Tox Report 73. Brain rot is non-partisan

Plus: Emotion at ten, complicated families and rabbit frauds

Welcome back, Tox Nation! This email is very long and I probably should have posted the essay part separately but it’s too late for that now. So far in 2025, I’ve written about how John Updike was brat (UnHerd) and the joy of learning to drive in my forties (the Times). I’ve also eaten a lot of turkey soup, and despite the Boxing Day column I wrote for The Times about how much I was looking forward to stripping the carcass, I was in fact sick of it before New Year and could only tolerate it as a vehicle for this amazing chilli sauce — which, thank God, my son gave me a jar of for Christmas.

What else does 2025 hold? Well, according to a column by Lionel Shriver, 2025 will be the year in which “We may finally be recovering from the woke brain rot”. Well, yes. A theme of this newsletter and my writing elsewhere last year was the decisive fallback of the wokescold mentality. On British primetime and US late-night, in pop music and the media, the social-media dictated defaults of the last ten years have started to look threadbare and hypocritical, if they haven’t been outright abandoned. The vibe, as they say, has shifted.

I’m going to skip past the bit of the column where Shriver says “whatever our private reservations about the guy, Trump’s election marks a hard Before and After” (reservations so private, she doesn’t even specify them! Which is awfully coy for a writer with such a swashbuckling demeanour). I’m also going to skate over her asking “will the reign of woke […] take its place alongside Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s showtrials, and Pol Pot’s killing fields” (no), and head straight to the end.

“Wokesters,” she concludes, “don’t really care about social justice. They care about appearing to care about social justice. They care about other people’s esteem. They care about fitting in. They echo what everyone else around them says, because being a mindless copycat means other mindless copycats will like them and they’ll keep their friends and their jobs. And they care about social fashion.” All we have to do to defeat woke, she says, is to keep insisting that woke is over.

So far so plausible! But if that’s true… where exactly is the cause for optimism? All Shriver describes is swapping one set of thought-terminating cliches for another. And while in-group conformity can drive massive and rapid advances for political positions (see: the incredible march through the institutions of gender identity theory), those advances tend to be shallow and quick to retreat (see: the incredible collapse of gender identity theory on contact with reality and polling).

This is just swapping one kind of stupidity for another. Shriver is making the same mistake a bunch of liberals did when they smugly took Stephen Colbert’s joke about “reality’s well-known liberal bias” seriously. No political grouping has a monopoly on truth, and the fact that your opponents are humiliating themselves egregiously right now is no guarantee that your allies won’t start doing the same tomorrow.

Tempting as it is to see the failures of “wokism” as ideology-specific, they’re not. In Helen Lewis’s (very good) recent article about the mess the US left got into over sports and sex, she makes the point that the left fluffed this because it refused to even make a case: “Progressives can’t expect to triumph by silencing dissenters through administrative pressure.” At the end of the piece, she underlines it: “Attempts at social change will not survive without the underlying work of persuasion.”

The left in America dug itself into a cursed position on sports, defending mediocre adult males’ human right to smash up elite women athletes, because it never deigned to test its ideas out through debate. Its stance grew ever more hopelessly entrenched because for a long time, social media gave the impression that it was winning: on Twitter, you could reliably bully someone into submission thanks to the dynamics of the pile-on, without realising that the IRL argument remained unpersuasive. And those dynamics are politically neutral.

The group that Shriver breezily characterises as “we sane people” does not exist. No faction has a monopoly on reason, especially not one that is only united by its rejection of positions such as (in Shriver’s summary) “women can have penises” or “wearing a sombrero that you bought yourself on Amazon is theft”. The fact that she phrases these in a deliberately derisory way suggests she believes them to be self-evidently ludicrous; and if they’re self-evidently ludicrous, demurring from them says nothing whatsoever about a person’s broader intelligence or competence.

A shift doesn’t have to be an improvement, and since a chunk of the wokescold left’s vacation of relevance can be put down to Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter, it isn’t. It is a strange thing that Musk thought he was buying Twitter to run it for the benefit of the right, and what has happened instead is — inevitably — is that the right is being run for the benefit of Twitter-now-X. See, for a very obvious example, the fact that the past week on X has been spent in paroxysms over the grooming gang scandal.

Within the X echo chamber, you would imagine that the abuse of white girls by gangs of Pakistani men had never been broached until brave truth-teller Elon blew it wide open. In fact, it was exposed by the journalists Julie Bindel and Andrew Norfolk in the Times over ten years ago. There was a damning inquiry. There have been prosecutions. If all this fury were motivated by a sincere outrage at child abuse, we would have seen similar rage about the historic abuse within the C of E that led to Justin Welby’s resignation. We didn’t, because that held no interest for a racist narrative.

It is a useful lie within the ecosystem of X. It fits the editorial biases of the site

The shame the British state carries over the grooming scandal is severe, and the Jay Report’s recommendations have still not been enacted in full. There remain some people who, for politically motivated reasons, choose to dismiss the abuse of girls as a racist conspiracy theory designed to malign Asian men (actually, the victims included Asian girls, who are equally inconvenient to those who would instrumentalise rape for racism, and to those who would dismiss rape for anti-racism). Nonetheless, it is simply a lie to pretend that the mainstream media ignored this or that there is some kind of ongoing cover-up. This was front page, bulletin-leading news.

It is a useful lie within the ecosystem of X, though. It fits the editorial biases of the site, just as cosily as spurious pileons about transphobia or cultural appropriation did back in the pre-Elon times. The difference now is that engagement-hungry posters used to have have to deploy some guesswork about what the trending topics bar would embrace: now they just have to look at what Musk is tweeting and follow that.

It’s the definition of “caring about social fashion”. Newspapers like the Telegraph are choosing to drift with that tide, as is Bari Weiss. Four years ago, Weiss left the NYT over its ideological capture by the online left, and founded the Free Press on Substack. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” she wrote in a punchy resignation statement. Now she seems to be taking the Free Press in exactly the same direction.

The “brain rot” doesn’t stop when certain views have been ousted or discredited. The “brain rot” is integral to any politics played out through social media. Once you vest your cause in a platform like X, the dynamics become inevitable: luxury beliefs, purity spirals and cancellations (and if you think the right is impervious to these things, just have a look at the beasting Tom Holland received for a nine-year-old tweet deemed insufficiently hostile to Muslims). Shriver thinks the sane people have won. I think that the madness of the internet has simply infested a different cohort. On a long enough timescale, no one online is sane.

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Listened

Carly Rae Jepson, Emotion

Thanks to Grace for informing me that Emotion is ten this year, and still unsurpassed as the ultimate album of the crush. Almost every song is a delineation of unspoken wanting; almost every lyric hangs delicately on the moment when anything could happen and nothing has yet. “Run Away With Me” hinges on the gorgeous promise that “Over the weekend/ We could turn the world to gold” — it’s a song of the conditional, a song of possibility, and possibility is what desire is.

When Emotion came out, I was working a staff job with little prospect for satisfaction or advancement, and I remember listening to this album over and over at my desk, losing myself in the pleasure of potential at a time when I seemed to have none. It wouldn’t be exactly right to say I handed in my notice and went freelance because of Carly Rae, but she was definitely the soundtrack to that decision. (By the way: I had some great recommendations to my callout on Notes for listening candidates, and I’ll be working through them.)

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Watched

Oedipus (Wyndham’s Theatre)

I don’t only go to see Robert Icke productions at the theatre, though I grant that from this newsletter it might look that way, and to be honest I’m not sure I’d be hugely sorry if it was true. Anyway, I saw this just before it closed and I’m very glad I did. It sets the Oedipus story in the present day, turning the protagonists into a Macron-like centrist-populist and his glamorous older wife. Modishness can be a risk (by the time I saw Icke’s The Doctor in 2022, I thought the identity politics it was sceptically playing with had already peaked, although I am admittedly unusually immersed in those and other people may not have been sick of them).

But Oedipus I think makes more sense than it did on its 2018 debut. Tiresius, the blind prophet whose intrusion inaugurates the tragedy, is recognisable to me now (in a way he maybe wouldn’t have been five years ago) as a YouTube guru-type. His lines haunted me: “a whole world lies under your feet. A whole universe, somewhere: here, unseen, and tonight it slips free… I came to warn you, not to help you. Powerless to help you: to see the disease in the cell is not to know the cure.”

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Read

Noémi Kiss-Deáki, Mary and the Rabbit Dream (Galley Beggar Press)

Engraving of Mary Toft by William Hogarth (via Wellcome Collection)

This novel is based on a true story. Mary Toft was an eighteenth century women who became a celebrity — well, became notorious — after she claimed she was able to birth rabbits. Learned men of science investigated her. The king took an interest. And then it turned out, shockingly, that she was not in fact giving birth to rabbits, or rather pieces of rabbit. (The mechanism of the fraud is easily imagined and hard to describe in a family newsletter.) “Hahaha,” you may be thinking. “Stupid olden times people, what idiots.” But there is more to Mary Toft than that.

The stunt had peculiar meaning — rabbits were a resource of the rich and poaching harshly punished, so (Kiss-Deáki says in this novel, which closely follows the work of historian Karen Harvey) a peasant who could generate her own rabbit-meat was making a grotesque kind of socioeconomic point. I read the novel engrossed, though I’m not exactly sure whether I was engrossed in it as a novel or as a freely told history, and maybe that doesn’t matter. I’m writing an essay about it for an exciting new project, so more thoughts on Mary Toft will be coming soon.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• “I could see it now: This is how it starts. Having tried to correct just one thing, I simply moved my target.” Frank first-person account of how a breast reduction turns out to be the beginning, rather than the end, of a bunch of problems for Katie Heaney. The plastic surgery industry seems bad. (New York Magazine, paywall/registration required.)

• “‘He wants to feel like she can be buried,’ a publicist working with the studio and Mr. Baldoni wrote in an Aug. 2 message to the crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan. ‘You know we can bury anyone,’ Ms. Nathan wrote.” The Hollywood smear machine vs Blake Lively. (NYT, paywall/registration required.)

• In response to that report, YouTube hack Kjersti Flaa has been trying to save her reputation. (Hollywood Reporter.) Not to gloat, but I did think there was something fishy about that one.

• “The elderly woman in question here was brought in by her son and daughter-in-law who told Santhouse, ‘She just isn't right,’ before leaving and turning off their phones. On her own, the woman, now in tears, told Santhouse there was nothing wrong with her. ‘They just don’t want me over Christmas.’” Caroline Criado Perez is essential reading on assisted dying debate and the how the specific threat to older women is being ignored. (Invisible Women.)

• I loved Gavin and Stacey and Wallace and Gromit over Christmas, but the thing that really wrung the emotion out of me in was Hugh Dennis’s line in the Outnumbered special about “the everyday stuff like — watching football on the telly — and beans on toast — and being with your family. And most of that is really good.” True, innit. (BBC iPlayer.)

• Human Presence, the National Portrait Gallery’s Francis Bacon exhibition, is on till 19 January. If you can, go. This posthumous painting of an ex-lover clinging onto a portal to nothingness has stuck with me. (You can ofc buy it as a teatowel, because art is dead.)

  

  Francis Bacon, Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps