42. Everyone's got internet poisoning

The Katespiracy industrial complex and the Peta Principle

Last week, I wrote about the hot influencers for Jesus phenomenon in the Airmail newsletter, and for UnHerd about why we need to rebalance the generational settlement so children aren’t just paying the price of a generous pension system. There’ll be a bonus newsletter this Thursday to see you through the Easter weekend, so look out for that in your inboxes.

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The 6pm Friday publication of the Kate video, announcing that she was being treated for cancer, left me feeling grubby for having written about the situation at all. Not there’s anything in my UnHerd piece that I specifically regret, but simply by publishing it, I became part of the Katespiracy industrial complex: shortly after it went up, I got a request to appear on a true crime podcast that runs a royals subchannel which seems to consist mostly of stanning Kate and disparaging Meghan. This is not an economy I want to belong to.

princeandprincessofwales

A post shared by @princeandprincessofwales

As with most mysteries, the resolution was deflating: the simplest interpretation of the situation (that she was in fact very unwell) was the correct one; once presented as a sick woman’s confessional rather than frantic supposition, it is stark and sad. There’s an argument that Kensington Palace managed all its communications appropriately — it informed the public that Kate was unwell and withdrawing from duties, and after a decent interval for the family to deal with the cancer diagnosis, it shared that with the public too. The bad photoshop was just a bad bit of photoshop, and only gained a more sinister appearance because of the demented theories that had been thrown around by that point.

But I think, depressingly, that any public-facing institution must deal with the fact that the public is a nest of lunatics. Your strategy must deal with conditions as they are, not conditions as you think they ought to be. Which means there is no luxury of time: any perceived void in the news cycle must be filled, lest the public fill it for themselves with their own manic bullshit.

One of the people apologising for his part in the manic bullshit was the Guardian’s Owen Jones, who also had his own big announcement to make. As of last week, he is no longer a member of the Labour Party — to which a mass chorus of people have shrugged and said, “Wow, I thought he’d left already.” Cue the highly enjoyable spectacle of Emily Thornberry barely pretending to be bothered.

The column in which he revealed this momentous decision reads like a motion of no confidence in Keir Starmer, but really it’s the opposite. Jones’s new project, We Deserve Better, promises to help supporters “send Labour a message and support transformative policies from taxing the rich to fund public services, backing public ownership, tackling the climate crisis and opposing war crimes in Gaza and around the world, safe in the knowledge that there’s no risk of the Tories getting back into government.” The plan is that We Deserve Better will campaign for selected Green and independent left candidates against Labour.

In other words, it’s predicated on Labour winning a majority so huge, left wing voters feel empowered to fuck around with alternative parties at no risk of ever finding out. Alas and entirely predictably, some finding out occurred within hours of We Deserve Better’s launch, when it turned out that one of the three-member committee steering the project was a conservative Muslim with some non-U views about gay people and abortion. The committee is now a two-member one. Oops!

I don’t care terribly much what Jones does. I am interested, though, in what this move says about the importance Israel-Palestine has attained in UK politics — We Deserve Better even uses the colours of the Palestinian flag in its branding. Jones was never likely to be mistaken for a member of Labour Friends of Israel, but since 7 October (that is, since the terrorist incursion in which Hamas massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians) showing support for Palestine (that is, the state governed by the organisation that committed the terrorist incursion) has become a key signal of left-wing affiliation.

Jones even made a video expressing his scepticism about reports of sexual violence committed by Hamas fighters against Jewish women and girls. “If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera,” he says, applying a standard of evidence (and a lack of concern for female dignity) I very much doubt he would apply to claims of Israeli forces assaulting Palestinian women. (To be absolutely clear: only the vastly naive and extremely partial could imagine that sexual violence is not widespread in combat situations, sometimes perpetrated opportunistically and sometimes systemically.)

I intend no endorsement of Israel’s later military actions when I say I found it shocking that the first line response of many self-identified leftists after 7 October was solidarity with Palestine, rather than sympathy for the victims. I don’t want to say antisemitism plays no part here (clearly, it does, in both its soft-conspiracist and actively genocidal variants: I was in London on 14 October and on the South Bank I saw a small group of ecstatically happy young men who had come from the main Palestinian solidarity protest, and who were clearly out to celebrate murder), but I also think the outrageousness of the stance is part of its appeal.

To revisit Slate Star Codex on the PETA principle: it is easy to support a resistance group that hasn’t committed a massacre of civilians. It is so easy that anyone could do it, and probably does. Easy beliefs prove nothing. But only a true believer — only a real leftist — could lionise the Palestinian cause after 7 October. And this perhaps explains the mass vibe shift on Twitter, where accounts have swapped trans flag in bio for Palestinian flag in bio: the mad claims of gender identitarianism pale next to the signalling possibilities of getting behind Hamas. Two years ago, Jones’s left-splitting project would probably have led on trans activism (in a way, it did, given how things shook down at the Guardian): now it’s Palestine.

There are those, and Jones is probably one of them (or perhaps was, up until the shocking discovery that one of his We Deserve Better colleagues was tweeting about “fags”), who seem to believe that a coalition between queer politics and “anticolonialism” is not only possible but inevitable. In her new book, Judith Butler writes: “LGBTQIA+ people should be joining in the struggle against continuing colonization in Puerto Rico, Palestine, and New Caledonia… Those who fail to do so are not seeing that their fate is linked with that of so many others, and that those who oppose one group tend to oppose the rest.”

It is, at best, wishful thinking that all the “good” causes should automatically align. More cynically, it is a mark of a worldview in which there are no principles, only oppositions: if X is against Y, and I am against X, then I must be for Y — even if Y is a theocratic regime and the “I” is a gay man or a lesbian professor. It is a way of thinking that has no valency in the real world. But then, it was never intended to approach the real world, only to delineate certain groupings of goodies and baddies for the purposes of psychodrama.

Listened

Chappell Roan, “Naked in Manhattan”

After several months of my friend Becca teliing me that the Chappell Roan album was the album of last year, I finally buckled in January and have been listening to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess incessantly since. Think pure pop with performance art overtones and heady lesbianism: I knew I was irrevocably in when this song got to the shout-refrain of “touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me!”

Watched

Andor season 1

I came very close to not watching this on account of being sick of Disney taking the bones of its thoroughly scavenged franchises and brewing them into thin broth. But the secret of Andor is that it wears its Star Wars-ness very lightly: you do not have to know the world to understand the story (though if you do know it, Andor makes it deeper and richer) and it avoids the temptation to go in for pandering fan service. Instead, it’s a genre-shifting thriller — there’s a heist arc, a prison drama arc and an ending that moves its pieces with the craft of a close-up magician, so the climax comes as a total and wonderful surprise.

Read

Alasdair Gray, Something Leather (Jonathan Cape)

There’s a great story behind Something Leather, as told by Rodge Glass in his life of Gray, A Secretary’s Biography. Having written two novels with main characters who were not self-portraits but also not exactly portraits of anyone else, Gray was worried about repeating himself. His friend Kathy Acker challenged him to write a book with a female perspective. And so Gray wrote this, a novel so pornographic it was considered a career-ender. (Later he revisited the problem in deft satirical style with Poor Things, so Acker’s suggestion wasn’t wholly a bust; the later novel has a great gag about God skipping the dirty bits from Bella’s letters while reading them to McCandles, which I assume is a reference to Something Leather’s hostile reception.)

The women characters of this novel are all essentially facets of Gray’s own libido. “Unless we bring one of our wicked dreams just a wee bit to life we live like zombies,” says one — and a lot of this novel is Gray bringing his wicked little dreams a wee bit to life by having the cast fantasise on his behalf. If you go in expecting to be shocked, though, I suspect you’ll be disappointed. There’s an almost-endearingly old-school smuttiness to Something Leather (a few genuinely grim moments notwithstanding), at least in comparison to the grot of the internet. And internet grot would never break off to deliver a socialist analysis of Glasgow’s tenure as Capital of Culture in 1990.

Gimme, gimme more…

• Robbie Collin investigates the absolute hellhole of the not-for-kids YouTube videos that the algorithm is nonetheless incessantly pushing at children.

• Helen Lewis on the impunity enjoyed by Taki at the Spectator: Taki was convicted of attempting to rape the writer Lisa Hilton, who has very bravely waived her right to anonymity.

• Multiple properties owned by Sean “Diddy” Combs raided; unclear whether this is related to the allegations of sexual abuse against him.

• There has never been a BARPod more relevant to my interests than this story of demented fandom in the hyperpop community. However, I was sorry not to hear a mention of #susanalbumparty, the great misbegotten hashtag which might explain why Susan Boyle was the hacking target here:

  Episode 208: Ayesha Erotica Can't Disappear (with River Page)

• A very old story but a pleasing one: the goat that played Black Phillip in Robert Eggers’ The Witch was a legit devil.

• The question that needs answering: are we sunsetting ass and entering a golden age of boobs? (Longstanding readers may recall that I tackled the demise of the booty in 2021.)

• Quadruple axels to the Succession theme? Maybe if Roman had pulled this off, his daddy would have loved him: