‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ These words are among the most frequently quoted from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We see them in memes, in online arguments, repeated endlessly in opinion columns in the national press. The passage has turned into the very thing that Orwell hated the most: a cliché.

Yet ideas become clichés for a reason. So many aspects of Orwell’s novel seem prescient today, not least this tendency among authoritarians to blur the lines between truth and fiction and demand that the population play along. There is no clearer example than what has become known as ‘two-tier policing’. The evidence for it is overwhelming, and yet commentators, journalists, politicians, podcasters, activists and online loudmouths continue to deny it. Once again, the narrative has taken precedence over reality.

The notion that members of the public must be treated differently according to their group identity is not simply a speculative explanation for egregious police conduct. It is explicitly encoded in guidance published by the College of Policing and the NPCC (National Police Chiefs’ Council). There are numerous recorded interviews with officers who tell us that their job is to investigate and arrest those who have caused offence to particular groups. Multiple whistleblowers have revealed details of training sessions they have been compelled to attend that have instructed them to take a two-tier approach.

But you wouldn’t know any of this had you only read a recent article by Andy Hughes, LBC’s Crime Correspondent. Hughes argues that it is ‘nonsense to say police are told to treat people differently based on their ethnicity’ and claims to have spoken to dozens of officers who have confirmed his view. It seems odd that Hughes does not realise that there is nothing particularly surprising about officers repeating the party line. Far more revealing are those who are speaking out about two-tier policing – none of whom Hughes appears to have spoken to – in spite of the risk to their career. They’re called ‘whistleblowers’ for a reason.

Then there is the police guidance itself. Hughes attempts to shrug off the Police Anti-Racism Commitment on the grounds that he doesn’t understand it:

‘The NPCC guidance says: “Producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences.”

I’ve read this section several times, and I still don’t know what it means.

The wording is “clumsy”, as the NPCC admits, and police chiefs say they will review the guidance.

But to suggest this means every police officer is now told to treat people differently based on race is inaccurate – and dangerous.’

A generous interpretation would be that Hughes simply hadn’t read the following sentences in the guidance, which could not be clearer even for those unfamiliar with the activist jargon.

And there you have it. The ‘Police Anti-Racism Commitment’ explicitly states that officers should treat people differently based on race and that they must reject the principle of equality before the law. Their commitment to racial equity, it says, ‘does not mean treating everyone “the same” or being “colour blind” (racial equality)’. Of course, it’s unlikely that Hughes stopped reading at that point. It’s more plausible that he realised that the document flatly contradicted his narrative and decided to omit the relevant line.

However, the ‘clumsy’ language that Hughes cites (but does not understand) is evidence enough. When the guidance calls for ‘equality of policing outcomes’, it is saying that suspects should be treated differently according to their race in order to reduce disparities. It draws on a principle of Critical Race Theory, that equality of outcome is evidence of unequal treatment. As Ibram X. Kendi puts it, ‘racial inequality is evidence of racist policy’.

It’s the same logic that prevented Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, from being sectioned by the NHS. Having perpetrated a violent crime, mental health staff did not detain him because they were concerned about ‘over-representation of black men’ among those committed. They were simply following the NHS guidelines, but Calocane went on to murder two teenagers and an older man in June 2023. When ‘racial equity’ is adopted as policy, it costs lives.

Let’s have a closer look at the evidence of institutional capture as reflected in the official police guidelines…

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While the country is still reeling from the horrific murder of eighteen-year-old student Henry Nowak, an astonishing article has appeared in El País, Spain’s largest national newspaper. Rather than focus on the failures of the police officers, or the institutional bias within the force, the headline steers its readers away from the case and towards the outlet’s own obsessions. The headline translates as ‘Farage’s far right stirs up hatred in the UK after a young man is stabbed to death by a Sikh man’.

As Alejo Schapire (an Argentine journalist based in France) has pointed out, this is the first and only article produced by El País on the subject of the Nowak killing. Instead of an image of the victim, the newspaper has opted for a photograph of Nigel Farage. The Guardian was similarly histrionic and detached from reality in its coverage: ‘As ethnonationalist far right drives racist agenda, Reform UK leader felt need to weigh in on murder of Henry Nowak’.

It is one thing to take issue with those who seek to weaponise human tragedies for their own political gain, and quite another to dismiss legitimate criticism of a failed system. Reform UK is by no means a ‘far right’ party, but of course the term has been so promiscuously misused in the press that at this point it might be best to dispense with it altogether. But of course, this is not really about Farage or his response to the murder at all. It is a cynical means of deflecting from the fate of Nowak and what it reveals about the state of policing in the UK.

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So what exactly did Farage say to have the Guardian fulminate about his ‘racist agenda’ and for El País to make him the focus of the story rather than the victim? During a live broadcast, Farage praised the Nowak family for their ‘extraordinarily dignified’ response following the conviction of their son’s killer, and went on to say: ‘I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage’.

And why not indeed? Let’s not forget the shocking details of what happened in this case. Nowak was stabbed multiple times by Vickrum Digwa using a Sikh ceremonial dagger. His mother hid the murder weapon, and his brother called 999 claiming that Nowak had been racially abusive. When police arrived, Digwa repeated this lie. And when Nowak repeatedly told the officers he had been stabbed, one replied ‘I don’t think you have, mate’ and handcuffed him as he lay dying.

Labour MP Jonathan Hinder, a former police inspector, was asked on BBC’s Newsnight whether he could understand the behaviour of the officers that night.

‘To me it’s unfathomable… If you are presented with a situation like that as a police officer, we have emergency life support training which should be deployed immediately in those circumstances. You should be treating it as a medical emergency if someone is telling you those things repeatedly. And crucially, they are not a threat. So the use of the handcuffs is just impossible to explain.’

Sadly, it is possible. The police have been trained to automatically believe all accusations of racism, which inevitably has led to the term being misused as a means to settle scores or, in this case, to prevent a victim from receiving life-saving treatment. The College of Policing has long been captured by an activist mentality that insists that group identity should be the ultimate concern of law enforcement. The chief of Hampshire Constabulary – the force that handcuffed Henry Nowak as he died – proclaimed in 2022 that ‘being anti-racist, ethical and inclusive is top of our agenda’. One would have hoped that tackling crime without fear or favour might take priority.

Moreover, the Police Race Action Plan, published in 2022 by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) repeatedly refers to the need for ‘equitable’ rather than ‘equal’ treatment. In other words, the public are to be treated unequally according to ethnicity in order to drive equal statistical outcomes. This is an activist agenda, and it involves a total undermining of the principle of equality before the law.

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So when Farage argues that the Nowak case exposes the police’s ‘anti-white prejudice’, he is not wrong. Such prejudice is built into the system, and is there for all to read in the policy documents. While Farage’s point was expressed bluntly, it was certainly not ‘ethnonationalist’ by any serious definition of the term. You may not approve of Farage’s choice of words, but it will take more than infantile cries of ‘bigot!’ to disprove them.

The evidence of two-tier policing is by now so overwhelming that it is astonishing that members of the press have the gall to deny it. The grooming gangs scandal is the most egregious example of how identity politics has taken precedence over justice, but there are many others. As one senior police officer told journalist Allison Pearson: ‘What you have to understand is most chief constables would rather mess up a major murder inquiry than be accused of being racist’.

We should not be surprised to see ideologues at the Guardian and El País attempt to reframe Farage and the ‘far right’ as the real issue here. After all, such news outlets are partly responsible for cultivating the very climate in which accusations of racism are so inaccurately applied and have so much power to destroy lives. Rather than reflecting on their errors, they are seemingly intent on compounding them.

There are grave problems with law enforcement in this country. While police officers are being trained by activists, we are unlikely to see any rectification. It is intolerable that the principle of equality before the law has been rebranded as ‘far right’, and that the misleadingly branded ‘anti-racist’ movement has been allowed to stoke so much racial division.

The activist media will continue to deflect and claim that those who are outraged by the murder are more concerning than the murder itself. But the public can see through these tactics and patience is wearing thin. Any ideology that encourages the state to view citizens primarily through the prism of race is regressive in the extreme. As the tragedy of Henry Nowak demonstrates, it can also be dangerous.

Cancel culture is often wilfully misunderstood. It is a retributive system of public shaming and character assassination that seeks to punish dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy, often through libel or deliberate misrepresentation. It is not cancel culture to be denied a platform or refused employment by people you have publicly attacked. That would be like marching into a shop, telling the owner his products were trash, demanding a job, and then complaining when he refused.

A similar scenario is currently playing out in the French movie industry, and it’s as good an example as any of how cancel culture is so often misconstrued. It all began with a petition published in Libération on 11 May 2026. The over 600 signatories include prominent figures in the industry, such as Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel and Raymond Depardon. This ad hoc collective of actors and filmmakers refers to itself as ‘Zapper Bolloré’ (‘switch off Bolloré’) and takes aim at Vincent Bolloré, the right-wing billionaire businessman with a vast media empire. He effectively controls Canal+, the country’s dominant private film financier that backs an estimated 40% of French movies.

The petition focuses on Bolloré’s growing influence and expresses particular concern about his right-wing views. The signatories fear that Bolloré seeks to take over the industry and to use it as a conduit for his political ideology. They claim that he already uses outlets like CNews and publishing houses to push a reactionary and extreme right agenda. But the histrionics in the petition don’t end there:

‘Voulons-nous prendre le risque que demain ne soient plus financés que des films de propagande au service d’une idéologie?... En laissant le cinéma français aux mains d’un patron d’extrême droite, nous ne risquons pas seulement une uniformisation des films, mais une prise de contrôle fasciste sur l’imaginaire collectif.’

‘Do we want to risk a future in which the only films financed are propaganda in the service of an ideology?... By leaving French cinema in the hands of a far-right owner, we risk not only a homogenisation of films, but a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.’

Quelle horreur! The pearls have been well and truly clutched. Apparently these grandees of French cinema are seeking to cancel their own boss for being too right-wing. They are sick of the industry’s silence on the issue, and hope to build a new movement that will grant them independence from Bolloré’s venemous and wide-reaching tentacles.

The response from Maxime Saada, CEO of Canal+, was rather surprising. He said that the insult was obviously unjust, and announced that the company would no longer employ any of the signatories. They have just written their own blacklist…

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Schadenfreude is the most ignoble of instincts. The English are so ashamed of it that they have left it to the Germans to invent the term. It is of course a perfectly natural impulse, albeit one that we should strive to curb. But who doesn’t feel that warm interior glow when our enemies finally get their comeuppance?

If we’re honest, plenty of us are feeling this way following the publication this week of guidance by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on single-sex spaces. The meltdowns from those who have consistently attempted to obliterate women’s rights have been predictably melodramatic. The collision with reality has left them smarting, and justifiably so.

‘In a world’s first,’ wrote one activist on X, ‘the United Kingdom moves to make it illegal for trans women to pee. Welcome to 2026 where laws discriminating against and segregating minorities are now commonplace again.’ We have grown accustomed to the trans lobby indulging in fantasies of their own oppression, but the extent of the hysteria is still difficult to fathom coming from grown adults.

Over on Bluesky, that toxic haven for bigots and bedlamites, the wailing has been deafening. The violent activist group Bash Back has vowed ‘further mass resistance’. Professional troll India Willoughby has called it ‘trans apartheid’ and asserted that he intends to continue breaking the law. Others have compared it to the era of Jim Crow, or taken it as further evidence of ‘trans genocide’.

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The infantilism of activist culture has prevented many from calmly accepting the law. Trans-identified people have precisely the same rights as everyone else, and nothing about this guidance has changed that. We need to ask serious questions about what has happened to our society. How is it that a sizable minority now believe that human beings can change sex, and that this pseudo-religious belief ought to supersede women’s rights in law?

Much of the blame has to lie with groups such as Stonewall that have misrepresented the law to public bodies and businesses. For years, campaigners have insisted that men who identify as women must be allowed to use toilets and changing facilities of the opposite sex. Since last April’s Supreme Court ruling clarified that this is not legal, activists have nevertheless continued to deny it. The collective meltdown we are now seeing is the result of this misinformation. If activists wish to direct their ire anywhere, it should be towards those who have lied to them and claimed that they have a special privilege to override women’s rights.

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Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities, has hardly helped matters. The guidance from the EHRC has been languishing on her desk since last September, while companies have claimed to be too ‘confused’ to implement its directives. This is disingenuous, of course, since the Supreme Court ruling could not have been clearer. But it just goes to show how adherents to genderism are committed to living in their own make-believe world.

The hysteria is completely unnecessary, given that the guidance explicitly states that trans-identified people should be offered a space of their own to change or use toilet facilities wherever possible. The EHRC has simply reminded service providers that single-sex spaces cannot exist where both men and women are permitted entry. This should not be difficult to grasp.

The tantrums we have seen over this basic restatement of the law suggest that, for some, it will be difficult to restore any semblance of sanity. Following the example of Stonewall, many people are determined to cling to the view that defending women’s rights is inherently ‘transphobic’. Civil disagreement is always preferable, but meaningful debate becomes impossible when one side insists on treating ordinary legal boundaries as expressions of hatred.

The current Labour government is the most anti-liberal in living memory. It has cracked down on free speech, sought to scrap juries in certain trials, postponed elections that are unlikely to go its way, laid the groundwork for the reintroduction of blasphemy laws… the examples are endless. And now, to cap it all, it has charged forward with its plans t…

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The painting below by Paul Cézanne demands our consideration. It cannot be passively observed. The glassy patch of water in the lower right-hand corner is where the painting – ‘Reflections in the Water’ – gets its name. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the thick tree on the bank whose ghost is captured on the surface of the pond where the foliage gives way, but really it is the slim sapling, unreflected, unbroken, rising boldly along the canvas’s left edge, that is the true subject of this piece. It is a triumph of subtlety and nerve.

Except that I’m wrong. I’ve been looking at the painting on its side and forming a completely inaccurate impression. Oh well. I’m probably not the first. There is an unconfirmed story that this painting by Cézanne was hung sideways for thirty-one years in London’s National Gallery. The origin of this gossip is from the economist Oswald Toynbee Falk (1879–1972), who lays the blame at the feet of one of its trustees, John Hugh Smith, exactly the kind of person who would in those days have had a hand in such decisions. I can find no corroboration of the story, but I do hope it’s true.

Of course, an establishment as prestigious as the National Gallery would be unlikely to admit to such a galloping blunder. And anyway, as I’ve said, the sideways version has much to recommend it. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s surely that once we commit to an error of thinking for too long it can be mortifying to correct ourselves, particularly if public humiliation is to be the outcome.

It strikes me that the culture war is largely characterised by groups of intelligent people investing in delusional ideas with such gusto that to backtrack would be a kind of social death. One might sooner teach a mule to moonwalk than persuade a celebrity who has championed gender identity ideology to admit that human beings cannot change sex. After demonising women for insisting on single-sex spaces, making excuses for the medicalisation of healthy children, and encouraging the dismantling of gay rights – all in the name of progress – it must be tremendously difficult to admit that it was all for nothing.

For many, the response to being corrected is simply to deny there was any mistake at all and to double down. This is certainly the position of the Green Party, whose representatives are now wholeheartedly wedded to the absurd proposition that human beings have an innate gendered soul that can be misaligned from their body. Their supporters are even congratulating them for their doggedness in the face of reason and evidence, so there is no incentive to course-correct.

Consider the party’s deputy leader, Rachel Millward, who, on this week’s episode of the BBC’s Question Time, was asked by Piers Morgan whether women could have penises. ‘Do you know what, Piers?’, she replied, ‘I think you have a unique, strange obsession with people’s genitalia’. Owen Jones reposted the exchange with the comment: ‘Obsessing over people’s genitals is weird, actually’. A predictably asinine piece in the Metro ran with the headline: ‘Piers Morgan brilliantly shut down after asking “weird question” on BBC’.

Of course, the chance that anyone involved in this debate sincerely believes that their opponents are obsessed with genitals is close to zero. As much as I disagree with Millward and Jones on just about everything, I have to credit them with more intelligence than that. So why are they lying? What is going on here?

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Few political leaders have the good sense to retire before they are pushed. The lure of power and status may be an innate human instinct, but it is surprising that more politicians don’t keep a keener eye on their legacy. ‘All political lives,’ wrote Enoch Powell, ‘unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is…

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It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. The viral images shared online this week of Matt Rattley, a lecturer in biochemistry at the University of Oxford, were first assumed by many to be satirical. For here was a bearded, middle-aged man with large prosthetic breasts who proudly wears this garb to work. It looke…

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On Saturday evening, an attempt was made to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The suspected gunman is Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from California, and his likely target was President Donald Trump and other figures from his administration. This is the third assassination attempt against Trump in less than two years. At this point, few would deny that political violence has become normalised. The more contentious question is what we can possibly do to reverse the trend.

Once again, the usual debates are raging online and in the legacy media. Does the left have a particular problem with violence, or is the right just as bad? Is the incendiary rhetoric of public and political figures to blame? On CNN yesterday, the political commentator Scott Jennings broached both of these questions, citing a speech this week by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in which he vowed ‘maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time’.

All such debates are understandable. The gunman at the Correspondents’ Dinner sought not only to deprive other human beings of their lives, he sought to deprive voters of their democratic rights. At times like this it is always worth emphasising that political violence is fundamentally authoritarian, a means by which an individual or group seeks to enforce their worldview on others.

But it is not helpful to explain away this behaviour as the unique tendency of a particular political tribe, or the impact of intemperate language on a malleable population. Those who have equivocated or even celebrated recent political murders – such as those of Brian Thompson, Melissa Hortman or Charlie Kirk – all share a tendency to justify violence through a process of moral reframing. There is good reason to believe that this is a sign of an increasingly infantile culture and a weak educational system.

Allen is surely a case in point. The recent ‘No Kings’ rallies – which Allen is said to have attended – saw thousands take to the streets to protest against a President who won both the popular vote and an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College. Criticism of the ruling class is healthy and necessary, but pretending that they are unelected tyrants is childish and self-defeating.

Allen apparently sent a ‘manifesto’ to his family shortly before the attack on Saturday. It is the usual sub-literate and self-aggrandising affair, but the contents are interesting for what they reveal about the anti-democratic mindset and how it seeks to justify itself. Most notably, Allen presents an argument for political violence, one that reframes it as a form of defence against tyranny.

There is nothing new in this approach, of course. It was the reason given by the conspirators against Julius Caesar, the most famous political assassination of all time. In his manifesto, Allen claims that all administration officials are legitimate targets, and calls Trump a ‘pedophile, rapist, and traitor’. This is simply an extension of the standard activist tactic of branding one’s opponents as evil in order to dehumanise them. Charlie Kirk was falsely branded a ‘fascist’ by those who defended and celebrated his murder. Feminists are routinely branded as ‘TERFs’ to excuse violence against them. This trick is as common as it is transparent.

Allen goes on to describe anyone who attended the Correspondents’ Dinner as ‘complicit’, the kind of guilt by association that we have come to expect. It’s the same logic as those activists who cancel speakers for ‘sharing a platform’ with those they have decided are beyond the pale.

Thereafter, Allen makes the standard case for political violence as a form of defence. He is not fighting for himself, he claims, but for the marginalised. This of course is the entire guiding principle of the ‘woke’ movement, which simplistically divides the world into categories of oppressor and oppressed – oftentimes misattributing each label – and poses as the defender of the latter. Allen writes:

‘Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.’

So let’s examine his claims a little closer…

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I met Victoria Wood only once. I had been told by those who knew her to expect her to be ‘prickly’ and ‘standoffish’, which might seem strange for the woman who once won a nationwide poll of ‘People You’d Most Like To Live Next Door To’. As it happens, I enjoyed our conversation, but I certainly detected that guarded quality I had been warned about. It …

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The woke movement has been a disaster for the arts. Any creative work that it touches suffers as a result. Good ideas are frequently sabotaged by the insertion of incongruous sermons in the name of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’, and audiences are left with the unshakable feeling that they are watching establishment-approved propaganda.

Take the reboot of Malcolm in the Middle, which has shoehorned in a new ‘non-binary’ character in the form of Malcolm’s sister Kelly. The show’s creators, married couple Linwood Boomer and Tracy Katsky, have said this character reflects their own experiences. ‘Three out of four of our kids are queer,’ said Katsky in a recent interview, ‘and without making it a thing and without making an issue, I think it’s really nice to have a character that, that’s just a facet of their personality as opposed to the entire story.’

We don’t know if Katsky has three gay children. It is a huge statistical improbability, and so we are not being unfair in assuming that some other category (from the ‘TQIA+’ appendage) has made an appearance here. Given that most of the ‘queer community’ now comprises of attention-seeking heterosexuals, there is simply no way of knowing. But it would be dishonest not to notice how self-defined ‘queers’ tend to be overrepresented among the progeny of the celebrity class.

It goes without saying that Katsky, like all creatives, is free to make her own artistic choices. It’s just a pity that virtually all studio executives are in lockstep and, ironically, there is so little diversity as a result. I can make no judgement whatsoever on the quality of Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair as I haven’t seen it. It might be brilliant. Yet a recent viral clip from the show (which you can watch here) would suggest that ideology is once again taking priority over storytelling.

The clip shows Kelly giving a speech in praise of Hal, but somehow making it all about herself. ‘I was like five when I started feeling wrong,’ she says in a monologue to camera, while mawkish music reminds the audience that they are meant to find it moving. The struggles of being ‘non-binary’ – i.e., aligning oneself completely with establishment trends – appears to be the topic. ‘Thought I was great at hiding it, because you guys never said anything.’

Hiding what exactly? That she didn’t feel entirely comfortable with old-fashioned tropes of masculine and feminine behaviour? This is a feeling that virtually everyone shares, but most people don’t require the formation of an entire ‘identity’ around it. The invention of a third category, supposedly to escape from the ‘oppressive’ sex binary, is simply to surrender to – and thereby reinforce – the very sex stereotypes that one is claiming to reject. Like so much of the new woke orthodoxy, it’s a reactionary notion dressed up as progressivism.

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Around fifteen years ago, I had a stand-up routine in which I would bemoan the ever-expanding initialism for sexual minorities. First it was LGB, then LGBT, then LGBTQI. I ended up increasing it gradually until every letter of the alphabet was represented and had its own assigned meaning. It was more a memory trick than a joke, but it always landed well.

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Censorship is one of the first signs that a society isn’t working. A truly free nation can tolerate the expression of offensive opinions, even repugnant ones, because where debate and discussion are encouraged the worst ideas can be exposed and defeated. When a government sets limitations on speech, it is admitting that authoritarianism is easier than liberty.

The news that Kanye West – these days self-styled as ‘Ye’ – has been banned from entering the UK is one such admission. He had been booked to headline the Wireless Festival in Finsbury Park, London, but the event has now been cancelled. The Home Office has claimed that West’s appearance ‘would not be conducive to the public good’.

This kind of thing has happened before. In 2015, Theresa May, then Home Secretary, banned the rapper Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler, the Creator) from the country for at least three years under anti-terrorism legislation. One might legitimately ask how rap lyrics can be said to be a form of terrorism, but that was the argument that the government opted to make.

Presumably the decision to ban West is based largely on his infamous track ‘Heil Hitler’, released in May 2025, which includes the lines: ‘Man, these people took my kids from me, then they closed my bank account. I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out… So I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain’. The chorus features a group of male voices repeatedly singing the refrain ‘Nigga, Heil Hitler’. The song closes with a recorded excerpt from one of Hitler’s speeches.

West’s antisemitism goes far beyond lyrics, of course. In October 2022, he posted on X his intention to go ‘death con 3 on Jewish people’. In December of that year, he appeared on Alex Jones’s show and claimed that he ‘liked Hitler’, saying that he ‘seems like a cool guy’ and went on to deny the holocaust. He was suspended from X for posting a Star of David combined with the Nazi swastika, and in early 2025 – having been reinstated – posted a series of unhinged remarks, including ‘I love Hitler now’ and ‘I’m a Nazi’, ‘every Jewish wife is a bitch’ and ‘Jews were better as slaves’.

West has since apologised, taking out a one-page advert in the Wall Street Journal for an open letter ‘To Those I’ve Hurt’, putting his behaviour down to bipolar disorder, and asserting ‘I am not a Nazi or an antisemite’ and ‘I love Jewish people’. He had previously met with Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto and expressed his ‘profound remorse’. Video footage of West hugging Pinto was widely shared.

Is West’s apology sincere? Has his medical condition really driven him to such depths? When it comes to his banning from the UK, neither of these questions is relevant. Either we have freedom of speech in our country or we do not…

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It’s a standalone introductory lecture in which I discuss the historical circumstances that enabled Shakespeare to flourish.

And if you’d like to enrol at the Peterson Academy, you’ll have access to all their courses, including my other cours…

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We live in an age of fake news. The scourge of online misinformation, combined with a media class that prioritises ideological narratives over the truth, means that most of us now routinely check multiple accounts of the same event to cobble together the reality behind the agenda. But yesterday the phenomenon of fake news hit a new low. For it was widel…

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In 1692, a coalition of villagers, ministers, judges and other local authorities took on the witches of Salem, Massachusetts. The trials lasted just over a year, but by the end more than two hundred had been accused, twenty had been executed and five others had perished in jail. There was just one problem: the witches did not exist.

It is tempting to mak…

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‘Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in ten or twenty years. It won’t matter.’ Such are the prophecies of Elon Musk, who believes that the inevitable improvement of Artificial Intelligence and robotics will mean that in the near future we simply won’t need to work. When AI becomes superintelligent, it will have the capacity to fulfil…

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Most successful politicians are adept at linguistic sleight-of-hand. I am not talking here about outright lies, but rather the twisting of the truth through wordplay. One of the most striking examples was the US military spokesman during the Vietnam War who described a bombing raid as having ‘obtained a 100 per cent mortality response’. This verbal form…

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We discussed whether Starmer might finally be on the right side of public opinion, why TV has suffered from being dominated by the middle-classes, and why Americans have no taste when it comes to cheese.

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‘We must all play our part in eradicating Islamophobia,’ Keir Starmer said before he became Prime Minister. ‘My Labour Party is committed to tackling it in all its forms.’ Given this government’s patronising and cynical efforts to pander to Muslim voters, one wonders whether the real problem is not Islamophobia, but Islamophilia.

According to a draft leaked to the Spectator, Starmer is about to unveil plans for an ‘Islamophobia tsar’. But what for? Hate crimes based on religion represent approximately 5% of those recorded, as compared to 14% for sexual orientation and 60% for race. Why not a ‘homophobia tsar’ or a ‘racism tsar’?

Of course, we shouldn’t be bothering with these tsars at all. It’s an odd term anyway, harking back to Russian autocrats before the revolution. But by creating a specific government role to tackle anti-Muslim ‘hostility and hatred’, Starmer is making clear that this particular community is one of his chief priorities.

There is nothing ‘progressive’ about any of this. No other belief system is deemed worthy of protection from ridicule or criticism, and in a free society it is intolerable that the government is singling out one ideology for special treatment. If I were Muslim, I’m sure I’d have something to say about a Prime Minister behaving as though I were some kind of pet in need of coddling.

This week the government issued its revised definition of ‘Islamophobia’, which it is now calling ‘anti-Muslim hatred’. This is some kind of progress, given that ‘Islamophobia’ is a nebulous term that was invented and propagated to curb criticism of the faith…

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