JAMES DELINGPOLE
Hell hat h no f u r y like a n irate teenage girl
faces! See their innocence and promise!
They want guns banned/CO 2 emissions radi-
cally reduced/animal cruelty ended/Brit-
ain to remain part of the European Union.
What kind of monster would you have to be
to deny our most precious commodity the
brighter future they crave?’
Also, it’s yet another manifestation of
the ugly identity politics which is causing
such needless division in our culture. It has
set women against men, ethnic minorities
against white people, trans activists against
the ‘cisgendered’, and — as was very much
evident in the aftermath of the Brexit refer-
endum, where older people were repeatedlyurged to hurry up and die for having voted
the wrong way — the young against the old.
And I really don’t want to live in a world
where I have to go round hating kids just
because they’ve been trained up, like the
Red Guard or the Young Pioneers, to strut
round making themselves objectionable
with half-baked, second-hand political opin-
ions. Not — as I was at pains to stress — that
I blame the kids themselves for this trend.
I blame the adults, mostly on the left, who
are taking advantage of those characteristics
that make the young so ripe for exploita-tion: their naivety, their impulsiveness, their
passion, their idealism, their vulnerability to
peer pressure, their lack of restraint, the fact
that by definition they are unwise because
they have not yet had the experience to form
a mature, considered view.
This was the point where — according to
an audience member who was sitting among
them — the girls’ ears started to blow steam.
And when the time for questions came, they
stood up, one after another, to tell me how
very, very cross they felt, how totally enti-
tled to their brilliant opinions they were and
what an awful, stupid old man I was.
No doubt I’ll be accused of more patron-
ising sexism by some of the girls when, inev-
itably, their parents draw their attention to
this column. But I’m afraid that what I say
is true: nothing that any of the girls said, not
one thing, presented anything by way of a
lucid, viable counter to my argument. It was
pure ‘muh feelings’ emotionalism, laced with
burning entitlement and more than a hint of
cry-bullying passive aggression.
I’ve noticed this a lot. On school and uni-
versity visits, in panel discussions, on social
media, the kind of normal discourse that
previous generations took for granted has
been twisted to the point of unhingement
by girls alternately sobbing like victims
and then shrieking at you and trying to get
you banned or — in their dreams — locked
up. No one seems to have told them that if
you’re going to chip in and you can’t make
an intelligent point, then at least make a
funny one. It’s as if young women these days
have been encouraged to believe that right-
eous fury is enough: merely being angry is a
moral act which relieves them of any obli-
gation to truth, wit, logic, justice or indeed
feminine grace, subtlety and charm.
Of course, girls have always had it in
them, this tendency. But it’s only in the last
few years that this consuming rage has been
weaponised in the name of ‘empowerment’.
Except that it’s not empowering. Far from
showing women at their best, it often brings
out their worst. Truly, I say, as the adoring
father of a teenage daughter, our girls
deserve better than this.S
omething troubling is happening to
our girls. I noticed it again most recent-
ly at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the
annual festival of free speech staged at Lon-
don’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonder-
ful event, where ex-revolutionary commu-
nists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-
ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how
much we have in common. I feel right at
home among the bright, engaged, friendly
crowds and when I speak I generally get a
warm reception.
But there are always exceptions, aren’t
there? On this occasion the trouble came
from a bloc of teenage girls in the audience
for my panel. Judging by their accents and
dress and demeanour I’d say they probably
came from one of the more selective London
day schools. One after another they stood up
to denounce me, just like my own teenage
female does most of the time when she’s at
home and I venture an opinion. Except Girl
is away boarding at the moment, so I did
rather feel: ‘What did I do to deserve this
busman’s holiday?’
My panel’s topic was gun control in the
US. More specifically, it was about how since
the Parkland, Florida school shooting, the
debate appears to have been hijacked by
photogenic teen survivors of the atrocity
with their #neveragain campaign, their end-
less appearances on CNN and their nation-
wide protests featuring bussed-in parties of
winsome, placard-wielding kiddies warning
that next time it could be them.
Had I really wanted to wind my audi-
ence up I could have said — as I more or
less believe — that every man, woman and
child should be obliged to have a gun from
the age of eight onwards. But because I was
in an emollient mood, I decided instead to
focus on a slightly more nuanced point about
the way that, increasingly, kids like the slight-
ly spooky Parkland survivor David Hogg are
being used to advance political causes. My
view is that it’s one of the more disturbing
trends of our age.
Partly, what I object to is that the mere
state of youth is being used as a substitute
for argument: ‘Look at these fresh young
It’s as if young women these days
have been encouraged to believe
that righteous anger is enough