Anthony McIntyre ☠ Today's weather is horrible.
It will not deter Drogheda Stands With Palestine later this morning from shivering in solidarity with the besieged of Gaza. Besides, as it is Ireland we are advised not to complain about the weather as it will change in fifteen minutes anyway. This is a country where climate change takes place four times a day.
As wet and windy as it has been, the storm we have possesses nothing of the strength of the hurricane that is currently pounding the BBC whose head of news and director general both resigned this week. Jonathan Cook, if we may borrow the analogy, in a recent weather report, observed that:
The BBC’s now in a death loop: it grows ever more craven to the billionaires, shifting the political centre of gravity further rightwards, even as the billionaire-owned media claim it’s too ‘leftwing’.
The top flight departures came in the wake of a Daily Telegraph exposé which revealed the 2021 BBC manipulation of camera footage for the purposes of presenting Donald Trump in a negative light. Seriously, if they had left the man now being ridiculed as Donica Lewinsky to his own devices, he would have generated more negative publicity than a child protection conference for rapist reverends.
That the axe fell their way was not down to the crime of manufactured news but because of the powerful figure it was manufactured against. Again, let Jonathan Cook explain:
The reason heads have rolled at the BBC this time are not because it made a journalistic blunder – it makes them all the time. It is because the corporation foolishly offered an open goal to the billionaire right and its media outlets.
If anyone is falling for the manufactured “furore” over Panorama’s latest journalistic gaffe, there are examples of far graver malpractice by Panorama – especially on issues related to Israel and Palestine. These editorial crimes have barely caused a ripple, even after they were exposed.
Why? Because the billionaires love Israel and hate its critics. Israel is their vision of the future: the model of a fortress state in which they believe they can protect themselves from the people whose lives they are destroying around the globe.
When, in May this year, Ramita Navi turned up uninvited to a meeting of BBC executives, they were discombobulated. As explained in the Observer:
They had not invited her because, as it turned out, the point of the meeting was to set her up as the fall guy.
Navi had been one of the executive directors of the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. It was a forensic investigation into the Israeli destruction of the Gazan health system. By the time she arrived as an uninvited guest at the meeting the documentary had been delayed for the sixth time. In her words:
the BBC was anxious because it had another Gaza film on its hands: one showing that doctors, medics and hospitals were being targeted and killed by Israel, made by a production company working hand in glove with two of its own journalists . . . An executive called and told us that those at the top of BBC News were ‘very jumpy and paranoid about Gaza’
The documentary was important because, again to cite Navi:
The BBC’s coverage was not showing what people could see on their phones: the killing of children, the targeting of hospitals, the erasing of entire families.
Those in leadership at the BBC trusted neither Amnesty International or The United Nations. Israel was its preferred source for information. As one BBC producer put it: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”
The obstacles encountered by Ramita Navi are emblematic of the malaise of structural and ideological bias that permeates the culture of BBC management.
In a damning report by the Centre For Media Monitoring, the BBC found itself taking serious criticism for its pro-Israel bias. The report's authors pointed out that:
In a damning report by the Centre For Media Monitoring, the BBC found itself taking serious criticism for its pro-Israel bias. The report's authors pointed out that:
Across the BBC’s coverage, a clear dynamic has emerged: the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives. The data shows that the BBC has consistently failed to report Israel’s war on Gaza with required impartiality.
Of course, the Labour government led by Der Starmer wants no such thing as impartiality or accuracy in reporting the genocide. Culture Secretary, Lousy Liza Nandy, responding in July to the broadcasting of another documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, whined that:
I have been very clear that people must be held accountable for the decisions that were taken . . .I have asked the question to the board [of the BBC]. Why has nobody been fired?
Hopefully that reference to accountability comes back to haunt her and Der Starmer for their government's role in facilitating and enabling genocide. To conclude with Jonathan Cook:
The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.
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| ⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre. |
What was it he used as a sales pitch?
Easter's not just about the Easter Rising, its about Easter Eggs.
Now he's trying to sell this one about 'a First Minister For All.'
It's just a lame excuse for becoming what Sinn Féin have become. For the wasted lives of brave IRA volunteers and civilians.
How can you possibly convince people, who's culture is based entirely on the hatred of everything Irish, and who constantly refuse to budge an inch from that position, to accept Irish Unification by taking part in everything which is repugnant about British imperialism?
These betrayals of principle merely feeds their desire to see an end to any aspiration to Irish Unity and more importantly the defeat of Irish Republicanism.
"Never a country gained her freedom.
When she sued on bended knee. - Lady Jane Wilde.
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Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman. Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie |
Frankie Quinn ★ Kearney alluded to everyone being permitted to commemorate their dead.
While this, of course, is true, there is a distinct difference between a volunteer of the Irish Republican Army and soldiers of the British imperialist forces who are paid killers and are employed by governments to terrorise, brutalise, maim and murder the occupied population of their invaded target country, all in the interests of their imperialist conquests.
A lot of the working-class lads and lassies who join this barbaric army are of course unaware of this fact. Hence the youthful age at which one can join the British army - 18 years old. The conduct of British imperialist forces is widely held as the worst in history, the world over; perhaps only surpassed by the cowardly murderers and rapists of the monstrous IDF.
In 1920, the British Empire ruled over a quarter of the world – 26 percent of it, with a population of over 449 million people. Their bloodthirsty rule by all manner of murderous methods and barbarism is well documented and even as early as last year, here in Ireland, they were found guilty of the torture of Irish republicans, namely the hooded men. Additionally, there are still political prisoners being held in Irish prisons; this is, in effect, internment without trial.
Even more far-reaching draconian laws are being introduced to crush any intention of rebellion. It is not a matter of agreeing with some of the strategies these people adopt, but the principal of states undermining, breaking and manipulating the law to serve their own warped purpose. When those who make the law, break the law, then there is no law.
So, with that said, we return to the insult of comparison of our resistance fighters, who SF placed in the same category, next to hired killers and mercenaries. By far and away, most Irish republican freedom fighters, who were involved with different organisations, were decent, normal people placed in an abnormal situation, against their will.
They found themselves involved in a revolutionary movement, in resisting the occupation and invasion of their country by brutal foreign forces in a reign of terror. These were ordinary working-class people, men and women trying to survive and etch out a living for themselves and their families. This, in itself, was extremely difficult amidst a unionist dominated country, deliberately created by its invasion and partitioning by the British, at the point of a gun, to control their own imperialist interests, and to this day, still maintained at the point of a gun.
The soldiers and volunteers of the Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army were of the people, for the people. Supported and covered by the people. They were volunteers - no wage, no financial gain involved. When a person became a member of the movement, as a volunteer, they were told there was only three ways this could end; imprisonment, death, or life on the run, and all three for some.
This is about dignity, pride and a thirst for freedom, sovereignty and a 32-county socialist republic. We were not even given the dignity by the oppressor to bury our dead - comrades who gave their lives so we, the Irish people, might be free and independent, running our own affairs without British interference.
So, as a comrade of mine pointed out the other day, under the hustle and bustle of the Remembrance Day rubbish, the Shinners slipped in another conformist betrayal by attempting to lump our fallen resistance fighters into the same category as British mercenaries and paid killers.
Our volunteer soldiers invaded no one’s country and stole no one’s land; they fought for a free and independent socialist republic. This, to benefit all the people of Ireland. And, of course, everyone can commemorate their dead. But, for a once revolutionary party to give full military honours to our oppressor and the most brutal imperialist forces in the world is totally wrong and we will not accept it.
We Remember Our Fallen Resistance Fighters With Dignity And Pride.
⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.
Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.
Before We Conform, Or Condemn, Let Us At Least Be Curious
♜One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it - Albert Camus♞
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| Photo: Harvard University |
Mention the term Cancel Culture and you are likely to elicit as many shrieks and howls as saying any of the things that might get you cancelled. There are topics you cannot broach, words that cannot be said, regardless of context, and opinions that may not be expressed. But even saying that Cancel Culture exists, may in a very Orwellian sense get you cancelled. Now under Trump new life has been breathed into yet another wave of this reactionary phenomenon. This time round, the assault on freedom of speech comes mainly from the Right. So, I was taken by Greg Lukianoff’s latest book with Rikki Schlott The Cancelling of the American Mind, which looked at Cancel Culture before Trump and was published prior to his second term. The comparisons and contrasts are illustrative. I don’t intend to do a review of the book as such, though it is well worth reading, but rather to use the book on the pre-Trump period to talk about the current assault on freedom of speech. It will upset many liberals, who see themselves as holier than thou and draw no parallels between their own attempts to police thought and the Trump offensive.
The petri dish in which Cancel Culture was cultivated and came to the fore acquiring an immediacy unparalleled in the history of censorship and thought control was social media. It is a relatively new medium that the state has sought to control through limiting access to, or restricting what can be said by whom and about what. This is not new, as new media forms arise governments have tried to ban them or control them. It may seem laughable now, but as Lukianoff points out:
In 1538, Henry VIII desperately attempted to put the printing press genie back in the bottle by requiring a crown- approved license to operate a printing press in England. But the proliferation of ideas proved impossible to contain.(1)
But the printing press is slow and cumbersome, even now. It takes a long time for a book to travel the world. However:
There are no peer reviewers on social media, no editorial committees. The decision as to whether a person is as odious and worthy of our opprobrium as Harvey Weinstein is taken in seconds, often by people with little experience in the matter and frequently behind anonymous accounts. It takes seconds, little skill, no thought and no consequences to edit a video clip, a tweet or reply on social media and ruin someone’s life. Lukianoff gives many examples. Who would have thought that a young woman who advocated in favour of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd by the police found herself cancelled over a three second video clip she had posted years before at the mature, ripe old age of fifteen? But that is exactly what happened to Mimi Groves. She wasn’t a right winger, she wasn’t opposed to the BLM, she did something stupid. When she got her learner’s driving licence she sent a private snap chat video clip of herself behind the wheel, to a friend saying “I can drive niggas”.[3] This is a movement of virtue signallers, there is no way back for those who have sinned and the new bishops of the Spanish Inquisition can be anyone with access to a keyboard. It also says a lot about the nature of virtue signallers, they have no intention of changing society. In the Groves case it was more important to embarrass her than it was to build a movement against police brutality.
Many found themselves cancelled for joking or commenting negatively on a variety of issues. Now those who commented or joked about Charlie Kirk’s murder find themselves cancelled, often for very unremarkable statements. He was a vile, thoroughly loathsome individual, and such a description of him could get you cancelled. Killing him solved nothing, but I feel no sorrow at his passing given his own lack of compassion for murder victims. But Trump has now taken the Cancel Culture rule book and decided to enforce it through state actions and not just peer pressure. Suddenly, the liberals find themselves on the backfoot. What can they say? If this was ok before, why not now?
Before Trump there were also institutional measures taken against various people, many of whom lost scholarships, jobs etc. Years of such moves left the Palestinian solidarity movement vulnerable. It was accused of hate speech and the same tactics employed by liberal keyboard warriors and the boards of universities were now rolled out with a vengeance, though a lot of this was done before Trump. In the waning days of Biden’s decrepit rule, he and Holocaust Harris lashed out at anti-Zionists and universities clamped down on protesters.
This is not limited to the US of course. British universities, many of them so woke, they barely get to sleep ever were to the fore in clamping down on free speech. Two years after the genocide in Gaza began it was revealed that British universities had agreed to monitor student chat groups and social media postings on behalf of arms companies, some of them complicit in the genocide. Jo Grady, the Secretary General of the University and College Union condemned the universities[4] but saw no contradiction between that and her support for the hounding of gender critical feminists. One of the wokest universities is Edinburgh University. It had in the past suppressed gender critical views, going as far as to halt the showing of the film Adult Human Female. The film showing eventually went ahead after two attempts. Jo Grady’s union was to the fore in trying to ban the film. They demanded it be banned and both the university and the union have been sued by two academics on this precise point.[5] It was virtue signalling of the highest degree. The students relied on their own muscle but also that of the university, a university which according to Francesca Albanese is one of the most financially entangled in complicity with the genocide in Gaza. So much so, the students walked out of their own graduation ceremonies in protest.[6] Some may well have been involved in the attempts to suppress the film showing also. Cancel Culture is not about struggle or protest, and it is certainly not about debate. It is about virtue signalling and cosying up to the powerful to suppress others. People complicit in genocide are apparently fair allies for enforcing speech codes etc. It never occurs to the virtuous that this will come back to bite them.
DEI
Universities are thought of as hallowed halls of free speech and intellectual inquiry. They are not. Whether they ever were and to what extent is a matter for another day. Lukianoff gives us some surprising statistics on universities in the US. Some of the top US universities are heavily tilted towards the Democrats and at the same time have a low ranking in terms of freedom of speech. In general, the proportion of Democrats to Republicans is 8.5 to one. However, at Harvard the proportion of Democrats to Republicans in a number of faculties (anthropology-sociology, biology, chemistry, economics, English, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology) is a massive eighty to one.[7] FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) which is headed up by Lukianoff, carried out a survey of free speech at universities and ranked Harvard 170 out of 203 with a score of 34.52 describing its record as below average. The worst was Columbia University, which came in at 203, scoring 9.9 and rated as abysmal.[8] The students and liberals who were part of Cancel Culture there, got a rude awakening when it cracked down on the widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Only one of the top US universities, Chicago, had a good speech climate. Not surprisingly, a majority of professors now self-censor in their classes, mindful of what spoilt brats on whom a university education is wasted might say of them. In comparison, only 9% said they did this during the McCarthy period.[9]
Trump attacked the universities with false arguments about antisemitism, being supposedly left-wing and went on the rampage against DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives. Part of this was the Charlie Kirk narrative that ALL blacks and Latinos and other minorities get their jobs despite not being qualified for them. There is no doubt that as part of his assault on DEI, Trump would prefer a world in which non-whites were just janitors. If he could, he would probably have Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio cleaning toilets and waiting upon him, rather than formulating right-wing policy. There are debates amongst black activists about the true value and impact of positive discrimination, but that is not what Trump is about, he is about racism. With positive discrimination, the holder of the job must be and is always qualified for the post. There are no pilots (Kirk’s example) who have not passed all the exams, or can barely ride a bicycle.
However, there is an element of DEI that gets less exposure and it is loyalty tests. Trump has implemented loyalty pledges across the board in new hirings.[10] He has now extended that to universities, who are asked to sign pledges which would see major changes to how the universities function, including their hiring process and caps on foreign student enrolment, amongst other things, in exchange for greater access to federal funds.[11] It is a completely reactionary proposal, though not any more so than what it replaces.
In this he is replicating previous practice at leading universities were academics and potential PhD students had to sign a DEI statement in which they had to explain what they had done to improve diversity in their own area of expertise and this was a key element in the employment process. So, the lecturer in nuclear physics or cardiology had to prove how politically correct they were. What was meant by diversity was deeply troubling. Social class was not considered important, nor was diversity in opinions. The purpose of these statements was political. As Lukianoff points out:
Faculty staff are vetted, just like Trump also does. People’s thoughts and speech are policed and there are real consequences to it. Sixty tenured professors have been fired for speech that “is – or in public settings would be – protected by the First Amendment”[13] with 2/3 of those sackings taking place since 2015. Trump will also sack professors for their speech. People have lost jobs in the US for failing to lick the unlamented deceased Charlie Kirk’s jackboots. Universities across the US have sacked staff and suspended students, one for describing Kirk as a reimagined Klan member. A controversial, though in my opinion a wholly accurate description.[14] Liberals are again on the backfoot, what they argued for over many years is now being used against them.
The cancelling of authors is well documented. There is no real need to go into detail here, though it is dealt with in Lukianoff’s text. We are all overly familiar now with the attempts to cancel JK Rowling over her comments on trans, the one issue you will never be forgiven for, ever. She was however, too big to cancel. Even liberal capitalists smell a dollar, no matter how many metres (or yards) away. Many other authors have not been so lucky. But cancel culture does exist in the publishing world. It is rife. That Rowling and others like Irish author John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas have survived and prospered does not mean they weren’t cancelled. It is as Lukianoff says:
Though there is one example from the publishing world worth looking at and it is that of Kosoko Jackson a misogynist who believed that women shouldn’t profit from gay men’s stories i.e. write about them professionally. He made his living as what is termed a Sensitivity Reader.[16] You have to give it to them, not even Goebbels was that imaginative when it came to spinning censorship. Could you imagine the Nazis having the brass neck to say their sensitivity readers have deemed the text to be un-Aryan? Jackson came a cropper when his own novel failed to meet the ridiculous tests he set for others. A certain sense of schadenfreude came over me whilst reading about him. I know that what happened to him is a as bad as the tripe and rubbish he heaped on others. But he was hoisted by his own petard.
Cancel Culture has always been reactionary; there are no good examples of it. It is not used against people who have actually committed crimes such as incitement to violence, hatred etc. It is used to stifle opinions that are not mainstream. It is also an industry in itself, with huge fortunes being made by the gatekeepers, the modern censors and witchfinder generals. Lukianoff is a liberal, his co-author is right of centre and the term Left is used throughout the book to describe liberals and more radical voices. Only in the US could the Democratic Party be described as left-wing. It is not. It is a right-wing party. It has led the US through many an imperialist war, coup d’etat, bombing and attacks on the living conditions of US workers to benefit Wall Street. Clinton, Obama, Bernie Sanders and AOC are not the Left. The Left are the socialists, those who believe in overthrowing capitalism, not those who think it is fine and some tinkering about the edges and slick PR is what is required.
And yet the Left has been to the fore in backing the liberal Cancel Culture and will now spout out contradictory nonsense about Trump’s version of it. Cancel Culture always had its liberal and its conservative wings. The Left should have said from the word go: a plague on all your houses. I would like to think that Trump’s offensive using similar language and tactics to the liberals might awaken them, but the woke are still profoundly slumbering at the wheel. Although Lukianoff is a liberal, his book should be a wakeup call to them. I couldn’t and didn’t even try to do justice to it here. But to quote Bertold Brecht, a man who would be cancelled were he alive today, “Reach for the book, it is a weapon.” Unfortunately, whole swathes of the Left don’t read anymore. They get their politics from Tik Tok and other social media platforms and whatever the middle-class mob are currently irked about before going back to work at mammy and daddy’s company. Lukianoff puts them all to shame in pointing out the reactionary and self-defeating nature of Cancel Culture.
References
[1] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) The Canceling of the American Mind. New York. Simon & Schuster. para 5.45
[2] Ibíd., para 5.50
[3] Ibíd., para 26.3 to 26.17
[4] The Guardian (08/10/20205) UK universities offered to monitor students’ social media for arms firms, emails show. Daniel Boffey & Aaron Walawalkar.
[5] The Scottish Daily Express (03/04/2025) Protests at Edinburgh Uni gender-critical film screening were designed to ‘create hostile environment’. H. William, PA & B. Borland.
[6] The Student News (06/07/2025) UoE shamed by UN for Gaza complicity as graduates protest. Dom Croot.
[7] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.34
[8] Ibíd., Apendix II
[9] Ibíd., para 12.38. Lukianoff deals with all of this in the book, however, greater detail is freely available from FIRE’s site.
[10] LA Times (25/01/2025) Loyalty tests and MAGA checks: Inside the Trump White House’s intense screening of job-seekers. Matthew Lee et al.
[11] PBS (02/10/2025) Trump asks 9 colleges to commit to his political agenda for better Access to federal money.
[12] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.7
[13] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.43
[14] University Herald (20/09/2025) Universities Fire Staff Over Posts on Charlie Kirk’s Assassination. Chris John.
[15] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 34.11
[16] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 27.58 to 27.64
Social media opens every institution, every individual, and every idea to the scrutiny of hundreds of millions of eyes. That makes them all vulnerable to being torn down. And it’s not always a bad thing. There are some institutions, ideas, and even people who need to be torn down—from Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt to odious sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein.[2]
There are no peer reviewers on social media, no editorial committees. The decision as to whether a person is as odious and worthy of our opprobrium as Harvey Weinstein is taken in seconds, often by people with little experience in the matter and frequently behind anonymous accounts. It takes seconds, little skill, no thought and no consequences to edit a video clip, a tweet or reply on social media and ruin someone’s life. Lukianoff gives many examples. Who would have thought that a young woman who advocated in favour of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd by the police found herself cancelled over a three second video clip she had posted years before at the mature, ripe old age of fifteen? But that is exactly what happened to Mimi Groves. She wasn’t a right winger, she wasn’t opposed to the BLM, she did something stupid. When she got her learner’s driving licence she sent a private snap chat video clip of herself behind the wheel, to a friend saying “I can drive niggas”.[3] This is a movement of virtue signallers, there is no way back for those who have sinned and the new bishops of the Spanish Inquisition can be anyone with access to a keyboard. It also says a lot about the nature of virtue signallers, they have no intention of changing society. In the Groves case it was more important to embarrass her than it was to build a movement against police brutality.
Many found themselves cancelled for joking or commenting negatively on a variety of issues. Now those who commented or joked about Charlie Kirk’s murder find themselves cancelled, often for very unremarkable statements. He was a vile, thoroughly loathsome individual, and such a description of him could get you cancelled. Killing him solved nothing, but I feel no sorrow at his passing given his own lack of compassion for murder victims. But Trump has now taken the Cancel Culture rule book and decided to enforce it through state actions and not just peer pressure. Suddenly, the liberals find themselves on the backfoot. What can they say? If this was ok before, why not now?
Before Trump there were also institutional measures taken against various people, many of whom lost scholarships, jobs etc. Years of such moves left the Palestinian solidarity movement vulnerable. It was accused of hate speech and the same tactics employed by liberal keyboard warriors and the boards of universities were now rolled out with a vengeance, though a lot of this was done before Trump. In the waning days of Biden’s decrepit rule, he and Holocaust Harris lashed out at anti-Zionists and universities clamped down on protesters.
This is not limited to the US of course. British universities, many of them so woke, they barely get to sleep ever were to the fore in clamping down on free speech. Two years after the genocide in Gaza began it was revealed that British universities had agreed to monitor student chat groups and social media postings on behalf of arms companies, some of them complicit in the genocide. Jo Grady, the Secretary General of the University and College Union condemned the universities[4] but saw no contradiction between that and her support for the hounding of gender critical feminists. One of the wokest universities is Edinburgh University. It had in the past suppressed gender critical views, going as far as to halt the showing of the film Adult Human Female. The film showing eventually went ahead after two attempts. Jo Grady’s union was to the fore in trying to ban the film. They demanded it be banned and both the university and the union have been sued by two academics on this precise point.[5] It was virtue signalling of the highest degree. The students relied on their own muscle but also that of the university, a university which according to Francesca Albanese is one of the most financially entangled in complicity with the genocide in Gaza. So much so, the students walked out of their own graduation ceremonies in protest.[6] Some may well have been involved in the attempts to suppress the film showing also. Cancel Culture is not about struggle or protest, and it is certainly not about debate. It is about virtue signalling and cosying up to the powerful to suppress others. People complicit in genocide are apparently fair allies for enforcing speech codes etc. It never occurs to the virtuous that this will come back to bite them.
DEI
Universities are thought of as hallowed halls of free speech and intellectual inquiry. They are not. Whether they ever were and to what extent is a matter for another day. Lukianoff gives us some surprising statistics on universities in the US. Some of the top US universities are heavily tilted towards the Democrats and at the same time have a low ranking in terms of freedom of speech. In general, the proportion of Democrats to Republicans is 8.5 to one. However, at Harvard the proportion of Democrats to Republicans in a number of faculties (anthropology-sociology, biology, chemistry, economics, English, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology) is a massive eighty to one.[7] FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) which is headed up by Lukianoff, carried out a survey of free speech at universities and ranked Harvard 170 out of 203 with a score of 34.52 describing its record as below average. The worst was Columbia University, which came in at 203, scoring 9.9 and rated as abysmal.[8] The students and liberals who were part of Cancel Culture there, got a rude awakening when it cracked down on the widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Only one of the top US universities, Chicago, had a good speech climate. Not surprisingly, a majority of professors now self-censor in their classes, mindful of what spoilt brats on whom a university education is wasted might say of them. In comparison, only 9% said they did this during the McCarthy period.[9]
Trump attacked the universities with false arguments about antisemitism, being supposedly left-wing and went on the rampage against DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives. Part of this was the Charlie Kirk narrative that ALL blacks and Latinos and other minorities get their jobs despite not being qualified for them. There is no doubt that as part of his assault on DEI, Trump would prefer a world in which non-whites were just janitors. If he could, he would probably have Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio cleaning toilets and waiting upon him, rather than formulating right-wing policy. There are debates amongst black activists about the true value and impact of positive discrimination, but that is not what Trump is about, he is about racism. With positive discrimination, the holder of the job must be and is always qualified for the post. There are no pilots (Kirk’s example) who have not passed all the exams, or can barely ride a bicycle.
However, there is an element of DEI that gets less exposure and it is loyalty tests. Trump has implemented loyalty pledges across the board in new hirings.[10] He has now extended that to universities, who are asked to sign pledges which would see major changes to how the universities function, including their hiring process and caps on foreign student enrolment, amongst other things, in exchange for greater access to federal funds.[11] It is a completely reactionary proposal, though not any more so than what it replaces.
In this he is replicating previous practice at leading universities were academics and potential PhD students had to sign a DEI statement in which they had to explain what they had done to improve diversity in their own area of expertise and this was a key element in the employment process. So, the lecturer in nuclear physics or cardiology had to prove how politically correct they were. What was meant by diversity was deeply troubling. Social class was not considered important, nor was diversity in opinions. The purpose of these statements was political. As Lukianoff points out:
Even if you completely agree with the importance of DEI, there really isn’t any reason to ask a potential physics professor to discuss their prior, past, and future “intellectual commitments” to “social justice”… other than to test their political outlook. Its purpose is obvious, and professors themselves know it.[12]
Faculty staff are vetted, just like Trump also does. People’s thoughts and speech are policed and there are real consequences to it. Sixty tenured professors have been fired for speech that “is – or in public settings would be – protected by the First Amendment”[13] with 2/3 of those sackings taking place since 2015. Trump will also sack professors for their speech. People have lost jobs in the US for failing to lick the unlamented deceased Charlie Kirk’s jackboots. Universities across the US have sacked staff and suspended students, one for describing Kirk as a reimagined Klan member. A controversial, though in my opinion a wholly accurate description.[14] Liberals are again on the backfoot, what they argued for over many years is now being used against them.
The cancelling of authors is well documented. There is no real need to go into detail here, though it is dealt with in Lukianoff’s text. We are all overly familiar now with the attempts to cancel JK Rowling over her comments on trans, the one issue you will never be forgiven for, ever. She was however, too big to cancel. Even liberal capitalists smell a dollar, no matter how many metres (or yards) away. Many other authors have not been so lucky. But cancel culture does exist in the publishing world. It is rife. That Rowling and others like Irish author John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas have survived and prospered does not mean they weren’t cancelled. It is as Lukianoff says:
Cancel Culture skeptics seem to think that someone isn’t truly canceled unless they’re completely obliterated forevermore. By this same logic, did the estimated 200 people accused of witchcraft in Salem have nothing to complain about because only about 10 percent of them were executed?[15]
Though there is one example from the publishing world worth looking at and it is that of Kosoko Jackson a misogynist who believed that women shouldn’t profit from gay men’s stories i.e. write about them professionally. He made his living as what is termed a Sensitivity Reader.[16] You have to give it to them, not even Goebbels was that imaginative when it came to spinning censorship. Could you imagine the Nazis having the brass neck to say their sensitivity readers have deemed the text to be un-Aryan? Jackson came a cropper when his own novel failed to meet the ridiculous tests he set for others. A certain sense of schadenfreude came over me whilst reading about him. I know that what happened to him is a as bad as the tripe and rubbish he heaped on others. But he was hoisted by his own petard.
Cancel Culture has always been reactionary; there are no good examples of it. It is not used against people who have actually committed crimes such as incitement to violence, hatred etc. It is used to stifle opinions that are not mainstream. It is also an industry in itself, with huge fortunes being made by the gatekeepers, the modern censors and witchfinder generals. Lukianoff is a liberal, his co-author is right of centre and the term Left is used throughout the book to describe liberals and more radical voices. Only in the US could the Democratic Party be described as left-wing. It is not. It is a right-wing party. It has led the US through many an imperialist war, coup d’etat, bombing and attacks on the living conditions of US workers to benefit Wall Street. Clinton, Obama, Bernie Sanders and AOC are not the Left. The Left are the socialists, those who believe in overthrowing capitalism, not those who think it is fine and some tinkering about the edges and slick PR is what is required.
And yet the Left has been to the fore in backing the liberal Cancel Culture and will now spout out contradictory nonsense about Trump’s version of it. Cancel Culture always had its liberal and its conservative wings. The Left should have said from the word go: a plague on all your houses. I would like to think that Trump’s offensive using similar language and tactics to the liberals might awaken them, but the woke are still profoundly slumbering at the wheel. Although Lukianoff is a liberal, his book should be a wakeup call to them. I couldn’t and didn’t even try to do justice to it here. But to quote Bertold Brecht, a man who would be cancelled were he alive today, “Reach for the book, it is a weapon.” Unfortunately, whole swathes of the Left don’t read anymore. They get their politics from Tik Tok and other social media platforms and whatever the middle-class mob are currently irked about before going back to work at mammy and daddy’s company. Lukianoff puts them all to shame in pointing out the reactionary and self-defeating nature of Cancel Culture.
References
[1] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) The Canceling of the American Mind. New York. Simon & Schuster. para 5.45
[2] Ibíd., para 5.50
[3] Ibíd., para 26.3 to 26.17
[4] The Guardian (08/10/20205) UK universities offered to monitor students’ social media for arms firms, emails show. Daniel Boffey & Aaron Walawalkar.
[5] The Scottish Daily Express (03/04/2025) Protests at Edinburgh Uni gender-critical film screening were designed to ‘create hostile environment’. H. William, PA & B. Borland.
[6] The Student News (06/07/2025) UoE shamed by UN for Gaza complicity as graduates protest. Dom Croot.
[7] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.34
[8] Ibíd., Apendix II
[9] Ibíd., para 12.38. Lukianoff deals with all of this in the book, however, greater detail is freely available from FIRE’s site.
[10] LA Times (25/01/2025) Loyalty tests and MAGA checks: Inside the Trump White House’s intense screening of job-seekers. Matthew Lee et al.
[11] PBS (02/10/2025) Trump asks 9 colleges to commit to his political agenda for better Access to federal money.
[12] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.7
[13] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.43
[14] University Herald (20/09/2025) Universities Fire Staff Over Posts on Charlie Kirk’s Assassination. Chris John.
[15] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 34.11
[16] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 27.58 to 27.64
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
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Even with an unfortunately and unfairly disallowed goal, Liverpool left the stadium post-match with as many points as they deserved - none. It was painful to watch. No flow, no fluency, just fumbling. Cork City played with more passion in their cup final.
One lesson Liverpool seem not to have learned is that at this level of soccer, playing with nine men is not a recipe for success, even when up against opponents who are not able to outplay them in every department like Manchester City did. Arguably, if they only field nine players rather than drain energy having nine men prop up two dead weights, the side might even fare better. More compact more controlled, no good passes thrown after bad.
One lesson Liverpool seem not to have learned is that at this level of soccer, playing with nine men is not a recipe for success, even when up against opponents who are not able to outplay them in every department like Manchester City did. Arguably, if they only field nine players rather than drain energy having nine men prop up two dead weights, the side might even fare better. More compact more controlled, no good passes thrown after bad.
Mo Salah should no longer be a first choice Liverpool player. Not only has his goalscoring acumen taken a nosedive, his passing is rubbish. Simple passes that a seventy year old man could complete successfully fail to reach their intended target and end up being intercepted by the opposition. Salah has charged Liverpool through the nose for a service that he has simply failed to provide. A Guardian columnist summed the situation up:
Florian Wirtz contributes no more than Salah. While the Egyptian has gone off the boil, the German has never even made the simmer. Every sort of excuse has been made for him but he shows no sign of improving, despite a few flashes against Madrid, seemingly hopelessly lost with not a sixpence of an idea about finding a way out. If he does not call time on his poor performances he will end up considered an infinitely worse buy than Darwin Nunez. The Uruguayan striker might not have been brilliant at striking but he could electrify a pitch and bring a touch of panache. Even with his below par performances in front of goal he was never a dead weight.
Why is Slot playing Mohamed Salah in every game? Why is Slot continuing to do this even when the evidence is clear that this is a mistake? One that can still be fixed, but which becomes more deeply compounded with every passing week.
Florian Wirtz contributes no more than Salah. While the Egyptian has gone off the boil, the German has never even made the simmer. Every sort of excuse has been made for him but he shows no sign of improving, despite a few flashes against Madrid, seemingly hopelessly lost with not a sixpence of an idea about finding a way out. If he does not call time on his poor performances he will end up considered an infinitely worse buy than Darwin Nunez. The Uruguayan striker might not have been brilliant at striking but he could electrify a pitch and bring a touch of panache. Even with his below par performances in front of goal he was never a dead weight.
Arne Slot will at some point come under scrutiny. Suggestions that he only won last years title with the team that Klopp built are off the mark. Klopp's final year in charge saw him reign over a side that faded in every competition towards the end. That Slot got enough out of them - helped by a poor Manchester City and a hapless Arsenal - was a substantial achievement in itself. To think that he has lost that canny coaching skill almost overnight is shallow. Yet this is his team. Of all the imports he has brought to the club in the close season transfer window, Ekitike alone has performed. Alexander Isak seems to be still on strike, forgetting that his move to Liverpool was the term agreed to bring his Newcastle withdrawal of labour days to a close.
Slot cannot dismiss the possibility that as a coach he might become a one hit wonder. Liverpool seem not to be at the point where they are asking who they might replace Slot with but they must be asking if we do need to replace him who is in the running? If Slot does not get off the slippery slope the direction of travel is only down.
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Even if you’re 1000% certain in your beliefs, you should be regularly exposed to contrasting views. Not only do you gain further knowledge, but you also learn how to argue back. This is especially important whenever it seems that “your side” has won the cultural battle: those who fail to carry on making the argument eventually get lazy and cannot rise to the challenge when their cultural hegemony is threatened.
We’re currently seeing this play out in real life in regard to a myriad of subjects: the union between the North of Ireland and Britain, the purpose of religion, the history of Western civilisation, the trans debate.
And now Jo Bartosch & Robert Jessel step into the arena with their arguments about why pornography is not only bad but deeply damaging both for the individual and society overall.
Pornography occupies a strange space in the culture these days: once upon a time it was a battlefield for freedom of speech. Think of Alberts v. California (1957) where the Supreme Court ruled that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment. Or Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) which was the first case to address the regulation of sexually explicit material on the Internet, and it was ruled that those provisions were unconstitutional. Nowadays, people rarely bat an eyelid at it, unless (understandably) it is revenge porn and/or child porn.
While it obviously isn’t for everyone, is it really such a cultural catastrophe in the way that Bartosch and Jessel make it out to be?
For a start, name checking Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon in a positive manner is a telling indication of the main argument: pornography is evil. Immediately, I have to sigh. To which I’m sure Bartosch and Jessel will assume I’m dismissing them.
I’m not. As I do think that they make many pertinent points such as discussing the crossover between sex education and pornography, which is where the book really hits home as adults are one thing, but children are a different matter altogether:
To a frazzled, overworked teacher, online resource libraries are a godsend. Instead of researching and creating teaching materials from scratch, they simply visit an officially sanctioned third-party website and download everything they need, from factsheets to classroom games to full lesson plans. Need an age-appropriate resource for teaching sex to 11-year-olds? There’s an app for that. The problem is, no one’s checking whether these resources are in fact appropriate at all. In 2023, The Times reported that one of the biggest providers of school lesson plans, TES (formerly Times Educational Supplement), was selling resources for children as young as 11 that described activities including anal sex, pornography and sending nude selfies and dick pics”
How has this situation been allowed to happen?
Sex education in the UK has been described by campaigners as a ‘Wild West’ where any group – including pro-porn campaigners – can submit resources and lesson plans with little to no vetting. That’s hardly surprising given that, until recently, the RSHE curriculum was non-statutory; unlike subjects like maths or physics, there was no government-mandated syllabus that schools had to cover. The introduction of government guidance in September 2020 has yet to provide anything like a clear and uniform framework for teaching sex education. In 2021, a year after the roll-out of the new guidance, the then minister for school standards, Robin Walker, admitted that only a fifth of UK primary and secondary schools had received training on how to teach RSHE. Twelve months later, a joint survey from teaching union NASUWT and the UK’s child-safety charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), found that almost half of secondary-school teachers do not feel confident teaching about sex and relationships, while a whopping 86 per cent said they need more resources and training.
A chilling example of how nature abhors a vacuum.
Further discussions around extreme acts in pornography, evidence suggesting that it has rewired the brains of the youth (leading to an epidemic of choking and slapping), zombie feminism and how tech is further removing the act of sex from humanity make for fascinating and uncomfortable reading. However, the tone throughout is one of po-faced hectoring: apparently, people who watch pornography are “clearly accomplices” in the abuse of performers. Really?
At one point, the authors reference the “man or bear” question that did the rounds on social media a while ago without any irony despite the whole thing demonstrating that some women are unable to make a serious point about male violence without resorting to ridiculous hyperbole that undercuts the severity of the argument. And the scenario bookends a chapter on male violence and pornography!
There’s also little to no indication that the breakdown of the traditional family structure and community has also helped in that a stable relationship with family and close neighbours will not only help solidify human relationships but help young men see women as people as opposed to sex objects. These are topics worthy of serious discussion instead of just declaring all pornography the source of the problem.
Certainly a challenging and thought provoking read, but the hectoring makes it much more difficult to sympathise with the authors and their arguments.
Jo Bartosch & Robert Jessel, 2025, Pornocracy. Polity. ISBN: 978-1509565139
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.
Before We Conform, Or Condemn, Let Us At Least Be Curious
Stephen Bradley: 'That was the target - a domestic double and get out of the league phase of Europe'
♜One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it - Albert Camus♞
Anthony McIntyre ⚽ FAI Cup final day also serves as one of two customary yearly swall days.
Not obligatory but as good as. The other is when a few former prisoners, some of them blanketmen, come down from Belfast around Xmas for a swall session. Each December the company plants itself in the pub almost after it opens and spends the rest of the day on the swall while regaling each other with memories, some dubious, of the bad old days.
For cup final day, the reliability of memory is never an issue. We tend not to go back much further than the previous game. On Sunday, passersby in Talbot Street must have gazed on myself and Paddy, thinking we were two early house alcoholics, as we stood outside the Celt for the few minutes it took to open. Jay, being thirteen, took the bad look of us, denying any puritan the chance to describe us as a trio of hardened drinkers they came across as they made their way to pay homage to whatever imaginary god they grew up being told was the only real and right one, the rest just imposters. And if they had been born to a different family a different deity would then be the one true god. I would go the religious life tomorrow morning if water really could be turned into wine.
We had arrived in Dublin just before noon. Last year we arrived too early so, unable to pub crawl our way to the Aviva, we had to settle for the bar closest to the stadium. The only swall available then was the hip flask I had brought for the match, which didn't last too long as we wandered the route to the stadium like lost thirsty souls.
The match itself is more important than who actually wins it, unless the Drogs are in the final. Although preferring a Rovers victory as that would be Bohemians pathway to Europe - and the Bohs have been strong on the Gaza question - I found my instinct wandering to the underdog. Cork, already relegated, did not turn up just to tick boxes. They made it through the first half without conceding a goal which which would have given them a confidence boost for the second half. Minutes short of the break disaster struck. Kamikaze Harry Nevin flew into a tackle with both feet raised and studs showing. A red card was not the only outcome, Shamrock Rovers completing the double for the first time in thirty eight years was now assured. Plucky Cork will rue the Nevin tackle because prior to it they were not some pesky fly that could be swept away by the Lords of Irish soccer. On occasion they posed a threat to the Rovers goal. A quick score in the second half followed by the formation of a shield wall might just have seen them leave the field victorious. A man down, a Rory Gaffney brace disabused them of any field of dreams hopes they might have nurtured.
We didn't hang around for the final whistle, opting to get out a few minutes short of the ninety so that we could make a Ringsend pub to catch the second half of the Liverpool game away to Manchester City. We shouldn't have bothered, having just watched more fight from Cork than there was in Mo's Millionaires.
Ronan and Olivia headed off earlier than the rest of us, college in mind. Just before catching the train back to Drogheda we stopped in a bar across from Connolly Station for a drink with my daughter, who managed to catch the tail end of my disgruntlement at Liverpool. She rolled her eyes before rolling me to pay for the drink!
On the train journey back we met Molly and her beautiful dog, Appa. Both awesome and adorable the entire carriage seemed to fall in love with her. I even got to hold her on the lead while Molly used the restroom. The biggest regret of the day apart from Liverpool putting up a less spirited defence than Cork was not getting a photo of the dog.
Just short of midnight, this old dog for the hard road made it through the door to home, not quite drunk enough to end up in the doghouse.
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With over 50 per cent of votes cast, it has widely been seen as a transformative moment in progressive politics in terms of the defeat not just of the Republican candidate but also that of a stale incumbent Democrat establishment by a radical, energised grassroots movement which spoke to, campaigned for and triumphed on the concerns of working class New Yorkers: a cost-of-living platform which included a rent freeze for rent-stabilised apartments, free bus service, universal childcare, and city-run grocery stores, all funded by increased taxes on corporations and the wealthy.[1]
Truly a victory for the audacity of hope on the anniversary of That victory for despair. Mamdani’s victory came on a night of impressive Democrat results with gubernatorial victories by healthy, double-digit margins for “moderates” Mikie Sherill and Abigail Spanberger in New Jersey and Virginia respectively also on campaign themes around the reduction of the cost of living. Completing the innings defeat for Donald Trump was the approval by Californian voters of a measure to redraw congressional boundaries, an attempt to stop Republicans from retaining full control of the federal government in next year’s midterm election and counter a gerrymander in Texas to carve out new safe Republican districts.[2]
So, have the tectonic plates of progressive politics in the USA at any rate shifted? Does Mamdani’s victory lay out a path to victory or the Democrats in next year’s crucial mid-term elections and, further ahead, to the White House in November 2028? Are the lessons learned from and the model of campaigning in Mamdani’s victory transferable to, for example, Britain? There the crisis of legitimacy enveloping the traditional two big parties of government, Labour and the Conservatives - due to cost of living pressures and a chronic breakdown of trust in politics - has led to the rise of and possible ascension to power of the populist right wing Reform UK party and has opened up space to the left of Labour for a radicalised Green Party led by its new self-proclaimed eco populist leader Zack Polanksi and Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zara Sultana joint but so typically fractious far left venture Your Party.
So, have the tectonic plates of progressive politics in the USA at any rate shifted? Does Mamdani’s victory lay out a path to victory or the Democrats in next year’s crucial mid-term elections and, further ahead, to the White House in November 2028? Are the lessons learned from and the model of campaigning in Mamdani’s victory transferable to, for example, Britain? There the crisis of legitimacy enveloping the traditional two big parties of government, Labour and the Conservatives - due to cost of living pressures and a chronic breakdown of trust in politics - has led to the rise of and possible ascension to power of the populist right wing Reform UK party and has opened up space to the left of Labour for a radicalised Green Party led by its new self-proclaimed eco populist leader Zack Polanksi and Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zara Sultana joint but so typically fractious far left venture Your Party.
Does it provide a model for the rejuvenation of the Labour Party along the lines of “radical social democracy” proposed by the writer and activist Paul Mason? Does his victory transcend the divisiveness of “identity politics” or does it represent a progressive essence of identity politics as argued by the writer Nesrine Malik? But what perils await the nascent project represented by last week’s New York Mayoral victor from a vengeful Donald Trump in whose lexicon the words “defeated candidate” will never figure?
The Triumph of Charisma Not Charlatanry
An undoubted factor in Mamdani’s victory was his charisma or, less definitionally problematic, relatability. He is the first Muslim mayor of New York as well as its first African Asian postholder, the son of a Ugandan academic, Mahmood Mamdani, a specialist in colonial and post-colonial history and Mira Mair, an acclaimed film maker.[3] While vocally opposed to antisemitism, he vocally both condemned the genocidal Hamas attacks of 7 October and the genocidal Israeli response in its two year war in Gaza. A proud Muslim who suffered an outrageously racist campaign against him drawing on unfounded jihadi slurs and exploitative memories of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, he resisted the pressure to play down his identity in order to fit in, he proclaimed “No longer will I live in the shadows”. He married his own Islamic identity by quoting the Arabic phrase ana munkum wa alaikum – “I am of you and for you – in his victory speech and named those “forgotten by the politics of our city,” the “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”[4]
The Triumph of Charisma Not Charlatanry
An undoubted factor in Mamdani’s victory was his charisma or, less definitionally problematic, relatability. He is the first Muslim mayor of New York as well as its first African Asian postholder, the son of a Ugandan academic, Mahmood Mamdani, a specialist in colonial and post-colonial history and Mira Mair, an acclaimed film maker.[3] While vocally opposed to antisemitism, he vocally both condemned the genocidal Hamas attacks of 7 October and the genocidal Israeli response in its two year war in Gaza. A proud Muslim who suffered an outrageously racist campaign against him drawing on unfounded jihadi slurs and exploitative memories of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, he resisted the pressure to play down his identity in order to fit in, he proclaimed “No longer will I live in the shadows”. He married his own Islamic identity by quoting the Arabic phrase ana munkum wa alaikum – “I am of you and for you – in his victory speech and named those “forgotten by the politics of our city,” the “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”[4]
That sense of the triumph of the audacity of hope is really conveyed by the New York based author and journalist Megan Nolan in her telling of her experiences of the Mamdani campaign trail. For Nolan, the triumph of such an unabashed radical seemed too good to be true in a city where the obscene wealth gap is virtually accepted as a natural phenomenon. It seemed too good to be true where the anointment of Andrew Cuomo, his opponent, scion of the Cuomo Democrat dynasty and the jaded, sneering former governor accused of sexually harassing more than a dozen women, as mayor of the Big Apple seemed inevitable.[5]
But it proved perfectly good to be true to the horror of Trumpians who encouraged Republican electoral support for Cuomo and to the barely disguised disdain of the Democrat old guard. Mamdani’s victory in the primary was built on a forcefield of phenomenal grassroots energy: the average donation to his campaign was $98, compared with Cuomo’s $593, and an unprecedented army of 50,000 volunteers which, by his account, had grown to 90,000 before the vote. Compare this economy of scale of resources to that of the corporate billionaires who had donated such immense amounts of money to anti-Mamdani and pro-Cuomo PACs (Political Action Committees). Michael Bloomberg donated $13m, Bill Ackman $2m, Joe Gebbia, the founder of Airbnb, another $2m. But on this occasion, democracy proved not to be the best version that money could buy as the combined power of capital and the numbing effect of a Democratic party wedded to the now worn strategy of peddling the same tired default ‘don’t scare the Wall Street/corporate horses’ ran convincingly out of road.[6]
It is the consensus of commentators and analysts of Mamdani’s victory was down to the centrality of the theme of affordability in his campaign. It is also widely agreed that his success was down to reaching out beyond his base of educated young leftists to disenfranchised working-class people alienated from a complacent Democratic party. But behind these explanatory factors are the backstories which so illustrate his human listening capacity and relatability.
Take the case of the tired mother and her daughter, a 17-year-old woman who used a wheelchair to whom Megan Nolan’s best friend Daniel had spoken to in the lead up to the primary. When he started describing Mamdani’s aims about affordability and prioritising New Yorkers’ ability to remain in their home city, mother, and daughter “lit up.” This, they said, was” the kind of thing they needed to hear and never did.” They “were excited to vote.”[7]
At SEIU 32BJ in Manhattan, the headquarters of a union that represents mostly building workers, union leaders whooped as Mamdani praised labour movements and expressed his admiration for those in the room, some of the workers having joined in the 1970s, others two weeks ago. He listened as doctors described broken-down lifts in their hospitals, teacher’s aides receiving salaries of $30,000 a year, and one security woman telling him that her daughter, born and raised in New York, had been priced out so severely despite working full-time that she had to move across the country: “Mr Mamdani, I want my daughter back”, she told him. To which he replied, “We want your daughter to come home.” “We will make this city a place your daughter a place your daughter can afford to live”[8]
For virtually the last twelve months in the wake of the election of Trump 2.0 Mamdani had been performing a one-man band operation to find out why working-class New Yorkers had voted for Trump. He set up premises in working-class streets such as Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queen’s, where Trump, despite the districts’ large immigrant populations, had enjoyed a double-digit lead over the Democratic Party. The lesson that Mamdani picked up was that lifelong Democrats had voted Trump or abstained because “they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago” and that they wanted the Democratic Party to offer “a relentless focus on an economic agenda.”[9] Hence at the top of his Mayoral campaign were the everyday living issues such as o the rent freeze, free and fast buses, cheap city-run grocers and free childcare.
A not insignificant aspect of the strategy to recover Trump defectors was the emphasis on showing respect for everyone on the doorstep. In the words of a campaign organiser “We’ve emphasised that it’s important not to chastise, not to speak down to people who turned to Trump or who just don’t vote.” This strategy obviously bore fruit with Mamdani’s victory in the Bronx, a borough that is majority Hispanic and which had swung notably towards Trump, by a margin of 11 points. This is on top of his overwhelming popularity with young voters, with a stunning 78% of 18-to-29-year-olds backing him.[10]
But as well as the promise of radical change, the Mamdani campaign offered joy. Mamdani closely connected his social media to the affordability message spread by his regiments of canvassers across the city. The purpose of the surreal and rapidly iconic video of a suited Mamdani taking the Polar Bear plunge in Coney Island was to drive home his promise to freeze stabilised rents. His spoof of his two Democratic primary rivals, Cuomo and Eric Adams, as two old dudes bickering in a New York diner was slapstick fun but delivered a biting satire of them as archetypes of a moribund party establishment.[11]
This tactic of targeting through entertainment was evident in two more eye-catching events. In August, the campaign held a scavenger hunt that drew 5,000 New Yorkers from all corners of the city. Last month, about 1,500 attended a soccer tournament in Coney Island where mixed-gender teams played friendly matches borough against borough. Both events underlined Mamdani’s commitment to, and love of, New York City, and attracted people to his cause who had hitherto never engaged in the political process.[12]
A major canvassing push to engage previously under-represented Muslim and South Asian populations across the city, spurred by Mamdani’s condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide also paid dividends. The Muslim civic engagement group Engage, which backed Mamdani estimates that turnout among the 380,000 Muslim New Yorkers registered to vote was likely to have doubled in the election; up from the 22% who participated in the 2021 Mayoral election. His stance on Gaza does not appear to have damaged his standing among New York’s roughly one million Jewish population with a CNN exit poll suggesting that Mamdani winning as many as one in three Jewish votes to the presumed chagrin of Amichai Chikli the Israeli minister of diaspora affairs who wrote apocalyptically after Mamdani’s victory that “New York will never be the same again” as “the city is walking eyes open, into the abyss into which London has already plunged.[13]
In the era of politics as personal presentation in which charisma and celebrity have been the currency of success, Mamdani stands out not as a great disruptor but as someone who has used the brushstrokes required to paint a different canvass; to modify the rules of the game to achieve radical and transformative results. His charisma is one of genuine connectedness with people and to reach those parts of the electorate through the arts of non-judgmental listening, engagement with those who haven’t engaged with and been engaged with political systems and to use fun and happiness to effect change. Unlike the charlatan, he doesn’t promise the undeliverable; unlike the sectarian ideologue he is not in the business of trying to create utopia from dogma and ending with grotesque chaos and dystopia. He offers hope and realisable change which will probably not be achieved in its entirety. But he will keep hope alive.
Lessons for the Left
Mamdani’s victory is a progressive exemplar of the old adage that politics is the art of the possible. For it inverts the commonsense that victory is only possible within the prevailing consensus which has prevailed throughout either side of the millennium; that there is no ideological and/or structural alternative to the hegemonic corporate, light touch regulatory model of financial capitalism. The change that did occur was refracted through the centrist Third Way model of Tony Blalir’s New Labour and Bill Clinton’s New Democrats which accepted the fundamentals of the market economy; the conditionality of social welfare benefits and built social and economic infrastructural projects through mixed public and private financing. For many, the success of Mamdani has shown that alternative social arrangements are possible; another world is possible if you like and that to campaign for this alternative is a winner and that the right can be fought.
That certainly is the lesson from Mamdani that the Guardian columnist Aditya Chakraborty draws. For, in his opinion, he is the first left winger to show that politicians can not only face down Trumpism, but they can also beat him. The defeat of Trump and Trump’s Triple P mutations across the world is the defining and preeminent task of our time as New York’s new mayor knows.[14]
For instead of taking on the extreme right, the centre-left is, as Fintan O’Toole writes in the latest New York Review of Books, it is playing at being not-Trump. Or not-Farage, not-Le Pen, In the UK, Starmer’s pitch is basically to adopt the language and flags but to deploy them with greater civility[15] although the singling out of Reform UK as Labour’s principal electoral and ideological rival and greatest threat to democracy by the British PM at Labour’s annual conference was encouraging.
For in the changing political and economic order that the economist Branko Milanovic describes in his new book The Great Global Transformation in which China and the Global South now account for more of the world economy than the US, Japan, Europe and many others out together and in which capitalism is being refined into narrower, meaner and harsher societies which are ditching the DEI culture of commitments to multiculturalism and equality for women,[16] the Third Way triangulations with electoral bases are no longer viable due to the hollowing out of these demographics and the consequent anti-politics mood that has swept the Western democratic world.
Despite the best efforts of anti-Muslim racists to elevate culture warriordom over the prospect of a Muslim mayor officiating in the city that suffered the cataclysm of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, Mamdani rose above the jihadi slurs, dog whistles and fog horns to fight a relentless cross-identity campaign fought on a purely economic agenda. But his campaign did owe itself to a form of “identity politics.”
It is necessary to enclose those two last words in quotation marks because of the bad rap that identity politics discourse and practice has received. Many on the left have written with despair on the toxicity of identity based struggles be they on race, sexuality, gender and other ‘markers’; of the competitive victimhood; the ‘cancellations’ and total divorce from the material realities of people’s every day lives as opposed to the primacy of particular “lived experiences” This type of ‘woketarian’ identity dynamics have drained so much oxygen from progressive politics.
Yet as Nesrine Malik reminds us, identity politics as an organising political force has its origins in universal goals. She revisits its definition by the Black feminist socialist organisation the Combahee River Collective in 1977; it connoted identity politics as a path to a liberation that could only emerge through understanding that systems oppress many different people along the lines of their identity, and could only be dismantled if all groups worked together. The collective emphasised that “we also find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are often experienced simultaneously.”[17]
Mamdani rooted his campaign solidly in the experience of being a New Yorker, and how the city needed to be more affordable, then expanded that to include all the ways in which different groups live that experience.[18] This is that “simultaneous experience” in actuality as opposed to the tortuous nomenclature and practices around “intersectionality”
His was a politics that is forged and defined by being on the margins, but not as single individual who wants to escape alone perhaps to a place of self-empowerment or hyper-individualism. The margins from which he came were spaces in which a majority can be mobilised, where people don’t want to hear about victimhood but justice, is to create coalitions and escape together. Its project is not the exposition of particular racism and prejudices, but an entire system that excludes all those who don’t have capital in all its forms. Above all, it is the story of the virtue of the American “melting point,” a nation of immigrants at the sharp end of capitalism who are collectively recognising all the ways in which the USA fails to live up to its ideals.[19]
So, it was neither just the economy nor just identity, stupid!
References
[1] Anna Betts, Joseph Gedeon and Robert Tait, Democrat Mamdani in historic win in New York. The Guardian. 6 November 2025 p.10.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Nesrine Malik, ‘Identity Politics’ really can win elections – just ask Mamdani. Guardian Opinion 10 November 2025 p.3
[5] Megan Nolan, How Zohran Mamdani Captured the Heart of New York. The Observer New Review 9 November 2025 pp.8-10
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid, p.8
[8] Ibid, p.10
[9] Guardian, 8th November 2025, p.33
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] Ibid
[14] Aditya Chakrabortty, Mamdani’s lesson for progressives: fight the right. The Guardian. Journal 6 November 2025 pp.1-2
[15] Ibid, p.2
[16] Ibid
[17] Malik, op cit
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid
[1] Anna Betts, Joseph Gedeon and Robert Tait, Democrat Mamdani in historic win in New York. The Guardian. 6 November 2025 p.10.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Nesrine Malik, ‘Identity Politics’ really can win elections – just ask Mamdani. Guardian Opinion 10 November 2025 p.3
[5] Megan Nolan, How Zohran Mamdani Captured the Heart of New York. The Observer New Review 9 November 2025 pp.8-10
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid, p.8
[8] Ibid, p.10
[9] Guardian, 8th November 2025, p.33
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] Ibid
[14] Aditya Chakrabortty, Mamdani’s lesson for progressives: fight the right. The Guardian. Journal 6 November 2025 pp.1-2
[15] Ibid, p.2
[16] Ibid
[17] Malik, op cit
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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