By Melanie Phillips

It will take time before the smoke of battle clears from the Oprah Winfrey interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and we can more properly assess its impact. It is unlikely, however, to dent support for the monarchy in Britain.

Indeed, the whole Oprah/Sussex circus tells us nothing about the Royal Family that withstands proper scrutiny. It tells us a great deal more about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and America itself. And none of it is good.

From the reported reaction, it seems America is overwhelmingly on the side of Meghan and unquestioningly believes the preposterous story she has told of her own alleged persecution and suffering at the hands of the royals (other than the Queen herself, who by Meghan’s own account treated her with nothing but kindness and has now had her whole family smeared and trashed for her pains).

In America, there seems precious little desire or ability to subject the Sussexes’ denunciation to anything like the skepticism it requires. For the whole thing was not only an attempt to besmirch the Royal Family by spraying a poisonous miasma of unspecific smears and unsubstantiated assertions. It was also riddled with astonishing ignorance and contradictions.

Take, for example, the explosive accusation of the Royal Family’s alleged racism. The Duchess told Oprah Winfrey that, while she was pregnant with Archie, there had been “concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born”. She variously ascribed this alleged topic of conversation to one individual and to more than one who had been talking to Prince Harry.

When the prince was asked about this alleged remark later in the interview, he told Winfrey the conversation in question had been “awkward” and left him “a bit shocked”. But he appeared to suggest he had heard this alleged slur from a royal figure before he and Meghan were married. He said:

That was right at the beginning when she wasn’t going to get security, when members of my family were suggesting that she carries on acting, because there was not enough money to pay for her, and all this sort of stuff. Like, there was some real obvious signs before we even got married that this was going to be really hard.

So was the comment made about the unborn Archie, or was it part of a different and maybe broader conversation? Without knowing the context of the remark, we cannot judge it.

The Duchess seems to have based this smear on conjecture. She said of the remark:

That was relayed to me from Harry. That was a conversation that family had with him and I think that it was really hard to see that as compartmentalised from everything else.

Winfrey asked her whether the royals were “worried that if he was too brown that would be a problem?” To which Meghan replied:

If that’s the assumption you are making I think that feels like a pretty safe one.

So she was repeating a second-hand conversation to which she was imputing a racist motive without a shred of evidence to back that up. What’s more, since both she and Prince Harry refused to say who had made this remark they were in effect smearing the whole family.

Subsequently, Winfrey told CBS that off-camera Prince Harry had stressed that “neither his grandmother or grandfather were part of that conversation”. But he didn’t choose to say it himself on camera, and so still left other members of his family smeared by implication and unable to defend themselves.

Meghan’s determination to assert racial prejudice against Archie at Buckingham Palace merely exposed her own risible ignorance. She suggested that these racist attitudes had deprived her son of the same kind of title or security protection as other royal grandchildren, by which she presumably meant the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. She expressed anger at

the idea of our son not being safe, and also the idea of the first member of colour in this family not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren would be.

But under royal convention, only the children of a future monarch have the right to the title prince or princess — which means the Cambridge children have those titles, but Archie Sussex is currently too far down the pecking order. And the idea that a royal child would be denied adequate security because of the colour of his skin is nothing less than paranoid or malicious nonsense.

In a previously unbroadcast section of the interview revealed yesterday, Prince Harry was asked if he had left the UK because of racism. He replied:

It was a large part of it.

What rubbish. Prince Charles stepped in with delight to walk Meghan down the aisle in the absence of her own father. The Queen was gracious and friendly to both Meghan and her mother. Britain was delighted to have a mixed-race princess. The public’s attitude soured as a direct result of the Sussexes’ arrogant and boorish behaviour, such as not allowing the public to know the names of Archie’s godparents.

People perceived correctly that Meghan was simply not willing to adapt to the rules of behaviour as a member of the Royal Family. Public unease and criticism turned into outrage when it became clear that the Sussexes wanted to milk their titles and royal status while refusing to undertake the duties of that role.

As for Meghan’s claim that life as working royal had taken her to the brink of suicide, is this really plausible? Suicidal feelings are the product of profound psychological disorder. She said she had recognised she needed professional help and wanted to check into a hospital. She said she went to “the institution” but claimed:

I was told I couldn’t, it wouldn’t be good for the institution. I went to one of the most senior people to get help.

Why didn’t she just visit a doctor? Why didn’t her husband haul her off to one when she told him she no longer wanted to live? And in the light of the trauma over Princess Diana and the damage done to the Royal Family as a result of her own psychological problems — not to mention her throwing herself down the stairs — is it really likely that if anyone at the palace had thought Meghan was mentally ill they would have sat on their hands? Isn’t it more likely that they chose instead not to act on what appeared to them be yet more tendentious complaints about the way she said she was being treated?

The most egregious contradiction, however, is between the Sussexes’ much-professed insistence on privacy and the appalling nature of those who dare invade it, and how they have not only made themselves into the biggest story in the world but have trashed the privacy of their family’s conversations and dealings with them.

Even worse than the Duchess’s attack on her husband’s family was Prince Harry’s attack on his own father, accusing him of cutting off his money and refusing to answer his calls, and on his brother and sister-in-law. More unscreened footage which has now been made public shows him piling yet more insults on his family.

This altogether despicable performance has now buried forever the notion these two assiduously promote that they are kind, decent and compassionate people. They have now revealed themselves to be the opposite. This interview with Oprah was a mutual, and mutually grubby, exploitathon.

The interview was a disaster: not for the British monarchy, but for the reputation of Prince Harry and his wife in the only place where this matters — in Britain, which these two have now grossly insulted along with the Royal Family and the monarchy. The Duchess has now revealed herself as self-obsessed, spiteful and venal. Prince Harry has done something even more unforgivable to his father, his grandparents and his brother and sister-in-law.

And in America, where the pair have apparently solid support, we can see exposed the yawning culture gap with Britain.

For it appears that this America (presumably there are some exceptions) can’t even recognise the blindingly obvious contradictions in this encounter. This America can’t acknowledge the grotesque disloyalty and spite that’s been unleashed against close relatives. This America can’t spot the rank hypocrisy and arrogance of a couple who lecture the world on its failings but cannot themselves behave with elementary decency.

This America can’t separate manufactured images from reality. Just as it was a sucker for Princess Diana’s manipulation of her media image, it is now being played by the woman who is trading on that tragic history to exploit Diana’s son. Incapable of separating reality from Hollywood, this America is now mesmerised by the performance of a Hollywood actress; from which it has formed a hanging jury to condemn a family across the Atlantic whose side of these events it doesn’t even think it necessary to hear.

This is because it already has a view about the British monarchy drawn almost entirely from ignorance and caricature. It has watched The Crown, and has assumed that the fabrications and character assassinations in that soap-opera are also true and so it now understands the British monarchy.

In the same way, it has a view of Britain that is itself drawn from the comically outdated caricature of a country still run by the English upper class. This America’s understanding of Britain, of the iron sense of duty embodied by Britain’s monarchy and the role it plays in unifying the country and underpinning its shared sense of decency, gentleness and identity, is next to zero.

As the British born journalist and American diva Tina Brown has said: “Let’s bow down to the real queen here – Oprah”.

Yup — that’s about the level of all this.

Victor Davis Hanson(American Greatness)

Two recent polls suggest wokism is beginning to recede on a variety of fronts, from less trust in Black Lives Matter and more confidence in the police, to suspicion that the Capitol “insurrection” account is being used to unfairly suppress political expression while Antifa, increasingly, is seen as a terrorist organization whose violence has been ignored improperly by authorities.

There are tens of millions of Americans who either have been stung, or turned off, by McCarthyite wokeness (and thus have anti-wokeness antibodies). More have been vaccinated from its latest virulent strains by their own values of judging people as individuals, not as racial or gender collectives. So lots of Americans have developed peremptory defenses against it. The result is that daily there are ever-fewer who are susceptible to the woke pandemic. And it will thus begin to fade out—even as the virus desperately seeks to mutate and go after more institutions.

Peak wokeness is nearing also because if it continued in its present incarnation, then the United States as we know would cease to exist—in the sense that 1692-93 Salem or 1793-94 Paris could not have continued apace without destroying society. Woke leftism exists to destroy and tear down, not to unite and build. It is not designed to play down and heal racial differences, but to accentuate and capitalize on them.

Scattershot Immunity

The methodology of cancel culture is utterly incoherent and unsustainable. The shark was jumped by the case of the Dr. Seuss books—banned by some local school districts, even as Dr. Seuss Enterprises, in terror, pulled some of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel’s publications of its own accord. If the author of The Cat in the Hat is now an enemy of the people, then anyone and all can be so designated.

That is, after 70 years and millions of books in the houses of millions of Americans, our generation’s new Soviet censors have now decided that Seuss’s books of the late 1940s and 1950s do not conform to our 2021 sensibilities and thus should be banned. The same kind of canceling of Disney films and cartoons, and of particular novelists and social critics is now a matter of record.

But what are to be the new standards of Trotskyization as we go forth? Can the Governor of New York be excused for months of policies that led to nearly 15,000 unnecessary deaths, but not for inappropriate kisses and touching of women? Or will he, as an Emmy-winning woke official, be exempt from punishment for both types of transgressions?

There are no logical standards that dictate who is and who is not canceled. For now, all we know about the rules of wokeness is that living leftists are mostly not canceled by the woke mob for the thought crimes that ruin both the non-Left or the generic dead.

The operating assumption is that the uncovered sins of the progressive are aberrations and not windows into their dark souls. Or perhaps woke leftism works on the same principle as carbon credits: the more you act progressively, the more pluses you have when minuses are summed up.

Most who have claims of being non-white are likely to find partial vaccination from the woke mob. Those who are independently wealthy or successfully self-employed likewise have some immunity. Then there are the defiant, the proverbial “Don’t Tread on Me” folks, who will fight, and thus encourage the zombie walkers to detour around them.

The only consistent pattern of woke punishment is the shared logic of the lions and water buffalos at the ford—devour the sacrificial, single, and vulnerable while avoiding the robust herd with retaliatory horns.

The Woke Tax

Wokeness eventually would put an unsustainable economic strain on the system. Wokeness is siphoning off billions of dollars from a productive economy through a sort of value-subtracted tax. We are spending a great deal of labor and capital for merit to be replaced in college admissions, in hiring, in grants, in publication, in the selections of awards, and in movies and videos, in everything—as racial, ethnic, and sexual identity considerations replace meritocratic, literary, artistic, and technological criteria, rather than just augment, them.

Americans also are investing lots of capital in preempting wokeness—writing/saying/acting in ways that are not productive, but simply defensive. Diversity oaths, and diversity applications, pledges, and statements take some time to read and digest. It will not be long before insurers will sell “woke insurance,” the premiums adjusted upward for those more conservative and of the wrong genealogy. It won’t be long before we all carry cards certifying that “At no time, did I say, hear, or think anything . . . .”

At a time of $1.7 trillion in student aggregate debt, and existential financial crises in universities during the zoom virtual campus, is higher education really so rich that it can add layers and layers of six-figure-income diversity and equity coordinators?

Most will not invent, create, teach, or produce. Instead, they are not merely monitoring but hindering those who do—either out of a need to justify their apparat or from self-importance. To believe otherwise is to suggest that on, say, May 1, 2020, the United States was an utterly racist society, without civil rights protections or any reparatory programs for those deemed unfairly victimized in the past.

The result is that billions of Americans’ hours are invested in woke reeducation and diversity training, in workshops and group confessionals, and in adjudicating and punishing those who do not comply. Ad hoc and personal cancel culture results in thousands of days of unproductive labor as functionaries scour the internet on the scent of a past misspoken word, or an ancient but now incorrect gesture that can return to ruin a rival or an enemy.

Our economy will soon mimic the totalitarian ones of old. Our commissars are like those of the old Red Army—ordering Soviet commanders’ counter-offensives during the Great Patriotic War to ensure that tank battalions were advancing ideologically correctly rather than just tactically or strategically soundly.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. But 280 former generals, admirals, and national security officials signed a letter warning that if Trump were to bring in any federal troops to keep the peace after the capital violence of late May and early June, riots that saw systematic attacks on police, vandalism, arson, injuries, and looting, and neared the White House grounds, he should be considered a dictatorial threat. “There is no role for the U.S. military in dealing with American citizens exercising their constitutional right to free speech, however uncomfortable that speech may be for some,” they insisted.

The same group remained mute when nearly 30,000 troops flooded the streets of the capital in the aftermath of the January 6 riot inside the Capitol building. They maintain their silence as barbed wire and fencing now cordon off the city, and thousands of troops remain without a terrorist or insurrectionist enemy in sight—a militarization of the capital not seen since the Civil War. Tolerable and intolerable violence is predicated on ideology, not its nature or magnitude.

No society can long exist if it believes that its own founding principles, its customs and traditions, its very origins are evil and must be erased. Tearing down statues of Abraham Lincoln, and redefining 1776 and 1787 as 1619, are many things, but one thing they are not is coherent. Trump was considered nutty when he warned that the statue topplers would go from Confederate monuments to Washington and Jefferson—and then when they did just that he was further ridiculed for being prescient.

Who were the long-dead men who devised a system whose natural and eventual fruition is what attracts indigenous people from Oaxaca, the destitute from Somalia, or the politically oppressed from Vietnam? If evil white people founded an evil system solely for their own evil purposes, why would anyone nonwhite dare risk his life to eat from the alluring fruit of the inherently long-ago poisoned tree?

If Americans are to accept that their Declaration of Independence and Constitution were frauds, abject falsifications of the real unspoken founding of 1619, then again what is to replace them? Whose statues are to rise, which books are we to be authorized to read, whose science are we to turn to?

Everyone has feet of some clay. For every cancellation, then must there be commensurate bowdlerizing? Is there no adultery, or unkind treatment of women or plagiarism in the past of Martin Luther King, Jr? No violence or criminality in the life of Malcolm X? Did Cesar Chavez never send his goons to the border to beat back illegal aliens? Was Margaret Sanger only a sometimes advocate of eugenic abortion? Are the written biographies of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to be freed of anti-Semitism and petty corruption? Is Louis Farrakhan an ecumenical leader in the way FDR was not? Was JFK really our first feminist?

Are we to look to those who erased our supposedly awful past for guidance?

Is it to be the architect of the 1619 Project? Long ago the ecumenical Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote that “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world . . . The descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community.”

Is going back into one’s student days to find such an embarrassing rant, in the fashion of the accusers’ of Brett Kavanaugh’s desperate but false allegations, unfair? If so, this past summer Hannah-Jones bragged that, yes, it would be “an honor” if the summer rioting—700 police officers injured, 40 deaths, and billions in property damages and hundreds—be called henceforth “the 1619 riots.”

At the height of tensions, she advised, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” And she added, “Any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property, but these are not reasonable times.” Did the Times consider its essayist inflammatory?

Tribes

In our self-celebrated liberal society are we all to be reduced to identifying by race? But first, do we even have the ability to ascertain who is and is not white or black or brown?

Most illiberal societies in the past that tried such stigmatization of race, ethnicity, or religion did not end so well—from the Ottomans and the Third Reich to the former Yugoslavians, Rwandans, and Iraqis. One eighth, one fourth, or one half makes one a person of color—or not color? Shall we seek knowledge of one-drop of tell-tale bloodlines from the archived jurisprudence of the antebellum South?

If Peruvian George Zimmerman had only used his matronymic, and Latinized his first name, then would a Jorge Mesa have become a sympathetic character who lost a fair fight with Trayvon Martin rather than reduced by the New York Times to a strange category of “white Hispanic” hoodlum, with the additional odor of a Germanized patronymic.

Why does class bow to race, since the former seems to trump the latter. If we forget percentages for a moment, and also forget that we are individuals, not anonymous cogs of vast racial wheels, in absolute numbers, there are roughly (in some studies) more poor white people—both those earning incomes below the poverty level and those with no income at all—than all other commensurate poor minorities combined. Were these supposed to be the targets of Barack Obama’s “clingers” remarks, or Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” John McCain’s “crazies,” or Joe Biden’s “dregs,” “chumps,” and “Neanderthals”?

Apparently, the supposedly all-powerful, all-determining Oz-like role of racial supremacy and the unearned privilege that accompanies it, have aided those 26 million white impoverished very little. Or perhaps they did not get the message that they were recipients of unearned, all-determinative white privilege.

Or perhaps they were just people, like the poor of all other races, who suffer from lack of or access to education or vocational training, the stagnation of entry-level incomes, divorce, family dissolution, bad luck, poor health, substance abuse, economic ill-winds, cultural disadvantages, self-inflicted pathologies, or all the other criteria that can make every one of us of every race susceptible to ravages of poverty.

Given that, in absolute numbers alone, there are more minorities that are not poor than the number of white people who are, how is it that class considerations are forgotten? Or for that matter, does any child’s destiny rest on just race—or a two-parent household living in Menlo Park rather than Parlier, or growing up with college-educated parents or high-school dropouts? And does race really determine all the other criteria that foster wealth or poverty?

Note the artifact that those who are now classified as nonwhite are wisely not often seeking to rebrand themselves as “white” to share in intractable “white privilege ”—in the fashion of the past when white majority racism was undeniable. Why are Asian-Americans, on average, enjoying over $20,000 more in average household income than so-called whites?

Why more commonly would so-called white people create an entire industry of constructing pseudo-minority identities—from Elizabeth Warren to Rachel Dolezal to Ward Churchill to Alec Baldwin’s wife, Hilaria—if not for careerist or social advantage or wishing to be cool by claiming not to be “white”? Why has the new racist “passing for non-white” replaced the old racist “passing for white”?

These are admittedly absurd questions. But they are quite apt for an absurd society obsessed with race but without any mechanism to develop a logical category of victimization and reparation.

Predicating wokism on race is a tricky business, even if one could define and identify race, quantify its role in determining class status, and convince millions that it is moral to judge people by how they look.

Like the Salem witch trials and the McCarthyite hysteria, when wokism fades, we are likely to see its real catalysts revealed. And they will not be found to be misplaced idealism, nor heartfelt desire for a more ecumenical society, but mostly the age-old, narcissistic destructive road to career enhancement, fueled by customary ancient fears, envies, and hatreds.