Latest news with #Jews
Perth Now
an hour ago
- Politics
- Perth Now
Second ultra-Orthodox party quits Israeli cabinet
An ultra-Orthodox party has quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet following a similar move earlier this week but left the door open to return if a dispute over military conscription is resolved. The Shas party said it was abandoning the cabinet to protest against MPs' failure to guarantee future exemption from military service for religious students. "Shas representatives ... find with a heavy heart that they cannot stay in the government and be a part of it," the group said in a statement, a day after the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) party also announced its walkout. However, unlike the UTJ, a Shas spokesman said the party was not leaving the parliamentary coalition, leaving Netanyahu with a razor-thin majority. The move means Netanyahu does not face early elections, nor does it undermine his efforts to secure a possible Gaza Strip ceasefire. Israel's parliament starts a three-month summer recess on July 27, giving Netanyahu time to try to resolve the long-standing problem over whether ultra-Orthodox students should continue to be exempt from military service. UTJ has seven seats in the Knesset, the 120-seat Israeli parliament, while Shas holds 11. The issue of conscripting highly religious Israeli men into the military has been a long-standing point of tension for Netanyahu's nationalist religious coalition. It has returned to the agenda due to the war in the Gaza Strip, with commanders warning of an urgent shortage of combat-ready soldiers. While members of ultra-Orthodox communities have been exempt from compulsory military service for decades, the exemption expired last year, and the government did not pass a new law to cement the special status. The Supreme Court issued a judgement last year that ultra-Orthodox Jewish men must be conscripted into military service. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews see military service as a threat to their pious lifestyle, partly because women and men serve together. with DPA
Newsweek
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Newsweek
Hamas Is To Blame For the Suffering in Gaza
This week we exceeded 6,600 days of Hamas' rule over the Gaza Strip. Hamas seized control of Gaza on June 14, 2007, after winning the 2006 elections and violently ousting its rivals. In the ensuing 18-plus years, Hamas has entrenched itself as an authoritarian regime in Gaza that many observers label as one of the worst governments ever to rise to power through elections. Gaza's 2 million residents have endured systemic oppression, human rights abuses, economic devastation, and repeated wars as a result of Hamas' "leadership." Hamas has systematically stolen from its people in every possible way, and explicitly makes the deaths of those under its rule a central facet of its military strategy. Hamas has waged a campaign of terror against Israel and Jews worldwide, but it does so by first reigning with terror over the people of Gaza. People are struggling with how to understand what has happened to Palestinians in Gaza. The poverty, violence, death, and hopelessness in Gaza is absolutely horrendous. Someone must be to blame, because there is no reason anyone should have to live in such conditions. But who? Many Westerners, especially young people, have latched onto a flagrantly false accusation: Gaza is in dire straits because Israel is in the process of perpetrating a genocide. Clearly, most who use that term don't know what it means. Some ought to know better: The false and horrific accusation before the highly politicized International Criminal Court is a total sham. When I speak to groups, I'm sometimes asked what I think of Israel's "genocide." I reply by asking them what "genocide" means. Their typical reply to me? A blank look. A squirm. They don't know what it means, or if they do, they don't know how to apply it to Israel's war on Hamas. Why? Because it's a completely false accusation against Israel. Israel is not trying to wipe a people off the Earth, and the evidence for that fact is all around—from Israeli troops' presence on the ground in Gaza (why would that be if they were trying to wipe Palestinians out?), to Israel's conduct in Judea and Samaria (where there is no active war against the Palestinians, much less something more dramatic), to the international freak-out that ensues whenever anyone discusses allowing Palestinians to leave Gaza in the search for better lives, even if only on a temporary basis. The narrative of Israeli genocide is outrageously false. But that doesn't mean there isn't a tragedy in Gaza, that no one is to blame, or that there is no coherent story we can tell about what has befallen innocent Palestinians there. A Palestinian woman mourns over the covered body of a relative, killed in overnight Israeli strikes, during the funeral procession at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on July 15, 2025. A Palestinian woman mourns over the covered body of a relative, killed in overnight Israeli strikes, during the funeral procession at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on July 15, 2025. Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP/Getty Images We should—indeed we must—define the tragedy of what has happened to Palestinians in Gaza. I humbly suggest we use this word: "dehumanicide." As in, Hamas and its terrorist partners in crime, including the Iranian regime, have committed dehumanicide against the Palestinians in Gaza for over 6,600 days and counting. I define "dehumanicide" as when a people's leadership condemns its population to death by treating them not as humans but as props. By camouflaging among civilians—placing weapons, tunnels, and command posts in and under hospitals, schools, mosques, and apartment buildings—Hamas has committed an act of dehumanicide. Hamas transformed civilian lives into strategic assets for international outrage. Hamas instrumentalized Gazans not as people to be protected, but as tools of their horrific, twisted, evil warfare. Hamas accepts these civilian deaths as the "cost of doing business." Indeed, Hamas welcomes the deaths because it knows the world will use them as cudgels against Israel so that Hamas can prolong its long war against the Jewish state. Hamas' crime of dehumanicide against Palestinians in Gaza differs from mere disregard for human life. It is a structural inversion of human value, where vulnerability is weaponized, and death is prized and monetized politically. How does dehumanicide differ from other "cides?" Unlike genocide, which seeks to exterminate a people from without, and unlike suicide, which targets the self, dehumanicide is a vicious betrayal from within—a leadership or organization reducing people it purports to lead to human sacrifices in service of its ideology and propaganda. Hamas and its related groups have committed dehumanicide against Gazans, aided by Islamic Jihad, Houthis, Hezbollah, and other terror groups that are part of this evil axis, along with the Iranian regime and its useful foot soldiers in the West who either sympathize with Hamas, or merely do its bidding because they fail or don't want to recognize this reality. Let's finally speak the truth about what has happened in Gaza. The real tragedy is not an imaginary genocide by Israel, but the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians by their own supposed leaders. May the day soon come when we stop the count of Hamas' rule and begin counting the days of Gaza's freedom from Hamas' oppression. And maybe after that, we can figure out whether there might be a realistic, implementable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what that might look like, so there is no more suffering of Palestinians or Israelis as a result of this seemingly unsolvable conflict. Jason D. Greenblatt was President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy between 2017 and 2019. He is the author of In the Path of Abraham and the founder of Abraham Venture LLC. Follow him on X: @GreenblattJD The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Politico
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Politico
Why I'm Rooting for Harvard, Just This Once
I don't expect my grandkids to attend Harvard University. After all, I didn't get in when I applied a half-century ago. Even though I'm now president of an elite college myself, I've enjoyed making fun of the fancy school in Cambridge whenever possible. 'They think they're so great,' is an attitude I've shared with many Americans whether the 'they' referred to graduates of our nation's oldest university or some other privileged group to which we don't belong. But now, as America's president targets Harvard with relentless vindictiveness, I'm seeing the school in a different light. As the White House insists on loyalty and subservience from all sectors of civil society, I find myself rooting for Harvard — and so should you, even if you share conservative priorities on other matters. When I was growing up, 'Follow the leader' was just a children's game in which players would mimic whoever was in charge no matter what silliness they indulged in. When I was a little older, I remember watching old newsreels of German and Italian adults in the 1930s and 40s marching in step, but my parents assured me that that would never happen here. As an American, they told me, I would never have to follow the leader. I could love my country without being subservient to those in power. And that's what I want for my grandchildren: to thrive in America without having to express loyalty to oligarchs and government officials. The logic of the current administration is that since many schools receive federal funding, they too are now expected to march in step. But countless groups receive financial support from Washington — from soybean farmers to computer chip manufacturers, from rural hospital workers to coal miners — and that funding has not, until now, depended on conformity with the ideology of those in power. So why would the Trump administration now demand exactly that from universities like Harvard? The answer is that the federal government's current assault on higher education is meant to erode the independence of colleges and universities, even though the excellence of this sector depends on that very independence. Although the president claims he is attacking 'woke,' liberal values, he and his administration are attacking core conservative values as well. The government's specific accusations are absurd on their face. Jim Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia, led a school where the fastest growing subjects were Computer Science and Data science, but he was targeted for leading an institution that was dominated, according to the government, by a bunch of leftist lunatics. Northwestern University and Cornell University have had grants suspended mostly from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Health and Human Services totaling more than $1.5 billion because of suspected civil rights violations. At Harvard, where the university president and several leading deans identify as Jews, the school is accused by the White House of deliberate indifference to victims of antisemitism. The funding threats to scientific research, especially in medicine, are astronomical. As an American Jew, I know that antisemitism is real, of course, and it has gotten worse in this country. But the administration's anti-antisemitism is a sham. The president and his minions have a long history of tolerating the most vile Jew hatred, whether being mealy mouthed about the extremists marching in Charlottesville or Nick Fuentes dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Elon Musk's Grok AI may have been praising Nazis last week, but this week the Department of Defense announced it was one of its bot-bros for government work. The truth is that the Trump administration's anti-antisemitism is a flimsy cover for their insistence on ideological conformity, particularly from institutions whose legitimacy has never depended in the past on expressions of loyalty to the leader. Another pretense Trump administration officials have used is enforcing the Supreme Court's decision last year to end race-conscious admissions. The White House does indeed have the authority to move away from programs that resemble affirmative action. Rejecting 'reverse discrimination,' the government can forbid attempts to deal with historical patterns of discrimination through preferences meant to counteract those patterns. Elections have consequences, and the new civil rights regime understands discrimination through a lens of individual fairness outside of a historical or social context. I don't agree with this approach, but I obey it as the current law of the land. The federal government also has the authority to insist that no one is discriminated against because of their political beliefs or protected speech. The political biases in some departments at some universities are real, and leaders of colleges and universities should be encouraged to do more to ensure that conservatives, for example, are not discriminated against in admissions or hiring decisions. But the recent moves against universities go far beyond reinterpretations of civil rights statutes. This White House wants to ensure that universities, like big law firms, media outlets and foundations, show their allegiance to those currently in charge. The mere independence of these organizations is seen as a threat to the concentration of power in the hands of the president. You don't have to be a progressive to worry about this assault on some of these key institutions of civil society. The president's supporters themselves rail against entrenched elites and a deep state that lords it over ordinary citizens. Indeed, at the core of modern conservative thought is the notion that a country needs 'countervailing forces' that push back against the centralization of state power. This was fundamental to Baron de Montesquieu writing about law in the first half of the 18th century, as it was for Edmund Burke writing about political culture in its second half. For the French philosopher, a healthy society depended on the freedoms that are preserved in local and regional traditions. Burke argued that we learned about freedom from what he called the 'little platoons' in our communities — those local associations that nurtured us without the intrusion of a central government. We learn about belonging as we develop allegiances to family, work associations, religious congregations. Schools are such associations, groups that come together for the purposes of learning and inquiry, communities that foster practices of freedom without being directed by a central power. Alexis de Tocqueville, another thinker beloved by many conservatives, underscored this dimension of American democracy when he wrote in the mid 1800s that 'without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty.' The spirit of freedom is built on the associations that develop without dictates from central government, and it guides educational institutions. 'The art of associating together must ... be learned,' Tocqueville wrote. 'In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made.' Colleges and universities in this country have long cultivated this subtle 'science of association,' and that's why it is so vital for all Americans to resist the current administration's efforts to force public and private schools to conform to the president's ideological preferences. It's not that the ecosystem of higher education is perfect — I know that firsthand. But neither are other institutions core to our nation's liberty, including churches and synagogues, scout troops and public libraries. Whatever the flaws of universities and other institutions, massive pressure from the executive branch cannot improve this vital part of our economy and culture; it can only impose conformity, something conservatives have long opposed. Nothing good will come from forcing schools as different as Hillsdale and Harvard, the University of Texas and the University of Virginia to conform to the president's image — any president's image — of what higher education should be. Chances are that when my little grandkids are old enough to go to college, if they apply to Harvard, they won't get in. (Even though I can assure you they are absolutely perfect!) That's okay, because if there are still great independent universities to apply to, that will mean that we were successful in fighting back against the tyrannical assault currently underway. It will mean that they can enjoy the freedoms that are my birthright and theirs.
DW
4 hours ago
- Politics
- DW
Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch turns 100 – DW – 07/16/2025
She survived Auschwitz and spent years fighting to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten. But she's now disillusioned: antisemitism is on the rise everywhere. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch has spent an entire century on this earth, and does not fear death. After all, she'd often looked it in the eye when she was deported to Auschwitz simply for being a Jew. It was the largest and most notorious of the Nazi internment system. Here, people were killed on an industrial scale, around 1.1 million of them in total. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch survived because she could play the cello. For decades, she has raised her voice against antisemitism, right-wing extremism and racism as a dedicated witness to history. She has told scores of schoolchildren unsparingly how the Nazis systematically marginalized Jews and ultimately murdered them. She feels it is a duty "that those who survived must serve as voices for the millions who were silenced." That's why she has also taken part in the "Dimensions in Testimony" project, in which interactive holograms enable Holocaust survivors to answer questions even after their deaths. There was a time when Lasker-Wallfisch was optimistic that her commitment was having an impact. "I've spoken with thousands of schoolchildren. If just 10 of them would behave properly, I'd be satisfied," she said. But in the meantime, Anita-Lasker-Wallfisch has become overwhelmed by hopelessness. "She's in despair," her daughter, Maya, told the weekly newspaper . Growing antisemitism, an increasing shift towards the extreme right and the situation in the Middle East all give Maya's mother the impression that all her commitment hasn't amounted to much. Considering the current global situation, her despondency is understandable. It's not only because 12% of Germans aged 18 to 29 have never heard of the Holocaust, according to a recent Jewish Claims Conference survey. It's also because since Israel's military operations in Gaza, antisemitism has been spreading worldwide. "Is it important whether you're Jewish? You're simply a human being," she recently told German daily, . Anita Lasker was born on July 17, 2025 in Breslau — the youngest of three sisters in a middle-class family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a violinist. Her parents valued a good education and music was part of that. The Laskers were not at all religious. "I didn't know I was Jewish until they spat at me and called me a 'dirty Jew'," she said decades later. "We were ordinary, fully assimilated Germans," she added. That was in 1933, the year the Nazis seized power. Her parents had no illusions about what the Nazi regime planned to do with the Jews. At the end of 1939, they brought Anita's eldest sister, Marianne, to safety in England. But they were unable to save themselves. Deported in 1942, Anita never saw her mother or father again. She and her sister, Renate, had to work as forced laborers at a paper factory. She used this opportunity to forge documents for other forced laborers from France, enabling them to return to their homeland. In 1943, when the two sisters tried to flee with forged passports, they were imprisoned. Five months later, they arrived at Auschwitz separately. Because Anita Lasker could play an instrument, she was assigned to the girls' orchestra at Auschwitz. "The cello saved my life," she said later. When the forced laborers left the camp in the morning and returned in the evening, the orchestra played music for them to march to. On Sundays, the girls performed for the SS. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video "Not a single one of us believed we'd make it out of Auschwitz in any other way than up the chimney," were her words. In 1944, when Soviet troops were advancing on Auschwitz, Anita and her sister were moved to the extremely overcrowded concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where people died of hunger, thirst and disease. "Auschwitz was a camp that systematically murdered people," she later wrote in her memoirs, "in Belsen, you just died." British soldiers liberated the camp on April 15, 1945. One day later, the BBC's German-language program broadcast one of the first eyewitness reports of German concentration camps. Anita Lasker came up to the microphone: "The Auschwitz prisoners, the few that remain, all fear the world will not believe what happened there," she said. She then described the horror in detail and added: "Liberation finally came on the 15th. The liberation we'd been hoping for for three years. We still think we're dreaming. We see the English driving through the camp, people who want to do us no harm ... But now we're looking forward. We're full of hope and new courage. We're liberated." In September 1945, she testified against the guards at Bergen-Belsen before a British military court. It would be a long time until Lasker felt able once again to speak of her experience. She emigrated to Britain in 1946. In London, she became a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra and played in this ensemble until the turn of the century. Lasker married pianist Peter Wallfisch, who, like her, was from Breslau. He had emigrated to Palestine as part of he Kindertransport (German for "children's transport") — an organized rescue effort of mainly Jewish children from Nazi-controlled territory. The couple did not speak to their children about the past. When her daughter, Maya, asked her mother why she had a phone number tattooed on her arm, she responded: "I'll tell you when you're older." After many decades, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was ready to tell her story. Her book "Inherit the Truth 1939-1945: The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen" was published in 1996. It made her internationally known as a witness to history. In 2018, on the German Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch gave a fiery speech in the country's parliament, the Bundestag, admonishing people not to forget. She said she perceived an increasing societal sentiment to leave such things in the past. Lasker-Wallfisch continued, "What are we meant to draw the line under? What happened, happened, and it cannot be expunged by drawing a line." To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Now Lasker-Wallfisch is turning 100. A concert is being held in her honor in London. Dignitaries from all over the world are coming to congratulate one of the last living witnesses of the Holocaust. Her daughter Maya, son Raphael as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren will also toast her. But what's important to the centenarian isn't the extravagant celebration. What Anita Lasker-Wallfisch likely desires above all is that the poison of hate and antisemitism be eradicated once and for all. A wish that is, unfortunately, not so easy to fulfill.
New Statesman
4 hours ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Far-right memes are poisoning British politics
Illustration by Sergio Ingravalle / Ikon Images A black man harasses a white woman in a railway carriage, then a white man comes up and punches him. Christians passing through Jerusalem are spat on by Jews, who then boast of killing Jesus. A softly spoken British imam explains that Muslims must take over the West completely, or describes the proper way to stone a woman to death. Reset. Repeat. Westminster has one kind of political conversation. It's to do with economics, the role of the state, legislation. Elsewhere a very different kind of talk is happening, the viral spread of well-produced vertical videos and mobile graphics designed to make people furious, destroy trust and ultimately upend liberal democracy. Almost always, conventional politics looks the other way. It must not. These demonisation machines come from both the left and right – but mostly from the right – fashioned and circulated by hundreds of usually anonymous accounts with names like The West Rises, Radio Genoa, and Truth Will Prevail. It's part of the same 'conversation' that asserts a senior British politician is being pursued by rent boys he failed to pay off. It also allows for filming asylum hotels across Britain, a practice the police refer to as 'video auditing'. This has been going on for years. But most people interested in conventional politics are resting happily in a fools' paradise. We comfort ourselves with the spaces in which well-informed adults debate moral and economic dilemmas. I think of it as the political imagination of James Stewart. This is being blown apart by online hate and conspiracy. A new survey by the think tank British Future says the UK is a 'powder keg' of social tension with polarised communities, leaving us 'more fragmented, fragile and less resilient to internal and external threats… The very basis of our democracy is at risk.' James Ball, author of The Other Pandemic, a book on the rise of web-fuelled conspiracies, argues that to ask Louise Casey to do a national study on grooming gangs was a memorable puncturing of conventional politics. For that moment, you could give the credit to Elon Musk after his denunciations of Keir Starmer and the British state for hiding and protecting paedophiles. Musk has just lost his CEO at X, Linda Yaccarino, which may or may not be related to his chatbot, the horribly named Grok, which repeatedly referenced white genocide in South Africa, praised Adolf Hitler, and referred to itself as MechaHitler. As the Times reported, the senior tech people around Musk describe the fight for online political direction as 'the memetic battlefield'. Buy Twitter and turn it into X. Soon enough, you have changed the layout of that battlefield. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But it is a battlefield where conventional politics doesn't turn up. Downing Street and Tory high command remains obsessed by feeding Westminster journalists and trying to 'get' front page stories in newspapers. They're fighting drone swarms with muskets. Meanwhile, on immigration, crime and identity, the country is being driven hard towards the right. I have written here recently about the likelihood of a Reform government coming next. Whether that happens or not, there are much more extreme possibilities ahead, including some kind of communal or race war. On bad days, it feels as if we may be living through the end times for civil democracy. But at this point, I should ask: is the above overwrought? After all, we have had big changes in communication in the past and they have often spooked society. And most of the population is probably dodging the racist harangues, the fist-fights and the invitations to hate Jews or Muslims. They may be with the cat-and-cucumber videos, the line dancing and conspiracy theories about ancient civilisations, not to mention the soft porn. Perhaps we are mature enough to screen out the bad stuff. Even if I'm poisoned by some online hatred, a short amble through the streets of the real world, surrounded by smiles and help, is often an effective remedy. But then there is the 'stuff itself'. Yes, it's crafted to make us angry, but we'd be foolish to blame 'algorithms' for material which interacts with our fellow citizens' genuine fears for the future. If there wasn't a grain of anxiety already, these videos would slide across our imaginations leaving no trace. We have been experiencing unprecedented levels of non-Christian migration and fertility decline across the West, at a time when many traditional communities are beaten-down and despairing. It would be surprising if there wasn't some kind of reaction, and, indeed, if 'invasion' videos shot in Leicester, Barcelona and East Germany did not essentially share the same narratives. We should not be calm about this memetic war zone. The material I am talking about is, over time, highly effective. It's rhetorical heroin heading straight for the amygdala. You may think you are a rational liberal but, I promise you, after an hour or so of exposure to 'hate the African, hate the Jew, hate the lawyer, hate the Muslim' propaganda, you will be subtly different. After a while, you need an awful lot of time in the neighbourhood to walk it off. Although we have lived through media revolutions before, their effects have often been dramatic. When Johannes Gutenberg brought to Europe the movable-type printing press, he also brought Luther's 95 Theses – eventually the catastrophic Thirty Years' War followed, killing an estimated eight million people. Nearer home, I cannot believe the violence and mutual hatreds of the so-called English Civil War would have been anything like as extreme without those early newspapers and broadsheets spreading fake news of atrocities – the reports of slaughters by Irish Catholics, for instance, helping provoke Cromwell's response. Early-20th century fascism, too, was made possible by the radio. This is bigger. And it is only just beginning. Many of the early attention-hogging online memes were made, Ball reminded me, in the real world with technological wizardry, actors paid to play their part for confrontations in the park, and even aircraft interiors hired to make viral images of fighting passengers. But AI allows amateurs to craft realistic narratives almost from scratch. As the software evolves and becomes more user-friendly, anyone will be able to take their paranoid fantasy and rub it into everyone else's brainpan. We know that the younger you are, the more online you are, and that our form of capitalism has robbed younger people of the chance to own property, and is increasingly robbing them of decent careers. They are being disinherited. Brace for their reaction. And again, it is soft to blame evil outsiders. Just as the Remainer left tried to blame Brexit on Cambridge Analytica, the belief that today's corrupted conversation is largely the fault of Russian agents is too easy. The West's enemies are working with what the West gives them. For the most malign actors, we go to the obvious culprits: the tech bros trying to reshape our politics. The influences on Musk and Peter Thiel are not St Petersburg trolls. They are men like Curtis Yarvin, a blogger turned premier public intellectual of the Trump age, who argues that democracy has failed and must be replaced by a semi-monarchy, and who once dabbled in ugly race science. His thought has been labelled the 'dark enlightenment'. In Silicon Valley's hands these ideas have accelerated fear and race-hatred across the West. This is a complex picture with a tangle of different views. Screenwriter Jesse Armstrong threw himself into the writings and interviews of key figures, including Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Bankman-Fried for his satirical film Mountainhead. As some fictional titans are relaxing and joshing with one another in a mountaintop winter sports retreat, watching the world burn below them under the influence of extremist memes, they have the 'are we the evil ones?' conversation. One says that the answer wasn't to stop making movies: 'We are gonna show users as much shit as possible till they realise: nothing is that fucking serious. Everything is cool. Have your say, scream your worst, but fucking chill. Nothing means anything and everything is funny and cool.' Armstrong tells me he was mimicking the affectation of nihilism that began in the chaotic, conspiratorial websites 4Chan and 8Chan, which developed the signature 'hey guys, it's all a provocation' trickster tone. But under the affectation of nihilism, Armstrong argues there is a strong ideology. And here comes the lesson. Relative economic decline and mass migration do cause social tensions, and there are difficult discussions to be had about how we handle them. It is neither conspiratorial nor paranoid to say that the state has failed to control migration or to keep the streets properly safe. But we should be in no doubt that we are under a sustained, intentional attack on liberal democracy which has already won victories while those allegedly in charge weren't looking. The battlefields are on the newsfeeds of voters' phones where conventional politics rarely even turns up. This is because of institutional paralysis. No one in the British state dares to take on Trump and the tech provocateurs he protects. Further, as was confirmed by the recent 'reset' summit at Chequers, this government sees AI as the prime solution to most of its problems. It has gone full Tony Blair Institute: this new media revolution is unique in that the same technology disrupting the state is also the tech being embraced by the state as its saviour. We have some useful (if outdated) regulation to protect children. But the chances of an effective British onslaught against misinformation and online hate are nudging zero. There are lesser responses, however. We could rip up the contempt of court rules, injecting a dose of free speech as in countries with a civil law tradition. If jurors are thought capable of sending someone to prison for life, surely they should be believed capable of ignoring online voices? That would squash the idea of there being secret truths 'they' don't want you to know about. Beyond that, the political class has to spend more time engaging on Instagram, TikTok and X, learning how to create memes, and never letting lies go unanswered. We need a frank, non-hysterical attitude to migration, community tensions and race in which the political class engages in a two-way conversation. And the best answer of all: we break our gormless couch-potato addiction to the phones. Easier said, I find, than done. [See also: Donald Trump can't escape Jeffrey Epstein] Related
