Oops! She thought she was writing in her private secret diary…how embarrassing.

Huh, I wonder why some knobhead in The Times gave me a bad review for a book where I criticise their paper’s coverage of working class people, their obsession with demonising trans women, the dominance of privately educated people in journalism, the stranglehold rightwing billionaires have on the media, and the cosy relationship between lobby journos and politicians?

It’s a mystery!

And then she does it again. Must be Thursday.

She could have written War and Peace except for the fact that no she couldn’t.

So anyway, after all that, of course I had to read the review.

Ash Sarkar, a two-legged viral outrage generator beloved by television producers, came to prominence during the late 2010s. Whether in TV studios self-identifying as a communist or at street demos screaming the word “Nazi” at people, Sarkar was an inescapable presence of those high-pitched times.

Inescapable indeed. There was that time she somehow found herself being a talking head in a BBC documentary on Nazism, alongside actual historians of Nazism such as Richard Evans. She contributed absolutely nothing.

What did Sarkar, a senior editor at the left-wing news site Novara Media, want back then, other than being internet famous for owning, burning, calling out and clapping back at room-temperature IQ pundits on breakfast television, or seeing her absolute boy Jeremy Corbyn in 10 Downing Street? “It’s about the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled,” she told one interviewer in 2018, “while also having fun.”

Be careful what you wish for. It turns out to be Trump and Musk who are doing the dismantling.

Her prose is leaden. The pages swarm with “emboldening effects”, “culture wars being stoked”, “vulnerable minorities”, “anti-migrant crackdowns”, “strong bulwarks”, “custodians of the status quo”, “individual subjectivities” and “pervasive feelings”. Sometimes she doesn’t make any sense at all: “Social media has partially, but dramatically, democratised the public sphere.” Good luck figuring out what a partial dramatic democratisation is.

…

As the book loses steam she goes back to calling people Nazis. Gender critical feminists, Sarkar reckons, are “not a million miles away” from Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy.

Really? Women who say that men are not women are comparable to Rudolf Hess?

Well no wonder the BBC included her in that documentary about the Nazis.