Dark, ugly places

Owen Jones and his ilk are everything they accuse you of being

Owen Jones has decided we’re ‘headed to a very dark, ugly place’. This appears to be because The Sun published an article claiming Lucy Connolly (who was imprisoned for almost a year because of a deleted tweet) was a victim of two tier justice—which she probably was.

To put it lightly, lectures about morality, intolerance, the media, and frankly almost everything else lack weight when coming from Jones and his fellow travellers.

Where to begin?

How about with the fact that this guy is one of the best known contributors to Novara Media, a South Parkian uber-woke publication, some of whose contributing editors and reporters responded to the news that a Muslim-supremacist death cult had carried out a massive, deadly Jew-hunt on Oct 7 2023 by calling it a ‘day of celebration’. And releasing a podcast suggesting that orgy of mass murder was a ‘strike back’ for ‘freedom and dignity’. And tweeting ‘so guys, do we support the right of an occupied people to fight an occupier or not’? I could go on. Tell us again about how the media is leading us to a dark place Owen.

Things that are outrageous in Woke Land: micro-aggressions, words, whiteness. Things that are not outrageous: Islamic death squads burning entire Jewish families to death, babies being taken as hostages, hundreds of unarmed young people being executed at a music festival.

Would undemocratic violence be a characteristic of the ‘dark, ugly place’ we’re headed towards? I’m sure we can all agree that would be awfu…oh wait. Here’s Jones describing a criminal assault on Nigel Farage, a British politician he disagrees with, as ‘art’.

Nothing says ‘tolerance’ like a few anti-democratic assaults.

Jones has spent years seeking to shame and vilify people through guilt by association and for who they’ve given a ‘platform’ to. He’s berated Douglas Murray, for example, because Viktor Orbán reads his books. Yet he himself campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn, who invited Hamas to parliament, called them ‘friends’, and described them as being ‘dedicated [to]…long-term peace and social justice and political justice’. He’s also attacked news outlets for daring to allow right-wing figures he disagrees with on their shows, saying they deserve ‘brutal’ judgment for doing so. Interesting. Let’s check out who he’s had on his show recently…

In recent times Jones has begun seeking to rebrand himself as a champion of free expression. As one journalist recently put it, ‘this has understandably raised a few eyebrows. After all, most of us have lost count of the times he has dismissed ‘cancel culture’ as a pernicious right-wing myth (Jones claims that the ‘cancelled’ are just upset at being criticised, despite the long and ever-expanding list of people who have lost their livelihoods for expressing their views).’

In 2020, according to the Telegraph, he tried to get an Oxford employee sacked over a tweet he posted. Also around that time, when big tech censorship of conservative accounts was at its absolute peak and the BLM-style racial grievance narrative was at fever pitch, here’s what he had to say:

I could go on and on. The inversion here is almost comical. Jones and his ilk are the most ruthless, droid-like enforcers of elite progressive dogma. They’ve built careers attempting to shame and hector any dissenters against that groupthink into submission.

They rail against the ‘media elites’ but they are the media elites, the red guard of woke authoritarian idiocy (see a viral Twitter thread I wrote on that here).

This isn’t just about one man, he’s an avatar for a broader movement whose advocates rage against supposed ‘injustice’ and ‘racism’ and ‘bigotry’ in the largely tolerant West while running cover for some of the most barbarous regimes and worldviews on the planet.

No doubt there are certain unpleasant characters on the right. But these leftists lack any moral authority to lecture the rest of us ever again. Indeed, widespread revulsion at their behaviour is a key driver of the tensions we see today.

They should be laughed out of public life.

This is an edited version of a Substack note I published yesterday.

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