Live not by lies, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned the West half a century ago, but we have hardly heeded him since. Fictions have bewitched our minds and captured our culture. Hard truths struggle to be heard. Last week BBC presenters took the leader of the opposition to task for her failure to watch a Netflix drama, Adolescence, which purported to explore the risks to young women from misogyny. At the same time they ignored Kemi Badenoch’s questions about real male violence – the abuse of thousands of girls by rape gangs in 50 British towns and cities. It is easier to think that we can protect young women by taking a stand against online grifters, such as Andrew Tate, who no one civilised seeks to defend, than it is to confront the failures of multi-culturalism, in which so many are complicit.
The same tendency to avoid reality was apparent in the reaction to the murder of the Southend MP Sir David Amess in 2021. The attack was motivated by Islamist ideology, yet several parliamentarians wanted instead to blame social media and campaigned to end online anonymity.
Failure to face the truth has skewed debate in so many areas of public life – and harmed innocents along the way. There are only two sexes, male and female, and the presence of the Y chromosome determines which you are. But the false creed that sex is mutable, that there are more than two genders, and that an individual can choose which gender he or she prefers led the NHS to prescribe drugs that likely made girls sterile and provide surgery that mutilated young women for life.
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