Dispatches from the Great Awokening Michael Kirke

I N P A S S I N G : Dispatches from the Great Awokening

by Michael Kirke

of mainstream media is in the problem. Real mobs are now on the in�midated and infiltrated they are now opening new fronts. Ex�nc�on Rebellion (XR) ac�vists have recently disrupted the produc�on and distribu�on of several na�onal newspapers in

Given our strange and Britain, a�er blocking access to uncertain current poli�cal three prin�ng presses owned by and cultural landscape, it is Rupert Murdoch. Prin�ng presses probably inevitable, but it is s�ll a across England and Scotland were strange inversion. News itself successfully targeted and eighty con�nues to make news and be the people were arrested. news. And it’s not good news. Subsequently, more than 300 In the anglophone world too much protests in central London. doghouse. That is the only term XR has accused the newspapers you can use to describe the place and their owners of “failure to where some formerly proud report on the climate and ins�tu�ons with an important part ecological emergency” and to play in our democracies now find “pollu�ng na�onal debate” on themselves. dozens of social issues. Ten more The an�-social mobs on social pressure on the government “to do media are certainly part of this more to act on climate change”. story, taking at will whatever scalps The irony of all this is that they they see crossing their woke already have much of the media on horizons. But they are not the only their side. people were arrested during days of ac�on are planned to put march. But, we might say, mobs will be mobs. Let us just grin and bear it Not content with the news un�l the storm passes – as these organisa�ons they have already storms invariably do.

The more worrying phenomenon now is that the news organisa�ons themselves are being unduly influenced by the new pseudomorality which is driving all this. Powerful cliques within some major news outlets, in thrall to the same mobs, are stabbing with their steely knives any of their own who seem to stray from the paths set for them by the pre-determined historical forces which, as neoMarxists, they see carrying them relentlessly to our future. In Britain earlier this year Alastair Stewart, the urbane anchor of one of the main evening news programmes, rolled off the block on the pretext of an ambiguous remark on Twi�er, duly deemed to be racist. Several months later his wounds are again the subject of examina�on in a full-page profile in a weekend broadsheet. In the US we are having instances almost on a weekly basis. James Bennet, editorial page editor at The New York Times, fell on his sword in June for allowing the publica�on of an unacceptable opinion. Then, not long a�er, Bari Weiss, an acolyte of Bennet’s, also an editor and writer for the paper’s opinion sec�on, resigned, ci�ng what she said was unchecked bullying from colleagues. In an open le�er to the paper she depicted the news organisa�on as a place where the free exchange of ideas was no longer welcome. The Wall Street Journal was also in the news-about-the-news because of rumblings from the shop floor complaining about what was essen�ally the paper’s disregard for the principles of the “new morality.” The NYT reported on a le�er from a group of Journal staff calling for “more muscular repor�ng about race and social inequi�es,” as well as skep�cism toward business and government leaders. In another context one would not fault a group of staff expressing opinions and even disapproval of aspects of the standards of a news organisa�on. That is a right. This all becomes a worry when it is put in the context of the current readiness of the new moralists to suspend the freedom of those who do not just differ from them but who are deemed in any way not to be singing from the approved hymn-sheet of the New Church of Cri�cal Theory.

What happened to Alastair Stewart?

In January he was obliged to admit to “errors of judgment” in the wake

of a Twi�er exchange with a black man in which he quoted a Shakespeare passage including the phrase “angry ape”. Reac�on of colleagues across the industry who defended him was not enough to save his career with the broadcaster. “I would never use the word ‘racist’ and his name in the same sentence,” said Ranvir Singh, poli�cal editor of ITV’s Good Morning Britain. ITV news anchor Julie Etchingham added: “Al is a trusted friend and guide to many of us.” Despite that and much more, ITN cut �es with Stewart, 68, claiming he had breached editorial guidelines by quo�ng the line from Measure to Measure. Why? Because if they had not done it, the mob would be a�er them, threatening their already fragile adver�sing revenue. Stewart has been quiet since that trauma�c event. But recently he spoke to the Daily Telegraph in a long interview. He talked, not about himself, but about the state of media today. In 1976, prior to his first job with ITV, he spoke to Frank Copplestone, then managing director. Copplestone asked: “So you’re broad le�?” “I said, ‘Yes’. And he said: ‘Right, if we give you a job, all of that stays at the door. You come in here and you leave all of it behind you’. It was almost a throwaway line and was the most profound and influen�al observa�on in my en�re professional life. I’ve clung to it, not only because it’s right but it helps.” But he sees how social media has now distorted the whole picture. Partly to blame is a belief “that you can say what you want online. Broadcasters think they can be someone else online, that they can be chameleon-like but they can’t.” He remembers the late ITV News At Ten host and former editor of The Economist, Alastair Burnet: “He always used to say: ‘Never ever forget, it’s the news that’s the star. It’s not you – you’re just lucky enough to impart it’.” Then there is the salutary li�le horror story of Andrew Sullivan’s recent profile in the New York Times. Sullivan had been forced to leave New York magazine recently because, according to the NYT, he had not publicly recanted edi�ng an issue of the New Republic published … in 1994. The issue at the �me was a symposium on The Bell Curve, a book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that explored the connec�on between IQ, class,

social mobility and race. “My crime,” he explained in a Spectator ar�cle last week, “was to arrange a symposium around an extract, with 13 o�en s�nging cri�ques published alongside it. The fact I had not recanted that decision did not, mind you, prevent Time, the Atlan�c, Newsweek, the NYT, and New York magazine from publishing me in the following years. But suddenly, a decision I made a quarter of a century ago required my being cancelled. The NYT reporter generously gave me a chance to apologise and recant, and when I replied that I thought the role of gene�cs in intelligence among different human popula�ons was s�ll an open ques�on, he had his headline: ‘I won’t stop reading Andrew Sullivan, but I can’t defend him.’ In other words, the media reporter in America’s paper of record said he could not defend a writer because I refused to say something I don’t believe. He said this while arguing that I was ‘one of the most influen�al journalists of the last three decades’. To be fair to him, he would have had no future at the NYT if he had not called me an indefensible racist. His silence on that would have been as unacceptable to his woke bosses as my refusal to recant. But this is where we now are. A reporter is in fear of being cancelled if he doesn’t cancel someone else. This is America returning to its roots. As in Salem.” These instances of wokeness as it con�nues to poison our public life – poli�cs and media – are but the �p of an iceberg. We are in big trouble. One hopes that the “Second Law” – no, not that of thermodynamics – o�en quoted by James Ehrendorf, a character in The Singapore Grip, J.G. Farrell’s novel about the last days of that Bri�sh outpost as the Japanese descended on it in 1941, doesn’t spell out the future for our public square. It runs: “In human affairs, things tend inevitably to go wrong. Things are slightly worse at any given moment than at any preceding moment.”

Michael Kirke

Michael Kirke is a freelance writer, a regular contributor to Posi�on Papers, and a widely read blogger at Garvan Hill (garvan.wordpress.com). His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@gmail.com.