One of the easiest ways to tell that one side is losing a debate — whether it’s about politics or anything else that’s grounded in the real world — is when they stop talking about specifics, and start talking about fantasy. Once you have to start relying on pure fiction to make your point, it’s usually a pretty good indicator that you don’t have much of a point to begin with. When feminists began citing “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a warning of what Donald Trump’s administration would look like, serious people understood that it wasn’t a clever analogy or a useful metaphor. It was desperation. It was a bit like citing “Shrek” as proof that we need to open the borders to creepy-looking outsiders. No one who’s attained even a basic level of maturity and competence would fall for this kind of thing. Unfortunately, as we’ve all known for a while now, basic levels of maturity and competence are nowhere to be found in the UK, which is why the entire country is currently transfixed by a Netflix miniseries called “Adolescence.” The show debuted last month, and already, it’s something of a cultural icon over there. At this point, calling “Adolescence” a mere “miniseries” is practically hate speech in Britain. They prefer to think of the show as a documentary, if not their bible. Everyone is expected to watch the entire show, start-to-finish, before they can engage in any kind of public debate on any topic. In a moment, I’ll talk about why this is happening. We’ll also go through the show, episode-by-episode, and discuss the plot and how utterly terrible it is, in every respect. For now, all you need to know is that — spoiler alert — the show is about a white 13-year-old boy who stabs a female classmate to death. He was upset because she rejected his advances, then taunted him online about being an incel. And the show makes a big deal out of how online interactions like this, along with misogynistic content on the internet, can supposedly “radicalize” young boys and turn them into killers. From a production standpoint, the central gimmick of the show is that all four episodes are done in “one take,” with no camera cuts of any kind. So you follow the journey of this 13-year-old kid as he’s arrested for murder, processed, interrogated, and so on. At various points, as a result of this groundbreaking approach to production, you’re even treated to uneventful 10-minute-long car rides to the local store, which is really riveting television. As far as I can tell, the point of this gimmick is to remind you of why things like “cuts” and “editing” were invented in the first place. If that was the objective, then: mission accomplished. WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show Before we get further into the specifics of the show — just so that you understand the magnitude of the mass psychosis I’m talking about, you need to watch this interview that just aired on a morning show called “BBC Breakfast.” Throughout this entire conversation, the two anchors berate the leader of Britain’s conservative party, a woman named Kemi Badenoch, for not watching “Adolescence.” And as the interview goes on, the anchors become more and more annoyed with the politician for not showing the proper deference to this show, which the anchor calls a “documentary” at one point. It’s pretty remarkable. Watch: It’s important to highlight this particular moment: The difference this documentary has made … is that this has made much more of an impact than any politician has, in terms of what people are talking about right now. This is the anchor’s response when the conservative leader reminds her, again and again, that the show is fictional. She calls it a “documentary” and says the show is being taken far more seriously than anything any political figure is saying. But instead of treating this like a very bad development for public discourse in Britain, the BBC anchor embraces it. She’s thrilled that the country has decided to abandon reality and fixate on a fictional diagnosis of their problems. And she can’t understand why the politician is confused and appalled by all of this. The male anchor gets in on the action, too. He begins accosting the politician because she dared to compare “Adolescence” to “Casualty,” another fictional show that the British can’t get enough of. That’s when Badenoch reminds them of the actual problems facing the country. Watch: Badenoch is trying to explain that, in Britain, Islamic terrorists are killing people in the street and Pakistani sex-abuse gangs are terrorizing children. But the anchors didn’t ask a single question about any of that. Instead, they continued to grill her over the 13-year-old white killer in a fictional Netflix show. We’re supposed to believe that this made-up 13-year-old character, whose name is Jamie, is representative of the real threat in the UK. From a statistical perspective this isn’t simply false. It’s one of the most flagrant lies the BBC has ever told, which is saying something. The statistic I’m about to read comes directly from the website of the government of London, and it’s accurate as of 2022: Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators. In England & Wales, as of 2017, roughly 38% of youth knife-crime charges involve ethnic minorities, even though they’re only around 17% of the population. Of course, most of these killers come from broken homes; as one UK study found, more than 70% of violent youth offenders come from single-parent households. If all of those numbers sound familiar, it’s because that’s how the crime stats break down in the U.S., too. Meanwhile, violence that’s targeted against women — the problem that “Adolescence” is all about — is actually declining. Take a look at this chart: The Guardian UK. Violent crime figures for England and Wales. Photo: ONS As you can see, violence against women in particular has been declining for decades in the UK. So there is no wave of young males taking out their aggression on women. On the other hand, there is an epidemic of violence that’s being committed by Britain’s non-white population, which has exploded in recent years. According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, knife crime has increased by roughly one-third since 2010, as the population has grown dramatically due to migration. People in the UK can see this is happening all around them. But now, rather than confront reality, they’re creating a fantasy world in which young white men are the actual problem. The British government is playing a large role in creating this alternate universe, for the obvious reason that it deflects from their failures.  That’s why they’re now instructing schools to play “Adolescence” for their students, as if it has any kind of instructional value whatsoever:   So they’re calling “Adolescence” a documentary, and they’re using it as an educational tool in schools. This is the British equivalent of the “Handmaid’s Tale” metaphor, except the entire country is transfixed by it. But what is this show, exactly? Just how terrible is it? As it turns out, it’s not simply an example of “race-swapping,” as you’ve probably heard many others say online. Yes, they’ve made sure that a white boy stabs the victim in this show, instead of someone more realistic, like a Somali migrant. But if you watch “Adolescence,” you’ll realize that this is actually much worse than a simple “race swap.” That’s just the beginning of what’s going on here. Throughout the entire show, they beat you over the head with the idea that there’s a vast underground community of white misogynist men lurking in the shadows because their brains have been poisoned by content they’re seeing on Instagram. For one thing, the killer’s white male best friend supplies the murder weapon (a knife), so that the killer can scare the female victim with it. This is all very upsetting to the studious black student in the school, who’s dismayed by all of the white male rage that surrounds him. Then there’s a scene where the father of the killer goes to the hardware store. He’s trying to buy paint because his work van was just sprayed with graffiti. And then when he’s talking to an employee — who happens to be a young white man — the employee suddenly starts whispering. The employee tells the father that he’s on his “side,” meaning that he thinks his son didn’t do anything wrong. And then he starts offering advice to the father about how his son could be acquitted by challenging certain pieces of evidence, even though the murder was caught on surveillance footage. The employee even tells the father to launch a crowdfunding campaign, because there are apparently a lot of other angry white men who think it’s great when white men stab innocent victims to death. The irony, of course, is that there is indeed a large community that’s willing to pay money to killers who stab people to death for no reason. But it’s not a community of young white men. In reality, the fundraisers are being established for thugs like Karmelo Anthony, as we discussed last week. In fact, Anthony has raised nearly $500,000 at this point, all because he stabbed a white high school student in the heart during a track meet. But in the world of “Adolescence,” reality is inverted. We’re supposed to pretend that all of these deep-seated cultural problems exist among young white men, to the point that the father can’t even go to a hardware store without being reminded of how many angry incels are out there. And in case you’re wondering just how angry these 13-year-old incels can be, there’s also an entire episode that’s devoted to the killer doing an interview with a female forensic psychologist. For an entire hour, you get to listen to this child talking to the psychologist. And it’s supposed to be really profound, because this is the first time that you see how angry and vindictive this child can become, when he’s dealing face-to-face with a woman. The dialogue includes truly clever lines like, “what do these emojis mean?” The kid’s hour-long interview with this psychologist ends with her telling him that there won’t be any more sessions between the two of them. And then the child freaks out and berates her, and has to be carried out of the room. So again, they’re beating you over the head with the idea that he needs to control women with his male rage. And then the psychologist breaks down, practically in tears, because even though she’s an adult professional who’s trained for situations just like this one, she’s still no match for the male rage of a 13-year-old kid. The rest of the episodes are just as ludicrous. There’s a scene where a white kid assaults a black girl at school, and also a scene where the black girl is distrustful of the police. All of this, of course, is evidence that systemic racism is real. Then there’s the scene where the son of the detective on the case, a wise black pupil at the school, explains to his father (who’s also the detective) what’s going on. He says that girls at the school — including the victim — bully boys online, calling them incels and so on. And the pupil explains to his detective father that he’ll never understand just how damaging this kind of online bullying can be. At one point, just to underscore how out-of-touch the detective is, he asks his son to define the word “incel.”  Once again, the message here is completely backwards. They’re trying to suggest that, even when you have a loving and intact family — which is the case for the 13-year-old killer in this show — that it’s still no defense against the emojis of the online “manosphere”. Having an intact family is supposedly no assurance that, if your son is cyber-bullied by a girl, that he won’t go out and stab her to death in a parking lot. The show makes this messaging explicit; it’s not a very subtle production. Throughout the entire series, it’s clear that the killer’s family is very concerned with his well-being. They’re with him when he’s arrested; they hug him constantly, and so on. The mother and father are together. And yet, to their shock and horror, their kid becomes a murderer. Just in case you missed the message they’re trying to send, the show’s creators have given about a thousand interviews where they explain that, in their view, having an intact family won’t prevent your child from going out and committing murder. Here are a few of them: “We wanted to make this feel like it could happen to you. … The one thing he said to me, right at the beginning, was that we can’t blame the parents.” In other words, the single most important variable that’s indicative of childhood delinquency — which is a lack of proper parenting — was taken off the table, before they even wrote a word of this show. If you removed broken homes, mass migration, and Islamic jihad from the equation, everyone knows that knife crimes would plummet in the UK. But those are the three topics that, from the outset, they knew they couldn’t talk about. They have decided to base the entire show around an extreme outlier fictional case. Which is fine, in and of itself. But then the media and the British government (and the creators of the show) are all treating it like it’s not an outlier case — as if the plot of this show happens all the time. That’s the sleight of hand trick. The producers claim that it’s impossible to understand what drives the supposed epidemic of “male rage,” beyond vague personalities on the internet. Watch: You can see how excited he gets when he talks about the Andrew Tate namedrop. He thinks it’s clever to say, “Aha, you don’t really understand why we mentioned Andrew Tate in the show; we’re just making fun of the dumb adults.” But at the same time, he’s obviously an extremely dumb adult himself. That’s why he offers none of his own conclusions about what’s happening in Britain. But it’s really not hard to do. Take a look at this image, for example: Screenshot: Netflix This is the Netflix stabber. He’s a fictional character. He was supposedly radicalized by emojis and mean comments he read on the internet. But really, we’ll never know. It’s a mystery that can’t be truly solved. Now take a look at this person: Merseyside Police. England. This is the son of African migrants who stabbed three girls to death at the Taylor Swift dance studio. Guess what “radicalized” him? Well, as it happens, it’s not much of a mystery. He was carrying an Al-Qaeda training manual around. So on the one hand, in real life, the motivations are clear. But on Netflix, there’s no definitive answer. This is one of the most familiar tools that propagandists use. They try to pretend that reality is hopelessly confusing, and you can’t possibly begin to understand it. But actually, it’s pretty simple. If both parents are responsible and present in the household, there’s a drastically lower chance that their son will become a knife murderer. Along the same lines, if a country stops importing third-world migrants, there’s a much lower chance that jihadists will storm the local Taylor Swift dance studio. It’s that simple. In the UK, common-sense observations like this are outlawed, which is why we have articles like this one, from GB News the other day: A Somali criminal seeking asylum in the UK has avoided deportation after a judge ruled that returning him to his home country would cause him too much ‘stress.’ The unnamed asylum seeker, who has been dependent on alcohol since 2006, would suffer stress if deported to Somalia, which would worsen his mental health. Yes, we wouldn’t want to “stress out” the Somali criminal. They won’t even say what crimes this Somali committed, by the way. That information is classified. All you need to know is that it would really, really make him angry if he was deported. So he gets to stay. Rather than highlight the absurdity of rulings like this — of government policy that directly leads to more murders every year in Britain — Netflix would prefer to blame young white men who spend too much time online. That is the function of the show “Adolescence,” and it’s why the show is revered like Holy Scripture in the UK. They’re pretending fiction is reality because they don’t want you to notice what’s actually happening. Pay no attention to the reality you can see right in front of you. Watch Netflix instead. That seems to be the message. And whatever we do, we can’t fall for it.