Ben Sixsmith

When it comes to recent controversies surrounding the very public life of the Conway family, we can only wish them the best. Kellyanne was a White House counselor, George was part of the anti-Trump ‘Lincoln Project’, and their teenage daughter is a young progressive who denounced both of her parents on social media. Kellyanne and George are stepping back from public life to focus on their family. We hope they can rebuild bridges and put all of this behind them.Having different political opinions within a family can be tough. We think, for example, of the Hitchens brothers. Christopher was an impassioned atheist and liberal internationalist. Peter is an equally impassioned Christian and social conservative.

If Joe Biden wins the US presidential election in November there is one possible outcome that even conservatives will be forced to welcome: the world might see less of Sarah Cooper. If you have been on Twitter in the last six months you will have no doubt encountered Cooper. Her fantastically popular videos offer a kind of impersonation of Donald Trump — Cooper does not mimic the President, however. She has no original script and never speaks. Instead, she plays the President's speeches aloud and opens and closes her mouth, as if she is speaking his words. That is not quite all she does. She also screws up her face. There is some minor craftsmanship to what she does. She is not just pulling Kenneth Williams-esque grimaces.

It was a frustrating weekend for the workers at the National Human Trafficking Hotline. For days, they ‘received hundreds of reports’ referring to’ a series of viral posts’, though ‘none’ were made by someone who had ‘a specific connection to any alleged missing children’. This made it ‘more difficult’ for them to ‘provide support and attention to others who are in need of help’. The subject of those reports? Wayfair.According to the Wayfair child trafficking theory, which has stewed on Reddit, Instagram and elsewhere, children are being sold across the internet through the e-commerce website Wayfair.

If you are on the internet you have no doubt heard of ‘Karens’. ‘Karens’ are middle-aged white women who have a fondness for reporting people, especially black people, to the authorities. ‘The archetypal “Karen”,’ says Vox in one of its invaluable explainers, ‘Is blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer.’ She ‘has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with it.’In practice, calling someone a ‘Karen’ is generally an excuse to abuse a middle-aged white woman and make it seem woke.

Joseph Miner, a 29-year-old resident of Queens, New York, fits into what you might imagine the ‘alt-right’ to be. A young man who posted photos of himself performing the Hitler salute alongside jokes about being an ‘incel’, he lived with his parents and posted racial abuse online under the handle ‘souljagoy’. (Get it? It's like Soulja Boy. But he’s not Jewish. Get it?)According to reports, Miner has been arrested for buying illegal weapons from an undercover agent with the aim of taking part in the ‘boogaloo’.Boogaloo? What the hell is that? Boogaloo, it turns out, is a euphemism for civil war, used ironically and unironically online.

Most of us have known about coronavirus for around four months, but already it has revolutionized everything that came before it. Age-old institutions and customs are dead, and the world will never look the same. There is precedent for this, of course. Before the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’, which emerged in 1918, young men had had a curious coming of age ritual in which they sat together in holes in the ground and fired guns at groups of young men from other countries. Soon, these men preferred to ‘socially distance’ themselves in armored vehicles. Normal life had been disrupted.Normal life is being disrupted again. Nothing will ever look the same. But how will it look? What will the ‘new normal’ involve in the coronavirus age?

Exactly two years ago, on May 8, 2018, Bari Weiss published an essay in the New York Times titled ‘Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web’. Describing a subculture of liberals, conservatives and disaffected leftists who were engaging in conversations about free speech, left-wing censoriousness and un-PC subjects like sex differences and transgenderism, Weiss described three common features of these different people:‘First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject… Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient.