Séamas O'Reilly: 'We’ve watched as the worst people on Earth have had the best days of their lives'

We may not wish for so many outrages to be heaped upon us, but we must continue to consider them outrageous

Sat, 19 Apr, 2025 - 02:00

The news that Liz Truss was to release her own social media platform brought a cheer to me this week.

The former British PM announced this at ‘a cryptocurrency conference in Bedford’ — five of the most beautifully accursed words I’ve ever read — where she compared the current UK media landscape to ‘Soviet Russia’ and promised a forum that was “uncensored and uncancellable, to actually talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about”.

Details, so far, remain scant. Everything I know about technology, the media, and the competence of Liz Truss leads me to believe it will be an unmitigated disaster with maybe a 10% chance of even reaching the market.

But I do know I will be rooting for its emergence with every fibre of my being, and following every further detail that comes out about Lizzer or Truss+ or whatever she ends up calling it, the second it becomes public.

This is because Truss represents a dying breed in our cruel, new world: a colossally unlikeable, laughable failure who somehow finds new, and bafflingly public, ways to die on her arse, time and time again.

Everywhere else, you might have noticed, this is not the case. For a while now, we’ve watched as the worst people on Earth have had the best days of their lives, again and again and again.

Across the US, people are being rounded up and arrested without charge so they can be deported, en masse, to El Salvadoran prisons. Some 90% have no criminal record, most have been exiled simply for being immigrants, and some even for the crime of protesting Israel’s still-ongoing onslaught in Gaza.

ICE agents are sweeping students from the steps of America’s premier universities and holding them without charge for writing politely worded op-eds in support of Palestine.

References to black and LGBT history are being deleted from departmental websites and government documents. References to slavery are being removed from school libraries, and posters promoting inclusion are being torn down in classrooms from Alabama to Minnesota.

Closer to home, the worst people in Ireland have seen their knee-faced avatar Conor McGregor utter his bile from the White House dais, and seen the Government cave to their demands that refugee accommodation be placed in areas they’ve torched to the ground.

In Britain, the Labour government has followed up its Freeze The Elderly bills with swingeing cuts to unemployment benefits and disability allowances, tightened restrictions on immigration, and overseen moves of deliberate cruelty to the LGBT community.

It’s too early to know the practical ramifications of Wednesday’s UK Supreme Court ruling on trans identities, in which the meaning of the Gender Recognition Act was reversed without a single testimony from a trans person being heard, but said ruling has been a source of lip-smacking delight for the fringe group of gender-critical activists who have worked hard to making Britain the Anglosphere’s uncontested capital of galloping, gleeful transphobia.

And it is this glee, this sheer horrible joy at everything being done, that can be so hard to swallow, so wearying to comprehend. It’s not enough that decades of slow, painful advances in human rights and basic decency can be reversed in a matter of weeks, it’s that we must watch the world’s collective ghouls cackling loudly with ecstasy as it happens.

I’m still optimistic enough to think of us as a majority, those who do not think people should be arrested or imprisoned for being foreign, or pro-Palestine; who think books featuring inclusive themes should not be censored nor schools or universities intimidated into dropping equality initiatives; who think trans people should be treated with dignity and respect or, at the very least, not be forced, by cackling bigots, to use the toilet before they leave the house.

It’s just that, for those of us within that majority, there’s very little to cheer. The embezzlement conviction of Marine Le Pen was a brief pick-me-up, as have been the slow, and moving, shows of solidarity and resistance taking shape in the US.

Mostly, we’re forced to feed off fumes, on nebulously meaningful gesture politics like Democratic senator Cory Booker speaking for 25 hours straight about the local and global threat to morality and decency posed by Donald Trump’s administration — just two days before he voted to approve $8.8bn more in arms sales to Israel.

Even this vaporous gesture was made to seem totemic in comparison to the big “feminism win” of this week, in which Jeff Bezos blasted six famous women into not-quite space on board a ship that looks parodically like male genitalia.

As noted political blogger Vladmir Lenin once wrote: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

That’s every week now, and none of it seems very good. If I seem despondent — or, worse, as if I’m advocating for despondency — I’m not. Giving in to any of this, letting it be normalised, or throwing our hands up in despair, is not an option.

We may not wish for so many outrages to be heaped upon us, but we must continue to consider them outrageous. And, where possible, we must seek out the joys we can, whether they be green shoots of resistance, or just the small distractions of little merit and less consequence, that make life living.

It is there that you will find Liz Truss. Bumbling, frothing, failing. The one right-wing ghoul who somehow never learned to win at anything, nor — more perfectly still — to stop trying. It is sad that this is very nearly all we have, but we have it for now, and that’s worth preserving.

Perhaps you disagree. In the interests of free speech, I invite you to challenge me in the comments. When I have my Truss+ handle, I’ll be sure to pass it on.