The extremists
Anyone who tells you they offer "common sense" rather than an ideology is dangerous; the British media is full of them and full of it.
Suella Braverman said that a “highly co-ordinated” Islamist network had been largely unchallenged as it spread propaganda and warped ideology.
Braverman told a counterextremism conference that Islamist ideology could look “perfectly respectable” but under the surface contain extremist views.
— ‘Political correctness let Islamist terrorists flourish’, says Suella Braverman’, The Times, Wednesday, March 01 2023
I say a highly coordinated far-right network has been largely unchallenged as it spreads propaganda and warped ideology. I’m telling you — a reader of this counter-media bullshit newsletter — that right-wing ideology is made to look “perfectly respectable” by British print and broadcast media and contains extremist views mostly without bothering to hide them under the surface.
In a deposition taken by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, Rupert Murdoch conceded that Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and former host Lou Dobbs promoted false claims that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’:
Some of our commentators were endorsing it. I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight.
The nominal top boss at the Fox Corporation is Rupert’s favourite son, the lizard-like Lachlan, but Murdoch admitted when asked if he could have stopped conspiracy-crazed guests like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell from appearing on the network: “I could have. But I didn’t.”
Disclosure in the case reveals that, despite on-air comments, in private, hosts including Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham thought Trump’s claims were “completely bs” and that he was “a demonic force”.
Asked why he allowed Carlson to host Mike Lindell — who repeated the allegations that Dominion’s voting machines switched votes to Biden — Murdoch said the decision was about cash. The MyPillow CEO was a major Fox advertiser:
It is not red or blue, it is green. The man is on every night. Pays us a lot of money. At first, you think it’s comic, and then you get bored and irritated.
Rupert Murdoch’s an extremist who employs extremists that platform extremists.
Until today, Murdoch was David Aaronovitch’s ultimate boss at The Times. In his final column after 18 years at the paper — something not explicitly noted in the text — Aaronovitch writes:
Sometimes it seems everybody on both sides of the Atlantic must be engaged in these [culture] wars…
… The reality is that most of us want little part in these conflicts and would rather be guided by moderation and common sense. Let me illustrate. It is true that some parts of the cultural establishment are not very brave.
Publishers, for example, believe like Falstaff that honour belongs to he that died o’ Wednesday. If a few activists tell them that a poet like Kate Clanchy’s honest observations about teaching in an inner city school are “insulting”, they will act briskly to stop publishing her.
Readers may remember my anger when about two years ago a series of galleries (including the Tate) signed up to a postponement of a retrospective by the US artist Philip Guston, not because he was in any way racist (he was the opposite) but because in the wake of the George Floyd murder some people might misunderstand his specifically anti-racist pictures.
As I wrote earlier this week, after Aaronovitch tried out this argument during a Times Radio appearance, this comes over like an old soldier in the culture war regiments throwing his uniform in the ditch and claiming he was only ever in the culinary corps anyway.
In the space of that short excerpt, Aaronovitch goes from identifying himself as part of an “us” that “[wants] little part in these conflicts and would rather be guided by moderation and common sense” to a skewed recounting of the Kate Clanchy story and a reminder of one of his many culture war flavoured columns.
I have neither the space nor the energy to pick at the scab of the Clanchy affair again but, in short, Aaronovitch is twisting the facts beyond recognition. The chain of events began when Clanchy herself drew attention to GoodReads posts that highlighted racial tropes and ableist descriptions of autistic children. In a long-since-deleted tweet, she said she’d been wrongly accused of racism by reviewers using quotes that were “all made up” and/or taken out of context.
She later had to backtrack, admit that the quotes were accurate, and apologise. But then the familiar ‘cancellation’ tour of right-wing outlets began and critics, particularly several authors who are women of colour, were portrayed as bullies, monstered in the press, and ‘investigated’ by detectives hired by Clanchy.
Look how Aaronovitch frames those women as he brusquely pushes them aside: “a few activists”. The author and academic, Professor Sunny Singh — one of the authors who rightly criticised Clanchy — tweeted this morning:
Ah, ‘activists’. Never writers. Never scholars. Never poets. A step up from ‘harpies’ or ‘Taliban,’ I guess. Their mediocrity and bitterness is laughable despite how it endangers me and my colleagues.
Monisha Rajesh — another of the writers targeted for her criticism of Clanchy — also replied to me saying:
“Activists” … just can’t bring himself to acknowledge brown women as authors / journalists / peers. Good riddance to the prick
Always beware the person who believes their views are “common sense”; it’s a sign of a particular kind of dishonesty. From the pages of The Times, whose new and comment sections vibrate daily — and have for years — with gleeful salvos in the culture war, Aaronovitch pretends he was waving the white flag of the moderate and the rationalist; irony can only take so much.
It shatters entirely with his column’s conclusion:
My very last bit of advice is this: don’t fall for the culture warrior’s hysterical schtick. Treat it with contempt. Unlike getting to grips with the Stormont brake or understanding net zero or contemplating the future of AI, any idiot or populist charlatan can have an opinion about drag queens or statues. In fact it’s all they can have an opinion about. We don’t have to listen.
That “schtick” has been peddled every day of the 18 years that Aaronovitch was at The Times, by the colleagues who sat beside him on those comment pages and, increasingly, by the reporters and editors who run the news sections that surround them. As he walks through the EXIT door, the unwillingly demobbed columnist is shouting that he never fired his rifle in anger, even as we’re still collecting the spent cartridges from his campaign for the Queen’s 1st Keyboard Warriors in the Iraq War campaign.
Another veteran of the war for the Iraq War, Nick Cohen, appeared on Times Radio this morning as part of the breakfast’s show columnist panel.
There were no signs of the “health issues” that saw Cohen ‘retire’ from The Observer in January; an investigation into his behaviour retired with him. He was hosted by former Sun managing editor Stephen ‘Stig’ Abell (who was on duty when Katie Hopkins’ notorious ‘cockroaches’ column about refugees was published). Julie Bindell, a fierce advocate for women’s rights, joined Cohen for the segment, seemingly untroubled by the sexual harassment allegations that he slipped onto Substack to avoid.
As I listened to that circus, I read James Marriott’s Times column, which sat across the page from Aaronovitch’s valedictory efforts. In it, he writes:
The lowbrow, rubbernecking approach to mortality has become the pervasive one. True crime stories that were once considered the preserve of the gutter press have been launched as a prestige form through the advent of podcasting. … The most famous series are produced not by tabloids but by venerable media institutions such as the BBC and The New York Times…
… Many have lamented the pervasive unseriousness of our culture, its tendency to transmute everything into a species of entertainment. On the wider point I am sanguine. Art forms change. High cultural seriousness is not required for a happy life. The addict of Love Island can fall in love just as easily as the scholar of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
But death is the exception. It is the one metaphysical question that unquestionably requires our attention. There will come a crucial hour in all our lives when we will regret not having given our mortality enough profound contemplation. And contemplation, of course, is precisely what our trivial and hyperactive digital culture is worst at providing.
Just as Aaronovitch absolves himself from combatant status in the culture war, Marriott pretends to have no peripheral vision (he simply cannot see what his own paper and its print and broadcast stablemates produce); no medium-term memory (his own “unserious” contributions are erased); and no sense that he is not simply an observer but a contributor to the “trivial and hyperactive”.
Across the UK’s politics, press, and media on this single day in March, I see so many extremists cast as acceptable and ordinary. There’s Isabel Oakeshott giving rage-filled interview after rage-filled interview today, shouting from her fetid pit that she “wishes to retain the moral high ground”.
In the aftermath of Oakeshott’s sordid deal with The Daily Telegraph, to stitch up the equally sordid Matt Hancock, The Sun’s political editor, Harry Cole1, berates her in the corridor at TalkTV, the British Fox News which employs Oakeshott as a host and competes hard with GB News for the title of most unhinged channel. These are extremists with easy access to TV and radio transmitters.
On the front page of The Daily Telegraph, the extremist spider-flaunting former fireplace salesman Gavin Williamson finds instant absolution for his time as Education Secretary from the paper’s hacks via an op-ed in which he farcically claims that he nearly resigned over school closures. I nearly won the lottery; I nearly married Nigella; I was nearly a contender.
The extremist atheist honey obsessive Richard Dawkins is on The Times letters page raging about Maori culture; the extremist adulterous, antisemitic novel writing, habitual liar and ex-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is all over the papers like a pissing puppy, with his latest tantrum about no longer being in Downing Street; and the extremely boring, extremely authoritarian Labour leader Keir Starmer has 3,000+ words in The New Statesman justifying his own recent trip to hobnob with a dangerous sect of economic extremists:
When I was asked the other day, “What is a Labour leader doing mixing with the financial elite in Davos?” I replied: “Vital repair work.” I was trying to persuade investors that Britain was still open for business despite the carnage of the reckless budgets of 2022. The world is changing rapidly, and our competitors are at the starting line, while we are still in the changing room tying our laces. When I meet business leaders, those wanting to invest in Britain, the message is the same. America is forging ahead. Their Inflation Reduction Act is a call to the world to invest in the United States. Europe is about to follow. And Britain? Ford is cutting jobs. AstraZeneca is setting up factories in Ireland rather than Britain. Investment is going elsewhere. Yet, none of this is inevitable.
Extremists enjoy slogans and origins myths; Starmer invokes his again:
First, it must be about values. For me, those come from my life experiences. I talk about respect a lot because I saw how my father felt disrespected because he was a tool maker. He always felt others looked down on him. Growing up, I saw too much unfulfilled potential; too often ambition was stifled; there were too many barriers to working-class kids getting a break.
His father was a toolmaker. He once had music lessons with Fatboy Slim. He likes Arsenal and locking people up.
When Michael Gove gave an eye-bogglingly extreme speech to Onward, the think-tank he helped found and which is now led by Sebastian Payne, the ex-FT and Spectator hack who could plausibly work as a Gove impersonator, earlier this week, it was welcomed with drool and clapping by The Sun. And The New Statesman’s political correspondent, Freddie Hayward, declared that it “could have been delivered by Keir Starmer”:
At times it felt as if his speech could have been written by Keir Starmer’s office. He kept reeling off Labour priorities: anti-social behaviour, devolution with an economic bent, less reliance on cheap foreign labour, affordable childcare, respect for institutions.
This convergence might be attributable to a growing consensus over the problems facing the country. A politics focused on belonging and place, that deplores regional inequality and invests in public services, would always survive the scandals of Johnson and his successors.
In the extreme ‘centrist’ environment of The New Statesman, Hayward cannot for a moment suggest that the “convergence” between the Tories and Labour is anything other than desirable; it would be akin to admitting something equally axiomatic: It’s often hard to discern why The New Statesman and Spectator haven’t merged to benefit from the cost savings and ideological ‘synergies’.
The Gove speech that Hayward so confidently asserted could have been spilling out of Starmer’s mouth was extreme. Gove said:
In the last decade there has been a growth in both the ambition and zeal with which advocates of radical social change have advanced their ideologies. There is a new energy animating the movement, which my colleague Kemi Badenoch has pointed out is closer to religious evangelisation than political persuasion.
Their world is divided into those who bear original sin – whether whiteness or some other privilege – and those whose suffering, linked indissolubly to their identity, gives them the moral authority to re-order this fallen world.
This movement is often described as “woke” activism. I dislike the use of the word woke. Both because it can at times seem to trivialise and render as simply eccentric and amusing what is actually an increasingly powerful and destructive force in our society; and also because being awake to genuine injustice is a distinctive part of the conservative tradition.
Those of us who have expressed concern about this phenomenon – we who see identity trumping ideas in arguments, who see language policed for evidence of thought crime, who see attachments to faith and family regarded as reactionary prisons – are often derided as culture warriors. But it is the radical social change activists who want to identify, create and magnify divisions, who want to tear down and transform, who demand repentance and self-abasement. Where they bring discord, I want to see harmony. I want to bring peace to our cultural war…
… It is necessary to look at the ideological roots of the movement to understand this current moment.
For much of the twentieth century, the radical left sought the economic transformation of society and considered the emancipation of the working class its cause. But with the collapse of state socialism in Communist countries, the spread of prosperity across classes in the Western world and the shrivelling appeal of Marxist revolution to the masses, the radical left had to find both an explanation for its failures and a new outlet for its energies.
New currents of radical left thinking, such as the Frankfurt School, believed that it was a lingering sentimental allegiance to traditional social structures and cross-class loyalties which had impeded the revolution’s advance. Family, church, community feeling, patriotism – all were obstacles to radical liberation and social transformation.
He evoked his extremist protege Badenoch — seen this week dismissing her Tory colleague Caroline Noakes as “speaking from a left-wing perspective” — and uses well-worn far-right tactics to build his rhetoric. In 2020, twenty-eight Tory MPs wrote a letter to the Telegraph attacking the National Trust for pushing “cultural marxism”; in 2023, Gove makes the Frankfurt School a central part of his ‘argument’2.
Badenoch has often used the “cultural marxism” trope — a descendent of Josef Goebbels’ beloved notion of Kulturbolschwismus (cultural bolshevism) — and it is a poisonous meme that relies on believing the Frankfurt School were engaged in a conspiracy to control culture.
The Frankfurt School was made up of Jewish intellectuals: Carl Grünberg was Jewish; Felix Weil was Jewish; György Lukács was Jewish; Friedrich Pollock was Jewish; Max Horkheimer was Jewish; Theodor Adorno’s father was Jewish; Eric Fromm was Jewish; Herbert Marcuse was Jewish. The right pretends that has nothing to do with its enmity.
James Butler explained what Gove is up to:
The claims about the Frankfurt School and ~cultural marxism~ in this Gove speech are a barely tidied-up version of conspiracy theory. In fact it tips directly into conspiracy theory when it makes dark allusions to the manufacture of evidence. But if we really want to get into an argument about who's out to falsify the historical record, we have pretty clear evidence – facts, of the kind Mr Gove likes – that a major culprit is the British government.
The extremists of the British media and political class howl endlessly about “rewriting” history when they are engaged in rewriting and erasing it daily; often the rewrites they engage in are to events of a couple of years ago (as with ‘The Lockdown Papers’) but it can be as fast as pretending they never wrote their last column or made their last speech (see the Liz Truss interregnum).
Evidence of the extremism is all around:
Tom Newton-Dunn relied on a neo-Nazi group for a now-deleted Sun front page that targeted left-wing journalists and academics during an election campaign; he’s been rewarded with a TV show that no one watches; Sarah Vine used her column this week to beg sympathy over lost friends and a lost marriage over Brexit (I wonder what Michael Gove twinks [sic] of that?); the press barons: Murdoch, Rothermere, the sadly still surviving Barclay brother, and the Lebedev, Lord of Siberia, are above the law and above the politicians.
In the editor’s chairs, the columnist’s jobs, and the TV and radio hot seats, extremists offer their views every day while insisting that they’re speaking for “us”. The Sun calls itself “the people’s paper” but it’s one person’s paper: His name is Rupert Murdoch and he admitted this week that he let his minions say any extremist talking point if it keeps the cash coming in.
There is no hidden media ‘conspiracy’; there doesn’t need to be. These things are done in plain sight and presented to you as “common sense”.
Thanks to Grimpthorpe for reading the draft.
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Cole’s new beard makes it look like his head is on upside down.
“Argument” used here in its loosest possible sense.