PROMINENCE FOR THE POMPOUS

One must admire the sheer, unblushing cheek of it. In an age when the average citizen has finally prised the remote control from the cold, dead fingers of the television schedules and wandered off into the wilds of YouTube, the British government has decided that what the public really needs is not freedom, not choice, not even decent broadband, but prominence. Prominence for the very broadcasters who have spent years assuring us that everything is fine, that the institutions are sound, and that any dissenting voice is either Russian, far-right, or both simultaneously. The consultation paper—elegantly titled Watch This Space, as though it were a jaunty invitation to a fireworks display rather than a quiet suffocation of the alternatives—proposes that YouTube and its unruly ilk should be compelled to give pride of place to the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and the rest of the familiar chorus line. Legacy media, they call it. One is tempted to call it something rather less polite.

The logic, if one can dignify it with the term, is impeccable in its circularity. People are getting their news from funny little channels run by individuals who own neither a suit nor a focus group. This cannot stand. Misinformation, that dread modern plague, is apparently running riot because algorithms—those mysterious, almost sentient forces—fail to direct the bewildered masses towards the soothing, authoritative tones of Clive Myrie or whoever happens to be reading the autocue this week. Never mind that the public service broadcasters have themselves been caught in more U-turns than a London taxi driver during rush hour. Never mind the scandals, the lavish payouts, the quiet admissions that perhaps the licence fee payer was not always told the full story on everything from climate to COVID to the precise location of certain parties in Downing Street. No: the solution, as ever, is more of the same, only louder and harder to avoid.

One pictures the scene in Whitehall. Earnest civil servants, their faces lit by the gentle glow of PowerPoint, fretting over the dangerous pluralism of the internet. “The people,” they murmur, “are choosing incorrectly.” It is the eternal complaint of the mandarin class: democracy would be so much easier if the electorate would simply shut up and listen to their betters. And so we arrive at this splendidly Orwellian notion of mandatory prominence. Not censorship, heavens no. Merely a gentle algorithmic nudge—more like a bureaucratic cattle prod—ensuring that the state-approved channels float to the top while the awkward squad sinks quietly beneath the waves of recommended videos. One almost expects the consultation document to include a helpful diagram: a pyramid with the BBC at the apex and, at the base, some poor chap in his bedroom recording a podcast between shifts at the warehouse.

The irony, of course, is exquisite. Alternative media exists precisely because so many grew weary of the legacy product. For years the main channels and newspapers operated as a sort of mutual protection society: government leaks to friendly journalists, journalists provide cover for government, repeat until public trust reaches absolute zero. Then along came the internet, that great leveller, and suddenly anyone with a laptop and an unwillingness to be condescended to could have their say. The result has been messy, noisy, frequently ridiculous—and, on balance, vastly preferable to the previous arrangement. It is the sort of development that used to be celebrated as “democratisation of the means of communication.” Now it is treated as a problem requiring urgent administrative correction.

Mr DeSanto’s original post captured the mood with commendable brevity: you cannot hate the government enough. One is inclined to agree, though hatred is perhaps too energetic an emotion for the occasion. Better to offer a dry, weary amusement, the sort PJ O'Rourke himself might have mustered while watching another batch of cultural apparatchiks tie themselves in rhetorical knots. For this is not really about misinformation. It is about control. It is about the deep, abiding horror felt by the governing classes whenever the proles start comparing notes without official supervision. During times of social unrest—those awkward moments when the public proves annoyingly unconvinced by the official narrative—the need for 'prominence' becomes especially pressing. One shudders to think what constitutes 'trusted news' in the eyes of the drafters of this document. Presumably anything that aligns neatly with the prevailing consensus in Islington and the senior common rooms.

The consultation closes on 31 August. One hopes a few brave souls will respond in the proper spirit: pointing out that if the public service broadcasters were half as indispensable as claimed, they would not require the heavy hand of the state to elbow their way to the front of the digital queue. Perhaps some enterprising alternative creator will produce a video essay on the subject, complete with clips of past broadcast howlers, set to the ironic strains of Land of Hope and Glory. It would, naturally, be buried deep in the recommendations, somewhere between makeup tutorials and conspiracy videos about lizards. That, after all, is the point.

There is something almost touching about the government’s faith in its own propaganda machinery. They genuinely seem to believe that if only the algorithms can be fixed, the punters will return, grateful and docile, to the familiar comforts of the evening news. It is the same touching delusion that once led the Soviet authorities to issue stern directives about the correct interpretation of tractor production figures. The internet, however, is not so easily managed. It is a hydra: cut off one head and another appears, usually with better production values and a sharper tongue. Forcing prominence on the old guard may succeed in irritating the independent sector for a while, but it will also confirm everything those independent voices have been saying about institutional arrogance and the quiet authoritarian streak that runs through modern British governance.

In the end, this consultation is less a policy proposal than a symptom. It reveals a political class that has lost the confidence to argue its case in the open marketplace of ideas and now seeks to rig the shop window. One can almost hear the sigh of relief in Whitehall: at last, a way to make the nasty online voices a little quieter without resorting to anything so crude as outright bans. Prominence, you see, sounds so very reasonable. Like giving the best seats in the theatre to the most important people. That the 'important people' have spent the last decade boring half the audience to tears is, of course, beside the point.

The rest of us will continue watching whatever we damn well please. And if the government finds that displeasing, perhaps it should ask itself why so many have turned elsewhere in the first place. The answer, one suspects, will not be found in another consultation paper. But it will make excellent material for the next wave of alternative content—precisely the sort that no amount of algorithmic prominence will ever quite manage to bury.

AMERICA REFUSES THE GLOBALIST SCRIPT

One might have thought, in these enervated times, that the spectacle of a nation turning 250 would be an occasion for the usual dirge: solemn academics in tweed lamenting the death of everything, NGOs wringing their hands over carbon footprints and historical sins, and European commentators sighing that the whole experiment had finally run its course. Instead, America threw a party. Fireworks blazed, crowds gathered, and the doom-predictors were left looking like minor prophets who had booked the wrong apocalypse. It was, in its noisy, excessive, slightly vulgar way, rather magnificent – a reminder that while the rest of the world perfects the art of managed decline, the United States still specialises in unmanaged exuberance.

The global elite, that loose confederacy of Davos devotees, Brussels bureaucrats, and Silicon Valley saviours, had hoped for something different. Their preferred script involved genteel failure: empty malls, polite protests, and a grateful populace ready to accept the soft tyranny of net-zero serfdom and equity quotas. For years they have peddled the miseries of global communism by another name – centralised control dressed up as compassion, surveillance as safety, and the slow erosion of the individual beneath the weight of the collective good. America, stubbornly, keeps declining the invitation. It has done so since 1776, and with a certain cheeky consistency ever since.

Consider the flaws, for they are legion and loud. America is brash where others are subtle, litigious where others are resigned, and occasionally capable of electing leaders who speak like auctioneers on a caffeine jag. Its cities can be violent, its inequalities glaring, its popular culture a riot of junk food for the mind. Yet these are not bugs in the system; they are the inevitable by-products of a society that refuses to sit still and be improved by experts. In more orderly nations, the trains may run on time, but the spirit has often missed its connection. America’s chaos is the sound of people still arguing with one another, still inventing, still failing upwards. From the Wright brothers to Silicon Valley, from jazz to the moon landing, its greatest hits have emerged not despite the mess but because of it. Personal liberty is a messy business. It permits bad taste, bad choices, and the glorious right to be wrong.

No recent figure has embodied this raucous refusal quite like Donald Trump. Love him or loathe him – and the chattering classes have made their preference abrasively clear – he promoted America with a salesman’s gusto that neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris could have mustered on their most caffeinated days. Where his predecessors offered managed decline wrapped in progressive pieties, Trump flogged the old republic like a slightly dented but still serviceable classic car: loud, powerful, and unapologetically itself. He understood that nations, like individuals, thrive on confidence rather than constant apology. Under his watch, the 250th birthday became less a funeral for the past and more a defiant birthday bash. The elite recoiled in horror; the country, by and large, enjoyed the fireworks.

This is not to say America is flawless or that its founding beliefs are immune to corrosion. The constitutional architecture – that Enlightenment scaffolding of limited government, free speech, and the right to pursue happiness on your own terms – requires constant maintenance. Yet as long as enough Americans remember that government is their servant rather than their shepherd, the republic retains its improbable vitality. Socialism, in its various fashionable guises, has failed everywhere it has been tried with sincerity: the body count in the last century remains a grim testament. Each time it reappears in fresher packaging – stakeholder capitalism, climate emergency authoritarianism, digital social credit – America serves as the control group that refuses the experiment. Its very existence is an affront to the planners.

The sardonic truth is that humanity’s best chance at freedom now rests with a country the sophisticated affect to despise. While Europe drifts into demographic winter and regulatory paralysis, and while rising powers perfect new forms of authoritarian efficiency, America remains the last major redoubt of the heretical idea that ordinary people, left largely to their own devices, can achieve extraordinary things. Its culture – raucous, commercial, endlessly renewable – exports both its best and its worst, but the worst is at least optional. You can switch it off. Try doing that with the mandatory ideologies elsewhere.

So let the elites continue their seminars on how to make the world more “equitable” by making everyone equally miserable. America will keep producing vaccines in record time, blockbusters no one asked for, and eccentric billionaires who want to colonise Mars. It will argue with itself, sue itself, and occasionally embarrass itself on the world stage. And it will, with any luck, continue to reject the velvet handcuffs of collectivism. Protect that raucous, flawed, indispensable republic – its Constitution, its wild culture, its founding suspicion of power – and the rest of us retain a fighting chance. 

The evils of socialism have been defeated before. With America still in the ring, throwing punches and cracking jokes, they will be defeated again. The fireworks, one suspects, are only just beginning.

COOL AIR DENIED BY HOT HEADS

In this 'sweltering summer' of 2026, as Europe has baked like an overambitious croissant under a record heatwave, one could almost hear the collective murmur of continental discomfort rising above the cicadas. Citizens of the Old World, long accustomed to treating extreme weather as a character-building exercise, found themselves once more at odds with the stubborn realities of thermodynamics. And into this furnace stepped the humble air conditioner, that mechanical miracle of chilled air and modest electricity bills, now elevated to the status of geopolitical metaphor. As one sharp-eyed observer put it on that indispensable barometer of modern thought, X: Europe sees problems through a zero-sum lens. AC uses too much electricity? We should use it less. 

America, by contrast, shrugs and says: get more power. One pictures the scene with a certain dry relish. In Brussels, earnest officials in sustainably sourced linen suits debate whether installing cooling units might offend the delicate sensibilities of Gaia herself. In Warsaw or Madrid, families retire to stifling apartments where the night brings no relief, consoling themselves that at least their carbon footprint remains elegantly petite. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the average American household – that temple of refrigerated comfort – hums along at a crisp 72 degrees Fahrenheit, its occupants perhaps debating baseball statistics or the merits of larger trucks, blissfully unaware that their very existence is a provocation to European climatological conscience.

The European approach possesses a certain austere poetry, a monastic commitment to suffering that would have impressed the medieval flagellants. Why install machines that guzzle power when one might instead master the noble art of perspiration? Windows flung open at dawn, shutters drawn by noon, and a strategic deployment of damp cloths: these are the traditional remedies, passed down like heirloom guilt. That only one in five European homes boasts proper air conditioning – compared to nine out of ten in the United States – is not mere coincidence or economic footnote. It is philosophy made manifest. Electricity, in this worldview, is a finite pie, and any attempt to enlarge the pie smacks of vulgar American optimism, that naïve belief that human ingenuity might yet outpace human folly.

How deliciously European it all is. One detects the faint whiff of Calvinist self-denial mixed with modern green orthodoxy, a potent cocktail that renders discomfort not merely tolerable but morally superior. Campaigners warn that widespread AC adoption would add a whisper of warming to the global thermometer – 0.05 degrees by 2050, or some such precise horror – while conveniently overlooking that elderly citizens dropping in the streets might represent a rather more immediate statistical inconvenience. The logic is impeccable in its circularity: we must not adapt too comfortably to the changing climate, lest we fail to feel sufficiently guilty about having caused it. Suffering, in this scheme, becomes the ultimate renewable resource.

America, of course, offers its own brand of cheerful absurdity. There, the AC unit is less appliance than constitutional right, a mechanical expression of the pursuit of happiness. One can imagine the average Texan or New Yorker confronting a heatwave with the same brisk efficiency they apply to other inconveniences: throw money at the problem, preferably in the direction of engineering. If more power is required, build more plants, drill more wells, or – in these enlightened times – festoon the landscape with solar arrays and windmills that somehow never quite manage to operate when the wind drops and the sun hides behind a convenient cloud. The zero-sum game holds no appeal for a nation that has always preferred the infinite pie, preferably served à la mode.

Yet even here, the satirist finds rich material. The United States' embrace of comfort can veer into self-parody, with shopping malls maintained at Arctic temperatures while the car park shimmers like a mirage. One wonders whether the national passion for air conditioning has not contributed to a certain softening of the collective character, a diminished tolerance for minor meteorological impositions. Where Europeans endure their heatwaves with stoic grumbling and strategic siestas, Americans simply adjust the dial and reach for another cold beverage. Both approaches contain elements of denial: one denies human frailty, the other denies planetary limits.

The true comedy lies in the mutual incomprehension. Europeans view American cooled interiors as decadent, wasteful, almost immoral – the environmental equivalent of driving a Hummer to collect the morning croissant. Americans, for their part, regard European resistance to AC as a form of performative masochism, the sort of thing that produces excellent literature and terrible plumbing. When French politicians of the right begin clamouring for subsidised cooling units while their Green counterparts issue dire warnings about energy consumption, one senses the familiar European instinct for turning practical questions into theological ones. The European Commission, in its wisdom, declines to take a position on air conditioning – neither pro nor con, merely committed to "energy efficiency" and "building renovation." This is bureaucratic genius: the perfect non-answer for an imperfect world.

Beneath the sardonic observations lies a deeper truth about differing civilizational instincts. Europe, scarred by centuries of scarcity, war, and careful husbandry, instinctively reaches for the hair shirt. America, born of abundance and frontier optimism, reaches for the thermostat. Neither impulse is wholly foolish. The European wariness of unchecked consumption has its virtues, as does the American faith in technological deliverance. Yet both seem increasingly inadequate to the realities of a warming planet that refuses to behave according to anyone's five-year plan.

As the heatwave of 2026 breaks records and claims its victims, one cannot help but admire the exquisite timing of it all. Just when Europe most needs cooling, it finds itself trapped in a debate about whether cooling is permissible. The air conditioners sit in warehouses, their potential unrealised, while citizens fan themselves with copies of environmental manifestos. Meanwhile, the planet, indifferent to such philosophical niceties, continues its slow bake. Perhaps the ultimate joke is on all of us: we argue about thermostats while the temperature keeps rising, each side convinced that the other has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the pie.

In the end, the AC debate reveals less about climate science than about human nature. We are a species capable of splitting the atom and landing on the moon, yet somehow unable to agree on the proper temperature for a living room. Europe will doubtless continue its experiment in virtuous discomfort, America its experiment in mechanical indulgence. Both will write eloquent essays about their choices. And the rest of us, sweating gently in the middle, may eventually conclude that the wisest course involves a little less sermonising and a little more sensible engineering – preferably with the air conditioning turned up just enough to think clearly. After all, even the most committed environmentalist eventually discovers that principles are easier to maintain at 24 degrees Celsius than at 38.