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is “liberty, equality, solidarity” really what the West stood for in terms of its engagements with minorities at home, and colonized peoples abroad?

Islam isn’t a newcomer. A decade ago, I wrote a book titled Muslims of Europe: The ‘Other’ Europeans that included an examination of Islam’s long European history. But one could write an encyclopedia that focused only on the history of Muslim European communities and figures, be they in premodern Spain and Portugal or the Emirate of Sicily or indeed the many Northern and Western Europeans who became Muslims. Framing Islam as a newcomer immediately restricts the scope of discussion that is needed. And such framing leads to a focus on salvaging broken models rather than seeking a new model for the West

The fear of Islam is where all of these insecurities come together—a world religion being caricatured to represent all the trials of the world coming upon “us.”

the subject of religion always arises when pundits and intellectuals discuss the ostensible faltering of the West

As Ryan notes, the sociologist Rogers Brubaker has characterized this stance as “a secularized Christianity as culture. … It’s a matter of belonging rather than believing.” He further describes the attitude as being one in which, “We are Christians precisely because they are Muslims. Otherwise, we are not Christian in any substantive sense.”

In every country surveyed, those on the right are more likely than those on the left to prioritize sticking to traditions, to say people today are too easily offended by what others say, and to say the bigger societal problem is seeing discrimination where it does not exist.

while those on the left and right are equally likely to say they are proud most of the time in both France and Germany, in the U.S. and UK, those on the right are more than three times as likely to say they are proud most of the time than those on the left

issues of pride for some were often sources of shame for others. In the UK, one such issue was the concept of empire. Those on the ideological right praised the historic empire for its role in spreading English and Western culture overseas, while those on the ideological left discussed how the UK had disrupted local cultures and often left chaos in its wake in its former colonies.

whereas groups composed of Republicans discussed American history through the lens of opportunity, groups composed of Democrats stressed the inadequacy of how American history is taught – and how it often glosses over racism and inequitable treatment of minority groups. Republican participants, for their part, even brought up how political correctness itself makes them embarrassed to be American – while Democratic participants cited increased diversity as a point of pride

While Britons are as ideologically divided as Americans on issues of pride, when it comes to every other cultural issue asked about in this report, Americans stand out for being more ideologically divided than those in the Western European countries surveyed.

Younger people – those under 30 – are less likely to place requirements on Christianity, language, birth or adopting the country’s traditions to be part of their country than older age groups. They are also more likely to say their country will be better off if it is open to changes. The notable exception to this pattern is Germany, where opinion differs little by age.

Staff described board members changing their work – making the documents “transphobic and seriously inaccurate”. When some employees complained, they were locked out of laptops and disciplinary action was taken against them. 

“I was seeing our upcoming publications and guidance pushing for trans rights being changed – or completely scrapped and shelved permanently – meanwhile the Board was building links to anti-trans groups. It was awful.”

All current EHRC employees and ex-employees wanted to speak anonymously, including not mentioning their roles. They are scared of a backlash from EHRC leaders, and fear losing their current jobs. Meanwhile, recent union meetings - discussing staff concerns - have been attended by over half of the EHRC's employees

“When I started in 2018, we were all celebrating LGBT rights and the EHRC was pushing to make the UK better for LGBT people. It’s like working for a different organisation now.”

“Staff are being pushed to not be so ‘woke’, and forced to be more impartial, but then we’re seeing statements from our leaders that are transphobic, or racist, and incredibly damaging.”

The EHRC was established in 2007 by the then Labour government to monitor human rights in England, Wales and Scotland, and to enforce equality laws based on protected characteristics, such as sexuality, gender reassignment, race and religion. Although not part of a government department, the EHRC is a public sector organisation funded by the taxpayer, with senior leaders appointed by the government.

In February 2021, Baroness Kishwer Falkner was appointed as chair of the EHRC – the most important role in the organisation. Falkner also serves as a member of the House of Lords. Another former employee – who left at the end of 2021 – told VICE World News that Falkner had personally changed EHRC publications about trans people, making the documents more critical of gender identity, and actively going against the organisation’s own guidance to protect people’s rights based on gender reassignment. 

“One paper was so heavily edited by Falkner that it left people speechless. She changed the case studies, the language… It was so transphobic, there was no way it would get published.” 

VICE World News attempted to access the “amended documents” through the Freedom of Information Act, but the requests were denied multiple times by the EHRC and the Government Equalities Office. LGBTQ organisations involved in helping to put together earlier versions of some EHRC publications told me that they were not given a “proper reason” for them being shelved. 

“Anyone working on LGBT policy will be trying to leave, if they actually care about LGBT rights. Nobody knows what to do right now. If you leave, then you’re giving in to hate, but if you stay, you’ll have to constantly defend your choice to friends, and to charities, and to yourself,”

The UK currently has some of the most restrictive gender recognition processes in Europe, as a result of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. A trans person looking for legal recognition of their gender identity requires medical assessments and psychiatric interviews in order to “prove” their gender. Non-binary identities are not currently recognised in UK law.

"It was as if Baroness Falkner and the Board wanted people who actually cared about human rights to leave,”

“The complete U-turn on the Gender Recognition Act had absolutely no evidence to back it up, but it still happened.” 

Jo Maugham, director of the Good Law Project campaign group, said: "Under the EHRC human rights have turned 180 degrees. No longer are they protection for minorities against populist sentiment. Now they are mechanics which turn that sentiment - and the hostility of Ministers - into policy."

trans people, like many minority groups, remain economically and socially disenfranchised in the UK. Excluding fraud, trans people are twice as likely to be a victim of crime in England and Wales in the year ending March 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. They also face years-long waits to receive gender-affirming care at NHS gender identity clinics and are more likely to report healthcare discrimination, domestic violence and homelessness.

UK's government has leaned into the culture wars debate in a bid to appeal to its traditional Conservative Party base and new working-class voters in northern England

Similar to some US Republican Party lawmakers' critiques of critical race theory, "war on woke" has turned into a catchall to describe what Conservatives don't like: be it the perceived excesses of the left, conversations around racial equality, or social justice initiatives like trans rights.

While "there are perfectly reasonably concerns of what the implication of trans women might be for women's rights, a lot of that anxiety is based on wildly exaggerated theoretical positions rather than practical ones," Blunt told CNN. "While [trans people] have to cope with the practical reality that it is bloody tough being trans."

A 2019 study by linguist Paul Baker, a professor at Lancaster University, found the British press wrote more than 6,000 articles about trans people between 2018-19, many of them written "in order to be critical of trans people" and painted "trans people as unreasonable and aggressive," the report wrote.

Despite those supportive words, the trans-critical dial in the media is up at full blast.

Despite there never having been a "trans member of Parliament (MP)," and close to zero trans editors or staff writers at [British] newspapers an idea has stuck that there is an influential trans "lobby behind the scene ... and that is very much characteristic of a moral panic,"

At the end of September, the Council of Europe's Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination likened the UK's record on LGBTQ rights to Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Poland -- countries with appalling track records on minority issues. The report pointed out that in England and Wales "trans rights organisations have faced vitriolic media campaigns, in which trans women especially are vilified and misrepresented."

Problems can arise when supportive cisgender people, or corporate entities, make poor linguistic and aesthetic choices when attempting to use inclusive language for non-binary, transgender and intersex people, Faye said. This happened at the end of September, when British medical journal The Lancet featured the words "bodies with vaginas" on the cover of its latest issue. The journal later apologized for conveying "the impression that we have dehumanized and marginalized women," after the wording was widely criticized.

These constructions are instead blamed by trans-critical commentators on trans people

"Nick, you could be asking me about climate change. You could be asking me about mental health. You could be asking me about education. You could be asking me about health. You deliberately are asking me about an issue that you know does not come up on the doorstep," Lammy replied. "[You] are choosing to land on this subject that most British people are not talking about in a fuel crisis," Lammy added. "And spend minutes on this, because it keeps Labour talking about identity issues and not about the substantive policies."

Abramovich—who, like many of the most prominent Russian oligarchs, is Jewish—has for years been a prolific donor to Jewish philanthropies. He has given half a billion dollars to Jewish charities over the past two decades, sending money linked to Putin’s kleptocratic regime circulating through Jewish institutions worldwide

Among other things, he has profoundly influenced Jewish life on three continents, developing deep financial ties with major communal institutions. He is partly responsible for the preeminent role played by Chabad in the religious life of post-Soviet Russia, for the growth of major Jewish museums from Russia to Israel, for a raft of anti-antisemitism programming involving leading American and British Jewish organizations, and for the expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem

the Jewish world is forced to reckon with its long embrace of Abramovich, and with the moral costs of accepting his money

Certain Soviet Jews of Abramovich’s generation found themselves at the forefront of an emerging market economy. Concentrated in white collar professions but systematically excluded from desirable posts and from the top ranks of the Communist Party, they were unusually prepared—and, perhaps, motivated—to find legal and semi-legal points of entry into the tightly-regulated commerce between the Soviet Union and the West. This helps explain why, as the historian Yuri Slezkine writes in The Jewish Century, six of the seven top oligarchs of 1990s Russia (Petr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexander Smolensky) were ethnic Jews.

Boris Yeltsin soon initiated the firesale privatization of state-controlled industries at the urging of Washington and the IMF—a reckless transition from a command economy to a capitalist one that drove millions of Russians into poverty

In 2008, Berezovsky sued his former protege over his confiscated Sibneft shares; then, in 2012, seven months after a judge rejected all of his claims, Berezovsky died in his London home in an apparent suicide. Some former associates believe he might have been murdered

In 1996, the handful of leading oligarchs pooled their financial resources—and directed their media companies’ coverage—to reelect the deeply unpopular Yeltsin over his Communist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov, whose platform of re-nationalizing industries terrified both the Russian and Western business classes

Fearing that it was unsustainable for a small group of mostly Jewish billionaires to prop up an ailing, visibly alcoholic president—especially after the ruble collapsed in 1998, dragging down a generation’s living standards and initiating a hunt for scapegoats—Berezovsky spearheaded an effort the following year to replace Yeltsin with a young, healthy, disciplined, and then-obscure former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. It was a decision he would come to regret.

wealth so easily acquired could just as easily be taken away. In 2001, Putin hounded Berezovsky and Gusinsky—whose TV networks had criticized the president’s mishandling of a naval disaster—with criminal indictments for tax fraud, forcing them to sell their media and energy holdings at a fraction of their true cost. As a result, Abramovich, who had never challenged Putin, acquired control of Sibneft, while Berezovsky fled to the United Kingdom and Gusinsky departed for Spain and then Israel. Abramovich again came out ahead in 2003, when the oligarch Khodorkovsky was sent to a Siberian prison on tax charges after criticizing Putin for corruption, leaving his assets in the energy sector to be redistributed among those on good terms with the president.

“I don’t think there is a percent of independence in Abramovich,” said Roman Borisovich, a Luxembourg-based Russian banker turned anti-corruption activist who once encountered Abramovich through Berezovsky in the 1990s. “For Abramovich to stay alive, he had to turn against his master [Berezovsky], which is what he did, and he has served Putin handsomely ever since.”

Whereas in the Yeltsin era, the term identified a system dominated by truly independent tycoons, “Putin’s top priority when he came to power was to break that system, replacing it with a system of concentrated power in which men who are inaccurately referred to as oligarchs now have only as much access to wealth as Putin allows them to have,”

Even as he built up his credibility with Putin, he joined many of his fellow oligarchs in stashing his billions in Western financial institutions, which proved eager to assist. “Elites in the post-Soviet space are constantly looking to move their assets and wealth into rule-of-law jurisdictions, which generally means Western countries like the US or UK,”

the Yeltsin administration implemented its infamous loans-for-shares program, selling off key state industries in rigged auctions to Russia’s new business elite for a fraction of their real value in order to stabilize the state’s finances in the short term. Berezovsky and Abramovich gained ownership stakes in Sibneft, one of the world’s largest energy companies, and became instant billionaires.

“No one forced the British or American real estate industries to toss their doors open to as much illicit wealth as they could find, or the state of Delaware to craft the world’s greatest anonymous shell company services,” said Michel. “Western policymakers crafted all of the policies that these oligarchs are now taking advantage of.”

Abramovich also safeguarded a significant part of his fortune in the US, especially during his third marriage to the Russian American socialite and fashion designer Dasha Zhukova. Even after their 2018 divorce, Abramovich began the process of converting three adjacent townhouses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side into what will eventually become the largest home in the city, an “urban castle” valued at $180 million—making him one of the many wealthy Russians sheltering assets in New York’s booming and conveniently opaque real estate sector. (The mansion is intended for Zhukova and their two young children; Abramovich also has five children from his second marriage based primarily in the UK.) He also owns at least two homes in Aspen, Colorado, a gathering place of the global elite.

Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan joined the heads of multiple Israeli charitable organizations in urging the US not to sanction Abramovich. The letter was also signed by Chief Rabbi of Israel David Lau and representatives of Sheba Medical Center, Tel Aviv University, and Elad

the oligarchs are now credibly threatened with exile from the West. Countries like France and Germany have already begun confiscating yachts owned by select Russian officials. And although the UK is still struggling to come up with a legal basis for following suit, leading politicians like Labour Leader Keir Starmer are urging direct sanctions against Abramovich. “Abramovich’s reputation has finally collapsed, along with the other supposedly apolitical oligarchs,” Michel said four days after Russia invaded Ukraine. “There’s no recovery from this. This is a titanic shift in terms of how these oligarchs can operate.”

Israel has been more hesitant to hold him to account.

In 2018, Abramovich acquired Israeli citizenship through the law of return, immediately becoming the second-wealthiest Israeli, behind Miriam Adelson. As a new Israeli citizen, he joined several dozen Russian Jewish oligarchs who have sought citizenship or residency in the Jewish state—a group that includes Fridman, Gusinsky, and the late Berezovsky. Since 2015, Abramovich has owned and sometimes lived in the 19th-century Varsano hotel in Tel Aviv’s trendy Neve Tzedek neighborhood, and in 2020 he purchased a mansion in Herzliya for $65 million—the most expensive real estate deal in the country’s history

As an Israeli passport holder, Abramovich is eligible to visit the UK for six months at a time and is exempt from paying taxes in Israel on his overseas income for the first decade of his residency

Given his increasingly precarious geopolitical position, Jewishness has become Abramovich’s identity of last resort—and Jewish philanthropic giving has provided him with an air of legitimacy not only in Israel but throughout the Jewish world. Abramovich and his fellow oligarchs “need to spend some money to launder their reputations,” said Borisovich, the anti-corruption activist. “They cannot be seen as Putin’s agents of influence; they need to be seen as independent businessmen. So if they can exploit Jewish philanthropy or give money to Oxford or the Tate Gallery, that’s the cost of doing business.”

A 2017 article in Politico, which identified Abramovich and Leviev as “Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide,” also referred to Lazar as “Putin’s rabbi.” Lazar has often run interference for the Russian president—for instance, by defending his initial crackdown on oligarchs like Gusinsky as not motivated by antisemitism, or by praising Russia as safe for Jews under his governance. (The researcher noted that Putin has also cultivated prominent loyalists in other Russian religious communities, including the Orthodox Church and Islam.)

Abramovich also significantly funded the construction of the $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012 (and to which Putin pledged to donate a month of his presidential salary). In a 2016 article in The Forward, the scholar Olga Gershenson suggested that the museum’s narrative bordered on propaganda, framing Jews as “a model Russian minority” and “glorifying and mourning . . . without raising more controversial and relevant questions that would require the viewer to come to terms with a nation’s difficult past.”

“It concentrates on the Soviet victory over the Nazis, and then it ends by saying that Jews in Putin’s Russia are all good and content.”

“Say No to Antisemitism” has brought together Chelsea players and management with many top Jewish groups; the currents heads of the ADL, the WJC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Holocaust Educational Trust, among others, are all listed on its steering committee. The campaign is at least in part intended to address the antisemitism of some Chelsea fans, who have been known to shout “Yid!” and hiss in imitation of gas chambers when taunting fans of the rival club Tottenham, which has a historically Jewish fan base that proudly refers to itself as “the Yid Army.” Last November, Israeli President Isaac Herzog described the campaign as “a shining example of how sports can be a force for good and tolerance.”

Abramovich is also one of the primary benefactors of a Holocaust museum that opened in Porto last May. As of last year, Abramovich is a newly minted citizen of Portugal (and by extension, the European Union), which offers such recognition to anyone who can prove Sephardic ancestry dating back before the Portuguese expulsion of Jews in 1496.

Berel Rosenberg, a representative of the museum, denied that Abramovich had given the Porto Jewish community any money besides a €250 fee for Sephardic certification; regarding reports to the contrary, he alleged that “lies were published by antisemites and corrupt journalists.” However, Porto’s Jewish community does acknowledge that Abramovich has donated money to projects honoring the legacy of Portuguese Sephardic Jews in Hamburg, and he has been identified as an honorary member of Chabad Portugal and B’nai B’rith International Portugal due to his philanthropic activities in the country.

Abramovich has made a $30 million donation for a nanotechnology research center at Tel Aviv University; funded a football-focused “leadership training program” for Arab and Jewish children; and supported KKL-JNF’s tree-planting campaign in the southern Negev, which is dedicated to Lithuanian victims of the Holocaust—and which has drawn opposition from local Bedouin communities who view it as a land grab.

he has kept his support for Israeli settlements well-hidden

Abramovich has used front companies registered in the British Virgin Islands to donate more than $100 million to a right-wing Israeli organization called the Ir David Foundation, commonly known as Elad, which has worked since the 1980s to move Jewish settlers into occupied East Jerusalem. Elad also controls an archeological park and major tourist site called City of David, which it has leveraged in its efforts to “Judaize” the area, including by seizing Palestinian homes in the surrounding neighborhood of Silwan and digging under some to make them uninhabitable.

“In order for settlers to take over Palestinian homes, they need a lot of money,” said Hagit Ofran, co-director of the Settlement Watch project at the Israeli organization Peace Now, “both to take advantage of poor Palestinians for the actual purchases, and then for the long and expensive legal struggle that follows, and that can bankrupt Palestinian families. The money is crucial.” Of Abramovich’s support for Elad, she added, “That’s a lot from one source; I assume that if you give such a big donation, you know what it is for.”

Just two days before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, it was reported that Abramovich is donating tens of millions of dollars to Yad Vashem, the global Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem

In 2017, BuzzFeed reported that US spy agencies suspect Russian involvement in as many as 14 mysterious deaths in Britain over the previous decade, including Berezovsky’s. In the wake of the 2018 poisoning of the defected double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, British intelligence services became increasingly wary of wealthy expats with close ties to the Kremlin. Diplomatic strain stymied Abramovich’s effort to acquire a Tier 1 British visa, which would have enabled him to stay in the country for 40 months.

Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Fridman, were already calling for peace negotiations just three days after the invasion. (Fridman and Deripaska are also major Jewish philanthropists, as are other Russian oligarchs including Petr Aven, Yuri Milner, and Viktor Vekselberg. All of them now face global scrutiny.)

Even before he announced he would be setting up a charity to help victims in Ukraine, members of Abramovich’s family were quick to distance themselves from the war: A contemporary art museum in Moscow co-founded by Abramovich and Zhukova has announced that it will halt all new exhibitions in protest of the war. Abramovich’s 27-year-old daughter Sofia, who lives in London, posted a message on her popular Instagram account that read, “The biggest and most successful lie of the Kremlin’s propaganda is that most Russians stand with Putin.”

Abramovich and others have spent more than two decades loyally serving and profiting off Putin’s corrupt and violent regime—one that has been accused of murdering and jailing journalists and political dissidents and of committing war crimes from Chechnya to Syria. And for much of that time, Jewish institutions worldwide have been more than happy to take money from Abramovich and his peers

longstanding philanthropic ties may affect the Jewish communal world’s willingness to hold Russia accountable for its violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty

“I think the view of much of Jewish philanthropic leadership, right and left, conservative and liberal, has been the bottom line: If the purposes for which the philanthropy is given are positive, humane, holy, and seen to strengthen both the Jewish community and the whole of society, then to sit and analyze whether the donor was exploitive or not, and whether this was kosher or not, would be hugely diverting, amazingly complicated, and divisive.”

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, acknowledged the difficulty of making ethical calls about donors, but argued that the attempt is still necessary. “In philanthropy, nearly all money is tainted, either because it was acquired by exploiting workers, by harming the environment, by selling harmful products, or by taking advantage of systems that benefit the wealthy to the detriment of others. That said, we can’t throw up our hands and say that we can either take no money or all money; there have to be red lines,” she said.

Berman, the scholar of Jewish philanthropy, agrees. “It is tempting to say all money is fungible, so where it came from does not or cannot matter,” she said. “But no matter how much we might want to launder the money, wash it clean of its past and its connections to systems of power, the very act of doing so is an erasure, an act of historical revisionism. Even worse, it can actually participate in bolstering harmful systems of power, often by deterring institutions reliant on that money from holding a person or system to account.”

YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens

“If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.”

94 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 use YouTube, a higher percentage than for any other online service

YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides. It has allowed them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their views to mainstream audiences, and has helped once-obscure commentators build lucrative media businesses

Many right-wing creators already made long video essays, or posted video versions of their podcasts. Their inflammatory messages were more engaging than milder fare. And now that they could earn money from their videos, they had a financial incentive to churn out as much material as possible.

The internet was an escape. Mr. Cain grew up in postindustrial Appalachia and was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents. He was smart, but shy and socially awkward, and he carved out an identity during high school as a countercultural punk. He went to community college, but dropped out after three semesters. Broke and depressed, he resolved to get his act together. He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything: YouTube.

they rallied around issues like free speech and antifeminism, portraying themselves as truth-telling rebels doing battle against humorless “social justice warriors.” Their videos felt like episodes in a long-running soap opera, with a constant stream of new heroes and villains. To Mr. Cain, all of this felt like forbidden knowledge — as if, just by watching some YouTube videos, he had been let into an exclusive club. “When I found this stuff, I felt like I was chasing uncomfortable truths,” he told me. “I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.”

YouTube’s executives announced that the recommendation algorithm would give more weight to watch time, rather than views. That way, creators would be encouraged to make videos that users would finish, users would be more satisfied and YouTube would be able to show them more ads.

A month after its algorithm tweak, YouTube changed its rules to allow all video creators to run ads alongside their videos and earn a portion of the revenue they generated.

Bellingcat, an investigative news site, analyzed messages from far-right chat rooms and found that YouTube was cited as the most frequent cause of members’ “red-pilling” — an internet slang term for converting to far-right beliefs

Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years. The executives, the people said, rarely considered whether the company’s algorithms were fueling the spread of extreme and hateful political content.

Google Brain’s researchers wondered if they could keep YouTube users engaged for longer by steering them into different parts of YouTube, rather than feeding their existing interests. And they began testing a new algorithm that incorporated a different type of A.I., called reinforcement learning. The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.

YouTube’s recommendations system is not set in stone. The company makes many small changes every year, and has already introduced a version of its algorithm that is switched on after major news events to promote videos from “authoritative sources” over conspiracy theories and partisan content. This past week, the company announced that it would expand that approach, so that a person who had watched a series of conspiracy theory videos would be nudged toward videos from more authoritative news sources. It also said that a January change to its algorithm to reduce the spread of so-called “borderline” videos had resulted in significantly less traffic to those videos.

the bulk of his media diet came from far-right channels. And after the election, he began exploring a part of YouTube with a darker, more radical group of creators. These people didn’t couch their racist and anti-Semitic views in sarcastic memes, and they didn’t speak in dog whistles. One channel run by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with titles like “‘Refugee’ Invasion Is European Suicide.” Others posted clips of interviews with white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke.

As Mr. Molyneux promoted white nationalists, his YouTube channel kept growing. He now has more than 900,000 subscribers, and his videos have been watched nearly 300 million times. Last year, he and Ms. Southern — Mr. Cain’s “fashy bae” — went on a joint speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand, where they criticized Islam and discussed what they saw as the dangers of nonwhite immigration. In March, after a white nationalist gunman killed 50 Muslims in a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mr. Molyneux and Ms. Southern distanced themselves from the violence, calling the killer a left-wing “eco-terrorist” and saying that linking the shooting to far-right speech was “utter insanity.” Neither Mr. Molyneux nor Ms. Southern replied to a request for comment. The day after my request, Mr. Molyneux uploaded a video titled “An Open Letter to Corporate Reporters,” in which he denied promoting hatred or violence and said labeling him an extremist was “just a way of slandering ideas without having to engage with the content of those ideas.”

Unlike most progressives Mr. Cain had seen take on the right, Mr. Bonnell and Ms. Wynn were funny and engaging. They spoke the native language of YouTube, and they didn’t get outraged by far-right ideas. Instead, they rolled their eyes at them, and made them seem shallow and unsophisticated.

“I noticed that right-wing people were taking these old-fashioned, knee-jerk, reactionary politics and packing them as edgy punk rock,” Ms. Wynn told me. “One of my goals was to take the excitement out of it.”

Ms. Wynn and Mr. Bonnell are part of a new group of YouTubers who are trying to build a counterweight to YouTube’s far-right flank. This group calls itself BreadTube, a reference to the left-wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 book, “The Conquest of Bread.” It also includes people like Oliver Thorn, a British philosopher who hosts the channel PhilosophyTube, where he posts videos about topics like transphobia, racism and Marxist economics.

The core of BreadTube’s strategy is a kind of algorithmic hijacking. By talking about many of the same topics that far-right creators do — and, in some cases, by responding directly to their videos — left-wing YouTubers are able to get their videos recommended to the same audience.

What is most surprising about Mr. Cain’s new life, on the surface, is how similar it feels to his old one. He still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of his favorite creators. It is still difficult, at times, to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.

It’s possible that vulnerable young men like Mr. Cain will drift away from radical groups as they grow up and find stability elsewhere. It’s also possible that this kind of whiplash polarization is here to stay as political factions gain and lose traction online.

I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.

There aren’t many things that Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn have in common, but here is one. Both were treated as joke candidates at the start of their campaigns. And joke candidates don’t face the same level of scrutiny as front-runners – which is a problem when they turn out to be serious contenders

Even once it was a straight fight between Trump and Hillary Clinton, too often she was treated like the next president and he was treated like the entertainment. There was a double standard of scrutiny.

With the EU referendum months and months away – and a win for Remain expected – Corbyn’s Euroscepticism seemed like a minor quirk, rather than a defining part of his politics. Journalists failed again to make the case for what really mattered.

the war of facts against narrative

“What happens in a hung parliament?” became one of the most searched-for terms in the UK. Hundreds of thousands of people were reading our piece at once. I was happy – it was a great article. I was also struck by something. As a specialist website, the New Statesman often struggles to compete with the huge newspaper websites on Google search results. Here, we had triumphed… because, it seemed, our rivals hadn’t written the piece.

I hope that my colleagues will continue their proud tradition of ignoring the herd – and therefore increasing their chances of being right

The seductive power of the conventional narrative is one of the most distorting forces in political journalism. Jeremy Corbyn is useless, Donald Trump is a joke, Theresa May is the Iron Lady, Remain will win, the Liberal Democrats are finished, Nigel Farage has retired from politics. All of these seem true, until – suddenly – they are not

One of my favourite sayings about journalism is this: “It’s not journalism’s job to report that people are saying it’s raining. It’s journalism’s job to look out of the window.” Too often, the words of a high-profile politician are repeated uncritically

the job of journalists is not to tell you what the Labour spokesman and “sources close to Michael Gove” are saying. It’s to evaluate their words and deliver them to readers or viewers in context. We need to look out of the window.

Tweet early, tweet often and don’t worry too much if you get something wrong, the thinking goes, because any attention is good.

Political journalism is often speculative, so there has to be latitude for predictions that prove incorrect. Sometimes that is taken as licence to write stories that are unfalsifiable, or will be correct – eventually

Among the journalists I spoke to, there was a general acceptance that some of their colleagues treated political journalism as entertainment. A story could be just that. At outlets such as the Financial Times and Bloomberg, which cater to a specialist audience who may make investment decisions based on their coverage, there are heavy sanctions for getting it wrong. Elsewhere, attitudes are more relaxed.

As humans, we find people more interesting than policies. But that has huge distorting effects. The best political journalists use people to tell their stories, reducing an abstract clash of ideas to a human scale. The worst ones treat existential questions as props for a Punch and Judy show

“All our stories are told through other people’s mouths,”

Journalists “create” public figures all the time. We decide which YouTuber to interview, which athlete to put on the front page, and which politicians are at the top of our mental Rolodex. We are, quite rightly, beginning to reckon with the lack of race, class and gender diversity in political journalism, and to expand our pool of sources. Why shouldn’t that apply on ideological grounds too?

Too often, I think, journalists identify one type of person with “true Britons”. We talk about Labour’s “heartlands” in working-class northern English regions, when the party is now strongest in multi-ethnic big cities. Asked to reflect on Labour’s loss of votes in the European elections, Richard Tice, chair of the Brexit Party, said: “This has happened because they haven’t listened to their core heartlands, they’ve listened to people in Islington.” But Labour has two Westminster seats in the Islington region, each with a thumping majority. So where is the party’s heartland now?

Because political journalists are stuck in the Commons and on Twitter – real world and digital versions of Versailles – they are prone to panic about not representing “real people”. But who gets depicted as the authentic voice of unheard Britain is governed by implicit assumptions that are grim when exposed to the light. Why are the views of a retired steelworker in Grimsby about “where the country has gone wrong” more important than those of a second-generation Nigerian-British nurse in Plaistow? Citizenship is supposed to transcend personal identity, and yet we still indulge an idea of the “volk”. This tendency applies equally in America, where retired steelworkers in Pennsylvania were held up as the Great Unheard, but the same epithet was not bestowed on black voters in Detroit.

Across Europe, the story of the latest EU elections was the rise of environmentalist parties. But somehow, their voters aren’t held up as “real people” whose real concerns must be heeded by the main parties. Why not?

There is excellent political journalism out there. And god, do we need it now more than ever. 

The trans community became a lot more organized and less fractured in the eighties and nineties. In 1987, the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE), a trans nonprofit of unprecedented scale, was established for the explicit purpose of countering widespread intolerance and ignorance, and, among other things, it took control of the magazine Transgender Tapestry

For several decades there had been a cyclical trend in which trans stories made the news and became fodder for Hollywood films but never led to any forward political momentum, leaving most trans people still living discreetly on the margins. Could a film really change things for the community? At the time, a “good,” forward-thinking movie would invariably still be outnumbered by films filled with both malicious and casual transphobia. And there was still an unspoken issue: these stories were not in the hands of the community, and it was unthinkable that an out trans person would have enough authority to work on a widely distributed film. The trans experience has long been tied to the struggle to gain autonomy over one’s body and life, making this phenomenon of trans stories being controlled by outsiders a problematic and unsustainable one.

it’s because of democratic digital spaces like the DTA that younger trans generations are now able to trace a longer history, and to see the continuity and lineage of trans experiences and perspectives

there is untold damage that will take years to undo, particularly due to how incurious the cis mainstream is about trans experiences

“I think that it gave us strength. And openness. Today we talk about diversity, about all those things. But I grew up with that. Going from apartment to apartment in the building where I lived, I toured the world.”

“I remember the very racist neighbors we had—they sicced their dogs on us!” Sy said. “We took everything as a game, as a child takes everything as a game, with a lot of innocence and without really seeing the harm. So we had fun trying to be the one not to get bitten by the dog.” Sometimes they’d be playing hide-and-seek and stumble upon things in a cellar: weapons, syringes, unsavory people.

“I was getting proposals for roles as gangsters and guys from the banlieue,” he told L’Express. “I didn’t have any desire to give film a try only to serve as a vehicle for clichés. No more than I have any desire, now, to be le Noir à la mode.”

Nakache and Toledano—whose Jewish parents immigrated to France from, respectively, Algeria and Morocco—had a formula for their films. They were fond of taking characters with different identities (Muslim/Jew, boss/employee, Black/white) and throwing them into hermetic situations together, eliciting both feel-good comedy and a social message. As the public-radio channel France Culture observed, “The fight against inequalities is often at the heart of the pairings; characters are called upon to help each other, have fun, and even love each other despite their differences.”

“The most distressed I’ve seen Omar was after the enormous success of “Intouchables,” when, all of a sudden, he became the spokesperson of a generation,” Laurent Grégoire told me. “People wanted to touch him like they touched Louis XIV to heal scrofula.”

Sy now had his pick of roles in France. He chose to star in Roschdy Zem’s “Chocolat,” a bio-pic of Rafael Padilla, a formerly enslaved Afro-Cuban clown who became a sensation at the Paris circus, establishing himself as one of France’s first successful Black entertainers before struggling with addiction. (His stage name was Chocolat.) The film was demanding in every sense. A Belle Époque period piece, it required Sy to pull off a mustache and a bowler hat. The circus routines, which Sy choreographed with James Thierrée—Charlie Chaplin’s grandson, who played Chocolat’s white circus partner—were technically challenging, involving slaps, stunts, and pratfalls, many of them at Chocolat’s expense. Above all, the film was emotionally draining in its exploration of what white laughter costs a Black artist. “It spoke to me,” Sy said. “The first Black clown is clearly my ancestor. He opened the door and we entered behind him.”

The actor Aïssa Maïga recently published “Noire N’est Pas Mon Métier” (“Black Is Not My Job”), in which she examines the “nebulous racism” of the French film industry. “I often asked myself why I was among the only Black actresses to work in a country as racially mixed as France,” she writes. The book includes essays from fifteen other Black female actors, who recount being asked to change their hair styles, to accept ludicrous lines, to play stereotypical characters (“65% of the time named Fatou”) such as prostitutes and African matriarchs.

Sy told me, “All minorities are unfortunately in the same boat at the moment, because society tells very few of these stories. Even when we do, minorities aren’t the central characters, or they appear in the form of clichés or beliefs that are erroneous and obsolete.” He didn’t want to name names, he said, “but we still see certain films that depict the banlieue how it was twenty years ago.” He continued, “It’s painful, because there are so many stories to tell, especially there. If we’re going to depict it, let’s do it accurately.”

Sy’s activism has a particular impact because he has always stood, in word and deed, for a unified, multicultural France. “He’s someone who was born into the problems and who incarnates the solution,” Achour said

The night of the Bataclan attacks, in 2015, Sy was in Paris, but he didn’t find out what was happening until later in the evening—he was at a Shabbat dinner at a friend’s apartment, with his phone turned off. During the 2017 elections, he called for French people of all political persuasions to prevent the election of the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. “That’s not politics,” he said. “That’s being human.”

Sy had been practically cut from the film that was supposed to be his American breakthrough. “It was actually a good lesson,” he told me. “I learned what Hollywood is.” What stung him most was that the studio hadn’t even bothered to let him know. “It was a violent surprise,” he said. “But, at the same time, I laughed about it a lot.”

Sneaking into American superstardom by acting in French: le cheval de Trappes was back.

Willoughby told Insider that she believes the "BBC is now institutionally transphobic," saying it would be "impossible for a trans person to have a high visibility role at the BBC." 

In a statement issued to Insider, LGBT charity Stonewall said: "It's extremely concerning to see misinformation about trans people in the news, particularly in major media outlets. "Trans people exist, which has been settled in law in the UK since 2004, and they should not be subjected to degrading 'debates' about whether their identities are real or an 'ideology.' Such discussions only serve to fuel division instead of moving us forward to a better, more inclusive world," it said.

The trans community makes up less than 1% of the population, but their sheer existence is a contentious topic for the media, documented as causing distress, pain, and mental health issues. 

McConnell spoke about what trans people want from the press: "Really, we want nothing. It's not because we're trying to hide anything. It's because there's literally nothing to talk about. We're just completely normal, boring people. And that's such an unsatisfying answer, but it's the truth,"

France operates a highly centralized public education system, with the education ministry managing the nation’s schools from Paris. Ever since waves of immigrants arrived after World War II, during a period the French refer to as the “30 glorious years” of rebuilding and economic expansion, schools have been perceived as imparting certain ideals about French citizenship. Even slight changes to the curriculum may be put under the microscope. 

Ndiaye’s rapid elevation from the director of a humble national monument to the head of France’s education ministry marks a leap of faith by Macron, who described Ndiaye as an example of universalism and equal opportunity when they appeared together at an elementary school in Marseille last month. Having survived a recent reshuffling of the president’s cabinet, Ndiaye has moved from managing the Porte Dorée Palace, an institution with around 100 employees and an annual budget of 15 million euros, to leading the country’s largest public institution, with more than 1.2 million employees, an annual budget of more than 55 billion euros, and the responsibility of educating more than 12 million public school students

it wasn’t until living in the United States that he reflected upon what it meant to be Black

“When you have even the smallest commitment to the United States, they think you talk on behalf of Americans,” the Senegalese-born French politician said in a recent phone call. “The French are fascinated by America, but at the same time they are very careful about being under U.S. influence. They want to think that their culture is different from the community-oriented model of the United States.”

“What’s confusing is that you had in the previous government a line of assertive secularism that was very opposed to any conversation on race, which in the French context is very delicate,” Belin said. “Macron has demonstrated a willingness to tackle some of the most difficult elements of the French colonial period, moving the conversation forward on Algeria and Rwanda. He is a modernizer for France’s history, but not particularly avant-garde on racial justice and postcolonial matters.”

Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist, said that she thought Ndiaye’s report for the Paris Opera demonstrated “a sociological misunderstanding of an actual problem” that should be addressed by reducing socioeconomic inequalities. She felt that Ndiaye’s analysis had been influenced by his time living in the United States, with its multicultural social model, “which tends to reduce individuals to their belonging to collective entities.”

Somewhat controversially, for France, he has referred to systemic racism in housing, employment, and in police relations with the Black and immigrant communities. But compared with U.S. academics plowing similar terrain, his views are relatively moderate

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a hard-left political figure who placed third in the presidential race in April, scorned the new cabinet when it was announced in May but singled out Ndiaye as an “audacious” choice—echoing the Revolution-era words of Georges Danton, who called for “audacity, more audacity, always audacity.”

Some role models whom Ndiaye has referenced over the years—Frantz Fanon, Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor—were Black French colonial authors who in one way or another turned to politics.

This generation, the first not to have known life before the internet, has acquired a battery of skills in navigating digital environments, but it isn’t clear how well those skills line up with the ones traditionally accredited by universities.

the drift of universities towards a platform model, which makes it possible for students to pick up learning materials as and when it suits them. Until now, academics have resisted the push for ‘lecture capture’. It causes in-person attendance at lectures to fall dramatically, and it makes many lecturers feel like mediocre television presenters. Unions fear that extracting and storing teaching for posterity threatens lecturers’ job security and weakens the power of strikes. Thanks to Covid, this may already have happened.

Many students may like the flexibility recorded lectures give them, but the conversion of lectures into yet more digital ‘content’ further destabilises traditional conceptions of learning and writing

the evaluation forms which are now such a standard feature of campus life suggest that many students set a lot of store by the enthusiasm and care that are features of a good live lecture

From the perspective of students raised in a digital culture, the anti-plagiarism taboo no doubt seems to be just one more academic hang-up, a weird injunction to take perfectly adequate information, break it into pieces and refashion it. Students who pay for essays know what they are doing; others seem conscientious yet intimidated by secondary texts: presumably they won’t be able to improve on them, so why bother trying? For some years now, it’s been noticeable how many students arrive at university feeling that every interaction is a test they might fail. They are anxious. Writing seems fraught with risk, a highly complicated task that can be executed correctly or not.

an injunction against creative interpretation and writing, a deprivation that working-class children will feel at least as deeply as anyone else.

given the changing class composition of the UK over the past thirty years, it’s not clear that contemporary elites have any more sympathy for the humanities than the Conservative Party does. A friend of mine recently attended an open day at a well-known London private school, and noticed that while there was a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers, nobody was waiting to speak to the English teacher. When she asked what was going on, she was told: ‘I’m afraid parents here are very ambitious.’ Parents at such schools, where fees have tripled in real terms since the early 1980s, tend to work in financial and business services themselves, and spend their own days profitably manipulating and analysing numbers on screens. When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.

There may be very good reasons for delivering online teaching in segments, punctuated by tasks and feedback, but as Yandell observes, other ways of reading and writing are marginalised in the process. Without wishing to romanticise the lonely reader (or, for that matter, the lonely writer), something is lost when alternating periods of passivity and activity are compressed into interactivity, until eventually education becomes a continuous cybernetic loop of information and feedback. How many keystrokes or mouse-clicks before a student is told they’ve gone wrong? How many words does it take to make a mistake?

In the utopia sold by the EdTech industry (the companies that provide platforms and software for online learning), pupils are guided and assessed continuously. When one task is completed correctly, the next begins, as in a computer game; meanwhile the platform providers are scraping and analysing data from the actions of millions of children. In this behaviourist set-up, teachers become more like coaches: they assist and motivate individual ‘learners’, but are no longer so important to the provision of education. And since it is no longer the sole responsibility of teachers or schools to deliver the curriculum, it becomes more centralised – the latest front in a forty-year battle to wrest control from the hands of teachers and local authorities.

Constant interaction across an interface may be a good basis for forms of learning that involve information-processing and problem-solving, where there is a right and a wrong answer. The cognitive skills that can be trained in this way are the ones computers themselves excel at: pattern recognition and computation. The worry, for anyone who cares about the humanities in particular, is about the oversimplifications required to conduct other forms of education in these ways.

Blanket surveillance replaces the need for formal assessment.

Confirming Adorno’s worst fears of the ‘primacy of practical reason’, reading is no longer dissociable from the execution of tasks. And, crucially, the ‘goals’ to be achieved through the ability to read, the ‘potential’ and ‘participation’ to be realised, are economic in nature.

since 2019, with the Treasury increasingly unhappy about the amount of student debt still sitting on the government’s balance sheet and the government resorting to ‘culture war’ at every opportunity, there has been an effort to single out degree programmes that represent ‘poor value for money’, measured in terms of graduate earnings. (For reasons best known to itself, the usually independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has been leading the way in finding correlations between degree programmes and future earnings.) Many of these programmes are in the arts and humanities, and are now habitually referred to by Tory politicians and their supporters in the media as ‘low-value degrees’.

studying the humanities may become a luxury reserved for those who can fall back on the cultural and financial advantages of their class position. (This effect has already been noticed among young people going into acting, where the results are more visible to the public than they are in academia or heritage organisations.)

I have heard plenty of dubious excuses for acts of plagiarism during these hearings. But there is one recurring explanation which, it seems to me, deserves more thoughtful consideration: ‘I took too many notes.’ It isn’t just students who are familiar with information overload, one of whose effects is to morph authorship into a desperate form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and everything dissolves into a unitary flow of ‘content’, the identity of the author – as distinct from the texts they have read – becomes harder to delineate.

Leaving aside the strategic political use of terms such as ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, it would be hard to deny that we live in an age of heightened anxiety over the words we use, in particular the labels we apply to people. This has benefits: it can help to bring discriminatory practices to light, potentially leading to institutional reform. It can also lead to fruitless, distracting public arguments, such as the one that rumbled on for weeks over Angela Rayner’s description of Conservatives as ‘scum’. More and more, words are dredged up, edited or rearranged for the purpose of harming someone. Isolated words have acquired a weightiness in contemporary politics and public argument, while on digital media snippets of text circulate without context, as if the meaning of a single sentence were perfectly contained within it, walled off from the surrounding text. The exemplary textual form in this regard is the newspaper headline or corporate slogan: a carefully curated series of words, designed to cut through the blizzard of competing information.

Visit any actual school or university today (as opposed to the imaginary ones described in the Daily Mail or the speeches of Conservative ministers) and you will find highly disciplined, hierarchical institutions, focused on metrics, performance evaluations, ‘behaviour’ and quantifiable ‘learning outcomes’.

If young people today worry about using the ‘wrong’ words, it isn’t because of the persistence of the leftist cultural power of forty years ago, but – on the contrary – because of the barrage of initiatives and technologies dedicated to reversing that power. The ideology of measurable literacy, combined with a digital net that has captured social and educational life, leaves young people ill at ease with the language they use and fearful of what might happen should they trip up.

It has become clear, as we witness the advance of Panopto, Class Dojo and the rest of the EdTech industry, that one of the great things about an old-fashioned classroom is the facilitation of unrecorded, unaudited speech, and of uninterrupted reading and writing.