People think the culture warification of politics started with Brexit, but I often wonder if ground zero was the moment Emily Thornberry lost her job over the white van tweet.

Over the last 6 years, British online politics is now just a gigantic struggle between groups of people who barely have any idea what they're fighting for. Ill-informed arguments about Brexit have mutated into ill-informed arguments about lockdown.

Every week everyone picks their mascot, be it Owen Jones or Tom Harwood or Darren Grimes or whoever, argues furiously that the other side is wrong, and before a winner can even be close to declared on the basis of the actual facts - we've moved onto the next thing.

The only winners, in fact, are people who 10 years ago would have considered a quick guest spot on Newsnight the zenith of their career, now gigantic talismans for whichever cause the crowds have had to hustle behind this week.

I can't imagine how tiresome it must be to pivot from one take to the next, furiously defending it with precious real insight: Neil Ferguson's model is *definitely* wrong, the government *definitely* wasn't listening to the scientific evidence, on and on ad infinitum.

Of course Sayre's law means it's almost always the dumbest Question Time audience comment, the stupidest tweet, that constitutes the basis of the most furious online struggles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

One of the grimmest things has been the way a bastardised, counterfeit version of "investigative journalism" has taken its place in the war - and the failure of the actual trade to call it out, to set parameters between those who deal in facts and those who don't.

The people propagating it are not really reporters, they're writers of compelling fiction masquerading as such. The damage they do to our understanding of truth is incalculable.

I believe we can do better.

That's why I'm setting up a patreon.

For just £5,000 a month I will allow you to subscribe to a truth-telling newsletter that picks apart the online myths and (contd for another 37 tweets)

ahem. But seriously, I do think that what's happened in the last 6 years has been very bad and I fear the end game is a kind of rigor mortis where every single political misdoing - gigantic or tiny - is raised to exactly the same level of defensibility. And no one wins.