Striking 13

Photo by Pau Casals on Unsplash Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. This is what it’s like to live under the whims of an evil old man. I just want it written down somewhere before we move on to the next thing. I want it recorded before our memories fail us, before this vicious manufactured crisis is replaced by the next vicious manufactured crisis. There is a little girl in an apartment building in Tehran.

Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Trump walks out like the doddering, vicious old fool he so obviously is. He slouches out, a cross between a corpse and a sullen teenager, a half dead thing made youthful by its bitter jealousies. He wears his insecurities like he wears his clothes: badly and ostentatiously. His face is darkened by the ugly thoughts which motivate him.

Photo by David Underland on Unsplash Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Last week I wrote about the political and media response to the war in Iran. This week I’m going to write about the market reaction. In both cases, we are witnessing the same process: the refusal of people to accept that the world is run by a madman. People will fight this realisation with every inch of their being, even when it concerns the investment of their own money.

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. The most important thing about Matt Goodwin is how boring he is. This is not how he is usually covered. He has had an unusual career path, from an academic who studied the populist right to a member of the populist right who sneers at academics. So naturally we tend to cover him with headlines like Gone Native or Matt Goodwin’s Fall Into the Abyss. I myself wrote that he “became his own doctoral thesis”.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Earlier this week, we were told that Keir Starmer was finally going to take the fight to the far-right. He had found his voice. He was going to make the case for patriotic diverse Britain. Today is the day of the promised speech. It began with an article in the Telegraph newspaper, behind a paywall, in which he announced a plan to introduce mandatory ID cards for work.

I arrived at Waterloo at the wrong time yesterday. Outside the station were the fascists. A small army of them, nearly every one holding a flag they do not understand and a symbol they do not deserve to stand under. A great swell of entitlement, and hatred, and cultivated victimhood. There was no indication, as the train rumbled into London, that anything unusual was happening. Usually, the arrival back is joyous.

This is the story of a human rights stitch-up. The purpose of this stitch-up is to prevent any meaningful scrutiny of the most far-reaching restriction of minority rights in our lifetime. It is the story of trans rights, or rather, if we're really accurate about it, the story of trans people's ability to exist in public space. But it is also something else.

Matthew Goodwin went to that there London the other day and what he found shook him to his core. You may know who Goodwin is. He is a kind of parable in political science, the lesson of which is that you should be careful how long you gaze into the abyss because the abyss gazes also into you. He is, in fact, a walking abyss, which now shuffles around the corridors of British politics as a warning to what might happen to other researchers who do not exercise proper caution.

The truth of the Marine Le Pen story is simple. She fucked around. She got found out. What did she actually do? You'd be hard pushed to find out, given that very few news outlets seem motivated to tell you. If you're really lucky, you'll get a brief mention of the court statements around paragraph 12, once all the populists got to have their say about how French democracy is being trampled over. So I'll tell you here, and I'll put it up top, above the digital fold, where it should be.

I sometimes like to fool myself that the worst has passed. It's reassuring, in a period where there's precious little reassurance to be found. I tell myself that we'll look back on these last few weeks, in the dead of winter, in the dark and the cold and the abject bloody horror, and wonder how we managed to keep hope alive before things improved. This week, for the first time, it was possible to feel a sense of optimism while still being at least vaguely rational.