The Social World

Category: Culture

  • How does the American right move on?

    How does the American right move on?

    At the time, it was audacious. Guy Benson, now a commentator for Fox News and Townhall, recalls being approached by an Illinois teenager who wanted Chicago high schoolers to listen to conservative ideas. He offered the same advice to the gangly 6ft 5in youngster that anyone would suggest to a man with a mind on politics: keep hustling, go to a good school, get a degree and an internship at a think tank. But the precocious Charlie Kirk had different ideas. “He was smart enough to completely reject my advice,” says Benson. Neither of them could have known how that decision, and the Turning Point USA organization Kirk then founded, would go on to change the country.

    Instead of pursuing the traditional path, Kirk built something new based on a combination of a natural charisma, a skill for fund-raising and social media and a smiling face of good-natured Midwestern sincerity. He embarked on a relentless campaign of campus debates, parachuting himself behind enemy lines at universities across the country. For eager students long-starved of conservative thought on campus, it was a jolt of inspiration to stand up for their ideas and, if not to win every argument, at least to win over many in the crowd.

    Kirk was calling on Americans to get married, to have kids and to return to the church

    In environments where silence about beliefs was the key to success and sympathetic professors were few and far between, Kirk offered more than just entertainment value: he became a living symbol for all those who wanted to push back against the dominant ideas of the woke left. It was a crusade with small beginnings, but one that led to events packed with thousands of young people with Charlie at its center. He had that winning “aw-shucks” patriotism. He was ready to take on all comers – and that’s exactly what he was doing on a bright sunny day in Utah when an assassin’s bullet struck him down at the age of just 31.

    It’s rare in a time of such constant news and disaggregated focus for an event to become the only story that matters. Kirk’s death became this instantly, on every network, dominating discussion not just in politics but in every corner of American life. Stadiums across the country filled with hundreds of thousands of fans saw moments of silence, prayers and player dedications for the young man. Heartfelt condolences were offered by everyone from Supreme Court justices to Marvel stars, from former presidents to members of Coldplay.

    The success of Kirk’s effort was no forgone conclusion. He started out long before presidents were going on comedy podcasts and at the time, the left was riding high on a feeling of permanent social change. Coming out of the Tea Party era, and the cultural dominance of Barack Obama when so many in the Republican cohort wrote off young voters as unwinnable, Kirk’s aspirations for a turning point in American history seemed naive to his critics – even those on the right who hoped for success. A decade later, Kirk and his operation would help return Donald Trump to the White House with stunning levels of support among young men and historic gains among the under-30s. “College and non-college males shifted so significantly in the Republican direction, it can be argued it was by itself the deciding margin in multiple swing states,” pollster Wes Anderson told me. “And TPUSA and Charlie were a massive piece of that rightward movement.”

    But Kirk wasn’t just offering arguments to use in class. He was calling on American citizens to get married, to have kids and to return to the church. “What Charlie tapped in to, on the front end, many of us didn’t think that stream existed,” Anderson says. “Yes, he was bringing conservatism to a lot of young people who had never heard of it, but more importantly, we’re talking about a generation that is the least churched ever, the least aware, with no exposure to religion – at a level unseen since modern polling began. But something very strange has happened: as Gen Zers enter the workforce, they are becoming exceedingly angry. In focus group after focus group, they tell us their frustrations, that everything they’ve been taught about how to order their lives by those indoctrinating leftist institutions is not working. Some of them radicalize even further to the left, but others are desperately searching for answers and not just politically, but about life. And to these people, Charlie was a man in the desert handing out cups of water.”

    In the context of the American right, Kirk also took on a role that effectively dictated the Overton window of conversation around multiple topics. His support for including gay people in the conservative movement in opposition to some social conservatives was well known, as was the inclusion at TPUSA events of critics of Israel – a decision that became especially controversial as one of his former compatriots, podcaster Candace Owens, engaged in increasingly conspiratorial anti-Semitic rants.

    Even as the success of this mission made Kirk an aspirational symbol for the right, he came to symbolize everything the American left hates – his Midwestern pleasantness transformed into a portrait of a smarmy jerk. How much the left hates him wasn’t fully evident until after his death, when social media posts celebrating his demise, users inventing false quotes and tweets mocking his mourning supporters led to hundreds of firings and suspensions, including among prominent media figures such as MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd and the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah.

    The outpouring of sympathy for Kirk’s young wife Erika, who gave a passionate on-camera speech mourning her husband, was one side’s natural reaction. The other side spread shockingly callous remarks about Kirk, along with an aggressive attempt to spin the alleged assassin as having impossibly vague motivations, or being himself a right-wing extremist. There was a desperation in this false depiction, embraced en masse by CNN hosts and the largest leftist Substackers. When the alleged killer’s text messages were released, his motivations became hard to deny. He was a smart young student from a conservative religious family whose reported relationship with his transgender roommate seemingly pushed him toward regarding Kirk as a fascist, an advocate for hate, just as the left-wing media had told him over and over again. “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” Tyler Robinson texted his partner. Yet an ABC News reporter said his messages were “so fulsome, so robust… so touching,” praising him for “speaking so lovingly about his partner.”

    Charlie was unafraid to go anywhere and make the case for what he believed

    Author Walter Kirn weighed in with his prediction on X about the next steps in the left’s narrative: “How this all started is not how it will end. A story that began with a clear traditional moral shape, an innocent victim, a vile perpetrator, will be transformed using secondary characters, new revelations and other dramatic elements into its very opposite – a story of forbidden love, persecution by religious bigots, a poignantly rebellious heartfelt protest against a World that Doesn’t Understand.”

    But for a generation which, as FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff has found, consistently supports more censorship and less free speech, including the banning of extreme views on campuses, Kirk’s death could instill the notion of the assassin’s veto. Conservatives are emphatic about the need to take up Kirk’s mission, but do college officials really want the possibility of copycat crimes on their quads?

    From the 2017 attempt to kill a group of congressional Republicans at softball practice, the steady increase of politically motivated violence in America has largely emerged from the radical left. The underlying motivation to consider such violence is clear: a recent YouGov poll found that 77 percent of Republicans believe it is always unacceptable to feel joy at the death of someone they oppose politically, while just 38 percent of Democrats feel the same. If you’ve been told over and over again that your opponents are Nazis, fascists and white supremacists who are literally killing people and who represent an existential threat to the future of the nation, why would you allow them to speak anywhere, let alone to impressionable college kids? Such people should be hounded from polite society – and worse. And if the end of your political effort is a bullet with “hey fascist, CATCH” written on its casing? Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been a fascist.

    As for many Christian conservatives such as Texas Congressman Chip Roy, the loss of Kirk is about more than a sad moment in American politics – it’s a time to reflect on what matters most. “The loss of Charlie is profound because it’s not just about the organization or who’s carrying it forward, but about an individual uniquely gifted by the Lord, who combined principle and courage with a level of goodness and kindness,” he told me.

    “There’s a new generation that is growing out of TPUSA, new people not yet known to us, who can reignite the American spirit and carry it forward. If they can do that, there is hope for not just the nation, but for a real Christian revival when people are hungry for it. Charlie was unafraid to go anywhere and make the case for what he believed. Not being dissuaded by this moment is key – we have to encourage and be encouraged by the people who were encouraged by him,” Roy said. For the American right, that could be the difference between the revival they hope for and the revolution Charlie Kirk feared.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk have exposed the media’s depravity

    Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk have exposed the media’s depravity

    “Clarifying.” It seems almost obscene to say that the murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk were “clarifying.” But the huge and still-exploding response to those savage events shows that the mournful synergy of murder can be an occasion for illumination as well as for grief.

    To say that something is “illuminating” is not necessarily to say that it is pleasant.

    The media yearned for a pro-Trump, heterosexual, white male killer of Kirk. One out of three was a disappointment

    A picture is worth a thousand words. Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine, was murdered on a commuter train in North Carolina on August 22. The attack went mostly unreported until early September. Then video footage of the incident emerged. That changed everything. The suspect in Zarutska’s case is Decarlos Brown Jr., a deranged black man who had been arrested at least 14 times. He was free on cashless bail the night he stood up behind Zarutska and stabbed her to death with a pocketknife. “I got that white girl,” he appears to mutter as he moves through the train, his knife dripping blood. But that gruesome clip was superseded by the still of Zarutska looking up in terror at Brown from her seat.

    We were not supposed to notice – or at least, we were not supposed to comment on – the fact that Zarutska’s suspected murderer was black. That was irrelevant, we were told. To suggest otherwise is racist. Is it?

    A picture is worth a thousand words. A few days after images of Zarutska’s murder began circulating, the popular conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck and killed at a campus rally in Utah. He was 31. The image of Kirk knocked sideways, clutching his neck in pain made the world hold its breath. It took a little more than a day for the police to discover the identity of Kirk’s suspected assassin. He was a 22-year-white man called Tyler Robinson. The fact that he was white was not only relevant, we were told, it was cause for celebration. To suggest otherwise is racist. Is it?

    The initial jubilation over Robinson’s race was at first compounded by the fact that his parents were Republican Trump supporters. The jubilation was short-lived. Despite his conventional upbringing, Robinson turns out to have been marinated in leftist ideology. He said Kirk was “spreading hate.” So, it appears, he decided to shoot him.

    Robinson also appears to have had a complicated private life involving a transgender “roommate.” This was not what the media wanted to hear. They yearned for a pro-Trump, heterosexual, white male killer. One out of three was a serious disappointment.

    Those pictures of Zarutska and Kirk represent a very large problem for the left. On the one hand, they are rallying points for a previously cowed current of normality. On the other, they are a revelation of a hitherto unnameable depravity. 

    The commentator Glenn Reynolds recently wrote an essay on his Substack about “preference cascades,” those “tipping points” in which people suddenly rise up and give voice to opinions they had previously suppressed. As Reynolds notes, usually preference cascades move in one direction.  But the murder of Charlie Kirk – to which I would add the murder of Iryna Zarutska –revealed two opposing cascades.

    The accepted media narrative was that Charlie Kirk was a “far-right” fringe figure.  But his murder allowed millions of people to realize that Kirk’s ideas were also their ideas. They were mainstream ideas. Not only were those millions outraged by Kirk’s assassination, they were also free to celebrate his teaching. At the same time, many on the left greeted the murder of Kirk with a snarling ecstasy of hatred. They were glad Kirk was murdered. Some hoped his wife and children would be, too. Others provided lists of people who should share his fate. As Reynolds observed, “These aren’t just a few wackos. These are large numbers of people in professional and managerial jobs… who genuinely believe that holding ideas they don’t like should carry the death penalty.”

    Which brings me to Plato. In Book II of The Republic, Socrates says that one thing no one can abide is “deception in the soul about realities.” Ordinary lies are one thing.  People tell them all the time. But “everyone fears” the “true lie” that would disconnect one from the way things really are.

    The commentator Scott Adams makes a related point when he talks about the people who are being fired or ostracized for saying hateful things about Kirk. The noteworthy thing, Adams says, is that they are surprised at the critical reaction to their vituperation against Kirk. They thought that the world at large would agree with them that Kirk, Donald Trump and their kith were fascists, Nazis, etc. They are shocked that this is not the case. They have been living in a media-nourished bubble in which Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler. They are, says Adams, “hypnotized Hitlerians.” They believe – because they have been assiduously instructed to believe – that America has been taken over by a Hitler-like figure. So in one sense, Adams notes, they are victims. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of Hitler? But the Hitlerians have been deceived in their souls about the truth. This does not mean they are not responsible for fomenting hate, only that their behavior can be explained.

    The silver lining is that Kirk’s assassination, like Zarutska’s murder, has punctured that bubble. The disabused lineaments of common sense are everywhere taking shape again. Perhaps it is another instance of the somber economy, the paradoxical gift, of sacrifice.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • A meeting with the Tate brothers

    A meeting with the Tate brothers

    “I detest lateness,” texts Tristan Tate, who’s offered to pick me up from a hotel in Bucharest. “So I’ll either be 15 minutes early or right on time.” Minutes later, he messages again: “All my talk on being late and cops pull me over haha.”

    Tristan and his older brother Andrew seem to have a knack for getting into trouble. They’ve been accused of all sorts: rape, actual bodily harm, sex trafficking, controlling prostitution for gain, organized crime, money-laundering, witness-tampering. To the media and bourgeois parents everywhere, they are infamous: the vilest beasts of the manosphere, monetizers of misogyny and leading purveyors of far-right hate.

    ‘I saw the video of Charlie Kirk getting shot and I thought, that could be my brother’

    Are the Tates really that bad, though? They still face a number of criminal charges, their homes have been repeatedly raided and they’ve spent time in jail, but they deny all wrongdoing and have not yet been found guilty of anything. The big Romanian case against them appears to have stalled, after a judge ruled that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to go to trial, and the brothers have launched a suit in America against a woman they claim conspired to defame them through a fraudulent conspiracy. The Tates are confident that their complaint will be upheld and then all other charges will melt away. Perhaps I am gullible, or toxically male, but I can’t help believing them.

    Tristan pulls up – only ten minutes late – in an Aston Martin. The police stopped him, he explains, because they couldn’t see his license plate. “But they were friendly. They know me.” He drives us to one of his favorite restaurants. “If you don’t mind, I’ll sit here,” he says, plonking himself down at the table. “I don’t like having my back to the room. A crazy Ukrainian guy came and tried to stab an employee of my house a few days ago.”

    Tristan is the gentler Tate. He cultivates a more civilized air. He smokes gold-tipped Sobranies and wears a brown three-piece suit with a Union Jack pin on the lapel. He has good manners, speaks to the locals in Romanian and doles out generous tips. “To you I sound fluent, to them I sound like Borat… but everyone here knows that we were set up because this happens to wealthy Romanians all the time: a fake case, they take all your money, later they find out it’s not real.”

    He orders us sushi with foie gras and a vast amount of steak. As we start to eat, two young men approach. “I’m like a crazy fan of you,” says one, a Brazilian, before asking for a selfie. Later, as Tristan asks for the bill, another male superfan approaches wanting a photograph. “I promise I didn’t pay these people,” he says. “I have a prolific number of female stalkers as well.”

    Dinner is meant to be a prelude to a longer interview with Andrew tomorrow. Tristan drops me off and says he’ll send a car in the morning. Overnight, we learn that Charlie Kirk, the MAGA star, has been killed at a university in Utah.

    ‘I’m seen as a national security issue because of how many young men obey me’

    The Tates didn’t know Charlie, but they had friends in common – the commentator Candace Owens, for one – and shared some views about the plight of young men in this hyper-liberal age. Kirk’s death seems to disturb them profoundly. When I turn up the following morning, Tristan tells me he hasn’t slept. “The media’s responsible for this,” he says. “Charlie was a good guy who loved his family and his nation. I saw the video of him getting shot and I thought, that could be my brother.”

    He gives me a quick tour of their famous residence. It’s like being in a 15-year-old’s Ferris Bueller-esque fantasy. Tristan shows me the expensive cars and gadget-stuffed rooms. There’s a personal trainer and a couple of chirpy tech guys with laptops pumping out content. Then I’m ushered into a smoking room. It has high-backed leather chairs. A young mixed-race woman, introduced as Andrew’s girlfriend, brings coffee and then disappears. “She’s another of our alleged victims,” says Tristan.

    Suddenly Andrew, the so-called “Top G,” appears as if from nowhere. In one motion, he slips a gold watch on to his wrist and shakes my hand. Kirk’s assassination looks like a professional job, he tells me, skipping the small talk. “We live in a battle for influence,” he says. “So if you’re someone like Charlie Kirk or myself with massive influence, you’re a problem. And the people who disagree with you want you to go away.”

    The Tate brothers were born in 1986 and 1988, 19 months apart, in Washington, DC. Their father, Emory, was an African-American Air Force sergeant and an international chess master. He met their mother, a British lunch lady called Eileen, while stationed at an RAF base in Bedfordshire.

    Andrew and Tristan moved to England with Eileen after their parents divorced in 1997. They lived in public housing in Luton, just outside London, near British right-wing influencer Tommy Robinson, and the brothers dropped out of school at 16 in order to make money. Andrew worked for a fishmonger; Tristan at a Pret a Manger in Luton airport. They discovered kickboxing. Andrew won a world championship belt; Tristan a European one.

    Their early adulthood coincided with the rise of the internet. Andrew spent large amounts of time on MSN Messenger and discovered his unique talent for saying truly shocking things on camera. He posted videos under the title “Offending what’s Trending,” which later came to be called “Tate speech.” The young brothers were drawn into terrestrial television, too: they set up a TV advertising agency. In 2011, Tristan appeared as a guest on the reality show Shipwrecked; five years later, Andrew made it on to Big Brother.

    The Tates live in their own world, which may or may not be real. Andrew is obsessed with ‘the Matrix’

    Around that time, a video was posted online of him beating a woman with a belt. Andrew and the woman on the receiving end have long insisted that the lashing was consensual. Soon after, the two brothers moved to Bucharest. Reports suggest Andrew was running away from allegations of sexual assault; Tristan says they found work commentating in English on Romanian extreme fighting events. Bucharest at the time was host to a budding online sex industry and the boys soon set up a small “camgirl” studio. “I thought: I’m in Romania,” recalls Tristan. “Do as the Romanians do.” But the seediness of that enterprise has dogged them ever since.

    Their real business bonanza came not from sex but from online education – or rather Hustlers University, which then became The Real World, an online platform for young men looking for purpose and ways to make money outside traditional employment. In 2022, for several million dollars, the brothers bought the domain name university.com, “to make a statement,” they say. They could afford it: The Real World was generating somewhere between $60 and $120 million a year by charging monthly fees, starting at $49, to teach students how to make fast money from e-commerce, cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.

    That’s what Andrew wants to talk to me about. Sitting across a mahogany table, puffing on his large shisha, he explains how his students learn how to build AI customer-service tools and rent them out to small businesses or build chatbots for lonely people to talk to online.

    But he keeps digressing into dark ruminations about the nature of the world and how he might end up like Charlie Kirk. “I’m seen as a national security issue because of how many young men obey me and I’m seen as a problem, which is why they weaponize their entire mainstream media into convincing [people] I’m a bad person.” He rails against the elites, the decline in living standards in the West, the pitfalls of sexual equality and “financialized capitalism, which is leading into monopolized capitalism, because everyone’s just putting their money into the last few producers of product.” There’s a money counter in the corner of the room.

    Who are the elite? “It’s very rich people who want to stay rich,” he says. “They don’t live among the mess they create.” A secret cabal, then? “That’s actually quite a cartoonish thought,” he replies. “I’m sure there’s lots of different cabals and I’m sure there’s lots of crossover between them.” The Tate brothers are convinced that they and their businesses are targets of a concerted government campaign. “I’ve gone from a Luton council estate to the upper echelons of fame and power and money,” says Andrew. “And I am telling you that I am the target of a military intelligence operation to dampen my influence and destroy my school.”

    He and his brother offer overlapping theories as to why the deep state wants them stopped. It’s because of their views on immigration, their criticisms of Ukraine, their opposition to Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates. It’s because the system wants to crush young men – and he inspires them. Andrew says his online academies represent a threat to the scam that is higher education. “Big Education is as powerful as Big Pharma,” he says. His online school has been the subject of relentless cyber attacks, he says, “but like a cockroach, I refuse to die.”

    Andrew and Tristan also suggest, darkly, that their real legal problems began in 2023, soon after they turned down $50 million from a large PR group whose lawyers wanted them to agree to stop spouting certain opinions and they refused. But they also now refuse to name the organization. “Call me paranoid if you like,” says Andrew.

    Trying to make Andrew reveal himself is like banging your head against a wall. You hope something cracks but you end up dizzy. He calls me “sir,” over and over, and refuses to show weakness. “Absolutely not,” he says when asked if his parents’ divorce made him sad. “Zero percent,” he says when I ask if he’s ever lonely. “Psychology is pretty shit, by the way.”

    He admits that he doesn’t sleep and that he has “to a degree, if it is real, which I don’t believe it is, some kind of anxiety disorder, I can’t sit still, I can’t relax… but all these demons, anxiety, panic attacks, all these things, I’ve grabbed them by the neck and I’ve forced them to join my legion.”

    The Tates live in their own world, which may or may not be real. Andrew is obsessed with “the Matrix,” a concept invented in the 1999 sci-fi film about machines enslaving man. It’s also the metaphor he uses to persuade young men to join his school in order to free themselves from the clutches of the system. Yet he also seems really to believe that we exist in some cruel virtual game.

    “I’ve always had a splinter in my mind that is permanently bothering me,” he says. “Do you ever feel like you’re living in a simulation?” In that moment, I do.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • The blurred lines between politics and common morality

    The blurred lines between politics and common morality

    Some 238 years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Charlie Kirk was a patriot and his blood, shed by an assassin’s bullet, is making Americans take their free-speech liberties seriously once again.

    Jefferson wrote his famous line in response to an insurrection – a real, armed one quite unlike the ugly out-of-control protest at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The author of the Declaration of Independence wasn’t defending the rebels who had risen up under the command of Daniel Shays. His letter was instead a warning against overreaction to the rebellion on the part of the national government. Kirk’s assassination also calls for a response that respects the principles for which he risked, and ultimately gave, his life.

    Kirk was a target because of his conservative views. Leftists demonized him as a racist, a Nazi and a living, breathing threat to the lives of transgender persons. For years, radical leftists and Trump-loathing liberals have casually labeled their political opponents as fascists or Nazis who threaten “democracy,” without owning up to the implications of such talk. If Hitler really were on the verge of taking power in America, wouldn’t using violence to stop him be not only moral but mandatory? Political rhetoric can be cheap to the point of meaninglessness, but it’s clear many commentators in the mainstream media, to say nothing of radical left activists, intended these characterizations to be taken seriously. Yet they dared not complete their own thoughts, let alone translate them into the logical action.

    Kirk’s murderer, who reportedly had a trans lover and carved anti-fascist slogans into his bullets, followed through on the left’s premises. And on the anti-Trump social network Bluesky, his crime was celebrated – or at least Kirk’s wickedness, not the gunman’s, was the major topic of conversation. “It is a tragedy both that charlie kirk lived and that he died,” one even-handed Blueskyer opined. Another, uniting the sexual and pharmaceutical obsessions typical of the crowd, wrote, “In honor of Charlie Kirk who believed  God wanted gays to be stoned I think I will have an edible.” Droll, even if it depends on the lie, widespread on Bluesky, that Kirk believed such a thing. A German account with the handle TRG Movies & Entertainment wrote, “Charlie Kirk, the white nationalist, has been killed? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Fuuckin’ hell. Wow. Who, how, and are you ‘sad’ about it? As a German, knowing where this fascist nazi shit is leading: I ain’t.”

    Disagreeing with the left, or the right, doesn’t make you a bad person – celebrating naked evil does

    Examples can be multiplied endlessly. “Kirk’s death was good. if you can’t agree with that then frankly you’re either a fascist yourself or a fucking dumbass,” wrote an account called “Harlot,” evincing a pathological hatred of capital letters as well as Kirk: “there is no wiggle room here, that man deserved to die.” “Remember this before you condemn ‘political violence,’ he advocated political violence against trans people,” wrote one “Natacha.”

    I didn’t have to hunt for those quotes – they were from posts trending under “Charlie Kirk” the day he was murdered.

    There were many more restrained comments as well, including from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, who wrote a post beginning, “Violence only begets violence.” Yet the replies from his site’s users included one quoting without comment a message saying, “When you argue that fascists should be defeated through debate what you’re actually suggesting is that vulnerable minorities should have to endlessly argue for their right to exist and that at no point should the debate be considered over and won.”

    God forbid a “vulnerable” minority should have to make an argument instead of having someone shot. If you can’t forever end a discussion with bullets, doesn’t that mean the fascists win? Some comments applauding Kirk’s murder or saying he got what he deserved – as if “what goes around comes around” applies to answering words with sniper fire – came from identifiable members of the public, including alarming numbers of teachers, medical professionals and caregivers. And some of those gloating enthusiasts for murder have since been fired. Is that an injustice – an insult to free speech?

    Not in the least. What they’re being fired for is not political speech but profoundly bad character. Someone who tells a rape victim he hopes she enjoyed it or who boasts about torturing animals shouldn’t be trusted to teach children or care for the sick. People who exhibit their wicked character by cheering for straightforward murder are declared enemies of the most basic moral standard.

    Yet there are overreactions of the kind Jefferson might have feared, including from the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, who unbosomed herself of the belief, incompatible with the First Amendment, that “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” threatening, “we will absolutely target you… if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

    Kirk himself would have been a target of the federal government under that standard, not because he was a purveyor of hate but because his enemies, themselves as hateful as their Bluesky testimonies indicate, would have been just as happy to silence him with federal goons under their control as they were to see him killed by a freelancer.

    The left, and anti-Trump liberals driven insane by the collapse of their own prestige and norms, have worked assiduously to blur the lines between politics and common morality. Disagreeing with the left, or the right, doesn’t make you a bad person – celebrating naked evil does. The First Amendment protects even that. But employers should not.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • I’m done with default illiberalism

    I’m done with default illiberalism

    It took me far too long to reach the point where I could vote for Donald Trump confidently. I’d been redpilled multiple times. First in 2015, during Trump’s first campaign and the unhinged reaction to it; then again during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings; and most intensely in 2020 while living in Los Angeles. That city under lockdown was chaos. Churches and AA meetings were shuttered. Protests, looting and arson were tacitly permitted. I watched the collapse of society, a grim spectacle of selective enforcement and eroded trust. The grown-ups, I realized, weren’t in charge. Someone had to clean up the mess.

    I could explain away my reluctance to vote for Trump with January 6 or his contesting the 2020 election results. Those events provided convenient excuses. But if I’m honest, the real barrier was deeper – a reflexive, almost primal reaction to shout “but the right…” This knee-jerk impulse to respond to any critique of “the left” with a list of crimes committed by “the right” kept me tethered to an ideology I didn’t really believe in. It was a factory setting, a default liberalism that took years to unravel.

    Hollywood doesn’t help. It relentlessly reinforces the idea that conservatives are villains

    I wasn’t redpilled in a single moment. It was a slow, humbling process of admitting I wasn’t the “good guy,” that I wasn’t inherently on the moral side of history. Only through conversations with people I respected did I see it clearly: I had a compulsive need to qualify any critique of the left with a jab at the right. It was a cultural tic, a way to signal virtue.

    And what’s virtuous about signaling left these days? Their excesses are glaring. Russiagate theories were peddled as fact for years. Race-baiting became a default response to electoral losses, with “white women” scapegoated as the problem.

    Commentators such as John McWhorter mused about wishing Trump had been assassinated, with no repercussions. The media didn’t wring their hands over “dangerous rhetoric” when it came from the left. There was no accountability, no boundary they couldn’t cross. For me, the tipping point came at a dinner party shortly after Trump narrowly survived his assassination attempt. A friend, emboldened by too much wine, lamented that the bullet had missed. “It was so close,” she slurred, as if rooting for a sports team. I was stunned – not just by her words, but by her confidence that she could say them in polite company. She spoke as if she were on the right side of history, untouchable in her moral clarity.

    After that, the left’s moral asymmetry became impossible for me to ignore. When George Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests, it legitimized any response – no matter how extreme.

    Yet when Charlie Kirk was assassinated a few weeks ago, we were told that attempts to call out those celebrating his death were excessive. The left can cheer political violence, but the right can’t even push back without being accused of overreach. This double standard is rooted in a myth: that the left is the “kinder, gentler” side of politics.

    But it’s not kindness. It’s weaponized empathy. Within hours of Kirk’s death, social media was flooded with teachers, doctors, pundits, musicians – pillars of civilized society in positions of authority – rejoicing in a man’s murder simply because they disagreed with him.

    In truth, the left abandoned its kind streak for good old-fashioned authoritarianism long ago. Under their latest attempt at governing, kids faced sterilization under the banner of “gender-affirming care.” Men exposed themselves in women’s spaces and women were assaulted in prisons by male inmates. Businesses and federal buildings burned during riots enabled by a “defund the police” ethos. Millions of children fell behind during Covid school closures (some never logged back on).

    For the left, being misgendered or told “no” are considered “existential threats.” For the right, the threat is literal: political violence and the possibility of being killed for your beliefs.

    Hollywood doesn’t help. It relentlessly reinforces the idea that conservatives are villains. Even actors such as Chris Pratt, who seem “red-coded,” face scrutiny for their beliefs. But Kirk’s murder changed the rules. The right is done with the “let it slide” approach. It is no longer willing to absorb aggressive tirades about its supposed evils or to take the high road against a culture that celebrates right-wing deaths. The left calls this shift “cancel culture,” but it’s a false equivalency. Its version of cancellation punishes ordinary people for believing in biological reality, or questioning progressive dogma. It’s about humiliation, de-banking and ruining people’s lives for their thought crimes. The right is simply demanding accountability for political violence.

    When Senator Chris Murphy warns that “something might be coming” in response to Kirk’s murder, he does not appear to be condemning the killers; rather, he seems to be scolding the victims for their outrage.

    It’s the final evolution of “BUT THE RIGHT…” – a refusal to confront one’s own side, and its radicalization, while chastising the right for daring to fight back.

    Most Americans have more in common with Charlie Kirk than with the alleged shooter or the elites making excuses. The everyday American “normie” sees this clearly. One side cheers murder; the other says it’s wrong. The choice isn’t hard.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • A lack of national identity has killed off the Great American Novel

    A lack of national identity has killed off the Great American Novel

    Is there hope for literature in America this century? The forecast looks grim. One walk through the literary fiction section at a bookstore is a testament to the art form’s cultural bankruptcy. Just about every other book on the new release table is a treatise on your racism masquerading as a tale of collective uplift. Fine, if you want to expiate your sins of privilege – but all in all, a snoozefest.

    Novels held a central place in America as a vital cultural force; novelists were worshipped as electrifying sages

    Same goes for most of the books on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the century so far. The subjects of race, gender and oppression generally dominate. Soap-opera conflicts about victimhood crowd the rankings, each one a reproach against your unspoken crimes: your whiteness, your maleness, your very existence. Narrow and righteous, this is a fiction that cannot be pulled apart from politics. Like the top-ranked sermons of Protestant ministers from the 1800s, the whole lot will slide into irrelevance, unread and forgotten.

    The poet Joseph Bottum once described to me what he calls a “cocktail party test” to gauge the cultural significance of a novel. The test is to ask whether you would feel any embarrassment if the smart set at a party brought up a new book and you had to admit you hadn’t read it yet.

    With TV shows, this still happens. The hit HBO series The White Lotus even satirizes such conversations, itself being a show everyone wants to share and talk about after an episode airs. Bottum suggested that the last novel to pass this test was Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, published nearly 40 years ago in 1987, a hard-to-believe time when novels still held a central place in America as a vital cultural force and novelists themselves were worshipped as electrifying sages by obsessive fans. The whole country talked about Bonfire. Not just an insular claque of corpses at New York publishing houses and magazines.

    Americans simply don’t read so-called serious fiction very much anymore. Particularly men. It is worth asking why.

    In a column this summer in the New York Times, David Brooks picked up the question, lamenting the fading glory of the literary novel. He too brings up Wolfe as one of the last great American novelists, along with a host of other big names in a Macy’s Parade of boomer nostalgia. Look there’s Saul Bellow! And Philip Roth and Toni Morrison! See how they elevated our souls! Such passionate and prophetic voices, but now, alas, the parade has been canceled, the crowds dispersed and the children told Santa was never real. They might as well look at their phones.

    It is true, Brooks concedes, there are fine novelists out there toiling in the fields of obscurity, but he says they have all failed to capture the whole public’s imagination because they play it too safe and too small. He calls for – begs for – novelists with a grand enough ambition to capture the zeitgeist, to show us who we are – all of us, not just some – and what we could become. Only then might America start reading again.

    It’s a rousing thought, for sure, a heady enough cocktail to quicken the pulse of the most indebted English major’s heart. At least for ten minutes before the next student loan payment comes due. But I’m not convinced that the future of literature in America is dim for lack of courage. The rot is much deeper than that. The poor, sad death of the Great American Novel has less to do with the lost virtue of aspiring writers and more to do with the erosion of a unified national identity and the country’s consequent trajectory toward a more fragmented society of different competing cultural tribes.

    These divisions in the US are deepening: boomers versus Generations X, Y and Z; urban versus rural; race communists versus conservatives; even regional differences are intensifying, with states such as California and Texas growing further apart in policy and culture. It’s hard to believe even a novelist of the first rank could appeal to all members of these warring factions.

    But while it’s true the mainstream literary beast lies belly-up, gasping for its last breath, something fervent is stirring in the cultural underbrush. There may never be a single novel that dominates conversation at cocktail parties across the nation again, but there are little polities of the mind emerging, building their own canons like medieval monks illuminating manuscripts in hidden scriptoria.

    Take the TradCaths. This small but spirited tribe is resurrecting G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh – not American authors, sure, but they will form the foundation of a counter-canon that’s booming in sales of reprints and in homeschool curricula, while the secular slop of literary fiction wheezes on life support. In short, the center cannot hold, but the fringes will flourish. And there is one niche with a strong counter current that interests me most.

    One of the oldest themes in the western canon is the conflict between greatness and prestige. What might roughly be called the hero versus the king. The very first word of The Iliad is an ancient Greek word for anger, but not just any anger. It is intense and divine and it is the fury of Achilles, the best among all the heroes in the field.

    One of the oldest themes in the western canon is the conflict between greatness and prestige; the hero versus the king

    And even though the Greeks are at war with the Trojans and have been for years, Achilles isn’t angry about that. He’s angry because an incompetent, corrupt, but legitimate king, his ruler and commander, has taken what doesn’t belong to him. So Achilles shrugs. In a huff he retires from the battle. The central conflict of The Iliad isn’t between the Trojans and the Greeks. It’s between Achilles and Agamemnon: the hero versus the king.

    There are two types of hierarchies battling it out in America today: the hierarchies of prestige and the hierarchies of greatness. They have very different cultures. Prestige hierarchies are those institutions that have a long history, that are large, bureaucratic and powerful and that form the establishment – the departments of the Federal government, Wall Street banks, the media, the professions and elite universities.

    Hierarchies of greatness, on the other hand, emerge when something is the best at what it does in a competitive landscape. They have a short history, they are small and they are extremely competent. A clear example is SpaceX compared to NASA. One soars; the other is buried in committee meetings and memoranda.

    In the hierarchy of prestige, advancement and promotion depend on pleasing superiors. To ascend this pyramid, you must have the right opinions and know the right people. In the hierarchy of greatness, to ascend you must win and solve problems. It’s not about who you know or impress, it’s about what you can do.

    The literature of prestige is the literary canon of the pyramid-climbing tournament that has gripped the nation for 50-plus years – that is, the elite college admissions tournament and beyond that, the tournament to enter the professions and civil service.

    The character-stripping rules for advancement in this pyramid anesthetize genius. Genuine artistic geniuses do not go to grad school, where conformism, collusion and incrementally becoming a toady are all rewarded. This pyramid molds a nation of diligent functionaries, time servers and careerists who don’t want to rock the boat. The table of new novels at the bookstore, the New York Times list of the 100 best books this century, contain the books you must read to advance within this world.

    For the hierarchies of greatness, it isn’t the professor or the critic or the journalist who makes a literary canon, but the builder or artist. Membership is determined by those who create.

    Among this crowd, there are books discussed as passionately at Silicon Valley house parties as French poets brawling over aesthetics in a Parisian café: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

    Meanwhile, the established, respected, highbrow world of literature, the gatekeepers to the professions and the petty tyrants of the administrative state read their canon on a sinking Titanic.

    The future of American fiction is not in New York’s publishing houses, nor in the pages of the New York Times. It’s tribal and alive in the shadows, where stories are written not for prestige but for truth. It will belong to those who win.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Jason Bateman breaks bad in Black Rabbit

    Jason Bateman breaks bad in Black Rabbit

    When Bryan Cranston staggered on-screen in the opening scene of Breaking Bad in 2008, stumbling out of a crashed RV dressed only in his underpants, and addressed the camera with, “My name is Walter Hartwell White…to all law enforcement entities, this is not an admission of guilt,” he immediately changed perceptions of who he was as an actor. Previously, he was best known for being the goofy dad in Malcolm in the Middle, and despite some effective straight performances, most thought of him as a comedic performer, rather than the star of what became the most talked-about crime drama series since The Wire.

    Jason Bateman would, one presumes, like to follow Cranston’s lead. He broke out in Arrested Development, in which he played the put-upon Michael Bluth, perpetually beset by the antics of his eccentric-to-insane family. Although the character was nominally the straight man, Bateman’s peerless comic timing saw him translate his television success to a decent film career, with good parts in big films such as Juno and Hancock. Yet he was usually cast as the lovable nice guy, playing the less interesting roles while his more eccentric co-stars walked away with the pictures.

    The first real attempt on his part to escape this typecasting was in the crime drama Ozark, in which he played a financial advisor who finds himself laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel. Not only did Bateman manage to find nuance and interest in the part of Marty Byrde, using his natural charm and charisma to perverted ends, but he also demonstrated an aptitude for directing, helming several episodes and winning an Emmy for his work on “Reparations.” Moving to the darker side clearly agreed with Bateman, because he was a spookily effective villain in the otherwise ephemeral Taron Egerton airport thriller, Carry-On, delivering pep talks to the protagonist even as he makes his life hell.

    It’s unsurprising, then, that in the new Netflix crime series Black Rabbit, Bateman – who directed the opening two episodes – has seized upon the chance to explore his inner nefariousness. He plays Vince Friedken, who initially appears to be nothing more than a small-time scam artist, trying to sell some (presumably stolen) coins to a pair of thieves who swiftly rob him in turn. Vince might look like a hobo, all long hair and straggly beard, but he’s far smarter than he looks: disposing of one of the thieves, he hot-tails it to New York, where he meets up once again with his estranged brother, Jake (Jude Law), the successful owner of a bar-club-restaurant named Black Rabbit.

    Zach Baylin & Kate Susman’s drama might not be wildly original, but it at least offers some novel twists on formula. Much of the tension in the first episode does not revolve around violence and betrayal, but about what the New York Times restaurant critic will make of the food at Black Rabbit. Vince isn’t simply a deadbeat junkie but a talented and once-successful restaurateur who was waylaid by the pharmaceutical stimulants that one too many ambitious and successful men ensure. And Jake, shown in the tense opening scene being confronted with an armed robbery at the restaurant, is clearly hiding his own secrets underneath his suave exterior.

    How this resolves itself over the eight episodes plays out partially as you’d expect and partially in new ways. It’s a novel touch, for instance, to have the crime lord Vince played by the deaf actor Troy Kotsur (an Oscar winner for Coda who has not been seen on screens often enough since) and even if the restaurant business stuff feels post-Bear in its machinations, it is at least engaging. All of which means that all the bad men waving guns and shouting – and foot chases through the seedier parts of New York – do at least have a touch of freshness to them: appropriately enough, given the Black Rabbit’s culinary stock-in-trade.

    But this is, again, Bateman’s show. Now 56, and with a misspent youth (which he once described as being “like Risky Business for ten years”) firmly behind him, he has an interestingly weathered face that makes him stand out from his more Botoxed peers. Law does what he does very well, but it is his co-star who stands out, bringing depth and humanity to what might have been a thin part, and ensuring that Black Rabbit is very much worth catching.

  • Why you should never date a German man

    Why you should never date a German man

    Call me unpatriotic but, although I’m German, nothing could ever have persuaded me to date a German man. I married an Englishman, finding Teutonic attitudes towards romance unbearable. Dating can go on for years, often ending in a quiet, dry dissolution after a decade. If you’re lucky, the relationship will limp on towards marriage, driven more by the need to save on taxes than any belief in what many Germans consider an antiquated institution.

    Two hundred years ago, we had the tragic intensity of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a cornerstone of the Romantic movement. It was so wildly popular that it sparked one of the first waves of romantic consumerism: perfumes, clothing and even mugs depicting scenes from the novel were sold. Fast forward to today, and we have Fack ju Göhte (2013), a comedy about a German-Arab ex-convict who poses as a literature teacher to hunt down the buried loot referenced in Young Werther. The country that once led the Romantic revolution now seems less interested in all-consuming passion than in cultural self-destruction.

    Instead of declarations of love, the modern German man is more likely to insist on splitting the bill 50/50, even on a first date – and heaven help the woman whose cash app request is off by even a cent. It’s no surprise that German jewellry shops and florists are disappearing – not just victims of an economic recession, but of a romantic one too.

    It’s tempting to blame communism. The German Democratic Republic’s drive for total female workforce participation aimed at turning women into men, with a few biological differences. Some progressives still call this empowerment, but it mostly meant steamrolling over what many women actually wanted. Personally, I’d take babies over a factory floor any day. Preferably babies that arrive with flowers and a husband who doesn’t ask me to split the hospital bill.

    Another culprit is western feminism, which encouraged women to demand equal rights. Too often, that has meant demanding to be treated as men rather than respected as a woman. If you browbeat any man who dares to open the door for you or offers up his seat, then soon almost none will. As these small gestures collapse, so does the architecture of romance, which must be built on an imbalance between the sexes.

    Sadly, Germany’s unromantic streak can’t even be said to be a recent aberration, despite the excesses of communism and feminism. Perhaps there is something more fundamental in the German character. You only have to read Erich Kästner’s 1928 poem “Sachliche Romanze” (“Sobering Romance”), which gruesomely dissects the eight-year death of love into wordless nothingness, to wonder. Certainly, we are a practical, taciturn people, and have adapted to the world of elasticated waistbands and low-maintenance short hairstyles quickly. Far too often, it isn’t just the men you see wearing cargo trousers or stretchy hiking gear, but the women also. Mata Hari would struggle to maintain any mystique in brightly colored moisture-wicking polyester.

    That doesn’t fully explain the issue, however. The right-wing commentator Anabel Schunke has spoken about how far too many German men are a kartoffel “potato”) and compared them unfavorably with Turkish or Arab migrant men, who still bother to wear aftershave and offer expensive gifts. These talahons, as we call them in Germany (from an Arabic phrase meaning “come here,” popularized by a Syrian-German rapper), might like to wear designer tracksuits and get haircuts in barbers with black-and-gold color schemes, but at least they make an effort in the dating arena.

    It’s possible the old ways are making a comeback, thanks partly to Instagram. German men who use the platform have started to present themselves as gentlemen. Influencers like Justus Hansen pose in suits and Barbour jackets, happily putting one foot in the past and another in the present. Without an older generation to guide them, young German men are looking to the internet to discover forgotten traditions. It helps if they can look good in the traditional trachten (the English call them lederhosen). Similarly, German women have discovered ways to look sexy in the dirndl, that Germanic bodice and blouse combination.

    There is an upside to German men. Even Tacitus, writing nearly 2,000 years ago, singled out the Germanic tribes for their rare commitment to monogamy: barbarians, yes, but loyal ones. Not much has changed. For all his quirks, the German man is generally a solid provider, faithful and competent with a toolbox. He’ll even stick around if you get an Angela Merkel bowl cut and go up three dress sizes. Just don’t ask him to give up the jean shorts, the bad haircuts or his beloved cargo joggers. There are limits to his love.

  • Is political Christianity back?

    There is a passage in Milan Kundera’s novelistic essay Testaments Betrayed where he writes about the nature of history. Man walks in a fog, Kundera observes. He stumbles along a path and creates the path as he walks it. When he looks back, he can see the path, he may see the man, but he cannot see the fog. Everything looks inevitable after it has happened.

    So we have the “sleepwalkers” explanation of how Europe stumbled into the first world war. We have the “inevitability” of the slide into the second. It is perhaps the greatest of all idiotic modern presumptions that so many people imagine while looking back that they would have known better or acted differently.

    Which brings me to the present. Because the only thing you can do if you are going to try to tread a path well is to use what senses you have to work out what the next step might be. In the past week there have been two events, one on each side of the Atlantic, which have revealed a very interesting sense of the path we are on.

    Charlie Kirk was a proud and devout Christian. When asked what he wanted his legacy to be (a question it is awful to think that a man only just through his twenties was often asked), he always said that he wanted to be remembered first and foremost for his faith. Before being an American, a Republican, an activist or a supporter of Donald Trump, it was that which he wanted to be remembered for. His faith in Christ was the rock on which everything else stood.

    Since Charlie’s assassination there have been many gatherings around the world in his memory, from cities in America and Britain to as far away as South Korea. And these have so far been notable for a number of things. Unlike those in response to, say, the death of George Floyd, these gatherings have not compelled local businesses to board up their windows. They have not, so far, been despoiled by significant violence. What they have been dominated by is prayer. Indeed the memorial gatherings to Charlie have so far been defined by their Christian content more than anything else. That is a rather remarkable thing: in response to a political assassination, the people on the side of the victim have gathered to pray.

    In London last weekend Tommy Robinson held a rally called “Unite the Kingdom.” There is the usual dispute over the number of people who attended, but the area around parliament was full enough to suggest that it was more than 100,000. It has been attacked in the British media as some kind of far-right, white-supremacist gathering, but was in fact marked by its racial inclusivity and peaceable nature.

    In response to a political assassination, people have gathered to pray

    Something that the media coverage almost completely ignored were the efforts to insert a Christian element into the proceedings. Yes, there were various anti-mass migration activists and politicians. Yes, there were musicians, including black gospel singers. But to me one of the most interesting aspects of the events on the main stage was the prominence of overtly Christian figures – including the Maori men who performed a haka with a Christian pastor. The proceedings were kicked off by a fogeyish clergyman called Bishop Ceirion Dewar from something called the Confessing Anglican Church.

    I found his performance a tad bizarre. He seemed to mix up the role of public prayer with that of a wizard in Tolkien warding off the hordes of Isengard. But that is a matter of taste. And I can’t help noticing that various bishops of the actual established church were not available last Saturday. Perhaps like the bishops of Dover, Southwark and Barking, they were too busy denouncing the event to bother praying anywhere near it, or even speaking to the sort of people attending.

    Still, it is noteworthy to me that two movements within a week, at the very edge of the cultural and political struggles of our time, should end up leaning so heavily into the Christian element. Especially in Britain, where the role of Christianity in public life has become no more distinct than a whistle in the midst of a hurricane.

    It is perhaps inevitable. The concern that many people have about the levels of legal and illegal migration over recent decades has a great deal to do with the fact that many people arriving into the West have no desire to integrate into our traditions and a distinct desire to spread their own way of doing things. Prominent historians, including Tom Holland, have noted entirely correctly that Islam seems to have things about it which make it uniquely indigestible to the modern secularized state.

    In reality it is a double whammy. The deep cultural concerns of our time are caused both by the challenges which Islam poses to a secularized society and the push that a new religion of “progressivism” has made into the space where Christianity once was. The concerns are by no means dampened by the way that elements of these two other faiths have found a way, for the time being, to march together, creating a hybrid that might be summed up as “Trans for Palestine”: a clown-car which will inevitably come off the road.

    Amid this fog it is probably inevitable that people will try to return to their firmest orientations. This is what R.R. Reno, the editor of the Catholic magazine First Things, has described as “the return of the strong gods,” Though deeply moving at times and slightly comical at others, there is something significant going on here.

    A sensible society and a wise Church here in England would do something to speak to these urges. But I don’t expect it. The Bishop of Barking, the Rt Revd Lynne Cullens, could be found this week claiming that Robinson’s rally showed it is time for a “refreshed, contemporary and broad-based understanding of British values.” Treading wisely and treading timidly are not always the same thing.

  • Don’t cry for Jimmy Kimmel

    The defenestration of the supposed talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, for the inflammatory remarks that he made during the monologue in his show on Monday night about Charlie Kirk, is both an unexpected and deeply predictable development. It was unexpected because Kimmel clearly believed that he was, like Lehman Brothers, “too big to fail,” and was therefore within his rights to make such comments as how “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” And it was deeply predictable because Kimmel now becomes the latest scalp that the right have seized this year, and perhaps the most high-profile yet. 

    In truth, Kimmel – whose show Jimmy Kimmel Live! should now, perhaps, be renamed Jimmy Kimmel Dead! as it has been pulled, or “pre-empted,” from the ABC schedules “indefinitely,” which means that the chances of its returning are negligible – was a marked man. It is, of course, possible that he may return in some form on a streaming service such as Netflix, and whether such employers of his as the Academy Awards are sufficiently cowed to take him off their roster remains to be seen. Certainly, the left will see the firing as Kimmel as a political action, and President Trump’s open gloating that the decision was “great news for America” will embolden his opponents even further, perhaps turning Kimmel into a martyr for supposed free speech. 

    If this does happen, they have picked the wrong person. In truth, Kimmel’s schtick wore thin a long time ago, and his continued presence hosting one of the nation’s late-night talk shows owed as much to a lack of imagination on the part of executives and producers as it did genuine talent. If there is a more irritating, drawn-out and smug running “joke” than his manufactured feud with Matt Damon – something that may have been briefly amusing for a couple of gags, but has now lasted, in some form, for twenty years (twenty years!) – then I would be horrified to hear about it, but the fake fracas sums Kimmel up perfectly: a bit that may or may not have been amusing for a short time, but was grotesquely overstretched far beyond any enjoyable or even bearable period. 

    Jimmy Kimmel Live! should now, perhaps, be renamed Jimmy Kimmel Dead!

    The talk show host has form. Many of the things that he should have been cancelled for on previous occasions, such as his donning blackface for a frankly racist impersonation of Snoop Dogg in 1996 and how he made some grimly sexist comments towards Megan Fox in 2009, were brushed under the carpet after Kimmel made the usual non-committal apologies of how “I believe that I have evolved and matured over the last 20-plus years,” even as he suggested that “I know that this will not be the last I hear of this and that it will be used again to try to quiet me.” He has always positioned himself less as a multi-millionaire interviewing celebrities and telling not-that-funny jokes on late-night television and more as a principled one-man source of opposition to Trump and MAGA. This may endear him to those on the left who will see his firing as an act of martyrdom, but for those on the right, or even of no political allegiance whatsoever, Kimmel’s attacks on the present administration will seem less like bravery and more like a childish urge to bear-bait. 

    Well, the bear has bitten at last, and apart from the fully paid-up devotees of this persistent man, who will be up in arms at ABC’s decision, many will be quietly relieved that Kimmel has been put out to pasture. No more wearisome Matt Damon “jokes”; no more MAGA insults. For any American who believes in dignity in retirement, let us hope that Kimmel enjoys a long and peaceful one, unburdened by the need to share his thoughts and feelings with the world again.