Why the elites keep being hoist by their own petard

You will recall that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern set off to England with a letter asking the king of England to kill their companion, Hamlet. But Hamlet alters the letter so that it instructs the king to kill the pair of hapless students instead, which duly happens. In describing his plan to do this, Hamlet introduced the phrase ‘hoist with his own petard’ into the English language.

Being hoist with your own petard is a surprisingly common political phenomenon these days. Again and again, prominent people complain about being the victims of policies they themselves have instigated, or finding themselves at the wrong end of public opinions they themselves have provoked.

Somebody grumbled to me last week about Reform UK’s plan to scrap ‘indefinite leave to remain’ for legal migrants and deport more than half a million people. He knew colleagues who had lived and worked here for many years and were now fearful of being thrown out of the country. Outrageous. Agreed, I said, but don’t you think that the reason Reform is riding high in the polls is because many thousands of migrants who come here illegally get to stay and claim benefits – even, in many cases, if they commit crimes? That’s the policy you should blame, I suggested, not Reform’s inevitable response as it seeks popularity.

Just last week Democrats and journalists in America were complaining that the indictment of James Comey, the former head of the FBI, was politicising justice. Cue a rash of online videos from two years ago of the very same Democrats and journalists describing the nakedly political attempts to prosecute Donald Trump as ‘letting justice be done’.

The Americans have a cruder acronym for this: FAFO, or fuck around and find out. In one of the more obscure cases of ‘petardry’, Comey once posted a picture on Instagram of shells on a beach, which seemed to spell out the numbers 8647, with the caption ‘Cool shell formation on my beach walk’. Since 86 can be code for getting rid of (or killing) and 47 code for Trump (he was the 47th president second time round), some wondered if Comey intended it as a threat. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted an AI-generated image of Trump kneeling down and rearranging sea shells to spell out ‘FAFO’. ‘Cool shell formation found on beach walk’, read Musk’s caption.

Donald Trump’s election was a spectacular case of left-wing politicians being hoist by their own petards. They spent years telling Americans they were deplorable racists, fascists and transphobes, then wondered why people did not vote for them.

Following Charlie Kirk’s murder, many people were shocked by the cancellation of late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel, after he falsely claimed Kirk had been killed by a MAGA conservative. But many of the same people had cheered or at least shrugged at the cancellation of conservative commentators in previous years.

Lots of academic friends are appalled by the Trump administration’s attacks on the funding of universities and scientific research. Perhaps, I say to them, it was not so smart to turn universities into far-left-monopoly madrassas full of angry extremists teaching students to decolonise mathematics, invent a hundred different sexes and hate their own culture. I generally get blank looks when I try to make this point to these supposedly clever people.

Of course petardry can catch those on the right as well as the left. When Trump cut the funding to the National Weather Service, one meteorologist warned:

‘These cuts will make it harder to keep your family safe when skies turn threatening. Hype? Wait for it… A potentially deadly edition of FAFO.’

Expect more of this as Trumpians reap what they sow.

Or take the question of two-tier justice in the UK. The attorney general, Lord Hermer, attacked Conservative justice secretary Robert Jenrick yesterday for daring to name and criticise judges – as if Hermer is blissfully unaware of just how political judges have become in their pronouncements recently. Judges have been wading into issues that used to be the prerogative of parliament and are increasingly acting like judicial activists. In one infamous case, a Muslim man who raped a 13-year-old girl was spared prison because the judge conceded he may not have known that raping a child was wrong. Do such judges really expect to be immune from criticism?

Patriotism in Britain is now growing angry and ugly, some lament, and the flag of St George is being appropriated by racists. Er, who started it by calling people who fly the flag of St George racist?

If you spend years screaming abuse online at anyone who mildly objects to men who are pretending to be women so that they can take part in women’s sports or get transferred to women’s prisons, then do not be surprised if genuine trans people receive less sympathy or consideration than they deserve from some people.

The BBC gladly platforms extreme climate alarmists, who say billions will starve or die in storms, and then lectures us all on the need to give up boilers, beef and trips to Benidorm. But it bans any appearance of reasonable sceptics who say global warming is real but not an existential threat. Then it acts shocked when the public, noticing that crop yields are going up not down, storms are no worse than before and energy has grown very expensive, begins to think the whole thing might be a hoax or a con job.

Vaccination rates have fallen sharply and centrist dads are blaming anti-vax activists. But who insisted on misleading the public by falsely claiming that Covid vaccines prevented transmission and forced everybody to get vaccinated on pain of losing their job or their chance to travel, even small children at minimal risk of dying from Covid? Look no further for who caused RFK Jr to rocket in popularity.

Why, oh why, have people lost faith in science and started listening to conspiracy theories, wail the bien pensants. Er, perhaps because you spent years telling us that we were conspiracy theorists if we thought Covid might have something to do with the fact that highly dubious and dangerous scientific experiments on bat viruses were being conducted in Wuhan, the same city where the first cases emerged.

Throughout the pandemic, ‘the science’ recklessly trashed its own reputation. Telling people that it was safe to join a mass demonstration for Black Lives Matter, but not safe to visit your grandmother, was an especially low point for scientific experts.

The reason petardry is on the rise, I suggest, is because of the echo-chamber effect. Living in their own filter bubble, people can’t even imagine a day when their actions come back to bite them. The rise of political violence on the left – such as the assassination attempts on Trump, and killing of Charlie Kirk and several immigration-enforcement officers – is not just wrong but extraordinarily dumb, if for no other reason than because the right generally owns more guns in America, and some idiots on the right may be only too willing to respond in kind.

Shakespeare’s phrase refers to the risk a 16th-century ‘petardier’ ran when he planted a small explosive into the wall of a castle to make a breach. The petard bomb, a conical metal device containing about five pounds of gunpowder, was inserted into a hole in a wall and its fuse was ignited before the petardier presumably ran like hell. It was invented in 1579 in France, péter being French for ‘to fart’.

Call it a petard, a pendulum, a boomerang, poetic justice, coming back to bite you or reaping the whirlwind – but do enjoy its effect on those who get hoist.

Matt Ridley is a science writer and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan.