WELL, it’s been a week of high drama. Not at TCW, where we always exercise restraint, but in the big bad world of the mainstream media. It started with Monday’s hyperbolic reporting of Ukraine’s ‘brilliantly audacious’ Operation Spiderweb. A third of Russia’s entire strategic bomber fleet eliminated in the space of a few hours, we were told. Really? Lt. Gen Riley had his doubts. ‘Was I interested in an article?’ he asked. The spectacular attack that wasn’t quite so spectacular, that Ukraine couldn’t even take credit for. We said it first on TCW.
More MSM excess was to follow. On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s now-deleted tweet of Trump’s ‘massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill […] abomination’ (referring to its estimated $2.4trillion impact on the national deficit) went viral. Elon couldn’t contain himself; Trump hit back. If you believe the Guardian, this best buddies’ fallout was something that ‘could have seismic political and economic consequences’.
Umm. What their hurled insults reminded me of was the Worldwide Wrestling bouts I laughed at with my sons when they were kids, ones that Donald Trump himself once took part in. A combat of the titans, the show that had to come.
But with sensible chaps like Mike Benz, standing in the wings and warning when their mudslinging had to stop, I guessed it would. Why risk ruining a fantastic alliance which brought everyone power, free speech and progress? Now, it seems I was right. A truce is on its way.
Excess and restraint. A book title from years ago – an anthropology monograph that I read as a student, at some point last week came back to mind. I looked it up. Yes, here it was: Excess and Restraint: Social Control among a New Guinea Mountain People, the work of one Ronald Berndt and his extraordinarily brave wife, with whom he ventured into the country’s Central Highlands in the early 1950s. Their study of excess – two chapters with the headings, ‘Sexuality and Aggression’ and ‘Cannibalism’ give you a clue as to the content – gave the word depravity a whole new cultural gloss. The depravity was sanctioned, you see; the ‘excess’ in the title, being all the natives’, and the restraint, the Berndt couple’s. No one else would otherwise have lived to tell the tale so dispassionately, a reviewer said at the time.
The trouble, I thought, is that murderous excess is sanctioned once again today, in our no-longer-so-enlightened society. Take the reactions to the premeditated murder of the Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a young, innocent and good Jewish couple, that Bernard Carpenter wrote about in these pages last week. Their brutal killer, Elias Rodriguez – who fired at least 21 rounds at the innocent Jewish couple, continued to fire after they fell to the ground, reloaded and shot Sarah at point-blank range when he noticed she was still alive and trying to crawl away, ‘execution-style’ – has been hailed a hero. Gen-Z TikTok influencer Guy Christensen, a student at Ohio State University, told his 3.4million followers that he did ‘not condemn the elimination of the Zionist officials who worked at the Israeli embassy last night’, urging them ‘to support Elias’s actions’, Bernard reported.
Endorsing murder of innocent people has become sanction free in the West. Take, too, the case of Luigi Mangione, who shot Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth. As Carpenter reported, tweeters responded with, ‘who cares if he did, he’s a hunk’. Just as with Dr Berndt’s New Guinea tribesman, it’s the absence of any social sanctions that allows such depraved excess to run full rein.
Perversely, sanctions that are imposed on us come where they are neither needed nor justified. Take that authoritarian, Sir Sadiq Khan: liberal on drugs and draconian on ULEZ. What’s more, don’t be taken in by his apparently aspirational Drugs Commission report recommendation to decriminalise possession in small amounts ‘to help police and ethnic minorities’ of a couple of weeks ago. It’s his way of making de facto, de jure; to let the police, who’d rather not face angry cannabis-addled ethnic minorities, off the hook entirely. Never minding the desperate Londoners of all colours and races on my ‘next door’ community newsletter who, again last week, told their tale of weed smoking at bottom of social housing stairs, outside their front doors, at the corners of their street; of smoke and smell welling up into their flats and pervading the air their children have to breathe; of local drug users and gangs they have to negotiate daily. Does Khan care about this excess? No.
Starmer is the same. No control where it’s needed (immigration) but plenty where it’s not. Labour, I read on Friday, is ‘exploring’ compulsory ID cards. On what grounds? You couldn’t make it up – to curb (the excessive) illegal immigration.
Excess, rather than restraint, also marks the euthanasia and abortion ‘reforms’ that godforsaken MPs are pushing. We stand at a moral crossroads, was a message that dropped in to my in-tray more than once last week. Kim Leadbeater’s terrifying Assisted Suicide Bill is due to get its final vote next Friday. You can still play your part.
I haven’t checked the names, but my guess is that it will be several of the same MPs who make up the 60-odd group, led by Tonia Antoniazzi, who’ve managed to get an amendment into the Crime and Policing Bill that would allow abortion on demand right up to birth. Yes, you read that right – as excessive and depraved as anything the New Guinea Highlanders got up to. We already have some of the most permissive abortion laws in the world, which resulted, in 2022, in a staggering 251,377 abortions in England and Wales, the latest year recorded and the highest yet. In a country where contraception is freely available!
Never mind that most Brits think 24 weeks is already too late (the same age a baby is deemed viable) and that there is no public appetite for extending the time limit. Reading about these MPs made me feel sick, even sicker to find a ‘conservative’ amongst them. Conservative, she is not.
I am, however. Too conservative, in fact, as I learnt from my colleague and dissenter-in-arms, Professor Norman Fenton. On Dan Wootton’s Outspoken show on Thursday, discussing inter alia Zia Yusuf’s resignation as Chair of Reform UK, he was asked: ‘Who do you think should be Chair now?’
‘Kathy Gyngell,’ Norman volunteered.
‘Oh no,’ said Dan. ‘She’s too conservative for Reform.’
Am I? Probably!
