Spectator’s Monkey Shagging Shame

The increasingly alt-right Spectator magazine is not thus described for nothing, and in this week’s edition of the publication, Doug Murray The K gives us another example of why the propagation of rank ignorance, together with implicit racism, now lies at the heart of so much in Spectator world. The subject is, as so often at present, Coronavirus.

It's not just the author peddling racism ...

Doug kicks off his brief treatise as he means to go on: by talking well, but lying badly. “There was always one key flaw in our species. Which is that someone always shags a monkey. I have expressed this thought fairly regularly in private, often to friends who don’t get the reference about the likely origin of Aids and look at me strangely ever after”.

... it's his editor, and ...

Except, of course, that the likely origin of AIDS is not in someone (by implication, one of those Bleck Cheps) indulging in a spot of al fresco primate humping. This, though, by complete coincidence you understand, satisfies the alt-right mission that appears to have become the Speccy’s new modus operandi: it’s bad, so The Other done it.

... by inference, at least, his author's boss

From here, it is a straightforward step for Doug to move on to speculation over the origins of Covid-19 in humans. “I suppose the monkey-shagger rule will now have to be updated to take into account the fact that someone will always blend a bat. For however developed or progressive we fancy ourselves, however many mega-cities we manage to build, we will still never have 100 per cent certainty that there isn’t someone looking at some scrawny cave-hanger and thinking: ‘What a nice soup he would make.’” It’s the way he tells ‘em.

But he does know that “It seems miraculous enough that our species can survive the stupidity of any one human being”. It certainly seems miraculous that the Spectator can keep on flogging copies while maintaining its links with Murray, Rod Liddle, the loathsome Toby Young, and of course self-proclaimed anti-Semite Taki Theodoracopulos.

It was the kind of thought that tasked Ross McCafferty: “'the likely origin of AIDS' — has anyone even believed that shit since the 90s? I know we shouldn't be shocked anymore, and I suspect they would say it's clumsy satire, but I mean just [Fraser Nelson] publishing an old, racist, disproven trope about HIV/AIDS should still be worth remarking on, no?”

Well, quite. Jonathan Portes was done asking the questions, and had moved on to the conclusions. “That [Douglas Murray] combines bigotry and prejudice with ignorance and inability to distinguish facts from his own paranoid fantasies is not news. The moral degeneration of the Spectator under [Fraser Nelson] continues”.

To which Steve Peers added “A pretty basic tenet of academic integrity is not to just make things up. That reference to sex with a monkey violates that, quite apart from its obvious racist implications of sex crazed jungle Africans … It's a racist trope that has no place being repeated by an academic”. Once again, though, Murray is doing just that.

Yet the Spectator is held up as some beacon of high principles, and yet higher standards, rather than a repository for the sniggering schoolboy set to peddle the kind of racist bigotry that had ceased to be fashionable sometime in the last Century.

The magazine’s management might even feel shame over this article. If they had any.

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