I read American Psycho so you don't have to. It's a harrowing read and I don't recommend it unless you have a strong stomach.
Amidst all the tedium of his day-to-day life Bateman also describes, in the same matter-of-fact tone, a series of gruesome murders which he commits. The violence is horrifying and confronting. He makes only perfunctory efforts to conceal these crimes. Some occur in public, frequently in broad daylight, but don't seem to be observed by anyone. Others occur in his own home, which is increasingly littered with body parts. At times he talks with his companions about his murderous thoughts, and even leaves a detailed confession on a colleague's voicemail. As the novel proceeds, he becomes increasingly unstable, subject to panic attacks, episodes of amnesia and an inability to follow the thread of a conversation.
You keep thinking his crimes will eventually catch up with him, and indeed at one point he is the target of a massive police chase from which he only narrowly escapes. Yet this is as close as he comes. At the end of the novel he is still in the same place as he started. Why is this? One possible reason is that the killings are not real. Nobody takes his murderous talk seriously and often they don't even seem to hear it hear it. Once when someone asks what he does he says 'murders and executions' but they respond as if he has said 'mergers and acquisitions', which is perhaps not so far from being the same thing. When he approaches the colleague on whose voicemail he left the confession and asks if he listened to it his colleague laughs. The murder of a colleague to which he confessed is impossible, because the two recently had lunch together in London. Perhaps the whole thing is the product of a sick imagination.
But there is also another explanation. The characters in the novel appear to be interchangeable. Bateman himself is constantly being given the wrong name by people he meets along the way. In their turn, he and his companions repeatedly mis-identify colleagues and prominent socialites they see in restaurants and nightclubs. It seems that Ellis is suggesting throughout the tale that Bateman's psychopathy, far from being aberrant, is the norm for wealthy New York society. Bateman and his crimes, real or imagined, could belong to anyone.
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Reading this novel in 2026 one of the most fascinating aspects of it is that Bateman and his companions hero-worship Donald Trump. Back in 1991 Trump was still married to Ivana, his first wife, and was a leading light of the New York business and social world, his political career a quarter of a century away. Yet he was, even then, a man who became a business tycoon by acting as if he was one, a master of smoke and mirrors, the ultimate bender of reality.
It is not exactly flattering to be portrayed as the patron saint of psychopaths, but if the wig fits.... As far as we know Trump has not directly killed anyone, but he bribed Stormy Daniels to keep silent about an affair they had, had to pay E. Jean Carroll a massive amount in compensation for raping her and then defaming her when she spoke out, and his companies have been fined for overstating the value of their assets to get favourable loan terms. He has boasted about grabbing women's pussies and that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue without losing voters.
And then, like Pat Bateman, you can never be sure if what he says is truth or fantasy. His social media outpourings include weird AI images, assertions of things that are obviously wrong, announcements that he contradicts the next day. He accuses people of things based on zero evidence because it would suit him if these things were so.
But also like Bateman, he is a kind of interchangeable character. If Trump were to die tomorrow, as many people fervently hope for, he would simply be replaced by JD Vance and things would continue unchanged. He has peopled the entire top echelons of the US Government with images of himself, people who jettison truth in favour of their preferred narrative and have no qualms about the harm they cause, in fact revel in it provided it is not happening to their tribe. We should beware of focusing too much on Trump as if he were an aberration, just as Ellis seems to be warning us not to focus on Bateman as a horrific person but to look at his entire social circle and the way he appears to be so much like them that nobody can tell them apart.
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It happens that the very next thing I read when I finished American Psycho was Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch's Media Wields Power and Punishment, by Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, which has just been published this year. Dodd and Ricketson are veteran Australian journalists who now teach journalism at two different Australian universities. Both their careers include stints at Murdoch's publications as well as elsewhere in the media industry. Their book is a perfect segue from the subject of psychopaths and of the Trump regime for which Rupert Murdoch helped pave the way through Fox News.
There are a number of reasons you could be 'murdoched'. You might be a direct critic or rival of News Ltd's business interests or its journalism. You might be advocating for greater media oversight. You might be prominently active in a cause Murdoch and his cohorts oppose, whether it be climate action, women's safety and empowerment, Aboriginal rights, LGBTIQ+ rights, a fairer tax and social welfare system, or many other things Murdoch hates. Or you might just have the misfortune of being a celebrity and News deciding it will boost circulation more by taking you down that praising you.
If you are chosen for a 'murdoching' there is not much you can do about it. You will be the subject of multiple articles claiming you have said or done various obnoxious or hypocritical things. Some of these things may be at least partly true but some of them will be plainly false. Your words will be taken out of context and twisted to mean things you never said or thought. No matter how often and how stridently you correct the record the same lies will continue to be told in multiple articles, as if you had never spoken. False facts will be allied with vitriol from opinion columns and editorials, and all of this will unleash the trolls on social media and some of their trolling may translate into death threats and assaults in the real world. None of this will make the Murdoch media pull back.
Take for instance, the case of Brittany Higgins. Higgins was (still is) a young woman who in 2019 worked as a junior staff member in the office of Liberal Defence Minister Linda Reynolds. In 2021 she went public with the allegation that she was raped in Reynolds' office by a more senior staff member, later revealed to be Bruce Lehrmann. She further alleged that she was encouraged not to go public at the time to save the government from negative publicity in the lead-up to an election. Lehrmann was charged with rape but the trial was aborted due to juror misconduct. There have since been two defamation cases, a judicial inquiry into the original prosecution and an inquiry into that inquiry, a damages payout to Higgins for workplace damage, much of which she was forced to pass to Reynolds as a result of a defamation case, and a finding from a judge that on the balance of probabilities it seems certain that Higgins was telling the truth.
Despite this finding Higgins had committed two grave sins in the eyes of the Murdoch establishment - she had brought a Liberal-National Party government into disrepute, and had served as a catalyst for an Australian #MeToo movement. Cue the murdoching. The chief antagonist was columnist Janet Albrechtsen, who wrote about the case 123 times over the following two years. Albrechtsen was not investigating the case and reporting the facts - she was intent on systematically destroying Higgins' reputation, painting her and partner David Sharaz as unreliable, dishonest, scheming, politically motivated and so much more.
She launched an extensive correspondence with Walter Sofronoff as he conducted the inquiry into the prosecution and was given an advance copy of its findings before those involved in the case, compromising the inquiry in the process. The News papers published extracts of Higgins' diaries that could only have been leaked by the ACT police, and gave airspace to Senator Reynolds complaints about how much the case had damaged her and how Higgins had misrepresented her, provoking an angry social media response from Higgins and her partner which opened the way for Reynolds to sue for defamation. The reporting unleashed a tidal wave of online abuse, and Higgins mental health suffered to point that she became suicidal and she and Sharaz left the country. In all this, News Ltd outlets did not once request an interview with Higgins.
What is all this if it is not psychopathic? To purposefully destroy not only the reputation but the mental health of a traumatised young woman while giving her rapist a free pass seems beyond callous. But News Ltd is unlikely to ever be called to account for its behaviour. Nor is this an aberration. While it is more vicious and sustained than some other murdochings, all the 59 people who the authors interviewed were subjected to something similar, and that is just a small sample of a much larger pattern. Are you a gay rights campaigner? A passionate environmentalist? A Jew who opposes genocide? A prominent Muslim? An Aboriginal rights campaigner? An outspoken victim of sexual abuse? A politician proposing tougher media regulations? A high-profile celebrity with vaguely progressive views? One day, you may find yourself in the firing line.
Over the last couple of years, Rupert Murdoch and his oldest son and chosen successor Lachlan have taken have taken Murdoch's three other oldest children to court to try to lock them out of the business. Eventually they reached a deal in which Lachlan and Rupert pay the others a large slab of money to go away. Why? Because they feared that Elizabeth, Prudence and James would force a more humane, ethical style of journalism on the business. They were firmly committed to their psychopathy. We will not be rid of it any time soon, although nothing obliges us to watch or read their tripe and thankfully fewer and fewer people are doing so. Nonetheless our governments are still cowed by the fear of them, and they are currently busy abandoning the Liberal Party in favour of Australia's own tin-pot Trump, Pauline Hanson. Having psychopaths in such prominent positions brutalises our whole society.
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Brett Easton Ellis's dark satire is prescient in many ways. In its most immediate sense it skewers (almost literally) the amoral ethos of 1980s and 1990s Wall Street, the engine of the global economy, putting the blood on the table. In the 35 years since, this ethic has steadily seeped into every part of our polity, poisoning everything it touches to the extent that we re happy to destroy the planet and subvert democracy for the sake of the profits of a few oligarchs, two of whom are mentioned in this article. You know the names of the rest! All these people have blood on their hands, as shown most recently in the climate change disaster in Nepal. Such things are becoming everyday occurrences around the world, in rich and poor countries alike, but none of this prevents us from opening the next new gas-field, sending immigrants to concentration camps and launching a Royal Commission into antisemitism while refusing to say the word 'genocide'.
But we should also notice the other side of the story. Donald Trump may be Pat Bateman's hero, but Bateman is not Trump. He is ordinary, even forgettable, a man who could be, and perhaps is, anyone. He could be you, or me. None of our hands are clean in all of this, even though some have done more damage than others. So let's not wring our hands in despair at what everyone is doing to us. Lets get out and stop the killings, before it's too late.
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