Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The rise of anti-Elonism

[Getty Images] 
issue 19 October 2024

You can tell a lot about a country by who it admires. I was pleasantly surprised some years ago to see a poll showing that the most admired man in the UK was Richard Branson. You may not love all his publicity stunts, or have liked the sandwich selection on Virgin trains, but that poll suggested the British public still liked entrepreneurialism and achievement.

It seems mainly to affect people who have really never done very much with their lives

I slightly dread a rerun of such a poll today, because I suspect that among the youth vote in particular the winner would be the person with the most perceived disadvantages in life. Having succumbed to the American woke mind virus, much of the generation coming up in Britain seems to be under the impression that we should only really admire people based on their position in the oppression hierarchy. Meaning that what we ought to think most highly of is an ethnically diverse woman with as many physical and mental disabilities as possible.

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