Can the Left Make Peace With a National Flag?

For many years, the English flag was an ambivalent symbol—the flag of the Crusaders who raided medieval Jerusalem, the flag of imperial conquest, and a flag appropriated by the white nationalists of the English Defence League. The cross of Saint George, red on a white background, was also the flag of a bunch of losers. The English men’s soccer team hasn’t won a major title since the 1966 World Cup.

Here in Europe, as in the United States, debates about flags are useful proxies for other cultural anxieties. Flags force us into a confrontation with our country’s history as a source of pride, or shame, or both. They create an us, whose composition can be inclusive or exclusive. And, quite honestly, they can stop the left from winning elections. Being uncomfortable with a national flag is often interpreted (or misinterpreted) as a sign that you don’t love the country it represents. The Scottish saltire and the Welsh red dragon have been thoroughly reclaimed by the nationalist parties of those countries, and even the Union Jack, which blends the flags of Britain’s constituent nations, was rehabilitated in the 1990s by New Labour. But until recently, the English flag languished behind them, unloved and unwaved.

[Read: Raising the American flag made in China]

The flag of Saint George is central to the plot of Dear England, a new play that has just opened at London’s National Theatre. The drama begins with a historical moment of personal and national humiliation. It is the semifinal of the 1996 European championships, England versus Germany, a match that resulted in a 1–1 draw and a penalty shoot-out. The first five players from both teams have all scored, meaning the rules change to “sudden death.” If a player misses his penalty, and his opposing number scores, the first team is out of the competition.

In this cauldron of pressure, a 25-year-old named Gareth Southgate steps up to the penalty spot—and kicks a slow ball directly at the goalkeeper, who blocks it.

For an audience in London, Dear England doesn’t need to show what came next. Almost the whole country knows, including those who aren’t sports fans or hadn’t even been born at the time. England’s goalkeeper, David Seaman, wearing one of the worst shirts ever designed—he looks like a children’s-party entertainer—can’t get a glove to the German team’s next penalty kick. That makes it 6–5 Germany, which goes on to the final and ultimately wins the trophy. Gareth Southgate, meanwhile, goes home with the weight of an entire country’s disappointment upon him. That winter, he makes a pizza ad where the joke is that he has to wear a paper bag on his head in public.

For a while, failure seemed to be history’s verdict on Southgate. “Every single day now, when I walk down the street, it is always mentioned to me,” he told a podcast in 2012. “When you have played for 20 years and that is the first thing people think about you, it is a bit of a downer.” But in 2016, he got the chance to become the temporary manager of the English men’s football team, after the incumbent was caught in a newspaper sting operation over his financial dealings. Since then, Southgate has been an unexpected success in the “impossible job,” taking England to the brink of victory—while nurturing a generation of players who are unafraid to speak out on child poverty and fans’ racism.

Southgate has turned England’s football players from tabloid punch lines into role models, and insisted that no single man should ever bear a team’s defeat alone, as he once did. During a period when Britain has been bitterly divided by Brexit, he’s created a team that belongs as much to a young Black girl in Brixton, South London, as it does to an older white man in Boston, Lincolnshire. He has encouraged a broadly secular, majority-white country to cheer for a young man of Nigerian heritage whose Instagram bio reads, “God’s child.” Southgate once hired a psychologist to encourage his young male players to talk about their fears and feelings, and has made them link arms during penalty shoot-outs. He has become so personally popular that England’s fans have awarded him a chant: “Southgate you’re the one / You still turn me on / Football’s coming home again.”

Okay, okay, after six years of Southgate’s management, England still hasn’t won anything. But the team has played with grace and lost with honor. This has given the country hope.

[Ben Rhodes: This is no time for passive patriotism]

Southgate understands that the power of sport is the power of story—the redemption arc, the last-minute comeback, the underdog triumph, the grudge paid back. He understands that soccer gives people values around which everyone can coalesce, regardless of their political beliefs: hard work, sacrifice, humility, courage. James Graham, the playwright behind Dear England, understands that too. Much of his work for the past decade has been focused on the country’s shifting identity, whether among former mining communities in the BBC drama Sherwood or within the emerging Thatcherite working class depicted in the hit play Ink. Graham is now the closest thing England has to a national playwright. You can probably imagine the demographics of an audience at a subsidized theater performance in London—whiter, richer, and more liberal than the country overall. Yet by the end of Dear England, the crowd was on its feet, shouting along to the unofficial anthem of the Southgate era, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” (Well, except for the former BBC journalist sitting next to me, who fled after the first half, perhaps finding it all a little too populist.)

Early on in Dear England, a senior football official accuses the Southgate character (played with eerie accuracy by Joseph Fiennes) of picking a team captain, Harry Kane, who is just like him. Kane is a decent guy—a father of three, with another on the way, married to his childhood sweetheart—but he is no one’s idea of an orator. All of his charisma is located in his feet. Graham’s script turns Kane, England’s most prolific goal scorer ever, into an avatar of stoic, unassuming English masculinity, a man for whom finding the right words is less important than leading by example. (The contrast with the hyper-loquacious but unprincipled former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is briefly drawn.) In one scene, Kane is shown wearing a rainbow captain’s armband at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to support LGBTQ rights, only to be forced to remove it by officials who don’t want to upset the more conservative countries in the tournament. In another, Kane leads the England team in taking a knee to protest racism—a white man from North London genuflecting in solidarity with his Black and mixed-race teammates.

The real-life Southgate has been manager through a period when the national team has become much less white, a trend that prompts anxiety among those who worry that immigration and multiculturalism are transforming England into a country they don’t recognize. (In the 1991 census, five years before Southgate missed his penalty, England and Wales were 94.1 percent white. That figure is now 81.7 percent.) Dear England’s soundtrack reflects this, shifting from the white Brit-pop of the 1990s to Stormzy’s 2019 hit “Crown.” That song is a doubly resonant choice. The lyrics—“heavy is the head that wears the crown”—certainly apply to managing the national football team. Stormzy, like Southgate, has also raised questions about what patriotism means today. When the rapper became the first Black British solo artist to headline the Glastonbury music festival, he wore a monochrome stab-proof vest adorned with the Union Jack. It was both a riff on the traditional John Bull caricature of Englishness and a rejoinder to the National Front’s racist slogan “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack.”

Southgate’s great achievement off the pitch has been to elevate national pride above racial divisions and to blend concepts dear to the right and the left into a new-model patriotism. His own beliefs, like those of many successful politicians, defy neat, stereotypical categorization. In June 2021, he wrote the open letter from which Graham’s play gets its title. “Dear England,” it began. “It has been an extremely difficult year.” Southgate referenced his grandfather’s service in the Second World War to explain why playing for England had been such an honor: “The idea of representing ‘Queen and country’ has always been important to me.” (He is a patron of Help for Heroes, a charity for veterans.) Having made this appeal to the right, though, Southgate moved into the tricky terrain of race, traditionally associated with the left: “Why would you choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin? Why? Unfortunately for those people that engage in that kind of behaviour, I have some bad news. You’re on the losing side.” The letter’s final image was of a young England fan watching the team, filling out a wall chart, looking up to the players, and feeling proud of the country they represent. The letter was, by quite some distance, more powerful and deeply felt than any speech I heard a politician give during the same turbulent period.

Inevitably, though, some commentators think that Southgate’s version of patriotism—respecting tradition without being blind to the sins of the past—is taking inclusion too far. Ahead of the last World Cup, the former footballer turned COVID contrarian Matt Le Tissier appeared on a talk show hosted by Nigel Farage, a leading Brexiteer, to complain that “woke Mr. Southgate” needed to instill a more “positive” attitude in the team. When the English forward Marcus Rashford, who was raised by a single mother, used his life story to campaign for free school meals during vacations, he faced similar jibes about “sticking to football.” Raheem Sterling, the English player whose criticisms of racism have been most uncompromising, has come in for particular heat. In 2018, his decision to get a tattoo of a rifle on his right calf led to demands, amplified in tabloids and social media, that he be dropped from the squad. The next day, Sterling revealed that the tattoo commemorated his late father, shot dead in Jamaica when he was 2, and his own promise never to pick up a gun. “I shoot with my right foot so it has a deeper meaning,” he added.

Southgate has always supported Sterling in his decision to speak out rather than suffer in silence. In December 2021, they gave a joint interview in which Southgate described criticizing another Black player for getting a yellow card for bad behavior, before realizing that he had faced racist chants throughout the game. Southgate also revealed his fear that reporting the chants against Black players was pointless because the football authorities would do nothing. “At the very least, this had to be a team where we were united on how we saw it,” he added.

Like the incident with the rainbow armband, this careful answer reveals the difficult terrain Southgate must navigate. He faces backlash from unreconstructed racists, who take loud and ostentatious offense at rich young Black men criticizing their country, even when those criticisms are couched in a desire for England to be better. But he must also steer his lads through the world of the image-conscious, money-obsessed, and sometimes openly corrupt football authorities, which—much like American sports leagues—tend to regard racism and other bigotries as PR problems rather than social-justice issues. (Perhaps if homophobic abuse had prompted a wave of popular outrage equivalent in scale to the George Floyd protests, the soccer authorities would rethink their stance on rainbow armbands. But with virtually no openly gay footballers, that seems a distant prospect.)

The scene that everyone will talk about in Dear England—after warm reviews, I expect it to transfer to a commercial theater, and probably become a television drama—shows Southgate in a meeting with his team, unfurling England’s flag and asking players to define what it means. They express unease with its legacy from the Crusades, and its associations with racism, before he clarifies his request. The team needs to say what the flag means to them. He asks them to talk about the places they grew up—Milton Keynes, a town best known as a temple to the traffic circle; Washington (the one in northeast England, not the United States); Walthamstow in North London; Wythenshawe near Manchester. Some of these are “shit places,” one player observes. Yes, replies another, “but they’re our shit places.”

This is about as perfect a distillation of English patriotism as you could hope to encounter. But the play’s real heart comes earlier, when Southgate first meets his coaching staff and players, and bluntly informs them that they are unlikely to win their next tournament. Why does England, a team that last won a World Cup more than half a century ago, still arrive at competitions expecting to dominate them effortlessly? he wonders. And why does it harbor a sense of wounded entitlement when it fails?

[Read: Britain’s distasteful soccer sellout]

In a drama that could easily have fallen into overripe metaphors for the state of the nation, the actors do not imbue these lines with unnecessary portentousness. But those questions do reflect the central challenge of Englishness in the 21st century. Is England always doomed to feel diminished by the end of its empire and by its relegation from the top rank of world powers? Or can the country rebuild itself, with hard work and humility, into something new? The question also applies to masculinity, the secondary theme of Dear England. “At home, I’m below the kids and the dogs in the pecking order but publicly I am the England men’s football team manager,” wrote Southgate in his famous letter. Both there and in the play, he talks about being a father figure to the players, some of whom have never known their own fathers.

Does change always have to feel like loss? Not if you write a new story instead of mourning the old one, argues Dear England. It’s a message that could also apply to the United States: How about a story where you can take a knee and fly the flag, and do both with equal pride?

What You Can’t Say on YouTube

Recently, on a YouTube channel, I said something terrible, but I don’t know what it was. The main subject of discussion—my reporting on the power of online gurus—was not intrinsically offensive. It might have been something about the comedian turned provocateur Russell Brand’s previous heroin addiction, or child-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. I know it wasn’t the word Nazi, because we carefully avoided that. Whatever it was, it was enough to get the interview demonetized, meaning no ads could be placed against it, and my host received no revenue from it.

“It does start to drive you mad,” says Andrew Gold, whose channel, On the Edge, was the place where I committed my unknowable offense. Like many full-time YouTubers, he relies on the Google-owned site’s AdSense program, which gives him a cut of revenues from the advertisements inserted before and during his interviews. When launching a new episode, Gold explained to me, “you get a green dollar sign when it’s monetizable, and it goes yellow if it’s not.” Creators can contest these rulings, but that takes time—and most videos receive the majority of their views in the first hours after launch. So it’s better to avoid the yellow dollar sign in the first place. If you want to make money off of YouTube, you need to watch what you say.

[From the November 2018 issue: Raised by YouTube]

But how? YouTube’s list of content guidelines manages to be both exhaustive and nebulous. “Content that covers topics such as child or sexual abuse as a main topic without detailed descriptions or graphic depictions” is liable to be demonetized, as are “personal accounts or opinion pieces related to abortion as a main topic without graphic depiction.” First-person accounts of domestic violence, eating disorders, and child abuse are definite no-no’s if they include “shocking details.” YouTube operates a three-strike policy for infractions: The first strike is a warning; the second prevents creators from making new posts for a week; and the third (if received within 90 days of the second) gets the channel banned.

For the most popular creators, the site can bring in audiences of millions, and financial rewards to match. But for almost everyone else, content production is a grind, as creators are encouraged to post regularly and repackage content into its TikTok rival, Shorts. Although many types of content may never run afoul of the guidelines—if you’re MrBeast giving out money to strangers, to the delight of your 137 million subscribers, rules against hate speech and misinformation are not going to be an issue—political discussions are subject to the whims of algorithms.

Absent enough human moderators to deal with the estimated 500 hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube uses artificial intelligence to enforce its guidelines. Bots scan auto-generated transcripts and flag individual words and phrases as problematic, hence the problem with saying heroin. Even though “educational” references to drug use are allowed, the word might snag the AI trip wire, forcing a creator to request a time-consuming review.

Andrew Gold requested such a review for his interview with me, and the dollar sign duly turned green—meaning the site did eventually serve ads alongside the content. “It was a risk,” he told me, “because I don’t know how it affects my rating if I get it wrong … And they don’t tell me if it’s Nazis, heroin, or anything. You’re just left wondering what it was.”

Frustrations like Gold’s rarely receive much attention, because the conversation about content moderation online is dominated by big names complaining about outright bans. Perversely, though, the most egregious peddlers of misinformation are better placed than everyday creators to work within the YouTube rules. A research paper last year from Cornell University’s Yiqing Hua and others found that people making fringe content at high risk of being demonetized—such as content for alt-right or “manosphere” channels—were more likely than other creators to use alternative money-making practices, such as affiliate links or pushing viewers to subscribe on other platforms. They didn’t even attempt to monetize their content on YouTube—sidestepping the strike system—and instead used the platform as a shop window. They then became more productive on YouTube because demonetization no longer affected their ability to make a living.

The other platforms such influencers use include Rumble, a site that bills itself as “immune to cancel culture” and has received investment from the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio. In January, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, announced that Rumble was now his “video-sharing service of choice” for press conferences because he had been “silenced” by Google over his YouTube claims about the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, in a true demonstration of horseshoe theory, Russell Brand (a left-wing, crunchy, COVID-skeptical hater of elites) posed with Donald Trump Jr. (a right-wing, nepo-baby, COVID-skeptical hater of elites) at a party hosted by Rumble, where they are two of the most popular creators. Brand maintains a presence on YouTube, where he has 6 million subscribers, but uses it as exactly the kind of shop window identified by the Cornell researchers. He recently told Joe Rogan that he now relies on Rumble as his main platform because he was tired of YouTube’s “wild algebra.”

[Read: Why is Joe Rogan so popular?]

For mega-celebrities—including highly paid podcasters and prospective presidential candidates—railing against Big Tech moderation is a great way to pose as an underdog or a martyr. But talk with everyday creators, and they are more than willing to work inside the rules, which they acknowledge are designed to make YouTube safer and more accurate. They just want to know what those rules are, and to see them applied consistently. As it stands, Gold compared his experience of being impersonally notified of unspecified infractions to working for HAL9000, the computer overlord from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of the most troublesome areas of content is COVID—about which there is both legitimate debate over treatments, vaccines, and lockdown policies and a great river of misinformation and conspiracy theorizing. “The first video I ever posted to YouTube was a video about ivermectin, which explained why there was no evidence supporting its use in COVID,” the creator Susan Oliver, who has a doctorate in nanomedicine, told me. “YouTube removed the video six hours later. I appealed the removal, but they rejected my appeal. I almost didn’t bother making another video after this.”

Since then, Oliver’s channel, Back to the Science, which has about 7,500 subscribers, has run into a consistent problem—one that other debunkers have also faced. If she cites false information in a video in order to challenge it, she faces being reported for misinformation. This happened with a video referencing the popular creator John Campbell’s false claims about COVID vaccines being linked to brain injuries. Her video was taken down (and restored only on appeal) and his video remained up. “The only things in my video likely to have triggered the algorithm were clips from Campbell’s original video,” Oliver told me. Another problem facing YouTube: COVID skepticism is incredibly popular. Oliver’s content criticizing Campbell’s brain-injury rhetoric has just more than 10,000 views. His original video has more than 800,000.

Oliver wondered if Campbell’s fans were mass-reporting her—a practice known as “brigading.”

“It appears that YouTube allows large, profitable channels to use any loophole to spread misinformation whilst coming down hard on smaller channels without even properly checking their content,” she said. But a Google spokesperson, Michael Aciman, told me that wasn’t the case. “The number of flags a piece of content may receive is not a factor we use when evaluating content against our community guidelines,” he said. “Additionally, these flags do not factor into monetization decisions.”

YouTube is not the only social network where creators struggle to navigate opaque moderation systems with limited avenues for appeal. Users of TikTok—where some contributors are paid from a “creator fund” based on their views—have developed an entire vocabulary to navigate automated censorship. No one gets killed on TikTok; they get “unalived.” There are no lesbians, but instead “le dollar beans” (le$beans). People who sell sex are “spicy accountants.” The aim is to preserve these social networks as both family- and advertiser-friendly; both parents and corporations want these spaces to be “safe.” The result is a strange blossoming of euphemisms that wouldn’t fool a 7-year-old.

Not everyone finds YouTube’s restrictions unduly onerous. The podcaster Chris Williamson, whose YouTube channel has 750,000 subscribers and releases about six videos a week, told me that he now mutes swearing in the first five minutes of videos after receiving a tip from a fellow creator. Even though his channel “brush[es] the edge of a lot of spicy topics,” he said, the only real trouble has been when he “dropped the C-bomb” 85 minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour video, which was then demonetized. “The policy may be getting tighter in other areas which don’t affect me,” he said, “but as long as I avoid C-bombs, my channel seems to be fine.” (While I was reporting this story, YouTube released an update to the guidelines clarifying the rules on swearing, and promised to review previously demonetized videos.)

[Read: Social media’s silent filter]

As a high-profile creator, Williamson has one great advantage: YouTube assigned him to a partner-manager who can help him understand the site’s guidelines. Smaller channels have to rely on impersonal, largely automated systems. Using them can feel like shouting into a void. Williamson also supplements his AdSense income from YouTube’s adverts with sponsorship and affiliate links, making demonetization less of a concern. “Any creator who is exclusively reliant on AdSense for their income is playing a suboptimal game,” he said.

Aciman, the Google spokesperson, told me that all channels on YouTube have to comply ​​with its community guidelines, which prohibit COVID-19 medical misinformation and hate speech—and that channels receiving ad revenue are held to a higher standard in order to comply with the “advertiser-friendly content guidelines.” “We rely on machine learning to evaluate millions of videos on our platform for monetization status,” Aciman added. “No system is perfect, so we encourage creators to appeal for a human review when they feel we got it wrong. As we’ve shown, we reverse these decisions when appropriate, and every appeal helps our systems get smarter over time.”

YouTube is caught in a difficult position, adjudicating between those who claim that it moderates too heavily and others who complain that it doesn’t do enough. And every demonetization is a direct hit to its own bottom line. I sympathize with the site’s predicament, while also noting that YouTube is owned by one of the richest tech companies in the world, and some of that wealth rests on a business model of light-touch, automated moderation. In the last quarter of 2022, YouTube made nearly $8 billion in advertising revenue. There’s a very good reason journalism is not as profitable as that: Imagine if YouTube edited its content as diligently as a legacy newspaper or television channel—even quite a sloppy one. Its great river of videos would slow to a trickle.

Roald Dahl Can Never Be Made Nice

Do you have a favorite book by Roald Dahl? I do—it’s his adult novel, My Uncle Oswald, a work defined by its unremitting misanthropy, vulgar sex scenes, and troubling sympathy for eugenics.

The negative Goodreads reviews of My Uncle Oswald tend to focus on its sexism, homophobia, and “glorification of rape culture.” Set at the turn of the 20th century, the book follows Oswald and his accomplice, Yasmin Howcomely, as they tour Europe slipping Great Men a beetle powder that turns them into uncontrollable horndogs. That allows Oswald and Yasmin to harvest their sperm in the hope of selling it to rich, childless women. It is not a subtle book.

Like most of Dahl’s work, the novel is nasty: casually cruel, even sadistic in places. In real life, Oswald would be a menace—he makes the sexist social-media influencer Andrew Tate look like Gloria Steinem. As a fictional protagonist, he’s a delight.

However, nastiness is now out of fashion. Over the weekend, the Telegraph revealed that Puffin, the British publishing house, has released new editions of Dahl’s children’s stories that have been comprehensively rewritten to suit modern sensibilities. An organization called Inclusive Minds was hired in 2020 to advise on “updating” the novels, the same year Dahl’s family quietly published an apology for the author’s anti-Semitism. (Dahl’s estate was sold to Netflix in 2021.) Reading through the extensive list of changes—such as removing a reference to Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull having a “horsey” face—I first felt revulsion: Roald Dahl without nastiness is not Roald Dahl. Something about the process feels dishonest, like an Instagram filter that flattens and smooths, trending all faces toward one idealized yet utterly generic face.

[Michael Harriot: In our house, Dr. Seuss was contraband]

My second thought was this: If his work is really this bad, why even try to save it?

Dahl grew up in the repressed world of the British upper class in the 20th century, where his mother was happy to pack him off to boarding school and his country was happy to pack him off to war. His own feelings were unimportant. As a writer, he responded by focusing on the horrible and the uncanny, on revenge and revolution. You can see the BFG—bullied by the other, bigger giants in the book of the same name—as an analogue for the young Dahl at Repton School, small and picked on by the older boys. Miss Trunchbull, meanwhile, is a grotesque version of every teacher who gave Dahl the cane. She deserves everything she gets.

When I think back over the most memorable parts of Dahl’s work, it’s always the nastiness that lingers. At one point in the writer’s first memoir, Boy, Dahl’s father, Harald, has a broken arm that an incompetent doctor mistakes for a dislocation, tugging on the injured limb until it is permanently disabled. The awful married couple at the center of The Twits subject each other to a campaign of relentless psychological harassment. The message of George’s Marvelous Medicine is “Why not brew up all the chemicals you can find in your house and feed the resulting concoction to your grandmother?” This is not an easy fit for an era when peanut packets carry a warning that they contain nuts.

Some of the changes to Dahl’s work were therefore inevitable. Friends tell me that they find themselves, when reading his books aloud to their children, silently editing the texts as they go. (The author himself was repeatedly pressured during his lifetime to tone down some passages.) Some of the new edits are minor and defensible, such as changing the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach to be Cloud-People. Some reflect adult pieties far more than the protection of children: Matilda is no longer allowed to read the colonialist Rudyard Kipling and is given Jane Austen instead.

[From the December 2007 issue: Who was Kipling?]

A few edits, though, are so contrary to the spirit of Dahl that they feel like a violation. In The Witches, for example, the protagonist’s grandmother warns him to watch out for the evil women who rule the world. They are bald, and cover this up with wigs, as well as hiding their claws under gloves. The grandmother used to say: “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.” Instead, in the 2022 Puffin edition, she warns the youngster that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

Have you ever read a less Dahl-like sentence? He would never have included such a wholesome teachable moment. His cold, unsettling spikiness is his defining quality as a writer. After all, the conclusion of The Witches sees the young male protagonist stuck as a mouse, with a shortened life span to match. Hardly a happy ending.

The Telegraph’s careful analysis of the rewrites shows quite how many nips and tucks the new texts have received. An earthworm’s “pink skin” is now “smooth skin,” a change for which I can imagine no other explanation than that the editors didn’t want to racialize an invertebrate. Elsewhere, references to “black” clothing have been excised. In a few decades’ time, such alterations will seem as awkward as the 17th-century poet Nahum Tate deciding that King Lear needed a happy ending, or Thomas Bowdler shaving down plays to create The Family Shakespeare. The sheer weight of the Dahl edits reveals a kind of corporate safetyism: This might offend someone, so why take the risk?

One of the inadvertently funniest amendments is a passage in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which once explained how the Oompa-Loompas—whom Dahl originally wrote specifically as African “pygmies”—had come to work for Willy Wonka. “It was easy,” the deranged capitalist inventor used to say. “I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them.” In the newly sanitized version, Wonka instead tells his audience that the Oompa-Loompas were volunteers and “they’ve told me they love it here.” Yes, the sensitivity readers have somehow re-created a classic trope from colonial literature: If these slaves are unhappy, why are they singing all the time? Thank you for the clarification, Mr. Wonka, and now perhaps your PR firm could explain why the Oompa-Loompas aren’t allowed to leave the factory.

Many writers I know have reacted strongly to the news of the rewrites, probably because we know how powerful editors can be. Almost everyone who covers difficult, sensitive subjects can tell you about a time they received a “hostile edit” in which the process of publication felt like running uphill through sand. In such cases, the editors introduce so many caveats and concessions to other people’s perspectives that the work ceases to feel like yours. Those kinds of editors—whose highest goal is a piece that won’t cause any trouble—presumably approach a dead author’s work with an appropriately Dahl-esque glee. Finally, a writer who can’t fight back!

Also, let’s not be cute about it: Sensitivity readers, including those at the company that edited the Dahl books, are a newly created class of censors, a priesthood of offense diviners. How can any one person be an expert in all of the fields covered by modern publishing? It’s an impossible request, and so instead, too often the industry resorts to identitarian deference—one member of an ethnic or racial or sexual minority gives the “minority view.” (Inclusive Minds told the Telegraph that its Inclusion Ambassadors have a range of “lived experience,” and that the company does the bulk of its work at the development stage, only rarely suggesting changes to existing works.)

Given the zeal with which the American right is currently targeting books such as The Handmaid’s Tale, the cultural left should be extremely cautious about championing the censorship of literature, particularly when that censorship is driven by business prerogatives rather than idealism. The Dahl controversy will inevitably be presented as a debate about culture—a principled stand in favor of free speech versus a righteous attempt to combat prejudice and bigotry. But it’s really about money. I’ve written before about how some of the most inflammatory debates, over “cancel culture” and “wokeness,” are best seen as capital defending itself. The Dahl rewrites were surely designed to preserve the value of the “IP” as much as advance the cause of social justice.

In their cruelty, lack of empathy, and blithe assumption of Western superiority, Dahl’s novels share many of their flaws with the books of Ian Fleming, born eight years earlier and a survivor of the same vicious public-school system. The writers knew each other, from their mutual involvement in wartime espionage, and their estates pose the same problem: They are money machines, but the original works embarrass their current owners. Fleming’s James Bond was a suave misogynist prone to slapping women and making disparaging remarks about “Chinamen.” Today’s audiences would recoil from that version of 007.

Now add in the pressure from activist groups and cultural critics who write with an explicit social mission—such as the video-game websites that agonized over reviewing Hogwarts Legacy because of its connection with the novelist J. K. Rowling—as well as the pressure from China to create depoliticized content suitable for its citizens. In these conditions, the gravitational pull for companies wishing to make blockbusters is toward blandness: Delete anything anywhere that might upset anyone. But you can’t do this to Dahl—the offensiveness is braided through the work so tightly that unpicking the individual strands is impossible.

[From the August 1943 issue: The sword]

A more honest stance would be that it’s time to take Roald Dahl’s work, put it on a Viking longboat, and sail it flaming into the sunset. Plenty of people are writing new children’s books; whatever we lose by discarding Dahl can be gained elsewhere. A form of Darwinism is rampant in the literary canon. Most authors who were best sellers in their day are now forgotten. Who reads Samuel Richardson’s Pamela now, except first-year literature students? Where are the Netflix adaptations of Hannah More’s pious-conduct books or the gratuitously blood-soaked plays of John Webster? The three best-selling books of 1922—the year when Ulysses was published—were If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson, The Sheik by Edith M. Hull, and Gentle Julia by Booth Tarkington. Like most literature, those titles couldn’t escape the age in which they were written.

But Dahl staggers on, embarrassing the cultural gatekeepers by remaining popular despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times. The work does so because of the dirty secret that children, and adults, like nastiness. They enjoy fat aunts and pranked teachers and the thrilling but illegal doping of pheasants. Today’s corporations want to have it all, though. They want the selling power of an author like Roald Dahl, shorn of the discomforting qualities that made him a best seller. They want things to be simple—a quality that we might call childlike, if Dahl hadn’t shown us that children can be so much more.

The Internet Loves an Extremophile

On YouTube, a British influencer named Tom Torero was once the master of “daygame”—a form of pick-up artistry in which men approach women on the street. “You’ll need to desensitise yourself to randomly chatting up hot girls sober during the day,” Torero wrote in his 2018 pamphlet, Beginner’s Guide to Daygame. “This takes a few months of going out 3-5 times a week and talking to 10 girls during each session.”

Torero promised that his London Daygame Model—its five stages were open, stack, vibe, invest, and close—could turn any nervous man into a prolific seducer. This made him a hero to thousands of young men, some of whom I interviewed when making my recent BBC podcast series, The New Gurus. One fan described him to me as “a free spirit who tried to help people,” and “a shy, anxious guy who reinvented himself as an adventurer.” To outsiders, though, daygame can seem unpleasantly clinical, with its references to “high-value girls,” and even coercive: It includes strategies for overcoming “LMR,” which stands for “last-minute resistance.” In November 2021, Newsweek revealed that Torero was secretly recording his dates—including the sex—and sharing the audio with paying subscribers to his website. Torero took down his YouTube channel, although he had already stopped posting regularly.

[Read: To learn about the far right, start with the ‘manosphere]’

This was the narrative I had expected to unravel—how a quiet, nerdy schoolteacher from Wales had built a devoted following rooted in the backlash to feminism. Instead, I found a more surprising story: Tom Torero was what I’ve taken to calling an “extremophile,” after the organisms that carve out an ecological niche in deserts, deep-ocean trenches, or highly acidic lakes. He was attracted to extremes. Even while working in an elementary school, he was doing bungee jumps in Switzerland.

As churchgoing declines in the United States and Britain, people are turning instead to internet gurus, and some personality types are particularly suited to thriving in this attention economy. Look at the online preachers of seduction, productivity, wellness, cryptocurrency, and the rest, and you will find extremophiles everywhere, filling online spaces with a cacophony of certainty. Added to this, the algorithms governing social media reward strong views, provocative claims, and divisive rhetoric. The internet is built to enable extremophiles.

In his daygame videos and self-published books, Tom recounted a familiar manosphere backstory of being bullied by his male peers and friend-zoned by girls. But that wasn’t the whole picture. While doing my research, I received a message from Tom’s ex-wife. (In the podcast, we called her Elizabeth, a pseudonym, because she feared reprisals from his fans.) Elizabeth said she had been at university with Tom Ralis—his birth name—at the turn of the century. They’d met in the choir. He was “quite tall, and quite gawky … he had a kind of lopsided grin and he was sort of cheery and chirpy and wanted to make people laugh,” she told me. Elizabeth was a music student, and she was—unusual for Britain—a follower of the Greek Orthodox faith. How funny, Tom had said. He was interested in that religion too. But he didn’t expect to become her boyfriend. He was happy just to be friends.

[Read: To learn about the far right, start with the ‘manosphere’]

When Elizabeth’s father had a car accident, though, Tom started love bombing her. He turned up at her room in college with tea bags and biscuits, and told her that he did in fact want to date her. This proposal came with an implicit threat: “If I wouldn’t be with him, he would disappear,” she told me. “And the way that he talked about it … there was a kind of threat of suicide, that he would kill himself if I wouldn’t be with him.”

Confused, worried, and under pressure, Elizabeth said she “let him take over.” She began to date Tom, and they got married while still at university. Then, she recounted, they moved to a Greek island, where Elizabeth taught English, and Tom, who had started dressing all in black, went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos—an Orthodox monastery that bans women and even female animals to maintain its purity. When he returned, Elizabeth said, Tom announced that he wanted to become a monk.

I was surprised by this revelation: The man who became famous for teaching seduction had considered a vow of celibacy? But to Elizabeth, the announcement made perfect sense. When she first met Tom, he was a biology student who “hero-worshipped” the geneticist and atheist Richard Dawkins, she said, before he became “disillusioned with science and rationalism.” The common thread between all of these different Toms—Ralis and Torero; ardent atheist, wannabe monk, and YouTube pick-up artist—was a psychological need, a desire to be respected, to be listened to, to be a preacher. It was the role he wanted. The subject matter that he preached about came second.

[Read: Am I being love bombed? Are you?]

Not every internet guru follows this pattern. Some influencers have developed a genuine interest in a single topic and decided to make it into a career. But many other corners of the internet are full of serial enthusiasts who have pinballed from one ideology to another, believing in each one deeply as they go. These flexible evangelists are perfectly suited to becoming online gurus. They believe, and they need to preach—and because of the lack of gatekeeping on social media, the most talented talkers can easily find an audience online.

Andrew Tate is another extremophile. The misogynist influencer, a former kickboxer and reality-show contestant, used to describe himself as an atheist, but he announced last year that he had converted to Islam because—as one interviewer, the British rapper Zuby, summarized Tate’s view—“Christianity is kinda cucked.” Once Tate decided that God exists—which he had deduced because evil exists, and therefore so must its opposite—it was important to him to find the religion he deemed the most hard-core. (After all, a man who keeps swords in his house could not have become a mild-mannered Episcopalian.) On the other side of the gender divide, Mikhaila Peterson, a second-generation influencer who became known for advocating a “lion diet” as a cure for immune conditions, revealed in 2021 that she had found God through taking psychedelics. She now talks about religion healing her soul with the same intensity that she speaks about her all-meat diet healing her body.

Shortly after Tom Ralis returned from Mount Athos, Elizabeth escaped the Greek island, and their marriage. When they divorced in 2006, YouTube was in its infancy. Throughout the 2010s, she would search for him online occasionally, and she watched him develop his daygame model. It was like the love-bombing technique he had used on her but condensed from several months into a single date. In December 2021, she discovered from a text message sent by a mutual friend that Tom had taken his own life. He had often spoken of his experience with depression, but his death still shocked her. In April last year, several of his online friends organized a tribute in London, and talked about Torero’s effect on their life. He had successfully become the secular online version of a preacher—a YouTube guru.

Tom Torero wanted to be an authority figure, and he found the cultural script that best fulfilled his needs. On my journey through the gurusphere, I encountered many stories like his. Take Maajid Nawaz, whom The New York Times anointed a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” in 2018. Before becoming famous as a heterodox public intellectual, Nawaz had been jailed in Egypt for four years in the early 2000s for being a member of the Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. After renouncing that ideology, he became an antiextremism adviser to then-Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, and at the same time stood as a candidate for Britain’s centrist party, the Liberal Democrats. Having failed to succeed in politics, Nawaz became a talk-radio host and became radicalized again, this time into COVID denialism. He left the broadcaster LBC in January 2022 after claiming that mandatory vaccination was “a global palace coup” by “fascists who seek the New World Order.”

[Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Extremism has spread into the mainstream]

Nawaz is, I would argue, another extremophile. This 2015 description of him by The Guardian could just as easily apply to Tom Torero: “Nawaz’s powers of verbal persuasion are something even his detractors concede. There’s a strong line to take in every answer. But equally, there’s very little sense of being open to persuasion himself.” Unlike most of us, with our needling doubts and fumbling hesitation, extremophiles are fervent in whatever their current belief is. And they want to tell other people about it.

For this reason, extremophiles have always made particularly good op-ed columnists—and now podcasters and YouTubers. The Hitchens brothers are a traditional example: Christopher was a Trotskyist as a young man, yet he became a supporter of the ultimate establishment project, the Iraq War. Peter moved from socialism to social conservatism, and has used his Mail on Sunday column to oppose strict COVID policies. Their analogue in the social-media age is James Lindsay. He believes that America is under threat from a Marxist-pedophile alliance, and he frequently collaborates with the Christian Nationalist Michael O’Fallon. But Lindsay first entered public life in the 2010s, writing books in support of New Atheism. At that time, he saw himself on the left. Although his middle name is Stephen, he told me that he wrote his atheist books as “James A. Lindsay” to deflect any backlash from the conservative community where he lived. As far as he is concerned, he has always been a rebel against the prevailing political climate.

Not everyone with an internet following is an extremophile. Someone like Russell Brand, a left-wing British comedian and actor now dabbling in anti-vax rhetoric and conspiracy theories about shadowy elites “concretizing global power,” strikes me as having a different psychological makeup. He is merely a heat-seeking missile for attention. His mirror image on the right is Dave Rubin, a gay man who has built a fan base among social conservatives opposed to homosexuality, as well as a Trumpist who—sensing the wind changing—recently boasted about attending the inauguration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Extremophiles are more like the sociologist Eric Hoffer’s “true believers,” the people who fuel mass movements. “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not,” Hoffer wrote in 1951. Hoffer’s formulation reminded me of a friend telling me about a mutual acquaintance who had been in two cults. I felt like Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell: To be in one cult may be regarded as a misfortune; to join two looks like carelessness. Or think about the Mitford sisters, the quintessential English aristocrats of the early 20th century. As children, Unity was a fascist, and Decca was a Communist. Their childhood sitting room was divided down the middle; one side had copies of Der Stürmer and Mein Kampf; the other had hammers and sickles. The only point of political agreement between the two girls was that the mere conservatives and liberals who visited the house were boring.

My journey reporting on the gurusphere has led me to confront my own extremophile tendencies. After being raised Catholic, I became interested in New Atheism in the 2000s, because it was a countercultural phenomenon. Like pretty much everyone else, I would argue that my political beliefs are all carefully derived from first principles. But the ones that I choose to write about publicly are clearly influenced by my own self-image as an outsider and a contrarian. Being self-aware about that helps me remember that my fear of normiedom has to be kept in check, because the conventional wisdom is often right.

Researchers of extremism are now studying its psychological causes as keenly as they are its political ones. “Psychological distress—defined as a sense of meaninglessness that stems from anxious uncertainty—stimulates adherence to extreme ideologies,” wrote the authors of a 2019 paper on the topic. Many people become radicalized through “a quest for significance—the need to feel important and respected by supporting a meaningful cause.” The COVID pandemic was so radicalizing because one single highly conspicuous issue presented itself at exactly the same time that many people were bored, lonely, and anxious. Cults usually try to isolate their followers from their social-support networks; during the pandemic, people did that all by themselves.

The extremophile model helps us make sense of political journeys that are otherwise baffling to us, like the monastery-to-pick-up-artist pipeline. We might be tempted to ask: Who was the real Tom Torero—atheist bro, aspirant monk, or master seducer? The answer is: all of them. He was a true believer, just not a monogamous one.