I tend to subscribe to the view that if you resort to personal insults then you have lost the argument, but every rule has its exceptions. When U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently told Emily Maitlis to “fuck off”, I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy.
Maitlis, who spent many years at the BBC feigning traditional broadcast impartiality, has had no trouble morphing into her new role as a far-liberal talisman at The News Agents podcast (which has itself become something of a cult among the old gatekeepers of British media).
If I was being uncharitable, I would say that following the viral clip of Ms. Greene telling David Cameron to “kiss my ass” (after a Sky News reporter relayed the Foreign Secretary’s comparison of U.S. lawmakers to Hitler appeasers), Maitlis set out to get her own viral clip.
This wouldn’t be the first example of lazy journalism by The News Agents. The other week, they revealed an exclusive investigation into the GB News investor Sir Paul Marshall. The hard-working investigative journalists presumably worked day-in, day-out to present the public with these devastating findings. Sir Paul has a Twitter account and, as explained by arch-sensible Lewis Goodall amid a backdrop of otherworldly electronic music, has liked some tweets concerning mass migration to Europe. Shocking stuff, I know, but it gets worse.
Goodall presents some examples which he characterises as “quite extreme, especially on Isslaam, immigration and integration”. They include criticism of the Islamic call to prayer being recited inside a Parisian church and a clip of the Prime Minister of Hungary saying his country cannot be blackmailed into “putting children in the hands of LGBTQ activists”. The rest of the ‘investigation’ then finds other ‘extreme’ tweets, posted by some of the accounts which Marshall had ‘interacted’ with. It appears he is guilty of thought crime by association.
Against better judgement, I replied to the bombshell report saying I liked Mr Marshall more now. I did not expect this to provoke Mr. Goodall into asking me if I “approve of the political content of these tweets” and tagging my employer to ask if they were “comfortable with that”.
Maybe I’m a snowflake, but in my mind, that’s not intellectual sparring between journalists, but a measly attempt to instigate my firing from the company for which I work, also known as cancelling. I tried to respond, as Gavin McInnes often describes, by “talking to liberals in their own stupid language”, and stated I was the grandchild of Muslim immigrants (therefore, not ‘Islamophobic’) but I still thought we should be able to discuss our rapid demographic transformation. I was told that ‘no one is stopping’ me from discussing it and asked again to say whether I ‘agree’ with the content of the liked tweets.
As a reasonable person, I said I agree with some and disagree with others, and asked why he was tagging my employer into this conversation. Goodall then revealed his true colours, saying that as I agree with the migration-sceptic sentiments of some tweets liked by Paul Marshall, I should not “be working as a journalist for a reputable news organisation”, adding that the fact I “feel able to come and say that shows how normalised extremism has become”.
You see, we are allowed to say what we like and we have a free media, but if you dare agree with the sentiment of some people’s tweets that others do not agree with, then a public figure with considerable clout will alert your employer and call for your sacking as they accuse you of having extremist views. This censorious and frankly Soviet attitude of our sensible, friendly News Agent is sadly pervasive in our media and even has a strong grip over those working at organisations that explicitly position themselves as working to break this mould.
Many definitions of extremist are tautological, like the Oxford entry “a person who holds extreme views, especially one who resorts to or advocates extreme action.” Collins has gone with “a person who goes to extremes in political matters, a supporter of extreme doctrines.” Merriam-Webster’s entry for extremism is “the quality or state of being extreme, advocacy of extreme measures of views.” Great stuff, but the most interesting definition is given by Cambridge: “someone who has beliefs that most people think are unreasonable and unacceptable.” This is at least definitive. I don’t doubt this is the definition far-liberals subscribe to (consciously or not) but a problem lies within those key words: most people.
Following up their exclusive investigation into Paul Marshall’s Twitter likes, The News Agents have interviewed the other media mogul vying for The Telegraph, Jeff Zucker, who is leading the bid funded mostly by a high-ranking UAE royal and politician. Zucker declared to Jon Sopel, another sensible BBC-man, that The News Agents had “exposed finally that Paul Marshall is unfit to own a newspaper… that was clear from what your reporting last week exposed. We are clearly the best option for The Telegraph and The Spectator”.
Zucker’s decade-long stint as President of CNN saw that channel descend from a liberal-leaning and generally respected outlet to a collapsing parody of itself, irreparably damaged by thousands of hours of hysteria over the now disproven ‘Russia-gate’ allegations.
His reign also saw the network adopt a number of radical agendas including Covid-authoritarianism, accelerating uncontrolled immigration and carbon fanaticism. I’m not an expert on American social attitudes, but I’d expect ‘most people’ to find these beliefs ‘unreasonable and unacceptable’.
Most people wouldn’t agree with many Emirati customs either. Goodall’s view that engaging with critical views of mass migration to Europe from radically different cultures is racist extremism, would not be deemed reasonable by most people. The insistence of Maitlis that the many millions who have thrown their lot in with Trump are “conspiracy theorists” rather than concerned ordinary voters, would not be acceptable to most people.
I’m not trying to say ‘the other side are the real extremists’ (even though it’s an arguable case with this definition). I don’t find this word meaningful or useful – we already have words for those who advocate violence, and demonising people for not sharing an (alleged) majority view is not only unreasonable and unacceptable but the basis of all totalitarian societies.
In any case, watching The News Agents’ current tour of America is fascinating stuff. There’s a palpable sense they view themselves as political versions of Louis Theroux visiting rural Klan members or an Amish village. As a viewer though, the glaring perception gap between interviewers and interviewees cannot be missed. When Maitlis speaks to Congressman Byron Donalds, a black Trump-supporting Floridian, she asks him in incredulous tones whether he finds it “deeply offensive” when he hears Orange Man being racist and bad. Her questioning also includes some interesting remarks: “Donald Trump is trying to target the young black African-American: the masculinity vote”, asserts Maitlis. Her racial characterisations of the visibly bemused Congressman Donalds continue: “[Trump’s] lost a lot of women over the whole issue of abortion, so he’s going after young black men because they like his machismo”. The lack of self-awareness is truly astounding.
What happened to these people? As is often the case, they suffer from many of the afflictions that they ascribe to others. When the gammon awakening first took root at the advent of Brexit and Trump, we often heard about ‘the left-behind’, those people who, unable to deal with the changing world around them, had retreated to echo-chambers from which they sniped and lashed out. Look how the tables have turned!
In 2024, the far-liberals don’t even bother to hide their disdain for the masses with faux-empathy and anthropological labels. They don’t even engage with those they view as ideologically inferior anymore – they are simply to be mocked and then ignored. This is seen in the increasingly preferred format of propaganda, where mid-wit sensibles like James O’Brien angrily shout at and put down their listeners for being thick plebs.
What we are seeing is a radicalisation of those who view themselves as the sensible people in society. They are the dinner-party class and they have reacted to the deplorables breaking into the mainstream and creating thriving new media spaces by embracing their dismissive labels with a new vigour. While in the near-past there was some desire not to alienate the hoi polloi too much by calling them all whatever-ist or something-phobic, now the far-liberals don’t even try to restrain the scope of what they consider to be radical and extremist (as the inclusion of The Conservative Party, GB News, Reform UK, The Telegraph and even this esteemed publication in Hope Not Hate’s recent ‘State of Hate’ report shows).
As such, ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘extremists’ (and privately, ‘nutters’ and ‘cranks’) have become magic words for far-liberals to signal their virtue to each other, and to shut down anyone else who they deem politically incorrect. ‘The public are idiots’ and ‘voters are incredibly stupid’ are sentiments heard all too regularly from journalists off-camera. This fully closed mind has given up on intellectual curiosity and severed its connection with facts.
The conspiracies that they deride are often based on genuine intersections of vested interests and power structures, yet they have started to engage in their own conspiracy theories, alleging with little evidence that Boris Johnson is a FSB spy, that Russian interference decided Brexit and that dark shadowy forces are behind groups against lockdown and the endless restrictions on motoring. In their world, conspiracies are not engaged in by the elites against the people, but by the people against the elites – how about that!
These arguments can easily evolve into semantics so allow me to bring us back down to earth for a second – let’s picture in our head a hypothetical ‘normal, ordinary person’, and put to them a few differing positions and imagine what they’d say is the ‘extreme’ position:
Increasing our population by many millions with spiralling numbers coming from the poorest and most backward parts of the world VS taking in a very small and manageable number who have genuine ties and come from compatible countries.
Allowing endless thousands of unknown fighting-age illegal migrants from warzones to be escorted on dinghies into our country and to be put up indefinitely in hotels at the taxpayers’ expense VS using our armed forces to protect our borders from illegals.
Encouraging and subsidising children to mutilate their genitals and take copious amounts of hormones and hard chemicals as part of a legally recognised ‘identity’ and proposing outlawing therapists from talking children out of that VS recognising transgenderism for what it is: a mental illness, often mixed up with autogynephilia and fetishes, made into an identity and promoted by the state.
Sending billions of our taxes to military contractors via corrupt Ukrainian politicians so that a brutal war of attrition, that could have been ended a month after it started, continues to rage on even at the risk of nuclear armageddon VS telling Kiev that it has to become an explicitly neutral state and normalise relations with Russia so Europe can develop a new and lasting security architecture.
Systematically discriminating against white people on a political, corporate and cultural level to rectify the microscopic racism that other people face while ignoring heinous crimes like rape-gangs and stabbing epidemics in order to not be racist VS judging people by the content of their character and not by the colour of their skin.
I’ll let you decide which set of views you think Joe Bloggs would find most extreme, but to my mind, there’s no question that the positions of the far-liberals represent the real extremism plaguing our country. They have no sense of proportion or measurement. Despite the negative effects of their Swiss-cheese worldview being all around, ideological sunglasses convince them that they are not only correct but are morally superior. This is insane.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, an American left-wing journalist and big news star has been disowned by elite Democrats for pointing out that the party has lost the working class to the MAGA movement. She recently gave an interesting analysis on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast:
“Working class Americans, whether they vote for Democrats or Republicans, whether they are ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, they all have the same views. Neither party is really speaking to them, they all agree by and large about the most important issues – polarisation is a totally elite phenomenon.”
We see this here in Britain too. The major parties attack each other in the media while rabble-rousing in Parliament over their cosmetic differences but they agree with each other on all the major issues of the day, and the public by-and-large disagrees with them.
There is nothing sensible or tempered about the policies enacted, both at home and abroad, over the past few decades. There is nothing democratic about the messages sent by voters being disregarded and ignored time and time again. When they try to gaslight you into thinking they are on your side, like Sunak’s recently discovered concern about Islamist extremism, do not forget that it is he who is presiding over the current record levels of both legal and illegal migration, and his party that has enforced failing multiculturalism and indirectly supported radical Islamic terror in the Middle East. All the toys will come out of the box for our Punch and Judy elections, but be in no doubt: all the far-liberal elites are equally responsible for our woes and operate as a uniparty (which neither you nor I am in).
Commentator and author Mark Dice advocates using liberal jargon in reverse, coining phrases like ‘anti-whiteism’ and ‘black fragility’. I think we need to start giving back what we get and incessantly label these dogmatists as far-liberal extremists. Instead of being on the back foot, constantly defending ourselves against smears and allegations, it’s high time to tell these lunatics that we, ordinary normal people, are the real sensibles of this country and that those destroying society with dangerous ideologies are those better described as extremist.
Yet if they still laugh gormlessly in your face, you could always just tell them to “fuck off”.
Far-liberal Extremists and The Radicalisation of The Sensible Class
I tend to subscribe to the view that if you resort to personal insults then you have lost the argument, but every rule has its exceptions. When U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently told Emily Maitlis to “fuck off”, I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy.
Maitlis, who spent many years at the BBC feigning traditional broadcast impartiality, has had no trouble morphing into her new role as a far-liberal talisman at The News Agents podcast (which has itself become something of a cult among the old gatekeepers of British media).
If I was being uncharitable, I would say that following the viral clip of Ms. Greene telling David Cameron to “kiss my ass” (after a Sky News reporter relayed the Foreign Secretary’s comparison of U.S. lawmakers to Hitler appeasers), Maitlis set out to get her own viral clip.
This wouldn’t be the first example of lazy journalism by The News Agents. The other week, they revealed an exclusive investigation into the GB News investor Sir Paul Marshall. The hard-working investigative journalists presumably worked day-in, day-out to present the public with these devastating findings. Sir Paul has a Twitter account and, as explained by arch-sensible Lewis Goodall amid a backdrop of otherworldly electronic music, has liked some tweets concerning mass migration to Europe. Shocking stuff, I know, but it gets worse.
Goodall presents some examples which he characterises as “quite extreme, especially on Isslaam, immigration and integration”. They include criticism of the Islamic call to prayer being recited inside a Parisian church and a clip of the Prime Minister of Hungary saying his country cannot be blackmailed into “putting children in the hands of LGBTQ activists”. The rest of the ‘investigation’ then finds other ‘extreme’ tweets, posted by some of the accounts which Marshall had ‘interacted’ with. It appears he is guilty of thought crime by association.
Against better judgement, I replied to the bombshell report saying I liked Mr Marshall more now. I did not expect this to provoke Mr. Goodall into asking me if I “approve of the political content of these tweets” and tagging my employer to ask if they were “comfortable with that”.
Maybe I’m a snowflake, but in my mind, that’s not intellectual sparring between journalists, but a measly attempt to instigate my firing from the company for which I work, also known as cancelling. I tried to respond, as Gavin McInnes often describes, by “talking to liberals in their own stupid language”, and stated I was the grandchild of Muslim immigrants (therefore, not ‘Islamophobic’) but I still thought we should be able to discuss our rapid demographic transformation. I was told that ‘no one is stopping’ me from discussing it and asked again to say whether I ‘agree’ with the content of the liked tweets.
As a reasonable person, I said I agree with some and disagree with others, and asked why he was tagging my employer into this conversation. Goodall then revealed his true colours, saying that as I agree with the migration-sceptic sentiments of some tweets liked by Paul Marshall, I should not “be working as a journalist for a reputable news organisation”, adding that the fact I “feel able to come and say that shows how normalised extremism has become”.
You see, we are allowed to say what we like and we have a free media, but if you dare agree with the sentiment of some people’s tweets that others do not agree with, then a public figure with considerable clout will alert your employer and call for your sacking as they accuse you of having extremist views. This censorious and frankly Soviet attitude of our sensible, friendly News Agent is sadly pervasive in our media and even has a strong grip over those working at organisations that explicitly position themselves as working to break this mould.
Many definitions of extremist are tautological, like the Oxford entry “a person who holds extreme views, especially one who resorts to or advocates extreme action.” Collins has gone with “a person who goes to extremes in political matters, a supporter of extreme doctrines.” Merriam-Webster’s entry for extremism is “the quality or state of being extreme, advocacy of extreme measures of views.” Great stuff, but the most interesting definition is given by Cambridge: “someone who has beliefs that most people think are unreasonable and unacceptable.” This is at least definitive. I don’t doubt this is the definition far-liberals subscribe to (consciously or not) but a problem lies within those key words: most people.
Following up their exclusive investigation into Paul Marshall’s Twitter likes, The News Agents have interviewed the other media mogul vying for The Telegraph, Jeff Zucker, who is leading the bid funded mostly by a high-ranking UAE royal and politician. Zucker declared to Jon Sopel, another sensible BBC-man, that The News Agents had “exposed finally that Paul Marshall is unfit to own a newspaper… that was clear from what your reporting last week exposed. We are clearly the best option for The Telegraph and The Spectator”.
Zucker’s decade-long stint as President of CNN saw that channel descend from a liberal-leaning and generally respected outlet to a collapsing parody of itself, irreparably damaged by thousands of hours of hysteria over the now disproven ‘Russia-gate’ allegations.
His reign also saw the network adopt a number of radical agendas including Covid-authoritarianism, accelerating uncontrolled immigration and carbon fanaticism. I’m not an expert on American social attitudes, but I’d expect ‘most people’ to find these beliefs ‘unreasonable and unacceptable’.
Most people wouldn’t agree with many Emirati customs either. Goodall’s view that engaging with critical views of mass migration to Europe from radically different cultures is racist extremism, would not be deemed reasonable by most people. The insistence of Maitlis that the many millions who have thrown their lot in with Trump are “conspiracy theorists” rather than concerned ordinary voters, would not be acceptable to most people.
I’m not trying to say ‘the other side are the real extremists’ (even though it’s an arguable case with this definition). I don’t find this word meaningful or useful – we already have words for those who advocate violence, and demonising people for not sharing an (alleged) majority view is not only unreasonable and unacceptable but the basis of all totalitarian societies.
In any case, watching The News Agents’ current tour of America is fascinating stuff. There’s a palpable sense they view themselves as political versions of Louis Theroux visiting rural Klan members or an Amish village. As a viewer though, the glaring perception gap between interviewers and interviewees cannot be missed. When Maitlis speaks to Congressman Byron Donalds, a black Trump-supporting Floridian, she asks him in incredulous tones whether he finds it “deeply offensive” when he hears Orange Man being racist and bad. Her questioning also includes some interesting remarks: “Donald Trump is trying to target the young black African-American: the masculinity vote”, asserts Maitlis. Her racial characterisations of the visibly bemused Congressman Donalds continue: “[Trump’s] lost a lot of women over the whole issue of abortion, so he’s going after young black men because they like his machismo”. The lack of self-awareness is truly astounding.
What happened to these people? As is often the case, they suffer from many of the afflictions that they ascribe to others. When the gammon awakening first took root at the advent of Brexit and Trump, we often heard about ‘the left-behind’, those people who, unable to deal with the changing world around them, had retreated to echo-chambers from which they sniped and lashed out. Look how the tables have turned!
In 2024, the far-liberals don’t even bother to hide their disdain for the masses with faux-empathy and anthropological labels. They don’t even engage with those they view as ideologically inferior anymore – they are simply to be mocked and then ignored. This is seen in the increasingly preferred format of propaganda, where mid-wit sensibles like James O’Brien angrily shout at and put down their listeners for being thick plebs.
What we are seeing is a radicalisation of those who view themselves as the sensible people in society. They are the dinner-party class and they have reacted to the deplorables breaking into the mainstream and creating thriving new media spaces by embracing their dismissive labels with a new vigour. While in the near-past there was some desire not to alienate the hoi polloi too much by calling them all whatever-ist or something-phobic, now the far-liberals don’t even try to restrain the scope of what they consider to be radical and extremist (as the inclusion of The Conservative Party, GB News, Reform UK, The Telegraph and even this esteemed publication in Hope Not Hate’s recent ‘State of Hate’ report shows).
As such, ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘extremists’ (and privately, ‘nutters’ and ‘cranks’) have become magic words for far-liberals to signal their virtue to each other, and to shut down anyone else who they deem politically incorrect. ‘The public are idiots’ and ‘voters are incredibly stupid’ are sentiments heard all too regularly from journalists off-camera. This fully closed mind has given up on intellectual curiosity and severed its connection with facts.
The conspiracies that they deride are often based on genuine intersections of vested interests and power structures, yet they have started to engage in their own conspiracy theories, alleging with little evidence that Boris Johnson is a FSB spy, that Russian interference decided Brexit and that dark shadowy forces are behind groups against lockdown and the endless restrictions on motoring. In their world, conspiracies are not engaged in by the elites against the people, but by the people against the elites – how about that!
These arguments can easily evolve into semantics so allow me to bring us back down to earth for a second – let’s picture in our head a hypothetical ‘normal, ordinary person’, and put to them a few differing positions and imagine what they’d say is the ‘extreme’ position:
I’ll let you decide which set of views you think Joe Bloggs would find most extreme, but to my mind, there’s no question that the positions of the far-liberals represent the real extremism plaguing our country. They have no sense of proportion or measurement. Despite the negative effects of their Swiss-cheese worldview being all around, ideological sunglasses convince them that they are not only correct but are morally superior. This is insane.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, an American left-wing journalist and big news star has been disowned by elite Democrats for pointing out that the party has lost the working class to the MAGA movement. She recently gave an interesting analysis on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast:
We see this here in Britain too. The major parties attack each other in the media while rabble-rousing in Parliament over their cosmetic differences but they agree with each other on all the major issues of the day, and the public by-and-large disagrees with them.
There is nothing sensible or tempered about the policies enacted, both at home and abroad, over the past few decades. There is nothing democratic about the messages sent by voters being disregarded and ignored time and time again. When they try to gaslight you into thinking they are on your side, like Sunak’s recently discovered concern about Islamist extremism, do not forget that it is he who is presiding over the current record levels of both legal and illegal migration, and his party that has enforced failing multiculturalism and indirectly supported radical Islamic terror in the Middle East. All the toys will come out of the box for our Punch and Judy elections, but be in no doubt: all the far-liberal elites are equally responsible for our woes and operate as a uniparty (which neither you nor I am in).
Commentator and author Mark Dice advocates using liberal jargon in reverse, coining phrases like ‘anti-whiteism’ and ‘black fragility’. I think we need to start giving back what we get and incessantly label these dogmatists as far-liberal extremists. Instead of being on the back foot, constantly defending ourselves against smears and allegations, it’s high time to tell these lunatics that we, ordinary normal people, are the real sensibles of this country and that those destroying society with dangerous ideologies are those better described as extremist.
Yet if they still laugh gormlessly in your face, you could always just tell them to “fuck off”.
Photo Credit.