Influencers

The media are a fickle, unprincipled lot. I spoke to my insanely clever and talented son at length yesterday and since this is quite a rare occurrence, a few thoughts stuck with me. We are a quarter century apart, he and I which is lifetimes of cultural shifting and he is old enough to be a generation removed from the frenzied bloodbath of media hype  so beloved of twentysomethings Britain which, it seems, is doomed. Runaway inflation, crippling debt, gargantuan fuel costs. Strikes, a broken health system with medical staff walking out or quitting, three week waits to see a doctor. Rebellions, extinct and otherwise paralysing and disrupting people's lives. If we actually believed much of what the papers tell us, politics is a busted flush and we're teetering on the brink of democratic meltdown, running helter-skelter to destruction with our fingers in our ears.
Not quite so. Some borrow only as last resort, have fixed rate mortgages, insulate their homes properly and put on an extra layer when it's cold. They buy less over-processed junk food and eat sensibly - all measures a prudent person might take if costs rise. My boy seemed if not totally unconcerned, sanguine that he'd be able to ride out the storm.
Nevertheless, I found myself with a tinge of gratitude that such matters need not overly concern me, except by proxy - a state easily managed by closing the lid of my laptop and going for a brisk walk. Social media is bad for people because it over-emphasises the negative, dystopian aspects of our culture and, much as I'd love to believe otherwise, a lot of negative shit still hits my own slowly turning fan and I feel more pessimistic generally after gorging to excess on the literary sewage generated by my feeds.

I think I must be one of the few men on the planet, or at least in Europe and America who had to look up Andrew Tate. I was intrigued enough to find out why adolescent boys, starved of good male role models are ecstatically hanging on his every word. I watched him on Piers Morgan's show and rarely have I seen such undilutedly narcissistic and near-sociopathic behaviour. His views have been politely described as extremely misogynistic by domestic abuse charities. Others have used considerably more forthright language. Parents and teachers are concerned since his brand of toxic alpha maleness is capable of radicalising impressionable young men and boys to such an extent that they commit harm offline, especially towards women.
But this 35-year-old ex kick-boxer is no fringe personality lurking in an obscure corner of the dark web. Instead, he is one of the most famous figures on TikTok, where videos of him have been watched an astonishing 11.6 billion times. I don't use TikTok since 11.6 billion people can be wrong.
He presents himself as  a self-help guru, offering his almost exclusively male fans a recipe for making money, pulling girls and “escaping the matrix”, Tate has gone in a matter of months from near obscurity to one of the most talked about people in the world. In July 2022, there were more Google searches for his name than for Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian. Pictures of him, feet on the table smoking fat cigars, leaning up against fast cars and surrounded by half-clad young women seem to litter the internet like stale confetti. He, meanwhile rakes in bucketloads of cash.
It was with a certain sense of relief that I read that he and his brother had been arrested last week in his Castle Dracula in Romania as part of an investigation into rape, human trafficking and organised crime. However, in the hours after his detention, TikTok and Twitter were afire with posts falsely claiming he had been freed and conspiracy theories saying he had been set up. 

What a fickle mistress the Internet is. Influencers are dangerous people.

And finally in today's smorgasbord, another 'influencer'. Prince Harry's book 'Spare' has been widely leaked pre-publication and it's going to be an absolute cracker if dissing the Royals is your plat du jour. Fights with 'Willy' resulting in a (shock) broken dog bowl plus indiscreet commentary about piloting a fully armed Apache helicopter in Afghanistan and opening fire...Oh, dear. The tip of a very dirty iceberg. Senior military figures would love to have had a quiet word with him.

So, a concluding word just for you, H. I doubt you'll get to read this, but here goes anyway.

Congratulations, Harry. As an act of self-immolation, you could hardly have done it better. Even if you let off all the fireworks in the box all at once which it seems was the intention, in the end they all fizzle out into charred ash. Not only have you damaged yourself, you've set fire to a lot of other more deserving people than you, unforgivably those closest to you.

When overweening entitlement meets a bear of very little brain, the result can and probably will be catastrophic.

Furthermore, telling people how many Taliban you think you knocked off was unsoldierly, unnecessary and frankly stupid. 

That's all for today.