Facial Theatre
From the comments – which of course you’re reading – a phenomenon to ponder. A small but telling feature of our unrelentingly progressive times.
It began with this exchange from Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political debate programme, in which Green Party candidate Sarah Wakefield struggled with causality. Specifically, the apparently alien notion that a rapidly growing UK population – overwhelmingly a result of immigration – requires more housing. And thus the two topics – immigration and housing availability – being very much related.
🚨 WATCH: The Reform and Green candidate in the Makerfield clash over immigration
Sarah Wakefield: “Do you think if we locked down our borders, we’re going solve the housing crisis?”
Rob Kenyon: “The more people you have in the country, the more houses you need” #BBCQT pic.twitter.com/Fsog3KOFz8
— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) June 4, 2026
Ms Wakefield is, it seems, somehow unaware that immigration accounts for almost all population growth over the last six years, and the vast majority of such growth over the last twenty years.
When not struggling with simple arithmetic, Ms Wakefield spends her time announcing that farming is riddled with “white supremacy” and is in need of “decolonisation.” British food production, says she, “entrenches racial oppression.”
Still, whatever her shortcomings in terms of readily available facts and observable reality, she does put her face to eye-catching use.
Which prompted the following from your host:
I’ve seen this same facial theatre many times, not least among left-leaning women who’ve been appointed to positions for which they are clearly ill-suited. An observation that would itself most likely result in the ‘eww’ face.
And,
Again, the conceit seems to be that doing what is necessary, and right, will somehow never entail saying no. As if the correct and imperative decision could never entail doing things that might seem unfashionable or insufficiently accommodating of the latest Designated Victim Group, if only among one’s equally pretentious peers.
As if saying, “No, the entire third world may not come here and live entirely at the expense of the indigenous until the system collapses” were just some gratuitous meanness. For instance.
In reply, commenter [+] shared a link to this video, which may amuse, and deployed the term Longhouse Face.
Which in turn brought us this not implausible observation:
Dicentra added,
She was evaluating the STATUS conferred by expressing a particular opinion. His comment was LOW STATUS, so it had to be disdained.
Quite.
This facial phenomenon has subsequently, and happily, attracted wider attention. Among the commentary to be found elsewhere, this caught my eye:
That. ☝️
Well, the air of pretence, of contrivance and dishonesty, is certainly aggravating, what with it being an insult and all. And I think Dicentra’s comment is very much relevant, in that the face-pulling is often deployed as a way to pre-emptively dismiss logically obvious variables as being low-status, as terribly unfashionable, and thus unworthy of any further exploration.
It’s a neat trick. If you’re determined to avoid reality, I mean.
It’s delicious, they’re caught in a Morton’s Fork. Either we stop immigration or we build more housing and has anyone ever seen a proposed housing developed that the Greens and left in general didn’t bitterly oppose?
We’re doomed, aren’t we?
Cathy Newman could not be reached for comment.
Not entirely unrelated to the post above.
Another consequence of a rapidly growing immigrant population:
It’s her ‘I got nuthin’ face.
Someone on X used the term strategic incomprehension, which is pretty good – and which I suppose is a subset of theatrical indignation, used here quite a lot.
Ms Wakefield isn’t what you’d call a nimble thinker, but I’d guess she knows on some level that the issue of immigration in relation to housing is very much to be avoided or deflected, and not to be thought about with any kind of realism. The numbers just aren’t on her side.
In light of which, her cartoonish expressions could indicate something like, “I have no reply to this that would help my political tribe, and frankly I’m out of my depth again, so I’ll gurn for the audience in the hope of encouraging their instant dismissal or a pile-on from other like-minded people who don’t like reality either.”
Something along those lines.
I should add the Bradford Green Party is running an online ad of sorts featuring Ms Wakefield’s facial theatre, as if it were a validation of her appearance on national television, and of the Green Party in general.
They have, however, taken care to strip out the audio and remove any reference to what was actually being said at the time.
She doesn’t want to know more.
And she doesn’t want anyone else to know more either. Perhaps more to the point.
As someone noted on X, it’s as if she’s signalling to her supportive audience members how to react without them actually bothering to consider what’s being said. Sort of, “If I pull this face, as if I’m hearing something ridiculous, you can just skip ahead and applaud me.” Even if what’s being said, and sneered at, is the heart of the matter and amply evidenced.
It’s a reaction I’ve seen occasionally across the sexes and political tribes, but it does seem to be most concentrated – and by some margin – among women of a progressive or liberal inclination. As stated above, I think it’s largely about niceness, as imagined by left-leaning women, and to some extent women more generally, whereby facts that could be construed as mean-sounding, if only by those determined to do so, are deemed taboo and invalid by default.
As if niceness, so conceived, were the sole measure of rightness, the only thing one need consider.
In much the same way that enquiring about statistics regarding, say, race and crime can, and generally does, result in much clucking and pulling of faces, as if the very idea that one might wish to know were some appalling personal shortcoming, regardless of what the available data actually reveal. And reveal quite vividly, over and over again.
And I scarcely need to point out the Green Party’s weird reliance on Muhammadan voters, and the party’s consequent aversion to any implication that an even larger Muhammadan population, imported from overseas, might not be ideal.
How does ‘Longhouse Face’ differ from ‘gurning’?
I am currently full of noodles.
That is all.
#SharingAndCaring
Now pondering my dessert options.
I suppose I could chop up a banana and add a dollop of Greek yoghurt with honey.
There’s also one – I repeat, one – Magnum ice-cream lolly left in the freezer, though that might result in a scuffle, or some half-arsed sharing situation.
Oh, and half a bag of tangy cheese Doritos.
I need guidance.
Regarding faces in general, this one is hilarious. Sound on.
[ Rustling of Magnum wrapper being hidden. ]
Um … who in the marketing department thought this was a good idea?
This is a face oft deployed by passive-aggressive people in personal relationships, too — can be male or female, making the other immediately defensive or submissive. To see it done … and SO much … in public discourse to control the narrative is maddening. And indicates the complete collapse of even a pretense of civil discourse.
Not that there has been any “golden age” where this hasn’t happened. It just appears we’re now drowning in it.
[ Widens eyes. ]
The Other Half says I have to make it clear that he graciously and selflessly suggested, with no prompting whatsoever, that I eat the last Magnum entirely by myself.
I chose well.
People die because of DEI:
Niceness.
Niceness in France.
That same niceness is at work in America, where violent attacks on random innocents has been on the rise in recent years. God forbid we should actually incarcerate people who are clearly a danger to society.
And as Simon Webb has pointed out, severe mental illness is significantly more common among blacks than among whites.
As a rule Frenchmen shouldn’t be allowed to act French but circumstances do allow for exceptions.
And the downside?
It is a bit “Teetotal vegetarians feel excluded from Germany’s traditional sausage and beer festival.”
You wouldn’t want them to act English, would you? That would be cultural appropriation of the worst kind.
‘That would be cultural appropriation of the
worstsilliest kind.’Is it them, Yogi? Of course it is.
It’s them again, Yogi:
Two-tier policing: Black man “tampers” with milk bottles. Staff object. He calls police. Police arrest supervisor.
It’s time for a new version of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.”
Maybe “God save the rozzers, they’re a gang of fucking tossers.”
“The capacity for moral outrage, of course, is not the same as a moral sense, let alone as morality itself.” — Theodore Dalrymple
Sorry, David.
Good news after all. Not quite the equivalent of GF but keep it going.
British mobs should bully police into taking a knee for Henry Nowak.
And they should do it over and over and over and over. . . .
@David: a travel suggestion for your next vacation
What should happen to the judges who release these ferals?
A reminder that it is impossible to hate liberals too much.
The expressions on the faces of the audience when she was answering were even more telling.
The late, lamented Bill Hicks phrased it as “staring at me like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick”
You’re unlikely to get civil discourse from a Green Party candidate, by which I mean honest discourse. Evasion and dishonesty being insulting, and thus not civil.
A candidate may, of course, be superficially polite, but their platform, their worldview, is so incoherent, so riddled with contradictions, and is so dependent on avoiding reality – and as above, on stopping others noticing – that dishonesty is inevitable. You will be lied to, albeit with a forced smile.
And so we get Sarah Wakefield.
Note that Ms Wakefield avoids answering the question in any way at all until pressed by both the Reform candidate and by the host, at which point she says, “The number of people in a country” is “not necessarily to do with immigration.” When, as shown above, it very much is. The bulk of our population growth for the last twenty years has been due to immigration, with practically all of it being due to immigration during the last six years.
These are not esoteric facts. One could just stroll through a city centre.
How would you even begin an attempt at an honest conversation with such a woman, knowing how she responds to inconvenient lines of thought? What are the chances of anything approaching realism, and thus respect…?
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018681.html
It is no doubt too late, but may I just suggest that the idle thought of a Magnum Icecream combined with Doritos be set firmly aside as not worth it ?
And the term “longhouse face”, that wouldn’t be a derivative of the old Australian slang of “long and lazy” which means “crazy”, and sometimes asylums were known as “the long house” ? Seems a stretch, but where else does it come from.
I’ve mentioned before a low-key social gathering at which someone mentioned Net Zero, presumably to assert some imagined status as a socially-conscious person, a nice person, as if an enthusiasm for said policies were the measure of goodness. My failure to mouth the expected sounds – I remained entirely silent – was detected and prompted some probing. I was, it seems, being suspiciously unenthusiastic, by which I mean quiet. Sipping coffee.
I politely suggested that Net Zero policies have profound and very obvious downsides, including grid vulnerabilities and the very real risk of blackouts and energy rationing. (This was around the time of the very close call here in January 2025, and before the widespread outages in Spain and Portugal.) Despite looks of incredulity, I started to explain some of the basic practicalities, as well as I could. I was on my best behaviour.
However, the response was pretty much one of why are you even researching views at odds with The Ones We’re Supposed To Have? Nothing I said was disputed and the enthusiast of Net Zero didn’t seem to know anything about the subject, at all, or about any of the implications of the policy by which she was so enthused. And which she was so keen to be seen endorsing.
There was, needless to say, lots of face-pulling. As if I’d just loudly farted.
I offered to provide the person with links to some concise and non-party-political information, including interviews with researchers who study the energy grid and who are concerned by the obvious hazards and bizarre policy decisions. People who know their stuff and can explain it to a layperson. But my offer of supporting evidence was hastily declined. Instead, there was an air of irritation, of annoyance.
I’d broken the rules of niceness.
Presumably, because there’s no social status to be had in acknowledging the realities of the matter, only in being seen to mouth support for a fashionable cause. Even when the particulars of that cause, its actual implications, remain utterly mysterious and of no discernible interest.
According to Grok:
If that helps.
Damn. I’ve been neglecting that magazine lately.
I seem to recall term in a slightly different anthropological context as deriving from a south pacific aboriginal context where in certain tribal communities the women and children lived in one building, the longhouses, while the men lived in another. They said that such an arrangement made everyone happy, aboriginal peoples being the happiest peoples of course. But maybe I’m thinking of something else.
Band name.