With their profile and vile words, these malign provocateurs are tearing down decency’s guardrails
I
t lacks the elegance of “greed is good”, but as a distillation of the spirit of the age, it’s right up there. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the Financial Times shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”
So that’s what they meant by “vibe shift”. Though, as the Epstein files reveal daily, the top 0.01% were hardly primly biting their tongues before Trump’s win, at least not in private. Those with telephone-number fortunes and great power felt able to speak, and write, to each other about women in language so vicious, so filled with hate – women discussed as body parts, as “less than human”, in Gordon Brown’s apt phrase – that they didn’t need the encouragement of a “grab ’em by the pussy” president to cast off their inhibitions.
Still, as that unnamed banker made clear to the FT, women are not the only group the powerful and privileged have been itching to disparage. This week it was migrants who were the target, accused by the billionaire Monaco resident Sir Jim Ratcliffe of having “colonised” Britain.
