April 28, 2026

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The bougie nihilism that is killing America.

We now have an extraordinary situation where the university campus, once the great refiner of minds, seems to be indoctrinating the young with a fancy for violence. It seems that if you teach people that their self-esteem is the most sacred thing on Earth, and anyone who dents it deserves instant cancellation, then you will give rise to an army of the intolerant. That’s what we are witnessing, in the UK too: a style of politics that feels haughty, dogmatic and tinged with violence. From the trans lobby (‘Kill all TERFs’) to the orgy of Israelophobia that followed 7 October (‘Globalise the intifada’), silence through violence is the dream of those who LARP as progressive. A society where the educated openly clamour for the death of women and Jews is a society that is ill indeed. This is the jagged debris of cancel culture.

Ours is the age of bougie nihilism. That was brought home to me by Zohran Mamdani’s tweet about Saturday’s shooting. ‘Political violence is absolutely unacceptable’, said the New York City mayor. This is a man whose wife liked social-media posts that celebrated the most catastrophic act of political violence of this century so far: 7 October. This is a man who rubs shoulders with Hasan Piker, the leftie influencer who just last week was titillating the silver-spoon socialists of the keffiyeh classes by celebrating bank robberies and making excuses for Luigi Mangione’s murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Bougie nihilism has broken free of the quad and now infects even City Hall. Where next?

Jeffrey Blehar adds, “We Are Sometimes Blessed by the Arrogance of Fools:”

On Saturday, a heavily armed lunatic attempted to gate-crash the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington, D.C., Hilton, while the president and most of his senior administration were in attendance. Cole Allen — the gunman, whose name sounds like a shoe brand from the racks at Payless — was thankfully tackled by Secret Service agents almost instantly after he dashed past the first layer of security, and although he fired several shots, nobody was killed. (One agent was clipped in his bulletproof vest, but his gear kept him safe.)

A potential atrocity was instantly prevented. The most memorable image from Saturday’s WHCD will not be one of blood, or tears, or spectacularly televised violence; it will be that of a naked, hog-tied Cole Allen kissing the carpet as he lies prone with a Mylar blanket draped over his raggedy hindquarters to hide his shame. (Police had stripped him to search for weapons.)

I would have let him lie there myself, but then again, Allen exposed himself in a far funnier way: with his ridiculously cocksure manifesto, written in eager anticipation of a massacre. Leave aside for a moment (but only for a moment) the fact that Allen seems to have been deeply affected by Bluesky-like progressive rhetoric in labeling Trump and his administration a bunch of Epstein-associated rapist pedophiles. Instead, breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that this man was undone in the most Zoomer way possible — by his own unearned and undeserved belief in himself.

How on earth could Allen have become so radicalized?

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll