less vocal in articulating this messianic ambition than say Musk or Open AI’s Sam Altman, is no exception. It tracks with the worldview of the Valley’s intellectual guru Thiel, who endorses monopoly as the natural, healthy endpoint of all competition, which he says “is for losers”. In light of this, Zuckerberg’s identification with Caesar takes on a different meaning. It becomes less about individual emancipation and more about individual submission to a single fount of technological power and authority. That’s the thing about Caesars (and monopolies), there can only really be one.

There is, therefore, something more significant at stake than whether Republicans or Democrats get to benefit from the largesse of Silicon Valley. Its continuing domination over society heralds nothing less than a reckoning over the role and agency of human beings in a world of ceaseless technological saturation and collectivisation.

Conscientious voices across the Right and Left have raised many compelling arguments against the broader social ills caused by Meta’s platforms. Rather than taking a side in the reductive and overly partisan fight between free speech maximalists and anti-disinformation crusaders, opposition to Zuckerberg’s empire-building could instead rally around a more capacious standard, namely the common defence of our humanity against the brazen accelerationist schemes imposed by Meta and the other tech titans. Just as the American revolutionaries of 1776 likened George III to Caesar (“is not Britain to America what Caesar was to Rome”), so too should today’s citizenry see Zuckerberg and his fellow moguls as the agents of a great dehumanising tyranny. Against this would-be Caesar of the algorithm, their own refrain could be: Aut Homo Aut Nihil or “All Human or All Nothing”.

“More or less, more or less,” said Trump, a little timidly.

It could have been any eager kid explaining a new technology to someone almost four times his age, but what Trump said next encapsulated so much of what he has brought to American politics. “It’s the new wave,” he said, to which Ross enthusiastically agreed.

Trump’s podcast blitz over the last few months — on Kick with Ross, on X with Elon Musk, on YouTube with Lex Fridman and Theo Von, and most recently on Ben Shapiro’s podcast — showcased his ability to adapt to new media forms. This started in the Nineties, when he rose to political prominence as a regular guest on talk radio. He then became a nationwide celebrity through his starring role on reality TV’s The Apprentice. He ran for president in 2016 largely through his Twitter account and, when that was disabled in 2021, switched to his own social media platform, Truth Social. His 2024 campaign strategy hinges on his ability to reach low-information voters who wouldn’t normally pay attention to politics. (Von is a comedian and Ross an online gamer.) From the standpoint of communications, his approach has been astonishingly successful and may well return him to the White House. Really, the entire Trump phenomenon is just media studies — but why, with Kamala Harris only just appearing podcasts now, have his political opponents been so slow to learn its lessons?

Every time I try to understand our era, I find myself — like the kind of person who pulls out their pocket Bible on any occasion to check the relevant verse — reaching for Martin Gurri’s 2014 text, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri, a former CIA analyst turned media theorist, outlined the dominant dynamic of our time: it is “an episode in the primordial contest between Centre and Border” but with a new array of weapons made available to the Border. “Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest,” he wrote.

In the past, the Border had to make do with penny presses, alternative weeklies, late-night radio stations or, simply, the power of “word-of-mouth”. But, with the public-to-public traffic of social media, the Border developed an ability to communicate with itself at a staggering volume and to change the underlying dynamics of political discourse. For Gurri, 2012 was the watershed year, in which the two-way traffic of social media became a social force of its own, eclipsing the standard establishment media organs and creating an entirely different communicative discourse that was ripe for political exploitation. Gurri self-published The Revolt of the Public and the book passed largely unnoticed, but after Trump’s 2016 victory Gurri’s now-dug-up thesis was the only explanation that really fit.

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The poetic genius of Truth Social

By Malcom Kyeyune

Trump had said as much in a 2013 meeting with Republican supporters — a meeting reported on years later by Politico — in which he laid out his playbook for his longshot presidential campaign. “I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me,” Trump said. When told by an attendee that the only possible way to run was through lavish spending on paid advertisements, Trump said, “I think you’re wrong” — he would reach a “mass audience” entirely through the new possibilities afforded by earned media.

Initially denied the obvious entry points to airtime in his presidential run — he lacked endorsements and funding, and was far behind rivals like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker in access to conservative media — Trump made adroit use of the new technology. Twitter seemed juvenile for a presidential candidate — nobody else was really using it — but it allowed Trump both to make himself relatable and to take his case directly to voters. He became the protagonist of the election, and, when the establishment did what it could to sideline him, he turned the establishment into the foil of his story, attacking Megyn Kelly for her coverage of him.

Trump’s use of Twitter (and Truth Social) is, of course, well known. What’s vastly underappreciated, though, is the extent to which he’s consistently been ahead of his political rivals when it comes to social media and been able to use that playbook for other forms of new media. As a centrepiece of his 2024 campaign, Trump has, as The New York Times somewhat disparagingly put it, “embarked on a cavalcade of interviews”, appearing on podcasts, live streams, and basically any form of new media he can access.

That really shouldn’t be such a big deal. 360 million people use Twitter. 540 million people listen to podcasts. The only ones who don’t, it seems, are the grandees of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden never made effective use of social media — up until Biden’s announcement of not seeking a second term — and, even Kamala Harris, who is closer in age to digital nativity, has been a less-than-enthusiastic adopter. Meanwhile, Trump’s streamed conversations over the last month brought somewhere on the order of 100 million views.

In that same time period, when Trump was embarked on his “calvacade”, Harris made one — count it — large-audience media appearance, in front of the friendly audience of CNN. She appeared in person at a large number of rallies and was also interviewed by comedian Rickey Smiley, an ABC affiliate, and a Phoenix Univision station — none of those with anything like the reach of the podcasters Trump appeared with. The YouTube stream of the Rickey Smiley interview, for instance, has attracted a pitiful 7,000 views. Her paid ads have been saturating the airwaves, she can rely on near-universal support from establishment print media and favourable coverage from network TV, with the exception of Fox. She has an army of surrogates pushing out the campaign’s messages across a variety of media sources. And her debate performance, unlike Trump’s, only proves her confidence with established media forms.

The problem is that none of this messaging takes advantage of the unique resources of new media. New media — whether podcasts or social media — is all about casual, easygoing, personality-driven conversation. In Gurri’s terms, what is happening is that the entire society is going through an emperor-has-no-clothes realisation. The immediacy of digital resources makes social media users — who are also voters — highly sceptical of anybody who over-ceremoniously cloaks themselves in the mantle of authority. In the Twitter era, everyone — the world’s richest man, world leaders, sports stars, celebrities, whatever — is reduced in the end to a common denominator: they are individuals sitting behind a device and tapping into it, just like anybody else. From the perspective of “authority”, that’s something close to an existential threat — a difficulty in reestablishing the lineaments of majesty. But, from the perspective of a democratic politician who relies on popularity and relatability for legitimacy, it should be a golden opportunity. And, for every day that Harris doesn’t appear on general-interest podcasts, she is, essentially, leaving votes on the table. The Harris campaign seems finally, belatedly, to be recognising what should have been obvious a month ago, with Harris appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and with the campaign announcing a media blitz which included an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But it may be already be too late. For every day that Harris hasn’t made a new media appearance, she has missed a chance to set the narrative for the campaign.

There is nothing whatsoever that Trump does that digital media users can’t do as well. Anybody under 40 or so can do it in their sleep. But the Democratic Party still hasn’t managed a generational handoff from the Clinton era. They both don’t recognise the power of the new modes of communication and don’t know how to exploit it. Those who do — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have a vast leg-up compared with the rest of the party. And, really, that is the entire explanation of the AOC phenomenon. She tweets like a pro, she’s relatable, and she makes herself the protagonist of her story. It’s not a hard playbook to emulate, but you need to be digital media-conversant to emulate it.

Instead, though, the Dems have moved in the other direction. They have come to rely on their stranglehold over traditional media. They have newspapers, network TV, public radio. They have a war chest that gives them an advantage in all traditional ad markets. And none of that is to be underestimated — that arsenal of communicative technology has enabled them to make inroads particularly with seniors, a traditionally Republican bloc.

What the Democrats, like some red-coated, overly regimented colonial army, fail to recognise, however, is that this is asymmetrical warfare. None of their preferred modes of communication make inroads into the younger or low-information voters who are, at this stage, most likely to swing the election. The Republicans already have talk radio and Fox-world. Through Trump’s media dexterity, they have done very well in social media and, now, on podcasts.

When we assess the results of this election, what we likely will assess isn’t issues or even messaging but modalities of communication. The parties have swerved into very different communications bubbles. This has been the case at least since the era of media revolutionary Rush Limbaugh and talk radio’s shift towards conservatism, while print media and network television tended to skew more liberal. But now, with media ever-more-siloed, those distinctions are only exacerbated across a variety of forms. What the Democrats are still failing to get through their heads is that it’s the newer, more dynamic communications technologies where the more effective persuasion can take place — and which require an aggressive, personable, let-it-all-hang-out approach. Harris should be more than able to hold her own in those formats. But if she doesn’t visit them, she’ll effectively be passing over undecided votes — and those votes will cost her the election.

To the presumed horror of the English tourist board, Elon Musk has joined in, taking a break from trying to set off nuclear bombs on Mars by putting a metaphorical one under the discourse here instead. According to him, the UK is now beset by “two-tier justice” and “civil war is inevitable”. Over the past fortnight, he has sent out a stream of posts and memes, deriding various attempts by Starmer and his Director of Public Prosecutions to strike fear into the hearts of would-be miscreants, by telling them of the grave consequences they face for carrying out riots or inciting them online.

And it is the latter that has got Musk especially worked up. Communications offences in UK law have long included sending “grossly offensive” and “indecent” messages, as well as obscene and threatening ones. Last year’s Online Safety Act also criminalised knowingly false messages intended to cause “non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience” without “reasonable excuse”. Meanwhile, the Criminal Justice Act generally requires that racial or religious hostility be treated as aggravating factors in criminal conviction, resulting in heavier sentences than otherwise. Pleading guilty also means the decision can be faster than when guilt has to be established at a trial.

Accordingly, there have been some swift and draconian-looking judicial decisions over the past few days for Musk to highlight for his avid followers, contrasting them with apparently lenient criminal cases involving immigrants to the UK. “It’s 2030 in the UK, & you’re being executed for posting a meme…” goes one typically restrained post. Retweets have included memes merging the British police with the SS, and one jokily showing Starmer as a Nazi — a bit unfair when you remember it was the Conservatives who brought in the Online Safety Act in the first place.

Another meme, comparing a photo of an extremely blonde woman surrounded by black men in their underwear with another of a white policeman in the midst of Muslim community leaders, went out with the words: “Found this pic of the British justice system.” Immediately underneath, he wrote: “This meme could get you 3 years in prison in the UK (actually)”. One assumes Musk is partly worried about his business model: also according to the Online Safety Act, Ofcom now has the power to fine him 10% of a year’s worth of “qualifying worldwide revenue” for what users get up to on X.

Soberly raised, there are various angles one could use to attack the moral legitimacy of giving someone three months in prison, say, for the use of two emojis on Facebook — a brown face next to a gun — or for writing “blow the mosque up with the adults in it” in an online community group. You could question the use of aggravating factors in sentencing about speech. You could argue that illegality should depend on establishing a causal link between a particular post and an instance of violent unrest, rather than just positing a vague counterfactual. Many racist posts on social media during times of rioting are caused by the riots rather than the other way round, yet the system doesn’t reflect this.

Alternatively, you could argue that the fast-paced, vaguely dispersed, algorithm-triggered and impulsive nature of most social media messaging means it often doesn’t meet the bar for traditional notions of intentional harm or threat. Hitting two emojis and pressing “send” into the universe looks importantly different in this respect, say, to writing a letter, addressing it to someone, and putting a stamp on it. But Musk doesn’t seem interested in discussing such complicated matters, preferring instead to flex what his former spouse Talulah Riley calls his “naughty Twitter fingers” instead.

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Britain's Right is just as weird

By Kathleen Stock

It’s not that the vision of the UK being projected around the world at the moment has no truth behind it. As Carl Jung said of projections generally: “It frequently happens that the object offers a hook to the projection, and even lures it out.” The UK unambiguously has two-tier policing, at least in one sense: it has aggravated offences and non-aggravated ones. We also have a judicial system focused on maintaining public order and so likely to engage in example-setting, and politicians across the board who agree that visibly harsh sentences have a generally deterrent effect.

After a decade of institutionally adopted white guilt in many quarters, it is indeed possible that sometimes the judiciary punishes white offenders disproportionately relative to other ethnicities for the very same crimes — though cherry-picking individual decisions to compare them, as Musk and others are doing, is a terrible way to establish this as true. What does seem clear is that elements of the establishment are markedly more at ease castigating white working-class people than non-white ethnic groups, including where speech inciting racial and religious violence is concerned.

For instance, pro-Palestinian marches last year, though mainly peaceful and engaged in legitimate political protest, included instances of nakedly antisemitic speech that provoked few outraged op-eds on the Left about harms to British Jews. But then again, some subsequently overbearing criminal prosecutions prompted few objections from the normally free-speech-loving Right either, with many of them exaggeratedly describing the protests in their entirety as “hate marches”. People often say they want neutrality, but it’s tempting to conclude they just want a system that doesn’t enable their political enemies to succeed — and that’s not the same thing.

And the same apparently applies to Musk too. He didn’t seem such a big fan of free speech when his employee Martin Tripp spoke to a journalist about environmentally and financially damaging waste-management practices at the Tesla plant in 2018. Back then, Musk accused Tripp of “sabotage” and personally instructed others to hack his phone and emails, while a Tesla spokesman falsely claimed that Tripp was intending to come to the factory to commit a mass shooting.

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Equally, although the billionaire has this week complained on X about British judges sending citizens to prison for fighting the police, in his conversation with Donald Trump on Monday, he decried various cases in the US where insufficiently substantial sentences had been handed down for attacking cops. He also seemed to understand the principle of general deterrence, at least by broad analogy: for in the same conversation, he said: “It’s worth emphasising to listeners the immense importance of whether the United States President is intimidating or not intimidating, and how much that matters to global security… because there’s some real tough characters out there.”

But while Musk is busy conjuring exaggerated phantasms of Britain, what fantasies are we projecting upon him? Progressives who once lauded him as an ecological revolutionary, marshalling tech to save humanity, now see him as a pantomime villain who must be stopped at all costs. This week, for instance, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf called him “one of the most dangerous men on the planet” responsible for “the most wicked evil possible” in amplifying “far-Right white supremacist ideology”. As usual, this sort of hyperbolic overstatement produces defensive overcompensation from the Right, with some conjuring up a noble warrior saving liberal values and the West, one shitpost at a time. No mention tends to be made of the way his platform’s algorithms continue to monetise polarisation and forever culture wars on a scale of which Putin would be proud.

In the three-part BBC documentary broadcast about him last year, his evidently affectionate ex-wife Riley was more realistic, recalling how financial success made a sudden difference to how people responded to Musk: “Elon went from being ridiculed, to suddenly his word was gospel.” Now, she reported, “everyone listens to everything he says… I’ve had people say to me ‘oh I met Elon and I could tell he was a genius because he seemed a bit distracted and he was clearly thinking great things’, and I’d be thinking, really? He probably just didn’t like you or he was probably a bit bored.”

The unpalatable truth for those who would idolise Musk is that he’s as limited, self-interested, and hypocritical as the rest of us. The unpalatable truth for those who demonise him is that they are too. In fact, we are all “two-tier”, though it would be good if our justice system was not. Reality will always outstrip Manichean projections, whether about the world’s richest man or the state of the UK.

Until McSweeney arrived, the council had been fighting the problem by publishing “rebuttal” books for the residents. Facts and figures were being churned out to debunk the idea that the estates of Barking were getting dirtier and dangerous. In fact, according to the pamphlets, they were actually clean and tidy. The trouble was, no one took any notice. The leaflets were binned; the facts and figures disregarded. The BNP, meanwhile, was loudly blaming the state of the place on immigrants and their accusations had a receptive audience.

McSweeney knew the political response needed to change. The residents were right that their estates had deteriorated, but they were wrong about the immigrants — the council was to blame. The only way to defeat the BNP’s racism, therefore, was to change the leadership. It wasn’t just a question of what was being said but who was saying it, McSweeney concluded.

Influential in McSweeney’s strategy about how to tackle the BNP was the book by American behavioural economist Cass Sunstein, On Rumours: How falsehoods spread, Why we believe them, What can be done. “Terrible events produce outrage,” Sunstein writes, “and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumours that justify their emotional states.”

It’s unsettling reading the book in the wake of the riots, which were inflamed by false rumours about the horrific murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class. Shortly after the attack, social media accounts began spreading speculation that the murder was a muslim immigrant who arrived illegally. As Sunstein spells out, some rumours are particularly powerful because they both rationalise the incomprehensible and relieve our “primary emotional urges” of horror and fury by offering an explanation for why we feel as we do.

The inexplicable horror of the knifing of those children as they danced with their friends is so hard to reckon with that the urge to find something to explain it is understandably overwhelming. It is not only the far Right who are susceptible to rumours at such a moment, we all are. It’s just that different groups believe different rumours.

We are particularly vulnerable today because rumours now “cascade” through our social media networks at vast speed, building momentum as they circulate. Sunstein’s book describes the danger of such cascading rumours, which turn private rage into public violence. “When we are individually inclined to believe that unfairness has occurred, our discussion will intensify our beliefs and make us very angry,” he writes.

But the problem for those in power right now is that, as Sunstein points out, there are few obvious lessons for what to do. Simply denying a rumour, for example, often has the effect of making people believe the rumour even more intensely. Imagine a politician calling a press conference to say there is no need to worry about the safety of pork sausages. Most people’s natural reaction would be to assume there must in fact be a problem — otherwise why the fuss?

The important point that Sunstein stresses throughout, however, is that false rumours only tend to take hold when they align with “prior convictions”. This means that the lie circulating about the Southport murderer’s background was not actually the most important trigger for these riots — that would be the rioters’ prior beliefs.

The irony here, then, is that the understandable desire to blame Elon Musk or Tommy Robinson for fanning the flames comes from an emotional place located close to that original desire to find a wider explanation for the knife attack. To blame Musk or even Vladimir Putin “rationalises and relieves” the fears many of us now feel about the scenes of disorder we’ve witnessed. For the majority of Britons who are appalled at the violence, the story that it is somebody else’s fault is an attractive explanation, especially if the strings are being pulled from abroad. This also helps explain why there are ever more instances of people not only blaming bad billionaires and thuggish individuals but also “the Zionists”. For these antisemites, no amount of explanation, fact-checks or lectures will convince them that the riots are not part of some wider sinister plot.

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By Tom McTague

And people will do almost anything not to change their already-held beliefs. “A great deal of work demonstrates that people try to reduce cognitive dissonance by denying claims that contradict their deepest beliefs,” as Sunstein puts it. This is just as true for those he calls “the sensibles” as “the unreasonables”. For the unreasonables, the extraordinary turnout for the anti-fascist marches on Wednesday will not disabuse them of their core belief that they are in the silent majority. For the sensibles, meanwhile, the cognitive dissonance lies in dealing with what my colleague Aris Roussinos called the “ethnic conflict” evident in some of the rioting.

Similarly, the prior beliefs of the rioters help to explain why the discredited initial rumour about the attacker’s background has been so quickly replaced by a second grievance: the apparent “two-tier” justice in the UK. As this accusation has risen in prominence, Keir Starmer has sought to head it off. And yet, just as Sunstein describes, the fact that Starmer has denied the charge has only served to confirm it for many people.

The danger for the Government today is that it repeats the mistakes of Barking and Dagenham Borough Council by doubling down in its attempt to disprove people’s beliefs with facts and figures. Sunstein shows that even exposing people to “balanced information” doesn’t work and in fact only makes people more committed to their original belief.

To illustrate his point, he cites a study involving opinions on the death penalty. “After reading the opposing studies, both sides reported that their beliefs had shifted toward a stronger commitment to what they thought before they had done so.” In other words, we are now likely to see a hardening of attitudes in the UK among on the one side, those who believe multiculturalism is some kind of threat and on the other those who believe it is those who oppose multiculturalism who are the threat.

As McSweeney understood back when he was in Barking, the key thing is not what is being said, but who is saying it. The fact that Starmer has already been labelled “two-tier Keir” and — according to polls — is not thought to have handled this crisis well, should alarm the Government. The danger is not that the rioters have stopped listening to him — after all, they are criminals and should be in jail. The danger is that a much wider cohort of people stops listening to him.

The most important lesson McSweeney took away from Barking, though, and the most difficult for Starmer, is to prove that the state works for everyone, even when there’s no money. It’s a far bigger task than defeating the BNP in Barking.

Musk’s revelation came shortly after Thierry Breton, the EU’s censorship czar, announced the Commission’s preliminary findings that X’s new “blue check” verification system was in violation of the DSA. Given that anyone can now subscribe and obtain a “verified status” — unlike before Musk when the platform arbitrarily decided who was worthy of the coveted blue check — this, he stated, undermines users’ ability to make informed decisions about account authenticity.

The Commission also accused X of “fail[ing] to provide access to its public data to researchers”, as mandated by the DSA. It urged the company to address such breaches or face a fine up to 6% of its total worldwide annual turnover, which was approximately $3.4 billion in 2023. Failure to comply could result in X being banned from operating in the EU altogether.

The line trotted out by the Commission is that this all about “transparency” and protecting users from deception and disinformation. But the truth, as Musk suggests, is that this is really about the EU’s desire — and the DSA’s ultimate goal — to secretly control the online narrative. So much for transparency.

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The great Brussels stitch-up

By Thomas Fazi

This mission to censor has been backed up by Mike Benz, a former Trump official and cybersecurity expert who has alleged that “granting researchers access to X’s public data” isn’t quite as benign as it sounds. In fact, it’s a cover for the EU’s attempt to “use the DSA to force X to restaff the censorship squad fired when Elon took over”. Elon got rid of the team because, as the Twitter Files revealed, their sole purpose was to act upon government requests for censorship. Hence Benz’s claim that these “researchers” are actually “political operatives”. Musk reposted Benz’s analysis with one word of comment — “Exactly” — adding that if the EU pursues an enforcement action against X, he will take them to court.

The language and accusations are nothing new. The ground rules for this battle were laid the moment Musk took over Twitter and tweeted “the bird is freed”. Breton immediately replied: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” with a reference to the DSA, which had been officially signed into law that same month.

Even though Musk initially pledged to “respect the future European regulation”, the honeymoon didn’t last long. In May 2023, he pulled out of the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, which started out voluntary but was subsequently made de facto legally binding under the DSA. This triggered an investigation, in December, into whether the platform violated the DSA in areas such as “risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers”. Last week it concluded that it did, hence the latest showdown.

It’s hard to see how Musk can win this battle. Especially considering that his pro-free speech stance hasn’t just put him toe-to-toe with the EU, but also with a number of other governments around the world. Musk has attacked “takedown” requests in Brazil, India, Australia and Turkey and has even challenged some of these demands through national courts. In almost every case, however, the platform has ended up complying with governments’ requests. Indeed, a report from last year showed that under Musk, X had approved more than 80% of censorship requests from governments.

So even as Musk publicly challenges the EU, he is removing posts — as many X users have lamented — because of non-compliance with the DSA. On 10 October, for example, days after Hamas’s attack, Breton issued a warning to Musk over alleged “disinformation”; X responded by immediately removing or flagging tens of thousands of pieces of content.

Accusing Musk of hypocrisy, however, would be to miss the point. Complying with these requests is often the only way that the company can continue to operate — and at least Musk, unlike the other major platform owners, has brought online censorship into the open. The publication of the groundbreaking Twitter Files, remember, revealed the shocking level of collusion between the US administration and social media companies.

More to the point, though, X, despite the censorship, remains the only platform where information is allowed to flow relatively freely. Indeed, it remains the single biggest threat to the establishment’s desire for full-spectrum information control — and that is why they are coming down on it so hard. But one man, no matter how rich or powerful, cannot be expected to single-handedly stand up to some of the most powerful governments in the world — let alone to the European Union, the world’s most influential supranational institution.

There’s also another factor to consider. The global attack on free speech isn’t just the whim of out-of-control, power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a systemic problem that relates to the structural decay of liberal-democratic institutions, particularly in the West. As our societies degenerate into de facto oligarchies controlled by increasingly delegitimised political-economic elites, this manipulation of public opinion — not only through propaganda delivered via traditional mass media channels but also, increasingly, by policing and micromanaging the public conversation taking place on social media platforms — has come to be seen as an imperative for keeping the status quo safe from the threat of democracy. This is compounded by the growing militarisation of the geopolitical context, which requires an even more compliant populace given its political and economic consequences.

It’s no coincidence that the censorship-industrial complex started emerging in the second half of the 2010s. This was the time when the West was rocked by an unprecedented “populist” backlash against globalisation and the neoliberal order — Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests, and the rise of Eurosceptic parties and movements across Europe.

It was also when the path of future confrontation with Russia was being laid in Ukraine — and when Nato started developing the hybrid or cognitive warfare doctrine, which conceptualises the management of Western public opinion as an integral part of warfare. As Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s former Secretary General, put it in 2019: “Nato must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the first mass deployment of online censorship, bought Western elites some time. But not for long. Today, a “populist” backlash is once again engulfing the West: Right-populist parties are surging across Europe, and Trump is on course to winning the next US election. Meanwhile, escalating tensions in Ukraine have detonated into a no-longer-so-proxy war between Nato and Russia. From the perspective of Western elites, this all calls for a doubling down on the censorship regime, with a major difference: online censorship used to occur behind closed doors, extra-legally and in a context of plausible deniability of behalf of governments; today it is being institutionalised and constitutionalised through tools such as the Digital Services.

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Elites conveniently justify their censorship in two ways: by constantly expanding the scope of “hate speech” to cover almost anything; and, more ominously, by rebranding critical opinions, especially on foreign policy and geopolitical matters, as “disinformation” or examples of foreign interference. It’s no coincidence that the European Commission’s first-ever DSA report was entirely focused on the question of “Russian disinformation”. Tellingly, the report puts “Kremlin-aligned accounts” — potentially any account that is critical of Nato — almost on the same plane as accounts that are connected or associated with the Russian state.

This deliberate blurring of the line between illegal and harmful speech, and between critical opinion and foreign propaganda, is central to the censorship regime, as it effectively allows EU elites to determine what hundreds of millions of Europeans can or cannot say and read online. It’s state-sanctioned censorship, plain and simple. And it should come as no surprise that the greatest threat to free speech today comes from the EU: the bloc’s entire institutional edifice, after all, is geared towards constraining democracy, by transferring power to unaccountable elites largely insulated from the demos. In turn, the top-down imposition of unpopular policies on the people of Europe inevitably engenders opposition, which then requires the suppression of free speech to counter the backlash. It’s a vicious feedback loop.

This sort of mass censorship should really be understood as a desperate oligarchy’s last line of defence — and no one encapsulates this oligarchy better than Breton himself, a former businessman and military and intelligence contractor turned technocrat-in-chief. If this were a movie, one couldn’t imagine a better choice than him as the arch-enemy of the populist rabble rouser Musk. But it isn’t a movie. This is a struggle that will define the future of democracy for years to come. And if we expect Musk to fight for the rest of us, we’ve already lost.

Of course, this didn’t actually happen, because people don’t talk like that in real life. Many do, however, engage in this way on social media, typically towards total strangers. This week I’ve been trending on X (or Twitter, as I stubbornly still call it) following a mass pile-on instigated by several gender-critical activists. This particular bombardment resulted in my decision to temporarily deactivate my Twitter account, to the glee of my critics and transactivists alike.

Having since been contacted by friends within the gender-critical movement, I have learned that many of them are exasperated by the “intolerant elements” within their community who seek to destroy anyone who does not conform to every single aspect of their worldview, even if it means that the cause is fatally undermined. They describe a “civil war” being waged by a small but intimidating minority who maintain that any slight point of disagreement is a form of heresy, that language has the capacity to shape reality, and that those found guilty of wrongspeak ought to be publicly shamed and alienated. Remind you of anyone?

This civil war within the gender-critical movement is, of course, a boon to the high priests of gender identity, those authoritarians who have been conducting a frighteningly effective campaign to reorganise society around the metaphysical belief that “gender” should take priority over sex when it comes to spaces, sports and human rights. Given that the stakes are so high, not least for women, children, and gay people, it might be worth considering what this in-fighting is all about and how it might be avoided in the future. In order to do this, I should first explain the background to this week’s furore.

I host a weekly show on GB News called Free Speech Nation, which explores all aspects of the culture wars and has a particular emphasis on the ongoing attacks on women’s rights in the name of “progress”. Even before last Sunday’s show had aired, I was contacted by regular viewers who had taken issue with me for inviting the trans writer and teacher Debbie Hayton to appear for an interview. As an admitted autogynephile — a heterosexual man who presents as a woman out of an erotic attraction to himself — Hayton is something of a hate figure for many in the movement. By conducting this interview, I was deemed guilty of “enabling” and “promoting perversion”, in spite of Hayton’s gender-critical beliefs.

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Further context is required here. The day before my show, a profile appeared in The Times in which the interviewer, Janice Turner, referred to Hayton with female pronouns. Turner clarified her reasoning in a tweet: “The issue of pronouns is becoming absolutist on BOTH sides. Stonewall demands even bearded rapists be called “she”, GC ultras refuse to call any trans woman “she”. I reject both positions. I never call male sex offenders she/her. But I will be courteous to those who respect women.”

For many, the issue of pronouns has become a red line in the gender wars, and Turner’s efforts at compromise are seen not only as wrongheaded, but traitorous. It is widely held that trans-identifying individuals must never be described as anything other than their true biological sex, and cries of “hold the line” are often heard. Not only are the likes of Turner demonised for attempting to find a middle ground, but they are also told that they have been “groomed” by the men who are insisting that other people’s language must be modified in deference to their sense of self.

This tactic, of suggesting that an opposing view is the result of a delusion, is common to all ideological movements. Marxist theorists have often dismissed unbelievers as suffering from “false consciousness”. Similarly, many transactivists insist that those of us who believe that sex is immutable have been “radicalised online”. Yet this is also the identical approach of those gender-critical campaigners who deny the individual agency of their comrades and claim they are the victims of “grooming”. I suppose it is easier to explain away disagreement as the product of some collective fantasy rather than accept that not everyone thinks the same way as you.

The inevitable firestorm following Turner’s piece provided the backdrop to my own interview with Hayton on Sunday night. Initial feedback was cordial and productive: many feminists were pleased that I had listened to their concerns and asked questions about the use of toilets, single-sex spaces, and a schools guidance policy that Hayton had co-authored for the teachers’ union NASUWT in 2017. There were also many critical comments, which I welcomed and took seriously.

The first signs of trouble occurred when one of my critics began repeatedly railing against “the gays” in her posts. She complained that I had used the pronoun “her” in relation to Debbie in one of the introductory pieces to camera (as it happens, this was simply because the producer had written it that way in the autocue). I explained that I use pronouns to denote biological sex, and certainly when it comes to reporting on the news, because I do not believe in gender identity. But I also said that when it comes to personal friends who identify as the opposite sex, I have occasionally adopted their preferred pronouns and names. I have done this to avoid needless distress, not to signal that I share their belief-system. It would be like bowing my head for a prayer at a friend’s family meal, even if I didn’t believe in their particular god.

I respect and understand criticisms of this approach. Women are facing the erosion of their spaces and rights, and this is being actuated by gender-identity ideology and the compelled use of pronouns. I have written previously about the need to resist this pressure to conform to pronoun declaration, and I am particularly vexed by the tendency of journalists to describe rapists, paedophiles and other male criminals as “she” or to use nonsensical phrases such as “her penis”.

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Therefore, I answered many of my critics by agreeing that my view may be flawed, and that I was open to persuasion regarding their “slippery slope” argument. It was only when multiple anonymous accounts starting branding me a liar, a grifter and a hater of women, and outright telling me to “fuck off” that I realised this was beginning to turn nasty.

One of my traducers claimed that I lacked credibility and integrity because I adhere to “a deranged homophobic, sexist ideology”, even though I have consistently and outspokenly opposed it over many years. This struck me as an absurd overreaction, the kind of “you’re either with us or against us” purity demand that one has come to expect in these tribalistic times.

From there, matters escalated at a dizzying rate. I was repeatedly accused of being a misogynist, something which I find odd, given that over the past few years I have covered the rising threats to women’s rights on my show with a tenacity that has been notably absent in other media outlets. Every week I have invited women to appear, including Helen Joyce, Maya Forstater, Jo Phoenix, Julie Bindel, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Milli Hill, Kellie-Jay Keen, Dr Jane Clare Jones, Jo Bartosch, Mara Yamauchi, Holly Lawford-Smith, Sarah Phillimore, Kate Coleman, Rosie Kay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Sharron Davies. If my critics are correct, and I am indeed a rabid misogynist, surely I at least deserve some credit for going to such elaborate lengths to disguise it?

Many of my detractors took the view that my homosexuality was the issue. One self-declared feminist confessed to being “a raging homophobe” and wrote: “I don’t like gay men anymore. I think most of them are miso[gynist] pieces of shhh [sic] that mock women and platform AGPs”. Another was more direct: “The gays are definitely to blame as well. First off, sticking a penis inside a man’s asshole is unhealthy. If you can’t admit this then you are part of the problem.” Another went with “I hate men in general”, and then clarified her misandry in an oddly specific way: “Gay MEN. Straight MEN. White MEN. Black MEN. All MEN. I don’t discriminate. I view you all with equal amounts of derision”. Then there was an especially malicious attack from law scholar Dr Alessandra Asteriti, who called me a liar and resorted to the defamatory claim that my objective was to “harm women and children”.

Despite the onslaught, I should emphasise that this kind of sociopathic behaviour is far from typical in the gender-critical movement. Yes, there exists a small contingent who despise gay men and seek to bully and harass anyone who takes a different view. But this is most definitely not the norm, and the overwhelming majority of women I have encountered in this fight have been generous, compassionate and incredibly courageous in the face of threats and wholly unfounded accusations of “hate” and “transphobia”. It is only thanks to their hard work that we have seen a recent sea-change in public understanding of the dangers of this ideology.

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Naturally, at the time, I found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticisms and outright abuse. And once I started becoming defensive, it of course made matters worse. It’s always worth bearing in mind that, in the eye of a Twitter storm, one does not see individuals, but rather an army determined to see you crushed. At that point, nuance becomes impossible.

And while I am fully aware that most of those participating in the pile-on would have been appalled by the excesses of the few, that isn’t much consolation. This had all begun with one woman griping about “the gays” and ended hours later with complete strangers on my timeline discussing why gay men are so vile, invariably misogynistic, and have a tendency towards paedophilia (the most repugnant and common prejudice of them all). By the time someone posted an audio recording of one of my detractors saying that she would enjoy murdering gay men, I was out.

And of course, transactivists noticed the abuse I was receiving and were quick to weaponise the situation. One of them emailed me directly: “I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ but… ha.” Many have since boasted on social media that the attacks were karma for my stupidity in associating with this brood of reactionaries. They have shared screenshots of the worst tweets and taken this as confirmation of what they have been alleging all along: that the gender-critical movement is a front for far-Right homophobes.

My experiences this week have certainly alerted me to a dark element within gender-critical circles, one that has become a source of considerable concern for many women in the fight. I have retreated from Twitter and instead launched a Substack, in the hope that I may continue these conversations with those who are able to remain civil even while robustly disagreeing. I now understand that serious discussions about this issue are simply not possible on Twitter, and my mental health has to come first.

For all that, gender-critical feminism remains an essential force in protecting our rights in these maddening times. The genuinely bigoted elements of the movement may be aberrations, but they are increasingly being perceived as the norm. If this cannot be rectified, it will prove a disaster not just for women and gay people, but for truth and sanity itself.

1. Preference Falsification
If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech — whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship — is ultimately a request to be deceived.

2. The Opinion Pageant
The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are easy to counterfeit.

3. Limbic Capitalism
Capitalism needs us to keep buying, and the best way to keep us buying is to get us addicted — to food, drugs, porn, news. Our brains are being violently overstimulated as businesses compete to obsess us; the market is slowly turning us into mindless dopamine-junkies.

4. Path Dependence
The Qwerty keyboard layout was a misguided attempt to stop typewriters jamming, but, despite being inefficient for typing, it’s endured into the digital age, because we all just accepted it as the norm. We become blind to so many problems because we let them become part of life.

5. Firehosing
In the past, the purpose of disinformation was to convince you of a single narrative. In the digital age, the purpose of disinfo is to overwhelm you with many contradictory narratives until you start to doubt everything and become confused, demoralised and passive.

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6. Dartmouth Scar
In 1980, social psychologist Robert Kleck told his research subjects they’d engage in a study to test discrimination. He painted scars on some of their faces, and then had them attend job interviews. The participants with scars painted on their faces reported feeling discriminated against for their looks. However, unknown to them, their scars had been removed before they entered the interviews. It would seem we can be victimised by the mere belief that we’re a victim.

7. Bias Blindspot
Whenever I write about a bias or fallacy, I’ll receive replies from Leftists claiming it explains Rightist views and Rightists claiming it explains Leftist views. Not once has someone claimed it explains their own side’s views. The belief that bias is just something that affects our opponents is our greatest source of bias.

8. Shiny Object Syndrome
We’re drawn to whatever’s new, because in our evolutionary history new info tended to matter. But now it doesn’t, because 99% of new info is clickbait, mass-produced and rushed out to exploit our attraction to novelty. So stop chasing the new and seek info that’s stood the test of time.

9. Dysrationalia
Just because someone is intelligent, it doesn’t mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It’s possible to devote a genius-level intelligence to justifying idiotic opinions and behaviours. Tragically, a common fate of intellectuals.

10. Fanbaiting
Ideas that divide spread further than ideas everyone agrees with. Film studios portray a white character or historical figure as black, which stokes outrage and divides the internet, and as everyone complains or defends it, they all unwittingly publicise the movie.

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11 Licensing Effect
Believing you’re good can make you behave badly. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behaviour, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality.

12. Switch Cost Effect
We simultaneously inhabit two worlds — online and off — and both regularly interrupt us with demands/notifications, so we’re never able to settle in either. The constant switching of attention apparently lowers working IQ by around 10 points, dumbifying us twice as much as being high on cannabis.

13. St. George in Retirement Syndrome
Many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice. So, as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against, simply to retain a sense of purpose in life.

14. Goodhart’s Law
When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure. Since schools started to use test-scores as targets, they’ve gradually stopped teaching kids how to live fulfilling lives — and now mainly teach them how to pass school tests.

15. Hotelling’s Law
Rival products — burgers, pop songs, political parties — tend to grow more alike over time, because creators copy more successful rivals to steal their customers or audiences. Paradoxically, this increases the value of being different.

16. Segal’s Law
“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.” Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.

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17. Parkinson’s Law
Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. No matter the size of the task, it will often take precisely the amount of time you set aside to do it, because more time means more deliberation and procrastination. The underlying principle, known as induced demand, applies to many other resources: software expands to fill memory (Wirth’s law), patient numbers expand to fill hospital beds (Roemer’s law), energy consumption expands to meet supply (Jevon’s paradox), road congestion expands to fill roads (Braess’ paradox).

18. Pareidolia
We see whatever we look for. For aeons, survival favoured the paranoid — those able to discern a predator from the vaguest outline. From these survivors we inherited hyperactive pattern-detection, which once saved us from the lions, but now curses us to see them even in the skies.

19. Safetyism
After US schools banned peanuts because some kids had allergies, more kids developed peanut allergies from lack of exposure. We’re increasingly protecting kids from life, which only makes them more vulnerable to it. Too much safety is dangerous.

20. Nutpicking
Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy. The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side’s lunatics.

21. Celine’s 1st Law
National security is the chief cause of national insecurity. Government attempts to stop a threat to security lead it to draft harsher laws and to spy on its citizens, which eventually becomes a greater threat than that which it’s protecting against.

22. Problem Selling
Problem solvers take an issue and break it down into small solvable chunks. Problem sellers — such as politicians, or the press — do the opposite, blaming many small issues on one big problem that looks insurmountable and terrifying.

23. Idiocy Saturation
Online, people who don’t think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. 

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24. Celine’s 2nd Law
Honest communication occurs only between equals. If one person has power over another, then the less powerful person can’t risk saying what they really think. Thus, in any hierarchy, honest communication only occurs horizontally.

25. Crabtree’s Bludgeon
It’s possible to create a coherent explanation for any set of observations — even ones that are mutually contradictory. In other words, there is at least one seemingly rational argument to justify even the most idiotic bullshit. So be careful.

26. Presentism
We judge history by modern standards. We regard slave-owners as evil, but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebears that they were blind to its iniquities, as we are to the industrial slaughter of animals — for which we too will eventually be called evil.

27. Cynical Genius Illusion
Cynical people are widely seen as smarter, but sizeable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to do or think.

28. Boxer’s Child Paradox
Each generation tries to make life better for the next, but this deprives future generations of the ordeals needed to build character. In our relentless quest for ever more convenience, are we dooming posterity to weakness?

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29. Ambiguity Aversion
A 2016 study found that test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving an electric shock exhibited much higher stress levels than those who knew they’d certainly receive an electric shock. People tend to find uncertain outcomes less tolerable than bad outcomes.

30. Semantic Stopsign
One way people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word “evil” is used to explain behaviour but really only describes it. It resolves the question not by creating understanding but by killing curiosity.

31. Opinion Shopping
Many who conduct research online ignore every source they disagree with till they find one they agree with, and then use this source as an authority to justify what they already believe. They don’t consider someone an expert unless they agree with them.

32. Compassion Fade
“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” When presented with two appeals for charity — one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving girl — people tend to donate much more to the girl. Our minds can’t grasp big numbers, so we navigate the world through stories, not statistics. We’re moved by drama, not data.

33. Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity
Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world’s few evil people have little power without the help of the world’s many stupid people. Therefore, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.

This is an edited version of lists that first appeared on The Prism.

“People are thoughtless all the time,” writes Alexandra Hudson in her new book, The Soul of Civility, while arguing that the best way to depolarise our society is to recognise that good people can have bad ideas. This idea is classically Christian, but also fundamentally American: even after the Civil War, a central tenet of Reconstruction was that those who fought for the Confederacy should be given grace for having chosen the wrong side. But that’s a principle it’s easier to hold to in the wake of victory than in the fog of war — or, as this past week’s events have reminded us, War Discourse.

The response from certain corners of the progressive Left to the stories coming out of Israel has been extraordinary. The silhouette of a paragliding Hamas militant has been adopted by groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America — a graphic successor to that Che Guevara block print that used to hang on every dorm room wall. A crowd on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in Australia chanted “gas the Jews”. A cheer went up in Times Square at the news that 700 Israelis had been killed. And among the academic and media classes, a series of statements ran the gamut from half-hearted condemnations of the terrorist attacks to triumphant and bloodthirsty snarling.

“What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers,” wrote Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue. “Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide,” tweeted Rivkah Brown of Novara Media. The language varied, but the sentiment was the same: this is good, actually, and seeing it should fill you with the same cathartic glee as any underdog story. Don’t you see? This isn’t terrorism; it is justice.

Who has time to care about civility when the world is burning down? Three nights ago, I was part of an audience on East 46th Street listening to Hudson explain the relationship between civility and “the norms of the practice of war” — norms which, of course, Hamas has explicitly chosen to subvert in its targeting and killing of civilians. The next day, on the phone, I asked her what civility looks like in an age of extreme polarisation.

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“Human nature hasn’t changed,” she said. (Her references include many ancient texts.) “But the ubiquity of our interconnectedness… that is different, that is new, and it presents new challenges to civility. It can coarsen us and desensitise us to the suffering of others when we’re imbibing it all the time.”

The war in Israel, and the one in Ukraine: it’s not hard to see how our distance from these events, combined with the immediacy of so much coverage and conversation about them, lends itself to the most grotesque kind of rubbernecking. It’s war as spectator sport; people haggle over the reports of Hamas beheading babies with the same energy as a group of armchair referees debating an off-side call.

Some people, anyway. The term “luxury beliefs” was coined to describe how privileged progressives like to traffic in this sort of unhinged extremist rhetoric. Partly, it’s a hazard of their utter insulation from ever having to experience the practical impact of the policies they advocate. Violence and chaos have a way of breaking through the barriers that separate the ivory tower-dwellers from the masses they condescend; one imagines the occupants of Versailles looked out their windows at the guillotine being constructed in the public square and, not understanding what lay in store, pronouncing the structure adorable.

But it’s also what happens when you succumb to the Manichean worldview that every conflict, every issue, boils down to a simple question of who is the more oppressed party. Whichever guy has more privilege, more power: this is your villain. In trying to topple him from his unearned position of influence, his victim can do no wrong. Hamas, composed as it is of Muslim people of colour, is merely punching (and raping, and kidnapping) up.

While the attacks on Israel have given rise to a particularly stomach-turning iteration of this rhetoric, we have seen it before. In 2020, as the US protests against police violence spiralled out of control, members of the laptop class could reliably be found posting that Martin Luther King Jr quote about riots being “the voice of the unheard” — always from the safety of their homes, in nice neighbourhoods, in coastal cities, where things were conspicuously not on fire. The people looting, rioting, and wreaking havoc were members of an oppressed class, and hence above reproach.

But the most absurd example of how true-life horrors become grist for the mill of perverse progressive fantasy popped up downstream of the “decolonisation” discourse. Every now and then, someone announces on the internet that they would begrudgingly allow themselves to be murdered if Native Americans decided to violently re-exert ownership over their ancestral lands. The authenticity of such sentiments is obviously belied by the fact that these same people could, if they wanted to, voluntarily renounce their power instead of waiting for some noble savage to take it by force. If you truly believed yourself to be a colonist, illegitimately squatting on someone else’s property, why would you waste time tweeting about it? Wouldn’t you just leave?

But surely it’s hardly worth pointing this out. The offensiveness of such a line of speculation is exceeded only by its impossibility; we could just leave its proponents alone to play in their ghoulish little sandbox, with their terrible little toys. And yet this, too, would be uncivil.

“Civility doesn’t require forgetting, it doesn’t require sweeping grievances under the rug,” says Hudson. “It requires confronting people with their mistakes, misjudgements, misdeeds. To do anything else is to see them as a child, as lesser.”

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If civility demands that we hold people to account for the hatred they spew, it also rejects the notion that a person of an “oppressed” identity category should get a free pass to spew hatred. The bar for human decency, surely, does not shift depending on the colour of your skin or the arrangement of your genitals — and to insist on this, on one standard for all people, creates a clear path forward, which may be the best thing about civility as an ethos. It works on the assumption that, as bleak as things are now, there will be an “after” in which we forgive, even if we don’t forget.

A day after her “celebration” post, Rivkah Brown deleted it, and wrote the following: “I responded too quickly and in a moment of heightened emotion. Witnessing Palestinians defy decades of oppression hardened me to the suffering of Israeli civilians, including my friends and family, and I regret that. I’m sorry.”

Of course the human instinct, as demonstrated in the replies to her post, is to not accept the apology. The hazard of finding oneself on the moral high ground is that it becomes difficult not to revel in being up there, and not to kick at least a little dirt down onto the person grovelling below you. “Self-sacrifice is not our natural way of thinking or taking action,” Hudson writes in The Soul of Civility. “The Book of Proverbs from the Hebrew Bible goes so far as to charge us to ‘bind [these teachings] around our neck,’ as we are prone to forget them.”

As I left Hudson’s event on Tuesday night, I found the street closed off. Instead of cars, the pavement was occupied by hundreds of people holding signs and banners and flags: the remnants of what had been a massive rally in support of Israel. I would later learn that some people present were captured on camera wishing for the annihilation of Palestine; no one side, as it turns out, has a monopoly on hatred.

As I weaved through the crowd, Leonard Cohen’s “You Want it Darker” was playing through my headphones, a fitting meditation on war, death, and the cruelty we inflict on each other in the name of a just cause.

They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggle with some demons
They were middle-class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission
To murder and to maim

The chorus to this song is a Hebrew word, a line from the Torah. It’s what Abraham says, in response to God’s request that he sacrifice his son; it is also what we might say to each other, eventually, when civility or decency or whatever deity you believe in asks us to confront and forgive each other’s failings in this moment, the better to thrive in the moments we have left.

Hineni, hineni. I’m ready, I’m ready.

For this reason — and also because my own books feature murder, mayhem, and severed body parts in kitchen sinks — I make it a rule never to assume that the views expressed by a fictional character also belong to that character’s creator. But I have made an exception for Stephen King’s latest novel, Holly, because it includes a note from King himself, at the end of the book, stating that the novel’s politics are also his own.

The novel is set in 2021, in the thick of the Covid pandemic and addresses the country’s pandemic policies directly. King writes: “A considerable portion of the American population — not a majority, I’m relieved to say — are anti-vaccination” — but those people, he says, will probably find his heroine’s Covid takes “preachy”. After her own unvaccinated, Trump-supporting mother dies of the virus, the eponymous protagonist, Holly Gibney, spends a good portion of 450 pages obsessively masking, inquiring after other people’s vaccination status, and bemoaning the selfishness of the unwashed, unvaxxed Right-wingers without whom the virus would surely have been tamed by now.

King admits: “It’s true that my opinions match hers on the subject.”

Other critics have lamented King’s lack of subtlety, but to me, what’s more striking is the lack of craft. I’ve read — and in many cases, re-read — virtually everything the man has ever written; this is the first book of his I’ve ever struggled to finish. A hallmark of King’s oeuvre is how human the horror is, how rooted in a world that is familiar and recognisable. Holly, on the other hand, feels like it was written by someone who’d been locked down for so long that he no longer remembers the basic rhythms of normal in-person conversation. Insofar as the world it depicts is recognisable, it’s only because it’s the world as it appeared online during the pandemic, filtered through the lenses of social media and cable news. Holly is nominally a detective novel, but the mystery is like a whisper-thin web that strings together one trendy Covid narrative after another, the kind of stories that went viral on Twitter because they confirmed the biases of its highly educated, politically progressive user base.

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The irony is that a number of these viral narratives were themselves fiction, fed to us by a media that had gone all in on the pandemic as a politicised spectator sport and didn’t particularly care if the stories they aired were true. It’s a bit grotesque, to see how fake news becomes repurposed, and legitimised, in fiction: when Holly’s mother catches Covid at an anti-mask rally and dies gasping to her last that the virus is a hoax, one assumes that King must have caught the relevant segment on CNN — but not the later reporting that revealed it to be a fabrication.

And while Stephen King has never shied away from addressing political topics in his work, the pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-vax messaging of Holly is different — not in degree, but in kind. If there’s such a thing as a unifying political principle in King’s books, it’s anti-authoritarianism. Look at who his heroes are: bullied teens, rogue gunslingers, plucky outsiders who follow their principles instead of just doing what they’re told. And his villains? They’re the corrupt bureaucrats, the officious rule followers, the control freaks-in-chief who must insist you take your medicine — for your own good, and for the greater good.

Consider The Institute, his 2019 novel in which children with supernatural abilities are kidnapped, tortured, and weaponised by a shadowy government organisation that believes itself to be the keeper of a precarious world peace. Consider Firestarter, featuring a young family on the run from the state agents who want to imprison and experiment on them. Consider Carrie, whose protagonist is failed by every authority figure in her life until the story ends in a literal bloodbath — or The Running Man and The Long Walk, both set in dystopian futures where human suffering doubles as state-sponsored entertainment. Even Annie Wilkes, the iconic villain of Misery, is terrifying not because she’s an agent of chaos but because she’s a stickler for the rules, and as such, capable of perpetuating astonishing cruelty under the guise of giving care. If Wilkes had been around during Covid, she would have loved kicking people out of their dying loved one’s hospital room in the name of social distancing protocols.

The critical consensus in certain corners is that this is the result of King having gone woke — perhaps in an attempt to stave off cancellation for work that hasn’t aged well. There may be something to this — King’s pre-Y2K oeuvre makes heavy use of the Magical Negro trope, not to mention the n-word, which white authors are no longer allowed to put in the mouths of their characters. And some of his more recent books do carry a whiff of attempted atonement for past political incorrectness. Sleeping Beauties, co-written with son Owen, is an enjoyable thriller that nevertheless also reads like a 700-page plea for membership in the Good Male Feminist club (as do many of King’s tweets). Billy Summers, published in 2021, features a protagonist whose inner monologue is deeply disdainful of Donald Trump, and King himself has said that The Institute is intended as an allegory for the Trump administration’s border policies.

Pandemic aside, Holly definitely has the fingerprints of 2020 political Twitter all over it. The book’s female villain, one half of a pair of cannibal murderers who think they’ve found the proverbial fountain of youth in the form of human brain parfaits, is basically Karen incarnate, written to embody the stereotype of the older white woman who became a national object of fear and loathing during the pandemic. She’s not only anti-vax and anti-mask, but also anti-black and anti-gay. In one particularly on-the-nose scene from the book’s denouement, the female villain’s diaries are discovered: they contain a detailed record of her crimes interspersed with page upon page of all-caps racial slurs, in keeping with the contemporary belief that people do not contain multitudes, that any person who is one kind of bad thing must be every kind of bad thing.

But there’s something different, and tragic, about how this plays out for Holly — not the book, but the character. Holly Gibney had all the makings of a classic Stephen King heroine, an eccentric and iconoclastic outsider who has become an increasingly complex and confident character over the course of several books. Yet here, in this novel with her name on it, she’s practically unrecognisable: a model of pandemic paranoia, the personification of dull and dutiful compliance. King’s author’s note suggests that Holly just happens to share his views on the topic of Covid, but reading the book, she seems more like a mouthpiece for them, a character being used by her creator to send a message rather than tell a story. If you had any fondness for Holly Gibney, this hollowed-out version of her is dismaying to see.

Still more dismaying is to see an author who has written so poignantly about the triumph of the human spirit, of heroic free will, tweeting his earnest belief that unvaccinated people should be fired from their jobs and unpersoned by their government: “We are in a war here. Thousands of Americans die each week.” This sudden enthusiasm for empowering the state to strong-arm people into compliance is quite a change, coming from a guy who used to have nothing but contempt for such meddlesome overreach into ordinary people’s lives. As the narrator of Firestarter observes, “No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”

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There’s something decidedly Boomer about King’s political and creative evolution. His was a generation that fancied themselves revolutionaries, that fetishised youthful irreverence and made “Never trust anyone over 30” into a catechism; imagine their horror at waking up one day to discover that they had become the ones with all the wealth, all the power, all the butts in all the seats of our nation’s elected offices. For some, this identity crisis expresses itself in the form of frantic current thing-ism, as aging members of the protest generation glom onto LGBT pride, or the war in Ukraine, or anti-racist book clubs, all for the sake of aligning themselves with whatever passes for a movement these days; for others, it’s all about white-knuckling those last few years pre-retirement, praying to make it through without being cancelled by their 23-year-old assistants.

But if the boomers were set off balance by culture’s great awokening, the pandemic awakened something else: the terrifying and unavoidable awareness of their own mortality. The virus, as it turns out, does not care how young you feel.

Which brings us back to Holly, and more particularly to its villains. This couple, these cannibals, are terrified of aging, deteriorating, dying; consuming the flesh of younger, fitter people is how they buy themselves more time. It’s a perverse inversion, to sacrifice those at the beginning of their lives for the sake of those who’ve already lived full ones. But it’s one that we might recognise: what did so many of our pandemic policies accomplish, if not to prioritise the safety of vulnerable octogenarians over the health and happiness of kids?

There was a time, not long ago, when Stephen King might have objected. “Sane people don’t sacrifice children on the altar of probability. That’s not science, it’s superstition,” he wrote in The Institute. But of course, that was before the Science, and its self-appointed interpreters, decided that children were nasty little vectors for disease, and that maybe a little sacrifice on the altar of probability — just the education of an entire generation or so — was in order.

When you’re old, and scared, and vulnerable, maybe a government folder with your name on it suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. Someone has to protect you, after all, from all those irresponsible youths who don’t understand that it’s more important to be safe than free.

It’s been a while since anyone would believe any ascribed quote on Twitter. In my trembling little bubble at least, people have been saying the site is clinically dead for at least two years — although admittedly I do follow a lot of tired, cynical journalists. And let me tell you, they are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore. In real terms, freelance rates are lower than they were in the last millennium. No wonder so many of them decided the only route to solvency was to monetise themselves. Those of us who remained on the Twitter mothership during and after the pandemic watched an exodus of solo shuttlecraft head into the new media business-model troposphere. There they remain in geo-stationary orbit, a flotilla of atomised Substacks.

Everyone seems sort of resigned now to social media becoming less interesting and to us all spending less time on it. Nothing lasts forever. Twitter went from agreeable agora (c.2008) to brittle umbrage mill (c.2012) to enraged existential mobclash (c.2016) to a colourised trench-warfare horror scene. Then, it was sold.

It felt odd. Twitter always had the illusion of being, not publicly owned exactly, but common land at least. It was just there, like the roads and parks and pavements and internet. Suddenly it was worth $44 billion? Oh, but there was worse to come. The self-acknowledged Coolest White Guy on Earth had bought the site. And, excitingly, there was even worse to come. Artificially Intelligent Caligula was about to implement his Plan:

Phase 1: Sack all non-suck-ups and losers.
Phase 2: Wipe 70% off market value (totally cool, hold your nerve bro).
Phase 3: Invite back all the weird angry people previously banned.
Phase 4: Change name from Twitter (lame) to X (super-cool, mysterious).
Phase 5: Introduce frequent ad hurdles to acclimatise users to revenue grooming.
Phase 6: Introduce blue-tick charge to acclimatise users to subscription fracking.
Phase 7: Kick back. Wait for the world to deal with radical vibe shift.

It’s a far cry from those calm, underpopulated early days. Remember being on Twitter then, when it felt like everybody was in a social media sitcom. Silly puns and harmless banter — on one level, it seemed a shortcut to sophistication. There you were at some psychedelic Algonquin Round Table, wisecracking with preposterously accessible famous people as if you belonged there. Bloody hell, Caitlin Moran just retweeted a gag of mine and I’ve got 500 new followers! Ooh, Stephen Fry liked something I said and now I’ve got people in my timeline saying things like “Ahoy old chap!” Oh good, Piers Morgan’s alerted his adoring fans to some crack I made about Test Match Special and now I’ve got a dickhead with numbers for a name saying something horrible about a photo of my baby granddaughter.

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At another level, it was an infant-school playground with randoms tearing around making friends in a hurry. I started to follow a very wide spectrum of people interested in comedy and music and politics and beyond. I now look back to 2008 and realise that the overwhelming majority of my current non-professional friends were made then, on Twitter. We’d meet occasionally in Soho pubs, and everyone was exactly like the online version of themselves.

Maybe it was possible to build a social media community, but how would that work? By simply assembling a genial cross-section of liberal-Left Twitter? No. In a real community, you’re not shouting about Daily Mail headlines in the street. You have no idea what Sheila over the road’s views on Self-ID are, or what the builder at number 36 thinks about Just Stop Oil. I mean, you have an inkling. But their precise positions are not articulated in pithy, unequivocal one-liners in block capitals filling their front windows. I don’t know what your street’s like, but the most we’ve had around here was a Not My King sign and a missing tortoise poster.

The golden age of Twitter, like that of the fabled pre-war Edwardian version, was simply a long summer with benevolent weather. 2009 was the turning point for me. We still had a Labour government, just. My carefully curated Twitter circle was a model village of civilised people, insulated from the hateful wrongness of the outside world. Then, as now, the one thing Twitter was really good at was breaking news, which was the usual slurry of national misery and international catastrophe, with little shards of personal tragedy.

And, inevitably, tragedy sometimes happens to people you don’t like. David Cameron’s six-year-old son Ivan, who had severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, died suddenly. Cameron paid a moving tribute to the NHS staff who had cared for him. Prime Minister Gordon Brown (weird, typing that phrase) had himself lost a child, and spoke on behalf of all of us when he offered heartfelt condolences.

Well, nearly all of us. By then Twitter encouraged people to bark their own brutal truth to power. One of the people I followed tweeted with a shrug that the net result of Ivan Cameron’s death was one fewer potential Tory in the world. I stared and stared at it, trying to discern some reflexive, ironic meta-joke I hadn’t quite understood — but no, that was the whole tweet. Child’s death, silver lining. I told the person that it was a horrible thing to say. They refused to apologise, and explained that they struggled with tone. Who was the real victim here?

Clearly, if I could be shocked, it was because I had been hypnotised by the geniality of my magic circle. Perhaps following a few arseholes would give me some perspective. After all, we don’t like everyone in an actual community, do we? Even people we like wind us up now and then. Maybe mixing a few bad people into my Follows would make this illusory community more “real” somehow. I started with a few easy ones, including the exotically named Iain Martin, my alternative-reality centre-Right counterpart. I was always getting abused for something he’d written; he’d got mistaken for me a few times.

But I wanted to see what it would be like if you followed only terrible people. For a month, I went experimentally dark. I followed Westboro Baptist church members, Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, homophobes, all the phobes, all personally wounded by the injustice of “these people” just being in their eyeline. Misogynists were everywhere, social media affirming the warning Germaine Greer had sounded half a century earlier — that women have very little idea of just how much men hate them. Now, they had a very keen understanding of exactly how much. There were men, hating them graphically, cruelly, dismissively, in plain sight.

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Sometimes, I tried engaging. A few of the hateful people were perfectly civil. I had several conversations with a cheerful woman from Sarah Palin’s office who had every sympathy for me, living in England under the yoke of Marxism. She told me how the NHS worked (death panels, population control) and how Birmingham was a Sharia state. No guns, that was our problem.

Not many of the other accounts I followed seemed to do light conversation. Confederate Nazis called me the worst thing they could think of (gay) and wished unimaginative ill upon me, with unimaginative swearing. Someone even went to the trouble of opening a Twitter account in my name, simply to post me warnings. The just-for-you revenge Twitter account became a thing. The nastier ones, as always, were targeting women, set up by men obsessed with their former partners. I had my own for a while, bless him. Definitely a him. He followed only me, posted to only me. By the time he sighed his last message, he seemed exhausted by the whole enterprise: “I hope that everyone you ever loved is dead.”

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It’s tempting, of course, to project my own weary old man’s vibe shift — weltschmerz to ennui — onto the blank, threadbare screen. The renamed site may be under new management, but everyone seems to be doing that Unicode “shrug” emoji, expecting not a renewal but a gentle unmooring. Approximately nobody is ever going to call it X. Twitter will remain a vital channel for mutual support groups, for campaigners, for people plugging their work. But honestly, in terms of human interaction, it was always faddish. That was its point. It was born to die.

Twitter and I are losing interest in one another; it can’t even be bothered to pester me with vaguely relevant ads. Like many others, I’m just running down the clock now as it enters its Sunset Boulevard phase. It’s slowly leaving me, not the other way round.

He had started his Washington career working for the Right-leaning Weekly Standard magazine. In a town of grey suits and cement blocks, he wrote with cleverness and style. I covered local crime for a small newspaper in Alabama. But I wanted to write like he did, so I asked: to work for the Weekly Standard, did I need to buy into a whole ideology? Or could I write for the Left-leaning New Republic, too? I wanted to tell all kinds of stories.

I’ve returned to his answer many times since. “Just pick a side,” he said.

In the years that followed, Carlson rose, then fell, then rose higher again, and often I wondered how he did it. I believe among the millions of words he employed — the thundering waterfall of words; the warring, imprecatory, wheedling words — only one mattered most: “you”.

This was his great insight. Instead of describing events from around the globe with detachment, he invited viewers into a conspiracy of knowing. It was a modern Gnosticism, a rebellion outside the gates of information. And his audience — an ageing, shrinking middle class — found that call irresistible. It was ingenious television.

Never mind that he was one of the most influential figures in the ruling party. Never mind that the most powerful news network paid him $20 million per year for that influence, on the highest-rated cable news show in history. It wasn’t about him. The mobs are coming for you.

Then, a few months ago, Carlson suddenly lost his lofty seat. In a book published today, he claims Fox News fired him as part of a $787.5 million deal with Dominion Voting Systems, after the network broadcast Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud. “They agreed to take me off the air, my show off the air, as a condition of the Dominion settlement,” Carlson says in Tucker, a biography by Chadwick Moore. “They had to settle this.” (Dominion’s lawyers flatly deny this: “Dominion made no requests or demands whatsoever regarding Mr Carlson’s employment with Fox.”)

In the days after his downfall, Carlson posted a video to social media in which he described how most of it — the whole televised political battle — was a sham, but that he would soon reveal the truth. And he concluded with a final, second-person invitation: “See you soon.”

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Now Carlson truly does find himself cast outside the gates, maybe for the first time. He’s been an insider since his magazine stories turned into occasional television appearances, which became regular guest spots on CNN, then a hosting job on the show Crossfire, which pitted him against the liberal commentator Paul Begala. Carlson’s most famous moment on that show was a catastrophic encounter in 2004 with the comedian Jon Stewart, who accused Carlson and Begala of faking their outrage. “You’re partisan — what do you call it? — hacks,” Stewart said. He had drawn back a curtain to reveal the machinery of television debate, and the show never recovered. CNN soon cancelled it.

Carlson moved to MSNBC, where he hosted a show called Tucker. It never really caught on, and after its cancellation Carlson retreated to start a website called The Daily Caller, a conservative tabloid that gained popularity but never much respect as a real source of news. Then, in 2013, Carlson began his true upward trajectory, joining Fox News to co-host the chatty Fox & Friends. In 2016, he took over his own primetime show.

His timing was serendipitous, coming in the churn of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. But Carlson didn’t win an audience of millions by accident; he was exceptionally effective at the job, in ways small and large. His pacing, for instance, is impeccable. Speaking on television is hard — too slow and you’re plodding, too fast and you seem nervous — but Carlson had perfect timing. More importantly, he understood historical timing; as white Americans shifted from majority towards minority, many hardened into a political bloc and eyed institutions with distrust. Carlson recognised the power in their grievance and made a shift alongside them, casting himself as a populist voice for the forgotten and downtrodden.

It was a deft dance with his audience. It required them to forget that he rose to prominence wearing a bow tie, an affectation he began at preparatory school; that he lunched at The Palm on DuPont Circle in Washington, deep inside the Beltway; that he embodied the very Republican establishment against which he raged. It required him to rage for you.

Carlson and his producers pioneered a new style of commentary. Instead of bowing to Jon Stewart’s accusations of manufactured outrage, they built a full-scale factory. It worked like this: producers would scour the American landscape for someone — anyone — behaving in outlandish ways. Hyper-wokeness worked best, but sheer nuttiness served at a pinch. Then they presented this fringe behaviour as central, as representative of them, the un-Americans who would supplant you.

It started with mere exaggeration about issues that genuinely, legitimately, do matter to Americans. Immigration, for instance. In 2017 in Pennsylvania, a Roma refugee child couldn’t make it to a bathroom on time, pulled down his pants, and defecated outside. By the time Carlson injected the story into the national consciousness, “gypsies” had overrun the town and left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human faeces”.

Viewers reacted with anger and fear. And soon Carlson’s show grew so big it competed less against other news programmes than the internet itself. But rage is a market with inflation. By the end of his tenure at Fox, Carlson railed against candy: “Woke M&Ms have returned. The green M&M got her boots back, but apparently is now a lesbian maybe?”

For a time, a conscientious viewer could overlook the widgets tumbling from Carlson’s outrage assembly line because they mattered so little. “You know the official story about pandas. They’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they’re almost extinct,” he told viewers in 2018. “But like a lot of what we hear that’s a lie.”

Then, in 2020, the country suffered a presidential election so fractious it tore at the fabric of American society. The author Mark Bowden and I wrote a book about the effort to overturn that election, and much of our attention went to the literal machinery of democracy: the vote tabulators made by Dominion and Smartmatic. As we pieced together accounts from county-level election officials — themselves almost all conservative Republicans — reality diverged ever-further from the version put forward by Carlson and his colleagues on Fox News. And we wondered: how are they getting away with this?

Carlson had retooled the factory, and instead of cranking out horny pandas and woke M&Ms, the show offered viewers conspiracies about matters of life and actual death. The apparatus of democracy. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The war in Ukraine.

Segments from Tucker Carlson Tonight started appearing in Russia’s internal propaganda. And suddenly he wasn’t getting away with it. Dominion weighed in with a gargantuan defamation lawsuit against Fox News, a suit so strong that Fox scrambled to apologise, repeatedly and in prime time. Then, thanks to the suit, the private text messages of Fox’s biggest stars went public, revealing that they didn’t believe the lies from Trump’s team. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote of Trump’s lawyer, to a colleague. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” Carlson didn’t believe any of it. But he had picked a side.

Uglier, if less consequential, revelations followed. The day after the January 6 attacks, for instance, Carlson had sent the following text to a producer:

“A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”

All of it — the Dominion reporting, the hypocrisy about Trump, the racist messages — led Fox News in April to pull their highest-rated host from the air. In Tucker, Carlson’s biographer describes Carlson’s downfall not as the consequence of his own actions, but instead, naturally, as the result of a conspiracy with foreboding consequences for the reader: “What’s most stunning was the brazenness. A major network had caved to political and regulatory pressures, and the leftists behind it didn’t even feel the need to pretend otherwise. This is the way healthy societies die.”

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Carlson remains under contract with Fox — still receiving a paycheck according to the new book — although he has created a showdown with the network since then by broadcasting on Twitter (since renamed “X”). The videos portray Carlson in exile, and there’s an element of truth to it. He’s still fabulously wealthy and famous, but he no longer sits on the Fox News throne. Instead, he broadcasts from a less polished set, where he uses his hand to scroll his own teleprompter, and his shows feel like an attempt to grab a piece of a younger, online zeitgeist. Take the two-and-a-half-hour interview with “alpha male” influencer Andrew Tate, which Carlson began by claiming public schools in America are removing urinals from boys’ bathrooms because “masculine qualities are oppressive” and boys should “sit down when you pee, like a good little girl”. Carlson used a different set, for that episode, as Tate is under house arrest in Romania, awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking.

It is impossible to say where Carlson will go next. Maybe he’ll find a larger, younger audience. Maybe, like Howard Stern, the former broadcast radio shock jock who turned to satellite radio, he’ll shift to a narrower but even more lucrative format. Only one option seems unimaginable: that he could simply fade away.

At the end of the new biography, Carlson muses on his future, and makes what he intends to be a jab at television. One last conspiratorial offering for you. But for years he was the leading voice on the format, so instead it comes across as unintended confession: “You can tell when someone’s lying to you or when someone’s shading the truth or trying to spin you,” he says. “And there’s a lot of artifice in television.”

You can see its shadow in every Western country, from the US and Canada to Ireland and Australia, as well as in every multinational organisation, from the EU to the UN. Rising levels of hate speech and misinformation, we are told, make it more urgent than ever for governments, corporations and multilateral organisations to adopt stronger measures to protect vulnerable populations online.

It is for this reason that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security recently created a “Disinformation Governance Board”, the European Commission crafted a new Digital Services Act and Code of Practice on Disinformation, and the UN is proposing a “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”. All of these initiatives are allegedly the product of good intentions; all of them, however, are rooted in the same fallacy: there is little evidence to suggest that hate speech and misinformation are on the rise. On the contrary, Western countries are more tolerant of racial, religious and sexual minorities than ever before. To take one example, the percentage of Americans who approve of marriages between white and black Americans has risen from 4% in 1958 to 87% in 2013 to 94% in 2021.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of misinformation and hatred online, and Twitter and Facebook are right to reduce their spread — but often the threat is exaggerated. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), for instance, recently published a study that concluded that antisemitism was increasing on Twitter. But there is no definitive evidence of rising hate online. The ISD study counted tweets criticising George Soros which didn’t mention his Judaism as antisemitic. Elsewhere, “hate speech” includes the reluctance of some people online to use female pronouns when referring to transwomen — even though one might oppose using female pronouns for natal males and harbour no animus toward transwomen.

Here we can see that what people label as “hatred” and “misinformation” is often merely an opinion they don’t like or which they fear will encourage bad behaviour. In both the UK and the US, this led to government officials demanding that social media platforms censor “often-true” content, including about Covid vaccine side effects, out of fear that such stories would result in vaccine hesitancy.

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What’s more, Facebook and Twitter have also started deleting a significant amount of true content. Between 2020 to 2021, for example, Facebook censored claims that the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab, even though that was always as likely, if not more so, than the natural-origin hypothesis. Twitter also censored an accurate New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop while allowing supporters of his father, Joe Biden, to falsely claim it was a result of “Russian disinformation”.

The global campaign to censor disfavoured views on Twitter and Facebook is therefore rather curious. If there is no evidence that hatred and misinformation are increasing, and ample evidence of inappropriate censorship of true and accurate information, why are politicians across the West calling for greater power to censor?

Some of the demand certainly appears to be grassroots. Since 2016, an increasing number of psychologists have started to document the rise of “concept creep”, the dramatic expansion of what people in Western societies consider to be “harmful”. It used to be that one would have to show physical or financial harm from speech for it to be restricted: often, one would have to commit fraud, incite violence or ruin a person’s career. Today, by contrast, a growing number of people consider petty offences, such as calling a transwoman “he” or denouncing Soros as a “globalist,” to be the cause of “real-world harm”.

Yet this support cannot be taken in isolation; more often than not, it is the result of funding from governments. It was, after all, Renee DiResta, a former CIA Fellow at Stanford University, who proposed that DHS create a “Disinformation Governance Board”; in Brazil, meanwhile, a Supreme Court judge is leading calls for greater censorship; in Canada, it is Justin Trudeau who has sought a crackdown on wrongspeech; and in the UK, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue is funded by the UK government and the US Department of Defense.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that these efforts all share an elitist, anti-populist strain. Many of the government agencies, contractors and NGOs that are advocating for greater censorship have ties to the military, intelligence and security organisations, spawning what I term the “Censorship Industrial Complex”. How this is manifested is relatively straightforward: fearing that a wave of populist political victories would undermine Nato, the EU and the Western Alliance, government intelligence, military and security officials engaged in disinformation campaigns, such as the one claiming Trump was a Russian asset and that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, while demanding censorship of populist and anti-war voices.

Together, these measures constitute nothing short of a world war on free speech. After all, the intention of the UN and the EU is to censor disfavoured speech at a global level, specifically by insisting that Twitter and Facebook obey their dictates or face massive fines and nationwide restrictions.

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So far, one of the greatest obstacles to these censorious ambitions is Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, who has publicly stated that he refuses to comply with EU rules. But Musk is also under enormous pressure from advertisers, many of whom stand with the censorship advocates and heads of state. Under pressure from the Turkish government, for instance, Musk was forced to censor disfavoured Turkish journalists or face Twitter being cut off in the country entirely.

Even if this were not the case, free speech has never been a gift that can be secured by one person. Rather, for it to survive, it is up to the citizens of the world to insist that governments stop demanding, directly or indirectly through the NGOs they fund, that social media platforms censor disfavoured views. And to the extent that content moderation by social media companies is inevitable, they must be transparent about what content they are restricting, how they are restricting it, and why.

Nor is any of this outside the realms of possibility. It was encouraging, for instance, to see the Department of Homeland Security shut down its “Disinformation Governance Board” three weeks after introducing it, following an online backlash. In Europe, too, resistance is growing to the Digital Services Act. And, on Twitter, we have seen rowdy and rousing opposition to the UN’s proposed “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”, as well as new censorship proposals in Ireland, Brazil, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand.

Most of all, we need to change how we perceive ostensibly earnest calls for reducing “hate speech” and “misinformation”. We need to train our ears to hear such language as pretexts for government censorship. We need to remind our fellow citizens of the enormous progress we have made against hatred and discrimination over the decades and centuries. And, perhaps most of all, we should feel insulted, patronised and threatened by those elites who are trying to undermine that precious thing we have been fighting for since society was born: our right to express ourselves, however much it might offend them.

But amid widespread ridicule of his monetisation schemes, plummeting ad revenue, and declining investor confidence, Musk decided (wisely) to change course, announcing that he would hand over day-to-day operations to new CEO Linda Yaccarino; the news came just after Tucker Carlson announced that he was restarting his show on Twitter. These dramatic moves signal a prospective turnaround in the fortunes of the struggling social media giant. Musk will stay on as executive chair and CTO, continuing to set the platform’s overall course.

Throughout all the arbitrary changes in company policy so far, it is important to remember that Musk has, in fact, been working from a larger vision — one that he had stated plainly in October, just as he took the helm at Twitter. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he declared. Last month, it was revealed that Musk had merged Twitter into a shell company bearing the enigmatic name “X Corp”. It is part of a set of holding entities in Delaware, each with a variation on the brand name,“X Holdings”. But what exactly is “X”?

Quite simply, an everything app integrates a much larger range of functions than are usually found in a single app, and in doing so become absolutely essential to everyday life. It may enable messaging, social networking, peer-to-peer payment, shopping, ordering meals, ridesharing, exchanging QR business cards. Tencent’s WeChat, which is used by Chinese citizens for all these purposes and more, comes closest to the ideal of a “Swiss army knife” app. It is the model that Musk wishes to emulate.

If a Chinese citizen picks up his phone to interact with others online or undertake a commercial transaction of any kind, chances are he is doing it through an interface provided by WeChat. It goes without saying that the Chinese surveillance state therefore has an easier time monitoring information. Indeed, in 2018, WeChat was enlisted by the Chinese government as the vessel for its electronic identification system. And where most Americans might recoil at such an extreme concentration of unaccountable economic and technological power in the hands of a single firm, Musk apparently sees it as a positive development that could and should be replicated in the West. “If you’re in China, you kind of live on WeChat,” he has commented. “It’s really an excellent app, and we don’t have anything like that outside of China.”

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Few have reckoned with the significance of Musk’s ambition to turn Twitter into something like Tencent. He may yet prove too undisciplined to pull it off; but Twitter probably has enough institutional weight, and Musk enough wealth and time, to survive multiple false starts. Indeed, the appointment of Yaccarino as CEO may be the stabiliser needed after nearly seven erratic months of Musk’s direct rule, while Tucker’s migration to Twitter places the platform in the novel position of being able to compete with cable news for the attention of its many millions of older viewers (who may now be enticed to join Twitter at last). He is also said to be considering more big moves, such as introducing stocks and crypto trading, as well as a new dating app on the social media site. If successful, such initiatives would bring Twitter a few steps closer to becoming the omni-functional platform of Musk’s dreams.

Yet even as Musk generates headlines, his ultimate goal of an everything app remains opaque. The lack of critical attention paid to it — relative to the rest of his overexposed public persona — is a failing among the political forces that claim to be opposed to the pernicious influence of Big Tech. The same conservative and libertarian Musk fanboys who oppose government domination over individual lives seem to have no problem with the thought of one’s whole existence being mediated by a single app — or with Musk’s open admiration for an innovation pioneered in a totalitarian state that many on the Right (including Tucker Carlson) claim to fear and despise.

Across the spectrum, concerns around social media mostly revolve around either content or terms of access — too many racist and sexist posts, according to the Left; not enough viewpoint diversity, according to the Right. But neither side seems able to grasp the broader problem: the inescapable ubiquity and hegemony of social media itself. And yet, it is a problem that may get a lot worse, with the integration of powerful new AI.

Rather than representing a break with the old Twitter, Elon Musk’s takeover is perhaps better understood as a continuation and intensification of the trajectory the tech giant has always been on. From the moment it exploded into mainstream awareness in the early 2010s, Twitter has all but conquered politics and culture in America, deforming the terms of democratic debate. But if Musk gets his way, Americans would be forced to “kind of live on Twitter”, just as the Chinese do on WeChat. What could possibly go wrong?

The real “mind virus”, to use to use Musk’s evocative phrase, is not so much being woke as being “Twitter-brained” — that is, mistaking the petty, supercharged, hyper-reactive atmosphere of the platform for real life. So far, this bleak condition remains largely confined to the closed world of political and cultural insiders. Twitter is not exactly an everyman’s app — about 69% of journalists and commentators regularly turn to Twitter for news and networking, while the figure is only at 13% among the general public — meaning that the very particular kinds of neuroses and pathologies that being on Twitter breeds recur only in a small, self-referential sliver of society. Transforming it into a WeChat-style everything app would spread this atomising, anti-social mind virus to the wider public — and wreak further damage to the health and cohesion of the body politic.

For all Musk’s pseudo-revolutionary “lords and peasants” talk about wanting to democratise the accursed medium, it may just be better if the “peasants” are spared from the Twitter-induced cognitive rot that’s afflicted the “lords” of the media and political establishment. American society needs far less Twitter, not more. And the same goes for the other major apps, like Chinese-owned TikTok and Mark Zuckerberg’s no less megalomaniacal and soul-sucking Meta, which — surprise! — is also developing its own version of the everything app.

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That the so-called “techlash” mainly manifests as squabbles over privileged content — rather than pushing against total technological saturation — is a sign of its limitations. Yes, some long-overdue ideas have gained traction: proposals to ban infinite scroll, laws to remove TikTok from government-owned communication devices, and, most notably, Utah’s move to regulate children’s access to social media. (If Tucker were serious about carrying on the populist fight against big tech, he’d argue on behalf of policies like these — even at the risk of angering his friend Elon.) But given the scale and depth of the damage wrought by these apps to the social fabric, these measures are too little, too late.

Of course, there is another option. Many users, great and small, have come to acknowledge the demoralising, hellish quality of life on Twitter. If they abandoned the platform en masse, they would trigger a social media revolution. The costs of leaving the platform might, at least initially, be high — in terms of diminished “clout” and visibility — but they would be outweighed by the psychological benefits of disconnecting. Such an exodus would pre-empt the emergence of an everything app and maybe even lay the foundations for the return of more civilised public discourse.

But we’ve known for a long time that Twitter is toxic. If there were going to be a grassroots protest, it would surely have happened by now. With their worshipful attitude toward technology and novelty, Americans aren’t well placed to drive the techlash. In fact, they’ll probably crash the internet, in their rush to download the everything app.

The column is hardly a significant contribution to the literature of travel writing. Nor is it the most offensive account of an American in a foreign country ever written. But that it was met with such deep hostility speaks to a profound contemporary anxiety with what Datskovska did: dare to write unselfconsciously about a foreign country.

If Stacia Datskovska is too much for us, what would we do today with Martha Gellhorn? The travel writer and war correspondent, who died 25 years ago, looked upon many of the places she visited with a greater degree of scorn and disdain, disillusionment and despair, than any American undergraduate student in Florence could muster.

Gellhorn was like the protagonist of one of William Boyd’s cradle-to-grave novels. Born in 1908 and dead by 1998, she bore witness to an outstanding chunk of the period the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as the Age of Extremes. In the Madrid of 1937, she saw the republican government under the siege of General Franco’s fascist army. She followed Russia’s brutal invasion of Finland in 1939, and was there when Dachau was liberated by the American Army in April 1945. In Sixties Saigon, she documented the savage brutality of America’s military might. At an age when most people are comfortably retired, she was covering the war in El Salvador.

Gellhorn was always a witness, never a saint. Unlike many contemporary authors, she does not go out of her way to show she is a good person. Her moral probity is never foregrounded. Quite the opposite. She complains about the shit weather. She is annoyed by the unfamiliar customs of the people she encounters in foreign lands. This degree of honesty makes her an anachronism in today’s literary climate.

It is understandable that her reporting was full of bleak description; war is meant to be horrible. But her travel writing had none of the extravagant sweetness of, say, Jan Morris. Gellhorn’s collection Travels with Myself and Another describes five “horror stories”: thoroughly unsentimental accounts of human absurdity, rendered in brisk and unflashy prose. She never idealised a place once she had seen it, even if she had in anticipation. Before she visited Africa, for instance, it was “a vast lion-coloured plain, ringed by blue mountains. Beautiful wild animals roamed across the land and the sky went up forever. There were no people in this picture, no Africans or anyone else.” She kept trying to get editors to send her there, but eventually gave up and paid her own way. What she found was not the virgin territory of her imagination but a place full of human muck.

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She describes the local population in a way that would make many modern readers wince. “The natives look like Caribbean Negroes,” she writes of Douala, “and are dressed in odd scraps which are apparently the lot of poor blacks who live anywhere near whites.” Her descriptions of the places she visited flit between revulsion and fascination — at certain times dehumanising the people she meets, and at other times endowing them with human dignity. “They are also very pleasant,” she continues, “unlike US Negroes who have plenty of reason to be surly and usually are. These Africans are after all at home, and bosses in their house… no one can push them around just because they have a white skin.”

These are candid testaments from the journal she kept, rather than polished thoughts. But even when she is writing in hindsight, there is an unvarnished quality to her prose that can be challenging to read. In another chapter of Travels, about a visit to China in 1941, she describes Hong Kong as a city which was “nailed together hurriedly from odd lots of old wood and sounded like a chronic Chinese New Year”. There is no attempt to spare feelings; you could get cut by a spike here or a broken chip there.

She was the same, apparently, in real life. At a dinner party, Gellhorn was once asked by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien where she got her clothes from. She briskly replied: “Oxfam — I don’t give a fuck about clothes.” Being liked did not interest her. She once told a woman interviewing her: “This conversation is so boring I think I’m going to faint.” This quality makes her bracing to read, and read about. She wrote it as she saw it, warts and all. She never shied away from looking at the Other, even when her conclusions on it were not nice.  This abrasive attitude to everyone and everything would be interpreted, today, as a form of reactionary politics; it is better to not write about foreign people than to sometimes write negatively about them, some say.

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The alternatives are to write uncritically, or write about yourself, and Gellhorn would do neither. Like Datskovska, Gellhorn doesn’t look inward. As her biographer, Caroline Moorehead, writes, she “had no gift for introspection. Not just no gift: no taste for it either. Autobiography, the long journey through the past, for her spelt if not excessive self-love then at the very least self-absorption.” She wished to present — and allow the reader to make up her own mind — rather than oppressively impose her own self on whatever she wrote. If she did write about what she felt, she never dwelled on these feelings; to her, they were a distraction from what was in front of her.

Travel, for Gellhorn, was not about self-discovery. Paradoxically, it is this self-effacing aspect that makes her writing more honest than the very subjective stories — of the Eat, Pray, Love variety — that dominate the travel genre today. These modern accounts tell us more about the writer than the place that is meant to be described.

She had a great nostalgia for travel before the genre transformed, before mass tourism. This was the time when the “Mediterranean was clean”, and “when you were a person not a sheep, herded in airports, railway stations, ski-lifts, movies, museums among your fellow sheep”. In this instance, Gellhorn is asserting her self against what she sees as the homogenising tendency of the ski-lifts, the museum, the railway station. She looked back fondly at a time when it was uncomfortable to travel; she looked down on her sanitised present. “If attendance at airports was compelled by law,” she wrote, “we would protest in marches, demonstrations, picket the White House and Parliament, take the case to the World Court, write to The Times, raise the roof.”

But she couldn’t stop travelling. The bliss of getting out of oneself was so immeasurably rich to her. Once we are finally “inside the plane, our faces change, we toss jokes about, laugh, chat to strangers.” One doesn’t need to approve of all her observations, or sympathise with her fondness for an older age of foreign travel, to find some inspiration in her approach to writing. She could be grumpy and intolerant, parochial and savage, but she always strove to look outwards. Gellhorn’s was a life that testified to the importance of writing about foreign lands uninhibitedly and vigorously; without such travellers, our view of the world is diluted.

That, after all, was the destiny of perhaps the most famous British astrologer of the 20th century: Mystic Meg, who died last week. Known as Meg Markova, but born Margaret Anne Lake, she became so identified with the power to predict the future that “Mystic Meg” passed into everyday language as a byword for prognostication.

It might be tempting to imagine that the modern age is so secular, scientific and disenchanted there is no modern-day role for a magician other than popular entertainer. How else to describe the “asparamancer”, who foretold the death of the second Queen Elizabeth last year in a pattern of falling asparagus spears?

But if you think there are no sorcerers left, you are looking in the wrong places. In fact, thanks at least partly to John Dee, it’s more accurate to say his inheritors now rule the world.

Whether or not you believe there’s anything paranormal “out there”, a great many studies affirm that most of the time when we notice patterns, we’re not conscious of doing so; what can feel like a “hunch” or “intuition” is really just our own powers of unconscious observation trying to get our attention. In this light, one way of understanding the many traditions of “reading” fortunes — whether in Tarot cards, the flight patterns of birds, tea leaves in a cup or the entrails of animals — is as a means of accessing some of these buried powers of pattern recognition, and allowing less conscious and sometimes more accurate observations to inform our conscious choices.

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Dee himself used an obsidian mirror of Aztec origin, supported on wax discs inscribed with arcane symbols. He and the alchemist and medium Edward Kelley would gaze into its black, reflective surface, where they reported seeing visions of angels; these were reflected in numerous manuscripts, which form the basis of the Enochian system of magic. Their occult legacy has endured, from the 17th-century politician Elias Ashmole to the 20th-century British occultist and “father of modern Satanism” Aleister Crowley and beyond.

But this is hardly Dee’s only contribution. In the Elizabethan age, “natural science” and “occult science” were seen as intertwined — also seen in the mystical but proto-scientific study of alchemy. Dee epitomised this rich and strange Elizabethan brew of the material and magical, pursuing “thinges Supernaturall, æternall, & Diuine” alongside and often blended with mathematics, cartography and natural philosophy (and possibly also espionage, as the original “007”).

Dee stands alongside Francis Bacon as one of the founding figures of modern science — and the modern world in general. For two of his proposals helped lay the foundations for the age that followed: first, creating a national library accessible to anyone, and second, expanding Britain’s holdings into a “British Empire”, a term he’s credited with coining. While he didn’t live to see either come to full fruition, this vision of mass literacy and expansionary, extractive capitalism were key foundations of the Age of Enlightenment.

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This was in full swing two centuries after Dee’s appointment as court magician. But as this world blossomed, in the process (as Dee envisaged) vastly enriching Britain’s wealth and power, so the “natural” aspect of the alchemical sciences came to dominate — even as the “occult” aspect lost status. Thus as Dee’s political vision was realised, his black “spirit mirror” remained in circulation — but as a curiosity, having passed through multiple hands into the collection of Augustan writer, art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole.

Walpole was 56 in 1773, when Dee finally got his wish and the British Library was founded. That same year, too, Walpole denounced the immense inflows of wealth from the East India Company’s colonial depredations in India, deploring the “sink of Indian wealth” that he saw as turning Britain into a “gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation without principles, genius, character or allies”.

But did Dr Dee really “see” things in his black mirror? Was he a fraud, seeking only to befuddle the gullible? Was Mystic Meg only pretending to entertain the crowds?

It is true that in the flurry of affectionate recent articles commemorating the passing of Mystic Meg, there’s a conspicuous lack of efforts to tally up the hit-rate of her predictions on the National Lottery Show every week. But viewers loved her anyway: the theatrics, the crystal ball, the pendulum and the sometimes extraordinarily specific suggestions such that a woman named Pat or Cathy would win with a ticket bought at 6pm (which did not, in fact, happen).

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Nor have any of the other predictions made last year by “asparamancer” Jemima Packington come true. Boris Johnson hasn’t returned as PM; Princess Anne is not Duchess of Edinburgh; Prince William hasn’t been made Prince Regent. And the jury is still out on whether Ukraine will defeat Russia.

Even so, enough people found enough resonance to sustain Mystic Meg’s legend, such as the lorry driver who recently remembered gratefully sticking his ticket into the cab copy of the Yellow Pages on her advice, and then winning £15 million. And even if such stories have a touch of back-rationalisation about them, those who point to the patchy hit-rate of popular fortune-tellers to dismiss the power of pattern recognition as mumbo-jumbo don’t understand its real power.

The “libraries and colonialism” Age of Enlightenment in turn laid the foundations for the “digital libraries and post-colonialism” Age of Information we now inhabit. And in this world, you would only dress up your intuition (patchy or otherwise) with a breathy voice and the aesthetics of a Victorian medium if your preferred field was weekend telly and the tabloid press. What, though, if you were a figure more like John Dee — political éminence grise, global traveller, possibly spy? In that case, you’d want the kind of authority that gets you taken seriously by people with real power.

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Let’s say you wanted the modern equivalent of a royal charter today, for your powers of pattern recognition, and to offer those powers to guide the modern-day kings and princes in areas of unfathomable complexity, where decisions can make or break fortunes. You wouldn’t use hexagrams or chanting or the power of fear and the uncanny. Such a practice wouldn’t refer to angels, spirits or occult forces, either.

We live in the age that succeeded and built upon the one of science, exploration and British Empire that Dee inaugurated: that is, the American Empire. And in this era, someone who wanted the ear of those with real power would be far more likely to borrow the authority afforded by the exoteric side of Dee’s interests: the field now known just as “science”. Instead of sigils, it would use more mundane symbols to give substance to intuition. Users might call it “data-driven decision-making”.

And nor would such a person bother to learn abstruse tables of Enochian symbols or inscribe wax discs with elaborate symbols, if they wanted to use languages to shape reality. Other arcane languages are now routinely in use, coding the algorithmic trading engines that power the roiling back-and-forth of global finance, and the social media platforms that serve as giant, distorting scrying-mirrors for our collective souls.

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Should such an individual want to intervene more directly in these ebbs and flows of reality-shaping meaning, he might, for example, in the wake of a crucial tech-sector investment bank’s failure, take to Twitter and whip up investor panic or (according to some) try to incite bank runs so as to force a government bailout.

In other words, were John Dee alive today he wouldn’t be Mystic Meg. Her role was more akin to what I do: dabbling in pattern recognition, in service as much to entertainment as anything more solemn. Dee’s real inheritors, meanwhile, eschew overt “mystic” symbolism to hide in plain sight, in metropolitan skyscrapers and first-class business lounges. Nor do they stare at the images conjured on a blank piece of obsidian supported by a disc of wax inscribed with mysterious symbols. Instead they (and in fact most of us) spend much of our time staring at messages conjured on a blank surface powered by a tiny chip of silicone covered with mysterious symbols. Which is completely different.

Is this sorcery? Well, not exactly. I dare say the financiers, coders and economists conjuring in realms of pure meaning would (at least in public) vehemently reject the idea that they’re communing with anything beyond the exoteric world. Others, though, increasingly treat the voice behind the silicone mirror explicitly as an entity (or entities), with agency and unknown intentions.

Mystic Meg epitomised an age, and a culture, in which those with unusual powers of pattern recognition were more often than not perfectly happy not to be taken seriously. But in ways we’re only just beginning to grasp, this more innocent age is succeeded by a much more eerie one. And here, as in the age of Dr Dee, the natural and occult sciences are once again unnervingly intertwined.

Over two decades later, the flaws in Holbrooke’s grandiose plan for a global propaganda war directed from Washington are glaringly obvious. At the heart of Holbrooke’s conception of what became known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT) was the idea that the crucial post-9/11 battles would be won or lost not in physical locations in Afghanistan and Iraq but rather inside the heads of ordinary Muslims. The truth was that bin Laden and his terrorists understood their target audience far better than the White House, the CIA and the FBI ever could or did. Yet bizarrely, the dream of controlling reality through semiotic and technical means remains current in Washington and other Western capitals, even as the battlefields of the Middle East have gone silent. What started out as a way to fight a far-away foe has quietly metastasised into a totalitarian fantasy of endless warfare against the erroneous thoughts and feelings of ordinary citizens closer to home.

The idea of “information warfare” was born in the Seventies, when Pentagon war colleges began to take notice of the role played by so-called information operations in Soviet military planning, particularly in promoting third-world insurgencies. In 1991, American military planners included a heavy “information operations” (IO) component in the first Gulf War, which, despite featuring large set-piece tank battles in the desert, was widely labelled “the first information war”. In American military doctrine, IO was defined as a toolbox of capabilities consisting of computer network operations, electronic warfare, operational security, psychological operations, and deception. It was these capabilities, merged with high-flown Cold War rhetoric about freedom and democracy, that Holbrooke, President George W. Bush and others imagined would ultimately win the war against Al Qaeda.

America’s withdrawal of its military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan under Barack Obama left many with a less optimistic view of US IO capabilities. “Many analysts have concluded that the new media conditions are tilted in favour of non-state actors, such as insurgent militias or terrorist groups,” wrote Amy Zalman, an expert who frequently consulted for the Pentagon. “When information is restricted, the remaining void is quickly filled with conspiracy theories and distorted facts. These theories balloon and proliferate with startling speed, because it is so cheap and easy for most of us to access the means of digital communication.”

Yet the failure of the American war in Iraq, launched 20 years ago this month, and the seeming futility of IO efforts when confronted with the ungovernable spaces opened up by the internet and mobile phones, only seemed to strengthen the Pentagon’s underlying belief in the fusion of information operations (IO) and counter-terror (CT) tactics as the future of modern warfare. “In cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield,” summarised an article in The Nato Review in May 2021. “The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviours to favour an aggressor’s tactical or strategic objectives. In its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions.”

A key turning point in transforming these tactics from a war-fighting technique to a new theory of Western governance happened quietly a decade ago, when large-scale spying on US citizens by the NSA was licensed by the Obama White House. Documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden alerted the public to a series of domestic spying programmes, as well as the fact that the NSA was routinely mining social media platforms to build profiles on Americans without judicial review. While the NSA had previously been required to stop searching the contact chain of a foreign target when it reached a US citizen, a change in policy allowed intelligence services to continue tracing the online contacts of Americans so long as there was a “foreign intelligence” purpose to justify the snooping.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, hints of further centralised US government surveillance activities using private technology companies began to emerge. The Obama administration routinely spied on reporters by monitoring their private telephone records and using that information to issue subpoenas to force them to reveal their sources. In 2014, Twitter filed a suit against the US Department of Justice and the FBI, stating that it had been served FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants to collect the electronic communications of its users. Some of these efforts were apparently focused on the Obama administration’s attempts to sell the Iran Deal, the centrepiece of his second term.

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Twitter’s lawsuit, which asked the court for permission to release a public report containing the precise number of warrants it had been served, was filed by Perkins Coie, the prominent Democratic Party-aligned DC law firm. The firm’s lead attorney in the case was a former DOJ cybersecurity expert named Michael Sussmann. Then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, who was friends with Sussman, refused Twitter’s request. Crucially, the entire cast of characters involved — including Obama, Twitter, the FBI, Perkins Coie, James Baker and Michael Sussman — would soon play important roles in a startling expansion of the US government’s nascent efforts to wage information warfare against its own citizens.

The device by which this transformation was effectuated was the so-called Russiagate conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Donald Trump had been handed the White House by agents of Vladimir Putin. Even if the evidence for Russiagate was often only legible to true believers on social media, who often sounded like characters in a Philip K. Dick novel, its function in Washington was entirely practical. By identifying Trump as an extension of Putin, the Russiagate theory neatly transformed a foreign threat into a domestic one — thereby legitimising all-out warfare by the Washington establishment against a President that many believed to be a dangerous lunatic.

Russiagate began when Perkins Coie, then employed by Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, paid a company called Fusion GPS, run by an ex-journalist named Glenn Simpson, to produce a dossier of dubious reports under the by-line of a British ex-spy named Christopher Steele. Before leaving office, Obama ordered his spy chief John Brennan to draft an official assessment claiming that the Steele dossier was real — and that Putin had helped put Trump in the White House. Obama then signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, targeting Putin, and by extension Trump.

If the Global War on Terror was founded on a profound misapprehension of America’s ability to control how other people interpret reality, Obama’s war on foreign propaganda and disinformation was founded on an outright lie that was kept alive for years by a pliant media addicted to taking handouts from nameless operatives who waged information warfare against their political enemies — and a majority of the country. “The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter,” a typical 2018 feature in The New York Times falsely asserted. The extent of the “massive fraud” that had occurred on social media platforms suggested a “plausible case that Mr Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr Trump”. Yet according to exhaustive investigations by Robert Mueller and the US Department of Justice, the only fraud that occurred was the promotion by every normative authority and publication in the county of a hallucinatory conspiracy theory that allowed the DC establishment to bring the GWOT back home and use it an instrument to control the American public.

In the autumn of 2017, the FBI increased its leverage over the content of social media by establishing the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations” through “strategic engagement with US technology companies”. The Department of Homeland Security set up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to serve a similar purpose. Together, these and similar nodes in other agencies helped knit together US intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organisations into a single warfare behemoth whose job it was to “secure” the US information environment. And since “Russia” equalled Trump, stopping “Russian disinformation” meant censoring Trump, his supporters, and anyone else opposed to the bureaucratic takeover of domestic communications infrastructure.

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CISA’s censorship of Twitter, which is now a matter of public record, provides one example of how the new public-private information warfare partnerships worked. One such partnership was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a censorship consortium consisting of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a DC-based company made up of former national security officials and employed by the Senate Intelligence Committee. According to the recent Twitter files dump, CISA regularly censored information by filing requests with EIP, which relayed them to Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies.

By this point, Twitter had given up suing the US government. In fact, James Baker, the former FBI chief counsel who had refused to allow Twitter to spill the beans on the US government’s use of its platform, and then authorised the FISA warrant that laid the basis for Russiagate, was now Twitter’s own in-house lawyer — one of at least a dozen former FBI and intelligence community operatives working to actively promote censorship policies based on a conspiracy theory that the platform’s own internal metrics showed was a lie.

In pressuring technology companies to do their bidding, the US security bureaucracy and its external allies in the Democratic Party and anti-Trump circles utilised two key levers of power. The first was the threat to regulate digital monopolies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. The second was to label the technology companies that had supposedly been leveraged by Putin as national security threats. Both these tactics relied on the wording of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a law originally intended to punish the distribution of child pornography, which exempted Google and Facebook from libel and other claims for which publishers of newspapers, magazines and other editorial products remained liable — on the theory that tech platforms were not publishers.

Monopoly platforms such as Google and Facebook were now caught in a bind. Facing potentially ruinous regulation, and at risk of being labelled national security threats, the platforms were prohibited from engaging in editorial decision-making that would turn their shiny liability-free monopolies into ordinary publishing pumpkins under the terms of Section 230 of the CDA. What the technology companies needed, in other words, was an external authority that would make editorial decisions for them, on a basis that would be acceptable to Democrats and national security bureaucrats.

Enter the fact-checkers. As a profession, fact-checking was once a minor ornament of the grand edifice of mid-20th-century American journalism. As that edifice collapsed in the face of competition from internet platforms, which hoovered up all their advertising dollars, fact-checkers began to replace actual journalists. Between 1990 and 2017, US newspapers lost more than a quarter of a million jobs, a decline of more than half. Meanwhile, between 2014 and June 2021, the number of fact-checking organisations in the US — employing mostly freelance workers with no particular qualifications or prior experience — rose from 44 to 341, an increase of nearly 800%, the vast bulk of that rise having been funded in order to support the false assertion that “foreign disinformation” had swung the 2016 election in favour of Trump.

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On November 17, 2016, an organisation called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) published an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company’s acceptance of $150,000 in Russian-linked ads supposedly resulted in Trump’s victory. “We would be glad to engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims,” the IFCN suggested on behalf of the 20 fact-checking organisations belonging to its network. The following month, Facebook announced that the IFCN would be its main partner in fact-checking all claims made on the world’s largest social media platform.

The IFCN was launched in 2015 as a division of the Poynter Institute, a media non-profit. Initial funders of the IFCN included the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The partisan nature of “fact-checking” activity provided by the IFCN and its partners and similar agglomerations was not hard to spot: analysis from 2018 of fact-checks by the Associated Press found that 94% were made on Republican and conservative statements. The new “fact-checking” system allowed the major internet platforms to keep their monopolies, at the price of binding them to the Democratic Party and the DC bureaucracy.

The pandemic only tightened the elite nexus between bureaucrats, the Democratic Party, and technology companies in the attempt to make information safe for Americans. In February 2020, for example, The Washington Post denounced Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton for promoting a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” that Covid-19 had escaped from a Chinese lab in Wuhan. In May 2020, the Post’s head “fact-checker”, Glenn Kessler, a member of the IFCN advisory board, said it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a laboratory. The head of the FBI, Cristopher Wray, has now acknowledged that scenario as likely. Heretical information on the failure of lockdowns in halting transmission of Covid and the regressive inefficiency of masking children in schools was treated the same way, skewing public opinion in favour of bureaucratically convenient falsehoods and radically decreasing public trust in doctors and public-health authorities.

In October of 2020, the new domestic information security complex showed its overt partisan political purpose by massively censoring news reports about the contents of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden while his father was running for the presidency. In addition to lurid footage of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex with prostitutes, the hard drive, which had turned up in a Delaware repair shop, contained politically-damning information about business dealings between the Biden family, including Joe Biden, and companies with ties to the governments and spy services of China and Ukraine. It was, in other words, a huge political story of the type that decides elections — except very few Americans saw it in time. When they did see it, they were told that the story was a fake, the likely product of a Russian disinformation campaign.

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At Facebook, Andy Stone, once the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee press secretary, explained that the reduction of Facebook’s “distribution” of the article would go into place while it was looked over by Facebook’s “third party fact checking partners”. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, and his top attorney, Vijaya Gadde, kept the article from being shared on their website on the grounds that the material potentially constituted an invasion of Hunter Biden’s privacy. Meanwhile, the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content.

The FBI unit designated to coordinate with social media companies during the 2020 election was the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was led by agent Elvis Chan and corresponded with Twitter and other tech companies to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering. Chan openly pushed the theory that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian disinformation operation” — a theory underwritten by an open letter signed by no fewer than 50 distinguished US intelligence officials. Yet former head of site security Yoel Roth, himself an impeccable leftist, claimed to have found little evidence of Russian activity on Twitter. According to Roth, the FBI primed him to attribute reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian hacking operation. Needless to say, the FBI’s reports — and subsequent “disinformation” claims — were disinformation invented by the FBI, which had been in possession of the laptop for nearly a year and therefore knew the material on the Bidens to be authentic.

Donald Trump may indeed be a dangerous lunatic, or simply a crackpot — but the attempt to “secure” the US information environment from his supposedly malign influence has proven to be far more destructive than anything Trump actually did as President. As our brains were turned into battlefields by political operatives and government bureaucrats, using their power over private companies to manipulate and censor information in the service of what they regarded to be publicly beneficial falsehoods, it is hardly surprising that public confidence in the American press has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded. Only 16% of American adults in a recent Gallup poll expressed “a great deal” of confidence in the information they receive from newspapers, with 11% expressing similar levels of confidence in what they see on television. Among Republicans, the number expressing confidence in newspapers is 5%. This decline in confidence has no parallel in any other Western country. Americans, it turned out, were no more susceptible to domestic information operations than Muslims were in the Middle East two decades earlier.

Now America, just like Afghanistan and Iraq, must face the challenge of how to govern a country in which trust has been comprehensively shattered, and all that is left is a landscape of endless information operations run by warring tribes who define their opponents as “insurrectionists” and “terrorists”. None of these efforts to define reality seem likely to do much to promote social peace in the US, any more than they succeeded in bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East. Twenty years later, it would appear that bin Laden’s paradoxical understanding of asymmetric warfare was right: the most powerful weapon against the West is the West.

It was only a matter of time before the American media delivered a story of a millennial forced to choose between pure posting and real politics. And with the past two decades as our guide, their decision was inevitable: they would choose the post. Emperor Nero was alleged to have fiddled while Rome burned, but a millennial poster would today logged onto Twitter, “shitposting” his way through the cancellation of everything prior generations might have held dear.

On 19 January, the Chicago Reader revealed that 36-year-old Pericles “Perry” Abbasi — a campaign attorney, who was running for office in Chicago’s 25th police district with the backing of the Fraternal Order of Police — had a history of posting bizarre and unseemly content on social media. In a leaked screenshot from a group chat, he had written that “the horrible black diet” was the reason for “13/50”, referencing a common internet meme about Black Americans’ percentage of the population (13%) and supposed share of violent crime they commit (50%).

Abbasi denied these accusations of bigotry. He claimed he didn’t remember everything he was alleged to have written (without necessarily denying his authorship, either), while also offering a second more general defence of his behaviour: this was the internet, he argued, and if he thought of something funny, he’d immediately post it. If this meant writing a tweet about how a relationship with a 36-year-old woman led him to conclude that child porn sentencing is far too long, then so be it. If it meant “making up insane things to stir shit up”, then it meant just that. Abbasi admitted he couldn’t even remember what he posted 48 hours ago; it was all just a blur of posting, retweets, engagement, and likes. He has posted nearly 104,000 times over the past four years, averaging roughly 70 tweets per day (one can also assume he retweeted hundreds of replies each day). In a sense, Abbasi was telling the truth: he was lost in the sauce, living from post to post.

Many of Abbasi’s clients were less than impressed by this. The original report in the Chicago Reader was quickly amended to insert various statements from political figures whose campaigns had him, each stating his comments were unacceptable. But Abbasi doubled down, posting a series of tweets about how being cancelled “was a choice”, that he was an “alpha male” and thus above apologising for things out of principle, and that Osama Bin Laden himself taught us that people will always prefer a “strong horse” to a “weak horse.” Then, he received a “like” on one of his tweets from Elon Musk and declared that the era of his cancellation had ended.

At first glance, this appears to be a fairly mundane story. Political candidates and semi-public figures have their improprieties revealed in the press all the time, and careless millennial posters have been ruining their careers for years, as people who remember the case of publicist Justine Sacco know. The story of Pericles Abbasi, however, deserves a second look. It shows a crash between two different worlds, and reveals what happens when millennial online culture collides with reality.

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Abbasi’s field of work — being an attorney for political organisations and campaigns, where he had begun to make inroads with Right-leaning groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police despite earlier support for Black Lives Matter — is based on trust and professional reputation. But the Chicago Reader revelation put his other reputation at risk: his reputation in the online world of “posting”, where he was among the most prolific posters on social media — perhaps the most prolific, as far as sheer volume of content production is concerned. In this world, online micro-celebrities fight with each other tooth and claw for likes, attention, followers, and social position inside a myriad of private group chats and social circles on Twitter.

Abbasi thus faced not one but two risks of reputational loss. He could either jeopardise his standing as an attorney entrusted with major real estate transactions and real-world political campaigns, where he is implicitly trusted not to embarrass his employers in public — or his standing as a preeminent poster. Abbasi chose the latter, which begs the question: why exactly would anyone choose to protect his standing — his “clout” — online, over his real-world career, for which he devoted years of his life? It is impossible to imagine scandalous figures from decades past, a rogue’s gallery ranging from Ted Kennedy to Silvio Berlusconi, risking so much for so very little — for a handful of likes, shares, and retweets.

There is little proof that Abbasi was motivated by some sort of genuine racist belief. He has in the past shared strong views in support of civil rights and, in his pre-shitposting days, cautioned a more intimate circle of colleagues about heaping too much scorn on BLM protestors. If Abbasi ever entertained a racist thought, I suspect he would just have forgotten it 24 hours later; lost in the endless stream of posting and “doing a bit” as he played some sort of role or character online. Abbasi, for instance, is engaged to woman, has also devoted a good many tweets to jokes about logging onto Grindr, a gay hook-up app, for the purpose of “outing” cheating husbands or “something I’m doing for a Nathan Fielder type show I’m developing”. Clearly, his tweets have little grounding in reality.

All of this ties into a curious fact about the sort of online culture that Abbasi is a part of: it is openly, almost to the point of being parodic, a form of “youth culture”, where the rules do not matter and where the norms of ordinary adult society are scorned. But time is a cruel thing: what might seem irreverent or radical at the age of 20 takes on a whole other sheen at 35. When Trump famously descended that escalator and inaugurated his campaign, an entire online “alt-Right” or “dissident Right” subculture clung to him like limpets, constantly stressing the “vitalist” and “youth” pretensions of his movement.

But that was eight years ago. During that time, many former members of these subcultures found partners and started families, leading them to naturally drift away as they assumed the responsibilities of the adult world. But others such as Abbasi remain there, stuck like Peter Pan in a permanent, virtual Neverland.

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The Abbasi story is interesting, then, because here was someone who had punched his ticket out of this overproduced netherworld of millennial losers: he had a good career, good education, good skills, and a good client base for law practice. He cultivated political patrons; he is preparing to get married. Yet there he is, posting under his own name at a prodigious rate others in his generation wouldn’t attempt to match unless masked by anonymity; posting his life away.

Historians and cultural theorists have argued that civilisations have collective “death drives” — fuelled by an oppressive atmosphere of decline and decay — and here is a new variation, the “posting drive”. Abbasi, who is continuing to run for office in Chicago now that he has secured the coveted endorsement of some New York-based “dissident podcasters”, is willing to go down with the ship, so irony-poisoned from years of hard posting that the pain of drowning will be nothing short of sweet relief from his need to respond to likes and notifications.

He is not the first such millennial to go out this way, nor will he be the last — as many in his entire generational cohort, along with the ageing, weakening American empire that subsidises its narcissistic waste, seem likely to follow suit in due course. There are alternatives to running a nation-state to failure, such as serious involvement in real politics, but are those as fun as Elon Musk liking your tweets? I think not.

***

An earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Pericles Abbasi retweeted a photoshopped image of himself over police officer Derek Chauvin. This was incorrect: Abbasi tweeted a photo of himself next to another of George Floyd.

But, as Big Brother Watch revealed on Sunday, the activities of these units went far beyond refuting claims such as “gargling warm water cures Covid”. The Counter Disinformation Unit, first used in 2019 to monitor potential interference in elections, was intended to combat deliberately misleading online content. In March 2020, however, its scope was extended to include misinformation and to work even more closely with social media platforms. This may not be an official censorship regime — departments have a hotline to these platforms to ask that material is removed — but it is a very easy way for the Government to reduce the spread of posts it disapproves of.

Based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the CDU has also been active in relation to COP26 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Freedom of Information requests and questions from MPs have failed to discover its budget or how many people it employs. The Big Brother Watch report has, however, identified a number of contracts with firms which specialise in using AI and automated systems to detect “harmful and illegal content” online.

During the first months of the pandemic, both medical theories and government policies were highly contested. Epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of Sage, criticised lockdowns as a policy response to Covid as early as August 2020, while a number of experts openly disagreed over the assumptions underlying the computer models used to make policy decisions, including the Imperial College model used to justify the first national lockdown in March 2020. Nevertheless, public questioning of Covid policies, or close examination of the scientific evidence, was enough to earn an appearance on the weekly CDU report. Conservative MP David Davis was among those cited as “critical of the Government” after he questioned, on Twitter and in the Daily Telegraph, the mathematical reasoning of the Imperial model.

Similarly, when vaccines against Covid were created, the CDU worked to counter a number of falsehoods, including the conspiracy that they make people (especially those from ethnic minorities) infertile, or the fanciful idea that they would turn people into monkeys. But the CDU didn’t stop there. Included in its file on “vaccine sceptics”, for instance, were many who objected not to vaccines, but to policy measures such as vaccine passports or mandated vaccination for care workers. Here, a matter of public debate was deemed beyond discussion — and turned into a target of countermeasures by a state unit that is not even subject to scrutiny by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.

Nor is the CDU the only unit engaged in this kind of narrative-management. The Cabinet Office has its own Rapid Response Unit (RRU), set up in 2018 and focused since 2020 on rebutting or removing (via social media platforms) “false and misleading narratives” about coronavirus. It monitors both social and traditional media, reporting on engagement with narratives and countering (or suppressing) those it deems harmful.

The RRU also uses media monitoring services which can report on audience demographics as well as content and sentiment analysis. Even sharing news articles critical of government Covid policies was enough to get an RRU flag. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, for example, appeared in RRU analysis, after voicing concerns about the effectiveness of localised restrictions. Expert criticism of data used in public briefings, personal testimonies of the impact of anti-Covid restrictions, and even jokes about the complexity of travel rules, were all included on RRU lists. Here, the scope of RRU activities goes far beyond false information to include opinions that question or contradict government policies. Again, it’s hard to see this as misinformation, let alone disinformation.

Yet for the Government, this was war. According to a whistleblower from the 77th Brigade, normally the British Army’s cyber-warfare unit, extra personnel were recruited to monitor social media for keywords — ostensibly looking for accounts that might be foreign agents spreading disinformation, but with no measures in place to ensure they were “not being directed at the UK population”.

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The whistleblower claims that screenshots of social media posts were collected and sent to the Cabinet Office. “We learned… that the Government were very keen on hearing what the public thought about their Covid-19 response and how scared people were,” said “AB”. “However, these posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated — it was simply fear and domestic dissent.”

The UK is not the only country to invoke the spectre of disinformation to seek to control public conversations. Greece passed a law against spreading false information in 2021, with a penalty of five years in prison, while Malaysia used emergency powers to pass a “fake news” law imposing jail terms for anyone spreading “wholly or partly false” information about either the pandemic or the state of emergency itself. Elsewhere, Turkey passed a law in October last year which threatens those who spread misleading news with prison, and social media platforms with fines for failure to remove content or disclose a user’s identity. Arrests have already been made.

But, as the wide-ranging activities of the UK’s CDU, the RRU and even the 77th Brigade reveal, allowing governments to define what counts as disinformation and misinformation is a slippery slope. As they extend their powers beyond falsifiable facts to policy debates, and even narratives, there is no limit to who can find themselves under scrutiny.

Throughout the pandemic the Government displayed a woeful lack of trust in the population to make sensible decisions, to act in a public-spirited manner, and to understand complex and changing information about a novel disease. Suppression of dissent and discussion is a symptom of that low opinion of the public. It’s the same paternalism that suffuses the Online Safety Bill: the politicians offering to keep us safe online by requiring technology companies to exercise a poorly defined “duty of care” are the same politicians working with those same companies to remove critics of its policies from the public square.

Government departments cracking down on false coronavirus information to protect us from dangerous falsehoods and malicious conspiracy theories? Don’t take their word for it. It’s Fake News.

Some of the suggested “home hacks” in this book have attracted particular mirth, seeming as they do to involve great effort and even high personal risk for exceptionally low reward. For instance, should you be desperate to get your hands on an egg ring — that is, a metal ring that helps you form perfectly round fried eggs — but unable to afford the £2.10 that would obtain you one from Amazon, Monroe suggests removing the lid and the bottom from a tuna tin, sanding the rough edges away, and washing afterwards to remove “any tiny dusty bits of metal”.

Should you be poor enough to lack a tin opener, meanwhile — currently on sale in Tesco for 60p — she suggests using a “small sharp knife that you are not particularly attached to, a hammer or mallet, a bit of vigour, some patience and a VERY steady hand”. As the internet has pointed out, combining both of these suggestions to produce an egg ring seems to make it likely that by the end of the process, you won’t be particularly attached to your fingers either.

It is hard to know to whom these tips are really addressed. It seems improbable that the average cash-strapped and harassed parent is going to need — or indeed have time for — any of them. The most obvious candidate for lacking a tin opener is someone homeless or in temporary accommodation, but having perfectly circular fried eggs is surely an unlikely priority here. Other tips in the book involve making firelighters by stuffing cardboard toilet rolls with tumble dryer fluff; filling worn-out socks with lavender for a microwaveable “hot pocket”; making a rolling-pin out of a glass bottle filled with ice; and gluing ring-pulls into your handbag to keep your sunglasses secure. Perhaps, then, the envisioned reader is a pastry chef living in the woods, but still with access to a lot of home appliances.

If you are familiar with Monroe, you’ll know that fearlessly confecting the imaginary habits of poor people is something of a habit of hers. If you aren’t: she’s a queer, tatted, highly articulate and Very Online single mum who mostly writes about low-cost food. Ten years ago, she stumbled into fame at the height of the government’s austerity programme by writing a blog post about not being able to feed her son or heat her home in Southend-on-Sea. Since then, she has authored several cookbooks and continued her blog, heavily mining her own lived experience to evangelise about how to eat cheaply and well when you’re hard up. Nigella Lawson is a big fan and offers a fulsome tribute in the new book.

These days, Monroe seems professionally wedded to a narrative of personal struggle and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, for better or worse. She has a huge Twitter following, regularly detailing physical and mental health challenges, struggles with alcohol, a rollercoaster love-life, and anecdotes that heavily imply that the wolf is never far from the door. She’s helped by a fluent writing style that cycles rapidly through a variety of clickable moods: cheerful resilience in the face of adversity, living-my-best-life showboating, sassy clapbacking, ruefully relatable parenting moments, and so on. In short, she’s the acceptable face of modern poverty in the eyes of many middle-class progressives — and they adore her for it.

Equally though, the very characteristics that make her so pleasing to some make her absolutely infuriating to others. And just imagine — some of these infuriated people are actually poor and/or working-class. It’s no doubt a hard job to stand in for an entire demographic in the public imagination but still, Monroe’s apparently inability to keep a story straight about whether she’s really a downtrodden victim of a cruel system or rather #winningatlife tends to get on the nerves of readers feeling permanently crushed by rising interest rates, rents, energy bills, and food prices. In the last year or so, an army of determined internet sleuths has arisen to challenge the official back story of poverty, obsessively documenting internal discrepancies within Monroe’s voluminous Twitter output, cross-referenced with her many heartfelt Guardian op-eds, interviews, and blog posts. Understandably wounded, the writer is now apparently psychologically locked into an escalating and ultimately unwinnable confrontation with a multi-headed hydra of critics on Twitter.

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Personally, although I find Monroe’s online persona more grating than — as she might have it — a metal sheet into which you’ve just punched several large holes with a sharp knife, I don’t think she’s a deliberate scammer. She strikes me as more of a disorganised, constitutionally inconsistent type who can’t remember what she last said from one moment to the next. Either way, I’m not too bothered. I’m just grateful for the lolz provided by some of the recipes — and specifically, the juxtaposition of Monroe’s middle-class culinary sensibilities with her cheap, ultra-processed ingredient list.

Think Nigella-does-Asda. Descriptions of unctuous smatterings and glossy meldings are one thing when enthusing about béarnaise or Sachertorte, but they take on another register altogether when the subject matter is Sainsbury’s Baked Beans or Instant Mash. A much-derided blogpost of Monroe’s from last year suggests buying a tin of spaghetti hoops, washing the tomato sauce from the hoops, then grating some cheese on top to produce “Anellini Con Cacio e Pepe”. (Readers are also told that the washed-off tomato sauce can be reduced down “in a vigorous boil to concentrate it” to make something approximating tomato purée.) In the latest book, Monroe waxes lyrical about such culinary temptations as “moonshine mash” (Instant Mash mixed with pureed tinned sweetcorn), chicken cooked in Fanta, and cornflake ice-cream.

Once you have unscrewed your face, consider that the real attraction of Monroe’s writing for readers cannot possibly be that it gives impoverished people genuinely delicious things to eat, still less that it saves them lots of money. After all, no amount of repurposing stale cornflakes or fiddling about with ring pulls is going to make even the smallest dent in household bills these days. Rather, the main appeal of Monroe’s writing is surely that it taps into an old and perennially satisfying literary tradition, which for want of a better term I’ll call Thrift Lit.

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In this genre, fearless housewives — often abetted by a calm and steadfast husband with carpentry skills — marshal all their domestic forces against a hostile local environment. They build shelters, repurpose natural objects into domestic ones, find ingenious uses for old things, and waste nothing. They pickle, salt, ferment, and store up for winter; mend, patch, darn, and husband; plant crops then tend and harvest them; look after animals. Slowly, over time, they produce gleaming, quiet, well-ordered homes in which to bring up docile children, safe little shelters from the chaotic storm of life outside, lit warmly from within. Classics of the Thrift Lit genre include The Swiss Family Robinson, the Little House On The Prairie series, and The Country Child.

Viewed in this light, despite all the contemporary trappings (non-binary, tattooed, neurodiverse), Monroe becomes a surprisingly traditional figure, grounded in Puritan values of self-restraint and respectability: a castaway, pioneer, or farmer’s wife, ingeniously building a succession of bright, glowing homes for herself and her child out of nothing, in the midst of a punishing economic wilderness. The virtues to which she exhorts us by her own alleged example are thrift and frugality, not as means to any further ends but as wholly satisfying moral and aesthetic ends in themselves.

Of course — because we are limp and useless spoilt softies who can’t do anything right — we get the heroes we deserve. Our own modern-day Ma Ingalls is a pale shadow of her stoic forebears in terms of stiff upper lip at least. Still, the appeal of her message is timeless, and a good one for a cold and pitiless January. You too can use your own resources to make order out of chaos. It may be a fantasy, but it’s a consoling one. And if that doesn’t help, there’s always the circular eggs with a light smattering of metal dust to look forward to.