Introduction To The Age Of Stupid
Welcome to The Age Of Stupid.
My name is Gareth Roberts. You may know me from such books as ‘Gay Shame: The Rise Of Gender Ideology And The New Homophobia’, or from TV shows that I worked on as a writer including Doctor Who and Coronation Street.
Here’s some background on me.
I was born in 1968, and grew up very ordinarily in a small town not far outside London. I have a degree in Drama from what is now called Winchester University - current motto ‘Be The Difference!™️’ - but which was known then as King Alfred’s College. It wasn’t actually a degree in drama but a course in overthrowing society through improvisation, sort of like a militant version of ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ If only Greg Proops and Josie Lawrence had known they had so much potential power.
I wrote my first book while I should’ve been paying attention to my studies in radicalising Hampshire. This was a Doctor Who TV tie-in original novel (the TV series itself was, mercifully, off the air at the time). Many of these followed, along with lots of other genres of delicious hackwork. I then moved into TV where I worked reasonably happily for many years, though I noticed the creative sector getting madder and madder.
In 2017 I made a cheap but well-observed crack in public about the blessed and saintly community of men who claim to be women, and the TV phone immediately stopped ringing. Luckily the phone immediately started ringing again, but this time from sane people, and so I began a new writing career with publications such as UnHerd, Spiked and The Spectator, at whose Coffee House site I now have a weekly column, covering political subjects of all kinds. This led to an approach from Forum, an imprint of Swift Press, and the publication of ‘Gay Shame’.
And now here I am on Substack. I thought it was about time, nearly twenty five years in, to enter the new century. I am often accused of living in the past, but as this critique comes mainly from people who claim that human beings can change sex, I think that it can be safely ignored.
This Substack is a repository for thoughts that don’t quite fit into my other gigs. A journal/chronicle of what I call The Age Of Stupid - the cultural cul de sac/mini-Dark Age that we find ourselves in. It won’t generally be angry. I tire as much as anybody else of hair pulling, and I have no hair left to pull.
In the process of writing ‘Gay Shame’, and in life generally over the last decade or so, a question kept being asked of me by many, many people - not only about genderism but many other modern malaises from the nasty race-baiting of the ‘diversity’ industry, or the mass public demonstrations in favour of Hamas in big cities every Saturday, or the general awfulness of culture.
‘Why do you think this has happened - what has caused it?’ And I think the answer is multi-factorial, and complex, and a comprehensive response would bring in politics, technology, the ennui of affluence, etc etc.
But when you boil it right down, its perpetrators are just stupid. It is the revenge of the mediocre, the empowering of the daft. Of course technically they may be ‘bright’, with high IQs and dripping in qualifications, but they have no bloody judgment.
It is a mark of how bad things are that I’ve recently, on several occasions, been called a voice of sanity. This is ludicrous. But this is where we are.
I am told that one should be rigidly focussed and single-subject on this platform, which in my case would mean talking mainly about genderism. I will definitely be doing that, but there will be many other reflections too.
I do not have a rigidly focussed mind. Focus is good, yes. But I enjoy other writers when they’re butterflying about from subject to subject, and I hope you will enjoy it in me. Living in the Age Of Stupid can get you down in the dumps - but here I will strive to entertain, to leave you feeling a bit better than you did before.
Why subscribe?
Being from the pre-internet age I feel so cheap doing this. But this is the future, whether I like it or not.
For £5 a month - the price of four snouts - or for the knockdown price of £50 annually - you get full access to all articles. There’ll be at least one substantial post per week. All paying subscribers will be able to comment on my posts, and I will make an effort to engage directly.