Contrary to grasping, spurious claims of wiretapping, Sheldon Adelson really was one of the good guys. We shared a mutual friend - an old New York Jewish philanthropist who, like Adelson, came from humble beginnings to achieve breathtaking success. For these people, giving was methodical exactitude: their causes always flourished.
But the timing of Adelson’s death is unfortunate: he was a Donald Trump donor - and the New York Times, a newspaper that can’t even keep tramps dry anymore, will do its best to never let you forget this.
Ignore Trump and Parler: the real action is taking place four of five tiers below, where impotent sparks of resistance mark the first stage of the purge.
Here in America, Sarah Jeong, an insect-y incel who was promoted at the NYT because - not in spite of - her racist views, has broken a year’s silence to attack Andy Ngo, an independent reporter who covered Antifa’s violence across America’s west coast at great cost to his personal wellbeing.
Back in Britain, the head of the Free Speech Union and the editor of Lockdown Sceptics, Toby Young, is under what appears to be a choreographed, well-resourced attack by a grubby little Westminister busybody (“co-Chairman of the Conservative Party’s Policy Board” - FFS) named Neil O’Brien.
YouTube censoring Donald Trump for two weeks makes news - but the real damage occurs when people like Jeong and O’Brien convince Twitter to ban Ngo and Young.
To think that there are some relieved - even happy - that the likes of Mitt Romney (the Ralph Lauren version of Ray McCauley) have returned to political prominence is depressing. Romney is an excellent loser, the model of controlled opposition - the patronising (always slippery) asset stripping wanker who dismisses you as a bigot when you cancel your subscription to the Times of London for behaving like a spastic teenager (describing climate change as an “emergency”).
Romney as opposition / critic to Zuckerberg? Really? “Now you listen here son, put down those screens, stop fidgeting with them small hands and answer me this: what is your favourite book in the Old Testament?”
The island across the channel was the scene of a summit a few weeks ago between Elon Musk (at the announcement of him overtaking Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest man) and the island’s owner, Larry Ellison. Ellison purchased Lanai in 2012 for a reported $300m. Neither are declared enemies of the purge - for now (their time may yet come). The edgier culture warriors fighting out of our corner are suspicious - but this is silly: you don’t turn a 70% ally into a 30% enemy.
Musk and Ellison are the people we need to sponsor the construction of the alternative to the world Joe Biden is tasked with dismantling. There is a sense of the unequal at present, a void that desperately requires common sense and re-assurance.