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By: Frederick Alexander

Published: Nov 23, 2025

“Let’s be honest – saying some cultures are better than others is just racism smuggled in through the back door”.

You’ve probably stumbled upon a comment like this before, perhaps on the BBC or in the pages of the New York Times. It’s the kind of thinking that flows through the progressive bloodstream, bypassing the prefrontal cortex and heading straight for the emotional centre of the brain – especially the part responsible for virtue-signalling. It’s abject nonsense, of course, but we need to deal with the problem of moral and cultural relativism – that’s what we’re talking about here – because it pops up all the time.

Let’s begin with a simple test that takes five seconds. Would you rather raise your daughter in Norway or Afghanistan? You already know the answer – everyone does. Some cultures are simply better for human flourishing. We know instinctively that South Korea produces happier, healthier people than North Korea. We can measure it empirically, too.

Migration patterns illustrate the point beyond doubt. When people risk drowning in the Mediterranean to reach Europe, they are risking their lives on the promise of a better life in countries like Italy than in places like Somalia. Migration flows one way. Nobody at the North London dinner party is planning on moving to Mogadishu for a better life.

None of this should be controversial because all of this is observable reality. So why does saying as much seem gauche at that same dinner party? “But colonialism”, they’ll say. “Who are we to judge?” intones another. “That’s bigotry!” exclaims Tarquin as he tops up his organic natural wine.

But these are not counterarguments. They’re evasions designed to protect progressive orthodoxy and move the conversation along without further scrutiny. But scrutinise we must.

The Malala test

In 2012, Malala Yousafzai was on her way to school when she was shot in the head by the Taliban for the crime of wanting an education. The fifteen-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl survived, and we know her story today because she went on to advocate for girls’ schooling. Her courage earned her the Nobel Peace Prize two years later.

Her cause was simple: girls deserve to learn.

Cultural relativism has no coherent response to this because it claims that all cultures are equal. For the relativist, education means different things in different contexts; we can’t judge one form by the standards of another.

Here’s where that reasoning falls apart. Because if we can’t measure a traditional Afghan society by Western values, then what exactly was wrong with what the Taliban did? Weren’t they simply enforcing their cultural norms about women’s roles? Protecting their traditions? Who are we, sitting comfortably in Oxford or Boston, to judge?

The relativist has three moves, all of which are fatal to their own position.

First move: “That’s not real Afghan culture”.

But of course it is. A conservative interpretation of Islam has dominated parts of Afghanistan for centuries. To say “that’s not real Afghan culture” is to suggest there’s a better version of it. You’ve already abandoned neutrality. You’re doing exactly what you claim is impermissible: judging between different cultural visions and declaring one superior.

Second move: “We support Afghan women’s own choices”.

Good. Malala and millions like her want education. But now you’ve conceded everything because you agree that Afghan women’s desire for education should override conservative cultural norms. You accept that individual autonomy should take precedence over traditional authority. You’ve admitted that some values – women’s rights, education, choice, autonomy – are superior to others. You’ve abandoned relativism entirely.

Third move: “Violence is the line”.

On what grounds? If no external standard exists, then honour killings and religious violence must count as valid, a legitimate part of the culture. When the Taliban shot Malala, they were enforcing their cultural rules. If you condemn them, you’re appealing to some universal principle that transcends culture. Once you’ve sided with Malala against the Taliban, you’ve granted that some cultures are better than others.

What we’re really measuring

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. We’re not talking about race or ethnicity. No thoughtful and intelligent person is claiming one race is better than another. Let’s leave that idea to genuine fascists. We’re talking about observable, measurable outcomes produced by some cultures in comparison with others – women’s rights, literacy rates, life expectancy, the rule of law, and freedom of religion.

True, history, geography and economics are important variables, but outcomes are largely shaped by how norms and institutions respond to the hand they’re dealt. When we think of cultures as competing solutions to the universal human problems of hunger, disease, violence, and injustice, it’s clear that some cultures produce solutions that help humans flourish; others produce the Taliban.

Literacy rates in the Philippines for males and females are 98% and 97% respectively. In Afghanistan, it’s 52% and 27%. The statistics reflect how cultures think about half their population. It’s not about ethnicity but how societies respond to the challenges they face. We don’t need to compare different countries or ethnicities to see this; we can compare one people divided between two systems. North and South Korea offer a striking contrast – ethnically identical people with one half thriving and the other imprisoned by its own leaders.

Saudi Arabia denies women equal legal status with men. Women need male permission to marry, travel, or leave prison. They’re treated as permanent legal minors. Pakistan criminalises blasphemy; people sit in prison for years, sometimes lynched by mobs, for insulting religion. Iran hangs gay men from construction cranes. The Taliban bans women from public life altogether.

If you condemned what happened to Malala, you must condemn this too. The principle is identical: women’s autonomy matters more than traditional male authority. The only difference is that one involved a bullet and the other involves a legal code. Both are evil.

Relativism’s intellectual bankruptcy

Let’s deal with the central claim of moral and cultural relativism: no culture can judge another. More precisely, judgments about what is right and wrong are not universal but are determined by the norms, beliefs, and practices of each culture.

Read that again. It’s making a particular kind of claim, one that is itself universal, requiring acceptance across different cultures if it’s to make any sense. In other words, it’s self-refuting. If all moral claims are relative to culture then so is that very claim. Why should a non-relativist accept a relativist’s injunction not to judge? They won’t, because it’s nonsense. As Roger Scruton noted:

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”

Relativism, he argued, is a convenient way for people to avoid taking a moral stand – a kind of intellectual and moral cowardice and “the first refuge of the scoundrel.”

Daniel Dennett made a similar point about postmodernism:

“Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.”

“Ah...” says the relativist, switching gears. “But what about slavery and colonialism? The West did terrible things”.

Yes, of course colonial powers did terrible things. We know they did because we spend a great deal of energy documenting and condemning the sins of our past. It’s also why we introduced reforms. Britain abolished slavery in its empire in 1833 and then spent the next several decades using the Royal Navy to suppress the Atlantic slave trade – at considerable cost in lives and money. This doesn’t erase Britain’s earlier participation in that trade, but it does demonstrate what holding ourselves accountable to universal standards looks like: the defence of human rights, equality and the rule of law.

When the relativist says we must judge Western societies by strict moral principles but not extend the same to other cultures out of “respect for diversity”, they’re obviously invoking a double standard. Moreover, it’s not respectful, it’s deeply patronising. Why fail to apply the same standards to Pakistan as we apply to ourselves, unless you think the former is somehow incapable of meeting those standards? Female genital mutilation (FGM), honour killings, child marriage, death sentences for apostasy – if these things were prominent features of life in Toronto, we’d condemn them immediately. Why do we exempt those practices when they occur in Helmand Province?

The relativist has no answer except to switch the subject back to colonialism. But you can’t have it both ways: either some practices are objectively wrong, or none are. If relativism is true, then condemning anything is impossible because there’s no objective standard.

In any case, this simple moral logic is beside the point for relativists because they don’t actually believe their own doctrine. You wore a sombrero to a Halloween party? That’s cultural appropriation, says Jemima, draped in a keffiyeh on her way to a hate march. A white person in dreadlocks? The Oxford Union will treat it as a hate crime, yet when girls are forced into burqas, it’s a “cultural difference deserving respect”. The incoherence is spectacular; the bigotry of low expectations is contemptible.

Who pays the price

The tenured sociology professor will airily dismiss these arguments from the comfort of his office because relativism comes at no cost to him. But for ex-Muslims facing death threats for apostasy or women fighting for fundamental rights in patriarchal societies, the cost is life itself.

The people who pay for this cowardice are never the academics theorising about decolonisation. They’re the reformers trapped inside these systems.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali endured genital mutilation, forced marriage, and beatings before fleeing Somalia. She later became a Dutch MP and advocated for Muslim women’s rights. Her collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered in the street – his assailant pinning a letter to his chest with a knife, promising her the same fate. Western feminists should have rallied. Instead, many dismissed her as an Islamophobe.

When Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, Iranian women burned their hijabs in the streets. They were beaten, imprisoned, and some were killed. Did the Western progressives who’d spent years defending the hijab as empowerment march in solidarity? Did they don their pussy hats and start a movement supporting the oppressed girls and women of Iran? Of course not. Many went quiet or looked the other way as Iranian clerics beat women and girls whose only “crime” was to want the same freedoms their sisters enjoy in the West – and once enjoyed in Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

[ Tehran University students in 1971 ]

What moral seriousness requires

Let’s put it plainly. A culture that lets you leave your religion is better than one that kills you for it. A culture that allows women to choose their husbands is better than one that marries them off at twelve. A culture that protects gay people is better than one that hangs them from cranes. A culture that investigates its own failures – slavery, exploitation – is better than one that admits to no flaws because God said so.

None of this should be controversial to say. It merely requires making two distinctions that relativists dismiss.

First: people and practices are not the same thing. Muslims deserve equal protection under the law and freedom from bigotry. But no group gets to smuggle illiberal practices under that cover. You can wear a veil; you cannot beat your daughter for refusing. You can preach your religion; you cannot demand blasphemy laws in a secular democracy. Defending Muslims while criticising conservative Islamic practices isn’t “Islamophobia”. It’s a basic liberal principle.

Second: universalism is non-negotiable. Those who drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had just watched what happens when governments insist their “culture” permits treating humans as sub-human. States from every continent signed the declaration. So when Pakistan jails blasphemers or Saudi Arabia executes homosexuals, the correct response isn’t Who are we to judge? It’s You signed. Now keep your word.

A game of pretend

Why do intelligent people maintain this obvious fiction? Because admitting that some cultures produce higher levels of human flourishing means defending their own, and this has become strangely anathema to many in the Western cultural establishment. Saying that our culture is better than illiberal ones is seen as unsophisticated, unrefined, low status – the sort of thing a plumber might say.

Because ultimately this is really about snobbery, a display of moral and intellectual superiority that begins in the academy and percolates through our institutions until it becomes orthodoxy. The irony, of course, is that it claims the culture of progressivism is better than the liberalism it replaced.

It would all be academic except that the posturing and moral evasions have real consequences. The progressive class abandons the vulnerable, emboldens theocrats, and prevents honest discussions about integration and social cohesion. It’s how we end up with the absurd contortions around multiculturalism. It’s how we end up with grooming gangs.

The choice is simple

Either you believe women’s autonomy, freedom of conscience, and protection from violence are universal goods, or you believe they’re culturally relative. If universal, then some cultures are better than others. If relative, then you have no grounds to condemn what happened to Malala.

There’s no third option. The attempt to split the difference – condemning individual acts while refusing to judge the cultures that produce them – is intellectual cowardice. It lets you feel moral while abandoning the people who need moral clarity most.

Some ways of organising society create more human flourishing than others. It’s measurable, observable, and obvious. We know it from seeing the direction people flee when they can.

Some cultures are better than others. It’s not bigoted to say as much, and we’re allowed to notice.

==

Fuck I hate postmodernism. It's not profound, it's not insightful, it's pseudo-intellectual, pretentious nonsense. It doesn't mean anything. It lets low IQ people and dangerous fanatics pretend to be deep and thoughtful while vomiting up words that mean literally nothing.

It truly is the embodiment of the old saying:

“The mark of a true intellect is the ability to explain complex things simply. The mark of a fool is the ability to make simple things unnecessarily complicated.”

"Who are we to judge?" We are the people who live in the places that everyone wants to come to. So, yes, we are completely qualified.

one of the funniest quirks of extremely-online politics is the dual belief that america is a uniquely evil place, but prohibiting people from moving to america is a human rights violation. if it's really that bad in here should't we be keeping people out? – Mike Solana

This reminds me of the old argument about "God" being the source of objective morality. Except that definitionally, objective morality is just "God's" arbitrary whims.

"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" – Euthyphro's Dilemma

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: May 1, 2026

Imagine you’re a tourist in Vietnam, enjoying a bowl of noodles in the hostel’s little restaurant. A couple of tables across from you is a Chinese couple, travellers like you. You realise they’re Chinese only when two women nearby, having spotted a tattoo on the woman’s arm, demand to know where they’re from. The tone of the women is sharp, then hostile, then hectoring. From the accent, you guess they’re British. As the embarrassed Chinese couple get up to leave mid-meal, the women throw taunts and accusations of depravity and murder at them, making the couple complicit in China’s “genocide” of Uyghur Muslims. The other travellers sit rooted to their chairs, hoping the scene will quickly pass.

It’s hard to imagine this happening anywhere, let alone in a little corner of Southeast Asia – two British women haranguing a Chinese couple for their apparent crimes against the Uyghur Muslims. What a strange and unlikely scene this would be.

But of course, the couple weren’t Chinese, they were Israeli – identified by an Israel-shaped tattoo – and the cause wasn’t the Uyghur Muslims but Palestine. Suddenly, even a thousand miles away in an unlikely locale, none of this seems far-fetched but all too familiar, so inured have we become to the eruptions of Jew hatred.

“We’re just the goyim, aren’t we?” says one of the women. There it is. She knows the vocabulary well; she’s rehearsed these lines for just such an occasion. “Say you’re against Netanyahu!” insists one of the women. “What about Ben Gvir?” says the other. They can’t believe their luck, and on holiday no less – an Israeli couple on whom they can perform all the antisemitic tropes: “You’re monsters. You’re savages… A hundred and ten countries you’ve been thrown out”. Nobody steps in, nobody urges restraint. The Israeli couple make their way out of the restaurant at last. “Look at them…rats running away… Go on rats. Murderers. Murderers. Savages. Monsters. Genocidal”.

We know this is how it happened because one of the women recorded it on her mobile phone and later uploaded it to social media. That says something in itself. Because you can’t imagine this happening following any other kind of racism. Not towards a Chinese couple or an Indian one. If it had been a black couple, the incident would likely never have taken place – even a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist would pause, and if he uploaded any incident of the sort, it would be in private to a group of fellow racists. The costs are too high.

Antisemitism is different. One of these women uploaded the video to social media for all to see. I’m quite sure she did so with pride. Because far from being racist, they likely viewed this as a moral achievement – one that took courage and conviction. If they had any regrets, it was probably that they didn’t get around to chanting “from the river to the sea,” although I doubt they could have put a name to either. Geography is an irrelevant detail when the borders that matter are the ones that divide good from evil, the oppressor from the oppressed. This is what hatred feels like when it feels like virtue.

They didn’t arrive at these beliefs independently, of course. The world’s oldest hatred filtered through numberless versions over countless centuries in which societies have formed certain ideals and defined them in opposition to what they consider “Jewish”. As Dara Horn puts it, referencing David Nirenberg’s research:

“If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. ‘Anti-Judaism’ thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice. This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist.”

The trope is infinitely adaptable; only the hatred stays constant. And in that consciousness, like malware passed from one age to another, lies the permission to hate: antisemitism recast as a righteous act of resistance against evil.

The Soviets – who could master propaganda in a way they could never muster a successful society – did more than anyone in recent history to rebrand Zionism as “racism” and “colonialism”, exporting this messaging to the developing world and ultimately to the DEI industry in the United States and from there into nearly every university department in the West.3 Qatar and Al Jazeera have since done more than anyone to propagate and finance the operation.

The scene in the restaurant is the end product of all this. Here are two women who have downloaded the full ideological toolkit from a progressive class whose "polite" dinner-party antisemitism repackages the world's oldest hatred in the oppressor/oppressed framework, making righteous hatred feel legitimate in the 21st century. But it's the Islamists that provide the raw power and endless newsfeed of suffering, some of it real, some of it fabricated. And it's the Islamists who take it to the streets, calling violence "resistance" and murder "justice".

Glastonbury Festival put it to music in 2025 while the BBC filmed it for the nation. “Death, death to the IDF” chanted punk-rap duo Bob Vylan while a thousand middle-class festivalgoers joined in like a gruesome karaoke in the fields of Somerset – a ritual of moral self-congratulation with Palestinian suffering providing the emotional kick. The BBC saw no reason to edit it out because they didn’t hear a racist chant but urgent clarity expressed by like-minded people, high on a feeling of righteousness.

Bob Vylan issued a statement shortly after. “We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people,” they wrote on Instagram, now carefully substituting “dismantling” for “death” – a word that presumably tested better with the lawyers. “We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine.” Perhaps those women in the restaurant, who called the Israeli couple rats, were also just dismantling a violent military machine. Or maybe they no longer know the difference because the issues are already complex enough, and sometimes “monsters” does the job.

The Glastonbury death chants were sinister, evoking something dystopian, something alien to the society we thought we knew. In Orwell’s 1984, the state organises a daily ritual called the Two Minutes Hate. Party members come together before a screen, faces contorted with rage, screaming at a singular enemy in an ecstasy of denunciation. Winston Smith, who privately resists everything the Party stands for, joins in at first out of pretence – but then finds himself overtaken by the same urge, which is contagious, delirious, and purifying.

What must it be like to be a Jew in the West today? To have been told from the earliest age that your history is the darkest of all histories, that the evils of the past are stepping boldly once more into the present. To see politicians adopt their practised solemnity at the latest atrocity and the media rolling out exhausted clichés. “An attack on one is an attack on all of us,” they say. “Hate has no place in Britain”. “This is not who we are as a country”.

But hate evidently does have a place in Britain, and this is who we are as a country, at least in parts of it. The clichés and platitudes can no longer hide the fact.

On a pro-Palestinian march through London not too long ago, a kippah-wearing man came face to face with a British police officer. “You are quite openly Jewish,” scolded the latter, as if to preempt any blame for the antisemitic violence that might follow.

At some point in his life, that man in the kippah would have read Anne Frank’s diary, probably as a child at school, as so many of us did. He might have wondered as a boy what it takes for a civilised society to force its Jewish population into hiding, then hunt them down and finally kill them. Perhaps he closed the book, saddened but convinced that those evils, decades in the past, were safely locked away and unrepeatable. After all, civilised society had agreed: never again.

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: May 24, 2026

Imagine Catholics were walking into pop concerts and blowing up children. Picture the scene as extremists drive vans into a crowd of people or self-detonate on an underground train while citing the catechism. Play that vision in your mind for a moment: young men shouting the name of the Trinity as they shoot people at random in a shopping mall.

Now imagine an intellectual class rushing to the airwaves to insist that motives remained unclear. Meanwhile, a gigantic voluntary PR machine of global reach kicks into motion on behalf of the clergy, who remain mysteriously quiet about the whole thing. While all this is going on, ordinary Catholics go about their business and the rest of us are encouraged to worry on their behalf about a possible backlash.

If any of this is hard to imagine, it’s because our expectations would run in the other direction entirely. So much so that few in the Church would dare respond in any way other than perpetual contrition – the media and intellectual class nagging them into near madness, implicating them in the terrible actions they neither committed nor condoned.

We would hear other Catholics condemning the fanatics in their midst morning, noon and night. The public disavowal from Catholic priests, politicians, and celebrities would be deafening and unanimous. Every parish newsletter in the country would become a counter-terrorism pamphlet. The Pope would barely get through breakfast before issuing another statement. Nobody would need to ask where the moderate Catholics were, because we would be unable to hear ourselves think over the sound of them. We’d be bored with it, frankly. Here they go again, we’d say. Yes, we get the message: you don’t want any association with it, you condemn it utterly. Duh.

Would anyone say it was bigotry to ask why men invoking Catholic doctrine kept murdering children? Would people on discussion panels and newspaper op-eds insist that the real problem was “Catholicophobia”, a word so obviously absurd you’d have to be drunk on communion wine to say it with a straight face?

Do you really doubt any of this? Westerners are pretty good at apologising and worrying out loud for the sins of the past, after all. We’ve heard practically nothing else for decades. Why would this be any different? And what if we swapped out Catholic for Protestant or Quaker? Nothing changes.

How about Muslims?

Just asking that last question makes this piece controversial in a way every preceding line wasn’t. That should tell us something.

But wait a moment, you say. The comparison is unfair. The Catholic Church has a Pope, while Islam has no comparable figure who can issue a statement. This is true, but it’s not the point I’m making. The disavowal that counts springs from the op-eds and discussion panels, from the ordinary believers and those in the community who speak for them, who simply don’t want these things done in their name.

That’s not to say condemnations don’t exist. Of course they do. The Muslim Council of Britain issues its statement, and the press release goes out. Every serious survey finds the same thing: British Muslims condemn terrorism at least as readily as everyone else. Anyone claiming ordinary Muslims secretly approve of atrocities is not paying attention. But a press release read by no one is different from an organic expression of remorse for acts carried out in your name. You might not share that intuition, and if you don't, the rest of this won't move you. But many people, asked honestly, will recognise it.

The disavowal we’re talking about is the deafening, spontaneous, unanimous reflex we imagined for the Catholics, the kind nobody has to ask for because staying quiet would seem so at odds with the claims of the religion of peace. Nobody polls for that, and I cannot hand you a figure. But you do not need one. You know the difference between a reflex and a press release, and that’s what’s missing from the scene following every terrorist atrocity, the unmistakable sense that ordinary Muslims are impatient to condemn the evils carried out in their name.

This is a very different claim from one that says Muslims should perform some sort of disavowal ritual after every atrocity. Of course not – guilt by religion is grotesque, and we’d never impose it on anyone else. The question is why institutions, media and public culture appear to have no comparable expectation of visible, sustained disavowal from Islamic authority and civil society, a public expression of condemnation from ordinary Muslims through their community leaders and public figures.

John Cleese asked a version of that question recently, to which the broadcaster and author of Win Every Argument, Mehdi Hasan, answered: “Oh STFU you racist unhinged ignoramus.”

This is at least a step up from the accusation of “Islamophobia”, more honest in what it’s trying to do, which is to make the man asking the question sound morally suspect and intellectually defective. Anything but answer the question. One can almost admire the efficiency. Why answer the question when “racist” does the job, and the crowd does the rest?

The question is never answered because answering it would be to admit that the question is reasonable. And it is reasonable, because we would ask the same of Catholics and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists if the most extreme elements were strapping bombs to their bodies.

What explains the anomaly? The radical of any other religion would be disavowed by moderates at no cost, because nothing exists to punish the person doing the disavowing. Not so with Islam.

Consider how much propaganda it takes to make criticism of child marriage feel gauche. Young girls were raped in England, and still are, by groups of men predominantly of Pakistani-Muslim heritage – but saying so makes people wince, because decades of top-down institutional pressure have made plain speaking about obvious evils sound like the real problem.

The concept of “Islamophobia” is just a few decades old, but it has completely changed how we think about a set of beliefs alongside the people who hold them. It has merged these two things in a way that makes the latter a protected entity, so that criticising Islamic ideas now reads as hatred of Muslims themselves. To say that it’s been wildly successful as a way to deflect criticism of Islam is to state the obvious.

Muslims, like everyone else, deserve equal dignity and legal protection. Islam is a collection of beliefs and traditions that should be open to critique like any other. Nobody is arguing that criticism of Marxism is bigotry against Marxists, and we can run the analogy with any other ideology. Only Islam gets a pass.

Which is why today, everyone in public life has reached the conclusion that thinking clearly about Islamist atrocities is bad for community cohesion. It’s a form of moral confusion, of course, but it’s also strangely condescending – as if Muslims need to be held to a different standard. And it’s ordinary Muslims who count the cost of that confusion, since it’s their own dissidents who pay the highest price for speaking in ways we would expect of any other religion. And the more dangerous the question becomes – for Muslims and any of us who dare raise it – the more its absence is presented as proof of good manners.

==

I looked it up. Yes, Medhi Hasan has a book literally called "Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking."

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: Mar 29, 2026

Somewhere in Britain at this moment, a man and his young family are living a life in secret. They go about their lives under false identities in an unfamiliar town or city, making new acquaintances, but never revealing who they are or what brought them there.

The Batley Grammar School teacher, as we know him today, remains in hiding. No one has been arrested for threatening him, his career is over, and he will spend the rest of his life knowing that he’s the target of Islamist rage.

I don’t know what was in his lesson plan, except that it was about blasphemy and free expression. It wasn’t the first lesson he’d given on the topic, and it followed the approved national curriculum. Charlie Hebdo was in there somewhere. If I’d been teaching the lesson, I might have asked the students what motivates some among us to murder twelve people for publishing a cartoon. Perhaps he did the same.

What we know for certain is that the lesson led to protests outside the school gates, along with denunciations from “community leaders” and the sort of threats that would make anyone want to stay out of sight.

This all happened exactly five years ago and made two messages clear to anyone paying attention. First, intimidation works. Second, those with the power to do something about it will not merely look away; they’ll recast the intimidation as a legitimate grievance.

[ Protesters outside Batley Grammar School, March 2021 ]

The career-ending accusation of “Islamophobia” has hung over every discussion of Islam in the West for decades. In Britain, which leads the world in self-sabotage, a formal definition has now arrived, rebranded as “anti-Muslim hostility”. It’s carefully worded and accompanied by caveats that claim to protect criticism, ridicule, and academic debate.

Near the end, it drops in a line like an afterthought:

“This is a working definition and, as with all working definitions, it may need to evolve over time as understanding of the issues develops.”

Evolve how? Upon whose “understanding”? It’s not cynical to wonder what this means and where this leads. It’s not an exaggeration to call this a blasphemy law in all but name.

A few days after the definition was formalised, London Mayor Sadiq Khan led a sex-segregated public Islamic prayer session in Trafalgar Square.

Nick Timothy, a member of parliament, remarked:

”Too many are too polite to say this. But mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination…I am not suggesting everybody at Trafalgar Square last night is an Islamist. But the domination of public places is straight from the Islamist playbook…”

Timothy’s X post was exactly the kind of thing protected by the definition’s own terms. Still, the Prime Minister responded with synthetic indignation, demanding he be sacked for his "utterly appalling" remarks. The Attorney General, Lord Hermer, opted for whataboutery: “Would they have a problem if I, as a Jewish man, were praying in public?”, he asked – as though the concern were about prayer rather than ideology; as if it wasn't Islamists who were forcing teachers into hiding, threatening autistic children for accidentally scuffing a book, and detonating themselves at pop concerts. As if religion were an irrelevant detail when men were gangraping children on an industrial scale in the forgotten towns and cities of the UK.

“Islamophobia”, in a line often credited to Christopher Hitchens, is “a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons”.

It's an elegant compression of something we all know to be true – including, and perhaps especially, those who are first to deny it.

The fascists who created it

Theocratic regimes popularised the term “Islamophobia” in the late 1970s after facing criticism of Islamic governance, particularly from dissidents within Muslim-majority countries.

Aided by the burgeoning left-wing NGO industry, they borrowed the moral force of anti-racism by making criticism of Islamic doctrine equivalent to attacking Muslims as people. It’s a move that hides its flagrant dishonesty by tapping into Western sensibilities – the preference for tact and good manners over cultural ineptness. Conflating criticism of Islam with bigotry toward Muslims shields the theology behind the person. What better way to make that scrutiny feel gauche among people who pride themselves on their progressive credentials?

It makes no sense, obviously. As soon as you apply the same logic to other belief systems, it falls apart. Can you critique Christianity without accusations of Christophobia? Can you question Marxism, capitalism, Zionism – any ideology – without being labelled bigoted against its adherents? You know the answer. Secular democratic societies defend these rights scrupulously. Only with Islam have we accepted that scrutinising ideas equals hatred of people.

We first saw this pattern emerge in 1989, when Salman Rushdie went into hiding after publishing a book. Perhaps nothing captured the strangeness of that moment better than Cat Stevens, the singer-songwriter who had converted to Islam and become Yusuf Islam. Here he is, endorsing the murder of a fellow artist in a panel discussion shortly after the fatwa.

Years later, in an astonishing display of victim-blaming, Baroness Shirley Williams, a prominent Liberal Democrat politician, said of Salman Rushdie:

“This is a man who has deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way, who’s been protected by the British police against threats of suicide [sic] for years and years at great expense to the taxpayer…”

Christopher Hitchens responded by calling the remark “contemptible”, which, of course, it is.

The script has been the same for all Islamist violence ever since. Charlie Hebdo: “They provoked Muslims”. Samuel Paty beheaded: “French secularism is inflexible”. The Batley teacher forced into hiding: “The lesson wasn’t necessary”.

Always, the reflex is to blame the victim rather than the people who follow through on their death threats. Always, the preoccupation is with the supposed offence that was caused, not the murderous response to it.

The cowards who use it

The Batley teacher did nothing other than follow his vocation: to educate young minds and get them thinking critically about the issues of the day. An independent investigation cleared him, but a robust defence of his actions was asking too much, and the school all but abandoned him, because it understood that a disturbed conscience is more bearable than a damaged reputation.

The Batley teacher is just the most famous example. Consider Steven Greer, the Bristol University professor who was fully exonerated after teaching about religious violence. The university dropped his course, leaving him to the wolves. He wore a disguise in his own city.

It’s a calculation made again and again to avoid accusations of racism. It works because a demoralised public will eventually let the matter slide. They’ve seen it all before, and deep down, most know they’d do the same.

The problem is not that we don’t understand what’s happening. Free speech is the only tool that can dismantle a bad idea, and “Islamophobia” is designed to take it out of our hands. We see it clearly. The problem is that we hesitate to say it out loud, because speaking plainly now carries a higher price than staying quiet.

The state has now given this cowardice written form. Although it’s woven in a few caveats which may “evolve”, censorship won’t come primarily from government prosecutions but from every institution pre-emptively protecting itself. Universities will sanitise curricula still more, and publishers will reject “problematic” manuscripts. The state won’t need to silence anyone because everyone will silence themselves.

The UK government has shown no comparable urgency on antisemitism, the one form of hatred visibly intensifying on British streets. It’s driven in large part by the ideology that the new definition of Islamophobia shields from scrutiny. The irony is lost on politicians, who mutter a few words of condemnation, perhaps even sounding like they mean it – although it depends on who's listening.

The morons who are manipulated

We’re not talking about stupid people, not in the ordinary sense. These are educated, influential, and sometimes genuinely compassionate people who have walked headfirst into a linguistic trap. They think defending Muslims against hatred requires defending Islam from criticism, a move they would consider condescending if the same logic were applied to their own beliefs.

Muslims, like every other minority, face their share of discrimination in the West. This is true. Therefore, any criticism of Islamic doctrine must stem from prejudice. This is false. Yet it’s false in a way that allows some people to build a career. A whole industry runs on this category error. The human rights lawyers, NGO officials, activists and journalists all see it and pretend it isn’t there because their careers and status depend on ignoring it. The ayatollah has no clothes.

Consider how odd it would be if Italians complained that criticism of the Mafia was anti-Italian. Why don’t Muslims march through the streets after every new atrocity, declaring “not in our name”, unless they feel cowed by the extreme, ideological wing of their own religion? Or agree with it.

Instead, the activism runs the other way. While women in Tehran burn their hijabs knowing they may be killed for it, a gruesome alliance of wannabe jihadists and weekend revolutionaries parade through Western capitals, openly supporting clerical fascism while their children hold placards of Khamenei, the man whose guards beat Iranian women to death for showing their hair.

Who pays for this moral and intellectual bankruptcy? It’s people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has spent decades advocating for the rights of women and girls, having been denied the same in her native Somalia. She fled the country after surviving genital mutilation and later renounced Islam. In 2004, she collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on a film that criticised the treatment of women in Islamic societies. Following the film’s release, Van Gogh was murdered by an extremist, who pinned a death threat to his body. The threat was against Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom Western progressives have since labelled an “Islamophobe”.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is just the most famous example. There are countless others whose names we’ll never hear but who bear the same cost of saying obvious things out loud, while their critics win applause for dealing in nothing but moral fraud.

A definition that claims to protect Muslims silences the Muslims who need protecting most – the women fighting for equality and ex-Muslims fleeing religious violence. Watch as they tear off their hijabs while we legislate against hijabophobia.

Britain abolished blasphemy laws in 2008, recognising that protecting ideas from criticism was incompatible with free inquiry. Now, under the auspices of people desperate to display their progressive credentials, blasphemy has returned under new management.

This is Britain in 2026. When the next atrocity arrives – and it’s just a matter of time – the institutions will respond with messages pre-checked against the latest definition of “Islamophobia”. The police will furrow their brows; the politicians will reach for “community tensions” and tell us that diversity is strength while the bodies are still warm. And the rest of us will be expected to shrug our shoulders, say nothing, and pretend this is normal.

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: May 17, 2026

The last James Bond movie was five years ago. I remember nothing about it except that, in a first for 007, he dies at the end. This was the best part of the film because it signalled that it was over and I could drag my CGI-battered senses to the exit sign, which had been the most interesting visual in the cinema up to that point.

There was a lot of messaging in the film, of course (masculinity is bad, etc), but as I say, I don’t recall the details; nobody does. The next instalment, when it arrives, will likely ignite the usual media buzz, the sort that accompanies the England football team going into the World Cup before getting knocked out by Uzbekistan on penalties in the quarters. These two events, coming every few years, have tested the patience of an exhausted people who just want a few wins to punctuate the decades-long managed decline of their country – something that says “we can still pull our weight, make a splash, hit the target”.

I doubt the next Bond will deliver on that promise. There’s been speculation about a woman in the lead role, but the more likely move will be to make the next Bond black. Idris Elba’s name has popped up a few times. He would be a fine choice because he would fit the expectation that actually counts. He could inhabit that masculine, brutal, slightly cruel character of the Fleming novels if they let him. Because Bond is resolutely not a feminist. He’s not checking in with Moneypenny about her boundaries or filling out MI6’s inclusivity survey. He’s an assassin. True, Fleming imagined him as a Scots-Swiss product of the British establishment, but the franchise stopped treating that as binding decades ago. This is an action movie, first and foremost, with a recognisable character at its centre. The colour of his skin (it seems to me) is irrelevant.

I’m not sure I would say the same about the casting of Helen of Troy. We recently learned that Lupita Nyong’o will take the role in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The film, which opens in July, is Nolan’s most expensive and ambitious to date. Like Bond, Helen is a character in a work of fiction. But unlike Bond (a franchise character invented in 1953), she’s foundational in a 3,000-year-old text of Western civilisation. Hers is the face that launched a thousand ships. Homer’s stories are what the Ancient Greeks told themselves about who they were, and Helen of Troy is a pivotal figure in that account. Homer describes her as “leukōlenos” – white-armed.

To cast a black actress in the role is to make a statement, and Nolan knows it. The issue isn’t whether Nyong’o is beautiful (I’ve no argument there), nor that she’s black per se. It's that we're being spoonfed an anachronism that shoehorns modern sensibilities into the ancient world. Bond is a character in a franchise. Helen belongs to the Western canon. Casting them isn't the same kind of choice.

If you think it’s irrelevant who plays Helen, then imagine a film adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita – the most sacred text of Hinduism – starring Ben Affleck as Lord Krishna. Or a biopic of Confucius with Tom Cruise in the title role. Or Lady Gaga in the musical version. No Hollywood studio would dream of making these casting decisions today, so why does the same logic operate in reverse for the Odyssey?

Nolan might yet surprise us. He’s made a dozen films, and none that I remember were interested in identity politics, so maybe he’ll leave ideology at the door for his latest as well. But the early signs are not encouraging. There’s already a rumour that Elliot Page will take the role of Achilles, armoured with pronouns and a six-pack. Then there’s rapper Travis Scott. Nolan recently told Time magazine that Scott was cast because the Odyssey was “oral poetry, which is analogous to rap” – the reasoning of a man who has just discovered both.

Even if all these speculations are just to create noise (as I’m doing here), there’s no escaping the broader trend. Hollywood, the BBC, and every other production company keep casting people in roles in ways that run counter to audience expectations. It’s designed to elicit a reaction that can then be filed as evidence of the racism or transphobia it sets itself up to combat. This is a feedback loop that has played on auto for years and shows no signs of wearing itself out. But what the cultural establishment fails to understand is that the pushback is not, for the most part, a protest about historical accuracy and rarely, if ever, actually racist in any literal sense. The actual complaint is more mundane.

At its best, great entertainment immerses you in the moment. All of the machinery that makes it possible disappears so the audience can sink into the world on screen. Cast Helen of Troy according to the text – according to your expectation of what the Queen of Sparta, the daughter of Zeus looks like – and you’re transported to the ancient Greek world of Homer’s imagination. Cast against it, and the machinery becomes the show. You’re no longer watching Helen of Troy but a Hollywood studio making a statement about Helen of Troy. In that moment, you leave the Aegean and enter a Californian HR department.

What jars is the implication that audiences need educating; that, despite decades of this sort of thing, our education is not yet complete, our moral and intellectual superiors not done with us yet. But nobody who’s not already aligned with progressive ideology wants to see a film that’s been hijacked to deliver a message about itself, especially when the message is that the rest of us need correcting.

A lot of this can be explained by a particular set of incentives. Since 2024, films are no longer eligible for Best Picture at the Oscars unless they meet specific “representation and inclusion” standards covering things like casting choices and the makeup of the creative team. Producers chasing awards now factor these into their calculations. Audiences have made their feelings known about this, leading to box-office failures, but that’s incidental to a conversation Hollywood is having with itself.

Closer to home, the BBC has been playing this game for years. Take Horrible Histories – a children’s programme often used as classroom-friendly edutainment. In 2021, it produced a song called “Been Here From The Start,” part of a British Black History special, set variously at Hadrian’s Wall, a Georgian country house, and a prehistoric landscape. The education here was of an unmistakable kind: to instruct children that their grasp of British history (if they had much of one to begin with) was wrong. The lesson reaches back ten thousand years to Cheddar Man, whose DNA suggests dark skin, in order to deliver a message about contemporary Britain – Cheddar Man having been conscripted, posthumously and presumably without consent, as the BBC’s diversity adviser. Whether or not the history and science hold up is beside the point. The point is the lesson, delivered through song, to primary-school children via the public broadcaster on the assumption that children need to be set straight. That this came out in the wake of George Floyd is not an irrelevant detail.

Worse, parts of the so-called woke right have learned this game in reverse and discovered there are enormous financial rewards to be gained from bolting to the other extreme. This is how we get Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes resuscitating the kind of racism that was on life support just a decade ago, because doing so elicits a strong reaction from people who have grown to despise progressive sermonising and embrace anything that cuts against it, including, at the margins, undisguised bigotry. It's a grisly form of entertainment for a highly politicised age, appealing to the types of people who have already been written off as deplorable.

As for the rest of us, which is most of us, we just want to be entertained; to go to a film about a man trying to get home to his wife and son, and have an enjoyable three hours without being finger-wagged about our moral failings, and without having to decide whether objecting to the sermon is worth the bad-faith reading we’ll get for our trouble.

The lectures will keep coming, but the auditorium is only half-full, and half of those who bought the ticket have one eye on their TikTok feed while the rest wearily toggle on the ideological filter – a habit formed somewhere between the third Star Wars reboot and the all-female Ghostbusters. It’s hard to imagine any director of worth actually wants this from an audience, and would only have assented to it under studio pressure, or out of some misplaced desire for “cultural relevance”.

I only wish Nolan had committed fully to the ideological ask. If Helen must get us thinking about “issues”, then at least cast Morgan Freeman in the role. That would be making a statement worth talking about. As for Odysseus’s twenty-year journey home, why not reframe it as a coming-out narrative, the struggle with his own sexuality and gender? After all those battles with monsters, gods and men, we learn that the real struggle was with the demands of Bronze Age masculinity. He returns to his wife Penelope exhausted but free and on his own terms – or rather her terms, because Odysseus is now the woman she was always meant to be.

Working title: The Odyssey: She's Coming Home.

This is the Nolan film we need, the honest one, unafraid of its own implications – the epic that finally maps onto the strange odyssey we've actually all been on for two decades and more.

==

Hollywood has ruined literally every franchise they've laid their dirty activist fingers on: James Bond, Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, Predator, Alien, everything in Marvel, everything in DC, the so-called "live action" Disney remakes, Terminator, Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones, Willow, The Witcher, TRON… the list of vandalized properties is endless.

They don't see these franchises as tales to be honored, they see them as vehicles for their ideology. Opportunities to pull the franchise's fans in and reeducate them about the right way to think. They see the ability to take someone else's work, which they're not talented enough to make from scratch, and put their own stamp on it by changing it to suit a non-existent "modern audience" when they don't understand – and don't care to understand – why it worked and why it's loved.

They don't deserve any benefit of the doubt whatsoever. None.

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: Jan 25, 2026

Christopher Hitchens once divided the world into the things he hated and the things he loved.

“In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”

What stands out is the inclusion of irony, an appreciation of which is one of the most reliable indicators of intellectual flexibility – the capacity to hold multiple perspectives without surrendering to one.

People without irony tend to be humourless, of course, but it goes deeper than that. You cannot be a fanatic and possess it. The two are incompatible. Fanaticism requires absolute certainty, whereas irony sees the gap between what’s said and what’s meant, between the ideal and the actual. This is why fanatics are so literal-minded. They cannot grasp ambiguity or complexity.

We see it in the comment sections and replies. It’s all over social media, naturally. Ironic writing on divisive issues gets hijacked by a noisy few – the sort who treat every utterance with unbearable seriousness. Every disagreement becomes a morality test because they see the world in black and white. They miss the point entirely, or pretend to, which amounts to the same thing.

The click economy rewards this. Literal-minded outrage in the replies is gold-star algorithmic content – the shrieking and melodrama, the rapid descent into Godwin’s law. Make a sharp ironic comment about Greta Thunberg – her strange silence about Iran, for example – and you’ll discover that you’re “bullying a young girl” (she’s 26). Correct “pregnant people” to “pregnant women” with an eyeroll while reading the BBC news, and receive a thousand complaints.

The fanatical among us operate in a mode where every utterance is examined for heresy, every challenge a threat to their sense of themselves as a good or right-thinking person.

It’s exhausting, which is rather the point. By refusing to recognise irony, they force you into endless clarifications and retreats. This is why it’s tempting to caveat every note and post, add a wink emoji here or a disclaimer there in anticipation of being misread. But it’s pointless in the end. Some people will see a provocation in anything.

The managerial class can’t stand irony either. It’s too slippery; it doesn’t fit their risk framework. When The Babylon Bee satirically named Rachel Levine – a transgender Biden administration official – its ‘Man of the Year’ in response to USA Today honouring Levine as ‘Woman of the Year,’ Twitter suspended the account. The platform demanded the publication delete the tweet or remain locked out. Humourless compliance was the goal, but the Babylon Bee refused to play along, only later being reinstated when Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X.

Most other satirists of the last few years have tended to comply. The 2010s and early 20s handed them the richest material in decades – institutional capture, authorities demanding we deny what we could see, and so on. Instead of savaging it, mainstream comedians played safe. They mocked the 'approved’ political targets and heterodox thinkers while leaving the real absurdities and societal evils untouched. The few who aimed their wit at fashionable orthodoxy – and you can probably think of a few examples – were fired or de-platformed.

None of this is new. Satire has always made those in charge uncomfortable. Jonathan Swift suggested eating Irish babies to solve poverty, and the pamphlet circulated for years before authorities could figure out how to suppress it. You can’t arrest someone for a modest proposal.

Voltaire mocked the church and state so effectively that he spent years in exile, but his books kept circulating anyway. Private Eye magazine spent decades needling British institutions, and while it faced libel suits, it survived because enough people understood that mockery is a public service. Then it too fell quiet when the targets shifted.

Today, the best satire can be found in a few corners of the internet. The Babylon Bee is one example, publishing satirical headlines and short pieces on X and elsewhere. It’s not always subtle, but it’s often very funny and brave, sometimes doing more work in a single headline than a thousand columns. Nietzsche had an ambition “to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.” The Babylon Bee does it in ten words.

What’s changed with the internet is not simply distribution but the mechanisms of control. Previous generations had to ban books, arrest writers, or win costly court cases. That still happens, but now the arrests follow a Facebook post, by which time the satirist’s work is already done and circulating. That’s the real reason platforms like X get banned in certain countries: they threaten the state, not because they care about deepfake nudes or whatever the official excuse is.

The ultimate aim, though, is self-censorship. In the ideal world (as imagined by the authoritarian), you don’t need laws because the personal costs are high enough that everyone learns to speak carefully. That might take the form of professional ruin in the West or imprisonment or death in places like China. The desired effect is the same: irony becomes risky, satire gets reclassified as harm, and silence becomes the safer option.

Hitchens understood irony as a defence against tyranny. Dictators hate it, which is exactly why satire is so powerful. You can’t arrest a joke as easily as you can arrest its author.

The humourless tend toward the authoritarian because they need the world to mean exactly what they say it means. Authoritarians likewise tend to be humourless – or intolerant of it in others – because humour, and irony especially, undermines the fixed certainties on which their control depends.

This is why we should resist the temptation to self-censor. The more we can afford to laugh – at ourselves, at authority, at the fashionable delusions we’re expected to go along with – the more we know we’re still free.

Oscar Wilde once said we should be able to “play gracefully with ideas”. We can only do that when we’re free enough to laugh.

==

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: Feb 3, 2026

I’m generally against criminalising stupidity. Nobody can be blamed for being born with a low IQ, or for having the misfortune to miss out on an education – although the latter isn’t strictly stupidity, and avoiding a Western university education is increasingly the smart move.

But some utterances are so stupid, so utterly devoid of logic and sense, so obviously designed to win applause rather than connect with intelligent life, that I find myself believing there must be a cost. A price must be paid. I’ll return to this.

Billie Eilish, I’m assured, is a talented singer. She’s the sort of person who can fill a stadium and make teenagers cry with a chord change. She’s also the sort of person who stands at the Grammys and tells the world that “nobody is illegal on stolen land” – and gets a standing ovation for it.

Let’s take a moment to unpack this. If all land is stolen – and it is repeatedly, by different groups throughout history – then the logical conclusion is either that everyone is illegal everywhere, or nobody is illegal anywhere. If the latter, then every country on earth should open its borders to every person who wants to come in.

Even a child can work out that this wouldn’t be practical. But Billie Eilish isn’t a child, she’s a celebrity – completely insulated from the real world and surrounded by sycophants and other moneyed morons who all think alike.

She doesn’t need to understand what the scripted line means. The only calculation she has to make is whether the phrase sounds compassionate. In her world, that’s the same thing as being compassionate – which is top-tier positioning for the status-hungry. The standing ovation confirms it.

Why does this matter? Who cares what singers and actors think?

Well, imagine someone tells Eilish that the Earth itself is stolen land. Stolen from whom, exactly? Doesn’t matter. Maybe the dinosaurs. The point is that by Friday, there’d be a #FreeEarth march in Los Angeles. A pin would be designed in the shape of a T. rex. Celebrities would wear it, and fans would follow suit. Within a month, Greta Thunberg would ditch the keffiyeh for a lizard-patterned onesie and release a spoken-word manifesto called Asteroid about the ancestral trauma of the Mesozoic Era. And anyone pointing out that the Earth belongs to nobody – or, more likely, to everyone – would be accused of being a planet supremacist.

And then someone would blame it on “Israel”. Then they all would.

Hollywood celebrities aren’t ideologues. They haven’t worked out a political philosophy or economic framework. They’re not wrestling with Marxist dialectics or decolonial theory. They’re airheads and useful idiots who’ve spotted a status opportunity and grabbed it. The oppressor/oppressed framework is the most efficient virtue-signalling machine ever invented. You don’t need to understand anything. You just need to know who’s the victim and who’s the villain – and then declare that you’re on the right side of history.

Hollywood is the perfect fit because these are people who tell stories about goodies and baddies for a living. This is what makes them so dangerous. They genuinely believe life is this simple and that they are at the centre of it. Moral narcissists are everywhere, but Hollywood moral narcissists really are everywhere – on every screen, in every feed, telling young people that Israel is evil and brown people are oppressed. There’s no further context or nuance. No complexity. Just a story that gets told and retold, deformed and eventually borrowed by sadists and fanatics for moral cover.

At the Golden Globes, a reporter asked Bill Maher why he wasn’t wearing a “Be Good” pin – a tribute to Renee Good. Half the celebrities in the room were already adorned. Maher’s answer:

“It was a terrible thing that happened. And if they didn’t act like such thugs, it wouldn’t have had to happen. But I don’t need to wear a pin about it.”

Later on his show, he reiterated the point:

“I hope I didn’t spoil the perfect record of pins and ribbons solving the world’s problems. You can’t name a problem – from guns to AIDS to bullying to breast cancer – that still exists after people wore a ribbon for it. Except all of them. You fucking posers.”

Few celebrities puncture the hypocrisy of their own tribe as effectively as Maher. He understands that pins and ribbons aren’t political statements but accessories. They signal membership of a very exclusive club – the club of People Who Care™. Or, more accurately, the club of people who need everyone to know they care.

Which is why the silence on Iran is so damning. The system reveals itself as one that isn’t designed to pick up every genuine cause, only the safe ones. While Billie Eilish rehearses lines about stolen land, the Islamic Republic is massacring its own people by the tens of thousands – the majority of them killed on two days, shot by the Revolutionary Guard on direct orders from Khamenei. Most of the dead were under 30. The government cut the internet to hide it while doctors smuggled footage out via Starlink.

Where’s the pin for this? The hashtag? Where’s Mark Ruffalo?

Nobody’s surprised at any of this because Iran doesn’t fit the template. The oppressor is an Islamic theocracy, not a Western democracy. Criticising Islam is career suicide in Hollywood. So they simply don’t see it. Their radar only picks up signals that come pre-packaged for virtue signalling, and Iran isn’t one of them.

“Our voices really do matter”, said Eilish at the end of her speech. This is true but not in the way she thinks. Celebrities are so convinced that good intentions are the same thing as good outcomes that thinking becomes optional. Their young and unworldly audiences lap it up all the same.

Which brings me back to the cost. The price that must be paid.

It’s tempting to indulge the fantasy of chartering an A380 and flying Hollywood royalty immediately to Tehran to discover the true cost of speaking out for freedom.

But the real cost of moral narcissism ought to be much simpler than that. Holding luxury beliefs should become hugely embarrassing – stigmatised, even. Delivering scripted opinions about Gaza while ignoring Iranian clerical fascism should be career-terminating. Not because some authority decrees it, but because enough people have enough moral clarity to see the hypocrisy for what it is – a game for status junkies. They’ll stop watching the films and streaming the music because it’s all just a bit gross.

And only then, when the status calculation flips, when performance stops paying, will Hollywood’s moral narcissists pause and wonder whether any of it was ever real.

––

By: Patrick Reilly

Published: Feb 2, 2026

Lefty pop star Billie Eilish is facing calls to hand over her ritzy Los Angeles digs to a Native American tribe or illegal immigrant after she declared “No one is illegal on stolen land” at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony.

The “Wildflower” singer, 24, is being accused of virtue signaling for the anti-ICE remarks she made while accepting the award for Song of the Year on Sunday night.

“What about if we all showed up to her mansion and said we are going to live there now? It’s stolen land right? She doesn’t own it,” wrote one X user in response to Eilish’s comments.

“Meanwhile, she’s chilling in her … Hollywood Hills fortress with armed guards and a moat of privilege. If the land’s so stolen, sis, hand over the keys to the nearest tribe or migrant family,” wrote political commentator and YouTuber Brandon Tatum.

“The woman is a blithering idiot. Of course, if she really means it, then she’ll happily hand over her multi-million pound Malibu beachfront home to illegal migrants,” wrote British journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer on X. “Which she won’t, because it’s all just silly celeb posturing.”

“Any white person who does a public ‘stolen land’ acknowledgement should immediately give his or her land to native Americans. Otherwise they don’t mean it,” charged US Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on his personal X account.

Eilish, who Forbes estimated had a net worth of $53 million in 2020, purchased a $2.3 million horse ranch in Glendale when she was just 17 years old. That home previously belonged to British singer Leona Lewis, according to Hello! Magazine.

It’s unclear what other properties she owns.

Her brother and music partner Finneas O’Connell, who stood beside Eilish as she accepted her Grammy on Sunday night, reportedly sold his beach house on the sands of Malibu for $5.66 million in 2022, the LA Times reported.

O’Connell had purchased a Spanish Colonial-style home in Los Feliz in 2019 before purchasing the house next door in 2022 to create a small compound.

“As grateful as I feel, I honestly don’t feel like I need to say anything, but that no one is illegal on stolen land,” Eilish said from the stage of the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

“’F**k ICE’ is what I wanna say,” the singer concluded.

[ The singer purchased the $2.3 million horse ranch in Glendale when she was just 17 years old, per reports. ]

==

You can take the trash out of the gutter...

If you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech, right? You're in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

So, if you win, right, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god and fuck off. Okay?