The Social World

Category: Media

  • De Blasio ‘imposter’ hoodwinks British paper

    Of all the people to go as for Halloween, why would you choose Bill de Blasio, an undistinguished Mayor of New York and flame-out 2020 presidential candidate? 

    That’s a plausible explanation for the recent howler from the Times of London – Great Britain’s newspaper of record – whose veteran US correspondent Bevan Hurley quoted a man identifying himself as de Blasio on his misgivings about Zohran Mamdani.

    “While the ambition is admirable, the cost estimates – reportedly exceeding $7 billion annually – rest on optimistic assumptions… about eliminating waste and raising revenue through new taxes,” this total imposter told Mr. Hurley, with strange eloquence. “In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.” With a seasoned newsman apparently under his spell, the fake de Blasio could have plausibly put any words he wanted to into the former mayor’s mouth – like, say, an endorsement of George Wallace. How strange that he limited himself to a thoroughly centrist spiel on fiscal credibility. 

    All the same, Hurley must have thought he’d happened upon the scoop of the year: a left-populist denounces another left-populist days before an election. Hence, perhaps, the haste to get the story out, which duly appeared on the Times website at 4 p.m. ET Tuesday. 

    Mayor de Blasio was indignant. On X he declared that he was “appalled” by the story, which was “an absolute violation of journalistic ethics.” Tell Cockburn what you really think! The Mamdani campaign now seems more or less unstoppable, hence this slightly frantic attempt on de Blasio’s part to prove his loyalty to the candidate he’d endorsed.

    Hurley’s article was quickly deleted (though an archived version remains online). Cockburn notes that it’s traditionally been easy for foreign correspondents in America to bluff their way around on the strength of their accent; we may have just witnessed the first ever case of the opposite. 

  • ‘Trump isn’t easy’: Piers Morgan on his friends – and foes

    ‘Trump isn’t easy’: Piers Morgan on his friends – and foes

    When I meet Piers Morgan, he warns me he’s glued to the “moment in history” happening on his TV screens that morning. He is watching Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages as part of the peace deal negotiated by his old friend Donald Trump.

    The two have known each other for 17 years, first meeting when Morgan appeared in – and won – Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. He tells me that Trump’s final words to him on the show were: “Piers, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re almost certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the Celebrity Apprentice.”

    Eight years later, when Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Morgan sent him a card saying: “Well, Donald, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the President of the United States.”

    It hasn’t always been such plain sailing between the two. Morgan recalls a time when Nigel Farage attempted to sabotage a planned interview by furnishing Trump with a dossier of every negative column Morgan had written about him, including the statement that he should be “barred from ever running for president again.” The interview was salvaged only when Morgan mentioned that he wanted to ask about Trump’s recent hole-in-one on the golf course.

    “Trump as a friend isn’t easy,” Morgan muses. “He can be incendiary, his rhetoric pisses people off, he can be very shoot-from-the-hip.” But in spite of all this, he’s not surprised that Trump may be the man to secure peace in the Middle East. “[Is there] anyone else who could get an agreement from Middle Eastern countries to end this war now?” he asks. “I don’t think there is.”

    Morgan says the two talk constantly. The morning after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer handed Trump the invitation for his second state visit, for example, the President phoned the former Daily Mirror editor, unable to decide between Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle for the state dinner. “You’ve got to go for the castle – looks better,” Morgan advised. When Trump rang the morning after the banquet, he reported that he loved it. “He’s a sucker for pomp and pageantry,” Morgan says. And just the other day, Morgan tells me, Trump called him to let him know: “Piers, you’re looking good on the TV.”

    The self-confessed “rampant egomaniac” who used to party with the stars as the Sun’s showbiz reporter isn’t one to shy away from criticizing those he considers to be friends. Despite regularly texting Starmer to discuss Arsenal Football Club, he doesn’t think the Prime Minister is doing a good job. “Domestically,” he says, Starmer has “been a failure so far.” Perhaps this is why Starmer won’t sit down with him for an interview. He had said he would do so after Morgan gave him “an unwanted lecture on how to run the country” at a party, but so far he’s not made good on his promise to appear on the YouTube show Piers Morgan Uncensored.

    “If you’re going to run the country you better be able to deal with an interview with me,” Morgan says. “He’s a bit like Boris Johnson when he ran into that fridge on Good Morning Britain.” Scared, in other words.

    On the subject of former prime minister Boris Johnson, he’s pretty damning: “Beneath the buffoon exterior may lie an actual buffoon.” And he doesn’t stop there: “Until he learns to comb his hair, I’m not interested.” What does he reckon about the current Tory leader? “Reports of her political death may have been exaggerated.”

    He’s less kind about Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform party, predicting that with “his current economic policies” Reform won’t win the next general election. “He has momentum but how you pay for things matters.”

    It’s the Green party leader Zack Polanski who bothers him most, however. The two got into a spat on his program earlier this month and Morgan tells me now: “He’s just not impressive at all. You cannot be prime minister of Great Britain if you think women have penises. It’s a red line.”

    Polanski embodies the “woke” culture Morgan loathes. His latest book, Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness, was published this month. He’s returned to the theme in print five years after writing Wake Up about the war on free speech. “They [the left] ignored me and got more insane – and then suffered electorally.”

    So is he pleased that the Democrats were punished at the ballot box for adopting “woke” causes? No, Morgan says: “I’m a centrist… Socially, I’m pretty liberal.” But for now, “they’ve demeaned the American justice system” in their attempts to block Trump. “They got him for shuffling a bit of paper over and alleging a one-night stand with a porn star… [It’s] trivial and ridiculous.”

    And while he might be right that the Democrats got a beating for hitching themselves “to an ideology most Americans rejected… Trump’s re-election was a repudiation of it,” has woke been abandoned in quite the same way this side of the pond? After all, Green party membership in the UK has now surged past that of the Conservative party. “It still pops up like weeds, and we need to root it out when it does,” he says. “This is an important moment to draw a line and lay groundwork so it doesn’t come back.” That’s what the book’s about. We need, he tells me, an “industrial woke weedkiller” ready for when it next rears its head.

    For Morgan, it seems personal: he appears to genuinely care about the victims of cancel culture. The plight of “teachers, nurses, professors” who have lost their jobs plagues him. “They should get medals,” he says. He reserves deep sympathy for J.K. Rowling because of the abuse targeted at her for her views on single-sex spaces, despite conceding that they “don’t get on personally.” (She once described him as a “fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologizing celebrity toady.” In return he called her “superior, dismissive and arrogant.”)

    Perhaps his sympathy for her comes about because of the abuse he has received himself. After the “Meghan Markle saga,” which saw him storm off Good Morning Britain after criticizing the duchess, “they came for me and targeted my kids,” he says. His son received a death threat on Instagram, but after months of investigation the police said they couldn’t find the identity behind the anonymous accounts.

    Has this experience shaped how he views Elon Musk and his running of X? Musk, Morgan says, has joined Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer in dodging him for an interview – so far, the tech mogul has canceled twice. Could this be owing to the famous feud between Musk and Morgan’s pal Trump? He’s dismissive of that idea and thinks Musk and Trump could make up at some stage. They met at Charlie Kirk’s memorial recently and may do business together again – though Morgan doesn’t think “that relationship will ever be quite the same again.”

    Were he to sit down with Musk, the subject of anonymous accounts might form part of the interview. While he praises the fact-checking of X’s AI chatbot Grok, Morgan is damning about the types of accounts that threatened his son: “Death threats aren’t free speech.” He’s also unhappy about the accounts that go too far: “Kanye West should be banned for anti-Semitic hate; Alex Jones, too, for the Sandy Hook lies [that the massacre was faked].”

    How would the man who played a not insignificant role in killing woke culture like to be remembered? “That I didn’t die wondering.” For him, his most important legacy is his children: “They still want to hang out with me in adulthood – that’s a success.” And he still wants to hang out with them. On two conditions, though: that they stay loyal to Arsenal, and never, ever go on the reality television show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

  • Is Jack Carr behind the Department of War?

    Is Jack Carr behind the Department of War?

    As a Navy SEAL for 20 years, who reached the rank of Lieutenant Commander and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jack Carr knows about warfare on an expert and visceral level.

    And as the New York Times bestselling author of The Terminal List series and writer of the Amazon hit show based on the books, starring Chris Pratt, he knows the power of words.

    He also has a tendency to succeed at whatever he turns his mind to (see the above). But, still, when he decided the Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of War, it seemed like a very tall order and he was a lone voice. Undeterred, he wrote in op-eds about how the department had lost its way and needed to refocus on warfighting by changing its name back to that it was given in 1789. He urged the vital name change in the pages of his novels, on TV and he even interviewed Pete Hegseth on his podcast just before he was appointed Secretary of Defense by Donald Trump.

    Perhaps, then, it should have come as no surprise when the President signed an executive order last month that the department was to be called the Department of War once again.

    Carr shrugs when asked if he thinks he was in any way responsible. Others believe he was, they say no one else was championing the name reversal but him.

    His latest book in The Terminal List series – Cry Havoc – is itself a throwback to another time: Vietnam in 1968. Think James Bond (but an American) as a Navy SEAL fighting the North Vietnamese at brutally close quarters and also untangling le Carré-esque spy webs in America and Europe. The weapons, the tactics, the events and even the people all feel real – which is because, almost always, they are. Carr’s research is meticulous, his storytelling white-knuckle. Gunsmoke, jungle heat and the fog of communist East Berlin drift from the page.

    In a world where Amazon has stripped James Bond of his guns and spies are either hopeless – Slow Horses – or prioritize diversity – Black Doves – over detecting and dispatching dastardly villains, Cry Havoc is a refreshing blast of undiluted 1960’s masculinity, hard drinking, carnal violence and sophisticated subterfuge.

    So, why did Carr decide to write an origin story for the father of his Terminal List character, James Reece? What did he say when he was sounded out for a position in the first Trump administration? And do his kids think he’s cool now he hangs out with Chris Pratt?

    Why did you write Cry Havoc?

    I wanted to drop an espionage thriller into the heart of the Vietnam War, specifically into the heart of Saigon. And I didn’t want to just put on some Creedence Clearwater Revival in the background, call it 1968, throw in a couple things that happened that year and then just write a normal novel. I really wanted to capture the feeling of 1968 for people who lived through it.

    And then I wanted to capture, specifically, what it felt like to be a MACV-SOG [special forces] operator in Vietnam going into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. I had some of the guys who served in MACV-SOG on my podcast and as I got to know them I’d reach out to confirm things and get their take on what I was writing. The main thing that I wanted to do was honor them.

    It was the most research I’ve ever done, there were books everywhere, maps from the sixties, I even bought a dictionary from the sixties so I could look up words and definitions because some of those have morphed over the years. I wanted to use the terminology of the day.

    If I’m looking up a street name in Saigon – what is now Ho Chi Minh City – I need to know what it was in 1968. It certainly wasn’t what it’s called now. I had to go back to photos and I had to zoom in on grainy black and white images. It takes a lot of time to do that.

    What were your influences in writing Cry Havoc?

    I thought it was a type of story that hadn’t been told in a long time, so I went back to The Quiet American by Graham Greene, that was 1955, The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry, that’s 1974, and The Honorable Schoolboy by John le Carré, that’s 1977. Those authors were so influential to me.

    Cry Havoc takes a skeptical view at the role the media played in shaping public opinion about the Vietnam war. Do you think reporters influenced the outcome?

    The role of the media was very interesting, specifically highlighted by the Tet Offensive, which was obviously a strategic win for the North Vietnamese but also a tactical loss for them. That was a huge turning point in the war, largely manipulated by how it came out in the reporting.

    American reporters misrepresented a little of what was happening. A lot of them were, and this is a very blanket statement, reporting from Saigon and making it look like they were out in the jungle and then going back to nice hotels for drinks in the evening and really living it up.

    This is a broad generalization, but certain people in the media at the time realized that they weren’t just reporting the news anymore, they had the power to shape the news through opinion. But up to that point, people weren’t seeing it as opinion.

    To really get to know someone, to find out what kind of person they are, you give them power. And I think that happened with certain reporters back then. They realized that they had this power, and it wasn’t just straight up reporting the news anymore. They could influence events. And of course it’s continued to go in that direction today.

    What’s the next project?

    My next book’s going to be a James Reece, but I also have my first co-written thriller that should come out in 2026. I wrote it as a screenplay and then clawed it back. I had this huge outline. I had this mood board. I had the whole thing, probably thirty pages of a PowerPoint ready to go to pitch to Hollywood. And then I was about to do it, and I decided that I was going to turn it into a book first and then option it to Hollywood.

    I spent about a year searching for a co-author, just reading other books that are out there and looking for the right person. We haven’t announced my co-author just yet. But he’s a fantastic guy and he’ll be right there on the cover with me. It’ll be a test case and hopefully people like it. It certainly works very well for James Patterson and it worked for Tom Clancy, so we’ll see.

    Do you think you were responsible for the Department of Defense being renamed the Department of War?

    I don’t know if I talked to Pete Hegseth about it, but I mentioned it multiple times when I was on Fox News after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I put it in my book, and I wrote op-eds on it. Then lo and behold, here we go, the Department of War.

    Precision in language reflects precision in thought. And when you think about a Department of Defense, to me from a language perspective that seems more like border patrol or a means of defense, like defending a fixed position, the United States. There’s something psychological that happens when you use precise language.

    I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that this could change back very easily to the Department of Defense with the new administration. As I read it, this doesn’t seem as permanent as they’re making it out to be.

    Would you ever go into politics?

    I get asked about going into politics all the time. Someone gave me a call actually in the first [Trump] administration and nothing official, but they said, “Hey, I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a nomination for Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Low Intensity Conflict.” It was just someone giving me a heads up test, testing the waters, saying they wouldn’t be surprised, not a “Hey, what would you say if.” I want to be very clear about that. Anyway, never happened.

    But I just love what I’m doing now, and this is all I ever wanted to do, other than serve my country as a SEAL.

    It seems like a horrible time to work in government. I just wouldn’t want to spend my life in this fight or flight. Constant engagement, constant getting arrows and spears thrown at you virtually all day, every day from not just every corner of the country but the world. It’s just a very, very toxic time, I think, to step into that kind of service. I’m glad mine was Iraq and Afghanistan, very basic, very primal. I was very good at it, and I don’t think I would be very good at the other. That’s not my battle space, so I’m going to continue to write and solve problems creatively on the page.

    Would you encourage your children to join the military?

    It’s tough. Our daughter is getting close to that age, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she joins. She’s worked with World War II veterans for the past five years now, taking them back to Normandy, taking them to the Netherlands, taking them to Pearl Harbor. She’s been able to hear stories of Iwo Jima and Normandy from guys who were there.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if that influenced her much more than my service or much more than anything I write or say. Talking to a 100-year-old World War II veteran that isn’t trying to convince her one way or another, but is just telling her what it was like to run off the back of that landing craft on Omaha Beach and run across this open terrain while machine gun positions and elevated positions up top or shooting down from the cliffs and what that was like. And I think that really has made an impact.

    So I will not encourage, probably, or dissuade her, she’s going to make her own decision.

    But I think in life, it’s important to listen to those callings inside, whether they work out or not. At least you don’t look back at 50 and wonder what could have happened if I’d only gone to Hollywood, what could have happened if I’d only turned in that script that’s been sitting in my drawer here for the last 30 years if I’d only worked a little harder to find an agent.

    You’ve just finished filming series two of The Terminal List with Chris Pratt in Morocco. You took your family with you – just how cool do your kids think you are now?

    I’m cool for maybe a minute and a half, then I just go back to being dad and they’re completely unimpressed with any of this. My youngest son, who’s 14, was just in a tent with Chris Pratt in the Atlas Mountains having a conversation, and they’d also met at the premiere. I was cool for a brief moment and then I went straight back to being just a goofy dad.

  • The perils of Catholic social media evangelism

    The perils of Catholic social media evangelism

    Jesus, it could be reasonably observed, recruited a motley cast to serve as the first heralds of the gospel.

    An endlessly squabbling band of fishermen, with a few tax collectors and zealots thrown in, the biblical narratives have them endlessly jockeying among themselves for prominence and status before they, to a man, flee when the going gets tough and their Messiah gets arrested.

    In the two thousand years since, the Catholic Church has done its best to balance the inevitable imperfections of its messengers with the perfect truths they are supposed to announce. It’s not always an easy task – and as with so many other things, the internet has made it much more complicated. Especially because there are as many or more self-appointed evangelists as those actually commissioned by the Church to do so, and often with far less formation.

    Recently, one of the new crop of self-made and self-credentialed online evangelists appeared to flame out in grisly spectacular fashion.

    Alex Jurado, a young man with a burgeoning following for his “Voice of Reason” platform, found himself accused via several social media accounts of exchanging sexually explicit messages with a number of women and, allegedly, a 14 year-old girl – which he has vigorously denied, while acknowledging unspecified “mistakes, failures, and sins.”

    Screen shots of the supposed exchanges to one side, the details are a little murky. It’s not exactly clear when all of these exchanges were meant to have happened (if they did). In fact, it’s not immediately clear how old Jurado is himself – different reports suggest he is somewhere between 28 and 30 years old.

    For those unfamiliar with him – as I was myself – it is equally unclear what his credentials are as a professional public explainer and defender of Catholic teaching, though he claims to have spent some brief period in a seminary, at some point, somewhere.

    Other Catholic media sites have been quick to scrub guest appearances by Jurado in response to the accusations, and to distance themselves from the young man. It remains to be seen if and how his situation will resolve itself, but thus far the narrative arc is – like so many things in the online world – unique in the particulars but familiar in its outline.

    In the great before time, before social media and YouTube, before podcasts and livestreams, Catholic evangelists and apologists existed in the same kinds of gate-kept ecospheres as many other areas professional expertise: to get in front of a large audience, generally speaking some institution had to credential you and put you there.

    For Catholics, highly developed systems of doctrine, dogma and canon law favoured the ordained clergy, where most of the institutional knowledge, training and endorsement tends to be focused. And Catholics, unlike their Protestant brethren, retained an innate suspicion of anyone who showed up on the scene without an official hierarchical endorsement.

    As American TV airwaves filled with self-made televangelists in the late 20th century, flashing their Rolexes and private jets and preaching a highly lucrative vision of salvation-as-pyramid-scheme, Catholics tended to shake their heads in amusement – all the more so when these self-ordained profits of prosperity would end up flaming out in scandals of one sort or another.

    All that, though, has changed in an era of instant online celebrity and riches, where “influencing” is a big business with almost no barrier to entry. And in an age of institutional disaffiliation and suspicion, self-proclaimed experts of every variety have shot to celebrity status, opining online about everything from politics to medical science to the practice of journalism.

    Among Catholics, a new micro industry of social media celebrity evangelist-apologist-commentators has flourished, fueled by skepticism of the Church hierarchy in the wake of clerical abuse scandals on one side, and the ever advancing tide of progressive sexual, social and political mores on the other.

    Opportunities for money and sex and never far behind. A trailblazer of the online outsider Catholic persona was Michael Voris, founder of the combative Church Militant website, who pitted himself as a prophetic voice of truth and integrity against a supposedly compromised Church hierarchy and wicked secular world, before the whole project collapsed under the weight of debts, lawsuits and accusations of sexual misconduct.

    One of the more established and credible websites to distance themselves from Jurado last week, Catholic Answers, has already had to watch Patrick Coffin, previously one of its more well-known in-house personalities, depart and slide into an obsession with anti-popes and chemtrails.

    For the Church hierarchy, the phenomenon of celebrity social media Catholicism is a vexing problem. Indeed, the Church might reasonably conclude it has enough problems online with its official ministers.

    The former Bishop of Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland was fired by the Vatican in 2023 in no small part because of his social media posts, which increasingly catered to the bishop’s committed personal following while taking aim at the pope personally.

    The Vatican’s former ambassador to Washington, D.C., Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a quiet career Church civil servant who retired in 2016, went viral at the height of the sex abuse scandals of 2018 when he publicly accused Pope Francis of covering up for the later defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and demanding that the pope step down.

    From there, the archbishop became a fixture in the MAGA firmament, addressing “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 election and hailing Donald Trump as a divinely-sent defender of Christian civilization, before deciding the Donald was soft on LGBT issues and switching his endorsement to Vladimir Putin and finally being excommunicated by the Vatican last year.

    Minnesota’s Bishop Robert Barron, whose Word on Fire media company racks up considerable digital engagement across platforms, pitches himself as a patient pastor and friendly teacher, wide open to dialogue with all comers. Yet he’s also routinely savaged as being “Trumpy” for holding the Church’s teaching on, for example, trans issues, or for failing to make immigration a front line priority.

    Social media, perhaps sadly, isn’t going anywhere. While it has become an unignorable reality, almost no one holds it out as a good thing getting better – in fact, the received wisdom is the opposite.

    But, as long as there are souls to be saved and money to be made, Catholics of all ranks and kinds will be there, bringing a fair share of scandal along with the gospel.

  • Did the mafia make NBA stars offers they couldn’t refuse?

    Did the mafia make NBA stars offers they couldn’t refuse?

    The FBI has arrested Chauncey Billups, NBA champion, Hall of Famer, and coach of the Portland Trail Blazers for his association in a rigged poker game operated by some of New York City’s most notorious crime family. “Why would Chauncey do it?” the world of sports is asking. He’s already worth tens of millions of dollars. That’s a question for Billups, his attorneys, his God, and, presumably, Blazers ownership to answer. But as someone who regularly plays a lot of low and micro-stakes poker, I have a pretty good idea.

    The games I play in are monitored by security cameras, with armed guards at the exits in case people get out of line. When I play in World Series of Poker or World Poker Tour events, there are a strict set of rules by which the vast majority of players abide. There’s some rule-bending, but it usually involves peeking at other people’s cards, using computer solvers to help make quick decisions at the table, or a variety of “angle shooting” tricks upon which the poker world tends to frown. In the rare instances when actual cheating does occur, with the occasional earbud installed to allow a player who know what’s happening on the internet livestream in which they’re participating, the poker world roots it out pretty quickly, and that player quickly finds themselves uninvited, in legal trouble and having to actually work for a living instead of playing cards.

    Chauncey Billups, on the other hand, fell prey to the sinister temptations of the “private game,” which is where all poker pros know the real money lies. The Bonanno, Genovese, Lucchese and Gambino crime families paid Billups, as well as two Miami Heat players, Terry Rozier and Damon Jones, to participate in New York games that involved rigged card shufflers and special glasses and contact lenses. Rozier also apparently faked an injury to throw games, or at least manipulate NBA stats, winning thousands of dollars in sports betting as a result.

    So the NBA is at least partially rigged, big surprise, but let’s keep our eyes on the cards. As the New York Post put it, the mob used the NBA stars to attract “fish” to the games. However, these weren’t mere fish. I play against fish on the average Thursday night as they pull crumpled $20 bills out of their wallets in a desperate attempt to beat a game they can only occasionally win. These were bonafide whales.

    It might seem odd for people to risk playing a private game, run by the mob, when the bright and mostly regulated lights of Atlantic City casino poker are just 80 miles away. But poker is a tempting devil. The idea that you can turn $100 into $2,000 isn’t just an abstraction. It’s a reality, and it happens in card rooms around the world every day. Blowing thousands of dollars at a time also happens regularly. So whales don’t even necessarily know that they’re whales. They’re just swimming in the ocean.

    And the temptation of playing with actual professional basketball players, who we’ve seen on TV and probably gambled on before, is pretty high. In the skeezy world that makes up my days and nights, guys get pretty excited if they play against someone who was once a AAA pitching coach for the Red Sox, or a backup point guard for Michigan State for a couple of seasons. Imagine playing against Mr. Big Shot himself from the Pistons. You’d never suspect that he’s actually a bald, black Le Schiffre.

    “The fraud is mind-boggling,” said FBI director Kash Patel at a press conference yesterday. Yet when I heard about it this morning, it didn’t quite boggle my mind. If you play poker, you just assume that kind of stuff is going on at private games, at all stakes, all the time. I, for one, would be very wary of playing in a game run by someone named “Flappy” who’s backed by the Gambino crime family.

    There’s no real mystery that the mob would run a shady card game. That’s nothing new. Or that rich marks would fall for their schemes. The real question revolves around Billups, who risked his shining reputation and his substantial fortune to help criminals cheat at cards. We can only assume that the mob made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  • How Alex Jones won

    How Alex Jones won

    One of my favorite Walt Whitman stanzas goes like this:

    I’m a pioneer! I’m an explorer! I’m a human, and I’m comin’!

    I’m animated! I’m alive! My heart’s big! It’s got hot blood goin’ through it fast!

    I like to fight! I like to eat! I like to have children! I’m here! I got a life force!

    This is a human! This is what we look like! This is what we act like!

    This is what everyone was like before us! This is what I am!

    Just kidding. That’s Alex Jones, the voice of our time. Nobody in media has won more in the past 20 years than Jones. He’s lost a lot along the way, of course, including the largest defamation suit in American history and access to every mainstream media platform. But those were only temporary slowdowns. They may even have been accelerants.

    In 2018, a bunch of nervous Silicon Valleyites overestimated their control of the web and deplatformed Jones. Today, he’s back on Twitter with 4.4 million followers. Pressure is mounting to reinstate his YouTube channel. His app was recently allowed on the Apple Store again. It’s currently ranked 13th in the news section – higher than Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the AP, NPR, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and CNN. His shows pull in millions of streams every week. He’s not fringe. I’m watching InfoWars as I write this. His guest is Senator Tommy Tuberville.

    All you really need, Jones has proven, is a mic and an internet connection. In fact, he’s proven that only having a mic and an internet connection might be better than having, say, a primetime slot on Fox. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens – hosts of the first and third most popular news podcasts in the country, respectively – certainly learned this lesson from Jones. So did Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon.

    Jones also changed what these voices dare speak about. Owens is obsessed with proving that Brigitte Macron was born a man, Carlson with UFOs and 9/11 trutherism – such topics would fit right into a Jones segment, but would have been unthinkable subjects for the biggest names in media to cover a few years ago. Carlson just brought Jones onto his broadcast for an episode titled “Alex Jones Warns of the Globalist Death Cult Fueling the Next Civil War and Rise of the Antichrist.”

    More important than that, however, is that Jones has shifted the way regular Americans think, even those who’ve never listened to him. It’s totally unsurprising to go to a party and hear someone say the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles – a theory that he’s been incubating for decades.

    “Globalism” has become a dirty word; populism is in; no one likes Bill Gates; Christian nationalism is on the upswing. Jones has been screaming for all this for the past two decades. He was doing so when no one else with a major platform would. Everyone – on the left and the right – has a pet conspiracy these days, because the average American thinks a lot more like Alex Jones than most people are willing to admit.

    Still, he’s nuts. For every one thing he gets right – for example, that George Soros is flooding the country with bad prosecutors – he gets 99 things wrong, such as his theory that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an inside job. Given his nuttiness, journalists have a hard time accounting for his popularity. This is because journalists, as a rule, tend to lack imagination.

    A mixture of Martin Luther King Jr. and L. Ron Hubbard, Jones combines biblical diction with sci-fi bunkum

    There’s a discomfiting but simple explanation for Jones’s popularity: he is America’s greatest living orator. (Sorry, Obama.) His Texas voice growls like a souped-up semitruck engine; his monologues burn with Christian fire and swinging fists; you can smell the whiskey on his breath and hear him fire Colt .45s skyward before raising his arms and proclaiming, “Praise Jesus, amen!”

    This puts him in the same tradition as Whitman, Cotton Mather and William Jennings Bryan. A mixture of Martin Luther King Jr. and L. Ron Hubbard, Jones combines King James biblical diction with science-fiction bunkum. “Get behind me Satan!” he yells into the microphone during a sermonette on the New World Order before describing interdimensional systems beyond our imagination and declaring that “Humanity is going interstellar!”

    Soothsaying and calls to repentance spill from him as if against his own will – the Large Hadron Collider opened a portal to hell; death-worshipping, third-world hordes will fall upon the American promised; the Devil is building a machine to impersonate God; men must stop watching football. It’s all very prophetic-sounding.

    Sometimes he adopts the persona of Jeremiah weeping over his people. “People are ugly now,” he laments. “They’re stupid. Their IQs are dropping. They’re dying all around us. I feel like a failure. God, if I ruled the planet, I’d feel like I ruled a pile of cockroaches or something. I mean, who the hell would want to rule this?”

    But most of the time, his prophesying is a rallying call against the forces of evil in his cosmology: Democrats, globalists, Justin Bieber. His monologues are often uploaded to Instagram and TikTok and backed by rousing music. One such speech sees him shouting, “I’m so full of life and so full of resistance to these murdering pedophiles who want to get in the way of God’s plan! And let me tell you, I’ve been taken up to the third heaven. I’ve been jacked into the big plan. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it and I can’t even compute all of it, it’s so fantastical.”

    He goes on, “Anybody that tries to get in the way of the incredible plan the big guy’s got for us has got me pissed and I’m just begging to stay on the team man. Just put me in the game coach, whatever you say coach, I know I’m weak, I know I’m pathetic. Man, you’re amazing. I’m so lucky you made me. What do I need to do boss!?” Then he starts panting like a dog and growls, “I’m like a hunting dog man, just take me out of the house, just turn me on them!”

    For a religion-starved population – which American zoomers and millennials certainly are – this is water in the desert. (Is the water safe to drink? That’s another question.) Jones’s audience skews young. It’s composed largely of people who grew up in a secular world. Most of these young people probably didn’t go to church growing up, and if they did, they were exposed to the milquetoast Protestantism so common across the country. But it’s human nature to want a prophet, and a few decades of secularization can’t change that. For these listeners, hearing Jones for the first time must be like hearing thunder for the first time. Pollsters insist that America’s young men are turning back to religion. That’s a hopeful idea. But what if Alex Jones is the nation’s highest prophet?

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Wikipedia’s harmful untruths

    Wikipedia’s harmful untruths

    There was a time when Wikipedia felt like a miracle: a spontaneous, self-governing lexicon arising from the turbid chaos of the web. No editors kept gates, no gilded towers barred entrance, no one had power to impose a worldview, it was all done by thousands of neutral volunteers harvesting and serving the world’s knowledge, onto a digital platter. And their sheer numbers – it was hoped – would preserve accuracy and objectivity. The same way a crowd has more wisdom than the individual.

    However, as the years pass, that illusion of noble neutrality has shattered. And a clear and maybe terminal tilt to the left has revealed itself. As Wiki-founder Larry Sanger lamented in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the Wikipedia he wanted has long gone. What we have now is, in particular areas, worse than nothing.

    I can personally vouch for the way Wikipedia slants left. About 15 years ago, while journalistically researching some horrible crimes in northern England, I came across the case of young Charlene Downes. She was a tragic victim of the vast Muslim rape and grooming scandal in the UK, this time in Blackpool.

    Yet one thing marked out her case, amongst the tens of thousands of victims of this crime; a crime which – in terms of state failure – is arguably Britain’s Chernobyl. Charlene Downes was not just raped and tortured, she was murdered, and then – according to lurid witness statements never proved nor disproved – possibly eaten. Literally put into fast-food kebabs. I wish I was joking.

    I used Wikipedia to research her appalling fate. But then one day I found the entry on her case had been taken down – disappeared like an Argentinian dissident under the junta. I dug into the entrails of this editorial decision, and discovered that activist editors had deleted it because it “lacked notability.” How could the rape, torture, murder and alleged cannibalization of a young British girl not be “notable”? Especially when much more “everyday” murders had their own entries?

    The answer is, I believe, that Woke Wiki editors didn’t like any focus on the ethnic identity of the perpetrators. In the end the page reappeared, and it stands today. But the attempt by Wikipedia editors to conceal the scale and horror of the overall Muslim rape gang scandal goes on. A few months ago the entire entry devoted to this monumental horror got renamed as “Muslim grooming gang moral panic”, like it never existed. Like it was just some fever dream of fascists, rather than the greatest black mark in Britain’s modern history. Again, the original entry – after much angry slanging – has been reinstated, but the fact this attempted erasure even happened is telling.

    Deeper data throws light on the problem. A 2024 Manhattan Institute report, Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?, used sentiment analysis on over 1,600 politically charged terms and found a mild-to-moderate tendency for right-of-centre figures to be depicted with more negative language than left-of-centre figures. Another study, Polarization and Reliability of News Sources in Wikipedia, examined nearly 30 million citations and concluded that Wikipedia exhibits a systematic liberal polarization in its choice of news sources – even after controlling for their factual reliability.

    The initial gatekeeping of sources is another fierce battleground. A 2025 report by the conservative Media Research Center found that none of the right-leaning media outlets studied earned a “generally reliable” classification in Wikipedia’s source assessments, while 84 percent of left-leaning outlets did. Critics argue these reliability judgments are decided via opaque community consensus among liberal-left editors.

    This is of course self-reinforcing. If a conservative editor adds a citation from, say, the New York Post, it is swiftly questioned or deleted; if a progressive editor adds one from Vox, it often slides through. Over time, this creates a lopsided citational ecosystem that makes neutrality impossible. Even if you have the best intentions.

    It is worth reflecting on why this tilt persists. Partly it is those demographics: anecdotally, the volunteer army of Wikipedians tends to be young, tech-savvy, university-educated, comfortable with progressive assumptions. Also, this is an example of institutional capture: once a small group of committed editors has embedded a set of norms, they can and do police the boundaries with ferocious diligence.

    The consequences are, as we see, grave. First, contested pages simply cannot be trusted. Second, even when a page appears reasonable, the selection of sources ensures that readers encounter a progressive consensus rather than the full spectrum of debate. Third, the instability of controversial pages means that “truth” can swing from week to week, depending on the latest edit war. Fourth, because Wikipedia is mined relentlessly by search engines and artificial intelligence, its bias is then amplified and propagated far beyond its own digital horizon. Elon Musk has complained that his AI, Grok, skews to the left however he tweaks the machine. This must be partly because it is trained on Wikipedia.

    It is a melancholy thing: because the Wiki project once seemed like maybe the finest creation of the digital age. An encyclopedia of everything, freely available, self-governing, universal. But noble dreams have a way of dissolving when they meet reality. Wikipedia is just such a case. It has fallen prey to the same “long march through the institutions” that reshaped the universities, many of the arts, much of the media, and the NGOs. It now too often reflects the worldview of its most committed editors, not the messy plurality of reality. And that makes it – how sad, how dispiriting – almost unusable as a source of facts on anything contentious.

    The lesson is clear. Use Wikipedia for lists of monarchs, for summaries of chlorophyll or Caravaggio, or deep dives on the moons of Jupiter. For that it remains absolutely marvellous, still an internet miracle. But if you want to understand a political dispute, a culture war, a controversy, you must treat Wikipedia not as the final word, but as a cleverly illustrated propaganda pamphlet. A mirror crack’d. It is also a warning of how even the grandest experiments in collective truth can be bent to one side: producing, instead, mournful and harmful untruths.

  • The celebrity guide to selective outrage

    The celebrity guide to selective outrage

    In the West, outrage has become performance art. It’s not about real causes, but about carefully branded ones that play well in pastel Instagram carousels. Climate change? Of course. A vague plea for “justice”? Naturally. A curated “Free Palestine” hashtag? Absolutely. But when it comes to standing with their peers in the Middle East – singers, actors, writers who are literally jailed or executed for their art – the voices vanish.

    This isn’t about Israel. The point is larger: why do so many Western artists reserve their outrage for one convenient villain while ignoring regimes that jail, torture and kill their peers? Syria’s Christians and Druze are being ethnically cleansed. Yemen is enduring a famine. The Uyghurs in China and Christians in the Congo suffer horrors that make Western protest slogans look like parody. But those crises don’t trend on TikTok. And so our moral guardians stay silent.

    Take Turkey. Pop star Mabel Matiz was dragged into court, slapped with a travel ban for a song with LGBTQ themes – branded as “immorality” by Erdoğan’s government. Where was Lady Gaga, a self-proclaimed advocate for the LGBTQ community, when this happened? Actor Cem Yiğit Uzumoğlu, known from Netflix’s Rise of Empires: Ottoman, faces seven years in prison for posting an Instagram story calling for a boycott after Istanbul’s opposition mayor was arrested. Where were Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem? These are not rebels with guns – they are artists with words, punished as if they were criminals.

    Iran is even darker. Musician Mohsen Shekari was publicly hanged in 2022 – his “crime” nothing more than protesting against the regime. Rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death the same year for lyrics critical of the authorities, accused of “enmity against God.” He was spared only after global outrage forced the regime’s hand. Where’s Hollywood when this happens?

    These are the true causes that should evoke outrage: a song punished as immoral, a post punished as treason, lyrics punished as blasphemy. In the Middle East, art itself can be a death sentence. And yet from Hollywood? Silence.

    Contrast that with the U.S. this month. Jimmy Kimmel faced backlash for comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder. His temporary suspension triggered an avalanche of headlines. Disney reportedly lost between $4 and $5 billion in market value. That was one man, one career, one late-night show. Meanwhile, artists across the Middle East aren’t just losing jobs – they’re losing their freedom and their lives. Where was the celebrity chorus for them?

    Mark Ruffalo and Susan Sarandon have plenty of time for press conferences about Gaza. Billie Eilish can summon her fans to demand a ceasefire. But for their fellow artists – their actual peers – who risk prison or the gallows for a song, a lyric, or a post? Not a word. Apparently solidarity stops where the headlines end.

    The truth is that many of these artists aren’t radicals or rebels at all. They are brand managers. Their conscience extends only as far as their fanbase and their ticket sales. They pick causes the way others pick outfits: whatever flatters them, whatever gets applause, whatever comes risk-free. Supporting Gaza? Safe. Supporting Uyghurs? Risky. Speaking up for a jailed Iranian rapper? Not worth losing a Spotify stream.

    Artists were once dangerous to tyrants. Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia – their art was truth-telling in the face of power. Today’s artists, by contrast, pen open letters to guarantee free PR and social media applause. They confuse hashtags with heroism.

    And so one can’t help but wonder: do these celebrities care about justice at all? Or is it simply self-interest, attaching themselves to a fashionable cause to stay relevant? As long as the slogan looks good on a T-shirt and the cause is safe to support, they’ll perform their outrage. But when bravery is required – when it might cost them something – they retreat into silence.

    Art is supposed to speak truth to power. Today’s celebrities speak only to the algorithm. And for their fellow artists, silence isn’t neutrality. It’s betrayal.

  • The joke’s on Dave Chappelle

    The joke’s on Dave Chappelle

    The problem with Dave Chappelle taking his comedy to Saudi Arabia isn’t the money they paid him. It’s what they bought.

    We’re all familiar with the reputation laundering that the Middle East has engaged in on a grand scale in recent years, spending big to get into sports, entertainment and now hosting more than fifty of the biggest names in standup comedy for a Riyadh Comedy Festival. Chappelle’s performance was notable for its direct attack on the quality of free speech rights in America – and a claim that Saudi Arabia of all places is actually more free.

    “Right now in America, they say that if you talk about Charlie Kirk, that you’ll get canceled,” he said according to the New York Times. “It’s easier to talk here than it is in America.”

    During his set, Kevin Hart – no stranger to the appeal of a dollar – was even more obsequious. “I love what y’all are doing here,” Hart said. “I’ll continue being a positive ambassador of your change to the world.” Who knew that amount of cringe could come in such small packages?

    Of course, the conditions for these men and others to go to Saudi Arabia in the first place was to break faith with the whole mindset of comedy. Entering a country where all media is government approved and massive legal sentences can be directed at people who flaunt the most basic conventions is easier when you’re a paid guest – but they still had to sign on a dotted line of a contract that included this prohibition:

    “[Artists] shall not prepare or perform any material that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute…The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including its leadership, public figures, culture, or people; B) The Saudi royal family, legal system, or government, and; C) Any religion, religious tradition, religious figure, or religious practice.”

    The actual problem isn’t accepting the money. Plenty of artists and performers and businesses have done the same. The problem is signing away the whole reason your comedy became popular in the first place. Hart is one thing – he’s always been a corporate shill, Jumanji, Draft Kings, Saudis, what’s the difference? No one would be surprised at him making the hand prints in the sand ceremony.

    Chappelle was different. He made a career skewering the hypocrisy and posturing of right, left, and middle for years. He made a recurring hilarious joke of going after George W. Bush. And the only real threat he ever experienced to free speech in America was when he ran afoul of the trans mob, who endeavored unsuccessfully to get him canceled from Netflix.

    When Chappelle signed up for the Saudi cash, he was giving something up by agreeing to their terms and going above and beyond to criticize America along the way. He was agreeing not to keep it real, lest anything go wrong. And the Saudis knew it, and were happy to pay for it. That’s because what they were buying wasn’t comedy – it was compliance.

  • ‘Media Literacy’ and the decline of Woke

    What is “woke”? To Jordan B. Peterson it is “postmodern neo-Marxism.” To James Lindsay it is “critical race theory” and latterly “revisionism” in general. These theories of what woke means take for granted that one of its core tenets is a denial of objective truth under the influence of what is broadly called “critical theory,” but the thinking behind contemporary wokeness falls far short of these theoretically exalted standards.

    Critical theory was a movement, primarily among academics, in the mid 20th century which had a diverse array of followers, but the common denominator was the belief that texts, whether literary works like novels, or historical documents, had no inherently “true” interpretation. What this means, to hugely simplify, is that there exist as many ways to read a story as there are readers. The critical theorists arrived at this idea by different arguments, one of the most famous is Roland Barthes’ reading of Sarrasine, a short story by the 19th century French writer Honore de Balzac, by breaking down each sentence into a system of “signs” largely borrowed from psychoanalysis. 

    It is pretty obvious, if you are an activist interested in spreading your ideology to as many different media as possible, that an idea which lets you disregard the intention of the original author would be appealing. When critical theory crossed the Atlantic (and hopped across the Channel), it rapidly lost its brooding, Nouveau Roman character and found its utility in readings which emphasized the implicit racial, sexual and gendered meanings of texts. This was not always the case: one of the foremost critical theorists, Paul de Man, was a collaborationist writer in Nazi-occupied Belgium. De Man conceived of his own brand of critical theory as a means of pre-empting, and expurgating, any intrusion of “the social” into literature by claiming that any such reading was arbitrary. 

    However, today, the left has entirely abandoned even the pretense of postmodern skepticism present in retro-eighties critical theory. The phrase of the day is “media literacy,” a meme implying that there is an objectively “correct” way to read texts, or watch movies, and a set of compulsory moral judgments about art to be derived from it. Go on Google Trends and you’ll see searches for “media literacy” jump in the 2022-23 mid-Biden era, when woke influencers like Hasan Piker and @woke_karen on TikTok began using the term. Search the tweets of a typical woke kingpin like evan loves worf or Will Stancil on X and you will see “media literacy” breathlessly invoked as if it were the God of a newly imported cult. The term is ubiquitous in the subreddits associated with these communities.

    Media literacy does not, like the critical theorists, try to read texts through complex philosophical lenses like Marxism, let alone deconstruct them. It exists at the intersection of the vast online world we call “fandom” – in which very basic storytelling techniques, tropes and characterization are explained in less rigorous terms for the sake of entertainment – and the lowest levels of woke academia (“Why The Matrix is about Late Capitalism”). If critical theory proclaimed the death of the author, media literacy is the deification of fandom. What other people say about the work is all that matters to understanding it.

    The left has entirely abandoned even the pretense of postmodern skepticism

    What does this look like in practice? A frequent subject of the media literacy polemic is the film Starship Troopers, beloved of many online right-wingers because it shows a militarised, quasi-fascist society battling hostile aliens. An Adorno, a Derrida or a Foucault would, albeit badly, try to analyze what this says about fascists. The contemporary woke leftist can only point to the dismal intention of the creators for this to be a “satire”. This is what the term means 90 percent of the time it is used: a generic right-winger, somewhere, likes a piece of art but rejects the moral assumptions of the fandom or the creator. Thus, the right-winger is somehow “illiterate” because… because… they just are. Much like, I suppose, anyone who reads The Tempest, and finds the portrayal of the colonized subject Caliban more sympathetic than Prospero, “doesn’t understand” Shakespeare. 

    An uncontroversial standard of “good” art is that it should stand on its own terms and be judged on qualities inherent in the work – in common parlance “show, don’t tell.” The judgment of fandom websites and creators is an example of telling and not showing. The fact that a creator wills something to be a satire does not make it satirical. Satire, for example, requires at least some people to find it funny; the 2008 comic strip PowerUp Comics is intended to be a “satire” of George W. Bush but does not work because it is so obvious. Contrary to the creators’ intention, the comic today is enjoyed ironically as an example of on-the-nose moralizing. 

    Similarly, simply declaring that you find your creations immoral does not mean people with different moral views are “misunderstanding” the work. When right-wingers decide that they support the supposedly parodic protagonists of Starship Troopers, Watchmen and Warhammer 40k they are not failing to understand something about the show. Rather, they are rejecting socially mediated signifiers to liberate the pure text. They are, in short, ideal postmodern readers.

    Modern wokes remind me of the career of an earlier French literary critic, Sainte-Beuve. Sainte-Beuve thought that he was woke. He was steeped in Eclecticism, a minor philosophical movement which took inspiration from Hegel. But Sainte-Beuve got it wrong. He thought that what this meant was that writers could only be understood by their biographies, which inevitably included a great deal of moral commentary on the value of the lives in question. He rapidly became a catchphrase of ignominy among 19th century cognoscenti. Nietzsche called him an “ass” and Marcel Proust devoted an essay to making fun of him, because his oeuvre rapidly degenerated into a series of tabloid kiss-and-tell stories about whether such-and-such writer was a good husband. 

    So, too, have many educated in the tradition of critical theory ended up recapitulating a basically Victorian literalism in how they see art: art is good if it is produced by good people, if it carries sentimental value and if it edifies society. Criticism is good if it comprehends the moral intention of a morally virtuous creator. This is not just bad news for the arts (left-wing people are and will remain dominant in culture for at least another generation) but bad news for the left. As we see Trump’s Department of Homeland Security making repatriation the subject of jokes, it is not that the right “doesn’t understand” some facet of left-wing morality – they actively reject it. If the left wants to put up a persuasive counterargument, it must be prepared to face moral differences head on, rather than outsource their critical faculties to consensus.