THE STEPFORD STUDENTS AND THE MIDWICH MEDIA

by Colin Liddell

Now and then the back end of the Liberal-Leftist train – i.e. the Conservative baggage car – makes a mournful, screeching sound as its slightly off-centre wheels dig into the rails down which the Leftist locomotive is dragging it. Such a screech resonates through a recent article in The Spectator, that bastion of old-school British conservativism that doesn’t really know what to do about the premises of the Liberal Left – except to lube well before being shafted by them in the best public school fashion.

The article in question “Free speech is so last century: Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable” starts out well enough, as so many of these things do, with references to The Stepford Wives and the evil alien children in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, later made into the movie Village of the Damned:

"Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up."

The cartoon from the article, referencing "Village of the Damned." 

The article then describes how a debate on abortion, which the writer was invited to participate in at Oxford University, was shut down by feminist students. How tragic!

The Spectator, of course, despite the occasionally bruised sensibilities of its journalists, is nevertheless firmly part of the mainstream media and is not adverse to shutting down debate itself. When is the last time it published a race realist or gender realist article, or indeed anything that seriously challenged the premises of the Liberal Leftist mantras?

It’s also a stretch to even call it conservative these days. The writer of the article in question happens to be Brendan O'Neill, the editor of Spiked Online (formerly known as Living Marxism), who flits effortlessly between the so-called Left- and Right-wing publications in the mainstream media.

This is exactly the kind of writer that old school conservatives feel happy surrounding themselves with these days, all the better to deflect those ever-so-painful charges of "racism," "sexism," and "classism" that might scare away advertisers, little realizing that by looking out for their own tender skins they are just helping push the Overton window well to the Left.

The spectacular balllessness of The Spectator is summed up in what is supposed to be the article’s closing climax:

"The others nodded. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Pre-rapists! Had any of them read Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novella about a wicked world that hunts down and punishes pre-criminals, I asked? None had."

The writer is of course referring to the short story The Minority Report that was later made into the rather tedious film starring Tom Cruise, but all he’s doing here is likening himself and the readers of The Spectator to undiscovered criminals. This, in essence, is the position of conservatives in modern society: “Yes, we are thought criminals, but don’t shriek at us quite so much until you have duly uncovered us.”

In short, they admit their pre-guilt but just don't want to be punished for it (at least not yet).

In taking this attitude the conservative media has not only become incapable of standing up to the Left, but has become pregnant with its children. It is frosty November, but oddly I can hear the cuckoo's warbling cry echoing through the woods.