Something wicked this way comes
Listen. Can you hear it? It’s the sound of an out of tune calliope crackling to life as a haunted carousel judders into motion. Around the carousel creaks, bringing into view a dead horse, the words ‘liberal elite’ scrawled across its rotten flank. Can you see it?
Not everyone can. Quite a few seem to see a freshly painted stallion shining in the sunlight, the words ‘new elite’ airbrushed on its side, ridden by a giggling blonde child. The word ‘new’ glints and catches their eye as the horse slowly revolves. They miss the bloated tongue hanging purply from the horse’s lolling head.
Matt Goodwin has written a book. You might have seen it all over the place and heard him talking about it at length in all those news outlets run by a censorious new elite who would never give over space to radical new ideas like his.
I’m not linking to it. Don’t buy it. Don’t.
I’d rather I hadn’t seen anything about this book at all, but couldn’t really miss the massive coverage (to which I am now contributing — hooray for me). Because of that comprehensive coverage, Goodwin has been interviewed by Aaron Bastani and debated by Mic Wright. I quite enjoyed watching these, but I’d have preferred it if one of them had toe-punted Goodwin up the hoop and chased him away, flapping an umbrella at him and screeching.
Still, you work with what you have, and watching these has awoken thoughts that have made the writing bit of my brain come out of retirement like a rubbish John Wick that can barely do a forward roll.
Anyway, thoughts. I will now hoot them at you.
‘New’ elite? New? Really?
There’s nothing new about the idea of a left wing elite who hate ordinary people and are all politically correct and stupid. It’s been the mortar between the bricks of every moral panic for decades.
I don’t think it’s credible that someone who’s spent any amount of time researching far right politics wouldn’t know that.
But this is the clever bit. If you look directly into Goodwin’s eyes, not around his eyes, directly into his eyes, you’ll see that his version is different. His new elite isn’t actually liberal, he is. Aha. Got your nose.
He explains everything to Mic Wright, making it all super clear and well defined. See, ‘classical liberals’ like himself are football — and the new ‘not liberal’ elite are muggy boneheads. (Link for the uninitiated).
Seriously, ‘classical liberal’ = a list of rigorous and brilliant good boy golden generalities, ‘new elite’ = illiberal, and rubbish and stupid bogeyman words. They stink of fish, probably.
Aside from that, this new elite with their swanky Russell Group University degrees do all the nefarious things the liberal elite has been up to since before Matt Bianco went on Saturday Superstore.
Classical liberals though? They’re subversive and countercultural and sexy rebels. You know, like Toby Young, the bloke that goes on the Alex Jones conspiracy theory shows and that weird Swedish YouTube strongman (probably). Wuurgh, look at them.
What do this new elite do?
They insert themselves into positions of responsibility where they go about supressing any views that challenge their woke religion. But not like the liberal elite did with political correctness. Or — whisper it — Cultural Marxists. Its definitely different.
Take the media. It’s left wing, anti Brexit, pro diversity, pro immigration and pro trans rights. It will not tolerate any voice critical of immigration or in praise of Brexit.
The British media.
The media in Britain.
Basic observable reality is swerved by saying over 50% of journalists describe themselves as left wing.
Two things:
a) what do we mean by left wing?
2) if most journalists are left wing, and most news outlets are very right wing, then quite a lot of the new elite is keeping its own views quiet to please billionaire masters.
Bit of a shit elite then.
But they cancel people
Despite what you can plainly see with your own two eyes, nothing that challenges the woke religion survives and anyone who tries it is banished from public life forever.
In both the interview and debate, Goodwin says the rigorously researched and unimpeachably evidence based ‘report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ was rubbished for daring to challenge the woke orthodoxy and its author cancelled with the removal of an offer of an honorary degree. Proof!
In actual reality of course, the media loved it. It got tons of fanfared coverage all over the shop. It was eventually rubbished for being poor scholarship, not including relevant experts, not being peer reviewed, cherry picking evidence from people the report claimed had contributed when they hadn’t and being rewritten to fit the government’s political agenda.
And it’s author got an honorary degree from another university anyway.
And he’s a Lord now.
You know, cancelled.
They stop ordinary people seeing their anti immigrant and pro Brexit views represented
Its not just the media. Even our very right wing send ’em back, keep ’em in camps and bung ’em on prison ships Conservative government is powerless in the face of the woke new elite. And so was every government going back as far as Thatch.
They all promised to bring down immigration but never actually did, see.
So, successive governments have either thought drastically reducing immigration is a bad idea or found it impossible to do, but could never say it out loud because it would be electoral suicide.
And this shows the anti immigration lobby lacks power?
The anti immigration bro Brexit people are pursued by both main political parties with ardour so fierce it would make Pepe le Pew look like a voluntary incel. They’re promised everything they could ever want. Nobody is denying them representation.
How could such a nefarious gang of bad baddies be defeated?
With science. Golden good boys like Goodwin love science and evidence and rational, sensible enquiry. The new slimy elite baddies hate it and want to make it shut up if it says anything that isn’t woke. Shut up, science! You said ‘black’.
In an unguarded moment with a sympathetic interviewer, Goodwin was filmed saying advances in genetics would change the way people thought about disparities between groups and woke ideas would lose their grip.
Whatever could this mean?
You’d expect anyone who’d spent years studying extremist and far right politics would know that this is code for, ‘it’s caliper time, ma!’
Usually your ‘classical liberals’ who write for Quillette or whatever pretend it’s not by keeping schtum about what groups they’re talking about. They never mention the ‘live rail’ of race so you can’t say it’s that. It’s not allowed. They just mean ‘groups’. You know…‘groups’. Like people are in sometimes.
Here though, Goodwin apparently only meant health outcomes in the clip. As if the medical experts who criticised the Sewell report know nothing of genetics and believe sickle-cell anaemia is a societal construct.
But when asked flat out 5 times by Bastani if he also believes genetics has an effect on educational outcomes between groups, he refuses. He didn’t mention intelligence or anything else in the clip so you’re not allowed to ask him directly about it. It’s not in the rules.
You can’t infer he has any other issues with race from looking at anything else he says or does. Like sharing a chart on twitter that shows the ethnic make-up of London by splitting us into ‘White British’, ‘White Other’ and just ‘Nonwhite’.
Not because ‘Nonwhite’ people have to be excluded from being British, or the ‘White Others’ are supposed to be included in with the ‘nonwhites’. Gawd bless you, no.
It’s because there are too many sub groups of ‘nonwhite’ to fit in the graph. The plus button on Eric ‘Racial self-interest is not racism’ Kaufmann’s calculator must have been broken on the day he made the chart.
So that clears everything up. The always just on the horizon advances in genetics will destroy woke ideology because it will reveal things we definitely don’t know about medical differences and have never heard of sickle-cell anaemia or the higher incidence of diabetes in South Asians or anything like that at all already.
And it’s just a coincidence that his chart doesn’t count anyone as British if they’re not white.
Hey! You don’t think he’s maybe not being straight with us, do you?
Wallet inspector, or wallet inspected?
As risible as all this is, it’s still sinister, and it still feeds into a long tradition of mainstreaming the far right by blaming society’s ills on a shadowy elite of left wingers who are damaging the west by allowing our pure bloodlines — sorry, ethnic composition — to be diluted.
Take just what he says about the media. Sure it’s funny to look around you and think that anyone believes it’s left wing, but whether he believes it or not, he pushed for a permanent representative of anti immigrant, pro Brexit sentiment to be employed by all media outlets in his debate with Mic Wright.
In the reality that actually exists, that would mean despite having the news agenda being set by a whole host of opaquely funded right wing think tanks and the right wing press (which is most of it); despite the rest of the media having to include right wing voices for balance, often coming from those very publications and think tanks, we have to insert even more right wing voices.
I know it’s a cliché to say that every accusation from the right is a confession, but bloody hell. Does even Goodwin’s fantasy new elite even have that sort of full spectrum dominance?
Also. Jo Cox: Russell Group University graduate, sympathetic to immigration, anti Brexit. Member of the sinister new elite that must be resisted? Discuss.
Ultimately, whether Matt Goodwin believes his work normalises some odious far right ideas, whether he believes everything he writes is true or not — grifter or grifted — doesn’t matter. It does the work of the far right and it’s completely at odds with observable reality either way.
Look at it this way. Imagine putting a lovely thick layer of Nutella on some toast, but when you bite into it, it’s dog shit! Would it taste nicer if it turned out the guy who sold it to you didn’t know?
Would it stop being dog shit?
