This is an extract from today’s episode of Spectator TV, with Toby Young and James Walton, which you can find at the bottom of this page:
I wasn’t all that overbowled by the series. I think one of the reasons it’s met with such a chorus of approval, particularly in the mainstream media, is because it’s just repeating back to the liberal metropolitan elite what they already think about the causes of knife crime and the dangers that influencers like Andrew Tate pose to women and girls. We’re in this sort of incredible loop. There might be a less polite term for it, but let’s call it a loop in which the metropolitan liberal elite make a television program, a fictional drama which exemplifies all their groupthink, and then cite it as evidence, subsequently, that that groupthink is spot on.
I mean, at one point, Keir Starmer – and incidentally, the production company that made Adolescence was part state-funded – Keir Starmer described it, in a slip of the tongue, as a ‘documentary’ in the House of Commons, and I think that is how it’s viewed. I mean, that was a Freudian slip. But I think that is how it’s viewed by the Metropolitan liberal elite. They think this is virtually, if not a documentary, a docudrama: that it is an incredibly accurate portrayal of exactly what’s gone wrong in the lives of adolescent white boys, particularly white-working class boys like the character in the film, and actually it bears very little resemblance to reality. There was a poll recently which showed that I think 13 to 15-year-old boys, something like 83 per cent had heard of Andrew Tate, but only 23 per cent had a favourable opinion of him, more than 60 per cent had an unfavourable opinion. So it’s not as if, you know, he enjoys this extraordinary kudos. Most adolescent boys dislike Andrew Tate. And the ones who, like him are disproportionately black and Asian, not white.
I think another difficulty is that it’s just hooey to think that the main threat of violence posed to women and girls, particularly girls, is white working-class boys brought up in stable two parent families. Total hooey. The main writer of the series claimed that he based it on three real life cases. In every case, the perpetrator was not a working-class teenage boy from a stable family background. You can see why, you know, the appalling murders by Axel Rudakubana, has prompted a kind of moral panic about this. But this is a complete misdiagnosis of what the causes of that episode were.
And the idea now that this is going to be shown in schools! There’s been a real clamour for Adolescence to be shown in schools, to teach boys why they should resist these kind of toxic influences. The idea that that these poor mites are going to have to sit through this and self-flagellate afterwards and explain to the their classmates why masculinity is toxic and should at all costs be handled with tongs – it’s awful to think. They’re in a bad enough way as it is without being demonised yet again by the mainstream media, their schools and MPs.
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