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New Statesman
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
British food is reactionary now
Illustration by Arne Hoepfner I am eating lunch in the Yellow Bittern on London's Caledonian Road. It is co-owned by chef Hugh Corcoran, a Belfast man. And so, fittingly, we are eating soda bread and butter; and then we split an expensive pie, its crust made glistening by the butter-flour ratio. It's a carefully staged restaurant: demure to the point of austere, with old-fashioned wooden chairs; there is a looming poster of Vladimir Lenin and a slightly friendlier photograph of Samuel Beckett. Downstairs is a bookshop – I see a copy of the Communist Manifesto with an introduction by AJP Taylor. Among his influences Corcoran counts Robespierre, the Sans-culottes and Keir Hardie. Yearning for the moral cleansing such a proletarian aesthetic might provide? Head to the Bittern. And then look to the (frequently changing) menu: sausages and potatoes in broth, turbo-charged Hibernian peasant food; beef stews; the centuries-old classic, potted crab; apple pie, just like grandma used to make it. The Bittern is on the sharp-end of 2025's reactionary swing against the culinary frippery of the 2010s: a decade symbolised by the so-called small-plates revolution; a single ravioli split between three in a Scandi-minimalist hole in the wall somewhere in E8; when the wine was cloudy and the vibes set by the super-restaurateur Richard Caring. This was a culinary universe that the spirit of Brexit could not penetrate, where pan-European liberalism survived in the form of seven padrón peppers. In the identikit restaurants of Dalston they presented the customer with crudo and hispi cabbage; at home all of a sudden we started drinking Picpoul de Pinet, the cheap stuff barely a single quality marker up from Oyster Bay, but somehow it came bearing a patina of casual sophistication. Well, now the culture is sending that vaguely fusion cabbage salad back to the kitchen. Here is pie, here is soda bread, here is a pork chop, here is full-fat unadulterated butter, and no I don't want my feta whipped and I certainly don't want my wine to be orange. The Yellow Bittern might have taken this project to the very extreme, but this is not a one-man crusade against the poly-crisis of small plates and bad wine. At the Devonshire in Soho, run by Oisín Rogers, another son of Ireland, desserts trend to postwar nostalgia: bread and butter pudding, sticky toffee pudding, it gets no more modern than crème caramel. And your starter is invariably a prawn cocktail, last exotic in the 1980s, maybe? If you want something to come on a small plate, expect it to be explained to you under the more traditional parlance of 'a side'. The restaurant's deserved popularity – in part thanks to the Guinness boom of 2024 – is proof of concept. When I visited, I had bread, cold white Burgundy, salty butter. 'What could be better!' I say, with immediate guilt, as I glance over to the kitchen and to the men sweating over a literal open flame to cook meat someone else reared, killed and butchered for me. But grill it and they will come: The Devonshire has worked out how Londoners want to eat in 2025. Food and politics never move as perfect analogues. But if we are to extract some message from this volte-face in the dining landscape it is this: take us back, the consumer pleads. To an imagined past? Maybe. Or to somewhere else entirely? But the sense that something in the world has gone terribly wrong is there; the suspicion that all this miso-charred broccoli might have had something to do with it looms. Hence the turn towards meat and custard. The restaurateur Raymond Blanc, with typical Gallic generosity, once described this island as the 'culinary dark hole of Europe'. And before the vaunted restaurant revolution of the Nineties, prefiguring New Labour by just a minute, who could challenge him? In the Seventies, British children were eating Angel Delight; their parents wondering if quiche Lorraine was the height of elegance. It was a decade in which salads were made with gelatin and set in plastic moulds; when cheese was only to be eaten on a stick. We cannot divine everything about a national psyche by what the middle classes make for dinner. Ham and bananas hollandaise – instructions for which you will find in the 1973 recipe book Contemporary Cooking – is a psychotic episode on a plate, not a political argument. But food is still a keystone in the development of a national identity – go and tell an Italian that the secret ingredient to your ragù is ketchup and I'll arrange the funeral. It is also a loose weather vane for the political mood. In the Seventies, Britain endured four prime ministers and four general elections, an oil crisis in '73, such profound industrial unrest to warrant the declaration of five states of emergency, property booms, a banking crisis and stagflation. And so, yes, I will wager that a decade as fraught and fragmented as that might also be the one that serves salad preserved in aspic as the centrepiece of a dinner party. If food is a sensory reflection of the moment, then the moment sounded something like this: agghhhhh! As London recovered from the downbeat Seventies, it took a while for the restaurant scene to catch up. Paris was still teaching the world how to eat. But good cooking crept in slowly and by the 1990s the demi-monde was eating sun-dried tomatoes and all of a sudden posh mums knew not only what Chardonnay was but that their preference was for the French stuff, not whatever the arrivistes in the New World managed to come up with. As a decade, beset by the ambient presence of Marco Pierre White, it taught the British elite something simple: here was a new way to signal your belonging; screw Mozart and Veronese, gen up on the River Cafe and ricotta. And so in London, as in New York City, the bourgeoisie were trading the trickier fine arts for the secretly low-brow universe of eating (basil oil, no matter how carefully considered, is not providing the same intellectual challenge for the consumer as Proust). A proper critical framework emerged, and the rock star line-cooks headed for the television: MasterChef, 1990; Rick Stein's Taste of the Sea, 1995; Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef, 1999. In 1995 the veteran Delia Smith triggered a nationwide run on cranberries after she put them in duck rillettes. The Nineties were haunted not by the end of history, but another perennial question: what if we put pesto on that? The collision of the new gastronomic landscape and the political moment was perhaps no better captured than in that picture of Tony Blair with his wife Cherie at the devastatingly fashionable Le Pont de la Tour with the Clintons in 1997. They ate ballotine – a kind of layered, stuffed poultry first associated with 19th century French cuisine, but really, this carnal swiss roll was a star of the Nineties kitchen. These left-ish tribunes, now with Jamie Oliver emerging as their standard bearer, were winning. All their affinities for the continent were cropping up, not just at the hard-to-get tables, but even in your pantries. And it continued through the rest of the New Labour years; their affection for Chianti creeping into the home kitchen; neoliberalism with a Caprese salad; the Iraq War drizzled in balsamic glaze. The year 2025 is gripped by something closer to a reactionary nostalgia. The Yellow Bittern and the comparatively more accomplished Devonshire are not sole-traders in the shift toward the traditional – their culinary ancestors at the Quality Chop House and the St John have been making similar arguments for years. Copycat menus of the Devonshire are cropping up; Ashton's in Dublin offers a near-perfect replica. This is all part of a natural culinary evolution. Brexit deflated the elite vision of Britain as somewhere with endless capacity for cosmopolitanism and reawakened a belief in the proud meat-and-two-veg nation. Even if it is all served to bourgeois executives under a Potemkin trad aesthetic. But this is not an instinct reserved for the restaurant-goer. Just look to the redemptive arc of our most ancient foodstuff: butter. Since the Eighties, the public health commissars across the Anglosphere were committed to a simple message: saturated fat was killing you. In Ireland, the dairy farming class exported cream and butter but bought hydrogenated vegetable oil for their own kitchen tables; pale and insipid margarine filled supermarket shelves; low-fat yogurts and semi-skimmed milk landed on breakfast spreads. The idea was fully realised by the 2000s when Special K told you to eschew fat and eat cereal. Restaurants never gave up on the stuff: any chef will tell you the secret to good cooking is knowing how much butter to use, and having the confidence to use it. But a counter-revolution was brewing for the consumer too, whose lives existed far from the Michelin Guide. By 2014, Time magazine staged an intervention with a cover story beseeching the world to 'Eat Butter'. The experiment was a failure, it argued; we cut saturated fat, people only got sicker. And butter's redemption was in motion, no matter that it continued to run counter to British health advice. Finally, by 2025, the grip of the low-fat regime is loosening: demand for butter and whole milk is recapturing ground in the United Kingdom, once stolen by their margarine and skimmed counterparts. One raffish young chef, Thomas Straker, found viral fame (and possibly a restaurant empire) with an extended series about the stuff. It stands as a slippery, greasy, yellow shorthand for the Great British Nostalgia Drive: a nation yearning for a custardy past, where Irish peasant food is served to counter-signalling elites on the Caledonian Road; where the very-modern anxiety about saturated fat is discarded for ancient wisdom. It is almost as if Britain looked in the mirror and said 'quite enough modernity, thank you!' [See also: We should be eating oily fish – but what's the catch?] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
New York Post
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Conservative star Brett Cooper recalls being pelted with ‘Communist Manifesto' at UCLA party
Once a child actor, and now a conservative media star, Brett Cooper has taken the internet by storm with her commentary on a variety of political and cultural issues to millions of followers and subscribers across her social media platforms. Fox News Digital sat down with Cooper, host of 'The Brett Cooper Show,' ahead of her live show in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss her media career and new podcast. Cooper has since signed as a Fox News media contributor. Advertisement Cooper attended UCLA and felt like the political climate of the school and the city of Los Angeles didn't represent her. 'I went to UCLA, I just kind of decided that really wasn't the path for me, at least being an actor wasn't, and so I got really interested in production and being on the other side of Hollywood, and that sort of led me down a path of making videos.' When Cooper started making videos, she gained the attention of conservative media. 'I got in contact with some conservative organizations like PragerU,' Cooper said. As Cooper was making videos for PragerU, she received attention from the Daily Wire to start a show, and then her career 'took off from there.' Advertisement 5 Cooper attended UCLA and felt like the political climate of the school and the city of Los Angeles didn't represent her. Getty Images for DailyWire+ In January, Cooper launched 'The Brett Cooper Show.' 'My family was always super vocal and open about politics and values and philosophy,' Cooper said. 'We were a big debate-over-the-dinner-table family, but I didn't really follow politics, and we didn't discuss news and current events in that way.' 5 When Cooper started making videos, she gained the attention of conservative media. AFP via Getty Images Advertisement While attending UCLA, Cooper found herself having to analyze her political views. 'Going to UCLA, I was confronted with people who were very much involved in that world and cared very deeply,' Cooper said. 'So it forced me to kind of reconcile with the values that I had been raised with. So I think that was probably a turning point where I just had to be confronted with that and figure out, you know, do I actually believe in the things that I was raised with.' Cooper was initially hesitant about making politics a big part of who she is. 'I definitely didn't make it the forefront of my personality, especially because I knew that so many of my friends were on the left, I never really wanted to cause any problems, but over time they figured out kind of what I believe,' she said. Advertisement 5 Cooper was initially hesitant about making politics a big part of who she is. Fox News Digital However, the political differences at her school were very evident to Cooper. 'My favorite story is that I was hit in the head with a 'Communist Manifesto' at a party because they were like, 'you should read this,' and they like chucked it at me.' In 2020, Cooper posted a video on Instagram where she spoke out about the COVID lockdowns in Los Angeles. 'I make a video, and I was literally so terrified that I turned off my phone and I like chucked it across the room. Um, because I was just so terrified to publicly, you know, put myself out there in that way.' 5 However, the political differences at her school were very evident to Cooper. Instagram/@imbrettcooper Now, Cooper hopes that she can help others by providing unique perspectives and starting conversations. 'I'm not asking you to change your mind, but if I help you understand something in a different light or see a different perspective that just makes you think about something in new way, that's great. And if I can foster that in this community with my audience, my comment section, then I think I'm doing something right.' Advertisement Cooper will provide cultural, social, and political commentary across all Fox News Media platforms. Cooper launched her podcast 'The Brett Cooper Show' in January and has amassed over 9 million followers across her social media platforms. The Gen Z conservative is known for 'her grounded perspective, sharp wit and distinctive takes,' Fox News Media said when announcing her new role. 5 Now, Cooper hopes that she can help others by providing unique perspectives and starting conversations. Instagram/@imbrettcooper In January, Cooper appeared on 'Jesse Watters Primetime' to discuss the changing media landscape. Advertisement 'I watched the media landscape change… and young people are just hungry for independent voices who are authentic and honest with their audiences. They don't want to hear from traditional pundits 24/7,' Cooper said. Cooper is a graduate of UCLA and is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband. Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.
Daily Maverick
26-06-2025
- General
- Daily Maverick
Unlocking the power of words: How writing shapes equality and activism in society
In the past few years, writers have been liberated from traditional publishers with the advent of platforms like Substack, and there's been a mushrooming of individual newsletters. But could it be that paradoxically the explosion in the production and accessibility of writing has led to an implosion in reading for meaning? ' Words got me the wound and will make me well — if you believe it ' Jim Morrison, Lament, An American Prayer 'Sticks and stones may break my bones But words can never hurt me' (Bombs and drones may break your bones… ) Colloquial saying For most of human history writing and reading has been a squarely elite affair. For centuries it was intricately bound up with power and privilege. Only a few people were taught the art of word-fare, and access to the repositories of history, thought and ideation that were stored in writing was strictly controlled. As usual, it took a combination of struggle by poor people — and the growing needs of the capitalist economy for literate workers by the late nineteenth century — to break the rulers' monopolisation of the written word. Once that happened though, education facilitated mass literacy that in turn opened the door for poor people to greater equality and upward mobility through the classes. Not many made it, but enough did to trick people like my father into believing that the key to a good life was getting an education and working hard, 'pulling up your boot straps', as he and others frame it. If only it were that simple. Nonetheless, while the expansion of public education eventually meant that most people learned to read, not everyone could write and be read; for the most part, the ability to publish was still tightly controlled by class and quality of education. When there were breakthrough texts, like Thomas Paine's 1791 The Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), or Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx's 1848 Communist Manifesto, the huge readership they garnered demonstrated the revolutionary potential of the written word. But these books were the exception, not the rule. For the most part the publishing of words remained tightly controlled — mostly by men. It wasn't just political words they were afraid of. Words were also used to censor morals and shape culture, often protecting the dominant views of sex and sexuality. Books such as English writer DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's L over were considered 'indecent' and became the subject of court cases. In addition, as Pip Williams has shown in her beautiful novel The Dictionary of Lost Words, certain words were deliberately left out of the dictionary if their meanings reflected people or subjects that the elites preferred did not exist. In democracies slowly that grip has been relaxed. Today in countries like South Africa or England we can still write almost anything. But in autocracies the control over words and writing is as tight as ever. To an extent the digital and communications revolution of the last few decades has subverted all that. Through social media and online publications, millions more people can write and reach an audience, potentially in millions. Indeed, sometimes it feels as if suddenly everyone is writing. Even accomplished novelists, historians and writers of non-fiction now have their own newsletters. In the last few years, writers have been liberated from traditional publishers with the advent of platforms like Substack, and there's been a mushrooming of individual newsletters, including my own News from JAH. Many of them are outstanding. But here's the rub. Could it be that paradoxically the explosion in the production and accessibility of writing has led to an implosion in reading for meaning? Daily Maverick, for example, publishes dozens of 'Opinionistas' and op-eds a week. But its own statistics show that the average attention span on a page in 2020 was 12 seconds, only a few seconds more than the attention span of a goldfish. So, the problem is do people read for meaning, or do they just — like I often do — first cast an eye over an article, think they get the gist of it and move on? In this context the challenge facing a writer, a person who wants to use writing to persuade others, who wants to use writing for connection, advocacy and engagement is… how do you write in a way that arrests people's attention? How do you write for reading? For social justice activists it is these questions that occasion the need to have a discussion about the obvious: how to write in order to be read! Where do we start? Respect the written word Words are powerful. They must be handled with care. They can carry love. And hate. They can liberate and they can imprison. They can betray. They can hide and reveal. In her book Black and Female, Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga describes her childhood encounters with words and puts it this way: 'Watching the adults around me I developed an intuitive idea that words were power. After adults spoke to each other, things happened… I realised I was powerless which meant I needed power, which in turn meant I needed words. With words I could do things. I could make good what was no more.' Book cover: Faber & Faber The infinite beauty of words Isn't it amazing to think that words will never run out? Words seem to be as infinite as the stars. Words offer limitless forms, vocabulary and meaning. New words are being born all the time, and every year a handful enter into common enough usage to get added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In 2022 more than 650 new words, senses and sub-entries were added to the OED in its annual update, including ' trequartista, influencer, and side hustle '. There's even a process by which words gain recognition and a right of entry! But, like black stars, some words are also disappearing. Then there are archaic words that may have been discarded, which find their way back to life by myriad means. Words are the building blocks of meaning. But in addition there are limitless styles, genres and methods for delivering words: whispered or shouted, through poetry, on the page, as part of musical scores. I'm a firm believer in respect for grammatical rules, which is partly showing respect for the reader: but I'm also an anarchist when it comes to disrupting and reimagining styles. Connection is all. The bottom line: as a writer, the word's your oyster. Writing as considered communication We write primarily to communicate with other people, but how we write will vary enormously depending on who we think we are writing to and for. Once upon a time one of the most popular and private forms of writing was letters. For years, at boarding school, every Sunday my school mates and I were made to sit down for an hour and write letters to our parents. As I grew up, my repertoire of recipients expanded to girlfriends and later lovers. Today, I sometimes think of the articles I write as letters, a way of reaching out to unknown people, seeking affinity, hopefully touching hearts and minds, persuading. But in addition to writing for/to another person I have discovered that writing is also the best way to achieve concentrated and deep thinking; it's a way to shape your own thoughts, corral information and tease out meaning from the experiences and ideas you are trying to capture and explain in words. In her book The Purpose of Power, Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, writes: ' When I write I want to accomplish an outcome… For me, writing is a spiritual practice. It is a purging, a renewal, a call to action that I am unable to defy. It is the way I learned to communicate when there seemed to be no other options.' In this respect, the lonely act of writing becomes a form of self-realisation, a way of learning, of forming and shaping your own opinions, hopefully sometimes changing your own mind, as you bring intense thought to bear on trying to put an idea or a feeling or an observation into words. It's a way of staying human. The art of writing I had the privilege of learning about the beauty of words and their power through having inspirational English teachers at school and studying English language and literature as an undergraduate at Oxford University. Studying literature, however, taught me more about the feeling of words, than how to construct them for readers! Writing arduous essays about every book written between Beowulf in the ninth century and Samuel Beckett in the twentieth also taught me how to really read texts closely to try to understand their meaning. There's a difference, however, between being able to read for meaning and write with meaning. You should never rub your personality out of your writing. How you write should be a part of your personality, like the color of your eyes. It's instinctive. Nonetheless, there are a number of guidelines to consider if you aspire to effective public writing. Let me try and unpack a few that help me. Interestingly, as it turned out, it was not the study of literature (the most refined form of writing) that taught me how to write, but the study of law. For a few years, in the late 1980s while South Africa was in the final throes of rebellion against apartheid, I wrote for an underground journal, Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (meaning the Worker's Fortress in isiZulu), under the strict editorship of Rob Petersen, a distinguished legal and political thinker. Petersen had gone into exile to establish the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC. Back in those days words and writing in South Africa were much more subversive. Publications, songs and even books of poetry were banned by the apartheid government because of their power to inflame resistance. In defiance of this, Steve Biko's collection of essays was titled I Write What I Like. Biko wrote under the pseudonym Frank Talk. Petersen was a disciplinarian with words, although often more with the intention to exclude meanings and misinterpretations, than to expand the power and possibility of the word. Revolutionary politics required precision of meaning. The Marxist world was an ideological one and because politics was seen as a science rather than an art form the purpose of words was formulaic, that is to form equations of meaning. A wrong word could give you a wrong meaning! That I think is the nature of legal writing as well. However, being under Petersen's cosh taught me two rules of more general application to writing: Firstly, that no word should ever be superfluous. Every word has a role, and therefore every word in every sentence needs to be examined and questioned. Secondly, the reader of a journalistic article, and even an essay, will always be assisted by finding that there is a logic and structure to an article. The article needs to build a case, to progress, and not to require acrobatics or high jumps from the reader. Don't lead them into a forest of abstraction. Don't think of an article as being about you and how clever you are. I learned that the hard way. After being given a subject to research and write about for an article I would often get carried away in the process. Because I was learning through writing, my articles would be full of what I thought to be extraordinary epiphanies. Thinking and connecting ideas is exciting. But what I thought were new ideas may have been new and exciting to me, but not necessarily to other people. The editorial board meetings of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi were jokingly called the abattoir. Days would be spent pouring over sentences and even words. 'The writer must be prepared to slaughter your favourite sentences,' said Petersen, and though it hurt like hell, he was usually right. You can get fixated on a few words or sentences and then find that they unwittingly impede the further flow of the article. But my years studying great literature were far from wasted. As well as writing to convey meanings, a good writer also has a feeling for words. You may not realise it, but words have rhythm and a relationship to each other that adds another layer to their meaning. Reading Shakespeare, or any great writer, can teach you that. Writing is like lovemaking. It should start with some foreplay. My advice is to always look for poetry, even in prose writing. Look for the poetry that flashes in politics and even injustice. Find the angle less seen and explored. When you point it out people will recognise it and realise it was there all the time. Recognition is an important part of reading. But, beware, I am not giving you an excuse for flowery, flabby when you think you have finished read what you have written. Place yourself in the shoes of the reader and ask yourself whether you would have read your article. If the answer's no, then it's back to the writing board. How not to write Unfortunately these days there's a lot of bad writing about. Many people produce bad writing for good reasons, so I bear them no grudge. The problem is that there isn't enough discussion about what we are trying to achieve when we write, and very few of us have the privilege of going on creative writing courses. English writer George Orwell fulminated against bad writing, particularly the bad writing produced by writers on the left. The withering critique he makes in his essay, Politics and the English Language, should be required reading for all social justice activists who pick up the pen. But, as if to prove his point, Orwell shows us the best of writing from his own pen, as well as its power. A beautiful homily to the Common English toad can be turned into a powerful political statement: 'So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.' Orwell's criticisms resonate with the feelings I had for some of the op-eds I used to receive for publication when I was the editor of Maverick Citizen, a section of the Daily Maverick that we had established as a kind of activists' corner. Our journalists tried to tell stories about activists and activism, but we also created a platform to publish opinion pieces. Unfortunately I found that often the articles that came from political activists were dense and dry, jargonistic, didactic and hectoring and poorly structured. Sometimes their authors seem more concerned with their own political correctness, than with reaching out to and engaging with an unknown reader. As a result, one of my pieces of advice to writers is to carefully read back over what you have read, as if you were the reader. Detach yourself from your article, read it through someone else's eyes and then ask whether you would have stayed with it from start to finish. If at first you didn't succeed, get back on the computer and try again! And remember, even the most accomplished writers find writing hard. DM
Time of India
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
‘DMK govt's aim is equitable society'
Chennai: Chief minister M K Stalin on Thursday said his govt settled disputes between employers and employees through discussions. Relationships between employer, employees are balanced through mediation, he said, after laying a wreath at the May Day Park to mark International Workers' Day . Stalin said, "You know that Tamil Nadu is witnessing massive industrial growth, and as a result, workers are also growing. Industrial development in Tamil Nadu is on the rise. Just like targets are fixed for industrial growth, govt has fixed targets for the growth of workers too. Whenever a new project comes up and we sign an MoU, the first question I raise is the total number of jobs generated from the project." You Can Also Check: Chennai AQI | Weather in Chennai | Bank Holidays in Chennai | Public Holidays in Chennai Indirectly referring to the recently held tripartite talks between the state govt, Samsung India, and its labourers, Stalin said, "The relationship between the employer and the employees is balanced through mediation. Our govt ends the dispute through talks." Quoting Periyar, Stalin said, "Dravidian means worker". He added, "Periyar was the first to translate the Communist Manifesto into Tamil in 1932." Recalling the announcement to construct a statue for Karl Marx, Stalin said, "The aim and objective of DMK govt is to establish an equitable society, and schemes are framed based on this." Earlier, Stalin, while extending wishes for May Day on X, said, "Happy World Labour Day to all the workers, comrades who are responsible for the functioning of this world through their hard work. The govt was created by the common man for the common man. We will always be with you."
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The fascist moment is here: Have mainstream liberals heard the alarm go off?
This is pretty much it, I would say: This is the moment we have long feared — or, from another point of view, the moment we've all been waiting for. If you think you know what I mean by 'this' being 'it,' you're probably right. This is the moment to bust out clichés and make them sound authentic, the moment for 'Which side are you on?' or 'What did you do in the war, Daddy?' to stop sounding like antique rhetoric out of earnest postwar melodrama. Of course the moment has been more of a long, drawn-out process, and the premise that 'it' can't happen here has been slowly and gradually degraded and negated, somewhat the way Hannibal Lecter ('the late, great Hannibal Lecter,' as President Trump likes to say) keeps you alive and doped up on happy pills while he eats your brain. Still, though: Wasn't there something like a moment for you? There certainly was for me. The question of who understands the nature of the moment, and who does not, has been thrown into dramatic relief over the course of the last week or so — and boy howdy, have there been some surprises. This is too much of a generalization, but it's an irresistible one: We are seeing a truly extraordinary transformation, something like the awakening of the mainstream conservatives alongside the continuing surrender of the mainstream liberals. Yeah, I'm talking, for instance, about New York Times columnist David Brooks calling for mass action against the Trump regime and quoting the 'Communist Manifesto,' pretty much non-ironically. I don't think anyone had that on their mainstream-media bingo card. I'm also talking about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer literally hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office, and about California Gov. Gavin Newsom's dramatic heel turn, which this week included describing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, as the 'distraction of the day' compared to truly important things like whether Trump's tariff policy is 'accountable to the markets.' But before you 'well, actually' me about any of that stuff, let's get back to the singular moment that hit me hardest — and affected a lot of other people the same way — because I think it illustrates a much larger problem. It was that video, the one shot from somebody's window in suburban Boston that shows a group of masked people in plain clothes seizing a young woman off the street and driving her away in an unmarked van. To be more specific, it was the video itself and also what happened — and did not happen — after the world saw it. That woman's name is Rümeysa Öztürk. She is a 30-year-old Turkish citizen who has lived in the U.S. for at least the last several years on a student visa. According to her LinkedIn profile (now deleted), she is a former Fulbright scholar who holds a master's degree from Columbia University's Teachers College. She is, or was, a PhD candidate in Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She has not been accused of any crime. The government says it revoked her student visa because she supports Hamas, but has produced no evidence beyond an op-ed she co-authored (with three other students) in the Tufts student newspaper last year. Since her arrest, although that word seems like a euphemism, she has reportedly been held in ICE detention centers in four different states. On Friday, a federal judge ordered Öztürk returned from Louisiana to Vermont, where she was being held when her lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition demanding her release. Her arrest and detention 'raised significant constitutional concerns,' wrote Judge William K. Sessions III. (Yeah, no s**t, Sherlock.) That ruling represents a procedural victory, and begins to establish some semblance of due process in this case — but you can feel the energy drain out of the conversation when we start to talk about this as a legal case, right? That's how it works. A woman was literally disappeared off a public street by government agents with no uniforms, no official vehicle and no visible identification because of her political opinions. No one is even pretending there is any other reason. But that fact has itself almost disappeared into a bottomless swamp of procedural questions and jurisdictional disputes and supposed contextual ambiguity, while the human being in question remains in ICE custody into the indefinite future. People generally use 'Kafkaesque' as an exaggerated metaphor, perhaps to describe the runaround you get from an insurance company or an especially aggravating trip to the DMV. But no longer: What happened, and is still happening, to Öztürk and Abrego Garcia and however many other people have been swept up into the ICE gulags, is almost exactly the situation described in Franz Kafka's 'The Trial,' in which carelessness, bureaucratic incompetence and impenetrable legalism are just as damaging as outright cruelty. The Trump administration is making Kafka great again. Judge Sessions' ruling will of course be appealed to a higher court by some factotum of the Trump regime, and then that court's decision on that appeal will be appealed as well. Öztürk has a bail hearing scheduled for May 9, and a hearing on her habeas corpus petition scheduled for May 22, more than a month from now. It's conceivable that one or another of those proceedings will lead to her release, but it's far more likely that they will drag out for months, or possibly years, with no clear resolution. That's a feature of our new fascist regime, and most certainly not a bug. What has not happened since we saw the Öztürk video is anything approaching an admission that the policy that led to her abduction, or the way it was conducted, was a legal, moral or political mistake. Quite the opposite: Of course this individual's fate should matter to all of us, but what ultimately happens to Rümeysa Öztürk is, in a certain sense, beside the point. The point, indeed, has been made: Donald Trump's agents are entirely free to remove people from society on any pretext they like, or none at all. Whether they can do this to U.S. citizens as well as non-citizens remains an unanswered question. No one has made any serious effort to stop them, and they have faced no consequences beyond finger-wagging from judges and lectures from (ahem) the media. To be entirely fair, I don't believe that the range of responses to what is now happening in America has much to do with ideology, in the normal sense. It's more about whether you actually believe in something — and boy, oh boy, has the wheat been separated from the chaff in that respect. It was certainly instructive to encounter David Brooks' call to arms in the same week as another Times contributor, Bret Stephens — a staunch dispenser of anti-woke, pro-Israel right-wing conventional wisdom — described the Trump administration as 'drowning' in policies he called 'reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad.' It was also the week that Bill Kristol, onetime leading 'New Right' intellectual, called for the abolition of ICE. Those three guys are not identical or interchangeable, but they are all non-MAGA or anti-MAGA conservatives who would tell you they believe in 'liberal democracy,' more or less meaning an orderly society based in private property rights and political coalition-building. I might conclude that their views on democracy are somewhere between naive and noxious, but let's give them credit: They have spoken out forcefully against a regime that imperils what they cherish, including the so-called principles of conservatism. When we see Democrats like Newsom and Whitmer — and Amy Klobuchar and John Fetterman and Chuck Schumer, the list goes on — triangulating themselves into oblivion and semi-genuflecting before the Trump throne at exactly the moment when the fascist regime has made its intentions clear and the American people and the world are beginning to push back, we see people who have sucked on the crack-pipe of realpolitik for so long that, like all addicts, they have lost touch with everyday morality. They believe in nothing except political survival, and that, they believe, depends on the discount-store, focus-group version of voter psychology sold to them by expensive consultants. Any principles beyond those have atrophied into and Whitmer both hope to become president in 2029, and have placed their bets on a particular understanding of reality, beginning with the premise that there is no fascist moment. The second Trump presidency, in this view, will be an especially ugly form of normal politics, and then the pendulum will swing back in customary fashion. To win the next election, they need to define a 'moderate' space halfway between MAGA-world and the progressive wokeness they believe destroyed the Democrats last year. In similar fashion, Democratic pollster Natalie Jackson protested that Abrego Garcia made a 'bad poster child' for the anti-Trump cause because Republicans had dug up some fragmentary and unconvincing dirt on him, and journalist Matt Yglesias responded that 'clinging to the due process rights of people making asylum claims' had become a political problem. Again, no discernible principles are at work, only mock-jesuitical debates about what they think the collective mind of the public will think, based on last week's poll numbers. Jackson eventually deleted her X post about Abrego Garcia, partway through Sen. Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador to visit him. The lesson here is not complicated: Van Hollen is about as much of a normie liberal white-guy Democrat as anyone could possibly be. But he believes in something — in mildly cringe ideas about democracy, no doubt — and he understands what time it is.
