Let me start with a confession: I find it oddly satisfying to watch the slow unraveling of people who’ve spent their lives weaponizing prejudice. Rod Liddle’s recent passing isn’t just a footnote in the annals of bad ideas—it’s a case study in how society collectively decides which villains deserve to be remembered. And honestly? I’m not even sure we’re doing it right.
There’s a bizarre ritual that happens when someone like Liddle dies. Suddenly, the internet becomes a courtroom, and every tweet, column, and offhand comment gets dissected like evidence. But here’s what bugs me: we treat this as a moral victory, as though his death somehow purifies the world. It’s not. It’s just a reminder that the culture wars are a zero-sum game where the only real winners are the people who enjoy watching others lose. What makes this particularly fascinating is how we’ve normalized the idea that hate speech is just ‘satire’—a linguistic loophole that lets monsters hide behind a smile.
Liddle’s career was a masterclass in toxic performative outrage. He’d write about Welsh people as ‘seaweed-munching hill tribes’ and then claim it was ‘just a joke.’ But here’s the thing: jokes don’t carry the same weight as calculated insults. When you reduce entire communities to punchlines, you’re not being funny—you’re being complicit. I’ve seen this pattern before, in every era where the powerful feel entitled to mock the marginalized. What many people don’t realize is that this isn’t just about humor; it’s about power. The ability to dehumanize others without consequence is a luxury reserved for those who’ve never had to live under the weight of systemic bias.
Then there’s the part about wanting to bomb Glastonbury with a nuclear weapon. Let’s be clear: this isn’t a metaphor. Liddle didn’t just write about violence—he invited it. He described a world where ‘street drummers, liberal politicians, and provo vegans’ deserved annihilation. And yet, when I called the police, they laughed. That’s the real horror story here: a society so desensitized to extremism that it treats mass murder as a punchline. A detail that I find especially interesting is how Liddle’s audience never seemed to question the line between satire and genuine malice. It’s as if we’ve collectively agreed that certain words are too dangerous to take seriously.
What this really suggests is a deeper crisis in how we engage with ideas. Liddle’s defenders would argue he was ‘just being provocative,’ but provocation without accountability is just another form of violence. His legacy isn’t just his words—it’s the culture that let them exist unchallenged. And here’s the kicker: he wasn’t even subtle about it. He openly admitted to wanting to ‘shag the kids’ as a teacher, then wrapped it in a veneer of dark humor. If you take a step back and think about it, this is the same strategy used by every serial offender in history: disguise their intentions in layers of irony until no one can see the rot beneath.
I’ve spent years debating whether satire can ever be a legitimate tool for social change. Liddle’s work gave me my answer. When your ‘satire’ requires a dictionary to decode and a therapist to process, it’s not art—it’s a mirror held up to the darkest parts of human nature. The fact that he could publish such material in The Spectator (a wordplay on ‘protects hate’ that’s too on-the-nose to be accidental) says everything about the media’s role in amplifying hate. We’ve become so obsessed with ‘free speech’ that we’ve forgotten the difference between speaking freely and speaking responsibly.
So here’s my take: Liddle’s death isn’t a triumph. It’s a wake-up call. We need to stop treating the death of a villain as a celebration and start asking harder questions about why such people exist in the first place. If we keep reducing complex social issues to a game of ‘gotcha’ with dead white men, we’ll never address the real problems. The next time someone says, ‘Oh, he was just being funny,’ I hope we remember that laughter can be a weapon—and sometimes, the loudest silence is the one that lets the worst ideas thrive.
