A note on The Daily Telegraph and the paranoid style in British newspapers

Elite columnist Allister Heath warns his establishment readers that the enemy within are out to get them... again.

Previously | Columnist Translator: Keir Starmer's 'soft authoritarianism' and TikTok as the devil | The New Statesman's editor gives Keir Starmer a tongue bath and Camilla Long decides that social media -- newspapers' great nemesis -- is the true evil in this world.

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How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . . What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. . . . The laws of probability would dictate that part of . . . [the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

— Joseph McCarthy, June 1951, in his speech to the US Senate condemning then-Secretary of Defence (and former Secretary of State) Goerge Marshall.

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McCarthy’s spittle-flecked rant, delivered 10 years before President Eisenhower’s clear-eyed warning about “the military/industrial complex”, is quoted early in Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (1964).

In the article, Hofstadter explores the role and dominance of conspiracist thinking and paranoic anger on the American Right. His conclusions resonate with me every day as I pick through the output of British newspapers, particularly the bile vomited daily by the zombie corpse of The Daily Telegraph.

Hofstadter writes:

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

The names change but the song remains the same. Let’s have a look at what badly painted angry hard-boiled egg, Allister Heath, has filed in the Telegraph today:

In many countries, university over-expansion has created a toxic two-tier society, fuelling elite overproduction. Woke storm-troopers have seized control of culture, education and business across the English-speaking world, imposing nihilistic gender extremism and critical race theories. The governing classes have got it shockingly wrong on many other issues, from foreign policy to Covid to money-printing, and never atone for their mistakes. 

In Europe, including Britain, there is a popular consensus that there has been and remains too much immigration. In France and several other countries, integration is widely understood to have failed. There is growing scepticism of the rush to net zero: while Western publics are very concerned about climate change, they aren’t prepared to see their living standards decimated to deal with it. There is an increased suspicion of the surveillance society and of the war against cash, and a growing urban-suburban clash. 

I can’t be sure — and I’m glad I can’t — but I suspect that Allister was masturbating while he wrote that; it’s the wild-eyed ranting of a man who considers Independence Day to be a documentary and thinks Richard Kimble in The Fugitive should have been thrown in a Supermax prison forever.

We could waste a lot of time pondering whether Heath truly believes there are “woke stormtroopers” out to get him; he may do or he may be pandering to an audience that gobbles down GB News’ output (liquid shit sold as chocolate ice cream).

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because the effect is identical. Heath and his colleagues are engaged not in journalism or anything resembling good faith commentary and analysis; they are fiction writers, the modern equivalent of those old pulp novelists who’d pump out the same story multiple times with different covers, different names, but the same essential plot points. It is key to the Telegraph’s business model — such as it is — that its readers remain convinced that ‘enemies within’ dominate the UK and that it has all been going downhill since some imagined Elysian 1950s.

Umberto Eco wrote:

There was only one Nazism [but] the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. 

He defined 14 ‘typical’ features of what he called “Ur-fascism, or Eternal Fascism”, and this one is particularly useful in understanding the game that Heath is engaged in:

By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

Heath’s conclusion illustrates how the enemy must be ever-present, regardless of the actual facts:

Keir Starmer will win, and then seek to impose Left-wing solutions on to an increasingly Right-wing world. 

Like Heath — a columnist for the Telegraph and the editor of The Sunday Telegraph — Starmer, a knighted former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, is of the very elite that the Telegraph pretends to rage against. Starmer’s every action since he became Labour leader has been designed to mollify and pacify the right wing.

Heath’s colleague, the ludicrous Tim Stanley, wrote recently that, whilst he did not want Starmer to win, he did not fear the eventuality. Heath knows/should know that Starmer will not be a radical and that his comfortable position is not at risk but he needs to stay fully committed to his character as the End Is Nigh sandwich board-wearing ranter who stokes the readers up to boiling point.

The paranoid style in British newspapers will not go away; it is a profitable grift for a coterie of bad columnists with bad intentions who believe that the only ‘good’ Britain is one that exists in their fevered, fetid imaginations.

A pox on Allister Heath and the rest, today and always.

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