Donald Trump and the decay of left-wing thought

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,’ wrote Allen Ginsberg in his famous poem Howl. I thought of it the other day on reading a column by the alleged ‘comedian’ Stewart Lee in the Observer:

‘Nascent neo-Nazis are looking for confirmation bias for their worst instincts, but back in the good old days at least they had to look. Now social media, stripped deliberately of safeguards and, in Twitter’s case, re-algorithmed to steer far right, will ping lies straight on to your phone unbidden…we can’t let Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos reshape our reality, and have to encourage every friend, relative, celebrity and institution to disconnect from them…we should now be imposing the same boycotts on Musk’s hideous fascist US that we once did on apartheid South Africa.’

Nurse, the screens! 

So on reflection, when I quoted ‘finest’ I probably meant ‘the most mediocre’ and when I wrote ‘madness’ I should more specifically say, ‘A range of interesting psycho-social disorders, starting with Brexit Derangement Syndrome and most recently Trump Derangement Syndrome’.