Newsletter #21: The Cruel Kids' Table

PLUS: Rachel Reeves goes for growth; and Priti Patel's car-crash interview

Good morning.

Finally, a week in which something happened in British politics! It’s a long newsletter for a reason. But first, a word from our Deputy Editor, Scott Goetz, on the United States.

This newsletter’s agenda: On ‘The Cruel Kids’ Table’: the production of thinly-veiled pornography is not a prerequisite to political ascendancy (free); Priti Patel’s car-crash interview with Harry Cole: how can Badenoch keep her in the Shadow Cabinet? (paid); Reform’s education policy: does it even exist? (paid); The Telly: The License Fee; Sky News pivots to online, total GB News victory (paid); Rachel Reeves goes for growth (paid); Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock among the top ten most active MPs in the Commons (paid); What does Trump have against Canada, anyway? (paid).

On ‘The Cruel Kids’ Table’: the production of thinly-veiled pornography is not a prerequisite to political ascendancy

Last Monday, the New York magazine ran an article entitled ‘The Cruel Kids’ Table’, in which a man in a dress (yes, really) recalls his time at the inauguration in Washington, DC. It tells the novel tale of how young Republicans celebrated after their massive election victory, with many eerily-lit pictures of smiling young white people. Actually, there were a number of smiling young non-white people in the original pictures, too, but they were all cropped out by the man in the dress — for some reason.

Who could have guessed that the man in the dress (and his editor) was going to be duplicitous?

‘The cruel-faced avatar of the new “Nietzschean” Right.’ ‘A legitimising aesthetic of glamour for young MAGA, the “vibe shift” is real — we’re so back.’ And so on. You’ve probably seen it all already on X. Such is the babble that has accompanied four days of people on the Right posting the exact same attractive young woman at one of the inauguration balls (from an image that, to state the obvious, New York were clearly attempting to use negatively, not positively). My view is that much like ‘Gio Scotti posting’, ‘Tennis Skirt Nationalism’, et cetera, this is all little more than thinly-veiled pornography for people who cannot get a brass for religious reasons. In the words of a certain northerner: ‘This is fine, not good, but fine.’

However, others do not take this view. The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo has offered this justification for spending so much time thinking about one attractive woman being photographed at a MAGA event:

The Right is ascendant for the moment, but long term, we cannot delegate the function of cultural legitimation to outlets like New York magazine. We need to invest heavily in aesthetics, design, and prestige media, so that we can rival, rather than require, these outlets.

The demand that we focus on aesthetics, design, and — of course — art was something that knocked around in right-wing circles for the entirety of the period of total Woke cultural ascendancy, as the Right became enraged that media companies insisted on destroying their own products by using them as political vehicles. Attempts to wrest control of the cultural heights ran from Ben Shapiro’s awful film company to ‘LD50’ in London (an art gallery I know almost nothing about other than the fact it succeeded at being called ‘alt-right’, and not much else).

It should be obvious by now that this is not how you win political influence. Often, the motivation was not practical anyway, as they would claim (‘politics is downstream of culture’), but rather that many (most?) people prefer aesthetics, design, and art to the often extremely boring work that underpins any successful policy platform or political campaign.

As I write, Trump is authorising his staff to hammer through the pages of Project 2025: a clear plan of action, prepared before victory, intended to attack leftist institutions and entrench the spirit of MAGA in the federal government. Many of these ideas can be traced back to the ‘Very Online’ Right because staffers and pundits follow people they perceive as smart and funny on a text-based form of social media, and will often copy their ideas. Sometimes, they even ask them first. Sometimes, Elon Musk just tries to use your work for free because it is high-quality, even if — like DataRepublican — you are an anonymous, non-verbal deaf woman in Utah. Indeed, Musk is currently storming through the US government attempting to shut down programs on this anonymous woman’s advice because of the quality of her independent research. This can hardly be ascribed to her beautiful aesthetics, and it would be rude to claim that this is the cause of her influence.

All this is to say that the impact of the ‘Very Online’ Right on the policy environment and the limits of acceptable political thought has overwhelmingly come from good-humoured and coherent political arguments, and not from ‘right-wing aesthetics’, or from paying for graphic designers (hello, Palladium Magazine). Rufo should know this better than anyone, given that he himself first became well-known for his practical, grassroots political campaigns.

—Scott Goetz Deputy Editor, Pimlico Journal

Priti Patel’s car-crash interview with Harry Cole: how can Badenoch keep her in the Shadow Cabinet?