The tyranny of the cry-bully

Reading 29-year-old actress Nicola Peltz Beckham’s comment about the recent death of Quincy Jones – ‘my heart is shattered’ – I was somewhat nonplussed. Just think who we’re talking about here. The legendary music producer lived until the age of 91. And when I say ‘lived’, I mean lived. Jones escaped a life of extreme poverty and crime – from being attacked with an ice pick and having his hand pinned to a fence with a switchblade to seeing his schizophrenic mother taken away in a straitjacket when he was just seven. At 11, when he was breaking into a store, he saw a piano up close for the first time. His recollection of this moment is thrilling: ‘The first time I touched it, it’s like every drop of blood, my heart and soul, and every cell in my body, said: “This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.’’’

He did indeed spend the rest of his life doing the thing he loved, which he happened to excel at. People frequently called him a genius. Last but not least, he had sex with Nastassja Kinski for a whole three years. I once wrote: ‘Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.’ If ever there was a man to whom this applies, it was Quincy Jones.

But no. These days, it’s not enough to simply feel sad for a bit when someone dies, no matter how advanced their age or fulfilled their lives. Hearts must ‘shatter’. We must feel ‘broken’, ‘in bits’, ‘destroyed’. No one is so old that their death cannot be ululated over as a full-blown tragedy. When the great writer, ER Braithwaite, died in 2016, aged 104, I couldn’t help posting: ‘Taken too soon – I hate you, 2016!’

It has got a lot worse since then. When did a sizeable proportion of the Anglosphere, especially its youth, become such hysterical, hyperbolic ninnies? I call them the fit-wits, as they’re always having convulsions about something. It would be bad enough if their fits were confined to the personal arena of grieving, but they’ve grown to embrace political grievances, too. In the past, when one side lost an election, they’d mostly shake hands and agree to differ. Now they film themselves screaming while punching a pillow and put it on TikTok.

Do the grown men and women with Trump Derangement Syndrome not feel shame about displaying their emotions in such a way? No, because they’ve grown up believing that acting in a way that would make Chicken Licken seem chillaxed is somehow proof of their ‘authenticity’. You can see them all over the socials, adults wailing like toddlers in need of a nap and a weighted blankie. They’re shaving their heads and swearing off sex. Some are apparently so scared for their lives that they’re seeking out ‘safe houses’, ‘listening circles’ and ‘therapy ducks’. They talk darkly of mass trans suicides and the death of democracy and repeatedly say, ‘no words’ (which is two words).

Whoopi Goldberg has claimed that Trump intends to make interracial marriages illegal, separate non-white wives from their white husbands and forcibly marry the white men to white women. I don’t know how vice-president-elect JD Vance, proudly uxorious husband to a beautiful woman of Indian heritage, missed that memo.

The most educated, as ever, are the dumbest. Students at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy were reportedly offered treats like ‘milk and cookies’ and ‘hot cocoa’, as well as Lego toys and ‘colouring and mindfulness exercises’ to take their minds off the election results. The Guardian, that bastion of mental excellence, has been offering free counselling to its journalists.

You can see the most entertaining examples of fit-witism on the excellent Rita Panahi’s Sky News Australia segment, amusingly called ‘Lefties losing it’. You get the impression that this type of behaviour may have started out as performative and a bit keeping-up-with-the-Owen-Joneses (more on him later). But just as fame is a mask that eats the face, emotional incontinence is a poison that eats the brain. It’s possible that these people are suffering from an actual thing called ‘disconfirmed expectancy’, a type of cognitive dissonance produced when new information directly contradicts an individual’s existing beliefs. This causes disciples to double down on the trounced worldview, much as followers of apocalyptic religious cults, disappointed when the aliens fail to land, say it’s going to happen next year instead.

While this is true of the wretched followers, the leaders are good old-fashioned ‘cry-bullies’, a splendid phrase I created nearly a decade ago: ‘This is the age of the cry-bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper. They are everywhere, these duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political, from Celebrity Big Brother to the frontline of Islamism.’

As luck would have it, two of the biggest cry-bullies of our age – racial identitarian and one time Big Brother contestant Narinder Kaur and Palestinian-flag-shagger Owen Jones – have been vying for the top trending spot on X this week with their respective examples of cry-bullying. In the first case, Kaur wondered why the Princess of Wales looked so ‘aged’ on Remembrance Sunday – suggesting that she might be a secret smoker, and claiming ‘my brother had cancer… he didn’t age like that’. When I and several million others suggested that a 42-year-old woman who had undergone chemotherapy recently might not look as fresh as a daisy, Kaur accused her critics of all being racist because a ‘brown woman’ dared to have an opinion.

Far more serious have been the pronouncements of Owen Jones since the Amsterdam pogrom last week. Having spent the past decade – along with Gary Lineker and every other half-witted celeb – calling everything he doesn’t like fascism (especially Trump), Jones seems absolutely impervious to the fascist reality of what happened in Amsterdam when football fans from Israel were attacked seemingly for the ‘crime’ of being Jewish. He continues to blame this ‘Jew hunt’, as one of the attackers put it, on the Israeli football fans themselves. Like Kaur, Jones is word-blind. He has wrangled the language of hatred for his own ends, and squealed so loudly about trivialities for so long, that he can no longer see actual atrocities. Now, in a superlative cry-bully move, he’s warning his followers that he’s going to be beaten up for his apparent fearlessness:

‘Given the bile being whipped up, I’m resigned to being attacked again. Last time I was beaten up by a neo-Nazi. His friends, I later discovered, spewed hatred about me on Twitter before the attack. If I get attacked again, let’s not all act surprised!’

Jones and Kaur are particularly grisly symptoms of the degradation of our language in both private and political life. But even if the tiresome pair stopped yapping, a million would replace them. The rise of the emotionally incontinent is nurtured and encouraged in the captured institutions of everything from the army to the zoos. With their shattered hearts and addled minds, there seems to be no end to the rise of the fit-wits and the cry-bullies.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.