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I’m almost at the end of my tether with the Amazon Prime series The Boys. What started out as a witty commentary on the superhero genre is growing more frustratingly woke by the week. To be sure, its sympathies were always obvious, but the second series in particular has taken to bludgeoning viewers repeatedly with its (left-wing, naturally) politics. While a thinly-disguised Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez politician takes on the even more thinly-disguised Disney analogue, the villainous personification of White America, Homelander, teams up with a literal Nazi.
Yes, it’s that blatant. Its dialogue is likewise growing more awful by the episode, as the writers seem to labour under the delusion that Karl Urban repeatedly growling “c–t” in a painful Mockney accent is somehow the acme of wit.
One of its more risible left-wing paranoias is the delusion that the political right is mustering a clandestine army of neckbearded, basement-dwelling “far right extremists” to manufacture online content and direct political discourse. This is, of course, the tissue-thin fictionalisation of the left’s continuing dark fantasy that “Russian bots” colluded with the American right to brainwash voters and “steal” an election that was rightfully Hillary Clinton’s.
The British left are no less deluded. But, just as the American left’s grand conspiracy theory was white-anted by the disappointing reality of the Mueller investigation, the British left’s favourite conspiracy theory explaining why they “inexplicably” lost the Brexit referendum has also run aground on the harsh rocks of fact.
Cambridge Analytica was ‘not involved’ in the 2016 EU referendum. The digital marketing firm that Remainers love to hate did not swing the British electorate towards Leave, as we were constantly told. In the words of the Guardian, no doubt uttered through gritted teeth, Cambridge Analytica did not ‘directly misuse data to influence the Brexit referendum’.
But…but…
These are the conclusions of the Information Commissioner’s extensive three-year investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Throwing a big bucket of cold water on the chattering-class belief that Cambridge Analytica stealthily and probably illegally harvested people’s online data in order to manipulate our minds and make us vote Leave, the Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said yesterday that, in truth, CA was not a significant player in the referendum, ‘beyond some initial enquiries’.
What’s more, Denham and her office found no evidence to back up one of the key stories about CA – that it colluded with Russia to shift Brits towards Leave. Denham, in her letter to MPs outlining the findings of her investigation, says her staff uncovered no ‘additional evidence’ of Russian involvement in the referendum on the Cambridge Analytica computer servers they pored over.
Indeed, like the so-called “Russian collusion”, the flaccid reality of which amounted to little more than global politics-as-usual, the CA “affair” was no different from, say, the Obama administration mining publicly-available data in order to identify target audiences for political messaging. (It should also be remembered that Obama also sought to influence elections in democracies like Israel – but as always, it’s OK when they do it.)
That doesn’t excuse, say, Facebook selling its users’ data, but it hardly amounts to a grand conspiracy.
Are there questions to be asked about the security of our data on social-media sites? Of course. But the idea that CA was doing something uniquely sinister, that its digital marketing was somehow more evil and dastardly than other companies’ digital marketing, just doesn’t stack up. Neither does the idea that it deployed its sinister methods to swing Brits towards Brexit.
Like the “Russian collusion” narrative, the CA conspiracy was absolutely central to the Remoaners’ “We wuz robbed!” narrative.
There always was a whiff of desperation to the Cambridge Analytica obsession. For some bruised, dazed liberals, horrified by Brexit, the tall tale about CA’s Machiavellian antics became the go-to explanation for why Remain lost the referendum. It couldn’t possibly be that millions of rational Brits, more than capable of thinking for ourselves, decided that it was time to leave the EU. No, something darker must have taken place. We must have been brainwashed. We must have been ‘got at’.
Like their American cousins, don’t expect the British left to give up their conspiracy theory just because of pesky facts, or anything.
Otherwise, they’d have to accept that no one in the real world – as opposed to their Twitter echo-chambers – is listening to them.
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