Why Does the BBC Platform a Crank? Because He’s Their Crank

A front-page political controversy recently broken out over a major media outlet giving a wholly undeserved platform to a known fringe theorist to spread bizarre and unsupportable claims relating to fascism and its leaders to a credulous general public—not Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, as you may automatically have presumed, but the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) allowing a man named Rutger Bregman to deliver this year’s Reith Lectures.

The Reith Lectures are a prestigious series of annual radio-talks delivered by a specially chosen public intellectual, in memory of the BBC’s chief founding father, Lord Reith. The very first was given by Betrand Russell; he was followed by other genuinely substantial orators, like Robert Oppenheimer and J.K. Galbraith. Rutger Bregman is not quite of the same calibre, however. 

A fashionable left-wing thinker and author of popular economics books, Bregman graced the front-page of the UK’s rightwards-leaning Mail On Sunday tabloid after it turned out his first Reith Lecture, entitled ‘A Time of Monsters,’ seemingly compared U.S. President Donald Trump and his UK ally, the anti-immigration Reform UK Party leader Nigel Farage, to fascist leaders of the 1930s. An anonymous Mail source (possibly the blogger Paul Staines) alleged that, in his speech, Bregman had: 

Made very clear that Trump was one of the monsters of the [talk’s] title. He basically lumped together Trump with Farage and the tech billionaires [like Elon Musk who support them] as a bit ‘fashy’ [i.e., ‘fascist’]. He said that to combat this we needed a moral campaign on a par with that which abolished slavery.

Bregman’s talk came in the immediate aftermath of the BBC having been caught out misleadingly re-editing an old speech of Trump’s to make it sound as if he was inciting violent revolution, leading Trump to threaten to sue the Corporation for billions of dollars in damages. Being traditionally very anti-BBC, and hoping to manufacture a ‘scoop,’ the Mail sought to inflame the situation further by approaching a White House communications spin-doctor, Stephen Cheung, with this news, eliciting the obliging response that “The BBC has been caught red-handed doctoring President Trump’s remarks on multiple occasions, so it’s no surprise that they have commissioned a rabid anti-Trump individual to deliver a lecture.” 

Waking up to find himself on the front page of the Mail, Rutger Bregman took to social media to call the whole story (not entirely without cause) “A nice, self-contained loop of outrage, manufactured by the newspaper itself.” The “bit fashy” line was not his, Rutger explained, but “a quote from a Silicon Valley tech bro I cited in the lecture,” whilst the title of his talk was a nod to a phrase of the leading Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to the effect that “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is a time of monsters.” 

Maybe so, but the most obvious implication of these words would still seem to be that Trump was one of these “bit fash” monsters himself, is it not? After all, Bregman has in the past given overblown media interviews shrieking that, with the rise of Trump, there was “the real chance of an authoritarian breakthrough” of a quasi-fascist kind in America, and that as a consequence, “This is not normal politics any more; this is not left versus right, this is good versus evil.” 

“I live in New York,” Bregman continued. “Europeans don’t realise how bad the situation is.” They might do if they’ve ever heard of Zohran Mamdani.

You topia if you want to

Online, Bregman denied his sermon focused on ‘Nazis’ like Trump and Farage at all, arguing instead that “In reality, most of my criticism was aimed at my own side: cowardly centrists, a European Union struggling to stand up to authoritarianism, and the broader failures of Western elites.” Yet the true controversy here should not really be what was said during the BBC’s Reith Lectures this year, so much as the person who was invited to say it in the first place.  

I first became aware of Rutger Bregman back in 2017, when he had just released a best-selling new book about economics, Utopia For Realists. I read it, considering it for possible inclusion in a satirical book I was then myself writing about history’s most lunatic financial ideas, called False Economies. But in the end, I thought Bregman’s ideas were all just far too lunatic to include, so I settled for writing about other less deluded individuals who thought gold could have sex and babies, or that paranormal psychic vampires controlled the global stock-exchange, instead. 

Utopia for Realists was a real smash-hit amongst the left-wing commentariat at the time, gifting the young Dutchman a privileged seat at the table of the great and the good. As ever, fortunate timing played a key role in all this; 2017 came immediately after the twin shocks to the globalist post-national elite of Brexit and Trump’s first victory, making Bregman’s book easily marketable as a ‘plausible’ remedy to the alleged evils of ‘populism’ (previously known as ‘democracy’) amongst Europe and America’s depressed-feeling progressives.  

Bregman wasn’t then yet thirty, but, like Greta Thunberg, knew he had all the answers. In true utopian fashion, he felt it would be easy to shift towards a fifteen-hour work-week for virtually all workers, advising the enactment of a generous Universal Basic Income to allow this to happen, and advocated for totally open borders, seemingly for anyone. He also advised placing hugely punitive taxes on bankers, hoping to force mathematical geniuses out of the field into becoming more socially useful inventors of the cancer cures and space rockets of tomorrow instead! One chapter was quite literally titled ‘Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone.’ At the time, this seemed ridiculous. Three years later, come the COVID-lockdowns, it became official pan-European government policy. 

Bregman even praised the impact of the UK’s Three-Day Week, that unhappy period in 1974 when the nation was held hostage by militant trade unions, leading to electricity being rationed. Bregman says that, despite working hours being cut so drastically due to lack of power, industrial productivity declined only by a paltry 6%, empirically proving we could all work less if we wanted to—albeit probably by candlelight. 

Overall, Bregman’s idealistic ideas seemed little more than a path towards creating likely dystopia whilst in search of an unlikely utopia: but then, that seems the main path ploughed by most other left-leaning politicians throughout the Western world these days anyway, with their suicidal march towards Net Zero, debt-default, and demographic Great Replacement. To sceptics, Bregman seems like little more than a gifted self-promoter and crank, much as his own critics would say Nick Fuentes is. Looked at in this way, the BBC giving Bregman a major platform is precisely the same as Tucker Carlson giving a crank like Fuentes a major platform recently—but Bregman is an Establishment crank, so that’s alright.

Actually, Carlson did once give Bregman his own public media platform, too, interviewing him in 2019. After Bregman began insulting him as “a millionaire funded by billionaires,” however, a short-tempered Carlson cut short the interview by swearing at his guest, calling him both a “tiny brain” and a “moron,” later apologising for the obscenities but not his disparaging assessment of Rutger’s intellectual capacities which, he said, were “entirely accurate.” 

Turn of the crank

To put it mildly, Rutger Bregman does not appear to live in the world of actual human reality. But this only acts as a perfect recommendation of the man to elite gatekeepers of ‘acceptable’ public opinion like today’s BBC. To them, he appears as some trendy-bearded, avatar-like harbinger of the ideal liberal future mankind is supposedly destined to enjoy, once all those pensionable-age, utopia-hindering, “bit fashy” types can be pushed off the political scene forever, by fair means or foul.

Youth like Bregman enjoys (he is still under 40) is not always a virtue, however, particularly not when you are a historian who seems determined to avoid the lessons of the past. In a 2017 interview with English broadsheet The Sunday Times, Bregman, then only 28, boasted of how he had managed to studiously ignore the lessons of the past, as taught to him by people tedious enough to have actually lived through it:

I was born in 1988 before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and when I went to university it was assumed by everybody that utopias are extremely dangerous and they almost always end up as dystopias … But I had this nagging sense that we had lost something. I thought every milestone of civilisation [like abolishing slavery or giving women the vote] had always started as a utopian fantasy.

So, for example, Bregman’s fantasy about open borders might seem like … well, like fantasy, but, he argues, could easily be implemented if only there were not “so much nonsense going around about it” from fashies like The Donald. ISIS would certainly agree, as would people traffickers, arms dealers and druglords. Inconveniently, however, many voters do not. In a contemporary liberal utopia like the EU, of course, the voters should simply be ignored—just like ordinary licence-fee payers are ignored by the BBC, who are more and more switching off their unwatchable, propaganda-laden programming as a result. 

When he heard Bregman would be delivering this year’s Reith Lectures, former UK Conservative Party Cabinet member Michael Gove looked up a list of past speakers and calculated the following extremely telling fact:

The Reith Lectures have been running since 1948 …  Since they started I can think of only three lecturers who were identifiably conservative.

Maybe, to restore the balance, the Beeb could go “a bit fash” themselves next year and invite Donald Trump or Nigel Farage to deliver their own Reith Lecture series about the destructive and deleterious impact upon Western society of fanatical open borders and free money idealists like Mr Bregman? Quoting not Gramsci, but Goya, they could call it ‘The Sleep of Reason Brings Monsters’ instead?