It’s the corruption, stupid

The recent DC media revelry was thwarted by a blundering assassination attempt, and in my case, a drunken challenge from journalist Jim Acosta, formerly of CNN and now Substack. He asked me to “step outside” so we could settle our differences like real men. I was eager to oblige on the sidewalk in front of the Smithsonian Museum, where Substack was hosting its gala. His fury erupted when I dared approach the VIP partygoer Julie K. Brown – comically credited with having broken the Jeffrey Epstein story in 2018 with her series of painfully overrated articles in the Miami Herald. She has since enjoyed hero status, getting showered with every contrived journalism award. Julie has even had her likeness optioned for some sort of streaming-service drama.

It’s tempting, even fashionable, to pooh-pooh the hyperbole from our tech overlords. The release in 2022 of ChatGPT, the first mass-market conversational AI system, unleashed a volley of supercilious put-downs. The chatbot was not intelligent. It was merely hallucinating, manipulating statistics, regurgitating phrases from the internet: it was a “stochastic parrot.” Well, over the next three years, ChatGPT became unputdownable. It learned to handle photographs and videos, extract wisdom from dense textbooks, sound like Scarlett Johansson, write everything from code to songs to emails and offer tips on fixing washing machines. Not bad for a parrot.

It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked just for doing his job – for stopping a thief nicking booze – and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. Sean is on morning TV as I write, donations to pay for his appeal rising steadily. In part, the fuss is a measure of sympathy. Sean worked at Morrisons for 29 years and was liked by the people of Aldridge. He was sacked, say Morrisons, because they have a “deter, don’t detain” policy – though what Morrisons think could possibly have deterred this thief, given his long list of previous convictions, is anyone’s guess. But the feeling for Sean isn’t just a swell of support for one man; it’s also a symptom of wider frustration.

During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society, who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – “Here’s the wannabe Jew” – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: “You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.” A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks!

It’s a year since the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that gender means biological sex – and not much has changed. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is advising the government on how to apply the judgment to law, has spent a long while drafting guidance. But last week, word arrived that Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, wants the EHRC to “tone down” its advice, leading to further delays. Why the holdup? My guess is that it has something to do with a new era we are entering. An era of “TRANS RAGE.” That’s not my expression. It’s from Bash Back, a recently formed anonymous collective going after people and organizations it believes frustrate the transgender experience.