I respect Helen's opinions but fail to see what Graham Linehan has got wrong. I think it is tremendously disappointing that someone like Jon Ronson, fearless truth teller (self styled) of unusual and interesting stories, has preferred to stand on the sidelines while the trans activist craze has taken off and point fingers at someone like Linehan.
Jon Ronson also withdrew his blurb from Andrew Gold's book because Gold had interviewed Posie Parker on his podcast. Ronson is clearly not brave enough to be even tangentially associated with a man who interviewed, ironically, a "difficult woman".
I agree that the clip posted is frustrating, and Ronson has lost a lot of credibility with me over his cowardice and unwillingness to adequately investigate the neoreligious, cult-like elements of modern gender ideology. However, I will say that as correct as Linehan has proved to be on many elements of youth gender medicine policy, he has absolutely gone off the deep end at this point. He's hyperfocused on one issue in a way that simply has not been good for his brain - you can contrast him with Helen Joyce, Janice Turner, Victoria Smith, Hannah Barnes et al to see that it is possible to be fiercely engaged with this very important topic without entering the realm of using 'NPC' unironically.
I think Linehan has been so thoroughly monstered by the whole thing, plus abandoned by erstwhile friends and colleagues (like Jonson), there's not other way for him to be. I respect him for speaking out early on, I think people are put off by how strident he is and I get that.
Again as much as I respect Helen and enjoy her work, I think she's missing the point that media people like Ronson and Buxton would also cut her loose without hesitation if she ever expressed anything beyond her very mild views on gender ideology. The pandemic excuse is a bit of a convenient fig leaf I think, some people really are just cowards!
I listened to Glinner's autobiography and felt a great sympathy and respect for him. He's humble and insightful about his work - and it's great work. But there seems also an attitude of "I'm going to save these women whether they want it or not" I think he might have helped his cause better if he had not insisted on being at its forefront, and supported women from the wings.
Honestly, I don’t see where Glinner has ‘insisted’ on being at the forefront. Where? He hosts an irregular podcast, where plenty of women speak. He’s occasionally on other podcasts and was once on an infamous Newsnight episode where Sarah Smith interviewed him with barely disguised disdain. He gets attention because he’s well-known, and because he is (sometimes unwisely) unfiltered. Nothing ‘insistent’ or ‘forefront’ about any of that, and he *is* supporting from the wings, I assure you! There are many organised groups of women campaigning & speaking on this issue, often at great cost to their personal & professional lives. I’m in touch with/belong to many of them & I’ve never been aware of Glinner muscling in at all….male allies are welcome & there are a number. The men who don’t speak up even though they can see the harm & the stupidity of this pernicious ideology are selfish & cowardly. The attitude of ‘poor old [former friend & colleague ..G’s not the only one] ….he’s totally lost it, poor sod’ while remaining silent on the issue, just stinks.
You summed up what I was trying to say with the fig leaf comment very well. Agree completely, the "he's lost it/he'shad a bad pandemic" rhetoric while smugly staying silent and avoiding even the possibility of angering some of the most vocal activists is pathetic. I suppose Buxton, Ronson et al want to maintain their media favourite status.
Very disappointed by Helen Lewis including Glinner in her list of covid conspiracists. He was speaking up about gender rubbish before covid. I’d like to see Helen do a list of men with public personas that have avoided speaking about the attacks on women’s rights. Oh, of course, they’re men so they don’t see these attacks. Does Helen?
Some people are passionate about specific issues, I am one. The fact that we are curtailing the lives of children, many who are autistic and many who are gay with unproven medical treatments is an absolute scandal. No, what is weird is why so many ignore it and by their complicity enable the social contagion.
Re Helen's thoughtful piece on our Covid isolation and what it did to some people, I agree with most of it, apart from her mild criticism that we (that is the authorities) maybe were too dogmatic in their statements about science behind the lockdown /masking, when some of the science wasn't as clear as all that, at the time . Are you kidding me? We needed that constant messaging, based on the very worst case scenario, because too many people were apparently not going to do the right thing otherwise. They would weasel a way to avoid rules they didn't fancy obeying. They were like small children trying to find a way round a parental "No".
I met people during lockdown telling me Covid was a hoax and nobody was dying of the virus, the coverage from hospitals was all actors. We even had morons trying to take very sick relatives out of hospital. We had smirking men unmasked in shops full of the elderly, claiming to have asthma. I saw no reason why we should debate the rules with these delusional/selfish gits when we had nurses and bus drivers dying of Covid because we asked them to put themselves at risk, and they did. Often the very same people who were desperate for the Government to lift lockdown then moved straight away to rejecting the vaccine "for reasons". That was just here in the UK.
I have a brain, I knew then the authorities were just trying to work out which way to jump sometimes, on incomplete information, but I totally approved of not giving that section of our society who are anti-social idiots the excuses they wanted to ignore any rules that they didn't like.
It was all much more authoritarian than it needed to be. They should have done some science instead of propagandizing against people who had doubts about a new RNA therapy. They turned friends and family against each other, and it went far enough that it seemed to a lot of people that obedience was a bigger factor than public health.
And now that everyone (like me) who got the vaccine and all the boosters and STILL caught it multiple times, despite early assurances that it would absolutely prevent disease and grant herd immunity, wonder what that stuff actually did to or for us. There was almost certainly older people who died from Covid because people who visited them thought they were immune.
We REALLY need a truth and reconciliation on Covid and the vaccines.
There was never a promise that the vaccines that were actually rolled out would prevent all disease and grant herd immunity.
Everyone hoped for that, and maybe eventually a vaccine will be produced that will do that, but what we actually got was ‘good enough’ vaccines that is brilliant at preventing severe disease and death, and medium-good at preventing the spread of disease. That was enough to rely on at the population level for the lifting of other restrictions and getting back to a version of ‘normal’.
In fact the whole basis of demonizing antivaxxers was over the idea of herd immunity.
You all are conveniently rewriting history. I know for a fact that if I was told that this wasn’t really a vaccine, it was non-sterilizing and does not prevent disease or passing on the disease, that all the herd immunity stuff was bunk, I WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN IT, and therefore would not have had the adverse reaction that put me in a wheelchair that I can’t even sue them about.
FFS, the mortality rate for Covid was only .28%. We almost certainly did more harm than good.
Jesus, I just read your link and it’s Fauci saying he was doing his best to nudge vaccination levels higher because they don’t actually know and can’t promise what level of vaccination will produce herd immunity. It could be as high as 90% - in which case many countries never achieved it.
Which is entirely consistent with what I said - it was never *promised*. It’s a novel virus and new vaccinations mixing with the unpredictable behaviour of the general public. Of course everyone expressed their hopes and gave their best estimates, no-one could know for sure.
It's worth reading Scott Alexander's review of the science behind masking, posted the day the UK went into lockdown: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ tl;dr the "science" at the time was *so bad*, we were basically flying blind. Also worth noting that the CDC's anti-mask recommendation dated from at least 2009, so the theory that it was a Noble Lie to protect supplies can't be true.
You have got me thinking about this, the pandemic was so awful. If we are to do better in future, we need to conduct ourselves more like a fatal aircrash investigation, where it's not about blame but about being very sure what caused the crash, so as to prevent another like it.
I really like Scott. But my experience of reading most "dissents" from how the US federal authorities chose to handle the pandemic is they are focused on pinning "blame" on people. As nobody wants to be witchhunted, you aren't getting anywhere with truly understanding what went on. People can't look back and agree (or disagree) that they sometimes might have made the wrong call, and then consider how to make that call in future, when cynical politicians will leap on any retrospection and demand the poor guys be punished for some unknown "crime". I wouldn't cooperate with any such "enquiry".
Plus, I really didn't care at the time to debate where the virus came from, once it was already out of China. And I still don't care that for pragmatic reasons of reducing international tensions, and getting China to cooperate a little with info - in a crisis where China was reacting predictably to being shamed - officials deflected us from the lab leak theory to natural causes. The whole origin issue was a distraction, then, from fighting the war with the enemy, the virus. Now is the time to hold China's feet to the fire over biosecurity, so it doesn't happen again. So I don't feel a bit betrayed by the "lies" of the establishment, over the origin. Wartime is wartime. That's one where I would say "grow up" to people who think it's a "gotcha".
There's an ideological issue in American discourse on the pandemic that might as well be from Mars for most Europeans, which is the libertarian "I'll take my chances" response to a public health emergency. Not to dismiss that American view, but it's unique to you
Our default position is community first. I was in Venice during the pandemic when lockdown had been lifted, but before the vaccine, and I still got told off for taking off my mask on the outside deck on the river bus. Was it justified by science? Probably no. Did it hurt me to comply and so reassure the elderly woman who was scared? Also, no. We just didn't do the partisan politics about infection prevention, or the vaccine - that was all-American.
Our pandemic preparedness here in the UK was awful, and that's where I think we should all focus for the future.
> But my experience of reading most "dissents" from how the US federal authorities chose to handle the pandemic is they are focused on pinning "blame" on people.
Absolutely, and I think that's why that piece is so valuable - it represents a doctor who was not part of the public health establishment trying to make sense of things *at the beginning of the pandemic*, when it was published.
> And I still don't care that for pragmatic reasons... officials deflected us from the lab leak theory to natural causes.
Was that the reason? I thought it was because they (in particular Peter Daszak, a co-author of the Lancet letter) were personally involved in either the research at WIV or in funding it. I'm now much more inclined to believe that Covid had natural origins than I used to be, but I'm still outraged that they tried to cover up the mere possibility of a lab leak.
> Not to dismiss that American view, but it's unique to you
I'm not American! I'm a Brit living in Scotland, and my username is Czech :-)
> Was it justified by science? Probably no.
I actually think this was a big part of the problem - because the rules (at least here in the UK) were so arbitrary, and constantly changing, and clearly not backed up by science (they were still emphasising handwashing and surface cleaning for *months* after it was clear that Covid was predominantly airborne) everyone decided to follow their own subset of rules that they thought made sense.
Sorry, I did indeed realise you were a Brit! I don't know how that "you" crept in. You make a good point about the arbitrary nature of the rules, or at least their apparent arbitrary nature as things evolved. I'm sure we all developed our own local version of "the rules". But I am proud of the way we all pulled together on the key stuff, most of the time.
I don't think the scientists that had experimental research running in Wuhan were ashamed of it before the leak, so I don't agree that they would have been motivated to pretend a leak that they didn't cause, didn't happen, to cover up the fact of their research. Obviously they would be very embarrassed, but that's not career-ending in the West - in contrast to the expectations of the Chinese scientists.
I remember reading in the Times at the very start, some of the theories about why the Chinese had kept quiet about the spread of infection and left the borders open until Covid was everywhere. The political journalist argued that the Chinese Government could not tolerate any foreign suggestion of Chinese incompetence in letting the virus loose, so the WHO, knowing full well that the leak was a possibility, was dancing around, going along with the live market explanation, and trying to let the Chinese save enough face to let us have access to relevant information.
My anecdote - I was in Penang for the 2020 Chinese New Year. I thought it was charming that so many mainland Chinese had flown in to be with relatives in Malaysia for the holiday. By the time I flew out of Singapore a week later, airport staff were masked and the military were using temperature guns on people on arrival and departure.........
Re the arbitrariness and the persistence in the advice: I can at least partly agree with you, but...
I think it's important to crisply distinguish between 'the science', 'science-informed public health interventions', and 'sociology- or behaviour-based public health interventions'.
With The Science (a phrase which made me cringe every time I heard it), the goal is to reach consensus, however long it takes. With public health questions, it's generally a case of having to make a decision _now_ – literally today or this week – with big downsides both ways, and all you can hope for is rational use of whatever evidence is available. It's predictable that The Science will not give a clear direction to this decision.
While it might have become evident (it appears; I'm not competent to have an independent opinion) that there's little virological effect of masks, it might still be deemed worth sticking with that as the advice, on the grounds that (I speculate) if people are wearing or talking about masks then they are constantly subconsciously being reminded 'pandemic... be careful... contamination!' which might, as a point of psychology, prompt useful population-wide behaviours. Yes, we can complain this is a rather paternalistic approach, but what else do you do, if you're trying to promote behaviours that will only work if almost everyone falls in line?
That behavioural or social aspect is also why I can see it making sense to be coy about the precise reasons for particular advice, and to stick with advice longer than seems biologically necessary. Actual scientists are comfortable changing their minds several times a day, but the reporting of those is often 'scientists can't make up their minds!' or 'is red wine good for us again, then?', which promptly leads to 'scientists don't know everything' (trivially true), and thence to 'so just ignore The Science'.
That is, it might be that the communications, and the behaviours they were intended to encourage, are actually a more important think to talk about, and criticise in retrospect, than the biology or the epidemiology.
The worry was that Covid is related to MERS and SARS, and could have had a much higher death rate, so early caution was warranted. However, it clearly became a battlefield in the US political battle between parties, and quickly turned into a litmus test. We Americans recognize that this usually equals hiding serious bullshit.
The whole pandemic should have been as transparent as possible and failures should have been owned. The next time, nobody here is trusting the government.
And in the other extreme there were people absolutely panicking that it was armegeddon - those people needed the reassurance that the authorities had measures in place to keep things under control and that it was all going to be ok.
It doesn’t take many people in a panic to spark a wave of consequences - think about how a bank run happens - so appearing calm and in control amidst the uncertainty was also important.
They caused that panic with their coverage! This virus was horribly mishandled by both parties. The response was a cotillion for US/European elite authoritarianism, and to this day, people who desperately want to be owned by their betters won’t stop to look back at what actually happened, they just keep spitting propaganda from 2021 and assuming any disagreement can only be caused by poor moral character.
I think this article is unfair on Glinner. His career was demolished because his cowardly friends stayed silent while he spoke up against the very real threats to women’s safety. We know now who will say anything - ANYTHING - to fit in.
I think you’re peering through the wrong end of the telescope Helen - lockdown led to the mushrooming of “trans”, which is what led Graham Linehan to stake it all on trying to make people understand what’s happening. Most people - including Ronson & Buxton - either didn’t want to see, or actively supported it.
I read Linehan's Substack for a while, as I am gender-critical myself, but was alienated by his mocking, polemical tone, especially his deployment of 'groomer' stereotypes, all of which reminded me uncomfortably of anti-gay polemic from the 80s. I noted too his endorsement on X of the socially-conservative anti-abortion party Aontú at the general election in Ireland last year.
I've heard Linehan speak very movingly about he and his wife campaigning for abortion in Ireland, after his wife needed an abortion due to a fetal abnormality. Similarly he's very vocally supportive of gays and particularly lesbians. I suppose people will read what they want into his social media but I don't get any of those anti-abortion/anti-gay vibes from him in the slightest.
It’s a long time ago, but I remember Linehan in the audience giving someone at a Google Big Tent who was on stage from, I think, the Daily Mail a real pasting over the way tabloids would print near-pornographic pictures of starlets the moment they turned 16. His point being that this was encouraging lechery verging on paedophilia. He has always been someone who gets deeply into a cause. Perhaps if what he’s fighting against doesn’t give way easily enough he gets more extreme. Recently it has started tipping over into more extreme political views; maybe this is the inexorable outcome of continued frustration.
His views on women’s rights are not extreme, and until recently were repeated by many politically leftwing men. I didn’t realise how flimsy the latter’s commitment to women’s equality, safety, and dignity was: how quickly and easily they would drop them if the winds changed.
To clarify, by “extreme” I meant the form of his reaction, not necessarily his position. Calling people NPCs, as Helen points out, is hardly a position that will win over doubters.
He also devotes space to reposting photos of extremely unattractive, non-passing transwomen, a number of whom appear to be mentally unbalanced. Some people might say, well, those transwomen chose to put those pictures online, on dating sites and trans forums and other social media, so what culpability does Linehan have? None, I suppose, if you think it’s okay to lift images out of their context in order to encourage mockery of troubled, only partially functional individuals. I don’t see how doing this sort of thing constitutes a defense of women’s rights to single-sex spaces, to fair competition in sport, and so on — in fact, he discredits the argument for fairness by displaying so much animus, and more than a few feminists and LGBs consider him a liability more than an asset.
He shares those pictures because according to the ideology, those people you call transwomen who are "troubled" are men we are supposed to accept uncritically as women, and thus allow them access to single sex spaces etc. No matter how "unattractive or non passing" (your words), or indeed "mentally unbalanced" they are. You can't see how that poses serious risk to women and girls? How does that "discredit the argument for fairness"?
If you think this tactic is acceptable, nothing I can say is going to persuade you otherwise. My point, really, is that it’s no mystery why so many people want to keep him at arm’s length: he comes across as a bully, and it’s very distasteful.
You've not said anything to try and persuade me! You've not addressed the central question I asked about the risk to women and girls. You might not like his tactics but he's very effective, and many women and "LGBs" as you call us, are happy to have him speaking up.
I think putting Graham Linehan in this list is grossly unfair. If middle of the road liberals could risk some of their status to stand up stronger for reality then people like Graham Linehan, JK Rowling, Genevieve Gluck wouldn't be so isolated. The question is why aren't more people standing up?
Totes agree. Glinner has been treated appallingly by the gender loons, which is bad enough, but then, while under siege, found his “friends” stabbing him in the back while wearing masks of smug righteousness. Buxton is famously a shallow twat, but Ronson is deeply disappointing. This combined with him removing his blurb from Andrew Gold’s book paints a picture of a weak moral coward.
Even Glinner’s inclusion by Ms Lewis in this piece is unfair; he’s still being dismissed as somehow outrageous or beyond the pale. He’s gone mad!!! It’s a strange kind of shoot-the-messenger instinct: he spoke the truth, he gets cancelled by the luvvies, he can’t work, and somehow it’s his own fault? Like those people who were thrown into asylums by the soviets: “yes the system is insane but by mentioning it publicly you must be insane too so in you go, Vlad. By the way your family are gone because we’ve exerted so much pressure on them and made it so dangerous to seem loyal to you they’ve changed their names and moved away. But remember, YOU’RE the crazy one, Vlad! Not us!!!! Hahahahaha!!!!!”
Hopefully Glinner’s new venture will be a success, and he can get back to being a writer.
Yes that's it exactly. I can understand not necessarily wanting to take a public stand because of fears about livelihood but to throw someone under the bus who does stand up, that's some psychological scapegoating thing at work. Post-Cass review it would be easy to be mildly supportive for many and actually turn the tide but it seems that the media classes have become captured in a device of their own making. Ronson agreed is the most insufferable hypocrite - I can't imagine the cognitive dissonance on being a self-professed expert on moral panics but refusing to look at the social contagion happening under his nose. The condescension and toady manner of his dialogue at the end of S2 Things Fell Apart where he condemns Linehan ‘going extreme’, similar to the condemnation of this piece, made me lose all respect for him, despite his talent.
Yes! I discovered this about Oliver as I was reading his book ‘wisdom of the ancients’ (written pre-Covid). The man was a wonderful writer and the book was lovely. I couldn’t fathom how the two seemingly opposite men could be the same person… and I said to my husband ‘he obviously had a bad pandemic’. It’s become code in our house for just what you describe here. Spot on.
I was recently blocked by Huey Green (former Fun Luvin Criminal now BBC6 DJ) for critiquing his batshit IG posts and imploring him not to be Neil Oliver.
Watching public figures lose their reason has morbidly fascinating.
So glad you mentioned Matt Goodwin. Recently came across him on X and could hardly believe it was the same writer.. although Carole Cadwallader had her suspicions a few years back.
I think some of this movement towards conspiracy theory is based around sudden institutional embrace of extreme counterfactuals. Being told you have to accept three impossible things before breakfast breaks brains. I know I’m barely holding in there.
I wonder, Helen, where you think (*if* you think) people like JK Rwlng or Ed Yong fit into this typology - some kind of radicalisation seems to have happened, thanks to some interaction of isolation, self-selection etc (I'm totally open to being wrong on the premise; after all, *I'm* looking at *them* through my tiny window of social media)
You can’t really compare JK Rowling, whose views are completely mainstream, scientifically accurate and until 5 minutes ago were questioned by nobody, to Ed Yong. She has not been “radicalised” in the slightest, she is doing what she has always done which is to help and protect the vulnerable. JK Rowling has made the world a better place: through just three organisations she either founded and/or funds, she’s helped countless orphans, single mothers and female victims of abuse; she has got a whole generation reading, her work has given employment to thousands of people and is worth billions to UK economy, not to mention has given joy and pleasure to millions. She funds research into MS because unlike other billionaires, she would rather do that and pay all her tax, than spend $600 million on her wedding. Her advocacy for women, who unlike her aren’t financially secure, has drawn ire from some of the worst people on the internet - or have you missed thousands of death and rape threats she’s received? There is no “both sides” here - only one side is wrong. She will be remembered with great affection and her books will still be read long after we are all gone.
Wait, what's happened to Ed Yong? I haven't read his stuff for a while, but I remember him being *great* for the first year or so of the pandemic - one of the science writers I trusted most.
I think it is also probable that famous people just get more (a LOT more) trolls trying to provoke them and drive them literally insane. Probably each of these people you mention (and others you don’t) has the equivalent of a full-time team of 10-25 people working around the clock to make them specifically go specifically barking.
And that with the celebrity they had they were already more divorced from real life, had more people around then they couldn’t really trust, had got more used to taking their sense of self from their public persona.
When you’re successful it’s terribly easy to believe that when random strangers tell you you’re wonderful that is just the honest truth. Which makes it harder to notice when they start saying slightly off things to you about Jews.
Yeah, that makes sense. Also — people who embrace being famous (rather than those who see it as a part of the job) are often trying to fill some gap in their lives, I think.
Yeah. And of course those gaps in life can open up in ways that are unpredictable and invisible - we don't know when someone has had a personal tragedy, or has lost a dear friend, or even has eg had to give up a favourite sport because of injury, something like that. The gaps maybe were always there. Or maybe open silently, maybe the person themselves isn't aware of them and what they're filling up with the social media madness machine.
Probably this is at least half of the reason it happened to so many people during the pandemic; we'd all lost massive amounts of social life, entertainment, hobbies, opportunities for exercise etc etc. And the conspiracy theorists were there, ready to fill the gaps in everyone's lives.
It is *amazing* now to look back at pre-pandemic conversation on eg my Twitter archive and to see how even the most contentious questions were still basically possible to talk about in a relatively civil way five years ago. I feel like actually right now there's beginning to be a kind of "waking up" where people are remembering "didn't we use to be able to talk about this differently?" Long Covid Of The Discourse.
I'm afraid I must disagree with Helen on the Washington Post "One in four US programming jobs has gone" story. I'd argue that she has read too much into that story, to the point that summarizing it as "do not 'learn to code'" is somewhat of a mischaracterization.
The author makes clear that the U.S. federal statisticians' definition of "programming" is quite limited:
> In the real world, “developer” and “programmer” can seem almost interchangeable. But in the world of government statistics, where we have legal permanent residency, there’s a clear distinction.
> In the government’s schema, programmers do the grunt work while the much more numerous — and much faster-growing — software developers enjoy a broader remit. They figure out what clients need, design solutions and work with folks such as programmers and hardware engineers to implement them.
For myself, I think that AI killing this narrowly defined "programmer" job was predictable. Technology companies have been trying for years to make routine "grunt" programming not so much the domain of "programmers", supervising "developers", or customers who use the programs, but of those end customers themselves, who only need to know a little bit of "how to code" to automate the things they do manually every day. AI's use in software programming and development is (among many things) just an extension of this long-time effort, which explicitly intends to kill "grunt programming" as a necessary trade.
Agree. I'd say, *do* learn to code, among other skills, and don't plan on walking into the kind of Big Tech jobs that were plentiful a few years back and less so now.
I wonder if the people defending Graham Linehan here have actually engaged with his output over the last few years? He’s not just “outspoken” or “brazen” - he calls his opponents groomers and paedophiles! He calls drag queens “grotesque sex clowns”! That so many GCs still celebrate him or, at worst, treats him as a sort of well-meaning but OTT relative is an indictment on that movement. (The same goes for Rowling, who has likened someone being asked to use a trans person’s pronouns to being held at gunpoint!)
And what though? Does any of that make him a conspiracy theorist? Quite a lot of people he calls attention to could certainly be called groomers and paedophiles, he's just not afraid to highlight them. And many drag queens are pretty bloody grim, again he calls attention to the excesses of that form of "entertainment". Just because you don't agree with him doesn't make him wrong. Not sure what your point on JK Rowling is.
Well he’s currently asking for money because he’s being sued for calling someone a paedophile so let’s see if the claim that doing so is justified holds up in court.
I don't know about that case, haven't looked into it. But go and look at many of the weirdos and abusers he calls out - he's very rarely wrong. Again, just because you don't like him doesn't mean he's a conspiracy theorist. That so many men are quick to dismiss Linehan, while so many women appreciate his speaking up, tells you most of what you need to know about those men.
He has literally said “trans is not real” and society is in a “mass delusion”. If you defend this position you are quite obviously an extremist - moderate gender criticals (like the author of the substack we’re commenting on!) don’t believe that.
"Quite obviously an extremist" according to who!? I mean, it's clear to me that society is in the grip of a mass delusion when so many important institutions appear to believe that by simply announcing it, a person can change sex, and that person must be affirmed and laws changed to make that possible. I think that's bonkers. So I'm clearly an extremist.
Yes you are. Trans people exist. There is independent evidence of their existence in multiple cultures over thousands of years. Saying they don’t exist is denying reality.
Helen, I love your writing but on this occasion I can't work out who you're writing about: 'us' (your readership) or 'them' (celebrities like Neil Oliver)?
After ruminating on how a list of famous people may have “Gone Culture War” you add:
'But clearly this is not limited to celebrities: most of us know someone who hasn’t been quite the same since 2020.'
Well, sure. But why would the stories of how some celebs went off the rails have anything much to do with how non-celebs' mental health has changed? The attention economy may well offer them 'huge rewards for saying provocative things,' but not us.
I sense a false equivalence or consequence being implied. If you're really writing about us, give examples from among us. I know: celebs attract readers. I suppose Neil Oliver attracted me, if wariness bordering on aversion can be called attraction. But I'm mainly reading you because of you!
I was lucky in that I lost neither loved ones nor my job during the pandemic but its consequences changed my mental health nonetheless, not least when an unholy alliance between Tory government and Labour councils used lockdown to impose a series of senseless Low Traffic Neighbourhoods on my area which are still there 4½ years later, impediments to my working and social life that have worsened rather than improved the local environment (and which journalists seem unable to deal with except by imposing a crass 'Greens vs Drivers' template on reality).
Social media offered endless opportunity, not for rewards but for further harm of the self-inflicted variety, much of it generated by local politicians, but I wasn't drawn to my screen, I largely fled from it. I could go on; my employer used lockdown to inflict cuts and changes which still deeply affect me now. Its effects on my children's mental health were considerable, and are ongoing.
I like your honesty about what you wrote in the past. As a sidebar, I don't think you should criticise yourself about giving in to pressure re the scientific consensus. Many journalists are prone to thinking science delivers - or should deliver - hard (unarguable, unvarying) facts. But true science, if such a thing can still be distinguished from government press releases, is always changing, always checking, updating, rewriting. Science is only ever our best educated guess at a moment in time. Vaccines rolled out at speed might have had greater unintended consequences, and conceivably still might. That doesn't change the fact that those who persuaded people not to be vaccinated were scientifically and morally wrong to do that at that time. And still are.
Many people may well have "gone culture war" because of the pandemic. But I believe Neil Oliver et al have much less to tell us about this phenomenon than your piece implies.
I respect Helen's opinions but fail to see what Graham Linehan has got wrong. I think it is tremendously disappointing that someone like Jon Ronson, fearless truth teller (self styled) of unusual and interesting stories, has preferred to stand on the sidelines while the trans activist craze has taken off and point fingers at someone like Linehan.
Jon Ronson also withdrew his blurb from Andrew Gold's book because Gold had interviewed Posie Parker on his podcast. Ronson is clearly not brave enough to be even tangentially associated with a man who interviewed, ironically, a "difficult woman".
I agree that the clip posted is frustrating, and Ronson has lost a lot of credibility with me over his cowardice and unwillingness to adequately investigate the neoreligious, cult-like elements of modern gender ideology. However, I will say that as correct as Linehan has proved to be on many elements of youth gender medicine policy, he has absolutely gone off the deep end at this point. He's hyperfocused on one issue in a way that simply has not been good for his brain - you can contrast him with Helen Joyce, Janice Turner, Victoria Smith, Hannah Barnes et al to see that it is possible to be fiercely engaged with this very important topic without entering the realm of using 'NPC' unironically.
I think Linehan has been so thoroughly monstered by the whole thing, plus abandoned by erstwhile friends and colleagues (like Jonson), there's not other way for him to be. I respect him for speaking out early on, I think people are put off by how strident he is and I get that.
Again as much as I respect Helen and enjoy her work, I think she's missing the point that media people like Ronson and Buxton would also cut her loose without hesitation if she ever expressed anything beyond her very mild views on gender ideology. The pandemic excuse is a bit of a convenient fig leaf I think, some people really are just cowards!
I listened to Glinner's autobiography and felt a great sympathy and respect for him. He's humble and insightful about his work - and it's great work. But there seems also an attitude of "I'm going to save these women whether they want it or not" I think he might have helped his cause better if he had not insisted on being at its forefront, and supported women from the wings.
Honestly, I don’t see where Glinner has ‘insisted’ on being at the forefront. Where? He hosts an irregular podcast, where plenty of women speak. He’s occasionally on other podcasts and was once on an infamous Newsnight episode where Sarah Smith interviewed him with barely disguised disdain. He gets attention because he’s well-known, and because he is (sometimes unwisely) unfiltered. Nothing ‘insistent’ or ‘forefront’ about any of that, and he *is* supporting from the wings, I assure you! There are many organised groups of women campaigning & speaking on this issue, often at great cost to their personal & professional lives. I’m in touch with/belong to many of them & I’ve never been aware of Glinner muscling in at all….male allies are welcome & there are a number. The men who don’t speak up even though they can see the harm & the stupidity of this pernicious ideology are selfish & cowardly. The attitude of ‘poor old [former friend & colleague ..G’s not the only one] ….he’s totally lost it, poor sod’ while remaining silent on the issue, just stinks.
You summed up what I was trying to say with the fig leaf comment very well. Agree completely, the "he's lost it/he'shad a bad pandemic" rhetoric while smugly staying silent and avoiding even the possibility of angering some of the most vocal activists is pathetic. I suppose Buxton, Ronson et al want to maintain their media favourite status.
Very disappointed by Helen Lewis including Glinner in her list of covid conspiracists. He was speaking up about gender rubbish before covid. I’d like to see Helen do a list of men with public personas that have avoided speaking about the attacks on women’s rights. Oh, of course, they’re men so they don’t see these attacks. Does Helen?
Are you asking if I’m aware of the attacks on people who contradict the progressive orthodoxy on gender?
No I’m asking if you understand “progressive orthodoxy on gender” to be an attack on women’s rights.
Have you read any of my work?
Some people are passionate about specific issues, I am one. The fact that we are curtailing the lives of children, many who are autistic and many who are gay with unproven medical treatments is an absolute scandal. No, what is weird is why so many ignore it and by their complicity enable the social contagion.
Re Helen's thoughtful piece on our Covid isolation and what it did to some people, I agree with most of it, apart from her mild criticism that we (that is the authorities) maybe were too dogmatic in their statements about science behind the lockdown /masking, when some of the science wasn't as clear as all that, at the time . Are you kidding me? We needed that constant messaging, based on the very worst case scenario, because too many people were apparently not going to do the right thing otherwise. They would weasel a way to avoid rules they didn't fancy obeying. They were like small children trying to find a way round a parental "No".
I met people during lockdown telling me Covid was a hoax and nobody was dying of the virus, the coverage from hospitals was all actors. We even had morons trying to take very sick relatives out of hospital. We had smirking men unmasked in shops full of the elderly, claiming to have asthma. I saw no reason why we should debate the rules with these delusional/selfish gits when we had nurses and bus drivers dying of Covid because we asked them to put themselves at risk, and they did. Often the very same people who were desperate for the Government to lift lockdown then moved straight away to rejecting the vaccine "for reasons". That was just here in the UK.
I have a brain, I knew then the authorities were just trying to work out which way to jump sometimes, on incomplete information, but I totally approved of not giving that section of our society who are anti-social idiots the excuses they wanted to ignore any rules that they didn't like.
Thank you for reading my rant.
It was all much more authoritarian than it needed to be. They should have done some science instead of propagandizing against people who had doubts about a new RNA therapy. They turned friends and family against each other, and it went far enough that it seemed to a lot of people that obedience was a bigger factor than public health.
And now that everyone (like me) who got the vaccine and all the boosters and STILL caught it multiple times, despite early assurances that it would absolutely prevent disease and grant herd immunity, wonder what that stuff actually did to or for us. There was almost certainly older people who died from Covid because people who visited them thought they were immune.
We REALLY need a truth and reconciliation on Covid and the vaccines.
There was never a promise that the vaccines that were actually rolled out would prevent all disease and grant herd immunity.
Everyone hoped for that, and maybe eventually a vaccine will be produced that will do that, but what we actually got was ‘good enough’ vaccines that is brilliant at preventing severe disease and death, and medium-good at preventing the spread of disease. That was enough to rely on at the population level for the lifting of other restrictions and getting back to a version of ‘normal’.
BIDEN: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” — town hall.
Here’s Fauci on herd immunity:
https://www.axios.com/2020/12/25/fauci-goalposts-herd-immunity
In fact the whole basis of demonizing antivaxxers was over the idea of herd immunity.
You all are conveniently rewriting history. I know for a fact that if I was told that this wasn’t really a vaccine, it was non-sterilizing and does not prevent disease or passing on the disease, that all the herd immunity stuff was bunk, I WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN IT, and therefore would not have had the adverse reaction that put me in a wheelchair that I can’t even sue them about.
FFS, the mortality rate for Covid was only .28%. We almost certainly did more harm than good.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54873105.amp
You must not have read the actual information released at the time.
Jesus, I just read your link and it’s Fauci saying he was doing his best to nudge vaccination levels higher because they don’t actually know and can’t promise what level of vaccination will produce herd immunity. It could be as high as 90% - in which case many countries never achieved it.
Which is entirely consistent with what I said - it was never *promised*. It’s a novel virus and new vaccinations mixing with the unpredictable behaviour of the general public. Of course everyone expressed their hopes and gave their best estimates, no-one could know for sure.
My point being that there can be no herd immunity without a sterilizing vaccine.
It's worth reading Scott Alexander's review of the science behind masking, posted the day the UK went into lockdown: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ tl;dr the "science" at the time was *so bad*, we were basically flying blind. Also worth noting that the CDC's anti-mask recommendation dated from at least 2009, so the theory that it was a Noble Lie to protect supplies can't be true.
You have got me thinking about this, the pandemic was so awful. If we are to do better in future, we need to conduct ourselves more like a fatal aircrash investigation, where it's not about blame but about being very sure what caused the crash, so as to prevent another like it.
I really like Scott. But my experience of reading most "dissents" from how the US federal authorities chose to handle the pandemic is they are focused on pinning "blame" on people. As nobody wants to be witchhunted, you aren't getting anywhere with truly understanding what went on. People can't look back and agree (or disagree) that they sometimes might have made the wrong call, and then consider how to make that call in future, when cynical politicians will leap on any retrospection and demand the poor guys be punished for some unknown "crime". I wouldn't cooperate with any such "enquiry".
Plus, I really didn't care at the time to debate where the virus came from, once it was already out of China. And I still don't care that for pragmatic reasons of reducing international tensions, and getting China to cooperate a little with info - in a crisis where China was reacting predictably to being shamed - officials deflected us from the lab leak theory to natural causes. The whole origin issue was a distraction, then, from fighting the war with the enemy, the virus. Now is the time to hold China's feet to the fire over biosecurity, so it doesn't happen again. So I don't feel a bit betrayed by the "lies" of the establishment, over the origin. Wartime is wartime. That's one where I would say "grow up" to people who think it's a "gotcha".
There's an ideological issue in American discourse on the pandemic that might as well be from Mars for most Europeans, which is the libertarian "I'll take my chances" response to a public health emergency. Not to dismiss that American view, but it's unique to you
Our default position is community first. I was in Venice during the pandemic when lockdown had been lifted, but before the vaccine, and I still got told off for taking off my mask on the outside deck on the river bus. Was it justified by science? Probably no. Did it hurt me to comply and so reassure the elderly woman who was scared? Also, no. We just didn't do the partisan politics about infection prevention, or the vaccine - that was all-American.
Our pandemic preparedness here in the UK was awful, and that's where I think we should all focus for the future.
> But my experience of reading most "dissents" from how the US federal authorities chose to handle the pandemic is they are focused on pinning "blame" on people.
Absolutely, and I think that's why that piece is so valuable - it represents a doctor who was not part of the public health establishment trying to make sense of things *at the beginning of the pandemic*, when it was published.
> And I still don't care that for pragmatic reasons... officials deflected us from the lab leak theory to natural causes.
Was that the reason? I thought it was because they (in particular Peter Daszak, a co-author of the Lancet letter) were personally involved in either the research at WIV or in funding it. I'm now much more inclined to believe that Covid had natural origins than I used to be, but I'm still outraged that they tried to cover up the mere possibility of a lab leak.
> Not to dismiss that American view, but it's unique to you
I'm not American! I'm a Brit living in Scotland, and my username is Czech :-)
> Was it justified by science? Probably no.
I actually think this was a big part of the problem - because the rules (at least here in the UK) were so arbitrary, and constantly changing, and clearly not backed up by science (they were still emphasising handwashing and surface cleaning for *months* after it was clear that Covid was predominantly airborne) everyone decided to follow their own subset of rules that they thought made sense.
Sorry, I did indeed realise you were a Brit! I don't know how that "you" crept in. You make a good point about the arbitrary nature of the rules, or at least their apparent arbitrary nature as things evolved. I'm sure we all developed our own local version of "the rules". But I am proud of the way we all pulled together on the key stuff, most of the time.
I don't think the scientists that had experimental research running in Wuhan were ashamed of it before the leak, so I don't agree that they would have been motivated to pretend a leak that they didn't cause, didn't happen, to cover up the fact of their research. Obviously they would be very embarrassed, but that's not career-ending in the West - in contrast to the expectations of the Chinese scientists.
I remember reading in the Times at the very start, some of the theories about why the Chinese had kept quiet about the spread of infection and left the borders open until Covid was everywhere. The political journalist argued that the Chinese Government could not tolerate any foreign suggestion of Chinese incompetence in letting the virus loose, so the WHO, knowing full well that the leak was a possibility, was dancing around, going along with the live market explanation, and trying to let the Chinese save enough face to let us have access to relevant information.
My anecdote - I was in Penang for the 2020 Chinese New Year. I thought it was charming that so many mainland Chinese had flown in to be with relatives in Malaysia for the holiday. By the time I flew out of Singapore a week later, airport staff were masked and the military were using temperature guns on people on arrival and departure.........
Re the arbitrariness and the persistence in the advice: I can at least partly agree with you, but...
I think it's important to crisply distinguish between 'the science', 'science-informed public health interventions', and 'sociology- or behaviour-based public health interventions'.
With The Science (a phrase which made me cringe every time I heard it), the goal is to reach consensus, however long it takes. With public health questions, it's generally a case of having to make a decision _now_ – literally today or this week – with big downsides both ways, and all you can hope for is rational use of whatever evidence is available. It's predictable that The Science will not give a clear direction to this decision.
While it might have become evident (it appears; I'm not competent to have an independent opinion) that there's little virological effect of masks, it might still be deemed worth sticking with that as the advice, on the grounds that (I speculate) if people are wearing or talking about masks then they are constantly subconsciously being reminded 'pandemic... be careful... contamination!' which might, as a point of psychology, prompt useful population-wide behaviours. Yes, we can complain this is a rather paternalistic approach, but what else do you do, if you're trying to promote behaviours that will only work if almost everyone falls in line?
That behavioural or social aspect is also why I can see it making sense to be coy about the precise reasons for particular advice, and to stick with advice longer than seems biologically necessary. Actual scientists are comfortable changing their minds several times a day, but the reporting of those is often 'scientists can't make up their minds!' or 'is red wine good for us again, then?', which promptly leads to 'scientists don't know everything' (trivially true), and thence to 'so just ignore The Science'.
That is, it might be that the communications, and the behaviours they were intended to encourage, are actually a more important think to talk about, and criticise in retrospect, than the biology or the epidemiology.
The worry was that Covid is related to MERS and SARS, and could have had a much higher death rate, so early caution was warranted. However, it clearly became a battlefield in the US political battle between parties, and quickly turned into a litmus test. We Americans recognize that this usually equals hiding serious bullshit.
The whole pandemic should have been as transparent as possible and failures should have been owned. The next time, nobody here is trusting the government.
Yes, indeed.
And in the other extreme there were people absolutely panicking that it was armegeddon - those people needed the reassurance that the authorities had measures in place to keep things under control and that it was all going to be ok.
It doesn’t take many people in a panic to spark a wave of consequences - think about how a bank run happens - so appearing calm and in control amidst the uncertainty was also important.
They caused that panic with their coverage! This virus was horribly mishandled by both parties. The response was a cotillion for US/European elite authoritarianism, and to this day, people who desperately want to be owned by their betters won’t stop to look back at what actually happened, they just keep spitting propaganda from 2021 and assuming any disagreement can only be caused by poor moral character.
Hmmm, you sound like a totally rational person who is not prone to motivated reasoning and extreme overreactions at all…..
There’s the tribalist gatekeeping that lost the election.
Did you vote for Trump?
No, I did not.
No, I did not.
Big Trowel. That has made my day.
I think this article is unfair on Glinner. His career was demolished because his cowardly friends stayed silent while he spoke up against the very real threats to women’s safety. We know now who will say anything - ANYTHING - to fit in.
Helens behaviour towards Graham has always been poor . This is part of a pattern. Reveals her own character flaws.
I think you’re peering through the wrong end of the telescope Helen - lockdown led to the mushrooming of “trans”, which is what led Graham Linehan to stake it all on trying to make people understand what’s happening. Most people - including Ronson & Buxton - either didn’t want to see, or actively supported it.
I read Linehan's Substack for a while, as I am gender-critical myself, but was alienated by his mocking, polemical tone, especially his deployment of 'groomer' stereotypes, all of which reminded me uncomfortably of anti-gay polemic from the 80s. I noted too his endorsement on X of the socially-conservative anti-abortion party Aontú at the general election in Ireland last year.
I've heard Linehan speak very movingly about he and his wife campaigning for abortion in Ireland, after his wife needed an abortion due to a fetal abnormality. Similarly he's very vocally supportive of gays and particularly lesbians. I suppose people will read what they want into his social media but I don't get any of those anti-abortion/anti-gay vibes from him in the slightest.
It’s a long time ago, but I remember Linehan in the audience giving someone at a Google Big Tent who was on stage from, I think, the Daily Mail a real pasting over the way tabloids would print near-pornographic pictures of starlets the moment they turned 16. His point being that this was encouraging lechery verging on paedophilia. He has always been someone who gets deeply into a cause. Perhaps if what he’s fighting against doesn’t give way easily enough he gets more extreme. Recently it has started tipping over into more extreme political views; maybe this is the inexorable outcome of continued frustration.
His views on women’s rights are not extreme, and until recently were repeated by many politically leftwing men. I didn’t realise how flimsy the latter’s commitment to women’s equality, safety, and dignity was: how quickly and easily they would drop them if the winds changed.
To clarify, by “extreme” I meant the form of his reaction, not necessarily his position. Calling people NPCs, as Helen points out, is hardly a position that will win over doubters.
He also devotes space to reposting photos of extremely unattractive, non-passing transwomen, a number of whom appear to be mentally unbalanced. Some people might say, well, those transwomen chose to put those pictures online, on dating sites and trans forums and other social media, so what culpability does Linehan have? None, I suppose, if you think it’s okay to lift images out of their context in order to encourage mockery of troubled, only partially functional individuals. I don’t see how doing this sort of thing constitutes a defense of women’s rights to single-sex spaces, to fair competition in sport, and so on — in fact, he discredits the argument for fairness by displaying so much animus, and more than a few feminists and LGBs consider him a liability more than an asset.
He shares those pictures because according to the ideology, those people you call transwomen who are "troubled" are men we are supposed to accept uncritically as women, and thus allow them access to single sex spaces etc. No matter how "unattractive or non passing" (your words), or indeed "mentally unbalanced" they are. You can't see how that poses serious risk to women and girls? How does that "discredit the argument for fairness"?
If you think this tactic is acceptable, nothing I can say is going to persuade you otherwise. My point, really, is that it’s no mystery why so many people want to keep him at arm’s length: he comes across as a bully, and it’s very distasteful.
You've not said anything to try and persuade me! You've not addressed the central question I asked about the risk to women and girls. You might not like his tactics but he's very effective, and many women and "LGBs" as you call us, are happy to have him speaking up.
I think putting Graham Linehan in this list is grossly unfair. If middle of the road liberals could risk some of their status to stand up stronger for reality then people like Graham Linehan, JK Rowling, Genevieve Gluck wouldn't be so isolated. The question is why aren't more people standing up?
Totes agree. Glinner has been treated appallingly by the gender loons, which is bad enough, but then, while under siege, found his “friends” stabbing him in the back while wearing masks of smug righteousness. Buxton is famously a shallow twat, but Ronson is deeply disappointing. This combined with him removing his blurb from Andrew Gold’s book paints a picture of a weak moral coward.
Even Glinner’s inclusion by Ms Lewis in this piece is unfair; he’s still being dismissed as somehow outrageous or beyond the pale. He’s gone mad!!! It’s a strange kind of shoot-the-messenger instinct: he spoke the truth, he gets cancelled by the luvvies, he can’t work, and somehow it’s his own fault? Like those people who were thrown into asylums by the soviets: “yes the system is insane but by mentioning it publicly you must be insane too so in you go, Vlad. By the way your family are gone because we’ve exerted so much pressure on them and made it so dangerous to seem loyal to you they’ve changed their names and moved away. But remember, YOU’RE the crazy one, Vlad! Not us!!!! Hahahahaha!!!!!”
Hopefully Glinner’s new venture will be a success, and he can get back to being a writer.
Yes that's it exactly. I can understand not necessarily wanting to take a public stand because of fears about livelihood but to throw someone under the bus who does stand up, that's some psychological scapegoating thing at work. Post-Cass review it would be easy to be mildly supportive for many and actually turn the tide but it seems that the media classes have become captured in a device of their own making. Ronson agreed is the most insufferable hypocrite - I can't imagine the cognitive dissonance on being a self-professed expert on moral panics but refusing to look at the social contagion happening under his nose. The condescension and toady manner of his dialogue at the end of S2 Things Fell Apart where he condemns Linehan ‘going extreme’, similar to the condemnation of this piece, made me lose all respect for him, despite his talent.
Yes! I discovered this about Oliver as I was reading his book ‘wisdom of the ancients’ (written pre-Covid). The man was a wonderful writer and the book was lovely. I couldn’t fathom how the two seemingly opposite men could be the same person… and I said to my husband ‘he obviously had a bad pandemic’. It’s become code in our house for just what you describe here. Spot on.
I was recently blocked by Huey Green (former Fun Luvin Criminal now BBC6 DJ) for critiquing his batshit IG posts and imploring him not to be Neil Oliver.
Watching public figures lose their reason has morbidly fascinating.
So glad you mentioned Matt Goodwin. Recently came across him on X and could hardly believe it was the same writer.. although Carole Cadwallader had her suspicions a few years back.
I've always been slightly wary of Huey Morgan after he smashed a cup in anger after some gentle ribbing on Never Mind The Buzzcocks
I think some of this movement towards conspiracy theory is based around sudden institutional embrace of extreme counterfactuals. Being told you have to accept three impossible things before breakfast breaks brains. I know I’m barely holding in there.
I wonder, Helen, where you think (*if* you think) people like JK Rwlng or Ed Yong fit into this typology - some kind of radicalisation seems to have happened, thanks to some interaction of isolation, self-selection etc (I'm totally open to being wrong on the premise; after all, *I'm* looking at *them* through my tiny window of social media)
When did standing up for women’s rights, dignity, and safety become seen as radicalised thinking?
You can’t really compare JK Rowling, whose views are completely mainstream, scientifically accurate and until 5 minutes ago were questioned by nobody, to Ed Yong. She has not been “radicalised” in the slightest, she is doing what she has always done which is to help and protect the vulnerable. JK Rowling has made the world a better place: through just three organisations she either founded and/or funds, she’s helped countless orphans, single mothers and female victims of abuse; she has got a whole generation reading, her work has given employment to thousands of people and is worth billions to UK economy, not to mention has given joy and pleasure to millions. She funds research into MS because unlike other billionaires, she would rather do that and pay all her tax, than spend $600 million on her wedding. Her advocacy for women, who unlike her aren’t financially secure, has drawn ire from some of the worst people on the internet - or have you missed thousands of death and rape threats she’s received? There is no “both sides” here - only one side is wrong. She will be remembered with great affection and her books will still be read long after we are all gone.
Wait, what's happened to Ed Yong? I haven't read his stuff for a while, but I remember him being *great* for the first year or so of the pandemic - one of the science writers I trusted most.
I think it is also probable that famous people just get more (a LOT more) trolls trying to provoke them and drive them literally insane. Probably each of these people you mention (and others you don’t) has the equivalent of a full-time team of 10-25 people working around the clock to make them specifically go specifically barking.
And that with the celebrity they had they were already more divorced from real life, had more people around then they couldn’t really trust, had got more used to taking their sense of self from their public persona.
When you’re successful it’s terribly easy to believe that when random strangers tell you you’re wonderful that is just the honest truth. Which makes it harder to notice when they start saying slightly off things to you about Jews.
Yeah, that makes sense. Also — people who embrace being famous (rather than those who see it as a part of the job) are often trying to fill some gap in their lives, I think.
Yeah. And of course those gaps in life can open up in ways that are unpredictable and invisible - we don't know when someone has had a personal tragedy, or has lost a dear friend, or even has eg had to give up a favourite sport because of injury, something like that. The gaps maybe were always there. Or maybe open silently, maybe the person themselves isn't aware of them and what they're filling up with the social media madness machine.
Probably this is at least half of the reason it happened to so many people during the pandemic; we'd all lost massive amounts of social life, entertainment, hobbies, opportunities for exercise etc etc. And the conspiracy theorists were there, ready to fill the gaps in everyone's lives.
It is *amazing* now to look back at pre-pandemic conversation on eg my Twitter archive and to see how even the most contentious questions were still basically possible to talk about in a relatively civil way five years ago. I feel like actually right now there's beginning to be a kind of "waking up" where people are remembering "didn't we use to be able to talk about this differently?" Long Covid Of The Discourse.
I'm afraid I must disagree with Helen on the Washington Post "One in four US programming jobs has gone" story. I'd argue that she has read too much into that story, to the point that summarizing it as "do not 'learn to code'" is somewhat of a mischaracterization.
The author makes clear that the U.S. federal statisticians' definition of "programming" is quite limited:
> In the real world, “developer” and “programmer” can seem almost interchangeable. But in the world of government statistics, where we have legal permanent residency, there’s a clear distinction.
> In the government’s schema, programmers do the grunt work while the much more numerous — and much faster-growing — software developers enjoy a broader remit. They figure out what clients need, design solutions and work with folks such as programmers and hardware engineers to implement them.
For myself, I think that AI killing this narrowly defined "programmer" job was predictable. Technology companies have been trying for years to make routine "grunt" programming not so much the domain of "programmers", supervising "developers", or customers who use the programs, but of those end customers themselves, who only need to know a little bit of "how to code" to automate the things they do manually every day. AI's use in software programming and development is (among many things) just an extension of this long-time effort, which explicitly intends to kill "grunt programming" as a necessary trade.
Agree. I'd say, *do* learn to code, among other skills, and don't plan on walking into the kind of Big Tech jobs that were plentiful a few years back and less so now.
I wonder if the people defending Graham Linehan here have actually engaged with his output over the last few years? He’s not just “outspoken” or “brazen” - he calls his opponents groomers and paedophiles! He calls drag queens “grotesque sex clowns”! That so many GCs still celebrate him or, at worst, treats him as a sort of well-meaning but OTT relative is an indictment on that movement. (The same goes for Rowling, who has likened someone being asked to use a trans person’s pronouns to being held at gunpoint!)
And what though? Does any of that make him a conspiracy theorist? Quite a lot of people he calls attention to could certainly be called groomers and paedophiles, he's just not afraid to highlight them. And many drag queens are pretty bloody grim, again he calls attention to the excesses of that form of "entertainment". Just because you don't agree with him doesn't make him wrong. Not sure what your point on JK Rowling is.
Well he’s currently asking for money because he’s being sued for calling someone a paedophile so let’s see if the claim that doing so is justified holds up in court.
I don't know about that case, haven't looked into it. But go and look at many of the weirdos and abusers he calls out - he's very rarely wrong. Again, just because you don't like him doesn't mean he's a conspiracy theorist. That so many men are quick to dismiss Linehan, while so many women appreciate his speaking up, tells you most of what you need to know about those men.
He has literally said “trans is not real” and society is in a “mass delusion”. If you defend this position you are quite obviously an extremist - moderate gender criticals (like the author of the substack we’re commenting on!) don’t believe that.
"Quite obviously an extremist" according to who!? I mean, it's clear to me that society is in the grip of a mass delusion when so many important institutions appear to believe that by simply announcing it, a person can change sex, and that person must be affirmed and laws changed to make that possible. I think that's bonkers. So I'm clearly an extremist.
Yes you are. Trans people exist. There is independent evidence of their existence in multiple cultures over thousands of years. Saying they don’t exist is denying reality.
That’s not true.
The bicycle thing is to die for. Thx for sharing
Helen, I love your writing but on this occasion I can't work out who you're writing about: 'us' (your readership) or 'them' (celebrities like Neil Oliver)?
After ruminating on how a list of famous people may have “Gone Culture War” you add:
'But clearly this is not limited to celebrities: most of us know someone who hasn’t been quite the same since 2020.'
Well, sure. But why would the stories of how some celebs went off the rails have anything much to do with how non-celebs' mental health has changed? The attention economy may well offer them 'huge rewards for saying provocative things,' but not us.
I sense a false equivalence or consequence being implied. If you're really writing about us, give examples from among us. I know: celebs attract readers. I suppose Neil Oliver attracted me, if wariness bordering on aversion can be called attraction. But I'm mainly reading you because of you!
I was lucky in that I lost neither loved ones nor my job during the pandemic but its consequences changed my mental health nonetheless, not least when an unholy alliance between Tory government and Labour councils used lockdown to impose a series of senseless Low Traffic Neighbourhoods on my area which are still there 4½ years later, impediments to my working and social life that have worsened rather than improved the local environment (and which journalists seem unable to deal with except by imposing a crass 'Greens vs Drivers' template on reality).
Social media offered endless opportunity, not for rewards but for further harm of the self-inflicted variety, much of it generated by local politicians, but I wasn't drawn to my screen, I largely fled from it. I could go on; my employer used lockdown to inflict cuts and changes which still deeply affect me now. Its effects on my children's mental health were considerable, and are ongoing.
I like your honesty about what you wrote in the past. As a sidebar, I don't think you should criticise yourself about giving in to pressure re the scientific consensus. Many journalists are prone to thinking science delivers - or should deliver - hard (unarguable, unvarying) facts. But true science, if such a thing can still be distinguished from government press releases, is always changing, always checking, updating, rewriting. Science is only ever our best educated guess at a moment in time. Vaccines rolled out at speed might have had greater unintended consequences, and conceivably still might. That doesn't change the fact that those who persuaded people not to be vaccinated were scientifically and morally wrong to do that at that time. And still are.
Many people may well have "gone culture war" because of the pandemic. But I believe Neil Oliver et al have much less to tell us about this phenomenon than your piece implies.