Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
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We went to Skye last year on a family holiday – an amazing island, beautiful scenery, so many great people. Towards the end of our trip we visited Dunvegan Castle, ancestral home of the mighty Clan MacLeod. It featured much about the history of the family and its famous sons and daughters, although I noticed that it failed to mention perhaps the most influential and important MacLeod of all time – Donald J. Trump.
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A few years ago, a conspiracy theory was born, based on the idea that the population of Britain was far larger than the government claimed. This was known to be true because receipts from Tesco, the country’s largest supermarket, gave an indication of how many people were buying everyday necessities, and these sales were too high to be explained by the official figures.
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Donald Trump is arguably the most unsuitable candidate of any major western political party in living memory, let alone leader of its most powerful state. Brazenly dishonest at times, fond of extreme and reckless rhetoric and disdainful of most political conventions, he’s also the funniest politician in decades. The two things are not unconnected. Comedy as an art form has come under a great deal of strain in the past decade, a result of western society’s new moralisation. Comedians have increasingly sought to be ethical figures on the right side of a great moral struggle, ignoring the fact that funny people don’t have to be good people; indeed, some of the greatest comedians have been malicious or self-centred.
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34 min listen
On this week's episode of Americano, Freddy Gray sits down with journalist and Spectator author Ed West who writes the Substack Wrong Side of History and Richard Hanania who writes the Richard Hanania Newsletter to discuss Elon Musk's interview with Donald Trump on Twitter (X), how much influence Twitter has both in the UK and America, and whether the right-wing men are 'weird'.
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If there is one thing that can be said about Elon Musk, whether you like him or not, he is certainly an argument for the great man theory of history. Rather than the human story just being just a series of social forces pushing us like waves, a single individual can steer events in a totally different direction. Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the social media site was driving the English-speaking world towards more progressive social norms, and it’s unlikely that the Great Awokening would have happened without it, especially both the Black Lives Matter and the transgender movement. The former culminated with the summer protests of 2020 when 19 people were killed in the United States and several billion dollars’ worth of damage was caused.
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My father did National Service and was lucky enough to end up in Trieste, which was probably the best posting around. He was assigned to the intelligence corps, his job to track down former members of the Croatian Ustaše, a pro-Nazi collaboration regime known for bloodthirstiness so extreme that even visiting Gestapo were shocked by their inhumanity. I’m not sure if dad managed to get any Nazis brought to justice, but it inspired a love of Yugoslavia which led him to move to Sarajevo and become fluent in Serbo-Croat, and for the rest of his life he was obsessed with the Balkans – always a healthy pastime.
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My brand is pessimism so I’m wary of flogging it to death or becoming a parody of myself, but it’s hard not to feel a bit downcast about the direction of the country. Perhaps it’s just been an especially grim couple of weeks for Britain, with riots in Leeds, a soldier stabbed in Kent and the unimaginable horror in Southport, followed by the ugly mob scenes that followed. That this happened on the same evening as screaming crowds were seen in Southend running from a machete fight added to the sense of national fragility. This was followed, yesterday, by horrific scenes of widespread mob disorder across the country in which policemen and civilians were attacked, and businesses looted.
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I’m old enough to remember the sense of optimism, hope and promise felt when Tony Blair was elected back in 1997; not by me, obviously, but I could at least appreciate that other people felt that ‘things can only get better’. Whether you think they did or not, Blair transformed the country in his own image, just as his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had done during her similarly long reign. No one could say the same of the recent 14 years of Tory-led governments, a period that has been marked by a continual drift away from conservatism both within civil society and in many ways driven by the administration itself.
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Sea-thieves messenger, deliver back in reply,tell your people this spiteful message,that here stands undaunted an Earl with his band of menwho will defend our homeland,Aethelred’s country, the lord of mypeople and land. Fall shall youheathen in battle! To us it would be shamefulthat you with our coin to your ships should get awaywithout a fight, now you thus farinto our homeland have come.You shall not so easily carry off our treasure:with us must spear and blade first decide the terms,fierce conflict, is the tribute we will hand over. So speaks Byrhtnoth, hero of the poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’, telling of an epic clash of arms in Essex against Viking raiders in 991.
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I’m old enough to remember when ‘it’s a free country’ was a phrase people used in conversation. It feels like it was the kind of thing they said regularly, either when someone asked permission to do something or when commenting on some particular eccentricity. Can I sit there? It’s a free country. You want to walk around dressed up as a pirate? Well, it’s a free country. Perhaps it reflected a self-conscious British sense of themselves as freedom-loving people – which isn’t really true, or at least hasn’t been since 1914 – or maybe it was a Cold War thing. But I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase in at least 20 years, and perhaps that’s because it’s just not true anymore.
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31 min listen
On this week's episode, Peter Hitchens remembers a Christmas in Bucharest, Lionel Shriver says people don't care about Ukraine anymore, Ed West wonders if you can ‘meme’ yourself into believing in God, Mary Wellesley reads her ‘Notes On’ St Nicholas, and Melissa Kite says she had to move to Ireland to escape the EU‘s rules.
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One of Professor Richard Dawkins’s most influential ideas was the concept of the ‘meme’, which he coined in The Selfish Gene. A meme is an idea or form of behaviour that spreads by imitation from person to person. Memes can be beneficial or harmful to the individual and the wider community. The most successful have some great psychological appeal. Memes are a form of contagion, and with 21st-century technology, the power of that contagion has grown. Yet people are not merely passive recipients of ideas. Indeed, one aspect of human psychology clearly visible on social media is the willingness of people to meme themselves into belief.
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Western liberalism was built on the principle of marrying out. Our beliefs about the freedom of the individual ultimately stem from the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage, which helped create a worldview that was open, trusting and opposed to both clannishness and xenophobia. The medieval Church’s insistence that marriage be consensual was revolutionary and strange; back in the 13th century a romantic poem, The History of William Marshal, has the protagonist coming across an eloping couple who have defied their parents to seek true love. Our hero then robs them, and since the story was commissioned by Marshal’s sons to glorify him, we can assume that public opinion might have thought this the right thing to do.
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‘We – conservatives of left and right, all those who believe in the old way – need to win this battle, to restore the conservative normative as the proper basis for our culture and society, with a restored “covenantal” understanding at the heart of families, neighbourhoods and the nation.’ So the MP Danny Kruger writes in his recently published Covenant, where he also states that ‘To strengthen family life and restore the oikos we need good housing in the right places, jobs that sustain the home, and a decent system of care for children and dependent adults.
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I love the BBC’s Horrible Histories; in fact, I’m on record as saying it’s among the best things about being a parent. The show, which in its first five seasons starred the six actors who went on to make Ghosts, has engaged children and adults alike with a dry wit that owes much to Blackadder. Go and have children just so you have an excuse to watch it. One of its highlights is the music, and the most brilliantly crafted songs, works of genius such as the Scorpions-inspired Viking rock anthem, a song about the Pilgrim Fathers based on ‘Empire State of Mind’, the Kings of Leonesque ‘Alexander’ and the finale to the fifth season, a sort of ‘We Are the World’ tribute.
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My dog is great with children, I will give her that. The family pet and I don’t really get on, and since I last wrote on the subject of ‘Twiggy’ I’m afraid there has been no great budding human–canine love story; I won’t be played by Owen Wilson in the biopic of her life any time soon. She is warm and affectionate around people but has a relentless desire to hunt – rats, pigeons, squirrels and mice have all on occasion fallen prey, much to the distress of some members of the public. This ends up causing great inconvenience because Twiggy regularly gets trapped or lost while out hunting, and we have to waste hours looking for her.
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Seven years ago on Friday, a 31-year-old man got behind the wheel of a 19-tonne lorry and purposefully drove it down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais at speed as crowds celebrated France’s Bastille Day. Eighty-six people were killed, including 14 children, the image of an infant’s corpse wrapped in foil beside a toy shocking a country that had grown wearily used to violence. The previous November, 130 people had been murdered across Paris in a series of attacks which reached their most intense savagery at the Bataclan. This followed earlier atrocities that year at the Charlie Hebdo office and a Jewish supermarket in the French capital. In all cases the attackers were of North African origin, although often born and raised in France.
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After Brexit, it was all going to be so different for Europe. Following years of growing dominance by the English-speaking world, at last the great European project could return to the language of its founders. Well, that’s what the French believed. For many officials in Paris, Britain’s exit was seen as an opportunity to raise the status of the French language in the EU. Under their presidency last year, French diplomats announced that all key meetings would be in French, alongside translations, with minutes and notes being in French.
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Seventy-five years ago today perhaps the most famous ship in British history arrived at this island. A new nation was born, and with it, a new founding myth. The story begins in the last few weeks of the second world war, when British troops advancing on Kiel in the very north of Germany captured a ship called the Monte Rosa. Built in Hamburg in 1930, after the Nazi takeover in 1933 the Monte Rosa had been used in the ‘Strength Through Joy’ workers’ holiday programme; later it became a troopship for the invasion of Norway, where it remained until 1945, when the vessel was transferred to help with the tragic rescue of Germans escaping from East Prussia.
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Tabloid journalism begins with W.T. Stead, who as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s brought news and scandal to the newly literate masses, transforming public culture and politics with it. The son of a Congregationalist preacher, Stead grew up in a strict religious household in Northumberland, in a home where theatre was ‘the Devil’s chapel’ and novels ‘the Devil’s Bible’. Taught to read by his father, the newsman’s nonconformism would inform his campaigns after he moved from the Northern Echo to the Gazette in London.
