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The sort of language and ideas once confined to my most ignorant and bigoted callers have found their way into the White House, and the world seems split into people who find this immensely gratifying and people who find it all as puzzling as it is terrifying.
When people like him, and there are plenty who employ altogether more sophisticated language and sophistry to make similar points, demand that their right to free speech be respected, what they are really demanding is that their speech be free from scrutiny.
(I put British in quotes here because, for me, anyone working in Britain is a British worker, just as anyone working in a fish and chip shop is a fish and chip shop worker.)
The more fractured and divided a society becomes, the more fertile the ground is for terrorists to plant their views and ideologies.
If you were seeking to persuade an impressionable young Muslim man to become a terrorist because the ‘West’ really did hate him, his family and everyone like them, it’s hard to think of anything more helpful to your cause than much of the media.
The idea that ‘freedom of speech’ somehow equates with a freedom to spout undiluted, often inflammatory nonsense without being contradicted or called out is currently more popular on both sides of the Atlantic than at any other point in living memory.
The conflation of ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘freedom to say silly things without being challenged’ and, more, ‘freedom to insist that people have to listen to me even if they think I’m ridiculous and/or dangerous’ is rarely quite as glaring as in this case.
He is, thankfully, no longer in the editor’s chair but his nation-damaging legacy will continue to pollute public discourse for at least a generation.
For all the subsequent hand-wringing and revisionism, every single person who campaigned to leave the EU knew full well that they were feeding prejudices like Sean
something fundamentally wrong with their very nature persists. Historically, few questions can light up a studio switchboard faster than ones inviting people to explain why they are disgusted or dismayed by a complete stranger’s sexual preferences.
It sounds a little trite to suggest that every homophobe must therefore be struggling with their own hated and hidden homosexuality, but why else are they so desperate to believe that being gay is a ‘choice’ – unless, of course, they are desperate to persuade themselves that not being gay is too?
Did a gay person tell you that they had chosen to be gay but could easily have gone straight if the clubs and fashion had been better?
You just don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff (serious news).fn2
Sounds like my ex husband
I still struggle to believe what I’m about to write but recent events have provided pretty incontrovertible evidence that it’s true: many apparently straight, unmistakably white men believe that they are the real victims of discrimination in the twenty-first-century West.
But as I get older and recognise that I’ve spent most of my life utterly oblivious to the offences and abuses that women endure on a daily basis, I realise that men won’t change until society changes and, right now, forces seem to be trying to pull society backwards as well as forwards.
I learned that Section 40 of the Equality Act 2010, which required employers to safeguard employees against harassment from clients and customers, had been repealed in 2013 as part of the Conservative Party’s tabloid-friendly programme of ‘cutting red tape
The inchoate anger some men feel at not only having to check their objectification but also to accept that only a woman gets to decide when a woman has sex, is one of the ugliest phenomena at loose in the world today.
The ‘nanny state’ is a phrase now used exclusively to describe mostly good and important attempts to prioritise citizen welfare over corporate greed; and ‘classical liberal’ now has nothing to do with Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith.
He at least articulates the sense that things can’t go on like this, that the Scylla and Charybdis of demographics and economics will crush us all, unless drastic action is taken.
It still beggars belief that he could so quickly have created an environment in which violent racists, anti-Semites and Nazi ideologues could march unashamedly – and unhooded – on American streets.
For all the talk at the time of ‘economic insecurity’ and the ‘left behind’, it is clear now that Trump appealed knowingly and deliberately to the notion that white people were deserving of a higher status in American society than any other group.
Detailing here the extent of the deliberate dishonesty he employs and the absolute contempt in which he holds his supporters won’t bring the rest of us any closer to understanding why they still cheer him.
Take an angry person, tell them you feel their pain, give them a target for their anger and help them to switch off their brain.
women but it’s one which Trump understands implicitly. Treat people as stupid, hate-filled, gullible and mean while simultaneously helping them to blame all their problems on ‘others’ and they will love you for it. So much so, that you could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote.
The analysis impugns people I still consider colleagues and friends, but the infection runs so deep now that rank Islamophobia passes mostly unnoticed across the national media.
The rest of us can sit here tearing our hair out and wringing our hands, but Jack and pretty much every diehard Trump supporter I’ve encountered will just carry on blithely insisting that the emperor is most definitely not naked, even as his bare buttocks quiver on national television.
Brian doesn’t want to open his eyes. He wants the big orange man-baby to sell him a baseball cap and give him a cuddle and tell him everything’s going to be alright.
You can’t get much more integrated into British society than getting yourself elected as mayor of the UK capital; a Muslim isn’t going to be elected mayor by a population that is ‘sick’ of Muslims and a politician trying to tackle everything from air quality to knife crime can hardly be portrayed as harmful.
For the record, I have been unimpressed by some aspects of Khan’s mayoralty and encouraged by others. He is a tricky interviewee because, as a former lawyer, he is particularly adept at dodging questions.
My fellow University of Law alum!
The people who ignore or pretend not to believe this do so because they enjoy being frightened and thrive on anger. It is, in many cases, all they have. In almost all cases, it is the only thing that can rescue them from the realisation that their unhappiness and grievances probably owe more to their political heroes, their own past votes and actions than the existence of a Muslim mayor, a Polish plasterer or a Mexican housemaid.
When the liars have the loudest voices, the tellers of truth need to find new ways to be heard.
If you cannot account completely for who is paying your wages, you should have no place arguing for political change in a British TV or radio studio, and you should certainly never see your ‘research’ reported as news.
Drown out the democracy-defying hogwash that he shouldn’t talk to the ‘mainstream media’ because it’s so biased against him, by making it clear that he can have all the time in the world to prove his fitness to govern after he has been asked a few questions that potential Labour voters want answers to. And if that’s too much of a challenge for him, ask how someone who can’t navigate an interview is going to run a country.
The EU insisted throughout that there was no prospect of accepting such flimsy proposals but Brexiters persisted in promoting them, apparently believing that if they said the same thing, only louder, then the foreigners would finally acquiesce.
Similarly, we advocates of a Second Referendum – or a so-called People’s Vote – struggle to convey our sincere concern for misled Leave voters without sounding patronising or condescending.
