Charlie Kirk’s death has exposed the bigotry of the ‘Be Kind’ brigade - spiked
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Detour
I took a long time getting here,
much of it wasted on wrong turns,
back roads riddled by ruts.
I had adventures
I never would have known
if I proceeded as the crow flies.
Super highways are so sure
of where they are going:
they arrive too soon.
A straight line isn’t always
the shortest distance
between two people.
Sometimes I act as though
I’m heading somewhere else
while, imperceptibly,
I narrow the gap between you and me.
I’m not sure I’ll ever
know the right way, but I don’t mind
getting lost now and then.
Maps don’t know everything.
Ruth Feldman
(The Ambitions of Ghosts)
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
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We’re too dysfunctional to stop small boats, admits
French police chief
Force is ill-equipped to deal with
‘violence’ from migrants and spends British money on wrong equipment
France’s efforts to stop the migrant boats are dysfunctional in the face of extreme violence orchestrated by people-smuggling gangs, a policing chief has admitted.
Marc Alegre, who represents officers
in Calais and Dunkirk, said efforts by police and gendarmes were
disjointed, plagued by a lack of training, faced shortages
of recruits and spent British money on the wrong type of
equipment.
He said his Unité police union was pushing for the French government to set up dedicated police units to specialise in tackling immigration and taking on the people smugglers so that they could reverse the record level of migrant small-boat crossings this year.
The admission came as 1,097 migrants crossed the Channel on Saturday in 17 boats, close to the daily record this year of 1,195 on May 31.
It takes the total past 30,000, up 36 per cent on last year’s figure at the same point and the highest number since the first arrivals in 2018.
Mr Alegre said officers’ lives were being put at risk by the unprecedented violence by migrants, who were encouraged by the people smugglers to attack officers with petrol and smoke bombs, stones and burning life jackets and to vandalise police vehicles.
The ongoing clashes between police and migrants meant police
were running out of tear gas, grenades and vehicles.
“Police are pelted with stones practically every night. We’re
short of cars because they’re vandalised by migrants, who the smugglers and
traffickers order to throw stones at us to slow us down,” he said.
“I have colleagues who are regularly injured, who go to hospital
because they’re doing this job. We use grenades and tear gas to stop the
migrants, but they throw stones, smoke bombs and burning life jackets at us.
All our vehicles are damaged. We’re practically out of ammunition. It’s not
easy every day, every single day.
“Last year, two
night-shift officers were surrounded by migrants and almost got burned to
death. The migrants had set fire to the place with bottles of petrol. They were
dog handlers. Two against 60. They risked their lives to prevent a boat from
reaching England. Is it worth dying burned alive to let a boat pass? Would you?”
He conceded there
were significant “coordination” problems between different forces policing the
northern French coast, which remained too “compartmentalised”. He said that
police lacked any specific “training” on how to handle the migrant crisis.
It comes after the number of migrants crossing the Channel
topped 30,000 in record time. Some 1,097 migrants crossed on Saturday, the
highest daily number for four months and bringing the total for 2025 to 30,100.
Reinforcements sent in the summer months and dedicated only to
tackling migrant crossings were mostly not from the area so did not know it as
well as local police, who continued to have a “dual mission” of fighting crime
and dealing with migrants.
“That’s not good for the French taxpayer,” he said. “In my
opinion, we need to create special units that would work all year round,
covering the entire border from the Belgian border to Boulogne, both the police
and the gendarmerie, but working only on the beaches.
“It’s currently too compartmentalised, meaning that if, for
example, gendarmes between Calais and Dunkirk are attacked by migrants and find
themselves surrounded, which has already happened, the gendarmes will call the
police or vice versa. It would be quicker if there was direct communication.”
Mr Alegre said
police sent from outside the region lacked training. “No one has been trained
in France [to deal with migrants and small boat departures]. It’s all
on-the-job experience. [Local police] know the beaches, we know the migrants
from working there every day, and we know how to deal with them,” he said.
“But when you come from Lyon or Paris and you come to work on
the beach, it’s not the same job. When you work in a housing project, it’s not
the same way of working as on the beach.”
He said there were also recruitment problems. “At the police
academy, where people can choose their police station in France, they know that
if they go to Calais or Dunkirk, they’ll work twice as hard as in other
places,” he said.
“We have to motivate them because they have to do the normal
work of the police, but on top of that, they have to guard the borders. That’s
twice as much work for them, with more risks and more work, but for nothing
extra.”
He said that British
funds were not always spent in the most effective manner. “Regarding the
resources bought with British funds, often we don’t ask the police officers who
are on the ground for the equipment they really need,” he said.
“For example, we got some 4x4 vehicles that can go on the beach.
That’s good, but my colleagues would have preferred pick-up trucks because when
we discover a boat, we have to put it somewhere, and it doesn’t fit in the boot
of a seven-seater. But a boat with an engine can be put in the back of a
pick-up truck and driven away.”
He believed the new one in, one out deal with the UK could act
as a deterrent provided those deported from the UK were not sent to the
northern French coast.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/8e9b488cf633dd11
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‘Left-wing authors are
cancelling their own books. It’s f---ing wild’
Adam Szetela is a
young author going to war on cancel culture as publishing faces new forms of
censorship
A few years
ago, deep into his graduate studies in literature at Cornell University, New
York, Adam Szetela noticed a slew of stories about books being attacked and
cancelled for their dangerous content. As a self-described political
progressive, Szetela was struck by how this new censoriousness was
coming from the Left.
“I’m 35, so I came
up in the post-9/11 era, when I associated censorship with the Right,” says
Szetela over Zoom. “Growing up, it was the religious Right who were the ones
trying to control what you listened to and read. But seeing these stories, it
became very apparent that certain sectors of the Left have a very similar
tendency.”
There was one
book scandal that made Szetela realise there was something unusual going on. “I
remember vividly this young adult novel called Blood
Heir. It was a fantasy novel set in a world where people don’t see
race but there’s still slavery. People went after the author [Amélie Wen Zhao]
and said it was anti-black to have slavery that wasn’t African-American
slavery, and it was erasing that. That’s a preposterous accusation, in my
opinion.
“And Penguin
cancelled the book, sent it to sensitivity readers and eventually reissued it.
All this s--- at the time was new to me. I was like, ‘What the f--- is a
sensitivity reader?’”
There was a twist.
One of the people who had initially criticised Blood Heir was Kosoko Jackson,
who was about to publish his own novel, A Place for Wolves. “Just a few months
later he cancelled his own book after it was accused of Islamophobia or some
s---. I was like, ‘This is f---ing wild’, especially because it’s all [about]
progressives going after other progressives.”
In his new book, That Book is Dangerous, Szetela calls this the “circular firing squad”.
What had started as some notes on his iPhone developed into a research project,
and the result is an exposé of publishing that demonstrates how efforts to
diversify the industry have resulted in new forms of
censorship.
Published by MIT University Press, the book is part sober
sociological study containing dozens of interviews with editors, agents, and
authors – almost all of whom speak anonymously – and part feisty polemic. It’s
Szetela’s enthusiasm for the latter that will doubtless attract controversy:
perhaps even the kind of online pile-on that he documents in his research.
“I’m like, ‘If
this is what I’m privy to in public, then certainly there is stuff going on
behind closed doors that I am not aware of’. At that point I started reaching
out to people in publishing to investigate what is going on behind closed
doors.”
What he found from
his interviewees was a pattern. An advance copy might be critiqued for the way
it represented identities, resulting in an online brawl – what Szetela terms
“rage spectacles” – with hundreds, even thousands posting negative reviews of a
book which they had not necessarily read. What was most troubling, in all this,
was the move from valid criticism to demands for books to be banned.
Many of Szetela’s
examples of books that have come under attack are from the world of YA (young
adult) fiction: Laurie Forest’s The
Black Witch was subject of a campaign of one-star reviewing on
Goodreads because it included prejudiced characters; Laura
Moriarty’s American Heart, was accused of Islamophobia, and Kirkus
retracted a starred review after a backlash; some readers burnt advance copies
of Keira Drake’s The
Continent because it featured a “white saviour” narrative; Dav Pilkey’s
The Adventures of Ook and Gluk was pulled by Scholastic because of its
representation of Asian characters.
“Once you
start saying a book needs to be pulled from Amazon like it’s a f---ing weapon
or something,” says Szetela, “that just seems insane to me. I hear people talk
about how, with YA novels especially, kids’ brains are not fully formed, but
it’s like, dude, these kids have iPhones,
they’re on PornHub and s---. And you’re worried about a f---ing
fantasy novel that, on page 86, has something come out of some fictional
character’s mouth that is mildly sexist?”
Szetela’s book
argues that this censoriousness is, curiously, the consequence of initially
good intentions. “This all starts with a good faith effort. Can we make publishing more
diverse? And can we make stories more diverse? If you’re a young
reader, it’s good to see positive representations of people who are like you,
right? So when those books can be hard to find, that’s a problem. And a related
problem is there’s a history over hundreds of years of publishing of white
authors representing black and gay people in really stereotypical, offensive
ways.”
Yet, Szetela
claims, what began as an effort to address these issues resulted in some
authors being pressured to write about their identity. “It has created ironic
consequences for people who maybe don’t want to write about racism even though
they’re a black person. I spoke to this gay author – and this is representative
of many conversations I’ve had – and he’s telling me he was working with this
editor who told him he needed to “gay up” his work. He’s like, ‘Dude, I just
want to write about f---ing zombies; I’m not trying to write about being gay.’”
Szetela, from the Boston area, is the first in his family to go
to college and is the product of a blue-collar upbringing. In the
acknowledgements to his book, he thanks “my dad, Adam, an immigrant who blew
out his back and knees on the job before he died, and my mom, Suzanne, who
washed dishes in an old folks’ home, as well as my brother, Travis, who gave me
my first bloody nose, for never permitting me to self-identify as a victim”.
He says that his
writing style has been influenced more by his passions than by any intellectual
forbears: “the Ultimate Fighting Championship, bodybuilding, skateboarding,
mosh pits, rap music, stand-up comedy”. With his mop of hair, he looks a young
35, and has recently finished his PhD at Cornell. Alongside his academic work
he has worked as a freelance journalist, writing for The Washington Post and
The Guardian, among others.
One
development Szetela writes about at length is the #OwnVoices movement, which he
believes has “permeated every corner of literary culture”. The idea behind
#OwnVoices is that the most “authentic” novels are written by people who share an identity with
their protagonist.
“Sensitivity
readers emerge from this. If I’m a white dude writing novels, I can’t have all
my characters be white, right? Because that’s gonna get accusations of racism.
So I need to have diverse characters in my book. But #OwnVoices says I’m not
gonna know how to write a black character or a gay character. So sensitivity
readers share a ‘marginalised’ identity with a fictional character and help
ensure they are ‘authentic’.
“It’s important to
note that you don’t go to school to become a sensitivity reader. I’ve talked to
people in publishing and when I ask, ‘Where did you get a sensitivity reader
from?’ They literally just go to X and type in ‘sensitivity reader’. It sounds
wild when I say it out loud.”
But while the
industry navigates some of these issues with cynicism, readers surely do crave
a sense of authenticity in what they read? The reaction to the Salt Path scandal is
evidence of that. “I’m not familiar with that [The Salt Path].” But, he says,
take James Frey, “the guy that wrote A
Million Little Pieces. It turns out that the three months he spent
in jail was, like, three hours for DUI, and anyone with a thinking brain should
be critical of that.
“But I think
there’s a huge difference between objective falsehoods and more esoteric
definitions of authenticity that get intertwined with weirdly creepy ideas
about race … There’s a big difference between [the Frey scandal] and a black
sensitivity reader who purports to understand what would be in an authentic or
inauthentic meal that a black person is eating. It’s that sort of race
reductionism that concerns me.”
Given what
Szetela writes about, does he not fear his own online backlash? “There are
people from the get-go who are gonna be like, ‘Who’s this white, cisgender guy
to be writing about race?’ Obviously, these people who engage in these cancel culture effigy
ceremonies are not going to like it.
“As for me,
personally, I decided very early on, if I want to be a writer, I’m gonna
f---ing write about whatever the f--- I want to write about. If I wanna keep my
mouth shut and kiss a--, there are other professions. And like, yeah, people
are gonna dislike it. And, you know, if I wanted to be a professor, I know for
a fact there’s certain departments that would never hire me.”
Does he not worry
that his appetite for the kind of polemic that punctuates his book might
distract from the research? For example, in one chapter he pointedly attacks Ibram X Kendi,
whose books have a huge readership and whose work has been feted with many
awards. Kendi’s work is premised on the idea that we need to be active in the
fight against racism or risk complicity in it. For this reason, he argues, you
cannot be “not racist”: you are either “anti-racist” or “racist”.
Szetela rejects this binary. “I think [Kendi] is absolutely
emblematic of the problems I look at, and he’s a great example of how you
profit from this moment. I stand by what I said in the book, which is, ‘George
Floyd’s death was the best thing to happen to Ibram Kendi’s career.’ I
understand how that could be screenshotted, and the same people who are like,
‘Who’s this white guy writing about this?’, could be upset about that. Frankly
those are probably people who aren’t going to be sympathetic to any of the arguments
in the book.”
Szetela’s book
comes out at a moment when the political pendulum has swung back hard to the
Right. The Trump administration
has banned more than 500 books from its military schools,
including To Kill a Mockingbird and The Handmaid’s Tale, while across the US,
schools are removing books, including novels by Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison,
Kurt Vonnegut and even the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. Szetela is alarmed by
this new round of censorship, but points out that it is still also coming from
the Left.
“A few months ago,
a romance book [Sparrow
and Vine by Sophie Lark] was cancelled pre-publication, accused
of racism. It was also accused of including a fictional character who is too
sympathetic to Elon Musk. So reading that, I’m like, if I was writing a preface
to my book right now, there’s a f---ing example.”
His next book? He
is writing about why young men have moved to the political Right in the United
States. At Cornell, Szetela taught a class on the culture wars – now he is
about to wade right into them.
That Book is Dangerous! (£27,
MIT) is out now
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/d8c167bb8795d2f3
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
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