Novara Media posted a video tonight about GB News’ continuing problems. The channel has managed to annoy some of its audience for the departure of far-right host Mark Steyn. Steyn had been off-air for a little while due suffering two heart attacks. He has refused to come back because of the new contract the station sent him. This included the statement that if he returned, they’d have to keep a defibrillator on hand. This, however, is not a problem, as apparently the station is able to provide one. The problem is that they’ve been trying to shut him up about the subject of the evil Covid vaccine after Naomi Wolf, a noted Covid sceptic, turned up on the programme and made a few choice comments. But this isn’t all. Neil Oliver, one of the archaeologists from Coast, has managed to get them embroiled in a row about anti-Semitism.
Oliver gave a full, bug-eyed conspiracist rant on his programme, entitled ‘Silent Wars’, about how we were having our national sovereignty slowly taken away from us by THEM, who are intent on creating the One World State. Matthew Sweet, a campaigner against anti-Semitism, sent a tweet stating that this was a reference to a document, Secret Weapons for Silent Wars. This piece of literature is very much of the same type as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and similarly popular on the paranoid right-wing fringe. Complaints have been made to Ofcom, and Oliver’s rant was condemned by the all-party parliamentary group against anti-Semitism.
GB News is in trouble, but probably not to the extent that it’ll be taken off the air. However, their presenter Dalia Gebrial stated that the broadcaster wanted to be a British version of Fox News, but forgot that Fox is allowed to get away with its nonsense because America doesn’t have a broadcasting regulatory authority like Ofcom. She also made the point that the broadcaster was created by a couple of very rich men, and so it naturally shows their own irrational concerns and dangerous prejudices.
But, Novara concluded, just in case GB News is taken off the air, we can still look to Talk TV, owned by Murdoch, for quality right-wing journalism. For example, there’s Piers Morgan interviewing the older woman who allegedly took Prince Harry’s virginity. Actually, that at least may have some facts behind it, as opposed to anything Julia Hartley-Brewer has ever said about Brexit or people on benefits.
I have to say, I’d never heard of Secret Weapons for Silent Wars before, so that’s another conspiracist screed spreading hate. As for Oliver, it was evident that he was very right-wing – he gave a talk to the New Culture Forum, for example – but now he’s crossed into conspiracy theorist nuttiness. It’ll be interesting to see what happens about this. It’s just a pity that Talk TV isn’t having similar problems.
‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind’, as Sergeant-Major Shutup from It Ain’t ‘Alf ‘Ot Mum used to say. Mad Brexiteer Mahyar Tousi put up a video yesterday gloating over the continued demise of GB News and boasting about how his own YouTube channel now has more average viewers than the ‘old media’ TV stations. People are continuing to switch off GB News, and so Angela Frangopoulos, the station’s chief Dalek, has ruled that guests will no longer be paid fees for appearances. Regular guests will be paid a flat rate, which sounds like it’s basically just expenses, but it looks like they’re expected to find their own transport and be prompt and prepared for their appearance. Tousi points out that this isn’t a good idea, as guests and contributors should be paid for their expertise and broadcasters are in competition for them. This included GB News, which used to pay them well.
He then talks about the poor average ratings of these channels. The BBC is at the top with 100,000 average views. Next highest is Sky News. GB News is below them, and right at the bottom is Talk TV, which Tousi describes as only half a station that’s only on for part of the day. His channel has 300,000 views or followers, which shows how YouTube channels are eating the old media alive. Which is true, but I wish it didn’t include right-wing channels like Tousi’s.
As for GB News, I think this was supposed to be a rival to the ‘woke, wet BBC’. Their ratings have been steadily going down since they were launched. Many of their programmes have zero people watching. They tried to improve matters by bringing on Farage, and he did boost their rating – but only for his show. Once Farage’s programme had ended, people went back to not watching. This dire situation probably explains why they’ve now hired Lozza Fox and are hiring Jacob Rees-Mogg. Speaking personally, Mogg is one of the last people I want to see on TV, but for some reason the man who comes across very much as wanting to send small children back up chimneys is a great, molten hero of the Tory voters. And I definitely do not want to see any video with Nana Akua complaining about the health service and subtly hinting that it should be privatised.
And this isn’t all of the channel’s problems. Libertarian Islamophobe Mark Steyn left/ was given the heave-ho because of his remarks about the Covid lockdown and vaccination, and the channel is ordering its staff to keep any anti-vaxxer views they may have to themselves. This has outraged all the right-wingers who think that it should have been better to have kept Britain open, risking more people catching the disease and who think that there’s something in the vaccine itself that’s harmful. I think the YouTuber Paz 49 is one of these, as he threw a strop when Reform’s Richard Tice advised people to get the jab.
The internet is taking over, but rather than people watching GB News or Tousi’s right-wing rants, I’d rather people looked at left-wing YouTubers like A Different Bias, Novara Media, Maximilien Robespierre and so many others. As they are presenting a genuinely different view of this country and its politics, which is far more informative than the nonsense spouted by the privileged individuals spouting populist nonsense against the NHS. welfare state and the Channel migrants.
I spent some time Saturday evening watching a couple of videos posted by the far right YouTube outfit, Correct, Not Political. One was of their man Jim walking around the demonstrators and supporters at Drag Queen Story Time in Colchester asking them awkward, ‘Socratic’ questions. The other was an interview between Jim and another fixture of the British far right, Godfrey Bloom. Both were weirdly interesting, but only for the light they cast on these two men’s conspiracist views. I’ve already written about how Correct, Not Political has the classic paranoid idea that the Masons are behind a massive conspiracy. His interview with Bloom, and the comments he made talking to some of the people in Colchester confirmed it. It also revealed him to be a mad anti-vaxxer who thinks they’re putting something in it to kill people as part of the WEF’s goal to reduce the human population on the planet.
The drag queen reading to the kids in Colchester was Edward Wilcox, who performs under the name ‘Ann Nemic’ or something similar. Talking to various members of the crowd, Jim said that ‘Nemic’ had been vaccinated twice, and given blood 92 times. He didn’t want to say too much, as he didn’t want his channel to be banned, but didn’t this tell you something. Er, yes. It demonstrates that he was like everyone else and did as the government and medical authorities advised. He got vaccinated to protect himself. As for giving blood 92 times, one of the women at the demonstration pointed out that it made him a good person and that surely you want people to give blood? His stage name also shows that he has a sense of humour: Ann Nemic/ anaemic. It doesn’t say anything more than that, unless you’re so paranoid you think he was actively trying to spread whatever it is in the vaccine which you think is a poison by donating his contaminated blood. Sadly, I think Jim really is that bonkers.
Looking at the crowd, he declared, ‘There isn’t half a lot of sodomy going on here!’ This was probably because they were quite a few gay people and people waving pride flags, not because gay men were having sex in the street. He then went round warning people that drag queen story hour was a plot to indoctrinate kids with gender ideology and abuse from paedophiles. Here he has a point. James Lindsay has read out a paper co-written by a drag queen and queer activist, which states that the purpose of these shows is to queer the children’s minds and upset gender norms. And yes, the founder of Queer Theory, Judith Butler, did support paedophilia and the breaking down of barriers between adult and child. But this doesn’t mean that every drag queen, library or school which stages these sessions holds such views or is even aware of their existence. They may just be doing it because they genuinely feel it is spreading tolerance towards gay and trans people whilst encouraging children to read. No more than that.
Walking around the demonstration was a bald bloke, who looked a bit like the Matt Lucas character George Daws, selling copies of the Socialist Worker. So Jim immediately called him a Communist, asked whether he was trying to get people to sign up for Communism, and then asked people to tell him if there was a country in which Communism had ever succeeded. Well, technically the man was a Trotskyite, which is a slightly different form of Marxism. And I actually agree with him in that there hasn’t been a country where Communism has been successful. China has been doing very well of late, but that’s also thanks to a capitalist component in its economy. But from where Britain stands at the moment, capitalism isn’t working very well either. Far from improving people’s living standards, they’re being lowered. However, the right haven’t given up the refrain that this generation has it far better than anyone else at any time in history, and capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than socialism has. The first part of that statement is utterly wrong, and the second needs serious qualifications.
The drag show, Jim said, was all about promoting equality. But this was equality under communism, where everyone didn’t have life equally good, but equally bad, except for those at the top. Again, this seems to come from critiques of the woke ideology from James Lindsay and the EDIJester. It’s certainly present in those ideologies, though its equity – equality of outcome – rather than equality of opportunity. There were a couple of examples of this in the American education system a month or so ago. One teacher, in the interest of equality, gave all her students an ‘A’. Another one just gave the average award to a series of excellent students, who actually deserved much higher marks to take them into one of the prestigious American universities to study science. This was eventually revealed after an inquiry and possibly legal action. I have yet to hear of a case like this in this country, however.
Jim also got shirty with the Trotskyite because the man called him a Fascist and a Nazi. Jim told him that was libel, to which the fellow rightly pointed out that it was slander, as he’d know if he’d actually had any knowledge of the law. As Jim has prefaced several of his livestreams with old footage of Oswald Mosley and the BUF, and that Mosley changed his benighted organisation’s name to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’, it could be said that what the man said was fair comment.
When someone asked who was behind this plot to corrupt Britain’s kids, Jim replied that, again he didn’t want to say too much, but it was the Freemasons, citing a couple of 19th century authors, who, he said, were themselves 33rd degree members of the brotherhood. I’ve forgotten just who they were, but their names rang a bell among the sources cited by those convinced of such a conspiracy. Finally, after bothering the good burghers of Colchester for about an hour, and nearly being assaulted by some particularly angry LGBTQ+ rights demonstrators, he went off in search of something to drink. Going through the town’s back streets, he complained about the number of ‘weirdos’ there were and that it was all coffee houses. Quite what he has against coffee houses I don’t know. Perhaps he was afraid that if he went inside, left-wing intellectuals would all jump on him like the characters in Fraser all those years ago.
His conspiracist views became much clearer in his conversation with Godfrey Bloom. Bloom announced himself has having been an investment banker for 40 years and at one time a member of the defence council or something like that. He was thus well-placed to know that capitalism was about to collapse. Actually, there’s a Marxist economics professor on YouTube, Richard Wolf, who has being saying exactly the same thing. And if it hadn’t been for Brown in 2008, I’m sure it would have collapsed. The two then shared their views on the World Economic Forum wishing to depopulate the planet, set up Green Communism and make us all eat bugs. The WEF has captured all our institutions, including the monarchy. Prince Philip also believed there were too many people on the planet. Well, the late Duke of Edinburgh was the head of the World Wide Fund for Nature, so his views are hardly a surprise. The WEF are Malthusians, which means that they believe that population always outstrips the supply of available food, as suggested by the 19th century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus and his followers believed that when this happened, starvation and war would inevitably result. In order to prevent this, they recommended birth control and were active promoting contraception. As did the Duke, who on one of his official visits to some tribe showed the men how to put on a condom using a spear. However, the WEF were going much further and planning to wipe out a sizable chunk of humanity using a manufactured disease or its vaccine. Those who survived would be under the WEF’s new communist order.
This made me wonder if Jim knew about the wretched views of the late zookeeper John Aspinall, best known for his big cats killing and mauling people. Aspinall also believed that there were too many people around. He said the British population should be only eight million. However, he definitely wasn’t a communist of any description. He declared that what the country needed was a ‘counterrevolution, Francoist in spirit.’ So his green views were closer to Hitler’s than the WEF. And almost certainly pretty close to Jim’s and Bloom’s.
Correct, Not Political’s Jim therefore seems to have read or watched much material about the woke ideology, especially Queer Theory, and mixed this up with old conspiracy theories about the masons. I also think there might be a touch of anti-Catholicism in their as well. When he was voicing his objections to drag queens reading to children as getting them used to nonces, one woman asked him about Roman Catholic priests abusing children. He didn’t agree with that, either, but said he didn’t agree with established religions as ‘they’re from Satan’. But some of the other things he has said, and they’re nothing I can put a precise finger on, suggests that he might have the same conspiracist views about the Catholic church, which is supposed to be doing the work of the antichrist, as some as the bigoted Protestant writers of the 19th century.
Correct, Not Political aren’t physically violent, and while Jim’s sneers about socialism are irritating, he personally has an affable manner. I can’t say that they present a physical danger, unlike National Action or the BNP, for example. What is dangerous is the mad anti-vaxxer views and the deranged paranoia about the WEF, which he also shares with the Lotus Eaters, Alex Jones and any number of others on the right. And these views are a danger to democratic politics, if only because the undermine proper democratic views in favour of suspicion and paranoia.
GB News, the self-proclaimed alternative to the ‘wet, woke BBC’, is in this fortnight’s Private Eye. The broadcaster apparently has overtaken Sky News in ratings, and has taken to pushing stupid, and potentially dangerous conspiracy theories. These include myths that the vaccine doesn’t work, or is responsible for deaths, and that there’s no need for the lockdown. Pretty much staples of the wider right-wing anti-vaxxer fringe. But one of these conspiracy theories comes very close to fascism. Mark Steyn has apparently told his viewers that the coronavirus vaccine is the cause of the falling birthrate in the west of the ‘Aryans’, who built civilisation. Firstly, as the 19th century linguist, who used the term ‘Aryan’ for what are now termed the Indo-European languages, George Muller, it’s a linguist not racial term. A dark-skinned Indian, who speaks Hini or one of the other languages descended from Sanskrit, or an Urdu-speaking Pakistani can both be fairly described as Aryans, because their languages are derived from that introduced by the Aryans, who invaded Indian c. 3000 BC. But both would be targeted by the Nazis over here because of their race. Muller stated quite clearly that conflating Aryan with race was dangerous, and it’s a pity more people didn’t listen to him otherwise the carnage of the Third Reich might have been avoided.
He’s right that the birthrates in the developed west are falling along with the sperm count of western men. This is alarming, as there have been predictions by respectable magazines and newspapers that if it continues, by 2050 half of western men will be considered clinically infertile. No-one really knows the cause of this, but it’s been suggested since the 1990s that a type of plastic, phthallates, may be responsible. Other causes are probably the industrial pollution responsible for the reproductive deformities in amphibians, which Alex Jones notoriously declared were ‘turning the frickin’ frogs gay’. These chemicals are believed to mimic female hormones, hence their damage to those animals. I’ve also seen claims that it’s all due to female hormones from the reproductive pill getting into the biosphere, but I haven’t seen any scientist make this claim. In my opinion, it comes from that part of the right which is anti-feminist and so pro-life as to condemn contraception as well as abortion. I also got the impression that all western men were affected, including Blacks and Asians, and not just Whites.
Steyn’s claims resemble the conspiracy theories that were going around the Black communities in America and possibly apartheid South Africa back in the 90s. These claimed that the government was putting chemicals in Coca-Cola to sterilise young Black men. That was totally wrong, though it was understandable given the persecution of Blacks in both those countries. Steyn’s is a first-world, White version of this. It comes very close to all the stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about the machinations of the Jews to enslave and destroy the White race, although as far as I know Steyn isn’t an anti-Semite.
He is, however, an Islamophobe. About a decade ago he was a partner with late Reaganite bloviator Rush Limbaugh and his radio station out in New Hampshire. Much of the content Steyn put out on his blogs and columns on the internet were attacks on Islam, including some of the weirder rulings made by Iran’s late Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was one of those pushing the ‘Eurabia’ fear. This holds that Muslim birthrates are outstripping those of indigenous European Whites to such an extent that they will become the dominant race and religion and impose sharia law. A friend of mine told me he did some calculations, and that’s simply not going to happen. I don’t doubt that the Muslim population will expand immensely in the next decades, and this will present serious problems if the radicals and Islamists extend their influence over these communities, but it won’t lead to their population overtaking everyone else’s.
Steyn also tried to warn or scare people with the example of Feyenoord in the Netherlands. This is a majority Muslim town where some decades ago the Muslim dominated city council publicly invited the non-Muslim population to convert. I don’t know, but I think their attitude would be unremarkable, perhaps even ordinary in very pious, hardline Muslim countries like Pakistan, where non-Muslims can come under very intense pressure to convert. But obviously in the context of the non-Muslim, secular west, where religion is considered a matter for the individual’s private conscience, it’s totally unacceptable. The problem is, I don’t know how common such political moves by Muslim-controlled local authorities are. As far as I know, it only happened in Feyenoord, although I’m sure that non-Muslims living in solidly Muslim areas are under pressure to conform to their standards of behaviour.
Away from Steyn, the article describes how GB News, like Fox over in the US, threw in their lot with Donald Trump, talking him as US president until it became the ‘MAGA channel’. Their predictions of Trump’s eminent suitability for the Oval Office was definitely born out by the Orange Buffoons massive greed, incompetence and disastrous policies towards blue collar workers – more attacks on their rights, further decimation of their welfare provisions to enrich Trump’s friends and donors, and more outsourcing. As well as attempts to muzzle federal climate and environmental scientists for the benefit of the oil industry. And I could go on.
As for GB News’ attitudes over here, it’s solidly behind Farage and Brexit and resolutely against the welfare state and the NHS. If you’re a member of the working class, GB News is not your friend. But the stupid conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine threaten to do real harm. We’ve already seen instances where people have refused the vaccine, then caught the virus and died. And Steyn’s story about birthrates and ‘Aryans’ threatens to encourage real Nazis and Fascists, who’ll target not just Muslims but Jews.
My discipline, archaeology, has been massively going after Graham Hancock this week. Hancock’s ah, um,, ‘maverick thinker’, I suppose you’d say, who’s been presenting a series on Netflix arguing that thousands of years ago there was a highly advanced civilisation that perished in a cataclysm, but passed on its secrets to other ancient civilisations around the world. This has understandably annoyed archaeologists and a number have put up videos, some of them lengthy and quite detailed, disproving him. Hancock’s been promoting this idea for some time now. Going back two decades and more, he had a series on Channel 4 with the title ‘Water World’ or something like it, also arguing that there was a global advanced civilisation, whose monuments have been covered up by a flood, as recorded in the Bible and other ancient religions. Now I’m sure that Hancock is wrong, and the criticisms of his dodgy history and archaeology are right. But I take exception to one of the other accusations levelled at him, which is that he is racist.
This accusation is partly based on his false ascription of the achievements of indigenous cultures around the world to this putative prehistoric civilisation. It denies those people the credit for their achievements. But the accusation is also that it’s similar to the ideas of some bonkers White supremacist groups, who are using Hancock’s ideas to promote themselves. One archaeologist posted a video saying that Hancock should have disavowed the use of his ideas by these fascists. It also criticised him for being friends with Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. There are fair criticisms to be made of both of these men. Peterson’s an arch-conservative and anti-feminist, but hardly a Nazi. Rogan was pushing anti-vax nonsense and is an advocate for some mind-expanding drugs. A few years ago people were accusing him of being a ‘gateway to the Alt-Right’. Possibly, but he also talks to people from the left, who are otherwise denied a platform by the lamestream media. Journalists like Abbie Martin, who talked about Israeli propaganda against the Palestinians and how she found, when she visited the beleaguered Arab nation, that the reality was nothing like the picture painted by the Israeli state. He’s also talked to biologists and journalists exposing the lies of the trans ideology. This is not Alt-Right, no matter what groups like Mermaids, Stonewall, Antifa and the rest say. The people criticising the gender ideology tend to be radical feminists, many from the socialist left. Part of their opposition against it is that it reduces masculinity and femininity to traditional, stereotypical sex roles. One of the feminist vloggers interviewed one of the leading activists against the trans ideology, who was furious that people like her were being presented as right-wing. Another feminist activist criticised Matt Walsh for misrepresenting feminists as uniformly in favour of trans ideology, and then criticising them for it. Rogan gives a voice to people outside the mainstream. Sometimes it’s rubbish, and sometimes it’s immensely valuable. He has also interviewed a number of Black celebs, so again, not a Nazi.
The White supremacist ideas being referred to seem to me to be the Traditionalist ideology of Giulio Evola. Evola was an Italian Fascist and occultist, who was a major ideological influence on the scumbuckets behind the Bologna railway bombing in the 1970s. A fascist group bombed the station, killing and maiming over a hundred people. Evola believed that there was a strongly hierarchical, ‘Aryan’ civilisation in Hyperborea in the arctic, which was responsible for all the subsequent cultural achievements of the civilisations around the world. This is twaddle. But Hancock’s ideas are also similar to those of others, which don’t come from people in the fascist fringe. A couple of years ago I picked up an old book, Colony Earth, which had been published in the 1970s. This claimed that Earth may have been an extraterrestrial colony, whose advanced civilisation was destroyed in a nuclear war. The pyramids may have been fall-out shelters, as were the megalithic tumuli in Britain. It’s an interesting read, but certainly wrong. I think Charles Berlitz, who started the Bermuda Triangle myth, also believed in this, supporting it in one of his books with artefacts from Aztec tombs that look like aircraft. Berlitz is someone else, who I’m fairly certain has absolutely no connection to fascism whatsoever.
And I don’t believe Hancock is either.
When he was travelling the world on his Channel 4 series he was accompanied by his wife, who is Sri Lankan. Now, White supremacists do not, as a rule, marry dark-skinned people from outside Europe. If they do, they’re angrily denounced as ‘race traitors’. In one edition of this earlier series, Hancock reported on the mysterious ruins of ancient city found off the coast of the Bay of Bengal. He was shown talking respectfully to an Indian gent, who told him how such findings tie in with Hindu ideas of the antiquity of civilisation and ancient Indian legends of flooded cities. Again, this isn’t quite behaviour you’d expect from a genuine White supremacist. He also travelled to South and Central America, where he proposed the old theory that the Mayans, Aztecs and other ancient Amerindian civilisations must have learned how to build their pyramids from someone else. I think this was once again ancient Egypt. But who brought that knowledge to the New World? Black Africans. He pointed to an Olmec bas relief of a warrior’s head, and declared its features to be ‘proudly African’. If this is racism, then its Afrocentrism rather than White supremacy. As for the ancient race behind these monuments, Hancock doesn’t say what colour they are. In this, he breaks with some of his predecessors, who say they must have been White because the legends of numerous Amerindian peoples state that vital parts of their culture were brought to them by White gods. Hancock is therefore less racialised in what he says than his predecessors.
I disagree profoundly with Hancock’s ideas, but he has a right to say them like everyone else. And if it piques people interest in these ancient cultures so that they want to find out what they were really like, that’s all to the good. But I do think it’s profoundly wrong to accuse him of racism. That just further cheapens the word and weakens it as a weapon against the real thing.
Remember Candace Owens? She the young, Black American right-winger who turned up over here a few years ago to launch Turning Point UK with Ben Shapiro. This was supposed to be the British branch of the American conservative youth organisation, Turning Point USA. She got into trouble then for her massive ignorance about the Nazis. She declared that Hitler wasn’t a nationalist, because he wanted everybody to be German, and that his actions would have been alright if they’d been confined to Germany. The answer is ‘No’ to both statements. Hitler didn’t want everyone to be German – he just wanted the Germans to rule over Europe, or at least eastern Europe. And exterminate the Jews, of course, because they weren’t German. His dictatorship, imprisonment of political opponents and the persecution of Jews, Gypsies and gay people would have still been utterly monstrous even if he kept it to Germany. It really is amazing how Owens could make such a monumentally stupid statement.
Now she seems to have done something similar. According to a report by Alternet’s Brandon Cage, on her show on the Daily Wire, Owens opened her mouth to defend basketball player Kyrie Irving, who had caused massive offence for his weird views. He’s an anti-vaxxer, Flat Earther and believes in the New World Order. But Owens argued that Irving is the victim of overzealous persecution by the Anti-Defamation League and the National Basketball Association. She backed up her case by pointing to how the film ‘Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America’, became a bestseller on Amazon after Irving promoted it. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the film not only denies the Holocaust it also claims that Jews have falsified the historical record to conceal their true nature and power. It also states that Whites can’t be authentic Jews, beliefs which the article says inspired the perp behind a shooting a kosher supermarket last year in New Jersey. This sounds like bog-standard Black Hebrew Israelite anti-Semitism. Organisations like the Black Hebrew Israelites believe that only Blacks who have experienced transatlantic slavery are the real Jews. There’s apparently a similar outfit over here in Birmingham, according to Simon Webb, who turn up in paramilitary uniform ranting their nonsense against Jews and Whites in the streets unmolested. Webb was annoyed that they were getting away with it, while Whites with just a trace of racism were rounded up for prosecution by the cops.
According to Owens, the book’s popularity somehow exonerates Irving, because if you over-censor something, you end up asking if it’s true and how they could keep this information from us. She said
‘I was right. Last night, #HeroestoNegroes was trending on Twitter. It was a top trend on election night, no less, and everybody under the trend was saying ‘I’m watching it right now, I’m watching it, why would they try to take this from us?’ Why would they try to keep this information from us?’ And that is what happens when you over-censor information.
It was never necessary to attack Kyrie Irving, even if you felt that the information in this documentary was bad. And there are plenty of people that have spoken out and said that. The extreme efforts that the ADL went through in coalition with the NBA to punish him and their efforts to then demand that Amazon take this documentary down, of course, was going to pique people’s interest.
Not only is the documentary the top documentary on Amazon, but it’s also the book – which I didn’t know they had a book – is now a bestseller on Amazon’s list. If you go to Amazon bestsellers, you will see ‘Heroes to Negroes.’ It is one of the bestselling books.‘
She also protested against demands for Amazon to withdraw the film as an attack on free speech, and said people had a right to be wrong. Then she defended people reading Mein Kampf.
‘A little reminder, if you actually go on Amazon right now, you can order and read ‘Mein Kampf.’ It is not an endorsement of Adolf Hitler to read a historical textbook. It just is not, right? And the idea that we should be censoring all this information and no one should see it because it hurts some group of people, to me, just does not gel well with our First Amendment rights.
Amazon, still not in trouble, don’t know how Kyrie Irving’s entire life is on the line, but nobody is talking about Amazon, but they are making a ton of money. So Kyrie Irving is losing money and Amazon is making tons of money. Think about that for a second.‘
Okay, I’ll defend her comments about reading Mein Kampf. It certainly isn’t a textbook, but it is read like one by people, who want to understand the beliefs that motivated Hitler and his murderous regime. The monster’s Tabletalk, as recorded by Martin Bormann, has also been published. Here in the UK, the OUP edition has a foreword by Hugh Trevor-Roper discussing ‘The Mind of Adolf Hitler’ and making it very clear how bizarre, poisonous and semi-educated Hitler’s views are. People generally read it to gain insight into Hitler, not because they think he might be right about the Jews. Or at least, I hope they don’t. Hebrews to Negroes is different. People are reading it because they’re interested in its ideas about the Jews. And yes, people have a right to be wrong. The ability to be wrong is one of the fundamental human freedoms. But there are ideas so dangerous, that people have to be protected from them. No decent person wants to see a repeat of the Holocaust. That’s why books like Hebrews to Negroes should be banned, like the infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
There seems to be a large amount of anti-Semitism in certain parts of Black America. Webb posted a video about it the other day on History Debunked, which pointed to a wretched book published in the 80s by the Nation of Islam as the source of the poisonous myth that the Jews were responsible for the transatlantic slave trade. But decades before then the book Colour Prejudice noted that there was a lot of anti-Semitism amongst the Blacks in Harlem. Some of it might come from the Jewish-owned stores there originally refusing to employ Black sales staff, though the Italian and Greek-owned businesses also didn’t. And not all Black Americans were happy with the racist rhetoric of protesters like Sufi Abdul Hamid, who organised Black labour protests against the stores in the 30s. Indeed, Hamid lost control of the protest movement because his coalition partners thought he’d gone too far. You can’t defend films like Hebrews to Negroes, in the same way you can’t defend Egyptian television’s serialisation a few years ago of the Protocols.
Some things just shouldn’t be published, and you’re harming people when they are.
Hat tip to Gillyflowerblog, one of this blog’s many great commenters, for alerting me to a Zelo Street article on this, ahem, ‘person’. Earlier today I put up a piece about Correct, Not Political, a right-wing group who protest Pride Marches, Drag Queen Story Hours and Climate Change demonstrations, posting that teachers are being incentivised to tell the government if their pupils believe in any conspiracy theories, what they are, and how they are combating these beliefs. Well, it seems that GB News, much touted as the antidote to the ‘woke, wet BBC’ has been platforming one of the worst of the conspiracy crew: Peter Sweden. Sweden was invited onto Neil Oliver’s little programme to talk about declining birth rates. Apparently there was a massive decline in them last year, so that the programme asked if we were facing population collapse.
I think I saw the title to the video posted of this on YouTube, but didn’t watch it. According to some scientists, birth rates all over the world are declining to such an extent that there will be a population collapse in the middle of this century. This means that there’s going to be a shortage of people everywhere on Earth. I assumed they were going to talk about this, and so didn’t watch it. Unfortunately I was wrong. Apparently they were talking about a massive drop in British fertility that occurred last year. Peter Sweden, real name Imanuelsen, reckoned it may have been due to Covid vaccinations.
As General Jack D. Ripper says in Stanley Kubrick’s cold war black comedy, Dr Strangelove, ‘We must keep our bodily fluids pure’.
If such a drop did occur last year, I can think of a number of reasons for it which have zilch to do with the Covid vaccination. As I understand it, when animals are under stress they don’t breed. This is one reason why zoos are keen to look after critically endangered animals and make sure they are well and happy. Humans are animals, and an increasing number of us are stressed and very unhappy. The Covid lockdown, necessary as it was, meant that people couldn’t go to work and many businesses had to close for the duration. People therefore lost at least a portion of their income. Add to this Tory cuts and the problems they’ve inflicted on the Health Service and I am honestly not surprised people aren’t having so many babies.
But that isn’t all. While Sweden hails from that country originally, he currently lives in Northallerton on this side of the North Sea. He’s also appeared on Paul Joseph Watson’s YouTube videos, which is an indication of how far to the right he is. That the same Paul Joseph Watson who was Alex Jones’ British buddy on Infowars, although to be fair he was never as raving nuts as Jones.
Worse, Imanuelsen has some extremely unpleasant views about Jews and gays. He is apparently a Holocaust denier and that the concentration camps had swimming pools, theatres and cinemas. Which is very obvious grotty, horrible nonsense. He’s also said admiring things about the Third Reich and Hitler. And as well as having negative views of the Jews, he has also said that LGBT people should be put in concentration camps. Which is what the Nazis did to gay men. They didn’t imprison lesbians, apparently, because they thought they could or would eventually turn straight. Which is prejudiced, but fortunately it served to protect people rather than lead to their persecution.
Looking at this, Imanuelsen should never be allowed anywhere near a TV studio to give his views whatsoever. And Neil Oliver should never have invited him. As one of the commenters here has said, it’s a pit what has happened to Oliver as he was good on Coast. He was. And now he’s become a spokesman for the far right and bonkers conspiracy theorists.
This fortnight’s Private Eye, for 22nd February – 7th March 2019 ran an article by ‘Ratbiter’ about a messy power struggle for struggle of the moribund Socialist Health Authority. This blamed its current leader, Dr Alex Scott-Samuel, for taking it to the point of death. Dr Scott-Samuel was described as a conspiracy theorist, who appeared alongside anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield on a show broadcast on David Icke’s forum and had unjustly attempted to get one of his Association’s employees, its director Martin Rathfelder, sacked.
The article, ‘Socialist Malaise’ ran
The once respected Socialist Health Association is looking peaky. If not dead, it’s certainly in a coma.Â
The Association campaigned for the creation of the NHS in 1948 and has fought to defend free healthcare at the point of use ever since. But it hasn’t published a policy statement since 2017, and calls to its office are likely to go unanswered since it sacked its only staff member last year. Who could have brought a proud campaign group to the brink of death? Step forward Dr Alex Scott-Samuel, chair of Liverpool Wavertree Labour party.
Shadow chancellor John McDonnell assured worried Labour supporters that Scott-Samuel and his comrades were drying to get Luciana Berger MP deselected (prior to Berger leaving Labour of her own accord) not because they were anti-Semites, but because of “other issues”. These honeyed words became harder to swallow when it became clear Scott-Samuel had made comments promoting a “Rothschild” conspiracy theory that led Liverpool University to emphasise last week that it no longer employed him.
Scott-Samuel’s arrival at the Socialist Health Association was part of a wider move by Jeremy Corbyn supporters into Labour’s 20 affiliated socialist societies. They have a seat on the party’s national executive committee (NEC), which is handy as Labour fights its civil wars. More significantly, the societies have impressive voting rights in local Labour parties. A minimal presence in a constituency gives the Socialist Health Association the right to send five delegates to the local Labour party and help purge the sitting MP and councillors, should they so desire.
Martin Rathfelder, the association’s direct, told the Eye that “everything changed” when Scott-Samuel and friends took over the association in 2017. As a neutral officer, Rathfelder said his job was to encourage doctors and nurses to stand for election. “They really didn’t like that,” he said. “They saw it as me threatening their control.”
Scott-Samuel saw his chance to strike when Rathfelder lost his temper with a YMCA worker in Crewe who was refusing to let members into a hall the association had booked. He sacked Rathfelder for “being abusive” and encouraging “candidates to run against a sitting officer”. The purge ended in fiasco. Unison was appalled and withdrew its funding from the association. Rathfelder appealed and secured a very generous settlement-so generous that the association has been unable to hire a replacement.
Even though it is now a moribund organisation, surely Scott-Samuel can still defend public health in a personal capacity as a good socialist must? He had that chance in his latest appearance on The Richie Allen Show (broadcast on conspiracist David Icke’s forum) when he was on air alongside a supporter of discredited anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield. Once upon a time the Lancet, Private Eye and most of the national press took Wakefield’s claims that the MMR vaccine might cause autism seriously-but now every sensible person accepts Wakefield is a fraud. Not so Scott-Samuel. When presented with a chance to warn parents that listening to the anti-vaxxers could put their (and other) children’s lives in danger, he ducked it for fear of offending his fellow conspiracists.
At a time of mounting concern about mental illness, social care, obesity and measles epidemics, the Socialist Health Association is now not only useless, but also dangerous. (p.10).
Now I don’t know what the facts behind this article’s account of these events really are. It’s possible that Dr Scott-Samuel really is a raving anti-Semite, who believes in an odious conspiracy theory about the Jews centred on the Rothschilds. And if he didn’t speak out against the anti-vaxxer’s nonsense, then he was seriously, dangerously wrong not to. There is indeed a surge in the diseases Ratbiter mentions, especially in America amongst predominantly right-wing communities that are against vaccination. But Private Eye also has its own biases, that cast serious doubt on parts of the narrative as told here.
Firstly, as you can see, the story is very anti-Corbyn and determined to push the view that he, or his supporters, are Jew-haters. And Ratbiter is one of those involved in pushing it in Private Eye. I think I can remember an article by the redoubtable and definitely Jewish Tony Greenstein on his blog, where he revealed who Ratbiter was. Or the identity of one of the people behind the pseudonym. As we’ve seen, Wavetree wished to deselect Luciana Berger, but I’ve seen precious little evidence that genuine anti-Semitism is involved. Berger has suffered some horrendous anti-Semitic abuse, but she’s pointed her finger in the wrong direction when it comes to culprits. There’s no evidence that anyone in the Labour party or who supports the Labour party has ever sent her anything anti-Semitic. The local party wanted her out because she’s a lazy, entitled Blairite – she was parachuted into this very safe constituency when she was in a liaison with Blair’s spawn, Euan. Who was rumoured to be the new leader of the Centrist party a few months ago.
Going on to Scott-Samuel’s views on the Rothschilds, the banking dynasty is indeed the centre of any number of conspiracy theories about the Jews trying to take over the world, and enslave and destroy White gentiles. They also figure in more sanitised versions in which the culprits aren’t the Jews, but the New World Order or Illuminati, or there is a distinction made between good Jews, those murdered by the Nazis, and evil Jews, like the Rothschilds and other elite bankers. But the Rothschild’s are hardly innocent or above suspicion. During the 1930s and ’40s they did lend money to the Nazi regime, even when it was persecuting and murdering Jews in the death camps. Recently Mike mentioned on his blog the case of a female Labour supporter/member, who was accused of anti-Semitism after a Tweet or Facebook post she made about the Rothschilds. But Mike made the point that the Rothschilds are immensely rich and powerful, and asked why they should be exempt from criticism or their power and influence from legitimate questioning. I don’t know, but Scott-Samuel’s case could be another like this.
And lurking behind these events and machinations is the article’s bias about the SHA itself. This, we are told at the start, is an organisation that campaigned for the NHS and for free healthcare ever since. But I remember a few years ago, when Blair was still a power in the land, the Eye ran a story about a socialist health organisation – it might be the SHA, or it might be the Socialist Medical Society – which complained that it had been taken over by the Blairites and turned into a mouthpiece for their privatisation campaign. This organisation was also described, if I recall correctly, as almost on its last legs. If this was the SHA, then the Blairites cannot complain about being displaced by Corbyn supporters in their turn. Well, they can, but they’d be hypocrites. Which definitely wouldn’t stop them.
And note another unspoken assertion in the article: the Blairites in the Labour party apparat – the party bureaucracy – are the victims, who rightfully hold their position, while Corbyn’s supporters are invading, disruptive supporters. But the opposite is almost certainly the case. Blair’s supporters within the Labour party are numerically small, and they hold control of party’s bureaucracy against the wishes of the majority of party members. Whom they have been desperately trying to purge, using their positions. And it would only make the party more democratic and accountable if they were forced out. They were put in place by a firmly centralising Labour administration, determined to make sure that no-one was appointed to any position of authority within the party without the express permission of Blair. And in the case of the student union, that meant that the system of election by the students themselves was removed and replaced with appointment from above. By Blair.
Ratbiter’s Private Eye article is thus, whatever the truth about its allegations of Dr Scott-Samuel’s conduct and views, just another piece of Blairite anti-Corbyn propaganda. It is designed to preserve the Labour party as the exclusive property of wealthy, entitled neoliberals like Luciana Berger, keen to carry on Blair’s noxious and destructive policies of privatisation and the destruction of the welfare state. And as inveterate enemies of Corbyn, the Eye is more than willing to give ample space to Ratbiter’s and the other Blairites’ lies and smears.
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