I Warned You This Would Happen

My entire public career since 2016 has been predicated on describing what anyone could see with their own eyes: the Left was going off the deep end. The first and most obvious sign of this was the response to the Brexit vote here in Britain and the election of President Trump in the United States. As a Remain voter and Trump skeptic myself, I could not believe what I was seeing.

I devoured Ayn Rand’s writings in my youth and, while much of my thinking has evolved significantly since, one quote stayed with me: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” In other words, if events you cannot believe keep happening, you are missing something. Because of this, even as a default liberal in 2016, I had one choice and one choice only: to ask what I was missing and seek information outside my bubble. This, incidentally, was the genesis of TRIGGERnometry.

But that is not what my soon-to-be-former friends on the Left did. Instead, they buried their heads even deeper into the sand, something, as I have explained before, even ostriches are not stupid enough to do. While Steve Bannon, who orchestrated Trump’s first electoral success, and Nigel Farage, the driving force behind Brexit, went from podcast to podcast and TV show to TV show to explain exactly how they had done it, the media and political Left kept screaming about Russian interference, fascism, and stupid, racist voters.

And, in many ways, this seemed to work. Destroying people’s careers, ruining their lives and keeping them quiet through fear of being next kept the lid from flying off the pressure cooker. Peaking during the summer of BLM in 2020—when people were fired for questioning the idea of “white privilege” and failing to post black squares on social media—cancel culture was an effective tool used by the Left to retain cultural hegemony and prevent political opponents from winning. Hard as it is to believe now, there was a time when ALL social media companies enforced woke orthodoxy and censored dissent. Feminists like Meghan Murphy were banned from Twitter for saying men can’t become women. Suggesting that COVID was likely to have originated in a Chinese laboratory - now the consensus view of the CIA, FBI, prominent scientists and a wide range of reputable organisations - resulted in an instant and coordinated ban across social media. These platforms even colluded with mainstream media outlets to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was blatant and undeniable election interference.

Throughout this period, those of us on the Left who reluctantly voiced opposition to this behaviour—on the basis that it contradicted every principle the Left had stood for our entire lives, namely belief in freedom of speech, science, the pursuit of truth, skepticism of big pharma, opposition to racial discrimination, free and fair elections and so on—were told that we were not, in fact, on the Left. On the contrary, we were now “right wing” and eventually even “far right” as this cartoon from my friend Colin Wright illustrates:

These smears were based on a number of things. But, chief among them, was a complete failure of imagination. Hard as it may be for those of us with a functioning brain to understand, many on the Left genuinely thought that they would get away with this. One defining feature of wokeness is an unshakable belief in your own virtue and righteousness, which blinds you to the possibility you may be wrong or, at the very least, strategically misguided. There is, of course, a version of this on the Right, but more on that later.

Suffice it to say that the Left thought they could censor, smear and cancel their way to a permanent dominance of media, entertainment, education and, ultimately, political power. It was therefore irrelevant whether their behaviour violated their own principles. Like dictators who have been in charge too long who somehow combine the sense of their own invulnerability with a paranoid fear of criticism and challenge. The result: an inability to change course based on real-world feedback, paired with an increasingly brutal apparatus for suppressing dissent.

Drunk on power, they refused to listen to those of us who kept warning them with an obvious and simple message: “The weapons you are using today will be used against you”.

And sure enough, the supremacy the Left enjoyed was never going to last. Many dislike what Twitter has become since Elon Musk’s takeover. I share some of these concerns, but it is undeniable that his purchase of that platform just 3 years ago changed everything. The reason it did is best summarised by Bret Weinstein who coined the phrase “Zero is a special number”: the emergence of just one censorship-free platform rendered censorship on other platforms pointless and even dangerous to their business. Why ban something from Facebook when everyone will just access it on a competitor platform?

The result has been an acceleration of two connected processes: the rise of new media and the fall of legacy media, culminating in the election of President Trump in 2024. Wokeness was comprehensively defeated at the ballot box, the owners of the online platforms all turned up to kiss the ring at the Trump inauguration, and the cultural balance of power shifted massively to the Right.

While I was less enthusiastic about this outcome than many of my actually-right-wing friends, I was nonetheless relieved. The lunacy of open borders, blatant racial and sex-based discrimination called DEI, the legalisation of crime, the increasingly counterproductive egging on of Ukraine without sufficient practical support, the mutilation of children in the name of trans ideology and the generally stench of decline had to end.

Since Trump’s election, several major political battles have been fought, but so far the Right has mostly resisted the urge to take vengeance on the Left at scale. Yes, individual opponents like Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton had their Secret Service protection and security clearances withdrawn. Yes, the Department of Justice launched criminal probes into law firms with ties to Clinton and George Soros. But the Right has not engaged in systematic cancel culture which targets ordinary people, comedians and hostile media organisations.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, however, appears to be the excuse some on the Right were waiting for. The mood is best summed up by Gavin McInnes, who at least deserves credit for his honesty, if not for the utter naked vengefulness of his position. Responding to Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air for accidentally or deliberately lying about the killer of Charlie Kirk being a “MAGA” guy, he said:

“What we did in cancelling Jimmy Kimmel is hypocritical. We talk about ‘free speech’ and then when someone says something we don’t like we cancel them. It’s not consistent with our values. AND I DON’T GIVE A FUCK. FUCK YOU. YOU KICKED ME IN THE BALLS, I GOUGE OUT YOUR FUCKING EYES”.

Some of my right-leaning readers will be tempted at this point to accuse me of “defending the Left” or suggesting that there is an exact equivalence between the Left and Right on this issue. Let me clarify: