Worst Take of the Week: 'Kim Jong-un is Misunderstood' vs The Royal Wedding (2024)

Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I will be pitting two of the wildest takes the world’s great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world’s happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.

TAKE #1:

What’s the story? Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump’s (now cancelled) summit in Singapore.
Reasonable Take: Good if this can happen, long-term, but Kim Jong-un is a certified rotter!
Quarter Pounder and Fries: No actually, my dude, Kim Jong-un is misunderstood.

How quickly things change. The central thrust of this deeply inspiring and unbelievably patriotic hot take is already irrelevant, as Donald “Dotard” Trump yesterday announced he was calling off his hugely unexpected meeting with Kim “Rocket Man” Jong-un. Nevertheless, the theory espoused by Fox News reporter Pete Hegseth as to why the North Korean leader wanted to agree to the meeting in the first place is so off piste, it would be churlish not to share.

Things start off fairly ordinarily for old Pete, when he’s asked why Kim wants the meeting. He fairly accurately reckons that the sanctions currently imposed on North Korea are strangling the country, and that added pressure from China is compounding this. However, he then says: “And then I think there’s probably a point where the guy who wants to meet Dennis Rodman, and loves NBA basketball, loves Western pop culture, probably doesn’t love being the guy who has to murder his people all day long, probably wants some normalisation…” Pete, that’s… that’s the plot of that Seth Rogan film The Interview. You’re describing the plot of The Interview.

You are in the smoking area of a club. You asked Pete Hegseth if you could nick a cigarette and now he’s got an arm clamped around your neck, his shirt transparent with sweat, sleeves rolled up to his biceps, his free hand roving wildly with a lit smoke of his own. “Thing is, mate, about Kim, mate, is that people don’t know him,” he’s shouting in your ear. “Like, they know him, like dictator-him, but not him-him. Like: you’d actually get on so well with him, mate. All the starving his nation stuff, and the forced confessions, and the gulags, and the hard labour and the blah blah blah, you know? It’s noise, like. He’s actually really excited for the new series of Arrested Development. He follows Timothee Chalamet on Instagram. He really wants to meet you.”

The re-casting of Kim Jong-un as a hard-working, misunderstood American patriot is one of the biggest rebrands of the year, and I am here for it. In other words, if I ever do something horrendously f*cked up I want Pete Hegseth to defend me on TV and tell everyone that actually, deep down, I’m just an average dude who like shooting hoops.

TAKE #2:

What’s the story? Whether or not the Royal Wedding was boring.
Reasonable Take: Yeah, it was boring. I mean, yes, I watched all of it, but only so I could participate in the discourse.
Hot Pot: If you don’t like the Royal Wedding you should probably… go back where you came from?

The Royal Wedding was last weekend, and if you’re anything like me it was probably an instructive lesson in how the political, or the rational, cannot hope to over-power the emotional. Or in other words: being a big man and saying the monarchy is a bad thing is all well and good, but actually there’s something elemental about billions of people watching a wedding at the same time. Plus, the cello bit was good, and Tom Hardy was there looking like one of those security guards at festivals who tells you to get down off your mate’s shoulders.

That said, not everybody enjoyed the special day. Journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was one of them. She took to Twitter after the ceremony to ask if it was “safe to return” and whether journalists had run out of breath yet, and called the wedding proof Britain is an “infantilized, escapist nation”. Which, while a bit of buzzkill, is probably true. Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, however, took umbrage to these remarks and told Alibhai-Brown, who was born in Uganda, to “be nice”. She continued with the suggestions that she should “appreciate just a little the country and the people” where she has chosen to live, and benefited from. Which is, you know, rank.

Dorries has since tried to defend her comments, saying she would have said the same to anyone who was trying to spoil a day of unity that “crossed racial boundaries”. Which would be fine, had she not literally pointedly centred her entire riposte around Alibhai-Brown appreciating the country from which she’d benefitted from. It’s that distance – that “you should count yourself lucky” attitude – that marks this out. She’s explicitly saying: you don’t really belong here, so enjoy it. It’s sort of the post-colonial equivalent of, “Cheer up, love, it might never happen.” Anyway, shouts to Nadine Dorries for watching us take two steps forward and shoving ten steps back.

PRIME CUT: “Probably doesn’t want to be the guy who has to murder his people all day long.” Then don’t?

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